Chapter Text
It’s as if there is no blood in his veins. He is an unimpeachable gentleman, he is ruthlessly gentle and genteel. Jonathan is gallant and good, he is righteous, he is everything anyone could ever want of him. He is the true-born son; he is a citizen, a scholar, an athlete of renown, he is untouchable.
He is made of marble, and Dio--Dio, who lives in a noxious mist of rumor, Dio wants dreadfully to sunder him. To tear him from his pedestal, riotous, he wants to hurl a chain around that chiseled neck and heave.
Jonathan must learn that he is himself an animal, base as the masses Dio crawled from, base as Dio himself.
No matter if the world knows. No, it is a thing for Jonathan alone, to rot the scaffold he stands on.
And, Dio thinks, teeth edging at his lips, it will be so trifling, so easy to show him.
It is a given, in the book of falsehoods that is their household’s peace, that Jonathan knows Dio’s transgressions. The things he has done, in the rage, the bitterness of his youth, and even since.
Jonathan is a fool to have forgiven him, merciful and sickening sweet.
Jonathan is a fool to think that Dio does not see him, too. Certainly, he is companionable, he is polite. He is no cad.
But Jonathan--he looks. When they walk home together in the evening, flush with victory, his eyeline finds the cockeyed sway of Dio’s hips. At the vaunted table, what is Jonathan watching but the shapes that Dio’s mouth makes, the way his lips stain bloody with warmth and wine?
And in the drawing room--Dio bends across the billiards table, he calculates his shot. He calculates Jonathan, the hover of his hands. As if the bones in Dio’s back are stations of the cross, as if he’d like to pray at every one.
It’s not as if Dio is above this; he revels in it, sordid. But at the very least, he has no misgivings about himself. Not when his false congenial smiles turn hungry, not when his voice turns southward toward a croon. Not in the night, when sleep evades him, when he tightens his lean thighs around the ache, when scheming flickers through his mind.
It is as simple a thing as this: Dio dons his red crushed-velvet jacket, he ties a mocking bow around his throat. He bites his lips, claps his cheeks like a spinster embarking on her last-chance season.
Dio goes along with him, up the grand staircase, across the shadowed hall. He smiles, he makes his most docile conversation, and then…!
He falls, crumbling with a sprezzatura cry, he feigns the turn of an ankle. Hisses a curse, for verisimilitude; Dio falls with his thighs open wide.
The trap sings, it springs the instant it is set. Jonathan is on him, then, he is gathering him up, he is pressing him frenzied to the broadness of his breast.
Dio feels the anvil of his heart, shot through with adrenalin. It edges on surprising that Jonathan’s heart beats at all.
“Oh my goodness,” Jonathan says, his voice is ragged with lost breath, “Dio, are you alright?”
The purse of lips, a gaze cast up through blond lashes. “I’m quite fine,” Dio says, his breath wound taut. “I’ve only turned an ankle.”
Jonathan cannot smooth over his cringe. “I imagine it’s painful. Shall I fetch a doctor?”
Dio sighs; he softens, just slightly, in those arms. He lays cheek to ox-yoke clavicle--like this, he can smell Jonathan, like clean sweat and goodwill.
“No,” says Dio, labored, “I’ll be well enough in the morning. All I’d ask,” he tells him, poised for the killing blow, “is that you help me to my bed.”
A nod, stalward and kind. As if Jonathan would grind down mountains for him, if only he would ask. And then Dio is lifted, bridal, he is hefted tenderly against that shoulder.
And yes, yes, this is right. This is the ideal state of affairs, this is the way things ought to be.
He nuzzles just a little closer, he hides his face against the curve of Jonathan’s neck. Breaks off a sharded little sound, he paints vulnerability with his breath.
Jonathan hitches, a moment, but still holds him. Still he walks on, all the way to Dio’s room, still he opens the door with Dio in his arms. Still he lays him careful on his bed, fingertips slipping soft across his back.
“Is there anything else you need from me?” Jonathan’s voice is nearly quavering, nearly worshipful. “Anything at all.”
A smile, through manufactured pain. He needs nothing but Jonathan’s surrender, Jonathan to come to know himself like a frigid dawn.
What he says is this, voice strained and nearly languid: “would you help me to undress?”
Jonathan is still, stunned. His mouth is unbecoming, slack, and Dio wants to press his fingers past those lips. Wants to pet that speechless tongue, to verge on Jonathan’s throat.
He doesn’t have to, doesn’t have to do a thing. Jonathan kneels, as if to be knighted, he lifts shaking hands to the laces of Dio’s shoe.
Valeting does not come naturally to him; he does not dress himself. But he turns his hand to it, for Dio. Gently, carefully, for the sake of Dio’s false pain.
A smile spreads on Dio’s face, unbidden and warm as a lascivious dream. And that heat--what is it? Affection?
Impossible. It is the sear of mastery, of ownership. It is everything Dio was ever meant to feel.
Jonathan eases off the shoe; he lays it gently on the floor beside the bed. His eyes follow a languid trail up Dio’s shin, they catch just underneath his knee. There is a wistfulness to him; something, perhaps, that yearns to leave a kiss there.
The silence dares him, but he won’t. He only looks up, only opens out the uncertainty of his eyes.
Dio lifts his hands, languid, as if to a piano forte’s keys. He plays two scales: one, his fingers weaving in Jonathan’s hair, two, unfurling the bow about his neck.
“I didn’t think you were the sort to leave a job unfinished,” Dio says, and that palm swoops slow, it gentles the plane of his cheek. Falls away, then, with the raggedness of Jonathan’s breath, and trails to the buttons of his bloody-wine coat.
He undoes them, one by one, and Jonathan is undone with them. He reaches for Dio’s other foot, his fingers scrabble blind for shoelaces. Now, as ever, there is nothing for him but to watch.
Dio shrugs away his coat, he parts the buttons of his shirt. Bares his pale throat, the ornate knives of his collarbones. The burgeon of his breasts, like the waxing of the moon, and Jonathan is breathless, graceless, lost.
The shoe clatters to the floor, but they are not there to hear it. It does not make a sound.
The only vibration is Jonathan’s voice, low and softly awed. A wedding-night noise, and all he says is ”Dio...”
But this is not a wedding night. This is something older, deeper. Something pagan, instinctual, and Dio will provoke that impulse in him. He will stoke that hearth, he will burn away that great house.
“Oh,” he sighs, like sugar to absinthe, “you’ve been too kind to me. I’m wracked with guilt--would you still care for me like this, if you knew I’d been deceitful?”
He rises to his feet, despite Jonathan’s wordless protest. Stands above him, sure-footed, and smiles. There is a melancholy in it, manufactured.
“Dio,” murmurs Jonathan, in a voice that is only fit to say you are beautiful, “I don’t understand.” He stands as well, he lays a hand on Dio’s shoulder.
There is nothing then but for Dio to list into his space, to press his breast against the broadness of Jonathan’s. To speak, and tint every syllable dirgelike.
“It was a ruse,” he confesses, with his lips to Jonathan’s cheek. With his thighs between Jonathan’s hips, he can feel how close he is to winning. “I am unhurt. I was so lost in my desire for you, and all I could think to do was scheme. To feel your touch, to beg another moment of your gallantry.”
Jonathan has been fed all his life from a silver spoon. He swallows this, too, eagerly.
“I’m dreadfully sorry to have been untruthful,” Dio murmurs, “and if there’s anything I could do to make amends, anything at all… Please, Jonathan. You can have whatever you want of me.”
And this, surely, is the breaking point, the snap of the labored spine. This is the casting-off of Jonathan’s laurels, this is when he will finally bare teeth. Dio knows this, he feels it in the quick tide of Jonathan’s blood, the arrythmic throbbing of his cock.
But Jonathan is preternaturally still. He is good, doggedly so, even now. Even sharing his heartbeat with Dio, even tantalized with a rare and calculated softness.
“I shouldn’t,” he whispers, with a shiver in his voice like the Arctic circle, like a lost expedition. Honorable, he will go down with the ship.
Surely, surely, this is not the core of him. Surely Dio has not lost; it is never over until he has won. Until he has carved out what he wants, with chipped teeth and splintered nails.
Dio smiles, knows that Jonathan can feel it at his cheek. “But you want to.”
No answer. Stillness turns to tremor, like the grinding of a fault. It will buckle, it will snap. Dio will nurture it until it does.
“You just think that it’s ungentlemanly, to do this outside of marriage. You think it’s improper—sinful,” he croons, “to do this with another man. Even a man like me.”
Dio feels more than sees it, the purse of Jonathan’s lips. Feels more than hears his word, a simple, somber yes.
He is in the snare. Dio needs only cut the line. He smiles, he raises one hand to gentle at Jonathan’s cheek. “Sweet one,” he murmurs, so soft and slow and secretive. “You don’t believe everything you’ve been told, do you?”
He doesn’t. And if he does not know that of himself, Dio is here to guide him, he will bind him up in Ariadne’s thread.
“Besides,” Dio carries on, “you are a great student of archaeology. You would know better than anyone that mores are relative to their time and place. And have you not read about the Sacred Band of Thebes?”
A stiffening. It seems that Jonathan has.
“Then tell me,“ says Dio, his tone shot through with innocence, “who were they?”
Jonathan chooses his words like he might a wedding ring. He takes care with it, takes time.
Dio hums, softly gusting in Jonathan’s ear. It is a love song, one that he so desperately hates.
It could be an hour before Jonathan speaks, voice flimsy for his size and strength. “They were,“ he edges, “they were lovers.“
A nod from Dio, close enough to be a caress. “Full marks,” he says. “One hundred fifty pairs of lovers, an untouchable fighting force. Don’t you want to stand alongside those men?”
“Don’t you want to stand there,” he whispers, and his every breath is a kiss, “with me?”
The admission is tacit, but Dio knows it for all that it is. Dio knows that he is gaining ground, that he leans on his front foot, his rapier. There is solely one last thing to say.
“Of course you are not my prisoner,” Dio says, almost offhand. “I only want this of you if you want this of me.”
Because it would be useless, if it was only Dio’s volition, another vile act of his. This depravity, this baseness must be Jonathan’s alone.
“You could leave,” he says, but Jonathan is rooted to the floor. He is rooted to Dio’s body, those fingers are curled helpless in the slump of his shirt.
Dio lets a long moment pass. There is no change, only the waver of Jonathan’s heart, only the way his body twitches.
There is only the quiet, hanging like the sword of Damocles.