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ashintheairlikesnow · 4 months

Text

Wonderful

CW: Intimate whump, frank/mocking noncon discussion, captivity, forced relationship (... sort of), threats of violence/death

(As always, Jax is @comfy-whumpee's OC and is used with permission and oversight)

Brayden Marcoset has never hated a single soul as much as he hates his cousin’s stupid fucking English muffin of a man.

Savvie had taken a perfectly good house slave, trained by the best man in the business, and then she somehow ruined him entirely. Placid and obedient had become watchful and cunning. As if she’d turned a fucking housepet into a caged, half-rabid… coyote, or something.

Not that Brayden’s ever seen one other than on television, but… still. Metaphors don’t matter.

She’s given the man delusions of grandeur, pulled him into her bed when he should have spent his nights in the servant quarters or bedded down with the hunting hounds where he belongs.

It’s one thing for a Marcoset man to take a liking to staff - that's just part of life - but none of them ever demanded to marry one. And no Marcoset man ever tried to make any of the resulting little bastards into legitimate Marcoset heirs.

It’s disgusting.

Brayden’s eyelid twitches just looking at him, where he sits on the long end of the sectional like he even deserves to be there. Savvie dresses him in clothes that are worth more than he is, simpers and smiles and kisses him, calls him sweet little nicknames and all but throws herself at him 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

It’s hell, having to play along with her ridiculous little games.

But… here they are, he and the man Savvie insists on calling her husband sitting across from each other like this is normal or fine and not Savvie twisting and bending the rules of reality to her will like she always does.

Jax should be standing unobtrusively in a corner waiting to be given an order. He should be wearing the staff uniform of white shirt, black pants, black collar, and eyes on the ground.

He should be her little secret she brings to her bed and then sends away right after and he should be grateful for being her favorite.

Instead, he’s sitting on the couch as miserable as Brayden is, wearing a pair of tailored jeans and a sweater Brayden owns himself in a different color and now can’t wear ever again, not now that the muffin has worn it.

Not now that he realizes Jax looks better in that style of sweater than he does.

Grudgingly, he admits to himself that Jax looks pretty good in general. Too thin, thanks to Savvie’s iron control over how much he eats and when he gets the chance to eat it, but… good. He’s got that hint of lean muscle you can’t quite hide, and his hair looks good. Maybe he’s got shadows under his eyes, but really… that’s not so bad. He’s handsome enough, even with the shock collar permanently locked around his neck.

Next to him, looking ethereal - she thinks, anyway - in an empire-waist gown with too many layers of faint pastel shades that she believes turn her into some kind of watercolor queen, Savvie has a hand on his knee as she gestures. She pauses, looking between he and Jax, and Brayden feigns a reaction - he has no idea what she just said.

Neither does Jax, he thinks - he’s staring slightly off to one side as Savvie chatters about their most recent ‘babymoon’, a trip down to the beach house to enjoy the waves, work on her next album, and really just focus on being ‘us’ for a while. She’s only twenty-three weeks pregnant and they’ve already gone on two of the damn things, Savvie dragging Jax with her like the idiot little dog on a short leash he might as well be.

How many more can she plan? How many more of these stories is he going to have to pretend he’s listening to?

Brayden watches Jax instead.

His jaw is angled more sharply than it was when he’d first arrived, years ago, as if he’s always biting something back. Brayden had seen him a few times before back then, before he’d gone to the cops and it had nearly cost them all everything… Jax had been blank, then, too, but it had been… different.

Now he isn’t really empty.

Jax's face always looks like a computer with the monitor off but programs still whirring all the same. Whatever there is going on behind his eyes, Brayden can’t see it. And he’s usually pretty good at reading the shit the servants think they’re hiding. Or roughing them up until they tell him anyway.

But with Jax, it’s like looking through completely frosted glass. Shadows, a hint of a color, maybe, but… nothing clear. Never enough to get any understanding. Being trapped in Savvie’s life - in her bed, in her arms - has made Jax into a better liar than he’d been when he first arrived.

That’s not just irritating.

That’s dangerous.

But Savvie doesn’t see it.

Savvie pauses, leans over, whispers into Jax’s ear as she gives his knee a squeeze. Brayden watches a soft smile flicker across his face, gone as fast as it came. He whispers, Yes, Miss Savvie in that hushed voice that makes Brayden’s teeth itch. Savvie pushes herself to her feet. Her stomach isn't really that rounded but she acts like it’s already huge, rubbing her hand over it, up and down. Brayden barely stops himself from rolling his eyes.

He gets the sense Jax feels the same as he does, for once.

“I’ll be right back,” Savvie says brightly. “Keep an eye on him for me, won’t you, Bray? Just… part of the magic, I guess, is having to go to the bathroom every six minutes. I swear…” She’s still talking when she leaves the room. Has she stopped since she got here? He’s pretty sure she hasn’t. She barely even pauses to breathe.

But at least the room gets quiet, now.

He glances over at Jax, who doesn’t look back. But, like a shark scenting blood a mile away, Brayden sees how his scarred hands shift where they rest, falsely relaxed. Brayden watches his ring finger twitch, the simple band Savvie put there glinting dimly in the light.

“How badly do you wish she would just drop dead right now?” He asks, seemingly idly, tipping his cut-crystal glass to watch the whiskey and ice swirl around each other. “More than before she got herself pregnant, or less?”

Jax’s jaw shifts. Those eyes move to his, briefly, all innocent uncertainty. “Don’t know w-what you mean,” He says, voice low.

“Oh, give up the bullshit,” Brayden says, huffing as he takes a drink, leaning over with his elbows on his thighs. He finds a half-smile, but he doesn’t mean it, and he doesn’t try to look like he does. “We all know how you feel. You might as well be honest with me about it. Besides, we’re basically family, now, right? I was at your wedding. I was your best man, your best-... what, d’you call it your best mate in merry old England?”

He laughs at his own mockery of an accent that has only the slightest relation to Jax’s own, taking a drink. This is his fourth whiskey of the evening and the other three went down smooth. The world is getting brighter, with sharper edges - just how he likes it.

At the mention of the wedding - where Jax had gone where he was told, done what he was told to do, said the words Savvie gave him to say, and probably gone back to Savvie’s home that night and whispered sweet nothings like a man with a gun to his head - Jax’s fingers twitch again. They close into loose fists. He doesn’t even bother with a reply, this time.

Just looks away again.

“Hey.” Brayden frowns, snapping his fingers, but Jax doesn’t even flinch. “I’m talking to you.”

More silence.

“Come on. Give me something to work with.” He sits back again, raking a hand back through his hair. “You’re a treat to have around for a visit, aren’t you? So very talkative. Goddamn chatty. Jax, why are you even here, anyway? You don’t have to be.”

That gets him the briefest bit of eye contact, but nothing more. “Miss Savvie was invited for dinner,” He says, voice low and blank and empty. It makes Brayden’s anger rise like a storm surge inside him, battering his resolve.

The rest of the staff… react. They murmur obedience, they smile when he tells them to, they answer every question with yes, Master Brayden or no, Master Brayden, or whatever you want, Master Brayden. But Jax, the worst of them all, has to be treated like he matters just because Savvie thinks his dick hung the moon.

Brayden moves fluidly onto his feet, ignoring the way the world spins a little. Maybe, he thinks, he shouldn’t have another whiskey after he finishes this one. He moves around the coffee table, closing the distance between them. Jax’s fists close tighter and tighter, until his nails must be breaking skin. As Brayden bends and then leans in close, Jax subtly leans away, trying to keep distance between them.

But Brayden isn’t in the mood for distance.

Not tonight.

Instead, he shifts gears, switches over to easygoing, we’re all guys here friendliness. “Seriously, man. We all know she’s batshit, she always was. We all know it. Nobody really thinks this is Romeo and Juliet but her. You know? You should be scrubbing floors right now. Or… I don’t know, maybe you should be somewhere else. Like back home, huh?”

Jax takes in a breath, his eyes determinedly focused on a spot on the wall somewhere over Brayden’s shoulder, but he doesn’t reply. This close, Brayden can smell the cologne Savvie makes him wear.

“It’s okay,” Brayden murmurs, looking towards the door Savvie went through and then back. “It’s just the two of us here. Be honest with me, Mr. Marm-... Marcoset.” He’s slurring a little as the whiskeys catch up to him, but it doesn’t matter. “You spend half the night thinking about putting a pillow over her fucking face, and you know nobody who actually knew her would even blame you, so why not do it? Or… look, it’s just us here and now. Just you and me. Tell me why you don’t just… go, get out of here, get the fuck out of my sight. And don’t say the collar. If you’re here at this house, the shock collar can’t be set to make you stay at her house, so… why not just fucking take off before she can get to the remote? You could make it outside before she even notices. I wouldn’t even say anything, I’d just sit here and wait. I’d even give you a good head start.”

He drops his voice lower, soft and poisonously seductive. The kind of voice he might use on a pretty servant girl, not his cousin’s idiot husband. Just above a whisper. The same way he might have otherwise murmured to one of the staff to be in my room at midnight, to Jax he offers a different kind of poison laced with sugar.

“She left the keys in the car, didn’t she? You know she did. Go on, Jax. I won’t say a damn thing. Just go. Get the fuck out of our lives and be free and then I never have to see your ugly fucking face again.”

He’s nearly breathing whiskey-breath in Jax’s face, and still, the man doesn’t move. Doesn’t even wrinkle his nose.

Brayden chuckles, forcing it, because he’s getting absolutely nothing from the man still seated in perfect still silence on the couch, but he can feel under all that empty space the rising tension. He can tell he’s getting to Jax, at least a little.

He wants to throw him to the floor, kick his ribs until he hears the satisfying snap when one of them breaks, and then keep going. Give Savvie back her man with black eyes and busted-out teeth, a broken jaw. Show him how little he means, no matter what Savvie tells him.

He’s just staff.

He’s just something else the Marcosets own.

He doesn’t deserve their name, and he isn’t even grateful for it.

“Come on,” He murmurs, nearly close enough to touch now. “You know you want to go. You could get out before there’s some little monster screaming for you alongside her all night, some bastard baby you’ll hate as much as you hate her. Throw a punch, I’ll let you hit me even. Make it look like a fight and not like you’re just following my orders, too. Go on. Or… well, wait a second.”

He sits down next to Jax, slinging an arm around his shoulder like they’re the best of friends, leaning in until he’s nearly close enough to kiss.

“Do you... do you not even want to go? Huh? Is the problem that you really want to be here? Got a lil case of the Stockholm Syndrome? That’s not real, you know. They made it up... doesn’t matter. But hey, maybe you have it anyway. Maybe you like fucking her every single night. That’s why you never take the chances, because… because we know there are chances, don’t we, you and I? After you dick her down real good, she falls asleep and you have hours, but no… you stay right there and wait to be told to dick her down again, huh? Because you want to be here." He laughs again, barely making a sound. "You sad little shit, you actually love her and you don’t even know it. Love her so much you’re having a baby together. Some little fucking clone of my cousin, but hey. Maybe the little goblin will have your eyes, huh? You can teach it to say yes, Miss Savvie like a goddamn moron just like you. Gonna be the baby's first words, right?"

There.

Jax’s back and shoulders feel like iron, tense as steel bearing too much weight under the soft cashmere, beneath Brayden’s arm. The way that tension turns to shaking makes him smile. Jax’s knuckles are bleached against the fabric of his jeans, his face paper-white beneath some red that lingers in his cheeks.

It’s a good look on him.

It’d be better if he was bleeding.

Too much whiskey has Brayden’s hand creeping back up, over the back of Jax’s neck to the shock collar’s lock. He knows the combo, the whole family knows the combo they use for the shock collars. “I’ll take it off,” He whispers, “And give you twenty minutes. How far can you get, I wonder? I want to see. Don’t you want to see how far you can get?”

Jax’s eyes, locked as they are on the wall in front of him, flare slightly. Brayden’s close enough to hear his breathing suddenly go shallow, and then catch.

“Come on,” Brayden whispers. “Run, rabbit. Run.”

Brayden’s fingers brush over the lock, the hair that just barely curls over it at the nape of Jax’s neck.

“Don’t,” Jax says, voice tight.

Brayden’s lip curls in disgust. “Why not?”

“Because, Brayden, in this particular moment he is smarter than you are.”

The voice of Brayden’s father booms from the doorway,.

Brayden feels blood somehow both rush to his face and also drain from it at the same moment. Then his vision goes red. Jax had seen Isaac coming, hadn’t he? He'd seen, and he hadn’t said a damn thing.

Brayden gets back to his feet, stumbling forward before straightening his posture. Even in his late thirties, he’s still got a hint of nerves around Isaac. Being too drunk in front of his father feels like a great way to get himself in deep shit all over again.

Isaac Marcoset, always the biggest presence in any room he enters, moves casually as he rolls his sleeves back down. Smears of faint red on his knuckles are the only sign of the work he’s been busy with for the past hour. The head of the Marcoset family is all charm and darkness. He’s sly smiles and handshakes that sometimes go on just a little too long, and he’s also agonizing, lingering death in a back room, with staff removing bodies out the back door.

Brayden takes a breath. He feels the strangely teenage urge to hide his whiskey glass behind his back and fights it. “Hey... Hey, Dad.”

Isaac only raises an eyebrow, pouring himself a drink from the bar cart in the corner. The silence draws out, awkward and heavy.

Brayden clears his throat. “I-I wasn’t really going to take it off, I was… I was just fucking with him, that’s all.”

“I certainly hope you’re not fucking with him, Bray.” Isaac takes a drink, waiting for Brayden to understand his terse joke. No one laughs. “I realize he has some sort of attractive quality to him, although I have no idea what, but still. It’s bad enough that my niece lowers herself to bedding him, surely you can abstain?”

Brayden's face burns so hot he half thinks he'll catch fire. "Dad!"

In the corner of his eyes, Brayden sees the corners of Jax’s smile shift into a shit-eating little smirk.

The little shit. How dare he looks like that, like he's gotten one over on Brayden, and how dare he wear the fucking wedding ring that means Brayden can’t even do anything about it. Not anything permanent enough to count, anyway.

Brayden drops back into his seat, hunching his shoulders and glaring over the edge of his glass. He tells himself if Jax so much as cracks a fucking joke, he’ll break this glass, carve that smirk into the stupid fucker's face, and beg Savvie for forgiveness afterward.

When he looks, though, Jax isn’t even looking at him. Those hazel eyes are locked on Isaac, as if Brayden simply ceases to exist when his father walks in the door. It’s a feeling that’s far too familiar, and it makes Brayden feel… small.

Which pisses him off even more.

And Jax knows it.

“Hello, Uncle Isaac,” Jax says, serene. As if they were all simply discussing the weather. But that shit-eating grin doesn’t leave his face, even if it never makes it to his eyes.

“Hello, miscreant,” Isaac replies, apparently in a good enough mood to humor him. “I have to assume, if I’m forced to endure your presence, that my niece is here as well?”

“She went to th’bathroom,” Brayden mutters, drinking the rest of his whiskey in two gulps, using the burn as a distraction from his embarrassment and fury at even being embarrassed in front of glorified staff, Savvie’s little toy. “Mother said… what, twenty minutes ago? I think? She said supper’s served at seven.”

“Hm. Not much longer, then. Good, I’ve worked up an appetite.” Isaac settles into his favorite armchair in the sitting room, tapping fingertips on the upholstery. “You should learn to control yourself, Bray. My niece’s choice of men may not run to the most handsome or most intelligent-... or men with brains at all, really-... but despite his many faults… well. There isn't anything we can do about those. The miscreant remains whether we like it or not."

“Now you’re just hurting my feelings,” Jax says, with absolutely no emotion whatsoever. “Thought we were family now, Uncle Isaac.”

Brayden glares at him - he’s been silent, but now he talks? Now he has little quips to say, once Brayden looks like a moron in front of his father and Isaac is the one holding fucking court?

Jax’s smile widens ever so slightly as he finally meets Brayden’s eyes. “Didn’t you just say so? You were at the wedding. You were my best mate.”

“I’m going to pull your teeth out with pliers!” Brayden lunges forward with a roar. He winds one arm back and whips his glass right at Jax, whose hands are up fast enough that it just bounces off his forearms, sprays half-melted ice cubes and whiskey-flavored water in Jax’s hair and clothes, and then cracks into pieces on the floor. “You little shit! I’ll pull out each and every fucking fingernail and make you regret-”

“Brayden Marcoset!” Isaac’s voice is louder than the pulse of fury in Brayden’s mind. “Calm yourself!”

For a long, drawn-out moment, he can’t move. All he can think about is choking the life out of Jax until his smirk dies, until his eyes go dim, and then the emptiness isn’t fake anymore, it’s real. And he can see that Jax knows he wants to, knows just how little there is keeping him from turning him into a smear on the floor for the staff to scrub out.

He wouldn’t even be the first.

Then, he takes a breath and sits down.

“Hannah!” He yells over his shoulder. “Come clean this mess up in here!”

She’s always close by. Hannah, one of the aforementioned bastards the Marcosets hold onto for their own purposes, looks entirely too much like Savvie. She, though, wears the white-and-black uniform, her collar snug around her neck, and her hair - that Marcoset hair, wavy and thick - is cut to her chin. She swallows, hard, when she sees them all. “Master-... oh, good evening, Master Isaac,” She says, feigning cheer, but Brayden isn’t in the fucking mood for it. "Master Jax."

"He's nobody's fucking master. Shut the fuck up. Just clean up the fucking mess,” He says, and waves his hand. Hannah takes in the sight of the cracked glass on the floor and droplets of water, Jax sitting there marked with it himself, and then her gaze moves to the fury on Brayden’s face.

She pulls a towel from where it had been tucked over her belt for easy use. Her face is carefully expressionless. “Yes, Master Brayden.”

That’s more like it.

The three of them watch her clean in awkward silence - or Isaac and Brayden do, who the fuck knows what Jax is actually looking at - and then she vanishes as quickly as she came.

Brayden points after her. “That should be you,” He says to Jax, voice flat. “Cleaning up my mess, saying yes sir and no sir, and never giving me any shit. Got it? Savvie’s weird obsession with you is the only thing that keeps me from making sure you work your hands to the bone here on my orders.”

Jax opens his mouth - Brayden’s going to kill him, whatever he says next - but Isaac speaks before he manages to say whatever was on his mind.

“Oh, let it go,” Isaac says, waving a hand. “You’re letting him work you up. When you do this, you teach him that he matters to you.”

“He-”

The door bursts open and all three men tense, then, but it’s only Savvie returning. She’s breathless and flushed and her eyes are shining. She looks like a princess in a fairytale as she rushes forward to grab Jax’s hands in her own and pull him to his feet. “Jax! Honey, come feel!”

She doesn’t even seem to see her cousin or uncle. Only Jax.

Only.

Jax.

Brayden’s teeth grind together watching Jax’s sly cunning disappear, replaced with the play-acting at earnest, if nervous, adoration that Savvie demands from him. Everyone else on earth could disappear and Savvie wouldn’t care, as long as she had her fucking English muffin to cling to.

Nothing fucking matters but him.

“Feel what, Miss Savvie…?” Jax’s confusion, at least, is genuine. His hands hang slightly limp in her grip. She pulls him to her, pressing his palms over her stomach through her dress, biting her lower lip and looking downward.

Brayden groans as he realizes what it is.

Jax glances at him and then back, but it doesn’t seem to have sunk in for him, not just yet. Then he flinches, minutely, eyes widening. He pulls his hands back. “M-Miss Savvie-”

There are bloodstains, small but vibrant, on her dress now, from the wounds he’s made with his own fingernails in the palms of his hands.

Savvie doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care.

She pulls him right back, her hands pressed down a little too hard over his to keep them where she wants them. Hard enough to make him wince. Savvie’s forehead touches his, and she whispers excitedly, “Did you feel her? Did you feel her kicking?”

Jax stares down, then, at their hands, and her rounded stomach. As if he could look right through it and see the growing life inside. “Yeah,” He whispers. He looks like he wants to sink into the floor, like he might be sick. “I-... I feel it, I th-think. That’s-”

“That’s her kicking,” Savvie whispers. “That’s her. Jax, sweetie, that’s…” She sniffs, taking pause for dramatic effect. “That’s our daughter. Our baby.”

“Th-that’s our baby,” Jax repeats. He sounds numb.

“Oh,” Savvie whispers, sounding a little amazed. It’s an oddly genuine sound, dropping the theatrics, the eternal performance. As if this has knocked even Savvie out of her usual song-and-dance. She hesitates, and then shifts Jax’s hands a little. “She’s kicking harder for you, isn’t she? She knows it’s you already.”

“Y-... you think she does?” Jax’s voice nearly matches Savvie’s. The awe in his voice might almost be real. It’s brief, but they almost look and sound like a real couple. Just for a second. Just if you tilt your head, squint, and pretend you don’t see the shock collar locked on his neck and the way she holds his hands too tight.

“Yeah,” Savvie says, and her smile is sweet as she lifts one hand to touch his face. There’s a pause, Jax’s eyes are locked on her stomach, he doesn’t react to her touch at all. Some of the syrupy-soft smile on her face starts to fade. The warmth in her chills. “Jax. She knows you’re her daddy, isn’t that wonderful?”

Half of Brayden is amused that she still has to prod Jax to give his line, to keep up the performance. Half of him is disgusted that Jax goes along with it, tips his head into the palm of her hand and gives her the big doe eyes she loves so much.

“Yes, Miss Savvie,” Jax answers, automatically, meeting her gaze now. He turns his face and it might almost seem like he’s kissing her palm, although even drunk Brayden can see that he isn’t really doing that at all. Savvie, though, sees what she wants to see - she always has. Jax’s fingers twitch where his hands are still laid on her rounded stomach, feeling the shifting movements of the growing child, the fucking anchor Savvie has tied around his neck. He manages something like a slight, faint smile. “It’s w-wonderful.”

It’s fucking depressing, is what it is.

“Fuck,” Brayden mutters, wishing he had another drink.