Cisco used to think, thanks to Catholic parents and dramatic preachers, that hell was a place of fire and torment and cackling demons and whatnot. He was wrong. They were all wrong. Hell is a couch full of warmth and solid muscle and teasing touches. Hell is Len’s fingers and their slow, deliberate card through his hair, which never fails to make him melt down like everything under his skin is suddenly liquid. Hell is the weight of Slade’s hand on his thigh, the slow circles of his thumb, the rumble of laughter in his voice as he watches a movie Cisco’s only vaguely aware is playing.
Hell is an amazing, awful place, and though Cisco visits there as often as humanly possible he still can’t get used to the simple torments of it. He can only handle Len’s touch tugging so gently at his hair for a few seconds before he’s slumped and completely free of tension, even while Slade’s never-still hand puts the tension - the want, the desire - back inside him. It’s enough to drive a stronger man crazy, and Cisco is not strong with them. He’s simple and needy and eager. He’s trying to get stronger, because Len and Slade can play a much longer game of tease than he can and he’d like to keep up with them. But so far, his resistance to them doesn’t seem to be building.
His breathing is already thicker as Slade’s fingers slide under his shirt. He manages to keep still instead of squirming into the touch or, more greedily, just climbing into Slade’s lap and demanding they forget the movie he himself put on. He tries to focus on the screen as Len and Slade both make their teasing comments about his choice. Len, he knows, likes this kind of thing almost as much as Cisco. Even so, he wants to answer that there’s a reason he picked a movie none of them care about enough to see the through to the end. There’s not a thing about this that will grab anyone’s attention away from each other.
He draws a breath, curling into Slade’s touch and reaching out to run absent fingers along Len’s shirt. “I’ll have you know,” he informed them, proud of himself when his voice didn’t squeak despite his breathlessness, “that this movie has some super relevant themes about good-intentioned people - well, aliens - threatening earth’s destruction in order to make humanity entirely nonviolent against their will. I thought it would appeal to your sense of justice.” Full sentences and everything, maybe he is getting better at standing up to their torments. “We could…” He sucks in a breath as Slade’s fingertips brush a spot that makes his back arch. “…have a proper debate, once it’s over.”
There was a time there still are times, if he’s being honest that Len considered touch a utility. It was a tool, useful for a variety of purposes, but not inherently meaningful. His father used it to instill fear, to teach lessons. His mother used it in an always ill-fated attempt to soothe a savage beast. He learned to use it like them, and he learned to use it for his own purposes. To calm a sobbing child when her skin was bruised and her heart was broken, or to distract a well-dressed woman from her handbag long enough to see it a little bit lighter. Touch was useful. Nothing more, nothing less.
He’s since … reevaluated.
He relishes the connection it brings. Tucked together on the couch with two people whose skins he knows almost as well as his own, he savors the intimacy of a simple hand on a hip or fingers twisted in a shirt. It means I want to be close to you. It means I’m here with you. It means I trust you. And from Cisco and Slade, that means more to Len than even he in his infinite loquaciousness can put to words. Yes, there are times he shies away from it. When old habits are just a little too hard to break and that familiar prickle under his skin is just a little too hard to ignore. But those times are growing fewer and farther between.
He tips Cisco’s head back for a kiss. "Sense and justice don’t belong in the same sentence,” he says, but the words are more teasing than contrary. The movie is sanctimonious, but nostalgia still brings a smile to his face when they watch it and movies like it. Not quite as big a smile as Cisco’s quiet gasp, though, and damn, he supposes that’s a point for Slade in this little game they play. He’s not bitter. It just means he’ll have to try harder, and the kiss deepens with his resolve.
The challenge in his eyes when he glances up at Slade could just as easily be an invitation.
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