Work Text:
The thing about Jo was that he didn’t want people.
Oh, he wanted things. He wanted a lot of things, and he wanted them a great deal. But he didn’t lust the way some of the others did. He didn’t want people carnally. No matter how sensual, alluring, or outright debauched someone got, Jo seemed to recognize it as a performance skill without physically responding. He was easy to fluster, but hard to arouse.
That made him seducing him quite a challenge.
The thing about the team was that it was made up of people drawn to challenges and addicted to conquering them. It was a big part of what made them great.
And when it came to this one, K was trying the hardest. No one could really contest that. He was handsy with everyone, but downright provocative with the people he actually wanted to bring down, and he’d set his heart on toppling Jo very early on and never given up.
He’d flustered Jo nearly to the point of tears more times than he could count. He could give Jo the shivers with the merest brush of his fingers, or with glancing eye contact at a mischievous angle. Jo was absolutely desperate for him, dogging his heels and trying to absorb every accessible element of who he was, and K loved seeing those facets reflected back at him from behind Jo’s eyes.
But he couldn’t make Jo want to sleep with him, no matter what he tried. Jo loved it when K touched him, and he seemed to enjoy touching K back on the rare occasion when he found the courage, but it never went anywhere. He never seemed to be restraining any more dangerous urges.
It was slowly driving K insane.
He wasn’t used to people not wanting him that way. Everyone wanted him. He’d put a lot of work into honing that particular trait, and he was proud of it. It was hard to reconcile how obsessively devoted and hungry he knew Jo was with his apparent immunity to one of K’s most powerful and reliable charms.
He’d been baiting Jo into doing something for years, through increasingly inventive methods, but nothing was working. Absolutely nothing.
Jo was never going to so much as kiss him, he was in the process of realizing, though he was determined not to accept it. Jo was never going to lay hungry hands on him, or ache and tremble under K’s hands, or fall apart skin to skin the way K had imagined a thousand times.
He was never going to want K the way K wanted him, and K couldn’t stand it.
But what was there to do? Sit him down and say it baldly, when there was no response Jo could give him that would satisfy? That wouldn’t make it worse?
Beg until Jo gave what he could out of his deep-rooted desire to deserve K’s love? That would be monstrous.
All he could do was stew, and simmer, take as much of it out on others as he could, and try to talk his heart around. Surely, given nothing to sustain it, the obsession would have to fade eventually. Surely.
It got worse. Every day, it got worse. Jo got better, onstage and off, charisma blooming and deepening, and K only got hungrier, taunted by the feast he knew was a mirage and would only taste of dust if he actually got his teeth into it.
He almost felt bad for all the people he himself had teased and provoked over the years without ever intending to give them anything. Was this how they’d felt? Had they painfully craved without hope of fulfillment just like this? Had he had the kind of power over them that Jo had over him, now? The power to drive them to do anything for a chance?
But being wanted like that was in the job description. It was also in Jo’s. They weren’t supposed to satisfy anyone. They were supposed to be unattainable. He and Jo were both very good at their jobs.
Which meant he couldn’t even be mad, really. He was the one who’d spent these years doing his absolute best to help Jo grow and refine himself into what he was now. He’d raised his own destruction, shaped his own downfall with patient, loving hands. It was perfect. Jo was perfect.
K was going to lose his mind.
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