Kronos was a beautiful world, gold and green and fragrant with the scents of wide, wide seas and billions of growing things.

The founding colony had been a caste-heavy thing.  The ruling class was rife with retiring Starfleet elite and their families, the rest a multi-racial hodgepodge of the desperate and indebted.  The failed, little-known Rakshan empire had fallen to the Federation and fallen hard, leaving billions of poor rustics. 

When Kronos had been opened for colonization, when Markwell had been appointed First Governor, he'd looked at the dying hordes of refugees transported to Gat and Horus and saw opportunity...    The former followers of Mander Raksha had been offered what could only be considered a miraculous bargain -- parcel upon parcel of fertile ground in return for pledges of fealty.  The fine print was ignored, for the refugee planets were grey, cold rocks, and the Rakshani were dying.

Hardly anyone had refused.  Governor Markwell had started his colony with a grateful, willing army of slaves.    Kronos grew strong quickly, the export business exploding with strong, sweet wines and the most perfect fruits within parsecs.  The climate was sweet.  The seas were calm.  The native predators were small, and easily trained.

It was paradise, and if the former Rakshani had trouble freeing themselves from their tethers to the land....  Well, who really wanted to go?   And so it was for generations. 

No one cared that the "free" education came with commitments to planet service in the Governor's private armies, for there were no battles to fight.

No one paid attention to the strict population controls, for the Governor was generous with farm technology.  Extra children were given unto the state, and there were many holos of grateful adults in the Governor's colors. 

No one noticed that they never came home.

No one noticed that the Governor's last name was *always* Markwell, that there was always a sharply patrician face in the holos.

A dynasty was built within the fastness of the Federation, a planet was made a plantation, and no one said a word.

Tourism was high, and there had never, ever been a happier population.  Even Risa's inhabitants grew weary.  Kronos had the perfect mix of real life and idyll, and Jeffrey Spender wanted, *needed* to get out.

He was of the First Families, raised in tasteful splendor, educated by the best and brightest, loved absently by his wide-eyed mother, loving his absent father.  It wasn't the plight of the proletariat -- he was well-versed in many versions of the hushed Rakshani war, and he knew these people would never have been so healthy, so well-cared for under the madly pious Mander.

It wasn't even the rigid class system that meant he could never be sink lower than the rank of an Elect, never rise to Governor.  Jeffrey was less than ambitious.

It was the Researchers.

It was what they did. 

His father's work, and his birthright.  Complex upon complex of coldly brilliant men and women doing things to the Extras illegal in damned near every society in the known universe.  Suddenly it was clear why his social life had always been just slightly more protected than the others of his class, why he'd been encouraged to raise plants instead of pets.

And his father had shown him the vista of experimentation, had clasped his hand on Jeffrey's shoulder and smiled.

Kronos was lush, Kronos was lovely and always as perfectly ripe as a Sevenmonth rosoma.  And Kronos was at the cutting edge of Federation medical science for a very simple reason. 

Jeffrey had held his breakfast until he'd gotten back to his quarters. 

And after a very long shower, Jeffrey began to plan.

*

Walter frowned in concentration, hunched closer to the crackle of static from the subspace radio.   Mostly it was just an incoherent garble of intermingled signals snatched out of the ether.    At least that's what an untutored ear would have heard.    But Walter's ear was anything but untutored in this particular art. 

And he knew what he was looking for.

Key phrases, odd words -- the signs and signals of that particular Federation code he'd come to associate with *them*.

The nearly nameless, nearly faceless 'them'.   Those who would be held accountable.

If by no one else, than him.   His mission.   Well, mission sounded noble.  And this wasn't anything to do with noble.   It was....    It just was.   No more way to explain it but that.   And it was enough explanation for the only two people who counted on the *Rose of Sharon*.   Enough to send him weeks and parsecs out of his way on the basis of a single garbled radio transmission he'd picked up on the edges of this galaxy.

Enough to keep him here for four more standard days, staying awake on stimulants and field rations, trying to pinpoint the source.

While the universe whizzed by in hyperspace and the timestamp on his ostensible cargo neared its expiration date.   And Alex paced.

As if the thought of his name summoned him like a demon, Alex was there.  Pale hand slapped down on the console hard enough to make Walter wince in sympathy and irritation.

He raised his head, ready to mete out the discipline he knew the wild boy required and stopped and the unexpected storms in those ocean eyes.

"This music *hurts*," Alex said.

Not complaint, not a whine or whinge but pained puzzlement.

Walter winced again, inside this time.   Of course that's what it was. 

Music was the current lesson.   Had been since the stop of Gerrelian which had unfortunately or fortunately coincided with the carnal carnage of the Month of Knives and Woodwinds. 

"This isn't music," Walter began.

"It has patterns," Alex said.   Walter nodded, impressed once more by the hidden depths to Alex's thought processes.   He wished he had the time and patience to explain...

"It's like dry water over smooth rocks," Alex went on.   Talking more to himself than Walter, it seemed, though Walter's presence was clearly necessary to the process.   As was the use of senses Walter wondered at.   Alex's hands roamed over the body of the speaker and he pressed himself against it, nudging Walter out of the way.

Four days of fatigue and a growing sense of the futility of this particular sidetrip were enough for him to give way.   He slumped back against the console, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.   The smell of Alex so close -- not quite clean, warm musk of sleep and those odd esters he produced, stirred him a little.   He thought about pulling Alex to him for a quick fuck, knew he didn't even have the energy to fantasize about it decently.

Alex's body covered the speaker completely now, head tucked in so that his slightly pointed ear was flush with the woofer.   His eyes were screwed shut, face a studied scowl.

A thought struck Walter.

"So how does it hurt?" he asked.

"Hurts sharp," Alex said.   "Burns sour..." he trailed off, lost in his own thoughts.   Whatever the hurt he wasn't moving away from it.   In fact, he seemed to Walter to be trying to climb inside the speaker.   It annoyed Walter, though he couldn't put a name to why beyond his general ill-humor.

"Talk sense..." he said, harder than he meant to let show.   Alex's eyes sprang open.   Scanned Walter's face as if reading subtler signs there than Walter ever saw in the mirror while he depilated.

Slowly he disengaged from the speaker, cautiously rested a hand on Walter's tired knee raising faint sparks there.   But his eyes never left Walter's face.

"The voices," he said.   "They all follow lines...arcs.   They flow one way--" he made an odd wiping motion with his free hand.   Back and forth.   "But there's one...thing...Not a line.   It cuts across.   It's green where everything else is cream and thin black strands."

And slow, deep dawning making sense of Alex's synaesthetic constructions.

"You're hearing something that doesn't fit?"

"Yes!"  And oh Alex's face opened to such bright delight at being *understood*.   And Walter's heart ached for it, but he thrust that down hard.  Bore down on the single ray of hope.    "Show me, Alex," he said.

And those eyes, so busy reading the secret instructions written on his face in the air into which he would next more -- turned inward.   He could almost hear the whir of tiny mechanisms engaged.   Walter found himself up on his knees, leaning forward as if to pull the information out.   And then Alex was nodding, up on his feet -- so graceful -- to lay artists fingers on the interface of the starmap generator.   Drawing what at first seemed to be nothing more than a wonky grid of thin, green lines.   Walter watching open mouthed as the thing took shape before his eyes.

A map.   A fucking three dimensional map.   From sound and static and -- god help him -- something he must have learned listening to Walter's old Earth recordings of  Miles Davis and Bach.   And arrowing through the center -- that line of wrongness, a directional sign leading right to the source.   A solar system.  A handful of planets around an M-class star.   And the joy broke so strongly he almost laughed, clapped Alex on the shoulder hard enough to rock him. 

And Alex's face, warily pleased. 

"I did well?"

"That you did, boy," Walter said, taking over the controls, hard fingers over Alex's long slim ones to punch the map in, watched the co-ordinates, identification keys blossom on the screen.   A green world.   A lush world.   A place that should have been another Eden for sentient life to flourish and grow.   That had become instead a mere windowbox for the Federation to plant its seeds -- and worse, a breeding ground for the unseen blight he was sworn to cut from its heart.

Kronos, the map named the place.   Factoids -- history, politics, geography -- scrolled by along the bottom of the screen.   Walter ignored them for the moment -- plenty of time to study them on the way in-planet -- but for now his energy had returned.   A sonic shower was in order, some food, maybe even sleep.   And Alex, definitely time for Alex.   And then they would go right some wrongs. 

*

Alex didn't understand.

The months with Skinner had made this an old thing, a familiar thing and it made him want to hug the ground and tear and tear until he'd dug grooves in the grey with his nails. 

Skinner had clipped his nails very soon after he'd brought Alex to his ship, destroying years of strengthening, sharpening and then whispered something about "aesthetics."

He wasn't sure he understood that, either.  It seemed so foolish to limit the things you found pleasing. 

But there was nothing he could do but accept this constant low-grade strangeness, this forcible softening of himself for the pleasure of Skinner.   Because it was the older man's pleasure, and because that was what he was here for, somewhat. 

The borya had left him on the sprawl, in grey-orange dust, among the bones, and Skinner had come from the sky and taken him in and away.   Fed him.  Gave him water so different from everything he'd tasted that he'd thought it poison.

The concepts of "sweet" and "pure" had been among the first to be taught, and they were frightening things because there seemed to be something he was missing to make them right.  He had snarled, bit at Skinner.

And tasted his strap. 

Alex had taken it silently, knowing this was deserved, knowing it was *needed*.  The borya had taken him easily, his burrow was unearthed by the force of the Eight, a windstorm coming down and down from the far Dagger peaks to whip across the settlements of thieves and killers, the place of his home.  And because he had failed to defeat the Eight the borya took him and his belongings. 

He had failed, and so he was beaten, broken systematically at the hips, shoulders, and fingers in The Pattern.  The origin was lost, meaningless now.  The Pattern remained, and it was through the pattern that corak such as he could come to be reborn, to try again and struggle for this something they all longed for. 

The truth of their homeworld's name... 

Pax was nothing but a word for Alex, and uncomfortable sudden blockage at the back of the throat as if the word itself was offended by the improper nature of its vessel and when Skinner had asked --

"What is this world?"

-- Alex had spat pax to the ground, and found himself pleased at how meaningless it was in this dark grey place, this soft place...  but then had come the lash and it was the most perfect thing to have a Skinner who would do this for him so freely.  Each blow was binding, each lost droplet a portion of his cursed mortality, gone forever to be replaced with Skinner's professional touch and Skinner thick tool hard on his tongue.

So perfect and it had seemed as though Alex would understand all this after all.  But the lessons came on the same flood of the other man's come.  Alex had knelt to take it all, pleased and right to have his punishment and destiny meted out with such exactitude, but Alex didn't understand.

The concept of time often eluded him, its passages empty and strange for the boy.  Always more lessons, always on his knees.  Alex was trapped by the crudity of his own metaphor, helpless in the thrall that bound him between Skinner's knowledge and Skinner's fine cock.   He had no knife to free himself, he'd been as thoroughly declawed as fired chapak for the Moon Nights, he was nothing but a slave here.

That he understood. 

But it had taken him far too long to make Skinner take him as he wished, days and days of language and training in meaningless things before he had finally flipped him over and driven inside.  Skinner had bit off every scream in the flesh of Alex's shoulder, and he'd felt the blood flow and he'd cried out and come hard and hot on the man's shiny-warm blanket. 

And when he'd licked it clean, as he'd been taught, Skinner had stroked him, praised him.  Took Alex in his arms and squeezed tight, so tight it made him breathless and Skinner's peace was so *real*...

Yes, that he understood, and it was all part of his ownership. 

Even if Skinner had not taken his property immediately, as was custom.

And now, even now, he would make Alex wait for too long.  Alex had seen the heat in his eyes, the pleased appraisal of Alex and his abilities.  He had done well, Skinner had said so, and perhaps Skinner thought to spare Alex his cock because of this?

The thought was ugly, eminently killable.  He was *almost* sure Skinner didn't use his fuck as punishment -- not all owners did, after all -- but what if he did? What if he would only get the man's touch if he struggled, if he fired Skinner's thoughts as well as his groin?

It was all too easy to understand that, but he didn't *want* it to be that way.  His life, his self, all that he was was forfeit to Skinner until the day he died as he was supposed to on the sprawl.  That's how things *were*.  But he wanted the man's cock whenever he could get it, needed to know where he stood, or lay, or bent, or knelt. 

Alex would tell Skinner this, and find out which way Skinner would lead him.

It was the only way.

*

After four days, the sonic was as good as water.   Walter Skinner stood in a white cloud of his own dead skin cells and let the dry heat and fizz ease sore, cramped muscles.   Gritty eyes.

He touched the flush and a dry, desert wind poured down across his scalp and back.   So good.   Too good.   The temptation to stay and bask was strong.   How long since he'd *relaxed*?

And steeled himself against the thought.   Slapped the shower off and stepped out.   Better not to even ask those kinds of questions any more.   Relaxation was for men with lives, men with families, men who's work ended at the end of the day.   And he'd given that up along with his comm badge and his collar pips.

Better not to even think of himself as a man anymore, but as a tool.   A weapon, charged and aiming at the heart of the enemy.

//oh so noble...// he snarled at his ignoble and stubble-dusted mug in the mirror and slid the depilating wand across his jaw. 

But even so, he wished it -- *willed* it to be true.   He needed to be that.  To have that strength.   A man might look at the life he had chosen -- that he'd had no choice but to choose, but never mind that -- and despair. 

And with that word Walter ruefully recognized the familiar strains of the black melancholy that too much time and too little action plucked upon him.

Thank Jesu they were in motion now.   Or thank the boy...

Warm flush of something like pride, something like wonder at the thought of Alex pulling together all his strangeness and all the things Walter had stuffed his head with to come up with...exactly what he needed.

Uncanny really.   And not the first time he'd presented Walter with something both unasked for, unthought of and yet, once in hand -- perfect:  the perfect tool for some minor repair.   The perfect spice to perk up some reconstituted pap to the point of edibility.   The perfect sprawl of limbs across his bed...

Walter frowned at his reflection.

How had he missed this?

Well...easy enough to see why if he had ever cared to *look*.   It wasn't just the strangeness of the boy -- though Walter knew without a doubt Alex was the strangest creature he had ever come upon -- it was that Walter simply didn't know how to fit Alex in with his books and his swords and his bitter memories and all the things he'd gathered around him and labeled 'Walter Skinner's life'.

Alex, like this life, had been imposed upon him -- not from outside but by moral imperatives he still had somehow not managed to shake. 

Had come onto his ship, as undemanding and undeniable as an ancient Vulcan godstone -- too big to shelve, clashing with all the furniture and yet too beautiful and somehow -- yes, the metaphor held -- sacred, to be dumped or sold.

Undemanding, pliable, as plastic as a shapeshifter to his needs... 

...and still, not *invisible* enough to be taken for granted.

God, invisible.   Walter almost laughed.   Alex was anything but invisible.  And his mind flashed him back to that first terrifying glimpse:  teeth, eyes, a matted fall of hair like the tangled mane of some ill-kept beast.   A spider- sprawl of limbs shrieking through the air towards him...

Hard to reconcile that fanged and feral creature with the quiet, studious...well, *creature* that currently prowled his ship, speaking politely, acceding to any demand or request.   And fooling Walter not at all.

So, he *had* known.   He'd known and understood the nature of this harmonic convergence, if not its name or its intent.   Had known and turned a blind eye, because to see it meant he'd have to take it on.

And tools do not take on other tools.

Only men do that.   And he'd given up far too much of manhood for this idiotic, irrefutable quest to turn around now and accept something so meager as this boy's strange 'companionship'.

And yet...and yet...  that infuriating moral compass behind his breastbone spun and spun...  hung on the myriad wrongnesses of taking what he knew was not so much a gift of obedience, but a tithe.   Of taking with no heed to what was being begged.   Not that the boy would ever *mind* being utterly his slave.  He could feel (always could if he hadn't been averting his eyes) the burning hunger in the boy to simply be commanded.   Used.

And by the customs and the rules of both his culture and what he could make of Alex's, that would be right enough to suit them both.

But he knew he wasn't up to that.   It would give him too much pleasure, too much pain and ultimately too damn much to brood about in the long deep reaches of space to make it worth either of their whiles. 

But the thing he was proposing was far worse. 

It was one thing to strip your own life of all but bones and sinews, gears and wheels, leaving only enough to get from zero hour to zero hour.   But to flay another, for no greater reason than that it's...expedient...

Even if that other offers himself up to be flayed with more enthusiasm than is wholesome.

Which reminded Walter, he really had meant to give some thought to figuring out an *appropriate* punishment for bad behavior.

At any rate, he decided, he'd brooded on the matter enough.   He wiped the last of the powder that was left of his beard off his face and cinched the belt of his robe.   There would be time enough to consider the problem of Alex after they had dealt with the blight on Kronos. 

For the moment all he wanted to do was throw himself into bed for the few hours he needed to dent that bone-deep fatigue and then get to work on his plan to infiltrate the Federation's finest defenses.

He would have done just that, too, except when the door of the head slid open, Walter found himself staring into the eyes of a naked and not entirely submissive looking Alex.

The sight froze him to the spot, for a moment.

Naked, Alex exuded an almost tangible aura of menace -- as though a field usually damped by clothing had come to life with a crackle.

He was clearly older too, than the wild boy who lived in Walter's mind.   The pale skin, just this side of metallic luster, showed the definition of a young man's musculature, not a boy's.

And his face was deadly calm.

Walter felt uneasily vulnerable in his robe.   Tempted to throw it off and cloak himself in the heavier, hairier armor of trained fighting man.

Instead he simply set his jaw, presented the bulwark of his disapproval in his face.

"What is it you want, Alex?" he said, low and flat, somewhere between question and the baring of territorial teeth.

And Alex neither flinched nor bared his own.   Simply blinked: another fact recorded for the mill and reached out lay cool fingertips on Walter's collarbone.

"I want you to fuck me," Alex said.   "Because I want you to."

"You..." the word came out before anything like a sentence had formed in Walter's mind.   He felt his body flush from nape to heels, a strangely chilling heat that centered in his groin, hefted his cock to upright in an instant.

Quick glance showed him Alex was no less aroused -- his cock rolling as it thickened to jut, ivory and blunt, from its bed of black curls.

Walter opened his mouth to answer, found that the sentence still hadn't managed to gel, although any number of thoughts were circling in the cobwebby shadows left by the morning wallow.

Alex, head cocked to one side attentively, took advantage of the hesitation.  Pressed his palm flat against Walter's chest, just above his heart.

Not much pressure, but Alex's hand was unnaturally cool.   Skinner could feel, or imagined he could feel, each finger, each line and mound of palm.   His own flesh seemed fever hot under the touch.   Strangeness, strangeness.   The coolness of Alex's hand seemed to seep through his skin, shimmer there in the thin sheath between dermis and muscle, diffusing through his flesh like some kind of contact poison.   Hell, maybe it was.   He thought he should have moved by now.

He tried, found his hand came up easily as ever.   Rested his own blunt fingers on the more fragile strut of Alex's collarbone.   Mirroring.   Had he meant to do that?

"Alex?" he asked, hearing the sound of his own voice as rusty and old.   "Are you doing something?"  Again that long, calm consideration.   That tiny birdlike tilt of head, but Alex's face was slowly folding into its puzzled frown.

"I...might be," Alex said.   Guileless.   "Must I stop?"

"Can you?" Skinner asked.

Brittle concentration crossed the boy's face like pain.   Faded.   He moved his palm, slid it down Skinner's chest, the friction of skin tugging at the hair there.   Skinner didn't notice a difference.   The hand still felt cool.  Slippery.   Odd.   And very good against his skin.

The palm continued moving.   Slowly circled, chafed a nipple.   Walter licked lips he hadn't realized had gone dry.

 "I would like very much to hurt you someday," Alex said.   "I think you would be beautiful."

And Skinner had to bite back what threatened to be a truly, eviscerating moan, could not stop the forward buck of his hips.   His free hand shot up, grabbed Alex's wrist.

Ground a little on the bones.

Alex smiled.   Honest smile.   Childlike.   Pure.

"Yes.   And knives," he whispered, nodding.  "The curved knives, please..."

"Shut.   Up." Walter growled.   No anger in it but implacable firmness.   Slow twist of his wrist and he was turning Alex, torquing his arm high on the smooth, scarred back.

His other arm reaching to clasp the taut bow of his throat.   And as Alex's ass pressed back to intercept his cock he realized that once again, without having been asked, his boy had handed him the perfect tool to fill his needs.

*

Alex felt himself being fitted to the vast, hot canvas of Skinner's body and something cold and insinuating slid up under his skin and tugged.  He was bare, raw against the rough chafe of skin and hair and man.  His shoulder burned with the pressure, his body complained, begged to be allowed into a more comfortable position.

As always, the cries of his own cells were music, true music and pure and he wanted to sing with it, something old and quiet and smooth, that would meld smoothly with the sound of wind through bone.

It was not until Skinner loosened his good grip that Alex realized he'd spoken.

He froze then, frightened and on the edge of rage, though Skinner had not moved.  His body remained against his own, but...  Alex growled.  Skinner was holding him as you would hold a foolish child, loose and contemptuous.

"Are you ordering me?"

Skinner's voice came low and simple at his ear, and while Alex's instincts screamed to twist, jerk, break the other man's unremarkable nose, there was something, something... 

Skinner flexed against him, squeezing his wrist for a brief moment of pleasure.  *This* was what they wanted.  Alex knew it, it was so, why did Skinner not comply?

Another mystery, something so important and close -- Ah, but at least he knew now that Skinner would never punish him with his cock.  He should have known, should have understood that the man would not be so...  easy. 

Alex loosened himself, a conscious act of surrender, frustration running hot over his body, need taking every lost bit of tension and transferring it to his aching, aching cock. 

"I will not order you."

Skinner released him entirely, then, and Alex whirled quickly, met the other man's gaze.  A flow of something across the strange dark eyes, a ripple in an oily pool.  It might have been emotion, it might have been a shift in his own blood flow.  Only the muties had eyes like that at home, the ones that had to be exposed....  Alex shook it off when he felt the other man's gaze lock on his face and pull.

It was a look of cold curiosity, a rich man's knife teasing the flesh away from bone, another use of himself that Alex approved of heartily.

He hadn't been taken by just *anyone* -- Skinner would learn all, take all....

"What do you want me to do?"

"I didn't call you here."

Alex lifted his chin, defiant of Skinner's ability to put a knife there before he could -- Alex cursed himself silently, he was unable to concentrate.  Skinner reached in and thumbed his face, pressed crude and even along his cheekbone, back to tug at his ear once, sharply. 

Alex let the rolling sound out, unwilling to resist that tiny indulgence. 

Skinner curled his hand, ran thick knuckles over Alex's cheek.  *Was* he making demands? How much could he take? How far could he go? The first -- the only other -- man who had saved his life had not survived long.  Alex had not risen to protect him from the chapak.  Alex was cursed under every star he knew, though he had not told Skinner this.... 

He searched himself, tried to find how deeply his desire for redemption ran, but found the answer blocked by a curious mist.  It filled the air like smoke, it swallowed him whole --

Skinner had stopped moving, was studying again.  What had he shown? Rage? Proof of his unfitness?

Without warning, Skinner backhanded him.  One sharp blow, more power behind it than Alex had been willing to admit was there.  Skinner, after all, was not of his stock.  Alex ran his tongue over his lip, tasted blood and felt the first of him burst out of his cock with shameless joy.

"Where were you?"

"I was remembering."

Skinner shrugged off his robe, threw it casually to the side.  Alex took in the powerful thighs and spun to his hands and knees, willing to stay down here if that was what the other man wanted --

"Why did I strike you?"

Alex's teeth ached to tear the man's throat out, but he breathed instead.  Breathed in the room, the dust of one man.  He had not taken a companion since long before Alex then.  The territory was nearly pristine....  He longed to rub his bleeding cheek along the bedpost, to sit patiently and watch himself soak into the old, old wood. 

"I don't know."

"Think."

He breathed in deep and scented the man himself, calmed himself with the sharp, rising scent of his want, his *need*.  Watched the man's cock wave and shift with each breath, so dark and heavy.  Skinner grunted and it brought Alex's eyes up...

The crudely formed face had...  softened.  Not the slack, mindless hunger he wanted to see, wanted to feel deep inside, but something...  affectionate.

For hungering him?

"Does it please --"

"Answer me, Alex."

He let the words out in a snarl, uncaring momentarily.  "You don't like it when I am not focused completely on you."

Skinner laughed then, a bark of true humor.  Alex knew -- he had analyzed it for anything other.  He didn't understand...

"Is that so wrong, Alex? What predators must you watch for here?"

It was like finding yourself nothing but a hilt when you thought yourself a blade, empty and useless and wrong.  And the truth only came when the blade clicked home.  To be so foolishly chained to a concept with no meaning here....  Alex had forgotten to adapt.  Such a small thing within the context of this pleasure, this blood and sweat, but, if allowed to remain, it could kill them both.  A shaming lesson for one his age and former status, but he knew the reaction wouldn't please Skinner.

Or perhaps it would, but not as much as, "I understand." 

Skinner nodded, crossed his arms.  Alex watched the muscles flex inexorably with each small movement, tried to taste the air.  And then simply crawled forward, nudged the other man's thighs apart with his face, and rubbed his cheek along one strong column.  Smooth on the inside, burning his face... 

Alex groaned, pressed hard against the muscle, trying to get inside, to push his blood in to flow with the other man's.  Skinner's hand fell on his head, pushed him back.  Watched him closely, but Alex couldn't really pay attention to the scrutiny this time, not with the other man's cock bobbing at his cheek.

He closed his eyes, breathed Skinner's sex, breathed more, and more and each taste hooked onto his cock, his self and yanked.  He could hear a low moan with each exhale now and he thought he might float away altogether, fly apart without something to ground and solidify him.

Make him real.

Skinner pushed him back a little further, and Alex whimpered, but then the hand settled on the hinges of his jaw, pressed in viciously, forced his mouth open... 

And oh, this was fine, perfect.  Pain was rarely regretted, but when it came with purpose, contact, a fire of something tight and tight between himself and another it was something to be craved, worshipped.  Skinner moved him roughly into position and slid his cock in, slow, steady, ruthless. 

Alex opened his throat and moaned his pleasure, not bothering to edit out the small note of triumph.  This was what he'd wanted, and yet there could only be more...  Skinner settled his other hand on the back of Alex's skull, toying with the casual knot of his hair -- short and bound to get shorter if Alex had his way, he did not care for the smooth waves of it, he missed the bones -- before simply weaving his blunt fingers in and holding Alex in place.

Skinner's other hand still lightly tortured the bones of his jaw.  Alex held still, and was rewarded with the first, second smooth thrust scraping against the flesh of his throat.  But then the other man paused.

Alex moaned again and felt Skinner's entire frame shudder.  He worked his throat in a ragged series of half-instinctive swallows and felt several hairs work themselves free of his scalp.  Finally, he just pushed his face harder against Skinner's groin, his movements fractionally small as he was already tight against the other man's hot flesh.

But it made his point.  There was a brief, breathless chuckle from above and then Skinner was gripping him harder still.  And fucking his face with the steady, even strokes of a man obsessed.  Alex reveled in the stretch and slight release of his mouth, and decided there were worse things than being part of a man's obsession. 

Much worse...  He tasted so uniquely like *Skinner*.  Simply satisfying, acridly painful across the fevered landscape of Alex's brain, making of his vision a velvet black landscape ripped with lightning, a fury of nature and it was his, all his...

He felt himself relax and he hadn't even been aware he'd been tensed.  The release flooded his muscles with something acidly welcome and he moaned, and Skinner thrust and he had a few more moments of perfection before his jaw was released and his head pulled back and back until all he could lay claim to was a thin pearl of Skinner's pre-come slick on his lip.

"Get on the bed, on your back.  Spread yourself for me."

Skinner's voice was ripping cloth, low and insinuating and irresistible.  When he released Alex's hair, it was merely the confirmation of a command...

And Alex counted himself a fine machine.

*

A perfect tool.   Alex rose from his knees like a snake from a basket, eyes locked on Skinner's face.   Those eyes were clear now.   Crystalline and nearly black -- green-ringed, copper-flecked and all that blackness holding only him.  Only Skinner. 

Only Skinner as he backed toward the bed, climbed -- sinuous and slow upon it.  Did as he was bid, oh yes, but something different now.

Not placating his master with obedience, but...Skinner's mind too deeply awash in lust to come up with more than glimpses, images of Alex -- painted, stretched -- a dancer, a...a canvas.   Less than an artist; more than clay.  And those long, elegant legs folding back upon themselves, spreading wide.

Taut architecture of his thighs, pulled and drawn.   Truncated curls of coarse black hair.   Ivory column of his cock, head glistening, thickly glazed with pre-come.

Skinner's eyes moved down.   Alex's balls -- tightly furrowed, close to his body -- and below where the flesh darkened to the pink of dusty roses, the rose of Karkorium plums...

The puckered rosette buried in between the milk-white globes of his ass.

His.

Not taken by him.    Not given to him.

Simply, his.

There were oils by the bed, exotic oils from Lyra and Orion.   Lubricants appropriate for a dozen different human/alien pairings.   Some night he would use them with Alex.   Not tonight.

Tonight there would be only them; himself and his own.   And if it hurt...

He followed the boy onto the bed.   Knelt up between those arched and waiting thighs.   Took his cock in his own hand stroked roughly, spreading the slick pre-come with his callused palm.

Positioned himself at that still virginally tight entrance.   Shifted his weight.

Alex gasped into the nudge, pushed forward, down.   Friction allowed only the head to penetrate.

Walter wrapped a loose, but warning fist around Alex's cock, held him to stillness.

Hard enough to hold *himself* to stillness, but Starfleet's discipline was good training for any endeavor of the flesh.

But oh, the heat inside. 

Alex, so cool on the surface, roared volcanic under the skin.   His cockhead swelled in its narrow, burning channel.

Almost too much heat to bear. 

"Tell me about the pain," Skinner said.  "This pain.  Let...let me see it on you."

"Yesssss." Alex hissed.

Skinner withdrew the head of his cock, levered the boy's legs higher.

"Now," he said, and thrust.

Alex screamed -- high, wild, unrestrained.   And writhed and seemed to unfold beneath him like some fabulously complex insect.   And Skinner saw-- he *saw* the pain, race like the flush of blood across the surface of his flesh.

The sight provoked another thrust.   A battering buck of motion that brought him up blunt and short, stuck deep in molten, molten flesh.

Another scream -- rising torn like comet's tail of silk and sand and cold black water and oh god it *was* music. 

And it was moving him, dancing his hips in an undeniable rhythm.   Short punching strokes and Alex was choking on his next scream, liquid sounds and helpless gasping mewls.   Those long legs spreading impossibly wide.   He could almost hear the tear of tendon, rend of muscle from the bone. 

Felt the dull scrape of friction as he withdrew all the way.

"More..." he demanded through gasping breaths.   "All of it, Alex.   All...." And thrust again, full force of his muscular hips and legs.

Feeling flesh give, part abruptly hot and so so dangerously slick..  and he could feel the moral compass spinning wildly again, the ship swaying beneath him.   Glance down to see that yes, god, yes his cock was streaked with crimson and...don't deny it...still moving.   Plunging back into Alex as he watched.

No, not *watched*...he knew...didn't want to know.   He *wanted* this.   Not taken.   Not given.   It was his.   He owned it all.   Pain and blood and Alex Alex Alex -- transformed.   Not screaming now but writhing, muscles moving under the skin.

Mouth open, crimson spatters on his cheek -- brief flutter in Skinner's throat.   //Where did that come from...// he couldn't tell, but his eyes were drinking the red of blood and he *wanted* those dark red dribbles on the pale flesh.   And he wanted --- stroking stroking now into nothing but slick pleasure.   The burn so far away.   Oh but if only Alex's blood would burn him burn him again.

"Come on Alex," he growled.   "*Show* me..."  and when those eyes came up blacker than before he knew: it was his fault, not the boys.   He wasn't hurting him *enough*.   And while he was so close Alex was...drifting.   Lost.

And so much rage rising in him at those unspoken demands -- demands of flesh and of humanity and of the simple presence of someone other than himself.

Building in him like a charge, his teeth ground hard enough to feel something give and *crunch* and he raised his hand.   Brought it down in one hard ringing slap to the cock bobbing insistently toward his belly.

And there was the cry, the boy's body jerking hard beneath him.

Pre-come jetting tiny fountains and he hit again, wishing his hands hard enough, sharp enough to draw blood from the bruising flesh.   All that blood welling just below the skin and Alex had been right...he should have brought the knives.

And like a brand behind his eyes he *saw* it, saw himself, curved knives in either hand, slathered in the sticky copper sluice of blood and shredded milk- white flesh.   And heard the choking gurgle of untimely death and saw the smile that would curve Alex's parted, perfect lips...

And looked down, his fist merciless on Alex's battered cock and saw that smile already there...

And came.

*

Alex was raw.

Inside and out, every nerve bruised or throbbing or heated with Skinner's...  With *Skinner*.  The borya knew *nothing*.  His people had forgotten themselves, the Pattern was meaningless.

This was how he was supposed to enter the darkness, not the random ache of broken limbs, but this utter sensitivity to the universe.  A drop of sweat fell from Skinner's chest to his own, he closed his eyes and it was a liquid punch, it would bruise him, too.

He could hear himself, panting or sobbing...  he wasn't sure which and that meant it was probably both but there were no *words*.  He shifted beneath the other man, cried out because Skinner was still so *hard* inside him...  He'd been fucked with a weapon, hot, so hot. 

A pon stick left in the sun, still charged, still sending pulses through every part of him.  Such wealth...  he prayed to everything he knew to keep Skinner there until Alex could just die...

Muscles flexed at the corners of his vision and he bore down in reflexive fear, sending flares of pain so pure it was a form of light previously unknown; Alex felt he would simply break apart and spill it all over...

"You haven't come."

Growled out, a simple statement.  Another would make it an accusation, not Skinner...  He felt himself cracking again, thought sure this time it would be fatal.  But he didn't know how to respond...

Thankfully, Skinner didn't ask for anything, simply lowered himself enough to make it possible to brace himself on one elbow.  Skinner's furred chest against his own...  even if this man *was* human it seemed too banal a designation. 

Alex could feel how sweat had curled, thickened the hair just a little.  Alex never wanted this to stop, and tried to say so by arching and rubbing.  He wanted Skinner to flatten him, smother him, fuck him again, just like he had before and then the blunt edge of Skinner's palm, callused and horny, came up under his chin and pushed.

For a moment, Alex wasn't sure whether to surrender to the push or resist until his spine had snapped, but Skinner eased off when Alex stilled, waiting for him.  It felt criminal and Alex pressed the round of his skull back against the hot, damp pillow and arched up, offering as much of his throat as he could.

And then Skinner came down fast, snake-strike fast and bit him.

Held on and growled.  Alex couldn't hold in his cries, couldn't stop the rapid arch and thrust of his hips, couldn't remember why he'd stopped.

And Skinner just held on, increasing the pressure with slow inevitability, adding to the pain, the wonder, the sheer solid *reality* of it.  Alex released his knees and braced his feet and screwed down, feeling Skinner soften but not really caring at this point beyond the glory of his own movements, the release of old tension, the creation of new. 

He was careful to keep his upper body as still as possible, not wanting to disturb Skinner's process, and the other man showed his approval by biting harder.  It was starting to get hard to breathe, his cock felt petrified, permanently blunted and full --

And then Skinner's teeth broke the skin, and Alex felt himself split under the pressure, felt himself start to spill and it was so perfectly, wonderfully right that he couldn't keep from screaming.  -- the sound was so breathless, so hoarse and broken that he lost it, painting their chests and bellies, scalding himself with his own heat. 

Skinner suckled his throat greedily, finally blanketing Alex fully with most of his weight.

And Alex shakily curled a hand around the smooth scalp and held the man there, right there.

*

Somewhere in the middle of the ship's nightcycle, Walter woke.   On his bed.  Alone.   Definitely something wrong, but no clear idea of what.   He felt -- gluey.

Inside and out, and vaguely achy, as though he were coming down with recyck fever or a cold.   His mouth tasted like -- he ran his swollen tongue over his teeth experimentally -- shit.

Something nagged at him.   He shifted on the smooth coverlet and his hand slid into a patch of cold dampness.   More than dampness.   Wet enough to leave his fingers slick.   Sticky.   Dull horror dawning, he brought the fingers to his face.

The movement alone brought the bright copper stink to his nose, along with the underlying musks -- sex, fear, ass... 

Enough to bring Skinner to full alert in an instant.   He rolled off the bed, into a fighting crouch, teeth bared -- not stopping to question why.

Nostrils flaring, ears cocked to listen to the ship.   *His* ship still and he knew all its noises.   Listened a long moment, heard nothing new and felt himself relax.

Breathed deep and straightened, took a step toward the head.

"Alex?" he called softly.

No reply, but the 'lock on the bathroom door was closed.   He rubbed the aching stretch of muscle at the back of his neck and took another step, intending to override the door with his palmprint.   His foot came down in cold, congealing ick. 

He stopped.   Controlled his breathing.   He had done a terrible thing, he knew that, but it hadn't seemed this...He stopped the rationalization before it could be allowed to birth.   Self-disgust hardened him against the growing fear.

"Lights..." he grunted.

He'd said it low, but any spaceman used to traveling alone kept the ship's computer finely tuned enough to catch a dying breath.   And the lights came up.

"Jesu Christos..."  The childhood invocation slipped out between his dry lips.  Blood...blood...   What had bled...?

Bloody abbreviated footprints led toward the bathroom door; a smeared handprint on the control pad like the attenuated digits of a Norn.   Skinner closed the distance to the door in an instant, slapped the override hard enough to sting his palm.   The door slid open.   Walter froze.

Alex stood in the center of the tiny head.   His back was to Skinner and the door, but his reflection faced them all. 

Skinner had been in space battles and planetside skirmishes.   He'd pulled friends and soldiers off battlefields and out of wreckage.   He'd seen his share of blood and wounds and the fierce madness that battle can strike in a man.   But he'd never seen anything like this.    Blood ran in a wide swath down across the young man's chest.   Blood painted the insides of his legs and long drips twined down the length of his downy calves to puddle in the arches of his feet.

It made no sense.   Walter had known he'd drawn blood from the boy -- he could still feel the scissoring split of tender skin between his teeth; remembered the terrible slick heat around his cock -- but he had not done *this*.

And looking at the boy.   Cold wash of strangeness as he tried to puzzle it out.   Alex hadn't moved; still hadn't acknowledged Skinner's entrance -- gave no sign of even knowing he was there.   He seemed transfixed on his own image -- eyes glassy, mouth open and breathing in short, shallow little gasps.

One hand was slowly tracing its way up his ribs, touching every rising bruise, every raw abrasion with something like the reverence of a priest touching relics.   The other hand...   Skinner frowned into the slight shadow cast by the boy's own body...  the other hand was straight at his side, held a little stiffly.

The boy's traveling left hand detoured from his ribs then, skimmed the bloody spill across his chest.   To his clavicle.   To the blackening circle of the massive bite mark on his throat, the ragged oozing tears in the flesh...

Skinner saw a flicker of too quick movement; looked up and caught the glitter of bright metal in the mirror.   Alex's hand had come up so fast...

The cuts exactly where his teeth had cut.   But flowing now, fresh spurt of crimson so much brighter than the old...

And the hand coming back around behind --and Skinner saw the blade, the curved blade flipped and angled to slip between the milk-white cheeks.

The sight unfroze him, shot through him like electric charge and Skinner moved so fast he was on the boy before the thought had time to form. 

He grabbed the boy's knife hand, ground a precise thumb into the nerve bundle at the base of his wrist.   The knife clattered to the floor.   His other hand went around Alex's waist and he lifted him, bodily off the floor and without preamble carried him out of the head.

Whatever combination of self-hypnosis and bloodloss had entranced the boy lasted just until Skinner dragged him out the bedroom door and into the companionway.

Then, like a switch had been flipped and thrown them back in time, Skinner found himself with an armful of snarling, screaming animal rage.

Hard pressed not to hurt the boy further in his efforts to subdue him, he tried to calm him with words, with the sound of his voice, the weight of his authority.

For a moment it even seemed to work, and Alex, whether through conscious effort or simple exhaustion and weakness, simply sagged in his arms -- but when they reached the infirmary, it was renewed his struggles with such crazed energy that Walter was forced to slam his head repeatedly against a wall strut to keep him from breaking free.

He regretted more than he could say the thought of having inflicting further damage on that mutilated flesh, and it was with tender care that he lay the stunned and blinking boy in the cylindrical, steel coffin of the med-unit and belted him in.   Alex came round before he was finished and started screaming again, flailing against the restraints and then, when Skinner held his head still and pressed his lips to the boy's forehead -- begging...*begging* for Walter to stop...please, please, please, please stop...

"Stop what?" Walter asked.

His hand was poised on the control pad, but as he watched Alex made a visible effort to compose himself and it stalled him.

"You..." Alex said, his voice rough and raw as torn silk and his words came out in choppy, panicked bursts.   "Destroy...  you cannot...it is..  I am...you have made it *godmade*...first Pattern...you can't...Skinner, it is *perfect*..."

The words made little enough sense, but the boy's eyes on him were so intense, so desperate he knew without a doubt that this was more than mere animal tantrum.   It was hooked into that strangeness.   That thing that made Alex more or less than truly human.   That made him who he was.    For Walter Skinner, something...*perfect*.   He took his hand off the control panel, raised both palms as if in temporary surrender.

"About the pain..." he said, knowing he had only the vaguest stirrings of what this might be about, and still never a man to distrust a gut instinct so strong as this:.   "Tell me about it Alex.   This time so I can understand." 

*

And there was that word again. 

Another act of cruelty, though Skinner's face did not mock.  And he smelled more of Alex than himself...  he rolled up against the restraints and got nowhere.  He was too weak, too close to changing...

Alex felt the air leaving his body, and with it went some of the harsh white light of this...  this *repair* center.  Purity was not to be thanked.  But Skinner was waiting for him.  He tried to put it into words.

"You gave me so much."

When Skinner frowned, it was a total thing, a reshaping of his face into something more stone, more beautiful.  But it was always a sign of disapproval...  Alex felt himself craving that look, that inky flood of anger, leashed violence. 

But that wasn't where the other man had called his work on Alex from, it was just Alex's own weakness.  If he was brought back to himself, he would only be tempted to see what true rage would get him, and that wasn't the way --

"It was mine to give; it is mine to take." Skinner's low growl pulling him back to himself, and the flare of re-entering his body sent blood to his aching cock and just made him hurt more and he felt his body rise in a wave and there was more blood flowing and then a warm, rough hand on his chest.

Centering him.  Alex tried to focus, found the rage on Skinner's face had tightened into something like fear.  Wrong wrong wrong --

"If you don't stop I'll sedate you.  Talk."

"Want to be perfect.  So little time to be perfect please let me have the knife you showed me how now I can finish and be done --"

The hand pressed him down harder.  Alex felt his skin split again beneath it, moaned his appreciation.

"That's.  Not.  Your.  Choice." 

Alex tried to free himself again, but he knew he did not move.  "How could you undo what you've done? Why do you punish me?"

A brief pause, and then Skinner came down, a mountain of blood-tacked muscle and aggression.  Stole his mouth and plundered it.  He tasted like death and Alex moaned again, sucked at his tongue.

And then there was a sound like the rush of a Five into your den when the seal is released too soon, and a spreading chill beneath his skin.  His eyelids dropped of their own accord, and Alex knew he'd been tricked.

"Why?"

"So I can do it again."

And that was all he knew.

*

Night, like most things on Kronos, came gently.  A deep blue -- too gentle for indigo -- blanket tugged over the sky.  Less a command for all to rest than a suggestion. 

It made Jeffrey feel naked.

There were no *true* moons here, just an endless series of asteroids with irregular orbits.  Well before the colonists had arrived, said orbits had been corrected for safety, yet left in semi-random patterns for their pleasing effect.  Tonight there were four in Jeffrey's sky, glowing in the backwash of Kronos' young, healthy sun. 

Jeffrey looked at his hand and thought it must glow, too.  Everything was clear in his vision, in his senses in general.  While he was not unfamiliar with the concept of adrenaline, Jeffrey's life before now had been calm, empty of such things.  This was very, very new, and he was convinced that, because the shape of a lone and obviously lost breed tawa was so easily discernible to *his* eye...  Well, he must surely be exposed to every eye tonight.

And it was not yet high Spring, not yet the proper season for young people to be out of their homes this late. 

Certainly not among the surprisingly poor streets of the Merchant's Quarter.  Not dirty, just vaguely...  discouraging. 

If he were a merchant, he would not be eager to come here.  Not when it was so clear that Kronos *could* provide better.  Jeffrey ran a hand down his tunic, and his palm identified the fabric as none other than lirat, soft and natural and native.  Hardly anyone wore anything else.

Two weeks ago, no more, the thought would've filled Jeffrey with pride at his homeworld's self-sufficiency.  But he'd never been to the Merchant's Quarter then, and he'd never seen the secrets...

//"Kill me...  why won't you just kill me?"//

The words had been running through his brain since the last time he'd gone to the Barns.  The fourth time altogether, the first without his watchful, watchful father. 

He had been led around the facilities, shown the progress, the growth...  a dozen different new species, each less recognizably humanoid than the last, easier to breed.  His father told him of the successful attempts to seed mostly uncharted worlds with the creatures, all something less than precisely sentient yet trainable.  Perfect slaves for new colonies on the crumbling edges of Federation morality.

And the prospective Governors paid well, and the latinum rolled in and it was so easy these days to smudge a genetic fingerprint to unrecognizability and someday it would all be his... 

Jeffrey paused at the edge of the alley he'd chosen to rest in, unable to quite bring himself out into the spots of the asteroids again.  He rested his head against the cool wall, and tried to breathe. 

He had not been shown Barn 14, and so that was where he'd gone.  Anything he wasn't shown would clearly be where the incontrovertible proof was hidden, something he could take holos of, steal evidence from to back up that letter he'd sent, *something*. 

And he was right, because Barn 14 held all the best Extras.  The one's whose stock was the most easily manipulable.  The ones whose faces had been shown in a million cheerful holos, but whose bodies had never been seen anywhere within the ranks of the Governor's Elite. 

Generations of them.  Revived and frozen and revived again, nearly heedless of damage, certainly of human need.  The newest ones were childlike, having never been taught otherwise, simply raised rapidly from infancy to artificial young adulthood.

But there at the end was Quirabi, and *her* cheerful holo had been one of the first, according to the histories.  By Kronian time, she was well over three hundred years old, at least.  Her arms and legs, a third of her face were of that strangely glassine and withered quality common to early cryo treatment, but the rest of her body was youthful. 

She was naked and restrained, a new wound had been bandaged on her side.  When she spoke, she did not focus on his face.  Her voice was the slurred pipe of a drugged child. 

And she had begged to be killed.  Again, and again, and again and Jeffrey had stood there until a hand fell on his shoulder and even then he'd been too shocked to move.  He'd been turned to face his father, who watched him with an odd sort of knowing happiness. 

And introduced to the legendary Admiral Surok, whose career Jeffrey knew by heart, who'd once written to say Jeffrey might someday have a place on his staff, whose staff would receive his simple but eyes-only letter for the general about the Problem On Kronos within hours.

Jeffrey had managed not to vomit, and nodded in the appropriate places, and when he'd been dismissed he packed up a small number of his belongings and ready cash and got out.  There was no way his father wouldn't know about the message by tomorrow morning, and then... 

And then he didn't want to think. 

So he was here, in the Merchant Quarter, and his only hope would be to buy his way onto a private vessel.  Something good and alien to Kronos.  A captain who would listen to his story with sympathy and get him so far away from home he wouldn't even be able to dream of it anymore. 

The hope was a small one, but it was there, and he cleaved to it. 

*

Skinner took one last look at the control readouts on the med-unit -- mostly green now, he was relieved to see, but he'd also set the autofunction to slide Alex into a nice, deep sleep for the next few days.   He wasn't entirely thrilled at the idea of leaving the boy alone in the ship, but the alternative -- having to deal with the delicate business of infiltrating a Starfleet medical facility while keeping his wild creature in check -- seemed worse.

The ship's defenses would protect Alex from looters and curious port officials who might decide to pull an unrecorded inspection of the vessel while the captain was not at home and -- as long as nothing kept Skinner from returning before his induced sleep was done -- might keep Alex safe from this new, bloody madness of his as well.   Skinner did not dwell on the possibilities of either mechanical failure or his own.

Satisfied with his final adjustments, Skinner left the ship, turned his documentation over to the 'port authority and headed out into the spaceport town. 

In Kronostes he found a place both like and unlike most cities that had sprung up around 'ports.   Every city had its places -- its wealthy quarters and industrial sectors; its tourist traps and its whoring places.    All different; all the same.   The form might change, the names, the value in which a sentient life was held, the races of the whores ...but the nature of these places seemed universal to Skinner.  There was a sameness to all 'port cities.   Or perhaps that was the influence of the Federation itself.

Another reason to curse them.

But every port city had one place whose form and whose nature was always exactly the same.   A place where the flotsam and jetsam of the city lapped up against the adamantine and forcefield fences of the landing fields in little boxtowns and shantytowns.   Here were the shadows in which the thieves and killers hid -- rough bars that stank of piss and blood and the bitter esters of too many aliens too close together.   Places where even a man like Walter Skinner walked with his hand resting on between his phaser and his knife and ready to draw either at a moment's notice.   He began his search here.

What he was looking for, was an *in*.

It was never the same from planet to planet.   Sometimes it was a person, sometimes the location of a place or a tidbit of knowledge bought at a price that was always too high, and that he always paid.   Whatever the *in* turned out to be, it was the single most vital key to Walter Skinner's success and, particularly, his survival:  the power to get in and out quickly and make his one shot count. 

For three days and three nights he prowled the city in search of his in.    His hunting skills honed by practice and necessity brought him time and again to places that should have yielded his prize.   But Kronos was different from most colony worlds.   Here there seemed to be no dissatisfied underclass, no resentful aboriginals eager to help poke holes in the Federation shields.   Not even criminals happy to make trouble for the simple opportunity it brought.   Kronos from top to bottom seemed fat and complacent in every way and the inhabitants of the dockside bars were not so much the criminal underbelly of the city as simply its lazier, stupider burghers.

Day four bloomed hot and green and devoid of even the most plausible of leads.  Walter Skinner had learned all he ever wanted to know about the richness of Kronos's soil and the peacefulness of its history and the wisdom of the ever- smiling Governer Markham.   He had also learned the general whereabouts of the fine new Starfleet medical facility and had gleaned, from his own experience and the chatterings of Kronostes happy citizens, that it was indeed his target. 

What Walter Skinner did not know, was how he was going to destroy it.  And he was running out of time.    His last lead had sent him on a long and pointless tramp to a clean and wealthy looking enclave where there was no one of any use at all.   He had spent all afternoon following one dead end after another and by the time he decided that there really was no hope, the sun had set and the gentle blue of Kronos night had descended -- a velvet drape of sky into which asteroids had been set like four semi-precious stones on display in a jeweler's window.

The slowly-cooling evening found Walter Skinner tramping irritably back through town via the Merchant's quarter.   His irritation was compounded by his growing concern that Alex would wake before he returned to the ship and by the fact that the worry was only a small distraction for the real ache in his heart -- that their simple mission had now become a suicide run and that he was going to lose the strange and razor-studded puzzle box that was his 

//His!//

Alex, just as he'd begun to understand the nature of its first unlocking twist.

And so distracted was he by the new, knife-cut anguish of this loss, that he nearly walked by the alley in which a young man -- tall and pretty-mouthed and dangerously over-dressed for the neighborhood -- was about to lose his virtue and most probably, his life.

*

Jeffrey was seeing stars.  The realm of his vision was collapsing and collapsing and then, with each jerked movement, exploding in a bright flare of something too momentarily stunning to be called pain.

And then the process would begin again.

There was a voice at his ear and something bluntly professional at his aching temple, and something else not quite so professional pressed at the small of his back. 

Something within him coolly reported that the reddish splotch on the wall was where his head had impacted, that the bluntness at his temple was a phaser, that the arm around his neck was, quite redundantly, choking the life out of him, and that the roughness of the voice and the hardness of the cock implied imminent rape.

The rest of him was steadily trying to beat that something to death because this was just too much to cope with right now and hadn't he had enough anyway?

His vision cleared from the blow for just long enough for him to notice that his body had gone on struggling in complete ignorance of his brain.  He was abruptly very proud of his body.  Then his attacker lifted him clear off the ground with just the arm around his throat and Jeffery wondered why he'd ever thought the night was too bright.

Jeffrey felt numbed and sleepy and then he felt the ground punch him in the face and then there really wasn't much of anything at all. 

*

Red sands obscured the sky, swirled around Alex's body in delicate whirls that blew apart and re-formed countless times around his body.  Red sands moved against the soles of his feet just before he set them down in step after step.

It was said that many of the First Ones had quietly turned to the worship of it after they had been left, that they believed the sands alive in a way utterly incomprehensible, yet timeless.

Alex walked through the gentle stings of the Two, naked save for the tightly sealed eye mask and the cloth wrapped low and efficient over his genitals, and believed.

He knew he was dreaming, though.  He could *see* his world, which meant the eye mask actually had some form of hole to see through, and that was....  Well, when someone was said to have "gone to see the sands" or was called a "sandgazer" then everyone knew to seal their dens against the person, because it just wasn't safe to remain close to the mad. 

To see was to open your eyes to the shape of the land, vast and scarred and the same red as your own dried blood.  The storms were near-constant on Pax, the sands always in motion.  When they *did* calm you could finally see it all, miles and miles of empty.  Few people left their dens during the Zeros.  It hurt the mind. 

More practically, seeing the sands was to allow each grain to sink into the tenderest flesh and burn and burrow and burn your brain until you went even madder. 

Though Alex had been born here, his body had always known this was no fit place.  Had railed and thrown itself against the walls of wind and dust-blood until it was strong and lean, which was good.  But it also never stopped telling him to leave, find something softer and cooler and wetter and it was so *weak*. 

Alex had never understood why his body couldn't just learn to accept what was, though perhaps there was less shame now that Pax was only a dream. 

And Alex walked.  Saw the sands with something a lot like guilty pleasure, reveling in the taboo of derangement until the weight of the drug pushed him back down and down into simple black. 

*

It was the familiar shuffle and gasp of night violence that brought Skinner out of his head.

That sound that was two bodies in collision -- fucking hard or fighting -- and he turned, a half step past the alley.  already knowing what it was he'd heard and seen.   Whir of the damned moral compass in his chest.   On another world he might have walked away.   Violence was a fact of life and Skinner had no need to save a boy too rich and stupid to protect his own worthless life.  And.   time wasn't his to waste on strangers -- Alex would be waking soon. 

And who was he to tear some lion from his kill?  But the man on top in this alley was no lion. 

Just another rank and dirty urgol rutting on something already too lame to run.   And four days simmering frustration, four days worth of prodding the city's flabby underbelly to no end but his own sacrifice congealed suddenly, catalyzed to rage.

Three long steps and he had the *urgol* by the throat.   Yanked him backwards, twist of his arms and the man's vertebrae snicked to the edge of breaking.  Skinner gave him just long enough to register the attack, stiffen in abject terror, send up a musk of wild fear that sent a rush of blood to Skinner's prick -- and snapped the man's neck.

The body shuddered against him, relaxed.   Collapsed in upon itself.   Stink of foulness rising and he tossed the suddenly heavy corpse aside.    Looked down.  The boy sprawled on his belly on the ground before him.   Half naked, fine tunic a ruin.   Hands scrabbling in the dirt and his legs spread wide where the dog had left him.

The sight sent another deathrush through him, filled his cock like the flex of a fist.   That animal desire.   This kill was *his* now -- and he *was* a lion.

The boy moaned, flexed his back, tried to rise.   Walter's foot twitched wanting to kick those knees apart again.   The rich boy's ass looked soft and pink as a D'abo girl's, dark heaviness in the shadow of his thighs promised more.

But that was the 'man' thinking again.   Thinking with his cock, his gut.   He needed cold steel between his legs, not silky flesh.   And a rich boy out alone at night in *this* place sent out alarm bells that he should have heard long before now. 

So he steeled himself, took the boy's arm instead, gave him his other arm to lever on.   Got him sitting against a wall.

"Okay?" he asked.

Not a real question.   The boy -- were they *all* so young? -- was clearly stunned.   His face was wet with blood and dirt and his gaze skittered wildly across the planes of Skinner's face.

Annoyance reigned.   Did these Kronos people have no wits about them at all? The boy was likely hopeless -- an idiot escaped from the family pen.   The sane thing to do would be to leave now, get back to the ship.   Prepare for the final run.   But something held him back.   Skinner frowned, racked his brain, trying to sort through the accumulated trivia of the last four days.

Something about the clothes.   The tunic, torn and dirty, green-gold badge of the family crest pulled askew...   And the key slid home.   If Skinner was a smiling man, he would have smiled. 

He knew that crest:  those crossed staves, green fields of 'baccy and gold trefoil.   House Spender.   The name had come up time and again -- right hands to the Governor, a direct channel to Starfleet.   Wealthy beyond your dreams.  Impossible to reach.   And here, as though sent by the hand of whatever passed for a god in this place, was one of their very own.

Skinner looked closer at the boys face, felt encouraged when that vague gaze sharpened, found him.   He watched the boy take in the scene:  the lump of dead man in the shadows, his own disarray.   He raised slim fingers gingerly to his forehead, stared at the blackness of blood on his fingertips.   As if he'd never seen his own blood before.

"Did you...?" he asked.   His voice was a little deeper than Walter expected, his pretty features tangled up in a frown.

"Un-hunh," Skinner grunted and then to make sure there was no mistake.   "I saved your life."

"I-- Thank you," said the boy.   He sounded puzzled.   Skinner's impatience made him grind his teeth, set his jaw against hauling the boy to his feet, dragging him along.   Instead he held his voice to softness.

"Can you walk?" Skinner asked.

"I think..." The boy frowned, shifted to get his feet under him.   "I think so.  Yes."

"Good," said Skinner.   "I'll take you somewhere you can get cleaned up." Squint of suspicion as the boy pushed himself up using the wall as leverage.

"I...thank you.   No," he said, his voice was shaky.   Words a little thick.

And Walter's patience reached the limit of its chain, yanked hard.   He wrapped one hand firmly around the boy's slender bicep.

"It wasn't an invitation, boy."

The rich boy cringed back against the wall.   "No..." breathed shaky but something like will behind the words.   Walter rolled his eyes, shook his head.  "I said get clean, boy.   Not get fucked.   Get clean and get yourself fixed up.  I'll do that much for you.   And you can tell me your story if it's short.  And then," and he fixed the boy with his long-practiced captain's glare.   "Then we can talk about how you're going to pay me back."   Was this what it meant to leave home? Was this night just his due for deserting his birthright? Jeffrey felt briefly wistful for those otherwise useless electives about religion.  The vast, alien thing had had no place in his life, but there was probably something useful there for *this* moment because this wasn't his life anymore.

Not by any stretch of the imagination was he following the massive brutal stranger passively, without even a fist around his arm to compel him.  The moisture on his face was rainwater, not blood.  The man *would* just get him medical attention and help him -- no matter what the man's eyes said --

And that was just a little too close to admitting this was all perfectly real, another today of his life and if he admitted that he'd also have to admit there was nothing here he could understand and really, if he went back to that alley he could crawl back into his body and go back to sleep.

His damaged body... 

A part of Jeffrey's mind was cursing a blue streak, words he'd never had any real reason to know, much less use.  He knew it was just to keep from screaming and that was a real thought, too, and he couldn't really focus on the sky, or the night people in the Quarter, or on anything but the vaguest shape of his not-at-all altruistic savior...

Too real, much too real and he knew if he stopped walking and curled up the man would just pick him up and haul him for the...  the *repairs* he obviously thought were necessary before he could lower himself to rape him and oh *fuck*, but Jeffrey had only been trying to avoid Wrong --

And there was the fist on his arm.

"Are you going into shock?"

The words were in the same toneless rumble the man had been using all night, and the eyes might have been blackly unreadable on any other night, but... 

Jeffrey's own eyes were dark, and he knew contempt when he saw it.  He pulled himself up a little, deliberately slowed down.  Watched the irritation ripple across the other man's features and resisted the urge to ask when the man had last had to hold *his* pants up by the torn, ruined waistband.

He would probably tell him. 

A small, bright giggle worked its way up despite his best efforts to keep it down, and the other man raised his eyebrow, seemed to be gearing up to explain to Jeffrey one last time How It Was Going To Be. 

Oh, he knew this man.  He did.  And Jeffrey knew he didn't have to be real at all.  None of this did.  Not even himself.  If he listened very, very closely the wind sounded a lot like the soft, gentle chuff of the doors to his home holochamber. 

"No.  What's your name?"

That earned him a measuring look, but he knew the part he was supposed to play here.  No backing down. 

"Skinner."

Skinner.  He turned the name over in his mind, but found no meaning but obvious gore...  Obvious didn't quite seem the man's style.  "I can pay you --"

"I'm not interested."

And that, too, made perfect sense within this new...  life he was trapped in.  He caught himself nodding absently.  "You know me."

Another look, a smile crooked less out of humor than unfamiliarity.  "No, I don't.  You're going to tell me, though."

Jeffrey flat out laughed then, and gestured to Skinner to lead the way. 

Perfectly absurd. 

It would do.

*

There was a hiss and a click and a great wedge of searing white light and Alex Krycek knew he was awake.   He felt...fine.   Ordinary.   His senses had returned to their blunt, dull selves -- capable of sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell and nothing more.   No, not returned -- had *been* returned.   Skinner had done that, had pulled him back from the edge of change and made him nothing more than flesh again.

Or maybe *something* more.   Something about his dreams...  Strange, telling dreams.   He could feel them like a cupped palmful of water in his mind, a slippery weight just beyond the walls of memory.   No chasing would bring them any closer and so he closed his fingers around the weight, put them with the hard-shelled eggs that were his rage.

He ran mental fingers over those treasured eggs.   So many.   Someday perhaps, he would be allowed to smash them all, let all the roaring <deadly creatures> fly.

He lingered on the pleasant thought, then pulled himself back to the dull casing Skinner had chosen to give him for a body.   He pulled himself upright.  No pain.   Not even the smallest twinge.   Curious, his hand went to his throat.  Not even there, although his fingers found the short, sharp ridges of the tiny angled scars.

So, there were marks at least.   And memories. 

And Skinner's promise.

Perhaps all had not been undone.   And feeling cheered by this, he climbed out of the great undoing box and stretched his muscles one by one and then set out to find the cause of the staleness of Walter Skinner's scent upon the air. 

* 

Skinner glanced sidewise at Jeffrey Spender limping along beside him down the catwalk to the Rose of Sharon and couldn't help but shake his head.   Here was this creature -- draggled and damaged and clearly on the thin ice over water much deeper than he'd ever expected to cross -- and the sound of his honest, open laugh still rang in Skinner's head.

How many years...?  Surely he'd heard people laugh since he'd left Starfleet? What difference did it make?  None, he told himself firmly.   He was a weapon.  Jeffrey Spender was his sight.   His *in*.   Already the boy had told him almost everything he needed to know.   One simple question -- what were you doing in that alley tonight? -- and after one brief hesitation; one probe of his face with those dark and hungry eyes -- the words had poured.

How he'd had to leave -- his home, his father -- terrible things he couldn't reveal.   Well, Skinner already had an idea of what those were.   He'd been in growing barns before.   And it was clear that Jeffery Spender had the kind of clearance Skinner always dreamed of finding.

He knew too, that it would take little encouragement to persuade Jeffrey to help him.   That sonic shower, a new pair of pants.   A gruffly sympathetic hand on his shoulder. 

He could almost imagine the shine of grateful tears in Jeffrey's eyes when Skinner told him he could right the wrong.   And then...what?

Sense told him it wasn't his problem.   *His* path was always clear.   Get in, get the job done, get out.   There were no innocents and all was fair.   And he'd only known the boy for less than a 10th of a rev and knew him already for a lamb and a naïf and fifteen kinds of fool.   Who could laugh at the ridiculousness of his own personal disaster, with warmth and gentleness and to his captor's face. 

They turned the corner of the catwalk and Rose of Sharon hove into view.  Skinner heard a soft exhalation beside him and glanced over to see Spender's eyes gone big and dark.   His face unnaturally pale in the harsh landing field lights.

"She's a good enough ship," Skinner said, bluntly.   But it was always a source of pride to see Sharon pierce another man's heart.   "Sonic shower and med-unit--"  He broke off.

He broke off, gut clenched with sudden alarm.   He checked his chron.

Damn.   How had he lost track of so much time.   Right on the edge now.   The sleep cycle would have ended, yes, but not so long ago that Alex couldn't still have drifted on in normal sleep.   But not so recently that he couldn't have gotten up to whatever the hell that was that he'd been after.  Perfection.   Godliness.

The peace of death.

Skinner set his jaw.

"Stay here," he ordered perfunctorily, not even bothering to see if Jeffrey would obey. 

He considered his options, decided expediency was the better part of valor here and drew his phaser.   Set the thing on stun.   It might not stop Alex if he had gone back into some strange fugue, but it would likely slow him down enough to restrain him painlessly if the need arose.

"Does your watchwraith not have a safeword?" The voice at his shoulder was unexpected, but Skinner didn't flinch.

"No," he said gruffly, biting down on the smile that threatened to bloom.  "And I haven't fed him in days, so unless you want to be fresh meat..." Skinner sensed rather than heard the boy's withdrawal, noting with pleased surprise: he moves well.   And then banishing Jeffrey from his mind, he hit the lock and opened the doors of home. 

*

Empty, empty, empty.  This ship, Skinner's den was empty of everything him.  For days now.  He'd been left here to sleep while Skinner left this place like a den with crumbling seals.

And yet the ship reported nothing was wrong, save that he was alone here. 

Alex caught himself before the knife in his hand could do more than puncture the corner of the man's mattress, watched the foam boil up and harden around the blade.  He was almost too late to remove it, and he did not wish to lose it just yet. 

It was the same knife Skinner had taken from him, after all, and had been neatly replaced on the wall, with all the other knives.

Surely Skinner would not leave such wealth behind?

He pressed his face to the mattress and it was just what he already knew.  Old and stale. 

It was wrong on more levels than he really wanted to pick through, so he settled on the idea that dens like *Skinner's* were designed for more...  care than his own.  More connection.  Leaving a place so rich and functional was madness, Skinner was not mad, therefore Skinner would be back. 

And so he was not surprised to hear the false wind of the airlock opening, and he did not stop working the blade on the old leather strop Skinner kept in his wall panel. 

He did, however, catalogue each and every step the man made, noted the cautious, but healthy rhythm.  Heard him pause...  that would be the *repair* center.  Alex accidentally cut a small, translucent sliver from the strop. 

He frowned at it for a heartbeat, then ate it.  What Skinner didn't know wouldn't put Alex down like an *infant* for a rest --

Skinner was moving again, toward his own room.  Alex leaned forward, the door opened, and *there*.

Skinner, fresh and stronger than he remembered, or maybe he just hadn't scented anything in too long.  He smelled hard and ready, acid.  Alex was up and moving before he really knew what he was doing, knife glanced against plastic and he noticed the phaser in the other man's hand. 

He looked directly into Skinner's eyes, found them searching him.  And then the other man was gripping his head and kissing him hard.  He even tasted stronger -- Alex couldn't have refused the kiss even if he'd wanted to, it pulled at everything he thought of as himself and demanded. 

He smelled...  he smelled like someone else's death. 

Alex was hard as stone, heating under the skin.  So much blood, all of it eager to spill out into Skinner's touch.  "Who was it? Tell me how it was I want --"

"Alex, we --"

And he saw a dark head moving up slowly behind Skinner and let the knife fly but Skinner kicked the stranger's legs out from under him before the blade could sink into his eye.

Alex had been with Skinner long enough to understand this probably meant there would be no kill for *him*. 

He tried not to scowl.

*

Thankfully, Jeffrey landed on his good temple.  Not that it felt particularly good anymore, but Skinner's "watchwraith" was apparently flesh and blood and not especially tolerant of intruders. 

He didn't want to be unconscious around it. 

He probably should have stayed in the hangar.

"I told you to stay outside."

Skinner's wraith eyed him in a way that suggested he wanted very badly to push Jeffrey back outside.  Preferably through a very small hole. 

Jeff giggled out an apology and let Skinner haul him to his feet.

"You're going to the med-unit now."

The wraith practically smirked, but Jeff didn't really feel like puzzling that out.  Skinner turned and said, 

"You're staying here."

The wraith moved, a nearly imperceptible fade backwards into what seemed to be Skinner's quarters.  It was definitely a good sign that Skinner had the thing leashed. 

And that he already had a lover, too. 

Although the long walk back to the man's ship had taken some of the numb horror out of the idea of being saved from one rapist by another, more patient rapist.

It wasn't that Skinner had convinced him that Jeffrey was only here to get cleaned up, and it wasn't the man's sparkling conversation either.  He'd limited himself to brief bursts of speech, the epitome of taciturn and grim, but there was also a touch of dry humor in there. 

And he seemed to respond well to Jeffrey's own humor...

Briefly, he could hear a soft yet piercing scream in something that sounded a lot like his own voice and it made him falter a step.  Skinner responded by taking him by the bicep again and there was so much simple *there* there. 

He was going to the infirmary and that was final.  Every *other* part of him liked the way Skinner was directing the plot here, so the screamer could just go...  fuck itself.

He chuckled at himself.

"What's funny?"

Skinner was eyeing him curiously, though with a vaguely surprising lack of concern.  Even Jeffrey new he was probably somewhere near hysteria. 

Or maybe he wasn't?

"Nothing, nothing.  Just...  having a good time." Hey, it would be an even better life if it was true --

And that was a definite bark of laughter.

"Good, Jeffrey.  Good."

* For all young Jeffrey Spender's bravado, Skinner recognized the symptoms of battle fatigue setting in.

Not that it had been much of a battle, but the boy was no Starfleet veteran and he had taken more than a few hits to the head.   A bluish egg-shaped lump was rising under the raw scrape on his forehead.   The blood from the cut had dried in scabby lumps, begun to flake off.   And he was swaying on his feet.

He didn't look quite up to the task of sonic showering and time was short anyway.   He dragged Jeffrey to the infirmary, pushed him onto the room's sole chair.

He tugged at the ripped collar of Jeffrey's stained tunic. 

"Off..." he said, and again without looking to see if his order was followed, turned and jammed his large hands into the buzzing purple light of the sterilizer.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see the young man fingering the tab of material he'd pulled at, eyeing him warily.   Or maybe there was more than just wariness in that glance.   Skinner knew the feel of a young man's eyes on him.  Always had.   He pulled his pink and tingling hands from the light and snatched up the small medical tricorder.

Jeffrey was just pulling the tunic over his head when Skinner nudged an empty storage container over to the chair and sat on it, placing himself between the boy's knees.

With his shirt off Jeffrey seemed to shrink a little into himself, shoulders slightly hunched, head down.   His obvious discomfort made Skinner even more aware of the softness of his milk-pale skin.   The dark curls, neatly squared across his narrow pecs, slender arrow of hair down his long torso to his navel.   The recyc fan had clicked over and a thin, cool draft raised lines of gooseflesh on the boy's bare shoulders, made his nipples peak into tiny, clenched buds.

A pretty sight indeed.   And daubed like a chargas-wood carving with black- purple fingerprints at throat and jaw; scarlet quiltwork of abraded flesh, oozing tiny crimson drops...

Pretty and if he'd paid 200 strips of gold-pressed and got this for his whore, he would have taken the time to linger over every inch.   But Jeffrey had been neither bought nor paid his own way yet and Skinner flexed his jaw, set to applying the regenerator to the worst of the hurts.

The regenerator buzzed and tinkled as it knit together cells.   Skinner worked almost automatically, moving Jeffrey this way and that to get to the injured parts of him, but his mind was already racing ahead to the plan that had been vaguely gelling all the way back from town.

"Is something wrong?" Jeffrey asked.   Skinner looked up, realized he was scowling trying to put pieces together.   He'd forgotten how intimidating his blunt face could be.

Letting his captain's tools get rusty -- sign of an undisciplined mind.   He made the scowl deeper, pinned Jeffrey with his eyes.

"I'm thinking how you're going to pay for this," he said.   No real threat in his voice, but he could feel Jeffrey's muscles tense, heard him swallow.

"I thought--"

"Shut up," Skinner said.   His mind still slogging along, lining up targets, shooting them down.   Almost there.   "How mad's your father going to be?"

"What?" 

"Can you go back?" Skinner asked.

"Back?  I don't want to go back..." Jeffrey's eyes were wide, betrayed, like a pet lamb seeing his leash being handed to a priest.   Skinner shook his head, pushed down hard on the boy's shoulder to get at the nasty scratch across the back of his neck.

A little resistance, but hardly more than reflex, Skinner let the reality of his strength hit home.

"It's not what you want here, Spender," Skinner said.   "It's what I need.  Which is a man inside."

"Inside what?" Jeffrey nearly whining now.   Honest fear; real incomprehension and he squirmed under Skinner's hand "What...the hell is this about?"

Skinner dug his fingers in a little, shook the boy -- not hard.   A warning.

"Stop talking, boy," he said.  "And listen."

For a minute Skinner thought he was about to be disobeyed and he had only himself to blame for the twitch the possibility gave to his cock.   But Jeffrey only sagged beneath his hand, his face folding into a frown, gaze cast down.

And listened.   Skinner suspected the boy already knew, or suspected much of what he told him of the Federation and -- he nearly spat the words: Starfleet Medical.   At least he hadn't jumped up to argue the point -- clearly he'd been horrified by what little his father had shown him.   And it seemed clear too that he understood Skinner's intent.   Understood what Skinner wanted and why it was the only way that justice could be done.   At least he'd been nodding, if somewhat vaguely all along.

And Skinner hadn't been coy about the debt the boy owed for his life and that he intended to collect payment one way or without qualm, another.

It was clear he understood.   Maybe even agreed.  The boy had close to said as much.   So what Skinner didn't understand was why, when he had finished, Spender had simply shook his head and said:

"I can't."

"It's not a request."

"No, Mr.  Skinner -- I...I want to.   I wish I could...  I know you're right.  There is no justice for these men.   No courts..."

"But you're afraid," Skinner said.

"No," Jeffrey said, and shook his head and gave that honest laugh again.   "I mean, yes.   I'm...I'm terrified.   Obviously.   I'm not that much of a fool."

"Explain yourself." 

To Skinner's surprise Jeffrey flushed at that -- the high pink color rising in his face and down his throat where it recolored the already fading bruises.

"I did the worst thing I could have possibly done, I think," he said.   And he looked up at that moment to meet Skinner's gaze with his own -- open and honest and black with something like despair.   The sight stirred Skinner -- a little steel beneath the milk-fed flesh -- and for the first time he really felt for the boy.   Saw him as someone...real.

"What did you do, Jeffrey," he asked, and took the captain's goad out of his voice.   And Jeffrey sighed.

"I told someone the truth." 

*

Jeffrey watched a rush of something that looked a lot like murderous rage wash over Skinner's eyes before getting crushed and knew the other man had gotten the point.  He wondered if the wash of depression he felt was normal, caught himself before he could start thinking about what normal might mean.  Swallowed.  "I ruined whatever chance I had of getting you...  inside when I sent that letter to Admiral Surok."

Skinner nodded, leaned back a little, apparently to think.  Jeffrey hadn't noticed him getting closer during his speech about atrocities and duty.  But then, he hadn't noticed himself getting so thoroughly pulled in, either.  He leaned back a little himself, and discovered that he had rather further to go than he'd expected. 

He examined himself as much as he dared.  Found the screaming thing still there, quickly turned away.  Found the cold thing calmly explaining that Skinner was most probably his best hope.  Found he wanted, perhaps needed for the other man to come up with a reasonable solution.  Something that could make his stupid, childish mistake...  meaningless. 

Found himself a lot warmer than he'd been just a few minutes before. 

And found