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The first time that Johan suggests it, Tenma doesn’t even let him finish.
They’re in the kitchen of the small place that they’ve begun to share. Share is a strong word. Johan doesn’t pay rent, nor is he listed on any papers, and he doesn’t even live there all the time. He’ll disappear for days at a time, long enough stretches that something cold will start to take root in Tenma’s heart and he’ll think that maybe, this is happening all over again. There’s another trail of bodies, another path to follow down, another impossible choice. Johan, versus whatever he’s done. Tenma, versus finally being free from all this.
So far he hasn’t had to choose. Before Tenma can even bring himself to go down the rabbit hole of checking missing person notices and police blotters, Johan is home again. Crawling into bed with him and taking up more room than he should. Technically, the guest room is his, all soft sheets and minimalist decor, as inoffensive as possible, because Tenma doesn’t know what Johan likes and he thinks that if he asked him, Johan might not answer at all. As it is, his ignorance of it might be enough of an answer. Maybe he doesn’t want anything except Tenma—if that’s even a want , and not just another mind game.
Whenever he’s here, it’s like he never left.
Whenever he’s gone, it’s like he was never here at all. Because Johan is, at his core, allergic to leaving pieces of himself behind.
Which makes Tenma wonder if any of this is even real. Johan is always so careful to pick up his pieces, the smallest shards of them, and use them to sand away another part of himself. Nothing is ever left behind, except for when it is. Nothing ever matters, except for when it does, when Johan’s got his face pressed into the curve of Tenma’s neck and one arm thrown over his shoulder, and Tenma thinks that he’s a little bit closer to understanding what it is that Johan’s getting out of all this.
They’re fucking, because of course they are.
They’re fucking, because there’s nothing else to do when Johan shows up out of the blue one day, rain pouring down his face melting all his features together, almost identical to the last time he was standing in front of Tenma. The circumstances have changed. Neither has a gun in their hands. Neither has a death wish, at least one that they’re saying out loud.
“Can I stay here?” Johan says, soft in the words, even softer in the curve of his mouth. Water drips down from his bangs, which are stringy and curled against the skin. He looks pale underneath it. He always has. He’s always seemed more ghost than human.
“You’re soaked,” Tenma says. There’s a heavy wind and it warps the path of the rain, sending some of it to pool just inside of the doorframe at Tenma’s feet. Pinprick drops of water stain his shirt. Still, he doesn’t close the door. “Where’s Nina?”
He would think, after all of this, that Johan would come to her. Nina is the one who loves him. Nina is the one who forgave him. Everything about them is so inexplicably intertwined that he almost believes that if he looks over Johan’s shoulder, he’ll see another of the same face, staring back at him.
Johan edges a little closer, showing Tenma that the only thing behind him is rainclouds. “You tell me.”
They’re fucking, because after Tenma’s committed the sin of letting Johan back into his life, it’s a little hard not to commit the sin of fucking him too.
Which isn’t to say it happens immediately. There’s a lot of things that have to happen first. He has to let Johan inside. He has to stop looking over his shoulder. He has to trust Johan when he says that he isn’t going to hurt him and he never was. He knows that it’s the truth, he knows that the entire time Johan didn’t so much as point a single gun in his direction—just made him watch as he pointed them everywhere else.
But that doesn’t mean that it’s any easier to trust. It isn’t any easier to look at Johan and not see the flooded street in Ruhenheim, the flames of the university library, the body on the hospital rooftop.
Still, it happens. He lets Johan inside while he’s home. And then, when he comes home after working a late shift and Johan is there again, standing against the door in the rain, he gives him a spare key. This is the point where he starts fixing up the guest room, but the same day that he finishes fixing it up he goes to sleep with Johan next to him instead, backs to each other, bed filled with so much tension he could cut it with a knife.
The thing is, Johan doesn’t like to sleep.
He doesn’t like to sleep but he likes to be touched. He likes hands crawling up his sides and tongues in his mouth, so five days after he first starts sleeping in his bed, he asks Tenma to kiss him. He’s got his fist in Tenma’s shirt when he asks, and he’s lax with fatigue, and they both know that he’s counting on Tenma being the same way.
Because this is never happening if he gives Tenma even an inch to pull away.
Tenma rolls over to look at Johan, but doesn’t dignify the question with an answer . “Johan,” he says patiently.
“Doctor Tenma.”
“Go to sleep.”
“What’s wrong?”
Tenma makes a frustrated noise and rolls back over to stare at the ceiling. There’s too many things wrong. “Is that really what you want?”
“Yes.” Johan gets an inch closer. “Come on.”
So they’re kissing and because of that they’re also fucking, and sometimes Johan lives here and sometimes he doesn’t. They’re in the kitchen, and Tenma is washing his hands after getting home from work and Johan is sitting in one of the barstools looking right through him.
“I was thinking, Doctor Tenma,” Johan starts. “Next time we fuck.”
Tenma’s hand jolts a little. He’s not sure he’ll ever really be used to this—both Johan’s crass dialogue, and the fact that it’s Johan at all.
Johan thumps one leg against the wood of the counter and continues, “We could put that gun of yours to use.”
Tenma’s gun is carefully secured in a locked safe in his closet, buried under boxes of newspaper articles and clothing. From time to time, even he forgets it’s there. He thought about pawning it off when he first got back from Ruhenheim, but he still hasn’t been able to bring himself to do it. All those months of training, and he only ever fired one bullet.
One bullet, and it never even hit the real target.
He’s never told Johan about the gun. The only time Johan has ever seen it is when it’s been pointed right at him, and there’s no reason to believe that Tenma would’ve kept it. He’s shed nearly everything else he brought with him—the clothes, the shoes, he’s even cropped his hair back to how it used to be before this all started. Why would he still have the gun?
But it’s Germany, and a Germany post-Johan-Liebert, even though most people still don’t really know who that is. It’s a Germany that’s been wracked with crime all over. Not having a gun would be a stupid thing to do.
So of course Johan knows about the gun. He probably knows Tenma’s place even better than he does, because that’s the only way he can live in it so effortlessly. That’s the only way he can walk down the hall without stepping on the creaky floorboard, or washing his hands without turning the faucet to the wrong angle, the one that makes it leak.
It’s the only way that he can take up space in Tenma’s heart without leaving behind a crater.
Johan looks down at his hands. “You know what I mean? Like—”
“Johan.”
He looks up at Tenma sheepishly. There’s a hint of a smile in his lips, buried beneath the surface.
“No way.”
“Doctor Tenma…” Johan reaches across the counter.
His hand stays empty.
“I’m not putting a gun anywhere near you,” Tenma says. “Especially in bed. Are you nuts?”
“You can’t say you’ve never thought about it.” Johan’s lip curves up a little. “Come on.”
“I haven’t,” Tenma says. He steps closer and closes his fist around Johan’s wrist. “What makes you think I would do that to you?”
Johan flips their hands, forcing Tenma’s into his own. “So you’re okay with planning to shoot me down in public spaces, but you can’t even put a gun to my head in the privacy of your own home?”
“I’m not talking about this with you, Johan.”
Tenma looks exhausted, and Johan’s barely even getting started.
“Do you need your meds upped?” Tenma pulls his fingers away from Johan’s one at a time. It’s not difficult. “Is that—is that what this is?”
Is this another death wish, just cloaked in eroticism instead, because it’s his new way of getting in Tenma’s head? Is this all this has ever been? Johan’s trying to get better—he’s trying to make Johan better. He’s trying to make all of this better than it is. If he can make this into something that it isn’t, something that it never has been, then maybe, just maybe, Johan will stay this time.
Maybe he can stop looking at Johan and expecting to one day see a body.
Johan bites his lip. “I never said I wanted you to pull the trigger.”
Johan is stubborn. He’d have to be, in order to be this good at getting under Tenma’s skin. He takes what he wants and when he doesn’t get that then he keeps asking, pushing and pulling at the boundaries until they’ve eroded altogether. No doesn’t mean yes , it means maybe.
So Tenma doesn’t expect the discussion to be over completely.
But it lays dormant for longer than he expects. A week passes. Some of it Johan is there, and some of it he isn’t. Two nights he’s in bed next to Tenma, and a third he’s on the balcony, staring out into the city.
“Come back to bed,” Tenma says. It’s quiet enough outside for the words to carry even from the mattress. The glass door is cracked open, just enough for a cool breeze to settle in, and he doesn’t have the strength to get up and close it.
Johan doesn’t make a move. He has one of Tenma’s t-shirts on, and maybe one of his pairs of pants too, judging by the way it hangs off his frame. When Tenma sits up and squints, he can see the white-knuckle grip against the railing.
“Johan,” he says, softer, and he isn’t sure this one is heard at all.
In the morning, the glass door is closed and Johan is gone. He’s there the next day though, coming in out of the cold when Tenma least expects it and making a home on his couch, knees pulled up to his chest with eyes wide and wanting.
Tenma has two surgeries scheduled in the evening back to back the next day, and then an emergency call while he’s on the way home. It’s a simple procedure, but it still goes on for longer than it should. He can’t focus. That’s the issue. The tweezers get too loose in his hand, his hair sticks to his forehead with sweat, and the patient’s bleeding all over the place.
By the time he finally gets home, it’s pushing two a.m., and he knows better than to expect Johan to still be around. Johan doesn’t like waiting up for him. He barely knows what to do with himself when Tenma’s home. Tenma’s taken notice of the way that he only ever shows in the mornings, and the evenings when he comes home. His days off. Never on the days that he takes a sick day, never when it’s unexpected.
When he comes home, Johan comes home. And if he isn’t coming home, then Johan has no reason to wait around.
Which is why it’s such a surprise when he falls into bed, work clothes still on, house completely dark, and hears soft, soft breathing.
“Johan?” He says quietly.
The bed creaks as he rouses. “Doctor Tenma… you’re home?”
Tenma inches closer, nuzzling his face into Johan’s neck. “Why are you still here?”
“Waited for you.”
“You never wait for me.”
He doesn’t need the light on to be able to imagine the smirk painted on Johan’s features as he says, “I never have to.” Johan rolls over, bringing their bodies that much closer.
This close, Tenma can feel the heat between Johan’s thighs against him, practically burning hot and weeping pre-cum all over the fabric. He hisses. “Johan, it’s late.”
“Aw, but Doctor Tenma, shouldn’t you take care of me?” Johan teases. “I’ve been waiting here all night for you.” He kisses the edge of Tenma’s jaw with spit-slick lips, trailing up to his mouth and whispering, “Make me feel better, Doctor.”
Tenma’s own slacks are growing tight, his cock practically throbbing with each press of Johan’s lips against him. It’s Pavlovian at this point. Johan’s molded him into exactly the way he wants him to be—pliant and submissive to his touch, but always, always thinking that he’s still in control. That when Johan’s underneath him, face pressed into the pillow, whimpering as Tenma gets balls-deep inside of him, that Tenma’s the one that chose this, and that Tenma is the one that’s crossing a line.
In this way, maybe Johan’s finally made him into a monster after all.
He chases Johan’s lips with his own, just barely missing as Johan pulls back.
Johan’s got a fist tight in the collar of Tenma’s shirt. It’s a nice shirt, and Tenma doesn’t like to get it wrinkled, but it was going to get slept in anyway. Johan traces the line of the collarbone with his thumb through the fabric. He pulls Tenma a little closer but still not enough to kiss, just enough for him to be able to feel as he lets out a laugh, short, and full of breath against Tenma’s cheek. “Come on,” he urges, before finally leaning in and letting Tenma swallow him down.
Tenma drinks up everything he can get. Bites the edges of Johan’s lips the way that he likes, squeezing out a whine, and then swallowing that too. Just this is enough to rile Johan up. He likes being touched and he likes being toyed with, but only in the ways that he wants to be. He’s a cloud hanging over everything. No matter how vulnerable he is, no matter how many times Tenma brings him to the brink of orgasm until he’s barely conscious, he is always always always pulling the strings.
“It’s gonna make a mess,” Tenma says against Johan’s cheek, when he’s finally brought himself to pull away.
“You’ll clean me up,” Johan answers easily, sliding in for another kiss.
Ten minutes later, Tenma has three fingers inside Johan and he’s so hard that his head is spinning. He turned the light on so he could see Johan, and he’s thinking about never turning it off ever again. Johan’s rim is pink and shiny where it’s stretched around his knuckles, drooling a mix of spit and lube onto the mattress. His cock’s hard and untouched where it sits against his stomach, dripping pre-cum over the surface of his stomach. Some of it’s gotten smeared against his nipple, making the pink look even more vibrant than it should be.
He presses a kiss to the inside of Johan’s thigh and curls his finger, relishing the way Johan tightens around him.
“Fuck,” Johan hisses. “Please.”
“You look good like this.” Tenma pushes deeper, watching Johan’s face contort.
“You just don’t wanna have to fuck me.”
“Ha.” Tenma pulls his fingers out and wipes them on the sheet. He leans in for a kiss, nipping at Johan’s bottom lip. “That’s a lie.”
He sinks into Johan easily, without even a hint of resistance. The lube has gone a long way in easing the stretch. Johan’s tight around him in all the right ways, a pulsing heat that only gets better as he rocks up against his prostate.
The movement draws a sharp inhale out of Johan. “So good.”
Tenma draws back and pushes in again, this time not as deep. “Better?”
“No,” Johan whines, hooking his legs around Tenma’s thighs to pull him in. “Come on.”
“I’m teasing,” Tenma says. He lets Johan guide him into place as he picks up a rhythm, the soft sounds of skin against skin and heavy breathing drowning out the conversation. Every time Johan gasps his cock jerks a little, painting a new thread of pre-cum over his stomach. Tenma reaches down to help him out a little, but Johan clasps a hand around his wrist and pushes it towards his thigh instead.
“Let me do it,” he says, hand grasping tight and fast around the base. He’s not good at multitasking—every movement he makes gets cut short with every push and pull of Tenma. He likes being fucked better than he likes getting off. But his grip is enough, and so is the warm friction that he gets every time he rides up against it, and soon enough he’s got the knuckles of his other hand in his mouth and he’s biting down hard enough to taste blood.
Tenma stills inside Johan. “Let me hear you,” he says, reaching up and prying Johan’s fingers from his mouth. The nails are bitten down and the sharp edges jab at Tenma’s knuckles in resistance, but all he has to do to get Johan to let go is sink a little deeper inside, a little closer to the spot that makes Johan weak in the knees.
“Fuck,” Johan grits out, and then that’s hushed too, as he bites down on his tongue in lieu of a hand.
“Stop,” Tenma scolds, and leans forward and kisses him. It’s not like he can hear Johan any better like this, all the words and pants going straight down his throat, but that’s not even what he really wanted in the first place.
Johan’s cock jumps between them, ever responsive to Tenma’s touch. Johan’s hand is slick around it still, making a mess of the both of them. The other one is crawling up Tenma’s side, searching for his hand again. He pulls away from the kiss slowly. Now that his mouth isn’t occupied at all, it’s easy to hear the syllables spilling out the edges with every snap of Tenma’s hips.
They’re both close, and they both know it. Maybe Johan a little better than Tenma.
He brings Tenma’s hand up to his cheek and then his temple. His grips tighter than before, knuckles white with how hard he’s gripping Tenma. He could break his hand like this. He could break his dick , and probably every cell in Tenma’s body too with how tight he is, but that isn’t important right now.
“Think about it Doctor Tenma,” he pants, “Think about fucking me like this.” He jabs Tenma’s hand a little harder against his head, until there’s a fingernail scraping against his eyebrow. “Think about having a gun in your hand. Think about killing me if I so much as even breathe the wrong way.”
It’s probably a bad look for Tenma that he comes right then.
Johan soothes him through it, rubbing the back of his hand, even though he keeps it exactly where it is, fingers pressed directly over the raised skin of his scar.
When Tenma comes back to himself, he doesn’t pull out all the way. He leaves his hand in Johan’s and moves the other to cover the one around Johan’s shaft. “You want it that bad?” he rasps, rocking his hips against Johan’s, until Johan’s spilling all over them both, and the only answer he can give is in between gasps.
“Yes.”
Tenma rubs at the pink pucker of Johan’s scar and frowns, before leaning in and kissing it. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Five days later, Tenma starts making preparations.
The first order of business is to check that he even still has the gun—that this, for once, is something that Johan wants that is exactly what it seems on the surface.
Johan’s not necessarily the type to steal a weapon. God knows he can find his own. If he wants a gun to shoot, and Tenma’s the one he wants to shoot at, then this is not the path that he would choose.
But he checks anyway, because he has to, because it’s Johan, and because if there’s no gun, then there’s no this.
Whatever he’s about to agree to.
The gun is there, just as he left it. There’s a bullet in the chamber, and three more in the magazine. He counts them, but doesn’t take them out. There will be time for that later. Now, he just wants to sit with the idea. He wants to feel the weight of the gun in his palm, remember how the trigger feels, and what it feels like to point it without shooting.
It’s not a difficult task.
The safety’s on and he’s pointing at the ground, at the safe, and he doesn’t dare let his finger brush the trigger more than it has to. All things considered, it shouldn’t go off. It shouldn’t hurt anyone.
He lifts it a little higher, pointing at the wall, and trying to see Johan there instead.
This is also not a difficult task. He doesn’t know how to hold a gun and not see Johan. It’s branded into the motion. Maybe that’s the reason this whole thing feels easier than it should. Because, really, this isn’t anything more than he’s already done before—he’s just holding it.
Johan said it himself. He’s not asking Tenma to shoot him. This isn’t another rainy night, another death wish, another way of grappling with the impossible and forcing it into Tenma’s hands.
This is Johan relinquishing control.
It’s not lost on Tenma that Johan’s still in control if he’s the one that wants it. Johan will always be pulling the strings, because this is the stage that he’s set, and Tenma is the puppet that doesn’t know how to leave it. But there’s beauty to be found in the offering of even a single cord, and God damn it if Tenma doesn’t want to pull this string and see how much it takes to break.
Which is to say; he wants to do this. Beneath the arousal, beneath how worked up he’s been making himself for the past week over the still image of Johan on his knees, beneath the part of him that’s used to bending and breaking to grant Johan exactly what he wants, is the primal urge to play with a lit match and see what lights.
It’s dangerous and it’s sexy and he’s never getting any use out of this gun ever again, so he’s gripping this string with everything he’s got and pulling .
(It doesn’t matter what happens after this—it doesn’t matter where Johan goes, who he hurts, what he does, because he knows better this time than to ever think that he could stop him. He’ll chase him down, because he always has before, because there’s a piece of him inside of Johan and a piece of Johan inside of him, but he isn’t deluding himself anymore into thinking that he can stop this with a bullet.)
Downstairs, a key turns in the front door.
Tenma wipes the gun off with a cloth and puts it back in the case, locking and replacing it exactly how it had been. There’s the sound of footsteps in the kitchen, the rummaging of drawers, the sharp metal of a knife dropping into the sink basin. All of it rings quietly in his ears as he shuts the closet door and proceeds down the stairs, just to find exactly what he expects.
“Doctor Tenma,” Johan says, at the first creak of wood. He’s drying his hands with a towel, and there’s a shock of red against the light blue cotton.
Tenma takes a step closer. “Are you bleeding?”
“A little.”
“Let me take care of it.”
“Don’t bother.” Johan puts the towel down, revealing a thin line across the top of his hand. Blood keeps beading at the surface, and he keeps wiping it away with his other hand. “It’s not deep.”
“That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t take care of it.”
Tenma takes his hand and brings it back to the sink anyway, washing a new round of cool water over it. “Why is there a knife here?”
“Got blood on it.”
Tenma stills long enough for the water to become ice cold. Slowly, the shock sets in and he shuts the sink off. Pink water drips from Johan’s hand onto the knife. “Did you hurt yourself?”
Johan shrugs. “Does it matter?” His hand slips out of Tenma’s, and into his pocket.
“Yes it matters. I don’t want you to hurt yourself inside my house, Johan.”
“Okay,” Johan says, stepping away. “I’ll hurt myself outside of your house.”
Tenma sighs. “That’s not what I meant. Are you still taking your meds?”
Johan’s meds are under-the-counter pills that Tenma’s been getting as a favor from a psychiatrist that works at the hospital. Antidepressants, antipsychotics, sleeping pills. Whatever he thinks will help. Whatever will get Johan to stop seeing the world as a battlefield whose war has already been lost. Tenma knows it’s branded into him, that extricating the problems is a much deeper problem than any pills can fix, but as long as Johan is staying under his roof (no matter that this isn’t really staying), he has to do something.
Johan’s quiet stare is just as loud of an answer as if he’d spoken aloud—he isn’t.
“Johan.”
“Doctor Tenma,” Johan refutes.
“Do you want to get better?”
“I’m not getting better.”
Tenma sucks a breath in between his teeth.
“I’ll wash the knife,” Johan says, his gaze slowly coming back to Tenma. It starts at the bottom, crawling up Tenma’s legs before settling somewhere at his chest.
“I’ll do it,” Tenma interrupts before Johan can take a step. He picks the sponge up and turns the faucet on, scrubbing until his hand is tired. Most of the blood came off when Johan was rinsing off his own hand but he checks it over a few times to be sure, and even then he doesn’t really have the stomach to turn the water off and turn back around. He lets it run a few seconds longer, water dribbling down his wrist. “Where do you go when you leave?”
The only indication of surprise at the question is a quick draw of breath from Johan. “Nowhere important.”
“Is it important to you?”
Is anything important to Johan? Nina. He knows that. But Nina is busy with university. She can’t be accountable for all of Johan’s disappearing acts. So what else is there? Is this important to Johan? Or is this just a warm bed to sleep in, and a body to fuck?
Johan thinks about this question. “No.”
Tenma turns the faucet off and turns to look at him, as if he can draw the answer out by sheer will. Usually, he can’t. Johan’s stronger than mind games, especially when he’s masterminding his own. He’s guarded away all the parts of himself that he has left, and there’s no breaking these chains. Johan probably couldn’t even break them if he wanted to. The best he can do is loosen them, letting the smallest pieces slip out, warping in shape along the way.
For whatever reason, Johan chooses now to do this. “Sometimes I go to the park. Sometimes I sit in the lobby of the hospital and try to look for you through the glass doors.”
Tenma’s breath catches.
“I spend a lot of time just watching people.”
There’s water steadily dripping onto the floor from Tenma’s hands, but he doesn’t move for a towel.
“I woke up from the dream and since then, all I’ve been doing is trying to find it again.”
Johan’s not dreaming, but Tenma is.
Or he's dying, and this is the way that he's going to go, head crushed between Johan's thighs, drowning in the scent of his body.
Trying to confront Johan about his habits leads to trying to talk to Johan which leads to trying to touch Johan which leads to Johan, face down and ass up on the sofa as Tenma presses wet kisses to his hole.
"Can I touch you, Johan?" Tenma asks, sitting down on the couch next to him. Johan's posture curves a little as he does—a little more to the side, a little more coy.
"You can touch me whenever you want, Doctor Tenma."
"That’s not what I mean," Tenma says, impatience holding him down like a weight in his chest. His shoulder nudges Johan’s "I don't want you to hurt yourself."
"I'm not hurting myself," Johan says, opening both hands. The cut on his left hand has clotted into a thin red line. Dried blood crusts two of the nails on the opposite hand.
"You're impossible," Tenma says, but Johan is easy too, so easy that when he pulls Tenma in for a kiss, he gives in.
Just because the strings are pulling him doesn’t mean that he's fighting them.
Tenma’s hand is heavy on Johan’s thighs as he pushes them open wider. Wide enough to lean in and press the flat of his tongue to Johan’s taint, the skin more tender than he remembers. Johan retaliates with a groan that thrums through his whole body, vibrating in Tenma’s ear where his cheek presses to the back of Johan’s thigh, soaking in the warmth of him.
The hair on his legs is light blond and baby smooth. You wouldn't even know it was there unless you've spent as long with your hands on it as Tenma has, felt the way that the muscles underneath throb when he hits the right spots inside of Johan.
Fingerprint-shaped bruises dot the insides and backs of Johan’s thighs, souvenirs of Tenma’s touch. They’ll fade by morning, but there’ll always be more. He can’t keep his hands off Johan long enough for the skin to ever be completely unmarred. There’s always a reason to spread his legs open wider, or to force them closed and watch the way cum drips down them. Hoist him up on the sofa, on his lap, on the counter, wherever it is that he can sit pretty on a pedestal and look down on Tenma like some kind of God.
He’s not very good at being a God, but that’s besides the point. Omnipotence is in the hold he has over Tenma, the salvation of releasing inside of him. It has nothing to do with anything Johan does. Johan wraps Tenma around his fingers like a demon. He calls him home to the space between his thighs like a siren, and leaves no trace like a ghost.
His cock drools pre-cum against the cushion. Tenma catches some of it with his thumb and mumbles against the skin, "Should make you lick it up."
Johan's hole is slick enough with spit for two fingers to work their way inside, rubbing at his walls until he's gasping. "Doctor Tenma," he gets out, words soft, as if they're barely there. Closer to smoke in the air, something impossible to catch in your palm.
Tenma kisses the small of his back, the soft expanse of skin where his spine ends and his ass begins. Drives his fingers a little deeper, directly up against Johan's prostate. "Yeah?"
Johan's back rises and falls as he takes his time getting oxygen into his lungs. He's left his shirt on, one of Tenma’s faded ones, and it's bunched up around his ribs. "...nothing," he groans, voice low as Tenma’s fingers push up again.
"What is it?" Tenma urges. Milky white drips from Johan's cock, staining the suede of the sofa.
Johan bites down on the inside of his cheek and doesn't say anything coherent, leaving Tenma to read between the lines.
Reading between Johan's lines is hard. For starters, Johan doesn’t even have lines—he has thick inky black shapes of misery that you have to dig through with your fingers to find the empty spaces. He's a mess of half-truths and forgotten lies and secrets long kept and emotions not-really-there-anymore.
Tenma pulls his fingers out.. Johan whines at the loss of contact, ass arching back against Tenma.
It’s tempting to give him what he wants. If none of this was tempting, then it wouldn’t be happening at all. It’s not logic that has Tenma fucking him, and even less obligation.
(Though—he has thought about it. More than once. Enough for it to become an occurrence in his mind, every time the dialogue and touch lapses for a little too long during moments like this.)
( Is he just fucking Johan because he has to? Because it’s the only way to get Johan feeling human, feeling alive, feeling a little less like the world is cracking under his feet?)
(He’s not fucking Johan to save himself, or anyone else, but it might be an unintended side effect.)
(Then again though, maybe not. Maybe it doesn’t matter how high he can get Johan feeling, if at the end of it he still has rock bottom to come crashing right back down to.)
Tenma leans his chest against Johan’s, close enough to hear his pulse. He pushes Johan’s cheek into the pillow and starts to feel it too, vibrations from the carotid artery traveling up his wrist. He’s heavier than Johan, enough for the weight to hurt, but Johan doesn’t protest as Tenma presses against his body, with the exception of the begging for more spilling out of his lips.
“Please,” he rasps. When he pushes his ass up, it meets Tenma’s clothed thigh. Tenma thinks about staying like this, maybe grinding a little against his cock if Johan really wants to come, but ultimately the thought of Johan’s tight wet heat wins out and his fingers are pressing back against the rim.
Johan sucks him back in like his body was made for it. Maybe it was. He was bred to be beautiful, after all, and what is the sweat-soaked entangle of their bodies if not beautiful?
He coaxes Johan through orgasm, strings of white smearing down the couch cushions and the knee of Tenma’s work pants. Not a minute later, Johan is grappling for Tenma’s waistband and mumbling "Let me—"
Let me destroy you .
Tenma catches his wrists and pushes Johan back down, kissing the back of his neck and draining all the fight out of him. "Don't worry about it."
He'll deal with it himself once Johan’s gone. Tight fist, bitten lips, shaking his way through it in the privacy of his bed.
Though, that privacy never comes. Johan sticks around for the rest of the day and even into the evening, bundling himself so tight against Tenma’s body that when the other side of the mattress is empty in the morning, it's a whiplash beyond anything he's known before.
The ache in his groin comes curling up again, knees weak with the forgotten promise of release. Still hazy with sleep, he buries his face in Johan’s pillow and jacks himself off quietly.
It doesn’t smell like anything. He's not sure what he expected.
Still half on the verge of sleep, he spills into his hand. He's not sure what he's dreaming of but against all odds, he thinks he's starting to like it.
Four bullets. Three in the magazine, and one in the chamber. Tenma counts them as he removes them, fingertips smearing sweat all over the iron. He lines them up on a sheet, counting again, and then drops them into a small box, burying it in the bottom of a drawer.
The gun doesn’t feel any lighter in his hand with them gone.
He flexes the trigger and waits for a firing that never comes. He does it again, and when nothing happens that time either, he sets the gun back down and goes about cleaning out the inside of it. There shouldn’t be anything in the chamber. Russian roulette may be more of Johan’s thing but it is certainly not Tenma’s. The only way that this is happening is if he’s as safe about this as he can possibly be.
(The safest way is not even to use this at all—because if you have a gun in your hand then you always have to be ready for it to fire. That much was drilled into him by Bernhardt when he learned to use the damned thing in the first place. This is a gun . This is a weapon that shoots and kills and nearly has before, and is everything that Tenma has been trying to put behind him.)
(It’s safer to tell Johan no, but the more Tenma thinks about it, the more he wants it. The more he wants to push Johan to the edge, give him exactly what he wants until he’s begging for it.)
(It’s safer to use a replica, something that’s not meant to fire at all, but that won’t cut it for Johan, and it won’t for Tenma either. He knows this gun too well. He wants it to be real.)
Cleaning the gun is a methodical process. Tenma refuses to let it be anything but. It’s the only way he’ll ever let it happen—if every single step along the way is carefully, delicately handled. Just because he’s willing to play with fire doesn’t mean that he wants to start burning bridges. Johan’s taken two bullets to the brain already. There doesn’t need to be a third, even if the whole thing does come down to the allure of if there was.
If he was able to finally end this.
Somehow, he gets Johan to take his meds.
The somehow, is by getting Johan down on his knees on the kitchen floor, staring up at Tenma like a child. It’s not the reverent way that Tenma sometimes looks at him. Worship is exclusively Johan’s department, a throne that he doesn’t quite deserve. The closest way to describe this might be trust, but that’s just as much of a lie as to call it worship.
It’s obedience laced with arsenic.
Tenma presses a pill to the flat of Johan’s tongue and watches him swallow. The hollow of his throat shifts with the motion, shadows flickering down and across his collarbone as he sucks in one cheek and sticks his tongue in the other.
“It’s not supposed to taste like anything,” Tenma says.
Johan has this look on his face like maybe it does.
He doesn’t feel like arguing. He feeds another to Johan and this time he doesn’t pull his hand away. He keeps it pressed over Johan’s lips, holding them closed as he savors, and then swallows the capsule. Johan’s bottom lip is dry and bitten. Tenma’s thumb skims over and pushes against it, easily slipping inside.
Johan’s tongue teases the side of it. It’s sticky-wet inside his mouth, and weird to touch with a finger. It’s only ever been pressed against his own, or stretched wide around his cock.
As if making the same connotation Tenma is, Johan shifts a little closer and releases Tenma’s thumb with a pop. His hand snags in the belt loop of Tenma’s pants. “If you want I can—”
There’s drool all over Tenma’s hand now, and it smears in Johan’s hair as he gently pushes him away. “Don’t worry about it.”
Johan pauses, but doesn’t let go completely.
Tenma brushes his hair back down, trying and failing to get it looking the way it usually does. Instead of carefully being swept to the sides, his bangs hang directly over his eyes, wisps of sunlight blocking out the darkness in his eyes. “Just get better. Okay?”
“Doctor Tenma,” Johan starts. His finger curls around the belt loop and then drops back down to his side. He swallows again and says, “I don’t know what you think that means.”
That’s fair.
Tenma doesn’t think he knows what the fuck he means either.
Maybe there is no better.
Better, is this; Johan on a leash. Johan pulling strings, as he always is, but at least the strings are starting to lead back to him.
It’s probably never getting any better than this.
That’s fine. This is already more than Tenma deserves.
A week passes without Johan coming home. Tenma tries not to think about it, until he does. Until the monotone rhythm of work begins to grate harder than usual, with nothing to buffer it. Another week passes and it’s impossible not to feel the hole that’s been left behind, even though Tenma has nothing real to trace it to.
Johan doesn’t eat meals with him. He doesn’t sleep with him, not in the literal sense, not enough to be waking up beside him in the morning. He steals Tenma’s clothes but Tenma’s wardrobe isn’t very distinct in the first place. It’s hard to tell one shirt from another, harder still to notice one being gone completely.
Still, the sensation of something missing persists.
Police blotters don’t mention any names that Johan has used before. Neither do death notices. There’s no string of crimes that make sense for Johan to commit—it’s mostly robberies and drunk driving and illegal substances and it’s all lacking the murder that Johan is native to.
Not everything Johan does is a murder. Not every kill of his can even be classified as that.
But there’s no suicides either.
There’s an article on the University of Heidelberg in one issue. A grainy black and white photo displays the campus and when Tenma looks closer, there’s Nina in the background, head buried in a textbook. None of the other students in the photo spare her a passing glance, and none are identical either. It’s the smallest iota of proof, but it’s enough to assure Tenma that she’s safe, and so maybe Johan hasn’t gone to her either.
He’s not sure he ever will. He’s spoken to Nina a few times since the whole thing with Johan started, careful to leave out the details, the hard parts, the I’m fucking your brother and it’s not my fault. I’m fucking your brother and it’s the only thing I know how to do. Nina never mentioned Johan in their conversations, so the natural conclusion is she hasn’t seen him at all. Though it’s possible she’s been keeping late-night secrets too, but he’ll never truly know, will he?
Work drags on, one day at a time. Some schedules are busier than others. Sometimes there’s nothing to do but watch the clock tick away the minutes of the day, and other times he’s rushing from room to room, because even if it isn’t his surgery, there’s still something to be done, there’s still someone to help.
There’s another life that he can’t bear to let slip away.
He thinks about filing a missing person report. There’s too many hoops to jump through for it to work though. He doesn’t have a picture of Johan. Johan isn’t even his name, really, and it’s not like Tenma can legally claim guardianship over him. He’s a legal adult, who’s traveled all around Europe before even hitting the age of 25. If he has disappeared, then legally, who cares? So Tenma stops thinking about it, and he crosses out the number to the police that he has carefully etched into a note on the fridge.
Two days later, Johan comes home.
It’s been a long day. Bloody images of surgery meld together in his head, fused from lack of sleep and disconcerting worry. Almost every light on the way home is red, adding to an already longer-than-it-should-be commute. He doesn’t have any real reason to care though—there’s nothing to come home to. Just an empty home, and an even emptier abyss of want curdling inside of him.
By the time he gets inside, all the light has drained out of the sky. Even the moon and stars are hiding tonight, buried beneath the blackness of a hazy night fog. It makes the way that the light flicks on in the room all the more dizzying. Too bright, even though it’s only a warm golden hue. Too little, even though it soaks into everywhere to light up all the places he doesn’t want to see.
The house is empty, for what’s going on the third or fourth week in a row. Tenma doesn’t know. He isn’t keeping count anymore. It’s too hard to measure the difference between five days and two weeks, when at the end of the day they’re still netting the same result.
He doesn’t want to sleep. He wants to run himself ragged all around Germany a second time over and do it all again. If this is what it takes to have Johan, he’ll take it. The chase before the kill. The journey before the cage.
Nevermind that it’s not much of a cage if Johan was always able to leave.
If Johan wants him to follow, then he’ll be the one to lay the path. There will be a body, or a bullet. A remnant of something still needing to be saved.
If Johan wants him to follow, then he’ll have to come back, and if Johan comes back—
It’s selfish, but if Johan comes back, Tenma doesn’t want him to leave again. And it’s not out of concern for Johan, or anyone he might hurt, or any reason that would allow him to sleep at night. It’s as simple as this:
He doesn’t know who he is without Johan anymore. The whole thing has marred him like a bad bruise, but the blood under the surface isn’t draining away. Johan’s changed his life, for better or worse, taken all the pieces of him and rearranged them into something new, scraping open his fingertips on the bone along the way. They still look the same. His heart still beats the same. He’s the same person he was before, except for all the ways in which he isn’t. There’s cracks between the pieces and they’re wider than before and they’re just open enough for Johan to be able to slip through them easily.
And there’s no way for this to be anything but on purpose.
Johan wants him to want him. If he can’t move Tenma to kill him than he’ll move him to want him, because that’s a suicide for them both. Johan doesn’t want to be wanted, and Tenma doesn’t want to struggle with the impossible chasm between loving and chasing.
So all this is to say, Tenma isn’t sleeping.
He’s somewhere on the cusp of it, maybe. Pretty close, if he had to guess. If there was any less of a knot in his stomach he might be there already, but the knot is tight and the bile is thick in the back of his throat. His pillow is warm and stained with sweat, and he doesn’t care enough to flip it over. His eyes flutter closed. It’s still not sleep, but it’s still somewhat of a reprieve. He doesn’t know how long it takes but slowly, his pulse crawls back to a normal rate. The knot loosens enough for him to stop feeling nauseous, and there’s a period of time where he’s staring up at the ceiling and he realizes that he hasn’t been thinking about anything at all.
Sometime later, the mattress creaks, and it isn’t his fault.
He knows it’s Johan before he even hears the telltale breath. Johan has this way of moving—a fine tuned method of moving his body to make as little noise as possible. Tenma’s learned to listen to his movements by listening to the air around him. The shift in weight of a mattress, the rustle of fabric. Air sucked between teeth. The shifting blackness around him, and the way Johan seems to glow even through it.
Tenma shifts from his position, just enough to lift his ear off the pillow. The only inclination of Johan is the sinking feeling of the mattress beneath him and the warmth that begins to crawl out from his lungs as the situation fully sets in.
Johan is in his bed.
There are three things in his bed, and all of them are inexplicably intertwined with another.
There is him. There is Tenma, and everything that he is trying to be. There is Johan, and everything he is trying to destroy. And there is a gun, buried in the space between the mattress and the headboard, nestled deep, and they both reach for it at the same time.
Johan lets him grab it first. His fingers settle around Tenma’s wrist instead, scooting up a little closer to Tenma. His cheek knocks against the barrel of the gun and as soon as it does Tenma is quick to drop it. Johan pulls his hand back to it and guides Tenma’s fingers back in place.
“You can do it,” he says. Tenma doesn’t need the encouragement but they can both tell Johan isn’t saying it for Tenma’s benefit. “Come on.”
The barrel presses against his cheek again, light.
It’s empty. It’s supposed to be empty. The last time Tenma checked it it was empty, and there was zero chance of it firing anything that it wasn’t supposed to. The safety is on, and so he couldn’t pull the trigger even if he tried, and the gun is supposed to be empty.
Still, there’s no way of being sure.
The barrel ghosts over Johan’s jaw, pressing up against the bone. Tenma’s grip gets a little steadier, a little more confident. He blinks a few times, rooting himself back in the real world and away from the doorstep of slumber before he does anything else. His voice is only a rasp when he speaks. “Where have you been?”
He senses, more than he sees Johan stare up at him unblinking. No answer comes.
He flicks on the light next to the bed and takes in the view of Johan. He’s a little more gaunt than usual. A little more pale. It makes the scar on his forehead stand out even more. Tenma touches it with the hand that isn’t holding the gun and says, “Get up.”
Johan obeys. There’s a slight curve to his mouth that Tenma catches as he picks himself up off the mattress. He gets on the floor, knees bent, eyes wide, and waits for Tenma to settle in front of him. His gaze spends an equal amount of time flickering between Tenma’s eyes and the gun. It’s hard to say which he wants more—which he thinks he’s supposed to want.
This still is not a form of worship. There’s no reverence in either of their gazes. Reverence doesn’t burn like this. Reverence doesn’t grow roots deep into their skin and threaten to break through the surface. Reverence doesn’t go straight to Tenma’s cock and make it throb with a cadence that only compliance brings.
The gun hovers in front of Johan’s face, brushing against blond bangs. “This is what you want?”
Johan doesn’t speak, trailing his gaze up Tenma.
The gun jabs against his cheek and then pulls away. “Tell me.”
“Yes,” Johan responds.
There’s something thick in Tenma’s chest, and it isn’t exhaustion. It weighs his next words down but he manages to get them out anyway, tarry and smudged with more emotion than he’d like. “Where do you want it?” The barrel traces the line of Johan’s cheekbone before swooping down, closer to his mouth. “You want it right here?”
“Are you gonna shoot me, Doctor Tenma?” Johan asks. He wets his lips and chases the gun with them, spit smearing down the barrel. “You gonna give me what I want?”
Tenma rests it directly against Johan’s lip. “What do you want?”
It’s not just dirty talk—there’s a little bit of truth in it too. A little bit of Tenma trying to dig deeper than he should. What does Johan want out of this? What does Johan get from showing up at his doorstep over and over again, carving out spaces to squeeze himself into, just to leave those spaces hollow and gaping for weeks at a time?
Johan’s eyes glint in the light. He closes his eyes and his eyelashes settle on his cheeks, feather-light. He kisses the gun when Tenma presses it harder against him, pursed lips and flushed cheeks. “Whatever you want to give me.” His mouth moves higher up the barrel as he leans in closer, getting closer and closer to where Tenma’s fingers are wrapped around it, still just barely ghosting over the trigger. “Maybe you want to finish what you started,” he whispers. “Maybe you should make up for what you’ve done—this all started with you taking a bullet out of me, remember?” His mouth twitches. “Maybe you should put it back.”
There’s no truth in Johan’s words—not any truth that Tenma can do anything with. He doesn’t know what he expected. Even if there is a reason for all of this, how can Johan ever be expected to say it? Tenma’s choking on his own words, on the lead in his stomach that he doesn’t have the breath to name.
“Is that what you deserve?” He whispers.
“No,” Johan breathes out. Part truth, part prayer. His eyes lock onto Tenma’s again. They look more grey than blue in this light. “I don’t.”
Tenma guides the gun to the hollow of his throat, directly under his Adam’s apple. It fits perfectly between the start of his collarbones. The finger on the trigger shakes. If this is loaded, then he’s one safety click off away from ripping Johan’s throat open.
He pulls the gun away from Johan and weighs it in his hand again, thinking things through. It’s hard. It feels like his brain has turned to sludge and sunk straight to his cock and whatever’s left up there is too busy committing Johan’s features to memory in case it’s the last time he ever sees him again.
Then, less gently than before, he presses the barrel back against Johan’s lips.
It’s not an invitation. It’s a demand.
Johan takes it in carefully, a little at a time. He knows Tenma isn’t going to push him and it’s a knowledge that he holds with great pride, eyes crinkling a little as he looks up at Tenma. Steel on his tongue and death against his teeth and somehow, he’s still in complete control. It’s like a warning light how his chin shines with drool as he sucks the gun in deeper.
Johan doesn’t have a gag reflex. This is a fact that is helpful when he has Tenma’s cock down his throat, and is downright obscene when he has a pistol between his teeth. The gun isn’t big enough to go down his throat, but it gets pretty close, and Tenma’s practically salivating himself when Johan’s taken it deep enough that his lips are kissing the trigger.
It may not be enough to make him choke but there’s still something wet in his eyes as they stare up at Tenma, and that’s an achievement in itself.
“Good,” Tenma says, carefully drawing it back and then pushing it back in, up against the back of Johan’s throat. It’s easy to move it back and forth, the passage made easier by the slick slide of Johan’s tongue. The steel of the barrel is slick with spit and it’s even starting to drip from Tenma’s fingers. He fucks it a little deeper into Johan’s mouth, gripping his chin and forcing his mouth closed around it. “Good boy.”
Johan’s eyes shine.
Tenma slides the gun out of his mouth all the way and wipes the barrel on Johan’s cheek. A little gets in his hair, catching the strands and pasting them to the skin messily.
Tenma’s achingly hard, and he doesn’t remember at which point that happened. Sometime before the gun was in Johan’s mouth. Before the gun was even a player in this game at all.
Johan’s lips are still half-open and dripping, and it’s easy work to slide his cock inside, listening to the way Johan whimpers low in his throat at the stretch. Tenma gets a little lazy with the gun, smoothing over Johan’s hair with it, then his shoulders. Once his cock is settled in Johan’s throat, he presses the barrel of the gun lightly against the scar at Johan’s temple and says “Suck.”
Either Johan’s too tired—or too into it—to be a brat about it, or there’s nothing else to do but suck Tenma’s cock. Whatever it is, he complies immediately, mouth tight and wet around the shaft, squeezing a few drops of pre-cum right into the back of his throat. His eyes close, sealing the bright blue of them away from Tenma’s gaze and replacing it with the sight of tears on wet lashes. A few more form with every push and pull of Tenma’s cock against his lips, but aside from a few soft groans, there’s no complaints.
Johan’s hands are down at his sides, still. There’s no motion to bring them up to grip at Tenma’s thighs, or try to force the cock out of his mouth. He’s content with even the gun to his head, and when he opens his eyes again, it’s the only thing he looks at.
Not Tenma. Not the patch of pubic hair kissing the tip of his nose. Even as he rocks up against it as Tenma thrusts again.
Tenma skims the gun over his temple, watching the way the skin perspires under it. It’s an identical motion to the way Johan’s tongue moves under his dick, lazily slow.
There’s something forming on the edge of his tongue. Another question, another tease, another way to get underneath Johan’s skin and see what he drudges up. Another sentence to try for an answer that he already knows. He bites his lip and swallows it back down, fucking into Johan’s mouth a little harder. His grip on the gun is getting loose, a mixture of sweat and drool pooling in his palm and greasing it. He can’t be bothered to fix it, not when he’s a half-centimeter away from coming down Johan’s throat.
He groans and nudges the gun against Johan’s cheek, trying to get him to open his eyes again. This time, they do meet Tenma’s—in fact, the blue of them pierces right through him.
“Want it inside?” Tenma mutters, only just loud enough for Johan to make out over the cock in his mouth. He usually doesn’t have to bother asking—Johan’s happy to sit there, lips plump and swollen, and wait for whatever Tenma’s willing to give him.
Johan doesn’t make a sound. His eyes flicker back and forth between Tenma’s. It’s not an affirmation but it’s not a refusal. And with Johan, the default is always acceptance.
So Tenma fucks into his throat a little harder. Makes the stream of saliva stringing down Johan’s neck a little wetter. Presses the barrel of the gun up against the scar again as he comes, hand shaking so bad that there’s a split second where he thinks it might fire.
But the gun doesn’t fire. The safety is on and it might be empty. Tenma still doesn’t know. He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to bring himself to check. Does he really want to know how close he might have come to ending this all? To reduce Johan to nothing more than a body.
As it is, Johan is a body. He’s still and motionless on Tenma’s floor, cum on his tongue and drool on his shirt. Tenma’s shirt. God. He doesn’t know that either. Johan runs his tongue over his lips and swallows. His gaze has dropped to the floor.
Tenma pulls the gun away from his temple and tosses it on the bed behind him. He kneels down. He cups Johan’s face in his hands, and studies the tear tracks that line his cheeks. They’ve partially dried, but the moisture still shines in the dim light. “Don’t leave me for that long again.”
Johan’s mouth twitches.
“Okay?” Tenma says.
He kisses Johan’s cheek. It elicits a soft hum.
“I wonder what you would do to me, Doctor Tenma,” Johan begins, “If I was gone for even longer.”
So this is how it goes—Tenma manages to get his hand on one string, and there is Johan, with both hands on it already ready to pull it back out of Tenma’s line of sight entirely. His mouth twitches, lips shiny with spit.
Tenma runs a finger over them and sighs. He kisses Johan’s forehead. “Come back to bed.”
“If you really want me to.”