Chapter 3: Mentor Suppression
The studio air had turned to ice. Reggie could feel the polished wood of the barre digging into the small of his back, Edward’s wiry strength surprisingly unyielding. The old man’s breath came in ragged bursts, clouding in the chilly room.
“You smell different,” Edward hissed, his face inches from Reggie’s. “Like ozone and engine oil. Where the hell have you been going?”
“It’s nothing. Personal stuff.” Reggie tried to twist away, but Edward shifted his grip, hands sliding from Reggie’s shoulders down to his ribs, pressing through the thin cotton of his rehearsal shirt.
“Don’t lie to me. I’ve poured five years into you. I fought the board, the donors, every petty bigot in this town who said a boy your size shouldn’t be on pointe. And now you’re just… fading. Missing rehearsals. Showing up with your head in the clouds.” His fingers dug in, seeking purchase, and then they stilled.
They both felt it.
A ridge of something hard and unyielding beneath the soft fabric, just below Reggie’s left pectoral. It wasn’t bone. It was cool, smooth, like polished chrome.
Edward’s furious eyes widened, confusion erasing the anger. His other hand flew up, pawing at Reggie’s chest, and found another patch near his collarbone, and another along his flank. He ripped at the shirt buttons. They popped, skittering across the floor like tiny pearls.
The dim spotlight caught the edges of the malformations. They were plates. Dark, metallic, subtly hexagonal, seamlessly embedded into his skin at the edges but rising from his flesh like the carapace of some beautiful, terrible insect. They hummed with a faint, violet energy.
“Jesus Christ, Reggie,” Edward whispered, all the fight gone from his voice, replaced by a dawning, terrifying awe. “What is this? What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. He… it just…”
“He? Who is ‘he’?” Edward’s hand, now trembling, traced the outline of a plate. The touch was no longer an attempt to restrain, but to comprehend. As his fingertips made contact, the violet hum intensified, a static pulse that traveled up Edward’s arm. He gasped, but didn’t pull away. A lifetime of appreciating form, of seeking perfect lines, warred with sheer horror. This was a new anatomy. A blasphemous, impossible sculpture grafted onto his finest living artwork.
Reggie saw the shift in his teacher’s face—the fear morphing into a dark, obsessive curiosity. He’d seen that look before, in the mirror, right before he surrendered to the crystal’s call. It was the look of someone staring into an abyss and finding it beautiful.
“His name is Alistair,” Reggie breathed, the confession loosening something in his chest. “He showed me… more. A different kind of movement. A different kind of strength.”
“This is strength?” Edward spat, but his hand remained, palm now flat against the largest metallic patch. The energy vibrated through his old bones, a sensation both alarming and inexplicably erotic. It felt like power. Raw, untamed, and deeply fucking wrong. It called to the part of him that had always loathed the constraints of tradition, the petty rules of their small world. “This is corruption.”
“Is it?” Reggie challenged, a new boldness flooding him. He pressed forward, pinning Edward back against the barre, their positions reversed. He guided Edward’s other hand to his waist, where another cluster of plates formed the suggestion of a sleek fairing. “You always said I was meant for more than this town. More than Swan Lake. You were right. This is more. Feel it.”
Edward felt it. The thrum was inside him now, a bass note resonating in his marrow. He’d been celibate for years, his passion channeled entirely into his art, but this… this awoke a hunger he’d forgotten. It was filthy and profound. His academic appreciation for the male form evaporated, replaced by a carnal need to understand this new geometry with his mouth, his hands.
He dropped to his knees. The polished floor was hard under his old joints, but he didn’t care. He pressed his face against Reggie’s abdomen, smelling sweat and that strange, electric scent. His fingers fumbled with the tie of Reggie’s dance pants.
“I need to see,” Edward muttered, his voice thick. “I need to see all of it.”
Reggie looked down at the silver crown of his teacher’s head, this man who had been his sole defender. A dizzying rush of power, borrowed from Alistair, from the transformation waiting in his cells, swept through him. This was another kind of submission. He yanked his own pants down, letting them pool at his ankles.
His cock, already hard, sprung free. And there, at the base, the skin gave way to more of the dark, sleek metal, forming a subtle, ridged casing that followed the vein up the shaft.
“God…” Edward breathed, horrified and mesmerized. He leaned in, not with tenderness, but with the brutal curiosity of an archaeologist uncovering a relic. His tongue, dry at first, licked a stripe from root to tip. The taste was alien, metallic and sweet, with a crackle of energy that made his lips tingle.
He took Reggie into his mouth. Not to please, but to consume the mystery. He sucked hard, his jaw aching immediately, his hands gripping Reggie’s thighs where flesh met impossible plate. Reggie threw his head back, a choked groan echoing in the empty studio. This wasn’t love. It was dissection. It was conquest and worship and damnation all at once. The mirrors reflected them endlessly: the towering dancer, half-revealed as a machine, and the old man on his knees, devouring the future.
Edward worked him with a desperate, graceless intensity. He gagged, pulled off, and stared at the glistening, part-flesh, part-metal cock before diving back down, his nose pressed into the coarse hair at the base. He wanted to be stained by it. He wanted the town, the board, all those small-minded ghosts, to see the marks of this on him.
“Fuck, sir…” Reggie gasped, the honorific falling from him by habit. His hands tangled in Edward’s thin hair, not guiding, just holding on as the sensation built—a familiar tightness, but deeper, amplified, routed through the strange new channels in his body. The plates on his chest began to glow, a soft, pulsating purple.
Edward felt the change. The cock in his mouth grew hotter, the hum becoming a palpable vibration. He looked up, tears in his eyes from the strain, and saw Reggie’s face transfigured with a pleasure that was not entirely human. It broke the last of his reserve.
He jerked his own trousers open, freeing his aching erection. He stroked himself roughly, in time with his bobbing head, the rhythm frantic, needy. The taste, the vibration, the sheer wrongness of it was the hottest thing he’d ever experienced. He was fucking himself on the idea of it, on the ruin of everything he’d supposedly held dear.
Reggie was close. The pressure wasn’t just in his balls; it was in every transformed cell, a crescendo of magical and physical release. “I’m gonna… fuck, I’m gonna come…”
Edward didn’t pull away. He redoubled his efforts, his own strokes becoming punishingly fast. He wanted it. He wanted the physical proof of this corruption down his throat.
Reggie’s orgasm hit like a transformer blowing. A shout tore from him, raw and echoing, as his body arched. The glow from his chest plates flared, illuminating the entire studio in a sudden, violent lavender flash. What erupted into Edward’s mouth was not just come. It was shot through with tiny, crackling sparks of silver energy. It tasted of lightning and salt.
The sensation tipped Edward over the edge. He cried out around Reggie, a muffled, broken sound as his own orgasm ripped through him, painting the studio floor in stark, white stripes. He collapsed forward, forehead resting against Reggie’s thigh, coughing, sputtering, but swallowing every last drop.
Silence, save for their ragged breathing.
The glow from Reggie’s body faded to a faint ember, then died. The plates were just dark, cool metal again. Edward slowly, painfully, got to his feet. He avoided Reggie’s eyes, fastening his trousers with shaking hands. He walked to the mirror and looked at his reflection: an old man with bruised lips and a wild, terrified look in his eyes.
“Get out,” Edward said, his voice a wreck of gravel and shame.
“Sir, I—”
“Get out!” Edward screamed, spinning around, spittle flying. “Whatever that is… whatever you’re becoming… you can’t do it here. This place is too small for that kind of magic. Too brittle.”
Reggie pulled up his pants, his body singing with spent power and a hollow loneliness. He moved toward the door.
“Reggie,” Edward said, quieter now. He didn’t turn from the mirror. “If you go back to him… if you choose that… don’t come back here. You’ll destroy it. And part of me… a very ugly part… wants to watch you try.”
Reggie paused at the door, the weight of the dismissal settling on him heavier than any scorn from the town ever had. He had crossed a line, and in doing so, had burned the only bridge that ever truly mattered. He stepped out into the cool evening, the pull from the crystal in his pocket now a desperate, screaming siren. There was only one direction left to go.