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There were a lot of things that Lor'themar was capable of doing that irritated Rommath to no end. He was loud when he drank with Brightwing, he was annoying when he waxed poetic about the history of war and the politics therein, and—nearing the worst of all—he was rather irritating when complaining about every lost relationship in his life.
But none of these were the worst of the worst.
The worst thing that Lor'themar was capable of inflicting upon Rommath was his absolute dedication to seeing what he referred to as the bigger picture. Which did seem to Rommath to be patently absurd. The picture he saw was—often enough—all he needed to see. Rommath didn't need to waste time drinking in the array of colors and sights and sounds that gave him more context as to whether or not someone was worth any of his fucking time.
Especially like this.
Hissing under his breath, Rommath's fingers tighten around the plastic stem of the shitty, bulk-bought plastic champagne flute proffered by the Silvermoon Department of Engineering & Applied Physics. His shoulders pinched up around his neck, not terribly unlike an alley cat furious at the sudden intrusion of a secondary stray taking up his space.
All relatively formal events for the department happened in the rented hall a few buildings away. It had polished floors and a bar and access to the better part of the Silvermoon University catering system. It held a few hundred people at the absolute minimum and offered more incentive for people to dress nicely—if only to be seen walking the cobbled steps from the parking lot to the burnished metal doors.
Rommath had, possibly, wrongly assumed that the welcoming event for the new tenure-track professor of applied biomechanical engineering would be held there. He had dressed accordingly, fashioning his inconveniently long hair into a complex updo that still managed to leave a handsome, thick tail dangling just past the shoulder blades of his well-tailored, deep-maroon suit. He had even made sure that his shoes were polished and bright, and he'd opted to wear his contacts over the glasses he often wore while teaching or conducting late-night research.
He had only realized his error when he reread the email in the empty parking lot and realized they had intended to cram everyone into one of the fucking labs.
Into, he would readily point out, his fucking lab.
"You knew." Rommath accuses, his eyes not vanishing from the short-haired figure dancing his way through the fawning crowd. He was easily overdressed for the occasion. The majority of the engineering department faculty were still in their lab coats.
At least standing beside Lor'themar, whose long hair was thrown up into a high ponytail and who had traded out his perpetual outdoor-chic look for well-appointed academic professional years ago, he felt slightly less out of place.
Slightly.
He was still, unfortunately, going to kill him.
"I wouldn't say I didn't know," Lor'themar confessed, sipping at the cheap bubbly provided by a department that made more money than Rommath could ever hope to conceive of. "This is terrible."
"It's better than what your history department provides," Rommath bites. He does not add "but barely" to the end of it—though he does think it. Loudly. "Your wife?"
"Thalyssra was a part of the hiring committee; I believe you knew that."
"Of course she is. Being married to a real academic is the only reason you're invited to these events," Rommath points out, sullenly hiding behind his plastic glass. "It does not save you from my ire."
"She had no way of knowing," Lor'themar said, tipping his head as if tracking the bobbing figure of his wife across the lab. You can take the man out of the National Guard, etcetera, etcetera. "You and Umbric …"
"Remarkably," Rommath seethes, "I do not want to talk of it."
A moment passes in bitter, wrathful silence.
In the end, Rommath breaks it. "Your wife had no way of knowing, but you certainly did," he bites.
"Hiring in her department is her business. I didn't know who the final decision was until a few days ago."
"You could have given me more warning," Rommath snaps in return, the plastic bottom of the fragile cup cracking under the force with which he slams it onto the top of the lab table. A few passing grad students glance his way, wincing already. "A few days… he should be banned from this campus for life, Lor'themar, and you know it. What he did was—"
"Dr. Rommath." The voice comes from behind him. At once, the fires of rage quell into a single frozen moment. Rommath's head throbs, and his mouth fills with the bitter, acrid taste of rage. His eyes snap to the crowd, scanning it for blue eyes and pale skin and a shock of purple hair.
He finds none around the time that Lor'themar turns and—in that placid, I'm smoothing this social problem over tone of his—says, "Dr. Umbric. It's lovely to hear you're joining the faculty at Silvermoon University. It'll be lovely to have you back in these hallowed halls."
"Dr. Theron," Umbric greets, as warm and welcoming as ever. His voice makes Rommath want to throw up. It makes him dizzy. It makes him want to fucking kill something. Possibly himself. "It is lovely to see you again. I saw photos from the wedding; it was beautiful."
Mostly Lor'themar.
Probably Umbric.
Rommath does the worst thing he could possibly do in this moment. He turns around and looks at Umbric.
Umbric has, terribly, always been a rather attractive man. It was the most gutting thing that Rommath had ever discovered in the whole of his wretched life.
They had been young when they first met. Umbric had been one cohort beneath Rommath in the graduate program at Dalaran Institute for Technology—just close enough to have the same courses in Rommath's final year of coursework, but just far enough apart that Rommath had been assigned to guide him through the inner workings of the practical labs they used. They fought, bickered, and then—rather appropriate to being twenty-three with little else to do—fucked in their shared mentor's lab.
Rommath, for all he was endlessly acrid and cruel, hadn't been with anyone before then.
Umbric hadn't mocked him when Rommath had confessed, with his lips bitten and his slacks already stained with evidence of a leaking interest. Instead, he had sunk down to his knees and showed Rommath exactly what he had been missing during his endless pursuit for knowledge. Rommath had always known he was interested in men. It was impossible to deny such a thing, flanked from youth with childhood friends like Lor'themar and Brightwing—two men who had, in their teenage years, seemingly been allergic to the concept of wearing shirts in the summer. He just hadn't expected someone like Umbric.
Rommath completed his program, began adjuncting, and then secured tenure at Silvermoon University within a handful of years.
Umbric completed his program and then—to listen to Rommath tell the story—went patently insane.
Somewhere in the middle, there had been a proposal in the quiet, recessed halls of the Engineering Library. Somewhere after that, there had been a marriage.
And then, between that fateful night in the lab and now, there wasn't.
It had been nearly a decade since Rommath had last seen Umbric—his eyes sunken and his lips pale—across the polished desk of a lawyer's office.
He looked better now. His hair was dyed purple, a far cry from the sleek black it had been when Rommath had first started dating him in graduate school, and he had more wrinkles around his eyes and lines where his smile cut into his face. He was older, in all the ways that Rommath was too.
Unlike the rest of the denizens of the party, Umbric was also dressed relatively well. His deep purple-black dress shirt fit well with his brilliant eyes and his pale complexion. He wore it without a tie and unbuttoned exactly as close to the line of propriety as would be considered respectable. It was tucked into his black slacks and half-hidden by a matching black sport jacket.
Respectable.
Well. It would be, at least, if Umbric hadn't had the sleeve pushed up just enough to showcase the biggest mistake of Umbric's entire, insane life.
Umbric had once had beautiful hands. They were strong with square palms and calloused fingers from where he worked on his machines himself. He had a scar over his left knuckle that Rommath could forever feel pressed against the delicate skin of his lips and defined whorls of his thumb that always tasted like salt and sweat whenever Rommath drew one into his mouth. His hands had once been part of him that Rommath could worship for hours of his day.
Once.
Staring at Rommath and glinting in the buzzing fluorescent light of the lab is all the evidence Rommath ever needed of Umbric's insanity. Where once, Umbric had possessed a beautiful hand, now he sports a thick and permanent metal pseudo-prosthetic. The metal itself was welded into Umbric's very bones, turning his supple, soft skin into a wretched and gnarled monstrosity of steel, wires, and scar tissue. The stripped and narrow wires replicated a perfect nervous system, grafted into Umbric's own body to puppet a limb that had once worked perfectly.
The hand is not a prosthetic in the traditional sense. Rommath knows this.
He had seen the insane, scribbled-upon drafts that Umbric had shown to him and their shared supervisor once. Umbric's hand contains its original skeletal system, with its flesh stripped away and the fibers of his muscles puppeted by a machine controlled by the electric pulses of his own body. The hand twitches, a silver-and-purple thumb tucked under the belt loop of Umbric's slacks, and Rommath's mouth fills with bile.
What's the point of it? Relying on existing functional nerves means that it could never be controlled by someone with a lost limb, Umbric.
It isn't a replacement! It's an improvement. Think about what we can do if we can trade out pieces of flesh for something more precise. It doesn't need to be everything—
Do you hear yourself?! Umbric, I am not asking you again. Stop this. You cannot ask people to potentially amputate healthy limbs based on a theory.
I'm not asking them, Rommath.
Rommath snaps himself out of it as he drags his gaze up to Umbric's stupid, handsome face.
"I didn't realize the hiring standards of the university were so low that they were willing to entertain the idea of letting you around impressionable youth. Or do you still see them as easily led fodder for your obscene lack of ethics?"
Lor'themar coughs from beside him. "Rommath!"
The singular remaining real hand that Umbric sports holds out as if seeking peace in the cradle of his flesh-and-blood palm. "It's alright. I tried to call you to tell you, but I see my number is still blocked."
Rommath, who has little recollection of blocking Umbric's number but is relatively certain he did, hums. "Part of the divorce settlement should have been ensuring that I never have to see your wretched, malformed failure of a so-called experiment around here again."
"The basis of the prototype has been in use for almost five years in four different branches of the government here. It's—"
"Congratulations on making a weapon, Umbric. I'm certain that was what you intended when you burned your own flesh off in our basement."
"It wasn't just a basement! It was a fully functioning and sterile lab environment. You're making it sound like I'm some kind of madman."
"Is that what I'm doing?" Rommath presses, his teeth already gritting together as he chokes back a line of deeper-cutting insults regarding whether or not Umbric had replaced other, more sensitive parts of his anatomy. "In that case, given the lax nature of this department, maybe I should start looking at taking my leave."
He tips his head to where Lor'themar stands, looking equal parts his age and rather like a young man watching his parents bicker in front of him. "Lor'themar, tell your wife her selection criteria needs updating."
"I certainly will not, thank you," Lor'themar offers, as Rommath pushes his way past Umbric and directly out of the lab.
Rommath's office is on the third floor of the Silvermoon University Engineering Department's building. It's conveniently far enough away from undergraduate labs that he doesn't need to worry too much about them getting lost and finding their way into his office by mistake—and unfortunately far enough away from his own lab that, on occasion, he has been known to consider the benefits of simply staying in his lab all day. On nights like this, it is a boon.
He doesn't feel like grabbing his keys from his pocket and walking down the steps to the parking lot. He doesn't feel like getting into his car and gripping his steering wheel and driving back home to a quiet and empty house. He doesn't feel like waiting for the sound of the cat that Umbric took in the divorce ten years ago, he doesn't feel like sitting on the cold and empty couch, and he doesn't feel like going into his empty and forgettable bedroom and sinking into sheets that he knows that Umbric has never touched. For all its sturdiness, the two-story Eversong suburban home had never been the one that Umbric mutilated himself in—Rommath is already exhausted of attempting to exorcise that particular ghost from its walls.
Instead, he takes the second-best approach. Mounting the stairwell, he takes himself up to the third floor and walks with a rising urgency towards his own office.
Muttering curses beneath his breath in every language he knows, he dedicates himself to a night spent grading lab reports and experiments until he inevitably gets so exhausted he falls asleep with his cheek pillowed on his fist. The key to his office door slides, grinding metal over metal, and he hisses another bitter and profane sentiment as his rage-trembling hands struggle to fit the right key in.
Out of a fury that Rommath hasn't known since the first time he walked out of Umbric's hospital room and screamed himself hoarse in the bathroom, he wheels back and punches the wooden doorframe as hard as his anger can allow.
It's pointless.
It hurts.
"Let me."
White-hot pain explodes in the delicate bones of Rommath's hand, but something silver and cold deftly takes the keyring from it.
"What are you doing here?" He snarls, whipping around to where the all-too familiar scent of Umbric's skin lingers too close to his senses. Great. Now he'll never stop smelling it, even in brand-new sheets.
"I wanted to talk to you, Rom."
"Who told you that you're allowed to call me that?" Rommath snaps as the door to his darkened office deftly pushes in. He shoves his way inside, callous to the still-pulsing pain in his fist. He doesn't bother to turn on the light switch.
"You're right." The door shuts behind them, leaving Umbric and Rommath on the inside.
Rommath knows his office is small. He's never needed a larger one. His desk is too big, and it hardly fits it and his chair and the two chairs he has for students who rarely come to speak with him. There are books and half-finished experiments and paintings of Eversong before the war that nearly took his friends from him. It's cramped. His chest pinches with the sudden realization that it's hot in here. It's terribly hot in here.
It's terribly hot in here, and all he can smell is Umbric's fucking cologne and the shampoo he's used since they were in their twenties, and he's going to kill himself or Umbric or something.
"What do you want? If it's an apology for advocating for your removal from the university, then I have nothing to say to you. The experiment that you conducted was beyond unethical, Umbric. It was insane. You had no idea if it would work—"
"I did," Umbric pressed, holding up his stupid, functioning, mangled hand. "I did it on myself to prove it, Rommath. I wouldn't have let those volunteers risk themselves if none of us knew the cost and the benefits."
"And for what?! You could have killed them. There wasn't approval from the board, and there wasn't approval from the department. Human experiments require ethical codes," Rommath sneers. "You side-stepped all of that because you knew they would say no."
"I made sure everyone knew the risks," Umbric says. "These adaptations, my invention, have saved lives, Rommath. It can create bulletproof points in a person's own body. It can increase fine motor skills in doctors by up to 70%; it allows us to transcend what our own bodies are capable of in the name of doing something greater. We cannot be afraid of progress—"
"This—" Rommath snaps his hand out, grabbing hold of the cold, metal wrist and wrenching it up between them. "It is not progress. If you want to make a tool that aids in surgeons' accuracy, then make a glove."
"Gloves aren't as easily maneuvered as a body part," Umbric says, his eyes flashing in the low light of the streetlamp from outside. "This is the future, Rommath."
"This is insane."
Rommath doesn't know when Umbric steps closer—but in a breath, Umbric's back is against the door, and Rommath can feel the tips of his shining black shoes pressing against the toes of Umbric's. "I knew that my experiment could cost me my hand," Umbric says. "It was worth the price for advancement."
Rommath stares, his eyes flickering down from the lost, sky-dark blue of Umbric's eyes down to the slightly chapped shape of his lips. "Is that all it cost you, then?"
"You're petty, Rommath," Umbric says, the corner of his lips tugging ever so faintly. "But I wouldn't dare presume that something so superficial as a hand is what cost me my marriage."
Rommath has never hated the way that he hates Umbric.
And he doesn't think he could hate someone the way that he hates Umbric.
He hates the way his presence seems to cloud his judgement now the same way it did when they were in their twenties. He hates the way that Umbric gets under his skin like nothing that has ever existed in the natural world. He hates the way that Umbric has him by the guts.
He hates.
And he hates it.
And he hates the way that he can taste cheap champagne off of Umbric's tongue when their mouths crash together, and he hates the way that he yields like he's twenty-three again to the brutally elegant shove of a slick muscle between his lips. He hates that he gasps, slick and wet, into the embrace, and he hates that his other hand scrambles for the front of Umbric's purple-black silk fucking shirt to hold him tighter against himself.
It's a filthy, profane display of a kiss. Spit keeps them connected when they part—a glimmering line that only breaks when they pant for breath.
It's a moment.
A test.
(A testament to something, Rommath doesn't fucking know anymore.)
What comes next is quick. It's the small of Rommath's back being shoved up against the biting edge of his own desk. Its teeth nipping at his lower lip until he gasps to let Umbric plunge the full length of his tongue past his teeth. It's a metal hand urging a thigh up around Umbric's hips. Its flesh-and-blood fingers tearing open the buttons of Rommath's shirt and rucking up the black-cotton undershirt beneath it.
"Fuck," Umbric groans against Rommath's already-reddened lips. "Fuck, Rom, I missed this."
"Shut," Rommath says, biting at Umbric's lower lip in retaliation. "Up."
"Yeah?" A warm thumb sweeps up the delicate and sensitive edge of Rommath's ribcage, sending sparklight fragments of pleasure racing down his spine until it finds the dusky peak of an eager nipple. "Doesn't seem like you're hating it."
"I'm hating you," Rommath says, his thighs squeezing around Umbric's hips as a familiar flitter of jolting want rolls through him at the first brush of a hand over the sensitive place. "My body is reacting normally."
"Oh yeah, it is," Umbric sighs, his hips pushing forward to remind Rommath that his nipples aren't the only part of him perked into this current entanglement. He isn't as young as he used to be, but his cock has certainly taken notice of the current predicament. He's already half-hard in his slacks, the insistent swell of his groin filling out to meet where the deeply familiar curve of Umbric's nudges back. "Fuck, Rom. You don't keep lube in your office anymore, do you?"
Rommath prickles, his hackles raising to hiss, "I do not! I never did!"
Umbric raises a brow—still black, despite his mop of purple-dyed hair.
To prove his point, Rommath adds, "That was you!"
"I put it in your office," Umbric reminds him, rolling his hips forward to choke Rommath's next protest out in the middle of his throat. Rommath's nails bite into the smooth fabric of Umbric's sport jacket as his cock twitches in earnest in his trousers. "It's fine. If I can't bend you over and fuck you stupid over your own desk like the old days, I can still grind off on you until you come in your own pants."
Rommath is going to bite his tongue off next time it's in his mouth. This, he swears.
But Umbric kisses him, and Rommath can't bring himself to give it up—even as Umbric shakes free Rommath's old hand on his metal hand to use it to undo Rommath's fly. There's little he can do in the trembling throes of pleasure as Umbric uses that ugly, hateful thing to draw Rommath from his slacks.
All he can do is cling onto Umbric with one hand and use his own trembling one to return the favor. Umbric's cock is heavy and smooth in his hand, a familiar weight filling his palm and a familiar pleasure as Umbric brings them both together. Already, Rommath's cock jerks and spurts a thin glob of precome, slicking down between the joined space of their cocks as Umbric groans and shifts to press them tighter together.
"Come home with me after this," Umbric says, the humidity of his own breath filling up Rommath's senses. That fucking metal hand takes them both in its fingers, and Rommath is going to go fucking insane. "Let me fuck you right, Rom. I'll eat your ass until you cry like I used to, and then we can keep fighting." The thumb of it sweeps over the swollen and drooling head of Rommath's cock just like Umbric's used to. "I'll get you to come on three fingers, too. Fuck, when was the last time someone made you come just from fingering you? When was the last time they were made to come twice in a row? Rommath, Rommath, I'm going to make you come so fucking hard."
Umbric had never—not once in his life—known when to shut the fuck up.
His lips slide, wet and warm, against Rommath's as his running mouth just oozes profane vows as his hips jut forward to rut their cocks together.
Rommath had never been the talker.
He grits his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut like he can forget the horrifying embarrassment of having a human body long enough to let himself be battered by the unhinged waves of pleasure that slam through him again and again and again with each grinding fuck of Umbric's cock against his own.
He shudders himself apart in his own fucking office, his ankles linking behind Umbric's back as if he wants to hold this monster closer to him. As if he never wants to let go of it.
He comes first—a fact that maybe when he comes down he'll find embarrassing. It paints Umbric's self-made hand, coating the inorganic fingers and palm with something real as Umbric strokes it down the length of their cocks until he spills with a grinding cry of Rommath's name.
It splatters the front of Rommath's ruined shirt and the exposed flesh of his belly.
Two breaths, then three.
Then four.
"I hate you," Rommath says, his forehead pillowed on Umbric's shoulder.
There is silence for a long while—but for the ragged panting of breath.
"Yeah," Umbric manages. "I know."
Rommath does not untwine his legs.
"We go separately," he tells him, after a long moment. "I'll text you the address."