Work Text:
The Past
Sam had wanted to stay for the interrogation, but Sergeant Keel had asked him to take a break. Actually, it had been an order, and so he’d gone for a walk around the streets to get his thoughts organised.
Nancyball had given him an odd look when he’d told him where he was going. Normally he spent his break in the Watch House with the rest of the lads but it had seemed like the sort of thing Sergeant Keel might do. Anything Sergeant Keel might do was rising rapidly in Sam’s priorities.
Now that he was out on the streets – proceeding down Treacle Mine Road – he was beginning to doubt his decision. The situation at his own Watch House had been diffused by Keel but it was still a dangerous time to be a man of the Watch in Ankh-Morpork. There were reports coming in of riots in almost every district of the city.
Sam noticed the darker part of the darkness. Keel had shown him this trick: often the people trying hardest to hide were the easiest to spot. There was a figure in black, leaning against a crumbling wall near one of the old miner’s houses.
‘Show yourself,’ Sam said, hoping he didn’t sound anything like as nervous as he felt. He waved his lantern in the vague direction of the figure and tried to remember Keel’s advice against drawing his sword. ‘It’s the Watch.’
Sure enough, the darker part of the shadow unpeeled itself from the wall and stepped forward. Its movement had an easy grace, as if it had been just about to move anyway and Sam’s asking it was a mere formality. The figure was dressed all in black, confirming Sam’s worst suspicions.
‘Are you here for Sergeant Keel?’ he asked the Assassin.
‘Not professionally,’ said the Assassin. He stepped forward into the half-light of the hooded lantern.
Sam could see now that his initial assessment was only half right. This was an Assassin, but instead of the sleek and anonymous all-black ensemble of the fully-fledged graduate Assassin he wore the distinctive ebony uniform of the Guild School. He was younger than the full Assassins too. Probably about the same age as him, although to Sam’s embarrassment, considerably more refined in appearance. He had the stern look of a young man eagerly accelerating to a destiny of eternal middle age. His face was angular, nose tending towards large and beaky, dark hair swept neatly back.
‘Wait,’ said Sam, ‘I’ve seen you before.’
The Assassin smiled lightly.
‘Indeed.’
‘You were here the other day.’ Sam regarded the Assassin with increasing suspicion. Maybe they did send student Assassins out to inhume people, in the same way he always seemed to have to handcuff the rowdiest drunks.
‘You were watching me,’ said the Assassin, lowering his hood. ‘You and your father.’
Sam was confused for a moment, before spluttering as he realised the implication.
‘The sarge isn’t my dad!’ A voice in his head tutted disapprovingly. This certainly wasn’t how Keel would have handled the encounter. ‘And,’ he continued, as the subtle accusation in the Assassin’s statement dawned on him, ‘we weren’t watching you. We were going about our duties as watchmen, i.e., patrolling the neighbourhood.’
‘Oh? Splendid. I can assure you, however, that nobody sees me unless I want to be watched.’
Sam took a moment to wrap his head around this one. The Assassin was awfully close to him now, right next to the lantern he was holding at arm’s length. He allowed his arm to relax, drawing the lantern closer in. If the young Assassin was going to try and outwit him Sam was going to at least make sure he could watch him do it.
The truth was, Sam had been watching the Assassin. In the Watch-sanctioned and approved sense, but also sort of… unofficially. He’d been drawn to the sight of the black-clad young man leaning against a wall and reading. If anybody had ever leant nonchalantly against a wall to read in real life, they certainly didn’t do it in Treacle Mine Road. They probably wouldn’t risk doing it anywhere in Ankh-Morpork and his eye had been drawn to the peculiar sight.
It had, admittedly, stayed there a bit. But expensively dressed young Assassins were a rare enough sight in the Shades that Sam hadn’t felt any need to justify gawping. He’d taken in the high cheekbones and the lean form in its close-fitting uniform, but these were important details, such that he might need to recall at a later time. For Watch business.
‘But I can see you now,’ Sam pointed out.
The Assassin smiled faintly. The lantern glared up, illuminating his eyes like the white-blue part of a candle flame.
‘What do you want?’ asked Sam, realising, as many watchmen had before him, that sometimes a blunt instrument is best.
He might have surprised the Assassin with this question; it took him a moment to answer.
‘At present,’ he said carefully, ‘Ankh-Morpork is a vast number of coins spinning. In a day or so, they will land. For now, we are in a state of possibility. Can you feel it? Where would you have them land, Lance-Constable?’
Sam screwed up his face. He didn’t like riddles.
‘In my wallet I hope.’ This felt like a smart answer for a moment. ‘I don’t take bribes,’ he added quickly.
‘Are you going to arrest me for breaking curfew?’ asked the Assassin. He stepped even closer. He was taller than Sam. He drew himself up to his full height, which still didn’t quite close the gap.
‘What? Well, we don’t have the wagon out. And as of this evening, we aren’t arresting people as such because Sarge says…’
The Assassin was very close now, and he reached out a hand, placing it on Sam’s breastplate. It rested near the top. The tips of his long fingers extendied over the lip of the metal, almost ghosting along the collar of his undershirt. Sam wondered if the Assassin could feel his heart hammering through the layers of cloth, leather and metal.
‘I wonder,’ said the Assassin, ‘If there is anything I can do to dissuade you from doing so.’
Sam knew he had a reputation for slowness among his fellow watchmen. It was true he had a lot to learn in the realms of insinuation and implication. But he wasn’t quite thick-headed enough not to realise what the Assassin was getting at. He also wasn’t quite enough of a model watchman to refuse. The implication dawned on him in a rush of sensation. He grasped the front of the Assassin’s uniform, pulling him in – and, frustratingly, slightly down – to kiss him.
The Assassin sighed gently, but if the move had surprised him he didn’t show it, winding his hands around Sam’s neck to pull him in closer. The Assassin opened his mouth and Sam flicked his tongue inside it experimentally. He was rewarded with a noise of satisfaction, and with the sound of their mouths moving together, wetly in the dark.
The lantern seemed to have gone out, so Sam dropped it, freeing up his left hand for more pressing matters. It hit the road with an almighty clang and Sam panicked for a moment that someone would come to investigate. But who would come, the Watch? The thought made him laugh into the kiss with nervous excitement, and the Assassin pulled away curiously, sucking lightly on Sam’s lip as he did.
Sam took advantage of having two free hands to seize the Assassin’s wrists and made to push him up against something. He stumbled a little in doing so – the nearest wall was slightly too far away - but the Assassin chuckled lightly, not seeming to care.
Sam held the Assassin’s hands up against the brickwork, wishing he could see him more clearly than the fuzzy grey of his night vision. He went in eagerly to kiss him and found his jaw, pressing kisses along it, sucking further down onto what little of his neck was exposed.
‘I do hope,’ panted the Assassin, ‘You aren’t still worried about my attacking you.’
His head seemed to gesture towards his restrained wrists. Sam let go briefly to seize the Assassin’s hands instead.
‘Better?’
The Assassin hummed lightly in assent, before once again finding Sam’s mouth with his own.
Sam moved in closer, their mouths and bodies moving against each other. He was afraid the other young man would feel the hard length of his cock against his leg but pressing their bodies together he felt the Assassin responding in kind. He gasped in satisfaction when Sam rubbed up against his own hardness, but pulled away abruptly.
‘What?’ asked Sam. The question came out more aggressively than he’d hoped.
‘Not here,’ said the Assassin. ‘We can go to my rooms. Will you come with me?’ He tilted his head to one side curiously. ‘So to speak.’
Sam remembered that, hunched up against a wall though they might be, they were still, essentially, right in the middle of the Shades. Somewhere more private, and possibly more comfortable was certainly an enticing prospect. Although if the Assassin was offering what he thought he was offering, that was exciting enough to lead him just about anywhere.
He nodded his approval, and reluctantly pulled away from the body was enjoying rubbing against. The Assassin stepped away from the wall, smoothing his clothes as he did so.
Sam stumbled about in the dark for a moment, searching for his lantern. To his surprise, it lit up quite easily once he had retrieved it, not having run out of oil at all. He shrugged, focussing on trying to rearrange his clothes so that he didn’t look too much like a young man trying to come down from desperate arousal.
The Assassin moved closer to the middle of the street, raising his hands to his mouth, and made an odd, whistling birdcall.
The native bird population of Ankh-Morpork were not the singing kind. They were the kind that would screech at you before flying off with your sandwich. Nonetheless, once night fell, the streets would invariably be filled with the gentle, lilting calls of various songbirds native to neighbouring, greener areas of the Disc.
‘The carriage will be here shortly,’ the Assassin informed Sam, coming back to stand by his side. They weren’t quite touching, but the small distance between their arms was enough to get Sam’s face flushing again.
He was aware the situation he found himself in had all the makings of A Trap, in the very textbook sense that even Fred Colon had known to warn him against. But that same textbook was getting torn up all the time by Sergeant Keel. Sam couldn’t quite convince himself that Keel would approve of his exact course of action, but the thrill of risk-taking had hit him. This was going to happen someday, so why not now? Change was in the air after all.
Sam was considering taking the Assassin’s hand in his own when the carriage rattled round the corner. The fingers he had been stretching out to the smooth black leather of the Assassin’s glove recoiled back into a fist.
Before turning his lantern off once again, Sam took in the carriage as something sleek, black and nondescript. When Assassin ushered him inside, and Sam found himself disappointed in its modest interior. The Assassin took the seat opposite Sam and had scarcely the time to shut the door before the carriage was away.
Sam felt far more nervous than he had thus far in his time with the student Assassin. He was afraid to speak in case the coach driver would hear him and similarly wracked with anxiety about what to say, if given the chance.
He glanced at the boy opposite, who eyed him with frank and open interest. Sam looked back down hurriedly, embarrassed to be caught looking even by someone so unabashed about doing the same thing.
The Assassin held a book in his lap. It had covers of plain black leather, the titled etched in faded gold writing. The book was upside down from Sam’s point of view, so he focussed himself on trying to surreptitiously make out the title.
The Lays of Old Klatch. Sam’s eyes widened in spite of himself. He hoped the Assassin hadn’t noticed. So that was the kind of thing he’d been reading! And in a public street too! He looked up at the other young man with renewed awe, wondering what someone with so much experience of these matters might want with him.
(The mistake made here by Lance-Constable Vimes was one in which he was far from alone. His misapprehension followed a legacy of disappointed readers – the Assassins’ School alumnus who had donated the book, the Guild librarian who had accepted the donation, and generations of frustrated students. In fact, it had taken some time for the book to fall into the hands of the only reader in whom it inspired a sincere enthusiasm, who we have now met, albeit not by name.)
Come to think of it, what would anyone rich enough to project refinement and elegance instead of adolescent awkwardness want with him? Considering the question Sam recalled certain off-colour jokes he’d heard among the men of the Watch, the kind of jokes he laughed at but didn’t really understand. Some involved the idea that posh women might like ‘a bit of rough’ on occasion, and Sam supposed the same might be true for posh men, although the jokes had not been forthcoming on this point.
Reasoning the driver must be focussed on driving – especially given the speed he was going – Sam moved a leg to brush against one of the Assassin’s. He rubbed their shins together, just firm enough that the Assassin could be sure he was doing it on purpose. The boy’s eyes widened slightly, and Sam was delighted he had managed to surprise him. Perhaps posh boys didn’t bother with rubbing legs under tables.
The Assassin shifted slightly in his seat, leaning to ghost his inner thigh against one of Sam’s knees. Sam had lost some of the thrill of arousal in his discomfort with the coach journey, but he could feel the throbbing feeling returning. Eagerly, he pressed his knee harder into the presented thigh. The Assassin’s lips parted slightly, and a sliver of pink tongue flicked out to wet them. Sam was ready to lean in further, get closer, but was once again thwarted as the carriage drew to an abrupt halt.
The Assassin sighed but opened the carriage door. Sam stumbled out, trying to adjust his uniform to hide his arousal. He looked around uncertainly in the dark. He didn’t frequent this part of the city, but he knew where they were. The Assassin’s Guild.
His companion hopped nimbly onto the roof of the carriage, and gestured Sam follow him. He clambered up behind him with considerably less grace.
The Assassin leapt from the carriage onto the side of the building and shimmied up the wall to a window on the second floor. Sam watched, open-mouthed, and was relieved when a rope was dropped down to help him follow.
Looking at the rope, Sam nearly baulked at the idea of actually entering the Guild School. He never welcomed the reminder that he was of an age with some young men still attending their fancy boarding schools or the most junior wizards at the University. He was supposed to be a man of the Watch.
But the Assassin was waiting for him, and Sam was too far gone to resist at this point, even if he’d wanted to.
With considerably less elegance than he’d have liked, Sam struggled up the rope, and hauled himself over the window ledge. He looked around the room as he got his breath back, the Assassin having had time to light the lamps. It was large, larger than two of Sam’s room at his mum’s put together. One side of the room was lit up, one in darkness, each the mirror of the other. There was a four-poster bed in each, as well as a desk, wardrobe, armchair, bookshelves and other furnishings. All the items in the room looked old, the type of old that transforms objects into valuable antiques rather than wearing them out.
‘We are, regrettably, put upon to share digs,’ explained the Assassin, having spotted Sam looking from one side of the room to the other, ‘Even we of the Upper Sixth.’ Sam tried to nod as if he understood completely. ‘However, my dormmate suffered a most regrettable accident early Primemas term and since then I have been compelled to struggle on alone.’ He smiled wanly, proceeding towards Sam, who lingered at the window.
Sam’s nerves returned as the Assassin strode purposefully towards him. How many people had the young Assassin brought back to his empty room since whenever Primemas was? He was sure to be a disappointment in comparison. The Assassin, however, strode right past him to the window, where he drew up the rope, and cajoled the ancient casements into closing.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘where were we?’
‘I was kissing you,’ said Sam, ‘and you were making noises like you liked it.’
The Assassin frowned slightly but didn’t object when Sam stepped towards him, leaning in to bring their mouths together once again. As if to prove Sam’s point, the Assassin moaned into his mouth. He grabbed the Assassin’s waist to pull him closer, wanting to hear more of those sounds. They went straight to Sam’s cock, which had felt harder and more in need of release each time the Assassin had his blood up.
He could feel the Assassin’s cock as it hardened against him. He was rubbing it against him with motions that were slight but perceptible. Sam pulled them closer together, giving the Assassin that harder pressure he seemed to be craving. He was rewarded with a stifled noise of pleasure, the Assassin flicking his tongue deeper into Sam’s mouth.
Sam drew back slightly from the kiss to suck and nibble at the Assassin’s lower lip but was disappointed in his attempts when the man drew his mouth back completely.
‘Have you done this before?’ asked the Assassin. His voice was steady but he was panting slightly and Sam could feel his body trembling. Maybe he was trembling too.
‘Kissing? Of course.’
The Assassin’s face returned to its delicate frown at the flippant response. Sam was enjoying these opportunities to get the other boy riled up. The Assassin’s hips rolled against him sharply, erection pressing into his thigh.
‘I meant,’ continued the Assassin, ‘Sleeping with someone.’
Sam had been expecting the question, while still hoping he could continue to side-step the issue of his inexperience. Sam had been kissed before, but only because a neighbour’s daughter had made it her mission to snog every boy in a five-street radius.
With the Assassin, things were different. He wanted to be good at kissing for him, to elicit responses of pleasure from the other man and explore more ways to do so. He had no idea, really, if his own technique was up to much, just that it seemed to be working for them.
‘I assume that’s why you’re here?’ prompted the Assassin, raising an eyebrow. ‘Unless I have made a serious miscalculation.’
The Assassin’s face remained composed in nonchalant inquisitiveness.
‘Yes,’ Sam shot back, too quickly to be considered smooth, ‘I mean, yes, that’s why I’m here. But no, I haven’t done this before.’ He watched the Assassin’s face closely for any sign of reservation.
The Assassin nodded. He moved his hands to the laces that secured his black velvet capelet, loosened them and tossed the garment to one side. He shrugged off his blazer.
‘Have you?’ asked Sam, watching the Assassin’s pale hands as they moved to the buttons of his high collared shirt (black, naturally), exposing more of his pale neck. How much of the paleness was his actual skin tone, and how much was it the black making him look peaky?
‘Hm?’ The Assassin’s attention turned to Sam, hands drifting to the fastenings of his breastplate.
‘Have you… done this… before?’ Sam asked, cringing as he heard the clunky words fall out of his mouth.
‘Well,’ replied the Assassin softly, casting his eyes downwards in a posture of coyness. His careful fingers eased the rusted buckles on Sam’s armour. ‘You know what they say about boys’ boarding schools, don’t you?’
Sam didn’t, but he felt he could field a guess.
The Assassin withdrew his hands. The breastplate would have clattered to the floorboards had he not also had the reflexes to catch it on its way down. He pressed his hands to Sam’s torso. Sam was sure the Assassin could feel his heart pounding now. The other man moved his hands curiously over the planes of Sam’s chest. Sam considered himself too scrawny by half but the Assassin seemed to like what he found. He let out a contented breath before kissing him again, painfully gentle and slow this time.
The Assassin pulled away again, returning to the matter of unbuttoning his strange, almost clerical looking uniform.
‘Right,’ said Sam, in answer to a request the Assassin had not needed to make, and began to undress himself further, stumbling a little in his haste.
Sam felt much less embarrassed of his own eagerness when he saw the speed with which the Assassin disrobed, moving toward the bed as he did so in a succession of fluid motions.
The Assassin was thin, but with that thinness was a lean muscularity. Sam was skinny too, but in a gangly, scrawny way that made him look like the skeleton designed to sit inside a much stockier man. The Assassin’s thinness looked intentional, the shape he was supposed to be.
The Assassin settled onto the bed and watched Sam as he removed the last of his clothing. Sam could see the his erect cock now – the Assassin was holding it as he lounged on the sheets. Sam had seen cocks before, but only in such banal situations that he’d convinced himself each time it wasn’t a body-part he was interested in.
This was different in so many ways. The Assassin’s cock was longer and thinner than his own, and lent slightly to one side. It had a grace to it, a strange kind of delicacy. Sam wanted to know how it felt in his own hands, larger and more calloused than the touch of the Assassin’s own.
The hair at the base of it had been neatly trimmed. Sam was a little abashed removing his drawers to reveal his own untamed thicket.
Fortunately, the Assassin didn’t seem put off by this lack of grooming. When Sam freed his painfully hard cock from his underwear the Assassin raised his eyebrows in approval. He leapt onto the bed, the old frame and mattress creaking in protest, and focussed the attention back on the other man, drawing him into a kiss and running his hands along soft, pale skin.
The frustrated, clothed rubbing up against one another had been exciting enough, but the full contact of their naked bodies was something else. Sam ran his hands through the Assassin’s hair, grasping his head to pull him deeper into the kiss. He tangled their legs together, cocks rubbing up against naked flesh and sometimes finding each other, hard length pressed against hard length.
Realising he was now able to touch the Assassin wherever he wanted, Sam let a hand drift between their chests, observing a sharp intake of breath when he rubbed a thumb over a nipple. Interesting. His hand moved on, down to the Assassin’s arse. This was as skinny as the rest of him but Sam grabbed what was there with enthusiasm. The Assassin let out a strangled noise that for someone less elegant would have been called a whimper.
Sam opened more to the kiss, licking deeply into the answering wetness of the Assassin’s mouth. The Assassin’s tongue moved against and into Sam’s mouth with cautious but purposeful flicks. Sam was sure his own technique lacked finesse in comparison but he found that in the hot press of skin on skin he didn’t really care much about polish. If the frantic caresses and breathy noises of the Assassin were any indication, he probably didn’t mind either way.
As they continued kissing, continued rubbing their bodies together, Sam did find himself wondering how things were supposed to progress. He knew (approximately) what happened when only one partner had a cock, but they had a surplus of one puzzle piece and a distinct lack of the other. He’d heard creative insults implying some possibilities, but he hadn’t the foggiest how any of it actually worked.
More pressingly, he wasn’t sure he’d last long enough for any of that to matter. Probably the Assassin was in a similar state - the wetness leaking between them couldn’t be entirely Sam’s.
The other boy seemed to be thinking along similar lines.
‘This is marvellous,’ he panted, ‘And I’m close, but for the formality of the thing I think we should…’
He words trailed off as he retrieved some items from his bedside table. Sam eyed them with curiosity. One was a bottle. The other took longer for him to place. He was most familiar with Sonkys in their worn, filled and discarded form, rather than fresh from the packet.
‘Best be safe,’ said the Assassin under his breath, easing the rubber sheath onto Sam’s cock.
Sam was getting a clearer picture of how all this was going to work in broad terms and was glad that he hadn’t had to put the thing on himself. He wasn’t sure how and besides he enjoyed the feeling of the Assassin’s cool fingers easing the rubber onto his hot and straining dick. While the Assassin fiddled with the bottle, Sam leant in to his neck.
While sucking and biting bruises into the Assassin’s neck Sam remained alert to his motions – after pouring something from the bottle, the Assassin had reached his hand round behind him. Sam traced the motion with one of own hands. All the blood in his body seemed to rush to one of two places with the dawning realisation of what was going on.
Glad that his furiously flushing face was hidden against the Assassin’s shoulder, Sam’s fingers followed the his hand up to where a finger or two disappeared inside him. Finding the point where the finger met the Assassin’s hole, Sam traced the join curiously, slick with whatever had been in the bottle
The Assassin breathed in sharply and out in a ragged gasp of satisfaction.
‘I prepared before I went out,’ he said, removing his fingers with a sigh, ‘Just wanted… to be sure.’
He poured some more liquid and slathered it on Sam’s cock before tossing the bottle to one side. Sam was about to ask what he should do next when the Assassin placed a hand on his chest, guiding him onto his back.
The Assassin straddled Sam, kissing him before withdrawing to a kneeling position. He was frowning a little, seeming to focus himself. Biting his lip, the Assassin found Sam’s cock with one of his hands, and aligned it beneath him.
He looked at Sam questioningly. Sam nodded.
The Assassin began to slide himself down, and Sam gasped at the first pressure of the Assassin’s hole clenching around the head of his cock. He was glad of the barrier between him and the Assassin’s insides, feeling sure that without it he would have spurted helplessly into him.
The Assassin was panting, frowning in concentration. Sam ran his hands along his pale thighs in soothing motions.
‘You’re wider,’ he managed to say, ‘than I had imagined.’
‘Is it painful?’ Sam asked.
The Assassin shook his head.
‘It’s actually rather… um… a pleasant stretch. But a little difficult.’
Sam nodded, continuing to stroke the Assassin’s trembling limbs. He hadn’t considered breadth as a factor in pleasure and had always worried his very average length might prove disappointing. That didn’t seem to be a problem here.
The Assassin sat astride him now, having taken the entirety of his cock inside him. He took a moment to collect himself, looking down at Sam, who, for his part was staring up at the young man in undisguised admiration and desire. The Assassin smiled lightly and began to rock his hips against him.
The movement was slight, but Sam couldn’t stop himself from bucking his hips upwards in clumsy, arhythmic motions, each one making the Assassin gasp.
He began to move more vigorously in response, up and down on Sam’s cock. His hands pressed lightly onto Sam’s chest, eyes pressed tight in concentration, movements fast and purposeful. His cock bobbed up, leaking precome between them. At some point his slicked back hair had fallen over his eyes, lending him a rakish look.
The Assassin slowed his movements, running a hand through his hair.
‘This is…’ he began, ‘I need to try something else.’
Sam scarcely had time to nod before the Assassin knelt back up, releasing Sam’s cock from inside him. Sam gasped at the loss of pressure. The Assassin had moved to lie on his back.
‘Can we try it like this?’ he asked. The Assassin’s face was flushed from exertion, or maybe he was a little embarrassed. ‘It wasn’t quite… enough.’
Sam was happy to oblige, shifted himself between the Assassin’s legs. He fumbled about trying to align himself correctly. He tried to flash the Assassin a reassuring smile, which was met with a restless sigh and peevish expression.
‘You want me to…?’ asked Sam, cautiously nudging the head of his cock inside the Assassin’s hole. The Assassin tried to bite down on his lip, but was a fraction too late, and let out a low whine.
‘Yes,’ he replied, gasping as Sam suddenly thrust all the way inside him, ‘Oh gods, yes!’
Sam leant forward to place his hands on the bed and began to move in shallow thrusts against the Assassin’s body. The Assassin was tight around his cock, but Sam was determined not to let himself come yet, difficult though that was. There was the sensation of being inside him, and the noises, and his reactions to Sam hitting certain spots…
The Assassin’s body was soft and pliant. He had let his hands fall limply by his head, next to where Sam’s own hands rested to support his weight. Acting on a hunch, Sam moved his hands to grasp the Assassin’s wrists, holding him down, and the young man’s hips shuddered against him.
The Assassin wrapped his legs around Sam’s back as if trying to pull him in even deeper. Sam moved faster, responding the motions that made the Assassin fight hardest not to cry out. Sam could feel desperate noises passing his own lips but didn’t have the self-control to try and stop them.
He could feel the Assassin’s cock tensing between them and wondered if it was possible for him to come like this. Sam was running ragged himself, nearing the limit of how long he could stand to be inside the Assassin without things running their course.
The Assassin lazily twisted an arm free from Sam’s grasp, and brought it between them to touch his straining cock.
Sighing and bucking his hips up to match the pace of Sam’s thrusts, the Assassin touched himself. Sam looked down to watch the deft, fast strokes. It was a harder and more determined motion than he used on himself. He looked back to the Assassin’s face just in time to see it contort in pleasure. Unable to contain a gasp, the Assassin sighed and rocked through his climax, pink tongue flicking out to wet his bitten lips.
Sam couldn’t have held on longer even without seeing the Assassin come, feeling the hot liquid between their sweating bodies. He gave one final, deep thrust before groaning contentedly as the hot knot of tension in his body released. He could feel his cock twitch and shudder inside the Assassin. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d come this hard and was only able to avoid embarrassment by being overcome with sensation. He let his body slump, releasing the Assassin’s wrist to caress his hair with awkward tenderness.
The Assassin was catching his breath. His arms were lying flat on the bed, deceptively vulnerable.
‘That was…’ Sam began, but then lost the thread of his sentence.
The Assassin nodded.
‘Yes,’ he agreed, his expressive control returning quickly. ‘But we ought to hurry. You’ll be missed at the watchhouse. And I have certain business to which I must attend.’
Disappointment washed over him, but Sam could hardly argue.
He pulled away from the Assassin, unable to resist a last kiss before doing so (the Assassin rolled his eyes), washing and dressing hurriedly.
‘Can I see you again?’ he asked.
The Assassin – already dressed, this time in some shapeless greyish garments – considered this.
‘If we both survive the next few days,’ he said, ‘I will find you.’
Sam was still struggling to respond to these ominous words when the Assassin reached the window, ready to out.
‘Goodbye for now, Lance-Constable,’ he said, half outside already, ‘Make the noise of a Lancre wowhawk. The driver knows the way.’
The Assassin seemed ready to slip out, but doubled back, pulling Sam in for a kiss. It was quick and a little clumsy, but the warmth of it spread through Sam’s whole body.
Then he was gone.
Sam shimmied down the walls of the Assassin’s Guild, panting as his fingers scrabbled on alarmingly smooth stonework. Should he have bothered asking what noise a wowhawk makes? Losing his footing momentarily, he fell the last floor of the building, landing unceremoniously on his arse.
He made his way back to the Shades still in a blissful daze. Having been embarrassed to place the used Sonky in the Assassin's wastepaper basket he disposed of it in the traditional way, by lobbing it over someone's wall en route.
Sam hadn’t yet stopped to consider the what the Assassin had meant by if they both survived… That was for the future, and the future hadn’t happened yet.
* * *
The Past (a few days prior)
‘This Keel is certainly an unforeseen element in our plans.’
The Assassin’s aunt had said this in greeting, as he approached from a shadow. She was at her dressing table, applying various powders and unguents. The purpose of some of these remained a mystery to him, no matter how many times he saw her attend to her toilette.
The Assassin inclined his head in agreement.
‘If you have a moment, Havelock,’ she said, applying perfume to her wrists, ‘You might investigate goings-on at the Watchhouse. Have a look around, maybe speak to the men. There’s a boy your own age.’ She met his eye in the mirror, confident that he was going to agree to her suggestion.
The Assassin frowned, taking on the whole a rather dim view of boys his own age. The ones he’d had the displeasure to encounter at school were all bullies or dreadful bores. Perhaps some piqued his interest in a specific and limited sense, but he was ignoring that for the time being. School first. Well, school and subterfuge.
He had first seen the Lance-Constable a day later. He was patrolling Treacle Mine Road, trying to follow the assured, longer strides of Sergeant Keel. He watched them slyly from behind a slim volume of poetry.
Keel was of interest, but there was something compelling about the younger man too. Contained within him was the shadow of the man he might become given the right circumstances, if he were pushed in the right direction.
The Assassin knew that his aunt made use of certain wiles in her dealings with the men who were (for want of a weaker verb) running Ankh-Morpork. He considered this gap in his knowledge, which had never troubled him before.
The Lance-Constable was watching him now. So was Keel, although the older man knew he needn't disguise it. The Assassin shifted to recross his legs, sensing the younger officer following the movement. He was interested and doing a shockingly poor job of disguising the fact.
While the Guild School uniform might be tragically unsuited to blending into shadows, it was certainly eye-catching. There were establishments where approximations of the Guild uniform were much in demand, or so his aunt’s friends had informed him. Being well aware of the equivocal nature of his own attractiveness, Havelock was glad of the erotic draw of the uniformed Assassin. He knew he could be striking in the right dress, attitude and circumstances, but was far from the most handsome of the graduating class. The Lance-Constable certainly seemed interested though.
Keel’s interest was more difficult to gauge. The glances the Assassin had detected had a searching, confused nature. It was difficult to watch the Sergeant watching him, because whenever the Assassin looked, Keel was gazing frankly and intently back.
* * *
The future
‘Tell me again,’ said Sybil, rolling over in bed to face him.
Vimes sighed, and retold the well-worn story. The first few times she’d asked him he’d worried she was jealous, or thought he must only really be interested in men. He’d come to realise over time that couldn’t be further from the truth. Her own stories about boarding school, finishing school, and various wholesome all-girls outdoor excursions had certainly helped.
‘Are you quite sure you don’t want to know who he was?’ she asked him, her mouth making a moue of disappointment. Vimes wasn’t sure what a moue was, but Sybil could wield one to devastating effect.
He sighed, because wasn’t this always the sticking point? If this were Sybil, she’d want the Assassin’s name and last known address jotted down neatly in a book. She would send a card every Hogswatch and a tasteful flower arrangement on occasion of a bereavement.
Vimes couldn’t stomach that.
‘I could ask around the Assassins’ old boys, you know,’ Sybil continued. ‘It wouldn’t be any trouble.’
‘Don’t, Sybil,’ Sam warned, knowing quite well there was no stopping his wife once she’d put her mind to something.
‘All right.’ Sybil seemed resigned, but not annoyed, and leaned over to kiss him. ‘Good night, Sam.’
‘Night, love.’
Vimes lay on his back, looking up at the dusty canopy of their bed. If the Assassin had wanted to meet him again, he would have done so at the time. Hadn’t he said he would? Perhaps he hadn’t survived the fortnight.
The thing was, since his misadventure at the University library, memories of that night had been bursting into his mind with alarming regularity and clarity. Details were coming back. He nearly had a full picture of the chap, and he was concerned about how things were coming together.
He sighed and rolled over in the bed, clutching the bedclothes to his chest. The blankets pulled taut between the couple’s determined grips, and cold air rushed between them. Vimes shivered and wriggled back towards Sybil. He was a lucky man, in so many ways.