Porn Post-Mortems: Seymour x Aizen @ the_love_hotel - Part 3
Part 3: From your desire, this star; from this star, my course.
When we last saw our heroes: Well Aizen was just about fed up with Seymour's nonsense.
I had begged Aizen-mun for a bone, but hard on that, I basically left the house for a while. I can't think about sex and sensuality in any meaningful way while holding still. I had to take a nice long bike ride. Thinking about this now makes me very unhappy as my bike was stolen a couple days ago. The bike ride that Cracked Aizen's Case was indeed a pleasant ride.
It was late afternoon and warm. There's a walking trail that curls between several nearby towns, and lots of brushy forest and little creeks on either side. The roundtrip is about ten miles and for the first seven, I assure you, my mind was even more empty than usual. I was just working very slowly on a single idea.
Why would Aizen Sousuke want to be in that bed.
At the top of the trail I turned abruptly and headed back the way I came. The tall wildflowers bowed in the wind and the deep green blackberry brambles looked lush, I remember admiring them and their trembling fruit. That was what was wanted: a trembling lush ripeness ready to be taken. How to evoke it.
It was useless to try and figure out some kind of canon-related reason. I didn't know anything about his canon. I barely knew anything at all. However unlike the void that confronted me with Kasumi, I did have something: Aizen-mun's letters.
That player had picked that character and this situation, and there were these letters.
Aizen will not submit out of cowardice or fear, he can't be threatened, and if he can be coerced it won't be by any kind of simple and obvious method. What was it that he had said: ""If you know who I am, why are you going to such lengths to test my patience?"
He's powerful, like a god. Seymour isn't that powerful. In fact Seymour has exactly three tricks: he's smart, he's a smooth talker, and he has the informed attribute of being good at fucking. The magic and whatnot is just dress-up: all submissions must come back to these three tricks in the end. All his dominations are psychological first and foremost. How can anyone psychologically dominate a god?
Only a god could do that. How to present Aizen with a god's authority: wait. Aizen-mun's so-specific fetish: "...especially since most of my kinks are sensuality based, for instance katoptronophilia (mirror fetish) or...." The mirror. Of course.
But it wasn't enough to just plunk him in front of a mirror and announce "be impressed with yourself please! ♥" There would have to be ceremony in which he is led to the correct frame of mind. The ceremony would require a contract, the contract would require consent. He must be made to consent: what makes him consent. What brought Aizen-mun here in the first place: curiosity.
This position would rewrite all the events of the scene to this conversation:
"I bet I can dominate you."
"Oh yeah? I'd like to see that."
As I pedalled up the trail back home, the sun was setting. A lovely rose-scented breeze blew up off the houses and gardens on the left. I felt very good about that ride; I had been so deep in thought that I hadn't realized how fast I was going, but I was sweating like a pig and felt a line of attack on Aizen growing over my previous uncertainty like a scar.
Consent & Ceremony: Tags 7-17
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 7 09/07/09 04:21 AM Seymour 203 70 45 55 65 15
He didn't answer right away; rather, his pale eyes closed against the excruciatingly erotic sight of Aizen's compressed lips, and he was still and shuttered.
Within, he sank into profoundest thought. His mind unfurled in a luminous network of dark blue dreams and he tested each possibility-of-Aizen that occurred to him as though this were only a complicated game that he had begun.
it will not
no, this is not
impossible to
it is too remote
what a mess it would leave
without the use of
unavailable here, even if it would
that would kill
he would never accept
more than I can
At last his fingertips touched the shining smooth surface of the correct path, and he emerged into it as though surfacing from deep waters. His eyes opened; they were peculiarly bright and warm, and perhaps even sympathetic. It had been only a few seconds.
"You flatter yourself; it was not difficult. I discovered many remarkable things about your body while you slept." He sat at the edge of the bed, well within Aizen's reach even as he was mindful of the dangerous expression that illumined his dark eyes. "You who have no equals: shall I tell you what I learned?"
I began the ceremony at once, anticipating that I would obtain consent by the immediate appeal to Aizen-mun's curiousity. This stage is like opening the temple doors.
It was necessary to show Seymour's re-assessment - essentially rebooting the scene - after he'd shown such weakness earlier. This was a shot across the bow: "I am changing the rules starting now, and something magical is going to happen, if you want it to. If you let it." It's difficult to say how this affected Aizen-mun at the time - she would have to hustle over here and tell us - but I felt it almost as though I were physically constructing a foundation on which to build.
Note the little juicy bits of implication there. All kinds of gore, rape, and power are hinted at, and gently turned away in favor of something else. Anyone even a little curious could not fail to wonder "what on earth could be better than gore and rape?!?!!!" The kicker is an insult ("it wasn't hard to kidnap you, mr. god") and a blatant appeal to Aizen's vanity. And yet after all that, look at Seymour sitting nervously at the edge of the bed!
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 8 09/07/09 07:37 PM Aizen 196 70 50 50 60 15
Aizen's fingers tightened imperceptibly in the smooth folds of fabric under them, watching the stranger's eyes willfully close against the sight of him. A few seconds were a considerable amount of time; in the space of so long he might have exercised his will to leave a little more determinedly. As it was, he waited until the grey eyes opened once more, and though the subtle softness of them was instantly unnerving he made no attempt to disengage his own.
Nor did he move away as the stranger settled beside him, despite the intimacy of his sitting so close. His weight on the edge of the bed disrupted the level plateau of the mattress beneath him, and his hip nudged the stranger's back before he self consciously drew himself away from the contact.
The spoken words, in the meantime, melted into the back of his spine, flickering interest mounting in the roaring wake of impotent rage; curiosity. He weighed his words carefully before he spoke.
"I suspect that your revelations might come with a hefty price." But he was not a miser, and his eyes narrowed subtly before he continued. "What is it that you want?"
Confronted with an emerging splendor and the promise of hearing all about himself, Aizen's force is blunted immediately.
He perceives that he must give consent and balks from it. Yet he's interested - certainly, he is interested. The bait has been taken up, and now it is a question of not tearing the hook out of his mouth before he bites down.
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 9 09/07/09 11:02 PM Seymour 265 75 60 50 55 20
A boy has his companions, who fill up the silence of his days with noise, play, combat, exploration, threats, treachery, warmth; from this a man emerges who carries his childhood ruckus with him in his smiles and jokes and the way he takes umbrage and in what he finds lovely. In Seymour's smile there roiled the soundless sacred space of his temple exile and, attendant upon it like a funeral upon death, an unreal and furious hunger. But these things were of course invisible to those who had no comprehension of loss, isolation, rejection, or greatness.
This was the manner of smile with which he answered Aizen's protestations. It contained, too, an element of trust as fine and bright as the filament of a lantern. He burned where the swordsman had pressed against him, though he was motionless, and avid.
"All I ask is that you will allow me to show you. Should you find it unedifying, I will not prevent you from leaving. Do I have your consent, Captain?"
He barely looked over his shoulder at all; there was no need to. The long legs tangled in his sheet covered in fine chestnut hairs, with horseshoe indentations at the outer edges of his kneecaps; or the hands whose fine fingers bore characteristic calluses between the first two knuckles, yet which barely had fingerprints at the third; the forearm whose blue veins submerged into the cords of muscle in a pattern that suggested low and menacing storm clouds - he was already a master of these details and many others. No need to be greedy.
Here the bait is sweetened by two details:
1. Seymour Is Deep Waters - worthy of a god's attention, and capable of having experiences and performing actions that would be novel even to a god. This will be good, I promise. That's what he's say-showing here.
2. A taster - when the promise is "I'm about to tell you all about yourself", it is always nice to know exactly what kind of All-About-Myself will be delivered. It is made explicit here that the knowledge to be bestowed is sensual-physical - this intentionally plays on the mun's interest in his or her own character in addition to playing to the vanity of someone canonically self-interested.
The request for consent is made explicitly. The stage of the ceremony is: the revealing of the artifacts and relics. The alchemy performed here is that it makes a virtue of the Creepy Strategy that I had recklessly heaved into at first! "Sure buddy I kidnapped you and took all your clothes off while you slept. You wanna know why?" The crime is subsumed in its product.
It doesn't cancel the initial fault, but it does make a manifestation of delicious criminality out of a rather low and gross piece of dodgy behavior. Is it enough?
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 10 09/08/09 12:28 AM Aizen 223 75 60 50 55 15
Aizen's knowledge of all four of those things was impersonal. He was a study of other people's human behaviour, and whilst he had certainly achieved greatness it was not an experience; he had been born with the greatness instilled in his very essence, and he had become it. Still, he paid careful witness to the surface feelings that the stranger allowed to mask his face. Until he knew him better, however, he would be at a permanent disadvantage.
He knew this game; he could feel the broad strokes as the stranger painted them, and he had settled upon his curiosity immediately and expediently progressed to wielding something secret and ungrasped above him as though he could simply reach out and take it. The question was whether or not he could trust the man to not simply tug it away as his fingers closed around it.
His voice, when he finally resolved to speak, had fallen a pitch lower. It rumbled, threatening with darkness but also underlined with a low laughter.
"If you wish for my consent, you will have to trust me with the power of your name first. There may be other stipulations, but I will decide on them as we proceed." It was anything but a surrender, but it was a step up from 'You were not brought here to speak'.
I think that while Aizen's narrated and expressed lack of interest in Seymour's Specialness (bullet #1 in the previous tag) is power-grabbing, Aizen also leaks a little control between the narration of 'a step up from' - itself implying that he was a step down in the first place - and a stipulation on consent. In general everyone's position holds steady here. But Seymour would snatch on that stipulation as though it were itself an agreement.
This is the first tag in which Aizen consents and participates in the ceremony. While he says 'there's a stipulation, and there may be more stipulations' - just doing so is taking the a step into the metaphorical temple: the space of interest and wonder which Seymour has promised and controls absolutely.
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 11 09/08/09 01:08 AM Seymour 156 80 65 50 50 15
"My name is Seymour Guado." He answered immediately, then rose and ducked behind the bedcurtains. His voice called back to Aizen, indistinct, from the southeast quarter of the room beyond, "I am fetching your clothes; that should please you."
A door opened, somewhere. There was a heavy sliding sound and the light, dry, pleasant, condescending voice drifted back to the bed again. "Your insistence on terms and conditions is admirable, but unnecessary. Is it so impossible to believe -" There came a grunt here before Seymour resumed, his words overlaid by a hissing shushing that drew closer as he did. "That you were brought here under exactly those conditions that would make your voyage palatable to you?"
The bed shook briefly as though struck by something heavy, and his head poked through the curtains once more. He tossed a handful of loose light garmets on the bed - white, black-cuffed, with rather severe tailoring. "Get dressed."
Ahaha check that out, Seymour takes "maybe" for "yes" and proceeds to sail off as though everything that follows is a foregone conclusion. Was it?
This tag sets up a sequence that was necessary to me as a player much more than to Seymour as a character. I knew fuck-all about Bleach or Aizen. What does this Aizen guy wear? How does it go together? Ffff hey I've got an idea, why don't I have Aizen show me. So Seymour dumps his clothing on the bed and says 'get dressed, sugar.' This wound up being a much more interesting decision strategically than it was tactically, as we will later see - and it was already pretty interesting tactically. Coincidentally I extracted a little revenge on Aizen for dumping his naked angriness in Seymour's bed in the first place.
Overall this order was an economical and efficient piece of action that would continue to pay dividends for the next dozen tags at least.
A few signatures of control:
1. Condescending tone: to be administered only to non-threats.
2. Seymour off-scene: he's off controlling a part of the scenery Aizen can't see and Aizen-mun doesn't know about. While he's doing so, he's basically untouchable.
3. An order which sets up a lose/lose situation for Aizen: either follow Seymour's instruction, or stay naked and vulnerable. In fact this would be called out explicitly in the next Seymour tag.
After all that, flipping Aizen a name to work with was a bagatelle.
Ceremonially speaking, this is the reading of the litany.
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 12 09/08/09 03:56 AM Aizen 155 80 65 48 50 15
A name, and finally he is on a level playing field with his companion. Seymour. Guado certainly isn't the name of any noble families he's aware of. Though in any other circumstance such a thing would have immediately brought him to register him as below his class, the simple eloquence of his words forces him to believe otherwise.
As clothing is tossed carelessly beside him on the bed, he reaches out to curl his fingers around the fabric. He doesn't immediately move to move to dress, though he does lower his eyes to his closed hand in idle contemplation. When he actually speaks his smooth voice is not directed toward his companion, but to the bed, and his breath ghosts across his own skin as he speaks.
"It seems to me that you went to a remarkable amount of effort to strip me if you intended your first order to be for me to redress."
There's actually not much Aizen can do right now while remaining civil. Certainly, he could at any moment bust out and punish Seymour for such profuse insolence. But he doesn't - because it's undignified? Because he is curious? Because there's some kind of higher power at work?
The way he directs his words towards the bed rather than his opponent speaks to his loss of momentum and creeping loss of control. It's a submissive act, to be honest. Perhaps Aizen's first genuinely submissive act in the thread.
He calls out Seymour for ordering him to dress after taking such trouble to get him naked...
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 13 09/08/09 06:03 AM Seymour 136 85 67 48 45 18
Seymour regarded him with an expression of eloquent surprise, not that Aizen was paying attention. "Your first order was for your clothing. Now you have it. If you hope to spite me by remaining naked, I must admit -" A soft sigh uncurled in his voice. "I would find it infuriating."
He sat again at the far corner of the bed and watched Aizen steadily. His robe hung open nearly to his waist, exposing a chest ridged with promiscuous muscle and engraved in black ink, and his hair seemed to runch at the temples like the fitful curls of a young girl. His long fingers shifted in a pinched yet elegant movement that suggested nearly that they had sneezed. Aside from this last peculiarity he seemed, perhaps for the first time, perfectly at ease.
He waited.
....and walks right into a wall. Not only does Seymour have a deeply unpleasant answer waiting for his inquiry, it is an answer that is earmarked as following Aizen's own order from his first tag in the thread. Good work me! That was just awful.
Seymour gets comfy on the bed to watch the show, with little hallmarks of weirdness in attendance. Being a little weird tends to keep the ball in one's own court. The next time we're in prison, I'll show you how it works.
This represents a ceremonial rebuke: Aizen does not have the proper holy frame of mind to refute any doctrine presented in the litany as he attempted to in the previous tag. He must be broken to the law.
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 14 09/08/09 06:46 AM Aizen 298 85 70 45 45 20
There was something almost unsettling about the thought of redressing in front of someone. He was being watched, as though his compliance in the act was simply a show; a demonstration for private eyes. It was so immensely personal that he briefly hesitated before he withdrew the first item, a white shirt with no sleeves, and corrected it to the right position before him. His fingers closed together to perform the necessary maneuvre of threading them in through the holes, but he felt no better with the garment on than he had been without it. There was certain eloquent surity to nudity that he lacked partially dressed.
It felt uncomfortable, a truth bourne in no uncertain terms. Something he had never practiced, something undeniably human and trivial, and yet it had never been shared with another. The question was only how Seymour had known - if he had known at all - that this might bring him such discomfort.
Apart from the single hesitation, and one firm glance toward his observer, he showed no other sign and continued to dress in silence. He pulled his coat purposefully over his bared arms, then moved to the edge of the bed when it was necessary to rise to finish dressing. His face had resumed the fine lines of something a little more business like, the curious smile waning just as easily as it had waxed. His legs - long and unwieldy unclothed and hardly the legs of a self-proclaimed god - moved from one concealment to another, although the curtains had none of the warmth that his body had transferred to the sheets. With only the briefest of grazing glances toward his companion, he reached across the bed behind him for his hakama and the burgundy obi that accompanied them.
A magical reply from the perspective of the dominant. Aizen's unease and awkwardness, his disconnection from his seat of power, and yet his sense of purpose as he obeys - absolutely wonderful. In fact I hadn't even thought about how awkward it would be to dress in front of someone. This layer of power was painted and surrendered by Aizen-mun alone. I think this is probably the point where I started to genuinely enjoy Aizen's response just as a beautiful response - rather than the rather masturbatory gratification of seeing my plan come off so well.
One of the traits of Aizen tags that I would come to love is their emotional translucency. And here, especially - so much three-dimensional detail here - expression and thought, physical action, reflection on the past, contemplation of the future. This was a great tag and worst of all check the timestamps: Aizen-mun popped it out so fast!
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 15 09/08/09 02:08 PM Seymour 270 80 70 45 45 15
There was nothing of satisfaction or vindication in Seymour's faintly pompous expression. He tilted his head a little to better see the curve formed by the long muscles of Aizen's back and shoulder as he shrugged into his shirt; the jacket bored him, but Aizen standing was not unpleasant to regard, though there was something deliciously silly about such a tall man wearing no pants. He watched with particular interest the coy show of long thighs that shifted behind the length of his jacket.
Suddenly, as if remembering something, he stood. Ducking behind the curtains again, he spoke again: "You may dislike this next step, Captain. Be easy."
He must have moved to the far end of the bed. The curtains were suddenly parted there, and Seymour had a long length of dark red rope in his hands that gleamed like satin in the low light. He seized the rope approximately at the center and let the rest drop to the floor; the look of concentration he wore, and the way his hands shifted, suggested that he was evening the ends. Then he let it slide between both hands as he spread his arms; that seemed to satisfy him, and he tied it nearly as high as he could reach onto one ornately carved and turned bedpost. He then stretched it - not too taut, as it was visibly sagging in the centre - to the other bedpost at his left, and tied it there at the same place. He turned the ends over the tied length; they fell abundantly onto the bed, bouncing, with fat tassels at their tips.
Seymour watches, a little mockingly, and then shoots off to do more Generation Of Drama.
This tag was intentionally set up to foreshadow a bondage scene. The rope - itself an ornament, fat, red, and tasseled. The bedposts - classic place to tie someone to on a first date. The methodical way that Seymour measures and adjusts the rope - even as Aizen's next tag would note, it is... what was the delicious phrase Aizen-mun used? "Aesthetic compulsiveness" that is so well-developed in the art of bondage.
A tertiary level of control over the scene: letting Aizen-mun assume that what was coming next was bondage, when, in fact, it was something else entirely. This misguidance was the final stage of the ceremony, setting everyone involved up for the Revelation Of The Mysteries.
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 16 09/08/09 04:38 PM Aizen 292 75 65 50 50 20
Trust, if only in his own grasp of the situation, was all that was truly necessary to advance through it, though he did incline his head slightly to look over his shoulder. He watched with unashamed interest as the man reappeared through the curtains with nothing less than a piece of rope held in his long, strong hands. Aizen spared a moment to observe him in silence, undisturbed by the suggestion in his actions, and rather more curious about the abnormalities in the stranger that he was now free to observe at will. Beside the obvious inhuman attributes, there were intricate tattoos hinted at from beneath the loosely tied kimono. They were oddly primal, if only for their decorating a clearly masculine chest. Seymour displayed a desire for order with his attention to the rope; or perhaps an aesthetic compulsiveness.
His attention returned to his efforts to dress, and he leant into the curtain, the luscious fabric trailing across his face like a lover's carress as he rose to his feet. It parted around him and settled again, and he found himself in what was an incredibly sparse room. It was clear that the bed was the centerpiece; all of the warmth and decoration in the room was confined within the encapsulating curtains. The effect for anyone of lesser will than his own would, he assumed, be to draw them back to the warmth as quickly as possible, but instead he took his time dressing properly, and moved one hand deliberately to check that his hair was in place, rather than tousled from sleep.
Feeling infinitely better, he turned once more toward his bed, lifting away the curtain with the back of one hand. He waited for Seymour's attention in patient silence.
Aizen himself is in a holding pattern in this tag, interested despite himself. However the tag itself carries a lot of secret heat - suppressed eroticism seems to well up from it. The details of Seymour's body, the shocking coldness of the empty room contrasted with the voluptuous bed, the way in which Aizen adjusts himself - it's all pitch-perfect, a final shriving. Aizen is nearly kneeling at the altar here.
When I talk about things like this, I don't mean to give the impression that I in my genius foresaw all of these details and Aizen was operating within my confines like a puppet. It is so far from that. The reason why Aizen-mun quickly came out as a superior partner and Aizen as a superior character to play against is because I would keep setting up these situations, and Aizen would completely fulfill all their possibilities. Like with the detail of feeling awkward while dressing, or adjusting his hair in this tag - his responses are profoundly characteristic, profoundly aware, profoundly gratifying. In Aizen-mun's vivid depiction I could see all the effects of Seymour's actions so clearly.
The way that Aizen was led through the stages of this ceremony is nothing like how a dog is led, and everything like how a dance partner is led. No matter how interesting the steps, I would get bored and oppressed quickly if my partner didn't fill that dance with his or her own light, grace, and ornament.
OMG I have overrun the entry size limit. Tag 17, kink scoreboard and roadmap in addendum post!
When we last saw our heroes: Well Aizen was just about fed up with Seymour's nonsense.
I had begged Aizen-mun for a bone, but hard on that, I basically left the house for a while. I can't think about sex and sensuality in any meaningful way while holding still. I had to take a nice long bike ride. Thinking about this now makes me very unhappy as my bike was stolen a couple days ago. The bike ride that Cracked Aizen's Case was indeed a pleasant ride.
It was late afternoon and warm. There's a walking trail that curls between several nearby towns, and lots of brushy forest and little creeks on either side. The roundtrip is about ten miles and for the first seven, I assure you, my mind was even more empty than usual. I was just working very slowly on a single idea.
Why would Aizen Sousuke want to be in that bed.
At the top of the trail I turned abruptly and headed back the way I came. The tall wildflowers bowed in the wind and the deep green blackberry brambles looked lush, I remember admiring them and their trembling fruit. That was what was wanted: a trembling lush ripeness ready to be taken. How to evoke it.
It was useless to try and figure out some kind of canon-related reason. I didn't know anything about his canon. I barely knew anything at all. However unlike the void that confronted me with Kasumi, I did have something: Aizen-mun's letters.
That player had picked that character and this situation, and there were these letters.
Aizen will not submit out of cowardice or fear, he can't be threatened, and if he can be coerced it won't be by any kind of simple and obvious method. What was it that he had said: ""If you know who I am, why are you going to such lengths to test my patience?"
He's powerful, like a god. Seymour isn't that powerful. In fact Seymour has exactly three tricks: he's smart, he's a smooth talker, and he has the informed attribute of being good at fucking. The magic and whatnot is just dress-up: all submissions must come back to these three tricks in the end. All his dominations are psychological first and foremost. How can anyone psychologically dominate a god?
Only a god could do that. How to present Aizen with a god's authority: wait. Aizen-mun's so-specific fetish: "...especially since most of my kinks are sensuality based, for instance katoptronophilia (mirror fetish) or...." The mirror. Of course.
But it wasn't enough to just plunk him in front of a mirror and announce "be impressed with yourself please! ♥" There would have to be ceremony in which he is led to the correct frame of mind. The ceremony would require a contract, the contract would require consent. He must be made to consent: what makes him consent. What brought Aizen-mun here in the first place: curiosity.
This position would rewrite all the events of the scene to this conversation:
"I bet I can dominate you."
"Oh yeah? I'd like to see that."
As I pedalled up the trail back home, the sun was setting. A lovely rose-scented breeze blew up off the houses and gardens on the left. I felt very good about that ride; I had been so deep in thought that I hadn't realized how fast I was going, but I was sweating like a pig and felt a line of attack on Aizen growing over my previous uncertainty like a scar.
Consent & Ceremony: Tags 7-17
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 7 09/07/09 04:21 AM Seymour 203 70 45 55 65 15
He didn't answer right away; rather, his pale eyes closed against the excruciatingly erotic sight of Aizen's compressed lips, and he was still and shuttered.
Within, he sank into profoundest thought. His mind unfurled in a luminous network of dark blue dreams and he tested each possibility-of-Aizen that occurred to him as though this were only a complicated game that he had begun.
it will not
no, this is not
impossible to
it is too remote
what a mess it would leave
without the use of
unavailable here, even if it would
that would kill
he would never accept
more than I can
At last his fingertips touched the shining smooth surface of the correct path, and he emerged into it as though surfacing from deep waters. His eyes opened; they were peculiarly bright and warm, and perhaps even sympathetic. It had been only a few seconds.
"You flatter yourself; it was not difficult. I discovered many remarkable things about your body while you slept." He sat at the edge of the bed, well within Aizen's reach even as he was mindful of the dangerous expression that illumined his dark eyes. "You who have no equals: shall I tell you what I learned?"
I began the ceremony at once, anticipating that I would obtain consent by the immediate appeal to Aizen-mun's curiousity. This stage is like opening the temple doors.
It was necessary to show Seymour's re-assessment - essentially rebooting the scene - after he'd shown such weakness earlier. This was a shot across the bow: "I am changing the rules starting now, and something magical is going to happen, if you want it to. If you let it." It's difficult to say how this affected Aizen-mun at the time - she would have to hustle over here and tell us - but I felt it almost as though I were physically constructing a foundation on which to build.
Note the little juicy bits of implication there. All kinds of gore, rape, and power are hinted at, and gently turned away in favor of something else. Anyone even a little curious could not fail to wonder "what on earth could be better than gore and rape?!?!!!" The kicker is an insult ("it wasn't hard to kidnap you, mr. god") and a blatant appeal to Aizen's vanity. And yet after all that, look at Seymour sitting nervously at the edge of the bed!
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 8 09/07/09 07:37 PM Aizen 196 70 50 50 60 15
Aizen's fingers tightened imperceptibly in the smooth folds of fabric under them, watching the stranger's eyes willfully close against the sight of him. A few seconds were a considerable amount of time; in the space of so long he might have exercised his will to leave a little more determinedly. As it was, he waited until the grey eyes opened once more, and though the subtle softness of them was instantly unnerving he made no attempt to disengage his own.
Nor did he move away as the stranger settled beside him, despite the intimacy of his sitting so close. His weight on the edge of the bed disrupted the level plateau of the mattress beneath him, and his hip nudged the stranger's back before he self consciously drew himself away from the contact.
The spoken words, in the meantime, melted into the back of his spine, flickering interest mounting in the roaring wake of impotent rage; curiosity. He weighed his words carefully before he spoke.
"I suspect that your revelations might come with a hefty price." But he was not a miser, and his eyes narrowed subtly before he continued. "What is it that you want?"
Confronted with an emerging splendor and the promise of hearing all about himself, Aizen's force is blunted immediately.
He perceives that he must give consent and balks from it. Yet he's interested - certainly, he is interested. The bait has been taken up, and now it is a question of not tearing the hook out of his mouth before he bites down.
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 9 09/07/09 11:02 PM Seymour 265 75 60 50 55 20
A boy has his companions, who fill up the silence of his days with noise, play, combat, exploration, threats, treachery, warmth; from this a man emerges who carries his childhood ruckus with him in his smiles and jokes and the way he takes umbrage and in what he finds lovely. In Seymour's smile there roiled the soundless sacred space of his temple exile and, attendant upon it like a funeral upon death, an unreal and furious hunger. But these things were of course invisible to those who had no comprehension of loss, isolation, rejection, or greatness.
This was the manner of smile with which he answered Aizen's protestations. It contained, too, an element of trust as fine and bright as the filament of a lantern. He burned where the swordsman had pressed against him, though he was motionless, and avid.
"All I ask is that you will allow me to show you. Should you find it unedifying, I will not prevent you from leaving. Do I have your consent, Captain?"
He barely looked over his shoulder at all; there was no need to. The long legs tangled in his sheet covered in fine chestnut hairs, with horseshoe indentations at the outer edges of his kneecaps; or the hands whose fine fingers bore characteristic calluses between the first two knuckles, yet which barely had fingerprints at the third; the forearm whose blue veins submerged into the cords of muscle in a pattern that suggested low and menacing storm clouds - he was already a master of these details and many others. No need to be greedy.
Here the bait is sweetened by two details:
1. Seymour Is Deep Waters - worthy of a god's attention, and capable of having experiences and performing actions that would be novel even to a god. This will be good, I promise. That's what he's say-showing here.
2. A taster - when the promise is "I'm about to tell you all about yourself", it is always nice to know exactly what kind of All-About-Myself will be delivered. It is made explicit here that the knowledge to be bestowed is sensual-physical - this intentionally plays on the mun's interest in his or her own character in addition to playing to the vanity of someone canonically self-interested.
The request for consent is made explicitly. The stage of the ceremony is: the revealing of the artifacts and relics. The alchemy performed here is that it makes a virtue of the Creepy Strategy that I had recklessly heaved into at first! "Sure buddy I kidnapped you and took all your clothes off while you slept. You wanna know why?" The crime is subsumed in its product.
It doesn't cancel the initial fault, but it does make a manifestation of delicious criminality out of a rather low and gross piece of dodgy behavior. Is it enough?
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 10 09/08/09 12:28 AM Aizen 223 75 60 50 55 15
Aizen's knowledge of all four of those things was impersonal. He was a study of other people's human behaviour, and whilst he had certainly achieved greatness it was not an experience; he had been born with the greatness instilled in his very essence, and he had become it. Still, he paid careful witness to the surface feelings that the stranger allowed to mask his face. Until he knew him better, however, he would be at a permanent disadvantage.
He knew this game; he could feel the broad strokes as the stranger painted them, and he had settled upon his curiosity immediately and expediently progressed to wielding something secret and ungrasped above him as though he could simply reach out and take it. The question was whether or not he could trust the man to not simply tug it away as his fingers closed around it.
His voice, when he finally resolved to speak, had fallen a pitch lower. It rumbled, threatening with darkness but also underlined with a low laughter.
"If you wish for my consent, you will have to trust me with the power of your name first. There may be other stipulations, but I will decide on them as we proceed." It was anything but a surrender, but it was a step up from 'You were not brought here to speak'.
I think that while Aizen's narrated and expressed lack of interest in Seymour's Specialness (bullet #1 in the previous tag) is power-grabbing, Aizen also leaks a little control between the narration of 'a step up from' - itself implying that he was a step down in the first place - and a stipulation on consent. In general everyone's position holds steady here. But Seymour would snatch on that stipulation as though it were itself an agreement.
This is the first tag in which Aizen consents and participates in the ceremony. While he says 'there's a stipulation, and there may be more stipulations' - just doing so is taking the a step into the metaphorical temple: the space of interest and wonder which Seymour has promised and controls absolutely.
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 11 09/08/09 01:08 AM Seymour 156 80 65 50 50 15
"My name is Seymour Guado." He answered immediately, then rose and ducked behind the bedcurtains. His voice called back to Aizen, indistinct, from the southeast quarter of the room beyond, "I am fetching your clothes; that should please you."
A door opened, somewhere. There was a heavy sliding sound and the light, dry, pleasant, condescending voice drifted back to the bed again. "Your insistence on terms and conditions is admirable, but unnecessary. Is it so impossible to believe -" There came a grunt here before Seymour resumed, his words overlaid by a hissing shushing that drew closer as he did. "That you were brought here under exactly those conditions that would make your voyage palatable to you?"
The bed shook briefly as though struck by something heavy, and his head poked through the curtains once more. He tossed a handful of loose light garmets on the bed - white, black-cuffed, with rather severe tailoring. "Get dressed."
Ahaha check that out, Seymour takes "maybe" for "yes" and proceeds to sail off as though everything that follows is a foregone conclusion. Was it?
This tag sets up a sequence that was necessary to me as a player much more than to Seymour as a character. I knew fuck-all about Bleach or Aizen. What does this Aizen guy wear? How does it go together? Ffff hey I've got an idea, why don't I have Aizen show me. So Seymour dumps his clothing on the bed and says 'get dressed, sugar.' This wound up being a much more interesting decision strategically than it was tactically, as we will later see - and it was already pretty interesting tactically. Coincidentally I extracted a little revenge on Aizen for dumping his naked angriness in Seymour's bed in the first place.
Overall this order was an economical and efficient piece of action that would continue to pay dividends for the next dozen tags at least.
A few signatures of control:
1. Condescending tone: to be administered only to non-threats.
2. Seymour off-scene: he's off controlling a part of the scenery Aizen can't see and Aizen-mun doesn't know about. While he's doing so, he's basically untouchable.
3. An order which sets up a lose/lose situation for Aizen: either follow Seymour's instruction, or stay naked and vulnerable. In fact this would be called out explicitly in the next Seymour tag.
After all that, flipping Aizen a name to work with was a bagatelle.
Ceremonially speaking, this is the reading of the litany.
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 12 09/08/09 03:56 AM Aizen 155 80 65 48 50 15
A name, and finally he is on a level playing field with his companion. Seymour. Guado certainly isn't the name of any noble families he's aware of. Though in any other circumstance such a thing would have immediately brought him to register him as below his class, the simple eloquence of his words forces him to believe otherwise.
As clothing is tossed carelessly beside him on the bed, he reaches out to curl his fingers around the fabric. He doesn't immediately move to move to dress, though he does lower his eyes to his closed hand in idle contemplation. When he actually speaks his smooth voice is not directed toward his companion, but to the bed, and his breath ghosts across his own skin as he speaks.
"It seems to me that you went to a remarkable amount of effort to strip me if you intended your first order to be for me to redress."
There's actually not much Aizen can do right now while remaining civil. Certainly, he could at any moment bust out and punish Seymour for such profuse insolence. But he doesn't - because it's undignified? Because he is curious? Because there's some kind of higher power at work?
The way he directs his words towards the bed rather than his opponent speaks to his loss of momentum and creeping loss of control. It's a submissive act, to be honest. Perhaps Aizen's first genuinely submissive act in the thread.
He calls out Seymour for ordering him to dress after taking such trouble to get him naked...
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 13 09/08/09 06:03 AM Seymour 136 85 67 48 45 18
Seymour regarded him with an expression of eloquent surprise, not that Aizen was paying attention. "Your first order was for your clothing. Now you have it. If you hope to spite me by remaining naked, I must admit -" A soft sigh uncurled in his voice. "I would find it infuriating."
He sat again at the far corner of the bed and watched Aizen steadily. His robe hung open nearly to his waist, exposing a chest ridged with promiscuous muscle and engraved in black ink, and his hair seemed to runch at the temples like the fitful curls of a young girl. His long fingers shifted in a pinched yet elegant movement that suggested nearly that they had sneezed. Aside from this last peculiarity he seemed, perhaps for the first time, perfectly at ease.
He waited.
....and walks right into a wall. Not only does Seymour have a deeply unpleasant answer waiting for his inquiry, it is an answer that is earmarked as following Aizen's own order from his first tag in the thread. Good work me! That was just awful.
Seymour gets comfy on the bed to watch the show, with little hallmarks of weirdness in attendance. Being a little weird tends to keep the ball in one's own court. The next time we're in prison, I'll show you how it works.
This represents a ceremonial rebuke: Aizen does not have the proper holy frame of mind to refute any doctrine presented in the litany as he attempted to in the previous tag. He must be broken to the law.
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 14 09/08/09 06:46 AM Aizen 298 85 70 45 45 20
There was something almost unsettling about the thought of redressing in front of someone. He was being watched, as though his compliance in the act was simply a show; a demonstration for private eyes. It was so immensely personal that he briefly hesitated before he withdrew the first item, a white shirt with no sleeves, and corrected it to the right position before him. His fingers closed together to perform the necessary maneuvre of threading them in through the holes, but he felt no better with the garment on than he had been without it. There was certain eloquent surity to nudity that he lacked partially dressed.
It felt uncomfortable, a truth bourne in no uncertain terms. Something he had never practiced, something undeniably human and trivial, and yet it had never been shared with another. The question was only how Seymour had known - if he had known at all - that this might bring him such discomfort.
Apart from the single hesitation, and one firm glance toward his observer, he showed no other sign and continued to dress in silence. He pulled his coat purposefully over his bared arms, then moved to the edge of the bed when it was necessary to rise to finish dressing. His face had resumed the fine lines of something a little more business like, the curious smile waning just as easily as it had waxed. His legs - long and unwieldy unclothed and hardly the legs of a self-proclaimed god - moved from one concealment to another, although the curtains had none of the warmth that his body had transferred to the sheets. With only the briefest of grazing glances toward his companion, he reached across the bed behind him for his hakama and the burgundy obi that accompanied them.
A magical reply from the perspective of the dominant. Aizen's unease and awkwardness, his disconnection from his seat of power, and yet his sense of purpose as he obeys - absolutely wonderful. In fact I hadn't even thought about how awkward it would be to dress in front of someone. This layer of power was painted and surrendered by Aizen-mun alone. I think this is probably the point where I started to genuinely enjoy Aizen's response just as a beautiful response - rather than the rather masturbatory gratification of seeing my plan come off so well.
One of the traits of Aizen tags that I would come to love is their emotional translucency. And here, especially - so much three-dimensional detail here - expression and thought, physical action, reflection on the past, contemplation of the future. This was a great tag and worst of all check the timestamps: Aizen-mun popped it out so fast!
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 15 09/08/09 02:08 PM Seymour 270 80 70 45 45 15
There was nothing of satisfaction or vindication in Seymour's faintly pompous expression. He tilted his head a little to better see the curve formed by the long muscles of Aizen's back and shoulder as he shrugged into his shirt; the jacket bored him, but Aizen standing was not unpleasant to regard, though there was something deliciously silly about such a tall man wearing no pants. He watched with particular interest the coy show of long thighs that shifted behind the length of his jacket.
Suddenly, as if remembering something, he stood. Ducking behind the curtains again, he spoke again: "You may dislike this next step, Captain. Be easy."
He must have moved to the far end of the bed. The curtains were suddenly parted there, and Seymour had a long length of dark red rope in his hands that gleamed like satin in the low light. He seized the rope approximately at the center and let the rest drop to the floor; the look of concentration he wore, and the way his hands shifted, suggested that he was evening the ends. Then he let it slide between both hands as he spread his arms; that seemed to satisfy him, and he tied it nearly as high as he could reach onto one ornately carved and turned bedpost. He then stretched it - not too taut, as it was visibly sagging in the centre - to the other bedpost at his left, and tied it there at the same place. He turned the ends over the tied length; they fell abundantly onto the bed, bouncing, with fat tassels at their tips.
Seymour watches, a little mockingly, and then shoots off to do more Generation Of Drama.
This tag was intentionally set up to foreshadow a bondage scene. The rope - itself an ornament, fat, red, and tasseled. The bedposts - classic place to tie someone to on a first date. The methodical way that Seymour measures and adjusts the rope - even as Aizen's next tag would note, it is... what was the delicious phrase Aizen-mun used? "Aesthetic compulsiveness" that is so well-developed in the art of bondage.
A tertiary level of control over the scene: letting Aizen-mun assume that what was coming next was bondage, when, in fact, it was something else entirely. This misguidance was the final stage of the ceremony, setting everyone involved up for the Revelation Of The Mysteries.
Tag # Timestamp Author WordCount SM-Control SP-Control AM-Control AP-Control Smut 16 09/08/09 04:38 PM Aizen 292 75 65 50 50 20
Trust, if only in his own grasp of the situation, was all that was truly necessary to advance through it, though he did incline his head slightly to look over his shoulder. He watched with unashamed interest as the man reappeared through the curtains with nothing less than a piece of rope held in his long, strong hands. Aizen spared a moment to observe him in silence, undisturbed by the suggestion in his actions, and rather more curious about the abnormalities in the stranger that he was now free to observe at will. Beside the obvious inhuman attributes, there were intricate tattoos hinted at from beneath the loosely tied kimono. They were oddly primal, if only for their decorating a clearly masculine chest. Seymour displayed a desire for order with his attention to the rope; or perhaps an aesthetic compulsiveness.
His attention returned to his efforts to dress, and he leant into the curtain, the luscious fabric trailing across his face like a lover's carress as he rose to his feet. It parted around him and settled again, and he found himself in what was an incredibly sparse room. It was clear that the bed was the centerpiece; all of the warmth and decoration in the room was confined within the encapsulating curtains. The effect for anyone of lesser will than his own would, he assumed, be to draw them back to the warmth as quickly as possible, but instead he took his time dressing properly, and moved one hand deliberately to check that his hair was in place, rather than tousled from sleep.
Feeling infinitely better, he turned once more toward his bed, lifting away the curtain with the back of one hand. He waited for Seymour's attention in patient silence.
Aizen himself is in a holding pattern in this tag, interested despite himself. However the tag itself carries a lot of secret heat - suppressed eroticism seems to well up from it. The details of Seymour's body, the shocking coldness of the empty room contrasted with the voluptuous bed, the way in which Aizen adjusts himself - it's all pitch-perfect, a final shriving. Aizen is nearly kneeling at the altar here.
When I talk about things like this, I don't mean to give the impression that I in my genius foresaw all of these details and Aizen was operating within my confines like a puppet. It is so far from that. The reason why Aizen-mun quickly came out as a superior partner and Aizen as a superior character to play against is because I would keep setting up these situations, and Aizen would completely fulfill all their possibilities. Like with the detail of feeling awkward while dressing, or adjusting his hair in this tag - his responses are profoundly characteristic, profoundly aware, profoundly gratifying. In Aizen-mun's vivid depiction I could see all the effects of Seymour's actions so clearly.
The way that Aizen was led through the stages of this ceremony is nothing like how a dog is led, and everything like how a dance partner is led. No matter how interesting the steps, I would get bored and oppressed quickly if my partner didn't fill that dance with his or her own light, grace, and ornament.
OMG I have overrun the entry size limit. Tag 17, kink scoreboard and roadmap in addendum post!