Work Text:
Over the long years, Sebastien had been forced to sleep in any number of uncomfortable places. He’d slept alongside musty bones in a crypt in Mainz and with a quiver of cobras in a shed in Manila. Countless times, he’d nodded off while his body was still singing with the pain of wounds not yet fully healed. Neither the sour smell of shit and sickness nor the cloying aroma of death and decay had the power to stave off the brief oblivion sleep provided. In fact, dark and dreamless sleep was only balm he found for the burden of life, and he supposed he was addicted to it, sure as others he’d known found relief in the embrace of absinthe or laudanum.
Tonight, however, sleep proved elusive.
Squashed into a bed with Joe and Nicky wasn’t close to the worse place he’d sought sleep, not by a long shot. Sure, the crumbling, abandoned house was cold, but long after the other men’s breathing had deepened and slowed, Sebastien remained stubbornly awake. The scent of smoke and sweat and dried blood wrapped around them. When Nicky twitched and mumbled a wordless protest, Joe shifted, the hand splayed across Nicky’s stomach reflexively stroking and soothing. The touch that settled Nicky teased Sebastien as the back of Joe’s hand rubbed against him.
Sebastien’s cock hardened at the touch, and the unexpected surge of lust that burned through him left him warm and wanting. For a wild, frantic moment, he wondered what would happen if he rocked his hips to rub against Joe’s hand until he spent on Nicky’s chest. How would it feel to pin Joe down and fuck his tight ass until he screamed or to slip between Nicky’s sleep-parted lips and lose himself in that wicked mouth?
When Nicky stirred and turned to burrow in against Joe, his ass rubbed against Sebastien, who only just managed to bite back a groan. His fingers curled as he fought the urge to grab Nicky’s hips and pull him back against his aching cock. Then, before he could do something that would likely see one of them dead or at least brutally bloodied, he rolled over to face away from his friends.
As the dark and the cold pressed down on him, Sebastien’s arousal faded. The person his body and soul ached for died over a century ago, and she wasn’t coming back. He was never going to know the blissful rush of relief he saw in Joe's and Nicky’s faces each time the other’s corpse startled back to life, never going to feel that first soft, tentative touch to assure themselves the other was real and whole and alive. He was never going to know the peace that came from waking in the arms of a lover for centuries on end. It was only natural to be drawn to something as priceless and tempting as that. Only natural to want to claim it for himself.
Only natural to hate what he could never have.