✶ — VIGILANTE-SQUARED !
summary: you and adrian are already on the outs when you venture into an alternate universe to find peacemaker. when you show zero signs of forgiving him, he finds the perfect opportunity to make it up to you. (9k)
pairing: adrian chase / f!reader / adrian chase 2, brief mentions of past rick flag / f!reader
contents: enemies to lovers, enemies in love, grumpy x sunshine, established relationship, brief angst, hurt/comfort, strangers to lovers (w/ adrian 2), based on the events of s2ep6 cw for brief mentions of death, mentions of stalking and toxic behavior (both adrian's are total perverts lol), so much swearing, so much smut, unprotected sex, threesome, double penetration, truly dirty stuff 18+ MDNI!!
“How do you think it happened?” Adrian wonders suddenly from the opposite side of the familiar park bench — which, in this dimension, has your name engraved on a square bronze plaque. He runs a gloved knuckle over the perforated letters on the old wooden slat: In Loving Memory of Dr. Doctor, who loved this park, but hated everybody in it, and will forever be missed.
It’s a dizzying thought, to discover that you’re alive in one world and six feet under in the next. It’s even more agonizing to know that the stupid nickname a drunken Rick Flag gave to you still sticks in every universe. Six PhDs, and all you have to show for them is the dumbest fucking superhero moniker known to man, based on a stupid 1980s song you don’t even like.
“I really don’t wanna talk about that right now…” you answer, half-distracted, as your fingers fly across the bulky computer in your lap.
There’s an old tracker in Peacemaker’s suit that you disabled for him a long time ago. You think that if you can get it running again, and decipher the slightly off coordinates of this upside-down universe, then you can find him and finally get the hell out of here.
Adrian doesn’t seem to share your sentiments, though. He’s convinced that your death in this world must mean you have some kind of immunity here.
“It means you can’t die!” he insisted with a maniacal giggle when he found about your other-dimensional demise. “I mean, that basically goes against, like, every law of physics, honey. Everyone knows that.”
You’re not totally sure if that’s true. (Or if he even knows what the first law of physics is). And you don’t plan on sticking around long enough to find out.
“Well, look on the bright side!” Adrian shrugs, teal-black suit squeaking quietly as he sits up straighter on the bench. “You’re already dead here, which obviously means you’re immortal in this dimension—”
“No, it doesn’t,” you deadpan.
“—So, I don’t know, maybe we should just stay here forever?”
“We are absolutely not doing that.”
“I mean, everything I like is here already! Eagly, Peacemaker, you guys, another me,” the boy rambles, talking wildly with his gloved hands. “So, if they have crows and manta rays here, honey, I’m basically set for life.”
“Yeah, I just checked, they definitely don’t have crows here.”
“What?” Adrian whines, drawing out the vowel for a second too long, as his bright smile ebbs into a more cartoonish pout. His light eyes dart across your profile when you refuse to meet his gaze. “Wait. How do you know that? …Holy shit— Does your computer track crows, too?”
He tries to shift closer to you. You adjust the laptop on your denim-clad thighs so it’s out of his view, and you never take your eyes off the screen. “Do you seriously think I possess the kind of technology that would allow me to keep track of every single crow on every single universe?” you monotone.
Adrian blinks like an owl, nudging his glasses up his nose with his knuckle. “Yeah?” he shrugs, completely missing your sarcasm.
You sigh. “Well, the faster I figure out how to re-activate this stupid tracker, the faster we can go back home to your stupid fucking crows, alright?”
Adrian tilts his head back to bellow a deep, dramatic groan at the stark blue sky. He’d hoped that, in travelling dimensions, he’d find another version of you that wasn’t so angry at him — or, at the very least, that all the subsequent chaos would make you forget why you were so angry in the first place. But now, all you are is still mad and visibly stressed. An absolutely horrid concoction.
“But what am I supposed to do?” he whines.
“I don’t care what you do— Go for a walk or something!”
“But where am I supposed to go?!”
“Anywhere!”
Adrian huffs with a deep frown creasing his brow. He glances around the near-empty park, which he’s walked with you a thousand times over back in your original dimension. The only difference now is that the fountain is square instead of circular, and the children’s playground is now a dog park.
His eyes catch a familiar treeline in the distance — a towering evergreen with two barren branches that curl into the shape of a wrinkled heart. The setting sun will sparkle right through them if you catch it at the right time of day. And if that’s still west, then his house should be a straight shot through that forest.
“Can I go that way?” Adrian murmurs, pointing vaguely out in front of him.
“Yes,” you huff, borderline pleading, and still not looking in his direction. A series of never-ending neon green code fills the black screen ahead of you — an encrypted file that would take a normal person days, if not weeks, to break. But you don’t have weeks. And, admittedly, you’re not a normal person.
“I don’t care where you go, honestly. I just want you to leave me alone for ten minutes.”
Adrian rises slowly. The wooden bench squeaks under his weight. He towers over your sitting form with his pretty face scrunched into a puppy-like pout. “Aren’t you gonna come with me?”
“Nope.”
“Well, why not?”
“What part of I’m busy do you not understand?” you snap and finally turn away from your laptop screen, which could very well be considered another appendage the way you’re constantly glued to it.
Your eyes meet Adrian’s for the first time in two days. They hold a sort of fire within them that he can feel in his chest just now. The acknowledgement that the past forty-eight hours have done little to erase your rage.
“You’re still mad at me…?” Adrian wonders softly, digging the toe of his boot into the bright green grass beneath him like a shy child.
“Yes,” you answer, with a bite in your words that makes him flinch.
“…Well, can I make it up to you?”
“Yes! You can make it up to me by helping me find Peacemaker.”
“Okay! Yeah. I can do that,” he says with a quick nod and a pair of hopeful eyes. “I can— I can take you, you know, somewhere safe!”
“Somewhere… safe?” you echo dubiously.
“Yeah! If you’re supposed to be dead and all, you probably shouldn’t be walking around, right?” he laughs. “I mean, what if they think you’re a zombie, and they go all Dick Grimes on your ass?”
“You mean Rick Grimes?”
Adrian grins slowly, tilting his cheek to his shoulder. “Nah, I’m pretty sure his name is Dick…”
“Okay. So, what? You’re gonna take me to your house?” you ask, then scoff when he nods rapidly in response. “Your obsession with finding your other self is getting really weird, you know that?”
“Well, jokes on you, honey,” he says with an unconvincing chuckle. “I never said anything about finding my other self, so… Egg on your face.”
“It has literally been all you have talked about since we got here,” you argue and close your laptop with a quiet thud before rising from the squeaking bench.
You try not to think too hard about the memorial you leave behind as you follow Adrian to his house. You try not to think about what happened to you here — what killed you, who killed you — or what the hell you could’ve done to deserve to be remembered so fondly. You’ve racked up an impressive amount of charges in your own dimension, to be fair. Cyberterrorism and the like. It’d probably take more hours than there are in a day to list them all.
So, instead, you try to focus on the quiet idiosyncrasies of this strange dimension — which is basically just like your own, only everything is shifted slightly to the left. The clouds are whiter and rounder and heavier than usual, like a couple of cotton balls wedged into the sky. The air feels weirdly thinner here, too — every breath you drag in feels foreign in your lungs. And the scent of the trees Adrian leads you through smells of a bitter sort of pine that is no longer familiar to you.
Everything is the same, but just a little bit off. Uncanny, almost. It’s still your home, but one that belongs to a different version of you — to people that look just like you, to people that wear your skin.
“Hey, remember when we talked about you being mad at me and stuff?” Adrian wonders suddenly, voice ringing through the quiet wood, as he lifts a low-hanging branch for you to duck under. “And, like, how you wanted me to make it up to you and everything?”
“Do I remember the conversation we had three minutes ago?” you scoff like it’s obvious, adjusting the brown leather jacket on your shoulder when it starts to slip. Adrian flashes you an expectant look over his broad shoulder, still waiting for your answer ‘cause your sarcasm doesn’t quite compute. “Yes, Adrian. I remember.”
“Well, then, do you remember what we talked about the other day?” he asks with a wide grin that you meet with a confused sort of scowl.
“The one about Chris?”
“No—”
“The one where you were crying in my arms because he left you?”
“I was not crying,” Adrian argues. “I was trying to comfort you, actually.”
He turns around to face you with a crazed sort of look dancing behind his thick lenses as he waves an accusatory arm in your direction. You stop in your tracks just a few short inches ahead of him, with your laptop cradled to your chest.
“Oh, so then you must be talking about the conversation we had after that,” you tell him with an innocent lilt that doesn’t match the fire in your eyes. “You know, after you flirted with that naked woman right in front of me—”
Your last few words are drowned out by Adrian’s dramatic groan. “For the last time, I was not flirting with her!”
“I saw you, Adrian!”
“I was trying to intel about Peacemaker—”
“By staring at her tits?!”
“How was I supposed to know we were stumbling into an orgy?” he argues with all the essence of a stubborn child that makes you roll your eyes.
You know it isn’t totally his fault. See, Peacemaker had a close friend named Zora, who you quickly realized was rather infamous for the elaborate sex parties she threw — many of which Chris had been in attendance. Zora invited both of you over to give you what little intel she had on his sudden disappearance. Zora was very serious about the information she gave you, despite the fact that she was standing stark naked on her back porch. It wasn’t Zora that bothered you, necessarily, but the fact that Adrian couldn’t seem to stop looking at her.
What he called active listening, you called being a total fucking creep. And you haven’t quite been able to get past the jealousy still simmering in the pit of your chest.
You walk past him, knocking into his shoulder as you go. Adrian stumbles over his feet as he tries to fall back in step with you. “Anyway, that’s not the point— I’m talking about the threesome.”
“Threesome?” you scoff. “What threesome?”
“Remember? At Harcourt’s party?” he lilts. “When you said you had a dream about it once and that you wanted to try it out? And I said that if another guy who wasn’t me even thought about touching you, I’d have to blow his fucking brains out?”
You smack your lips against your teeth in a silent recollection. “Right.”
“Well…” Adrian trails off, motioning his hand to the side of you. You follow his gaze through the thin treeline to find a quaint suburban neighborhood standing on the other side of it. His house looms at the edge of the block, sage green with an ornately decorated yard.
Your eyes flit from the home to his glittering gaze. “Yeah, I’m not following.”
“If there’s another me in there, that means we can both get what we want! You can have your threesome, and I don’t have to worry about killing some random motherfucker for touching you!” His crude language doesn’t match the pretty smile on his face, which squints the very edges of his eyes just now. “And then you don’t have to be mad at me anymore! It’s basically a win-win!”
“…You are so fucking perverted, Adrian,” you squint.
“What?” he laughs. “I’m doing this for you! It’s what you wanted, right?”
“Yeah! When all of our friends were missing—”
“Uh, newsflash, honey. Our friends aren’t missing,” he chuckles and motions to the empty woods surrounding you. “They’re here! All of us are somewhere in this dimension, which you’re not dead in anymore, so… We have nothing to worry about!”
His sunshine disposition still has a way of surprising you, even after all this time. You know there’s no point in arguing with him, so you just shake your head and keep on walking. “Oh, my god. Okay. Let’s just go,” you mumble under your breath.
You trek through the empty street and the half-dead yard. Browning grass and fallen leaves crunch under your boots as you go. Adrian giggles all giddy to himself as he shoves his mask back over his wild head, eyes squinting behind the red visor under the weight of his beaming.
He guides you past the threshold of his home, which is as warm and achingly familiar as always. Nothing is overtly out of place — save for the mislabeled Cheeri-ohs on the counter, and the clay dragon in the china cabinet that’s supposed to be a snake, and the fact that his dad isn’t gay anymore.
His secret room is still located down the steps and around the corner, and it still has the bright red “No Admittance” sign taped to the front of it.
You lead the rest of the way there while Adrian lags slightly behind, still musing over the misspelled cereal box that he cradles in his left arm. “Think the locks are still the same?” you wonder from the bottom of the staircase.
Adrian digs into the pocket of his suit with his free hand. “Let’s find out,” he says and tosses you the jingling key ring, which you catch against your chest.
He looms over your shoulder while you make careful work of each lock. The first key slides in with little effort. You twist your wrist to the right until you hear a dull click that makes Adrian giggle like a child just behind you. “No fuckin’ way!” he curses while you move onto the second lock. That one unlatches just as easily as the third, which opens with a heavier clack when the heavy door gives way.
“Unbelievable…” Adrian mumbles under his breath as you push the metal entrance the rest of the way open.
You venture slowly into the top-secret bunker and find very little out of place. It still smells of dust and blood and sweat. Bricks of cocaine are still stacked to the ceiling. Millions of dollars still go untouched on the metal shelves (you make a mental note to pocket a few stacks before you leave). But, further inside, another Adrian sits slouched at a desk against the wall, suited but unmasked.
He’s too distracted to notice the presence of the two strangers standing just behind him — or not strangers, perhaps.
“Knock, knock,” you monotone in lieu of any actual greeting, because you’re not exactly sure how to announce your arrival in this sort of situation.
“What the fuck?!” the other Adrian exclaims as he scrambles on the other side of the room. His metal chair scrapes hard against the floor when he rises, unholstering a gun from his side in a blink, and pointing it ahead of him in practiced motions.
“Who are you, and how are you here?” he interrogates in a stern sort of voice that makes your Adrian laugh loudly to himself.
There is nothing different about the Adrian standing in front of you than the one at your side. Your eyes dart wildly over his form, searching for any singularity that might set him apart, but you find only the man you love. Or, at the very least, a stranger wearing the skin of the man you love.
The other Adrian seems to do the same to you, with his eyes wide and panicked behind his glasses. His studies you carefully, face screwed in a mixture of panic and confusion. How are you here, he asks, because for him, you died a long time ago.
“Oh, dude. Hold on— hold on, dude,” your Adrian rambles, breathless from how hard he’s laughing. He sets the Cheeri-ohs on the table beside him and pulls off his mask with two hands, revealing his reddened face and wild curls. “It’s me!” he beams. “I’m you from another dimension— My keys worked to get in here!”
You lift your right hand to reveal the key ring jangling on your pointer finger, an exact copy of the set sitting safely in Other Adrian’s suit pocket. Somehow, that’s enough to convince him. “Are you fucking kidding me?!” he laughs, holstering his weapon and grinning wide.
“No!” your Adrian chuckles.
“Holy shit!”Other Adrian exclaims, eyes flitting between the two of you as he waves a gloved finger in your direction. “Wait, so you— You’re not from here, right? ‘Cause you’re, like, super dead in this dimension.”
“I heard,” you monotone and quickly change the subject. “Is it okay if I sit down? I have actually important shit to do.”
Other Adrian nods until the words catch up to him. “Yeah. Yeah, sure. Go— Go ahead.”
He swallows hard when you walk by him, adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. Everything about you is exactly how he remembers — your hair, your style, your scowl. The way you look at him like you couldn’t care less if he lives or dies. You even smell the same, too, of a musky raspberry vanilla that hasn’t yet left his head.
You plop down on the beige couch on the opposite side of the room, which he had always dreamed of fucking you on, and it’s like you never died at all.
You open the lid of your laptop and force yourself to focus on the encrypted file before you, rather than the dopplegangers across the room. That’s what you’re here for, anyway — a safe place to hide while you try to locate a friend — no matter what Adrian has to say in the matter.
“So, she was your girlfriend in this dimension, too?!” Your Adrian beams, visibly elated at the thought of having you in every universe.
“Girlfriend?” Other Adrian scoffs. “No. No way— She fucking hated me, dude.”
Your Adrian frowns but is hardly deterred. “No, she didn’t,” he argues with a strange sort of conviction despite never even knowing this other version of you.
“How do you know?”
“‘Cause this one claims to hate me, too, and we’ve been together for four years.”
“No way!” Other Adrian chuckles.
“Yes way!”
They laugh together in the same melodic cadence and fall into step as they saunter towards the couch, long legs moving in sync. You don’t think to look up from your computer until they’re towering over you. By then, your Adrian has already shoved his glasses back on his face, making it impossible to tell which boy you came here with.
Their suits are practically identical — you can’t find a single stitch out of place. They wear their helmet hair the same way, too, chesnut curls sitting in matching wild halos on their heads.
You try hard to tell the difference in their smiles, ‘cause your Adrian’s is always a little skewed to the lopsided left, and his front two teeth are ever so slightly crooked. But so is Other Adrian’s smile, it seems, which leaves you at a rather dizzying loss.
“Wait, wait, wait—” you blurt suddenly, eyes flickering between the two of them. “Stay on one side, alright? So I know which one of you is which.”
You walked in with your Adrian on your left, so you cross your fingers and hope your Adrian is still standing on the left now.
“What do you mean?” Your Adrian questions, head tilted to the side like a confused puppy.
“Which one of you is mine, I mean.”
“Well, if the laws of the universe are right, honey—” Your Adrian lilts with a pink grin tugging slowly at his mouth.
“The laws of the universe?” you repeat in a monotone.
“—I think that technically means we’re both yours.”
Something about his words makes your stomach do a blackflip, though your scowl never wavers.
Having two Adrians is as much a dream as it is a total nightmare. You don’t know which one to focus on—
Peacemaker, a cynical voice in the back of your head reminds you. You need to focus on finding Peacemaker and Harcourt before something totally terrible happens and you end up dead in both dimensions.
So, you say nothing as you shake your head and turn back to the computer in your lap. Both Adrians take their spot on the couch on either side of you, effectively sandwiching you between their broad bodies.
You’re enveloped immediately in their innate warmth and their identical musky cologne. You struggle to type with their arms caging you on either side, and with their legs spread like both of them are determined to take up as much space as humanly possible.
You grit your teeth and struggle to focus while they talk over you.
“Wait, so, if we’re talking laws of the universe and everything—” Other Adrian, now seemingly on your right, wonders aloud. “—Does that mean we were technically supposed to be together in this dimension?”
Your Adrian thinks for a moment, light eyes flitted to the ceiling. “I think so,” he concludes with a lazy shrug, basing his answer on approximately zero information.
“Both of you are using the word technically very liberally,” you deadpan.
“I’m just saying! You know, maybe you died before you could tell me you loved me!”
“Oh, dude…” your Adrian grimaces. “That’s sad…”
“I always had a feeling, you know?” Other Adrian shrugs, slouching against the back of the sunken sofa and staring far off at something on the other side of the room. “We ran into each other on a mission once, and I thought she was gonna kill me, but instead she just broke my jaw! And I thought, hey, if that’s not a proclamation of law, then I don’t know what is—”
“No fucking way!” your Adrian chuckles and sits up straighter on the sunken sofa.
“What?”
“That’s how we met!” he exclaims, gesturing wildly between your bodies. “In our dimension!”
“Are you kidding me?!”
“No! That’s how I knew she liked me, too— She holstered her gun just so she could punch me in the face!” your Adrian giggles maniacally. “And I was like, jeez, you might as well just kiss me while you’re at it!”
Other Adrian’s face screws as he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Did you actually say that?” he asks.
“Yes,” you answer for him, fingers flying across the keyboard. The neon green numbers start to blur as you fight to stay concentrated. “It was very, very strange.”
“…And did you?”
“Hell no.”
“No, she just kneed me in the balls and left,” your Adrian answers with a whimsical sort of sigh. “But she did leave me her number, though.”
Your head whips in his direction, eyes narrowed in a challenging squint. “I dropped my phone, that hardly counts!”
“Yeah,” your Adrian scoffs. “Because you wanted me to find it!”
“It fell out of my pocket!”
“Tomato, tom-ah-to,” he shrugs.
Other Adrian watches silently while the two of you bicker back and forth. He wonders if this is what he missed out on — a life of petty banter and heated arguments that always seem to lead to make-up sex. It’s like watching one of his wildest dreams play out right in front of him. A lost reality that he’ll spend the rest of his life mourning.
“I knew it…” he huffs.
“Knew what?”
“Every time I tried to talk to her after that, she just called me a stalker and told me to leave her alone— But I knew she was just playing hard to get.”
“No, yeah, you have to promise to leave her alone, and then conspicuously show up wherever she is until she finally decides to talk to you,” your Adrian explains like it’s obvious.
“Really?”
“Yeah, you can’t let up, that’s the important part,” he says, and then elaborates at the confused glance he gets. “‘Cause then you lose all the momentum.”
“Oh…” Other Adrian croons, nodding slowly to himself.
Your eyes widen at the chaotic computer screen ahead of you, now filled with blinking numbers and a blank map dotted with pinging coordinates that don’t match the ones you’re familiar with.
It was easier back home, you think, to hear Adrian say the most bizarre shit like it was all too normal to him — ‘cause you had a team of actually normal people to put him in his place. But now, all you have is an exact mirror version of him, who takes all of his horrible advice like it’s some kind of prophecy.
“I wish I had said something then…” Other Adrian mourns. “You know, before the incident…”
The intentionally vague language makes the Adrian on your left lean further in, taking up what little personal space you have left. “The incident?” he repeats, visibly intrigued.
“Yeah. The Task Force X mission,” Other Adrian nods, pointing to the bulletin board across the room where he’s pinned various documents and blurry photos to the wall. “I tried to find the files, but they’re, like, super redacted, so I guess no one actually knows what happened, but… My guess is something went horribly wrong, and they had to cover it up—”
You squint at the newspaper clippings, classified records, and botched polaroids — all entwined with the kind of red string you only see on true crime television. It’s like a map, almost. Adrian’s map to find you. Or to figure out what had happened to you, at the very least.
“—All I know is, I told her that I didn’t think it was a good idea for her to go, and she was like, How did you get in here? Did you climb in through my window?” Other Adrian rambles. “And I was like, doll, you really need to start locking your windows at night, ‘cause there are some real sickos creeping around.”
Your Adrian nudges you. “I tell her the exact same thing!”
Other Adrian swallows hard. “I just think… What if I had been there, you know? What if I had tried harder to stop her?”
Anger builds like bile in your throat. The grief does, too. The thought of your death is as nagging as the thought of this Adrian mourning you — of him blaming himself for your death, like you weren’t strong enough to die on your own. You fight to swallow it all down, but it comes spilling out anyway, as you groan and tilt your head back against the sofa.
“Oh, my god, can you cool it with the altruism?” you say with an exhausted huff. “I’m sure there was nothing you could’ve done to stop me, alright? I famously don’t listen to people— I’m known for it, actually, so…. I’m not surprised it probably got me killed in this dimension, ‘cause it’s almost killed me a thousand times back in mine. So stop acting like you could’ve been special enough to stop me, because you obviously weren’t.”
You ramble in one breath, then turn away again like it’s nothing, fingers click-clacking on the keyboard with an evident expertise.
Other Adrian finds it hard to look away from you, light eyes going suddenly glassy. He is not fazed by the ire in your words — he’d had ample time to grow used to that — he’s more so taken by the strange sort of comfort in them, ‘cause he’d dreamed of hearing them for so long.
Maybe he can actually get some sleep now, without being plagued by nagging thoughts that your death was his fault — knowing now that you aren’t angry at him for not saving you, for not being there when you took your last breath. His hands ache to reach out and touch you, but he balls them into fists instead.
“Don’t mind her,” your Adrian mutters like he’s telling some kind of secret, like he isn’t sitting right next to you. “She’s, like, totally pissed at me.”
“…What’d you do?”
“Well, to make a long story short,” he starts, which always means he’s about to ramble until his breath gives out. “We came here to look for a friend, my best friend, ‘cause he’s been missing for a few days now. And before we found out he was in another dimension, we were trying to figure out where he went, right? Well, then, I remembered that he has this other friend named Zora—”
Other Adrian notices the way you tense at the mention of the stranger’s name. His eyes flit back to the other version of him, who talks wildly with gloved hands.
“—Who isn’t his best friend, obviously, ‘cause I’m his best friend. But I thought, hey, maybe she knows where he is! Turns out, the place she asked us to meet her at was this crazy orgy, and I was trying to ask her about my friend— but I wasn’t looking at her tits, alright? I swear!” Adrian defends, palms splayed in surrender. “She just had this really cool nipple piercing that had something engraved on it, but the word was way too small to make out—”
“You idiot!” Other Adrian exclaims, rising suddenly from the sofa.
His hurried movements make your computer jolt faintly in your lap. You grip the edges of it and watch as your Adrian cowers when his doppelganger towers over him. Your eyes dart between the two of them, trying to make sense of their sudden argument.
“What?!”
“Why would you do that?!”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“You committed the ultimate transgression someone can commit in a relationship that isn’t cheating!” Other Adrian insists with a deep scowl that pinches his narrow features. “Staring at another girl’s naked body obviously makes it seem like you’re interested in her!”
“Thank you!” you grumble. “Finally, some understanding here.”
Your Adrian stands with a dramatic huff. “That’s not what it was at all!” he exclaims, gesturing wildly with his gloved palms.
“Doesn’t matter,” Other Adrian says, crossing his strong arms over his chest. “You should’ve turned around. Like a gentleman.”
“Okay. Yeah. I’ll be sure to make a note of that for the next time I stumble into a random orgy!”
“I’m just saying, you know, be respectful. That’s all.”
“Hey. I’m respectful.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“I’m you!” Your Adrian exclaims.
Other Adrian shrugs. “Then I guess that makes us both idiots, doesn’t it?”
Your Adrian whips his head to face you, waiting for a witty response that never comes. Your attention is now more focused on your laptop, which has just started to beep faintly in your lap. It makes you sit up straighter, eyes wide with a newfound intrigue.
“Okay. Look,” your Adrian starts. “I can appreciate that we’re supposedly the same person and all, but maybe don’t talk about my girlfriend like you know her, alright?”
Other Adrian scoffs in offense. “I know her just as well as you do!”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“I know she likes her eggs scrambled in the morning,” he answers.
“Yeah,” your Adrian nods. “Both literally and figuratively.”
“And I know she’s a morning person,” Other Adrian lists on his gloved fingers. “And I know she likes Martinis with extra olives, especially from her favorite bar—”
“Which is?”
“The Roadhouse.”
“Correct.”
“And I know her favorite stall to take suitors in.”
Your Adrian screws his face while the other version of him grins all smug. “Suitors?” he echoes.
“Oh, yeah— Her and Rick Flag used to get busy in the handicap stall, let me tell ya.”
“Gross,” he grimaces. “…Wait. How do you even know that?”
“The same way I know her greatest sexual fantasy— The walls left very little to the imagination, my friend—”
“A threesome, right?!” Your Adrian laughs.
“Yeah! …Holy shit, have we had one before?”
“No,” he answers instantly. “No way, dude, I can’t let someone else fuck her. I’d have to—”
“Blow his fucking brains out?” Other Adrian finishes for him, strangely solemn. “Yeah, I get it. I’m the same way…”
“But that’s why we came here!” Your Adrian tells him, suddenly aglow. “Well, we came here to find our friend first, but then I realized this is, like, the only opportunity we’ll have to have a threesome— If you’re down, obviously. I can’t just assume your consent ‘cause you’re me.”
“If I’m down?” Other Adrian repeats, like it isn’t even a question. “Of course, I’m down—”
“Fuck, yes!” you exclaim after several long moments of concentrated silence, rising suddenly from the squeaking sofa.
You wear a newfound smile on your face, eyes glowing at the computer screen in your hands — an encrypted code now deciphered, along with the tricky coordinates, which now track Peacemaker’s every move.
Your glimmering gaze turns back to the identical boys ahead of you, who wear matching looks of amused shock. You forgot that you were supposed to keep track of them, too. Now you’re not entirely sure which Adrian you came with and which Adrian you’re about to leave behind.
“Wait, really?” the Adrian on your left wonders. “You want to? I thought you said I was perverted for even thinking it—”
“What?” you interject, face screwed. “What are you talking about?”
He grows suddenly solemn. “What are you talking about?”
“Chris!” you answer and flip the screen around to show him the blinking dot on the neon map. You close the lid of it with a soft click. “I found him! So, we have to go— We have to tell Economos and Lee. Maybe Harcourt’s with him, too—”
Their faces twist in sync, pinching into a grieved pout. “But we just got here…” both Adrians chorus in identical inflections.
“Yeah,” you nod. “And now we’re leaving.”
You storm between the two of them. Or, rather, you try to. The Adrian on your right grabs the wrist of the hand not cradling your laptop. His hold is gentle but stern, and even through the gloves, you can feel the body heat radiating off of him. Adrian Chases are human heaters in every dimension, it seems. You falter immediately under his touch, face screwed as you turn to glare at him.
“Well, why?” Adrian protests like a pouting child. “I mean, it’s not like your friends are going anywhere. Let’s just— stay here for a while…”
His boots scuff the floor when he takes a slow step towards you. He towers over your body, swaddling you immediately in his innate warmth and familiar cologne.
You flinch away on instinct, practically stumbling over your feet as you wrench your wrist from his grip. You collide into the chest of the Adrian standing behind you as a result, head-spinning ‘cause you still don’t know if it’s your Adrian.
“No,” you announce with a stubborn shake of your head. “Nope. I’m not doing this— This is freaking me the hell out. I feel like I’m in the fucking Twilight Zone!”
“Why?” the Adrian looming before you scoffs, getting over the idea of infinite dimensions a lot faster than he probably should.
“Because I can’t tell which of you is mine!”
“It’s easy…” he answers with a lazy shrug, pink lips curling into that same lopsided smile you fell in love with so many years ago. He takes another step closer, until you have to crane your neck to keep his gaze. You forget to turn away when he takes your hand. “’Cause we’re both yours. Remember?”
There’s a fleeting moment of heavy silence after that, where you have to remind yourself to breathe. You only vaguely register the way he leans further into you. You’re much more focused on the wild look in his fiery gaze. His eyes are all squishy around the edges with adoration, but glinting with something much more crazed in comparison — a sort of hunger that only comes from losing someone.
It’s the Other Adrian that’s kissing you now.
You know this.
And you let him kiss you, anyway.
His broad nose squishes into the side of yours when he presses his lips to your mouth. There’s nothing unfamiliar about his touch or in the way he tastes, like spearmint and soda and boy. But there’s a foreign sort of gentleness that strikes you deep in the chest — a hesitance, a stillness, a longing.
Your Adrian hasn’t kissed you like this in a long time. He hasn’t ever needed to. Because he never lost you like this one did.
Your heavy sigh fans across his cupid’s bow. You’re moments away from melting into him when your laptop threatens to slip from the crook of your elbow. It jolts you awake again, like one of those dreams that feels suddenly like you’re falling. Your lips click softly when you jerk your head back.
“Okay!” you blurt with an emotionless laugh, eyes wide and a little crazed. “Okay, you had you’re fun. Now we’re leaving—”
“You can kiss him if you want,” your Adrian murmurs, pleads, from just behind you. “I don’t mind.”
Your head whips over your shoulder to look at him. Your face is screwed in a mixture of hesitation and confusion — you don’t know why Adrian wants this so bad; you don’t know why you want it so badly, either. “We’re on a mission!” you shout, voice fragile and breaking in an unconvincing protest.
“They’ll be okay!” Your Adrian assures. “They’re safe here. You’re safe here, so just… Relax.”
“Yeah, I don’t know how to do that,” you scoff.
“I can help you,” Other Adrian offers quickly, a little too quickly to be cool. He clears his throat, pushes his glasses up his nose, and tries again. “Relax, I mean...”
You open your mouth but struggle to find the words. “I—” is all you can manage out before your breath gets caught in your throat. Completely and utterly and totally pathetic.
Your Adrian grins, though you aren’t looking at him to see it. He knows you well enough to spot when you really want something. He can practically see the shroud of cynicism giving way to something much softer, quieter. “She likes it best when you kiss her—”
“Let me guess,” Other Adrian interjects, eyes darting wildly over your face beneath his glasses, like he’s studying you. He raises a gloved hand and presses two fingers just over your pulse point. The textured leather meets your delicate skin like fire. You have to remind yourself to breathe. “…Here?” he guesses, though a part of him already knows it’s the right answer.
He’s watched you a thousand times through that tiny, wretched glory hole in the Roadhouse bathroom. He’s watched other men who didn’t deserve you caress your body. He’s analyzed the way they touched you, learned everything you hated and everything that drove you wild.
The sight of Rick Flag fucking you against the dank, graffitied brick is still stained in the back of his head. He still remembers the way the man sank his teeth into your neck, and the face you made when you came a second later.
He already knows everything about you, he thinks. The very most intimate parts of you.
He’s just waiting for your acknowledgement, which comes now in the form of a slow nod, ‘cause you don’t trust your voice not to break.
A gasp catches in your throat when Other Adrian ducks down, parting his rosy mouth to press a wet kiss to your thrumming pulse.
He kisses you there like he’s done it a thousand times before — it feels like he has, anyway, after spending what feels like his whole life dreaming about it. He rakes his teeth over the delicate tendon there, like he already knows it makes your head swim, then runs his warm tongue over the sharp bite to soothe it.
Your heavy head tilts back as you exhale a whispered moan at the ceiling. Through your lidded gaze, you see Adrian grinning over your shoulder. “Told ya you’d like it,” he lilts.
“I fucking hate you…” you sigh in a honeyed moan.
“No, you don’t,” he says with a knowing smile, before ducking down to engulf your mouth with his own.
His kiss lacks all the diffidence of his counterpart. He’s terribly confident in the way he wastes little time licking into your mouth, in the way he kisses you like he’s trying to swallow you whole.
A pretty noise sounds in the back of your throat when you lift your right hand to fist the curls at the crown of his head. Your free one cradles the back of Other Adrian’s neck to keep him close as he leaves a trail of sloppy kisses up and down the length of your jaw.
As the world sways beneath your feet, you feel his hands working fast with the buttons of your jeans. The boy standing behind you slides the fabric of your heavy jacket down your arms in the meanwhile. The thick fabric pools at your feet with a quiet thud, leaving you in a form-fitting black tank top.
Adrian is on you and all over you, all two of him. A heavy, warm feeling sparkles in the very pit of your stomach accordingly.
Your lips smack in protest when you pull away from your Adrian to sigh. “I’m dreaming…” you conclude with bated breath, talking mostly to yourself. “That’s what this is, right? I’m just dreaming?”
Adrian smiles down at you, lips swollen and shining with your spit. “It’s very real, actually,” he answers, very giddy about the whole thing.
“Doesn’t this feel real to you?” Other Adrian wonders, dragging your hand away from his neck and down his lean body.
The tips of your trembling fingers brush the textured leather of his teal-blue suit until they rest finally over his crotch. His wide, calloused palm cradles the back of your knuckles and urges you to cup his clothed cock, growing harder and harder in the strict confines of his suit.
His free hand slips through the fabric of your unbuttoned jeans and rests over the soft cotton of your underwear. Your breath catches when his fingers brush the warm, wet spot forming slowly there.
“‘Cause it feels real to me…” he murmurs.
“Actually…” your Adrian croons as he wraps his hand around the doppelganger’s wrist. “She likes it best when you touch her… here.”
He brings the boy’s hand an inch or more upward, until his fingers are resting just slightly above your sensitive clit. Not enough to overstimulate you, but enough to make you keen.
Your head tips back to exhale a high-pitched moan at the dim ceiling. “Please fuck me,” you hear yourself say, in a distant voice that sounds nothing like your own.
“Who?” the boys chorus simultaneously.
“I don’t give a shit,” you sigh, hardly patient. “One of you. Both of you.”
There is no Adrian Chase, in any of the infinite dimensions, that has ever denied you of anything, it seems.
You forget to keep track of which boy is which when they unravel you on the ancient sofa across the room. You’re not so sure it matters now, anyway. They both belong to you in the same way you belong to both of them — laws of the universe and all that jazz. It’s all strangely fluid, accordingly, the way they maneuver you onto the couch like they share the same mind — like they know exactly how to take you.
One Adrian lies flat on the cushion below you. The shirt of his suit sits in a forgotten pile on the floor with the rest of your clothes, leaving him only in a white tank top and his unbelted bottoms. His boxers are tucked under his balls, allowing his cock to jut proudly from the leather, weeping and glowing a strawberry red at the tip.
One of his hands rests warmly along the curve of your hips as you straddle his thin waist. His fingertips threaten to dig bruises into the plush skin there. His free one slithers between your bodies to fist his heavy cock, slipping it between the folds of your drooling pussy. Your nails dig crescent shapes into his pale shoulders as you sigh a delicate moan.
You hear a soft click from behind you, then. Over your shoulder, the other Adrian pops the cap to the bottle of lube he always keeps in his desk drawer for special occasions. The translucent blue bottle you’re used to is now a deep purple in this dimension, you find, and it doesn’t look like it’s gotten much use.
He is as undressed as the Adrian beneath you, pants unbuckled and white tank top clinging to his torso. You’d protest about how naked you are compared to the two of them, completely bare save for the plain black bra cradling your breasts, if you could find the words to.
Your heavy eyes flutter shut as you turn away to hang your head. You grit your teeth and anticipate the cold jelly against your ass, yet still shiver when it comes. The Adrian below you rests a soothing palm over your burning jaw while the one behind you works his fingers slowly into you, preparing you for his cock. You sigh at the distant, full feeling.
“I’ll be gentle, doll,” Adrian tells you, trailing his free hand up your spine and over your shoulder. His touch his far too innocent compared to the sinful way he fingers your ass. “I promise…”
You realize, then, that the boy behind you must be the other Adrian. You can tell by his seemingly preferred nickname for you, doll, and in the way his voice tremors with the reassurance — like he’s just barely managing to hold himself together, like he’s never fucked you this way before, like he’s never fucked you at all.
Besides, your Adrian wouldn’t bother with such sympathies. You trust him enough to take care of you. And you hardly ever want him to be gentle.
You swallow down a sob when Other Adrian slips his fingers out of you to put something much thicker in their place. The bulbous head of his cock pushes slowly into your ass. He groans, pressing his face into your back and exhaling panted breaths against your bare skin.
His fingers dig into the plush of your hips as he fights to rein himself in, to ease his length slowly into you despite the hunger begging him to move faster than that — to take you the way he’s always dreamed of taking you.
You keep reminding yourself to relax, and to breathe through your nose, while Other Adrian bottoms out. With his lean hips flush to your ass, the soreness there ebbs slowly into a distant, fuller feeling that makes it hard to gain your breath. He fights to catch his own with his cheek pressed to your shoulder.
Your Adrian brushes his fingers along your warm cheek, pushing the hair out of your face. When your heavy eyes flutter finally open, you find him grinning all lopsided up at you — glasses fogged and sitting crooked on his nose.
“You know what I like most about you, honey?” he coos and doesn’t wait for you to answer. He knows they’ve already fucked you far too stupid for that — and they haven’t even started. “No matter how mean you are… You always get so sweet when I fuck you.”
A whimper sounds in your throat when Adrian shifts beneath you. He takes his stiff cock in his fist, which had been grinding sweetly over your clit, and slides it down to your suckling cunt. “Show him,” your Adrian tells you, half-distracted, as he lines himself up there. “Show him how sweet you get for me.”
He slides his thick length inside you with surprisingly little effort, considering the way your pussy drools for him. It’s a fleeting ache that blossoms into a warmer, more pleasurable, and achingly fuller feeling when he’s sheathed inside your pulsing cunt.
Caged between both their bodies, you quickly realize that there’s nowhere to go — nowhere to run from the overwhelming pleasure that seeks to suffocate you entirely. All you can do now is take it.
Your Adrian groans, dropping the crown of his wild head back against the arm of the couch. “Fuck…” he grumbles through gritted teeth. “God, you’re so fucking tight— Always so tight for me. Holy shit.”
The other Adrian moans between the sloppy kisses he presses between your shoulder blades. “I always dreamt about this, you know?” he pants into your blazing skin. “Watched a hundred guys fuck you, knowing they didn’t deserve you— Knowing that I could fuck you better… Do you have any idea how hard that is?”
You don’t notice the dirty confession in his words because he’s thrusting his lean hips further against your ass, pushing his twitching cock deeper into your suffocating confines.
A scream wells in your throat at the feeling. Your Adrian seems to sense it and lifts his hand to clamp his palm over your mouth before it can escape your mouth. His round eyes go wide, begging you to keep quiet, ‘cause his parents are still upstairs after all.
He doesn’t want to have to explain this impromptu threesome, or why you’re suddenly alive, or why there are suddenly two of their son.
Your whine rumbles against his palm instead.
Everything between your legs throbs and aches when the two of them begin to move in tandem. Your Adrian keeps a bruising grip on your waist while the other gropes sloppily at your chest, tugging down your bra until your breasts spill from the top of it.
His thumb smooths over your pebbled nipples. You tense, achingly sensitive under his touch. Your pussy clenches around your Adrian’s cock, which makes his hips jerk upwards — a foreign feeling the Other Adrian can feel between your thin walls. He buries his groan into your shoulder, grasping at you with all the stern tenderness of someone scared to let you go.
“O—Oh, f…uck,” he whimpers a broken moan against your skin. “It’s too much— It’s too…. shit… You’re gonna make me cum, doll— Fuck!”
His hips stutter. His cock jerks in your strangling hole. Heat fills your ass no more than a second later — a distant blooming in the deepest parts of you. Adrian digs his teeth into your shoulder while he forces himself to fuck you through the rest of his high, whining when his sensitivity grows.
“Thank you…” he murmurs, pressing tender kisses over the bite marks on your skin, as his strong arms slither around your stomach in a loose embrace. “Thank you, baby—”
You whimper when Other Adrian slips out of you, face screwed at the feeling of being so suddenly empty. The couch squeaks slightly when he slouches on the other side of it, still close enough to touch you. He never takes his hand off of your body as he smooths his palm over the plush of your ass, caressing and squeezing and tapping you there.
You feel his cum trickling out of you a moment later. Something warm and slick drools from your ass towards your pussy, where your Adrian continues to fuck you — with a lot less restraint than the other version of him.
He plants his feet, one on the sofa and the other on the floor, and digs his blunt fingernails into your ass as he punches up into you.
“Adrian…” you whimper, voice breaking under the weight of your pleasure. You fight to keep your heavy eyes open, ‘cause you want to memorize the way he looks just now — lying below you, curls wild, cheeks flushed pink, eyes closed tight beneath his crooked glasses.
“I know,” he gasps, sucking air through his teeth when his cock starts to jerk within your pulsing cunt. “I know, honey. C’mon. Cum for me.”
His hazel eyes, dark with lust, snap open to reveal a twisted and warped sort of love in his gaze that makes your stomach do a backflip. The coil tightening in the pit of your belly snaps in that instance. A bright white and distant heat that rushes out of you like honey.
A pained whine gets caught in your throat.
“Yeah… There you go…” he praises, chuckling breathlessly at the pitiful look on your face. Your nails dig crescent shapes into his shoulders as your orgasm racks through your body in merciless waves. He revels in the ache. “There you go, honey— Fuck.”
He tenses suddenly beneath you, cock jerking. He tries and fails to swallow down his groan. It escapes in a low rumble through his gritted teeth as he spits several ropes of warm cum inside of you. His hips jerk on their own accord every time your velvety cunt squeezes around him, milking him for everything he’s worth.
The pleasure ebbs slowly. The scent of sex hangs heavy in the air. Panted breaths fill the subsequent silence.
Adrian is slow to relax beneath you. He pushes his half-fogged glasses up his nose as his eyes dart wildly across your face. “Are you still mad at me?” he murmurs through labored breaths, blinking rapidly through the haze.
You try to laugh, but it sounds more like a scoff as you try to catch your breath. You smooth your palms over his jaw as you lean down over him, pressing a too-sweet kiss to his waiting mouth. The tip of your nose brushes the bridge of his with every word from your lips.
“Adrian… You brought me here, to a whole different dimension, so I can fuck another version of you— just because I told you once, when I was drunk, that I had a wet dream about a threesome one time,” you answer with a love drunk smile. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s way more than any guy has ever done for me, ever.”
Adrian struggles to read between the lines. “…So you’re not mad?” he presses.
You shake your head until the words catch up to you. “No, baby. I’m not mad.”
He’s left grinning all over again. “Cool,” he chuckles.
You’re slow to dismount from his cock. You try to anticipate the cold feeling of emptiness when you rise off of him, though the bitter numbness still finds you anyway. A little sore and full of bliss, you adjust your bra and slouch back against the couch, resting your body weight on the other Adrian’s shoulder.
It takes him very fleetingly by surprise, breath catching for a second, ‘cause he has to remind himself that he’s not dreaming. He raises a strong arm and wraps it around the front of you, pressing you further into his clothed chest. You rest your feet in your Adrian’s lap while he tucks his softening cock back into his pants.
He huffs quietly and sits up straighter on the arm of the sofa. A proud grin pulls slowly at his lips in sync with the Adrian sitting across from him. It’s like looking into a mirror.
“Up top,” he says and raises his arm for a high-five, to which the Other Adrian meets with a boyish enthusiasm.
“Dream work makes the teamwork,” the boy grins.
“It’s definitely teamwork makes the dream work, by the way,” you laugh breathlessly.
The Other Adrian thinks for a moment, then smacks his lips against his teeth. “No, I’m pretty sure it’s dream work makes the teamwork, doll,” he lilts, almost sympathetically so.
It reminds you all too much of the boy you fell in love with, who massages gently at your calves just now from the other side of the couch. You find it hard to believe that there could be another version of you that isn’t totally in love with every version of him. Maybe he’s right, you think. Maybe I died before I got the chance to spend a life with him here.
The notion pierces you somewhere deep in the chest.
You shift on the sofa and grimace at the way the cotton sticks uncomfortably to your ass, dampened by the mixture of cum seeping slowly out of you. You curl your hands around the muscular forearm on your chest and tilt your head to squint up at him.
“I’m sorry…” you hear yourself say.
You don’t know why you’re saying it. Only that you feel like you should.
“About the couch?” Adrian scoffs. “I already told you, I don’t care about the stupid couch— This shit’s older than I am.”
“I’m not talking about the couch…” you whisper and feel him tense behind you.
“Oh…” he sighs, like you’ve knocked the breath from his lungs.
“I’m sorry for wasting so much time acting like I hated you… Both of you.” You glance down your near-naked body at the Adrian on the other end — the Adrian you’ve spent four years with; the Adrian you get to spend the rest of your whole life with. “‘Cause I do kinda love you… Even if I don’t say it much.”
You scrunch your nose and kick gently at his clothed chest when he grins all smug back at you.
“Trust me, honey,” Adrian coos, squeezing gently at your leg. “I know… I always know. Even when you think I don't.”
