diversified | Blessed by light and burden of shadows. [ closed ]

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Blessed by light and burden of shadows. [ closed ]

WHO Shannon Vaughn (

privatematter), Eli Delacroix (

aspectional).
WHAT Eli is an idiot; Shannon is curious. How exactly does D/s go down when you're not to the Having Sex stage in the relationship yet?
WHEN Late 1990. Seven months after Jumpscapades.
WHERE Shannon's place.

Shannon was anxious. Not in a bad way, but the anticipatory way that everyone got when something new and exciting was going up and there was no way it could go badly, but predicting the end outcome was almost impossible. It was a great feeling, but one that left Shannon feeling like a teen heading out to prom instead of a grown man getting ready to have fun with his boyfriend and potentially make some hilariously heartfelt gestures to express his trust in Eli. That was probably something he didn't do enough in general, actually.

Breakfast had been something simple. Pancakes, fresh cut fruit and sausage. Eli had come over pretty early to get ready, talking over the generalities of what they were going to do while the specifics were to wait for after they were done. Well, now they were done and sitting on the couch, and Shannon's leg was jiggling even under the hand he had placed on his knee to keep himself still. Lacey had wandered off after breakfast, stomach filled with her own food and presumably was napping on the foot of the bed in Shannon's room. Probably for the better, really.

"So," he said, ignoring the obvious tell he was giving off. If Eli took it for misapprehension, then Shannon was going to definitely lean over and smack him. "Where do we start?"

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"It involved Eli being harmed in some way and you're involved. This definitely won't be something taken lightly," he explained. As one of the few Aspects who had an original close to both Nate and Thomas, Javier was in a position to know just how tense things were between father and son and how Thomas would deal with any slight to his child.

There was silence before Javier covered the receiver to talk to Matheus privately. When his hand was removed, Matheus was the one who started to speak, having taken the phone from his friend. "Electricity needs a spark to catch things on fire and Eli didn't spark. In fact, he didn't react with his powers at all. His first thought was to grab you and make sure you were okay."

It wasn't much of a secret that Shannon didn't know what to do with Thomas. It was hard to get much of a bead on the guy. He did, however, know that Thomas had the power to do something if he felt Shannon wasn't taking care of his son. It wasn't a scary prospect so much as a reminder that he really needed to get his shit together if they were going to go talk to Thomas. "Of course it won't," he said mildly.

While part of him was distressed to hear that it was most definitely himself who had set something on fire, another part of him simply reacted to hearing Matheus' voice. He knew Matheus was all right now and that worry had been set aside for now. "Do you just not know how to knock?" Perhaps not the best greeting, but he was still wound up from dealing with Eli and trying to calm him down, not to mention his own experience of becoming a jumbled mess.

Despite the ever present threat Thomas held over Shannon's head about what would happen if he wasn't taking care of Eli, he wouldn't do something that would upset Eli. After what happened when Eli was a child, Thomas had started to be more cautious about how he dealt with his son and the people who were in his life. He may not like the fact that Eli was dating a fire Aspect, but he wouldn't do anything to separate them. If it happened involving things not under his control, then he'd take advantage of it, but never would cause trouble on his own.

"I usually don't need to! I didn't think I was going to be walking in on that," Matheus said with a tone that made it obvious that he wasn't exactly happy that he had walked in on them at all. There are just some things you don't need to know about your friends and that was definitely one of them in his mind. "And if you didn't want to be walked in on, you should have been doing that in the bedroom."

Shannon hadn't learned that lesson about Thomas quite yet. There was a general idea floating around but, above all, he intended to shield Eli from whatever Thomas deemed appropriate and if that meant defending himself to spare Eli from pain, then he would do it. It didn't matter that Thomas was the big man in charge, he wasn't going to take any shit from him for accidental circumstances. That much he knew.

"If you hadn't noticed, it wasn't exactly my idea where we were going to be," Shannon said drolly. "No, but seriously, do us some goddamn courtesy and start knocking at least. Jesus, Rocha."

If he hasn't learned it yet, then he'll learn it soon enough. Thomas wasn't the sort to hide his intentions when it came to Eli and he'd be transparent for Shannon as well as long as he was still dating his son. It was only polite and he thought it'd gain points with Eli, despite the fact that Eli still has yet to forgive him for everything.

"Fine, I'll start knocking if that'll make you happy and if it'll keep me from seeing it again." Now that this seemed to be taken care of at least in Matheus' eyes, he shifted the conversation a bit. "So, how long? I didn't think you were that kind of guy."

Shannon blinked a few times for the effect. It didn't matter that no one could see him, because that was pretty much a learned behavior anyway. If he was interacting with someone else, Shannon was always more animated than if he were on his own or simply with Lacey. "That was our second try. What kind of guy do I have to be to do something different?"

It certainly didn't strike Shannon as something you had to be a type for. It wasn't for everyone and had some elements to it that others wouldn't be able to grasp or fall into, but that was hardly different from any other activity, intimate or otherwise. It was a kink, a personal preference, an interesting activity Shannon found that he did enjoy doing with Eli.

"Second try?" He sounded genuinely surprised by that. From his point of view, it definitely seemed like the two of them had been doing this for far longer, but neither Eli nor Shannon seemed the types to be like other people to begin with, so it shouldn't have been much of a surprise to find out that they clicked together nearly instantly for a D/s scene. "I would have thought you two had been doing that for longer and we just haven't found out about it until now."

It was definitely easy to answer Shannon's question though, at least according to Matheus. From his memories of Jack, he knew how the roles in D/s worked well enough to be pointing them out to someone else, especially to someone like Shannon who was new to the game. "The kind of guy who'd be able to relinquish control of things to another person. I thought you'd be a Dom instead of a sub and the opposite goes for Eli too, really."

"We've only been together three months," Shannon pointed out. How much longer had Matheus expected this to all be going on? It wasn't exactly first date kind of material! What did it say that he expected them to do it from the get go? Shannon wasn't sure, but he was pretty sure Matheus was going to clarify. Hopefully.

All right, that sort of made sense. When put like that, it did sound out of character and all that. "It's Eli," Shannon said with something of a verbal shrug. Of course he would trust Eli enough to give him the control. That was what it was all about. And whether Eli acted like it or not, he really did have leadership qualities in him somewhere. Whether he fully understood the significance or not was negligible, but he did try to sound casually confident when he added: "Besides, we're switches."

"So? You two could have been doing this more during that time," he replied. If Eli wanted to do D/s with Shannon (which is what he figured what happened, wrong as he is) he could have definitely brought it up earlier. He wasn't exactly a shy kid, even after he withdrew from everyone once he returned with Jasper. Hell, he would have expected it to happen just so Eli would have a normal routine of sorts again.

"Well, I guess that's true," he agreed easily. Matheus may be an idiot at times, but he knew about the trust they had for each other. He was also getting the idea of just how ignorant Shannon was about this as well. "That explains a lot, really. He going to teach you how to Dom?"

Shannon huffed, laughter coming through in the tone. It had been a long and hard road to get Eli to open back up again; as much as he seemed more settled nowadays, Shannon knew there were still plenty of roadblocks still ahead of them. With how seriously he took this D/s thing, there was no doubt in Shannon's mind it wouldn't have come up at all if Michelle hadn't been joking around only a few weeks ago. "We weren't."

"Well... I guess so. Who else would?" It was almost rhetorical, but part of it was genuine enough. Matheus seemed to know more about this than he did and they were on the subject, anyway.

The eye rolling was almost audible over the line. Matheus, like most of the other Aspects, wasn't aware of what had happened while Eli was travelling the multiverse to find Jasper and didn't know of Eli's distancing himself from Shannon. "Obviously," he answered. "I'd ask what you were doing instead, but there are some things I don't want to know."

It wasn't too difficult to know more about the subject than Shannon at this point, but Matheus was decently knowledgeable on the subject and willing to impart some of it on his friend. "A Dom at a club. Some of the older experienced ones will take on students and teach them the ropes, so to speak. That's probably how Eli learned how to do it."

Shannon grinned and it came through in his voice. They knew each other well enough by now to gauge emotion from vocal tone — Shannon more than Matheus, granted, and he knew better than to linger on the previous subject. That was between himself, Eli, and the few others that it had affected. "Better off if you didn't."

"Clubs aren't really my scene," Shannon said in amusement. "But a mentorship... makes sense. From what I can tell, you don't learn about technique in books or at classes here. Gotta go old-fashioned, huh?" Whether or not that was truly the norm, that wasn't how Shannon wanted to do things. He liked going in with measures of control and confidence that he knew what he was getting into. Just wandering into a club and honing in on his target, someone trustworthy but knowledgeable and willing to share, would be next to impossible with the amount of information he had been able to dig up. Why try, when he already had Eli here and willing to take it at their own pace?

"You saying that just makes things worse," grumbled Matheus. He couldn't say that he wasn't expecting something like that to be said, but that doesn't mean that he's happy he said it anyway.

"With this, you've gotta get a bit more hands-on experience," he replied with a grin at his terrible comment. "But I shouldn't be the one telling you this. Eli's your mentor and Dom in this, so it's probably a good idea for you to start flooding him with questions about this."

There was nothing more Shannon could do except chuckle. He and Eli had never really made it past kissing and snuggling, sleeping together without sleeping together or anything that it might imply. Due to Shannon's own hangups, they were going very, very slowly. No one else needed to know that, and neither of them were particularly keen to share with those who would no doubt see it as an invitation to nose in on private business.

"He's sleeping right now," Shannon pointed out. The questions were good, but also a way of working off some nervous energy. He was worried that the sleep wouldn't do Eli much good, that the damage may have been a bit more lasting; he wasn't scared that it was permanent, but that Eli had been more harmed than Shannon had. He wanted to know that Eli was okay and the only way to confirm that would be to give him time. "How do you know about all this, anyway?"

Despite the sort of things Matheus remembered from his original, he still didn't want to pry into that part of Shannon and Eli's lives. He would be pleased to hear that sex wasn't a thing that was happening between them, but like most of the Aspects, he figured they were screwing like rabbits mostly to make up for lost time.

"I didn't mean now, Shannon. He needs the sleep after how messed up he was." When it came to the D/s stuff though, it definitely seemed to fall under a different heading than sex for Matheus since he was having no issues discussing it with Shannon. It was probably due to the fact that he had stumbled upon them and fucked things up royally and this was one way to fix things for both of them. "I remember it from Jack. He was in a D/s relationship with one of the other dragons and when I awakened, I tried a few things out from his memories to see if it fit me."

That was honestly how Shannon preferred them to look at it. It made them seem normal, like they were making it work. He figured if they came off like a healthy enough couple while still having the issues that they did, then something was genuine about it that shone through. They weren't just faking it until they were making it or trying to fool themselves or anything. This was real, no matter how unorthodox.

"Jack," he mumbled quietly. Despite knowing everything he knew, it was all secondhand knowledge and nothing real to him. It was hard to pick up names from another life and place them to the people he knew now. "Do I even want to ask who else he was with?" He was reminded of the incestuous relationship Eli had mentioned a few months previously, and realized that he probably didn't. "Wait, I revoke the question. Never mind. I'm guessing it wasn't your cup of tea."

Well, the more their relationship seems normal on the outside, the less people would want to pry. Normal means boring and boring means nobody really wanting to poke around to see what's going on and with the Aspects being who they are, nosy is a bit of an understatement when it comes to how they deal with one of their numbers getting into a relationship in the first place.

"Better if you didn't know, really." Jack's relationships were considered fucked up even where the dragons were concerned, especially considering he was in an on and off again relationship with the one who killed and ate him multiple times before forced amnesia occurred. It wasn't something Matheus liked to share, even if the awakened Aspects were fully aware of it. "I haven't found the right person to put my trust in, is all."

That was exactly the point, as well. They wanted to appear normal because they hoped they were normal. Something normal enough, anyway, despite the weirdness going on inside. Being able to pass it off with the rest of the group was a definite blessing, even if it ended up with Michelle mistaking what was going on between them and led to their current predicament.

"Yeah, this isn't the kinda thing to do with strangers," Shannon agreed. He couldn't imagine opening himself up to someone he didn't know, giving them the keys to utterly destroy him with nary even a word. It would be impossible to do anything like that.

Normal was subjective to begin with, but no matter what the definition, they weren't anybody's description of normal, even their own. Things looked normal from the outside, sure, but that wasn't the case as to what was actually going on. Eli's adventures out into the multiverse and Shannon's sexuality were both problems that kept them from having anything near a normal relationship, but time and effort was needed to smooth everything out so everything went into a routine if not normal.

"And each of us are looking for something specific from their partner." It was definitely obvious that Matheus had thought on the subject for a while. He wanted his Dom to be somebody who'd fit with him right and a permanent fixture in his life as more than just someone who was only around for the scene. "What are you looking for?"

"From Eli?" Shannon considered that for a moment. It was a question he hadn't quite considered before. What was he looking for from Eli? He hadn't exactly come into this whole thing as educated and aware as most others probably would be, had started with the advantage of an experienced Dom that he knew wouldn't take advantage of him from the word go. At first, it had been something to try out. It was interesting and definitely did like the places that Eli took him both times that they'd tried it, but what was he looking for from it all?

Funny how Shannon was so often making sure everything was kept in their own boxes to maintain a clear focus on the rest of the world, yet he hadn't tried categorizing this yet. If he really had to pinpoint something as what he wanted out of this, then maybe that wasn't so hard as he was making it out to be. "I guess... I'm just looking for Eli from Eli," he answered with a laugh.

He wanted to clarify that he was asking about what he was wanting out of the scene in general and not what he wanted specifically from Eli, but he realized pretty quickly that both answers were going to be the same. Shannon was only going to do this with Eli, so obviously what he wanted had to be something he wanted just from him.

"Should have known that you'd say something like that," he said with a chuckle. It wasn't a specific answer, sure, but it was definitely the obvious one. He may not know much about the relationship between Shannon and Eli, but he did know that they were compliments to each other and fit perfectly, despite whatever hidden issues may be hidden from the public eye.

"Were you looking for something else?" asked Shannon. He was amused by the response, but also curious. What exactly did other people look for in their partners for something like this? Clicking personalities seemed to be the most important part, but perhaps there was some facet he was missing. Considering that Matheus was keeping an eye out himself, he wasn't worried about asking.

There was a soft grunt while Shannon shifted around. Aching muscles let him know they didn't appreciate being in that position when he could be back in the bedroom and resting and he studiously ignored them. He needed some time to his own mind, doing what he wanted despite what common sense told him to do.

"You could say that. Usually when that question gets asked, it's an action or something specific that gets said, not a person. Personally, my answer would have been that I'm looking for someone to absolve me of my failures through punishment or otherwise," he replied, his voice still carrying some amusement. He could guess that Shannon hadn't really thought on the subject and Matheus didn't mind telling Shannon what he looked for himself. It might help him pinpoint things more clearly for him.

There was a moment where he quieted down after Shannon grunt. Almost immediately, his mind went straight to the gutter. It wasn't something he was ashamed of, but once again, he would really like to not have that directed at those two. "So, Eli rough with you after he dragged you off to the bedroom?"

"That's oddly specific," Shannon said, more thoughtful as he let that one sift through. There was something there, the idea of looking for a specific something from the release of losing control, of absolute trust and faith in the person who became everything for that scene. Maybe it wasn't so odd after all. Was he looking for something like that from Eli? Probably, but that was secondary to the fact that he was looking for it from Eli. No one else would ever be given the kind of trust for Shannon to reach the place he wanted to go when they did this.

It wasn't that Shannon was all that shy in talking about it, but it was still new talking about a relationship with another man to another man and he didn't want to speak of it to Matheus right now. He was more than physically sore about the intrusion. "More the opposite. Electricity was involved, that's all." When it came to Aspects, that was all that needed to be said. Right?

"It usually is, but you usually tend to start out vague and explore your options to find out what exactly it is that you want from the experience," Matheus explained. He knew once Shannon has had more time to explore things with Eli, he too will find out the specifics of what he wants. Maybe then they'll be able to talk more.

Once Shannon said that, Matheus went very quiet for a long moment because yeah, he got that and he didn't want that mental image in his head. He wasn't worried about Eli hurting Shannon with his powers, especially seeing how well he has used them against him earlier. "That explains a lot, really."

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Blessed by light and burden of shadows. [ closed ]

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