Work Text:
1. You don’t realise it until he smiles at you. It’s been days, days upon days, and all his mouth has done in your direction is twist, cruel at the side, a pattern of dismissal that you’ve already memorised and begun to despise. (Later, you’ll come to understand that what sparks in your gut does not render his mouth hated, only hateful, and that although you want to make him pay as much as ever the method is not quite what you originally thought you had in mind. But time’s getting shorter and the fucking world’s ending, dude, so you cut yourself some slack.) So it’s been days, days of clipped consonants and the insults his mouth is too washed out with soap to say writ across his eyes like neon signs, and you want to rip his skin off his bones just so you can burrow under it, just so you can be the only thing he knows. But you say something off-hand, dumb and odd and dumber and odder than you’re trying to be in front of him, because everything is ammunition and you’ve already got so much ammunition left to give, for him to steal, accidental, slipping out from your mouth and from under your cuffs and between your ears, and you say it and he smiles at you, smiles like you’re worth just one single second of his attention, for the very first time. He smiles and you stop dead in your tracks like something from an old movie and he’s already turned away, you’re already a thing he’s forgotten, and you’re so hard inside your jeans that you’ve actually forgotten how to breathe, and your fingers open and close convulsively and you maybe seriously need to go to the bathroom and take care of this before he notices because Jesus you feel dizzy, and you think shit, you think fuck, you think, this is the worst ammunition I could ever hand a man like Hermann Gottlieb.
2. You don’t kiss him. You don’t kiss him so many times. You don’t kiss him when he calls you an idiot, a boor, a hack, when he triggers the fire alarm just so the sprinklers can ruin your new specimen, when he files his thirty-ninth complaint form about how loud you keep playing Rammstein and how you never respond to what he carefully does not call threats, when he’s the only person you’ve seen for three days straight and the only one you’ve spoken to in five. You don’t kiss him, and maybe it’s because you want to kiss him, or maybe it’s because you’re a coward, or maybe it’s because you’re so utterly, utterly sure that he’d rather choke on his own tongue than kiss you back. You don’t kiss him until you ache with it, pacing your room when he’s locked you out of the lab just so you’ll get some sleep, just so you’ll cease making infernal bloody levels of noise for six hours or so, if you think that’s something you’re capable of managing, Mr Geiszler. You jerk off until it hurts, thinking of how he hates you, how he’d hate you even more if he knew you were doing this, until you can’t even tell anymore if that makes you feel dirtier than you already do. You don’t kiss him because he hates you and you hate him, you hate him until it hurts, you hate him until your toes curl and your breathe his name into your pillow as your voice cracks around it, but you don’t kiss him, because he’d say no, and he says no to you in everything and you take it, you love it, it pushes you to the brink and beyond, but not in this. Never in this. So you don’t kiss him, and much as you wobble endlessly, the status quo maintains.
3. You pretend well enough, you think. You’re careful to never touch him and he rarely touches you, possessive grabs at your wrist to wrangle your attention which speak to you things you cannot begin to parse. You think he’s doing it because the splitsecond of hot skin against your own grounds you, sparks you into a different direction, because he’s a scientist and he’s observed Mako doing it when you’re riding too high. He doesn’t know that it works when she does it, because she’s love easy, she’s love good, she’s a small smile that you always know how to find and every novel you ever lent her when she was little and a lot more impressionable but always so, so wise. Her touch is a comfort. His is a forest fire, a wall socket, an open wound. When he touches you your skin wants to crawl off because you want it so much, because you’d beg him not to stop if you could, if you could be so weak, or so strong, you’re not sure anymore. When he touches you your spine goes ramrod straight and your fingers do that treacherous tell-tell tarantella upon your thigh. He stops touching you, after a little while, and you hate that you miss it, hate that you hate him for it, hate him, period, the way you always do. You try not to think about his hand about your wrists as you ride him, as you gasp down a phone line so the last thing he can hear before his lecture is your voice as you come, of how you’d probably even like it if he called you names or bit you or made you work for every last thing he gave you, no matter how small. You don’t think. You don’t touch. You look, but you make sure he never catches you looking, and it doesn’t matter, right, because you could die tomorrow and he’ll never have to know how many times you’ve come just from thinking about him putting his hand against your bared throat and pressing down. But you don’t touch, so that makes it okay. It’s all okay.
4. Pretend that you don’t keep count. Pretend that it’s not well over three hundred. Pretend, above all, every morning or night or afternoon when you meet his eyes over a pile of Kaiju guts, that you’d stop coming to the thought of his hands on you if you could, if that was even an option, if that was even a world you have the capacity to imagine, because, well, it’s really not, man, it’s really really not.
5. You wake up from the drift with his hands on you, with your name on his lips and your own blood on yours. He steps back for Pentecost, because you make him, arms windmilling and wild, but he doesn’t leave. He yells at you until his voice breaks with the strain, calls you names he’s never called you before and tries, a brief aborted foolish attempt, but an attempt all the same, to set your side of the lab on fire, throwing debris at you all the way. Now is when you say something dickish, or arrogant, or so smart even he has to recognise it, narrowing his eyes in that way of his, the one you’ve come to cherish and loathe in equal measure, cherish because you did that, you moved the world, you had impact, you shook his foundations-- but loathe, because his foundations are made of steel and you never shake them for long. But you don’t. You feel the heat from his hands still pressing into your skin like a brand, and you wonder if he noticed that when you came screaming back into consciousness there was a hot minute there before the trauma of it all cut in when you were hard as a rock with his entire body practically in your lap. But you guess not, because he’d cut your dick off soon as look at you if he’d realised, right? Right? Right?
6. With me? you say, and then--
7. Look, you’re just saying, if you knew he had so many fucking thoughts about your belt and your desk and exactly what you could bite down on to sodding shut you up, maybe you would’ve-- something. Something, you guess. A long time ago. But there’s a world to save and he keeps flushing hot and red every time you glance sidelong at him, and yeah, okay, maybe now’s not the time, you guess, especially because if you pause to think you’re going to realise he knows everything and then you’re going to puke for the fourth time today, and who wants that, man, come on, get it together.
8. You’re sitting in the mostly metaphorical ashes of the last Kaiju you might ever see, and you’re a wreck. You’re a mess, there’s blood on every single item of your clothing and crusted in your hair, under your fingernails and on the soles of your shoes. You smell like death and you don’t look much unlike it, and when he sits down beside you, in that careful heavy way that the cane requires, you want to hate that he’s seeing you like this but he last saw you about fifteen minutes ago, and even you haven’t conspired to get into more shit in such a short window of time. He’s beautiful and his mind is a steel trap made of ice and pure mathematics and apparently he wants to bang you until you’re sobbing from it, and you do not have the reserves to deal with this shit right now, no matter how much you want to, and Christ on the cross, you want to, you want to so much. You should probably kiss him because that’s what people do in movies, but this isn’t a movie and so many people died today, this week, this month, this year, and you’re so tired you’re seeing spots, so you bump your knee against his better one and just for now, just to tide you over for twenty four or so short hours, it’s enough.
9. You open the door and he’s standing there and you don’t know what to say so you don’t say anything at all. He’s leaning on the cane even more heavily than he normally is so you step back, which turns out to be the greatest mistake you’ve ever made, because he moves in to fill the space and threads his fingers through the short hair at the back of your head and tugs so hard it makes your eyes sting. You should say something because that’s what people do, that’s what adults do, but you’ve never been that good at any of that shit, so when he pulls your head towards him and kisses you wet and messy and so, so hot, you don’t say a thing. He’s more frantic than methodical and you want to be surprised but you’re not, and you steer him back and back until his calves are bumping up against your bunk and you can feel him hard against your thigh and half of you thinks that this is one last favour from your feverish flickering synapses just before your brain stem’s cut, that you’re dying and the Kaiju ate your soul or whatever and this is a lie, this isn’t happening, this can’t be happening, fuck, God. It’s the hottest thing that’s ever happened to you and almost before it starts you know you’re never going to live it down, but you’re already past the point of no return. You come inside your jeans with your teeth grazing his neck and bless him, fuck him, when he laughs in your face when you draw back it’s only slightly cruel, especially for him, and fuck yourself, too, because you feel yourself turning bright, humiliating red and you know that he knows that you wouldn’t have it any other way.
10. You wake up with your head on his stomach and your hair knotted into clumps that his fingers made, and there’s teeth-marks in your wrists and you don’t feel as bad as you did after the Kaiju drift but this is worse than your last hangover, that’s for sure. You wake him up because you don’t know how to be silent, you have a limited capacity for still enjoyment of the quiet but so does he, and now you know from the drift that he likes it when you shout, that his fondest wish of a long list of fondest wishes was finding out if you would be that loud when he found out exactly how you liked to be fucked and executed it as quickly and roughly as possible, so you wake him up and his lips pull back from his teeth in one of his nastiest snarls, and you love him, you hate him, you close his hand around your cock and you let him feel it twitch in his palm when his mouth gets meaner. He magnanimously lets you ride him and calls you names in four different languages and his tongue only stutters, betraying him, over the letters of your first name. You do not tell him that you love him and he does not tell you that he loves you, but when he comes his thumb is ghosting gently over your already scarring eye, and does not press down.
11. You tell no one, and nothing changes. Well, that would be true, except that you saved the fucking world and rendered whole parts of your operation virtually obsolete in one fell swoop. Dismantling the shatterdome is a job for half an army, and nobody notices two awkward scientists in a corner, sitting a little too close. They notice you when you shout, of course, and they notice when he shouts back, but when your pinkie grazes his on the top of your workbench, only the two of you will ever know. There’s so much to do and nothing to do, all at once, so you fuck for days, pace the lab with your shirt off knowing that he’ll never file a complaint form again and revel in knowing his eyes are on the bruises smattered across your hips. You’re rockstars and you’re dinosaurs, caught in the stasis between being the most famous scientists in the world and being nobodies, being nobody at all. There’s no one to look at you so you make him look, blow him under his desk and grin at him across the mess table with an edge that he’ll take out of your ribcage later, and his eye begins to scar to match yours and you don’t say it, you don’t say it, and no one asks, and maybe this is what love is, this tethered hurricane between you, this gulf that no words but every touch can breach, you don’t know, for once in your life, you just don’t even begin to know.
12. He says it for the first time in Rio, an accident, you think, a pillow under his leg for leverage and fucking you into the mattress so hard that you limp a little for days afterwards, (your bloody turn, he whispers, and you want to do it all over again), and he doesn’t say it when he comes but when you do, his index finger shoved up to the knuckle in your mouth and it’s so quiet you almost don’t hear it, like something ripped it out of him, like a dying confession. It doesn’t scare you, the way you thought it might, because, as it turns out, everything is rendered real by the drift, even the things you thought might not be real until you hear them out loud. Everything is real, and the inescapable realness of this is a drug, has left him forever the immovable object you’ve always needed and will spend the rest of your life shoving against with all your might. You say it to him after he gets off the back of your motorbike in Berlin, and he gets this look in his eye, and you think he might deck you, because you went kinda fast on the autobahn, even you’ll admit that-- but he leans back against the bike and pulls you into him, kisses you so hard that you end up rutting against his leg in a Berlin alleyway. He calls you magnificent, he calls you fearless, he calls you, once, and only once, for as long as you both shall live, darling boy, and you love him, love him until it burns you, until it makes you want to throw up, so you tell him so, and he calls you names you hate even more because you want to hate them and can’t quite bring yourself to care, and you’re rockstars, baby, you’re the best of the best, and the light catches the thin red slit of the white of his eye and you’re gone, you’re gone, you’re done for, it’s over, so long and thanks for all the fish.
13. Look, but the thing is-- they could always come back. There’s no such thing as safe anymore, and you could, in a way, care less, because you throw yourself off cliffs without looking and he’s the closest thing to a safety net you’re ever going to get. He’s the only thing the universe has ever promised you with any certainty, except for the magnetism of your smile and the way that you unfailingly crash on the third Tuesday of every month, no matter what pills you take, no matter how hard you try to push the cycle out a little more. Life does not come with safety nets, merely bitter mathematicians who you guess you should legally marry, one of these days, just in case, although just in case of what you’re not quite sure. You’ve rarely taken anything for granted, mostly because you’ve rarely had anything worth having, but every time his cane taps against the floor you remember that sometimes, things change, and saving the world could only be harder a second time, so let’s get this fucking show on the road, kids.
14. They take your picture until you’re dizzy, until you’re seeing stars, almost until you begin to regret the hickey on your neck. No one ever guesses that you’re together, not together together, and you’re always asked out of the side of the mouth about the girlfriend they assume they should include in your profile. You get phone numbers, panties, even, and Hermann turns the full force of his icily polite stare on them, and mostly gets nicer cookies than you do, and a substantial amount of tea. You give all the phone numbers back and try judiciously not to wonder about the panties, even when Hermann hisses that if you keep them he’ll make you wear them later, even when you flush so deep at that even your ears turn red and Hermann gives you a look too hungry to really be called considering. You’re a grin and a brain and no one really knows you, no one knows the anime that got you here or the songs you sing in the shower or exactly how many meds you’ve spent years pouring down the bathroom sink. They take your picture, shoulder to shoulder with the smartest man you’ve ever met, and you feel like a colossus, you feel like you’re twenty feet tall, and you understand for the first time that although this would have all been worth it without the man behind you, you wouldn’t have been worthy, not by a mile. He tells reporters that your company was bearable, if only just, corrects all your figures and interrupts you more than half the time, and refuses to get his hair cut into anything resembling a normal shape. (Okay, yeah, it makes you hot, and yeah you’ve got a vested interest in no one else noticing that he’s basically the hottest shit alive, but Jesus, it’s not a good look, not objectively, and you’re trying to hold to a little of that scientist’s objectivity here, okay, you’re trying, God.) Sometimes you hate him, really hate him, until bile clings to the back of your throat and you almost never want to see him again, except you don’t, you want to look into into the sun until it makes your skin peel off, and you’ve never known moderation and you don’t know it now, don’t even want to try. He fucks you every single night for an entire year, and most of the mornings, and if anything is rock and roll shit, it’s this, and you let it slip eventually, the way you always knew you would, and only you notice that the fury that makes his mouth the cruellest it’s ever been is more pride than anger, when caught in the right light.
15. You never say it again. You don’t need to, is the thing, it doesn’t even make any difference, not after the drift, not now you know the things you know. It’s lucky, in its own twisted way, that it was him, that it was someone whose attention you want on you forever, because you even have the same dreams, can’t even get away from him when you’re unconscious. It doesn’t matter if you go to bed angry because that’s your default setting, and his, and if you fuck like you’re dying for it in reality it pales in comparison to what you do while asleep. There are other things, flashes of how he wants to leave long scratches on the back of your thighs, distracting when you’re finishing a journal article, enough to finish you off without even pausing for breath when he’s already inside you, and the nauseous hue of his nerves before he has to go on stage, thoughts the closest to jumbled they ever get. You can taste the patterns of his brain on the tip of your tongue, and you couldn’t figure out the words for it even if you wanted to, which you don’t. He’s a mystery to you because he isn’t one. You hate him hopelessly, helplessly, scarred into your brain and your eye just as nakedly and permanently as the beings you hunted are writ all over your flesh. You yell at him because you want to, not because you need to, because he knows the colour of your thoughts even if not the specifics, virtually all of the time. You speak in tongues only he understands and you blind him, so he blinds you right back. Time is short and life is short, so you pull his belt between your teeth, raise an eyebrow, and thank God, thank God, for stupid fucking scientists who’ll wear anything, who’ll do anything, who saved the world, because now he knows what you want him to do to you, with you, without even having to open your mouth.