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The light or lack thereof makes traditionalists of us all. Them all. The Fortizens. There aren't enough candles to go around, definitely not enough power for much indoor lighting, so when the last little grimy trickle of light is gone, you do things that you don't need to see to do.
Some people knit by feel. Some people write -- Braille, I shit you not, it's becoming a second language around here. Some people just drop and sleep. Some people guard in the light outside. Lots of people fuck.
And 'fuck' was what the couple next door had chosen, probably chasing the two or three other couples in the room out into the commons to sleep with the dogs. Maybe they'd asked nicely. Who knew?
But I could hear them; the whole house was connected, and even though the Baron had a room of his own (and an office, Stars, can you believe it?), he was still living jammed in with everyone else.
He also got a candle. He's special. He was doing listwork by the flickering light, keeping track of his resources in that paranoid double-triple-check way that had made him the ruler of Chicago's underworld and kept him tyrant-king when the whole city, the whole world, went Armageddon-y.
Still. The guy's human. As the voices drove through the wall -- mostly a woman's, apparently her partner was giving decent foreplay -- his eyes flicked up. Flicked down. He frowned and shifted, adjusting his pants -- then he sent an annoyed glance my way, as if to say 'I know you saw it, I don't care that you saw it, if you weren't lounging on my bed you wouldn't have had to see it.'
"Oh, come on," I said, rolling my eyes. "Like I didn't know."
"I hadn't realized you took such an interest in my groin," John said mildly, and wrote something in his ledger.
"I speak from personal evidence here. Little Harry is entirely interested in the proceedings," I protested.
"...That's amazingly off-putting," John said with a wince.
"Enough to put you off?"
"No," he said with a scowl, shutting the ledger. "Mister Dresden. I'll need my room now. Go stick it in a snowdrift."
"John, you're not going to be able to sleep with THAT going on."
"I don't recall mentioning sleep." He glared at me.
I gave him a wide-eyed innocent look.
"...It has been six months since my last waking orgasm. I am going to masturbate, and then I am going to sleep the sleep of the just," John said, arching a brow at me.
"I'm not invited?" I squawked. "John! That's mean."
"I'm sorry, do you want to sit in a small stuffy room trying to masturbate quietly while suppressing your mood-killing guilt because you aren't a voyeur at heart? How rude of me not to offer. Harry, do feel free to join me in this awkward and immensely un-erotic moment of bodily function."
"I thought you'd never ask." I grinned widely and started shucking clothes. "John, I always wanted you to be my first." His face creased in honest and thorough confusion, and I clarified: "Booty call."
He spluttered a laugh, and before he could get it under control, I got my boxers off and was sprawled across his bed, dick in hand.
"DRESDEN!" he whisper-bellowed, still trying not to laugh. "Out!"
"Nuh-uh! You offered! You can't break your hospitality," I taunted him, wagging a finger, the hand on my dick waggling it in tandem.
I saw a mischievous light come into his green eyes.
"Ah, yes. HospiTALity," he said, a smirk curving up his mouth. "A gift is customary."
"That it is," I said with a grin.
He gave me a long look. He eyed the wall next to us, where Loud Woman was still wailing away.
John started to undo his shirt. And then, in a move that shocked me, he jerked it over his head with a dramatic flourish, striking a pose, breaking into: "She's got LEGS! She knows how to use'm."
He dropped into a crouch and back up, spinning his shirt over his head like--
--Well, hey. If the Baron offers you a striptease, do YOU say no?
He got halfway through Legs and was simultaneously trying to remember the words to Genie in a Bottle AND give me a lap dance when I tumbled him into his bed. I was laughing too hard to talk and he was losing the very last of his control, guffawing on me.
I tried to kiss him and it didn't work very well -- I couldn't stop laughing and I kept having to breathe, but when I scooped him up into my arms and felt his chest heaving against mine it was pretty much as good. He snorted against my neck for a while until he got his giggles under control. (He was giggling. I was doing a very manly belly laugh. Promise.)
We were still clinging to each other when I finally managed to stop laughing, and the silence sank in around us. At some point, Loud Woman had finally climaxed and either they'd gone to sleep or the other partner was a lot quieter.
"You took your boxers off! Where am I supposed to put the dollar bills?" I whispered, the words sounding buzzy and close in the stuffy silence.
"Use your imagination, Mister Dresden," John told me primly. "If you can do that much heavy lifting, this late at night." Our legs were just an inch and a leg-hook from being entangled. His erection was nestled against my hip. Mine was rubbing against his thigh, squished between us.
"I," I said, and completely failed to come up with a good comeback.
The lightness of the moment was fading away, giving me time to really process how good it felt to touch human skin. John's skin. There was a warmth in his aura that all the orgiastic revels in Faerie couldn't match, a hominess in bantering and bickering with him that made me feel like the world hadn't ended, like I was still strictly mortal and that somewhere out in the city there was an apartment I'd be going home to at the end of the night, with a subbasement full of my working mess and Bob's porn, with cracked ceramic dishes for Mouse's kibble and water that Mister would probably get to before him.
It tried to dawn on me that my apartment had burned down and even if it hadn't, the city was a haunted ruin. I refused to let it -- jammed my eyes shut and pressed my mouth hard against John's.
His tongue slid into my mouth and one hand scraped down my back to my buttocks and squeezed. The angry heat that happened whenever he and I were in the same place flared up, and went all sexy-shaped.
He gasped. I grabbed him. We rolled over, humping each other, suddenly desperate, suddenly hungry. He sucked my breath out, kissed me, groped me, bruised me -- I grabbed his wrists, pinned his arms, bit his lips and neck and jammed my dick into the crease of his muscular thighs, and then his legs spread and wrapped around me and I was frotting myself between his clenched buttocks, feeling his dick bounce against my stomach at every thrust and letting one of his arms go so that I could cup it stroke it rub it against me--
--He came hard, first. Six pent up months splattered against my chest and I eased him back down into bed so that I could jerk myself off, kneeling over him, aiming for divot of his belly button. His quiet protest brought me over the edge and I came all over his stomach, watching disbelieving as I iced him like a cake.
Neither of us had spoken, made a sound louder than a whispered grunt. I couldn't bring myself to speak as I fished around the bed for my boxers and used them to clean us up. Two guys always made so much more of a mess. I'd given it up to enough random Sidhe men to have kind of a routine down.
Nothing was fucking normal anymore, was it?
I felt my face freeze and the cold realization I'd been trying to stave off finally knifed me right in the gut. I was kneeling beside John and the world was over and I was Winter's, now. I was starting to breathe in hard, short, sharp gasps, not sure how to turn it off before I started hyperventilating.
"Harry?" John whispered, and reached up to pull me down. "Harry. Dresden. Mister Dresden, sssh."
"It doesn't help," I said back, twisting in his arms. "It doesn't--"
"--Mister Dresden, if you throw a tantrum right now because change is scary and you missed your nap, I am going to lock you in the hall until you calm down," he said.
And it did help. It did. I wrapped my arms around him again and he shifted into them, happily relinquishing the responsibility of being supportive to me. ...That helped, too. As my pseudo-hysteria stopped before it could start, I quieted down, finally got around to enjoying the afterglow.
I was half asleep when John poked me. "We're wasting the candle. Put it out."
I waved a vague hand and a puff of wind snuffed the candle. John hummed appreciatively and settled back down, using my arm for a pillow.
"Why don't you ever have tantrums?" I grumbled at him.
"I can't. Not as long as life goes on; there's no time." I felt him kiss my shoulder in the darkness. "And it does go on."
"Since when?"
"Since a big phallocentric antihero showed up to save the day."
"Aw. You never told me I was your antihero. That I was everything you'd never like to be--"
He cut off my rambling by kissing me, kind of disarmingly sweetly. "Harry. You've been my outcast cowboy drifter, blown into town to bring back Justice and Order with your six guns and your old fashioned manners since the day you first looked me in the eyes. Here you are, leading with your mouth and your cock and your brain trailing far in the rear; here you are doing what you shouldn't, what I can't. Here you are. So I know that life goes on."
Something in my throat clamped shut.
"Hnn," I said, trying to discern what strange wetness was happening around the vicinity of my eyes.
His fingers touched my mouth. "I'm not sure how long I've loved you. It's immaterial. This is enough."
"You're such a queer," I said, voice cracking midway through, and started to leak the saline that had gotten frozen up in my ducts years ago.
"Overgrown adolescent," John whispered raggedly.
And there was too much fucking hurt to deal with, so we both shut up. Life is pain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
The Baron fell asleep in my arms, and the one he was using as a pillow was already going numb. So I vengefully nestled close and drooled into his hair, eyes drifting shut.
And life went on.