Fic: "Brought to Bay" (Titus [1999 movie])
Of course, the movie is an adaptation of the Shakespeare play Titus Andronicus, so. Movie-basing it just lets me include more anachronisms. I KNOW, anachronisms in Shakespeare? Never! Ahem.
This is intended as a gift for romanticalgirl, but given the subject matter of play, movie, and fic alike, it may be a gift in the sense that your cat bringing you a mutilated chipmunk is a gift. I give you dead chipmunks because I LOVE you, Laura! Remember that!
Many thanks to sionnain for beta and encouragement. :)
Set before Act 4. Aaron and Demetrius.
These, the princes, the pride of the Goths. Aaron knows them well, hide and tooth and claw, knows these feral cubs as well as if they were his own. Thank the chill and indifferent gods they are not; he would have thought it well to drown them when they were but kittens, and take their skins for gloves. Not for their cruelty, oh no--he had taught it them, and would they had taken more from the lessons. No, Aaron disdains Tamora's sons not for those parts that are hard and cold as flint, but for their softness, their erratic dispositions, their want of steel.
He had done best with the eldest; Alarbus had grasped the singular dark pleasures of cruelty, for its own sake as well as sensual reward. In truth, upon reflection, he thinks he did quite well with Alarbus after all, and had made him quite nearly of worth to claim as son of Aaron in spirit if not flesh. As near as Goth could come to Moor, as far it went.
But Alarbus is slain, cut down and burned to sanctify the tomb of the Andronici. And Aaron is left as aides to his amusements only Tamora's lesser get, his halfhearted proteges, Chiron and Demetrius. Wild, unguided, unhoned. Willful and spoiled. Now he must see what can be reclaimed from these neglected projects, if he is to have assistance in his sport in Rome.
If either of them is to be of use, it is Demetrius; Chiron as youngest was longest at his mother's side and breast, and Aaron suspects he would return there if he could, would crawl again between her legs were he but able. Childish, petulant, and impulsive, Chiron. His use is as a stick to goad his brother.
It had been as sport to Aaron, when the cubs were young, to set them upon each other for the promise of some trinket or small boon. No more than the chance to sit on Aaron's knee at the fire would have them at one another's throats with teeth and whatever small weapons they could set hands upon, until Aaron deemed them old enough to press a dagger between their fingers. Ho, the games in those days...
It cannot be so very different now. Although in body they are grown, no one has ever demanded that the whelps prove themselves more than whelps indeed. They can be set upon each other with the promise of maid or coin or sweet-sour smoke to cloud the brain; bright lights or loud music or toys to use and smash and toss aside.
He finds the game to be even better now than then, their aggression grown strong and strong-willed after so many years unfettered, and brought to an edge as goodly as the rapiers they carry at their sides. Aaron must needs step in only at the final moment, to keep Chiron's blade from taking Demetrius' throat, or Demetrius Chiron's heart, for true-shed blood would bring the tigress herself down upon them in wrath, and Aaron far prefers to make her purr.
Weeks pass with them all in the idle lap of Rome, weeks that turn to months and swell to seasons. Tamora, too, swells in her season, and the Gothic princes make crude and careless speculation on the time and circumstance of conception. Surely it must have been an accident, they laugh, for the Emperor has no wit to guess the use of his own piz. Aaron forbears from pointing out that Tamora is well able to school the man; there are few guides to what will set the princely tempers aflame, but their desultory notion of their mother's honor is often one.
Aaron has not been idle, has not rotted debauched in Rome as Chiron and Demetrius seem more than content to do, has not grown bored and vicious within the gilded cage. What viciousness he possesses is his by right, and he prefers it tempered down to the razor edge of cruelty, not snapping wildly at errant fingers as the cubs do, their spitting and snarling befouling the air.
No, Aaron has not been idle, Aaron has listened, Aaron has watched. And the signs he has seen, the whispers he has heard in corners here and there, leave him not unsettled or uneasy but perhaps a shade...discordant.
He will seek his answers in Tamora's sons, and should they not be to his liking they will wish they had been taken to the sacrifice a stride behind their brother, guts pulled free and spilled upon the fire, screams rising to uncaring gods.
He finds Demetrius abed, near a given at this hour of the day, the sun still high and enough hours passed since dining that the blood is thick and the mind bored and idle. The boy is buried deep in one of the sleepy-eyed, slow-moving women of Saturnine's house, fucking her with a steady and indifferent energy, so little pleasure or pain on either face that Aaron wonders why Demetrius hadn't simply called for his horse or the river-barge or the minstrels or some other idle way to while the hours, instead of dragging the girl from her work and fouling the sheets.
Aaron recalls the first time Demetrius took a woman; Aaron had arranged it, in the stead of the Gothic king lost to Roman hands. The boy was old enough to make himself a nuisance and so in want of any other amusement Aaron brought a girl from the slave pens and held her bound hands to the earth while Demetrius fumbled his way to learning the use of her. The boy had shown a healthy interest then, a hunger that ought to have been honed. Instead it has been overfed with all things gross and sensuous, leaving him spoiled and jaded. If asked, doubtless he would profess that he feels nothing at all.
If his answers to Aaron's questions do not come aright, Aaron will make him feel, and well the boy will wish he not had done.
He waits until Demetrius spends himself and moves off the girl, rolling onto his back as he regains his breath, his sullen expression not altering as he considers the ceiling. Aaron comes forward from the doorway and addresses the girl. "Out with you. Back to work."
She goes without protest--well-kept and well-trained, the trulls of Saturninus--and Demetrius turns his head to eye Aaron with dissatisfied boredom. "You take your pleasure in watching from corners like a dog, Moor?"
"I take my pleasure as it pleases me." Demetrius returns his gaze to the ceiling and Aaron steps closer still; the cub's own mistake to be so unaware. "Though I am surprised to find you abed and at play without your brother to take second." Demetrius looks up sharply, uncertain if he should pluck the insult from the chaff, and Aaron hides a smile at the ease with which the foolish child was turned and brought to bay. "I would have a word with you, my lord."
"Then have it." Demetrius snatches his cigarettes from the table and takes one between his lips. "Have your word and leave me be."
"You and your brother made game of the daughter of Titus."
The boy rolls his eyes and cradles the flame expertly between his hands. "This is old news, Moor. So stale not even the swine would feed of it. The girl is plundered, she is shorn, she is finished, and long ago."
"And you made quite sure?" Aaron presses, and presses closer, until the space between he and the bed and the boy is no space at all. "You finished her off, as your mother instructed? You were sure of her?"
Something flickers in those unnatural pale eyes, and Aaron has him. The trap is sprung though the cub has not yet felt its sting. "We left her for the crows," Demetrius says, drawing smoke deep in his lungs and averting his eyes. "She was fodder for the beasts and the worms after. What of it, Aaron? Why drag this long-dead corpse back to light of day?"
"There are whispers." Still the boy has not noticed how close Aaron stands, how his anger boils behind the steel gates of his will. The whelp notices nothing. He sees nothing. Aaron is Moor and so Aaron is no more than the shadows of the room. "From the house of Andronicus. Rumors crawl and swim and fly--" his hand lashes out and catches Demetrius' chin, yanking him about to face him "--and sing that Lavinia lives."
The blue eyes widen, with the shock of one who has been found out rather than the surprise of one who did not know, and Aaron's other hand comes up to catch the pale throat. "And so she presents a problem to us, Demetrius."
"We cut out her tongue," the boy mutters, defiance and fear warring on his face. "She is no danger to us. She can do no harm."
"Idiot," Aaron says, his voice a caress, and he shoves with both hands, throwing Demetrius back on the bed. "Your royal mother should curse the day her womb spat forth such a fool." He moves fast as a serpent, placing his knee in the center of the boy's chest to pin him down. "Have you no sense at all of the sweetness of revenge, cub? Are you grown so soft, so idle, so weak that your wits have died off in despair?" Anger threatens to overcome the boy's fear, and Aaron seizes the crucial moment, reaching down to catch Demetrius' softened cock in his hand and squeeze, lesson and warning at once. The boy makes a choked cry and Aaron shakes his head.
"You are a fool, Demetrius." His free hand pulls his dagger from his belt, and the boy's eyes impossibly go wider. "A weakling, an idiot, and a child." He sets the blade to the base of Demetrius' cock and smiles. "Certainly you are no man, and near-certainly you never shall be."
If Demetrius could summon air to his lungs, he would weep; his fear is as a warm blanket to Aaron, as honeyed mead. "You have seen me weild the gelding-knife, boy, do not doubt for an instant that I can repay your idiocy with your manhood and never flinch." He lets the threat linger, ripen, grow to rich and bursting fruition, then eases the blade away. "But that is not the lesson I wish to teach you, this day."
Relief softens Demetrius' features for no more than a breath before Aaron smoothly reverses the knife in his hand and thrusts the hilt between the boy's legs and buries it deep inside him. Now Demetrius does find the breath to shriek, a cry of pain and terror laced with bewilderment, a glory to Aaron's ears and heart.
"Now, my lord," he says, fucking the boy slowly and deeply with the knife-hilt, waiting to feel warm blood coat his fingers before he will consider the penance paid. "Mark well your lesson. You have no honor to lose, boy, no sacred chastity, no nuptial vow to stain--I have not cut off your hands nor laid knife's edge to your tongue--and yet--" He shoves the hilt as deep as it will go and then pulls away, tossing it to the floor and stepping back from the bed. "Would you not swear bloody vengeance on me now? I shall let you live, Demetrius, I shall not take a killing stroke--and will you not plot your revenge in dark places, and come hunting after me one day?"
"By all that is holy," Demetrius snarls, his breath catching on sobs, his face distorted and reddened. "Do not sleep in comfort, Moor."
Aaron laughs and shakes his head, turning to the door. "Do you think to frighten me, little cub? Am I to be haunted, to think my death lies in the hands of Tamora's son? For shame, Demetrius. You speak as if I do not know you, as if I have not seen you for precisely as you are, and dismissed you as flawed and far beneath me. If it were not so, would I ever have suffered you to live this long? Or would I have cut your throat and left you on the roadside in the long walk to Rome at Titus' heels?"
He does not look back, but he knows the boy's face has gone from red to deathly pale. "I do not fear you, Demetrius, and I never will. You know I speak truth, in your coward's heart. You lacked the nerve to finish the girl, and it will return to cut your throat. This I know, and this I will live to see, even if I die a heartbeat after."
Aaron makes his exit and saunters away through the palace halls, his mouth curved in the smile of a panther, sated.
This is intended as a gift for romanticalgirl, but given the subject matter of play, movie, and fic alike, it may be a gift in the sense that your cat bringing you a mutilated chipmunk is a gift. I give you dead chipmunks because I LOVE you, Laura! Remember that!
Many thanks to sionnain for beta and encouragement. :)
Set before Act 4. Aaron and Demetrius.
These, the princes, the pride of the Goths. Aaron knows them well, hide and tooth and claw, knows these feral cubs as well as if they were his own. Thank the chill and indifferent gods they are not; he would have thought it well to drown them when they were but kittens, and take their skins for gloves. Not for their cruelty, oh no--he had taught it them, and would they had taken more from the lessons. No, Aaron disdains Tamora's sons not for those parts that are hard and cold as flint, but for their softness, their erratic dispositions, their want of steel.
He had done best with the eldest; Alarbus had grasped the singular dark pleasures of cruelty, for its own sake as well as sensual reward. In truth, upon reflection, he thinks he did quite well with Alarbus after all, and had made him quite nearly of worth to claim as son of Aaron in spirit if not flesh. As near as Goth could come to Moor, as far it went.
But Alarbus is slain, cut down and burned to sanctify the tomb of the Andronici. And Aaron is left as aides to his amusements only Tamora's lesser get, his halfhearted proteges, Chiron and Demetrius. Wild, unguided, unhoned. Willful and spoiled. Now he must see what can be reclaimed from these neglected projects, if he is to have assistance in his sport in Rome.
If either of them is to be of use, it is Demetrius; Chiron as youngest was longest at his mother's side and breast, and Aaron suspects he would return there if he could, would crawl again between her legs were he but able. Childish, petulant, and impulsive, Chiron. His use is as a stick to goad his brother.
It had been as sport to Aaron, when the cubs were young, to set them upon each other for the promise of some trinket or small boon. No more than the chance to sit on Aaron's knee at the fire would have them at one another's throats with teeth and whatever small weapons they could set hands upon, until Aaron deemed them old enough to press a dagger between their fingers. Ho, the games in those days...
It cannot be so very different now. Although in body they are grown, no one has ever demanded that the whelps prove themselves more than whelps indeed. They can be set upon each other with the promise of maid or coin or sweet-sour smoke to cloud the brain; bright lights or loud music or toys to use and smash and toss aside.
He finds the game to be even better now than then, their aggression grown strong and strong-willed after so many years unfettered, and brought to an edge as goodly as the rapiers they carry at their sides. Aaron must needs step in only at the final moment, to keep Chiron's blade from taking Demetrius' throat, or Demetrius Chiron's heart, for true-shed blood would bring the tigress herself down upon them in wrath, and Aaron far prefers to make her purr.
Weeks pass with them all in the idle lap of Rome, weeks that turn to months and swell to seasons. Tamora, too, swells in her season, and the Gothic princes make crude and careless speculation on the time and circumstance of conception. Surely it must have been an accident, they laugh, for the Emperor has no wit to guess the use of his own piz. Aaron forbears from pointing out that Tamora is well able to school the man; there are few guides to what will set the princely tempers aflame, but their desultory notion of their mother's honor is often one.
Aaron has not been idle, has not rotted debauched in Rome as Chiron and Demetrius seem more than content to do, has not grown bored and vicious within the gilded cage. What viciousness he possesses is his by right, and he prefers it tempered down to the razor edge of cruelty, not snapping wildly at errant fingers as the cubs do, their spitting and snarling befouling the air.
No, Aaron has not been idle, Aaron has listened, Aaron has watched. And the signs he has seen, the whispers he has heard in corners here and there, leave him not unsettled or uneasy but perhaps a shade...discordant.
He will seek his answers in Tamora's sons, and should they not be to his liking they will wish they had been taken to the sacrifice a stride behind their brother, guts pulled free and spilled upon the fire, screams rising to uncaring gods.
He finds Demetrius abed, near a given at this hour of the day, the sun still high and enough hours passed since dining that the blood is thick and the mind bored and idle. The boy is buried deep in one of the sleepy-eyed, slow-moving women of Saturnine's house, fucking her with a steady and indifferent energy, so little pleasure or pain on either face that Aaron wonders why Demetrius hadn't simply called for his horse or the river-barge or the minstrels or some other idle way to while the hours, instead of dragging the girl from her work and fouling the sheets.
Aaron recalls the first time Demetrius took a woman; Aaron had arranged it, in the stead of the Gothic king lost to Roman hands. The boy was old enough to make himself a nuisance and so in want of any other amusement Aaron brought a girl from the slave pens and held her bound hands to the earth while Demetrius fumbled his way to learning the use of her. The boy had shown a healthy interest then, a hunger that ought to have been honed. Instead it has been overfed with all things gross and sensuous, leaving him spoiled and jaded. If asked, doubtless he would profess that he feels nothing at all.
If his answers to Aaron's questions do not come aright, Aaron will make him feel, and well the boy will wish he not had done.
He waits until Demetrius spends himself and moves off the girl, rolling onto his back as he regains his breath, his sullen expression not altering as he considers the ceiling. Aaron comes forward from the doorway and addresses the girl. "Out with you. Back to work."
She goes without protest--well-kept and well-trained, the trulls of Saturninus--and Demetrius turns his head to eye Aaron with dissatisfied boredom. "You take your pleasure in watching from corners like a dog, Moor?"
"I take my pleasure as it pleases me." Demetrius returns his gaze to the ceiling and Aaron steps closer still; the cub's own mistake to be so unaware. "Though I am surprised to find you abed and at play without your brother to take second." Demetrius looks up sharply, uncertain if he should pluck the insult from the chaff, and Aaron hides a smile at the ease with which the foolish child was turned and brought to bay. "I would have a word with you, my lord."
"Then have it." Demetrius snatches his cigarettes from the table and takes one between his lips. "Have your word and leave me be."
"You and your brother made game of the daughter of Titus."
The boy rolls his eyes and cradles the flame expertly between his hands. "This is old news, Moor. So stale not even the swine would feed of it. The girl is plundered, she is shorn, she is finished, and long ago."
"And you made quite sure?" Aaron presses, and presses closer, until the space between he and the bed and the boy is no space at all. "You finished her off, as your mother instructed? You were sure of her?"
Something flickers in those unnatural pale eyes, and Aaron has him. The trap is sprung though the cub has not yet felt its sting. "We left her for the crows," Demetrius says, drawing smoke deep in his lungs and averting his eyes. "She was fodder for the beasts and the worms after. What of it, Aaron? Why drag this long-dead corpse back to light of day?"
"There are whispers." Still the boy has not noticed how close Aaron stands, how his anger boils behind the steel gates of his will. The whelp notices nothing. He sees nothing. Aaron is Moor and so Aaron is no more than the shadows of the room. "From the house of Andronicus. Rumors crawl and swim and fly--" his hand lashes out and catches Demetrius' chin, yanking him about to face him "--and sing that Lavinia lives."
The blue eyes widen, with the shock of one who has been found out rather than the surprise of one who did not know, and Aaron's other hand comes up to catch the pale throat. "And so she presents a problem to us, Demetrius."
"We cut out her tongue," the boy mutters, defiance and fear warring on his face. "She is no danger to us. She can do no harm."
"Idiot," Aaron says, his voice a caress, and he shoves with both hands, throwing Demetrius back on the bed. "Your royal mother should curse the day her womb spat forth such a fool." He moves fast as a serpent, placing his knee in the center of the boy's chest to pin him down. "Have you no sense at all of the sweetness of revenge, cub? Are you grown so soft, so idle, so weak that your wits have died off in despair?" Anger threatens to overcome the boy's fear, and Aaron seizes the crucial moment, reaching down to catch Demetrius' softened cock in his hand and squeeze, lesson and warning at once. The boy makes a choked cry and Aaron shakes his head.
"You are a fool, Demetrius." His free hand pulls his dagger from his belt, and the boy's eyes impossibly go wider. "A weakling, an idiot, and a child." He sets the blade to the base of Demetrius' cock and smiles. "Certainly you are no man, and near-certainly you never shall be."
If Demetrius could summon air to his lungs, he would weep; his fear is as a warm blanket to Aaron, as honeyed mead. "You have seen me weild the gelding-knife, boy, do not doubt for an instant that I can repay your idiocy with your manhood and never flinch." He lets the threat linger, ripen, grow to rich and bursting fruition, then eases the blade away. "But that is not the lesson I wish to teach you, this day."
Relief softens Demetrius' features for no more than a breath before Aaron smoothly reverses the knife in his hand and thrusts the hilt between the boy's legs and buries it deep inside him. Now Demetrius does find the breath to shriek, a cry of pain and terror laced with bewilderment, a glory to Aaron's ears and heart.
"Now, my lord," he says, fucking the boy slowly and deeply with the knife-hilt, waiting to feel warm blood coat his fingers before he will consider the penance paid. "Mark well your lesson. You have no honor to lose, boy, no sacred chastity, no nuptial vow to stain--I have not cut off your hands nor laid knife's edge to your tongue--and yet--" He shoves the hilt as deep as it will go and then pulls away, tossing it to the floor and stepping back from the bed. "Would you not swear bloody vengeance on me now? I shall let you live, Demetrius, I shall not take a killing stroke--and will you not plot your revenge in dark places, and come hunting after me one day?"
"By all that is holy," Demetrius snarls, his breath catching on sobs, his face distorted and reddened. "Do not sleep in comfort, Moor."
Aaron laughs and shakes his head, turning to the door. "Do you think to frighten me, little cub? Am I to be haunted, to think my death lies in the hands of Tamora's son? For shame, Demetrius. You speak as if I do not know you, as if I have not seen you for precisely as you are, and dismissed you as flawed and far beneath me. If it were not so, would I ever have suffered you to live this long? Or would I have cut your throat and left you on the roadside in the long walk to Rome at Titus' heels?"
He does not look back, but he knows the boy's face has gone from red to deathly pale. "I do not fear you, Demetrius, and I never will. You know I speak truth, in your coward's heart. You lacked the nerve to finish the girl, and it will return to cut your throat. This I know, and this I will live to see, even if I die a heartbeat after."
Aaron makes his exit and saunters away through the palace halls, his mouth curved in the smile of a panther, sated.