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If he’d wanted to fuck someone (which he didn’t) and wanted that someone to be a slave (which, even more so, he didn’t) then he would have still wanted that someone to be at least old enough to grow a beard.
Beren looks down at the child. He’s dressed in a pretty pink bow and Beren’s own suit coat, dropped around his shoulders in an attempt to preserve some of his dignity on the way in from the porch.
Beren really wished he’d let that particular client be convicted for the decades of tax fraud. The world would have been a much better place with her not running free in it.
The house wasn’t much warmer than outside—Beren’s grandparents had instilled their own ideas of thrift into him quite young, and penny-pinching via slight discomfort was almost second nature by now. He ushered the boy in with a hand on his bony back, and immediately turned to the thermostat. The vents huffed to life, breathing warmer air into the living room, and Beren pushed the kid gently towards the couch.
“Sit,” he ordered, and the shoulders under the suit coat froze. Small bare feet curled toes into the carpet, and the boy looked up. His brown eyes were wide, and he glanced away quickly ad Beren raised an eyebrow at him.
“What?” Beren asked, and the kid’s tension ratcheted up again. “Sit. It won’t bite you.”
Cautiously, the kid did. The way he lowered himself onto the couch was…odd. This whole situation was odd.
“I’m going to get you some clothes,” Beren said, taking the opportunity to leave the room. Talking to a scared kid was bad enough. Talking to a naked scared kid was off the table entirely.
He grumped up the stairs. His closet was mostly suits and watches, but there was a drawer of old sweats. Most of them were a little ragged around the edges, with stained cuffs and oily smudges down the front from dropped food—it wasn’t as if anyone but him ever had to look at them, so it had never mattered. Now, he frowned at them, digging fruitlessly for anything better before giving up. They would be soft and warm, better than being mostly naked, and that’s all they needed to be right now. He grabbed the warmest of the sweatshirts—a gift from a client he actually liked—and stumped back down the stairs.
The kid was bent forward a little on the couch, looking curiously at the cover of ‘Streets of Venice’—a book of photography that Beren had honestly never looked at since the designer had placed it on the coffee table to achieve what she called a ‘chic and sophisticated’ look. When he heard Beren on the last step, he snapped back into the awkwardly stiff position he'd been holding before, a little more curled into himself now.
“Clothes,” Beren said, holding them out. The boy reached out to take them cautiously, and then held them very carefully on his lap. Beren rubbed at his forehead. Hard.
“Put them on,” he said, and the kid leapt up, shimmying into the clothes faster than Beren would have thought possible, or particularly safe. The kid nearly toppled over trying to get his foot into a pant leg, and Beren reached out a hand to catch him, which the kid flinched away from hard enough that he re-balanced himself. He glanced warily at Beren’s hand, pants half-on, totally still. Beren took his hand back, and nodded at the pants, which was apparently enough of a cue to get the kid to continue getting dressed.
Thank god.
Finally, the kid’s wearing big baggy sweats, and Beren doesn’t have to look at him and be reminded that all that sallow skin and protruding bone was supposed to be somehow arousing, which means that Beren’s stomach can be a little steadier.
The kid is still watching him with wide eyes, and it’s hard to think of what should be next. Beren has a guest room with an ensuite bathroom, a priority from back when his sister still talked with him, still stayed over sometimes. It’s probably a little dusty.
There are leftovers in the fridge, some day-old rice and some eggs and the remnants of a crunchy ‘superfood’ salad from a work lunch a couple of days ago. Food would be the priority, here, probably, right?
Right.
“Follow me,” he says, and hears the kid’s bare feet padding on the hardwood behind him. He should have thought of socks. He’d get the kid socks in the morning, after food and everything else, because for some reason, thinking of socks right now felt like taking another step towards locking himself in his room and not talking to anyone for a week.
He directed him to sit again. Apparently that meant that the boy crumpled to the floor in a kneel and bowed his head, which. Beren couldn’t deal with right now, so he focused on taking ingredients out of the fridge and heating up a pan on the stove with some butter.
Beren wasn’t a great cook, but he knew how to time a leftover stir-fry, at least. He cracked the eggs into the rice, stirred and tossed and finally added the leftover salad and a little bit of sauce to flavor it up and keep it from being dry. He spooned it out into a bowl and turned around.
The kid was slumped over, leaning hard into the kitchen island and breathing slow and steady. Beren thought about picking him up and carrying him to the guest room and dealing with all of this in the morning. Then he set the food on the island counter and knelt down, tapping the kid lightly on the shoulder.
The boy startled, flinching backwards before going stiff and bowing deeper, nearly touching his forehead to the floor.
“I’m sorry for falling asleep, master, I’m sorry,” he whispered. His voice was very young, but not pitched like a child’s—trained, Beren thinks, to sound more mature.
“It’s fine,” Beren said. “What’s your name?”
“Dove, master,” the kid said. Right, he was from The Forest, that themed brothel that liked to dress its employees—its slaves—up in different cabaret-style animal costumes as some kind of marketing thing.
“Your real name,” Beren said, and the kid went, if possible, even stiffer.
“I will answer to any name you like,” he said, sounding very cautious, and Beren frowned.
“You’re really called Dove?” he asked, and the kid glanced up. His eyes were wet, and he looked back down again just as quickly, breathing fast and not answering. Beren had fucked this up.
“Okay,” he said. “Dove, then. Come sit in one of these chairs, you need to eat.”
Dove moved quickly, clambering up onto the bar-height stool exactly like an awkward pre-teen and staring at the fork and bowl like it was gonna bite him. He glanced at Beren—fast, like he didn’t want Beren to notice—and went back to staring at the food.
“Eat,” Beren said, and almost added ‘you’re too skinny’, but he remembered mediating a divorce, before he’d gone into criminal defense, where the husband kept arguing with the wife about her comments on their daughter’s weight. Beren had ended up reading three separate studies about the effect of making any mention of a kid’s appearance in front of them, looking for a pithy quote. (scientific studies were terrible at creating pithy quote material, as it turned out, but the sheer amount of studies on the subject had ended up being compelling on their own).
He bit his tongue and just said, “Stop when you’re full. Don’t get sick,” before shooting up the same rote prayer he’d been using since he was a kid scolded for not saying grace at his grandparent’s house and digging in, himself.
He'd maybe oversalted it a little. And he’d forgotten water, fuck—he stood up, going to get some bottles from the fridge—the tap water here tasted like he was licking a penny. When he got back to the table, the kid had stopped eating, both hands flat on the counter. He wasn’t looking at Beren, but he definitely wasn’t looking anywhere else.
“Water,” Beren explained, feeling like he’d made some kind of social gaffe. The kid studied the bottle that was slid across to him—frowned at it, slightly. “To drink,” Beren added, and immediately felt like an idiot.
“For me to drink?” the kid asked, a few long moments later.
“Yeah, Dove. For you,” he said, and then dug into his food again so he wouldn’t have to watch Dove approach the bottled water like he was a mouse and it was a suspiciously nice piece of cheese. Eventually, he heard the crackle of the seal on the bottle being broken, and he glanced up to find Dove staring at him, hands frozen on the water bottle. Beren smiled, like this was perfectly normal, and went back to eating.
It was another full minute before the boy actually drank.
--
The new master had told him to keep the water bottle, so Dove was still holding it with both hands, not daring to let it slip out of his grip as the man led him up a staircase and into a bedroom. He was walking around the room, dusting off surfaces with a rag, shaking out the blankets. A bedside lamp clicked on, revealing lacy patterns in the lampshade and casting the room in a yellow glow. There was a window in the corner with curtains hanging over it. the carpet was soft under Dove’s toes.
He held on to the water bottle and told himself that this was good. It was a step up. There were two ways to be sold out of the brothel, and one of them was bad. The ones who aged too much, or got too injured, or fought too often, or started crying and wouldn’t stop no matter how often they got caned for it, got sold at auction at the end of the month. That was the bad way, because the people who went to the auctions weren’t looking to train up a slave to serve them for a while. They were looking for cheap ones, and cheap meant disposable. The ones that went to auction weren’t expected to live much longer than the next year.
But Dove had been picked up by a private investor, a woman who had given the club so much money that they were obligated to give her a token of their gratitude. And then she’d called him pretty and dropped him off here. As a gift.
Private ownership was good, when it was like that. It meant that Dove’s papers showed a lot more value, now, so it was in his owner’s best interest to keep him alive, to train him up, so that he’d gain value even as he aged up too much to be pretty, and they could sell him off for a profit as a professional courtesan—or a household administrator, if he got the right kind of education for it.
At least, that’s what it usually meant. Dove wasn’t sure what it meant when his buyer turned right around again and gave him as a gift to someone else—someone who didn’t even seem to want him.
The man seemed to finally be satisfied that he’d brushed the dust off of every surface in the room. His brow was still furrowed when he turned back to look at Dove standing in the doorway. He looked angry, and it was making Dove’s heartbeat stutter—he hated angering his clients, hated the way it made him feel like he’d managed to lose all his worth at once—but the man hadn’t done much more than snap at him a little, and even then, he hadn’t yelled.
“This is your room,” he said, as if the fact wasn’t particularly pleasing to him. He gestured at it, and pointed to a wall that Dove, hovering in the doorway, couldn’t see. “Bathroom’s through there. Shower if you want.”
Dove stepped into the room, his toes sinking into the rug, and looked where the man was pointing. There was, sure enough, a door leading right into a bathroom. Dove could see tile walls and a sink. If he was supposed to sleep here, he’d be able to sneak water from the faucet, if he needed, and clean up whenever he needed to…it was more of a luxury than the carpet under his feet, and it was what sealed Dove’s need to make sure he was understanding everything correctly.
“You mean for me to sleep here, Master?” he asked, and braced to find out that he was horribly wrong.
“Yes, it’s your room,” the man said. “Do you have—oh. Toothbrush. I’ll be right back.”
He strode past Dove without so much as brushing against him. Dove listened to his footsteps recede down the hall.
This was the second time he’d been left alone in the man’s house. He’d been caught snooping the first time, so in spite of the temptation to look around the room—maybe see if there was a view of anything through the wide window by the bed—he stayed exactly where the master had left him, his hands obediently at his sides. If the man was a client, Dove would have stripped and knelt near the bed, but he wasn’t sure the man would want that, yet.
Also, the clothes were warm and soft, and Dove didn’t want to take them off until he had to.
The man came back in the room, holding a colorful cardboard-and-plastic packet with the back partially torn off. It looked like the packet had once contained two toothbrushes, but now only had one. It was green. Dove took the packet instinctively, and blinked down at it. He’d arrived at the man’s house already clean, but he had eaten since then.
“That’s yours, too,” the master said. He was also staring at the toothbrush. Finally, he scrubbed a hand over his face, brushing it back over his head and upsetting the hairs that clung to the balding patch on top so that they stood up straight, looking oddly lonely in their bed of age-spotted skin. Dove glanced away from that before he laughed about it. Clients were sensitive about their hair.
“We should talk,” the man said, and, to Dove’s surprise, he sank down slowly to sit cross-legged on the floor. Dove knelt in front of him, hands in his lap.
“I don’t…enjoy sex,” he said, after a few moments of silence.
Of all the things Dove was expecting to hear, it wasn’t that. Free men were allowed to not like sex, but perhaps he was supposed to—help, somehow? Sometimes he had clients who wept on his shoulder, after, told him that they hadn’t felt that good, that in control, in a long time. They acted like he’d done something important for them, like something that had been broken had been made whole again, and it always left Dove wondering what being in control of something might be like—if he might feel something shift into place inside himself.
“So we’re not going to have any.”
That was not something Dove had been expecting to hear at all. If not that, what was he here for?
“I can make it good for you,” he offered. “I’m skilled with—”
“No,” the man said, his voice harsh, and Dove couldn’t help but flinch back from his tone. He’d pushed, and now the man would make it clear what happened when Dove pushed him.
Instead of gripping Dove by the throat or wrist, though, the man only sighs deeply.
“Let’s start over,” he said. He bent down, groaning as he lowered himself to sit on the floor. Dove dropped down to his knees, not wanting the man to look up at him, but the master tapped the carpet in front of Dove’s knees.
“Look at me, Dove,” he said. Dove…tried to. He was usually very obedient, but it was harder to be good today than it had ever been before, and he kept catching himself looking away, not wanting to see the man’s face.
“My name is Beren,” he—Master Beren—said. “I wasn’t expecting you, and I’m not going to fuck you, but you’re mine now. You don’t have to worry about that, okay? You’re mine now.”
“I’m yours, Master,” Dove repeated. The words didn’t feel right, didn’t feel okay, but they settled him. It felt like the tonic the madam used to give him when he was too little to go to sleep by himself—something that was almost a relief, except for the taste that it left in his mouth.
“Hm,” Master Beren said, and Dove looked up to find the man with one hand almost extended, as if he’d almost touched him, but thought better of it. He looked like he’d swallowed something bad, too.
“Well,” he said. “You’re tired, anyway. Rest up. We’ll see how things are in the morning.”
He left Dove alone, and Dove brushed his teeth in the bathroom, and drank some water from the tap, and curled up in the soft bed, entirely alone. He let his hand splay out on the pillow, and thought that this seemed…good. Like it might be good. He hurt less than he usually did, and he’d been fed, and Beren seemed…fair.
He drifted off to sleep without any rougher palm curling around his, no reassuring squeeze to let him know that he wasn’t alone, and he’d haven taken almost anything in place of the ache was was settled deep in his chest.