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“What’re you doing skulking around after dark?”
Tom slows to a stop at the doorway to the classroom. Pope is inside, his expression masked by the low light of the single lantern behind him, but his tone is as belligerent as ever. He points it at Tom like an accusation.
This is, possibly, the last thing in the world Tom needs right now. It’s well past midnight, but he’s been tossing in bed for the past few hours. He caught a Skitter claw in the gut on his way back from a patrol this evening; it’s proved to be more of a problem than he’d hoped, but not enough that it’s worth it to wake up Anne. That’s his story, anyway, and it’s more true than not.
“What are you doing out of your quarters?” he retorts sharply.
Pope shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep. Figured I might as well get some work done.” He tilts his head, teeth flashing. “If you want to take it up with someone, blame it on the fools who were too sound asleep to stop me slipping out.”
Tom doesn’t have the energy to take anything up with anyone right now. And Pope seems to be telling the truth, besides; the scatter of tools laid out beside him confirm his version of events. “That’s… fine,” he says. “Go back, and there’s no need to worry about blame.”
Pope doesn’t respond except to raise his eyebrows, an unamused half-smile playing on his lips. He pops his hip against the side of desk he’d been working on and waits.
A pang pulses from the still-open wound in his abdomen. Tom swallows hard, and takes a few steps forward so he can sag against the doorframe. “Pope, come on, don’t make this difficult.” The exhaustion has audibly leaked into his voice.
“Why don’t you answer my question, Mason,” Pope proposes. “What the hell are you doing up?” He flicks his hand at him. “Hiding something from the common folk? Not that I count.” Another teeth-bared shadow of a smile.
Tom hesitates, though he couldn’t say why. “I need something from medical. Butterfly closure. Skitter got me on patrol.”
Pope snorts, skeptical. “You got back, what, five hours ago? And you didn’t you get it treated then?"
Million dollar question. He can hardly admit to himself that — while he couldn’t call it a comfort — pain has begun to resemble an old friend; he’s certainly not about to admit it to Pope. In his days of white picket fences and teaching, it was rare and alien enough to hold some spark of excitement. Now, with an ever-failing sense of identity — an ever-failing sense of the world — it’s become one of the few constants he can rely on. He’s equally reluctant to acknowledge this as a problem. “I didn’t realize it was bad enough to warrant it at the time,” he says slowly.
Pope pushes the lamp closer and squints. “You’ve bled through your shirt.”
“Can we go?”
“You can go. I’m working.” Neither of them budge for a moment, and then Pope is approaching, moving at an angle so he doesn’t interrupt the light. “How’d you not notice?”
“I was trying to sleep,” Tom says. “Which I’d like to get back to. Look—” He leaves behind the doorframe and walks into the room, thinking if he takes the lantern with him, Pope will have no choice but to follow.
“Hang on, let me,” Pope says, cutting behind him and blocking the exit as he turns back around. He’s firmly slipped inside of Tom’s personal space now, and Tom’s feeling a fizzing cocktail of emotions rising. He lifts the bottom of Tom’s shirt without asking, and Tom reaches back to brace himself against the desk as the fabric tears gently against the dried blood. Pope glances up at him and says, “You know, I’ve had to do more than my fair share of patch jobs while out there. You could do worse.”
And then, because if Pope is anything, it’s a fucking asshole, he reaches his hand out and touches the jagged cut.
The air is knocked out of him. Tom tips his head back and gasps for breath. His fingers clench against the desk. Tom realizes he’s half hard before he has any chance to justify why.
Pope is infuriatingly close to him. Tom’s never thought about kissing him — doesn’t have the time or stomach to think about that with anyone, at the moment — but some two wires seem to have crossed in his head and he’s suddenly desperate for it. He focuses on continuing to breathe instead.
“It’s not that bad,” Pope says. “But it’s not that good. Skitter claws don’t leave clean cuts. It’s been hours, and you’re still bleeding, see?” And his finger slips along the edge.
“Uh-huh,” Tom grunts intelligently. Pope pulls back back by a centimeter, and Tom unconsciously sways forward to keep them in contact. It’s — fuck, he wants to call it grounding, but he’s pretty sure the opposite is going on here. He feels half high.
The sexual reaction isn’t really the surprise. He hasn’t been intimate with anyone since Rebecca’s death; he’s hardly been able to get himself off, between the lack of privacy or time, and worrying about the boys, and, yes, the grief. It’s an unnatural but logical extension of being perpetually scuffed and bruised of late and being deeply wanting for a distraction. He’s not seeking out moments, but when the opportunity for relief has found him, he’s leaned into the diversion from his thoughts that mixing pleasure with a little discomfort can provide.
Not… not like this, exactly. Not with nearly so much intent. Nor this sense of exigency that’s overtaking his rational thoughts.
Pope looks up at his face, and his expression transforms into a kind of stunned mistrust, like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar. He hasn’t moved, either. “I was — you’re right, it really shouldn’t be bad enough for all…” he says, like he doesn’t understand what’s going on. To his credit, neither does Tom. “This was supposed to be the part where you tell me to fuck off,” he adds, like it’s obvious, like Tom should know he was looking for a fight.
Tom inhales sharply, searching for a response, but all that comes out is a low moan. Shouldn’t be bad enough for all this, Pope was going to say, and hell, that’s true enough. He’s struggling to keep his eyes open. Pope’s fingers are an inescapable burn, cutting through to his core. There’s a slow trickle of blood where the shirt had ripped open the wound, and Tom can feel twin pulses building in his abdomen and his dick. Everything about him is aching to get lost in it; it is a stunning and involuntary abdication of control.
One of them seems to come to their senses, and Pope drops his hand. “Maybe you should get Glass after all,” he says.
“No, no.” It comes out too easily, for the first words he can manage, but at least he has an excuse. He doesn’t want her to see him like this. Doesn’t want her to know him like this. Whatever’s been delicately building between them is not something he wants to ruin with this… baseness. And clearly, his usual self-restraint is proving ineffective.
“You’re freaking me out, Mason.” Pope’s sarcasm is wilted. “I shudder to think about what happens to me if I’m the only one to see you pass out.”
“I’m fine,” Tom chokes. He’s feeling the fucking aftershocks of being touched, and he’s only getting harder, and his hips jump at the next pulse. He wants to ask Pope to do it again. He bites his lip, hard.
Pope’s gaze tracks across his body language and lands on the outline of his erection. He’s wearing black, and it’s dark, but the lamp casts long shadows and he’s wearing cloth sweatpants — barely one apocalypse up from pajamas. The only sign of recognition is in the light reflecting a sharp gleam off of Pope’s eye.
Pope brings his bloody fingers up to his mouth, contemplative, and looks Tom in the eye as he sucks them clean. Tom’s arousal turns into something concrete, something with weight and heft.
“Fuck,” he croaks, knowing better. Knowing that this is the thing he doesn’t acknowledge, that this is power he doesn’t want Pope having over him.
Pope lifts his spit-clean hand back to Tom’s side, hovering an inch or two away. Tom’s muscles clench with desire, which only hurts worse. It supersedes the arousal for a moment. He groans through his teeth.
Pope leans forward, his other hand ghosting the inside of Tom’s thigh, and against all his better instincts, Tom gives him a coarse nod of permission.
“Holy shit, Cambridge,” Pope murmurs, drawing the words out as his fingers trail along the bulge in Tom’s pants. “You know, I suspected you’d be a kinky fucker behind closed doors, but I gotta say, I couldn’t have predicted this one coming.” He presses his palm flat against Tom’s abdomen, and his sweat burns against the open wound. “Soundly beats out my expectations. Congratulations.”
Tom gasps. He rolls his hips, grinding forward into Pope’s hands. “I don’t care what you — shut up.” There’s no authority behind it, and Pope’s laugh shows he can tell.
Pope is more careful than he expected. He keeps his eyes trained on Tom’s face as he manipulates his reactions with a measured touch. He’s also unusually unfazed by having his hand on another man’s cock, which reminds Tom that he doesn’t really know him at all. John Pope continues to defy stereotypes right in lockstep with reinforcing them.
And if getting off on hurting Tom is what’s doing it for him, what’s giving him the plausible deniability of whatever this is, he’s a damned natural hand at it. It’s physically all Tom can do to hold on and breathe and pray that sound doesn’t carry down the hallway from the open door.
“Christ, do you always moan like a virgin?” Pope asks, teasing along the edge of cut. He pivots and digs the pad of his thumb into the center instead, and Tom falls apart.
“God, fuck, that’s—”
“Little too much, huh?” Pope draws back the pressure by a degree, and Tom moans breathily, only confirming his taunt. “Gotta keep things gentle for your first time, I forgot.”
It’s a comparison that holds some water, though Tom’s loathe to admit it. This almost doesn’t feel like sex — the sensation being wrung out of his body is so all-consuming and foreign — except that he’s too hard to do anything but mindlessly rut against Pope’s hand. It’s more embarrassing than humiliating, closer to the blush of being seen undressed for the first time than any real shame. He doesn’t trust Pope as far as he can throw him; Tom doesn’t know how the hell he’s pulling off this dance.
He's not sure how long it’s been when Pope gradually pulls his hand away from the wound. Tom shivers and doesn’t recognize the bare sounds that fall from his lips. Overwhelmed is an understatement.
“Oh, Mason,” Pope murmurs, looking at him with guarded fascination. “This is a bad, bad idea.” He braces his right hand on the table, behind where Tom is gripping the edge, and gradually lowers himself to one knee. It’s a somewhat precarious position, balanced so he can hang in the in-between space of Tom’s torso and his crotch, but there’s a lithe grace in all of his movements.
Tom’s still caught up considering the potential of getting blown by Pope when the other man dips his head, laps at the blood pooling at his waist, and draws a path up with tongue, not down. He hesitates at the edge of the abrasion. “Yeah?” Pope whispers.
“Fuck,” Tom echoes again, his vocabulary seemingly rendered inert.
“Is that a—”
“Mm-hm.” Tom’s fingers tangle in his hair on instinct, and Pope grins impishly up at him.
Pope stays true to his word; he’s gentle. Which is good, because anything else would have been too much. This, already, is playing on the verge of more than he can take. Every few seconds the pain threatens to swell past his limits, and then pleasure crashes through and brings it down again, like being caught against the pull of a riptide. And the psychology of Pope’s face pressed against him, eating him out…
Tom whines through his teeth, his hand tightening in Pope’s hair. It’s the control he’s clinging to, the illusion that he can move Pope where he wants him — as opposed to the truth, which is that all he can do is hang on and take it. His cock is heavy and aching against Pope’s hand, friction and heat pressing through his clothes in time with the movements of Pope’s tongue.
“You know,” Pope says, drawing back. Tom can barely look at him. His blood is clinging to Pope’s beard, which is a dichotomy he can’t seem to wrap his head around. “You’re making it really hard not to whip out some line, you know, like… ‘if I’d known this was all it took to make you stop talking…’” He smirks and cocks his head. “But that’s not even fair on me, because you stick anything inside a guy’s injury and he’ll usually stop talking — just doesn’t often make him hard in the process.”
“Pope,” Tom grits out. Thank god the hand on his dick is still lightly moving. “Could do with a lot less talking from you right now, myself.”
Pope cackles. “You wanna ask nicely for what you want, and I’ll think about it?”
There is a demoralizing moment where Tom considers it. But his pride has taken enough of a hit already, and he’s not so far gone that he’s willing to throw the rest of it to the wolves for the sake of getting off. He might beg, but it won’t be for John Pope.
He adjusts his grip on Pope’s hair and presses him against his crotch, and breathes a sigh of relief when he feels Pope acquiesce with another laugh — nip at the skin along his pants line and then lick his way back up to where he was before.
Pope’s tongue pushes into him, and a fresh wave of pain knocks through his body. His knees go weak. He bears down on the desk, letting out a thready groan as his eyes screw closed. “Fuck — Jesus — fuck.”
He realizes how close he is abstractly and belatedly, too overwhelmed by sensation everywhere else in his body to notice how much it’s coalesced. He pries a hand free from the table to shove at the band of his pants and underwear, and hopes Pope will get the hint.
Pope readjusts to let him before continuing his efforts with a self-assured lack of urgency. He helps Tom get his pants around his thighs, and then — fuck — there’s a hand actually on his cock instead of through layers of fabric. “C’mon, Professor,” Pope mumbles into him. His beard scrapes against raw skin. “Give it up.”
Tom doesn’t come on command, but it’s a near thing. It only take a few stuttered, gasped breaths, his vision swimming even behind closed eyes, and Tom’s muscles are clenching hard as he climaxes. Pope ducks to the side with a quiet whoop, but his hand stays on Tom as he pulls him through the end of it.
It takes a long time for Tom to come down from it. Even in the absence of Pope’s interference, he shudders as the pain ripples through him. Pulling his pants back up turns into a task unto itself. He’s feeling it on two levels at once, presently inextricably tied to his arousal as it is but without the benefit of a sexual hunger behind it. He can hear himself whimpering even as he tries to bite it back.
Pope gives up on humoring him with silence after about a minute. He’s found a spare rag to wipe his face and then his hands somewhat clean with as he watches. “Jesus Christ, Mason, you better not have anything,” Pope says, careless. “If I catch alien AIDS in the apocalypse, I am fucking killing you. Assuming it doesn’t get to you first.”
Tom stares at him for a moment, barely comprehending, before he shakes his head. “Shut the hell up, Pope.”
“I’m serious — who knows what sort of nasty shit Skitters are carrying around that we don’t even have names for yet.”
“You probably shouldn’t’ve done it then, should you?” Tom snaps. He’s quickly exceeding his ability to deal with Pope’s bullshit, and even more quickly losing the fight not to find a room to close himself in and panic. Though for better or worse, the haze he’s in also seems to be suppressing his rising anxiety.
Pope raises his hands in surrender. “Touchy, jeez.” He snorts. “Sensitive in the comedown, I get it.”
He struggles to string together a retort before he’s forced to give up. His whole body is shaky. He tries to straighten up, to pull himself together physically if he can’t manage it mentally, and a pang shoots through his abdomen. He grits his teeth and hisses.
“Mm, yeah, your endorphins are crashing. Pow,” Pope says, lazily miming an explosion. Tom blinks. “Stay put. I’ll grab a disinfectant and stitch you up.”
“I can’t let you do that,” Tom says by rote, though this has only further sapped his energy to fight about it. “Don’t… don’t take advantage, Pope.”
Pope rolls his eyes. “You serious? Yeah, this was all part of my plan to get your guard down and run away.” He slings the dirtied towel over his shoulder. “Have a little faith, Professor. Thought that was your favorite hobby.”
He’s gone before Tom can try to argue.
It occurs to Tom that he hasn’t seen Pope touch himself once in all of this. Suddenly, the whole affair is swung under a different light. Pope isn’t someone who gives something for nothing — especially not when the disparity is so in his favor — and Tom hasn’t been able to spare a thought for the real consequences. Real bang up job, handing Pope invaluable blackmail material for free.
Tom drags himself into the chair that Pope had been working in earlier and drapes his arm across the desk to lay his head down. He is so fucking exhausted. He wants this night to be over, locked away, and to throw away the key.
He doesn’t expect Pope to run, not after obtaining leverage like that, but he’s still surprised to find his silhouette in the doorway with first aid supplies tucked under his arm.
“Did a real number on you, huh,” Pope says, walking over and kneeling next to Tom’s side. Tom lifts his head a few inches.
Pope tips the isopropyl alcohol onto a cotton round. The rag he left with has disappeared, and his hands and face seem cleaner, but there's still red stained into his beard. “I’d warn you that this is going to hurt, but I don’t imagine that’s a deterrent.”
“Give me… give a second,” Tom says, pushing himself further upright. He’s uncomfortable about it, but he’s grateful that Pope is helping. He doesn’t trust that he wouldn’t just fall asleep if left to his own devices. He glances around for something to bite down on, sighs when he sees nothing, and bunches up his sleeve instead. “Okay.”
Pope is quick about it, another line on the growing list that makes Tom reluctantly indebted towards him. Tom still has to choke back a cry through a mouthful of fabric as soon as the alcohol touches him. The shivering, which had dissipated, returns to wrack his body.
Pope finishes with the alcohol and spreads a very thin layer of ointment before taping it closed. Tom mumbles curses. The arousal doesn’t return, which is a factor whose mystery he’ll have to unravel later. Or never, maybe, if he manages to block this out of existence.
“All that carrying on before, and you gotta muffle yourself at the last step?” Pope says, an almost absentminded crack. He’s more focused on lining up the wings of the butterfly strips. “Disappointing. But… you’re done, either way.”
Tom spits out his sleeve. “Thank you.” His voice is raw. He doesn’t make eye contact.
Pope stands and switches off the portable lantern. They’re plunged into darkness, though it doesn’t take long for Tom’s vision to adjust to the moonlight coming in through the windows. “Now, I’m gonna be a good boy and find my way back to bed,” Pope says. “Might take my time getting there…” There’s some implication laced in this that Tom suspects should concern him, but he’s too tired to parse it. “But it’ll be like I never left come morning.”
He slaps the table as he leaves, and Tom flinches in slow motion. “I suggest you do the same, Mason. Before you fall asleep here and have your own explaining to do tomorrow, eh?”
“Pope.” The man turns around. It’s too dark to really make out his face. “If you tell anyone…”
“You’ll what?” There’s a genuine warped curiosity there.
Tom hesitates. He shouldn’t have started with a threat in the first place; he can’t back it up, and Pope knows. “I know my reputation,” he says softly. Weaver may not completely trust his judgment, but he wouldn’t buy this. “You’re not going to be the one the damage it. And I don’t think either of us want to get into a competition of my word against yours.” He exhales. “So leave it here. And keep your mouth shut.”
The outline of his posture shifts. Pope’s laugh is rough. “Keep your panties on, Mason. Your secret’s safe with me.”
Pope walks away, and the space he left around ‘secret’ echoes in Tom’s head. He groans as he muscles himself to his feet. Dealing with this feeling tomorrow is going to be hell for a dozen reasons he’s too drained to unpack, no matter how insistently his brain is trying to demand his attention on them. Come what may, this can’t happen again. Will never happen again.
He presses a gentle hand against the raised closures on his abdomen. His stomach jumps at the touch. He drops his hand and follows Pope out.