Honeypot

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Part 2: Orientation

Chapter 4

Notes: This chapter is a little less smut and a little more plot, some new characters, and hopefully a broader look at the world Mikel inhabits. Also a set up for a lot of smut next chapter.

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I do not dream. On the rare occasions I do, my dreams evaporate like fog when the sun rises.

This morning is no exception. I wake to find my body tangled up in the bed linens, as though I've been fighting all night. They feel so familiar against my skin, for a moment I wonder if the whole evening was a dream. But, when I roll onto my back, there is no second bunk above mine.

Right. I'm in the western dormitory. I'm a candidate now.

I stare up at the ceiling until the wake up signal sounds and the lights flick on.

Some things don't change. Beds get made, athletic clothes get put on, training shoes get laced, and we report to the yard. But, an extra 20 repetitions are added to my push ups, sit ups, and squats, as well as an extra lap through the course.

The initiates and the trainees complete their morning exercises and stand at attention. They wait for the candidates to finish. Every strike of my foot against the ground, I feel that tenderness inside me throb.

Oren jogs up next to me. "How did the Magister's cock taste?" He doesn't wait for an answer, just picks up his pace and leaves me behind.

He used to have the bunk above mine until three months ago. We're dormmates again, I suppose.

By the time we finish, a new uniform is waiting at the foot of my bed. It's identical to my old one but for the crimson band at the collar.

Another difference, candidates may make their way to the dining hall as they wish. No getting into a single file line. No guards serving as escort. No one has to wait for the last straggler keeping them from their breakfast.

I take my time brushing my teeth, trying to get rid of the sourness lingering in my mouth. The sinks here sit on their own pedestals, instead of one long trough against a wall. Just like the beds, there aren't enough of us to have to economize on space.

My reflection stares back at me from the mirror hanging on the tiled wall. Dark circles hang heavy under his dull blue eyes. He touches the crimson collar of his uniform. He followed orders last night. He performed -- more than adequately, judging by the Magister's reaction. He earned this collar.

I spit my toothpaste into the sink. It still tastes sour.

The lights in the hallway glow without flickering or buzzing. As I make my way through the corridor, I note the doorways I'd shuffled past the night before. A large set of double doors opens to a library. Stacks of books surround a seating area outfitted with low wooden tables and armchairs upholstered in worn leather.

Leather the color of -- not the sheets. Those were black, splattered and stained. The walls.

I shake my head and realize the room is occupied. Another candidate sits with one leg over the arm of his chair. A white ceramic mug gives off wisps of steam on the table beside him. He turns a page, not looking up when I pause to watch him. He seems to be looking at the words in front of him, rather than reading. I've seen him before. I'm certain I've seen him before. He scrubs a hand over the light stubble on his chin and turns the page again.

I pass several shut doors before coming to a small kitchenette. A fresh pot of coffee sits out on the counter -- he must have been drinking coffee. But why? Food is fuel. The food from the commissary is measured and portioned to meet the needs of our training. We don't need more than we're given.

"You're going to have to learn to make your own decisions," a voice behind me says.

"What?"

Library Man gestures with his now empty coffee cup to the kitchenette. "About food. Once you're out there in the field, you don't get a staff making meals engineered down to the last nutrient. And you gotta figure out when to eat and what and how much. It's a lot more choices than you're used to."

Irritation simmers in my gut, how did I fail to hear his footsteps in the hall? How did I let myself slip? "I've been in the field before."

He slides past me. "Yeah, as a trainee, with a handler monitoring everything you do," he says, rinsing his mug out in the sink. "Once you graduate, you have to actually maintain a cover. Live like a civilian." He wipes his hands on a dishtowel with a shrug. "So, it's not just a privilege, it's training for that."

Up close I notice what I couldn't see before. The sharpness of his features, the lean line of his jaw, the breadth in his shoulders. There is a completeness to him that I don't have yet.

My nostrils flare. "You know so much about being a graduate, but here you are." His jaw clenches -- just a fraction. Enough to know I hit the right target. "Is that part of the privilege here? Because when a trainee falls behind--"

His head snaps towards me and there are daggers in his gaze.

I don't finish the sentence. I don't have to.

I leave him there with his clenched jaw and empty mug.

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"What took you so long?"

A tray of oatmeal and scrambled eggs sits at an empty seat next to Oren. He smirks around a bite of apple, kicking the chair away from the table. The dining hall staff are already packing away the empty serving trays. Every portion already measured and accounted for.

"Come on," he needles. "You're not mad about this morning, are you? You'll be back to kicking my ass in the morning run before you know it."

It's this tray or nothing.

"I'm not mad." As I sit, I feel the ache that slowed me down. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Oren's smirk falter. I manage not to kick his shin under the table.

​"Really, because you look mad." His face snaps back as though nothing happened. "Or is that just how you always look? I forget."

I shovel a spoonful of eggs into my mouth. "Asshole."

He gestures with the bitten apple and a pointed finger. "That's bait, and I'm not taking it."

Oren always had that smirk, a disarming weapon all his own. That hasn't changed. Neither has his mop of untamable dark curls nor his prominent features. The details of his face all seem to fight for your attention. He seems mismatched in a way that you might remember a detail. Maybe two. But your mind would fill in the rest to make something more cohesive.

His posture is different though, easier somehow. The kind of slouch that would get you smacked with a bamboo stick as a trainee. Civilian-like. Is that what the man from the library meant?

He finishes off his apple, setting the core aside. "It's not that bad, you know."

"I've had worse." If he's looking for a weak spot, he won't find it.

Oren laughs. He laughs. He laughs and he leans back in his chair and runs a hand through those curls. No guard comes to chastise him for it. "I mean it, Mikel." He tugs at the edge of his own crimson collar. "It's worth it."

I finish my oatmeal in silence.

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The morning sprints past me. I nearly run out of time on my physics assignment. Words elude me during linguistics. I find them eventually, dredging them up from somewhere that feels too far away. None of the instructors call attention to it.

They know. They must know.

I'm not hungry when lunchtime arrives, but I eat anyway.

An hour at the range isn't long enough, but I manage to put round after round through the center of the target. At least I still have my aim. I want to stay here all day, but my schedule demands otherwise.

An instructor I've never met before shoves a new book into my hands and sits me down in a side room. Away from the other candidates. From time to time I see a faint flickering blue light under the door -- like you'd see from a screen. They must be watching something.

I need to focus.

Operational Case Studies in Social Influence, the cover reads. There is no author listed, no date of publication. The fabric on the cover fades at the edges, touched by everyone who has come through here. Everyone who has sat here with this sour taste in their mouth and burn in their core.

I turn the first page. Notes line the margins, the others leading a trail for me to follow. They may have forged it. I will conquer it. Chapter by chapter, lessons from my geopolitical studies take new turns.

An attache to Holvern's ambassador had grown too curious for his own good. His death would have caused an international incident. After a two-month operation by a Ludus graduate, he simply resigned. He wanted to spend more time with his family.

Ostnark lost the war with Drevna a kilometer at a time. They ceded ground again and again forever changing the border between the nations. And who was the new bride of Ostnark's prime minister? A graduate of Umbrae's sisterhood.

Familiar handwriting creates a footnote near a passage about election interference in Meridian --

--- A bullet kills a man once. A secret kills him every day.

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"Did you see my note?"

Oren's voice rises above the sound of water pouring from the shower head. Even if he is trying to sneak up on me, the creaking of the door already gave him away. So it's not his presence that startles me. Maybe it's the way he seems to claim the space as he walks. Or maybe it's the drape of his towel, low on his hips, revealing a fine trail of dark hair guiding my gaze downward.

Words snag in my throat. "That was you? Never took you for the philosopher type."

My eyes snap up to meet his, and I hope it looks like I was just sizing him up. The glimmer in that brown gaze says I can't fool him. Have Oren's eyelashes always been this long?

His hand finds my shoulder, the lightest brush of fingers against skin. "You don't have to pretend, Mikel," he says my name and I don't have a defense prepared for his sincerity. "I remember my initiation. I told myself that it was just like any other training. That I could suffer through it like we suffered through every test they threw at us."

He pauses.

My gaze flicks to the pout of his lower lip, waiting...

"I was wrong." The heat of steam pouring from behind me matches the heat pouring off of him. "Our lives are built around death. How to avoid it. How to wield it. How to watch it take us one by one. How we hope if we suffer enough, if we suffer the right way, it won't be coming for us next."

I'm not sure when Oren's hand found the back of my neck, or when he had pulled me in so close. Or if I hadn't been the one to pull him towards me. But I can see the walnut wood grain of his eyes.

"This is the first thing they've ever taught us about being alive." He breathes. "Let me show you how to feel alive."

Oren's lips find mine. They're chapped, but warm and supple and they fit against mine like they are meant to be there. I've never once thought of Oren like this. I've never thought of anyone like this. But it's not the part of my brain that thinks that feels alight.

That something that hijacked my hard-won willpower stirs in me.

Want.

My hands, uncertain of where they should go or what I should do, just grab. Anywhere my hands can reach, they grab because all I want at this moment is for Oren to keep kissing me.

And as unskilled as my hands are, Oren's caresses have pinpoint accuracy.

Oh.

They've been trained, I realize, to find the spots that make me melt against him. He's practicing on me. And some part of me should be furious for that. But when he pulls back, with his lips glistening and cheeks flushed, I know that I need to learn this.

"Fuck," I breathe.

Oren's reddened lips curve into that smirk. "Yeah, that's the idea."

A wolf-whistle echoes against the tiled walls. That's when I realize two of our bunkmates have been lingering by the door, taking in Oren's performance. But before I can truly register what their presence means, he catches the lobe of my ear between his teeth. A mix of pain and pleasure sinks into me, like it's welcoming me home.

"C'mon, Mikel," he growls, drawing my hips towards his. The only thing left between him and my stirring cock is the thin fabric of his towel, and I want it gone now. "Let us make you feel alive."