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He didn’t think he could ever care about a human, but here Legato is, body broken, curled in his lap. His fragility should be infuriating. Instead Knives feels something like loss. He splays his hand on Legato’s back, feeling the thin beat of his heart.
“Bluesummers,” he mutters.
Those gold eyes straining up at him, nearly shut.
“Master,” Legato wheezes, blood shining on his mouth. “My master.”
And he doesn’t understand it, can’t begin to understand it, but Knives lifts him closer, brings his lips to the seam where Legato’s dark hair parts. There’s a tender ache in his throat. Something about Legato’s love, his brokenness.
“Master,” Legato breathes. “I don’t deserve… have never deserved…” There are tears glittering in his thick blue lashes. Knives touches them with his lips.
“God,” Legato whimpers. “My god…”
How old was he when he picked Legato’s name? Infantile, infatuated—not with Legato, no, but with the idea of him, proud broken boy, his eyes summer-gold and his long hair summer-blue, blue as plums, bluer. That first night, given a hot bath, he had sat there tearing and scraping at his skin until it bled. He hated people too, Knives’s arrogant boy, and if he was people—well, there was something tragic about it.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Knives had said, staring coldly down at the pink bathwater, and Legato had gazed up at him, beseeching. “It’s a waste of warm water, a waste of the doctor’s time to patch you up. I didn’t bring you here for waste.”
“No, master,” he’d said, face wet with blood and tears. “Never again.”
And Knives had never seen him that vulnerable again, not really. Effortless, beautiful, snide, luxuriating like a cat in his violence, his skill. His graceful fingers twitch in Knives’s hands now. And if it’s taken Knives himself breaking the man to understand he could break—he doesn’t feel regret, not exactly, but something like grief before grief, the sense of impending loss.
He uncurls Legato’s crushed fingers and kisses them, down every joint, to the center of his palm. Legato gasps. Pain, lust—Knives isn’t ignorant, he understands these are hopelessly mangled for his servant, a thick stew.
“We should let the doctor take care of you,” he murmurs.
Legato nods fervently.
“Yes, master,” he whispers. “Whatever you wish to do with this body, master—it’s yours. It’s not mine, it’s yours.”
“I know that,” Knives says, irritated. He sees the flash of fear in Legato’s eyes and kisses his hair again, breathing him in. Fragile, sweet-smelling, and the tang of human rot. And perhaps what Legato means when he gasps these things is something like this: I disavow the rot.
“I know that,” Knives says again, quieter.
Slowly Knives considers him. The white face pale with pain. The red mouth gaping, like a wound. The bruises under his eyes, haunted, nightmare-prints—they had disgusted Knives before and they disgust him now, but there is something wonderfully pathetic about them, something that makes him want to hold Legato closer. Plum-blue, summer-blue. Knives presses kisses to the corners of his eyes and lingers.
“I’m a worm,” Legato chokes, gripping his arm. “I’m just a worm, you’ll sully yourself—!”
“But you are my worm,” he says.
A caught breath, the fingers on his arm loosening. Legato stares at him in a golden daze. Knives hates how much he needs, how little he settles for. Blood trickles slowly from his nose.
“Bluesummers,” Knives says. “You will heal for me. I won’t tolerate it if you don’t heal for me.”
“There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you,” he breathes, licking his red lips.
Survive me, Knives thinks then, with sudden clarity. Survive me if you can.