Chapter Text
They talk, at length, of the things they enjoy, and of what they do not.
Goodsir finds that speaking, before and afterward, puts him at ease. It is a comfort to have any concerns of his listened to and heeded, just as much as it is a comfort, after, to have another body warm against his own so as to prevent himself becoming numbly peculiar. And it also makes him happy to relate what things might make others happy.
Sometimes, this is a problem: as when it had taken him so long to tell Collins that he no longer felt the same about another being permitted to touch his throat.
Collins had not tried to choke him with no warning—heaven forbid! but he hadn't known what had happened. How was Goodsir to comport himself with ease around others, while constantly fearing that of which others have no knowledge? For what if they are to touch him in such a way as for it to elicit Goodsir's memory of—
He'd been trying to kill himself, as it so happened. Hickey took away the shards of glass; the poisons; his hope. Told him, when he'd woken, that he should be grateful.
Goodsir is only grateful to have outlived him. And that gratitude belongs not to Hickey.
Both Collins and Silna know, now. He's talked of his suicide attempts, talked of how frightened he is that someday he might not warn them of himself. But he is not a broken thing; no more than is Collins, for his own natural human fear; nor Silna, for hers.
But Collins has always been naturally anxious; it had been natural, then, that Goodsir wanted to hide something with such potential to be disruptive to their relationship, despite it being the hiding which was what ultimately placed stress upon it. A mistake, to be sure, but ane he'd remedied.
After all, he'd never want for Collins to withhold his own truth. Especially in matters of love and flesh.
In some ways, that is why their pretensions of ignorance as to the truth of a no is so freeing. The catharsis of a terrible scenario comes to pass, but with all parties so attuned to the actual truth of the matter that the utterance of a single agreed-upon code word has the power to halt all proceedings, immediately. No questions asked, and no fault levied. It is the best of safety.
They have that safety catch of sorts in place at this time, and are also, for this scene, instituting an expansion of their usual pretense.
Goodsir stops to find his second wind. He's worked on scraping tuktup skins all day, and it feels good to stretch his legs, and to breathe in the beautiful arctic earth. It rained earlier, but the sun is peeking out to dapple the tundra, the plants damp and aromatic, the water droplets and the full burn shining with fresh-scrubbed radiance.
He already cannot imagine his life without either Silna or Henry.
He glances ahint himsel and a jolt of energy goes through him to realize that Collins is much closer than he'd thought. Turning, Goodsir cuts downhill and resumes his flight toward the burn, feet tumbling forward and arctic heather whipping at his shanks. Wild laughter escapes him as he is by Collins overtaken.
Collins does not quite tackle him, for he keeps his feet, but they are both still running when he grabs Goodsir about the middle, lifting Goodsir's feet right from the ground and spinning him to kill their momentum. The next instant Goodsir has been flung onto his belly—air leaves him in a burst, the jarring impact of his elbows keeping his face from meeting tundra—and the weight of the other man is fallen upon him.
For a primal moment, Goodsir is only the rabbit caught in the canine's jaws. Shaken, scared. Surrounded by panting heat.
“Got ye,” says Collins. Growling it into Goodsir's ear.
Goodsir makes some noise of acknowledgement, shuddering. Collins shifts atop him, feet hooked at the backs of Goodsir's knees, a hand pressing Goodsir's head into the moss. Breath licks at the nape of his neck. The shifting takes on a repetitive, grinding quality.
“Nothing to say, Little Bunny?” Collins asks.
He whines in response, earning himself a nip to the ear. Collins lips him afterward, as if in apology. Starts putting wet kisses to his ear, the side of his face—licks him! Tasting the sweat on his brow and then snuffling into Goodsir's lug again until he can't but shiver all ower from his scalp down to his toes, and twist and buck against Collins atop him, still helpless against any of it.
“O Sweet One,” Collins murmurs, the voice in his chest rumbling against Goodsir's back. “I think I'll have my way with ye.”
“No,” Goodsir moans.
“Have nothing to say to that, Little One?”
Goodsir only moans his pretense.
Collins chuckles darkly, reaching under Goodsir's a’nuraaq to clasp his waist in one large, strong hand—the strenth o him!—and through the a’nuraat of amiit made by Silna for them, he rubs his stand, gripping Goodsir against himself.
From behind them, Silna claps her hands, and Collins sits up.
Before Goodsir can so much as raise his head on his own, he is being divested of his top, and his naked kist re-pressed against the chill damp turf. His arms are restrained behind himself, and Collins is binding Goodsir's wrists in braided sinew cord with efficient sailor's knots. Goodsir tests the bonds, as soon as Collins is done, and they hold fast no matter his tugging. He's well and truly tied.
“Oh,” says Goodsir. But he cannot melt into the pleasant chafe of the bonds because Collins has hove him up and is rudely dropping him onto his feet. He must stand or fall—; nay, Collins makes sure to poke him in the ribs before he'll allow him lose balance.
Goodsir spits a wee tuft of moss and, with a glower, resentfully lets himself be prodded onward.
Striding up hither to meet them is Silna.
“Look what I caught us!” says Collins, sounding proud as if he's caught some genuine domestic cuniculus that has miraculously occurred here in the Arctic.
She takes up Goodsir's chin, and turns his face ane way then the ither, inspecting him. He feels himself blushin neath the delighted sparkle in her gaze, his hair prickling, his areolae tight and his member shamefully hard under his trousers. There are bits of broken moss down his front and in his chest hair, his curls are a mess in his face, and Collins' hand doesn't leave his waist.
Silna runs her hand through his coif, tidying him up. “He'll do nicely,” she signs, and picks some moss off his head.
The slap to his cheek is not unexpected, but Goodsir lets it take him by surprise; lets it discombobulate him and knock him back against Collins' chest. Collins curls his brawny arm around Goodsir and holds him up. The next slap that she lands is on Goodsir's other cheek to even it out, but though it stings and moves his head, it's less so what with her non-dominant hand. She then turns and walks on toward their campsite.
Goodsir makes another break for freedom, forcing Collins to run him down and bind his ankles, too, but Silna does not so much as glance backward; Collins hoists Goodsir over his shoulder and easily carries him the last stretch of the way. It is eminently uncomfortable; the breath goes out of him at the weight of himself on his ribcage where he is bent over the hard, broad shelf of Collins' shoulder, watching the heather sway in their wake. He doesn't kick for fear of unbalancing them, and breathes in time with Collins' steps.
The feeling of helplessness only heightens as he is deposited onto the fur robes in their tupiq. The lens of his fear turns the familiarity of the shared bed theirs into something so sacred as to be terrifying. The mere fact of his fear, of their flesh, and of that here, is enough.
“Harry,” says Collins, straddling his bound, prone form. Reminding him before it is too much.
“No, no, no,” Goodsir says, keeping his special word safe under his tongue. When he twists, he can feel Collins' yard pressing into the seat of his trousers.
“O Little One,” Collins growls. “So—so sweet, hm? Such a pretty bunny.”
Goodsir revels in this strangest of freedoms, trapped under someone who loves him, who loves him so much he won't let Goodsir go no matter his physical struggle. Collins brackets Goodsir with his arms, pressing his broad warmth down upon him as he wriggles in his bonds and breathes faster into the fur.
“Pretty Bunny,” Collins repeats, starting to lose his words as he affects the mindset of a mere hungry beast. “My pretty, pretty bunny.”
Silna's hands clap, and Collins gets off him, loosens Goodsir's drawstring belt, and yanks down his trousers. Leaves his bare arse on display for them both to see. Leaves the trousers around Goodsir's legs, for he doesn't unbind his ankles.
Goodsir shivers in humiliation and moreover when Silna smacks his buttock then clutches and kneads him. He is still sore there from the last time she'd spanked him.
She laughs in breath, gripping into the bruises she gave him, and then, instead of the pleasant spanking he was rather hoping he'd been in for, she comes back at him with the leather-bound antler switch.
He cries out, betrayed: “How?”
Of course, he'd known to expect this possibility out of those prearranged options on which they've discussed and agreed, but it is his least favorite among them. The switch inflicts a crawling, itchy, superficial type of sensation, firm enough not to be intolerable…but barely. Nothing compared to the deep, unequivocal thud of better impact.
Silna and Collins both laugh at him now, and Silna snaps him across the arse with the switch again, the infuriatingly sharp but shallow pain going straight to Goodsir's cock. He moans at their apparent disregard for him; for the heat tingling in his buttocks as she hits him over and over while he pleads with her that she not; at this whole indulgence.
She canes his thighs and backside until he's weeping. He hasn't anywhere to run, his hands and feet being tied quite securely. And safely—the cord knotted so that the bonds shan't tighten, and Silna's ulu set out beside the bed where he shall see it, and know that it might be used at any moment to cut him free. Silna is not so terribly heavy o haund, but she is clever at this, the pattern of the blows keeping him in suspense as to itself, the application constantly surprising him at his tenderest.
He bears it for as long as he can until finally the switch stings his bawbag a time too many, and then he sobs out: “Ruth!”
The cruel switch is immediately dropped, and Silna's warm hands are upon his sorry flesh, massaging him and spreading him. A single oiled finger, slim and unerring, briefly slides into him, and simulates what is about to come.
He rolls his wet face, gasping, in the fur. Feels Collins grasp the bonds about his ankles, tugging him downward. Silna rolls him over and grabs his prick, and leans in to kiss him.
Goodsir sighs, relaxing, into the kiss; into his previously negotiated reward. Collins lies down alongside him, stroking Goodsir's belly and flank before joining Silna in gripping his member. He lets himself drift in this incomparably soft realm so created for him, here with a beloved to his either side, and the tingly ember-pulse of his pain is like unto companionable heat in winter.
Too soon he shudders in crisis and pours out his tallow into Collins' palm. Collins' hand leaves to slick his own cock with Goodsir's spend. Turning Goodsir to face Silna, he presses himself, slowly, very slowly, into Goodsir's softened body, all the way to the press of coarse hair on new welts. Goodsir whimpers breathlessly as more tears flow from his eyes; as he lets himself be held and open as a soft, beloved thing, himself; as he accepts inescapable affirmation.
Silna brushes back Goodsir's hair and kisses the tears from his cheeks, watching him carefully as Collins moves in him. Goodsir cries until she gives him her mouth to kiss, and she makes a sound of fondness, a wee hum, and nibbles at him before also biting outright.
He is stretched taut, caught between the pain of her bite and that of being penetrated, neither bringing him to blood but both touching him deeper than he ever would have thought. She pats Collins on the shoulder, and he rolls onto his back, bringing Goodsir with him, so that Silna can swing her leg astride them and take Goodsir into herself. Lithe, lively weight bearing down upon his pelvis, driving him ever deeper onto Collins, coring him even as it enwraps him, wet and tight.
Goodsir twists his hands against Collins' strong trunk, admiring the flexing of the man's muscles neath himself as Collins pumps his hips, falling into a rhythm with Silna's riding of Goodsir. Collins squeezes Goodsir's own hips, Silna's thighs braced outside of Collins' grip, Collins' feet likewise flat on the furs for leverage. This time Goodsir is allowed to fall lax in his bonds, and he does so, rocked there between them.
They take what they want from him, the pleasure of it lifting and lowering him as would the tide a boat at anchor. He only realizes he comes again when the last tension in his muscles suddenly peaks and then falls out of him to leave him heavy, the orgasm just another thing to happen to his flesh; another thing to observe in himself with neither blame, nor selfishness.
Silna comes next, her hand moving in small, rapid circles above where she and he are connected until a musky surge of her honey drenches his nether curls and she lifts herself from him with a satiated sigh, swiping her wet hand over his nose and into his mouth that he might smell and taste her. Then she rolls from them, her hair dragging in a silky arc across Goodsir's chest, and Collins takes the opportunity to flip Goodsir underneath himself. He mounts him like that, fucking Goodsir face-down to his own groaning finish.
Silna unties him immediately after this—no numbness in his extremities, full control of the digits retained—as Collins more drowsily parts from him and uses a clout made of Goodsir's old shirt to bathe himself, trading the clout for Goodsir's hand a moment later.
She wipes Goodsir off, and then, after she is back inside the tupiq from wringing out the clout and hanging it up to dry over the tent line and she has laced shut the entrance ahint herself, she kisses Collins on the forehead and settles in at Goodsir's side with a pail of fresh water. She tips the water to his mouth, and Goodsir drinks deeply, and, remembering that he has his hands back, cups the sealskin pail with ane to steady it.
“Thank ye,” he croaks, and Silna sets aside the pail to cuddle him, sighing in contentment. He takes up her hand, too, so that his arms are crossed over himself and he is holding hands with both of them.
“My words are…returning, to me,” he eventually says. “O Henry, Darling?”
Collins grunts an affirmative. Snuggles into Goodsir's side, his breath tickling Goodsir's armpit.
“Hmm. I think I'll sleep for an age, too,” Goodsir remarks. “I quite enjoyed when I was being a-a, a wee helpless coney, caught by your big, burly self.”
“Thought that was all the time already,” Collins teases, and Goodsir giggles.
“Stop it!” Goodsir eventually says, for now even Silna is shaking with laughter, and Collins does an excellent imitation of a real dog's growl, the sound deep and softly resonant—perhaps the production of the noise is akin to Silna's breath game growl, for it does not damage the larynx or otherwise hurt the throat. Goodsir is not so good at producing either noise, although he has practiced both, with both of them.
He cowers in play, and squeezes both their hands. “It was not too bothersome, me running away?” he cannot but ask.
“You doing that's the whole point,” his Henry says. “Chase ye to the ends of the earth, you ask me to.”
“I hunt caribou for food,” says Silna, raising her arms to speak. “It's my favorite thing to do; that, and the eating itself! I love having sex with you; why would I balk when you want me to hunt you for sex?”
“I can't argue with that rhetoric,” says Goodsir, using a simpler sign from his vocabulary in place of the verbal “rhetoric” as he responds aloud and in kind. But what she says of hunting makes him wonder how she might feel to let that go, were she ever to return with himself and Henry to Britain; for her to wear a corset and petticoats and never run across the tundra again. He can't imagine it.
“Expect,” says Collins, “that I'll be a little less the dog for ye both, once we've met up with someone we can get a real one from, and have it pull the sledge. But the feeling—you're right, it's like I'm floating, but I'm good and happy and I still know my role. I've a mistress, and a plaything, and all's right with the world.”
“Silna,” says Goodsir, “you really want to see England, and Scotland? I do not actually know, you see, whether they are good, or. Better, there. Whether the people are any better there. The different customs…the clothes—!”
“I don't think a corset could be that bad,” Silna says. Even with herself laid down, Goodsir recognizes the sign she's made for “corset,” with her fingers mimicking the boning of corsetry alongside her own ribs.
“Well. You still have not decided whether you want to see England?”
“Oh, I want to see it,” says Silna. “But it would be up to my helper to let me go.”
“I…that does depend,” says Goodsir. Tuunbaq, he understands, is a unique helping spirit, in that it is also—unlike other tuuŋŋat, but akin to those Greenlandic tupilat of which he's heard—of flesh. He can imagine Tuunbaq in the hold of a ship en route for the British Isles, and the scene involves far too much in the way of chaos and bloodshed.
The spirit is obligated to Silna only insofar as she is its shaman, and only since its massacre of several crew; even while it had killed Hickey.
Goodsir is still not sorry that this lattermost is so. But Silna has said she believes herself capable of dissuading Tuunbaq from attacking—; so long as Silna is with them.
“We still meet up with the others, we'll be fine either way,” says Collins. “Won't we?”
“We'll go as far as we can,” says Silna, “and do our best as it comes.”
“You won't…be disappointed, were we to live here? Even after helping assist the others to rescue?” asks Goodsir.
Silna looks to Collins for his answer.
“It's beautiful here,” says Henry.
Ařgiaq and Paniŋajak are the brothers whom they meet before making the crossing from King William Island—Qikiqtaq—to the mainland. Paniŋajak is the elder and the more cautious, while Ařgiaq waves and runs toward them as soon as he recognizes Silna.
“Aiŋai,” says Ařgiaq, falling to a walk. Seeing the qaplunaak, he introduces himself: “Ařgiaŋuřuŋa. And who are you two?”
“They are my husbands,” says Silna, with her hands.
“Ah—Goodsir-uřuŋa,” says Goodsir, pointing at himself.
Collins tugs his forelock and says, “Henry Collins.”
“You've taken up your father's helper?” Ařgiaq asks Silna.
“They took my tongue,” Silna agrees, matter-of-fact. It is another thing unique to Tuunbaq, out of tuuŋŋat, for it to have taken her flesh so as to bind her to itself, and it occurs to Goodsir that the shaman who was Silna's father is perhaps infamous among the local Indigenous populace. “Last winter, after my father died.”
“How did he die?”
“He was shot by accident,” says Silna, the measurements of her hands now faltering.
“I'm very sad to hear of it,” says Ařgiaq, deeply sympathetic. “He cured a fever of mine, when I was on the verge of death.”
“Yes, I remember that.”
Goodsir watches Paniŋajak read Silna's signs, and accidentally makes eye contact. Smiling, Goodsir averts his gaze to the two dogs hitched to the others' sled. One, the black one with white legs and a white chest, is a bitch, with two fluffy, floppy puppies at her belly.
“Have you seen the nanuq?” Ařgiaq asks.
He must not be referring to Tuunbaq, for Silna says that she has not. “You are following him?”
“Yes. Your compatriots on the mainland were given a seal; we left them before summer breakup, following him.”
There is another white bear that goes around giving people food?
“You saw their fellow qaplunaat?” asks Silna.
“Yes, on the mainland, going to Utkuhikšalik,” Ařgiaq says. “They were going to follow the river. We talked with their leader, Aglukkaq.”
Silna turns to Goodsir and Collins, smiling broadly.
“Do you want to trade?” Paniŋajak pipes up.
After the trade, they are one steel knife lighter and their sled is one puppy heavier, because the wee ane is too little to walk so far on its own legs. The first night the puppy cries and cries, and Collins ends up outside in the middle of the daylit night, fully dressed and giving it a seal stomach bottle filled with broth.
Silna wakes with the first faint rumble of thunder. Goodsir was awake already, just in case—he does not believe the twa blokes they've met pose any threat, but just in case!—anything happens.
“Tell him to bring the puppy inside if it starts raining,” says Silna to Goodsir, as the first drops begin to pelt the tupiq skin.
“O Darling, come inside with that!” cries Goodsir.
Collins comes in with the puppy in his arms and his shoulders hunched against the rain, hair straggling, and his fingers covered in fur and slobber. “Forgot the bottle,” he says.
“Oh, nevermind that,” says Goodsir. “Come here, you and the wean.”
Collins comes over and spills himself and the wee piebald puppy onto the bed. He lands on his back, the puppy on his chest, a draft whooshing in with him. He smells of the damp tundra. The raindrops have sharpened into hailstones outside, and Collins lets the puppy slide onto Goodsir so that he can lean the other way to kiss Silna on the cheek before crawling away again to do up the entrance.
The puppy shakes its heid, drops splattering Goodsir's face, and then begins to cry for its mither.
Collins returns and relieves Goodsir of the thing. “Will you be so petrified when we—you have children?”
“Children?” says Goodsir.
Collins gives Goodsir a pitying look, and Goodsir's pride in himself as an anatomist compels him to add, childishly: “I ken how weans are made! But children, ourselves?”
“We go on as we are, and yes, ourselves,” says Silna, giving him a warm look of condescension of her own. “You were not thinking about it?”
“I-I…took it for granted, perhaps?” Or…“No, I suppose I wasn't.” But every time that he had imagined a family, before, he'd felt whelmed by the anxieties of a family. Since this family has manifested unto him, however, he's not worried over thae things he used to. He needs not be apprehensive over what will be a blessing, should it occur. “I'd not thought about it,” he says, starting to smile, because now he is.