[he can tell. could tell, even back then. he didn't have to read her mind, sense through the force. he can tell. he could have told, simply, from cassian's objections.]
Can't make that up to you, but there's my my mistake I can do something for. In words or with deeds. Your preference.
Edited (idk what the fuck I was doing, edited) 2026-03-21 20:07 (UTC)
There's a gym that isn't pink upstairs. You sound like you have a little energy to work out. Meet you when you can.
[this one is different from slay ya later. not pink. dense, matte black floor mats and the low, drizzle-colored frequency of fluorescent lights overhead. quiet, too, which was why takeshi recommended it the other month; the stranger normally trains outside, without company except for the inane natter of birds, which he generally prefers to the inane natter of people.
but he has his best contrition face and cotton jersey on today, and that is. admittedly this face is not very different from his normal, except he's cleared off the smirk too often incipient around his eyes, looking at her soberly from across the stretch of rubber flooring. he will not be cheating. 'cheating.' some aspects of force-sensitivity as as involuntary as the patellar reflex and unpremeditated as blinking, but most of his powers, he has cinched between his molars. still. hard to ignore the specific energy crackling and fritzing off her lean frame. her hair always looks nice, today leavened with the chunky, motion-swept curls he's definitely seen before, or he'd think something—something about it insinuates she just got done fucking her husband through the mattress.
he shifts his feet into a front stance. left foot forward, right back.] Sure this was a good time?
[ max doesn't actually have an issue with slay ya later - hell, she works there - but it's true that she's not exactly in the pink and leopard print mood after coming off a few days of doing battle with her hormones (and cassian's). she hasn't voiced this concern yet, but she's worried about the effect his death consequence could have on her own system. she's used to heat cycles, but she's also used to them occurring three times a year. if this is something that's happening for him every month now...
she doesn't want to think about it. she doesn't even like that it's something she's thinking about; she isn't the one who'd died and she's the one who's used to it. but it and the fact that she's still coping with the tail end of things has her willing to take him up on the offer to spar. she'd be lying if she said she wasn't curious about how someone with a more cerebral type of abilities fights, even if he doesn't end up using them.
in truth, she hasn't just gotten her cardio in by riding her husband, at least not today. his cycle, fortunately, seems to be shorter than hers, but she'd wanted to give him a rest given how new this all still is to him. she'll cope; she's been able to go the entire stretch of time without doing anything about it before. but there's still an obvious undercurrent of tension and a flush to her skin which she isn't shocked to realize he can pick up on, but her mouth sets anyway before she moves into a defensive stance, hands up and shoulders squared as she situates her feet. ]
Yes. [ there's a toss of her hair over her shoulders before she looks squarely at him, preparing. ] Ready?
[the stranger does not read her mind. he isn't concerned about conventions of honor, but he is serious about his commitments, when he makes them—his oaths, and he made a promise, even if not in so many words, to max and her husband. her thoughts are his own.
but she looks like she wants to kick his ass, and he's not unhappy about it.] Yes.
[the answer comes with only a split-second delay, just durable enough to allow a lesser combatant to wonder if there ought to be some other ceremony, a countdown, a friendly staffmember with a bell to ring. it's not even a feint. just time enough for the left corner of his mouth to pitch into a smirk, sincere in his pleasure at the long flex of her arms. he thinks he saw a tattoo peek out of the hug of her tanktop, close to the tawny creme and flex of her ribs, but this isn't the moment for talking anymore.
instead, he lunges across the mat. he knows she is fast; he's felt the laser point of her presence sprint pell mell through the house before, a burning miasm of desperate love carried with every fleet step. there is no holding back. the fist to her head is off by a casual half-degree, reverses viciously into an elbow at the side of her neck.]
[ she manages to twist enough to avoid most of the elbow's impact, though she still grunts as the end of it catches the side of her neck. she counters by shoving at his shoulder with the heel of her hand, using the leverage to spring back and swing her leg into the side of his ribcage with a vicious kick.
she's not aiming to hurt him, at least not seriously. but he's clearly skilled to a degree that she doesn't need to hold back the way she would with an ordinary opponent. she knew this, but it's still interesting to witness and experience.
there's a similar smirk that curves her mouth when the kick lands, and she fakes as if she's going to move towards him, only to twist her body towards the floor, swinging her legs out to try and catch both of his to take him down to the mat. ]
[he feels it, when the side of her neck ricochets off his elbow. he's already moving after that, of course, not one to rest on a single point scored, especially when nobody's awarding any. this is not a formal match. this is—
—max flipping entirely upside-down where she was once right side up, a movement as fast as a switchblade. he could blame the fact she is stronger, faster, than a normal human. or the house and its unholy energetic interference in his read of the split-second to come, fucking up that low-grade precognition that's always guiding his reactions before he's even begun to see. but really. honestly. it's just that her thighs open up in the air around his head and he remembers, suddenly, that earth has a thing called the bible, and the pearly gates supposed to open before a place named heaven. there's the inseam of her leggings racing by, then the intersection of stitches at her—
whump. he hits the mat with her legs around his head, grunting, his shoulder taking the brunt of the impact, his hair in his eyes. god, she's strong. a fucking hydraulic vise in the knee wound around his neck. the stranger's next attempt is—less than valiant, grabbing for her pinkie toe, twisting it like basic self-defense always instructs with the smallest finger of some goon's hand.]
Edited (leggings and formatting error) 2026-03-26 16:57 (UTC)
[ his next move is, safe to say, entirely unexpected, though not exactly ineffective. max glances over her shoulder to confirm yes, he is doing what she thinks he’s doing, then back to his face with an incredulous expression before kicking her foot free and tucking into a forward roll, setting him free and giving herself time to process what the hell that move was.
she springs back to her feet, whirling around to watch as he gets to his, hand on her hips as her brows furrow, even as the shock wears off to…humor, actually
she tries to keep the mirth from reaching her eyes. she’s not as successful with her tone. ]
[the gates of heaven open up to release his head and the stranger can breathe again. at least half of those consequences are positive. the smile on her face—humor that he very rarely inspires in one max guevara—tip the scales a solid few degrees after that. he doesn't generally care about happiness, but humor, like nitrogen, argon, and the rest of air, make life survivable—stops it from killing you.]
You're— [whoops. he has to squeeze out a brief, polite cough, from that brief and savage airway compression.] —welcome.
[but he's already moving again, his path traveling laterally, a curve, a half-circle to match her own feline strides. dark eyes dart over her frame. smaller than his, yet fortified by bloodbound secrets that he would no longer consider discreet, by any means. no ordinary person moves like her. but it goes beyond blood. he sees that, now. today. clear in the force, or what passes for it. should have, before, when she stood over cassian's grave and the freezing air hummed taut, but he'd thought it was grief, then. he's always thought it was just cassian, when they walked together. he has so rarely encountered max alone.
there's some place she needs to be.] What do they mean? [he asks.] Your tattoos? [but she won't be surprised, not really, that he doesn't wait for a reply before lunging for her again. kick first, fist second.]
[ her origins haven't been a secret for a long time, here or in duplicity. they aren't even a secret at home anymore. and she hasn't been in the habit of covering her runes so much as it's been winter and she hasn't had reason to wear anything that would display them. but it still throws her off when she's asked about them; enough that he manages to get the kick to land on her side. she grunts at the impact, then shakes it off and goes at him with her fist, satisfied when it lands.
he knows. this is what he does. she's known this since the beginning, when cassian had panicked when he'd revealed he knew what he'd done for the rebellion without him revealing anything about it on his own. it's still jarring to hear it. ]
They're a message. [ she leaves it there before spinning, trying to aim a back kick to his ribcage. she knows he can dig further if he wants to, but it doesn't mean she has to volunteer anything.
she does with one more fact, though, to hopefully get him to drop it. ]
[she gets him squarely. not because she cheated. not even because he couldn't see it coming. it's the convergence of physics and material reality coming for him as inexorably as gravity. hell. he can negotiate with gravity, most of the time. but she's fast, and when her foot connects with his ribs, the air leaves his lungs with a whuff like air smashed out of a mattress with the broadside of a sledgehammer.
he goes backward, knees folded to stop him going actual ass over elbow. one heel slides across the floor hard enough to burn the heat of friction off the mats through the calluses under his foot, the other tottering a few steps. he looks up, and there's no effort to disguise his interest. he's interested in that. the message. a prophesy. she would have one, wouldn't she? look at her. a face to launch ships, haunt the dreams of knights errant, and see villains off to hell.
he coughs inelegantly. just the once. and then he's a forward scatter of fast hands and faster feet, an off-center dupe of her earlier move, rolling across the floor and a kick flashing out, upward, as if to catch her upside the immaculate symmetry of her tawny chin. except it falls short—there's no contact, nothing but the cheater-cheating bastard twitch of his hand in the air. telekinesis yanks her knee forward so he can hook it with his leg. he's heavy, heavier with weird power on his side, dragging her down into the festive collapse of a house of cards demolished to confetti-like bits.
she's on top of him. he has fingers around her elbow, but they fail to do anything nefarious.] You fulfill it?
[ it's about as far as she wants to take it, especially since he's broken the rules now. she tries jerking her leg free, but she's brought down instead, brought on top of him before she can wrench herself back or try to land another hit.
she braces a hand on the mat, hovering above him, hair curtaining both their faces. she breathes hard, swallowing as she catches his scent and tries to ignore the flush that spreads through her from being this close to someone and this physical with them. his eyes are deep and brown, curiosity and amusement and something else she can't quite discern sparking in them.
there's a flare of anger, but she stops trying to jerk free or move back. for a long moment she just stares at him, and it's a second before she remembers what he can do and tries to make her mind blank so he can't pry any further.
[her mind goes empty, he can tell just from the flowback of emotion in the force around her. it's a refusal clearer than a shaken head, an open hand in the face, a red 'x' slashed over in paint. the stranger knows that he's a difficult person. he comes by it honestly, but that doesn't leave anyone less dead or annoyed, respectively. he wants what he wants like other people carry shrapnel inside their bodies, the edges of it keenly felt with every step he takes.
she says no. he means to ask her something else. to press her. perchance, even, to plead.
instead, he flexes up to sit on his elbows, the long plank his torso like the lever of a seesaw coming up under her, bringing his face close enough to kiss her on the mouth. he can tell the difference between someone trying to get away from him and one trying to dive out of the immolating path of a terrible question. the ache it kindles in him is close enough to sympathy to pass for lust—or the other way around. his hand travels up to her neck, a thumb on the angry raptor of her pulse kicking angrily in the captivity of her tawny skin.
he'll ask her later, probably. but he is a patient man.]
i don’t remember if she knows whether or not this is true
[ he could pry. she knows he probably wants to. he doesn’t, and what he does instead surprises her less than it probably should, given how this interaction began. even going back to when he’d first introduced himself, unaware she already had reason to mistrust him because of how he’d read cassian. she’s wondered occasionally if she’d judged too harshly, especially after he’d offered to help with cassian’s burial. it can’t be easy to live with, picking up on things like that just from being in someone’s proximity. she’d been protective because it had happened to who she loves. but it could have just been incidental. he still hadn’t had to confront him about it. and she’s still pissed about what he’d said to both of them.
not pissed enough, it turns out, to not reciprocate when he kisses her.
living in a city and then a mansion centered around sex has given her a looser definition of “faithful” than she’d had previously. sex outside of a relationship is kind of an inevitability and she’s more inclined to express when she finds someone attractive and appreciate friends and acquaintances for their beauty more often. but he hadn’t been someone she’d considered, mostly because of how things had started, even after he’d helped her. maybe in part because she knows some of what he can do, enough to make her wary. bringing up the runes already has her uncomfortable. she can’t tell at the moment if she’s the one being distracted or the one using a a distraction. either way, the residual hormones respond predictably; a low-level hum of pleasure beginning to thrum in her body.
her pulse starts to pick up in speed under his thumb. she shifts against him, making pointed contact as she parts her lips. ]
[for the purposes of training, it is important not to wear excessive clothes. the stranger's vendetta against denim jeans is known, hilariously, to many in his acquaintance—he's been on tara about that, before. it's only four membranes of fabric between them. the material of her leggings feels like a second skin to the hand that finds its way around to her ass. the curve of it could rewrite the laws of physics. maybe they have, and that is why her kicks feel like being hit with a hammer gloved in a human foot.
there are people he wants to fuck to claim and keep a piece of them, an unlikely keepsake in a multiverse careless of memory or the directional flow of time. she might be the nearest thing to a rosary he's ever met, and it's not exactly manipulation that drives his groin to grind up under the lithe axle of her hips, the flexy fit and breathable weave of gym clothes making it easy for heat to be known to heat. there's a vague trickle of awareness, in the back of his head, that she must be—in a mood, to want this from him, considering he fucked with her husband, not egregiously but still.
lucky, that desire is not always lessened by disgust. true in every universe.
long digits scatter wide over her left buttock, and she'll feel it then. the ghost-walk of sensation traveling up her spine, fingertips that don't have fingers walking up her spine, dragging the lightest edge of friction up. but he's also only kissing her, eyes closed, pretending to be up to nothing, to feel nothing in the way of desperation, as if he wouldn't leech from her a little bit of love and the stability, he guesses, that grants her if he could.]
[ it’s slow to start, pointedly so. he’s making her very aware of what he’s doing, where this is leading. but it’s more an appreciation of her assets and form than blind, possessive groping and that’s…interesting. she can appreciate curiosity, but not feeling like she’s being tested or part of an experiment.
so when his hand starts to move and his hips start to rise, she responds by shifting forward and down so that her thighs are draped over his hips before she rocks down, punctuating the movement with a slow, deliberate grind. there’s very little separating them, only a few thin layers of fabric, and the effect has her residual excess of hormones surging, making themselves known by infusing heat through her veins that leaves her flush as she sinks against his form. she makes a low noise in her throat at the impact; both his and hers, and continues exploring his mouth, up until she withdraws her tongue to scrape her teeth against the swell of his bottom lip.
she keeps her mind carefully blank, only focusing on what they're doing. ]
Edited (i stg i know the difference between 'they're' 'there' and 'their') 2026-04-07 01:06 (UTC)
[there's a subtle wrongness to the way her body moves. too much liquid moving through the synovia, greasing the balls and hinges of joints; a roll through her spine, articulating geometry that shouldn't be possible in a human being. he can see it without looking,. it goes straight to his groin. the stranger is a simple man in the ways that matter at saltburnt; a woman descends on him, the v of her thighs, her thinly sleeved cunt flexing around his cock and it's practically gravity, falling upward into her body. a jerk of his hips like he's fourteen and desperate. (some things you don't grow out of.)
she doesn't want to fucking talk about it, and he could be miserable about this with his hardening dick to himself or he could be miserable about it while he drags his hands down her back, skewing the elasticized weft of her shirt, mapping out cryptic tattoos that she refuses to explain, breathing heat into her teeth, the off-gold alcove under her chin. it's going to be the latter, obviously. a kick of his foot against the athletic mats, and they're going over—if only halfway, a pinwheel of elbows, knees and dark hair that promises to turn again before this is over.
he pins her right thigh under his hip. his mouth finds her ear, even while the broadside of his hands are separating for their respective ventures. one palm skates down the sinewy clasp of her waist to her ass, squeezing. the other pulls her wavy hair crosswise along her shoulders, unveiling the barcode on her neck to open air, brushing her hackles, the fine grain of her nape. his voice is low in her ear:] I know what you're doing.
[ he pushes back, and max acquiesces without as much resistance as he may be expecting, bracing herself with her weight on one elbow in front of her, body tensed and arched. she breathes out as she feels his hands skim up her body with purpose; as she feels him gather her hair and drag it across her back to drape over her shoulder. a low groan escapes her as she feels teeth graze over the lines marking the back of her neck, tingling pleasure shooting down her spine and liquid heat pooling in her stomach before spreading through to her cunt.
she shifts beneath him, teeth grit in a dangerous grin as she tries to catch his eye, even fleetingly. ]
Yeah? [ her tone is low, hinting at something predatory; a hunter circling its kill. she rocks back sharply to punctuate it, the grin spreading wider when she feels him hard against the curve of her ass. it’s working, or he wouldn’t be calling her out on it. there’s a flash of relief at the realization; this isn’t a thing she wants to discuss right now. ] You want me to stop?
[i would love to stop and talk about our feelings does not seem like it's going to fly, and the stranger is good at responding to his environment. drop him onto an alien planet with ten minutes to research and a go bag and he'll be fine. drop him between max guevara's bag with existential despair like a cyst under his skin, and—
—he strips off her shirt. it's a clean motion, his fingers fisted in the elastic fabric of the hem and an easy jerk of it with the liquid flex of her body. his, too, after that—which is not typical for him, and she'll know that or not know that, be able to tell or suspect or not care that he wanted to see in the light, the strange ink laddering her shoulderblade and the highest canopy of her spine. a wayward hand will tell her he has marks of his own, but greed makes him indifferent to the old risks they once represented.
his arm folds double around her waist, snares her close, the mystery bible of her long, tawny back against the broadside of his chest—a farce of a trap she could splinter bloodily with the knife edge of her hand if she wanted to. but he thinks, probably, she doesn't. his breath fritzes through the back of her hair, and she'll feel it intuitively, in her hackles, the nerves in the nape of her neck, when the air moves again with the disembodied shape of his power, planing down her body like long bristles laden with molasses until it catches on the waist of her leggings. starts to peel them down.] No.
[he is but a man.] Don't think that's how destiny works. [an audible, shit-eating grin—just for an instant, before it folds into a kiss on her barcode.]
[ his instincts are good, and he’s quick enough to catch her off guard when he ensnares her in his arms, shucking her shirt free of her body as quick as a blink. she can sense his eyes roaming over the markings on her back, could swear she feels a press of curiosity in her brain, like a reminder he’s there. that if he really wanted to, he could push past the barriers she’s put in place and go in to see for himself: what the words translate to, how she’s destined to prevent famine and disease and global devastation. how she’d feared, for years, that the world back home had gone on without her and all of that had come without her being able to prevent it, or that the familiars had succeeded in wiping her people off the planet. that one way or another she’d return home to a world that was dead.
he doesn’t. he keeps his prying physical, fingers tracing over the runes that roam over the expanse of her shoulder blades and back, down her waist and over her hip until they hook into the band of her leggings and push down, down, down, until they’re off and she’s left naked except for her sports bra and panties. her arms remain at her sides throughout this, body still tended and braced for movement, prepared to move away if she wants to.
she doesn’t. especially as he moves in, sweeps her hair aside to press a hot mouth to het barcode. max groans and shudders, grinding onto his lap as the tightly coiled tension in her body releases, just slightly. just enough for her to crave more of the relief that comes with it. ]
Haven’t had much choice in the matter. [ since other universes have decided they need her more than her own does. but they’re veering dangerously close into talking about things again, so she changes tactics, shifting in his arms and turning her head to capture his mouth with hers. ]
[there are worse antidotes to existential despair than sex. there are better ones too, but those seem to be slipping through his fingers like so much sienna skin. his thumb maps the distance between the cryptic marks winging down on her shoulderblades and the ones entrenched in her spine. he studies them with his eyes closed, with perception beyond sight, which is—pretty fucking rude, maybe, but his body doesn't betray him, reliable as it's been for forty years and more. he knows how to listen to it and always, the flesh answers.
he kisses her back, and it's the way of snakes eating each other, heedless, their jaws cabled hard with muscle designed for warning and killing sooner than anything you'd call love. his finger threads through her hair, catching the base of her skull, mere inches above the barcode (barcode?) centered on her nape. his arm folds around her waist and his cock hardens between her thighs, blunting up under the fabric of his fly until there's a mutter of something sharper than resignation, a hand jolting under the hot humidity trapped beneath her groin to get his damn clothes off. well. down, enough inches that his ass sticks unfavorably to the vinyl coat on the athletic mats, but his dick heaves itself out into open air.
he used to be better at telling the difference between people wanting this from him and people wanting him, but he's practically cross-eyed in the force here, and for the moment, it's like rolling open-armed into the tide, breathing in her breath. his thumb digs up, over the hem of the seat of her panties, pulling the fabric aside from the slick of her sex. elastic creaks; white nylon stitches stretch like so much glue between the seams; the weft of fabric itself protests, licking a burn up the crease of her thigh. he ignores it, the curl of his index finger teasing entry with the shallowest crook of his knuckle, even while his teeth clip her bottom lip.]
[ she can tell he’s not done pushing the subject, although he might be tabling it for the time being. she wonders, briefly, if he can read what it says without translations, but doubts his universe factored earth into it. cassian hadn’t heard of it or recognized the language. no one in the years she’d been on duplicity and now here seem to have seen it. not many people have asked, and when they have she’s given the minimum of details, because that’s all she has.
it’s a big part of why she doesn’t want to discuss it.
however curious he remains, he follows her lead for now. she can feel and hear shifting of body parts and fabric, and she rises slightly on her knees to accommodate him, feeling him hot and hard against her backside when he pulls himself free and tugs her back down. he reaches in front of her, between her thighs, and pushes the scrap of fabric aside before sliding the tip of his index finger over her cunt, only giving a brief reprieve before pushing inside, just enough to tease, punctuating it with a bite at the swell of her bottom lip.
she whines, high in her throat, and tries to rock onto his hand. she feels him hard again against her ass and grinds, as needy as she is teasing. ]
boop me if I remembered/read dark angel canon wrong!
[somewhere out in the multiverse, someone with a hard dick stops caring what their partner's face looks like at a certain point in escalation. whether that's selfish, cruel, adversarial, or part of the play, will vary. what lies between max and the stranger has been all of those things before, but her voice convulses prettily around that register, her teeth hit the plush peach fold of her lip and—
he manages to work exactly one finger up there before his dick is butting its way up, looking for paradise in the wet squirm of her body, the convulsions of silky flesh flushing the liquid run of her desire into mesmerizing drops fat as pearls on his palm, his wrist, then the head of his cock bullying its way past. you'd never know he was still thinking, still sensing through the force, to look at him. his mouth opens against the side of her neck and it's a sound, hoarse, pre-language, guttering against her skin—
they make some vulgar, five legged monster, tipping forward so he can get traction on the mats with his knees braced down, one hand to tripod for balance, the other—slick right into the grooves of his nails—gripping her bunched-aside panties with the mania of a man overrun by tastes to hoard, or he'd have stopped for a lick. instead, he's fucking into her, his teeth scoring down her barcode with a harsh cloud of breath, which rides up almost like laughter when he says—]
Your tattoos—don't have scar tissue under them. None.
[ there’s a low grunt as she feels him press his finger fully inside her and she tries to chase the movement, reaching for something to anchor herself to and grasping his thigh as she tries to rock down, impatient and desperate for the contact. but she doesn’t have to wait much longer for it; before she knows it, he’s bending both of them forward and she moves on instinct, hands bracing in front of her as he withdraws his hand and replaces it with his cock, shoving her underwear aside before pushing inside her. she cries out, back arching as she pushes back against him as he fucks into her, rough and messy, rhythm erratic, like he’s just barely maintaining control.
the thrum of pleasure inside her starts building to a crescendo, and she shudders as pleasure ripples through her, groaning as she feels him sink deeper inside her as she rocks back to meet him. his teeth scrape down the skin on the back of her neck and it’s enough for her to cry out as the pleasure nearly reaches a peak - but then his words come to her, and it’s so ridiculous that she huffs out a breathless laugh. ]
Thought - [ she rocks back again, punctuating the movement with a grind and moaning again, her arms locking in front of her again as she shivers ] - thought we’d moved on from that for now.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
i appreciate wanting to comfort someone you care about, yeah.
i didn't like being the one on the sidelines. for the record.
[ she knows he can tell if he wants to. it still feels important to say. ]
no subject
[he can tell. could tell, even back then. he didn't have to read her mind, sense through the force. he can tell. he could have told, simply, from cassian's objections.]
Can't make that up to you, but there's my my mistake I can do something for. In words or with deeds. Your preference.
no subject
actions speak louder than words.
what did you have in mind?
→ action
[this one is different from slay ya later. not pink. dense, matte black floor mats and the low, drizzle-colored frequency of fluorescent lights overhead. quiet, too, which was why takeshi recommended it the other month; the stranger normally trains outside, without company except for the inane natter of birds, which he generally prefers to the inane natter of people.
but he has his best contrition face and cotton jersey on today, and that is. admittedly this face is not very different from his normal, except he's cleared off the smirk too often incipient around his eyes, looking at her soberly from across the stretch of rubber flooring. he will not be cheating. 'cheating.' some aspects of force-sensitivity as as involuntary as the patellar reflex and unpremeditated as blinking, but most of his powers, he has cinched between his molars. still. hard to ignore the specific energy crackling and fritzing off her lean frame. her hair always looks nice, today leavened with the chunky, motion-swept curls he's definitely seen before, or he'd think something—something about it insinuates she just got done fucking her husband through the mattress.
he shifts his feet into a front stance. left foot forward, right back.] Sure this was a good time?
no subject
she doesn't want to think about it. she doesn't even like that it's something she's thinking about; she isn't the one who'd died and she's the one who's used to it. but it and the fact that she's still coping with the tail end of things has her willing to take him up on the offer to spar. she'd be lying if she said she wasn't curious about how someone with a more cerebral type of abilities fights, even if he doesn't end up using them.
in truth, she hasn't just gotten her cardio in by riding her husband, at least not today. his cycle, fortunately, seems to be shorter than hers, but she'd wanted to give him a rest given how new this all still is to him. she'll cope; she's been able to go the entire stretch of time without doing anything about it before. but there's still an obvious undercurrent of tension and a flush to her skin which she isn't shocked to realize he can pick up on, but her mouth sets anyway before she moves into a defensive stance, hands up and shoulders squared as she situates her feet. ]
Yes. [ there's a toss of her hair over her shoulders before she looks squarely at him, preparing. ] Ready?
no subject
but she looks like she wants to kick his ass, and he's not unhappy about it.] Yes.
[the answer comes with only a split-second delay, just durable enough to allow a lesser combatant to wonder if there ought to be some other ceremony, a countdown, a friendly staffmember with a bell to ring. it's not even a feint. just time enough for the left corner of his mouth to pitch into a smirk, sincere in his pleasure at the long flex of her arms. he thinks he saw a tattoo peek out of the hug of her tanktop, close to the tawny creme and flex of her ribs, but this isn't the moment for talking anymore.
instead, he lunges across the mat. he knows she is fast; he's felt the laser point of her presence sprint pell mell through the house before, a burning miasm of desperate love carried with every fleet step. there is no holding back. the fist to her head is off by a casual half-degree, reverses viciously into an elbow at the side of her neck.]
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she's not aiming to hurt him, at least not seriously. but he's clearly skilled to a degree that she doesn't need to hold back the way she would with an ordinary opponent. she knew this, but it's still interesting to witness and experience.
there's a similar smirk that curves her mouth when the kick lands, and she fakes as if she's going to move towards him, only to twist her body towards the floor, swinging her legs out to try and catch both of his to take him down to the mat. ]
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—max flipping entirely upside-down where she was once right side up, a movement as fast as a switchblade. he could blame the fact she is stronger, faster, than a normal human. or the house and its unholy energetic interference in his read of the split-second to come, fucking up that low-grade precognition that's always guiding his reactions before he's even begun to see. but really. honestly. it's just that her thighs open up in the air around his head and he remembers, suddenly, that earth has a thing called the bible, and the pearly gates supposed to open before a place named heaven. there's the inseam of her leggings racing by, then the intersection of stitches at her—
whump. he hits the mat with her legs around his head, grunting, his shoulder taking the brunt of the impact, his hair in his eyes. god, she's strong. a fucking hydraulic vise in the knee wound around his neck. the stranger's next attempt is—less than valiant, grabbing for her pinkie toe, twisting it like basic self-defense always instructs with the smallest finger of some goon's hand.]
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[ his next move is, safe to say, entirely unexpected, though not exactly ineffective. max glances over her shoulder to confirm yes, he is doing what she thinks he’s doing, then back to his face with an incredulous expression before kicking her foot free and tucking into a forward roll, setting him free and giving herself time to process what the hell that move was.
she springs back to her feet, whirling around to watch as he gets to his, hand on her hips as her brows furrow, even as the shock wears off to…humor, actually
she tries to keep the mirth from reaching her eyes. she’s not as successful with her tone. ]
That’s a new one.
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You're— [whoops. he has to squeeze out a brief, polite cough, from that brief and savage airway compression.] —welcome.
[but he's already moving again, his path traveling laterally, a curve, a half-circle to match her own feline strides. dark eyes dart over her frame. smaller than his, yet fortified by bloodbound secrets that he would no longer consider discreet, by any means. no ordinary person moves like her. but it goes beyond blood. he sees that, now. today. clear in the force, or what passes for it. should have, before, when she stood over cassian's grave and the freezing air hummed taut, but he'd thought it was grief, then. he's always thought it was just cassian, when they walked together. he has so rarely encountered max alone.
there's some place she needs to be.] What do they mean? [he asks.] Your tattoos? [but she won't be surprised, not really, that he doesn't wait for a reply before lunging for her again. kick first, fist second.]
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he knows. this is what he does. she's known this since the beginning, when cassian had panicked when he'd revealed he knew what he'd done for the rebellion without him revealing anything about it on his own. it's still jarring to hear it. ]
They're a message. [ she leaves it there before spinning, trying to aim a back kick to his ribcage. she knows he can dig further if he wants to, but it doesn't mean she has to volunteer anything.
she does with one more fact, though, to hopefully get him to drop it. ]
A prophecy.
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he goes backward, knees folded to stop him going actual ass over elbow. one heel slides across the floor hard enough to burn the heat of friction off the mats through the calluses under his foot, the other tottering a few steps. he looks up, and there's no effort to disguise his interest. he's interested in that. the message. a prophesy. she would have one, wouldn't she? look at her. a face to launch ships, haunt the dreams of knights errant, and see villains off to hell.
he coughs inelegantly. just the once. and then he's a forward scatter of fast hands and faster feet, an off-center dupe of her earlier move, rolling across the floor and a kick flashing out, upward, as if to catch her upside the immaculate symmetry of her tawny chin. except it falls short—there's no contact, nothing but the cheater-cheating bastard twitch of his hand in the air. telekinesis yanks her knee forward so he can hook it with his leg. he's heavy, heavier with weird power on his side, dragging her down into the festive collapse of a house of cards demolished to confetti-like bits.
she's on top of him. he has fingers around her elbow, but they fail to do anything nefarious.] You fulfill it?
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[ it's about as far as she wants to take it, especially since he's broken the rules now. she tries jerking her leg free, but she's brought down instead, brought on top of him before she can wrench herself back or try to land another hit.
she braces a hand on the mat, hovering above him, hair curtaining both their faces. she breathes hard, swallowing as she catches his scent and tries to ignore the flush that spreads through her from being this close to someone and this physical with them. his eyes are deep and brown, curiosity and amusement and something else she can't quite discern sparking in them.
there's a flare of anger, but she stops trying to jerk free or move back. for a long moment she just stares at him, and it's a second before she remembers what he can do and tries to make her mind blank so he can't pry any further.
until it's just them. ]
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she says no. he means to ask her something else. to press her. perchance, even, to plead.
instead, he flexes up to sit on his elbows, the long plank his torso like the lever of a seesaw coming up under her, bringing his face close enough to kiss her on the mouth. he can tell the difference between someone trying to get away from him and one trying to dive out of the immolating path of a terrible question. the ache it kindles in him is close enough to sympathy to pass for lust—or the other way around. his hand travels up to her neck, a thumb on the angry raptor of her pulse kicking angrily in the captivity of her tawny skin.
he'll ask her later, probably. but he is a patient man.]
i don’t remember if she knows whether or not this is true
not pissed enough, it turns out, to not reciprocate when he kisses her.
living in a city and then a mansion centered around sex has given her a looser definition of “faithful” than she’d had previously. sex outside of a relationship is kind of an inevitability and she’s more inclined to express when she finds someone attractive and appreciate friends and acquaintances for their beauty more often. but he hadn’t been someone she’d considered, mostly because of how things had started, even after he’d helped her. maybe in part because she knows some of what he can do, enough to make her wary. bringing up the runes already has her uncomfortable. she can’t tell at the moment if she’s the one being distracted or the one using a a distraction. either way, the residual hormones respond predictably; a low-level hum of pleasure beginning to thrum in her body.
her pulse starts to pick up in speed under his thumb. she shifts against him, making pointed contact as she parts her lips. ]
Delighted to go with it, and omg that iconnn
there are people he wants to fuck to claim and keep a piece of them, an unlikely keepsake in a multiverse careless of memory or the directional flow of time. she might be the nearest thing to a rosary he's ever met, and it's not exactly manipulation that drives his groin to grind up under the lithe axle of her hips, the flexy fit and breathable weave of gym clothes making it easy for heat to be known to heat. there's a vague trickle of awareness, in the back of his head, that she must be—in a mood, to want this from him, considering he fucked with her husband, not egregiously but still.
lucky, that desire is not always lessened by disgust. true in every universe.
long digits scatter wide over her left buttock, and she'll feel it then. the ghost-walk of sensation traveling up her spine, fingertips that don't have fingers walking up her spine, dragging the lightest edge of friction up. but he's also only kissing her, eyes closed, pretending to be up to nothing, to feel nothing in the way of desperation, as if he wouldn't leech from her a little bit of love and the stability, he guesses, that grants her if he could.]
oh i got more where that came from
so when his hand starts to move and his hips start to rise, she responds by shifting forward and down so that her thighs are draped over his hips before she rocks down, punctuating the movement with a slow, deliberate grind. there’s very little separating them, only a few thin layers of fabric, and the effect has her residual excess of hormones surging, making themselves known by infusing heat through her veins that leaves her flush as she sinks against his form. she makes a low noise in her throat at the impact; both his and hers, and continues exploring his mouth, up until she withdraws her tongue to scrape her teeth against the swell of his bottom lip.
she keeps her mind carefully blank, only focusing on what they're doing. ]
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she doesn't want to fucking talk about it, and he could be miserable about this with his hardening dick to himself or he could be miserable about it while he drags his hands down her back, skewing the elasticized weft of her shirt, mapping out cryptic tattoos that she refuses to explain, breathing heat into her teeth, the off-gold alcove under her chin. it's going to be the latter, obviously. a kick of his foot against the athletic mats, and they're going over—if only halfway, a pinwheel of elbows, knees and dark hair that promises to turn again before this is over.
he pins her right thigh under his hip. his mouth finds her ear, even while the broadside of his hands are separating for their respective ventures. one palm skates down the sinewy clasp of her waist to her ass, squeezing. the other pulls her wavy hair crosswise along her shoulders, unveiling the barcode on her neck to open air, brushing her hackles, the fine grain of her nape. his voice is low in her ear:] I know what you're doing.
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she shifts beneath him, teeth grit in a dangerous grin as she tries to catch his eye, even fleetingly. ]
Yeah? [ her tone is low, hinting at something predatory; a hunter circling its kill. she rocks back sharply to punctuate it, the grin spreading wider when she feels him hard against the curve of her ass. it’s working, or he wouldn’t be calling her out on it. there’s a flash of relief at the realization; this isn’t a thing she wants to discuss right now. ] You want me to stop?
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—he strips off her shirt. it's a clean motion, his fingers fisted in the elastic fabric of the hem and an easy jerk of it with the liquid flex of her body. his, too, after that—which is not typical for him, and she'll know that or not know that, be able to tell or suspect or not care that he wanted to see in the light, the strange ink laddering her shoulderblade and the highest canopy of her spine. a wayward hand will tell her he has marks of his own, but greed makes him indifferent to the old risks they once represented.
his arm folds double around her waist, snares her close, the mystery bible of her long, tawny back against the broadside of his chest—a farce of a trap she could splinter bloodily with the knife edge of her hand if she wanted to. but he thinks, probably, she doesn't. his breath fritzes through the back of her hair, and she'll feel it intuitively, in her hackles, the nerves in the nape of her neck, when the air moves again with the disembodied shape of his power, planing down her body like long bristles laden with molasses until it catches on the waist of her leggings. starts to peel them down.] No.
[he is but a man.] Don't think that's how destiny works. [an audible, shit-eating grin—just for an instant, before it folds into a kiss on her barcode.]
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he doesn’t. he keeps his prying physical, fingers tracing over the runes that roam over the expanse of her shoulder blades and back, down her waist and over her hip until they hook into the band of her leggings and push down, down, down, until they’re off and she’s left naked except for her sports bra and panties. her arms remain at her sides throughout this, body still tended and braced for movement, prepared to move away if she wants to.
she doesn’t. especially as he moves in, sweeps her hair aside to press a hot mouth to het barcode. max groans and shudders, grinding onto his lap as the tightly coiled tension in her body releases, just slightly. just enough for her to crave more of the relief that comes with it. ]
Haven’t had much choice in the matter. [ since other universes have decided they need her more than her own does. but they’re veering dangerously close into talking about things again, so she changes tactics, shifting in his arms and turning her head to capture his mouth with hers. ]
nsfw ahead!
he kisses her back, and it's the way of snakes eating each other, heedless, their jaws cabled hard with muscle designed for warning and killing sooner than anything you'd call love. his finger threads through her hair, catching the base of her skull, mere inches above the barcode (barcode?) centered on her nape. his arm folds around her waist and his cock hardens between her thighs, blunting up under the fabric of his fly until there's a mutter of something sharper than resignation, a hand jolting under the hot humidity trapped beneath her groin to get his damn clothes off. well. down, enough inches that his ass sticks unfavorably to the vinyl coat on the athletic mats, but his dick heaves itself out into open air.
he used to be better at telling the difference between people wanting this from him and people wanting him, but he's practically cross-eyed in the force here, and for the moment, it's like rolling open-armed into the tide, breathing in her breath. his thumb digs up, over the hem of the seat of her panties, pulling the fabric aside from the slick of her sex. elastic creaks; white nylon stitches stretch like so much glue between the seams; the weft of fabric itself protests, licking a burn up the crease of her thigh. he ignores it, the curl of his index finger teasing entry with the shallowest crook of his knuckle, even while his teeth clip her bottom lip.]
nsfw the rest of the way down, probably!
it’s a big part of why she doesn’t want to discuss it.
however curious he remains, he follows her lead for now. she can feel and hear shifting of body parts and fabric, and she rises slightly on her knees to accommodate him, feeling him hot and hard against her backside when he pulls himself free and tugs her back down. he reaches in front of her, between her thighs, and pushes the scrap of fabric aside before sliding the tip of his index finger over her cunt, only giving a brief reprieve before pushing inside, just enough to tease, punctuating it with a bite at the swell of her bottom lip.
she whines, high in her throat, and tries to rock onto his hand. she feels him hard again against her ass and grinds, as needy as she is teasing. ]
boop me if I remembered/read dark angel canon wrong!
he manages to work exactly one finger up there before his dick is butting its way up, looking for paradise in the wet squirm of her body, the convulsions of silky flesh flushing the liquid run of her desire into mesmerizing drops fat as pearls on his palm, his wrist, then the head of his cock bullying its way past. you'd never know he was still thinking, still sensing through the force, to look at him. his mouth opens against the side of her neck and it's a sound, hoarse, pre-language, guttering against her skin—
they make some vulgar, five legged monster, tipping forward so he can get traction on the mats with his knees braced down, one hand to tripod for balance, the other—slick right into the grooves of his nails—gripping her bunched-aside panties with the mania of a man overrun by tastes to hoard, or he'd have stopped for a lick. instead, he's fucking into her, his teeth scoring down her barcode with a harsh cloud of breath, which rides up almost like laughter when he says—]
Your tattoos—don't have scar tissue under them. None.
looks good to me!
the thrum of pleasure inside her starts building to a crescendo, and she shudders as pleasure ripples through her, groaning as she feels him sink deeper inside her as she rocks back to meet him. his teeth scrape down the skin on the back of her neck and it’s enough for her to cry out as the pleasure nearly reaches a peak - but then his words come to her, and it’s so ridiculous that she huffs out a breathless laugh. ]
Thought - [ she rocks back again, punctuating the movement with a grind and moaning again, her arms locking in front of her again as she shivers ] - thought we’d moved on from that for now.
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