The only liberty I'm taking here is that Oliver gets a haircut on the island. Because I cannot with his hair. Oh, and that Slade and Oliver got it on a ton. But that's clearly canon.
I blame/thank latbfan and CreepingMuse for this.
Found
I did this to him. It's my fault.
He tracks me, finds me when I'm alone. He speaks less and less. The Slade I knew is disappearing. What's left? Need and hate. A ghost.
I ached from our training. I had bruises up and down my ribs, on my thighs. My knuckles were cracked and bleeding. My hands were too sore and weak to grasp. It hurt to breathe. But he needed me to be faster, stronger. He needed me to be his partner if we were going to escape.
"Do you want to be useless like you were when I found you? Or do you want to live?"
Once I chose it, chose not to give up, he dug in.
"Again," he growled as I hit the ground. "Get up."
Slade expected everything. Our lives depended on my success. I tried, really tried, for the first time in my life.
After three painful, frustrating days in the field, I turned a corner. I was less distracted. I had learned how to focus, what to look for, how to predict his next move. Like a sixth sense, I started to feel him twist in the air across from me, behind me. I could meet almost every strike.
His face softened. I thought I saw a sliver of respect. Maybe even hope.
Today he sucked me so hard I was sure he'd tear my dick off.
Sara hasn't said anything but she's got to know. Something.
"Don't get comfortable, kid." His voice was gravel in the dark fuselage. "Can't lose your focus."
It was probably three in the morning. He always knew when I wasn't sleeping. He never slept.
I knew it was about the kiss. That afternoon, our eyes had locked for too long. I wrapped my sore, mud-crusted hand around the base of his neck, where it was widest, where it sloped into his shoulders, and pulled us toward each other. His lips opened against mine. I felt the tremble in his breath. It wasn't just me.
Lying there hours later, I let his admonitions echo in the silence.
His next words were inches from my face. "So don't."
And then he kissed me. He pressed my head back against the ground with the strength of his jaw while he slid his hand down my side, my thigh, down to my knee and then slowly back up to my chest.
When I reached out to touch his neck, he left.
I miss the way he used to look at me, in the weeks before Shado came. Like he knew the dirtiest thoughts in my head and could beat every one of them.
You can hear everything in the fuselage. There's no hiding. But a few nights later, as silently as I could, I took off every layer of my clothing. Each silent step toward him was like balancing on a tightrope.
"What are you -?" he coughed when I settled my knees beside his hip.
I kissed him, again, maybe for the last time. I let my hand wrap itself around the back of his neck, like it had wanted to, and then it slid, like his hand had, down over safe parts of him – hip, thigh – but nowhere was really safe. I promised myself that if he pushed me away, if he humiliated me now, I would be done with this, whatever this was, this terrible rock of an idea I couldn't stop worrying.
I knew he'd been thinking about it, too. I caught him watching me, his lips a little full, a little open. During training, he locked my arms, our thighs wedged together, and everything shifted for a moment. He froze, our faces inches apart, his breath suddenly slow, and his eyes darted to my lips. "Don't drop your shoulder," he said then, too loud, untangling himself from me.
There was every good reason not to rest my hand on the swell of his tricep, not to press my chest against his, not to risk slipping my tongue along his top lip. Our survival depended on working together; couldn't this tear us apart, wreck everything, complicate our partnership beyond repair? Maybe. Yes. But.
He didn't send me away. He didn't say another word. He let me kiss him, let my lips be soft against his, strong against his. He let me unbutton the fabric hiding his chest, let me sweep my hungry palms across his skin while his fingers raked desperate lines up the backs of my thighs. No, by the time his hands were on me, it wasn't about letting me anymore. I think it was about letting himself.
He hissed at my lips on his skin, when I pressed them into the hollow of his sternum, sucked at the place where his pulse raced. At first I was surprised by how sensitive his body was, for a fighter like him, but then I knew. His senses keep him alive. He's good because he feels everything. I feathered fingertips over his ribs; his head fell back with a moan. Everything.
He wrenched his pants down to his ankles, still under me but strong enough to lift me with just his hips. I eased him back to the floor, straddling him, hard and throbbing and nestled against him, sliding along the hot length of him, already slick. I reached between us, held his cock, heavy and wide, in my hand. I ran my thumb over the tip; another hiss, as he knocked his head against the cold ground. Then he went silent, breathless, as I worked myself onto him, slowly.
"Careful," I whispered, my voice nearly as low as his.
Our hips began to roll, his into mine, mine into his. It wasn't what I had expected – I don't know what I expected, sneaking up to him, naked and hard, in the dead of night. But it wasn't a mistake and I know he knew it, too. His eyes fluttered closed, his body thrown gloriously open beneath me. My cock was painfully hard, fallen against him, tracing along the line of hair that snaked up to his navel. He took me in his fist, squeezing and pulling in time with our thrusts, faster and faster until I shuddered and his breath came out in a roar.
He's the better hunter. He's had more practice. And now he hunts me. When he finds me, he's wild-eyed, wordless. Venomous. And hungry from a year without me.
I'm inside him fast. Beneath me, he grinds his cock and his face into the muddy leaves. There's no room for my hand, and I want to tell him everything I didn't say, and that I'm sorry I filled him full of poison and ruined him forever, but there's no room for that, either.
I couldn't get enough of him. Training sessions were foreplay and we fucked anywhere, everywhere.
Up against a tree, both of us ridiculous with pants around our ankles and me glad as hell for his hands around my cock, squeezing in time and protecting it from the sharp bark. Afterward, he didn't flinch as he washed his bleeding knuckles in the salt ocean.
In the cold evening sand, my face buried in his lap, lips stretched, mouth utterly filled. His open hands laying lightly on my head. Drunk on the animal smell of him, taste of him.
In the fuselage, stretched under his thick body, both of us bare and yearning. We kissed into each other, sliding cock along cock until we couldn't stand it anymore and he dove into me, his breath gravel against my neck.
When Shado came, we stopped. Cold.
Very cold.
My hair was always falling in my eyes while we were training. I had to flick it back just to see. Exasperated that day, he caught me up before I could block, doubling me over with a bruising strike to my gut.
"Done," he grunted.
Then he headed back; I fumed but followed. Done? Inside the fuselage, he grabbed a knife and a bowl. I followed him back out again. "What are you -?"
He knelt in front of a shrub. Grabbed two fistfuls of leaves. "Cutting your hair."
"Not with a knife you're not." But I followed him to the beach.
The leaves made a sort of lather with the sea water, slimy and yellow. He cleaned the knife with water and sand, then sharpened it against a stone. "Take off your shirt," he told me.
I shot him a glance. He didn't look at me, just raised his eyebrow. He was a deadly flirt.
I stripped to the waist and knelt in the sand beside him. Despite his explosive strength, his hands could be so delicate. He massaged the lather through my hair. "You'll be glad for this step," he whispered at my ear. I was, if only for the gift of his hands suddenly soft in my hair.
When he picked up the knife, I laughed – at him, at me, at the knife we both had used to gut fish and birds and reptiles, to hack them apart before we roasted them or didn't. That knife was a screwdriver, a fork, a threat. And a razor, but only for the well-worn skin of chins and cheeks, skin that was used to a hard rake like this. Not for virgin scalp. He nodded, then began to shave me from my hairline in, all the way around my head. The slime was a pathetic substitute for shaving cream. There was a lot of scraping, a lot of blood. But he was right, I was glad it was there.
I'd never been bald. It was a kind of naked I'd never felt before. We stripped down right there in the sand and he kissed me while he rinsed my head – I hissed at the salt sting.
"Aw, does it hurt, Sally?" he taunted.
I held his hips and thrust against him. "You know I'm not any kind of Sally."
He groaned when I bit his lower lip, and we fucked long and deep where the water met the shore.
I don't try to find him. I know what he's capable of. All I want is to see him, to know he's okay.
He's not okay.
And seeing him doesn't come close to all I want. I want the sand under me and him – the old him – over me, inside me, surrounding me. I want that moment again when he hovers above my mouth, then sinks into a groaning kiss.
I couldn't make my face look hopeful. It wouldn't look anything but horrified.
Shado was closer, kneeling beside him. We never stood close after she came. He took her hair in his hand, stared at it like it had a secret to tell him, and he said, "I should have told you."
"Told you what?" she asked him and all three of us knew he wasn't talking to her. She knew, eventually, that when she caught him watching us it wasn't because of her. No matter how much he flirted with her. She knew and she never confronted me. Maybe she confronted him.
"How I felt about you."
That was the second to last time I failed him. When I didn't respond. A flood of clichés filled my head about how I had loved him, still loved him with a part of me I hadn't recognized before him. About what he had been to me, still was to me, how I longed for him, how I needed him, even just one more time. Inside my head, I begged him not to die.
But I was silent. He was finally speaking about this, about us, after a year of barbed silence. And I couldn't even breathe, let alone say any fucking thing at all.
"Do it," he growled.
He hummed when he took a piss, some low, tuneless tune, always the same.
"Sing for me," I prodded one night while he pulled his shirt over his head.
He coughed a laugh. "I don't sing," he told me, extra low and raspy, to prove it.
"Yeah you do. I like it."
He had slept beside me for few months by then, skin against blessed skin, hot and smooth. He actually slept this way, his breath even, rumbling like a furnace.
He paused, his broad, scarred back still facing me, his face hidden. "I don't sing," he insisted, flatter this time. He clenched his fist once, twice. "Princess."
I grinned in the dark. "Fine. You don't sing. When you piss."
He twisted to look at me. "What?"
"Come to bed."
"I do not."
I knelt, reaching my hand around the nape of his neck, tugging his stubborn face toward mine. An inch away from my open lips, he repeated, "I don't." I just nodded.
Sometimes I liked to rile him up.
He tossed me down to the ground and met me there, his face so close, still withholding his lips. He not at all carefully dug me out of my pants and, with a look that could melt glass, slid his fist slowly up and down.
I reached for him but he batted my hand away.
His sensitivity, his awareness, everything that made him such an intimidating opponent (and ally) – he trained all of it on me, on my response. My eyelids melted closed; he squeezed gently, at the base. A shudder; he slowed. My cock wept a first, slick tear; he bent to lick it away. I moaned then, low and long, as his lips parted and he sucked me inside. He refused to let it build, holding my hips to keep me anchored, to maintain control. If I was going to come, it was going to be him that got me there, only him.
It might have taken hours. My lips swelled, unkissed. My balls throbbed, unspent, hitting the point of almost more times than I could count. I was incoherent, burned nearly through, and he knew it, he'd done that. So that when he decided it was time - probably after I'd heatedly said things I could never take back - leaning his thigh between my legs, finally giving me his lips, he pulled even, slow strokes tighter and tighter until I exploded under him.
Then he curled beside me, my eyes still closed, the narcotic, well-fucked fog settling over me. And he hummed me to sleep.
Sara knows it's not safe to come out here alone. We both know it. Ivo and his men will kill us, or worse. But she doesn't say a thing.
Slade isn't safe either. I'm going to have to do something, maybe soon.
But not yet.