Blood flushes up Alucard's neck as he takes in the decadent vision before him. He's a little embarrassed by his lack of awareness, but that pales next to the lust beginning to clot between his ribs. The thought that Olrox has been watching while Alucard tinkers, has been aroused while he does so, is far too addictive to be good for him.

Olrox smiles wickedly as Alucard's attention falls on him. He pushes himself up to sitting with his free hand propping himself up, his gaze still fixed on Alucard in that way that always, fucking always, makes him hellfire-hot all over. "I thought you'd never notice," he drawls. "Unless the great Alucard just isn't interested anymore."

Alucard doesn't deign that with a response. Instead, inventory forgotten, he stalks towards him, doing his best to keep the pace of his boots slow and deliberate and not at all like he's far too fucking turned on by Olrox's forwardness. By the man himself, really, who angles his head up to keep their gazes locked as Alucard approaches, his hand still maintaining that unerring rhythm on his cock. His eyes twinge with green when Alucard, now looming above him, takes his chin between his fingers and tilts his head even further.

"How very rude of you," Alucard says, keeping his voice low and level and like he's not stiffening in his leathers. Presses his thumb firmly into Olrox's jaw. "To begin without me."

Olrox's grin splits even wider, completely belying his next words; "My apologies," he purrs. He slips out of Alucard's grasp and begins to slide off the bed, until he hits the floor with a soft thud, and Alucard can't help his hissing breath at the sight of him on his knees. "Allow me-" he draws another shaky sound from Alucard as he works at his trousers until his erection is free, "to make it up to you."

Alucard groans from his throat as Olrox takes him into his mouth, filling out to full hardness almost immediately at the close of his lips around him. He lets his eyes drift shut, swaying his hips into that enveloping warmth as Olrox hollows his cheeks and begins to suck. Running almost on instinct - because any higher thought is very difficult right now - he begins to work away at the topmost buttons of his shirt. The more skin, right now, the better. Olrox clearly agrees, because while he's wrapped one hand around the base of his cock he uses the other to begin unbuttoning Alucard's shirt at the bottom.

They've had sex a lot, over their months of working together, and Alucard has begun to notice some patterns. Sometimes Olrox is hard and hot and insistent, shoves him into the mattress or the wall or the ground with the bruising bite of his fingers on his arms and no room for mercy until Alucard can do nothing but cry out his name. Sometimes, a little more rarely, he wants Alucard to take of him himself, lies pliant for Alucard to bend him to his will and control the pace at which the pleasure waxes and wanes between them. Sometimes sex is a fight, pushing and fucking and hands pulling at hair and vicious bared teeth and glorious pain and nobody emerges the victor but both of them do.

And Alucard appreciates all of these, dearly, in their own ways. But this, he often thinks, is perhaps his favourite of Olrox's moods. When there's a battle for power, but it's thrumming quietly and unsaid between them rather than bold and bloody, as they nip and tug and tease and gently bend the limits of each other's patience and pleasure. When Olrox is eager to please but demanding to be pleased, as well. Because, once their fingers have met in the middle of Alucard's shirt to undo the last buttons and he can shrug it off, Olrox's hand returns between his legs to begin stroking himself again, his arm moving at the same, teasingly steady pace with which he bobs his head up and down Alucard's cock, and he looks up at Alucard with those green, impossibly sultry eyes that dare him to do anything about it. A proposition, and a threat.

Alucard's heart leaps as if for a rabbit, and every hunter's instinct in him flares with that permission. He pulls again, a sharp tighten of the slack, rushes headily through with achievement when Olrox's head is yanked back until his face is turned up to the wall. He's clearly more prepared for it this time, but he still looses a strained groan - Alucard can't tell what makes up more of it, pain or pleasure - that burns through Alucard's chest as he begins to thrust again. His back arches slightly, too, and isn't that another beautiful sight?

It feels greedy to take more. He takes it anyway. He gathers more of Olrox's hair from his shoulders, wraps it in a smooth length around his hand. He curls his fingers tighter into the black silk and tugs again until Olrox gasps.

It feels too rawly intimate. It feels like staring into the sun. Olrox's hair is always his own domain - swept back into place by his own hands after every fight or fuck or bluster of wind, his braid managed by his own practiced fingers in his idle times during the day. And now Alucard's hand is woven into the night-dark strands, controlling it, defiling it further, and Olrox sounds more and more wanton with every pull.

(In a few hours, Alucard will remember something Olrox once said about hair, and battlefields and capture, and protection and power and souls. Right now, all he can think of is-)

Olrox moans tightly again and the sound aches right through Alucard's balls. Another hard thrust sounds like it knocks the air from Olrox's lungs. He's clenching around his cock with every pull - involuntarily, surely, another reaction Alucard has clawed from him - and Alucard fucks him harder, faster, hounding and desperate for his tightness and heat. Another pull; sweat falls from his chest onto Olrox's back. The sheets are snarled and rumpled beneath them.

By now Alucard is practically dragging Olrox back onto his cock by his hair, meeting him with every thrust. Olrox's pants and groans are breathy, strangled - it's because his head is pulled that far back, Alucard realises, his trachea unnaturally bent. It sounds painful.

She smiles at Maria as she runs along the dock, rambunctious and laughing and driven wild by the wind. The sea breeze whips her hair across her face; it'll be a pain to detangle later, salt-brittle and mussed. But they'll have time aplenty on the journey home, and Tera wouldn't deny her any snatch of joy.

She hopes she'll enjoy Richter's company. Having a brother, of sorts, at least before Julia can fetch him again. Tera's never been the younger sister. It's hard to know what to expect.

She backs away from the water's edge and takes Maria's hand to keep her by her side as the sailboat docks, that they don't lose each other in the bustle. Squinting, she tries to pick Richter out from among the tangled crowd. It isn't a passenger ship - Julia had written that she'd be arranging passage for Richter on the soonest boat that would take him, and evidently that had been a trade boat carrying the flurry of cargo now being offloaded. So it's hard to spot one child among the rush of dockhands, the crates and barrels bigger than Maria, shouting sailors and feet pounding on the boards, lashes of rope and splashing saltwater and the dazzle of the sun as it sets to the west, the creaking of-

There. The small figure approaching the edge.

Tera's heart sinks to the sea floor below her feet.

She doesn't realise how tightly she's clutching Maria's hand until she cries out. She lets go as if scalded - but she's paralysed, unable to apologise, or offer comfort for the red nailmarks in her daughter's palm. Unable to do anything but stare, and stand for the second time in her life in the loom of helpless, coiling dread.

Richter's hair reaches unkempt to his cheeks. His once-fine clothes are spattered with stains. Even for a ten-year-old's stature, he's impossibly diminutive, hunched and cringing down the gangway as if approaching a hissing snake at musketpoint.

So Adrian basks in this familiar, steady bliss. Until, when he has Olrox's trousers undone, he reaches inside his pants to grope for his hardening cock, and goes to swipe through the wetness beginning to gather at the tip only to find-

He freezes - against Olrox's cock, against his lips, thrown by the unfamiliarity he just felt against his thumb. Olrox pulls away to look at him.

"Something the matter?" he asks sweetly. He sounds innocent. Adrian knows he can't be.

Ignoring him, Adrian casts his gaze sideways as he feels more carefully over Olrox's cock, tentatively exploring over the tip and yes, there. Something smooth and hard and unyielding beneath his thumb.

"Well," he murmurs to himself. "That's new." He looks back at Olrox, so smug and expectant as he traces Adrian's reactions. "So either you've gone and contracted something very unsavoury-"

Hard fingers dig into his ribs for that. Which is fair.

"Or…" He's too distracted to finish the thought aloud, instead focusing on freeing Olrox's growing erection from its confines entirely. Olrox helps, squirming a little at the touch, until his dick is throbbing and free and-

And Adrian can pull back his foreskin all the way - eliciting a half-pained hiss - and see in all their glory the gleaming piercings decorating the head of Olrox's cock.

"Fuck," he breathes - half reverent, half disbelieving. The silvery metal looks fantastic against the darkening skin it threads through and he can't tear his eyes away.