Fire And Ice Three

I was a maniac, rushing around our guest bedroom, wildly stripping linen until only a thin white sheet remained on the narrow single bed, filling empty storage boxes with all the dross that had spilled from our lives into the spare closet and drawers, tearing the drapes from the window to display bare – though thankfully not overlooked – glass, even ripping the carpet from its runners to leave bare unsanded floorboards. By the time I’d finished, I was drenched in sweat and the room looked as stark and functional as a cell.

I moved the boxes out into my already overflowing office, marking some for storage in the communal basement and others for Goodwill – though I never did get around to doing either – and returned to the room with my small toolbox. I’d never been the most practical man with my hands, but I’d learned enough basics of DIY to remove the interior door handle so that the room could only be opened from the outside. Then I completely removed the connecting door between the room and its tiny en suite.

By then it was a different exertion that was causing the moisture to keep pooling on my forehead before dripping down my flushed cheeks – the strain of ignoring the faint cries of pain that had begun to filter through from the living room…

It took all my self-control – and, despite Scully’s often scathing comments, I have far more of that than is always immediately apparent – not to join my two lovers…

…lovers.

What a crazy, insane notion. Scully and Krycek. My lovers.

Almost as insane as my decision to turn our spare bedroom into a permanent rat cage.

Yet that was what I was doing. It never even occurred to me that I should turn the spare room into Krycek’s ‘bedroom’. I wanted, right from the outset, to set the tone of our future lives together. I might have accepted Krycek was our ‘lover’ but his role in our relationship was not, and possibly never would be, in any way a position of equality.

Besides, Scully hadn’t agreed I could bring Krycek home as my ‘lover’.

She had agreed I could acquire myself a pet rat.

Which sounds pretty brutal, except for the fact that the pet rat in question had been in hospital, fighting for his life, only a week previously and his physical debility hadn’t been simply due to his failure to seek medical attention for his septic stab wound. It had been exacerbated to almost fatal consequence by the fact he was so malnourished that he obviously hadn’t been caring for himself for weeks or even months before his mugging.

I’ll admit to a certain amount of guilt over my failure to *notice* that lack of self-care on his part, but I wasn’t prepared to accept the ultimate responsibility. Krycek was a grown man who’d always had the survival instincts of a gutter-rat. I should, perhaps, have recognized the signs of his breakdown – in retrospect, his increasingly self-destructive behavior *had* possibly been indicative of a mental illness - but neither Scully nor I were the cause of it. We were, admittedly, the instruments he’d used to enact his self-flagellation but we were only puppets dancing to a tune he’d carefully composed himself.

Nevertheless, my little rat had proven himself to be such an unreliable guardian of his own health that I considered it was practically my *duty* to impose a regimen of care over his physical welfare. And since, more worryingly by far, he’d proven himself incapable of even dreaming that Scully and I might care whether he lived or died, I’d decided it was time to take matters into my own hands and *force* him to accept my care for his health whether he trusted my motives or not. It didn’t matter to me at that point that he’d inevitably believe my concern over his welfare was no more than that of a man wanting to ensure his *toy* remained undamaged enough to play with.

The lack of trust he’d displayed when he’d failed to call us for help was totally unacceptable to both of us… though I admit that since it had taken his near death to make me face up to the fact I had certain ‘feelings’ towards him, it was perhaps unsurprising that he’d assumed I’d be indifferent to his demise. Unsurprising, but still patently *wrong*. My rat needed a swift lesson in re-evaluating his own worth.

A lesson I was more than prepared to give.

And it would be a physical lesson rather than a meaningless conversation. My rat was so used to lying himself that he was incapable of according value to mere words. He had proven himself to be a tactile creature, responding only to pain and pleasure, believing only in realities bought with the sensation of his own flesh. My rat was a hedonistic animal that lived from moment to moment with no thought or plan for the future. He merely clutched at brief moments of pleasure, never caring if he had to steal that satisfaction by enjoying the sensations of pain.

He was actually *extremely* sexually responsive to pain, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in itself, but it had made his decision to offer his body to his enemies, namely Scully and I, monumentally stupid. Not because we had chosen to accept his offer, but because he obviously had never cared *why* we’d said ‘yes’. That was the kind of stupidity that could have gotten him killed and, in view of his failure to call us when his wound became infected, I could only assume that suicide had *never* been far from his thoughts. It made both of us more than slightly ashamed of ourselves.

When he’d first approached us with his bizarre suggestion, we’d both been more than slightly horrified by the idea. But, as time went on and he doggedly persisted in calling us to repeat his offer, our resistance to the idea had crumbled. Between the constant shadow cast over our lives by his many personal betrayals of us both, his eager and apparently sincere desire to settle the debt between us and the habit I’d already developed of striking him physically at any possible opportunity, I started to become sorely tempted to give in to his demands.

Scully had her own reasons for believing Krycek deserved to suffer for his sins, but her gradual acceptance of the idea was layered with more complexity than mine. Where I was largely satisfied by the idea of having a pressure-valve to release my anger against a man who not only *deserved* punishment but was actively *begging* for that punishment, Scully’s motivations were many and varied. She believed that Krycek deserved to be punished, but saw that punishment as an almost religious process through which he could truly gain redemption. Having said that, she was more concerned about *my* redemption than his. She saw my own anger as being a form of cancer that was gnawing at me mercilessly, and if Krycek’s suffering would bring *me* relief then that justified his pain. While she never would have allowed me to seriously injure him just to satisfy my need for revenge, her love for me enabled her to turn a blind eye to the odd battery and bruising.

But all the above, while perfectly true, does *both* of us a considerable disservice because the bottom line was that despite our very real hatred of the things Krycek had done, we both shared a mutual fascination with his undeniable sexual attractiveness. Our anger towards him had never been impersonal. Our loathing of him had always been exacerbated by the fact that such potential for evil lurked inside such a gorgeous exterior. We both wanted him, and hated the fact we wanted him, so that just made us hate him all the more.

So although it wasn’t *easy* to make the decision to accept his offer, it was almost inevitable that our resistance to the idea would eventually crumble as he refused to take no for an answer and persisted in thrusting himself into our faces with his demands to be used and abused in any fashion we chose.

It certainly hadn’t started as a sexual thing between us. His first few visits, he’d been no more than a punching bag for my frustration under Scully’s careful supervision. She’d always stopped me before I went too far, and Krycek had limped out of our apartment those first times with no more than severe bruising and perhaps a split-lip or bloody nose. It had been on his fourth visit, by which time my anger towards him had finally begun to ebb enough that I was no longer attacking him in a blind rage that I finally noticed my assaults turned him on.

As my fists sank into his gut, I saw his pants bulge in reaction, and a couple of slaps across his face had him panting and gasping with an emotion that certainly wasn’t fear. And then, as a dark stain suddenly spread over his groin, my anger returned in a maddened wave as I abruptly understood that his visits had *never* truly been about his desire to pay ‘penance’ for his sins, the little bastard was simply getting his perverted fucking rocks off at my expense!

I think Scully thought I’d finally gone completely crazy when I grabbed the front of Krycek’s pants and started ripping them open. She grabbed my arm, trying to stop me as I dragged the pants down his hips, and screamed at me that she wouldn’t stand there and let me rape him in front of her.

I remember turning to her and yelling, “Rape? How the fuck can it be rape? Look at the bastard, Scully. Just fucking look at him.” And I spun him around, whipped down his boxers, and her mouth dropped open with complete stunned shock at the sight of Krycek’s wet, spent cock.

“He likes it, Scully. *That’s* why he’s coming here!” I’d screamed. “The little bastard fucking LIKES it.”

So she’d said nothing as I’d grabbed hold of his buttocks, pulled them apart and forced my own angry cock through the tight resistance of his hole. She’d just watched in frozen shock as I’d rammed myself in and out of his flesh so brutally that each thrust of my cock wrested a scream out of his throat, all the while taunting, “Do you like this TOO, you fucker? Is THIS what you really want?”

Since his own cock had reared back to almost instant life from the moment of my penetration, there wasn’t any point in him denying it. And when I’d finally pumped my wad into his treacherous lying ass, I’d made him stand there on rubbery legs and prove *just* how much he’d enjoyed my ‘rape’ by jerking himself off in front of us.

I hadn’t expected him to ever come back. As soon as he’d forced himself to come, I’d opened the front door, thrown his pants out into the hallway and made him limp brokenly out of the apartment half-naked, his stomach and face bruised by my fists, my semen trickling out of his swollen and torn ass, his expression so humiliated that he couldn’t meet either of our eyes, and I’d slammed the door in his face.

But about a week later, when I’d returned home from work in a blue-funk after dealing with yet more crappy aftermath of the official cover-up of the secrets Krycek himself had given to us in exchange for his immunity, Scully had taken one look at my face and had dialed his cell phone. An hour later he was at our apartment door, and although his face had burned at my immediate order that he was to drop his pants, he’d done so without protest and I’d discovered that he’d arrived with an already lubed and stretched hole.

And so the madness between the three of us had started in earnest. It had seemed almost, well, ‘natural’ to keep pushing the envelope a little further. To devise a series of escalating humiliations as though I was testing to see just how far I’d have to push him before he finally refused to respond to our summons. It became a game of mapping the extent of his masochism as we varied our methods of applying pain to his body in an attempt to find his most erogenous zones. And that’s how I eventually became addicted to the sight of him kneeling face down with a quivering, scarlet backside thrust high in the air.

It was the only time I could allow myself to accept the fact that Krycek was truly beautiful. When he was red-faced and weeping, kneeling like a true penitent, his striped and swollen ass high in the air, and his defenses so broken down that the skin around his asshole was fluttering and pursing like it was blowing silent kisses in my direction to try and entice my cock into his depths. It was the only time my anger towards him was completely extinguished by my desire for his flesh. It was the only time I looked at him with nothing but approval in my eyes. In those brief, perfect moments of his total willing surrender, I almost *loved* him.

But, in the wake of his near death, my memories of those tiny victories had been shadowed with self-doubt.

For a whole week, an argument had raged between Scully and myself as to what we were to do with him on his release from hospital. It had taken all my powers of persuasion to convince her that it was too damned late to turn our backs on him. Having invited Krycek into our lives, even under the bizarre and violent conditions of that invitation, we had accepted responsibility for him. Much as beginning to feed a stray cat obligates you to eventually invite the animal permanently into your house. Having dangled a thread of hope in his face, it would be too cruel to turn our backs simply because we’d suddenly realized we’d possibly bitten more than we could chew.

Yes, we were the wronged party. Yes, Krycek *did* owe us more apology than could ever be strapped out of his miserable hide. Yes, Krycek had *begged* us to use him as a vessel for exorcising our various ghosts. Yes, he had come to us voluntarily and had clearly gained as much physical satisfaction from suffering our wrath as we had gained in expressing it.

But that still didn’t justify our decision to deliberately blind ourselves to the mental cost Krycek had paid to give us our satisfaction. It certainly didn’t justify *my* willful ignorance of his mental state. I was far too well versed in psychological aberrations to cry innocence. My little rat was so far off the scale of mental normality that I doubted there was even a term to describe his condition.

And a few months previously, I would have said ‘so what?’. I had no responsibility for his inability to live with the things he had done. I wasn’t the arbiter of his uneasy conscience. Back then, I would have said, ‘serves the rat bastard right’ and would have walked away.

I should have walked away.

But I didn’t.

So I found myself in the unenviable position of being responsible for him after all.
I had accidentally acquired myself a pet rat.

Having acquired him, the only question became what I should do with him. This was no tame rat. Krycek had an inbuilt self-destruct button that made him bite and claw and struggle constantly for the freedom to die alone and unloved. He would submit to my fists, but not to my caresses. He would allow me to fuck him, but god forbid I might want to kiss him. He would bare his butt for my whip, but he’d never willingly bare his soul. I was permitted to abuse him, perhaps even to kill him. But I wasn’t permitted to love him even if I’d wanted to.

What we’d always shared was uncontrollable lust and overwhelming hate.

But, perversely enough, where before I had been happy to accept our mutual desire and loathing of each other, in the wake of his close encounter with death, I discovered I wanted far more than just his submission of his body. I wasn’t satisfied with what he’d offered me. I wanted to steal *all* of him. Mind, body and soul.

Now that I knew his lust for me was born out of an honest, if somewhat bizarre, feeling of love, I wanted us to mature to a new level where the dark sexual desires that bound us together eventually became just a role-play inside a far healthier type of relationship. I wasn’t prepared to face the possibility that I might come to genuinely love him too. That seemed at best unlikely, given our past, and I sincerely doubted he could handle me expressing that kind of emotion anyway. But, as I’d told him at the hospital, I was willing to forgive even if I couldn’t forget, and I was sure I could learn to at least feel some genuine affection towards him.

When I’d said that to Scully, she’d laughed at me. Not cruelly, but with a tired despair at my refusal to accept the obvious. AlexRat wouldn’t understand affection if it reared up and bit him on his far-too-sexy ass. He’d perceive any act of kindness on my part as evidence of weakness. He’d pour scorn any attempt on my part to gentle the interactions between us. And if I refused to give him the violence he craved, he’d undoubtedly turn tail and run.

“He orbits you like a moon caught in the gravitational pull of a sun,” she’d said. “He’s attracted to you because you’re his antithesis in so many ways. But you aren’t polar opposites. What *really* binds him to you is your mutual dark sexuality. He deliberately unleashes that small part of you because it’s the only aspect of your personality that has any similarity with him. He feels comfortable with that side of you. He doesn’t fear it, the way he fears the *real* you.”

She was right, of course. Except for her assertion that the dark side of my personality was something *other* than my true self. It wasn’t. But, as she’d pointed out, it was only a very *small* part of the total package that made up the entity known as Fox Mulder. It took furious anger or irresistible temptation to unlock that darkest part of myself - or maybe it just took Alex Krycek since no other person had ever managed to make me lose control of myself in that way - and she was right when she said he didn’t fear it, despite the blood and tears he always spilt as its consequence. In a very real way, Krycek had orchestrated and controlled every instance of abuse he’d suffered at my hands. He’d goaded me into striking him. He’d taunted me into fucking him. And never will I accept that my penetration of him was ever at all akin to rape. Because, ultimately, all three of us knew full well that Krycek’s ultimate aim of every confrontation between us was always to receive my cock in his ass.

So the question wasn’t whether Krycek would still accept pain as the cost of my penetration. It was a given that the violence between us only added to his sexual thrill in such encounters. The problem was whether he could ever accept that penetration *without* the violence that had always proceeded it. I had no intention of spending the rest of my life allowing myself to be needled and provoked into anger just to fulfill Krycek’s perverse desire to be punished. Particularly as I knew full well that a large portion of his so-called remorse was just an excuse for him to play out his sexual fantasies.

If I was going to keep my new pet 24/7, there were going to have to be a lot of changes in our relationship. I needed to find a way to keep Krycek in the sexually submissive frame of mind we both preferred, without me having to physically beat the shit out of him every night to re-establish my right to dominate him in bed.

Hence the idea of the ‘rat cage’.

Rats didn’t need closets and drawers in their cages, because rats didn’t wear clothes. Krycek thrived on a certain level of humiliation, and so I decided that keeping him permanently naked was an easy way to ensure he’d always be psychologically at a disadvantage to both Scully and myself. And, admittedly, the idea of a naked AlexRat crawling around the flat with his ass on constant display was a highly erotic image.

Rats didn’t need pillows and comforters, just sheets to keep stains off their mattresses. Rats didn’t even need beds, strictly speaking, but I had enough respect for my knees to want to keep them off the floorboards as I fucked my Rat’s hungry, sluttish hole.

Rats didn’t need drapes, since there were no neighbors within spying distance. They just needed a chain or two draped from the curtain rail, to hold them in place as they displayed their whipped cock to the passing birds and their whipped ass to any eyes passing the open ‘cage’ door. There was something absolutely irresistible about that image – my little beaten rat chained and displayed against the window-frame, his eyes watching the lights of the cars passing below, his face burning with humiliation at the thought of anyone training a pair of binoculars on him from a distant apartment block – his ass exposed for my constant pleasure… plugged perhaps… yes, permanently plugged with something thick and fat and achingly uncomfortable so he could never forget his new purpose in life.

Rats needed chains on their metal bedsteads too… Another good reason for leaving him a bed… chains that could strap his ankles wide apart, a pulley to pull them up and wide, perhaps with a chain to hold his cock high and taut to the ceiling…

The possibilities were endless.

And still, I could hear the irresistible sounds of his sobbing whimpers as Scully prepared his ass as thoroughly as I was preparing his little rat cage.

The dull, flat thwacks were undoubtedly the sound of her leather paddle slapping taut, quivering buttocks. She had learned to wield it with a skill that amazed the hell out of me. She never let temper, or pity, affect the steady punishing rhythm. She never left his flesh blotched with uneven color. By the time she had finished, he would be a solid, even scarlet from the tops of his buttocks to mid-thigh, with even the flesh between his legs a matching hue of pain.

By then, he’d be crying so hard, so defenselessly, that his face would be the same vivid color and his eyes would be water-logged pools of suffering.

He’d be, frankly, heart-wrenchingly beautiful.

And the fact that just imagining that scarlet and emerald splendor made my cock so hard it was difficult not to whimper in pain myself, was only bearable to my conscience because I *knew* my little rat had begged to gift me with that particular form of his beauty. It was the only way he could bear to offer me the pleasure I needed from his ass. He *needed* to offer himself in sacrifice.

So I couldn’t, in conscience, refuse to accept.

I’m not using that fact to fully justify myself. I was not unaware of the possible dangers of continuing the ‘game’ we were playing. I have never been self-deluding enough to pretend that my own hot and horny desire for his abject humiliation wasn’t something a little sick, or even a little perverted perhaps. The fact that he was willingly offering me my ‘fix’ didn’t negate the base and unhealthy nature of my own admitted addiction to seeing the unarguable beauty of his pain.

But it still gave me sufficient permission to indulge myself in what was ultimately only a ‘game’ between consenting adults.

And if the stakes were higher than any sane person should gamble, if the rules were bizarre and cruel by any ‘normal’ standards, then so-be-it. Where was the harm? Where was the offense? If a man who craved pain and humiliation as the price of saving his soul, was offered those things by a man who needed to inflict them to repair the gouges ripped in his own soul, wasn’t it simply a fortuitous circumstance that they had been brought together?

He loved me.

My little AlexRat loved me. He loved my touch, craved my attention, creamed for my blows and howled in desperation for the benediction of receiving my cock in his sluttish, eager ass.

And… well, I loved the way he crawled at my feet. Loved the way he whimpered and begged for my abuse. Loved the way his cock bled tears of lust every time I buried my fists in his guts and my dick in his bowels. Loved the idea of maybe even burying my *fist* in his bowels… And…so… maybe…. I loved *him* just a little, after all.

Not as I loved Scully, of course. I’d have cut my hands off before raising them to Scully. I’d never dreamed of burying my fist into *her* ass. I’d never wanted to see *her* face red with tears, or *her* buttocks bruised with a cane.

Which, judging from the sudden squeal of genuine distress from down the corridor, was what had just been harshly applied down AlexRat’s sensitive crack.

That told me two things - firstly, that my new pet had agreed fully to accept Scully’s discipline. She wasn’t physically strong enough to make him submit to that most painful of punishments. Time and experience had taught us that the pain he found most difficult to accept was the strike of a cane across the puckered flesh of his asshole. Even blows against his groin seemed to pale into insignificance next to his dread of being struck directly on his hole. AlexRat had a most incredibly sensitive asshole. Which was probably what made him such a spectacular fuck. But my point is, the fact he allowed her to cane him there, without any restraints and in the full knowledge that he was free to simply walk out of the door rather than accept her punishment, sent a throb of such heat to my own cock that I could barely breathe.

AlexRat had clearly chosen to accept Scully’s right to discipline him physically, in whatever way she chose, as the cost of his inclusion in our relationship. So he’d made the choice to stay with us.

But, the second thing the caning told me was he had chosen *not* to accept her right to use him sexually.

Naturally, Scully and I had spent endless hours discussing the various possible permutations of our new *threesome* and she had expressed, more than once, her assumption that her own use of Alex in a sexual manner was unlikely to continue. She’d come to the conclusion, somewhat reluctantly, that Alex was simply whoring himself to her as a means to get into *my* bed, and if Alex confirmed that impression she wouldn’t continue to use him in that way. She’d told me she was more than prepared to ‘punish’ him, but she wasn’t a rapist.

I’d laughed, at the time, at the suggestion of my tiny, perfect Scully ‘raping’ the big, bad AlexRat. But the more I’d thought about it, the more I’d seen the situation from her point of view, though I still thought she was wrong to back down on the issue.

While I accepted the fact Alex was gay meant he might not find her sexually ‘attractive’, he’d certainly never shown any physical problems in responding enthusiastically to her touch. So I was sure his reticence about letting her continue to use him was actually only a subconscious resentment at the idea of being dominated by a woman. In which case, he was going to have to rethink his chauvinistic attitude to her pretty damned fast. I wasn’t going to tolerate him using the fact she was a woman to draw invisible boundary lines between what she could or couldn’t do to him if his problem with the idea stemmed from his prejudice rather than his sexuality.

But it was an issue that would probably resolve itself. If she was prepared to initially accept his inclusion into his household under those restrictions, I was content to let the matter lie for the moment. I had enough understanding of the way Alex’s mind worked to be confident he wasn’t capable of separating his desire for physical abuse from his sexual response to receiving it. So, since Scully intended to establish herself as the alpha-dog of our relationship as far as the doling out of punishment was concerned, I was sure Alex would eventually reach a point of eventually *begging* her to use him sexually again.

But, in the meanwhile, her choice to use the cane in addition to the paddle, told me clearly that she’d chosen to establish her control over AlexRat’s sexual relations with me by ensuring he would feel an intensity of pain regardless of how gently I might choose to fuck him that night, out of respect for his injuries.

Not that ‘gentle’ was much of a likelihood. I planned to be careful, obviously. But gentle wasn’t on the cards.

Neither was the idea of *not* fucking him.

After all, I’d given him a *promise*, hadn’t I? I’d told him I’d find the sight of him kneeling red-assed and weeping irresistible. And, unlike AlexRat, I wasn’t a liar.

So, having prepared his room as much as possible given the fact that I hadn’t been confident enough of his decision to move in with us to purchase all the necessary equipment required for the total care of my personal pet rodent, I returned to the living room and, although I was expecting something rather dramatic of Scully, my heart almost stopped at the sight that greeted me.

A naked, scarlet-assed Rat kneeling on the coffee table, with his sobbing face pressed against the tabletop and his quivering buttocks raised to the perfect height for my cock to enter with ease. With an impressive act of balance, AlexRat’s right arm was lifted over his back and his middle and third fingers were pumping in and out of his already swollen asshole, in what I assumed could only be a desperate attempt to widen himself for my entry.

“No lube?” I asked Scully neutrally, although my own asscheeks tightened with reluctant sympathy at the Rat’s whimpers of distress as his dry fingers thrust between the whipped, over-sensitive flesh of his hole.

“He hasn’t made it yet,” she replied easily, her eyes cold.

“Oh?” I asked, becoming cruelly interested.

“Tell him,” she said, snapping the cane up between AlexRat’s open thighs. His high-pitched squeal of pain confirmed she’d struck his scrotum, so I was impressed that he resisted the natural urge to clutch at the abused flesh.

Scully gave an enigmatic, Mona Lisa smile in response to my raised eyebrows. “Tell Mulder what happens if you take your fingers out of your ass, Alex.”

“T…t…t…twelve of… of… the best…on m…m…my c…cock,” he stammered, his voice hitching with obvious fear.

I didn’t blame the Rat for his terror. Both of us knew that Scully *always* kept her promises, even though twelve full-strength strikes of the cane against his groin would probably put him right back in the hospital.

“Tell Mulder *why* you can’t take your fingers out of your ass, Alex,” Scully continued, her tone icy, and snapped the cane sharply against his balls again.

My rat squealed with pain, his legs trembling so wildly I feared he’d crash prone on the table - which wouldn’t do the stitches across his stomach a hell of a lot of good. “I…I…have to…to…make…make myself come,” AlexRat snuffled miserably, when he’d finally caught his breath. Then Scully raised the cane in obvious threat and he winced visibly as his fingers desperately increased their frenetic pace as they thrust between his buttocks.

I met Scully’s eyes and offered her an admiring smile, as I suddenly understood her fiendish order. Clearly, if Alex wanted to avoid a dry fuck from my cock, he had to give himself a dry fuck with his own fingers until he provided enough come to coat my not-insubstantial dick.

“I’m…um… not sure that’s going to work,” I told her quietly. “Without some stimulation to his cock, he won’t be able to come.”

Although some men could come simply from intense stimulation of their prostate, poor Alex always needed the additional stimulation of some friction against his cock. Which was one of the reasons it was so delightfully easy to torture him with his own arousal.

“Then it would to be a long evening for him, if I wasn’t prepared to help him out, wouldn’t it?” Scully replied. With a sweet and absolutely evil smile, she flicked the cane again, and this time, judging from AlexRat’s higher-pitched howl of agony, she’d struck not only his balls but also the tip of his cock.

Then, not giving him chance to recover, she began flicking the cane in rhythm to Alex’s desperate fingers, striking his cock with light stinging blows that soon had his buttocks dancing in a craze of pained over-stimulation. He gasped and squeaked and groaned his distress but continued to work his fingers frantically as though praying she’d show mercy if he displayed sufficient submission to her abuse.

“Faster,” she said, increasing her taps to a staccato, and he desperately kept time to her brutal rhythm, his fingers flashing in and out of his hole, his breath ragged and punctuated by sobs.

I was slightly shocked by her viciousness, given the concern she’d voiced earlier with regard to his physical weakness, and my surprise must have shown on my face because she laughed at my expression.

“I’m not damaging him, Mulder. There’s no strain on his stitches in this position, and he might as well get used to it from the get-go. I’ve already explained to him that we expect him to be on his knees with his face on the floor and his ass in the air at all times.”

I nodded. The position was designed to emphasize his position as fuck-toy and object of punishment. No doubt Scully had explained that to him thoroughly. The fact he had still chosen to stay, despite that condition, confirmed his acceptance of the role. And Scully was a doctor. She wasn’t capable of putting his health at risk. So, despite his whimpers of genuine pain and distress, I believed wholeheartedly when she said she wasn’t ‘damaging’ him.

We both understood AlexRat’s body well enough to know that the blows against his cock and balls, whilst undeniably painful, were the reason he was managing to assault his tender asshole so enthusiastically. The strikes of the cane were the kind of pain that he craved, allowing him to overcome the almost unbearable ache in his ass. I was pretty sure he wasn’t consciously aware of that distinction, that he was simply writhing in dual-agony and his sobs for mercy were for cessation of *both* abuses, but we’d mapped his body in long sessions of delicious torture, we knew its form and substance, and we knew, for certain, that another few blows against his slit would wrench an orgasm out of his body that would subsequently leave him humiliated enough to be ready for our next assault against his already uncertain defenses.

AlexRat was a jewel in the rough - dull, tarnished and seemingly worthless on the surface. But underneath the ragged edges of his personality, we had both spied something brighter, something that could be honed with effort into something of value and beauty. By the time we had finished with him, we intended him to sparkle like a diamond-cut crystal. But we had a lot of work ahead of us, admittedly pleasurable work from my perspective at least, to find the gem buried inside the Rat’s murky exterior.

Sure enough, another few slaps of Scully’s cane against his now red and angry cock, and Alex froze, shuddered, gasped and came with a guttural howl.

I was so entranced by the quivers rippling down his sweat-sodden scarlet flanks, that it took a shove of Scully’s hand in the small of my back to spur me into action. I reached my right hand under his dripping cock and scooped some of his slimy offering on to my fingers, while my left hand released my eager dick from its fabric prison. Then I smeared my hot flesh with his spunk, grabbed his hips in my hands and thrust without warning into his opened hole.

His dry stabbing fingers had paved the way for me and it was easy to glide slickly into his heated flesh although I was so much wider and longer than his own digits that his passage still felt deliciously tight against my cock. I thrust hard and deep, and my rat rewarded me with a grunt of obvious discomfort – partly due, I’m sure, to the bite of my zipper against his swollen buttocks as I bottomed out into him.

Then only the strength of my hands kept his ass aloft as I swung my hips back and forth, stabbing him with a series of short, brutal thrusts that soon had him sobbing with combined pain and arousal.

Harder and harder I rode him, almost to the point of bruising my own cock, my hips slapping against the intense heat of his paddled buttocks, my flesh creating unbearable friction against his caned pucker, my dick punching into his bowels with the violence of an angry fist, and all the time I was fucking him, Scully was slapping his cock and balls with the paddle she’d used on his ass. Even from my position, I could tell her blows were so light they were barely more than taps, but against his over-sensitized flesh they must have stung like hell so it was barely surprising he was gasping and crying and pleading for mercy.

“I warned you,” she said, in a voice chilly with triumph. “Pain is the only currency we deal in here. If you want the pleasure of Mulder’s cock in your undeserving ass, you have to accept the price *I* set for that privilege. Do you understand me, Alex?”

“Yes,” he gasped, his hips twisting crazily as her assault on his groin continued. “Yes, I under…understand.”

“And why don’t you deserve Mulder, Alex?” she continued, mercilessly.

“Because I’m scum…I’m slime… I’m shit….”

I wasn’t happy that she made him say it. It was the exact opposite of our avowed intention to build his self-confidence up, rather than reinforce his sense of worthlessness. But I accepted that he probably had to wallow a little deeper in his misery before he’d be in the right frame of mind for us to start some serious work on creating our vision of a new and improved Krycek. So I tuned out the desperate, pathetic litany I’d heard so many times before. I’d heard her drag the words out of his mouth so often that I’d lost the ability to even feel satisfaction at his broken tone, let alone the ego-stroking knowledge that it wasn’t the pain that had driven him to speak as much as his understanding that it was the price she was demanding in exchange for my brutal assault on his ass.

There was something horribly empowering about knowing AlexRat was so addicted to my violent fucking that he’d accept any pain or humiliation to receive my cock’s attention. But that wasn’t why I tuned out his sobbed confession. It was the undeniable fact that every strike of Scully’s paddle made my little rat’s hips buck and twist like a wild bronco’s and the resultant friction on my cock was such ecstasy that I found it impossible to concentrate upon anything except the sensations flooding through my groin. And when I came, I erupted so hard into his ass that I surely flooded him with my semen. I felt it gushing out of me, in hot, merciless spurts right into his depths, and I continued to ride that sensation, driving in and out of his flesh, until the part of me that remained inside him was limp with exhaustion.

I pulled my wet, slopping dick out of his hole, tucked myself back into my pants, and stepped away from him into Scully’s waiting arms. We kissed, long and hard, her breath eager against my mouth, her body supple and inviting, and her natural almost frigid reticence to my touch forgotten in the excitement of witnessing my assault on AlexRat’s ass.

I knew that it was the Rat who had brought her blood to fever-pitch, that it was the Rat who stirred the longing in her loins, but I realized suddenly that it didn’t matter, because it would be *my* cock she’d open her legs for later to satisfy her sudden flush of desire. In our unholy trinity, AlexRat was the key to the relationship between Scully and I.

And, I think, that was the moment I decided I *could* learn to love him after all.

So I was quite gentle as I helped him down off the table onto the floor and told him we’d finished with him for the night so he could crawl to his room and get some sleep. I was positively friendly as I explained the basic ‘rules’ of his tenure. That there was a special head connected to the shower of his tiny en-suite to ensure he kept himself clean for me at all times. That he’d find lube and a set of plugs in the cupboard under the sink, and I expected him to use them to keep himself permanently prepared for my pleasure. That he was never to move throughout the apartment in any fashion other than crawling on his hand and knees. That his first duty, every morning, after rising and cleansing himself, was to present his upturned ass to Scully and request her politely for a paddling so that I’d never see his buttocks any color except the particular shade of red I most preferred. And that, if he continued to please me as he had that night, I would refrain from caging his cock to prevent his own release.

I fully expected gratitude for that leniency, and wasn’t disappointed. Although he was clearly incapable of speech at that moment, AlexRat raised his exhausted head off the carpet sufficiently to press his lips against the toe of one of my boots before wearily dragging himself out of the room, his swollen buttocks shivering with exhaustion and his inner thighs glistening where my semen was beginning to trickle out of his enlarged hole.

Scully seemed less impressed. She watched Alex’s slow, pained retreat with a pinched expression on her face, and when she turned to me her expression was confused.

“I thought we’d agreed he had to earn privileges like that,” she said. “How’s he ever going to get past his need to be punished by us, if we don’t make him believe he’s *earned* out forgiveness inch by painful inch?”

“I know,” I agreed, my expression appropriately contrite. “But it seemed to me that he *had* earned a concession simply by agreeing to submit to you tonight, Scully. He let you cane him, and you know that’s the punishment he fears the most.”

“Why do you think I did it?” she countered. “There was no point starting this whole crazy idea if he wasn’t sincere. I wanted to know straight away whether he was going to cut and run the moment it got tough. But it seems he wants you, more than he fears me.”

“It’s not just that. He wants to suffer, Scully. He wants to *earn* his forgiveness.”

“That’s easier said than done, considering his masochistic sexuality,” she pointed out, a little snidely. “Which is why we were *supposed* to start this by denying him any sexual release.”

“I changed my mind,” I admitted. “I think it will be easier to get him to adjust to the rest of it, if he *is* sexually satisfied,” I explained. “Submitting to us 24/7 is going to be a hell of a lot for him to adjust to. His previous submission has been limited to coming around every week or so for a couple of hours of humiliation, so he’s always had plenty of time to recover his strength and equilibrium. When he wakes up tomorrow morning he’s going to be sore as hell. It’s going to take a lot of courage for him to crawl in here and ask you to paddle his already aching butt. Courage he might not find if he knows he isn’t going to receive a reward for his obedience.”

“So much for his desire for redemption through suffering,” she scoffed, though her expression had softened slightly at my explanation.

“Unmitigated suffering creates resentment in the recipient, rather than acceptance and understanding,” I reminded her. “Sticks and carrots, Scully. Besides, it’s a privilege that can be taken away, and he knows it. He’s smart. He’ll quickly learn the benefits of pleasing us.”

“And what about you, Mulder,” she asked, her face creasing with a different kind of concern. “How are *you* going to cope when that happens? When you run out of reasons for applying the sticks?”

It was a good question, given my undeniable pleasure in inflicting hurt upon my pet rodent. It deserved a good answer… and I hadn’t got one to offer. I had only an honest one.

“I’m not proud of myself, Scully. If I could turn back the clock, to when Krycek first made us the offer, I would. I don’t like the part of me he taps into. But it’s too late for regrets. I opened Pandora’s box and gave life to dark impulses inside me that always existed but should never have been acknowledged. I’ve developed a taste for satisfying those cravings, just as Krycek has developed a hunger for being on their receiving end. At the moment, what we share is an unspeakably vile addiction to each other,” I admitted, with considerable shame. “I *like* hurting him. Pain transforms him. It strips away his layers until he becomes the most sexually desirable creature I’ve ever known. So, in all honesty, I’d be lying if I said I object to his masochism. But, with your help, I honestly can see a possibility of turning this viciousness between us into something still mutually satisfying but far healthier. If I can learn to control my temper with him, like you do, I can give us what we both crave without the situation spiraling into violence.

“Then, until you *do* learn that self-restraint, I think all punishments should be applied by me,” Scully replied, her tone matter-of-fact. “Particularly while he’s still so physically weak.”

I nodded my complete agreement. Considering the state of the rat’s stomach, the last thing any of us needed was for me to forget myself and smack my fists into his guts. I was honest enough to know I’d probably still smack his face if he was stupid enough to give me any back talk, but for now I was satisfied to let Scully handle all necessary paddlings and whippings. Besides, given her dedicated thoroughness to any task she set her mind on, I was sure the rat’s buttocks would be kept sufficiently reddened to reduce the risk of him daring to provoke either of us to genuine anger.

“Set the alarm for six,” Scully said, as we retired to our bedroom.

“Why?”

“Because it’s a good idea to start as you mean to go on. If Alex has obeyed you, he’ll have gone to bed plugged and lubed, so it will be easy for you to give him a wake up fuck,” she replied blandly. “He needs to learn, right from the outset, that he’s always available for your use.”

I nodded my reluctant agreement, and seeing my expression she laughed sadly. “I know,” she agreed. “He’ll be swollen and sore from tonight. But he’s still slut enough to enjoy it and, by your own reasoning, that little pleasure is going to help him cope with the rest of tomorrow.”

She was right, but I still found myself plagued with a little guilt when I rose the next morning, entered the rat’s ‘cage’ and found him sprawled facedown on his bed. He was snuffling miserably in his sleep, as though the pain of his buttocks had followed him into his dreams. Perhaps it had. I hadn’t fully appreciated the thoroughness of Scully’s paddling until I saw how reddened and puffy his flesh still appeared seven hours later. His legs were spread a few inches apart, possibly to keep his paddled thighs from touching each other but more likely as a result of the thick plug wedged firmly into his hole. I knew from the color of its base that he’d chosen the smallest out of the collection, but even that was substantial enough that his pucker appeared an even angrier red than it had the night before.

It was clear my little rat *really* wasn’t going to enjoy being woken with a thorough reaming. So I’m a little ashamed to admit that my cock was already hard and weeping with eager excitement as I teased the plug out of his ass. There was a tiny resistance, but not enough to wake him. He’d slathered enough lube into his passage to slide the fat bulb inside that his skin was still slick with it.

I stared for a few moments at the angry red flesh surrounding his dark glistening hole, and then I climbed between his open legs. I took my weight on my hands, not wanting any part of my body to touch him and alert him to my presence, and then I lowered myself until my cockhead was positioned at his open entrance. I waited again, until his deep even breathing and occasional sniffled sob, assured me he was still asleep, and then I buried my cock inside him in one smooth, powerful, merciless thrust.

He woke with a startled scream, so disorientated that he struggled wildly beneath me for escape. But I dropped down and used my bodyweight to ensure he remained skewered on my cock until he came to his senses enough to remember where he was.
The moment he stopped fighting me, I began to move inside him in short, hard strokes.

“Shit, Mulder,” he gasped. “You’re hurting me.”

“So?” I replied, deliberately deepening my thrusts until he was bucking wildly in a frantic attempt to drive me out of his ass. “That’s what you like,” I reminded him.

“No,” he sobbed. “You’re *really* hurting me.”

“Deal with it,” I replied, continuing to drive into his deliciously quivering heat.

He continued to struggle uselessly for a few moments, attempting to clench his ass with forbidding tightness around my cock. But his flesh was too sore and stretched to defeat me. His efforts only increased the friction between us, heightening my pleasure and deepening his discomfort. Eventually, he shook his head, either in despair or disbelief, and then he… well, softened is the only way I can describe it, as he accepted that I had no intention of stopping my assault on his tender flesh. He stopped fighting me, stopped even pleading with me, and deliberately opened his legs a little wider in silent but obvious submission.

“Lift your ass,” I instructed, and he hauled his legs up enough to rise slightly on his knees. I rewarded his obedience by reaching under his belly and grasping his cock in my right hand. His surprised squeal might have been pain, given that his cockhead was still undoubtedly sore from being caned and paddled the night before, but the sound certainly wasn’t one of complaint. His dick was so hard and hungry in my hands that it only took a few quick pulls against his sheath before he was screaming with undisguised pleasure, arching under me in orgasm and his hole was squeezing and clenching against my own eager flesh with enough enthusiasm to pull me over the edge too.

“You’re such a slut, Alex,” I announced cheerfully, as he collapsed with a groan into a puddle of his own semen. I pulled out, rolled off him and rose to my feet. “When you’ve cleaned yourself up, go to the kitchen and ask Scully for your morning paddling.”

I left before he could swear at me. I really didn’t want to start his first day in our apartment on a bad note.

Besides, I had a little more DIY to finish before breakfast.

As I’ve already explained, I hadn’t felt confident enough to purchase all the various equipment I’d wanted, as though going ahead with my preparations for Alex’s arrival might have jinxed his decision to move in with us. But I’d spent several long nights trolling the web, discovering a range of rat ‘toys’ that had both shocked and excited me – and a large portion of my excitement had been to discover that such things existed for purchase at all. Perhaps the relationship I was planning on establishing between us wasn’t ‘normal’ but neither was it as unusual as I’d assumed. Rare, yes, but definitely shared by other people judging from the variety of amazing toys I found for sale – and although I so far had only book marked the sites of my potential purchases, I’d already stolen a couple of ideas to devise a temporary home-made solution to the question of how to feed my pet rat.

Scully and I had discussed the problem extensively. Alex was too malnourished already for us to accept him *not* eating properly and although good food would encourage his physical recuperation – and thus his capacity for resistance – we both understood that our domination of him was psychological, so an increase in his physical strength wasn’t really going to be an issue.

My personal preference had been the idea of feeding him on the floor like a dog but Scully had overruled me. She hadn’t objected to the psychology of making Alex kneel and eat food out of a bowl, she simply hadn’t accepted its practicality. With only one arm for balance, Alex would have been reduced to lapping food up with his mouth and, as Scully had pointed out, that would dramatically reduce our options of what we could feed him. She’d also pointed out that the position would hardly help his digestion.

But letting him simply sit at the table with us would have been completely counter-productive. There was little point in making Alex crawl to the table on his hands and knees, if we were then going to throw away that psychological victory by letting him eat and converse normally for half-an-hour. Given the elastic nature of Alex’s submission, the time it took to eat a meal would be enough time for him to possibly resent and resist the instruction to return to his hands and knees and following each meal with a session of paddling him back to submission was hardly conducive to getting some weight on his bones.

So I’d come up with a solution that had made Scully squirm with combined horror and fascination. She’d even insisted on dropping her pants and gingerly sitting on the small stool herself to test how it felt against her skin. She’d announced, within seconds, that it was absolutely fiendish even *without* a paddled ass to increase its effect and I’d felt quite smug about my ingeniousness. I’d sacrificed our front door mat, butchering it into the right size to cover the seat of the stool with a ‘cushion’ of inch-high stiff bristles. And after I’d tried it myself, I agreed with Scully that it was definitely fiendish. But since its construction two days previously, I’d been contemplating an improvement to its design and, although seeing Alex’s raw, sore hole that morning had given me a moment of doubt, I felt that changing its design *after* its first use would send a negative signal to the Rat. I couldn’t afford to let him think I’d added the modification as some form of punishment. He had to accept, right from the start, that it was simply the way things were going to be.

Otherwise, I might as well just forget purchasing the item I’d book marked to be Alex’s permanent chair and although my bank manager would have no doubt been relieved, owning it was a fantasy that I just *had* to fulfill.

So leaving Alex to Scully’s more than capable hands, I hid myself in our bedroom and added the final touch to the stool.

By the time I emerged, the sound of their morning ablution was so loud that I could have closed my eyes and found my way to the kitchen simply by following the Rat’s whimpers of distress. I was pleasantly proud of them both. Of Alex, for submitting himself to the punishment and of Scully for administering it despite his quite heart-rending sobs.

He was bent face-down over the kitchen table, with a soft pillow cushioning his stomach, and his buttocks were already such a brilliant hue that they radiated enough heat to practically cook eggs on. But that wasn’t the only reason for the pathetic noises emerging from his throat. Scully had established a three-beat rhythm of spanks. Left cheek, right cheek and then a blow directly against the base of his plug. He was dancing from toe to toe, his butt wriggling a crazed desperate waltz, his sobs a combination of genuine pain and obvious, if reluctant, sexual excitement.

Scully was being rather naughty, under the circumstances, since there was no practical difference between what she was doing than her strapping on her dildo and simply giving him a damned good fuck. But psychologically there *was* a huge difference, and we all knew it. She was using her knowledge of Alex’ body to turn him on, but distancing herself from the heat building in his groin to make his reaction something that could only humiliate him. Sure enough, soon after my entrance she ceased her assault, raised a curious but not disapproving eyebrow to the modified stool I was holding in her hands, and told Alex to rise and face her.

It took him a few minutes to collect himself and rise groggily off the table to stand in front of her on weak, wobbly legs. Despite having come less than an hour previously, his cock was rock-hard and scarlet with arousal. And, regardless of Alex’s posture of slumped-shoulders and flushed humiliated face, his cock bobbed excitedly over his pubic hair, rearing and bowing in clear homage to Scully’s skill with the paddle.

With a cold expression on her face, Scully deliberately let her cool gaze drop to his groin and her mouth twisted into a sneer.

“Is that for me?” she mocked, flicking a contemptuous finger against his engorged cock.

Alex closed his eyes, shuddered, and clearly wished the floor would open up and swallow him whole.

“If it is, it’s mine, Alex. Give it to me,” Scully snapped.

I actually found myself cringing with empathy as two slow tears of terrible humiliation slipped down Alex’s flushed cheeks, but I was in too much awe of Scully’s impressive show of dominance to even dream of interfering. I watched with total fascination as, eyes still closed, Alex moved his hand reluctantly to his treacherous cock and masturbated himself for her until his cock expelled the come she’d declared hers by right.

Oddly, there was nothing particularly sexual about the sight. Scully was like a wrathful goddess demanding homage, and Alex spilled his small offering with a groan of embarrassment rather than pleasure. Then he stood there, shaking, his hand sticky with his own juices, his head bowed in defeat, his legs trembling so much that he seemed likely to collapse to his knees at any moment.

Which seemed a good time to produce my ‘surprise’.

I dropped the stool next to the table, in the place he’d been standing for his morning paddling, removed the cushion off the tabletop, and slapped Alex’s smarting buttocks hard enough to gain his full attention.

“Sit down, Alex. It’s time for breakfast.”

He shook his head, as though trying to snap out of a daze, and then his eyes widened with such comical horror that I had to bite the inside of my mouth to keep a straight face.

“No way,” he gasped, backing a way a step only to collide with a sharp snap of Scully’s paddle against his backside. He yelped and froze, not even reacting as her hand grasped the base of his plug and teased it out of his body. His eyes were mournful and confused as they sought mine. “I don’t… I can’t,” he gasped, in a clear plea for mercy.

“You can, and you will,” I replied cheerfully. “I made it for you specially, Alex. Don’t you like it?”

Although it was clear he *didn’t* like it, something softened in his eyes at my declaration that I had made the stool for him with my own hands. It was the first time I’d ever gifted him with anything and the significance of that wasn’t lost on him. It might have been an object of deliberate torture, but I had made it for *him*. I had taken time and effort and thought to create something for *him* alone.

“I like it,” he whispered finally, and his husky voice wasn’t subdued because he was broken and defeated, his quietness was awe and acceptance of my perverse gifting.

He hissed loudly as he lowered himself onto the fat rubber dildo I’d bolted into the center of the stool, and it took him several deep breaths before he could take its entire length into his body. Then he jerked and whimpered with distress as his buttocks came to rest on the prickly bristles, but by that time he was too well skewered to even squirm from the biting sensation on his swollen ass cheeks.

I was pleased to see his exhausted cock twitching with weary interest, despite the quiet tears rolling down his face, and so was satisfied that the sensations of my fiendish ‘present’ were being fully appreciated by at least *one* part of Alex’s body.

Masochistic little rat.

“After we’ve eaten, Scully’s going to shave you,” I told him, as she busied herself preparing breakfast.

His hand moved automatically to caress the dark stubble on his cheeks before something in my expression made his eyes flare with alarm and drop towards his exposed groin and the dark curls nestling his cock.

“She’s not going to shave you *there*,” I laughed, and waited for his look of swift relief before continuing. “She’ll use cream on your cock and ass.”

He paled slightly, but swallowed any objections unspoken.

“Today’s your last chance, by the way,” I continued, my face deliberately expressionless.

He frowned with confusion. “Last chance?”

“To leave,” I explained. “You’ve already had sufficient taste of how things are going to be between us to make an educated decision whether you want to stay. If you can’t handle it, this is your final opportunity to get up and walk out of that door. If you stay, we’ll take that as tacit agreement to all our future behavior towards you. I’m making this point clearly. There will be no ‘safewords’ in this game.”

“Game,” he repeated weakly, his eyes so dark and confused that it was obvious he’d never perceived our interactions in that light.

Taking advantage of his momentarily stunned state, I bent down and planted a soft but meaningful kiss against his lips. He flinched from my touch, unprepared to receive even so small a gesture of affection, whereas he’d *never* flinched from my fists. And I felt a surprising depth of sorrow at this confirmation that, despite his unarguable love of me, he was comfortable only to receive my anger. So when his jerking shock made him gasp with pain as the bristles of the stool bit savagely against his swollen butt, perhaps it was perversity that made me take advantage of his open lips and press my tongue into his mouth to deepen the kiss into something more savage and demanding.

As he quivered on his fiendish stool, I plundered his hot mouth with my stabbing tongue until he was breathless and sobbing, overcome completely by both my rape of his mouth and the brutal gnawing of the stiff bristles into his tenderized flesh. And, when I pulled back I was both pleased and amazed to see that his cock had reared back to hungry life and was waving its definite interest like a flag of surrender.

In a lot of ways, Alex had aged dramatically in the few years I’d known him. His face bore lines of suffering and pain. His temples were shot through with faint traces of silver, and the lushness of his flesh had reduced to a spare, whipcord thinness that didn’t suit his frame. But, despite that, his third erection in less than two hours proved he clearly still had the libido of a teenager.

Luckily for me.

I took a lesson from Scully’s book, stepping away from him and staring pointedly down at his engorged cock until he blushed with abject shame.

“It’s mine, Alex. Give it to me,” I said, in a deliberate echo of Scully’s earlier words.

He cringed visibly, but since that only increased the pain in his buttocks his erection stayed firm despite his obvious distress at my demand.

It was another thing that Scully and I had learned from our previous encounters with Alex’s body - that he had a complete horror of being forced to masturbate in front of our curious eyes. So, naturally, we both were intending to use that knowledge to our full advantage.

“I’m waiting,” I reminded him impatiently, as he made a half-hearted attempt to stroke his cock.

His eyes glanced sideways to Scully, he shivered miserably as he saw she had ceased her cooking to watch his humiliation, and then he closed his eyes tightly and proceeded to pull and tug on his erection until he came. It was more of a weak dribble over his fingers than a full orgasm, but it was still pretty impressive under the circumstances, so I kindly handed him a small tissue to wipe his fingers as Scully returned to piling three plates with a hearty breakfast.

He stared at his full plate with a different kind of horror. “I’m…I’m not really hungry,” he muttered, his eyes downcast.

“You’re not getting off that stool until your plate’s empty,” Scully snapped, in a no-nonsense tone and, paling at the idea of spending any length of time sitting on the vicious bristles, he nodded his head in sullen understanding and reached quickly for his fork.

I was pleased to note she’d thoughtfully cut up his food into easy mouthfuls. She sincerely *did* want him to eat every morsel on his plate. As I’ve already said, he was painfully thin. So even if the only reason he ate his breakfast was to escape the cruel pressure of the bristles digging into his backside, I felt a certain amount of relief when he finally dropped his fork onto his empty plate and waited hopefully for permission to leave the table.

Scully met my eyes and we had a silent but meaningful exchange, after which she told Alex she was so pleased with him that he could shave *himself* that morning. He looked both startled and grateful for the concession, and I hid a smile of satisfaction that Scully had clearly taken on board my comments about carrots being more effective than sticks.

“Go to your room and wait for Scully to bring you what you need,” I told him and, though I pretended not to notice his difficulty in extricating himself from the stool, I made a mental note to lubricate the dildo a little better in future.

He started to crawl slowly from the room, his bobbing ass glowing like a beacon, and Scully waited until he’d made his painful way right to the doorway before calling him back.

“You’ve forgotten something, Alex.”

He froze in place for a moment, and then turned slowly to face her. His eyes were tragic with misery and disbelief when he saw the butt plug she was holding in her hands. I saw a flash of temper cross his features, a momentary consideration of telling us both to go to hell, then he dropped his head towards the floor and crawled slowly back through the room to where Scully was waiting. I said nothing, not even when Scully refused the submissive offer of his buttocks and instead made Alex reinsert the plug himself. Neither did I comment when she said that Alex had just earned himself six whacks of the paddle for breaking a ‘rule’, even though she applied all six directly against the base of the plug and Alex was literally howling by the time she’d finished.

I waited until Alex had hauled himself out of the room again, his movement so slow and careful that it was obvious he was in considerable pain, before turning to her with a raised eyebrow. “That was a little harsh, don’t you think?”

“Am I seriously supposed to think you disapproved?” she mocked, her eyes dropping pointedly to the definite bulge in my pants.

I flushed under her gaze and shrugged lightly. “I can’t pretend I’m not turned on when I watch him submitting to your punishment,” I admitted, “but I don’t think his asshole was in any condition for more abuse. You could have paddled his cock instead.”

“To drive home the lesson he should have plugged his ass?” she retorted scornfully. “But I agree he’s pretty inflamed. I’m planning on giving him an anti-biotic suppository after his shower.”

“Oh?” I said, as the tone of her voice suggested she still had more plans to abuse my rat that morning.

She smiled at my look of interest. “You’re more than welcome to watch.”

So biting my lower lip, I followed her as she walked first to our room to pick up a bag, then into the rat cage, where Alex was kneeling miserably on the floor in expectation of her arrival. I deliberately walked to the far wall and leant against it, with my arms crossed in front of my chest, to indicate I had no intention of interfering between them.

“Sit up,” Scully instructed, and Alex rose up on his knees, keeping his eyes trained firmly on the floor.

Scully reached into her bag and retrieved a safety razor, shaving foam and a large tube of dilapidatory cream. “Shave yourself, then remove the plug, give yourself a thorough enema and then apply the cream to *everywhere* you have pubic hair. If I find any hairs remaining on your balls or ass I’ll remove them one by one with a pair of tweezers,” she promised. “You can walk,” she added, when Alex stared helplessly between the items in his hand and the doorway of the en suite.

I say doorway, although there wasn’t an actual door. Scully had told me to remove it from its hinges, and I’d assumed that was to prevent Alex from locking it from the inside. Now, as I watched his slow, painful attempt to obey her orders, I realized that her real intention in removing the door was to deny him any sense of privacy for even his most personal activities.

He was literally crying, albeit quietly, as he pushed the enema hose up his ass and flushed himself out in front of us and I don’t think I’d ever seen him so utterly dejected and humiliated as the moment he washed the dilapidatory cream off with the showerhead and first saw the bare skin of his groin. I understood his distress. There was something unbelievably strange about the sight of his bared cock and balls. The lack of hair made his genitals more prominent, but the vision was oddly juxtaposed with the pre-pubescent hairlessness. He looked… naked. Truly naked and vulnerable. So much so, that when he finally shuffled out into the bedroom he had his hand clenched protectively over his groin as though to hide it from us.

“Lie face down on the bed, I want to take a look at your ass,” Scully said, reaching into her bag and retrieving a pair of latex gloves.

He looked understandably alarmed, but complied without protest. Possibly just so he could hide his naked cock and balls by burying them into the mattress.

Scully snapped the gloves onto her hands, reached for a jar of antiseptic gel and coated it liberally over her fingers before starting to press carefully at the raw, angry flesh surrounding his hole. Ignoring his mild whimpers, she used her fingers to probe deeply into his passage, and a sudden muffled yelp told me she’d successfully found and massaged his prostate. She took a suspiciously long time to apply the gel to his passage, turning the application of the soothing medicine into a definitely deliberate thorough finger fucking. Alex was writhing and moaning, apparently torn between pleasure at the relief the cooling gel was giving him and horror that her ministrations appeared to be arousing him sexually. He definitely seemed to buck with more hunger than pain as Scully first produced a suppository out of her bag and pushed it deeply into his passage, and then used a slim, long plug to seal it inside him.

“Turn over,” she said, slapping his buttocks to encourage him, and when he rolled over, wincing as his butt touched the mattress, his cock was definitely at full attention yet again.
I wasn’t sure whether to be envious of his amazing libido or pity him for it.

Scully pretended to be offended by the sight, her mouth pursing into a moue of distaste, but it was obvious she’d done it to him deliberately. It struck me that Alex had definitely bitten off more than he could chew when he’d told her he didn’t find her sexually attractive. She seemed positively determined to teach him she was *more* than capable of arousing him whenever she felt the whim to do so.

He was so damned gorgeous lying there, with his cheeks as red as his cock, with his eyes stark with misery at his own inability to control his reactions to her skilful playing of his body’s reactions, that I had to fight the impulse to throw his knees against his shoulders, rip out the small plug and give him the attention he truly craved.

But I knew his ass was too damned sore to take my cock again so soon, so I settled for telling him to get up and kneel next to his bed. Scully looked at me with annoyance, clearly thinking I was going to usurp her rightful ‘tribute’. I laughed and shook my head. “He doesn’t need his mouth to jerk off for you,” I pointed out crudely, unzipping my pants to release my eager cock. So while his hand frantically worked his cock to provide the offering she demanded, I thrust myself between his lips and gave his face a thorough and satisfying fucking.

In contrast to the now almost pathetic dribble of come that trickled out of the rat’s weary cock, I ejected a veritable fount of jism down his throat while he swallowed desperately and tried not to choke. By the time I released his head, he was red-faced and coughing, and looked so exhausted by the morning’s activities it was clear the only thing on his mind was sleep. So I helped him to lie facedown on the bed, and then we left him there to recover until dinnertime.

“Tell me we aren’t planning to do that *every* morning,” I groaned, as Scully poured us both a cup of coffee.

“For at least the rest of this week,” she replied firmly. “It’s important to keep the intensity going. We can’t afford to give him the opportunity to ‘think’ about what’s happening here. Keeping him in a state of constant sexual exhaustion will make him a lot easier to handle. Hopefully, if we work him hard enough over the next few days, by the time we have to return to work he’ll have settled down enough to be left on his own. I admit, you’ve made things a lot easier by deciding not to keep him sexually frustrated,” she laughed. “Can you believe he managed *four* erections this morning?”

“Well, the last two were pretty feeble,” I argued, as though my own manhood was being threatened by his virility. “And, anyway, I thought your relationship with Alex was going to be non-sexual,” I teased.

“It is,” she argued, with a complacent smile. “But since he *does* get aroused when I punish him, it would be pretty stupid of me to ignore the psychological advantage of using that arousal against him.”

“He really hates masturbating for our amusement. It re-enforces his belief that he’s nothing more than our fuck toy. Aren’t we supposed to be trying to *improve* his self-image?” I argued.

“I know,” she replied, with a soft sigh. “But Alex *isn’t* a pet rat, Mulder. He’s a pet *tiger*. We’re playing a dangerous game with a half-wild, psychologically damaged and definitely dangerous man. We both agreed we’d keep playing this by *his* rules, until we were sure he wouldn’t snap and turn on us. We don’t dare loosen his leash until he’s been tamed, Mulder.”

I nodded my agreement and took a deep gulp of my coffee. She was right, and we had both agreed how the game would be played before it had even begun, but there was still a part of me that worried that Alex might immerse himself too fully in his role of penitent to ever emerge whole again. Yet, at the same time, I was equally certain that Alex’s decision to stay had been *because* of the way we were treating him, not in spite of it. Alex believed he deserved punishment at our hands, so he accepted it without argument, and giving him that punishment was the only way we’d ever eventually convince him that he’d earned our forgiveness.

“I’m just feeling guiltier than I expected to,” I confessed, with a wry smile. “I’m not sure I like the role that *I’m* playing in this game. It was…well; it was a lot easier before. When you only called him over when I was angry and frustrated. It’s a lot harder to do it in cold blood.”

“Good,” she replied. “Because anything you need to be in a temper to do, shouldn’t be done at all. I’m not criticizing you,” she added quickly. “Alex always deliberately wound you up in an attempt to make you react to him in that way. It gave him a sick kind of control over you. The trick is in accepting that and finding some kind of middle-ground where *you’re* the one in control.”

“A middle-ground consisting of keeping him so red-assed and fuck-drunk that he can’t get himself into trouble?” I laughed. “It sounds insane, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” she agreed. “But it seems to be working, so why over-analyze it?”

So I finished my coffee, poked my head into the rat cage to check Alex was out cold, and then logged into the computer and made a couple of purchases. If I was going to go through with this, I decided I might as well go for it all the way.

It was gone four when Alex finally emerged out of his cage. We were both sitting in the living room, me on the computer, Scully reading a book, when he crawled uncertainly into the doorway and waited there quietly until he caught our attention. I was pleased enough by his subdued and submissive attitude that I only made him wait about ten minutes before turning to see what had driven him to seek our company.

“You want something, Alex?”

Eyes downcast, he mumbled something that sounded like ‘wasn’t sure what to do.’

I slapped myself mentally as I imagined him waking up and lying there not knowing whether he’d be punished for letting us know he was awake or punished for *not* doing so. If I wanted to be fair with him, I was obviously going to have to be a lot more specific about the rules.

“If I haven’t locked your door, I expect you to come and find one of us as soon as you wake,” I informed him. “Come here.” I saw a slight tremor run through him at the order. Knowing my rat, I decided the tremor was as likely to be excitement as dread.

He crawled so slowly and stiffly across the room that the first thing I did, when he reached the floor at my feet, was inspect his ass. His buttocks were a little less swollen and red, but the skin of his pucker still looked angry and inflamed. I played with the plug a little, sliding it slowly in and out of his swollen hole to the accompaniment of his low hisses of pain. Then I pulled it out completely and replaced it with my middle finger. I played with him for a few minutes, curling and straightening my finger inside his hot flesh, as he wriggled his ass and pressed his face into the carpet to try and stifle the sounds my teasing digit was wrenching out of his throat.

Since I couldn’t see his cock from that angle, it was hard for me to tell whether his gasps were merely expressions of pain or were also tinged with excitement. But since he thrived on being the sole object of my attention in *any* circumstances, I decided it didn’t even matter whether my finger was giving him pain or pleasure as long as it remained inside him. He certainly whimpered miserably when I finally tired of playing with him and replaced the slender plug.

So, although I returned my attention to the PC, I made a point of stopping every ten minutes or so and wriggling the base of the plug until he made sufficient entertaining noises to convince me he hadn’t fallen asleep at my feet. At six, I turned the computer off and asked Scully whether she was ready to eat. She looked up from her book with a mild frown, as though irritated by the interruption, but then her eyes fell on Alex and a shadow of guilt crossed her face. I assumed she’d just remembered her own insistence that Alex ate regular nutritious meals, but when she drew me aside and whispered the cause of her concern it was *my* face that abruptly darkened with guilt.

“He can’t possibly sit on that damned stool tonight, Mulder. There’s a hell of a difference between punishment and brutality, and that would cross the line.”

I was sulkily tempted to point out that if she hadn’t given him those final six blows of the paddle his ass wouldn’t be so badly inflamed, but it was obvious, even to me, that it had been my own two enthusiastic reamings of Alex’s hole that had been most responsible for his swollen flesh.

“So he can eat off the floor this once,” I finally suggested. “Let’s make it sound like a privilege,” I added, when her face clouded with doubt.

And though, even a few hours earlier, Alex might have found it difficult to appreciate an offer to eat out of a bowl like a dog to be a ‘privilege’, he leaped so gratefully at my ‘casual’ offer to let him eat at my feet in the living room rather than in the kitchen that it was clear he doubted his ability to sit on his stool as much as we did.

So when Scully whipped up some kind of casserole that tasted great but had the consistency of thick soup, and placed it in a bowl in front of his face, my pet rat obediently stuck his head inside and lapped it up like a hungry dog. Naturally, he ended up with almost as much in his hair and on his face as inside his belly, and he had to crawl off for a quick shower, but his posture throughout was one of gratitude for the unexpected avoidance of the kitchen stool, rather than resentment over being made to eat like an animal, so I decided he deserved a reward for his good behavior.

When he returned from his shower, I moved onto one of the sofas, pulled a cushion onto my knees and told him to lie across my lap. He hesitated for just a fraction, genuine fear flashing in his eyes, and I could see he expected another spanking. Instead of reassuring him, I just waited him out, my expression promising him swift punishment if he chose to disobey me. And, with a whimper of fear, he capitulated; climbing painfully to his feet and draping himself face down over my knees.

“No,” I snapped, pretending to be surprised. “On your back. And don’t speak. Not one single word is to come out of your mouth tonight.”

He stiffened on my lap, clearly fighting confusion, but then rolled over carefully until his hot, burning buttocks were nestled into the cushion and his head and legs were supported by each end of the sofa. Then I reached for the remote control, switched on the game, and spent the next hour and a half cheering the Knicks and playing idly with Alex’s balls.

I discovered that I *liked* the silky feel of his hairless groin. His balls felt like large marbles wrapped in velvet-soft suede as I alternated between rolling them together and pushing them apart. The skin beneath his scrotum was equally soft and almost as sensitive as his asshole. I discovered that if I scraped my thumbnail back and forth between his balls and his ass, I could make him squeal and squeak like the rat he was.
If I pinched the skin of his scrotum, his feet drummed a helpless rhythm against the sofa arm and I started to contemplate the idea of placing a myriad of tiny clamps on his ball-sac until he looked like a human pincushion. I could already imagine the delicious squeaks and squeals he would make as I applied each tiny set of biting teeth.

I completely ignored his cock, although it was slapping eagerly at his belly with each probe and pinch of my fingers on the flesh beneath. It was, of course, incredibly interesting to gauge the ebb and flow of his arousal by watching the reaction of his cock to my investigation of his balls.

At the interval, I asked Scully to fetch me a flogger and a dozen clothes pegs. Alex stiffened on my lap and his eyes went wide and dark with fearful confusion, but he still obeyed my order for his complete silence. His obedience might have been from fear of punishment, but it was more likely his fear that I would stop what I was doing if he broke the spell by questioning my behavior.

Scully, ever efficient, returned not only with the items I’d requested but a couple of other interesting objects that I hadn’t even been aware we owned. I gave her a questioning look and received an enigmatic smile. It seemed I wasn’t the only one who’d been shopping recently. The first item was a stiff leather strap with an attached elastic band in an approximate figure of eight. After a moment’s thought I realized it was intended to strap around the top his scrotum to pull his balls away from his cock and the attachment then spread and separated his balls into individual taut sacs.

It took a few minutes, with me giggling and Alex squeaking in muted protest, before I managed to tug the various parts of the contraption into place. From the look on his face it was still far from comfortable even after I’d stopped trying to stuff various parts of his anatomy into the wrong holes. But it looked pretty damned good on him, so I decided it could stay on.

The second of Scully’s presents was far more fiendish looking and far harder to figure out. There were two short chains locked together with one slightly longer one. Each of the smaller chains ended in the kinds of clamps I’d been fantasizing about clipping on Alex’s balls, the third chain ended in a solid metal ring that was perhaps an inch and a quarter across. I decided, eventually, that the clamps had to be for his nipples. He swore quite loudly when I closed the teeth of one of them onto his left tit, but I accepted it had been an involuntary exclamation so, except for sharply slapping his balls, I let him get away with his breach of my rules. He was so careful to clench his teeth and accept the clamping of his right tit in silence that I realized I might have slapped his balls a little harder than I’d intended.

Then I looked helplessly at the metal ring. It *looked* like it was supposed to fit over his cock, but the ring seemed too damned small to fit over his substantial width and the chain was a fraction too short to reach that far anyway.

“Let me,” Scully said, when I finally gave up and voiced my confusion. She crossed over to the sofa, took the ring in one hand and Alex’s cock in the other, and then literally forced the head of his cock through the metal. It took most of my strength to hold him down as he swore loudly, flailing his arm and kicking his feet in protest, as his flesh was squeezed cruelly through the ring. Then Scully released his cock and I saw that the ring was now wedged tightly against the narrower ridge of flesh directly under his cockhead. The tautness of the chain meant his cock was held flat against his belly, its tip almost touching his belly button, and the pressure of the connected chains meant the clamps were now straining cruelly against his nipples.

“Please Mulder, take it off me. For god’s sake, Mulder, it fucking hurts,” he snarled, his eyes flashing with angry desperation, clearly too shocked to remember my insistence he remained silent.

“Deal with it,” I replied, completely unimpressed with his theatrics. While I agreed his nipples were beginning to look slightly sore, they couldn’t possibly be hurting him as much as he was suggesting. The irritation of the little teeth against his nipples couldn’t compare with the sensation of a vicious fuck, for instance, and he would have accepted *that* from me without complaint. So I was confident it wasn’t the pain that was bothering him, as much as his unfamiliarity with the way I was choosing to play with him. I’d moved the goal posts on him and he was understandably confused and maybe even a little frightened, but he wasn’t in actual ‘pain’.

Well, no more than he wanted to be.

So I ignored his pleas to remove the contraption binding his cock and tits in a triangle of pain, and began attaching the clothes pegs to his balls. I took my time, since I was as interested in the drama being enacted on the television as I was with his Oscar-worthy complaints, but by the time the final score was flashing on the screen I’d clipped six pegs to each of his balls and they were swelling in red angry protest.
By that time, he’d lapsed into silence again except for uttering a loud gasp with the addition of each peg.

Once they were all in place and I’d admired my handiwork, I played with them for a while, giving each peg a tiny tug and twist that made his whole body quiver with reaction. Then I temporarily abandoned my teasing of his balls and started slapping the soft flogger against the underside of his cock. Because of the chain holding his cock taut against his belly, only the underside of his cock was available for my abuse, so I made the most of its revealed vulnerability, snapping the soft leather thongs against its swollen length with considerable enthusiasm and enjoying his soft grunts of pained arousal.

“Please,” he was pleading constantly, in a low breathless voice, and I knew he wasn’t pleading with me to stop as much as begging me to throw him down on his knees and gift him with my cock.

But, I had no intention of aggravating his angry little hole again that evening. I was quite content to settle for a blowjob after I’d finished entertaining myself with his genitals. His balls were beginning to look a little swollen in their elastic cages, so I reluctantly removed the pegs and eased his balls out of the figure of eight but left the top strap in place. Then I gave his entire scrotum a light but through flogging until its flesh was such a bright, shiny pink that I could no longer see the sharp teeth-marks that had been left by the pegs.

By the time I’d finished, Alex had lost the ability to speak in coherent words. He was just moaning a continuous stream of sobs and gasps and his cock was straining so hard against its chain that his tits were starting to look oddly distended. I reached down and released the clamps from his tits and he literally screamed as the blood returned to the bruised little nubs. I decided there was no way I was going to be able to get the ring off over his engorged head until his entire cock was limp and spent, so I left it in place for the moment.

His throbbing nipples were just begging for some more attention, so I flicked the soft flogger against them just to see how Alex reacted to the sensation. From the way he arched his back and hissed deep in his throat, it was obvious I’d found another of his erogenous zones, so I started applying the flogger with serious intent until he was writhing and bucking so enthusiastically that his cock was bouncing on his belly to the clinking accompaniment of the three chains. A fiendish thought suddenly struck me, and I released the strap from the top of his scrotum, and then fastened the nipple clamps to each of his balls.

The clamps clearly had a tighter bite than the clothes pegs because Alex almost jumped out of his skin when I applied them and he uttered a couple of peculiarly high-pitched yelps. Then, as I played with the chains, I discovered that a whole new range of interesting sounds could be teased out of Alex’s throat simply by pulling them in different directions. A sharp tug upwards, for instance, produced a reedy, breathless scream, and a sharp yank towards his face made him yelp and drum his ankles against the sofa in protest. I was so absorbed by this new and interesting phenomenon that I investigated it for a long time.

But eventually he stopped making interesting noises and settled for a continuous pathetic whimpering instead, so I decided I’d wrested sufficient entertainment out of his balls for one night and turned my attention to his relatively neglected cock. Holding the chain in my left hand I pulled it into a vertical position and slapped the flogger back and forth along his length from root to tip and then back again. Not unexpectedly, I’d barely started my second run when his whole body arched and come began to shoot out of him in a volcanic explosion.

I continued the flogging, up and down his withering cock, until his choking gasps of pleasure became begging broken sobs for me to stop as the soft leather became torturous against his now highly sensitive skin.

Despite his desperate protests to the contrary, I decided there was probably still one more orgasm to be teased out of his body. This time I swapped between snapping the flogger against his cock and slapping it down on his balls, and the combination of the dual sensations eventually caused his reluctant dick to start stiffening again.

By then Alex was in some kind of endorphin haze, no longer even trying to resist my brutal insistence that he should offer me one last orgasm but clearly too exhausted to want to actively participate. He just lay there and shivered in reaction as I whipped his flesh into compliance, and by the time his cock was eventually standing at full mast again I was beginning to feel pretty damned tired myself. So I grabbed his hand, shoved it against his cock and told him to finish the job himself.

I think he’d gone far past any possibility of feeling shame at the idea of masturbating for me. His eyes were wide, dark and dazed as he lay there, looking at me, his hand sliding obediently up and down his sore, much abused cock, and the expression on his face was somewhere between awe and exhaustion as he finally teased a small dribble of come out of his slit and then raised his sticky palm up towards me in a gesture of obvious appeasement.

Deciding to be gracious in my victory, I leant over and lapped at his bittersweet offering. His whole body shivered in reaction to the slide of my tongue over his palm and I realized it was the first time I’d ever tasted his come, despite the numerous times I had forced him to spill it for me. It felt like the breaching of a barrier, a small but significant step in our relationship. In taking his essence into my mouth I had finally found a way to convince him that there was at least a *part* of him that I didn’t find distasteful.

Since his organ was now shriveled and limp, I took the opportunity to slide the metal ring over his cockhead and then detached the clamps from his balls. From his yelps of pain and the deep marks etched into the soft skin of his sac, I accepted, a little guiltily, that nipple clamps were a lot more brutal when attached to a scrotum. Alex was going to be pretty bruised there by the morning.

But, curiously, despite the pain of his ass and the new throbbing aches in his cock and balls, he seemed less subdued than peaceful, as though conquering and surviving the various indignities of the day had given him a sense of quiet satisfaction. Or maybe he was just too fuck-drunk to manage *any* coherent thoughts.

He looked so exhausted, I was tempted to forego my own pleasure and send him directly to his bed. But I was conscious of Scully’s silent observance, just as I had been aware all evening of her interested speculative eyes, and I knew she wouldn’t approve of me finishing the day’s ‘lessons’ without a final display of dominance.

So I told him to get off my lap and down on his knees, then I unzipped my pants, pulled out my cock and told him that if he didn’t give me the best damned blow-job of my life, he’d spend the rest of the night sitting on his stool in the kitchen.

He looked at me with such huge, tragic eyes and his lower lip trembled so badly with obvious terror, that I immediately regretted the enormity of my threat. I was so horny, after my evening of playing with him, that I simply didn’t want my own satisfaction to be over before it had begun. If he weren’t careful, I’d shoot down his throat the minute he took me between his lips. But I could have just told him to take his time, rather than issuing such a brutal threat, so I felt a little ashamed of myself.

But since he didn’t know what was going on in my head, he took my comment seriously and consequently did give me what had to be the most spectacular blowjob of my life. He nuzzled his face into my groin and used his lips and tongue to tease my balls out of my open pants. Then he spent the best part of an hour licking and sucking me, nipping lightly at my sac, bathing my balls with his tongue and then taking them alternately into his mouth to roll them in his soft, wet heat. He conspicuously returned the favor of my own ball-teasing, but his play was reverent where mine had been brutal, and by the time he finally dared to take my cock between his lips I was so turned-on that all I wanted to do was grab his head between my fists and fuck his mouth so hard my come would shoot out of his ass.

Instead I forced myself to remain still and accept his slow, gentle worship. I let him suck and kiss and lick my cock. I trembled and quivered as his clever tongue darted in and out of my slit like a bee seeking nectar. I groaned as he took me deep into his throat and began to hum loudly so that my flesh was tickled with vibrations even as his tongue continued to lap and knead my flesh. It was only when he hollowed out his cheeks and began to suck and slurp at my cock that I gave into my initial impulse and took control of his mouth by grabbing two handfuls of his hair. He’d already taken most of my length into his throat, but I pulled his face forward until it was mashed into my groin and my whole cock was inside his delicious warmth. Then, instead moving my cock, I yanked his head back and forth to create the friction I wanted.

It only took a minute or two of sliding his lips up and down my shaft before my balls tightened and erupted a gush of fluid into his throat. Although he was red-faced and gasping for breath, he still managed to swallow my offering without choking on it. He quietly licked me clean and carefully tucked me back into my pants. Then he just knelt there, breathing heavily, his eyes downcast, as he waited for my judgment on his performance.

“That was very nice, Alex,” I announced, which was something of an understatement but since my original intention had been to declare his efforts no more than ‘adequate’ regardless of his performance, I felt I was being more than generous with my praise. “You can go to bed now.”

I saw a ripple run down his spine, as though his entire musculature had been tensed with fear but had now relaxed. He began to crawl wearily out of the room and, again, Scully allowed him to get all the way to the door before calling him back. He halted, shivered visibly and turned to face her, his eyes full of dread.

But all she said was “Don’t forget to lube yourself and change your plug to a wider one before you go to sleep.”

He looked at her blankly for a moment, and then a flush rose on his cheeks as understanding dawned. He flicked a tentative look in my direction before nodding his compliance and turning to resume his slow, painful crawl to his bed.

“You think he’ll be up to repeating it all tomorrow?” I asked her uncertainly.

“He’s only sore, not torn, and by the morning his swelling should have gone down considerably. If you aren’t too ‘enthusiastic’ with his wake-up call, I don’t see why he can’t eat breakfast in the kitchen.”

“I think today went well, don’t you?” I asked hopefully.

She smiled at me, her eyes sparkling with good humor. “He impressed me,” she admitted. “I had a moment of doubt when you chained him and he went ballistic, but on the whole he seemed to enjoy the experience. He obviously adores being the sole focus of your attention like that and the only way he can accept that attention is if it’s in the guise of a sadomasochistic ‘game’. But…well, don’t take this the wrong way, Mulder, but I don’t think you needed to threaten him to get that admittedly spectacular blow-job.”

“I know,” I agreed, my expression contrite though I was pleased she’d fully appreciated his display of talent. “I realized I’d gone too far as soon as I’d said it, but there was no way to take it back without totally confusing him. Considering the amount of trust he’s giving us by staying here, the last thing he needs to hear is one of us second-guessing ourselves.”

She nodded her understanding. “Just be a little more careful,” she suggested. “Because if you threaten him with something and he disobeys you, you’re going to have to follow through with the punishment. If we’re not consistent, he’ll start to get confused and then he’ll start thinking instead of simply reacting.”

“Yeah,” I agreed miserably. Our entire campaign depended on us keeping Alex too preoccupied with immediate physical sensations to stop and question where the whole game was ultimately leading. So neither of us could afford to make a stupid mistake. I’d uttered just a half-dozen thoughtless words but Alex *could* have ended up spending the night in undeserved agony as a consequence of them. Not to mention the fact that the stool would have done so much damage to his asshole that I wouldn’t have been able to fuck him for days. Which sounds pretty selfish, except for the fact that Alex wouldn’t have been overjoyed about that prospect himself. As I’d said to Scully, despite his genuine desire for redemption, Alex couldn’t live in a permanent state of misery. Unless he received sufficient personal satisfaction to counter his discomfort, he’d soon tire of playing the ‘game’ with us no matter how sincere his initial intentions.

The next morning, Alex’s wake-up call was significantly gentler. Not just because his ass was still slightly inflamed, but because he was sleeping on his side, presumably because it was the only comfortable position given that his groin was now as swollen and bruised as his buttocks. I had to roll him onto his face to remove the plug from his hole and that woke him up, so he wasn’t caught unaware by the entry of my cock.

Actually, he rose on his knees and lifted his hips to ease my entry – though that might have been primarily to prevent my body weight grinding his groin into the mattress – and although I rode him hard enough to wrench a deep gasping grunt out of his throat with each thrust, I refrained from my usual habit of pulling myself all the way out and then violently slamming my hips against his butt with each re-entry.

Despite the relative gentleness of the fuck, Alex’s cock responded with its usual enthusiasm and it took barely three tugs of my fingers on his rigid flesh before he shot his wad onto the sheet. My own completion took longer to achieve - my balls still hadn’t recovered from their late-night party in Alex’s mouth - so I rode the full contractions of his orgasm until his asshole was just fluttering weakly against my invading flesh and then, not wanting to over-irritate his asshole, I pulled out, told him to turn over and then drove my cock between his surprised lips. I saw his nose crinkle with disgust as his mouth filled with the taste of lube, but his tongue went rapidly to work on my shaft and it only took him a couple of minutes of serious sucking to bring me off.

I left him to clean himself up and walked to the kitchen. It was, as Scully had cheerfully reminded me, my turn to cook breakfast. But I remembered, at least, to grease a generous amount of lube over the dildo on Alex’s stool, before I started cracking eggs into the frying pan. Scully entered the room a couple of minutes later, carrying a pillow and a long rubber crop. I looked at the implement with curiosity and a little doubt.

“Can’t find your paddle?” I joked lightly.

“I don’t want him getting complacent. A little variation of sensations will keep him on his toes,” she answered with a careless shrug, and put the pillow on the table.

I said nothing, although Alex looked *anything* but complacent when he finally crawled into the room. His hair was still wet enough from his shower to appear almost black, and that just emphasized the paleness of his face. He looked tired and drawn and far from happy at the prospect of having his buttocks reddened to my preferred shade. But he still crawled silently to the table and hauled himself upwards with the clear intention of obediently positioning himself for his spanking.

Scully stopped him before he draped himself over the pillow. She made him stand still while she checked his stitches for any sign of infection. Then she snapped a pair of latex gloves onto her hands and ran critical fingers over his cock, checking for any swelling, before finally giving his balls a long and thorough inspection.

“He’s got some nasty bruising from those clamps,” she informed me, while he flushed with obvious embarrassment at her impersonal handling of his groin. Although her tone was deliberately indifferent in Alex’s hearing, I was left in no doubt that she was giving me a clear warning to leave his balls alone until the bruising faded. She waited until I nodded my understanding, then told Alex to lean over the table.

She removed his plug and carefully examined his pucker. Unlike the day before, she kept her inspection totally professional and, although she used her fingers to poke and probe inside his passage, it was obvious she was genuinely only checking for damage.

“Well?” I asked, when she finally straightened and peeled off her gloves.

“He’s still a little swollen, but he isn’t torn or infected so you don’t need to worry,” she announced, and Alex quivered slightly at her decisive tone – no doubt understanding that she’d just given me official approval to continue my abuse of that particular part of his anatomy.

But before he had a chance to worry about that, she reached for the rubber crop and slapped it across the crease of flesh directly under his buttocks. He yelped with both shock and pain, as he belatedly realized he was going to receive something other than a paddling that morning.

The crop had left a perfect red welt across his skin. Nothing that would bruise or mark his flesh permanently, but I imagined it would take at least several hours for the welt to fade. Scully swung the crop a second time to create a matching stripe about an inch higher than the first. I was impressed as hell by her precision and told her so. She just smiled at me and added four further stripes, the sixth and final one just below Alex’s tailbone. I stared in undisguised admiration at the six perfect marks. They were a gorgeous adornment for Alex’s ass; although from the way he was sobbing quietly into the pillow it was obvious he wasn’t as appreciative of them as I was.

Scully stared miserably at Alex’s crack and I knew she was just *dying* to add a final intersecting mark through the middle of the horizontal stripes, but she resisted the temptation and just sighed with mild disappointment as she put the crop aside and told Alex he could stand up.

He rose from the table, dropped his miserable gaze to his now rampant erection and, without waiting to be told, sank gracefully to his knees in front of her and quickly jerked himself off. She waited until he’d come, then turned away without a word - as though deliberately indicating that since his ‘tribute’ was hers by right she felt it needed no acknowledgement - and she took her seat at the table.

Deliberately keeping his embarrassed eyes averted from both of us, Alex rose from the floor and gingerly lowered himself onto his stool. He well stretched so he didn’t display much discomfort as he eased the dildo into himself but when his welted ass touched the bristles he gave a loud startled yelp and froze his descent. Before long I could see his calves trembling as they attempted to keep his full weight off the seat. Meanly, I contemplated ordering him to lift his feet off the floor, but then I realized he was fighting a losing battle anyway. In that position his legs couldn’t hold the strain for long so he’d have no option, eventually, except to drop fully onto the bristles or rise off the seat completely. And I doubted he’d risk the consequences of the latter.

Sure enough, by the time I’d put his breakfast in front of him he was fully seated and whimpering pathetically but, despite his sniffles, his incredibly resilient dick was standing up in the air and waving an eager hello in my direction. I decided to wait and make its acquaintance later, so I concentrated on my own breakfast while Alex started shoveling his food down his throat so fast it looked like he was trying to win a world record.

Scully and I were still only halfway through our meal when Alex dropped his fork with an unnecessary clatter and announced that he’d finished in a tone of obvious relief. I was tempted to tell him he had to wait for us to finish before leaving the table, but he was looking at me with such a pathetically hopeful expression that I hadn’t the heart to make him stay on the stool any longer.

“Come here then,” I said, with a pointed glance at his erection, and he was so relieved that he scrambled off the stool, crawled over to my feet and began stroking his cock for me with grateful enthusiasm. Although, after he’d finally managed to produce a small dribble of come, he dropped his eyes and refused to look at me as if he’d suddenly remembered to be humiliated by the act.

Scully raised her eyebrows at me, indicating her surprise that he’d come so far in just twenty-four hours. I just shrugged, though I was equally surprised by Alex’s behavior that morning. He was either adjusting remarkably well to the regimen we were imposing, or he was just in a state of shock and going through the motions while trying not to think about what he was actually doing.

I left him kneeling at my feet while I deliberately dawdled over the remains of my breakfast. I was trying to come up with a plan as to how the rest of the day would go. Scully’s instruction to leave his balls alone had scuppered my original plan, which had been to make a start on correcting one of his physical flaws.

Alex had very few imperfections in my mind, and none of the few I *did* count were anything to do with his scars or his truncated arm. He had an undeniably beautiful face, with gorgeous expressive eyes, a cute *talented* mouth, and perfect teeth. But one definite imperfection was his current poor condition. I was eager to see his buttocks return to their previous lushness and I wanted a little more weight around his waist and hips. I wanted to feel *flesh* in my hands while I was fucking his hot, eager ass. A second flaw was his hair. I’d decided that if he ever was stupid enough to have a cut that severe again, he’d be lucky to be able to sit down for a month. But his third, most annoying, imperfection was his genitals.

I’m not referring to his dick. Alex had a nicely shaped cock. It might have been a fraction shorter than my own but more than made up for its lack of length with its impressive thickness. Alex’s flaw was the placement of his balls. When I’d played with them the night before I’d discovered they were large enough, and nicely heavy in my hands, and no one could argue their efficiency given his almost unbelievable capacity for multiple erections. But they hung so high and tight against the base of his cock that they’d always *looked* deceptively undersized to me.

When he was kneeling naked at my feet, with his reddened ass in the air, I wanted to see his scrotum hanging hot and heavy and eager for my touch, not tucked so high and tight against his pelvis that it was barely visible through his open thighs. So I’d decided I was going to strap the top of his scrotum to pull it away from his cock and then hang a series of increasingly heavy weights to it until his balls learned to permanently hang a lot lower. Since it was probably going to a few weeks to achieve the complete desired effect, I’d wanted to make an immediate start on my remodeling.

But, in view of Scully’s comment, I was going to have to wait a day or two for his bruises to heal before beginning the process. The delay was pretty damned disappointing, since I was eagerly looking forward to the various squeaks of protest Alex would undoubtedly utter as he had to crawl around the apartment with a weight swinging like a pendulum between his thighs.

And his new chair wasn’t going to arrive until the end of the week, since it was being built to order, so I couldn’t play with *that* either.

I eventually decided that what I *wanted* to do was go shopping and buy the things I hadn’t yet ordered off the net, like the cuffs and chains and a pulley system for over his bed… not to mention a whole new selection of more ‘personal’ toys. The problem was I didn’t want to simply lock him in his room, since that would give him too much time on his own to think about what he was letting us do to him. On the other hand, I wasn’t happy to leave him alone with Scully unless I was sure he was too exhausted to give her any trouble. Unfortunately, I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t physically up to giving him another good fucking yet and, since he’d been so well-behaved that morning, it wouldn’t be fair to give him another spanking just to wear him out. So both of my obvious choices for temporarily de-fanging him were out of the question.

I thought furiously and suddenly the solution came to me. A wicked grin slid over my face. I told Alex to go to his room and lie face down on the bed. He gave me a suspicious, cautious glance from the corner of his eye but crawled obediently from the room – remembering to pick up and re-insert his plug before leaving.

“He learns quickly,” Scully commented, with a soft sigh of disappointment as though she, too, was wishing she had a valid excuse to paddle his ass again.

“I’m going out for a couple of hours. I want to buy some new toys for our rat,” I told her and, though her eyes sparked with interest, she stiffened slightly.

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea for you to leave me alone with him yet,” she admitted reluctantly, clearly not happy at having to admit she was concerned for her own safety with our unpredictable new pet.

“I know, but it’ll be okay. Trust me. Go fetch three of my ties from the bedroom, they’ll do for temporary restraints, and tie his ankles and hand to his bed. Make sure his legs are spread about this far apart,” I said, indicating the distance with my hands. “Oh, and you’d better put a folded towel under his hips.”

She gave me a suspicious look, but didn’t ask me what I intended to do to him when he was tied up - maybe she just figured she’d know soon enough anyway. She just rose to her feet with a slightly put-upon sigh.

“Call me if he gives you any trouble,” I said, though I highly doubted Alex would refuse the bondage. He’d never objected to being restrained by us in the past.

I waited until she left the room before enacting my cunning plan. I reached for my wallet and withdrew two foil-wrapped condoms. Then I went to the freezer and withdrew a tray of ice cubes. It took a little time since the latex was fragile and the ice was sharp, so my fingers were almost blue by the time I’d finished, but I managed to fill the condom with ice until it was the size and shape of a slightly malformed cock. Then I tied it off, popped it into the freezer, and repeated the operation with the second condom.

Next, I went into our bathroom and retrieved the hollow dildo Scully sometimes played with in the bath. It had a screw-type base and had been designed to be filled with warm water. I took it to the kitchen, boiled the kettle and washed it thoroughly to make sure it was sterile. Then I filled it with warm water – a little hotter than Scully usually used but definitely not dangerously warm – and took both it and the ice-filled condom into Alex’s room.

Not the ‘rat cage’. Strange that it was only the third day and I’d already forgotten my decision to call it that.

Anyway, I found Alex tied nicely to his bed in exactly the position I’d asked for and proudly presented Scully with her toys.

“What on earth is this?” she asked, looking at the distorted condom with near-horror.

But instead of answering her, I collected Alex’s lube from his en suite, removed his plug and smeared a generous handful of lube into his hole. Then I drew her aside until we were both out of his hearing, before offering her an angelic smile.

“It’s an ice pack. We need to get that swelling down, don’t we?”

She frowned repressively at me for a moment, but then a reluctant smile twitched across her lips. “And this?” she demanded, waving her dildo in my face.

“Well, I don’t want him to get frostbite,” I replied seriously. “So I thought you could swap and change them every ten minutes or so. There’s another ‘ice pack’ in the freezer and plenty of hot water in the kettle to refill the dildo. You should be able to easily keep him amused for a couple of hours while I go shopping.”

With that, I walked out of the door. I wasn’t sure whether she’d actually go through with it, though I honestly thought the ice might truly be beneficial to Alex’s irritated pucker – if not to his nerves – but even if she refused to use my toys, at least Alex was restrained and unable to cause any trouble during my absence.

I reached for my jacket and opened the front door and, just as I walked out into the hall, I heard a high-pitched scream of outrage from Alex’s room so obviously Scully had decided the ice-pack *was* a good idea after all.

In the event, it was closer to three hours than two by the time I finally arrived home with two bulging carrier bags full of purchases. I’d felt more than slightly self-conscious walking into a shop that catered specifically for sexual fetishes, but the shop assistants had been so friendly and ‘normal’ that I’d ended up buying things that in other circumstances I would have been too embarrassed to even look at in public.

I opened the front door with a combined feeling of excitement and dread. I was looking forward to showing Scully what I’d bought but I had this horrible gut feeling that something would have gone so badly wrong in my absence that either Alex would have fled or Scully would have made the decision to throw him out herself.

The absolute silence that greeted my entrance seemed so horribly ominous that I dropped my bags in the hall and practically ran into Alex’s room. Except for the three ties lying in a heap next to the bed, there was no evidence he’d ever been in the room. I had a sudden vision of him breaking out of his restraints and strangling her in a sudden fit of murderous rage. I chased into our bedroom, fully expecting to find her lying dead and broken on the floor. But the room was empty. In a complete panic, I charged into the living room and then I froze in complete shock.

Scully was sitting in one of the winged armchairs, peacefully reading a book, and she was using a kneeling Alex as a footstool.

But not the Alex I’d left three hours previously. This Alex had buttocks that were a vivid shade of red that I would have previously sworn couldn’t be produced on human flesh. His entire bottom was so swollen and glowing that I couldn’t even see the marks left by his earlier cropping. He was wearing a thick leather belt around his waist and his arm had been twisted up behind his back and cuffed to it so he was being forced to balance between his knees and his forehead. And, unless I was mistaken, his hole was stuffed with the biggest plug we owned - the one that had a bulb almost as wide as my fist and had only been bought my me as a kind of joke.

But Alex clearly wasn’t laughing. Except for the whisper of Scully’s pages turning, the only sound in the room was the muffled, desperate sound of someone sobbing their heart out into the carpet.

“What the hell happened here?” I asked, walking over to the chair opposite Scully’s and sitting down in a state of bewildered amazement.

Scully calmly marked her page, closed her book and looked at me with an expression of complete innocence. “What do you mean, Mulder?”

I glared significantly at the cruel bondage and the spectacular color of Alex’s butt.

“Oh, you’re referring to *that*,” she said, with a smug smile. “Alex forgot his manners,” she continued primly. “But he’s remembered them now, haven’t you, Alex?”

Alex mumbled something unintelligible and hunched his shoulders as though he was trying to burrow face-first through the carpet. That, of course, just helped to raise his ass higher, which consequently made his buttocks quiver beautifully, and I couldn’t prevent myself from smiling at his posture of absolute, dejected submission.

“Are you going to give me details?” I prompted cautiously, trying not to sound too eager.

Scully laughed softly at the look on my face. “Despite the care and trouble you took to kindly design an icepack to reduce his swelling, instead of showing gratitude for your thoughtfulness, Alex took it upon himself to call me a number of quite distasteful names when I tried to apply it. I won’t repeat what he said to me since I don’t use that kind of language, but suffice it to say that he was *seriously* offensive.”

“I believe it,” I agreed, my eyes fixated by the spectacular color of Alex’s butt.
While yelling abuse had admittedly been an understandable reaction to Scully ramming a condom full of ice up his ass, it still wasn’t an *acceptable* reaction.

If Alex had reacted differently, if he’d pleaded and begged for her to stop, she *would* probably have decided my game was too cruel. It had been *his* choice to loose his temper and abuse her instead of *asking* her to stop. He wouldn’t have dared speak to *me* like that. So it wasn’t what he’d said that was the issue, it was the fact his refusal to accept Scully’s discipline had made a lie of his assertion that he was willing to submit equally to *both* of us.

“So,” she continued, as she saw understanding dawn on my face, “since his lack of appreciation proved his ass wasn’t as uncomfortable as he’d been pretending, I decided he needed a lesson in crying wolf. As he clearly wasn’t sore after all, I threw the ‘ice pack’ in the trash and decided I might as well replace it with a butt plug.”

“A very *big* butt plug,” I pointed out quietly.

“I thought it was appropriate since he was being such a big asshole,” she retorted dryly. “Of course, it took a little effort to get it in,” she continued, “so he called me *more* disgusting names, didn’t you, Alex?”

There was another unintelligible mumble from the carpet.

“So that’s when I decided to *really* teach him some manners,” Scully concluded. “It took a long time, as you can see for yourself, but the lesson finally seemed to sink in.” She gave me a mock apologetic look. “I think you might have to wait until tomorrow to try out your new toys, Mulder. Alex is quite overwhelmed at the moment. He’s unlikely to be much fun to play with tonight.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied thoughtfully. “I think I like his current attitude. Maybe I should leave you alone with him more often.”

Alex’s response was a full-body tremble that made his buttocks tremble quite alluringly. I wondered whether they were as hot as they looked, and licked my lower lip at the