Share/Spill

[x_losfic]

Title: Share/Spill

Author: x_los

Rating: NC-17

Pairing: Ten/Simm!Master, (Theta/Koschei mention)

Summary: It's nearly impossible to shake your cultural heritage. Especially when you kind of get off on it.

Beta: gritsinmisery ! Who fought the flu to bring you coherent sentence structure! Hail her!

A/N: edited request for best_enemies Anon Meme: if you'd like, here's the original version. I am REALLY sorry about the title source quote. Gag on my pretension!

Share/Spill

"Blood doubly unites us, for we share the same blood and we have spilled blood."

--Jean-Paul Sartre

Back in the High Pre-Rassilonate period, the Time Lords enjoyed a period of decadence so extreme it remained the shock and shame of their descendants, millennia after the fact. Or it would have, if they’d widely studied their past instead of preferring to consign everything that came before their glorious founder (as if any one individual ‘founds’ a whole society, and yet everyone pretended they didn’t know better) to oblivion. In the era when they observed slaughter in the Death Zone like Japanese aristocrats took in the cherry blossoms, Gallifreyans had fetishized mortality.

At dinner parties, society women wore elaborate temporal stabilizers as jewelry and dressed their hair with a glut of bright blood, held static with the power of the time field, but controlled by the power of the Time Lady in question. The blood’s source was variable. The higher the animal of origin’s sentience quotient—which still buzzed through the liquid, such past association being detectable to Time Lords, enticing them with the energy of an active mind humming in the decorative sweep of a woman’s hair—the more daring the fashion statement.

She might provide an arrogant peacock display, complete with glistening drips from her curls falling back into the mass of her hair, only to be channeled up again, precise as a fountain, if she was capable of it. Not a touch of red would mar her dress. Not a fleck would stain the high collar she wore to protect her sensitive neck, and coyly suggest its eroticism. No blood should ever (publicly) touch her elegant porcelain skin—that was a rather more private affair.

People of high Houses were born within the dome and never exposed to full sunlight. Even at the festive Death Zone viewings, Time Lords of either sex assiduously carried parasols to blunt both the glare off the suns and the possible splatter from particularly daring close observations.

The Doctor and the Master carried the blood of high Houses such as these, cosmetically distorted but fundamentally unaltered by looms and centuries. Even after looms, good families only bred with their sort of people, which compounded certain undesirable traits. By their generation, incidence of madness was getting harder for ‘their sort of people’ to hush up. Nonintervention as a doctrine was getting a little difficult to distinguish from simply liking to watch things die.

Neither man had ever been particularly soothed by revisionist history, or interested in palatable lies. They were very aware of their heritage. Neither had ever been particularly good at switching off the hard, shuddering thrill they got from watching a traced line blossom into a thick, dribbling red string in a certain, private context.

They didn’t suffer harm from just anyone -- both would have considered that a violation - and they didn’t inflict physical violence carelessly. But when one of them said he wanted to kill the other with a more personal touch than a bomb, than a gun, the other understood that meant a long knife and a slow, near teasing drag across the skin, splitting it almost as an afterthought, a cut that would seem to beg for a tongue to lick it up, to probe the dimensions of the wound, to tease it deeper.

One of them made a real effort and got out of a somewhat frightening society (and a rather more terrifying personal situation) while he could. The other stopped trying to deny his nature altogether. He treated his compatriot’s running from his as simply an invitation to higher games, a sort of galactic hide-and-seek. He refused to acknowledge it as a dismissal. That might have actually hurt him, and not in the way he liked.

The latter finally got the other in a position to play the games he always ran away from. It had taken full centuries of effort, but it was so worth it.

“Stay still,” he muttered, not unkindly, “Stop shaking. Those are my best handcuffs, you’ll break your wrists. And besides, there’s no need to be coy with me.”

He took out a tiny dagger, so small and elaborate that it seemed almost a toy right up until he used it to trace first errant lines, then his name, onto the other’s skin. The beaded lines perched on his back all in a circle, that dripped with he finished and smeared when he slid in and elicited a twisted yelp when he laid a hand on them to balance himself. Really he could have used a palm on the bed, but how could he resist the other’s failure to smother his cry? The sound rang in his ears louder than the drums, and his name there, painting the skin as it once had, as it always should have, was lovely to look at.

“You’re no blushing bride, you,” he teased the next day, when he’d come back with a long, plain knife that spoke intent in its high sharpness, made it clear that the pain before had just been foreplay. He sat astride his bound partner, working the muscles of his back with mocking tenderness, and also because he liked to remind himself that he could touch him now, for as long as he wanted, any time he wanted. The knife wasn’t in his hands, but on the bed where the bound man could see it. “I first made you bleed long ago. Remember that?”

The other didn’t answer with anything more than a weak noise that sounded like choking on a sob. Which wouldn’t do at all, he frowned. Here he was getting all nostalgic, and he’d just feel ridiculous if his partner wasn’t also in a mood to reminisce. He did hate feeling ridiculous, so he dug the knife in until he got a satisfying, high “Yes!” which was much better.

Blithely he continued, tossing the knife from palm to palm. “I made you bleed, and you trembled with trust and asked me to. I consecrated you to me then. Blood binds, in nearly every culture. Certainly in ours, and if everyone else is gone we’ll just have to carry all of that inheritance in us. I don’t mind.”

He bent to draw his tongue in long, flat licks over the wound. There was that thick viscosity in his mouth, just as he’d remembered, as he’s imagined it in the interceding centuries. It was as if he’d finally gotten a taste of what he was hungry for, and now he could be satiated. He smirked as the man beneath him trembled. “Neither do you, not really. Do you know the most arrogant, the most impossible thing you’ve done out of an impressive list?”

The Doctor was learning, and his “no” came immediately. The Master continued, pleased. “Pretending you’d lost your taste for this. Here, I’ll even let you lick the knife, love. After all, it’s hardly fair that only I should get to know how good you feel, slipping across the tongue. Come on, don’t be shy. There’s a boy — and swallow that; if I catch you spitting yourself out I’ll slit and artery and teach you not to waste it.”

The Master rested his knife on the back below him like it was a table, and set his fingers to toying at the pretty mess he’d made, playing the edge of the cut like he’d fuck that too if he could. “One day you’re going to beg to see if I match your memory. One day I’m going to let you find out. Now beg me to fuck you or I’m going to shove this right through your auxiliary heart. You don’t need that one, but I imagine you like it.”

“Fuck me,” the Doctor spat, and the Master held out for a ‘please,’ and then for his name. When he’d gotten both he smiled, confined himself to retracing another pattern that had lapsed with the Doctor’s first regeneration and doing as he’d been asked. Enough concessions like this, enough blood, enough time, and they would get to that ‘one day.’ He did hope it was soon. Of the games they knew how to play with each other, this was just checkers. He liked it well enough, but he did rather miss their Bughouse chess.