Work Text:
Detective Kim Kitsuragi blinks when he opens his apartment door. He hesitates long enough for you to register his surprise, but not enough for you to begin feeling unwelcome. “Detective. Is everything alright?”
SUGGESTION: Even if it isn’t, you’re welcome here.
“I was in the neighborhood.”
“I see.”
SHIVERS: The street stretches out from the leaning pre-war walk-up, washed by sodium lights. To the left is the pulsing heart of Jamrock, the endless noise of Boogie Street and its young population of speedfreaks and ravers. To the right is a long, long walk uptown.
You follow him inside. Kim’s apartment is exactly how you imagined it. Sparse but neat, arranged just so. A place for everything.
PERCEPTION: He can’t afford luxury, and even if he could he’d be uncomfortable inside it.
He watches you out of the corner of his eye as he takes your coat.
A single glass of wine sits on an end-table, half-full. A book sits spine-up on the chair. You are deeply, selfishly gratified to have found that Kim is also alone on a Friday night. Wordlessly, he picks up the glass and pads into the kitchen. “Make yourself at home.”
EMPATHY: He’s wondering if you’re here because you’ve had a relapse.
ESPIRIT DE CORPS: It would be alright if you had. Most cops don’t kick their habits on the first try. Most don’t kick them at all.
Kim returns with a clear bottle and two lowball glasses full of ice. He’s the most dressed down you’ve ever seen him, thin sweatpants cuffed several times at the ankle, the ends of a well-worn t-shirt peeking out beneath a sweater. His feet are bare. They look cold on the polished wooden floor. He has long toes.
VOLITION: Stop looking at his toes. Why are you looking at his toes?
LOGIC: It’s the novelty of the situation that’s caught your attention. You’ve only ever seen him fully put together. Never vulnerable.
He sets the bottle on the coffee table. It’s sparkling mineral water, cherry flavored.
PERCEPTION: He doesn’t usually drink this. He bought it for you.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Or some other buzzkill.
It tastes a little like cherry cold medicine, but you’ve had worse.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Vodka would liven it up.
Kim appears to agree. He’s staring thoughtfully at his glass, watching the bubbles rise. You feel suddenly guilty for interrupting his evening and forcing him to toss a perfectly good glass of wine. You are, however, grateful for it.
VOLITION: If he were drinking you wouldn’t be able to focus on anything else.
“Sorry,” you say belatedly. “If you were busy.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
PAIN THRESHOLD: Lonely echoes linger here. Lonely nights. Memories of times spent in contemplation.
ENDURANCE: And devastation.
You sit beside Kim on the sofa. You’ve caught the slight smell of citrus before when you hovered close, but it was subsumed in the grease and cigarette smoke of the Whirling, the damp sear of air along the jagged Martinaise coast. Now it’s hovering around you in a warm cloud. Did he put cologne on just to stay in?
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: He had a date. He got stood up!
RHETORIC: Or it's habit. Just part of a routine.
PERCEPTION: His apartment smells like home. Not *your* home, but *a* home. Cooking, dust, an old leather chair, and the ozone from a gathering summer storm.
You talk about work for a while, your respective cases in your respective precincts. Kim tells you about a body discovered in an apartment downtown, bisected cleanly at the waist, its legs nowhere to be found. They’re currently searching for a murderer with a very sharp blade and a spare pelvis. You tell Kim how boring the 41st has been recently.
“Boring is good, right?” he asks you with a little smile.
ESPIRIT DE CORPS: Both of you know the right answer, but it’s not one cops say aloud, even to each other.
“You look good,” you tell him thoughtlessly, at one point. You don’t know why.
VISUAL CALCULUS: Because his hair is in his eyes, the lamp is turning his skin to gold, and the barest trace of a five o’clock shadow stands out on his chin.
He looks at you sidelong.
EMPATHY: He’s surprised. Flattered.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: He doesn’t find himself attractive in the least.
“You look...” He pauses a moment to take you in.
You’ve firmed up--impossible not to, with sobriety--but you aren’t ever going to be at the sort of peak performance you were before your years-long bender. You are too old, eroded down to your atoms too many times.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” you tell him. “It’s fine.”
“No.” He touches your wrist--three fingertips, three burning points of contact. “You do, too. Of course you do.”
AUTHORITY: He means it. He just didn’t want you to think he was responding on reflex. He never wants you to feel like he’s talking down to you.
His thumb traces slow circles around the nub of bone in your wrist.
“Kim?"
He pulls his hand back. “I’m sorry, I’ve been drinking.” He smiles. “Not all of us have your willpower, I’m afraid.”
You laugh. His pupils are dilated and the warmth coming off of him is feverish and so tempting. You want to bury yourself in it and roll around until you smell like citrus too. You don’t know why tonight is any different than any of the others you’ve spent together. But it is, somehow.
LOGIC: No murder. No task. And you aren’t stoned out of your mind.
You long for the clarity of the high, though. For the rush of courage it drags through your bloodstream. Without it, what are you?
HALF-LIGHT: You’re Harry fucking du Bois, baby!
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Run your fingers across the soft, shaved hair at the nape of his neck. Suck on the steady, pounding pulse in his throat until you feel it elevate.
VOLITION: You should do it. He won’t push you away.
EMPATHY: He wants it too.
So you do it.
AUTHORITY: Bite down. Make him writhe. Show him who’s in charge.
Kim makes a low noise of surprise. His pulse spikes and his shoulders rise. “Detective?” A hand fists the hair at the nape of your neck, yanking you back, forcing you to meet his eyes.
PAIN THRESHOLD: Being separated from him hurts. He hates you now.
CONCEPTUALIZATION: No, he doesn’t. He’s making sure you’re as sober as you say you are.
DRAMA: He knows you too well, sire.
HALF-LIGHT: He knows you’re a coward without the sauce.
Shame wells up in your throat and you start to pull away. He doesn’t let you go, fingers still twisted in your hair, that unexpected strength exerted to keep you in place. “What did you do that for?”
“I--.” You don’t have the answer. wanted to taste your pulse.
VOLITION: You can’t say that, that’s too weird.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Say it anyway. Tell him how good he smells. Tell him about the dreams you’ve had.
So you do. Light gleams on his glasses, hiding his eyes for a moment. Then he kisses you so hard your teeth knock together, striking like a snake. His stubble rasps against your chin, followed by the lithe heat of his body as he climbs into your lap. Zero to sixty, that’s Detective Kim Kitsuragi. Nothing, nothing, and then suddenly his tongue is in your mouth.
Kissing him isn’t like kissing Dora, but nothing has ever been like kissing Dora. She devoured you, scouring you down until there was nothing inside you except what she put there. You loved it, honestly. You’ve never had a keen attachment to yourself.
Kim feels...perhaps kinder isn’t the word. But kissing him feels like a conversation, rather than total obliteration of everything you are.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: He would obliterate you if you asked nicely.
EMPATHY: Oh, he absolutely would.
He pulls away, but he doesn’t get out of your lap. His glasses are slightly fogged over, mouth pink and flushed. “Detective, is this what you came here for?”
VOLITION: What do you want, Harry?
You want to take him apart, peel back flesh and rend bone until you reach the warm, pulsing heart of him. You want to understand where his impossible calm comes from, the steadiness that carried him through the fog of your madness, riots, and a firefight. The willpower that allows him one cigarette and a single glass of wine. How he can remain still and logical as you fall to weeping pieces.
You want what he is, what he has. You want his resolve. You want to worship at the altar of his will and ask him to bestow its blessings upon you.
At the same time, you want proof that he is just a man. That he will bleed when cut, that he lives at the mercy of the same appetites that you do.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Writhing, sweating, panting your name.
You don’t know how to say it.
EMPATHY: He knows.
You press your palm to the front of his sweatpants. He sucks in a breath and bucks up against your hand. There is no resistance in him at all. In fact, he arches into your touch, mouth hot and hungry, pulling at the collar of your shirt, fumbling with buttons.
“Have you been with men before?” He asks it sharply, like he thinks this is a trick. As if somehow you could fake your giant hard-on.
“Not that I can remember. I don’t...uh.”
He nods. You imagine him pulling out his notebook and jotting it down neatly. First homo-sexual experience.
“How far do you want to go?”
AUTHORITY: He is interrogating you.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: It’s kind of hot.
“I--.”
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: All the way, baby!
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Hey, who came on to who? Show him you’re in charge, show him you’re the MAN in this scenario.
He’s still in your lap, still moving with tiny twitches of his hips that you think might be unconscious. His tongue darts out to taste a puffy bite on his lower lip.
EMPATHY: He feels it. He knows how much you want him.
“Let me be more clear,” he says. “Are you looking for a quick fuck? Do you want me to suck your cock and then we go on as friends, as if nothing has happened?” You feel your way down his back, the firm lines of slim muscle. “Will you panic if I ask you to spend the night with me?”
EMPATHY: He’s asking it. Even if you do panic, he’s asking. That’s what he wants.
How could he want that?
CONCEPTUALIZATION: He wants to do the same things to you that you want to do to him. Crack you open, sort through your insides.
You look into the Lieutenants eyes, down into the echoing loneliness that’s always been there. You’ve just been too wrapped up in your own miserable existence to see it.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Pick him up.
Kim gasps and wraps his legs around your waist reflexively, heat flaring in his eyes. He is a well-oiled machine, a fine-tuned engine that is completely at your disposal.
PERCEPTION: He’ll follow your lead. If you want to be rough, he’ll take it rough. If you want it slow, he’ll play along.
SAVOIR-FAIRE: Take him to the bedroom.
“Through there,” he murmurs, indicating with his chin. He is heavier than he looks, but you still manage to cross the few feet of tiny living room and drop him onto the neatly made bed.
SHIVERS: A scatter of candles dancing in the warm breeze from the open window, soft voices in the dark. A man who was so used to sleeping alone, not alone for once. The terrifying knowledge that he will be again.
He handles you the way you’ve seen him handle his motor carriage. Confident, thorough, and just a little bit eager. Your belt, shirt, and shoes are removed in record time (you take your shoes off yourself) before he spreads hungry fingers over your chest, palming your nipples. Heat flashes down to the pit of your stomach.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Oh. Yeah. Those.
Kneeling on the edge of the Lieutenant’s bed you feel eerily calm, but somehow also outside of yourself. Like you are seeing all the way to the edges of the room and across the static between you. This feels different.
LOGIC: You’re sober, boss. When’s the last time you fucked anybody not looped halfway out of your brain?
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Ugh, who wants to bang sober? Get some speed, baby, let the Lieutenant feel how hard you can get.
You’re already hard enough without it, truth be told. Kim is a slender shadow in the dark, moving with purpose, arching his back as he peels off his undershirt.
SUGGESTION: Showing off.
You put your hands around his waist. They look huge and clumsy against him, his stomach going concave, ribs standing out. A rush of breath. He’s ticklish. You trail the pads of your fingers along his sides experimentally.
“Don’t.” His voice wavers. “Don’t you dare, I will throw you out into the rain.”
“You wouldn’t,” you say, voice dropping low and warm. “You would never.”
“Don’t be so sure." He pulls you forward by the belt-loops, and you need to take your hands back to prevent yourself from toppling over.
“Do you think this is a good idea?”
AUTHORITY: Fraternization. Frowned upon.
It’s too dark to see Kim’s eyebrow rise, but you know he’s doing it. You can *feel* it.
“We are both grown men, with no outstanding professional or personal conflicts of interest.” He shimmies out of his sweatpants and folds them neatly, then somewhat ruins that by tossing them off the foot of the bed. “Neither of us is married or otherwise attached. If it is a question of morality, there is no object. If it’s legality, well…” His mouth quirks up at the edges. “It hasn’t been illegal in Revachol for over two decades.”
You let him pull you further onto the bed.
HALF-LIFE: What are you doing? Take charge! Forge ahead!
“What about before then?”
“Hmm?” Kim pushes his glasses back from where they’re slipping down his nose. “What about before what?”
He is always laser focused on the task at hand, which currently is undressing you.
“You said it hasn’t been illegal for two decades, so before that, did you, uh, partake?”
“You mean, did I do gay crimes?” Another fluttering smile. “One or two.”
ESPIRIT DE CORPS: Rookie cop Kitsuragi, flushed and young, backed into the corner of a dark bar by a man twice his size. He’s a threat, a promise of violence, but also the promise of building heat underneath his skin.
The way Kim Kitsuragi uses his mouth *should* be a crime. You should fine him the highest possible penalty for how he opens your fly one-handed, pausing in his task of undressing you to suck your dick for a few long, luxurious minutes. You can’t remember the last time someone did this to you, especially not with such single-minded focus. The Lieutenant makes an encouraging noise when you put your fingers in his hair, though you don’t quite have the courage to drag him around.
Time blurs, but at one point Kim pulls a clear, half-full tube out of a bedside drawer. “Have you done this before?”
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Fuck yeah, baby. All the way. Back door!
HALF-LIGHT: You gonna put your fingers in his ass, chief? You gonna do that homo shit?
VOLITION: Instead of the totally heterosexual shit you’ve been doing all night? Fuck off.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Yeah, shut up. I’m getting us laid, asshole.
Somehow, watching the Lieutenant draw one leg up and sink two slick fingers into himself is more visceral than him fighting to hold your guts in during the tribunal. His hands are long and pretty, the concentration on his face intense. You flush all the way down your chest. You’ve never seen anyone do this to themselves before.
Kim’s toes flex, his breaths move his chest and shoulders. His cock lies against his hip, not fully hard yet but getting there. The angle of his wrist looks like it hurts.
PAIN THRESHOLD: Help him out, dickhead.
You move closer and Kim looks up at you through his eyelashes. For a moment you wonder if he will react the same way he had when you’d touched the controls of his Kineema. Impatient and possessive, covering badly the fact that he doesn’t trust you with something so delicate. But apparently he is less fussy with who he lets drive his ass than his car, because he removes his fingers and lets his legs fall open further.
“Not too fast,” he says. “Your fingers are bigger than mine.”
VOLITION: Go slow. You don’t want to hurt him.
AUTHORITY: But if you do, he has the whole weekend to recover, doesn’t he?
He’s hot inside, muscle quivering around the intrusion. Red stains his cheeks, his bangs are in his eyes, and he pushes down with more insistence than you were expecting. Your wrist twinges.
“Fuck,” he says plainly, covering his face with his hands.
“Does it hurt?”
He shakes his head. “It’s just been a long time.”
“Me too. I mean, not that I've done this exact thing. But you know what I mean."
He laughs.
He is very quiet when you put your dick inside him. You’ve recently had a full health panel, but you use a condom anyway. It’s more habit than anything else.
He’s incredibly warm, soft skin pressing against you as you fuck him from behind. You focus on the back of his neck, on the slightly damp fall of hair there, the slight patch of rash from where he nicked himself last time he shaved.
“Ah--detective. Hold on, my leg--.”
You’re leaning on him, cutting off circulation. “Sorry.” You pull out and sit back, pulling Kim with you. You lift him easily, one hand beneath each of his slender thighs. Your dick paints a shiny smear up his flank. He laughs, breathless.
“I’ve been, uh.” You clear the rasp out of your throat. “Working out.”
“I can tell.” He lets himself rest back against you.
EMPATHY: He knows you have no idea what you’re doing, but he trusts you. And he finds your strength arousing.
You drag your tongue along the back of his neck, tasting his sweat. The electricity under his skin sings back into yours. Is sober sex always like this?
“I figured I should get it together a little before I seduced you,” you tell him.
His breaths shake as you sink back inside him, thighs trembling until you catch his weight. “Mhm...and I imagine the exercise helps with the cravings.”
You’d hoped he’d be like this. Still making calm observations even after you got him in bed. Well, half of you did. The half that enjoys being dissected. Being known. The rest was hoping you could take him to trembling pieces.
AUTHORITY: You can. You are.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: Show him what you can do.
You fuck up into him, smacking out a gasp. His hands spasm in midair; there’s nothing for him to hold on to. “God. You--you didn’t have to, you--.” He drags in a breath. “You didn’t have to get yourself together before we did this. I would have fucked you that first night, if you’d asked.”
The bedroom is very still. Rain hits the windows like it’s knocking to get in. “What?”
“I thought about it--when, when you stood with me on the balcony. When you called me cool.” A hard breath that might have started as a laugh.
“But I hadn’t even bathed yet.”
A ghost of his smile in the dark.
“You’d watched me puke at a crime scene. Twice!”
“Yes.”
“I looked like a fucking corpse that day, Kim.”
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: A *masculine* fucking corpse.
He reaches back over his shoulder and wraps his fingers in your hair. Shorter than it had been back then, tangled from the wind, but clean. “I am legally blind without my glasses.”
That makes you laugh hard enough that you have to let him go, falling forward down onto his hands and knees, as sleek as a seal in the dark. “You’re unbelievable.”
“I know.” A little frown. “Are we done, or--.”
EMPATHY: He thinks he’s ruined the mood.
As if him telling you this hasn’t banked your desire for him higher and higher, until it’s blazing through you like a full-body chemical burn.
You meet his eyes, just before you push him forward, flat against the mattress, skinny ass in the air. It takes a couple tries to get back inside him, your hands shaky and both your bodies slick with sweat. The first thrust punches a groan out of him, which he buries in the sheets. You rake your fingers down his back, making him twist on your dick, pushing back onto you, desperate.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: Make him scream, boss.
“Make noise,” you lean down to whisper it in his ear.
“I—.” Kim’s fingers flex against the sheets. “I thought about—about, I liked how even still drunk—and probably high, you were so—so effective.” Kim has interpreted your plea as a request for him to keep talking, which. Okay. You’ll take it. “I liked—that you were bigger than me—.”
You press down on the back of his neck, lying against him to let him really feel how heavy and broad you are.
“Ah, yes. Like—. Like that.” He turns his head so he isn’t speaking directly into the pillow. “When you were on your knees beside the body, sticking your fingers into the dead man’s head—.” You angle his hips up and he cries out. “—Just, picking apart his brains—.”
“Fucking god, Kim.”
You’re vaguely aware that this should be killing your boner. Your partner recapping the time the two of you stripped and examined a week-old corpse. But it’s not. And when you reach down and get your hand around him, he bucks into your grip, slick and desperately hard.
“—I’m not a necrophiliac, I just—you looked, I don’t know, like—!”
He bites off what he was going to say, the precision of your thrusts finally enough to shut him up. There is a deep-seated tension in him that doesn’t release even in the molten throes of what you’re doing to him. His body is all angles, a rigid string he’s letting you play.
He sobs when he starts to come, burying it in the sheets. You push your fingers into his hair and yank his head back, forcing his cries into the open.
“Fuck, Harry, fuck—.” He shakes and shakes and shoots in your hand, and you fuck it all out of him. He twists around, utilizing his spine in a way you don’t think a man his age really should. His eyes are huge in the dark, and he forces your head down so he can bite at your mouth. It’s nothing like a proper kiss but you don’t ever want it to stop.
“You can keep going,” he says into the humid space between you. “I don’t break easily.”
DRAMA: He speaks the truth, sire.
Afterward you share a cigarette. Kim lies with one hand behind his head, hair in pieces across his forehead. You’re touching all down your sides.
“Did you…you didn’t really mean what you said, did you?”
INLAND EMPIRE: You shouldn’t ask. You don’t actually want to know.
“What, that I would have fucked you that first night at the Whirling?” He takes a drag and stretches out with one arm above his head. Without his glasses his face looks round and young. “Probably not. I am a professional, after all. But I would have considered it.” His mouth quirks. “And you certainly seemed to like me saying it.”
“Yeah.”
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: A red-hot kick to your libido, a live-wire.
“I liked how you looked at me.” He passes you the smoke. “As if I was the only thing you could trust. It scared me, but I liked it. And I liked that you would have done anything that I asked you to do.” He glances up at you.
You realize the cigarette is hanging limply from your lips. You suck in smoke too fast and choke. “Fuck.”
AUTHORITY: He likes having power over you.
You’ve always sort of known it. Since the first time he cocked an eyebrow at you and pulled you into his thrall.
AUTHORITY: This is bullshit! Him, have power over you? Impossible. You outrank him.
PHYSICAL INSTRUMENT: And you’re bigger than him.
ELECTROCHEMISTRY: And *way* more hung.
Kim hooks a hand around the back of your neck (he likes grabbing you there, you’ve noticed) and pulls you down, kissing you hard enough to draw blood. He’s hot. Holy shit, this guy is so hot. Kind of weird to notice right now, when you’ve already fucked him, but he very much is. Sweaty and tousled, normally severe posture softened from pleasure, eyes sleepy. The sheets are kicked down to the foot of the bed.
EMPATHY: He doesn’t find himself attractive, but he also isn’t shy about any part of his body. It’s a tool, like any other.
“You’re sexy, Kim.” It’s suddenly extremely important that he knows this. The thought had been floating around you all through your week together, just out of reach. It was an electrical current between as you stood smoking on the balcony, when you faced down the Hardie boys shoulder to shoulder, when you watched oily red letters go up in flames, burning away the traces of bloodshed. You didn’t really have a name for what you felt then, although you’d seen the shape and the outline.
The window is open to the soft pattering of the rain. Stories down, you hear the occasional swoosh of tires on wet asphalt.
You’re a little nervous. Awkward. You aren’t sure if you should leave. Get going. It’s a long walk back to Jamrock, and you don’t have the money for a cab. Kim had asked you to spend the night, but…
ENDURANCE: But that could have just been a euphemism. “Spend the night with me”.
AUTHORITY: Kim isn’t really the euphemistic type, though is he? The son of a bitch told you he was thinking about a dead guy’s brain while you were nailing him.
“Detective.” Kim takes one last drag and crushes the cherry red end into the clean ashtray on the nightstand. “Are you alright?”
You run your fingers through your hair. “I don’t know.”
Kim doesn’t tell you that everything will be fine. He doesn’t tell you lies. But he does reach down and pull the sheets up over you both. “Good night, Harry.”
It takes a few seconds, but you feel the knots in your muscles begin to unwind. He is very warm. The wind sighs outside, long and lonely and far away.
“Goodnight, Kim.”