Fic: Wolves' Eyes (Elena/Tseng, not worksafe)
I'm feeling a bit of get-back-on-the-horse-that-threw-you nervousness about posting this (it's probably no surprise to people on my flist that I've been having writing troubles lately), but... well, I just have to get back on that horse. And how better than with an Elena/Tseng fic, complete with smut?
Elena/Tseng was requested as a holiday present by several of you. This one in particular is dedicated to lindensphinx, as a thank you for sending me pants! But I hope all of you who were looking forward to Elena/Tseng also enjoy it.
Wolves' Eyes
In the alley’s consuming darkness, Elena faded away, visible only as a shimmer of light above a patch of deeper black.
Final Fantasy VII. Elena/Tseng, plus other Turks. 6400 words.
Not worksafe/NC-17 for explicit (and mildly kinky) sex. Implied violence. Advent Children-compliant, but not spoilery for AC.
In the alley’s consuming darkness, Elena faded away, visible only as a shimmer of light above a patch of deeper black. Even knowing she was there, Tseng could barely see her. Shadow. Light. Shadow.
“Ready,” Reno’s voice crackled in his earpiece.
“Target coming down Thirty-Ninth,” Rude’s voice followed. Tseng let his eyelids slide half-shut, visualizing their relative positions: Reno in the car at the intersection of Thirty-Ninth Street and Bluestone Avenue, Rude in the lookout Perch on the Amini Building at that same intersection: the two of them together his closing net. And Elena and him, in this alley that forked like a snake’s tongue off of Thirty-Ninth south of the intersection, the traps’s steel jaws, straining to snap shut.
A dozen paces away, he could see her face, pale in the darkness, her eyes unreadable as bruises, pockets of watchful shadow. She hated waiting even more than Reno did. In fairness, Reno could be quite patient; Elena never could be. But she did, now, for the sake of the job, keep herself still and silent. Nonetheless he could sense more than see her every muscle tensed beneath the fabric of her suit, could sense the way she strained against the invisible leash that he held.
“Target approaching the intersection,” Rude said.
“Now?” Reno asked.
Elena hissed between her teeth, softly, but more like the whistling hiss of a weasel or a badger than like a snake.
“Move,” Tseng confirmed.
One of the frustrations one had to overcome in serving as a leader of Turks was this: you could never keep track of everything -- and you shouldn’t try. In the middle of a job you had to trust your agents. Turks were selected, always, because they had a potent blend of intelligence, flexibility, resourcefulness and amorality -- everything else they needed to know could be taught, but those four things were non-negotiable -- and they worked best within loose constraints, when they were allowed to use those skills. Guided too closely, watched too narrowly, their advantages faded away. If you wanted orders followed, you called in the troops. If you wanted Turks, you needed to let them be Turks.
Still, it was difficult, as squad leader, to hear the squealing of tires and the sound of gunshots and not know for certain what was happening. He listened over his earpiece to the sound of Rude’s labored breathing and the soft grunts of blows exchanged. He listened for the sound of Reno’s car revving, and the sound of footsteps.
As he listened Elena sidled up until she was even with him. She stopped, hesitated, drawn tight and dangerous as garotte wire. She didn’t say anything, which was a novelty, but also a sign that she was learning. (Her tendency to chatter when nervous was one of the first things he had determined to train out of her.) She radiated eagerness, bristled with it. He could see the pale skin of her ungloved hand hovering over the butt of her gun without -- quite -- touching it.
Gunshots. Running feet: four pairs -- three pairs; that would be Rude peeling off -- two pairs, as Reno let them give in to the false sense of safety, let them convince themselves they were heading toward respite, let them drive themselves into the mouth of the trap.
“Now,” Elena breathed, sounding -- hungry, ecstatic. Tseng said nothing, and let his silence be his answer.
Two men in all black plunged into the mouth of the alley. Elena strode forward out of the cover of darkness, into the half-light of a post-disaster Midgar night. The clear moonlight turned her hair the color of wolves’ eyes.
She had never quite lost her taste for the theatrical, and perhaps she never would. For all that she claimed to hate the idea, she was a Turk who’d followed Reno’s lead more often than not: reckless, ferocious, pretending carelessness to hide a rigor that tended to the obsessive. It was Rude who could leave well enough alone; it was Reno who fixated. And now it was Elena who fixated, who learned to hone her rabid-weasel tendencies into a genuine weapon. In many ways it was a good thing; Turks who embraced that personality were less likely to crack under pressure than those who pretended to a controlled stoicism that didn’t come naturally to them.
Still, it made him both wince and suppress a smile at the extent of her theatrics, the way she brought her gun up, moonlight bright on the barrel, moonlight bright on her fair skin, moonlight not touching her eyes, dark, dark not like water or stone but like wood, leather, smoke.
(It was really not appropriate for him to notice her as he did, and yet he did not stop, could not bring himself to stop; the world was smaller than it had once been, and yet it had fewer walls. Before the disaster he could not have been her lover; now, in the ruined world, he could not be otherwise.)
“Hello, gentlemen,” she said, and the thieves bristled all over, like angry cats.
Elena wanted to kill them, he could see that -- he could smell it, taste it, rising off her like smoke. She was capable of becoming rabid with the slightest provocation. He wondered whether she had a reason for that, and whether he would ever know that reason.
And she got her wish, as the first thief touched something on his belt and the green flash of materia blazed in the dark. It seared his eyes to weeping, and must have seared Elena’s, too, but she kept them open just as Tseng did and fired, even before the flash resolved itself into a shower of ice crystals, a bone-crack cold.
She fired once, twice, three times, face impassive. He had taught her many things: how to plan, how to strategize, how to be patient, how to be effective, how to hack a terminal, open a lock, fight hand-to-hand. But he had never taught her violence, or rage. He had never had to.
***
“That’s two down,” Reno said. He stretched his legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankle, effortlessly casual. Elena envied him that. Maybe she envied that even more than she did Tseng and Rude’s easy solemnity.
“Two more unaccounted for,” Tseng said, referring to the cryptic message the President had left him on his phone. Sure, she wished she was as unflappable as Rude or Tseng, but she knew she was never going to be as calm as them, so it didn’t hit her quite the same way. But if she could display her lack of gravitas as stylishly as Reno did, well, that would be a different kind of cool all to itself.
“Not quite unaccounted for,” Reno said. “Sources in Edge say they’re hanging around the Market District, renting a room above the greengrocer’s. Across from the old clocktower.”
“We should take care of them now,” she said "before they get a chance to react." Leaping, she knew, to the obvious solution. Let’s go take them out. In truth, there was still a lot of her that was the flailing angry ferret of a Turk she’d been when she first filled in for Reno years before - with enough balls to go after Cloud with minimal backup, but without enough sense to know that, brave or not, that was a really bad idea. She just wasn’t good at waiting for the proper moment. The proper moment always felt like right now, something she knew Tseng was always trying to train her out of. Something she knew Tseng was unlikely to succeed in training her out of.
But Tseng gave her a coolly appraising look (goddamn it, she wished she had as much poise as him; you’d never think to look at him that they had anything beyond a professional relationship, whereas she was sure you could read it written on her skin whenever she was in the same room as him), and then, to her mild surprise, nodded. “We need to move quickly, ideally before they figure out what happened to their allies - and before they find out that we know where they’re holing up. So the question is: who?”
She didn’t, to her credit, launch herself into a round of pick me, pick me. That kind of eagerness might have done well by her back when she was a cadet, but the Turks played it cooler than that. Still - still. She hated waiting around and hearing what was going to happen.
Silence. Then Reno let his arm dangle over the back of his chair, and said, “I think you two. Rude’n’me are better at hand-to-hand work, this seems like more your thing.” Which was as close to a compliment as she was likely to get from Reno. She tried not to beam, and succeeded. More or less.
***
Of course, the desire to be the one to take them out - to get the kill, to finish the job, to have last blood - didn’t quite obviate the way that a stakeout triggered every impatient bone in her body.
At night, the view below the clocktower was mostly dark. The Market District bustled during the day and into the evening, when Edge thronged with people looking to buy onions and cabbage, apples and spices, chicken (whole or plucked and clean), and milk by the quart. (The Market District was something new - before Midgar fell apart, most people bought that kind of thing in huge antiseptic indoor groceries, or at least aboveplate they did, but now it all came in in trucks and got sold from stalls and bodegas and, sometimes, out of the backs of the same trucks.) But at night, the shopkeepers packed up and returned to their own homes, and the streets, without the funding for proper streetlights, fell dark. The only light came from the second-story rooms rented out as apartments, which cast sodium-yellow light out in a haze to the streets below.
Her job was to wait for her targets (six-two man, blonde, thirtysomething; five-eight woman, dark-haired, in her forties) to emerge from the third apartment from the right, and to shoot them where they stood. But until that happened, the crucial part of her job was to wait.
She hated, hated, hated waiting.
One of the things she’d learned over the course of this job was that too long watching the same stretch without change would make your eyes start to play tricks on you. You’d start to think you saw movement when you didn’t, or wonder if maybe you’d drifted off and missed something. Plus there was the simple discomfort of it: there wasn’t much room to move around up there, besides which it was better if she didn’t move around. She was high enough, and the night was dark enough, and the old clocktower obscure enough that people were unlikely to look up and see her. (One of the important lessons a Turk learned was that people didn’t tend to look up. Reno loved to use that to his advantage by dropping down from the ceiling like a fucking spider.) But moving around a lot would more likely attract attention than staying still would.
So she crouched, rifle against her shoulder and her thigh muscles screaming with the strain until she couldn’t bear it and had to shift, sit back on one ankle to stretch one leg out, switch to resting on the other to stretch the other leg out - all without looking away from the street.
Why did I volunteer for this post again?
Because I wanted to be the one to bring their heads back on a plate, that’s why.
And she couldn’t quite regret that, but . . . . Still. Waiting. No thank you.
Five past ten, and she heard feet on the metal scaffolding of stairs behind her, and then the three-knock-then-two-knock-then-three-knock pattern that meant that it was Tseng coming up and that he would prefer if she didn’t shoot him. In the low light, he never seemed to quite materialize out of the darkness - black hair and black suit made it hard to tell where he ended and the night began. Of course, it didn’t help that she had to keep one eye on the street.
“Holding up?” he asked in the low murmur that carried less than a whisper.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I can take the watch,” he said.
Yes, said her screaming leg muscles. And her freezing-cold knuckles. And the part of her that was bored beyond speaking of waiting here. But -
“No," she said. "I don't think we're going about this the right way." She didn't look back to see his reaction, because she was watching the apartment, but she felt him still behind her, considering.
"How so?" he asked.
"The longer we wait, the more likely something will go wrong. Or we'll get tired. We don't have a dozen Turks to take over the post anymore. We have to take some risks."
"And you're the one to take that risk?" Tseng asked. Very calmly. She swallowed.
"Yes," she said, feeling daring. "I'm not good at waiting. But I'm good at this."
“Mm,” he said, "perhaps you're right." She dared a glance back at him, in the darkness, and saw his predator's smile. "Try it your way, then, Elena." He was so hard to read, but she thought he was pleased. She felt the hot frisson of pleasure that she knew wasn't purely professional pride and yet that she couldn't regret --
And he must have known he was distracting her, because he touched her shoulder lightly, her wrist, brought her hand to his mouth. And. Oh. Brief, and yet absolutely impossible to ignore, the fleeting hot pressure of his open-mouthed kiss on the inside of her wrist, where her blood beat - where her blood began to beat faster.
“Take them out,” he murmured.
She didn’t manage an, “I will. Sir,” until Tseng had already vanished down the steps, but she figured it still counted. And then she slipped down the stairs herself, knife ready under one palm and gun ready in the other hand, to do this her way.
***
One gunshot, then another, told Tseng what he needed to know. He didn’t bother to follow up; she was a Turk, if she needed backup she’d call for it, and if she didn’t, it was his responsibility to let her handle it as she chose.
She was smart enough to do this her way, get in and get out, and slip away in the ensuing uproar. She didn’t need trophies, anyway: they all knew she’d managed it. Hanging around the scene of the crime was an amateur move. Letting the news report two deaths, and quietly accepting the credit due you was more Turk style.
Or loudly accepting the credit due you, in Reno’s case, and he seemed, as he so often did, to be leading Elena down the same path. Well. It could have been worse.
Seventh Heaven, and even Reno was smart enough not to say anything overt under Tifa’s watchful eye, but that didn’t stop him from ordering a round of tequila shots for all of them, plus a double for Elena, which he nudged her way. Silent praise. And really, she had earned it, which was why he accepted his shot despite not caring much for tequila.
“Didn’t think you’d last up there,” Reno said.
“Fucker,” Elena said. “You’re the one who suggested I do it.”
“Did not. Just said I didn’t want to. And I didn’t. Got feeling back in your toes yet?”
“Fuck you,” she said, but without heat, and downed her double with a practiced jerk of her head. Licked salt off her lip, and Tseng realized he was watching her mouth, and didn’t try to hide it. She hadn’t noticed yet, although Reno clearly had by the way he was smirking. She hooked the lime off the edge of the shot glass and bit absently down on it, and he watched the white line of her teeth, the way her mouth worked. And thought of her in darkness.
And had a very good idea.
Well, probably a very good idea.
Time would tell.
“It was fucking cold up there,” she said, but the tequila was beginning to show in the flush on her cheeks. And he knew that the celebration was not for her kill - she had killed more than one man before, that was nothing new, she had violence enough to suit anyone - but for something more.
She followed the tequila with a beer, which she nursed very slowly, and he was glad of it. He wanted her in full possession of her faculties, and by the time the night spilled them out into the street, the flush had receded, and her steps were steady. “Elena,” he said, and she turned to look up at him - her eyes were clear and sober and, in the deepening shadows of the street, also very dark. Black with shadows, black with - he smiled a little and watched as she echoed him, smiled back, sharp white teeth and night-dark gaze, and he thought that he would have to be careful not to train all of the impulsiveness out of her, because that would be deeply regrettable.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Come home with me?” he said, and her smile widened, and she touched the back of his hand, fleeting, which meant yes.
***
Tseng always offered her a drink, when he invited her over -- a drink or food, as if he felt obliged to prove that he hadn't just had her over to fuck. She wasn't sure how to tell him that she really was okay with going right to bed, and anyway they usually did talk, albeit afterward. It was just too distracting to do anything else first, with him right there, and she had never... had any patience. Story of her life. There was time to talk and have a glass of wine and listen to music and act like civilized people after she's gotten a taste of his skin, and doing it in the other order seemed like unnecessary frustration.
He usually obliged her. He obliged her tonight, sitting on his wonderful huge bed in his low-lit room as she stood between his knees, kissing her long and wet and slow before drawing back and stroking his thumb over her shoulder.
“Close your eyes,” Tseng said, and she hesitated a moment - looking at him - before she did. But hell, fuck, she regularly trusted him to tell her to move or not move, act or not to act, when her life was on the line - how was this really any different? And she’d be a liar if she pretended that it didn’t turn her on, the tenor of his voice when he was telling her what to do, the silk-smoothness of total control when you were confident of it, when you didn’t doubt for a moment that you’d be obeyed . . . .
His gaze chased up her spine like the brush of a feather, and she shuddered although she didn’t mean to, and knew that he had seen her shudder by the way his eyes narrowed, his pupils flared, black on almost-black and almost indecipherable. If she closed her eyes she wouldn’t be able to see that, would only be able to judge his reactions by his breathing and the infrequent velvet sound of his voice and by the heat of his skin, and, and - fucking hell. Yes.
She closed her eyes, and he made a low, satisfied noise. She felt his hand on her hair, smoothing from the crown of her head down to the curve of her jaw, tracing along the curve of her jaw to her mouth, and she parted her lips - because he’d told her to keep her eyes closed, he hadn’t told her not to move, and anyway she wouldn’t have agreed not to move, not when he was so close. She leaned forward to take his fingertips into her mouth, sucked down his index and middle fingers together. He didn’t speak but she could hear the way his pulse quickened in his sudden inhale, exhale, in the way he slipped his fingers deeper into her mouth so that she could lick his fingertips, slide smoothly down to the last knuckle.
His other hand: light touch on the outer curve of her ear, light touch on her cheekbone, and then something soft and heavy settling over her eyes. She blinked them open on instinct, could see nothing but darkness. Blindfold.
He slid his wet fingers out of her mouth and said, softly, “Any objections?”
Fucker. “No,” she said, and cursed her own unsteady voice, cursed the fact that he knew perfectly well she wasn’t going to object at this point. She reached out, trying to find him, to get a hand to his skin so that she could use that to read him instead of relying only on his infrequent panther-smooth words. He met her hand with his own, let her fingers twine through his - she could feel the dampness of her own saliva, shivered.
“Good,” he said, fingers still wound through hers, and with his other hand began to unbutton her shirt. It would’ve been easier on him if he’d let her undress before he blindfolded her, but . . . maybe he didn’t want it easy on either of them. The thought made her tingle from her bared throat down her belly to between her legs, and she pressed her thighs together to quell the surge of arousal - and then had to spread them again as he unbuttoned her pants (her shirt still hanging open, her bra still in place) and coaxed her to arch her hips and let him push them down farther. Pants, underwear - she wondered what she looked like, bare from the waist down, nearly bare from throat to belly. She had to think about it, and then realized that she was wearing her least sexy bra - well, of course, something that she could run in it without any discomfort. When her pants were off, Tseng leaned back - she could tell from the retreat of his body heat, and prevented herself, just barely, from leaning after him to follow that warmth.
“Good,” he repeated, but she could feel the heat in his tone, now, the shivery velvet touch of approval, of - no, not approval, admiration. He liked the way she looked like this. (She tried to imagine it - black blindfold, white shirt, white bra, nothing else but her own fair skin and hair - but it was so much more compelling to think about how he looked, his hair loose and his clothes still on. Had he taken his jacket off? Was he beginning to flush? That was always the first thing to go about his composure, the color that crept up his throat . . . .)
“What now?” she asked, because the silence of his regard was becoming uncomfortable. She was trying hard not to fidget, her fingers curled in the bed’s soft coverlet.
“I had planned to fuck you at this point,” he said, smooth as dark glass, and she caught her breath and shuddered, pressed her thighs together again, rubbed them, felt the way she was slick and swimming and ready, immediately ready at his words. Yes. “But,” he continued, “actually, now that I have you like this, I find that I’m not nearly done watching you.”
“So?” she said, with more bravado than she meant. His fingers skated up her back and then sprung her bra, so suddenly she yelped and jerked her head back. Back against his shoulder - she had been too distracted by his words to notice that he’d crept up behind her on the bed.
“Here,” he said, sliding off her shirt, her bra, coaxing her back until she was sitting half on his thighs, half on the bed, and the awkwardness of moving like that when she couldn't see left her with her legs canted wide apart. She moved to close them again, but he kept one hand high on her thigh, kept her there. “All right?”
“Yeah,” she said. What she didn’t say was, If you don’t touch me I think I’m going to bite you.
Instead of putting his fingers between her legs where she wanted them, though, he skated the palm of his hand up her hip, her belly, to cup one of her breasts. His thumb circled her nipple. “Will you touch yourself for me?”
It was a question, which surprised her. She had expected a command. The fact that it was a question meant that she had to drag her thoughts together, her head rocking back against his shoulder - her body rocking back against him until she felt his erection through his clothes, rubbing against the small of her back. Oh god. She wanted to say no, she wanted to insist that he do what he had planned to do and fuck her, hard and solid and good, as they'd done before, the way she thought about more often than was wise.
But. But maybe he was right about patience. Maybe it would be better if she waited - maybe it would be better if she decided to wait, teased them both, made them both wait . . . .
(Maybe it would be better if she didn’t hold off just because he ordered her to, maybe it would be better if she held off because he asked her to, and she agreed, maybe it would be better if it was a conspiracy of two.)
“Okay,” she said. “I, uh - what do you want to see?”
“Touch yourself,” he said, “as you would do if you were alone. As if you wanted to bring yourself to orgasm with no one else to help you. Let me see what that’s like for you.”
She drew a shaky breath, let her head fall back on his shoulder again and stared blankly at the inside of the blindfold. She was far more aware of the cadences of his voice like this, of the slightest hitches in the rise and fall of his breathing, of his heartbeat drumming against her back. “It’s going to be fast if I do it the way I do by myself.” She rarely had patience of her own, patience was her hardest lesson of being a Turk, patience didn’t come naturally to her.
“I won’t complain about fast,” he said, and he - rocked his hips, subtly but enough that she could feel a really insistent hardness against her back. She couldn’t help making a noise, but the thing that surprised her was that he matched the noise with a very small sound of his own - a very small indrawn-breath sound, but still, a sound. He caught her right hand (what the hell? didn’t he want her to - ) and then brought it to his lips, sucked her fingers into the strong heat of his mouth as she had done to him, stroked them with his tongue, wet them - as if she needed the help, as if she wasn’t already slick-swollen and screaming for touch. (Her own touch, his touch, didn’t matter, whatever the hell, just a hand on her.) When he let her fingers go, she reached for herself, but he stopped her with a gentle clasp around her wrist. “Do you think of me when you masturbate?” he asked.
The word ‘masturbate’ should have been embarrassing, even clinical, but she made a hard frustrated noise and jerked her hand in his grip. “Sometimes,” she said. “Let me - “
He let go of her hand very suddenly, and said, “Then touch yourself as you would do when you’re thinking of me.”
As if she could do anything else with him behind her, his chest against her back and the smell of him potent in the air. Skin and soap and shampoo, clean hair, faint spicy smell of aftershave or maybe deodorant, and underlying it faint but undeniable the musk of arousal. Or maybe that was herself . . . .
She slid her hand, still wet from his mouth, down her belly. (She almost expected him to take her wrist again, torment her more, but he didn’t; just breathed hard in her ear, so that she knew he was leaning forward over her shoulder, watching. She could feel his body heat, tangible as a touch even where he wasn’t actually touching her.)
She slid her finger down over her clit and she couldn’t help it, her whole body jerked at her own touch finally, finally where she wanted it, and made a noise - not quite a moan, just a little sound on the edge of the sharpness of her breathing. She felt him tense up behind her, muscles in his bicep where he held her still against him, muscles in his stomach and his chest, and though he didn’t make any noise she could hear his breathing get faster. She was getting wet enough that she had to rub hard to get enough pressure; if she’d felt like teasing she might’ve used that lack of friction to her own advantage, but she didn’t feel like teasing, felt like fast, like she’d said to him. So she rubbed her fingertip against herself firm and steady and felt the slow crawl of heavy heat gathering in her belly, lower, the way her cunt felt sore and heavy, the way her body buzzed. Slid her fingers down because she liked the feeling of something inside her when she came. (The truth was that when she was at home touching herself and thinking about him she usually used one of a variety of toys.) Still, she focused on her clit, focused on rubbing it with the heel of her hand, the bony base of her thumb, as she slipped her index and middle fingers up into herself (and thought about his mouth on them, slicking them wet).
She realized that she’d begun making noises in earnest, her head rocked back against his shoulder, and he was still not saying anything, though she could feel the eager tautness of his body, drawn tight against her back as he watched, and she could feel his breath on her ear and her shoulder. “Goddamn it,” she breathed, “it’s not fair, you’re the one that never talks and I’m the one with the blindfold on.”
“Don’t stop,” he said.
“If it was you blindfolded you’d know exactly what I was doing because I can’t keep my fucking mouth shut but you,” she said, and then her hips twitched without her meaning to twitch them, her body arched and thrust and she squirmed, rubbed hard against her clit, and Tseng -
Still didn’t say anything, but bit down on her shoulder, and that was better than words. She felt his teeth and the heavy wash of his breath and rocked against her own hand, cried out, cried out, came.
Maybe it wasn’t as unfair as she’d been saying, because now she splayed out over his lap, shaky and limp and warm and very happy indeed, and he was still hard against her, and shaky himself but for a different reason. She felt him lick and then kiss the place he’d bitten on her shoulder. He wrapped his fingers around her hand and brought it up to his mouth. But he didn’t do what she’d expected, which was suck her moisture off her fingers. Instead, he kissed the inside of her wrist, where he’d kissed her before, when she was waiting before she'd made her kill. And the heat arched through her body, hissed through her veins like water droplets sizzling over a hot iron pan.
“Going to fuck me now?” she asked, tipping her head back as if to meet his eyes even though she still had the blindfold on.
“Yes,” he said, “now.” He coaxed her up to her knees. She turned around to face him, kneeling up over his thighs rather than sitting so he had room to undress. She could hear the clink of his belt buckle, the metallic rasp of his zipper, and she knew that if she could see the sticky wetness on her thighs she might be embarrassed by it but she couldn’t and so she wasn’t, and so maybe this had been a good idea after all. She heard the sound of cloth sliding down, and then the distinctive sound of a condom packet ripped open, the catch of his breath. (She could see behind her closed darkened eyes the way his throat muscles would tighten as he rolled the condom down over his cock.) She took the opportunity to unbutton his shirt and get her hands in under the loose starched edges, soft like wings against the backs of her hands as she slid them up his chest, felt his nipples tighten beneath her palms, felt his heartbeat pounding against his skin.
He ran a hand up the line of her back and she arched, and he cupped the back of her head - for a wild second she thought he meant to take off the blindfold, but no, he pulled her in for a kiss. Ah. His insistent and the feel of his breath across her cheek, his tongue, his lips. No teeth here despite the hard way he’d bitten her shoulder . . . .
He pulled away and she expected his hands on her hips to guide her down onto him, but he didn’t, he kissed her jawline, her bared throat as she tilted blind eyes toward the ceiling and let him, let him kiss her collarbone and scrape it with his teeth, let him kiss the upper slope of her breast and down to her nipple but he didn’t try to pull her onto him for all that she could hear and feel and smell how much he wanted it, and she realized that he -
- was giving her control of the pace, was going to wait, for all that he’d bound her eyes was going to wait until she -
She reached for him, fumbled. She found his flat belly twitching with self-control, felt the shiny-smooth expanse of scar where he’d been nearly gutted years ago, and then lower to the hard angles of his hipbones, the crisp patch of hair, the soft weight of his balls and then, just as he made a hard, strained noise between his teeth (you made me wait, she thought, raptor-triumphant; see how you like it), finally closed her hand around the base of his cock. Felt hot skin, and less hot but more slick the bottom of the condom; spread her knees wider and positioned herself over and slid down until just his tip slid into her.
Waited.
(He didn’t think she had any patience. Ha. She’d show - )
“Elena,” he rasped. She felt him bend his head, felt the way his hair slithered over his shoulder and fell over her shoulder, down her back, over her breast; smelled the sharp-sweet scent of his shampoo. Groaned. He shuddered, tight and hard. “Please,” he said, and she realized that she really didn’t have that kind of patience.
She sank down all the way, the insides of her thighs pressed tight to the hard flexing muscles of his legs, as he rocked up into her deeper than she’d expected and drove the breath out of her.
She moved fast and hard, fast enough that he never slid very far out of her, a deep steady rocking. It wasn’t so much that she moaned between breaths as that each of her catching breaths shattered her long continuous moan into a hundred pieces. He was - talking, more or less (as she’d asked him to, she realized, and tipped her blind eyes toward his shoulder) but there wasn’t much sense to his words. He didn’t hold her hips. He didn't need to; his control was that good, she moved for him, she rocked on him and listened to the nonsense sound of his voice. His hands ran over her waist, her ribcage, her breasts, her throat, and she moved and moved and moved until she came first, and keened against his shoulder. He curled his hands up her back to pull her down onto him. She could hear him breathing, breathing, rasping hard and breathing and suddenly she couldn’t stand it anymore and without asking him she reached up to pull off her blindfold.
- He was too far gone to look surprised, but even so she wasn’t sure whether he’d expected it. As soon as the blindfold came off and she blinked against the over-brightness of the light on her dark-sensitized eyes, she saw that he was looking at her, his eyes narrow with pleasure and dark with heat and his skin flushed and his hair tangled over his shoulder and hers and she thought he said her name before he came. And she was glad she had taken off the blindfold because it would have been a crying shame to miss that look of startled epiphany on his face at the moment of his climax.
***
"I suppose patience has some advantages," Elena said to him in the dark, and Tseng pulled her more toward him, kissed her, breathed the smell of her skin, sweat and musk and sweet with the lingering powder-smell of her deodorant. He knew she wore no perfume.
"One of us needs to get down to business," he said, and kissed her shoulder, and she laughed, a smoky sound, soft and pleased. In the darkness he could barely see her, just the reflection of streetlights off her hair.
"That's as good an excuse as any," she said, and tucked in against him. She was asleep within minutes. He lay awake longer, looking at the darkness, and the echoes of light on her skin.
Elena/Tseng was requested as a holiday present by several of you. This one in particular is dedicated to lindensphinx, as a thank you for sending me pants! But I hope all of you who were looking forward to Elena/Tseng also enjoy it.
Wolves' Eyes
In the alley’s consuming darkness, Elena faded away, visible only as a shimmer of light above a patch of deeper black.
Final Fantasy VII. Elena/Tseng, plus other Turks. 6400 words.
Not worksafe/NC-17 for explicit (and mildly kinky) sex. Implied violence. Advent Children-compliant, but not spoilery for AC.
In the alley’s consuming darkness, Elena faded away, visible only as a shimmer of light above a patch of deeper black. Even knowing she was there, Tseng could barely see her. Shadow. Light. Shadow.
“Ready,” Reno’s voice crackled in his earpiece.
“Target coming down Thirty-Ninth,” Rude’s voice followed. Tseng let his eyelids slide half-shut, visualizing their relative positions: Reno in the car at the intersection of Thirty-Ninth Street and Bluestone Avenue, Rude in the lookout Perch on the Amini Building at that same intersection: the two of them together his closing net. And Elena and him, in this alley that forked like a snake’s tongue off of Thirty-Ninth south of the intersection, the traps’s steel jaws, straining to snap shut.
A dozen paces away, he could see her face, pale in the darkness, her eyes unreadable as bruises, pockets of watchful shadow. She hated waiting even more than Reno did. In fairness, Reno could be quite patient; Elena never could be. But she did, now, for the sake of the job, keep herself still and silent. Nonetheless he could sense more than see her every muscle tensed beneath the fabric of her suit, could sense the way she strained against the invisible leash that he held.
“Target approaching the intersection,” Rude said.
“Now?” Reno asked.
Elena hissed between her teeth, softly, but more like the whistling hiss of a weasel or a badger than like a snake.
“Move,” Tseng confirmed.
One of the frustrations one had to overcome in serving as a leader of Turks was this: you could never keep track of everything -- and you shouldn’t try. In the middle of a job you had to trust your agents. Turks were selected, always, because they had a potent blend of intelligence, flexibility, resourcefulness and amorality -- everything else they needed to know could be taught, but those four things were non-negotiable -- and they worked best within loose constraints, when they were allowed to use those skills. Guided too closely, watched too narrowly, their advantages faded away. If you wanted orders followed, you called in the troops. If you wanted Turks, you needed to let them be Turks.
Still, it was difficult, as squad leader, to hear the squealing of tires and the sound of gunshots and not know for certain what was happening. He listened over his earpiece to the sound of Rude’s labored breathing and the soft grunts of blows exchanged. He listened for the sound of Reno’s car revving, and the sound of footsteps.
As he listened Elena sidled up until she was even with him. She stopped, hesitated, drawn tight and dangerous as garotte wire. She didn’t say anything, which was a novelty, but also a sign that she was learning. (Her tendency to chatter when nervous was one of the first things he had determined to train out of her.) She radiated eagerness, bristled with it. He could see the pale skin of her ungloved hand hovering over the butt of her gun without -- quite -- touching it.
Gunshots. Running feet: four pairs -- three pairs; that would be Rude peeling off -- two pairs, as Reno let them give in to the false sense of safety, let them convince themselves they were heading toward respite, let them drive themselves into the mouth of the trap.
“Now,” Elena breathed, sounding -- hungry, ecstatic. Tseng said nothing, and let his silence be his answer.
Two men in all black plunged into the mouth of the alley. Elena strode forward out of the cover of darkness, into the half-light of a post-disaster Midgar night. The clear moonlight turned her hair the color of wolves’ eyes.
She had never quite lost her taste for the theatrical, and perhaps she never would. For all that she claimed to hate the idea, she was a Turk who’d followed Reno’s lead more often than not: reckless, ferocious, pretending carelessness to hide a rigor that tended to the obsessive. It was Rude who could leave well enough alone; it was Reno who fixated. And now it was Elena who fixated, who learned to hone her rabid-weasel tendencies into a genuine weapon. In many ways it was a good thing; Turks who embraced that personality were less likely to crack under pressure than those who pretended to a controlled stoicism that didn’t come naturally to them.
Still, it made him both wince and suppress a smile at the extent of her theatrics, the way she brought her gun up, moonlight bright on the barrel, moonlight bright on her fair skin, moonlight not touching her eyes, dark, dark not like water or stone but like wood, leather, smoke.
(It was really not appropriate for him to notice her as he did, and yet he did not stop, could not bring himself to stop; the world was smaller than it had once been, and yet it had fewer walls. Before the disaster he could not have been her lover; now, in the ruined world, he could not be otherwise.)
“Hello, gentlemen,” she said, and the thieves bristled all over, like angry cats.
Elena wanted to kill them, he could see that -- he could smell it, taste it, rising off her like smoke. She was capable of becoming rabid with the slightest provocation. He wondered whether she had a reason for that, and whether he would ever know that reason.
And she got her wish, as the first thief touched something on his belt and the green flash of materia blazed in the dark. It seared his eyes to weeping, and must have seared Elena’s, too, but she kept them open just as Tseng did and fired, even before the flash resolved itself into a shower of ice crystals, a bone-crack cold.
She fired once, twice, three times, face impassive. He had taught her many things: how to plan, how to strategize, how to be patient, how to be effective, how to hack a terminal, open a lock, fight hand-to-hand. But he had never taught her violence, or rage. He had never had to.
***
“That’s two down,” Reno said. He stretched his legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankle, effortlessly casual. Elena envied him that. Maybe she envied that even more than she did Tseng and Rude’s easy solemnity.
“Two more unaccounted for,” Tseng said, referring to the cryptic message the President had left him on his phone. Sure, she wished she was as unflappable as Rude or Tseng, but she knew she was never going to be as calm as them, so it didn’t hit her quite the same way. But if she could display her lack of gravitas as stylishly as Reno did, well, that would be a different kind of cool all to itself.
“Not quite unaccounted for,” Reno said. “Sources in Edge say they’re hanging around the Market District, renting a room above the greengrocer’s. Across from the old clocktower.”
“We should take care of them now,” she said "before they get a chance to react." Leaping, she knew, to the obvious solution. Let’s go take them out. In truth, there was still a lot of her that was the flailing angry ferret of a Turk she’d been when she first filled in for Reno years before - with enough balls to go after Cloud with minimal backup, but without enough sense to know that, brave or not, that was a really bad idea. She just wasn’t good at waiting for the proper moment. The proper moment always felt like right now, something she knew Tseng was always trying to train her out of. Something she knew Tseng was unlikely to succeed in training her out of.
But Tseng gave her a coolly appraising look (goddamn it, she wished she had as much poise as him; you’d never think to look at him that they had anything beyond a professional relationship, whereas she was sure you could read it written on her skin whenever she was in the same room as him), and then, to her mild surprise, nodded. “We need to move quickly, ideally before they figure out what happened to their allies - and before they find out that we know where they’re holing up. So the question is: who?”
She didn’t, to her credit, launch herself into a round of pick me, pick me. That kind of eagerness might have done well by her back when she was a cadet, but the Turks played it cooler than that. Still - still. She hated waiting around and hearing what was going to happen.
Silence. Then Reno let his arm dangle over the back of his chair, and said, “I think you two. Rude’n’me are better at hand-to-hand work, this seems like more your thing.” Which was as close to a compliment as she was likely to get from Reno. She tried not to beam, and succeeded. More or less.
***
Of course, the desire to be the one to take them out - to get the kill, to finish the job, to have last blood - didn’t quite obviate the way that a stakeout triggered every impatient bone in her body.
At night, the view below the clocktower was mostly dark. The Market District bustled during the day and into the evening, when Edge thronged with people looking to buy onions and cabbage, apples and spices, chicken (whole or plucked and clean), and milk by the quart. (The Market District was something new - before Midgar fell apart, most people bought that kind of thing in huge antiseptic indoor groceries, or at least aboveplate they did, but now it all came in in trucks and got sold from stalls and bodegas and, sometimes, out of the backs of the same trucks.) But at night, the shopkeepers packed up and returned to their own homes, and the streets, without the funding for proper streetlights, fell dark. The only light came from the second-story rooms rented out as apartments, which cast sodium-yellow light out in a haze to the streets below.
Her job was to wait for her targets (six-two man, blonde, thirtysomething; five-eight woman, dark-haired, in her forties) to emerge from the third apartment from the right, and to shoot them where they stood. But until that happened, the crucial part of her job was to wait.
She hated, hated, hated waiting.
One of the things she’d learned over the course of this job was that too long watching the same stretch without change would make your eyes start to play tricks on you. You’d start to think you saw movement when you didn’t, or wonder if maybe you’d drifted off and missed something. Plus there was the simple discomfort of it: there wasn’t much room to move around up there, besides which it was better if she didn’t move around. She was high enough, and the night was dark enough, and the old clocktower obscure enough that people were unlikely to look up and see her. (One of the important lessons a Turk learned was that people didn’t tend to look up. Reno loved to use that to his advantage by dropping down from the ceiling like a fucking spider.) But moving around a lot would more likely attract attention than staying still would.
So she crouched, rifle against her shoulder and her thigh muscles screaming with the strain until she couldn’t bear it and had to shift, sit back on one ankle to stretch one leg out, switch to resting on the other to stretch the other leg out - all without looking away from the street.
Why did I volunteer for this post again?
Because I wanted to be the one to bring their heads back on a plate, that’s why.
And she couldn’t quite regret that, but . . . . Still. Waiting. No thank you.
Five past ten, and she heard feet on the metal scaffolding of stairs behind her, and then the three-knock-then-two-knock-then-three-knock pattern that meant that it was Tseng coming up and that he would prefer if she didn’t shoot him. In the low light, he never seemed to quite materialize out of the darkness - black hair and black suit made it hard to tell where he ended and the night began. Of course, it didn’t help that she had to keep one eye on the street.
“Holding up?” he asked in the low murmur that carried less than a whisper.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I can take the watch,” he said.
Yes, said her screaming leg muscles. And her freezing-cold knuckles. And the part of her that was bored beyond speaking of waiting here. But -
“No," she said. "I don't think we're going about this the right way." She didn't look back to see his reaction, because she was watching the apartment, but she felt him still behind her, considering.
"How so?" he asked.
"The longer we wait, the more likely something will go wrong. Or we'll get tired. We don't have a dozen Turks to take over the post anymore. We have to take some risks."
"And you're the one to take that risk?" Tseng asked. Very calmly. She swallowed.
"Yes," she said, feeling daring. "I'm not good at waiting. But I'm good at this."
“Mm,” he said, "perhaps you're right." She dared a glance back at him, in the darkness, and saw his predator's smile. "Try it your way, then, Elena." He was so hard to read, but she thought he was pleased. She felt the hot frisson of pleasure that she knew wasn't purely professional pride and yet that she couldn't regret --
And he must have known he was distracting her, because he touched her shoulder lightly, her wrist, brought her hand to his mouth. And. Oh. Brief, and yet absolutely impossible to ignore, the fleeting hot pressure of his open-mouthed kiss on the inside of her wrist, where her blood beat - where her blood began to beat faster.
“Take them out,” he murmured.
She didn’t manage an, “I will. Sir,” until Tseng had already vanished down the steps, but she figured it still counted. And then she slipped down the stairs herself, knife ready under one palm and gun ready in the other hand, to do this her way.
***
One gunshot, then another, told Tseng what he needed to know. He didn’t bother to follow up; she was a Turk, if she needed backup she’d call for it, and if she didn’t, it was his responsibility to let her handle it as she chose.
She was smart enough to do this her way, get in and get out, and slip away in the ensuing uproar. She didn’t need trophies, anyway: they all knew she’d managed it. Hanging around the scene of the crime was an amateur move. Letting the news report two deaths, and quietly accepting the credit due you was more Turk style.
Or loudly accepting the credit due you, in Reno’s case, and he seemed, as he so often did, to be leading Elena down the same path. Well. It could have been worse.
Seventh Heaven, and even Reno was smart enough not to say anything overt under Tifa’s watchful eye, but that didn’t stop him from ordering a round of tequila shots for all of them, plus a double for Elena, which he nudged her way. Silent praise. And really, she had earned it, which was why he accepted his shot despite not caring much for tequila.
“Didn’t think you’d last up there,” Reno said.
“Fucker,” Elena said. “You’re the one who suggested I do it.”
“Did not. Just said I didn’t want to. And I didn’t. Got feeling back in your toes yet?”
“Fuck you,” she said, but without heat, and downed her double with a practiced jerk of her head. Licked salt off her lip, and Tseng realized he was watching her mouth, and didn’t try to hide it. She hadn’t noticed yet, although Reno clearly had by the way he was smirking. She hooked the lime off the edge of the shot glass and bit absently down on it, and he watched the white line of her teeth, the way her mouth worked. And thought of her in darkness.
And had a very good idea.
Well, probably a very good idea.
Time would tell.
“It was fucking cold up there,” she said, but the tequila was beginning to show in the flush on her cheeks. And he knew that the celebration was not for her kill - she had killed more than one man before, that was nothing new, she had violence enough to suit anyone - but for something more.
She followed the tequila with a beer, which she nursed very slowly, and he was glad of it. He wanted her in full possession of her faculties, and by the time the night spilled them out into the street, the flush had receded, and her steps were steady. “Elena,” he said, and she turned to look up at him - her eyes were clear and sober and, in the deepening shadows of the street, also very dark. Black with shadows, black with - he smiled a little and watched as she echoed him, smiled back, sharp white teeth and night-dark gaze, and he thought that he would have to be careful not to train all of the impulsiveness out of her, because that would be deeply regrettable.
“Yeah?” she said.
“Come home with me?” he said, and her smile widened, and she touched the back of his hand, fleeting, which meant yes.
***
Tseng always offered her a drink, when he invited her over -- a drink or food, as if he felt obliged to prove that he hadn't just had her over to fuck. She wasn't sure how to tell him that she really was okay with going right to bed, and anyway they usually did talk, albeit afterward. It was just too distracting to do anything else first, with him right there, and she had never... had any patience. Story of her life. There was time to talk and have a glass of wine and listen to music and act like civilized people after she's gotten a taste of his skin, and doing it in the other order seemed like unnecessary frustration.
He usually obliged her. He obliged her tonight, sitting on his wonderful huge bed in his low-lit room as she stood between his knees, kissing her long and wet and slow before drawing back and stroking his thumb over her shoulder.
“Close your eyes,” Tseng said, and she hesitated a moment - looking at him - before she did. But hell, fuck, she regularly trusted him to tell her to move or not move, act or not to act, when her life was on the line - how was this really any different? And she’d be a liar if she pretended that it didn’t turn her on, the tenor of his voice when he was telling her what to do, the silk-smoothness of total control when you were confident of it, when you didn’t doubt for a moment that you’d be obeyed . . . .
His gaze chased up her spine like the brush of a feather, and she shuddered although she didn’t mean to, and knew that he had seen her shudder by the way his eyes narrowed, his pupils flared, black on almost-black and almost indecipherable. If she closed her eyes she wouldn’t be able to see that, would only be able to judge his reactions by his breathing and the infrequent velvet sound of his voice and by the heat of his skin, and, and - fucking hell. Yes.
She closed her eyes, and he made a low, satisfied noise. She felt his hand on her hair, smoothing from the crown of her head down to the curve of her jaw, tracing along the curve of her jaw to her mouth, and she parted her lips - because he’d told her to keep her eyes closed, he hadn’t told her not to move, and anyway she wouldn’t have agreed not to move, not when he was so close. She leaned forward to take his fingertips into her mouth, sucked down his index and middle fingers together. He didn’t speak but she could hear the way his pulse quickened in his sudden inhale, exhale, in the way he slipped his fingers deeper into her mouth so that she could lick his fingertips, slide smoothly down to the last knuckle.
His other hand: light touch on the outer curve of her ear, light touch on her cheekbone, and then something soft and heavy settling over her eyes. She blinked them open on instinct, could see nothing but darkness. Blindfold.
He slid his wet fingers out of her mouth and said, softly, “Any objections?”
Fucker. “No,” she said, and cursed her own unsteady voice, cursed the fact that he knew perfectly well she wasn’t going to object at this point. She reached out, trying to find him, to get a hand to his skin so that she could use that to read him instead of relying only on his infrequent panther-smooth words. He met her hand with his own, let her fingers twine through his - she could feel the dampness of her own saliva, shivered.
“Good,” he said, fingers still wound through hers, and with his other hand began to unbutton her shirt. It would’ve been easier on him if he’d let her undress before he blindfolded her, but . . . maybe he didn’t want it easy on either of them. The thought made her tingle from her bared throat down her belly to between her legs, and she pressed her thighs together to quell the surge of arousal - and then had to spread them again as he unbuttoned her pants (her shirt still hanging open, her bra still in place) and coaxed her to arch her hips and let him push them down farther. Pants, underwear - she wondered what she looked like, bare from the waist down, nearly bare from throat to belly. She had to think about it, and then realized that she was wearing her least sexy bra - well, of course, something that she could run in it without any discomfort. When her pants were off, Tseng leaned back - she could tell from the retreat of his body heat, and prevented herself, just barely, from leaning after him to follow that warmth.
“Good,” he repeated, but she could feel the heat in his tone, now, the shivery velvet touch of approval, of - no, not approval, admiration. He liked the way she looked like this. (She tried to imagine it - black blindfold, white shirt, white bra, nothing else but her own fair skin and hair - but it was so much more compelling to think about how he looked, his hair loose and his clothes still on. Had he taken his jacket off? Was he beginning to flush? That was always the first thing to go about his composure, the color that crept up his throat . . . .)
“What now?” she asked, because the silence of his regard was becoming uncomfortable. She was trying hard not to fidget, her fingers curled in the bed’s soft coverlet.
“I had planned to fuck you at this point,” he said, smooth as dark glass, and she caught her breath and shuddered, pressed her thighs together again, rubbed them, felt the way she was slick and swimming and ready, immediately ready at his words. Yes. “But,” he continued, “actually, now that I have you like this, I find that I’m not nearly done watching you.”
“So?” she said, with more bravado than she meant. His fingers skated up her back and then sprung her bra, so suddenly she yelped and jerked her head back. Back against his shoulder - she had been too distracted by his words to notice that he’d crept up behind her on the bed.
“Here,” he said, sliding off her shirt, her bra, coaxing her back until she was sitting half on his thighs, half on the bed, and the awkwardness of moving like that when she couldn't see left her with her legs canted wide apart. She moved to close them again, but he kept one hand high on her thigh, kept her there. “All right?”
“Yeah,” she said. What she didn’t say was, If you don’t touch me I think I’m going to bite you.
Instead of putting his fingers between her legs where she wanted them, though, he skated the palm of his hand up her hip, her belly, to cup one of her breasts. His thumb circled her nipple. “Will you touch yourself for me?”
It was a question, which surprised her. She had expected a command. The fact that it was a question meant that she had to drag her thoughts together, her head rocking back against his shoulder - her body rocking back against him until she felt his erection through his clothes, rubbing against the small of her back. Oh god. She wanted to say no, she wanted to insist that he do what he had planned to do and fuck her, hard and solid and good, as they'd done before, the way she thought about more often than was wise.
But. But maybe he was right about patience. Maybe it would be better if she waited - maybe it would be better if she decided to wait, teased them both, made them both wait . . . .
(Maybe it would be better if she didn’t hold off just because he ordered her to, maybe it would be better if she held off because he asked her to, and she agreed, maybe it would be better if it was a conspiracy of two.)
“Okay,” she said. “I, uh - what do you want to see?”
“Touch yourself,” he said, “as you would do if you were alone. As if you wanted to bring yourself to orgasm with no one else to help you. Let me see what that’s like for you.”
She drew a shaky breath, let her head fall back on his shoulder again and stared blankly at the inside of the blindfold. She was far more aware of the cadences of his voice like this, of the slightest hitches in the rise and fall of his breathing, of his heartbeat drumming against her back. “It’s going to be fast if I do it the way I do by myself.” She rarely had patience of her own, patience was her hardest lesson of being a Turk, patience didn’t come naturally to her.
“I won’t complain about fast,” he said, and he - rocked his hips, subtly but enough that she could feel a really insistent hardness against her back. She couldn’t help making a noise, but the thing that surprised her was that he matched the noise with a very small sound of his own - a very small indrawn-breath sound, but still, a sound. He caught her right hand (what the hell? didn’t he want her to - ) and then brought it to his lips, sucked her fingers into the strong heat of his mouth as she had done to him, stroked them with his tongue, wet them - as if she needed the help, as if she wasn’t already slick-swollen and screaming for touch. (Her own touch, his touch, didn’t matter, whatever the hell, just a hand on her.) When he let her fingers go, she reached for herself, but he stopped her with a gentle clasp around her wrist. “Do you think of me when you masturbate?” he asked.
The word ‘masturbate’ should have been embarrassing, even clinical, but she made a hard frustrated noise and jerked her hand in his grip. “Sometimes,” she said. “Let me - “
He let go of her hand very suddenly, and said, “Then touch yourself as you would do when you’re thinking of me.”
As if she could do anything else with him behind her, his chest against her back and the smell of him potent in the air. Skin and soap and shampoo, clean hair, faint spicy smell of aftershave or maybe deodorant, and underlying it faint but undeniable the musk of arousal. Or maybe that was herself . . . .
She slid her hand, still wet from his mouth, down her belly. (She almost expected him to take her wrist again, torment her more, but he didn’t; just breathed hard in her ear, so that she knew he was leaning forward over her shoulder, watching. She could feel his body heat, tangible as a touch even where he wasn’t actually touching her.)
She slid her finger down over her clit and she couldn’t help it, her whole body jerked at her own touch finally, finally where she wanted it, and made a noise - not quite a moan, just a little sound on the edge of the sharpness of her breathing. She felt him tense up behind her, muscles in his bicep where he held her still against him, muscles in his stomach and his chest, and though he didn’t make any noise she could hear his breathing get faster. She was getting wet enough that she had to rub hard to get enough pressure; if she’d felt like teasing she might’ve used that lack of friction to her own advantage, but she didn’t feel like teasing, felt like fast, like she’d said to him. So she rubbed her fingertip against herself firm and steady and felt the slow crawl of heavy heat gathering in her belly, lower, the way her cunt felt sore and heavy, the way her body buzzed. Slid her fingers down because she liked the feeling of something inside her when she came. (The truth was that when she was at home touching herself and thinking about him she usually used one of a variety of toys.) Still, she focused on her clit, focused on rubbing it with the heel of her hand, the bony base of her thumb, as she slipped her index and middle fingers up into herself (and thought about his mouth on them, slicking them wet).
She realized that she’d begun making noises in earnest, her head rocked back against his shoulder, and he was still not saying anything, though she could feel the eager tautness of his body, drawn tight against her back as he watched, and she could feel his breath on her ear and her shoulder. “Goddamn it,” she breathed, “it’s not fair, you’re the one that never talks and I’m the one with the blindfold on.”
“Don’t stop,” he said.
“If it was you blindfolded you’d know exactly what I was doing because I can’t keep my fucking mouth shut but you,” she said, and then her hips twitched without her meaning to twitch them, her body arched and thrust and she squirmed, rubbed hard against her clit, and Tseng -
Still didn’t say anything, but bit down on her shoulder, and that was better than words. She felt his teeth and the heavy wash of his breath and rocked against her own hand, cried out, cried out, came.
Maybe it wasn’t as unfair as she’d been saying, because now she splayed out over his lap, shaky and limp and warm and very happy indeed, and he was still hard against her, and shaky himself but for a different reason. She felt him lick and then kiss the place he’d bitten on her shoulder. He wrapped his fingers around her hand and brought it up to his mouth. But he didn’t do what she’d expected, which was suck her moisture off her fingers. Instead, he kissed the inside of her wrist, where he’d kissed her before, when she was waiting before she'd made her kill. And the heat arched through her body, hissed through her veins like water droplets sizzling over a hot iron pan.
“Going to fuck me now?” she asked, tipping her head back as if to meet his eyes even though she still had the blindfold on.
“Yes,” he said, “now.” He coaxed her up to her knees. She turned around to face him, kneeling up over his thighs rather than sitting so he had room to undress. She could hear the clink of his belt buckle, the metallic rasp of his zipper, and she knew that if she could see the sticky wetness on her thighs she might be embarrassed by it but she couldn’t and so she wasn’t, and so maybe this had been a good idea after all. She heard the sound of cloth sliding down, and then the distinctive sound of a condom packet ripped open, the catch of his breath. (She could see behind her closed darkened eyes the way his throat muscles would tighten as he rolled the condom down over his cock.) She took the opportunity to unbutton his shirt and get her hands in under the loose starched edges, soft like wings against the backs of her hands as she slid them up his chest, felt his nipples tighten beneath her palms, felt his heartbeat pounding against his skin.
He ran a hand up the line of her back and she arched, and he cupped the back of her head - for a wild second she thought he meant to take off the blindfold, but no, he pulled her in for a kiss. Ah. His insistent and the feel of his breath across her cheek, his tongue, his lips. No teeth here despite the hard way he’d bitten her shoulder . . . .
He pulled away and she expected his hands on her hips to guide her down onto him, but he didn’t, he kissed her jawline, her bared throat as she tilted blind eyes toward the ceiling and let him, let him kiss her collarbone and scrape it with his teeth, let him kiss the upper slope of her breast and down to her nipple but he didn’t try to pull her onto him for all that she could hear and feel and smell how much he wanted it, and she realized that he -
- was giving her control of the pace, was going to wait, for all that he’d bound her eyes was going to wait until she -
She reached for him, fumbled. She found his flat belly twitching with self-control, felt the shiny-smooth expanse of scar where he’d been nearly gutted years ago, and then lower to the hard angles of his hipbones, the crisp patch of hair, the soft weight of his balls and then, just as he made a hard, strained noise between his teeth (you made me wait, she thought, raptor-triumphant; see how you like it), finally closed her hand around the base of his cock. Felt hot skin, and less hot but more slick the bottom of the condom; spread her knees wider and positioned herself over and slid down until just his tip slid into her.
Waited.
(He didn’t think she had any patience. Ha. She’d show - )
“Elena,” he rasped. She felt him bend his head, felt the way his hair slithered over his shoulder and fell over her shoulder, down her back, over her breast; smelled the sharp-sweet scent of his shampoo. Groaned. He shuddered, tight and hard. “Please,” he said, and she realized that she really didn’t have that kind of patience.
She sank down all the way, the insides of her thighs pressed tight to the hard flexing muscles of his legs, as he rocked up into her deeper than she’d expected and drove the breath out of her.
She moved fast and hard, fast enough that he never slid very far out of her, a deep steady rocking. It wasn’t so much that she moaned between breaths as that each of her catching breaths shattered her long continuous moan into a hundred pieces. He was - talking, more or less (as she’d asked him to, she realized, and tipped her blind eyes toward his shoulder) but there wasn’t much sense to his words. He didn’t hold her hips. He didn't need to; his control was that good, she moved for him, she rocked on him and listened to the nonsense sound of his voice. His hands ran over her waist, her ribcage, her breasts, her throat, and she moved and moved and moved until she came first, and keened against his shoulder. He curled his hands up her back to pull her down onto him. She could hear him breathing, breathing, rasping hard and breathing and suddenly she couldn’t stand it anymore and without asking him she reached up to pull off her blindfold.
- He was too far gone to look surprised, but even so she wasn’t sure whether he’d expected it. As soon as the blindfold came off and she blinked against the over-brightness of the light on her dark-sensitized eyes, she saw that he was looking at her, his eyes narrow with pleasure and dark with heat and his skin flushed and his hair tangled over his shoulder and hers and she thought he said her name before he came. And she was glad she had taken off the blindfold because it would have been a crying shame to miss that look of startled epiphany on his face at the moment of his climax.
***
"I suppose patience has some advantages," Elena said to him in the dark, and Tseng pulled her more toward him, kissed her, breathed the smell of her skin, sweat and musk and sweet with the lingering powder-smell of her deodorant. He knew she wore no perfume.
"One of us needs to get down to business," he said, and kissed her shoulder, and she laughed, a smoky sound, soft and pleased. In the darkness he could barely see her, just the reflection of streetlights off her hair.
"That's as good an excuse as any," she said, and tucked in against him. She was asleep within minutes. He lay awake longer, looking at the darkness, and the echoes of light on her skin.