Chapter Text
Finn thought that the course of his emotions were much like a river and he was merely the poor soul on a raft floating upon it. The river wound a bit, sometimes shallow and sometimes deep. Every so often there was a section of rocks and differences in elevation that made the normally tranquil waters choppy and difficult. Sometimes there were places where everything was murky and strange. Sometimes there was a misting fog and a dark roar which overcame him and he knew that he was headed for a precipice which would send him careening into the plunge pool at the bottom. The force of his emotions would pound above him and cycle him underneath their twisting depths until he thought himself utterly drowned by them. And eventually...he would be released...and he would find his raft again. And again he would be helpless to the flow, trapped within this cycle of harm and set upon an endless eternity of shame.
He could feel the mist around him. He could hear the roar of the waterfall so close. But he couldn't stop. He'd rucked up his night clothes and he'd tented his sheets with his knees, his fist around his throbbing manhood. He was so close. The fantasy in his mind was most always the same though it had small differences that he was keen to note.
He was a boy. No older than seven. He remembered how small he was and how small he felt. He struggled but he did not cry at first. He was called good. He was given small pieces of chocolate while his little trousers were stripped off of him and a big warm hand reached beneath his drawers between his legs.
Finn could feel sweat forming on his face as he squeezed at himself and held back his climax, his breaths tight and his heart steadying until he chose to stroke himself again, building up his pleasure while the fantasy rolled on in his mind.
Two fingers, soft and slick, tugging his small, boyish cock into arousal, creating a heat in his belly that made his breath catch. He couldn't eat any more chocolate. There was something happening to him. Something he did not like one bit. A wrongness filled him before whispering words came to his ear and he was made to hold a book.
“Read to me, Finny. Read me this story.”
Small, soft sounds began to escape him as he gave himself lingering strokes and he felt the first oozing of come pearl at his tip. “Hunnnh...unnnh...”
The book had words in it that he didn't know. He tried them anyhow and he was told that he was good. So good. He didn't know what he was reading but he knew he could not stop. His uncle would not like it. His voice trembled when he read on and he felt his uncle's fingers tug on him harder and then press him back until something big and thick was pressed hotly against his rump, slotted right against him. He was rocked gently forward and backward as he continued to read, the Alpha's hot breath on his tiny ear as the fingers which held his genitals grew a little too tight.
Finn came with a startled little cry, warm come splashing over his stomach as he tensed and released in jerking waves of orgasm, his breaths hitching until he was finished and the night collapsed around him. It was as though someone had reached inside him through his chest and pulled his heart out. He felt cold and empty and disgusting. Pleasure still tingled in his softening cock and in his tight little sack but the hollow emotions that pounded him down beneath the water kept the breath from his lungs and he floundered.
It was all he could do to close his thighs and shift to his side, letting hot tears slide from his cheeks and soak into the bedding while he sobbed. Pathetic. Disgusting. Deplorable. Impure.
Sooner or later he would find his raft again. Sooner or later he would be able to breathe and he would crawl up from the pool of roiling shame and he would somehow find a way to look another person in the eyes again. Though sometimes, he thought, one day he would not recover. One day he would lay in his soiled bedsheets and he would expire from the shame. One could die from shame, could they not?
Why do I think this way? Why is this the only fantasy which comes to haunt me? Why can I not think of anything else? Why am I so compelled to touch myself?
He'd tried his very best to create a different fantasy. One in which he was with boys his own age. He'd been tied down during his first heat and it had been so horrifyingly awful that as soon as it was over, as soon as everyone had left him alone, he had furiously touched himself, drawing out climax after climax with the only fantasy that he could conjure that he knew without a shadow of a doubt would sate that ravenous hunger. It didn't have to be his uncle. It didn't have to be anyone specific. Just an Alpha much older...touching him. Destroying him.
He lay wallowing in his shame and disgust for himself, weeping softly until he found the strength to ease over to the side of his bed. He wiped himself off with part of his sheet and then put his feet to the carpet. Donning his night robe, he tied it too tight around his slim waist and shuffled his bare feet to the door. No one was awake at this hour and so he exited into the hall, finding it cold and drafty.
The house was always somewhat too-big, he thought. He'd always thought that. From the time he and Pearl had come here, he had thought the house was a grand and gaudy bit of splendor. His aunt and uncle had been much wealthier than their parents and he was supposed to be grateful for having their mercy laid upon them enough to take them in and provide for them. But what cost had come to his peace of mind for the event having occurred? Should he had been better off starving in the gutter?
His hands all over me. His body crushing me as I lay on the floor. My mouth forming around difficult words and unnatural concepts.
Finn paused, bringing his arms up to hug himself as more tears flowed freely down his cheeks. It was as though he were constantly trapped in a terrible dream, one that would not even leave him alone in his waking hours. How could this be? How could he be so haunted by this nightmare which had plagued the whole of his youth?
When his uncle had died, he'd thought it was over. The pain was gone forever, surely—but it was only the beginning. Every episode of terror and pleasure and confusing mixtures of pain and euphoria had been burned into his mind by the white-hot iron of his touch. It was much too complicated to have left him with death and now he feared that perhaps it would not even leave him with his own.
If I knew that it would, perhaps I would have thrown myself from the balcony before now...but that will only leave my tortured ghost.
He made it to the kitchen and placed the kettle on the stove to make himself some tea. He sat in the cold and the dark, still holding himself while his toes slowly lost their feeling from the ice of the stone floor. The singular maid, Carla, would not be up until a few hours from now and Finn had brewed his own tea in the middle of the night many, many times. The stench of a grieved Omega was all around him and he sat muddling about nothing, bubbles of incoherent thought floating and popping through his mind until he could hear the water boiling.
His tea he always took in the drawing-room and he sat there now, a knitted afghan over his lap with his feet tucked up beside him on one of the overstuffed chairs while he stared out the large window toward the foggy London street and the greenish glow of the gas lamp where it stood just outside the gate.
“Finn?” Her voice was soft and sounded so far away though she was only by the door, her soft blonde hair in a cascade over one of her shoulders and her eyes so limpid and beautiful, shining in the darkness.
“It's alright, Pip,” he told her. Pearl was always worried for him and he knew it was something to do with being twins. It was as though sometimes they could feel each others' emotions, the good and the bad, and the uniquely painful. She was holding her hand over her heart. “I swear to you, Pip...I'm alright...”
“Another dream?”
It was a lie and he suspected she knew that it was. “Yes.” He focused on his fingers picking at the fibers of the afghan. “Pearl...how do you...”
She came toward him, pulling a chair near to his and gathering a quilt from the settee, settling herself down with the quilt wrapped around her. She stared at him, her eyes wide and alert to him.
“He hurt you too...but you don't have the same dreams I do. You don't think about it as much, do you?”
She looked out toward the street and the lamp. “I think about it. Often, I would say.”
Finn sipped his tea, finding his hands still shaking but not as much as they were before. Pearl had a way of calming him just with her presence. “Do you dream of it?”
“Yes...sometimes when I am awake.”
He let go of a single sob. “Pip...I cannot know how I could allow an Alpha into my life. I cannot know how I will survive being parted from you...and being...touched again...”
Pearl licked her lips and then shifted to get up, pouring herself a cup of tea and then sitting back down. Her scent was so sweet and so calm that he could not imagine her being tortured by this at all. She admitted to him often that she was harmed by their uncle and he had seen her weep—her lashes wet and clumped by her tears—but she was never so ravaged by memory as he was. “I hope that one day I will find a mate who will hold me gently,” she said, her voice soft and quiet and soothing. “They might care for me and treat me well and kiss me softly in different ways and maybe I won't be reminded of what happened to me...but maybe I will be. I cannot know if there will be any escape. But I will never know if I do not marry.”
Finn wiped at his cheeks. “He stole so much from us...”
Pearl's eyes were moving back and forth as she searched for something to say and when she did reply, it was confusing and odd. “I suppose then that we must steal it back.”
He wasn't certain what he could respond with and so he didn't, sipping his tea again until it was gone. He couldn't tell her of his secret project. The one he had been working on tirelessly over the last few months. The project that perhaps might let him sleep better in the night. They sat together until the sun was shining through the panes and he could feel the tiredness in his eyes again. There was no relief for them. They would be taken to the park and to small dinner parties. They would be shown off to Alphas of all kinds and they would have to remember all the terrible conventions of society.
Though their aunt had plenty of money, they were not rubbing elbows with royals or nobility and the most prominent of men they'd encountered were usually men of business or officers with the regiments. Finn had tried, to no avail, to find an Alpha who might have had access to printing so that he might have a method by which to print his articles. He'd sent them anonymously to a paper or two under a false name but only one had been published and it was hidden in the back page and clipped so disastrously that it had lost all of its original impact. No Alpha, it seemed as yet, could help him create his own leaflets and should he find one, he would then have to determine how to spread them. It was not as though he had a small army by which to do it and so it would all be up to him.
Pearl was snoozing, her head lolled to the side against the wing of the chair while the sunlight played over her face.
Finn's heart felt weighted and empty, his body dirty and misused.
I don't want to feel like this. I don't want anyone to feel like this.
He stared at Pearl, at her face so soft and so sweet. They looked so similar that should he have grown his hair, they might have been indistinguishable save perhaps the very slight masculine cut of his jaw and the very small swell of her breasts. He wanted to protect her. The morning after the day of his uncle's funeral, he had found the disgusting literature the man had always forced him to read and he had buried the terrible thing deep in the woods of the country house. Somewhere the worms could eat it and the earth could take it away and let it rot. But even for all that, he was reminded of it. He could remember the words that had gone along with the stripping of his innocence and he thought of them when he snaked his hand under his drawers. He'd even had the thought late in the night that he would like to see it once more. That he would like to read it and remember the prick of pleasure that came from how it slithered through his mind. He'd been so tempted once that he had stood in the garden on a warm summer's evening under the light of the silver moon, staring at the deep dark of the wood.
It was gone. And he wished that all of it might be gone. But he knew that there was an underbelly to London—a scourge of written lewdness that was never spoken of in polite circles around decent Omegas. He'd caught small bits of conversation as he stood in hallways and eavesdropped. He'd written down the names of gentlemen who he suspected knew of such things and he had gently prodded them but they had yet to divulge any secrets. So he wrote his articles and he sought to have them published but it was difficult though he dared not give it up. He would fight against obscenity as hard as he could—and he would, despite his position and dynamic, purge every ounce of these texts and these persons he could find.
The most Finn had ever discovered was that the man who seemed to know everything about the trade of erotic literature and the flow of disgusting material through the complicated web of rumor and tales was a man without a name. This man was Finn's enemy though he did not know it yet. This was the man who, should Finn find success, would be unmasked to the world for the filthy degenerate he was. This was the man he was determined to transform into a pariah.
This was a man they called The Librarian.