ghostrunner (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ghostrunner) wrote2011-08-09 10:30 am
ghostrunner) wrote2011-08-09 10:30 am
Entry tags:
blue on black, tears on a river
Round up of the stories I wrote for Porn Battle XII.
bones in your closet, Bedlam, Jed Harper/Kate Bettany/Ryan McAllister, rough, proof, nightmares
Jed is talking in his sleep.
That’s Ryan’s first thought. That Jed’s having a nightmare or a… vision… thing, and he’s talking in his sleep. Ryan is willing to let this slide. He imagines being Jed is not very pleasant.
Today they walked through the entire third floor looking for the room where a maid murdered the wife of a doctor. Jed stood in front of every door for a few seconds, steeling himself before he touched the handle. The rooms where nothing happened were almost worse than the right one.
He’d been so badly shaken by the end of it that Ryan’d had to half carry him back down the stairs. Jed’s arm over his shoulders, tense and strained and pressed so tightly against him Ryan was sure he could feel his heartbeat.
Jed wanders around the flat shirtless all the time and Ryan looks more than he would be willing to admit but now he knows from firsthand experience what Jed feels like up close. The solid weight of all that muscle.
It was a long trip back to their flat.
So today was bad. And long. And now Jed is talking in his sleep. This would be perfectly understandable if he wasn’t saying, “Kate, Kate, Kate,” over and over between gasps for breath.
He’d dreaming about her, Ryan thinks. And then, Good fucking lord, that family.
There’s the sharp sound of something bumping against the wall, and Ryan thinks Jed has woken himself up but the sounds don’t stop. If anything they get more insistent and now he can tell that sometimes Jed is saying, “Kate, no.”
Good fucking lord, that family.
There’s a gasp for breath that’s far, far too high pitched to be Jed.
Ryan throws the covers back and is out of bed and through the door into the living room before he really thinks about what he’s doing.
Half the time Jed falls asleep on the couch, but he slept his own little room tonight and the door is ajar. Ryan walks up to it, half in a barely awake trance, and half out of horrified curiosity.
He doesn’t bother to peek around the jam, or listen at the keyhole. He puts his hand flat against the door and pushes it creaking open far enough to stand in the middle of the doorway.
Neither of them notice.
Jed is sitting up in his bed, shirtless and sleep-tousled and tangled in the sheets. A streetlight outside pours through the window and turns his body into sweeping planes of light and shadow. He looks very much the way Ryan imagines him, whenever he allows himself to imagine coming to Jed’s room in the middle of the night. Except that Kate is kneeling above him.
Her nightdress is sliding up over her thighs and her hair is falling across Jed’s cheek, his hands on her hips, her waist, her back. They’re kissing like they’re trying to destroy something. Like they know they’re not supposed to.
Wet and frantic and open-mouthed and Jed is saying, “Kate. Kate, no,” whenever she lets him breathe.
Kate is ignoring him, digging her long sharp nails into the gilded muscle of his shoulders, clawing at his back. Kissing him like she’s hoping he’ll devour her and she can finally lose herself.
And part of Ryan, he’ll admit privately, just wants to stand there and watch. Watch as one of the best people he’s ever met gets dragged down and abused by the woman he can’t say no to. Watch Kate, with her sharp bones and her long claws and her razor tongue, strips Jed bare and rides him until his strength gives out. To see how long it takes before they notice him.
To see what happens when they notice him.
A part of Ryan wants Jed that badly. Enough that he wants to see all of him, no matter the cost. But a bigger part of Ryan just plain likes Jed. Likes Jed a whole lot more than he likes Kate.
That better part of Ryan says, “He said, no, Kate.”
They break apart, startled and sudden, flash of guilt. Jed looks stunned, like a trance, broken. Kate’s eyes and face go hard, accusatory. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she snaps.
Ryan has known Kate a long time and he knows that look. She knows she’s wrong, but she’ll never admit it. Ryan refuses to be put on the defensive. He says, very deliberately, “What. The hell. Do you think you’re doing?”
Kate sneers at him and climbs to her feet. “Turnabout is fair play, I suppose,” she says as she stalks out past him. “He did interrupt us, after all.”
Her bedroom door opens, and closes behind her. Ryan is looking at Jed.
His eyes are dark and hazy and a little frightened. He gleams in the glow of the streetlight.
--
you're a wolf, girl, get out of this town, Drive Angry, Piper/The Accountant, drive, fuck, hell, baby girl
--
She means to stay with Webster, like Milton wanted her to, she really does. She means to stay out of trouble and take care of the baby but Piper's just not that kind of girl.
She names the baby Hope. And she hits the road.
--
"Where are you going?" the Accountant asks her, the first time he finds her. He's walking his coin over his knuckles.
Piper checks on Hope with a glance. Hope is fine. Piper is restless.
She wraps a hand around the Accountant's belt buckle.
"What the hell does it matter to you?"
--
It's not the best way to raise a little girl, maybe, but it sure as hell ain't the worst, either and Piper'd raised hell and killed cops to protect Hope long before she'd ever held her in her arms and the things she'd do for her now are staggering. It doesn't bear thinking about.
So Piper works her way across the country, wherever she wants to go. She has money and she has Webster's car and she has a duffel bag full of guns and Hope is a happy baby. Piper's gonna make her a girl Milton will be proud of.
There are problems, oh yeah. There are backwater psychos who still think Hope is the key to something that will make them kings. There are minor, crawling demons who think killing is fun and killing one who got away would be the most fun.
But there's nothing much that Piper can't handle, these days.
--
The Accountant says, "I have a nostalgic fondness for deserts. Not for the people, though. Abraham was such a whiny little tool."
He's fucking into Piper in long, smooth strokes as he says this, so instead of making some sneering comeback she just rolls her eyes and rolls her hips up into him. The hood of the car is warm against her back through the bunched up leather of Milton's jacket. Around them the desert is a wasteland of dry hills and dusty sagebrush, bad water and bleached bones.
The Accountant's hands are hot and dry, his strength implacable. He moves Piper a little and the next thrust takes out most of her higher brain functions. She starts to cry out and then chokes it back, remembering Hope, asleep in the back seat.
"Son of a bitch," she gasps, instead.
He chuckles.
The sky is a pitiless, burning blue. So blank it doesn't seem real. The Accountant groans and his rhythm stutters.
Piper takes ragged breaths of the scorching air.
This is freedom.
--
She wraps Hope in Milton's jacket when it gets cold at night. She's trying to give her some feeling of connection to him. No matter how tenuous.
Hope will never meet her mother, or her sweet, useless father. She'll never know the grandfather who broke out of hell for her. Piper can't do anything about any of that, but she can do this. She can let Hope sleep safe in the smoky leather, the way she slept, once.
It smells like him, a little. Like tobacco and whiskey and gunpowder. Like fire.
Piper keeps driving.
--
"Why do you keep coming back?" she asks him. It's a serious question and it's something she's been thinking about for a long time, but they just got done screwing each other into a boneless, contented sprawl and she can't make her voice sound anything but idle.
The Accountant gives his dry little chuckle and she feels him roll towards her. The hot, iron strength of his hands on her.
"Do you just stop in for a fuck every time you're up here chasing souls?" She wants that to be accusatory but he knows her body very well now and it comes out more breathless than she'd like.
He flicks one her nipples in an idle display of control. "Yes." But she knows him fairly well, too, by this point. As well as he really can be known and she hears the amusement of a lie in his voice.
"Maybe you're important," he says against the crease of her thigh. "Maybe Hope is."
He slides long clever fingers inside her. Unerring, unhesitating. He makes her crazy.
"Maybe I just like you."
Piper sucks in air, feeling her toes curl, the drag of sweat in her hair.
"Fine," she says. "Maybe I don't want to know."
--
The United States is a big place and Piper is never taking Hope anywhere near Louisiana.
Hope tugs on her hair and points at the sky. There isn't a cloud in sight so Piper isn't really sure what she's looking at.
"Okay, baby," she says. "Okay."
The air is hot and dry. A red-tailed hawk wheels over the dusty parking lot.
Piper thinks of the desert. The Accountant's body against hers in the strangling heat.
She heads north.
--
you ain't broken (you're just bent like me), Haven, Audrey Parker/Duke Crocker/Nathan Wuornos, raw, possessive, sly, bold, physical, touch, strength, conduit, sensation, pain, force, middle, press, jealous
--
It would be nice to say that it started innocently enough.
It didn't.
Nothing that involved Duke Crocker could ever be innocent.
--
He can feel Audrey, but only skin to skin. With a little concentration on everyone's part he can feel other people, if Audrey touches both of them at the same time.
They discover this in the middle of a fist fight.
--
That fight over who fucking even knows what, Nathan will take any excuse to punch Duke in the face, turns into Nathan pressing Duke into the wall, Audrey digging her short, clipped fingernails into their arms. Duke making empty breathless threats about police harassment with his hands on Nathan's belt buckle. Bruising force and teeth, kissing like this was still a fight.
Nathan doesn't care about anything Duke says most of the time, but particularly not now. Duke under his hands is all clean, cool muscle and biting force. Audrey watches them kiss like the world could burn behind her for all she cares.
Duke drags Nathan's shirt over his head and there's a strange stuttering break in the sensory loop where Audrey has to move her hands. A second adrift, lost in an empty sea, the plunge back into nothingness is brutal, worse than the decades he's endured without touch.
He understands then, what this will cost him. These little tastes of the thing he wants so badly.
But Audrey gets her hands back on him and he's crushed into Duke's bare chest and the first slide of skin on skin nearly takes him out. His mind goes red, and then white. He's probably making some devastatingly embarrassing noises and he couldn't care less.
Duke slides his thumbs into the hollows of Nathan's hip bones and bites his lower lip hard enough that Nathan tastes blood. Audrey gasps, rocks up on her toes, pressing close to kiss the line of his jaw.
She turns her head to kiss Duke, his mouth wet with Nathan's blood. Nathan is briefly, bitterly jealous. Not of Duke, or of Audrey, but of the touch. He wants them to touch him. He never wants them to stop.
He must make some sound of protest because they break apart and look at him. Audrey, hilariously, looks apologetic. Duke laughs.
"Someone's greedy," he says. He's taller than Nathan and when he tips down suddenly the next kiss is hard, clicking their teeth together. Nathan's already abused lip stings and he can fucking feel it. It doesn't hurt exactly. Or, it does, but his brain can't interpret the pain as bad. Or maybe it can and he just doesn't care.
Duke bites again and then uses his grip on Nathan's hips to shove him back a little. "Audrey," he says, "put your hand in my hair."
She blinks at him but does it, and Nathan takes the opportunity to kiss her. It feels like a sunburst. She tastes like his blood and Duke's skin and the coffee that was all she had for breakfast this morning.
Duke chuckles and Audrey looks up him, her hand still knotted in his hair. "Fantastic," he says. And he drops to his knees.
Nathan nearly swallows his tongue.
Audrey sucks in a sharp breath.
Duke looks up at them and fucking winks.
Then he takes Nathan so far down he can feel himself hit the back of Duke's throat. He manages a short, strangled, "Holy..." and Duke hums. In agreement, probably.
Audrey is panting against his shoulder, her eyes dark and wide and fixed on Duke. Nathan doesn't even care. Duke is unsurprisingly good at this. Duke is good at most illicit things.
It has been a very, very long time, and it is over very quickly.
It feels like Duke's skin under his fingers. It feels like Audrey's lips against his throat. It feels like electrocution. It feels like dying.
It feels.
--
Nathan comes back to himself in pieces. It may as well have been eons, but from the way Duke is still kneeling and Audrey is still clinging to both of them, it's only been a few seconds.
Duke is smirking at him, but Nathan can't find it in him to care. He'd let Duke get away with anything, right now.
There's a twinge from the cop in him and he mentally amends that to 'almost anything'.
"Duke," he starts, unsure of where that sentence is going.
Duke cuts him off with a laugh. He straightens to his feet, kissing Audrey, brief and wet, on the way up.
"Oh, Detective Wuornos," he says, his grin full of teeth that Nathan is now intimately acquainted with, "We are so far from being done here."
--
the world is a vampire, The Vampire Diaries, Alaric/Katherine, rough, bite
--
It takes him about thirty seconds to realize that she isn’t Elena.
But it’s already too late.
--
Katherine looks exactly like her, that beautiful, strong girl who could have been his daughter.
Except that she doesn’t, really, look anything like Elena at all.
She’s wearing the wrong necklace, yes, but she’s also wearing the wrong expression. Elena doesn’t move like this. Doesn’t talk like this. Doesn’t walk into his apartment and slide her hands over his chest like she’s considering buying him at auction.
Alaric makes a mental checklist of the weapons at his disposal. “What do you want, Katherine?”
She tosses him back against the wall like he’d toss a discarded shirt. She presses close and smiles with sharp teeth and dark eyes.
“To start trouble,” she says.
--
The fact that she looks like Elena isn’t really a problem. They’ve all been dealing with that for months now and if he’s interested in being honest with himself (which he isn’t, generally), it’s kind of a turn on.
He thinks she can probably tell.
Katherine shreds his shirt with a casual gesture, shoves him back into the wall with one finger when he tries to struggle.
She hums in pleasure, or approval maybe, and drags her nails down to the waistband of his jeans. She draws blood in long thin lines and presses close to lick it up.
Alaric hisses, half in pain, half in pleasure. “Katherine…” he starts.
She lifts her head to laugh at him, sliding her fingertips under his jeans, against his skin.
“Come on, Alaric,” she says. “We both know you—“
He smashes his elbow into her face and goes for the stake on the bookshelf.
Katherine is a vampire, but he’s a big man and she wasn’t expecting to be sucker punched in the middle of her seduction routine and he gets close enough to brush the stake with his fingertips before she’s on him again.
She forces him to the ground, puts a knee on his chest, and slaps him idly. The blow rocks his head to the side and damn near dislocates his jaw.
She’s laughing again. Her nails dig painfully into his skin as she turns his head back to face her. “Nice try,” she says. “I can see why Damon likes you.”
There isn’t really anything to say to that, it’s true, this probably is why Damon likes him, so Alaric keeps his mouth shut. His jaw hurts a lot.
Katherine bends down and kisses him. He makes a muffled sound of protest which she ignores in favor of licking his teeth, sinking deep. She feels good, pressed against him, her mouth on his, but she tastes like old blood and bitter herbs and he wants her the hell off him.
He starts working at the baseboard with his fingernails.
“You’re a funny one, history teacher,” Katherine says. She shifts to straddle his hips, pinning him to floor with her negligible weight and otherworldly strength. “Is this what you wanted when you came to town?” She sucks a biting kiss into the center of his chest. “Did you find what you came looking for?”
Her hands work at the leather and metal of his belt buckle.
The creak of wood nails from the baseboard is soft, but he worries she can hear it anyway.
He came to this town looking for any shred of hope that he wasn’t crazy, that vampires existed. He found the vampire he’d seen with his wife.
Before he came back to his apartment and walked right into this, he was at the bar with Damon.
“No,” he says. “I didn’t find what I was looking for.”
Katherine looks mockingly surprised. “No? But you found the vampire who took your wife.” She snaps the button on his jeans clean off. Alaric hears it ricochet off the counter and roll across the floor.
The baseboard is coming loose, slowly.
“I was looking for the wrong thing,” he says. “Isobel didn’t want to be found.”
“And now the man who took her from you is your BFF.” Katherine makes the statement a sneer.
Alaric doesn’t have a response for that, either. Again, it’s sort of sadly true.
Katherine bends to lick slowly at the triangle of skin exposed by his half open jeans.
“Isobel left,” he says. He’s very impressed with the evenness of his voice. Katherine huffs a laughing breath that he feels against his dick.
He says, “And now she’s dead.”
He stabs the shard of baseboard into her shoulder.
--
There was no way he was going to get her heart, but she reacts instinctively. Throwing herself backwards and shoving him away.
Her shove sends him sliding right into the wooden box on the lowest level of his bookshelf. Alaric tucks away from her retaliatory strike, rolls, and comes up with a crossbow pointed at her chest.
Katherine makes a disappointed moue, and puts her hands on her hips. She rakes her eyes over him, shirtless, disheveled, and bleeding.
She tosses her hair like this was her plan all along. “What did you find, Alaric? If you came looking for the wrong thing, what did you find here, instead?”
Alaric keeps the crossbow leveled at her while she smiles, draws her nails across the wall, and walks out the door.
He found a family here, is the truth.
And none of them ever need to know about the ten minutes he spends in the shower, thinking about Katherine’s claws and teeth.
--
bones in your closet, Bedlam, Jed Harper/Kate Bettany/Ryan McAllister, rough, proof, nightmares
Jed is talking in his sleep.
That’s Ryan’s first thought. That Jed’s having a nightmare or a… vision… thing, and he’s talking in his sleep. Ryan is willing to let this slide. He imagines being Jed is not very pleasant.
Today they walked through the entire third floor looking for the room where a maid murdered the wife of a doctor. Jed stood in front of every door for a few seconds, steeling himself before he touched the handle. The rooms where nothing happened were almost worse than the right one.
He’d been so badly shaken by the end of it that Ryan’d had to half carry him back down the stairs. Jed’s arm over his shoulders, tense and strained and pressed so tightly against him Ryan was sure he could feel his heartbeat.
Jed wanders around the flat shirtless all the time and Ryan looks more than he would be willing to admit but now he knows from firsthand experience what Jed feels like up close. The solid weight of all that muscle.
It was a long trip back to their flat.
So today was bad. And long. And now Jed is talking in his sleep. This would be perfectly understandable if he wasn’t saying, “Kate, Kate, Kate,” over and over between gasps for breath.
He’d dreaming about her, Ryan thinks. And then, Good fucking lord, that family.
There’s the sharp sound of something bumping against the wall, and Ryan thinks Jed has woken himself up but the sounds don’t stop. If anything they get more insistent and now he can tell that sometimes Jed is saying, “Kate, no.”
Good fucking lord, that family.
There’s a gasp for breath that’s far, far too high pitched to be Jed.
Ryan throws the covers back and is out of bed and through the door into the living room before he really thinks about what he’s doing.
Half the time Jed falls asleep on the couch, but he slept his own little room tonight and the door is ajar. Ryan walks up to it, half in a barely awake trance, and half out of horrified curiosity.
He doesn’t bother to peek around the jam, or listen at the keyhole. He puts his hand flat against the door and pushes it creaking open far enough to stand in the middle of the doorway.
Neither of them notice.
Jed is sitting up in his bed, shirtless and sleep-tousled and tangled in the sheets. A streetlight outside pours through the window and turns his body into sweeping planes of light and shadow. He looks very much the way Ryan imagines him, whenever he allows himself to imagine coming to Jed’s room in the middle of the night. Except that Kate is kneeling above him.
Her nightdress is sliding up over her thighs and her hair is falling across Jed’s cheek, his hands on her hips, her waist, her back. They’re kissing like they’re trying to destroy something. Like they know they’re not supposed to.
Wet and frantic and open-mouthed and Jed is saying, “Kate. Kate, no,” whenever she lets him breathe.
Kate is ignoring him, digging her long sharp nails into the gilded muscle of his shoulders, clawing at his back. Kissing him like she’s hoping he’ll devour her and she can finally lose herself.
And part of Ryan, he’ll admit privately, just wants to stand there and watch. Watch as one of the best people he’s ever met gets dragged down and abused by the woman he can’t say no to. Watch Kate, with her sharp bones and her long claws and her razor tongue, strips Jed bare and rides him until his strength gives out. To see how long it takes before they notice him.
To see what happens when they notice him.
A part of Ryan wants Jed that badly. Enough that he wants to see all of him, no matter the cost. But a bigger part of Ryan just plain likes Jed. Likes Jed a whole lot more than he likes Kate.
That better part of Ryan says, “He said, no, Kate.”
They break apart, startled and sudden, flash of guilt. Jed looks stunned, like a trance, broken. Kate’s eyes and face go hard, accusatory. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she snaps.
Ryan has known Kate a long time and he knows that look. She knows she’s wrong, but she’ll never admit it. Ryan refuses to be put on the defensive. He says, very deliberately, “What. The hell. Do you think you’re doing?”
Kate sneers at him and climbs to her feet. “Turnabout is fair play, I suppose,” she says as she stalks out past him. “He did interrupt us, after all.”
Her bedroom door opens, and closes behind her. Ryan is looking at Jed.
His eyes are dark and hazy and a little frightened. He gleams in the glow of the streetlight.
--
you're a wolf, girl, get out of this town, Drive Angry, Piper/The Accountant, drive, fuck, hell, baby girl
--
She means to stay with Webster, like Milton wanted her to, she really does. She means to stay out of trouble and take care of the baby but Piper's just not that kind of girl.
She names the baby Hope. And she hits the road.
--
"Where are you going?" the Accountant asks her, the first time he finds her. He's walking his coin over his knuckles.
Piper checks on Hope with a glance. Hope is fine. Piper is restless.
She wraps a hand around the Accountant's belt buckle.
"What the hell does it matter to you?"
--
It's not the best way to raise a little girl, maybe, but it sure as hell ain't the worst, either and Piper'd raised hell and killed cops to protect Hope long before she'd ever held her in her arms and the things she'd do for her now are staggering. It doesn't bear thinking about.
So Piper works her way across the country, wherever she wants to go. She has money and she has Webster's car and she has a duffel bag full of guns and Hope is a happy baby. Piper's gonna make her a girl Milton will be proud of.
There are problems, oh yeah. There are backwater psychos who still think Hope is the key to something that will make them kings. There are minor, crawling demons who think killing is fun and killing one who got away would be the most fun.
But there's nothing much that Piper can't handle, these days.
--
The Accountant says, "I have a nostalgic fondness for deserts. Not for the people, though. Abraham was such a whiny little tool."
He's fucking into Piper in long, smooth strokes as he says this, so instead of making some sneering comeback she just rolls her eyes and rolls her hips up into him. The hood of the car is warm against her back through the bunched up leather of Milton's jacket. Around them the desert is a wasteland of dry hills and dusty sagebrush, bad water and bleached bones.
The Accountant's hands are hot and dry, his strength implacable. He moves Piper a little and the next thrust takes out most of her higher brain functions. She starts to cry out and then chokes it back, remembering Hope, asleep in the back seat.
"Son of a bitch," she gasps, instead.
He chuckles.
The sky is a pitiless, burning blue. So blank it doesn't seem real. The Accountant groans and his rhythm stutters.
Piper takes ragged breaths of the scorching air.
This is freedom.
--
She wraps Hope in Milton's jacket when it gets cold at night. She's trying to give her some feeling of connection to him. No matter how tenuous.
Hope will never meet her mother, or her sweet, useless father. She'll never know the grandfather who broke out of hell for her. Piper can't do anything about any of that, but she can do this. She can let Hope sleep safe in the smoky leather, the way she slept, once.
It smells like him, a little. Like tobacco and whiskey and gunpowder. Like fire.
Piper keeps driving.
--
"Why do you keep coming back?" she asks him. It's a serious question and it's something she's been thinking about for a long time, but they just got done screwing each other into a boneless, contented sprawl and she can't make her voice sound anything but idle.
The Accountant gives his dry little chuckle and she feels him roll towards her. The hot, iron strength of his hands on her.
"Do you just stop in for a fuck every time you're up here chasing souls?" She wants that to be accusatory but he knows her body very well now and it comes out more breathless than she'd like.
He flicks one her nipples in an idle display of control. "Yes." But she knows him fairly well, too, by this point. As well as he really can be known and she hears the amusement of a lie in his voice.
"Maybe you're important," he says against the crease of her thigh. "Maybe Hope is."
He slides long clever fingers inside her. Unerring, unhesitating. He makes her crazy.
"Maybe I just like you."
Piper sucks in air, feeling her toes curl, the drag of sweat in her hair.
"Fine," she says. "Maybe I don't want to know."
--
The United States is a big place and Piper is never taking Hope anywhere near Louisiana.
Hope tugs on her hair and points at the sky. There isn't a cloud in sight so Piper isn't really sure what she's looking at.
"Okay, baby," she says. "Okay."
The air is hot and dry. A red-tailed hawk wheels over the dusty parking lot.
Piper thinks of the desert. The Accountant's body against hers in the strangling heat.
She heads north.
--
you ain't broken (you're just bent like me), Haven, Audrey Parker/Duke Crocker/Nathan Wuornos, raw, possessive, sly, bold, physical, touch, strength, conduit, sensation, pain, force, middle, press, jealous
--
It would be nice to say that it started innocently enough.
It didn't.
Nothing that involved Duke Crocker could ever be innocent.
--
He can feel Audrey, but only skin to skin. With a little concentration on everyone's part he can feel other people, if Audrey touches both of them at the same time.
They discover this in the middle of a fist fight.
--
That fight over who fucking even knows what, Nathan will take any excuse to punch Duke in the face, turns into Nathan pressing Duke into the wall, Audrey digging her short, clipped fingernails into their arms. Duke making empty breathless threats about police harassment with his hands on Nathan's belt buckle. Bruising force and teeth, kissing like this was still a fight.
Nathan doesn't care about anything Duke says most of the time, but particularly not now. Duke under his hands is all clean, cool muscle and biting force. Audrey watches them kiss like the world could burn behind her for all she cares.
Duke drags Nathan's shirt over his head and there's a strange stuttering break in the sensory loop where Audrey has to move her hands. A second adrift, lost in an empty sea, the plunge back into nothingness is brutal, worse than the decades he's endured without touch.
He understands then, what this will cost him. These little tastes of the thing he wants so badly.
But Audrey gets her hands back on him and he's crushed into Duke's bare chest and the first slide of skin on skin nearly takes him out. His mind goes red, and then white. He's probably making some devastatingly embarrassing noises and he couldn't care less.
Duke slides his thumbs into the hollows of Nathan's hip bones and bites his lower lip hard enough that Nathan tastes blood. Audrey gasps, rocks up on her toes, pressing close to kiss the line of his jaw.
She turns her head to kiss Duke, his mouth wet with Nathan's blood. Nathan is briefly, bitterly jealous. Not of Duke, or of Audrey, but of the touch. He wants them to touch him. He never wants them to stop.
He must make some sound of protest because they break apart and look at him. Audrey, hilariously, looks apologetic. Duke laughs.
"Someone's greedy," he says. He's taller than Nathan and when he tips down suddenly the next kiss is hard, clicking their teeth together. Nathan's already abused lip stings and he can fucking feel it. It doesn't hurt exactly. Or, it does, but his brain can't interpret the pain as bad. Or maybe it can and he just doesn't care.
Duke bites again and then uses his grip on Nathan's hips to shove him back a little. "Audrey," he says, "put your hand in my hair."
She blinks at him but does it, and Nathan takes the opportunity to kiss her. It feels like a sunburst. She tastes like his blood and Duke's skin and the coffee that was all she had for breakfast this morning.
Duke chuckles and Audrey looks up him, her hand still knotted in his hair. "Fantastic," he says. And he drops to his knees.
Nathan nearly swallows his tongue.
Audrey sucks in a sharp breath.
Duke looks up at them and fucking winks.
Then he takes Nathan so far down he can feel himself hit the back of Duke's throat. He manages a short, strangled, "Holy..." and Duke hums. In agreement, probably.
Audrey is panting against his shoulder, her eyes dark and wide and fixed on Duke. Nathan doesn't even care. Duke is unsurprisingly good at this. Duke is good at most illicit things.
It has been a very, very long time, and it is over very quickly.
It feels like Duke's skin under his fingers. It feels like Audrey's lips against his throat. It feels like electrocution. It feels like dying.
It feels.
--
Nathan comes back to himself in pieces. It may as well have been eons, but from the way Duke is still kneeling and Audrey is still clinging to both of them, it's only been a few seconds.
Duke is smirking at him, but Nathan can't find it in him to care. He'd let Duke get away with anything, right now.
There's a twinge from the cop in him and he mentally amends that to 'almost anything'.
"Duke," he starts, unsure of where that sentence is going.
Duke cuts him off with a laugh. He straightens to his feet, kissing Audrey, brief and wet, on the way up.
"Oh, Detective Wuornos," he says, his grin full of teeth that Nathan is now intimately acquainted with, "We are so far from being done here."
--
the world is a vampire, The Vampire Diaries, Alaric/Katherine, rough, bite
--
It takes him about thirty seconds to realize that she isn’t Elena.
But it’s already too late.
--
Katherine looks exactly like her, that beautiful, strong girl who could have been his daughter.
Except that she doesn’t, really, look anything like Elena at all.
She’s wearing the wrong necklace, yes, but she’s also wearing the wrong expression. Elena doesn’t move like this. Doesn’t talk like this. Doesn’t walk into his apartment and slide her hands over his chest like she’s considering buying him at auction.
Alaric makes a mental checklist of the weapons at his disposal. “What do you want, Katherine?”
She tosses him back against the wall like he’d toss a discarded shirt. She presses close and smiles with sharp teeth and dark eyes.
“To start trouble,” she says.
--
The fact that she looks like Elena isn’t really a problem. They’ve all been dealing with that for months now and if he’s interested in being honest with himself (which he isn’t, generally), it’s kind of a turn on.
He thinks she can probably tell.
Katherine shreds his shirt with a casual gesture, shoves him back into the wall with one finger when he tries to struggle.
She hums in pleasure, or approval maybe, and drags her nails down to the waistband of his jeans. She draws blood in long thin lines and presses close to lick it up.
Alaric hisses, half in pain, half in pleasure. “Katherine…” he starts.
She lifts her head to laugh at him, sliding her fingertips under his jeans, against his skin.
“Come on, Alaric,” she says. “We both know you—“
He smashes his elbow into her face and goes for the stake on the bookshelf.
Katherine is a vampire, but he’s a big man and she wasn’t expecting to be sucker punched in the middle of her seduction routine and he gets close enough to brush the stake with his fingertips before she’s on him again.
She forces him to the ground, puts a knee on his chest, and slaps him idly. The blow rocks his head to the side and damn near dislocates his jaw.
She’s laughing again. Her nails dig painfully into his skin as she turns his head back to face her. “Nice try,” she says. “I can see why Damon likes you.”
There isn’t really anything to say to that, it’s true, this probably is why Damon likes him, so Alaric keeps his mouth shut. His jaw hurts a lot.
Katherine bends down and kisses him. He makes a muffled sound of protest which she ignores in favor of licking his teeth, sinking deep. She feels good, pressed against him, her mouth on his, but she tastes like old blood and bitter herbs and he wants her the hell off him.
He starts working at the baseboard with his fingernails.
“You’re a funny one, history teacher,” Katherine says. She shifts to straddle his hips, pinning him to floor with her negligible weight and otherworldly strength. “Is this what you wanted when you came to town?” She sucks a biting kiss into the center of his chest. “Did you find what you came looking for?”
Her hands work at the leather and metal of his belt buckle.
The creak of wood nails from the baseboard is soft, but he worries she can hear it anyway.
He came to this town looking for any shred of hope that he wasn’t crazy, that vampires existed. He found the vampire he’d seen with his wife.
Before he came back to his apartment and walked right into this, he was at the bar with Damon.
“No,” he says. “I didn’t find what I was looking for.”
Katherine looks mockingly surprised. “No? But you found the vampire who took your wife.” She snaps the button on his jeans clean off. Alaric hears it ricochet off the counter and roll across the floor.
The baseboard is coming loose, slowly.
“I was looking for the wrong thing,” he says. “Isobel didn’t want to be found.”
“And now the man who took her from you is your BFF.” Katherine makes the statement a sneer.
Alaric doesn’t have a response for that, either. Again, it’s sort of sadly true.
Katherine bends to lick slowly at the triangle of skin exposed by his half open jeans.
“Isobel left,” he says. He’s very impressed with the evenness of his voice. Katherine huffs a laughing breath that he feels against his dick.
He says, “And now she’s dead.”
He stabs the shard of baseboard into her shoulder.
--
There was no way he was going to get her heart, but she reacts instinctively. Throwing herself backwards and shoving him away.
Her shove sends him sliding right into the wooden box on the lowest level of his bookshelf. Alaric tucks away from her retaliatory strike, rolls, and comes up with a crossbow pointed at her chest.
Katherine makes a disappointed moue, and puts her hands on her hips. She rakes her eyes over him, shirtless, disheveled, and bleeding.
She tosses her hair like this was her plan all along. “What did you find, Alaric? If you came looking for the wrong thing, what did you find here, instead?”
Alaric keeps the crossbow leveled at her while she smiles, draws her nails across the wall, and walks out the door.
He found a family here, is the truth.
And none of them ever need to know about the ten minutes he spends in the shower, thinking about Katherine’s claws and teeth.
--