Author's webpage: http://adult.dencity.com/terma/aristide/aristide.htm

Disclaimers and notes can be found in part one.

The Dragon - Part three
By Mairead Triste and Aristide
May, 1999

Then there was quiet; what seemed like measureless, untold quiet. Blair just went with it.

He didn't feel like he had much of a choice-- what the hell do you say after something like that, anyway? The strongest candidate was 'marry me'; but there were certain difficulties there that far exceeded his current capacity for rational thought, so for the moment he just let it ride and sank a little deeper into the lush, sensual haze.

Jim kept petting him-- one hand moving in slow circles on the small of his back, the other sweeping gently back from his forehead to the nape of his neck, over and over. Nice. Loving. Easy. It was easy-- yet another surprise in this day of staggering surprises.

He was still wondering what he should say, when Jim spoke first.

"Hey." Soft, near his ear. It made his nipples harden.

"Yeah?"

"I really... I don't think I can tell you how much I needed that."

And then he had to smile, and try not to laugh since he still felt too tingly to bear laughing; because it was the kind of thing that Jim might say at the end of a hot and exhausting day after Blair handed him a beer.

"Yeah." He rolled his smile into Jim's throat and took a little taste, and then rubbed his salty tongue over his teeth to see how that felt. Yeah.

It all felt pretty good.

Good to know that his innate talent for getting himself into complicated situations hadn't deserted him in the crunch.

The dilemma: he'd started the whole thing as a way to bring himself and Jim together, led by nothing more than his own intuition. He'd succeeded... well, he'd succeeded a hell of a lot more spectacularly than he'd planned to, and he was pretty sure that if he and Jim were any more together their molecules would actually be fused. But... he needed to ask, to be sure; and the motive he'd begun with seemed terribly shallow now, and he didn't really know how to ask the questions he needed answers to. 'So, Jim; you've given up that stupid suicide idea since I fucked you raw, right?' just wouldn't cut it.

In the end, he had to settle for: "Jim, are you okay?"

Jim shifted in his arms and looked at him, and he had his answer. That was Detective Jim Ellison lying there next to him, focused laser eyes and every inch crime's worst nightmare even though his hair was all in dorky spikes and he was wearing only a layer of sweat and Blair's leg. "You bet, Chief. Just thinking."

Thinking-- Jim was back on-line, Jim was thinking; and that acute, speculative look suggested that he was thinking about matters slightly more pressing than when he might possibly be able to get it up again. It brought Blair back to the matter at hand with an abrupt jolt, and new fears rushed in to fill the vacancies left by the ones he'd just wrestled into submission. It was hard-- damn hard-- to switch gears like this, to put away the momentous event that had just transpired between them and get his mind back on business, but, tactically speaking, it was probably pretty damn important. "Yeah-- I guess we should do some of that."

But... before he did, he took one moment-- one last little clandestine time-out-- just to make sure he had it all down. One silent breath pulled deep to establish that, yes, this had really happened-- this is what he and Jim smelled like, felt like, looked like...

New fears indeed. They had a job to do; Jim was focused on the job-- but one of Blair's new fears had to do with the fact that, somehow, Jim didn't need him anymore. Based on nothing more than simple emotional intuition, he felt that the rift, the schism in Jim had closed tight-- and that's what he'd wanted, what he'd worked for, after all, but... But, Blair had all these new fears to deal with, and whether he liked it or not the thought that Jim had transcended need was the stupidest and saddest of them.

So, he breathed. Memorized. Learned it all by heart.

And then he felt ready to close the door on that; to just put all that shit aside and deal with it later (if, indeed, there turned out to be a later), and put his mind squarely on the fact that they still had an incubus to deal with.

But it was damn hard.

He looked at Jim again, saw that Jim was staring resolutely at the ceiling, his forehead furrowed into deep lines of concern. "Hey-- what's up, man?" The job, and his place in it, would have to be enough for now.

"It's a weird situation, Sandburg," Jim's 'going over the case' voice. "I mean-- it's not really going to do any good to arrest her, you know?"

The results of his morning's research came back to him in a rush of speculations, frustrations, ideas. "Um... no, I guess not. I tried to look into this at the library, but there wasn't a lot there. I mean-- we don't really know what she can turn into--"

Jim sat up abruptly, leaving Blair with a view of his back. It was a very nice back... he scolded himself silently and forced his attention back onto Jim's words.

"--pretty much anything, Chief. The things I've seen her turn into would... would straighten your hair."

Blair decided that this wasn't the time to tell Jim what he'd seen-- he put that firmly in the 'later' pile. "So, you don't arrest it... her. What then?"

Jim smiled at him from over his shoulder. "Why don't you tell me?"

Blair hesitated, wondering if he was still too post-coital to make sense of things. "Tell you what?"

Jim tossed his head a little, that movement that either meant 'get off it, Blair' or 'jeez, my neck hurts'; something Blair had never really been able to tell for sure. "Oh come on, Chief; you mean to tell me you haven't scraped together a bunch of herbs and crystals and shit like that, all ready to 'cleanse' her right back to the underworld?"

He sincerely hoped that Jim was kidding him. "Uh... I have some salt."

Jim blinked. "You have... salt."

Blair nodded. "Ten pounds of it. Downstairs." Jim still didn't look convinced. "In a bag."

Jim's expression was pure Skeptical Ellison. "You mean salt, as in, 'yanking it out of my hand whenever I try to eat steak' salt?"

Blair sat up, and tried not to pay attention to the weird fact that they were having this conversation naked in bed together. He pulled the sheet into his lap. "Yeah, man-- salt. I had a hell of a time trying to find any information at all-- there were just, like, fairy tales, mostly; and not many of them lived happily ever after, if you know what I mean." He cleared his throat a little. "It was all myth and no hard facts, but yeah-- the salt thing-- someone trapped one in a ring of salt. So I got salt."

Jim blinked again. Blair wanted to ask him to stop it, but didn't. "Trapped it in a ring... of salt."

"Yeah."

"Then what?"

Blair's turn to blink. "Then they cut its head off."

Jim squinted at him. "Sandburg..."

Blair shrugged. "Like I said, man-- fairy tales."

Jim scrubbed at his face with his hands. "I don't even believe this--"

"Hey--" A chill shook him, and he pulled the sheet up higher around himself. "You didn't... did you really think I had this whole thing figured out? That I actually knew what to do about it?"

"Well why wouldn't I?" Jim gestured in the air, a suggestion of futile frustration. "You came in here and started giving orders like you had it all figured out-- like you had this thing dissected on a lab table somewhere, ready to start compiling your friggin' notes--"

"Whoa-- Jim-- Jim; I came in here like that because I was determined not to let you blow your head off, man." He hated it when he felt defensive, when Jim made him feel defensive. No matter how clearly he understood that some things were not in his job description, Jim's failed expectations could always be counted on to make him feel like he was responsible for everything. His previous chill returned, and he wished he could feel casual about getting up and pulling on his clothes. He burrowed deeper underneath the sheet instead, wondering dimly where all the heat had gone.

Jim looked like he had plenty of heat-- in his eyes, at least. "Yeah, well-- good job, Chief; I'm still in one piece." Blair watched a muscle flex and clench tight at the edge of Jim's jawbone, fascinated despite himself. "Although how long I'm going to get to stay that way--"

"Look," his best Voice of Reason, guaranteed to either calm Jim down or totally piss him off, depending on which way the wind was blowing. Either one would be acceptable-- either one he could match easily. Anything would be better than the tight, divisive tension that resulted from this low-grade sniping. "We'll figure something out, okay? I mean-- it's not like we're totally helpless here--"

"Sandburg," Jim interrupted him, and Blair clamped his teeth together hard. Jim's voice was just as reasonable as his own had been, but where Blair's was meant to soothe, Jim's Voice of Reason seemed to exist for the sole purpose of assuring the listener how phenomenally stupid and wrong they were. "I'm a Detective. An officer of the law. I can't arrest this thing, and now you're telling me that my only way out is to cut its head off? How'm I supposed to justify that to Simon, when he asks me where the decapitated body came from?"

For once, the guarantee had fallen through. Jim hadn't shifted into full-blown anger, and he certainly didn't seem any calmer. He just kept on looking... disappointed. Blair's muscles ached with the threat of his own temper; a flare-up that did nothing to drive the cold from his bones. His stomach knotted with a sudden twist of nausea, and he swallowed reflexively. "Well, Jesus-- I wish I had all the answers to give you, Jim. Wish I could just, like, wave some sage at it and make the problem disappear." He heard his own volume level creeping toward the high side, and he paused a moment to force his vocal cords into some semblance of composure. "But I don't-- I can't. I've been in the dark on this since it started, going nuts just trying to figure out what the hell was happening-- God knows I didn't get any help from you--"

He had to stop there. His throat was perfectly arid. The very air in the room weighed on him, and he suddenly knew that he couldn't handle this; couldn't handle the combined threat of Jim's recriminations and his own anger and his own terrified desire to just pull Jim back down to the bed and move him irresistibly beyond reason. Blackness existed in him; as if somehow he'd sucked it out of Jim but forgotten not to swallow.

His body tingled-- anger? Fear? Untimely lust? He didn't, couldn't know; he lacked the reach and resources to nail it down-- he only knew he felt abruptly on the edge of panic, on the edge of some unforeseen and monumental mistake-- and, God, what if it was too late? What if he'd already made the mistake and this was only the beginning of paying for it?

That thought drove him from the bed, icy and shivering and amazingly sore as he bent to scoop up his pants and struggled into them. Something pressed at his eardrums, and he had a sudden, terrible realization that he'd neglected his own internal barometer for too long-- something was happening here, like he was about to throw up or pass out or maybe just plain old start screaming...

But he made it into his pants and over to the top of the stairs without doing any of those things. He took one last, fleeting look at Jim-- an impression of a gathering storm there, confusion and wrath and that awful, maddening sense of disappointment that made him feel like he was being shredded from the inside out-- burning with the unfairness of it, except that he was still fucking freezing. He shivered.

And he thought that Jim might say something, but evidently that was way too much to hope for under the circumstances. Jim said nothing, nothing at all, and Blair stalked down the stairs without giving him the satisfaction of another word.

He kept straight on, moving with dedication and purpose, and he almost walked out the door with no shirt or shoes on until his attention was snagged by the challenging question of what the hell he thought he was doing.

His heart pounded. His eyes burned and he found it very difficult to pull in a complete breath-- something had just happened up there, something he probably should have seen coming, or should have some understanding of except that right now it was very hard to think clearly. Everything seemed to have a jagged edge to it; harsh or unforgiving or just plain dangerous, and that threat of panic hadn't dissipated at all but still sat low and solid in the pit of his stomach, making him queasy.

He rolled his neck until it cracked satisfactorily, and forced himself through a deep breath. Of course he was panicking-- he'd just gone through an utterly overwhelming experience; an experience he'd tried to brush aside immediately without considering his own feelings, the enormity, the profundity of what had happened. He had tried to simply put it aside to be addressed later, but evidently that wasn't going to work.

He would have to try to deal with it now.

And, to do it right, he'd have to deal with Jim at the same time.

He stood motionless by the door, his gaze locked and unseeing until his brain registered the fact that he was staring at the bag of salt.

The big bag of salt.

The really, really big bag of generic salt.

And suddenly, he could see the funny side of it.

Funny and sad and scary, God yes-- because he really didn't have a clue, here, not at all; and if he wasn't very careful or very lucky or very both then either or both of them could wind up dead-- but really...

He was mesmerized, captivated, by that massive fucking bag of badass salt-- what all the fearless incubus hunters were toting this year. De rigeur.

It was too sad and scary to laugh about it. But he couldn't help a smile. Really, truly ridiculous-- it was almost nine o'clock, for God's sake-- this wasn't the time for him to be--

At that moment his thoughts were interrupted by a loud 'thunk' from upstairs. He looked up, trying to place the sound. Jim throwing something, possibly-- one of his workboots? He kept listening, but there was nothing more beyond some vague shuffling, then a few soft creaks from the bed. Just Jim, going through god knew what-- Jim upstairs by himself, probably hurting and angry and still confused as all hell...

And suddenly, all he wanted was to go upstairs and mend his fences; get them back to that 'together' place before it was too late. Deal with what could be dealt with. Do what he could.

Share what should be shared.

In the interests of sharing a smile, he took the salt upstairs with him.

Jim didn't look like he was confused or angry or hurting-- he just looked neutral.

Well, Blair amended mentally, as neutral as a guy could look while lounging in bed naked. With-- his eyes were drawn, helplessly; and suddenly he wasn't cold anymore-- with a full-blown erection.

Maybe that wasn't very neutral at all.

"Jim," he began, not sure what he could follow it up with, not sure where to start. "I think--"

"Don't." Jim interrupted blandly. "Don't think. Don't think, Sandburg. Just put that down and come here."

"Uh, Jim..." Blair didn't move, but his heart started to pound and his whole body flushed warm as Jim stretched out on the bed, staring at him intently, one hand absently massaging his own shaft.

Blair swallowed. Well, this was an unexpected development. And probably an unwise development. He couldn't look away. Jim stroked slowly, arched into his own fist, but never took his eyes from Blair. Focused. Resolute.

Blair swallowed again. Not, exactly, an unwelcome development. He realized abruptly that his legs were shaky.

"You're hard right now," Jim said matter-of-factly; and as a matter of fact, he was. "Bring it on."

And there were so many words, so many arguments, so many rational logical reasonable reasons for him to persuade Jim that they had a job to do, but... but Jesus! Jim was just... just kept jerking off, staring, waiting for him.

Blair pulled at insufficient air, dizzied all over again. He watched as Jim's other hand slid down his torso, lingeringly, a torment Blair seemed to feel himself; and then dipped under his busy fist to cup his own balls. He never looked away. " Do you know how long I've been waiting for you? I want your ass, Sandburg."

Fear and desire crested to one white-hot pulse, and when he opened his eyes again he found that he'd drawn closer-- he didn't remember moving, not at all, but here he was at the edge of the bed-- feeling lost already, lost in the rush and spark and spreading waves of his brand-new addiction.

A heavy weight dragged at his shoulders, and belatedly he realized that he was still clutching the bag of salt. Glancing at that instead of Jim cleared his mind for a moment, and he found the words that had eluded him before. "I want to-- I really, really want to, Jim; but we've got to talk about this-- the incubus, I mean. We're running out of time--"

He heard a gasp, and looked up. Just Jim, shivering with pleasure that made Blair feel like he was starving. "Do you trust me?" Jim's eyes were dark and deep.

And then it all made sense to him-- a sudden click of comprehension that was almost audible. They'd been through this before, after all; only this time it was Jim's turn to do what was needed, to breach that barrier between them. His breath caught.

"-- asshole question, man--" was all that Blair managed. The bag slipped from his arm and thudded heavily to the mattress.

Jim smiled. "Right," he agreed solemnly, and then stopped what he was doing and reached out and got Blair firmly by the waistband of his pants, and the moment those hot hands touched his skin Blair pretty much stopped comprehending anything beyond the miracle of touch.

He thought Jim might kiss him, but he didn't. Actually, he wasn't entirely clear on what Jim did do, but there was no question that his pants had been removed, and even less question that Jim's hands on his body were wonderful-- wonderful; strong and compelling and undoubtedly powerful. Almost fierce.

It was a profound relief when Jim shoved him to the bed, because then he was able to let go of the fear of simply sliding to the floor in a heap. He gasped, and closed his eyes. Knees... knees... Jim wanted him on his knees, apparently; and he could do that-- he had help, Jim's tight and ruthless grip to help him, good... good... this was all very well and all very good...

He groaned loudly enough to hurt his own throat. How could he have lived this long without figuring out that the backs of his thighs were just two erogenous zones waiting to happen? Jim's nails were sharp and demanding on the skin there-- and maybe it would have hurt, except that he seemed to have lost the ability to feel pain and all that happened was that he almost came all over the bed... "Jesus fucking Christ, Jim--" the words rushed out of him helplessly, followed immediately by another throat-shredding groan.

"Don't move." Adamant voice from behind him, adamant hands on his ass, spreading him open. He knew what was coming next, knew somehow but didn't know if he was at all ready, didn't know if he could stand it but then it was too late-- Jim's tongue touched his balls and then up and up and up and he could feel his own pulse there, a hot, eager pulse of wanting, and wanting broke apart around him in a million pieces as Jim licked, flicked, and then just dove in.

He'd been told not to move-- Jim had said that; he remembered-- but in order to follow directions you have to have some kind of control, some kind of discipline-- and he had none. He skidded down flat onto the bed until his head hung free right over the edge, his body so sensitized and electrified that the slight burn of the smooth sheet across his nipples made him cry out, stunned with pleasure.

Jim stayed right with him, in him, hands almost brutally tight on his buttocks; the only sign of reaction a low growl that could have meant anything. Blair gasped at the new allowance of air afforded to him, panting for it; feeling razor-sharp ecstasy glitter fast across every nerve while his hips lifted instinctively and he wondered dimly if he was about to set some kind of record for speed.

He hung in space, writhing, lunging; felt another agonized groan torn from him as Jim pushed his thighs wider apart...

And then he froze solid as pair of hands appeared from under the bed. From under the bed. Bloody hands. Gripping onto the edge, and pulling.

His lungs were completely empty; he had no breath with which to scream. His chest, limbs, even his heart seemed to be locked into complete immobility-- nothing more than one massive cramp of terror as he watched the hands struggling at the bottom edge of the bed. He felt nothing-- he was beyond feeling. Beyond everything. All he could do was stare in horror, fascinated by the hands-- familiar hands, shockingly familiar hands; streaked with blood, blood splashed across familiar lines, blood grimed deep around ragged, bitten nails.

Bitten nails. Jim had bitten his nails.

A swooning wave of crawling revulsion swept him as he remembered being on his knees; head down and dying of pleasure as sharp nails tormented the backs of his thighs. Still... still... (right now!) just vaguely, with the part of him that could still try to clutch at reality he could feel them-- sharp nails digging into his hips, right on either side of that spear of heat and muscle plunging... inside him...

He opened his mouth, finally; finally seizing some air-- his vision widened like a panoramic vista as the encroaching gray of failing sight disappeared into clarity. Everything seemed to have slowed down-- he drew in breath forever while the rest of him was still held immobile, pain and loathing building in his stomach like bile as he had all the time in the world to remember the irrational dread he'd felt before he came downstairs, and the noise he'd heard when he was there... Jim losing his temper, he'd thought. Jim losing it.

Everything in him stood still-- everything perfectly motionless and still pulling in the same breath, balanced at the peak of panic, but outside his frozen, ice-locked world he saw Jim, Jim; Jim dragging himself out from beneath the bed-- and he'd thought it couldn't get any worse but he was wrong because Jim had bled from his eyes, from his nose and mouth and ears; Jim had oozed blood from his pores like sweat. For one split second he wondered what would do something like that; but the answer was clear and plain and perfectly simple-- and buried deep in his ass right now.

His shriek seemed to split the world. He didn't know how he got himself turned over, how he managed that little miracle of self-preservation, but the fact that he knew he'd go insane if that thing remained inside him even one more second probably had something to do with it. He lay on his back, every exhalation of breath another painful screech, choked with nausea. He'd kicked it fairly hard in the flipping-over process, apparently; because all he could see was a vague shape of something huddled near his feet, fuzzy and hard to identify until it uncoiled and flew at him, so fast he barely even saw it coming.

It landed on his chest with enough force to drive all the air from his lungs once again, enough force that around him he heard things toppling, shattering, breaking. It was Jim on top of him, yes; but this Jim had a mouth that stretched from one corner of his jaw to the other, so that the whole bottom half of his face was simply a deep-hinged and hellish trap of terrible, pointed teeth-- Blair's hands came up in reflex, a spontaneous action born of the fact that this thing looked like it could rip his entire throat out with one well-placed bite.

His eyes told him that he was struggling against skin-- Jim's smooth, muscular flesh. His fingers, however, felt something leathery and hard, much harder than any human flesh should be, pitted and ravaged to the touch, and yet immune to the clawing of his hands-- he might as well have been fighting a chunk of rock. It weighed on him, pressed him down so heavily that if he hadn't been lying on the forgiving mattress he would have collapsed, his bones crushed to fragments.

Something dark teased the edge of his peripheral vision-- he couldn't look, couldn't look away from the snapping, lunging maw that all his strength barely held off; but as the shape rose up it resolved into Jim, dragging himself one handhold at a time up onto the bed-- still fighting; still trying to fight even though it looked like there was nothing left of him but blood and pain. Blair gasped and held his focus, held that hot and hungry thing away from the vulnerability of his throat-- but God Jim had bled so much, so much! The smell of it, rich and reminiscent of memories of death, mixed with the raw animal smell of the thing on top of him, and he would have screamed again if he could have drawn any but the smallest amount of breath into his battered lungs.

Jim loomed; Jim's bloody hand groped towards them-- and Blair was convinced that Jim was about to lose a couple of fingers-- but the thing on top of him only reached out, swiped one hand with lightning speed across Jim's skin; and Jim howled and fell back, bleeding again, almost fountaining blood; and disappeared from view.

The part of Blair that still had hold of his mind, the part of him dim and somehow removed from this moment-to-moment battle for survival, took that information and ran with it. He wasn't bleeding-- whatever it was that gave this monster the power to force blood at a touch-- it lacked that power over him. And that meant...

He tried to follow, tried to trace the theory to its logical conclusion; but his vision was beginning to gray out again, and his heart stuttered in his chest as the weight and heat and vile savage smell bore down on him. That mouth-- that mouth was going to unzip him, tear him right to the bone if he didn't... if he didn't...

He closed his eyes. To surrender? To remember? He didn't know.

...vulnerable...

He snagged the word, seized it, forced it into life within his own consciousness. Vulnerable. It was vulnerable to him-- not to Jim; Jim had been compromised long ago, but to him.

As if the thought were strength itself, he found that he could breathe-- he sucked air in, gagging a little at the smell/taste of lunatic beast, but snatching breath greedily nonetheless.

"Gotcha."

He barely whispered it; his throat was too raw for any volume, any force, but he said it.

And decided that he could roll over.

By the time he had the thing pinned, it had started to change. Inky rays of blackness oozed out of it, and he pulled his hands away with a hiss at the awful, searing cold that bit deep-- cold that felt like it would freeze him to the bone. It squirmed, shuddering and twisting up from underneath, squealing what sounded like victory-- and without thought Blair slammed himself full-length down on top of it, sacrificing the skin and muscle of his naked body to that hideous cold.

He was stuck, locked frozen to it while it changed around him; he felt nails-- claws-- skittering over his spine, digging at his skin there, razoring him open with slow, agonizing gouges of pain that somehow weren't worse than the cold blackness coalescing around him. He realized his mistake, his irredeemable mistake in thinking that he could beat this, in thinking that he could do anything except get himself gutted in a spectacularly grisly fashion...

Hot, stinging pain hit his back, pain that actually felt like a blazing, fathomless relief because the burn of suffering negated the cold, erased it, and blackness dwindled under a suffocating cloud of white-- a shower of white; coming down over him, over them like a blistering snowfall.

He sucked some in and choked on it, tasting the sea.

Apparently, Jim had found the salt.

He blinked furiously; hot tears ran down his gritty face as he struggled to see. When he finally blinked his eyes clear he saw piled drifts of white clotted and dotted with red-- his blood, Jim's blood, blood everywhere; and underneath him only Jim-- no mouth filled with razors, no blackness, no claws-- just Jim, his face dusted with salt through which liquid tracks left behind clear patches of blameless skin. Blair's breath snagged in his throat.

"Help me," Jim's voice, cracked and lost; a clear echo of Jim with the gun in his hands, hurting silently. But this Jim wasn't silent. "Hurts..." Jim whispered to him, eyes bloodshot and brilliant with pain. "Blair, it hurts..."

Even through the layer of salt between them he was intensely aware of Jim's body under his-- a temptation, a distraction; a taste his hands were hungry for. He gasped, and pulled his hands away like they'd been burned-- it seemed like he could feel love coming from Jim, like something tangible that could touch him-- comforting, seductive; it soothed all pain, put to rest all fears; Jim needing him, wanting him, Jim wanting only him.

"No," he muttered, trying to pull away, feeling things in his own mind go soft and yielding. His heart felt like it was splitting, tearing, rupturing into useless pieces deep in his chest.

"Please, Blair," Jim touched his face, tugging at him, pulling him close to that strong and yet terribly defenseless throat. "I need you--"

Blair burrowed in, helplessly, his eyes closed, his breath slowing. The words went on, but he didn't hear them. One of his outstretched hands was touched by something weak and shaking--was taken, lifted; and then something sharp glided against him with a keen, stinging bite as his hand was wrapped around... around...

Slick and hard and fragile in his hand. Glass. Had to be. A heavy, knife-edged shard of glass. He shivered.

He didn't stop to think about it. He drew in a deep breath, nuzzled eagerly at Jim's throat until Jim's head went back and back, exposing that long span of lovely skin and muscle.

"Yes, Jim." He put his heart into the words. What was left of it. Jim sighed under him, whispered his name.

He drew back only a little, only barely enough to make room for his fist as he brought the glass down in a brutal, furious arc. It sliced into Jim's throat with a whickering and yet fleshy sound, and somewhere he found the strength for one last scream as it carved his palm-- slicing deep and becoming immediately slippery, but he just tightened down on it, bit his own tongue fiercely, and kept pushing.

A hot rush of blood spurted into his face-- he wished it had blinded him, because through burning tears he could see a terrible rawness gaping; open wet red horror of Jim's neck, Jim's life being severed-- but no blindness intervened to save him, only a lens of eye-watering pain. Jim uttered a choked, gargling sound, and Blair caught an image of deep blue eyes wide with terror above bloody teeth-- hands touched him, fluttered delicately over the flayed skin of his back, pulling at him, mutely demanding to know how could he, how could he do this awful thing...

That last was too much and he closed his own eyes, laid his head down on the gritty curve of Jim's shoulder and pressed himself close, murmuring senseless sounds of grief while he sawed deeper into the wound he'd made. He heard voices around him, gentle whispers of recrimination and miserable reproach, a host of accusations that told him wordlessly that he'd done this, he'd brought on this pain; it was the flaw buried deep in his own heart that had forced this darkness into being.

He was no longer in control of his hand-- it was numb, everything dropped into numbness right below his shoulder-- and that was a relief; because his hand just kept on cutting while the rest of him shook with remorse, clinging desperately tighter and tighter even as Jim's body lost solidity, lost the cohesive tangibility of touch and began to slip away from him, becoming immaterial, leaving him behind; leaving him forever.

He heard a growl, low and infuriated, fading as quickly as if it were being hauled off into the distance. He refused to open his eyes. There was a ragged, tearing sound, a loud crack, a thump... and then his cheek had nothing to rest against, nothing except a wet, viscous, gushing wound where there used to be a head...

...Because Jim (Jim?!) had just lent another hand, had just...

...had just finished the job, had just...

...ripped Jim's head off...

The body beneath him went utterly stiff, one brief moment of convulsion that seemed like some sort of high-pitched earthquake. He heard more things shattering, a din of crashes and clatters all around, and as if from a great distance he heard Jim, screaming. The thing under him rose up-- he kept his eyes tight shut but he could feel its blackness, feel its fury and wrath as something loosed itself and spun crazily around him, spiraling and trying to pull him in, suck him into that great lunatic darkness of hunger that never ended, never stopped craving feeding shrieking terror terrible empty want...

...and for one horrible moment he felt very small, a speck before the raving madness of something that spread out and up, towering; something so huge that it could eat the sky-- hold on, he held on, all he could do was hold on...

... and then he collapsed with a muffled whoosh into the bed, because there was nothing underneath him, nothing at all. All at once the clamor became only the harsh sounds from his own throat that would have been wails if he'd had any voice left, and the wet mess underneath him was only a pile of bloody, salty bedding, a slick piece of guilty glass. He let it drop from his fingers, shuddering.

He never realized that he'd been praying for unconsciousness until the darkness closed in, and everything in him welcomed it as a miracle. He went gladly, knowing that there was mercy in the world, after all.

When he opened his eyes, it was dawn. Light came down from above, from the side, pink and gold and perfect. It made everything look unreal, a construct too sharp, too clean to be anything but imagination, or maybe a dream.

Oh, but his dreams had been dark. So dark.

His nose itched. He tried to move his hand to scratch it, and hissed. He hurt. He hurt so badly that he wondered for one vague moment why he seemed to be in Jim's bed and not in the hospital--

Jim's bed--

"Jim?" No sound-- he had no voice. He cleared his throat, winced as he coughed up what felt like a huge wad of sandpaper, turned his head to the side, and spat.

More blood. Not that it made much of a difference; Jim's bed looked like the scene of a slaughter...

Which, of course, it was. Memory slammed into him with such force that he shivered, and moaned silently at the pain that tore through him.

"Jim?" He tried again. Nothing. Mute. He closed his eyes, and reminded himself that mute was better than dead.

He sat up, and made a voiceless sound of agony. The worst part wasn't the dizziness or the nausea, but actually feeling the salt-encrusted cuts on his back tear open again-- that was the worst. He lowered himself cautiously to the floor (he didn't trust himself to stand, so he'd have to crawl), and crept around the corner of the bed.

And stopped dead while the pink and gold leached out of the day, leaving only grainy pinpoints of muted color. Jim was sprawled on the floor, looking somehow dusty and gray, dried maroon smears over gray skin-- no movement, not even breathing; just a fallen man who had given what he could, and then given up.

"Oh Jesus--" Silent. His stomach clenched.

He crawled forward, and his first touch of the skin at Jim's neck was awful, because Jim was icy and unyielding under his fingers, not feeling like Jim at all-- and he didn't really need any more of that, no, he didn't-- but then his fingertips picked up the thready, faint thrum of a pulse. Only barely, but it was there. Right there.

The relief was so great that he sagged forward, let himself go boneless and face-down onto the cold, still breadth of Jim's chest. He turned his head to the side and took in gasp after gasp of air, staring intently at Jim's throat-- Jim's streaked-bloody, gray-skinned, but whole, blessedly whole throat.

"Mmmph..." Jim slurred. His eyes didn't open, but his hands came up and around, slid solidly over Blair's shoulders, cold and weak, but alive.

Blair reached out slowly, carefully-- with his mangled hand; he couldn't really feel anything in that hand except a dull ache, but that was probably for the best-- and touched Jim's cheek. He wished he could have said something.

He watched Jim open his eyes. "Blair." A croak.

He nodded.

"God, you're-- are you alright?" Blair nodded again and held Jim as best he could, tried not to hiss with pain when Jim's hands slid searchingly over his skin, over his back. He just held on.

Jim peered at him through maroon-rimmed eyes. "Tell me. Tell me you're okay."

"I'm okay," Blair said, nothing more than husked air. He frowned in frustration.

He did what he could, cradled Jim's head in his good hand and pulled him close against his neck, breathing deep, encouraging Jim without words to breathe deep.

Jim obeyed, and the hands on him tightened perceptibly. Jim breathed him in, touched him, pulled him higher and pressed one ear to the hollow of his throat.

When Jim let go, Blair sank back onto his knees, wincing.

Jim cleared his throat. "Can't talk, huh?"

"No." Silent. Blair shook his head.

Jim covered his own eyes with one hand, groped around with the other until Blair felt his fingers taken in a feeble grasp. Jim sighed.

"Well, this has just been one phenomenon after another, hasn't it, Sandburg?"

He sighed, and squeezed Jim's fingers gently. He didn't know what to say to that.

Of course, that was kind of a moot point.

Even after he'd had a shower and some food, Jim didn't seem inclined to go back upstairs. Blair didn't really blame him. When they first got downstairs Jim had asked quietly if Blair had any clothes he could borrow, and Blair just shrugged, nodded, and then sorted carefully through one of his bottom drawers until he found his biggest pair of sweats and an oversized T-shirt. He handed the items over without even attempting to speak.

He took the shower first at Jim's insistence, and muddled through it to the best of his ability, given that he could only use his left hand. He took care of his right hand first thing, in the sink; trying not to think about how much it looked like a shredded claw, and not really a hand anymore. Stitches. He probably needed stitches-- but that would entail doctors and hospitals and questions, not to mention going outside the confines of the walls of the loft; something he found himself amazingly unwilling to do.

He bound up the cuts as best he could, and then gritted his teeth through the duration of the shower. He would have liked hot, pounding water to ease the ache from his joints, but given that even the tepid trickle he stood under made him weak-kneed and shaky with pain, it looked like it was going to be a while before he and hot water had more than a nodding acquaintance.

When he was done he wiped the mirror clean of condensation, dug out another small mirror from the left-hand drawer, and took a few deep breaths. It took some time, and a great many deep breaths, before he felt prepared to look. In the meantime he kept busy-- he fumbled in the medicine cabinet for Tylenol, removed the cap with his teeth, and made a great production out of shaking six tablets out onto the counter. He swallowed them one by one, each accompanied by lots of water, but in the end it didn't really take too long to get down six pills, no matter how leisurely he was about it. Eventually, he had to pick up the mirror again.

After all that, what he saw was almost anticlimactic. He counted seven cuts, some short, some medium-length, and one long one that ran from the back of his neck down to the top of his right buttock. Only one of them; a short, almost curlicued sweep to the left of his spine, appeared to be still bleeding, and that was nothing more than a watered-down, pinkish trickle. Not as bad as he'd expected, then.

The mirror trembled in his hand. Not as bad as he'd feared, no; ...but it sure did hurt.

As if his mind had been satisfied as to the state of his own existence and now felt free to move on to other matters, Blair found himself wondering, even as he dismissed the wounds on his back, what should be done for Jim.

He assessed the question dispassionately. The answer, after all, was easy enough. Jim had bled from every orifice in his body, so Jim should go to the hospital. Blair should probably push him into it.

Strangely, even the thought of it made his teeth ache. Doctors and questions, again-- he couldn't, just couldn't do it; and apparently, he couldn't make Jim do it, either.

An unexpected situation, and not one he'd planned for in the least-- even his worst imaginings about this eventuality had counted on a dead body as a factor in the equation, something that demanded outside interference, and the doctors and questions that went along with it. There was nothing he could recall in any of the literature about incubus bodies just evaporating-- although he seemed to remember that he'd read something along those lines about vampires-- but there was no question about what he'd felt, right before he went under.

Of course, he couldn't rule out hallucination, not in the state he'd been in. For all he knew there was a body up there, perhaps stuffed conveniently under Jim's bed.

He shivered again. Right. If there was a body stuffed under Jim's bed, it was just going to have to stay there. There was no amount of mythological or scientific curiosity that was going to motivate him to go up there and look. His curiosity, in fact, seemed to be at an all-time low. All he wanted was...

He blinked. Cleared his throat. Winced.

Was...

Blair swallowed, grimacing; sighed, and began the painstaking task of brushing his hair with his stupid hand. He didn't know what he wanted-- he was probably in shock, he guessed; and right now he couldn't think beyond the possibility of tea and his room and his bed. Simple enough. It would have to do.

He'd planned to accomplish the 'tea' part of the process while Jim was in the shower, but when he emerged, he found that Jim had already done it. He helped himself silently, proud to see that his hand was steady. He stood at the counter, stirring, sensing Jim's presence behind him; wondering in a sort of low-key way why he didn't want to turn around, didn't want to look at Jim right now.

"Hey," Jim murmured. Blair stopped stirring, but that was all. There was a fairly long pause.

"I just... thanks. Thanks for the clothes, Sandburg. I appreciate it."

Blair nodded, but apparently Jim hadn't waited for any response-- he caught Jim out of the corner of his eye, walking towards the bathroom with his head down, his borrowed clothes bundled loosely in one hand.

Later, from behind his closed bedroom door, when he was warm and sore and exhausted and absolutely unable to fall asleep, he heard Jim rooting around in the kitchen for a while-- quiet sounds, but unmistakable; Jim using the microwave, eating on the couch, setting dishes in the sink to be washed later. It was almost as if his own senses had heightened; it was so very easy to track Jim's actions. When Jim came and stood silently outside the door of his room after dropping off the dishes, Blair just kept watch, waiting, wondering what came next.

It didn't occur to him to open the door. He knew Jim wouldn't disturb him.

And of course, Jim didn't. Blair just kept breathing, kept his eyes fixed on the doorknob. After a while, Jim went away.

When he heard Jim settle back onto the couch with a low sigh, Blair's eyes finally became heavy, drifting shut of their own volition. Sleep sucked him under so suddenly and so fast that his last thoughts were of drowning; drowning somehow inside his own head-- reaching for some ambiguous shape of safety that remained eternally right beyond his grasp, feeling the soft tickling squeeze of impending panic telling him, no matter what he argued to the contrary, that he was hopelessly, terrifyingly out of his depth.

The problem, he decided later-- much later; like about thirty hours later, according to the clock in his bedroom-- was inertia.

Not normally a problem for him. It was, after all, hard for inertia to get a foothold on any object that kept zinging off in different and unexpected directions on a fairly frequent basis-- his customary lifestyle simply precluded it.

But, he'd been in this room for a long time now, and with each passing hour the thought of leaving it became more and more intimidating. Inertia. Imagine that. If it wasn't so disturbing, he might be fascinated.

He snuck out occasionally, of course. When everything was totally silent and his intuition told him that Jim was asleep, he crept out and went to the bathroom.

Everything else was provided.

The first provision, the initial delivery heralded by a soft rap on his door, very soon after he woke up for the first time, was oatmeal and juice and water and tea and Tylenol. On a tray. On the floor. With no Jim around anywhere. The breakfast fairy, apparently; and his amusement at the sight of it felt like the first thing that had really touched him, really gotten through to him, in a long time.

He took the tray, polished off the contents, and then put it back outside the door. After that, every five hours or so as long as he was awake, there would be a quiet knock, a brief awareness of Jim's presence-- and then nothing but silence; nothing but another tray waiting for him-- an offering he no longer found amusing, but couldn't quite manage to resent.

Along with the various items of food, drink, and medication, the trays also often bore first-aid supplies: bandages, ointments, and the occasional box of butterfly strips. He made use of them as best he could, always careful to remember not to put any blood-soaked old bandages back on the tray with the rest of the garbage-- those he threw right into the trashcan in his room, vaguely ashamed in a strange way that he didn't really understand. His room quickly took on an odor very similar to a late-night emergency room, but after a few surprise moments of panic at wondering where the smell of blood was coming from, he stopped noticing it.

He didn't really think, much. At least, he wasn't aware of the conscious process of thought. He pondered inertia for a while, as the hours went by and the trays kept coming and he still showed no signs of leaving the room; but other than that his mind seemed to be occupied with nothing more than how bad or not-so-bad his pain was in any given moment, and a continual, but weirdly mellow, low-grade buzz. In the end, there was nothing in particular that moved him past his point of reclusiveness; only some shuffling, unobtrusive noises that told him that Jim was once again fumbling around in the kitchen, and the knowledge that very soon there would be another knock, another discreet tap at his door, another tray-- another excuse not to do anything.

Stepping out of his room was like emerging from deep water-- the light and the air dazzled him; rarified with sound and sensation. He took a deep breath, tingling at the touch of fresh air over his skin.

Jim was indeed in the kitchen, standing over a simmering pot on the stove. He wasn't gray anymore, but he was very pale, almost ghostly; pallid and looking like he was trying to keep worry out of his expression, which of course just made him look... well, worried.

Blair met his eyes, and something turned over inside him, some huge and unexamined thing-- probably everything he'd spent all this time not thinking about, he guessed. He suddenly felt aware of every single inch of his body, and wondered dimly if his hair was standing on end.

"Hey," Blair began. He was pleased to hear that his voice had come back, a little-- he sounded like a frog, but at least an audible frog.

"Hey." Jim looked away, picked up a spoon, and started stirring the pot. "Dinner's soon. You hungry?"

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask how he could possibly be hungry when Jim had been shoving food at him every few hours, but then he closed his mouth when he realized that, amazingly enough, he was hungry. "Yeah."

Jim met his eyes again. They stared at each other. Blair was suddenly, inexplicably, cold.

"Yeah," he repeated, just because he couldn't stand the silence. "I guess I am."

Jim nodded soberly. "Dinner's soon. Have a seat."

Blair did.

He tolerated the silence until Jim was actually seated across from him, glancing at him occasionally and spooning soup. Blair tried some, but if it had any flavor, it was lost on him. The grating normalcy of the environment gnawed at his stomach-- it might have been the end of any garden-variety, challenging day; a touch of the mundane that seemed utterly ridiculous, utterly at odds with the realities of the situation. It made him shift in his chair a little too often, and pay a little too much attention to the particulars required by dining with one hand. Most of all, it made him terribly, terribly conscious of a sincere and fervent desire to bolt for his room and slam the door behind him.

But he didn't. Creative in adversity, he determined to see if the colloquial atmosphere could work for instead of against him.

"So," he began casually enough, wishing his voice could produce more than just a faltering rasp, "you, like, ripped that thing's head right off, didn't you?"

Jim swallowed and put his spoon down, his face intent, deliberate. "Yes." He paused a moment, and then continued quietly. "Is that really what you want to talk about?"

As if Jim's question had punctured some inner barrier, suddenly Blair felt like he was drowning in unspoken words, submerged abruptly into a state of near-panic by all that was yet unsaid. His own spoon tumbled to the table. He opened his mouth, frighteningly unsure of what was about to come out of it.

"I--" he stopped, took a breath. "I had... it got some kind of hold over me, Jim; at the end. Like it was telling me, yelling at me that I was killing you."

Jim looked at him-- a questioning, almost hesitant look that didn't really seem to fit his face. "It was good at that sort of thing, Sandburg," he said bluntly. "Anything and everything that might get to you-- that's what it did." He stared at Blair for a few long, uncomfortable moments, shrugged, and then picked up his spoon.

"Right." Blair manhandled his water glass with one-and-a-half hands, managed to drink some and then put it down without causing any major calamities. Apparently, for whatever reason, Jim was being careful. Careful he could do. Questions-- if he asked questions, then he wouldn't have to worry so much about his own answers. "When did it... how did it get to you? Upstairs?"

He watched Jim press his lips together. A faint flush stained his pallid cheeks, and Blair took some small consolation in the thought that perhaps he wasn't the only one who was uncomfortable here. "After we... when you left, when we were talking about what to do... you left. I think it was there, somewhere close, watching-- the sense of it was there; the... I don't know... influence, I guess. I was just sitting up in bed and feeling sick, and crazy, and angry, and not sure why. I rubbed my eyes for a second, and when I took my hands away it was just there, it was you, lying next to me."

Jim seemed to be studying his soup. Blair waited. "I tried to... grab it, I think. I tried to do something, I don't know; and then it touched me and there was this pulling, like it was... trying to pull me inside-out or something--"

Blair could hear the muted echo of pain behind the calm words, but he kept quiet. That hook-- the thought of a hook sunk deep in Jim-- his own imagined metaphor apparently hadn't been far off.

"But it was... different," Jim said softly, now looking off to the side, as if trying to find the right words. "Like it didn't-- it couldn't get all the way inside anymore; all it could do was... pull." Jim glanced at him, a faint, rueful smile on his lips. "I thought, when I felt that, that I could beat it. Thought I had its number for sure." He shrugged again. "I was wrong."

Entangled. Intertwined. Blair looked down at the table, took another untasted spoonful of soup. His head was swimming. The same problem he'd had before-- he couldn't really pick out the 'safe' bits for discussion, because the whole thing was one big convoluted knot. His empathy for Jim tugged at him-- he remembered all too clearly his own erroneous conviction that he somehow had that thing on the run, but he couldn't talk about it without alluding to... well, to the fact that before all the nastiness started, the monster had almost fucked him while Jim bled to death under the bed, for one thing.

His breath caught, and he forced himself into calm; put his spoon down again and laced his fingers together, determined not to let his hands shake. Influence. Right.

The silence stretched out. Jim didn't seem to mind; he just kept eating his dinner, as if he'd said all that was necessary, as if once again everything was normal.

But Blair didn't feel very normal. Blair was back in that place that had so unnerved him before, when he'd felt like, whatever happened next, somehow it was up to him. It was pressure, pressure and confusion; and he honestly didn't know if he could stand it. For the life of him he couldn't seem to find the words to relieve the one, or articulate the other.

Heart's desire. That kept circling back to him, burdened with too much meaning. He knew now why he'd locked himself away, why he'd pulled back the way he did. Unfortunately, comprehension didn't seem to be doing him much good.

With the incubus dead, his duty was finished. All of his energy, all his focus had been directed towards that resolution, and once it had been achieved, he had automatically disengaged-- from Jim, from himself, from everything. His contract with himself was complete; the threat nullified. Neutralized. The end.

Except, of course, that hadn't been the end at all. No neat wrap-up, no tipping his hat and riding off into the sunset knowing that his job here was done. There was, after all, the 'heart's desire' factor to contend with, as well as the 'influence' factor. He remembered... he remembered everything, but what he didn't know, what he couldn't be sure of, was how much of what had happened between them was real, and how much of it was... influence. He'd lived with Jim for years, after all, without feeling anything like... what he'd felt. Which left him...

Undone. Which left him still somehow sitting in the middle of a big mess of salt, and blood, and utterly ruined sheets; surrounded with evidence that neither he nor his life would ever be the same. Just when he thought he'd finished with fear. Yeah, right-- the only thing scarier than the things he'd learned he was capable of, was the thought of thinking about the things he was apparently capable of-- a contradictory dynamic so fucking perverse that he didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

In the end, he did neither. He just sat there; feeling afraid, feeling trapped by his own reluctance to answer the questions he was similarly unwilling to ask, feeling undone. When Jim finally stood and began clearing the table, Blair left his chair before he knew he was going to do so. He moved quickly enough to make himself dizzy; towards the one place he knew it was safe to go.

He didn't go back into complete seclusion, however. He went back to bed, but he left his door open.

He left a few other doors open, as well.

Up to him. The raw knowledge of it pressed against him like an invisible weight, heavy and unavoidable; a tale told by silent, labored breath. It was up to him, now.

He listened to the quiet noises from the other room, absently tracking Jim's progress as he slowly and methodically put the kitchen to rights. The sounds were somehow tranquilizing without making him feel at all tranquil, and before he knew it he drifted away on them; drowning once again in the gloom that swarmed up to claim him, pressed deeper by the burden of awareness that he could no longer avoid.

//...dark here. Dark all around and a touch he knew intimately, knew too well, perhaps; rose up from below and cupped his face. There was no hiding from it because it was all around him; it was everywhere and he thought maybe he couldn't stand it, to be touched like this, to be known--

The touch was gone. Cold, and dark still, and in a strange room until he recognized it and saw Gustave there on the bed, Gustave with clouded, marbled eyes, eyes that had gone dim looking at something black and terrible. The thought of that was somehow worse than the fact that all of a sudden those eyes moved, that Gustave rose up and came to him silently, touched him with stiff, frozen flesh. He closed his eyes and tried not to breathe, but the smell of death was all around him anyway and couldn't be denied when Gustave took his hand, guided his hand to the fat, dusty lump of chalk, to the white wall--

Pain comes out like this-- you can still see its shape even with your eyes closed. Always. No element can overwrite it, no stroke or line or shade obliterate the stark truth that guides, that moves the hand from within--

Jim's face. Half lost in darkness. Half there. He smelled gun oil and sweat, and he leaned close because his heart was pounding so hard, because he was coming apart and coming together, and his hands knew the way, yes; his hands knew exactly what they wanted and where to go--

When he touched Jim's face, it paled. Drained to pale, drained to white, white fine-grained texture under his fingers, and then a silent rolling shock of horror as Jim crumbled to salt under his touch. He tried to hold on but it was impossible, there was no shape or form or substance to be had except for white, drifting white, and when he dug all the way down he found only more white-- a flurry of white pages, closely written with words that made no sense, that told no real truth but only repeated facts and statistics that avoided the heart, there was no heart, no heart under his hands fluttering flying slipping away from his grasp//

Blair staggered awake, gasping, both hands pressed to his pounding chest. For a moment all he could do was try to get enough air-- he shook his head from side to side, a silent refusal of the pain that clutched at him, and panted for breath through gritted teeth.

He got up without further thought, and stumbled to the living room. Jim was there; stretched out on the couch but struggling to sit up, his eyes wide and troubled.

"Don't," Blair rasped insistently. He walked towards the couch as if he were being driven to it, barked his shin on the coffee table, and went blindly to his knees. "Jim--"

He reached out and Jim was there, slightly damp with night sweat under the thin fabric of his shirt, solid and real and not fading away, not at all. Blair breathed him in greedily, pressed his suddenly hot face into the center of Jim's chest while his hands groped on their own, renewed their acquaintance with the feel of smooth skin over hard muscle. The immediate, nearly furious response from his own body overwhelmed what little bit of equanimity he had left, and he started to shake.

"Blair--" That was as far as he let Jim get before he descended on the other man's mouth, stopping any and all words, questions, or other possible difficulties. It was pleasure, yes; but it went beyond that-- right past any pleasure he'd known and over the edge into compulsion. He pulled Jim to him hard, squeezing them together with frantic desperation until Jim groaned against his lips.

And still, it wasn't enough. He straddled Jim's body, ignoring the flare of pain in his back, and stifled Jim with his tongue while he shifted, slid down until they fit, snugged against each other like they were built to touch that way. Jim gasped.

Blair pulled his head back just a bit. "Put your hands on me-- touch me..." Jim's hands obediently cupped his knees, then skidded up his thighs to curl over his buttocks. Blair pressed closer, seeking proof of vitality; clinging to the heat that built between them, and rested his damp forehead against Jim's. "You know what to do." His voice was low and unsteady, but it was all he had.

No influence here-- no influence here at all except his own; the fact that he wanted this, needed this, needed Jim like this. He held on tighter, utterly oblivious of his mangled hand, and spread himself out while Jim arched, lifted under him, pushed up against him while pulling down-- yes, Jim knew what to do, alright; Jim knew just how to touch him, how to please him, how to be with him in this dark warm place where nothing else existed.

He met and held Jim's eyes, pupils dilated to wide blackness, almost velvety in the dim light. When he swiveled his hips tighter into hardness and heat he saw the soft flicker of reaction there; the connection between them open wide and shifting back and forth-- moving as Jim moved under him, flowing as he flowed over Jim. He shuddered, and Jim groaned again.

"You... want this..." Just saying the words illuminated him. He held on tighter.

"God-- yeah." Jim's voice was almost as indistinct as his own, but that was okay because Jim's eyes carried all the proof of emphasis he could have wanted. He took Jim's mouth again, licking deep into hot wet silk, trying to satisfy an appetite that only seemed to be growing in several different directions at once, spreading like a fever. Craving spiraled through him, and he bit Jim's lip until he tasted blood.

Jim's answering moan pulsed through his body, and Blair's eyes fluttered closed-- moist, coppery heat; life, alive-- so alive around him, against him, against his heart, Jim's heart. He listened for it, found it, and like before he followed the rhythm, let it take him over while he pressed them even closer together. Jim arched towards him and he pushed back, over and over and dangerously fast, it seemed, but this was what he had to have, what he needed, and he could no more have stopped than he could have stopped breathing.

Jim gasped around his tongue, and the grip on his ass grew nearly brutal as Jim pulled harder, bucking up against him. His cock throbbed painfully-- this was panting, writhing ecstasy; at once tender and merciless, and utterly, totally irresistible. Blair had thought, once upon a time, to offer Jim some of his own light; but the truth of it was far different; the truth of what they gave to and took from each other was a complete reversal of every expectation. Instead, he'd discovered his own darkness, an unsuspected reserve of fierceness and passion that had nothing to do with his usual humanity. It lived in him, arcane and voracious; a darkness that meshed seamlessly with Jim's inner shadows.

Blair groped for and found Jim's shoulders, pressed him hard into the couch, and groaned as loud as his raw throat would allow. Darkness. Darkness had brought them to this point and now darkness was what held them together, wrapped up in each other in a private intimacy that was both piquant and terrifying. He kissed Jim softly, relishing the touch of bruised, yielding lips under his own.

"With me--" the best he could manage was a whisper, but he couldn't stop the words. "Do this with me-- be with me-- come on, Jim-- come on-- come..."

...And he felt himself lifted right off the couch-- lifted and squeezed as Jim shuddered convulsively beneath him, thrusting against him, crying out his name. A wicked spike of pleasure and pain and tenderness tore through him, and then they were right together, coming together-- wet everywhere, sliding in wetness. Jim tasted like tears. A throbbing, thundering rush spread through him, through all of him, and Blair somehow found Jim's face with his hands and pulled him close, swallowing the violent sounds Jim made, feasting on them, knowing they were all for him.

Jim remained arched in that rigid, bowed position for a long time, still shivering, still holding tight. When he finally, slowly eased back down to the couch, Blair managed to loosen his own fierce grip-- he stroked Jim's face softly, pressed a line of gentle kisses from Jim's swollen lips down the angle of his jaw to the slick, salty skin of his throat. Jim sighed.

Blair closed his eyes at last, and let his hands range freely over what he could reach without actually having to move. His fingertips discovered a racing, thudding pulse, clearly palpable at Jim's temples-- it soothed him, anchored him; a tangible reminder of the quintessence of connection, of existence, of good things. The images of his dream recurred, but they seemed very faint and distant, drained of their power. All there was really room for was this; Jim with him. Right now.

"Jim." Talking was a huge effort. He relaxed further, let Jim hold him up.

"Mm-hm."

He sighed. "It's over."

Jim's hands traced a line of warmth down his back, and there was no pain. "Mm-hm."

He heard Jim's bones creak, and then a quiet indrawn breath. A sense of protectiveness lit him from within, and he cupped Jim's face, traced the swollen lower lip with his thumb. "I'm here." He wasn't sure why he said that. But he did.

Jim squeezed him gently, and Blair felt a soft kiss on the top of his head. "Really you. I remember." Almost a whisper.

Blair flushed with renewed heat, remembering Jim that way, with all defenses put aside. He buried his hot face deeper in the hollow of Jim's throat. "Right. Really me and you."

Jim stirred under him, stroked his back once more. Sighed. "Finally."

Blair smiled, marveling even as he began to drift away-- awed gratitude or brusque exasperation; it was hard to tell which there was more of in Jim's one-word response. It sounded like a pretty perfect blend of both, actually, which was just... well... just very Jim.

He surrendered to the inevitable, but this time he welcomed the darkness that rose up to claim him-- he was drowning once again, yes; but he was no longer out of his depth. Not at all. He snuggled closer, and spoke one more time, sleepy and slurred from the extravagant comfort of being held like this.

"Yeah, Jim; finally."

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