Partner

This only got finished because I had a bad day, oddly, and needed a little something of what I knew I could do.

Though... given the topic here, I don't know what I'm doing so... yeah. Ah well.

Read, Review and Enjoy.




For the next two days Mik let Essuan play doctor. The Sidhe’s idea of healing took too much time, naturally allowing the flesh to knit rather than taking prescribed medication that would aid in healing. Mik had gone to the doctor on the first day because the marks made by Souse’s teeth puncturing his skin were still visible. Palt had practically laughed Mik out of the office.

The second day, Souse returned and all of the Sidhe drifted to the pool. It wasn’t much of a conscious decision on any of their parts, it seemed. One by one the Sidhe just seemed drawn to the pool. Paw hadn’t seemed happy about going but he took Mik’s hand, ducked his head and led the man to the pool.

Souse paced the pool room, aggravation and annoyance rolling off of the male as he snarled at every Sidhe that entered except Paw, and later Essuan. Essuan was the last to enter and the female slipped into the water in what seemed to be her sleepwear. She floated about as Souse paced and was the first Side to speak. What she said was quiet, more a statement of the obvious. The others shifted nervously after she spoke.

Something only the woman sleeping with him could say? That his temper had gotten the better of him?

Mik looked away when Souse shot a blazing look in his direction. Away and down, he had to remind himself at the last moment to look down. Sidhe would look away when the other was near the same rank as them but when dealing with Souse it was always away and downward.

Whatever Souse said, he said it with his hands, with a few sounds that were almost sputtered. Mik glanced at the large male and watched the intricate dance of his hands. Around the room others seemed to be ‘speaking’ back to Souse. Most responded all the same, same motions at the same time in the same way. A few seemed to try to say what everyone else did but were off in timing or one or two motions were different. Paw, Hohi and Lillow were amongst the ones who were completely out of whack. Wrong timing, wrong motions, wrong speed.

“Zzzaaahhhaaat.” Souse’s voice raised up, starting as a lower note and hitting a higher one.

Mik would not be the only one watching this. He glanced up at the corner of the room and the camera that would be buzzing away up there. How strange this seemed and yet, how oddly right. Like there were no words to describe the problems that the tribe was facing and so they turned to something that could express these things better than words. There are no words to express a real smile.

There were no words to express what Souse was feeling. Not without his tongue running off and making sounds that he didn’t mean it to make. His hands would say what he was really feeling, because they would move faster than his thoughts. This was just the way it was.

Paw’s hand found Mik’s and tightened around it, the contact between skin and shirt no longer enough to express this.

Express what?

Mik looked at Paw and saw the Sidhe smile even though the creature’s body didn’t move. It seemed that in a room full of Sidhe, the strangest thing Mik saw was himself. A small, stocky body staring back at Paw with dim eyes. Skin so filled with the smell of metal, the very air around him tasting of the ugly stuff.

Like licking a penny.

Lillow giggled and told Hohi to close his mind. The male was startled and annoyed and had no idea why he should close his mind when people should clean themselves properly before entering HIS territory.

Paw blocked this all from Mik’s mind and directed the man’s attention to Souse. The leader was standing patiently, waiting for Mik to focus. He realised it was difficult, seeing this, being this. This was the way things were, amongst Sidhe, and the first time he had seen it, he had felt like he had been dumped in the middle of an ocean of thoughts, left to drown.

He had lost control.

But Souse hadn’t had Paw guiding him.

Mik shivered as Paw wrapped something around them. He could separate Paw’s thoughts from his own more easily than he could separate Souse’s. Paw’s thoughts were clearly and entirely Paw. Souse’s thoughts seemed to bleed into his own.

Focus.

Piss off.

Go.

The last was like a whisper from across the room. Violet, echoing off of the walls with a startling clarity as her being brushed for a startling instant across Mik’s mind. He caught the faces, heard the broken words and had the broken understanding of a wounded creature who didn’t understand the language.

Except with those broken words he knew he could find them.

Violet pulled back from him, shocked, and gave him what must have been the mental version of a slap. Or perhaps a harder push that was necessary. Mik found his attention back on Souse and the large male.

…suggested by Paw. That perhaps words are not enough.

Words are never enough.

A scoff from a strong voice that Mik didn’t recognise. Male. Female.

Wasn’t this just like that night in bed? The oddness of the voice that spoke but was not quite his own?

Another mind, from across the pool, tinged with arousal as an image broke free of Mik’s mind. Essuan laughed in reality… in… was it not all reality? Souse was amused, but only because Mik was embarrassed by something so simple as sex.

A threesome. With. Two guys.

Here for a reason, one mind gasped, not all of those of existence can hold this forever.

Pity, amusement, and the realisation that a good deal of the tribe members were not even participating. To have it or to not have it. But to have it only enough to taunt a Sidhe? Gods have mercy.

Touch his mind. Paw murmured beside Mik.

Souse was not good at the kind of thing. He usually expressed the wrong information. Even if he did focus.

Shut up and do it. Paw growled and showed his ‘teeth.’

Here Paw was dominant. He spent a majority of his time in the place, in this existence. The others had brief glances or could chose to step into it, could chose when to step back out. He had been here for as long as he could remember. A child who had known too much, had known all the tribe’s secrets even though a Sidhe tribe only kept the darkest, most terrible things secret.

Like murdering elders, Essuan muttered.

The shame and guilt that filled the pool shocked Mik. Horror to look back and know that this was one’s own hand and yet appreciation at how far it brought them. The child would have been taken whether Paw’s tribe was there or not and their being there had saved more lives. More escaped. More lived. It was not condoning his actions, not by far, but he had made his bed and he slept in it.

Paw’s existence within the tribe was not because he was a candidate. He had, technically, not changed since joining the tribe and truth be told, Souse suspected before, with how Whisper approached the boy, with how the man touched the boy. Paw existed within the tribe because he was a good pair, a good match, to so many of the females and because, once he was coupled with Mik, he still had his position.

He still was the Sidhe whose life was the deciding factor in Koln’s buying them. A wild Sidhe amongst the tribe had made Koln leap at the possibility, even if that wild Sidhe was not the one that they all, the people, called wild.

Paw was so wild, he was contagious.

Wild. Born, bred and raised in freedom. Paw did not look at Mik and see the one who had raped or murdered or tortured. He did not hear about those things from others of the tribe. And…

Something that was beyond Mik’s comprehension. The existential question from a philosophical view point.

What?

Maybe if he stopped chewing on his damned pen he’d get more paperwork done. Maybe if there was less paperwork he’d have less to do. Wait. No. That wasn’t how it worked. Maybe if Mik didn’t get his, this other person whose thoughts were invading Mik’s own, panties up in a bunch then he wouldn’t be ordering strange toys on the internet with even stranger names.

Wallbanger.

By the gods, Koln?

Something turned in his direction, like a head turning to catch the last bit of a conversation after hearing ones own name.

Paw carefully pushed Mik back to himself, collecting all the bits and urging them to reform into what they had been before. What seemed like an eternity and yet a moment later, Mik found himself back where he belonged, back inside his own head and closed off from everything else. He wondered if he had imagined it all, but there was Paw’s hand still tightly entwined with his and the Sidhe gave him a small, unsure smile.

“Mik is back,” the Sidhe murmured, “come, sleep time, no?”

“I am tired,” Mik muttered, “Mik is very tired.”

A reassuring of himself, that he was this man named Mik, this was his flesh and these were his thoughts. Amazing how such odd and seemingly unnecessary things played such a strong role.

Once one knew what was going on.

Not that he’d think that he actually knew what was going on, not for a single minute. Because every time he thought he had the Sidhe, had Paw, figured out, they went and did something that completely threw him off and turned all his definitions upside down.


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