Things I've Been Posting Elsewhere
So I haven't exactly been prolific, lately, but I have written a few drabbles here and there - mostly for comment_fic. Here they are below, some in the form of links to AO3. Hope you find something here to like :p
Past, Present, Future
X-Men: Days of Future Past
future!Logan/past!Charles
Their first kiss is so romantic it's practically cliché.
He's never kissed someone like this. In part, because he's never actually felt like this while kissing someone. That sounds really sappy and sentimental and cliché inside of Logan's own head - and he wants to roll his eyes at himself, just thinking it (he is so glad Charles promised not to use his newly regained powers on Logan without Logan's permission) - but it's true.
Logan usually considers a kiss to be a kind of entrance... and everyone who knows him knows how Logan prefers his entrances: loud, proud, and leaving no doubt in people's minds that Logan comes and goes as he pleases. But this kiss is nothing like that.
At the small of Charles's back, Logan's touch is gentle as he pulls Charles's body close to his. His hand at Charles's chin, tilting Charles's face back just right, is practically reverent. Their lips brush before they kiss; once, twice, again... A slow sweep of skin against skin, until it's Charles that makes the move to take things further.
With a sound in his throat that Logan's pretty sure will stick in his dreams for a long time, Charles comes alive in Logan's arms. He grabs Logan's face, molds his upper body against Logan's, and licks at Logan's lips.
Still, Logan gives nothing to the blood pumping double time through his veins - the rush of feel, need, want, GET that usually leads to violence when it overtakes him - except a low moan of helpless desire.
Logan kisses Charles with a care and a patience that he honestly didn't think he was capable of, until just now.
When he lets Charles up for air, Charles sounds torn as to whether it's a good thing that Logan's discovered these things. "Come on," Charles says, all urgency and passion. "Come on, man. You'll not break me."
Logan almost laughs. He'll never get used to that voice, sounding so less calm and cultured than it will when Charles is an aged man. So much more human, imperfect and rough and insistent. Logan's never been more glad that he'll get fifty years he wouldn't have had before the Sentinels to not get used to it.
"You're the strongest man I know," he says, meaning it. He smiles into Charles's bright blue eyes, drunk on this moment. "I'm not stupid enough to try."
Charles huffs, frustration, surprise and pleasure combining in a short burst of laughter that Logan swallows with the next kiss.
No, Logan's never kissed someone like this - as though he could go on kissing them forever. He's always been too angry, too impulsive, and too jaded for that. He's stood unclothed in front of people and felt less naked than he does kissing Charles.
But then, Logan's battled men twice his size and felt less intimidated than he does by this slender man, held up only by Logan's arms, who looks at him - who has always looked at him (or had, in that future that will no longer be) as though Logan is more than Logan can honestly believe himself to be.
Logan continues leading them to the sofa near the fireplace, and instead of depositing Charles upon it, he falls back, allowing Charles to land on his chest with their mouths still joined.
Charles laughs again, into their kiss.
Logan runs his fingers through Charles's unruly hair before wrapping some around his fist and using it to hold Charles still, to pull back so he can look up into Charles's face.
When Logan first arrived in 1973, he considered this a face from the past. When he became stuck here - dead, presumably, in the now dead future he came from - this face became his present.
Charles and Logan's first kiss tonight was their first ever, and - if Logan gets his way - it will be the first of countless many.
'I'm not him, you know,' Charles said, as they neared the end of the dance they've been doing around one another basically since Logan got here - and the beginning of whatever all this turns out to be. 'Your professor. I'm not him. Not sure I ever will be, this time around. So if this is about him...'
'It's not,' Logan assured Charles.
Charles lifts himself up with his arms on the back of the sofa when Logan continues to stare at him.
"What're you looking at?" he asks, smiling but brows furrowed, bemused.
'My future,' Logan thinks, and then considers getting one of those helmets Erik used to wear to keep Charles out of his head. Just for makeout sessions with Charles, which apparently have the power to turn Logan into a thirteen-year-old girl.
"Your mouth," Logan says aloud. He brings the thumb of his free hand up to the body part in question and rubs Charles's swollen bottom lip.
Desire does wonderful things to Charles's eyes when drawn out long enough, Logan's learning. 'Wonderful, dirty things,' he thinks, his mind at last sounding more like itself.
But his hands are still gentle on Charles's skin, even when Charles chases Logan's thumb across his lip with his tongue.
"Yeah? You seem to like it quite a lot of a sudden."
"Oh, it's not sudden," Logan says. Then stows the touchy-feely urges that he's given free reign over his body up until now, and lets himself remember how badly he's been wanting this man and how long it feels like he's been waiting to know it. "I just feel like I should apologize to it, is all."
Charles quirks a brow at him. "What for?" he asks, playing along.
"For giving it a false sense of security," Logan says. He smiles at Charles as he had earlier, but with far more teeth. "I'm about to be a lot less nice to it."
Charles looks pretty damned okay with that, actually.
"Apology accepted," Charles said. "And now how about we give you something to be sorry for, eh?"
Their second kiss is like the first kiss's violent, maladjusted cousin.
But just as perfect.
[end.]
The Passion Of Great Souls (WIP)
Grimm
Nick Burkhardt/Sean Renard
Sean's been cursed and only a certain kind of grimm can save him. But where to find such a grimm? (Written for a prompt on grimm_kink.
(The Passion Of Great Souls)
Not In The Stars, But In Ourselves
Grimm
Nick Burkhardt/Sean Renard
Nick confronts his captain in the episode 'Face Off', as a grimm and as a scorned lover. (An AU remix of the series in which Nick and the captain were involved when the show started.)
(Not In The Stars, But In Ourselves)
A More Profound Bond
Supernatural
Dean Winchester/Castiel
If Ruby had been the angel and Castiel the demon...
(A More Profound Bond)
Quantum Leap
Chuck
Chuck Bartowski/Bryce Larkin
Chuck knows three things: he isn't in Burbank, California, anymore; Bryce isn't really an accountant... and Chuck is going to die.
AO3
It's a crazy explanation - but Chuck comes to it pretty quickly.
He's tied to a chair. There are men waving guns at him, speaking in a language he can't understand and calling him 'Agent Larkin.' Chuck can see a reflection in the cracked mirror hanging on the dingy 'no tell' motel room wall behind one of his captors, only it isn't his reflection that he sees. Chuck has swapped bodies with his one-time friend and secret crush (and current nemesis) Bryce Larkin.
This tells Chuck exactly three things:
He isn't in Burbank, California, anymore; Bryce isn't really an accountant...
And Chuck is going to die.
Chuck especially knows that last thing.
Except he doesn't die. He is, apparently, so very not Bryce Larkin - even wearing Bryce's actual face - that the bad guys look almost embarrassed as they let him go. (Chuck blames the begging and the somewhat girlish screams.)
They let Chuck go and then hang around outside his motel room, "watching his movements", or whatever, but Chuck hardly even cares about that.
He's too busy freaking out because he's swapped bodies with Bryce Larkin. And then he's busy scouring the motel room, like he's back at Stanford in the middle of a game of foam darts in the library, looking for Bryce's secret stash. And then he's busy freaking out again because he's just found Bryce's glock, his passports (plural), and a lot of knives.
Chuck has seen enough Quantum Leap to know that these things generally happen because he has a job to do. Some mission to complete, as Bryce, that is important to either him or Bryce or the both of them (maybe even the world). But what kind of job could Chuck possibly complete that requires guns, knives, and Bryce's face?
Chuck decides to do the only thing he's really equipt to do, under the circumstances.
Go home.
He uses the cash he finds in Bryce's wallet, and the least shady-looking passport, to book a train ride to a more touristy part of Europe, and doesn't stop moving until he thinks he's lost the guys who tied him to the chair he woke up in.
Then he makes a collect call to the apartment in Echo Park - twice - before he realizes that he can explain his situation to neither his sister nor her boyfriend with a stranger's voice. Couldn't - even if they accepted the charges.
Before he leaves the payphone, however, Chuck gets a call himself.
Bryce doesn't wait for Chuck to say anything. As soon as he lifts the receiver off of its hook, Chuck hears his own voice over the tinny connection of the phone line, saying, "Who are you and how did you get this number?"
He's never heard himself sound so dangerous.
In fact, Chuck is mostly silent after he hears - presumably - Bryce speak because he's impressed that ten words can threaten so explicitly without the use of any variation on the words 'murder', 'unrecognizable' or 'entire family.'
Not that Chuck has time to get wordy, because next another group of bad guys is showing up on the scene - shouting at Chuck (or, technically, Bryce) in another unfamiliar language, and the phone receiver gets shot right out of Chuck's hand.
So that's how Chuck ends up making the transatlantic trip home dependent solely upon his own resources and what Bryce had on him when Chuck got his body. All in all, the body swap turns out to be the least exciting element of the whole ordeal.
At least, if you define "exciting" by the number of car crashes, assassination attempts, and explosions Chuck gets caught up in on the way back to America.
Being literally inside of Bryce's body is an "exciting" of a very different kind.
Chuck isn't (usually) a pervert, so he does try to keep his hands - and even his eyes - to himself.
He gives in, eventually, of course. He has to shower, after all... And (more often than Chuck is, frankly, comfortable with) check to make sure that he doesn't have a bullet in him, or a knife blade, and is in shock and so therefore unable to feel it.
Chuck doesn't play with himself - with Bryce, technically - in the shower. He jerks off, a time or two, in the dark in bed, because he has to. It's not like Chuck can forget that he is closer to Bryce's body than he's ever been. Chuck is constantly aware that he is responsibile for anything that happens to Bryce's body while Bryce isn't in it. And he has to take the edge off someway, but he thinks (he hopes) that if he does it with as little looking and exploring the different textures and breadths of Bryce's flesh as possible, then the fallout won't be quite so bad when this is all over. (If he comes harder, by Bryce's hand - even when he's the one using it - than he ever has by masturbating before, Chuck chooses not to think of it.)
Mostly he thinks about what all of this means to his relationship with Bryce. Will they make up after this and be friends again? Do spies even have friends? (Or assassins or whatever Bryce is that he travels around the planet pissing people off in foreign languages... )
Maybe they never stopped being friends. Maybe there was more to what happened between them in college than Bryce could tell Chuck about. Maybe he can tell Chuck now, and Chuck can forgive him because there's nothing to forgive if it was, like, to save someone's life or something-
Maybe Chuck is grasping at straws, and Bryce would just as soon shoot him as soon as he's got his own body back.
Chuck tells himself that it doesn't matter. What really matters is getting back to his home country, and into his home body, and away from everyone who wants to do bodily harm to 'Agent Larkin' regardless of who the 'bodily' refers to in their situation. It's just difficult to focus with Bryce's face following him, in every reflective surface, after he hasn't seen the guy in years.
Chuck's spent his time since Stanford hating Bryce - or, at least, trying to. It's kind of hard to hate someone who was pretty much perfect right up until he seemed to just spontaneously decide to hate Chuck.
And it's even harder now. Whenever Chuck looks down at his hands, they're Bryce's hands. It's impossible not to remember a time when Chuck used to have to force his eyes away from Bryce's hands - wrapped around a bar in the gym as Bryce practiced some gymnastics routine and Chuck "studied" while he waited for Bryce to finish; slender fingers flying over the buttons of a game controller or the keys of a keyboard. Chuck's eyes are Bryce's eyes, and Chuck can finally look at them for as long as he'd like without having some excuse.
He feels like a freak. In Burbank, Bryce is probably laughing his ass off because Chuck still has mementos of Stanford in the back of his bedroom closet.
Then again, Bryce probably doesn't accidentally have sex with Chuck's girlfriend (namely, because Chuck doesn't have one.) So it's a toss up as to which one of them is the shittier friend.
It takes Chuck three weeks to get back to the States. In that time, he is kidnapped twice... run off the road while in a moving vehicle three times... and shot at five times.
He's been drugged and woken up with bed with Bryce's spy partner... Contacted by (and then threatened when he ignored) Bryce's bosses.
Chuck puts down his continued survival to the fact that evading spies and criminals isn't all that different from this silly variation of hide-and-seek that his dad taught him when he and Ellie were kids.
Chuck feels ridiculous when he realizes that he's making decisions based on the rules of a childhood game, but it works, so he rolls with it. Right when he feels like he might be stuck being Bryce Larkin forever, Chuck finds himself in Burbank, California, at last.
He visits Morgan first. Morgan was as big a fan of Dr. Beckett as Chuck was, so if Chuck can convince just one person that the him who looks like him isn't him, it's Morgan. Chuck knows things about Morgan that no one else will ever know, so he can prove himself through a simple game of twenty questions. And, honestly, Chuck just kind of needs for Morgan to see him like this before he and Bryce figure out how to fix it.
("Dude. We've got to hit some clubs before-"
"No."
"Come on! Chuck, chicks'll be falling all over us!"
"This is Bryce's body, Morgan, not his car. We're not using it to pick up girls!")
Next, Chuck enters his own bedroom through the Morgan door.
This is not the proper way to approach a spy in the middle of the night, but Chuck is hoping that Bryce won't shoot first when it's his own face he sees sneaking into Chuck's bedroom.
Bryce tackles him before he clears the window sill.
"It's me! Bryce! It's me!" Chuck screams.
He screams it in Klingon - and when Bryce throws Chuck onto his back, he lands in a patch of moon and streetlight so Bryce can clearly see his own face staring up at him - but still, Bryce glares down at Chuck, forearm pressed to Chuck's throat, and says, "He could have told you how to say that."
Chuck gets it. He does. He's a big science fiction geek. He wakes up halfway across the world, wearing someone else's face, and he thinks Like Father Like Son - Freaky Friday - the whole late-night tv line-up.
Bryce is a spy. There's no telling what's going on in his (borrowed) head.
All Chuck can do is tell the truth.
"Man, I have done everything just to get here in one piece! Do you know what it's like being you?! I've been shot at! I was almost blown up! I've been wearing these clothes since Amsterdam."
The problem is, once Chuck starts, he can't make himself stop. All of the craziness of the past three weeks just overwhelms him... and he almost forgets that there's a paranoid bodysnatcher who's been trained to kill and already ruined his life once looming over him as he speaks.
"First, your buddies in Uzbekizan tried to kill me... I didn't even know there is a Uzbekizan! Then there were these guys in Belize- Then your bosses tried to kill me, too! And your girlfriend... partner... whatever drugged me, slept with me, and then tried to kill me!"
Bryce blinks.
Having confessed to having slept with Sarah doesn't lessen Chuck's anxiety, but even that doesn't turn the faucet off.
"Sorry about that, by the way... But seriously! And now you're going to kill me? After all of that? After I forgave you, sort of, for getting me kicked out of Stanford and sleeping with Jill... You weren't even drugged first! I mean, not that I know that there was some kind of top-secret, important reason you had to ruin my life. But I thought-"
Bryce kissing him shuts Chuck up like nothing else could.
It's one of the weirdest sensations Chuck will ever have. The feeling of being kissed by himself.
And also not feeling like it's him at all. It's totally Bryce who just captures Chuck's mouth and sucks it quiet. It's Bryce who pulls back and grins at Chuck after.
"You slept with Sarah?" Bryce asks. Chuck doesn't bother to feel insulted that he sounds so amused.
He's a little preoccupied by the revealation that Bryce has apparently thought about kissing Chuck before too.
"She thought I was you... At first. Then she tried to stab me-"
"You're lucky she didn't. Chuck... How the hell did you make it this far. I thought you-" Bryce swallows.
Maybe Bryce has wanted this reunion every bit as much as Chuck has... or maybe being Chuck has played with Bryce's head as much as being Bryce has messed with Chuck's. Whichever, Bryce looks less cool and more uncertain, in this moment in the moonlight, than Chuck's ever seen before.
Chuck's sure he should probably pay that fact a little more attention, but he's still hung up on-
"Did you just kiss me?"
Bryce stares at him.
Then he grins.
What he says shouldn't make any kind of sense, but of course - to Chuck - it totally does.
"I had to shower sometime, right?"
[end.]
Past, Present, Future
X-Men: Days of Future Past
future!Logan/past!Charles
Their first kiss is so romantic it's practically cliché.
He's never kissed someone like this. In part, because he's never actually felt like this while kissing someone. That sounds really sappy and sentimental and cliché inside of Logan's own head - and he wants to roll his eyes at himself, just thinking it (he is so glad Charles promised not to use his newly regained powers on Logan without Logan's permission) - but it's true.
Logan usually considers a kiss to be a kind of entrance... and everyone who knows him knows how Logan prefers his entrances: loud, proud, and leaving no doubt in people's minds that Logan comes and goes as he pleases. But this kiss is nothing like that.
At the small of Charles's back, Logan's touch is gentle as he pulls Charles's body close to his. His hand at Charles's chin, tilting Charles's face back just right, is practically reverent. Their lips brush before they kiss; once, twice, again... A slow sweep of skin against skin, until it's Charles that makes the move to take things further.
With a sound in his throat that Logan's pretty sure will stick in his dreams for a long time, Charles comes alive in Logan's arms. He grabs Logan's face, molds his upper body against Logan's, and licks at Logan's lips.
Still, Logan gives nothing to the blood pumping double time through his veins - the rush of feel, need, want, GET that usually leads to violence when it overtakes him - except a low moan of helpless desire.
Logan kisses Charles with a care and a patience that he honestly didn't think he was capable of, until just now.
When he lets Charles up for air, Charles sounds torn as to whether it's a good thing that Logan's discovered these things. "Come on," Charles says, all urgency and passion. "Come on, man. You'll not break me."
Logan almost laughs. He'll never get used to that voice, sounding so less calm and cultured than it will when Charles is an aged man. So much more human, imperfect and rough and insistent. Logan's never been more glad that he'll get fifty years he wouldn't have had before the Sentinels to not get used to it.
"You're the strongest man I know," he says, meaning it. He smiles into Charles's bright blue eyes, drunk on this moment. "I'm not stupid enough to try."
Charles huffs, frustration, surprise and pleasure combining in a short burst of laughter that Logan swallows with the next kiss.
No, Logan's never kissed someone like this - as though he could go on kissing them forever. He's always been too angry, too impulsive, and too jaded for that. He's stood unclothed in front of people and felt less naked than he does kissing Charles.
But then, Logan's battled men twice his size and felt less intimidated than he does by this slender man, held up only by Logan's arms, who looks at him - who has always looked at him (or had, in that future that will no longer be) as though Logan is more than Logan can honestly believe himself to be.
Logan continues leading them to the sofa near the fireplace, and instead of depositing Charles upon it, he falls back, allowing Charles to land on his chest with their mouths still joined.
Charles laughs again, into their kiss.
Logan runs his fingers through Charles's unruly hair before wrapping some around his fist and using it to hold Charles still, to pull back so he can look up into Charles's face.
When Logan first arrived in 1973, he considered this a face from the past. When he became stuck here - dead, presumably, in the now dead future he came from - this face became his present.
Charles and Logan's first kiss tonight was their first ever, and - if Logan gets his way - it will be the first of countless many.
'I'm not him, you know,' Charles said, as they neared the end of the dance they've been doing around one another basically since Logan got here - and the beginning of whatever all this turns out to be. 'Your professor. I'm not him. Not sure I ever will be, this time around. So if this is about him...'
'It's not,' Logan assured Charles.
Charles lifts himself up with his arms on the back of the sofa when Logan continues to stare at him.
"What're you looking at?" he asks, smiling but brows furrowed, bemused.
'My future,' Logan thinks, and then considers getting one of those helmets Erik used to wear to keep Charles out of his head. Just for makeout sessions with Charles, which apparently have the power to turn Logan into a thirteen-year-old girl.
"Your mouth," Logan says aloud. He brings the thumb of his free hand up to the body part in question and rubs Charles's swollen bottom lip.
Desire does wonderful things to Charles's eyes when drawn out long enough, Logan's learning. 'Wonderful, dirty things,' he thinks, his mind at last sounding more like itself.
But his hands are still gentle on Charles's skin, even when Charles chases Logan's thumb across his lip with his tongue.
"Yeah? You seem to like it quite a lot of a sudden."
"Oh, it's not sudden," Logan says. Then stows the touchy-feely urges that he's given free reign over his body up until now, and lets himself remember how badly he's been wanting this man and how long it feels like he's been waiting to know it. "I just feel like I should apologize to it, is all."
Charles quirks a brow at him. "What for?" he asks, playing along.
"For giving it a false sense of security," Logan says. He smiles at Charles as he had earlier, but with far more teeth. "I'm about to be a lot less nice to it."
Charles looks pretty damned okay with that, actually.
"Apology accepted," Charles said. "And now how about we give you something to be sorry for, eh?"
Their second kiss is like the first kiss's violent, maladjusted cousin.
But just as perfect.
[end.]
The Passion Of Great Souls (WIP)
Grimm
Nick Burkhardt/Sean Renard
Sean's been cursed and only a certain kind of grimm can save him. But where to find such a grimm? (Written for a prompt on grimm_kink.
(The Passion Of Great Souls)
Not In The Stars, But In Ourselves
Grimm
Nick Burkhardt/Sean Renard
Nick confronts his captain in the episode 'Face Off', as a grimm and as a scorned lover. (An AU remix of the series in which Nick and the captain were involved when the show started.)
(Not In The Stars, But In Ourselves)
A More Profound Bond
Supernatural
Dean Winchester/Castiel
If Ruby had been the angel and Castiel the demon...
(A More Profound Bond)
Quantum Leap
Chuck
Chuck Bartowski/Bryce Larkin
Chuck knows three things: he isn't in Burbank, California, anymore; Bryce isn't really an accountant... and Chuck is going to die.
AO3
It's a crazy explanation - but Chuck comes to it pretty quickly.
He's tied to a chair. There are men waving guns at him, speaking in a language he can't understand and calling him 'Agent Larkin.' Chuck can see a reflection in the cracked mirror hanging on the dingy 'no tell' motel room wall behind one of his captors, only it isn't his reflection that he sees. Chuck has swapped bodies with his one-time friend and secret crush (and current nemesis) Bryce Larkin.
This tells Chuck exactly three things:
He isn't in Burbank, California, anymore; Bryce isn't really an accountant...
And Chuck is going to die.
Chuck especially knows that last thing.
Except he doesn't die. He is, apparently, so very not Bryce Larkin - even wearing Bryce's actual face - that the bad guys look almost embarrassed as they let him go. (Chuck blames the begging and the somewhat girlish screams.)
They let Chuck go and then hang around outside his motel room, "watching his movements", or whatever, but Chuck hardly even cares about that.
He's too busy freaking out because he's swapped bodies with Bryce Larkin. And then he's busy scouring the motel room, like he's back at Stanford in the middle of a game of foam darts in the library, looking for Bryce's secret stash. And then he's busy freaking out again because he's just found Bryce's glock, his passports (plural), and a lot of knives.
Chuck has seen enough Quantum Leap to know that these things generally happen because he has a job to do. Some mission to complete, as Bryce, that is important to either him or Bryce or the both of them (maybe even the world). But what kind of job could Chuck possibly complete that requires guns, knives, and Bryce's face?
Chuck decides to do the only thing he's really equipt to do, under the circumstances.
Go home.
He uses the cash he finds in Bryce's wallet, and the least shady-looking passport, to book a train ride to a more touristy part of Europe, and doesn't stop moving until he thinks he's lost the guys who tied him to the chair he woke up in.
Then he makes a collect call to the apartment in Echo Park - twice - before he realizes that he can explain his situation to neither his sister nor her boyfriend with a stranger's voice. Couldn't - even if they accepted the charges.
Before he leaves the payphone, however, Chuck gets a call himself.
Bryce doesn't wait for Chuck to say anything. As soon as he lifts the receiver off of its hook, Chuck hears his own voice over the tinny connection of the phone line, saying, "Who are you and how did you get this number?"
He's never heard himself sound so dangerous.
In fact, Chuck is mostly silent after he hears - presumably - Bryce speak because he's impressed that ten words can threaten so explicitly without the use of any variation on the words 'murder', 'unrecognizable' or 'entire family.'
Not that Chuck has time to get wordy, because next another group of bad guys is showing up on the scene - shouting at Chuck (or, technically, Bryce) in another unfamiliar language, and the phone receiver gets shot right out of Chuck's hand.
So that's how Chuck ends up making the transatlantic trip home dependent solely upon his own resources and what Bryce had on him when Chuck got his body. All in all, the body swap turns out to be the least exciting element of the whole ordeal.
At least, if you define "exciting" by the number of car crashes, assassination attempts, and explosions Chuck gets caught up in on the way back to America.
Being literally inside of Bryce's body is an "exciting" of a very different kind.
Chuck isn't (usually) a pervert, so he does try to keep his hands - and even his eyes - to himself.
He gives in, eventually, of course. He has to shower, after all... And (more often than Chuck is, frankly, comfortable with) check to make sure that he doesn't have a bullet in him, or a knife blade, and is in shock and so therefore unable to feel it.
Chuck doesn't play with himself - with Bryce, technically - in the shower. He jerks off, a time or two, in the dark in bed, because he has to. It's not like Chuck can forget that he is closer to Bryce's body than he's ever been. Chuck is constantly aware that he is responsibile for anything that happens to Bryce's body while Bryce isn't in it. And he has to take the edge off someway, but he thinks (he hopes) that if he does it with as little looking and exploring the different textures and breadths of Bryce's flesh as possible, then the fallout won't be quite so bad when this is all over. (If he comes harder, by Bryce's hand - even when he's the one using it - than he ever has by masturbating before, Chuck chooses not to think of it.)
Mostly he thinks about what all of this means to his relationship with Bryce. Will they make up after this and be friends again? Do spies even have friends? (Or assassins or whatever Bryce is that he travels around the planet pissing people off in foreign languages... )
Maybe they never stopped being friends. Maybe there was more to what happened between them in college than Bryce could tell Chuck about. Maybe he can tell Chuck now, and Chuck can forgive him because there's nothing to forgive if it was, like, to save someone's life or something-
Maybe Chuck is grasping at straws, and Bryce would just as soon shoot him as soon as he's got his own body back.
Chuck tells himself that it doesn't matter. What really matters is getting back to his home country, and into his home body, and away from everyone who wants to do bodily harm to 'Agent Larkin' regardless of who the 'bodily' refers to in their situation. It's just difficult to focus with Bryce's face following him, in every reflective surface, after he hasn't seen the guy in years.
Chuck's spent his time since Stanford hating Bryce - or, at least, trying to. It's kind of hard to hate someone who was pretty much perfect right up until he seemed to just spontaneously decide to hate Chuck.
And it's even harder now. Whenever Chuck looks down at his hands, they're Bryce's hands. It's impossible not to remember a time when Chuck used to have to force his eyes away from Bryce's hands - wrapped around a bar in the gym as Bryce practiced some gymnastics routine and Chuck "studied" while he waited for Bryce to finish; slender fingers flying over the buttons of a game controller or the keys of a keyboard. Chuck's eyes are Bryce's eyes, and Chuck can finally look at them for as long as he'd like without having some excuse.
He feels like a freak. In Burbank, Bryce is probably laughing his ass off because Chuck still has mementos of Stanford in the back of his bedroom closet.
Then again, Bryce probably doesn't accidentally have sex with Chuck's girlfriend (namely, because Chuck doesn't have one.) So it's a toss up as to which one of them is the shittier friend.
It takes Chuck three weeks to get back to the States. In that time, he is kidnapped twice... run off the road while in a moving vehicle three times... and shot at five times.
He's been drugged and woken up with bed with Bryce's spy partner... Contacted by (and then threatened when he ignored) Bryce's bosses.
Chuck puts down his continued survival to the fact that evading spies and criminals isn't all that different from this silly variation of hide-and-seek that his dad taught him when he and Ellie were kids.
Chuck feels ridiculous when he realizes that he's making decisions based on the rules of a childhood game, but it works, so he rolls with it. Right when he feels like he might be stuck being Bryce Larkin forever, Chuck finds himself in Burbank, California, at last.
He visits Morgan first. Morgan was as big a fan of Dr. Beckett as Chuck was, so if Chuck can convince just one person that the him who looks like him isn't him, it's Morgan. Chuck knows things about Morgan that no one else will ever know, so he can prove himself through a simple game of twenty questions. And, honestly, Chuck just kind of needs for Morgan to see him like this before he and Bryce figure out how to fix it.
("Dude. We've got to hit some clubs before-"
"No."
"Come on! Chuck, chicks'll be falling all over us!"
"This is Bryce's body, Morgan, not his car. We're not using it to pick up girls!")
Next, Chuck enters his own bedroom through the Morgan door.
This is not the proper way to approach a spy in the middle of the night, but Chuck is hoping that Bryce won't shoot first when it's his own face he sees sneaking into Chuck's bedroom.
Bryce tackles him before he clears the window sill.
"It's me! Bryce! It's me!" Chuck screams.
He screams it in Klingon - and when Bryce throws Chuck onto his back, he lands in a patch of moon and streetlight so Bryce can clearly see his own face staring up at him - but still, Bryce glares down at Chuck, forearm pressed to Chuck's throat, and says, "He could have told you how to say that."
Chuck gets it. He does. He's a big science fiction geek. He wakes up halfway across the world, wearing someone else's face, and he thinks Like Father Like Son - Freaky Friday - the whole late-night tv line-up.
Bryce is a spy. There's no telling what's going on in his (borrowed) head.
All Chuck can do is tell the truth.
"Man, I have done everything just to get here in one piece! Do you know what it's like being you?! I've been shot at! I was almost blown up! I've been wearing these clothes since Amsterdam."
The problem is, once Chuck starts, he can't make himself stop. All of the craziness of the past three weeks just overwhelms him... and he almost forgets that there's a paranoid bodysnatcher who's been trained to kill and already ruined his life once looming over him as he speaks.
"First, your buddies in Uzbekizan tried to kill me... I didn't even know there is a Uzbekizan! Then there were these guys in Belize- Then your bosses tried to kill me, too! And your girlfriend... partner... whatever drugged me, slept with me, and then tried to kill me!"
Bryce blinks.
Having confessed to having slept with Sarah doesn't lessen Chuck's anxiety, but even that doesn't turn the faucet off.
"Sorry about that, by the way... But seriously! And now you're going to kill me? After all of that? After I forgave you, sort of, for getting me kicked out of Stanford and sleeping with Jill... You weren't even drugged first! I mean, not that I know that there was some kind of top-secret, important reason you had to ruin my life. But I thought-"
Bryce kissing him shuts Chuck up like nothing else could.
It's one of the weirdest sensations Chuck will ever have. The feeling of being kissed by himself.
And also not feeling like it's him at all. It's totally Bryce who just captures Chuck's mouth and sucks it quiet. It's Bryce who pulls back and grins at Chuck after.
"You slept with Sarah?" Bryce asks. Chuck doesn't bother to feel insulted that he sounds so amused.
He's a little preoccupied by the revealation that Bryce has apparently thought about kissing Chuck before too.
"She thought I was you... At first. Then she tried to stab me-"
"You're lucky she didn't. Chuck... How the hell did you make it this far. I thought you-" Bryce swallows.
Maybe Bryce has wanted this reunion every bit as much as Chuck has... or maybe being Chuck has played with Bryce's head as much as being Bryce has messed with Chuck's. Whichever, Bryce looks less cool and more uncertain, in this moment in the moonlight, than Chuck's ever seen before.
Chuck's sure he should probably pay that fact a little more attention, but he's still hung up on-
"Did you just kiss me?"
Bryce stares at him.
Then he grins.
What he says shouldn't make any kind of sense, but of course - to Chuck - it totally does.
"I had to shower sometime, right?"
[end.]