Archive of Our Own ^beta

It had been a fairly average day when they’d met. He’d finished up a fairly average piece for a fairly average girl - something with flowers that Scaramouche could have finished with his eyes closed, but she liked it and he got paid, and he supposed that was all that really mattered. It was raining, which also put him in a sour mood, and not just a little but really raining, the kind of downpour that made you feel like there couldn’t possibly be any water left in the world since it was all right there with you. It was 2 hours before closing and he heard the clank and clang of the door opening in a hurry and closing just as fast. Looking up from his station he saw a tall, slim, completely drenched figure. Pushing back the sopping wet hood of their black hoodie revealed damp but still distinctively orange hair. His smile to the receptionist was charming, in an annoyingly self aware kind of way. He shrugged off the dark denim jacket layered over the thick hoodie as he spoke and Scara didn’t avert his stare as his colleague pointed towards him, he was the type not to back down after all. The man’s smile only grew and something made the hairs on Scara’s neck stand up, an odd chill down his spine that, despite the discomfort of it, he strangely didn't hate. Like that same feeling of waiting for the drop of a roller coaster, an adrenaline that surged and brought an excited nausea with it.

There was a vague familiarity about him, someone Scara had seen in passing once or twice, maybe? Perhaps a younger version from years ago at school, or a drunker version on a night out. He couldn’t pinpoint it, but whatever it was it didn’t make the way the man bounded over to him with overt enthusiasm any less alarming to see.

“Hey,” He managed through the smile pushing at his pale cheeks, his eyes sparkling with something far too wild for Scaramouche to pinpoint. It struck him then, just how terribly blue they were. On one hand it was a beautiful color, vivid and dreamy in the way it was so solidly saturated. On the other, it was startling, making Scara’s skin tingle with a warning, as though lightning were about to strike. There was soon a phone in front of his eyes instead, whatever app this was in light mode - which told him all he needed to know. There were square pictures neatly arranged on the screen before the other man switched the view, scrolling through them instead. Scara quickly realized they were pictures of him, mostly anyway. It was the tattoo parlor’s account. They were artistically framed images of him working, some where he was concentrating intensely, most just his hands or the back of his head, and then there were a select few where he actually looked into the lens. He was scowling in some, and there were a few where his dark eyes were bored as his tongue, pierced and pointed, poked through pink lips. Those same dull eyes glance up over the device held ahead of him, questioning exactly what this slew of images of himself were supposed to mean.

“Ah, I’ve been seeing your stuff on social media for a while,” He turns the phone back to himself, scrolling through absentmindedly as he speaks to the artist in the flesh. “I figured I’d finally come see if you were free. A long shot, I know, but I’m told you don’t have anything concrete for the rest of today? Think you could fit me in, just for a little one. I really… really admire your work. I’m Childe by the way.”

Like his eyes there’s a strange intensity in almost everything he does or says. It's frustratingly hypnotizing. An easy rhythm to get caught up in, and Scara is sure that’s the whole point of it, so purely on instinct he refuses to go too easily with the flow. Still, he is intrigued and so he can’t quite bring himself to refuse, even when it means giving up on going home early. Spinning slowly in his chair just so he could face this new energetic intruder fully, Scara stares in silence for a while - too long judging by the way Childe seems to get visibly confused.
“Fine.” The word is short and cutting, accentuated by the way Scara rips off the gloves he was wearing to replace them with fresh ones. The way Childe practically jumped into the client chair was aggravating, too, his eyes bright and his grin far too full of joy for this. Scaramouche really couldn’t figure him out - was it all fake? A silly little prank of excitement? He looked too old for that, but then again you never really know. Maybe it was genuine, maybe he really did spend all this time watching videos from above of Scara’s hands working on skin that wasn’t his and wishing it was. A strange weight settled in Scara’s stomach then. It was weird, undoubtedly so, a strange thing to do and it didn’t make him feel good but it would be a lie to say he hated it too. It was just strange, a new little feeling he was going to do his best to pretend he had never felt at all.

“I don’t usually just let people wander in, maybe make a note of that for the future, it’s not like you’re a special case.” His brows furrowed as he looks over the arm Childe is already holding out towards him, waiting patiently for his turn to speak with all the poorly contained excitement as a Labrador promised a walk.

“Fine, fine. I’ll make sure to call next time, but I like taking a chance on good luck. You never know what’ll happen.” The lopsided smile that follows has Scara’s eyes dropping to his own lap, fake fidgeting with the fingertips of his blue gloves until they were perfectly aligned with the smaller digits inside. This dull sanitized blue was far better to stare at than the lively one that waited higher up. “My luck was good today but if you tell me not to test it then I won’t. Since you’re willing though, I want something small, nothing too crazy, it’s gonna sound stupid but… Do you know about narwhals?” Scara just stares. Well, it’s not the oddest request he’s ever had, but it’s not exactly normal either.

After a brief discussion about what exact kind of narwhal Scara was supposed to tattoo onto his freckled arm, the process began. It used to be tedious but now, despite his anarchistic exterior, he enjoyed the routine. It was what he knew, what he did well, the one thing no one could take away from him. Methodically he cleaned his equipment, then Childe’s arm (only after drying it first, the man dripping the rain that had clung to him from outside all over the chair he sat on), hovering the sketched out design over the slim limb until they were both satisfied with the patch just below the inside of his elbow. There was something in the air just before he really started. An odd electricity, an unsettling anticipation. After the first touch of needle to skin there was a tense silence, something Scara wasn’t quite used to. People usually tense their muscles or clench their jaw - the most unprepared made a small sound if the placement was painful but Childe, Childe didn’t change at all. He smiled, the same as before, and met Scaramouche with an even wider version as their gazes crossed paths. Suddenly, the one thing he knew how to do, the one thing he hadn’t had to think about in years, seemed so unusually difficult. It wasn't Childe who was tense, it was Scara, it was him who couldn’t help a little tremble in his hand until he shook his head and breathed harshly through his nose. It was one thing to have a client who was resilient, it was another thing to have one who seemed to not feel it at all. Not only that but with a smile, like he was enjoying it. That same twist in Scara’s stomach returned.

The time seemed to pass like a slug on salt, staggered and slow Scaramouche suffered through the work. It wasn’t his greatest achievement, but the result was impressive nonetheless. A thin lined narwhal, slightly jagged where it was connected like a constellation of stars. Around it were splashes of dark blue ink, etched into the skin like watercolor. After wiping it down once more and applying some ointment, he rather unceremoniously wrapped it in thin plastic. It wasn’t as though he was intentionally gauging Childe’s reaction, checking for a pain response he still had yet to see, it was just a mixture of curiosity and his own rough nature. When they met eyes Childe still wore a small smile and with perfectly unbothered serenity he mouthed an almost silent “Ouch.” without a hint of discomfort on his handsome face. Scaramouche hit the plastic down with a loud slap of his palm as his brows furrowed dramatically. He was already beyond acting professional with this freak, he trusted his instincts far too much.

“Pay at the counter, you’re done. Remember what I said, if you come again -”

“Call first, I know. I will. Next time -” He pauses, reaching out and tapping one surprisingly warm (Scara expected a senseless cold, considering) finger against the dark ink at his own wrist. He had matching tattoos on both, shadowed ball joints like a doll that he’d had etched in years ago, something similar at his ankles too. “I’ll get something bigger, so you have time to tell me all about these.”

He didn’t even wait for Scaramouche to reply. He would have firmly refused, of course he would have, but still. The smaller man watched the ginger wander nonchalantly away to the front of the store, his staring seemed not to bother him at all, at least not in the obvious way it usually made people shrink into themselves, the instinctual need to be smaller under an antagonistic watch like Scara’s. He kept watching too, when Childe pulled out a wad of cash so unnecessarily large it made his frown disappear for a moment, replaced only by a concerned surprise. It was the kind of stack of notes you only saw in movies, kept together by straining elastic bands, and flipped through by Childe’s fingers with an expertise and dexterity that Scara didn’t have the time to fixate on - thankfully. He was so transfixed by his confusion over why anyone would carry such a huge amount of bills he almost didn’t register the way Childe looked back at him, far too aware of his surroundings for Scara’s liking, and offered a knowing grin, lopsided and youthfully handsome, then a wink that made Scaramouche’s hand twitch around the heavy needle in his hand, weighing the pros and cons of hurling it the distance of the parlor.

It wasn’t that he wanted to think about the odd man for the next few days, it was simply that he couldn’t stop. Like an infestation of ravenous termites Childe ate away at every thought in Scara’s mind until the foundations were all ruined and crumbling and he was simply staring, faraway and lost, at a wall rather than picking at his hurriedly prepared lunch. If anyone asked he was simply tired and absolutely not dwelling on the bony extensions of pale fingers, or the way freckles almost too light to see crept along the bridge of his nose - or that stupidly conspicuous amount of money just tumbling around in his pockets. He wasn’t interested in the money itself, not really, it was the reasoning behind it that concerned him. People around here didn’t carry money like that unless it had a purpose, unless they were involved in something. Scaramouche had spent the better part of his life trying to be uninvolved, he didn’t need a random man dragging him back in, accidentally or not. So he was distracted, but alert, waiting for that shock of orange hair to reappear because something so sure and strong in his gut told him it would.

He hated the little flutter in the pit of his stomach when it finally did. True to his word there was an appointment this time, booked at the last possible moment sure, but still it was there. He arrived promptly, like he’;d been waiting just around the corner until the clock ticked over exactly. The first thing Scara noticed was the sharp red line across his lower lip. The red was dark, dried over the course of a day or two perhaps, but it was still scarlet around the edges and subtly swollen. When he dropped his gaze he saw the telltale bruising of jagged knuckles. He didn’t stare any longer than it took to note the information, he did cock a brow as he looked up at his customer, receiving only an emptily joyful smile. He didn’t ask. Years of his life had been spent learning that asking only led to knowing, and knowing was where the danger lay. He could live with the biting curiosity.

The piece requested was bigger as promised but still fairly small considering how big it could be, given all the spare space Childe seemingly had to offer. This time Scara blended the watercolor effect around the constellation down into a flowing strip of water-like color, transforming into a blade that followed the length of the underside of Childe’s forearm, the sharp point of it stopping neatly in the center of his wrist. It itself looked made of liquid, the edges waving and dripping like water over pale skin. It was a longer sitting than the first piece, but Childe still barely moved. He didn’t fidget nor complain, he never needed a break or to flex his arm. He stayed as he was, neat and still, staring holes into the top of Scara’s dark haired head. It wasn’t uncomfortable necessarily, but he felt the weight of it, some underlying emotion he couldn’t pinpoint whenever their eyes met as he looked up to check on his suddenly stoic client. He did just that after wiping down the finished artwork only to find that for once Childe’s eyes were elsewhere, locked and staring outside the large front windows of the shopfront. It was raining again today, but only lightly, a drizzling of moisture onto the graying landscape. There was a figure at the door, not facing in fully, but turned to the side, leaning on the heavy frame of the building as they lounged under a wide black umbrella. They themselves were shadowed, their clothes dark all over but neat and crisp, a suit he supposed, though from here it was hard to recognize.

“Do you have a back entrance?” The words brought Scara’s eyes back with a start to Childe.

“Excuse me?”

“Another way out.” The very ends of Childe’s lips curved up like they’d just shared a rather unfunny joke, just enough for Scara to notice, as close as they were right now, and wonder if it made the split in his lip ache. “I can give you the money before I go, I just need to leave a little more… Discreetly.”

He didn’t want to be involved. He didn’t want to help with whatever nonsense this was sure to be. Scara wanted to shove the man out the front door, taking a fistful of cash from him before he stumbled through. Instead, he found himself crammed into the back rooms with Childe, who was rather unsuccessfully trying to stop his newly tattooed arm from grazing the concrete walls. This was one of the smaller rooms in the building, dark and sometimes damp, and used only to store extra furnishings, or ladders and the like, really just anything that couldn’t ruin itself in a sub-optimal environment. There was a single flickering lamp overhead, the bulb naked and hanging from a line that needed desperately to be rewired before it sent them all up in flames. Scara, with gritted teeth and frustrated hands, was trying to budge the rarely used backdoor open without causing a fuss, nor crashing himself back into the man behind him.

“This is so. Fucking. Stupid.” He grunts, giving the bottom of the door a kick with his heavy black boot but it barely moves an inch, only the thud of his attack echoing through the tiny cramped room. He feels a shift behind him then, and suddenly he’s encased, imprisoned between two arms as Childe’s hands settle on the door in front of him. It wasn’t the time to think about it, but he’d never given much thought to just how tall the other man was. He was truly lost among him, if someone had walked in they might not have known Scaramouche was there at all. There was warmth rising on his face that he refused to acknowledge, willingly oblivious and joyfully ignorant to the twist in his gut. He tilts his head back, able to bend until he could look up and see the angled features of Childe looking down at him, a strange smile on his face. He sort of wished, in some admittedly violent way, he could wipe it clean off.

“I’ll help. Push on three, alright?” Why, he desperately pondered, had Childe made his voice so unnecessarily soft? It was so disconcertingly kind, gentle and encouraging, whispered straight into the top of Scaramouche’s head as he looked forward again. He felt the way Childe’s breath ruffled the top of his hair, the way he stepped closer just enough to be able to really push his palms against the metal door. Just enough too that Scara could feel something press into the dip settled low in his back. He heard the three just in time to push.

The door swung wipe and banged metallic and loud against the wall outside. Scara stumbled into the afternoon light with the sudden loss of his balance as Childe, with infuriating grace, stepped out leisurely after him. The scent of the misty air and the feather light spattering of rain on his skin was refreshing after the nightmare of the room just before. He felt thin strands of his hair begin to stick to his cheeks and the exposed back of his neck as he stood under the rain for a moment before turning to look back at Childe. He noticed the way his eyes darted from somewhere - something on the back of him that had caught Childe’s gaze - then settled on him properly. Seeing him in the light like this didn’t help whatever stirred in him whenever they were close. The slowly setting late afternoon sun picked up all the golds and reds that lingered among the orange in his hair, highlighting each wave and subtle curl in it that tickled the edges of the face Scara tried to forget he’d seen in a dream this past week. His eyes, those eyes he hated, didn’t shine. They had a strange emptiness under all that blue, still the light brightened them, made him drown, struggle, and swim, when all he had ever tried to do was float.

“You -” His hand lifted, a finger pointed in accusation but he stalled. How exactly did he ask this - accuse this, to his face. Was it as simple as blurting out the age old question ‘Hey, was that your dick on my back?’ or was there supposed to be some tact here that he hadn’t yet figured out? Scara could admit he was a vulgar person at times, he’d say what he thought and he’d never think about it again but here, now, he felt a redness flooding his skin as he stared up (frustratingly up, up, up) at the other.

“Me?” There was an edge, a knowing edge, to his voice. Childe leaned against the still open door, hands pushing aside the trailing ends of his jacket so his hands could slip into loose jean pockets. It brought Scara’s furious attention low again, so he saw what Childe obviously wanted him to. “What about me?”

There were two things, actually, one more dangerous than the last. The first, that given the upcoming information seems far less intrusive or offensive than before, was the subtle yet noticeable tent in the front of Childe’s pants. It wasn’t a glaring, awe inspiring bulge, but it was something. A man brought to half hardness by either the crushing of their bodies in a dusty, moldy closet or the sharp, consistent sting of a tattoo needle. Scara couldn’t figure out which he found raised his heart rate first. The second thing was what consumed him. A black leathery shape was strapped around Childe’s waist, half hidden by his over sized shirt, but the fabric bunched up around it some, just enough to show the dark, shiny hardness of a hand molded grip. Scara’s pointed finger dropped, only for him to raise both hands in an exasperated shrug.

“Really? Really?” The first word was loud before he realized exactly the situation ahead of him, and his voice became hushed, but insistent, even more visceral in nature than if he had yelled it straight into Childe’s ear. “What, are you going to shoot me in the back alley for getting you hard? Or is this some freak way of getting me to do something about it?” The distance between them was easy to close and he did it with such fervor he swore he almost saw Childe flinch. With a harsh pull, he dragged Childe’s shirt down over the exposed weapon. “I'd rather take the bullet.” He spat the words with such venom he was surprised he didn’t taste it himself, sour and bitter on his tongue like he hoped it was to Childe.

That wasn’t exactly what he saw though. The man who towered above him only tilted his head to the side, the eyes that usually reminded Scara of the summertime pools, or an all too excited puppy, were looking at him with something he didn’t dare to name.

“That wasn’t the plan, but if you’re going to bring it up -” A subtle pressure at Childe’s belly stops him, Scara knows he notices, because he sees the way he glances down and clocks the sharpness ready to gut him through his shirt. It’s not a huge knife, but in the hands of Scara it didn’t have to be. It fit snug in his pocket or down the side of his chunky, stomping boots, and when he flipped it open he had every intention of using it to its full violent potential.

“Try it.” And he thought he did taste the venom this time, but it was really just the bile rising in his throat. Nervousness and images of violence flooding his mind all in one go until he hears the ringing bell of a laugh, and Childe’s hands raising in mock surrender.

“I won’t, I won’t! I might have some peculiar tastes, but an unwilling participant isn’t one of them.” The way this was like a game to him, the exuberant energy and ridiculous smiles, Scara realized he could be rid of it all now if he just slid that knife exactly where he knew it needed to go. Painful but quick. Except there was a longing when he imagined it all gone, and a horror when he remembered just how blood feels on skin when you know it shouldn’t be there. The knife is flipped back into its attached casing and slipped into the pocket of Scara’s baggy denim shorts.

“I agreed to let you out here because I get it, i get needing an out, that’s all. If you come back, be less of a freak about it.” One hand tugged at the side of Childe’s jacket to bring it even more around his front for good measure. “Don’t bring your shit here, not ever, do you understand? If you ruin my life I… I’ll -”

“Never forgive me?” The ginger pokes with mild amusement, fingers pushing wet hair back from his own face. Scaramouche stomps without restraint on one sneakered foot just to see the rare glimpse of pain simmer under the clown’s facade when he does. It's as satisfying as he'd hoped.

“I’d haunt you for the rest of your shitty life, asshole, and living with ghosts is worse than being one.” He shoves him off the door, watching him hop away into a puddle before all Scara sees is the rusted metal slamming shut in front of him. Like a robot on autopilot he wanders to the employees bathroom without revisiting his station. Sitting on the toilet he stares instead at another door, this one clean and well kept, stark white and like a blindness that unhelpfully leaves Scara making up images of his own. Sitting like this he feels just how weak at the knees he’d become. He wishes it was from fear. His chest feels tight and his brain foggy, there’s a heat in his cheeks and it was humiliating, more than humiliating, it was mortifying, shameful, when he realized he felt wet. Not his skin from the rain, nor his clothes from the same, but between his slim thighs there was an ache. With trembling fingers he unbuttoned his bottoms, lifting his hips to shimmy the baggy denim down until it pooled around his ankles, he then did the same with the grey tight fitting boxer style shorts underneath. He watched, with a growing embarrassment that settled heavy in his stomach like pleasure, as strings of slick elongated from his folds, stuck to the cotton of his underwear before they snapped and dripped down into the toilet bowl. He should be at work, not just here but cleaning up, helping out, thinking of his next client, not thinking of Childe with a gun at his hip and a semi in his jeans.

Not for the first time in his life, the discomfort won out against his morals. The sigh he let out was one of needy relief when warm fingers slid along the moistness of his cunt. They were just his own, of course, but he could imagine they were others. He tried desperately not to let them be his. He failed, of course he did, imagining with desperate clarity the way Childe’s boyishly handsome fingers must feel crooked inside of him, stroking his soft walls into heated spasms. Christ, he was so wet. Childe would probably notice, too, he’d probably tell him over and over until Scara would either have to punch him or kiss him. Oh, that made his hips jerk up from the cold plastic seat. He wasn’t quite sure which one, so he kept thinking of both. A bloodied nose but soft, warm lips. The taste of blood but the salty sweat of skin, too. He was already so close, dripping all over his own fingers, two fucking wet and fast into his clenching hole as the thumb of his free hand rubs contrastingly slow circles over his engorged clit. It’s when his mind wanders that it all comes to a head. It’s his imagination, thinking of exactly what Childe had beneath that denim, exactly what he’d drive Scara into any wall, or mattress with. His mind wanders too far and instead of the heavy hot heat of flesh it’s a cold unyielding metal. Something smooth sliding over his folds, not a tongue nor finger, not the velvet slick length of a shaft, nothing human at all. When it slips inside he imagines - against his better judgement - how rigid it would be, how smooth but unbending. He imagines the tiny almost inaudible click as the safety releases, the danger all too real and all too good to run from. When he cums it's to the thought of Childe tonguing his clit to sweet numbness whilst he fucks the end of the barrel of a pistol shallowly inside him. He has to bite down clumsily into his lower lip, head thrown back as his foot bangs into the wall, the spasm that shakes his leg uncontrollable for a moment.

Standing was almost too much after, both his hands coming down hard against the door ahead of him to steady himself as he leaned forward to catch his breath, thighs spread as his feet were still caught in the mess of fabric of his shorts. He felt the slick moisture sliding down the insides of them, his smooth pale skin glistening with it and he felt nothing but relief, until all he felt was rage. He wouldn’t be brought to this, not rendered a gooey mess in bathroom stalls by a foolish gang lackey when he’d built himself so much more.

He was certain that’s all Childe was, too. Someone attached to those roaming bands of criminals the inner city was always home to. It took a lot to remind himself that he had been like that once. When he was done cleaning himself up and staring into the mirror, one hand settled on the back of his neck, feeling under the hair that settled there as if he could feel the markings of that time. He was free now. Different. He didn’t belong to anyone except himself, and no idiot with a gun was going to change that. The rest of his day was normal, a stark numbing contrast. The figure out front had gone, probably long before he’d thought to check on them. No one had really noticed his extended break, all his remaining clients were average people, wanting average things, and had no weapons to speak of, and certainly no hardons they were looking to press into the curvature of Scara’s spine.

He saw Childe at work a few more times. They rarely spoke, and when they did it was related to the art, or a ridiculous joke Childe tried and failed to tell in a way that could elicit anything more than a stony glare from Scara. Most of the tattoos were basic, among them there was some kind of flower his mother liked, a strange abstract fishing rod that was catching a star instead of any kind of fish, a teddy bear perhaps the size of a thimble, for his little brother apparently. Scara heard all about his siblings that day, far more than he should know he thought, considering Childe’s position. It was by far the most normal conversation they’d had, though, and something about the mundanity of it had him unable to interrupt nor scowl, instead he was only struggling not to find the entire thing endearing. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred to them, or between them on these visits, and Scaramouche assumed his words had had effect.

“You’re going to run out of room.” He says blankly, slapping down the paper a little harder than he needed to. It was the latest of their strangely normal sessions and Childe was once more asking for yet another little doodle upon his arm.

“That’s why I get them small.” Childe doesn’t even flinch.

“It’s going to take forever to fill it all in like that, or it’ll end up a mess.” He frowns as he wipes down the section, then starts to peel it away, revealing the design underneath.

Childe doesn’t even glance at it even when Scaramouche holds up the mirror to help with the difficult angle. His frown deepens. The nonchalance was exasperating beyond belief.

“I’ve got space, and time.” He said, hand lifting with his fingers bending one by one as if to note each point, “And money. And you, to make sure it isn’t a mess.” There’s an annoying twinkle in those outrageously blue eyes that makes Scara want to swing the needle right through them. But he continues on with his job. Sulking and angry, but still he goes. When it’s done - a neat little wave of water with foaming ends - and Chide’s gone, his colleague stands beside him as he cleans up.

“If he annoys you so much you can refuse his money, you know? It’s not like anyone’s got a gun to your head.”

He wants to laugh and say “Not yet!” with the cadence of a jester to the king on the verge of a nervous break, but he doesn’t, he only grunts a small sound and shrugs. That’s about all he can offer without spilling far too many secrets, and perhaps his own guts in the process.

By the time he gets home he’s exhausted. His cats are angry and hungry, much like he is. There’s too many messages on his phone and far less food in his fridge than he remembered. Instead of fixing any of these issues (besides his cats, he loves them too much to let them starve) he collapses on his couch, lost in the softness of the pillows and the familiar subtle scent of long ago burned candles - he can’t place the exact scent, but it’s woody and floral, not sweet but natural, something calming. When he wakes with a start in an almost pitch black apartment it’s not without a healthy helping of shock to accompany it. He curses, and stands, lighting up the room with a lamp dimmed with a haphazardly cut piece of purple fabric. It’s too late to cook in his mind, and with the current state of his energy levels, far too late to walk to the store. So Scara settles into a loose fitting hoodie and snug bike shorts, shoves his feet into soft slippers and collapses back onto his couch again. Nestled comfortably he orders himself pizza, something plain and big enough to keep for leftovers - erasing another chore from his list for tomorrow.

It took a while to arrive, the streets empty when it does, and really it’s not an appropriate time to eat dinner at all - but he’s too hungry to sleep, and the smell wafting from behind his front door tells him whatever annoyances follow will be worth it. He doesn’t think his gift of prophecy accounted for the man behind his door. Ginger, tousled hair. Pale freckled skin. A scarf pulled up to his mouth, and one gloved hand lifts to pull it down to reveal a surprised but elated smile. And those stupid, ridiculously blue eyes, lighting up like a puppy as they stare down at him.

He goes to swing the door closed.

“No! Wait, no, no -” Childe’s foot wedges in the gap, just for a moment, before he quickly pulls it back after realizing just how aggressive it might seem, his free hand raised in faux surrender just like it had been in that alley, weeks before, as his other still balances the pizza box albeit rather precariously.
“I know this looks bad. It’s not. Really -” He must have noticed the disbelief in Scaramouche’s scowl. “A fun twist of fate! That’s all, honestly. Here, you can just take the pizza for free, I’ll pay for it, don’t even worry, you know I’m good for it too.”

He holds the box out into empty air as Scara keeps his hands by his sides.

“Do you even work there, for real?” The question is pointed, accusatory, and his hanging arms lift though not to claim the pizza but instead to cross over his front, his defensive stance further solidifying just how much he mistrusts Childe’s story.

The taller man points to his shirt, bringing attention to the shiny red pin that has the gaudy logo of the pizza place, followed by ‘Childe’ written in bold white letters. It wasn’t exactly cold hard proof, but for some reason it was good enough, at least good enough for Scara to take the pizza - he was still considering if it was worth the risk of eating it.

“Why do you even have a job anyway? It’s not like you need one.” He’s holding the box now, marveling a little at the warmth of it in his hands. It had been uncharacteristically cool for the end of spring and he couldn’t deny the appeal of a little extra heat. Childe seemed far too enthused by the idea of Scaramouche striking up something akin to a conversation, and the latter already began to wish he hadn’t.

“Whatever could you mean by that? I’m just a normal graduate, working a normal job, until I find a very normal career.” He leans on the door frame, half in and half out of Scara’s apartment now, but he couldn’t find the strength to really care. He was locked in by those eyes again. Like little ocean’s he was lost in, a thought that made him want to vomit, but unfortunately true. It was hard to look away when Childe caught your gaze. The color was vivid, so blue it felt fake, and his stare was intense but in a way that pulled you in rather than pushed you away. He was all charisma when he wanted to be, and all idiocy when he didn’t. Scaramouche was used to that by now though, no, now it was the familiar glint of something else that held him. That promise of his troublesome past, that glimmer of danger in the deep depths of blue. He hated himself for wanting more of that, hated himself for remembering exactly what it had led him to do before.

“Right. I forgot.” Is the best reply he can manage under what he has decided are extremely strenuous circumstances, the guillotine strung high above his head and he wasn’t willing to see it fall just yet. “Well, as a normal person who already has a normal job, it’s getting late, stop looking at me like you want to come in. It’s not going to happen. Not now, not ever.”
With one arm firmly holding the pizza box, his other grabs at the door, angry eyes glaring up at the ginger man with unyielding hostility. He’s met with the most cheerful smile he’s seen perhaps in his entire life and he regrets not bringing his knife to this encounter.

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” He steps back to free the space in the door frame, all long limbs and annoyingly good posture, his hands clasped behind his back as he continues to smile. It’s awful, really, how good looking he is. Scaramouche is convinced it’s the flickering light of the hallway that does it, he’s sure his stomach doesn’t flip like that in daylight (except it did). He’s just tired (he’s not, not anymore). Childe stares for a second more. “Aren’t you going to close the door?”
There’s a small gasp of realization, before the door swings closed with a slam Scaramouche is sure to get a note about from his neighbors in the morning.

Once it’s closed, he leans back against it, gripping either side of the pizza box with a frown so deep he was certain it’d stick. He stares, following the pattern of pepperoni and cheese printed on the cardboard until he hears a strange shuffling sound. Looking down to his feet a piece of paper slides under his door between them. He’s wary at first, cautious of what ridiculous sentiment could be on it - it was surely too early for the complaint he expected so he deduced this was either a dumb prank, or Childe, who he wished was a dumb prank. When he picked it up he was slightly dumbfounded. On one side of the paper (a recycled unused receipt) it read;

‘If you found this accidental meeting creepy, I'm sorry, I'll make sure they assign someone else to your pizza needs.’ and a hastily scribbled stick man who seems to be… Kneeling in apology.

On the flip side, it instead reads, ‘If you didn’t find this unscheduled meeting creepy, here’s my number! Either way, please don’t throw it away, it might get me killed.’ This time there’s a small pleading face beside it. It’s so pathetic that he really can’t imagine exactly how he was supposed to react. On one hand, he’s sort of disgusted, but on the other his heart clenches a little. He’s worried about his standards. Is this what living alone does to a person? He shoves the already crumpled receipt paper into his pocket, trying not to dwell on the implications. It’s fine to keep it if he was unsure, wasn’t it? Childe was a little weird, in right and wrong ways. He showed up out of the blue when Scara didn’t expect it, he never really said the right thing, every cute thing he tried to do came off a little creepy, and, oh, right, he was a part of some kind of gang. Scara weighed all of these thoughts as he settled back on to his seat, surrounded by cushions and his cats, with a lap full of pizza box. The most aggravating thing was realizing he just kept revisiting the better parts - like Childe’s stupid sense of humor, or his reverence for Scara’s art, or the way he always has a spare something-or-other to give out to the employees at the parlor, a coffee here or a pastry there. And his face. He really couldn’t stop thinking about his face. Or his hands, Scaramouche responsible for some of the small pieces etched now into his knuckles, or on the long expanses of his fingers. It had been torture. Holding them still, unable to look at anything but the boyish bony frames of his large hands for hours. He’d had dreams about them, not that he ever admitted that to himself, delusional in his own head.

Maybe it was fine. He could have a little infatuation with the gang member who frequents his tattoo parlor just for him, right? This wasn’t a book for horny moms, or a movie with a ridiculously dramatic plot. Scara could think he was hot, and it’d be fine. He could tattoo him on the regular, and it’d be fine. He could fuck him, if he wanted to, and end it, and it’d be fine. Probably.

So when he’s curling into bed, just before he sets his phone to the side, he taps in a new contact, sends a single emoji (the angry purple devil, after far too many minutes of pondering over it) and decides not to think about the consequences.

Childe makes all his subsequent appointments through Scaramouche’s phone. It was like the floodgates opened from that one emoji. Upon waking he found at least fifteen back to back texts, none expecting a reply, simply a seemingly manic episode of excitement translated through incomprehensible rambling texts, most barely even 5 words. He’d replied groggily but swiftly,

> If you spam me again, I’m gonna block you.

> yessir

And then three emojis, one saluting, one puffing streams of air from its nose, and the last wide eyed with a blush. Scara almost crushed his phone in his bare hands. He changed Childe’s basic name to Mob Idiot, a gun and a clown following after.

Now, Childe sent only 3 or 4 messages in a row, usually broken up sentences he could have sent all at once, but like this it was as though Scara was experiencing his ridiculous stream of consciousness in real time. It pained him to admit that he found some of it largely amusing to witness, and his lunches were far more active and entertaining with the constant buzzing of his texts than they had been before, with only too limp salads or too bland instant noodles for company.

After a few more small additions, Childe asked for something to match the blade they’d done all those weeks ago. He wanted to start on his other arm, he said, at least just for a change, for now. So that day, from afternoon to evening, Scara etched an arrow made of water into Childe’s bare skin. It matched the length and placement of the blade, but not its design. It added interest, he said, and was less of a waste of space than if it had been purely identical, in his opinion at least. It had taken longer than they’d thought, mostly because Childe had ordered them food for the late work and inadvertently distracted him for so long with his ramblings that Scara had been left to close up shop alone. The door was already locked and the sign turned to closed as he finished up Childe’s lines, wiping them down with a tired, satisfied huff of air. He watches long fingers follow the pattern, the skin around the dark ink red and sore, but Childe never flinches, only hums low in his throat.

“I just cleaned that,” Scara chastises, once more wiping over what was for all intents and purposes, a wound. He swats Childe’s hand away before he can touch it again with joyful little smirk, he himself scowling as he often did as he wrapped the artwork. “Don’t mess with it. I mean it. If you get an infection or it heals weird, I’m not fixing it for you. Your idiocy is on you.”
Childe just smiles, silent and still, as Scara starts cleaning up around him. Most of it is easy, but some aspects are built for people with a little more length to their limbs than him. He reaches over the chair Chlde was leisurely reclined on to tug at the light bent overhead to tug it back down and away for the night. In doing so his shirt, already slightly too short, lifted, as the waistband of his pants lowered. He was quick to move, quick to back up a little and tug both clothing pieces back where they should be, but whether Childe had seen what he tried to hide or not, the haste only seemed to draw his predator-like attention.

“What was that?” His usual shine-less eyes seemed to glisten only now, just for him, in this darkening room. His hand reaches out and Scara dodges, moving to the other side of the chair, trying again to turn from Childe’s grasp. The latter sits up, fast and reflexive, and catches Scaramouche between his hands and legs too. Their eyes were level and it made him flinch. Childe didn’t notice, preoccupied with tugging at the thin hem of Scara’s purposefully tattered shirt. Scaramouche knew he was had, so he opted only to avoid the looks he knew he was about to get, choosing not to view Childe’s reactions and instead tilting his head to the side, staring up at the ceiling with an angry pout. He feels the warm brush of Childe’s knuckles against his midriff as he lifts the fabric from his skin, and simultaneously tries to ignore the way one finger dips below the waistband of his sweats to pull, giving Childe the view he’d been wondering about.

“Is that -?” He can hear the laughter mixing with surprise in his voice and Scara swats at the hand on his shirt roughly, trying to make him drop the fabric but Childe was, despite him not wanting to admit it, stronger than him. So Scara has no choice but to shiver lightly when fingertips draw across the swirling pointed pattern that stretches from one hip to the other, sprawling across his lower stomach.

“It was a bet.” Hearing the breathy tone in his own voice made him want to scream or gag, or both perhaps, but he cleared his throat to try and find some normalcy. “I lost, obviously. Don’t read into it.”

Deigning to raise his gaze from the faded purple lines on Scara’s skin, Childe offers only an incredulous look. His eyes flicker down then up again, a smile beginning to curve thin lips as his hand settles flat against the subtlest curve of Scara’s stomach. He’d run out of energy to fight this sudden touchy feel-y era of Childe’s, standing still as the heat from his palm radiated right into his own core. It felt like he was melting far too easily.

“Did it hurt?” What a weird question to ask after all this time, considering the visible tattoos littered all over Scara’s body. He shakes his head silently in response, so Childe settles on a new question just as his hand dips, twisting so his fingers are facing downward and edging their way back under the waist of Scara’s loose fitting pants. “Did it feel good, then?”

The lump in his throat almost chokes him before he can swallow around it, a strange tremble in his legs starting so abruptly he almost collapses where he stands - something Childe seems to sense as his free hand clasps roughly at his waist, a fit far too perfect for Scara to ignore as desperately as he wanted to. Fingers shift lower when he doesn’t respond nor push away. They slide and slide until he feels the fiery heat of them catching over his clit. His own arms still hang by his side, he doesn’t know what to do with them, so caught off guard he forgets every way he’s ever done this before. It takes a second, a few hesitations, before he lifts his hands enough to rest them on the slim muscular frame of Childe’s arms. He can’t believe he’s letting him do this, he’s sure Childe can’t believe it either with the way he looks up at him with a brightness behind his eyes that gives away his enthusiasm all too easily.

Thick black lashes flutter when Childe’s fingers push further, easing their way between already slick folds to spread the rapidly leaking moisture through them. He could feel the way the man’s eyes never left him as he unraveled before him, rounded lips open with a sigh so light he was surprised either of them could hear it at all. His brows furrow, eyes closed to avoid the void of blue he knew waited if he opened them, and instead he focused only on the steady glide of surprisingly soft fingers against him. It takes him by surprise when two slip so easily inside. It punches a gasp out of him he wishes he could have held inside, a shiver startlingly its way along his spine and making him grip Childe's shoulders with renewed strength.

“So you don’t hate me.” He hears the voice muffled into his shoulder - Scara leaning so fully onto Childe now that his arms were draped over his shoulders, his head tilted to rest atop the fluff of orange waves, smelling like fresh spring air.

“No one ever said that.” He breathes the words, each syllable that left him he found a struggle not to moan. The sounds were the worst, the sound of his own gasps and whimpers, the matching rise and fall of Childe’s own breathing, the slick wet pumping sound of Childe’s fingers inside him, so unabashedly loud in a room so shamefully silent otherwise. He could feel that sense of oblivion washing over him, that emptiness that felt so good you chased it without meaning to. His legs were weak whilst his fingers gripped onto Childe’s shirt with all the strength they could muster, his head spun with the heat of it , he -

“Can I have one?”
The spinning abruptly stops.

“What?”

“Can I have one? Like this.” Childe’s hand - the one not still knuckle deep in Scara - lifted from his waist only for a finger to poke lightly into the central part of the design on the smaller man’s stomach. “It could match.” Scara simultaneously felt his high rise and recede all at once. Childe’s fingers stilled, and it was cemented that the orgasm he chased was tumbling quickly back into the abyss. He sighed, frustrated, confused and not entirely free of subtle disgust.

“Remember when I told you not to be fucking weird?” His hand pushed at Childe’s shoulder, rough and harsh, forcing their bodies to separate as much as he needed to let dexterous fingers slip from inside him. He moved to turn, to stomp away in show of annoyance but Childe caught him easily again, one arm wrapping around the thin shape of Scara’s waist to pull him down onto his waiting lap. There wasn’t a single thing Childe did that didn’t make Scara question their entire… Friendship? Relationship? Whatever kind of situationship this was supposed to be. He stayed sitting though, sulking in the middle of this weirdness as Childe nosed at the subtly sweaty side of his neck, black hair tousled and sticky against his skin.

“I’m serious, I want one. You have one.” Somehow the hardness that swelled at Childe’s crotch became obvious then, pressing heated and wanting into the cleft of his still clothed ass.

“Then make an appointment.” He pressed back, with words and his body, ignoring the latter movement, chalking it up to momentary possession.

“I am. I want it now. I’ll pay.”

“I know it’s hard for you but can you not be stupid for five seconds? It’s almost ten, I don’t want to -” He’d scoffed, voice clearly irritated, but all the while he was leaning his head to the side more and more as Childe mouthed along his pulse until his teeth grazed the lovely curve of Scara’s jaw, just enough sharpness to sting, and his words cut off with a gasp. He was going to kill him someday.

“And I want you to let me fuck you while you do it.” He was going to kill him right now, actually. The stamp of a heavy boot Scara gave into Childe’s left foot went straight to his cock, he would know, he felt the obvious twitch against his backside as soon as it happened. He felt the subtle vibration of Childe’s chest as he moaned against Scara’s neck. Hopeless, he thought, at first about Childe alone, but the sentiment swiftly covered himself too as he eased himself out of Childe’s grasp and turned. Roughly he lifted the front of Childe’s shirt to inspect his lower abdomen.

“You have scars. It’ll be a little less clean than mine.”

“That’s fine.” He sounded winded. Surprised. Another gamble he’d taken then, and one he hadn’t expected to land in his favor.

Scara wondered if he was having fits of black outs. He’d think one thing, usually that Childe was far too odd, freakishly open or weird, that he’d rather stand on hot coals or a bed of needles than spend another moment acting on his whims. Yet the next second he’d blink and find himself doing just that. Like now, for example, for all his blustering and sulking complaints, he was still here, straddling Childe’s now naked hips and trying not to be too obvious about how hungry he was for the cock he was rutting himself against. He tried for nonchalance and somehow landed on eagerness, he’d attempt indifference and find himself so obviously wanting. Even if the eyes that stared down were bored and dark, he couldn’t hide the way his body worked itself into a stupor just to feel even an inch of the man inside him.

“Jesus, fuck, you’re so -” Scara’s hand slapped down on Childe’s mouth with a grunt as he used up all the muscle in his body to keep himself steady, thighs aching as he stopped himself from simply falling all the way down and impaling himself on the long length below. The head stretched him sweetly, just enough for him to feel the fullness without the pain of being too much to take. In the moment he was more than glad he hadn’t let Childe finish his sentence, whatever it might have been, he found he didn’t need the validation of knowing his imagination had been right, he really had been the type to point out every obvious thing Scara was trying not to acknowledge. He already knew, he already felt the way he squeezed tight around the frustratingly just perfect for him shaft, he felt it too when he only grew wetter and wetter, leaking all over the other, a sticky mess between them whenever he raised his hips.

Gradually, he let his hand slip away, Childe taking in a long, deep breath in the process. His eyes had fluttered closed a few times, orange tinted brows furrowing whenever Scara felt gracious enough to let him bottom out.

“You move. I have to -” The artist started, but there was no patient wait for an explanation, his words tumbling from his lips in a sharp, high moan instead as Childe canted upwards, hands sliding over the pale expanse of Scara’s thighs, fingertips lingering to follow the lines of the ink that stained the skin. Scara used one hand to steady himself, all jelly like limbs and fluttering lashes, languishing for a moment as Childe fucked up into him so mercilessly all of a sudden that he thought he might be more than willing to forgo this strange experiment all together. Each hard thrust up punched a little ‘Ah’ sound from Scara’s rounded mouth, eyes closed to the world as he only listened to the slap of Childe’s skin against his. Still, he was a professional, and after a moment his hand slapped onto the toned slab of muscle that was the other man’s stomach, shooting a warning glare that must have been far less imposing than it had been now it was surrounded by a lustful flush of red skin.

“I - mhm! - have to prep, or you’re not getting this tattoo at all.” That did it. The movements between them stilled, completely for a moment, then slowly they started again but calmly now. Childe rolled his hips obedient and gentle like a wave. Scara could move and adjust the needle like this, only the occasional drag of heat against his walls making him pause with a delighted shiver. It still took longer than it should have, but it’s not as if that was surprising. He hadn’t placed much of a sketch to follow, just the barest of outlines to guide him. There was a hesitation between them, a knowing weight in the air. Scara knew - had known - exactly what this did to Childe and it wasn’t until now that he really knew exactly how aware Childe had been of that fact. He’d pushed his limits just to sit and feel Scara permanently mark his skin, he’d sat through and enjoyed every prick of the needle, calm and collected, just so Scara could see, hoping he’d notice the subtlest blush at the tops of his ears or the way he had to swallow a sound that would have given away too much at once. So he watched now, intent and intrigued, as that first touch of the needle made Childe’s forehead wrinkle with the furrowing of his brows, let his usual bored gaze become just subtly enraptured by the movement of muscle when Childe pushed up into him whilst trying not to move the rest of his body. It was, against his better judgement and usual forced obliviousness, intoxicating to watch someone get exactly what they wanted because he was willing to give it to them. That power could get addicting. He supposed he wasn’t getting a bad deal either.

They continued like that, sometimes Childe would stay completely still, lips raw from being bitten down on by his own sharp teeth, as Scara worked without interruption. Sometimes Childe would lose himself to the sensations a little after behaving so well for so long, and Scara would watch him sweat as he circled his hips, lifting the needle only to push it back down on a new untouched patch of skin, working until it was sore and Childe was huffing labored breaths, a whine catching in his throat before he’d ever let Scaramouche hear it. It was something of a revelation in those moments for Scara to realize he wanted to hear it. He was a little desperate to get to, actually. He played that everything they did, all these interactions over the weeks, were forced upon him, or only to placate the weirdness of Childe but really, he was enjoying it. To everyone else perhaps that was obvious but in his own world where he’d forged a path of pure delusion, of being certain this was a fling just for him, a needed injection of attention (however dangerous) in his daily life. It was something of a startling update to find he was somewhat invested in them both enjoying this and that it was so easy to get off on simply giving someone what they asked for.

Around the end of the tattoo process, three quarters of the dark blue pattern completed, he had the sudden thought of how ridiculous an endeavor this was. He couldn’t keep still and neither could Childe, both of them desperate for more yet acutely aware of just how steady they both needed to stay. Scara stopped inking for a moment, just a second of pure relief, rocking himself insistently down onto Childe’s hard length. His thighs ached with the way they were still spread open across sharp hips, and his heart felt much the same with how the other looked up at him, all sudden strange affection now in his unwavering, exhausted gaze. With Scara’s hand lifted, and thus the pain momentarily ceasing, Childe lets his large hands grasp at the thin jutting shape of pale hips and, just for a sweet unencumbered moment, he fucks up into him again, relentless and free of the need to be still. Scara’s stomach knots and flips and twists and it’s so embarrassingly good that he wants to stop. He decides with this wave of pleasure that he wants to not have to know what Childe feels like inside him, that he knows just where to touch Scara, and where to push or pull, where to pinpointed rut against, over and over, to make his head tilt back and his tongue feel heavy in his mouth.

“Stop - Ah, stop. I have to…” He tries to finish the sentence, but he can only gesture with a nod to the heavy needle still in his hand. Their movements slow, but Childe doesn’t really stop and Scara supposes he never really expected nor wanted him to, each thrust softer but it still remains a rhythmic steady pace. Scaramouche takes a moment, breathing in through his nose and trying not to think about the warmth spreading in his muscles every time the man below him bottoms out inside him. As his body bounces he tries to concentrate, wiping at the half done tattoo to remove the excess, and again trying to draw straight steady lines, without raking the needle across the entirety of Childe’s lower stomach when the strength in his hand occasionally gives out.

As soon as the painful part starts again, no matter how subtle the pricking of the needle might be, Childe sighs a stuttering breathy sound, just as pleased as the first time. He really does like it, Scara thought, intrigued and amazed and somewhat perturbed but never quite put off. As the gun drags over the sharp hardness of a hip Childe chokes out what was almost a whine, his cock twitching and in turn, Scara has to pause, his free hand steadying himself as Childe bucks up fervently into him. That one must have hurt a little more, he was certain. Not only because of this one moment, but each time it stung a little sharper, his voice got a little sweeter and Childe fucked up a little harder, seeking heightened pleasure to match the scathing pain. It only took a few more scratches, lines filled and edges sharpened, and Scara was done. He couldn’t really quite believe he’d actually agreed to this - not even the whole fucking part, but just the fact Childe had asked for this, of all things. It was pretty at least, a sharper pattern than Scara’s but the style matched, and he’d even thought to invert some of it. If the images were ever laid atop each other, they’d fit perfectly. He cringed a little inside, whatever had possessed him to do it had apparently given back control of his body. It didn’t last long, Childe aware that he was free to do as he pleased now as he saw the tattoo gun placed on the side.

With half a smile and eyes that without a good look could pass for closed, he placed his hands on Scara’s bent legs. He traced the dark lines of his joint tattoos that were drawn around bony knees and for a moment he worried he might ask about them again but instead his fingers started to trail up Scara’s arms instead. The touch is soft, starkly contrasting the rest of the mess they had going on, and it made him want to shiver and tremble and break away. It didn’t last. Suddenly Childe shot his grasp up, to slim hips, and grabbed hard enough Scara was certain he’d be able to pick out the purple of bruises between the black ink tomorrow. He felt that thought shock its way through his nerves about the same time that Childe’s cock pistoned as deep as he could possibly have pressed it. Free of the restraints of being careful they moved with an abandon they hadn’t quite gotten to yet, when Scara was doing his best not to mark Childe with incoherent squiggly lines forever. Childe’s feet pressed into the edge of the reclined chair, knees bent so his thighs offered a strange sort of support behind Scara whose hands were flat against the freshly drawn tat on Childe’s stomach. Beneath his clammy palms the skin was red and raw and he knew it had to hurt, but Childe only smiled, only tilted his head forward to watch himself disappear inside the other man’s cunt, again and again, faster and faster, until all they both heard was slick slaps and fervent, heavy breaths. Scara had never been all that loud, he just wasn’t built that way, but in this moment he found himself biting back sound after sound that the usual him would balk at, reddened and bashful beyond belief.

“Shit, Scara, I -” He was barely stringing the words together, and Scara didn’t let him, interrupting with a wide eyed and flushed pink expression.

“If…” Childe’s thumb stretched from his hand at his hip to brush electrifying strokes against his swollen, sensitive clit. The words failed for a moment as he cried out a pitched, breaking moan. He gritted his teeth and continued when his mind would allow. “If you cum inside me right now - ah - I’ll kill you.”

The response was too fast.

“Really?” And Childe was looking up at him with sincere enthusiasm, an excitement that brought a shine and sparkle back to that never ending blue in his eyes. The idea seemed to satisfy him so completely that he didn’t take it seriously at all and Scara could only gasp, whine, and curse as he felt the red hot flood of cum rush inside all too fast for him to do anything about it. If he really would have, anyway. He felt it cover his walls, felt it heavy in his gut and the way it leaked so easily from the tightness between Childe’s cock and his glistening folds. The worst part was the way he felt what it did to him. The sudden rush of warmth, the feeling of being so full of it mixed with the still pounding rhythm (Childe was like a machine in that regard) and the firm, consistent circles he was drawing across his clit… Scara couldn’t help the full body shake that started. He didn’t see stars or god or anything as romantic a notion as that, but he felt a kind of pleasure that was as equally hard to describe as it was to find in the first place. It was an all encompassing tension that broke all at once, a dam failing, a wall of numbing sweetness that washed through his veins and took the rest of him away with it, no escape possible. It was embarrassing after to see how much damage his orgasm wrought, but in the moment he couldn’t help the dampness that spread from him, the liquid that rushed forth and covered Childe’s abdomen in a shiny, glistening wetness with one harsh spray then a slower, weaker spew, clear and some parts viscous. Probably his own cum coming right back, Scara thought later when he was wiping it away, serves him right. He felt his hole twitch against Childe’s cock, knew exactly what was going to happen when it slipped out as he tensed, and still felt the shiver and drop in his stomach when it did, a shameful gushing mixture of liquids that made him feel satisfied and disgusted all at once. He knew he was going to be cleaning this place for hours, and he hated Childe more with every viscous globule he felt dripping against his skin.

He hadn’t been lucid enough to hear the delight in Childe’s voice, or to see the way his eyes only lit up more than they had at the prospect of violence as he watched, so taken with the sight of Scara all coiled, tense muscle and squirting just for him that it was like he’d been waiting for it all his life. He didn’t stop moving his hand either until Scara winced and slapped his wrist to push it away. They sat in silence then, besides the slowly settling sound of their fevered breathing, marinating in their own mess until Childe shifted. He at least had enough strength left to sit up, lean but lanky arms wrapping loosely around Scara’s hips, engulfing the smaller man within his larger frame as the smaller had no choice but to stay where he was, held only partially captive.

“You’re gross, stop it.” Scara scowled as he looked down between them, the parts of their skin that touched were sticking together, slimy or sticky, it didn’t matter, it felt awful now it was all cooling on their still warm bodies, the temperatures as mismatched as the textures. Of course, after he said that, Childe made a point to make sure as much of them touched as possible, leaning in as Scara squirmed in his lap to press their foreheads together just for good measure. He was amused at least, laughing slightly as dark eyes scowled up at him. There was silence again, a strangeness between them he didn’t like, and Scara had an awful feeling in his stomach, a knot that grew tighter and heavier until it felt like Childe might just lean in and -

His hand raises without him thinking about it, palm facing Childe, feeling the moment lips make contact. They stare at each other across the top of Scara’s pale fingers, a warm wall to keep him at bay. He can tell Childe is smiling despite it from how it curves his eyes, crinkling the corners in a stupidly charming way that might make the average person (but never Scara) fall in love. Neither of them looks away, and Scara’s hand doesn’t move, stubborn and still as a statue.

“So that’s the hard line, is it?” Childe’s voice is muffled against porcelain skin and Scara can’t find it in him to reply to the genuine softness in it, so he doesn’t, leaving the unanswered question hanging in the air between them. It’s an odd boundary maybe, considering what had just transpired between them but still he kept it. It was something that felt personal, attached, a string from Childe to him he wouldn’t be able to cut. So up his hand stays. Except Childe doesn’t move either and their gazes remain caught by the other’s, light against dark, a summer sea and a starless sky. There’s a subtle pressure against his palm that brings him back to himself, the unmistakable warm press of lips again, and there’s a firmness to the action this time, firm enough to push Scara’s hand back until his own lips touch his skin. The reaction of his blood is immediate, he feels it boil, in an odd anger and even stranger bashfulness. His cheeks to his nose to the tips of his ears are red. Even with the hand between them, even without a single brush of mouth to mouth, this felt even more intimate than that might have. Childe’s eyes, blue and unnecessarily adoring, were half closed as their foreheads touched. Scara’s, dark and furious, were wide with surprise. The murder he’d promised felt closer with every action Childe took. Still Scara didn’t proceed, whatever violence he promised stayed tucked in his pockets for now. He simply stayed put, stuck that way until Childe pulled back, smiling like the cat who’d got the cream. When he pulled back even more his fingers brushed across Scara’s sweat soaked forehead, pushing the hair that had become tousled and unruly out of his eyes for him. Everything was so unnecessary.

“This is just a hookup.” Scara hears the croak in his voice, the dryness and roughened tone from all the sounds Childe had pulled so dexterously from him. “Don’t make it a thing.”

“I’m not making it a thing.” Scara’s eyes must have given away his disbelief there, and Childe laughed, hearty and free, as he grabbed the wet wipes Scara kept near his station. “I’m not, really. I can just hook-up, I’ve done it plenty, it’s fine. We’re cool, this is cool. Lift your leg a little.”

It was the kind of sentence not even the person saying it believed, the desperation that lay below the surface shone through brighter the harder he tried to convince either of them that he meant it. Scara lifted his thigh enough for Childe to wipe underneath.

“Sometimes, you’re very good at lying, and sometimes it’s like you’ve literally never met a person before.” He grabbed his own wipe and with much less gentle coaxing or delicate strokes, wiped down the mess that glued itself to the subtle rise and fall of Childe’s abs.

“You can still get tattoos here, you can still text me or whatever that spamming thing you do is.” He stands, almost falls, but saves it before Childe can really notice. With his stomach wiped down Scara - still naked and trembling in his thighs - dresses the fresh tattoo as he should have done before. “But you can’t kiss me, or hold my hand, or be possessive. This,” He gestures, one finger pointing to Childe then him, and back again. “This is not a thing. We are not a thing. Outside of drawing on you, I don’t want anything to do with the shit you do.”

Childe had listened obediently, fastening his jeans all the while Scara was talking, wincing when the waistband was obviously a poor choice for this tattoo’s placement but he had no idea he’d be getting into this earlier. At the end though he let his shoulders slump, then he stood.

“You don’t know what I do.” It was cold, the way he said it, by Childe’s standards at least. An emotionless jab that couldn’t really hurt him, it didn’t mean anything, but it was defensive and made to prove there was still a wall from his side too, despite what appearances may seem. “Or why, or how, actually you really don’t know anything.”

Within moments he was smiling again, shrugging on his jacket with a disappointed sounding sigh.

“I got the message Scara, loud and clear, I may look stupid but I assure you, I understand.”

He felt a little stupid now, naked and talked down to as Childe dressed himself with ease. He took a moment to tug on his shirt at least, moving to drag his underwear up his legs, hopping slightly as he tried to speak.

“What don’t I know? You walk around with rolls of cash, you keep a fucking gun on you. Childe, you literally ran away from some creep who was obviously waiting for you. Do I even need to know anything else?” The fabric snapped against his hip as he let it go, hands raising in an exasperated gesture. “That’s the goddamn definition of bad news, you are literally a walking red flag!”

He turned to start moving equipment off the chair, exhausted and frustrated and a little sick of the man opposite playing innocent. As he scrunched up the papery sheet on the chair (embarrassment in the back of his mind when he spotted the large wet patches soaking it through) he felt a hand at the back of his neck. He flinched, but not away, only stood still as he felt Childe’s finger brush at the hair until it parted around his nape. Blunt nails scratched softly over the symbols eternally etched into smooth skin.

“Then what does that make you?” Cold, scathing, a judgement Scara didn’t even know Childe had been making. There was a knowingness to it, a familiarity he hated hearing. He flinched properly then, turning in a flash and grabbing, or maybe scratching (he wasn’t sure whilst his mind was a flurry of thoughts) at Childe’s arm to hold it away. He was more than scowling now, he was furious, startled, hurt, all of it and more. The fading but never gone tattoo at his nape was something he didn’t show off, something painful and old. That he couldn’t see it himself regularly was a blessing and a curse. He didn’t want to be reminded, a blissful kind of ignorance kept him sane in his daily life when he could pretend it wasn’t there at all. Alternatively, it was like it was always just out of sight. A darkening knife point of paranoia just waiting to strike. There, just where he couldn’t quite see, on the nape of his neck, lived a ghost that wouldn’t stop haunting him no matter how hard either of them tried.

The two men stood locked in an electric stare. Scara’s pointed nails dug into the thick denim of Childe’s jacket sleeve and his larger hand, in contrast, was cupped softly around Scara’s forearm like it was cradling the emotional wound.

“It’s not as big a city as people would like to believe.” Childe murmured, unintentionally antagonizing Scara with how tenderly he spoke. He was never a thing to be gentle with, never so fragile he needed coddling. Or so he told himself, because of course he was. He had always clamored desperately for affection, for attention, for anything his mother would give, or his friends, even his numerous scorned lovers. “I’ve known about you for as long as it matters.”

“You were stalking me? What is this, a set up?” With a jolt of his arm he tried to rip it away from Childe’s gentle touch but he couldn’t, the other man exerting his strength with every pull Scara tried, only to go right back to his soft hold. “Was it worth all the permanent reminders of me, right there on your skin, just to say you found me? That you fucked me? What’s next, are you really going to shoot me this time?” He felt his voice raising, couldn’t help it, he couldn’t seem to stop the welling up of emotion, the spit that cascaded when he spoke, venomous and electric. Childe had the audacity to look confused, hurt himself even.

“What? Scara, no - No!” He almost laughed too, disbelief and concern written clear across his sharp features. “I always… I admired you.” Scara thought he was going to be sick. As he felt his stomach flip and his mind begin to spin, Childe continued.

“Everyone knows your family, and you, I could never compete even in my own organisation. I was always playing catch up, then you just disappeared. I’d never met you yet, never even seen you. It felt… Unfair.” He at least had the decency to let Scara go now, his hands preoccupied instead by gesturing along with his story as Scara pressed himself back against the large chair behind him. “I couldn’t prove I was better if you weren’t there. It was empty. I know, I know, you never even knew we were competing. I get that now, but back then I thought we were both in on it, that you were thinking about me as much as I was thinking about you. That’s how I was raised, to be better than you, better than your whole gang, and I thought it was worth it. I must have been crazy.”

“Must have been.” Scara’s words tumbled out before he could help it, but there was no violent rebuttal nor angry glare, Childe just laughed and lifted a hand to ruffle his own orange hair.

“You think I still must be, I don’t disagree. I’m rather stubborn, I guess, so I kept on looking for you but it wasn’t stalking. It was more an accident, a twist of fate, right?” He brought it back to this again, as he had done the day he showed up at Scara’s doorstep with welcomingly warm pizza. “I really did just see a post about you out of the blue, and I swear I really do work at the pizza place. If neither of those things had happened, I wouldn’t be here at all! I’d have accepted you were gone, out there living a life far from this one.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Scara, a little more back to himself in that moment, reached out and pushed at Childe’s chest forcing him backwards so he could stumble past him, a million thoughts rushing through his mind, all at full force and speed, with no context nor solution. “Reminding me that actually, I was really so very close to not having to ever deal with you at all?”

“I’m trying to explain myself -”

“You’re failing. You’re failing so hard it’s not even funny.” Scara’s hands balled into fists as he shook them, then hit them against his own forehead, an exasperated yell escaping him and with a sigh after he scrunched his eyes closed. “Of course this is all it was, some deranged lackey wanting to feel better about being shit at their job. Did you tell anyone? The person that followed you… They’re not…”

“No, and no.” Childe seemed to have found the ability to feel awkward now, hands shoved into his pockets as he watched Scara pace with a kicked puppy look like he wanted to be closer than he was currently allowed to be. Scara wished he could tell him he didn’t deserve to have that, to look at him like that, to deny him all chances at coming back from this. “I’d never lead them here. I know what it was like, I know how they -”

He was cut off by Scara holding his hand up, a calmness in his expression now that couldn’t be deciphered. “No. No you don’t. Forget it, forget all that. Forget I said that you could come back.”

“Scara, it’s not dangerous, I already -”

“Forget about texting me, delete my number, I’ll block you anyway.” He’s grabbing the little things that belonged to Childe, his phone and his wallet, a bracelet he’d left behind a few weeks ago whilst his wrist was worked on, his water bottle. He shoved them all unceremoniously into the man’s sturdy chest and waited until he wrapped his arms around the pile himself to start pushing him out the door. Acutely aware that he was still only in his own shirt and underwear, but it was so late and he was so enraged he’d long decided it was unimportant if a passerby saw this ruckus in the dead of night.

“You're not listening to me, I had my reasons for all this. I wanted you to help, I needed you to know I -” Childe talked fast and hard, like bullets out of a gun, and it made Scara riled and restless. Right now in the dimness of the parlor’s lamps and the moon he wanted him out and gone, and to never think of this again. He watched Childe stumble backwards onto the street and he stood in the doorway, sweaty, half dressed, hurt and confused.

“Of course I’m not, because I don’t care. Whatever you know about this,” His hand slaps against the back of his own neck, feeling the sticky strands of sweat soaked hair and the now raising goosebumps from the cold air. “It’s all gone, done, I’ve used up every ounce of me that lived through that. I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m not your savior or your daydream or anything else. I’m just an artist who needed a fun distraction and I did my job and you did yours, I hope you’re happy doing whatever the fuck you do outside of it.”

“But I quit. I quit already.” Childe blurts it with such desperate anxiousness that Scara does pause, letting him speak for just a moment. “When I found out you could just… You could just do that, everything changed. I left, I found you. I quit, I got my own place - I got a job!”

He’s breathing heavily by the end of it, speaking so fast and fervently to get his words out before his time would inevitably be cut short, and when he’s finished there’s silence, the kind that reminds you just how vacant a space can become without the familiarity of noise within it. He thought in that moment how alien Childe sounded, how removed he had been from a normal daily life that these accomplishments felt like mountainous achievements to him. It would make someone feel sorry for him, to know just how he had lived, following a path laid out for him filled with monotonous cruelty and unashamed violence. It still wasn’t enough. Scara shifts, one hand on the door.

“Good for you.”

And slams it shut.

He doesn’t know where Childe went after that. He didn’t knock on the door nor wait out the back for Scara to be done. The latter spent at least an hour of mindlessness cleaning the rest of the store, he’s not sure he locked it, or if he even put things where they needed to be. He was empty, a walking little void that only knew how to get home and lay on its bed, and nothing else. He wasn’t sure if he cried, or if he just felt like he should or could. He knows he felt his cats curling up against his legs as he in turn curled into himself, awake even as light started to stream through his crooked blinds. He called out of work that day, and the next, and the next. It was easy enough to do when you owned the place. He feigned illness, a bad stomach bug or the flu, he’s not entirely certain which one he went with, and if it changed no one questioned it. Perhaps the bags under his eyes made them think twice.

He didn't really think for those days, he mulled things over perhaps, but it was fruitless and hardly anything filled with intelligent thought. He knew from the start that what upset him wasn’t something he could pinpoint without delving into ideas and emotions he’d kept locked away for years. It was the paranoia that kept him awake, the threat that at any moment figures from his past would kick the door down and drag him back to his personal nightmare.

It wasn’t that they’d bonded, as much as Scara had been in denial that that was what was happening anyway, and it wasn’t that they’d had sex, Scara exposing himself to Childe in multiple ways and with multiple layers of vulnerability he was sure the other couldn’t understand. These things all added to the weight of what he saw as betrayal, of course they did, but in the end what hurt the most was the secrecy. It was knowing that Childe had known so much more of him than he’d ever let on, and that Scara had known nothing in return. They had always been unequal, from the very start there had been an unfairness that tainted every interaction that followed. There had been that familiarity the day they’d met, like Childe was someone he might have known before, but it wasn’t that. It was the essence of it, the feelings that emanated from him, it was probably that sometime in his past someone had described the upcoming young leader of a rival faction. They would have said he’s tall, and handsome, got this real distinctive ginger hair too. Eyes like a madman, maybe. Scara could imagine it now, couldn’t remember if it were true, but it was all he had. A tiny life jacket to feel like he wasn’t so surrounded by the unknown.

Childe knew where he’d come from, the family that had abandoned him long before he returned the favor. Devoid of care and devoid of love, his family was nothing more than a business, at least that’s how they’d treated him. He was a means to an end, a continuation of an eternity of their lineage. Like royals they clamored to stay atop their throne, covered in blood and seated on money they ruled the churning underground of sewer rats and criminal gangs with sickening ease, all the while pretending they were above them all, that they alone were clean. Scara had been carefree as a child, he grew up with the stability only wealth could afford, but never the affection to go with it. He loved art, but his mother never had time to look at it. He wanted to read, but she was never home to listen. Every memory he had, every hobby he started, every cut he needed kissed, there were only empty spaces half filled by the rotating staff of caretakers she employed. The first thing he’d done on the day he’d left was take his sharp, reliable knife and cut her face out of the ostentatious portrait that hung in their all too large entry hall. She’d never been there anyway, it was just Scara, no more than 5, perched on the lap of a maid who’d only started the week before. They’d added his mother’s face from a photograph later on, beautiful as the fresh cut violets in the hall and as empty as the vase when they dried up and died.

The first tattoos he’d gotten outside of his family’s marker were the joints, they’d taken longer to finish than he’d expected, and the pain across his jutting bones was realer than anything he’d felt until that point. He didn’t cower though, no, for the first time he felt alive as the sharp jolts electrified his nerves and brought his eyes close to watering.

“Like a doll.” His artist had admired, wrapping his wrists with tender care.
“Like a puppet.” He corrected, only offering a small smile in response to her subtle confusion.

He stared at those same tattoos now, and he felt those years come rushing back like a punch to his gut. It was like he could feel the creaking of them, the grinding of the ball joint against his very bones, the strings of a puppet winding tight around his skin until his limbs were blue and numb. The purr of a cat tangling themselves between his legs cut his spiraling short. He knelt to pet the scruffy black fur, the creature flopping to the side to revel in his undivided attention. He smiled. It was a reminder that he could take care of things, that he could be tender and kind, that he could be relied upon. That he, despite it all, could love things still.

It had been three weeks and a few spare days, and Scara had neither seen nor heard from Childe. Obedient at the strangest of times, as always. Despite his threats, he hadn’t blocked the number that was still labelled with a clown and a gun. Some nights, without realizing, he’d opened the chain of messages as if he thought he might have missed one. He always shook his head and slammed the phone to his table with a sigh. Those nights were the longest. In those weeks Scara had finished numerous tattoos, big and small, complicated and easy. He’d lost count of all the flowers he’d had to etch with careful delicacy. One client had asked for whatever he thought would look best, just something small above their elbow at the back of their arm. He’d gone into autopilot and when the time was up he stared at the result. A small, flowing wave, full of energy and life with foaming edges. He took his break early after that.

That day, when it was almost 4 weeks gone, Scara had weaseled his way out of closing with the gift of coffee and doughnuts. Now, in the early evening, fresh out of the shower he lay on his stomach in bed, scrolling through his phone mindlessly, watching videos of intricately detailed tattoos completed and mindless videos of cats screaming into the air. It was then, as he flipped away from a woman showing off a colorful sleeve and to a man about to demonstrate how to pierce your own ear, that saw the notification slip down from the top of his phone. At first, out of habit and a need to remain undisturbed, he brushed it back up to where it came from. Then the emojis registered. He sat up, faster than he knew he could, and knelt in the middle of crumpled blankets and haphazardly strewn pillows. Did he open it? Did he even give it the time of day? He’d been so adamant about this, so cold and certain in his rejection, what was even the point? But despite that, it had been almost a month with no word, he had to have believed it when Scara threatened to block his number, so why now? Why try? He rocked back and forth a little on his knees, he even threw his phone to the side then after two seconds, shamefully crawled his way back to it and grabbed it again. Flipping onto his back with a sigh he held it above his face and reluctantly pressed on the message. He felt his blood surge with adrenaline, then drain with horror.

It was a short spam, not unlike him at all, and it read;

> I know you said you’d block me
> I believe you
> and you have every right to be mad at me
> but i have to try
> just in case you see this somehow will you come here

An address followed, not one he recognized fully but a street he knew at least in passing. Then a picture, a familiar sculpted plane of a pale chest, then a sturdy abdomen, the familiar pattern Scara had himself etched into tough skin. That was now smeared in blood.

He was only wearing his ratty pajama shorts, a hairband to keep his bangs from his brow, and a shirt so old he didn’t remember what the imagery on the front had even been when he’d bought it, but he was there in his doorway pulling on a thick zip up hoodie and stomping into his chunky boots before he’d even had time to consider how deranged he might look on the street. He didn’t have a car, but he did have a motorbike, one he rarely used nowadays when he lived so close to work. Still, to what would be his friend's disappointment if they knew, he swung his leg over and revved until he sped away without even a look toward his leathers. Luckily, in the darkening mid evening, it was fairly quiet, only people leaving early as he had, or those making last minute stops before the rush. He had to stop himself a few times to get his bearings, with each time he became a little more erratic, a little more breathless and panicked that he had no choice but to take up all this time. He was certain, after he’d pulled up to the right apartment building, that when he busted the door down and wandered in he’d only find a corpse. Or, the creator of a prank that would soon be one. He hadn’t considered the optimistic third option.

When he found the right door, it was ajar only enough that Scara could reach inside and unhook the chain. He hurried, slamming it shut behind him and stomping a noisy jog through the hallway, ducking his head into every room he saw along the way.

“If that’s Scara, I’m in here,” The voice, weak and strained, echoed from what he assumed was the back bedroom. He ran. “If that’s not Scara, pretend you didn’t hear me, I’m dying anyway, I’ll be no fun.”

He skidded into the doorway at that last part, and almost threw his keys at the man laying across the bed, who was smiling despite his current state.

“Not funny?” He asked, wincing and grasping at his side all the while.

“Not fucking funny. You fucking idiot, what the fuck happened?” The few short feet to the bed felt like miles, felt like years, felt like the distance between Childe’s mid level and far too fancy apartment and the moon. Scara threw himself on to the bloodied blankets piled around him and leaned over to inspect the damage across his stomach. “Jesus, fuck, Childe what the -”

“Fuck, I assume? Yeah, what the fuck.” He laughed again, winced again, Scara scowled again, it was a terrible pattern he needed to end. “Nobody tells you when you quit that that’s just for you, huh? The rest of them still think you’re in it.”

Retaliation, then. He understood. Nobody gets to just leave, not even Scara. He remembers, with terrible clarity, the first few homes he'd had being set ablaze whilst he was left to watch on the sidewalk. He still felt the all too hot trickle of blood over his fingers when the knife went in, in all too desperate self defense. He understood.

“Knife? Gun? Is it bad, Childe, is it…” He didn’t even hear the tremble in his voice until Childe looked up at him, tender even now. Scara’s hands hesitated, lifted in preparation of whatever he was faced with, whatever he was asked to do.

“It’s clean, which is poor on their part. It was a lucky hit from way too far for what they had, nervous I guess.” He lifted his hand and Scara could see the wound, round and neatly gory. So, a gun. “It didn’t come out, but it didn’t go all that far in either. It hurts like hell, and I’m gonna bleed out if we talk about it any longer, so, first aid, bathroom. Make yourself acquainted. Please.” The added politeness was so quiet, so full of a desperate ask that Scara couldn’t bear it. Within the minute he’d run back and forth until he had all he needed scattered around him, Childe laid out flat across his huge expensive, and now ruined, bed.

“Bite.” Scara demanded, pressing rolled up strips of ripped fabric against Childe’s mouth, he obeyed without question.

It was messy. A recovery mission more violent than the crime that caused it. Childe screamed, after all the ways Scara had seen him take pain like no other, every man had limits. The fabric muffled the worst of it, and the rest they’d think of later, in his nightmares he was sure. With shaking but expertly trained hands Scara used long steel tweezers and the propped up torch from his phone, paired with the reluctant but necessary press of his bare fingers. It took longer than either of them wanted, but the bullet was out, and now the panic set in. Scara’s fingers trembled with the nerves he thought he’d burnt away years ago, and Childe’s with the rush of blood leaving his body, a cold settling into his bones he never thought he’d feel. Scara had seen this done more times than he could count, he was sure Childe had too, and judging by his scars he’d been there himself before, at least in slightly less serious ways. But this was a first, he’d never stitched through flesh nor muscle, he could only do what he remembered and what Childe so gently instructed through a strange delirium brought on by the chill of blood loss now that the fabric had fallen from between his chapped lips.

“You’re doing great, don’t cry.” His words were almost slurred, his eyelids heavy as Scara watched his own fingers hold his flesh closed as his other hand stitched it in place. He didn’t know how long Childe had been here, by himself, wondering who to call or who to send his last thoughts to - long enough that he was already in this state from a small wound. If Scara had erased that number, or blocked it, would he be dead by now? He didn’t realize he was crying until Childe pointed it out, felt with sudden clarity the warm drops inching their way down the curve of his cheek, he tried to wipe at them with his wrist to avoid smearing blood across his face, but it was everywhere, and so he failed. Childe, with whatever strength he had left, did it for him. A hand that had been so warm, now cold, brushed across his newly bloodied cheek to erase all trace of the tears.

“No wonder you quit, you’re a real softie.” The one second Scara allowed himself to look up he set on a scowl, contrasting - as he always did - with Childe’s soft, teasing grin. “If it’s too much, I’ll finish.”

A reaching hand, a careful dodge. Scara frowned as he concentrated and shook his head with disbelief.

“Yeah? You and whose hand? You can’t even fix your own clothes, I saw you make Nahida do it when she dropped me my lunch, I’m not letting you near your guts, idiot.” His tone was biting, but there was a gentleness to it too, an affection in the admission of his always watching attention. He noticed, he always noticed. He knows Childe read into it, too.

“Make sure I end up pretty then.” He smiled, despite everything.

“Don’t ask for the impossible.” Scara, at long last, did the same. Between the blood and guts and tears, he felt a glimmer of hope.

After what he felt had to have been hours, Childe was stitched up and ready to pass out. Scara, kind as he was, slapped a now cleaned hand against one of his cheeks to bring him back to the world for a moment, just long enough to feed him a couple of plain chips he found in the kitchen to steady his stomach, and a few painkillers washed down with tap water after. He let him sleep then, he couldn’t bear to keep him awake any longer when his ocean eyes couldn’t stay open and his muscle still occasionally spasmed with the shock of it all. Still, he also couldn’t bear to be awake by himself. He sent a text to Nahida, missing all the important details, but asking her to check on his cats for the next few days. He then messaged his colleagues, another few days off work. Family emergency, obviously. When that was done he was alone with his thoughts again, so he tidied the room as best he could until there was nothing but the bed Childe was asleep in to fix. At a loss, he laid down, avoiding the worst of the staining that was still tacky to touch. It was strangely comforting then, to hear the slow steady breathing of the man beside him. He kept waiting for it to stutter or cease completely, those lulls where his sleep was so deep his breathing slowed for a moment sending chills straight through Scara’s spine. Throughout the night he was in and out of his own sleep, too tired to stay awake but too wired to slumber properly. In the morning, or as close to it as he could get before laying still was just too much, he set to work again. Cleaning what he’d cleaned the night before, then preparing a plain breakfast and coffee.

When Childe woke up, he took more pills for the pain, Scara changed his bandages, and they finally swapped the bed sheets - well, Scara did, Childe leaned weakly against the bedside table until he was free to collapse again. It was a routine with an odd sense of mundanity, considering. And it was a routine they stuck to for the days Scara stayed. The first three turned into three more, then another two passed after that. He’d popped in to work once or twice, when Childe insisted he could manage six hours alone, but otherwise he was there, scowling from a corner as the tall man pushed himself unnecessarily. That day, when it was midday and thus time to change the bandages, Scara was still sulking over how Childe had pulled one of his hard won stitches that morning reaching for something Scara had already told him he would get.

“I said I was sorry. It’s already all better, you made sure of it.” He pleaded with the artist, who delicately peeled the stained bandages back from the slowly healing wound. He said nothing, only looked up to meet Childe’s still bright eyes with his own as he pressed the cloth soaked in antibacterial liquid against him. He smiled slightly, a sadistic twinge of his lips, as Childe winced.

“It’d hurt less if you let it heal more.” Was all the wisdom he offered before he worked in silence again. Childe, in his apparent endeavor to ruin all of Scara’s efforts, had fallen out of bed the day before when a surge of pain stopped him from standing properly when he tried, and had grazed his temple in the process. Scara checked it now, standing between Childe’s legs as he sat on the edge of his bathroom counter. He tiptoed just a little, slim fingers brushing back the permanently tousled orange locks whilst his other hand gently poked and prodded at the slowly swelling bruise and cuts. He was concentrating on this new wound, so much so that Scara couldn’t see the way Childe looked at him. The way he watched with rapt attention, followed each furrow in his brow and each pursing of his lips. He didn’t get to see the way his expression was heavy with affection and gratitude and something that was far too beyond either of their reaches.

“Thank you.” Childe manages eventually, as Scara is dabbing at the dozens of tiny little cuts that form the graze with a ball of cotton wool doused in another stinging mixture. Scara pauses only for a moment, then continues.

“Don’t mention it. It’s not like I was going to let you die.” Childe looked at him as if he didn’t quite believe that was true. “What? I wasn’t. You die when I say you can die.” He chose to ignore the flush of color he saw flooding Childe’s face then, the apparent joy the aggressive sentiment brought him, and the subsequent flutter that then brought to Scara’s own pulse. He’d thought he was over this.

“Well, even so, you didn’t have to stay. I appreciate it, really.” All the while he’s talking, his head keeps moving in tandem with his hands - Childe was what most would call an emotive talker, punctuating each word with gestures - and Scara, with another scowl, has to keep following his actions with his wad of cotton.

“Would you - Childe.” He grabs the man’s face, with his free hand, thumb pressing into one cheek as his fingers press into the other, his palm cupped under his chin. “Stop. Moving.”

The obedience returns with ease. Childe doesn’t move, doesn’t even really breathe too hard now. He only watches Scara, diligent and still. As the artist works he feels a soft touch, then a slightly heavier one. Childe’s hands, hesitant and bashful at first as they slowly settle on his hips. They don’t hold him where he stood between sturdy thighs, they only lay warm at the curve of jutting bone, where Scara’s sweats hung loose around them. It was annoying, really, how easily they settled into things like this. The ease with which Scara could still accept Childe’s hands on him, how even when Childe’s thumbs dared to rub tiny soft circles against the sliver of exposed skin there, that Scara only chided him with a knowing glare before continuing as they were.

When the cleaning was done he placed a flesh colored band aid, large and square, over the graze. Gently he smoothed it down with practiced tender touches, his fingers pausing before trailing across warm skin, one down the side of Childe’s face whilst the other took the longer route. It travels across his forehead - brushing through thick hair first - then down his other unblemished temple, over an angled cheekbone, until both hands were cupping an all too excited face between them.

“I hate you for not telling me what you knew.” It’s true, and he means it.

“I know.” Childe says, and it’s true, “I like you, though.” and he means it.

“I know.” And Scara leans forward, the last thing he sees the wide open rounded oceans he was still too scared to dive into, before his own eyes closed and all he saw was the pitch dark of his eyelids as he felt molten warmth against his mouth.

Childe’s lips were soft, softer than he’d expected, always led to believe he was the kind of man not to care about things like this. Except of course he did, because nothing about Childe made sense. And his lips were soft, and smooth, and tasted faintly of the sour apple chapstick left on the kitchen table. They were both still for a moment, until Childe’s shock wore away and Scara’s guts told him he had to finish what he'd started. It was a head rush, a sudden hit of something he hadn’t allowed himself in so long he couldn’t pinpoint the dates anymore, couldn't fathom that he'd gone without this for so long, a man in the desert crawling towards an oasis he’d been so certain wasn’t real. The slow needy glide of lips, the shy but desperate brush of tongues when they dared to, and Scara could feel the heat rising in his cheeks and his chest, the way his breath caught in his throat when Childe’s teeth grazed across his lip. There was a moment he thought they were parting, a separation of open mouths, a shuddering breath of cool air before he was taken under again, Childe’s tongue heavy on his and leaving him wanting - mewling between them. He could feel the desperation, the hunger, the way Childe was taking what he could get whilst Scara was willing to give it - who knew what would change when he let him go for too long. He felt lightheaded, though, forgetting to breathe through his nose, or at all, as they kissed and kissed and kissed. At some point Childe had slipped off the counter he’d been seated on and pressed forward until Scara’s smaller frame was trapped against the wall, large hands cupping his heated cheeks to keep his head tilted back. It must have looked a little funny, he thought, the way Childe had to lean so far down just to reach the lips he wanted so badly, Scara could only assume he’d pay for keeping his neck bent back like this later, with an ache he’d have to assume would be worth it. His lips felt raw and used, bitten and soothed by teeth and tongue alike until he had to ball his fists against Childe’s chest and push himself away, panting and dizzy and acutely aware of the slick glistening strings of saliva that stretched and snapped between their mouths.

The weight of warm hands left his face and like a ship in a storm he floundered without them, horrified then by the notion that Childe could be anything he needed. For once he bit down the cruelty he used as defense and silently he used the distance between them to silently, resentfully, walk away. This must count as some kind of growth, right? He wondered though, that if the cost of being better was being so vulnerable, if he really wanted it at all.

The rest of the day passed, trapped in the sludge of a missed opportunity it ran on and on, Scara uncomfortably plagued with what could have been and what might have happened, if he had just stood his ground against his doubts. Maybe he’d still be pressed against the cool bathroom wall, damp seeping through the back of his shirt, so tangled in someone else it didn’t matter. He cooked that night. He wasn’t the best but he did his best. It was a dish with fish, per Childe’s request from that morning, and Scara had had to scrape away the scales, remove the head and gut the creature himself. It felt both therapeutic and prophetic. He could relate to the idea of it, of being flayed by something you never stood a chance against, to be helpless and stripped of all the flesh and pieces that made you yourself. For much of his life he’d felt a blade across the back of his neck just waiting to fall, or to swipe, to cut him where it mattered most. He’d felt free for a while but now as he chopped through the meat and bone he felt a strange shiver ripple through him.

They ate together, despite the awkward tension that settled on them like a weighted blanket, though rather than easing Scara’s anxieties it only proved to keep them trapped below it. Childe ate energetically, shoveling fish and rice and vegetables into himself like it was a competition. Scara supposed it was endearing, in a Labrador-esque kind of way. On the other hand he pecked at his plate like a bird. A bird riddled with stomach churning emotion. In the end he let Childe take it, watching him from his corner of the ostentatiously large couch. It was boring and grey, the kind that makes a large L shape. It’s only saving grace had been the plushness of it, a velvety fabric that felt like it was alien in nature; it was so soft to touch. Now, it had another, and that was just how far it let Scara sit away from Childe. He was currently curled up, knees hugged to his chest, in the corner of the L whilst Childe was sitting at the very end, legs stretched out in front of him as he balanced Scara’s discarded plate in one large, sturdy hand. It never bothered him when he was stared at, Scara had noticed, no matter when or where he did it - no matter what had transpired between them - he always greeted him with a smile.

“I can take you fishing if you want.” The words startled him, he’d been so suddenly comfortable with their silence.

“Why would I want that?” His nose crinkled slightly as he rested his head back against the plump cushion of the couch.

“It’s fun. You get to sit out in nature all day, even when it’s raining or cold. Sometimes you don’t catch anything but it’s fine, because it’s just, like, really peaceful.” He stacks the empty plates on top of one another, wandering off to run them briefly under the tap. “Plus, if you do catch anything, that’s good food. Depending on how much you get, you could eat for a week.”

“Was all of that supposed to convince me? Childe, most of that is making it sound worse.” Scara grumbles, turning and folding his arms on top of the back of the couch, chin resting on his evening chilled hands. He watched the tall man tidy under the guise of making sure he didn’t mess with his wound again, and certainly never focusing on the way the muscles in his forearms flexed slightly when he lifted heavy stacks of pots and pans, or how deftly his fingers sort through rows of cutlery. This was so ridiculous, he thought, what kind of person gets hot and bothered over someone working a dishwasher. “I don’t want to eat fish for a week - does anyone? That’s a pretty insane amount of fish.”

Childe laughs and Scara has to ignore the melody of it, for the good of his sanity.

“Well, maybe, I don’t know. My parents used to take me and my siblings. It was fun. I haven’t been in a while.” The tone never changed but Scara felt an adjustment in the air, a tender sadness. The silhouette of his back in the kitchen that’s far too large for this apartment and the single person in it would have made anyone’s chest ache.

“It’s not like I said I’d never go.” He scoffs, the mumbling tones of his voice muffled against the back of his hands, and inwardly he’s berating himself for being so idiotically soft. “Maybe I’d go, just for the experience, since I’ve never done it. Just if I had time and like, nothing else to do.”

When he returns to the couch Childe doesn’t sit, doesn’t even come around to the right side, he just walks to where Scara is looking over the back of the seat and he smiles down at him, “Alright, well, then maybe one day. Just for the experience.” The strange sadness, like a lingering ghost, returns to him and the question that follows is a sudden turn, “How long are you staying?”

Scara actually hadn’t thought about it. Childe needed help and he’d come running - it was life or death at the time at least. Now it was just life and mild pain. Soon it would just be life, and Scara already had one of those without him. It was a sudden thought to be provoked, one he’d been avoiding, that being here wasn’t normal, that he was supposed to be alone in his own apartment, watching a documentary about serial killers until he could bring himself to sleep knowing tomorrow would be the exact same as today. Here, he didn’t know what he’d be doing in two hours, let alone the next day, and even when he did he awaited it with a calmness he hadn’t felt in years. Here, he was in admittedly more danger simply by existing near to the other man, but it felt more normal than the mundanity of home.

“I don’t know.” He was honest, quiet in his response. His void dark eyes lifted, head tilted back in a pose he’d worn not so long ago in a humid bathroom with Childe’s tongue down his throat. Looking up at him like this, through long lashes and sinking in uncertainty, he didn’t know what Childe wanted to hear. The need to push rose within him, a little testing of the waters with sarcastic, teasing tones, “Why? Am I intruding now? Do you hate having me around that much?”

It’s one thing to push the buttons, it’s another thing to watch as they do absolutely nothing, like pressing eject in a nose diving plane and never hearing the satisfying click of certain safety. Childe doesn’t say a word, his smile doesn’t really change either, it stays small and compact and nothing at all like the shitty grins that stretched his lips gleefully whenever Scara battled him before. The thing with asking pointed questions just to get a rise was that sometimes, the rise never came and all that was left was the sinking feeling that that was the only answer there was. In this case, Scara decided, the unsettling silence was as good as agreeing. He stared, for a seemingly infinite period of time, the tension dropping slowly from his shoulders to be replaced by a slumped, defenseless shape instead.

“I’m gonna take a shower.” Was all Childe said in the end. Scara didn’t bother reminding him to at least try not to get his bandages soaked. He heard the shower run, heard the stupid bathroom radio Childe insisted on having as it played some classic rock Scara would rather die than listen to one more time. He sat there for a while, not moving, before he set off for the bedroom. He hoped, childishly, Childe heard the slam of his expensive door through the rush of the hot water and dull repetitive chords.

Whilst staying here Scara had been afforded Childe’s bedroom. He had originally refused, dumbfounded by Childe’s insistence when he was the one ready to bleed out at a moment’s notice. The ginger had been relentless about it though and Scara had learned just how oddly polite Childe could be, the product of decent parenting. How unrelatable he had been at that moment. After being shown the plushness of the bed that could be unfolded from the ridiculously large couch, Scara had given in knowing that Childe wasn’t exactly sleeping on a cold dirty floor. It was strange even now to be laying face down in the huge expanse of such a soft, bouncy mattress. It was firm enough that he’d already slept better here than he had since buying his own creaking contraption of a bed, but still plush in a way that made him feel like he was carried to his slumber in sunny, soft clouds. Tonight he realized, with a strange regret, that after so many days he’d worn away the rough woodish scent of Childe with his own.

Laying across tousled sheets he found there was a bitterness in him now after that strange staring match. Had that really been what he meant by it? Did Childe agree? After everything, this was where it went, with Childe cutting him off? The childishness of that particular source of resentment didn’t quite hit him, and he settled firmly in backing his own argument. It was unarguably stupid how oblivious he was to what was going on in his own mind. He decided he was angry because Childe was ungrateful, or because he had to be the one desperate for a semblance of affection, chasing after Scara until he made himself sick of him. Scara, meanwhile, was of course innocent of all need or desire, he wanted for nothing, and every crumbling of his resolve was a fluke, a strange anomaly in his ironclad defense. It couldn’t mean a thing that at the idea of being turned away from this place, from Childe, that he balked and panicked and set out to rectify this perceived wrong. It was decidedly unfortunate that Scara often fought fire with fire. He tossed and turned in the collection of thick blankets until he heard the silence brought by the turning of a knob, the loud hissing rattle of the shower ending abruptly. He stood in a hurry and grabbed his bag, the largest one he owned that could still only fit enough clothing and toiletries for a weekend at best. He threw it onto the bed and with a sigh began aggressively packing. There was no order to it, no neat folding nor careful placement, only a rough and tumble explosion of possessions filling the bag to the brim. He heard the click of the door opening, the sigh Childe made as he leaned on the frame. Scara didn’t look up.

“Scara.” Childe stated, rather than asked. Scaramouche didn’t move, at least, he didn’t change his movement. He slowed but with the same angry eagerness he shoved black sweats into the slowly diminishing space.

“Scara?” A question now, wondering if perhaps he hadn’t heard. Nothing changed.

“Scara.” There was an exasperation there now, frustrated by this obvious scowling ignorance, and Scara wrongfully relished it, like a rare gem he cherished that feeling of capturing such an expression, one Childe hadn’t shown him yet.

There were three things Scara had inherited from his mother that he could readily admit to. First, her looks. Fair skin and hair and eyes dark enough to startle but lavish enough to seem purple in the light. He was short like her, cold like her, slim like her - dainty in all the right places, but strong in them too. He’d grown up knowing he was pretty, been taught it was a weapon more than a weakness, and learned in his freedom it didn’t matter either way when all he saw in the mirror was the person he wanted to run from the most.

Second was her indifference. He had been born with it, but never been as absorbed by it as she was. His mother was a faraway star, faintly glowing and never within reach, she shone her light because she had no choice and the world was merely lucky to be caught within it. Scaramouche had been a shooting star, bright and wild and willing to land, willing to give if he could have your eyes on him for a moment of sweet attention; he would shine as he crossed your sky, just for a hit of attentive adoration, before his wonder fizzled out and he moved on. Older now he controlled it more maturely, but it was still a switch he kept a finger on. He was volatile, that was certain, but his upbringing had left him no choice but to learn the art of indifference, of leaving people wanting for your hatred. To never think of them at all leaves your enemies sick, foaming at the mouth with their maddening need to be acknowledged.

Lastly, was her stubbornness. Perhaps this was the wall that had always been between them, the untraversable distance that ran from him to her. She could give nothing up and neither could he, a stalemate of emotion that had begun the day he was born. It ran through all things they did, he couldn’t give up on a single thing he believed he was right about - even when he knew later that he was wrong.

This was what led him here, what made Childe’s hands ball into loose fists at his sides. Scara began to take his time rearranging the contents of the bag in front of him all while Childe stared, unanswered and unresolved.

“Sleep well, then.” It was annoying to realize just how level he’d made his voice, and how he didn’t even slam the door - not like Scara had. He felt like a child. His stomach churned with an anger only he deserved.

The silence stretched on and on, and the room was rapidly darkening without the door open to let in the light of the hall.

Maybe it was a madness, what he had, a strange onset of hysteria that could be explained away by a stressful series of events and lack of sleep. Except he’d been sleeping wonderfully here, at Childe’s house, and his life had been remarkably stress free, even with the attempted murders around him, compared to what it had been a decade ago. Whatever it was that had him, be it his own idiocy or a rapidly growing insanity, it made him do particularly stupid things. With a huff he shoved his small hands under the heavy mattress and with an exertion of force, flipped it as much as he could. Unable to turn it over he succeeded only in shifting it across the frame, but that was as good as he needed. In a swift movement he stood on the frame and with strength not many people knew he possessed in his lithe frame he stamped, again and again on the wooden slat. He heard it crack, but it wouldn’t break, far too well made (expensive taste seemed to be a running theme in Childe’s home) to be split by the foot of a five foot four tall man fueled by pure frenzied desperation. Scara sucked in a labored breath, recovering from the moment of exertion before stomping across the room. After numerous days tidying this apartment for his bedridden accomplice he’d discovered many a stash of odd or dangerous equipment, so he knew that in the bottom of his large closet Childe kept a ratty old shoe box that was filled with unusual weapons only someone at a loss for something better would run to. He grabbed the crowbar that was suspiciously crusted at one end by something long dried.

It didn’t take long to hear the uneasy snapping of wood underneath metal. It didn’t stop at one, either, no, Scara broke multiple helpless slats until there was a ragged gaping hole beneath the mattress that made it almost impossible to sleep on. Satisfied, he sighed, sliding the bar across the floor so it was half hidden beneath the nightstand.

“Bed’s broken.” He was standing at the end of the folded out couch Childe was using as a bed. Scara’s hair was slightly ruffled from his activities, and he’d changed into one of the hugely over sized shirts Childe had been lending him for pajamas. There was a faded image from a movie on it that Scara had never seen, and he’d had to stop Childe from continuing his insistent monologue about it being one of the best ever made, and that he’d happily show Scara it, along with its sequels any time. Now, that man was laying on his back, eyes half closed as he stared with exhaustion up at Scara. Adjusting, Childe sat up and Scara could see the freckled expanse of his sturdy, toned chest even in the half-dim light of the lamp across the room.

“Huh?” His voice was rough with the short sleep he’d barely managed to enjoy before this entirely odd interruption. Scara melted in the privacy of his mind.

“Bed broke.” He repeated as he started to crawl onto the decidedly less sturdy mattress, it buckled beneath him but only in the way most foldouts did. He made it halfway up the giant length of it before Childe held out a hand to stop his movement.

“How? That thing is heavy, what’d you do to it?” It was honestly a normal question, because he was right, the frame of Childe’s bed was built to withstand an atomic blast as far as Scara was concerned. There was no reasonable explanation that his slight frame could snap even one piece of wood, let alone the mess he’d left behind.

“Nothing. Guess it was just a scam, or put together wrong.” He finished his travelling momentum, landing with a quiet ‘oof’ next to Childe, who only seemed to be able to stare at where Scara had been. Perhaps his sleep was still entangling his mind. “Move over.” Scara added, with a softness in his voice he hadn’t meant to add.

He didn’t, not at first. It took a minute or two for Childe to even look down at him. When he did he still looked as confused as he had been the moment he woke up to Scara shaking his leg. Within another minute he was scooting his way down to where Scara had crawled on himself, and silently walking to the bedroom.

“It’s broken. Like really fucking broken?” His voice was dumbfounded but clearly more awake when he reemerged.

“That’s what I said.” He couldn’t even see him, laid back and already tucking himself under the still warm blankets. “I’ll just sleep here, it’s not like it matters. I’ll be gone soon.”

A heavy silence, a beat, then the quiet padding of bare feet on the cold floor. Childe had to climb over him to get back to where he’d been and Scara knew he felt the waft of his breath against his shoulder when it passed him by, watching the hair raise along Childe’s arms as he flopped beside him. It was hurtful, in a way, when Childe turned over. It wasn’t a rejection definitively, but it was in this all too sensitive time. A silent blocking out of Scara’s existence beside him that made the smaller feel the lump swell in his throat against his will.

“You didn’t answer my question.” He found himself blurting the words out after about 5 minutes of silence. Childe groaned, and the lump grew thicker. Scara stared, glassy eyed and still, up at the ceiling.

“Because I’m trying to sleep. You’re the one who told me I need it to get better.” His groggy voice, the open plain of his broad back, Scara bore fiery holes into the prominent sculptural lines of his shoulder blades now, hopeful he might feel it the way Scara always did when Childe watched him across empty rooms.

“From earlier.” He paused, there was no reply. He refreshed his memory gently, with an openness to his isolation, “Do you really hate having me here?”

“You know I don’t.” He still didn’t turn but Scara could see the shadowy movement of his arm in the dark, long fingers rubbing across tired eyes.

“Then why didn’t you say that?” Scara turns himself, if Childe wouldn’t he could at least let it be known he was willing to face him. He settled on his side, mere inches between where his hand lay on the pillow and the nape of Childe’s neck, tickled by orange curling hairs, settled too. “Why do you still want me to go?”

There’s no pause this time, no lengthy delve into rigid silence, Childe was prepared, like an archer tensed with the string of his bow, taught and ready to release.

“Because I’m sick of whatever we’ve got going on.” He turns, now, in his fair burst of frustration. But he jolts, surprised to see Scara’s wounded eyes staring right back at his rightfully angered ones. They soften, though, unable to help it in the face of the other. Scara hates that, even if it swayed this in his favor. He wanted Childe to be honest, to be mad, to be everything Scara couldn’t let himself be. “I’m tired of being let down, because you’re really bad at it, alright? It’s not gentle. You’re not nice at all, actually.” It was a whisper, ridiculous and funny, subtly mean and altogether true. After the fitting second of silence that followed, Scara heard himself laugh. It was short and resoundingly sad but it made Childe smile and that made him warm, from the core of his heart that he sometimes forgot was still beating, despite it all. His sleeping companion continued,

“And it’s not fair that you get to give me the cold shoulder whenever you want but I can’t even act a little off, can’t even be a little unhappy about all this. I get wanting space, but that goes two ways, you know?” Scara could only nod silently, meekly, timid under the weight of the embarrassing truth of his immaturity.

They could feel each other’s slow breaths when they lay this close, Scara’s shaking for a split second of honest flustered shock when Childe’s legs brushed his own, the taller adjusting his posture now he was laying on his other side, facing Scara fully. He seemed unbothered.

“I wasn’t trying to let you down.” He wasn’t sure if he had meant to move his hand or if it had been subconscious, a slow drag of it across the pillow between them, just the side of his little finger resting in the silky waves of hair that pooled there. Even that brought a skip to the rhythm in his chest.

“Doesn’t matter if you meant to or not. And that’s worse, you know that, right?” Childe didn’t move and Scara realized it was purposeful. This wasn’t about him, this wasn’t the moment for Childe to sweep him up and kiss him better. He was big enough and mature enough (they both hoped) to do it himself, and he’d been the one to cause the hurt this time, no matter how terrible he felt in the aftermath. This was the moment Childe was giving him to step up and be honest. To give in to himself and make a move, consciously and with purpose. “You crossed all the lines you put down yourself, you gave me all the leeway in the world, you can’t pretend you didn’t know how I’d take that.”

“Like I’m supposed to be a mind reader.” He mumbled, pathetically clinging to the dissolving remnant of his false indifference. “I didn’t know.”

“I’m not debating with you all night, Scara, not if all you can do is plead shitty ignorance.” He sighed, eyes closing against the assault of features far too enrapturing even in the dark. “Go to sleep.”

“I’m sorry.” It came from him in a desperate rush, as much breath in it as there were words, like it had been punched from his gut all of a sudden. Childe, in the middle of beginning to turn again, just stared at him. The darkness stopped Scara from being able to read his expression enough to know if he’d lost his chance for this to mean anything so he chose to simply continue, choosing the sliver of hope that always taunted him in the back of his mind, just this once. Like the steady battering of a hammer against stone he let the words tumble free, “I’m sorry for it all. I’m sorry I’m not soft or nice, that I can’t just… Kiss and make up with you like it’s nothing. You hurt me first, and I know that’s childish and just, a completely nothing argument, but I am who I am and even if I wanted to change, it’s not like it’d happen overnight.” He stops to breathe and when he hears Childe try to say something he lifts his hand to blindly stop his mouth, continuing with even more fervor than before.

“And I’m not sorry for saying I hated you, because I did, and I still do. Kind of. It’s not simple, or normal, but I know I meant it. You know what else is true? I like being here, I like your stupid apartment full of stupid expensive things and I like you.” A deep breath, and he goes again, “Even when I left where I grew up, I never felt like a normal person. I couldn’t do normal things the way normal people did them, I’m always paranoid and I’m always prepared to fight. Every average thing made me feel weirder, so when I’m with you, why do I feel like the most boring person in the world? Watching you tend to your own bullet wound is more mundane than going to the store for milk. I wake up, and I’m worried about you - about my own safety - but I don’t feel sick with anxiety anymore. I don’t feel the dread of knowing I’m never going to be like them, not the way I want to be.”

He could feel that Childe had stopped trying to wrestle himself away from the pressure of his hand against his mouth, so he dropped it, and felt all the fonder for it when Childe didn’t try to interrupt at all this time.

“I’m angry. Angry that things I spent decades trying to fix feel better because I’m just sitting watching you get rice all over your own face. Angry because I want to let myself be happy, but I can’t, because,” A heavy, warm weight on his side made him pause, Childe’s hand, under the sheets and softly settling into the curve of Scara’s waist. His skin burned under the thin fabric of his borrowed shirt. The touch was a comfort and a curse, and Scara wondered if Childe knew it was ever the latter. “Because I’m scared.” The words ripped from him like a thorn from a fingertip, sore and rough and bleeding.

“I don’t know what to do with all this, with you. Where I’m from, the people who raised me, affection wasn’t given for free, if it was even given at all.” He could feel the heated sting of tears as Childe’s hand crept upwards rough fingertips drawing invisible lines along the smoothness of Scara’s pale arm. When the touch reached his face he trembled where he lay, the engulfing tenderness of Childe’s hand cupping his cheek sending him reeling. “How do I take it?”

He was glad for the darkness of the night that remained uninterrupted, the lamp long since turned off by Childe on his way back to the couch earlier. It was a comfort knowing that no matter how well adjusted Childe’s eyes became he couldn’t see the intricacies of the pleading expression Scara wore, nor the shimmer of liquid that threatened to spill from damp eyes.

“You just accept it, that’s it. You just say, wow, that’s so nice, and you keep going.” Childe rubbed a thumb across his skin, “And you go fishing with me, because you know I like it. And I go look at weird statues made of like, socks or trash, or something like that, in an artist's basement, because you like it. And you might not get anything out of fishing, and I’ll probably never get modern art, but isn’t it all just a sign of affection?”

Scara sniffs, loathes the way he could feel the air soften between them when he does, all too aware of Childe hearing the sound of it, of how it gave away his feeble teary eyed state below him. But, for once, he lets the weakness overtake him, lets himself fall into it and be tenderly walked through the aching numbness of vulnerability.

“Is that what all the tattoos were for? Because I like them?”

“Are you kidding? I think we both know I was getting something out of that, Scara, come on.” Even though he couldn’t see he could imagine in astounding detail the way Childe’s brows were most definitely raising, and the ridiculous grin that must be tugging at the corners of his already upturned mouth.

“You’re gross.” He chided as his balled up fist collided weakly with Childe’s chest.

“And you’re an enabler.” The grin was so charmingly audible within each word, the freeing joy of it resonating between them. “You were playing the S to my M after all, you know?”

The embarrassment that drew out in him was new, Scara unfamiliarly bashful at the idea that Childe knew he knew all that time. Aware of the way Scara had let himself be pulled along by his strange current.

“Shut up already.”

It was strange to think of the range of emotions he was feeling in this moment. The myriad of things that plagued his mind all faded in the presence of just a little attention. It wasn’t just a little, though, nor just any kind. It was the dazzling spotlight of Childe’s unrelenting adoration that settled upon him and he realized just how good it felt, not just to be wanted in some generic unlabeled way, but to be wanted by someone he wanted back. Reciprocation was the key, it always was, but Scara had never allowed himself to enter that tacit agreement of feeling. He’d hidden, always ran, when it came down to it. For once then he would try it, try to be here and present, understanding that what he felt was real and that he liked it - liked Childe, and all the violent baggage and odd idealism he came with.

The fist he'd balled up against that firm chest unfurled and traveled, the flat of his palm sliding up until he felt the short strands of hair that hung down onto the back of Childe’s neck. He didn’t need to move, despite it really being all his move to make, just the subtle pressure of a push against his nape had Childe leaning forward. It was endearing, perhaps in a way it shouldn’t be, that even now he could be so sweetly obedient like that. Scara did put in effort, as he had decided he would and as Childe desired him to, and shifted across the short distance of empty pillow. He found himself surprised by just how close Childe really was when, with a spark that sent electricity through his veins, they found each other in the dark, lips meshing with ease.

It was different this time, not just because of the monologue Scara had dumped upon the other, nor the short lived fighting, but in the vulnerable state they both settled themselves into it all felt new and dazzlingly visceral. It was everything Scara had never felt in a kiss, physically or emotionally. It was soft, slow, a tender exploration of mouths that made his head fuzzy with a numbness that rid him of every thought he’d ever had. When his mind began to clear, coming back to him in short stupid thoughts, he thought dumbly that Childe’s lips didn’t taste like apples anymore, only the refreshing tang of mint that made his own lips tingle. His heart felt full in his chest in a way it hadn’t, perhaps ever. He felt fulfilled, peaceful, wrapped in a warmth that extended from within. He felt a little queasy when these thoughts came to him, out of fear and out of resentment of such emotive, gentle sentiments. He could move past it though, he could accept that maybe, somewhere deep (really very deep) down inside him, he could like that kind of thing too.

He couldn’t dwell too long, couldn’t happily relax within the confines of this cotton bud clad dream, not when Childe’s hand was easing its way up along the uninterrupted length of his thigh. He could feel the brush of fabric as it was slowly drawn upwards, bunching around the other man's wrist with each staggered rise of his hand. He could feel, too, the exact moment Childe realized he wasn’t going to find what he expected.

“Scara,” He said, muffled by the others lips that continued to place light, consistent kisses against his own. “Did you climb into this bed, in the middle of an ongoing cold war, without any underwear on? I was pouring out my feelings and you were going commando?”

Scara laughs against his mouth, knowing that Childe can feel it more than he can hear it, partially because he feels it from him too, the stuttering breaths hot against his moistened lips.

“I always sleep like this.”

“You didn’t lead with that when you got here, you should have led with that, I’d never have unfolded this couch.” Another laugh, another kiss, another fevered brush of fingers against the inner curve of his thighs.

“You were bleeding out, you could have died whilst I was telling you I sleep half nude.” His own shorter fingers curled into the ginger mess at the back of Childe’s head, trying to force him to stay close, to keep his busy lips on task. It didn’t work and Childe broke contact long enough to breathe out around a smile,

“Yeah, but I’d have died, like, really fucking happy though.” Scara sighed, a rumbling kind of mock growl in his throat as he shook Childe with his one hand (the other fairly useless with him laying on his side) and he brought them close again after.

“You’re going to get a chance to die pretty miserably if you don’t focus right now.” He’s rewarded for his succinct orders with a kiss so tender it knocked the wind out of him for a moment. Their lips like silk on velvet, a softness and a sweetness that spread through him slow and warm until he was putty in Childe’s expert hands.

“Oh, trust me, I’m focused on all the right things.”

It was like a haze, a smoky expanse of time that Scara couldn’t quite recount yet at the same time he could see it all with perfect clarity. Their kisses changed again, all the sweetness stayed but there was a tension too, a fiery heat that started when Childe’s hand couldn’t help dipping between the plush press of Scara’s two thighs. He felt the almost silent gasp that rounded Scara’s mouth and had all the encouragement he needed to dip his fingers into dripping wet heat. In all of Scara’s dreams, in every fantasy he’d locked away from his waking mind, he’d never been lost nor out of control. Even when he’d been handled roughly or used in ways he wouldn’t usually let himself be, he was in charge, he had the power over the other. Now, though, as Childe made him lay on his back, legs falling open as deft fingers rubbed through the wetness of his cunt, he’d never felt more wonderfully, freeingly pliant. He let go of his need to dominate, to yell and fight and be in charge of every moment. He let his eyes close, let his lips be smothered by the others, let every sound that he thought to make leave him with the openness he’d been too afraid to admit he needed.

Childe’s fingers were magic, he decided. Long and slim and so skillful Scara couldn’t think on how they’d come to be that way too long, lest he found he hypocritically hated the answer. The larger man’s entire hand cupped his pussy, palm warm and heavy, already slick with him, as it massaged down onto his blissfully aching clit. His fingers, his goddamn fingers. Scara felt a mess already, his arms lifted and crossed above his head, no blankets nor pillows for him to grasp in his building ecstasy. He was laid out so bare that it was only the darkness that let him simmer there comfortably, lost in the heat of it all. Childe’s fingers were deep, moving in waves against Scara’s walls until he was shaking and soft beside him. He was stretched happily around three of Childe’s deft, slim digits, and with each slow draw of the three pads against his sweetest spots he thought more and more that this might be the night he started to believe in god.

“Scara,” Childe murmured, voice almost lost among the tousled black hair he pressed his lips to now. “I wanna taste you. God, I need to.” His fingers sped up, never leaving the tight embrace of Scara’s hole, only quickly shifting up and down, over and over, the wet sound of it making Scara flush an impossible shade of red as his thighs shivered and spasmed and he felt the breath catch with each of his chest.

“I bet you’re so sweet, you’ll be so good on my tongue.” He was going to die, that was it, all those threats against Childe and tomorrow the papers would write about the man who’d passed away, blushed and drooling, with three fingers deep in his pussy.

“Just shut up and do it, Jesus fucking -” The sudden lack of anything keeping him open drew an interrupting startle of breath, his thighs jolting back together with a firm press and a loud slap when he threatened to cum just from the shock of it. He didn’t know what Childe had done to the stoic, hard to please version of himself that he knew, but sometimes he sort of wanted them back, just to avoid this embarrassing display of desperation.

Soon, though, he was staring at the blurry shadowed outline of Childe in the darkness, now settling happily - almost ecstatically - between Scara’s thin legs, pulled open again by inquisitive hands. Despite the passion that had been apparent only moments ago, that now begrudgingly familiar softness began to return again. Childe, calming himself for the moment, drew his lips along the inner expanse of flesh tenderly, as if it were Scara’s mouth he were kissing. In moments like this Scara understood his affinity for water, they were alike. Childe one moment was wild and free, maddeningly so, then without warning it would pass and he would be gentle and sweet, an inviting calm that hid an unfurling depth of horror below. That man full of intricate insanities kissed and kissed along inviting thighs, suckling at the most tender plump parts until redness formed or Scara whimpered for him to stop. It was only when he grew restless, when his hand - as gentle as he could manage - settled atop the mess of wavy locks on Childe’s head and attempted to guide him to his aching wet cunt. He was charmingly compliant at that moment.

God, Scara thought, there’s never been more proof you exist than this. It was like the rush of summer in his veins, that joy that you get only when the sun shines on you and the sky is blue and the water is warm and clear, and you feel like you’re the only person in the world. Childe’s tongue, flat and dripping with his spit, drew up along his folds and Scara’s entire body jolted back to the shadowed, silent living room. He was tense, his body coiled like a spring, and it felt so insanely incomprehensibly good. He wanted to be wound up more and more, like a little clockwork toy, until he couldn’t be wound anymore, so set to burst that when he did he might just explode with the intensity of it. For now though, he simply cried a lust filled exclamation of Childe’s name and let his thighs fall wide open, the heels of his feet sliding along the bare skin of Childe’s back. He lapped at him hungrily, like he was a man starved, as though he was the insatiable personification of greed and gluttony and lust all at once. He wanted and desired and Scara buckled under the weight of it, lost in sweet heat whenever his mouth would wrap around the swollen head of him, clit red and aching where it peeked out from its hood, sensitive between soft lips. Childe sucked him off so well Scara couldn’t think, at this point he wasn’t certain he could even feel, he was becoming something outside of corporeal, something not real, not seen nor heard nor felt. Lips that looked thin but were deceptively plush slid up and down the short bump of his clit, again and again, just enough stimulation to teeter on too much, Scara in a perpetual state of wanting to cum and wanting to cry. He was always on that precipice, a knife’s edge of too much and too little and it was so real, so viscerally, breathtakingly real. He’d never felt it so honestly and truly. He existed, he was here, every cell in his body was vibrating with his exhilaration. He whined and whimpered and rocked his hips wantonly against Childe’s face like he’d never felt pleasure in his life. He hadn’t, not like this, not the way Childe gave it to him.

Fingers, delicate and warm and welcome, pushed into him all over again, only two now but it was enough with the way Childe’s tongue was circling his swollen bundle of edged nerves. With less digits, they had more maneuverability, dexterous and eager to please, they writhed and wriggled and pinpointed every spot that sent his muscles into a frenzy of shivers. It was an assault of every kind, from every angle, and he was so willingly weak, so happy to be conquered and claimed.

It was when Childe lifted his head just a little - no longer tasting Scara with his lips but instead letting his mouth fall open, tongue lolling out as though waiting whilst his fingers began to thrust in a hurry, desperate and frenzied - that Scara realized exactly what he wanted. His body heated up in a flash of striking warmth, like he’d been thrown upon a fire. He didn’t know why but he found himself with the unshakable desire to provide, to fulfill this desire Childe was so hungry for. Like the eager companion he’d become he began to rub his own fingers across himself, three fingers rolling his clit underneath them as Childe’s own still pressed up into him, moving with a slick ease. It was embarrassingly fast like this, the speed with which he went spiraling past the height of pleasure. It hit with force, a startlingly satisfying release of all the tension in him that resulted in a moan that choked the sound from him and brought him to silence, just as he gave Childe exactly what he wanted. When Scara came, his stomach flexed, pressing in as the sweet tension of his muscles peaked, his hips lifted, and clear, warm liquid shot straight across Childe’s tongue for a humiliatingly long time, the rest that followed after falling weakly over his hand. Scara trembled through the aftershocks when the aforementioned man couldn’t help lapping at the sopping, twitching mess of his cunt as if the spend he found there was ambrosial, a honeyed nectar rather than the colorless, practically flavorless mess it really was. Even in the dark, when Scara tilted his head with what remained of his strength then, he could see just the outline of droplets dripping from Childe’s chin as he licked across his dampened mouth.

“Don’t even think about it.” He weakly chastised him when Childe crawled up his body, settling so perfectly between his legs - made to be there, Scara’s intrusive inner voice proposed. He saw the smile that radiated even in the night, and couldn’t bring himself to turn away when Childe pressed through his fragile resistance. His lips were wet, and tasted subtly sour in an oddly pleasant way, Scara coating his tongue and lips and most of the rest of him. It was messy and loud and entirely ungraceful, but it was good - right. His mouth could barely close as Childe overtook it and all the while kept his fingers moving, plunging slow and steady into the flexing, tight moisture of Scara’s hole. His hand was caught between the wet mound and the hard tent that formed at his own crotch and Scara could feel the jolting action when he rutted against the thin form of his own wrist. He could hear it too when Childe’s free hand rustled through his boxers, worn as pajamas, until his aching cock was free. All he could do was lay there with the subtle tremble of his orgasm still rumbling through his legs, that lay open and inviting as they always seemed to when Childe set himself between them.

There was something different about the way Childe pushed himself inside him this time, compared to the urgency of the tattoo parlor, where Scara sunk himself down only to satisfy their salacious needs. Now, as his body felt like it was faraway and electrified, the slow press of hard heat was too good, too familiar, too much. It was pleasure and it was lust, but it was tender too, a patient press that lasted longer than Scara thought he could survive. When he felt the sharpness of hips against the backs of his thighs and that addicting pressure inside him, he knew Childe was as deep as he could get. Scara felt the wandering touch of his hands, explorers with a purpose, a mission, to touch each part of him until it was memorized. He felt too, the damp warmth of lips, from above his navel to his sternum, along the dark patterns of ink at first and then following one faded scar under the left side of his chest as his finger traced the mark’s twin on his right. The sensation of touch there was always strange, always a little alien to his mind, but now, in this space for just them that they’d created, it made him shiver with an as yet unnamed joy. It was replaced with a shuddering wave of pleasure soon after when wet warmth engulfed his nipple, the roll of a thick tongue across it making him clench and flex and he felt the reverberation of Childe’s gluttonous moan against the bud he kept in his mouth.

When he moved, Scara cried. Not out loud, not his name nor a moan, but he cried. Whether it was by pure emotion, the honeyed way Childe praised him with whispers against his pale skin, or the way the over stimulation hit him all at once until even his pulse was too much to feel. Both his arms were lifted, folded across his face as his mouth hung open dumbly, lavishly seductive moans and whines falling with each slow snap of Childe’s hips. Tears stuck to his lashes where they brushed against the arms that hid them, one or two dribbling down his high curved cheeks. When Childe sped up, hitting deep and hard and far too accurately grinding himself into every spot that brought Scara to a new high, Scara heard the wrecked hiccup of Childe’s name that ripped from his throat. It didn’t sound like him, there was no hint of sarcastic defense, not even a whisper of indifference there to find, only the desperate insistence and need of a man possessed by unfamiliar affection.

Strong hands pulled his arms from his moistened eyes, until he was blinking up at his lover, the saltiness of a tear catching in the corner of his kissed raw lips. The intensity with which Childe stared down at him made him ache more than the cock that fucked him full below.

“Are you crying?” He murmurs, all seduction and no sympathy. Scara had felt the twitch in his swollen length when he’d noticed the falling droplets. Another strange kink for him to discover far too late. “You’re so cute.” He sounded breathless then, fit to burst with all his odd affection. He kissed, fervent and hungry, across Scara’s cheek, tasting the salted well of emotion that overflowed from dull eyes, with the lips that still must be covered with all the other remnants of him Childe had collected.

“Does it feel that good?” His panting breaths were loud, but never quite matching the volume of the damp slapping of skin against skin, the indescribable sound of his cock stirring up his insides with expert ease, the likes of which made Scara’s skin flush with bashful pink for how lewd the scene was playing out in his mind. “Do you wanna cum? You can cum, I’m close -”

His breath catches when Scara tenses around him, and it wasn’t that he’d been waiting for permission, no, it’s just that hearing Childe whisper straight into the blushed shell of his ear had made his already overstimulated cunt slick and warm and feel so good he couldn’t help it. His body pulsed and ached for him so sweetly, he felt the gush of liquid - unbelievable that he could still provide even this much - that caught around Childe’s still thrusting cock. With the intrusion to halt the pressure of the flow, it dribbled out around him and the sound - God the sound. Scara wanted to die right then, half from the pleasant numbness that made his mind foggy and his heart full, and half because he’d never been quite so openly dirty with anyone. He’d made it his job to maintain a sense of distance, not even emotionally but socially. He wanted to be better than this, to feel like he was more than what others might expect, but sometimes we are what we hope we aren’t. It wasn’t a crime to feel good, he was realizing that. Still, his mind still clung to the prudishness of his past.

“Tell me -” Childe was practically drooling against his throat, mouth open and eyes squeezed closed when his words caught around a desperate moan. “Tell me where you want it, I won’t - nhn - I won’t do it inside, I know you don’t -”

“No, do it.” He felt possessed then, like something was inside his nervous system, something deep within the layers of his muscles, something that was him but wasn’t all at once. His legs, with their shivering lack of strength lifted and hooked weakly around working hips. He heard the stutter of Childe’s breath against his arching neck. “Cum inside me.” Who even was he anymore?

But Childe, obsessively obedient as he could be, did just as he was told. With gasping grunts he fucked Scara into the creaking frame of the fold out mattress until the smaller’s tears returned and Childe was filling him so full he thought he might die all over again. He collapsed when he was done, heavy on top of Scara’s light frame, but it was impossible to care among the softness of the blankets and the sticky sheen of sweat that settled between them both. He felt, with mild discomfort, the dribble of white viscous threads that overflowed from the used, reddened folds of his cunt. There wasn’t a part of him that wasn’t wet with something.

Their breathing settled slowly, matched to one another as Childe kept his weight upon him, settled where he was between warm thighs. He nuzzled on occasion into the sweaty, kiss-marked crook of Scara’s neck, Scara letting his head full of racing thoughts lean against the fluff of tousled orange hair. They shouldn’t fall asleep like this, disgusting and uncomfortably strewn out as they were, but it was a scene too good to end, a moment too sweet to break. So they did, Childe falling to it first, the flutter of his sleepy lashes tickling the sensitive skin of Scara’s throat until the sound of subtle snores accompanied the slow pressing rise of his chest against the smaller man’s. When Scara slept, he did so with an unfamiliar ease. He dreamed only normalcy, good things he hadn’t dreamed of before, and when the dreams ended there was no surprise, no scare nor cruelty waiting to jolt him awake. He felt only peace and the welcome weight of Childe upon him.

That morning when he woke, light was only just beginning to pour into the open living room. He saw only the white of messy sheets for a moment, and the golden glow of the rising sun from behind thin blinds. Slowly he turned, and he saw him then, the still sleeping form of the man who’d made him wonder who exactly he was trying to be. Maybe it was the way Scara stared, all heavy intensity and unrelenting curiosity, or perhaps it was just that time, but Childe stirred. He woke up much the same way Scara often did, with futile resistance and squinting, blinking eyes. It seemed the surprise of their reality was mutual if the way he only stared too, open mouthed and disbelieving at the face beside his, was anything to go by. They were still close, despite their movements during the night they’d ended up back to each other, their noses only an inch or two apart. Scara could feel the tickling air of his breath against his skin, and the warmth that emanated from his entire existence. A smile softened all the surprise away, just the same as the sun burnt away the night. He was unbearably sweet like this and Scara saw his hand reaching out before he even registered that he had made it do so. Softly, his fingers brush the hair back from blue eyes that creased at the corners. The expectant exhilaration that sparkled in the ocean waves of his irises made Scara’s heart clench and soar and beat right into his throat.

“Hi.” Childe croaked, rasping and low, the morning stealing all the energy from his tone. Affection poured from him like an open wound. It wasn't hard to close the distance and kiss him. It wasn’t hard at all. It was so unbearably easy. “Hi.” He repeated around a faint chuckle when Scara finally released him, all scowling brows and pouting lips, mad only that he really was equally as adoring as the man shaped puppy below him had been for weeks. It was alarming just how easily he had caught him up.

“We have to check your bandages.” He wore his business tone, but it seemed now that Childe had always known when to see right through it. His hands, large and so good at holding him, wrapped gently around his arms so that he could pull him down, forcing him to collapse against his still bare chest.

“No, no. We can do that later.” Scara squirmed, Childe squeezed. He stilled then, as strong arms wrapped him up so thoroughly he felt cocooned. Safe and sound and adored. “Stay here awhile.”

His voice was soft, lost in the feathery short lengths of hair at the crown of Scara’s head, where he followed the hushed request with a series of light kisses. So he did, because the nonexistent argument had been so convincing he didn’t want to think of a reason to disagree. They cozied up, cuddled and dozed for another hour, until Scara grew restless and Childe’s stomach rumbled with poorly timed hunger. They ate together, they showered, they checked his bandages. Later they cooked together, Scara burnt his and Childe fixed it, reliably. They watched a movie, and then refolded all the clothes in Scara’s scornfully packed luggage. They talked and napped and ate dinner. The day passed with ease and poorly repressed laughter and unknown bursts of joyful coexistence. The week passed much the same. Some mornings Scara let himself be gently held and loved, kisses melting along the sharp curve of his jaw as his body splayed across twisting sheets, lit by the golden sunrise glow that crept across both their bare bodies, a picture of heavenly delight. Some nights, when the moon was full in the uncovered floor to ceiling windows and the task of closing the blinds was long forgotten, he let himself be ravished instead. His back would arch as he trembled on all fours, knees bruised and sliding against already messed blankets. Childe’s mouth burned kisses along the arch of his spine as Scara confessed his every desire into the drool soaked pillow he hid his face against. They were in a haze of mundanity together like this, a routine of forgetting that they existed outside of the here and now. It caught up soon, though.

“I have to go back.” Scara said, sudden and unprompted, as he lay between Childe’s legs, head tilted back against a broad chest. He was watching the screen as Childe mashed buttons on the controller he kept tight between his hands, arms wrapped loosely around Scara’s waist. “I miss my cats.”

He watched as Childe’s character died gruesomely when the words sunk in.

“Oh. Yeah.” Silence, at first. “That makes sense.”

And that was it. The next two days they spent ferrying the things Scara had accumulated there over the past few weeks back to his own smaller, shabbier apartment. Compared to the modern open style of Childe’s, his own was sectioned into small, cozy rooms, each littered with overgrowing, and some slightly dead, plants. There were dark patterned blankets draped across the single two person couch, and shelves full of odd curiosities he’d picked up travelling when he’d first set out on his own adorned every wall that allowed it. The light didn’t filter in through huge wall sized windows, just average squares, and a set of old french doors that stuck and squeaked during the winter, guarding the barely usable balcony he’d set up a harsh mesh container around, all so his cats could stare down upon the masses without fear of them throwing themselves down to them. Childe had just stared when he first walked in, Scara elbowing him harshly in the lower half of his ribs just to get him to close his mouth.

“Maybe this is a stupid question -” He started.

“No, we can be certain it will be.” Scara interrupted.

“Well, it’s just..” He stopped folding the sweater in his hands and crumpled his face a little, confusion and indecisiveness. “Your organisation was bigger than mine. Didn’t you take anything when you left? You could have been living the high life you know?”

“I didn’t need a bigger target on my back than I already had, and besides, I like my apartment. It’s fine for me.” He kicked the pair of shoes he’d dropped to the floor under the end of his bed, not fussed by the messiness. “Does the pristine white box you live in feel like a home?”

Childe didn’t seem to need to think on it much before his head shook, he was staring at the fabric bunched between his hands and the sigh that left him was heavy.

“No. No you’re right. This place reminds me of where I grew up, that was my home.” Looking up Scara sees the nostalgia pooling in his eyes and the smile it brings is mirrored on his own lips. “You’d have hated it, not a single room was empty. There’s like five of us kids you know?”

Scara scoffed a laugh and dropped himself onto the bed beside Childe, flopping against his sturdy side like a creature content.

“Maybe if I’d had that growing up I wouldn’t be so fucked up.”

“That’s not true.” Childe says soft and timid, his arm slipping comfortably around Scara’s shoulders and he feels the smile pulling at Childe’s cheeks as he presses his face into the top of straight black hair. “I turned out totally fucked up, so it definitely doesn’t work like that.”

His weakly balled up fist smacked against the taller man’s thigh as he snorted. They fell back into the mass of blankets together when Childe pulled on him, resistant as ever to Scara's squirming against his ironclad cuddle technique.

“It’s okay, we can be kinda fucked up together.” He stilled finally when Childe spoke, settling instead into the warm embrace he still wasn’t quite sure was meant for him, but he’d stay there until he was told to leave. It was odd to think of them being here, having gotten to this point without killing each other in the process. There was still work to do, rights and wrongs to process and traumas neither of them had even begun to overcome haunting from the shadows, but it felt like maybe this was a start. Neither of them were particularly upfront with their feelings, not in any way that would be perceived as normal at least, but Scara could feel himself opening up; his jabs were less pointed, his venom soothed, and even if he spat or clawed on occasion he still curled up against his companion’s side at the end of the day to lick each wound clean himself.

Before Childe left, busy by the front door patting himself down for his phone after Scara had watched him absentmindedly leave it sitting on the coffee table, Scara reached for his waist. There was one last thing he wanted to take, and his hands quickly found purchase on the rigid frame of what he was looking for sticking out under Childe’s over sized jacket.

“Hey! What are you -” Childe tried - and failed - to grab at the weapon nestled in Scara’s petite hand.

“You don’t need this because you’re not gonna use it anymore, right?” Holding a gun was always a strange feeling, even after years of unwanted experience. The weight was never what you expected it to be, it was always heavier, like it was weighed down by the blood it expected to spill.

“You still have a knife, what’s the difference?” Another swipe, another miss. He was frowning now but Scara only smiled prettily. “Scara. Come on.”

“You can have a knife, a little one. I’ll give you one of mine if you want, but you can’t have this.” There’s a click and his hands released the magazine with a skill, a trained muscle memory, that he hadn’t had to exercise in a while. Childe had to simply watch on in subtle horror as Scara dismantled his gun in front of him, throwing a piece to the side, then another elsewhere, until it was an empty shell. “Fresh start, without all that junk following you around.”

“And what if someone shoots me again?”

“I don’t know, dodge or die.” Slim arms lifted in an indifferent, mocking shrug. “Listen, you wanted to quit, this is what quitting is. If you want this,” He shook the carcass of the weapon in front of Childe, “You don’t get this.” He spun slowly on the spot until their eyes met again. It wasn’t only a gesture emphasizing himself, but this apartment, this life.

The answer wasn’t immediate but he didn’t resent that, he understood. He saw the struggle on Childe’s face as he reckoned with facing the loss of the lifestyle he’d grown up in, that had shaped him into the admittedly strange person he’d become. Even if you recognized the brutality of it, the violence your very soul was steeped in, the wrongness of it, it wasn’t as easy as simply letting it go and never again wishing you’d kept hold. That was an impossibility. Scara sometimes longed for the ease of a life set up for him still, riches and rules, but then he felt the freedom of sleeping in until midday and eating a slice of leftover pizza for breakfast, or bringing a stranger home to fuck, or opening a tattoo parlor just because he thought he was good at it, and the desire for the rigidity of leadership and bloodshed was lost.

“You have to start learning how to live without the crutch of violence, it won’t solve everything, it never did.” Scara took a tiny step forward, placing the leftovers of the gun on the hallway stand beside him. He had to crane his neck slightly to look up into Childe’s eyes. That familiar unending blue sky trapped inside of them still made his stomach sink and fly all at once, but he could stare into the depths now and find the light behind it. “Just curl up and cry about your problems instead, like the rest of us.”

Childe laughed then, the tension releasing from his shoulders as he looked down at Scara tiptoeing up toward him. Broad palms settled at Scara’s cheeks, squashing them inwards so Childe could delight in the way it warped his expression, and how he furrowed his brows so intensely in retaliation. He let him go just enough for him to return to normal and placed a chaste kiss to his forehead. No one had kissed his forehead since he was a child. He burned with a sweet but stinging nostalgia.

“Fine. Fine. Keep it, throw it away. Do whatever you want. You just better pick me out a good knife though, something cool.”

“Like anything cool has ever suited you.” He shoved him, forcing them apart only to find Childe springing right back to him, like there was an invisible elastic that stretched then snapped their bodies back to one another.

“I don’t know, you suit me pretty well.” The unnaturally smooth delivery, the expression he wore, all of it was more comedic than charming and Scara had to scrunch up his face to keep the laugh from bursting out of him. Childe at the strangest times could be so… Uncool. It was a part of him that endeared Scara more than his falsely charming flirting ever could. It was those moments, when he was bashful or silly, when he wanted desperately to impress with his greatness that he went full circle back to awful, that made Scara feel like he could really do this, that staying would be so easy.

“Lame. Really fucking lame.” With his hand balled in the checked shirt under a denim jacket, he pulled Childe low to kiss him, because he wanted to, because he could, because it finally felt like being tethered to someone wasn’t the worst thing that could happen anymore.

The weeks after were a blur. He spent most of it as he always had, sprawled across his couch watching true crime horror stories and eating ice cream straight from the tub, but it was different, because his legs weren’t caught between pillows but neatly laid across firm thighs instead. Warm hands, bandages wrapped around one wrist where a fresh tattoo healed beneath, rubbed against his shins before pointing at the screen determinedly.

“Her. She knows something.” Scara rolled his eyes at the fourth person to be persecuted by Childe’s trigger happy judgement.

“This isn’t that kind of show.” He berated, for the fourth time as well. For the hundredth, actually, because he did this every time.

“I just know a criminal when I see one.”

“That’s an 89 year old woman, who is blind, and has an alibi.” Scara pointed with his spoon toward the television screen, the look he was giving Childe so incredulous it must have burned to be its target. His partner only shrugged and slouched back into the couch, resuming the light massaging touch against pale inked legs.

Of all the things Scara had learned it was that normalcy was relative, that what was mundane to you was madness to another. So when Childe was chased in his car by an old gang mate and came home like a knowingly guilty dog who’d broken a vase, speeding ticket in hand, Scara only rolled his eyes. When Childe called him at 3AM from his lavish apartment, breathless and aching, asking if he’d ever draw his knife across his skin, just a little, just to see, Scara sighs, tired and struggling to stay awake, but indulges him in his thoughts nonetheless. And when he wakes up, alone, anxious and afraid that things were going to go wrong, that someone would find him just the way Childe had, the same man showed up whatever the hour and whatever the day, just to curl his larger frame around Scara’s scrunched up body until he was well enough to unfurl, like a flower under the sun. That was normal now too, that safety and calm, it was natural and real and it was his.

As the credits rolled, the volume turned down, Scara looked over to see Childe asleep. His head tilted back, hair flopping across peacefully closed eyes, mouth juxtaposingly wide open as he snored. He looked a little stupid, drool beginning to pool at one corner of his mouth, but charmingly so, and Scara knew he’d never want him any other way.