Kleine Füchsin

Nikto is not slick or desperate or theatrical about it, no. There is a laziness to how he strokes himself, one-handed while the other routinely pulls the cigarette to those chapped lips of his. He moves like a scribe or a craftsman, like the work is deliberate, the tempo regulated by need alone. And he watches you just as steadily as you watch him, and the eye contact is a challenge, or a dare, or maybe just a record of mutual complicity. You are allowed to look, and he is allowed to show, and the permission is a currency that neither of you can afford to waste.

But then you realize with a kind of horror - yes, horror - that it is not sterile at all. He turns the act into something protracted, patient, even respectful. At first, you jot a note about his focus, then realize he is not the only one hyper-attuned to the experiment. Your own pulse skips and you feel the flush up your neck, visible, you're sure. He tracks every minute change in your posture, the way your legs cross and uncross, the way your hands drift to your collar or up the line of your jaw and you catch yourself blinking too slowly, holding your breath too obviously, and you hate that you are letting the mask slip. You write down: 'Subject maintains deep eye contact throughout process. No visible signs of shame or discomfort. Possible exhibitionistic streak, or perhaps only transactional.' But then in the next line, your handwriting falters and you strike the pen so hard that the tip tugs the paper and rips it.

This does nothing to deter him.

He works himself in lazy, tireless pulls, not fast enough to finish, not slow enough to stall, and the head deepens in color then wanes, the shaft twitches under his thumb when he tells you to look closer, and you do, you do. "You wanted to see?" You feel the wild, humiliating urge to adjust your own posture, knees pressing together, blood everywhere at the surface as if you have been summoned for the humiliation rather than the observation. And for a full minute, neither of you say anything, and the air in the sanctum grows heavy, the plant trays sweating their oxygen into the heat, two animals locked in their tableau. The science of it is gone, the wet sound of his fist, the small grunts, the flat stare - these things are no longer data, but offerings.

You reach for the clipboard again and he shakes his head. "No more notes. Watch only." His voice is so certain, so at odds with the rough spectacle of his exposed body that you almost laugh in pure shock of it all. You are humiliated, yes, but more than that: you are split open, waiting, every cell alive with the thrilling terror of being observed in your own right. It is a study - no, an autopsy - of your composure. Yet you're not even sure who is performing it now.

He tips his chin, and the invitation is clear and unmistakable. You should break the tableau, regain the upper hand, reduce this to data again, but your body has already declared mutiny.

You don't reach for the pen. You don't look away.

Nikto's cigarette burns down between his fingers, ash collecting, unbroken, and all the while his hand keeps its rhythm, never ceasing the glide of fist along the thick length of him now slick (with what you can only assume to be pre or spit) and purposeful. He leans back so that his hips thrust forward on the edge of the chair, opening himself with something akin pride, and you realize you are standing as if summoned, not even sure when you'd pushed off from the table. And he likes that you're staring. He likes that you have abandoned the paper shield of your clipboard and the knowledge strikes you as violently as you'd expected it to.

"Idi syuda," he says, "Come here." It's the first overt order you have heard from him. His voice is fractured, sharp-edged and fragile, but it lands in you like a spike. You don't move, but you do not deny him either, and so he says it again, this time softer as if to a child or a pet: "Come here, Warden." The sound of your own title in his mouth makes something pool between your legs, thick and honey-dark.

You swallow back and walk to him, slow and defiant as if hoping to savor and kill the moment at once. But he captures your wrist in one swift movement, his still-slick hand curling around your forearm with a heat that nearly scorches the delicacy of your skin. He doesn't drag you, but he doesn't let go either. He pulls you forward, just enough so that you are standing between his knees, so close the heat of his skin radiates up your thighs and chest.

You expect a show, a push for dominance, or maybe a calculated retreat, but instead, Nikto fixes you in place with the weight of his stare and with an ease that makes your own breath feel borrowed, he yanks you forward by the wrist - hard enough to nearly pull you to your knees, hard enough to erase the buffer of air between his hunger and your uncertainty.

"Observe," he says, in that same deadpan way as before, mocking your use of the word, but with the tiniest fracture, an edge of need you recognize from the world outside these walls, the Wildes, the memory of hunger stretched so thin it became its own source of power. He forces your fingers closed, not roughly but with the unyielding pressure of a man who has spent his entire life in deficit and now will settle for surplus only, nothing less. And you let him - goddess, you do - because at this point it is the only honest thing left. There are seconds where you just hold, the body heat of him burning into your palm, the texture all wrong and all right, velvet and skin and slick, the insistent throb of circulation making him seem less a specimen and more a living, bleeding animal, which is to say: exactly as you.

Your mind fractures into the two observers: the one who wants to claw her hand back, to reassert the rules and slap him for his audacity, to have him chained again like the beast he is.. And the other one who is shuddering down to the arches of her feet, savoring the forbidden, wet-hot throb of the skin in your palm, the little flexes of flesh like small questions you'll never have the language to answer.

He offers nothing more for a moment, just holds you there in the bright, annihilating focus of his gaze. He's watching you, no longer a predator, but a creature sizing up a new terrain. You hear the ragged intake of his breath as you tighten your grip around him and a low, involuntary growl escapes him and you wonder if he's ever been handled this way, if any of the other Seedwardens had ever breached the membrane of their own professional armor. Or if you were the first to allow, to want.

"Observation is…for both," Nikto mutters, his voice clotted with smoke and you nod, or at least try, but the world narrows to the pulse you feel under your fingers and the sweat beading at the base of his throat. Everywhere else feels too heavy to observe. He then shifts, widening his legs and drawing you closer, so the heat between you collapses into something singular. His cock is flushed and veined and leaking at the tip, and you work it in your fist as if coaxing a specimen from a seed pod.

"Like this?" you ask, the words softer and less clinical than you had meant them to be, and he nods once, a wild animal’s nod, and his grip softens on your forearm, allowing you the illusion of control. "Faster," he says, the order clipped and absolute.

You obey.

He goes rigid under your touch, every muscle in his thighs and stomach rendered in high relief, so much so that you want to reach with your other hand and map the terrain of him, trace the conflict and violence knitted beneath the skin and claim it was simply part of observation. But instead you work him, and with each stroke you feel your own composure eroding in molecular increments, undermined by the slick velocity of his cock and the way his eyes, always, always on you, begin to squint with need.

You wait for him to lose composure, to snarl, to goad you into a contest of will - but instead, he turns the tables with a cocked half-smile and irreverence. "You want results?" he pants, his voice torn from the place violence is born. "You are close now." He laughs, smoke-laced and beautiful. "Fucking good at your job, Warden." The word is spat with the kind of admiration that cuts, that wounds. He's so smug about it, too Not greedy. Just certain, a bruised wolf with a kill in his jaw. "You could do this all day, da?" His lips curl at the edge, the scar there making the smile doubly obscene. "Guess you pass your test, too."

You should hate him for it, the way he weaponizes your title, how it sounds like a pet name and a curse at once. But what you feel is not anger but the raw, collapsing gravity of need - need to crush him, to tame him, to invent a method of domination that the High Mother herself could not have anticipated. So instead of speeding your hand, you change tactics. You measure out the distance between pleasure and discipline and claim it as your own: slowing the pace to a crawl, squeezing at the base until he hisses, denying him every wave of pleasure until you can see the muscles in his neck go rigid with the effort to not beg.

"This is the test," you say, your voice so dispassionate it almost hums. "Stamina, endurance. You want to impress the council, you can start by showing control." Your hand is a vise, remorseless, keeping him just shy of the edge. The thick shaft is impossible in your grip, pulsing with every heartbeat, slicked with a kind of purity that makes your mouth water and your legs tremble. You hold him in the liminal space, not letting him seize or soften, just letting him hang like a trapped animal, all threat and no release.

He shudders and you want to see what happens if you let him break, so you squeeze tighter, twist your wrist, and watch as he bares his teeth and looks away, refusing your gaze for the first time as if the intimacy were a knife at his throat. When you finally relent and stroke him with purpose, he groans, and so you stop again, pull your hand away, and stand back, your arms folded as if this were a puzzle you expect him to solve alone.

"Show me again," you say, "from the beginning." Your voice is slicked with the honey of command, and it's only when you see him obey - see him take himself in hand with perfect, mercenary discipline - you realize that at this moment you are not a scientist at all. You are merely a witness to some wild, ancient trial.

He mutters a string of curses - "Cyka blyad…" hard consonants and Slavic vowels sliding off his tongue with the weight of real injury - and then does exactly as told, the heel of his hand slamming with a new, brutal velocity up the length of him. His eyes are murder, locked on yours, but the flush that breaks across his throat and cheeks is submission. The labored, rhythmic slap of skin on skin is indecent, almost violent, and you have to press your own thighs together to keep from swaying forward, forehead blooming with sweat. You move to the table as if to mark something on the clipboard, but your legs wobble and the word you write, 'compliance,' is barely more than a scribble, your pen splitting the page once again.

He keeps going, his knuckles whitening, and you are overtaken by the urge to direct, to catalog with audible commands. "Slower." And he slows. "Stop." He stops, his breathing ragged. "Again." He obeys, faster this time, his fist sliding so wet and wicked you're certain he must have spat in his hand, except you want so badly for it to be just him, leaking and eager and extraordinarily alive. He groans low in his chest, the animal part finally showing, and you realize with a kind of awe that you've never made anyone this way, never orchestrated the tempo, never been the reason for such naked, abject need.

You hover at the table, taking notes you cannot ever submit: how his nostrils flare when you tell him to pause, how his thighs jump at the command to resume, how 'keep going' makes his eyes close as if in benediction. "Just like that," you mumble, but he hears, and his mouth splits into a bent, mad little smile that makes you ache somewhere old and extravagant inside. He doesn't ask if you want to touch again, doesn't even offer. The power is the show, the proof of life he lets you see, and that is enough for now.

Your knees go soft and you grab the edge of the table to center yourself, pretending you need to record the length and color and reaction time and not the inhuman throb between your own legs.

"Goddess," you whisper, and he laughs a short, delighted bark that turns into a grunt as he arches off the chair and spills over his own belly, the pulse of it as violent and beautiful as anything you've ever grown. And for a moment you are both just breathing, listening to the hum of the AC unit to the slow collapse of tension. Nikto slumps back, his legs wide, cock softening but still flushed, and wipes his hand on the waistband of the shorts, looking at you with the flat challenge of a man who has just won and lost in the same instant.

"Is finished?" he asks, his voice harsh and accompanied by panting. You nod, stunned and slack-jawed, "For now."

You write something useless on the sheet and realize your hands are trembling and the heat between your legs unmistakable. You let your pen fall to the desk and for a moment, you can't remember whether you're a warden or just a witness. You reach for the tin, flick the lid closed, and say, "Not bad for an opener, but I'm afraid they prefer a multi-trial average." Protocol, again, yes - but there is no air of protocol in the way you watch drops of spend cling along the ridge of his navel, or the way your own pulse shudders when Nikto leans back, arms splayed, taking up space meant for you both.

You touch a napkin to the mess as if it were a swab, but he moves fast and closes a hand around your wrist, holding you there, his grip no longer bruising but poised - delicate, even. The briefest squeeze says, thank you for the cigarette, but the longer, quieter pressure is somewhere between gratitude and demand. He's testing you, and you know the game, and your body is already answering for you.

You just hope the way your pulse hammers against his grip, the way your breath catches in your throat, the way heat pools low in your belly - that all of it is worth the dangerous, exquisite results you're hoping for…

But between the passage of time, you've noticed things… Like how he picks at the skin around his cuticles; always bloodless, never quite enough to open himself. When you walk in with your notes and the morning's ration of water, he has already made his tour of the space and is halfway through disassembling the ends of his own fingers, his eyes fixed on the window's battered mesh and glass as if waiting for some sign.

You can't help but wonder if the ghosts he listens for ever answer, or if silence is their only reply.

He's a selective mute, the dossier said. But really, it's more like a rationing: he measures each word the way you measure fertilizer for your plants - however you'd learn soon enough that Nikto is more than capable. But you start a conversation anyway, part of the protocol, and when you hand him his breakfast you catch a flicker of surprise on his face, more at the gesture than the food. No tranquilizers this time, nothing but nut-sweet cereal and yesterday's bruised banana. He eats with care, the kind that suggests he knows what hunger can do to a person, and you let him, hovering just close enough so that he knows you’re watching.

It isn't lost on you that he's watching you, too, though. He catalogues your movements with a kind of forensic curiosity: the way you chew the ends of your pens while reviewing data, how you pause at the edge of your greenhouse to cradle the fragile, wilting stems of your rarest plants.

—

By the sixth day, your log is an indictment. The High Mother's warning seeds every blank line: Complete his transcript in total. No matter what occurs. The phrase is a worm in your mind; you measure the line between careful and complicit and tell yourself it hasn't been crossed.

But there's no transcript if there is no voice to chronicle. No currency in data measured in heartbeat and heel-strike alone.

You sit across from him at the battered table, a journalist's recorder between you. "We need to begin the assessment," you say, matter of fact. "I'm required to conduct a full psychosocial, and the High Mother-"

His eyes catch yours immediately. "She wants to fuck me." Not a guess, not an invitation, just a fact placed on the table. You nearly laugh at the audacity, but what you feel is a wind shear of embarrassment ripping through you.

"The High Mother doesn't - she's not involved in that way. She approves placements. Denies them." The embarrassment hits you hard, and you can feel the heat climbing your throat and your pen finds your mouth before you can stop it. He cocks a scarred brow at you, then makes a sound, a kind of single, dry grunt. "She wants to know if it works, mm?" He shifts in his chair, lacing his fingers together, knuckles whitening as he clenches and releases. "And if not, throw me out."

You hear the echo of the High Mother's phrase - repurposed for breeding - but it’s the 'throw me out' that catches. Like disposal, like compost. You swallow, and in the practiced tongue of Seedwardens everywhere, you pivot:

"My responsibility is to determine your fitness for integration," you say. "We do this through a series of tests. Intelligence, memory, physical aptitude, speech—" Here, you pause, and his eyes narrow. "And, eventually, fertility and breeding, yes."

He stares at you a moment and then away, his jaw set. The silence makes you want to fill it, but you force yourself to wait. You remember reading somewhere that silence is the truest test of leverage: whoever breaks it first, loses.

"You could just ask," he says, his voice flat. "Da, it works." The corner of his mouth twitches, and it exposes a few teeth. "Maybe better than what you're used to."

You should feel something more than the heat embarrassment - a flare of anger, perhaps, or at least the distant shame of being seen through your own script. Instead, you let the words hang in the space between you as you simply blink at him before you straighten and lock your eyes with his and drag the notebook closer. The motion is crisp, deliberate, maybe even a little too forceful, a compensation for the pulse of heat now visible at the base of your throat. He doesn't miss the tell; you watch the flick of his gaze as he files it away for later, a data point, a wedge.

"Is that an assertion, or a hypothesis?" you counter, forcing your tone back to something clinical, or at least approximating it. "Because my report requires empirical evidence. If you're making claims about function, I'm obligated to observe…objectively." The syllables fall with a manufactured chill, but you hear the thrum in your own voice: not mockery, but anticipation. You see him catch on to it, see the way he leans back so that the old chair creaks beneath him, as if offering his body up for display.

And then he grins, really grins, and the scar that tugs at the right edge of his mouth turns it feral. "You want demonstration." It's not a question, but you resist the urge to look away and set your pen down.

"Not want. Protocol." The word is as heavy as lead and tastes the same. "You understand what's required for the breeding evaluation. Both physiological and psychological assessment. I've explained it several times over, Nikto." Your voice is too measured and he hears the challenge behind it.

The moment has an edge, a shimmer of possibility, and he shrugs, his hand drops to his lap, groping himself through the threadbare shorts, bold and unimpressed by the open air. A leer, not the classic kind but something close: if this is what you want, he will let you see. The gesture is so deliberate, so brazen, that it takes you a half second too long to react.

"Part of the demonstration." His accent is thick around the soft consonants, but there is no mockery, only bureaucratic boredom and a flicker of amusement.

"I haven't even started the questionnaire," you manage, your jaw stiff, but the words are limp on arrival. He swings both legs wide under the table, sits back, and looks you straight in the eye. Handsome is not the word for him - too many broken angles, too much scar to carry off that ease - but there is a reckless beauty in the way he chooses to be seen, all cards face up on the table.

He reshuffles his grip, making it clear: nothing is happening unless it's a trade. "You want me to show?" Another laugh. "You give me something, I give you something. Is only fair, da?" His palm is spread in a full, obscenely honest clutch that would have gotten any other subject sedated and recollared within a breath. However, you are not any other warden. You fixed your eyes to the slow beat of his pulse in the hollow just below his jaw, then to the webbing of scars that band his left forearm, anything to anchor yourself north of his groin.

There is a queasy conviction in the way he holds your gaze: not defiant, not even predatory, just exact. You want, you evaluate, you get what you earn. When you feel yourself begin to flush with warmth or horror - hard to say which - you reinforce your professional remove, clicking your pen and scraping the chair back from the table as though granting yourself another meter of immunity.

"As long as the demonstration is strictly clinical," you say, flat as you can manage.

He only laughs in response and then, slowly, he pushes the waistband of the shorts lower, freeing himself with a care that is almost ceremonial. Your mind rushes to fill each inch of exposed skin with a corresponding measure from the dossier - size, shape, color. You catalogue the data, but the act itself is more than anatomical; it is a proof of life, a dare to the system. He's not performing for you, not exactly, but there is a tension, a vibration in the air as if the act of showing himself was a way of showing you the gap between theory and practice.

You maintain your best face of detachment, or try - for you have performed dozens of similar evaluations, and seen every variant the world’s genetic bottleneck produced - but the sight of him, thick and broad even in the lazy idle of his lap, bludgeons your professionalism with a sick heat. Every protocol in you screams to note, to measure, to reduce, but your gaze, traitorous, insubordinate, lingers too long for neutrality.

You document the obvious: uncut, slightly darker than the rest, the head pronounced and subtly mushroomed, a discolored seam of scarring at the base, likely from unresolved trauma years back that healed itself with the blunt efficiency of wild tissue. Another inch of him, and another, and you remember the cold statistics from the file and everything on display now was proof. The urge to look away is a physical thing, but so is the urge not to, and you are caught between them, pinned.

Instead, you busy your left hand with the clipboard; your right is not so steady, and you set it beneath the table, pressed flat against your thigh, fingers digging almost to bruise. You speak in measured tones, each syllable prepped for deposition. "Please describe your typical function. Erection, ejaculation, response time. Any issues with pain, urination, or sensation?"

He rolls his thumb over the head, and chuckles. There's a sort of slow, thorough confidence in the movement, a sense that he's not posturing but simply testing himself for operation, like a man flexing a restored limb.

"Nyet, no issues," he says. "Works all the time. Only problem is too much, sometimes." He glances upward and to the side. If he's embarrassed, it's not in a way that makes him softer. He continues, "Pain once," and shows his hand in a squeeze she recognizes as laboratory exaggeration, like he is wringing out a cloth but for the muscle itself. "Broken, but healed." His voice is so casual. All the while, his grip tightens and slackens with the same analytical patience she’s seen him apply to the perimeter, or to the morning ration of water: nothing wasted, no movement without intent.

You realize, distantly, that you're breathing through your mouth. You focus on the clipboard, ticking boxes and scribbling shorthand notes you'll later have to transcribe into something more clinical. You know before the ink dries on the first box that a sterile demonstration will not be enough. The lattice of protocol has always been protective: keep the subject distant, keep the gaze clinical, reduce the specimen to operation and defect. But this specimen, this male, Nikto, leans into his own body with a careless lucidity, sizing you up through the act of baring himself, and what should be exhibition feels almost like collaboration, or seduction, or worse: an invitation for your complicity.

The rules, you think, were written for a different species altogether.

You arrange your features into neutrality and calculate your next step, but the knowledge is already flickering through you: this test is not a test if the subject is unaroused and disengaged, if blood remains pooled in his thighs and never floods the shaft. It is your role to push him there. And yet, your pulse climbs, betraying you, because the only thing that would prove the system’s intent - the only thing that would fill the transcript with what the High Mother wants - is him, hard in your hand, under your direction.

If he refuses, you will need to do it for him. If he does not, you still will.

You resent how much you want to. You will say it is necessary for testing.

"You'll need to-"

"Nyet." He releases himself, thumb sweeping deliberately slow across the head, and then gives a single, almost dismissive shake of his head. "No more show for free." The grin is gone, replaced by a blankness that leaves a chill up your spine. With one hand he hauls up his waistband and the other he leaves waiting on the wood of the table, palm up and expectant.

The change in temperature is immediate and you can feel your skin prickle, all the warmth of anticipation now pooling in the miserable hollow of your gut. You set the clipboard down and manage to keep your face bland, but the silence between you is charged with everything left uncompleted. In the space of three seconds, Nikto has managed to retake the room and you suppose you should be grateful for the return to protocol. Considering this is precisely what the guidelines were meant to prevent - but instead you feels the sting of rejection, and worse, the knowledge that he has seen it in all its glory.

"Sigaretka. Palka." He taps two fingers against his lips. "You want the rest of the test, you find me these first, da?" It is more of a demand than a suggestion; the test will not continue until the conditions are met, and his gaze dares you to refuse. His cock, half-forgotten between the folds of generic cloth, twitches once. The movement is not involuntary; it is the punctuation at the end of his demand, as if to remind you what lies at stake. He doesn’t break eye contact, not until he grins - truly grins - and the scar on his face splits with the motion.

It's then you find your own hands have stilled, and you resist the urge to fidget. You swallow once, then say, "It's prohibited, for all residents. You know that."

"Trust has a cost." His voice is lower, rougher. "You want test, I want cigarette. This is truce, mmh? You give. I give. Simple."

You barely manage not to smirk and instead fix him with the flat, professional stare you have honed from endless intakes. "Is that really what you want? An oral fix?" The words are sharp and knowing: a containment breach, all that practiced insulation gone. He tilts his head, watching you attempt to build a fresh carapace, but his silence tells you he's content to wait for the next crack.

"Da. Give me this and I give you results." He grabs himself again, this time with the raw authority of ownership, knuckles blanching, crown of it thickening in the V gap between thumb and forefinger. The heel of his hand rolling up the softening shaft until the friction of fabric and skin stirs a pulse. It is crude and practiced, a show for you entirely. You watch, face blank but unable to keep your attention from the display. Finally, your training breaks and you slide your chair back, standing so abruptly your knees rattle the underside of the table. The notebook slips off the surface, and the pen clatters to the cold floor.

You cross the room and go to one of your many cabinets and harshly open the top drawer; your flustered state apparent in the way you were moving. Under the detritus of old papers lay packets of napkins, old black rubber bands curled up and some snapped, a bent spoon, a stack of paperclips. And then you find the tin - its edges rusted, paint worn thin by a decade of nervous thumbs - and labeled in marker: PASTILLES. Inside, six cigarettes, bent but whole, and a book of matches grown soft with humidity.

You set the tin on the table and flip it open so he can see the contents. He releases himself immediately and appraises the cigarettes with a glee only someone like Nikto could have. A thing you haven't yet catalogued in him. You push the tin across the table, then settle yourself back in the chair, arms folded but hands still visible.

You watch him extract a cigarette, rolling it between scarred fingers as reverently as a relic and make him wait for a light, letting the transaction breathe. He taps the filter against the table once, twice, then sets it between his lips and waits, as if to suggest you should come to him. You narrow your eyes and reach for the matchbook, taking a single match and striking it. The slow rasp punctuates the silence and he leans forward - not enough to close distance, but enough to show you the lines carved along his neck, collarbones rising in stony ridges beneath the frayed tee. You reach forward, holding the flame steady while he draws in, the cherry blooming red at the tip. The smell is acrid and forbidden; it clings to his skin, curling between you like another set of arms.

You sit back once again, arms folded, pinning him in place with your stare. "Debt is paid," you say, your voice canted somewhere between command and invitation. "Now, finish the demonstration."

He takes a long drag, the smoke spooling into the air, and you watch the microexpressions chase each other across his jaw. Then, without preamble, he frees himself again, this time drawing it out with a slow, deliberate tension - base to tip, exposing the full length of him in the haze of cigarette smoke. You can't help but wonder, absentmindedly, if this is how he survived the wildes: saying nothing, waiting for the other animal to perform first.

You reach for your notebook, feigning notes, but your eyes do not stray.

All you can think about is how cheap trust was these days and whether or not you should take over and claim it was protocol.