they're coming to get you, barbara!

[royalpassport]

Who: Jefferson & Eliot (and later Kenzi??)
Where: Go Ask Alice
When: May 23
What: Jefferson caught a bit of Laura's transmission, but not a pretty important detail. Cue: attempted liberation from his tracker.
Warnings: Blood? Will update as necessary.

[Closed]

'There are trackers in our legs. They come--'

He doesn't even get to finish listening to the message before it cuts out. And, considering he can't go back and listen to it again, Jefferson spends the rest of the day trying to push the transmission out of his mind. It was only one and a half sentences, there one moment, gone the next. He must have imagined it. (Hard to say, when he can't ask anybody if they heard it, too. Not without violating the notices or sounding mad.)

But the thought won't leave him. Two days, three, his mind always finds its way back to the tracker that may or may not be in his leg. Whenever he's alone and undressed, he'd press his fingertips along his calves, then his thighs, feeling for anything unusual. The first few times, it turns up nothing. But then he notices it, a little bump an inch above the back of his knee. Small, easy to miss, but it's there.

If he manages to find his way to the edges of the woods, if he somehow escapes, would they hunt him down and haul him back? What if he needs to hide from the sheriff? He's already been visited twice. And as long as this thing's in him... The thought that he'd be so easy to find by... by whoever, makes him sick to the very pit of his stomach. He'd cut it out right then and there if he could, but every time he presses the tip of a knife to his leg, he stops short of breaking the skin.

Weak. He doesn't have what it takes to take the damn thing out himself. But if he has help...

The next day, he goes through the motions at the tea shop for a couple of hours, before he leaves it to Cassian and Rhiannon, retreating into the back office when the company of others becomes too much to stomach. But even there, he can't feel any peace. They're watching. There are eyes everywhere. He huddles by himself on the beaten up office couch, the hairs on the back of his neck prickling like he knows somebody's staring at him. A couple more hours pass, and he calls Eliot, voice strained but reaching for casual.

Come on over at 7. I'll close the shop. We'll have tea and sandwiches before you go to work. Just us.

He closes up shop at 5. And when the last straggler leaves and he's all alone (but not alone) again, he starts to turn over his office, upending everything to try to root out the cameras. He manages to find one, but nothing more. (Was there only one eye watching all along, or did he miss the others?)

Hair and clothes disheveled, eyes red-rimmed from days of unrest, he sits on the desk and waits for Eliot, a paring knife dangling between his fingers. Hopefully it'll do the trick.

Comments

[sybaritic]

That, Eliot isn't sure how to answer; he can't even answer it consistently for himself. Becoming me was the greatest project of my life he'd said, all those broken pieces mended with precious metal. Kintsugi in motion. Some days - most days - he wants that to be the answer. Life isn't about finding yourself, it's about creating yourself. With enough determination, you can be anyone.

The rest of the time he thinks: you don't want to be what life made you? Tough shit.

But it's only when he's in his blackest places he wants to make anyone else believe that (and maybe it's just him, maybe it's just that he's such a fuck-up no amount of care can can cover all those cracks), so. For Jefferson there's a chance. And if there isn't Eliot will just ...make one. What else is magic for? Surely it should, in his mind, be able to burn out the things you don't want.

Meanwhile: even kneeling he's still more than chest level with the lip of the desk, managing, somehow, to half-close his eyes and brush light fingertips up until he feels--well, certainly a little bump of some kind. "Iiiii don't think there's a safe answer to that question," he murmurs; it's light, as per the trend of this whole conversation save that last detour. "Just an entire joke book's worth of vulgarity."

He moves his hand out from under Jefferson's leg, rubs his hands together like he's warming them and puffs out a little huff of air. The spell he's doing, Popper number whatever, is a variant on one of the first he learned (fan the spark, gather the flame), except much, much hotter, and more precise: a surgical laser held steady as Eliot can keep his hands.

Sooo it's probably good he's done fewer drugs lately. "You might want to look away for this part," he murmurs, although this time it's without looking at Jefferson, concentrating on what he's doing. The magic moves too quickly and at too high a temperature for much blood, but feeling around under someone else's skin still makes like, disgusting noises. "And the next time we try bloodplay? My safeword is pineapple."

................that's a joke.

[royalpassport]

He can't stop himself from laughing, nearly folding over on himself as if every bit of tension was just snipped as easily as a length of thread. But with his head dipped just so, he finds his face close to Eliot's. He's stopped questioning, by now, how the magician always manages to work a smile out of him. Jefferson's just glad to have some distraction from the seriousness of everything. "Is it my turn to say something like... while you're down there...?" he asks, light and teasing.

And then, there it is: more magic, beautiful and comforting and also a bit terrifying, because he knows just what it's capable of. Jefferson looks, until he's suggested to do otherwise. Though he likes to think of his stomach as strong, from all he's seen and experienced in all the different worlds, he figures he ought to take Eliot at his word. Those few seconds of anticipation seem to stretch out for ages, and then that white-hot heat is applied to the skin and Jefferson winces, trying not to make a sound.

But it's not the magic that hurts nearly as much as the fingers digging for the tracker. He cries out from the sheer discomfort, fingers gripping the edge of the desk. At least with the noise he's making, he can't hear any... squelching or anything.

At least it's over with quickly. By the time that tracker's out of him, Jefferson's panting shallowly, eyes intense as he stares at Eliot. His leg, where the tracker once was, is throbbing with a pain that goes beyond skin-deep for-- well, for obvious reasons. But it's over with, and he feels light and airy and he's laughing breathlessly, with a grin bordering on manic.

"We might need to work our way back up to that," he manages. Also a joke, because there's no way he's getting involved in recreational bloodplay.

But he can't deny that he feels, strangely, more alive than ever now. Practically electrified. He reaches out, fingers drifting through Eliot's curls, and then leans down because... Well, perhaps this isn't the most appropriate time for it, but who cares? He wants to kiss him, as if that'll say-- more than words-- just what he's feeling in this moment. Gratitude and affection and-- obviously-- a hell of a lot of attraction.

He remembers doing this so many times, but he's never really done it before. It's a first kiss, and it isn't, and he has no idea if what he remembers reflects what Eliot even likes in a kiss. But as he presses his lips to the other man's, he finds his thoughts and uncertainties pushed to the background of his mind like so much noise.

no longer a horror of sudden death? great.

[sybaritic]

Honestly, Eliot has too many memories of death by massive hemorrhage to find the concept of bloodplay even remotely appealing, so their tastes continue to be beautifully aligned.

Which apparently extends to blithely ignoring the appropriateness of first kiss-hundredth kiss times and places; Eliot makes a startled, plaintive little sound he will never, ever admit to, a deluge of memory crashing headfirst into entirely new experience, kisses falling everywhere from the exhilaration of novelty to worn-soft, familiar and intimate, jostling elbows with a swimmer treading uncharted water.

So it takes him a second to find his feet, but he wants this badly enough not to remember how doing anything imperfectly makes him feel stupid and clumsy and lost. Partially because, in a slightly less loftily emotional vein, most fumbling here is engendered by being like, totally poleaxed with lust. It's awesome.

(But there is, at the same time, the afterimage burned behind his eyes of how few times he remembers, on days that either happened or didn't, how infrequently Jefferson looks like this. Eliot wants to make that happen as often as possible, as selflessly as such a desire can remotely hope to be.)

Even if this is technically a first kiss it's as easy as if he's done it dozens of times before to let his lips part, just slightly, reach up to cradle the curve of Jefferson's skull and twine curls around his fingers. After uh, some time of that, he has ...no real idea how long, oxygen becomes an annoying, pressing concern, and he pulls back exactly no inches away to breathe, eyes still closed.

"This is--the actual weirdest foreplay I've ever taken part in, and if you think that means you're hearing 'stop,' I will staple you to this very desk."

............. romance. If he sounds like he's smiling, that's because. Well. That's exactly what's happening.

[royalpassport]

Feeling truly at ease with another person is a rare enough phenomenon for Jefferson, but here he is with Eliot, comfortable enough to ask him to cut something terrible out of him, to undress, to reach out and touch him and pull him in. It's true, though, that at least some of this is based on lies designed to... torment him or keep him complacent, he really doesn't know which, because the way he regards his life here shifts with whatever brand of melancholy he's feeling on a given day. Sometimes he sees it as a glimpse into a kinder life (what could've been), but then there are the days where his false memories feel like a taunt, giving him a sense of love and friendship and community with the knowledge that it's all a lie. A gentler cruelty than Regina's curse.

What he's sure of, now, is that there must be some grain of truth in the way he feels with Eliot, and that it may be reciprocated with sincerity. It has to be real, because today, the real Jefferson asked the real Eliot to help him, and he followed through. The false Jefferson would've buried his anxieties to the point of bitterly lashing out, and the false Eliot would've given him his space, and everything would have festered.

As they kiss, Jefferson finds himself sliding closer to the edge of the desk, framing Eliot with a leg on either side of him. His fingers drift down, cradling Eliot's cheek, touching his jaw, then his neck, then tracing along his collarbone.

Jefferson smiles, letting out a breath of a laugh, before taking a moment to lightly nip at Eliot's lower lip. "Well, if you staple me down, that might limit what we can get up to."

[sybaritic]

It must be acknowledged Eliot is currently very deliberately hook, line and sinkering himself into probably the ideal state of compliance. Idaho is more boring than a Methodist bingo game, and he misses his friends, misses Margo like the spaces in an arrhythmic heartbeat, but the only thing he has to be responsible for here is making sure there are clean glasses and not accidentally poisoning anyone. He doesn't have an entire world's worth of fuckery to unfuck when his forte is the opposite, and--

If he's honest (and for once he wants to be) there's this. There's prying open his ribcage the slimmest sliver, exposing knife marks on bone from the last time he tried that, hoping when he holds out here I am, it's for something real, or even something that could be. Jefferson looks at him (a Jefferson who never lived in his memories, speaking of that) like he makes things better. Like he's capable of leaving anything other than wreckage in his wake, and he wants to keep that. He doesn't care if he has to wear blinders the size of his own head to do it, because he never gets to keep anything.

Honestly, with most people someone would be bent over this desk by now, but despite the magnificently suggestive position of Jefferson's legs, what he turns into without a thought is the hand curved around his cheek, following all those simple little brushes like fluttering ribbons irrevocably bond to a kite. Before he can really examine that too deeply (thank Christ, al...though there's nothing saying Jefferson can't have noticed), teeth are guaranteed to get a response that is. ...well, mostly about the aforementioned poleaxed with lust thing, light or not.

Usefully, that means he catches all of the witty one-liner that prooobably makes his pupils visibly larger, because look, while he may not be working with any 30 year dry span here, it's been a while. He drapes absurdly long arms over the tops of Jefferson's thighs, and looks (just barely) up at him, interestedly.

"Are we getting up to things? In the sanctity of your office?" Shut up, Eliot, you must have a dozen fake memories of banging in here. "Sir. I am scandalized."

(Give it half a second and that mock-appalled face is going to fall riiiiight apart.)

[royalpassport]

For all his faults and weaknesses (and there are many), Jefferson's typically a rather observant person. He notices the way his not-ex follows the touch. Eliot doesn't go right for his body; there's no sense that touching each other in that light, exploratory way is just tedious foreplay to be endured before everything zeroes in on their dicks. Which is for the best, since-- for as much as Jefferson certainly enjoys the act of fucking and the countless variables that go into each encounter-- he tends to crave sensation more than anything. The sound of his partner's breathing changing with every touch, the feel of fingers ghosting over his inner thighs, the sight of flushed skin in dim lighting, each piece coming together to overwhelm his senses.

Not that he hasn't had his share of quick lays without much preamble. And those were fun, too. Especially when pressed for time, which, incidentally, they're not right now, so he feels no need to rush.

"Look around. Anyone who walks in will think we already did," he points out, playing along as if he's taking Eliot's remarks at face-value. He scrapes his teeth along his lower lip, deliberate in calling attention to his mouth, to the color his bite brings out in his lips, before grinning. "So we might as well. It's only practical." Right. It's a matter of practicality! Of justifying why the office is a wreck.

Anyway. Jefferson's just going to hook his ankles around Eliot's middle and use his legs to pull him closer which-- he immediately regrets a little, because it just reminds him of that throbbing pain above the back of his knee. But despite his brief wince of discomfort, he doesn't seem interested in stopping now.

PROBABLY THIS SHOULD.....TO AN INBOX

[sybaritic]

Eliot is--well. That's most of his sexual history, frankly, and he has no real regrets save one of the very small handful of exceptions. What he does have is a defiant streak a mile wide, so between that and how much he wants this to be real, despite its unreal origins, it's enough to make him shove down the idea that the last time he liked someone enough to want time, and exploration, and banter between equals, it went so sideways not everything that's making his heart beat double-time is anticipation and happiness.

You know what's a great distraction from that, though? Jefferson's mouth, for one thing, and for two (...or about six, really) being lassoed with legs. This is a newsletter he would like to receive everyday, thank you. "Listen, Jefferson. I love the banter and everything? I really do, just say the word go and my ability to chatter from now 'til one of us passes out will put blue jays to shame, but--"

Ah, this is his only even facsimile of regret regarding a lack of clothing right now; it would be a spectacular opportunity to pull Jefferson's head down by the scarf. Oh well, Eliot will use his curls instead, meaning by necessity (because his hands are the size of catcher's mitts) the heel of his palm lines up with where the prominent scar rings the back of his neck. It couldn't be said Eliot doesn't notice; there's a sudden new shade of light in his eyes that says he's watching whether or not that's all right (in a second he'll just ask, but he has a point to make):

"That is - and I don't say this lightly - the least practical thing I've ever seen a person do with his mouth." A beat. "Well. That's a lie, but it's high on the scale! Fortunately for you, I hate practicality. It's so ...practical."

This isn't all about trying to see if he needs to make sure he avoids touching the scar without embarrassing Jefferson, but that's. A lot of it. He can, and will be, direct, that tends to save time, but it's--it's complicated. At least it would be for Eliot. "Not that I'm saying we shouldn't profane the shit out of your office."

Which is the note on which he's going to push off with his hands to either side of Jefferson's hips and stand up just, in the leg lasso, because this is the optimum angle to maybe encourage general.....draping backwards over the desk.