Elf, the horrible degenerate

He didn't answer right away; rather, his pale eyes closed against the excruciatingly erotic sight of Aizen's compressed lips, and he was still and shuttered.

Within, he sank into profoundest thought. His mind unfurled in a luminous network of dark blue dreams and he tested each possibility-of-Aizen that occurred to him as though this were only a complicated game that he had begun.

it will not
no, this is not
impossible to
it is too remote
what a mess it would leave
without the use of
unavailable here, even if it would
that would kill
he would never accept
more than I can

At last his fingertips touched the shining smooth surface of the correct path, and he emerged into it as though surfacing from deep waters. His eyes opened; they were peculiarly bright and warm, and perhaps even sympathetic. It had been only a few seconds.

"You flatter yourself; it was not difficult. I discovered many remarkable things about your body while you slept." He sat at the edge of the bed, well within Aizen's reach even as he was mindful of the dangerous expression that illumined his dark eyes. "You who have no equals: shall I tell you what I learned?"

Aizen's fingers tightened imperceptibly in the smooth folds of fabric under them, watching the stranger's eyes willfully close against the sight of him. A few seconds were a considerable amount of time; in the space of so long he might have exercised his will to leave a little more determinedly. As it was, he waited until the grey eyes opened once more, and though the subtle softness of them was instantly unnerving he made no attempt to disengage his own.

Nor did he move away as the stranger settled beside him, despite the intimacy of his sitting so close. His weight on the edge of the bed disrupted the level plateau of the mattress beneath him, and his hip nudged the stranger's back before he self consciously drew himself away from the contact.

The spoken words, in the meantime, melted into the back of his spine, flickering interest mounting in the roaring wake of impotent rage; curiosity. He weighed his words carefully before he spoke.

"I suspect that your revelations might come with a hefty price." But he was not a miser, and his eyes narrowed subtly before he continued. "What is it that you want?"

A boy has his companions, who fill up the silence of his days with noise, play, combat, exploration, threats, treachery, warmth; from this a man emerges who carries his childhood ruckus with him in his smiles and jokes and the way he takes umbrage and in what he finds lovely. In Seymour's smile there roiled the soundless sacred space of his temple exile and, attendant upon it like a funeral upon death, an unreal and furious hunger. But these things were of course invisible to those who had no comprehension of loss, isolation, rejection, or greatness.

This was the manner of smile with which he answered Aizen's protestations. It contained, too, an element of trust as fine and bright as the filament of a lantern. He burned where the swordsman had pressed against him, though he was motionless, and avid.

"All I ask is that you will allow me to show you. Should you find it unedifying, I will not prevent you from leaving. Do I have your consent, Captain?"

He barely looked over his shoulder at all; there was no need to. The long legs tangled in his sheet covered in fine chestnut hairs, with horseshoe indentations at the outer edges of his kneecaps; or the hands whose fine fingers bore characteristic calluses between the first two knuckles, yet which barely had fingerprints at the third; the forearm whose blue veins submerged into the cords of muscle in a pattern that suggested low and menacing storm clouds - he was already a master of these details and many others. No need to be greedy.

Aizen's knowledge of all four of those things was impersonal. He was a study of other people's human behaviour, and whilst he had certainly achieved greatness it was not an experience; he had been born with the greatness instilled in his very essence, and he had become it. Still, he paid careful witness to the surface feelings that the stranger allowed to mask his face. Until he knew him better, however, he would be at a permanent disadvantage.

He knew this game; he could feel the broad strokes as the stranger painted them, and he had settled upon his curiosity immediately and expediently progressed to wielding something secret and ungrasped above him as though he could simply reach out and take it. The question was whether or not he could trust the man to not simply tug it away as his fingers closed around it.

His voice, when he finally resolved to speak, had fallen a pitch lower. It rumbled, threatening with darkness but also underlined with a low laughter.

"If you wish for my consent, you will have to trust me with the power of your name first. There may be other stipulations, but I will decide on them as we proceed." It was anything but a surrender, but it was a step up from 'You were not brought here to speak'.

"My name is Seymour Guado." He answered immediately, then rose and ducked behind the bedcurtains. His voice called back to Aizen, indistinct, from the southeast quarter of the room beyond, "I am fetching your clothes; that should please you."

A door opened, somewhere. There was a heavy sliding sound and the light, dry, pleasant, condescending voice drifted back to the bed again. "Your insistence on terms and conditions is admirable, but unnecessary. Is it so impossible to believe -" There came a grunt here before Seymour resumed, his words overlaid by a hissing shushing that drew closer as he did. "That you were brought here under exactly those conditions that would make your voyage palatable to you?"

The bed shook briefly as though struck by something heavy, and his head poked through the curtains once more. He tossed a handful of loose light garmets on the bed - white, black-cuffed, with rather severe tailoring. "Get dressed."

A name, and finally he is on a level playing field with his companion. Seymour. Guado certainly isn't the name of any noble families he's aware of. Though in any other circumstance such a thing would have immediately brought him to register him as below his class, the simple eloquence of his words forces him to believe otherwise.

As clothing is tossed carelessly beside him on the bed, he reaches out to curl his fingers around the fabric. He doesn't immediately move to move to dress, though he does lower his eyes to his closed hand in idle contemplation. When he actually speaks his smooth voice is not directed toward his companion, but to the bed, and his breath ghosts across his own skin as he speaks.

"It seems to me that you went to a remarkable amount of effort to strip me if you intended your first order to be for me to redress."

Seymour regarded him with an expression of eloquent surprise, not that Aizen was paying attention. "Your first order was for your clothing. Now you have it. If you hope to spite me by remaining naked, I must admit -" A soft sigh uncurled in his voice. "I would find it infuriating."

He sat again at the far corner of the bed and watched Aizen steadily. His robe hung open nearly to his waist, exposing a chest ridged with promiscuous muscle and engraved in black ink, and his hair seemed to runch at the temples like the fitful curls of a young girl. His long fingers shifted in a pinched yet elegant movement that suggested nearly that they had sneezed. Aside from this last peculiarity he seemed, perhaps for the first time, perfectly at ease.

He waited.

There was something almost unsettling about the thought of redressing in front of someone. He was being watched, as though his compliance in the act was simply a show; a demonstration for private eyes. It was so immensely personal that he briefly hesitated before he withdrew the first item, a white shirt with no sleeves, and corrected it to the right position before him. His fingers closed together to perform the necessary maneuvre of threading them in through the holes, but he felt no better with the garment on than he had been without it. There was certain eloquent surity to nudity that he lacked partially dressed.

It felt uncomfortable, a truth bourne in no uncertain terms. Something he had never practiced, something undeniably human and trivial, and yet it had never been shared with another. The question was only how Seymour had known - if he had known at all - that this might bring him such discomfort.

Apart from the single hesitation, and one firm glance toward his observer, he showed no other sign and continued to dress in silence. He pulled his coat purposefully over his bared arms, then moved to the edge of the bed when it was necessary to rise to finish dressing. His face had resumed the fine lines of something a little more business like, the curious smile waning just as easily as it had waxed. His legs - long and unwieldy unclothed and hardly the legs of a self-proclaimed god - moved from one concealment to another, although the curtains had none of the warmth that his body had transferred to the sheets. With only the briefest of grazing glances toward his companion, he reached across the bed behind him for his hakama and the burgundy obi that accompanied them.

There was nothing of satisfaction or vindication in Seymour's faintly pompous expression. He tilted his head a little to better see the curve formed by the long muscles of Aizen's back and shoulder as he shrugged into his shirt; the jacket bored him, but Aizen standing was not unpleasant to regard, though there was something deliciously silly about such a tall man wearing no pants. He watched with particular interest the coy show of long thighs that shifted behind the length of his jacket.

Suddenly, as if remembering something, he stood. Ducking behind the curtains again, he spoke again: "You may dislike this next step, Captain. Be easy."

He must have moved to the far end of the bed. The curtains were suddenly parted there, and Seymour had a long length of dark red rope in his hands that gleamed like satin in the low light. He seized the rope approximately at the center and let the rest drop to the floor; the look of concentration he wore, and the way his hands shifted, suggested that he was evening the ends. Then he let it slide between both hands as he spread his arms; that seemed to satisfy him, and he tied it nearly as high as he could reach onto one ornately carved and turned bedpost. He then stretched it - not too taut, as it was visibly sagging in the centre - to the other bedpost at his left, and tied it there at the same place. He turned the ends over the tied length; they fell abundantly onto the bed, bouncing, with fat tassels at their tips.

Trust, if only in his own grasp of the situation, was all that was truly necessary to advance through it, though he did incline his head slightly to look over his shoulder. He watched with unashamed interest as the man reappeared through the curtains with nothing less than a piece of rope held in his long, strong hands. Aizen spared a moment to observe him in silence, undisturbed by the suggestion in his actions, and rather more curious about the abnormalities in the stranger that he was now free to observe at will. Beside the obvious inhuman attributes, there were intricate tattoos hinted at from beneath the loosely tied kimono. They were oddly primal, if only for their decorating a clearly masculine chest. Seymour displayed a desire for order with his attention to the rope; or perhaps an aesthetic compulsiveness.

His attention returned to his efforts to dress, and he leant into the curtain, the luscious fabric trailing across his face like a lover's carress as he rose to his feet. It parted around him and settled again, and he found himself in what was an incredibly sparse room. It was clear that the bed was the centerpiece; all of the warmth and decoration in the room was confined within the encapsulating curtains. The effect for anyone of lesser will than his own would, he assumed, be to draw them back to the warmth as quickly as possible, but instead he took his time dressing properly, and moved one hand deliberately to check that his hair was in place, rather than tousled from sleep.

Feeling infinitely better, he turned once more toward his bed, lifting away the curtain with the back of one hand. He waited for Seymour's attention in patient silence.