Participants:
| Scene Title | Do Not Disturb |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Bed lining to ruin, confessions to be made, take-backs to ask for. It's deplorably saccharine, and neither minds. |
| Date | 9 April, 2019 |
A Decent Hotel
One of the beds is for sleeping.
Possibly, Alexander will be creeped out soon. Ten years older, and with a proportional amount of obsession, bloodshed and other decadence for that interval, Teo has accumulated bad habits or observed personalized rituals that some might construe as creepy.
He's clingy as fuck, for one thing. Perhaps less unexpectedly, also a greedy slut prone to dropping bruises on available surfaces. Earlier, he'd skimmed linens off his companion's sleeping torso like so much skin off milk, and awakened Al with an unsignaled but not ungentle bout of sex and a laugh breathed into his ear, good tidings: that Alexander's voice is adorable when stoked to moaning in his sleep.
It's later now. A crooked rhombus pool of actual sunlight is stretching around the floor underneath the curtains. Teo isn't sleeping but to all appearances drowsing, one eye above the wrinkled horizon of a pillow, the other buried.
While Al lacks Felix's relentless police-dog aggression, he's still just as obliging as he ever was. Oppportunistic, frankly - scruples discarded under only a veiling of alcohol and a little urging. He is sleeping with puppyish abandon, despite or perhaps because of the bruises now written on his skin, lips slightly parted. Abby's healed him, but he's still utterly exhausted.
He hadn't been drowsing, of course. Not exactly. The next instant, Teo's eyes blink back to quartz clarity, his immediate surroundings replacing the images of further distances he had been roving. He moves slightly against his lover's skin.
One large half of a hand closes on the roof of Alexander's head, a thumb smoothing against, then with, then against the grain of short red hair above his temple.
Blowing out an equally canine sigh, he pushes his nose to rest against Alexander's scalp. Rests a moment, before inhaling skin oils and organic salts, once, like summoning up another vestige of strength or energy. That accomplished, he creaks nearer, presses quiet and curiously inobtrusive kisses down on the layers between strands, as if hair has provided an unexpected challenge in mapping the entirety of the younger man's surface area with his lips. This is either good for his heart or atrociously bad for it.
There was a shower in there, somewhere. Al smells like fancy hotel soap and shampoo, over whatever his clean skin smells like. Always curiously oceanic and saline. Al's hair is…not too much of an obstacle, for all that it grew out somewhat from that brutal buzz in prison. He mumbles something, stirred into vague wakefulness, cracking an eye and rolling it slowly to Teo. His smile is….somehow dreamy and triumphant at once, really.
"Y' look happy," Teo says, choosing to dignify the obvious because it is not a commonplace occurrence. Al being happy. He still remembers. Admittedly, he mostly remembers not trying hard enough. Ten years in, that much hasn't really changed. The Sicilian doesn't elaborate. He continues about his business with point precision, fingering through brief hairs, skimming through them to scalp.
"I feel good," Al says, simply, and does not elaborate. His eyes cloud, but only briefly. Not going to yield to the temptation to melancholy, not now. This is going to be a short interlude, one of those dreams you hate to wake from - his fatalism's enough to tell him that now. But that just means there's all the more reason to cling while you can. He rolls to really look at Teo, face going a little more somber. "You…..what's it been like?" he finally settles on, rather than, "Man, what in hell happened to you?"
One tattooed arm lifts to allow his lover to turn, settles on the other side. Alexander's head is temporarily haloed in its jointed crook, elbow perched on sternum.
Teo has apparently decided that inherent sea spray and bodywash out of tiny yellow bottles are inadequate to the cause; he continues to groom Al, fixedly, without missing a beat. He's caught a lot of Felix's habits over the years. This only vaguely resembles one of them. "I'm in counter-terror," he says, settling for the most obviously helpful answer. "Mostly Israel.
"With Hana. Guess that much hasn't changed." Despite the government's choice in terminology, Phoenix never had fit the actual definition for terrorists. Ironically, their most notorious work amounted to killing those.
Alexander cuddles up, contentedly, settling his head on Teo's arm. "Funny, you don't look Israeli to me," he mumbles, teasingly. "Never did settle down, did you?" HE eyes Teo, thoughtfully. "Now what?" he says, quietly. Last night was….strange for the both of them, despite being enjoyable. It's bizarre to be with someone who magically knows precisely what you like….and yet is someone you've never been with before. A little bit of cognitive disconnect there.
"Ionno." Teo is less lazy with his speech these days than he used to be, but there's a lot of old behavior he's catching up on here. What should have been two words is moulded into one. "'M sure after I run out of Palestinians there will be other parts of the Middle East that could use sorting.
"Maybe Hana will decide." Hana will decide. On what, he doesn't know, and the whole thing hinges on a rather small and obscure probability that they would both survive this particular battle on terror, anyway. Yes, Teodoro knows that this wasn't what Alexander was asking about.
He conveniently pretends otherwise, muffling his next words into the side of Al's skull, the prop of his arm giving out abruptly underneath him. "Guess I should see Hel and Lucia 'nd everyone."
"Yes," Al says, gently, but he does nudge Teo with an elbow, patiently. "I don't want to leave the bed," he adds, tone plaintive, closing his eyes. That's how he'll spend the future - eating, sleeping, fucking. Let the past take care of itself. "How did we finally sort things out enough to get together?" he asks, nuzzling into Teo's shoulder.
They're apparently doing this now. Of course they're doing this now. There's nothing else to do besides eat, sleep, fuck— and talk. Teo's eyes close, flicking the top of Alexander's cheekbone with fringy eyelashes bleached blond by the insistence of Tel Aviv's nearly summer sun.
Remembering is hard. Not because he can't, but because going that far backwards means going past a few intervening memories that are difficult to cross, like fast and deep water.
"Uuuuhh." He exhales thoughtfully, nudges his shoulder up against Al's nose and mouth, answering kiss with acquiescence. "Took some time apart. Sa—Sonny 'nd I broke up, I tried seeing some other people— you might have too, but we didn't really talk about that. I came to visit you in Atlanta, nearly died doing something fucking stupid, freaked myself out, kissed you.
"Spent awhile convincing you to take a chance on me, and then… you did."
That's apparently answer enough for Alexander. He doesn't question further, doesn't pry or enquire. "I see," he says, simply. It does sound like that's how it would play out.
Does it? Teodoro's perspective on the whole thing is skewed. He has had eight years to pour over their last mistakes and final exchanges, and probably eroded them into a different shape than what had been there. He closes his eyes and turns his head slightly, rubbing his nose into the coral pink rim of Alexander's ear, a canine gesture of companionship.
"There was a notable absence of duels and grand gestures," Teo mumbles wearily. It does make sense; they're men, not particularly high-key in any aspect of their lives when unaccompanied. Still, there's a twisting thread of regret there, tied in a loop, a knot, holding him back, chafing, constricting, and unbreakable.
"Most of the time, I'm pretty sure I could've…" He fades out into blinking quiet.
"What? Defended my nonexistent virtue with more vigor?" Al's voice is low, amused. "I may not have much formal education, but I read a lot of Dumas and Sabatini. And while I like the idea of you stepping onto the field of honor at dawn…..what, Teo? If this is your second chance to say all the things you meant to but never did, then don't keep silent," He rolls over to face Teo, expression patient, draping an arm over Teo's shoulder gently, but puts up a finger to Teo's lip. Not quite the 'shush' gesture. More as if he'd tease the words out of him, if he could. He's still utterly at ease, sleepy contentment in the lines of eyes and mouth.
Al's bright-skinned face is caught up, cupped in one of the Sicilian's hands, the fleecier, finer hairs trailing down in front of his ear smoothed with a forefinger so densely callused it almost does work as the teeth of a comb. Teo has his mouth twisted, wry with unspoken disagreement. At— 'nonexistant virtue' maybe, or just some other, minor disjunct of understanding. In the end, though, Alexander's right.
"I don't think you'dve gone to Columbia if I'd made your guilt go away."
Lipped out on Aleander's finger, this might well illuminate more than Teodoro had honestly intended to. This endless bombardment of affection, grasp of hands, ankles hooked around Alexander's own, secrets and stories volunteered despite the pain of handling their razor edges, this narrow-eyed and relentless pursuit of his erstwhile lover's satiation, physical, material, and spiritual.
Teo's eyes blink the clarity of quartz. He looks down at Alexander's mouth briefly, looks tortured the way dogs do; as if that's just his face and the only shape it could ever be. "When I went to Atlanta, I brought a lot of reminders with me. I think you felt guilty again, and that's probably why you went back to New York when Helena called us."
It's nice to have someone give so unstintingly, because he never has. Always poverty of one sort or another - and while money can't buy you love, it makes it a lot easier to find, in many a way. Al looks to him…..and while he's still physically the younger, there's that broken-down look in the pale eyes. "I don't know. I….no one can make guilt go away but the bearer, if even then. You're my lover, not a priest, you can't absolve me. It's not your job to even try," he says, heavily. "It's water under the bridge. Though now I don't know….it's a catch-22. If I go back, will I be able to go, knowing what I know now? And what ….what if I live? Do I do more good as a dead martyr?"
"No." Teo's nose dimples his cheek, and muscles contract underneath the weight of Al's red-haired head, his bicep shifting as he lists over, leans closer, his other arm finishing another long section of a circle around the other man's supine torso.
Teo's nose trials up the edge of Alexander's face, the slight hollow pasteled in to the clear pallor just past the corner of his eye, up to his hair again. "The only thing your death does is add more gas to the fire of the counter-terrorism efforts against the culprits — Humanis First!, and those were already well underway as it was. It was random, horrible violence and it never should have fucking happened."
If you could take the conviction in Teo's voice and bottle it, you could probably make five poets and a suicide bomber out of sane men. Blunt fingernails rough along the underside of Alexander's arm, worrying tender skin in tiny circles as a neurotic dog would a bit of well-loved rawhide or he used to chew his knuckles.
He doesn't say anything else, though his breath washes warm down the roof of Alexander's head, swift with things he was undoubtedly about to say. Not that the redhead really has to hear them aloud to have an inkling, to get the sense: Don't go.
Well, chances are now better than good that Jesse Knight will never set foot upon the campus of Columbia U. Ah, well. He grunts, not arguing the point. Al's long past the point where death can be romanticized. After Iraq, after New York, there is nothing glorious about dying. Not when living and screwing over your foes is both more fun and more satisfying. The redhead simply reaches up, running a palm over Teo's hair, wonderingly. And then he sinks his fingertips into the older man's muscle, to pull him wholly over, as if cuddling down under a blanket.
Flump. Teodoro ends up on top Alexander, which is all well and good by the laws of nature and reality, as far as he's concerned. The worst of his weight is held off by elbows pinned down on either side of the other man's torso, sunk into bedsprings and bedsheets that probably have enough sperm dried into them to impregnate a washing machine.
Teo doesn't have much hair on top of his head anymore. It's militarily short, shaven down to a velvet prickle that slithers flat, directional, at the pressure of a palm. "Checked 'f your ability works 'gain yet?" he asks, his jaws wrapped around the side of Alexander's throat.
That's why they -sleep- on the other bed. Al's turn to scratch gently, enjoying that soft nap. He pauses, ponders that. Expression turns inward for a moment, and then he winces. "No. Doesn't yet. Still hurts. It'll come back soon enough, I s'pose," Having dragged Teo over himself, hips ground to hips again, he writhes a bit to settle him more comfortably, legs parted. And then settles his palm atop Teo's crown again, the better to shove on his head. Hey. Things to attend to.
Whenever they can think to get all the way to the other bed, which generally depends heavily on whether or not Teo has enough energy to pick up the pretty ginger princess and carry his lazy ('exhausted') ass over. There's like four feet of carpet between the two pieces of furniture, but it feels a lot longer when you're spent.
"Not hungry?" Teo's face winds up pushed into Alexander's sternum. Every syllable scales another fraction of an inch Southward, but it's gradual going, considering he is genuinely concerned, you know, there might be a health issue involved somewhere in here. Metabolism, caloric intake; Moab thinned Al out. "There's this sushi place down the street," he informs the other man's navel, nosing its dusted half-moon. "And Tang does good scallion pancakes and sweet and sour soup."
Alternatively, Teo's just being a jerk. Little bit.
"I have some class, so I am not making the obvious joke here," Al says, with as much dignity as one can while utterly naked and underneath another human being. "That all sounds great, we can go out in a little. Depends on how fast you work," There's another gentle shove, by way of hint. "I'm willing to accept a bit of rushing." There's a crescent bruise to the upper right of said navel, one among several. Like he's been kicked by a particularly small and insistent pony.
In what might be initially unwonted backpdalling, Teo's nose slides up Al's belly, briefly, roving pale skin to examine the bruises set there. "'S that mine?" he inquires, blinking enormous blue eyes.
Scooted down the bed, Teo's tattooed arms now meshed in sheets. Half-hidden by creased linen, his fingers ladder up the other man's thigh, securing a grip, tacit promise— or a benign taunt that, yeah, he'll get on that in a second. His shoulder pushes up, easing his weight; the tattoo on his upper chest peeks out briefly. The chess piece.
It's not so much a gasp as a sudden inhale. Al is not tired of this yet. If, in fact, he ever will be. "Yeah. No one bit me in prison. I got in a few fights, but the legends you hear about showers and soap don't apply to Moab, thank god," he says, with a little laugh in his voice. "I don't mind. You wanna add more, you can." He's marked Teo a little in his turn - the far more miniscule crescents left by Alex's own bluntcut fingernails, in patterns on the older man's back. And a few teethmarks of his own. Al remains something of a biter, though he's not all that vocal.
Listening to tortured breathing is pretty satisfying, as far as Teo is concerned; harder to fake, or so goes for general consensus. It may be a matter of personal preference, but he generally deems it no disrespect or criticism to his ministration when the air coming out of Alexander's lungs skips his vocal chords entirely. He isn't tired of this either.
There's a half-smile; nothing wan about it. Teo elbows linens back, sets his other arm over Al's belly like locking in a safety bar, and nips at the marzipan ridge of his lover's hipbone once, briefly, syncopated with the clench of fingers on the redneck's leg, before he settles in to work. With some luck, to shore up the inevitable departure of forethought, they'll be ready to go before the lunch menus are taken down.
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