
Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/4830185.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Rape/Non-Con, Underage
  Category:
      M/M
  Fandom:
      Blake's_7
  Relationship:
      Kerr_Avon/Roj_Blake
  Character:
      Kerr_Avon, Roj_Blake, Vila_Restal, Jenna_Stannis, Cally_(Blake's_7)
  Additional Tags:
      season/series_1, Alternate_Universe_-_Canon_Divergence, meet_the_parents,
      mentions_of_past_underage_father/son_incest
  Collections:
      Hermit.org_Blake's_7_Library
  Stats:
      Published: 2008-05-26 Words: 23815
****** Outlaws and Inlaws ******
by HermitLibrary_Archivist
Summary
     By Nova
     Avon and Blake's relationship has reached the point where they have
     to meet the parents.
Notes
     Author's Notes: For Ika and the Pink Triangles
     This story takes place in an alternate universe that peels off after
     The Web.
     Previously Published in Fire and Ice #7, ed. Kathleen Resch
      
     Note from Judith and Aralias, the archivists: This story was
     originally archived at Hermit.org_Blake's_7_Library, which was closed
     due to maintenance costs and lack of time. To preserve the archive,
     we began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-
     approved project in August 2015. We posted announcements about the
     move and emailed authors as we imported, but may not have reached
     everyone. If you are (or know) this author, please contact us using
     the e-mail address on Hermit.org_Blake's_7_Library_collection
     profile.
     This work has been backdated to 26th of May 2008, which is the last
     date the Hermit.org archive was updated, not the date this fic was
     written. In some cases, fics can be dated more precisely by searching
     for the zine they were originally published in on Fanlore.
1. The frontier planet's third sun was setting behind the silver dome of a
Federation research station but the air was still thick with lemon-coloured
light from its paired suns, suspended above the jagged grey mountain that faced
the dome. Avon eased himself cautiously to the edge of a pock-marked slab of
volcanic rock and peered down the mountainside. A line of men and women in
olive coveralls - the labour force of prisoners who had just finished building
the research station - wound through the maze of boulders below him, headed for
a waiting spaceship. He turned to Blake, expecting the signal to move, but
instead found him staring at the prisoners with a bemused, almost fearful
expression.
'Blake?' he whispered, touching the other man's arm to attract his attention.
'Roj, what's the matter?'
Muscles twanged under Avon's palm. When he looked closer, he saw a sheen of
sweat glossing Blake's face. 'That man and woman at the end of the line,' he
muttered, still staring. 'They're my parents.'
Avon's eyes narrowed, straining against the acid glare: a purely reflex action,
since he would hardly have been able to identify any family resemblances from
that height. He contemplated saying, 'I thought your parents were dead' but he
had never liked stating the obvious.
**I can leave that to Vila. And besides, Blake should know.**
'All right,' he said, assimilating the information with his usual speed. 'This
calls for a change of plan. Come on, Vila.'
A theatrical sigh eddied towards him as Vila elbowed through the gap between
Blake and the rock face, stuffing a pack of cards into his pocket. 'I was just
going to cheat myself at Patience,' he complained. 'Can't a man ever get any
peace around here? Why me?'
'Because we are about to rescue two Federation prisoners and you are wearing a
Federation uniform. I assume you can make the connection between those facts.'
'So? Blake's in uniform too.'
'Ah, but these prisoners are Blake's parents, which presupposes that they are
intractable liberals, if not outright revolutionaries. Either way, they are
unlikely to react favourably to the sight of their son in Federation blacks.'
'What's an intractable liberal, when it's -?' Vila began and Avon snarled,
'Hurry, fool! We don't have time to waste on political discussion.'
He gripped Blake's hand and then released it, unholstered his blaster and set
off down the hillside under cover of a stony ridge. Vila caught up a few
seconds later, jogging along behind him.
'Wait a minute,' he whispered. 'I thought Blake's mum and dad were dead.'
Avon smiled. **There, I knew I could rely on Vila for the appropriate
banality.** 'So the Federation told Blake,' he replied. 'But here they are.'
'Parents,' Vila mused, as he dodged a spiny bush. 'I had one of them once, a
long time ago. Well, two, I suppose, except I wouldn't recognise my dad if I
fell over him in a Federation holding cell - which I may've done from time to
time, come to think of it. Still, they say that people who grow up round their
parents tend to get attached to them, so it'd be a nice gesture, saving Blake's
mum and dad. Any idea of how we're going to go about it?'
'Why don't we just trust our luck? That seems a suitably Blakean strategy.'
Vila winced. 'Actually, I might trust your luck, Avon,' he decided. 'Mine's
been wearing a bit thin lately.'
As it turned out, the rescue was easier than either of them anticipated. They
ducked across the track, skidded down a shale slope and squeezed between two
standing stones, emerging at the next bend in the path just in time to
intercept the three Federation troopers who were guarding the final batch of
prisoners. While Vila fanned his blaster in a casual semi-circle, Avon scanned
the group and pointed to a tall thickset man and the small round woman beside
him.
'We need two labourers to carry some equipment you idiots left behind,' he
snapped. 'They'll do.'
Five seconds later, they were herding their prisoners back up the track towards
the research station. Avon kept an eye on the guards until they turned the
corner but the three men didn't even bother to look around.
**Marvellous what an air of authority can achieve. Let's see whether it works
equally well on Blake's parents.**
As they reached the rocky outcrop that marked the beginning of the ridge, he
halted and said, 'I should inform you that we are not, in fact, Federation
troopers. Your son is waiting in the hills. If you leave the path here and -'
Before he could finish the sentence, the small woman was tilting her head back
to glare up at him. 'Oh no, we aren't quite that gullible,' she snapped. 'If
you want to shoot us, you can do it right here, where they'll find our bodies.
Maybe some of your precious scientists will think twice about the system
they're supporting, if they see what it costs in human lives.'
She bristled and puffed her chest out, like a bantam confronting a fox. Avon,
gazing down into a pair of devastatingly familiar hazel eyes, found himself
temporarily silenced. At his side Vila shuffled and cleared his throat.
'He means it, you know,' he said earnestly. 'Roj Blake's a friend of ours,
honest. We came down to blow up that place you've been working on, only Blake
saw you, so we decided we'd better rescue you first. It'd be nice if you could
believe us straight off, because me and Avon ought to get a move on, before
they start shipping the scientists in.'
For some reason, Vila's random babbling seemed to have more effect than
rational explanation. At any rate, the small woman breathed, soft and
questioning, 'Roj? Roj is here,' while the tall man gnawed his thumb and
murmured, 'A strange lie for a pair of Federation executioners to choose. I
think we might risk believing them', as though he were talking to himself.
That seemed close enough to assent. Avon raised his hand in a signal and
watched Blake scramble to his feet - little more than a distant smudge against
the hillside but Avon could recognise the tension in his stance. Blake's
parents took one look at the shadowy figure and turned away without another
word, helping each over the first ridge of basalt and filing along the stony
track with the unconscious precision of sleepwalkers. Avon watched them for
half a minute and then jerked his head at Vila, who blinked and rubbed his
eyes.
'You sure we shouldn't stay and help them up the hill?' he said wistfully. 'I
wouldn't mind a front seat at a family reunion.'
Avon hitched at the tube of explosive devices slung over his shoulder. 'Curb
your sentiment,' he told Vila. 'We have a job to do.'
So they did it, planting the explosives at regular intervals throughout the
dome and then teleporting back to the Liberator where, to Vila's obvious
delight, the family reunion was still in full swing. Cally, Gan and Jenna
clustered in a benevolent semi-circle around Blake, who was canted at an
alarming angle, one arm hooked over his father's shoulder, the other arm
reaching down to embrace his mother. They swayed together, still too dazed with
emotion to say anything more than variants on 'You're alive' and 'The
Federation claimed you were dead' and 'Oh god, so they were telling the truth
about Jak and Meirion' - Blake's brother and sister, as Avon recalled: the
rumours of their deaths had clearly not been exaggerated. He halted at the
outer edge of the circle, hooding his eyes and folding his hands in front of
him.
'Objective achieved,' he reported in his driest tones. 'The dome is now a
kilometre-deep crater. The Federation will have to find another site for their
research station.'
Blake's mother broke away from the group embrace and took a step towards him.
'Thank you,' she said fiercely. 'Well done.'
Avon shrugged. 'There is no need to thank me. I am not the resident hothead.'
'Nah, he's the resident bucket of cold water,' Vila cut in. 'Which reminds me,
I could use a drink right now. After all, we've got a lot to celebrate -
reducing the dome to rubble and finding Blake's folks.'
He beamed at the family tableau and headed for the door. Blake overtook him in
two strides and swung him back. 'Not so fast, Vila,' he said. 'Let me introduce
everyone first. These are my parents, Gwyneth and Huw Blake. My crew - Vila
Restal, Jenna Stannis, Cally and Olag Gan.' He paused to wrestle his smile back
into manageable proportions, then grasped Avon's elbow and urged him forward,
adding proudly, 'And this is my lover, Kerr Avon.'
For a moment Avon genuinely believed that the temperature on board the
Liberator had dropped. He was about to go and investigate when he identified
the waft of icy disapproval emanating from Blake's mother. She let out a tiny
wail, like a disappointed kitten.
'Roj, no!' she protested. 'What on earth do you mean?'
Side by side, Roj and Huw Blake frowned, lifted their hands in perfect
synchrony and bit down on their thumb knuckles. Avon's mouth twitched. But his
sense of humour, cultivated to help him through his own family gatherings,
seemed out of place here, so he disciplined his face into its customary mask
and launched a social smile in Gwyneth's general direction.
'Perhaps we should leave the celebrations until later,' he suggested smoothly.
'Blake, your parents must be exhausted. Why don't you show them to one of the
vacant cabins?'
He twisted a hand into the back of Vila's jacket. At the same moment Cally,
always intuitive, linked arms with Jenna and Gan. Between them, they hustled
the others across to the corridor, leaving Blake and his parents alone on the
flight deck.
'What was all that about?' Vila said plaintively, as Avon steered him towards
the recreation room.
'Well, I hope I'm wrong,' Jenna said, falling into step, 'but I got the
impression that Blake's parents don't approve of homosexuals.'
'Homosexuals? Where?' Vila asked, startled.
Cally said, 'Oh, Vila!', Jenna kicked his ankle and Gan heaved a patient sigh.
Vila covered his face with both hands, peeking out through a crack between the
fingers.
'Sorry, Avon,' he groaned. 'The thing is, I'm so used to you and Blake by now
that I'd forgotten.'
'Never mind,' Avon said with a backward glance at the flight deck. 'If you
forget again, I am sure Blake's mother will be happy to remind you.'
 
*
 
Three hours later Blake lurched into the recreation room, leaning on Jenna's
shoulder. Gan was perched on the couch beside Cally, his big hands held half a
metre apart so she could wind a skein of Kairan silk around them, and Avon was
playing mah jongg with Vila, using the antique ivory and wood tiles that Blake
had given him. Blake stared at him intently but he refused to look up.
**I knew it. Avon's angry with me too. It looks as though I'm under attack from
all sides, as usual.**
When he continued to hover irresolutely by the door, Cally raised compassionate
eyes towards him. 'They can't help it,' Blake said, half-defensive and half-
pleading, talking to her but keeping his gaze fixed on Avon. 'My parents lived
on a farming planet all their lives, until the Federation caught up with them.
In general, their ideas are extremely progressive but like most farmers, they
still tend to think in terms of ...'
'Breeding,' Jenna completed with a shudder. 'I know. Couldn't get away from my
home planet fast enough.'
'You come from one of the redneck planets too?' Vila said, surprised. 'That
explains why you and Blake get on so well. I can see it in him but I never
would've guessed about you.'
Jenna smoothed an infinitesimal crease from skintight satin trousers. 'We all
have our secrets,' she murmured. 'And it looks as though your parents have just
discovered one of yours, Blake.'
'It wasn't a secret,' he protested. 'I haven't seen my parents since I left
Cymry IV to work on the Aquitar Project. At that point I hadn't realised I was
gay, so there was nothing to tell. Still, I assumed my parents would be as
liberal about homosexuality as they are about everything else.'
'But apparently they are not,' Avon said, glancing up.
Vila ducked instinctively and the skein of silk twanged between Gan's hands.
When Avon returned to contemplating a row of red, white and green dragons,
Blake slumped against the wall, caught in a vortex of giddy tiredness, more
powerful than the pull of a black hole. An awkward interval of silence was
broken by the clack of Jenna's boot heels, as she strode across to the kaff
machine.
'By the way, Blake,' she said over her shoulder, 'would you ask your mother to
stop matchmaking?'
Vila sniggered. 'Just tell her you tried hard, then settled for Gan,' he
suggested.
'Oh, shut up, Vila,' Cally said, unexpectedly stern.
She whisked the skein away and released Gan, who patted her knee and smiled.
'That's all right, Cally,' he said placidly. 'I know I was Jenna's second
choice.'
' And a much more sensible choice too,' Jenna said, forthright as ever.
'Although I don't suppose I can expect Blake's mother to agree with that.
She'll have to get used to it, though. Call her off, Blake.'
'I'll do my best,' he said wearily. 'But I warn you, my mother's very strong-
willed. She's exhausted me. I think I might go to bed now.'
He turned back to Avon with a look that was intended to be appealing but came
close to desperate. Since desperation didn't normally cut it with Avon, Blake
was both startled and relieved when he shrugged and rose to his feet.
'Sleep well,' Vila told them, adding irrepressibly, 'unless Blake's mum comes
knocking at your door.'
He grinned at Avon, who shuddered ostentatiously. 'Thank you, Vila,' he said.
'That thought was all I needed to make my day complete.'
He followed Blake out of the room and they walked down the corridor in silence,
although this time the silence seemed more like a truce. After a while Blake
let their hands brush casually together, holding his breath until he felt
Avon's fingers slot into his. He almost dragged Avon the rest of the way,
shunting him into his cabin and drawing him straight into an engulfing kiss.
That was, evidently, a little too desperate for Avon's liking. He inserted both
hands into the narrow gap between their bodies and gave Blake a peremptory
shove.
'Easy, Blake,' he said. 'Would you mind explaining why you've chosen to turn a
minor social contretemps into a three act tragedy?'
'Isn't it obvious?' Blake growled. 'I've just discovered that my parents
escaped the Federation executioners through a bureaucratic error - apparently,
they'd already been interned during a purge of rebel sympathisers, so the
relevant data-puncher marked them down as dead. But instead of seeing our
reunion as something to celebrate, my mother keeps alternating between stony
silence, reproachful sighs and heroically suppressed tears ... all because she
doesn't like my choice of lovers.'
His mouth twisted, as if he'd bitten into something sour, and he sat down
heavily on the bed. He was still trying to decide whether he was more upset by
his mother's disapproval or by the knowledge that he was upsetting her, when a
shadow blocked the light and he looked up to find Avon standing over him. There
was a faint vertical crease between his eyebrows, like the mark left by a
thumbnail.
'You expect a lot from your family, don't you?' he observed.
'Of course I do,' Blake snapped. 'We're talking about my mother, Avon.'
Avon blinked. 'Yes, I'm aware of that,' he said politely.
'It's a special kind of relationship,' Blake persevered, searching for words to
explain the obvious. When Avon continued to look puzzled, he said in a clumsy
attempt at humour, 'You did have a mother, didn't you?'
'Oh yes,' Avon confirmed. 'However, the words "special relationship" don't
evoke any fond memories, possibly because I rarely saw my mother and therefore
have little to remember.' His eyes narrowed into feral slits as he added, 'And
please, don't start feeling sorry for me, Roj. You are already fully occupied
by feeling sorry for yourself.'
Blake let his head drop into his hands. 'You think that's unreasonable?' he
asked in a muffled voice. 'I don't. It's quite a shock to find out that my
parents are homophobic.'
The mattress jolted. Avon settled behind him, knees braced against Blake's
hips, hands massaging his shoulders, brisk but soothing. 'I warned you about
this,' he said. 'It is easy enough to decide you are homosexual on a spaceship
of which you are the unofficial commander. Rather more difficult when faced
with the usual planetary prejudices.'
He dug his thumbs into a knotted muscle and Blake used that as an excuse to
groan out loud. 'But my parents aren't usually prejudiced,' he said. 'It seems
so ... illogical.'
'Not really,' Avon told him, leaning forward to slide his hands down Blake's
chest and unbutton his shirt. 'This galaxy is still comparatively
underpopulated and the Federation only controls half the civilised worlds,
which gives them a vested interest in promoting reproductive relationships.' He
whisked the shirt over Blake's head, pushed him down onto the bed and straddled
him, saying, 'Conversely, since the increased radiation levels on spaceships
mean that pregnancy is contraindicated, spacer culture is inherently more
tolerant of homosexuality. You have, up until now, been shielded from reality,
my dear.'
Blake yelped at the cool touch of oil trickling down his spine, then scowled
into the pillow. 'You're very calm about all of this,' he said resentfully.
'Doesn't that kind of bigotry make you even slightly angry?'
Avon laughed. 'My sexuality was relatively low on my family's list of reasons
for disapproving of me,' he said, spreading the oil across Blake's back with
quick firm strokes. 'It was, in some ways, a relief to find a label that
defined my difference. I am not a crusader for queerdom, Blake. If it helps, I
would be happy to downplay our relationship while your parents are here.'
'No, thank you,' Blake said indignantly. 'I can't stop them judging me but I'm
damned if I'll let myself be silenced.'
'Very well then,' Avon sighed. 'By all means, go ahead and flaunt your sexual
preference at your parents. Just remember that my offer still stands.
His voice sounded tetchy but his hands continued to ease the tension from
Blake's muscles. After a while Blake swivelled round and pulled Avon down
beside him. He butted his head into a convenient hollow on Avon's shoulder and
sheltered there until the soothing hands persuaded him to release the tears
he'd been trying to suppress. Avon held him while he gulped and hawked and
snuffled, kissed him ruthlessly when he attempted to apologise and tucked him
back into the convenient hollow. Blake snuggled closer, hiding a secret smile.
**When it comes to saving face, Avon's always been an expert. It's nice to know
he's as concerned to safeguard my pride as his own.**
 
*
 
After Blake had fallen asleep on his shoulder, Avon lay awake for another hour,
staring at the darkness and anticipating trouble. His instincts proved
accurate. Over the next few days, Gwyneth Blake's attempts to pair her son with
Jenna accelerated to the level of self-parody. Embarrassed on her behalf, Avon
did his best to stay out of her way but whenever they were obliged to share the
same space, Gwyneth twitched and jumped and glanced nervously over her
shoulder, like an ailurophobe who suspects there is a cat in the room. It was
unexpectedly depressing. Long before they'd become lovers, he had fallen into a
half-acknowledged habit of shadowing Blake and touching Blake, whenever
circumstances allowed, but under Gwyneth's monitoring gaze, even the most
casual contact seemed more like defiance than reassurance. So Avon volunteered
for the night watch and began to invent projects that required him to spend
increasing amounts of time alone, researching the Liberator's systems.
He was in the computer room, investigating the flight predictor, when Blake
stormed in, with such majestic speed and fury that Avon felt as though a minor
cyclone had buffeted him away from the navigation computer and flung him at the
nearest wall, knocking the breath out of him. Blake's hands, heavy on his
shoulders, and Blake's mouth, urgent on his mouth, provided a more prosaic
explanation. Still unnerved at times by Blake's directness, Avon turned his
head aside, hoping to disengage himself for long enough to assert his control
of the situation. But Blake had already wrenched his trousers open; Blake's
hand was already plunging in to seize his cock. He enveloped the shaft and
thumbed the hood, locating the most sensitive spots with an assurance that was
as erotic as its consequences. Avon gasped, leaned back and let the approaching
orgasm thrust him into the eye of the storm, lifting him and dropping him and
hurling him hard against Blake's chest.
Some time later he summoned the energy required to straighten his buckled
knees, slide his spine up the wall and look Blake in the eye. 'So your parents
have been badgering you again?' he asked, smiling faintly.
Blake's eyes wavered and refocused. As he ran a quick scan down Avon's ruffled
hair, bruised mouth and disordered clothing, his teeth sank into the full curve
of his lower lip.
'You're right, of course,' he apologised. 'I'm taking it out on you. Do you
mind?'
Avon's smile broadened. 'As a matter of fact, I like it,' he said. 'It's
possible to appreciate a good fuck and still feel curious about its
provenance.' He ran a finger down Blake's chest, pausing to toy with the first
button on his shirt, and added, 'More propaganda about the evils of
homosexuality, I suppose?'
Blake made a stifled sound, halfway between a snort and a whimper. 'My mother's
persuaded Orac to track down all the Federation studies that prove queers are
immature, promiscuous and self-hating. She passes them on to me for my bedtime
reading.' He watched Avon bisect his shirt with surgical precision and tweak at
his nipples, then captured his hands and said abruptly, 'Kerr, don't give up on
my parents, not yet. I'm the only child they have left, so I'm carrying a
triple load of expectations at present. But I'm sure they'll learn to like you,
once they get to know you.'
Avon's smile mutated into something more wry and wary. 'I think not,' he
murmured but Blake clutched his hands in mute appeal, so he sighed and said,
'Never mind, I'm prepared to humour you. I assume you locked the door behind
you, when you barged in?'
'I'm not as rash as you think,' Blake grumbled. 'I can remember to take
elementary precautions.'
'Good,' Avon said and sank to his knees, pulling his hands free and reaching
for the clasp on Blake's belt.
Blake's cock strained towards him, already thrusting at the air - apparently
without its owner's conscious volition, because Blake cursed mildly and lounged
back against the wall, elaborately casual. Avon caught a pearly drop on the tip
of his tongue and rolled it across his palate, taking a moment to savour the
bitter familiar taste, before he steadied the shaft between his palms and
guided it into his mouth. Blake lunged convulsively, then muttered an apology
and disciplined his hips into an almost imperceptible rocking motion. Avon
rounded his tongue to cushion the shaft and caress it with long lapping
strokes, closing his eyes and letting the world contract to a darkly private
space where he could read Blake's reactions in the pulsations of his cock,
swelling and trembling, spasming and gushing.
As the first warm spurt hit the back of his throat, a split-second frisson of
panic rippled down Avon's spine, claustrophobia edged with an aura of
vulnerability. And then, without pausing to reflect, he was gulping thick tangy
liquid and swallowing greedily, because he was safe here: because this was
Blake. He sat back on his heels and looked up, wiping a flamboyant hand across
his mouth. Blake was gazing at him with the dazzled awe he usually reserved for
heroes of the resistance or street conjurors.
'Oh, Avon,' he whispered. 'It's been six months and we still can't get enough
of each other. I hope that never changes.'
Avon knotted a hand in Blake's shirt and hauled himself upright. 'Yes, well,'
he said, as he kissed Blake in passing, 'one can always hope.'
 
*
 
Blake stumbled into his cabin just before midnight, collapsed onto the bed and
lay there without moving or thinking. After a while he tried to urge himself
into the shower but there didn't seem to be much point, given that he was
unlikely to have any late night visitors - that is, unless his mother turned up
to pimp for Jenna again. His mouth hitched into a humourless smile. It was
ironic, really. A fortnight ago, he'd had a lover and happy memories of his
parents. Now his mother had turned into a mouthpiece for the Federation's anti-
queer propaganda ... and Avon hadn't come near him for the past week.
Oh well, he'd never expected it to last. Avon had resisted him strenuously,
right from the beginning. Then, after they escaped the Web, he'd cornered Blake
on the flight deck and interrogated him for half an hour about his reasons for
handing over the energy rods when Saymon's humanoids tortured Avon with a shock
stick. Blake had been defensive, to begin with, convinced that Avon was trying
to make him admit he'd gone against his revolutionary principles by protecting
one of his crew members, instead of holding out for a deal that would save the
Decimas.
Although, when he finally confessed that he simply couldn't bear to see Avon
hurt, Avon had just said, 'Then thank you,' and leaned forward to kiss him on
the mouth.
Nothing more than a light, swift touch from lips that felt unexpectedly warm
and yielding but the implicit invitation had been a bigger surprise than Bran
Foster's revelations about his past life in the Freedom Party. At first, it had
seemed like a purely intellectual puzzle. **Avon? The man with the cast iron
boundaries? Did** Avon **actually kiss me?** But seconds later Blake realised
he was rationalising a response that had been completely physical, an awareness
so strong that he could still feel the imprint of Avon's lips on his. He stared
at Avon, simultaneously alarmed and elated.
'I've been very stupid, haven't I?' he whispered.
'Either you have or I have,' Avon replied.
He stared back, obdurately expressionless. Blake flinched, suddenly afraid that
Avon was about to withdraw his invitation - although in retrospect, it occurred
to him that Avon had probably been referring to the risks involved in making a
pass at another man. At the time, however, he just reached out impulsively and
caught hold of Avon's hand.
'Would you do that again?' he asked.
Avon hesitated, then shrugged. 'Why not?' he said.
His lips brushed across Blake's lips, aligned and settled. Blake shuddered and
sighed. No question about his reaction this time. His entire body was instantly
engaged - skin tingling, nerves throbbing, cock standing to attention, arms
folding round Avon and pulling him close. Avon laughed suddenly and wedged his
knee between Blake's thighs, tilted him back against the seat and thrust his
tongue into Blake's mouth. He sucked hard, drawing Avon's tongue deeper, while
his hands slithered busily across fine-weave cotton, memorising the planes of
Avon's back.
It was overwhelming. Too much data to process: touch, taste, sound, sight,
smell. Too much that he wanted to do: explore Avon's mouth, discover the
texture of Avon's hair, find out what would happen if he moved this way and
then that way and nudged his erection into the hollow of Avon's groin.
Apparently, while his conscious mind had concentrated on arguing politics and
tactics with Avon, Blake had subconsciously been compiling lists of erotic
possibilities. Now he was floundering ridiculously, one minute spreading his
legs wide to fit Avon against him, next minute shaken by a jolt of confused
sensation that almost pushed Avon away. It would have been embarrassing, if
Avon hadn't been assailing him with equal fervour, riding Blake's thigh as he
reared, bearing down when Blake caved and all the time systematically ravishing
Blake's mouth with a sequence of soft/hard kisses that destroyed his previous
certainties and then remade them, into something simpler and more certain than
he had ever known.
Some time later Avon's hand slid inside his shirt, to find and tease his
nipples. Blake twitched as galvanically as if the fingers had been electrodes
and wrenched himself out of reach.
'Not if you want this to last,' he explained breathlessly.
He hooked an arm across the back of the seat, grinning as he noticed that they
seemed to have swapped places at some point in the last few minutes. When he
looked up, Avon's eyes were shining with a fierce glaze, like a predator in
mid-hunt. Blake touched his cheek and watched the eyes cloud and clear,
gradually resuming their habitual detachment.
'After waiting so long, I would prefer something more memorable than a brief
tussle on a couch,' Avon agreed. 'Your cabin or mine?'
Blake stretched lazily. 'I don't want to move,' he said, reaching for Avon, who
frowned and shrugged his hand away.
'We have been lucky so far,' he warned. 'But every second increases the
likelihood that one of the others will walk in on us.'
'Is that a problem?' Blake asked, genuinely curious. 'Why should they care?'
'Gan comes from a farming planet,' Avon reminded him. 'Vila is a Delta and
while Deltas are, in practice, more tolerant than farmers, they consider queers
to be **de facto** women and, therefore, second class citizens. Jenna is in
love with you, which would hardly predispose her towards acceptance ... and who
knows how the Auronar feel about homosexuality?'
Blake laughed. 'You've made quite a study of them,' he commented.
'Haven't you?' Avon asked, slanting an eyebrow at him. 'It seems a sensible
precaution - although on second thoughts, that may explain why you've neglected
it.' He rose abruptly, smoothing his tunic, and added, 'Enough, Blake. I was
contemplating a seduction, not a debate on the topic of homophobia.'
He turned and strode off, so Blake heaved himself to his feet and followed,
overtaking Avon halfway down the corridor and propelling him into his cabin.
Avon used the momentum to swing Blake round, pin him to the wall and press full
length against him. Blake flattened his palms on the slippery plass, suddenly
unable to stand without support. The second onslaught of desire was even more
devastating than the first, accelerating his pulse and glossing his skin with
sweat. When Avon began to mark a line of soft-mouthed bites down his throat, he
tipped his head back to expose himself more completely.
'Oh, very nice,' Avon approved, completing the sequence. 'You like that, do
you? What else do you like?'
'I don't know,' Blake said frankly. 'I've never done this before.'
A fractional pause and then cool air rushed in on him, congealing the heat of
his skin. 'Ah,' Avon said, stepping back a pace. 'As it happens, I'm not in the
habit of seducing virgins. Do you want to reconsider?'
'No!' Blake yelled, panicking. 'You can't stop now.'
He seized Avon's hand and cupped it round the bulge of his erection, sighing as
inquisitive fingers traced the shape of the stiffening shaft. Avon favoured him
with a nova-bright smile.
'True,' he admitted. 'It seems I can't stop.'
Blake sighed with relief. Before Avon could come up with another reason to
renege, he shucked his clothes off and scrambled into the bed. Avon strolled
across to the desk, hanging his tunic on Blake's chair and then adding the rest
of his garments, one by one, in a slow progression that incorporated a
tantalising element of display. By the time he turned, Blake was shivering with
anticipation. He bit down on his lip and stared wide-eyed at Avon's cock, awed
and reverent as a knight who had achieved a vision of the grail.
Naked, Avon seemed more relaxed than Blake had ever seen him. He lingered for a
moment, one hand resting on the chair and the other on his hip, letting Blake's
eyes caress his cock until it swelled and strained higher. Then he crossed the
room, pelvis tilting in the slightest of swaggers, slid under the sheet and
surveyed Blake, still smiling. Blake's heart constricted and filled. He watched
his hand rise of its own accord, splay wide and close around Avon's shaft. On
first contact it felt like marble sheathed in warm chamois leather but within
seconds it came alive, butting into the funnel of his fist. Avon gasped.
'You're very forward, for a virgin,' he said dryly.
'I wish you'd stop using that word,' Blake complained. 'It isn't technically
accurate. I slept with a number of women during my time in the Freedom Party.
Not a very large number, I admit - I always thought sex was an overrated
activity, although I'm finally starting to see what all the fuss was about.'
'Oh, are you, now?' Avon murmured. 'If that's how you feel after a kiss and a
quick grope, it should be interesting to see how you react to more direct
stimulation.'
He stretched out, leaning into Blake and running a hand down his side. Close
contact with a naked male body completed the process begun by Avon's kiss on
the flight deck. Blake fell back onto the pillows, startled all over again by
his sense of recognition and belonging. The women he'd slept with had ranged
from tall to tiny, full-breasted to boyish, but none of them had inspired this
kind of instantaneous fervour. Every cell in his cock - hell, every cell in his
entire body - seemed to have dilated to bursting point. Blake felt as though he
might have flown apart, if Avon hadn't been been monitoring his responses with
impersonal efficiency, curbing him when he reached the limits of his endurance
and steering him back to safer territory. He found himself welcoming Avon's
detachment, even while he resented it.
**Oh well, at least one of us knows what he's doing.**
For a while he drifted in a haze of generalised rapture, only aware of specific
sensations when Avon nibbled his ear lobe or kissed the creases at the back of
his knees or traced the patterns of bulging veins along his shaft. Then,
without any advance warning, his hips jerked violently and lifted off the bed.
Avon supported him with an arm round his shoulders, while his other hand pumped
Blake's cock, identifying the precise way to channel Blake's pent-up desire
until it exploded with an intensity that was almost painful. Blake shuddered
and yelled and collapsed. Some time later he registered a ripple of movement
against his side and lifted his head to see Avon gazing down at him,
masturbating pensively. He swallowed hard, recognising a new kind of craving.
'Please, let me do that,' he said urgently.
He swivelled round and bent over Avon's cock, sighing with satisfaction as he
took the glistening head into his mouth. A sharp hiss of breath confirmed that
Avon hadn't anticipated this particular move. Blake chuckled quietly, then
filed Avon's response to the vibrations for future reference. He stretched his
jaw wide, hollowing his tongue and engulfing the shaft. As the cockhead nudged
the back of his throat, he paused to savour the sensation of being filled to
capacity.
**An unlikely sort of activity, objectively speaking ... but it's what my mouth
was made for. Dear god, I feel happy. I'd almost forgotten what it was like.
But I'm happy now.**
He drew in a long breath, deliberately channelling the air along Avon's shaft.
Then he played with his new toy for a while, rolling it between tongue and
palate, sucking on the head, painting delicate tongue-tip lattices across the
underside. Avon murmured and writhed and drew his knees up, grinding his hips
into the mattress.
'A little harder,' he advised. 'Oh yes, that's perfect,' and then, a few
seconds later, 'Blake, I can't hold out much longer. Since you're a novice in
these matters, I'd suggest switching to manual stimulation at this point.'
Blake shook his head obstinately, vibrating the shaft. An involuntary groan
escaped from Avon's lungs and his cock pulsed faster. Blake braced his arms and
moved in steady counterpoint to Avon's thrusts, finding the rhythm by instinct,
while at the same time his engineer's brain graphed the spaces of his mouth and
throat and invented methods for taking Avon even deeper.
Next time. Next time.
And then, too soon for Blake's liking, Avon's cock stalled and jerked and
spurted, flooding his palate, filling him even more completely. Blake swallowed
until he had absorbed the last viscous drops. As he lifted his head, Avon
smiled and stretched languorously.
'You have a natural talent for fellatio, Blake,' he said. 'Are you sure it's
your first time? After all, your memory's not entirely reliable.'
'I'd remember this,' Blake said with fervent certainty. 'It's the best thing
that ever happened to me.'
He flung himself onto the pillows, as charged with adrenalin as he'd been after
his first Freedom Party raid, reliving the risks, desperate to do it all over
again. Avon's eyes darkened, their glint of mockery eclipsed by a shadow that
Blake might have identified as envy, if he'd been able to imagine Avon envying
anyone.
'You're a strange man, Roj Blake,' he observed. 'But you have your moments.
Don't look so serious. This was meant to be recreational, not earth-
shattering.'
He leaned forward to kiss Blake on the mouth - another light swift touch, like
a ritual of closure. Then he pushed himself upright and swung his feet to the
floor. Blake's hand shot out and clamped round Avon's wrist.
'Where are you going?' he asked.
'Back to my cabin. Where else?' Avon said, mildly puzzled.
'Now?' Blake demanded. 'Do you usually walk out on your partners straight after
making love?'
'Since this is your cabin, you are hardly in a position to leave,' Avon pointed
out. He frowned down at his wrist and said, even more puzzled, 'Do you want me
to stay?'
Blake's grip tightened. 'What do you think?' he said brusquely.
Avon arched his eyebrows, eliding the frown. 'Very well,' he said. 'If you
insist.'
He settled back and fell asleep with disconcerting suddenness, as though he'd
flicked an Off switch. Blake propped himself on one elbow and watched the
dreaming flicker of Avon's eyelids, until his own eyes insisted on closing.
Next morning, when he surfaced from an unexpectedly sound sleep, Avon had gone.
Blake stood beside the bed for a few minutes, studying the dent in the second
pillow, while he catalogued his memories of the previous night and assessed his
new certainties.
**Gay rights as a non-negotiable item on the revolutionary agenda? Hmm. This
promises to be more immediately rewarding than most of the things I've done for
the cause.**
He dressed speedily, collected two mugs of tea from the galley and found Avon
on the flight deck, mending a circuit board. 'So that's where you disappeared
to,' he said cheerfully, as he placed a mug at Avon's elbow and bent to kiss
the nape of his neck.
Avon froze, then recoiled. It was the first time Blake had ever seen him
completely without defences, his face blanked by shock - but very revealing,
for all that. Within seconds, however, he had recovered enough to exchange the
shocked blankness for a vicious glare.
'Have you lost the few wits you possess, Blake?' he spat. 'What makes you think
I'd welcome -?'
Blake grinned. 'That's right, you're working,' he cut in blandly. 'Never mind,
I can wait until ...'
Before he could finish the sentence, the flight deck emptied. Gan muttered
something about elevenses; Cally said, 'Jenna, I think we should continue our
inventory of the medical supplies' and Vila frankly bolted. Blake examined the
defensive set of black-clad shoulders, hunched over the circuit board.
'Well, Avon?' he said eventually. 'Any chance of an explanation?'
Avon wrenched at a filament, which snapped. 'Damn you, Blake,' he said softly.
'Have you no sense of self-preservation? Must you insist on broadcasting your
affairs to the rest of the world?'
'Why not?' Blake asked. 'I didn't realise you cared so much about other
people's opinions.'
'I don't,' Avon said with a return of his usual arrogance. 'On the other hand,
I see no reason to go out of our way to provoke hostility, in exchange for one
night together.'
'One night?' Blake echoed. 'When did we decide that?'
Avon laughed. 'I keep forgetting how inexperienced you are,' he remarked. 'It's
hardly something one needs to discuss, Blake. Believe me, I have rarely slept
with the same partner more than twice.'
'But I don't want to sleep with you twice,' Blake told him.
In the silence that followed, Avon met his eyes for the first time since he had
walked out onto the flight deck, startled into a direct response, wounded
against his will. Blake reached out and ran a reassuring finger down his cheek.
'Twice wouldn't be anywhere near enough,' he said. 'I want to sleep with you as
often as possible.'
Avon turned his head away, a fraction too slowly to conceal a transient look of
relief. 'How flattering,' he said in his driest tones. 'Or rather, it might be
flattering, if you had any basis for comparison.'
'Really?' Blake said, scowling. 'So you think I can't know what I want, until
I've fucked my way round the galaxy?'
'Your future choices are none of my business,' Avon said silkily. 'However, I'd
suggest that, in this case, you are drawing inappropriate conclusions from one
isolated incident. I am glad you enjoyed our little encounter, Blake, but I
advise you to consider carefully, before deciding you are queer.'
'Too late,' Blake said. 'I am queer. I know that now - and I know I want you.
What do you want, Avon?'
In response, Avon snatched up a probe and began to lever at the damaged
filament. 'I would like to be left alone, so that I can concentrate on my
work,' he announced.
Blake smiled down at the top of Avon's head and traced a swirl of coffee-
coloured hair with his fingertip. 'Fair enough,' he said, turning away. 'I've
got work to do myself. We can discuss this again later on.'
He'd expected to wait several days before making his next move. But that night
Avon had arrived at his cabin door, austerely splendid in a long black brocade
dressing gown.
'All right,' he said fiercely, before Blake had time to look surprised. 'All
right, Blake, you win. You are as naively idealistic about this as you are
about everything else. But apparently naivete is contagious.'
He stalked into the cabin and spun round, arrogant and wary. Blake stared
disbelievingly, then yanked him into an urgent embrace. His hands skidded down
the brocade, searching for buttons but finding a complicated twist of fabric.
He fumbled clumsily, until Avon laughed and guided his finger to the central
knot.
'A Chinese puzzle,' he said, pushing the knot through a loop of brocade. 'See,
it's quite simple, really.'
And it **was** simple, for a while. Alone in his midnight cabin, Blake lay back
on the bed and shuffled through his memories, faster than one of Vila's card
tricks. Avon in academic mode, inducting him into the art of sodomy. Blake
slyly teaching Avon the art of accepting affection. Avon allowing Blake to
drape an arm around him when they were on the flight deck. Blake watching the
others stare and then avert their eyes, venture a few barbed comments, talk
together in corners and finally come to terms with the situation. Blake
rhapsodising endlessly about his new sense of liberation. Avon citing instances
of Federation homophobia, to dampen his enthusiasm. Blake searching for the
words that would show Avon how much he loved him. Avon listening and smiling
indulgently.
Avon asleep, one arm shielding his head. Avon waking, momentarily dazed and
open, before his defences snapped into place - although, if Blake was able to
reach him before that happened, he could fuck Avon until he was almost sure he
heard the echo of unspoken words: 'I love you'. Avon's cock, filling his hand
or his mouth or his arse. Avon's face, illuminated by orgasm. And Avon after
sex, saying for the twentieth time, 'It can't last, of course.' Always holding
something back. Blake had tried to get as much as he could, while he could,
even though he'd known it would have to end at some point.
And maybe now it had.
Then he snarled, seeing through his pretence of resignation. **Damn Avon. He
makes me greedy. I thought I could settle for a few nights with him - but I've
had six months and I still want more.** He considered the possibility of
storming down the corridor, to make Avon explain himself, but he couldn't
summon the energy. Consoling his parents, while they grieved for his brother
and sister, had drained Blake dry. Ever since the mindwipe, his energy had been
undependable, carrying him through crises and emergencies, then plunging him
into intervals of lethargic brooding.
**Avon steadies me ... but I can do without him, if necessary. And it looks as
though it** will **be necessary.**
 
*
 
Perhaps the most irritating aspect of his current situation, Avon decided, was
that Gwyneth Blake fitted into the daily routine of life on board Liberator far
better than he ever could. She made cakes for Vila and mothered Jenna in a way
that Avon would have found nauseating, if he hadn't witnessed Jenna's grief
when Zen confronted her with a vision of her mother's death. Gan had a big
man's protective instincts towards small women. Cally traded stories with
Gwyneth and Huw, comparing the resistance movements on Cymry IV and Saurian
Major. And Blake played the dutiful son, explaining the Liberator's workings in
exhaustive detail, indulging in long sessions of family reminiscences and
generally allowing his mother to monopolise his time.
All in all, Avon had begun to feel distinctly superfluous, long before the day
when he realised he'd left his favourite probe on the flight deck and went
strolling down the corridor, just in time to overhear Gwyneth saying, 'Can you
explain what my son sees in Kerr Avon?'
It was an almost irresistible cue. Avon hesitated, struggling with the
temptation to materialise like the demon in a Delta revivalist show and say,
'Well now, he thinks I'm a good fuck, of course.' Luckily, at that point Vila
launched into an extended fit of coughing.
'Oh, the normal sort of thing,' he mumbled, once he'd recovered.
'Normal?' Gwyneth snapped. 'There's nothing normal about preferring that ...
that person to a sweet, pretty girl like Jenna.' She sighed and added, 'I'm
sorry, Olag. I realise Roj has missed his chance with Jenna now. But I don't
understand what on earth could've driven him into something as - well,
**sterile** as a relationship with another man.'
'I don't understand it either,' Gan said, amiable as always. 'Still, everyone's
different, I suppose.'
'That's certainly true where Avon's concerned,' Gwyneth said crisply. 'One look
would be enough to convince anybody that there's something queer about him. I
can't help feeling he deliberately set out to recruit poor Roj - although, come
to think of it, Roj was always interested in anything out of the ordinary. Hmm.
Perhaps Cally ... I'm not sure whether aliens can mate with humans but ...'
That was enough. Avon strode out, collected the probe and departed, saying,
'Don't let me interrupt you' with just the right degree of ambiguity to leave
Gan shuffling guiltily, while even Vila seemed vaguely mortified. Back in the
corridor, he allowed himself a brief smile of triumph, although it soon faded.
In some ways, he couldn't help admiring Gwyneth's aptitude for simple
certainties, having already learnt to admire that aptitude in her son.
How long would it take before Blake, infected by his mother's certainties,
rejected him completely? He had been withdrawing from Avon by slow degrees,
letting his mother trap him into endless consultations with Jenna or Cally,
avoiding Avon's eyes whenever Gwyneth delivered a particularly cutting gibe.
Meanwhile, Avon had retreated into his work, just as he had always done when
the rest of his life became unendurable, adding another layer to his defences,
by now so solid that he could barely register Blake's presence. He was
distantly aware that Blake seemed unhappy but then, supposing Blake had decided
to put an end to their connection, he was sentimental enough to regret causing
Avon pain.
**And I refuse to ask for confirmation, because I do not wish to know.**
Ah, well, it had only ever been a matter of time before Blake recognised the
inherent liabilities of queerdom and reasserted his claim to normality. Having
faced the facts squarely, Avon smiled with bitter satisfaction and returned to
his current refuge in one of the Liberator's back rooms. As he sat down at his
work table, a leather armchair in the opposite corner lurched and creaked.
'Sorry, Avon,' Huw Blake said, scrambling to his feet. 'I could tell this must
be somebody's bolt hole but - well, I needed to get away. No offence to you or
the rest of the crew, of course. It's just that, as far as I was concerned, one
of the worst things about life in a Federation prison camp was the lack of
privacy. Don't worry, though. I'll leave you to it now.'
He looked so meek and large and conciliatory that Avon felt obliged to invite
him to remain. Huw promised to be as silent as a mouse but ten minutes later
Avon found he'd been lured into explaining Orac's operations, while Huw nodded
and listened with a glazed intensity that suggested he didn't understand a word
of it.
'Orac is what first calendar researchers used to call an artificial
intelligence,' Avon simplified politely. 'As a matter of fact, Ensor found his
initial ideas in the private papers of a first calendar scientist called Alan
Turing. Turing was both a genius and, unfortunately, an overt queer, at a time
when homosexuality was actively penalised, rather than merely discouraged, as
it is now. In consequence, he was never given the research opportunities he
deserved and then, after admitting his queerness to a law enforcement officer
in a moment of foolish honesty, he was prosecuted, subjected to doses of
hormones and, a little later, killed himself.'
He broke off, concerned that he might have inadvertently slipped into Blakean
polemic. When he glanced up apologetically, Huw was scowling at him and
furrowing his grey curls with both hands.
'That's an appalling story, Avon,' he said flatly. 'And, as you imply, it's
probably still happening today. What a ridiculous waste of talent!'
'You think so?' Avon murmured. 'Somehow, I didn't expect you to see it that
way.'
'Well, you couldn't really know what to expect from me,' Huw pointed out.
'After all, you've never asked for my opinions.'
Since that was true, Avon made no attempt to deny it. He returned to his
diagrams of Orac's circuitry, although a few minutes later he surprised himself
by looking up and saying, somewhat obliquely, 'Blake reacts to homophobia. In
my experience, that comes perilously close to validating it. I prefer to avoid
confrontation, wherever possible.'
'Roj doesn't know much about the dark side,' Huw said, equally lateral.
'Neither does Gwyneth. That's how she managed to steer us through two years in
a Federation prison camp, relatively unscathed. I steer us through ... other
things.' He gnawed his thumb for a while and then added, in an apparent change
of subject, 'You realise Gwyneth will come around, once she understands?'
'Understands what?' Avon asked, frowning.
'That Roj has been looking for someone like you all his life,' Huw said
promptly. 'He hasn't told you so himself?'
'Well, you see, he doesn't recollect a great deal of his previous life,' Avon
explained. 'However, I'm afraid I find that theory rather hard to believe.'
'I don't,' Huw said. 'But then, I **can** recollect a great deal of Roj's
previous life. While he was at school and university, he used to bring a series
of boys home for the holidays. Half of them were lame dogs and the other half
were skilled debaters, although none of them ever lasted for long. I remember
thinking he really needed someone who was combative **and** vulnerable ...'
His voice trailed away and he blinked guiltily, clearly wondering whether he
had gone too far. Avon, unaccountably amused, spread his hands in a dismissive
gesture. Encouraged, Huw hitched himself to the edge of his seat and leaned
forward conspiratorially.
'You do like him, don't you?' he asked.
Avon sighed. 'Oh, more than that, I'm afraid.'
'Good,' Blake's father said economically. 'Now, tell me more about artificial
intelligences.'
For some reason, this elliptical conversation had a lasting effect. After Avon
had finished collating his printouts, he stared at the diagrams until his eyes
blurred and then rose, hesitated briefly and went out to the flight deck, where
Gwyneth, more technologically literate than her husband, was enlisting Cally to
help Blake explain the operation of the force wall. Avon lounged against the
wall and listened, while they tried to convince her that the force wall was
Avon's area of expertise. As Gwyneth simmered with exasperation, he strolled
across to the terminal and leaned past Blake, resting a hand on his shoulder,
while he pointed out the relevant areas of the display.
Blake reached back instantly and caught hold of his hand, looking up at him
with such open relief and gratitude that Avon's heart clenched and expanded
painfully. Annoyed by the strength of his reaction, he turned towards Gwyneth
and launched into a brisk lecture on force wall technology. Blake's mother
questioned him ruthlessly, extracting every scrap of information that he
possessed, while her eyes flicked sideways, settled on their paired hands and
veered away again. At the first hiatus in the conversation, Blake stood up,
retaining his grip on Avon's hand, and headed for the stairs with a dogged
determination that Avon found himself unable to resist.
'So you haven't written me off completely?' he demanded, as his cabin door
hissed shut behind them.
'Now, why would I do that?' Avon asked.
Blake shrugged. 'You always told me it wouldn't last,' he said with a
reasonable approximation of stoicism. 'I kept thinking there'd be time to
change your mind but over the past few weeks you seemed to have given up on
me.'
'I was merely anticipating your wishes,' Avon explained. 'I assumed you had
finally recognised the disadvantages of a male lover.'
'You thought I was ashamed of you?' Blake said incredulously. 'Christ, Avon,
where did you get that idea?'
Avon smiled pleasantly. 'From two decades of experience,' he said.
Blake thumped down onto the bed and chewed his thumb knuckle for a while. 'Yes,
our experiences have been very different, haven't they?' he said finally.
'Especially our experiences of being queer. You've always told me that but now
I'm starting to see what you mean.'
'And what aspect of your past experience prompted you to ignore me?' Avon
asked, determinedly casual.
'I haven't been ignoring you,' Blake said hotly. 'Not intentionally, at any
rate. But - well, you know what my mother's like, so it shouldn't be hard to
guess that she's always looked forward to playing matriarch to a brood of
grandchildren. In the space of a few sentences, I took all of that away from
her. I wanted to give her time to adjust, before I started haranguing her about
gay rights.' He broke off to nail Avon with an accusing stare, adding, 'I told
you that, weeks ago.'
Avon stared back, scanning his memory. 'I suppose you did,' he conceded.
'However, I can't say it made much sense to me, either then or now.'
'You don't understand the concept of making allowances for people you love?
What kind of family do you come from?'
'I believe the technical term is dysfunctional,' Avon told him.
'Yes, I'd gathered that,' Blake said wryly. 'I was hoping for something more
specific.'
'Were you, now?' Avon murmured. 'Would this be specific enough?'
He wedged his knee against Blake's thigh and swung the other knee up in
counterbalance, positioning himself on Blake's lap and leaning in for a kiss.
Blake shifted awkwardly, trying to avert his head. His eyes were shadowed and
anxious, all his usual sublime confidence held in abeyance.
**As if the fool really believed I might abandon him - although, on reflection,
perhaps Blake wasn't altogether foolish. After all, I almost convinced myself
that he had rejected me.**
He tilted Blake's face towards him and looked into multifaceted hazel eyes,
smiling at human folly. Avon watched till Blake's mouth twitched into an
answering smile and then swooped down to kiss him, hiding his sense of reprieve
from Blake: and from himself.
 
*
 
To Blake's relief, Avon stayed around from then on, although he said less than
usual, conspicuously absenting himself from the discussions about Gwyneth and
Huw's departure. Blake's parents finally opted to join Avalon's advance guard
in the Cymry system, hoping for a chance to assist in the liberation of their
home planet. They teleported down to the main base on Cymry II, a ramshackle
conglomeration of tents and dormitories, mired in ankle-deep mud. Avalon came
striding over to welcome Blake and his crew, then turned her attention to her
new recruits, identifying their skills and assigning their duties in the space
of a few energetic minutes. After that, Huw drifted off to inspect the kitchens
- 'the best way to get a feel for the place,' he explained - while Gwyneth took
her son on a tour of the base.
'Avalon's a nice girl,' she commented, pausing to assess the weapons cache like
a veteran. 'She seems to really like you, Roj.'
'Yes, and the names are so similar,' Avon said helpfully from behind them.
'Avon. Avalon. It would really be quite easy to replace one with the other.'
Gwyneth turned and looked up at him. 'Oh dear, you're more perceptive than I
thought,' she said with a sigh. 'I've made a mistake, haven't I? Huw was right
- you're exactly what Roj needs. He's always been a little too impetuous but
you'll curb that. I think it's time we had a chat, Kerr.'
She tucked a small hand into the crook of Avon's arm and led him away to quiet
corner. Blake watched from a distance, amused to see that even his recalcitrant
lover was unable to resist Gwyneth, when she set out to charm him. They talked
together, subdued and intent, until Huw wandered back and informed his wife
that their mess mates were waiting to meet her. While he planted a pair of
paternal kisses on Blake's cheeks, Gwyneth stood on tiptoe and hugged Avon
warmly, which disconcerted him as much as it entertained Blake. He wrapped his
arms round his mother, hoisting her off the ground and swinging her in an
exuberant circle.
'Thank you,' he whispered, as he set her down.
'What for?' Gwyneth said briskly. 'I should've got to know your Avon sooner.
Never mind, there'll be time for that when you come to visit.'
Blake laughed and said his farewells and called for teleport. Back on the
Liberator, Avon followed him to his cabin, lounging against the wall and
watching Blake tug off his muddy boots.
'Your mother seemed quite effusive at the end there,' he said, visibly puzzled.
'Oh, I always knew she'd come around,' Blake said over his shoulder, as he
hunted for a pair of dry socks.
'Where did you get that idea?' Avon asked. 'I wouldn't be generally regarded as
a good candidate for parental approval.'
Blake squatted down to forage through a mound of clothes. 'My mother only wants
what's best for me,' he explained. 'It was just a matter of convincing her that
you fitted the bill.' He sat back on his heels, saying irritably, 'I'm glad my
parents are alive and I look forward to spending time with them in future but I
must say it's a relief to get them off my ship. It isn't easy to maintain
proper discipline, with one's parents perpetually hovering in the background.'
Avon's eyes widened. 'What a magnificently simple view of the world you have,
Roj,' he said, half mocking and half admiring.
Blake pounced on the missing socks and looked up in triumph. 'Yes, that's why
we make a good team, because we complement each other,' he remarked. Then he
frowned, faintly worried, and added, 'You do know we're a good team, don't you,
Kerr?'
He watched Avon hesitate and reflect, clearly still somewhat overwhelmed by the
Blake family. 'As a matter of fact, I do,' he said eventually, avoiding Blake's
eyes.
Blake dropped the socks and surged to his feet, hauling Avon into an impetuous
embrace. Avon resisted and then yielded, so suddenly that they toppled together
onto the bed. Clothes flew through the air and piled in a heap on the floor,
beside the socks. As Blake stripped off his shirt, Avon twisted round to nip
his bare shoulder. Blake yelped indignantly and wrestled him to the mattress,
discovering that Avon had somehow contrived to reverse himself and land face
down, arse lifted suggestively.
'Tart,' he growled. 'All right, then. Whatever you want.'
He collected a tube of gel from the bedside locker and began to prepare Avon. A
familiar ritual, by this time: within minutes, he was angled over Avon's body,
balanced securely on his clenched fists, cock sheathed in warm pliable flesh.
Blake eased forward and back, lowering himself slightly with each movement
until his elbows took the weight and his hands could lift and stroke Avon's
sides, as slowly and thoroughly as his cock was stroking Avon's arse. When he
bent to lay a trail of gentle kisses from shoulder to shoulder, Avon wriggled
and bucked impatiently.
'Harder,' he said in a stranger's voice.
Blake's throat tightened. He lunged involuntarily, then restrained himself with
an effort. 'That mightn't be such a good idea,' he murmured. 'I don't want to
risk hurting you, love.'
'You won't,' Avon said harshly. 'Harder, Blake.'
He clenched his buttocks, gripping tighter than a cock ring. Blake's shaft
stiffened and strained. **Harder? Hell, I feel hard as iron.** He reared back,
wrenching a groan from the bottom of his lungs as the sphincter squeezed his
cock like an implacable fist. Avon fought him and welcomed him, one minute
tensing his arse to make Blake work for every centimetre, next minute swinging
his knee sideways, opening wide and inciting him to plunge deeper. Blake rammed
and grunted and heaved, each successive thrust pushing him closer to the edge
of unknown and dangerous territory. Avon was writhing beneath him now, sobbing
for breath and crying out, wilder and more abandoned than Blake had ever heard
him. His vulnerability was addictive. Blake couldn't get enough.
Then, while he struggled with the temptation to pound down Avon's remaining
defences and fuck him into submission, Blake's balls jerked sharply, flooding
his groin with liquid fire. Orgasm offered a resolution to his conflicting
impulses. He sank and stilled and came in slow steady spurts, releasing all his
month-long anger at Avon's evasions: and all the love underlying his anger.
Avon whimpered and ground his pelvis against the mattress, too urgent to wait
for Blake's hand - although, the instant Blake pulled away, he rolled onto his
back and stared up, as defiantly unreadable as ever. **Elated or afraid?**
Blake opened his mouth to ask, then changed his mind and decided to let Avon
maintain his privacy.
'So what did you and my mother talk about?' he asked instead.
Avon yawned and stretched. 'This and that,' he said, intentionally vague. 'It's
rather disconcerting to find myself cast in the role of daughter-in-law. I warn
you, Roj, I draw the line at cooking your favourite dinners.'
'Oh, I don't think my mother would expect that,' Blake said with a grin. 'Her
revolutionary agenda mightn't have included gay rights, until this morning, but
she's always been very strong on feminism.'
'Well now, that's a relief,' Avon drawled. 'Gwyneth does have a notable ability
to get precisely what she wants. Meeting her has been quite an education. I
understand you much better now.' He paused, glanced sidelong at Blake and
added, 'Perhaps I should reciprocate. By an odd coincidence, I discovered that
my parents are currently occupying their country cottage on Lindor, two planets
away, which prompted me to consider the idea of paying them a visit. Would you
be interested in accompanying me, Roj?'
Blake's breath caught in his throat. He blinked fast and bowed his head, awed
by this sign of trust. His first impulse was to say, 'I'd love it' but he
didn't want to discourage Avon by sounding too effusive. So he shrugged and
borrowed a line from Avon's repertoire.
'All right,' he said lightly. 'Why not?'
2. Avon smiled guilelessly at the viewscreen on the flight deck. A familiar
face dimpled back, eyebrows arched extravagantly over thick-lashed doe's eyes,
sleek dark hair drawn into a knot of braids, pointed chin resting negligently
against a smooth white hand. His mother had obviously paid another visit to the
rejuvenation clinic: at this rate, she would look younger than he did on their
next encounter.
'I'll have to consult your father before confirming those details,' she purred.
'But I'm sure we can come to a mutually satisfactory arrangement, after a few
minor adjustments. I do hope you'll be reasonable, Kerr. I'm dying to find out
what you've been up to.'
Her image contracted to a pinpoint of light, then winked out. Avon swung away
to consult the chart on his console, crossing off another pair of worst case
scenarios and one of the best case scenarios. He frowned moodily at the
results. If the bargaining continued in this fashion, he seemed likely to get
the terms he was aiming for, which was rather disconcerting. Either he'd
overlooked some crucial flaw in his planning or else his parents were genuinely
eager to see him, a prospect that Avon found as daunting as it was improbable.
He was still frowning at the chart when Vila tiptoed down the steps, making an
elaborate comic performance out of being small and unobtrusive. Avon's frown
deepened into a scowl.
'What the hell are you doing here?' he demanded. 'I told you to stay out of my
way.'
'That was three hours ago,' Vila complained. 'If I'd known you were going to
take over the flight deck for the entire shift, I would've rescued my special
pack of cards. Come on, Avon, do me a favour, just this once. Let me have a
look around, to see if I can remember where I put them.'
'Oh, all right,' Avon sighed. 'But be quick about it.'
Vila beamed triumphantly and snapped his fingers. Straight away Jenna and Gan
and Cally came surging down the steps, with an alacrity that suggested they'd
been waiting in the corridor. Jenna strode over to the pilot's console and
began to run a check on the navigation computer. Gan collected a bag of jubes
from the side table and then went to help Vila hunt for his cards, overturning
cushions and rummaging through the seating bay, while Cally drifted across to
Avon's side and studied him sympathetically.
'Your blood pressure has risen by two points and there is a migraine aura
forming across the left hemisphere of your brain,' she observed. 'Blake's
parents never elicited that kind of reaction from him. Are you sure this is a
good idea, Avon?'
'No, I am not,' he replied. 'However, I don't intend to stop now. If you want
to help, you can assist me by leaving - and taking those other fools with you.'
As Cally smiled tolerantly and patted his arm, Zen's screen pinged. Avon shook
her hand off and leapt to his feet, shouting, 'Get out, all of you! Now.' The
frisson of panic in his voice embarrassed him and unnerved the others. They
scattered and bolted for the steps, disappearing into the corridor just as his
mother's image formed on the screen. Avon drew in a long breath and smoothed
his hair with both hands, settled back at his console and prepared to resume
negotiations.
Two hours later the image faded for the last time. When Avon looked up, the
flight deck seemed to be shrouded in pale mist. He blinked, rubbed his eyes and
jotted down a comprehensive summary of the final terms in his elegantly
illegible handwriting. As he hoisted himself out of the chair, discs clicked at
the base of his spine and his muscles twanged protestingly. Avon stretched and
touched his toes, then took the stairs two at a time, pausing at the door of
the recreation room to say, 'The flight deck is free now,' by way of apology
for his momentary panic. Blake caught up with him at the door of his cabin.
'Well?' he asked. 'How did it go?'
Avon palmed the lock, dragged his boots off and collapsed on the bed. 'We
arrive at my parents' house at 1930 hours tomorrow,' he said, letting his eyes
close. 'They have agreed to send all but one of their servants to a nearby
encampment, after which I will seal the house with a force sphere for the
duration of our visit. Tench, my parents' butler, is seventy years old and
blind, so we shan't be in any danger from him - although, naturally, I intend
to run a heat sensor check before we depart, to make sure there are no more
than three people in the house. In return, I have given my word that neither
you nor I will bring any kind of armaments with us and that we will allow
ourselves to be searched on entering and leaving - a reasonable concession, I
think, given that my father has also promised not to use any of his weapons.'
He rubbed his temples and waited to be congratulated. After the silence had
stretched out for half a minute, Avon levered his eyes open again. Blake was
standing at the end of the bed, mouth gaping, as though he'd been hit by a
blast from a stungun.
'That sounds very ... comprehensive,' he said. 'Although, considering all your
other precautions, I'm surprised you're prepared to rely on simple promises,
when it comes to the weaponry.'
Blake was clearly making one of his awkward attempts at humour but Avon felt
annoyed, all the same. 'Those "simple promises" were the most difficult part of
the negotiation,' he said sharply. 'Among the Alpha Elite, a man's word is
considered binding. It is one of the cornerstones of Elite culture.'
'Oh, is it?' Blake said, still irritatingly amused. 'In that case, why didn't
you just make your parents promise to leave us alone, while we're in their
house?'
'Too open-ended,' Avon sighed. 'The Elite do exactly as they promise, nothing
less but nothing more. According to your formulation, my parents would be
entitled to call in the Federation to arrest us, once they realised they were
playing host to the galaxy's most notorious outlaw - after all, technically
speaking, they could themselves still claim to be leaving us alone. However, I
feel confident that my formulation covers all the possible contingencies.'
Blake stared at him for a long moment. 'Avon, we're visiting your parents, not
planning a raid on Servalan's headquarters,' he pointed out.
'I know,' Avon told him. 'That's why I am being more cautious than usual. This
is not a pleasure trip, Blake. If you have visions of sharing sentimental
reminiscences with my parents, think again. In my family, I am regarded as
tolerant to the point of weakness and excessively liberal in my social and
political opinions - and before you ask: no, I haven't changed greatly since I
left home.'
That finally seemed to get through to Blake. He sat down heavily on the bed,
examining Avon with scientific curiosity. 'Bran Foster used to tell me the
Elite were different from the rest of us,' he commented. 'I was convinced that
all life is linked, so I didn't believe him. But maybe Bran had a point.'
'Oh, the Elite are much the same as everyone else,' Avon said wearily. 'Vain,
greedy, jealous, self-centred, cruel and ruthless. Their wealth and status give
them more latitude to express their little idiosyncrasies, that is all.'
The light of the cabin drilled through his irises, probing the dense ache at
the base of his skull. His migraine was intensifying. Avon rolled sideways,
flinging an arm up to shield his eyes, and felt the mattress dip as Blake moved
closer.
'Vila caught a quick glimpse of your mother on the screen, after you ordered
him off the flight deck,' he said, leaning over to massage Avon's neck. 'He
claims she looks remarkably like Servalan.'
Avon winced under the soothing hands. 'Oh dear, there is a lot I don't tell
you, isn't there?' he said with a faint undertone of apology. 'Although neither
of us has chosen to advertise the fact, Servalan is a second cousin on my
mother's side. Mother was rather annoyed at the way in which cousin Irene
positioned herself as the Servalan.'
'Servalan's your cousin?' Blake said, laughing and disconcerted. 'That explains
a thing or two. I sometimes used to wonder whether you fancied her'.
'Yes, we've always flirted, ever since we were in our teens,' Avon murmured.
'Servalan's such a faghag that we both find it irresistible.'
As he smiled at the memories, Blake's hands slowed and stopped. 'Wait a
minute,' he said in his rebel leader voice. 'If Servalan's related to your
mother, won't your parents already realise you're involved with - ah, the
galaxy's most notorious outlaw?'
'I'm not sure,' Avon admitted. 'At present, they don't appear to be aware of
the connection. That could be a double bluff, of course, but equally, cousin
Servalan may have elected to withhold the information. Knowledge is power,
after all - and like power, it decreases in value when it is shared.'
Blake shifted uneasily, jarring the mattress. 'Well, at least the force sphere
ought to prevent your parents from calling the troopers in,' he said wryly.
'I'm starting to understand some of your precautions. Is there anything else
you haven't told me, Avon?'
'My name,' he remembered. 'I was, as it happens, christened Ivor Gilles
Kirconnell Chesku. The Elite tend to recycle family names - my father's name is
Ivor and I have an Uncle Gilles, so I was generally called Kerr within the
family circle. Avon is my own invention.'
He was contemplating the regrettable circumstances under which he had acquired
his new name, when a hand seized his shoulder, clamped tight and slammed him
onto his back. 'Chesku, as in the recently retired Federation Minister for
Justice?' Blake snarled.
'Unfortunately, yes,' Avon sighed. He looked up into stormcloud eyes and said,
'I am sorry, Roj. I should have volunteered that information sooner. If we
continue with our plans, you are likely to learn rather more about me than you
wish to know. Would you prefer to renege on the agreement?'
'Do I have a choice?' Blake asked, still stormy.
'Not as much as I might have given you,' Avon confessed.
Blake's eyes darkened further, then creased into a sudden smile. 'As long as we
both agree that you're a manipulative little bastard, then ... yes, I still
want to come with you. I can't say I like the idea of being civil to the man
who presided over the ruin of the Freedom Party but - oh well, he'll probably
dislike it as much as I do. Besides, I'm far too curious to back out now.'
The lights of the cabin were flashing like a distress signal: or so it seemed
from behind Avon's eyes. He sighed again, relieved by the detente, and pulled
Blake down beside him, determined to fuck him one more time, before tomorrow's
risky venture. But as he turned his head, the spike of pain impaling his skull
twisted and drove deeper. Avon realised with distanced regret that he barely
had the strength to reach up and take hold of Blake's hand. Blake drew
reassuring circles on his palm, then cuddled him close and talked comforting
nonsense while Avon drifted into a troubled sleep, flinching at the images that
peopled his dreams.
 
*
 
The dining room of the Cheskus' country cottage was twice the length of the
Liberator's flight deck, shadowed by cobwebs of drapery fluttering from the
ceiling, lambent with oblique reflections from the mirror-topped table and the
glow-tailed worms weaving through the Lindorian livesilk tapestries on the
walls. The patterns of light and shade were so confusing that it took Blake
several minutes to be sure that Avon's father wasn't present. He'd already met
Avon's mother in an anteroom, after Avon had activated the force sphere and the
blind butler had patted them down and admitted them, all of which had clearly
taken more time than Sarinda Chesku anticipated. She'd brushed cheeks with Avon
and whisked them straight back across the hall.
'Hold the introductions, Kerr,' she said in transition. 'You appear to have
forgotten that your father always sits down to dinner at 1940 hours.'
Now they were hovering beside the table, while an opalescent time flash marked
the final countdown in nanoseconds. Avon and his mother managed to convey the
impression that they were absorbed in examining the tapestries but Blake was
blatantly shuffling his feet and watching the door. That turned out to be a
tactical error. As the time flash blazed and dimmed, one of the tapestries
billowed stormily. When it subsided, a man was standing at the head of the
table, so vibrant with suppressed energy that the rest of the room became a
vortex, orbiting around him. Blake glanced sideways and discovered that Avon
and Sarinda had slid into their seats, presumably following some Elite protocol
that had escaped him. He sighed.
**Avon might have given me a few clues, before we set out. But I suppose he
takes all of this for granted.**
Avon's father turned and ran his eyes across Blake, with an impersonal force
that left him feeling as if he'd been stripped naked. 'So you're still a
pervert, Kerr,' he commented. 'That's the Servalan bloodline. Cheskus have more
sense.'
He dumped a reader unit on the table and sat down, dismissing Blake from his
notice, although seconds later his head jerked up and his eyes flared in
hostile recognition. Avon smiled like a chess player who'd scored a point
during a hard-fought game. He strolled back to Blake's side and leaned against
him, more demonstrative than he'd ever been on Liberator.
'Mother and Father, I'd like to present Roj Blake,' he drawled. 'Roj darling,
my parents, Ivor and Sarinda Chesku.'
Ivor Chesku flicked a switch on the reader unit, scowling at its screen with
offensive concentration, but Sarinda let a tinkling laugh escape her perfect
mouth.
'Roj Blake the rebel?' she lilted. 'How clever of you, Kerr! So you've found
something even more unacceptable than rough trade or seducing your brother's
fiancŽe.'
As Blake swung round, startled by the last item of information, Avon tucked a
hand into the crook of his arm and steered him to a chair beside Sarinda,
before returning to his seat. Marooned in Chesku formality, Blake found his
gaze drawn irresistibly to Avon's father, hunched over the reader unit like a
bird of prey. Feral yellow eyes squinted down a jutting nose, absorbing the
lines of print at breakneck speed. When the butler dealt out a round of
entrees, Ivor slammed a big hand onto his plate, groped unseeing through the
array of molluscs and stuffed three Gondwana prawns into his mouth. Blake
stared.
**Typical Elite table manners or another test? Better make sure, before I copy
him.**
He looked down and groaned inaudibly at the array of cutlery - knives, forks,
spoons, picks, tongs and other implements he couldn't even name, stretching out
on either side of his plate like bars on a cage. His reflection stared up at
him from the mirror surface, peering between the bars with a worried frown. As
Blake tried to smooth the lines from his forehead, Avon sighed and swept half
his implements onto the floor.
'Really, Mother!' he said over the clatter. 'There was no need to tell Tench to
set the table for a formal banquet.'
Sarinda's scarlet mouth puckered into a pout. 'I hope you're not becoming
tiresome, Kerr,' she said petulantly. 'You never used to object when we teased
provincial governors with an excess of etiquette.'
'Perhaps my sense of humour has changed since then,' Avon suggested.
'Impossible,' his mother said. 'Cheskus don't change.'
Her words echoed round the walls with the authority of an edict. Blake clung to
the edge of the table, feeling hollow and weightless, so insubstantial that
Sarinda's next breath might send him eddying across the room and out the door.
**Cheskus don't change - and Avon's a Chesku. I've made a hundred speeches
about the corrupting effects of Elite privilege but I never expected it to
become a personal problem.**
As he stared into the mirror, struggling against an attack of vertigo, Blake
heard a chime like a silver bell. When he looked up, Avon was meditatively
tapping a knife and fork on the table top. They held the gaze for a moment and
then Blake bent to select the cutlery that Avon had indicated, still
destabilised but consoled by the knowledge that Avon was, at least to some
extent, on his side.
While he prodded his molluscs, Avon and Sarinda embarked on a stylised
discussion, riddled with references to people Blake didn't know, mined with
allusions that Blake didn't understand. They sniped and jousted, carping at
each other's choice of words, then uniting to criticise some outsider with
creative virulence. It was, Blake decided, the next event in the Chesku games,
although he couldn't quite fathom the method by which Avon and his mother kept
score. Ivor was easier to interpret, cutting across the conversation every now
and then with a dismissive judgment which usually closed that particular topic.
'Sev Rontane?' he said at one point, when Sarinda and Avon were demolishing the
reputation of an up-and-coming official. 'He turned out to be a faggot, just
like you, Kerr - although I suppose all you perverts recognise each other on
sight. Ever let him fuck you up the arse?'
Avon hooded his eyes. 'Rontane isn't my type,' he said, ostentatiously bored by
the effort of explaining. 'Queers do have personal preferences, just like
heterosexuals.'
Ivor stared and shrugged and lifted a strip of meat from the plate Tench had
bestowed on him. 'Do they?' he asked, as he poked a trailing end into his
mouth. 'I wouldn't know.'
Tench shuffled on, muttering irritably, and shoved a plate under Blake's nose.
He frowned down at a pile of barely-cooked flesh, quivering in a pool of blood.
Real meat, not the reconstituted protein to which the Liberator's food
synthesiser had accustomed him. Blake's stomach churned. He scanned the table,
sighed with relief and turned to Sarinda.
'If I asked for the sauce, would you make me justify my need for it or would
you pass it to me?' he said.
Sarinda blinked, as disconcerted as if the sauce boat had spoken, then released
another tinkling laugh. 'Kerr, your barbarian is wittier than he looks!' she
exclaimed. 'I must say he's almost presentable, for a provincial.'
She scanned Blake thoughtfully, subjecting him to a visual autopsy that clearly
placed him in the Cymry system and quite possibly traced right him back to
Cymry IV. To break her focus, he glanced at the sauce boat and held out his
hand. Sarinda laughed again, amused by his presumption.
'Sauce, Tench,' she said indulgently.
The butler shambled round the table, muttering something about 'nice goings on
in a decent house' and 'bloody fags sitting down to dinner,' as he groped for
the sauce boat and shunted it towards Blake. He doused his meat with peppery
sauce, which enabled him to swallow most of it, while Avon and Sarinda
languidly demolished a few more Elite reputations. When Tench started another
circuit of the table, banging plates onto a trolley, Avon's father wiped bloody
hands down his shirt and hoisted himself to his feet.
'Come to my study, Ivor,' he commanded.
Apparently, his father's use of Avon's first name wasn't standard practice in
the Chesku household. Avon's chin lifted and his eyes widened fractionally
before he answered, without any inflection, 'Why should I?'
'Because, until I get your signature on a couple of documents, you still have
some residual legal connection to this family,' his father growled.
'All right,' Avon said, pushing his chair back. 'That sounds like a worthy
cause.'
As he rose, Ivor loomed over him, jamming an arm across his throat and spinning
him around. 'Take a good look at your bit of rough, before you make any final
decisions,' he snarled. 'He'll be dead within a year, you know.'
'Perhaps,' Avon rasped. 'Although no doubt people said the same about you,
while you were clawing your way to the top of the Elite hierarchy.'
'True,' Ivor agreed, clearly taking it as a compliment. 'But Roj Blake,
Mindwipe 187, isn't going to top any hierarchies, no matter how well he tops
you. I've seen enough of him now to know he doesn't have the ambition.'
'How kind of you to point it out, Father,' Avon murmured. 'Yet another reason
to prefer him.'
Ivor's forearm twitched and tightened, yanking Avon's head back against his
shoulder. He scowled down for several long seconds, angry yellow eyes only
centimetres away from opaque amber eyes.
'It's hard to believe you're my son,' he observed, casually contemptuous.
'Come.'
He released his grip, so abruptly that Avon staggered and almost fell. As he
clutched the table and gasped for breath, Blake stared intently, willing him to
refuse his father's summons. But Avon's temporary vulnerability had evidently
lost him a point in the Cheskus' complex game, because he straightened his
spine and followed his father to the door, mutely obedient. Blake watched them
leave, charged with such free-floating anxiety that he jumped when Sarinda laid
a delicate hand on his arm.
'Ivor never takes dessert,' she said, as though that explained the scene they'd
just witnessed. 'However, I feel sure you have a sweet tooth, Roj. Would you
like to join me in the drawing room for a pot of chocolate?'
Compared to the stark magnificence of the Cheskus' dining room, the drawing
room was claustrophobically intimate. Red velvet walls, embossed with intricate
goldleaf landscapes, enclosed a maze of purple velvet chairs and couches, the
pathways between them clogged by a dozen small gilt tables. Sarinda threaded
through the maze and arranged herself on the most spectacularly ornate couch,
gesturing imperiously at the table in front of them. Blake looked down at two
white porcelain eggs, inset with silver cups, each accompanied by a long-
handled silver spoon, a jug of white liquid and a dish of brown flakes.
**Oh, wonderful. Another test. Can't the Cheskus ever let up for a moment?**
Fortunately, Blake's brain elected to regard the eggs as an engineering
problem, rather than a social problem. He spotted a flamestick on the table,
located a hole in the side of the nearest egg and lit the small candles
positioned under their silver cups. A few minutes later he and Sarinda were
sitting in companionable silence, spoons clinking musically, while the candle
flames melted chocolate into the white liquid. It was an unexpectedly calming
ritual. When Sarinda demonstrated how to use the spoon's hollow handle as a
straw, flirtatiously compressing her red mouth into a cupid's bow, Blake smiled
back with genuine amusement, before leaning forward to sip from his own pot.
'You're fond of Kerr, aren't you?' she fluted, just as the hot sweet liquid
filled his mouth.
Blake choked and swallowed. 'I love him, if that's what you mean,' he said.
'Love?' Sarinda echoed speculatively. 'Not a word that's often used in the
Chesku household. Let me be more specific, Roj. You seem, heaven knows why, to
be besotted with my son at present. How long do you think this little dalliance
will last?'
Blake's first impulse was to say, 'It's none of your business.' Then, as he
opened his mouth, a more obscure instinct took over, prompting him to reveal a
piece of information that he hadn't confided to anyone on board Liberator.
'I've asked Avon to pairbond,' he said gruffly. 'But he keeps coming up with
reasons against it.'
'A different reason each time?' Sarinda said, quick and conspiratorial. 'Keep
asking, Roj dear. He'll agree in the end. Kerr needs someone like you and I
think - or, at any rate, I hope he has the sense to realise it.' She held his
gaze for half a second and then let her eyes drift away to the door, adding
lightly, 'You are, after all, more attractive than his usual rough trade.'
As she ran a fingernail down the triangle of bare skin at the neck of Blake's
shirt, Avon came strolling towards them. Blake glanced up, annoyed to find
himself blushing hotly.
'No need to look so alarmed, Roj,' Avon said, unperturbed. 'Flirting is as
natural as breathing to the Servalan clan. They practise it from the cradle
onwards.'
'You make it sound quite impersonal,' Sarinda complained. 'As it happens, your
barbarian positively inspires flirtation. Those curls - delightfully original!
No Elite could tolerate the disorder, of course, but I suppose it reminds
provincials of those woolly animals - sneep or shoop: something like that.'
Avon murmured, 'TouchŽ' and they examined each other thoughtfully, preparing
for the next round of barbed comments. Blake decided he'd had enough. He rose
to his feet, interposing himself between mother and son.
'Don't worry,' he told Sarinda. 'I'll look after him for you.'
In response, she shuttered her eyes and sighed, theatrically pained by Blake's
directness. 'I see,' Avon said, smiling down at her. 'So you have been
transferring your maternal responsibilities yet again?'
His mother inclined her head. 'Aren't you grateful, Kerr?'
'Of course,' Avon said and they laughed together, hands lifted at the same wary
angle, like a pair of exotic birds ready to take flight at the first sign of
danger. It made a charming picture, no less charming for being deliberately
composed, although for the first time Blake thought he could detect signs of
rapport under the artifice. He joined in the laughter, adding a bass
counterpoint to their lighter tones, and they turned towards him, eyes meeting
in a moment of shared understanding, instantly broken when a shadow blocked the
door.
'Tell your son that this house is equipped with the latest security systems,'
Ivor Chesku growled to Sarinda.
'Tell your husband that I can dismantle any security system,' Avon replied.
His father snorted. 'Another of your terrorist tricks, I suppose. All right,
Kerr, don't wreck the circuitry. I give you my word that I'll turn it off for
the night.'
Blake frowned, assessing the nuances. Avon seemed to have been demoted from
'Ivor' back to 'Kerr', presumably as a result of the conversation in the study.
It didn't appear to bother him, however. He turned in a stagy half-circle,
smiling slightly to the left of the door.
'I'm much obliged, Father,' he said courteously. 'That should save me at least
five minutes work.'
Ivor grunted and left but the fragile understanding had been demolished.
Sarinda stifled an affected yawn and summoned the butler to show Avon and Blake
to their room. Tench shuffled up the stairs ahead of them, joints audibly
creaking.
'I've put you in the Blue Room,' he wheezed. 'Will that suit you, Master Kerr?'
'No,' Avon said curtly. 'I prefer my old room.'
Tench tottered to the first room down the left hand corridor, kicked the door
open and ambled off, muttering, 'Bloody little nuisance. Never satisfied. Have
to fetch the fucking towels now.' Blake wanted to pull Avon into his arms, to
reassure himself that Avon could still be attracted to a barbarian, but he
didn't fancy the idea of being interrupted by Tench, so he clasped his hands
behind his back and surveyed the room. A black lacquer desk with one of the
early tarriel cell computers, a black-sheeted bed and glossy black walls,
studded with lifesized holos of the superheroes from Blake's teenage vid-
viewing, dressed in iridescent skinsuits that left little to the imagination.
When he grinned at the superheroes, Avon's shoulders lifted in an exaggerated
shrug.
'I was fourteen years old when I left this house for a boarding school in the
Federation capital,' he said, faintly defensive. 'I have rarely been back since
then, so my room remains unchanged.'
'You grew up here?' Blake asked, surprised. 'I thought you called it your
parents' country cottage.'
'It was,' Avon said. 'My parents only visited during my father's infrequent
vacations. As the second - and therefore dispensable - son, I was raised by
Tench and a computer.'
'Tench brought you up?' he said, even more surprised. 'Strange, you didn't seem
particularly pleased to see each other.'
'As I said, Tench raised me,' Avon repeated patiently. 'Or, rather, he
supervised my progress through the Elite child-rearing program. Since I had,
even then, an inconvenient habit of questioning everything I was told, we
developed a mutual and enduring dislike.'
At that point, Tench dawdled in and dumped a pile of towels on the bed,
demonstrating the durability of his dislike by mumbling, 'Bloody perverts - and
it's me who'll have to deal with the fucking sheets.' When the door slammed
behind him, Blake turned eagerly, arms already opening, only to find himself
confronted by Avon's back. His hands dropped to his sides and he stood stranded
in the middle of the room, watching Avon investigate the long mirror opposite
the bed with an absorbed concentration that excluded him completely.
Eventually, Blake decided he had nothing to lose by asking the question that
had been puzzling him all evening.
'Avon, what did your mother mean by that reference to your seduction of your
brother's fiancŽe?'
'Precisely what she said,' Avon replied abstractedly.
He tapped his way down the frame of the mirror, identified some variation in
the sound and tapped again. Blake shifted from one foot to the other, feeling
large and awkward and intimidated.
'I thought you'd always been exclusively homosexual,' he ventured.
Avon sighed. 'Yes, well, I've warned you about the dangers of making
assumptions. I admit I started flirting with Anna Grant from a natural desire
to annoy my brother - and, indeed, my father, who wasn't impressed by Mikel's
taste in fiancŽes. However, I soon realised that Anna and I had a lot in common
- a shared sense of humour and a similarly perverse sexuality: I always
suspected that Anna's interest in cousin Servalan went further than an old
boarding school rivalry. Somehow, we convinced each other that our only hope of
salvation lay in escaping together. Hence the banking fraud, which resulted in
Anna's death, my incarceration and the end of my capacity for hope.' He turned
abruptly, presenting a face like a white mask. 'Is that what you wanted to
know, Blake? And does it matter?'
'Not to me,' Blake said sturdily. 'Does it matter to you?'
In answer, Avon took a long step forward, thrust a hand under his jaw and
kissed him - a cursory, tight-mouthed kiss with nothing erotic about it,
obviously designed to shut him up. Blake closed his eyes and endured until Avon
released him and returned to the mirror, after which he swung away and started
to strip off his clothes, hands shaking with fatigue and misery. As he stumbled
across to the bed, Avon said, 'Got it!' and prised a tiny black chip from the
frame.
'What's going on?' Blake asked, startled when his voice sounded almost normal.
'A quadruple bluff, if I am counting right,' Avon informed him. 'My father
promises to switch off the circuitry of the security system - but neglects to
mention the individual bugs concealed in every room. I accept his offer - and
proceed to neutralise the bug. A fairly typical interaction: quadruple bluffs
are standard practice in the Chesku family. We have been known to go as far as
octuple bluffs on occasion.'
'Yes, I can believe it,' Blake said flatly.
He crawled into bed and huddled under the black sheets, shivering at their
chilly touch. His heart felt like a fist-shaped mass of ice wedged painfully in
his chest, frozen solid by four hours' exposure to the Chesku family. Sarinda's
deft insults, Ivor's violent contempt, discovering that Avon had neglected to
mention a lover whom he had considered his salvation - it all combined to make
Blake feel more irrelevant than he could have previously imagined.
'Are you coming to bed?' he asked, morbidly testing the one area where he still
hoped he might mean something to Avon.
No answer. Instead, Avon leaned closer to the mirror, levering at the frame
with his thumbnail. It was the last straw. A surge of indignation scorched
along Blake's arteries, firing his temper and melting the ice around his heart.
'What's the problem, Avon?' he growled. 'Too provincial for you, am I?'
Avon's head snapped up, displaying his mirrored eyes, wide-open and dark and
stricken. Apparently, Blake was right: and Avon was mortified. There were no
apologies, of course - **that'd be too much to ask** - but he shifted to meet
Blake's gaze, dazzling the mirror with a reflected smile.
'Hardly,' he drawled. 'As it happens, that is one of your principal charms.'
'So I do have **some** charms, despite being a barbarian?' Blake demanded.
'Oh, you're full of them,' Avon said, desperately sincere.
Blake relaxed back on the pillows. 'Tell me the top three,' he suggested with a
last flicker of insecurity.
Avon whirled away from the mirror and flung himself onto the bed, leaning down
to touch Blake's hair and cheek and mouth. 'I am glad that your hair curls,' he
said. 'I am glad that your face always shows what you are thinking. I am glad
that you say what you mean, rather than communicating through oblique
innuendo.'
'Glad I'm an antidote for the Chesku poison?' Blake said smugly, although a
second later his doubts kicked in again, causing him to add, 'If it does help,
having me here.'
'More than you could possibly guess,' Avon told him. 'I was about to slip into
playing my family's vicious little games - but as usual you grab me by the
scruff of the neck and haul me back to reality. Would you like to complete the
process by fucking me senseless?'
'Here?' Blake asked, hoisting an eyebrow at the relics of Avon's childhood.
'Where else?' Avon said irritably. 'Consider it an act of redemption. I suspect
that may be one of my main reasons for returning to this house.'
He stretched out full length on the bed - the opening move in a game they'd
played before, where Blake stripped him with leisurely deliberation, pampering
or teasing each successive centimetre of bared flesh, while Avon tried to
remain impassive for as long as possible. Blake hesitated briefly before he
began, wondering whether he wanted to play yet another Chesku game, then
deciding to believe Avon's theory of redemption. He snapped studs: peeled black
leather away from pale skin: sucked soft nipples till they were as sharp as
tacks: lovingly traced swirls of dark hair from the chest down to the groin. By
the time he snared the zipper tab between thumb and finger and gave a
preliminary tug, Avon's hands had knotted into fists at his sides and his
breath was rasping his throat. Blake grinned and took pity on him, releasing
his cock and cradling his balls in one hand, while his other hand travelled
slowly up the shaft.
'Harder,' Avon demanded, even earlier than he expected.
Blake's hand clenched and then slackened. 'Are you sure?' he asked.
'Yes, of course,' Avon snapped. 'You still don't understand, do you? I can't
feel it, otherwise.' He tossed restlessly, averting his head and adding, almost
inaudibly, 'And I want to feel it.'
The whispered words lodged in Blake's brain, as securely as if he'd already
reserved a place for them. When he tightened his grip, squeezing shaft and
balls, rubbing his thumb across the glistening cockhead, Avon sighed and
relaxed and let his eyes slide shut. Blake gazed down at translucent eyelids,
the flutter of long dark lashes and a mouth curving towards an enigmatic smile.
**All right, Avon, I think I understand at last. Having met your parents, I can
see why ordinary levels of feeling mightn't come easy to you. Dear gods, it's
lucky I didn't interpret all those requests for hard fucking as cues for a spot
of recreational S&M.
I suspect you've already learnt more than enough about eroticised power
plays.**
 
*
 
Avon smiled, signalling a change in tempo. As his cock swelled in Blake's hand,
he pushed himself upright, nipping at an ear lobe, the angle of the jaw, the
join between neck and shoulder. Blake flung his arms up in self-defence, then
tried to grapple Avon close, but he ducked and evaded. Blake lunged for him and
they rolled across the bed, tussling and wrestling until they were breathless
with laughter, until the last lingering traces of the Chesku games had been
purged from Avon's memory.
When he sighed and stilled, Blake growled softly and drove his tongue past
Avon's lips, so forcefully that for a moment he was convinced Blake had delved
down to lick his heart. He made a small pained sound and Blake immediately
pulled away, although the incipient concern in his eyes melted on contact with
Avon's steady gaze.
'I love you, Kerr,' he said, as surprised and heartfelt as if it were the first
time.
'Yes,' Avon replied, obscurely definite. 'Oh yes, of course.'
He shifted sideways and surveyed Blake, who lay balanced on the fulcrum of his
pelvis, ready to tilt back or forwards. Normally Avon liked the comfort of
Blake's weight, holding him in place, but tonight he needed more freedom of
movement, so he settled an imperious hand on Blake's shoulder and tilted him
backwards. Blake's breath quickened. As his thighs spread receptively, Avon
settled over him, letting his cock nudge the column of Blake's erection. Once
he had aligned their shafts to his satisfaction, he braced his arms and started
to rock his hips, eyes narrowed with the effort of maintaining contact. Having
established the rhythm, he continued to slide to and fro, skimming across
satin-smooth skin, varying the pace and pattern, until sensation blazed a trail
along his neural pathways, so comprehensively that it blocked out any
possibility of thought.
'Avon!' Blake said abruptly, as though he had some urgent information to
impart.
The sudden interruption startled Avon out of his sensual reverie. When he
glanced down, he found himself staring into wide-open hazel eyes, focused with
apprehensive rapture on impending orgasm. He laughed hectically and rode Blake
as he bucked, revelling in the piston thrusts of Blake's thighs, tantalised by
the come-and-go pressure on his cock. As sperm jetted warmly between them,
Blake grunted and heaved, flipped Avon onto his back and bore down hard. Avon
gasped and came, squirming luxuriantly against slippery muscle, shouting
triumphantly when a skilful hand wrung the last drops from his pulsing cock.
**One way or another, Blake knows how to handle me. It's unexpectedly agreeable
to feel less than totally responsible for myself.**
Some time later he opened his eyes and looked round at the churned sheets, the
pillows littering the floor, Blake's garments draped untidily on the furniture,
the lamp that one or other of them must have kicked over while they wrestled.
The superheroes on the wall seemed to be smiling their approval at the ruin of
his room's sterile tidiness. Avon frowned back, embarrassed by the banality of
his teenage fantasies.
'In retrospect, it's not entirely surprising that my parents packed me off to a
deprogrammer when I was fifteen,' he observed. 'I thought they were a little
quick off the mark but in fact they had more reasons than one for their
assessment.' He paused for a second, lifted his head and added, clear as a
trumpet call, 'Although, as you see, your attempts to cure me of being queer
had no lasting effects.'
Blake stirred beside him. 'Avon?' he said, drowsily puzzled. 'Who on earth are
you talking to?'
'My father,' Avon explained. 'There will undoubtedly be other bugs in the room.
I merely dismantled the most obvious one, as a token gesture.'
'Other bugs?' Blake yelped. 'You mean your parents will have tapes of ...?'
'Yes, of course,' he said blandly. 'Don't worry, Roj. You were very good.'
Blake stared down in comical dismay at his naked torso, then burst out
laughing. Avon subsided against him, lightheaded with relief. Introducing his
lover into his parents' orbit had been a calculated risk but Blake had
proceeded to break all the Chesku codes with the insouciance of a Zen master.
While Blake's logic was often shaky, his instincts could always be relied on.
Right at that moment, for example, he was gathering Avon into his arms with a
fierce tenderness clearly induced by his mention of the deprogrammers, although
Blake wasn't about to affront his reticence by putting that insight into words.
Avon sighed and burrowed into the embrace, cushioning his head on Blake's broad
chest, lulled by the steady reassurance of Blake's heartbeat.
While Blake's breathing slowed into its sleep rhythms, Avon let his mind drift
back to the conversation in his father's study. Secure in Blake's arms, he was,
paradoxically, able to admit that he'd been tempted by the deal Ivor had
offered. It was a gratifying form of revenge to hear his father say, 'Your
brother Mikel's a disappointment. After all I've done for him, he seems
unlikely to rise beyond the rank of Councillor. Perhaps I got rid of you too
quickly.' Avon smiled at the belated vindication and indulged a fantasy of his
other self - Ivor Gilles Kirconnell Chesku, restored to full Alpha Elite
privileges, being groomed for high office under his father's patronage. The
Alpha Elite might be devious, detached and incorrigibly manipulative but,
despite the pain his parents had caused him, he felt at home here, as he had
never felt at home on Liberator.
**And yet ... and yet I feel safe with Blake, even under my father's roof, even
given Blake's undeniable propensity for getting people killed. Could I walk
away from that?
Not easily, I'm afraid.**
As Blake mumbled in his sleep, slinging an arm out to hitch him closer, Avon
rolled deftly sideways and tucked a pillow into Blake's grasp. He stood and
gazed down at Blake, memorising the dreamy pout of his lower lip and the crease
between his eyebrows, always deeper when he was sleeping. Then he turned away,
dressed speedily and activated the computer on his desk. A swift scan of the
files; a subdued smile of triumph when he discovered that his encryptions had
survived the past two decades; a silent hunt for a thumbnail-sized chip to
record the data. Avon palmed the chip, paused for a last look at Blake and
padded barefoot out into the corridor and down the stairs.
The front hall opened around him, high and shadowy as an underground cavern.
Avon sauntered across to the door of the anteroom and leaned against the frame,
inserting a finger into the crack where he used to hide his pornovid chips from
Tench. He smiled reminiscently - **everything changes: everything stays the
same** - and drifted on to his mother's drawing room. More memories. He'd
fucked Anna for the first time on one of those over-stuffed couches, her
silvergilt hair catching on the purple velvet, both of them made more ardent
and eager by the knowledge that Mikel or Sarinda might walk in at any moment.
**If only Anna had survived. She matched me perfectly. She understood the
Chesku ethos, as Blake never could. Her only flaw was her gender but then, we
would hardly have been obliged to remain monogamous. We might be living
together in adequate splendour on one of the more civilised frontier planets,
if only the bank fraud had succeeded, if only she had survived ...**
Grief and guilt tugged his mouth down, erasing the remnants of his smile. Avon
swung away and paced across to the library - one of his mother's more expensive
affectations, an entire wall lined with antique paper-books. He switched a
light on and browsed the shelves, selecting some of his childhood favourites
and reading a line here, a paragraph there. At the end of one shelf, a space
had been cleared for a group of family holos - his father, imposing in the
black and silver uniform of the Justice Department; his mother at a family
gathering, competing with Servalan for the camera's attention. Apparently,
Mikel was too far out of favour to warrant inclusion, although, when Avon
looked closer, he spotted the corner of another xenite frame, protruding from
behind the books. He levered the holo out and turned it over.
And Anna Grant gazed up at him, serenely knowing, dressed in white like a
ghost-bride.
Avon's eyes blurred. He gripped the frame, letting a sharp corner dig into his
palm, until his hand stopped shaking. Then he focused more steadily on the holo
and gasped in muted surprise. Anna wasn't alone. His brother Mikel stood beside
her, in the traditional black skinsuit of a bridegroom.
Synapses sparked across Avon's brain, making connections faster than logic
could process them. He laughed, appreciating the irony. Obviously, Anna
understood the Chesku ethos far better than Ivor Gilles Kirconnell Chesku ever
had. She must have bargained with his father, offering to dispatch his
inconvenient second son, in return for the Cheskus' acceptance of her marriage
with Mikel.
**So much for that little dream. I should have known there are no easy escape
routes, where my family is concerned.**
He was still staring down at Anna's ethereal face when the floorboards vibrated
beneath his feet. Avon turned and saw his father looming against the light, a
few metres away.
'I don't need much sleep either,' Ivor told him. 'I had a feeling you'd be
sneaking around the place. It occurs to me that you might be equivocating about
my offer because you don't think I can implement it. Trust me, Kerr, I still
have more than enough power to reverse your dismissal from the Elite and shut
your cousin Servalan's mouth.' He waited for an impatient half-second, then
snapped, 'Well? Have you made up your mind yet?'
Avon restored the holo to the centre of the cluster. 'Your timing is as
impeccable as always,' he observed. 'I had just this moment decided to
decline.'
'Because of Mikel's whore?' Ivor said astutely. 'You could have her, you know.
She sells to the highest bidder.' His mouth quirked into a raffish grin and he
added, 'Yes, I agree. Not a particularly enticing option - but you can do
better than that skinny spy-girl. Hell, you could hire a troop of Delta
musclemen as bedwarmers, providing you're prepared to compromise, for once in
your intransigent life, and marry some Elite bitch to keep up appearances.'
'As you did?' Avon asked and watched his father's eyes light with feral anger.
'Careful, Kerr,' he warned. 'You're about to make one of your biggest mistakes.
You really should consider staying. At least you'd be safe, under Chesku
protection. You'll never be safe with **him**.'
'That depends on one's definition of safety,' Avon pointed out. 'Besides, there
are other factors to consider. After all, I love Blake ... quite as much as I
hate you.'
Ivor shrugged. 'I hated my father too. But he made me what I am.'
'Well now, perhaps I prefer not to become what you would make me,' Avon
murmured. 'Good night, ex-Minister Chesku.'
He strolled towards his father, outwardly determined, inwardly apprehensive. At
the last possible second, Ivor snorted like a stallion and gave ground. Avon
brushed past him, controlling a shudder at the tangential contact, and strode
out into the hall. As he climbed the stairs, he could feel his father's gaze,
marking his back like a target, but he refused to turn his head.
**It is finished now. I am free of him. At last.**
He stumbled into the bedroom, tore off his clothes and collapsed beside Blake,
sinking straight into a sleep as deep and dreamless as if he had been drugged
or stunned. When he opened his eyes some time later, Avon had no idea of where
he was, although his hands, less uncertain than the rest of him, were already
searching for Blake and finding the bed empty. As he prepared to panic, he
heard Blake's voice, oddly distorted.
'Awake at last? I would've fetched you a cup of coffee, if I hadn't been afraid
Tench might've boobytrapped the kitchen.'
Avon propped himself on one elbow, passing a hand across his face, to make sure
he hadn't aged a hundred years during the night. Upsidedown hazel eyes gleamed
back at him. Blake bent at the waist, reversed his shoulder stand and sat up,
curls buoyant from the shower, cheeks immaculate from the shaver unit. Avon
smiled ruefully.
**And the room has been restored to sterile tidiness as well. Oh dear, Roj must
have been very bored.**
'Time for breakfast, I suppose,' Blake said, scrambling to his feet. 'What kind
of ordeal will your parents have organised this time?'
'Nothing that need concern you,' Avon told him. 'We won't be staying.'
Blake let out a cautious sigh of relief, gathering momentum as he decided that
Avon meant it. 'I can't say I'm sorry,' he admitted. 'Your parents' idea of
hospitality reminds me of the Justice Department's preliminary interrogations.'
He took a closer look at Avon, frowned and came to sit beside him, tucking an
arm around his shoulders and saying, 'Are you all right, love?'
'I will be,' Avon said. 'Just get me out of here.'
He leaned against Blake for a few restorative seconds, before dragging himself
to the bathroom and splashing cold water over his face and torso. Blake dressed
him like a valet, fastening his studs and smoothing his leather tunic, then
kissed him lightly on the forehead and shepherded him downstairs. As Avon
headed across to the anteroom, the hairs at the nape of his neck prickled in
warning. He turned and saw Ivor, Sarinda and Tench, clustered together by the
library door.
'Kerr, darling,' his mother fluted reproachfully, 'don't tell me you were
planning to leave without saying goodbye?'
'Or without submitting to the standard stripsearch, to prove neither of you are
taking anything that doesn't belong to you,' his father added in bureaucratic
mode.
Avon tensed. 'I agreed to a search,' he stated. 'I did not agree to a
stripsearch.'
Sarinda studied him through a butterfly flutter of long lashes. 'No, you
didn't,' she murmured. 'But I think you'll concede that it's in your best
interests to cooperate.'
Her hand swung up, finger clenched on the trigger of a small pearl-inlaid laser
gun. As Avon stared blankly, Ivor Chesku slapped his thigh and roared with
laughter.
'Got you there,' he said jovially. 'You perverts always underestimate women. I
gave my word that I wouldn't touch any weapons ... but you forgot to extract
the same promise from your mother.'
'True,' Avon admitted. 'Still, despite her general lack of maternal instincts,
I somehow doubt that Mother would be prepared to shoot me.'
'You're quite right, darling,' Sarinda purred. 'That's why I'm aiming at your
barbarian. Nothing personal, Roj dear. As a matter of fact, I rather like you,
so I hope you're bright enough to believe I'm an excellent shot, without
requiring me to prove it.'
Morning sun dazzled the windows, laying strips of light across the polished
floor. Avon blinked, to clear his eyes, and focused on the tiny black death-
dealing circle, held steady in his mother's hand. He should have been computing
the odds but he felt strangely lethargic, more inclined to collapse into one of
the high-backed chairs near the door than to initiate some daring rescue. As he
wavered, Ivor grinned and rubbed his hands.
'Check and mate,' he said with relish. 'Into the anteroom, Blake, and drop your
trousers.'
Avon turned, silently apologetic, and met an affirming smile. 'Easy, love,'
Blake said. 'Your father's obviously been reduced to playing kindergarten games
in his retirement but I don't mind indulging him. After all, we've got nothing
to hide.'
He strode through the doorway and started to strip, as efficient and unworried
as if he were preparing for a medical examination. Avon shivered and averted
his eyes, to escape a sudden image of Blake in Federation custody, stripping
for the psychosurgeons who'd studied him and then wiped his memories.
**Ah well, I suppose Blake has endured worse than this, although I can't say I
find that thought particularly consoling.**
As he looked up, his mother went gliding past, eyes wide with unfeigned
admiration. 'A well-endowed barbarian,' she said, running the point of her
tongue across scarlet lips. 'Really, Roj, you make this more of a pleasure than
a duty. Now, if you'll prop your hands against the wall and spread your legs
... There, that wasn't so bad, was it? You can get dressed now. Kerr, it's your
turn next - and don't forget, any sign of resistance means a laser scar on that
rather attractive body of Roj's.'
The air seemed to thicken and curdle. Ivor gripped Avon's shoulder and marched
him into the anteroom, with Tench shambling behind. Avon's hands lifted, as
slowly as if they were pushing through deep water, to unfasten the studs that
Blake had fastened only minutes before. He couldn't look at Blake but he was
aware of his lover's brooding presence, shadowy at the edge of his vision,
caged behind the sightline of Sarinda's gun.
**How Blake must despise me for submitting without protest to this ritual
humiliation. Unfortunately, I can neither break my word nor risk Blake's life,
merely to avoid embarrassment - and, to look on the bright side, Blake can
hardly despise me more than I despise myself.**
By the time he eased his trousers down, Avon had achieved an almost total
detachment from his body - a trick learned in his youth that had often proved
useful since then, although never more so than now. He watched unmoved while
Ivor scanned his nakedness, tracking the slow passage of his father's yellow
eyes, noting the triumphant rise and fall of his father's chest.
'Up against the wall,' Ivor ordered and Avon obeyed, hands spread, feet apart.
He was gazing dreamily at the bronze flecks in the wall hangings when his
father added, 'Go on, Tench. Do your stuff.'
A sharp snap of latex and a muffled shout from Blake. 'Hold on,' he protested.
'That wasn't in the agreement.'
'Oh, it's a customary part of a stripsearch,' Ivor said amiably. 'Consult the
troopers' training manual, if you don't believe me - but, of course, you don't
recognise Federation authority, do you? Never mind, there's no need to get too
hot and bothered on my son's behalf. I assure you, Blake, Kerr's had a lot of
experience in ... ah, that area.'
Avon froze, belatedly realising what his father intended. A wave of
anticipatory nausea wrenched his guts and then he vacated his body completely,
letting his consciousness float up to the ceiling and bob there like a party
balloon, while Tench fumbled for his buttocks, inserted a gloved hand and
shoved. The butler muttered and cursed and forced two fingers past the
resistant valve, probing the anus with short swift stabs that would have been
intolerably painful, if Avon had allowed himself to register pain. His father
chuckled and moved closer.
'Does he still have a nice tight little arse?' he asked.
Tench grunted. 'It's tight enough, Master Ivor. Nothing nice about it, though,
not from where I'm bloody standing.'
His knobby fingers jabbed deeper and then spread wide. Avon heard a soft
despairing groan. As he searched for some way of reassuring Blake, he realised
that the groan had been forced from his own lungs. He was back in his body
again, trying to control its wracking tremors, bracing himself against the
onslaught of hurt and shame.
'All right, that's enough,' Sarinda snapped. 'Leave it, Tench. Kerr, put your
clothes on and join us in the hall.'
Footsteps clattered across the **faux marbre** floor. Alone in the anteroom,
Avon retched and wiped his eyes and dressed himself, numb fingers fumbling
every stud. Before he had time to think or react, he limped across to the
doorway and slumped against the frame, clutching it tightly, as though he would
have fallen without its support.
'Well?' he asked. 'Have you finished with us now?'
His father laughed, a high-pitched yowl of excitement. 'Raise the force sphere,
Kerr,' he challenged, canted forward like a hound straining against the leash.
'Let's see whether you get away - or whether my guards get you first.'
He went loping towards the main door but Sarinda skimmed across the hall and
intercepted him. 'Sorry, darling,' she murmured, as her gun rammed into Ivor's
midriff. 'The game's over now. Goodbye, Kerr. We won't meet again - oh, and Roj
dear, do take care of him.'
Avon reached into his pocket, thumbing the unit that operated the force sphere.
'Goodbye, Mother,' he said, polite and affectless. 'Rot in hell, Father.'
As Ivor swung back, baring his teeth, Blake activated his bracelet and yelled,
'Teleport now.' The hall hazed and the teleport bay shimmered into existence
around them, with Vila frowning anxiously from the control panel.
'Hope you had a nice stay with your folks,' he said. 'Only, we spotted some big
burly men hanging round outside the house, so we wondered whether you were in
trouble.'
Before Avon could answer, Cally, Jenna and Gan appeared in the corridor, all
talking at once.
'... sensed an intense hostility, hovering over ...'
'... make sure we have a back-up plan, next time you ...'
'... mightn't feel like part of the team but we don't want to lose you, Avon.'
Their concern was oddly gratifying but Avon felt unprepared to deal with it. He
took a step forward, intending to push past them and retreat to his cabin, but
since he was still somewhat detached from his body, he misjudged the distance
and collided with the teleport desk. His expression must have been less guarded
than usual, because the others instantly crowded around him, offering support
(Gan), comfort (Cally), a bracing grin (Jenna) and a glass of soma and
adrenalin (Vila, naturally). It was well-meant but Avon was relieved when Blake
waved them away, rescuing him from all that claustrophobic attention.
'Sorry, Avon and I are both done in,' he said. 'Would you mind waiting for the
full story? I think we need a rest and some debriefing first.'
A murmur of slightly regretful assent and then Blake was ushering Avon down the
corridor and steering him into his cabin. 'Well, that was interesting,' he
said, as the door closed. 'You were right, Avon. Your family definitely
qualifies for the term "dysfunctional".' He leaned back against the wall,
folding his arms across his chest and adding, 'By the way, how old were you
when your father raped you?'
'Oh, so you worked that out?' Avon said, mildly surprised. 'Congratulations,
Blake. I was fifteen years old at the point where my father caught me in bed
with a schoolmate. I believe his exact words were, "If you can do it with him,
you can do it with me." He then proceeded to test the truth of that axiom for
the next three months. Quite publicly, as a matter of fact - he took me
everywhere he went, as his consort.'
'He what?' Blake exploded. 'For Christ's sake, Avon! Is that sort of thing
common among the Elite?'
'Not precisely,' Avon told him. 'The Alpha Elite have all the usual taboos
against father-son incest. However, breaking taboos - and getting away with it
- is the quickest way to enhance one's Elite status. Any Elites who looked
shocked or protested when my father fondled me at social functions would have
suffered a considerable loss of prestige among their peers. If you consider me
proficient at ignoring other people's reactions, remember that I had good
teachers.'
Blake sat down on the end of the bed, as suddenly as if he had been knee-
capped. 'And your mother?' he asked hoarsely.
'Is herself a member of the Elite,' Avon completed. 'She is also what they call
"a one-man woman" - and unfortunately, the man in question happens to be my
father. I was rather startled when she turned the gun on him, at the end there.
It's most unlike her to deny him anything he wants.'
He swayed slightly, giddy with exhaustion, and dropped into the chair by
Blake's desk. Silence settled over the cabin, heavy and suffocating. Avon
watched the toe of his boot swing back and forth, regular as a metronome, an
activity that struck him as infinitely preferable to the option of raising his
head and testing Blake's reaction. It seemed poignantly unfair that, just when
he had abandoned the last of his illusions about his parents and their
daughter-in-law, he was compelled to risk alienating Blake by the disclosure of
his sordid history. Still, he had set this course of events in action when he
elected to bring Blake to his parents' house. At some level of his psyche, he
apparently wanted Blake to know everything, so he might as well answer Blake's
questions and be done with it.
'And at the end of three months?' Blake said, on cue.
'At the end of three months I behaved ... unacceptably at a state banquet,'
Avon replied. 'My hysterical outburst might have caused my father to lose face,
if he hadn't instantly had me committed to a luxurious private establishment,
run by Federation deprogrammers.'
'Wasn't that regarded as hypocritical?' Blake asked, terse and strained.
'No,' Avon said. 'You're missing the point, Blake. My father's dislike of
homosexuality was well-known in Elite circles. If his opinions on that subject
hadn't been so vehement, his taboo-breaking would not have been so dramatically
effective.'
The bed frame twanged as Blake shifted restlessly. 'I see,' he muttered. 'But
the deprogramming failed?'
'Obviously,' Avon sighed. 'On the day I was released from the luxurious private
establishment, I went straight to a queer bar recommended by one of the
orderlies - although, as an assetless member of a rich family, I considered it
advisable to conceal my backsliding from my parents. Over the next decade I
completed four degrees at New London university, while at the same time I
fucked my way around the bar scene and the fringes of Elite society. Oh yes,
Blake, there are queers among the Elite - but it is, of course, a secret
network, unregenerate queerness being as despised as my father's effrontery was
admired.'
He paused and waited for a stirring denunciation of Elite closetry. When Blake
remained silent, Avon hitched himself higher, wedging the chairback under his
shoulder blades to hold himself upright, as he launched into the final chapter
of his story.
'In my late twenties, I was arrested for - well, for resisting arrest during a
routine investigation into a queer bar. My father arranged my release, on
condition that I returned to the deprogrammers and that, if I embarrassed the
family a third time, I would resign all claim to any Chesku inheritance. So I
knew what I was doing when I seduced - or, I should say, let Anna Grant seduce
me. When she suggested defrauding the Federation bank, it struck me as a
marvellous revenge on the society that had effectively neutered me - although,
ironically, I now suspect that she used the proceeds to bribe her way into the
Chesku family ... and that my father used his share to obliterate me from all
Federation records, so comprehensively that even the Minister for Justice could
not access my new name.'
He paused, still perversely stung by his disenfranchisement, and tried to think
of a suitable epigraph. To his horror, Avon found himself possessed by an
urgent desire to fall on his knees and beg Blake for - what? Understanding?
Forgiveness? Absolution? Grand concepts but, ultimately, as irrelevant as the
gesture itself.
**There is still too much of the Elite in my nature to let me plead
successfully. Desperation only works if it appears sincere - an impossible
achievement, when one has learnt calculation in the cradle.**
Instead, he steepled his hands together, to hide their betraying tremor. 'So
now you know what you are dealing with,' he said, cold and clear. 'Damaged
goods, Blake. Very damaged goods.'
A dull echo bounced the words off the walls and threw them back at him. When
Avon forced his eyes to lift and focus, Blake was staring morosely at the
floor, shoulders slumped, full mouth dragged down into a bitter curve. Avon
studied him with valedictory affection and then bowed his head, resigned to the
imminence of loss.
**Yes, well, what else did I expect? I set this up, after all. Better to be
rejected now than later.**
As he prepared to rise and leave, Blake looked up with a grin that transformed
his sullen scowl. 'Damaged goods?' he said. 'Sorry, Avon, I was brought up by a
pair of neoMarxist-Lacanians. I don't go in for that kind of metaphor.'
Hope ripped Avon's resignation apart, with a force that was physically painful.
'Really?' he asked, catching his breath. 'What would you say instead?'
 
*
 
Blake clasped his hands behind his neck and stretched till his joints cracked.
It had been an effort to hold back for so long but he'd been reluctant to say
too much or react too strongly, in case he distracted Avon from his narrative.
He wanted to hear all of it and, even more importantly, he suspected Avon
needed to tell all of it.
**But now, thank heavens, I get a chance to add my own opinions.**
'As you've often pointed out, I have a tendency to slip into revolutionary
rhetoric,' he said ruefully. 'I'd probably start talking about heroic struggle
and resistance.'
He turned to share the joke and found himself confronted by an incredulous
stare. 'So you consider that a story of heroic resistance, rather than
mercenary collusion?' Avon inquired.
'Yes, of course,' Blake said energetically. 'I don't know how you survived it -
or how you still had the courage to kiss me, that night on the flight deck. It
was braver than anything I've ever done. I spent years ranting about freedom,
without freeing myself from Cymry IV's implicit homophobia. You were
systematically abused by a repressed queer and his accomplice and yet you never
lost sight of who you were.'
'A repressed queer and his accomplice?' Avon mused. 'You're referring to my
parents, I presume. A somewhat idiosyncratic point of view, Blake.'
'In Elite terms, maybe,' he agreed. 'However, I don't buy your father's rather
convoluted line about fucking you to test his peers. How do you see it, Avon?'
Avon tilted his head to one side, considering the question. 'Well now, I have
been told for most of my life that I was a disappointment to my parents,' he
offered.
Blake smiled back, overtly sardonic. 'Oh, I'm sure the feeling's mutual,' he
replied.
He watched Avon's eyes open wide, then narrow with amusement. 'What made me
think you'd be unable to cope with those revelations?' he wondered. 'Nothing
shocks you, does it, Blake?'
'On the contrary,' Blake said, more forcefully than he intended. 'Your father
shocks me to the marrow. I wanted to take him by the throat and choke him, very
slowly - wanted it more than I've wanted anything, since I fantasised about
killing my Federation torturers.' He glanced at his clenched fists and uncurled
his fingers, one by one, adding, 'Then again, I can't see why you'd be
interested in hearing about my reactions, when you already have to deal with
your own.'
'How astute of you,' Avon murmured. 'Still, it may console you to know that I
brought the means for revenge away with me. While I lived under my parents'
roof, I entertained myself by compiling a dossier on the more blatantly illegal
activities of my father and his colleagues. If it is made public, I think you
can rely on an extended period of chaos in the Federation's upper ranks. I
stored the data in my childhood computer, hoping it might be exempt from the
usual surveillance. Last night I downloaded it, concealed the chip in a crack
beside the anteroom door and retrieved it this morning, while -'
'While your father thought you were devastated by his bloody stripsearch,'
Blake breathed. 'That's brilliant, sweetheart! Show me.'
Avon hesitated and then came to perch on the bed beside him, opening his hand.
Blake stared down at a thumbnail-sized chip, embedded deep in Avon's palm by
the force of his grasp. As he reached out to prise the chip free, Avon
involuntarily jerked his hand away, although seconds later he muttered an
apology and slumped against Blake's side, shivering uncontrollably. It seemed
unlike him to let his reactions show so clearly but, after considering the
matter, Blake decided Avon wasn't aware that he was shaking.
'Having second thoughts?' he asked gently. 'I gather you don't want to expose
your father.'
'Apparently not,' Avon admitted. 'I can't understand why. It's really quite
illogical.'
'Only by Chesku standards,' Blake said with a grin. 'Most people take some
degree of family feeling for granted, even when their family's less than
functional. Never mind, love, there's a simple solution. Delete the information
about Minister Chesku and publicise the rest. All right, there's still a chance
that your father'll be implicated by his colleagues - but if so, that's his
responsibility, not yours.'
Avon stared at him blankly for a moment, then flung his head back in one of his
rare unaffected bursts of laughter. 'My hero,' he gasped finally. 'A veritable
Alexander, cutting the Gordian knot. Don't scowl at me, fearless leader. I
shall explain that reference later. Right now, I have better things to do.'
He stood up and began to strip methodically, tossing his clothes onto the floor
and trampling over them on his way to the shower unit. A few seconds later
Blake heard a rush of water and saw wisps of steam seeping under the door.
**Oh yes, of course. A symbolic cleansing. That makes sense, under the
circumstances.**
To assist with the symbolism, he gathered up Avon's clothes and stuffed them
into the laundry chute, then dimmed the lights and started to undress. As he
turned down the bedcovers, a minnow-flash of light whisked through the shadows
- Avon, ducking under his arm and dropping onto the bed, hands lifting in
welcome, legs splayed wide. Blake lowered himself into the remaining triangle
of space and frowned down doubtfully.
'There's no need to be concerned,' Avon informed him. 'I was not torn by Tench,
only bruised.'
When Blake remained hesitant, he glanced sidelong through a screen of lashes
and whispered, 'Please, Roj,' which was unusual enough to send Blake's hand
reaching for a tube of gel, against his better judgment. After the emotional
turmoil of the last few hours, he assumed he'd need to work for an erection but
his cock seemed to be focused on the present, rather than the past - or, more
specifically, on Avon, currently engaged in tucking a pillow under his hips to
hoist his arse higher, indicating quite unambiguously that, for the first time,
he wanted to be fucked face to face.
Blake's pulse quickened. He slathered his stiffening shaft with gel and
positioned his cockhead meticulously, nudging the soft dimple between Avon's
buttocks. Avon's legs lifted instantly; Avon's heels hooked over his shoulders,
urging him closer. Blake ran his eyes down the slant of a dark-furred torso,
still rosy from the heat of the shower, then leaned forward to kiss the damp
tendrils at Avon's temples, letting his cock sink, by slow and cautious
degrees, into Avon's arse. Avon gasped sharply and bit his lip, so Blake held
still, giving him time to adjust and settle, admiring his gallant determination
to transcend the pain. Words came spilling out of him, random but heartfelt.
'My dearest love,' he crooned. 'Bravest of Alphas. I love you so much, Kerr.
You make me very happy. I want to make you happy too.'
'Really?' Avon said, alert and interested. 'Will you give me the Liberator?'
'No,' Blake said, jolted out of his dreamy trance. 'Of course not. Why do you
ask?'
'Just testing,' Avon told him. 'I thought that little speech was hyperbole but
I gather I'm supposed to believe it.'
Blake shrugged. 'Believe whatever you like, sweetheart. As long as you remember
that I believe in you.'
Avon's eyes darkened. 'Be careful, Blake,' he warned. 'I can't change. I am
what my parents made me. You will undoubtedly catch glimpses of them in me from
time to time.'
'That's all right,' Blake said comfortably. 'I fell for a devious, manipulative
bastard. It's quite consoling to know you could be a lot worse.'
Avon tugged his mouth down, trying to suppress a smile, but the cat's whisker
creases at the corners of his eyes betrayed him. In the end he abandoned the
struggle and laughed out loud, muscles clenching tight around the base of
Blake's shaft. Blake moaned and thrust, felt Avon wince and thrust again more
carefully - a gentle rocking motion, repeated over and over, until his vision
blurred and motes of light spangled his eyelashes, casting a golden glamour
across Avon's face. He hung suspended, absorbed in the shadow play of Avon's
changing expressions, exulting in the rhythmic contractions timed to the slow
friction of his cock.
The slight, controlled movements had a hypnotic effect, heightening his
perceptions and alerting him to the minutest variations in texture. When Avon
sighed soundlessly and arched his pelvis, the imprint of his erection marked
Blake's sensitised skin like a brand. He reared back to take possession of
Avon's cock but Avon shook his head in silent protest and pulled him down,
welding them together. Blake closed his eyes and saw, with hallucinatory
clarity, Avon's cock pulsing between their bellies, his cock buried in Avon's
arse, both moving to the same inexorable tempo. They cried out simultaneously,
shuddered and stilled, clutched each other and collapsed in a sweaty heap.
After a drowsy interval Blake disentangled himself, looped an arm round Avon
and fitted him against his side. Although his body still felt languid and
sated, his mind was already ranging back over the last hour, pondering Avon's
instant acceptance of his simple solution, remembering how Avon had been
prepared to indict his father for what was essentially Blake's cause.
**He finally trusts me as much as I trust him. Or perhaps even more, by now.
It's time to up the ante.**
'There's something I ought to tell you,' he announced, hitching himself higher
on the pillows. 'I've been working on a plan to -'
'Yes, I know,' Avon sighed.
'You do?' Blake said, startled. 'How?'
Avon laughed. 'You're fairly transparent, my dear. If you want to maintain any
kind of secrecy, you'll need to watch that habit of gnawing your knuckles, when
you're keeping something to yourself. What is it this time?'
'I've been collecting information about the computer complex that monitors all
the Federation's political, civil and military activity,' Blake confessed. 'I
know where Central Control is - in an underground compound on Earth - and I
think I know how to bypass its defences.'
'Then think again,' Avon told him. 'If this compound is so easy to find, it
clearly isn't the right place.'
'So we have to look for a place we can't find? That might prove a little
difficult.'
'True, but Orac and I can do it. And once we locate Central Control, what
next?'
'We set up a council to organise the release of all the subject planets from
Federation control,' Blake said promptly. 'I'll suggest we start with the most
independent planets like Albian and Helotrix, to set a precedent for self-
determination, and we might make general elections a condition of our
assistance. If the Federation's already preoccupied - say, as the result of a
well-timed scandal in their upper echelons - we should be able to restore
galactic autonomy within a year.'
Avon nodded approval. 'An excellent idea,' he agreed. 'I was worried that your
scruples about the corrupting effects of power might convince you that it would
be simpler to blow up Central Control.'
Blake grinned. 'Oh, I think I can resist corruption for a year or so,' he said
cheerfully.
Beside him, Avon stirred and shifted, butting his head into the crook of
Blake's arm. 'I didn't imagine you'd need to guard against your own
corruptibility,' he said in a muffled voice. 'You might, however, be concerned
about the effect of absolute power on my father's son.'
'Hardly,' Blake said spontaneously. 'You know more about the dangers of
absolute power than I do.'
He reached down to smooth Avon's hair, combing the damp tangles with his
fingers, massaging cable-taut neck muscles. As he stroked and kneaded, the
rigid angle of Avon's shoulder gradually softened into a reasonable facsimile
of relaxation. He yawned and stretched, latching onto Blake's hand.
'I love you, Roj,' he murmured. 'You are aware of that, aren't you?'
'I **had** guessed,' Blake admitted. 'Still, it's nice to hear you say it.'
'Oh, good,' Avon said sleepily. 'In that case, I might tell you again in a few
years' time.'
Blake stiffened indignantly but seconds later, he realised that, in his own
inimitable fashion, his tortuous beloved had just informed him that he saw
their relationship as a longterm proposition. He leaned forward, noting a wary
flutter of eyelashes against Avon's cheek, and deliberately ruffled the hair
that he'd just smoothed.
'Thank you, Avon,' he said blandly. 'I shall look forward to that.'
Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed
their work!
