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It’s late enough that Olruggio’s workshop is lit only by candlelight. The curtains are drawn, the door is locked, and a huge amount of care has been put into the spells tacked into the wood around that door; spells to block sounds inside the workshop from spilling out, but to let any sound from outside in. Just in case.
Olruggio is on his knees.
The bed is a little lower than he’d like it to be, his eyes just about level with Qifrey’s upper stomach. Qifrey, for his part, is halfway to undressed, the endless braided cords around his neck and thighs hanging loose. When he swallows, his throat works visibly. Olruggio is maybe going a little loopy.
He wonders if these moments will ever stop feeling stolen—if something will shift in the near future, if Qifrey’s body will stop treating intimacy like a death sentence.
“Olly,” Qifrey says quietly. “Have you stared at me quite enough yet?”
Olruggio leans up on his knees, gets close enough into Qifrey’s space that he knows he can see him even with his glasses abandoned somewhere behind them; forehead to forehead, nose to nose.
“Hi,” he says.
Qifrey’s pupil contracts, expands, settles. A tiny, intensely brilliant smile flitters across his face.
“Hello,” he replies.
Olruggio leans in further and kisses him once, twice. Qifrey exhales smoothly and presses in closer, chasing Olruggio even as he moves away.
“Relax,” Olruggio says.
Qifrey’s smile goes tight. “I know,” he says.
Olruggio sits back down on his heels, slouching backwards. Qifrey doesn’t miss the positioning or its implications, if the tiny hitch in his breathing is anything to go by.
“What do you want?” Olruggio says levelly.
Qifrey’s expression is caught, distant—Olruggio watches him cycle through panic, guilt and desire, finally settling on determination. It’s movement. Olruggio smiles.
“I want you to—” Qifrey looks down at Olruggio and his face twists again, lip caught in his mouth. Embarrassed. Olruggio’s smile widens. “Do we have to do this every time?”
“Every time,” Olruggio says with delight, just to watch Qifrey roll his eye and smile back at him. “Come on. Please?”
Qifrey sighs tightly. “I would like you to suck me off,” he says flatly, eye flicking up towards the ceiling.
“Oh, you’d like me to?” Olruggio just barely manages to suppress a laugh as Qifrey overcomes his palpable fluster to narrow his eye in Olruggio’s direction.
“Suck me off, please.” Qifrey amends.
Olruggio squeezes one of Qifrey’s ankles gently. “Top marks for politeness, but—”
“Good grief, can you just suck my cock!” Qifrey snaps, face flushing dully.
Olruggio is still laughing as he leans in, nosing at Qifrey through his layers.
“Thank you,” Qifrey huffs, almost managing to sound put upon. His pulse gives him away, though, slamming through his body with enough force that Olruggio can feel it in his ankles, and where his face touches the inside of Qifrey’s thighs.
Olruggio licks Qifrey’s cock through his trousers, just once, and Qifrey’s entire body jolts.
“Okay,” Olruggio mutters to himself, and does it again. Qifrey’s thighs twitch inwards, then relax. Again. He whispers something inaudible. Again, and one of his hands clenches so hard in the sheets that they creak. Again, again, again, hands sliding up Qifrey’s shins and over his knees, hooking into the fabric of his waistband; Qifrey shudders, whispers something else, and lifts his hips just enough for Olruggio to peel off his trousers and underwear in one smooth movement.
Qifrey’s dick is a lot harder than Olruggio expected it to be; he notes the moisture beading at the tip with a faint jolt, and licks his lips.
“Are you—” One of Qifrey’s hands flails towards Olruggio’s head, then firmly lands back in the bedsheets. The pang of disappointment in Olruggio’s stomach is offset by the vicious satisfaction he feels watching Qifrey almost physically shake his brain back into place. He breathes in, breathes out; Olruggio leans forward until his lips are almost touching Qifrey’s cock, just to watch him shiver.
“What?” he asks, all breath. He slides his hands back up Qifrey’s legs, stopping solidly at his mid-thigh.
“Suck me off, Olly,” Qifrey manages, shoulders coiling like he’s preparing to run.
“Thank you,” Olruggio says simply, and lowers his head.
They’ve done this a lot, but not enough; Qifrey is jittery, some part of him still held by the parasite, still pushing him away from what Olruggio wants for him. It’s been a slow build, but Olruggio can be patient, and he’s nothing if not fucking stubborn.
Qifrey likes to be an island, during. Olruggio sees the way his eye goes distant, the way he closes off from everything that isn’t the immediate physical sensation; and sometimes, even from that. Olruggio bobs his head slowly, bringing a hand down to take what he can’t fit, and digs the nails of his other hand into Qifrey’s thigh.
It hasn’t worked before, but maybe it’ll work now.
He chances a look upwards every so often, and files away the brief snatches of emotion that he catches: the beginning of a smile, a momentary furrowed brow, Qifrey’s clenched jaw and tightly held shoulders.
Please, Olruggio thinks, and moves faster.
He closes his eyes, and it all falls away, nothing but the feeling of Qifrey’s legs around him and Qifrey’s panted breaths and Qifrey’s hands fucking up the bedsheets and Qifrey’s cock in his mouth, twitching, pulsing. If nothing else, his body is honest. It’s something.
“Please,” Qifrey gasps, and Olruggio’s eyes snap open and up towards him.
Qifrey’s hands are fisted in the bedsheets, his face doing something very complicated and very cute; his eye is hazy and he keeps biting back gasps, still floating in that water by himself. Olruggio feels a desperation that borders on aggression bloom in the pit of his stomach.
He pulls off Qifrey’s cock and all but snaps, “Put your glasses on.”
Qifrey is slow to react, which makes the way he flushes all the way to his ears even more excruciatingly beautiful to watch.
“Oh,” he says faintly. “Fuck.”
“I’m waiting,” Olruggio says, sitting back on his heels, quietly thankful for the moment’s respite on his aching neck.
“I—” Qifrey reaches somewhere behind him, clearly trying to find his glasses by touch alone. “I know they’re here somewhere—”
“You know how much work I put into that seal?” Olruggio’s not sure where he dredges up the brainpower to tease Qifrey, but he sees how the familiarity of bickering relaxes the tense set of Qifrey’s shoulders. “You’re mental for just chucking them in the sheets like that.”
“I was distracted,” Qifrey says, his voice a little less reedy.
“Can’t imagine what by.”
There must be some residual glue on the nosepiece, because the glasses just about manage to cling to Qifrey’s face; this means the Qifrey’s subsequent unimpressed look is aimed directly at Olruggio’s eyes. The effect is, of course, somewhat lessened by Qifrey’s visibly weeping dick lying against his thigh between them.
“Can you see me now?” Olruggio asks, leaning forward, and Qifrey’s expression darkens.
“A bit better,” he says, a hand coming around to hover at the back of Olruggio’s head. Olruggio grins, kisses the inside of his thigh, and moves back until his head comes into contact with that hand. Qifrey’s expression darkens further, his eye all pupil.
“Don’t look away from me,” Olruggio says, and dips back forward to lick up Qifrey’s length; Qifrey startles, hand reflexively clenching in Olruggio’s hair. When Olruggio gets the head in his mouth, his thighs twitch. And when he licks over the slit once, twice, Qifrey’s eye flutters closed.
Olruggio pulls off.
“What,” Qifrey mumbles, plaintive, hand tugging pathetically at the back of Olruggio’s head. When Olruggio doesn’t move, his eye opens again.
“I wasn’t asking,” Olruggio says.
And—something in Qifrey’s mood changes. A funny half-awake smile drifts onto his face and sticks there.
“Okay, Olly,” he says.
“Good,” Olruggio replies.
Olruggio realises relatively quickly that it’s hard to suck someone off and maintain perfect eye contact, but the aggressive tangled writhing something in his stomach pushes him forward. It keeps his eyes open and focused even as he coughs when he moves too far too fast, even as he pulls back to catch his breath, even as Qifrey’s breathing gets shakier and his hand pulls harder at Olruggio’s hair.
Qifrey’s eye never leaves his. Whatever has taken up residence in Olruggio’s stomach grows bigger, lashes against his every extremity; he takes Qifrey in his mouth again, just the head, just resting, and Qifrey mumbles something incoherent, and his hips twitch, and he doesn’t look away.
Olruggio only realises how disastrously turned on he is when Qifrey’s hips jolt again with a bit more force, and Qifrey—Qifrey says—
“Sorry,” Qifrey whines, wrenching his hand out of Olly’s hair to fist it resolutely in his own.
Almost without thinking, Olly drags his hands up from Qifrey’s thighs to his waist, then down to his hips, yanking him forward and deeper into his mouth. He’s probably digging his fingers in too hard.
Mine, he thinks.
“Olly,” Qifrey gasps—sobs, really. “I—I’m—”
Olruggio goes for broke; he arches forward, sucking Qifrey all the way to the root, stomach a disgusting knotted mess of joy and lust and snarling possessiveness and—
All at once, Olruggio’s iliocostalis lumborum group says, bye!, and a thick, searing band of pain explodes across what feels like every nerve ending in his lower back. Given that his mouth is still full, Olruggio’s attempt at screaming FUCK results in nothing more than a weird little squeak-moan-thing. Though every muscle his back shrieks in protest at the movement, he manages to pull off, jaw clenched, eyes screwed shut, forehead pressed as hard as he dares into Qifrey’s inner thigh.
“Did,” Qifrey says, breathing laboured, sounding almost like he’s about to faint. “Did you—finish?”
“Fuck,” Olruggio grits out. “Fuck, fuck, shit, fuck.”
“Ah,” Qifrey mumbles, voice strained and trembling.
“Fucking shit, bastard, fuck, ow.”
Qifrey’s thigh tenses slightly against Olruggio’s forehead.
“Ow?” he says cautiously.
“I didn’t come,” Olruggio gasps. The pain is radiating now, invading every inch of skin and muscle and connective tissue it comes across. “My back. Went.”
“Your back.”
“Yep.” Something somewhere, deep, next to Olruggio’s spine, twitches; the wave of agony that follows forces its way out of his mouth as a whimper.
“You’re not serious,” Qifrey replies, now sounding absolutely appalled.
“I actually don’t think I can move.”
Qifrey’s hands land squarely over Olruggio’s where they’re holding onto his hips for dear life.
“Okay, love,” he says, “maybe try untensing a bit?”
Olruggio’s chest squeezes pleasantly at the pet name before remembering to squeeze unpleasantly at the absolutely everything else.
“Don’t be cute right now,” he grumbles. “Everywhere hurts.”
Qifrey’s hands stop uselessly scrabbling at Olruggio’s knuckles, instead smartly sliding under each finger in turn, unlatching his death grip.
“Okay,” Qifrey says calmly, before slithering to the floor.
“Why are you down here?” Olruggio’s hands, now freed, come around to support his lower back. It doesn’t do much, but at least it feels like progress.
Qifrey cups Olruggio’s face in his palms and turns it up towards him.
“I’m helping,” Qifrey says patiently.
“How?” Olruggio tries poking at the worst offender in his tapestry of back pain, and is rewarded by the bloody thing seizing entirely. “Agh. Fuck.”
Qifrey kisses his forehead, then his nose. “You tell me,” he says.
And somehow, incredibly, something in Olruggio’s sternum relaxes, and the radius of pure violence emanating from his lower back decreases by orders of magnitude.
“Fine,” Olruggio mumbles. “Point taken.”
“I think I have beard burn,” Qifrey notes idly, shifting his legs slightly. Olruggio laughs reflexively and immediately regrets it.
“Oh fuck, don’t be funny either. Ow.”
“How you stymie me,” Qifrey sniffs. “To think that my own star would impose the same rules on me as Easthies did.”
“I said don’t be cute or funny,” Olruggio gasps; laughing feels like being beaten with a stick, but he smiles despite himself. Qifrey looks triumphant.
“Got you,” he says quietly. He’s smiling back. Olruggio’s heart almost explodes out of his chest right then and there.
“I love you,” he says dumbly. A muscle in his side twitches horrifically. “I love you and please get me a snugstone right now.”
“Up we go,” Qifrey says serenely, arms suddenly wrapping around Olruggio’s middle. The words oh fuck, please no never even have the time to leave Olruggio’s mouth before he’s heaved into a crouch, then dragged to sit on the edge of the bed. His back hurts so much he feels lightheaded.
“You absolute fucker,” Olruggio spits.
“I’m going to get you a snugstone now.” Qifrey kisses the top of Olruggio’s head and wanders off down the stairs, completely naked save for his ridiculous shirt.
“You either need to put more clothes on or take that thing off,” Olruggio calls after him, frustrated in about a thousand different ways. He slowly tries to lie himself down, muttering every swear word he knows until his back hits the mattress. “Why?” he asks the ceiling. “Why me?”
“It’s your posture, I think,” Qifrey replies from somewhere distantly below.
“You weren’t meant to hear that.” Even gathering the strength to project his voice hurts something awful. Olruggio wiggles his shoulder against the mattress, trying to inchworm further up the bed so his legs are at least level with the rest of his body instead of dangling stupidly.
Qifrey’s footsteps move gently up the stairs when Olruggio’s just about made it to the pillows. He’s chosen the ‘take the shirt off’ option, and Olruggio briefly loses focus at just how much skin is on display.
“Snugstone,” Qifrey announces, waving one illustratively. “It needs to go under your back.”
Olruggio groans wordlessly.
Qifrey grimaces sympathetically. “It’ll be over quickly,” he promises.
“Okay,” Olly sighs, staring at the ceiling to steel himself, “go.” The sensation across his back as he arches it is not unlike touching a frying pan. Olruggio squeezes his eyes shut against it, and relaxes the second he feels Qifrey tuck the snugstone under him.
“Fab,” Qifrey says. He sits down on the bed next to Olruggio’s hip, then visibly decides against his initial course of action and clambers over him like some bizarre spider.
“You could’ve walked around the bed,” Olruggio grouches, staring straight up at the ceiling once again. He feels Qifrey’s weight settle next to him.
“Probably,” Qifrey says evenly. “How are you feeling?”
“Just awful,” Olruggio replies. “That was a complete disaster.”
“I wouldn’t say all of it was a disaster,” Qifrey murmurs, voice lowering in a way that has Olruggio’s gut pulling with arousal.
“Don’t be hot either,” Olruggio whines.
“I can’t win.” Qifrey sighs dramatically. “Really, though,” he says after a pause. “I—really liked that.”
“What part?” Olruggio asks.
“All of it,” Qifrey says. “Well,” he amends, “not the part where you threw out your back.”
“You didn’t come,” Olruggio remembers miserably. “This is awful.”
“It’s fine,” Qifrey insists.
“Maybe you could—”
Qifrey cuts him off quickly. “Olly, please just relax.”
“But I want you to—”
“You are injured.”
“If I lie like this with the snugstone under me, you could probably still fuck me.”
“What are you talking about,” Qifrey whisper-shrieks. “Shut up.”
“We put up a sound-blocking spell, remember?” Olly mutters mutinously. “You can be louder.”
“I’m not shouting at you while you’re unwell, even if you are a lunatic.” Qifrey shakes his head. “‘You could probably still fuck me’. Honestly.”
“Well, you could,” Olruggio whines.
“No I absolutely could not.”
“I wasn’t asking,” Olruggio attempts, in a facsimile of when they were having fun, hot, frankly awesome sex instead of lying next to each other motionless, dealing with the results of Olruggio’s despicable sleep hygiene. And his lack of exercise. And probably mostly his atrocious posture.
Olly hears Qifrey shift, and turns his head to face him. His lower back pulses uncomfortably in protest. Qifrey’s eye is very, very blue.
It is also glowering at him with an air of intense menace.
“We are not doing that right now,” Qifrey says. “You’re completely ridiculous.”
Olruggio pouts. Qifrey sticks his tongue out. Olruggio scrunches his nose up, and Qifrey finally, finally laughs.
Olruggio knows whatever’s happening on his face is probably very stupid, but he can’t find it in himself to care; Qifrey’s real, unburdened laugh is a rarity even now. Since they met, Olruggio has bottled up these pieces of Qifrey that slip past his walls, the parts of him that are jagged enough to reflect the light. Recently, it’s felt like Qifrey might have leashed himself too tightly to ever let them escape him, but now—
Qifrey’s staring at him. He reaches out to touch the side of Olruggio’s face, fingernails tracing gently over his cheekbone.
“You’re looking at me like…” The sentence drops uncertainly as Qifrey visibly casts around for any word that fits.
“I always look at you like this,” Olruggio replies, meaning it almost too much to get the words out of his mouth.
“Oh.” Qifrey’s answering smile seems reflexive, all teeth. Sharp. Bright.
Slowly, painfully, Olruggio rolls onto his side. Qifrey clicks his tongue disapprovingly, but doesn’t comment further.
“Hold me,” Olruggio demands. Qifrey narrows his eye suspiciously, clearly trying to gauge Olruggio’s likelihood of trying to start anything; Olruggio rolls his eyes in return. “Oh, come on, do you really think I have any mobility in my hips right now?”
“Fair point,” Qifrey concedes, one arm dipping behind Olruggio to grab the snugstone before wrapping firmly around his waist, holding its warmth against his aching muscles.
“Oh.” For some reason, of everything they’ve done tonight, this makes Olruggio’s cheeks flash warm, his breath stuttering. “Thank you.”
Qifrey’s eye is already drifting closed. “You’re welcome.”
“Your glasses,” Olruggio says pointlessly. Qifrey mumbles something that sounds like who cares. The answer, tragically, is Olruggio—he wrangles a hand up to Qifrey’s face to peel them off, and moves to twist towards the bedside table. Qifrey catches his wrist before he can move far.
“No,” he says, sliding them from Olruggio’s grasp and using the final, brave, remaining dregs of glue to stick them to the bedpost.
“Smart.” Olruggio wriggles his hips, attempting to achieve some semblance of a stretch.
“Bad,” Qifrey says.
“I’m not—” Qifrey’s hand presses the snugstone more firmly to Olruggio’s back, and in doing so manages to comb out a tiny knot of muscle. “Ah. Thanks.”
“Mhm.” Qifrey knocks his forehead against Olruggio’s, flickering candlelight catching on the scarring over his right eye socket.
“The candles,” Olruggio says. “Before we sleep, we should—”
“Hm,” Qifrey says. “Later.”
“Okay,” Olruggio replies, helpless. “Later.”