April 12, 2006
Fiction
Balance of Power
Warmth is always the first sense to return.
It blooms on my tongue, this warmth, and I am shocked to discover how cold the rest of me is.
You’d think this wouldn’t be a surprise after so many thousands of years.
My mouth is filled with a hot, heavy richness, with the lush copper tang of life . . . Ah, taste has come back as well.
The warmth trickles down my throat, and my heart gives its first great thump.
There’s a tickle against my ear, and I dimly hear a voice murmur, “I’m back.”
My beloved Naram-Suen. If history is any indication, he has counted the two hundred years of my torpor to the day, using that new-fangled Gregorian calendar he raved about in his notes the last time he woke me.
The warmth — his warmth — continues to burn down my throat, the trickle frustratingly slow. My lips twitch helplessly in a vain attempt to latch on to his wrist, but even if I could, I’m too weak to suckle. All I can do for now is lie here, totally at his mercy, as his lifeblood drips from the gash in his wrist.
My heart thumps a second time, thunderous in my ears.
And then the trickle stops.
Damn him. He does this every time.
“Oh, Manishtushu,” Naram-Suen says. “How I love you in this state.” Hands stroke my bare, desiccated flesh with the gentle patience of an artist, and I feel gentle fingers outlining the shriveled form of my penis.
He’ll love me better when I have enough blood to fill it.
I can practically hear his frown as he says, “Hmm. I thought I’d—”
Ha.
His wrist descends over my still-open mouth, and I feel my cells sing as his blood pours down my throat. I try to latch on, to take some small modicum of command over my own sustenance, but my jaw is locked in its wide-open grimace. I, the third king of an ancient dynasty, who once had legions under my command, am now reduced to a helpless husk, completely dependent on the man that history calls my son. I would weep with frustrated rage, only I cannot afford to expend any precious blood on tears.
Just a little more . . .just a little more . . .
My jaw twitches, and I slowly creak it closed just enough to wrap my lips around the gash, probe my tongue into the moist slit —
And he pulls it away.
Damn him!
His fingers resume their earlier exploration, and this time, my tiny reservoir of blood rushes to fill the organ.
Damn him thrice. I like it.
I feel delicate tickles turn to firm strokes, and he chuckles as my penis stiffens in his hand, even as the rest of me lies wrinkled and emaciated before him. “As I was saying, Manishtushu, I love you in this state.”
My heart thumps a third time as I feel the heat and strength of his lean thighs as he straddles my prone, stiff body. And then there is a delicious tightness enveloping the only part of my body that is truly alive.
I feel him rise and fall around me, his body tremble, and try to imagine the scene taking place on the other side of my frozen eyelids. The lovely Naram-Suen, waves of black hair falling against broad, bronzed shoulders, his head tossed back, exposing the long, tantalizing throat. His full lips would be open, working at the empty air, as if sucking a phantom cock. Was he stroking himself? Were long fingers caressing his slender chest, straying from nipple to nipple? Would he open his black, liquid eyes and fix my rigid, helpless body with a gaze that hungered for something more intangible than blood?
My brain rages with impotent fury as his hips rise and fall, rise and fall. There is so little that I can feel, so little of my body that is truly awake. My cock is on fire from his heat, his tightness, his delicious friction. But it is helpless to react on its own. Not when my hands are curled up in stiff claws, my torso flexed in a stiff arc, my mouth frozen open in a hungry, silent scream. My orgasm is trapped, beating at the taut skin of my oversensitized cock. Naram-Suen is flaying it with each stroke of his hips. This is an agony like no other.
I never want it to stop.
There is a cry, a hot splash on my belly, and he sags against me, kissing me first on the upper lip, then on the lower. I try to kiss him back, try to make my mouth respond, but there is no blood for it to use. It all concentrates on my rigid, helpless organ. All I manage is the barest of tremors, an impotent articulation of frustration.
A tongue laps me clean, and then his wrist is back.
The blood gushes, rushing into my starving tissues, pouring life back into them, and as my body comes alive, the long-dead nerves flare and spark and I finally spasm with an orgasm that rattles my loose teeth, my clacking bones. Heat pours through me like fire. I can feel my heart resume a slow, steady rhythm, and the dried out raisins of my eyes plump beneath thin eyelids.
My eyes.
I need to see him before he’s too far gone. I direct all my will at my eyelids, and they slowly creak open.
He smiles down at me, my beloved, the lines already starting to etch deeply into his once-smooth face.
It is already too late.
We have not seen each other at full vitality for nearly four thousand years.
I feel my skin softening, my joints loosening, and reach one clawed hand up to try to gently stroke that beautiful face. He feels like paper to the touch.
Too late.
I gasp in a long, rattling breath. “Naram-Suen.”
His grin turns wicked, even as his face crinkles into deep crags. “Ah, so your mouth is working.”
Again, he pulls away his wrist, and I watch with a ravenous gaze as he licks the wound closed. I should tell him to stop, to let us both lie together in this state for hours, or days. That there is no hurry. But that tongue, that ruby tongue, it has me distracted. He used to tease me to such wicked heights with it, back when we could both walk the earth at the same time. I should miss him for his intellect, or for his companionship, or for the skillful way he has managed to pull the strings of power from his hiding place in the shadows for all these centuries. And I do. But when he teases me like this, I find that I miss his body the most of all.
From the twinkle in his rapidly-dulling eyes, it seems he’s thinking the same thing. “Let’s put that mouth to good use.”
And I marvel that he’s able to engorge again, despite giving me so much of his blood. I would gag if I needed air, but I haven’t needed it for anything other than speech over four thousand years. And he is thick and delicious — a true delicacy of cock. My lips close over him, and I suck greedily, reaching tremulous hands up to fondle his heavy balls. The femoral artery pulses so close to my lips. I can smell it — still rich with blood, so close. My own cock stirs again, stiffening against my hollow belly, diverting valuable blood to satisfy its selfish needs.
I’ll take care of it soon enough.
My beloved Naram-Suen bends over my prone form, sucking in deep gulps of air, and pulses his cock in and out of my mouth. I suckle the sweet juices from the tip as he pulls back, swirling my ever more lively tongue over his sensitive head, and he shudders and drives deep again. His arteries flutter against my lips, and I am almost dizzy from hunger.
Not yet. Not until he . . .
Naram-Suen cries out, spills forth, and I bite deep, drinking life.
And there’s no stopping me anymore. I push him onto his back, his cock still in my mouth, as I drink deeply from his veins, filling so fully that I can feel my muscles swelling with his rich, ancient blood. My body feels alive again, warm and vital, every nerve ending alight with renewed life. I want to roar in triumph, race across the desert sands, consume an entire village for the sheer gluttonous joy.
But I will need to do so alone.
I tear myself away from my feast and look down at my beloved, at the papery skin, brittle hair, at the bones now lying so close to the skin.
Naram-Suen. Oh, my Naram-Suen.
If only we could both walk the earth at the same time. But the earth could not survive that. We are the oldest still walking, the thirstiest, the most powerful. Thousands of years ago, our twin appetites for power and blood nearly brought down Babylonia. Now, after all these centuries of growing steadily stronger, we would break the world entirely with our machinations. We would dare each other to greater heights of depravity, draining dry the human animals that sustain us out of mere one-upmanship. And by the time we would come to realize what our decadence had wrought, it would be too late. We would be doomed spend eternity watching each other slowly starve.
I could not let him suffer so.
And so we are doomed to never see each other in all our immortal perfection.
I gently stroke Naram-Suen’s brow and kiss him on his shriveled lips. They are dry, cold, but they still taste sweeter than any nectar to me. He struggles to move them against mine, and a thin wheeze escapes his throat.
“Yes,” I say, and gently raise his desiccated legs.
I enter him and give him one last gift. He is so cold, so thin, but I close my eyes and imagine the days when we would lie naked together on the Tigris, our royal boat drifting in the moonlight. He would wrap his strong thighs around my neck as I filled him, thrusting my hips in and out of his heat, mining his body for my own pleasure. And he would latch onto his own wrist and suckle with an animal intensity that frightened me. I have never since met another one of our kind who has taken pleasure that way, not in all the millennia I have been bedding them in his absence, desperately searching for the one who could keep me company while he slumbered. None have ever come close.
I open my eyes, still imagining his smooth skin, his bright, liquid eyes, and help him raise his wrist to his lips, help give him one last pleasure before the end. There is a faint crack as his teeth puncture his too-thin skin, and his eyes roll back in their sockets as a thin trickle of blood drips into his mouth, his muscles too weak now to swallow.
Let the poets say what they will. This is love. No short-lived mortal could possibly understand the depth of our devotion, of our sacrifice. To trade off time among the living, only seeing each other for an all-too-brief exchange of blood every two centuries. Love is sacrifice. And we have sacrificed for millennia like none other can.
And now my hips pound in rhythm with my robust heart, driving my cock deep into him, as if I could somehow go deep enough to find a place where we could merge into one. And yet we are one. His blood fills me. I will carry him with me in my veins while I wake, and when his time comes, feed him back to himself. He fills me, and I fill him, and there can be no more perfect feeling in this life, to exchange yourself so fully with your lover, to carry him within you while he sleeps.
I can feel my orgasm building, tight and low behind my balls, and I lean forward and clutch him tightly in my arms, nuzzling at his aorta, feeling its thin, slowing beat under the heat of my lips, in this, our last moment together.
And as the fire pours from me, I bite down and drink and drink until there is nothing left but dust.
The world is now mine for the next two hundred years.
“Sleep well, Naram-Suen,” I croon, caressing him with fingers that he can no longer feel.
I carry his feather-light body from the bed to the sarcophagus, wrap him in clean linen, and close the lid, tracing my fingers over the ancient inscription that seems as if it was written just yesterday.
“Through love, balance.”
I place one last kiss the lid, then turn away to begin my two hundred years.
• • •
is a Massachusetts-based writer who feels that the world doesn’t have enough gay vampire smut. This story should help fix that.
