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custody | /ˈkʌstədi/ | noun
1. Law enforcement. The lawful detention of a person; the condition of being held, guarded, or controlled by an officer of the militia; the duty of safekeeping owed to that which one has taken in.
2. (reflexive, c. ’51; a one-room motor-inn at the edge of the Pale, a long way from Revachol, the hour after lights-out) Of one lieutenant surrendered into the hands of another: the condition of a former lieutenant of the 57th, woken to find one wrist closed in his own regulation steel and the key a long arm’s reach away — discovering, against twenty years of training and on the bare evidence, that he is in no hurry whatsoever to be released.
The room smells like every room this far from Revachol's gaze.
PERCEPTION (SMELL) [Easy: Success] — Wet plaster. Cheap pine cleaner laid down over something older and sweeter that the pine never quite beat. And under all of it the cold tin nothing-smell of the country past the city limit — the smell of a place where the Pale sits closer than anyone here says out loud.
You are a long way from home. The suspect had run — east, past the last tram stop, past the last streetlight, out into the grey towns where the RCM's writ goes thin and the maps stop bothering to name things. Nine hours in the Kineema to run him down. And then Precinct 20 on the radio, when Kim called to hand the collar across: not our paper, Lieutenant.
By the time the local station finished explaining that no one with the authority to sign for the handoff would be awake until morning, the suspect was locked in their holding cell, the fuel station had gone dark, and the road back to Revachol was hours of unlit Pale-country asphalt neither of you had any business attempting on a day this long. Captain Pryce, reached over a line that crackled like frying fat, authorised one night's lodging and exactly one room at the only motor-inn for forty kilometres.
The RCM doing what the RCM does.
So the paperwork's yours to sit on overnight, in the single room Captain Pryce signed for because the RCM is broke and you have a documented history of not deserving nice things.
Two narrow beds. One lamp between them. A radiator that knocks.
Kim drove. Kim always drives — every hour of it today, both hands on the wheel of the Kineema he will not, on pain of death, let you so much as breathe on, waving off every offer to swap at every grey roadside town until the exhaustion you have never seen him admit to finally caught up with him at the door of the room.
He'd turned in at nine without a word. Folded the orange bomber over the chair-back, two creases (not his usual three!), square. Set the glasses on the nightstand. Took off his boots and khaki cargo pants. Hung something on the chair while your back was turned. Then he'd lain down on the far bed in his undershirt with one arm flung up over his head and gone under between one breath and the next — wrung past the point of fighting it.
You lie down on the second bed for an hour and listen to the parliament in your head argue about everything and nothing. An hour goes by like that. You're used to passing long swaths of time this way — lying in the dark, waiting for the two deeper voices to cut in. The ones you don't like meeting at the threshold of sleep. But the old animal dread of Limbic System and the Ancient Reptilian Brain keeps you up on the near side of it, and that was never a pleasant place to lie.
So instead you listen to Kim breathing one bed away, and you think about how you want. And right on cue, the gland clears its throat.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Medium: Failure] — There's a bar not too far from this place. There always is, baby — forty kilometres of grey nothing out there and still a light on somewhere, still a bottle going warm with your name on it. Just the one. C'mon.
A beat. Conspiratorial.
...OR. OR. FORGET THE BAR, HARRY — HE'S RIGHT THERE. WARM, AND ASLEEP, AND ONE BED AWAY.
VOLITION [Medium: Success] — No. You are lonely and your skin is crawling, and yes, he is warm, and yes, he is right there. That is exactly why you are going to keep your hands to yourself.
You Ignore Electrochemistry. Physically shaking your head. Yet you still feel antsy.
You cannot sleep. Months sober, with nothing in the room to takef the edge off and the edge therefore taking you, you prowl.
No Kim to keep you entertained. That's the trouble with it. All day there'd been the back of Kim's head as you babble about everything and nothing, and the Speedfreaks preset he pretends he doesn't have, plus the occasional flat devastating remark out the side of his mouth. Now there's just a sleeping man one bed away and a radiator knocking — and the back of your own skull, which is the worst company in Revachol.
So you work the room. You run your hands along the underside of the nightstand, the bed frame, the lip of the window casing — a sweep for bugs, the wired kind, because some animal part of being a cop never fully clocks out and because it's something to do with your hands.
Nothing. You get down on the carpet and peel back a corner of the mattress, hunting the other kind of bug now, the six-legged kind, fully expecting a horror.
PERCEPTION (SIGHT) [Easy: Success] — Nothing. Clean seams. Clean ticking. The room is, against every prior the rest of you holds, immaculate.
Huh. The one clean motor-inn at the edge of the Pale. You let the mattress down, almost disappointed, the prowl with nowhere left to go —
— and that's when you see it. In the corner, draped over the back of the second chair where Kim must have hung it before lights-out: the leather holster rig. The one that lives flat against the lieutenant's ribs under the orange bomber jacket, that only ever peeks out for half a second when he bends over a body, normally so well concealed that you forget it's there at all.
It is not concealed now.
PERCEPTION (SIGHT) [Medium: Success] — And there, in the small leather pocket sewn to the rig — riding where they had clearly ridden for longer than Harry had known him — the cuffs. Kim's cuffs. Standard issue. Smith pattern. The blued steel catching one thin line of lamplight.
Your eyes go from the cuffs to the sleeping lieutenant. Right arm flung up over his head, wrist resting loose and pale against the iron rail of the bedframe.
Eyes flick back. Cuffs. Wrist. Cuffs. Once. Twice.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Trivial: Success] — Cuff the sleeping lieutenant to the bed. He wakes up trapped. It's hilarious. It's the funniest thing that has ever happened. Jackpot. Comedy jackpot.
DRAMA [Easy: Success] — Sire — a prank upon the good Lieutenant! The gallery will weep with laughter! History will record this corridor! Strike, and strike with flair —
SAVOIR FAIRE [Difficult: Success] — Light fingers. Don't wake him on the approach. You have never in your life been this graceful — savour it. (And you, for once, slam no part of yourself into any furniture. The voice is so proud it could cry.)
VOLITION [Medium: Failure] — Harry. He drove all day and wouldn't let you take the wheel for one hour of it. He is finally, defenselessly asleep. Let. Him. Sleep. (Volition is outvoted. Volition will remember this.)
You lift the cuffs off the rig. You cross the gap between the beds, slow, grinning, an absolute child.
HAND/EYE COORDINATION [Godlike: Success] — Bracelet open. Seat it past the wristbone — gentle, don't catch the skin. Close. The second one around the cold iron of the rail. Your hands have never been steadier in your life and the one time it counts you're using it to commit a misdemeanour. Click. Click.
"Gotcha," you whisper.
Kim's eyes open.
Not startled — Kim does not startle — just open, fast and clear. He has been woken on worse nights than this. A flick to the wrist. A flick to the rail. A flick to your delighted idiot face hanging over him.
And you, committed to the bit, drop down onto the edge of the bed and go for the ribs. The dumb six-year-old move, the schoolyard finisher. Coochie-coochie, who's cuffed NOW, who's restrained NOW —
Kim laughs. It's torn out of him, half a yelp and half a gasp, entirely involuntary — and it is, you think distantly, the first real laugh you've gotten out of the lieutenant in weeks.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Trivial: Success] — There. There it is. You feel that — that warm gold flood coming up the back of your skull? That's the good stuff, baby. That's oxytocin and dopamine walking in arm in arm: the bonding hit and the reward hit, together, on the house. And we have not scored anything this clean in months. No bottle. No speed. No pyrholidon. One sound, out of one man you'd take a bullet for, and the whole brain lights up like Jamrock on Funday night. You quit drinking and you thought you'd shuttered the party for good — wrong, detective. We just moved venues. So get him to do it again. Chase it lower. We are so high right now. We are so high.
So of course you keep going. Drunk on it. Greedy for the next one. Your hands chase the laugh lower, off the ribs and down toward the waist where the undershirt has come untucked, fingers skating the warm bare strip of skin above the band of his shorts —
And Kim makes a sound.
It's short, and low, and bitten off half a syllable in, and it does not come from anywhere near the throat. Your hand goes still against the warm skin. But the grin doesn't go anywhere, because you — you are still, fundamentally, playing.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY [Easy: Success] — Hilarious. Big stoic flyboy lieutenant, ticklish as a schoolboy down low. Do it again. Get the squeak again. This is the best night of your entire life —
LOGIC [Medium: Failure] — Sound, reasonable. The subject is ticklish in a localised lower region. Map the region. Strictly for comedic purposes.
EMPATHY [Challenging: Failure] — He's embarrassed, you ape. Nobody likes being squeaked out of his dignity at midnight. Pat his shoulder, give him the joke, and go back to your own bed before he writes you up.
The parliament, in its wisdom, has concluded the lieutenant is ticklish and mortified, and that the decent thing is one last poke and an early night. You believe them. You always believe them.
"Didn't take you for ticklish, Lieutenant,"
Fond and stupid, already half-pulling back — and your palm drags absent-minded over that same untucked stretch of him on the way, no joke in it at all, just the careless warmth of a big hand leaving.
Kim makes a sound.
Lower than the first. Longer. It rolls out of him before he can get a hand to the wheel of it, and it fills the room, and it is not — by any reading the parliament can scrape together at speed — the sound of a man being tickled.
And something clicks — sorta,.
LOGIC [Trivial: Half-Success] — Processing. The subject's vocalisation is — cross-referencing — not, strictly, consistent with a tickle response. Reviewing the evidence. Collating the data. Building the case. The conclusion this faculty is being dragged toward, over its own strenuous objections, is that the lieutenant — that Kim — that he is, in point of fact, enjoying — ...he's into it, Harry. He is into it. (Let the record show I am the sharpest instrument in this skull and it still took me the better part of a paragraph to reach the obvious. Strike that from the report.)
Oh, you think.
The word arrives with nothing attached to it. Just oh. The grin is still sitting on your face, but it has stopped meaning anything; it's a hat you forgot you were wearing.
You do the thing you do when you cannot believe an instrument reading. You check it again. Slow. Deliberate, this time — no tickle, no bit, no schoolyard in it — the flat of your palm dragging back down over the warm skin below the navel, and you keep your eyes on Kim's face — the look you save for a witness you've just, finally, caught out.
Kim moans harder.
PERCEPTION (HEARING) [Medium: Success] — That one came from the exact same place the last one did. You can stop calling it a squeak now, Harry. You can stop calling it a lot of things.
Go back ninety seconds.
Kim Kitsuragi is asleep — truly asleep, the dreamless drop of a man who put a full day of bad road behind the wheel and had nothing left to give the evening but the folding of a jacket and the squaring of his glasses.
He surfaces on a sensation, not a sound: cold metal closing around his right wrist. Click. Then a second, further off, against the frame. Click.
The lieutenant does not move. His eyes open into the lamplight and his mind comes up clean and fast, already cataloguing, because cataloguing is what Kim does with a fact before he can afford to feel it. Steel. Single bracelet, right wrist. Second bracelet, the rail. Weight, action: regulation. Smith pattern. And then, with the particular flat horror of recognising his own handwriting on a ransom note: mine. My cuffs. My rig. Cleaned and oiled last Sunday. Not for this.
Above him, beaming down with the uncomplicated joy of a large dog who has stolen a roast off a counter, is Detective Harrier Du Bois.
"Gotcha," the detective whispers.
The lieutenant decides, in the half-second available to him, to suffer this with dignity. He will lie still. He will wait the bit out. He will, at the appropriate moment, observe in a level voice that the detective's comedy is of a quality usually found loose at the bottom of a Frittte! [sic] bargain bin, and then there will be a key, and the lamp will go back off, and they will never — never — speak of it again.
This is the plan. It is a good plan. It survives exactly as long as it takes Harry to go for his ribs.
And Kim laughs.
It surprises him as much as anyone. A real one. Startled out of him, undignified — because it is funny, the great sad idiot grinning down at him in a one-room motor-inn at the edge of the world, having lifted his own cuffs off his own rig to commit the lowest-stakes arrest in the history of the RCM. For one bright unguarded second the lieutenant is simply a man being tickled by someone he likes, and the laugh is the truest sound he has made in weeks.
Then the hand slides. Lower. Off the ribs, where it was funny, and onto a stretch of him that is not ticklish at all.
And the laugh comes apart in the middle.
What comes out the other side is not a laugh. It is low and involuntary, and it arrives from somewhere a good deal beneath the throat — and Kim bites it off half a syllable late. Too late. A full half-syllable too late to call it anything else. He lies there with his own steel on his wrist and the detective's broad warm hand gone still against the bare skin below his navel and the radiator knocking once into the gap he'd just opened.
Procedure, thinks the lieutenant, with rising alarm.
He built the procedure eight weeks ago and has run it every working day since — maintenance, the kind you give a weapon you can't afford to forget.
Look.
Want.
Stop.
Identify the want. Acknowledge the want. Set the want down, two fingers, square on the table, and walk away from the table. It has held on balconies. It has held in the close warm dark of the Kineema at the end of long days. It has held across a corpse and a coffee and nine hours of road.
He reaches look — Harry's face, the grin still up but the eyes underneath it beginning, slowly, to fall in.
He reaches want with a speed that genuinely alarms him; the file is already open, the file was always already open.
And then he does not get to reach stop. The detective — believing, in his enormous and catastrophic innocence, that he has merely located a ticklish spot — says it fond and oblivious, already half-withdrawing: "Didn't take you for ticklish, Lieutenant" — and on the word Lieutenant he drags that hand back across him one more careless time on the way to leaving, no joke left in it at all, only the warmth of a big palm going.
And the lieutenant's body files its report ahead of him, without authorisation, and the report gets out.
The moan is not loud. It does not have to be. It is enough. He hears it leave him and he hears it land and he watches it land on Harry's face, watches the precise instant the joke dies in the man and the want come awake behind it.
The lieutenant attempts, on schedule, to compile a defence.
Are you cold? No.
Are you frightened? No.
Are you going to ask him, in a level voice, to remove these and forget the entire matter? —
A beat.
The radiator knocks.
…You are not going to ask him anything of the kind, are you.
No.
Because here is the discrepancy his discipline cannot resolve, the one that arrives whole and unwelcome and undeniable: the detective is still holding the cuff key somewhere on his person. Kim's right hand is closed in steel a long arm's reach from any lock. Restrained, outmatched — there is no honest way a lieutenant of the RCM could write the situation up otherwise.
And yet — the slack wrist that has not pulled against the rail, the breath he cannot get level, the colour climbing the side of his own neck — Kim is forced to note that he is in no particular hurry whatsoever to be released.
The lieutenant noted this.
The lieutenant did not, this time, correct it.
Harry's hand is going still on him again, hesitating now, and the man's mouth is opening on the question Kim can already see coming — the careful one, the one Harry always asks, the one that will hand the night back to Kim to do with as he pleases.
"…Kim," Harry says, and the voice has gone low and uncertain, the grin nowhere in it now. "Hey. We don't — you don't have to — do you want me to —"
And there it is, held open between them: the out, the off-ramp, the single dry word that would fold all of this back down and let them both pretend the lamp had never come on. The lieutenant has the word ready. He has had it ready a long time.
He does not say it.
What he says instead — cutting clean across the unfinished question, levelly, into the lamplight, in the same flat register he uses to read a charge sheet — is:
"I won't."
Harry blinks down at him, confused.
"Tell you to stop," the lieutenant clarifies, reading out the fine print of his own surrender. And then — because he is Kim, because he cannot let a statement go to the record with a known inaccuracy in it, because some vain unrepentant part of him wants to be a spoilsport about his own undoing and is visibly pleased to have found the chance —
"— and I haven't got the key, Detective. You'd have to."
The joke lands flat and deadpan, the exact tone Kim uses for evidence logs, and it detonates. The key is warm in your own trouser pocket. You do not, yet, reach for it.
COMPOSURE [Formidable: Success] — He just made a joke. Look at him do it. Look at the work it's taking. The flush has gone all the way down past his collar, his breath won't hold a line, and he reached for a punchline anyway, because the punchline is the last railing he's got. He is also losing. He is losing harder than you are.
And that — that — is the thing that scares you. The steel doesn't scare you. The wanting doesn't either. It's the effort — him reaching for a bit to stay composed while he slips.
So the lizard comes up the back of your neck, cold and fast, and for once it asks the right question.
HALF-LIGHT [Trivial: Success] — Wait. Wait. What if you read it wrong. What if he's just being polite. What if you put your hands on the one good thing left in your life and break it. Abort — check — abort —
This time you listen to the lizard, because this time it's right. You go still. And then you do the thing it costs you everything to do — you take your hand off him. Lift your palm clean off the warm stretch of him and sit back on your heels — and then you reach past the lamp and snap on the big overhead light too, the ugly bright honest one, because some part of you has decided it needs to see this clearly or not at all.
The room floods. Hands to yourself, all of it laid plain between you under the hard white glare, because you do not trust a single thing you'd read in lamplight with his skin still under your fingers.
The joke drains clean out of you and it's just you under there — wide-eyed and terrified — and it comes out in a rush with nothing smooth left in it, breaking the bit clean in half:
"No — wait. Fuck. Kim, this was stupid." The joke collapses in your hands. You pull back so fast your knees nearly come off the bed. "This was supposed to be stupid. I was tickling you. I wasn't trying to —"
You can't even finish it. Shame goes hot up the back of your neck. Your hand is already in your pocket, closing around the little brass key.
"I'm sorry. I'm taking them off."
And Kim — Kim, who has never raised his voice in front of you before — yells.
"No " — the word cracks clean across the room — “don't! "
It is too loud for the four walls. It splits in the middle. It is, instantly and irretrievably, the least dignified sound the lieutenant has ever produced in your hearing, and you watch the man's whole face go scarlet the moment it's out (you thought he couldn't blush) — because that was not level, that was not filed, that was Kim's wanting getting out ahead of him with both hands, and there is no redacting it now.
PERCEPTION (SIGHT) [Difficult: Success] — Look, then. Actually look. You've been so busy being scared you forgot to use your eyes.
And you look.
Kim is straining against the front of his shorts, hard and obvious, beyond any deniability the lieutenant could draft. He's flushed clear down past the collarbone. The undershirt has ridden up off the flat of his stomach. His free hand is white-knuckled and twisted into the sheet like he's gripping the edge of something. His chest heaves and his breath comes out shaking — wanting this helplessly, head to heel, and furious, you can tell, that his body has said so out loud.
EMPATHY [Heroic: Success] — That is a yes. That is the realest yes you have ever been handed in your life. He is mortified and he does not want you to stop, and both are true at the same time, and you are going to hold both of them carefully and you are not — not — going to laugh at him for either.
HALF-LIGHT [Heroic: Success] — Green. We're green. Threat assessment complete. The only thing in danger in this room is his composure. Stand down. (...and, strictly off the record, Harry — yours too. Carry on.)
So it is ruled, by the two paranoid razor-edged little voices that spend their whole lives shrieking about death, in the one dialect Harry trusts without question: he means it. You're sure. Proceed.
And now Authority and Savoir Faire — who have lost every roll that ever mattered, who watched you fall off a barstool and out of an engagement and very nearly off the mortal coil — pick this one single night to win.
[Legendary: Success] — Then put the lizard back in its hole and pick the voice up off the floor. He asked you not to stop. So you don't. You take charge of him. This man has carried everyone in his life for twenty years and set the weight down for no one. Tonight you hold it. All of it. Be steady. Be sure. Be the man he just shouted for.
SAVOIR FAIRE [Legendary: Success] — Low. Slow. Unhurried. You have never been the composed man in any room on Elysium. Be him now, for him. He will come apart so beautifully for it you'll feel it in your teeth.
And Volition — who held the line for eight weeks, who begged you not minutes ago to let the man sleep — clears its throat, and to its own audible horror, casts its vote with the majority.
VOLITION [Medium: Success] — ...Let the record show I had reservations. Let the record further show that I no longer have them. He's safe. He's certain. And — yes. All right. Fine. I like this too, Dei help me. Be careful with him, Harry. Proceed.
Your voice drops. All the way down — past the careful question, past the gym-floor gravel, into something lower and quieter — and absolutely certain. You settle your weight on the edge of the bed, deliberate, let it land, and let your free hand come to rest flat and possessive, low on the lieutenant's stomach.
"…That's what I thought," you say. "Eyes up here, Lieutenant."
Here is a thing about Kim Kitsuragi that no one in the 57th and now 41st has lived to confirm: with the pressure off and someone he trusts at the wheel for an hour, the lieutenant has a bit of a mouth on him.
It starts the instant Harry pulls rank. And the rank Harry pulls is, gloriously, entirely his to pull.
"You're out of uniform, Lieutenant Kitsuragi," says Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor Harrier Du Bois — all six stripes of him, the senior rank he turned down captain twice to keep and almost never remembers he has — to a lieutenant of the 41st he outranks on every organisational chart ever printed in Revachol.
It does not land clean. The first one never does. There is a hitch in the delivery — the authority not quite seated, a question mark hiding at the back of the sentence where the full stop belongs — and on the last word Harry's eyes drop to his face for half a second, checking.
He is nervous, the lieutenant notes, and the noting arrives with a tenderness that has no business being anywhere near it. He is doing the voice. And he is frightened of the voice.
And Kim knows the lurch precisely, because it is sitting in his own chest too — the same unmooring, the same not-knowing where the line goes from here. The only difference between them is that Kim has already lost the right to pretend otherwise. Cuffed to a bedframe with his own steel, hard and breathing wrong, he does not get to play composed about any of it. So the lieutenant tips in first. He gives the detective something to push against — a bone tossed to a skittish animal to settle it, he thinks distantly.
The lieutenant — cuffed and deeply compromised — finds the wherewithal to arch one eyebrow.
"…That is a double-Yefreitor who has not pulled rank a single time in his entire career,"
Kim informs him, with the withering precision of a man reading a parking citation aloud:
"You outrank me on every document in the precinct, Officer, and you have never remembered it. You turned down captain. Twice. You cannot complete a transfer form without my help. And now, of all the nights available to you, you remember the chain of command. I will be noting the irony. At length. In writing. I will be filing —"
"Filing what, Lieutenant?"
Harry's hand drifts lower, unhurried, until it is at last laid warm and flat over the front of his shorts, over the hard ache of him, and the rest of the sentence dies an undignified death in Kim's throat.
"Doesn't look to me like you're in any shape to file much of anything."
The hitch is gone from him now. Somewhere in the last half-minute the question mark filed itself away and was not retrieved, and the voice has found its feet beneath it. Harry has heard himself work, the lieutenant registers — and, Dei Above help them both, he has started to believe it.
The heel of Harry's palm presses down, slow, the heat of it bleeding straight through the thin cotton — and Kim is already obscene under there, the hard jut of him straining the fabric, a dark bead of him soaked through at the tip before anything has properly begun. Then Harry's fingers find the shape of his dick through the cloth and stroked — once, the whole patient length of it, the damp cotton dragging over the head — and the lieutenant's hips come up off the mattress to chase it before he has authorised any such thing. The wrist pulls bright against the steel — not to get free; the other direction entirely, toward, toward. His pulse is loud in his own ears. A lifetime of composure, and his whole body has gone over to the other side in under five minutes.
And here is the part that finishes the lieutenant's long and decorated career in self-discipline: he brats.
He cannot help it. He talks back through gritted teeth even as his hips betray him, even as the slow merciless work of Harry's hand drags through the wet cotton — clinging, gone translucent now, the dark of him spread across the front of his regulation shorts — and pulls every last thread of his composure loose one at a time.
"This is a flagrant abuse of rank," he manages, "you have never — ah — you have never invoked it and you do not get to start now, Detective, this is not how the chain of —"
Harry's free hand leaves his stomach. It comes down, light and flat and entirely without warning, in a sharp little crack against the outside of Kim's bare thigh.
The chain-of-command lecture dissolves, mid-clause, into a sound that is unmistakably a whine — high and helpless, shocked clean out of him — because the sting blooms hot across the thigh and routes straight to the trapped ache, crack and throb wired into one signal he cannot pull apart. The lieutenant's free hand flies up to cover his own scarlet face in pure mortification.
"Were you about to finish that sentence?" Harry asks. Mild. Conversational. The exact tone he'd use across an interrogation table with a confession already in the folder. He smooths his palm over the same spot he just struck, gentling it, circling, and the gentleness is somehow worse than the strike.
"Go on. Tell me how the chain of command works. I'm taking notes."
"You are taking nothing —"
Another light crack, the other thigh. Another whine, torn higher, and the lieutenant hears it leave him with something close to despair. Kim's hips jerk up into the hand still working him slow through the clinging wet cotton — the slick drag of cloth over him filthy and loud in the room — and the two impulses, to escape the sting and to chase the stroke, war for the length of a breath, and he loses both. The fingers gentle the second thigh exactly as they gentled the first, slow and patient, and the contrast of crack-then-kindness, over and over, takes his higher reasoning apart seam by seam in a way years of fieldwork never thought to prepare him for.
It is, Kim registers somewhere far away, behind the fog, a can-opener.
He has watched the detective do this to suspects across long days of interview hours and read a hundred case files — the flat steady pressure, the mild questions, the mercies handed out exactly when the resistance peaks, the lid coming up clean on something that swore on its mother it would never open.
He has admired it.
He has filed reports praising the technique. He did not, until this precise and ruinous moment, fully appreciate what it would be to be laid out on the other side of the table.
"There it is," Harry murmurs, watching his face. Not unkind. Giving him the same read he gives a room. "You went somewhere just now. Where'd you go, Lieutenant?"
"Nowhere of interest to the investigation," Kim says, and means it to come out flat, and it comes out ruined — breathless, half a register too high, the consonants going soft at the edges. They both hear it. Harry's mouth tilts, and the hand never once stops its slow obscene drag through the damp fabric.
"See, that's not true." The palm rolls over him, slow, deliberate, learning the shape it's already learned.
"That's the first untrue thing you've said to me all night. You don't lie. You correct other people's lies. It's your whole — it's the thing you do."
He leans in a degree.
"So let's try it without the citation voice. Where. Did. You. Go."
And the lieutenant, who has stonewalled gangsters and union men and mercenaries in full ceramic armor at gunpoint — without his pulse moving a point — the lieutenant cracks one seam.
"…I was thinking," Kim says, to the ceiling, the light bright, to anywhere but Harry, "about how often I have written the phrase: ‘suspect proved unexpectedly forthcoming under patient questioning’. And what it cost them."
Harry goes still for one full second. Then, very softly: "Yeah. That's the one. Good Lieutenant." And he rewards it — there is no other word for it — with a long, slow, firm pass of his hand that lifts Kim half off the bed and gets a broken oath out of him before he can redact it.
This is the method.
Kim can see it being run on him and he cannot for the life of him stop walking into it. Each retort gets the brat slapped or stroked clean out of it. Each true thing gets the reward. The detective is conditioning him — the slow gentling you'd use on a difficult animal — and the awful part — the part the lieutenant will turn over on quiet nights for the rest of his life — is how fast it works, how badly some long-starved part of him wants the next mild question, the next good, Lieutenant, the next slow forgiving drag of that enormous patient hand.
"You've got more, though," Harry observes, conversational, while Kim shakes under him.
"You always do. The mouth. C'mon. Give me the rest of the lecture. I want to hear how this is a flagrant abuse of rank."
It is a trap and Kim knows it is a trap and he walks straight into it because he is, at the bottom of everything, contrary unto death.
"It is an abuse," he says, gritting it, hips rolling shamelessly up into the friction even as he says it, "of every — every principle of conduct the militia — I will see you formally rep— ah — reprimanded, I will see this entered into the perm—"
The hand stops.
Just — stops. Holds him, the heel of the palm a maddening still weight right where he needs movement, the fingers curled and not moving — and now there is nothing working him at all, only his own cock left throbbing and untended against drenched cotton, his balls drawn up tight, the wet of him going cold at its edges with no friction left to renew it. The loss of rhythm punches a sound out of the lieutenant he could not have stopped if he tried: a thin, involuntary no — not a safeword, the opposite of the safeword, a protest against the stopping. His hips chase up into the stillness and find nothing, and he hears himself, distantly, begin to beg in the only dialect he has left, which is complaint.
"You stopped," the lieutenant accuses, wrecked, scarlet, the parking-ticket voice in absolute ruins. "You — that is — put it back."
"Mm." Harry doesn't. Holds him right there at the cliff-edge of not-enough, the cruelest possible mercy.
"See, here's the trouble, Lieutenant."
He leans down, close, his hand a still warm promise that won't move, and his voice drops into the low patient register that has emptied a hundred holding cells.
"You keep mouthing off. And I keep getting distracted listening to you do it. And at this rate neither one of us is getting anywhere tonight."
A pause, weighed out, exact.
"So I'm gonna make you an offer."
Kim's breath saws.
His cock tents the ruined cotton, the dark stain of his own wanting laid out plain on regulation fabric, and his whole body is one drawn line strung between the steel at his wrist and the hand that won't move
. "…I am listening," he says, with the absolute last scrap of dignity left in the building, and even that comes out frayed.
"A deal."
Harry's thumb strokes, once, just once — circling the wet, cotton-covered head, finding the soaked spot exactly — a taste of what's on the table, and Kim's eyes roll closed.
"Off the record. No notes. No file. Nothing leaves this room."
A beat.
"…Terms," the lieutenant manages.
Negotiating. Negotiating, cuffed to a motor-inn bedframe with another man's hand on his cock and his own hips betraying him every two seconds — and the part of Kim that loves him aches at it, and the part of Kim that's running this aches a different way entirely.
"You stop being a little shit," Harry says, kind as anything, like he's reading terms off a sheet.
"That's one. You hold still — or you try to, I'll allow for the hips, the hips aren't your fault — that's two. You let me hear you, every sound, no biting them back, no swallowing them down into that flat little voice — that's three. And you don't cover your face. I want to watch you the whole way. That's four."
His mouth moves to the shell of Kim's ear, and the smell of him closes over the lieutenant — soap, clean linen and Kim's own chestnut Astra smokes that Harry keeps bumming, close and warm — and his voice goes lower still — devout, filthy in its tenderness.
"And if you do that — if you give me those four things — if you're good for me, Lieutenant — really good —" the thumb moves again, slow, a down payment "— then I am going to take you apart so carefully, and so completely, that when I'm done you will not be able to remember the shape of a report. You won't remember your own badge number. I'm gonna leave you so well looked-after you'll forget there was ever a procedure to keep."
The lieutenant is, at this juncture, turned on beyond any prior in twenty years of living. Beyond language, very nearly. His system has nowhere to file this, and he stops trying to find one. There's only the steel, the four terms in that low certain voice, and the appalling relief of being handled — of someone else carrying everything he carries, for one single hour.
The brat goes out of him all at once, a held line finally giving. His free hand comes down off his face — slow, deliberate, offered — and lies open and empty on the sheet, palm up, surrender written into the very set of the fingers. His hips settle. His shoulders come down off their long-held guard. And his eyes, dark and blown and entirely undone, come up to Harry's and stay there, no longer running anywhere at all.
"…Yes," says Kim Kitsuragi, very quietly, voice raw and wrecked, to the only man he has ever handed the keys to.
"All right. Yes."
Kim says yes and goes pliant under your hands and looks up at you like that, and the chamber — which has spent this entire night shouting over itself, Authority chairing, Electrochemistry howling, the whole rowdy bench in uproar — does something it almost never does. One bench at a time, it stops talking.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY [—] — ...okay. Okay. I'll — I'm gonna give you this one. Don't screw it up. (and, astonishingly, it dims.)
[—] — My work here is done. The floor is yours. (gone.)
HALF-LIGHT [—] — ...no threats. Stand-down confirmed. (gone.)
And then it's just you, and the lamp, and the radiator knocking, and the undefended patient face of the man who said yes — and one last voice, very soft, the one that held the line so long and lost it gladly.
VOLITION [—] — Go on. He's waiting. Don't make it a performance. Just mean it.
So you don't reach for the rest of him. You don't do the next obvious thing. You bring your hand up instead — the spanking hand, the working hand, gentle now — and lay it along the side of Kim's jaw, thumb at the cheekbone, tilting his face up that last half centimetre.
"Good," you say, low, and mean it with your whole chest. "That's so good, Kim."
And then you, who had not realized you wanted exactly one thing for months, and have just been told you can have it, lean down the last of the distance and kiss him.
It is not what either of them would have guessed, from the night they've had. It is careful — your mouth soft and unhurried against Kim's, asking the wordless permission you always ask for, your thumb stroking once along the cheekbone to check that he's real.
A first kiss. Their first. Eight weeks and a long day's drive and one pair of regulation cuffs in the making, and when it finally lands it lands gentle, and you feel the exact moment Kim stops bracing for anything and simply lets himself be kissed.
For a brief moment you break character. Not as Double-Yefreitor Du Bois, but as Harry. You make a sound into the kiss. Not a moan - something smaller and worse and better. Relief, maybe, with grief underneath it.
The sound of a man who did not think he was allowed this…
The world shifts by one degree.
And then Kim's free hand comes up off the sheet and finds the front of your shirt and fists it, pulling you down, pulling you in, and the kiss deepens — opens — your hand sliding back into the short neat hair, Kim's mouth going urgent under yours — and it deepens again, and the careful thing turns into something with weight and heat and weeks of held breath behind it, and the cuffed wrist pulls hard at the rail, and you kiss him like you've got all night, because for once — stranded a long way from Revachol, with one lamp and a knocking radiator and the one person alive you'd trust with the key — you do.
Kim Kitsuragi has been kissed before. It has never once felt like a confession read into the record.
He has time, while it happens, to file exactly nothing. This is itself unprecedented. The drawer where he keeps such things — first contact, oral, initiated by H. Du Bois, 2214, consensual, reciprocated — does not open. There is no folder. There is no label. There is only Harry's careful mouth and Harry's thumb at his cheek and the appalling, total relief of being kissed like he was worth the care, and the lieutenant, for the length of it, simply ceases to conduct any business at all.
He kissed back. He is aware that he kissed back without strategy, with one hand — the grab of someone already going under. The honest part of him, the one that lives in the room he never shows anyone, threw the door wide and did not even pretend to file the report.
And then Harry pulls away.
Kim hears the sound he makes at the loss of it and is too far gone to be ashamed. He has perhaps half a second to mourn the mouth before Harry is moving down him — down the sternum, the soft of the belly, the jut of a hipbone — and the detective's hands are at the band of his shorts, and his fingers hook the waistband and drag, and the steel sings against the rail as Kim's wrist follows the helpless arch of his own hips up off the bed to make it easier, and that — the lieutenant assisting in his own undressing — is a discrepancy he will have to account for later, on some quieter and more cowardly night.
The shorts go. The cool air of the room finds him — finds him hard, and already leaking, his own wanting entered into the record where he cannot recall it — and then Harry's mouth finds him too, warm and open against the crease of his thigh, a breath away from where he needs it and not one degree closer, and Kim's whole body goes rigid.
He means to be quiet. He is a quiet man. He built a procedure for exactly this.
The procedure is in another district. The procedure has, frankly, transferred precincts.
Are you going to keep still? — He is not. His hips are already lifting off the mattress, chasing the heat of that mouth, offering the hard ache of himself up to be taken.
Are you going to keep your dignity? — A beat. Harry's tongue drags up the underside of his cock, flat and slow and ruinous, and the question answers itself, and the lieutenant makes a sound he has never let anyone hear.
Are you — given the obscene and undeniable evidence your own body is entering into the record without your authorisation — going to be honest about what you want?
The radiator knocked.
Yes. In the open hand on the sheet. Yes in the wrist gone slack and willing in its steel. Yes in the half-degree forward tilt of his hips — forward, into the wet heat, not back. Yes, finally, in the only language he has left, the one beneath the lieutenant register, beneath even his own name for himself.
And then Harry's mouth seals around the head of him and sucks — wet and slow and devout, tongue dragging the slick from the tip, one big hand wrapped around the base and stroking what will not fit — and the lieutenant's mind, the famous instrument, the one that has read a thousand scenes and never let itself look away, simply goes out.
Like a thrown breaker.The file room goes dark.
The careful voice that narrates and notes and weighs and files — gone, between one heartbeat and the next — and there is nothing left behind his eyes at all but white heat and the obscene wet pull of that mouth.
The sound that tears out of him is high and ruined and he cannot grade it, cannot place it, cannot file it under shame or pride or anything at all, because there is no one home to do the filing.
There is only want — enormous, wordless, finally off its leash — and he wants more, he wants it deeper, he wants the whole devout heat of Harry's mouth and Harry's hands and years of starved-down appetite all at once, and the apparatus that has spent two decades telling him he may not is dark and silent and gone, and so for the first time in his life there is nothing at all between the wanting and the world.
"Please," he says.
It does not come out level. It does not come out filed. It comes out wrecked and high and helpless, in a voice he would not recognise as his own if there were anyone left behind his eyes to recognise it — and there is not.
"Please — Harry — your mouth, please, more —" babbling now, the careful consonants gone soft and slurred at the edges, the word spilling up out of him over and over with nothing left to govern it, to the lamplight, to the knocking radiator, to the great careful idiot unmaking him so tenderly that the cuff on his wrist has stopped meaning captivity and started meaning kept.
"Harry. Harry — please."
Somewhere the radiator settled, and the lieutenant, for the first time in twenty years, did not reach for the word that would have stopped any of it.
Harry gives it to him.
There is no more holding at the edge now, no more patient cruelty.
Harry takes him down — all of it, to the root, in one slow obscene glide, until the head of him drags past the soft give at the back of that throat and lodges there, and Harry just swallows, the muscle fluttering and clutching tight around him, wet and scalding and impossibly close.
Then up — a long slow drag of suction, hollow-cheeked, tongue pressed flat and working the underside top to bottom — and back down to the root, and again, and again, a thick wet sound filling the little room each time his lips meet the base. Spit slides down the shaft and over the knuckles of the big hand chasing his mouth, and the lieutenant's whole body arcs up off the mattress to follow the heat of it. The cuff drags hard against the rail. Whatever sound he has left loses its shape completely and climbs.
Harry pulls off only far enough to speak — lips wet and red and shining, a bright thread of spit strung between his mouth and the flushed, leaking head of him, his breath gusting warm over the slick aching length — and the words come gravel-low and unguarded and openly adoring, every one of them landing somewhere well beneath the lieutenant register, down in the place where Kim has no standing left to argue with anything:
"You're so good, Kim. Yes — give it to me. Good lieutenant. Good."
And then his mouth is back, sinking all the way down to the root, throat fluttering in a tight wet swallow around him, the hand fisting and stroking the base in time with the suck — and that is the thing that finishes him.
Good lieutenant.
All those years of being good for people who never said it aloud — and here is the only man who has ever mattered with his mouth stuffed full of his cock, saying it like a benediction, meaning every last syllable down to the marrow — and the praise goes up the lieutenant like current up a wet wire, his balls drawing tight, the heat coiling vicious and low at the base of his spine, and there is nothing, nothing at all left in him to hold.
Kim gives him everything.
He breaks apart into the warm sucking heat of that clever mouth with a name in it — Harry, torn out of him cracked and helpless into the room — and spills, pulse after pulse after helpless pulse down that working throat, hips stuttering up off the bed, and Harry takes all of it, swallows all of it, throat moving around him through every last spasm, and keeps him deep in that wet heat and sucks him through the aftershocks until the lieutenant is wrung utterly empty and shaking and raw — and still the mouth does not let go. Still it gentles him. Still the broad hand strokes slow over his hip. Still that low voice hums good, that's it, I've got you, good against the softening, spit-slick length of him, easing off the oversensitive head with one last soft lick, as though it could go on saying it forever, as though there were nowhere else in the world it would rather be.
And the lieutenant — kept, cuffed to a motor-inn bedframe far from home, fucked-out and emptied and used and more thoroughly and tenderly looked-after than he has ever once let himself be — lets himself be held there in the warm, and does not, this once, file a single thing.
The act drops away from you the moment it's done.
You don't decide to drop it. It just leaves, a tide going out, and what's left standing on the wet sand is only you — a little shaken, a lot in love, kneeling over a man you've just taken apart and not entirely sure what to do with your own hands now that they've stopped being someone else's.
The chamber, mercifully, stays quiet. No Electrochemistry victory lap. No Authority taking another bow. Nobody. Just the radiator, and Kim's breathing finding its way back to level, and the enormous tender hush of the after.
You fish the little brass key out of your trouser pocket. Your fingers aren't quite steady.
The cuff opens with an oiled click — his cuff, his maintenance, even now — and the bracelet falls away from the rail. And that's when you see it. The ring around his right wrist: dark, pressed livid into the skin where he pulled against the steel. Not to get free. You know that now. He pulled to get closer. A bruised red bracelet where you'd —
"…Kim," you say, and your voice cracks on it. Your thumb comes up to the mark like you could rub it back out. "Hey. Shit. I didn't — your wrist, I should've checked, I should've —"
"Don't."
Quiet, but it lands flat and final — the lieutenant's voice, the one that ends discussions. He's looking at you, glasses still off, his eyes soft and unguarded in a way you have never been allowed to see, and he turns his wrist deliberately in your grip so the mark presses into your palm instead of away from it.
"Do not apologise for that. I will not have it. I pulled. I knew precisely what I was doing." The corner of his mouth moves. "I always know precisely what I am doing."
And — to prove the point, or perhaps only because he has decided the moment calls for it — he reaches past you to the nightstand, takes up the glasses, and settles them onto his nose in one smooth, unhurried movement, the gesture so practised and so certain that it puts the lie to nothing he has just said. The lieutenant, restored to his own eyes, regards you levelly over the rims, and dares you to argue.
So you don't apologise. You do the other thing. You get a hand into the short neat hair and you pull him up off the pillow and into you, and you kiss him — and this one is nothing like the first. The first was careful. This one is earnest: open-mouthed and unhurried, no performance left in it, no gravel, no Lieutenant, no Detective — just the two of you and the wet warm fact of it. And you say into his mouth every single thing you don't have the nerve to say out loud.
You can feel him doing exactly the same. Neither of you uses a word. Neither of you has to. The whole conversation happens behind the teeth where it's safe — there, that, this is what I meant, this is what I've meant since the start — and he answers in the same language, and it goes on a long time.
When you finally break the kiss there's a thread of spit strung bright between your mouths in the lamplight, and neither of you laughs at it, which is its own miracle.
Kim breaks the quiet. Of course he does. Breathless, voice shot, and still, somehow, dry as a bone:
"…I believe," he says, "the courtesy is generally reciprocated."
And that lands somewhere you weren't braced for, and you feel your whole face go red — which is ridiculous, given the last twenty minutes.
"I, uh." You rub the back of your neck.
The smoothest man on Elysium, gone.
"Yeah. About that. I want to — I really, God, I want to. I just."
You make yourself say it.
"I've never actually gotten this far. With a guy. Hands, yeah. Mouths, yeah. Disco Days — with— uhm — never mind but.. — Not — the rest of it. So I don't totally know what I'm —"
You expect him to go gentle on you. He does, but not in the shape you brace for.
Kim Kitsuragi simply takes command of the situation, exactly as he'd take command of a scene — quiet, unbothered — and the only tell of what the night's done to him is that when he swings his legs off the bed and stands, they are visibly shaking, and he ignores this with magnificent dignity.
He crosses to the chair. To the leather rig hanging on the back of it. And from a flat inner pocket of the same rig the cuffs came off, he produces — with the brisk efficiency of a man retrieving evidence bags — a strip of condoms and a tube.
You make a sound. You cannot help it. It starts low in your chest and comes up as a wheeze and then you are gone, face half in the pillow, shoulders shaking, the helpless delighted laughter of a man who has just learned that the most squared-away officer in the RCM keeps lubricant in his gun rig.
Kim's ears go red. He straightens with enormous composure.
"It is standard to carry field supplies," he informs the middle distance, "for contingencies."
"Contingencies," you wheeze, the laugh knifing a stitch up your side.
"One prepares," says Kim, reading it into an invisible tribunal record, "for the operational requirements one can reasonably anticipate." A beat. "I anticipated broadly."
"Lieutenant Kitsuragi," you manage, wiping your eyes, sitting up, committing fully because you physically cannot not, "are you standing there telling me you have been driving around Revachol this whole time packing a complete tactical —"
You don't get to finish the bit. Kim crosses back, gets one hand around the side of your neck — firm, sure, the grip of a man who has decided — and kisses you hard, swallowing the rest of the sentence whole. By the time he lets you go you've forgotten what the joke even was.
"Efficient technique," he says against your mouth, deadpan, dropping it like a stone into a still pond. "I'll remember to utilise it next time."
Next time. You make a noise that is frankly undignified. You are, you realise dimly, completely and permanently sunk — next time, he said, like there's a docket of them, like this is precedent —
He undresses then. Without ceremony, no show in it, the undershirt up over his head and gone. And then his hands come to you, soft and deliberate, and he undresses you too — the shirt, the rest — his knuckles grazing warm down your sides as he goes, and there's a tenderness folded into the efficiency that closes your throat.
And you notice, somewhere in the middle of it, that you are still alone in your own head.
The benches are empty. Not gone — you can feel them, a lit room behind a shut door — just stepped out. Quiet. Giving you this. Even Electrochemistry, who would ordinarily be doing breathless colour commentary, has tactfully found somewhere else to be. It feels, absurdly, like respect — like the rowdy parliament drew the curtains and left the two of you the room.
You have spent your entire life unable to hear yourself think over them, and they picked tonight, of all nights, to let you have the silence. You could weep about it. You don't. But you could.
Kim sits back on his heels and looks at you — really looks, the cop's eye gone warm — and says it plainly, like a fact entered for the record: "…You are a very good-looking man, Harry. I don't believe I have ever told you that. It seems an oversight."
Your hands twitch toward yourself — the grey coming in at the chest, the frankly absurd amount of body hair you've spent forty-odd years half-apologising for.
"I'm kind of — there's a lot of me. And a lot of, uh. Hair. I know it's not everybody's —"
"It is exactly to my taste." The flatness of it makes it un-arguable — a finding, not a flattery.
His hand spreads warm and deliberate over your chest, fingers working into the hair there like he's been wanting to and has finally decided he may. "It has been exactly to my taste," he adds, quieter, "since a cold morning in Martinaise, over a body, when an enormous hungover wreck of a man asked me in all sincerity whether his necktie was speaking to him, and I thought — God help me — oh, no."
You stare at him. "Martinaise?" The word comes out in a register only dogs should hear.
"That was — Kim, that was months ago, that was the first day — wait. wait. Wait. Are you telling me we could have been doing this — this entire time — we could've —"
Kim hooks two fingers into the waistband of your briefs and drags them off, and the question dies in your throat for the second time tonight.
There's a silence.
You watch him take you in.
Out of pure habit you reach back for Empathy — for someone in the gallery to read the man's face and hand you the verdict.
Nobody answers. The bench is still empty. They gave you the room and they meant it.
So you look on your own. No instrument, no commentary, just your own two eyes doing a job you've farmed out for as long as you can remember — and it feels strange, off-balance, like writing your name with the wrong hand.
But untooled, alone, half-blind, you cannot miss it.
Kim goes still.
Completely still.
His eyes have dropped to your cock and they are not leaving it. And then he breathes in — sharp, through the nose, far too loud for the little room — and his tongue comes out and wets his lower lip, once, before he can stop it, and you feel it land somewhere low and electric, your dick giving a thick interested twitch under the frank weight of his stare.
You don't need a skill check to file that one.
You clear your throat.
"So, uh."
You are aware you have gone scarlet to the roots of your hair.
“People have — mentioned — it's kind of a lot. I don't, um. Is that gonna — will it even —"
And Kim laughs.
Not the bitten-off thing, not the startled yelp from before — a real one, wide open and entirely without a barrier behind it, head tipped back, more undefended than you have ever seen him, and you would commit several minor felonies to hear it again.
"It will fit, Detective," he says — the crude promise landing flat and certain in the charge-sheet voice, his gaze coming back up dark and unhurried — "I intend to make it fit."
And then, because he is who he is, he simply takes over the instruction. He does not turn away. He lies back instead — on his back, facing you, keeping you in it — and he uncaps the tube, and the smell of it reaches you, clean and synthetic and clinical, and your whole body understands what it means a half-second before your brain does.
He slicks your fingers himself, then takes your hand in his and guides it down between his thighs and presses your fingertips to the tight heat of his hole. Here. Like this. Slower. Yes — there, that's it.
He works you into him by degrees, and the give of him registers up your arm like a current — the clutch and slick and impossibly intimate grip of the most guarded man in Revachol opening around your knuckles one careful inch at a time.
The exact register he'd use to teach you to lift a print or clear a jammed weapon when you'd forgotten how — except his breath keeps catching on every push, and his eyes keep going dark and unfocused, and he keeps losing the thread of his own instructions to say your name into the gaps.
Harry.
You learn him. He lets you. The lube's gone warm and obscene and he's loud with it now — wet, slick, a filthy sound every time you work back in — and you feel the exact moment his discipline lets go and the want comes in: feel his hole flutter greedy around your fingers and clench, pulling, his hips chasing down onto your hand like his body is already begging for the thicker thing. And then the lieutenant's mouth comes open and what falls out of it is not an instruction.
"More," Kim says. Low, wrecked, the flat voice cracking right down the seam. "Another — Harry, I can take it, give me — ah — give me another." And when you do, when you press a third into the slick clutch of him, the sound he makes is obscene and undignified and you feel it in your teeth. He bears down on it, shameless, working himself on your fingers, every scrap of his discipline gone over to this.
"There — Dei — you have no idea how long I have —" He bites it off, too late, the way he has bitten off everything too late tonight, and he doesn't finish it; but his eyes find yours, blown black, and finish it for him.
Your cock is aching, hanging heavy and flushed and drooling against your thigh, jumping every time he clenches, and you have to breathe through your teeth to keep from rutting against the mattress like an animal.
He deals with the rest himself, brisk and unembarrassed, and his hand closes around your bare cock and slicks you in one cool merciless stroke that punches a sound out of you you'd be ashamed of any other night. His thumb rolls over the head, spreading the slick and the wet you've already made of yourself, and you'd laugh at how matter-of-fact he is about handling you if you had a single scrap of composure left to laugh with. You don't. He took it the second he wrapped his fist around you.
And when he decides you're ready — when he decides, because he is running this and you are deeply, gratefully glad of it — he lines you up himself, one hand steady around the base of your cock and his voice steadier still.
"Now. Slow. I've got you." And you fit the fat head of yourself to his slicked-open hole and feel him give, feel that first scalding clutch swallow the crown of you — and you have to grit and stop, barely the head in, because he is tight, he is so fucking tight even open, and the grip of him around just that much of you whites out every thought in your skull.
You feed it to him in slow inches. Feel him stretch around the thickest part and take it, take all of you, breathing you through it — "yes — all of it — don't you dare stop" — until your balls are snug against him and you're buried to the root in a heat that has no bottom, and the clench of him milks a broken sound out of you before you've even moved.
"Move," he says, against your jaw. You feel the word more than hear it — his breath, his mouth, the scrape of stubble. And then, lower, filthier, only for you: "Fuck me, Harry."
So you do.
And then it's hot and heavy and wet and it stops being anything you have the words for — the slow drag of your cock out to the head and the slick punch back in, the helpless catch in his throat every time you bottom out against him, the two of you finding the rhythm and then losing it to something rawer.
Kim's heels hook at the backs of your thighs and pull, dragging you deeper than you'd have dared on your own, and his voice goes ragged and obscene at your ear — there, like that, harder, fuck, Harry — and the heat coils tight up the backs of your legs and the base of your spine and the underside of your cock.
You give him everything you have, clumsy and devoted and overwhelmed, sweat slicking the press of your chest to his, your cock buried in the tight wet heat of him over and over, and he takes all of it and gives it back and tells you you're doing so well, so well, Harry, until the praise alone, in that wrecked low voice, nearly tips you over.
And then — because he can never quite stand to not be the one driving — Kim gets a leg and an arm and a wicked spark of the old competence under him and flips you.
Neat as anything. Rolls you onto your back into the rucked, damp sheets and sinks back down onto your cock in one long shameless slide that whites out the room, one thin strong hand pinning your wrists loose to the mattress like the whole night has come round full circle.
He sets the pace from up there, riding you slow and merciless and deep, the clutch of him working your cock with every roll of his hips, and you can do nothing — are allowed to do nothing — but lie there and feel him take it. "This is what you do to me," he says, low and ruined and not the least bit ashamed of it now. "Look at you. Look what you — ah — look what you do to me."
And you look up at him.
But before the sight of him can finish you — even as the clutch of him drags you up toward the edge — you take in the rest of it: he is hard again where your bodies meet, flushed and leaking against your stomach, having ridden you all this time and not touched himself at all. He already gave everything once tonight and asked for nothing back. Not this time. Not if you have any say in it.
So you get a hand free — his grip on your wrists has gone soft, gone trusting, and he lets you — and you reach between you and wrap your fist around him, slick and sure, and start to stroke.
He gasps. The roll of his hips stutters.
"With me," you manage, wrecked, the words half-gone. "I've got you. Come on — together."
And then the ceiling lamp is behind his head.
It catches in the soft, fucked-out ruin his hair has become and throws the rest of him into warm gold shadow, and for one suspended second the lieutenant is haloed above you — every careful line of his face gone open and unguarded, the light ringing his head like something out of an old devotional painting, like a portrait of a quiet saint who has only just discovered he is permitted to be happy. And you swear you've seen this before and in this very moment can't remember.
And that is what does it. Not the heat. Not the rhythm. Just the sight of Kim Kitsuragi, lit from behind, looking down at you like you are the answer to a question he stopped letting himself ask years ago — and it tips the two of you at once. You come apart underneath him, deep inside him, your fist still working him through it — and Kim breaks in the very same instant, your voices going up together in the lamplight. His release spills weak and shivering across your knuckles, all his body has left after being emptied once already tonight — and it is no smaller a thing for being smaller, because this time he does not go over it alone. His name in your mouth, yours in his. His forehead drops to yours. Nothing held back on either side.
And then the strength simply leaves him.
Kim folds down onto your chest, boneless, his face tucking into the side of your throat, and you get both arms around him and hold on. You've gone soft inside him; on a slow shift of his weight you slip free, and the warm slick of you leaks out between your bodies, smearing where you're still pressed together — and neither of you moves to fix it. Neither of you cares. Let the bed be a ruin. There is a naked lieutenant breathing against your collarbone and his heartbeat is climbing back down to meet yours, and in this whole grey country at the edge of the Pale there is nothing left that either of you has to do about anything.
So you do nothing. You breathe. He breathes. The radiator knocks. The parliament keeps its respectful silence — the rowdy bench of you hushed and gone gentle, giving you this last of it too.
And then, slowest of all, the realization arrives: that this happened.
That it was him.
That you are allowed to keep it.
…,
A long way from Revachol, in a clean little room you will never again be able to afford to feel this safe in, Harry Du Bois holds the man he loves against his chest and finally, finally runs all the way out of things he is too afraid to say —
because he has just said every one of them, and not a single one needed words at all.