Trickster

by J. C. Andrijeski

  I didn’t answer that, either.

  After another few minutes, I was having trouble controlling my light at all, though.

  “You don’t want to be a name on a list, then, brother?” Terian prompted. “Is that it?”

  “No.” I let out a low groan when the other male began unfastening my belt. I clenched my jaw, then finished answering him anyway. “No to both questions… sir.”

  “So, what is it that you want from me, brother?”

  I felt the confusion in my light worsen.

  Despite that confusion, I felt my aleimi reaching for that of the other seer.

  I knew I was reacting strangely to him, and perhaps even more so to his light.

  I couldn’t quite admit to myself in what ways, or how quickly my light seemed to want to return to being immersed in that of the other seer.

  I had heard stories about such things, of course.

  I’d had crushes before, fixations even, but my mind couldn’t go logically over how this differed from those. As soon as I let myself, my light flooded back into Terian’s without reservation, without restraint, without even any shielding.

  Rather, I found myself pulling on him.

  Pulling on him hard.

  I could feel the insistence there, the near-anger… both of which still felt totally out of proportion to anything I could articulate in my mind, anything that made logical sense. The intensity there caused Terian to gradually tense, too.

  He paused where he’d been unfastening my pants.

  “I see,” Terian said, his voice thicker. “You like my light, is that it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How much?”

  I closed my eyes, fighting to think. “A lot, sir.”

  “A lot? Is that all you can tell me?”

  I grimaced, looking away as I fought to think.

  “…Enough to want to beat the hell out of you right now,” I said, speaking before it occurred to me to censor my words. “Enough to want to hurt you… for finding this… I don’t know… funny. Enough to want to force you.”

  “Force me to do what?”

  “Force you to open to me.”

  I tensed once I’d said it, unsure how the other male would react, but I only felt Terian waiting. My whole fucking body hurt by then, but I couldn’t seem to move, not even to get away from his fingers. When Terian’s palm began caressing me through my pants once more, I let out a low sound.

  “Gods,” I said finally, as those deft fingers finally got my pants open. “Don’t do this to me. Please, sir. Find another. Please, find another…”

  Terian gripped me tighter. “Why would you want me to find another?”

  Confused again, I shook my head, clenching my jaw.

  “You think this is a diversion to me?” Terian said. “Is that it?”

  “Yes,” I said, my voice thick. “I do.”

  “I see,” Terian said. “And what the hell else would it be to me, brother?”

  I clenched my jaw harder, unseeing through my pain.

  After a too-long pause, I shook my head.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you? Are you certain, brother?”

  I fought to speak past that pain, to say more, to even wrap my mind around what he wanted me to say, then flinched when he knelt abruptly in front of me, yanking down the armored pants. He had his mouth on me before I could make up my mind how I wanted to react to that, either.

  Then that moment was gone.

  I groaned aloud when I felt the other’s tongue and lips, painful with light despite the fact that Terian had shifted back to sensual again, to borderline soft. Leaning my weight deeper into the palm I still rested against the paneled door, I clenched my fingers in the auburn hair, letting go of more of my light when the other male didn’t stop.

  My aleimi snaked out of me in a dense wave, wrapping aggressively into Terian’s, demanding that he open more, that he let me in… all the way in.

  He wouldn’t.

  He didn’t fight me. He didn’t even try to resist.

  He just fucking… wouldn’t.

  I felt another surge of possessiveness, and that time, the man below me paused long enough to look up at my face.

  “Do you really want me to stop?” Terian asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Do you want me to find another?”

  I hesitated, then shook my head again.

  For some reason, that brought the smile back to Terian’s lips.

  “Ah, back to quiet, are we? We’ll have to see what we can do about that, brother.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer.

  I fought to control myself briefly, then decided I didn’t care about that, either.

  I let the possessiveness rise to the forefront of my aleimi, using it to wrap my light deeper into that of the seer kneeling in front of me. Terian’s light resisted at first, but I gripped his hair tighter, going from asking to demanding, hitting the other male harder with my light, tempted to use more than just my light.

  Below me, Terian let out a low sound, the first glimpse that I was getting to him at all, even from before, when we first came to the room.

  I wanted to hit him again after that, but just clenched my hand tighter in his hair, knowing I was being toyed with, but unsure how much, or even in what ways. I could feel Terian getting off on the reactions he was evoking, but something else lived there, too.

  Something I could almost feel, some hint of real emotion…

  He stopped what he’d been doing some minutes later, and then he was standing.

  By then I was practically in a trance, barely supporting my own weight.

  He had been holding me off orgasm for what felt like an interminable length of time, and the pain in my light nearly blinded me when he stopped entirely. Before I could recover enough to step back, or even take my hand off the fucking door, Terian hit me hard in the chest, using both of his fists.

  He hit me again before I could recover, forcing me to stumble back, nearly making me fall. My light reacted in shock, but I only stared at the other male, breathing hard.

  “You aren’t leaving, brother.” Terian’s voice came out cold, colder than before. “You try to leave here again, before I tell you to leave, and I’ll do more than just threaten you.”

  I nodded, gasping. “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  That fire in Terian’s light didn’t dim.

  He continued to stare at my face, especially at my eyes.

  For the first time, I realized the other male was shaking, barely containing some emotion that seemed to twist brokenly through his light, stuttering behind my eyes. The sheer level of voltage in the room caught in my chest, made it even more difficult to breathe. I felt glimmers behind that fire, hints of memory and familiarity, most of it not attached to me.

  It occurred to me that Terian saw something in me, something beyond me as a person, something that merged into some aspect of his light, that connected us and separated us all at once. As soon as I’d thought that much, I found I understood.

  Really understood, that time.

  Dehgoies.

  Gaos di’lanlente a’ guete.

  This was about that fucker, Dehgoies.

  Varlan said I looked alike to him.

  Maybe I’d underestimated how much. Maybe my light was somehow resonant to that of Dehgoies, too.

  As soon as I thought it, I realized I was hard again.

  I was hard, but I was also angry.

  I couldn’t explain to myself rationally why either of those things would be true, but I knew they were. Nor did I care about the reason behind them, not really.

  Not then.

  Worse than the anger, and the part of me that was turned on by the vulnerability I could feel in Terian’s light, I felt softer, more wrenching emotions evoked in me from the emotional pain I felt in Terian’s aleimi.

  I felt for the other man.

  I felt
for him, and I hated it.

  I felt that older, denser hurt, something so raw that I flinched whenever I got anywhere close to it, and it made me want to hurt him, really hurt him.

  That vulnerability made me nearly irrational, in fact.

  It made me want to both beat the other male and shield him from any pains caused by anything outside the two of us.

  It made the possessiveness worse, the pain worse, that irrationality I felt towards him worse, the anger worse… the desire to claim his light worse.

  All of it, I could see now, came from that wound of lost light, of deprivation.

  Such a small thing.

  So small, so seemingly insignificant, yet it could render even a being like Terian raw to the touch––broken even––even half-a-decade later, and despite all his power within the Org. Terian must be significantly more powerful now than he had been back then, when Dehgoies had been the brightest star in the network.

  But Terian still missed his friend.

  Maybe Dehgoies had been more than a friend.

  At the thought, I fought not to hit him for real, to knock him down with my fists.

  I forced my mind to turn those feelings over instead, to wonder if Dehghois and Terian had possibly been more lovers than friends.

  On some level, the question itself felt meaningless.

  It wasn’t even the true source of my jealousy.

  Truly, I had no idea what they’d been to one another, either alone or in the outside world, and maybe in the end, that had no bearing on any of it. Maybe in the end, given everything they had been through together and how long they had shared light, Dehgoies had been family.

  Not biological family, but family like most young seers found family these days.

  Family in light. Family in purpose.

  Something I myself had never had… not even in the Org.

  I felt Terian flinch as I thought these things, almost like he heard me.

  I felt those amber eyes boring into mine. I saw them glowing at me through my aleimi in the Barrier’s rose-tinted dark, flickering with greenish glows.

  Whatever Dehgoies and Terian had been to one another, some part of my light wanted to know more about that wound.

  I hated it, yes. I was jealous of it. It angered me and made me feel irrational, but I felt some part of that truth belonged to me now, as well. The more my light coiled into and around those questions, the more I found I wanted to know.

  I wanted the truth of Terian.

  I wanted the truth of the two of them… him and Dehgoies.

  I wanted to crawl inside that truth, to witness it maybe.

  Or, more likely, I wanted to feel it, perhaps from both sides.

  I wanted to know that feeling of family, if only through pain.

  I didn’t know if that wanting came more from jealousy, curiosity, or something else entirely, but thinking about it made my separation pain significantly worse.

  It also made me want to fuck again, and more than just physically.

  I wanted brother Terian to tell me things.

  Above all, I wanted him to open his light.

  I would gladly have beat him half to death, if I could get him to open his light. Even if it got me killed in the end, I might have done it anyway by the time those few minutes had passed.

  “You’ll stay,” Terian said.

  I felt my muscles tense at what I heard behind those two words.

  I didn’t lower my gaze, or retract any part of my light.

  I backed deeper into the room when Terian stepped towards me, though.

  “You’ll stay by my side every minute I want you there.” His burnt-glass eyes stared into mine as his voice lowered. “You’ll do what I tell you, when I tell you… no matter what it is. If I ask you to stay with me when your pod leaves this insect-infested swamp, you will stay with me, brother. If I make you my second in the field, you will operate in that capacity, no matter how much the others complain about it, no matter how many of them say you don’t deserve it, or accuse you of getting the job from your knees…”

  I just stood there, listening, feeling the charges off the other male’s light as my own pain worsened.

  Terian’s voice grew colder still.

  “…For that matter, if I make you my dog and ask you to suck off every shit-blood in this camp, purely for my entertainment, then you’ll do that, too, brother. And things will continue that way with you and I until I’m done with you. Do you understand?”

  He waited for my nod.

  Once I had, Terian clenched his hands into fists, pulsing the muscles in his tanned arms. He made his voice softer still, so low my ears strained for the words, although nothing in my light or mind managed to miss a single one.

  “And if I am never done with you, brother Quay, you will belong to me,” Terian said, his voice a whisper in that dark. “Do you understand me, brother? Are we on the same page with this thing yet? You might want to ensure you do understand me, brother Quay, because if you ever try to run from me again, I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you without a second thought… and I’ll make sure that death takes a very long time and that it hurts a fuck of a lot. And after I’ve finished making it hurt and I’ve cut the cord to your miserable life, I won’t ever think on you again. Not once. Not even on your birthday… assuming I ever bother to learn it in the first place. Do you hear me yet, brother? Do you?”

  My pain worsened, but I only nodded.

  I felt that emotion strengthen in my light the longer we stood there, in the flickering light of his outdated and borderline dingy officer’s quarters. The emotion I felt no longer struck me quite as sympathy for the other seer… or even fear, which I probably should have felt by then, given what he’d just said.

  Instead, I continued to feel that overwhelming pull, almost to the exclusion of all else.

  I felt the connection to Krikev in this, from my own past and childhood.

  I felt the part of me that learned to look forward to those sessions with the drunken human pedophile, even as I fantasized about killing him in his sleep. I felt that darkness in my aleimi still––the longing, the desire to die, to lose myself and be ripped apart within it.

  I felt the part of me that longed simply to lose control, to no longer care that I had something less than beautiful that drove me.

  At the same time, some more hungry part of my mind wanted to understand it, too. That part of me wanted to pull Terian’s pain into my own light, to examine it perhaps, maybe see why it resonated so strongly with my own.

  That part of me wanted to see what Terian saw, what he told himself this was, what the thing with Dehgoies had been––why he would not open to me.

  Had he opened himself to Dehgoies?

  Had the other male felt his light?

  Had he really felt it, perhaps in a room not unlike this?

  Either way, I knew what Terian was asking of me.

  He voiced it not as a question, but as a demand––but I knew that was window dressing at base. Such things could only really be given willingly. One could pretend consent and not give it, regardless of how things appeared on the outside.

  I knew this from Krikev, too.

  I knew it when Krikev cried those nights when he let himself see how I denied him, how I would never give him what he wanted, no matter how often he beat me, no matter how often he threatened my life. If he had managed to break my mind in his quest to get what he wanted from me, he would only have ensured he never got it.

  The same was true of Terian.

  It would be true whether he killed me for denying him or not.

  Still, in looking at him in that work camp bunker outside of Manaus, I already knew what my answer would be. I knew it would not be the same answer I gave to Krikev.

  I would not leave him, like Dehgoies had done.

  I would give him permission to be that darker thing, to not hold back or pretend to be something else. Perhaps I could give him a haven from all the rest, a place to truly be himsel
f, to work through this wound to its logical conclusion.

  Perhaps Terian could rid me of Krikov, too, once and for all.

  I could not help but believe that ridding Terian of that emotional handicap might be the thing to finally allow him to reach his full potential. For I could plainly see––any seer with sight could see––Terian was not like others of our kind.

  He was different.

  Better, perhaps.

  I wanted more than anything to help him step into that higher place.

  Perhaps I could crawl reborn out of that darkness, too.

  Perhaps I would rise with him.

  Perhaps we would rise together… phoenixes in the night.

  Perhaps this was the role for which I had spent so many years waiting.

  I didn’t doubt the other male’s words, though.

  I didn’t doubt them for a second.

  If I fucked this up, he would definitely kill me.

  He would kill me, and then he would forget me utterly.

  Ten

  Why Didn’t You Tell Me?

  Org Apartment Bloc #98101k-12

  Hansaviertel Residential Quarter outside Tiergarten

  West Berlin, West Germany

  August 10, 1958

  Terian overheard them talking about him.

  He heard them before he was all the way inside the top-floor apartment.

  Not talking. Arguing.

  They were arguing about him.

  They were arguing about him in English.

  Terian heard his friend’s voice first, the deep resonant tones, his English tinged with the faintest edge of a German accent, one that had grown more prominent in the months they’d been stationed here. Most of the anger was coming from him. Most of the distress Terian felt in the construct was coming from his light.

  Something about that distress almost touched him.

  Galaith’s voice was more calming, more reasoned, more subdued.

  He was reasoning with Dehgoies, talking him down off some ledge where he teetered, fighting from falling into true anger and emotionality over whatever distressed him.

  Whatever distressed him.