Fanner was fuller than he’d ever been. He was so full it was making him drowsy, but he’d already decided he wouldn’t be sleeping much tonight. He wanted to be useful, to balance out all the harm he’d done and the burden he’d been for Yore. Maybe that was impossible, but he wanted to at least try to do something good.
Sex wasn’t the answer. Maybe people would want to have sex with him, but sex as a service seemed to be frowned upon on this side of the border. He could think of only one other way to make himself useful.
The problem was that he had to do it secretly because this was one thing nobody could ever know about. As soon as the three of them arrived back in the room upstairs, Yore placed a hurdle in his plans.
“Okay, Fanner, you must need to be balanced by now, so you can share the bed with Lucas. I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“No, it’s okay, I don’t actually ever need to be balanced,” Fanner said. “I can move energy, and that includes inside of myself, so I always stay balanced. I—I should sleep on the floor.”
Which also didn’t mesh with his plans, but he wasn’t about to volunteer Lucas for it.
“Have you ever slept on a floor before?”
“Well…” Once, when he’d been shut in that storage closet waiting for Mr Burrows. “We still have the bedrolls, don’t we? I can sleep on one of them and it won’t be any different from the last few days. You need to rest your back.”
“Just share the bed,” Lucas cut in before Yore could object. “I’ll be fine.”
Yore’s eyebrows lifted. “You’re going to sleep on the floor?”
“First of all, I’m a fucking bandit, so I don’t know why that’s such a wild idea to you. Second… no, of course not. We’re at an inn. There are other beds. Maybe I’ll go see if Berron’s still looking for some company.”
“That works,” Yore said. “And to be clear, I was implying that I thought you were too selfish to sleep on the floor, not too soft.”
“Oh, okay. That’s much less insulting and far more accurate.”
“Thank you,” Fanner told Lucas. “Will I see you again before we leave?”
“Uh huh. I’ll see you for breakfast tomorrow,” Lucas said, and then, “Fuck!” as he opened the door and was confronted with Cookie. “Cookie, you’re a little shit.”
Lucas had to use his legs to block Cookie as he edged through the door so that she wouldn’t try to get into the room and then he was gone, and the door was shut, and they were alone. Yore walked over and locked the door.
“Just in case,” Yore explained. “Cookie does more or less have hands, and I don’t want to wake up to her breathing on my face.”
“Yes, me either,” Fanner agreed. Would he hurt her if he did? Would he reflexively try to pull energy from her if she startled him like that? He didn’t even know anymore.
But now wasn’t the time to think about that. He had exactly what he wanted.
Yore took his shirt off and began stretching out his back. He always looked away from Fanner when he was doing that, as though he was trying to avoid attention, though it was impossible to ignore.
“Is it bothering you?” Fanner asked.
“Ah, well, it always does a bit,” Yore said, twisting his torso one way and then the other. “But yeah, the last few days have been rougher on it than usual.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. Anyway, I’ll be fine. I’ll see if I can get a friend of mine to give me a massage when I drop you off. That’ll loosen things up a bit.”
Fanner bit the inside of his cheek to suppress a smile. He had been wondering how he was going to lead into this, and Yore had just given him the perfect opening. “Well… I could give you one now, if you’d like. We get training in massage. I’m very good at it.”
Yore hesitated. “Just so we’re on the same page here, this would just be a massage, right? You’re not expecting it to be anything more?”
“Just a massage. You said you didn’t want anything else, so I won’t. I promise.”
Yore smiled and then made a face as he stretched his arms out in front of himself. “In that case, yes. If you really don’t mind, I would appreciate that.”
“Do you have any massage oil?”
“I’m sure Lucas has a lot of things,” Yore said as he went and sat on the edge of the bed and started going through the drawers in the bedside table. He unscrewed the lid on a bottle, sniffed the contents, then put the lid back on and put the bottle back. He tried a second bottle, nodded to himself, and then held it out to Fanner. “Here. Massage oil.”
Fanner took the bottle and sniffed it. Lavender.
Yore lay stomach down on the bed and Fanner knelt next to him. It would have been easier to straddle his ass, but that was the kind of thing they’d been taught to do for their masters only. There was a reason they’d never actually practised that move during their training.
Fanner poured some of the oil into his palm. “It’s okay if you still don’t want to answer this, but. Um. How did you get hurt?”
“Oh,” Yore said, and then, “Mm,” as Fanner spread oil across his back. “I don’t mind telling you now, it’s just… kind of complicated.”
Fanner began to gently knead Yore’s back. “I’ll try to understand. I’m smarter than I seem.”
“I don’t think you’re too stupid to get it, it’s just—” Yore yawned “—a bit of a long story.”
“We can talk about it later if you prefer. Or not at all.” Fanner was still struggling not to tack a ‘sir’ on to some of the things he said to Yore. It felt disrespectful not to. Fanner’s mind had only been programmed to deal with humans and mages, and he was still struggling to figure out how to apply this to Yore. He couldn’t exactly convince his brain that Yore was a mage, though intellectually he knew he wasn’t human either and it made more sense to treat him as an equal. Probably? He didn’t exactly know how the politics of these things worked, but Yore didn’t seem to expect anything else.
“No, you’re helping me now, so I’ll tell you now,” Yore said. “Mh. You’re good at that.”
“Thank you. Being at the House for so many years meant I got more training in such things than most.”
That was only part of the story, however. He’d always been particularly good at giving massages because he had a secret trick. He had always instinctively used his magic to relax the muscles of the person he was massaging and ease any inflammation. He had told one of the other boys about it when he was too young to know better and the boy had just seemed confused and then had tried to tell one of the humans in charge what Fanner had told him.
Fortunately the boy’s explanation had been muddled enough that Fanner had been able to convince them that he had meant that he cleaned the surface of the person’s skin while giving them a massage. He had been reminded not to do things he hadn’t been asked to and that had been the end of it.
After that, Fanner had been more careful about what he’d shared with others. He did keep using his magic for massages, however. It just made his massages better. It gave him an unfair advantage and he was doing things that weren’t asked of him which was bad, but he was so bad at most things. He needed just one thing he would be praised for.
“Mm, okay,” Yore said. “Story time before I fall asleep. I suppose this story starts with me being in the human military for several months.”
“As part of the work to free slaves?”
“Oh, no, this was before that. I just wanted to understand humans better — especially their combat abilities. Surprisingly, though, I ended up making friends with some of them.”
Fanner’s hands moved to Yore’s lower back, working at the knots in the muscle. He’d never felt anything like it. Yore was surely downplaying the pain. “I suppose they would have thought you were human. Humans treat other humans well, at least some of the time.”
“They did at the time, but—well, I’ll continue the story and you’ll see.” Yore made a sound in the back of his throat as Fanner dug his fingers in. It was hard to tell if it was from pain or pleasure, but he made no complaint so Fanner kept doing it. “Uh, so, we were out on a job, vampire stuff, and this glowing form appeared in my tent. I knew it was the fae. I’ve seen them before. It wanted me to follow it.”
“And you did?”
“And I did, which was and generally is a bad idea, by the way. They don’t understand the physical world, the difference between warning you of danger and leading you right into it. I knew that, but I was young and impulsive and I thought someone might need my help. I snuck away from my human friends and followed the fae all the way to Lainton and into the vampire infested tunnels there, even though I knew how dangerous they were because my pack lives nearby.”
“Why didn’t you ask your—your pack? Why didn’t you ask your pack for help?”
“My mother leads us and I knew if I told her I planned to go down there, she would stop me. I don’t fault her for that, because that would have been the correct thing to do. But anyway, I’m stronger and faster than any vampire so I thought I would go down there, dash through the tunnels, and see if there was anyone who needed help or anything in particular we should be aware of. I’d forgotten how tight the tunnels were, hadn’t realised how many vampires were down there, and I soon became overwhelmed. I’d kill one and there would be two more behind it. They exhausted me and chained me up in an old train.”
Fanner drew in a deep, shaky breath. The idea of being kept chained up all of the time by evil beings that wanted to hurt you… “How long were you there for?”
“A few months.”
“I’m sorry. That sounds awful. I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”
“It was quite bad, yes.”
“That’s what the scars on your neck are from?”
“Yes.”
“And… and the rest? Everything hurting? Did they do that as wel?”
“It’s related, but not exactly. After those few months of being down there, someone found me. A friend of my human friends. A mage, actually.”
“A friend wouldn't be what they’d be to your human friends, surely, if they were a mage.”
“It turns out I chose my friends wisely, so that’s exactly what they were to him. And more than that, for one of them. That mage was the mage you know, by the way, but don’t worry about that. This is already complicated enough.”
“I—yes. I’m not sure I’m quite following. Why were they there?”
“On a military job to clear the tunnels, ostensibly, but really to find another mage who had been taken by the vampires. Once I was free, I went home and convinced my pack to help them find her. I was in no condition to help in any physical way, but I went back anyway just to be there and help how I could. And, of course, it was our tunnel they came bursting out of with that mage we were looking for.”
“Did you save her?” Fanner asked, then realised he’d been so focussed on the story that he’d stopped massaging at some point. He started again.
“Mm,” Yore said. “I had been kept in wolf form all those months, and that does strange things to us. Shifting back into human form was safe enough to do, but after that my body needed a break to readjust. But that mage… I couldn’t save her unless I shifted. So that’s what I did, and I did save her. At that point, however, the damage had been done. I was locked into that one form forever. If I ever shifted back, it would tear through every part of my body.”
“But you did shift back, I assume? Is that how…?”
“Yes, that’s how I ended up like this. I should have died, but I had a lot of help both from mages and from my human friends. I really do believe we’re stronger together. It’s the only reason I’m still alive.”
Fanner felt suddenly, achingly lonely. Yore had placed his trust in all of these people, in someone Fanner apparently knew who was presumably a Companion and in humans, and they had been loyal to him and had saved his life. He wanted that, but he knew he could never trust anyone enough to have it. How could you ever truly know that someone wouldn’t betray you? Maybe if you already had a family you could trust, a whole community you were born into that supported you, trusting others was less of a risk. Even if someone betrayed you, you wouldn’t be on your own.
“Are you okay?” Yore asked, and Fanner realised he’d stopped massaging again.
Fanner moved his hands back up to Yore’s shoulders and cleared his throat. “Yes. Sorry. I was just—I was just thinking. It is a complicated story.”
“Don’t worry if you don’t understand it all just yet. There’ll be plenty of people to talk to about all of this.”
“May I ask… how bad is the pain, really?” Because Fanner could feel it under his hands. He could feel the way the scar tissue permeated everything. This was more than a mild irritation.
“If I’m truly honest? It’s enough to take the fun out of life. I don’t want to die, but my life, more than ever, is about duty. About serving my pack, my people, and those I’ve sworn to protect. For that, I’ll endure this. I’d endure anything.”
Fanner swallowed around a lump in his throat. “You should rest now. I’ll keep doing this but—but you can sleep. It’s okay.”
“Thank you, Fanner. You’re a kind person.”
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