warbonds: (24)
Steve Rogers ([personal profile] warbonds) wrote in [community profile] bakerstreet 2012-07-15 01:37 pm (UTC)

Like I said, we're basically writing parallel fic here. It'll get less tl;dr eventually.

It's not only embarrassing but also uncomfortable to walk in his current condition, Steve discovers. He feels unbearably exposed and battling the constant desire to cover himself with his hands to provide some small modesty (which he does once, only to find Alec correcting him firmly). Besides that, he's fast discovering how efficient the metal ring is in keeping him aroused.

Given how embarrassed he is by this whole scenario, he's certain that his erection would have--should have--subsided already. But the cock ring seems not only to hold his hardness, it also just feels arousing: its pressure is strangely and subtly stimulating every time he takes a step. And there's a mental element to it too, an awareness of just how kinky, how perverse, it is--a foreign-feeling exoticism that tugs him away from himself and toward a place of fantasy. And the next things that happen only speed him on that route, though each comes with a new internal struggle of its own.

Alec leads him down the corridor and through a doorway into a huge open room that Steve's mind can only associate, however loosely, with an empty gymnasium. There's a central arena with a low wall running the length of its perimeter, leaving a sort of walkway around the outer edge. At the top of the room, where they've entered, the intervening area is broader, lined with wooden cabinets and shelves on which are set a dizzying variety of harness-like leather straps and bindings with well-polished buckles and fixings.

Speechless at the sight of it, Steve watches Alec step back to look at him, and then lay a hand on his arm in a way that, though he says nothing, seems clearly to convey the notion that he's chosen "just the right thing."

From one of the cabinets he draws out an appliance of dark brown leather with brass buckles, one which, Steve realizes vaguely, matches the soft brown of his boots. Steve can't picture what it's for or how it's meant to be worn, but he'd have to be a fool not to anticipate that it's going to be put on him.

"Stand with your arms behind your back, palms flat together," Alec says.

But Steve doesn't do so. He just gapes at him.

He's agreed to let Tony do these things to him--agreed in the abstract. And he's chosen to come here as part of the arrangement that they've made together. Yes, of course, there would be other people about. Steve has always known that, but in his mind, the other people were...atmosphere. He's always imagined them in the background. Certainly not touching him like this! Not...putting him into restraints!

Tony isn't even here! How can anyone expect Steve to just...just....

It seems almost ironic to him, given how much he's permitted so far--the bathing, the touching, the oiling, allowing himself to be stroked into hardness, all by a complete stranger. Even if Steve does, on some level, have a long history of experience with submitting his body to clinical examination, testing, and use by scientists and military men, even if he has an impressive threshold for allowing all sorts of tactile manipulations, sometimes-invasive palpations and procedures, none of those have ever been prurient in their goals. No one was wanting to get him aroused so that they could put him on display and stare at him like some...he doesn't even know what.

None of that, he realizes, ever made him feel this kind of exposed, this kind of vulnerable. Not physically vulnerable, of course. He's still confident that he can fight his way out of anything that truly crosses the line for him. But vulnerable before the look of...of who?

There's no one here with him now but Alec--a man who's already touched and looked at him so intimately that it makes Steve blush just to think about it. Alec has been oddly professional through all of this, and Steve doesn't doubt that he will continue to be. There's nothing lascivious in the way that Alec looks at him, no teasing and certainly no lewd comments.

Even exposed as he is, Alec, Steve realizes, does not make him feel vulnerable.

But still there's the lingering awareness of the why: what is the objective behind all this outfitting and preparation? It's not for some greater good, this time. It's not to uphold some value or principle. It's purely and simply for the sexual pleasure of others--not just Tony, but everyone else who would see him too, who would look at him as part of the greater tapestry of their experience here, just as they would, of course, become part of the same for him.

Alec doesn't rush him. He simply waits, and presently, to his own shock, Steve relents. He can do this. He's stood up against harder things in his life than this, and he's not going to start backing down now. Not when this was his choice, an action he's set for himself to do.

Taking a deep breath, he places his hands behind his back, not with hands loosely clasped as he would if he were standing at ease, but in a strange inversion of standing at attention, and he feels Alec move around behind him.

The first two straps pass over his shoulders and cross over his chest, attaching in the back between his shoulder blades. He can feel where the anchor point rests, and the first two cuffs, buckled around his biceps, link to it. They're softer than he might have imagined--the leather is padded so that it doesn't dig into his skin when it's pulled tight. And then the next pair of cuffs, just above his elbows, another around his forearms, and then the pair around his wrists.

Almost on reflex, he tests the sturdiness once the binder is in place. It stretches his shoulders, forcing him to stick his chest out, and though he could break free if he tried, he'd have to set his mind to it. In fact, the thing would afford him a fair degree of struggle, he thinks, if struggle was what he wanted to do. And a moment later, he reconsiders whether it might be.

Alec has taken a long stiff driving whip from one of the cabinets, and Steve's eyes are immediately wide with shock. It has a long sturdy shaft of polished wood, a leather-wrapped grip, and a lash that's nearly half its length over again, but Alec holds it casually, as though it's an everyday sort of thing to use on a man (which, Steve supposes, for him perhaps it is).

"I'm going to show you something of how they'll want you to move," he says, equally calm and casual. "It's only a taste, not a proper training. That will come in the village. Now, come onto the court with me," and he leads the way through a gate in the wall so that they're standing together on the dark burnished wood floor from where Steve notices the high angled mirrors that make him visible to himself from practically every direction.

"The most important thing is for you be proud," Alec is telling him. "That's what will be hardest to remember at first. I can tell that you're embarrassed already. You think you look ridiculous." (And Steve wonders when he says it if he's really been that obvious, because that is, indeed, exactly what he thinks--ridiculous and obscene.)

"You don't though. You look stunning, and everyone who's here will think so. This is what's hardest when you're new. You're just waiting for the laugh that will break all the tension, and you're holding out in case you're the brunt of the joke. It's like that for everyone. But no one here is going to make a fool of you."

Looking into the man's bright eyes as he speaks, Steve can tell that he's not lying, and the words do indeed reach something inside of him that's been coiled taut, but he must admit that the reassurance only goes so far to allay his tension. It seems that Alec is not going to spend too much more time on assurances though.

He takes a few steps back so that he's standing just beyond the reach of the whip, which he now shifts in his grasp. "You should always move at a sharp march, with your knees high. Eyes forward, and don't turn your head to look at me. Go ahead, let me see you try."

Steve gapes at him for a moment, suddenly feeling a renewed rush of absurdity which makes what he's been told just moments ago seem painfully ironic. But Alec seems to actually be serious about this, and after several seconds, Steve closes his mouth, takes a several breaths to steady himself, and then marches forward about half a dozen steps before pausing.

"Go ahead. All the way around."

But marching has never felt so hard to Steve in all his life, and this is like no marching he's ever done. He has to reach into a whole different storehouse of fortitude to make himself do it, and, moreover, to keep himself going once he starts: he can feel his erection bouncing and bobbing with each step he takes, and with his arms bound behind his back, it effectively leads him. The whole idea of it is mortifying, and Steve knows even without a glimpse in the mirrors, that he's blushing crimson.

Alec, however, is praising him, encouraging him, telling him to lift his knees higher, and then, suddenly, there's a sharp sting and the lash of the whip lands right on the side of his buttocks, and he balks, stops dead, and stares at the man holding it like he must actually be out of his ever-loving mind. "What the Hell--?"

Calmly, Alec shakes his head at him. "You have to keep going when that happens. Don't stop, and don't look at me. You should never turn and look at whoever holds the lash. It's seen as very resistant."

Steve is indignant. "But what the Hell was it for?! You could have just said if you wanted me to do something."

"It isn't always for something, Steve. Sometimes they'll want to see you flush or go faster. Sometimes it will just happen. Now, again."

There's a deep frown on Steve's face for several seconds as though he might argue or protest, but he's beginning to understand that Alec's role here is to acclimate him to sensations, not to justify their existence. Ironically, in that sense, the whole experience is bizarrely reminiscent of basic training in the Army: you do first because you are told to do, and it's only over time that you begin to appreciate the full importance of your having done so.

So he marches again, and this time, when the lash of the whip stings his thigh, he keeps going in spite of it, and when he's told to move on faster, he steps up to march in double time, and lets the lash catch him across the backside without pause, continuing until Alec is pleased, and again instructs him to walk. And when he does, Steve is rather shocked to discover that, not only is his erection not flagging, he actually feels harder than ever.

At the final door to which Alec leads him, they pause. "And here is where I shall leave you, though I do have one more thing for you first."

From a drawer beneath a side counter, he takes what Steve recognizes immediately as a gag. The ball at its center is large, but hollow, and perforated with holes. But the sight of the thing still makes Steve tense, and for the first time he sees something almost like amusement enter the other man's eyes.

"You'll thank me later," he says as raises the ball to Steve's mouth and slips it into place, leaving Steve to wonder at the willingness with which he opened his mouth to allow it. Given how tightly Alec fastens the buckle, Steve is certain he'd have no easy time working it free, but though it stretches his mouth so that he can't possibly speak a single word around it, it doesn't impede him drawing breath.

At last, Alec steps back as though assessing the full effect of his work, and then, satisfied opens the final door for Steve to walk through.

Around the gag, Steve swallows hard, his tongue and his throat having to work awkwardly to do it. He realizes that he doesn't know how long it's been since he entered the building; he realizes that he somehow scarcely feels like the same man who walked through the front door; he realizes that he can't tell Alec goodbye or thank him for attending to him so thoroughly. And then he realizes that he's not supposed to say thank you.

Still achingly hard and hyper-aware of the steel cock ring, his arms bound firmly behind his back, his body oiled, and his mouth forced open so that he cannot speak a word, Steve realizes the full degree of his trepidation, the extent to which he's been relying on his guide--the extent to which he wants someone to anchor and instruct him, because he's not sure what he's about to walk into when he steps through this door, but he's damn certain it isn't Tony. And he realizes, too, just how badly he wants to see him.

So that's what he reminds himself: when he gets through this, then Tony will be there, waiting to see him to..."own" him. And shockingly, Steve finds that right now he very much wants that. So with an acquiescent nod at Alec, he steps through the doorway.

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