Content: NSFW, Arthur/TMWTPF, Genital dysphoria, Masturbation, Oral sex

The air is hot and the television is muted. Arthur's muffled, panting breath hits the pillows of the couch and pushes back against his face. All of him is tense and teetering. The man with the painted face is lying behind him, so close that the buttons of his vest dig indents into his spine. Color smears across sweat-slicked skin - white, blue, and red.

Arthur's hand is in his underwear, wrapped around himself, and the man with the painted face has enveloped it with his own; gentle and undemanding. He murmurs words into Arthur's ear that sound like pictures melting into each other - spread legs, fingers in holes, cum painting teeth. Arthur feels the heat of a mouth on his neck and the cotton softness of a thigh between his legs. He tastes color and salt and the sweetness of smoke. Then the fingers slotted between the ridges of his fist squeeze, just a little - just enough to matter - and Arthur bites his lip, smothering the noise he makes when he reaches a dry, shuddering orgasm with his half-hard cock in his hand.

There is a brief moment where Arthur stops existing, where the world is consumed and his body is gone, and all of him has been collected into a single, heated pool. Slowly, things begin to skim across the surface of him: the humid air, the glowing television, and the man at his back.

"I wanna - you.." Arthur fumbles behind himself, touches the man with the painted face's thigh, then slides his hand higher. The man with the painted face takes it and guides it to the hollow between his legs.

"You're not hard," Arthur says, panicked and ashamed. He tries to pull his hand away but the man with the painted face presses it closer and Arthur feels nothingness beneath it. "You don't have a-"

"I don't have a cock, yeah."

"D'you have a, um-" Arthur flips through every term he knows, trying to find one that fits the situation, one that his mother rarely uses for herself and that won't make him sound like a child, "-a vagina?"

The man with the painted face laughs just to make Arthur blush. "No, I don't have a pussy. I don't have anything."

Arthur turns and his eyes flick down to where his hand is now flush against fabric hugging pelvis. "Nothing?"

"Wanna see?"

Arthur's eager nod makes the man with the painted face grin like he's just won a game. They move together on the couch, Arthur sliding to one end and the man with the painted face stretching out languidly across from him. He tugs his trousers down his hips and off his body, letting them fall into a puddle on the floor. And there, framed beneath the V of his parted shirt, Arthur sees nothing. Where something should be there's only a pale, empty slope following the curve of his body.

"Oh", Arthur breathes.

"You like it?"

"Yeah. I like it a lot." Arthur puts his fingers there, just two at first, and the man with the painted face spreads his legs wider to make room for his palm to fit between them.

"How come? 'Cause you hate what you have?" The man with the painted face asks, simplifying it, twisting it, warping it into something more painful than it really is.

"No, I don't hate it," Arthur answers, "But I don't like it either. It barely works now and when it did it was like I couldn't get it to go down. And every time I got hard I felt... dirty."

It's deeper than that, more complicated. He felt sick. He felt evil. He felt like a predator. He never touched himself without a layer to hide the shape of his hand; or he'd rut against something like an animal, covering as much of himself as he could. Whenever he did look at his own erection curving against his belly it was when he was so sick and so low that his mind and body were fractured and disjointed. He would take it in one hand and it was like jerking someone else off.

Arthur watches his thumb rub up and down soft, empty skin and thinks.

"Sometimes I wish I had a vagina. Something out of the way that I wouldn't have to think about as much, or feel as often. But I'd like being like you even more." He searches for something else to say, the right words to describe how he feels when he poses in front of the mirror with his dick tucked between his legs. The way his body becomes streamlined and transforms into something both sexless and sensual. "I think I would look prettier." Arthur swallows. "I wanna- can I lick you? Here?"

"Sure you can," The man with the painted face says with a sly upward lilt, grinning like this is just another game he's won.

They move together one more time, Arthur sliding to the floor and crawling into the space the man with the painted face makes for him between his legs. Arthur reaches up and drags him closer, to the very edge of the couch, and nestles his face in the valley beneath the tendon that joins thigh to hip. He kisses the hollow there, then trails his lips along his body until they're pressed against the center of him, where the skin is petal soft. Heat radiates against his mouth, past his teeth, into his throat. Licking up and over the slope of his pelvis feels like running his tongue across polished, sun-warmed marble.

The man with the painted face tenses and shivers, though it's impossible to tell if he's feeling something or if he's pantomiming pleasure the way they've pantomimed sex - frantic nights spent forcing their bodies together in ways they were never meant to fit. Arthur pauses to suck at the place where a cock should be, or a clit, and the man with the painted face pulls him closer, raking his fingers over his scalp and twisting them in the thick locks of his hair. His grip holds the memory of every other time Arthur has been held; things tender and painful and sharpened by control. Arthur moans, open-mouthed and muffled, when he feels the quiet pressure of penetration deep inside himself.

Above him, the man with the painted face is making new sounds; desperate but muted. Soft, unthreaded, discolored, and human. And Arthur recognizes them as his own - the same sounds he had been making when they had lain together earlier, and every time they had lain together before - and he knows that this is what he would sound like if someone else touched him, if someone else loved him, if someone would just let him get close enough.