Participants:
| Scene Title | For The Winter |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | A little bit about vanity and good deal about greed. Teo accidentally breaks the medal of Saint Michael and Felix has to stop and think a moment. Then it really is over. Follows Interruptus. |
| Date | February 11, 2009 |
Nondescript Hotel Chain: Felix's Room
Still nondescript.
The lamp is on the bed, snagged or knocked off by a stray foot or something when Teo carried the older man out of his robe and off the floor. There's a cigarette in the ashtray — not Teo's, and the clock skewed on the bedstand makes a report in red, segmented digital numerals, that they remain somewhere in the small hours of the night. Dawn is soon. Daylight — whenever it chooses to emerge, will have to compete with the flicker and dull chitter of the television walking its shadows and limned geometry across rumpled linens.
Felix has a boy. Still has a boy, as the correct words may well be. Teo is with him, and looking at the ceiling.
Which is plain, blank, boring, the subtle flaws of age and dirt not yet accumulated enough to be visible in the half-light — quite unlike the last place Felix was staying at. Blunt fingernails pry a rasping noise from his skin above his eyebrow, as if to offset something like a headache. "I'm not—" The sentence aborts into an uneven cough. Talking is a skill that atrophies for him quicker than others.
It took Fel a little to pry Teo entirely out of his clothes - the Sicilian definitely started at an advantage there. Not that Felix in heat isn't an entirely shameless creature. It's quite the contrast to the soberness of his dress when clothed that he's utterly unselfconscious out of it. At the moment, he's sprawled on his back, though he rolls on to his side lazily to lift the lamp back to its proper place, and stub out the cigarette carefully. "Not what?" he asks, in a low, pleased murmur. He's still loose-limbed and relaxed, though as usual he shows no actual urge to sleepiness.
"Beautiful." Teo's knee tents a bedsheet, automatically moving his leg aside and out of his bedmate's way when the creak of bedsprings betrays that Felix is trying to do something. Possibly something constructive. He tips a glance that way, sees the lamp struggle back onto its base, and then folds an arm up to pillow his own head, which automatically tilts down the angle of his forearm and the stoop of his shoulder.
His eyes fall, swing around to see Felix's face. "I'm pasty for an Italian guy. You have no idea how wrong it is, being a pasty Italian. My legs are too thin for my shoulders. You, on the other hand." His eyes thin with a smile that takes its time finding its way to his mouth. Self-deprecation is its own brand of conceit, but the incipient compliment might be something else.
"You sound like a woman," Felix says, with a massive dose of implied misogyny smeared around the edges of that statement. "And your opinion doesn't matter, save when it's you and your hand alone." He turns back to prop his head up on a hand, and give Teo a very appreciative looking-over. "I'm the one fucking you, and I like the way you look. Me, I've too much mileage on rough roads, and while that may catch up to me later, it doesn't seem to slow me down now," He shrugs scarred shoulders in elaborate disregard.
The younger man lapses into a pause there, as if trying to make up his mind whether or not to acknowledge the insult that the implied misogyny is pushes at him, though the moment is past the instant he fails to react out of any true or visceral sentiment. Girls don't say that to him. Do they? Teo's face goes blank: he can't remember.
"You're put together well," he replies, presently, apparently dismissing Felix's dismissal by forgetting entirely to acknowledge it. "I mean, in terms of… fuckin'…" he's sleepy the way Felix rarely ever seems to get; doesn't pay attention to the inadvertently lewd conjugation of the curse word and the noun he eventually pulls out of the air. "Proportions. You're not the tallest guy, but everything — fits. If you didn't have these," he raps a knuckle on one of those nonchalant shoulders.
"Thank you," Felix says, simply, before eyeing Teo a little askance. "What about 'em?" he says. He's too starkly muscled, wiry - half grayhound, as someone once teased him. "And besides, I'm lucky. I'm a man, I don't have to be pretty," he adds, stretching out his arm and mirroring Teo's posture, still eyeing him.
The sanguine line of Teo's mouth creases briefly, purling around indecision, confusion, or some hapless mix thereof. Either he forgot where he was going with that or Felix's insistence to the contrary isn't helping. "Nothing. I don't know. It's one way to improve on the original material, I guess," he says slowly, a furrow marring his forehead.
"No dumber than anything anybody else I know does." He cants a glance down at the stark barbs, lines and letters that march up around his own skin like mad little soldiers. Pauses, thinking of something that makes him frown, the way he does to repress a smile that would otherwise make him feel guilty. Means, probably, he's thinking of some other guy. That other guy.
Felix shrugs again, stretches luxuriously, and promptly rolls onto his back, letting one hand curl over his solar plexus. "I had my ears pierced, back when I was a teenager who thought he was punk," he says, lazily. "Someone ripped 'em out of my ears in a moshpit, and that was that." Wait, what? There are miniscule scars on his lobes that bear it out, funnily enough.
"He thought he was a what?" For a moment, Teo wonders if his aptitude for learning languages completely shorted out on the grammatical frame and definition of the one slang term that seemed to be mutually exclusive with everything that Agent Felix Ivanov's oxford shirts and clean-pressed sensibilities.
"Mosh pit?" Apparently English continues to elude his grasp. Felix's earlobes, on the other hand, are well within the reach of a precise forefinger and thumb, and Teo's breathing on the side of his face the next moment, squinting pointlessly in the lack of light. The whorled pads of his fingers will have to do his seeing for him. "What, you mean like— a concert?"
"Yes," Felix says, quietly. He lets Teo fool with his earlobes without fussing - not that he minds having them nipped, as it is. There they are - little ripped scars palpable to fingers. "Punk. I was seventeen, I had blue hair. I'm just glad all I pierced was my ears. Did it myself with a mixing syringe needle."
The haphazard scoring of Teo's teeth has never divulged the minute flaws nocked into the nerveless velvet slips that he's pinching at. The whole thing seems at once amazing and completely predictable. Of course Felix used to be a little hellion.
Still might be. Squint a little, and the style in which Felix spent his teenaged years was the cosmetics, ripped jeans, and jewelry, early version of faking his death, chasing ex-informants into guarded safehouses, and roguing off the FBI to massacre terrorists. "Lei e matto, tesoro." Laughter flares briefly against Felix's cheek, nothing unkind—
And then Teo rolls away. There's a spare fragment of shadow on the skin of his back, where the inked eagle is poised in mid-flight, though it's out of view the next moment as he snags his shirt and finds his way back into its wrinkled seams.
And Fel's lips twist, thinning out into that line of displeasure. "Gotta go, huh?" he says, sounding none too happy about any of it. But resigned, certainly. Until he reaches over to snag the shirt, drag it and its wearer closer to him.
If something sweeter or more edifying inspired the question, Teo probably would have a harder time meeting Felix's gaze when he asks it. For lack of anything sweet or edifying, however, he ends up half-prone, half-naked, one foot stepped into his underwear and his neck twisted around an odd angle, looking up at the agent out of lucent blue eyes. His face is motionless with curiosity, a rare instant completely void of shame. "Ever thought about quitting your job?"
"Well, every day," Felix says, mildly. Underwear bad. He matter of factly sets about stripping Teo out of that hard-earned clothing. It's not dawn yet. You don't have to go. "Why d'you ask?"
There's only an instantaneous flinch when the pull and grain of threads bites against Teo's back in a small point of injury he had forgotten. There's a token protest, something under his breath, Italian, incomprehensible but difficult to mistake for anything else.
His elbow crooks, hangs the sleeve for one stubborn moment before Felix uses his amazing intellect to work the garment off his arm anyway, and then the hem shifts upward, hiccups his head free. "'Cause." The raging paranoia and ill temper that had strengthened Teo's resolve earlier has departed in favor of a small ruin of a smile. "'Cause I'm an asshole, I guess."
He's confessed to greed before. And will, now, again. He first kisses and then nips along the line of Teo's ribs, with that air of assured possessiveness. Whatever he may be - rough, gentle, pliant - he's never uncertain or hesitant. "Mh?" he asks, though there's already a thread of that familiar distraction creeping into his tone.
The thread follows the reverberation of Felix's nose against the younger man's ribs and swiftly spans the distance to Teo's brain. That's hard to think through. His head drops onto the mattress, bounces once.
That doesn't clear anything up, so he rolls it back to glance at the bedstand and check if his crucifix and pendant were other casualties of their journey off the floor. Both are fine. Twinkling, slightly. "Eh." The TV is showing some kind of vegetarian recipe. He can no longer remember why reviewing his physical flaws seemed like logical discouragement for whatever. "Your job is the only thing." A long forefinger makes its way to the hollow of Felix's neck and curls, stretches, flexes, finds its way down the oblique muscle of Felix's back.
Whatever Teo's physical flaws, they are quite obviously still negligible in Felix's eyes. "Only thing what?" he asks, looking up for a moment, gaze a little hazed but not noticeably dimmed. There's the glint of his own medal, not removed, but warm as skin, rather than the chill of metal.
Teo's physical flaws are pretty negligible in his own eyes, too. They just seemed like suitable parting terms, as jokes go. Tough crowd. He picks his hand up, draws his arm back in order to prop himself up on both elbows. His finger snags on Saint Michael on the way, and the pendant ends up flipped around, clasped speculatively between forefinger and thumb.
Despite being looked at, he doesn't look bac until he figures out how to put the words together. "That's making me go away," he replies, eventually. His grip tightens and the two halves of chain looping the back of Felix's neck straighten, strain gently.
Fel, reflexively, pulls away, though it's no more than a gentle tug. As he does, some link in it parts, and it comes away in Teo's hand. The Fed doesn't protest. It's happened before, clearly. He's silent, for a little, before he simply says, "I know."
It may have happened before, but never because of Teo. He's slightly disconcerted, an apology muttered out of a frown. He flops back down again and doesn't look at the other man, puts two long hands to the task of examining the clasp, thumb roving half-blind over the tiny geometry of the locking mechanism, reassuring himself that the metal didn't snap, bend, or break, even if its owner hasn't even chastised him for it. He didn't mean to break anything.
It wasn't the clasp. Merely one link among the myriad that yielded. "I can replace the chain. I've done so before," Felix says, calmly. He's not so much looking at the medal as he is Teo's face, patiently, waiting for what needs to be revealed to appear.
Unused to having to prove anything— or just used to disappointing those who expect it, Teo is left to glare at the ends of chain. There's a cursory slide of his fingers across his own chest, searching for the link that fell out of order, but he turns up empty. Sighing, he lets the pendant slide off the chain, rattling and clinking, until it falls into his palm and its stark edges sit in the hollow of his hand, fingers loosely splayed. He offers it to Felix and his gaze turns inquiring, even as he flippantly flips the chain away, out, over into the trash can.
Fel takes it, turns it over gently, eyeing the engravings now worn - the avenging angel conquering the dragon, sword in hand. And then he sets it on the bedside table, reverently. His turns to look away, for the moment.
"Are you okay?" A note of complaint manages to steal into Teo's question without undercutting the overriding concern. He pushes himself over, onto his hip, sits up and scoots in the same sinuous flex of movement through the whole of his torso. There's warmth at the Russian's back, the line of Teo's body curving into a hollow to frame the stoop of his spine. Something bumps into the back of Felix's jaw, accompanied by a very near voice. By default, Teo's nose. "Felix?"
Fel reaches back to drape his arm over Teo's waist. "I'm fine," he says, before rolling to face Teo. Face to face, first, and then mouth to mouth. Greedy, again, hands seeking blindly. Skin to skin. Like this can be stored up against famine and grief.
That isn't really how it works, unfortunately. Common practice has it that the only thing that can really replace one addiction is another and that, too, would be awfully unprofessional. It's just another self-immolating hit that will probably utterly fail to bring surcease to desire for another, even if it doesn't do precisely the opposite.
If Teo had anything like presence of mind, he'd probably think to make the noise he tries to push into Felix's lungs a little less gratifying. There's a minor accident of wet teeth, click, before he finds a good angle; his hands come up around scarred shoulders, and hitch short only briefly, tactile memory confused by the rare absence of Saint Michael's medal.
 February 10th: No Promises |
 February 11th: Great Responsibility |