When the dam breaks (carry what you can). John Wick x August Walker, aka the crossover that nobody asked for but is happening anyway. Two bedraggled men meet in a bar. They’re cold. Wet. Miserable. It’s a good time to find a warm willing body. Smut, oral, handjobs, angst (dammit this was not supposed to happen), over abundance of water metaphors.
———
John and August are unlikely companions, if you can even call this companionship. It’s the natural outgrowth of a chance meeting, two souls brushing against each other in a bar that’s seen better days. It’s silence, save for the soft thump of glass on wood after each sip. It’s the faraway drone of rain and the droplets sliding down John’s cheeks before he pushes his hair back with a sigh and folds himself down onto a barstool. You look like shit, he says, with a sideways glance that cuts to the bone and spreads out warm beneath August’s skin.
Says the drowned rat. August isn’t exactly fresh as a daisy either; he’s been drifting, friendless, washing his socks in one motel sink after another for weeks. Can’t go home to Langley, can’t go crawling back to the Apostles and beg to be accepted into the fold. Either way he’s a traitor; either way he can expect a long imprisonment somewhere far from the light, followed by an unmarked grave and an eternity of rotting into worm food. He rubs thumb and middle finger together and considers his next words. Buy you a drink?
Yeah.
Of the two of them, August is the talker, all bravado and schemes within schemes within schemes. He can weave a tale so riveting that he’s long gone before you notice there’s nothing at the center of it but empty air— or at least that’s how things used to be. Poor fucker doesn’t have a soul loyal to August the man anymore; he’s been written off, 86’d, thrown to the dogs. John Lark the myth is another story. There’s probably someone already stepping into those shoes, shedding their old name and taking up the mantle of Lark the Apostle, Lark the world-ender, Lark the killer of innocents. He’s got revolutionaries lining up around the block to suck him off while he reads from his beloved manifesto.
You really believe that shit?
Yeah. No. I mean. What he means is that he wants— wanted— to excise the rotten core of the world, to cauterize the wound and find a new way forward. What he wanted was the impossible. What he got was— what? Chucked off a cliff, crushed and incinerated in a lonely valley? Nah. If he’d done that, then he wouldn’t be here, bottle dangling from his hand, doing his damnedest not to let his leer slip into a grimace. Fuck it. If I wanted to spend the night feeling sorry for myself I’d just sit here until I float away. Nevermind the chorus of coward coward coward that stands behind his every thought. Nevermind the moment he lost his nerve and bailed on the last leg of the mission.
Was it cowardice, though? To stand on the precipice of the world’s undoing and feel that gnawing sense of wrongness? August says it is, but he’s a liar even to himself. Easier to tell himself he was too shit-scared to go through with it than to face the years he’s spent doing it all wrong. Come on. August leaves the bottle and makes his way upstairs. John follows a half step behind, shedding pieces of his suit until he’s no longer bulletproof, heart hammering away with only a sweat-stained shirt to keep it contained. And soon enough that, too, is gone.
Everything in this room is tinted red from the neon sign that blinks and fizzes outside the window; its light pulses in time to the need that ratchets their breath higher and faster; the slow steady exhale-inhale-exhale that leads up to the kill shot has no place here. This isn’t a dance; the burn of stubble is artless, honest, cutting swaths of mine across their skin. There’s a scar below John’s clavicle that still carries that strange sensation that vibrates between numb and burning; August fills its shining red hollow with tongue and teeth, biting down and working his jaw to make John buck his hips and growl.
(What’s the last thing you want to see? To hear? To feel? What sensations are you going to carry with you when you leave this world?)
Fucking and fighting are much the same at their core. There’s the sweat and straining limbs, the tight-knotted elation of movement, the rough raw physicality of it all. And there’s blood smeared on the sheets, scabs torn off from the friction of bodies sliding across the bed; John looks down at August and there isn’t a sneer or a smirk or any kind of twisted lip to mark his conquest but it’s clear all the same. And so they stare at each other, wild-haired and panting, until August speaks because of course he’s the first to break the silence.
We gonna fuck or what? There’s no waver in his voice, of course not. Probably not. Aw hell. He hears it plainly and maybe it’s just been too long. Maybe he’s still burning from the inside. But it’s strange: there’s no shameful heat across his cheeks, no ache from grinding his teeth in the aftermath of cracking himself open like this. Maybe it’s the way John watches quietly, somewhere between assessing and patient, free from judgment. But he is thinking all the same, lips parted around words that have yet to take form. He speaks like he moves: thoughtful, purposeful, much like the sea in the moments before nascent islands break its surface.
It’s…been a while. Seems there’s always gravel lodged in John’s throat these days. The pad of his thumb is rough and callused; he draws it over August’s mustache and down, arousal sparking through him at the feel of August’s teeth as he bites onto John’s thumb and grins. It’s easy enough to shove his way further, pressing down hard on August’s tongue; need glazes those pretty ocean blues and maybe it’s a risk but he’s going to spit right onto August’s tongue, blood and bourbon leaving their sting.
The thing about taking a risk, about actions that could have repercussions beyond your wildest dreams, about taking a bat to a beehive for that sweet sticky honey, is this: you have to ask yourself, is it worth it?
(That’s the problem with you, John. You know what the fallout is going to be and you do it anyway. You’re a damned fool.)
Yeah, it sure as hell is worth it, if only for the unh that rips loose from somewhere deep in August’s gut. And maybe it’s been a while for John, but he’s not the only one. August’s hand reaches out and it’s shaking, maybe mildly enough that in any other situation it would go unnoticed, just like the gnarl of breaks set and reset, the fingernails that never grew back quite right, the deep white line across his palm. But it does shake. John sees it all, and folds it into his understanding.
John rests his forehead against August’s belly; he breathes and thinks only of this moment, savoring the twitch and jump of muscle beneath him, shoving away thoughts of anyone or anywhere other than this. Easy, he mouths, clever fingers reaching down to grasp August at the root. Gotta want it bad enough.
Didn’t. Ah. Didn’t realize you knew how to be patient.
I got a little perspective. It’s a hell of an understatement, coming from the guy who wakes still wrapped in dreams of the world beyond the world: not white clouds and angels, not burning agony, but merely quiet— until the waking world filters in with its noise and chaos pulsing bloody at the edges of his thoughts. But still, somehow, he walks back into the world. Better days may never come again but he shrugs back into his suit and finds his way from one day to the next.
(Don’t rush it. Time means nothing except the long stretch between stab and scar.)
It’s— oh, fuck. It’s been a while for me, too. Laced between August’s words are the hitched breaths of too much, too soon but he is sweating from ears to asshole and when he says I want it’s the wrecking ball before a failing dam; when he says I need it’s the shiver and groan of cracking concrete; he closes his hand tight over John’s and his fourth finger slots into the gap between John’s third and fifth. Their grip skips and stutters; it’s rough with calluses and scars, the marks of lives hard-lived. But their hands are strong, steadying and falling into rhythm; the susurrus of skin-on-skin is the sound of river stones tumbling as the current carries them along.
It’s a dry burn, and this time when John spits it’s to ease the way, to give brief respite— and perhaps, a bit, to admire the way it slides down August’s shaft— mingling with precum, foamed white with friction.
Orgasm isn’t even the point of all this, although it’s good— better than good, with August’s eyes first screwed shut and then opening muzzy and unfocused— and though John pulses hard and wanting, he holds back; he drinks deep from the well of a mind devoid of thought and for a moment he, too, finds himself purely empty and still. Their hands are still joined, sticky with seed, til August disentangles and reaches out. His hand is almost steady when he says now let me get at you.
And now their places change; the coverlet crumples beneath them as John rolls to his back and hooks one arm behind his head; neon light pools in his navel and in the hollows of his many scars. Words unspoken hang about his lips, caught against sharp fangs. Easy there, he mouths. There’s nothing to prove and nowhere to hide here; their lives are written in tightly shining ink across their skin, and the sum of all those scars is this: we’re here. We survive no matter how we feel about it. He strokes a hand over the back of August’s head, not pressing down but weaving through soft hair. And there— just there, right at the base of August’s skull where every nerve seems to converge— his hand settles in a weightless grip.
August laps up salt and musk, letting the taste burn its way onto his tongue. If his eyes are wet it’s from the effort of swallowing John inch by inch. The red streaked across his cheeks and throat is just from the strain of cataloging every twitch, every rolling groan. It can’t be more than physical, it can’t. It can’t. Absolutely not. Aw, fuck.
Alright? John’s voice is level despite the hitch of his hips, chasing after warmth and that slick clever tongue.
Yeah. It’s just. Just what? It’s like I said. Just been a while. August’s lips are spit-slick and shiny and when he speaks the words are roughly prickled. Now zip it. Gonna give you something you won’t forget. He descends again and keeps his word: he is artless, messy, and above all unforgiving. There is no room to breathe, no finessing John to the edge and back; he swallows hard and with a press of his tongue he ends it. His mouth is filled with bitter come that drips pearlescent from his ruddy open lips; he glances up and he is caught— they are caught— bound and drowning in this moment. He is seen, and in turn he understands.
(Nothing is permanent. How can you stand it?
You don’t. You hold on to what you can and grieve the rest.)
There is time, tonight, to take it slow; the room is paid through the night and anyhow it’s lousy weather. Here beneath the burning shower spray, draped over the back of a chair, tangled in the pile of their own discarded clothes, stillness waits for them. And rain is falling on the river somewhere far away.
