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Karl doesn't know how to handle the softness Ethan bestows.
He flinches hard when Ethan's teeth touch his throat, blunt as they are. Living among varcolacs is enough to give any man reservations about having someone that close to his throat, nevermind all the scrapes he's suffered breaking up their fights over the years. He seizes Ethan’s shoulders, ready to throw the man aside and call the whole thing off.
But the scrape of those teeth is almost tantalizing in all the harm it doesn't do, and the soft press of lips that follows throws Karl into disarray. His grip becomes uncertain, shuddering into putty. The sense of danger doesn't recede, but his fascination with that novel softness only grows, tingling sensation bursting from that point of contact like fireworks. Dazed, he leans back and lets Ethan sweetly ravage his throat.
The punched-out sounds Karl emits are ugly and unfamiliar. He prides himself on his self-mastery, yet his throat gutters with wrenched-out groans like disobedient machinery with a wrench caught in the works—as if whatever organ meant to receive these tender abuses has rusted with disuse. His skin crawls with unease at that surrender, and yet in the same breath he craves it, though it aches with all the unbearable heat of a near-at-hand furnace after coming in from the bitter cold, fingers frostbitten, stinging sharply as their vital heat is restored so quickly it hurts.
Karl doesn't know how softness like this can exist. All his life has been an exercise in hardening himself, the better to withstand future treachery. He once thought the villagers soft, showing their stomachs whenever Miranda rose her voice. But none of them chose that, not really—not as anything but a logical alternative to greater reprisal. They were guarded in their own way: surrendering preemptively what they knew would otherwise be taken.
But Ethan has no reason to show his hand, nothing to gain by treating Karl this way—in fact, he has everything to lose. Karl could hurt him so easily like this, so intimately close, so stupidly trusting. He could destroy him—but he won’t, Karl realizes, with something like despair at what he perceives as a loss of control. He won’t harm a hair on Ethan’s head—not after Ethan has unmade him so easily, offering something Karl always assumed he could simply take.
Ethan harnesses his own softness, unselfconscious, and offers it up with a kind of fearlessness that frightens Karl beyond belief. Unsatisfied with unmaking the self-made man beneath him, Ethan presses his advantage to suck a wet kiss into the vulnerable jugular. Karl gasps like he’s been stabbed in the gut, his fierce grip on Ethan’s arms twitching, his spine seizing as if with an electrical current.
When Ethan pulls away at last, Karl is panting heavily, thoroughly disheveled with heat and desire. His hat has been knocked aside, glasses askew, as he stares at Ethan with dread and wonder. His heart judders in his chest like a backfiring engine, handling poorly on unfamiliar roads. He's waiting for the turning point, for the moment of his humiliation, the revelation that this was all a ruse for some greater purpose, a trick to punish him for a secret grudge, a joke at his expense. His suspicion mounts as Ethan's eyes glint with mischief, but stripped of his defenses, Karl has no reprise prepared when Ethan leans back in—not for Karl’s neck this time, but his lips.
Ethan cradles Karl’s sweat-damp face in his hands, in a caress so self-assured that Karl can't help but cede to its guidance, and he is drawn, inexorably, into a kiss that threatens to dethrone him.
If Ethan had kissed him at the beginning of all this, Karl thinks he would have given as good as he got—a competitive kiss, a battle for dominance, brimming over with teeth and savage abandon. Now it’s all Karl can do not to let his lip quiver before Ethan captures it with that surety that so astounds him, as assuredly as Ethan’s strange and improbable resilience in the face of mortal injury astounded him when he first discovered the man wandering in Miranda's personal patch of hell.
Ethan beneficently restores a measure of that stolen confidence with the coaxing press and tug of his kiss, proof of his desire. It is a reminder that Karl is not merely a vessel for Ethan’s affections (though he would be, he thinks, he would take it all, anything, as much as Ethan wanted to give, grateful and bereft and aching endlessly for more—) but an active participant in the proceedings, should he choose to be. Karl reminds himself that he wanted this—wanted his hands on Ethan’s body, an object of scientific intrigue and erotic fascination both.
Is he allowed to reach back out and touch? Will it be as easy as Ethan makes it look, if Karl tries to answer that softness with reciprocal sentiment?
His fingers ache when he releases Ethan's elbows from their desperate grip. He lays a leather-clad hand upon the nape of Ethan's neck, and is rewarded with a quiet hum that makes his lips tingle, sets off a buzzing in his brain like a build-up of static. Ethan cards a hand through his sweat-damp hair, and Karl sighs into his mouth. With his other hand he reaches out, clumsy with uncertainty, fumbling into Ethan's waist like some desperately-needed object in the dark. Ethan shivers beneath his touch, and Karl's confidence grows, his grip firming. He cups his hand and strokes Ethan from hipbone to rib, coming to settle at last between the man's shoulder blades, pressing him gently, insistently closer.
Karl Heisenberg finds absolution in that embrace.