Fear in the face of god (explicit) (whitewulf)

28 March 2024

He couldn't bear the bright blue of the situation room, so he slunk back to the shadowed edges when the others filed in for a tired review of the infiltration. Holiday already began to fuss over Rex, and she saw Biowulf in the blue glow and narrowed her eyes at him, but he had practice by now in ignoring her invitations for ‘check ins.’ That had been an indignity he had only suffered once, before he realized that she never offered it to the human members of their cell. Biowulf had no patience for that scientifically curious gleam to her eye, or for the patient over-explanation of an experience they had all only just survived, or for maintaining his composure amongst humans. He still twitched in time with the tempo of combat they'd left behind hours ago. Better to put himself in the hallways and the catwalks alone, to comb through the tangle of his thoughts and pace out the nervous energy. In the castle he could prowl through the overgrown gardens and the labyrinth of corridors; he was not in the castle now, nor would be ever be again, so he made a loop of the maintenance halls and the outer circle of the situation room, the side that rounded close to the lone occupied office. The room emptied, and the screens dimmed, and he could see in the dark to prove it was lonely and safe.

Five months, nearly. This dam, this small handful of allies, a heatmap of the space that began to glow here at this closed door. Biowulf passed it again, claws tapping dully on the concrete. He had wavered for a long, hazy period, turned loose after the Bug Jar, and finding himself under the rubble had been a long and hard-won process. The anchor had been heavy on his back until he found somewhere new to set it down. He paced an hours-long rhythm.

On the thirtieth, maybe fortieth pass – he still stuck on knots making sense of the day – the door slid open. He froze like he could disappear into the dark, but there was no pretending when he looked up to meet White Knight's stare through the cool yellow of his visor. Once in Abysus some small white butterfly had come in unscathed on the wind and he had caught it between his fingers, finding it so delicate that the wings pierced on one claw without him meaning to do it; that's how White Knight's eyes felt on him, knifepointed to keep him pinned. White Knight breathed out a terse sigh. He filled the doorway when he stood in it, extra height and breadth given to him by the exosuit.

“Would you knock that off,” he grumbled, squinting through the light cast off by his own visor. It was dark here, and late at night. It wasn't unusual for there to be the scrape and murmur of activity in White Knight's room until early hours, but he didn't come away from it unscathed. There were shadows under his eyes. He brought a hand up to his face, then aborted the motion just before his fingers touched the visor. (Biowulf knew that half-action – muscle memory for a lost human shape.) “Get in here.”

It took a minute to coerce his joints into movement. By the time Biowulf had loped into the office, White Knight had himself propped against the front of his desk, arms crossed over his chest. The space wasn't really an office, in the same way none of the dam was meant for the way they used it; there were shelving units pushed to the side of the room, and crates no one had cared to look inside. The desk was the only piece of furniture that matched how White Knight used it. There were no chairs for visitors, and Biowulf rarely fit in human-sized chairs anyway, so he stood in front of White Knight.

If he hunched his shoulders, White Knight stood a few scant inches taller than him.

White Knight scrutinized him for a long quiet moment. He did this – like there was some aspect of Biowulf only he could see, a page at the end of the book that made him up that Biowulf couldn't read, trapped in his own story – often. A study of his pawn that left Biowulf feeling scoured and seen through. Then his lips thinned and he shifted his gaze back up, shifting his weight. “All right. Give me a debrief.”

They had debriefed – the others had debriefed in the situation room hours ago. Biowulf could pretend many things about the way things worked here but he wasn’t so far gone as to delude himself that anything that Six heard didn’t get reported to White Knight within the hour. White Knight certainly knew exactly what had happened in the mountain base, in precise detail, down to the excruciating humiliations Biowulf would have preferred he never heard about. “A debrief,” he echoed, voice uneven. He hadn’t spoken since the lab.

“Well, you clearly heard me.” White Knight tapped a finger against his other arm, but there was something in his voice. Biowulf could never quite identify it. Humor, or else impatience. Not knowing left him unbalanced, which kept him alert. “I need every angle of this mission. The Consortium can’t be underestimated, after all.”

Not every angle. He hadn’t called Rex into his office. Biowulf twitched. The casual lie settled between them. This was another thing White Knight would do often: he would lay the lie out bare and clear and then meet Biowulf’s eyes like to see what he made of it. The allure was in how comforting it was to let those lies go unchallenged. White Knight, narrowing his eyes, knew this mission already, the process of infiltration and extraction, the failures and successes, Black Knight and her ruthless calm. Biowulf’s report would certainly be redundant, but for the raw part of it that hovered haunting in his memory. He did not wish to give it.

He gave it anyway. White Knight to his credit did not seem disinterested in the parts he had surely already heard: the violence of entering the facility, the eerie connection Rex had with the nanites. It had made his fur stand on end, Rex turning inward, communicating with a part of himself that shouldn't even be alive. Watching it had left Biowulf uneasy; he had never before cared to guess at the hidden reason why the target was so bright on Rex's back. He could have been made god through the Pack, and their master -

He remembered what this debrief marched him toward. White Knight loomed, clean, bright, expectant.

“We knew they wanted to reestablish the Nanite Project,” he told White Knight, flexing his hands. “They are further along than expected. They seem to have unearthed the original research team. Salazar. Meechum.” The night quiet pounded in his head. “Rylander, somehow – a nanite ghost. And.”

And? In the glow of White Knight’s exosuit he could see the question hanging unsaid, the answer already known, locked in Biowulf’s throat before he could speak it. The name was too heavy to fight its way out of his mouth. He had dressed it in its weights and barbs and now it had clawed into him from the inside. He played through each day as though he was not still caught, like because the string tied to the other end had snapped it meant that he didn't still have the hook in him. In the facility Biowulf had caught sight of him through a window and it had felt like this then, too, like only remembering that he had been clipped to a leash because he had reached the end of its length.

“Van Kleiss.” Biowulf’s head snapped up at the sound of the name on White Knight’s voice. White Knight uncrossed his arms and leaned his weight back against his hands. “Well. I have to give Black Knight credit for her optimism, if she really thinks she'll get anything of use from him in that state. I hear he’s not exactly all there after his little trip through time.”

They were speaking to each other from wholly different shores. White Knight's eyes fixed hard on Biowulf, somehow unwavering, solid. Biowulf felt like his body would shake apart at every joint. “That’s how he appears,” he heard himself say.

“You think it's an act.”

“Maybe. He lies. He has always lied. I don't know.” Even his truths had room for lies. Those lies had made structure of Biowulf's life for years, still built walls and foundation. Trying to page through them, identify them for what they were, felt like a betrayal – walking away from that lab had been a betrayal – he stared wild up at White Knight. “I thought I would kill him. Van – he was pathetic. I would have put an animal out of its misery if I had seen it brought so low.”

He had forced the door of that lab open with fur bristling and claws sharp and hesitated . Not long – seconds, parts of seconds – but it never needed to take long.

Here, White Knight raised an eyebrow. “Oh? But you think he's only acting.”

“It’s a pathetic act. It doesn't matter. I didn't. I fled.”

He had been the animal, frozen in the sudden light of the lab, van Kleiss’ eyes turned onto him sharp and dark, as lucid and brilliant as the day Biowulf had left him in the Bug Jar. He had been the dog hunched quivering in the corner. Van Kleiss had seen him and met his eye and tipped his head, half inviting, and when Biowulf hadn't moved he’d looked away unafraid; and because his master had willed it so, Biowulf had not gone to harm him. Pathetic, he had been the pathetic one, he had been the one brought low, and it was known by his master, and it was known now by White Knight. Something like a whine came from the back of his throat. He wanted to tear the memory out of his body. He wanted to crumple into the concrete.

White Knight hummed a thoughtful note. When Biowulf managed to meet his eye there was a strange glint there, like White Knight had noticed something fascinating in the mess Biowulf had left of himself. “Disappointing,” he said, and Biowulf flinched full-body. White Knight tsked disapprovingly, but he tipped his head, half inviting. “Soldiers who show that sort of initiative would get rewarded.”

That same knowing smile. That same complete confidence. In this dim confined space, something wound between the perfect shine of White Knight and the six-year memory of servitude and coiled into Biowulf’s nerves. An old and perfect clarity bloomed into his mind. The discontent of his betters fell over him like a blanket, sweetly familiar, a maze he knew how to navigate. It took him by the gut and guided him. “Yes,” he breathed, and without thinking, said, “I'm sorry, Master.”

It wasn't intentional – he shouldn't have said it – the shock flooded him hot and almost hungry. This was not how they maneuvered in this group, under White Knight's rule, and he would surely be punished for it. He hoped to be punished for it. But White Knight barked a laugh, a gleeful kind of surprise, and said, “Oh, is that so?”

That was a response Biowulf couldn't make sense of, until White Knight looked meaningfully down at the floor between them. Dropping to his knees was a language he spoke fluently – he went down so quickly that the metal at his knees rang hard against the concrete. White Knight laughed again. There had been a hollow in the space between them since Biowulf had come here and he had never known how to fill it, even after he had been worn down to fit better amongst this tiny sect. Of course it was this: penance won on his knees, absolute obedience to a new master, certainty through the whims of someone who could carve a path through the world. Biowulf couldn't pretend as though he hadn't missed this. He went warm from the back of his neck down to his gut. He tipped his head back to meet his master's gaze.

“There,” White Knight cooed, pushing away from the desk to stand straight. “You’ve been waiting for permission for this all along, haven't you.”

His smile turned sharp and dark. White Knight patted one thigh twice, the way one would call a dog to come, and that humiliation thrilled down Biowulf's spine. He shuffled forward, still on his knees, a phantom arc of electricity between him and White Knight’s body. When he came close enough to touch, he forgot his hesitation and leaned in brazenly, trying to fit his muzzle against White Knight’s hip, but a hand came up to stop him, wrapping tight around one ear. White Knight made a warning sound.

“You’ll take what you're given,” he said, and laughed to himself again when Biowulf shivered and whined in answer. Balancing on the unpredictable wire of permissive boundary-pushing, identifying what's acceptable by faith alone, was a familiar sour bite that made Biowulf's blood pound in his head. Being forced back away from his prey only because his master wants to see him hunger for it tightened a hot knot in his core. He tried to lean in again just to feel White Knight refuse him, then slackened in his grip.

“Good mutt,” White Knight murmured. At this angle, the light of the visor his much of his face, but Biowulf could see him wet his lips. A sheer second passed before White Knight pushed a shin between Biowulf's knees and jammed it up against his groin. The pressure and the blessing left Biowulf reeling; he must have spoken, or tried to speak, because White Knight was laughing unevenly again and saying, “You don't even know what you're begging for. Or are you begging just to beg?”

He seemed to decide that was the case, because he finally pulled Biowulf’s face in towards his crotch, the smooth white planes of his hips, and Biowulf greedily pressed his nose into the joins between hip and thigh. White Knight's grip went painfully tight on his ears, the metal crunching under the exosuit’s power. White Knight’s voice dropped to a hiss. “Do you need someone to take your leash?”

Biowulf had never missed his humanity in the last six years. That was a lie. Of course he had: standing two paces behind his master waiting fitfully to be used, to be put to use, imagining the salty weight of flesh on his tongue. Some days the fantasy nearly consumed him. He would bend himself to his knees on the dirty stone in Castle van Kleiss and remember having a soft mouth that opened, his breath wet and hot as he panted, lips slick with spit. He would pretend he could recall the twitching sensitivity of human skin. It was fruitless daydreaming; van Kleiss had never looked at him with more intention than a chess player might give to his pawn. He was more here, subservient to the rule of his knight, his new master, and the irony was that the fantasy still shattered – all of White Knight's soft parts were walled away behind smooth armor. Biowulf convinced himself that when he came close, he could smell the tang of sweat and blood underneath the ozone and metal. He still wished for a tongue. He wished to press himself whole against the sturdy pillar of White Knight's body, mouth open and thighs spread, whining incoherent. He looked up at White Knight’s gaze, sharp and dark, and wished to be so well used that he would have to be thrown away after.

“Master,” he whimpered again, hands sliding carefully up to White Knight’s thighs, claws clicking on the suit. When he ground down against White Knight’s leg like an unruly pet he could feel that overwhelming pressure, the humming heat of whatever electrical systems that kept the suit running, the weight of White Knight's intent. There was nothing more for him; he was not human. This was enough. White Knight released his now-crumpled ear and gripped at his mane instead, close to the base of his skull. “Master–”

“Don't call me that,” White Knight interrupted him, but his voice had gone rough and low. Biowulf could hear his breath heaving under the combined whir of the exosuit and his own body. “You’ll call me White Knight or you won't call me anything at all.”

Obedience came first, but he'd had the heady taste of master and now Biowulf could not shake it. He ran it on a loop in his mind as he shook, snaking a hand up to spread wide over the span of his master’s crotch. It seared heat under metal. He kept his claws careful to not leave scratches on the perfect finish, pushing the heel of his hand between White Knight's legs. Maybe some sensation would travel through, even a faint echo, weight and warmth like he could feel. Being allowed to touch was thrill enough.

White Knight rocked into the touch, but then he bared his teeth and grabbed Biowulf's hand at the wrist. He pushed him away, dragging him by the hold on his hair, enough force put into it that Biowulf had to catch himself on his hands to keep from toppling back. The distance between their bodies was an awful loss. He almost keened –

But White Knight, brilliant in the dark, stepped over him and set a foot right into his groin, heel grinding in, some of his weight focused there. “Down.”

He went down. Biowulf dropped to his back on the cold floor and was rewarded with a twist of White Knight's heel, so rough that it made his hips jump. The glint was back in White Knight’s eye, maybe a rush of power, maybe the bright knowledge that he had an inhuman soldier so dedicated to him that he could crush them underfoot and hear them beg for more, maybe simply lust. The tight pleasure of White Knight’s foot between his legs skidded close to pain, then tipped firmly into it, aching and wonderful. Biowulf's back arched like he was being pulled up by a marionette string. He did not try to run from this; low sounds punched out of him when White Knight leaned forward, one arm propped on his knee. His claws skated over the ground.

“Beg me to stop,” White Knight told him, voice barely audible over the rush of blood and nanites in Biowulf’s head. Biowulf thrashed; he choked on words; he shook his head.

“I won't,” he promised.

White Knight laughed, one last time, grin wolfish and full of teeth, and then he – pulled back. He took his foot from Biowulf's body, and stepped away. The sudden void of feeling left Biowulf breathless and almost shaking. He watched White Knight smile mildly at him and walk back toward the desk, whatever late night paperwork still waiting. His head thudded down onto the floor. It felt unreal, still, even as he heard White Knight sit himself back into his chair, tap a few keys to wake his computer. The silence crept back in around the sound of Biowulf's heart in his own ears.

“This has been an … informative session,” White Knight said, and his voice sounded almost even – there was still a distant waver in it. Biowulf clung to that. “You're dismissed, Biowulf. Get some rest.”

His master had dismissed him. He had completed his task. Biowulf struggled to wrap his head around it, the lingering ache, the flutter of heat dying down between his legs. White Knight’s presence in the room was a known weight, now. He felt displaced, but alert, less haunted, more whole. A last shiver coursed through him before he pushed himself up to his feet.

White Knight glanced up over the work he had already started. “And next time, take the initiative. You might flourish with the right reward.”

Biowulf left quickly after that, unsure if he'd be able to leave at all if he heard more. The dam was still cool and empty, but he did not make more rounds of the corridors. He tucked away into the corner he had taken for himself, the quiet leaching into him, remembering his master, thinking of his master's cruel will. He thought about it through to the morning. He was his master's now.

He could feel the ring of the collar around his throat.