by Gray Miller
“Stupid git. Probably got no porn worth anything on that laptop. Talk about two wasted tools… anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah… and also just like sex, these people sometimes take the time to learn how to use that energy better. As it happens, the best way to manipulate it, store it, do things with it is through directed sexual action.” He squinted for a moment at Brian, still seated and silent. “You getting any of this?”
“Power. Manipulated by the beautiful people. Controlled through good sex. I played a lot of D&D when I was a kid, I can figure out how a magical system works.” Brian paused. “I’m not joking, I understand what you’re telling me. It’s just really hard to believe. Even with… what happened.”
“Of course it is,” Sullivan agreed. “Because you and I, m’lad, we are a couple of North American good ol’ boys, raised on John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and Natassja Kinski and Kelly LeBrock.” He shook his head. “Hell, kids nowadays have it even worse, with the Cruise, Kid Rock, Pamela Anderson and such. Talk about unrealistic.” He sipped his coffee. “Tell me if I’m wrong. Your parents didn’t want to talk about sex with you. Your friends only occasionally would do it in giggles, or whispered conversations at night around a stroke book passed around at a sleepover. Your teachers wouldn’t talk to you about it for fear of being labeled pedophiles, and the only other authority figure left—the church you went to, what, Catholic?”
“Mormon.”
Sullivan made a face. “Gah. Even worse. The church managed to both convey the magic and mystery of sex while at the same time keeping you completely ignorant of it, with the presumption that when you finally met your own Holy Sperm Vessel and began to fruitpully multifly, you’d figure it all out. How’m I doing so far?”
“Pretty much spot on. But that’s the way it is for most people I know. Or meet. Sexually healthy or not.”
“Right, right, but here’s where I get good.” He held up one finger, laced with the same ink that swirled down the back of his hand and up his arms. “Somewhere early on, you had two things happen: one, you developed a tendency, a proclivity, an interest in some sort of sexual aberration. Whips, chains, goats, latex, beans, whatever… something outside the norm.” He held up a second finger. “And two, somehow, some way, you lucked into a sexual relationship that did not put the burden of shame on you.”
Brian sat back, looking intently at Sullivan. “OK. Yes. Into kink early on, starting with trying to figure out the sex scenes in my Dad’s copy of ‘The Anderson Tapes’. And then Melinda, in high school, a year older than me and with a mother who encouraged us to the bedroom after dinner with a ‘have fun kids, don’t bang the wall too hard.’” He paused, and looked down at his hands for a moment, for a moment reliving the same moment that always came to mind, leopard print panties, so exotic to a sixteen year old, glimpsed just before she blindfolded him, and bound his wrists and ankles to the bed, and then an eternal thirty seconds or so of nothing, broken by the sudden unmistakable feeling of the panties being hung from his left big toe, and the throaty chuckle of his girlfriend… he felt his scars starting to warm, and shook his head quickly.
Sullivan was leaning forward out of his chair, one hand halfway to Brian’s wrist again. He looked carefully at Brian’s eyes, and seemed to be trying to measure something. After a moment he nodded to himself, satisfied. “Hmmph. Ok then. You have some control after all. That’s the first sign that you won’t, at least, shoot yourself in the head.” Again that sour smile returned. “You’ll just have to worry about others doing it for you.”
He sat back in his chair. “And here’s where I really get the Swami Merit Badge.” He held an imaginary envelope to his forehead. “Recently, within the last month or so, you discovered a new kink. Something that excited and interested you almost as much as sex did when you first discovered it, something that calls to you like nothing else.” He paused again, and rotated his arms, flexing them and causing the twining lines of his tat to pulse and writhe. “Something like ink. Or piercing. Or leather. Or—“
“Rope.” Brian said softly. “I’ve been working with my lovers and rope… shibari, it’s called.’
Sullivan sighed. “Fuck. Shoulda known. You couldn’t’ve picked something simple like spanking, could you? Had to pick something meditative and focused.” His voice again assumed the nasal wicked-witch tone. Then his face softened as he looked again at his arms. “Then again, I bet it wasn’t exactly a choice, was it?”
Brian nodded. “Yeah. It was weird—I’ve been kinky pretty much my whole sexual life, maybe earlier. Been bottom, been sub, been top, tried all sorts of things—well, as much as I could, life got in the way a lot.” Ain’t that an understatement, buddy boy? “But yeah, a couple of months ago… I dunno, I was with my girlfriend at a fetish conference, and in the marketplace the only thing I could afford was this rope. Real bondage rope, not the stuff you get from the hardware store.” He looked down at his own hands. “Somehow, in my hands, it just felt… right. When I started using it with my lovers, it became both a means and an end, functional lingerie, whatever you want to call it… it just felt, well, right. For me and them.”
“It’s called a fetish, bucko. Not in the latex and Skin-Two sense—well, in that sense, too, sometimes, but I’m talking more about anthropology here. According to the Study of Man,” he grinned at Brian’s wincing as he twisted the word in the same way Vashte had, “a fetish is any object or action to which inordinate power is attached. On some people, having this ink,” he waved a palm over his opposite arm, shoulder to wrist, “would be nothing more than a decoration, like a necklace or earring. But it’s my fetish, and that means I can use it as a conduit for that power we were talking about… ” He demonstrated by waving his hand in the air again, opening his palm and blowing out across it towards the man with the laptop.
Brian could almost see the turbulence in the air—no, scratch that, he actually did see it moving across the room to where the computer-bound man sat. When it struck him, his eyes widened, and he looked up again, suddenly, face flushed, to where Sullivan sat—but the instigator of the disturbance was feigning innocence, idly looking at his nails. And in the process, showing off his hands and muscled forearms to Happy Boy over there… Brian thought, and smiled. Come to think of it, he’s showing it off to me, too.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to play with it, if it’s so dangerous?” Brian wasn’t criticizing, he was curious.
Sullivan barked out a laugh. “Are you kidding? That’s what it’s for, boy, to be played with! Hell, it is play! Why do you think all the sex gods are tricksters, starting with Pan?” He glanced over at the man, and gave a very deliberate wink. The man licked his lips nervously… and dove back into his laptop, hands moving twice as fast as before. “There’s just one problem.”
“It’s no accident that your parents, you and your friends,never found out more about sex than the plumbing. It’s no accident, my friend, that this entire civilization of ours is kept in the constant tension of being told sex is bad while at the same time having it thrust in our faces at every turn.” His tone deepened, and his eyes grew hard. “There are people who see this power as a threat to their existence, as something that needs to be quelled and eliminated wherever possible. They are not nice people. In fact, they are ugly in so many ways… ” His voice trailed off, and he looked sadly at the floor, seeming lost in some internal memories.
Brian tried to simply wait patiently, but as the silence grew longer, the need to break it with some bit of humor, some lighthearted remark (Well, I’ll bite… How ugly ARE they?) grew within him. Finally his mouth opened, but Sullivan’s head snapped up and the eyes that drilled into him were glistening with tears. Suddenly Brian was very glad he’d held his tongue.
“Look, bucko, I don’t have time—we don’t have time—to turn this into a metaphysical discussion. So I’ll give you the cliff’s notes. Those that have have been controlling the have-nots for a helluva long time, ever since the men—and some women, chauvinism is n
ot biological—threw Astarte out of her own temple. They figured out that a population ignorant about its own sexuality would be easy to scare, easy to corrupt with promises of forbidden pleasure, and best of all would continue to procreate and replenish the work force with wild abandon, reinforcing the cycle and keeping things in their place.”
Brian nodded. “Sure, I’ve read that sort of economic theory before. What does that have to do with this… power thing?”
Sullivan groaned. “Oh, you poor babe in the woods. It’s not about economics, it’s about Power. The Power you and Vash were fooling about with. The ‘pressors don’t want anyone mucking about with it except them, and they use it with great success to keep themselves in control of things.”
“’Pressers?”
Sulllivan looked startled at the question. “Eh? Oh. ‘Pressors, with an oh-are. Repressors. As in those who repress. Those who work to keep you ‘ignant’, as Dear Saint Cho would say. But again, I’m digressing, and it’s going to get you killed and me annoyed. So listen.”
“They, like me, will have seen your firestorm of power tonight. And make no mistake, boy, you are one helluva Mage to have been able to wrest that kind of juice from Vash. Pun intended. Problem is, you’ve got the power of a nuclear plant combined with the training and self-control of a rabid jackrabbit, which gives you the life expectancy of a horny mayfly in an electrical plant. They won’t know where.you are yet, since I got to you pretty quickly… but they’ll be a-huntin’ now, for sure.”
“Hunting?” Brian was having no trouble understanding the words, it was the concept that gave him trouble. Sure, things were swinging a bit to the conservative side right now, but this talk about hunting and vast conspiracies was a little hard for him to accept. It’s one thing to be a fan of fantasy, he’d been reading this kind of stuff forever. But trying to actually work it into reality…
Then he saw them.
Walking past the front window of the coffee shop, he saw two young men, looking like Mormon missionaries. In fact… he squinted, and saw that they had the typical rectangular black nametags. They were Mormons.
But something about them looked different. These two didn’t have the gawky awkwardness that Brian associated with the eighteen year old proselytizers he’d known growing up. These two moved with sure athletic smoothness, their eyes alert as one peered into the coffeeshop, the other with his back to the window, taking in the street. Covering all avenues of attack, Brian realized. Or flight.. Their haircuts went beyond Beaver Cleaver conservatism and into the shaved precision of the military. In fact, they reminded Brian disconcertingly of some Navy Seals he’d worked with in his Marine days. Scary men.
“Yeah, I see them,” Sullivan said quietly. Brian started and looked at the man nonchalantly sipping his coffee. “They’re sniffing around. Don’t worry about staring at them; this kind of place always has people staring at anyone who looks as out of place as they do, and for a change they won’t take it as an invitation to ask you the Golden Questions.” He put down his coffee and looked at them as they entered the building. He looked relaxed, but Brian noticed that his feet were flat on the floor, and could sense a readiness for some sort of action that belied the calm exterior.
The two men came into the coffee shop, looking over the patrons with eyes that seemed too small for their faces. As for the coffeehouse crowd, they were all suddenly studiously involved in whatever was in their hands, be it book, magazine, cup… or laptop. The missionaries moved straight for the man Sullivan had been toying with earlier, who looked up in surprise at their quiet intense murmurs as they flanked the hapless grad student.
One of them continued to look around the room, and as his glance brushed over Brian, he he felt a wisp of sensation, like a slimy glove drawing fingers slowly over his cervical vertebrae. It lasted just a moment, and then was gone. Sullivan gently laid a hand on Brian’s to keep him from reaching up to rub his neck. “You shouldn’t be able to feel that, bucko, so just stay where you are, and smile at your big leather daddy here.” Brian flushed, not so much out of embarrassment as from the fact that he was finding Sullivan’s big hand on his more than a little exciting. Startled, he could feel his cock thickening in his jeans, pressing out the fabric. Sullivan glanced down, grinned. “Ah, fear does make for a great aphrodisiac, doesn’t it?”
Brian suddenly thought What am I scared of? These are just missionaries. Indeed, the men had reverted to form, both of them seated and talking intently to the man with the laptop, who had a weird mix of confusion, annoyance, and titillation on his face.
“Good. They went for the scent. That’s our cue. Let’s go, loverboy.” Sullivan continued to grip Brian’s hand as they began to walk towards the side door of the coffeeshop. The man with the laptop was looking more and more flustered as the missionaries leaned closer to him, one of them resting a hand not-too-softly on his shoulder.
Suddenly it was all just too much. Brian pulled away from Sullivan.
“This is ridiculous.” Brian said loudly. “They’re just missionaries. My parents sic them on me all the time.” Sullivan’s head tilted down towards the floor, wincing. He shook his head with a heavy sigh. Brian suddenly felt inexplicably angry. “This is just part of some complicated pickup line, isn’t it?”
Sullivan brought his head up, still not looking back.. “Suit yourself,” he said amicably, and continued to walk towards the door. Brian was taken aback at how quickly the big man disappeared through the door, and he felt a little lost. The club, the evening with Vashte, the feeling of the Power slipping, the sex, the healing process, it all seemed very far away in the sunny warmth of Mimazu’s coffee shop… but a part of him knew it had all happened, it was all real. And it knew that there was really no one to explain it except the man who had just walked out the door.
His thoughts were broken by the sudden harsh grasp on his shoulder. “You’re the one, aren’t you?” he heard one of the missionaries say, in a friendly bland tone. “You’re coming with us. Now.”
Brian was confused, now, and turned towards the man, whose hand shifted but tightened on his shoulder. “What? No, I’m not interested, guys, I was a Mormon but it’s really not… GAHHH!” His protests morphed into a painful gurgle as the hand on his shoulder tightened, fingers pressing into his trapezius with more force than he’d ever felt before.
“You’re coming with us. Now.” And before Brian’s indrawn breath, about to protest, could even be taken, the other man had grasped his wrist and twisted it outwards, locking his elbow flat out at the joint. The pain was incredible, and he lifted on his toes to try to alleviate what felt like his arm being broken in half at the elbow. A clinical part of his mind recognized the arm lock as something familiar from his occasional aikido classes, but those practices were with people working very, very hard not to damage each other. Brian found that when your sparring partner didn’t really care about the pain they caused, it was a very different feeling. All the pretty movements blew out of his mind in a haze of pain and the very real fear that his tendons and cartilage were creaking towards oblivion as the missionary adjusted his grip slightly. Brian’s other arm could only flop helplessly, as every time he tried to move it the missionary would increase the torque on his joint and flexed wrist, lifting Brian further on his toes as he tried to relieve the pressure. Caught between the grip on his shoulder and the agonizing burn of his elbow tendons, Brian was feeling very helpless.
But not scared. Not yet. Instead, he was getting pissed. Pain did that to him, sent him into rages that made him want to do something, anything, the adrenaline driving the need to strike out to the forefront of his mind. It became a little cycle; Brian would struggle, the missionary would adjust his grip slightly, and Brian would again be forced to stop as his elbow creaked in protest, spears of pain shooting up his ligaments. He knew just how it would sound, like a chicken leg being popped out of its socket. He looked around the coffeeshop, but the other patrons seemed frozen—even the barista was simply watching, making n
o move towards the phone. “Call the—“ Brian tried to urge her, his voice breaking off in a hiss as the pressure again shifted.
Both men were still calmly smiling with their small eyes looking intently at Brian as he struggled. The first released his grip on Brian’s trapezius, the relief unnoticed as Armlock Man twisted some more, just to keep his attention. His partner calmly drew a small black case out of the breastpocket of his black suit, unzipping it and laying it on the table next to Brian. He looked down and saw it contained, wrapped in neat little black bands of elastic, a small black vial and hypodermic needle. Brian watched the missionary—now dubbed Needle Man in the back of his mind—reach for it, a soft click made him turn his head, and he saw Armlock man matter-of-factly using a knife with a boxy handle to slice through his jacket and shirt all the way from his wrist to his shoulder. The leather and fabric put up no more resistance to the blade’s edge than water, and Brian wondered at exactly how sharp that meant the knife had to be. As he saw a line of red appear up his now-bare arm, he realized that it was even sharper than that, having sliced into his skin without his feeling it.