Current mood:	hungry
Entry tags:	fanfic, kept, rps

Fic: A Kept Boy 57/?
Fandom: CWRPS
Pairing: Jeff/Jensen, Jared/Jensen
Rating: Adult
Warnings: Slavefic AU. Sexual, mental and physical abuse of adults and minors. Dark themes, adult concepts and language.
Disclaimer: This is in no way a true story.
Word Count: 2,900
AN: Master list of previous chapters found here. Cast of characters can be found here. Banner by the lovely and generous bloodquartz. And don't forget the other really awesome stories to be found at whatwekeep.

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"This is dangerous you know."

Jeff hooks his arm over the back of his chair and leans back, the smile pushing at his lips rueful and not really amused. "Well. It's probably inadvisable, but I think dangerous is a bit of an exaggeration."

If anything, Kane's gaze gets darker, thumbs pulling out of his pockets so he can cross his arms. "If anyone finds out, it'll cause questions we don't want asked," he says, in the calm, stretched voice that means he's gone through pissed and out the other end.

Jeff rubs the bridge of his nose. There's an old break there from his basketball days and it aches when he's tired, reminding him he's not what he used to be, all the way down to his bones. Most days, he counts that a blessing. "So we'll have to make sure no one finds out."

"Jeff—"

"No." He doesn't slam his hand down on the table, but it's a close thing. "It's important, Chris. What if—" Jeff hesitates, not sure which ground they're standing on, master and slave or otherwise. Not sure he has the right to cross this threshold, whatever their relationship's become in the last fifteen years. "What if it was you?" Jeff continues, quieter. "Wouldn't you want the chance?"

Jeff's watching Kane's face closely enough that he sees the faint flicker in the otherwise hard blue of Kane's eyes. "It's dangerous," Kane repeats, but it’s quieter and the steel’s gone out of his voice and Jeff knows he's more or less won.

"I think it’s important," Jeff says, quiet himself. He's finding it hard to meet Kane's eyes over the slow simmer of anger-and-something-else bubbling around in his belly, but he makes himself do it anyway. Because he owes Kane at least that much, at minimum.

"No, I get that, man. Just…" Kane sighs, jangling his bracelet with the agitated flick of his wrist. "We have to be careful. You have to be careful. And Jensen…" Another sigh, this one deeper than the first. "Look, I'm coming around on the kid, all right? Jensen's okay. One of us, all that good shit. I'm willing to admit that maybe I was a little wrong about him. But you. But when it comes to him, you're not as careful as maybe you need to be. And that's a problem."

It's a bitter pill to swallow and Jeff doesn't much like swallowing it, but this is what Kane does, what Jeff's asked him to do.

I am not that asshole, Jeff thinks, barely audible over the grinding of his jaw. And if I'm not going to be that asshole, then I am going to sit here and take this. Because this feeling right here? This is fucking childish, man. All this anger, it's just a child upset for not getting his way. I am not a child. I need to act like it.

"It is a problem," Jeff says slowly, as if by repetition he can get a better handle on what he wants and means to say. "And this is why I'm counting on you to help pull me up short when I'm too close to things. But." Jeff taps the pad of his finger against the table. "I want to do this for Jensen. I want to give him this, if I can. And I'm asking you to help me."

Kane's face scrunches in disgust. "There's no call to get all girly about it, man, damn."

Jeff rolls his eyes but his response is held off by the simultaneous buzz of his and Kane's phones, rattling across the tabletop. Text message; Kane actually knows what he's doing with his phone, so he gets to the message first: "It's Joe. Says they're about five minutes out." Kane lifts his head and shakes his hair back to eyeball Jeff. "Probably long enough for you to make it out the back if you leg it."

It's a test and Jeff knows it and resents it, but he also can't blame Kane for questioning him, all things being equal. So he just shakes his head. "Nah. I told you, I just needed the afternoon. I'll man up, face the music."

Kane looks at Jeff over the rims of his glasses. "With or without the help of modern chemistry?"

Jeff sighs pitifully. "Yeah, like I could convince you to tell me where you've hidden the drugs."

Kane shakes his head and clicks his tongue in mock regret, giving Jeff soulful blue eyes. "It's not that I don't sympathize, seriously. But you know and I know that she'll smell it on you, even if she doesn't, you know, literally smell it on you. Can't take the risk."

"You afraid of my mom?"

Kane doesn't blink. "Aren't you?"

"Sure, but I lived with her."

Kane shivers and then claps a hand on Jeff's shoulder, squeezing. "And believe me, you have my deepest respect for that. It may be the only thing I respect you for." Kane smiles, pleased with himself and then glances around. "So what do you think? Mess up the place, look deep in deep, important thoughts?"

Jeff shakes his head. "Nah. I should go out and meet the car, get it over with. Besides, you lied for me, you've suffered enough."

Moving with a graceful liquidity that Jeff usually forgets he has, Kane slips to his knees and prostrates himself on the carpet. "O, thank you, my Lord and Master, your muni…munfic… Goddamn it, I can never remember that word." Kane sits back on his heels with a frown.

"It's munificience, jerkwad. If you're going to kiss my ass, at least do it right."

"I thought that was why we bought Jensen?"

Jeff swats Kane lightly on the back of the head, scooting hastily out of the way of the return swipe and his smile lasts all the way outside until he sees Crispin wheeling the van with his usual pinpoint accuracy around the roundabout.

At the sight of him, his mother's lips tighten into a flat, grim—but perfectly rouged—line. Only Botox keeps her from making a similarly disapproving expression with her eyes. The rear of the car is empty of everyone other than Joe and Javier and Jeff breathes a small sigh of relief that Lady Hathaway and Madame Kreuk won't be making another appearance over dinner. His dressing down will be, at least, family only.

Small mercies.

Crispin nudges the van right up to Jeff so that it's only an easy movement of his arm and a step aside to open the door for his mother. She refuses to wear a seatbelt—wrinkles her clothes—and so there's nothing to hold her back as she turns to face him, knees and ankles kilted tightly together, hands pressed palm down to her thighs.

"Jeffrey." Her tone is like samurai steel; hammered, folded, forged and re-forged to be refined, flexible and sharp enough to slice through bone in a whisper. The look in her eyes—so like his own—isn't any better, a practiced mélange of maternal angst, sad, resigned fondness and, like a dollop of Tabasco to make it piquant, red, simmering anger.

"I'm sorry, Mom. It was important."

"So I heard." Another verbal cut, no less razor-keen than the first. His mother's always been a 'to the pain' duelist. "And from the cowboy, no less."

"Isn't that why we have slaves in the first place?" Even as the words slime their way off his tongue, Jeff cringes at how easily they come to him, how easy it is to slip into this persona that probably isn't nearly as fictional as he'd like.

"Hmm. In theory." She considers him a moment, head canted to the side and her dyed hair a match for the fading glories of the sun. Then, fast enough that he can't flee it, she licks her thumb and applies it to scrub at a real or imagined smudge on his cheek.

"Aw, Christ, Mom!" Jeff throws up his arm and flinches back—too late.

"Language, Jeffrey." His mother slips down from the high seat—only literally and in no way metaphorically—and puts her arm possessively and pointedly through his. "We Must Talk," she says, urging him toward the house with the pressure of her arm like the lead in a dance. The capitals in her words are bitten off and precise. "I'm sure your brother can amuse himself for dinner, can't you, darling?"

"Of course, Mother," Javier replies with such oily obsequiousness that Jeff cranes over his shoulder to look at him, eyebrows quirked. Javier rolls his eyes and makes an expressive—yet still mocking—face back at him.

He and Javier didn't have a childhood together. Hell, Jeff didn't know there was a Javier until he was in his mid-twenties. Things being like they are with them, Jeff doesn't really miss it—most of the time—but every now and again, he gets a weird, aching question in his mind about what it would have been like if they had been kids together. If he hadn't grown up so much by himself.

They'd had slaves, of course, scads of them; Jeff had been surrounded by them from his earliest memories, but he sometimes wonders what it would've been like if there'd been another kid like him, another set of shoulders to bear up under the family's expectations. And he wonders if they would have turned out to be allies, or whether they were always destined to be at odds, the opposite spectrums of Margaret Morgan's mothering skills.

Sam doesn't bat an eye at the news that Jeff and his mom will be taking dinner by themselves and that Javier will need a plate prepared for him at some point. The fact that Sam had eaten a few dinners—both in the family home and here—with his mother isn't something anyone ever mentions and Jeff has to fight his same sense of shame and amazement at how thoroughly his mother can erase Sam from any category other than 'slave'. As usual, the experience is leaving him with very little appetite to speak of, even though whatever it is that Sam sets in front of them smells delicious.

Also, as usual, despite her stated urgency in needing to talk with him right now, his mother refuses to settle down into any meaningful conversation, chatting instead about redecorating the house (a semiannual event), about what her roses are doing this year (his mother has six gardeners and never gets closer to her flowers than what's required to take credit for them), and the gossipy end of goings-on at Morgan International (not that his mother would ever stoop to calling it gossip).

The plus side of this is that Jeff only has to look attentive, nod and agree at the right places and laugh at her dry, barbed humor. The waiting though, the horizon-wide thundercloud of what's to come and the itching irritation of knowing how much she enjoys this slow cat-and-mouse. He reaches for Jensen a couple dozen times, gesture become reflex, and comes up empty every time because Jensen isn't there. Which, to be fair, can only be to Jensen's benefit. But it doesn't mean it isn't unpleasant and unsettling, like a newly removed tooth.

It's the last scrapes of a truly delicious key lime pie of china and alternating sips of wicked-dark, sin-sweet coffee before his mother gives him a sharp look over the gilt rim of her cup as though she's only just noticed he's there.

"Jeffrey," she sighs, when she's done with her sip, setting cup to saucer without a clink and reaching across the table to cover his hand with her own.

"Mother," he counters steadily, leaning back in his chair with an ease he doesn't at all feel. It's bothersome to him that he's not old enough to keep her from pushing his buttons with the ease of Jeremy totting up the year's tax returns and it bugs him more that he can't stop this hot-stomached, anxious feeling, like he's still four years old and getting called on the carpet for spilling grape juice on the upholstery.

She sighs again, differently, and something about her body language slips and softens, leaving behind… Well, it's not a different woman entirely, but she is a version of his mother he doesn't see very often, one that he sometimes chalks up to a wistful illusion of his little boy heart. "Look, darling," she says, squeezing his fingers warmly under hers. "I know I sprung this on you, all right? But I meant what I said—you're forty-two, dear. You're not a young man and I'm not a young woman and neither one of us has time for the months of wrangling it would've taken if I came at this slowly. I don't have time to fight with you."

Jeff's initial spurt of mulishness washes up sharply on the rock of a different thought altogether and he looks at his mother more sharply. "You…you're not sick or anything, right, Mom? I mean…is everything okay?"

Her laugh reassures him more than anything she could have actually said and her eyes shine a bit brighter when she says, "Well, it's nice to know my son still gives a damn about his old lady now and again, but yes, Jeff, I'm fine. Healthy as a horse. Just…an old horse."

"You're not old," Jeff scoffs, a reflex like sprinkling salt over his shoulder.

She leans across the table more to cup his cheek. "I'm old enough," she says finally. "Old enough to worry." She shakes her head. "You know I love your brother, but even if he was a Morgan, you know why I couldn't possible leave M.I. to him…"

"Javier's worked really hard," Jeff says, but it's faint, half-hearted, because he knows Javier as well—if not better—than she does. His mother gives him a look that's the closest she can come to actually raising her eyebrows and Jeff waves the air in front of him like he can erase the words. "Yeah, I know."

"He doesn't know how to hold onto things. Not like he should, not like a Morgan. He, sometimes I think…" His mother bites her lip delicately, a hint of uncertainty that's as uncharacteristic as it is unnerving. Then she shakes her head, casting it off. "Well. It's not important. The important thing is that you, my dear, are the last of the Morgans. And you have no children."

"I know, Mom," Jeff says, his voice coming out a lot weaker and more punk than he's comfortable hearing. "I know. I just… You can't walk in here and present me with a couple of…of co-eds barely out of diapers and expect me to play along. You can't put me to some girl like a horse at stud. It's demeaning to them. It's demeaning to me."

"And what am I supposed to do?" His mother straightens her back, her shoulders, mouth tightening up again. "Just wait and hope and pray? You know better than that, Jeffrey. I am not the sit-around type. And for all your financial successes, my dear, I am very much afraid that you are."

"Christ, it's not like I've been sitting around playing video games and smoking weed all this time, Mother. I have businesses to run. I have things to do. I have responsibilities."

I have Jensen, he thinks, but that's not reason enough, never reason enough, for his mother.

"You have a responsibility to everything that your family has sweat and bled for all these years! And if you think those responsibilities stop at the board room, you are sadly mistaken. I will not leave your father's company to strangers and vultures because you are too goddamned squeamish about doing your duty!" Jeff's seen her anger—as wrathful and catastrophic as any tantrum of his grandfather's, for all she's only a Morgan by marriage—but he doesn't know if he's ever seen her so passionately angry about a subject before, her voice shaking over the words. "I don't care if you fuck boys, Jeffrey. Have every pretty slave-boy in the state of California—hell, in the whole country—for all I care. But you will do this. You will give me a grandchild to take over when you and I are gone. Because there's never as much time as you think."

"Jawohl, mein Fuhrer." The sarcasm, the flippancy, the mocking and traced salute of his fingers, are as much a reflex of the years as the rest of it. Jeff doesn't have to fight hard for the words and, although he'll undoubtedly pay for them later, it has the desired effect of pissing her off enough that she throws up her hands and leaves.

When she's gone, and long enough after that he doesn't feel like it's punking out—Jeff lets his held breath out and grips either edge of the table, panting like he's just run a race.

"Jeff?"

Anyone else, it would feel like an intrusion. But Jensen… Jeff reaches out, blindly, and Jensen is there, kneeling at Jeff's feet, crowding into the space between Jeff's legs, letting Jeff manhandle and drag him close until it's just the two of them, Jeff's forehead tilted in against the solid bone of Jensen's and Jeff is holding on, just holding on, tight as anything.