If shounen-ai, sex or shopping offends you, it may be a good idea to skip Cloud and Leon's half. XD
Thanks - babymar-mar, daea, Praetor, Uzumaki-sama, mysleevesR2long, Mahon, Holstein, Darkazriel.
Degrees of Separation – 2 – A Beautiful Day
'How was I to know the future's black as coal?' – Jesse Malin
Sora spent Monday watching Riku's entrance replaying, carved into his eyelids, slid with stills of the same boy walking through Decay and dancing over and over again in his head. The lights were pounding and the music bled steadily into his scalp. A strange headache, one which sharpened every time he closed his eyes.
"It's him, isn't it?"
Kairi hissing back into Sora's ear as Riku nodded a yes to Mr. Hegan, lounged into a front row seat as if it had been sculptured for the notches of his spine. Riku called away five minutes later, the headmaster's secretary flustered and muttering of school property and gosh, there was written notification to take a different path, wasn't there? The class erupting, again, as Riku strolled after her, nonchalant enough not to even glance back. Not to bask in the rabble he'd left, in the admiration, in the way all thumbs were up, and Kairi was lost with some disbelieving grin. Riku. Not looking back for anything.
"The boy from Decay."
She turned to stranger with his name on her lips, a girl Sora wasn't sure he'd like to meet. There was a phoniness to it, an overreaction. Practically breathless, and he was a good-looking guy, and he walked like nobody else, and he had strolled up the sacred drive, but he was vaguely human, all the same.
Sora was a minority.
"... So he was kicked out, and what I heard, the science teacher was never the same again. He had to retire early, and now, what I heard, he's knitting and scheming how to get revenge..."
"... But the witness protection programme isn't working out, because everybody knows already..."
"... It was the craziest thing I've ever seen. He rode down on a motorbike, and he did this jump, like, straight over the bars..."
"... The headmaster was freaking completely. He tried chasing after, but it was just stupid, even trying. He went and broke down, on the front steps. And Raku just stood over him and laughed..."
And he was invisible, as if the tangibility of sight or conversation were failure. Riku could be in the headmaster's office, on the verge of expulsion, or he could be in the process of relocation by the cops, or he could be nursing his bike, filmed with oil and triumph. Rumours' only fuel is ever their subject's silence.
Kairi embraced them, reappeared at Sora's side with a new story every other moment. Riku had walked into the classroom looking at her, recognising them. Sora trudged to history heavy with annoyance, and a frantic skew of words rushing behind his eyes. There was a lot to debate and ponder and decide, but battles of centuries before, they didn't seem to have too much relevance.
It was him, at Decay. No doubt about it. You dreamt of him, and here he is. Freedom. So what do you say? Do you ask him where he learnt to dance? Do you look for a little sanity, a little explanation? Who are you? And where did you come from?
"Gentle first lesson in, class."
And why?
"I just want you to get down notes from pages thirty to thirty five, the basics. How Ansem's work affected the century in his wake. Scientific discovery, relevance today. It's all simple stuff, and we'll discuss it next lesson. So I'll be wanting silence, please. I'll be checking your notes next lesson, and if they're not done-"
Silence a perfect stage for this spiral dance.
You're thinking like he'll remember you. It was a fleeting glance in the darkness, and he was looking at Kairi, anyway. And gods, really, why do you care? Maybe he'll be a friend. Maybe not. Haven't you made enough? This desperation, since when was that you?
Ansem's scientific studies, and their historical impacts.
Under water, shower, after the dream, cold tiles against your back warming with time, hands moving down with a guilty reluctance and silence, then, too, without a name to whisper, just a face and a fantasy.
With a desperate desire to think about anything different(something perfectly normal), Sora thought about Tidus and Selphie.
Tidus and Selphie, whose mothers had met at one of those classes women went to, to learn how to breathe when giving birth. Like it would apply. Tidus and Selphie who had been born in May within a fortnight of one another, whose mothers had maybe breathed in synchrony, Sora thought, if they'd remembered their instructions. So they breathed in synchrony and out came Tidus and Selphie, and Tidus and Selphie grew up and started dating when they were fourteen, and lost their virginities to one another the night of last year's May prom, which was after her sixteenth birthday and right before his.
If you asked, Tidus or Selphie would happily recite their lives to you. Both unnaturally upbeat, terrifyingly positive. And people called Sora an optimist. Tidus or Selphie would shrug, grin awshucks and talk of how Tidus would take over his father's beach business; managing the local mini-league's blitzball champions, the Abes; selling boards and balls from a little wooden shack with brands and surfing posters on the windows. After awhile, they'd buy the building next door, convert it to a beachside café. Selphie's notebook was full of possible names, none of which were massively appealing. They had no doubts that all of this would come true. It wasn't dream or chance, it was life, comfortably tangible, set out on flat yellow turf three miles west.
Sora didn't know what he was doing in the next ten minutes, but maybe lunch, lunch was a good idea.
His history pad was blank apart from a title and one sketchy pencil line amongst the dozens of processed blue ones, a line he didn't remember drawing. The paper crumpled in his fist, rocketed off the bin's rim as he stumbled after the rest of the class, out into sun so bright he was nearly blind. Missed. On a good day, he'd have stopped to pick it up. Today, he was out of the classroom, dreading the notes he'd have to find, and turning down the hallway before he decided, with a pointless ache, that it could have been a trace of horizon.
---
The weather broke.
Tuesday morning and Sora looked up to a sky in bruised crusts, undersides of clouds like damp bandages, trailing over the ocean. He stood on his bed and shifted the skylight to smell the rain, dank and foreign in summer's wake. The first storm of fall. School again. He jumped down and fumbled for music and clothes, the warmth of sleep beginning to seep away. A radio DJ was feeling a little ironic.
Goddamn right, it's a beautiful day.
He caught pieces of himself in the mirror as he dressed, still mussed from sleep, nodding to the music, grinning at himself for being such a dork. He always got surprised, every time he found his reflection. Sora wasn't arrogant, but he was perceptive enough to know that something had gone right. He wasn't beautiful, like Riku, or cute, like Tidus, but people glanced at him when he passed them by, beneath lashes, a boy with marbled eyes and a contagious smile stamped momentarily into their day.
Kairi called it a vague molestability.
She was already waiting for him, a pink umbrella clutched in her fists. Sora thought that maybe it would be better to get wet than to walk to school under that thing, but she reached for his hand and he smiled and slipped beneath magenta.
"I hate the rain.
"'Cause it messes up your hair?"
"Sora!"
He laughed, tugged the umbrella away from her, begun to run. A paper boy had to swerve for his life. Kairi slid along on wet leaves, shielding her face and screaming and giggling until he slowed enough for her to grab his arm, still dancing the umbrella away, though, just out of her reach. They were both soaked enough not to need it.
"So c'mon, what's it worth?"
"Just give-"
"A kiss?"
She sighed and leant into him. There was no contrast of temperature, this time. In movies, you kissed in the rain and you were good as in love. But their lips were slippery and they didn't fit together and Sora's stomach twanged in the realisation that this wasn't some great romantic moment, just a means to an end. She just wanted her stupid pink umbrella. He pulled back and handed it over and they stood in silence for a second, Kairi trying the handle, testing.
"I think you've broken it," she said.
---
Sora knew that if he didn't get some history notes, murder was a likelihood, a real, honest to gods possibility. Detention, anyhow. That was how he came to be with one hand resting on the door handle, peering through the frosted glass doors to darkness beyond. It had been the first announcement in assembly; that the school had been unable to locate a new librarian, so the library would be temporarily out-of-bounds at lunchtimes. The English teachers had been drawing straws over who had to mind it after class, but they had refused to give up their midday break for anything under an extra grand. The headmaster had spluttered down the phone to a few governors before arranging another sign. DO NOT ENTER. COME BACK AFTER SCHOOL. He liked authority and he liked boundaries. The signs sort of came too.
The way Sora saw it, the library door had no lock, and the books were still there. Besides, what was the danger of being unsupervised? In a library? That his head was about to be crushed beneath War and Peace?
He glanced down the corridor and dashed through, waiting for the lasers, alarms perhaps. With a slight grin around, his heart settled.
I really should do things like this more often.
Chuckling at the fact he found it so hardcore defiant in the first place.
Nestled away from the drive and classrooms, the library was a wasteland of darkness and dust, the smell of new books hanging close to shelves, shadows draped across blotted wooden flooring. Sora could count previous visits on one hand, but they had all been in summer, pre-exam crises. The place was different now. For a moment he thought the ceiling to be black, but it wasn't, was glass, the dead sky still bowling out for ocean, lashed in lightning and storm.
The library was laid out for suspense. A single aisle straight down the centre, shelves forming deep alcoves. It was impossible to see more than one section at a time.
History. Right.
Once you noticed yourself breathing, it suddenly became a task.
Sora didn't particularly understand the Dewey Decimal system, and it took him awhile, squinting at tiny print and tugging badly-laminated books from the shelves. The history texts were shoved near the back, the left alcove before the last. The story so far, neatly contained on paper, bound by card and awaiting. Sora had twenty minutes. He dragged up a stool and struggled to focus. Light was too risky.
Even for a practised rebel such as yourself.
The clouds flinched outside and his page lit into ease. Sora had to admit, he was sort of a sucker for history class. It was like some great, ongoing movie which shifted with the centuries. Sure, stuck in a little seaside town, his life wasn't likely to puncture it, but the possibility was always a hopeful little gnaw. Amongst algebra and formulas and balancing chemical equations, it was nice to spend a couple of periods a week alongside old reality.
Spotted pages crinkling as he turned, turn smooth skim, the colour of iodine or scraped gold. Stories of heroes, battles, worlds saved and lost again. He rubbed dust out of his eyes and yawned. It seemed as if the pages were still turning, in this drained state, all automatic, just turning. He found some lined paper and struggled to focus, groggy from lack of sleep and this enclosing darkness.
But pages were still turning.
Sora stood up. His hands were shaking a little. If it was a teacher, he was screwed. And who else would be spending their lunchtime hanging around the forbidden library? Maybe somebody who didn't want company. Maybe somebody who wouldn't want to see Sora peering around the shelves, see his mouth falling open, little jolts of surprise and he'd never imagined, this proximity. It was like coming face to face with an idol, somebody you never really expected to exist in the first place.
He was straddling the chair, jaw resting on bare arms on the back, spinning slowly, shoes rocking to keep the slight momentum, bangs engulfing his eyes in shadow, blazer discarded on the ground. Sora couldn't make out the cover of the book he was reading, couldn't tell if maybe he had just drifted off whilst holding it. Had always hated people wearing sunglasses, because if he never concealed the way he felt, why should anybody else?
This stranger concealed everything. Sora was about to retreat, unnoticed, when neutral lips gave to a smile. He didn't look up or move, but he spoke.
"I read somewhere how strange it is... what you can do with twenty-six letters. All of this. Don't you think?"
Riku snapped his book shut and brushed his fringe away. His gaze had a casual arrogance Sora could never imagine slipping. Some detached high-speed collision on the hard shoulder; it was hard to look but harder to tear yourself away.
"I guess so," Sora said. Then, realising it was his turn to speak; "Did you get into trouble?"
"Trouble for what?"
"For – for – your entrance."
The inability to conceal, every slice of admiration and shock carried in that stutter.
"I didn't know. I didn't know that it was sacred land and all."
"Didn't you read the-?"
"No, no, that's just what I told the Principal. I'm not illiterate. I read the notice." Riku was laughing, mocking him, that laugh, but somehow openly addictive, too. Sora would have said something equally gullible, to have him laugh like that again. "Everybody here... You're all so simple... I'm sorry."
"Simple, as in, stupid?"
"No, no... Just, like, innocent, I guess. I don't know."
Riku stood up, spun the chair away with the careless grace Sora had already begun to accept, a grace that meant Riku would never slouch, or trip over his own feet. In eighth grade, Sora's feet had grown three sizes within six months. He had spent more time on the floor that year than the average toddler.
Riku was miming for an explanation, eyes slanted, amused.
"Ok. What do you think I'm doing here?"
Sora shrugged. "Reading?"
The laughter twitched but subsided, folded back into skin that couldn't feel as smooth as it looked, a faultless pale still half curved away, because he was replacing his book now, one slender finger following the titles and there. Sora wanted to remember, wanted to know, but the spines instantly blended. He would never read the words Riku had been reading, reading and listening to him scramble for history notes in the minutes before they met.
"Well, yeah. But really, anything forbidden, it has to be intriguing. I saw the sign and in I went. That's what librarians should do if they really want to get all kids reading. Seal off the libraries. Ban them all."
That little perverse thrill, even at the smallest thing?"
Riku looked up, and for the first time, the darkness filming his features flickered away. Thunder and lightning had found the ocean, and now there was only rain, a dull pattering upon blurred glass. He stepped closer.
"You know that feeling?"
In all of his bemusement, Sora was no way going to step back.
"But there's nothing really here, right? I mean, sure it's forbidden, but that's because the librarian retired. Aren't you... disappointed?"
"No," Riku said. "Not at all."
Something about the silence and the way Riku lulled back into it. Something about the silence made Sora have to snip it.
"So... you want to get lunch together?" Sora glanced at a watch he had never worn for the excuse to look away. "I'm meant to be meeting my friends any minute now."
"How's the food?"
"Aw, don't ask!"
"And you're Sora, right?" Riku bent to pick up his blazer, trousers pulling taut(androgynous, anyway) around his ass, shoulder blades arching slightly through his shirt as he straightened. "Well, why not?"
Riku moved quickly, strode out into the aisle of shelves. The sky a pasty, translucent white. Dust clumps blinked and danced into visibility. A few steps ahead, tiny spindles of sunlight nestled into silver strands. Sora had the feeling that whoever, wherever they were, nobody would lead Riku.
(Just a dream.)
With the night at Decay stubbornly ignored or seemingly forgotten, that was becoming easier and easier to believe.
---
It was a mistake. Sora knew that the moment he wound Riku through the cafeteria to their usual table. Kairi saw them coming, and he caught her pupils and mouth dilating before she frantically looked down, hands automatically finding her hair, sweeping strands behind her ears to fall back down the exact same way they always did. Her sudden self-awareness like a miniature betrayal. Sora wanted to tell her not to bother. She looked beautiful without the adjustments, and hadn't he told her enough? Hadn't he always been enough?
Riku slid into Sora's seat, and he knew, knew as he grappled for another chair, glanced to see Kairi enthralled on introduction, knew that he'd made a mistake. He leant in to hear what Riku was beginning to say, everybody quiet for him, like the words were precious stuff. Sora knew. Knew that things between he and Kairi would never quite be the same again.
"To be honest," Riku began, "I had no idea it was that special..."
Was surprised by how little that actually hurt.
The tarmac had gathered a whole summer's heat and now it was beginning to spew it back out. Cloud watched his mind dream cartoon waves of warmth floating into hazed air, squinted the sun's rays to needles of white, shifted against the wall digging into his hips. There was no shade, just this searing afternoon sun, a hundred shades of it rocketing off the cars parked by number-letter in the mall lot. He'd lost(smashing against the opposite wall) the sunglasses Leon had bought him the month before, smooth little back things which he couldn't stop adjusting, and his eyes ached at the back where the light had reached. And then there was Leon, a squiggle of leather down the street, striding from his car, waltzing the white lines with his hands in his pockets and a hunched posture. The heat a circus mirror, and parts of Leon falling to pieces as he approached, a black Picasso shedding his skin, picking it up again, everything but this new, constant half-smile, which was still making Cloud ache.
They didn't say anything but a sweeping kiss, a kiss about smoke and missing you and the electric sky sweeping ahead.
They drifted in, joined the currents, air conditioning spilling out, like slipping between Egyptian cotton sheets with a dream you'd never have to leave. Cloud couldn't stop smiling, couldn't get used to this, the walking with Leon and knowing he was his. Everybody had that slight desire for envy, and he couldn't remember sensing it before, glances brushing off his skin, little signatures of want and need. Cloud couldn't imagine taking it for granted, or being oblivious, or simply frowning and moving forward. Leon's steps were scrawled with purpose.
"You know," Cloud smirked, "I always wondered where you found it all."
There were photographs in the front of Erl Heat, all black and white with streaks of sudden colour, lips and irises outlined in pink. Nobody ended or began, they simply merged, limbs twisted together, slight brushes of flesh or hair entwined. The boys writhed together in indigo diamonds and girls with hair dyed the exact same shade writhed on tarmac. They came together at the centre of the display, holding hands, dolled in symbol tattooes and cut after cut of leather and graffiti across their chests. Skinny arms make you look vulnerable.
Leon was already inside, stalking the racks.
Cloud didn't think of anything, sat outside the changing room on a smashed in speaker. There were things he was prepared to do for Leon, and there were clothes like these. He smiled to himself, quietly, and the salesgirl moved closer, wanting to ask why he was smiling, wanting to share a look of complete content she'd never quite grasped. Her hair was henna black and her skirt was all belt.
"You don't want to try anything yourself?"
"Er -" Cloud blinked, grinned. "I'm not sure if it's quite for me."
"You never know. What were you smiling about, before?"
"Smiling?"
"Just then. You were in your own little world."
And suddenly, everybody wants a piece.
"I suppose I was just -"
Leon stepped out. New black pants clung to his ass, and fell over bare feet. A tank top stopped right about his naval, colour of blood with oxygen, or roses, sleeves cut off and shredded. The sun had been dyeing his skin a cream chocolate for three months and now it stuck. He had gloves on, fingerless ones, black again, reaching just past his wrists. He surveyed himself in the mirror with an acceptant shrug, stretched his arms out behind him and, raising a lazy brow, turned to Cloud.
Who nodded.
A flip of leather curtain, and the air left with a hollow, like it missed him.
"I suppose -"
"It's alright," the salesgirl said, closing her eyes, turning away. "I understand."
In the two minutes as Leon changed, Cloud bought a reminder of what he had, a slight silver chain fed through a tiny bronze coin. "From shores a long way away," the salesgirl said, doing her job. He would give it to Leon before he left, repeat the words, lift dark locks to fasten it up.
---
Places in every mall which are less tread. An advertisement promised a new store which should have been open two months, and posters peeled away from plaster, concerts long past. There, Cloud and Leon slid down the wall and sat together, munching on pizza and silence, and watching the occasional person passing them by. Some shop was giving out free balloons, parents harassed to blow them taut. One boy went past with his mother, doing it himself, face red with the effort. The balloon was perfect, already twice the size of the child's head, and yet he kept puffing. His mother was attached to a cell phone, hadn't even noticed. Cloud could see the pressure shift right before it burst, overcome with the strangest urge to shout out, stop, kid, it's going, going, gone in one second; the shiny scarlet sphere just a sheet of weird rubber in the kid's hands. His mother flinched at the sound, made some vague noise of dissent, and Cloud waited for the tears and the bawling, but they didn't come. Boy just dropped the red and let his mother lead him away. Cloud rested back against the cool tiles and exhaled. He hadn't realised he was holding his breath.
"I'd have gone insane," he muttered, more to himself. Leon had been watching the scene with his usual disinterest, but his expression twitched to that.
"Brat..."
"Oh, screw you."
"Maybe he wanted it ruined," Leon said. "Kids are always doing that. Dropping their chocolate, bursting the balloon, losing it when it's just right. To see what happens."
"I don't remember ever thinking it through like that."
"Whatever. Maybe you were just clumsy."
Cloud laughed. "Probably."
He felt Leon's hand move between his shirt and spine, surprisingly cold, moving up, rubbing the muscles near his hairline with some determined tenderness. Cloud's voice, when he spoke, was thick with comfort.
"I'm going to be leaving in a month, you know."
Leon's fingers paused, then resumed with the same rigour, easing out the cricks, liking that he knew. He knew how Cloud's neck played up, knew how Cloud rubbed at it when he was tense, how he slept looking a little awkward, twisting to accommodate the aching.
"I know it."
"I used to – I really did want to. Gods, there... that's really good, Leon."
"But you don't want to now."
"No."
"So... don't. I didn't."
Cloud wanted to say a lot of things that would break them, right then. What did you do, though, Leon? Look at what you did. Look at what it left you with. But the scar was beautiful in this filtered light, and Leon's hand felt so good, working away. Cloud had always, always found it easier to ignore things, acceptation a weird form of letting things go.
"Not everybody can live the way you do. Things happened to you, and they haven't happened to me, and I don't know if I'd want them to. But I know I want to stay here."
"We'd have all the time," Leon said. "All the time in the world."
"Nobody has all that."
"Get over the philosophy, Cloud," Leon smiled to himself. "It doesn't suit you."
"I guess it's just- all I really want to do is stay right here, right now. Like, time blows. The best days -" he shivered with recent memories, how sheets and skin felt together, how Leon's eyes screwed his body, the contrast of midday sun on his chest and sanded boardwalk splinters digging into his shoulders, "-just, road trips... or when we stay in bed all day? I want more of them. Just – eating cold pizza and all the -"
"The take-out wrappers?"
"Gods, yeah. All abandoned from the night before. Nothing but music and sleeping and," he grinned, "sex and you. I've never had that before. And maybe that's the life you can keep. But, you know it, Leon, you know it's not going to be with me. I'm gonna have to work and support my mom and - maybe never do just what I want to do. But yeah, who really gets to do that?"
Leon opened his mouth, but the m was lost in Cloud's lips. It was unexpected and it was the end of the conversation. Cloud moved to straddle him, hardly believing he was doing this, in the fucking mall, anyway. It just felt like time was running away, out to drabber places, full of expectations and loss.
"People could walk past –"
Liking that, liking Leon anxious and protesting, even through a suggestive smile and fingers slipping into the hooks of his jeans.
"So?"
"I know a place."
"A place?"
"It's this – just come with me."
"If I didn't know better," Cloud said, "I'd think you'd done this before."
The Eastern exit, always a desolate end, Leon a difficult person to follow(two stairs ahead), what with the leather sliding tight, one of his hands latched around Cloud's own, the gentle pulse of blood, stirring a little. It was a door that nobody would ever have noticed. Cloud saw handle, a sudden hollow, and they were detached, hidden and tumbling into the darkness together.
"Are you sure we should -?"
A deserted janitor's closet, something hilariously dirty about that. They laughed through kisses, dust dancing in the bands of light slipping through a filthy window overhead. A wasp hummed lazily at the pane, but the noise was easy to ignore with Leon's hands slipping below his waistband, tangling with the pale hair there. Cloud arched back against the wall, knocked a broom aside. He reached for something to grasp, squeezed nitrogen, clutched Leon's hair and pushed him down.
"Whose idea was it?" Leon muttered. He dropped to his knees, smirked upwards. "I could have waited."
Cloud could hear people talking through the walls, bad music blasting out of some toyshop, all of those people out shopping, oblivious to them, not even knowing. Savage thrills shot to his throat, half-wanting to be caught, half-hoping. He opened one eye. There was a poster peeling from one wall. Get yourself clean with Mr. Sheen. Cloud started to laugh again, almost hysterical through the pleasure. He shut his eyes, tried to keep quiet, tried not to move, not to show Leon how much he was enjoying this.
Even through tight lids, the sudden wash of light shot through. Flickering lashes to stunned navy. The janitor had always thought men only fucked other men on the television. All he saw was a curve of immaculate stomach, the blond beginning to blush furiously through his laughter as the other drew his jeans zip up with his teeth, steadily rose to his feet. His expression was impossibly serene.
"Sorry," Leon said. "We thought it was disused."
---
"I think stopping there could have been, y'know, a health risk."
Leon smiled behind his sunglasses, but didn't reply.
Cloud rolled the window down as far as it would go. People always expected Leon to drive so fast, but he sat on the limit, so that only a breeze crept through. It smelt of strawberry ice cream, of the last lawn-mow of summer, of barbecues and cheap beer. The streets were strangely quiet, just a couple of joggers and kids playing Tig into the road. The silver metallic was warm when Cloud rested his hand outside. He would have liked some music to remember to, but the radio, the broken radio had been a pretty good price to pay.
He was almost disappointed when the rumble of engine ceased. But then he and Leon looked at one another, laughed in synchrony, were fumbling before they reached the door.
---
"Whoever would have thought it? Us, turning out like this? Together."
Ripples of laugher moved across Leon's body, across the bed to where Cloud was lying, eyes half closed, lashes heavy beneath the sunlight. Basking in this strange happiness he doubted he'd ever get used to. His shirt was on the floor and he got that familiar little rush under scrutiny, Leon's eyes running over his figure, hands trying not to move. Their game; who'd be the first to give in, to close the space. Cloud usually lost.
"I'm still not used to the fact that you can actually smile."
"Fuck you, Cloud."(hey, fuck you, Leon.)
There were so many retorts, but they both just kept still, watching one another, Cloud laughing a little. Ribs shifted below faultless golden skin, jeans low enough for his hips to protrude. Frustration was eating him away, but he was too comfortable to shift, just sprawled, smiling. Leon squirmed and leant over to break it, slid his tongue lazily into the blond's mouth, felt the grin begin to fade.
Cloud usually lost, but not today.
Leon laid his hand flat where tan went white, the base of Cloud's stomach, slid his fingers lower and moved over the blond. Hearts reverberated closer to one another and Leon's mouth moved against his neck and Cloud squirmed as the skin there began to darken. He liked himself dominated and twisting, Leon beginning to know everything, every reaction of what he induced before he did it. Leon peeled out of leather, nudged Cloud's jeans back open and down.
"I don't like the having to wait," Leon whispered.
And I don't like the feeling our time trickling away.
Cloud smiled, moved onto his front achingly slowly. Leon knelt, dug his fingertips into the softer skin between ribcage and pelvis, almost wanting it to bruise, wanting to leave Cloud with scars of himself, an aggressive tenderness he had never been able to hide.
It always starts physical, starts a joke, and then we fall to all of this, and you still wonder if the tears are just sensation.
It didn't hurt anymore, and if it did, it was more like a distraction from something better, more real like this, Leon's breath rushing against his shoulder, impossible to keep his eyes open. He could see the corner of a plastic bag, the one with Leon's present, the one with the chain in it. When he looked over his shoulder, the brunet was kneeling there, hair filmed against his face, ribs pressing out, lips curled. He was the colour of coffee, radiating heat and moving with a hard rhythm. Cloud closed his eyes and pressed his face into cotton. He muttered things, and Leon went faster, the irregular motions, the moaning before he came. Like the pictures in that shop full of leather and black, he forgot where he ended and he began, because the spaces in between were just fine sweat and motion and noise. Leon withdrew with a desperate gasp at the last friction, the only hint of pleasure betrayed by his throat, leaving Cloud squirming there, alone.
"Don't... don't you.... Fuck, Leon...!"
Cloud turned over to face him, and Leon was back, hands pinning into the slender hollows of the blond's thighs, intent unreadable beneath the shadow and sensation.
"You really think I would?"
Cloud teetered there, his world heaving, just long enough for the feeling of Leon's mouth enclosed around him before he came. Came into warmth and damp, shouted Leon's name twice, bucking against him. Pause. Just the breathing in and out and in and out. Semen and sweat in the next kiss, when Leon dragged himself up Cloud's body, their ribcages defined and heaving, sliding together.
"Taste yourself," Leon muttered. He closed heavy lids and let his limbs begin to relax, one by one, breathing into the pillow, stopping his shaking. Cloud's eyes were liquid pleasure. He wrapped a hand around Leon's back and separated dark strands of hair, rough and sticky together. Time could freeze here, ok. That was what Cloud thought, what he'd always remember thinking. Time could freeze here.
Only it didn't.
Goddamn, that mall janitor's a lucky guy.
Sora's radio DJ's playing The Eels – Mr E's Beautiful Blues.
Thanks for reading. I love hearing what people think, criticism and all, so please drop a review! - Abs