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The collar was made of leather, Dutch leather, and Indies knew this because the Kingdom of the Netherlands had told him so when he'd buckled it around his throat three hours ago, as if the provenance of the thing were a gift worth noting. It sat just above his collarbone, warm now from his own skin, the brass ring at the front heavy enough that he felt it shift every time he swallowed. The leash ran from that ring in a slack line across the tile floor and up into Netherlands' left hand, where it looped twice around pale blue fingers that did not seem to notice it. Netherlands was writing. The scratch of the quill was the only sound in the room aside from the insects outside the shuttered windows and the occasional creak of the imported chair, good mahogany, probably teak, probably from here, probably cut down and shipped out and shaped into something comfortable for a body that had no business being comfortable in this climate. Indies stood beside the desk with his hands at his sides and watched the quill move and thought about rice.
Not rice in the abstract, not rice as a concept or a grievance, but the specific paddy two kilometers south of Semarang where the water had been diverted to irrigate sugar cane. The paddy was dry now. The soil cracking in patterns that looked, from above, like the lines on an old man's palm. He had felt it the way he felt everything that happened on his own land, a dull ache behind his sternum, not sharp enough to double him over but persistent enough that he couldn't forget it even when he wanted to. He wanted to forget it now. He wanted to think about nothing at all. Netherlands turned a page in the ledger and the leash shifted, not a tug, just the incidental movement of a hand that held something it had forgotten it was holding, and the collar pressed briefly into Indies' windpipe before settling again.
"Eighty-seven thousand guilders from coffee out of Semarang alone this quarter," Netherlands said, and his voice carried that particular satisfaction of someone reviewing numbers that pleased him, warm and conversational, the tone of a man discussing the weather with someone he considered almost an equal. His bright blue eyes flicked up from the page. The red band across his forehead caught the late afternoon light from between the shutters, vivid as paint, the same red as the hair swept back from it, and below it the white stripe of his mid-face and then the blue that started under his nose and ran down his jaw and throat and all the way down, the rest of him that same clean colonial blue. He looked at Indies with an expression that was not cruel exactly but was something worse: comfortable. "You've been productive, Indies. Truly."
Indies said nothing. He had learned the architecture of these silences, which ones were meant to be filled and which ones were traps. This one Netherlands filled himself, glancing back at the ledger and running his fingertip down a column of figures. "Sugar's up as well. Indigo, tobacco, all up. I'll have to write to the Hague about expanding the quotas in Priangan." He said it like he was thinking aloud, like Indies was furniture that happened to have ears. Then he set the quill down and turned in the chair and looked at Indies fully, and his hand came up and gathered the slack from the leash until the leather went taut between them, a straight line from Indies' throat to Netherlands' fist, perhaps sixty centimeters of it left. "On your knees."
Indies' jaw tightened. A small rebellion, involuntary, the muscles of his face doing what his body could not. He went down. The tile was cool through the thin fabric of his trousers, a small mercy in the heat, and he felt his kneecaps settle into it with the familiarity of repetition. Netherlands spread his legs wider in the chair to make room, and the movement was so casual, so practiced, that Indies felt something hot and tight coil behind his ribs. Hatred, probably. Or something adjacent to it, something with teeth. Netherlands' free hand went to the front of his own trousers, unbuttoning with the unhurried ease of a man undressing for bed, and Indies watched his own breath fog against the blue skin of Netherlands' inner thigh and thought: eighty-seven thousand guilders. From coffee. His people were eating less so this man could drink more.
"Go on," Netherlands said. He tugged the leash once, a short pull that brought Indies' face forward, and his cock was there, half-hard already, flushed a deeper blue against the surrounding skin, the foreskin still covering most of the head. Indies could smell him: soap and salt and something warm, animal, underneath. His stomach turned and he opened his mouth.
The first taste was skin and musk and the faint bitterness of sweat, and Indies closed his eyes because that was the one thing he was still allowed to close. He took Netherlands in and felt the weight of him on his tongue, the way the foreskin drew back as he hardened fully, the ridge of the head pressing against the roof of Indies' mouth. Netherlands let out a breath, not quite a sigh, more like the sound of someone settling deeper into a comfortable chair, and his hand came to rest on the top of Indies' head. His fingers threaded into the red hair there, not gripping, just resting, proprietary, the way you'd rest your hand on something you owned.
Indies worked his mouth and tried to think about the tile pattern. Octagonal, cream and terracotta, imported or locally made, he wasn't sure. His jaw was already beginning to ache, the stretch of it around Netherlands' girth sending a dull burn into the hinge of his mandible. He breathed through his nose in controlled pulls. Netherlands' hips shifted, a lazy thrust that pushed deeper, and Indies gagged, a wet, ugly sound, ghhk, and felt his eyes water. Netherlands' hand tightened briefly in his hair, then loosened. "Easy," he murmured, the way you'd speak to a horse. "The Indies always deliver eventually, don't they. Just need the right quotas."
A tear slid down Indies' cheek, tracking from the corner of his eye across the white of his mid-face and down onto the blue below his nose, and it was purely mechanical, purely the result of his soft palate being hit, and he hated it anyway. He hated the sound he was making, the slick, rhythmic schlck schlck of his mouth working, hated the way Netherlands' breathing had gone just slightly uneven, hated the taste, hated the way his own hands sat useless on his own thighs because he did not know where else to put them. He could feel the collar with every bob of his head, the leather shifting against his throat, the brass ring clicking faintly against the buckle at the back. Netherlands' thumb traced the shell of his ear, almost tender, and Indies wanted to bite down so badly that his molars ached with it.
He didn't. He kept going. The quill sat on the desk above him, drying. The guilders sat in their stacks. The numbers sat in their columns. His jaw ached and his knees ached and he kept going because the leash was short and the chair was tall and the distance between his mouth and the door was a measurement he'd stopped calculating months ago.
Netherlands pulled him off by the hair. Not violently, but not gently either, a firm backward pressure that dragged Indies' mouth free with a wet sound, pop, a thread of saliva stretching and breaking between his lower lip and the slick head of Netherlands' cock. Indies gasped and his jaw throbbed with the sudden relief of closing. Netherlands stood, and the full height of him unfolded, easily over 190 centimeters, that lanky scaffolding of blue limbs and narrow shoulders, and Indies was still on his knees looking up at the tricolor of his face and the bright, placid eyes that looked down at him without malice or mercy, only ownership. It was the same tricolor Indies wore. Red, white, blue, stacked in the same bands across his own face, and looking up at Netherlands was like looking at the original from underneath the copy.
"Up. Over the desk."
Indies stood. His legs were stiff and he stumbled slightly, the leash catching him short, and Netherlands steadied him with one hand on his upper arm as if helping him across a puddle. The desk was solid under Indies' palms when he braced against it, and then his chest, when Netherlands pressed him down with a hand between his shoulder blades. The ledger was right there. His cheek settled against the open page and he could read the figures upside down, columns of yields and tariffs and export values written in Netherlands' precise, slanted hand. His breath fogged the ink. Coffee: 87,000 guilders. Sugar: 63,000. Indigo: 41,000. The numbers blurred as Netherlands yanked his trousers down to his thighs, the air hitting his bare skin, the same blue as the man behind him, a color that had been painted onto him and had never once washed off.
Netherlands used something slick. Oil, maybe, from the small bottle on the desk that Indies had assumed was for the lamp. It was not warm and it was not enough, but it was something, a concession to practicality rather than kindness, the minimum required to make this mechanically possible. Netherlands' fingers pushed into him, two, perfunctory, scissoring once, twice, and Indies hissed through his teeth and gripped the edge of the desk. The wood bit into his palms. Netherlands withdrew his fingers and replaced them with the blunt, insistent pressure of his cock, and Indies felt his body resist and then yield, the way a door gives when forced, and the sound that came out of his mouth was not a moan, it was something rawer, a punched-out "nngh" that he couldn't swallow back.
"Count," Netherlands said. He was fully seated, his hips flush against Indies' ass, and his voice was steady, conversational, the same tone he used for discussing quotas. "Every one. Out loud. If you lose track, we begin again."
He pulled back and thrust in, and Indies' forehead scraped against the ledger page. "One," he said. His voice sounded like someone else's.
Netherlands set a rhythm. Not fast, not slow. Methodical. The pace of a man turning pages, reviewing inventory, checking figures against projections. Each thrust drove Indies' hips into the edge of the desk and pushed the air out of his lungs in small, forced grunts. "Two," he managed. "Three." The leash was looped around Netherlands' wrist now, keeping Indies' head up just enough that he couldn't bury his face in the papers and disappear. "Four. Five." His voice cracked on five and he pressed his lips together and breathed hard through his nose, the smell of ink and oil and his own sweat filling his head.
Netherlands' hand settled on his hip, fingers pressing into the bone there, and the angle shifted, deeper, and Indies' vision swam. "S-six. Seven." He was gripping the desk so hard his knuckles had gone bloodless, paler than the rest of him. "Eight." A sound was building in his throat, something he was fighting to keep behind his teeth, and Netherlands thrust harder on nine and it escaped, a broken, unwilling "aahh" that rang off the tile floor and the shuttered windows and the stacked guilders. "Nine," he said belatedly, and his voice was shaking. "That was nine."
"It was," Netherlands agreed, mildly, as if confirming a sum.
"Ten." The word came out thick and wet. "Eleven." He could feel everything, the stretch and the burn and the terrible fullness, the specific shape of Netherlands inside him, the way his own body was responding in ways that made him want to crawl out of his own skin. He was half-hard against the desk and the shame of it was a second violation, his own flesh betraying him the way his land had been made to betray him, producing what was demanded whether he willed it or not. "Twelve. Thir... thirteen." The ink on the page beneath his cheek was smudging, the eighty-seven turning into a dark smear, the guilder amounts bleeding together under the moisture of his breath and the press of his face. Good, he thought, wildly, irrationally. Ruin the numbers. Make him rewrite them.
Netherlands' pace increased. The sounds were obscene, the slap of skin against skin, wet and percussive, and Indies' counting became ragged, numbers tumbling out between grunts and half-swallowed sounds. "Fourteen, fff, fifteen, sixteen..." He lost the rhythm at seventeen, his mind blanking as Netherlands hit something inside him that sent a white flash through his vision, and for a terrible, suspended moment he couldn't remember what came next, his mouth open, panting against the ruined ledger page, the number gone, just gone.
"Seventeen," Netherlands supplied, and his voice had finally lost some of its composure, gone slightly rough at the edges, his breathing harder. "Don't make me start over, Indies."
"Seventeen," Indies repeated, and it tasted like ash. "Eighteen. Nineteen." Each number was an admission. Each number was compliance. Each number was a crop yield delivered on schedule. "Twenty. Twenty-one." He was shaking, his thighs trembling against the desk, and he could feel Netherlands' rhythm faltering, losing its bureaucratic precision, becoming something more animal, less controlled. "Twenty-two, twenty-thr..." Netherlands thrust deep and stayed, and Indies felt him pulse, felt the warmth of it inside him, and the sound Netherlands made was quiet, a low, satisfied groan through closed teeth, like a man finishing a good meal, and his hand tightened on the leash until the collar dug into Indies' throat hard enough that the count he'd been about to say came out as nothing but a wheeze.
Netherlands held there for several seconds. Then he exhaled, long and slow, and pulled out, and the sudden emptiness was its own particular discomfort, the cool air against wet, raw skin. Indies heard him step back, heard the rustle of fabric as he refastened his trousers, the creak of the chair as he sat back down. The leash went slack. It pooled on the tile between them like a shed skin.
Indies stayed bent over the desk. His cheek was still pressed to the ledger. The ink was smeared beyond reading now, eighty-seven thousand guilders reduced to a dark blur against the page, and his breath came in shallow, uneven pulls, and his fingers were still curled around the edge of the desk because he had not yet told them to let go. Behind him, the quill scraped. Netherlands had picked it up. Netherlands was writing again. The scratch of nib on paper resumed its rhythm, steady and precise, filling in new columns, new numbers, new yields from new soil, and Indies closed his eyes and pressed his face harder into the ruined page and breathed the smell of smudged ink until it was the only thing he could taste.
Something sat behind his teeth that wasn't a number. It wasn't Indies either. Indies was a word Netherlands had handed him the same way he'd handed him the collar and the colors on his face, Dutch-made, provenance noted, buckled on and expected to be worn. This was something else, unformed, a shape his tongue kept almost finding and losing, like the name of a place you were born in a language you'd been made to forget. He couldn't say it. He didn't know it yet. It existed somewhere, maybe, scratched into some foreign journal by a stranger's hand, waiting. And under the borrowed tricolor, under the blue, there was a feeling he couldn't name either, two colors and not three, red and white and nothing else. He kept both pressed against the backs of his teeth where Netherlands couldn't reach them, couldn't tally them, couldn't put them in a column, and they were the only things in the room that were his.
The afternoon light shifted through the shutters, one slat dimmer than before, and the insects outside kept singing.