Cameron is lying face-down on the bed, one knee drawn up underneath him, and Daniel is kneeling in between his open thighs. Cameron, here, not Mitchell, as Daniel is Daniel (though sir would fall from Cameron's lips as easily as yes or please, Daniel will not permit it). Names are words; words have power; come now, let us build ourselves a city and a tower, its tops in the heavens, and let us make ourselves a name, lest we be scattered over the face of all the earth. The nature of a language influences the habitual thought of those who speak it. No man understands the language of his neighbor, but that means nothing here. Tonight, Daniel will not allow Cameron to speak unless there is good reason; he is not interested in what Cameron thinks he wants.

Cameron's body understands what it wants far better than Cameron's mind does; that is, after all, the reason they have reached this point. From first hint to last confession, Cameron's skin cries out: to be touched, to be marked and tended and claimed. Daniel is touching him now, the fingertips of one hand stroking lightly over the red and lavish marks lining Cameron's back, hips, ass. Cameron's voice is silent, but his body is screaming: yes, please, more.

Daniel's nose is itching; he disregards it. Easy enough to do: he has been growing ever-more-experienced in setting aside the demands of his body over the continuum of his lifetime; his body is not his totality, and most days it will barely register on his radar. He has been unbuilt and rebuilt, cell to cell, nucleotides stacked upon each other haphazardly by some unknown hand to spell out the sequence that houses his self. He is vast, he contains multitudes, but that has been literal fact rather than metaphor more often than he is comfortable with knowing and it's easier if he just doesn't open those doors.

Daniel is thinking of memory, unreliable in the false light of the artifice of eternity: unreliable twice over, when memory has been stripped away and gifted back so many times, introducing subtle errors in transcription. Cameron is not thinking at all: he is stretched out, making of himself an offering, secure in the knowledge that Daniel's hands will hold him. Daniel touches: nape of neck, small of back, all the places that shiver at his passage. Such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make of hammered gold and gold enamelling, to keep a drowsy Emperor awake. No country for old men indeed.

This is the stillness (between two waves of the sea). Interstitial: from the Latin interstitium, past participle of intersistere: to pause, to break. In Ancient it is enterestere and it is conjugated irregularly. Languages are one of the few things Daniel has never lost.

(The terms "sadism" and "masochism" were coined by a nineteenth-century Austro-German psychiatrist: sadism, after the Marquis de Sade; masochism, after Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Daniel has read both their works, de Sade's in French, von Sacher-Masoch's in German. He finds them as dull and tedious as he finds all pornography; there has never been erotica he finds erotic. He has found nothing in all the reading he has done that speaks to him. Pain is something to be endured, not something to be pursued; and yet, Daniel keeps a shelf of the most useful references, the ones with diagrams and instructions. He does not know, yet, where Cameron's journey will take him, and he does not know what he will need to know to bring Cameron safely home.)

Cameron is lying face-down on the bed, motionless save for the leap and dance of muscle beneath his skin, and Daniel wonders, again, what bargains and compromises Cameron has made with himself to allow himself to arrive here. It is not important. There is a paraffin candle, uncolored, unscented, burning on the nightstand; Cameron's eyes had not stopped at it when Daniel led him into the bedroom, assuming it to be for ambience.

Daniel has never cared about ambience.

He leans over Cameron's body, knowing the cotton of his pants is dragging across the reddened and sensitized skin of Cameron's ass, hearing it in Cameron's hiss and whimper, feeling it in the shiver that passes through the body beneath him. He walks the fingers of his other hand down Cameron's spine, feeling for each jut of bone until he can construct a map through his fingertips, taking careful note of which spots cause Cameron to press back against his fingers and which spots cause him to shy away.

The first drop of wax lands, neatly and precisely, where Daniel had intended for it to fall; the tiny tendrils of the droplet radiate from its center core as it marks the center of Cameron's shoulderblades, along the spine. Daniel has a heartbeat to admire his handiwork before Cameron is rearing back, leaning into the heat and burn, something he's always craved and always denied himself, and the sound he makes is halfway between yearning and pain. Daniel waits to see if there is any further response. Cameron is rarely speechless; the stream of words falling from his lips is often a valuable diagnostic tool, and yet tonight Daniel has ordered him to silence. Cameron is keeping his silence now, breathing out only on a pharyngeal vowel that resonates in the space between them. Daniel takes note of the sound; it is the noise Cameron voices when what he means is more.

The sinographs for yi (yì) and jing (jīng), placed together, are familiar to most Americans, if they are familiar at all, as the I Ching, rendered into English as Book of Changes; the implications of those two tiny characters cannot be unpacked in anything less than a paragraph. The great teachings of simplicity, substitution, and persistance. The wax, as it falls, turns trigrams into hexagrams: ming (míng) yi (yí), "darkening of the light", xu (xū), "attending", bo (bō), "splitting apart". Daniel is watching the future, unheeded, splashing itself over Cameron's skin as Cameron pushes his palms, open and flat, against Daniel's headboard, struggling to keep himself still. Daniel places his other hand on the nape of Cameron's neck; Cameron falls quiet. Daniel knows Cameron feels loosest when there is something there to anchor him.

"Three words," Daniel says, keeping his voice calm and neutral lest Cameron infer things Daniel does not intend.

Cameron shudders beneath his hand, beneath the wax, beneath the weight of whatever pieces of himself he is allowing to break. "It doesn't --" he starts, but catches himself, biting his lip. Daniel can barely see it from his vantage and perspective, but he is familiar with the presence of the gesture, the provenance it signifies; he has asked Cameron to do something he finds uncomfortable. Daniel bid him to silence because Cameron, though rarely speechless, just as rarely says anything of substance, and Daniel is made weary enough by translating the language of Cameron's body to wish a reprieve from picking through the weight of his words.

After a silence (xiǎo chù, "the taming of the power of the small"; fēng, "abundance") Cameron says, boundless, breathless: "Sharp. Rich. Strong."

Daniel frowns. He has spent a considerable amount of time building a semantic map of the inside of Cameron's mind; sharp carries negative semantic weight, strong carries positive. He is uncertain of rich. It annoys him that he has to ask. "Good or bad?"

Cameron's hips tilt backwards, pushing up as though he's seeking Daniel's touch like a flower turning its face to the sun. From anyone else, Daniel would consider it a plea. He will, someday, determine whether Cameron's stated aversion to penetrative intercourse falls into the category of things Cameron has always convinced himself to be true, but that day is not today. Instead, he waits, and Cameron says, voice full of wonder, "Good. Very -- very good."

Daniel tilts the candle; the wax splashes across Cameron's skin, pooling, cradling, falling and spilling to smear over the sheets. Cameron turns his head, buries his face in the pillows, grinds his hips against the bed. Daniel is wondering what Cameron is thinking, is feeling, to make him so aroused. Daniel's understanding of Cameron's experience is academic at best, but he is used to systematically disassembling a set of behaviors to find their component motivators, and this is no different. Just messier.

The sheets will need to be changed. No matter; it would not be the first time he has had to change or discard his bedlinens after one of Cameron's visits, and he has learned to keep a sufficient quantity on hand that if the weekend's activities should necessitate the destruction of several sets, he will still have more.

"Please," Cameron says, unbidden, unprompted, full of heartfelt delicious agony, the sound of a man hanging suspended between wanting and having. "God, Daniel, please."

Cameron is beyond rational thought; it is the plea of someone who does not know what he is asking for, who could not articulate the object of desire even if it were the only way he could hope to receive it. Daniel always must guess, at this point; he has learned enough, by now, to guess properly more often than not, and the times when he guesses incorrectly are little more than additional data to expand his understanding. He blows out the candle. Cameron makes a noise in the back of his throat, an epiglottal trill of desire, and Daniel reaches over him to place the candle back on the nightstand and take the bottle of lube from the glass of water in which it has been warming.

The wax cracks and flakes away as Cameron's muscles shift, as he rises to hands and knees on the bed, as Daniel's hands close roughly around his cock and stroke. In this there is no uncertainty at all; Cameron's cock has never been hesitant to inform Daniel about how it prefers to be touched.

Afterwards, when Cameron is face-down and spent on the bed, Daniel reaches for the towel he has learned to keep at hand. He cleans his hands, begins the process of picking the wax free. Cameron's face is incandescent, blissful. Daniel pauses to study it for a moment before resting the back of his hand against Cameron's cheekbone -- one quick brush, and Cameron does not even open his eyes. Daniel must run the edge of his nails along the sides of the smallest droplets of wax to free them, and when they lift, they leave raised red badges behind. Cameron will wear them proudly, Daniel knows, but they will have faded into nothing by Monday's dawn. He is careful.

When he settles himself against the headboard, pulls his feet and legs into something resembling comfort, Cameron finally stirs, slinging his arm over Daniel's thighs and turning his face to bury it against Daniel's hip. He lets out a sigh, deep and satisfied, and Daniel rests his hand at the top of Cameron's spine, idly running his thumbnail over a splash of wax he missed. Cameron rumbles contentment again, and Daniel can feel his lips moving through the thin cotton: a kiss or a secret, unvoiced, unknown.

(The word respite comes from the Latin respectus: refuge, looking back. It shares a common root with the word respect, but they have become two separate concepts over the years. Daniel wonders, sometimes, whether all his valuable words came from Latin even before he began dreaming in Ancient, but that's the sort of question that has no meaningful answer, and it is therefore not worth the time it takes to contemplate it.)

Cameron's fingers are playing with the draw-strings of Daniel's pants. Absently at first, a kitten batting at a dangled string (and oh, that comparison, if he spoke it aloud, would earn Daniel a snarl from Cameron -- but it is true nonetheless), then with a growing sense of purpose, as Cameron tangles his fingers and tugs, lightly: an invitation, an offering. "I could --" he starts, before realizing he is uncertain if the injunction against speaking is still in effect.

His meaning is clear. In Cameron's world, a gift such as the one Daniel has given him is to be reciprocated; to fail to do so is to devalue the offering. Daniel has yet to decide if he finds it charming or tedious.

Tonight it is more tedious than charming. Daniel is not in the slightest bit aroused; he is, sometimes. There are nights when Cameron's body, on offer, has the capacity to thrill him; there are nights when Cameron's trust, given so beautifully, can strike an odd tenderness in places he'd thought were long since scarred over. This is one of the nights when Cameron's need is little more than a puzzle to be pieced together, a variable to be optimized for. To be tuned: like one tunes a piano, sounding a note and waiting to hear how it resonates, like one tunes an engine, bringing it to its highest performance. The care one takes with a precious and valuable thing, to make it its truest and most perfect self, does not require the one who tends to be a part of the equation.

And yet, Cameron's need to give affection is a part of him, twined alongside his need for danger, so deeply rooted it could not be pried out even if Daniel were interested in doing so. Which he is not; affection has been a liability for him more often than not, but for Cameron, it is not liability but necessity. Daniel understands this. He cannot provide one without providing the other; to do so would be unacceptably cruel.

And so he closes his eyes, forcing himself to be aware of his body, to be present, immanent and incarnate, carnal, in a way he finds more uncomfortable than not. Cameron is not one of the people he can give himself over to; not yet, perhaps not ever. To balance on that knife's edge between arousal and submersion, he must be in the proper mood, and tonight he is far from it. But he shifts his weight anyway, allowing Cameron's palm to fall lightly against his penis, and thinks of physical things: the flutter and press of Cameron's lips, the earthy smell of Sam's inner thighs, the weight of Jack's body against his spine, holding him, bearing him, leading him fearlessly down into the darkness.

Cameron makes a soft purr of pleasure, rubbing his cheekbone along Daniel's skin, and shifts himself to drape, bonelessly, between Daniel's thighs. Daniel rests his fingertips at the edge of Cameron's hairline, along the nape of Cameron's neck, feeling the gooseflesh that rises to meet him; he lets his head fall back against the wall as Cameron pulls his waistband down. At least his mind is quiet tonight; he may be thankful for small mercies.

"This okay?" Cameron says, his breath feathering over the head of Daniel's penis, his eyes caught cool blue by the streetlights as he looks up. Daniel knows what Cameron is asking: sir may I touch you sir may I please you sir please take me in hand and tell me what to do. But Cameron is not quite ready to acknowledge that their evenings are about submission, so much more than they are about sensation, and so all Daniel does is run his fingers through Cameron's hair and murmur assent, cupping the side of Cameron's head, holding him as he takes Daniel into his mouth in the way Daniel knows he always forgets how much he craves.

Cameron needs: needs to be well-thought-of, needs to be challenged, needs to be of use. Needs to be pushed and prodded and forced out of the tight small patterns he's built for himself, needs to be coaxed into laying down his lies and walking away until he can find the truths he's been hiding. And his needs are not so arduous to meet, after all; Daniel has seen, has been, far worse. He strokes the side of Cameron's jaw, and he is thinking about warm things, welcoming things (Cameron's mouth and Sam's cunt and everything Jack is to him), and he is concentrating on the slide of skin through lips and the dark wet furnace of Cameron's desire.

There is a place inside Cameron's head that Cameron does not know, that Cameron has never reached, that he has spent his entire life circling in fascination and backing away from whenever he comes too close. Daniel understands this. Cameron's body shouts it at him, in frantic and urgent semaphore, even as Cameron's voice denies. There is nothing so tragic as an unrealized dichotomy. And so he brings his other hand up to Cameron's face, cradling him roughly, and he rocks his hips and fucks Cameron's mouth and listens to Cameron's body telling him yes, yes, please, like that. And in all of it, what he is doing is taking Cameron in hand and leading him down: past the guardians, past the gatekeepers, stripping each shield and guard away with the careful ruthlessness of the twice-dead, the thrice-born. He knows Cameron will hang bare, suspended, freed of every weight he has given up unto Daniel's hands, until something can unfold inside him to be reborn into light and sunshine.

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