emil fouchon / pik van cleaf / reader || throw you to the hounds⬩➤
commission for @nshtn, in order to torture a mutual friend :)
[✦ AO3 link] NSFW. gender neutral reader. afab implied. dom / sub, boss / employee, degradation, rough, blood… the works. see further tags on ao3.
1989. A new year. Your second year, actually, in this city. The trend ‘til now had been to complete a season per country, sometimes across two cities if it’d made for particularly smooth hunting ground. The one constant you could rely on in this job was the travel. The transience. Which is why this extension made you nervous.
Italy was beautiful, naturally. But it pretended as much as any other place. Pretended to be gentle, a swooning romantic destination, rose petals and red wine. It gave you pale stone stained the color of bread, balconies with lacy ironwork, rivers sliding beneath bridges lazily. Even the characteristic cold dead of the north Italian winter moved with manners here, like it was taught to send word before it arrived. You had learned, in the years you’d worked for this team, that manners didn’t equal mercy. They were simply… a language. One Mr. Fouchon happened to be fluent in.
The apartment sat above a narrow street that smelled of espresso and car exhaust and old mortar. In the afternoons, the curtains were pulled to a comfortable angle. Light came in thin honeyed rays, washing the floor tiles in waves. Somewhere below, a Vespa coughed and sped away. The bell of the Basilica rang out into the frigid air, trying always to outlast everything else in the city. It had managed as much for six centuries.
You stood at the edge of the sitting room with your jacket folded over your arm. Not because you were uncertain what to do with it, really. It was just that holding something gave your hands purpose, kept your fingers from picking at your cuticles nervously. The sitting room was staged to look like a place people lived, as usual. There was a bowl of fruit on the table, brightly deliberate. A decanter sitting beside it caught the light and separated it into colored fragments on the wood. On the far wall, an ornately framed print of a renaissance Madonna watched with serene sternness. The Christ Child in her arms looked on, impassive. You averted your eyes.
Fouchon was in a chair near the window, one ankle resting on his knee. A cigarette hung between his index and middle finger. It was some French brand he preferred, well-rolled, ash holding impressively. He wore linen like it’d been invented for him, you thought. He looked like a man on holiday (if you didn’t already know better what his holidays consisted of).
Pik occupied the black leather sofa near the center of the room. He wasn’t much of a lounger, you’d come to learn. He sat, spine straight, long forearm stretched across the back while his other arm cradled a recent copy of L'Arena. He’d taken his shoes off at the door without being asked. You remembered the gesture being so casual it felt like discipline in its purest form. In the soft light, he looked younger than he did when he was outside. Indoors, the angles of him found flattering shadows. His gaze found you then, and stayed there, unblinking.
Fouchon watched your posture. Pik watched your throat.
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