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They’re barely out of interrogation when some tight-lipped chairborne John doesn't recognise, pulls them aside.
There's still adrenalin buzzing against his hearing, the heavy thud of his heart and the shoreline imitation of his lungs in his ears, a constant rattle that chokes sound from the rest of the world. He can barely make out what's been said. He’s watching a mouth move, words forming, but he’s not really understanding. It’s like he’s still flying. Caught up between the clouds and wind-deafened.
Then Buck’s got him by the elbow and he’s dragging him towards the Jeep, brows twitching in place of a frown. John wants to smooth it out with his fingers, swipe the worry from his temple. It can stay behind on his hands, he doesn’t mind.
Somehow he ends up in front of the wheel. He doesn’t know where they’re going but he’s got Buck against his arm, breaking through the haze with his warm breath, directing them wherever with a firm tone and a hand squeezing down on his shoulder. ‘Bucky,’ he’s saying, and John can focus on that. Pinpoint his name off of his friends lips, the sound of it between his teeth.
They’re driving deeper into the tree line than he’s used to, and further from their quarters than he’d like. He’s grimy and exhausted, and he can’t get the stink of copper out of his nose. There’s red smeared across his cheek from one of his gunners who’d caught a piece of shrapnel to the chest. Some new kid, shit out of luck, now lying in the back of a blood-wagon, half dead.
It's not until they’re parked and stood out front of an unfamiliar building, that John feels right again. Petricore and the plain old sweetness of dirt and leaf rot finally chasing away the smoke and iron eating at him.
The Adjutant had said ‘temporary relocation’, and John can’t remember why. He turns to Buck—who’s staring up at the metal structure with disdain riddled resignation—lips parted, question on his tongue.
The words don’t come.
It’s too much, asking. It feels like he’d be revealing something secret and shameful; the underside of his vulnerable belly. He knows it's not. Knows when Buck looks, properly looks, he sees straight into him. He peels John open like some sugary plum, digging his fingers into soft, bruised flesh and pulling until he finds his pit centre.
Still, he. He just. He can’t.
He saunters forward, as if he can leave behind his uncertainty and the mortification he’s got nipping at his heels. The door is grainy and unlocked when he pushes at it. He steps through that turns back to Buck expectantly, head tilted, grip steady as he pries a great yawn from the threshold in his waiting.
Buck gives him a smile shaped like a lopsided grimace, his eyes are soft and tired looking. He takes one final moment, neck craned skywards, breath visible as it drifts up from around his head towards the clouds, then he makes his way past John, into the stomach of the room. That’s all it is, one rectangle cut up into smaller pieces, a single cot pushed against the furthest wall and a wood desk sat next to a window.
‘It’s all they’d had left,’ the Adj. had told them plainly.
The sun’s almost setting now, the horizons blushing pink and orange in anticipation. If John squints up through the trees he thinks he can make out the faint outlines of Deneb and Gienah, though he can’t really tell all that well just yet.
It’s still strange to him, that when he looks up he’s met with a familiar face. He’d spent hours at Randolph, tucked against a tree, Gale Cleven pressed against his side, eyes cast upwards. (‘Cygnus,’ Buck is whispering to him in the dark somewhere, mouth fond, tracing out the shape with a gloveless finger. The Swan. ) It didn’t seem right that the view was the same from here when so much had changed.
The air is cool, so crisp against his face he thinks his eyes could water if he stood here too long. He pulls the door shut with a quiet snap.
The quarters are cramped and awful, and neither of them are all that surprised.
٠ ✤ ٠
John awakens to quiet and a steady weight hot against his front, caught between his arm and his chest.
Momentarily he’s disorientated, sleep still thick and heady across his mind, blurring his vision and turning his thoughts into sticky molasses against his eyelids. Silence is so rare. The world is too often fraught with movement. Planes and people and machinery; An endless barrage of noise and motion that hasn’t truly ceased since the war’d begun.
It’s almost hedonistic, this newfound tranquillity. It washes over him, gentle and soothing and he sighs, a puff of air that barely breaches the stillness. That he imagines curls into the room on a frosted plume of wind—like vapour breath on a frozen morning—like Buck’s against the half-light sky—drifting up against the shadow-darkened ceiling and then dissipating.
It’s summer here. The room still feels cool and empty like winter. Bare concrete flooring, bare steel walls; An echoing cavern of frigid quietude. The pliant warmth rested across his front is beatific. Like sweet, golden syrup spilled across his chilled skin. Like the hot, stuttering, July sunlight that used to creep through his blinds back home—When things had seemed simpler and he’d slept straight through the night without worrying. Without wanting for something. Food. Warmth.
Something else entirely.
Anything that might stem the hollowness gnawing at his insides.
Without meaning to, he curls in closer, chasing the sensation. Fatigue confuses him, turns him to amnesia. Within its haze he forgets to find it strange. Forget that this is unnatural, that the weight against him is something of an abnormality. A far off part of him sparks with pleasure, half submerged in the fog of his sleep. It feels nice. It feels good. He fumbles, seeking out that same touch. Suddenly greedy. An animal need tugging at him.
He allows himself to luxuriate in it. Steeping in a rarely found contentment, a saturating, clingy thing that he feels drunk on. Like he’s been shot with adrenaline or morphine or something, and now he’s gone on it.
He lingers there between states of consciousness, unable to drop back into sleep, the ache between his legs growing unignorable. A steady pulse that refuses to relent. All-consuming like some heat wave that pushes over him, dizzying and unignorable.
It’s a familiar sensation. It draws him further and further from his drowse; A metal hook, hard between his teeth, is tugging him from smooth-stone depths, pulling him up, up, up, until he’s caught and dangling against the sun.
His eyes are heavy. Lethargy’s unhappy fingers pressing down against them, casting static impressions against the dark. The shapes of the room seem blurred, as if someone’s spilt water over their ink lines and turned them to bleeding muck. When he can finally make sense of them, it’s puzzling. Not unfamiliar, just confusing.
He’s grown used to metal cots and his boys lined up like little tin soldiers. The lot of them, packed tight together like sardines, almost still forms wrapped up in too thin wool, tacked against the barrack’s steel as black shadows against the night’s grey.
What he finds instead is Buck's lean shoulder.
In and of itself, it's not so strange. When Texas had come knocking at them with winter on its heel, they’d used to crawl into each other's bunks for warmth, dignity frozen over and shattered between them. It’d been nice. Made John feel more like a person, and less like some shiny toy Uncle Sam had been polishing up to ship off into the English mud.
Even then it’d been difficult. Ever since he’d met Gale Cleven something had been lodged beneath his skin. A wanting he didn't know what to do with. It’d been easier then, though. When his heart was still intact, not scrapped to shit like it was now. When he’d had the energy to fight it.
It's harder now, he’s been so tired. It’s leeching him of his resolve, and ain't that a dangerous thing.
Buck’s warm against him now, he realises. It saps him of his contentment, blood turning to lead in his veins. He’s curled up around him, like some vine thing wrapped around an oak tree, choking it of life. His wanting has manifested. His desire is trapped against him in a way he’d never have allowed.
He’s got an arm across Bucks waist and his thumb rested against the dent of his belly-button.
Panic swells up in him like he’s been cut with something sharp. It’s red and bitter, and it’s awful. The feeling seems endless and serrated; An agony, stark and burning behind his eyes. He moves to pull his hand away. The hope that Exhaustion still has Buck tangled up in her grasp pushed into the forefront of his chest, leaving his heart battering against his ribcage. His mouth is dry, tongue stuck to his pallet. His throat works for saliva that refuses to come—a desperate, silent motion.
A bruising grip tugs at his wrist, so suddenly it’s almost frightening. It rips a harsh gasping thing from him, violently crunching the midnight-brought serenity between his teeth. Everything fades away. For a single, taut moment, nothing in the world exists but John and the trembling, iron touch gripping at his forearm.
He’s still hard and aching, pressed into the small of Buck’s back, inescapably discernible. A flush of heat’s creeping up his neck, slipped from beneath his undershirt like a lover's sweet caress. He should say something. He should. His teeth feel alien against his gums and nothing but another shaking rush of air manages to crawl into the darkened room.
Buck doesn’t say nothing either though. He doesn’t say a goddamn thing and John’s glad for it. The roar of blood in his ears is deafening. Like he’s standing too close to the tracks and watching a freight train rush past, wind whipping at his hair as the world shakes.
Slowly—like a frightened, timid thing—Buck drags John's hand back across his abdomen. Leaving it there, fingers splayed across his stomach. Even through the white cotton of his singlet he can feel the draw of muscles tensing, a strained rhythm against his palm. It makes something in John pitch. A hungry thing he hasn’t allowed to surface, that now sticks its spindly claws into his skin with a frenzied urgency.
He can’t help but shift his hips again. A single, hitched movement, almost instinctual, that provides little relief, sending keen, sputtering pleasure down into his toes like fleeting static. It’s barely more than a feeble jerking motion but Buck’s inhale is sharp, and panic catches in John’s throat.
Something like ‘sorry’ climbs across his tongue. ‘Please. I’m sorry. I’m still sleeping and I thought you were someone else.’ It clacks against his jaw politely, as if in warning; A fool's excuse. Anything that will stop Buck from leaving. Anything that might leave their friendship unruined.
Buck’s the only thing really keeping him going now.
He thinks, maybe he’s been the only thing keeping him going for a while.
Even before this. Before he’d watch men he’d sat with over breakfasts plummet from their planes, twenty-two thousand fucking feet above ground. Before he’d watched boys, barely twenty, cry and struggle, blood gushing from their shrapnel holes and glass bitten skin. When they were both just idiot cadets caught against American soil. Stubborn and eager, ready to take on anything thrown their way.
The words don’t come. Lodged somewhere just above his Adam's apple. Useless and choking; A bullet in his throat.
It doesn’t seem to matter though, because Buck doesn’t sit up. He doesn’t move to smack some sense into him. Shake him ‘till he sees right again and the aching longing he’s got living in his bones finally dissipates.
Instead, he takes John's hand, and he pushes it further down, down, down, his stomach. Moves it until it’s pressed right up against the line of his trousers, fingertips dipping just beneath the waistband. That hungry thing caught inside him drives itself against John’s ribs, maddened by that simple sensation. Skin against skin.
He’s frozen. Breath ripped from his lungs, punching at the air in ragged, gasping exhalations. He feels feverish with lust. With something else. Desperation, maybe. Still, he stays unmoving against Buck, waiting.
Anticipation is a tentative pressure building in his gut. An itch he cannot shake. Buck’s hand is still rested atop his own. A solid, burning weight against his bones. A final anchor tethering him to the ground. They’re so close. John can feel a foreign heartbeat tapping at his skin, beating up a shaking tempest.
For a while they just stay there. Still. Rocking with each inhale, a newly made entity, one whole from their two halves. As if anything more than what they have will send everything down into ruin. They’ve been spun out onto the middle of a lake. It's glacial and crackling, and it's threatening to plunge them into cold, clawing darkness if they take one wrong, shifting step, and they're both terrified of drowning.
The dark cradles them, a soft cocoon shading them from the world. He imagines it gently soothing at him with evening-tipped hands—a sweet mother who coos at them with fond sounds.
A moment is all it takes for everything to change. That’s how it always is.
When you’re pinned against the horizon, sun beating uselessly against your metal skin, the leather of your green apple turning your air funny, all you have is interminable moments of possibility. Life and death, made into string, stretches out in front of you: Tangible. For just a second, you can reach out and touch it, hold it against your gloved palm and feel your soul catch alight in understanding. (You’ll die here if you’re not careful. If you’re not lucky. This frostbitten place is a graveyard and this is where you’ll meet your end.)
All it takes is a moment for John to slip his fingers further past Buck’s waistband.
He doesn’t do nothing there for a while after that. Just rubs the pads of his fingers across his pelvis, dragging short nails out so he can trace the length of muscle clenching under his ministry—taking it in.
It doesn’t seem real. Like a dream. The best dream he’s had. Buck’s hot against him, and he's making a low sound in his throat, almost unnoticeable if not for the silence; a sweet thing that pools straight into John's stomach, lighting him up from the inside.
He pushes his brow against the back of Buck's neck, mouth open, teeth pressed across the first gentle bump of his spine. Short, sleep-tousled hair comes to greet him. Blonde and soft, brushing across his forehead, almost something gentle. A shuddering pant breaks from his lungs, raucous against the quiet and terribly exposing. Joined only by dulled cricket chirping and the noises Buck’s making, trapped against him.
He smells of toothpaste and soap, underneath that, the faint trace of something that’s just Buck brushes at his senses. Like leather and something earthy, and the aftershave he’s always wearing. John wants to run his tongue across his skin, lick thick strips up the length of his throat until the taste of him lingers in his mouth—Stays there like something permanent, so he doesn’t have to forget this.
When John slides his fingers down around his cock, Buck’s already hard and wet. The sensation is almost cathartic. Proof of his desire—of a desire—if only something reactionary.
Almost in unison, two sharp gasping breaths sink into the silence. Slicing through any lingering inhibitions cast up along the ceiling. This is real, John thinks. This is real. He twists his wrist experimentally, maybe just to see what it will coax from the mouth he’s now, somehow, connected to. The body he’s got taut against him, that jolts with each terribly slow movement he allows himself, as if it’s being shocked, static turning every touch between them searing.
It feels like reaching out and taking Vega between his palms. Plucking it from the sky and holding onto it like something he’s not supposed to, letting it burn its impression into his skin. ‘This wasn’t yours to take’, his aching, scorched skin throbs, ‘but now you will take it. And it will change you.’
He finds himself lost in the rhythm of it, the touch familiar, yet utterly unknown. He maps the length of Buck’s cock with an unsteady hand, face hidden against his back, as if it will shield him from the brevity of this moment. The immortality of its impression. The back of his eyelids are just as dark as their room.
The world is no longer silent. Slick skin and gasping breath turning the air to obscenity. It’s erotic in a way nothing else has ever been, John feels as though he might combust. He feels like he’s standing over something hot and he’s burning up because of it.
Buck’s so sweet against him, it hurts a little. In his chest. In his stomach. It’s not something new, but it feels different like this. When he’s got everything he’s ever wanted right in front of him.
This is a privilege, he thinks, heart fragile, cupped between his lungs. This is the greatest privilege of my life. The notion seems absurd, but he cannot find anything but truth in it.
He can’t believe in God anymore, not really. But this—devotion—is something that comes easily. As though he were made for it. Shaped with hands beyond that of Man. Greater than Uncle Sam’s gnarly fingers, that have twisted him from boy into machine thing.
He presses himself close, wanting more than anything to be closer. Somehow. As close as possible.
He whispers into Buck’s hair, voice taut with desire, “Gale.” Then, softer, as if afraid of being heard, “baby.”
The words are hot and fragile, breathed straight against his skin. The hand that’s not wrapped around Buck's erection finds itself beneath his singlet, soothing at the line of his back. Touching, touching, touching, as if he’s starved for it. He’s reaching for anything he can, committing him to memory; A blind man tracing the shape of his lover's face with wanting, clumsy fingers.
Buck makes a harsh noise, a strangled sound that wrenches itself from his throat. John wishes he could drink it up, just keep his lips on Buck’s and take it all, keep it in his chest until he’s full and sated.
He wants to kiss him—Press his palms across Buck’s face and breathe him in, flesh against flesh. The sweet dip of his cupids bow, hot against his own, leaving behind an eternal, phantom brand—but he’s terrified of moving. Scared that it’ll crack apart this impossible moment, plunge them back into reason.
He isn’t really one for religion. Any lingering propensity for it had been leached away by the war. He’s watched pilots sit and pray, familiar calling carved into the surrounding air. Seen as they’d gone down in flames, made silent by death. As they’d been carried away on stretchers, bloodied and desperate, orison still burnt across their tongues, billowing from them like awful, black smoke.
It’d made no difference. A chapel couldn’t shelter you from the bombs.
But he knows that want like this want—burning—all consuming, blinding him to anything else—will get you sent straight downstairs. Knows boys who want boys are dead boys unless they keep their mouths shut and their eyes straight.
He’s tried. He has. Desire sits in the bottom of his stomach, bubbling and endless; a familiar weight he’s forever forcing down.
Drinking helps. It’s easier to find what he’s looking for when he’s staring down the bottom of a bottle. When he can press up against his friend, drop a needy hand across his shoulder and pretend it's nothing. Let himself be moved about, strong fingers curled around his waist, a long line of muscle pressed against his side. Moments of weakness he allows himself to revel in. A temporary remedy for a chronic condition.
Him and Curt have an understanding of sorts, another balm to soothe his malady. Flesh is flesh is flesh, and they’re friends like that.
If there are others like them here John doesn’t know it. He feels like they’re two buoys floating out at sea—bobbing up and down across a forever stretching emptiness—that’ve somehow, impossibly, found each other. He thinks, maybe, he loves Curt, just a little. The same way two stars drawn into the same constellation might love. Like something born out of coincidence, made permanent with time and molten fondness.
It’s better this way, he knows it is. Keeping how he feels caught and trapped, forced into a glass jar. Like an ugly moth that reckons itself a butterfly.
Buck has his girl. Delicate and wonderful and golden. Everything he deserves. She says his name so prettily, like it’s something beautiful, and John wishes he hated her but he doesn’t.
She’s everything. Everything. And one day, if this godforsaken war ever ends, Buck’s going to marry her, and John Egen is going to take it standing straight and smiling from Gale Cleven’s side. ‘Cause that’s what he deserves.
Buck makes another noise, it sounds like ‘please’. It sounds like begging. Something hot and painful claws at John’s throat.
It feels like grief.
“I know,” he says sweetly against Buck’s ear. “I know, baby.” He presses a thumb to the head of his cock and wishes it was a kiss. Precome beads beneath his finger and Buck writhes against him, desperate and wanting.
John nips at the flesh of his earlobe, free hand threaded through Buck’s hair, up where it’s close and shorter near the base of his skull, tugging, bearing his throat to the darkness. He fucks up into Johns grip, all guttural sounds and shuddering breath, as if he’s got the same animal claws digging into him. Pulling something aching and needy from some deep well dug into his chest.
John can’t help but grind up against him, pressing close and chasing his own pleasure. The desire in his gut has been there, simmering. Now it’s overwhelming. It drowns out anything else—like a loud, crackling storm pelting down onto him, begging to swallow him up into oblivion. He wants. It’s almost unbearable.
Instead his fist tightens against Buck's head, drawing a winded groan from his throat; a poker iron pressed against his insides, something sharp turning him soft and malleable. This is the closest he will ever be to eudaimonia, John accepts, fingers sliding down to brush the sensitive skin at the base of Buck’s cock, coaxing his muscles stiff in pleasure.
He drags his teeth along the length of Buck’s neck, mouth leaving behind a wetness too hesitant to be a kiss—a sweetness too tender to be anything else. He tastes of salt and warmth, and the only thing John can do not to kiss him is bite down.
Part of him regrets it, worry tugging at him, making him wonder if it’ll be enough to pull Buck away from this. Away from him. But Buck just hisses quietly, pushing back against him, hips working, leaving John gasping against his skin; made into a panting, aching thing.
A guttural sound slips out across his tongue, making a place for itself against the spit-wet line of Buck’s shoulder, where the indents of his teeth remain to taunt him. Buck’s got his throat bared on his own accord now, lips parted and kissable, quivering—the vision of it is awful like deja vu, and for an instance they’re both young and stupid, neck craned, staring up at the sky—and John can’t do anything but quicken his pace. His hand is slick, the sensation of skin on hot skin so familiar that a phantom pleasure tugs at him, like a lusting grasp clawing at his thighs.
It’s almost overwhelming, the depth of it all. The sensation of a single moment stretched out across his mind, stealing away everything else. He can feel it pressed up inside his head, too big to fit properly, leaving his ears cotton stuffed.
“Please,” Buck begs, voice low and rough with something. Sleep—disuse—desire—John doesn't know. His eyes feel hot and he blinks, willing it away. Tears have no place here, similar to his tender longing; Both have made a place for themselves, nonetheless.
He’s close, John can tell. His whole body’s pulled taut, seeking out release. Buck’s turned to iron beneath his fingers, trembling and desperate, murmuring pleas hushed into the pillow he’s pressing half his face into. As if he can turn his sounds dull and rid them from the air, ashamed of them.
John aches to give him what he’s asking for. What he needs. That aching turns his fingers tremulous where they’re frantically pulling at Buck’s cock, gripping at him with something like reverence. He’s still on the cusp of his own release, mind turned hazed and wanting, hips working frantically against the curve of Buck’s back.
They both turn sloppy in their movements. John reaching for Buck, Buck reaching for something else, the two of them fumbling towards a binary zenith. It’s inevitable that this is how it plays out. This is how it has always played out.
They stay there on that precipice for an eternity, it feels like a lifetime passes them by. There is nothing but the two of them and the press of Buck against John's fingers. He’s grinding back onto John’s cock and he can’t tell if Buck knows it, too fuck-drunk to tell or care, but it’s like he’s burning up. He’s been flung out into the mesosphere and he’s coming down too fast, his skin is ash and dust and there’s nothing he can do.
His orgasm is right there, just out of reach. It rises up, up, up, towering over him as a vast wave on the verge of breaking, yet still it evades him. Frozen in its magnitude. It turns him wild and feverish, madness creeping up through his spine into his skull, warping rational beyond recognition. He no longer possesses conscious thought. It cannot be separated from the insatiable need for something that's thrashing inside him. That’s slipped beneath his skin and grown into his bones, now wearing him like some tattered suit.
Buck seems equally gone. He’s got a finger between his lips, white canines pressed down into his knuckle, barely visible but bright against the soft dark. His other hand is gripping at John’s with a violent desperation, nail digging sharp shapes into his wrist—they’re a matching set now, John thinks, almost hysterical, the imprint of his hungry teeth, an impermanent claiming he’d taken impudently, mocking him silently.
He’s watching Buck. He’s always watching Buck. He’s so beautiful like this, it’s almost too much. If he looks too long, John thinks he might fall apart. But he can’t look away. His ear is red, glowing warm against John’s nose when he—stupidly—selfishly— presses his mouth behind the gentle curve of it, hiding his shameful lack of temperance away against his hair.
It doesn’t take very long after that for everything to come crashing down over them.
Somehow, Buck becomes more rigid, his whole body shuddering with exertion, trembling like a lone leaf stuck against the wind. He turns silent, lungs wide and full, unable to take in any more air, lips parted in quiet, choking desperation. He stays like that, stretched out and ready, almost frozen, like someone’s captured him on camera and Johns staring down at that instead, and then he snaps.
He jolts like he’s been struck, a sharp gasping noise wrecking through him as he shakes, pushing back against John, hips snapping, chasing the sensation of his orgasm. For a moment, he is transformed into something animal, reduced to primal need, unable to grasp his humanity. John thinks he’s broken skin, his hand is wet with Buck’s release and aching with injury. It feels good, like being claimed, in some foolish way—he hopes it scars into half moon smiles that he gets to keep.
Watching Buck fall apart, feeling him against him as reaches euphoria, pushes John right over the edge. It’s too much, he thinks. It’s too much. He’s drowning in it. His fingers turn to claws, tearing at the back of Buck’s neck, where they’re still buried in his hair.
“Gale,” he sobs into Buck’s shoulder, just to say it. Just to have some part of him in his mouth, pressed against his lips. Pressed inside of him, close and forever. “Gale.”
He comes. The world turned to nonsense, and something within him shifts. He tastes blood and static and a bitter, bitter hopelessness, poisoning that chemical elation jolting through him. It stretches on forever. One long, drawn instance of corrupted ecstasy that tears through his body, raw and unstoppable.
It’s like almost dying. Closing your eyes and wondering if you’ll ever wake up again. When you do, the world turns fresh and crisp, unchanged yet, somehow, realigned.
His face is damp with tears, the shock of his release stealing away his control, his resolve. His body has turned to immovable stone. He’s sinking down, down, down like he’s been tossed into a pond, unable to breathe, unable to think.
Buck is unmoving against him, as though his muscles have calcified, freezing him in place, like something carved into beauty by Michelangelo's dedicated hands. His stillness turns John's stomach sick. He hadn’t meant for this to happen, for the thing inside of him to betray him—Take ahold of his limbs, turn him into a dumbstruck marionette, helpless on its strings.
Buck doesn’t say anything.
John’s hand rests against his neck, a thunderous pulse beats against his fingers. He can feel as Buck swallows, throat trembling, as his chest heaves, silent and shallow, knocking back against John with every hesitant breath.
Buck’s nails are still pressed into his skin, his own pulse a sharp protest throbbing up into his shoulder—a persistent ache that smarts more than it should, pressing against him with grief-sharp pain.
He wishes more than anything that he could have this. The want inside him bangs against his chest, violent and bruising in its protest.
Slowly, John moves to pull himself away, grip still loose around Buck’s cock, as if the rest of him hasn’t caught up. As though his body doesn’t understand that this is all he’s allowed, that he’s already taken too much.
Buck’s still hooked into him, keratin teeth biting down into his wrist insistently as he tries to move back, a harsh, strained noise stuttering from Buck’s chest. His grasp is crushing, tight and shaking, it feels familiar. Like wanting and wanting and wanting, and the awful terror of having. Almost having.
The claws still pressing into his ribs, begging and tentative, seem like the same ones ripping at his arm, and maybe. Maybe-
Buck doesn’t say anything but he doesn’t let go either.