hellllllo! i loved lapping at the edges. i have a question: are you ever going to write vegas bottoming to pete?
Thanks for the ask, and I’m glad you enjoyed the fic, anon!
Actually, most of the pairs I wrote pre-VP were vers in my work. We’re not often given explicit canon preferences, and sexual roles only hold as much meaning as the people involved feel they should, so why not play around with it?
With VP specifically, I feel it’s a little trickier, because I think Vegas would initially conflate topping with control/dominance/masculinity. I would guess he’s mostly bottomed to men who wanted to assert their power over him, and also as a manipulative show of trust/sincerity with guys like Tawan (“Kinn wouldn’t let you do this to him, would he?”). From that perspective, “submitting” to bottom is a debasement, and untangling that feeling from the kind of sex Vegas has with Pete will take work—and probably also some frustration along the way.
(mini-idea for how that might look:)
He doesn’t tell Pete what he’s about to do, the first time. He ties him down, and blindfolds him, and feels slightly better for having done so. Pete is very confused when Vegas rolls the condom onto him. Vegas enjoys watching his face as he sinks down—the shock and uncertainty, the furrow of his brow. He likes shredding Pete’s expectations.
He doesn’t like the pleasure in the arch of Pete’s back. Doesn’t like the flush in his cheeks or the breathless oh on his lips. Subconsciously, Vegas doesn’t want it to be good. He wants to treat it as something Pete is owed, and then wants to treat it like something he’s taking from Pete instead of giving to him.
It makes him cruel about it. A hand on Pete’s throat when Pete tries to speak. Teeth digging into his tongue, nails leaving furrows at odd angles with the scars on his chest.
Pete gets off anyway. Pete gets off, bright and gasping, and raises his shoulders after to offer a cradling space for Vegas’s head, and Vegas—blinks hard, and stares down at him, and then can’t. Something inside him chokes. He stumbles off the bed—swipes uselessly at the lube on his thighs—mumbles that he needs a glass of water—shuts the door behind him.
He leans against the kitchen sink for several listless minutes, glaring down the drain. There is an emptiness in his chest where the shame would normally roost, and he thinks his lungs might collapse without it there to hold his shape.
When he returns to the bedroom, Pete has worked his way out of the ropes on his wrists. He is a curled-up stillness and a tension, face pale against the dark of the blindfold. Worry smeared across his mouth.
The emptiness in Vegas is where Pete is meant to fit, so Vegas goes to him—shoves his face into Pete’s stomach, arms snaking under his back, and tries to make it comforting instead of suffocating.
It was shitty to leave him here. Probably the whole thing was shitty, whether Pete liked fucking him or not; probably Pete is some kind of pissed off and he just hasn’t said it yet; probably Pete is searching for the words to address what a fuck-up Vegas is without setting him off. Pete chose not to follow him into the kitchen, so maybe that’s the signal and Vegas should have left.
Or maybe Pete let him choose to return.
Pete’s hand grips his nape tight. Slowly, they remember how to breathe.
while im talking bad fanfic lubes: rosin is only used with bowed string instruments, not plucked ones! it goes on the bow hairs to make them grip the strings better! most importantly, it comes in a SOLID CAKE and is STICKY. it's literally the opposite of lube. and jaskier thewitcher wouldn't be carrying it around anyway, because he plays THE LUTE
Continuation from a conversation with @lu-sn lu and @supernovasimplicity boots. part 1 | part 2
“So,” Vegas says, carefully casual, “what did the quizzes say today?”
Pete, mouth full of delicious hand-pulled noodles, slides over his phone and the pictures he not-so-subtly snapped
Vegas scrutinizes the screen for a few moments. Finally says—“What a bullshit answer. Why would I steal your toothbrush?” He zooms in on Tankhun’s handwritten addition. “Haven’t taken any of your teeth, either.”
“Yeah, but it worked out okay,” Pete replies, muffled through the noodles. “I just picked my answer based on if you had.”
Vegas frowns. “It’s not your answer, then.”
“Does it matter? Like you said, it’s bullshit anyway.”
“…What would you have answered?”
“Probably depends on which tooth.” Pete swallows and goes for his next bite. “We can just take a quiz, if you want.”
Vegas mocks the idea but then gets weirdly intense when he’s the one taking the compatibility quiz (this quiz that will externally validate or repudiate his relationship with Pete)
He tries to answer based on how he thinks Pete will answer
He fails to realize that Pete is already doing the same for him
“Huh,” Pete says after he tallies their score. “Hold on, that doesn’t seem…huh.”
“What.”
…They scored a 7%
That evening, Macau walks in on the biggest sulkfest-pretending-it’s-not-a-sulkfest-because-these-quizzes-are-bullshit-anyway he’s ever seen
Macau takes the same quiz with Pete, just to prove it’s bullshit
They score an 89
“See?” Pete says after. “Now we know it’s nonsense.”
Macau snickers. “I dunno, I’m starting to come around on it.”
A moment later, seeing how tightly his hia’s fists have clenched, he relents—“I mean, obviously it’s bullshit, just look at this question. ‘What do you do when someone flirts with your lover in front of you’—‘shoot them on sight’ isn’t even given as an option.”
“That’s a bad one,” Pete agrees. “I figured the closest choice for Vegas would be the—” He flushes and shoots a glance at Macau— “seduction answer, so I picked that too.”
Vegas, who picked “stay calm and trust my lover to respond” because he (wrongly) figured that was the Pete answer, falls into a prickly silence
They discover the extent of the confusion a couple minutes later. Pete laughs—of course they failed when they were both trying to compensate for each other’s natural responses
Vegas does not laugh. He does not like the dots he's connecting
If this is the real explanation for Pete’s high scores with Tankhun, where else is Pete compensating for Vegas’s inadequacies?
From an excellent conversation with @lu-sn lu and @supernovasimplicity boots. Part 1 here.
By evening three, Vegas 100% knows Tankhun’s trying to quiz-trap Pete
He also vaguely knows he’s not supposed to tell Pete he can’t see his friends, because that would be controlling and Pete might leave if Vegas gets controlling
Pete will come home. He needs Vegas to feed him
And Vegas isn’t so pathetic he can’t get by on his own for an evening or three. He’ll just make dinner. Pete will come home. He’ll eat. It’ll be fine
(The fridge is at this point so overstuffed with the fruits of Vegas’s anxiety cooking that Macau’s getting concerned)
Pete meanwhile is four hours into Tankhun’s new quiz and getting twitchy. He’s started inventing reasons to call Vegas to “ask for quiz responses”
“You were born on a Tuesday, right?” he greets Vegas. Tankhun can’t hear Vegas’s response on the other end (not that he’s trying)
It’s a three-minute call at most. A lot of hums and yeses on Pete’s side—and not even an “I love you” at the end, which is promising
Except afterwards, Pete announces that he has to go now
But he’s barely started the quiz??
Pete gathers up the debunked quizzes Tankhun gifted him and begins to put on his shoes. “It’s dinnertime—”
“Eat here.”
“—and Vegas made hand-pulled noodles,” Pete explains, half-apologetically
And then he is simply gone
Tankhun watches on the security cameras as Pete exits the building and crosses the front sidewalk to meet Vegas, leaned up against his car flicking a lighter like a low-class goon
And—Tankhun makes Arm zoom and rewind so he can watch this part twice, then has him loop it for good measure—yes, that is a skip in Pete’s step the moment he sees Vegas waiting for him. Tankhun is steamed
Tankhun loves Pete. Pete was his most understanding bodyguard. Tankhun was the first to notice Pete missing, and the one who held a funeral for him, and the one who took him to Tankhun’s favorite place and sang karaoke at him to cheer him up when he was struggling
And here Pete is, telling him again and again in multiple-choice format that Vegas is a good cook and does thoughtful things around the apartment and cares for his (horrid) little brother and knows what Pete needs at the end of a long day
(Tankhun does not think to ask what Pete needs at the end of a long day, and Pete would not answer if he did)
Certainly it’s a lie and a facade—certainly Pete is brainwashed—certainly Vegas masterminded this whole plot as a slap in the face for Tankhun specifically
And yet—
“Make more popcorn,” Tankhun snaps at Pol before the thought can complete itself. “Apparently the only thing Pete is loyal to is his stomach.”
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