Work Text:
And they returned to the darkest depths, to sink even lower.
Nathan can’t sleep anymore, his dreams are louder than ever. He should never have listened to the voices the first time. He did this to himself, and everyone else here.
"Good morning. Nice to see you all present."
His head pounds an aching rhythm as he struggles to pay attention while Charles has the floor. After two months in this fucking submarine, he can't even scrape up the desire to interrupt meetings for fun anymore, he just sits there like a corpse and occasionally responds to direct questions. The only thoughts left in his head are mired in an ugly swamp of sexual frustration. The whole band is suffering from it. There's no way they're going to finish recording the album in this state.
The first month was fine, he could at least jack off. But after the RSIs in their wrists, and Roy Cornickelson’s scolding, masturbation was forbidden for the rest of the recording. Nathan is back to lifting weights to vent his frustrations, an old ally from the time before he was a krillionaire who could get any girl he wanted, and some he didn’t.
He squeezes his eyes shut for a long moment and opens them again, distracted briefly when Abigail shifts to write something on a notepad. Her hands are so pretty and small. Nathan looks away. Now's not the time. Let the other assholes fumble first and get rejected, he's gonna wait for the right moment. Stop thinking about Abigail. Whatever you do, don’t think about Abigail.
"Now let's solidify our schedule for next week. Skwisgaar…" Charles continues on, and Nathan watches him lace his fingers together. Charles's hands are bigger than Abigail's. Of course they are.
His fingers are kind of long, and the way they curl is angular. His nails are trimmed neatly. There's a bit of wrist visible before the sleeves of his shirt and jacket cover his arm. Charles moves a hand suddenly and Nathan's eyes follow to where it lands, curled in thought at Charles's chin, first knuckle pressing in slightly under his mouth.
Charles's lips are vaguely pink, teeth straight, and he clearly keeps shaving every morning like normal. His jaw is square and even, supported by a straight and rigid neck. The cords of Charles’s throat shift and jump slightly as he talks. A small bead of sweat trickles down from behind an ear, slowly disappearing beneath a stiff white collar. He feels the heat down here too, but he still does his shirt and tie up all the way. Nathan's eyes snap to new movement as Charles's hand lowers again, palm coming to rest on his other hand, now flat on the black table.
"Is that all right with you, Nathan?"
Nathan blinks hard and he rears back in his chair slowly, the sludge in his brain sloshing from the movement. His gaze zooms out and he looks at Charles’s unassuming form as a whole. At length he answers, "Yeah, fine," with no recollection of anything said before that. He didn’t realize just how hard he was staring at his manager’s hand. And mouth. And neck. His headache must be making him focus on weird details.
Charles gives him a small sharp nod, "Very good," and moves on to the next task assignment.
Nathan catches bits and pieces of what’s to come next week, in between throbs of his headache and interruptions and input from the others. Pickles bails early, and it sets off a chain reaction, Nathan taking his turn to leave between Toki and Murderface. He goes straight down to the band weight room.
His regimen isn’t serious, but Nathan has to admit it does feel good to drop some weight and see some muscle definition again. Once they get back to land he’ll go right back to his old diet, but right now it’s something to do that distracts him from remembering he can’t get laid, or get off. For a solid forty-five minutes, he tunes out everything but the sound of metal and breath. No ethereal whale voices compelling him. No humans bothering him just to ease their own frustrations.
“Ah. There you are.”
Nathan wobbles slightly at the bench press, and after a moment he rests the weight back on the rack above his head. He sits up and sees Charles standing at the open door of the weight room. “What?”
“You weren’t in recording studio C. I see you lost track of time.”
Nathan blinks, brow furrowed deeply. “What the fuck are you talking about.”
Charles clears his throat. “The experimental session in C. The one you agreed to this morning. You, ah… weren’t listening were you.”
“Oh. No.”
“That’s fine, we have time. Take a minute to clean up,” Charles looks down at Nathan’s sweaty torso, “and we’ll go.”
Something about Charles’s eyes in that moment makes Nathan’s stomach jolt, abdominal muscles flexing. He grumbles and grabs a towel, wipes his face, and gets up. Charles steps back and turns sideways to let Nathan hunch through the cramped doorway, and Nathan glances down at him when he passes. Charles is looking at his chest again, nostrils flaring just slightly.
Maybe he’s irritated over losing time. Maybe he’s jealous of Nathan’s muscles. Maybe he just doesn’t like the smell of sweat. None of those explanations quite match the unreadable expression on Charles's face.
Nathan goes straight through the door across the narrow hallway, into the showers. Five stalls sit side by side, with a row of sinks on the opposite wall. At least half of them get used regularly, and Nathan’s been seeing Skwisgaar and Toki more often as the weeks crawl by and their restraint frays further.
Nathan half-turns to grab a fresh towel and is almost startled to see Charles just inside the room, checking his watch briefly before glancing up to meet Nathan’s gaze. “Something the matter?”
“Just weird seeing you in here,” Nathan grunts, and starts to strip down to shower. He tosses his sweat soaked clothes on the floor as he passes behind the frosted glass half-wall. His pulse is still thrumming in his ears from exertion.
Charles stays there the entire time Nathan showers. He doesn’t make conversation. Nathan doesn’t check to see if his manager is watching him or not. The idea of it raises his heart rate enough on its own. It’s fucking weird.
Nathan dries off and looks in the locker marked with his initials, expecting fresh clothes. There aren’t any. Charles makes a small disapproving noise, and Nathan looks over his shoulder at him.
“I’ll have something brought down right away.” Charles reaches up to his ear and murmurs a quiet order, and within thirty seconds a Klokateer is running a set of clothes to him, kneeling in the doorway, panting, head bowed.
“Apologies, my lord.”
Ignoring the Klokateer who has already disappeared from sight, Nathan gets dressed. The clothes are still hot from the dryer, and it feels awful. He wonders if someone will die over this minor inconvenience. Maybe. He can’t relish in the idea for long when he sees Charles glance down at Nathan’s abs for one fleeting moment before they disappear under his black shirt. He realizes with a gut-wrenching shock that he’s seen that expression on hungry women before. Not groupies who fell at his feet begging to worship him, but other superstars, aloof businesswomen who saw him as something to hunt, wrangle, and tame.
“Do try to remember your limited wardrobe on the submarine, Nathan,” Charles says mildly. He gestures into the hallway. “Well, come along.”
Electricity prickles under Nathan’s skin when they walk side by side. He takes up most of the hallway’s width on purpose, leaving Charles bunched up to one side, but still the manager moves as smoothly as ever. He doesn’t even brush against Nathan’s arm by accident, leaving Nathan to wonder why he’d want him to in the first place.
The last time Charles touched him was eons ago, before he died. The memory is abrupt and unavoidable, like it always is: Charles standing over him and drunkenly playing with Nathan’s long hair while he sat, a warm hand braced clumsily on his back. He never partied with the band like that again, not really. Nathan lets it wash over him, closing his eyes briefly. He can’t even drink it away, the whole sub is dry.
Nathan’s boots thump steadily, accompanied by the staccato rhythm of Charles’s shoes. The cadence is almost good, even when it’s lost beneath Charles trying to reiterate what they’re supposed to be doing right now. Evidently he agreed to come do a vocal recording exercise using some recent audio Knubbler sampled from the ocean, not unlike Murmaider I and II. Why Charles needs to be there, to be directly involved, Nathan doesn’t know.
The idea of more whalesong prickles his nerves, but he’s not going to say anything about it. He’d have to admit to everything else going on in his head.
“So, are you holding up okay?” Charles asks. “I know it’s been tough for you all.”
Nathan grumbles bitterly, “Yeah, tough. It fucking sucks. You couldn’t have just let a couple girls on board? At this rate Murderface is gonna try to fuck Toki.” Even he’s willing to concede that Toki does have a nice ass. It’s getting dire. “You really want that on your conscience?”
“You’ve already made it through most of the voyage. Just one more month, maybe six weeks. I’m sure you can all handle it. The sooner we finish, the sooner we can return to the surface.” Charles clasps his hands behind his back, glancing up at Nathan.
“Then why are we wasting time on an experimental recording instead of just pushing through like normal?” Nathan scowls ahead, turning a corner and watching a pair of Gears shuffle out of their way.
“Because you expressed in previous sessions that your delivery felt stagnant. It was Abigail’s idea that perhaps an exercise like this could help shake something loose.”
He’s right, he did say that. Just using nowhere near as many words. Nathan really needed that tantrum at the time. Sure it destroyed most of the equipment in recording studio B, but that’s why they have C, and D, and however many other letters are needed as backup. “Whatever, maybe.”
Studio C is smaller than the other ones, and no one else is inside. “Don’t we need Knubbler or Abigail for this?” Nathan enters the room fully and looks over his shoulder at Charles, who closes the door behind him. It’s dark and cloyingly warm here.
“They’re occupied with Toki and Skwisgaar for the day, we won’t be needing them. The presets are already in place for your purposes.”
“God, it's hotter in here than the gym.” Nathan pushes a hand through his damp hair. “How can you stand it? Fuck this,” in frustration he tugs at his shirt and pulls it over his head. It does little to fight the heat, but it’s marginally better than the alternative of his shirt gradually soaking through.
“I suppose it is rather warm,” Charles says almost absently, and removes his jacket, draping it neatly between the two curved spikes of a console chair. “Take a seat here and listen to a couple of these samples, see what you think.” He claims the chair farther away, leaving the other empty one to Nathan. He holds a headset out to him. His sleeve stretches and folds snugly around the surprisingly defined curves of deltoid and bicep.
Nathan sits down and takes it, and puts it on. Charles presses a button and sits back in his chair slightly, hands folded near his stomach, perching an ankle over his knee. Nathan stares at a bare patch of skin where Charles’s pant leg rides up over the top of his plain black sock. A small flash of dull silver at the side reveals a sock garter. It doesn’t look anything like lingerie, but the function reminds him of it anyway. He turns his eyes toward the sound mixer where it’s safe.
“What am I listening for? I don’t hear anything yet–” The slow undulating groan of a whale rises from under Nathan’s voice and fills his ears. He goes still and stares out unseeing, feeling like he’s right on the verge of understanding the animal. It sounds enough like the ones in his dreams that the dissonance of not actually understanding what it’s saying sets his teeth on edge. He rips the headset off, throwing it onto the console.
Charles’s brows raise over the rim of his glasses. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing,” Nathan snarls. He stands up, suddenly simmering with agitation bordering on boiling fury. “We already did whales. That’s not different.”
“Yes, we did, but the idea this time was to harmonize with–”
“I don’t want to do it.” Nathan paces around the tight room.
After a long pause, Charles asks, “Nathan, are you really all right?” As if the question didn’t have the most obvious answer possible.
"No! I'm pissed, and I’m hot, my head feels like it’s being split with an axe, I’m sick of listening to whales, and I'm so fucking pent up and horny it's starting to make me look at you! "
There's nothing but Nathan's heavy breathing filling the silence for a dozen horrible heartbeats.
For some unfathomable reason, all Charles says at first is, "I see." He reaches up and loosens his tie, just an inch. “You can’t delay gratification any further?”
Nathan looks up from Charles’s throat, parsing the words slowly, eyes widening.
“I understand the circumstances aren’t ideal, but would my hand suffice?”
The more Charles speaks, the less it makes sense. “What?”
“You aren’t allowed to masturbate on company time, but I am under no such limitation.” He presents a hand to Nathan, palm-up, fingers relaxed and inviting.
Meaning finally crashes into Nathan with meteoric force. “Why the fuck would I let you touch my dick?” His breath comes faster and heavier, a bead of sweat trickling down his back.
Charles retracts his hand and lets it fold back into the other over his lap. “Why indeed? Fair enough, forgive my crass joke.” Just like that he drops it, leaving Nathan much closer to rattling apart than before. “Well, let’s get back to work, then. As I was saying, the idea is for you to find a melody using the whalesong as your harmony.”
Would Charles’s hand be firm and confident, or a little clumsy? Does he even jack off himself? Nathan doesn’t know anyone more sexless than Charles Offdensen. The opposing ideas create such all-consuming conflict in Nathan’s mind that he ends up going into the recording booth to try vocalizing with the fucking whales after all.
Charles watches him through the glass, his gaze even and focused, pinning Nathan in place. Nathan shudders as more sweat drips down his spine. He wasn’t serious. It was a joke, he said so himself. But if that’s true, why does Charles still look like a wolf who’s sighted his prey? It only agitates Nathan further.
He concentrates on the whalesong and growls lowly with it. To call it a melody is generous given his style, but the exercise pushes him to try it. He starts to give words to it, long slow pronunciations of singular words chosen not quite at random. He groans, “Deathly light,” and it vibrates so deeply inside of him that it manifests outside of him, rattling the glass and shorting out the sound equipment and lighting briefly. He got too close, he found the words the whale was trying to say. He stops singing and steps back from the mic, trying to control his breath. The recording light turns off.
Charles is just standing there, hands planted on the lower edge of the console, leaning forward slightly, eyes focused straight on Nathan. He presses a button and his voice cuts through the faint static still crackling in Nathan’s headphones, “That’s all right, take a little break. That was good.” He leans back, loosens his tie further, and undoes the top button of his white shirt.
Nathan’s cock throbs in his jeans. He looks down and knows Charles can see it. Why does he still sound so nonchalant? Why is he hard in the first place?
“Do you want to come out?”
He’s stuck between two terrible choices. Both of them make him want to bash his own skull open to make it stop, but only one of them carries the additional promise of some form of release, as strange and perverse as the thrill might be.
Nathan inhales and exhales slowly, deeply. He removes his headphones and leaves the recording booth. “You weren’t joking at all, were you.” He doesn’t even bother phrasing it as a question.
“If it helps you find your focus long enough to finish this album,” Charles says evenly, carefully unbuttoning the cuffs of his sleeves and folding each of them up twice, “I’ll do whatever is necessary.”
Absolutely nothing about this should make Nathan hard. Charles Offdensen– a dry and ruthless businessman– offering to jack him off purely for the sake of the company’s bottom line. A fucking boring forty-something man touching his dick with the same hand that signs billion-dollar contracts with men and monsters. A man who has died for the band, and possibly killed for the band, too. For Nathan.
When Charles tells him, “You can turn around if you prefer, Nathan,” he exhales shakily and drops his shoulders, head lowering dangerously.
“Fuck you.”
“I’d need a little more time to prepare for it, but I'm surprised, I didn’t expect you could actually enjoy something like that.”
Nathan lets out a percussive almost-laugh, and says again emphatically, “Fuck you, Charles.” He stalks to the door, and for a moment he fully intends to leave, but he stops short and locks the door instead. “Fuck,” he whispers to himself, desperate.
He needs this so badly, he tells himself it doesn’t matter whose hand it is.
He turns around and returns to Charles, stands toe to toe with him, looks down at his perfectly average features. “Just make it quick.”
Charles’s mouth curls imperceptibly. “Oh, that’s doable.” Nathan aches.
Nathan furiously unbuttons his jeans, unzips his fly, and pulls his cock out, thick and heavy and almost fully hard. Charles doesn’t even hesitate before curling his hand around it, like it means little more to him than a handshake. He strokes his full length matter-of-factly, the pervasive sweat actually making things fairly easy to start.
Charles's method is different from Nathan's; his grip is almost punishing. He squeezes tighter at the base when he pulls up, doesn't twist at the head, lets up a little on the downstroke in a slight show of mercy. Nathan bows his head and closes his eyes, the ache in his balls gradually building. It isn’t enough to truly hinder his arousal, the promise of finally getting to come is so much stronger.
"Steady, Nathan," Charles says softly, and Nathan's eyes snap open to see his manager's face much closer than a moment ago, and his hand hovering near Nathan’s chest. It isn't Charles who's moved, it's him; he bows over him dangerously, breath clouding hot and damp between them, sweating harder. Nathan takes Charles's shoulder in a harsh grip and Charles's free hand presses against his chest in answer. His grip around Nathan's cock doesn't even stutter.
"It's too dry," Nathan rasps, noticing the uncomfortable level of friction only after saying it, and Charles pauses. His firm hand leaves Nathan's cock, and reappears in front of his mouth.
"This will have to do," Charles says, fingertips brushing Nathan's lips, and when Nathan parts them to ask what will, those fingers push into his mouth. They press down onto his tongue and stroke back and forth shallowly, sliding around the sides of it, tasting salty and vulgar as they collect spit from Nathan's mouth.
His eyes are wide and his mouth still hangs slightly open after Charles withdraws his fingers and goes right back to work, heedless of how blindsided he's left Nathan. He's alarmed to realize he's a lot closer to coming than he expected. Charles simply makes a small approving sound.
When orgasm cleaves his body in half, Nathan squeezes both of Charles's shoulders, his only anchor points besides the hand milking his cock through each blinding wave. He dimly hears Charles speak but he doesn't try to parse the words, he just spits, "Fuck," and inhales in shivering relief.
A hand slides down from his chest to his side, holding him there until Nathan can slowly scrape his brains from the floor and put them back in his skull. He still aches more or less from head to toe, but the dense fog has lifted slightly. When he looks down, Charles is still holding his cock, even as it softens.
"Did that knock something loose?" Charles asks him again; Nathan belatedly links the familiar sound to the fuzzy words he heard moments before.
"Something," Nathan agrees, uncurling his hands from Charles's shoulders and stepping back. He reaches down to get rid of the remaining smears of cum and sweat from his spent cock.
"Let me," Charles says, and Nathan pauses in confusion, letting the man step back into his personal space, cleaning him off with a pair of tissues stacked together. Charles even tucks Nathan's cock back into his jeans when he's done. He does it the way Nathan would do it himself, and somehow that is the thing that finally wakes the silent, ravenous monster chained down deep inside of him.
"Did you do this on purpose?" Nathan steps backward again, his thigh bumping the side of the sound mixing console. "Did you fucking try to seduce me?"
"I'm not sure what you mean," Charles says, throwing the used tissue away and rolling his sleeves back down. "I don't think I've been particularly seductive."
Nathan can neither agree nor disagree in a way that isn't mortifying, so he says nothing, and his fingers itch to upend the console bolted to the floor beside him. Charles isn’t even visibly hard. He doesn’t look affected at all. Would it be better or worse if he did?
"This is completely confidential between us. Rest assured I won't breathe a word about it." Charles does the top button of his shirt back up, and fixes his tie. "Your recording experiment seems to have been fairly successful. If you like you can take it to Abigail for workshopping, try again later, or table it."
Nathan despises and admires the way Charles can selectively discard parts of a situation so effortlessly. He looks at the recording booth, his brows drawn and his jaw set firmly in the reflection of the glass. Charles's reflection is in profile, looking at the corporeal Nathan.
"I’ll take the back half with the words in it for now. Could mix them down way low and work it into The Galaxy, maybe Rejoin… like subliminal messaging, that might be cool. If it doesn’t work I’ll hold onto it." With a slightly clearer head, Nathan can acknowledge there's something worth exploring here. "I'll try it again later." A new song is already slowly forming an accretion disk in the back of his mind.
"All right. I'll pencil it into the schedule."
"Good. We're done here." Nathan snatches his shirt from where he threw it on the floor minutes and years ago, throws it back on, and leaves recording studio C. The air outside the room is slightly less hot, and the speed at which he walks is almost enough for the air to cool the sweat on his skin.
He steals four hours of sleep in his massive bunk, some of the tension in his body temporarily eased by that one long-awaited orgasm. In the short term, it’s beneficial. But when Nathan wakes he’s confronted with the realization that Charles Offdensen jacked him off, and he liked it, and that comes with a whole host of new and terrifying problems.
At every daily meeting afterward, Charles looks no different than before. The only thing that's changed is the way Nathan feels gripped and bitten and impaled when Charles's eyes fall on him. The hunger that gnaws at him when he looks at Charles’s hands and thinks about how those fingers were in his mouth, on his cock. He wants it again, wants more in a way he doesn’t want to give words to yet.
With a looming, yawning horror, Nathan starts to worry he may never think of Abigail again.
—
It’s slightly easier for Nathan to channel his frustration into work now. His mental crises and dangerous thoughts have a specificity to them, instead of just being a massive, formless sea. That makes him able to chase them into rivers and canals, and wall them off for the time being. It also means he can wrangle the others into following suit with marginal success.
Tensions are still higher than ever with the band. They crowd into the weight room sometimes just to scream and sweat and commiserate over how much of a cold bitch Abigail is. Skwisgaar stops between sets on the lateral bar to shout, “She turns me down, too. Me!” He gestures indignantly at himself. “I am a god. She is impenetrable. You tried too, ja?” Skwisgaar looks at Nathan sitting up on the bench press.
“No, I was waiting for the right time,” Nathan says haltingly, and wipes his face with a towel. “You want to talk cold, what about Offdensen? This is all his fault.”
The furious agreement that follows is close enough to the unique frustration Nathan feels that he can take solace in the anger they all share and direct at their cold, unfeeling CFO, who wouldn’t even bring a single available lady on board.
At the next morning meeting, Charles confirms with him, “Nathan, are you still interested in a second experimental recording session in C?”
No one even looks at him, but Nathan still feels completely watched as he deliberates with a long, “Uhh…” before settling on a carefully neutral, “Yeah.”
“Alright. Say four p.m.” And Charles moves on smoothly, delivering a brief message from Roy Cornickelson, and a few other pieces of business bullshit.
Nathan naps after the meeting, wakes up and eats breakfast at two p.m., then loiters on the couch in studio D while Pickles and Abigail re-record his drums for Skyhunter. She seems so fully absorbed in working here that when four rolls around, Nathan slowly realizes she isn’t going to be coming with him to studio C. He gets up and leaves, and Abigail only calls with half-attention, “Let me know how it goes.”
Charles is coming down the opposite end of the hallway when Nathan reaches recording studio C. “Ah, right on time. Good.” He opens the door for Nathan.
Hating that his pulse is already speeding up in perverse excitement, Nathan ducks into the studio wordlessly. Charles follows him inside and closes the door. He wonders if the room has been used since last time. He resists leaning over to peer into the garbage can to check for evidence. “Is the setup the same?”
Adjusting his glasses, Charles peers at the mixer. “I believe so. You may want to examine the presets for yourself, I’m not completely sure what I’m looking at here.”
Nathan breathes through his nose in mild irritation, and comes to look. Charles only takes a couple of steps to the side, and he can feel the man’s body heat radiating against his bare arm. Knowing it would be hot, but too guarded to want to remove his shirt now, Nathan picked a sleeveless shirt this time. “Looks fine to me.”
“That’s good.” Charles looks up at Nathan, visible in his periphery. “You seem to be a little more even-keeled lately. Did it help?”
Nathan exhales in a rush and curls his fists on the edge of the console. “Fuck, don’t bring this up now.” It did help, but it also made him feel even more insane in different and worse ways than before.
“Alright. Why don’t you go ahead and step into the booth, whenever you’re ready.”
Nathan throws himself into the exercise for a full hour, making his own notes and directing his own experiments. There are new audio samples this time, and he writes a few lines of half-nonsense lyrics for them. Why would whales be singing about the stars?
Charles never moves from his chair, his hands stay interlaced in front of his face for most of the session, chin resting on his thumbs. He watches Nathan the entire time, only offering quiet responses and pressing record when prompted. Bit by bit Charles adjusts his clothing, taking his jacket off, loosening his tie and undoing the top two buttons of his shirt this time.
The heat inside the booth and his manager’s undivided attention gradually brings Nathan’s blood to a rolling boil. Has Charles always looked at him like this, and he never noticed? Or has the confinement finally gotten to Charles the way it already got to the band three weeks in?
“I’m done.” Nathan takes off his headphones and wipes his sweaty brow. The room outside the booth isn’t much cooler.
“Good work,” Charles says, removing his headset, looking up at Nathan over the rim of his glasses. The silence that hangs in the air is thick and uncomfortable and charged with a dark electricity. Charles stands up deliberately slowly. “Shall I go?”
Nathan fails to answer, the muscles in his jaw working and straining. Without turning his head, he watches Charles start to collect his jacket and head toward the door. Just before he hears the latch turn, Nathan barks, “Wait.” He whirls and stalks to the door where Charles is starting to turn around, and Nathan pushes him back against the heavy door, caging Charles in and leaning down to crush their mouths together.
He hears the sound of the door locking somewhere in between the back of Charles’s head hitting the door and his tongue meeting Nathan’s. Their breath is hot and noisy and primal. Nathan takes deep pleasure in asserting his dominance physically in this moment, after feeling like he’s been led around by the nose for so long.
“So–” Charles is satisfyingly out of breath when their mouths part, and it makes Nathan's cock jump just hearing him– “I take it… you want another?” His glasses are askew, and he adjusts them back into place. The faint scar tracing the top of Charles's cheekbone… has that always been there?
Nathan throws away all pretense, and nods, “Yeah.” He stays there, crowding Charles against the door, and watches his manager reach down between them to pull Nathan’s cock out again. This time, he opens his mouth for Charles’s fingers voluntarily, letting them slide over his tongue while he works his salivary glands. When his hand starts to withdraw, Nathan catches Charles by the wrist and makes eye contact while he licks his palm. Charles’s nostrils flare and his pupils swell.
Nathan’s cock is already stiff and dripping a little when Charles wraps his hand around it. He doesn’t seem the slightest bit uncomfortable with their position this time; he didn’t even seem surprised when Nathan kissed him. “Are you gay?” He isn’t sure he really wants to know, but the question escapes anyway.
“I’m very particular,” is all Charles offers back, focusing instead on stroking Nathan’s cock in the same firm and steady grip from before. Then his other hand reaches in to cup Nathan’s heavy balls, making Nathan’s hips jerk uncertainly at first.
Charles massages them with a level of care that complements the way he handles Nathan’s cock. Nathan doesn’t know why he’s touching his balls at all, it feels to him like a dangerous sort of intimacy that borders on violation. Even so, he doesn’t stop him.
He works up to orgasm fast and steady, it doesn’t last much longer than a few minutes. There’s little more than the sound of Nathan’s harsh panting, Charles’s spit and precum-slicked hand. His hips rock insistently the closer he gets to the edge. Charles grips one of his hips to hold him steady while the hand on his cock moves faster.
A thumb settles into the strip of bare skin between Nathan's shirt and his jeans that they haven’t bothered to pull down very far. It’s different than Charles touching his cock, it’s different, and Nathan lets out a low wounded noise when Charles strokes the line of his hipbone. He bucks forward, and he comes hard, pressing the head of his cock straight into Charles’s stomach.
Just like before, Charles keeps stroking until Nathan can't stand it anymore, has nothing left to give. He slowly catches his breath, chest heaving, and dazedly watches Charles pull some tissues from his pocket and clean him up. His cock gives one weak twitch as Charles works quickly and efficiently.
There's a lot of semen smeared into Charles's shirt, a little on his tie and belt as well. A horrible, possessive fire burns deep in Nathan's chest and he feels like he must be the first one to ever lay claim to Charles Offdensen. It probably isn’t true. Charles calmly cleans that up too, as best he can. Nathan watches him do it. He looks down a little farther and finally, another sign of humanity. Charles is hard.
“You going to do something about that?” Nathan murmurs, still standing much too close to him. Charles looks up at him, and doesn’t bother to look embarrassed, or even flushed.
Charles smirks at him. “I have a little more self-control than that. Could you excuse me, please? I need to throw these away.”
Stunned, eyes wide, Nathan takes one step back and lets Charles get rid of the tissues. He puts his jacket back on, buttoning it closed, and it hides the damp semen stain perfectly.
“If that’s everything, I have another meeting in, ah,” Charles checks his watch, “fifteen minutes, and I’d better get cleaned up. Good day, Nathan.”
Nathan is still standing there when the door opens and closes. He hasn’t laid claim to Charles at all. He’s being pulled on a leash and brought to heel.
Technically, the situation was ideal: Nathan got to come, didn’t have to work for it, and didn’t even have to pretend to want to reciprocate. Charles’s apparent disinterest should be a blessing. He should be able to forget about the whole event, finish recording the album, and return to land like nothing ever happened. This was nothing more than desperate times and desperate measures. He’ll go right back to fucking as many groupies as he wants, every day.
The next night he has a session in the Grand Recording Chamber with Abigail, and she asks him how his experiment went. Nathan tells her, “Fine. Nothing to put in the album, but something for the next one, maybe.”
When he stands behind the glass in front of her and refines his vocals for the last time, she gives him a hungry look, like she’s finally come to her senses and realized she wants him to bend her over the mixing board. Maybe her fucking dildo ran out of batteries. He can’t believe her terrible timing. The frustration is brutal. It makes him want to punch through the glass of the recording booth and destroy everything in sight. Why did it have to be now, when they’re finally at the end of all of this?
He could rise to the occasion and have sex with her anyway, but it would cause more problems down the road than Nathan can handle. He doesn’t even know how he’s going to handle the problems he already caused with Charles.
She should have thrown Pickles a bone instead. Nathan is already ruined.
—
The album is finished with one week to spare. A modest fifty bottles of champagne are presented to the band and production team, a secret stash brought up from a safe in Charles’s private quarters, the only true hiding place on the submarine.
“Congratulations, boys.” Charles lifts his glass to Dethklok, though the ceremonial gesture is lost under Pickles already double-fisting two bottles while the others throw back their glasses with similar abandon. Nathan accidentally meets Charles's eyes when he goes for a refill, and for that one fleeting moment Charles looks him up and down with the same expression that had Nathan slavering like a dog and all but begging for his hand. “You earned this.”
The covetous serpent did constrict those that luxuriated their final feast.