Yes hello!!! Tanner telling Kayden to slap himself in the face again and Kayden grinning and doing it and Tanner savoring it Is a kink I did not know I had But maybe it's just T and Matt making it so compelling *sweats* (Tanner should go over there and do it himself; I'm sure Kayden would look up at him and offer up his face with a sneer and a lick of his lips)
anonymous asked: talk to us about kayden being SO willing to slap himself for tanner that seems like a thing you’d enjoy :3
“You having fun now?” snapped Tanner, hands shoved deep in his pockets as he paced back and forth, jittery, trying to cover his nerves. This was- this was a lot. This was too much. He couldn’t admit it outloud, wouldn’t admit it outloud, but he couldn’t fucking cope with this. He was a kid, they were all just kids, and he could feel the panic trying to strangle him as the reality of their potentially-deadly situation abruptly asserted itself.
Worst of all, it was real. It was all real, and a year’s worth of denial, of hating Kayden for what he had supposedly done, had just vanished in a puff of smoke.
“Tons.” Kayden bit out the end of the word, as though he was forcing it through his teeth, his jaw tight and eyes hard.
Tanner barely contained the laugh that twisted around his lungs like a thorny vine, a black, humourless thing. The reasoning behind the hatred may have collapsed, but that didn’t mean the hatred itself had – and right now, drowning in fear-anger-panic, it was the one thing he could actually cling to. “A lot of fun?” he asked, and even he could hear the poorly-suppressed hysteria in the words, beneath the fury of them. “Everything’s just so much fun, isn’t it?”
“God, Tanner…” breathed Sat, her face still tear-streaked and horror-stricken. She looked as scooped-hollow as Tanner felt, and it made something in his chest ache – but he ignored her, eyes locked on Kayden’s.
And Kayden… Kayden, the fucker, looked him in the eye right back, and slapped himself. He growled through it, through the pain and the flushing-red of his pale skin beneath the blow, sniffing, and still staring at Tanner with that loathsome, implacable defiance.
The roiling anger in Tanner’s stomach, abruptly, solidified into cruelty.
“Harder,” he ordered, voice quiet and all the more dangerous for it. “One more time, harder, so I can see it.”
There were exclamations from the others, surprise and horror, but he tuned them out. None of that mattered right now – nothing mattered, except for his anger, and the electric tension in the air, and the way Kayden was flexing his hand in a half-heartbeat’s worth of thought. Tanner was hyper-fixated on it, and time seemed to move molasses-slow for a moment, as he held his breath.
He didn’t actually expect Kayden to slap himself again, but really, that just made the crack of Kayden’s hand against his cheek all the more sweet.
One of the girls cried out, something shocked and indignant about it not being Kayden’s fault, and Tanner could hardly contain his laughter. “There’re a lot of things that are his fault,” he said, bitterly, teeth clenched tight enough his jaw was beginning to ache. “Just give me a minute to enjoy him brought down a peg.”
He might have been be talking to the girls, but all he had eyes for was Kayden – Kayden and his stupid fucking smirk and his stupid fucking hair and the stupid fucking look in his beautiful eyes, like he was angry-excited-hollow-sad all at once. The handprint on his cheek was blooming candy-red, and god, Tanner wished it was his.
Kayden smiled, all bared teeth and insolence, and Tanner’s hands curled into fists at his sides.
“Good enough for you?” asked Kayden, lazily, eyes bright and cheek red and teeth bared, like some creature out of Tanner’s nightmares come to haunt him on Earth for his sins. “Or you wanna hit me yourself, huh, Tanner? Make sure it’s done properly, because god, I’m enough of a fuckup as is, who knows if I can even hit myself ri-”
He didn’t get to finish the sentence before Tanner punched him in the mouth.
Raina yelped in shock, and Sat lunged forward to try and get between the two of them, but Kayden- Kayden just grinned, split lip and bloody teeth and faintly manic eyes, as Tanner stared.
He felt about as surprised as Raina looked. He’d never hit anyone before, not… not like this.
And then Kayden’s nose wrinkled into a sneer, and he bared his teeth, and spat a globule of bloodied saliva right into Tanner’s face – and it suddenly didn’t matter that he’d never hit anyone before. He was more than willing to learn, right here and right now, and Kayden’s face would do as his punching bag, because fuck that smug, sneering asshole, the bastard, who does he think he is-
Everything went red-rage-black after that, for a while.
By the time Sat managed to pry Tanner off Kayden, yelling the whole while and eventually shouting for Darby to help, Kayden’s face was a mess – as were Tanner’s knuckles. It was hard to tell whose blood was whose, crimson smeared across Kayden’s lip and below his nose, and from the cut across his eyebrow where Tanner’s fist had split the thin skin over the bone. Tanner’s hands were red-streaked, too, knuckles cracked and bruised from sloppy punches, bruises already rising to mirror the ones around Kayden’s eyes.
And he was still grinning. The fucker was still grinning, even as he scrambled out from under Tanner and stumbled upright on shaky legs, wiping the trickle of blood running down over his lip.
“Feeling better, huh, Tanner? Feeling powerful?” Kayden asked, the edge of a hysterical laugh to his voice. For all his bared teeth and curled lips, though, there was an edge of fear in his eyes that hadn’t been there before – and a miserable sort of resignation that Tanner couldn’t quite understand. He wiped at his nose again with a shaking hand, staring at the red streaked across his thumb as though surprised it was still bleeding. “Like father like fucking son. Should’a fucking known. Hah. Shit.”
Tanner’s insides turned to ice, the vicious rage cooling in a heartbeat to be replaced with horror.
“I- you provoked me,” he spluttered, trying to ignore the fact he was still on his ass in the dirt, with Sat pinning his arms behind his back and digging nails into his skin. He could feel the way she was shaking, just from her grip on him, and the sick feeling in his stomach soured further with the knowledge that he’d upset her so badly. “You knew what you were doing- you deserved that, and you know it-”
He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth, cringed from them and the memory of how often he’d heard them – accompanied by the snap of his father’s belt, burning across his thighs. But they were out there, and there was no way to take them back.
All he could do was sag in Sat’s grip, panting as he slowly came down off the adrenaline high, and try not to look at the bruised mess of Kayden’s face, staring down at him. He didn’t want to see what he’d done.
“Spoken like a real man,” sneered Kayden, blocking the stream of blood from his nose with forefinger knuckle and thumb whilst he waited for it to clot, hissing as he nudged his nose. “Fuck.” The grin was sliding off his face, the same sharp, shocky anger-misery lurking behind his eyes beginning to tug at the corners of his mouth. “Daddy’d be so proud, Tanner. Make sure you fuckin’ tell him all about it when you get back – how you put the fuckin’ trailer trash bastard in his place, huh? Fuck you.”
He spat at Tanner’s feet, lip curled up in disgust, and stumbled over to where he’d left his backpack – slumping down on the rotting log next to it as though his knees had given way, as though he was trying very hard to hide that fact and was failing dismally. His hands were shaking, though whether from adrenaline or fear or something else entirely was anyone’s guess.
Tanner felt the grip on his arms loosen, ever so slightly.
“If I let you go,” said Sat, voice shaky and a little hoarse from yelling, “are you going to hit him again?” She sounded like she was about to start sobbing.
“…No,” mumbled Tanner, shoulders slumping, eyes on the ground. The shame was choking, now, winding around his stomach and throat, increasingly difficult to ignore. He didn’t want to hit anyone any more – didn’t want to do anything. He wanted the ground to open up and swallow him whole.
The grip on his arms disappeared entirely, and he barely had time to bring them around to his front and rub at his forearms before Sat was there, glowering at him through tear-streaked makeup. He was entirely unsurprised when she slapped him, snapping his head to one side, one of her rings catching his cheek and opening a tiny, half-inch cut across his pale, freckled skin.
“Deserved that,” he said, quietly.
Sat just stared at him for a moment, jaw clenched and eyes hard. Then she nodded, once, and stalked off across the clearing to where Kayden was sat – leaving Tanner on his ass in the dirt, alone, as Raina stared at him wide-eyed. Darby made studiously sure she was looking at her journal, and only her journal.
Tanner stood up, on legs scarcely more steady than Kayden’s, and found his own log to sit on – careful to keep Darby and Raina between him and Kayden. Or rather, Kayden and Sat, since she had her arm around Kayden’s shoulder and her eyes narrowed in Tanner’s direction.
“So,” he said, quietly, heavily, wiping the drying blood off of his knuckles with the hem of his plaid shirt. It was difficult to speak through the guilt but, somehow, he managed it, voice raw enough that it almost seemed like he had been the one doing the screaming. “…What do we do now?”
zempasuchil replied to your post “Nineteen (16302 words) by Snickfic Chapters: 2/10 Fandom: Hockey RPF...”
Dude, I don’t even go here but I keep reading your xeno/ABO hockey RPF and loving it. Thumbs up
Awwwww ty. <3 It all owes something to my SPN roots, for sure. ;) The real question is, how much of it do you have to read before you can’t say you don’t go here anymore? :D
What is this vampire/nephilim Romantics fiction you are reading?? It sounds amazing omg
Oh, it’s The Stress of Her Regard, by Tim Powers (whose pirate fantasy novel the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie took its title from). I have given up on it, alas, for being too many bland dudes and not enough ladies, but if you’re specifically looking for weird vampiric nephilim, it could be very much up your alley. :)
zempasuchil replied to your post “Also, i can tell from context that “filk” means songfic. But where did...”
If by song fic you mean fan-song, like a song instead of a fic, yes that is what filk means. I think it's fic/folk ? Like folk-culture songs
riiiight, song fic is usually used to mean a story that has existing song lyrics interspersed (heavily) among the action/introspection. Is that correct?
And most of the stuff tagged filk were based on a specific song, they just changed the lyrics but kept it to the rhythm of the original, so i’m not exactly sure if folk culture is where that came from.
I’ve been in fandom for almost ten years and I’m only now starting to ask the important questions.
zempasuchil replied to your post “ugh, gender is already complicated enough without corporate dress...”
I HEAR YA. I got a blazer from H&m for an interview for about $35 last month, cheapest I could find
Oooh, that actually sounds really nice and in my price range. (Did it have pockets tho? askin’ the real questions)
The other day i accidentally walked into a really fancy men’s suit store because it said there was a sale. They said the price ranged from $300-450, and when i was like “i’m in the wrong place” one of the guys said he might have one that was $200. And then it turned out they thought i was getting it as a gift for some man and not myself, so that was a bust.
It’s frustrating because sometimes my tenor gender wants to dress more dapper with blazers and driver’s caps and shit, but sometimes it’s “no, let’s go fucking grunge” which is obviously not workplace attire.
ALSO, the main lawyer who was complaining about how i dress like a student? Today I came into the office and he had a polo shirt and khakis, so. double standards, much?
