Kink, Love, and Galactic Domination

"Optimizing that chance should be your top priority," Cordic told Leora. "It would give us near total control in a single move."

"Control to make him do what, exactly?" Leora asked.

In an instant, every eye in the room was on Leora, and narrowed in suspicion.

"What's in the best interests of the empire, obviously," said Cordic.

"Such as," Leora insisted. "Give me a specific example of something we're working on right now to make things better."

Maybe that would remind her of what she was doing this for. Or maybe it would just be more comfortable to listen to than a strategic dissection of her sex life.

"Well, we need to get the right people officially named to the new merged council in the transition, for one," said Cordic. "Your uncle Dagget has his eye on Chief of Defense."

"My uncle Dagget is retired."

Cordic burst out laughing, then coughed and recovered himself. "Excuse me, your majesty. You... You were serious?"

Leora pinched the bridge of her nose. "What 'defense' does he even want to be chief of? We just struck an alliance with our only enemy."

"A very new alliance," said Flissom. "It would be foolish not to prepare for potential threats. Civil threats, for example."

That was not an argument Leora would ever win, so she let it pass in silence. She reached her hand under the table, feeling its smoothness, enjoying the thought of spiting it.

That was the one detail of last night that she'd left out of her report. It was so small, so innocuous. What damage could it do to allow herself the same high of keeping a secret that Trisque liked so much?

Her fingers found an interruption in the smoothness.

If Leora had not been through painstaking training to suppress any reflex that might make her look surprised without her choosing to look surprised, her face would have revealed to the entire council that there was something under that table worth examining.

She ran her thumb over it a second time, tracing the T, the L, the outline of a neat little heart.

Trisque had been quicker than she'd thought.

That same training was the only thing protecting her from a smile.

#

"Oh no, shit no, I know that look," Aidrom pointed accusingly at Trisque's face. "That's the someone-touched-my-dick-and-I-liked-it-time-to-throw-the-rest-of-everything-in-the-fucking-trash-compactor look."

"You're imagining things," said Trisque, yawning to stretch out the spasm in his cheeks that kept trying to pull the corners of his mouth upward.

He hadn't actually allowed them to turn upward in Aidrom's presence, of course, but Aidrom was annoyingly gifted at detecting even minor facial spasms.

"Did you fuck her?"

She fucked me, Trisque thought, but saying that out loud definitely wouldn't ward off any of Aidrom's criticism.

"She asked me to," he said instead. "And not like, 'oh, well, this is my duty now, knock yourself out, I guess.' More like 'rarr, get on that bed, big boy—' she didn't actually call me big boy, but like, 'get on that bed before I start dripping down to my ceremonial garters.' Was I supposed to say no? Because I seem to remember you specifically advising me not to say no."

"I also advised you not to make me watch you play out some syrupy, maudlin first love story."

"Well then maybe you should have given me the chance to get one of those out of the way before we got here."

This came out before Trisque had thought it all the way through. Aidrom looked like all his worst fears had been confirmed.

"Maybe I should have," said Aidrom. "Maybe I should have let you have a girlfriend, just so I could rip you away from her when the time came to say your vows. Get you properly jaded before we got to the big leagues. Do you think that would have been less cruel? Because I can tell you now, the biggest, snottiest, jilted juvenile hissy fit you could have thrown at me would still make you more useful than the puppy dog eyes you're sporting now."

"Jilted means rejected," said Trisque, "not broken up by outside forces."

"Do you think I give a fuck what jilted means?" Aidrom raised his voice, "when the fate of the galaxy is riding on an emotionally stunted man-boy's belated teen hormones?"

"Calm down and quit hogging the oxygen," said Trisque.

This was something Aidrom was fond of saying when Trisque was on his way to making a point. One of these days, he was going to make it work in reverse.

"Remember the first time I got drunk, and I was scared it was going to change my whole personality?" Trisque asked. "It didn't. I was still the same person, only drunk. It's like that. Yeah, the sex was good, and maybe I'm still a little hungover. Big deal."

Aidrom didn't look convinced. "You'd better be right. Don't you go getting addicted."

"What happened to, 'sex leads to attachment, especially in women?'" asked Trisque. "Did you stop to think that I'm giving her something just as addictive? She liked it. How many other men would let her—"

"Tons," Aidrom stopped him.

"I didn't even tell you what I let her do—"

"Doesn't matter," said Aidrom. "Have you brushed the stars out of your eyes long enough to actually look at that woman? The answer is tons."

"All right, fair." Trisque touched his lips, exerting a little extra pressure to keep them in a straight line. "But none of them are me."

While Aidrom cursed some more and prayed loudly for various deities he didn't believe in to deliver him from the delusions of the young, Trisque surreptitiously touched the carving he'd made under the table while the rest of the ship was asleep.

He hoped Leora had found it during her old council's turn in the conference room this morning. He noted, with only mild alarm, that he was fantasizing more about the smile on her face than the reward she had promised him — though that ran a close second.

If he focused hard enough, he almost thought he could feel the thin layer of ink on his skin, waiting for her tongue.

"Anyway," Aidrom concluded his own grumbling. "If you're done embarrassing yourself for now, maybe we can get some actual work done."

"You were the one who wanted to talk girls, but whatever. Work. Lay it on me."

Aidrom ignored this and passed him a tablet.

"We've finalized the proposal for the relief missions to the disputed planets."

"Who's we, by the way?" asked Trisque, glancing significantly around the empty perimeter of the conference table. "Wasn't the whole point of this unification treaty to unify the Litani and Parusan governing bodies? This room was specifically designed to be large enough to hold everyone with any kind of title from both sides at once while we figure out what the new structure's going to look like. So why are we still using it in shifts? For that matter, where even is the rest of our council?"

"Doing actual work like this, to make your job look easy," Aidrom answered, tapping the tablet. "And yes, I've heard the rumors that the Parusans seem to consider it everyone's job to drop everything and handhold their princess through every little detail with big council meetings, but it's really only a one-man job."

Before Trisque thought to pull away, Aidrom grabbed hold of his hand and used it to scroll down to the bottom of the proposal.

"This," he said, "is where you and wifey sign. See? Easy peasy. Now it's up to you to make sure she does it, before any more war orphans go and catch cholera, or diphtheria, or whatever the fuck it is people are dying of in those hellholes this week, okay?"

#

"This paragraph outlines a series of 'protections' against equal rights legislation for the next twenty years," said Leora, looking up from the tablet Trisque had presented her with when they both returned to their suite for dinner that evening.

Trisque could feel her assessing him for surprise, for approval, guessing at whether he'd already read the proposal and what he thought about it.

He hadn't read it all the way through, but he couldn't muster the look of shock she was probably hoping for.

"Yeah," he said, "that sounds like something my guys would do."

"Yeah, it does," said Leora, which hurt more than Trisque would have expected it to. "You realize I'm not going to sign it, right?"

Trisque set down his sandwich and dialed his sensitivity down as low as it would go. It was a talent that he'd never had enough of to please Aidrom, but what he did have of it had helped him survive more than one briefing on similar proposals.

"If we don't sign," he explained, "thousands of people will die."

"You mean what remains of your government will murder thousands of hostages if I don't sign away the rights of billions," said Leora.

Trisque rubbed his forehead. "Technically, the thing I said is still accurate."

"We are the ruling couple of all known inhabited space, including those planets. We're going to get them help, without a catch."

"Look, I know your uncle just did whatever the hell he wanted whenever he wanted, and if his advisors didn't like it, they ended up drifting through space," said Trisque. "But that's not how Litani administration works. None of the executive departments in place in Litani space will actually carry out a directive unless they've had a hand in negotiating it first, before it comes to us for a sign-off."

"Well, I'm not signing off," said Leora. "We'll just have to organize some shipments using my infrastructure."

She turned to the window, arms crossed, shoulders tensed under a flood of logistical impossibilities. The Parusan distribution system had never been the most reliable, and that was before most of its resources had been diverted into relocating and consolidating key facilities.

Trisque stepped closer behind her. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm really... I'm sorry. And I know how you feel. I want to strangle my team half the time too."

"You could let me do it for you," said Leora bitterly. "If you were really sorry."

There was an extremely high probability that Leora did not mean this in the same way it manifested Trisque's imagination. Yet after how well last night had gone, Trisque could not resist putting his version out there.

He went to his bag, still not unpacked, and dug through it to the batch of underwear at the bottom. From among the cotton and silk shorts, he pulled a longer, thinner piece of silk: Aidrom's favorite office tie as of three years ago, when Trisque had stolen it in a fit of rebellion.

At first, it had simply been a petty, private source of satisfaction, getting to take something from the spymaster himself without him noticing.

He hadn't planned the other use he'd ended up finding for it. It had just happened.

As he'd done more times before than he cared to count, Trisque fastened the tie around his neck in a knot neat enough to satisfy the most exacting etiquette advisor. Then he pulled it tight enough to impinge just slightly on his trachea and arteries, putting effort to his breaths and starting a mild, pleasant throbbing in his head.

"Will this do?" he asked Leora.

She turned around to face him, lifting her eyebrow at the Litani Department of Intelligence logo on his new accessory.

"You want to make up for bringing me that insult of a proposal..." she assessed the situation in slow, enunciated words, "by having me choke you with the tie of the spymaster who basically raised you?"

"He didn't raise me," Trisque corrected. "He's more like.... It's complicated."

Leora nodded, thankfully taking this as explanation enough of their relationship.

She stepped forward and took the two ends of the tie thoughtfully in her hands.

"Why would you want me to punish you with a symbol of him?" she asked neutrally.

"It's more like I am him," Trisque tried to explain.

The idea seemed more perverse out loud than in any of his solo play.

"I see," said Leora, adding a shade more pressure to his neck. "But if you're really as angry as I am," her mostly cool voice wavered a little on angry, "wouldn't you want to be the one in control, taking it out on someone else?"

"I'm... not good with that," Trisque tried to explain. "I don't like how I feel after losing my temper. But being him, that's...."

"The ultimate control over him," Leora put it together.

"Is that crazy?" Trisque asked. "It sounds crazy."

"I'm wrapping my head around it," said Leora, while wrapping the tie more securely around her hand.

"I also get to blow off steam," said Trisque. "Without it really being me. I get to lose his temper instead of mine. I get to be as big a tool as he is, knowing that for once, it won't go unpunished."

"Oh, you've got that right," said Leora, pulling his face down toward her so that their noses were nearly touching. "So, lose it. Babble his bullshit at me so that I can choke it right the fuck off."

Trisque cleared his throat, heart pounding in both his head and chest from self-consciousness, and a little bit from Leora's proximity.

He summoned his best impression.

"Stop pretending to be a real politician, be a good little princess, and sign the fucking propos—"

Leora cinched his airway completely shut. The world went gray, then black. His legs lost their substance.

#

Leora knew she might have gone a little hard in those first few seconds of the game. In her defense, however, Trisque didn't struggle at all.

He looked her right in the eye and smiled in the moments before he collapsed.

As soon as his knees hit the floor, Leora loosened the tie and pulled it out from under the collar of his shirt. He rested, wheezing lightly, with his hands against the floor, while she pulled the hanging ends of the tie around to the back of his neck, turning it into a makeshift leash.

She waited with it in hand, until he was ready to speak again.

"Is that the best you've got?" he coughed in a voice that was still not quite his own. "Weak fucking cunt."

"Is that the best you've got?" Leora answered at double volume, yanking up on the tie. "Weak fucking cunt? You can't think of a single worse thing to call someone, can you? Not monster. Not despot or disaster or pompous, ignorant fool. No, it's cunt. Pussy. Bitch. You can't imagine anything worse to be than the parts and the people that you want to fuck. You must be really terrible at fucking, aren't you?" She unfastened his pants, yanked them roughly down over his ass, and gave him a hard slap. "Aren't you?"

"As if I'd ever ask a cunt for a review," Trisque answered.

Leora yanked him forward in the direction of their shared bathroom, letting the knot grow tighter as Trisque struggled to keep up at a crawl, with his pants around his knees. After a few missteps he grabbed the ends of the tie, under her hands, and held on while she dragged him over the lush carpet.

"Guess what you're going to be tonight," said Leora, picking up her wide, silver hairbrush from next to the sink and showing it to him.

Trisque's face formed the sort of smirk she'd always thought it was built for. The expression no longer looked right to her there. "Let me guess—"

"I just told you to guess—"

"I'm supposed to be your bitch?" he pressed on. "I don't think you have it in you."

"You're the one who's going to have something in you." Leora shoved him forward over the edge of the unused spa tub and knotted the ends of the tie around one of the knobs. "Need a warmup?"

"Foreplay is for pussies," said Trisque.

Leora spanked him with the back of the brush. "Foreplay it is, then. Don't worry, I won't make it gentle. You'd just about die of embarrassment if I did that, wouldn't you?"

She struck again, and again, leaving just enough time between strokes for his face to relax before the next one.

Most of the time, he was Trisque, her perplexingly sweet new husband with an uncharted bundle of intriguing and useful kinks, one of which currently had his neck tied to their bathtub. There were moments, however, when he was nothing but that tie, with the Litani intelligence logo on it.

Leora would blink and open her eyes to see cold, brutal, malicious power wrapped in silk affectations of civilization. She would hit the subhuman creature in front of her as hard as she could, high on the rare, decadent opportunity to let her body act out the rage in her chest, and then the image would shift.

She'd ease up, ashamed of getting carried away, hoping that she hadn't done any serious damage, but Trisque's attitude never changed. If she paused too long, he'd goad her on with more of the same sort of taunting. His occasional, stifled gasps of pain had a tone of dark glee at the ends of them, his own odd sadism toward thing he'd decided to embody.

"There we go, nice and warm." Leora caressed his fully reddened cheeks.

He was all Trisque to her at that moment, and she had to stop and marvel at how "Trisque" had become so separate from "Litani corruption" in her mind.

Trisque shuffled his lower body backward toward her, seeking more of the caress. Leora shoved him back into place.

"Oh, you're nowhere near done, bitch. Cunt. Pussy." On the last word, she tickled the light hairs protecting his asshole.

The hairs all over the rest of his body stood on end before her eyes.

Leora grabbed the jar of coconut oil she used in place of lotion, warmed a generous dab of it between her hands, and rubbed it all over the handle of the brush.

"This is so much better than you deserve," she mused to herself. To that horrible tie. "I bet you never smelled this good while you were doing the fucking."

She held the brush in front of his face in demonstration.

He took in a deep breath through the nose, and even stuck out his tongue to taste a little bit of the oil off the tip of the handle.

"You just can't stop being a softie, can you?" he said.

Leora lined up the silver handle with Trisque's ass and pushed slowly but steadily inward, past the first outward-bulging nodule in its decorative design.

"How's this for soft?" she asked.

#

Trisque took in a sharp breath and spread his fingers wide against the floor of the empty tub for stability, as the penetration shivers wracked through him.

He was tempted at this point to let go completely, lean back against the hairbrush handle, and reach down to stroke his "JUST MARRIED" erection.

Only the thought of transferring this overpowering, inescapably humbling sensation to Aidrom, always in-control Aidrom, kept him in character.

"Holding hardness in your hand isn't the same as having it, baby girl," he said, prompting Leora to shove the brush in deeper, just as he'd hoped she would.

He pulled against the tie, deliberately tightening it under his chin — under Aidrom's much wider, hairier chin. He almost convinced himself that it was Aidrom's body here, bent over the tub, lightly puppeted by Trisque's own consciousness. His influence was just enough to keep the spymaster here, not enough to prevent him from making it worse for himself.

In the back of his oxygen-deprived mind, Trisque was aware that there were plenty more questions Leora could ask him about this particular proclivity that he wouldn't be able to answer.

He had gotten very good at not worrying about what he would say if he ever decided to ask himself, "So, is thinking about Aidrom's very existence not a stone-cold turn-off for you? 'Cause you'd think it would be."

That was the kind of matter best left on the desk of his non-sex brain, to be filed away on some remote cluster of neurons, never to be accessed again.

For now, he turned his knuckles as white as the bathtub and grunted with each of Leora's thrusts — the closest compromise he could find between Aidrom's voice and the wild moaning he wanted to answer them with.