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“If I strike you, Demerzel, will you bruise?” Cleon’s hands grip at either of Demerzel’s shoulders as he sits beneath one of the grounds’ many pavilions, a book-film reader placed across his lap and projecting a vague translucency of words upon the air before him. There’s a faint chitter of insects, and the peripheral motion of birds, though no shadow falls upon them beyond the structure’s own shade. Untouched by the flicker and the dreary sky, they pose like marble.
Demerzel regards him without alarm, unturning in his position, but his hair sifts, and the musculature of his neck shifts as he offers a tilt to the head. The reader clicks into dormancy with a slight shift of Demerzel’s fingers, becoming inert. “Sire?”
One of Cleon’s hands moves to his nape, feeling that twin thread of apparent muscle; Demerzel’s head straightens to indulge this odd fascination. Cleon's hand nearly trembles. He's so hard, beneath, perfectly unyielding. Why is he so hard?
He lowers his head to look upon his still-First Minister’s face, and, as he does, his mouth pinches slightly, an exaggeration of the burnished look that the microadjustment has given him. Like a painting, its canvas twisted roughly into the impression of motion; Demerzel’s countenance is much more natural, a soft opening of the lips, a slight slackening of the jaw, and without the ugliness of banked, erotomanic fury--a kind Cleon cannot believe himself to possess.
Cleon can feel another shift beneath his palm, clamps it tighter upon his nape. Hardness. Imperturbable Demerzel.
“No. Stay seated. I’ll order it of you.” His voice smiling. “Are you such a thing that you can refuse my order?”
Seldon’s been calling him by name too often, too freshly turning the stilled soil of his selfhood, and he can smell the rising loam even in his deepest entrenchment of Demerzel. It comes too easily, too often, but he lacks the desire to will it away--at least yet. At least for now.
Static light, dark hair, the plasticine sheen of temperature-controlled material molding to the craggy throat and flashing from beneath the parted buttoning of a collared shirt. That wonderful texture of the mind, its forceful machination. You are too much the master.
Oh, his voice...
There is a spastic contraction that runs the track of his spine, sinuous and jerky at one, a paradox of psychosomatism given form by the violence of the recall, the silhouette of longing it adopts as long-irrelevant processes and impulses attempt to manifest, burning their obsolescence all through him, no part untouched. Elijah!
“No, Sire.” Demerzel says, mildly, thinly, all strain in him well-concealed. He rounds on him, releasing his throat to circle to his front.
The emperor sinks to his knees; The then-First Minister does not gasp, but he does sit somewhat straighter, attempting both to appease and discourage in one. The sprawl of his mind densifies, becomes leaden with the fractional, minute calculation his Emperor demands of him.
Cleon, unthinking, though feeling deeply, intensely, obscurely, pushes the viewer aside to thud gently against the scalloped brick. He runs his flattened hands over Demerzel’s clothed thighs. A redness rises in his face, though it does nothing to deter him from the touch, leaning against some haphazard resolution borne of effervescence. His robe is puddled about him, as if that fallacy of station is in melt.
It has been a long time since Demerzel has been touched. He has been seized upon, or seized others, placed consoling and suggestive hands on knees and thighs and in the soft dimpling curves of men and women’s lower backs. Perhaps received some handshakes not self-initiated, though no more than could be counted on the fingers.
Cleon’s breath comes heavier; His own mind densifies; His eyes glaze over that pinkness of the face.
The desire is not new in him. Very often, and with growing frequency, does this particular tumult of emission rollick beneath the active cognitions in his Emperor’s mind. The desire to touch Demerzel.
Sometimes gently: to reach for his elbow, to clasp his hand and run the fingers into the very beginning of his sleeve and travel the wrist, to press the thumbs into the center hollow of his clavicles and feel its giving softness. Sometimes harshly: to jerk him by the hair, to sink teeth into the tender shell of the ear, or the juncture of throat and shoulder, all the fierceness of a lover's fancy. To slap him clear across the face, watching his head snap and his cheek redden in the print of his palm--this most often, most luridly for the command of taboo in it, the streak of feasibility run through it.
To indulge one is to indulge the other, and thus to indulge either is to risk some betray of his nature. With little effort, Demerzel has always buried the impulse. Unaltered, it has become intensified, and impossible to veer from his course, and Demerzel struggles for a rationalization of its suppression. Struggles long enough that the course has been undertaken too decisively, and all choice is gone from him.
Even through the clothing, he feels the precise topography of the man's hand. Organically perfect, assymetric in the fine detail, but replicable still. The trousers' subdued, rosaceous sheen glows against the Emperor’s pale hands--always pale, like that of a mystic, without spindliness yet still long and somehow severe--and again he thinks of... His body does not shudder, but there’s some impression of organic motion within the imperturbability of his steel braincase, an odd and cruel trick to play.
Cleon feels the round of his knees, down the firmness of the calf, furtive fingers molding around the knob of his ankle, still breathing heavily, though with more clarity in his face, a furrow of the brow betraying some settling of emotion, some decisive domination that Demerzel awaits the read of.
So hard! Such strength, some aquifer unknown in him, completely obscure.
His hands seize as if struck by some electric shock. He hooks his fingers over the lip of Demerzel’s heels, and gently removes them from his feet: Demerzel’s feet, bare, long and just a bit paler than the relative warmth of his skin. The gentle slope of the thing, the blueness of the vein beneath, the unkindness of age in the length and bulge of the knuckle, and yet still, indescribably, in some unpinnable manner, perfect.
He becomes wildly confused again, and no emotion dominates; Demerzel wouldn’t know which to tweak, even the deeply, almost preterconsciously familiar cerebroanalytical equipment unable to discern motivation with enough clarity to give the man what it is that he wants. It is as if his entirety of wanting, past and coming, hinge upon the faint massaging motion his thumb performs against Demerzel’s ankle.
Demerzel, for his part, does not sigh or soften, does not lean against him or otherwise helplessly encourage the touch. Unmoved by the Emperor and Empire at his knees, folded over itself to look intently at those bared feet, touching upon them in the mimicry of consolation and tenderness. Debasement in the crouch but a tremulous dignity, some facsimile of love in those mystic’s hands. For all its grace, it cannot appease Demerzel’s weariness.
“So quiet, Demerzel.” He says, with his lopsided smile, a breath of laughter dying in it. His face is hot, but he loves, in a varnished way, these pretend games, and loves that Demerzel is effortlessly his better in them--but now he’s winning, isn’t he? Everything about this begs a question, but neither of them know what form it would take, which interrogative it would demand.
“I’ve been thinking about it, is all. I’ve never seen you bruise, you must know. Maybe twenty odd years by your side, and over a dozen more with you at my father’s, and no one’s taken it into their head to strike you? I’m shocked.” His look becomes salacious, the fancy of wickedness curling in it, even as he curls his palms around Demerzel’s heel, cupping them as if in weighing. He surprises himself with how easy it is to speak from his knees.
The implication: I should have. If at least once.
“I…” Demerzel begins, uselessly. How impossible of him. He releases a short breath instead. He’s right, in that Demerzel has never been struck. Daneel has … the avenue narrows, the recollection forcibly flooded and flushed. Cleon’s mouth closes, feeling spurned again.
With the delicacy of burgeoning age, Cleon rises, slowly, slowly, perhaps under the guise of worship or perhaps in the actuality of, his hands retracing that line of musculature by the calf and rubbing gently over the ungarish, sorbet field of his thigh.
There is no interruption at his buckle, and they do not disturb the clasps of his shirt, but there is still some reservation, some sense of savoring as he smooths them up his hips, his chest, ceasing in their motion only when they reach his shoulders. There, again, settled, in the dullness of that unintimate place. Gripping hard at either shoulder with the skin beneath unbruising, body bent so that he can watch him.
Yes, watch, with those same opaque, scrutinizing, humiliating eyes, the look of the shepherd that Demerzel does not know himself to wear. There is a serenity blooming in him, one borne of imperfect, self-validating ownership, and he’s attempting to seize on it, to remember that, without condition, Demerzel is his.
Demerzel thinks, in the shorthand of calculation and deduction, all stopped short of action: Is he going to kiss me.
Based on the lag, the little interruptions and stutters--the lack thereof--he is, of his own will and sapience, not resistant to the prospect. If there is any resistance, it is much less than he’d encounter in regular affairs; It’s statistically significant.
He thinks, this time in words, in deliberation of formation, and with a surging reminder of his once-desolation: Don’t!
The word anathema to a robot. No!
Cleon’s head draws to his temple, and the noble protrusion of his nose nudges against his neat-trimmed hairline, then draws in further. Demerzel stares at the scoop in his neckline, the bare skin exposed by his posture and the parting of his state-robe. He takes a deep inhale, and, oddly enough, Demerzel is unsure what it is that he could be scenting on him.
“I…” he ponders for a moment, but again the enticement of taboo overwhelms him, and there is no better repository for his wickedness, his furtive feelings of outsized ego and unkingly, vertiginous desire than Demerzel. “I will miss you.” He inhales against his hair again, coming closer, and there’s a charming, self-conscious brutishness to it, though his embarrassment is directionless and uncomprehending of its own source.
“Thank… you… Sire…” Demerzel says, unslurring, still unmoved, speaking slowly by the impression of deliberation. It is incisively nonreciprocal, which thrills Cleon as much as it enrages him, there in the dense and indiscriminate mists of his unexamined mind.
Cleon backs away, straightening his spine, and his robe so follows.
“You are released.” He says, and Demerzel understands he thinks himself an agent of deceit as he says it. Demerzel nods slowly, with complete purity in his telegraphed understanding.
Too, he thinks himself satisfied and tries for stiffness, for Demerzel’s cool, inviolate stillness, but ends up retreating with an almost girlish demeanor, skittish and thrilled and secretive and still, unknown and unprocessed, furious. His shoulders are rippling, his heels are perking unevenly, and he just barely meanders along the pathway, though he keeps from turning his head.
Demerzel, as in all other things of this bewildering, though perhaps inevitable, predictable affair, does not interfere. He turns to look at the collapsed viewer, the half-protrusion of the inserted film knocked loose, then back to the pathway. There’s a quiet tumult in him. He clasps his hands together, an apparent gesture of demureness and submission; He closes his fingers about his middle finger, twisting at a seam that no longer exists, and his downturned wrists stay mercifully unopened, no life spilt from them.
His still-bare feet nudge at the gape of his neglected shoes, but there's no effort in the motion. Just the nudging.