hold your breath and count to ten.

[izkariote]

Wee-hee. More "Boys, hands OFF!" material for all us merry fan girls to read. XD

This bit is connected to Visceral Love in the sense that it's the same characters and same story, but it's a new take on how I'm going to get the two together. XD

“Come on.”

“Where?”

Alistair turned away without answering. It was a terrible job at feigning indifference and he knew it, but a week’s worth of hard battles on the front lines made him sore enough to take just about anything in without complaint. For this reason, all of the personnel who made attempts at saluting or simply hopped out of his way as he went along survived their walk through the cafeteria without getting eaten by the infamous Major Mordechai.

Hikaru had obligingly closed the records he had been reviewing and risen to his feet to follow him; the youth’s presence was written in the light tap-tap of well-shined shoes against tiles, the smell of aftershave borrowed from Yasamu’s medicine cabinet, and the crooked smile that was sure to be in place on a pair of lips that Alistair used to dream about when the nights on the field were long and lonely and cold. He still wondered what they tasted like.

This is your fault. That was something he might have told Natalia, but Natalia was not around. They had been together at the beginning of the day, standing over the three-dimensional grid map of the city they had recently occupied and determining their squadron’s next course of action.

“Lots of bars in this area, and bars seem to equal trouble in this sector. You’re going to have to supervise the boys moving around these streets just for good measure. Oh, and while you’re at it you might as well waste him and fuck him up in one of the nearby motels before we pull back into headquarters.”

Careless words, so casually spoken that Alistair had almost dismissed them. Instead, he had doubled back and stared at the woman as though wings had sprouted from her back. Natalia, in response, had blinked as though blinking was the act of the innocent.

“…If this had been any other day, I wouldn’t have listened to you.”

“I know.”

And she had grinned as a shark that smelled blood in the water.

So there they were, Alistair walking and Hikaru trailing some distance behind him, both of them exchanging words with everyone who greeted them but each other (or at least, Hikaru was). If Yasamu had been there they would have walked side by side, forming an efficient little three-soldier barricade that no one complained about because it was the three of them. Yasamu would have his arm draped over both their shoulders, drawing them close and filling the air with his good-natured banter. Hikaru would be busy complaining that his older brother was treating him like a child again. Alistair would be too busy pondering upon Hikaru’s sudden closeness to say a thing.

They grow up so fast.

Whoever made statements like that deserved capital punishment, Alistair believed.

“We’ll take the jeep since we’re going through Sectors 20 through 29.”

“Captain Riddel and his executive officer Parkas are handling that part of the city.” That was the only kind of protest one would ever hear from the likes of Hikaru, and it wasn’t even a complaint.

“Not anymore.” Alistair tapped swiped his keycard through the feeder and marched through the moment the doors slid open, moving into the chaos of the hangar deck. Hikaru followed him with a smile and a little shrug, never saying a word.

In the 290 days of the regular year on Tabris, it rained on about 270 of them. Luckily, CLOVER’s forces had managed to re-take Tabris’ capital city of Luciano from Confederate forces at the tail end of the years first 135 days of rain before a 20-day repose. Still, the streets were damp and moisture accompanied the haze of song and smoke and sex and drugs in Luciano’s pleasure quarter, where the best brothels and casinos sat alongside bars of every name and size.

They made their way through it together. Alistair drove and Hikaru kicked back in the front seat with his hands folded behind head and feet up on the dashboard. CLOVER soldiers were all over the area, moving about pairs or small groups as they patrolled… or at least, they looked like they had been patrolling whenever the two Special Forces soldiers came by to check on them. Nobody wanted to look bad in front of a dragoon, especially Alistair and his younger brother. Only Yasamu Shinta at full-force in a fighter jet or at the mission board was worse than they were.

Bar-hopping was hardly his weapon of choice, but there couldn’t have been any other way around it, and ditching Natalia’s idea now would leave her laughing at him for the rest of the week. There might have been other ways to achieve the result he wanted, but it wasn’t as if he had spent a good portion of his life in CLOVER trying to figure the way that particular song went already.

Of course, there were unexpected rewards to this sort of escapade. For one, Alistair would finally see Hikaru drunk. For his slight stature, the youth had a gut of steel — in the past, Alistair and Yasamu had both witnessed the youngest in their family drink bigger fish on the force under the table. It takes Hikaru almost five bars before he even wobbles on his feet, and Alistair catches him before he could take a header into the street.

It was difficult, by that point, to ignore the thought on how fantastic Hikaru smelled at that point, even with the night air and the alcohol, his body a warm and generally limp weight against him from knees up. He could almost be jealous of the boy now. Being wasted sometimes made things so much easier for a person.

“We’ll hit the barracks straight away. We can’t report back to base with you looking like this.”

A soft, lazy chuckle. It grated down Alistair’s spine like a serrated blade, twanging every end of every nerve that he had. Suddenly and very uncomfortably, it made him remember why they were at that point in the first place. Luciano and the rest of the sectors of Tabris passed him in a blur with lights swimming in it after that.

Alistair’s official quarters on the front consisted of one practically bare white room: it was a little larger than a hotel room, but it possessed the same transient feel. He had never opened the window or even bothered to move the curtains back to the glorious view that it had of Tabris City, and the bed had hardly been slept in. This was where he dumped Hikaru the moment they entered, moving away to leave the youth to his drunken contemplation as he programmed the lock on the sliding door.

“You were only taking one drink at every bar.”

That voice came out even and surprisingly clear for somebody that had just counted his years in the number of shots he had downed that evening. When he turned around, undoing the top buttons of his uniform as he did, Hikaru was lying back, one arm dangling and the other one limp over his forehead, staring at him with pale violet eyes still sharp and piercing despite being that far into the bottle.

Alistair held his silence and approached the bed, letting the top of his uniform drop to the floor. He took hold of Hikaru’s wrists before the latter could move away and held them over his younger brother’s head with one hand. He occupied his other with the zipper on his companion’s uniform.

“What are you—” Hikaru cut off with a slight gasp when Alistair slid his knee up between his legs and put a finger against his throat, putting enough pressure to cause alarm but discourage further protest.

“Urusai,” his older brother uttered in return, pulling upon the old reserves of Japanese that he only used to get points across and frustration out. A moment afterward the top of Hikaru’s uniform was off and Alistair was slowly licking the salt from the youth’s skin as his fingers traveled downward to undo the clasp of the younger pilot’s pants.

Creamy skin, petal-soft lips, long and dark eyelashes, lissome body… Hikaru hardly looked like a soldier, and he looked even less of it now from where he was, pinned by Alistair’s weight and Alistair’s hand working the most sensitive part of him with a fervor that denied the older pilot’s chill. He was being too rough on the boy; he knew that from the little sounds of pain Hikaru made every time Alistair would mark him or the heat and feel was too much to bear. But the years of holding back from doing the worst was enough to make anyone violent when the chance was in their grasp, and it wasn’t in his nature to pass up the opportunity at hand.

He had memorized those paths that his fingers and tongue were taking, mapping territory that had remained foreign to him until that point, even if he had dreamed about them during lower times in the past. There would be bruises later, memories of his fingerprints for Hikaru to study in the mirror after they were done, and it wouldn’t be the only thing he’d leave for the youth to think about.

“A… Alistair… please…”

Whether there was a yes or a no in those words, Alistair could not determine. What happened afterward was nothing so smooth; it was written in the flurry of movement and sound and waiting for Hikaru to cry out, and satisfaction came with every time that the youth did. At the end of it his brother was a boneless heap beneath him, tired and drunk and as fucked up as possible. He was quiet, but that wasn’t odd considering what had passed between them.

Alistair only moved when he was certain that he wasn’t shaking anymore. He took his gaze away from the figure curled up on the bed and rose to his feet, walking towards the islands that articles of his clothes had made. He was half-dressed when the silence between them crumbled to bits.

“You’re leaving? No cuddling? No sweet, post-coital talk?”

This coming from his younger brother, a person he had practically raped only moments ago. It made Alistair feel something akin to hitting mach nine on a fighter jet breaking apart in the atmosphere, and thus he was unable to conceive an immediate reply. It was only when he turned back and found Hikaru looking up at him with a crooked smile on slightly swollen lips and a look in those eyes that was hardly one of violation.

Any weaker, and he might’ve pulled the gun from the holster at his side, put it to his head, and pulled the trigger.

“…Get out of here as soon as you can move.”

And he turned and stepped out the door; he thought he heard Hikaru laugh before it slid shut behind him.

Natalia was hanging around at the end of the corridor; she leaned against the wall with one arm over her chest and the other holding the helmet of her flight suit.

“Congratulations.”

She was smiling. Alistair passed her by without a word.


This bit may or may not be revised in the future.

Comments, please.

:D

Comments

[yukitsu.livejournal.com]

“You’re leaving? No cuddling? No sweet, post-coital talk?” <-- That is so Hikaru! x_x

Interesting.... Alistair's toned down !! XD XD XD Kidding. Bwahaha. *extends a hand* More?

*rereads*

[brand-new-chaos.livejournal.com]

i guess my formula worked, huh? /gg

... nothing more to say on the subject. just wanted to use my icon.

yep.