》 WARNINGS: 18+ | MATURE: allusions to smut but nothing graphic/explicit
》 TAGS: Gender-Neutral Reader. Angst. Mutual Pining. Idiots in Love (but in Romania). Fluff. Love and Romance described as death and decay and broken religious imagery. Y'know. The usual Yey tags.
》 NOTES: I recently got into Augury (just a fancy word for bird watching, innit??) so this feels more whimsical and nonsensical than usual. Good luck with this one, lads.
It's like clockwork.
A text comes—some variation of are you awake, or are you home? in that strange Price-esque way he manages, even through the stark face of a message (biting derision, Gaz calls it, adds: man can't pretend to be a little less angry even over text)—and then a phone call.
Always after midnight.
Devil's hour.
When your phone rings at half past three in the morning, hearing Price's gruff perfunctory greeting of "alrigh'?" bleeding through the phone, and right into your ear doesn't surprise you anymore.
(Not much does, really.)
These phone calls are a strange, almost paradoxical thing that both happens often enough not to be considered rare, and yet: it still seems outlandish enough each time it happens for you to ever really let yourself expect it. Odd. Price doesn't strike you as the type of man to need to rely on his friends—the seldom few he does have, you often joke (always a shade too close to the truth like most jokes are; the one that makes him dip his head in a nod of quiet acquiesce, and make you wonder if you went too far)—but he's never given you a reason for them.
Never answered why.
They just—
Happened.
(Over and over and over again—)
The brief conversation in the oddest hour of the morning started a new tradition. A routine. Expecting a phone call from Price at least once a week was now so commonplace, you almost felt empty when days had passed, and your phone never rang.
He can't sleep. Neither can you.
And so, he calls you.
It's not always about a mission. Most of the conversations that take place are about absolutely nothing. Everything, sometimes, when you pry apart the bones locked around your chest, and bare your insides to the warm cellphone clutched in your hand. To the voice on the other line.
A man you know—have known since you first stepped into his training ring, and into the orbit of Captain John Price—and barely understand at all.
You know everything about him—his name, his title, where he grew up, went to school, his favourite food, his least favourite drink, what he does after a mission; his greatest fear, his biggest worry, the insecurity that gnarls in his chest, and the weight of the world that sometimes feels like it might splinter his bones, grinding them into gun cotton—and nothing at all.
The reason why he called you all those months ago, invited you on a mission you had no real part to play in, and why he still does is a mystery.
(Loneliness, maybe.
Insomnia, you find, is more bearable when it's shared between two.)
But that was before.
The last phone call you got from Price had been nearly three months ago after you touched down in Heathrow following a botched mission in Tenerife.
You heard the murmurs about Shepherd, about Zyani that trickled through the mess hall (when there was no battle to be fought, they gossiped), and so his radio silence makes sense considering he was halfway across the globe for the bulk of it.
In the midst of it, though, you would find yourself staring blankly at your phone, screen black and void of any calls, and wonder if it had anything to do with your offer. With his swift rejection.
When it rings after an aching expanse of time, you can't place the gnarled tension in your chest. The uncomfortable feeling that blooms in your heart at the sight of his name flashing in neon blue.
Price seems almost surprised to hear your voice on the other line instead of the monotonous droll of your voicemail.
"Up for a trip?" He asked when you cleared the sleep from your throat, and rubbed blearily at your eyes. "Jus' me and you."
It feels like nothing at all had changed since he last called you with an offer to accompany him to Tenerife.
"Just like old times," you murmur, a touch distant. Hedging.
"Right," he says, words glueing to his throat. You hear the click when he clears it, and pretend you're only pulling the phone away from your ear to check the time.
Half past three. Of course. Of course.
"Got a proposition for you."
Typical Price: he gets right to the point.
There is no staying up talking about everything, nothing, and all the in between until well past five in the morning when your alarm sounds for your run. Or his for a shower before heading into headquarters at Hereford to reach a new class of hopefuls when he isn't saving the world with his infamous team.
The very same one he refuses to let you be a part of.
(Better on your own, he says.
You think you'd be better with him—
His team. Team. Not—)
The blooming heat under your cheeks is never acknowledged in the sanctity of your lonesome bedroom with his rough voice pitched low enough to squeeze through the little holes of your speaker. Tucked away to pine while still somehow making a fool of yourself.
You're only half listening when he murmurs about his proposition.
It's a simple mission, he tells you. The usual grab and go.
Usual, because only in this work could kidnapping bad people in foreign countries be considered normal. Routine.
(Legal, kind of.)
"It's in Romania," he murmurs, and the tinny sound of his voice through the old dial phone of the inn he's staying at between missions makes him sound lighter than he usually does. Airy. "I know you liked visiting the last time—"
It drags a snort from you. "Yeah, on holiday. Something about this whole ordeal tells me I won't be enjoying mici in Târgovişte much."
"Well. Consider this a pre-paid holiday. I'll do all the work, you just 'ave to sit there, and—"
"Look pretty?"
"—listen."
You hum. "I think I'm much better at looking pretty than I am at listening, John."
"Yeah," it's dry, derisive. "Don't I know it."
Silence lapses between you—intentional, of course. He's letting you think it over. Weigh the pros and cons of a free trip to Romania. With four hands and two heads you could clear it up before the allotted time frame, giving you those extra, precious few days to linger in the country.
Tying up loose ends is what will end up on the official report. Discouraging witnesses from coming forward with stacks of Euros stuffed deep in their pockets.
Making sure no stone has been left unturned—the Americans, in particular, like that one. They never ask questions when you wax about patriotism, and ensure there's no chance of calamity. They like their ends tied, and their witnesses happy.
It's all a cash business. More than enough money wired to an infant account under an preconstructed name. Passwords and identification handed to you in a sealed envelope. It's unlikely that anyone would ever track said witnesses down to discover the person given hush money was actually a nightclub in Mamaia or a fancy pub in Cluj.
Illegal, of course. Should you ever get caught, you'd be reprimanded. Punished. Made an example of.
(But who doesn't skim a bit from the top? Especially when the pile is given to you by the military.)
"Fine," you huff, and aim for some semblance of acquiescence in your tone despite knowing full well that you've yet to turn down these impromptu partnerships with him since they started two years ago.
Moldova. Egypt. Chad. Canada. The Philippines. Taiwan. Tenerife. Your odd partnership has taken you further across the world than the sedentary office job of pretending to make a difference ever did.
The place he said you were better suited for. You refuse to wonder what that means.
"Okay. I'll go. But I'm not doing anything at all except enjoying the Romanian countryside."
"Wouldn't expect any less from you."
You want to say, then why bring me at all? Why not take Gaz or Soap or Laswell? Why sideline me so blatantly only to keep asking for my help when it's never really needed? but the words are stuck in your throat. Trapped in their esophageal prison.
Instead, you say: "count me in then, I suppose," and wonder when you became such a coward.
"Mm. I should let you get some sleep, then."
You make a noncommittal noise in the back of your throat. It's been three months of nothing but unanswered texts that gradually faded into nothing by the third week. An island of uncertainty. Worry. Dread. Fear. Wondering what you did wrong, and coming, quite conclusively (and indignantly) to the conclusion that you didn't.
Hearing his voice again, tinny and always shades softer than you've ever heard him speak before, unearths the sarcophagus you laid your feelings inside; a sudden and abrupt disinterment of everything you tried hard to ignore. The desecration cracks the tomb wide open. The flood of everything you tried to bury blooms; the foetid sickness of your festering wants taste a little bit like regret, and even more like hope.
Helpless, your finger gnarl around the blossom of what laid bare, bones and rotted flesh, and the weight of it in your palm feels more comforting than ever before. Made more potent, you think, by the absence of him.
It's an unignorable truth that you missed him.
And so, you cling to the offering like it's a sacred trinket.
"How—," the words are rough, gritty, when they slip through the moulted dirt clogging your throat. Dredged up in the wake of the sudden excavation. You swallow hard when he makes a noise. Force yourself to claw through the humus. "How are you, John?"
You want to add something you know will make him huff, call you cheeky, something a little coquetry in the wake of your exhumation. Such would be your exequy, but the words are buried once more when the dirt shifts as he draws in a deep, staticky breath.
He's not usually a loquacious man in person, but something seems to crack open, shift, when it's well after midnight. A secret, a new side of him, shared only with you.
You don't expect him to respond. You hope, but you don't assume.
When he sucks in a breath, a staticky little noise that reverberates through the receiver, victory snakes across your vertebrae. Unwarranted and unearned, but the stinging reminder of it does little to stop it from nursing on the marrow of hope pullulating inside of you.
"Been better," he offers, and the muted shift of him relaxing into the starchy pillows cuts through the line. Settling, you think, for the beginning of your routine. "Didn't have much of a chance to call you. How've you been?"
"Been better," you echo, a wry twist of humour snaking across your lips when he offers a huff in response. "Lots to get caught up on, I suppose."
And you do.
You talk about nothing. Everything.
Your darkest secrets were spilled out in those phone calls at Devils Hour—fears, uncertainty, failures. This is no different. He tells you about Shepherd blinding them all with his dedication to the cause. About how he would have let Laswell rot to save his own arse, but knew, of course, that not letting Price and Gaz rescue her would have raised even more alarms.
They cornered an animal, he spits. One who led them around by the nose for years.
Bloody American Politicians, he grumbles.
No better than the bloody English, you snark back. At least they're honest about their motives when it all comes tumbling down around them, and don't hide it under layers of the blooded elite. Of status.
He mumbles to himself for a moment before begrudgingly conceding your point.
It buzzes in the static. A lapse in the midst of espionage tainted catch-up that makes your hindbrain tense for what he might say next.
He shifts, then, offers even softer than the hello he greeted you with:
"What about you? Get up to any trouble while I was gone?"
He listens to you bisect yourself in a midnight confessional, letting your rotted guts tumble out in deep lags of silence you wish weren't as comfortable as they are.
He talks, too.
Tells you about woes of nepotism, and the muppets they send him for basic training. The fleet of soldiers he doesn't want to carry on his back, but does anyway. The losses he couldn't prevent. The monsters he made.
"I wouldn't change anything," he always says, as if you don't know him by now. As if you need reminding of just how tar-coated his heart really is. "I'd do it all over again."
You say, "I know, John." And when you hear the hitch in his breath, you add: "you wouldn't be you if you did. I trust your judgement—no matter what."
Explicit trust. He runs from it.
He makes a noise in the back of his throat. It always sounds a little bit like a mourning toll.
"I… should let you get some sleep."
It's something he always says during your late night phone calls.
Par the routine, the same question claws through the mess of words unsaid in your oesophagus until it reaches the seam between your teeth and lips.
Why me, Price?
But every tradition has its rules.
You let him run, and wonder if he feels as cleansed as you do after baring your soul to someone who knows you better than most of your closest relatives, your friends.
(Or if the silence that lingers when you hang up feels just as oppressive and empty to him as it does to you.)
Wishful yearning.
Instead, you say: "try to get some sleep, John. I'll talk to you later."
And then, like the hypocrite you are, you lay awake and wonder why.
He meets you at Heathrow, and really—
It sometimes surprises you just how intimidating a man like Price is.
He glowers down at the phone in his too large hand, eyes downcast, and brows pinched by whatever is irritating him now—emojis, you later discover.
(Bloody things make no sense to me, he grumbles, shoulder knocking against yours when you make yourself comfortable on the plane.
You gently remind him he's barely even forty.)
Price is an indomitable man.
Tall. Broad shouldered. The heft of his bicep is actuated when he curls his hand around the strap of his duffle bag, muscles bulging. Flexing.
It's hard not to stare at him.
His shoulders roll back when you approach, eyes flickering up from unravelling the nuance of modern text messaging from a man who came out of the womb a fully fleshed adult with a mortgage.
The corners of his eyes relax from their narrow slits when recognition bleeds into ashlar blue. His mouth parts a little; the flash of nicotine stained teeth.
The furrow of his brow flexes like it wants to smooth itself out, but something passes across his face—unknowable, brief; the incipient markings of something that makes him look a little more at ease in the bustling confines of Heathrow (hell on earth you have both very quickly, and unanimously, acknowledged)—and it's pulled back together. Irritation, but not at you. Never at you.
(But if not at you, then who?
Why, you wonder, does he always look so cross in your presence?)
He clears his throat. The grumble of his voice, full and robust, and so different from the tinniness of a phone, nearly makes you jump when it glides across your ears, abrasive and raw. A rough growl.
(You wonder sometimes if the brassiness of his timbre is from choking back apoplectic snarls all day.)
"Took you long enough."
You huff. "London is a nightmare at this time of day, John. As if you could've gotten here any faster."
"You chose to live in it."
Another sigh falls from the split seam of your lips. "It's not that bad."
"London smells like shite."
"As if Liverpool smells any better," you volley back, watching the subtle shift in his expression fade from the pinched world wariness almost permanently etched into the lines of his face into something more relaxed. Agreeable. Or rather, as agreeable as Price could be in the middle of Heathrow, and surrounded by people.
He opens his mouth, then, as if to remind you of the sea-salted scent of Liverpool, briny and bitter. Smog and hardwork. Oil, gun cotton. The city smells like the working class. Blue collar. Hands gnarled from the factories, and stained permanently with grease.
A distinct thrum of pride, of home, rumbles through him with each new add-on to why Liverpool, in his opinion, is the best choice to call home.
(And London, he always adds, if only for another barb, another insult in your choice, always reeks of selfish ambition. The kind that rots your insides into something askance, and is deprived of decency.)
His biggest gripe with London, however—
"They never fuckin' smile."
You passively nod in agreement—you mostly get looks of outright suspicion when you smile at passers-by in central London, so: point to Price—and then undercut the small victory he gains with a mocking grin in his direction.
Price's nostrils flare when he catches the derisive bite of your lips curling over your teeth.
"You think you're smart, mm?"
"I'd rather hope so, considering."
"Bloody annoyin' is what you are, considerin'—"
His words are swallowed by some boarding announcement ringing shrill overhead. You pull away from him, and the mocking smile fades into some facsimile of genuinity when you watch him shake his head, put-out and already annoyed by whatever thought skimmed through his thoughts.
London always seems like a sore topic, but you've known him long enough that the edge in his voice is less severe and more mocking. There is a distaste for the city, but the reason has evaded you much like—
Well. Everything else.
You've thought about asking why nearly hundreds of times in the past, but that line of questioning has always been a terrifying endeavour. There is a locked door: a proverbial floodgate keeping all of the other why's at bay. Opening it now, in the middle of a crowded terminal, feels reckless. Stupid.
It's nearly four hours from here to Transilvania.
You think of all the insubstantial reasons he could offer, and find the idea of them all rather bitter. Anguishing. It sends a ripple of hurt through your chest, and the sting alone is enough to seal your lips.
Words stuck, once more, in the back of your throat.
Price says nothing when you quiet, eyes flickering between the throng of people rushing through the terminal, listless and impassive.
There is always a degree of separation between you and him whenever you meet in person, as if the personal, raw conversations whispered into the early hours of the morning are just some strange dream. A fugue wanting, unslaked and bothersome, that ripens inside your virgin sulci. A sickness that manifests in the fibrils of your desire, covetous and greedy; gnarled gyri breathes life into the dreams you reach for until the delineation between reality and fantasy wanes, fades to cinders.
So, you bite your tongue, letting the noxious words pollute, rot, inside their esophageal prison, and pretend the claw marks on the walls aren't from your own bloody hands.
You follow his lead, and he's always seemed so content not to speak of the vulnerability you whisper into his ear. The fear he rasps about at quarter to four.
Gone, then. It doesn't exist when you can see the lapis of his eyes listing toward you periodically, expression oscillating between a rendition of something that feels a little worrisome, and—
Tenerife.
That unnameable thing that broke through the gleaming sapphire when you whispered his name, and broke your own rules for the very first time.
(You'll call me anyways.
Does it bother you?
Never. Wished you called more—)
You turn away from him, from the weight in his gaze when it finds you. Worried, somehow, that a single look will be enough to ferret the secrets out of you.
A man in fatigues lingers in your periphery, standing awkwardly by the Starbucks entrance. He nods sharply when you catch his eye.
"Guess we're up," you murmur, smile fading into placid neutrality. Getting caught riling up Captain John Price won't win any favours back in the concrete vacuum of Hereford. "Ready, cap?"
If he notices your sudden distance, he says nothing about it. His eyes drop to the phone clutched in his hand, before he rolls his massive shoulders.
"Suppose so," he grumbles, slipping his phone into his pocket.
Out of sight.
Selfishly, you wonder who else he calls late at night, and find the burn of bitterness, jealousy to be some torturous form of retribution.
It burns like a knife to your gut. You wallow in it.
Price isn't a man known for his garrulity, and so, when he takes his seat on the plane, and immediately reaches for the files stuffed haphazardly into the zippered fold of his duffle bag, you take no real offence the undeniable abolishment of conversation.
You're used to it, really.
Silences that stretch on, culled by the hum of the engines cutting through the thin air some several hundred kilometres above sea level, are nothing novice.
In turn, you take to flipping through the worn, jaundiced pages of a book you packed away in your carry-on specifically for this. Whatever secrets lay nestled in the crease of his rumbled folders doesn't matter to you—not yet, anyway—and you're content to enjoy something that you can pretend to be immersed with for the four hours you'll be sharing the scant space that separates the two of you.
Pretending, of course, being the operative word.
Price is a breathing furnace. The seams of his tight jacket crackle with unbridled heat that wafts against your arm when you settle into the chair. There is no armrest allotted to you with his sinewy bulk taking up most of the aisle and middle seat, and you feel each exhale when his frame almost melts into your own.
Broad shouldered. Thick biceps. A tapered waist. Thighs quite nearly the width of a gnarled, hardened fir. It's hard to find space, privacy, with him bleeding out around you. It's hard to concentrate on anything that isn't the muted press of his covered flesh on yours, and, rather illicitly, the way it makes you feel.
It's a rush of singular emotions nearly indistinguishable from each other, but all leaving you feeling like a raw nerve scrapped from muscle, and dissected from bone. Flayed with just a touch.
The tremulous wake of them makes your body fight against the onslaught of the roaring deluge that rips through you. An amalgam of wishful anticipation, trepidation, and fear of being caught. Discovered. Having your dirty secrets, the one's you're not willing to share over a tea after midnight with a man who, despite knowing his greatest fear (the lives of his team over the stakes of everything, everyone, else), and his proudest accomplishment (getting the fuck outta Hereford while he still had the chance), galvanised out of you. Spilled into the open air.
It comes too close to the lowered inhibitions you felt in Tenerife to ever sit well in the churning pits of your stomach.
And so, you try to force some semblance of distance between your bodies despite there being none. The curved ledge of the plane window digs harshly into your forearm, but you still press into it more.
Welcoming the ache, almost.
It doesn't feel good, but it's a harsh reminder that the feelings pooling inside of your chest are wrong.
A part of you, then, almosts hopes that the pain will soon become an almost Pavlovian reminder whenever you think of Price, and of—
Everything.
Negative reinforcement.
(Price and you; the thought brings pain.)
He mistakes your tension for nerves, and drops his chin down when you keep wriggling about, struggling to find a modicum of distance between the weight of him pressing against you.
His expression is always oscillating between lour surliness and a pinch of frustration, and something in the middle of the two—glum, you think: stoic impassivity weighed down by heavy shadows—but the usual ire dims as the jet lurches down the runway. It's washed away in the tenebrous that leaks in from the empty interior of a military craft where it's just you and him and the pilots.
A world where the stench of London dissipates into the familiar filtered scent of recycled oxygen that wafts through the open vents. Sterile, almost. Void of the grime, the pungent smell of stale petrol on the wet pavement, the distinct scent of the tube—sweat, fungus; putrid and ripe with something mouldy; tobacco and marijuana—and old cigarettes.
(Smells like shite, he'd gripe if he knew you thought of it with fondness.)
When he looks at you, you have to force yourself to remember hierarchy, propriety. Decorum.
Distance. Reality.
It aches, but you push it down. Swallow the words until they leak back into their cage, glued against the soft tissue of your oesophagus, and force something neutral, unbothered in your countenance while pretending as if you weren't choking yourself to death.
"Alright?" He murmurs, words uttered low. Susurrus, almost. It's different from the phone calls where his voice is relaxed, muted; saturated in an ease, a warmth that lacks the usual snarl choked in the back of his throat. He talks with a degree of distance. Boxed into the role of unflinching, infallible leader even in this microcosm that bubbles between you.
Still. It makes the air in your lungs stutter all the same.
"Fine."
He hums, and the guttural vocalisation is adorned with the flat press of his disbelief. Price isn't the type to pry, though, and he takes your virginal lie with a mere shift of his eyebrows; a soft buoy of skepticism that is just scrutinising enough to let you flee if you so wish.
You do, and so, you take it. Offering him a tight smile that you know will never reach your eyes, or any semblance of believability, but it's the most you can manage over the drumroll of your heart (now making serious threats of breaking through your ribcage, and leaping out of the jet), and the shallow gasps of your breath, a desperate struggle to quench the flames billowing in your lungs.
He's so warm, you think, that he burns you. Fire spread from the heat of him, catching on the cindered embers lying in the soft fibrils of your being, and igniting you in a flameless smoulder.
Price nods once, and you're unsure if it's in a gentle acquiescence of your bold-faced lie, or your quick prevarication, but you find yourself mimicking it all the same.
Good, then. Settled.
But he leans down instead of returning to the urgent press of files and papers all neatly stacked in a manila folder, and you come undone at seams when the scent of him envelops you.
Crushed tobacco leaves, stale smoke, ambergris and vetiver.
The headiness of his smell smothers you, and makes your hindbrain tense at the familiar, enticing miasma that seeps into your lungs, and fills your sinuses until it washes everything out but the gun cotton, and leather he reeks of.
"Hmm, a bit early to start lying," he rasps, the words just as brittle as your crumbling resolve. "Ain't it?"
Your breath shudders out of your lungs. Caught, then. Called out. The idea of confessing everything to him, all at once, passes through, but it's immediately dismissed. Shoved back into whichever crevasse it slunk out of.
The fact that it even drifted through, sneaking past the tightly guarded prison it was kept in is enough to make you fluster.
As if to hold them in, you sink your teeth into your tongue to keep from speaking the words that still echo in your head, and offer nothing more than a simple shake of your head, and some facsimile of a wry smile tossed in his general direction.
He hums again, and the coo rumbles through his flesh and ripples across your skin. Electric shocks. Static buzz. The vibration of it shakes the doors of the mausoleum where everything is left to moulder, rot.
A plume of nicotine dusts across your nose when Price shifts in his seat, much too small for a man with such broad shoulders, and thick thighs, and when you breathe in the heady scent of it, your head spins.
"We're all entitled to our secrets," he murmurs. His hair scratches against the fabric when he turns his head, chin notching down to bore into the side of your face. It's all you'll offer him when the rattling at the doors of your tomb dislodges a piece of rotten wood; lignin crumbles to the floor around you in stripped, fleshy white. A hole big enough to sink your fist through.
"And that's fine, but—," his tone dips, timbre scorching through you when he speaks. The words are gritty, and coarse. They sink into your ears until the flesh is rubbed raw. The change in pitch makes you look up, wordlessly following the command that tangles around each vowel. Sharp, authoritative. This isn't John right now. It's Captain Price.
His pelagic eyes are hardened into firm, dense sapphire lined with unbreakable obsidian.
"But," he stresses the word again, brows arching high on his forehead until three, four, lines are carved into the pale skin. "Those secrets can't interfere with the mission, yeah?"
His stare is intense. Firm. Unyielding. He doesn't look away. Doesn't cower under the strange, too hot sensation that fills your head whenever you're forced to make eye contact for more than a few moments.
It occurs to you, then, when he holds your stare for three, flinching inhales, that the only reason he's saying this is because he knows. Maybe not everything, maybe not all of it. But he knows enough that you're acting strange. Odd. Not yourself.
Price sits back, and the loss of his intense stare boring into you, stripping you down to basal parts—raw and vulnerable—allows air to inflate your burning lungs. Oxygen bubbles and seeps into your bloodstream so quickly that you feel a little sick with it. Dizzy.
"We clear on that?"
His expression is guarded, pinched.
You swallow thickly against the deluge of emotions that run down your spine, and wonder what he knows. What he pieced together already. It makes your heart slam against the flesh and bone cage it's prisoned in.
His flat, phlegmatic expression seems to wobble. A frisson ripples, and splinters his reticent resolve, and he looks, in that moment, like the man who speaks to you late at night about his biggest worries, and fear. Touchable, reachable. It's a sharp contrast to the impenetrable man who stands at the top of the command post, and makes decisions of life and death. A stalwart leader made human.
You drink it in, trying to make sense of the softening of his gaze, the tremble of his moustache as his lips relax into an even line, but it's indecipherable. Unknowable. You struggle to piece the pensive, almost contemplative look together, but the gingerness in his expression snaps shut.
All at once, it's forced back, and pulled taut. The drawing of a bridge.
His lips flatten into a grim line. A divot forms between his brows. The tick in his jaw speaks of frustration, but—
Not at you. Never at you.
You can't make sense of the enigmatic distance in his eyes—a floating island in the middle of the open ocean. Separated by the turbulent sea.
Something changed between you. You feel the incipient shift trembling through your bones; a novice crack. The plates deep below the surface surge, and split; shattering into the other. The waters froth white as something begins to emerge from the depths.
A new landmass, maybe.
"Alright, then," he rasps, turning back back toward the files spread out on his lap. "Try to get some rest. We'll be jumpin' into the thick of it when we land."
You can see the hesitation in his eyes. The uncertainty in his mein. It's a sharp juxtaposition to how these strange missions usually unfold, where you both pour over documents, and leads, and have easy conversations between sharp, playful barbs, and impish quips to always devolve into some debate over something trivial.
The silence is stifling. Oppressive.
Tenerife, you think, when you drunkenly stumbled down the stairs, and into his arms, and—
Coldness. Frigid distance. He cut you off after that, and it was radio silence until last night when he called you.
You don't know what it all means, but Price is startlingly observant when it comes to you, and you wonder, with your heart thudding in your throat, just how much you gave away.
A snag in the middle of lush green. You tremble.
Into the thick of it, huh?
His words haunt you.
(But when don't they?)
The novel—a neo noir mystery disguised as a romance—does little to capture your attention. Threads of interest snag on the ends of the protagonist's steadfast determination to not to let crime run rampant in the city he's taken a reluctant appreciation for, and to rescue his penultimate damsel from the crumbling affair she's trapped in with a married man of the mafia, but it dwindles after the discovery of the red herring.
It sits, untouched, in your lap as you gaze out of the circular window. Plumes of thick, white clouds blanket the world below the plane, and look dense enough for you to almost believe you could stand on the curled peaks of the cumulonimbus. A mirage, maybe.
(Or wishful thinking: you've always enjoyed chasing the unattainable.)
The sky above is a midnight blue that fades into lighter shades of lazuli as curves around the earth.
A shade lighter, flecked with greens and golds and greys, and it might have looked just like his eyes.
(Chasing, always chasing.)
The shock of it makes your leg twitch as your muscle tense back into that familiar state of constant fight or flight that Price always seems to put you in. Stage fright. Fear of discovery.
Sometimes you wonder if it would be easier to just spit the words that have been coagulating in the back of your throat for years out now into the world, and let him run from them.
Flee, like Tenerife.
Does it bother you?
No, I wish you called my more—
—can't, love. Can't do that, you know I—
Dreams pop like rubber balloons around you. The snap of the recoil blisters your skin.
A lesson, then, that there are certain words that should never be uttered, or mentioned.
He drew a sharp delineation between you and him. A line in the sand. Uncrossable. Unspeakable.
Unignorable.
Your heart aches, but you know it'll soon pass. Soon. Soon—
"Ready?" He asks when the wheels of the plane kiss the solid ground with a jolt, and the single word feels more augury than you'd like.
It feels almost instinctual, then, to glance through the small window, eyes listing to the pale blue sky. Two chaffinches chase each other in the blooms of white, their plumage harsh against the idling clouds overhead.
"Sure," you say, and wonder if he'd asked the same thing when you touched down in Tenerife. It doesn't matter. You shake the thought from your head, and try not to linger on the birds.
Leave it for Agamemnon.
Despite his insistence to the contrary, it turns out to be the exact opposite of what was promised.
Your idyllic vacation to the Romanian countryside is forfeited for the cold interior of Brașov where the man you're after, Iulian Mitrea, is hidden somewhere in the near hour long commute from here to Sinaia.
Somewhere, of course, because no one is willing to tell you anything at all. From the moment you landed at Târgu Mureș Transylvania Airport, help from anyone within the country evaporated, dissolved. Mistrust was rampant between the soldiers here to help you on your hunt.
You couldn't blame them, really. Not when their orders to stall, delay, and interfere came directly from above.
It makes sense when you're trying to capture a well-known friend of several high ranking politicians worlds over.
The pinch in their brow as they say, we don't know where he is, despite confirming only an hour earlier that they did, in fact, know where he was speaks volumes to their reluctance to participate in this farce. It needles inside of you because despite the irritation of the delay, you get it.
If they help you catch him, their name will be in the report. People will talk to you. You get to go home with a wanted man nicely wrapped in a bow for Lady Justice, and they stay behind and face the ramifications of letting a man go who greases paws with men in power—politicians, businessmen, foreign diplomats.
So.
You get it. It doesn't make it any easier to swallow when you see them on the radio each time you get closer.
It'll be a wait and see mission until someone either relents enough to let you get a headstart, or the bigger people in power finish the behind the scenes negotiations to protect as many people as possible from the fallout.
Either way—
You're landlocked in a city that's never felt more hostile to you; stuck in stasis in the middle of a brutal winter.
The inn is nice, you suppose. Old architecture. Its age sings with each movement you make against the wood that is nearly three generations older than you. It's plumed a dusting of disuse that sneaks into the corners where it rots, and stinks of mildew.
But it feels unwelcoming each time you catch the eye of a soldier, a local police officer. The lady behind the counter of the front desk is oblivious to the tension bleeding between everyone, and offers toothy smiles whenever she catches you. Eager, you think, to talk to someone who doesn't respond in clipped tones.
You soak up the rapid Romanian, and try to remember the phrases you picked up—much to her amusement.
Her hand fixes itself permanently against her chest with each new pronunciation of the Romanian alphabet you pick up—breve, circumflex, S-comma, T-comma—and she seems eager to listen to prattle on in stilted Romanian with more appreciation than the men who are meant to be your partners.
They linger, listening in on each conversation you have with the woman. Combat every effort of your futile attempt to salvage some holiday from this mess.
They undermine Price at every junction. Cut his opinion down until it's shredded paper snowflakes on the icy cobblestone. A forgotten arts and craft project now mushy from the snow blanketing the world around you in an endless white prison.
It's easy, you think, to just give up.
But you know Price.
Despite their delays, and mutterings to each other every time a lead pops up only to quickly slip through your fingers, he doesn't falter. He won't. Not until this is seen through.
He'll fight to the bitter end.
(You think he just might prefer to do his fighting on the battlefield instead of dabbling in subterfuge.
So.
You do it for him.)
Your efforts amount to a burst vessle: a rumbling eruption spewing anger and tension at your feet like an angry volcano.
And with it, you feel the words you try to swallow down buoy to the surface.
This mission makes you feel like little more than some ornate polyptych, folded away for convenience sake, and unravelled in the privacy of his borrowed office.
It's there where Price poses questions, and piques at you for more information.
His tongue is too thick when he tries to speak the language echoed around you, unable to catch the proper slur on the t-commas and drag the breve out the way it should be spoken. It sounds somehow more French than it does Romanian, and you resolve to take the mantle of lacklustre translator for him, wondering whether he took your words as coming only for the holiday as sincerely as possible.
It makes a needle of fondness grow in the gyral folds of your beating heart. A sudden deluge of empathy, and affection that makes you idealistically moony-eyed at his penchant for keeping promises.
Still.
It's unneeded.
You take a proactive role in trying to find the man who keeps evading the grasping fingers of the law (however twisted it might be), and make it quickly known to him that you're here as a partner, at his behest, and not as some fancy tchotchke to be placed, indiscreetly, on the sidelines.
It's unlike him, though. And you wonder more about the potential ramifications of this mission each passing day that you're stuck in the stifling confines of some luxury inn where the men around you whisper furiously to prevent your success.
You ask him about it, and receive a piercing stare in response. A gruff, don't worry about it. This is my muck up, not yours.
It hardens your resolve.
All it takes is a few words whispered while rolling sarmale, and you manage to find a man in Brașov who might be hiding the person you're looking for.
Information that turns out to be more fruitful than anything else thus far.
You tuck it close to your chest. The man is landlocked and stuck, hidden in plain sight by the soldiers there to help you. He isn't going anywhere.
But you might be.
The lack of progress is noted by the people who requested your aid on this—the ones that must have conveniently forgotten that the person who kidnapped foreign dignitaries was also the man they had over for summer parties at their luxury estates in Dorobanți.
They dangle Price's visa over his head during a massive row after—yet another—delayed piece of information is forwarded to you by the local police. By the time it lands in your hands, on his desk, it's too late.
More blocks. More opportunities to catch the man squandered, lost to politics.
The schism between Price and them widens. A wide chasm, uncrossable.
You catch his eye, and wonder if you should share the secrets you keep, but you don't. Not yet, anyway. There's a mountain on his shoulders. A mess of politics that you know makes his blood boil.
You want to ease the burden. The tension.
But it doubles to a new height when one of the men jabs his finger in your direction, eyes blazing, and calls you his assistant.
"My what?" Price's words are eerily calm despite the gyre welling in blue. "What did you say?"
The man doesn't back down. Neither does Price.
It's his warmth by your side, unflinching, as he stands tall and guarded, leaking anger and ruin at the slight against you. A white night in red-hot anger.
You've fought your own battles, cutting your knuckles on cracked teeth until bone embedded itself into your cartilage like a macabre set of brass knuckles in jagged ivory. You throw punches like you're fighting for your life behind the screen of a computer that ticks away for eight hours, and pretend the emblem on your lapel doesn't weigh you down to the pavement below. Your own weight to carry.
And you don't need this, don't want it, and a little part of you wants to rebel, to throw your fists around like they're the white-hot slugs spat out of the barrel of a firearm, but it's tapered down when he seethes beside you.
His hands curl into fists before swinging up, latching onto the straps of his tactical vest. A defensive manoeuvre, you once thought, but now you know better.
Price isn't clinging to the woven fabric to keep himself steady, to ground himself. It's to keep those burly fists from sinking into the gullet of the first man who wanders too close to the rapacious maw of a starving beast.
Your eyes are fixed on the hairs dusted over his knuckles as he flexes and tightens his grip until they bleach white like dead coral, sharp bones threatening to break skin.
Those hands once pressed you tight to his front, holding you steady as you stumbled through the haze of want, and longing, and kept you steady as the boat rocked with the calm waters of the neverending sea.
(—wish you called more—
—don't know what you're sayin', love. What you're startin'. Gonna let you turn around, and pretend this never happened, mm?—
—but—)
They tightened then. Hard enough that the skin around your hip bones bulged between his thick fingers. Your flesh filling in his gaps. His eyes dropped there, fixed on the way you fit between him despite the pain that bloomed where his fingers dug deep.
(—jus'... Walk away, love—)
Tenerife feels like a dream. A wisping cloud of want dredged from the depths of your subconscious yearning.
But the ache in your side where his hands rested the night before kept you from casting away the words as drunken ramblings and masticated dreams.
Those hands whiten under the strain of holding himself back, and you recognise the colour as the same shade when he held you. Paperweight. Featherlight. You wonder, then, your eyes only for him as the world you've been invited into erupts into chaos and blame tinged with the palpable weight of unwelcomeness and claustrophobia when he hasn't been holding himself back—
"Talk about 'em that way on more time, and I'll stick your goddamn heads on a post for that slimy bastard you want to protect so fuckin' bad to see—"
—from you.
You find him near the window, gazing out at the snow-covered roof-tops of the sprawling village below.
He stands, his back angled toward you, with one hand curled around the crystalline glass, filled with three fingers of scotch—the perfect amount, he stresses, and gives credence to his sincerity with each winkle in his brow—and a lit cigar in the other.
Price brings the cigar up to his lips, eyes roaming across the smear of lights in the distance. You catch the spark when he inhales, the orange intensifying into an angry red.
It casts a halo of orange on his face, and the fire makes him look somehow older and younger than he really is. An timeless visage of a man who, hours earlier, was recklessly throwing himself into the very same fire he syphons from as it burns the tobacco in his stem.
The brief flash of red is complemented by the harsh dandelion-yellow from the illuminated city when it spills through the glass, frosted with condensation from the heat in the room, and the brutal chill kept at bay by a two inch glass panel.
He's a composition in contrast.
The only light inside the room is from the kindling fireplace, and the jaundiced lamp on the desk table, spilling over the documents you'd come to talk to him about. The dimly lit interior bathes his back in a clouded tenebrous, darkening the crevasses, divots, and the contoured folds of his body until they're shadowed in the gloam. It's perfectly juxtaposed to the highlights that catch in the warm golden glow of the sleepless city just below.
A perfect chiaroscuro, you think.
The sight of him, then, at peace—or as close to it as he can manage—steals the air in your lungs. The words on your lips.
The look on his face is pensive, yet coloured in a hue of consternation that seems to quiver through the dark pools of blue gazing back at him. A ripple of disquietude. A splash of rumination. It all coalesces into an unfathomable knot of emotions that bloom in the deep divot of his brow. Ones you can't even begin to unravel.
(But your fingers itch to try.)
There is something about him in absolute stasis—completely unguarded, and unburdened by the devastating world around him—that spools under your skin like a fever. A webbing nebula that weaves with the threads of venial sin until it tangles around you.
When it tightens, it feels like a noose.
This moment of privacy between him and the thoughts locked tight inside his head makes you feel a little bit like you're intruding on a moment not meant for your eyes. A sacred thing. A voyeuristic spectator.
You should leave. Let him have the sanctity of this moment to himself, where the pensive, introspective look etched into his brow is shared only with his reflection, and no one else.
An unwitting birefringence. A glance inside Pandora's box.
You try to tiptoe back in the direction you came from, a manila folder tucked under your arm, but the wood is worn. Aged. The floorboards creak when you press your heel into them, letting out a loud, jarring noise that seems to reverberate through the arched ceiling, and against the frosted glass that encompasses the vast majority of the eastern wall.
Loud enough, you think, to crack the class. His reverie.
Price makes a noise in the back of his throat when he turns to you, brows drawn tight in wordless displeasure at the intrusion. Recognition bleeds into ashlar blue. His shoulders ease when he sets his steeled gaze on your cringing form, one foot out the door, and the other fixed firmly in your mouth.
The way he relaxes when he finds it's just you melts some of the embarrassment away. The tension dissipates, sheds itself from his coiled muscles pulled taut from carrying the weight of everything on his broad back.
(The world, then, is tucked into the corner when he dropped it earlier.)
"Sorry," you murmur, hiding another wince. "I didn't realise you were—" Brooding. Another grimace. Your foot slides deeper into your mouth. "Uh—"
"It's fine," he says, his voice hoarse from the growling threats he made against the Romanian diplomats who insisted on your help only to shrug off everything he suggested.
He clears his throat before he speaks, taking the brief lull to drag his gaze down your form. Tendrils of something soft liquify the hardened edges of sapphire—a look you haven't seen on him since Tenerife—but it pauses at the folder you try, and fail, to discreetly tuck further into the crevasse of your body. Hiding it, futilely, from view.
Something sours across his face. The half melted azure firms into unbreakable obsidian.
"Business as usual, then?"
You huff. "Not if you don't want that."
Price inhales deeply at your words, and you know that he can't. He won't.
You mourn the loss of that soft, unfathomable look on his face when the only concern he had was the condescension from his breath hiding the view of Sinaia from his appreciative gaze.
A look full of something aching. A want, maybe; a need. Things you can't begin to connect to your stalwart captain.
But then you think, again, of Tenerife. When he caught you mid-stumble, hands heavy and hot on your flesh. The look on his face ages younger than the grey around his temple would lead you to believe.
"Careful," he murmured, eyes lighter somehow as he pulled you in closer to his side. "Can't go falling all over the place."
It was your quip of, "but you'll catch me, won't you?" that made him feel almost reachable when he turned away from you, the tips of his ears dusting a pretty pink.
"Jus' watch where you're goin'."
You think about it now—about the unfathomable distance between the stars.
Between you, and him.
(And then of broken walls you mend with your own hands.)
"Jus' bring it here," he mutters, moving toward the desk cluttered with everything he was trying to avoid. The desk you brought him back to. It pinches something sour inside of you. "I'll 'ave a look at it."
Price sets the glass down, and reaches for the crystal ashtray left near the edge of the table. When he drags it closer to the fish-shaped map of Romania, decorated with little red stickers of possible hideouts for the man you're supposed to be catching, you count four ends of a cigar in the mess of ashes, all smoked down to the stem.
Concern gnarls in your gut.
"Busy day for you, Captain?"
All he gives in a noncommittal grunt in response before eying the chair with a touch of wariness as if sitting down now will prevent him standing up again. It might, you think, tentatively taking stock of the neverending pages on the desk just waiting for him to tackle. A ceaseless maelstrom that tries to drag him down that endless abyss that leaves stress marks on his forehead, grey hairs around his temple, and grinds his bones down until marrow below is exposed to the rotten air.
He doesn't sit. A pointed gesture.
The heels of his palms rest on the edge of the table, and he leans forward over the papers strewn in his familiar organised chaos, and drops his head down between the bracket of his arms, locked at the elbows.
He's the very picture of exhaustion.
"I don't have anything good to share with you," you murmur, tone low and susurrus as if raising above an octave will shatter the fragile glass that houses the two of you from the brutal storm outside these four walls. "Mostly a complete repeat of what already happened—"
"Bullshit," he grinds the cuss out like the potency of his tenor will somehow strengthen it into a hex. "Fuckin' politics."
"Nothing we haven't dealt with before," you note, turning to lean against the desk. You mirror his pose in the reverse, fingers curling around the ledge. "It'll smooth out eventually."
He considers your words, lids sliding to half-mass. Lost in thought. In—
Something.
You're not privy to the war in his head. The battle he struggles through.
But you want to be.
You'd give anything to fight alongside him in this moment of quiet contemplation. To aid him in the pursuit of victory, and help ease the burden he carries on his broad shoulders. A weight that makes his heels dig deeper into the ground than any other man you've met. Gravity falls on him harder than the others, but he never folds. Never falters.
Something shifts when you tilt your head toward him, waiting. Watching.
Irritation drips down, polluting the cenote until it's a gyre grey. Clouded with the poison of choices that lay in front of him.
"Maybe," he settles on, rolling one shoulder to alleviate the burn in his tense muscles. "Would be easier if they'd just bloody listen—"
"They will."
His eyes flicker up to you, curling with something playful, you think. Or as close to mirth as the shadows in his brow will allow.
"You gonna make them?"
The tone of his voice—smoke cured, molasse thick—is blunt, but—
Baiting.
Loose tendrils of smoke weep from the end of his forgotten cigar, and curls in the air between you. You taste ash, and feel the burn of nicotine when you breathe in.
It does little to quell the spike of nerves gnarling in your chest; the itch under your skin.
Something brims in your pulse. A rapaciousness that seems to burn through your arteries until they're blistered from the heat. You lean back on the desk, knees locking until your legs are straight to alleviate the anxious knot growing in your stomach.
His gaze drops to your legs when your ankles cross, sliding up to the softness of your thighs now spread plush over the wood.
Another shift. Poisoned grey darkens into thick tar. Bog water. You wonder how long it would take for anyone to find you if you sunk below the thin film of pleats, swallowed whole by the fen.
Imprisoned in his clutch.
"For you? Anything—"
The words slip out before you can stop them.
His head jerks up. The roundness of his almond shaped eyes can only be derived from your slip-up, to your unintentional confessional between secondhand smoke, and borrowed nicotine.
A mistake, you think. An accident. A follie.
But the words are lodged under the syrup-y thick water that leaks down your throat.
You swallow again, but it feels like you're drowning.
An impasse. Brutal, and uncrossable. You wonder what he might say, what he might do, and try to ignore the ache in your chest, the bitter throb of anticipation as the lines in his brow deepen, darkening with the stains of his indecision.
That same wellpool of emotions buoys in ashlar blue when he stares at you, plain faced and—
A touch uncertain.
It's strange to see him so unsure, so hesitant.
Price isn't a man who falters in the face of anything. Who concedes, and surrenders.
His tenacity is what drew you to him. That staunch perseverance that you sometimes wish you could fill each hairline fracture in your soul with. To somehow syphon the staggering presence of him, indomitable and ferocious when he needs to be, into your marrow where it'll congeal and paint the walls of your bones with the same stalwart dedication to a singular gospel that he carries with ease.
He huffs, then, and the exhale reeks of stale cigarette butts in a damp ashtray.
"Don't know what you're getting yourself into, love—"
Something flickers across his face, and you wonder if he even meant to say it. Or if the endearment slipped out, oiled by the same elixir that covered your throat and coaxed something closer to the truth, to your hidden wants, out of the depths of your yearning.
It's unfathomable, though. The mere idea of it being drug from the same hidden well as yours itches between your ribs; a blossom of something featherlight. Hopeful.
When you look at him, eyes scouring the dividing lines between the face he shows the world—the one with a deeply furrowed brow and obsidian clotting in the crevasses of liquid sapphire; a stalwart sense of detachment, and pointed distance—and the one he shows you.
With you, though—
With you, he's always asymmetrical.
A singular brow notching up at something audacious you said; one side of his mouth lifted in a crooked grin. The flash of teeth when you murmur under your breath about the stuffy politicians you're meant to be saving.
Rusted picket fences. Faulty hinges. Open, lax. Void the usual symmetry that makes him Captain John Price; a stalwart presence on the battlefield, shoulders strong enough to lift the morale (and morality) of every soldier under his commands. Has to, you think, or he might implode, crumbling under the stifling weight of his utilitarian choices, and the actions guised under the moral grey dust of patriotism.
It clings to him. Scars shaped like canines: the teeth of an old, rotten dog. Nightmares in absenteeism.
He never tells you about them, ever; but you've gotten more than a handful of phone calls during devil's hour to know they haunt him just as much as they do you.
(And if you've taken to turning your ringer on as high as it will go—just in case—then that's a secret between you and midnight blue sheets.)
The look on his face now makes you think of that mission in Tenerife, when his fingers curled around your wrist after landing in Heathrow. Warm, flushed skin. Rough like a cat's tongue when it slid over your flesh.
He stopped you from leaving, eyes shaded in stagnant blue as the taxi idled in front of you.
"Could go for a coffee. Want to come?" He asked, and it was unlike him to stall, but the prospect of more time, and coffee, numbed you to it all.
You didn't give it much thought, but the words feel almost sibylline now. Hindsight, you think: that pesky little thing that makes you feel like Lleu, caught in the crosshairs of a feud between Arianrhod and Gwydion.
Over burnt, bitter beans and coffee flavoured water, he said: "don't get much sleep anymore."
"Our late night phone calls don't bore you to sleep?"
It was a pawkish barb not meant to be taken seriously, but Price, you find, is percipient when it comes to you.
"No, they don't." He shifted in his chair, eyes cutting toward the mid-morning haze dusting the streets of London in a fine periwinkle blue. He looked older, somehow, in the virginal rays of the dawning sun. The words that slipped out felt softer, subdued in a way that made you wonder if they were meant to be uttered at all. "I sleep much better after them, actually."
Price has a strange ability to leave you both speechless and full of words. Of things, mundane and inconsequential, that you long to spill out over the linoleum countertop.
More often than not, they're just naked, bare. Raw words not yet shaped or formed into any semblance of meaning, but ones you want to say, anyway. If only to keep the conversation going. To keep him around a moment longer.
(After all: if the conversation does end, he can't leave.)
But your lips are glued. Words stuck in the wet ashes that congeal in your throat.
Your eyes followed the breadcrumbs of his gaze, and found the quieted road of Liverpool Street staring back at you. Drenched in cobblestone grey, and smeared in industrial neon. An uninspiring visage of some secluded corner tucked away from the tourist trap of central London.
The near hour long drive from Heathrow to London for a cup of coffee is another mystery. Why he invited you where, of all places, isn't known to you.
He paid for the coffee, the taxi. Said nothing at all but walked you back to your flat in London, the place you stay after each mission brings you back to Heathrow. It's a near twenty-nine minute commute in the opposite direction.
Said no when you offered him a place to sleep for the night, and you tried not to let the bitter sting of rejection show while his fingers curled around the wooden frame of your front door, knuckles turning white from the strain of—
Hindsight, you think.
The shift in his gaze when his hand snared around your wrist. When he hailed a taxi for burnt coffee in the middle of a city that he couldn't stand—a place you'd heard many tirades about in the middle of the night, all leading back to the same reason for his staunch hatred of London: it's too bloody far from Liverpool. Too bloody far from him.
When he turned to look out the window to watch your reflections contrasted against drab, grey London.
Earlier, when he was gazing at the city below.
It clicks, then.
He wasn't staring out the window. He never was.
"Why didn't you come into my flat?" You ask, words thick. Heavy.
His nostrils flare. "What—?"
"That night in London, after Tenerife—I asked you to spend the night. Why didn't you—"
White knuckles. The look on his face was—
Pensive. Dusted with consternation. Just like—
Now. Then. All the moments in between.
Like many things in conjunction to this, it's probably your fault. An unignorable truism that sits under your skin like an itch you can't scratch no matter how viciously you claw at your dermis.
You could have asked, but it wouldn't have mattered.
The answer was staring at you this whole time.
Why he called you in the middle of the night. Why he never even bothered to entertain your application to join the 141. Why he looked so troubled when you invited him in. Why he kept you at arms length this whole time, but let you see the gnarled ruins of his soul in the middle of night.
The delineation of your relationship was drawn in the distance of a phone call at midnight, ones made not because he was lonely or bereft of comfort—
But because he could hang up before he said too much. Widen the gap with a press of his finger.
You can see him try to pull back again. To put a distance between you greater than this lonely hotel in the middle of Brașov to Orion's Belt.
Words—stay, don't, why—caught in your throat. They refuse to come out. A conversation trapped. One you can't start.
(You've always been better with actions than words.)
And so, you kiss him instead.
A cacoëthes.
It's less of a kiss and more of a messy punch to his mouth with your blistered lips.
Your trembling fingers curl into the straps of his tac-vest. For leverage, maybe; or to hide the quiver in your joints from his widening eyes.
His mouth parts, wry curls flutter when he inhales sharply. Words, you think, like: what're you doin'? or this is sexual harassment and I swear to god I'll sue—
You don't let him finish. Don't let him start, either.
You fall back on the desk, yanking on his straps. He jerks forward.
You meet, clumsily, in the middle. An awkward assemblage of limbs; bodies cut across each other like an unfinished T.
It's messy. More sealed lips glueing together than it ever could be considered a proper kiss.
There are moments leading up to this that, in hindsight, make everything seem almost inevitable. The look on his face. The ache in your chest. It blooms from the same vine; a want in spades. You almost weep when he groans against your mouth, teeth knocking together. You taste heme in the back of your throat, and nearly choke on it when his fingers curl under your jaw, holding you steady as he tries to devour you whole.
It sheds threads of kismet, and tastes a little of finality when you brush your lips against his again, meeting in the middle: a perfect equilibrium. Absolute congruence.
(Or, maybe, it's the thrill of his taste that shades everything else in a roseate veil; that swallows down the other moments, trials and tribulations that felt more gruelling than your training, and lets the others surge to the surface. Moments of heartache, and pain, and—
And it doesn't matter, you think, a touch delirious; not when you know what his hands feel like when they curl around your waist, when his fingers dig into your skin, and he pulls you closer.)
"Listen—" the word is mangled in his throat; charred from the fire that burns in his lungs. "You need to know what you're getting yourself into."
"You say that like I haven't been thinking about it for years, John."
It sobers him a bit. He pulls back until a thin strand of space sits between your wet lips and his moussed beard.
The implication in your words makes his eyes darken. Lids fluttering.
Want, palpable and thick, pulses in the charged atmosphere between you. A microcosm of your own design: a place carved from stone, ashlar, and shaded in the midnight blue of his eyes. A roseate gossamer falls, veiling you in that corusating haze that makes the world look prettier than it really is.
Shades of rose.
The breath he pulls in is tremulous.
When he speaks, it sounds like an orison. A plea. "That so?"
It's a weighted question. Benediction paints his throat, stains the words when they slip out.
"Kept me waiting for quite a while."
"Didn't think you were waiting." His hands sear your skin when they slide up your back. His forehead falls, resting against yours. "Not much to sit around and pine over, love."
It makes you scoff, a wet noise in the back of your throat. "You think I answer my phone in the middle of the night for just anyone?"
"No," he murmurs. His hand lifts, cups your cheek in the seat of his palm. "But I'm not jus' anyone, am I?"
"Nope. Your a walking contradiction on how—sometimes—nepotism isn't all bad—"
"Watch it."
"Or what, John?"
You're distinctly aware of the age-old idiom about playing with fire, but when he dips his chin, and narrows his eyes at you like that, you find you don't really care much about getting burned.
His nostrils flare, eyes dark, and hungry. A warring pelagic storm looms over ashlar. Gyre grey. Arsenic white. You want to stain the tips of your fingers in the liquid blooming in his gaze.
"Might need to teach you a lesson in respect."
"Might need to teach you not to keep someone waiting."
His mouth is searing it when it presses to yours.
"Touchè."
Price tastes of saltpetre.
Thick, ichorous. An heady elixir that sits heavy on your tongue, leaking down the back of your throat when you swallow.
A fine sheen of nicotine paints his teeth from the forgotten cigar burning in the ashtray on the table, and when you swipe your tongue across them, chasing the secondhand buzz, it feels anxiolytic. Your head is a slurried mess from it all, and the way he feels beneath you.
Hard edges, broad—massive.
His chest expands with each deep inhale. Shoulders tense with the effort of holding himself back. A fact, you find, is more intoxicating than the nicotine on your tongue, or the saltpetre blooming in your veins.
The width of his thighs make your muscles burn when you perch your knees on the cushion beside them, the stretch a deep burn that feels more arduous than a workout.
You're not supposed to be kissing your captain.
To be sat on his lap while his big hands roam your skin, sliding down the knobs of your spine, thumb pressing the grove of each one. Massaging your sides when you gasp into his mouth, a wet noise full of the burn in your joints, the want in your belly—an ache, a need for more. More. More—
It was meant to be professional.
At work, on the field, in the stuffy headquarters of the SAS building in Hereford, it's meant to be distant. Cold. And—
And not this.
Not spread open in his lap, one palm cupping the soft cheek of your ass and squeezing until the flesh bulges from between his splayed fingers. Not heaving his name out in a palpable supplication drenched in want. Need.
Needy.
"Look'it you," he'd rasped into your neck hours earlier, slick with sweat from your impromptu training lesson in the comfort of his office. "So fuckin' needy—"
And you were. Are.
"C'mon, cap," you gasped, nose pressed taut against his temple, tongue chasing the briny tang that saturated his hairline. "Give it to me—"
He did.
Over and over and over again. Bending you over hard wood of his desk until your face was full of reports and papers, missions and confidential files on things, and people you'd rather not think about while your captain was spreading you apart with his tongue, and three fingers, and—
It was too much. Not enough. A paradoxical realm where pleasure and pain melded into a single entity. It's veins coursed with a potent cocktail of everything you could easily become addicted to—oxytocin, dopamine, endorphins rich enough to make you dizzy for aeons when it saturated all those gullible receptors in your head—and when he touched your skin with his bare hands, you felt the prickle of it leaking into your bloodstream.
The rough husk of his voice rasping out his pleasure in your ear is an audible opiate; euphoria condensed into decibels. It rattles your synapses. Your bones. You quiver under his bulk, eager for more.
Aching for it, really. Want him so badly that it hurts.
Even after he'd taken his time to prepare you, made you cum from his mouth, his fingers, more times than the chemical slurry of your melting mind could ever try to keep up with, it isn't enough.
Wasn't.
His cock feeding into you, stretching you open around the thick of him, until the world around you was awash in pure bliss in the most beautiful shade of blue, wasn't enough.
"More," you gasped, nerves throbbing like a bruise. Bones battered, rusted from the force of him taking you over and over again. "More, John—please—"
He obliged each time. Sliding home until all you could feel was him pulsing inside of you. The heavy weight of his hips notched against your ass. The branding heat of his hands gripping your hip, fingers curling around your shoulder, as he held you steady for him.
(Over and over again—)
Price smells of tobacco when he leans in close. Damp ash. The wet end of a cigarette butt. Stale smoke. Mossy, loam. You breathe in the bitter scent of him until it floods your lungs, clotting in each fibril until it's heavy with the tarish resin that leaks from the end of burning cigar.
"Greedy fuckin' thing," he hissed in your ear, fingers delving into you, feeling his release squelch around him. "Ain't you?"
"Always," you huffed, struggling through the onslaught of your mind buzzing for one more, just one more hit, and your body screaming for respite. "Always for you, John—"
"Stubborn, mm?"
He didn't give you one more. John is attune to you in ways you'd never anticipated. He just—knows you. Can easily see through the desperation for victory clawing at your throat, sinking it's nails into the delicate skin of your jugular, and hissing rapacious demands that rattle through your vocal chords.
When he meets the apogee of your mettle, he pulls back. Edging away from the battered fold of your limits once he brings it to a new precipice, a new level.
Price pulled you against him when your fawn-legs quiver, knees threatening to buckle, and tucked you against his chest, a protective embrace while he murmured words of gratitude, admiration, into your crown.
That was hours ago, and now—
The hunger rears. Your want is a perfect personification of greed, lust, pride, gluttony all coalescing into a molten desire that spools together, knotting tight against your chest where it tightens in a vice. A pretty bow of your searing need for the man whispering heavenly words of ardour into your damp skin.
"Price—"
He stops the whine with a nip of teeth against your jugular. "Come on, now," he bares the flat of them on your skin, pinching soft tissue between his incisors. "Rest a bit, love. Jus' wanna hold you, yeah? Jus' like this."
He leaks benzene, arsenic, and formaldehyde when he murmurs your name into the sticky column of your throat.
(And when he whispers it so softly, reedy benediction dipped the brush of his blunt affection, how could you ever deny him anything?)
Your arms thread around his nape, wrists locking together behind him.
The ticking of the clock on the wall is just another reminder of how little time you have, and yet—
"Stay," he murmurs against your jaw, whiskers scratching your chin.
Jet-lag. Exhaustion. Wishful thinking.
Whatever the reason might be, you pry your lips apart and choke out the words that have rattling inside your head from the moment you felt his chest bloom beneath your palms, and knew—without any doubt or uncertainty—that you would follow this man to hell and back if it meant you stand inches away from him for the rest of your meagre existence.
A tortuous whim. An exquisitely agonising proposition.
But you've always been rather smitten with poems that break your heart into pieces. Ones where you leave a little part of yourself between the lines that eviscerate your pericardium until you taste heme in the back of your throat.
Price reminds you of those poems. Ones that blugeons into you with a force so heavy and full, it feels as if it was written just for you. A pain so robust and brutal, that you're sure the lines in Times New Roman were first etched into your bones before they were spilled across the stark white page in black ink. Rotten blood between the pages of your barren soul.
Your fingers run through the mess on his crown, slick with sweat from earlier, and you nod, mind wandering down that path that leads to closed doors, a locked mausoleum, and with your bruised knuckles, broken nails, and bent fingers, you pry it open.
Finally, finally—
The words claw up your throat, grasping at the stretch of freedom within reach, and you—
stormborns
jacobvanloon
annaxmalina
jbbartram-illu
areudirty
germansingergirl
