Being Human: Sleep Twitch [Hal/Leo]
Title: “Sleep Twitch”
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: R
Timeline: 1955
Summary: The first month together doesn’t go as planned. Except there was never any plan, and some would say it could have gone worse. [Hal/Leo]
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC.
A/N: This story took ages to write because my Cutler muse bullied every other Being Human muse in existence. In his opinion, Hal should only be shipped with him.
SLEEP TWITCH
"Away with the past. I've done with the old world for ever, and may I have no news, no echo, from it. To a new life, new places, and no looking back!" But instead of delight his soul was filled with such gloom, and his heart ached with such anguish, as he had never known in his life before.
Fyodor Dostoyevski. “The Brothers Karamazov”
Hal doesn’t like being touched. Lord Harry uses touch as a means to an end, an occasional brush of fingers against someone’s cheek, deceptively gentle; gloved hand closing around a wrist in warning; teeth ripping open a vein. Every touch is carefully prepared for; every touch has a designation.
The others know better than to bring chaos into his order. Knew better, he has to remind himself. It’s been a few days, he hasn’t really counted how many, and his hunger coils and uncoils inside him like a restless serpent. He is feverish and gripped by all sorts of panic. When Leo pats his shoulder in reassurance, Hal rears his head and snarls:
“Get your paws off me, you filthy mutt!” He suffocates and sputters and rants: “How dare you even imagine that you are allowed to lay your hands on me, you disgusting louse-!”
Leo watches him calmly and then he suddenly flicks Hal on the nose.
Hal gapes at him. It is such a silly, insolent gesture, childish even. Leo gives him a wide, unapologetic smile and explains that it was what his grandmother did to placate him whenever he got too worked up. Hal doesn’t know what is more bizarre: to be brimming with such a turbulent mixture of disdain and gratitude towards the same person, or that Leo has taken a page out of his grandmother’s book to reign in an Old One.
Hal looks away.
“What are we doing?” he asks wearily.
They are walking towards the sea. Quite literally too; they have no money and they do their best to stay hidden even though, given the bloodbath (or more precisely, the ashbath) Hal had created during their escape, he is pretty certain no one is looking for them.
Hal is wearing his dress shirt that is covered in dirt stains and a coat he stole from someone’s back yard. Leo is wearing the shoes he borrowed off a staked vampire. There is nothing underneath the layers of dirt Hal thinks he owns. To Leo, there is enough.
The first time Hal falls asleep after the escape, he fully expects to wake up alone. He’s got the stench of a dog all over him. It makes him feel sick. He stretches his limbs and feels Leo sitting there like a bloody iceberg to Hal’s Titanic. He asks Leo why he’s still here. The man gives him a secretive smile that is only a little too sharp at the corners. Maybe this is all part of an elaborate plan. In that case, Hal would laud his ingenuity later. No one has ever tried to bring an Old One down by befriending him; not that Hal knows.
But maybe Hal is just paranoid.
* * *
“Is it the only thing you hate in me? The dog?” Leo asks.
It’s days later, and there is blood under Hal’s fingernails from scratching furiously at his own skin. The question comes out of the blue, and Hal gives him a puzzled look. He never thought about it, never actually categorized the feeling as hate. Dogs are beneath him; that’s just how the world works.
“What about me being black? Lower class? Talking funny?”
Hal feels that he is treading on thin ice.
“I don’t hate you because you’re a dog,” he protests. That earns him a sardonic glance. “Fine. I try not to,” he amends. It’s complicated. “You stand between me and what I want.”
Leo shakes his head, looking sickeningly sure of himself. “What you think you want. We both know it’s not what you need.”
“You don’t like me very much either,” Hal comments.
“You are high maintenance,” Leo admits. “Worse than a girl.” Hal narrows his eyes dangerously. “I think you are not used to being treated as someone’s equal. You either have them worship you or humiliate you. I’m waiting for you to figure out I’m as much of a dog as you are a bat. We could move on from there.”
Hal doesn’t want to move on. He needs a cage, not a friend.
“In a pack,” he says slowly, “a weaker wolf submits to the alpha by rolling on its back and exposing its vulnerable sides. Why do I have a feeling that your offer of equality is just that?”
Leo snorts in the way that spells: because you’re a paranoid bastard. He says nonchalantly:
“We could try it your way, but if you bite me, my blood will burn a hole in your throat.”
Hal flashes him a smile - steely and brilliant - and tries to calculate how quickly he can rip out Leo’s windpipe before his toxic blood knocks Hal out.
* * *
It’s a week until full moon, and they get lucky finding someone’s wallet in the street. It’s almost absurd but they need money and, well, finders keepers.
They take a train. Hal feels constrained in a rumbling wheeled box full of people.
They argue about the bloody barbershop again.
“As soon as I get access to my accounts I shall buy you the goddamn shop,” Hal insists. “I could buy you the whole town if you like.” If the blasted thing is even on the map. Sometimes Hal doubts it is. They don’t know its name, they don’t know where it’s located, but Leo is convinced that it’s out there. There are only so many perfect little towns by the sea.
“I am not your kept woman,” Leo protests. There is an underlying hint of exasperation in his tone.
Hal fidgets in his seat and huffs: “Why do you have to be so fucking proud?”
“Do you usually take handouts?”
“It is not a-!” He sighs, and the sigh comes out closer to a growl. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Dim-witted hound.”
“Leech,” Leo parries.
“Bull-headed imbecile.”
Leo knocks his knee against Hal’s, unable to articulate a proper insult in return. Hal snickers triumphantly and jabs Leo in the ribs with his elbow. They are very obviously not looking at each other.
Leo has been antsy all day. The musty smell of the dog is getting stronger.
“You won’t let me hurt anyone, right?” he says quietly.
Hal is still not looking at him. “Right.”
Leo finds his hand and squeezes it awkwardly. Hal still hates touching but he doesn’t say anything.
* * *
“Have we even got a plan?” Hal asks. “Admit it, just admit it, Leo: we haven’t got a plan!”
It’s raining cats and - pun semi-intended if Leo doesn’t stop splashing around like a month-old puppy - dogs. Hal huddles underneath a lean-to in front of a grocery shop, his coat drenched in rainwater and his hair plastered across his forehead. He feels like the victim of the Russian revolution: like he was promised something good and not given anything in the end.
Leo has a plan. Leo’s plan is to torture Hal with this ludicrous journey until Hal agrees to lie down and die.
“Maybe we’re going the wrong way,” Leo says. Hal cringes. It’s time for deep thoughts. “Maybe we should go up. All the way to the Hebrides.”
“I have a better idea. Why don’t we dump as much dirt in the middle of the ocean as it is required to create an island and move there?”
Leo has already rejected Portsmouth, Brighton, and Hastings as well as a few smaller locations in between. They are moving up to Essex now, and Hal is going to kill him if they don’t settle down any time soon. He needs civilization. Hot water. A comfortable chair. Radio. He should have prepared his escape in advance. He should have taken a car.
But he knows well enough that it wouldn’t have worked if he had planned it.
There is a storage house in London where he keeps a few things in case of dire need. There are several accounts in various banks loaded with money. They are private. The others don’t know about them.
Right now all that seems so far away.
Leo joins him under the lean-to and flashes him that annoying relaxed grin of his. Somebody is having too much fun.
Leo’s coat slips down from his shoulder. Hal holds the wet fabric between the tips of his fingers and pulls it back up. Leo addresses him a quizzical look, moves his shoulder and shrugs the coat off again. Wordlessly, Hal returns it to its rightful place. Leo knits his eyebrows and exposes his shoulder again. His shirt is soaked too and it sticks to his skin.
Hal reaches for the coat once more.
“Will you stop that?” Leo snaps.
“It’s asymmetrical! It bothers me.”
One of these days Leo will probably stake him. In fact, it might even be right now. The thought crosses Hal’s mind when Leo pushes off the shopwindow and vanishes briefly behind the curtain of rain. Yet he doesn’t return carrying a sharp piece of wood. There is a handful of small pebbles in his cupped hands. He pushes an empty overturned box towards Hal with his foot and pours the pebbles onto it.
“What’s this?” Hal asks.
“They’re for you.”
Of course. That obviously explains the lot. Hal glowers at the pebbles. Some of them are smaller than the rest. He picks out four of those and examines them. Mind you, he doesn’t find them fascinating or anything. But, say, these two happen to have tiny veins that look almost the same, and the other two are plain brown. And this bigger one has a dent, while those three are all perfectly smooth and round. Hal squats in front of the box and starts moving the pebbles around like chess pieces, sorting them into different piles based on their shape, size, colour and markings on the surface if there are any.
Leo snorts and mutters that he deserves a degree in vampire management.
* * *
Two days before the full moon is when it almost goes to the dogs (no pun intended this time).
Hal can’t take his eyes off a woman at the bus stop. She is dressed for a party, a sumptuous skirt and lacy openwork gloves, not a hair out of place. The perfect hourglass outline of her body plants thoughts in his head, the kind of thoughts he cannot tune out just because he knows they are wrong.
Leo’s skin is hot like he has spent too much time in the sun, except they haven’t seen the actual sun for days.
Leo says: “Look at me,” but that’s absurd; why would Hal be looking at a hound when he could be-?
Leo jabs him in the ribs and cups his face and forces the eye contact. Hal is shaking so hard that he can’t even spit out proper words. All that comes out is: “Leo,” in a pitiful squeal. Like a naughty child who was grounded and found a bogeyman under his bed.
It’s tough for Leo too. He’s irate and picking a fight. The beast inside him is getting restless this close to its single night of freedom.
“We’re good,” Leo says, and Hal notices that he can’t stop shivering either. Peace is hard to establish when your heart is not in it.
Hal looks back at the bus stop. The woman is gone.
“We’re good,” he echoes.
* * *
They find an abandoned factory on the outskirts of the town, besieged by woodlands on every side. The forest is damp and claustrophobic. Leo keeps talking, and Hal has had it up to here with his instructions in case something goes wrong. What can possibly go wrong?
“I could bite your head off,” Leo points out; his tone sounds a little too suggestive to Hal’s taste.
“No, thank you,” Hal replies automatically. Leo chuckles and then lets out a low bark. Hal starts. “Already?”
Leo curses and kicks aside a sharp twig, revealing a scrape on his calf. It’s still a few hours until the spectacle begins. Hal draws in a sharp breath. Tomorrow everything will be back to normal.
“Leo,” he says, hesitantly, “I wanted to-.”
He trails off for fear of getting sentimental.
Leo shrugs nonchalantly. “You’re welcome.”
Hal arches his eyebrows. They are taking hints now?
“That’s… not what I meant,” he backpedals before he can stop himself. “I mean… I will thank you obviously. When you do something to deserve that.” It’s like a train wreck; he can’t stop, and his brain-to-mouth connection is clearly impaired. There has to be an emergency brake in there somewhere. “I told you: I need a system. A place to be safe from the world so that the world was safe from me! Instead, you just drag me all along the coastline and-.”
Leo spins around to face him. “Right. I’m having a picnic here.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way-.”
“There’s the right way to take something like that?”
God, he’s insufferable. He couldn’t possibly even begin to understand. Hal points that out coldly. Leo advances, making Hal withdraw until a tree blocks his way.
“You forget,” Leo says, “you’re not the only monster here.”
This is just laughable.
“You only have to deal with it once a month!” Hal snaps. “I live with it.”
“Yeah, and half the time you enjoy it.”
Now that is beside the point.
Hal stiffens. He doesn’t like the heat that is pooling in the pit of his stomach due to Leo’s proximity. It’s either anger or desire, and he doesn’t have time for any of those.
He tries to reign in his temper as he says: “Would you please let me pass?” When Leo doesn’t move, Hal pushes him and snaps: “I can’t breathe past your dog stench!”
“Do you even need to breathe? You’re a walking corpse.”
Hal punches him in the mouth so hard that he feels Leo’s teeth grazing his knuckles. Leo staggers backwards and takes a second to collect himself before he returns the blow. Hal doesn’t think he’s ever been hit by a dog. This is so humiliating that he considers ripping the bastard apart, except of course it’s not that easy.
Leo presses him up against the tree and tilts his head up, a mocking smile twisting his lips. “Go ahead,” he says.
Hal’s jaws ache. Bloodlust is overwhelming. It spills out in a low growl, and instead of going for Leo’s throat, Hal clamps his lips greedily over Leo’s bruised mouth. Leo rubs against him like he has expected this, his body tense and hard against Hal’s. There is something fundamentally wrong with this.
Leo tastes of all the garbage he eats and all the insults he showers Hal with and many more that he probably swallows. Hal flips them over, slamming Leo into the tree face-first, and yanks Leo’s trousers down, tracing the outlines of his narrow hips with his hands. He arches forward, resting against the crevice of Leo’s arse, and Leo rubs wantonly against the fabric of Hal’s trousers and releases a low moan, a half-curse urging Hal on.
Hal pounds hard into him. Leo grunts and buckles to meet him halfway. Whatever desire Hal may have had - to punish him, to fight it out, to possess him - has faded away, ousted by the purest carnal hunger.
Afterwards, it doesn’t take long for the screaming and the nightmarish noise of bones cracking to come. Hal used to enjoy that sound. He loved watching the human in the cage freeze in sheer horror as their opponent began to change, bones splintering and solidifying again, organs rearranging themselves, fur sprouting through the hardening skin.
Now it just makes him sick.
Leo darts off to the factory. Hal follows and bolts the door and spends the night covering his ears and unable to drown out the howling and the rattling that come from the inside. It feels like a bad dream he cannot wake up from.
* * *
A quiet scraping sound wakes Hal up in the morning. He squints against the pale sunlight, scrambles up on his feet and lifts the heavy bar. Leo staggers outside and sags on the ground. He looks battered, but hardly worse than he did back in the cage. He hasn’t killed anyone; that’s a triumph.
Hal lowers himself next to him. Yesterday is history and so it will remain. By now Leo should be back to his usual mirthful, bossy self, and the grim, choleric stranger from last night would retreat until the next full moon.
Leo glances at him, turns around and forces him down, pushing against Hal’s shoulder with his knee. There is nothing violent about it. Hal complies and suddenly understands what it is about. He tilts his head up, exposing his throat, and Leo trails his tongue down his Adam’s apple, slow and deliberate as if licking a sweet and trying to pin down the taste.
“What happened to equality?” Hal asks with a smirk.
Leo’s whisper comes out husky and rough.
“Overrated.”
This can be argued with, considering last night, but Hal has already made up his mind that it doesn’t exist, never did; his entire life didn’t exist, and after all, following Leo isn’t the worst thing that could happen to him.
June, 2012
Author: Shaitanah
Rating: R
Timeline: 1955
Summary: The first month together doesn’t go as planned. Except there was never any plan, and some would say it could have gone worse. [Hal/Leo]
Disclaimer: Being Human belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC.
A/N: This story took ages to write because my Cutler muse bullied every other Being Human muse in existence. In his opinion, Hal should only be shipped with him.
SLEEP TWITCH
"Away with the past. I've done with the old world for ever, and may I have no news, no echo, from it. To a new life, new places, and no looking back!" But instead of delight his soul was filled with such gloom, and his heart ached with such anguish, as he had never known in his life before.
Fyodor Dostoyevski. “The Brothers Karamazov”
Hal doesn’t like being touched. Lord Harry uses touch as a means to an end, an occasional brush of fingers against someone’s cheek, deceptively gentle; gloved hand closing around a wrist in warning; teeth ripping open a vein. Every touch is carefully prepared for; every touch has a designation.
The others know better than to bring chaos into his order. Knew better, he has to remind himself. It’s been a few days, he hasn’t really counted how many, and his hunger coils and uncoils inside him like a restless serpent. He is feverish and gripped by all sorts of panic. When Leo pats his shoulder in reassurance, Hal rears his head and snarls:
“Get your paws off me, you filthy mutt!” He suffocates and sputters and rants: “How dare you even imagine that you are allowed to lay your hands on me, you disgusting louse-!”
Leo watches him calmly and then he suddenly flicks Hal on the nose.
Hal gapes at him. It is such a silly, insolent gesture, childish even. Leo gives him a wide, unapologetic smile and explains that it was what his grandmother did to placate him whenever he got too worked up. Hal doesn’t know what is more bizarre: to be brimming with such a turbulent mixture of disdain and gratitude towards the same person, or that Leo has taken a page out of his grandmother’s book to reign in an Old One.
Hal looks away.
“What are we doing?” he asks wearily.
They are walking towards the sea. Quite literally too; they have no money and they do their best to stay hidden even though, given the bloodbath (or more precisely, the ashbath) Hal had created during their escape, he is pretty certain no one is looking for them.
Hal is wearing his dress shirt that is covered in dirt stains and a coat he stole from someone’s back yard. Leo is wearing the shoes he borrowed off a staked vampire. There is nothing underneath the layers of dirt Hal thinks he owns. To Leo, there is enough.
The first time Hal falls asleep after the escape, he fully expects to wake up alone. He’s got the stench of a dog all over him. It makes him feel sick. He stretches his limbs and feels Leo sitting there like a bloody iceberg to Hal’s Titanic. He asks Leo why he’s still here. The man gives him a secretive smile that is only a little too sharp at the corners. Maybe this is all part of an elaborate plan. In that case, Hal would laud his ingenuity later. No one has ever tried to bring an Old One down by befriending him; not that Hal knows.
But maybe Hal is just paranoid.
* * *
“Is it the only thing you hate in me? The dog?” Leo asks.
It’s days later, and there is blood under Hal’s fingernails from scratching furiously at his own skin. The question comes out of the blue, and Hal gives him a puzzled look. He never thought about it, never actually categorized the feeling as hate. Dogs are beneath him; that’s just how the world works.
“What about me being black? Lower class? Talking funny?”
Hal feels that he is treading on thin ice.
“I don’t hate you because you’re a dog,” he protests. That earns him a sardonic glance. “Fine. I try not to,” he amends. It’s complicated. “You stand between me and what I want.”
Leo shakes his head, looking sickeningly sure of himself. “What you think you want. We both know it’s not what you need.”
“You don’t like me very much either,” Hal comments.
“You are high maintenance,” Leo admits. “Worse than a girl.” Hal narrows his eyes dangerously. “I think you are not used to being treated as someone’s equal. You either have them worship you or humiliate you. I’m waiting for you to figure out I’m as much of a dog as you are a bat. We could move on from there.”
Hal doesn’t want to move on. He needs a cage, not a friend.
“In a pack,” he says slowly, “a weaker wolf submits to the alpha by rolling on its back and exposing its vulnerable sides. Why do I have a feeling that your offer of equality is just that?”
Leo snorts in the way that spells: because you’re a paranoid bastard. He says nonchalantly:
“We could try it your way, but if you bite me, my blood will burn a hole in your throat.”
Hal flashes him a smile - steely and brilliant - and tries to calculate how quickly he can rip out Leo’s windpipe before his toxic blood knocks Hal out.
* * *
It’s a week until full moon, and they get lucky finding someone’s wallet in the street. It’s almost absurd but they need money and, well, finders keepers.
They take a train. Hal feels constrained in a rumbling wheeled box full of people.
They argue about the bloody barbershop again.
“As soon as I get access to my accounts I shall buy you the goddamn shop,” Hal insists. “I could buy you the whole town if you like.” If the blasted thing is even on the map. Sometimes Hal doubts it is. They don’t know its name, they don’t know where it’s located, but Leo is convinced that it’s out there. There are only so many perfect little towns by the sea.
“I am not your kept woman,” Leo protests. There is an underlying hint of exasperation in his tone.
Hal fidgets in his seat and huffs: “Why do you have to be so fucking proud?”
“Do you usually take handouts?”
“It is not a-!” He sighs, and the sigh comes out closer to a growl. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Dim-witted hound.”
“Leech,” Leo parries.
“Bull-headed imbecile.”
Leo knocks his knee against Hal’s, unable to articulate a proper insult in return. Hal snickers triumphantly and jabs Leo in the ribs with his elbow. They are very obviously not looking at each other.
Leo has been antsy all day. The musty smell of the dog is getting stronger.
“You won’t let me hurt anyone, right?” he says quietly.
Hal is still not looking at him. “Right.”
Leo finds his hand and squeezes it awkwardly. Hal still hates touching but he doesn’t say anything.
* * *
“Have we even got a plan?” Hal asks. “Admit it, just admit it, Leo: we haven’t got a plan!”
It’s raining cats and - pun semi-intended if Leo doesn’t stop splashing around like a month-old puppy - dogs. Hal huddles underneath a lean-to in front of a grocery shop, his coat drenched in rainwater and his hair plastered across his forehead. He feels like the victim of the Russian revolution: like he was promised something good and not given anything in the end.
Leo has a plan. Leo’s plan is to torture Hal with this ludicrous journey until Hal agrees to lie down and die.
“Maybe we’re going the wrong way,” Leo says. Hal cringes. It’s time for deep thoughts. “Maybe we should go up. All the way to the Hebrides.”
“I have a better idea. Why don’t we dump as much dirt in the middle of the ocean as it is required to create an island and move there?”
Leo has already rejected Portsmouth, Brighton, and Hastings as well as a few smaller locations in between. They are moving up to Essex now, and Hal is going to kill him if they don’t settle down any time soon. He needs civilization. Hot water. A comfortable chair. Radio. He should have prepared his escape in advance. He should have taken a car.
But he knows well enough that it wouldn’t have worked if he had planned it.
There is a storage house in London where he keeps a few things in case of dire need. There are several accounts in various banks loaded with money. They are private. The others don’t know about them.
Right now all that seems so far away.
Leo joins him under the lean-to and flashes him that annoying relaxed grin of his. Somebody is having too much fun.
Leo’s coat slips down from his shoulder. Hal holds the wet fabric between the tips of his fingers and pulls it back up. Leo addresses him a quizzical look, moves his shoulder and shrugs the coat off again. Wordlessly, Hal returns it to its rightful place. Leo knits his eyebrows and exposes his shoulder again. His shirt is soaked too and it sticks to his skin.
Hal reaches for the coat once more.
“Will you stop that?” Leo snaps.
“It’s asymmetrical! It bothers me.”
One of these days Leo will probably stake him. In fact, it might even be right now. The thought crosses Hal’s mind when Leo pushes off the shopwindow and vanishes briefly behind the curtain of rain. Yet he doesn’t return carrying a sharp piece of wood. There is a handful of small pebbles in his cupped hands. He pushes an empty overturned box towards Hal with his foot and pours the pebbles onto it.
“What’s this?” Hal asks.
“They’re for you.”
Of course. That obviously explains the lot. Hal glowers at the pebbles. Some of them are smaller than the rest. He picks out four of those and examines them. Mind you, he doesn’t find them fascinating or anything. But, say, these two happen to have tiny veins that look almost the same, and the other two are plain brown. And this bigger one has a dent, while those three are all perfectly smooth and round. Hal squats in front of the box and starts moving the pebbles around like chess pieces, sorting them into different piles based on their shape, size, colour and markings on the surface if there are any.
Leo snorts and mutters that he deserves a degree in vampire management.
* * *
Two days before the full moon is when it almost goes to the dogs (no pun intended this time).
Hal can’t take his eyes off a woman at the bus stop. She is dressed for a party, a sumptuous skirt and lacy openwork gloves, not a hair out of place. The perfect hourglass outline of her body plants thoughts in his head, the kind of thoughts he cannot tune out just because he knows they are wrong.
Leo’s skin is hot like he has spent too much time in the sun, except they haven’t seen the actual sun for days.
Leo says: “Look at me,” but that’s absurd; why would Hal be looking at a hound when he could be-?
Leo jabs him in the ribs and cups his face and forces the eye contact. Hal is shaking so hard that he can’t even spit out proper words. All that comes out is: “Leo,” in a pitiful squeal. Like a naughty child who was grounded and found a bogeyman under his bed.
It’s tough for Leo too. He’s irate and picking a fight. The beast inside him is getting restless this close to its single night of freedom.
“We’re good,” Leo says, and Hal notices that he can’t stop shivering either. Peace is hard to establish when your heart is not in it.
Hal looks back at the bus stop. The woman is gone.
“We’re good,” he echoes.
* * *
They find an abandoned factory on the outskirts of the town, besieged by woodlands on every side. The forest is damp and claustrophobic. Leo keeps talking, and Hal has had it up to here with his instructions in case something goes wrong. What can possibly go wrong?
“I could bite your head off,” Leo points out; his tone sounds a little too suggestive to Hal’s taste.
“No, thank you,” Hal replies automatically. Leo chuckles and then lets out a low bark. Hal starts. “Already?”
Leo curses and kicks aside a sharp twig, revealing a scrape on his calf. It’s still a few hours until the spectacle begins. Hal draws in a sharp breath. Tomorrow everything will be back to normal.
“Leo,” he says, hesitantly, “I wanted to-.”
He trails off for fear of getting sentimental.
Leo shrugs nonchalantly. “You’re welcome.”
Hal arches his eyebrows. They are taking hints now?
“That’s… not what I meant,” he backpedals before he can stop himself. “I mean… I will thank you obviously. When you do something to deserve that.” It’s like a train wreck; he can’t stop, and his brain-to-mouth connection is clearly impaired. There has to be an emergency brake in there somewhere. “I told you: I need a system. A place to be safe from the world so that the world was safe from me! Instead, you just drag me all along the coastline and-.”
Leo spins around to face him. “Right. I’m having a picnic here.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way-.”
“There’s the right way to take something like that?”
God, he’s insufferable. He couldn’t possibly even begin to understand. Hal points that out coldly. Leo advances, making Hal withdraw until a tree blocks his way.
“You forget,” Leo says, “you’re not the only monster here.”
This is just laughable.
“You only have to deal with it once a month!” Hal snaps. “I live with it.”
“Yeah, and half the time you enjoy it.”
Now that is beside the point.
Hal stiffens. He doesn’t like the heat that is pooling in the pit of his stomach due to Leo’s proximity. It’s either anger or desire, and he doesn’t have time for any of those.
He tries to reign in his temper as he says: “Would you please let me pass?” When Leo doesn’t move, Hal pushes him and snaps: “I can’t breathe past your dog stench!”
“Do you even need to breathe? You’re a walking corpse.”
Hal punches him in the mouth so hard that he feels Leo’s teeth grazing his knuckles. Leo staggers backwards and takes a second to collect himself before he returns the blow. Hal doesn’t think he’s ever been hit by a dog. This is so humiliating that he considers ripping the bastard apart, except of course it’s not that easy.
Leo presses him up against the tree and tilts his head up, a mocking smile twisting his lips. “Go ahead,” he says.
Hal’s jaws ache. Bloodlust is overwhelming. It spills out in a low growl, and instead of going for Leo’s throat, Hal clamps his lips greedily over Leo’s bruised mouth. Leo rubs against him like he has expected this, his body tense and hard against Hal’s. There is something fundamentally wrong with this.
Leo tastes of all the garbage he eats and all the insults he showers Hal with and many more that he probably swallows. Hal flips them over, slamming Leo into the tree face-first, and yanks Leo’s trousers down, tracing the outlines of his narrow hips with his hands. He arches forward, resting against the crevice of Leo’s arse, and Leo rubs wantonly against the fabric of Hal’s trousers and releases a low moan, a half-curse urging Hal on.
Hal pounds hard into him. Leo grunts and buckles to meet him halfway. Whatever desire Hal may have had - to punish him, to fight it out, to possess him - has faded away, ousted by the purest carnal hunger.
Afterwards, it doesn’t take long for the screaming and the nightmarish noise of bones cracking to come. Hal used to enjoy that sound. He loved watching the human in the cage freeze in sheer horror as their opponent began to change, bones splintering and solidifying again, organs rearranging themselves, fur sprouting through the hardening skin.
Now it just makes him sick.
Leo darts off to the factory. Hal follows and bolts the door and spends the night covering his ears and unable to drown out the howling and the rattling that come from the inside. It feels like a bad dream he cannot wake up from.
* * *
A quiet scraping sound wakes Hal up in the morning. He squints against the pale sunlight, scrambles up on his feet and lifts the heavy bar. Leo staggers outside and sags on the ground. He looks battered, but hardly worse than he did back in the cage. He hasn’t killed anyone; that’s a triumph.
Hal lowers himself next to him. Yesterday is history and so it will remain. By now Leo should be back to his usual mirthful, bossy self, and the grim, choleric stranger from last night would retreat until the next full moon.
Leo glances at him, turns around and forces him down, pushing against Hal’s shoulder with his knee. There is nothing violent about it. Hal complies and suddenly understands what it is about. He tilts his head up, exposing his throat, and Leo trails his tongue down his Adam’s apple, slow and deliberate as if licking a sweet and trying to pin down the taste.
“What happened to equality?” Hal asks with a smirk.
Leo’s whisper comes out husky and rough.
“Overrated.”
This can be argued with, considering last night, but Hal has already made up his mind that it doesn’t exist, never did; his entire life didn’t exist, and after all, following Leo isn’t the worst thing that could happen to him.
June, 2012