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The war clock glowed with a row of glorious zeroes.
As the Shatterdome exploded into jubilance, Hermann found himself gripped tightly round the waist, a tuft of smog-stiff hair up his nose and Newton’s face mashed into his neck. It was… less unpleasant than Hermann might have expected, had he ever thought to expect such a thing before. In fact, it was quite the opposite of unpleasant. Without his volition, his own arms had come up around Newton’s neck and he was holding on as if Newton were the only thing keeping him tethered to the earth. The cane was still in hand and crossed Newton’s back, and Hermann realized he was not only propped up against Newton, he was swaying with him.
“We did it, we did it, we did it,” Newton was saying into Hermann’s collarbone. Hermann could feel his fists at his back, convulsive in the fabric of Hermann’s suit coat. Hermann closed his eyes and let relief, cool and profound, dissolve the knot of tension in the core of his body, something he’d been carrying for far too long. He sagged into Newton, who took his weight as if it were not a burden but a pleasure. “We did it.” Then, Newton looked up and smiled at him, big and infectious and perfect in its crookedness, and the relief that had melted Hermann’s spine transformed into a molten heat. The next step was suddenly clear and obvious and necessary: Hermann leaned in and pressed his lips to that smile.
Saving humanity was a noisy business. In the rising din, Hermann perceived a moment’s stillness in his connection to Newton. There was a pulsing warmth in the back of his mind and the answering warmth in his arms. They had met each other in that space between worlds, between ears, and though Hermann couldn’t tell anyone what Newton’s favorite color was or who he’d admired in third grade, Hermann felt, for the first time, that he knew this man who shared his lab space. He knew him in his marrow, and he wanted him.
Newton steadied him by taking more weight from his bad leg and deepened the kiss with hands on either side of his face. When he pulled away, he was breathing hard.
“Wanna get outta here?” he said. Hermann blinked away the haze of the kiss and found himself back in the middle of a frenetic celebration. Shouting and cheering and hugging and kissing all around — no one had time to notice that a pair of scientists who were once at each other’s throats were now down each other’s throats. Still, Hermann’s rushing blood demanded a more private space.
“My quarters,” he said, and cleared his throat when his voice came out rough and rumbling. Newton’s eyes fluttered half-closed. He took Hermann’s wrist and led him through the crowd.
Once the door closes behind them, Hermann wasted no time in capturing Newton’s mouth again. His stubble was a delicious scrape against Hermann’s own smooth cheek. Hermann pushed Newton against a wall even as Newton scrambled to divest Hermann of his jacket, his waistcoat, his button-down, his undershirt.
“Jesus, Hermann, could you wear any more layers?”
“I have the parka, if it would please you.”
Newton laughed into Hermann’s mouth, and somehow the curve and huff of it became something Hermann could swallow, an undiluted happiness he could take into himself and merge with all he wanted and all he knew. Hermann was hard, and his heart was thundering, and he could feel his pulse growing heavy and urgent low behind his bollocks. He whimpered and ground his hips into Newton’s even though it sent a fission of pain shooting up his leg. Newton shifted enough to take Hermann’s weight against himself, and with one final yank, Hermann was naked from the waist up.
Hermann heaved air into his lungs when Newton drew back to run appreciative hands over Hermann’s chest.
“I fucking knew it,” he said.
Hermann was having difficulty thinking with Newton’s mouth so plump and red and his own cock so hot and straining.
“What?” he said.
“You’re hot as shit and secretly built,” Newton said. “I knew it.”
“How could you possibly…”
“Because someone who covers up so much is obviously a total sex beast in disguise, duh.”
“Your logic, Newton—”
“Shush,” Newton said, and off came his own soiled shirt, his undershirt. The tattoos were vibrant and begged for touch; Hermann obliged. “Not everything’s an if/then statement, you know?”
“If you get into bed, then I will blow you, how’s that?”
Newton gaped at him, but he had the good grace to compose himself after a moment’s indulgence. Then, a slow, sly grin curled his mouth and crinkled the skin around his eyes.
“That, Herr Doktor, is the best fucking thing I’ve heard in the last ten minutes. It would be all day, but…”
“Saving the world does tend to eclipse other matters, yes. Come on, Newton.” Hermann hooked two fingers in one of Newton’s belt loops, gripped his cane, and proceeded to drag Newton through to his bedroom. Newton, meanwhile, nattered on as per usual.
“…I’m so glad we’re on the same page here, man, I mean I have been thinking about this for like at least eight years, okay more like since the day I saw you but eight years ago it stopped being a hatefuck thing and became kind of a thing where I thought about like what pretty eyes you have and how I wanted to hold your hand and steal food off your plate and shock you with ice toes in bed and shit, I mean really perverse domestic shit, you know? Hermann, Hermann, oh Christ, I say too much, I always say too much.”
Hermann took the moment’s lull to plop Newton down on his bed.
“It seems to me, Dr. Geiszler, that this time you’ve said precisely enough,” Hermann said. Newton looked up at him with something quite close to awe, and the smile he bestowed on him was shy and wondering, and Hermann had to close his eyes against what that particular expression did to the ventricles of his ill-used heart. He felt Newton’s palms mold themselves to the sharp jut of his hips and he knew, he knew Newton could feel the misshapen mess of his left iliac crest, but the touch was no less reverent for it, and Newton’s gaze no less searing.
Newton made short work of Hermann’s trousers and pushed them down, underpants and all. But before Hermann could step out of them, he leaned heavily on his cane and reached for the light.
“Hold up, what are you doing?” Newton said.
“Turning the bloody lights off,” Hermann said. “Isn’t that the done thing?” All bodies are forgiven in the dark.
“Pfft!” Newton flapped a hand and twisted his face up. “Now that I got you, I’m gonna look at you until I’ve got my fill, which, spoiler alert, is gonna be never, okay? Okay. So.” So. So Newton held Hermann’s gaze even as he slid off the bed and helped Hermann get his shoes and socks off, and then the tangle of his trousers and pants, and then he looked up at Hermann with his own jeans open and his mouth glistening and Hermann’s cock flared back to life. Newton’s eyes were half-mast, slivers of green from beneath black lashes, and his tongues swept across his full lower lip. He leaned forward and pushed his nose into the thicket of Hermann’s thatch of hair, breathing deep and making a low, rough sound as if the scent of him relieved him of a heavy burden. Hermann shuddered and allowed his eyes to slide shut, allowed his hands to do what they’d itched to do for so, so long — years — and push into Newton’s recalcitrant hair.
“Don’t,” Hermann said, voice choked. He felt Newton stiffen before drawing back. When he forced his eyes open, he met a furrowed brow, half quizzical, half concerned over broken glasses gone askew. “I don’t… Newton, I appreciate the gesture,” Hermann said haltingly. “But I prefer, at least right now—” He cleared his throat and steeled himself through the blush. “—that is, I believe I made my wishes clear earlier. About who would be sucking whom.”
In the harsh fluorescence of the Shatterdome’s military quarters, Hermann could see Newton’s eyes dilate. Hermann petted through his hair — dirty with the day’s doings, but thick and luxuriant nonetheless — and traced the bones of his face until he was cupping Newton’s jaw. He rubbed his thumbs over Newton’s cheekbones.
“Next time,” Newton said, and turned his face to kiss Hermann’s palm. It was so simple, so chaste even as they were naked and leaking and saying filthy things, Hermann could hardly believe the spark of electricity that zinged him at the touch. His breath grew quicker, and his arsehole clenched in anticipation.
Newton rose again only to kick off his jeans and recline on Hermann’s bed, arms open. Hermann knelt on his good leg and lowered himself carefully between Newton’s legs. There was a fussy moment of arranging his fleet of foam pillows to accommodate his poorly hip, but Newton kept stroking the skin of his shoulders and back and arms, his hair, and when he turned back, Newton’s cock was still a heavy, damp column against his belly, balls weighty and full. It made Hermann’s mouth water. He rubbed his hands up Newton’s delicious thighs, which earned him a scratchy groan and fuller splay. Hermann nuzzled into the crease where thigh met body, breathed deeply of Newton’s particular musk, which proved heady and intoxicating. Hermann may have moaned and squirmed against the bedding before gripping Newton’s cock in hand and sucking the swollen head into his mouth.
Newton gave a shout. Any other day, Hermann would hiss at him to be quiet. Any other day, there would be other people to hear them. But, Hermann was acutely aware, any other day this might not have happened. Today, they could afford abandon.
Hermann moaned around the fit of Newton’s cock in his mouth. The head was smooth and hot and firm, snug against his soft palate as if designed to slot there by the laws of math and physics and biology all. It had been long, so long, since Hermann had done this, and the satiation of this particular lust made his eyes flutter shut, made saliva gather. He hadn’t forgotten how to open his throat, how to suppress a gag, how to apply suction even as he tongued the frenulum and avoided nicking sensitive flesh with his teeth. He pumped the shaft into his bobbing mouth and forgot everything but the feeling of sucking Newton’s cock and the throb and hum of his own blood.
“Oh my God, Hermann, you’re a fucking rock star of cock sucking,” Newton said, and damned if that didn’t startle a laugh out of Hermann. He barely managed not to choke on the penis stuffed in his mouth, and it plopped out to smack Newton in the belly. And then Newton laughed, and they were both laughing, and said penis rolled slick between their stomachs as Newton hauled Hermann up to plunder his mouth again. Newton squeezed at Hermann’s bum and elicited a loud groan and a snap of Hermann’s hips. His own cock jerked in the crease of Newton’s thigh. “Like that?” Newton whispered. As well as he could whisper, which was not at all.
“Newton.” Hermann said it as if it pained him to part with the word. He said it instead of of course you bastard, or give me more you infuriating little shit, or please, God yes, please. It did the job as well as anything else. “Newton.”
“Use your words, Hermann.” Another appreciative squeeze, this time with fingertips daring to dip tentatively between the cheeks.
“I need—” Hermann cleared his throat and tipped his chin up against the rising blush. “I need to be fucked, Newton. Are you up to it?”
Newton went still and his eyes went wide. Hermann almost clambered off him in a huff, but his arms locked around the small of Hermann’s back.
“Hey, sorry, sorry, stay,” Newton said, breathless. “Jesus, it’s like all my fantasies were sent down from the sex beast gods at once. I almost came right there, you have to gimme a second.”
Hermann glanced down at the cock in question, which had gone veritably purple in desperation, and Hermann wondered for one wild moment whether it would actually burst if it got any harder.
“I do want you to come in my mouth, Newton, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist on your being in me this time. I have needs.”
“Oh my God, you have to stop talking.” Newton groaned and insinuated a hand between them so he could pull his bollocks, gone tight and full, away from his body and grip tightly about the base of his cock. Hermann just grinned at him, and Newt laughed again, and pushed himself up to kiss him. “You’re fucking gorgeous you know?”
“Newton…” A ridiculous notion, really.
“Shut up dude you totally are, I can’t even stand it. Fuck, just…God, just look at you, just like that.” He let go of his cock and cupped Hermann’s jaw. The kiss was slow and soft and sweet, like a glowing ember low in the fire. “Are you for real?” Newton asked. “Do I actually get this?”
“Please,” Hermann said, because it bore saying, and because he couldn’t keep it in anymore. “Please, Newton.”
“Yeah. Yeah, God, yeah.”
Newton slid off the bed and began arranging Hermann’s foam pillows.
“What’s good here, how can we do this?”
“Here,” Hermann said. He turned on his good side and handed Newton a long wedge. “Put that behind my back.” Newton obliged, and Hermann pulled a firm one under his head and pulled his bad leg up whilst extending his good one. He reached for one of the body pillows, and when he couldn’t reach it, Newton got it for him. “Thanks,” he said, and Newt smiled.
“Not even a thing, dude,” he said. Hermann slid it beneath his upraised leg, and the position opened him up, laid him bare, but it was altogether soft and pain-free. When he was comfortable, he looked up to find Newton sitting back on his knees, looking at him with undisguised hunger. Hermann’s heart began to skip. “I’ve wanted this,” Newton said in a rush. “Oh my God, Hermann, I’ve wanted this so bad you don’t even know.” He leaned down and began laying sucking kisses along Hermann’s cheekbone, his jaw, his neck, his collarbones. Hermann pushed his hands into Newton’s hair and closed his eyes.
“I’ve wanted this as well,” he said, quietly, as if it were a secret. Newton rose up to look down into his face. Hermann stroked the backs of his fingers down one soft, colorful pectoral. Newton pushed his glasses up his nose.
“Lube and condoms?” he asked.
“Bedside drawer,” Hermann said. Newton leaned over him, skin to skin but never placing his weight on him, and rummaged one handed through the beside table. He smelled of rain and traffic, but underneath there was a warm, particular smell that Hermann realized he was familiar with. Day in and day out in shared labs for ten years, and he knew what Newton smelled like. Was comforted by it.
“Um,” Newton said. “Got the lube.” He held it up triumphantly. “But…”
“I don’t have any,” Hermann said. “Is that… that is, I haven’t exactly had much company these past few years, and neither have you, and we have those physicals every year. And… and I trust you, Newton.”
Newton wet his lips, eyes gone soft and half-way closed.
“Yeah,” he croaked, and cleared his throat. “I trust you too.”
Newton kissed him, sucked on his lower lip and drew his tongue out with his own. Newton’s kisses were intoxicating and addictive and Hermann wondered why they hadn’t been doing this for years. They’d missed out on so much time.
Newton eventually abandoned Hermann’s mouth in favor of tasting all his skin from neck to groin, and thus he reduced Hermann to an inarticulate mess of sensation, quivering in his pillow fortress and murmuring nonsense encouragements and embarrassing expressions of appreciation. When he got to Hermann’s arse, he lavished kisses on the cheeks and crooned things like, “Oh, you pretty thing, you come here often?” And Hermann couldn’t help laughing until a swipe of Newton’s tongue across his pulsing hole stole his breath away. Newton spread his arse apart and burrowed deeper into his perineum, zealous in his dedication to driving Hermann absolutely spare. He laved across Hermann’s arsehole before flickering the tip of his tongue around the tight rim and finally pushing inside. He squeezed at Hermann’s arsecheeks and moaned continuously into his perineum. Hermann writhed against him, hand locked in his thick hair as he ground down into his tongue. Newton sealed his mouth over Hermann’s arse and sucked until Hermann wailed and pushed him away.
“I can’t, I can’t,” he said, panting. “I don’t want to come ’til you’re in me, so get a bloody move on.”
“Patience is a virtue, Dr. Gottlieb,” Newton said, infuriatingly mild.
“I’ll give you virtue, you damnable— Newton!” Newton slid a well-lubed finger up Hermann’s arse all the way to the third knuckle with no resistance. Newton hooked it just so and Hermann howled. When the stars cleared from his vision, he found Newton grinning maniacally down at him, three fingers snug inside him and his own hands tight around Newton’s hips.
“Why Hermann, was there something you wanted?”
“Stop teasing me, you overgrown garden gnome!”
“Name-calling during sex, Dr. Gottlieb?” Newton made a tsking sound. Hermann let out an unintelligible syllable meant to convey his frustration, but all it seemed to do was make Newton cackle harder. Hermann shoved a hand down to grip Newton’s wrist, and he pushed Newton’s hand harder into his body and ground down into the pressure of being filled. “God, Hermann,” Newton said, voice cracking. He gently pried Hermann’s fingers off his wrist and drew back to slather lube onto his cock. Hermann’s breath was labored and his vision was hazy, but when Newton lined up the head of his cock against Hermann’s arse, Hermann forced his eyes open to meet Newton’s. His glasses were broken and smudged, but when they looked at each other it was as if nothing obscured their connection.
“You can hold on to my thigh,” Hermann said, voice low. “But you have to fuck me hard.” Newton tilted a crooked smile at him.
“Okay,” he said. He pressed the head of his cock into Hermann’s hole and Hermann took a sharp inhale at the hot tight goodness of it. He bore down and Newton pushed forward and then he was all the way inside and Hermann shouted just as Newton groaned. Hermann clenched around him and hummed his satisfaction — there was nothing so exquisite as being full to the brim with a hot, hard cock. Newton’s eyes were closed and he let his breath hiss out from between his teeth as he centered himself. Hermann held his own cock in one hand, and with his other he stroked along Newton’s shoulder and neck.
Newton gripped him by the hip and the knee, held him steady, and began to thrust. He managed not to put any weight on Hermann’s leg, just used it as leverage, and soon he had Hermann’s eyes rolling back and his breath coming in quick pants. His cock was thick and just the right length and curve to stroke perfectly along the walls of his arse before dragging across his prostate. Hermann’s eyes wouldn’t stay open anymore, and he smiled blissfully as Newton fucked him, stars bursting and cascading down behind his eyelids.
“God, Hermann,” came Newton’s voice through the haze of pleasure. “God, look at you, fucking gorgeous, keep, keep doing that, you beautiful fuck, Hermann…”
Distantly, Hermann was aware that he was making loud vocalizations he might be embarrassed about later, but for the moment he was full and Newton was drilling him into a rapturous oblivion and nothing mattered but the incredible stretch and thrust and electricity of being sated this way.
“Harder,” he heard himself say, choked, and Newton obliged.
“Oh fuck, Hermann, oh fuck are you gonna come? Jesus Christ, Hermann, Hermann…”
Hermann’s eyes opened enough to see Newton, flushed and sweating above him, glasses sliding down his nose, gazing down into Hermann’s face as if it held all the answers Newton had ever thought to ask about the universe. Hermann gasped and yanked his cock harder. “Yes,” he said, “yes yes yes yes yes just there, Gott, Newton, don’t stop, don’t stop fucking — ” And his breath left him. He threw his head back and his orgasm burst out of him in great arcs that landed in splatters on his chest and chin.
Newton was driving into him hard and quick, a litany of curse words falling from his lips, and he kept nailing Hermann’s prostate.
“Keep fucking me!” Hermann gasped. The feeling of it was a clear sharp pleasure he wanted to keep riding. He was delirious with it, seeing nothing, seeing everything, the air between them humid and thick. “Keep — fucking — me!”
“Oh God,” Newton was saying, “oh God, oh God, oh God. Hermann, Hermann, oh fuck I’m coming.”
His thrusts stuttered, and then he shouted and slammed into Hermann full-hilt. It hurt, but it hurt like an ache being soothed, like a hunger being sated.
“Yes,” Hermann whispered, mouth slack. “Yes, come in me, yes, just like that, Newton, yes, yes.”
Newton shook and groaned until he slumped against Hermann, forehead mashed into his neck, and, likely, his semen. He didn’t seem to care. Hermann was still half on his side, his legs an awkward tangle. He put his arms around Newton’s back. He kissed his hair, and a convenient ear.
“Newton,” he said. He got a grunt in response. “Newton, you have to get off my leg.”
Newton was up and off him as if shot from a cannon.
“Sorry, sorry, oh my God, are you okay?”
Hermann yanked him down again, rolling onto his back and kicking some of his pillows away.
“I’m fine,” he said, “I just can’t have you lying on it for too long. Stay with me.” He curled into Newton’s side and slung a proprietary arm over his chest. He settled his head on Newton’s shoulder. Newton went boneless once more and tangled his feet in with Hermann’s. He shoved an arm under Hermann’s neck to draw him closer.
They let their hearts calm. There was only breath and the cooling of the air between them. Hermann was idly tracing the lines of various kaiju splashed along Newton’s torso, eyelids growing heavier, when Newton took a deep, purposeful breath.
“So, like…are you my boyfriend now? Because I swear I would be the best boyfriend ever, Herms, like I would take you out to dinner and peer-review your articles and bake you weird cakes you can only get in Germany.”
“Only if you never call me that again.”
“Yeah, sure, okay.”
“I feel like you’re lying to me right now.”
“Well, yeah. But only because you make the most priceless face, Hermann, you really do.”
Hermann sighed. Newton shuffled onto his side to look Hermann in the eye. He yanked his glasses off and threw them somewhere. Hermann tried not to wince at the crack of them against a wall — they were ruined anyway, and surely Newton had a spare pair squirreled away.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hello,” Hermann said.
“So is that a thing you like, need all the time?” Newton’s eyes were made bigger by the hopeful way his brows rose. They were a churning green and blue and brown.
Hermann sighed again. “Yes,” he said, feigning exasperation. “I have a sensitive…anal area. I generally prefer sexual contact to happen in its vicinity.”
“That’s awesome, dude, for real. So awesome.”
“So you…don’t mind.”
“Are you kidding right now? Today is like all my dreams came true! I got to join brains with a kaiju, and then we saved the world, and then I found out that not only is the love of my life totally my super sexy smart boyfriend now, he’s actually got the bone for the same things I do, and we just had the best sex ever and it was our first time so things can only go up! It’s fucking nuts, dude, who gets to be so lucky?”
Hermann suddenly felt shy, which was preposterous, considering whose ejaculate was currently seeping out of him. He smiled a bit and shrugged.
“Oh shit,” Newton said, smile dropping from his face. “Is this a dream? Did I die in that Drift and now I’m living out my ultimate fantasy in the nanoseconds before my consciousness disappears from the universe forever?”
“Are you this irritating even in your own fantasies, Dr. Geiszler?”
“Huh? I mean…probably, I don’t know, I mean this is just how I—”
Hermann didn’t get to find out just how Newton anything, because he laid a hand on his cheek and swallowed his words with a kiss.