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Hans pulled against the cuff, testing the chain that pinioned his wrist to the wall. Then he flexed his feet experimentally. The ropes binding them to the bedposts did not yield in the slightest—Henry’s knots, after Hans had told him to put his back into it, were as sure as the steel he walloped into presentability on his anvil below.
“Quite the setup,” he said conversationally. It was novel to be restrained in such a peaceful fashion, after suffering the endless indignities of being drubbed and trussed and hauled from cart to cell to tower; to lounge and chatter within the washed walls of Henry’s quarters while his friend looped cords slowly around his ankles.
Henry only hmmed in reply as he hovered over Hans's shins, re-checking the ties compulsively.
“What are you so nervous for? I’m the one chained to your obscene bed.”
“It’s only—” Henry finally dropped the rope. “I never pictured you here.”
Hans swallowed the kneejerk jealousy. “Oh? Who features in your sordid fantasies, then?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Henry chided. “I thought—it was just for me, to keep me from wandering in my sleep.” His fingers rested on Hans's calf. “I think of you in my bed quite often.”
“Aren’t you lucky then, blacksmith’s boy,” Hans said, trying not to sound winded. The look in Henry’s eyes made him feel like a jack in a snare, chains or no. “Come here.”
***
Henry’s kisses were warm and lazy, and Hans was loath to interrupt as he dripped them from his mouth to his neck like a cook honeying a roast, but a familiar tension in his stomach compelled him to shove at Henry’s shoulder anyway.
“Henry—a minute—I might have had too much wine today.”
“Doesn’t seem to be a problem,” Henry said, glancing at his half-tented braies.
“I’ve got to piss, you sot,” Hans said, overenunciating the p in piss threateningly.
“Me? You’re the one up to your neck in Mole’s swill.”
Hans rattled the chain. “Let me out of this. I promise I’ll make it quick.”
Henry sat back on his haunches and rubbed his chin, looking for all the world like he was trying to outhaggle a market hawker. “It’ll take a while to redo them properly,” he said, “and we’re meant to set out early tomorrow. Is it bad?”
They had indeed agreed to return to the Den before noon—some semi-important errand for Žižka obliged their presence. “Well, it’s not quite breaking down the castle gates,” Hans said, amused by the challenge of versifying his privy-urgency, “but its banners are on the horizon.”
“Then hold it for a bit. Or can’t you?” Henry said, insolent, even as his eyes took on that pleading, hangdog look he could employ like a battering ram.
Transparent bait, of course—but Hans leapt to it like a trout that loved nothing more than a contest; one that, frankly, never had an objection to being served up on the Martinmas platter in the first place.
***
Perhaps he had been hasty.
Henry was taking the morrow’s early start seriously; he seemed to have made it his personal mission to undo Hans as speedily as possible, if the way he kissed him was any indication—ravenous and messy and careless with his teeth, as he tilted Hans's head back and licked into his mouth, a silver miner hunting for treasure down his throat.
Hans answered as well as he could, using his free hand to haul Henry in by the hair at the back of his neck and his teeth to stamp redcurrant-stain bruises into his bare shoulder—but in truth, he could not match Henry’s fervor. The mounting pressure in his abdomen was too persistent, demanding as a housecat worrying its empty milk dish. He jolted and hissed whenever Henry—the great lumbering ox—settled his weight on him, clenching hard against his bladder as waves of heat radiated from his core.
Henry didn’t seem to notice, or else he took it for a moan of pleasure. And it wasn’t not, that was the damnable part: the searing warmth in his belly, the tingling that pulsed from the base of his navel to the root of his cock, all of it tangled up with the knife’s-edge pleasure Henry was so intent on coaxing out of him like sap from a birch.
Well, Hans wouldn’t lose himself to it; he was a knight and a soldier. He would not relieve himself on the sheets like an untrained pup.
Perhaps it was another of Henry’s missions to test that resolution, because he pulled Hans's cock free of his unlaced braies and gave it a practical squeeze.
Hans's head knocked against the wall. “Fuck.”
“There’s linseed,” Henry said, already reaching for the nightstand. His face was strawberry-flushed.
“No, I—Henry, I’ll wet your bedding if you’re not careful,” Hans said through gritted teeth.
“You can handle it. I trust you.”
And wasn’t it just like Henry to make everything difficult and more wonderful at the same time, the charming little shit-stirrer? He didn’t even bother oiling his hands, only tipped the vial over Hans before starting to jerk him in steady, long pulls: the single-minded focus of a groom given three minutes to brush his master’s horse.
Hans bucked. His legs wanted to clamp together—wrenched uselessly against the ropes—but there was nowhere to go; Henry’s handiwork held fast. He registered, through the haze, the sting of its braid against the raw-rubbed skin over his ankles.
Henry had no intention of rescinding his challenge, and Hans's pride would not permit him to forfeit. Christ’s wounds.
He tried to anticipate every unbearable stroke, to brace himself for each twist of Henry’s wrist, but Henry wouldn’t let him—slowing just as his rhythm threatened to level, as if he had read Hans’s mind; tugging tenderly at the skin sheathing his cock, or letting his fingers creep lower to heft his balls with infuriating consideration.
“S’good?”
“Yes, Hal, it’s good, fuck you! Ah—fuck—fuck this forge, fuck your sister and your—”
Henry stilled, his maddening grin slipping into a frown directed somewhere near Hans's wrist.
“—dog and your hors—”
He shifted his weight, reaching past Hans's shoulder to check the clasp, and in the process leaned directly on his stomach. The pressure went white-hot; Hans held himself rigid, teeth bared.
“There,” Henry murmured. He had adjusted the shackle so it no longer dug into the meat of Hans’s palm. “That should be better.”
Hans hadn’t even noticed the bite of the iron until it was relieved, but he nodded anyway; it took less effort than speaking, and he thought, for a moment, that he could ride out the tremors shuddering through him.
The reprieve lasted all of a second. Henry slid back down and rolled his cock against him, his forearms braced on the mattress. He huffed like a bellows, his forehead pressed to Hans's, the fat-bound shelf of his stomach working into Hans’s bladder with every grind. Hans choked on his own inhale; the billet of heat in his gut flared, razor-sharp, and pain-ecstasy-pain pricked tears into the corners of his eyes.
He couldn’t draw back or kick out or clap his legs together; he could only dig the nails of his left hand into Henry’s back and arch to meet it as Henry rutted against him, slick with oil and sweat and trickling seed, biting back gasps when Henry’s foreskin rucked against his. The relentless sensations crowded in on each other until he felt overfull, fit to burst; on the brink of flying apart in a cloud of bloody feathers like a grebe run down by starved hounds. He had to master it. He couldn’t let go now, not after coming this far—
Henry paused again.
It was only a brief loss of pace, but the pressure eased just enough that Hans seized on it like an opening in a mercenary’s Vom Tag. He locked himself down, every muscle burning, breathing shallow and precise through his nose. The worst of it ebbed, tamped into a manageable smolder.
There. That was it. He could do th—
The thought broke apart as Henry put a fingernail against the slit at the head of Hans's cock and pressed. Hans screamed.
It was too much. Heat tore through him in a furious surge, from his burning face to his bladder to his prick, ridiculous and unstoppable. He fought it all the way down, and yet—
Piss streamed from him in spurts, soaking his braies, running hot and humiliating down their legs. He gasped through clenched teeth as the bed reaped the stains of his failure. The very sound was vulgar.
But the sound of Henry moving through it was more vulgar yet, breath rough in Hans’s ear and cock dragging hot and painful on his as he fucked against him in unthinking, desperate little thrusts, until—finally, with a strangled groan—he spilled over Hans’s stomach. Hans barely knew the warmth of his seed from the wetness already soaking him.
For a heartbeat there was nothing at all—no movement or sound but Hans's ragged breathing. The relief, if he could call it that, was brutally incomplete; the harsh ache in his belly had banked, but his prick—despite his acrid shame—was still throbbing hard.
Henry’s gaze slid down, then back up to Hans's face, and he lifted a hand to brush away a tear that had escaped into Hans’s temple. “You did well, Hans. Look at me.” He gave Hans’s face a gentle shake, the way he would Mutt’s. “All right?”
Hans barked a laugh, sharp and manic. “You’re cleaning all of this up, and I,” he said, his voice steady only through sheer will, “am absolutely going to wring your neck,” even as he turned his cheek into Henry’s calloused palm.
Henry’s other, sticky hand squeezed Hans’s flank; he shifted closer to buss his jaw, heedless of the mess between them, the sodden, heavy cloth of Hans’s hose and braies that must be clinging unpleasantly to the flesh and fur of his thighs. “That’s only fair.”