[ oh, but that's enough to get John's eyes dark, to get his breath slow and heavy despite the recent need to drag more in. to hone his focus down again, to eyes and the lips speaking words that sink into his spine and straighten it, just slightly, vertebra by vertebra. what he's best at. what he's built for almost, what he loves. taking to pieces. shouting down his own urge to crumble and pushing onward into someone else's, further, dismantling.
he doesn't know if Freddie knows, suspects, or if it's just something to pull him back up into action, another gift. either way, happy birthday, John Watson. today or another day. a chance to show what he's made of.
there's the barest edge of something stirring at the corners of John's lips. ]
How about you start off with that and I'll let you know if it wakes me up.
[Oh but Freddie's never anything other than a challenge. If no one else got bored with the alternative, he would. There are all kinds of easy, and Freddie is precisely one of them.]
You lazy bastard.
[And Freddie's lips curl just as lazily. Splaying himself against John's side, he stretches idly, unbending one leg to lay it out across John's thighs. They'd sat like this not so very long ago over beers in his flat, telling stories.
All right. Not exactly like this.
He rubs himself through his jeans at first, slowly, fingers curling in to ruck up the fabric. There's the slightest catch in his voice when he speaks now.]
So, I know you... mostly... do girls. But I don't know how mostly that is.
Girls. [ John's lips hitch up in earnest, girls, he's forty one for fuck's sakes, but he doesn't use the laugh to push the question aside. eyes drift down the line of Freddie's torso to where his hand works as he considers his answer. ] Almost exclusively.
[ the break in exclusivity being recent and easily named, splayed out as it is beside him and across his lap. John's palm moves to stroke over the inside of a thigh. ]
I've had my moments.
[ to know himself, understand his tastes. still home first, in anger, a brief span of months spent more and more often out and away from the house and never discovered for what it was after his sister's forcible dismissal: impossible to be there for her without a station on the inside, able to put in good words and pass out whispers. impossible to be anything other than the better child, the good son. later, out from all that, in a time of wandering that ended with university and the people he gravitated to. stifled by the time he made the army, the silence after.
he's always known, but he hasn't had much time. hatred was ground in early, shame alongside, fury and fear and a cocktail of so many other delicate parts of himself, wanting and caring and feeling, that this, too, became too precious a thing to show casually. difficult to get around all that. John's not inclined towards vulnerability at the best of times. wrap all his weak points up in the same package and very quickly you find yourself with something too sore, too fragile to touch.
so he doesn't. typically. flirts around on the outskirts, plays at it, never takes the final step. it's that way that he's left a trail he doesn't even know about: imperceptible to all (including himself, unconscious and easy as his actions are by now) but those who stumble after him, abandoned. friends. only ever friends. only ever.
eyes raise again, smile still sharp, kneading Freddie's thigh under his hand. ]
What would you have said?
[ before all this. he's heard accounts, heard his early opinions, recent ones too, but they're here now and John's curious: how mostly, in Freddie's best guess? John wears a well cultivated exterior, fits so well he sometimes forgets it's a second skin. until he catches an eye or the timbre of a voice and discovers it burns. ]
Edited (mandatory edits since it's been a while) 2016-04-17 16:40 (UTC)
[Girls. Women just sounds so... old. Women are his mum's age - and she's forty-five, so it probably is the correct term for the kind of dates John's supposed to go on. It's just a stretch of Freddie's vocabulary to make the connection between women and people you fuck (and that's one of the rare areas he's barely explored: he fucks boys, and men, and dates girls).]
Almost.
[There's no attempt to hide amusement, his eyes drifting down to focus on the hand that's curled around his thigh.]
Well, I figured that part out. [Or, he knows now. But if he's as honest as he can be, with the surface stripped down, he wasn't one hundred percent sure there'd be an exception made for him. When push came to shove in that bar, the threat might not have been idle. He's met men like that. Men you can push so far before some learned revulsion in them makes them snap. Men who would have broken his spine. It's one reason among many that Freddie's careful not to push - for the most part. Lance met a man like that, and pushed, and he's the one who fell.
But John.]
I would have said you were straight. [He gives that answer simply. To anyone else, it's how he'd have described him. Still would be, in fact.
He rubs his hand over the back of John's, spreading his legs a little more to accommodate the slight nudge higher he teases out of him.] But I've fucked a lot of straight men. And I might be their first time, but I'm never the first time they've thought about it.
[He's unfastening his fly, sliding a hand under the waistband of his briefs, still teasingly invisible, though his back arches sharply as his hand wraps his cock. Swallows hard when he starts stroking himself.]
I'd have said you thought about it. [There's another question there, but he holds it a moment, humming out a sigh.] Almost exclusively. So I really am your teenage experimental phase.
[At some point his eyelashes have shuttered down, letting John watch him unobserved and unanalysed by a sharp-eyed gaze. This, in itself, is another gift. But the question lingers on his tongue and his eyes open narrowly as he asks it.]
[ there's no shame in the way John's hand wanders, no hesitation. not now he's here, no nerves or first time flutters. and that's because it isn't. it really isn't. but it is the first time in a long time - the first person in a long time, anyway, this isn't their first time with their hands on each other - and so John doesn't rush to disillusion him. not when he's been asked a question. more important things to be doing besides, like watching all the small little ways Freddie's hand around himself hidden there inside the confines of his jeans is expressed in the rest of him. there's a sharp beauty in that, in the little ways pleasure paints itself on a person, that he hasn't had the time to watch in Freddie before.
and Freddie doesn't need the help, really, does he? where beauty's concerned. and still, ]
Not really.
[ not quite true, but he doesn't think his answer's what Freddie's asking after, so he gives that one first: Freddie was never fodder, strangely enough, before. but that doesn't mean he never thought about him. ]
I thought about how close it was coming. Whether you were doing it on purpose, really on purpose, or whether it was just something you do. [ thumb draws firm, insistent circles into the material under it now, smoothly working higher ] I'd think about that.
[ and how strangely complex a thing it had grown into despite itself. hard, because people are once they get closer than he realises he's let them, where he seems to root himself down beside the most difficult of the lot... but there's an ease to it too, to the way he can navigate the majority of his time with Freddie, the way Freddie navigates John. but there was a question, always, in the times he knew it and the times he didn't: is this turning into the step too far I've been waiting to take for the last seven... nine... God, or is it ten years now? longer than that? and when it comes down to it, it's never really been a matter of Freddie's age. it's that he's been standing in front of a door he's closed for ages now, never pushed quite hard enough in quite the right ways to persuade him to pull it open again and step over the threshold until, apparently, this.
Freddie's narrow eyes find John's watching closely the corner of his mouth where the particular stretch of its edge widening out into the fuller swell of lips had been worth keeping watch over. ]
You're not my first time. You're my first in a long time. [ gaze flits up, meets. ] I'll think about you now.
Edited (hopefully this is now a less shitty tag than it was I'm never tagging in the morning again in my life) 2016-04-18 18:01 (UTC)
[Like so many things Freddie declares of himself, like Freddie, this is both truth and a lie. What would be closer to the truth is that he owns his helpless or reckless choices. For every time he's vanished and left only fragments of an old identity behind him, for every time he's brought the wrong person home for the wrong reasons and taken a shower that burns after kicking them out...
For everything. They've all been choices and had purpose at the time however misguided. However guided by someone else's hand. He doesn't let himself off for any of it. Doesn't take anything back.
And the way he's been with John? It's just something he does. It's a track he stays on with almost everyone because it's safe: to tease and test and ground a relationship in the basis of flirtation and nothing of more substance.
It's John who broke the system. Stayed around where someone not interested in Freddie's offers and intimations would have fled, but not for them. Which... was confusing. Frustrating. Freddie can't, still, understand that someone might have other reasons to stay.
But frustrations will have an out. And on purpose became more of a deliberate thing.]
I thought about you. [He's nothing if not generous with this kind of honesty, where someone else's pride might be bruised.] A couple of times. Usually when you pissed me off.
[What starts as a laugh tilts into a moan, pleasure in little shivers making ripples across his surface.]
I don't believe you, though. Because - that's not how people work, is it? You don't kiss someone back, not the way you did, if you've not thought about it. I think... [He pauses, making a study of John's face from under lowered, sandy eyelashes.] I think you just got that good at not wanting things, you stopped noticing when you did. I think it all just got tossed away somewhere labelled things John Watson can't have. Boxed up and dusty, but there.
[It's a crude assessment, but Freddie can't help feeling like somewhere he managed to trip on that box and kick the contents free.]
[ John watches him for a long span of seconds after that. intent. intent again on the shape of Freddie's face, slipping gaze down out of sight of met eyes to follow the line of his jaw, the tautness in his throat, and it's just long enough that maybe he's neglecting to answer. maybe. but then there's the incline of his head, a huff of air out through his nose, that small smile that quirks just so when he's been caught by something— this time, for once, a concession.
Freddie's probably right. because he does that. more and more these days, John's coming to accept that he does exactly that. boxes it all away on a shelf too high to reach and leaves it there, known but forgotten, heavy. but he had known about this one. known enough that in had come employment of a much more recently learned tactic: don't think about the ones you might have. the ones you might allow yourself. because you also might not, and then it's worse.
the never going to happens of this world and the will happens and has happeneds are fair game. safe territory. the might happens are too much like self-flagellation. too rare and too much.
that Freddie's tipped himself off the shelf, that he's spread out here and saying all this with his hand around his cock, is enough evidence that he was always a might happen. that he's always been one of those dangerous few and that John, in his own way, has been scared of him. peeling off and falling back in turns because he was scared of this - right up until now, and suddenly not scared at all.
it makes him brave. no bravery needed to raise his hand the last of the way to slot it over Freddie's, over the fabric parting them, in quiet encouragement. bravery, perhaps, to speak, though this doesn't feel frightening anymore either. ]
Does this - [ not scare, not fear in the way people should be afraid of certain things, and John's aware he's asked a similar thing before and got a flat answer not worth chasing after. so, again, trying again ] - worry you? This is the second time now.
[ he's not blind. not ignorant to Freddie's usual pattern. then again, he also knows there was a man once who ended up with Freddie's clothes pressed between his own in a wardrobe somewhere, so maybe fearing it's not so much of a problem as habit paints it. still. interested to know if he's the only one who's been unsettled, pulled up out of his usual comforts, disrupted. he ought to be cautious with this next part: isn't. the tension in Freddie's bare abdomen somehow removes the need. ] I don't mind if it's not the last.
[ the preceding and is inherent and unspoken, even though it changes the meaning, brings two separate thoughts in to tie together. makes it about John if it needs to be, if it's easier. instead of Freddie and John, some strange folded orbit that might smack a bit too much of another kind of might happen to be worth talking about at all. he suspects Freddie might well be the same as him in that regard, even if his focus is differently placed. ]
Edited (ah yes the edit streak returns) 2016-04-19 06:54 (UTC)
[Freddie's asked John if he's dangerous, before. And had different answers. He's something waiting to explode, or shatter, and John thought he knew how to handle that. Although, one has to suspect, munitions experience doesn't quite cover what he's handled since. He's dangerous for being too close, and dangerous that, the next second, he might not be.
John's never asked the reverse. And the truth is that the people Freddie lets in have always been devastating to him.
But it's a cycle he repeats, despite all attempts to the contrary. He is, as John observed, a romantic. Though he's not an idealist: he never expects to be someone's first choice, and the ones than defy that expectation are never allowed to stick around, with taste so questionable. He learned love from a man who wouldn't so much as let him have a phone number, a photo, for whom affection was a tool to get what he wanted. So he tries love now, from time to time allows the possibility of it in - starts relationships, goes back to people after the first time, the second: it's rare but it happens - and then causes disaster before disaster can find him first.
There's no expectation of being first choice, here. He already knows John's practically married to his work, and just as practically to the man that brought it to his door. The nature of things may be different, but the priority remains. He has another world to think of.
Freddie is a romantic. Not in words. He keeps his head tilted up to watch John now but doesn't pay pretty compliments. Why, when the man has a picture by his bed that says I know the lines of your face from memory, I can close my eyes and picture the exact colour of yours. I've traced the outlines of your mouth and you're not beautiful, like I am beautiful, but I've found beauty in you that means more. He is romantic.
And when you're that, your heart is always at risk.
He tries to keep his in a box, gathering dust, but he's not so old or adept as John is - not yet. He lets John cover his hand, guide it, then easily swaps the arrangement, wrapping his fingers over John's knuckles, tightening his grip.]
Keeps me up all night.
[Does he worry. No, because that's not the way Freddie works. These things aren't worn openly on his surface, they scratch under his skin until he tears it off and runs. For now it's easy to be casual, easy to smile, to lift his hips and meet John's palm, controlling the pace.]
And I suppose there's next year's birthday. Maybe Christmas. [He's taken and filed away the last fragment, I don't mind but sorry - he's given John gifts tonight but this one is too much. He doesn't know if he'll be back. Won't know until he is, or until John presses the issue himself (presses Freddie against something, lips at his throat) and Freddie responds, or doesn't.
He can't give promises, they're too much of a risk. And that may be the answer John wants to know: yes, he's unsettled, no this isn't a simple thing that threatens to disrupt both their lives. Making things official doesn't work for Freddie, he's immediately pressed to rebel. Something that builds quietly, barely acknowledged until it exists, that might slip under his guard. Maybe.
There are no promises.
But at least, for right now, he can't see himself minding, either.]
Edited (maybe forgetting to include the paragraph i was aiming for when i started typing (and also a vital word)) 2016-04-19 21:58 (UTC)
[ a faint rumble somewhere in John's chest, his throat, smile tugged tight and sharp at the easy change. ]
Same for every occasion? [ a pause, punctuated by the shift of a thumb pulling free to graze over the head on Freddie's upstroke, brow innocently quirked with his second concession of the day - ] Better than socks.
[ more than enough to be getting on with though. he doesn't need this from Freddie, enjoys him perfectly well without it. the suggestion that either of them may stick around either in the other's orbit or here, in Eudio, for long enough for next year's birthday (maybe Christmas) might be exaggeration but still placates. it's a small implication that there's some duration left, even if it's not as long as all that. Freddie's not yet on the verge of making for the hills and John isn't either.
truly, he doesn't know what it is he'd be running from. it's not anything, but it's not nothing either. in John's world sex is complicating. sex belongs to the people he befriends to have sex with, the girlfriends who were never friends until the first date. a clear cut line that keeps his boundaries well set and his relationships simple, people mattering in different ways for different reasons, kept for the most part as separate as he can manage. sex, again, gains another level of complexity when it's come about as the impulse dismantling of years of avoidance, years on top of that of purposeful self-denial just as purposefully, willingly cast aside at the invitation of - a friend. Freddie is his friend. that's a rare enough thing. John barely keeps friends: there are the people he calls friend for want of a better word, the in-between people who probably fit it, and there are the people he calls friend because it's the closest thing to meaningful he has. Freddie is twenty-five years old, a boy who plays at man who plays at boy, ever-shifting, easier to talk to than most people he's met despite all the ways in which John ought to find him impossible (perhaps those are the parts that pull him in) and somehow, improbably but irrevocably, he is John's friend.
it means that he shouldn't be here. that it's complicated enough already. it also means that he chuckles as he slowly starts to twist his hand, moving it just ever so slightly into and away from the rise and fall of Freddie's hips. ]
When I pissed you off. [ go on, then. tell me more about that. ]
[Freddie didn't expect to make it a year in Eudio. His contract was paid in a bare few months, his mere presence in the city enough to power a full set of back-up generators for whatever it is the place runs on. He'd say it was the new faces that kept him as long as it took to decide to choose a new contract and revoke the old. Every few weeks a new flow of people who didn't know his name and wouldn't remember him when they, eventually, left themselves.
But Manchester has its tides too. Waves of students and the stream of tourists that kept Canal Street afloat. He could find the shock of the new anywhere.
It was more that he'd dropped little anchors, here and there. And enough of them stayed moored to keep him in place. He'd lost a couple, of course. Cassidy, early on. John Buchanan, recently. But there's Jem and Raven and Joe. And there's John Watson. It's no wonder his keel gets rocked every time it seems like John's readying to leave. There's a pull he can't quite explain.
And enough stormy weather to risk snapping the bonds on a semi-regular basis.]
Do you want me to go over the arguments, or the aftermath?
[And he grins, because rehashing old fights would be the easiest way to trigger new ones, he's not stupid. The occasion demands something else entirely.
Speaking of something else, he's had enough of this languid sprawl: there's only so much taking he can take. When it comes to sex, as with most things, Freddie's generous and selfish. He likes to be a participant. Pushing a hand behind him, he's out of John's grip long enough to straddle his lap, knees splayed on either side of his thighs.]
The first time was... ages ago. Few months. I wasn't thinking about fucking you, I was just... fucked off. So I took a shower and thought about ways of shutting you up.
[His hands are on his own body, running down his sides, his thighs, but he reaches for John, then, pulls him upright and meets his mouth with harder demands than before.]
Worked in real life too, now that I think about it.
[ John recognises the shift and meets him with equal fervour, pressing back hard and letting go, petulantly, playfully, of a low moan into Freddie's mouth. you can shut the mouth but you cannot quiet the man. ]
Did it? [ which time is a question, this or that, and when else springs to mind next. it's all worth knowing, all there to be asked after with Freddie so forthcoming... but there's something else, isn't there, of bigger interest and difficult to ignore sat so invitingly astride his lap that it would be rude not to prioritise him. a few pecks dropped along the swell of Freddie's lips, teasing nips at his jawline, and John's craning his neck to burrow up behind an ear to mouth and worry at the delicate skin there. lower, he takes him back in hand, easing into steady, insistent strokes.
right by his ear, voice a rich purr: ]
How long do you think you could stand it, Freddie? Me inside you. Slow, after you're all warmed up. I've already come once tonight. [ breath, the barest graze of lips against the shell of his ear. a brief catching of an earlobe lightly between teeth. ] There's still time to beg off. [ there's always time to beg off, but that much is obvious. here, for these purposes, the implication he's trying to make is clear enough: come now or come much, much later. it's half play, tease, but it's also entirely Freddie's call, John sitting content on the line between one place and the other but confident that he can at least place it down on the table. an edge to his tone that's entirely too deliberate, too full of surety, puts paid to any risk that he'd be lazy. playful threat and promise curled together and falling from his tongue entwined.
there's no expiry date on it. once on the table on the table it'll stay - now, Christmas or never. but he's never really been in the position to goad. seems only fair he take his turn now. ]
[If he visits for this purpose too often, it's becoming plain, he'll wind up with a permanent necklace of bruises from how often John's attentions fall to his throat, jaw, that oversensitive spot just behind his ear that makes him gasp prettily whenever it's caught by the graze of teeth. There's something about leaving marks behind that keeps memory sharper, sensation more clear. He'll never object.
Definitely doesn't object to John playing him at his own game. It's such a change to hear the lilt that comes into his tone like this, the low music behind his promises - threats. It makes his cock twitch against John's palm, but his face is serene.
He's too good to be undone until he chooses to be.
When he draws far enough from John's mouth to look down at him again his gaze is mild, serene. Gently, pleasantly mocking.]
If you want me to beg anything, you're going to have to work a lot harder.
[There's a harder inflection on the last word, focus skimming down John's body to what Freddie's slayed legs hide from view. As though taking the time to consider an offer he knows the answer to, he works his way down John's shirt, button by button, thanking whatever small gods there are that it's too warm for sweater vests.]
I can go as long as you can give, John. If you're sure you're up to it.
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no subject
he doesn't know if Freddie knows, suspects, or if it's just something to pull him back up into action, another gift. either way, happy birthday, John Watson. today or another day. a chance to show what he's made of.
there's the barest edge of something stirring at the corners of John's lips. ]
How about you start off with that and I'll let you know if it wakes me up.
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You lazy bastard.
[And Freddie's lips curl just as lazily. Splaying himself against John's side, he stretches idly, unbending one leg to lay it out across John's thighs. They'd sat like this not so very long ago over beers in his flat, telling stories.
All right. Not exactly like this.
He rubs himself through his jeans at first, slowly, fingers curling in to ruck up the fabric. There's the slightest catch in his voice when he speaks now.]
So, I know you... mostly... do girls. But I don't know how mostly that is.
no subject
[ the break in exclusivity being recent and easily named, splayed out as it is beside him and across his lap. John's palm moves to stroke over the inside of a thigh. ]
I've had my moments.
[ to know himself, understand his tastes. still home first, in anger, a brief span of months spent more and more often out and away from the house and never discovered for what it was after his sister's forcible dismissal: impossible to be there for her without a station on the inside, able to put in good words and pass out whispers. impossible to be anything other than the better child, the good son. later, out from all that, in a time of wandering that ended with university and the people he gravitated to. stifled by the time he made the army, the silence after.
he's always known, but he hasn't had much time. hatred was ground in early, shame alongside, fury and fear and a cocktail of so many other delicate parts of himself, wanting and caring and feeling, that this, too, became too precious a thing to show casually. difficult to get around all that. John's not inclined towards vulnerability at the best of times. wrap all his weak points up in the same package and very quickly you find yourself with something too sore, too fragile to touch.
so he doesn't. typically. flirts around on the outskirts, plays at it, never takes the final step. it's that way that he's left a trail he doesn't even know about: imperceptible to all (including himself, unconscious and easy as his actions are by now) but those who stumble after him, abandoned. friends. only ever friends. only ever.
eyes raise again, smile still sharp, kneading Freddie's thigh under his hand. ]
What would you have said?
[ before all this. he's heard accounts, heard his early opinions, recent ones too, but they're here now and John's curious: how mostly, in Freddie's best guess? John wears a well cultivated exterior, fits so well he sometimes forgets it's a second skin. until he catches an eye or the timbre of a voice and discovers it burns. ]
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Almost.
[There's no attempt to hide amusement, his eyes drifting down to focus on the hand that's curled around his thigh.]
Well, I figured that part out. [Or, he knows now. But if he's as honest as he can be, with the surface stripped down, he wasn't one hundred percent sure there'd be an exception made for him. When push came to shove in that bar, the threat might not have been idle. He's met men like that. Men you can push so far before some learned revulsion in them makes them snap. Men who would have broken his spine. It's one reason among many that Freddie's careful not to push - for the most part. Lance met a man like that, and pushed, and he's the one who fell.
But John.]
I would have said you were straight. [He gives that answer simply. To anyone else, it's how he'd have described him. Still would be, in fact.
He rubs his hand over the back of John's, spreading his legs a little more to accommodate the slight nudge higher he teases out of him.] But I've fucked a lot of straight men. And I might be their first time, but I'm never the first time they've thought about it.
[He's unfastening his fly, sliding a hand under the waistband of his briefs, still teasingly invisible, though his back arches sharply as his hand wraps his cock. Swallows hard when he starts stroking himself.]
I'd have said you thought about it. [There's another question there, but he holds it a moment, humming out a sigh.] Almost exclusively. So I really am your teenage experimental phase.
[At some point his eyelashes have shuttered down, letting John watch him unobserved and unanalysed by a sharp-eyed gaze. This, in itself, is another gift. But the question lingers on his tongue and his eyes open narrowly as he asks it.]
Did you think about me?
no subject
and Freddie doesn't need the help, really, does he? where beauty's concerned. and still, ]
Not really.
[ not quite true, but he doesn't think his answer's what Freddie's asking after, so he gives that one first: Freddie was never fodder, strangely enough, before. but that doesn't mean he never thought about him. ]
I thought about how close it was coming. Whether you were doing it on purpose, really on purpose, or whether it was just something you do. [ thumb draws firm, insistent circles into the material under it now, smoothly working higher ] I'd think about that.
[ and how strangely complex a thing it had grown into despite itself. hard, because people are once they get closer than he realises he's let them, where he seems to root himself down beside the most difficult of the lot... but there's an ease to it too, to the way he can navigate the majority of his time with Freddie, the way Freddie navigates John. but there was a question, always, in the times he knew it and the times he didn't: is this turning into the step too far I've been waiting to take for the last seven... nine... God, or is it ten years now? longer than that? and when it comes down to it, it's never really been a matter of Freddie's age. it's that he's been standing in front of a door he's closed for ages now, never pushed quite hard enough in quite the right ways to persuade him to pull it open again and step over the threshold until, apparently, this.
Freddie's narrow eyes find John's watching closely the corner of his mouth where the particular stretch of its edge widening out into the fuller swell of lips had been worth keeping watch over. ]
You're not my first time. You're my first in a long time. [ gaze flits up, meets. ] I'll think about you now.
it was a wonderful tag originally too fyi
[Like so many things Freddie declares of himself, like Freddie, this is both truth and a lie. What would be closer to the truth is that he owns his helpless or reckless choices. For every time he's vanished and left only fragments of an old identity behind him, for every time he's brought the wrong person home for the wrong reasons and taken a shower that burns after kicking them out...
For everything. They've all been choices and had purpose at the time however misguided. However guided by someone else's hand. He doesn't let himself off for any of it. Doesn't take anything back.
And the way he's been with John? It's just something he does. It's a track he stays on with almost everyone because it's safe: to tease and test and ground a relationship in the basis of flirtation and nothing of more substance.
It's John who broke the system. Stayed around where someone not interested in Freddie's offers and intimations would have fled, but not for them. Which... was confusing. Frustrating.
Freddie can't, still, understand that someone might have other reasons to stay.
But frustrations will have an out. And on purpose became more of a deliberate thing.]
I thought about you. [He's nothing if not generous with this kind of honesty, where someone else's pride might be bruised.] A couple of times. Usually when you pissed me off.
[What starts as a laugh tilts into a moan, pleasure in little shivers making ripples across his surface.]
I don't believe you, though. Because - that's not how people work, is it? You don't kiss someone back, not the way you did, if you've not thought about it. I think... [He pauses, making a study of John's face from under lowered, sandy eyelashes.] I think you just got that good at not wanting things, you stopped noticing when you did. I think it all just got tossed away somewhere labelled things John Watson can't have. Boxed up and dusty, but there.
[It's a crude assessment, but Freddie can't help feeling like somewhere he managed to trip on that box and kick the contents free.]
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Freddie's probably right. because he does that. more and more these days, John's coming to accept that he does exactly that. boxes it all away on a shelf too high to reach and leaves it there, known but forgotten, heavy. but he had known about this one. known enough that in had come employment of a much more recently learned tactic: don't think about the ones you might have. the ones you might allow yourself. because you also might not, and then it's worse.
the never going to happens of this world and the will happens and has happeneds are fair game. safe territory. the might happens are too much like self-flagellation. too rare and too much.
that Freddie's tipped himself off the shelf, that he's spread out here and saying all this with his hand around his cock, is enough evidence that he was always a might happen. that he's always been one of those dangerous few and that John, in his own way, has been scared of him. peeling off and falling back in turns because he was scared of this - right up until now, and suddenly not scared at all.
it makes him brave. no bravery needed to raise his hand the last of the way to slot it over Freddie's, over the fabric parting them, in quiet encouragement. bravery, perhaps, to speak, though this doesn't feel frightening anymore either. ]
Does this - [ not scare, not fear in the way people should be afraid of certain things, and John's aware he's asked a similar thing before and got a flat answer not worth chasing after. so, again, trying again ] - worry you? This is the second time now.
[ he's not blind. not ignorant to Freddie's usual pattern. then again, he also knows there was a man once who ended up with Freddie's clothes pressed between his own in a wardrobe somewhere, so maybe fearing it's not so much of a problem as habit paints it. still. interested to know if he's the only one who's been unsettled, pulled up out of his usual comforts, disrupted. he ought to be cautious with this next part: isn't. the tension in Freddie's bare abdomen somehow removes the need. ] I don't mind if it's not the last.
[ the preceding and is inherent and unspoken, even though it changes the meaning, brings two separate thoughts in to tie together. makes it about John if it needs to be, if it's easier. instead of Freddie and John, some strange folded orbit that might smack a bit too much of another kind of might happen to be worth talking about at all. he suspects Freddie might well be the same as him in that regard, even if his focus is differently placed. ]
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John's never asked the reverse. And the truth is that the people Freddie lets in have always been devastating to him.
But it's a cycle he repeats, despite all attempts to the contrary. He is, as John observed, a romantic. Though he's not an idealist: he never expects to be someone's first choice, and the ones than defy that expectation are never allowed to stick around, with taste so questionable. He learned love from a man who wouldn't so much as let him have a phone number, a photo, for whom affection was a tool to get what he wanted. So he tries love now, from time to time allows the possibility of it in - starts relationships, goes back to people after the first time, the second: it's rare but it happens - and then causes disaster before disaster can find him first.
There's no expectation of being first choice, here. He already knows John's practically married to his work, and just as practically to the man that brought it to his door. The nature of things may be different, but the priority remains. He has another world to think of.
Freddie is a romantic. Not in words. He keeps his head tilted up to watch John now but doesn't pay pretty compliments. Why, when the man has a picture by his bed that says I know the lines of your face from memory, I can close my eyes and picture the exact colour of yours. I've traced the outlines of your mouth and you're not beautiful, like I am beautiful, but I've found beauty in you that means more. He is romantic.
And when you're that, your heart is always at risk.
He tries to keep his in a box, gathering dust, but he's not so old or adept as John is - not yet. He lets John cover his hand, guide it, then easily swaps the arrangement, wrapping his fingers over John's knuckles, tightening his grip.]
Keeps me up all night.
[Does he worry. No, because that's not the way Freddie works. These things aren't worn openly on his surface, they scratch under his skin until he tears it off and runs. For now it's easy to be casual, easy to smile, to lift his hips and meet John's palm, controlling the pace.]
And I suppose there's next year's birthday. Maybe Christmas. [He's taken and filed away the last fragment, I don't mind but sorry - he's given John gifts tonight but this one is too much. He doesn't know if he'll be back. Won't know until he is, or until John presses the issue himself (presses Freddie against something, lips at his throat) and Freddie responds, or doesn't.
He can't give promises, they're too much of a risk. And that may be the answer John wants to know: yes, he's unsettled, no this isn't a simple thing that threatens to disrupt both their lives. Making things official doesn't work for Freddie, he's immediately pressed to rebel. Something that builds quietly, barely acknowledged until it exists, that might slip under his guard. Maybe.
There are no promises.
But at least, for right now, he can't see himself minding, either.]
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Same for every occasion? [ a pause, punctuated by the shift of a thumb pulling free to graze over the head on Freddie's upstroke, brow innocently quirked with his second concession of the day - ] Better than socks.
[ more than enough to be getting on with though. he doesn't need this from Freddie, enjoys him perfectly well without it. the suggestion that either of them may stick around either in the other's orbit or here, in Eudio, for long enough for next year's birthday (maybe Christmas) might be exaggeration but still placates. it's a small implication that there's some duration left, even if it's not as long as all that. Freddie's not yet on the verge of making for the hills and John isn't either.
truly, he doesn't know what it is he'd be running from. it's not anything, but it's not nothing either. in John's world sex is complicating. sex belongs to the people he befriends to have sex with, the girlfriends who were never friends until the first date. a clear cut line that keeps his boundaries well set and his relationships simple, people mattering in different ways for different reasons, kept for the most part as separate as he can manage. sex, again, gains another level of complexity when it's come about as the impulse dismantling of years of avoidance, years on top of that of purposeful self-denial just as purposefully, willingly cast aside at the invitation of - a friend. Freddie is his friend. that's a rare enough thing. John barely keeps friends: there are the people he calls friend for want of a better word, the in-between people who probably fit it, and there are the people he calls friend because it's the closest thing to meaningful he has. Freddie is twenty-five years old, a boy who plays at man who plays at boy, ever-shifting, easier to talk to than most people he's met despite all the ways in which John ought to find him impossible (perhaps those are the parts that pull him in) and somehow, improbably but irrevocably, he is John's friend.
it means that he shouldn't be here. that it's complicated enough already. it also means that he chuckles as he slowly starts to twist his hand, moving it just ever so slightly into and away from the rise and fall of Freddie's hips. ]
When I pissed you off. [ go on, then. tell me more about that. ]
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But Manchester has its tides too. Waves of students and the stream of tourists that kept Canal Street afloat. He could find the shock of the new anywhere.
It was more that he'd dropped little anchors, here and there. And enough of them stayed moored to keep him in place. He'd lost a couple, of course. Cassidy, early on. John Buchanan, recently. But there's Jem and Raven and Joe. And there's John Watson. It's no wonder his keel gets rocked every time it seems like John's readying to leave. There's a pull he can't quite explain.
And enough stormy weather to risk snapping the bonds on a semi-regular basis.]
Do you want me to go over the arguments, or the aftermath?
[And he grins, because rehashing old fights would be the easiest way to trigger new ones, he's not stupid. The occasion demands something else entirely.
Speaking of something else, he's had enough of this languid sprawl: there's only so much taking he can take. When it comes to sex, as with most things, Freddie's generous and selfish. He likes to be a participant. Pushing a hand behind him, he's out of John's grip long enough to straddle his lap, knees splayed on either side of his thighs.]
The first time was... ages ago. Few months. I wasn't thinking about fucking you, I was just... fucked off. So I took a shower and thought about ways of shutting you up.
[His hands are on his own body, running down his sides, his thighs, but he reaches for John, then, pulls him upright and meets his mouth with harder demands than before.]
Worked in real life too, now that I think about it.
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Did it? [ which time is a question, this or that, and when else springs to mind next. it's all worth knowing, all there to be asked after with Freddie so forthcoming... but there's something else, isn't there, of bigger interest and difficult to ignore sat so invitingly astride his lap that it would be rude not to prioritise him. a few pecks dropped along the swell of Freddie's lips, teasing nips at his jawline, and John's craning his neck to burrow up behind an ear to mouth and worry at the delicate skin there. lower, he takes him back in hand, easing into steady, insistent strokes.
right by his ear, voice a rich purr: ]
How long do you think you could stand it, Freddie? Me inside you. Slow, after you're all warmed up. I've already come once tonight. [ breath, the barest graze of lips against the shell of his ear. a brief catching of an earlobe lightly between teeth. ] There's still time to beg off. [ there's always time to beg off, but that much is obvious. here, for these purposes, the implication he's trying to make is clear enough: come now or come much, much later. it's half play, tease, but it's also entirely Freddie's call, John sitting content on the line between one place and the other but confident that he can at least place it down on the table. an edge to his tone that's entirely too deliberate, too full of surety, puts paid to any risk that he'd be lazy. playful threat and promise curled together and falling from his tongue entwined.
there's no expiry date on it. once on the table on the table it'll stay - now, Christmas or never. but he's never really been in the position to goad. seems only fair he take his turn now. ]
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Definitely doesn't object to John playing him at his own game. It's such a change to hear the lilt that comes into his tone like this, the low music behind his promises - threats. It makes his cock twitch against John's palm, but his face is serene.
He's too good to be undone until he chooses to be.
When he draws far enough from John's mouth to look down at him again his gaze is mild, serene. Gently, pleasantly mocking.]
If you want me to beg anything, you're going to have to work a lot harder.
[There's a harder inflection on the last word, focus skimming down John's body to what Freddie's slayed legs hide from view. As though taking the time to consider an offer he knows the answer to, he works his way down John's shirt, button by button, thanking whatever small gods there are that it's too warm for sweater vests.]
I can go as long as you can give, John. If you're sure you're up to it.