The prince and the soldier

Chapter two

The prince is infamously cold. He has a reputation as passionless save for his intellectual pursuits, and is known to draw blood, not always metaphorical, from those who cross him.

John knows better. The spark in Sherlock's eyes is anything but passionless when he waves John into his fire-lit rooms and bids him to strip. John stretches out on his belly on the skins before the fire, its ruddy heat beating into his muscles, and moans in time with the movement of Sherlock's fingers inside him. Sherlock licks drops of sweat from the well of his spine, and John is nearly unmanned, his fingers clawing through dense bear fur in his fight to keep frustrated tears from falling.

Crescents bitten across his shoulders, red weals raked down his sides, John lies spread obediently and shakes in his prince's pitiless embrace.

How characteristic, John had thought the first time the prince bedded him, that Sherlock would choose the most forbidden of passions to pursue.

He should stop this, he knows, if Sherlock won't. But he's only a serf. His oaths are to protect and obey his masters. The only person Sherlock has to obey is the king, and John can imagine all too well how Sherlock's father would respond to John's request that Sherlock stop requiring him to commit sodomy.

Whenever he watches Sherlock curl his lip at someone, John can't help but wonder whether there were others before him. Others who look at him and know what sort of marks he wears beneath his clothes, and how Sherlock touches him at night, and makes him beg despite his best intentions to stay unmoved.

But worse than the idea of being one of the prince's many conquests is the idea that Sherlock has had none. That something in John alone drove Sherlock to this. Most of all, John flinches away from the thought of what it implies if he is the only one.

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