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When the basin was full, the King moved slowly around it to stand before Salas.
Salas did not look up. He did not shy away, either. If the King was here to snap his other leg, to drag him to a cage to die in the cold, or become half-beast and tear him apart, he knew he had no power to stop any of it.
Nor did he want to fight anymore.
Presenting his good will to the King by pleasing Victoria. That had been his last hope.
Running to the washroom to discover the window barring him in. That had been his last fight.
What was left wasn’t much. It wasn’t enough.
He didn’t realize when the King moved to crouch lower to him, so lost was he in the haze of his mind. The King must have spoken something to him, though he hadn’t caught it.
He lowered his head and said nothing.
“Come,” King Jareth said softly, coaxing gently with a small motion, “I’ve drawn you a bath. You’ll bathe, and then rest.”
When Salas didn’t move, a moment passed where they continued on like that. He could feel the King’s eyes upon him, most likely glaring, wondering why he was not submitting to the order.
Finally, the King stood and, before he knew what was happening, Salas was being tenderly swept into the thick, familiar arms. He was taken over to the basin and, with odd care, lowered inside after the King tested the temperature with a flick of the hand.
Salas was enveloped in warmth, but the water itself held his attention. There were flashes of drowning in a bath of ice in the base of a well, but instead of suppressing those memories, an odd dark yearning claimed his desires towards those memories instead.
How easy it would have been if he’d simply stayed down that well, and had never resurfaced.
The water here in the tub was calm and inviting, provoking the emptiness inside him to make one final act. This action, he thought, could be warm, and simple, and when it was over, he wouldn’t have to feel anything ever again.
While he had been staring at the water, he was late to realize, Jareth had elevated his injured leg from the wetness so that it hung over the side. Salas wondered bitterly why he thought it mattered what happened to the leg. He’d been the one to break it, after all.
The King had spoken to him again. Perhaps more than once.
Salas only lay there, unwilling or unable to reciprocate.
He registered dully when his skirt wrap was pulled off and away from his body, leaving him completely naked. But after that, the King perfunctory cleansed him for some reason, as though the man were a handmaid and not a King. And all of this slipped past his sensory notary. His skin felt detached as it was scrubbed down, his hair rubbed clean perhaps, and the rituals that followed were all lost to him.
The King must have said something again.
Salas closed his eyes.
When he opened them again some unknown time later, he was alone, sitting in the water.
Salas didn’t think much about the decision. The haze in him had already made up its mind some time ago. The only thing different about ‘now’ was that with solitude, the opportunity presented itself.
The Kingdom of Diagor would be happy, to relieve themselves of their fae intruder who had cursed them. The birds, hopefully, would be safe. There was nothing that he could do for them.
He lowered his body further into the basin until his head slipped under the water. It would be difficult, fighting against his body’s natural desire to resurface. It would be his final act of self-discipline.
Opening his eyes to a squint, the grime-and-soap-murky water was all he could see. He tried to pull some happy memories from the depths, to serve as his last living thoughts. Yet, as everything now seemed to be working against him, even his own mind, none surfaced.
He held his breath, until he could not.
Chapter Nine
With Victoria before him, having come intohischambers, having sat in his chair and made use of his fire, Jareth detested the witch for her intrusion.
But after learning of the great violation she had bestowed upon the fae boy, relayed in horrified stutters by his most trusted armsman whom did not cringe at even the most grotesque of battle lesions, Jareth wanted to rip her skull from her neck and watch her broken body bleed out.
“Salas was on the floor, orally…stimulating…h-he used his mouth to pleasure her,” was Tarick’s explanation. Even as crippled as the report was, it was nevertheless plainly stated.
