Work Text:
One, two, three, in, out. One, two, three, in, out.
He’s standing on the porch of Steve’s bungalow long after the sun has set, smoking what he’s fairly sure is at least his third cigarette, not bothering to keep track. He’s trying to keep his mind as clear as possible, because he had heard the change in Steve’s voice on the phone when he had asked him to come over after work and he had seen the darkness in Steve’s eyes once he’d quietly let himself in through the back door and he had learned from experience what it meant. He was ready this time, he told himself. He would be ready. He would make himself ready.
He wasn’t ready, not by a long shot, but he concentrates on the burn of the January cold and the burn of the tobacco in his lungs and smiles, just a bit. Just an upward twitch on the side of his mouth, really, not an expression that any passing stranger would be comforted by.
He smiles, and smokes, and waits.
His eyes open when he hears the creak of the screen door, surprised both at the fact that he had at some point closed his eyes and the knowledge that this is what he had been waiting for all night without knowing it. He’s about to let his current lungful of Marlboro out into the night and call Steve some ridiculously saccharine pet name (maybe he’s wrong, maybe Steve just had an off day and all he needs is to be part of a passably normal relationship for one night, god knows he’s been there), but as soon as he’s opening his mouth, Steve has the back of his head cradled in one hand and the entirety of his mouth covering the entirely of Tony’s mouth and he knows what he knows.
He still has to breathe, though. He’s still human, even now. So he exhales when it starts to look like Steve is planning on spending the rest of his eternity stock-still and pressed against Tony’s body and mouth and skull, he exhales right into Steve’s mouth and feels Steve take everything Tony gives him, just like he always does.
Tony likes to think he’s gotten to know Steve pretty well during the relatively short time that they’ve been together, due in no small part to the fact that for a long time, getting to know Steve was literally his job. Now that he knows Steve from his eyes and his ears and his facial expressions when he’s exasperated and when he’s about to come and when he’s about to cry (rather than from his victim patterns and his organized/disorganized offender profile and his ballistics breakdown reports), he knows that Steve possesses the capacity to be many things and many people. The Steve that would seek Tony out and shotgun the smoke directly from his mouth, dark and dirty, used to be one of Tony’s least favourites because he knows what comes after, what it means when Steve starts to lose the tightly-wound control he fights so hard for every single day. Nowadays, Tony finds that he doesn’t mind it, despite the fact that it means his day job is about to get a lot harder. There’s a sick beauty in the looseness of Steve’s limbs now, and in his own loss of the fear that he used to feel when he thought too hard about what his life had become.
When there’s no more smoke left between them and the cigarette in Tony’s hand is burning close to the filter, Tony feels that same dangerous smile take over the curve of his lips. Amazingly, he sees an answering one on the face of his lover, something that he’s fairly sure he has never witnessed when Steve gets like this. Tony briefly wonders whether he should ask what Steve is thinking, but he’s not entirely sure he wants to know. Instead, apropos of nothing, “I think we should move to the country. I’m sick of all the light pollution, and you look better by starlight anyway.” Even spoken lowly and completely sincerely, they both know it’s a lie. Neither of them have any desire to leave San Francisco, and both of them still have work to do.
Steve rolls with it, though, just like he always does when they talk facetiously about the kind of things they would do if they were a normal couple. “Sure. I’ll buy us a vineyard, how’s that? We can get drunk in the sun every day, miles away from any living soul, and I’ll feed you grapes like an Egyptian pharaoh.”
Tony, who could never resist shooting his mouth off whether the moment called for it or not (here, on this porch, with this man, it did not), wraps his arms around Steve’s neck and shoots back, “Or we could skip a few steps and bunk down in one of the cells in Alcatraz. We’re both gonna have to learn how to make toilet wine at the end of this, let’s face it – ”
Steve unwinds one of Tony’s arms from his neck and takes a drag from the cigarette still loosely burning between Tony’s fingers. He seals their mouths together then, and Tony convinces himself that he has no choice but to breathe in. Steve’s eyes are open even as their faces are touching, and Tony’s heart skips a beat at what he sees lurking there. It won’t be long now.
God help him, but he no longer knew whether the dark feeling that curled low in his gut as he and Steve breathed as one was arousal or anticipation. All he knew was the feeling of Steve’s lips on his and the haze of smoke that surrounded them like a cocoon, mingling with the fog coming off the Bay to create a momentary space under the starless and blank canvas of the sky where nothing and no one could touch them. He doesn’t know why, but the only coherent thought that he manages to hold on to as they hold on to each other is a fervent, immaterial, reverent there are only monsters here.
One, two, three, in, out. He doesn’t need to be ready. For now, this is all he needs.