fic - star trek rps - give it up
title: Give It Up
pairing: Chris/Zach (Star Trek RPS)
rating: PG-13
word count: ~2,200
summary: “Oh, no,” Zach deadpans, feigning an exaggerated look of horror, “you found my stash of kinky sex paraphernalia. Whatever will I do.” He rolls his eyes. “Seriously, you read sex into everything; it’s pathological. They’re for shaving.” He goes back to what’s probably the New York Times, then looks up again and adds pointedly, “For shaving facial hair.”
disclaimer: This is a completely fictional story written about fictional constructs of real people. I make no profit; I do not know these people; and I intend no disrespect whatsoever.
notes: Written for the prompt "Zach/Chris, Zach shaving Chris's beard" at trek_rpf_kink.
“Dude,” Chris calls from the bathroom. “What is all this shit?”
He pokes his head out around the doorframe and holds up a couple oddly colored brushes, a ceramic-like block, an unlabelled white tube the size of chapstick, and a strip of leather.
“Or, wait, should I not ask?” he says with a smirk.
“Hm?” Zach looks up from the newspaper he’s reading, just in time to see Chris waggle his eyebrows.
As always, Zach catches on quickly.
“Oh, no,” he deadpans, feigning an exaggerated look of horror, “you found my stash of kinky sex paraphernalia. Whatever will I do.” He rolls his eyes. “Seriously, you read sex into everything; it’s pathological. They’re for shaving.” He goes back to what’s probably the New York Times, then looks up again and adds pointedly, “For shaving facial hair.”
“Hey, you said it.”
“Call it a preemptive strike,” Zach says dryly.
Chris grins, stuffs the equipment back into the cabinet below the sink, and comes back out to sit at the breakfast bar in the stool next to Zach’s. He leans an elbow on the counter.
“So, what-Gillette just doesn’t make the cut?”
“That is an atrocious pun, Christopher, one for which you deserve to be punished.”
He’s still holding the newspaper in front of his face like it’s Cosmo and Chris is his pedicurist, which he probably knows Chris will take as a challenge.
“Ha fucking ha, you’re a regular laugh riot. Seriously, though. A straight razor?”
“It allows for precision, and the shave actually lasts the whole day.”
“Precision, huh?”
“Mm. A concept foreign to a mountain man such as yourself, I understand.”
“Au contraire, mon ami. I grew the beard in the pursuit of precision. For my art!” Zach’s still not looking, but Chris affects a tragic pose, hand over his wounded heart. “To help me ‘penetrate Stephen’s miserable je ne sais quoi.’”
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to read your own press?”
“Says Mr. Google Alert.”
“You wound me,” Zach says, and finally puts the paper to the side. “But you can’t use that excuse anymore, man. Run’s over.”
“Yeah,” Chris says and runs a wistful hand over his scruff. “Just haven’t gotten around to getting rid of it yet.”
“I could do it for you,” Zach says, disinterested and casual as you please.
Chris swallows and goes for an appropriately jocular tone. “Think I’m going to let you anywhere near my livelihood with a fucking razor?”
“You wouldn’t get any work without the pretty face, this is true.”
“That’s not what you said to at least a dozen interviewers,” Chris says.
“It was a press junket. The express purpose was to entice people to see the movie; I could hardly tell them that the iconic Captain Kirk functioned as little more than eye-candy.”
“You flatter me, really.”
Zach smiles at him, sharp and just a little sweet, and Chris gets up for a glass of water. (Chris does not have it bad, no matter what Zoe says.)
“The offer was genuine,” Zach says.
Chris remembers his first high school lit professor, who told him that when an author you trust repeats something in a work-an idea, a phrase-it always, always means something.
He downs the water in one go, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and says, “Sure, why not.”
*
Chris watches in fascination as Zach sets everything up-bringing a chair into the bathroom, wetting a cloth, pulling out the weird brush, the chapstick thing, and a, whoa, a really fucking sharp razor.
He feels his eyes widen, and one hand goes almost involuntarily to his throat. Zach could easily slit it with that thing.
Zach meets his eyes in the mirror then turns around to face Chris. The bathroom’s not that small, but Chris is close enough to the sink that Zach can reach out with his hand to tip Chris’s chin up, exposing the line of his throat.
Chris swallows hard, feels his Adam’s apple bob.
“Don’t worry,” Zach says lightly, letting go and turning to face the mirror again. “I promised Zo she wouldn’t have to help me hide another body for at least a few years. Can’t have the cops getting suspicious.”
“The straight razor killer? Hmm. No, not inventive enough; no ring to it.”
“Ironic enough,” Zach says, and that’s about as close to a confession as Chris has ever heard from him.
Chris sits.
“All right,” Zach says, bringing the cloth from the sink. Chris expects him to hand it over, tell Chris to wet his face with it, but instead Zach takes a corner of the cloth and starts to do it himself. The cloth’s soaked warm, almost hot, and is softer than any towel Chris has ever used before. He closes his eyes, partly because it feels good and partly because wow, this is really intimate and they haven’t even actually started yet.
He opens them again when Zach steps away, feeling the rush of air chill his skin. This time Zach turns around with a mug and a brush in either hand. He holds up the mug and says, “Fairly self-explanatory, but-shaving soap-” then raises the brush “-and badger hair brush.”
“What the fuck? Badger hairbrush? How is that self-explanatory?”
“Ah, yes, how could I forget? You’re but a shaving plebe. The brush is essential to a good shave-it both exfoliates and helps to create a more emollient lather.”
Chris laughs, feeling some of the tension leave his shoulders. Zach smiles slyly. He once told Chris that he hates nothing so much as people not being able to tell if he’s joking or not, and Chris is just really glad he gets quirky humor.
“Okay, I know it’s going to be a Herculean task for you, but you need keep your mouth shut for an indeterminate amount of time, starting now,” Zach says, and just when Chris is about to open his mouth to retort, Zach shoves the lathered brush in his face, right around his lips.
He expresses his (extremely witty, thanks) response as best he can with just his eyes. Zach darts his own eyes up briefly, in time to catch the look, and chuckles. “Mm, blessed silence,” he says obnoxiously, focusing once again on lathering.
The brush’s bristles feel weirdly good, paradoxically both rough and gentle, and the soap, cooling his heated skin, smells familiar.
Zach comes over with the razor once he’s lathered just Chris’s upper lip and chin. He walks around behind the chair, presses close enough that Chris can feel his body heat against his back. Then he rests his left arm on Chris’s left shoulder and uses his left hand, cupped under Chris’s chin, to tilt Chris’s face, eyeing its position carefully in the mirror.
He brings his right hand-the hand holding the razor-up until it’s centimeters away from Chris’s chin. “Don’t move,” he murmurs, right next to Chris’s ear, and angles the blade acutely.
The first stroke is anticlimactic-“Breathe,” Zach says in that low, quiet voice, and Chris realizes he hasn’t been-and extremely disorienting at the same time. No one has ever shaved Chris’s face except Chris, and to feel the blade skim across his skin while his hands are in his lap is startling, unpredictable, like being touched by another person for the first time. (Shit, bad analogy, Chris thinks.)
Zach carefully wipes the excess lather off on his left hand, on the small expanse of skin between his thumb and forefinger, then goes back to work on Chris’s chin, making even, practiced strokes all in a neat row.
Chris doesn’t know where to look. Zach’s eyes are-thankfully-intently focused on the razor’s edge, but Chris alternates uncomfortably between crossing his eyes to look down at his face and staring at their reflections in the mirror.
The quiet is starting to get to him, maybe taking on a charged quality only in his imagination, but Chris is an actor-he has a pretty powerful imagination. He wants to start humming John Phillip Sousa or something, something jaunty to take his mind away from Zach’s arms wrapped practically around him, Zach’s attention so wholly on him. Usually he likes attention, but he doesn’t know how to obfuscate a goddamned thing when someone-when Zach-is this close. It’s a relief when he goes to rinse the lather from his hand, but of course only a momentary one.
As Zach moves up from Chris’s chin to work on his mustache, his thumb settles against Chris’s lower lip. Chris inhales sharply through his nose. Zach’s eyes dart up to meet his in the mirror again. “All right?” he says, taking his hands away so that Chris can safely reply.
“Yeah,” Chris says hoarsely, clears his throat and tries again. “Yeah.”
“Good,” Zach says, leaning back down to resume, but, Chris notices, taking care not to touch his lip again even though it makes the shaving more difficult.
Suddenly Zach says, “Shit-” and hurries to the sink. He sets the razor down with a clatter, picking up the weird white tube and running the end under water.
“Wha-” Chris starts, and then he feels the sting.
“Sorry,” Zach apologizes, holding Chris’s chin in one hand. “This is going to burn a little,” he continues, and applies the end of the stick to Chris’s cut.
It does burn, but it also stops the bleeding very quickly.
“Styptic pencil,” Zach says before Chris can ask. “Type of antihemorrhagic.”
“Handy,” he observes, feeling like a tool.
“I’m just going to-” Zach grabs the cloth and rewets it, rubs and rinses Chris’s skin right where it was starting to get tight and would soon have gotten itchy. He’s careful around the cut.
Chris wishes he knew what to say to bring back the repartee they’re usually so good at, but Zach is now facing him, near enough that his individual eyelashes are distinct. In fact, if Chris had poorer close vision he could pretend that Zach was staring at his mouth, which is a thought not at all conducive to thought.
Next Zach turns to Chris’s left cheek, staying bent down to lather it. Chris’s eyes turn traitorously to the periphery, watching Zach in soft focus until he stands up. He sets the brush down to pick the razor up, and maneuvers so that his right forearm is directly in front of Chris’s line of vision while his left arm snakes around Chris’s chin. His left hand cups the side of Chris’s tilted face, fingers perpendicular to his cheekbone. “Relax your neck,” he murmurs. “I’ve got you.”
Chris shuts his eyes and does, lets Zach hold his head up, the side of his throat completely exposed, vulnerable.
The drag of the blade against his skin feels more pronounced now, whether because the blade is slightly blunter, because Chris’s eyes are shut, or because the skin on the side of his face is more sensitive, Chris doesn’t know.
When Zach finishes the left side and steps away to get the towel, Chris keeps his eyes closed. His head feels heavy.
Zach positions himself in an almost exact mirror of just before to shave the right cheek, supports Chris’s head again, and as stilted and awkward as Chris feels, he kind of stupidly wishes he had a dozen more cheeks.
His earlier analogy might have been bad in one sense, but it’s pretty accurate; he feels like he’s been laid out and tied up and touched everywhere. By the time Zach kneels in front of him to clean the last of the lather off, he’s flushed and loose-limbed and his skin feels charged, like Zach is one of those static electricity balls in museums, the ones that make your hair stand on end.
He opens his eyes uncertainly, thinking he probably looks drugged, or maybe like a cat perched on a radiator, just as Zach swipes the towel against his chin for the last time. In its wake, his thumb sweeps across the now smooth slope of Chris’s cheek.
“There,” he says quietly, meeting Chris’s gaze with warmth, maybe even a little wonder, his right hand still supporting Chris’s chin.
It makes it easy to tip forward and kiss him, visions of ruined friendship and worries about disparity notwithstanding.
Zach reciprocates almost immediately, slides his left hand onto the nape of Chris’s neck as they kiss slowly.
When they break, Zach breathes, “Jesus,” into the space between them. “You were so good,” he says, almost in a rush, and Chris shudders a little. They kiss again, briefly. “So fucking pliant.”
“You like that, hm?” Chris says, trying for a little of his usual equilibrium.
“Mmm.”
“Well,” Chris smiles against Zach’s lips, “don’t get too used to it.”
“No? Is that a challenge, Mr. Pine?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Chris says, and gets ready to lose spectacularly.
He doesn’t think he’ll mind all that much.
pairing: Chris/Zach (Star Trek RPS)
rating: PG-13
word count: ~2,200
summary: “Oh, no,” Zach deadpans, feigning an exaggerated look of horror, “you found my stash of kinky sex paraphernalia. Whatever will I do.” He rolls his eyes. “Seriously, you read sex into everything; it’s pathological. They’re for shaving.” He goes back to what’s probably the New York Times, then looks up again and adds pointedly, “For shaving facial hair.”
disclaimer: This is a completely fictional story written about fictional constructs of real people. I make no profit; I do not know these people; and I intend no disrespect whatsoever.
notes: Written for the prompt "Zach/Chris, Zach shaving Chris's beard" at trek_rpf_kink.
“Dude,” Chris calls from the bathroom. “What is all this shit?”
He pokes his head out around the doorframe and holds up a couple oddly colored brushes, a ceramic-like block, an unlabelled white tube the size of chapstick, and a strip of leather.
“Or, wait, should I not ask?” he says with a smirk.
“Hm?” Zach looks up from the newspaper he’s reading, just in time to see Chris waggle his eyebrows.
As always, Zach catches on quickly.
“Oh, no,” he deadpans, feigning an exaggerated look of horror, “you found my stash of kinky sex paraphernalia. Whatever will I do.” He rolls his eyes. “Seriously, you read sex into everything; it’s pathological. They’re for shaving.” He goes back to what’s probably the New York Times, then looks up again and adds pointedly, “For shaving facial hair.”
“Hey, you said it.”
“Call it a preemptive strike,” Zach says dryly.
Chris grins, stuffs the equipment back into the cabinet below the sink, and comes back out to sit at the breakfast bar in the stool next to Zach’s. He leans an elbow on the counter.
“So, what-Gillette just doesn’t make the cut?”
“That is an atrocious pun, Christopher, one for which you deserve to be punished.”
He’s still holding the newspaper in front of his face like it’s Cosmo and Chris is his pedicurist, which he probably knows Chris will take as a challenge.
“Ha fucking ha, you’re a regular laugh riot. Seriously, though. A straight razor?”
“It allows for precision, and the shave actually lasts the whole day.”
“Precision, huh?”
“Mm. A concept foreign to a mountain man such as yourself, I understand.”
“Au contraire, mon ami. I grew the beard in the pursuit of precision. For my art!” Zach’s still not looking, but Chris affects a tragic pose, hand over his wounded heart. “To help me ‘penetrate Stephen’s miserable je ne sais quoi.’”
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to read your own press?”
“Says Mr. Google Alert.”
“You wound me,” Zach says, and finally puts the paper to the side. “But you can’t use that excuse anymore, man. Run’s over.”
“Yeah,” Chris says and runs a wistful hand over his scruff. “Just haven’t gotten around to getting rid of it yet.”
“I could do it for you,” Zach says, disinterested and casual as you please.
Chris swallows and goes for an appropriately jocular tone. “Think I’m going to let you anywhere near my livelihood with a fucking razor?”
“You wouldn’t get any work without the pretty face, this is true.”
“That’s not what you said to at least a dozen interviewers,” Chris says.
“It was a press junket. The express purpose was to entice people to see the movie; I could hardly tell them that the iconic Captain Kirk functioned as little more than eye-candy.”
“You flatter me, really.”
Zach smiles at him, sharp and just a little sweet, and Chris gets up for a glass of water. (Chris does not have it bad, no matter what Zoe says.)
“The offer was genuine,” Zach says.
Chris remembers his first high school lit professor, who told him that when an author you trust repeats something in a work-an idea, a phrase-it always, always means something.
He downs the water in one go, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and says, “Sure, why not.”
*
Chris watches in fascination as Zach sets everything up-bringing a chair into the bathroom, wetting a cloth, pulling out the weird brush, the chapstick thing, and a, whoa, a really fucking sharp razor.
He feels his eyes widen, and one hand goes almost involuntarily to his throat. Zach could easily slit it with that thing.
Zach meets his eyes in the mirror then turns around to face Chris. The bathroom’s not that small, but Chris is close enough to the sink that Zach can reach out with his hand to tip Chris’s chin up, exposing the line of his throat.
Chris swallows hard, feels his Adam’s apple bob.
“Don’t worry,” Zach says lightly, letting go and turning to face the mirror again. “I promised Zo she wouldn’t have to help me hide another body for at least a few years. Can’t have the cops getting suspicious.”
“The straight razor killer? Hmm. No, not inventive enough; no ring to it.”
“Ironic enough,” Zach says, and that’s about as close to a confession as Chris has ever heard from him.
Chris sits.
“All right,” Zach says, bringing the cloth from the sink. Chris expects him to hand it over, tell Chris to wet his face with it, but instead Zach takes a corner of the cloth and starts to do it himself. The cloth’s soaked warm, almost hot, and is softer than any towel Chris has ever used before. He closes his eyes, partly because it feels good and partly because wow, this is really intimate and they haven’t even actually started yet.
He opens them again when Zach steps away, feeling the rush of air chill his skin. This time Zach turns around with a mug and a brush in either hand. He holds up the mug and says, “Fairly self-explanatory, but-shaving soap-” then raises the brush “-and badger hair brush.”
“What the fuck? Badger hairbrush? How is that self-explanatory?”
“Ah, yes, how could I forget? You’re but a shaving plebe. The brush is essential to a good shave-it both exfoliates and helps to create a more emollient lather.”
Chris laughs, feeling some of the tension leave his shoulders. Zach smiles slyly. He once told Chris that he hates nothing so much as people not being able to tell if he’s joking or not, and Chris is just really glad he gets quirky humor.
“Okay, I know it’s going to be a Herculean task for you, but you need keep your mouth shut for an indeterminate amount of time, starting now,” Zach says, and just when Chris is about to open his mouth to retort, Zach shoves the lathered brush in his face, right around his lips.
He expresses his (extremely witty, thanks) response as best he can with just his eyes. Zach darts his own eyes up briefly, in time to catch the look, and chuckles. “Mm, blessed silence,” he says obnoxiously, focusing once again on lathering.
The brush’s bristles feel weirdly good, paradoxically both rough and gentle, and the soap, cooling his heated skin, smells familiar.
Zach comes over with the razor once he’s lathered just Chris’s upper lip and chin. He walks around behind the chair, presses close enough that Chris can feel his body heat against his back. Then he rests his left arm on Chris’s left shoulder and uses his left hand, cupped under Chris’s chin, to tilt Chris’s face, eyeing its position carefully in the mirror.
He brings his right hand-the hand holding the razor-up until it’s centimeters away from Chris’s chin. “Don’t move,” he murmurs, right next to Chris’s ear, and angles the blade acutely.
The first stroke is anticlimactic-“Breathe,” Zach says in that low, quiet voice, and Chris realizes he hasn’t been-and extremely disorienting at the same time. No one has ever shaved Chris’s face except Chris, and to feel the blade skim across his skin while his hands are in his lap is startling, unpredictable, like being touched by another person for the first time. (Shit, bad analogy, Chris thinks.)
Zach carefully wipes the excess lather off on his left hand, on the small expanse of skin between his thumb and forefinger, then goes back to work on Chris’s chin, making even, practiced strokes all in a neat row.
Chris doesn’t know where to look. Zach’s eyes are-thankfully-intently focused on the razor’s edge, but Chris alternates uncomfortably between crossing his eyes to look down at his face and staring at their reflections in the mirror.
The quiet is starting to get to him, maybe taking on a charged quality only in his imagination, but Chris is an actor-he has a pretty powerful imagination. He wants to start humming John Phillip Sousa or something, something jaunty to take his mind away from Zach’s arms wrapped practically around him, Zach’s attention so wholly on him. Usually he likes attention, but he doesn’t know how to obfuscate a goddamned thing when someone-when Zach-is this close. It’s a relief when he goes to rinse the lather from his hand, but of course only a momentary one.
As Zach moves up from Chris’s chin to work on his mustache, his thumb settles against Chris’s lower lip. Chris inhales sharply through his nose. Zach’s eyes dart up to meet his in the mirror again. “All right?” he says, taking his hands away so that Chris can safely reply.
“Yeah,” Chris says hoarsely, clears his throat and tries again. “Yeah.”
“Good,” Zach says, leaning back down to resume, but, Chris notices, taking care not to touch his lip again even though it makes the shaving more difficult.
Suddenly Zach says, “Shit-” and hurries to the sink. He sets the razor down with a clatter, picking up the weird white tube and running the end under water.
“Wha-” Chris starts, and then he feels the sting.
“Sorry,” Zach apologizes, holding Chris’s chin in one hand. “This is going to burn a little,” he continues, and applies the end of the stick to Chris’s cut.
It does burn, but it also stops the bleeding very quickly.
“Styptic pencil,” Zach says before Chris can ask. “Type of antihemorrhagic.”
“Handy,” he observes, feeling like a tool.
“I’m just going to-” Zach grabs the cloth and rewets it, rubs and rinses Chris’s skin right where it was starting to get tight and would soon have gotten itchy. He’s careful around the cut.
Chris wishes he knew what to say to bring back the repartee they’re usually so good at, but Zach is now facing him, near enough that his individual eyelashes are distinct. In fact, if Chris had poorer close vision he could pretend that Zach was staring at his mouth, which is a thought not at all conducive to thought.
Next Zach turns to Chris’s left cheek, staying bent down to lather it. Chris’s eyes turn traitorously to the periphery, watching Zach in soft focus until he stands up. He sets the brush down to pick the razor up, and maneuvers so that his right forearm is directly in front of Chris’s line of vision while his left arm snakes around Chris’s chin. His left hand cups the side of Chris’s tilted face, fingers perpendicular to his cheekbone. “Relax your neck,” he murmurs. “I’ve got you.”
Chris shuts his eyes and does, lets Zach hold his head up, the side of his throat completely exposed, vulnerable.
The drag of the blade against his skin feels more pronounced now, whether because the blade is slightly blunter, because Chris’s eyes are shut, or because the skin on the side of his face is more sensitive, Chris doesn’t know.
When Zach finishes the left side and steps away to get the towel, Chris keeps his eyes closed. His head feels heavy.
Zach positions himself in an almost exact mirror of just before to shave the right cheek, supports Chris’s head again, and as stilted and awkward as Chris feels, he kind of stupidly wishes he had a dozen more cheeks.
His earlier analogy might have been bad in one sense, but it’s pretty accurate; he feels like he’s been laid out and tied up and touched everywhere. By the time Zach kneels in front of him to clean the last of the lather off, he’s flushed and loose-limbed and his skin feels charged, like Zach is one of those static electricity balls in museums, the ones that make your hair stand on end.
He opens his eyes uncertainly, thinking he probably looks drugged, or maybe like a cat perched on a radiator, just as Zach swipes the towel against his chin for the last time. In its wake, his thumb sweeps across the now smooth slope of Chris’s cheek.
“There,” he says quietly, meeting Chris’s gaze with warmth, maybe even a little wonder, his right hand still supporting Chris’s chin.
It makes it easy to tip forward and kiss him, visions of ruined friendship and worries about disparity notwithstanding.
Zach reciprocates almost immediately, slides his left hand onto the nape of Chris’s neck as they kiss slowly.
When they break, Zach breathes, “Jesus,” into the space between them. “You were so good,” he says, almost in a rush, and Chris shudders a little. They kiss again, briefly. “So fucking pliant.”
“You like that, hm?” Chris says, trying for a little of his usual equilibrium.
“Mmm.”
“Well,” Chris smiles against Zach’s lips, “don’t get too used to it.”
“No? Is that a challenge, Mr. Pine?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Chris says, and gets ready to lose spectacularly.
He doesn’t think he’ll mind all that much.