Mostly Harmless (Claude/Bennet)
Title: Mostly Harmless (AKA The Obligatory Though Very Time-Inappropriate Morally Grey Christmas Fic)
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Claude/Bennet
Spoilers: For Company Man
Summary: Santa Hats, Jail Cells, Revenge, and Porn
Notes: This started as a ficlet for cerebel's Sekrit Cabal Ficlet Battle and ended up... not quite that, what with it being a bit over 9K and all. Many filthy, morally grey thanks to entangled_now, for the wonderful investigative beta and for pushing me down the slippery slope of porn the constant encouragement with words of pervy wisdom, and to indyhat for helping me not die of embarrassment and for being generally supportive and awesome.
Mostly Harmless,
AKA
The Obligatory Though Very Time-Inappropriate Morally Grey Christmas Fic
(Featuring: Santa Hats, Jail Cells, Revenge, and Porn)
"Claude!"
This wasn't Bennet's idea of the perfect holiday.
For one, a holding cell filled with drunken, disheveled, foul-smelling denizens, wasn't high on his list of ideal locations for Christmas Eve.
Another thing that didn't entirely align with his maliciously detailed plans was the nasty bruise decorating his left eye (and its more subtly placed companions, spread-out along his body with no apparent pattern,) with the naturally associated throbbing ache that was still very much present.
However, the aspect of his situation he was finding least tolerable, was roughly two-thirds of a Santa Claus suit that served as his current attire.
Actually, it was toss-up between that, and the fact his so-called partner had apparently decided to leave him here to rot.
This wasn’t happening.
It had to be a particularly vicious dream, or maybe even a sadistic telepathic manipulation. Nothing that wouldn't go away if he banged his head against the bars hard enough, which was a course of action he wasn't entirely opposed to at the moment. It even seemed strategically sound, if you looked at it upside down.
But Bennet was disillusioned enough to know the universe had a penchant for bad practical jokes.
As did Claude.
Speaking of…
"Claude! You son of a-"
He broke off in the middle of the passionate if unimaginative slur, voice diminishing into a dejected groan.
Pressing his forehead against the cool metal bars, he vaguely wondered which mythological entity would be the appropriate one to pray to (or optimally, threaten with a large gun) in a time like this. Not that he'd ever found sufficient ground to believe in anything supernatural, which rendered his musings entirely theoretical, but - his thought process was abruptly and crudely cut off as he registered a hand insistently groping his ass.
He turned his head, very slowly, towards the initiator of the invasive contact.
The man, a close physical approximation of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla, gave him a lewd, thoroughly troubling grin.
Bennet gazed at him blankly.
"Will you excuse me? I'm talking to my invisible boyfriend."
The gorilla swiftly retracted his hand.
The way Bennet figured, he had better chances of survival if he was considered insane.
Or maybe he just was insane.
After all, it'd only be a matter of time.
~ Earlier that week ~
"It's for the greater good, rookie."
Claude's grin grew to spectacularly punchable proportions.
And no, for once Bennet didn't care that 'punchable' wasn't technically a word.
"How -" he paused to find a semblance of balance, drawing a breath chopped efficiently around the edges to convey all the annoyance in his disposal, "- is dressing up in this and subjecting myself to the whims of -" tiny, infinitely devious and, by his best estimations, pure evil brats who, for some loathsome politically correct reason, were often referred to as 'children', "- how does any of this serve the greater good?"
"You're short-sighted, friend. When you're old and wise like I am, you'll know what I'm talkin' about. Trust me. Besides, bit of camouflage is essential for a successful operation."
Bennet decided against mentioning the fact that Claude was a year younger than he was, which made the whole promise distinctly paradoxical.
"I don't see you employing any camouflage."
"Well I'm invisible aren't I? Hardly need to bother with that sort of thing. Besides, I have much better things to do with my time."
"Like what?" Bennet frowned darkly.
"Like mingle with the local population. That blonde from the bar is a goldmine of information."
Bennet gritted his teeth, because he'd be damned if he was going to comment on Claude's… mining techniques. An urgent change of subject was in order.
"A kid tried to throw up on me." It was a painful confession, one he'd repressed for most of the day and now found himself unable to keep undisclosed.
"Tried? With malicious intent?" Claude seemed genuinely curious. "Did you manage to dodge?"
"Narrowly."
"Good for you, mate," Claude patted his shoulder with the utmost of friendly condescension. "I'm sure Kaito will be thrilled to know his lessons are servin' you well."
Bennet retaliated by giving Claude a cold, hopefully menacing glare.
Claude, being Claude, promptly disregarded it with yet another insufferable, endlessly fickle grin. "No reason you should be all alone here," he said. "I can sit on your lap, keep you company."
“Don’t even think about it,” Bennet growled.
“C'mon, don't be such a coward. It's not like anyone would know.”
“If you try to sit on me, Claude, I’ll throw you off.”
Claude frowned. "You don't make a very jolly Santa, you know that?" he managed a surprising amount of righteous indignation, not an inch of it even remotely genuine. "Keep this up an' you'll be gettin' visits from the ghost of Christmas past soon." He shrugged, the very picture of indifference. "Well, suit yourself. I have important business to attend to."
Claude had already faded into thin air before Bennet had the chance to show him some truly jolly behavior.
And then he was back in his newly acquired personal hell.
---
Bennet gave the line of his jaw a desperate scratch, but the itch persistently refused to go away.
"I think I might be allergic to the fake beard."
Claude made a noise that sounded suspiciously like suppressed laughter.
"You think that's funny?"
"No mate, tragic's what it is. Catastrophic, really. However are you goin' to live without the comfort of a good fake beard?"
"Just wait until you have to wear one," Bennet grumbled. "See if I show any sympathy." Not the most effective or dramatic of threats, to be sure, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances. He scratched harder, to no avail.
"Who's the subject?" Claude asked absent-mindedly, tracing vulgar patterns on the dusty tabletop while surveying the smoke-infested bar environment with a laid-back, casual air.
"You know who the subject is, Claude."
"Yeah, but I like to hear you say it," he grinned back at Bennet. "You make mission briefings sexy."
Bennet gave an exasperated sigh. "Henry Stuart, twenty-seven, five-foot-eight, currently unemployed. Potential technopath," he relayed the information in the blandest tone available to him.
"Technopath in the most miserable hole in Alaska. Kind of ironic, that. Most awe-inspirin' display of technology here is that electronic dart board over there."
"You think he's rigging it?"
"Public menace, our boy, rigging the local dart board. Think we should take him out before he causes any real damage?"
Bennet sighed, preparing an elaborate, bullet-pointed rant regarding Claude's innate inability to take anything seriously.
Then, of course, Claude had to go and ruin it all. "There he is," he tapped Bennet's shoulder. "You forgot to mention he looks like a deformed leprechaun."
"That wasn't in the file."
"It should be."
For once, Bennet had to agree. The man certainly had a… distinctive appearance.
"Quit starin', rookie, you're drawing attention to yourself."
"I wasn't staring," Bennet protested feebly. "And I think the outfit is taking care of the attention-drawing part already."
"Well, whatever it is you were doing, stop doing it and drink your bloody beer like a normal person."
"We're on a mission, Claude. I'm not going to get drunk."
"It's surveillance, not like we're goin' to bag him here and now. It'll look strange if you don't drink."
"I can live with that." There was something about Claude that brought out the most instinctively stubborn in Bennet, quite a bit like the red cape waved in front of a bull, only to an opposite effect.
"I see what this is about," Claude declared, clearly enjoying a light-bulb moment. "You just can't bring yourself to do anything that might be in the least bit fun. It's just beyond you - the whole concept of it. You probably think 'fun' is some alien life form that should be dissected and studied and locked up indefinitely, don't you Bennet?"
"This isn't supposed to be fun," Bennet rationalized. "It's a mission."
"Life isn't supposed to be fun, either, but you have to live anyway." Claude was up on his feet before Bennet was able to fully appreciate and analyze that particular piece of philosophy. "Right. I'm off. Enjoy your absence of fun."
"Off where?" The invisible man ignored him while doing a very literal job of fading into the crowd. "Claude!"
No answer.
Bennet released a hissed breath through his teeth.
His frustration failed to last long, because precisely two minutes into his surveillance effort, one Henry Stuart was standing in front of his table, looking fifty percent paranoid, fifty percent agitated, and precisely a hundred percent ugly. "The hell you think you're looking at?"
"I wasn't-"
"I am not gay," insisted the deformed leprechaun vehemently.
"What-" but Bennet's earnest question never stood a chance of completion, because a fist was on a direct collision course with his eye.
Things hadn't gone up from there.
~ Back in the Cell of Desolation and Ass Groping ~
There is comfort to be found in pure misery, once you've adapted to it.
It's not masochism. It's not melancholy. It's acceptance.
It was an hour or two past midnight, and everybody but Bennet had already been released, courtesy of small town nepotism - the kind that so often came with intense, unyielding xenophobia - and Bennet had come nowhere close to accepting the cruel and unjust misery inflicted on him.
In fact, he was determined to stare down reality until it admitted it was fully in the wrong, and agreed to correct itself accordingly.
The only problem was that reality was nowhere to be seen.
"Let me guess, rookie," said a voice that lacked visual context. "You shot a man in Reno just to watch him die? Thought I told you to keep those homicidal urges in check."
Claude. Thank god.
"You bastard."
"Nice to see you too, mate. Doing hard time? Anyone claim your lily-white arse yet?"
The fact that the answer was, for lack of a better alternative, 'yes', wasn't exactly something Bennet considered ideal circumstances. He suspected it was only a matter of time before Claude started with the soap-related prison jokes, and that was a slippery slope he wasn't at all willing to face.
"Let me out."
"Not right away," Claude objected. "First I need to contemplate the moral repercussions of unleashin' you onto an unsuspecting world."
Bennet's hands clenched over the bars, almost painfully. "What?"
"Well, clearly you're a dangerous criminal. Possibly unstable. I'm takin' a great risk just talking to you."
"Claude, if you don't-"
"Well, if you're goin' to be such a baby about it," Claude's voice was mercifully punctuated by the click of the lock, and the door to the cell opened. "Don't get your knickers in a twist, it's not like you have anyone but yourself to blame for this."
"I'm not wearing knickers."
"Going commando, Bennet? Bold of you. Especially since you're supposed to be serving as a role model for young children."
"Boxers," Bennet muttered tiredly, exiting the cell. "I'm wearing boxers."
"Right, same difference. C'mon, Noah, let's get you home before your mum starts worryin'."
"Don't call me that."
"What, 'Noah'? 's your name, isn't it?"
Bennet closed his eyes, willing the demolition team taking residence inside his brain to take a break. "It isn't when you say it like that."
The road back to the motel was passed in the kind of silence produced only by indecent bar brawls and subsequent awkward jailbreaks. Not uncomfortable silence, but one that goes beyond the definition of comfort and discomfort; something that might as well be made of meteor rock.
“This is quite possibly the worst night of my life,” Bennet decided, back in the small, familiarly suffocating room.
Claude responded merely by shrugging his shirt off, then unceremoniously dropping onto the motel bed.
“Merry Christmas, mate,” he offered a bright, illegally cheerful grin. "You'll have worse."
~ Some time later, in a rather different state of mind ~
Claude woke up with the distinctly uneasy feeling he was being watched.
His paranoia soon paid off, as he rolled over and discovered Bennet sitting silently at the side of the bed, looking at him with the sort of unnatural, focused intentness that would've sent lesser men running. Claude, of course, was no lesser man, so he chose the path of being mildly unnerved instead.
Something was wrong, irreversibly skewed with this picture. He was the one with the elite sneaking skills. The rookie was overstepping his bounds.
"You tryin' to give me a sodding heart attack, Bennet?"
Bennet's gaze didn't budge, not even a blink to give an indication that he wasn't a particularly life-like mannequin. It took Claude all of three second to start wondering whether his normally quiet and sensible partner has spontaneously turned into a gleefully voyeuristic serial killer.
People were infinitely surprising like that.
Then again, the ominous effect was somewhat tarnished by the fact that Bennet, while having deemed it fit to remove the Santa coat and boots, and strip to his undershirt, made no such adjustments to the fluffy red trousers, nor for, strangely enough, the hat.
He was about to get gruesomely murdered by bloody Santa Claus. Brilliant.
Dim, thinning moonlight was slipping elusively through the window, lending to the designer-eerie atmosphere, making Claude's skin prickle. Steel-colored eyes glinted in the near-dark, and if he hadn't known better, he would've said the gaze belonged to a natural predator.
But Bennet wasn't predatory. Was the farthest thing from it, matter of fact - as tamed as they come, thoroughly domesticated in that suburban, eternal Boy Scout, neatly-pressed, perfectly-tucked-in dress-shirt sort of way.
Predators didn't look at beer like it was an insult and threat to their very existence. They didn't smile politely and use infinite niceties and have the kind of impeccable table manners that should only exist in after-school specials. They certainly didn't elevate paperwork into a bloody divine entity.
Did they?
"You should be afraid. I'm a dangerous criminal," Bennet's suddenly regained speech ability nearly made Claude jump, for Christ's sake. Alright, maybe he was more than just mildly unnerved. He also wasn't sure if it was his imagination that painted the momentary quirk at the corner of Bennet's mouth. "Possibly unstable.”
“Yeah," Claude scoffed, quickly regaining his footing, or at least projecting his usual unruffled image, "‘bout as unstable as a stuffed teddy bear, and I'm being generous. About as wild and unpredictable as one, too."
Unfortunately he didn't get to elaborate on his ingenious plush toy theory, because Bennet was moving, fast, and then there was soft velvet digging into his sides, the texture unfairly rich and improbably tempting against his bare skin.
Well okay, so maybe teddy bears did have some unpredictable qualities after all.
It's not like he was a sodding plush anthropologist.
He figured imminent murder, at least, was out of the question, what with the look Bennet was giving him. Instead he was ready to put his money on morally grey sexual assault. Jail time could do that to a man.
"You've been naughty," Bennet said; an inflectionless, clinical accusation, the shameless antithesis to everything sex talk stands for.
Claude couldn't help a violent snort. Unbelievable, that. Just unbe-bloody-lievable. "Is Inga from the Playboy channel feedin' you lines?"
"Shut up."
There was something hard, uncompromising to Bennet's voice; a feral note of authority, and Claude had to jolt himself out of this sharply surreal Twilight Zone moment to remind himself that he was the senior partner, and that the rookie needed to be taken down a peg or two. Or ten.
But then Bennet was kissing him, raw and hot and impatient, and thinking about pegs was no longer an option, because his body was responding, tingling at the edges, betraying him without so much as a hint of remorse, and any kind of dangerously coherent thinking was becoming thoroughly inappropriate for the situation.
Instead he focused on kissing back, on claiming every available inch of Bennet's mouth - the irritatingly smooth upper lip especially though, since it seemed to be hell-bent on infuriating him for no reason whatsoever, which made him even more determined to fight back, fight dirty if he had to, or if the situation called for it, or if he bloody felt like it…
And then there was the strange journey Bennet's hands were making through his hair, movements ranging between clumsy and calculated, like he wasn't quite sure what he was doing or why but was thoroughly, fanatically intent on accomplishing that certain something anyway.
It took Claude several long moments of breathing without Bennet's mouth interrupting to come to the conclusion that there must've been a fairly impressive amount of alcohol circulating in his partner's system.
"If I'd known you were this much fun under influence, I would've spiked your coffee more often."
Bennet glanced down at him with a slightly raised eyebrow, curious in a distinctly 'you spiked my coffee?' sort of way. But he apparently quickly disregarded that troublesome line of thought, choosing to stick to the basics instead. "I said - shut up."
"Why don't you make me, rookie?"
He liked the constant challenge between them, the pushing and prodding. It was pure tension, elastic and ever-morphing. Sometimes it seemed like the only right way to be.
Bennet narrowed his eyes, tilting his head an inch sideways as if considering the matter in great detail. Probably making mental charts and filing them up one by one, making sure there wasn't the slightest margin for error and -
- and then he was lower, in a more interesting way than Claude would've anticipated.
"Are you tryin' to unbuckle my belt with your teeth?"
"…No."
"You're smashed, mate."
"I'm not drunk," Bennet insisted somberly from his strategically-sound position. "I'm lightly inebriated." A few desolate teeth-pulls later, "Possibly moderately."
"How about you get your possibly moderately inebriated teeth off my soddin' belt and let me do it?"
Bennet frowned, seemingly not at all satisfied with the outrageous suggestion, swatting Claude's hands away and getting to work on the buckle himself, now using fingers, at least, but still acting entirely too possessive about the whole thing - which was only fitting, considering he was acting more than a touch possessed. Not that Claude felt any immediate urge to call an exorcist - he much preferred this Bennet to a hypothetical one with his head spinning wildly around its axis.
In fact wildly spinning heads were what he considered a major turn-off.
Finally Bennet was done with the Herculean task of belt unbuckling, moving on to bigger and better things, and soon Claude's jeans and underwear were pulled down efficiently around his knees.
"I do know what fun is," Bennet insisted suddenly.
Well that was certainly a random and useless piece of information, especially considering other far more urgent matters at hand. Or matters that would be at hand, if Bennet wasn't too busy making annoyingly pointless statements.
"So that's what this is all about? You tryin' to prove your fun-having capacity? I think you could do that with a little less conversation, a little more action mate." Surely quoting Elvis at him would help Bennet find his path into the light? He'd heard it worked on more than a few Americans.
"I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm teaching you a lesson."
"Yeah? And what lesson would that be? How to get a bloke's pants down in forty-seven easy steps?"
"No," Bennet sadly refused to take the bait. "The lesson is: you're invisible," he leaned closer, voice going low, dangerous, slipping under Claude's skin with alarming ease. "But that doesn't mean you can get away with anything."
"Actually," Claude protested, because the assumption was entirely unjustified and pretty nonsensical, really, "I can."
Bennet's disapproving glare transformed fluidly into a thin smirk. "Well, you're not going anywhere now. I can assure you of that."
"Oh you can assure me. Well isn't that nice. You know what you are, rookie?" Bennet met his eyes with a blandly inquisitive stare. "You're… what's the word I'm lookin' for?" Timid? Mild? Non-threatening? Oh, there it was. Perfect. "Harmless."
"Harmless," Bennet repeated, and the word suddenly acquired a brand new metal coating of disdain, a filling of sardonic amusement - and something else, something that contradicted the very notion of 'harmless', something unchained and stealthy and when inspected from a very certain perspective, deadly.
Apparently Bennet had the secret ability of turning simple words into ninjas.
"Harmless as a kitten," he proceeded stubbornly, undeterred by the strange new subtext of the word. "And not one of the scrappy street cats either. A good, well-bred little kitten, with pitch-perfect manners and pampered fur and everything."
Bennet stayed perfectly still throughout the lecture, breathing just above his waistline, measured but not in his usual, carefully polite sort of way. Measured and silent in the way a tiger is before pouncing on an innocent gazelle and tearing it apart. Not that Claude had much to fear in that regard, since the pouncing had already commenced in full, and he was far from an innocent gazelle.
"Are you done?"
"Not by a long shot. Now that I think about it, a kitten doesn't quite cut it either. 'S far too sophisticated for you. Too bloody devious. You're just an overgrown puppy, Bennet. Bet your wife takes you out for long walks and does your hair and lets you play with-"
"Don't." Bennet's eyes went cold, the warning subtle but absolute. There weren't many rules between them, certainly not many that were unbendable - but The Wife Factor was the one rule that went undisputed.
Claude met Bennet's gaze, challenging without words, and for a good few seconds it was your classic staredown, neither willing to back down or budge an inch - all that was missing was a good old Western tune to spice things up properly.
Then Claude came up with an immediate plan of action.
He reached out, tugging at the sides of the Santa hat and pulling it down until it covered Bennet's eyes completely.
Probably not the most legitimate way of winning a staredown but hey, it'd worked, hadn't it?
It also had the distinct advantage of making Bennet look even more ridiculous than he already had, and even though he did appear vaguely affronted by the article of clothing blocking his view, he seemed otherwise rather keen on accepting his fate blindly, surprisingly enough.
Claude fleetingly wondered how much of his apparently-not-so-secret alcohol stash was left intact.
The troublesome line of thought was severed when Bennet, following a brief moment of disorientation, turned to sensory experimentation, leaning down and pressing his tongue to the nearest available surface, which conveniently happened to be located just an inch south of Claude's navel. From there he concentrated on tasting his way upwards, or maybe just on driving Claude insane - he wasn't going to underestimate Bennet's talent for stealthy, calculated warfare, blindfolded or not.
If he'd known it would awaken a covert, repressed oral fixation, he would've pulled the Santa hat treatment on him ages ago.
Bennet seemed to be intent on taking the full tour, excruciatingly thorough in his oral research, tongue circling a nipple tauntingly, insistently pressing in until it was hard, aching, until Claude was hard, until he was an inch away from grabbing Bennet by the bloody ears and pushing him down to his cock so he could do something fucking useful for a change - but he didn't - he didn't and not because he was naturally thrilled about dragged-out, meticulous, torturous slowness, but because it was Bennet, and telling him to hurry the fuck up and get to the point not only was likely to result in the exact opposite reaction, but was also somehow wrong.
So he just stayed still like a good boy and strangled a sound that was trying to crawl - fuck, tear - its way up his throat; a sound that really wasn't tolerable or decent in any shape or form - not that he had any problems with indecency, but Bennet would've gotten a complacent thrill out of it, and he wasn't prepared to grant him that satisfaction, not yet. And if he was going to die of asphyxiation - well that would be the rookie's bloody fault.
The sensual assault was sharply interrupted by Bennet's forehead bumping into his nose, prompting a blunt wave of pain and a loud, dissatisfied groan.
Claude supposed telling him to watch where he was going would be a touch hypocritical on his side, but he certainly wasn't going to let that particular transgression go unpunished.
In retaliation, he grabbed Bennet roughly by the back of the neck, pulling him in for a forceful, sloppy kiss. Pressing teeth into his lower lip (he still didn't trust the shady upper one) until he drew a faint but fully enthusiastic hiss, pressing even harder until Bennet returned the favor - okay, that fucking hurt - and Bennet's tongue pushed into his mouth, acting about as mutinous and petulant as tongues get.
Which was pretty damn mutinous and petulant, really.
The heating in the room was absolutely exaggerated, growing hotter with each passing second, seeping into him - and if eyes had really been the windows to the soul, he should've been as blind as Bennet, because his would've been fully fogged by now. Somehow he doubted that was the metaphor's original intention, though.
But it really was inhumanely hot, judging by the quickly gathering, prickly sweat, his and Bennet's, he couldn't tell the difference anymore - by the feeling that reality was standing on edge, tilted sideways, with all the associated vertigo.
Reality could shatter into a million tiny pieces for all he cared - right now there was just one focus, and that was beating Bennet at his game, drawing shallow pants from the bastard, making him push and pull and squirm and sweat.
Finally Bennet tore away, mouth red, breathing hard and low but recomposing himself far too quickly for Claude's taste - but that was soon forgotten as Bennet turned to work his way down the stubbly line of Claude's jaw, down to the curve of his neck where he made a tactical stop, making an effort to mark territory with his teeth.
"If you're not careful," Claude threatened, drawing a sharp breath, "you'll give me a soddin' Santa fetish."
"That'd be terrible," Bennet murmured, without a trace of sympathy, voice vibrating against his neck with an utterly maddening warmth. "Sodding Santa Claus, that's highly inappropriate, Claude."
Claude failed to stifle a raw, unhinged bark of laughter. "God rookie, warn me before you go and mutilate good and decent British words, will you?"
Bennet's own laughter was brief and silent, just a small huff of breath, letting itself known only through the irregular movement of his chest.
Which reminded Claude of something.
Leaning forward and catching a handful of stray fabric, he quickly managed to wrestle Bennet's undershirt off of his shoulders, and in an unlikely feat of luck and agility, keep the hat on - though unfortunately it was now back in its more traditional position, no longer serving as a makeshift blindfold. He threw the shirt aside, grinning proudly at the accomplishment.
There. Now they were a bit closer to being on even ground.
Bennet's upper body was rather curious-looking at the moment, he had to admit, stuck at a moot point between car-crash and train-wreck, battered and painted with eclectically-colored bruises, not to mention the occasional intriguing scratch mark.
"Charming," he observed cheerfully. "You could serve as a nice Christmas tree decoration."
Bennet wasn't at all daunted by the compliment, his stare turning fully accusatory. "This is your fault."
"It's your own goddamn fault, rookie. I wasn't the one leering at Mr. Leprechaun there like a dirty panty-sniffin' stalker. What do you want me to do? Send you a Get Well card with lots of pretty flowers and sparklin' rainbows? Kiss it and make it all better?"
"Yes."
"Yes, what?"
"Do it," the words stretched out surreally, balancing on the surface of foggy, abrupt breath. Claude felt his own breathing coming to a stop. "Kiss it and make it better."
There was a wild, reckless glint in Bennet's eyes, just one step off-balance, but enough to remind Claude that you didn't choose this line of work if you were entirely together.
If Claude were to be rational about this, the whole act should've pissed him right off - the overbearing, controlling attitude, the ridiculous pushiness, the corny lines - he should've by all rights thrown Bennet off the bed and gone back to sleep, but instead he found it irreversibly intriguing, in an annoyingly magnetic sort of way, and he honestly couldn't tell whether that was good or bad. Maybe both. But probably bad.
Also, he was pretty fucking horny.
With that in mind, he found that he couldn't care less about rationality.
Bracing his arms at the backs of Bennet's thighs to lift himself up, he found himself a nice, unthreatening, light-purple-shaded bruise at the left side of Bennet's abdomen, deciding it was just perfect to start with. All ripe and innocent.
Without waiting for an invitation, he brought his lips to the mark - softly, almost gently at first, before deciding that really didn't do the trick - then he pressed his tongue against it, hard and careless and intrusive until Bennet drew a jagged breath through his teeth, nails dragging aggressively over Claude's hip - then sucking around it, sucking and tasting and applying the occasional teeth pressure to spice things up.
He seriously doubted he was making it better under any proper medical definition, in fact it was likely to have the exact opposite effect, but the strangled moan it elicited from Bennet indicated it was therapeutic enough, in an alternative sort of way.
Now as long as nobody suddenly started to hum 'Sexual Healing', everything would be just dandy.
Once he decided that spot of skin had taken enough abuse for the moment, he moved to the next bruise - lighter, greyer, altogether not very spectacular or noteworthy, but Claude was sure it'd be a right star once he was done with it.
He skipped the introduction this time around, going right to tongue and teeth and claiming the spot as his own, encouraged by the dubious noises Bennet was trying to stifle -
- and by the fingers wrapping absent-mindedly around his cock, thumb offering distracted, lazy strokes - teasing shallowly and provoking against his skin - as if Bennet wasn't quite committed to the cause yet.
Well then, Claude just had to make sure the cause was worthwhile.
He ran his finger lightly from Bennet's thigh to his arse, then over the curve of his spine, relishing the resulting shudder while he picked out a new victim - this one especially red and raw and vulnerable-looking, probably caused by an unplanned collision (though considering this was Bennet, not-quite-as-meticulously-planned-as-usual-due-to-urgent-circumstances-involving-leprechauns was the more correct assumption) with a hard surface, positioned curiously close to his left nipple. Which made it two birds with one stone, really.
Trailing his tongue on a curious route from bruise to nipple, just taunting at first - two could play this game, after all - then picking up pace and raking his teeth over skin - slowing down again to get a good look at Bennet - clearly not quite as rock-steady as he would've liked to be, gaze glazed, lacking focus - biting on his lower lip to keep himself from being too vocal, to save himself a small measure of control.
Well, good luck with that.
Claude grinned into Bennet's chest, glancing up. "Sadomasochism looks good on you, mate," and though he doubted it sounded like one, it was as honest a compliment as he ever gave out.
"Really." And there was that invisible mouth quirk again, impossible for the naked eye to catch.
And then the hand around his cock was squeezing hard - fucking bastard - his cry drowned by Bennet's as Claude instantly snapped his teeth over inflamed skin as hard as he fucking could - then falling back, head hitting the pillow with a silent thud - a rush of blood - pounding dimly in his ears - dizziness as the world was painted a curious shade of red, and what was meant in all likelihood to be a growl quickly transforming into low laughter.
That was… oddly exhilarating. Not to mention fun.
When he rediscovered his lost link to reality, he glanced up at Bennet - all frown caught in a haze, fingers wandering over fresh teeth-marks at the side of his chest. Claude hadn't broken the skin, but the bruise would stay for days, weeks if he was especially lucky. And by his scientific estimations as well as the grim downwards-tilt of Bennet's mouth, it also hurt like a bitch.
Fantastic.
"You bit me."
If Bennet was appealing to his conscience, he would've had better luck having a heart-to-heart with the wall. Claude just grinned at him wildly. "Well clearly you bring out the animal in me."
Bennet did that face that indicated he would've rolled his eyes, if he wasn't in fact light-years more mature than the other party. The kind of face that usually made Claude yearn to catch him in a headlock and give him a proper noogie. The kind of look that was horribly hypocritical of him right now, all things considered. "Should I get a Rabies shot?"
"It's not like you're bleeding or anything," he stretched up again, callously snapping his fingers over the terrible, terrible wound, getting a rough hiss and accusing eyes in return. "So stop cryin' about it like a little girl."
"Bastard."
"Crybaby."
Not to mention the rookie was entirely too well-dressed for the occasion. With no devious belt to battle, one well-placed tug was enough to slide the burgundy trousers down to Bennet's hips - a mild eyebrow raise was all he received for his effort - then another to get them past his thighs to his knees.
Bennet had told the sadly not-particularly-naked truth - there were boxers alright, and unsurprisingly, they were as plain and boring as they came.
He made a mental note to get the rookie into a pair of genuine knickers, though that was a task that would require masterful amounts of finesse, manipulation and alcohol. He was already devising a plan he'd creatively dubbed Plan Knickers, when he was derailed by catching an eyeful of Bennet, lips wet and reddened, skin flushed… with a lovely bite mark for extra decoration - gaze intent, hole-drilling, feverish - and Claude realized something.
This was apparently what happened when you dragged Bennet to the edge, gave him a pep talk and then offered a tiny but infinitely helpful push.
This wasn't just Bennet drunk. It was Bennet without restraints, without inhibitions, without his endless self-outlined borders, without the nagging, sensibly overbearing, impossibly responsible sanity -
- and as of now, without trousers on.
Fuck. He liked this Bennet.
"You want me," Bennet said, as if on cue, and it was a simple bland statement of fact, as indisputable as the color of the sky, or Thompson's inadvertent ability to creep the fuck out of anybody with a pulse unless they lacked a very specific set of self-preservation genes.
And it was true, of course - you don't normally pull a bloke's trousers down if a polite conversation was what you had in mind - which meant the Bennet Stating the Obvious hour had come early today.
"An' what if I do?"
Bennet didn't respond at first, simply using his index finger to trace a lazy, teasing line from Claude's chest to his lower stomach, refusing as if on principle to go any lower.
"Then beg."
Yeah, because Claude was the meek and compliant type. Sure.
"Keep dreaming."
"I'm not a dreamer," Bennet said slowly, patiently. "I'm a pragmatist."
Then Bennet sat back, and everything turned instantly cooler, growing strangely, abnormally, cruelly distant. It was as if the bastard had turned a bloody switch and now there was a machine sitting on top of him. And if the sudden disconnect hadn't quite done the trick, Bennet decided to top that by folding his bloody arms. Altogether he irrationally reminded Claude of that Nazi-looking copper in Terminator who had a fetish for trucks and slicing people up.
For purely scientific purposes (and possibly a few self-preservation-related ones), he poked Bennet in the stomach. Hard.
Bennet squinted at him. "What are you doing?"
"Checking to see if liquid metal comes out."
"Is there any particular reason it should?"
"You're a fucking android, aren't you mate. Admit it."
"I'm not T-1000, Claude."
"Could've fooled me. Besides, you'd look cute, all lost and naked and… killing people."
"You're trying to change the subject."
"Y'know, Bennet, years from now, they'll develop an obnoxious little cybernetic creature in your honor. And all it will do is nag people and spy on them when they're sleeping and drive them absolutely fucking bonkers by stating the bleedin' obvious and not being even remotely helpful." Claude wondered what else he could add to make his magnificent precognitive vision truly convincing. "And it'd look like an obscene paperclip."
Bennet sighed patiently, conveniently ignoring the entire rant. "Say please, Claude. If you want me, I want acknowledgement, it's only fair."
Fair. Now that was rich. Obviously Bennet took the original 'monumentally fucking unfair' and scrambled it in some sort of giant truth blender to get to that very special conclusion.
"I don't remember it saying cocktease in your qualifications, rookie."
"I'm not teasing," Bennet said and proceeded to do just that, giving his entire body - particularly the lower regions - an offensively thorough look-but-don't-touch treatment. "I'm delivering an ultimatum. It's a simple negotiation technique - I really don't see why it should bother you so much."
"You negotiate like a terrorist."
"I'm being perfectly reasonable here. I haven't even threatened to blow anything up yet," Bennet rationalized rationally. "I'm merely withholding certain services. It's like going on strike - it's my civic right, if anything."
"That makes you a very civilized terrorist then."
"Come on, Claude, it's just one word. It's not that hard," he punctuated the last word with a tactical glance downwards, and a carefully ironic tilt of his brow.
Amazing. Bennet meets innuendo. Would the wonders ever cease?
"Pretty please with a shiny pile of fresh paperwork on top?"
"I think you're being sarcastic."
"How could you even suspect me of such a thing?" Claude perfected his Voice of Innocence.
"I'm naturally suspicious. Comes with the line of work."
"Nah, you're just bein' paranoid."
"That comes with the line of work too."
"You know rookie," they could do this all night long, and he for one had more resourceful and creative ways in mind to how to spend that stretch of time, "it's not like I'm the only one with needs here."
To prove his point, he swiftly reached out, sweeping his palm aggressively over the front of Bennet's boxers. "You want this just as much as I do."
Then, to make this as believable a live presentation as possible, he pressed closer, finding a grip and slowly, patiently moving his hand up and down his erection, getting the appropriate Bennet-patented death-glare in return. Much as he would've doubtlessly loved to deny it, Bennet couldn't stop himself from reacting, from growing harder under Claude's grasp - head tilting a few millimeters backwards, lips pressing together with a quiet desperation, breathing coming to a slow halt.
Yeah, there was definitely need there.
Then Bennet's hand closed over his forearm, nonchalantly pushing it down and away in yet another feat of bloody robotics.
"I can wait," he said, infallible.
Claude could wait too, really he could, indefinitely if he had to - but then he could also miss the narrow window of opportunity of Bennet like this, and just the thought of it was met with irrational fear that this Bennet would soon just fade away into the astral plane of bizarre sexual fantasies involving Santa hats.
And that was one astral plan he wasn't prepared to set foot in.
Well that settled it then. There went the little that was left of his dignity.
"Please, alright? There, you have your soddin' acknowledgement, you wanker. Now how about you stick it where the sun doesn't shine and we'll call it even?"
"I knew you could be polite," Bennet smiled slowly, loathsomely. "Now say my name," his tone hardened, all traces of a smile evaporating, "like it isn't a goddamned joke."
Well, it's not like it was Claude's fault that the rookie's first name was so wonderfully… mockable.
"You know, Noah, it's not like you're giving me much of an incentive to play along here. I could have you bent over that nice little table over there and mewlin' my name before you can say 'ho ho ho'."
Bennet didn't seem terribly intimidated - in fact his lack of intimidation shone through quite clearly as he formed a smile that to the rest of the world would've been mild and civil, but to Claude, who knew better, was recklessly, obscenely smug. "You could try."
But Claude had had a lifetime experience of confusing could and should, often purposefully, so he instantly pushed himself up on his forearms -
- and then he was promptly foiled by a hand pressing flatly against his chest, firmly pushing him back down.
"Ho, ho, ho," Bennet said, deadpan, making it sound like a terrifying one-liner in a spectacularly bad action flick. Then his expression grew slightly defensive. "And for the record, I don't mewl."
Oh, this was just too much. Far, far too much. He broke down laughing - it wasn't even respectable manly laughter, but an uncontrollable, painful giggle fit. He laughed until his sides hurt, and his lungs feel burnt-out and overused.
And the fact Bennet still kept a fully serious face didn't help one bit.
"Noah," and he couldn't make the name a goddamned joke if he tried, because reality was far more amusing, "did you just call me a ho?"
"It's not a groundless accusation."
"S'pose not. Now are you going to act on it, or should I take matters into my own hands? I can call 1800-my-partner-is-a-sadistic-prick, I'm sure they'd be more than willing to service a man in my condition." Then again, Alaskan sex lines might be a bit frozen this time of year.
"One last thing," Bennet objected.
Oh, for fuck's - "What?"
"Promise you won't call me rookie," Bennet said in an utterly reasonable voice, with an utterly reasonable expression, and Claude suddenly had the utterly reasonable desire to punch him in the face, "for a month."
Claude glared.
Bennet glared back, entirely impassive.
"Do we have a deal?"
This was beyond absurd. Claude could have easily told him to bugger off, to take his negotiations and his deals and his stupid, ridiculously sexy Santa hat with him. He could do anything but give in. Surely he had better self-control than that.
Who was he kidding?
No he didn't.
"Deal."
Bennet reached out with his hand, and it took Claude a long moment of consulting his Bennet-to-Earth dictionary to come to the conclusion that he was proposing an actual handshake.
"Bennet, get that hand out of my face before I make sure it becomes a permanent extension of your arse," he growled, "and make yourself fucking useful."
Bennet frowned, staying still for a moment before shrugging impassively and relocating his hand to a more useful landmark.
Claude instinctively arched into his grip, but the more he pushed the more elusive it got - like a sodding magician's hat or some other useless metaphor he couldn't fully wrap his mind around nor did he really care to - what with the insistent, stinging ache throughout his body - one fucking area of it specifically - and Bennet's bleeding Inquisition.
The Inquisitor General smirked at him with unbearable arrogance. "Patience is a virtue."
"So is not getting strangled to death by your sexually frustrated partner," he shot back with a sneer, making sure he was just the right amount of feral to unnerve.
Bennet looked far closer to devious than unnerved, unfortunately - progressively so as he lowered his mouth to Claude's cock, sliding his tongue over it with burning, malicious intent.
Okay. Now this was an improvement. This was good. Great really.
There was only one tiny problem.
"Bloody hell Bennet, your pom-pom is itchy."
"My pom-pom is itchy," Bennet repeated blankly, tone underlined with poorly concealed sadistic glee. "How bad is it?"
"I don't think I should tell you, actually," he said once his brain got sufficient circulation. "I think you'd use that information to my disadvantage."
"Now who's being paranoid?"
Claude figured this didn't deserve a response, not really, and gave Bennet a dirty look instead.
"Alright, I'll take it off," Bennet obliged, pulling the hat off of his head and placing it on the side of the bed. "I can be reasonable."
He closed his eyes, breathing in, allowing himself a small surrender -
- when he felt a soft, invasive fluffy presence pressing against him.
He bucked, doing his very best not to kick Bennet in the face, which admittedly would've been tricky under the circumstances, though infinitely satisfying.
"What the hell was that?!"
Bennet froze, staying silent and immobile and apparently pretending to be invisible before offering a faint, vaguely guilty response, "I don't know what you're talking about."
"It felt like you were tryin' to stick the pom-pom up my arse!" Claude elaborated helpfully and possibly a touch hysterically.
"I wasn't going to do that," Bennet objected with the sort of apologetic, defensive air that went with conspicuous lack of innocence. He promptly discarded the hat, employing the kind of class stealth that two-year-olds playing hide and seek would take pride in.
"Yeah, like hell you weren't."
"I wasn't."
Claude didn't believe him for a second. Not a bloody second.
"You try that again and next thing you know you'll be wakin' up naked and gagged and tied spread-eagled to Thompson's desk, you got that, mate?"
Bennet's face paled and he made a small, stilted noise of horrified unhappiness, which pleased Claude to no end. Maybe the threat was a bit harsh, but it was the cold hard truth, and the son of a bitch had it coming.
Fucking pom-pom pervert.
Luckily Bennet didn't take the threat too close to heart, and things were soon back to where they'd been before the infamous pom-pom invasion.
He dug his fingers into Bennet's hair, pulling on it as Bennet's lips slid over him, calm and efficient and impossibly focused, and he was breathing in uneven, shuddering gasps, just barely keeping himself from thrusting because he doubted Bennet was deepthroating material, and choking him really wasn't on the agenda no matter how utterly maddening the bastard was.
Then Bennet just stopped, creating a brutal tear in time and space and Claude's highly sensitive psyche.
"What -" Fuck, fuck! "The hell are you waitin' for Bennet - an All Clear?"
Apparently not, because then Bennet's mouth was on his, slick and wet for all the wrong reasons, and his hand was rubbing against him instead, rough and urgent - and just that was enough to throw him right over the edge.
He came with a rough bark of a sound, triangulating somewhere between a moan and a growl and a laugh, easily muted into Bennet's mouth, struck with impossible warmth and giddy lightheadedness and the fleeting realization that really this wasn't the worst way at all to spend a Christmas night.
Then he sprawled out, blatantly ignoring life, the universe and everything.
Eventually he forced himself to crank his eyes half-open and squint to see what Bennet was using to wipe away incriminating evidence.
"Don't think that's what the original designer had in mind, but this is a very innovative use of a Santa hat," he complimented, feeling pretty damn jolly despite all the heavy torture he'd endured. Or possibly because of it.
"It deserves far worse," Bennet said darkly, clearly not quite over the traumatic experience of falsely posing as Father Christmas.
Having discarded the now definitely no-longer-usable hat, Bennet resettled on Claude's thighs, glaring down at him with blatant, pleading puppy eyes.
Those weren't regular puppy eyes, either, but clearly Puppy Eyes of Shameless Sexual Solicitation.
So Bennet was expecting to be repaid for his dubious services. Fancy that. Claude had just the thing in mind.
Slowly running his hand up the inside of Bennet's thigh, he slid into his boxers, brushing against his balls before finding a conveniently infuriating hold and just keeping his hand there. He could feel Bennet was close already, fuelled by his walk on the wild side. All he needed was a little help from his friends.
All he offered a small, entirely unhelpful rub.
"Feels good, doesn't it?"
Bennet swallowed, starkly failing to provide a verbal answer. Claude took that as a yes.
Then he withdrew his hand, sticking it conveniently under his head as a secondary pillow.
Bennet blinked.
"Well you said you can wait," Claude granted him a brutally charming grin, schooling every part of his facial muscles to act as obnoxiously as possible. "Next time you have negotiations, mate, remember that it might damage your diplomatic relations with the parties involved, yeah?"
Bennet just looked at him with a vacant, stunned face, mouth hanging half-open, lips still glistening from their earlier adventures.
It wasn't a bad look for him, sadistically speaking.
To jolt him out of his trance, Claude helpfully delivered a sharp, vicious slap to his naked thigh - Bennet responded with an oddly repressed acoustic effect, followed by a quietly infuriated grimace - and if that wasn't enough do the trick, he hoped that the pink, angry stinging mark would get the message across loud and clear.
"Now shoo, I need to catch up on some beauty rest."
Bennet scrambled off of him without a word, apparently beyond biting commentary, looking altogether very cross and more than a touch betrayed.
Claude would've shed a tear, really, if only he wasn't enjoying himself so goddamn much.
He closed his eyes and enjoyed the fuzzy sensation at the edges of the world, allowing himself to drift away for an undeterminable stretch of time, until tiny but vastly irritating spikes of conscience started digging into him, nagging with vile persistence.
Drawing a deep, mournful sigh, he opened his eyes.
A quick room overview revealed Bennet sitting quietly on his own bed, wearing nothing but his tedious boxers and writing into a notebook.
"The hell do you think you're doin'?"
He got an illustriously clipped sigh in return. "What does it look like I'm doing? I'm starting on the mission report."
Well, at least it was still Bennet alright, in all his workaholic, repressed, passive-aggressive glory. Maybe this whole… incident had all been just a temporary, particularly stimulating, particularly perverted case of a body snatching.
Doubtlessly one involving a copious amount of anal probing.
With fucking pom-poms.
"Let me guess - 'Dear Mission Report: Today was a pretty damn rotten day. Trailed heinously unattractive subject, got into a bar brawl by acting like a right pervert, spent the night getting lovingly fondled in jail, unexpectedly shagged my partner's brains out but got nothing in return because said partner is a selfish, resentful bastard. Love, Noah'?"
"Yes, something like that," Bennet muttered under his breath, radiating enough dutiful bitterness to fill the entire room, and then some.
"Put it down."
"Why?"
"Because Thompson would want a performance review."
Bennet had the decency to look properly alarmed, at least. "Really?"
"I don't know, maybe, probably - God Bennet, I'd rather not think about it, alright? Either way you're not doing the bloody report now."
Bennet gave a critical frown, clearly not entirely willing to part with his beloved report. "You've got a better idea?"
Well, he supposed there was no point in dragging this out any longer. Bennet was a magnificently pedantic arse as it was, and to be perfectly truthful Claude feared the prospect of Bennet with blue balls - he could easily cause a spontaneous black hole of repression in the fabric of reality, or something equally nerdy and destructive.
"Yes as a matter of fact I do. C'mon, roo-" god fucking damn it. He was going to regret this deal. "Beginner time is over. Now turn over, and let the master work his magic."
"The Master? Like in Doctor Who?" Bennet sounded quite intrigued by the possibility. "He has advanced technology, not magic. Especially not… ass magic."
"What-" Oh no. One, one bleeding misstep, and he'd opened the door to Doctor Who ass magic. "You're not allowed to talk during sex ever again, that clear?"
"This really doesn’t technically count as during-" Bennet then seemed more inclined to shut up, what with a thoroughly unhygienic Santa hat stuck demonstratively in his mouth.
After the initial shock had worn off, he spit the offending article of Santa-wear out, looking somewhere between morally outraged, bitterly amused and strangely turned-on.
Then an exceptionally well-aimed, hard-knuckled fist ensured that Claude would have a black eye of his very own to match Bennet's in only a few hours' time.
The ensuing scuffle was embarrassing to relay, involving copious dirty motel-fighting moves including but not limited to biting, scratching and manly hair-pulling, and in the end they both sported enough bodily decorations to get a free pass into a domestic violence shelter - Claude got himself a brand new bloody nose, Bennet a split lip. It was altogether a very generous Christmas.
The upside was that he had Bennet effectively pinned to the floor, and there was still a full hour until sunrise.
"I think it's time I reclaimed your lily-white arse, ma-," the rest of the sentence, something very witty and soap-related, was rudely cut off by an intensely painful click in his jaw - "ow."
Bennet snorted but kept still, only turning his head to offer him a thin, bloody smirk from his prone position.
"You don't still think I'm harmless, do you?"
It probably wasn't the best state for him to be asking that particular question, but the point stood.
Maybe, just maybe, the body snatching was more permanent than he'd thought.
The answer - the truth - unnerved Claude far more than he was wiling to admit, but lying seemed a bit out of place. So he chose a middle path. It was altogether very Buddhist of him.
"Well -" he sighed.
"- Mostly harmless."
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Claude/Bennet
Spoilers: For Company Man
Summary: Santa Hats, Jail Cells, Revenge, and Porn
Notes: This started as a ficlet for cerebel's Sekrit Cabal Ficlet Battle and ended up... not quite that, what with it being a bit over 9K and all. Many filthy, morally grey thanks to entangled_now, for the wonderful investigative beta and for pushing me down the slippery slope of porn the constant encouragement with words of pervy wisdom, and to indyhat for helping me not die of embarrassment and for being generally supportive and awesome.
Mostly Harmless,
AKA
The Obligatory Though Very Time-Inappropriate Morally Grey Christmas Fic
(Featuring: Santa Hats, Jail Cells, Revenge, and Porn)
"Claude!"
This wasn't Bennet's idea of the perfect holiday.
For one, a holding cell filled with drunken, disheveled, foul-smelling denizens, wasn't high on his list of ideal locations for Christmas Eve.
Another thing that didn't entirely align with his maliciously detailed plans was the nasty bruise decorating his left eye (and its more subtly placed companions, spread-out along his body with no apparent pattern,) with the naturally associated throbbing ache that was still very much present.
However, the aspect of his situation he was finding least tolerable, was roughly two-thirds of a Santa Claus suit that served as his current attire.
Actually, it was toss-up between that, and the fact his so-called partner had apparently decided to leave him here to rot.
This wasn’t happening.
It had to be a particularly vicious dream, or maybe even a sadistic telepathic manipulation. Nothing that wouldn't go away if he banged his head against the bars hard enough, which was a course of action he wasn't entirely opposed to at the moment. It even seemed strategically sound, if you looked at it upside down.
But Bennet was disillusioned enough to know the universe had a penchant for bad practical jokes.
As did Claude.
Speaking of…
"Claude! You son of a-"
He broke off in the middle of the passionate if unimaginative slur, voice diminishing into a dejected groan.
Pressing his forehead against the cool metal bars, he vaguely wondered which mythological entity would be the appropriate one to pray to (or optimally, threaten with a large gun) in a time like this. Not that he'd ever found sufficient ground to believe in anything supernatural, which rendered his musings entirely theoretical, but - his thought process was abruptly and crudely cut off as he registered a hand insistently groping his ass.
He turned his head, very slowly, towards the initiator of the invasive contact.
The man, a close physical approximation of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla, gave him a lewd, thoroughly troubling grin.
Bennet gazed at him blankly.
"Will you excuse me? I'm talking to my invisible boyfriend."
The gorilla swiftly retracted his hand.
The way Bennet figured, he had better chances of survival if he was considered insane.
Or maybe he just was insane.
After all, it'd only be a matter of time.
~ Earlier that week ~
"It's for the greater good, rookie."
Claude's grin grew to spectacularly punchable proportions.
And no, for once Bennet didn't care that 'punchable' wasn't technically a word.
"How -" he paused to find a semblance of balance, drawing a breath chopped efficiently around the edges to convey all the annoyance in his disposal, "- is dressing up in this and subjecting myself to the whims of -" tiny, infinitely devious and, by his best estimations, pure evil brats who, for some loathsome politically correct reason, were often referred to as 'children', "- how does any of this serve the greater good?"
"You're short-sighted, friend. When you're old and wise like I am, you'll know what I'm talkin' about. Trust me. Besides, bit of camouflage is essential for a successful operation."
Bennet decided against mentioning the fact that Claude was a year younger than he was, which made the whole promise distinctly paradoxical.
"I don't see you employing any camouflage."
"Well I'm invisible aren't I? Hardly need to bother with that sort of thing. Besides, I have much better things to do with my time."
"Like what?" Bennet frowned darkly.
"Like mingle with the local population. That blonde from the bar is a goldmine of information."
Bennet gritted his teeth, because he'd be damned if he was going to comment on Claude's… mining techniques. An urgent change of subject was in order.
"A kid tried to throw up on me." It was a painful confession, one he'd repressed for most of the day and now found himself unable to keep undisclosed.
"Tried? With malicious intent?" Claude seemed genuinely curious. "Did you manage to dodge?"
"Narrowly."
"Good for you, mate," Claude patted his shoulder with the utmost of friendly condescension. "I'm sure Kaito will be thrilled to know his lessons are servin' you well."
Bennet retaliated by giving Claude a cold, hopefully menacing glare.
Claude, being Claude, promptly disregarded it with yet another insufferable, endlessly fickle grin. "No reason you should be all alone here," he said. "I can sit on your lap, keep you company."
“Don’t even think about it,” Bennet growled.
“C'mon, don't be such a coward. It's not like anyone would know.”
“If you try to sit on me, Claude, I’ll throw you off.”
Claude frowned. "You don't make a very jolly Santa, you know that?" he managed a surprising amount of righteous indignation, not an inch of it even remotely genuine. "Keep this up an' you'll be gettin' visits from the ghost of Christmas past soon." He shrugged, the very picture of indifference. "Well, suit yourself. I have important business to attend to."
Claude had already faded into thin air before Bennet had the chance to show him some truly jolly behavior.
And then he was back in his newly acquired personal hell.
---
Bennet gave the line of his jaw a desperate scratch, but the itch persistently refused to go away.
"I think I might be allergic to the fake beard."
Claude made a noise that sounded suspiciously like suppressed laughter.
"You think that's funny?"
"No mate, tragic's what it is. Catastrophic, really. However are you goin' to live without the comfort of a good fake beard?"
"Just wait until you have to wear one," Bennet grumbled. "See if I show any sympathy." Not the most effective or dramatic of threats, to be sure, but it was the best he could do under the circumstances. He scratched harder, to no avail.
"Who's the subject?" Claude asked absent-mindedly, tracing vulgar patterns on the dusty tabletop while surveying the smoke-infested bar environment with a laid-back, casual air.
"You know who the subject is, Claude."
"Yeah, but I like to hear you say it," he grinned back at Bennet. "You make mission briefings sexy."
Bennet gave an exasperated sigh. "Henry Stuart, twenty-seven, five-foot-eight, currently unemployed. Potential technopath," he relayed the information in the blandest tone available to him.
"Technopath in the most miserable hole in Alaska. Kind of ironic, that. Most awe-inspirin' display of technology here is that electronic dart board over there."
"You think he's rigging it?"
"Public menace, our boy, rigging the local dart board. Think we should take him out before he causes any real damage?"
Bennet sighed, preparing an elaborate, bullet-pointed rant regarding Claude's innate inability to take anything seriously.
Then, of course, Claude had to go and ruin it all. "There he is," he tapped Bennet's shoulder. "You forgot to mention he looks like a deformed leprechaun."
"That wasn't in the file."
"It should be."
For once, Bennet had to agree. The man certainly had a… distinctive appearance.
"Quit starin', rookie, you're drawing attention to yourself."
"I wasn't staring," Bennet protested feebly. "And I think the outfit is taking care of the attention-drawing part already."
"Well, whatever it is you were doing, stop doing it and drink your bloody beer like a normal person."
"We're on a mission, Claude. I'm not going to get drunk."
"It's surveillance, not like we're goin' to bag him here and now. It'll look strange if you don't drink."
"I can live with that." There was something about Claude that brought out the most instinctively stubborn in Bennet, quite a bit like the red cape waved in front of a bull, only to an opposite effect.
"I see what this is about," Claude declared, clearly enjoying a light-bulb moment. "You just can't bring yourself to do anything that might be in the least bit fun. It's just beyond you - the whole concept of it. You probably think 'fun' is some alien life form that should be dissected and studied and locked up indefinitely, don't you Bennet?"
"This isn't supposed to be fun," Bennet rationalized. "It's a mission."
"Life isn't supposed to be fun, either, but you have to live anyway." Claude was up on his feet before Bennet was able to fully appreciate and analyze that particular piece of philosophy. "Right. I'm off. Enjoy your absence of fun."
"Off where?" The invisible man ignored him while doing a very literal job of fading into the crowd. "Claude!"
No answer.
Bennet released a hissed breath through his teeth.
His frustration failed to last long, because precisely two minutes into his surveillance effort, one Henry Stuart was standing in front of his table, looking fifty percent paranoid, fifty percent agitated, and precisely a hundred percent ugly. "The hell you think you're looking at?"
"I wasn't-"
"I am not gay," insisted the deformed leprechaun vehemently.
"What-" but Bennet's earnest question never stood a chance of completion, because a fist was on a direct collision course with his eye.
Things hadn't gone up from there.
~ Back in the Cell of Desolation and Ass Groping ~
There is comfort to be found in pure misery, once you've adapted to it.
It's not masochism. It's not melancholy. It's acceptance.
It was an hour or two past midnight, and everybody but Bennet had already been released, courtesy of small town nepotism - the kind that so often came with intense, unyielding xenophobia - and Bennet had come nowhere close to accepting the cruel and unjust misery inflicted on him.
In fact, he was determined to stare down reality until it admitted it was fully in the wrong, and agreed to correct itself accordingly.
The only problem was that reality was nowhere to be seen.
"Let me guess, rookie," said a voice that lacked visual context. "You shot a man in Reno just to watch him die? Thought I told you to keep those homicidal urges in check."
Claude. Thank god.
"You bastard."
"Nice to see you too, mate. Doing hard time? Anyone claim your lily-white arse yet?"
The fact that the answer was, for lack of a better alternative, 'yes', wasn't exactly something Bennet considered ideal circumstances. He suspected it was only a matter of time before Claude started with the soap-related prison jokes, and that was a slippery slope he wasn't at all willing to face.
"Let me out."
"Not right away," Claude objected. "First I need to contemplate the moral repercussions of unleashin' you onto an unsuspecting world."
Bennet's hands clenched over the bars, almost painfully. "What?"
"Well, clearly you're a dangerous criminal. Possibly unstable. I'm takin' a great risk just talking to you."
"Claude, if you don't-"
"Well, if you're goin' to be such a baby about it," Claude's voice was mercifully punctuated by the click of the lock, and the door to the cell opened. "Don't get your knickers in a twist, it's not like you have anyone but yourself to blame for this."
"I'm not wearing knickers."
"Going commando, Bennet? Bold of you. Especially since you're supposed to be serving as a role model for young children."
"Boxers," Bennet muttered tiredly, exiting the cell. "I'm wearing boxers."
"Right, same difference. C'mon, Noah, let's get you home before your mum starts worryin'."
"Don't call me that."
"What, 'Noah'? 's your name, isn't it?"
Bennet closed his eyes, willing the demolition team taking residence inside his brain to take a break. "It isn't when you say it like that."
The road back to the motel was passed in the kind of silence produced only by indecent bar brawls and subsequent awkward jailbreaks. Not uncomfortable silence, but one that goes beyond the definition of comfort and discomfort; something that might as well be made of meteor rock.
“This is quite possibly the worst night of my life,” Bennet decided, back in the small, familiarly suffocating room.
Claude responded merely by shrugging his shirt off, then unceremoniously dropping onto the motel bed.
“Merry Christmas, mate,” he offered a bright, illegally cheerful grin. "You'll have worse."
~ Some time later, in a rather different state of mind ~
Claude woke up with the distinctly uneasy feeling he was being watched.
His paranoia soon paid off, as he rolled over and discovered Bennet sitting silently at the side of the bed, looking at him with the sort of unnatural, focused intentness that would've sent lesser men running. Claude, of course, was no lesser man, so he chose the path of being mildly unnerved instead.
Something was wrong, irreversibly skewed with this picture. He was the one with the elite sneaking skills. The rookie was overstepping his bounds.
"You tryin' to give me a sodding heart attack, Bennet?"
Bennet's gaze didn't budge, not even a blink to give an indication that he wasn't a particularly life-like mannequin. It took Claude all of three second to start wondering whether his normally quiet and sensible partner has spontaneously turned into a gleefully voyeuristic serial killer.
People were infinitely surprising like that.
Then again, the ominous effect was somewhat tarnished by the fact that Bennet, while having deemed it fit to remove the Santa coat and boots, and strip to his undershirt, made no such adjustments to the fluffy red trousers, nor for, strangely enough, the hat.
He was about to get gruesomely murdered by bloody Santa Claus. Brilliant.
Dim, thinning moonlight was slipping elusively through the window, lending to the designer-eerie atmosphere, making Claude's skin prickle. Steel-colored eyes glinted in the near-dark, and if he hadn't known better, he would've said the gaze belonged to a natural predator.
But Bennet wasn't predatory. Was the farthest thing from it, matter of fact - as tamed as they come, thoroughly domesticated in that suburban, eternal Boy Scout, neatly-pressed, perfectly-tucked-in dress-shirt sort of way.
Predators didn't look at beer like it was an insult and threat to their very existence. They didn't smile politely and use infinite niceties and have the kind of impeccable table manners that should only exist in after-school specials. They certainly didn't elevate paperwork into a bloody divine entity.
Did they?
"You should be afraid. I'm a dangerous criminal," Bennet's suddenly regained speech ability nearly made Claude jump, for Christ's sake. Alright, maybe he was more than just mildly unnerved. He also wasn't sure if it was his imagination that painted the momentary quirk at the corner of Bennet's mouth. "Possibly unstable.”
“Yeah," Claude scoffed, quickly regaining his footing, or at least projecting his usual unruffled image, "‘bout as unstable as a stuffed teddy bear, and I'm being generous. About as wild and unpredictable as one, too."
Unfortunately he didn't get to elaborate on his ingenious plush toy theory, because Bennet was moving, fast, and then there was soft velvet digging into his sides, the texture unfairly rich and improbably tempting against his bare skin.
Well okay, so maybe teddy bears did have some unpredictable qualities after all.
It's not like he was a sodding plush anthropologist.
He figured imminent murder, at least, was out of the question, what with the look Bennet was giving him. Instead he was ready to put his money on morally grey sexual assault. Jail time could do that to a man.
"You've been naughty," Bennet said; an inflectionless, clinical accusation, the shameless antithesis to everything sex talk stands for.
Claude couldn't help a violent snort. Unbelievable, that. Just unbe-bloody-lievable. "Is Inga from the Playboy channel feedin' you lines?"
"Shut up."
There was something hard, uncompromising to Bennet's voice; a feral note of authority, and Claude had to jolt himself out of this sharply surreal Twilight Zone moment to remind himself that he was the senior partner, and that the rookie needed to be taken down a peg or two. Or ten.
But then Bennet was kissing him, raw and hot and impatient, and thinking about pegs was no longer an option, because his body was responding, tingling at the edges, betraying him without so much as a hint of remorse, and any kind of dangerously coherent thinking was becoming thoroughly inappropriate for the situation.
Instead he focused on kissing back, on claiming every available inch of Bennet's mouth - the irritatingly smooth upper lip especially though, since it seemed to be hell-bent on infuriating him for no reason whatsoever, which made him even more determined to fight back, fight dirty if he had to, or if the situation called for it, or if he bloody felt like it…
And then there was the strange journey Bennet's hands were making through his hair, movements ranging between clumsy and calculated, like he wasn't quite sure what he was doing or why but was thoroughly, fanatically intent on accomplishing that certain something anyway.
It took Claude several long moments of breathing without Bennet's mouth interrupting to come to the conclusion that there must've been a fairly impressive amount of alcohol circulating in his partner's system.
"If I'd known you were this much fun under influence, I would've spiked your coffee more often."
Bennet glanced down at him with a slightly raised eyebrow, curious in a distinctly 'you spiked my coffee?' sort of way. But he apparently quickly disregarded that troublesome line of thought, choosing to stick to the basics instead. "I said - shut up."
"Why don't you make me, rookie?"
He liked the constant challenge between them, the pushing and prodding. It was pure tension, elastic and ever-morphing. Sometimes it seemed like the only right way to be.
Bennet narrowed his eyes, tilting his head an inch sideways as if considering the matter in great detail. Probably making mental charts and filing them up one by one, making sure there wasn't the slightest margin for error and -
- and then he was lower, in a more interesting way than Claude would've anticipated.
"Are you tryin' to unbuckle my belt with your teeth?"
"…No."
"You're smashed, mate."
"I'm not drunk," Bennet insisted somberly from his strategically-sound position. "I'm lightly inebriated." A few desolate teeth-pulls later, "Possibly moderately."
"How about you get your possibly moderately inebriated teeth off my soddin' belt and let me do it?"
Bennet frowned, seemingly not at all satisfied with the outrageous suggestion, swatting Claude's hands away and getting to work on the buckle himself, now using fingers, at least, but still acting entirely too possessive about the whole thing - which was only fitting, considering he was acting more than a touch possessed. Not that Claude felt any immediate urge to call an exorcist - he much preferred this Bennet to a hypothetical one with his head spinning wildly around its axis.
In fact wildly spinning heads were what he considered a major turn-off.
Finally Bennet was done with the Herculean task of belt unbuckling, moving on to bigger and better things, and soon Claude's jeans and underwear were pulled down efficiently around his knees.
"I do know what fun is," Bennet insisted suddenly.
Well that was certainly a random and useless piece of information, especially considering other far more urgent matters at hand. Or matters that would be at hand, if Bennet wasn't too busy making annoyingly pointless statements.
"So that's what this is all about? You tryin' to prove your fun-having capacity? I think you could do that with a little less conversation, a little more action mate." Surely quoting Elvis at him would help Bennet find his path into the light? He'd heard it worked on more than a few Americans.
"I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm teaching you a lesson."
"Yeah? And what lesson would that be? How to get a bloke's pants down in forty-seven easy steps?"
"No," Bennet sadly refused to take the bait. "The lesson is: you're invisible," he leaned closer, voice going low, dangerous, slipping under Claude's skin with alarming ease. "But that doesn't mean you can get away with anything."
"Actually," Claude protested, because the assumption was entirely unjustified and pretty nonsensical, really, "I can."
Bennet's disapproving glare transformed fluidly into a thin smirk. "Well, you're not going anywhere now. I can assure you of that."
"Oh you can assure me. Well isn't that nice. You know what you are, rookie?" Bennet met his eyes with a blandly inquisitive stare. "You're… what's the word I'm lookin' for?" Timid? Mild? Non-threatening? Oh, there it was. Perfect. "Harmless."
"Harmless," Bennet repeated, and the word suddenly acquired a brand new metal coating of disdain, a filling of sardonic amusement - and something else, something that contradicted the very notion of 'harmless', something unchained and stealthy and when inspected from a very certain perspective, deadly.
Apparently Bennet had the secret ability of turning simple words into ninjas.
"Harmless as a kitten," he proceeded stubbornly, undeterred by the strange new subtext of the word. "And not one of the scrappy street cats either. A good, well-bred little kitten, with pitch-perfect manners and pampered fur and everything."
Bennet stayed perfectly still throughout the lecture, breathing just above his waistline, measured but not in his usual, carefully polite sort of way. Measured and silent in the way a tiger is before pouncing on an innocent gazelle and tearing it apart. Not that Claude had much to fear in that regard, since the pouncing had already commenced in full, and he was far from an innocent gazelle.
"Are you done?"
"Not by a long shot. Now that I think about it, a kitten doesn't quite cut it either. 'S far too sophisticated for you. Too bloody devious. You're just an overgrown puppy, Bennet. Bet your wife takes you out for long walks and does your hair and lets you play with-"
"Don't." Bennet's eyes went cold, the warning subtle but absolute. There weren't many rules between them, certainly not many that were unbendable - but The Wife Factor was the one rule that went undisputed.
Claude met Bennet's gaze, challenging without words, and for a good few seconds it was your classic staredown, neither willing to back down or budge an inch - all that was missing was a good old Western tune to spice things up properly.
Then Claude came up with an immediate plan of action.
He reached out, tugging at the sides of the Santa hat and pulling it down until it covered Bennet's eyes completely.
Probably not the most legitimate way of winning a staredown but hey, it'd worked, hadn't it?
It also had the distinct advantage of making Bennet look even more ridiculous than he already had, and even though he did appear vaguely affronted by the article of clothing blocking his view, he seemed otherwise rather keen on accepting his fate blindly, surprisingly enough.
Claude fleetingly wondered how much of his apparently-not-so-secret alcohol stash was left intact.
The troublesome line of thought was severed when Bennet, following a brief moment of disorientation, turned to sensory experimentation, leaning down and pressing his tongue to the nearest available surface, which conveniently happened to be located just an inch south of Claude's navel. From there he concentrated on tasting his way upwards, or maybe just on driving Claude insane - he wasn't going to underestimate Bennet's talent for stealthy, calculated warfare, blindfolded or not.
If he'd known it would awaken a covert, repressed oral fixation, he would've pulled the Santa hat treatment on him ages ago.
Bennet seemed to be intent on taking the full tour, excruciatingly thorough in his oral research, tongue circling a nipple tauntingly, insistently pressing in until it was hard, aching, until Claude was hard, until he was an inch away from grabbing Bennet by the bloody ears and pushing him down to his cock so he could do something fucking useful for a change - but he didn't - he didn't and not because he was naturally thrilled about dragged-out, meticulous, torturous slowness, but because it was Bennet, and telling him to hurry the fuck up and get to the point not only was likely to result in the exact opposite reaction, but was also somehow wrong.
So he just stayed still like a good boy and strangled a sound that was trying to crawl - fuck, tear - its way up his throat; a sound that really wasn't tolerable or decent in any shape or form - not that he had any problems with indecency, but Bennet would've gotten a complacent thrill out of it, and he wasn't prepared to grant him that satisfaction, not yet. And if he was going to die of asphyxiation - well that would be the rookie's bloody fault.
The sensual assault was sharply interrupted by Bennet's forehead bumping into his nose, prompting a blunt wave of pain and a loud, dissatisfied groan.
Claude supposed telling him to watch where he was going would be a touch hypocritical on his side, but he certainly wasn't going to let that particular transgression go unpunished.
In retaliation, he grabbed Bennet roughly by the back of the neck, pulling him in for a forceful, sloppy kiss. Pressing teeth into his lower lip (he still didn't trust the shady upper one) until he drew a faint but fully enthusiastic hiss, pressing even harder until Bennet returned the favor - okay, that fucking hurt - and Bennet's tongue pushed into his mouth, acting about as mutinous and petulant as tongues get.
Which was pretty damn mutinous and petulant, really.
The heating in the room was absolutely exaggerated, growing hotter with each passing second, seeping into him - and if eyes had really been the windows to the soul, he should've been as blind as Bennet, because his would've been fully fogged by now. Somehow he doubted that was the metaphor's original intention, though.
But it really was inhumanely hot, judging by the quickly gathering, prickly sweat, his and Bennet's, he couldn't tell the difference anymore - by the feeling that reality was standing on edge, tilted sideways, with all the associated vertigo.
Reality could shatter into a million tiny pieces for all he cared - right now there was just one focus, and that was beating Bennet at his game, drawing shallow pants from the bastard, making him push and pull and squirm and sweat.
Finally Bennet tore away, mouth red, breathing hard and low but recomposing himself far too quickly for Claude's taste - but that was soon forgotten as Bennet turned to work his way down the stubbly line of Claude's jaw, down to the curve of his neck where he made a tactical stop, making an effort to mark territory with his teeth.
"If you're not careful," Claude threatened, drawing a sharp breath, "you'll give me a soddin' Santa fetish."
"That'd be terrible," Bennet murmured, without a trace of sympathy, voice vibrating against his neck with an utterly maddening warmth. "Sodding Santa Claus, that's highly inappropriate, Claude."
Claude failed to stifle a raw, unhinged bark of laughter. "God rookie, warn me before you go and mutilate good and decent British words, will you?"
Bennet's own laughter was brief and silent, just a small huff of breath, letting itself known only through the irregular movement of his chest.
Which reminded Claude of something.
Leaning forward and catching a handful of stray fabric, he quickly managed to wrestle Bennet's undershirt off of his shoulders, and in an unlikely feat of luck and agility, keep the hat on - though unfortunately it was now back in its more traditional position, no longer serving as a makeshift blindfold. He threw the shirt aside, grinning proudly at the accomplishment.
There. Now they were a bit closer to being on even ground.
Bennet's upper body was rather curious-looking at the moment, he had to admit, stuck at a moot point between car-crash and train-wreck, battered and painted with eclectically-colored bruises, not to mention the occasional intriguing scratch mark.
"Charming," he observed cheerfully. "You could serve as a nice Christmas tree decoration."
Bennet wasn't at all daunted by the compliment, his stare turning fully accusatory. "This is your fault."
"It's your own goddamn fault, rookie. I wasn't the one leering at Mr. Leprechaun there like a dirty panty-sniffin' stalker. What do you want me to do? Send you a Get Well card with lots of pretty flowers and sparklin' rainbows? Kiss it and make it all better?"
"Yes."
"Yes, what?"
"Do it," the words stretched out surreally, balancing on the surface of foggy, abrupt breath. Claude felt his own breathing coming to a stop. "Kiss it and make it better."
There was a wild, reckless glint in Bennet's eyes, just one step off-balance, but enough to remind Claude that you didn't choose this line of work if you were entirely together.
If Claude were to be rational about this, the whole act should've pissed him right off - the overbearing, controlling attitude, the ridiculous pushiness, the corny lines - he should've by all rights thrown Bennet off the bed and gone back to sleep, but instead he found it irreversibly intriguing, in an annoyingly magnetic sort of way, and he honestly couldn't tell whether that was good or bad. Maybe both. But probably bad.
Also, he was pretty fucking horny.
With that in mind, he found that he couldn't care less about rationality.
Bracing his arms at the backs of Bennet's thighs to lift himself up, he found himself a nice, unthreatening, light-purple-shaded bruise at the left side of Bennet's abdomen, deciding it was just perfect to start with. All ripe and innocent.
Without waiting for an invitation, he brought his lips to the mark - softly, almost gently at first, before deciding that really didn't do the trick - then he pressed his tongue against it, hard and careless and intrusive until Bennet drew a jagged breath through his teeth, nails dragging aggressively over Claude's hip - then sucking around it, sucking and tasting and applying the occasional teeth pressure to spice things up.
He seriously doubted he was making it better under any proper medical definition, in fact it was likely to have the exact opposite effect, but the strangled moan it elicited from Bennet indicated it was therapeutic enough, in an alternative sort of way.
Now as long as nobody suddenly started to hum 'Sexual Healing', everything would be just dandy.
Once he decided that spot of skin had taken enough abuse for the moment, he moved to the next bruise - lighter, greyer, altogether not very spectacular or noteworthy, but Claude was sure it'd be a right star once he was done with it.
He skipped the introduction this time around, going right to tongue and teeth and claiming the spot as his own, encouraged by the dubious noises Bennet was trying to stifle -
- and by the fingers wrapping absent-mindedly around his cock, thumb offering distracted, lazy strokes - teasing shallowly and provoking against his skin - as if Bennet wasn't quite committed to the cause yet.
Well then, Claude just had to make sure the cause was worthwhile.
He ran his finger lightly from Bennet's thigh to his arse, then over the curve of his spine, relishing the resulting shudder while he picked out a new victim - this one especially red and raw and vulnerable-looking, probably caused by an unplanned collision (though considering this was Bennet, not-quite-as-meticulously-planned-as-usual-due-to-urgent-circumstances-involving-leprechauns was the more correct assumption) with a hard surface, positioned curiously close to his left nipple. Which made it two birds with one stone, really.
Trailing his tongue on a curious route from bruise to nipple, just taunting at first - two could play this game, after all - then picking up pace and raking his teeth over skin - slowing down again to get a good look at Bennet - clearly not quite as rock-steady as he would've liked to be, gaze glazed, lacking focus - biting on his lower lip to keep himself from being too vocal, to save himself a small measure of control.
Well, good luck with that.
Claude grinned into Bennet's chest, glancing up. "Sadomasochism looks good on you, mate," and though he doubted it sounded like one, it was as honest a compliment as he ever gave out.
"Really." And there was that invisible mouth quirk again, impossible for the naked eye to catch.
And then the hand around his cock was squeezing hard - fucking bastard - his cry drowned by Bennet's as Claude instantly snapped his teeth over inflamed skin as hard as he fucking could - then falling back, head hitting the pillow with a silent thud - a rush of blood - pounding dimly in his ears - dizziness as the world was painted a curious shade of red, and what was meant in all likelihood to be a growl quickly transforming into low laughter.
That was… oddly exhilarating. Not to mention fun.
When he rediscovered his lost link to reality, he glanced up at Bennet - all frown caught in a haze, fingers wandering over fresh teeth-marks at the side of his chest. Claude hadn't broken the skin, but the bruise would stay for days, weeks if he was especially lucky. And by his scientific estimations as well as the grim downwards-tilt of Bennet's mouth, it also hurt like a bitch.
Fantastic.
"You bit me."
If Bennet was appealing to his conscience, he would've had better luck having a heart-to-heart with the wall. Claude just grinned at him wildly. "Well clearly you bring out the animal in me."
Bennet did that face that indicated he would've rolled his eyes, if he wasn't in fact light-years more mature than the other party. The kind of face that usually made Claude yearn to catch him in a headlock and give him a proper noogie. The kind of look that was horribly hypocritical of him right now, all things considered. "Should I get a Rabies shot?"
"It's not like you're bleeding or anything," he stretched up again, callously snapping his fingers over the terrible, terrible wound, getting a rough hiss and accusing eyes in return. "So stop cryin' about it like a little girl."
"Bastard."
"Crybaby."
Not to mention the rookie was entirely too well-dressed for the occasion. With no devious belt to battle, one well-placed tug was enough to slide the burgundy trousers down to Bennet's hips - a mild eyebrow raise was all he received for his effort - then another to get them past his thighs to his knees.
Bennet had told the sadly not-particularly-naked truth - there were boxers alright, and unsurprisingly, they were as plain and boring as they came.
He made a mental note to get the rookie into a pair of genuine knickers, though that was a task that would require masterful amounts of finesse, manipulation and alcohol. He was already devising a plan he'd creatively dubbed Plan Knickers, when he was derailed by catching an eyeful of Bennet, lips wet and reddened, skin flushed… with a lovely bite mark for extra decoration - gaze intent, hole-drilling, feverish - and Claude realized something.
This was apparently what happened when you dragged Bennet to the edge, gave him a pep talk and then offered a tiny but infinitely helpful push.
This wasn't just Bennet drunk. It was Bennet without restraints, without inhibitions, without his endless self-outlined borders, without the nagging, sensibly overbearing, impossibly responsible sanity -
- and as of now, without trousers on.
Fuck. He liked this Bennet.
"You want me," Bennet said, as if on cue, and it was a simple bland statement of fact, as indisputable as the color of the sky, or Thompson's inadvertent ability to creep the fuck out of anybody with a pulse unless they lacked a very specific set of self-preservation genes.
And it was true, of course - you don't normally pull a bloke's trousers down if a polite conversation was what you had in mind - which meant the Bennet Stating the Obvious hour had come early today.
"An' what if I do?"
Bennet didn't respond at first, simply using his index finger to trace a lazy, teasing line from Claude's chest to his lower stomach, refusing as if on principle to go any lower.
"Then beg."
Yeah, because Claude was the meek and compliant type. Sure.
"Keep dreaming."
"I'm not a dreamer," Bennet said slowly, patiently. "I'm a pragmatist."
Then Bennet sat back, and everything turned instantly cooler, growing strangely, abnormally, cruelly distant. It was as if the bastard had turned a bloody switch and now there was a machine sitting on top of him. And if the sudden disconnect hadn't quite done the trick, Bennet decided to top that by folding his bloody arms. Altogether he irrationally reminded Claude of that Nazi-looking copper in Terminator who had a fetish for trucks and slicing people up.
For purely scientific purposes (and possibly a few self-preservation-related ones), he poked Bennet in the stomach. Hard.
Bennet squinted at him. "What are you doing?"
"Checking to see if liquid metal comes out."
"Is there any particular reason it should?"
"You're a fucking android, aren't you mate. Admit it."
"I'm not T-1000, Claude."
"Could've fooled me. Besides, you'd look cute, all lost and naked and… killing people."
"You're trying to change the subject."
"Y'know, Bennet, years from now, they'll develop an obnoxious little cybernetic creature in your honor. And all it will do is nag people and spy on them when they're sleeping and drive them absolutely fucking bonkers by stating the bleedin' obvious and not being even remotely helpful." Claude wondered what else he could add to make his magnificent precognitive vision truly convincing. "And it'd look like an obscene paperclip."
Bennet sighed patiently, conveniently ignoring the entire rant. "Say please, Claude. If you want me, I want acknowledgement, it's only fair."
Fair. Now that was rich. Obviously Bennet took the original 'monumentally fucking unfair' and scrambled it in some sort of giant truth blender to get to that very special conclusion.
"I don't remember it saying cocktease in your qualifications, rookie."
"I'm not teasing," Bennet said and proceeded to do just that, giving his entire body - particularly the lower regions - an offensively thorough look-but-don't-touch treatment. "I'm delivering an ultimatum. It's a simple negotiation technique - I really don't see why it should bother you so much."
"You negotiate like a terrorist."
"I'm being perfectly reasonable here. I haven't even threatened to blow anything up yet," Bennet rationalized rationally. "I'm merely withholding certain services. It's like going on strike - it's my civic right, if anything."
"That makes you a very civilized terrorist then."
"Come on, Claude, it's just one word. It's not that hard," he punctuated the last word with a tactical glance downwards, and a carefully ironic tilt of his brow.
Amazing. Bennet meets innuendo. Would the wonders ever cease?
"Pretty please with a shiny pile of fresh paperwork on top?"
"I think you're being sarcastic."
"How could you even suspect me of such a thing?" Claude perfected his Voice of Innocence.
"I'm naturally suspicious. Comes with the line of work."
"Nah, you're just bein' paranoid."
"That comes with the line of work too."
"You know rookie," they could do this all night long, and he for one had more resourceful and creative ways in mind to how to spend that stretch of time, "it's not like I'm the only one with needs here."
To prove his point, he swiftly reached out, sweeping his palm aggressively over the front of Bennet's boxers. "You want this just as much as I do."
Then, to make this as believable a live presentation as possible, he pressed closer, finding a grip and slowly, patiently moving his hand up and down his erection, getting the appropriate Bennet-patented death-glare in return. Much as he would've doubtlessly loved to deny it, Bennet couldn't stop himself from reacting, from growing harder under Claude's grasp - head tilting a few millimeters backwards, lips pressing together with a quiet desperation, breathing coming to a slow halt.
Yeah, there was definitely need there.
Then Bennet's hand closed over his forearm, nonchalantly pushing it down and away in yet another feat of bloody robotics.
"I can wait," he said, infallible.
Claude could wait too, really he could, indefinitely if he had to - but then he could also miss the narrow window of opportunity of Bennet like this, and just the thought of it was met with irrational fear that this Bennet would soon just fade away into the astral plane of bizarre sexual fantasies involving Santa hats.
And that was one astral plan he wasn't prepared to set foot in.
Well that settled it then. There went the little that was left of his dignity.
"Please, alright? There, you have your soddin' acknowledgement, you wanker. Now how about you stick it where the sun doesn't shine and we'll call it even?"
"I knew you could be polite," Bennet smiled slowly, loathsomely. "Now say my name," his tone hardened, all traces of a smile evaporating, "like it isn't a goddamned joke."
Well, it's not like it was Claude's fault that the rookie's first name was so wonderfully… mockable.
"You know, Noah, it's not like you're giving me much of an incentive to play along here. I could have you bent over that nice little table over there and mewlin' my name before you can say 'ho ho ho'."
Bennet didn't seem terribly intimidated - in fact his lack of intimidation shone through quite clearly as he formed a smile that to the rest of the world would've been mild and civil, but to Claude, who knew better, was recklessly, obscenely smug. "You could try."
But Claude had had a lifetime experience of confusing could and should, often purposefully, so he instantly pushed himself up on his forearms -
- and then he was promptly foiled by a hand pressing flatly against his chest, firmly pushing him back down.
"Ho, ho, ho," Bennet said, deadpan, making it sound like a terrifying one-liner in a spectacularly bad action flick. Then his expression grew slightly defensive. "And for the record, I don't mewl."
Oh, this was just too much. Far, far too much. He broke down laughing - it wasn't even respectable manly laughter, but an uncontrollable, painful giggle fit. He laughed until his sides hurt, and his lungs feel burnt-out and overused.
And the fact Bennet still kept a fully serious face didn't help one bit.
"Noah," and he couldn't make the name a goddamned joke if he tried, because reality was far more amusing, "did you just call me a ho?"
"It's not a groundless accusation."
"S'pose not. Now are you going to act on it, or should I take matters into my own hands? I can call 1800-my-partner-is-a-sadistic-prick, I'm sure they'd be more than willing to service a man in my condition." Then again, Alaskan sex lines might be a bit frozen this time of year.
"One last thing," Bennet objected.
Oh, for fuck's - "What?"
"Promise you won't call me rookie," Bennet said in an utterly reasonable voice, with an utterly reasonable expression, and Claude suddenly had the utterly reasonable desire to punch him in the face, "for a month."
Claude glared.
Bennet glared back, entirely impassive.
"Do we have a deal?"
This was beyond absurd. Claude could have easily told him to bugger off, to take his negotiations and his deals and his stupid, ridiculously sexy Santa hat with him. He could do anything but give in. Surely he had better self-control than that.
Who was he kidding?
No he didn't.
"Deal."
Bennet reached out with his hand, and it took Claude a long moment of consulting his Bennet-to-Earth dictionary to come to the conclusion that he was proposing an actual handshake.
"Bennet, get that hand out of my face before I make sure it becomes a permanent extension of your arse," he growled, "and make yourself fucking useful."
Bennet frowned, staying still for a moment before shrugging impassively and relocating his hand to a more useful landmark.
Claude instinctively arched into his grip, but the more he pushed the more elusive it got - like a sodding magician's hat or some other useless metaphor he couldn't fully wrap his mind around nor did he really care to - what with the insistent, stinging ache throughout his body - one fucking area of it specifically - and Bennet's bleeding Inquisition.
The Inquisitor General smirked at him with unbearable arrogance. "Patience is a virtue."
"So is not getting strangled to death by your sexually frustrated partner," he shot back with a sneer, making sure he was just the right amount of feral to unnerve.
Bennet looked far closer to devious than unnerved, unfortunately - progressively so as he lowered his mouth to Claude's cock, sliding his tongue over it with burning, malicious intent.
Okay. Now this was an improvement. This was good. Great really.
There was only one tiny problem.
"Bloody hell Bennet, your pom-pom is itchy."
"My pom-pom is itchy," Bennet repeated blankly, tone underlined with poorly concealed sadistic glee. "How bad is it?"
"I don't think I should tell you, actually," he said once his brain got sufficient circulation. "I think you'd use that information to my disadvantage."
"Now who's being paranoid?"
Claude figured this didn't deserve a response, not really, and gave Bennet a dirty look instead.
"Alright, I'll take it off," Bennet obliged, pulling the hat off of his head and placing it on the side of the bed. "I can be reasonable."
He closed his eyes, breathing in, allowing himself a small surrender -
- when he felt a soft, invasive fluffy presence pressing against him.
He bucked, doing his very best not to kick Bennet in the face, which admittedly would've been tricky under the circumstances, though infinitely satisfying.
"What the hell was that?!"
Bennet froze, staying silent and immobile and apparently pretending to be invisible before offering a faint, vaguely guilty response, "I don't know what you're talking about."
"It felt like you were tryin' to stick the pom-pom up my arse!" Claude elaborated helpfully and possibly a touch hysterically.
"I wasn't going to do that," Bennet objected with the sort of apologetic, defensive air that went with conspicuous lack of innocence. He promptly discarded the hat, employing the kind of class stealth that two-year-olds playing hide and seek would take pride in.
"Yeah, like hell you weren't."
"I wasn't."
Claude didn't believe him for a second. Not a bloody second.
"You try that again and next thing you know you'll be wakin' up naked and gagged and tied spread-eagled to Thompson's desk, you got that, mate?"
Bennet's face paled and he made a small, stilted noise of horrified unhappiness, which pleased Claude to no end. Maybe the threat was a bit harsh, but it was the cold hard truth, and the son of a bitch had it coming.
Fucking pom-pom pervert.
Luckily Bennet didn't take the threat too close to heart, and things were soon back to where they'd been before the infamous pom-pom invasion.
He dug his fingers into Bennet's hair, pulling on it as Bennet's lips slid over him, calm and efficient and impossibly focused, and he was breathing in uneven, shuddering gasps, just barely keeping himself from thrusting because he doubted Bennet was deepthroating material, and choking him really wasn't on the agenda no matter how utterly maddening the bastard was.
Then Bennet just stopped, creating a brutal tear in time and space and Claude's highly sensitive psyche.
"What -" Fuck, fuck! "The hell are you waitin' for Bennet - an All Clear?"
Apparently not, because then Bennet's mouth was on his, slick and wet for all the wrong reasons, and his hand was rubbing against him instead, rough and urgent - and just that was enough to throw him right over the edge.
He came with a rough bark of a sound, triangulating somewhere between a moan and a growl and a laugh, easily muted into Bennet's mouth, struck with impossible warmth and giddy lightheadedness and the fleeting realization that really this wasn't the worst way at all to spend a Christmas night.
Then he sprawled out, blatantly ignoring life, the universe and everything.
Eventually he forced himself to crank his eyes half-open and squint to see what Bennet was using to wipe away incriminating evidence.
"Don't think that's what the original designer had in mind, but this is a very innovative use of a Santa hat," he complimented, feeling pretty damn jolly despite all the heavy torture he'd endured. Or possibly because of it.
"It deserves far worse," Bennet said darkly, clearly not quite over the traumatic experience of falsely posing as Father Christmas.
Having discarded the now definitely no-longer-usable hat, Bennet resettled on Claude's thighs, glaring down at him with blatant, pleading puppy eyes.
Those weren't regular puppy eyes, either, but clearly Puppy Eyes of Shameless Sexual Solicitation.
So Bennet was expecting to be repaid for his dubious services. Fancy that. Claude had just the thing in mind.
Slowly running his hand up the inside of Bennet's thigh, he slid into his boxers, brushing against his balls before finding a conveniently infuriating hold and just keeping his hand there. He could feel Bennet was close already, fuelled by his walk on the wild side. All he needed was a little help from his friends.
All he offered a small, entirely unhelpful rub.
"Feels good, doesn't it?"
Bennet swallowed, starkly failing to provide a verbal answer. Claude took that as a yes.
Then he withdrew his hand, sticking it conveniently under his head as a secondary pillow.
Bennet blinked.
"Well you said you can wait," Claude granted him a brutally charming grin, schooling every part of his facial muscles to act as obnoxiously as possible. "Next time you have negotiations, mate, remember that it might damage your diplomatic relations with the parties involved, yeah?"
Bennet just looked at him with a vacant, stunned face, mouth hanging half-open, lips still glistening from their earlier adventures.
It wasn't a bad look for him, sadistically speaking.
To jolt him out of his trance, Claude helpfully delivered a sharp, vicious slap to his naked thigh - Bennet responded with an oddly repressed acoustic effect, followed by a quietly infuriated grimace - and if that wasn't enough do the trick, he hoped that the pink, angry stinging mark would get the message across loud and clear.
"Now shoo, I need to catch up on some beauty rest."
Bennet scrambled off of him without a word, apparently beyond biting commentary, looking altogether very cross and more than a touch betrayed.
Claude would've shed a tear, really, if only he wasn't enjoying himself so goddamn much.
He closed his eyes and enjoyed the fuzzy sensation at the edges of the world, allowing himself to drift away for an undeterminable stretch of time, until tiny but vastly irritating spikes of conscience started digging into him, nagging with vile persistence.
Drawing a deep, mournful sigh, he opened his eyes.
A quick room overview revealed Bennet sitting quietly on his own bed, wearing nothing but his tedious boxers and writing into a notebook.
"The hell do you think you're doin'?"
He got an illustriously clipped sigh in return. "What does it look like I'm doing? I'm starting on the mission report."
Well, at least it was still Bennet alright, in all his workaholic, repressed, passive-aggressive glory. Maybe this whole… incident had all been just a temporary, particularly stimulating, particularly perverted case of a body snatching.
Doubtlessly one involving a copious amount of anal probing.
With fucking pom-poms.
"Let me guess - 'Dear Mission Report: Today was a pretty damn rotten day. Trailed heinously unattractive subject, got into a bar brawl by acting like a right pervert, spent the night getting lovingly fondled in jail, unexpectedly shagged my partner's brains out but got nothing in return because said partner is a selfish, resentful bastard. Love, Noah'?"
"Yes, something like that," Bennet muttered under his breath, radiating enough dutiful bitterness to fill the entire room, and then some.
"Put it down."
"Why?"
"Because Thompson would want a performance review."
Bennet had the decency to look properly alarmed, at least. "Really?"
"I don't know, maybe, probably - God Bennet, I'd rather not think about it, alright? Either way you're not doing the bloody report now."
Bennet gave a critical frown, clearly not entirely willing to part with his beloved report. "You've got a better idea?"
Well, he supposed there was no point in dragging this out any longer. Bennet was a magnificently pedantic arse as it was, and to be perfectly truthful Claude feared the prospect of Bennet with blue balls - he could easily cause a spontaneous black hole of repression in the fabric of reality, or something equally nerdy and destructive.
"Yes as a matter of fact I do. C'mon, roo-" god fucking damn it. He was going to regret this deal. "Beginner time is over. Now turn over, and let the master work his magic."
"The Master? Like in Doctor Who?" Bennet sounded quite intrigued by the possibility. "He has advanced technology, not magic. Especially not… ass magic."
"What-" Oh no. One, one bleeding misstep, and he'd opened the door to Doctor Who ass magic. "You're not allowed to talk during sex ever again, that clear?"
"This really doesn’t technically count as during-" Bennet then seemed more inclined to shut up, what with a thoroughly unhygienic Santa hat stuck demonstratively in his mouth.
After the initial shock had worn off, he spit the offending article of Santa-wear out, looking somewhere between morally outraged, bitterly amused and strangely turned-on.
Then an exceptionally well-aimed, hard-knuckled fist ensured that Claude would have a black eye of his very own to match Bennet's in only a few hours' time.
The ensuing scuffle was embarrassing to relay, involving copious dirty motel-fighting moves including but not limited to biting, scratching and manly hair-pulling, and in the end they both sported enough bodily decorations to get a free pass into a domestic violence shelter - Claude got himself a brand new bloody nose, Bennet a split lip. It was altogether a very generous Christmas.
The upside was that he had Bennet effectively pinned to the floor, and there was still a full hour until sunrise.
"I think it's time I reclaimed your lily-white arse, ma-," the rest of the sentence, something very witty and soap-related, was rudely cut off by an intensely painful click in his jaw - "ow."
Bennet snorted but kept still, only turning his head to offer him a thin, bloody smirk from his prone position.
"You don't still think I'm harmless, do you?"
It probably wasn't the best state for him to be asking that particular question, but the point stood.
Maybe, just maybe, the body snatching was more permanent than he'd thought.
The answer - the truth - unnerved Claude far more than he was wiling to admit, but lying seemed a bit out of place. So he chose a middle path. It was altogether very Buddhist of him.
"Well -" he sighed.
"- Mostly harmless."