Hungry and Hollow @chasing-denver-kane - Tumblr Blog

Mo[u]rning

edge-of-kane:

[He knows the moment Denver wakes up.

He can feel it, like a pulse in his own heartbeat, a trail of a finger down the back of his neck. As if he can feel the man’s thoughts, know where his gaze travels by some unknown force.

Their chemistry has always been bone deep. As has been, their unique form of silent communication, that came as smoothly and as effortlessly as their rockier, rowing communication. Fighting with Denver had never been easy. But it had been inevitable. As was their raucous crashing together, a force impossible to reckon with.

And so he wonders, briefly, if Denver had heard his unspoken call. If this thing between them runs so deep that Denver had known of Chase’s disquiet in the same way Chase had known of Denver’s wakefulness.

But an arm around his waist gives him a feeling of home and his unease settles a little. The difference is slight—his skin tremors still, but he feels warmed at the surface, like a wash of sunlight glowing over him.

He can’t bring himself to smile, though a part of him wants to at the touch, and at the intimacy of the comment. It’s true. Denver probably can hear him thinking, and it’s so much to do with why Chase loves him. Nonetheless, the nose in his hairline has his eyes falling closed, the feeling of Denver’s breath on his shoulder making him sigh into the press of the man’s broad chest. He sinks into it like an embrace of hot water.

Narrow, tattooed fingers trace gentle lines over the veins in Denver’s hands. It soothes him, but it doesn’t make speaking any easier.]

Sorry if I woke you.

[It smooths over him, again, that he’s never had this. Never quite had the morning after. Never had someone whose simple silence Denver does not have to actively parse apart and dissect like an animal. He stops thinking so damn hard. He reacts, he lets it run through him, wind through a canyon. Chase’s fingers toy with his and he lets himself sink impossibly closer, imagines the veins in his hard arching up in pleasure like a cat under the sun.

There’s a half breath, and Denver is too half-stupid with contentment to sink his teeth into that. But in the next exhale, one that feels more empty than the next breath Chase’s thin chest takes in, he gets a few words.

It’s a curious response. In another situation it would have Denver cocking his head, his eyebrow already disobeying and rising to show interest.

It’s a curious response, for how long Denver has spent unspooling the reactionary response of an apology from this boy. He’d thought perhaps they’d moved past it.

It’s a curious response, in that it dims the sunlight insistently streaming through the shades a bit. Cheapens it.

There’s still a slight tremor to those clever fingers.]

Don’t be.

[He quells the instinct to shift them. Tries to coax Chase out, in a way he feels familiar with. A balcony and a cigarette. Back then when he’d been more skittish animal than boy.]

Any desire to share?

#chat: chase #mourning #Chase

edge-of-kane

Mo[u]rning

chasing-denver-kane

kbedge-of-kane:

chasing-denver-kane:

[It’s rare for Denver to sleep deeply. It’s a habit that was trained out of him at a young and impressionable age where it meant the difference between life or death, and now he more often than not sleeps in fits and starts. As plush as the mattress is underneath his hips, he’s used to curling up with rats on concrete, staying still so as to not let them squeal and telegraph his location.

James Bond always made it look so damn glamorous. If only people really knew the kind of things Denver had done for his country.

But last night… last night was the fury and dying center of the storm. Full of forces blowing out roots of trees, no matter how much they clung to the dirt beneath them. Last night, with Chase underneath him, with Chase surrounded by him, he’d exhausted himself finally. Finally.

He had nothing left in his body when they had finally succumbed to sleep, no heat in his muscles, no pressure in his arteries. Every ache of his body was soothed and settled. It’s sweeter, and more blissful than any grueling workout he’s subjected himself to. And so he sleeps heavily, sated and finally unwound, sure of Chase next to him. His body oriented to the boy like a compass needle to true north even in unconsciousness.]

[Chase doesn’t dare wake him—breathes with the gentleness of a mouse, for fear of unsettling his Master, bringing him away from the dream world.

But there is an ache in Chase’s chest and it calls out to that heat of the man behind him. He yearns to be held. To feel that scratch of beard against his neck, to have a dark, rolling whisper in his ear remind him that all will be fine, and taken care of and safe.

But this is something he has to face alone. When he steps out across the boarder of this suite, it is a journey he has to make alone, and more lonely still, will be the walk back.

He isn’t even sure he will find the words to say.

His brows knit tightly together as he closes his eyes in a pinch, willing the pain to ebb. Willing himself not to fear.]

[Denver wakes gentle, muted and quiet. The wrap of sheets around him cool against his skin, even the rise of his chest feels tender.

He cannot remember that last time he was not yanked violently back to consciousness.

This is new. It’s all so fledgling, suspended on every breath that doesn’t rasp an anomaly and yet it feels like a half-remembered dream, wisps and pale whispers at the edge of his remembering. A re-awakening of softness. He shifts, scruff catching on the pillow, eyes tracing the lithe line of a sparrow bird spine until he hits the nape of Chase’s neck. A delicate line of hairs, the fragile cupping of the skull.

They’d shifted apart during the last few hours, Chase restless enough when he’s awake for it to spill over into sleep. As Denver watches half-lidded where Chase’s trapezius meets the curled shell of his ear, there’s a tremor dancing over Chase’s frame. A pause, a clench for control, a hitch in breath that if Denver were anybody else, it would not have been caught.

But they are too attuned to each other. Always have been, last night a culmination of gravitational inevitability, this morning a tranquil close orbit.]

I can hear you thinking.

[He curls his arm over the boy’s waist, tucks him in closer and noses right at the base of his hairline.]

#mouring #chat: Chase #Chase

edge-of-kane

Mo[u]rning

[There’s a heavy ache when he wakes. It’s sweetened by a bliss that sweeps over his marks and bruises like a rolling fog, caressing Denver’s path of darkened touches, a new Master’s trail, an urgent, burning history on Chase’s skin.

Things had changed quickly, swiftly. In bites and grinds and vice-like grips, they had changed and Chase has surrendered to each hot press with wild-wanton sighs.

But morning brings him a hit of reality and his ribs feel bruised around his heart as he blinks softly awake, dark lashes fluttering around crystal and cerulean eyes.

The sheets smell of Denver and he inhales them like a soothing steam of salt. His narrow, bony back is curled away from the Master, sleeping densely and stoically behind him, as he does everything else, and Chase’s fingers curl and unfurl in the bedding, feeling both calmed and yet deeply unsettled.

The morning–a glance to the clock tells him it’s only 4:30, still, and the sun is only starting to think about rising–has brought with it a deep, sinking truth. A truth he is not quite ready to handle on his own, but knows it’s the way it must be done.]

chasing-denver-kane

James Bond always made it look so damn glamorous. If only people really knew the kind of things Denver had done for his country.

#mourning #chat: Chase #Chase

edge-of-kane:

The writers always immortalize falling in love as a leap of faith, a headlong hurtle into the unknown, the joy and pleasure of extension and the swoop as your stomach registers the fall.

To Denver, it’s nothing more, nothing less than a relief.

He can feel every muscle in him unwind half a turn of the clock. Unbow, Unbend, unbreak. Love — his brain trips over the word, ungainly in a way Denver seldom ever is — is a sigh, the exhalation carrying with it the weariness that’s been permanently affixed to his bones. It leaves him gently, buoyed softly by Chase’s breaths mingling with his own.

It’s the solace in that first sip of hot coffee on a fogged morning. The soothing sensation of being sheltered and warm at home and the comfort of the possibility of the day.

It’s the stretch of sore muscles and glorious slick of sweat after a good run. After a good fuck.

The exhale after taking the shot and watching the mark go down.

It’s the feeling of finally achieving quiet, in a world that endeavors to be loud. It’s silencing the softly muttered threats that have been Denver’s constant, his paranoia that has clung to him slippery and needy as a shadow.

It’s coming back to a cheeky grin, the way the world seems a little bit more vibrant when seen through robin’s egg eyes.

Everything is crisp, polished, and unspoiled in a way that Denver is troubled is too vulnerable to be real. Before, Denver was built of granite walls. Now he’s full of saplings, bendable, easily discouraged, raw and new.

Love is the terrifying realization that your whole world is a person now.

Denver swallows against the grain, feels the click of his throat. Feels the tremor in his hands start again.

He has no context for this, no true north after the rearranging.

He has never needed anybody the way he knows he needs Chase.

It has been a blur of names and faces and scattered nights and that quiet rush of potential that would inevitably get stamped out like a petulant wildfire by the job, or by Denver himself. His refusal to crack himself open and allow a fissure in his armor would inevitably put enough distance between him and any lovers to suffocate any kind of hope.

He could never afford the kind of weakness that orienting your world around one person. Aligning your whole existence, rigging it all to fall with a single stroke, always seemed like sheer stupidity to him.

And yet Chase crawled inside him anyway.

He’s never let anything get this far.

And yet Chase is crying. Huge heaving, wracking things and it startles Denver. Chase is shaking hard enough in his arms he might just fly apart, as if the words meant to hold him up, meant to offer the same quiet comfort, have stripped him to the bone. There’s sheer wonderment in his eyes, through sticky lashes and the lines around his mouth spell a worlds of old aches, and Denver can’t understand how Chase didn’t know.

How could he not know how irrevocably Denver was his. From the first.

Denver has always been all or nothing.]

[It does come subtly sneaking in, the way a shadow extends as the sun drops in the sky. The realization of the darkness he’s opened Chase up to.

Immediately on the heels of this realization come shuffling resignedly in just how much Denver can destroy the will o’wisp of a boy caged in his arms right now. As Chase shakes with another sob.

He’s always been good at picking up on vulnerabilities. And this one was right in front of his eyes, he refused to see it because it meant his own failing. Chase has no idea the darkness he’s succumbed to by loving him but Denver is helpless to it. Utterly lost to Chase’s luminescence. He’s a moth to a flame, not matter how evolved he thinks he is. The warm, merry dancing firelight of Chase drew him inexorably in.

How can one so capable of killing, so successful at death, be fit for love?

And yet does it matter? He’s here now. And there’s no other word for the tug in his chest at Chase’s tears, the shiver of his skin in all the places they’re pressed together, the softness he can feel spreading through his ligaments.

And so he sets his jaw, resolves from this moment on to protect Chase from a world too cruel to know its own terrible strength. It’s not a job he feels wholly qualified for, the sheer magnitude of it staggering him — all he’s ever known is how to be alone.

But perhaps one so skilled at destruction should know how to thwart it.

There’s a desperation here, as if now that Denver has allowed himself to be the one holding Chase up, everything took a sudden drop. And Chase really let himself fall.

He’s kissing him through his sobs like he’s trying to unzip Denver and push himself inside. Like Denver is the only shelter in a world that’s on fire and he can’t quite unlock the door but he knows there’s absolute safety inside.

Only yours.

He permits himself to revel for a few scant seconds, in Chase. In all of him, in how thoroughly he is his, and perversely imagines swatting Hunter and Owen out of the boy’s head and out of his heart like fruit flies.

It’s shameless, the way Chase pulls his hand down to cup him, feel his heat and desperation against Denver’s solid palm and yet why should he be ashamed? He’s Denver’s. All Denver’s. Only Denver’s.

Denver is his.

Denver wants Chase closer, wants him impossibly close, wants to fit himself into those flighty limbs, that scattered grin. Can taste the salt of his tears and wants to be the only one responsible for those. Wants them borne of pleasure, of joy and exquisite agony under his hands.

Ruthless. Relentless. All or nothing. A freight train at full speed or an immovable pillar. They all had their own metaphors for him at MI6. If only they could bloody see him now.

Something terminal, and final slots into place, that sliver of Chase Denver was always pursuing, was in denial of pursuing, that relentless exhaustive feeling of never being able to have him whole settles finally. Finally.

He’ll take care of him.

He wants to encompass him, claim him, brand him and hold him until it sticks so the rest of the world knows he’s Denver’s responsibility. He thinks about taking the boy in his mouth, his thighs on the marble, wringing Chase out with wrecked sighs and those desperate fists in his hair but it’s not enough, it’s too impersonal, not enough of their skin touching for Denver to feel satisfied.

He wants Chase to be able to fall. Doesn’t want to have him put any effort in at all.

He pulls Chase off the counter, hands curled around those light thighs, and counts on Chase to know, to hook his ankles behind his back, to cling ever closer so they can make it to the seemingly far journey to the bedroom.]

You’re going to be good for me. You’re always so good for me, Chase.

[It’s pressed in between scorching kisses, the heat rolling off them like an afterhaze to their desperation. And Denver is determined to get Chase’s breath to hitch only on his touch, instead of steadily the way it’s hitching now. It’s all salt and snot and Denver is reveling still, that he gets to have this.]

Always so good. Only good for me.

[He’s messy, growling at the clothes Chase has on and ripping them haphazardly off off off until he’s got only dusted skin under his hands as they fall to the bed. Denver’s careful with his weight this time, knows how breakable Chase’s bones are. He surges up for another smashing of lips, a violence to it that they both seem to crave, before biting his way across a collarbone and down down down to Chase’s thighs, to his cock.]

You can come when you need to.

[His teeth connect with hipbone, but he soothes it with his tongue. With a kiss. He’s going to worship this boy until neither of them can see straight. And then he’s going to keep him in his bed and never let him go.]

Don’t hold back. I want to hear you.

[He nips a mark that will bruise beautifully into where Chase’s right thigh meet his arse, before shifting Chase bodily — it will never tire Denver, how easily Chase is maneuvered by him — licking a stripe wet and rich right over the crease between his cheeks, the pucker of his hole.]

[It’s been like this, always.

It’s been like this, since day one. Chase toeing lines, testing how many of them he can cross, but only just enough to spark a fire bright enough to feel it burn his skin in filthy waves—never enough to destroy.

It’s been this dance, between them—and for Chase, it’s been a game he’s played with many, because it’s the result that he craves, the raw, riveting vibrations of reprimand, the tingle of fear.

He has tested his limits with Denver since as long as he can remember, and Denver has never failed to deliver so beautifully. Even when Chase has crossed more lines than he’s meant to—even when he’s angered him out of actions that were not as much playfully on the offense, as they were defensive and reactionary and youthfully out of order.

Even when it’s been a sore mistake of a boy who’s still just a boy, Denver has handled him well. As he should. As Chase deserved, never more, though always better, never less, though always fair.

He’s always reached out, whether it be in affection or discipline, he’s reached out and touched Chase, and that, to the boy, is all that had mattered to him. To be acknowledged, to be addressed, even in expression of anger and hot tears.

Chase has always hated fighting with Denver, but he’d take the man’s terrifying and searing anger, over indifference any day.

And now, he gets in a whirlwind, a rush, exactly what he’s been craving from the man. He gets to feel that delightful snap of Denver letting go, of Denver releasing a chain from around his own neck and plowing forward onto Chase without hesitation. He is rewarded with snapping muscle, rough hands, impatient scruff and teeth.

Which is why Chase’s small sound of surprise when Denver heaves him off the counter, quickly turns into a moan of something else entirely. His groin, not yet hard when he’d urged Denver to touch him, now sings with a screaming possibility. He’d been flushed with a rain of overwhelmed arousal before, but now he twitches under the surge of it. His toes are curling even before his back hits Denver’s bed.

His world is a blur of torn cotton and greedy teeth. His throat riding a melody he can’t control, because Denver is touching him this way, abusing his clothes this way, to get to him. Out of desperation for him, and Chase is so slave to the satisfaction that brings, that he gives in quickly to the way his vision and consciousness swim around him.

And though so much of this is new, so much of today and this moment brings new (and even frightening) things, the element of being victim to Denver in every way is not new from any angle you look at it. Chase is quite swiftly somewhere far away, lost under a murky layer or five of Denver’s dominance, his robust power and assertion of lust.

Or is it of something else, now. Has it always been of something else?

Denver peppers Chase in bites and scrapes of teeth, and Chase arches into every single one with a wine and a choked breath. And then he’s been stripped of each of his garments in the blink of an eye and his feet are in the air, his knees nearing his chest.

Chase’s arms fly over his head, his fingers scrambling for purchase, feeling like his tongue is swelling in his mouth and keeping him from capturing a proper inhale.

His heart in his chest is deafening to him, and he wonders if it’s the same for Denver. If he could even hope to hear it over the escort’s panting, his litany of creamy cries.

Fingernails bite into sheets and he thinks they might tear, when Denver’s tongue licks a stripe up him.

He does exactly as he’s told; he doesn’t hold back.

But he can hardly imagine being capable of anything otherwise, had the Master instructed him differently.]

Oh—oh fuck. [A sharp, mewling wine, brightly colored and ringing of desperation.] Master, fuck yes, yes, please more sir—eat my arse so good, you always feel—[he’s got off by a rush of sensation at the Master’s tongue work, and he finds one of his hands suddenly clawing into Denver’s hair, while the other is still lost somewhere in a indiscernible scatter of pillow and duvet. His thighs attempt to tighten in, due to no decision of his own, and his legs press back against Denver’s broad, hot palms that hold him there.]

[He’s drowning in the need to mark Chase up, to stake a claim on every square inch of skin and brand it hotly for himself, and he knows even that would not be enough to sate him. He’s not going to chain himself up this time. This is the flick of a lighter to a set of gasoline, he’s let his leash go. His strength and intensity are focused on a singular goal, the pounding of ‘mine’ echoing through his temple with every rush of blood from his heart.

He wants to feel those lithe hands clutching at his shoulders. Digging in to his hair, shocky nerves buzzing into pleasure at the slight pain of it. He almost nudges his head back to encourage more from Chase, almost pauses to relish the tightening of those thighs.]

Just like that. Take what you need.

[His hands are shaking from the adrenaline, his triceps twitching with the effort of holding Chase open. He can’t get his teeth on the boy hard enough, get his mouth on him soon enough, get enough of his skin and his heartbeat under him. He growls in frustration, the limitations of their bodies and how he cannot have everything at once.

He ducks his head back up, wrist punched up at an awkward angle as he holds him open, but resting his chest on Chase’s hips. God, this boy even smells like home. Hickory, a hint of smoke, and honey warm green grass. He tastes rich, and right, the salt of his skin more than just sweat, something more primal that makes Denver’s tongue itch.

There is something so perverse about wanting to preserve this boy and keep him safe and light while wanting to wreck Chase until he’s nothing but dazed whimpers, blood brought to the surface of his skin, his own come smeared on his belly and Denver to the hilt inside him. Keeping him safe within his own arms where only Denver holds power over how to ruin him.]

So fucking perfect for me. Made for this. [He kisses his way up Chase’s spine, drags his hand through his hair and whispers in his ear.] Made for me.

[His fingertips are hard pressure points that are not kind over Chase’s skin and yet they stay reverent. His skin feels raw, buzzing with a static that is disintegrating his cartilage, loosening him to be nothing but bones and the scar tissue that will never dissolve.

Denver has never been a particularly vocal lover, preferring succinct and nipping commands, relying on silence to maintain the dynamic, but god, he can’t hold back the noises Chase coaxes out of him in counterpoint tonight. Doesn’t give any thought to holding back the grunts as they kiss violently, teeth clacking together, and he’s in no headspace to stop the heavy, satisfied exhale as he gets his tongue back on Chase’s hole. He is rolling growls and huffs, grunts and swallowed rich ghosts of moans. Chase has turned him greedy, He pulls back for a breath and rasps his scruff against Chase’s lower back until it reddens and raises.

Chase in contrast is loud, and Denver only wants him louder. Only wants this moment to somehow be a broadcast for the entirety of the world to know, to hear, that those sounds are made solely for him as he brings another bruise to the surface of the skin. As he wets his fingers with spit. Yet there is still an edge to Denver’s every movement, a desperation and a world ending kind of savagery that he has only ever felt paradoxically in the worst situations his line of work has brought him to. But those instincts, that pure crystal rush of the human need to have, to take, to survive are somehow pervasive and as easy to Denver as breathing.

He works Chase open messily, his fingers almost cramping with effort, his jaw clenched and his beard uncomfortably damp with spit. Slides his middle finger in alongside his tongue, pushes at Chase’s rim insistently and feels him give immediately into it. God, this boy. He runs his thumbs soothingly over Chase’s cheeks whenever he pulls back to breathe. His hips ache from the effort of holding himself still, his shoulders straining, his cock has been leaking sticky tendrils of pre-come onto the sheets underneath him.]

[His shoulder pulls tight with the effort of holding Chase’s legs, and he barely feels it. All he feels is every minute twitch of the frame underneath him, so sensitive and reactive to every twist of his fingers. Eager and craving, with a perfect sinuous roll of his hips. This boy.] Perfect.

[He’s got three inside Chase already, and the slick rhythm and the sounds of his fingers pressing into Chase, fucking Chase are obscene and he relishes them.]

Mine.

[In a few hours he will fuck Chase slow, taking his time to unspool the boy with every hot breath, every flick of his tongue. But now, god, now he wants to be inside him sooner with every bright cry that tumbles out of Chase’s open mouth. It scares him, as it always has, and yet somehow more right now, how he will never get enough of this. Constantly ravenous for this boy.

He’s all teeth. And all impatient gentleness. For every mark he makes he soothes, but it only fuels him further to make more. Hipbones, ribs, Chase’s damn collarbone that haunts Denver at night when he’s still awake and watching Chase’s soft breaths.

God he wants to melt into him, a slow drip and dissolve of honey that runs over his skin, flush with arousal. His hands are sticky with lube, too animalistic to be precise tonight. Heat is rolling off him, he can feel sweat beading at his temples, his hair already impossibly darker with it. Chase is looking at him with pupils blown so wide, framed in obscenely long lashes, it punches the air out between Denver’s ribs. And he’s heaving his breaths, barely noticing the both of them sucking in air just so they can have another minute of this.

Chase is fluid in his arms, his arms wild and his hands clutching at whatever part of Denver he can reach, as if he too wants to bring them impossibly closer, achieve some level of atomic fusion.

It hits his heart wildly. It’s the only way to keep this safe. To keep Chase safe. Any moment he’s not in Denver’s arms is a breath and a heartbeat too long.

Stay.] Chase. [It’s sub-vocal, guttural and hostile and desperate.] It’s you. Always been you.

[He pauses before he roughly flips Chase, onto his stomach and cants his hips up harshly. He’s lining up to slide in, bareback, and he doesn’t even take a second to steady himself. Too keyed up, snapping and snarling to get inside this boy and blanket his body with his own. Knock out the world for a few minutes because he never thought he would ever bloody have this.

Tomorrow morning he’ll make the necessary arrangements, he’ll speak with Madam V privately, and tomorrow afternoon Chase’s home will be Denver’s loft. The sun lit, bright washed kitchen. His warm, far too soft for his liking, sheets.

Tomorrow morning he’ll make the call to his old handler. It’s another precipice he never thought he’d see. Tomorrow morning he’ll start the process of erasing Chase’s name from every known database, erasing his face from countless photographs available to intelligence agencies worldwide.

Tonight he feels like a wolf in his own skin, Chase his only anchor to himself, violence triumphing in his veins and yet soothed by the boy underneath him.]

#nsfw #spontaneity #Chase #chat: Chase #there are no great gifs of what their position is like in the beginning?#idk if it even makes sense...

edge-of-kane:

denverrkane:

[Denver’s whole world is rearranging.

A whisper, a feather-light slur of three words.

It starts slow, a hushed murmur falling from cupid’s bow lips, until entire cities are being rewritten, crumbled to dust and reforged, bright and sharp. It happens in a heartbeat, but it’s irreversible, it has spun the galaxy Denver thought he knew, thought he only existed in, on its axis. Rearranged the poles.

Truths become vagrant lies. Nothing more than the dust of collapsed stars, red giants folding in on themselves.

And the only truth he’s ever clung to, ever known intimately in the bedrock of his own soul is his own darkness, his own stilted and withered and incapable heart.

And it’s a lie.

It’s the only thing that’s kept him centered, kept him anchored in the wash of blood, of violence he’s slogged through. The sluggish sewage of his humanity rose up around him, and it had been the only thing that kept him upright, his true north. And now that lie has shattered apart beneath his feet in the space of a breath, leaving him with nothing… nothing but this slender whip of a boy to desperately grab as he goes under.

He’s breathless with it.

Hope and air roll over his skin, pull him magnetically back to his own body, a container that shouldn’t fit his revelations, shouldn’t fit him anymore.

…And I’m all yers, if you’ll have me. Only yers, if you’ll have me…

He feels the rasp of fingertips on his jaw… can that really be his jaw, hard and sharp underneath those sweetly questing fingertips? Are those his hands, calloused and scarred and far too big to fit over those delicate hips they’re curled around?

He feels softer than he can ever remember. Gone, beyond his reach, are his granite walls. Gone is his anger, his exhaustion, the ash in the air gone. His heartbeat is clean and sharp, fresh and green, on the cusp of spring.

Is that his breath, gasping and hoarsely exhaled?

…'Cause I can’t do this like this no more. Pretendin’ it ain’t true…

There’s a hint of pain there, and Denver can feel his throat close around a whine not of his own voluntary making, sympathetic and clawed apart all at once. The truth a bright, fluttering bird desperate to be uncaged.

They’ve been hurtling headlong into this for months. A storm head gathering rain, sweet and clean, and Denver had known…

Denver had hoped. In his traitorous heart. Proof that he had the organ after all.

It’s too much. It’s too much and not enough at the same time, making him dizzy with want, and he’s only just come back into his bones.

He’s doesn’t know what he’s capable of, anymore.

…It’s always been you. I need it to be you….]

Chase. [It’s a prayer, it always has been, the way it leaves his lips. Sacred and soft, desperate and humbled, choking on the onslaught, seared and raw.

He doesn’t know what comes out along with that one word.

It’s you.

I need you.

Stay. God, please… stay.

Chase’s lashes are sticking together, eyes shiny and bright with promise, with fear, with…

The truth consumes him, swallows him with thoughts of Chase’s sleep-softened eyes, with his cheeky, crooked grin, with the soft lilting whines that spill from that mouth as he twists in their white sheets. Their white sheets. With Chase’s never ending persistence, his wild ability to say what is truly in his heart, in his mind. The way Denver’s hands steady their constant tremors every time they reach for him.

How many times has this boy come back to him, come back to his bed, his hard silences, his rough hands? How many times has Denver ever truly been able to let him go?

Denver’s inhale takes years, he can feel the weight of it filling his lungs, can feel every atom of his rearranged being screaming in thin tinny voices at him. Chase’s eyes are on him as if he is the sun, the moon, and everything in between and Denver aches. Has to close his eyes against the force of it.

I never let myself dream I’d have this.

The words don’t come, get sewn into the roof of his mouth on the way up, but he presses himself to Chase’s lips, slow and steady. It’s nothing short of as sweet as the first time, and Denver’s hand rise to Chase’s wrists before sliding to cradle his jaw, to sweep softly through that inky swath of hair as Denver pulls back for less than a heartbeat.

He starts at Chase’s forehead, dips to taste the tears on his eyelids, gentle… more gentle than Denver thought himself capable of, leaving soft and short presses of lips along the line of one of those cheekbones, kissing a temple and feeling a sparrow-fast pulse beat beneath the skin.

Before breathing words against the delicate shell of an ear…]

I’m yours. Only yours. [The words are steel-heavy in his mouth.] I — [his hands clench, involuntary, on the parts of Chase he’s holding. Anger, old and slow, rises through him at his own inability to articulate and he braces himself, protects his new green shoots of grass, the tender parts of his heart he’s only just discovered.]

You’re mine. [He shakes Chase a little as he says it, vehement and intentional, and he knows he’s leaving bruises with his fingertips.] Only mine. All mine. [I need you. I’ve never needed anything before. And now if I let you go I’ll fly apart into a hundred thousand shards.]

I need you. I need it to be you. [I love you it echoes.]

[Denver has never been this much made of air. Never has he been this soft fingered, gentle-touched. And it says more than words ever could—chokes the breath right out of Chase’s lungs. Because Denver’s lips are on his eyelid, cheekbone, temple and his hand is on his jaw, weaving through his hair… vice-gripping at a hip enough to have Chase letting out a moan that is halfway a product of the bruises it’s forming, the other half, direct result of this man saying those words.

Only yours.

Never has Chase dreamed Denver to say this to him. Never had he assumed himself deserving of it. Never had he thought it would ever happen, because how could he come to expect something that he can’t even offer himself?

But he’s offering it now. Has just offered it a few seconds, heartbeats ago, and it feels like time has stood still and he’s floated out of his body and he’s seeing all of their past moments together on one playing field.

A balcony of smoke and stolen, unpermitted kisses.

A heated argument, pounding on the door, oranges rolling on the floor.

Tears, apologies, misunderstandings. Chase on his knees begging for forgiveness he doesn’t think he deserves.

Denver giving it to him. Always awarding it to him. His hands on his face, gaze steady, ever steady, kissing him, touching him, allowing him to be his. Calling him a good boy. Muttering in soft whispers over and over and over until Chase falls asleep in the sticky afterglow of being his.

I need you.

It’s impossible.

Utterly impossible, and it rips Chase’s chest open like hot claws, and it hurts, it hurts because it’s a deep-set desire he’s yearned for so long that the idea of having it handed to him, spoken to him, that he’s needed, he’s needed by the very person whom he needs, needed by this man who might keep him, protect him, value him as Chase values him—it tears an almost sob from his throat.

And with it comes the sharp and very real ache of his world crashing down. His home, his boyfriends, his cat. Hunter and Owen and Chase being Hunter and Owen and Chase no more. Hunter and Owen not being there when he gets home, having to leave them, knowing they’ll hate him for it, knowing he’ll hate himself. Knowing they’ll ache as he aches.

And it hurts, because it feels unfair, like he has to wade through heartbreak to get to where he’s always been destined to go. So his hands shake and he cries, because Denver loves him, he can feel it, and he loves Denver and this place on the counter can be his new home—and it’s so perfectly bitter sweet. There’s relief tangling with agony in his chest, and every shaky inhale is one of both distraught, grateful adoration and pain.

This is right, this is right. But it means that what was once upside down needs to be flipped again and he’s scared of how he might survive another rocking of his world.

He kisses Denver hard and fast, permission or not, because it’s all he can do. It’s a desperate bite of starvation, and he’s inhaling Denver’s taste and smell and clinging to him like the sole pillar that will keep him afloat. His legs tighten around the man’s hips and his fingers grope at his shoulders, his neck, and he’s pushing so hard into his mouth that they clack teeth once, a kiss that’s needy and scared and encompassed.

Encompassed in Denver, and Chase needs him, because Denver needs him, and it’s the most fulfilling thing he’s ever had in his short, complicated and sad life.

Nails below a jaw, in the drifting of scruff down a neck. He can taste his own tears on Denver’s lips now. His chest hitches and he tries to pull him closer.] Please. Fuck—Denver, please. [He’s begging for something but he doesn’t know what. And then his left hand is seeking out Denver’s right, guiding it between their bodies in an insistent, thoughtless tug. Placing it over his groin and rising into it, a whimper in his throat and a sigh on his lips. It’s brazen, for a submissive, and it’s bold, probably too bold, but the moment calls for it, and he can’t see through the haze of his overwhelming fear and passion. He doesn’t care. Doesn’t care—because either Denver will forgive it this time, considering the weight of the moment, or he will get angry, and throw chase down on the table. Fuck him raw, wild. Either result Chase would be okay with.

But as it stands, he begs to stay right here, with Denver, under his hand, under his lips, and be allowed to cling to him as his strength drains from his body, pools in his groin and siphons the life from him.] Please touch me, sir. Let me cum fer ya. Make me cum fer ya, please. [All breath, rambling and senseless and he’s drowning in submission, lost in this world that he swears Denver created, or at least one that he rules. He can barely hold himself up any longer.

His lips fold wet against Denver’s, sweet and spiced as he rocks his hips forward into that placed hand again. What is intended as a moan turns into a whine.] Need ya t’touch me master, please. Please let me cum fer ya like a good boy. Make me yer good boy, please sir. Please.