Work Text:
Jude first notices when Sharpness moves into his base at spawn, back when they were teamed. Maybe it was the amount of time they spent together, longer than any of their prior interactions, more relaxed in a way that allowed them to exist in the same space without all their energy spent constantly scanning for threats, the shadow of a mace, the lash of a sword.
He doesn't know how he didn't notice sooner. Once it's something he's aware of, it's something he's aware of, constantly clinging beneath the surface of his thoughts whenever his ex-teammate/enemy/maybe-ally-if-the-situation-calls-for-it-on-a-good-day is nearby.
So here's the thing: Sharpness wears heeled shoes.
Not that Jude has anything against heels. Other people on the server have heeled shoes they may wear on occasion, and more power to them - Jude tried once, some boots with barely any height, and nearly broke his ankles much to the ridicule of everyone around him at the time because how do you even mess up that badly? So it's not really his thing, and he's not looking to try again any time soon. Any time ever. But that's beside the point.
Back when they were teamed, and Sharpness moved around in his base without pretending to sneak around, Jude would often hear the other man's steps down the hall, around the corners, crisp, clean, rhythmic among the other ambient noises of the base. Even with the active machinery hidden behind the walls and beneath the floor, Sharpness' footfalls were ever deliberate, click-clicking over it all like they were on a separate channel. Turns out, the dual gait pattern came from wearing heels, and Sharpness had heels on nearly everything: his netherite boots, his casual shoes, the pair of leather boots he wore for special, formal events.
It's insane. The detail feels like a no-brainer in hindsight because everything about Sharpness was so- so artful, so intentional, antithetical to the disorder of Strength. The way he holds himself, lean and languid, a panther in repose. His impeccable dress, everywhere and always, even on the battlefield with his finely polished and cared-for armour streaked in violent red. And his hair, always perfect, flowing ribbons of silk cascading over his shoulders, twisting into a ponytail or a braid or a bun however he felt like wearing it on a particular day. It doesn't fail to be stylish mid-fight where strands escape their bindings and stream behind him like bright gold, bright like the ferocity in his eyes, loose but still so refined. As if every snapshot of him in action is by some grand artist's design.
At the bottom of a trap, contorted up against the walls and screaming, yelling, begging, he still is breathtaking. Jude would know. He's responsible for the large majority of those situations. From above, he'd see the dash of blood along Sharpness' cheek which perfectly highlights the chartreuse of his eyes, then the coils of hair coming loose to curl beneath his jaw, then the lines of his armour, the drape of his cape, and Jude would hurl the dripstone down with more force than strictly necessary and delight in the crack of splintering armour, stone meeting skull.
Whatever. That was before, anyway. And to think that Sharpness does everything he does in heels? Crazy behaviour. So Jude noticed while they were teamed, and it was a distraction, because who wouldn't be distracted by an extra set of steps in their home that was only used to one? It was easy enough to ignore when they were the strongest duo on the server, laughing and fighting side by side, Sharpness slinging an arm around his shoulder so easily after a successful battle. It was easy enough to ignore at home where Jude would throw himself into his projects and create as much noise as possible with redstone to avoid thinking about it.
But that was before. And now his base, stark white with flawlessly etched columns and carvings in the quartz, a far cry from the warm, cozy wood - that Sharpness had blown up, mind you - is missing a part in its cadence. An instrument gone from the symphony, a stark emptiness in harmonic composition. Whatever! Whatever. He was dumb to let Sharpness in anyway. He'd known all along. The night after the betrayal, he'd broken all his villager beds and replaced them just in case Sharpness had his spawn set at one of them. And then his base blew up, so it didn't matter anyway.
When he'd confronted Sharpness for that - Sharpness, talk to me Sharpness, why did you blow up my base with fury and rage and a stifling tightness in his chest, the cheeky smile the other man had offered along with empty apologies made him want to scream. And scream he did. The fight didn't go as well as it could've. The fire in his veins made his swings go wide, unfocused, and this was the first time he truly watched, fully noticed, Sharpness fight in that inexplicable way of his.
The heels didn't hinder him at all. If anything, they helped, thick soles digging into the earth to snap him around at a moment's notice, faster than Jude can even blink, sword and axe following suit. When Sharpness leapt back, they allowed him to land firmly and let him brake at much shorter notice. Anyone else would have tripped or broken a bone; Sharpness moved like water, like fire, like lightning - nature entwined with itself to make one lethal strike flow into the next.
Through the explosions, the flying ash, the strips of grass pulled up in the wake of their clash, his eyes never left Jude. His hair was tied back that day, but escaped strands whipped against his cheeks in the wind. Blood, blood on his sword, on his armour, on his face, bleeding from where Jude had managed to get a dirty punch in. Yet he was smiling, elated from the adrenaline of the fight. His teeth were stained red from a split lip, and the blood only sharpened that smile, those pointed canines that revealed themselves when his lips pulled back.
It was a sight Jude couldn't tear his eyes away from. In that moment, there wasn't enough air for him to breathe. So he had bared his teeth right back, taste of iron unfurling on his tongue, and raised his sword again.
And then it was over. And then Jude never thought about it again.
—
He's cursed. Since his base is practically at spawn, it's a great way to eavesdrop on people who are there. Nobody checks beyond the entrance when they weren't going to his base. But this proximity is cursed now, because every fucking time Sharpness is at spawn, Jude knows without needing to see him. The stupid heels, the stupid gait - it's driving him insane. He doesn't even need to hear his voice, though Sharpness tends to talk to himself and hum little tunes when he thinks he's crossing spawn unobserved.
What's worse is that Jude can tell when it isn't Sharpness and just someone else in heels too; his ex-teammate strolls when he walks, steps measured and self-assured. Then there's the slight shift in weight when he's considering an ambush, strides turning into a stalk moments before he pounces or returns to strolling. And the silence when he's invis - on stone, on mud brick, Sharpness quiets his boots to faint impressions easily mistakeable as ambient noise.
The only time he deviates from the pattern is when he chases Jude. His movements grow skittish, amplified anytime he thinks a trap is coming though there's nothing for hundreds of blocks, and Jude delights in the way he makes his ex-teammate flinch back when he flashes a pressure plate in his hand. Sharpness' momentum would sweve abruptly, and Jude would cackle at being able to make him react this way when everywhere else his hunt is unerring.
It's the little things in life. A small payback for all the ways Sharpness bothers Jude.
—
There's a gathering in his base - one unauthorised by him, for the record, but sometimes people just like to show up in the foyer and do whatever - which he'd usually ignore. He's deep in the corridors, behind plenty of traps if someone decides to break the wordless truce and jump him for truly no reason. In fact, he's absorbed in testing out a new redstone construct for either a trap or a farm, the specifics undecided. The sounds of pistons and slime blocks are plenty to block out the rabble, until once voice rings out above the rest.
It doesn't say anything, but rather laughs, and the fact that Jude clocks it immediately makes the animosity rise to his sternum again, burning at the base of his throat.
Sharpness is here.
And all of a sudden the noise in the foyer is a hundred times louder, thundering through the very stones of his base, echoing in the foundations until the vibrations carry to the tips of his ears straight from the soles of his shoes planted on the ground. Chatter, laughter, the shink of spear lunges, people running around and jumping all over the place. Boots and sneakers shuffling, stomping, drumming up such a storm he can't pick out anyone in particular.
Who invited these people, anyway? He's trying to work, for fuck's sake!
So he drags himself up between the lines of redstone, winds his way through the halls, and shooes them out of his base. There's a perfectly nice open space in the middle of spawn. Several places around spawn, actually, make for wonderful places to dick around and shoot the shit. It's like trying to herd seagulls, but eventually with enough waving his arms and threatening to open the floor beneath them, his base is blissfully quiet again. Exactly how he likes it.
When he leaves his base some time later, the crowd has dispersed. He's had enough of crowds for the day, and briefly has the hope that he'll be able to go about resource collection in peace and zen like he deserves after debugging redstone for so long. Except he hears the burst of a wind charge, the lunge of a spear, and he turns his head to see none other than Sharpness chasing someone in invis along the banks of the nearby river.
As he watches, Sharpness launches another wind charge at his feet, sending him into the air in a graceful arc. His hair is in a ponytail today, streaming behind him like a brilliant banner start against the sweep of his cape. Then his body twists mid-flight, ever graceful, and the deadly momentum carries down as he flicks from his sword to his mace last second to burst his target open into a shower of blood and items.
Jude looks away. He just knows his ex-teammate is grinning wildly now, more delighted over the execution of a clean kill-shot rather than the sea of fresh loot at his feet.
Whatever. It's fine.
Jude hates him for it. Well, Jude hates him for a lot of things, and that's just another piece to the puzzle that has him clenching his fists at his side whenever he sees a flicker of pale gold in the distance, whenever he hears that oh-so-familiar accent clipping around syllables on the wind.
He swaps on his elytra and leaves for resources.
—
They're working on a trap, Parker and him, a few thousand blocks away from spawn. Parker wants to trap Tai for killing him, and Jude wants to trap Tai because… it is always morally correct to trap Tai. The wind whistles by the hole opened to the sky as they clear out the rest of the stone and dirt, funnel falling steeply into the earth beyond the tiers for redstone lines. No dripstone yet, though they aren't sure if they want to go with a dripstone trap at the bottom of this one.
Peering down the sheer drop, Jude can't help but think of another person he'd like to trap. He can already hear the loud swearing echoing against stone, swears that would soon turn into pleas. "I'm gonna kill you," he sing-songs below his breath, imagining the response he'd receive. So many ways to go. Crit-out, suffocation, potions, good ol' classic dripstone-
"What're you muttering about down there?" Above him, Parker pokes his head over one of the tiers.
Jude squints against the brightness of the sky around Parker's silhouette. "Oh, yknow, trapping a certain someone after Tai."
"Did he kill you again?"
"Not since we last fought."
"You trapped him for that."
"It doesn't have to be retaliation for me to trap him."
Parker squints. "We're several thousand blocks from spawn."
"You don't need to help me with this one, I can do the baiting myself."
"Whatever he did, he really pissed you off this time, didn't he?"
"He always pisses me off."
"But not like this. You have plenty of traps around spawn."
Jude looks down the hole and shrugs. "Yeah, well, might as well get another use out of this one."
A brief beat of silent passes. Curious, Jude raises his gaze back up, since it isn't often that the conversation between them two lingers like this. Parker is staring down at him, judgemental. "I see how it is. You've been weird about him ever since the betrayal. Before that, even. Why'd you stay in a team if it bothered you so much?"
Jude ponders for a moment. "I dunno, I thought it'd be fun. It's Strength, we all do things to see what happens."
And then they'd teamed, Sharpness took up residence in his base, and all of a sudden he started noticing little quirks and details of his then-teammate. The look of concentration, eyes focused and brows drawn, when he was repairing his armour and weapons. Sometimes, the tip of his tongue would poke out the side of his mouth as he worked through a particularly deep gash, carefully filling in the netherite and sealing it with a new layer of polish. The way he'd stand, arms crossed with his weight shifted onto one leg, head tilted, when he perused through the trades being offered by villagers. The halo of his untied hair fanning around him when he'd flop back onto his borrowed bed after a drawn-out fight, finally finding the downtime to shed his armour and relax.
Jude waves all the memories away. Just thinking about it made him feel angry. "And I found out what happens. Honestly, I'm glad he betrayed me."
Parker side-eyes him. There's something disapproving in that look. "You two need to talk."
"You keep saying that. We talk all the time."
"About your feelings." Parker chucks a slime ball, which Jude ducks out of the way with a cry of rude! "That sounds like something you should work through with him."
"What is there to work through? We fought about it, we talked about it, and everything's fine now."
And truly everything is fine. They've fallen back into their usual back and forth, laughing and killing each other exactly the way they had before their brief span of proximity. Before before. Jude's a reasonable guy. Sharpness upsets him, sure, especially when that giggle of his bubbles over his serious battle-hardened persona during a fight, which is really distracting and has earned Jude a mace to the skull several times, but Jude isn't one to run away from difficult situations. Avoiding the person he hates is giving up. Giving in. No, he plays along just fine and does a damn good job of it.
He doesn't notice Parker's eye roll.
"Sure, man. What you just told me sounds like a well-adjusted response," Parker says, and turns back to working on the trap. "Did you have an idea for what kill chamber, or are we just winging this?"
They get through laying down the basic redstone and filling the drop with banners before Jude speaks again, the agitation he'd been holding inside for weeks spilling over. "Did you know he wears heels?"
"Uh, no, don't really have the time to notice when I'm preoccupied by not getting killed by him." Parker responds noncommittally, focused on righting the alignment of the pistons.
"Well he fucking does. And it's fucking annoying."
"And you're bringing this up because…?"
Jude barrels on. "Like I guess it makes sense. He's all- yknow, elegant and shit even though he acts nothing like it. Motherfucker likes to murder people as a hobby, for god's sake, and he's always dressed to the nines for it. His netherite boots have heels to them, Parker, and he sprints around and does whatever like it's nothing! And when he's not in armour-"
"Whoa, Jude. Is this going to become a rant like the one you gave me about his hair stick a while ago?"
"First of all, he has multiple hair sticks. Probably to stab people with when he's not using them for their intended purpose. Even his favourite gold one with the rose at the end! And no, this is a separate thing. Everything about him aggravates me, you know-" He frowns at the face Parker is making at him. "Why are you looking at me like I'm fucking stupid."
"Because you are," Parker deadpans, dragging a hand down the side of his face. "Listen. I'm going to place what remains of my rapidly waning faith in you and believe that you can work through this without needing me to spell it out for you. You better not disappoint me."
Jude throws up his hands in exasperation. "You're not helping at all! I'm going to shove you down the funnel."
"And you're not helping either! I've been placing pistons by myself, while you were on your little tirade."
Jude bites back his retort. Fine, fine, Parker is right. They've got a trap to finish, and though they usually chat while they do so, getting so incensed about his stupid ex-teammate to the point where he'd stopped placing redstone is counter productive. Making sure his mouth is shut now, he returns to laying down the redstone line he'd abandoned.
Inevitably, his musings circle back to Sharpness with no external means to release his frustrations.
Literally, what is Sharpness' problem? He's tall enough Jude has to look up to meet his eyes whenever he steps close, and his chest would tighten in irritation at the height difference. Any extra advantage is overkill. Is un-auraful. Is infuriating-
"Jude."
His train of thought is abruptly derailed when Parker grabs him by his shoulders, facing him head on, supremely unimpressed. Oops, he'd been thinking out loud, huh.
Parker shakes him with what feels like desperation. His grip digs into Jude's shoulders. "Jude. You are one of my best friends, and I mean this in the nicest way possible: enough shit about Sharpness. I'm going to need you to lock the fuck in or I'm going to shove you down the funnel."
"Okay," Jude whines, dragging out the final vowel, and shrugs Parker's hands from his shoulders. So much for wanting a friend to rant to - Parker used to indulge him but for some reason has grown increasingly exasperated, and Jude can't figure out why for the life of him. Parker readily joins him in complaining about other people with no problem. "I'm sorry."
"Holy braincell loss," Parker snipes, and shakes his head.
—
Jude pops back into existence with a scowl. His body is fine now, though can still feel the blade of a sword angling between the plates of his armour as cobwebs snared at his legs, rendering him helpless. Sharpness got him again. Fucking Sharpness, again. And he was giggling the whole time, calling Jude's name in the amused melodic tone he uses when he knows he's won, all while Jude chugged gaps and used up his dwindling supply of health pots.
And yes, maybe Jude was giggling too, half smothered laughs entertwined with his screams that he was going to die, the swears he was throwing at Sharpness. But it's because that's how they'd always exchanged blows. See? He's great at pretending like nothing is wrong and he doesn't hate Sharpness' guts.
Jude sits up from his bed and grabs his communicator, keying in a message to a name that he can type through muscle memory alone. He pointedly ignores the comments in public chat about his death.
<You whisper to conexion> can i have my shit back
He's up and out of his base before the reply comes.
<conexion whispers to you> skill issue lol
<conexion whispers to you> but sure, come back
<conexion whispers to you> shulker
The walk back isn't far. Their fight took them through a forest, across a plain, and into a village where he got caught under a house overhang and was then killed. He turns the corner where he'd exploded and-
Oh. Sharpness is still here. He's leaning against the cobblestone wall with his arms crossed, cape draped over one shoulder like a fucking model, but when he sees Jude, he pushes off to grin at him.
Jude storms over to the shulker and cracks it open, dumping the stuff into his inventory. "You waited for me to come back just to gloat, didn't you."
Sharpness circles him while he organises his inventory. Another thing that Jude noticed way back: Sharpness never stands still. He's always moving, hopping between blocks, bouncing on his feet, crouching and uncrouching. When a situation calls for minimal movement, he still shifts his weight, switches between weapons idly, fiddles with the chains and accessories on his cape. Incredibly distracting.
"Mmmmaybe." Sharpness' voice comes from behind him, a full-chested rumble in the drawn out sound. His smile is audible.
Jude whips around, but finds no sign of hostility. Sharpness appears to be looking at his cape. Oh right, he's wearing his cat cape today, which he remembers Sharpness liking back then. Before. Whatever. "Fuck you, man."
Sharpness snorts, and backs off. "Missing anything?"
Jude checks his inventory. With it organised, he only needs to sweep his eyes across it to see if the shape is incorrect, but he comes up with nothing. Everything is there. "No."
"Okay, good," Sharpness says, collects his shulker, and vanishes in the whistle of a firework.
Jude traps him later that day, because of course he would, and laughs in his face as he crits him out in the kill chamber. A perfect trap to watch Sharpness squirm, face to face. Back and forth, business as always.
—
He's working on expanding the room at the end of the villager trading hall when he hears it: steps he would recognise in the dark, click-click, a rhythm he still hears sometimes in his dreams much to his dismay. It's nothing shocking; Sharpness used his base before they teamed, and continued to use it afterward, coming down to make use of his trading hall, his farms, his crafting table, his anvil. He'd do it when he thought Jude wasn't around, which was most of the time, given that Jude had many projects around the server that took him far from home.
But sometimes Jude was at home. And he'd hear those steps, now careful, quiet, a pale imitation of the clear, relaxed strides of the past. Back to sneaking, because this wasn't Sharpness' home anymore. He blew up the home he could've had, anyway. It's fine. It doesn't matter how the trading hall is still wood with its familiar plank floors, and how Sharpness' subdued steps sound wrong there.
Ignorance is bliss. Jude was able to achieve it in the past, and he is able to achieve it in the present. Or he was able to, before this present moment where the conversation with Parker pushes to the front of his mind and a voice that sounds suspiciously like Parker's screams FEELINGS at him. He places down a block of stone with more force than necessary as he clenches his jaw. Why did Parker say that? What was there to delve into regarding feelings, when it's plain fury? He shouldn't be spending so much brainpower on this, yet here he is, rifling through everything about Sharpness that digs up the burning acidity in his chest. Was he supposed to walk up to his ex-teammate and declare to his face that he hated him? That is an option, but Jude still needs to exist on Strength and they have a lot of shared friends. It'd be inconsiderate to everyone else to make them pick a side in what is beef between him and Sharpness alone.
He tries to turn his focus back to designing the wall of the redesigned room - he's no Bitzel or Godis when it comes to architecture - but the fire now ignited at his core only blazes stronger. Why did he have to do anything about it anyway? He's existing perfectly fine. He tries to ignore the presence in the hallway a few steps away but his methods are not working anymore; he can hear Sharpness move from the prot villager to the mending villager, then to the unbreaking villager. It's like before, where every one of Sharpness' actions existed on a separate channel from the rest of the world, just to annoy Jude.
The heat, incandescent in his chest, curling around his ribs and pulling tight, boils over.
Jude pokes his head around the corner into the villager trading hall. "Will you stop strutting about?"
He watches Sharpness jump, hand abandoning the enchanted book before him to fly to the hilt of his sword. His gaze finds Jude, and he lets go. "Strutting?" His mouth pulls into a pout. "What are you talking about? I am not strutting about."
Jude narrows his eyes. He tries to forget the sight of Sharpness miliseconds ago, before Jude spoke, where he was standing the exact same way he would before, weight shifted, a hand on his chin thoughtfully. "Yes you fucking are."
"I'm just standing here." Flippant.
"You weren't, a few seconds ago." Jude feels his lip curl back into a sneer involuntarily, and he ducks back into the room he was working on. He can't look at Sharpness. He can't look at him, all grace and poise and compulsion. Things were fine just yesterday when they passed each other at spawn. They even had an amicable conversation.
But maybe a line has been crossed, and Jude doesn't want to deal with pretending anymore. "Whatever. Deal with your shit and go." His hands are shaking, barely able to place down any blocks, so he stands with his back to the mouth of the hallway and doesn't move, waiting for the wave of emotion to pass.
Sharpness doesn't go back to trading. The clink of armour and whisk of a cape draws close, so close to the corner where Jude is standing. "Jude, are you okay? Did something happen?"
The gall of this man, to stay even a second longer and ask after Jude. He sounds genuine, too, his tone softening from the previous riposte. He isn't even turning the corner, like he's respecting Jude's choice to maintain space. What is wrong with him? One day chasing Jude down and stealing his shit, the next doing whatever this is.
Or maybe he's afraid of a trap. Yeah, that's probably it.
"I'm fine," Jude grits out a response. "Do your thing."
"You don't sound fine."
"Yeah? Whatever gave that away?" He snaps before he can think better of it, and oh no, now he's really given Sharpness material to work with.
Just as he feared, Sharpness picks up on it. "You're angry."
The atmosphere is stifling. His base goes about making its sounds, villager hums, redstone clicking on and off, pistons pushing and pulling, but he has never felt this kind of silence before. Thick, weighty silence in the presence of other noise. It's getting hard to breathe again, and in this room at the end of the hallway with no other exit, he feels trapped.
He shouldn't feel trapped. He's the trapper. You can't trap a trapper.
He needs space, and he needs it now. Resolutely not looking at Sharpness, because he knows exactly where his ex-teammate stands in the space, he brushes past him and heads toward the foyer.
Sharpness follows. "What happened? I've never seen you like this before."
Jude takes a sharp turn before the aquarium to head into his storage area. Itching for something to do, he begins opening chests and rearranging things in an imitation of sorting his items. He closes each lid hard, hoping the sound would drown out Sharpness' concern.
Because why concern, why couldn't they go back to their snark and threats, their push and pull, where every move was analysed for signs of danger, for hidden intent? He'd like it more if they were fighting, at each other's throats with feral gleams in their eyes. He'd like it more if Sharpness would get frustrated and curse him out right now, rather than this… sincerity. It reminds him of before, of a closeness that feels like a star going supernova compressed into the space between his ribs. An irritant he can't be rid of.
He shuts a chest with so much force the lid slams loudly and bounces back open. A hand reaches past him to catch it, then close it again, this time much more carefully.
Sharpness is standing beside him, arm extended around him.
In an instant, the fight leaves Jude. What was he doing, throwing a fit, making a mess of his own home? He so desperately wants to curl in on himself and hug his shoulders, but he can't do that in front of Sharpness. His ears are already drooping. He forces them back up.
"What's wrong, Jude?"
Silence, as Jude refuses to answer and Sharpness waits patiently.
Eventually, Jude offers the best he can: a deflection. "Why do you care? We're enemies."
"We're also… friends." Sharpness says this carefully, tentatively.
Jude scoffs. Friends. The word makes the heat in his chest flare again, and he clenches his fists so hard his nails dig crescents into his palms. Friends, friends, how could they be friends after everything that had happened? There's still parts of Sharpness left down deep in the earth, beneath one trap, beneath two, in that armourstand crit-out he hasn't bothered to clean yet, the deep red of harming potions staining the wool so deep the colour is irreversibly changed. There's still parts of Sharpness lingering around this base, not just his physical body that comes in to make use of Jude's resources as if everything was fine, and they were good, as if it didn't spike Jude's blood pressure every time Sharpness walked down the stairs with his steps muted, quiet, temporary. Sharpness is in the way Jude holds his sword, angled close to his side so he can switch to his other weapons fast enough before the world registers. The way Jude switches his shield for his axe. It's dumb. It's so dumb.
And now Sharpness is here, standing in front of him with one hand braced against a chest behind Jude, practically boxing him in. Because what? Because Jude doesn't want to talk to him, because he doesn't want Jude to run, because he really, truly wants to know what's wrong with Jude? And yes, Sharpness isn't forcibly keeping him here; Jude could leave if he wanted to, walk out of the very open gap opposite of Sharpness' arm. But fuck, that expression, that earnest, pleading expression, and-
Jude needs to kill someone. Preferably Sharpness.
"I hate you, you know?" Jude hisses. He stabs a finger into Sharpness' chest. It's met by a netherite chestplate, shimmering with enchantment and impossibly unyielding.
"What?" Sharpness' eyes widen. The hurt that crosses his gaze looks so real, as if he doesn't know what his mere existence does to Jude. "Why?"
"Fuckin'- you- I-" Jude sputters. "Because you're infuriating? Because you're distracting? Because-"
Before his mind catches up with his body, he's reaching forward to grab Sharpness by the collar and yanking him down, crashing their faces together. Sharpness yelps, cut short when their mouths collide hard, teeth clacking into each other through their lips. The impact sends starbusts through Jude's vision. He doesn't need vision. All he needs is Sharpness, the heat of his touch, the taste of his lips - Sharpness' mouth parts and Jude instantly cuts himself on his pointed teeth.
Blood spills between them, hot and heavy and flooded with the taste of iron. One of his hands leaves Sharpness' collar to slide up his neck, tangle into his hair, fingers undoing the pristinely set bun at the back of his head. And then he's being forced back, his spine hitting the line of his chests, netherite armour pressing against his front, a pair of hands coming up to cradle his face. Everywhere Sharpness' fingers touch leaves lines of fire, through his gloves, as if Jude's skin was splitting open, all that heat he had packed inside of himself was rupturing through and breaking out.
He has the urge to bite. Bite back, since his blood is already between them, so he does. Fresh blood bubbles up at the wound he opens. He can smell it, the tang of iron, and beyond that, the faint scent of ash, of smoke, of the wild that lingers on Sharpness. It's getting hard to breathe. His lungs feel empty and full at the same time. His body pulls so taut that he feels like he could snap like an overextended rubber band at any second now-
They break apart, panting hard. Sharpness staggers back a few steps, a pretty pink spreading across his cheeks, the rest of him thoroughly debauched. His hair is a mess, undone by Jude's grasping hand, yet still perfect somehow, like he had intended for it to be a messy bun. Blood smears at the corners of his mouth; his eyes are wide, pupils dilated, and in this light the green of his irises flicker bronze.
Jude sags against his chests. His knees feel weak, and he would collapse if not for the rigid edges digging into his back, holding him up. Cool, fresh air flows into his deprived lungs as he heaves in breath after breath, head spinning. His mouth is wet, sticky. He raises a hand like a trance to touch the corner of his lips. His fingers come away red-
Oh.
Oh shit.
Oh shit oh fuck oh-
Now that his brain isn't lacking oxygen, the reality of the situation crashes over him in a wave of cold water. Across from him, Sharpness looks dazed, and he, JudeLow, did that. He just kissed the guy he hates and- His thoughts devolve into chaos.
"Jude?" Sharpness' voice is raspy, breathless. "Jude-"
"Uh." Jude coughs into his fist and wipes at his mouth with his sleeves, trying to get rid of the blood. "Uh. Fuck. That wasn't supposed to happen. Shit. Fuck. I'm sorry." His words are not coherent in the slightest but he keeps forcing them out, one stumbling after the other, so he doesn't have to hear what Sharpness has to say about this. He has the feeling he wouldn't be able to handle it. Something else is growing in his chest and oh, it's fear, icy cold fear extinguishing any residual heat that may have been there before. "Yeah. So. Fuck you, I'm sorry, I'm going to go now."
And he does what he does best, what he's been trying not to do thus far: he runs.