viceindustrious | Fic: Leviathan

Title: Leviathan
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes 2009
Pairing: Blackwood/Coward
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: Not mine, just playing.
Summary: They don't realize how few their days are numbered while they have Blackwood down here, caged up like some kind of animal. "Do you think I'm impatient then?" Coward asks
Word count: 3800
Notes: Ritchieverse!Holmesian!London!Pentonville is not much like the real thing (never mind that it's extremely unlikely Blackwood would have been sent there in the first place. No one was executed at Pentonville until Newgate closed, more than a decade after the events of the film and why am I nitpicking this? Guy's London is clearly AU) but the set design was very nice.

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They're deep here. Six feet is all the room you need to be buried and one foot below the surface is still below. They call it the Model Prison, some even with sincerity, a place where isolation has driven men mad and the light only ever comes from above, only falls down on the vermin within. They're a good two miles from the Thames but the air is still full of maritime echoes, stagnant water salted by sweat and fear.

Coward stands between the rows of empty cells, surrounded by their hollow silences. It's as if a great wind has swept through this corridor and blown the inmates away. The doors lay open in almost perfect symmetry with one another, like the bend of branches in an orchard after a gale. All but the one at the end.

The Commons had been stifling that afternoon. The grim, sluggish machinations of the laws and the grim, greasy pallor of their faces. Coward's almost sure his fellows there have all been moulded from the same cheap tallow. Their time is melting away like it at any rate. They don't realize how few their days are numbered while they have Blackwood down here, caged like some kind of animal.

These things have all been predicted. Henry and he have counted on them and Coward will allow his enemies one small tip of his hat for that. They've made things so exceedingly easy. Perhaps another, for they're right about Henry in part. He is an animal. But of what manner? Oh they're quite ignorant on that count.

Coward's feet carry him briskly down the corridor, immune to the oily taint of fear that has infected this wing of the prison, his hands are folded behind his back and they do not shake.

"I thought we agreed you wouldn't come here, Daniel."

The voice doesn't seem to come from the cell. It slips like a shiver down the back of his neck, whispers form the dank shadows and the empty, hidden corners of the room. Coward wets his lips. Henry tried to teach him how to throw his voice once. Long fingers in his mouth showing him where to place his tongue. They had become sidetracked rather quickly.

"Did we agree on that?" he asks, footsteps slowing.

Henry is sitting hunched over a book, his head bowed. Coward stares for a moment and then stumbles forward, his fingers reaching out to touch the bars of the cell. He rocks up onto the balls of his feet and leans his weight on his hands.

"I thought you'd like to know that everything has been arranged," he murmurs.

Blackwood shifts, his shoulders stiffening.

"I would trust that was the case without you coming to tell me so."

Henry's voice is soft and still less warm than the iron beneath Coward's fingertips. He pushes back off the bars and looks down at the grime coating them, rubbing his hands together with a grimace.

"Do you have any idea," he says, bright and strained. "How eager I am to see you hang?"

Henry doesn't laugh, doesn't pin his heart with a reproachful look. No, he is quite motionless. Agitated, Coward trails his fingers across the bars one way, then back the other, his nails clicking against the metal. It's cool to the point of discomfort down here but to Coward it feels humid, suffocating. His breath is sticking in his lungs, stuttering along with the sound of his nails as they pass forward and back.

"I've missed you," he whispers.

The sentiment gets eaten up by silence and Coward shakes his head, gives a laugh from behind gritted teeth. He rests his forehead against the cell door and closes his eyes, volunteers his head into a lion's mouth of helplessness. The loss of sight causes a prickle of heat to race across his skin, urging him to open his eyes or back away and listen carefully for anything that moves.

"Really, this visit was simple to arrange. Don't you believe, Henry, there's no such thing as power one doesn't exercise?"

There's the dusty, muted sound of paper touching paper as Henry closes his book. Coward pushes his tongue against his clenched teeth and fights the impulse to step back at once.

"Forgive me?" he asks.

He opens his eyes to see Henry sitting upright, fingers steepled under his chin, watching him.

"It would be polite to say you missed me too," Coward says.

Blackwood rises up, unfolding himself in one swift, graceful movement. His eyes are fathomless, dark and placid yet possessed of such intense, innate scrutiny that Coward raises his hands to cover his chest, his stomach, on unthinking instinct. He steps back as Henry steps forward and glances down pointedly at the space between them, at the inch of iron separating freedom from captivity and them from each other.

"One might say I have your life in my hands after all," he says, raising his arms expansively.

"Come here," Henry says.

Coward stretches his fingers into the air and smiles. The light is behind Henry and striping the walls, the ground at his feet, with phantom bars. When Henry inhales, the shadows change shape like they've a pulse of their own. Coward counts the beats and waits and drops neither Henry's gaze nor his own smile.

"Come here," Blackwood says again.

His voice has fallen to a rough, muddy octave that barely covers the snarl Coward knows is lurking just beneath its surface. His smile broadens. He nods, deferentially and then looks up through his lashes.

"Tell me you've missed me, Henry."

Blackwood moves at the bars like he's forgotten they're there and in that instant Coward can easily imagine him stepping right through them, or the door itself melting away to appease him. The light is falling on his face now and Coward can see the white all around his eyes, the furious gleam in his pupils.

"If you-"

Henry begins but Coward cuts him off, still smiling. "Tell me."

They stare at each other.

Coward raises the toe of his shoe as though he's about to take a step forward and then sets it down instead, tapping out a slow rhythm against the grit of the prison floor.

"It's been so . . . " Coward casts his gaze to the ceiling and sighs. "Frustrating."

He gestures lazily in the air with his right hand, holding his fingers with the precise form of a dancer and then lets them fall to his cravat. Henry's eyes dart after the movement, gaze as sharp as a falcon whose hood has just been removed. Coward pushes his fingers into the knot of silk and loosens it, walks those fingers up to his Adam's apple and strokes his throat.

"I think I've been rather patient given the circumstances," he says.

"Come here, Daniel."

"Why, Lord Blackwood, we can conduct a perfectly respectable conversation like this, can't we?"

Coward laughs, a weightless noise carried on shallow breath. He can feel the vibration through his fingertips and he closes his eyes for a brief moment against the touch of his hand, draws his lower lip into his mouth and bites at it. Henry's gaze is there too, with its own gravity and its own heat and its own, impossible, friction.

"Do you think I'm impatient then?" he asks. "Irresponsible? Spoiled?"

He savours the last word, his tongue tapping hard on the d. Spoiled, tainted, over-ripe. He pushes his thumb against the tender flesh of his mouth and opens his eyes.

"It's your fault," he says.

"My fault?"

Henry's voice is so low, his lips hardly parting to speak and Coward has an idea the question was surprised out of him. His confusion is infuriating and Coward's smile finally shatters.

"This was not irresponsibility on my part!" he cries.

The words echo back from the walls and Coward stares about him, dismayed by the clarion of his own voice and startled by the hysteria in it. But without Blackwood he has felt off balance and set adrift. His intellect works against him as it works constantly, without cease, creating contingencies and picking apart policies, politics, philosophies and there has been no relief from this, no one to confide in, no one to share his thoughts with. Henry is his other half and being separated from him has been nothing less than losing half his own mind.

"I had to come. Because of your irresponsibility. You left your scent on the bedclothes, Henry. What can I do?"

He strides forward and of course, Henry's hands strike out and seize him as soon as he's close enough.

"I think of you," Coward says.

He pulls against Henry's grip, fighting it even though this is why he came, what he's been thinking about all day. Henry shakes him hard and his thoughts fly further into disorder, he almost bites through his tongue.

"On our bed," he says.

The fingers curled around his upper arms twitch, then loosen. For an instant Henry's strength feels like the clasp of something skeletal and Coward takes three deep breaths, blinking rapidly, turning the world before him into a zoetrope. In those fractional seconds of darkness, Coward can see himself picking up a worm, imagines his horror at the reflexive, mindless way it twists between his fingers, seeking escape and purchase at the same time.

He reaches through the bars and places the flat of his palm on Henry's cheek.

"I have to be eager to see you hang," he says and his fingers slide smoothly up into Henry's hair, as sleek and unwashed as the coat of an animal. His touch is tentative, light. He tips his chin up a little, leans forward into the bars and uses his hand to coax Henry forward. The iron presses cold against his face as his mouth touches Henry's.

"Daniel," Blackwood says.

Henry's breath brushes dry against his mouth like the whisper of dead leaves. Coward mutters a shushing sound.

"Daniel," Blackwood repeats.

Coward kisses him again, harder, nipping at Henry's lip to stop him from speaking. The chill of the bars at either side of his face ache like a deep bruise.

"There's nothing to worry about," Henry says.

Coward draws back. His lips press together thinly as he casts about for an alibi, searching for something to pull out of the air but the effort is exhausting and he sags, shakes his head wearily.

"I know," he says. "I know that."

His eyes fall away from the muddling trap of concern on Henry's face as he tries to swallow down all the sharp little uncertainties dancing on his tongue. The symbols on the walls would look like the scratchings of a madman to anyone else but he understands the portents beneath the portents. Besides, he's not sure that sanity isn't simply another one of those collaring words. Like virtue. Or nature.

"I didn't come for your reassurances. I'm the one who's had to oversee all of this, you know," he says.

Meticulously. With a constant, painstaking attention to detail. With patience above all else. Coward has tested every thread and every seam of their plan to the point of breaking. Until the details have burrowed their way under his skin and left his eyes too wide, his smile too tight. He can hide the stress of it well enough beneath the cloak of his youth, but within he is coiled tight as a spring.

"Why did you come?" Henry asks, a smile in his voice if not on his lips.

"Are you honestly asking?"

The air between them has more weight than his own body, Coward is sure. He does not feel quite anchored to the ground, any movement may cause him to drift away. He stretches up into the warm, heavy space between them, running his hands along the bars and his tongue over his teeth.

"Don't play the fool, Henry. I want you to fuck me."

"Oh is that it?"

"Or maybe I should ask your dear father."

He smiles sweetly at Henry and Henry smiles back and Coward feels that same breathless fluttering at the back of his mind as before. The itching, anticipatory beat of his own pulse.

"He is terribly fond of me. Don't you ever wonder-"

And there Henry's smile widens, terrifying and beautiful and full of threat.

"Don't you ever wonder how I've gained so much, so young?" he finishes, pressing his index finger to his lips as though he's asking for silence, then flicking his tongue over the tip.

There's a twitch in Henry's jaw, a flare of the nostrils and then Coward is pulled forward by the silk brocade of his vest. They kiss, teeth clattering together gracelessly. The toes of Coward's shoes scuff up against the door, his hips buck against its sold iron. Implacable, it's hard to judge the difference between that immoveable object and the ferocity of Henry's touch, his own answering urgency. If it were possible, he'd dash himself to pieces senselessly trying to break through but they are opposite and equal forces, both clinging to each other through the bars.

The door strips the skin from Coward's knuckles as he fumbles with his trouser buttons, movements as disjointed and flurried as a bird with a broken wing. He won't spare himself the space. Henry's mouth tastes stale, sour, but he is loathe to give it up just yet. Loves it as he loves the intimate scent of Henry's skin, sweat mixed with a fading shroud of Neroli and Macassar. Outside the crowds cry of magic and the Devil and soon they will whisper fearfully of phantoms and resurrection but this is a man, flesh and blood beneath his hands and one more astonishing than any of that.

He allows his trousers to fall around his ankles, unmindful of the dirt and the rumble of Blackwood's laughter passes onto his tongue. Coward shivers, plastering himself forward and then groaning at the chill against his thighs. He turns and Henry kisses the nape of his neck, grabs his hair and pulls him tight to the bars. Coward tips his head back and curses the barrier between them, the metal grinding cold against his scalp, the scalding touch of Henry's mouth.

From here it seems as though the stairs at the other end of the corridor are lit with arc lamps. The light flows down their steps with such strength, a stark, surprising reminder of the outside world. Coward has these men in his pocket and he has asked not to be disturbed but it is not impossible that some thoughtless . . . no. Some curious soul could venture down to see the infamous Blackwood and find Coward instead, naked from the waist, trembling pinned against the cell of a monster.

"Do it," he says, out of breath. "Henry, now."

Blackwood's teeth graze his shoulder, moist heat that spreads across the cloth and onto Coward's skin as he pants, chest heaving.

"Where . . . " Henry mutters, patting at Coward's waistcoat pockets.

Coward gives a high, giddy laugh that turns to a moan when he thinks how Henry expected this of him. What Henry expected of him. The assumption coils sinuously in his mind, the question is not did he bring anything, simply one of location.

He shakes his head from side to side, knocking it against the bars. It's only that slight, sharp pain that gives him the clarity of mind to put his words together.

"I didn't bring anything," he says.

"You can't possibly expect me to believe that you came here without this object in mind." Henry's fingers curl in vest, over his stomach.

Coward would allow him to claw his way inside like that if it were possible. If they truly were more than mortal he'd play Prometheus to Blackwood's eagle any time he liked. Better than the men who came before, expecting a Ganymede content to sit at their feet. Henry can call him beautiful and ravage him without conscience all the same and the cup he bears for Blackwood is the one he made himself.

He turns toward Henry's voice, begging for a kiss he can't receive and pressing his forehead against the bars instead. Next, his mouth, smudging damp prints of his lips against the metal until Henry raises his hand so he has fingers to kiss instead.

"No," he says and licks at Henry's skin, the filthy iron, both. "I wanted it like this. I want to feel it tomorrow."

Blackwood's sudden inhalation tickles the fine hairs just below his ear. The hand at his mouth brushes wet over his chin, his beard.

It is not the hand that reaches between his legs and pushes inside him, sudden and dry. Coward gasps, his mouth open as wide as his pupils as he stares sightlessly up at the grey stone ceiling, eyes rolling back in his head. Henry twists his fingers and it burns but Coward only closes his fists around the bars. Keeping himself captive and arching his back as that tight, rough pressure gathers in one low, sustained note at the base of his cock.

"Yes, yes," he hisses, the words drawn out to a sibilant nonsense through his teeth.

Henry swears and pulls his fingers free, his voice like steam. "God damn you, Daniel."

Coward laughs and reaches blindly backward to find Henry's hand, threading their fingers together,

"No, you. You damn me," he says.

Blackwood chuckles and Coward starts at the bar of heat that's laid suddenly along the cleft of his arse. Henry's other hand presses to his hip at once and steadies him there. They're only the pads of his fingers but Coward feels as bolted in place as the cell door itself. No. More so, for the door seems less like a barrier now and more like a prop. He suspects Henry probably enjoys it, the pantomime of sitting in his prison, the pretence of defeat. There are all kinds of pain that Henry has hidden predilections for.

This, right now, hurts them both. Henry thrusts into him hard and fast and the pain is the instrument, more so than Henry's cock. It scours him, a pain so close to its twin of pleasure that it wavers on that cusp and then comes crashing down on the other side. They both cry out at it. Coward bucks and knocks his wrist bones against the bars as he squeezes Henry's hand.

It's awkward to fuck like this and he can feel Henry's frustration in the rough jolt of his hips as he make up for a lack of elegance with simple force. Wringing satisfaction from his body, the ache of it spreads through Coward like a fast poison, scrapes along his nerves like the metal at his back.

He won't touch himself. The desire to is maddening and it makes his fingers twitch but it's a sweet kind of madness, one he welcomes. He wants those fires to burn brighter, hotter and bites his lip to the desperate throbbing that penetrates deep from the glossy, begging head of his cock, to where Blackwood is fucking him.

His release catches him by surprise, leaves him choking on the breath held simmering in his lungs. Henry growls as Coward clenches around his cock, fucking him through his orgasm into a torturous sensitivity. He's still half hard.

Coward might try to plea for the mercy his body is so desperate for, but all his moans seem to turn into words of encouragement. Henry is snarling like an animal caught in a trap and his movements are as uncoordinated as that, as frantic. His nails have grown out enough to raise white lines on Coward's skin where sweat is making his grip slip. The smell of semen mixed with the sewer scent of the prison is making Coward's head swim.

He can't truly feel it when Henry comes, feels when he stills instead, quivering deep inside of him but he imagines the heat of it all the same, groans at the idea. Being filled up. Henry pulls out and Coward winces at the sting.

A trail of something warm and thick and wet starts to roll down the inside of his thigh. Blackwood chases after it with his finger, catches the mess and smears it into his skin. Traces the path back up and pushes his seed back inside Coward's body, rubbing, stretching him now when he's so tender. Coward shudders, then wheels around and pulls Henry's wrist up to lap at his fingers.

"You're bleeding," Henry says, his voice hoarse.

Coward smiles indulgently around his fingers, curling his tongue around them to savour the taste. Henry shakes his head and looks pointedly at his mouth.

"No there, you're bleeding there."

He sounds a trifle dazed. Coward pulls his fingers from his lips with a pop and frowns at the streak of red painting in the whorls of his fingerprints. His bottom lip smarts when he tongues at it and fills his mouth with the iron tang of blood.

"Oh," he says, looking to Henry in surprise.

Henry's eyes flash and he moves forward as if to kiss him, but Coward turns his head to the side.

"I brought you a gift," he says. "I almost forgot."

Coward reaches into his vest pocket and pulls out a square of white silk folded neatly in half along its centre. He snaps it open with a flourish to reveal the tiny Acacia flowers embroidered at each corner. Henry's initials are there too, cursive swirls of purple next to the yellow. It is hand crafted, unique and exceedingly fine. Coward has a fondness for such things.

He brings the handkerchief to the cut on his lip and presses a kiss there, decorating his present with another flower, a rose that's truly one of a kind.

"It can travel through the underworld with you," he smiles.

He hands it to Henry, who takes it from him and keeps his hand too, their fingers joined together under the handkerchief as they kiss.

"You are singular," Henry says against his mouth, their breath mingling.

He straightens Coward's cravat and then pulls it tight.

"But this was irresponsible."

Tighter.

"I know," Coward says, struggling to swallow past the collar Henry has made of his tie.

He pulls his trousers back up and brushes them down, rashly disappointed that they've escaped so unsullied. He must make do with the bitter musk of salt in his mouth and the secret rawness between his legs for keepsakes.

And the promise he'll take from Henry now.

"You shall have to remonstrate with me properly once you're back in our bed."

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