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This was it. He was going to do it!
Edge was finally going to kill Russ!
He’d had more than enough of the constant chatter, all the forced positivity and insistence that he could be worth anything more than the scum of the earth. Just the suggestion had become enough to make him see red.
So, the second they’d landed back home, Edge’s home, he’d ambushed him with every attack pattern he’d known, holding back just enough that he wouldn’t dust immediately.
He couldn’t let it end too quickly. He needed to see the look on Russ’s face as he realized it wouldn’t even be worth it to plead for his life. He had to feel the fear pounding through him as the slow cracking and shattering of his soul was covered by that of his bones.
But after his frenzy, the fog had become too dense to see much of anything. It just barely cleared enough for him to see Russ’s form collapsed in front of him.
The details were obscured. He needed more.
So he dropped down and crawled closer on his hands and knees.
He’d done good damage. Russ’s body had been destroyed, his limbs bending at odd angles and his clothes reduced to shreds, revealing the bones underneath.
Smooth, pearly white bones, even after so many hits. If not for the obvious fractures, it was almost as if they’d never been touched by anything at all.
It was disgusting. Who did this skeleton think he was, acting like he was in any position to lecture Edge about redemption. Pristine as he was, he clearly didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. He was nothing but a shallow preacher, surrounding himself with the lowest of the low just to make himself look better.
Edge balled up his fists. He hadn’t yet decided what his final blow would be, but maybe it would suit him just to beat him to death. Flashy magic was quick and easy, but it could never compare to the sheer catharsis of feeling bone give way under his own hands.
The fog only grew heavier. He couldn’t get close enough to see Russ’s face until he was all but straddling his mangled ribs. Even then, he had to lean down close.
He had to see.
Then, just as quickly as it had arrived, the fog dissipated.
And there was Russ, staring up at him with his face covered in marrow.
And he grinned.
And he laughed.
Broken, wheezy nyeh heh heh’s shook his form as his laugh gradually grew louder. It rang through Edge’s skull, breathless cackling as genuine as it was mocking.
Edge shoved away the nausea building in his soul to raise his fist, ready to end this once and for all.
Then he froze as gentle hands settled onto his hips.
His own hands reached down and held Russ’s wrists without any force, trying to discern how he’d been fooled so easily. Hadn’t those arms been shattered just a few seconds ago? He couldn’t seem to remember now. In fact, it was hard to think at all.
Russ’s fingers traced soft, slow circles into his hips, gliding over the iliac crests with movements so deliberate and precise that he never would have guessed they were supposed to be broken, if he hadn’t been the one to break them. He tried to will himself to grip the other’s wrists just a bit firmer, just enough to push him away, just enough to get his own mind back… Yet, he found he didn’t particularly want to. Russ’s calm, practiced touch was seemingly all it took to suffocate any thread of willpower he may have had.
Swallowing, he forced his gaze away from where he was still straddling Russ’s perfect ribs, and looked back at his face.
That cocky, daring grin that always stretched up a little too high had been replaced with a warm, glowing smile. His eyelights had grown larger, rounder, a vibrant blue that could have rivaled the surface’s clearest skies. The only thing ruining the image of perfection, was where his brow furrowed with pity.
Edge’s hands moved beyond his control, releasing Russ’s wrists as they reached forward, ghosting over Russ’s cheekbone with gloved fingers that had lost their claws.
Before he could make contact, Russ’s hold suddenly became more firm. His hands felt further around Edge’s hips, exploring down his legs for just a brief moment, before they gently guided him lower down on Russ’s body.
There was a pause when they finished moving him, just barely drawing back enough to let Edge process where he’d be putting his weight if he were to sit down fully.
Then they returned twice as strong, fingers digging into his ilium in a surge of force as he was flipped onto his back. The cold seeped through his armor as his shoulders pressed into the snow, his legs flailing out in front of him before being caught.
Russ was still smiling, just as sad and tired as always. His clothes were still shredded, but the dark marrow leaking from his mouth was all that remained of any injury. His bones were thin, fragile as ceramic, and as he held Edge’s legs on either side of him they were just as beautiful as anything fresh from the kiln.
“Can you be good, Papyrus?” He asked, his voice echoing through the forest as if it were coming from the world itself.
“...No,” Edge answered. He didn’t feel his mouth move.
Russ laughed again, nauseatingly sweet and just about as comforting as it was condescending.
He leaned closer, pressing against Edge as his hands traveled from holding his knees to feeling further up his legs. Then he let go entirely, forcing Edge’s legs to squeeze around his waist to keep himself from falling. His fingers trailed Edge’s jaw before they finally cradled his face, a thumb resting just over his teeth.
When he stilled, their faces were less than an inch apart.
“What about for me?”
Edge couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even think of a response. All he knew was how close Russ’s face was to his, and how that closeness was the only thing still keeping his lower half from reaching the ground, suspended entirely by the point where their bodies touched.
Once again, his own hands moved without him, reaching up to hold Russ’s as he shut his eyes.
Russ laughed one more time, the way someone might if they’d just watched their pet do something stupid.
His hands slowly moved downward, stopping at Edge’s neck and tracing along the bumps and grooves of the vertebrae.
Then, his fingers wrapped around it.
And he squeezed.
Edge’s eyes shot open again, jolting as he struggled in Russ’s hold. He tried to push against his arms, but couldn’t put any force behind it. It was as if all of his strength and resolve had been sapped from his body in just a few seconds, exhausting him just as quickly as he’d been surprised. Russ didn’t move an inch, showing no reaction to the weak pats that made for Edge’s attempts at defense.
He felt it as a deep ache growing in his ribs, the numbness in his fingers spreading through his limbs quicker than he’d expected as it became increasingly harder to move anything at all. He was left wondering where his claws had disappeared to, the treated leather of his gloves proving worse than useless as he desperately fought for his life.
Soon, his vision was blurry, darkening at the edges. The only thing left that he could still see clearly was Russ’s face, which had changed again. It wasn’t the pitying smile anymore, nor the cocky grin, but now a genuine, truly happy smile that reached his eyes and beamed down at him like a halo through the worsening vignette.
At the bottom of that smile, he could see a building glob of marrow, so dark it was almost black as it mixed with blue saliva and grew thicker with dust.
From their positon, it hung down directly over Edge’s face. As he struggled, he could see it shake.
His mouth hung wide open, trying to breathe, scream, anything, as his body refused to fight against Russ’s hold.
The glob of marrow fell from Russ’s mouth.
Edge’s eyes snapped open, getting a gasp of air for all of one second before doubling over and coughing harshly as he immediately choked on something in the back of his throat. His head spun while he tried to regain his bearings.
He was in a house now, with a bitch of a headache and a concerningly wet face. He could gather well enough that he’d just woken up from some weird dream, but… that only explained one of those things.
“Edge! Are you okay??” A voice very close to him asked, making him jump about three feet into the air as it was the exact last voice he was wanting to hear at the moment. “You’re not getting sick, are you? Do you need water?”
He ground his teeth together as he used every bit of strength to look at Russ, who was very much sitting right next to him and very much had a hand on back as he recovered from the coughing fit.
“N-no, no, I’m fine,” he said, and technically he wasn’t lying, “I… th-thought I choked on something when I woke up. Why is my face wet?”
“You started drooling again,” Stretch answered, not looking up from the jigsaw puzzle he was working on as he crouched next to the coffee table.
“Maybe that’s what you choked on?” Russ suggested. “You woke up pretty violently. You could’ve breathed it in?”
“Ugh, no,” Edge put a hand over his face, not sure if it was a grounding technique or just an attempt to save his own pride. He hadn’t realized his face was so warm, but as he felt it he was glad he’d gone for his pride after all. “We’ve been over this, I don’t drool. You two are making that up.”
“Tell that to Russ’s lap,” Stretch joked, grinning as he found a piece he’d seemingly been searching for. “All your spit probably stained his shorts.”
“Stretch!!” Russ exclaimed, quickly putting his hands up as if to wave the words away as Edge sputtered, “You fell over and your head did fall into my lap at some point, but I put a pillow under you!! So no damage or staining was done!! Er… Except for the pillow. Which is quite gross now, actually.”
He held the aforementioned cushion out with two fingers, his arm fully outstretched like he thought he ought to be wearing a hazmat suit. Sure enough, it showed what may have looked like a stain of red saliva in the green fabric...if he were gullible.
“You faked that,” Edge said simply.
“How????”
“You think we’d put in that little effort to try and trick you?” Stretch asked incredulously. He looked up from his puzzle for the first time, placing his hands over his chest in mock pain. “God, it’s like you don’t even know–”
Suddenly, he stopped himself short, his eyes focusing somewhere below Edge’s face and widening as he quickly looked away.
“Uh– a-actually, y’know what, Russ is right!” he said instead, now looking very very closely at the puzzle piece he was holding as he turned it over repeatedly in his hand. “You, uh, woke up pretty violently. If that was… I don’t know, a nightmare or something, maybe you should try and take a shower to get your mind off it. Or, if you’re still groggy, I’m sure a cold shower could wake you up fast. But honestly, who doesn’t love a good shower just, for the heck of it, y'know? Maybe you should try it out. Real quick. Right now.”
Then he went quiet, waving off any questions Russ asked about what the hell he’d just said. Instead, he simply chose that moment to become incredibly focused on finishing the last twenty pieces of his puzzle as slowly as he possibly could.
Well. It was obvious what Stretch was trying to tell him, but Edge wasn't sure why he would be so oddly cryptic about it. He felt… fine, if not a little strange after that dream, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t shake off. If there was something on him, Stretch hadn’t said so, and Russ didn’t seem to notice anything either despite being right next to him. Then again, Russ couldn’t see him from the same angle as Stretch. Was he missing something?
As he thought about it and followed where Stretch’s gaze had gone, he suddenly became very, very aware of the weight sitting at attention between his legs. It was a wonder how he hadn’t noticed it before, because the exact second he did, it grew incredibly uncomfortable.
“I did have a nightmare,” he said, shifting to sit very straight with his hands over his lap.
“Oh!” Russ replied. “Do you want to talk about-”
“No thank you.”
He panicked for a moment as he tried to figure out how he could possibly stand up from the couch in this state, before his eyes landed on the stained cushion they’d tried to fool him with earlier.
“I. Am going to wash this,” he said, holding it casually in front of himself as he stood and walked away, just as any normal monster would.
“I think the laundry room is the other-”
“I am going to wash it by hand.”
Any other comments were lost to the wind as he stomped to the bathroom as fast as possible without outright sprinting. After certainly not slamming the door shut behind him, he threw the cushion onto the counter and tried to think of a game plan.
There were two ways he could go about this.
One, follow Stretch’s suggestion and take a shower to get his mind off of it. Just some quick, innocent bathing, nothing more.
The other option…
He swallowed. For a second, he could have sworn he still felt hands on his hips.
A shower would do.
He was no stranger to cold showers. It was a semi-frequent necessity whenever he had a LV-spike and needed quick grounding. Not to mention, it was far easier to wash off the occasional mixture of blood and dust under cold water rather than warm.
The thing was, he absolutely hated it.
The prickly feeling of icy water hitting him never felt clean, just uncomfortable and pissed off and shaky. Even if it technically helped, it had never once made him feel that way.
So, despite the fact that cold water would obviously be the correct choice for this situation… Maybe he could try a nicer temperature first. Maybe, if he treated this like a perfectly normal shower rather than a desperate attempt to defeat ironic process theory, he wouldn’t have to acknowledge the throbbing between his legs.
Of course, stripping naked didn’t help much with that, but his dyed, gold-trimmed leather armor had been far too expensive to put under a showerhead. Not to mention, the wide pauldrons would smack into the curtain and splash water everywhere. Not that he’d ever experienced that of course. Just… hypothetically.
On the bright side, the warmer water was soothing against his constantly-tensed bones, especially along the evenly spaced lines of his more recent injuries. Soon, he was able to concentrate on his own thoughts a little bit more.
Unfortunately, his own thoughts wouldn’t stop coming back to that damn dream.
He’d shifted to critiquing it, knowing deep in his soul nothing like that could ever really happen. It was almost a little baffling that his own mind had managed to concoct a scenario so obviously wrong in just about every way possible. He should’ve realized he was dreaming from the very start.
For one, he never would have let Russ get away with any of that in the first place. If he was killing him, he wouldn’t be wasting time trying to see his face or "feel his misery.” He’d be chasing down that rush of EXP with no seconds to spare, and he’d get it before there was a chance of Russ getting anywhere near his hips.
Secondly, how the hell would Russ even manage to strangle him like that? Skeletons, rather famously, don’t have much of a trachea or set of lungs. Oxygen was still needed to travel through bone marrow and fuel his magic, of course, but that could hardly be cut off by just a squeeze to the vertebrae.
Then again, it wasn’t like he’d ever been choked before. Maybe that part could be chalked up to a simple gap in knowledge. He still had no interest in trying, though. Obviously. That would be stupid. It wouldn’t even work. He wouldn’t entertain the thought any further, even if it felt…
…Third, Russ’s bones were nowhere close to what one could describe as perfect. He seemed to have no knowledge of the concept of modesty, and as such Edge was far more familiar with how his body looked than he’d prefer. His chest alone was a mess of crooked ribs and scarring, each mark having some nonsense story to go along with it.
His oldest scars were the most prominent, large splotches painting his entire torso from what he’d described as a “cooking accident” in his teens. His left ulna was dented inward from where it had clearly been broken and healed without proper resetting, and his right leg showed evidence of an even worse break than that. The leg was at least still mostly straight, despite the fracture not looking like it had ever healed over as much as it should have.
But among them all, there was one that Edge would catch himself staring at, now and then.
It wasn’t particularly large or deep, just some light grooves in the bone that barely stood out from the rest of the scratches surrounding it. It was on his back, right on the top edge of his scapula, and looked like the dashed outline of a circle. Each dash had a very small gap in between, not perfectly evenly spaced, but close.
It was an odd placement for a combat wound.
As he realized he was a little too curious about how Russ may have ended up with a bite mark permanently etched into the back of his shoulder, Edge yanked his hand away from where it had apparently been hovering near his legs and twisted the water temperature to be as cold as it could possibly go.
Even as the sudden shift made him jolt, he was reminded of snow soaking into his clothes.
With an exasperated groan, he leaned against the shower wall.
This wasn’t working. He wanted so, so badly to just ignore it, but it was getting to the point where it hurt. Frigid water be damned, his bones felt hot, deep into the marrow. He tried thinking of something, anything else, that could at least give him an excuse, something that wouldn’t force him to admit defeat, but even that was a mercy he couldn't have. He just kept returning to Russ.
Russ laid out underneath him in shredded clothes, panting, taunting, daring. Russ leaning over him, close and intimate and overpowering, overwhelming, paralyzing. Russ pinning him down, rocking his hips where Edge’s legs wrapped around him and holding his life in his hands, demonstrating with no possible confusion who was in control.
Edge pressed a hand to his mouth to suppress another groan, feeling his resolve drop just as quickly as the images that flooded in behind his closed eye sockets. As much as he hated to admit, they weren’t exactly new, but that stupid dream had put a solid crack in the dam that he’d been building and fortifying for so long he’d briefly forgotten about it entirely. If he gave in now, he wasn’t certain if he’d be able to put it back up again.
He thought again of the scar on Russ’s scapula, and something snapped.
Finally, finally, he brought his hand around his cock, glad he’d already thought to cover his mouth with the other one as he did a poor job of holding back the growl that came through his clenched teeth. He stroked slowly at first, but found himself steadily picking up speed as he surrendered to his thoughts.
Russ would probably tease his eagerness. Not to shame him, never to shame, just to poke at him in that way he loved, harmless and endearing and so ruthlessly affectionate. Maybe he’d tell him to slow down and concentrate on every small sensation, or maybe he’d tell him to speed up and not stop until he was utterly spent. Maybe he’d even replace Edge’s hand with his own, just to show him a better technique.
He certainly wouldn’t be quiet. He would never, ever be quiet. Edge wondered if he was more partial to grunts or whines. Or maybe he was a growler, just like Edge. Edge would gladly be an audience to any of it.
Russ was covered in scratches, and with that bite mark, that goddamn bite mark, Edge couldn’t help but wonder how many scars might not have been accidental. Would he let Edge bite down on him? Would Edge be able to taste Russ’s magic through his marrow, and scrape his claws down his back as he held him close?
Edge was nearly doubled over by now, stroking himself with fervor and keeping his other hand firmly clasped over his mouth as he lost all control over whatever unholy noises were spilling from his mouth. He hoped the sound of the shower covered it well enough, but didn’t so much as consider attempting to rein it in.
Russ wasn’t afraid to be firm, either. Edge knew that very well. Sometimes it was just a short scolding after Edge had been a dick to someone for looking at him funny. Other times, he was holding Edge very close, close enough to see the tiny black flecks in his eyelights, and wearing a strained smile while telling him to stop trying to hurt people for stupid reasons.
It could even be something as simple as an arm casually draped over Edge’s shoulder, but with an iron grip that wouldn’t be letting go any time soon. Edge never really wanted him to.
Edge wished nothing more than for it to be real. To one day stop having to fake being pinned while sparring when he knew he could throw Russ’s clearly underweight body off of him without even thinking about it. He wanted to live in the world where Russ could overpower and disarm him physically just as easily as he always did with his words.
The hand over Edge's mouth slowly drifted lower, lower, until it settled over his neck. But he didn’t do anything with it yet. Just held it there.
His entire life, he’d done everything he could to get stronger. It was just as much a necessity as it was a compulsion, an addiction. Sometimes he felt like he lived for that rush, the sheer strength, more than anything else in the world. He never stopped craving it. He needed it.
So really, he should have been much more frightened when he wondered if continuing to pretend to lose would make him weaker over time, and found the thought to be incredibly appealing.
He wanted Russ to get sick of him, to pin him to the ground and show him exactly how to readjust his attitude, to push him into the freezing snow until his face went numb. He wanted to realize he was powerless, that there was nothing he could do except listen, and he wanted to realize he’d never needed it any other way.
He stroked faster, harder. It had been far too long, he realized.
He needed this.
The hand around his neck readjusted to hold it more firmly, and he squeezed down as hard as he could.
Fuck, he needed Russ.
With a final growl that was hardly suppressed by clenched teeth, he came.
He needed a good minute to come back to himself, still huffing through his teeth, but was at least grateful for the shower saving him the cleanup. He wasn’t sure how he hadn’t noticed he’d been so pent up.
Letting go of his neck, he hummed– it wasn’t anywhere near as suffocating as it’d been in his dream, but still surprisingly restrictive. He still wasn’t sure how much he’d actually liked it, but perhaps he could… experiment some more in the future. Just a little bit.
Through deep breaths, he was forced to concede that he was, maybe, slightly grateful for the cold water. Not only had it… helped, but it had also made him far less sweaty than he surely would have been otherwise. With it, his bones were still warm to their very core. Without it, he’d be burning.
Still though, he was thoroughly shivering by now. He was certain he’d be achy and sore by the time he turned off the water, negating any “relaxation” he might’ve hoped to get from the whole ordeal.
Yet, finally, his mind was still.
Just as long as he adamantly refused to think about whatever this might mean for him, he could move on. He could finally just bathe normally and go about the rest of his day without that stupid dream hanging over him.
And if he spent a little longer washing himself than necessary, and then far too long scrubbing at that disgusting cushion by hand, it was his own business, thank you.
It wasn't at all related to the fact that he was going to have to look Russ in the eyes and pretend everything was normal as soon as he left the bathroom again.
He just really, really hoped there was at least some semi-decent soundproofing in this house.