Work Text:
Bunny is on his knees, between those of his friend. It is both his most beloved and most loathed place to be, though the loathing bit only follows the deed itself—in the throes of service, there is only delectation. Raffles guides him with a hand at the base of his skull, his slender, skillful fingers making a prudent fist in his hair as he drags Bunny’s mouth up and down the length of his prick. His gaze is fixed on him unwaveringly, even as Bunny’s own eyes drift shut in bliss, drool on his chin, lost to the act. Heat on his tongue, at the back of his throat, searing and salted. All the while, Raffles' stare remains piercing, fixed. “You are so very lovely,” he murmurs at some point, so Bunny cannot even choose to forget why his friend is looking, and what he is looking at.
His mouth is quite full, so lucky for Bunny, he is not expected to answer. Only suck, which he does. Dutifully, hungrily, his tongue working at the vein-traced underside, his lips drawn to a swollen kiss each time he’s tugged to the tip. He’s achingly hard in his trousers, palming himself with one hand, the other idly mauling up and down Raffles' cricket-powerful thigh. That is, until Raffles takes it, moves it. “Hand on the base,” he orders, licking the sharp peaks of his upper lip before his mouth falls open in a silent gasp. “I want to see you nurse the very crown. Make me finish, like that.”
Bunny is happy to oblige. He gazes up at Raffles in a hazy delirium, focusing all his efforts on the glorious crimson head of his prick. Satin-smooth, salty, wonderful. The tip of his tongue finds the brine-bitterness at the slit, a reflexive groan fluttering out of him as he laps at it, Raffles twitching against him. “Ah,” he says, the whole of him tensing, relaxing, his grip stinging at Bunny’s scalp. “There it is. Catch it, Bunny.”
With a tell-tale spasm in his palm, Bunny feels Raffles' climax fast approaching. His gaze is still focused even if it’s half-lidded, a hiss on his parted lips as he twitches, locks. “Hold it,” he orders as the first flood comes. “On your tongue.”
Bunny knows what to do, as this is one of Raffles' more frequent requests. He sits back on his haunches and opens his mouth, Raffes’s cockhead resting on the flat, expectant pad of his outstretched tongue. Raffles groans at the sight—Bunny has never seen it himself, but he can imagine the obscenity: spurts of milk white, the spit-encircled mouthful, raw and vulgar.
When Raffles is finished, he replaces his cock with his thumb, rubbing his spend into Bunny’s tongue, over his teeth. He paints his lips in shining bitterness, eyes glittering in the very same manner they do for a diamond. Shamefully, Bunny treasures these moments with a near pathological obsession, a thrill in his heart blooming in the rare certainty he feels that Raffles wants him. Finds him attractive. Desires Bunny, specifically and undeniably. Him!
“Alright,” Raffles says then, once he has sullied Bunny to his satisfaction. His voice is low, thick. “You may swallow.”
Bunny does. Then he licks his mouth clean, Raffles still studying him from where he’s flopped back to lounge, lazy and half-dressed, on the rumpled bed. Time pauses for a moment—aching knees and his own distracting arousal keeping Bunny arrested there on the floor of Raffles' bedroom, dazed until his friend huffs, sits up, and hauls him up onto the bed and into his arms to kiss him, chasing the remnants of salt with his tongue. Then, he dumps him onto his pillows to bury a manic smile against a racing pulse. “Well?” he asks, biting until Bunny yelps and twists away. “How would you like to have me?”
Bunny blinks up at the ceiling, dizzy. “I just did have you.”
Raffles licks over the marks his teeth have left in Bunny’s skin. “I had you, Bunny. More precisely, I had your lovely mouth.”
Bunny flushes, all this talk of having twisting in his gut. Usually, Raffles simply returns the favour without speaking about it first. Like all crimes they commit together, Raffles orchestrates the finer details, Bunny reduced to a bit of flotsam caught in his friend’s powerful wake. “Well, I’ll have you however you want me to have you,” he offers.
Another bite, this time harder. His vision whites out at the sudden sting. “I want to hear you tell me what you want, Bunny,” Raffles clarifies.
Bunny reaches up, rubs at his spit-wet throat. “But I haven’t thought about it—I want whatever you want!”
Raffles clearly does not like the sound of that, for he whips up to his knees, gaze cold and brows drawn. “That’s not very sporting of you,” he says. Somehow, he seems to take no pleasure in his power over Bunny, even if he expects him to cede to its natural sway under most circumstances. Bunny’s not sure how he’s meant to know the moments Raffles expects him to speak up and exert his will—the moments Raffles condescends to consider his opinion on the matter of crime. He gazes helplessly up at him, heart racing as Raffles continues: “You don’t think of it? Ever? You don’t think of me, what you’d like me to do to you? Am I so uninteresting to you, Bunny?”
Bunny sputters in disbelief. On the contrary, Raffles is so very interesting to him that when he does indulge in idle fantasy, it is of all the things he would like to do to Raffles. Study every detail of him and commit it to sense memory, worship the whole of his body with his mouth. Exist in that perpetual place that is both beloved and shameful. On his knees, between Raffles' knees. “Of course it’s not that!” he cries. “It’s that I’m uninteresting to me! So I dedicate much thought to you but not to you—you wanting to touch me.”
Raffles tuts, tongue clucking at the roof of his mouth. “That will not do,” he says, twitching like he wants to get up and smoke, pace the room as he always does when there is a puzzle to solve. He leans down for a kiss instead, worrying their mouths together with wet, compulsive hunger, sating his oral fixation with Bunny’s tongue rather than a Sullivan. When he pulls away, he is so close that his eyes blend into one single sapphire, his breath hot on Bunny’s mouth. “You don’t see yourself as the object of my desire?” he demands to know.
The blunt gravity in this question makes Bunny’s stomach swoop. “Yes, or—of desire at all. But I suppose especially yours.”
Raffles becomes heavier somehow, the weight of him crushing in its insistence as he straddles Bunny, driving him further into the bed. “I desire you as you desire me. It arouses you to pleasure me, does it not?”
Heat. Between their bodies, on Bunny’s cheeks, creeping lower, building in maddening, nearly painful waves between his thighs, under Raffles. Hot enough to burn. “So very much,” he manages.
Suddenly, Raffles throws himself upright, gesturing to the ceiling with his usual reckless grace, tinged in a note of desperate reverence, like he’s appealing to the heavens. He looks like a martyr, right now—shirtless, sweat-slick, mussed hair, expression both rapturous and mournful. “The same is true for me, Bunny!” he implores, before bearing down on him yet again. “You wouldn’t deny me that arousal, would you?”
“I wouldn’t deny you anything!” Bunny swears to him.
“Good man,” Raffles murmurs, stealing a kiss before settling back, grinding down into the yearning cradle of Bunny’s hips with purpose. “You admit you haven’t thought much of it—indulge me and think of it now. Think of all the things I could do to you.”
Bunny allows his mind to creep reluctantly into the realm of these unspeakables—the acts they have committed together, in silence, in darkness. The first time it happened, he thought Raffles would take him like a woman. Throw him onto the bed and give him a good rogering, use Bunny as a mere vessel to spend inside. He’d been shocked when, instead, Raffles worked his own body open on oiled fingers, straddled Bunny’s hips, and lowered himself with the expert grace of a man who has done such things before, onto his prick. He’d ridden him like that. Ruined his old settee in the sitting room of the Albany chasing his finish, head thrown back, shuddering, gasping, throat a jagged line and skin a blinding expanse of white, sweat-dewed marble. A martyr yet again, mournful and rapturous. And damn—without even realising it, Bunny is thinking of Raffles again. Raffles' beauty, his flesh. “I love being inside you,” he spits out, just for something to say that is true.
Raffles' eyes light up, and his hips churn so filthily that Bunny gasps at the slow drag of friction. “Very good,” he murmurs. “Would you like to be inside me now, Bunny? My mouth? My arse? Name your cut, like you were at the butcher’s. It’s yours.”
Bunny’s mouth falls open as he considers the options, but there is a nagging at the core of him, an emptiness. He is so used to ignoring such things that he hardly registers the sensation as a want, but Raffles keeps prodding him, pushing him. Goading him to name impossible things, instead of simply permitting them to happen to him. And the truth is, when he does take the time to turn inward and take stock of his flesh, what he truly desires at least in this moment, is not to take, but to be taken. He craves the dull stretching burn, the helplessness of being rent open, consumed in fire. His eyes dart to the junction between Raffles' spread thighs, heart racing to see that he’s hard all over again. Hard from this talk, from his careful cultivation of Bunny’s shame, and this knowledge spurs Bunny to sudden madness: “The truth is, tonight, I’d rather. Ah–”
“Go on, Bunny,” Raffles urges. “Spit it out.”
“I’d rather you do it to me,” he chokes, the words sticking, burning his tongue.
Raffles' eyes are frighteningly brilliant, ice-blue and singularly focused on the hunt, like a greyhound as he closes in on the rabbit. “Do what, exactly?”
“Fuck me,” Bunny manages weakly, face aflame with such intensity that he feels the rush of blood darkening him, not just his cheeks but all the way down his sternum like blood spilled from a wound. “I want you to fuck me, AJ.”
The look of triumph is worth the shame. A sharp reflective smile wrenched open over a moan, lips twisted awry at the corners. “Well, why didn’t you just say so, my dear fellow?” And with that, Raffles is springing across the room in a flash, stripping out of his trousers in a single fluid motion, recovering the oil from his bed stand. Then he’s back on the bed without a moment wasted, kissing Bunny with such deep, heated hunger that Bunny can tell his honesty has finally won him his reward. They are done talking—Raffles wheedled out what he wanted, cracked the safe as he always does, and now, Bunny won’t have to use his voice for anything other than involuntary moans. He lets Raffles strip his trousers and underclothes down his thighs, then kicks them into the sheets and hikes one knee up, exposing himself brazenly. Raffles slicks his long, wonderful fingers, crooks them up into the heat of Bunny’s body with a devilish confidence. “You must know,” he huffs out between filthy kisses, “that I wouldn’t deny you anything, either. That I seek to pleasure and please you just as desperately as you seek to pleasure and please me.”
Reciprocity seems absurd where Raffles is concerned, but Bunny does not have the will nor the words to tell him so. Not spread open and speared on the insistent drag of his knuckles, not with his tongue out and sucked on in ravenous pulses, quieting any protests he could have fashioned were he to make an attempt. This is how Raffles is: demanding words only when they suit him, necessitating Bunny’s supplicant silence as soon as he gets what he wants. True reciprocity can only be an illusion between them, something pantomimed for Raffles' whims. It is not in their natures to be equals—Bunny knows this. He knows he is the rabbit, and Raffles the greyhound.
Just when his pleasure is approaching a terrible crescendo, Raffles withdraws his fingers and clambers to his knees, oiling his prick and arranging himself atop Bunny. The sucked, recently-worshipped crown nudges against him for a few blistering seconds, teasing the promise of what is to come. And then—in a single thrust, Raffles sheathes himself inside Bunny, forcing the breath from his lungs, his voice from his throat in a ragged sob. And yes—yes, that is what he wanted. To be forced to make sound, to be fucked into confessing his desires. He moans into the pillows, slack and unresisting as Raffles drives deep, shuffles him up to the headboard. “You need me everywhere, don’t you?” Raffles marvels, voice breathless at Bunny’s sweat-damp temple. “My spend in your mouth wasn’t enough for my desperate little Bunny.”
“No,” Bunny admits, clawing at his shoulders, trying in vain to find a moment of stillness in this storm, only to delight in the absence of a buoy. He rocks in time with Raffles' thrusts, palms up the perspiration-damp planes of his back, helpless and open and fluttering around his prick, back chafed on sheets. It is beloved, it is shameful—maybe even more so than the kneeling required for prayer. Maybe he tells himself that is his most favourite and most loathed place to be, but really, in his heart of hearts, it is here. “Oh, please,” he moans, mouth open on the bone of Raffles' shoulder, tongue sweeping the twitch of his bowler’s tendon, pulled taut to hold him braced. “Please, AJ.”
“Please what?” Raffles hisses into his ear, hips stuttering, hand working its way between the unsteady grind of their bodies to find Bunny’s prick, and stroke. “Do you need me to touch you, is that it?”
“Yes,” Bunny sobs. Letting Raffles see him, see the truth. The mourning, the rapture. The love, the shame. The well of desire so deep that he cannot bear to stand at the edge and gaze down into that bottomless black, cannot bear to admit how much he truly wants, how infinite his hunger truly is, unless Raffles has steered him here: broken open, filled to the brim, debased.
It’s swift. A few drags of that skillful palm, a thumb swirling the slick beading out of him. That relentless, inescapable stretch deep inside Bunny. Raffles' dirty mouth, whispering, licking–
His climax comes easily, effortlessly. He cries out and spills into Raffles' palm, the action so unceremoniously base that he hardly feels it deserves praise, but Raffles lauds him all the same. “Yes, god, wonderful, dearest,” he hisses, each word spoken certainly, in time with his thrusts. He rubs the sticky white spend on Bunny’s stomach and continues to fuck him, licking sloppily at his mouth, pistoning into his slack body until he crests over the peak a second time, like a miracle.
Eventually Raffles pulls out and rolls over so that he doesn’t crush Bunny, boneless and panting at his side instead. Bunny stares at him—cheeks flushed, mouth swollen. He is certain there is nothing in the world so terrible and beautiful as Raffles in this moment, and his heart aches to behold it—he doesn’t think rabbits’ hearts are meant to house so much love without stopping dead in their fragile chests. “Was that more sporting?” Bunny asks, voice in tatters.
Raffles hitches his arm up, lands a wet, open-mouthed kiss onto the matted-down golden hair in the pit. “Very sporting indeed, darling,” he says, voice muffled, ticklish. Bunny yelps, tries to pull away, but Raffles holds him fast, throwing an arm around his waist to trap him. For a few moments, he indulges, mouthing over Bunny’s ribs and rucking up his hair, licking the sweat from the hollows beneath the collarbones while Bunny squirms and endures it, thoroughly embarrassed that even after climaxing twice, Raffles is still so attentive to him. To his body. He thought he’d escaped the unbearable scrutiny, but he should know by now that with Raffles, there is no such thing as escape.
He’s finally spared when Raffles pitches off of him to find his cigarette case in the sheets and light them both Sullivans. The smoke hazes the room, and Raffles settles at last, propped up against the pillows with an arm resting lazily across Bunny’s shoulders, lips buried in his hair when he is not inhaling. “You’re an odd rabbit,” he eventually murmurs. “When we engage in our other little crime, you’re always trying to prove yourself. Pushing me to tell you every little bit of the plan, insisting you could take charge as easily as I do, attempting to convince me you’re ready to lead an adventure. But with the other crime—”
Bunny snorts, palming up Raffles' chest to cup the vibration of his stubble-rough throat like he could still his voice there, keep it from touching the tobacco-thick air. “Burglary is far easier to speak about than—than this,” he explains, gesturing to their bodies. Naked, flushed, adhered together in a patina of salt and sweat and spend.
“Than what?” Raffles asks, feigning innocence. There is a wicked glint back in his eye, and it twists Bunny’s gut.
Harrumphing, he nuzzles closer, hiding his face in Raffles' still-heaving side so he does not have to see the satisfaction in his gaze when he finally mutters, “It is easier to speak of than sodomy.”
“Oh,” Raffles groans, voice decadence-thick like he’s just taken a generous sip of port, thick and sweet. “Than what? Say it again for me, darling. How I love that word on your lovely lips.”
Bunny flushes, but still he cants his face up so they lock eyes. He might as well give Raffles a show, since he knows there’s no wriggling his way out of those sinful clutches. “It’s easier for me to discuss stealing jewels with you than it is for me to ask you to sodomize me!” he spits out, feeling himself flush vividly yet again. “See! Even now, after we’ve just done the thing, it still feels awful to say.”
“Really? I don’t think so,” Raffles breezes before tapping ash from his Sullivan and into the crystal tray on his bedside table. Then he rolls Bunny onto his back and laboriously climbs atop him again, naked and soft-pricked and deliciously rumpled, so the picture he paints is even more obscene than the last time he assumed this position. If his intention was to strike Bunny dumb, it works. “I love the word sodomy,” he purrs, fitting his Sullivan back into his mouth where it hangs insolently, smoke escaping the corner of his smile. “I love to say it. I love sodomizing you. I love when you sodomize me,” he says this slowly, each word spoken with a deliberate sumptuousness that makes Bunny’s prick twitch to half-hardness yet again. “I love sodomy, and I love you, my dear Bunny. And I am not ashamed to say any of it.”
That’s where we’re different, Bunny thinks, but the words stick in his throat. He does love Raffles—in fact, he is nearly certain he loves Raffles with more depth and desperation and dogged loyalty than Raffles could possibly love him—but never does that love exist without shame slithering alongside it, cool and quiet and deadly as a serpent.
Raffles grinds against him as he smokes. He’s not yet hard again so soon after coming a second time, but he can likely feel Bunny hardening beneath his weight, knows exactly how to exploit every one of Bunny’s weaknesses. “I suspect my shame arouses you,” Bunny admits, reaching out with his free hand to brush down Raffles slender hip.
“Sometimes,” Raffles murmurs, dropping down to pepper Bunny’s neck in wet kisses, taking leisurely drags of his Sullivan between swipes of his tongue. “It can be a pretty thought—that I so thoroughly corrupted you.”
“You did thoroughly corrupt me,” Bunny reminds him.
Raffles sits back up, put out again. “Don’t sound so excited, Bunny! Sometimes I find the very same thought dreadful. We’re a team, you know. I don’t want to have forced you into any of this. I’d trade your shame for its absence, given the chance.”
That surprises Bunny. He’d always assumed Raffles preferred him squirming in self-recrimination, pitiful and hapless and caught in his current. He takes a thoughtful puff of his own Sullivan before stretching and twisting towards the bedside table to put it out. He can’t quite make it all the way with his lower half trapped beneath Raffles' weight, so his friend takes the cigarette from his fingers and neatly places it alongside his own to smoulder, side by side in the ashtray. “I’m not like you,” Bunny admits then. “I’m sorry. It never occurred to me you might not delight in the moral battles I’m ever waging with myself. ”
“I confess they sometimes benefit me,” Raffles offers after a moment of quiet. “Were you not so desperate to be a good man, your face might not sell our innocence to Scotland Yard as convincingly as it does. I suppose I need you conflicted, at least about the burglary. But this…,” he trails off, smoothing his palms up Bunny’s torso, from the soft concave of his gut to the ladder of his ribs, then pausing at last to rest over his heart. “As fascinating as it is to watch you fight your desire and cave to it all the same, I do wish you wouldn’t fight at all. It grows tiring, being a fisherman. Casting my line, hooking my Bunny, reeling him back into my arms, convincing him it’s worth the risk.” He smiles then, but it is a sad smile. Bunny’s heart leaps at the odd reminder he has power over AJ Raffles’ sadness. It’s so easy to forget he has any power here, at all. “I do try my hardest to make it worth the risk,” Raffles adds.
Bunny thinks of the spoils—not the diamonds, the silver, the Scotch whiskey and Sullivans they buy, but this. Raffles atop him, black curls mussed across his brow and mired in his sweat like a smudge of ink. Raffles' mouth, usually twisted in such fierce, devious cunning, downturned at the sides, muted in melancholy. Raffles nude, thighs spread over Bunny’s hips, his prick soft and lovely, the crown nothing but a cherry of pink half-obscured in a gather of sinfully soft, loose skin. Raffles exposed, unmasked, honest. Raffles, afraid of losing him. Him!
Bunny makes a fist in the meat of his side and drags him closer, capsizes him down so his mouth is in catching distance. It’s funny—he thought he was the fisherman, of the two of them. Sitting on the banks with an empty hook, desperate, so desperate for a bite. “It’s worth it,” he prays into that sad smile before their tongues tangle. Before Raffles' teeth start fraying at his seams again, not a fish but a hunting dog, a thief and a sodomite and beauty incarnate. Here, on Bunny’s lap, wanting him. Him! “It is so very, very worth it.”