It's hard, sometimes, to keep his desire. Especially on nights like this, when the belt lies slick in his hand and he has to force down on the disgust that wells up his stomach to burn, sickened, at the back of his throat before he can even bring himself to raise it.
He wonders why he does it, but that's a dangerous path to go down - if he chases that rabbit, then sooner or later he'll also have to ask himself why Jane does it and he'd - rather not.
(Because it's punishment to him, the pain, the humiliation. Because apparently, grinding himself down to the ground and onto the edge of parasuicidal isn't enough. Because Rigsby ought to use the opportunity to beat into him that it isn't his fault and it never fucking was so get over it, except Rigsby doesn't because Rigsby it seems isn't such a good friend after all.
He gets angry at Jane, sometimes. For making him into a bad friend. For not going to Lisbon or Cho or even Van Pelt, because they would all force him to open his eyes to forgiveness, unlike him, who never forced anything onto him except maybe his cock. For Jane to know that, and choose him of all of them for it.
He sometimes also forgets who he's angry at, Jane or himself.)
He lifts the belt. It hangs in the air for a second - he mustn't hesitate more than that - before hissing down.
He doesn't know which is worse to hear, the crack of dark leather on tender skin or Jane's cry, muffled twice: first by Jane's (stupid) so-called 'self-control' (as if it were an achievement to lock his feelings as remote as a dusty attic with a thin mattress and a smiley face on the wall), and then by the gag.
Considering which, he's glad it isn't duct tape this time round, that Jane has swiped from somewhere and presented to him (and he would accept it, obligingly, obediently, and smother it roughly over waiting lips). Duct tape was cruel, and Rigsby could never rip it off right, could never do it without bringing off the skin and bright red blood to patch at the surface.
This one is a tie, one of his own, knotted several times in the middle and tied amidst the mass of dishevelled blond curls. He's actually quite grateful for it, always is. Jane had been the one to first suggest it, in the way he made suggestions he knew were going to be followed up on, but Rigsby had been the one to need it. He'd never have been able to work up a nerve otherwise.
He allows himself some time to take Jane in - bent over, if not slightly awkwardly, the breakfast bar, palms flat and elbows stubbornly locked. He's trembling lightly, in fear-tinged anticipation, and the sweat runs in beads down his neck, where his hair is matted into disarray.
There are welts on his skin (naked, overly sensitive), angry reds and dark pinks slashed across the arch of his back, the clench of his buttocks and thighs, his tensed shoulders. That made it hurt more, his tensing, but Rigsby doesn't make a move to tell him he ought to loosen up. If he hasn't, then he doesn't.
Jane breathes out, audibly, the sound strained through his nose.
Rigsby grips the buckle end of the belt and before Jane can finish his exhale, slams the length as hard as he can allow himself across the small of Jane's back. Jane's head jerks up, chokes on his breath. His whimper, obscured as it is by the gag, is piteous.
It's easier after that, at least to work himself into a frenzy. Rigsby hits out at him, faster and faster, not really caring whether the blow lands low behind the knees, causing them to buckle and collide with the chrome bar stool, or whether the next snap meeting this behaviour catches him dizzyingly high. He doesn't give him any reprieve between the lashes, doesn't give him time to scrabble himself together before he strikes him apart all over again.
It takes an awfully long time.
Eventually Jane crumbles, crumples, cries slumped with his face buried into the cool surface of the bar and arms askew, barely holding himself up. He begs - Rigsby doesn't hear the words and doesn't want to - and keens through the gag, but it's still a while before Rigsby slows, and finally stills, arm aching and breathing rapid from exertion.
He drops the belt; it curls onto the floor, harmless and discarded once again. He spares it a glance before turning his attentions back to Jane. If he's not careful he'll feel sick again, and he would rather take the shaking Jane into the bedroom and on the sheets than take himself hurtling to the bathroom and violently throw up.
The marks are livid, crossing over each other in no pattern in particular; when Rigsby places a careful palm over them to guide Jane up, and coax him into walking, he can feel the heat of pain radiating onto his hand.
By the time they make it to the bedroom - Jane stumbling, gasping for blocked-off air, and Rigsby attempting to keep him from falling - Jane's sobs have subsided somewhat, and he crawls onto the bed uncharacteristically meek. Rigsby had really pulled a number on him this time round; hopefully he'll be alright come morning, or at least functioning.
Rigsby fumbles with his zipper, and as soon as his fingers grasp hold undoes it and struggles his jeans (they're not working, and the aimless suspension is what had Jane coming to him in the first place) and boxers off as one, leaving them to heap on the floor. His shirt follows. Socks, he wasn't wearing to begin with, preferring to pad around barefoot when on his own.
He joins Jane, who has already positioned himself on his hands and knees (it's never any other way, and Rigsby knows better than to bring it up) on the bed. The adrenaline has slumped down, now, mellowed to the extent that when Rigsby clamps a hand on either side of Jane's hips to adjust the angle a little, he almost wants to be gentle with him.
He knows better; better he doesn't cross the lines of barbed-wire and picket-fence and encroach into intimacy.
Give Jane his wastelands of affection, let him offer them up to deities long since dead and gone.
(Maybe he does this because it's an elaborate version of a pity fuck.)
It doesn't really matter. Or he can't summon up the coherency to make it matter, either way. He's all ready to push right in, until his mind flashes him a warning sign: it's been a long while. Long enough to hurt, anyway.
(Rigsby doesn't think he can stomach any more of that tonight.)
His erection - he's learnt by now not to let himself be consumed by the burn of humiliation it used to bring him, the proof that he was quite the sick bastard and what the fuck does Jane, what the fuck Jane, fuck Jane - is slightly less reasonable. Fuck Jane. Yes.
Nevertheless, Rigsby bears with the frustration long enough to awkwardly ram his fingers into his own mouth, and run them through Jane's opening. The image of slimmer, prettier hands than his paws clenching into the covers helps.
He's tense, and Rigsby, even as he slicks up his cock and begins to push in, knows that his preparation probably wouldn't make a half-cent of a difference anyway.
Jane groans, constricted, somewhere in his throat. His thighs tremble, as if he might collapse, but that's alright: they've done this before. Even if Rigsby sets up an erratic, off-tempo rhythm that's slightly too fast, even if he slides his palms down Jane's back and makes him arch and shiver and half-sob, half-whine, even if he knows if he flipped his palms around, they would be streaked with the faint red of Jane's suffering - it's all alright. Jane can take this, will have to take this.
(He isn't fooled for a moment that he's in control, though.)
And that's what makes him up the pace, still out of time to Jane's frantic breathing, and knead his fingers into sore, swollen flesh. Fuck Jane fuck Jane fuckjane. He reaches under him, grabs at the erection he knows is there. Moves his hand up and down. Rough. He does want Jane to get off, though. That much Rigsby can do.
He does. In the delirious seconds before they both run out of ground and hurtle off their respective edges, Rigsby into grim, overcast clouds and Jane God-probably-hasn't-an-inkling-where, he spares the hand that had been torturing Jane until he whimpered (broken and terrified and high-pitched) to tug off the gag.
Saliva coats it - he'll be tossing this one into the trash later. As of now, he flings it carelessly onto the floor, and - stepping into the unspoken no-man's land as it is - presses his torso flush against Jane's.
The man struggles in protest, uses his new-found voice to force out a hoarse mantra of no, no, no's, shaking his blond-curled head wildly.
He still keeps on all fours, so Rigsby takes that as initiative to keep locked against him and palming his cock without delicacy all the way until he bucks and tries in earnest to thrash him off, groaning like a wounded animal, coming, crying, in pleasure or frustration or panic or all three, and then, then he's done and so is Rigsby, who keeps him from melting rubber-boned into the covers until he's used him to ride out his own orgasm. It must have been uncomfortable, but inconsideration is one of the few of Rigsby's luxuries.
He's bone-tired afterwards, but is obliged to grab a few tissues from the box on the nightstand and clean himself up so that he is almost presentable. Or at least, no longer looking as if he'd just rolled through hay that hadn't quite wanted to let go.
He heads down, television in mind. He'll settle down on the couch with a good bowl of snacks and whatever godawful programmes they showed at way past twelve in the evening. It won't really make much of a difference, since he's bound to drop off into sleep in the next hour or half, garuanteed.
And Jane can look after himself. He knows Rigsby's flat well enough to find his own way out, which he'll do after Rigsby's well out of it, slipping quietly into the night like a troubled soul, and knows the bathroom well enough to smooth himself back into his usual, three-piece suited and crinkle-eyed grinning self. Rigsby's comfort isn't part of the package, after all, and to be honest he finds the prospect of approaching Jane daunting now that he has his voice back. (Jane was right. As ever.)
He hovers in the doorway, feeling for a split second guilty and filthy and ravagingly sad. Sex doesn't usually dampen him towards the maudlin, but then again, he doesn't usually (for that he is gladder than he can say, on behalf of his sanity if nothing else) take the belt onto his workmate ('workmate' hardly covers it - Jane isn't just another face at the CBI, though, he's part of their unit and family and sometimes he so obviously isn't and it makes them mad and devastates them all, not just Rigsby) and fuck his control or demons or whatever the hell it was Jane harboured in his chest out of him, if only for a few moments.
He can't help glancing back towards the bed. Jane is curled up over his knees, face hidden in rumpled white fabric. He should allow the man his privacy, but God, he felt so damn sorry -
His next thought is whether three-day old popcorn would have gone off by now. It would be such a shame if it had.
