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It should be a welcome sight, to pass into the boudoir and see Haarlep where they always are, sprawled waiting and ready to be made wanting at any given moment. Sometimes on the bed, sometimes in a chair. Sometimes reading, sometimes eating fruit or cooked meat; but always licking juices off their fingers, fitting their tongue under the curve of their claws. A beautiful thing, with a body not warm but hot.
Raphael loathes them.
Today, anyway. Tomorrow he might feel differently about them. Their imperfect mirror, their strange youth, the apparent stride with which they take anything that Raphael throws at them. Wine and oranges are their indulgence of choice today, their sharp teeth tearing obscenely into sunset-coloured flesh, dropping the mangled skins of quarters onto a burnished silver tray. Haarlep picks up the wine and sips, and over the glass chalice, they spy Raphael. The languid ease they have changes, only slightly, posture shifting: shoulders drawing back, knees parting expectantly. A raised eyebrow, then, and his own voice purrs at him from across the room, shaded and rounded by Haarlep’s own speech pattern.
“You,” they drawl, “look like you’ve had a terrible day, my master.” He hasn’t. He’s simply brimming with hate, and it shows, in the furrow of his brow. It’s hate for this creature. His concubine. He walks towards the bed and takes the carafe of dark wine, pouring his own measure into a bronze cup, and Haarlep bats just-too-long eyelashes up at him. They run a clawed finger around the edge of their glass. “Do you need my attention?”
Wine doesn’t do much for a devil. But a rich spiced red feels good on the way down anyway, and drinking it himself stops him from thinking about the taste of it on Haarlep’s mouth. His own mouth. Treacherous line of thinking when he’s trying to bask in all his simmering hate. He knocks the whole cup back in one long draught, and then sneers, “No.” He slams the goblet down. “Why would I need you? You bore me. Tedious. Don’t think you stay here unscathed, that I’m misguided and don’t understand you. My distraction. You’re the source of my ire, not the cure for it.”
This was not the first time he had decided that he loathed them. It wouldn’t be the last. He never quite swung the pendulum all the way over to love, but there were days of tolerance, days that who and what Haarlep was didn’t feel like quite as much an affront. There were endless, infernal nights that fell outside of that scope entirely.
Haarlep set their wine aside, turning, rising onto their knees. Raphael’s eyes flickered over the curve of their spine, the flick of their tail. They are him, but not him. They don’t move like him. They move with a critical level of sensuality, even in these small moments, drawing themselves up in front of Raphael.
They tilt their head, their own expressions living in the lines of Raphael’s face. It’s a torment, the gorgeous twisted mirror, the warping of his own frame. Their tongue peeks out between their teeth when they smile. “Are you done?”
His jaw clenches. How dare Haarlep speak to him like this. Look at them, like this, this close, being so fucking blasé and contemptuous. “You’re a wretch,” he spits. “A slave. Little better than the sole of my boot, though it could be said that my shoes do more for me.”
“And yet here you are,” Haarlep says, a thin chill of calculation entering their voice. “Bonded to me still, your secrets, my secrets. Your needs, my needs. Don’t you think it all a little contradictory? After all …” Haarlep trails off, and Raphael watches as they run their fingers down the planes of their stomach. He feels it. Haarlep’s palm presses over leather, between their thighs. Raphael feels that, too, and turns his head away, mouth twitching as he represses a shiver. “If you think me boring, a wretch, you must think the same of yourself.”
They lean closer. Their breath ghosts his face, tickling. “You can take your temper and your contradictions out on me all that you like, Raphael—but you could send me away, shut me out of your bedroom, out of your bed, and you haven’t for as long as I’ve been here.”
Mm. Pride, or his ego, stubbornly unable to turn away a gift this good, even if it’s a gift that talks back. Raphael growls, but he takes hold of Haarlep’s hips, broad palms either side, thumbs rubbing against leather bindings. He leans forward.
To his frustration, the incubus leans back, dipping away from being kissed. His temper flares exponentially, hot and bright and humiliated, then stunting when he sees the wicked grin on Haarlep’s face. “Take this,” Haarlep says, gesturing a finger up and down at Raphael’s body, “off.”
The anger turns to a simmering heat. Haarlep makes a good game of things, of their casual disdain for their position, for being a gift from father to son—but they always ask him to take off the disguise. If they didn’t want to see him, if they didn’t take the same perverse pleasure in looking at one’s self, they wouldn’t say a word. The two of them despise and enjoy each other far more than either will say. He hums and flicks his wrist, dispelling the human guise in an instant.
Haarlep watches appraisingly, approvingly, as Raphael’s great arched horns burn into view, the pallor of humanity melting away in favour of the deep infernal red, eyes burning coals, dark veins and black claws. He hooks one claw under the leather at their hip. Patronising, voice rolling into a smoky purr: “Is that better?”
“There you are,” Haarlep murmurs, sparks glowing in their eyes, the point of their tongue pressing into a sharp tooth before they lean in close to Raphael. They run hands over the fabric of his clothing before unhooking the fastens, tugging his doublet and then his shirt open. “See, what’s the point in making yourself a mirror you can touch when you spend so much time parading around as a human.”
Raphael rolls his eyes. “You could stand to talk less,” he snarls, and crushes Haarlep’s mouth under his own, a brutal coaxing open, his tongue skimming against fangs. Heated and for the moment silent; power over this thing, this beast he calls his own.
It doesn’t last. It never does. Haarlep’s body is his own, and so they are privy to every last one of Raphael’s physical needs, desires that he doesn’t and refuses to voice. Some people mistake pride for shame, but Raphael isn’t ashamed of his proclivities: he simply doesn’t trust anyone but himself with them. Nobody can fuck you the way you can. Bards don’t like to play borrowed lyres, and all that. Haarlep knows how to play him.
It starts with pressure: Haarlep pushes back against him, denying him the lead of the kiss, taking over, his tongue in Raphael’s mouth, licking obscenely. Then they curl a hand around the smallest, leftmost horn, and pull, dragging Raphael out of the kiss and shoving him down into the bed. He grunts as his wings crumple under him, rolling onto his back to try and flatten them out, but Haarlep has a hand against his neck in a moment, leaning over him on the bed.
He groans, inhaling deeply, the knot in his throat moving uncomfortably against Haarlep’s palm. He can feel the grip from within and without, the twin flames of power and powerlessness. It stokes his blood, makes his heart pound faster. Haarlep always seemed so pleased with themselves here, the early call and response. They shove their knee between Raphael’s thighs and press up. “I don’t know that anyone boring could have you like this,” they remark, “from a real dog to a bitch in heat in moments.”
He would protest, but Haarlep’s palm presses harder against his skin. It takes so much more than this to hurt him, but it does choke off his ability to speak, and he grimaces, both hands grabbing at their forearm. “Open,” they say, and Raphael growls. “Open your mouth, darling,” Haarlep insists, placid as a lake no matter the scorch of their gaze. They supply motivation: “Or I won’t fuck you.”
It’s an empty threat. Is it? In the midst of it, Raphael’s control begins to blur, on the way to collapsing, and he can never quite place if Haarlep could really follow through with such a thing. He doesn’t want to find out. He opens his mouth, scowling, but his tongue rests on his teeth, touching his lower lip, wanting, expecting, knowing.
No praise for obedience, not here. Haarlep has never mistaken Raphael’s needs as desiring a gentle lover. They spit directly into his mouth, without ceremony. It’s warm and awful and the shudder that runs through Raphael when he swallows has him bearing his hips down to meet Haarlep’s thigh. He can feel all of it. The heat of his own thighs clamped around his thigh, his palm against his throat, his spit in his own mouth, a debasing and glorious ouroboros. He devours himself, this way, gladly, hatefully, delicious and terrible, over and over.
After a moment, they deny him the friction; they deny him everything. They move so quickly that the absence of feeling is so sudden to be nearly devastating, and Raphael sits up, furiously, to see Haarlep stood beside the bed, drinking wine out of their glass once more. They lick their lips. “Undress yourself,” they say. “You don’t allow me the luxury of several layers of clothing to get through, so why should I have such patience for you?”
“Pathetic,” Raphael answers, dragging himself into a sitting position and flicking his wings out. “And petty, when I well know that you enjoy it.” But it’s to humiliate him. Make him take his human skin off, force him to deal with the complications of wing and tail in a tightly tailored doublet—or, as he does now, make him draw on reserves of magic to simply fizzle clothing away with a gesture. There should be little difference between his nakedness and Haarlep’s skimpy leather bindings, but not so; there’s a gulf, a little powerlessness that comes with it. “Perhaps next time I’ll give you a good reason that you can’t undress me. Such as having no hands.”
Haarlep’s smile is so sweet, coming to stand between Raphael’s knees, tracing a hand almost tenderly along his horns, the heavy, hard weight of them. He’s anticipating them being pulled on again, which is perhaps why Haarlep does not. “Take my hands,” they said, softly, “if you want. It’s really no business if mine if you’d rather not be touched. I think you’d miss my fingers though, no?”
“Cur,” Raphael growls. “The insolence. There’s not a soul on any plane with the temerity to speak to me the way you do.”
“Isn’t that why you’ve kept me? Razor-sharp wit and a brazen approach? Just like you, don’t you think?” Haarlep takes hold of him by the jaw, then pulls. Forward, always zagging when Raphael expects them to zig; he thought they would shove him back onto the bed, but they wrench him the other way, throwing him to the floor.
The air goes out of him. He feels the surge of throwing, as much as being thrown, and then before he can recover, Haarlep’s heat is beside him, and their hand is wrapped around his tail, and they pull. Raphael groans, all nerves struck like flint making sparks, all blood stirring south, and Haarlep pulls harder, forcing him onto his knees, head down. The pleasure of dominance is in the clench of Haarlep’s hand around his tail, lifting it, exposing him like he’s nothing, common, ripe for treating this way.
“I don’t think you’ve done anything to earn the softness of a bed,” says Haarlep, drawing claws shivering-soft over the bare flesh of Raphael’s thighs, between them, skating away from the most sensitive areas, where he wants to be touched, where he’s gotten hard quickly enough to ache pathetically. Instead, they palm a handful of his ass, let their claws dig in, and then spit again. They slick the spit over his hole with their fingers, and the feeling wrenches a shameful, wanting sound out of Raphael’s throat, and he presses his forehead to the stone floor, gritting his teeth.
“—but”—all Hells, they never shut up, on purpose, teasing their fingertips against him, circling and kneading and spitting again and never breaching—“from the look on your face today, you need this. No easy fuck on your back today, master.”
Snapping, frustration a bowstring in his chest: “Fuck me already or take your soliloquy elsewhere.”
Relief, momentary but staggering, when Haarlep yanks on his tail again and presses two fingers inside him. There’s a caution to it, claws considered, but Haarlep is nothing if not practiced with their shared body, and they sink in quickly to the knuckle, in perfect tension with the pull on his tail. Raphael’s wings rustle in an uncontrolled shudder.
Haarlep hums, all delight and pleasure to have Raphael so compromised. “I admit,” they said, something thready like want sneaking into their voice; desire is a real thing, a poison, in this room, “this is a perk of the job. Debasing you. Generally, if I’d been made aware what a brat you are ahead of time,” they move their palm; fuck him with their fingers, leave him too drunk on being tight and wanting to protest when they say, “I would have been more grateful to your father.”
“Don’t,” Raphael growls, all warning, all sincere warning to boot; talking about Mephistopheles with their fingers inside Raphael is nearly a bridge too far, to put it lightly.
But Haarlep knows how to manipulate and press a knife to a boundary without cutting through. They’ll talk enough to make him uncomfortable, to make his head spin, all the things he would do if he were the one fucking Haarlep instead. He can warn and crow and bark, but it’s empty air. There is so much empty air between the two of them. It’s a game.
They drag their hand along his tail, yank from lower down. “Don’t?” Wilful misinterpretation, using real ire to push and push and push. “Don’t what, Raphael? Would you like me to stop?”
There’s no good answer. He groans, head still down against the floor, back an obscene arch. If he says yes, Haarlep will stop. If he says no, Haarlep will take another victory in a string of their victories, today.
Other days are different. Many of them have been. Some days are in bed, Haarlep between his thighs, hitching his knees either side of their hips, looking himself in the eye, kissing, open mouthed and a different kind of heat than this. To be entirely pleasured, rather than taken.
Some days are for denying Haarlep anything at all, for demanding attention and withholding it from them. Some are for the use of toys: rare souls that handed themselves over to Haarlep willingly, to watch as Haarlep has them, as they feed pretty dolls to all manner of monsters. Some are far bloodier than this, the rending of flesh and re-knitting it with magic. It’s possible to go exquisitely far in the creation of new holes before one must concede that some damage is being done. This day is bullish, calls for the correction of force and coarse language.
Yet all days, in the House of Hope, are inevitably and equally welcome, bloody or otherwise.
But he still has not given Haarlep an answer, and that the incubus will not stand. He’s taken too long; they drop his tail, reaching over his wings, and they grab one of his horns, forcing his head off the floor. Tension rattles along his horns to his skull, and Haarlep moves their fingers pointedly, pressing. Raphael’s cock twitches, untouched, and he half-growls, half-groans.
“Don’t stop,” he manages, air half-caught in his throat, and Haarlep pulls harder on his horns. Almost pain, his head being pulled back, and—“Yes, fuck—“
“Beg,” Haarlep instructs, voice cutting through the haze, “If you’d like me to fill you up, you’re going to need to beg me.”
The instinct is to bite back. But he does want to be full, and taken, and filled up, and pushed around, and he can argue when Haarlep is fucking him and he can feel it through them. He steadies a prideful breath, and then, “Haarlep,” said nearly soft, said wanting. “Please. I need it.” A devil of any kind likes to have their egos stroked, and Haarlep is no exception; Raphael need only give them a little more, to get what he wants in kind. “I need you.”
Haarlep tugs one more time on Raphael’s horns. They sound overtly, sickly pleased when they say, “Good boy,” and Raphael shudders, half-repulsed, unable to stop the way it sends heat down his spine. It’s a uniquely irritating feeling, the way he would gouge the eyes out of anyone else who spoke to him like that.
He’s left cold when Haarlep is gone, then, leaving him empty, all hands off—the release of his horns means he can drop his head forward heavily, taking a deep breath. He glances over his shoulder, watches their silhouette, now naked, leather straps all gone, making them look more like him than ever. The sense of anticipation is delicious.
They shove him down, and his cheek hits the floor hard. He grimaces, flesh of his cheek cut against his sharp teeth, a little sulphuric iron flooding his mouth; grotesque, familiar, his own blood. Haarlep’s weight, quite exact to his own, settles heavily behind him, hands grasping at his hips. They slide their—his, Raphael’s, identical in every way—cock between his cheeks. Uncanny and so promising, and Raphael caves, just a little, arching his spine, silent please, silent pleading, silent bait. Haarlep has been known to protest otherwise, but they get something from this, their back and forth. After all, what a gift Raphael gives him, the ability to mouth off to an Archdevil’s son, to see him debased and looking to be taken.
They take a hand off his hip and Raphael closes his eyes, focuses in on the feeling, where he can feel Haarlep wrapping their fingers around their cock, can almost see it the way one can see a memory. Raphael inhales. Haarlep spits again—on Raphael, in their palm, slicking their hand over themselves. They press the leaking head of their cock to his hole and breach him so slowly that Raphael makes a frustrated, torturous sound, teeth gritting together, jaw clenched.
Half the agony is the pace that Haarlep works into him; the other half is he can feel how tight he is, through Haarlep, and has no control over the urge to be flush and home and deep. Raphael wants to fuck and be fucked, and Haarlep is intent on drawing this part out—presumably specifically to pile on the little miseries, the little humiliations.
“You can do better than that,” he hisses, trying for antagonism. The two of them are so closely entwined that acquiescence is indulgence; they both know what the other is trying to do, at all times, always, what intent sits on the back of their tongues.
Haarlep sighs, says, “You are so impatient”—and then obliges. They dig their claws into Raphael’s hips and snap their own forward, and the noise Raphael makes is loud enough to be heard in the halls of the House, he’s certain—and entirely doesn’t care. Let every soul know that Raphael has pleasure where they do not. When Haarlep moves in earnest, it’s as rough as they promised, hard and fast.
He'll never tire of feeling all of it. His eyes roll back, groaning, everything doubled up, the intensity getting him the closest thing to drunk that anything really can. He pushes himself back to meet Haarlep’s thrusts and feels that, too, his own eagerness echoing back at him. Haarlep is enjoying themselves, enjoying the curve of Raphael’s back, losing themselves in the in-out pressure, in what they’re doing to him. The pleasure of humiliation and humiliating.
“You,” oh, there’s a sweet airlessness in Haarlep’s voice now, clearly affected by their own desire, “look so delicious, taken down a peg or two—sometimes I think this is exactly where you belong, not with your—oh—endless scheming, but doing nothing but taking cock for eternity.”
Raphael shudders, presses his forehead to the floor, panting. “You would have me as one of our brain-dead dolls, mm?”
“Oh no, darling,” Haarlep purrs, and then takes the wind out of Raphael by shoving him down flat to the ground—no longer on his knees—and following closely. Their weight settles all over Raphael, so close and so deep with every rolling thrust of their hips, their chest pressed against his back. His wings are trapped, something about the discomfort so fitting, so correct. They wrap their fingers around the front of Raphael’s throat, teeth scraping his ear, biting the lobe.
It’s so much at once—every nerve ending is white hot—that Raphael cries out, no; whimpers Haarlep’s name, which only drives them on. He groans. “What, then?”
“Mm? Oh, I would want you full conscious and aware for all of it.” Haarlep’s tongue flickers over his earlobe, their mouth on his neck. “You would let me love you, you already do. But any beast in the Hells you would let fuck you open. Orthons are particularly large, I know you’ve already thought about that—”
No more struggling for power. No more anything. With Haarlep inside him, processing every sensation of his body in use, the thing he likes, fucking and being fucked, flat on the ground and being taken so roughly, it’s nearly easy to picture it. To imagine letting go. Raphael lets the incubus paint images like that. For just a little while, imagining being nothing is a sweet escape.
“Just a dog on a leash,” Haarlep groans, voice a terrible, promising whisper. Their hand presses harder on Raphael’s throat, making him dizzy. “Just a hole for other’s pleasure. Yours incidental. Nothing more and less. Wouldn’t you like that?”
It is just an escape, but Raphael gasps, “Yes,” anyway, all thought of fighting back discarded, because yes will keep Haarlep inside him, because yes feels good, because his cock is neglected and untouched but so hard, pinned against his stomach, and it’s all so abjectly obscene and—“Keep talking.”
There are some instructions Haarlep delights in following. The stroke of their hips quickens. “Do you want me to come inside you?” Before he can answer: “Really, you want you to come inside you. All of the benefits, none of the work. Pleasuring yourself”—they lose themselves, for a glorious moment, and bite down hard on Raphael’s shoulder, muffling a moan between their teeth before they can recover—“This is why being a bitch would suit you so well.”
Yes, yes. Nobody understands him the way he understands himself, nobody can push his buttons better than someone sharing his body, inside himself, taking himself, all-encompassing. In that too is that he likes to be ruined, and who else can he trust to ruin him? Yet—the fantasy is a nice one, and Raphael cries out for the press of teeth, how Haarlep bites hard enough to break skin and then licks up the blood.
“Tell me,” Haarlep growls, “Answer the question—"
“Come inside me,” Raphael says, something breaking inside him, desperate, willing in all his desperation, “I want you to—”
Haarlep gasps, bites Raphael again with a shuddering moan, “Yes, beg me—oh, beg for me, just like that.”
He does. He pleads, far better than before, far prettier, “Use me,” trying so hard to push back onto Haarlep’s cock but they have him pinned and at their whims, at their control, “fuck me, fill me up, I need you to come inside me. I need to feel it, or. Fuck.”
They make a sound of interest, of delight, nearly a laugh. “Or what?”
“I need it to come,” he admits. He knows he does, he knows that like this—where Haarlep is all but refusing to touch his cock—he needs the feeling, the kind of ruination, the marking, the claiming.
Haarlep is all too smug, when they say, “You’re so well behaved when you’re desperate.” They nip at his earlobe again, hand leaving Raphael’s throat to instead push fingers into his mouth—giving him no room to argue, and before he thinks to bite them off, he presses his tongue around them instead, groaning, sucking on Haarlep’s fingers. He feels that from within and without, too, as if he made the choice to put their-his fingers into his-their mouth.
“Good boy,” they murmur again, and Raphael flushes with hateful heat for it, the same as before, the same as always. Their claws press into his tongue. Their hips stutter. They don’t need to wax poetic about how close they are, they don’t need to ask if Raphael can tell; he feels it, and it floods through him.
Talk falling away in favour of breathing, in favour of moaning; Haarlep’s mouth against Raphael’s skin, Raphael whimpering around fingers. They’re both so close it’s nearly unbearable. He has a terrible, sneaking feeling that Haarlep is drawing it out on purpose—again—but he’s helpless, entirely held beneath them, and really, they both knew he would cease argument eventually, that he would be here, wanting and needing them to fuck him like this, however hateful an entrance he made.
As though hearing Raphael’s thought: “I could do this for hours,” Haarlep says, soft and dangerous. It’s not a tease, it’s the perfect, taut midpoint of a threat and a promise. “I know my stamina is better than yours. I could keep you here. On the edge. Maybe let you come, even if I’m not finished, then keep fucking you.”
“No,” Raphael says, letting Haarlep’s fingers fall from his mouth, aware that he sounds entirely pathetic, startled even. “No—I begged for you—”
Even as he’s saying it, he realises they wanted this: the most earnest kind of begging, the most pitiful kind, wanting their come so badly that he can’t stand the idea of being kept here all night. Their victory, again, and they take it from him. The true desperation pushes them over the edge, is what completes it for them, the most final kind of giving over—Haarlep’s hips jerk hard and they press flush, and stars shatter in front of Raphael’s vision. Their hand curls around his throat again, sweet pressure.
He less feels it than he experiences it, as though it’s him, buried flush in himself, cock pulsing, a shameless and hungry filling up. He feels himself gripping his own neck. He’s so tight around Haarlep, taking all of them and their come in turn, and Raphael thinks of how their come will trickle between his thighs later and all of it—the multi-layered, over-heightened, over-sensitive feeling—has him losing control, hips twitching towards nothing as his orgasm takes him.
It’s a filthy mess, between his stomach and the floor. There’s no air to be had. He squeezes his eyes shut, waves crashing, stomach clenching, muscles taut. It’s only when Haarlep releases the hold on his throat that he feels he can open his eyes, gasping. His eyes prickle damply, and he blinks fast, and shudders when Haarlep presses a kiss to the wound they made on his shoulder.
“Very good,” Haarlep murmurs. Their weight is, much as Raphael is loath to admit it, missed, when they draw away from him. He winces when they pull out. The heat of the Hells is nearly a cool breeze over his bare back, where they no longer touch him.
In his blurry peripheral, he sees Haarlep settle onto the floor beside him, sitting on their hip. He focuses on them. They are a welcome sight, skin dotted with sweat, naked and spent, their wings spreading out behind them. They tilt their head. “Needs? Other than to be helped off the floor.”
Raphael grunts. He unfolds his own wings, unrumpling them, shaking them out. He’s not quite ready to look at the spread of come, sticky and cooling, beneath him. Does he hate them less, now? Yes. For today, for the moment. “Perhaps you would roll me head-first into the bath so that I might drown.”
Haarlep laughs, leaning on their palm. “It might be arranged, but then what would your House do without you?” They kneel, reaching for him. “Come. I won’t drown you today.”
After a moment, Raphael reaches for them, too.