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Join the League of Explorers with me, Rosie had said. It’ll be great fun, she’d said.
If Jupiter ever saw her again...well. Once he got the crying and the hugging out of the way, he was going to shake her. Absolutely no part of this was fun. None. Maybe it had been once, when he was fresh-faced and new and everything still seemed like a grand adventure, but by now he had gone straight past bored and into actively looking for escape routes.
It would have been one thing if he’d been sent to uncover a distant, dangerous pocket realm or negotiate with monsters beyond his imagination or rescue a high-profile prisoner from Republic clutches. He would’ve loved that. (Well, not the pocket realms. He liked keeping his dinners on the inside.) But no, instead he was here. On purpose. In a tuxedo. Trying to keep a low profile.
Here was President Wintersea’s birthday party, held in her very own townhouse. The place was a mansion in all but name; it had six floors, three separate ballrooms, and a kitchen big enough to serve a village. He might’ve had more fun going undercover as one of the dozens of circulating waiters, but regrettably his superiors had vetoed that plan. “Too many eyes on you,” they’d said. “We need you to blend with the crowd. You can do that, can’t you?”
His skillset was the exact opposite of that, thank you, but they hadn’t listened and so here he was, dressed like a damned penguin, with his hair pulled back and his beard closely trimmed and absolutely no glitter, neon, or rainbow-patterned anything on his person. Even his socks were black. He’d hated it when he left and he somehow hated it even more now, because Under-Chancellor Dubois of Prosper was still talking to him.
Well. At him. Something about hunting dogs? Or griffins? He’d stopped paying attention a while back, swirling the champagne in his untouched glass and making vague listening noises while his eyes scanned the room. The ballroom was packed with the highest of Wintersea Republic high society—actors, wealthy industrialists, politicians, the leftover nobility of Far East Sang, all in silk gowns or stark black and white tuxedos. (One or two of the men had been daring enough to add gray. Scandalous.) He was almost sure that one of the women in jewel-encrusted saris was a relative of Morrigan’s friend Lam. All wealthy, important people here to dance attendance—or to be seen dancing attendance—on their beloved President who had, surely, been elected to an unprecedented third term fair and square. A string quartet in the corner was playing something soft and stirring while the cocktail hour went on.
There was Maud Lowry herself, glittering in her elegant midnight-blue gown as though she’d never once thought to sign off on a Wunimal genocide, but she was at the far end of the room and hadn’t so much as glanced in his direction. No, she was too busy holding court for her sycophants—the Chancellors of Prosper, Far East Sang, Southlight. Great Wolfacre—and the sight of Corvus Crow laughing at something she’d said like he deserved to still draw breath made Jupiter’s grip tighten on his glass.
There was one small mercy when it came to this outfit. Between the chaos of their last meeting and it having been—Divine Thing, four years now—Crow was unlikely to recognize him at a glance. As long as it stayed a glance, and he didn’t do anything to blow his cover.
...Like, say, breaking his glass across the man’s face. (He was not a violent man. He swore he wasn’t. But every time Morrigan tried to make herself small, every time she acted as though there was nobody else in her corner because there never had been before, every time she flinched, he saw red.)
He exhaled, made himself relax his shoulders, and kept looking. Under-Chancellor Dubois wasn’t a particularly popular man, probably because he was a nightmarishly boring one, but this conversation was good cover. He needed to find an opening—an unattended corridor, a gap in the whirl of servants and socialites, a big enough distraction he hadn’t visibly caused—but he needed to remain unaccosted by anything...taxing while he was doing it. Not an easy thing for a Witness in a ballroom, with so many biliously green fingers and black hearts catching the corner of his eye. Still, he’d had plenty of practice.
There, a brewing argument by the punch bowl over someone taking liberties with someone else’s wife. There, someone laughing so hard they almost choked on a canape. And there, a side hallway servants weren’t streaming in and out of—
He stiffened. Someone was watching him.
He could feel the pressure of eyes sliding over his back, sending a chill down his spine.
Shit.
He couldn’t tell who. There were too many damn people in the way, and nobody exalted enough to be invited to the President’s party would be rude enough to stare.
He had to get out of here.
Hastily, he cleared his throat and wrenched his attention back to Dubois. “Dreadfully sorry, old chap, but I see someone I simply must speak to.” With the right inflection, even the densest conversational partner could be dissuaded from following. Because you can starve out innocent Wunimals and tax your constituents half to death, but Divine Thing forbid you’re pushy at a fancy party, he thought.
It had the desired effect. Dubois shrugged. “Ah, well—don’t let me keep you.”
The man strolled off to hail someone in a sleek green dress. Jupiter didn’t relax, but he nevertheless felt a bit better. These assignments had a way of making him long for silence.
And he didn’t feel eyes on him anymore, which should have been a good thing.
Should.
(It was occurring to him, with a steadily rising tide of concern, that the one man he hadn’t seen—and who had definitely been invited, he was too powerful not to be—was Ezra Squall.)
He took a slow sip of his champagne. It was an annoyingly fine vintage, though the Deucalion’s cellars were better.
The unattended hallway was still clear. He made his way toward it, moving with the tide of the room. Not too fast, not too slow, not letting his gaze flick around nervously. He was just another rich, bored man strolling the perimeter of the room, glancing idly about as he went.
It worked. Nobody noticed; not even the waitstaff glanced his way. They probably weren’t paid enough to care. He set his glass down on the end of a long table, waited half a minute for a portly man with a bad combover to tell a genuinely dreadful joke, and stepped out of the room while the laughter drew attention away from him.
Just off the ballroom, the noise decreased immediately. But more importantly, it wasn’t so…“bright” was the wrong word. The gaslights still did their job. But until all his field of vision was reduced to fancy wallpaper and plush carpet, he didn’t realize how close the crowd had been to driving him to a migraine. (Well. Another migraine.) It was a terrible occupational hazard of what he was; even after decades of training and study, too many people moving around in an enclosed space still had the same effect on his brain as being shaken very hard did to a bag of marbles. He took a moment to squeeze his eyes shut and take a few deep breaths until the fizzing sensation died down.
Only a moment, though. He still had a job to do.
And luckily, his preparation for the mission had included floor plans. He set off at a quick, smooth pace—not running, running meant noise—until he reached the stairs leading up to the rest of the house. The strip of lush carpet down the middle was deep plum and spotless in a way that said lots of maids were tasked with cleaning it. He stepped carefully around it, avoiding spots that were likely to creak.
Right. First floor, conquered. Jupiter kept going. He could still hear the noise of the party going on below him, but nobody had yet gotten bored or frisky enough to sneak upstairs in search of privacy and a locking door. After the dancing started, he probably wouldn’t be so lucky. (Not that he blamed them—he’d spent plenty of these kinds of shindigs doing the exact same thing—but it would make his job harder than it needed to be.) If the maps he’d been provided were accurate, Lowry’s office would be on the next floor.
His feet were climbing stairs, his hand was on the banister, but his mind still buzzed. He couldn’t stop thinking about Squall. It boded something that the man hadn’t made a visible appearance—well or ill, he wasn’t sure. It should be a stroke of luck, he knew that, but…
(But he’d met the Wundersmith—it had been the most unnerving twenty minutes of his life, and hadn’t gotten better once he’d sat in on one of Mog’s lessons—and Squall wasn’t the type to miss a chance to prove what loyalty he possessed. That he wasn’t here was...nervewracking. Yes.)
(Not disappointing. Surely not.)
(He wondered how Squall would look in a tux.)
As he ascended the stairs, silence rose up around him. Darkness, too, as the lights were off here. It was a good sign, but he didn’t dare relax. He cast cursory glances into half-open doors as he went—guest bedroom, guest bedroom, office but not the one he was looking for and he couldn’t afford to spend all night here—ah. There. At the end of the hall was a double door with interlocked W handles.
It was locked. Not for long, once he knelt and pulled out his lockpicks. It had been a while since he’d had to do this, but it wasn’t something you forgot. With a quiet snck, the door opened, and he slipped inside.
The darkness of Lowry’s office had texture to it, darker splodges of black-on-black that were chairs or side tables or lamps. The desk squatted at one end like a toad, backed by high windows with their curtains drawn against the winter chill. He decided he would, in fact, risk opening them for light. The streaks of desperation and exhaustion and fear left behind were all very informative to him, but his superiors wanted paper trails.
The moonlight was silver as sorrow, strong enough to read by. He started with the desk, keeping half an eye on the door he’d locked behind him. Fuck stealth, he thought. If it rattles, I’m out the window and down a drainpipe.
He searched all five drawers and came up with six dry-cleaning receipts, a dozen pens, three rubber bands (one broken), a box of staples, and an unused notepad. The false-bottomed drawer he found underneath provided a half-full flask of brandy and a sheaf of papers in Lowry’s hand detailing planned construction of a new field hospital, so he spread them out on the desk and pressed a sheet of his own magic copy-paper on each one. The sheets were blank and would stay that way; the contents he copied would appear on its match back at HQ.
The door didn’t rattle. He put the papers back and moved to a cabinet along one wall. Might as well be thorough.
He was rifling through drawers when the shadows around him twisted. There was a frozen moment where he noticed this and could only think Fuck.
And then a low, smooth voice from behind him purred, “So this is where you’ve skulked off to.”
Even as he whirled to face him, some part of Jupiter was wholly unsurprised to be faced with Ezra Squall.
Well, at least he had an answer to his earlier question. Unfortunately, that answer was stupidly, unfairly good. While Jupiter battled every instinct he possessed to tolerate the sartorial prison he was currently ensconced in, Squall sported his own fabulously expensive tuxedo as though he’d been born to wear it. His tailor was a genius, but good tailoring wasn’t responsible for the breadth of his shoulders or the length of his legs. In the moonlight, he was all silver-pale skin and shadow-black silk, his eyes like dark fire as he raked his gaze up Jupiter’s form. When he finally made eye contact, there was a sharp-edged smirk tugging at his lips.
“Squall,” Jupiter managed. His skin felt too tight. Too hot. “What do you want?”
Squall’s smirk widened. “An end to my boredom. It’s terribly stuffy down there, wouldn’t you say?”
He scoffed coldly. “It’s a gathering of the rich and evil. You should feel right at home.”
Squall took a step forward. He was close enough to touch, so close that Jupiter could smell the faintest hint of his cologne. It was something warm and spicy he couldn’t place, but that made his mouth water. “And maybe that’s why I sought something different.”
“That can’t be the only reason you’re here.” His gaze flickered around the room. The door was still locked, but a Wundersmith certainly had ways to alert Lowry to his presence. Carefully, he started to edge towards the windows.
A sensation like a great hand wrapping around his middle stopped him in place. Squall hadn’t even twitched, but his voice held an edge that hadn’t been there before. “Running away already?”
He swallowed, tried to wriggle, and found he couldn’t. Oh, he could still throw a punch if he had to, but he wasn’t going to be diving out of any windows. Morrigan had mentioned her reach when it came to Weaving, and the part of his mind not presently screaming wondered if that was what this was. He drew back, narrowing his eyes at Squall. “I’d rather not make my formal greetings to your boss, thanks.”
Squall sucked in a furious breath and lunged, grabbing the front of Jupiter’s shirt so he had no choice but to look him in the face. This close, his eyes were dark voids in the moonlight. Voice low and vicious, he snapped, “Listen close, Captain, and listen well.” A moment’s pause, gaze flicking towards the door as though he was afraid of being overheard. When he continued, his voice trembled faintly. “There is no love lost between me and Wintersea.”
Jupiter should have been terrified. He should have been furious. But Squall smelled like fine cologne and champagne and cigarette smoke, his body was warm where it almost pressed against his, and the emotion gnawing at his core was anticipation. “You’re still her attack dog,” he breathed.
Squall kissed him. There was nothing tender about it; it was rough, biting, slamming his head back against the cabinet, and Jupiter’s mouth opened for his tongue almost on pure instinct. Almost, because his blood positively hummed in his veins and some part of him had been waiting for this—hoping for this—since the moment they’d met. When he’d seen him, and hatred and desire had merged into something dark. He tasted blood and knew he’d caught the inside of his cheek on a tooth.
Wanting didn’t make it less of a shock, though. Jupiter pulled away and spat, “The fuck—”
“Silence,” Squall hissed, and crashed their mouths together again. This time Jupiter was expecting it, and as he kissed him back his hands went to Squall’s hips. Not to push him away (Divine Thing, he should be pushing him away), but to yank him in closer, pressing them together from chest to hip with Squall’s thigh slotting in between his legs.
It was immensely gratifying to pull a surprised moan out of the man. Bet you weren’t expecting that, were you? Bastard. But his thoughts dissolved into static in the next second, because Squall drew away from plundering his mouth only to assail his throat instead; when he found a sensitive spot just under his ear, Jupiter had to bite back his own needy sounds.
He failed. “Ah…hah…”
And Squall kept going, mouthing down his throat while clever fingers undid his bowtie for more access. Jupiter’s head thunked back against the cabinet, back arching at the scrape of teeth and the hot sucking pressure of his mouth. Each biting kiss seemed to go straight to his cock.
“You have no idea,” Squall hissed. “No idea of the chains that bind me, while you cavort in your freedom, in our city. You have no idea what she’ll make me do.”
That sounded important. “Then tell me,” he forced out, willing himself to focus.
Squall actually growled, his mouth finding the thin skin just above Jupiter’s collarbone in a bruising almost-bite. The sting was sharp enough that Jupiter, fuzzy with the heat racing through his veins, almost missed his breathless, “No.”
Fine. Jupiter was nosy enough to find out later. And it would be later, because right now he had better things to focus on. He kept one hand on Squall’s hip, skimmed the other up his spine to tangle in thick dark hair, and pulled him back to his mouth. Squall made the most incredible noise, a sort of broken gasp, and kissed him savagely. The hard line of his cock was a brand against Jupiter’s thigh, and before he knew it he was grinding against it, seeking friction of his own.
Then Squall wrenched himself away, mouth red and wet, and ripped his gloves off with his teeth. Jupiter heard a stitch pop, and the bolt of raw need that flashed through him at the sound almost made his knees buckle.
“Get your hands on me,” he blurted out.
Squall favored him with another one of those knife-edged smirks. “Are you giving me orders, Captain?”
Jupiter closed his eyes briefly—how did this bastard make his title sound so filthy?—but before he could complain there was a hand palming the bulge in his slacks so what actually came out was a hissed, “Fuck.”
Squall hummed smugly and undid his fly, drawing him out with a slow stroke that was all the more intoxicating for how calm he was about it, as though he did this at every party he went to. (Maybe he did. Maybe Jupiter was just one in a long line of men who found themselves Ezra Squall’s willing entertainment.) “I thought not.”
Fingers rippled, and Jupiter rolled his hips into it with a ragged gasp before fumbling blindly between them—he wouldn’t be the only one coming undone tonight. The breathy, “Oh,” when his hand closed around Squall’s own thick, hot length was music to his ears. Then Squall kissed him, teeth clacking together—a little clumsy, but Jupiter could forgive him because he was also pressed bodily against him now, their hard cocks sliding together, and each pulse of friction made him gasp.
More. He needed—more. Squall’s free hand went to his hair, tangling in the loose waves and pulling his head back to mark up the other side of his throat; he groaned and rolled his hips again, and this time Squall shifted his grip to wrap around both their cocks together and—
Oh. That’s what he wanted. He shut his eyes and bit down hard on his already-bitten cheek to muffle the cry that escaped him when Squall started pumping his fist harder, slick with their combined precome. The man’s breath was coming out in shaky, harsh pants against his collarbone, and when Jupiter dug his fingers hard into his shoulder he was rewarded with a breathless, “Shit, North—”
Then he squeezed, and Jupiter couldn’t hold back a groan. “Fuck, yeah, like that—”
“Like that?” Squall huffed, and did it again, twisting his wrist just slightly. Jupiter gasped, his cock pulsing; Squall’s voice in his ear turned smug. “You like it rough, do you?”
Oh, he did. But his eyes fluttered open, half-focusing—he could barely see anything past the hot pink haze of lust pouring off both of them—and he growled, “I’ll show you how I like it.” If he dared to walk back into the ballroom after this, there’d be no hiding what he’d been up to, not with his shirt wrinkled and his hair falling out of its tie and the unmistakable marks of someone’s mouth on his throat, and he refused to be the only one. So he sank his hand back into Squall’s hair, pulling him up and off him, and deliberately licked a stripe down Squall’s neck.
Squall made a noise that sounded a bit like “Ngrhk,” but then—acting on a hunch—Jupiter mouthed hard at his jugular, adding the suggestion of teeth, and Squall growled and fucked roughly against him. Victory, he thought, so he did it again. Harder this time, knowing it’d bruise dark on his pale skin.
The sound Squall made was downright obscene, but then in the next instant he’d wrapped Jupiter’s hair around his fist and pulled. The shock of pleasure-pain practically took him out at the knees; he gasped wetly against Squall’s skin, boneless, and between that and the awkward angle he was being shoved back against the cabinet again before he could protest.
Not that he didn’t try. “Hey—”
Squall’s mouth slanted over his, which effectively shut him up. By the time Squall moved his attention to his throat again, he was reduced to ragged panting and half-coherent gasps of yeah, yeah, like that, more—and Squall gave him more, setting a pace that made his veins feel like they were on fire.
He was embarrassingly close already, the blood pounding in his veins. Squall pressed his thigh up, shifted the angle just a bit so he could grind down against it, and the friction made his breath hitch. The cabinet rocked as Squall pressed him back against it, and at any other time he might have been worried someone would hear the noise but just now he didn’t care, not as long as Squall kept doing that—kept setting the pace for their combined strokes, kept grinding against him, kept mouthing at that one spot just above his collar that would definitely leave a mark—
His mind blanked out entirely as he came, spilling over their hands. His voice left him in a groan; Squall’s own release followed a moment later, heralded by a broken whine that somehow made his cock pulse harder. (His first semi-coherent thought as the initial shock ebbed was that he wanted to hear that noise again—wanted Squall spread out on Lowry’s desk with three fingers or his cock in him, wanted him begging and desperate and ruined.)
(His next, somewhat more coherent thought was, Oh no.)
They stood together for a moment, Squall breathing raggedly into his chest. Jupiter couldn’t blame him; now that the adrenaline was fading, he felt like he’d run a marathon. I can’t believe I just did that.
When he blinked his eyes open, Squall was already stepping away and studying the mess on his hand with a grimace. “Well,” he said, and it might have sounded cold if he wasn’t so breathless.
“Yeah,” Jupiter agreed.
Squall tossed him a handkerchief, and Jupiter raised an eyebrow. “There isn’t a Wundrous Art that can clean this up?”
“Not unless you want your trousers to catch fire,” Squall muttered, tucking himself back into said trousers.
Jupiter decided, for once, not to ask further questions. If he started, it’d wind up in territory he knew he wasn’t prepared to face. This should have been a simple mission, but now…
Well, the mission was still simple, even if his life had just gotten more complicated than he’d ever dreamed. (He knew what Ezra Squall sounded like when he came—when he, Jupiter, made him come. He’d had his cock in his hand and his teeth in his throat. The hickies probably wouldn’t fade for a week.) “I’ll just...be getting on with things, then,” he said, more calmly than he felt.
It took a moment for him to register the look on Squall’s face as another smirk. He hadn’t expected it to be warm and wicked, as though they shared a joke. “Suit yourself. By the way, you may want to check behind the mirror in the third floor water closet. Just a hunch.”
Jupiter blinked at him, the sheer surprise knocking him out of the resolution he’d just made. “What—” he started to ask, but before he could finish the question Squall stepped into the shadows and vanished.
“...You arsehole,” Jupiter said out loud, just in case Squall could still hear him. Then he set about cleaning himself up as mechanically as possible, resolutely not thinking about what he was doing. The third floor bathroom mirror, huh? It could be a trap. But somehow...well, he’d always been a foolish optimist. He didn’t think it was.
When it yielded a folded scrap of paper in Lowry’s handwriting containing a series of names and dates—dates that meant nothing to him, but potentially quite a lot to the folks at Free State Sec—he’d never been more relieved to be right.
(And if he unfolded it to reveal a second scrap in a cramped, calligraphic hand that held only a phone number attached to the initials E. S.—and if he pocketed that scrap for himself—that was nobody’s business but his.)