Fic: Doppelganger - Chapter 5, "Symbiotes" [WIP 7/?]
Title: Doppelganger: Chapter 5, "Symbiotes"
Author: heddychaa
Pairings: John/Ianto, Jack/Ianto, Jack/Alonso, Mickey/Martha, other canon relationships
Rating: NC-17 this Chapter!!
Warnings: It gets into dub-con territory ahead, be warned!
Genre: Timey-wimey Post-CoE eventual fix-it
Disclaimer: "Doctor Who" and "Torchwood", including characters, concepts, and events, belong to their respective owners, including but not limited to Russel T Davies and the BBC. This is a work of fan-appreciation and no profit is being made.
Summary: Ianto Jones is searching for someone, and he's willing to risk and give anything if it brings him just one step closer. After materializing on an alternate Earth, the first person he happens upon is the smug and decidedly untrustworthy Captain John Hart, Time Agent. Hart seems to know what's going on in this world, and also knows more about Ianto himself than he's letting on, but most importantly he promises to take Ianto to Torchwood in London where he can continue his desperate search. However, when Hart's vortex manipulator takes them a crucial few months into the future, Ianto finds himself depending on him for much more than just directions . . . but at what cost?
A/N: Thanks as always to _lullabelle_ for beta-ing this fic. If it weren't for her, God knows what this fic would look like. (I read a lot of romance novels, so this chapter? Floral metaphors. Lots of floral metaphors!) You can assume any leftover errors are all me!
Chapter 5: Symbiotes
The Hive, as it turns out, is located on some sort of space station, which Jones first realizes as he passes by a window to the outside and sees the expanse of space beyond: millions of stars, unbounded by the glare of city lights or the haze of city smog. Hart walks on for several metres before realizing that Jones has stopped at the window, a hand pressed to its surface.
“Oh,” Hart says when he saunters back and comes to stand beside him. “Your first time in space.”
“It’s beautiful,” Jones finds himself saying, and then his face flushes in embarrassment.
“It’s empty, dark, and cold,” Hart replies, staring out at the stars, himself, and mercifully not noticing the weird progression of expressions running over Jones’ face. “And it will kill you.”
From the map stamped onto one wall, Jones learns that the space station is vaguely spider-shaped, built in 5015, with a round central area that leads out into long straight corridors like a spider’s legs. The corridors seem to be where all the life is on the station: The Hive is located at the very tip of one corridor, but as they walk along toward the centre section Jones sees there are all sorts of other doors along the corridor, too. Some of them are open, businesses, while others are closed and seem to be private residences. The whole station seems to be in a bad state of disrepair, everything dingy and covered in oil and grime. It’s crowded with John Hart-types, heavily armed and suspicious-looking, many of them not human. Jones tries his best not to gawp, because gawping will make him look like an outsider, and looking like an outsider makes him vulnerable. He sticks close to Hart, keeps a hand ready to reach for the blaster in his jacket, and tries to look mean.
“So, um, this is home for you then, is it?” he asks Hart, who grins to himself as he walks, greeting the occasional drunk slumped in a doorway or prostitute. Of course he’d be familiar with all the prostitutes in a place like this.
“No,” Hart replies, “But it gets me what I want, and I give them what they want.”
“A symbiotic relationship, then,” Jones opines.
“You could say that.”
They weave their way through the crowds, the drunks and drug addicts, the street stalls selling alien fast food and drinks, the blankets laid out with pieces of engines and scavenged parts and stolen shoes. They stop at one food and drink stall where John knows the bloke behind the counter, a vaguely humanoid alien with green, spiked skin like a cactus. John orders them both drinks which look black and tar-like but taste milky and vaguely sweet.
“Is this your idea of a date?” Jones asks between draws on his straw. Their shoulders brush together as they walk. Hart’s words sit at the back of his mind: It gets me what I want, and I give them what they want. Hart doesn’t reply. They have reached the end of the corridor, and are now facing the huge empty space at the centre of the station, which, as it turns out, houses a massive round building of windows, and overhead, a dingy dome window to space, a huge planet obstructing the view.
“I think they built it intending for it to be a tourist resort,” Hart explains, without being prompted, and Jones cranes his neck, staring up at the building. “This would be the main hotel, and then the corridors would be shops, restaurants, bars, and then lodging for permanent residents-employees.”
“What happened to it?” Jones asks. The hotel is in just as bad of repair as the rest of the station, but under the grime he can see that it was once a glittering art deco monstrosity.
“Well, see that planet? Used to be quite the tropical paradise until a religious war got real ugly and they burnt the whole damn thing up. Tourists would shuttle from the All Inclusive here down to the planet for nature tours, but not much for them to see now.”
Jones nods, looking up at the blackened state of the planet. There are probably Earths out there, parallel Earths, which look like that: where the Nazis won World War II, or the Cold War stopped being cold, or, or, or. He gulps.
“So!” Hart continues, tone suddenly chipper. “The owners want to pull out before they go bankrupt, so they sell low. Well, people like us,” he gestures to the assembled scoundrels, “don’t really give a shit about nature walks or a pretty view. A crime lord buys the place up at a good price, and we flock to it. It’s completely derelict, out of the way, and you don’t know about it unless you already do. If the Shadow Proclamation knows about us, somebody pays them off to stay out of it.”
“Did you come here often? With your old partner?” Jones asks.
“Huh? No, only once or twice. We didn’t actually travel together much. He just . . . makes an impression. You’d understand if you met him.” His answers, though uncharacteristically polite, are terse.
“Who was he, though?” Jones needles.
“A con-man. A particularly charming con-man.” Is there any other type? Jones wonders, Seems a con-man without charm isn’t going to be terribly good. “And if you keep asking questions, you’re going to start hearing answers that you really don’t want to hear.”
“Got it,” Jones says, and the pair of them enter the hotel.
Jones doesn’t know why, but he is expecting to see an actual hotel room when they come to door 437 and Hart unlocks it. You know, a double bed with a hideous floral duvet, an armchair, an alarm clock, a television with its remote glued to the bedside table, a print over the bed that has a 50/50 chance of being either a hideous excuse for “abstract art” or an awful country scene painted entirely in pastels. Instead, when Hart opens the door, he finds that all of these familiarities have been stripped away, leaving only two very uncomfortable looking cots, furnished simply with scratchy military blankets and thin pillows, and an alarm clock. He looks around, relieved, somewhat, to see that the walls are that awful peach that is shared amongst all hotel rooms. Even in space (he’s assuming thousands of light-years from Earth), even centuries in the future, some things never change.
He sits down on one of the cots, pulling his blaster from his jacket and laying it on the end table. Hart follows suit with his own weapons, although the process is significantly lengthier. For the first time, Jones realizes how foolhardy it was to try and ambush the other man. And yet Hart didn’t even try to fight back, despite the array of weapons at his disposal. Something doesn’t sit right with him about that.
“So what is that, anyway?” Hart asks, taking Jones off guard.
“What’s what?” he asks, looking over his shoulder self-consciously.
“That gun you carry.”
“Oh, that. High-energy pistol. Torchwood developed them to fight the Cybermen.”
“The Cybermen!” Hart exclaims. “You’ve fought Cybermen?”
His skin goes cold, clammy, at the thought. It isn’t that they look particularly threatening, it’s the very idea of them: a human mind, a human consciousness, trapped inside that horrible steel body, stripped of the very thing that made it human. Those things . . . they still remember their childhoods, their families, their lovers. But they are stripped of that tissue that connects it all, that makes it unique and wondrous and profound and heartbreaking. He can’t even conceptualize it, the thought of “Mother” without the huge weight of personal feeling, societal connotations, literature, music, religion, obligation. All of those emotions, feelings, connections, stripped down to a plain biological fact. And lovers? What is left there? Memories, maybe, but memories without fondness, regret, wistfulness, reminiscence, embarrassment. He swallows loudly, and realizes that John-no, Hart, always Hart-is watching him, his expression very soft, by Hart’s standards at least.
“Yes,” he says, finally. “Where I come from, we were at war. The Cybermen. Torchwood, the Preachers.”
“I’m sorry,” Hart says.
“Sorry for what?” Jones asks. “What’s there to be sorry about?”
“I don’t know,” Hart replies. “That’s just what you’re supposed to say when you hear something unfortunate, isn’t it?”
Jones fondles the cuffs of his jacket awkwardly. “Well then I forgive you,” he says, and forces a smile.
“I wouldn’t be too hasty saying that,” Hart warns, darkly.
He strides across the room in two long, graceful steps. His bony hands grip Jones’ shoulders tentatively, giving the roundness of them a circular rub that feels unsure but greedy, full of contradictions. Jones looks up, saying nothing, steadying his face, aware of each twitch of his pupils, each tensing of his facial muscles, the swell of his lips. He squares his shoulders, trying in vain to swallow a lump in his throat.
It gets me what I want. I give him what he wants.
“Do it,” he snarls. A dare, a challenge.
Hart smirks, and the expression is perfectly evil. “Oh, you thought I wanted your permission?” His hand suddenly snaps up from Jones’ shoulder, grasping him clawlike at the throat, fingers and thumb clutching his jaw, Hart’s forefinger jabbing into his cheek and against the sides of his molars painfully. The other hand reaches down to the buttons on his jacket, which Hart undoes deftly, with quick, angry movements that Jones doesn’t let himself flinch at-Hart never breaks eye contact, as though he’s waiting for a crack in Jones’ resolve. There won’t be one. “Take it off,” Hart demands, jerking at the right lapel of the coat in frustration, and Jones complies, wriggling out of the sleeves.
Hart uses his free hand to tug at the collar of Jones’ t-shirt experimentally, and when it doesn’t tear, he releases Jones’ throat. Jones gulps in the breath he didn’t realize he was holding. He sits still on the bed, his palms flat on the mattress just behind his body, keeping him steady. Steadiness is all he has left. He keeps his chin up, never breaking eye contact, facial expression never faltering. Two fingers still hooked in the collar of Jones’ shirt, Hart exhales through his nose loudly. The t-shirt springs back into place against Jones’ skin as Hart’s fingers slip away.
For awhile, they just stare at each other, wearing matching unreadable expressions, neither one willing to break eye contact. Eventually it’s Hart who makes the first move, reaching down to Jones’ sides and gripping the bottom of his t-shirt. He peels it up over Jones’ body, and again Jones is compliant, lifting his arms so that the shirt can be pulled away. Hart runs the pads of his thumbs along Jones’ collarbones, sweeping them up the ridges of bone that connect collarbones to shoulders. Jones realizes too late that he has begun to breathe heavily, belly and chest rising and falling in tandem. That same breath hitches when Hart leans forward, forehead to forehead, the lengths of their noses nudging together. He feels Hart’s breath on his face, ghosting over the skin of his lips. They stay like that a moment and Jones wonders, perhaps hopefully, if maybe they are both too afraid to move when suddenly Hart tilts his jaw, attempting a kiss. Jones turns his face abruptly so that they brush cheek-to-cheek, their day’s stubble creating friction. He swallows back a yelp when Hart bites him at the fleshy junction of neck and shoulder, tearing and scraping with his eye teeth.
There’s a shaky exhalation and Hart runs his hands up and over Jones’ chest, thumbs idly circling his nipples. One of Jones’ hands reaches up, fingers drawing themselves through the short-cropped hair at the back of Hart’s head, while the other undoes the button and zipper of the fly on his own jeans. He reaches in to stroke his own hardening cock through his boxers as Hart nips and licks at his shoulder and chest, thumbs tracing the spider’s web formed by the ridges of his ribs and the scars that pepper his chest. When Hart draws back to undress, it leaves him feeling cold and wanting. He tries to watch but it feels almost clinical, a little perverse. Instead, he busies himself removing his shoes, kicking off his jeans. When he looks up, he finds Hart standing naked in front of him, fully erect, hips canted. He raises an eyebrow in question.
“You’re . . . wiry,” Jones says, a little awkwardly, leaning back on his hands and twisting his mouth, not sure whether he’s going to smile or frown.
“You’re paunchy!” Hart retorts, “And you have chest hair!”
Jones fingers the dark fuzz that runs down the center of his chest self-consciously, and Hart laughs. The tension between them alleviates a little. Jones can feel the muscles in his jaw relax somewhat, though he can still feel the almost imperceptible vibration running through his body that tells him his muscles are pulled taut as bowstrings.
“What now?” he ventures.
Hart’s eyes are hooded, and when Jones asks, he can see the barest flicker in the other man’s pupils. “Now you stand up against the wall like you’re about to be frisked,” he orders.
Jones, flushed up the neck, rises to obey. This is it, he supposes. No more stalling, no more back-and-forth, no more pithy comments or failed attempts at what Hart probably thinks should pass for intimacy. He moves to the nearest clear piece of wall and puts his arms up, folding them forearm to forearm at head-height so that he can pillow his cheek. He glances over his shoulder, where he sees, rather than hears, Hart stalk up behind him. He sidles up close, slithering so that his chest slides skin-to-skin up the length of Jones’ back. Their breathing synchronizes quickly: Jones can feel Hart’s controlled breathing cool a path of sweat on one shoulder, while his own breath is trapped in the crevices formed by his folded arms.
He feels a forceful thigh and knee jerk his legs apart, two slick fingers probing rudely into him. He grunts into his arms, wondering briefly at what kind of man carries lube around in his back pocket, and then whimpers, the thought vanishing into the ether when those skilful fingers quickly find his prostate, rubbing firmly. Hart chuckles, bites his left earlobe, tugs at it experimentally, adds a third finger too soon. Jones squirms, bucking his hips uselessly in pain.
“Where’s your bravado now?” Hart taunts, and Jones can’t bear to respond, isn’t sure he can keep his voice calm enough, and he won’t give Hart the satisfaction. Any more than the satisfaction he’s already given him, anyway. He feels Hart’s fingers slip away, leaving him simultaneously relieved and wanting. Hart’s bony hands are on his hips now, pulling him back, positioning him like a mannequin. He feels Hart’s cock nudging at his entrance, and without pretence of consideration, he forces himself in, making Jones cry out, a treacherous noise.
Hart thrusts deep and fast, teeth finding the skin of Jones’ shoulder or neck or ear if he responds with a cry or a groan or yelp. Jones repeats a name in his head like a mantra, gritting it into his teeth like sand. It seems to go quick and businesslike, after that, and Jones presses his forehead to the cool wall, closing his eyes, trying to regain control of something, anything. Eventually, one of Hart’s hands snakes around to Jones’ cock, tugging at it arrhythmically until they both climax within moments of one another, Hart laughing and shuddering against Jones’ back, Jones spilling into Hart’s hand and onto the floor at their feet.
Go to Chapter 6: "Principles".
View the Masterlist for full chapter list and complete header info.
Author: heddychaa
Pairings: John/Ianto, Jack/Ianto, Jack/Alonso, Mickey/Martha, other canon relationships
Rating: NC-17 this Chapter!!
Warnings: It gets into dub-con territory ahead, be warned!
Genre: Timey-wimey Post-CoE eventual fix-it
Disclaimer: "Doctor Who" and "Torchwood", including characters, concepts, and events, belong to their respective owners, including but not limited to Russel T Davies and the BBC. This is a work of fan-appreciation and no profit is being made.
Summary: Ianto Jones is searching for someone, and he's willing to risk and give anything if it brings him just one step closer. After materializing on an alternate Earth, the first person he happens upon is the smug and decidedly untrustworthy Captain John Hart, Time Agent. Hart seems to know what's going on in this world, and also knows more about Ianto himself than he's letting on, but most importantly he promises to take Ianto to Torchwood in London where he can continue his desperate search. However, when Hart's vortex manipulator takes them a crucial few months into the future, Ianto finds himself depending on him for much more than just directions . . . but at what cost?
A/N: Thanks as always to _lullabelle_ for beta-ing this fic. If it weren't for her, God knows what this fic would look like. (I read a lot of romance novels, so this chapter? Floral metaphors. Lots of floral metaphors!) You can assume any leftover errors are all me!
Chapter 5: Symbiotes
The Hive, as it turns out, is located on some sort of space station, which Jones first realizes as he passes by a window to the outside and sees the expanse of space beyond: millions of stars, unbounded by the glare of city lights or the haze of city smog. Hart walks on for several metres before realizing that Jones has stopped at the window, a hand pressed to its surface.
“Oh,” Hart says when he saunters back and comes to stand beside him. “Your first time in space.”
“It’s beautiful,” Jones finds himself saying, and then his face flushes in embarrassment.
“It’s empty, dark, and cold,” Hart replies, staring out at the stars, himself, and mercifully not noticing the weird progression of expressions running over Jones’ face. “And it will kill you.”
From the map stamped onto one wall, Jones learns that the space station is vaguely spider-shaped, built in 5015, with a round central area that leads out into long straight corridors like a spider’s legs. The corridors seem to be where all the life is on the station: The Hive is located at the very tip of one corridor, but as they walk along toward the centre section Jones sees there are all sorts of other doors along the corridor, too. Some of them are open, businesses, while others are closed and seem to be private residences. The whole station seems to be in a bad state of disrepair, everything dingy and covered in oil and grime. It’s crowded with John Hart-types, heavily armed and suspicious-looking, many of them not human. Jones tries his best not to gawp, because gawping will make him look like an outsider, and looking like an outsider makes him vulnerable. He sticks close to Hart, keeps a hand ready to reach for the blaster in his jacket, and tries to look mean.
“So, um, this is home for you then, is it?” he asks Hart, who grins to himself as he walks, greeting the occasional drunk slumped in a doorway or prostitute. Of course he’d be familiar with all the prostitutes in a place like this.
“No,” Hart replies, “But it gets me what I want, and I give them what they want.”
“A symbiotic relationship, then,” Jones opines.
“You could say that.”
They weave their way through the crowds, the drunks and drug addicts, the street stalls selling alien fast food and drinks, the blankets laid out with pieces of engines and scavenged parts and stolen shoes. They stop at one food and drink stall where John knows the bloke behind the counter, a vaguely humanoid alien with green, spiked skin like a cactus. John orders them both drinks which look black and tar-like but taste milky and vaguely sweet.
“Is this your idea of a date?” Jones asks between draws on his straw. Their shoulders brush together as they walk. Hart’s words sit at the back of his mind: It gets me what I want, and I give them what they want. Hart doesn’t reply. They have reached the end of the corridor, and are now facing the huge empty space at the centre of the station, which, as it turns out, houses a massive round building of windows, and overhead, a dingy dome window to space, a huge planet obstructing the view.
“I think they built it intending for it to be a tourist resort,” Hart explains, without being prompted, and Jones cranes his neck, staring up at the building. “This would be the main hotel, and then the corridors would be shops, restaurants, bars, and then lodging for permanent residents-employees.”
“What happened to it?” Jones asks. The hotel is in just as bad of repair as the rest of the station, but under the grime he can see that it was once a glittering art deco monstrosity.
“Well, see that planet? Used to be quite the tropical paradise until a religious war got real ugly and they burnt the whole damn thing up. Tourists would shuttle from the All Inclusive here down to the planet for nature tours, but not much for them to see now.”
Jones nods, looking up at the blackened state of the planet. There are probably Earths out there, parallel Earths, which look like that: where the Nazis won World War II, or the Cold War stopped being cold, or, or, or. He gulps.
“So!” Hart continues, tone suddenly chipper. “The owners want to pull out before they go bankrupt, so they sell low. Well, people like us,” he gestures to the assembled scoundrels, “don’t really give a shit about nature walks or a pretty view. A crime lord buys the place up at a good price, and we flock to it. It’s completely derelict, out of the way, and you don’t know about it unless you already do. If the Shadow Proclamation knows about us, somebody pays them off to stay out of it.”
“Did you come here often? With your old partner?” Jones asks.
“Huh? No, only once or twice. We didn’t actually travel together much. He just . . . makes an impression. You’d understand if you met him.” His answers, though uncharacteristically polite, are terse.
“Who was he, though?” Jones needles.
“A con-man. A particularly charming con-man.” Is there any other type? Jones wonders, Seems a con-man without charm isn’t going to be terribly good. “And if you keep asking questions, you’re going to start hearing answers that you really don’t want to hear.”
“Got it,” Jones says, and the pair of them enter the hotel.
Jones doesn’t know why, but he is expecting to see an actual hotel room when they come to door 437 and Hart unlocks it. You know, a double bed with a hideous floral duvet, an armchair, an alarm clock, a television with its remote glued to the bedside table, a print over the bed that has a 50/50 chance of being either a hideous excuse for “abstract art” or an awful country scene painted entirely in pastels. Instead, when Hart opens the door, he finds that all of these familiarities have been stripped away, leaving only two very uncomfortable looking cots, furnished simply with scratchy military blankets and thin pillows, and an alarm clock. He looks around, relieved, somewhat, to see that the walls are that awful peach that is shared amongst all hotel rooms. Even in space (he’s assuming thousands of light-years from Earth), even centuries in the future, some things never change.
He sits down on one of the cots, pulling his blaster from his jacket and laying it on the end table. Hart follows suit with his own weapons, although the process is significantly lengthier. For the first time, Jones realizes how foolhardy it was to try and ambush the other man. And yet Hart didn’t even try to fight back, despite the array of weapons at his disposal. Something doesn’t sit right with him about that.
“So what is that, anyway?” Hart asks, taking Jones off guard.
“What’s what?” he asks, looking over his shoulder self-consciously.
“That gun you carry.”
“Oh, that. High-energy pistol. Torchwood developed them to fight the Cybermen.”
“The Cybermen!” Hart exclaims. “You’ve fought Cybermen?”
His skin goes cold, clammy, at the thought. It isn’t that they look particularly threatening, it’s the very idea of them: a human mind, a human consciousness, trapped inside that horrible steel body, stripped of the very thing that made it human. Those things . . . they still remember their childhoods, their families, their lovers. But they are stripped of that tissue that connects it all, that makes it unique and wondrous and profound and heartbreaking. He can’t even conceptualize it, the thought of “Mother” without the huge weight of personal feeling, societal connotations, literature, music, religion, obligation. All of those emotions, feelings, connections, stripped down to a plain biological fact. And lovers? What is left there? Memories, maybe, but memories without fondness, regret, wistfulness, reminiscence, embarrassment. He swallows loudly, and realizes that John-no, Hart, always Hart-is watching him, his expression very soft, by Hart’s standards at least.
“Yes,” he says, finally. “Where I come from, we were at war. The Cybermen. Torchwood, the Preachers.”
“I’m sorry,” Hart says.
“Sorry for what?” Jones asks. “What’s there to be sorry about?”
“I don’t know,” Hart replies. “That’s just what you’re supposed to say when you hear something unfortunate, isn’t it?”
Jones fondles the cuffs of his jacket awkwardly. “Well then I forgive you,” he says, and forces a smile.
“I wouldn’t be too hasty saying that,” Hart warns, darkly.
He strides across the room in two long, graceful steps. His bony hands grip Jones’ shoulders tentatively, giving the roundness of them a circular rub that feels unsure but greedy, full of contradictions. Jones looks up, saying nothing, steadying his face, aware of each twitch of his pupils, each tensing of his facial muscles, the swell of his lips. He squares his shoulders, trying in vain to swallow a lump in his throat.
It gets me what I want. I give him what he wants.
“Do it,” he snarls. A dare, a challenge.
Hart smirks, and the expression is perfectly evil. “Oh, you thought I wanted your permission?” His hand suddenly snaps up from Jones’ shoulder, grasping him clawlike at the throat, fingers and thumb clutching his jaw, Hart’s forefinger jabbing into his cheek and against the sides of his molars painfully. The other hand reaches down to the buttons on his jacket, which Hart undoes deftly, with quick, angry movements that Jones doesn’t let himself flinch at-Hart never breaks eye contact, as though he’s waiting for a crack in Jones’ resolve. There won’t be one. “Take it off,” Hart demands, jerking at the right lapel of the coat in frustration, and Jones complies, wriggling out of the sleeves.
Hart uses his free hand to tug at the collar of Jones’ t-shirt experimentally, and when it doesn’t tear, he releases Jones’ throat. Jones gulps in the breath he didn’t realize he was holding. He sits still on the bed, his palms flat on the mattress just behind his body, keeping him steady. Steadiness is all he has left. He keeps his chin up, never breaking eye contact, facial expression never faltering. Two fingers still hooked in the collar of Jones’ shirt, Hart exhales through his nose loudly. The t-shirt springs back into place against Jones’ skin as Hart’s fingers slip away.
For awhile, they just stare at each other, wearing matching unreadable expressions, neither one willing to break eye contact. Eventually it’s Hart who makes the first move, reaching down to Jones’ sides and gripping the bottom of his t-shirt. He peels it up over Jones’ body, and again Jones is compliant, lifting his arms so that the shirt can be pulled away. Hart runs the pads of his thumbs along Jones’ collarbones, sweeping them up the ridges of bone that connect collarbones to shoulders. Jones realizes too late that he has begun to breathe heavily, belly and chest rising and falling in tandem. That same breath hitches when Hart leans forward, forehead to forehead, the lengths of their noses nudging together. He feels Hart’s breath on his face, ghosting over the skin of his lips. They stay like that a moment and Jones wonders, perhaps hopefully, if maybe they are both too afraid to move when suddenly Hart tilts his jaw, attempting a kiss. Jones turns his face abruptly so that they brush cheek-to-cheek, their day’s stubble creating friction. He swallows back a yelp when Hart bites him at the fleshy junction of neck and shoulder, tearing and scraping with his eye teeth.
There’s a shaky exhalation and Hart runs his hands up and over Jones’ chest, thumbs idly circling his nipples. One of Jones’ hands reaches up, fingers drawing themselves through the short-cropped hair at the back of Hart’s head, while the other undoes the button and zipper of the fly on his own jeans. He reaches in to stroke his own hardening cock through his boxers as Hart nips and licks at his shoulder and chest, thumbs tracing the spider’s web formed by the ridges of his ribs and the scars that pepper his chest. When Hart draws back to undress, it leaves him feeling cold and wanting. He tries to watch but it feels almost clinical, a little perverse. Instead, he busies himself removing his shoes, kicking off his jeans. When he looks up, he finds Hart standing naked in front of him, fully erect, hips canted. He raises an eyebrow in question.
“You’re . . . wiry,” Jones says, a little awkwardly, leaning back on his hands and twisting his mouth, not sure whether he’s going to smile or frown.
“You’re paunchy!” Hart retorts, “And you have chest hair!”
Jones fingers the dark fuzz that runs down the center of his chest self-consciously, and Hart laughs. The tension between them alleviates a little. Jones can feel the muscles in his jaw relax somewhat, though he can still feel the almost imperceptible vibration running through his body that tells him his muscles are pulled taut as bowstrings.
“What now?” he ventures.
Hart’s eyes are hooded, and when Jones asks, he can see the barest flicker in the other man’s pupils. “Now you stand up against the wall like you’re about to be frisked,” he orders.
Jones, flushed up the neck, rises to obey. This is it, he supposes. No more stalling, no more back-and-forth, no more pithy comments or failed attempts at what Hart probably thinks should pass for intimacy. He moves to the nearest clear piece of wall and puts his arms up, folding them forearm to forearm at head-height so that he can pillow his cheek. He glances over his shoulder, where he sees, rather than hears, Hart stalk up behind him. He sidles up close, slithering so that his chest slides skin-to-skin up the length of Jones’ back. Their breathing synchronizes quickly: Jones can feel Hart’s controlled breathing cool a path of sweat on one shoulder, while his own breath is trapped in the crevices formed by his folded arms.
He feels a forceful thigh and knee jerk his legs apart, two slick fingers probing rudely into him. He grunts into his arms, wondering briefly at what kind of man carries lube around in his back pocket, and then whimpers, the thought vanishing into the ether when those skilful fingers quickly find his prostate, rubbing firmly. Hart chuckles, bites his left earlobe, tugs at it experimentally, adds a third finger too soon. Jones squirms, bucking his hips uselessly in pain.
“Where’s your bravado now?” Hart taunts, and Jones can’t bear to respond, isn’t sure he can keep his voice calm enough, and he won’t give Hart the satisfaction. Any more than the satisfaction he’s already given him, anyway. He feels Hart’s fingers slip away, leaving him simultaneously relieved and wanting. Hart’s bony hands are on his hips now, pulling him back, positioning him like a mannequin. He feels Hart’s cock nudging at his entrance, and without pretence of consideration, he forces himself in, making Jones cry out, a treacherous noise.
Hart thrusts deep and fast, teeth finding the skin of Jones’ shoulder or neck or ear if he responds with a cry or a groan or yelp. Jones repeats a name in his head like a mantra, gritting it into his teeth like sand. It seems to go quick and businesslike, after that, and Jones presses his forehead to the cool wall, closing his eyes, trying to regain control of something, anything. Eventually, one of Hart’s hands snakes around to Jones’ cock, tugging at it arrhythmically until they both climax within moments of one another, Hart laughing and shuddering against Jones’ back, Jones spilling into Hart’s hand and onto the floor at their feet.
Go to Chapter 6: "Principles".
View the Masterlist for full chapter list and complete header info.