Fangirling Over Fanfic: My Homage to Unhitched
It was the way his breath faltered that stirred me.
My left eyelid cracks open, just enough for the red heat of dying embers to singe my brain. In response to him, the air rushes out of me as if I'd been holding it in since the world went black—when I passed out. Then my inhale stutters and I swallow, the noise is overwhelming in this prehistoric quiet that drowns the room.
Butch shifts, I can feel the way the space thins between our bodies. It thins and thickens at the same time, and something awakens, predating the dawn and outliving the fire in the hearth. It feels like grey and it tastes like hope and despair. Something grey is coaxed inside me, and I try in vain to ignore. There’s no ignoring him.
It was just one finger, probably his index although it doesn't matter which. It lands on my skin, just where my shirt has lifted while I slept; a slither of my back is exposed to him and he can’t resist flesh. That finger rests on the crest of a vertebrae before it carefully traces into the dip... until it finds itself cresting the next.
My brain has cut through the fog and it's working as fast as my body is to respond. Does he know I'm awake? Of course he fucking does, it's Butch; he knows everything—seemingly. Is he just curious whether I have the correct number of discs in my spine? Or is he making a map, like a butcher, of where to make his cuts? And yet here I am: responding.
That same finger curves into the waistband of my jeans, running lazily between my flesh and denim as though he is cutting through a lump of butter. He’s separating me from my decency before he'll toss the bit he desires on to the heat, watch it bubble and melt and run hot. But I'm already running shamefully hot where he’s scored my skin.
I want to turn around and yell at him to fucking quit, that I need to damn well rest. I hurt almost everywhere. And yet his touch feels... it feels like a balm, and now I think I might be crazy—it was only a matter of time, really. This creature, the actual incarnation of every terrifying thing that’s haunted me up until my cold eggs, soothes my self inflicted trauma...
...soothes it, coaxes it, teases it...
... and so I stay where I am, my attention focused solely on that point of contact that now teases, unquenchable in it’s need, between the flimsy material of my underwear and my hip bone.
My mouth opens but words don't form on my tongue. The only thing that trickles out is a noise that sounds desperate and it is accurate. I'm a despairing, hopeful mess, and whatever tangle of tales lie in the body behind me don’t matter anymore, because he pulls my mess together.
A needle has been puncturing my skin since I met him—over and over—and it's only now that I can see the bloody sinew that's looped through those holes. And when he pulls tight on that thread my seams join, making a jagged line in the map of me. It's not perfect and it hurts like hell but the pieces are joined.
Sliced and pulled and darned, all by the same damn precise hands.
One of those hands is fanning itself out on my abdomen now, his fingers are spread wide. Perhaps he's trying to figure me out like a puzzle box; finding the right configuration, or a secret button, to make my lid spring wide open. Maybe he’s seeking out the soft spot he can touch to completely immerse himself in my body, blur into me; a beast of several shades of black. But then I realise that the sinew that now holds me together was pulled from his own joints.
He is already me, and I him.
I don't know what his intentions—I never fucking know what Butch’s intentions are, or if he even has any. What I do know is that his palm pours heat into me. My heart is pounding like poison is in my blood all because his damn hand has pushed under my shirt. I'm pubescent again, with no voice in the decisions my body make. And he fucking loves my responses...
Would I stop it if I could? Probably not.
Even if I can't be honest with myself, Butch reads those lies like they're an old and battered tabloid front page that I’m clutching in front of my bareness to hide my motives. And if I’m truly honest with myself, I know that's the reason I seethe—when he looks at me with an almost blank expression that is deafeningly loud in its accusations.
When I drift, sometimes the cab seats change in my mind, or the bed, or the floor. Then I'm sitting across from him in a tall, cold, and lofty room where his eyes claw at my soul. He could have a book open in his lap for the mental notes I can see him making: describing my pathology, sketching my anatomy, drawing fucking love hearts with my name centered in them. Books surround us, filled with notes on other people, but the ones that rest in his lap are irresistible to him. And I hate it but I can't stop presenting myself, like he can find answers in me that I don't know the question which precedes it. It's addictive and then I've forgotten I hate it. I can't remember what life was like before this and I need it.
I need him. And he... he needs me. That thought leaves a bitter taste on my tongue.
I almost laugh at the notion, but my mouth is not in communication with my brain right now, and so a needy moan spews from my throat instead. Needy and moaning—that about sums me up. Butch’s drifting hand has stopped in its track and I know what he's waiting for. He wants to feel me move; meet him in the perverse goddamn middle.
What I usually do is hesitate, dwell, and question, but the darkness has seeped into me tonight. I feel entirely dissolved and yet part of something bigger. For once I don't fight against the direction my muscles want to pull, the thing I feel is a want that only Butch can sate.
So, I turn to him. His palm dances over the surface of my skin as I move —the arm hovering over a record as it spins. A static charge is picked up as his flesh passes over mine. It must be static because I jolt when he pushes the heel of his hand into the small of my back, moving me to him, closing the distance between us.
I can't see the embers now, and they were greying before I rolled over, but I'm not sure if it's too dark to see or if I've closed my eyes. Knowing me I have my eyes closed, feigning my fucking ignorance. My fingertips are mapping him, recklessly searching his features until the pads of my thumbs run along his cheekbones, sharp and cutting like his tongue. Instead of the caution that is a necessity to survive at proximity to this beast, I charge forward.
Dancing with Death.
I can taste him before I feel anything. Past the obligatory smoke, Butch tastes like the unknown. I have no idea what the fuck that is: hints of this thing and that thing without any firm definition. That pretty much sums up the man whose mouth I'm invading. My tongue is sliding along his and there's something different—something new in the pause he gave before his fingers dig into me and his teeth graze my tongue. He expected more fight, he’s hesitant and that's new.
So I take advantage of it. I relish in the fact that he can't predict me, and usually he faces that reality with a cool facade; eager to watch what plays out. But now he's getting what he wants, and I am giving it without presenting my terms. The fact that we might be on the same page—without my usual denial—has thrown him.
I decide I like throwing Butch.
Pushing against his chest, he lets me roll him onto his back and I delve into his mouth, feeling the soft, and the hard, and sharp alike. How many souls have passed through his mouth? And here I am, gambling my own, to play on this graveyard.
I need to find his pulse so my lips land on his neck with desperation but no finesse. I leave marks on him as I find his jugular, I tease the skin that I hold in my mouth with my teeth. I’m determined to mark him the way he's marked me. Then I realise I already have; scars are left where he took the sinew to bridge my chasms.
My fingers are crawling down his chest, they fall into the ridges of his muscles— the weak parts in the armor of his body. He doesn't flinch that I'm there, my touch just makes soft sounds carry on his exhale, and they grow harsher the more I search him. He’s beginning to sound like the beast that he is. The beast that we are.
I like making those sounds come from Butch.
For this moment at least, I'm in control of the uncontrollable—the chaotic. It's a frenzy I stir within him, and it's utterly fascinating in it’s devastating nature. I’m in the eye of the storm and I command where it goes and which landscape it smites.
I can't feel my injuries anymore. I'm sure the pain will come crashing down on me sooner or later. All I can think of is that this power I feel right now, on top of Butch with my lips dragging down his chest, is exactly the same as when I take a life. To say it feels good is an understatement; it's a rush and I'm chasing the calamitous high.
So, a year and a half ago I wrote this homage to @joanielspeak and her work: the incredible Unhitched, if you haven’t read it then you really should. If you didn’t know you needed a 70′s Trucker Hannibal AU in your life, you’ve now been informed.
I adored the characters, I loved being in Hoppers head, and I love getting fucked up by Butch. Read. Enjoy.
