Anywhere and Everywhere People: Part One
“Jared, darling, come and meet your new friend,” his mom says, and Jared dismisses the newsfeed he was looking at, excitement and fear singing through his veins. His first slave, not a friend exactly, although Jared’s mother likes the antiquated terminology.
The large security crate is set up in one of the loading docks, and one of the dock workers Jared knows from playing in the holds presses in the key code. Through the small window of the stasis chamber within, he can see the slave’s face, smooth freckled cheeks and bowed pink mouth, and he frowns, a little concerned. “How old is he?” Jared asks.
“Old enough,” replies his father. “Legally, he’s several years older than you are. But being in stasis on the long trip, his youth has been preserved. We wanted him to be a good age to be a friend for you.” He calculates something in his head, dancing his fingers through the air as he counts. “He should look and act approximately fourteen. Although as we well know, boys grow up so quickly.” He ruffles Jared’s hair and Jared’s mother smiles fondly. To Jared, it feels as though his sixteenth birthday has taken ages to come, especially after he learned that his gift would be a body slave of his very own. “Congratulations, son. May you be a strong and fair master.”
The captain of the slaver leans in confidentially to Jared’s father, so that Jared is sure he isn’t supposed to hear what he says next. Which just makes him listen harder. “Of course we know the real reason we ship them in stasis, huh? Pesky child sexuality regulations. The contract is in your name, so you know he’s yours as much as your son’s until Jared turns 21. And he is a mighty pretty one.”
Father’s back stiffens, and his expression locks down tight, like it does when Jared gets the hiccups in front of company, an embarrassing breach of etiquette. “Thank you for your time, sir,” he says coolly. “If there’s anything more you require before you leave the station, my slaves have been keyed to your voice for the next two hours. They will be glad to see that your needs are met. Within reason.”
Jared feels as though he’s skating along the top of this conversation; he knows what they’re discussing, just enough to be uncomfortably reminded that there are many uses for a body slave of his own. He knows it isn’t the sort of thing his parents would ever talk about, but Jared wonders if they expect him to do that, to use his slave for sex. The boy in the stasis chamber looks so young, so vulnerable, dark lashes resting on his cheeks, slim shoulders visible through the window. In some households, he knows it’s commonplace; his friend Chad’s widowed father apparently has no compunction about bending his favorite slave over the dinner table if the mood takes him. Chad seems to find it hilarious, but Jared can’t imagine using someone that way, even a body slave who has been trained for it.
“Come along now, let’s get him up to medical and start revivification,” Jared’s father says, clapping his hands. Two workers maneuver the open security chamber onto a hover cart and point it toward the cargo transporter, strapping it in for the trip to the station’s medical deck, six levels up.
Jared watches it trundle off on the hover cart as Father leads the way to the passenger transporter. “My new slave,” he says tentatively, suddenly curious, “what’s his name?”
“Jensen,” replies Father. “His name is Jensen.”
***
Jared has never watched a reanimation before, and he’s sure it’s supposed to be about as exciting as watching paint dry, but somehow it’s fascinating, watching Jensen’s body drift in the tank as his blood is filtered clean of the chemicals that preserve it in the stasis period. He waits with bated breath for the first flicker of Jensen’s eyelids, the first steam of his breath against the inside of the oxygen mask. “Won’t he be scared?” Jared asks, remembering how his dog had whimpered after he was neutered, eyes big and confused. One of Jensen’s fingers twitches.
“It’s a very gradual process,” Dr. Morgan assures him. “He’ll come back to consciousness in stages so it won’t be too jarring. Just like waking up from a long strange dream. You don’t have to wait with him though. He won’t know you’re here for a few hours yet.”
“That’s okay,” says Jared. “I don’t mind waiting.”
“Suit yourself.” Dr. Morgan is the station’s chief medical officer, certified and assigned by the Central Government. He’s not like most of the other adults Jared knows; Dr. Morgan is casual and doesn’t take propriety so seriously. Jared suspects he’s not supposed to wait here like this, but he wants to be the first thing Jensen sees when he wakes up, not the beeping monitors or the forest of tubes. If Jensen is his, Jared’s possession and Jared’s responsibility, Jared has to do right by him. He has to make sure Jensen knows Jared’s there for him.
“You have to be a strong master,” Father said, when he announced that Jared would be receiving a new slave of his very own before beginning his first year of tertiary schooling. “You have to learn what is best for your slave and do your best to provide it. They have no other way to live than by your hand.”
Jared is close to dozing off when a more urgent beep begins from one of the many machines around the reanimation tank, signaling that Jensen’s heart is starting back up again. Jared glances around, looking for Dr. Morgan, but Dr. Morgan is attending a ship’s captain with food poisoning on the other side of the room. He nods briefly to Jared but doesn’t leave his other patient.
Jared watches as Jensen’s eyelids start to flutter, as he gulps in a first breath that frosts the inside of his face mask. His breathing evens out almost at once into the deep sound of sleep, and Jared deflates a little. It’s still going be a while before Jensen is fully awake and aware.
He’s back to skimming newsfeeds, thumbing through articles about a new art installation consisting of debris launched into space from Earth millenia ago, a games stadium financed by a famous pugilist and intended to bring tourists to a newly terraformed planet in the Theta system, and the hijacking of a transport vessel near Datura. Jared’s doing a second run through the headlines when he hears a tap on the glass of the revivification tank. Jensen is looking at him calmly, his eyes huge and distorted by the curve of the tank. He doesn’t seem frightened floating there, and Jared feels the strangest twinge of guilt for thinking that Jensen would react like a dog to waking up on the medical deck. They must have prepped him for this before he went into stasis.
“Dr. Morgan,” Jared calls out. “He’s awake!” He looks back at the tank. Jensen carefully averts his eyes this time, showing deference like a slave should as Dr. Morgan drains the tank and opens the hatch to raise Jensen out of it.
Jared’s heart is racing with excitement as Dr. Morgan does a cursory brain scan and reflex test, nodding at the results. He wonders how he should introduce himself to his new slave, how he can make himself seem both authoritative and kind. But Dr. Morgan takes care of that for him. “Jensen,” he says, “you’re on the Padalecki Shipping space station orbiting Trillium in the Beta system. I’m Dr. Morgan, and this fine young man is Jared Padalecki, your new master.”
Jensen nods and glances at Jared, eyes fixed on his chin to avoid causing offense. “Thank you, sir. I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Padalecki.” Jensen’s voice is soft, with a high nervous edge to it that makes him seem even younger.
“Please call me Jared,” says Jared cordially. “I’m very pleased to welcome you into my household, Jensen.”
“I’m honored to serve you, sir.” It’s obvious that Jensen’s been carefully trained, at least in the formalities of his station, and Jared’s a little grateful for that. He would have found it very difficult to punish an unruly slave, but his father would have been gravely disappointed if he failed to do so.
Jensen sits up on his pallet, skin drying quickly in the cool air of the med deck. He’s shivering a little, although he locks his elbows to make it show less. The only clothing allowed inside stasis chambers is a small undergarment held up by a drawstring, and it’s obvious Jensen needs a robe, preferably a heated one, before Jared can take him back to his quarters and the extensive wardrobe waiting for him there. “Hang on,” he says. “I’ll get you something to warm up in.”
Jensen folds his hands in his lap, looking down at his interlocking fingers. “Thank you very much, Jared.”
There’s a closet full of spare robes on the other side of the room, and even though it’s barely twenty paces, he can’t help looking back a few times, just to make sure Jensen’s still there, still real and breathing and his. His slave, his privilege, and ultimately his responsibility.
Jensen slips the robe on gratefully, and Jared watches the way he hugs himself into it, his narrow shoulders folding in, green eyes flickering up and down Jared’s body. “Do you need anything else?” Jared asks. “Are you hungry or anything?”
Jensen shakes his head. “Probably not for a while yet. The stasis does that. Thank you though, sir.”
“I don’t know if Dr. Morgan has anything else he needs to do or…”
“You can take Jensen to his quarters anytime you’d like, Jared,” Dr. Morgan says. “Keep him company and get him some real clothes. He’ll be fine. You kids keep out of trouble now.”
“Thanks,” Jared says, knowing a dismissal when he hears one.
***
It takes a few days for Jared to feel comfortable asking even basic questions about Jensen’s past, where he came from, what his childhood was like, even how old he really was before he was put into stasis and shipped here. And still there are other questions he wants to ask, less polite questions, about how Jensen ended up a slave, about the training that has made him both so polite and so politely distant, about what special skills Jensen was taught and how he has used them. It hasn’t escaped Jared’s notice that Jensen is very attractive. But his own curiosity about those things makes him uneasy. Even innocent questions about what his schooling was like push against a boundary Jared recognizes reflexively. All the slaves in their household were altered before he was even born, surgically adapted to their station in life so that they were usually literally deaf to the whims of a child, let alone his impertinent questions.
But Jensen is different. They can’t begin the standard slave surgeries until he reaches adulthood, and even so, he’s Jared’s; when the time comes, the voice he’ll be keyed to is Jared’s.
“Do you know anything about black holes?” Jared asks one day, poring over his holiday homework in preparation for the start of the term in ten days. Jensen is waiting attentively in the chair beside Jared’s bed, his hands folded politely in his lap.
“What in particular about black holes?”
Jared expands the diagram he’s annotating, its holographic surface rippling into midair so Jensen can see. “I’m supposed to be calculating the amount of force present at each of these points, but every time I think I’ve got it, I run the sim and it fails. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I used to know this stuff cold.”
Jensen comes over to stand behind him at the desk. He frowns at the diagram, then reaches for the keyboard of the holo-generator. “May I?”
“Absolutely. That’s why I asked.” Jared grins as he gives up his spot at the desk.
Jensen’s fingers fly over the keyboard as he adjusts Jared’s equations, rebalances them and puts the new numbers into the sim. It’s successful. Jared sits up straighter. Biologically Jensen’s at least two years younger than he is, and yet he’s just finished Jared’s homework in under a minute. “How in Earth’s name did you do that?”
Jensen looks startled, almost like he’s being reprimanded. “You just had a couple of arithmetic errors throwing you off. Most of it was perfectly done. Master,” he adds hastily, a nervous habit he falls into when he thinks he’s done something wrong.
“Can you show me? That’s just, that’s really amazing, that you could figure that out so quickly.”
Jensen flushes pinkly across his cheeks. “Thank you. I was at the top of my class in physics.”
“I didn’t think that was the sort of thing they taught in slave schools.”
“It’s not. I mean before.” He doesn’t volunteer more, just begins running the sim backward to show Jared his mistakes. Jared puts a hand over Jensen’s on the keys, stilling him, and Jensen flinches the way he does whenever Jared touches him.
“You weren’t born a slave?” Jared asks, taking his hand away.
Jensen shakes his head. “I was repossessed for unpaid debts to the state,” he says dully. “The rest of my family was killed in an accident.”
Jared thinks back to his law course last year. “Wouldn’t you have become a ward of the state then? Not a slave? If you’re a child, you can’t be held accountable for your parents’ debts.”
“We lived in government housing which was destroyed in an electric fire. The investigating committee determined that my family was liable for the damage, so. I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear any of this.”
Jared shakes his head. “No, I want to.” He had assumed Jensen was born a slave, a blank slate on which to write obedience and etiquette. “Please. If it isn’t too difficult to talk about.”
Jensen takes a breath and continues. There’s something sharp, almost defensive in his voice. “Since we were held liable for property damage, all my family’s assets were sold to pay damages, and when material goods didn’t cover the cost, I became collateral.”
“What caused the fire?”
“Faulty wiring well past due for replacement.”
“How could you be liable for that?”
“The work order was improperly submitted. It’s just the way things go sometimes. Especially on planets out as far as the Omicron System.”
“Is that where you’re from?” Jared knows very little about Omicron. Many of the planets in the system had rejected terraforming, and those that had been able to support human communities were still sparsely populated. The vids he’s seen have been mostly focused on agriculture, since new grafting techniques developed there were one of the things that had made any of those planets habitable in the first place. “I’ve never been that far out.”
Jensen nods. “Most people from the inner planets haven’t. Of course, I never thought I’d come this far in, so it works both ways.”
“How long ago was it, the fire?” Jared asks, feeling like an idiot as soon as the words are out. “I mean, for you. How long does it seem for you?”
“It’s strange, being in stasis, knowing that legally years of my life have been taken away. I was in training for about a year, and there was several months in medical before that.”
“Medical?”
“I had burns over almost half my body. They weren’t sure I’d survive to pay anyone’s debt. But there are good med centers, even in Omicron.” He looks almost regretful, like some part of him wishes he’d died with the rest of his family instead of having his life forfeited to a stranger. But Jared, however impertinent he is, can’t ask about Jensen’s feelings on something like that.
“I’m sorry,” he says simply. He holds Jensen’s eyes for a moment before Jensen drops his gaze.
“I’m sorry,” Jensen replies. “I’ve distracted you from your schoolwork, master. I didn’t mean to do that.”
“It’s fine. I want to know about you.” Jared hesitates, unsure what to say next that won’t make Jensen more uncomfortable. He glances at the still-floating diagram, rotating slowly in its holo-field. “Can you tell me about black hole math now?”
“It would be my pleasure.”
***
Chad comes to stay for several days before the start of the school term. When he sees Jensen, he lets out a low whistle. “The vids did not do him justice,” he says. “Have you had him yet?”
Jared is just glad neither of his parents is present to hear. Chad’s own body slave, an older woman who was his nurse in his youth, stands passively behind him; she must be used to this sort of remark from Chad. But Jensen flinches at Jared’s side. “Please remember that Jensen can hear you just fine, Chad,” Jared says curtly.
“Aww, showing off how proper you are in front of the new help,” Chad laughs. “That’s just fucking adorable. Hello, Jensen.” He gives an exaggerated bow. “I trust that my compatriot Jared has never been anything less than perfectly decorous in his conduct towards you. That better, Jay?”
Jared sighs. “It’s fine.” He starts off talking about something else, trying to distract Chad from his intense staring at Jensen. It makes him feel odd and uncomfortable that anyone could treat Jensen the way Chad treats slaves on instinct. But Chad is unwilling to give up.
“So, is he a virgin?” Chad asks abruptly in the middle of a race on Jared’s game system, and Jared is so shocked that he crashes his hovercar. Jensen’s cheeks go red, and Jared can see him trying to school his expression to neutrality.
“I don’t know,” Jared says simply, thumbing the button that gives him a new hovercar. “That is not the sort of thing I feel obliged to ask.”
“You’re too squeamish, Jay.” Chad turns to Jensen. “You just say, ‘Jensen, are you a virgin?’ It’s not as though he can lie to you.”
“Maybe I don’t care.”
Chad shrugs. “You will as soon as your balls drop.” He laughs at his own joke and goes back to the game.
***
“I’m sorry about Chad,” Jared says. “He’s my friend, but I don’t condone the things he says.” Jensen is helping him get ready for bed, folding Jared’s clothes into the cleaning tray as Jared takes them off.
“I know,” Jensen replies.
Jared turns to look at him, and his hand brushes Jensen’s hip. Jensen flinches away. “I wouldn’t do those things to you.”
“You have the right to do whatever you want with me.”
“But I also have the responsibility to take care of you.”
“It’s important that you’re satisfied with my service,” Jensen says quietly. Jared grabs onto the shirt he’s folding, wanting Jensen’s full attention, but not wanting to make him flinch away again.
“Do you think I’m going to sell you?” he asks bluntly.
Jensen clenches his hands around the shirt. “When I was sold, I was instructed that your family was very particular about their slaves and I needed to be careful about my behavior. I want to live up to any expectations you might have.”
“I don’t have any expectations. Not like that. Not like, sexual things.”
Jensen flushes. “It’s not my place to judge what you want from me. Even if it’s sexual. I’ve been trained to serve in those ways as well.”
Jared shakes his head, trying not to imagine that sort of training. “I don’t intend to ask you for that. I’m not like Chad and his family.”
He thinks Jensen swallows a smile. “That much is obvious.”
***
Clematis Tertiary School sprawls across a hundred acres of grounds on Clematis, the capital planet in the Beta system, everything manicured green in between WestEarth-classical buildings. There are several other hovercars on the pad when they arrive, Jared and his mother with Jensen sitting quietly behind them in the passenger compartment. All his luggage has been shipped ahead, and Jensen disappears almost immediately with a member of the school maintenance staff to unpack. Jared watches him go with mild anxiety; they haven’t been apart for more than a few minutes since Jared’s birthday. But soon he’s swept up in a parade of his mother’s friends and acquaintances, who all remark on how grown-up he looks and introduce him to their sons in a blur of names and faces. Jared keeps smiling and nodding and trying to commit any of them to memory, but each boy in a school flight jacket starts to look like every other. Boys come from light years away to attend school here, and very few come from his tiny secondary school. The only familiar face he sees is Chad’s, and that’s hardly a comfort, especially after the last few days of defending Jensen from increasingly explicit sexual comments.
When Jared finally reaches the dorm and swipes his new pass across the door sensor, he’s greeted by a kind of chaos that rarely visits any part of Padalecki Shipping. The lobby is crowded with boys, their parents, their slaves, and a cargo hold’s worth of luggage. Jared, reciting his room number under his breath, weaves his way through to the elevator, glancing around for Jensen and not finding him in the melee.
The hallway on his floor is much quieter, and his mother exclaims, “Oh, Jared, the view must be wonderful from up here,” before he even opens his door.
She’s absolutely right. The large window reveals a seemingly endless stretch of rippling lawn, laid with courts and fields for a number of ancient sports. Jared gravitates towards it, pressing his hands against the force field that prevents him from falling six stories. It’s not until he turns around that he notices the room is spotless, the bed made up with his linens from home, his school satchel laid neatly on the desk. “Jensen?” he calls.
Jensen pokes his head around a door that must lead to the adjoining slave quarters. “Hello, Jared.”
“Did you do this?” Jared asks, then realizes how critical the question sounds and rephrases. “Did you set all my things up so neatly like this?”
“I did. The man from maintenance helped me get your luggage and let me in. It didn’t take long.”
“But everyone else seems to still be squabbling in the lobby.”
Jensen shrugs and looks at his feet. “I would not presume to explain the behavior of other masters with their slaves.”
“Thank you, Jensen,” says Jared, aware that there’s an extra edge of formality to both their voices in the presence of his mother, although they’ve become less formal with each other in the last few days, laughing about Chad’s behavior.
“You’re most welcome, master,” Jensen replies.
“I’m so glad this arrangement seems to be working out so well for both of you,” says Jared’s mother enthusiastically. “What a wonderful asset you are, Jensen.”
“Thank you very much, madam. I am only as much of an asset as Jared allows me to be by his fine ownership.”
“Very good, Jensen,” says Jared’s mother. “Very good. I hope you may be a lifelong companion to my son.”
Jensen smiles, guarded but sweet, and Jared hopes he understands what a coveted commodity Jared’s mother’s approval is.
***
Jared has never considered himself a shy person. He’s always had friends at school, other kids to study with and take day trips with and spend time in the dorms with. But this is ten times the size of his secondary school, one dorm alone housing all of the three hundred boys who make up his class. “I’m not sure how I’ll fit in here,” he confesses to Jensen as he adjusts the display settings on his new desk.
“I have great faith in your ability to make others feel at ease,” Jensen replies.
Jared catches his eye for a moment and smiles. “Thanks.”
Jensen nods and looks away.
“I don’t know,” Jared sighs. “Did you ever go to a big school like this?”
“No. Colonies in the Omicron system are so spread out, we only have local, planetbound schools to serve the towns. And it’s hard to get access to system jumpers except on Saguaro, the capital. So people can’t travel like they do here; everyone they know would age and die while they were en route. So there’s nothing this… grand.”
Jared wonders what Jensen’s home world looked like, isolated and hard to reach, and he starts idly tapping through an atlas, zooming in on the Omicron system and pausing to look at Jensen. “Can you tell me about it? Where you grew up? I hardly know anything about where you come from.”
“If you’d like,” Jensen replies, frowning in confusion. “You’ll stop me if you find it boring?”
“I can’t imagine I’ll be bored,” Jared replies, turning over the desk to Jensen, who thumbs his way into a close-up of a small, dusty planet called Ocotillo, his deft fingers moving to highlight a town called Silver Hill, population at last census 2406 persons. Jensen pulls up a pictorial model of the town, walking his fingers through the center square, turning them so Jared can see all the colorful shops crowded together on all sides. Jensen smiles as he spreads the image out to the width of the desk, giving Jared a bird’s eye view of Jensen’s hometown.
It’s an unfamiliar word, “hometown,” to a kid like Jared whose life has been circumscribed by the edges of a space station, where you could walk days’ worth of circles without passing the same way twice, but there’s nothing like a “town”. “My mom was in the local government,” Jensen explains, absently moving down a side street in the hologram. “She ran the council of agriculture and resources, so we were always traveling out to local ranches and farms, testing the water supply from the Burbish River in different places. I saw a lot of the surrounding area that way.” Jensen zooms out, points to the rolling hills, patchy green with livestock fields. “Up here they kept goats, since it was so rocky, even after all the terraforming crews came through a few hundred years ago. Have you ever met a goat?”
Jared tries to remember. Traders come through with live cargo fairly often, not all of it in stasis or cold storage, so Jared’s met more cows and alpacas and chickens than an average boy of his social standing, but no goats. “I saw one in a museum once. It was stuffed, Ancient Earth style. It was sort of weird.”
“Yeah, they’re a little different when they’re alive.” Jensen smiles wistfully. “They can climb anything, I don’t know how they do it in the high hills without falling straight down the sides, but they just hop right up on top. When I was little, before my sister was born, my mom would sometimes leave me with the goatherds, and I would just watch them follow the goats wherever they went, making sure they didn’t get into trouble.” He spins the hologram again, and looks back down into the town. “I thought maybe I would be a goatherd when I grew up. It’s not a prestigious job, but it’s very important where I come from. The planet’s still not thoroughly stable, and if the food supply runs short, well, that’s likely to be the end of Silver Hill. And they got to be outside all the time.” Jensen pauses again and bites his lip. “Is it all right for me to tell you about these things? I know it isn’t in the protocols anywhere, and I don’t want to bore you or distract you from your work.”
“You’re not boring me,” Jared replies. “I’ve never been to Omicron, I’ve never seen a goat. I’m learning. Tell me more.”
Jensen’s cheeks go pink. “So, over here are the soybean fields,” he continues, focusing intently on the hologram and not Jared’s face. Jared watches the way Jensen lights up describing his life before he was a slave, and he aches inside, wondering if Jensen can see it too, how different he is when he talks about freedom.
***
Jared is playing an ancient earth sport called hockey out on the expansive games fields, just learning the basics with his class, all these new skills and activities they never had at his secondary school. The other boy doesn't mean to hit him with his stick, surely, but there's a loud crack of impact, and suddenly Jared's ankle won't hold him. He crumples onto the grass, howling with pain, and his entire side gathers around him, shouting for a medic. It's only the second week of school, and most of their faces are still only hazily familiar, so when Jensen pushes through the huddle of boys, wild eyed with concern, his is the hand Jared reaches for. Jensen helps him up onto one foot, his narrow shoulders bearing most of Jared's weight as Jared leans into him. The other boys stand by gawking as Jared and Jensen hobble off, the games teacher approaching at a leisurely pace. "Tell him you need to go to the infirmary immediately," Jensen hisses.
Jared, shocked at the firmness of Jensen's tone, passes the message on meekly. The teacher pokes at his ankle, making Jared cry out, and then he waves them on without a word.
"Why'd you tell me to say that?” Jared asks. “He would have been able to tell."
"I'm sorry if I spoke out of turn, master," Jensen says quietly, resettling Jared's arm on his shoulder as they approach the main school building, which houses the infirmary. “I was afraid he would keep you there longer looking it over. But it’s much harder for a person to argue with a direct request. And you need to have it treated as soon as possible if it’s broken. I just wanted to help.”
Afterwards, when Jared’s settled in the infirmary and Jensen has reluctantly gone back to their room, Jared realizes it’s the first time Jensen has willingly touched him, and the memory of Jensen’s hand squeezed tight on his shoulder makes him smile in spite of the pain in his healing ankle.
***
One night while they’re doing homework, Jared touches Jensen’s elbow and Jensen doesn’t flinch away. So he leaves his fingers pressed to the thin fabric of Jensen’s shirt, conscious of Jensen leaning towards him, tilting until their shoulders touch, the whole of their upper arms aligned. His face is so close, his mouth dark pink in the glow of the diagram Jared’s working on at his desk. Jared wants him, this guilty pull in his stomach that has only been getting harder to ignore as they know each other better. He can’t seem to stop looking at Jensen’s lips. Neither of them are paying attention to the diagram.
“Jared,” Jensen says quietly. “Can I do something outside the bounds of my requested service?”
“Sure,” Jared replies. He thinks maybe Jensen wants an off-world pass, some kind of freedom Jared has always taken for granted. But then Jensen kisses him.
His mouth is so soft, fitting over Jared’s, opening slow and sweet. Jared licks the wet seam of Jensen’s lips, pressing between and inside, and Jensen sighs and clings closer to him, one hand around the back of Jared’s neck pulling him in. He kisses like he’s been starved for it, sucking at Jared’s lips, licking into him. Jared grips his shoulders to keep his hands from wandering; he didn’t ask for this, and he wants to do it on Jensen’s terms.
The edge of the desk digs awkwardly into Jared’s side, and he makes a uncomfortable noise. Jensen rears back suddenly, looking lost, shocked at his own boldness. He touches Jared’s lips, then his own, and the fullness of his mouth makes Jared want to kiss him again, kiss him and not stop. “Was that all right?” Jensen asks.
“Do it again,” Jared replies.
“You should finish your work, shouldn’t you?”
Jared bites his lip. The assignment is due early in the morning, and he knows he should finish. “I’ll do it as fast as possible.”
He has Jensen in his bed an hour later, laid out on his back, opening for Jared’s kisses. Jared is trying so hard to keep a hairsbreadth of distance between their bodies, propped on one elbow and leaning carefully in, not letting himself press down flat into the warmth of Jensen’s body. He doesn’t want to spook Jensen, doesn’t want to do anything that might make Jensen want to tell him no. Because Jensen probably won’t tell him no, even like this, even flushed and gasping as Jared breaks away to nuzzle at his cheek. He’s a slave, and he takes his position more seriously than he takes himself. But finally Jared’s arm starts to go numb, and he has to change position. “Will you tell me if you don’t like this, any of this?” Jared asks.
Jensen swallows, and Jared watches the bob of his adam’s apple. “Are you ordering me to tell you?”
Jared considers this. “Would that make it easier, if it were an order?”
“Yes,” Jensen replies solemnly. “I want to be very sure I’m fulfilling your wishes. I have a job to do as your slave, and it’s important to me.”
“Then I’m ordering you to tell me if I do anything you don’t like. Anything at all. You have to tell me, as your master.”
Jensen closes his eyes, and Jared is close enough to feel the shiver that goes through him, the relaxation that follows. “Yes, master,” Jensen whispers, and the way he says it hits Jared in the gut, hot and lowdown.
Jared brings his lips to rest at the corner of Jensen’s jaw, nursing there, pulling a bruise to the surface of Jensen’s pale skin. He grabs onto Jared’s shoulders, pulling Jared in tighter, trembling and tense again. Their hips collide, legs tangling, and Jared can feel the fullness of Jensen’s cock against his belly. He tries to line it up with his own, clumsy and uncertain, wriggling until he finds an angle that makes Jensen gasp, Jared rocking down into him. It’s good, rubbing up against the heat of another person’s body, better than any of the simulations his room at home cooked up, better because he can feel Jensen’s punched-out breaths and the shudder that he can’t quite suppress. Jensen’s slim thighs squeeze around his, and his kisses grow clumsy and messy, his breath hot and harsh against Jared’s lips as Jared presses in as close as he can get.
His dick aches, rubbing in the softness of his sleep pants, bunching the fabric around the swollen head. He ruts down hard into Jensen, and orgasm overtakes him like a crashing wave. His pants are sticky with his come, and his dick is too sensitive to touch, but when he rolls to the side, Jensen gives a helpless little whimper and bites his lip, his fingers clenching at his sides. Jared realizes he wants to touch himself, but he isn’t sure if he should. It’s heartbreaking and confusing watching Jensen struggle with it, his face flushed and his eyes dark with want. “Can I touch you?” Jared asks. He has to, it seems like. “Only if you want, but I…”
Jensen wiggles his pants down enough that his dick bobs free, stiff and pink and slick at the head. “If you want,” he says softly, and his eyes close as Jared’s hand wraps him, dragging up the length of his dick. Jensen shivers and moans as Jared strokes him again, up and down like he does to himself, and it’s over before Jared feels he’s looked his fill, Jensen tidying himself back into his pants and going to find wet cloth to wipe his come from the webs of Jared’s fingers. “Did you want me to help you change your clothes?” Jensen asks hesitantly. His eyes fix on the wet crotch of Jared’s pants, and Jared blushes, realizing how sticky and squishy and gross it is. He just came all over himself from rubbing off on his slave.
“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Jensen whispers, and it’s as bold a thing as he’s ever said to Jared, unprompted and perfectly honest.
“Thanks,” Jared replies, and Jensen looks up to meet his eyes for a moment, smiling meekly. He lets Jensen help him out of his wet pants, tossing them into the laundry chute beside the closet. He’s still holding the wet cloth, and Jared nods for Jensen to use it. He only hesitates for a moment before wiping a smooth, cool stroke down the soft, sensitive length of Jared’s dick. Jared’s afraid he’ll start to go hard again, just from Jensen’s hand on him, but Jensen just gives him two more businesslike swipes up and down his belly and backs off. “Thanks,” Jared says again.
He likes that Jensen doesn’t ask before leaning in for another kiss.
***
It only gets harder to treat Jensen like a normal slave as the term goes on. Jared wants to reach out to him during cultural events in the school amphitheater, nuzzle into the side of his neck as the actors unfold another Ancient WestEarth tragedy on the stage. He wants to catch Jensen’s eye when one of his classmates makes a joke, laugh with him instead of ignoring his existence. Jensen draws his attention just being in the same room, but Jared knows that speaking to him, even acknowledging him, means something different because he’s a slave. The more intimately he knows Jensen the more difficult that is to accept.
“Why doesn’t Jensen come to class with you?” Chad asks, two months into the term. His slave, Helen, is rubbing his shoulders in the middle of the stretch of grass in the shadow of their dorm. Jensen is cross-legged on the grass just inside Jared’s peripheral vision. He could ask Jensen to do that kind of thing for him in public - he could ask Jensen to do a lot of things for him in public - but it feels wrong, having Jensen’s hands on him in front of other people when Jared aches to take him back to the dorm and touch him in private, not as slave and master. And there’s so much he still doesn’t know about Jensen’s body, primly covered up in brown linen slave garb, school-issue, so that no one who sees him running errands on Jared’s behalf could ever mistake him for anything but what he is.
“He does other things for me. I’m happy to carry my own things.”
“But he hasn’t been altered yet! You could have him do real work with you, not just fetch and carry. You wouldn’t have to be whispering to him all the time to get him to understand things.”
“I don’t want to,” says Jared firmly. “Jensen and I are fine the way we are.” He’s seen the way the boys who take their slaves to class are, hunched up beside them, hissing angrily when a slave taking notes by lip-reading misses a word in the lecture. Jared can’t imagine trying to learn that way is good for anyone. But he doesn’t judge. Everyone’s treatment of their slaves is their own right, even though it’s hard not to flinch sometimes when Chad smacks Helen for including the wrong fruit for his lunch. At least that kind of violence doesn’t happen often; unlike in secondary school, where the biggest show of strength was having your family’s slave fight someone else’s to a bloody pulp.
Chad huffs in disbelief and tells Helen, “Harder.”
Jared looks at the position of the suns overhead, then at Jensen, who is sitting so calmly still in the grass. “Did I have an appointment?” he asks, letting Jensen know that he’s ready for a break.
Jensen thumbs through Jared’s schedule on his tablet. “Yes, you do,” he says matter-of-factly. “In about ten minutes. Perhaps we should hurry.” Letting Jared know that he wants to go as much as Jared does, a simple but effective code.
Chad clicks his tongue. “Come on now, Jared. You have to train your slave a little better in keeping track of your appointments.”
“He is doing exactly what I want him to,” Jared replies, brushing down his trousers. Jensen follows him back to the dorm, two paces behind. Jared can feel his eyes, and he wants to turn and look, but he won’t, he’s not supposed to look at his slave like that. They take the elevator up, and Jared is glad the hallway is deserted at midday so he can rush for his door, Jensen’s footsteps quick and steady behind him, Jensen crowding at his back as Jared pushes through and into his warmly sunlit room. It’s still so exciting, seeing Jensen eager for him, seeing him forego distance and propriety to press close and whisper, “Hurry.”
“Was this what you were thinking of?” Jared asks, holding out his arms so that Jensen can step into them, his face tilted up and his mouth sweetly open.
“It was,” Jensen replies, and he rolls up onto the balls of his feet to kiss Jared’s mouth, bold enough now that he barely hesitates.
“I order you,” Jared says, by rote now, but still vehement, “I order you to tell me if I do anything you don’t like. Anything at all.” He whispers the words into the sensitive skin below Jensen’s ear, and Jensen shivers, breath wheezed out as Jared’s hold on him changes. “Do you want to lie down?” Jared asks. He tries to avoid asking direct questions because sometimes Jensen still goes flustered when Jared wants to know what he wants. But he’s too turned on for anything but bluntness, the splash of sunlight on Jensen’s reddening cheeks driving him wild.
“I want everything,” Jensen replies, and his mouth slides over Jared’s again, tongue slipping in, small, lithe body pressing close and warm. Jared grasps at Jensen’s loose shirt, holding onto fistfuls of fabric at his lower back. He likes the idea of “everything” and he’s not even sure what that means.
Jared stumbles and Jensen stumbles with him, a little giddy suddenly. Something clatters to the floor from the disturbed desk, and Jensen tenses, ready to reach and pick it up, but Jared kisses him again. “No, no, if you want to be with me right now, I want you to be with me. All with me. You don’t have to think about anything else.”
“That’s an order too, right?” Jensen teases, and there’s something so good about Jensen laughing at him, making it all feel so easy.
Jared kisses him, drawing him in close and tugging at Jensen’s shirt until he can get to the warm skin of Jensen’s lower back, sticky with sweat. He strokes the changing texture of the skin, moving back and forth, from the slight roughness of the skin graft on the left where the worst of the burns were to the smooth stretch on the right. These are the things he’s learning about Jensen’s body, things that weren’t obvious the first time he saw Jensen naked, in the foggy fluid of a stasis tank. Jared wants to know Jensen’s every scar and freckle and irregular joint. He’s never been much for detail, preferring the big picture and underlying principles, but with Jensen he’s starting to care, hungry for detail. He pulls the simple uniform shirt up higher, exposing the pale stretch of Jensen’s belly, still a little soft and totally hairless, betraying his biological age as much as anything about him does. They have to stop kissing for Jared to take it off him completely, their breaths mingling raggedly as Jared works the fastenings on Jensen’s clothes, pulling Jensen down onto the bed.
Jensen’s cock is hard beneath the fly of his loose uniform slacks, fitting into Jared’s hand as soon as they’re off. Jared strokes up the warm length of it, twists below the head in the way that always makes Jensen moan. “What should I do?” Jared asks, when they’re both naked, no diplomatic disguise to the quest for answers, no trick to make Jensen tell him the truth. Jared knows he’s innocent, even a little naïve, about sexuality, and Jensen, by contrast, has had months of training to help him answer exactly that question.
Jensen’s cheeks go pink in response, and he drops his eyes as he says, “Don’t stop touching me.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere.” He arches into Jared’s hand on his cock, grabs for Jared’s hip to return the favor, spreading his legs to expose the flushed sac of his balls. Jared feels bold enough to press one fingertip behind, soft skin and then the tight clench of Jensen’s hole. Jensen makes a surprised little noise and bites his lip. His hole shivers under Jared’s touch, and Jared hesitates. He wants to touch Jensen inside, but it doesn’t seem like it can be so simple.
“Remember, you’re under orders to tell me if you don’t like it,” Jared says, and Jensen looks up at him. Jared goes back to circling his fingers on the thin skin of Jensen’s balls.
“It’s not that,” Jensen says. “It’s complicated. I don’t know if I can explain.”
Jared can see his cock wilting, and that’s all the explanation he needs to back off, settling in at Jensen’s side and nuzzling at his neck. “Was it part of your training?”
“Yes,” replies Jensen. “Many things were. There’s a lot you have to learn, if you might serve as a pleasure slave.”
A sour feeling starts to build in Jared’s gut. “How did they train you?”
Jensen shakes his head a little, knowing instinctively what the question means. “No one touched me. They wouldn’t have been allowed to. But they gave demonstrations on slaves who were of age, and they had instruments for us to practice with, toys. We had to keep working with them on our own, in private, until we could satisfy ourselves that way, or at least take it without looking pained. At first I hated it, anyone telling me how I should touch myself, even when I was alone. But they didn’t watch us. And I was exceptionally good with the toys.”
He says it so matter-of-factly, but Jared’s whole body burns as he imagines Jensen getting himself off that way, fucking himself on a substitute cock and liking it. “What was it you were so good at?”
Jensen tilts his head, letting Jared suck at the lobe of his ear. “I could show you, if you wanted.”
“Would you like to do that?” Jared squeezes Jensen’s hip, watching his cock rise again but not quite touching it.
Jensen makes a low noise of agreement. “Anything that would make you happy, Jared,” he says, but it’s clear he’s not only doing it for Jared as he shifts restlessly against the bedclothes.
“It would make me very happy.” He strokes the inside of Jensen’s thigh, pale soft skin no one else gets to see.
There’s a small bottle of lubricant beside Jared’s bed, and now he’s glad he doesn’t use it much, so there’s more than enough for Jensen to slick his fingers and the small opening of his asshole. His hand moves slowly between his legs, stroking and teasing, and Jared looks up from the spectacle of it to find Jensen’s eyes on him, watching low-lidded. He’s eager to please, touching himself all splayed out this way, letting Jared watch every move he makes as he sinks a finger into himself.
Jensen’s mouth tightens uncomfortably on that first press in, and he pauses, waiting for a feeling he must know is coming. He takes a deep breath through his nose, and his eyes catch Jared’s for a solid three seconds before he looks shyly away again, like a good slave. Jared wants to grab hold of his chin and meet his eyes, make them equals here even if they can’t be anywhere else. But then Jensen’s eyes slip shut, and he twists his finger inside himself, gasping softly. His eyebrows crumple inward, and he’s quick to add a second finger, pulling out and then sliding them both in deep.
Jared wants to ask how it feels, but he won’t risk Jensen taking it as an order to share. Instead he listens to the slick sound of Jensen’s fingers in his ass and watches him bite his own mouth red as he works himself on them. Jensen bends his knees and plants his feet against the bed, legs spread wide in an offer Jared can’t refuse. He lies down on his belly, feet hanging off the end of the bed, so he can get at Jensen’s balls, tight and firm in their sac, hot in his mouth. Jensen’s knuckles brush Jared’s chin as he goes still, stifling a protest and rubbing his face against the pillow to hide his flush. Jared lets go of his balls, blowing coolly against Jensen’s hot skin, and he can see the clench of Jensen’s hole up close now, the way the tense muscle wraps his fingers.
Jared presses his mouth there, kisses the bend of Jensen’s fingers and the soft skin above his hole, flicking his tongue against it until the chemical taste of the lube is too much for him. Then he rests his head on Jensen’s thigh and stares as he fingers himself open. “Is it okay if I watch?” Jared asks. “Does it bother you?”
Jensen hesitates, and Jared wonders what’s going through his head. “I don’t know,” Jensen answers quietly. “Should it?”
“I like watching you,” Jared tells him. “So, if you want me to, I will.”
“I don’t know,” says Jensen. “I’ve only done it when I was alone. But we can find out. Do you want to…” he presses his fingers more deeply into himself. “You could touch me, if you…”
Jared reaches out, replaces Jensen’s fingers with his own, slotting them into the slick heat of Jensen’s body. He’s had his hands, even his mouth, all over Jensen’s skin, but not inside. It’s different, hot and confusing and Jared’s not sure how to move to make it good. Jensen opens to him so easily, parting around Jared’s fingers, the outer ring of his hole squeezing tight. He looks up at Jensen, trying to gauge how it feels, in case Jensen lacks the words for it the way he does. “Is it different? Me touching you?” he asks quickly, rocking his fingers a little.
“Yes,” Jensen answers, tipping his head back on the pillow and arching onto Jared’s hand, his cock jutting up stiffly between them. Jared goes still, letting Jensen set his own pace and depth, but Jensen shakes his head. “No, move. Please. I like it.”
Jared bites his lip. Jensen is finally saying what he needs, and all Jared wants is to give it to him. But it’s so new, the smooth heat of Jensen’s ass, the clutch of his hole as Jared draws back. “Show me how,” he says, flexing his fingers and making Jensen gasp.
Jensen barely hesitates before covering Jared’s hand with his own, sliding two of his fingers in beside Jared’s, stretching himself wide open and guiding Jared to a steeper angle, a harder rhythm. Jared watches his expression change, pleasure pinking his cheeks, his mouth opening on a moan as Jensen’s untouched cock twitches and dribbles against the pale skin of his belly. “You could…” Jensen begins, squeezing Jared’s fingers, pressed so intimately inside him.
Their eyes meet, and Jensen doesn’t look away this time. “I want to,” he admits.
“I want you to.”
Jared’s dick is aching, needy, but he tries to go slowly as he pushes into Jensen’s ass. Jensen draws his knees up tight to his chest, and his breath comes out in a soft gasp as Jared sinks deep into him for the first time. It’s overwhelming, the hot flex of Jensen’s hole around him, the way he goes tight as Jared starts to pull back, dragging through the grip of his insides.
Jensen's hips hitch and he whimpers, dick smearing all over his belly. It jerks when Jared pushes in again, and Jensen murmurs encouragement, spreading his thighs wider, trying to bend his knees up higher, his whole body open, straining and begging. Jared has never seen him so honestly, unabashedly turned on.
He bends up to kiss Jensen, shoving his cock deeper, angling them closer without even meaning to. Jensen grunts against Jared's mouth, surprised, as Jared’s cock slides up differently inside him. His chest is hot against Jared's, flushed pink, and the flutter of his pulse is irresistable. Jared presses his lips to Jensen's neck, tasting it, feeling the beat of it on his tongue.
"Is this okay?" Jared asks. He can barely control the way he’s rutting deep inside Jensen, not pulling in and out anymore, just circling and curling his hips, trying to hit the right spot, trying not to come too soon.
Jensen manages a hazy nod, keening softly when Jared slips out of him for a moment. Jared looks down at his hole, empty and clenching, so desperate to be filled up again, and he wonders if Jensen’s thought about this, dreamed of Jared inside him this way. "Don't stop," Jensen pleads. His eyes are heavy-lidded, hips shifting up, and Jared leans back in, giving them both what they need, Jensen crying out as Jared hits deep inside him again.
"Jensen," Jared says, and closes his eyes, throwing his head back as he loses himself in the feel of Jensen clenching tight around him, hands gripping desperately at Jared's hips. He thrusts with abandon, bowing his back and leaning over Jensen, hearing nothing but Jensen's pleading noises, high and sweet, unrestrained.
Jensen comes on his dick with a shuddering cry, back arching up towards Jared and fingers digging into Jared’s hips. It's the most amazing thing Jared’s ever seen, and that’s all he can take. He comes uncontrollably, gasping into Jensen's mouth as his hips snap erratically, come welling out of him in hot bursts. He clings to Jensen as he comes down, unable to let go or get even an inch of space between them, wanting to touch him forever.
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Art Post
The large security crate is set up in one of the loading docks, and one of the dock workers Jared knows from playing in the holds presses in the key code. Through the small window of the stasis chamber within, he can see the slave’s face, smooth freckled cheeks and bowed pink mouth, and he frowns, a little concerned. “How old is he?” Jared asks.
“Old enough,” replies his father. “Legally, he’s several years older than you are. But being in stasis on the long trip, his youth has been preserved. We wanted him to be a good age to be a friend for you.” He calculates something in his head, dancing his fingers through the air as he counts. “He should look and act approximately fourteen. Although as we well know, boys grow up so quickly.” He ruffles Jared’s hair and Jared’s mother smiles fondly. To Jared, it feels as though his sixteenth birthday has taken ages to come, especially after he learned that his gift would be a body slave of his very own. “Congratulations, son. May you be a strong and fair master.”
The captain of the slaver leans in confidentially to Jared’s father, so that Jared is sure he isn’t supposed to hear what he says next. Which just makes him listen harder. “Of course we know the real reason we ship them in stasis, huh? Pesky child sexuality regulations. The contract is in your name, so you know he’s yours as much as your son’s until Jared turns 21. And he is a mighty pretty one.”
Father’s back stiffens, and his expression locks down tight, like it does when Jared gets the hiccups in front of company, an embarrassing breach of etiquette. “Thank you for your time, sir,” he says coolly. “If there’s anything more you require before you leave the station, my slaves have been keyed to your voice for the next two hours. They will be glad to see that your needs are met. Within reason.”
Jared feels as though he’s skating along the top of this conversation; he knows what they’re discussing, just enough to be uncomfortably reminded that there are many uses for a body slave of his own. He knows it isn’t the sort of thing his parents would ever talk about, but Jared wonders if they expect him to do that, to use his slave for sex. The boy in the stasis chamber looks so young, so vulnerable, dark lashes resting on his cheeks, slim shoulders visible through the window. In some households, he knows it’s commonplace; his friend Chad’s widowed father apparently has no compunction about bending his favorite slave over the dinner table if the mood takes him. Chad seems to find it hilarious, but Jared can’t imagine using someone that way, even a body slave who has been trained for it.
“Come along now, let’s get him up to medical and start revivification,” Jared’s father says, clapping his hands. Two workers maneuver the open security chamber onto a hover cart and point it toward the cargo transporter, strapping it in for the trip to the station’s medical deck, six levels up.
Jared watches it trundle off on the hover cart as Father leads the way to the passenger transporter. “My new slave,” he says tentatively, suddenly curious, “what’s his name?”
“Jensen,” replies Father. “His name is Jensen.”
***
Jared has never watched a reanimation before, and he’s sure it’s supposed to be about as exciting as watching paint dry, but somehow it’s fascinating, watching Jensen’s body drift in the tank as his blood is filtered clean of the chemicals that preserve it in the stasis period. He waits with bated breath for the first flicker of Jensen’s eyelids, the first steam of his breath against the inside of the oxygen mask. “Won’t he be scared?” Jared asks, remembering how his dog had whimpered after he was neutered, eyes big and confused. One of Jensen’s fingers twitches.
“It’s a very gradual process,” Dr. Morgan assures him. “He’ll come back to consciousness in stages so it won’t be too jarring. Just like waking up from a long strange dream. You don’t have to wait with him though. He won’t know you’re here for a few hours yet.”
“That’s okay,” says Jared. “I don’t mind waiting.”
“Suit yourself.” Dr. Morgan is the station’s chief medical officer, certified and assigned by the Central Government. He’s not like most of the other adults Jared knows; Dr. Morgan is casual and doesn’t take propriety so seriously. Jared suspects he’s not supposed to wait here like this, but he wants to be the first thing Jensen sees when he wakes up, not the beeping monitors or the forest of tubes. If Jensen is his, Jared’s possession and Jared’s responsibility, Jared has to do right by him. He has to make sure Jensen knows Jared’s there for him.
“You have to be a strong master,” Father said, when he announced that Jared would be receiving a new slave of his very own before beginning his first year of tertiary schooling. “You have to learn what is best for your slave and do your best to provide it. They have no other way to live than by your hand.”
Jared is close to dozing off when a more urgent beep begins from one of the many machines around the reanimation tank, signaling that Jensen’s heart is starting back up again. Jared glances around, looking for Dr. Morgan, but Dr. Morgan is attending a ship’s captain with food poisoning on the other side of the room. He nods briefly to Jared but doesn’t leave his other patient.
Jared watches as Jensen’s eyelids start to flutter, as he gulps in a first breath that frosts the inside of his face mask. His breathing evens out almost at once into the deep sound of sleep, and Jared deflates a little. It’s still going be a while before Jensen is fully awake and aware.
He’s back to skimming newsfeeds, thumbing through articles about a new art installation consisting of debris launched into space from Earth millenia ago, a games stadium financed by a famous pugilist and intended to bring tourists to a newly terraformed planet in the Theta system, and the hijacking of a transport vessel near Datura. Jared’s doing a second run through the headlines when he hears a tap on the glass of the revivification tank. Jensen is looking at him calmly, his eyes huge and distorted by the curve of the tank. He doesn’t seem frightened floating there, and Jared feels the strangest twinge of guilt for thinking that Jensen would react like a dog to waking up on the medical deck. They must have prepped him for this before he went into stasis.
“Dr. Morgan,” Jared calls out. “He’s awake!” He looks back at the tank. Jensen carefully averts his eyes this time, showing deference like a slave should as Dr. Morgan drains the tank and opens the hatch to raise Jensen out of it.
Jared’s heart is racing with excitement as Dr. Morgan does a cursory brain scan and reflex test, nodding at the results. He wonders how he should introduce himself to his new slave, how he can make himself seem both authoritative and kind. But Dr. Morgan takes care of that for him. “Jensen,” he says, “you’re on the Padalecki Shipping space station orbiting Trillium in the Beta system. I’m Dr. Morgan, and this fine young man is Jared Padalecki, your new master.”
Jensen nods and glances at Jared, eyes fixed on his chin to avoid causing offense. “Thank you, sir. I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Padalecki.” Jensen’s voice is soft, with a high nervous edge to it that makes him seem even younger.
“Please call me Jared,” says Jared cordially. “I’m very pleased to welcome you into my household, Jensen.”
“I’m honored to serve you, sir.” It’s obvious that Jensen’s been carefully trained, at least in the formalities of his station, and Jared’s a little grateful for that. He would have found it very difficult to punish an unruly slave, but his father would have been gravely disappointed if he failed to do so.
Jensen sits up on his pallet, skin drying quickly in the cool air of the med deck. He’s shivering a little, although he locks his elbows to make it show less. The only clothing allowed inside stasis chambers is a small undergarment held up by a drawstring, and it’s obvious Jensen needs a robe, preferably a heated one, before Jared can take him back to his quarters and the extensive wardrobe waiting for him there. “Hang on,” he says. “I’ll get you something to warm up in.”
Jensen folds his hands in his lap, looking down at his interlocking fingers. “Thank you very much, Jared.”
There’s a closet full of spare robes on the other side of the room, and even though it’s barely twenty paces, he can’t help looking back a few times, just to make sure Jensen’s still there, still real and breathing and his. His slave, his privilege, and ultimately his responsibility.
Jensen slips the robe on gratefully, and Jared watches the way he hugs himself into it, his narrow shoulders folding in, green eyes flickering up and down Jared’s body. “Do you need anything else?” Jared asks. “Are you hungry or anything?”
Jensen shakes his head. “Probably not for a while yet. The stasis does that. Thank you though, sir.”
“I don’t know if Dr. Morgan has anything else he needs to do or…”
“You can take Jensen to his quarters anytime you’d like, Jared,” Dr. Morgan says. “Keep him company and get him some real clothes. He’ll be fine. You kids keep out of trouble now.”
“Thanks,” Jared says, knowing a dismissal when he hears one.
***
It takes a few days for Jared to feel comfortable asking even basic questions about Jensen’s past, where he came from, what his childhood was like, even how old he really was before he was put into stasis and shipped here. And still there are other questions he wants to ask, less polite questions, about how Jensen ended up a slave, about the training that has made him both so polite and so politely distant, about what special skills Jensen was taught and how he has used them. It hasn’t escaped Jared’s notice that Jensen is very attractive. But his own curiosity about those things makes him uneasy. Even innocent questions about what his schooling was like push against a boundary Jared recognizes reflexively. All the slaves in their household were altered before he was even born, surgically adapted to their station in life so that they were usually literally deaf to the whims of a child, let alone his impertinent questions.
But Jensen is different. They can’t begin the standard slave surgeries until he reaches adulthood, and even so, he’s Jared’s; when the time comes, the voice he’ll be keyed to is Jared’s.
“Do you know anything about black holes?” Jared asks one day, poring over his holiday homework in preparation for the start of the term in ten days. Jensen is waiting attentively in the chair beside Jared’s bed, his hands folded politely in his lap.
“What in particular about black holes?”
Jared expands the diagram he’s annotating, its holographic surface rippling into midair so Jensen can see. “I’m supposed to be calculating the amount of force present at each of these points, but every time I think I’ve got it, I run the sim and it fails. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. I used to know this stuff cold.”
Jensen comes over to stand behind him at the desk. He frowns at the diagram, then reaches for the keyboard of the holo-generator. “May I?”
“Absolutely. That’s why I asked.” Jared grins as he gives up his spot at the desk.
Jensen’s fingers fly over the keyboard as he adjusts Jared’s equations, rebalances them and puts the new numbers into the sim. It’s successful. Jared sits up straighter. Biologically Jensen’s at least two years younger than he is, and yet he’s just finished Jared’s homework in under a minute. “How in Earth’s name did you do that?”
Jensen looks startled, almost like he’s being reprimanded. “You just had a couple of arithmetic errors throwing you off. Most of it was perfectly done. Master,” he adds hastily, a nervous habit he falls into when he thinks he’s done something wrong.
“Can you show me? That’s just, that’s really amazing, that you could figure that out so quickly.”
Jensen flushes pinkly across his cheeks. “Thank you. I was at the top of my class in physics.”
“I didn’t think that was the sort of thing they taught in slave schools.”
“It’s not. I mean before.” He doesn’t volunteer more, just begins running the sim backward to show Jared his mistakes. Jared puts a hand over Jensen’s on the keys, stilling him, and Jensen flinches the way he does whenever Jared touches him.
“You weren’t born a slave?” Jared asks, taking his hand away.
Jensen shakes his head. “I was repossessed for unpaid debts to the state,” he says dully. “The rest of my family was killed in an accident.”
Jared thinks back to his law course last year. “Wouldn’t you have become a ward of the state then? Not a slave? If you’re a child, you can’t be held accountable for your parents’ debts.”
“We lived in government housing which was destroyed in an electric fire. The investigating committee determined that my family was liable for the damage, so. I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear any of this.”
Jared shakes his head. “No, I want to.” He had assumed Jensen was born a slave, a blank slate on which to write obedience and etiquette. “Please. If it isn’t too difficult to talk about.”
Jensen takes a breath and continues. There’s something sharp, almost defensive in his voice. “Since we were held liable for property damage, all my family’s assets were sold to pay damages, and when material goods didn’t cover the cost, I became collateral.”
“What caused the fire?”
“Faulty wiring well past due for replacement.”
“How could you be liable for that?”
“The work order was improperly submitted. It’s just the way things go sometimes. Especially on planets out as far as the Omicron System.”
“Is that where you’re from?” Jared knows very little about Omicron. Many of the planets in the system had rejected terraforming, and those that had been able to support human communities were still sparsely populated. The vids he’s seen have been mostly focused on agriculture, since new grafting techniques developed there were one of the things that had made any of those planets habitable in the first place. “I’ve never been that far out.”
Jensen nods. “Most people from the inner planets haven’t. Of course, I never thought I’d come this far in, so it works both ways.”
“How long ago was it, the fire?” Jared asks, feeling like an idiot as soon as the words are out. “I mean, for you. How long does it seem for you?”
“It’s strange, being in stasis, knowing that legally years of my life have been taken away. I was in training for about a year, and there was several months in medical before that.”
“Medical?”
“I had burns over almost half my body. They weren’t sure I’d survive to pay anyone’s debt. But there are good med centers, even in Omicron.” He looks almost regretful, like some part of him wishes he’d died with the rest of his family instead of having his life forfeited to a stranger. But Jared, however impertinent he is, can’t ask about Jensen’s feelings on something like that.
“I’m sorry,” he says simply. He holds Jensen’s eyes for a moment before Jensen drops his gaze.
“I’m sorry,” Jensen replies. “I’ve distracted you from your schoolwork, master. I didn’t mean to do that.”
“It’s fine. I want to know about you.” Jared hesitates, unsure what to say next that won’t make Jensen more uncomfortable. He glances at the still-floating diagram, rotating slowly in its holo-field. “Can you tell me about black hole math now?”
“It would be my pleasure.”
***
Chad comes to stay for several days before the start of the school term. When he sees Jensen, he lets out a low whistle. “The vids did not do him justice,” he says. “Have you had him yet?”
Jared is just glad neither of his parents is present to hear. Chad’s own body slave, an older woman who was his nurse in his youth, stands passively behind him; she must be used to this sort of remark from Chad. But Jensen flinches at Jared’s side. “Please remember that Jensen can hear you just fine, Chad,” Jared says curtly.
“Aww, showing off how proper you are in front of the new help,” Chad laughs. “That’s just fucking adorable. Hello, Jensen.” He gives an exaggerated bow. “I trust that my compatriot Jared has never been anything less than perfectly decorous in his conduct towards you. That better, Jay?”
Jared sighs. “It’s fine.” He starts off talking about something else, trying to distract Chad from his intense staring at Jensen. It makes him feel odd and uncomfortable that anyone could treat Jensen the way Chad treats slaves on instinct. But Chad is unwilling to give up.
“So, is he a virgin?” Chad asks abruptly in the middle of a race on Jared’s game system, and Jared is so shocked that he crashes his hovercar. Jensen’s cheeks go red, and Jared can see him trying to school his expression to neutrality.
“I don’t know,” Jared says simply, thumbing the button that gives him a new hovercar. “That is not the sort of thing I feel obliged to ask.”
“You’re too squeamish, Jay.” Chad turns to Jensen. “You just say, ‘Jensen, are you a virgin?’ It’s not as though he can lie to you.”
“Maybe I don’t care.”
Chad shrugs. “You will as soon as your balls drop.” He laughs at his own joke and goes back to the game.
***
“I’m sorry about Chad,” Jared says. “He’s my friend, but I don’t condone the things he says.” Jensen is helping him get ready for bed, folding Jared’s clothes into the cleaning tray as Jared takes them off.
“I know,” Jensen replies.
Jared turns to look at him, and his hand brushes Jensen’s hip. Jensen flinches away. “I wouldn’t do those things to you.”
“You have the right to do whatever you want with me.”
“But I also have the responsibility to take care of you.”
“It’s important that you’re satisfied with my service,” Jensen says quietly. Jared grabs onto the shirt he’s folding, wanting Jensen’s full attention, but not wanting to make him flinch away again.
“Do you think I’m going to sell you?” he asks bluntly.
Jensen clenches his hands around the shirt. “When I was sold, I was instructed that your family was very particular about their slaves and I needed to be careful about my behavior. I want to live up to any expectations you might have.”
“I don’t have any expectations. Not like that. Not like, sexual things.”
Jensen flushes. “It’s not my place to judge what you want from me. Even if it’s sexual. I’ve been trained to serve in those ways as well.”
Jared shakes his head, trying not to imagine that sort of training. “I don’t intend to ask you for that. I’m not like Chad and his family.”
He thinks Jensen swallows a smile. “That much is obvious.”
***
Clematis Tertiary School sprawls across a hundred acres of grounds on Clematis, the capital planet in the Beta system, everything manicured green in between WestEarth-classical buildings. There are several other hovercars on the pad when they arrive, Jared and his mother with Jensen sitting quietly behind them in the passenger compartment. All his luggage has been shipped ahead, and Jensen disappears almost immediately with a member of the school maintenance staff to unpack. Jared watches him go with mild anxiety; they haven’t been apart for more than a few minutes since Jared’s birthday. But soon he’s swept up in a parade of his mother’s friends and acquaintances, who all remark on how grown-up he looks and introduce him to their sons in a blur of names and faces. Jared keeps smiling and nodding and trying to commit any of them to memory, but each boy in a school flight jacket starts to look like every other. Boys come from light years away to attend school here, and very few come from his tiny secondary school. The only familiar face he sees is Chad’s, and that’s hardly a comfort, especially after the last few days of defending Jensen from increasingly explicit sexual comments.
When Jared finally reaches the dorm and swipes his new pass across the door sensor, he’s greeted by a kind of chaos that rarely visits any part of Padalecki Shipping. The lobby is crowded with boys, their parents, their slaves, and a cargo hold’s worth of luggage. Jared, reciting his room number under his breath, weaves his way through to the elevator, glancing around for Jensen and not finding him in the melee.
The hallway on his floor is much quieter, and his mother exclaims, “Oh, Jared, the view must be wonderful from up here,” before he even opens his door.
She’s absolutely right. The large window reveals a seemingly endless stretch of rippling lawn, laid with courts and fields for a number of ancient sports. Jared gravitates towards it, pressing his hands against the force field that prevents him from falling six stories. It’s not until he turns around that he notices the room is spotless, the bed made up with his linens from home, his school satchel laid neatly on the desk. “Jensen?” he calls.
Jensen pokes his head around a door that must lead to the adjoining slave quarters. “Hello, Jared.”
“Did you do this?” Jared asks, then realizes how critical the question sounds and rephrases. “Did you set all my things up so neatly like this?”
“I did. The man from maintenance helped me get your luggage and let me in. It didn’t take long.”
“But everyone else seems to still be squabbling in the lobby.”
Jensen shrugs and looks at his feet. “I would not presume to explain the behavior of other masters with their slaves.”
“Thank you, Jensen,” says Jared, aware that there’s an extra edge of formality to both their voices in the presence of his mother, although they’ve become less formal with each other in the last few days, laughing about Chad’s behavior.
“You’re most welcome, master,” Jensen replies.
“I’m so glad this arrangement seems to be working out so well for both of you,” says Jared’s mother enthusiastically. “What a wonderful asset you are, Jensen.”
“Thank you very much, madam. I am only as much of an asset as Jared allows me to be by his fine ownership.”
“Very good, Jensen,” says Jared’s mother. “Very good. I hope you may be a lifelong companion to my son.”
Jensen smiles, guarded but sweet, and Jared hopes he understands what a coveted commodity Jared’s mother’s approval is.
***
Jared has never considered himself a shy person. He’s always had friends at school, other kids to study with and take day trips with and spend time in the dorms with. But this is ten times the size of his secondary school, one dorm alone housing all of the three hundred boys who make up his class. “I’m not sure how I’ll fit in here,” he confesses to Jensen as he adjusts the display settings on his new desk.
“I have great faith in your ability to make others feel at ease,” Jensen replies.
Jared catches his eye for a moment and smiles. “Thanks.”
Jensen nods and looks away.
“I don’t know,” Jared sighs. “Did you ever go to a big school like this?”
“No. Colonies in the Omicron system are so spread out, we only have local, planetbound schools to serve the towns. And it’s hard to get access to system jumpers except on Saguaro, the capital. So people can’t travel like they do here; everyone they know would age and die while they were en route. So there’s nothing this… grand.”
Jared wonders what Jensen’s home world looked like, isolated and hard to reach, and he starts idly tapping through an atlas, zooming in on the Omicron system and pausing to look at Jensen. “Can you tell me about it? Where you grew up? I hardly know anything about where you come from.”
“If you’d like,” Jensen replies, frowning in confusion. “You’ll stop me if you find it boring?”
“I can’t imagine I’ll be bored,” Jared replies, turning over the desk to Jensen, who thumbs his way into a close-up of a small, dusty planet called Ocotillo, his deft fingers moving to highlight a town called Silver Hill, population at last census 2406 persons. Jensen pulls up a pictorial model of the town, walking his fingers through the center square, turning them so Jared can see all the colorful shops crowded together on all sides. Jensen smiles as he spreads the image out to the width of the desk, giving Jared a bird’s eye view of Jensen’s hometown.
It’s an unfamiliar word, “hometown,” to a kid like Jared whose life has been circumscribed by the edges of a space station, where you could walk days’ worth of circles without passing the same way twice, but there’s nothing like a “town”. “My mom was in the local government,” Jensen explains, absently moving down a side street in the hologram. “She ran the council of agriculture and resources, so we were always traveling out to local ranches and farms, testing the water supply from the Burbish River in different places. I saw a lot of the surrounding area that way.” Jensen zooms out, points to the rolling hills, patchy green with livestock fields. “Up here they kept goats, since it was so rocky, even after all the terraforming crews came through a few hundred years ago. Have you ever met a goat?”
Jared tries to remember. Traders come through with live cargo fairly often, not all of it in stasis or cold storage, so Jared’s met more cows and alpacas and chickens than an average boy of his social standing, but no goats. “I saw one in a museum once. It was stuffed, Ancient Earth style. It was sort of weird.”
“Yeah, they’re a little different when they’re alive.” Jensen smiles wistfully. “They can climb anything, I don’t know how they do it in the high hills without falling straight down the sides, but they just hop right up on top. When I was little, before my sister was born, my mom would sometimes leave me with the goatherds, and I would just watch them follow the goats wherever they went, making sure they didn’t get into trouble.” He spins the hologram again, and looks back down into the town. “I thought maybe I would be a goatherd when I grew up. It’s not a prestigious job, but it’s very important where I come from. The planet’s still not thoroughly stable, and if the food supply runs short, well, that’s likely to be the end of Silver Hill. And they got to be outside all the time.” Jensen pauses again and bites his lip. “Is it all right for me to tell you about these things? I know it isn’t in the protocols anywhere, and I don’t want to bore you or distract you from your work.”
“You’re not boring me,” Jared replies. “I’ve never been to Omicron, I’ve never seen a goat. I’m learning. Tell me more.”
Jensen’s cheeks go pink. “So, over here are the soybean fields,” he continues, focusing intently on the hologram and not Jared’s face. Jared watches the way Jensen lights up describing his life before he was a slave, and he aches inside, wondering if Jensen can see it too, how different he is when he talks about freedom.
***
Jared is playing an ancient earth sport called hockey out on the expansive games fields, just learning the basics with his class, all these new skills and activities they never had at his secondary school. The other boy doesn't mean to hit him with his stick, surely, but there's a loud crack of impact, and suddenly Jared's ankle won't hold him. He crumples onto the grass, howling with pain, and his entire side gathers around him, shouting for a medic. It's only the second week of school, and most of their faces are still only hazily familiar, so when Jensen pushes through the huddle of boys, wild eyed with concern, his is the hand Jared reaches for. Jensen helps him up onto one foot, his narrow shoulders bearing most of Jared's weight as Jared leans into him. The other boys stand by gawking as Jared and Jensen hobble off, the games teacher approaching at a leisurely pace. "Tell him you need to go to the infirmary immediately," Jensen hisses.
Jared, shocked at the firmness of Jensen's tone, passes the message on meekly. The teacher pokes at his ankle, making Jared cry out, and then he waves them on without a word.
"Why'd you tell me to say that?” Jared asks. “He would have been able to tell."
"I'm sorry if I spoke out of turn, master," Jensen says quietly, resettling Jared's arm on his shoulder as they approach the main school building, which houses the infirmary. “I was afraid he would keep you there longer looking it over. But it’s much harder for a person to argue with a direct request. And you need to have it treated as soon as possible if it’s broken. I just wanted to help.”
Afterwards, when Jared’s settled in the infirmary and Jensen has reluctantly gone back to their room, Jared realizes it’s the first time Jensen has willingly touched him, and the memory of Jensen’s hand squeezed tight on his shoulder makes him smile in spite of the pain in his healing ankle.
***
One night while they’re doing homework, Jared touches Jensen’s elbow and Jensen doesn’t flinch away. So he leaves his fingers pressed to the thin fabric of Jensen’s shirt, conscious of Jensen leaning towards him, tilting until their shoulders touch, the whole of their upper arms aligned. His face is so close, his mouth dark pink in the glow of the diagram Jared’s working on at his desk. Jared wants him, this guilty pull in his stomach that has only been getting harder to ignore as they know each other better. He can’t seem to stop looking at Jensen’s lips. Neither of them are paying attention to the diagram.
“Jared,” Jensen says quietly. “Can I do something outside the bounds of my requested service?”
“Sure,” Jared replies. He thinks maybe Jensen wants an off-world pass, some kind of freedom Jared has always taken for granted. But then Jensen kisses him.
His mouth is so soft, fitting over Jared’s, opening slow and sweet. Jared licks the wet seam of Jensen’s lips, pressing between and inside, and Jensen sighs and clings closer to him, one hand around the back of Jared’s neck pulling him in. He kisses like he’s been starved for it, sucking at Jared’s lips, licking into him. Jared grips his shoulders to keep his hands from wandering; he didn’t ask for this, and he wants to do it on Jensen’s terms.
The edge of the desk digs awkwardly into Jared’s side, and he makes a uncomfortable noise. Jensen rears back suddenly, looking lost, shocked at his own boldness. He touches Jared’s lips, then his own, and the fullness of his mouth makes Jared want to kiss him again, kiss him and not stop. “Was that all right?” Jensen asks.
“Do it again,” Jared replies.
“You should finish your work, shouldn’t you?”
Jared bites his lip. The assignment is due early in the morning, and he knows he should finish. “I’ll do it as fast as possible.”
He has Jensen in his bed an hour later, laid out on his back, opening for Jared’s kisses. Jared is trying so hard to keep a hairsbreadth of distance between their bodies, propped on one elbow and leaning carefully in, not letting himself press down flat into the warmth of Jensen’s body. He doesn’t want to spook Jensen, doesn’t want to do anything that might make Jensen want to tell him no. Because Jensen probably won’t tell him no, even like this, even flushed and gasping as Jared breaks away to nuzzle at his cheek. He’s a slave, and he takes his position more seriously than he takes himself. But finally Jared’s arm starts to go numb, and he has to change position. “Will you tell me if you don’t like this, any of this?” Jared asks.
Jensen swallows, and Jared watches the bob of his adam’s apple. “Are you ordering me to tell you?”
Jared considers this. “Would that make it easier, if it were an order?”
“Yes,” Jensen replies solemnly. “I want to be very sure I’m fulfilling your wishes. I have a job to do as your slave, and it’s important to me.”
“Then I’m ordering you to tell me if I do anything you don’t like. Anything at all. You have to tell me, as your master.”
Jensen closes his eyes, and Jared is close enough to feel the shiver that goes through him, the relaxation that follows. “Yes, master,” Jensen whispers, and the way he says it hits Jared in the gut, hot and lowdown.
Jared brings his lips to rest at the corner of Jensen’s jaw, nursing there, pulling a bruise to the surface of Jensen’s pale skin. He grabs onto Jared’s shoulders, pulling Jared in tighter, trembling and tense again. Their hips collide, legs tangling, and Jared can feel the fullness of Jensen’s cock against his belly. He tries to line it up with his own, clumsy and uncertain, wriggling until he finds an angle that makes Jensen gasp, Jared rocking down into him. It’s good, rubbing up against the heat of another person’s body, better than any of the simulations his room at home cooked up, better because he can feel Jensen’s punched-out breaths and the shudder that he can’t quite suppress. Jensen’s slim thighs squeeze around his, and his kisses grow clumsy and messy, his breath hot and harsh against Jared’s lips as Jared presses in as close as he can get.
His dick aches, rubbing in the softness of his sleep pants, bunching the fabric around the swollen head. He ruts down hard into Jensen, and orgasm overtakes him like a crashing wave. His pants are sticky with his come, and his dick is too sensitive to touch, but when he rolls to the side, Jensen gives a helpless little whimper and bites his lip, his fingers clenching at his sides. Jared realizes he wants to touch himself, but he isn’t sure if he should. It’s heartbreaking and confusing watching Jensen struggle with it, his face flushed and his eyes dark with want. “Can I touch you?” Jared asks. He has to, it seems like. “Only if you want, but I…”
Jensen wiggles his pants down enough that his dick bobs free, stiff and pink and slick at the head. “If you want,” he says softly, and his eyes close as Jared’s hand wraps him, dragging up the length of his dick. Jensen shivers and moans as Jared strokes him again, up and down like he does to himself, and it’s over before Jared feels he’s looked his fill, Jensen tidying himself back into his pants and going to find wet cloth to wipe his come from the webs of Jared’s fingers. “Did you want me to help you change your clothes?” Jensen asks hesitantly. His eyes fix on the wet crotch of Jared’s pants, and Jared blushes, realizing how sticky and squishy and gross it is. He just came all over himself from rubbing off on his slave.
“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” Jensen whispers, and it’s as bold a thing as he’s ever said to Jared, unprompted and perfectly honest.
“Thanks,” Jared replies, and Jensen looks up to meet his eyes for a moment, smiling meekly. He lets Jensen help him out of his wet pants, tossing them into the laundry chute beside the closet. He’s still holding the wet cloth, and Jared nods for Jensen to use it. He only hesitates for a moment before wiping a smooth, cool stroke down the soft, sensitive length of Jared’s dick. Jared’s afraid he’ll start to go hard again, just from Jensen’s hand on him, but Jensen just gives him two more businesslike swipes up and down his belly and backs off. “Thanks,” Jared says again.
He likes that Jensen doesn’t ask before leaning in for another kiss.
***
It only gets harder to treat Jensen like a normal slave as the term goes on. Jared wants to reach out to him during cultural events in the school amphitheater, nuzzle into the side of his neck as the actors unfold another Ancient WestEarth tragedy on the stage. He wants to catch Jensen’s eye when one of his classmates makes a joke, laugh with him instead of ignoring his existence. Jensen draws his attention just being in the same room, but Jared knows that speaking to him, even acknowledging him, means something different because he’s a slave. The more intimately he knows Jensen the more difficult that is to accept.
“Why doesn’t Jensen come to class with you?” Chad asks, two months into the term. His slave, Helen, is rubbing his shoulders in the middle of the stretch of grass in the shadow of their dorm. Jensen is cross-legged on the grass just inside Jared’s peripheral vision. He could ask Jensen to do that kind of thing for him in public - he could ask Jensen to do a lot of things for him in public - but it feels wrong, having Jensen’s hands on him in front of other people when Jared aches to take him back to the dorm and touch him in private, not as slave and master. And there’s so much he still doesn’t know about Jensen’s body, primly covered up in brown linen slave garb, school-issue, so that no one who sees him running errands on Jared’s behalf could ever mistake him for anything but what he is.
“He does other things for me. I’m happy to carry my own things.”
“But he hasn’t been altered yet! You could have him do real work with you, not just fetch and carry. You wouldn’t have to be whispering to him all the time to get him to understand things.”
“I don’t want to,” says Jared firmly. “Jensen and I are fine the way we are.” He’s seen the way the boys who take their slaves to class are, hunched up beside them, hissing angrily when a slave taking notes by lip-reading misses a word in the lecture. Jared can’t imagine trying to learn that way is good for anyone. But he doesn’t judge. Everyone’s treatment of their slaves is their own right, even though it’s hard not to flinch sometimes when Chad smacks Helen for including the wrong fruit for his lunch. At least that kind of violence doesn’t happen often; unlike in secondary school, where the biggest show of strength was having your family’s slave fight someone else’s to a bloody pulp.
Chad huffs in disbelief and tells Helen, “Harder.”
Jared looks at the position of the suns overhead, then at Jensen, who is sitting so calmly still in the grass. “Did I have an appointment?” he asks, letting Jensen know that he’s ready for a break.
Jensen thumbs through Jared’s schedule on his tablet. “Yes, you do,” he says matter-of-factly. “In about ten minutes. Perhaps we should hurry.” Letting Jared know that he wants to go as much as Jared does, a simple but effective code.
Chad clicks his tongue. “Come on now, Jared. You have to train your slave a little better in keeping track of your appointments.”
“He is doing exactly what I want him to,” Jared replies, brushing down his trousers. Jensen follows him back to the dorm, two paces behind. Jared can feel his eyes, and he wants to turn and look, but he won’t, he’s not supposed to look at his slave like that. They take the elevator up, and Jared is glad the hallway is deserted at midday so he can rush for his door, Jensen’s footsteps quick and steady behind him, Jensen crowding at his back as Jared pushes through and into his warmly sunlit room. It’s still so exciting, seeing Jensen eager for him, seeing him forego distance and propriety to press close and whisper, “Hurry.”
“Was this what you were thinking of?” Jared asks, holding out his arms so that Jensen can step into them, his face tilted up and his mouth sweetly open.
“It was,” Jensen replies, and he rolls up onto the balls of his feet to kiss Jared’s mouth, bold enough now that he barely hesitates.
“I order you,” Jared says, by rote now, but still vehement, “I order you to tell me if I do anything you don’t like. Anything at all.” He whispers the words into the sensitive skin below Jensen’s ear, and Jensen shivers, breath wheezed out as Jared’s hold on him changes. “Do you want to lie down?” Jared asks. He tries to avoid asking direct questions because sometimes Jensen still goes flustered when Jared wants to know what he wants. But he’s too turned on for anything but bluntness, the splash of sunlight on Jensen’s reddening cheeks driving him wild.
“I want everything,” Jensen replies, and his mouth slides over Jared’s again, tongue slipping in, small, lithe body pressing close and warm. Jared grasps at Jensen’s loose shirt, holding onto fistfuls of fabric at his lower back. He likes the idea of “everything” and he’s not even sure what that means.
Jared stumbles and Jensen stumbles with him, a little giddy suddenly. Something clatters to the floor from the disturbed desk, and Jensen tenses, ready to reach and pick it up, but Jared kisses him again. “No, no, if you want to be with me right now, I want you to be with me. All with me. You don’t have to think about anything else.”
“That’s an order too, right?” Jensen teases, and there’s something so good about Jensen laughing at him, making it all feel so easy.
Jared kisses him, drawing him in close and tugging at Jensen’s shirt until he can get to the warm skin of Jensen’s lower back, sticky with sweat. He strokes the changing texture of the skin, moving back and forth, from the slight roughness of the skin graft on the left where the worst of the burns were to the smooth stretch on the right. These are the things he’s learning about Jensen’s body, things that weren’t obvious the first time he saw Jensen naked, in the foggy fluid of a stasis tank. Jared wants to know Jensen’s every scar and freckle and irregular joint. He’s never been much for detail, preferring the big picture and underlying principles, but with Jensen he’s starting to care, hungry for detail. He pulls the simple uniform shirt up higher, exposing the pale stretch of Jensen’s belly, still a little soft and totally hairless, betraying his biological age as much as anything about him does. They have to stop kissing for Jared to take it off him completely, their breaths mingling raggedly as Jared works the fastenings on Jensen’s clothes, pulling Jensen down onto the bed.
Jensen’s cock is hard beneath the fly of his loose uniform slacks, fitting into Jared’s hand as soon as they’re off. Jared strokes up the warm length of it, twists below the head in the way that always makes Jensen moan. “What should I do?” Jared asks, when they’re both naked, no diplomatic disguise to the quest for answers, no trick to make Jensen tell him the truth. Jared knows he’s innocent, even a little naïve, about sexuality, and Jensen, by contrast, has had months of training to help him answer exactly that question.
Jensen’s cheeks go pink in response, and he drops his eyes as he says, “Don’t stop touching me.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere.” He arches into Jared’s hand on his cock, grabs for Jared’s hip to return the favor, spreading his legs to expose the flushed sac of his balls. Jared feels bold enough to press one fingertip behind, soft skin and then the tight clench of Jensen’s hole. Jensen makes a surprised little noise and bites his lip. His hole shivers under Jared’s touch, and Jared hesitates. He wants to touch Jensen inside, but it doesn’t seem like it can be so simple.
“Remember, you’re under orders to tell me if you don’t like it,” Jared says, and Jensen looks up at him. Jared goes back to circling his fingers on the thin skin of Jensen’s balls.
“It’s not that,” Jensen says. “It’s complicated. I don’t know if I can explain.”
Jared can see his cock wilting, and that’s all the explanation he needs to back off, settling in at Jensen’s side and nuzzling at his neck. “Was it part of your training?”
“Yes,” replies Jensen. “Many things were. There’s a lot you have to learn, if you might serve as a pleasure slave.”
A sour feeling starts to build in Jared’s gut. “How did they train you?”
Jensen shakes his head a little, knowing instinctively what the question means. “No one touched me. They wouldn’t have been allowed to. But they gave demonstrations on slaves who were of age, and they had instruments for us to practice with, toys. We had to keep working with them on our own, in private, until we could satisfy ourselves that way, or at least take it without looking pained. At first I hated it, anyone telling me how I should touch myself, even when I was alone. But they didn’t watch us. And I was exceptionally good with the toys.”
He says it so matter-of-factly, but Jared’s whole body burns as he imagines Jensen getting himself off that way, fucking himself on a substitute cock and liking it. “What was it you were so good at?”
Jensen tilts his head, letting Jared suck at the lobe of his ear. “I could show you, if you wanted.”
“Would you like to do that?” Jared squeezes Jensen’s hip, watching his cock rise again but not quite touching it.
Jensen makes a low noise of agreement. “Anything that would make you happy, Jared,” he says, but it’s clear he’s not only doing it for Jared as he shifts restlessly against the bedclothes.
“It would make me very happy.” He strokes the inside of Jensen’s thigh, pale soft skin no one else gets to see.
There’s a small bottle of lubricant beside Jared’s bed, and now he’s glad he doesn’t use it much, so there’s more than enough for Jensen to slick his fingers and the small opening of his asshole. His hand moves slowly between his legs, stroking and teasing, and Jared looks up from the spectacle of it to find Jensen’s eyes on him, watching low-lidded. He’s eager to please, touching himself all splayed out this way, letting Jared watch every move he makes as he sinks a finger into himself.
Jensen’s mouth tightens uncomfortably on that first press in, and he pauses, waiting for a feeling he must know is coming. He takes a deep breath through his nose, and his eyes catch Jared’s for a solid three seconds before he looks shyly away again, like a good slave. Jared wants to grab hold of his chin and meet his eyes, make them equals here even if they can’t be anywhere else. But then Jensen’s eyes slip shut, and he twists his finger inside himself, gasping softly. His eyebrows crumple inward, and he’s quick to add a second finger, pulling out and then sliding them both in deep.
Jared wants to ask how it feels, but he won’t risk Jensen taking it as an order to share. Instead he listens to the slick sound of Jensen’s fingers in his ass and watches him bite his own mouth red as he works himself on them. Jensen bends his knees and plants his feet against the bed, legs spread wide in an offer Jared can’t refuse. He lies down on his belly, feet hanging off the end of the bed, so he can get at Jensen’s balls, tight and firm in their sac, hot in his mouth. Jensen’s knuckles brush Jared’s chin as he goes still, stifling a protest and rubbing his face against the pillow to hide his flush. Jared lets go of his balls, blowing coolly against Jensen’s hot skin, and he can see the clench of Jensen’s hole up close now, the way the tense muscle wraps his fingers.
Jared presses his mouth there, kisses the bend of Jensen’s fingers and the soft skin above his hole, flicking his tongue against it until the chemical taste of the lube is too much for him. Then he rests his head on Jensen’s thigh and stares as he fingers himself open. “Is it okay if I watch?” Jared asks. “Does it bother you?”
Jensen hesitates, and Jared wonders what’s going through his head. “I don’t know,” Jensen answers quietly. “Should it?”
“I like watching you,” Jared tells him. “So, if you want me to, I will.”
“I don’t know,” says Jensen. “I’ve only done it when I was alone. But we can find out. Do you want to…” he presses his fingers more deeply into himself. “You could touch me, if you…”
Jared reaches out, replaces Jensen’s fingers with his own, slotting them into the slick heat of Jensen’s body. He’s had his hands, even his mouth, all over Jensen’s skin, but not inside. It’s different, hot and confusing and Jared’s not sure how to move to make it good. Jensen opens to him so easily, parting around Jared’s fingers, the outer ring of his hole squeezing tight. He looks up at Jensen, trying to gauge how it feels, in case Jensen lacks the words for it the way he does. “Is it different? Me touching you?” he asks quickly, rocking his fingers a little.
“Yes,” Jensen answers, tipping his head back on the pillow and arching onto Jared’s hand, his cock jutting up stiffly between them. Jared goes still, letting Jensen set his own pace and depth, but Jensen shakes his head. “No, move. Please. I like it.”
Jared bites his lip. Jensen is finally saying what he needs, and all Jared wants is to give it to him. But it’s so new, the smooth heat of Jensen’s ass, the clutch of his hole as Jared draws back. “Show me how,” he says, flexing his fingers and making Jensen gasp.
Jensen barely hesitates before covering Jared’s hand with his own, sliding two of his fingers in beside Jared’s, stretching himself wide open and guiding Jared to a steeper angle, a harder rhythm. Jared watches his expression change, pleasure pinking his cheeks, his mouth opening on a moan as Jensen’s untouched cock twitches and dribbles against the pale skin of his belly. “You could…” Jensen begins, squeezing Jared’s fingers, pressed so intimately inside him.
Their eyes meet, and Jensen doesn’t look away this time. “I want to,” he admits.
“I want you to.”
Jared’s dick is aching, needy, but he tries to go slowly as he pushes into Jensen’s ass. Jensen draws his knees up tight to his chest, and his breath comes out in a soft gasp as Jared sinks deep into him for the first time. It’s overwhelming, the hot flex of Jensen’s hole around him, the way he goes tight as Jared starts to pull back, dragging through the grip of his insides.
Jensen's hips hitch and he whimpers, dick smearing all over his belly. It jerks when Jared pushes in again, and Jensen murmurs encouragement, spreading his thighs wider, trying to bend his knees up higher, his whole body open, straining and begging. Jared has never seen him so honestly, unabashedly turned on.
He bends up to kiss Jensen, shoving his cock deeper, angling them closer without even meaning to. Jensen grunts against Jared's mouth, surprised, as Jared’s cock slides up differently inside him. His chest is hot against Jared's, flushed pink, and the flutter of his pulse is irresistable. Jared presses his lips to Jensen's neck, tasting it, feeling the beat of it on his tongue.
"Is this okay?" Jared asks. He can barely control the way he’s rutting deep inside Jensen, not pulling in and out anymore, just circling and curling his hips, trying to hit the right spot, trying not to come too soon.
Jensen manages a hazy nod, keening softly when Jared slips out of him for a moment. Jared looks down at his hole, empty and clenching, so desperate to be filled up again, and he wonders if Jensen’s thought about this, dreamed of Jared inside him this way. "Don't stop," Jensen pleads. His eyes are heavy-lidded, hips shifting up, and Jared leans back in, giving them both what they need, Jensen crying out as Jared hits deep inside him again.
"Jensen," Jared says, and closes his eyes, throwing his head back as he loses himself in the feel of Jensen clenching tight around him, hands gripping desperately at Jared's hips. He thrusts with abandon, bowing his back and leaning over Jensen, hearing nothing but Jensen's pleading noises, high and sweet, unrestrained.
Jensen comes on his dick with a shuddering cry, back arching up towards Jared and fingers digging into Jared’s hips. It's the most amazing thing Jared’s ever seen, and that’s all he can take. He comes uncontrollably, gasping into Jensen's mouth as his hips snap erratically, come welling out of him in hot bursts. He clings to Jensen as he comes down, unable to let go or get even an inch of space between them, wanting to touch him forever.
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Art Post