14 more days to go.
I'm feeling the pressure again. ~_~ I hope I make it.
103. During Lunch. Endtimes.
With the trainees attending classes, the regular Hunters on duty and the interns on break, the fifth floor of Netsach became an empty stage for Calintz, Feränen, Blake and Trent to perform on. Making full use of the powerful sound system in the branch, the four put on a play list of their favorite songs from an era of ripped jeans, b-movies and bad hairdos and sang to each one together, complete with appropriate air guitar motions and stage dramatization.
When Aidan Clayce opened the door of his private office to behold this sight, he managed to preserve his sanity by wisely shutting it again and remaining inside for the rest of the afternoon.
104. Hello Again. Thick as Thieves.
What does it mean to follow? What does it mean to be left behind?
Ouki Yamada had uttered those words to him at seventeen years old, in Amsterdam. What Alistair remembered most about the moment was not that Ouki had spoken, but that his young boss had wrapped his arms around his neck, smiling and whispering as he pressed close. He hadn’t known what Ouki could have meant at the time, and sometimes he liked to speculate that if he had, he might’ve been able to avoid its curse.
Do you love me, Alistair? Love is such an easy word to abuse.
Dying once had taught Alistair that his old life had been all about space: the distance between him and Maes in the front door of their Ireland home, two bar stools for him and Aidan in Farground, the dirty bed in Sureri with Hikaru stretched across of it, the junior’s lounge where Rethe tried to cut his arms open. Of the four, two of them walked away from him and he could do nothing. The other two he tried to drive away before they could do the same.
He was ‘tamed’ during his time in Arcis because Ganymede was there to hold him in check: his life had ordered itself at that point, and maybe that was why it had been all right for him to set everything up for his ritual suicide. It would have been perfect if the Methuselah hadn’t decided that it would be perfectly all right for them to bring a dead man back to life. Alistair went right along with their wishes rather than protest. Maybe something in him had figured this was penance. Then Hikaru Shinta came back and everything changed.
105. Distraction. Citrus Avenue, boys’ side.
Consider this a prologue to my past Mafuyu x Yue drabbles that I did for this challenge, and a sort of teaser for how things go with this couple in Citrus Avenue itself. :3
Yue Rukia’s form with the bow was perfection; his stance spoke of languid power and grace, and each action he perfect was executed with flawless, effortless ease. It was a marvel to find someone so young have such complete mastery of the art, whether he was in the midst of a crowd or completely alone in the archery range, just him and a circular target nearly one hundred meters way.
In the early phases of their relationship, Mafuyu had admired his roommate from a distance, respecting the space between them in as much as he feared the crumbling of his own resolve. After taking recent events into consideration, however, the law student could see no reason why he had to restrain himself. Repression of one’s desires had, after all, caused the whole mess for them in the first place. So it was without regrets that Mafuyu intruded upon the sanctity of the archery room and came up behind Yue as the latter strung another arrow to the bow, wrapping his arms about that slender form. A gasp touched the air, slight, like the trace of pink marring Yue’s cheeks. Those were Mafuyu’s only rewards.
“M-Mafuyu-san.”
“Keep going, Yue,” Mafuyu murmured, stroking Yue’s elbow with his free hand even as he snaked his other arm around the boy’s slim waist. He pressed closer, leaning his cheek against Yue’s face and feeling the embarrassed heat radiating off his roommate’s skin.
“S-senpai… I can’t c-concentrate like this…”
“Don’t be silly. Of course you can.”
Yue gulped, tearing his gaze away from the narrowed look in Mafuyu’s as he blushed even harder than he already was. The boy tried to re-focus himself on the bull’s eye and place his thoughts away from the fact that Mafuyu was breathing him in, nibbling along his neck. The older student’s hands were moving lower. They slid underneath the hakama he was wearing, just as he was about to let the arrow fly.
“What a waste,” Mafuyu mildly remarked, looking off in the direction the arrow had flown, completely missing the target. He didn’t stop the motion of his hand gently kneading that spot below the boy’s waist and between his legs in as much as he didn’t seem to hear Yue whimper when he sped up. “Try again.”
The heat was becoming unbearable. Yue could feel his whole being right down to his fingers quivering as he struggled to aim again, even with Mafuyu pressed against his back, touching him just about everywhere. He could feel himself growing hard in Mafuyu’s grip, just as much as he knew his concentration was slipping. The bow clattered to the floor.
“Now, now, Yue, you know you should be practicing from the inter-school tournament,” Mafuyu murmured, even as Yue fell back against him, shaking in his grasp. He had to admire the way the boy was trying his best not to cry out. One result was the soft, irresistible sounds of intermingled pleasure and protest that escaped Yue’s throat.
Mafuyu only clicked his tongue when Yue came in his grip barely five minutes later, as though his hand job had nothing to do with the incident. He smiled, right into the boy’s flushed cheeks and glazed eyes.
“Let’s get you cleaned up.”
He took Yue against the tiled wall of the bathhouse in slow, deep strokes, pressing as close to the boy as he could and leaning forward, letting the sound of the rising pleasure in Yue’s every gasp and moan lend to the furthering of his own passions. The shower water beat down upon them relentlessly, and there was nothing but the steam rising up from the heat all around them to conceal them from sight.
When he tired of coupling, Mafuyu pulled the boy down into the shallows, where Yue could brace himself against the edge of the tub as he showered that pale-skinned, lithe figure with kisses. Yue bit down upon his knuckles to fight off crying out when Mafuyu’s lips closed down upon him. The older student’s tongue alone was enough to drive him crazy.
Some time passed before Yue found himself seated upon Mafuyu’s lap in almost chest-high water, struggling to catch his breath and wrap his mind around the fact that they had fucked almost an hour and a half and they still weren’t moving from the tub where they were, with Mafuyu holding on to his waist and playing chair. He languished a few more moments in the attempt to think of some way to extricate himself from his roommate’s grasp and escape, if only for the moment.
“Mafuyu-san, I… I really need to leave soon. I have some tests I need to study for.”
“Are you asking me to hold you down and fuck you again?”
“N-no!”
Mafuyu leaned forward, kissing his younger roommate fully on the lips. “Then sit and behave,” he whispered as soon as they broke apart. Then he turned away, watching some invisible thing beyond the training hall’s bathhouse.
Yue, in the meantime, did exactly as he was told.
106. The Hollow. Thick as Thieves.
This one’s a teaser for the fourth and fifth arcs of Thick as Thieves, and it takes place generally before all of the happy, happy Alistair x Hikaru pieces I wrote in previous drabbles.
The first kiss was chaste, near reverent, and the boy carefully responded to his attentions, parting his lips to let him to slip his tongue between them. He felt the other shiver within his grasp as soon as he had a taste of the other’s mouth, and leaned forward to allow his companion to fold into him. Those slender arms reached upward, hesitant to touch him back until he guided them close enough, tracing his fingers across pale skin and the bandages concealing its scars from sight.
Alistair only broke away from it when he felt Hikaru whimper against his lips, and he pulled back, holding still and saying nothing as the young hunter leaned his forehead against his chest and breathed. The Seer brushed his lips against that dark, silken hair.
“It’s hurting you again, isn’t it?”
The arms wound about his neck tightened. “We shouldn’t do this. I can’t…”
“This time will be different.” Those eyes landed upon him, startled out of their pain. The light in them was fever-pitched and bruised, like the abuse written on Hikaru’s skin. “I won’t hurt you.”
The trust Hikaru put in him was almost heartbreaking. Everything in the Bladian’s body screamed fear and reluctance, but when he reached downward to brush the bangs out of those eyes the other merely closed his eyes and submitted. Alistair tasted salt in their third kiss, but he could not see the tears.
Their clothes marked their progress from the door to the bed, but there was no end to the resistance; even in his single-minded determination to loosen the Bladian up, Hikaru constantly attempted to fend him off. Alistair finally took the younger man by the wrists and kissed him, just kissed him, until the tension set within those shoulders melted away. The salt was still there; it lingered on Hikaru’s lips.
He thought himself ready to see the damage; how many times had he seen Hikaru, watched the other move through the day wrapped up to his fingers in bandages? They had come together in the past; it wasn’t supposed to matter. But it had never been like that, and he hadn’t realized the bladesong could move so quickly.
Hikaru lay still beneath him, seeming too scared to dare breathing; his bandaged hands had risen upward the moment Alistair had released his hold, and covered the young man’s eyes from view. Alistair took the hands away, intertwining his fingers between Hikaru’s own as he leaned forward to kiss the eyelids open, then work his way downward, from jaw line to belly. A ragged sob wrung itself from Hikaru’s throat the moment Alistair went past his hips and caressed his sex with his tongue. The young Bladian’s fingers tangled themselves within the Seer’s hair as he shut his eyes again.
“Don’t… I can’t… please…” Hikaru swallowed his words along with the dry fear in his throat as Alistair took hold of his legs, gently spreading them apart. “You can’t possibly want this… or want me.”
It was a while before Alistair responded; the Seer had turned from him to snatch up the small, plastic square sitting on the table. He tore open the top with two fingers. “I’d think it’d be a little late for you to start complaining again,” he said in a low voice; he breathed his words over Hikaru’s skin. When his companion didn’t respond, he kissed the Bladian again. “If I didn’t want this,” he murmured as he slipped his fingers in, “I wouldn’t be here.”
Coming inside was almost like coming home. Alistair took his companion with a single thrust, felt Hikaru arch beneath him; the young Bladian held fast to his silence, but he shivered when the older man reached out to touch him, to kiss away the furrowed brow or sweep the bangs from his face. It was hot and marvelously tight inside, pressing around Alistair at the slightest move. The Seer pulled back only to press in again, deeper, lessening the space between them. Hikaru’s breath hitched in the air. There was enough hurt to leave the boy reeling. It broke the Bladian’s resistance limb by limb, turning it fluid. Alistair could feel it shifting under his touch, with each hitched breath that left Hikaru’s gasping lips.
This was completion. For a long while Alistair lingered, holding his lover’s wrists crossed at the younger man’s back, fully sheathed into that slender body trembling in precarious silence beneath him. The Seer freed up one of his hands to reach downward and stroke his partner out of that frightened hesitance, knowing that he had done well when a moan touched the air before Hikaru could hold it back. He only released the Bladian’s wrists after he was certain that the other would do nothing, and let the rhythm take hold.
Alistair was unsure of exactly when he lost control; all he was certain of was that it was too much for him in the end, when the pain dissolved into pleasure for the lithe, scarred young body that was now in his possession. He was wrung, he was spent, and he could do nothing but thrust, stroke, thrust, conscious only of burning and friction and a litany of sound and vulnerability. Even that was lost when he grazed that place within that sent Hikaru shuddering into release. He managed to still himself on the crest of his lover’s pleasure, riding it, following it downwards to the fall.
Moonlight and half-shadows still greeted Alistair’s eyes when clarity returned to him. The silence reigned unchallenged over their place of sheets and pillows and warmth. Hikaru lay curled up on the other side of the bed; the wounds marring that smooth, pale back glared at Alistair from across a distance that had grown in their midst somewhere between climax and repose. The space was not un-crossable, and when he reached out to take the other in his arms it wasn’t because he simply wished to challenge it.
The younger man went rigid under his fingers. From there, Alistair knew that Hikaru was still awake.
“You’re shaking.”
Alistair received no answer, and could only look on as Hikaru braced himself with his arms and curled in even tighter; it was quiet enough for him to hear his companion’s breath in the air, ragged with sobs made only more heart wrenching with the boy’s attempts to stifle them. He turned Hikaru around in his arms before he even realized it, and leaving the younger man to shake himself apart couldn’t have been right either. He pulled the boy in close, so close that it was hard to tell which one of them was trembling.
They spent a long time like that together. Alistair stared off beyond moonlight and shadows, carefully running his fingers through that soft hair or down hot skin, kept from floating away completely only by the feel of someone sobbing in his arms and the taste of salt still on his lips. He didn’t know when the drift ended, only that Hikaru had quieted down and he hadn’t been aware of it. Then reality came back to him again, in three words.
“It’s not you.”
Alistair blinked out of mind traveling, and glanced downward in time to see Hikaru shut his eyes, breathe out, and slump against him as though he didn’t have the strength to do anything else. “It’s not,” the young man softly repeated, answering a question that Alistair would never dare to say aloud.
“It used to be.”
Hikaru didn’t answer him. Alistair drew the blanket around them and didn’t speak.
There was no Hikaru to greet him when he woke up, only the shallow dent on the space beside him that might have been a boy he’d slept with. Alistair got up, showered, and promptly vanished from the residential compound after a solitary breakfast, losing himself amidst the crowded streets of the Sureri District. Eyes followed him from corner to corner, from his departure to his return. Zangyaku’s whisperers felt no pressing need to conceal themselves from him. That did little to cure his mood.
It would be early in the evening when he found Hikaru again. Alistair turned a corner in the main wing and the Bladian was there, speaking with his closest associates. He wasn’t wearing white, for once, and it was easier to note the fresh bandages that way. Still, at that point, the boy couldn’t have looked better… the Seer had always considered gray and black to be colors for Rethe, but with the tasteful way Hikaru arrayed himself he was willing to indulge the change of scenery. That, and the skin, or what skin he could see from beneath the cloth or the bandages. Supple perfection, even in the bloodied breaks they gave way to. The feast of blades and demons and ghosts of the past.
Alistair stopped where he was, and watched the proceedings from that distance. While Hikaru made no outward indication of noticing him, the others in the group made their feelings on the matter painfully obvious. Feränen bristled up like a threatened wolverine, Trent’s near-coherent report was reduced to a nervous mumble, and Marrigan’s coldly luminous eyes locked dead on Alistair and did not move away from him for the rest of the meeting, even when she addressed her companions. Kasumi and Yue showed no distaste or disapproval, but the frost about them was thick enough to taste in the air.
Hikaru left the group first; the young Bladian gave his dismissal and turned away, walking past Alistair as though the Seer was little more than a part of the doorframe. Alistair followed, removing himself from the presence of Zangyaku’s elite more out of personal convenience rather than shame. Zangyaku’s Wolf walked through his compound and the Seer played shadow up until the central courtyard, where Hikaru finally broke the silence.
“You’re back early. Did anything happen?”
“I got bored.”
“Ah.”
There among gnarled cherry blossom trees big enough to punch through skyscrapers, Alistair felt the presence of the divine. He might have run away from it, had Hikaru not been there. He watched the younger man now from where he stood at the center of a clearing, looking up at the largest of the trees. Pale pink blossoms showered upon the both of them, glowing in the final brilliance of the late afternoon sun.
“Aidan dropped by this morning. That’s why I wasn’t around. He brings news.”
For the first time since their reunion in the compound’s dojo, Hikaru sounded his age, maybe even younger. The edge was gone, all emotions stripped bare save for that which made the Bladian susceptible to what would only hurt him, or make him appear weak. Even from that short distance, however, the bearing of a warrior was written into every limb. This was the boy that could rip him to shreds in under a blink. His viciousness and vulnerability was what made his oni-tsukai to follow him into the depths of hell.
“The syndicates in Arcis have been taken care of, and Miriam’s arranged a way out for you on the first flight next week. You’re finally free to go.”
Hikaru was slipping away from him, and he wasn’t even moving. The Bladian turned around, violet eyes filled with the kind of aching quiet that needed nothing but the wan, pained smile that always followed it.
“Farewell, Seer. I’m sorry Zangyaku could not offer you anything else.”
The wind picked up, stirring through the branches of the trees and sending cheery blossom petals swirling up towards white clouds and blue sky. When Alistair tried to speak, he could not find the words.
107. Over. Thick as Thieves.
Companion piece to #107: The Hollow.
It was a windless summer day at the peak of the cicada mating hours, where the sound of the little drones seemed to overpower everything else in the lower sectors of Arcis. While the rest of the metropolis went about its business and generally ignored the sweltering heat, in small pockets of fresh air like a place much like that one, time slowed to a crawl and everything within that space appeared abandoned, right down to cigarette smoke. They traveled upward, in small, wispy blue chimneys that bled into the overabundance of sky and drastic shortage of fluffy white clouds above.
Since he saw one such orphaned smoke stack rising up from the back of his pick-up truck, Alistair knew he wasn’t alone in the yard out behind his apartment building, which he often turned into his shooting range on a regular basis. The Seer watched the truck from where it was parked under the tree, never taking his eyes off the tell-tale sign of a smoker even as he cooled himself off with the aid of the garden hose and crystal clear water at the other end of the yard. He didn’t bother toweling himself dry when he was finished, only picked his gun case up and approached the truck. Suffice to say, the sight of Aidan lying face up at the back of his pick-up truck and smoking was enough of an eye-opener for Alistair, when he went over to investigate.
“I was waiting for you.”
“Ah.”
Alistair concealed his surprise to the best of his abilities as he watched Aidan sit up and set his back against the driver’s pit as he lit up another cigarette. White t-shirt, faded plaid flannel something tied around the waist, ripped jeans. It was a novelty, seeing Aidan dressed so informally. It was also a novelty to encounter a Voidseeker that didn’t feel the need to be nasty to him, regardless of the reasons.
“I heard what happened, back in Tokyo. Hearing might be the wrong word for it though, since Hikaru didn’t tell me anything, and neither did the rest of Zangyaku’s hunters. They didn’t have to.”
Alistair set his gun case in the back and wordlessly lifted a cigarette to his lips. Aidan offered him a lighter. “Rethe thinks you love him,” said the Voidseeker, softly, as he drew away. “I told him that I doubt you can even say that for yourself.”
“You’re right. I can’t.”
“Mm.”
This quiet camaraderie between them was something that Alistair had not thought possible, and he figured that Aidan must’ve felt the same way, to an extent. On a regular day Aidan hardly made an attempt to be civil with him and the Seer’s own attitude didn’t help. It was funny how Hikaru was the one bringing them together like that, and Hikaru wasn’t even there or aware of it.
“Marrigan wasn’t kidding when she said that you might be his last way out. He’s betrothed to the Princess of Japan, and Marrigan herself has probably left by now. Something… something’s happening to him that none of us can place our fingers on. It won’t do any good for him to be alone.”
Alistair did not ask Aidan how he knew such things. The Voidseeker was aware of what was happening to them in this small pocket of somewhere just as he knew about volcano eruptions, earthquakes, car accidents, suicides. The difference was that Aidan could do something about what was going on in the world. When it came to emotional ruts, he could only warn the ones involved.
“…I don’t understand how things came to be the way they are. I never intended…”
“Neither did him. So here the both of you are.”
Aidan took a drag of his cigarette, turning his face up to watch the sky.
“I still think you’re a bastard, but it isn’t my place to stop any of this. That’s your decision, and his.”
They must have gone through two packs of cigarettes between them, just hanging around the pick up truck and smoking and saying nothing, before Aidan hopped off and approached the lines of battered cans and other makeshift targets. Alistair joined him, and they fired away until sunset. The Seer invited the Voidseeker in for a drink, but the latter opted for a Stout out front, where they had a perfect view of the birth of stars across the skyline. Five bottles, and Aidan was gone without a word. Alistair lingered a moment longer. His thoughts touched upon Japan a sea away, and then he opted to think no more.
Feedback appreciated. And welcome back to the Philippines, archangel_dream. You were greatly missed.
103. During Lunch. Endtimes.
With the trainees attending classes, the regular Hunters on duty and the interns on break, the fifth floor of Netsach became an empty stage for Calintz, Feränen, Blake and Trent to perform on. Making full use of the powerful sound system in the branch, the four put on a play list of their favorite songs from an era of ripped jeans, b-movies and bad hairdos and sang to each one together, complete with appropriate air guitar motions and stage dramatization.
When Aidan Clayce opened the door of his private office to behold this sight, he managed to preserve his sanity by wisely shutting it again and remaining inside for the rest of the afternoon.
104. Hello Again. Thick as Thieves.
What does it mean to follow? What does it mean to be left behind?
Ouki Yamada had uttered those words to him at seventeen years old, in Amsterdam. What Alistair remembered most about the moment was not that Ouki had spoken, but that his young boss had wrapped his arms around his neck, smiling and whispering as he pressed close. He hadn’t known what Ouki could have meant at the time, and sometimes he liked to speculate that if he had, he might’ve been able to avoid its curse.
Do you love me, Alistair? Love is such an easy word to abuse.
Dying once had taught Alistair that his old life had been all about space: the distance between him and Maes in the front door of their Ireland home, two bar stools for him and Aidan in Farground, the dirty bed in Sureri with Hikaru stretched across of it, the junior’s lounge where Rethe tried to cut his arms open. Of the four, two of them walked away from him and he could do nothing. The other two he tried to drive away before they could do the same.
He was ‘tamed’ during his time in Arcis because Ganymede was there to hold him in check: his life had ordered itself at that point, and maybe that was why it had been all right for him to set everything up for his ritual suicide. It would have been perfect if the Methuselah hadn’t decided that it would be perfectly all right for them to bring a dead man back to life. Alistair went right along with their wishes rather than protest. Maybe something in him had figured this was penance. Then Hikaru Shinta came back and everything changed.
105. Distraction. Citrus Avenue, boys’ side.
Consider this a prologue to my past Mafuyu x Yue drabbles that I did for this challenge, and a sort of teaser for how things go with this couple in Citrus Avenue itself. :3
Yue Rukia’s form with the bow was perfection; his stance spoke of languid power and grace, and each action he perfect was executed with flawless, effortless ease. It was a marvel to find someone so young have such complete mastery of the art, whether he was in the midst of a crowd or completely alone in the archery range, just him and a circular target nearly one hundred meters way.
In the early phases of their relationship, Mafuyu had admired his roommate from a distance, respecting the space between them in as much as he feared the crumbling of his own resolve. After taking recent events into consideration, however, the law student could see no reason why he had to restrain himself. Repression of one’s desires had, after all, caused the whole mess for them in the first place. So it was without regrets that Mafuyu intruded upon the sanctity of the archery room and came up behind Yue as the latter strung another arrow to the bow, wrapping his arms about that slender form. A gasp touched the air, slight, like the trace of pink marring Yue’s cheeks. Those were Mafuyu’s only rewards.
“M-Mafuyu-san.”
“Keep going, Yue,” Mafuyu murmured, stroking Yue’s elbow with his free hand even as he snaked his other arm around the boy’s slim waist. He pressed closer, leaning his cheek against Yue’s face and feeling the embarrassed heat radiating off his roommate’s skin.
“S-senpai… I can’t c-concentrate like this…”
“Don’t be silly. Of course you can.”
Yue gulped, tearing his gaze away from the narrowed look in Mafuyu’s as he blushed even harder than he already was. The boy tried to re-focus himself on the bull’s eye and place his thoughts away from the fact that Mafuyu was breathing him in, nibbling along his neck. The older student’s hands were moving lower. They slid underneath the hakama he was wearing, just as he was about to let the arrow fly.
“What a waste,” Mafuyu mildly remarked, looking off in the direction the arrow had flown, completely missing the target. He didn’t stop the motion of his hand gently kneading that spot below the boy’s waist and between his legs in as much as he didn’t seem to hear Yue whimper when he sped up. “Try again.”
The heat was becoming unbearable. Yue could feel his whole being right down to his fingers quivering as he struggled to aim again, even with Mafuyu pressed against his back, touching him just about everywhere. He could feel himself growing hard in Mafuyu’s grip, just as much as he knew his concentration was slipping. The bow clattered to the floor.
“Now, now, Yue, you know you should be practicing from the inter-school tournament,” Mafuyu murmured, even as Yue fell back against him, shaking in his grasp. He had to admire the way the boy was trying his best not to cry out. One result was the soft, irresistible sounds of intermingled pleasure and protest that escaped Yue’s throat.
Mafuyu only clicked his tongue when Yue came in his grip barely five minutes later, as though his hand job had nothing to do with the incident. He smiled, right into the boy’s flushed cheeks and glazed eyes.
“Let’s get you cleaned up.”
He took Yue against the tiled wall of the bathhouse in slow, deep strokes, pressing as close to the boy as he could and leaning forward, letting the sound of the rising pleasure in Yue’s every gasp and moan lend to the furthering of his own passions. The shower water beat down upon them relentlessly, and there was nothing but the steam rising up from the heat all around them to conceal them from sight.
When he tired of coupling, Mafuyu pulled the boy down into the shallows, where Yue could brace himself against the edge of the tub as he showered that pale-skinned, lithe figure with kisses. Yue bit down upon his knuckles to fight off crying out when Mafuyu’s lips closed down upon him. The older student’s tongue alone was enough to drive him crazy.
Some time passed before Yue found himself seated upon Mafuyu’s lap in almost chest-high water, struggling to catch his breath and wrap his mind around the fact that they had fucked almost an hour and a half and they still weren’t moving from the tub where they were, with Mafuyu holding on to his waist and playing chair. He languished a few more moments in the attempt to think of some way to extricate himself from his roommate’s grasp and escape, if only for the moment.
“Mafuyu-san, I… I really need to leave soon. I have some tests I need to study for.”
“Are you asking me to hold you down and fuck you again?”
“N-no!”
Mafuyu leaned forward, kissing his younger roommate fully on the lips. “Then sit and behave,” he whispered as soon as they broke apart. Then he turned away, watching some invisible thing beyond the training hall’s bathhouse.
Yue, in the meantime, did exactly as he was told.
106. The Hollow. Thick as Thieves.
This one’s a teaser for the fourth and fifth arcs of Thick as Thieves, and it takes place generally before all of the happy, happy Alistair x Hikaru pieces I wrote in previous drabbles.
The first kiss was chaste, near reverent, and the boy carefully responded to his attentions, parting his lips to let him to slip his tongue between them. He felt the other shiver within his grasp as soon as he had a taste of the other’s mouth, and leaned forward to allow his companion to fold into him. Those slender arms reached upward, hesitant to touch him back until he guided them close enough, tracing his fingers across pale skin and the bandages concealing its scars from sight.
Alistair only broke away from it when he felt Hikaru whimper against his lips, and he pulled back, holding still and saying nothing as the young hunter leaned his forehead against his chest and breathed. The Seer brushed his lips against that dark, silken hair.
“It’s hurting you again, isn’t it?”
The arms wound about his neck tightened. “We shouldn’t do this. I can’t…”
“This time will be different.” Those eyes landed upon him, startled out of their pain. The light in them was fever-pitched and bruised, like the abuse written on Hikaru’s skin. “I won’t hurt you.”
The trust Hikaru put in him was almost heartbreaking. Everything in the Bladian’s body screamed fear and reluctance, but when he reached downward to brush the bangs out of those eyes the other merely closed his eyes and submitted. Alistair tasted salt in their third kiss, but he could not see the tears.
Their clothes marked their progress from the door to the bed, but there was no end to the resistance; even in his single-minded determination to loosen the Bladian up, Hikaru constantly attempted to fend him off. Alistair finally took the younger man by the wrists and kissed him, just kissed him, until the tension set within those shoulders melted away. The salt was still there; it lingered on Hikaru’s lips.
He thought himself ready to see the damage; how many times had he seen Hikaru, watched the other move through the day wrapped up to his fingers in bandages? They had come together in the past; it wasn’t supposed to matter. But it had never been like that, and he hadn’t realized the bladesong could move so quickly.
Hikaru lay still beneath him, seeming too scared to dare breathing; his bandaged hands had risen upward the moment Alistair had released his hold, and covered the young man’s eyes from view. Alistair took the hands away, intertwining his fingers between Hikaru’s own as he leaned forward to kiss the eyelids open, then work his way downward, from jaw line to belly. A ragged sob wrung itself from Hikaru’s throat the moment Alistair went past his hips and caressed his sex with his tongue. The young Bladian’s fingers tangled themselves within the Seer’s hair as he shut his eyes again.
“Don’t… I can’t… please…” Hikaru swallowed his words along with the dry fear in his throat as Alistair took hold of his legs, gently spreading them apart. “You can’t possibly want this… or want me.”
It was a while before Alistair responded; the Seer had turned from him to snatch up the small, plastic square sitting on the table. He tore open the top with two fingers. “I’d think it’d be a little late for you to start complaining again,” he said in a low voice; he breathed his words over Hikaru’s skin. When his companion didn’t respond, he kissed the Bladian again. “If I didn’t want this,” he murmured as he slipped his fingers in, “I wouldn’t be here.”
Coming inside was almost like coming home. Alistair took his companion with a single thrust, felt Hikaru arch beneath him; the young Bladian held fast to his silence, but he shivered when the older man reached out to touch him, to kiss away the furrowed brow or sweep the bangs from his face. It was hot and marvelously tight inside, pressing around Alistair at the slightest move. The Seer pulled back only to press in again, deeper, lessening the space between them. Hikaru’s breath hitched in the air. There was enough hurt to leave the boy reeling. It broke the Bladian’s resistance limb by limb, turning it fluid. Alistair could feel it shifting under his touch, with each hitched breath that left Hikaru’s gasping lips.
This was completion. For a long while Alistair lingered, holding his lover’s wrists crossed at the younger man’s back, fully sheathed into that slender body trembling in precarious silence beneath him. The Seer freed up one of his hands to reach downward and stroke his partner out of that frightened hesitance, knowing that he had done well when a moan touched the air before Hikaru could hold it back. He only released the Bladian’s wrists after he was certain that the other would do nothing, and let the rhythm take hold.
Alistair was unsure of exactly when he lost control; all he was certain of was that it was too much for him in the end, when the pain dissolved into pleasure for the lithe, scarred young body that was now in his possession. He was wrung, he was spent, and he could do nothing but thrust, stroke, thrust, conscious only of burning and friction and a litany of sound and vulnerability. Even that was lost when he grazed that place within that sent Hikaru shuddering into release. He managed to still himself on the crest of his lover’s pleasure, riding it, following it downwards to the fall.
Moonlight and half-shadows still greeted Alistair’s eyes when clarity returned to him. The silence reigned unchallenged over their place of sheets and pillows and warmth. Hikaru lay curled up on the other side of the bed; the wounds marring that smooth, pale back glared at Alistair from across a distance that had grown in their midst somewhere between climax and repose. The space was not un-crossable, and when he reached out to take the other in his arms it wasn’t because he simply wished to challenge it.
The younger man went rigid under his fingers. From there, Alistair knew that Hikaru was still awake.
“You’re shaking.”
Alistair received no answer, and could only look on as Hikaru braced himself with his arms and curled in even tighter; it was quiet enough for him to hear his companion’s breath in the air, ragged with sobs made only more heart wrenching with the boy’s attempts to stifle them. He turned Hikaru around in his arms before he even realized it, and leaving the younger man to shake himself apart couldn’t have been right either. He pulled the boy in close, so close that it was hard to tell which one of them was trembling.
They spent a long time like that together. Alistair stared off beyond moonlight and shadows, carefully running his fingers through that soft hair or down hot skin, kept from floating away completely only by the feel of someone sobbing in his arms and the taste of salt still on his lips. He didn’t know when the drift ended, only that Hikaru had quieted down and he hadn’t been aware of it. Then reality came back to him again, in three words.
“It’s not you.”
Alistair blinked out of mind traveling, and glanced downward in time to see Hikaru shut his eyes, breathe out, and slump against him as though he didn’t have the strength to do anything else. “It’s not,” the young man softly repeated, answering a question that Alistair would never dare to say aloud.
“It used to be.”
Hikaru didn’t answer him. Alistair drew the blanket around them and didn’t speak.
There was no Hikaru to greet him when he woke up, only the shallow dent on the space beside him that might have been a boy he’d slept with. Alistair got up, showered, and promptly vanished from the residential compound after a solitary breakfast, losing himself amidst the crowded streets of the Sureri District. Eyes followed him from corner to corner, from his departure to his return. Zangyaku’s whisperers felt no pressing need to conceal themselves from him. That did little to cure his mood.
It would be early in the evening when he found Hikaru again. Alistair turned a corner in the main wing and the Bladian was there, speaking with his closest associates. He wasn’t wearing white, for once, and it was easier to note the fresh bandages that way. Still, at that point, the boy couldn’t have looked better… the Seer had always considered gray and black to be colors for Rethe, but with the tasteful way Hikaru arrayed himself he was willing to indulge the change of scenery. That, and the skin, or what skin he could see from beneath the cloth or the bandages. Supple perfection, even in the bloodied breaks they gave way to. The feast of blades and demons and ghosts of the past.
Alistair stopped where he was, and watched the proceedings from that distance. While Hikaru made no outward indication of noticing him, the others in the group made their feelings on the matter painfully obvious. Feränen bristled up like a threatened wolverine, Trent’s near-coherent report was reduced to a nervous mumble, and Marrigan’s coldly luminous eyes locked dead on Alistair and did not move away from him for the rest of the meeting, even when she addressed her companions. Kasumi and Yue showed no distaste or disapproval, but the frost about them was thick enough to taste in the air.
Hikaru left the group first; the young Bladian gave his dismissal and turned away, walking past Alistair as though the Seer was little more than a part of the doorframe. Alistair followed, removing himself from the presence of Zangyaku’s elite more out of personal convenience rather than shame. Zangyaku’s Wolf walked through his compound and the Seer played shadow up until the central courtyard, where Hikaru finally broke the silence.
“You’re back early. Did anything happen?”
“I got bored.”
“Ah.”
There among gnarled cherry blossom trees big enough to punch through skyscrapers, Alistair felt the presence of the divine. He might have run away from it, had Hikaru not been there. He watched the younger man now from where he stood at the center of a clearing, looking up at the largest of the trees. Pale pink blossoms showered upon the both of them, glowing in the final brilliance of the late afternoon sun.
“Aidan dropped by this morning. That’s why I wasn’t around. He brings news.”
For the first time since their reunion in the compound’s dojo, Hikaru sounded his age, maybe even younger. The edge was gone, all emotions stripped bare save for that which made the Bladian susceptible to what would only hurt him, or make him appear weak. Even from that short distance, however, the bearing of a warrior was written into every limb. This was the boy that could rip him to shreds in under a blink. His viciousness and vulnerability was what made his oni-tsukai to follow him into the depths of hell.
“The syndicates in Arcis have been taken care of, and Miriam’s arranged a way out for you on the first flight next week. You’re finally free to go.”
Hikaru was slipping away from him, and he wasn’t even moving. The Bladian turned around, violet eyes filled with the kind of aching quiet that needed nothing but the wan, pained smile that always followed it.
“Farewell, Seer. I’m sorry Zangyaku could not offer you anything else.”
The wind picked up, stirring through the branches of the trees and sending cheery blossom petals swirling up towards white clouds and blue sky. When Alistair tried to speak, he could not find the words.
107. Over. Thick as Thieves.
Companion piece to #107: The Hollow.
It was a windless summer day at the peak of the cicada mating hours, where the sound of the little drones seemed to overpower everything else in the lower sectors of Arcis. While the rest of the metropolis went about its business and generally ignored the sweltering heat, in small pockets of fresh air like a place much like that one, time slowed to a crawl and everything within that space appeared abandoned, right down to cigarette smoke. They traveled upward, in small, wispy blue chimneys that bled into the overabundance of sky and drastic shortage of fluffy white clouds above.
Since he saw one such orphaned smoke stack rising up from the back of his pick-up truck, Alistair knew he wasn’t alone in the yard out behind his apartment building, which he often turned into his shooting range on a regular basis. The Seer watched the truck from where it was parked under the tree, never taking his eyes off the tell-tale sign of a smoker even as he cooled himself off with the aid of the garden hose and crystal clear water at the other end of the yard. He didn’t bother toweling himself dry when he was finished, only picked his gun case up and approached the truck. Suffice to say, the sight of Aidan lying face up at the back of his pick-up truck and smoking was enough of an eye-opener for Alistair, when he went over to investigate.
“I was waiting for you.”
“Ah.”
Alistair concealed his surprise to the best of his abilities as he watched Aidan sit up and set his back against the driver’s pit as he lit up another cigarette. White t-shirt, faded plaid flannel something tied around the waist, ripped jeans. It was a novelty, seeing Aidan dressed so informally. It was also a novelty to encounter a Voidseeker that didn’t feel the need to be nasty to him, regardless of the reasons.
“I heard what happened, back in Tokyo. Hearing might be the wrong word for it though, since Hikaru didn’t tell me anything, and neither did the rest of Zangyaku’s hunters. They didn’t have to.”
Alistair set his gun case in the back and wordlessly lifted a cigarette to his lips. Aidan offered him a lighter. “Rethe thinks you love him,” said the Voidseeker, softly, as he drew away. “I told him that I doubt you can even say that for yourself.”
“You’re right. I can’t.”
“Mm.”
This quiet camaraderie between them was something that Alistair had not thought possible, and he figured that Aidan must’ve felt the same way, to an extent. On a regular day Aidan hardly made an attempt to be civil with him and the Seer’s own attitude didn’t help. It was funny how Hikaru was the one bringing them together like that, and Hikaru wasn’t even there or aware of it.
“Marrigan wasn’t kidding when she said that you might be his last way out. He’s betrothed to the Princess of Japan, and Marrigan herself has probably left by now. Something… something’s happening to him that none of us can place our fingers on. It won’t do any good for him to be alone.”
Alistair did not ask Aidan how he knew such things. The Voidseeker was aware of what was happening to them in this small pocket of somewhere just as he knew about volcano eruptions, earthquakes, car accidents, suicides. The difference was that Aidan could do something about what was going on in the world. When it came to emotional ruts, he could only warn the ones involved.
“…I don’t understand how things came to be the way they are. I never intended…”
“Neither did him. So here the both of you are.”
Aidan took a drag of his cigarette, turning his face up to watch the sky.
“I still think you’re a bastard, but it isn’t my place to stop any of this. That’s your decision, and his.”
They must have gone through two packs of cigarettes between them, just hanging around the pick up truck and smoking and saying nothing, before Aidan hopped off and approached the lines of battered cans and other makeshift targets. Alistair joined him, and they fired away until sunset. The Seer invited the Voidseeker in for a drink, but the latter opted for a Stout out front, where they had a perfect view of the birth of stars across the skyline. Five bottles, and Aidan was gone without a word. Alistair lingered a moment longer. His thoughts touched upon Japan a sea away, and then he opted to think no more.
Feedback appreciated. And welcome back to the Philippines, archangel_dream. You were greatly missed.