Though the air between them was quieter, settling, Pryor could hardly feel it, couldn’t appreciate it. He had taken the tempest into his hands, his mouth, had swallowed it down and he was overloaded by it, static electricity overwhelming all of his senses: he peered out from sunbursts at the backs of his eyes, his nose was filled with ozone, his every nerve fired and then fired again until he was shivering, almost cold.
They said that Empaths could heal, but Pryor had never learned how. When he felt people’s worst emotions, it was like he doubled them instead of halved them. He felt them, but he couldn’t take them into himself. Maybe he didn’t truly want to. Because he’d rather feel like this knowing that Derrick did, too. He’d rather purge Derrick in this way, something relentlessly physical, this violent clashing and coupling, than choose something quieter.
Because he felt close to him, like this. And he didn’t know and wouldn’t know until later how much of it was an illusion of empathy, of a momentary intense mingling of emotions and how much of it was “real” — for some given value thereof — how much of it would endure. He wouldn’t have wanted to take Derrick’s hurt from him just to free Derrick of the burden of it, leave Pryor with an anger and a festering hurt that he didn’t want to feel, leave him to feel it alone.
This felt almost reciprocal. Like Derrick had crawled his way inside Pryor as much as Pryor had burrowed into him, felt like a connection that ran in more than just one direction.
And it was good, because Pryor had no problems taking from people. He would have wrapped octopus limbs around Derrick and taken this solace from him had he needed it — (and he did, needed this quiet moment to find his way back to himself, when it felt like all that made him up was flung far from him, tangled threads waiting to be reeled back in, coiled and safe once more) — except for how vulnerable it would have made him. Except for how much it had never been him.
He had never achieved these dizzying highs of closeness before he could make himself a conduit, before he could fill himself up with more than just his own need, his own desire, his own desperation. And so he had never crashed so hard. He’d always been able to extricate himself, to walk away.
Now, it just took a little longer. He would shake this off, he knew, his closeness with others came in intense flashes that ignited and then burnt out. Connections like these were fleeting, and probably all the better for it. He couldn’t take this kind of intensity all the time, he only wanted it because it was temporary.
Only wanted it because he knew nothing could truly stick to him. Chased it like a high, the only real kind he could have anymore, the only real way he could overwhelm himself with sensation. Emotional, instead of chemical.
Derrick, unlike Pryor, had no excuses. Derrick felt what he felt and no more. Derrick was vulnerable, and Derrick still needed something from him. And Pryor, with his chest still blown wide open for Derrick to pour himself into, was there to be taken from. For a little bit longer, he was still endlessly giving, still there to be used.
— Derrick took a kiss from him. Lips pressed to fingertips, then his body curling inward over Pryor’s, this time like something protective instead of something menacing, and it was tender save for the way that Pryor was already bruised, already raw, the way lips felt swollen and sensitive as they met Derrick’s. Derrick kissed him and it felt like apology, and every spark of almost-pain reminded him of what it was that Derrick was trying to apologize for.
Only Pryor didn’t want it.
He moved with all the awkwardness of a puppet with his string cut, lifted to Derrick’s lips and then flopping back on his chest, he peered up at him from a head that lolled on his neck, like he had been stretched out and had yet to spring back into place. Like he had no strength left.
Derrick kissed him, and Derrick squeezed him and Derrick apologized to him — and Pryor hit him. As awkward and ungainly as the rest of him, right now, just raising his arm enough to let gravity be the only force behind it, his palm thumping and skidding over a pectoral and laying where it landed, the impact nothing more than a dull sound, hardly jarring at all.
“Don’t be sorry.” His voice was still muffled, still spoken into skin. And he sounded tired, slurring almost drunkenly, and he was. Exhausted, but ready to throttle Derrick if he ruined this kind of quiet comedown, if guilt wound its way through Pryor’s veins and poisoned what was left of this red-tinged haze. He thought that it must be gathering, that it might already have been creeping over, waiting for him to sort his head out enough to recognize it already there.
“Your angst is ruining my afterglow.” Though it wasn’t, not yet, he still said it like a threat, groping upwards with one hand to lay his palm over Derrick’s mouth and peering up at Derrick with something approximating a scowl on his face, though he couldn’t and didn’t want to shake off the languor that kept it from being anything truly serious, truly threatening. It didn’t last, his hand slipping away to settle in the curve of his neck over his still-hammering pulse, his scowl dropping away as he tucked his face against Derrick once more.
And so he tried to disarm him with affection, hooking a leg over Derrick’s more firmly, turning his face further into shoulder and chest to nuzzle there, breathing soft and even as his eyes slipped shut. Not enough to fall asleep, there was still too much roaring disquiet in him that wouldn’t settle, would maybe keep him up all night until he found something calmer to leech it out of him — but comfortable.
“I’m a gift from the grude-fuck Gods, I know,” he said. He could have been serious, could have let Derrick engage him as seriously and as tenderly as he seemed to be trying to do. And he heard him, and he felt him — like a small flutter somewhere far away, like something he glimpsed through a thicket of trees, much too far away for him to grasp — but he was already frayed, fraught. He didn’t have it in him. And with everything so jumbled inside of him, intermingled and unrecognizable sensory input, he had the luxury of ignoring it if he wished.
So he did. Just tightened his hold, mumbled with his eyes still shut. “Five more minutes, okay, then you can drag me back to Torren.”
