Fic: the wolves' second interlude (Criminal Minds, Unsub!Hotch/Reid, NC-17)
Title: the wolves' second interlude
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Pairing: Hotch/Reid
Rating: PG-13
Prior: 1 2 1st Interlude
Summary: I could hear the angels whispering // So I droned into the words and wandered aimlessly about // Until I heard shouting through the fog. // It turned out to be the howling of a dog...
The twentieth time, Spencer rarely blinks.
He doesn't want to miss anything.
★ ★ ★ ★
The third time they've done it, Spencer thinks reality is catching up to him. He kept his eyes closed almost the entire time and let Hotch do all the work. He feels ill, and not even in that 'coming down' way he did after their first time; he feels sick. Feverish and unbalanced. Lying next to Aaron that night, the dark room around them seems expectant rather than mysterious for the first time with Aaron by his side. Spencer can sense Aaron's disappointment, probably far less intense than his own but so much more cutting.
"I told you we could stop." Aaron's voice is slow, and not unkind, and awful in its forgiveness.
Awful because Spencer needs to be forgiven.
"I know."
"This can't go on, Spencer."
It's possibly the most terrible thing Spencer's ever been told. He just got Aaron; he hasn't had him nearly long enough to let him get away. And if it's because he's let his nerves, his hang-ups, spoil this opportunity-
"I'm doing better. It's getting better, Aaron, I'm being honest." He can practically feel the incredulity in the look Aaron's sending his way.
"It's just-" Spencer swallows. He hadn't wanted to say anything. Didn't realize until they'd already started that it would be a problem. Maybe he should have. But it's been so long, and there wasn't a chair involved... No dim woodland shack, the smell of fish guts roasting on a fire... "The handcuffs..."
Aaron stiffens. Spencer can tell immediately that he's understood. "I didn't think-"
"I didn't either," Spencer is quick to defend. "But then you- You'd already started and I didn't want to say anything in-"
Aaron cuts him off almost instantly, shuts down that line of thinking before it can take further hold. "Spencer, your trust is important to me. If I do something, anything, to make you feel the way you obviously did tonight, I need you to trust me to stop as soon as you've asked. I need you to tell me, do you understand?"
Spencer can only nod. In the circle of Aaron's arms, it feels silly that he had let memory bother him to the point that he couldn't enjoy what these arms, Aaron's hands, can do.
"It was thoughtless of me. I'm sorry..." Aaron is saying, sounding truly regretful.
Spencer kisses him, not needing an apology, but only the retraction behind it.
"We don't have to stop." He doesn't even want to, not now. Would he have known that the handcuffs would be a trigger for him, if not for tonight? Would he have known that he could talk himself through it? What more doesn't he know about himself that Aaron is illuminating for him?
"Spencer..."
"I trust you. I trust you and you can trust me. I'll tell you when it's too much. Alright? I really don't want to stop."
They won't. There is still relief in the way Aaron touches him, the way he breathes as they discuss the possibility. And this time Spencer is relieved too.
"Don't stop," he repeats several times more that evening.
Aaron gives him every reason to.
★ ★ ★ ★
The tenth time, Spencer takes an initiative. He tests the careful boundaries of what they do together and Aaron, bemused, lets him.
He makes mistakes. He is awkward and, at times, uncertain, but Aaron follows his lead, lets him experiment. Aaron lets Spencer play.
Spencer is sloppy and ungraceful, nothing like Aaron. He doesn't understand why Aaron enjoys watching him so much, the way Aaron's pupils dilate, his sex-raw voice quiet and encouraging.
But he still enjoys it. Holy shit, does he enjoy it, and this is still new enough that Aaron's laughter in the throws of the intensity thickening the air between them feels obscene, irreverent, but Spencer enjoys that too. Laps it up - every sign of Aaron enjoying himself, enjoying Spencer, taking pleasure. Pleasure Spencer's given him. And maybe the mess is partially because Spencer is showing off a bit. Milking the experience for all it's worth. Taking the lead is fun, but Spencer can already tell that he won't be doing it often. Power belongs in Aaron's hands; the way he wields it is art compared to Spencer's crayon drawings.
"You did good," Aaron says when they're finished, all the same. They crowd into Aaron's small shower stall together and let the blood and sweat wash away.
"I'm nothing like you." It's true. But when Aaron nips at Spencer's ear, playful rather than punitive, he's glad that Aaron didn't take it the wrong way.
"Do you think there's something wrong in that?"
Spencer thinks this might be easier if what they did together meant the same thing to both of them. 'A submissive looks to his dominant partner not only for instruction but for purpose and meaning,' he's said himself.
Like he's reading Spencer's mind, Aaron says, "You're your own person, Spencer, and I would never take that away from you."
'Wouldn't you?' Spencer wants to ask, but he sticks his face in the shower's spray and gets a mouthful of water when Aaron bites down hard on the sharp curve of his shoulder blade and his mouth drops involuntarily open.
"I like seeing you decide what works for you," Aaron says, continuing to bite at Spencer's angles and the tender curve of the back of his neck.
"But you like showing me better," Spencer knows.
"Yes." Aaron licks at one of the marks he just made and presses his fingertips into Spencer's hips, arranging Spencer against the shower's front wall.
There's no decision to be made about what would work for Spencer right now. "Please," he gasps, pressing back, against the hard line of Aaron's dick, nestled into the cleft of Spencer's ass.
"Ask me again."
Spencer does.
★ ★ ★ ★
The second time, Spencer doesn't think so much. He feels less like he's going to shake himself to pieces when they've finished.
★ ★ ★ ★
The sixth time they've done it, there's a change and Spencer can tell that Aaron can feel it too. He doesn't know what's given it away... Something in the lack of tremor in his voice, or maybe the way his eyes linger on the body stretched prone before him rather than flitting quickly, shyly, away.
Aaron begins giving Spencer more control. It isn't overt. He's never going to give over the reigns in this completely, nor would Spencer want him to, but there are little things- Aaron asks Spencer to meet him rather than insisting on driving Spencer from the office. He lets Spencer make the first move. He fills the tentative silence at the start of their evening with meaningful glances and suggestive body language, and when Spencer finally interprets his clues, he smiles because Spencer's reaction is eager instead of wary.
"What's different?" Aaron asks, as they lie in his bed hours later.
"I don't know." Spencer could quote an endless array of sources on the topics of relevant psychopathy and the possibility of transference, but for the first time in his life, he's experiencing something he can't reconcile with what he knows of its concept. "I'm not different."
He doesn't feel himself changing. Whatever else he's told himself, he'd wondered if he might. If he would alter as his relationship to Aaron, to the world, altered, and if he would notice when he had. But he doesn't believe himself to be ignorant; he truly thinks that something else is happening here.
"I don't want you to be."
Spencer can't help but wonder what would happen if Aaron did. If Aaron asked it of him... How would Spencer answer?
★ ★ ★ ★
The first time they do it, he's so nervous. He changes his mind about a dozen times as to whether he even wants what he's promised Aaron more-or-less irretractably. "You don't have to," Aaron's told him, time and time again; "I- I want to," he's lied.
"You're not sure."
Spencer wants Aaron - that has always been true. He wants to please Aaron; since he's discovered that he can please Aaron, he wants it more than ever. Aaron is so understanding and so gentle with him. He kisses Spencer softly and steadies Spencer's shaky hands. He guides Spencer's movements when Spencer falters, and his patience never wavers. Spencer has to bolster all of his courage to repay that kindness. He has to bite his lip, once or twice, so he doesn't scream; has to fight himself not to step away and run.
When it's over, Spencer is quaking like he's about to seize; his teeth all but chatter. He feels flushed, dizzy. He's panting like his chest won't hold breath, and Aaron is his iron lung.
"If you didn't like it-"
"Aaron."
Aaron is quiet and calm, and sincere, and he brushes Spencer's damp hair out of his face, and Spencer can't bear to tell him that his stomach's churning. Human pleasure is such a complex experience - affective science maintains that it can't be completely isolated from the experience of pain. This could be pleasure that Spencer is feeling, this almost sickening ebb of adrenaline from his veins. This could be a kind of release. The sting and the dread of the needle before-
But Spencer isn't thinking about that. "Just- Just hold me. Please."
It's a telling thing, probably a significant thing, that Spencer could do... what he's just done at Aaron's request. What he's allowed Aaron to do. That he could submit himself to Aaron's needs with little objection, but it takes a concerted effort to tell Aaron what he wants for himself. Spencer is too overwhelmed to think of any one thing in terms other than the superficial; he just folds himself into Aaron's arms and refuses to unsettle when he feels Aaron hard against his hip.
"We don't have to do it again, Spencer," Aaron says against the jut of Spencer's clavicle as he bruises it with his teeth, but Spencer just mewls and bucks weakly into Aaron's fist when Aaron reaches between Spencer's legs and finds him not hard but ready to be.
"We will." Spencer has no illusions about it. He'll remember this embrace if he begins to lose his nerve, the next time they do - Aaron's relentless grip and roughshod voice. "We will, I just... I just need time. I..." He isn't entirely sure what he needs, but he trusts Aaron to provide it for him.
"Alright," Aaron moans, his relief dotting a line, and Spencer pushes their mouths together in lieu of a signature.
★ ★ ★ ★
Each time they do this, the experience has been different for Spencer. Distinctly revealing but similarly satisfying on some level Spencer hadn't realized he'd been unsatisfied before.
Each time, afterwards, he and Aaron make love. And those experiences, too, are a revelation. Spencer doesn't know when a stranger's carnage, created by his hand and his lover's, became a process of discovery for him, but at some point he knows that his mouth stopped painting 'You're welcome's across Aaron's skin in the aftermath.
Now, when Spencer unclenches his fist or sets down his knife, when Aaron captures his lips and begins pulling them out of their blood-stained clothes... When Spencer returns Aaron's kiss, his breath is a litany of 'Yes's and 'I'm grateful's and 'Thank you's.
[end.]
Author's Note: I don't know how I feel about this :p I should probably rethink my practice of not using a beta. Nonetheless, let me know what you think. And I promise to get back to writing an actual next part to this series :p Rather than another sort of ambiguously senquenced something like this.
Fandom: Criminal Minds
Pairing: Hotch/Reid
Rating: PG-13
Prior: 1 2 1st Interlude
Summary: I could hear the angels whispering // So I droned into the words and wandered aimlessly about // Until I heard shouting through the fog. // It turned out to be the howling of a dog...
The twentieth time, Spencer rarely blinks.
He doesn't want to miss anything.
★ ★ ★ ★
The third time they've done it, Spencer thinks reality is catching up to him. He kept his eyes closed almost the entire time and let Hotch do all the work. He feels ill, and not even in that 'coming down' way he did after their first time; he feels sick. Feverish and unbalanced. Lying next to Aaron that night, the dark room around them seems expectant rather than mysterious for the first time with Aaron by his side. Spencer can sense Aaron's disappointment, probably far less intense than his own but so much more cutting.
"I told you we could stop." Aaron's voice is slow, and not unkind, and awful in its forgiveness.
Awful because Spencer needs to be forgiven.
"I know."
"This can't go on, Spencer."
It's possibly the most terrible thing Spencer's ever been told. He just got Aaron; he hasn't had him nearly long enough to let him get away. And if it's because he's let his nerves, his hang-ups, spoil this opportunity-
"I'm doing better. It's getting better, Aaron, I'm being honest." He can practically feel the incredulity in the look Aaron's sending his way.
"It's just-" Spencer swallows. He hadn't wanted to say anything. Didn't realize until they'd already started that it would be a problem. Maybe he should have. But it's been so long, and there wasn't a chair involved... No dim woodland shack, the smell of fish guts roasting on a fire... "The handcuffs..."
Aaron stiffens. Spencer can tell immediately that he's understood. "I didn't think-"
"I didn't either," Spencer is quick to defend. "But then you- You'd already started and I didn't want to say anything in-"
Aaron cuts him off almost instantly, shuts down that line of thinking before it can take further hold. "Spencer, your trust is important to me. If I do something, anything, to make you feel the way you obviously did tonight, I need you to trust me to stop as soon as you've asked. I need you to tell me, do you understand?"
Spencer can only nod. In the circle of Aaron's arms, it feels silly that he had let memory bother him to the point that he couldn't enjoy what these arms, Aaron's hands, can do.
"It was thoughtless of me. I'm sorry..." Aaron is saying, sounding truly regretful.
Spencer kisses him, not needing an apology, but only the retraction behind it.
"We don't have to stop." He doesn't even want to, not now. Would he have known that the handcuffs would be a trigger for him, if not for tonight? Would he have known that he could talk himself through it? What more doesn't he know about himself that Aaron is illuminating for him?
"Spencer..."
"I trust you. I trust you and you can trust me. I'll tell you when it's too much. Alright? I really don't want to stop."
They won't. There is still relief in the way Aaron touches him, the way he breathes as they discuss the possibility. And this time Spencer is relieved too.
"Don't stop," he repeats several times more that evening.
Aaron gives him every reason to.
★ ★ ★ ★
The tenth time, Spencer takes an initiative. He tests the careful boundaries of what they do together and Aaron, bemused, lets him.
He makes mistakes. He is awkward and, at times, uncertain, but Aaron follows his lead, lets him experiment. Aaron lets Spencer play.
Spencer is sloppy and ungraceful, nothing like Aaron. He doesn't understand why Aaron enjoys watching him so much, the way Aaron's pupils dilate, his sex-raw voice quiet and encouraging.
But he still enjoys it. Holy shit, does he enjoy it, and this is still new enough that Aaron's laughter in the throws of the intensity thickening the air between them feels obscene, irreverent, but Spencer enjoys that too. Laps it up - every sign of Aaron enjoying himself, enjoying Spencer, taking pleasure. Pleasure Spencer's given him. And maybe the mess is partially because Spencer is showing off a bit. Milking the experience for all it's worth. Taking the lead is fun, but Spencer can already tell that he won't be doing it often. Power belongs in Aaron's hands; the way he wields it is art compared to Spencer's crayon drawings.
"You did good," Aaron says when they're finished, all the same. They crowd into Aaron's small shower stall together and let the blood and sweat wash away.
"I'm nothing like you." It's true. But when Aaron nips at Spencer's ear, playful rather than punitive, he's glad that Aaron didn't take it the wrong way.
"Do you think there's something wrong in that?"
Spencer thinks this might be easier if what they did together meant the same thing to both of them. 'A submissive looks to his dominant partner not only for instruction but for purpose and meaning,' he's said himself.
Like he's reading Spencer's mind, Aaron says, "You're your own person, Spencer, and I would never take that away from you."
'Wouldn't you?' Spencer wants to ask, but he sticks his face in the shower's spray and gets a mouthful of water when Aaron bites down hard on the sharp curve of his shoulder blade and his mouth drops involuntarily open.
"I like seeing you decide what works for you," Aaron says, continuing to bite at Spencer's angles and the tender curve of the back of his neck.
"But you like showing me better," Spencer knows.
"Yes." Aaron licks at one of the marks he just made and presses his fingertips into Spencer's hips, arranging Spencer against the shower's front wall.
There's no decision to be made about what would work for Spencer right now. "Please," he gasps, pressing back, against the hard line of Aaron's dick, nestled into the cleft of Spencer's ass.
"Ask me again."
Spencer does.
★ ★ ★ ★
The second time, Spencer doesn't think so much. He feels less like he's going to shake himself to pieces when they've finished.
★ ★ ★ ★
The sixth time they've done it, there's a change and Spencer can tell that Aaron can feel it too. He doesn't know what's given it away... Something in the lack of tremor in his voice, or maybe the way his eyes linger on the body stretched prone before him rather than flitting quickly, shyly, away.
Aaron begins giving Spencer more control. It isn't overt. He's never going to give over the reigns in this completely, nor would Spencer want him to, but there are little things- Aaron asks Spencer to meet him rather than insisting on driving Spencer from the office. He lets Spencer make the first move. He fills the tentative silence at the start of their evening with meaningful glances and suggestive body language, and when Spencer finally interprets his clues, he smiles because Spencer's reaction is eager instead of wary.
"What's different?" Aaron asks, as they lie in his bed hours later.
"I don't know." Spencer could quote an endless array of sources on the topics of relevant psychopathy and the possibility of transference, but for the first time in his life, he's experiencing something he can't reconcile with what he knows of its concept. "I'm not different."
He doesn't feel himself changing. Whatever else he's told himself, he'd wondered if he might. If he would alter as his relationship to Aaron, to the world, altered, and if he would notice when he had. But he doesn't believe himself to be ignorant; he truly thinks that something else is happening here.
"I don't want you to be."
Spencer can't help but wonder what would happen if Aaron did. If Aaron asked it of him... How would Spencer answer?
★ ★ ★ ★
The first time they do it, he's so nervous. He changes his mind about a dozen times as to whether he even wants what he's promised Aaron more-or-less irretractably. "You don't have to," Aaron's told him, time and time again; "I- I want to," he's lied.
"You're not sure."
Spencer wants Aaron - that has always been true. He wants to please Aaron; since he's discovered that he can please Aaron, he wants it more than ever. Aaron is so understanding and so gentle with him. He kisses Spencer softly and steadies Spencer's shaky hands. He guides Spencer's movements when Spencer falters, and his patience never wavers. Spencer has to bolster all of his courage to repay that kindness. He has to bite his lip, once or twice, so he doesn't scream; has to fight himself not to step away and run.
When it's over, Spencer is quaking like he's about to seize; his teeth all but chatter. He feels flushed, dizzy. He's panting like his chest won't hold breath, and Aaron is his iron lung.
"If you didn't like it-"
"Aaron."
Aaron is quiet and calm, and sincere, and he brushes Spencer's damp hair out of his face, and Spencer can't bear to tell him that his stomach's churning. Human pleasure is such a complex experience - affective science maintains that it can't be completely isolated from the experience of pain. This could be pleasure that Spencer is feeling, this almost sickening ebb of adrenaline from his veins. This could be a kind of release. The sting and the dread of the needle before-
But Spencer isn't thinking about that. "Just- Just hold me. Please."
It's a telling thing, probably a significant thing, that Spencer could do... what he's just done at Aaron's request. What he's allowed Aaron to do. That he could submit himself to Aaron's needs with little objection, but it takes a concerted effort to tell Aaron what he wants for himself. Spencer is too overwhelmed to think of any one thing in terms other than the superficial; he just folds himself into Aaron's arms and refuses to unsettle when he feels Aaron hard against his hip.
"We don't have to do it again, Spencer," Aaron says against the jut of Spencer's clavicle as he bruises it with his teeth, but Spencer just mewls and bucks weakly into Aaron's fist when Aaron reaches between Spencer's legs and finds him not hard but ready to be.
"We will." Spencer has no illusions about it. He'll remember this embrace if he begins to lose his nerve, the next time they do - Aaron's relentless grip and roughshod voice. "We will, I just... I just need time. I..." He isn't entirely sure what he needs, but he trusts Aaron to provide it for him.
"Alright," Aaron moans, his relief dotting a line, and Spencer pushes their mouths together in lieu of a signature.
★ ★ ★ ★
Each time they do this, the experience has been different for Spencer. Distinctly revealing but similarly satisfying on some level Spencer hadn't realized he'd been unsatisfied before.
Each time, afterwards, he and Aaron make love. And those experiences, too, are a revelation. Spencer doesn't know when a stranger's carnage, created by his hand and his lover's, became a process of discovery for him, but at some point he knows that his mouth stopped painting 'You're welcome's across Aaron's skin in the aftermath.
Now, when Spencer unclenches his fist or sets down his knife, when Aaron captures his lips and begins pulling them out of their blood-stained clothes... When Spencer returns Aaron's kiss, his breath is a litany of 'Yes's and 'I'm grateful's and 'Thank you's.
[end.]
Author's Note: I don't know how I feel about this :p I should probably rethink my practice of not using a beta. Nonetheless, let me know what you think. And I promise to get back to writing an actual next part to this series :p Rather than another sort of ambiguously senquenced something like this.