#sebsino

Despite his devotion, Sebastian struggled during choir practice. Orsino suggested flexibility exercises, honeyed tinctures, tested him to see if he had mistakenly put the lad into the wrong range -- no, that wasn't it, he was still a baritone, noble and strong, warm as brandy with a sweet lilt that set him apart just-so -- but Sebastian's worries did not abate.

"You should not have given me this solo," he fretted, earnestness shining in his eyes like firelight in a brazier. Orsino's hand listed up towards his chest in a gesture of wounded sorrow. "I don't feel like I am... I feel like my voice is weak, limp. It lacks truth. I am missing something."

Transfigurations and Trials were two of the most difficult canticles to sing if one did not feel them, feel the pathos and the pietas. But Orsino had chosen Sebastian for the Transfigurations solo, chosen him specifically, because of the glow that he carried within him every time he was in sanctuary, a glow that few possessed, even many of the most vocally pious. Orsino opened his mouth, intending to give religious counsel, but his tongue had other ideas.

"What is it that moves you, Sebastian?"

"Beauty," Sebastian answered, after a moment of consideration during which Orsino felt his heart skip at the way the Chantry's candlelight played across his high cheekbones, his full, parted lips. "It's why I joined the choir. I wanted to be... enveloped in beauty. Swept up in it. Speaking the Chant is one thing, but there is so much... passion in singing it..."

"And do you feel that passion, that connection to beauty, when you are singing?" Orsino's normally gentle and sweet-toned voice felt thin, weak, suppressed under Sebastian's unpretentious intensity.

"I try, but..." Sebastian bit his lip, his breath gusting out in a sigh, and Orsino was again overwhelmed when those vivid eyes rose to meet his own. "What is it, Maestro? What am I missing? I feel as though the Maker looks upon me and finds me wanting, every time."

A strange sorrow seemed to settle over Sebastian like a caul, dimming his eyes and the colour in his cheeks, thinning his lips, and Orsino whispered, "No, no, it's all right, we'll work this out, I promise," but the guarded pain in that sweet face made tears spring to his eyes, and he had to look away.

==

Orsino redoubled his valiant efforts to find Sebastian's light, his center, the elusive thing that would elevate the young soloist's voice and make a pretty thing into a beautiful one. They spent long evenings after practice talking in hushed tones, talking theology and philosophy, sharing their lives in pieces like jewelled shards of stained glass.

"You are... not like other men," Sebastian finally mused on one such evening, the candlelight burning down, a soft and comforting dimness settling over them. They'd spiked their tea, not much, but just enough that the gemstone brilliance of Sebastian's eyes was softer now, a drowsy smile touching his bow-shaped lips. "You have... softness, and grace, like a dancer. But you're not a dancer, are you, Maestro?"

"I'm not a dancer," Orsino agreed. His eyes flickered and fell away, his chest tight.

"Did I say something wrong? I did not mean to offend..."

"I am simply... missing something," he interrupted, although it hurt to speak the words. Anything to quiet the distress he heard in Sebastian's voice.

"Like me?" the young man asked, softly.

"Not like you, no. This is... physical. I had to give up something physical for my art, and it has left me half a man, if that."

He got up and left before he had to see the realisation dawn in Sebastian's eyes.

==

Orsino tried to keep Sebastian at a distance from then on, but if anything, the young man seemed even more determined to shine for him. He smiled in that crooked, almost mischievous way of his whenever their eyes met. He threw himself into his art with newfound vigour, even to the point of helping some of the other boys with theirs. He brought Orsino a bottle of a thick, spiced red with a parchment label -- Antiva, 8:66 Blessed -- and it wasn't even a holiday.

It all made sense when Sebastian approached him one evening, apropos of nothing, and said, as guileless as could be, "I've never heard you sing, Maestro."

"No," Orsino said immediately, turning away.

"Please?" Sebastian touched his arm, and the elf felt it through the layers of worsted and cotton, felt it like a firebrand. He pulled his arm away, but the mark was left; he had to meet his eyes, had to feel his shoulders sag and his hand flutter up towards his heart, had to be won over.

"Why do you make it so difficult for me to say 'no' to you?" he sighed, a rueful smile touching his lips, and Sebastian beamed.

==

He hadn't sung in years, aside from the bits of scales and notes he uttered in leading vocal exercises. The maestro sostituto had a voice more suited to the ranges the boys fell into, and it was him they followed vocally.

Orsino retained the voice of the slight, willowy young boy he'd been, retained it throughout his stunted transformation into a slight, willowy young man, retained it along with his long, pliant limbs and his hairless face and body.

They'd stopped the practice at the turn of the age, but Kirkwall's Chantry was rebellious and slow to conform, and Orsino was the last to be taken into that small, stuffy room and given brandy until he was woozy, until he wouldn't see the gleam of torchlight on the knife.

He still remembered what it was like, still felt the loss, still hated what he had been made into, and when the last castrato opened his mouth, a voice billowed out like doves from a gilded cage, a voice sweeter than cane sugar and higher than heaven, a voice that the Maker Himself would have been unable to ignore -- sorrow and loneliness alchemised into beauty and passion, and a crystal-clear tone that rose and took the heavy heart up with it.

"Maker, though the darkness comes upon me," Orsino sang, "I shall embrace the light," and Sebastian, soaring, did not feel the tears as they fell.

==

There was something different about Sebastian's voice after that, something... stronger.

But Sebastian's first performance as a soloist was fast approaching, and still he fretted, as though the secrets he was carrying were choking him every time he opened his mouth to sing.

==

Sebastian began to avoid him. Concerned, and more than a little afraid of the implications, Orsino sought him out.

He found a closed door, and the sound of barely-restrained weeping from behind it. Concern flared to a fever pitch, and before he could stop himself, he opened the door, temporarily lacking the sense and grace to knock.

"Sebastian! What--"

"No! Get out, I can't do it, get out, leave me alone..."

Orsino hurried to crouch beside him, a young man in his under-robe hunched and kneeling, a penitent's flail limp in his hands. Sebastian's tear-stained face was scored with disgust, a certain, specific sort of disgust. Self-loathing.

"Get out," he whispered again, but the words lacked strength, and he did not shrug off Orsino's hand on his back.

"Has someone hurt you? Have I said something? Tell me, Sebastian, what ails you?"

"You," he said, and Orsino flinched as if he'd been struck.

"Have I done something untoward?" he found the breath to ask, and realised his error when Sebastian raised his eyes again. There was no animosity there, no guarded anger, no contempt or revulsion. Quite the contrary.

"I have done something untoward," Orsino whispered.

"I have sullied the Chantry with my presence, Maestro, I have sullied the Chant with my voice. These thoughts I harbour... I am unfit to..."

Orsino cradled Sebastian's head in his long-fingered hands, pressed his lips to where Sebastian's hair stopped and his forehead began, and the young man's words stilled, and his head lifted, and the elf whispered, "Orsino, sweet Sebastian. You call me Orsino."

==

He'd never seen the Chantry in his way before. Sebastian drifted his fingers over the porcelain font, the hardwood pews, the altar under its modest ciborium. He looked up at Andraste's golden effigy with shining eyes and parted lips, but those eyes drifted closed when Orsino came up behind him, resting his hands on the young man's waist.

"Andraste can't see us," Sebastian said, "neither can the Maker," and though their was a note of boyish mischief in these statements, he mostly sounded rueful.

In the shelter of one of the shadowy aisles that braced the nave, Sebastian leaned against a pillar and pulled the elf close. Sebastian was a bit shorter than him but Orsino curved his body in, curving around Sebastian, his face buried in the heat of his neck, in the pulse that throbbed under the touch of his lips, and felt warmth uncoil deep in his gut, a suppressed want awakening and demanding to be sated.

The fullness of the erection Sebastian pressed against him shamed him, reminded him of his own small and weak organ, and he pulled back, his eyes shuttered; Sebastian tucked two fingers under the elf's chin and lifted, and in the instant before he kissed him Orsino saw a brimming and vulnerable lust, a passion so akin to that which suffused his features whenever he entered the chantry that Orsino was overwhelmed by it, and his weak, puerile attempt at protecting himself from the tempest of Sebastian's desire was obliterated.

They found the places in their robes where hands could slip in and caress greedy flesh. They gripped surging hips and nipped at exposed throats, swallowed each other's moans and gasps; Orsino almost jerked away when he felt calloused fingertips on his cock but it knew what it wanted, knew better than Orsino himself knew, and he rocked his hips forward instead, melting into Sebastian like candle wax as his flesh came alive.

"I... I don't know what to..."

"I'll teach you. Maestro." The huskily-whispered words were delivered with a quick, wicked grin and gleaming eyes, but when the elf pressed his thigh against Sebastian's groin and grazed his teeth over one partially-exposed shoulder, he gasped out Orsino's name, once and again, his head rocking back against the pillar as his hips bucked, the unrestrained cry of ecstasy ringing through the nave like a bell's clarion ring.

==

It wouldn't be the last time. The grand cleric's brows furrowed in bemused suspicion when Sebastian spoke of the Maestro during their walks, but she didn't comment. The grand cleric's brows also furrowed in bemused suspicion when Orsino spoke of his soloist during their suppers, but she didn't comment then, either.

She couldn't find an ounce of impurity in their obvious adoration of each other. So she never spoke a word.

==

Sebastian had come into Maestro Orsino's choir a singer. The young man who stepped up to perform his solo in the Kirkwall Chantry for hundreds of listeners during the Wintersend Mass was a virtuoso.

"O Maker, hear my cry; guide me through the blackest nights."

Orsino felt the tears rise and spill over, but did not stop them. He was not the only one, anyway.

"Steel my heart against the temptations of the wicked," and though his posture and focus did not falter, his eyes flicked towards Orsino, passionate and beautiful and brimming with love, "make me to rest in the warmest places."