House Of The Rising Sun (1/?)
Title: House Of The Rising Sun (1/?)
Pairing: Daniel Agger/Fernando Torres
Rating NC-17 overall
Summary: It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy and god I know I’m one. Daniel Agger lost himself a long time ago to London’s most notorious brothel and now he knows he has to go back or stay haunted by his past forever.
Disclaimer: Just Fiction. Very, very loosely inspired by a handful of lines in the song of the same name. This is a glorified prologue really but oh well.
Sometimes the memory of a place stays with you far longer than it ought to. You can close your eyes and see it vividly behind your shut lids, hear the raucous din of its atmosphere and smell the scent you associate so closely with all that it is. You see faces; some swimming in faded memory like a flower might wilt in the autumn, others bold and startlingly clear, the lines of their features etched into your minds eye.
The House of The Rising Sun was that place for Daniel.
It was a place filled to the brim with pariahs and connoisseurs of pleasure and of whores and gamblers and men who liked the debauched.
If you flipped open the pages of a history book and read everything there was to know about courtesans and Venice and Rome and the great Italian cities that belonged to its artists and great thinkers, you would come across a thousand descriptions of places such as The Rising Sun. If you read about the great bawdy brothels in London in the 17th century or the exotic whore houses in Paris and in Amsterdam you would find a great many details on the Rising Sun. It was eternal, immortal, a place quite removed from time and stemmed from the great debauched orgies of Rome herself. It was a place that had laid its foundations in the past, a throw back to times when vices were still vices and sin was sin. It was a place where scandal and obscenity and licentious eroticism made you feel alive and as immortal as the wares it presents. It was, after all, the oldest profession in the world.
The Rising Sun was decadent, a revelry for the senses and every whim, every desire, every messed up, frowned upon, craving could be catered for at the Rising Sun and it had been the down fall and ruin of countless, nameless, faceless people. Daniel knew he was one of them.
It was a secret place, a place you only ever hear about by word of mouth. It was like fight club, its members and its clients only ever told those who they deemed worthy, never just in passing, never just by accident. The Rising Sun was a secret and a secret worth keeping, half of its appeal came in the way it was a place few got to venture.
He’d heard of it long before he visited. His connection, Steven Gerrard, told him only because he knew that Daniel was bored, of life, not in the passing kind of boredom that consumes the senses and unrests the mind for a fleeting moment; the true sense of the word. He had finished College and University because that was what they all expected of him and now he was stuck. He was bored. He had unlimited access to great sums of money, an access that had seen his small gambling interest turn into a habit he could not break and a small niggling voice in that back of his head that demanded more than this.
Daniel had wanted more than the mundane, trivial day to day bullshit. He’d wanted more than a simple sunrise and a sleepy sunset. He’d wanted nights that lasted forever and he’d wanted to see things and do things but in the society he kept there was simply nothing to do. He’d been restless, aching and yearning and craving something to make life the revelry it had once been and Steven Gerrard had seen fit to give it to him.
The night had been dark, rain had been lashing down and soaking the streets in a slick sheen of shimmering wetness, drowning the concrete and slanting down over the unassuming street. It was a street like any other in the city of London, residential, run down, lost and abandoned by the wealth of the city; New Orleans Street.
He’d wandered down the street and sat perched on the wall beneath a street lamp on the opposite side of the road for a long time, staring back at the old Victorian house opposite him. To the unknowing eye it looked abandoned, boarded over and closed to visitors but he knew what lay inside. Eventually, after several cigarettes he pushed away from the wall and crossed the empty street. He pulled open the creaking gate and skipped down the steps to the basement entrance.
When the door opened it was the smell that hit him first, an erotic blend of alcohol and sweat and undeniable sex. It was the heat that hit him next. It was the kind of humid heat that sticks to your skin and makes you feel slick with other people’s sweat that clings to you.
The man looked at him, his face almost alarmingly threatening as he held his hand out wordlessly. Daniel blinked and reached into his pocket for the plain white card engraved only with The House Of The Rising Sun in sweeping black letters. No address, no emblem, no coat of arms, no contact details; nothing. Secrecy was paramount. The man accepted it, turned it over in his hands before nodding, sliding the card into a bowl on the side and smiling back at him.
He was welcomed in with open arms after that; a wide smile flashed to him from the man who admitted him, clearly a bouncer and menacing even as he smiled. The man wondered down a dimly lit corridor that was shrouded in lengths of lace; draped over lamps and wall hung photos of artistically arranged naked bodies. They passed a staircase; lined in a thick, deep red carpet and the sounds from above were unmistakable.
At the end of the corridor the man pushed open a door and turned back to flash another gleaming white smile at him. This room was large, music was playing and couches, bean bags, cushions and chairs were littered around the room. Scattered over every service, sitting at every table and drinking expensive looking drinks or smoking cigarettes there were people; lots of people. Some were sat around a card table, laughing, joking, and playing high stakes bets as pretty faced women and baby faced men draped themselves over the clients at the moss green table. In one corner there was smoke rising, thick as a cloud, several varyingly shaped and coloured bongs sitting on a low crouching dark mahogany table. The people on the couches and cushions and littered around the room were in various states of undress, varying degrees of drunk and wrapped tightly up in the people paid to cater to their every whim.
They were laughing, talking, watching with lustful eyes as the whores and the dancers simpered through the room, from couch to couch, from cushion to cushion, wearing next to nothing and holding trays of drinks or foods or drugs. In the corner, on a wide flat futon couch a couple were kissing, fervently, hands wondering, mouths travelling and a man was bending down to whisper something to them, gesturing to the ceiling. The couple left, hand in hand to ascend the stairs.
“Welcome to the House of the Rising Sun,” a cool, smooth voice said to him and Daniel snapped his face around.
The man that greeted him was wearing a dark red shirt and smooth black trousers and his dark, grey flecked hair was styled perfectly. His accent was exotic, Spanish perhaps; Daniel didn’t know but he knew the man was the boss, it was obvious, from the flash golden Rolex on his wrist to the thick golden chain around his tanned neck he carried himself like a king here and this was most definitely his court of sensations.
“I’m Mou, welcome to my humble abode,” the man said “this is Martin, he’ll get you a drink and show you around, please by all means enjoy yourself, there are no laws here just three very important rules, break them and you’ll regret it,” he flashed him a smile and despite the ringing threat in his tone Daniel smiled back.
“What do you drink?” The man, Martin, asked
“Beer, anything,” Daniel shrugged
Mou smiled “Anything it is then,” he said to Martin before turning back to Daniel as Martin disappeared to do his bidding “No brawling in my house, you leave everything as you find- it I’m talking no bruising my hands and no stealing from my home” he said “and of course no soliciting outside of it, what happens in The Rising Sun, stays in the Rising Sun, my hands belong here,”
When Daniel quirked his eyebrow Mou smiled almost indulgently “the whores, the dancers, the entertainers if you will, we call them hands,” he grinned and when Dan nodded Mou continued “they do not leave and they do nothing for free, they are… unavailable to reality and reality begins the moment you step outside my door, understand?”
Daniel let it sink in and slowly nodded his head “perfectly,”
Martin, the man with a predatory smile and gleaming shaved head handed him a bottle of beer and beckoned him away from Mou, with a nod of his head in respect to this man whom so obviously commanded respect, he followed.
They went to an empty couch, the futon previously occupied by the couple now no doubt upstairs in one of the many other rooms. Martin sat down beside him.
“What’s your name?” he asked his accent thick, foreign, but nice and rough in a way that reminded Daniel of fights and fucking. He supposed his was the perfect accent.
“Daniel,” He responded.
“What do you like Daniel, what brings you into the sun?”
Daniel took a gulp of his drink and turned his face to the man at his side “I don’t know, what would you recommend?”
Martin smiled and shrugged one of his shoulders lazily “There are bedrooms upstairs, if you wanted we could take you next door and you could have your pick, there is a bar upstairs too, with a stage and poles and shows that will make you harder than you’ve ever been, there are pools, Jacuzzi’s, massage tables, BDSM rooms, rooms for every fetish imaginable, you snap your fingers and flash the cash and you can have anything you want,”
Daniel inhaled and shrugged again “I gamble,” he had said
Martin smiled wolfishly “The stakes are high Daniel, don’t get swept away,”
Daniel snorted “I have the money if you have the thrill,” he said
Martin’s answering laugh was ringing and deep and Daniel found himself smiling along with him “money no problem Daniel, are you a rich man?”
Daniel shook his head “I’m not rich,” he said before he took a long gulp of his beer “but my father is,”
“Ah, yours are no fresh crisp notes from the bank, yours is old money!” he said
“Old and corrupt but not nearly corrupt enough,”
Martin narrowed his eyes and smiled “well then, this way Daniel,”
He’d drunk himself into a comfortably glowing haze, had gambled and lost a great deal more than he had won but that was half the fun, even he could not waste his father’s money faster than the old man could earn it.
It hadn’t taken long before he was being led by the hand up the stairs, quite a deal poorer than when he’d left the card table, hand entwined with the pretty young boy who had flashed him a smile and beckoned with his grey eyes and lured in by the danger in his every feature Daniel had followed.
The boy, for he was surely no more than eighteen, was called Martin. He was not the skinhead from earlier; he had thick dark hair and a muscular body on perfect display in the tight black jeans he had been wearing.
Paying for sex had not been as strange as he had thought it would be and from that first moment he had been sinfully and blissfully addicted to The Rising Sun. It became his haunt, every weekend, sometimes alone, sometimes with Steven Gerrard and the more times he frequented the more familiar its patrons and its hands became, hands, because staff just would not do for someone like Mou.
Martin Kelly though someone he’d taken his pleasure with on a number of occasions was not his, not the way that Xabi Alonso was so obviously Steven’s. He didn’t ask what it was, what Steven got from paying for his company for hours every weekend but every Saturday night Xabi Alonso was Stevie’s to do with as he wanted, paying very handsomely for the privilege too. It was not deep, was not love but the affection in Steven’s touches were unmistakable; the softness in Xabi’s eyes was undeniable. Daniel thought Stevie was a fool; he soon changed his mind and changed it back again when he became the fool, the same as Stevie. Though perhaps he was more a fool for ever believing he could get away with breaking Mou’s rules.
Daniel sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face before pulling his jacket tighter around him as he waited on the platform with nothing but the clothes on his back and his well armed wallet in his pocket, watching as the train rolled into the station. It had been three long years since he’d been back to that place, a place so far removed from reality it was easy to lose oneself in its erotic splendour; and lose himself he most certainly had.
The Rising Sun on its own was a marvel, an escape from a reality none of them wanted to live but there was one person in particular that captured him the way no one else ever could.
But to blame it all on him would have been unfair. Daniel had been consumed and taken over and given in to the pure unadulterated pleasure of it all long before he met him, or rather long before he knew him. He was tall, broad shouldered, muscular and softly spoken. He had a smile that stayed with you long after his lips had dropped their sensual curve. His eyes were deep, dark and full to the brim with the light of promise. His hair was blonde, just that little bit too long and fell down in a sweep over his eyes. His name was Fernando.
Calling him a whore didn’t sound fair but a whore was exactly what he was. He was a modern day courtesan, an entertainer, an escort, a dancer, a lover; he was anything you paid him to be and yet somewhere along the murky twisted road of sin the line had blurred between fantasy and reality, the illusory and the truth he didn’t want to hear.
Perhaps they’d gone too far. Perhaps they were never meant to advertise so explicitly their denial of the rules, their open favour; perhaps they were never meant to fall in love. The Rising Sun boasted only three rules; everything is left how it was found, no brawling inside and no soliciting away from the premises.
It was not an explicit rule but the owners knew first hand the mess that came when matters of the heart were concerned. If there were open favourites, or god forbid, love, other clients missed out and profits dropped and if the hand was tempted away from the lifestyle, away from the Rising Sun then that was most definitely bad for business. Why advertise the availability of the treasures inside when you branded them with such a high price? Why risk their pleasures being taken for free when clients would pay so richly for the service?
Daniel had broken all three rules. He had broken them and would do so again if he could live it all over because he had fallen, had fallen hard, beyond reason, beyond logic, in spite of everything and away from reality he had fallen and he would fall willingly every time.
But all things end. All good things end and perhaps all bad things too. One of them had to go, either he left the city and his heart behind or the reprehensible Mou would make sure Fernando left, and he would leave more than the city, more than a heart, for where they would have sent him there was no coming back from. In the end he had no choice. So he boarded a train, uncaring as to where and he did not look back.
But that place haunted him, in the night, in his dreams; flashes of knowing smiles and the sleek sweat glistened shine of skin beneath the glow of a hanging oil lamp. The feel of silk across his chest, lips ghosting over his neck, the raucous peel of ringing laughter, the flash of a winning hand of cards, the tinkle of falling coins and the crinkle of fresh, crisp fifty pound notes. He remembered the taste and the smell and though the years had passed like the solemn grains of sand in an hour glass The Rising Sun lived on in his mind and inevitably in his heart.
He knew he was going back well before he actually made the decision to do as such. He knew the Rising Sun was to him as Rome was to the old world; all roads led there, the city of promise, the root of everything and the seat of power, because The Rising Sun and it’s occupants would forever have power over him.
He had one foot on the train, one foot still on the platform clinging to determination, clinging to his new life that was pleading silently with him to stay. His hand was clutching the cold metal rail, slick with the sweat of his palms and his head pounded with questions and second guessing and he knew he’d take that next step. He was always bound to do so.
He boarded the train with a sigh as the whistle sounded in the distance and echoed through the train, slicing through the carriages on a breeze carried through the open windows.
He didn’t even know if Fernando would still be there, he didn’t know if The Rising Sun still existed in reality as it did in his mind, three years was, after all, a long time. But he had to try; he could not rest until he had.
Part 2
____________________________________
Just testing the water with this part tbh.
See I'm surprisingly nervous about posting this. I'm surprisingly nervous about the pairing too.
Feedback would be greatly appreciated if you're feeling generous.
Pairing: Daniel Agger/Fernando Torres
Rating NC-17 overall
Summary: It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy and god I know I’m one. Daniel Agger lost himself a long time ago to London’s most notorious brothel and now he knows he has to go back or stay haunted by his past forever.
Disclaimer: Just Fiction. Very, very loosely inspired by a handful of lines in the song of the same name. This is a glorified prologue really but oh well.
Sometimes the memory of a place stays with you far longer than it ought to. You can close your eyes and see it vividly behind your shut lids, hear the raucous din of its atmosphere and smell the scent you associate so closely with all that it is. You see faces; some swimming in faded memory like a flower might wilt in the autumn, others bold and startlingly clear, the lines of their features etched into your minds eye.
The House of The Rising Sun was that place for Daniel.
It was a place filled to the brim with pariahs and connoisseurs of pleasure and of whores and gamblers and men who liked the debauched.
If you flipped open the pages of a history book and read everything there was to know about courtesans and Venice and Rome and the great Italian cities that belonged to its artists and great thinkers, you would come across a thousand descriptions of places such as The Rising Sun. If you read about the great bawdy brothels in London in the 17th century or the exotic whore houses in Paris and in Amsterdam you would find a great many details on the Rising Sun. It was eternal, immortal, a place quite removed from time and stemmed from the great debauched orgies of Rome herself. It was a place that had laid its foundations in the past, a throw back to times when vices were still vices and sin was sin. It was a place where scandal and obscenity and licentious eroticism made you feel alive and as immortal as the wares it presents. It was, after all, the oldest profession in the world.
The Rising Sun was decadent, a revelry for the senses and every whim, every desire, every messed up, frowned upon, craving could be catered for at the Rising Sun and it had been the down fall and ruin of countless, nameless, faceless people. Daniel knew he was one of them.
It was a secret place, a place you only ever hear about by word of mouth. It was like fight club, its members and its clients only ever told those who they deemed worthy, never just in passing, never just by accident. The Rising Sun was a secret and a secret worth keeping, half of its appeal came in the way it was a place few got to venture.
He’d heard of it long before he visited. His connection, Steven Gerrard, told him only because he knew that Daniel was bored, of life, not in the passing kind of boredom that consumes the senses and unrests the mind for a fleeting moment; the true sense of the word. He had finished College and University because that was what they all expected of him and now he was stuck. He was bored. He had unlimited access to great sums of money, an access that had seen his small gambling interest turn into a habit he could not break and a small niggling voice in that back of his head that demanded more than this.
Daniel had wanted more than the mundane, trivial day to day bullshit. He’d wanted more than a simple sunrise and a sleepy sunset. He’d wanted nights that lasted forever and he’d wanted to see things and do things but in the society he kept there was simply nothing to do. He’d been restless, aching and yearning and craving something to make life the revelry it had once been and Steven Gerrard had seen fit to give it to him.
The night had been dark, rain had been lashing down and soaking the streets in a slick sheen of shimmering wetness, drowning the concrete and slanting down over the unassuming street. It was a street like any other in the city of London, residential, run down, lost and abandoned by the wealth of the city; New Orleans Street.
He’d wandered down the street and sat perched on the wall beneath a street lamp on the opposite side of the road for a long time, staring back at the old Victorian house opposite him. To the unknowing eye it looked abandoned, boarded over and closed to visitors but he knew what lay inside. Eventually, after several cigarettes he pushed away from the wall and crossed the empty street. He pulled open the creaking gate and skipped down the steps to the basement entrance.
When the door opened it was the smell that hit him first, an erotic blend of alcohol and sweat and undeniable sex. It was the heat that hit him next. It was the kind of humid heat that sticks to your skin and makes you feel slick with other people’s sweat that clings to you.
The man looked at him, his face almost alarmingly threatening as he held his hand out wordlessly. Daniel blinked and reached into his pocket for the plain white card engraved only with The House Of The Rising Sun in sweeping black letters. No address, no emblem, no coat of arms, no contact details; nothing. Secrecy was paramount. The man accepted it, turned it over in his hands before nodding, sliding the card into a bowl on the side and smiling back at him.
He was welcomed in with open arms after that; a wide smile flashed to him from the man who admitted him, clearly a bouncer and menacing even as he smiled. The man wondered down a dimly lit corridor that was shrouded in lengths of lace; draped over lamps and wall hung photos of artistically arranged naked bodies. They passed a staircase; lined in a thick, deep red carpet and the sounds from above were unmistakable.
At the end of the corridor the man pushed open a door and turned back to flash another gleaming white smile at him. This room was large, music was playing and couches, bean bags, cushions and chairs were littered around the room. Scattered over every service, sitting at every table and drinking expensive looking drinks or smoking cigarettes there were people; lots of people. Some were sat around a card table, laughing, joking, and playing high stakes bets as pretty faced women and baby faced men draped themselves over the clients at the moss green table. In one corner there was smoke rising, thick as a cloud, several varyingly shaped and coloured bongs sitting on a low crouching dark mahogany table. The people on the couches and cushions and littered around the room were in various states of undress, varying degrees of drunk and wrapped tightly up in the people paid to cater to their every whim.
They were laughing, talking, watching with lustful eyes as the whores and the dancers simpered through the room, from couch to couch, from cushion to cushion, wearing next to nothing and holding trays of drinks or foods or drugs. In the corner, on a wide flat futon couch a couple were kissing, fervently, hands wondering, mouths travelling and a man was bending down to whisper something to them, gesturing to the ceiling. The couple left, hand in hand to ascend the stairs.
“Welcome to the House of the Rising Sun,” a cool, smooth voice said to him and Daniel snapped his face around.
The man that greeted him was wearing a dark red shirt and smooth black trousers and his dark, grey flecked hair was styled perfectly. His accent was exotic, Spanish perhaps; Daniel didn’t know but he knew the man was the boss, it was obvious, from the flash golden Rolex on his wrist to the thick golden chain around his tanned neck he carried himself like a king here and this was most definitely his court of sensations.
“I’m Mou, welcome to my humble abode,” the man said “this is Martin, he’ll get you a drink and show you around, please by all means enjoy yourself, there are no laws here just three very important rules, break them and you’ll regret it,” he flashed him a smile and despite the ringing threat in his tone Daniel smiled back.
“What do you drink?” The man, Martin, asked
“Beer, anything,” Daniel shrugged
Mou smiled “Anything it is then,” he said to Martin before turning back to Daniel as Martin disappeared to do his bidding “No brawling in my house, you leave everything as you find- it I’m talking no bruising my hands and no stealing from my home” he said “and of course no soliciting outside of it, what happens in The Rising Sun, stays in the Rising Sun, my hands belong here,”
When Daniel quirked his eyebrow Mou smiled almost indulgently “the whores, the dancers, the entertainers if you will, we call them hands,” he grinned and when Dan nodded Mou continued “they do not leave and they do nothing for free, they are… unavailable to reality and reality begins the moment you step outside my door, understand?”
Daniel let it sink in and slowly nodded his head “perfectly,”
Martin, the man with a predatory smile and gleaming shaved head handed him a bottle of beer and beckoned him away from Mou, with a nod of his head in respect to this man whom so obviously commanded respect, he followed.
They went to an empty couch, the futon previously occupied by the couple now no doubt upstairs in one of the many other rooms. Martin sat down beside him.
“What’s your name?” he asked his accent thick, foreign, but nice and rough in a way that reminded Daniel of fights and fucking. He supposed his was the perfect accent.
“Daniel,” He responded.
“What do you like Daniel, what brings you into the sun?”
Daniel took a gulp of his drink and turned his face to the man at his side “I don’t know, what would you recommend?”
Martin smiled and shrugged one of his shoulders lazily “There are bedrooms upstairs, if you wanted we could take you next door and you could have your pick, there is a bar upstairs too, with a stage and poles and shows that will make you harder than you’ve ever been, there are pools, Jacuzzi’s, massage tables, BDSM rooms, rooms for every fetish imaginable, you snap your fingers and flash the cash and you can have anything you want,”
Daniel inhaled and shrugged again “I gamble,” he had said
Martin smiled wolfishly “The stakes are high Daniel, don’t get swept away,”
Daniel snorted “I have the money if you have the thrill,” he said
Martin’s answering laugh was ringing and deep and Daniel found himself smiling along with him “money no problem Daniel, are you a rich man?”
Daniel shook his head “I’m not rich,” he said before he took a long gulp of his beer “but my father is,”
“Ah, yours are no fresh crisp notes from the bank, yours is old money!” he said
“Old and corrupt but not nearly corrupt enough,”
Martin narrowed his eyes and smiled “well then, this way Daniel,”
He’d drunk himself into a comfortably glowing haze, had gambled and lost a great deal more than he had won but that was half the fun, even he could not waste his father’s money faster than the old man could earn it.
It hadn’t taken long before he was being led by the hand up the stairs, quite a deal poorer than when he’d left the card table, hand entwined with the pretty young boy who had flashed him a smile and beckoned with his grey eyes and lured in by the danger in his every feature Daniel had followed.
The boy, for he was surely no more than eighteen, was called Martin. He was not the skinhead from earlier; he had thick dark hair and a muscular body on perfect display in the tight black jeans he had been wearing.
Paying for sex had not been as strange as he had thought it would be and from that first moment he had been sinfully and blissfully addicted to The Rising Sun. It became his haunt, every weekend, sometimes alone, sometimes with Steven Gerrard and the more times he frequented the more familiar its patrons and its hands became, hands, because staff just would not do for someone like Mou.
Martin Kelly though someone he’d taken his pleasure with on a number of occasions was not his, not the way that Xabi Alonso was so obviously Steven’s. He didn’t ask what it was, what Steven got from paying for his company for hours every weekend but every Saturday night Xabi Alonso was Stevie’s to do with as he wanted, paying very handsomely for the privilege too. It was not deep, was not love but the affection in Steven’s touches were unmistakable; the softness in Xabi’s eyes was undeniable. Daniel thought Stevie was a fool; he soon changed his mind and changed it back again when he became the fool, the same as Stevie. Though perhaps he was more a fool for ever believing he could get away with breaking Mou’s rules.
Daniel sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face before pulling his jacket tighter around him as he waited on the platform with nothing but the clothes on his back and his well armed wallet in his pocket, watching as the train rolled into the station. It had been three long years since he’d been back to that place, a place so far removed from reality it was easy to lose oneself in its erotic splendour; and lose himself he most certainly had.
The Rising Sun on its own was a marvel, an escape from a reality none of them wanted to live but there was one person in particular that captured him the way no one else ever could.
But to blame it all on him would have been unfair. Daniel had been consumed and taken over and given in to the pure unadulterated pleasure of it all long before he met him, or rather long before he knew him. He was tall, broad shouldered, muscular and softly spoken. He had a smile that stayed with you long after his lips had dropped their sensual curve. His eyes were deep, dark and full to the brim with the light of promise. His hair was blonde, just that little bit too long and fell down in a sweep over his eyes. His name was Fernando.
Calling him a whore didn’t sound fair but a whore was exactly what he was. He was a modern day courtesan, an entertainer, an escort, a dancer, a lover; he was anything you paid him to be and yet somewhere along the murky twisted road of sin the line had blurred between fantasy and reality, the illusory and the truth he didn’t want to hear.
Perhaps they’d gone too far. Perhaps they were never meant to advertise so explicitly their denial of the rules, their open favour; perhaps they were never meant to fall in love. The Rising Sun boasted only three rules; everything is left how it was found, no brawling inside and no soliciting away from the premises.
It was not an explicit rule but the owners knew first hand the mess that came when matters of the heart were concerned. If there were open favourites, or god forbid, love, other clients missed out and profits dropped and if the hand was tempted away from the lifestyle, away from the Rising Sun then that was most definitely bad for business. Why advertise the availability of the treasures inside when you branded them with such a high price? Why risk their pleasures being taken for free when clients would pay so richly for the service?
Daniel had broken all three rules. He had broken them and would do so again if he could live it all over because he had fallen, had fallen hard, beyond reason, beyond logic, in spite of everything and away from reality he had fallen and he would fall willingly every time.
But all things end. All good things end and perhaps all bad things too. One of them had to go, either he left the city and his heart behind or the reprehensible Mou would make sure Fernando left, and he would leave more than the city, more than a heart, for where they would have sent him there was no coming back from. In the end he had no choice. So he boarded a train, uncaring as to where and he did not look back.
But that place haunted him, in the night, in his dreams; flashes of knowing smiles and the sleek sweat glistened shine of skin beneath the glow of a hanging oil lamp. The feel of silk across his chest, lips ghosting over his neck, the raucous peel of ringing laughter, the flash of a winning hand of cards, the tinkle of falling coins and the crinkle of fresh, crisp fifty pound notes. He remembered the taste and the smell and though the years had passed like the solemn grains of sand in an hour glass The Rising Sun lived on in his mind and inevitably in his heart.
He knew he was going back well before he actually made the decision to do as such. He knew the Rising Sun was to him as Rome was to the old world; all roads led there, the city of promise, the root of everything and the seat of power, because The Rising Sun and it’s occupants would forever have power over him.
He had one foot on the train, one foot still on the platform clinging to determination, clinging to his new life that was pleading silently with him to stay. His hand was clutching the cold metal rail, slick with the sweat of his palms and his head pounded with questions and second guessing and he knew he’d take that next step. He was always bound to do so.
He boarded the train with a sigh as the whistle sounded in the distance and echoed through the train, slicing through the carriages on a breeze carried through the open windows.
He didn’t even know if Fernando would still be there, he didn’t know if The Rising Sun still existed in reality as it did in his mind, three years was, after all, a long time. But he had to try; he could not rest until he had.
Part 2
____________________________________
Just testing the water with this part tbh.
See I'm surprisingly nervous about posting this. I'm surprisingly nervous about the pairing too.
Feedback would be greatly appreciated if you're feeling generous.