29 Days of Smut 2016
Dec. 21st, 2015 05:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
A self-imposed challenge of my own creation, running from February 1, 2016 to February 29, 2016. I only plan to start these stories (producing around a thousand words for each), not to finish them within the month.




















And Despair [1/?]
Date: 2016-02-15 12:19 am (UTC)But that had been months ago, and they warmed up to her considerably since then. After almost two decades of oppression, the Tiber brothers had truly been put back in their place.
Esmeralda yawned as she stretched beneath the silken covers of her bed. The moon was rising outside, and as it did, so did she. The tunnels had changed her, instilled in her a pointed dislike of the daytime sun, and so she had clung to her nocturnal routine upon her return to the surface. She heard the whispers, of course, heard that the peasants and the servants and even her father's old advisers had taken it as a sign that she had really with the demons deep within Gatelin to reclaim be throne, but she couldn't pretend she minded a word. It was best they knew, best they understood what she had gone through and sacrificed to free then from the tyranny of the Empire, and best by far that they recalled whose power kept then safe.
She wasn't hiding anything from them anymore.
Esmeralda rose, naked in the dark room, and walked to the fireplace. With pointed fingertips, she lit the flames and smiled to herself as she turned back to her audience. She remembered the first time the brute had seen what she could do, remembered the way he had raved and ranted about demons and witchcraft and magic he couldn't begin to understand, and all that she had done that day, too, had been to light the fireplace for them. At least he had learned to kept his condemnations to himself after that.
Her eyes scanned over the both of them, the younger still fast asleep in her bed and the elder glaring at her from the confines of his cage. She gave him an innocent smile that he met with the same look of utter hatred he had worn for months, and she laughed as she walked back towards the bed.
"Scorpius, darling," she said softly, running her fingertips through his short golden hair, "I need you to get up."
His eyes flickered open immediately, glazed with sleep at first until they settled on her and focused sharply. She remained quite pleased with how alert he was, even now; she had created in the beginning that she may have to come too far into his mind to earn his complacence, might ultimately risk taking too much of his will and leaving him broken and empty in the wake of her manipulations. But he had done so well, had bowed to her demands with surprising ease, and perhaps in the end, being married to him wouldn't have been the worst fate in the world. Even before Gatelin, she suspected this was a man she could have brought to heel.
His brother, however... Octavius was a man used to his own dominance, a man who expected others to submit as a matter of course, and so even now she was still struggling with him. As with the younger, she was loathe to break him; though as the weeks went on, she was beginning to suspect that it might be her only course of action. Eventually, much as she hates to think of it, the man would need to either submit to her sovereignty or face his execution. He couldn't be permitted to challenge her throne, and while he was certainly no match for the powers of Gatelin, if his army descended upon her lands, she couldn't be entirely sure some fool wouldn't try what her mother had, wouldn't descend into Gatelin out of panicked desperation and inadvertently break her covenant. She certainly wasn't about to let that happen.
Scorpius sat up on the mattress, the sheets sliding down his torso to pool around his narrow waist. His gaze fell upon the cage at the far side of the room, but he made no move toward it yet; he knew much better than that, had long since learned the importance of waiting for her permission. From behind the iron bars, Octavius glared silently at the both of them, whatever hateful words he would have tried to utter locked securely behind his gag.