Fic: Hit Or Miss (Elena/Tseng, NC-17)
I've been having a rough couple of days, and I wrote this to cheer myself up. (Should have been working on exchange fic, but.) Porn, but also... well, I'm a bit nervous about posting it, because it hovers more toward the soppy emotions than I'm one hundred percent comfortable with (which is to say, not very, but I'm particularly terrified of looking like a tool in that department), but... well, it also contains a gunfight, so there's some balance.
Hit Or Miss
That Elena acted fast and trusted her instincts was, in some ways, both her best and worst attribute.
Final Fantasy 7, Elena/Tseng. 3800 words.
NC-17/MA/Not Worksafe for smut, violence.
It pained Tseng, how often their missions devolved into urban warfare, anymore. It was inevitable, given that no one ruled the ruins of Midgar anymore, but still -- it was inefficient, it was dangerous, and it was especially infuriating now that their numbers were reduced to four. Losing even one of the team would have been crippling.
The worst part was, their enemies seemed to know that. This group -- a former small-time crimeboss, now setting his sights on sucking Shinra dry and then hiding in its husk -- took a positive pleasure in trapping them in street gunfights, and while Tseng wouldn't have had a hundred of his thugs in return for a single Turk, still, being outnumbered was a significant tactical challenge.
Especially when they had you pinned on opposite sides of the intersection. He and Elena had a clear escape route, but no good access to the enemy. Rude and Reno had no clear escape route, and perfect access to the enemy, but insufficient firepower. What they needed were the grenades, which Elena was carrying. (What they really needed was to be in opposite places, because he and Elena were better equipped both literally and in terms of skills for picking them off; Rude and Reno were better at hand-to-hand work. But while he was wishing for things, he might as well throw 'adequate intel' and 'backup' onto the list, too.)
He set his jaw and gave a swift, annoyed headshake. Elena reached back to the string of grenades across the small of her back, which meant that she'd figured out the same thing. "Damn it," she said.
The intersection was completely exposed to enemy fire. It wasn't more than perhaps thirty feet, but thirty feet was more than too much. And yet there wasn't any other good way out --
"I'm going to go," Elena said, interrupting his thoughts. Before he could even think about protesting, she added, "I'm faster than you, anyway." She hefted her gun and hit the intersection at a dead sprint.
She was a motion blur of blue and whitegold, and bullets pocked and pinged off the asphalt in her wake. She almost made it, too.
The bullet caught her high in the chest, almost the shoulder, and the force of it spun her up and around off her feet, so she hit the pavement hard and screaming as much with rage as pain. He realized for one adrenaline-cold second that she wasn't going to get out of the line of fire; she was pushing herself up to her feet on her good arm, but she was right out in the middle of the street, no cover, perfect target --
Rude lunged out from his cover, grabbed her hard by the forearms, and dragged her out of the open. She really screamed then, a thin high animal sound of pure pain, and that wasn't surprising because it was putting her weight on the hole in her chest, and then she was out of sight and her scream stuttered off a few seconds later.
***
"Fuck," Reno said, "fuck, fuck." Rude was already going for the Cure materia on his armband, which was good -- Reno hadn't brought anything but his flashy stuff, Fire and Bolt and Haste. Rude tore her shirt open to reveal the bloody mess of her shoulder and chest; the wound made a wet sucking sound. She shook, blood bubbling a little at the corner of her mouth, her jaw clenched so hard Reno imagined he could hear her teeth crack. Her eyes kept trying to roll back in her head.
He snapped the leather strap off his EMR and put pressure on her jaw to lever her mouth open, then forced it between her teeth. "Bite that," he said; not that she could probably hear him, descending deeply into shock as she was, but her teeth ground down on the leather and it held. Green fire flared from Rude's fingers. A bullet struck the corner of the building, and Reno pressed his back flat to the wall, edging around just long enough to return fire.
"Punctured lung," Rude said, his voice terse and clipped. "I think I can keep her from suffocating but that's it. We need to get her out now."
"Doin' the best I can," Reno said. It was ironic because he was a perfectly good marksman but their firearms experts were Tseng -- who was pinned on the other side of the intersection where he couldn't do much -- and Elena. But he had the advantage that now he didn't just want to kill them because it was his job, he really wanted to kill them, because it was understood that Turks sometimes got fucked up or killed doing their jobs but it was also tacitly understood that if that happened to you, well, your teammates would make sure to pay back whoever worked you over, with interest.
It didn't actually go on that long, but pinned down with bullets cracking off the bricks around his cover and Elena gurgling on her breaths behind him it felt like forever. It felt like entirely too fucking long.
"Fuck this," he said. "Gimme one of her grenades."
"They're too -- "
"Have some faith in my methods."
Rude grunted and shifted Elena gingerly until he could get at her string of grenades and slide one loose. He flipped it to Reno, who caught it without looking.
Marksmanship wasn't Reno's thing, but he could climb like a spider. They were still looking for his head to pop up around the cover again when he dropped the grenade straight down onto their heads.
She was still breathing, but her lips were turning blue, when they got her into the helicopter. Reno was smart and decided not to comment on it when Tseng silently took over the duty of making sure that Elena was still breathing from Rude, even though there wasn't much to do but sit with her and hit her with another Cure whenever her breathing started to gurgle off.
***
Asleep, even drugged to the gills and wired up with IV drips and sensors, Elena looked -- not innocent, and not younger than she was; perhaps simply as young as she actually was. It was easy for Tseng to forget that she hadn't yet seen the far side of twenty-five, and that there were more than ten years between them, because she worked so hard to appear confident and mature, and generally successfully so.
It put him in mind of a memory -- a memory in which their positions had been reversed, and one that still made him flinch reflexively. He'd been shot, cut up, burned, stabbed, and half-drowned, but for pure pain, being pinned to the floor with a sword, like some sort of entomologist's nightmare, and left to helplessly bleed out on the floor of the Temple of the Ancients still topped the list. He'd expected to die there, and in fact still had no good memory of getting out -- just of waking up, some long time later, in Shinra's elite medical facilities in Midgar.
It had been dark when he woke, and quiet, and he'd thought he was alone until his eyes finally focused on the bent blonde head, face shielded by the ragged edges of her hair as she dozed off in a hard plastic chair, a paper cup of coffee slipping slowly out of her fingers, and he'd said "Elena?" a little disbelievingly. It hurt to breathe.
That jolted her awake. "Sir," she said, getting a better grip on the cup of coffee. She took a sip, made a face, and put it aside. "How do you feel?"
He hurt -- a long line of pain throbbed fierce but dull like banked coals across his stomach, even through what he knew were serious painkillers -- but he was constitutionally incapable of saying anything other than, "As well as can be expected," and then, "What are you doing here?"
"The doctors said you'd be coming around any time now. We thought someone ought to be around when you woke up," she said.
"Mn," he said. It was hard to focus, which meant the painkillers were working. Well, that and the fact that he was pretty sure he'd been gutted like a fish and yet he was able to sit up, sort of, and carry on a conversation, sort of. "How did I -- "
"We got you out," she said. "Sir."
It would be an embarassingly long time before he realized that the 'we' in both those sentences meant 'I,' mostly (although, to give credit where due, Reno and Rude and the helicopter had played a vital role). He never let her know he knew.
Her wounds now were not so bad as his had been then: but the Turks no longer had the services of the world's best medical professionals at their beck and call. Those who hadn't died in the collapse had mostly fled; they made do now with considerably diminished resources. (Which was true of so many things.) Nonetheless, it was clear that she wold pull through once they got her out of the street and into professional care, and the doctors predicted a full recovery, just as they had accurately predicted a full recovery from his own Sephiroth-inflicted wound.
But still he stopped by her bed whenever his duties allowed him the time, and when her eyes fluttered open the next day, he smiled, and said, "We thought someone ought to be around when you woke up."
They released her four days later, with stern admonishment to rest and allow the Cure magic and potions in her system to fully rebuild her skin and muscle tissue before she strained them.
"Dinner?" he asked, when they were in the hallway with the illusion of a little privacy.
She looked so genuinely dismayed that he wanted to smile, and decided not to. "Oh -- I don't know if I have the energy to go anywhere, right now -- "
He let his hand settle on her good shoulder, lightly. "My apartment?"
Her smile could still catch him off guard. "That, I think I can manage."
***
Tseng was always weirdly... she didn't know the word for it. Adult, maybe. His apartment looked fully-furnished, whereas hers still had a half-lived-in look. He brought her wine. His books were on bookshelves rather than still in boxes. She wasn't sure why this all impressed her, but it did.
When he stopped fiddling with the food and joined her on the couch, she regarded him over the top of her wineglass. He looked back at her -- unfazed, unruffled, apparently unconcerned with her staring. "How's your shoulder feel?"
"Fine," she said. "Itches." As always his apartment made her feel peculiar: she simultaneously wanted to sink back into its understate luxury and felt restless, trembling beneath her skin, an itch that extended well past the border of her new scar. She was suddenly tired of small talk. She put her glass aside, and leaned forward, and kissed him. He put his own down without missing a beat and took her face between the palms of his hands and kissed her back. She parted her lips, seeking more, and he didn't deny her: but he also kept it slow, even gentle. The brush of his tongue simmered through her, leaving her loose-limbed and feverish. When trying to hurry him didn't work, she got her hands in his hair, her nails scratching lightly against his scalp, something guaranteed to make him shiver.
And he did shiver, but he didn't speed up. He worked her shirt off very slowly, one button at a time. Then the buttons at her wrists. Then he pushed it off her shoulders, barely touching her skin, and she squirmed with impatience. "What's the rush?" he asked, his lips brushing lightly against her throat and shoulder. "We've got time." It remind her that Tseng was more experienced than the boys she'd slept with at the academy, more deliberate, more patient. And as always she was torn between liking that and wanting to enjoy it, and wanting to drive him crazy so he couldn't help but lose control.
His mouth moved lower, down over the inner dip of her shoulder to the scar. Wounds healed quickly with materia and potions didn't scar nearly as badly as wounds healed the old-fashioned way, but you still couldn't blow a hole in your chest and get away unmarked. She was relieved that the wound was high enough that it hadn't destroyed the shape of her breast.
She slid her hand up the back of his neck and through his hair; if he was going to go so slowly she might as well enjoy it. His tongue rasped against the scar and she couldn't hold back a little whimper, though she tried. His mouth moved down to close around her nipple, and then she didn't even try to keep quiet.
She leaned back and he went with her, one arm under her wasit, his lips and tongue moving over her nipple until she squirmed and whimpered, and was a little embarrassed by the sounds: soft, needy, even girly, but there was no way she was going to be able to keep quiet like this, so she didn't try. She ran her fingers through his hair, brushed them across the nape of his neck, tangled up by didn't grab or pull. He kissed his way up her throat to her ear, and she felt his breath hot and her name on his voice almost too quiet to hear, but not quite. She could hear him, oh yes. Oh yes.
He shifted her just a little and she slid into his lap, and oh god, the slowness of his pace notwithstanding he was hard. She made a small hungry noise and ground against him without thinking, and his expression went from languid to fierce like a switch flipping. She thought my turn, with a little curl of delight that frissioned up her spine and made her smile, smile, smile stupidly. But he was smiling too, so it was okay. Smiling, and the look in his eyes dark and hot enough to scald her skin, nearly as breath-stealingas his touch.
"Want you," she said, unnecessarily. Her words broke the long silence, cracked it open, and that changed the mood, too. It made her giddy.
"Yes," he said. He fumbled a little as he unfastened her pants, and that was how she knew he was really worked up, demeanor notwithstanding.
"Here?" she said. She rocked against him again, just to feel him, and he made a low helpless noise.
"Nnn," he said. "No. I want more room to . . . ." She squirmed closer, pressing her breasts against him, feeling the contrast between the cool fabric of his shirt and the warmth of his skin. ". . . maneuver," he finished.
"You're making me sound like a field exercise," she protested, laughing, and kissed him before he could respond.
He tightened his arms around her and stood up suddenly, with her still wrapped around him. His mouth on hers made it hard to think. She didn't let go of him when they got to the bed, so they sort of... collapsed onto it, with her nuzzling at his throat and him laughing. He took the opportunity to tug her pants off. "Come on," she said, "I'm naked and you've barely got your shirt open."
He smirked, smug as ever, but obliged her: sat up to peel out of his clothing, and she could have watched the way muscles moved in his back for days. "You're looking predatory," he said, crawling up the bed to lean over her. "Should I be worried that you bite?"
"Oh yes," she said. "Worry." His chuckle was low and resonant. She silenced him by winding her hand in his hair and using it to drag him down for a kiss, not gentle, biting lightly at his lower lip. He didn't bite her back -- he almost never did -- but he coaxed her tongue into his mouth and sucked it firmly, until she moaned and squirmed.
He rolled over to rest against her, between her thighs, propped on his arms to keep his full weight off her. She drew her knees up, spreading wider and tilting her hips up, so he could settle in against her. "Mm," he said. "I don't want to -- I mean, you are still recovering."
"That's why I'm not trying to roll you over," she said. That made him smile. "It'll be fine. It'll be fine." She arched to rub against him. "Anyway, if you stop now I'm going to kill you."
"I wasn't planning on stopping," he said. He kissed her, very very lightly, just lips and the slightest brush of his tongue against her mouth.
"Tease," she said, and lifted her hips to rub wet and slow against his length just to watch his eyes flutter shut and to see him swallow hard.
"Elena," he said, as if he just wanted to hear her name. "Tell me what you want."
"You," she said, before she had time to think. She pushed herself up on her elbows to rub against him, skin on skin.
He bent his head, kissed her, said: "Would you care to be more specific?" Her voice was shaking, and she considered it vastly unfair that his wasn't.
"You," she said again, breathlessly, "in me, now, come on..."
His fingertips pressed her open and she caught her breath. "Keep talking," he murmured, positioning himself and then looking at her, like he could wait all day for her to go on, and he probably could. Fuck. "Tell me." Tell me and I'll do it hung in the air between them, unspoken. His eyes were very dark. Her mouth went dry.
"Come on," she said again, "I want your cock inside me. Now." His eyes locked with hers, and he pulled his fingers away and pressed into her, the thick head of his cock sliding in, stretching her just a little, not enough to hurt. She moaned. He pressed his mouth against her neck just below her ear and said, "Keep going." And his voice was a little unsteady, which delighted her, so she did.
"All the way," she said, as he slipped inch by inch into her, taking his time -- "all the way, god, deep, that's good" -- she couldn't put her thoughts in order, so her words came out jumbled. “God, that’s good, that’s - I love the way you feel,” she said, and would have been embarrassed by the way that last word came out as more of a moan than a word, except that he moaned quietly in her ear, too, breathing hard, his breath stirring her hair.
When he was all the way inside, deep inside, she said, "Hard," she said, "Fast," and he pulled back and thrust hard, and for a moment she couldn't speak, couldn't think, twined her arms around his neck and felt his hair soft against the backs of her wrists. "Yes," she said as soon as she could speak again, "yes, like that, just like that," and he groaned, catching her hips and steadying her and and and taking her at her word, hard and fast and deep, and she thrust back, feet planted to give her more leverage, rising to meet him.
His breath sped up, hot and harsh against her ear, with a little bit of voice behind it, a quiet moan.
And it was good, was good, was good beyond speaking; she made a high keening noise that turned into words, tangled nonsensical words: "yes, yes, yes, come on, hard, yes, that's right, Tseng,"
and he said, "don't let me -- stop me if I'm going to hurt -- "
and she knew he was worried about her shoulder, but she couldn't even feel her shoulder, and she said, "don't stop, faster, that's it, god, you feel so -- keep going, make me feel -- "
and he knew exactly what she meant, she knew it from the way his eyes changed, even before he said " -- yes, Elena," and kept it up, hard and fast and deep, god, just as she'd asked until everything came apart, and pleasure spiked hard so that she had to gasp for air, and she scrambled for something to hang onto and her nails scored down his back, screaming, her thighs wound tight around him, feeling the muscles in his back flexing under her hands.
Usually he held off for a little while after she'd come, and sometimes he'd try for a second orgasm (which wasn’t difficult, she came so quickly the second time) or even, if he was feeling ambitious, a third, but not today, not today. She'd barely finished when he tensed, and his thrusts lost their rhythm, and he made a long savage noise and came. He didn't collapse on top of her -- he had been careful the whole time to keep his weight off her -- but he slid to one side and rested his head against her good shoulder. She could feel him shaking. She ran her hands up his back, stroking sweaty skin until her breath evened out, and so did his.
They lay together for a little while, and then he propped himself up on one elbow and said, "Hungry?"
"Starving," she said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, which turned his back to her, and she saw six angry red lines where her nails had bitten deep; she had even broken the skin in one place. "Ooh," she said, "Uh, I didn't mean to...."
"Hmm?" He craned his neck, trying to look over his own shoulder, then stood and twisted to get a look in the mirror. Then he shrugged and shot her a look so heated that it made her toes curl. "I wasn't complaining then," he said, "and I'm not complaining now."
She pulled on a robe and followed him out of the bedroom. The food had gone cold but reheated beautifully -- some sort of spicy noodle dish, and a welcome change from the bland hospital food -- and they curled around each other to eat it, her head against his chest, her thigh resting on the top of his. Food led to more wine, and wine led to licking a drop off his lips, and one thing led to another and she did get her chance to be on top, straddling him on the couch, slow and slick and warm and comfortable.
She leaned against him, breathing deeply, right on the edge of sleep -- it had been a lot of exertion, and probably not something the doctors would have recommended -- but his silence made her look up. He was looking at her with an odd expression on his face. Drowsily, she settled in against the warmth of his skin and said, "Don't worry. I'm going to do my damndest not to get killed."
"Good," he said, and she felt his smile against her shoulder.
Hit Or Miss
That Elena acted fast and trusted her instincts was, in some ways, both her best and worst attribute.
Final Fantasy 7, Elena/Tseng. 3800 words.
NC-17/MA/Not Worksafe for smut, violence.
It pained Tseng, how often their missions devolved into urban warfare, anymore. It was inevitable, given that no one ruled the ruins of Midgar anymore, but still -- it was inefficient, it was dangerous, and it was especially infuriating now that their numbers were reduced to four. Losing even one of the team would have been crippling.
The worst part was, their enemies seemed to know that. This group -- a former small-time crimeboss, now setting his sights on sucking Shinra dry and then hiding in its husk -- took a positive pleasure in trapping them in street gunfights, and while Tseng wouldn't have had a hundred of his thugs in return for a single Turk, still, being outnumbered was a significant tactical challenge.
Especially when they had you pinned on opposite sides of the intersection. He and Elena had a clear escape route, but no good access to the enemy. Rude and Reno had no clear escape route, and perfect access to the enemy, but insufficient firepower. What they needed were the grenades, which Elena was carrying. (What they really needed was to be in opposite places, because he and Elena were better equipped both literally and in terms of skills for picking them off; Rude and Reno were better at hand-to-hand work. But while he was wishing for things, he might as well throw 'adequate intel' and 'backup' onto the list, too.)
He set his jaw and gave a swift, annoyed headshake. Elena reached back to the string of grenades across the small of her back, which meant that she'd figured out the same thing. "Damn it," she said.
The intersection was completely exposed to enemy fire. It wasn't more than perhaps thirty feet, but thirty feet was more than too much. And yet there wasn't any other good way out --
"I'm going to go," Elena said, interrupting his thoughts. Before he could even think about protesting, she added, "I'm faster than you, anyway." She hefted her gun and hit the intersection at a dead sprint.
She was a motion blur of blue and whitegold, and bullets pocked and pinged off the asphalt in her wake. She almost made it, too.
The bullet caught her high in the chest, almost the shoulder, and the force of it spun her up and around off her feet, so she hit the pavement hard and screaming as much with rage as pain. He realized for one adrenaline-cold second that she wasn't going to get out of the line of fire; she was pushing herself up to her feet on her good arm, but she was right out in the middle of the street, no cover, perfect target --
Rude lunged out from his cover, grabbed her hard by the forearms, and dragged her out of the open. She really screamed then, a thin high animal sound of pure pain, and that wasn't surprising because it was putting her weight on the hole in her chest, and then she was out of sight and her scream stuttered off a few seconds later.
***
"Fuck," Reno said, "fuck, fuck." Rude was already going for the Cure materia on his armband, which was good -- Reno hadn't brought anything but his flashy stuff, Fire and Bolt and Haste. Rude tore her shirt open to reveal the bloody mess of her shoulder and chest; the wound made a wet sucking sound. She shook, blood bubbling a little at the corner of her mouth, her jaw clenched so hard Reno imagined he could hear her teeth crack. Her eyes kept trying to roll back in her head.
He snapped the leather strap off his EMR and put pressure on her jaw to lever her mouth open, then forced it between her teeth. "Bite that," he said; not that she could probably hear him, descending deeply into shock as she was, but her teeth ground down on the leather and it held. Green fire flared from Rude's fingers. A bullet struck the corner of the building, and Reno pressed his back flat to the wall, edging around just long enough to return fire.
"Punctured lung," Rude said, his voice terse and clipped. "I think I can keep her from suffocating but that's it. We need to get her out now."
"Doin' the best I can," Reno said. It was ironic because he was a perfectly good marksman but their firearms experts were Tseng -- who was pinned on the other side of the intersection where he couldn't do much -- and Elena. But he had the advantage that now he didn't just want to kill them because it was his job, he really wanted to kill them, because it was understood that Turks sometimes got fucked up or killed doing their jobs but it was also tacitly understood that if that happened to you, well, your teammates would make sure to pay back whoever worked you over, with interest.
It didn't actually go on that long, but pinned down with bullets cracking off the bricks around his cover and Elena gurgling on her breaths behind him it felt like forever. It felt like entirely too fucking long.
"Fuck this," he said. "Gimme one of her grenades."
"They're too -- "
"Have some faith in my methods."
Rude grunted and shifted Elena gingerly until he could get at her string of grenades and slide one loose. He flipped it to Reno, who caught it without looking.
Marksmanship wasn't Reno's thing, but he could climb like a spider. They were still looking for his head to pop up around the cover again when he dropped the grenade straight down onto their heads.
She was still breathing, but her lips were turning blue, when they got her into the helicopter. Reno was smart and decided not to comment on it when Tseng silently took over the duty of making sure that Elena was still breathing from Rude, even though there wasn't much to do but sit with her and hit her with another Cure whenever her breathing started to gurgle off.
***
Asleep, even drugged to the gills and wired up with IV drips and sensors, Elena looked -- not innocent, and not younger than she was; perhaps simply as young as she actually was. It was easy for Tseng to forget that she hadn't yet seen the far side of twenty-five, and that there were more than ten years between them, because she worked so hard to appear confident and mature, and generally successfully so.
It put him in mind of a memory -- a memory in which their positions had been reversed, and one that still made him flinch reflexively. He'd been shot, cut up, burned, stabbed, and half-drowned, but for pure pain, being pinned to the floor with a sword, like some sort of entomologist's nightmare, and left to helplessly bleed out on the floor of the Temple of the Ancients still topped the list. He'd expected to die there, and in fact still had no good memory of getting out -- just of waking up, some long time later, in Shinra's elite medical facilities in Midgar.
It had been dark when he woke, and quiet, and he'd thought he was alone until his eyes finally focused on the bent blonde head, face shielded by the ragged edges of her hair as she dozed off in a hard plastic chair, a paper cup of coffee slipping slowly out of her fingers, and he'd said "Elena?" a little disbelievingly. It hurt to breathe.
That jolted her awake. "Sir," she said, getting a better grip on the cup of coffee. She took a sip, made a face, and put it aside. "How do you feel?"
He hurt -- a long line of pain throbbed fierce but dull like banked coals across his stomach, even through what he knew were serious painkillers -- but he was constitutionally incapable of saying anything other than, "As well as can be expected," and then, "What are you doing here?"
"The doctors said you'd be coming around any time now. We thought someone ought to be around when you woke up," she said.
"Mn," he said. It was hard to focus, which meant the painkillers were working. Well, that and the fact that he was pretty sure he'd been gutted like a fish and yet he was able to sit up, sort of, and carry on a conversation, sort of. "How did I -- "
"We got you out," she said. "Sir."
It would be an embarassingly long time before he realized that the 'we' in both those sentences meant 'I,' mostly (although, to give credit where due, Reno and Rude and the helicopter had played a vital role). He never let her know he knew.
Her wounds now were not so bad as his had been then: but the Turks no longer had the services of the world's best medical professionals at their beck and call. Those who hadn't died in the collapse had mostly fled; they made do now with considerably diminished resources. (Which was true of so many things.) Nonetheless, it was clear that she wold pull through once they got her out of the street and into professional care, and the doctors predicted a full recovery, just as they had accurately predicted a full recovery from his own Sephiroth-inflicted wound.
But still he stopped by her bed whenever his duties allowed him the time, and when her eyes fluttered open the next day, he smiled, and said, "We thought someone ought to be around when you woke up."
They released her four days later, with stern admonishment to rest and allow the Cure magic and potions in her system to fully rebuild her skin and muscle tissue before she strained them.
"Dinner?" he asked, when they were in the hallway with the illusion of a little privacy.
She looked so genuinely dismayed that he wanted to smile, and decided not to. "Oh -- I don't know if I have the energy to go anywhere, right now -- "
He let his hand settle on her good shoulder, lightly. "My apartment?"
Her smile could still catch him off guard. "That, I think I can manage."
***
Tseng was always weirdly... she didn't know the word for it. Adult, maybe. His apartment looked fully-furnished, whereas hers still had a half-lived-in look. He brought her wine. His books were on bookshelves rather than still in boxes. She wasn't sure why this all impressed her, but it did.
When he stopped fiddling with the food and joined her on the couch, she regarded him over the top of her wineglass. He looked back at her -- unfazed, unruffled, apparently unconcerned with her staring. "How's your shoulder feel?"
"Fine," she said. "Itches." As always his apartment made her feel peculiar: she simultaneously wanted to sink back into its understate luxury and felt restless, trembling beneath her skin, an itch that extended well past the border of her new scar. She was suddenly tired of small talk. She put her glass aside, and leaned forward, and kissed him. He put his own down without missing a beat and took her face between the palms of his hands and kissed her back. She parted her lips, seeking more, and he didn't deny her: but he also kept it slow, even gentle. The brush of his tongue simmered through her, leaving her loose-limbed and feverish. When trying to hurry him didn't work, she got her hands in his hair, her nails scratching lightly against his scalp, something guaranteed to make him shiver.
And he did shiver, but he didn't speed up. He worked her shirt off very slowly, one button at a time. Then the buttons at her wrists. Then he pushed it off her shoulders, barely touching her skin, and she squirmed with impatience. "What's the rush?" he asked, his lips brushing lightly against her throat and shoulder. "We've got time." It remind her that Tseng was more experienced than the boys she'd slept with at the academy, more deliberate, more patient. And as always she was torn between liking that and wanting to enjoy it, and wanting to drive him crazy so he couldn't help but lose control.
His mouth moved lower, down over the inner dip of her shoulder to the scar. Wounds healed quickly with materia and potions didn't scar nearly as badly as wounds healed the old-fashioned way, but you still couldn't blow a hole in your chest and get away unmarked. She was relieved that the wound was high enough that it hadn't destroyed the shape of her breast.
She slid her hand up the back of his neck and through his hair; if he was going to go so slowly she might as well enjoy it. His tongue rasped against the scar and she couldn't hold back a little whimper, though she tried. His mouth moved down to close around her nipple, and then she didn't even try to keep quiet.
She leaned back and he went with her, one arm under her wasit, his lips and tongue moving over her nipple until she squirmed and whimpered, and was a little embarrassed by the sounds: soft, needy, even girly, but there was no way she was going to be able to keep quiet like this, so she didn't try. She ran her fingers through his hair, brushed them across the nape of his neck, tangled up by didn't grab or pull. He kissed his way up her throat to her ear, and she felt his breath hot and her name on his voice almost too quiet to hear, but not quite. She could hear him, oh yes. Oh yes.
He shifted her just a little and she slid into his lap, and oh god, the slowness of his pace notwithstanding he was hard. She made a small hungry noise and ground against him without thinking, and his expression went from languid to fierce like a switch flipping. She thought my turn, with a little curl of delight that frissioned up her spine and made her smile, smile, smile stupidly. But he was smiling too, so it was okay. Smiling, and the look in his eyes dark and hot enough to scald her skin, nearly as breath-stealingas his touch.
"Want you," she said, unnecessarily. Her words broke the long silence, cracked it open, and that changed the mood, too. It made her giddy.
"Yes," he said. He fumbled a little as he unfastened her pants, and that was how she knew he was really worked up, demeanor notwithstanding.
"Here?" she said. She rocked against him again, just to feel him, and he made a low helpless noise.
"Nnn," he said. "No. I want more room to . . . ." She squirmed closer, pressing her breasts against him, feeling the contrast between the cool fabric of his shirt and the warmth of his skin. ". . . maneuver," he finished.
"You're making me sound like a field exercise," she protested, laughing, and kissed him before he could respond.
He tightened his arms around her and stood up suddenly, with her still wrapped around him. His mouth on hers made it hard to think. She didn't let go of him when they got to the bed, so they sort of... collapsed onto it, with her nuzzling at his throat and him laughing. He took the opportunity to tug her pants off. "Come on," she said, "I'm naked and you've barely got your shirt open."
He smirked, smug as ever, but obliged her: sat up to peel out of his clothing, and she could have watched the way muscles moved in his back for days. "You're looking predatory," he said, crawling up the bed to lean over her. "Should I be worried that you bite?"
"Oh yes," she said. "Worry." His chuckle was low and resonant. She silenced him by winding her hand in his hair and using it to drag him down for a kiss, not gentle, biting lightly at his lower lip. He didn't bite her back -- he almost never did -- but he coaxed her tongue into his mouth and sucked it firmly, until she moaned and squirmed.
He rolled over to rest against her, between her thighs, propped on his arms to keep his full weight off her. She drew her knees up, spreading wider and tilting her hips up, so he could settle in against her. "Mm," he said. "I don't want to -- I mean, you are still recovering."
"That's why I'm not trying to roll you over," she said. That made him smile. "It'll be fine. It'll be fine." She arched to rub against him. "Anyway, if you stop now I'm going to kill you."
"I wasn't planning on stopping," he said. He kissed her, very very lightly, just lips and the slightest brush of his tongue against her mouth.
"Tease," she said, and lifted her hips to rub wet and slow against his length just to watch his eyes flutter shut and to see him swallow hard.
"Elena," he said, as if he just wanted to hear her name. "Tell me what you want."
"You," she said, before she had time to think. She pushed herself up on her elbows to rub against him, skin on skin.
He bent his head, kissed her, said: "Would you care to be more specific?" Her voice was shaking, and she considered it vastly unfair that his wasn't.
"You," she said again, breathlessly, "in me, now, come on..."
His fingertips pressed her open and she caught her breath. "Keep talking," he murmured, positioning himself and then looking at her, like he could wait all day for her to go on, and he probably could. Fuck. "Tell me." Tell me and I'll do it hung in the air between them, unspoken. His eyes were very dark. Her mouth went dry.
"Come on," she said again, "I want your cock inside me. Now." His eyes locked with hers, and he pulled his fingers away and pressed into her, the thick head of his cock sliding in, stretching her just a little, not enough to hurt. She moaned. He pressed his mouth against her neck just below her ear and said, "Keep going." And his voice was a little unsteady, which delighted her, so she did.
"All the way," she said, as he slipped inch by inch into her, taking his time -- "all the way, god, deep, that's good" -- she couldn't put her thoughts in order, so her words came out jumbled. “God, that’s good, that’s - I love the way you feel,” she said, and would have been embarrassed by the way that last word came out as more of a moan than a word, except that he moaned quietly in her ear, too, breathing hard, his breath stirring her hair.
When he was all the way inside, deep inside, she said, "Hard," she said, "Fast," and he pulled back and thrust hard, and for a moment she couldn't speak, couldn't think, twined her arms around his neck and felt his hair soft against the backs of her wrists. "Yes," she said as soon as she could speak again, "yes, like that, just like that," and he groaned, catching her hips and steadying her and and and taking her at her word, hard and fast and deep, and she thrust back, feet planted to give her more leverage, rising to meet him.
His breath sped up, hot and harsh against her ear, with a little bit of voice behind it, a quiet moan.
And it was good, was good, was good beyond speaking; she made a high keening noise that turned into words, tangled nonsensical words: "yes, yes, yes, come on, hard, yes, that's right, Tseng,"
and he said, "don't let me -- stop me if I'm going to hurt -- "
and she knew he was worried about her shoulder, but she couldn't even feel her shoulder, and she said, "don't stop, faster, that's it, god, you feel so -- keep going, make me feel -- "
and he knew exactly what she meant, she knew it from the way his eyes changed, even before he said " -- yes, Elena," and kept it up, hard and fast and deep, god, just as she'd asked until everything came apart, and pleasure spiked hard so that she had to gasp for air, and she scrambled for something to hang onto and her nails scored down his back, screaming, her thighs wound tight around him, feeling the muscles in his back flexing under her hands.
Usually he held off for a little while after she'd come, and sometimes he'd try for a second orgasm (which wasn’t difficult, she came so quickly the second time) or even, if he was feeling ambitious, a third, but not today, not today. She'd barely finished when he tensed, and his thrusts lost their rhythm, and he made a long savage noise and came. He didn't collapse on top of her -- he had been careful the whole time to keep his weight off her -- but he slid to one side and rested his head against her good shoulder. She could feel him shaking. She ran her hands up his back, stroking sweaty skin until her breath evened out, and so did his.
They lay together for a little while, and then he propped himself up on one elbow and said, "Hungry?"
"Starving," she said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, which turned his back to her, and she saw six angry red lines where her nails had bitten deep; she had even broken the skin in one place. "Ooh," she said, "Uh, I didn't mean to...."
"Hmm?" He craned his neck, trying to look over his own shoulder, then stood and twisted to get a look in the mirror. Then he shrugged and shot her a look so heated that it made her toes curl. "I wasn't complaining then," he said, "and I'm not complaining now."
She pulled on a robe and followed him out of the bedroom. The food had gone cold but reheated beautifully -- some sort of spicy noodle dish, and a welcome change from the bland hospital food -- and they curled around each other to eat it, her head against his chest, her thigh resting on the top of his. Food led to more wine, and wine led to licking a drop off his lips, and one thing led to another and she did get her chance to be on top, straddling him on the couch, slow and slick and warm and comfortable.
She leaned against him, breathing deeply, right on the edge of sleep -- it had been a lot of exertion, and probably not something the doctors would have recommended -- but his silence made her look up. He was looking at her with an odd expression on his face. Drowsily, she settled in against the warmth of his skin and said, "Don't worry. I'm going to do my damndest not to get killed."
"Good," he said, and she felt his smile against her shoulder.