Work Text:
“You’re doing it—”
“If you say wrong one more time, Theo, I swear to God, I’m going to fucking—”
“You’ll fucking what?” A syrupy smile spreads over Theo’s infuriatingly handsome features. “You’ll rip my throat out? Hamstring me through my asshole? I’m the one who signed and patented those lines, Dunbar. Any other derivative threats you’d like to try out on me?”
“I was going to say…I’m gonna fucking withhold your movie selection privileges,” Liam mutters. “Although hamstringing you through your asshole does seem much more appealing right now.”
Liam doesn’t even need to finish his sentence before he registers Theo’s scent wavering wildly: not at the threat of physical violence, but rather at the mention of the loss of any right to picking the viewing for weekly movie night.
Liam eyeballs Theo incredulously for a moment before letting out a huff of delight and disbelief. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s the way to threaten you into shape. No movie picking for you.”
“I can’t be threatened into anything,” Theo mutters petulantly.
“Nooo movie picking for youuu,” Liam goes on in his irritatingly adorable singsong voice. “No movie picking, no movie picking—”
“On second thought, you’re the one who’s due for your bimonthly hamstringing.” Theo scoops up a squelching mass of pumpkin guts from the pile between their two pumpkins on the porch and flings it at Liam’s hair.
Liam freezes on impact. He goes deathly still, as if incapable of believing that Theo Raeken, master manipulator with a record-breakingly derelict sense of empathy, just slogged him in the back of the head with pumpkin waste.
Then Liam twitches, the tip of his nose wrinkling as he swivels on his butt to fully face Theo, and he comes back to life. “Oh, no, you don’t.”
Liam lunges for the pile of pumpkin guts. Caught up in a smug grin, Theo is too sluggish to block him from reaching for a palmful of guts, hefting it in his hand and flinging it smack in the center of Theo’s face.
The squishy, fibrous bits land on Theo’s skin with a wet slap that has him momentarily stunned, and then the pumpkin guts slowly slide down the length of his face, slithering around the bridge of his nose and drizzling down from his chin in golden droplets of juice onto his lap.
Oh, it is on.
Liam locks eyes with him, mouth puffing out comically to choke down a laugh. Theo glowers right back at him, feigning rage, but he knows—and he knows that Liam knows—that the sunny brightness of his scent and the flustered pitter-patter of his heart are telltale signs of his secret amusement.
They both dive for the pumpkin guts between them, knocking their skulls together in the process. Liam swears loudly and creatively enough to make a sailor blush while Theo ducks. Liam’s right on him, swerving and feinting this way and that, and Theo is forced to drive the center of his palm over Liam’s nose and mouth to thrust his face out of the way. Liam retaliates by furiously batting his hands at Theo’s chest. Theo’s jaw drops in outrage as Liam’s grubby paws leave shameless streaks of dark orange all over the front of his new hoodie.
“You’re going down for that,” Theo intones, deathly serious.
And before Liam can form a proper retort, Theo reveals his heaping scoop of pumpkin mess and grabs the back of Liam’s neck with one hand, yanking him in and holding him in place, so that with his other hand he can smear the entire disgusting mixture from Liam’s bangs down his brows and mouth all the way to the center of his flannel shirt.
Liam shrieks as the pumpkin fibers and juices make their way to the tender skin of his belly button where the hem of his shirt has ridden up.
“It’s fucking cold, you neanderthal!”
“Wuss. You don’t know cold. This isn’t half as cold as a body locker in a morgue,” Theo taunts him.
Liam’s chest is heaving as he squirms and breaks free from Theo’s hold on him. He parts his now matted-down bangs to reveal his eyes, stormy blue and scowling under the deep furrow in his brow, just so he can pin Theo with a historically unimpressed look. Theo simply cackles.
“Are you done now?” Liam deadpans. “Are you finished recycling your old hell jokes?”
“As soon as you’re done stealing my threats,” Theo quips lightly. Objectively, there is no way he should be finding Liam’s disheveled state or his mop of hair dripping with sticky pumpkin juice to be attractive, and yet here he is. And here they are: eyes locked once more, mouths parted as they pause to catch their breath and gauge one another’s heartbeats for the next move.
“I wasn’t stealing your threats. In fact, I came up with something very original and incredibly effective,” Liam reminds him primly. “You were the one who made a big hullabaloo about my pumpkin gutting skills.”
Theo raises first one brow, then the other. “You assume,” he says, “that you have any skills at all.”
“It’s not difficult, Theo. Just whip out your fingers and dig in.”
“Jesus Christ. With that mentality, my condolences to anyone you’ve ever slept with.”
“Not like you know how to use your fingers, either,” Liam protests.
“I do know how to use them. Gutting a pumpkin isn’t very far off from gutting a…well. You know.”
It’s Liam’s turn to shoot a judgmental brow his way. Look—objectively, he knows hanging out with a former serial killer swings wildly between missionary-level compassion and horror-film-protagonist-level idiocy on a normal day. But when he’s presented with the very vivid image of Theo snarling and wrist-deep in the flesh of an enemy, feral features flecked with blood, Liam is…
Only human, okay?
“Number of years of gutting experience aside, we have literally the same finger length. I don’t get what you’re bragging about. However much you grab from inside the pumpkin is the same amount I can pull out, too.”
Theo scoffs at Liam’s logic. “You’re shorter than me.”
“So? What does that have to do with hand size?”
Rolling his eyes and huffing, Theo grabs Liam’s left hand by the wrist and holds it up in the air, squishy gourd bits and all, so that he can slap his right palm against it for comparison. Liam rolls his eyes right back as if to let Theo know just how juvenile he thinks this method of settling the score is. Theo ignores him and instead concentrates on inching his hand sideways and upward until the heels of their palms are flush against each other and the sticky pads of their middle and pointer fingers are touching.
Both of them are overcome by a wash of silence for a few moments as they concentrate. Liam’s breath wafts out in warm puffs over their hands as he dips his head to watch Theo’s measurement, ensuring that the chimera isn’t angling his own hand slightly up or down in an attempt to cheat.
“What did I tell you? I got better hands,” Theo proclaims after a while.
“Yeah,” Liam snickers. “Sure don’t know how to use them as well as I do, though.”
“Oh? Is that why you last all of seven seconds in the shower in the mornings?”
A scarlet bloom overtakes Liam’s cheeks so rapidly that Theo has to bite back a guffaw. “It’s not about the length of time, it’s about the quality,” he snaps.
“Sure,” Theo humors him. “Maybe you just don’t know better.”
Liam’s scowl deepens as he stops to consider that. His scent is a complicated tangle of irritation and resignation, along with begrudging fondness, all laced through with an undercurrent of faint arousal. The last bit makes Theo’s grin stretch wider.
“Maybe,” Liam says, after a too-long pause pregnant with tension, “maybe you don’t know how to let go of my hand.”
Theo startles. Liam nods at their hands held up in the air between them, and sure enough, their fingers are interlocked. Neither one of them let go throughout the entire game.
Theo’s gaze slides back to his. A frisson of something foreign yet so long awaited flares to life between them. He lowers his voice. “Consider this,” he says. “Maybe letting go was never part of the plan.”
Liam’s throat bobs spasmodically as he swallows. It’s the only sign of his uptick in nerves, before he bites the bullet and leans forward across the rapidly narrowing distance between them. His jean-clad knees knock against Theo’s on the porch steps as he pauses just a second to murmur: “Then that means my plan worked, too.”
Theo’s tongue darts out to wet his bottom lip. “What plan?” he rasps.
“This plan,” Liam whispers, breath skating over Theo’s mouth, before he leans the rest of the way in and Theo’s vision tunnels and bursts with stars behind his eyelids as their lips meet in a warm press.
Liam sucks in a breath and angles his head, arching up into Theo, and Theo arches right back up into him. The oxygen zips from his lungs and sends his head soaring through the clouds as Liam deepens the kiss, reaching forward with his free hand to cup Theo’s face by the junction of his jaw, and Theo can only react with a bitten-off moan and his own galloping heartbeat thundering in their ears.
Liam’s own heart is thudding as they pull apart for air. Eyelashes fluttering, he peers up at Theo with silver-sky irises ringing pupils blown wide. Theo is silent, deathly still. Stunned.
And then, of course, Liam has to go and break the moment.
“And that,” he says brightly, “is how you use your fucking hands.”