Touch (NC-17)
Title: Touch
Author: mercurybard
Fandom: Dark Angel
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: Don't own Dark Angel. Just peeing in the pool.
Pairings: Max/Logan, Max/Alec
Notes: Written for daythirtynine in response to her prompt: “5 Times Max is Glad She Can’t Touch Logan”. Yes, the prompt was hard, which is why it took so long, but I wasn’t going to back down and take the easier one. And, besides, it morphed into something entirely different than what I was planning. Consider this my warm-up for pamalax’s Michael/Sara smut challenge. Heavy spoilers for “Hello, Goodbye” and references to “Art Attack”.
1.
“Jesus, Logan, what did you do? Roll in garbage juice?”
He swiped uselessly at the slime that was covering him from head to toe. Since his hand was already coated, all it did was move the goop around a bit. “My contact got spooked when the sector police showed up-he tossed the disk I needed into a dumpster and took off.”
Max laughed and shook her head. “Guess you didn’t get the memo: dumpster diving’s best done in the nude.”
His eyes bugged out a bit. “You sound like you know this from personal experience…”
2.
She came into Crash smelling like Flea Bombs and God knows what else. Her day had pretty much sucked. Original Cindy had woken her at the ass-crack of dawn because the water pipe running to the shower had developed a pinhole leak overnight and the wall was set to burst. Then, Normal had been his usual charming self and ridden her hard at work. She’d sworn if she heard the phrase “bip, bip, bip!” come from his mouth one more time, she’d snap his neck. Damn the consequences. There was only so much a girl could take.
So, by that point, all she wanted was a pitcher of beer and a nice chat with Logan. About normal stuff-like baby seals and the price of rosemary at the herbalists down the street from the apartment and the flea infestation over at Joshua’s. Ok, maybe that last wasn’t normal for most people because most people don’t have friends who have canine DNA in their genetic cocktail, but still, it was pretty mundane.
So, she walked in wanting a nice night with the man she thought she loved and what did she find? Him trying to solve all the mysteries of Manticore and the breeding cult on a cocktail napkin. He should be thankful the virus kept them from touching, because she suddenly had the overwhelming urge to slap him upside the back of his stupid head.
3.
In some twisted way, she’s thankful for the virus. Because it was what brought her to this point. She almost lost Logan again last night, thanks to them not being careful enough around each other. One reflexive movement-to grab her arm as she walked away-nearly killed him.
It put a crack in her shell.
Memories of Ben now threaten to split her wide open. She’s never been able to tell anyone what happened to the brother that went crazy. Logan, she guessed, has always thought he was killed by Manticore. It’s the only explanation that’ll make sense to him. If Ben had been recaptured, then she would have gone nuts trying to save him. She would have forced an assault on the Wyoming facility much sooner, even if she’d had to go it alone.
But she’d come back not wanting to talk about it, and Logan had respected her privacy.
Now, with Alec up on murder charges for Ben’s crimes, it brought all those old memories back. Of her hands around Ben’s neck, snapping it so he wouldn’t be taken alive. Of the pain in his green eyes as he pleaded with her to kill him. The outside world was too big for her brother Ben. He’d gotten lost in it and then lost it. And she’d just left his body there once she’d done her horrible deed.
She had never let herself cry for Ben, until now. Because Alec might be the only one who understands what she’s going through. He has all the same instincts she does-the same drive to survive that forced her to abandon Ben, at the end. He’s the one who’s even now pressing a kiss into her hair, rubbing her arm in a vain attempt to sooth her.
He can’t kiss away the hurt, but he can let her know she’s not alone. And that’s what Max so desperately needs right now.
4 & 5.
“So any deep thoughts you want to share? Any profound realizations about life?”
“Yeah-love sucks.”
It sucked because it hurt, and it sucked because it made her hope for a while that she could have something special, something untainted by Manticore. But Renfro was right-she was poison, and she poisoned Logan even when she couldn’t touch him. She’d torn out his heart tonight and deliberately stomped on it. Reminded him that even when he was whole and could walk, she was still the bigger badass-that she could still do more for the cause than Eyes Only could ever dream of doing. Manly pride might be completely retarded, but at least it was understandable. He should stick to Asha. She was pretty and dedicated. She was human.
This virus was probably a good thing, even if it doesn’t feel like it now. It’ll force them to stay apart and give him a shot at being happy in a way he could never be with her. It scared her that she was thinking the same sort of thing Alec had told her at Crash, but maybe-God this is hard to say even after last night-but maybe Alec was right. They weren’t meant to be with normal humans.
And if that was true, then it was a blessing she couldn’t touch Logan. Because touching him meant losing herself to him.
Alec scooted behind her, pulling her up between his legs, hugging her to his chest. She leaned into him, finding that hollow in the crook of his shoulder where she could rest her head. They were quiet for long minutes as the Seattle nightlife went on far below them. Somewhere, down there, Logan was drunk in his loft, and Joshua was heartbroken in his father’s home. She should be comforting Joshua now, but she felt too broken inside to get down off the Space Needle.
Alec sighed. “Love does suck,” he murmured into the back of her head. “Why couldn’t they have programmed it out of us back at Manticore? I mean, it’s got no use to soldiers. All it does is get in the way of the mission.”
“Take it away and add some bat DNA and you’ve got the X7s.”
It occurred to her then that Alec was grieving just as hard as she was. She tilted her head back to look up at him, just in time for a tear to leak out of the corner of his eye and land on the bridge of her nose. It slid to one side, stinging as it oozed into her eyeball. She blinked, and then he was kissing her.
The angle they were at meant the tops of their tongues slid along one another as the kiss deepened, the roughness of their taste buds sending a little shiver down her spine. His hands slid over her face like a blind man trying to memorize her features and then on down to her throat. His fingers found the zipper on the front of her leather jacket and hesitated. He doesn’t want to take advantage, she realized with a start. If they did this, it was going to mean something more than a pity fuck. It was going to mean more than a breeding program, more than sexual comfort.
Her hand folded over his and gently drew it down. He helped her shrug out of the jacket-a surprisingly gentlemanly act for him-and set it carefully aside before his cold hands slid up under her shirt until the tips of his fingers were tracing along the underwire of her bra, fondling her breasts through the silky fabric.
The night was cold, especially up here where the wind wasn’t blocked by anything. It blew Max’s hair into Alec’s face as she turned to face him, his hands still trapped under her shirt. It was her turn to shove his jacket off his shoulders. As much as she liked leather, she hated the damn thing. Its high collar was his only nod to hiding the barcode tattooed back there. He needed to grow his hair longer.
It would hide the tat and make him look less like Ben. Ben had practically flaunted Manticore’s mark…because he’d never really left there. Alec had. There was no doubting that as he undid the button and zipper of her fly, as his mouth tried to devour hers. This wasn’t how good little X5s mated, she figured, pushing him back against the sloping side of the Space Needle. This wasn’t clinical-this was somewhere between fucking and making love.
He shoved her jeans down as far as he could with her straddling him, and she stood momentarily-her skin aching at the loss of contact-to kick off her motorcycle boots and squirm the rest of the way out of her pants. One boot ended up precariously close to the edge, but at that particular moment, she didn’t care. Before she had a chance to sit back down, Alec stroked a hand up the inside of her bare leg, his fingers teasing across the outside of her panties when they reached the apex of her thigh.
Max sank to her knees beside him, and he rolled over onto his side to face her as his hand dipped into her underwear. He stroked her carefully, seeming to time each twitch of finger across her sex to cause the maximum amount of pleasure. For half a second, she wondered where he’d learned to do that, and then a small part of her brain not currently engaged in sensory overload reminded her that this was Alec-she really didn’t want to know.
Then he slid a finger into her, and her mind exploded into incoherence.
When she finally finished thrashing in the throes of her orgasm, she lay down beside him. The metal was icy beneath her skin, but he kept his hands-now hot-roaming over her. Her brain felt fried, like she’d been staring into the sun too long, but the rest of her still ached to play. She’d seen him without a shirt-fuck, that’d been part of their introduction-but actually feeling the tight ripple of muscles beneath her hands was a different matter entirely. She straddled him again, yanking the t-shirt free from his waistband so she could admire the bare skin and what moved beneath it. She pressed her mouth to his stomach, right over his bellybutton and sucked, running her tongue in a circle around the dent.
He shuddered with suppressed laughter. Who knew Alec would be ticklish there? It brought a smirk to Max’s lips as she kissed her way up his chest, shoving the shirt farther up so she could bite at a nipple. She watched him from beneath hooded eyes, arching her back as she crawled up him. He brings out the predator in me, she thought as she flicked her tongue across his swollen lower lip. A growl rumbled out from deep in his throat. And vice versa.
His hands slid up her back, under her t-shirt, and her bra popped open at the slightest touch. The fingers-so slow and teasing earlier-were now frantic as they tugged on the shirt, yanking it over her head and then ridding her of the bra as well. Her skin was burning, her ramped-up transgenic metabolism protecting her from the chilly wind. Instead of make her shiver, it just provided another exquisite play of sensations over her skin. Alec, impatient, undid his own fly, shoving pants and boxers down just far enough before turning his attention to her panties. Those he simply tore off her, letting the scrap of fabric flutter off into the night.
“In a rush?” she asked, arching one eyebrow teasingly even as she sank down onto his cock.
Instead of answering, he pushed himself up on his elbows, the angle of the incline allowing him to capture her mouth again even as she rode him. Their eyes stayed open when they kissed this time, hungrily feeding off each others’ mouths as if they could take from one another something that would fill the hole they both carried in their hearts. His pupils were blown wide, and Max didn’t need a mirror to know that hers were too.
They came together, both letting out feral, wordless cries that seemed to echo in the night.
When that had passed, she didn’t climb off of him. Didn’t dress quickly and rush off before he had a chance to recover. Instead, she huddled against his chest, his dick still resting inside her, and he reached over and dragged his jacket overtop of the both of them, to protect them from the cold.
Sex on the Space Needle wouldn’t fix things anything, but she didn’t regret it either. And she was happy that this man, of all men, could touch her.
Author: mercurybard
Fandom: Dark Angel
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: Don't own Dark Angel. Just peeing in the pool.
Pairings: Max/Logan, Max/Alec
Notes: Written for daythirtynine in response to her prompt: “5 Times Max is Glad She Can’t Touch Logan”. Yes, the prompt was hard, which is why it took so long, but I wasn’t going to back down and take the easier one. And, besides, it morphed into something entirely different than what I was planning. Consider this my warm-up for pamalax’s Michael/Sara smut challenge. Heavy spoilers for “Hello, Goodbye” and references to “Art Attack”.
1.
“Jesus, Logan, what did you do? Roll in garbage juice?”
He swiped uselessly at the slime that was covering him from head to toe. Since his hand was already coated, all it did was move the goop around a bit. “My contact got spooked when the sector police showed up-he tossed the disk I needed into a dumpster and took off.”
Max laughed and shook her head. “Guess you didn’t get the memo: dumpster diving’s best done in the nude.”
His eyes bugged out a bit. “You sound like you know this from personal experience…”
2.
She came into Crash smelling like Flea Bombs and God knows what else. Her day had pretty much sucked. Original Cindy had woken her at the ass-crack of dawn because the water pipe running to the shower had developed a pinhole leak overnight and the wall was set to burst. Then, Normal had been his usual charming self and ridden her hard at work. She’d sworn if she heard the phrase “bip, bip, bip!” come from his mouth one more time, she’d snap his neck. Damn the consequences. There was only so much a girl could take.
So, by that point, all she wanted was a pitcher of beer and a nice chat with Logan. About normal stuff-like baby seals and the price of rosemary at the herbalists down the street from the apartment and the flea infestation over at Joshua’s. Ok, maybe that last wasn’t normal for most people because most people don’t have friends who have canine DNA in their genetic cocktail, but still, it was pretty mundane.
So, she walked in wanting a nice night with the man she thought she loved and what did she find? Him trying to solve all the mysteries of Manticore and the breeding cult on a cocktail napkin. He should be thankful the virus kept them from touching, because she suddenly had the overwhelming urge to slap him upside the back of his stupid head.
3.
In some twisted way, she’s thankful for the virus. Because it was what brought her to this point. She almost lost Logan again last night, thanks to them not being careful enough around each other. One reflexive movement-to grab her arm as she walked away-nearly killed him.
It put a crack in her shell.
Memories of Ben now threaten to split her wide open. She’s never been able to tell anyone what happened to the brother that went crazy. Logan, she guessed, has always thought he was killed by Manticore. It’s the only explanation that’ll make sense to him. If Ben had been recaptured, then she would have gone nuts trying to save him. She would have forced an assault on the Wyoming facility much sooner, even if she’d had to go it alone.
But she’d come back not wanting to talk about it, and Logan had respected her privacy.
Now, with Alec up on murder charges for Ben’s crimes, it brought all those old memories back. Of her hands around Ben’s neck, snapping it so he wouldn’t be taken alive. Of the pain in his green eyes as he pleaded with her to kill him. The outside world was too big for her brother Ben. He’d gotten lost in it and then lost it. And she’d just left his body there once she’d done her horrible deed.
She had never let herself cry for Ben, until now. Because Alec might be the only one who understands what she’s going through. He has all the same instincts she does-the same drive to survive that forced her to abandon Ben, at the end. He’s the one who’s even now pressing a kiss into her hair, rubbing her arm in a vain attempt to sooth her.
He can’t kiss away the hurt, but he can let her know she’s not alone. And that’s what Max so desperately needs right now.
4 & 5.
“So any deep thoughts you want to share? Any profound realizations about life?”
“Yeah-love sucks.”
It sucked because it hurt, and it sucked because it made her hope for a while that she could have something special, something untainted by Manticore. But Renfro was right-she was poison, and she poisoned Logan even when she couldn’t touch him. She’d torn out his heart tonight and deliberately stomped on it. Reminded him that even when he was whole and could walk, she was still the bigger badass-that she could still do more for the cause than Eyes Only could ever dream of doing. Manly pride might be completely retarded, but at least it was understandable. He should stick to Asha. She was pretty and dedicated. She was human.
This virus was probably a good thing, even if it doesn’t feel like it now. It’ll force them to stay apart and give him a shot at being happy in a way he could never be with her. It scared her that she was thinking the same sort of thing Alec had told her at Crash, but maybe-God this is hard to say even after last night-but maybe Alec was right. They weren’t meant to be with normal humans.
And if that was true, then it was a blessing she couldn’t touch Logan. Because touching him meant losing herself to him.
Alec scooted behind her, pulling her up between his legs, hugging her to his chest. She leaned into him, finding that hollow in the crook of his shoulder where she could rest her head. They were quiet for long minutes as the Seattle nightlife went on far below them. Somewhere, down there, Logan was drunk in his loft, and Joshua was heartbroken in his father’s home. She should be comforting Joshua now, but she felt too broken inside to get down off the Space Needle.
Alec sighed. “Love does suck,” he murmured into the back of her head. “Why couldn’t they have programmed it out of us back at Manticore? I mean, it’s got no use to soldiers. All it does is get in the way of the mission.”
“Take it away and add some bat DNA and you’ve got the X7s.”
It occurred to her then that Alec was grieving just as hard as she was. She tilted her head back to look up at him, just in time for a tear to leak out of the corner of his eye and land on the bridge of her nose. It slid to one side, stinging as it oozed into her eyeball. She blinked, and then he was kissing her.
The angle they were at meant the tops of their tongues slid along one another as the kiss deepened, the roughness of their taste buds sending a little shiver down her spine. His hands slid over her face like a blind man trying to memorize her features and then on down to her throat. His fingers found the zipper on the front of her leather jacket and hesitated. He doesn’t want to take advantage, she realized with a start. If they did this, it was going to mean something more than a pity fuck. It was going to mean more than a breeding program, more than sexual comfort.
Her hand folded over his and gently drew it down. He helped her shrug out of the jacket-a surprisingly gentlemanly act for him-and set it carefully aside before his cold hands slid up under her shirt until the tips of his fingers were tracing along the underwire of her bra, fondling her breasts through the silky fabric.
The night was cold, especially up here where the wind wasn’t blocked by anything. It blew Max’s hair into Alec’s face as she turned to face him, his hands still trapped under her shirt. It was her turn to shove his jacket off his shoulders. As much as she liked leather, she hated the damn thing. Its high collar was his only nod to hiding the barcode tattooed back there. He needed to grow his hair longer.
It would hide the tat and make him look less like Ben. Ben had practically flaunted Manticore’s mark…because he’d never really left there. Alec had. There was no doubting that as he undid the button and zipper of her fly, as his mouth tried to devour hers. This wasn’t how good little X5s mated, she figured, pushing him back against the sloping side of the Space Needle. This wasn’t clinical-this was somewhere between fucking and making love.
He shoved her jeans down as far as he could with her straddling him, and she stood momentarily-her skin aching at the loss of contact-to kick off her motorcycle boots and squirm the rest of the way out of her pants. One boot ended up precariously close to the edge, but at that particular moment, she didn’t care. Before she had a chance to sit back down, Alec stroked a hand up the inside of her bare leg, his fingers teasing across the outside of her panties when they reached the apex of her thigh.
Max sank to her knees beside him, and he rolled over onto his side to face her as his hand dipped into her underwear. He stroked her carefully, seeming to time each twitch of finger across her sex to cause the maximum amount of pleasure. For half a second, she wondered where he’d learned to do that, and then a small part of her brain not currently engaged in sensory overload reminded her that this was Alec-she really didn’t want to know.
Then he slid a finger into her, and her mind exploded into incoherence.
When she finally finished thrashing in the throes of her orgasm, she lay down beside him. The metal was icy beneath her skin, but he kept his hands-now hot-roaming over her. Her brain felt fried, like she’d been staring into the sun too long, but the rest of her still ached to play. She’d seen him without a shirt-fuck, that’d been part of their introduction-but actually feeling the tight ripple of muscles beneath her hands was a different matter entirely. She straddled him again, yanking the t-shirt free from his waistband so she could admire the bare skin and what moved beneath it. She pressed her mouth to his stomach, right over his bellybutton and sucked, running her tongue in a circle around the dent.
He shuddered with suppressed laughter. Who knew Alec would be ticklish there? It brought a smirk to Max’s lips as she kissed her way up his chest, shoving the shirt farther up so she could bite at a nipple. She watched him from beneath hooded eyes, arching her back as she crawled up him. He brings out the predator in me, she thought as she flicked her tongue across his swollen lower lip. A growl rumbled out from deep in his throat. And vice versa.
His hands slid up her back, under her t-shirt, and her bra popped open at the slightest touch. The fingers-so slow and teasing earlier-were now frantic as they tugged on the shirt, yanking it over her head and then ridding her of the bra as well. Her skin was burning, her ramped-up transgenic metabolism protecting her from the chilly wind. Instead of make her shiver, it just provided another exquisite play of sensations over her skin. Alec, impatient, undid his own fly, shoving pants and boxers down just far enough before turning his attention to her panties. Those he simply tore off her, letting the scrap of fabric flutter off into the night.
“In a rush?” she asked, arching one eyebrow teasingly even as she sank down onto his cock.
Instead of answering, he pushed himself up on his elbows, the angle of the incline allowing him to capture her mouth again even as she rode him. Their eyes stayed open when they kissed this time, hungrily feeding off each others’ mouths as if they could take from one another something that would fill the hole they both carried in their hearts. His pupils were blown wide, and Max didn’t need a mirror to know that hers were too.
They came together, both letting out feral, wordless cries that seemed to echo in the night.
When that had passed, she didn’t climb off of him. Didn’t dress quickly and rush off before he had a chance to recover. Instead, she huddled against his chest, his dick still resting inside her, and he reached over and dragged his jacket overtop of the both of them, to protect them from the cold.
Sex on the Space Needle wouldn’t fix things anything, but she didn’t regret it either. And she was happy that this man, of all men, could touch her.