Archive of Our Own

You don’t know how it happened. Jake doesn’t explain, when he comes trampling in, boots dripping mud and rain everywhere and a look on his face you can’t describe - he doesn’t give you time to even begin to figure out what’s going on, he just opens his mouth and lets loose words ricochet off the walls like spilled marbles.

You’d have a better chance of making out what he was saying if he’d stop moving, or even if he’d just slow the fuck down for a second. He’s pacing around, hands up, frantic, mouth running a thousand miles an hour - his steps keep coming closer to you, and that sure isn’t helping you focus. You know he’s talking but you can’t work out how the words fit together. You’re tired, you know, but also it’s him, and he won’t stay still, and he’s close-

When you place a hand on his arm, it’s just to try to get him to pause for a second.

It works. It works too well. Jake stutters to a halt under your grasp, and the rest of the world does too; the stillness is unnerving, pulsing, and you can’t even see him breathe.

You stare at Jake, in that reeling moment, and Jake stares down at your hand on his skin.

“Oh, Satan’s seven synods,” he mutters. “Chum, I’m afraid it wasn’t just rats.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Jake lets out a breath, a long exhausted thing, and his head tips towards to yours. Your heartbeat thunders traitorously.

“…It wasn’t just the rats.” He pulls back again suddenly, paces a ragged circle, orbiting you. “It was- there was a- I’ve been trying-”

You might not’ve got the full story out of Jake yet, but you’re not stupid; you can see the bruise-dark circles under his eyes, the way he’s jittery and jolting at every tiny sound. He’s in trouble, and he’s come to you because you’re the steady, stable, logical one.

This is a role you could play in your sleep.

“Dude, it’s alright,” you start, flat and detached. It’s a sour relief, knowing what he needs from you. It’s never what you want, but it’s enough. And you’re good at it - you can play this any way he wants.

He stops in his paces to look at you, hand raking through his wet-curling hair, and a muscle pulls long in his neck.

“No,” Jake tells you lowly. “I’ve got a terrible hunch it’s not.”

“Then we’ll make it alright.”

“I-”

“-Trust me. We’ll fix this shit up, whatever it is. More fixed than a crack addict with a hand-plucked bonanza of dodgy needles,” you dismiss, letting your mouth run automatically - like he’s broken his Husktop, like he’s downloaded a dodgy file - and he turns towards you, flushed and dark-eyed.

“I don’t- Strider, the rats, the-” he hisses, fingers coming up to splay along his jaw, and you gingerly go in for the awkward backpat. This may be worse than you realised, and that’s- off-putting. Jake is a lot of things, but he isn’t usually unpredictable. “I need. I need, something-”

“It’s okay, man,” you repeat, as calm and as soothing as you can manage. Your arm snakes around his waist before you give it permission to move; you blame the way Jake is trembling, like he’ll break in half any second. This is fine; you still know what you’re doing. “It’s okay.”

“I need-” Jake mutters, hot and desperate in your ear, and something melts low in your stomach. You’re going to remember this one, definitely. Pathetic. You’re going to cherish it. “Dirk, I, I need-”

You’re pretty sure you still know what you’re doing. You’re not sure what he’s doing.

“Breathe, dude.” You tell him, and he lurches in (or you do). His fingers curl in your shirt, and every inch of exposed arm and shoulder not covered by your black tank suddenly feels vulnerable; his breath puffs over your neck, and you try to stay steady. “It, uh, it’ll be okay?”

“Dirk.” Jake repeats, and sways. His eyes are out of focus, and you try not to take that personally, tightening your grip around his waist as he tips into you. “I need-”

“We’ll get it,” you manage, and regret it instantly. Your voice comes out too low and too shaky, raspy like scissors against fabric, and it feels like a scarlet fucking letter. A flashing neon sign of shame, pointing at your stupid flushed face. “We’ll get you whatever you need.”

Jake creaks out a tiny noise and lets his head drop onto your shoulder. You cradle him, kind of awkwardly, like a good friend would; he’s heavy, shorter than you but broader, and even if you’re holding him up, your balance is tenuous. Push too hard, and he might just drag you down with him.

His face, unsettlingly warm and fevered, presses against parts of your neck that’ve never encountered human touch. You try not to stiffen up, but you don’t know if Jake would’ve noticed either way; he’s still muttering, weird strings of incomprehensible sounds, and slipping impossibly closer and closer to you until you essentially occupy the same space. He’s not shaking anymore, you think.

Then you realise he is, you’re just shaking too - as hard as he is, your breath coming short. You acknowledge to yourself, with a kind of detached panic, that you might not know what you’re doing.

Jake’s teeth graze your neck.

You inhale sharply. “Dude-”

“Mm-” he says, fingers tightening around your wrist, and a strange dizzy tide rises and rises in your stomach. You think- you just- he’s here. He’s so fucking close. Close enough to do anything.

Jake’s mouth presses to your skin, right over the jugular, and you quiver on the spot, holding on to him. The tide roars. You can hear your heart thrash in your chest.

When his teeth catch and slide smoothly into your flesh - when you hiss and jolt, startled - there’s a part of you that isn’t surprised at all. The pieces have clicked into place, a big ugly mural reading Fucking Duh, and then he seals his lips over the puncture as sleekly as any other predator animal. Your eyes flutter shut as Jake starts to feed.

And then you’re not thinking at all.

It’s not a sensation you can describe: you could say it burns like hellfire or like a fist in the face or like a bone snapping inside you, but that wouldn’t capture the way it feels good, like the kind of pain you’d kill yourself chasing. It’s fucking terrifying. You’ve been desperate for a closeness like this since before you knew what loneliness was.

How do you categorise this?

Your body is a length of quivering copper wire; Jake gulps down quick mouthfuls of blood, a pulling insistent pressure, and the motion vibrates all the way through you like an electrical current. It’s the kind of cold, spreading ache that sends panic signals to your brain, the same way it feels when anaesthesia starts to wear off, but it’s as good as it is bad - it’s liquid, somehow, thick and cloying as honey, rippling, or maybe a lightning strike, a natural disaster. A magma that coalesces through every atom of your body. It hurts so bad, it hurts so good. It feels like connection, a closed circuit.

Maybe like a kiss.

You shudder, and feel like you should be breathing steam, hot and dazed and desperate as you melt from the inside out.

“Ah-”

Jake isn’t clutching onto you for support, anymore. His fingers notch along your ribs, and his grip is brutal, hard enough to throb as he holds you still. In comparison, the flimsy grasp you have on him has turned extraneous, fluttering into a damsel-like swoon.

You’re going to have bruises up and down your torso, you think absently, and feel your knees tremble under you. Maybe it’s for the best that he’s got you locked down like a straitjacket.

You’re not sure why he’s wasting the effort, honestly. It’s not like you’re trying to get loose. At some point in this eternal minute, your hand migrated to the back of his neck, and now it’s hovering there halfway between a caress and a half-hearted restraint. You’re certainly not trying to pull him away, because of course you’re not. It’s Jake. If anything, you’re keeping him close, writhing up into him like a hooked worm as he makes use of you - still bleeding you in sharp greedy gulps, a frantic rhythm that has his hair scratching along your jaw when he bobs his head. You oscillate on the spot, overwhelmed by squirming, mortified arousal, and realise with a rush like the floorboards collapsing under you that you’re hard.

You’re not sure why that jars you so much. It makes sense: your whole body is lit up from the intrusion, aching with a kind of acrid heatrub warmth, and the way Jake’s pressed his whole indescribable being up against you is just fairly obvious cause and effect, stimuli-wise. It’s not even like you have to worry about him noticing; he’s beyond distracted. Your surreptitious pathetic boner for being needed is your problem, and your problem alone.

For some reason, though, the instinctual rabbity panic that wasn’t enough to stop you draping yourself all over a fucking blood-drinking creature finally seems to kick in at this laughably puritan concern. It breaks through to you like a screaming klaxon, shattering your flimsy veneer of calm, and you jerk back automatically.

Rookie mistake.

Jake’s grip is tight, but if he’s thinking at all, he probably isn’t expecting you to be stupid enough to recoil with his teeth still in you. A shock of pain sizzles through your neck, his hands vice around your hips, and a fucking appalling ripping noise accompanies the burst of wet heat on your skin.

“Shit,” you mutter, which is remarkably stoic considering the shitshow you’ve found yourself in. Jake’s unnervingly still.

It’s all about composure. Like he’s a startled emu. You shift your weight backwards - you’re handling this, you’re cool, an ice statue, a clean and uncompromising automaton.

…that’s a lot of blood.

In the split second it takes for you to look down and process the horrorshow occupying your neck, Jake lurches back in - easily ignoring your arm held up to block his body, which is alarming and thrilling and to be contemplated later in great detail - and presses his open mouth to your skin again.

“Dude,” you squeak, voice sliding abruptly up the musical register as it cracks. So much for stoicism. You tell yourself that you’re glad you’re finally capable of coherent words again, and it’s good that you’ve still got enough blood left to be flushing as humiliatingly as you are right now. There are bigger problems: Jake’s eyes are blown and his movements are too smooth, and you have no idea if he’s even lucid. The knowledge finally resonates permanently in your idiotic hormone-flush brain that English is functionally a starving lion, and you are a juicy and unassuming caribou. “I- Don’t-”

Don’t kill me? You’re not sure you want to hold him to that, though. Don’t hurt me? You don’t want him to stop. Don’t stop? There’s a stupid, suicidal part of you that tingles harder at the thought of bleeding out in Jake English’s arms. What a way to go, Jesus Christ. At least he’d never forget it.

You wouldn’t be around to enjoy haunting him, though. Eh. There are worse ways to go than swooning like a vampire-novel ingénue with Jake at your neck.

Jake doesn’t rip your throat out, though, just licks a long messy stripe up the torn skin; it’s fucking unhygienic and you should be horrified, but instead you’re vaguely woozy and light-headed with lust.

You draw in a sharp, ragged breath.

Jake laps at your neck again, and you concede defeat and lean back against the wall.

“Fuck-”

When that fails to hold you up, you half-slide half-fall down it instead. Jake doesn’t pause for a moment, coiling around you as he follows you down, and you try not to squirm under the attention. It’s- it’s unusually direct for Jake. You guess you’ve never been food to him before, though.

You land in an undignified mess of twined knees and elbows. Jake insinuates his thigh between yours, fists your hair in his hand and tips your head back to get at your neck - and you let him, you don’t even try to move away. The warm pressure of his mouth against your jugular is uncomfortably close to an embrace, and instead of pushing him back, your fingers are hooking into the tight fabric of his shirt.

He’s so fucking warm. Aren’t vampires meant to be cold? You’re not sure if it’s the blood loss, chronic exhaustion, or just the rare closeness, but suddenly, against all conceivable logic, your whole body loosens like a rusty screw finally unbolted. You’re ragdolled against a wall, a vampire in your lap, and you’re the most relaxed you’ve been in years.

There’s a joke about acupuncture in there, you think.

When Jake draws back to look at you, it’s with the eyes of a human again, instead of a wild animal. He’s panting, rumpled and flushed, and you think for a moment that he looks as little like a fucking creature of the night as possible. He looks like he’s mid-fuck; he looks like the victim of a vampire in a vintage gay porn film, pupils dilated, eyes dark and soft and pretty. Guileless. The vivid smear of blood around his lips is sending strange signals to your brain.

“You’ve got…”

Jake blinks and scrubs a hand over his mouth, absently streaking it along his jaw. “Mm.”

That’s your blood he’s wiping all over himself. Beneath the thick blanket of contented exhaustion, you know you should be alarmed.

“‘M I still- am I still bleeding?” You ask, and then he’s looking at your neck again and you can see his tongue flicker over his lips, almost compulsively. You’re the most insanely moronic dipshit to tread the earth; you don’t regret it, because the way he’s looking at you in that moment is worth being bled to death.

Slowly, he shakes his head. You’re so occupied by the drawn-tight space between you - the way things have sharpened, abruptly, tense and anticipatory - that you can’t even begin to strategise a way out.

It’s the stupidest thing you could do, bringing attention to it, but your hands go to your neck anyway. You only process that nod when your fingers come away wet but not drenched - you crane down, touch the edge of the puncture carefully.

It’s barely still bleeding.

“Coagulant,” you mutter, more to yourself than him, and think about teeth and venom glands and evolutionary aids and then- “Did you, uh, know that was going to happen?”

You don’t know why else he’d be licking your neck, now you’re lucid enough to question it, but it can’t hurt to ask.

Jake’s voice comes out raspy from strain. “I- no, no, I- instinct. It made sense.”

“It made sense?”

“I just knew what to do, chum,” he says shakily. He’s still staring at your throat. “Sorry.”

You both sit there for a second, shellshocked.

“J-”

“Dirk,” he starts abruptly, speaking a little too fast for comfort. “Are you alright?”

You’re so hard it hurts and you have a wound scabbing improbably fast on your neck. Jake English is closer to you than you knew you could be to a person.

“Never better,” you tell him dryly, and mostly manage to hide the note of hysteria that sneaks into your delivery.

“Splendid,” Jake manages tightly, and you almost laugh - only Jake fucking English could sound that sincerely ridiculous during what might be anything from a psychotic break to a goddamn maiming. “I- chum.”

“What?”

Usually, when Jake’s dragging his feet about something, you’ve got a pretty decent idea of what that something is. Right now, though, you’re stupid with shock, distracted and dazed - and, as excruciating as it is to admit even to yourself, you’re pathetically fixated on the ebbs of slowly-dimming electricity still going through you.

You weren’t expecting it to be good. You can’t emphasise enough how fucking unfair it is that it felt good. You’d have let him anyway, but you’d expected it to hurt, and there was something reassuring about that. You weren’t expecting it to hurt like sheer euphoria, though, agonisingly painful and indescribably satisfying. There’s no precedent for you, here: pain has always been pain, and that’s never once been a good thing. You’re too well trained for survival to enjoy it.

Then again, Jake persistently fucks with your head, so who knows. Maybe you’re a masochist now. Maybe you always were, and you’ve been waiting for him to pin you down and ravage you this whole time-

A shock of heat crackles through you so intensely and unexpectedly that you jolt in place again.

Jake’s eyes are on you, unblinking, as he hesitates between words.

You’ve still got no idea what he wants. It’s a hit to your ego, but your brain’s fried; you’re going to need more than a few ‘chum’s and ‘ahem’s.

“I, ah-”

You wonder if he’ll keep wanting your blood. How many times will he need to feed? How many times will you be guaranteed the sight of him, pretty artless Jake English with his Caravaggesque mouth coated in gore?

You spare a moment to be overwhelmingly glad that Jake’s too occupied with his vampire crisis to register your extremely obtrusive boner.

“…that is-”

Your focus returns to Jake’s hesitation. “Dude, what?”

“More,” he says, like the word is being ripped out of him. “I need- more.”

“What?” You blink, another whip-crack of heat seizing you. “Uh, blood?”

“Yep,” Jake manages, and you’ll give him this, he doesn’t look happy about it. He looks kind of horrified, honestly, maybe a little nauseated at the prospect of taking anything more from you - and it’s so fucking funny, because the second you realise you’ve got a chance to experience that feeling again, your brain lights up like a neon switchboard.

“Yes.” You cut through Jake’s messy spiral with enough enthusiasm to be distantly mortifying, but you can’t even think about that now, because you’re taking Jake by the shoulder, clumsy as hell, and pulling him closer.

“Yes?” His brows raise.

“Uh huh, dude, it’s whatever, don’t even worry about it,” you say, aiming for ironically breezy and landing in stilted deliriousness instead. Jesus Christ, you swear none of the swooning damsels in any vampire novel you’ve read ever had to worry about creeping out a vampire with their weird, horny clinginess. The only thing you can do is power through; you tip your head to bare the un-savaged side of your neck, brace yourself against the wall, and try not to give away the fact that you’re way more into this than a goddamn vampire.

Roxy’s going to laugh at you. If she ever hears about this, that is.

(Roxy must never hear about this).

Jake lets out a noise when you offer your neck to him, a near-inaudible choke, and sways closer. He pulls back a moment later, though, shaking his head.

“Not your- bally not sporting to be playing silly buggers with a man’s neck.”

You have no idea what he just said. “Not the neck?”

“Not the neck,” Jake says regretfully, and then rests his head in the crook of your shoulder anyway.

In a night full of weird, visceral intimacies, this really shouldn’t stand out, but it does. You can feel his lips move against your skin, and your body sings with adrenaline.

When Jake swallows, it vibrates through you. “It’s like paper, chum. I could just- I felt it tear under my blasted teeth. Like paper.”

You shiver again, and dig your nails into the wall in an attempt to disguise it. Obviously, it doesn’t work: he’s so up in your grill he may as well be splattered roadkill.

Jake lifts his head, and even though his eyes are so dark and dilated you can barely make out the green, you still see an alertness pierce his glassy stare as he looks at you.

“You’re scared,” he says slowly.

It feels wrong to laugh, but you do anyway: a creaky bark of laughter, half flatly ironic and half panicked. “I’m not.”

“Balderdash. You’re shaking like a leaf with it,” Jake pulls away, running a hand up over his mouth distractedly, like he’s not shaking too. “I should- I should go. Before. I promise, I’d never-”

“I’m not scared,” you interrupt, before he talks himself out of your house and away from you. “Dude. The, the Strider doesn’t quiver at a little bloodshed. It’s just adrenaline. You’re welcome to try harder.”

The thing that’s genuinely daunting is that you’re not lying, exactly. Fear is certainly not the overwhelming emotion you’re feeling right now - that’s some kind of exhausted, pathetic, needy euphoria mixed in with a bone-shaking horniness. You can’t say you’re not uncomfortable at all: there’s the primordial lizard-like part of your head that still lurches up in panic at the thought of death. There’s another part convinced you’ll humiliate yourself. Overall, though, caution is fucking routed by your pathological need to have Jake English stick it in you again.

Yeah.

“Trust me,” you mutter, too genuinely. “It’s not fear.”

For a terrifying moment, a tiny furrow appears between Jake’s glorious eyebrows. Before you talk yourself into another hole, though, he seems to lose his train of thought, leaning his head down to lick at your collarbone.

You only manage to half-muffle the noise you make, but Jake doesn’t seem to notice. He’s lapping at a trail of dried blood, you realise, with another uncomfortable pulse of heat. Your blood, thin rusty rivulets dried down your collarbone and dotted along your arm-

“If not the neck, where?” You manage, dazed and breathless. “Dude. Jake. Tell me- tell me the game plan.”

“Don’t know,” he mumbles back, and his teeth scrape lightly over your clavicle.

“Woah,” you say reedily, even as your heart stutters in your chest. You brace an arm against his chest and try to lever him backwards; it barely works.

“Strider,” Jake lets out a plaintive noise, and for a second he’s not a terrifying creature you’re trapped against a wall with, he’s-

“Shit,” you mutter again, and try to catch his eyes. “Jake. Jake, bro, where are you going to bite me?”

He leans back in, to where the faintest press of his fangs has drawn a thin red line below your left collarbone.

“I don’t care,” he tells you distantly, and noses at your skin.

“D-” You hold your breath for five seconds in an attempt to steady your voice. It doesn’t help. “Don’t bite me there.”

“Mm,” Jake hums, and you’re pretty sure he’s not listening.

“Dude. That’s not- no major veins close to the surface.” You bring your hands up, like the world’s least effective barrier, and Jake turns his attention to your arms instead.

You shiver. There’s something terrifyingly raw and exposed about this, stark and vivid, like hyper-detailed tunnel vision in life-or-death situations.

“That’s-” biology’s never been your area, but you’ve built enough humanoid machines to know your basic anatomy. “That’s the deltoid, that’s muscle-”

He presses his mouth to it anyway, and you shudder again. This is humiliating. You hate it, and you hate him, and-

“Ah-” you did not just make that sound. If you did, you’d kill yourself. “That’s-” Jake’s eyes are closed, he’s moving slightly too fast, and his tongue curls lightly over the pale, translucent skin of your inner elbow. You jump and hiss through your teeth.

“That’s the median cubital,” you tell him. “You could-”

“No,” Jake sits back suddenly, and scrubs a hand over his mouth. “No, no, that’s just a dickens of a dreadful- no.”

“No?” You repeat, idiotically. You really haven’t lost enough blood to justify this level of stupidity.

“You need your arms, dove,” he murmurs, low and horrifically soft. “For your- gizmos and swords and such. I- if I-”

You understand - the implication isn’t exactly subtle. You’re a swordsman and a mechanic; if Jake gets carried away, you’re going to need your arms to keep him from draining you like a juicebox.

You’re honestly not sure how much of a chance you stand anyway against an unresearched supernatural blood-drinker, but you appreciate the sentiment. You kind of wish he would bleed you dry anyway, but-

But then he’d have to get blood somewhere else, next time. And you might not have much, but you have this: he came straight to you. Rare as they are, you’re obligated to celebrate your victories.

One of these days, you’re going to kick your own ironic hide for being such a simpering lunatic. That day is not today.

“Hand?” You offer, high-pitched, as English huffs a breath along your wrist and then drags his tongue - his fucking tongue - between your knuckles. Jesus Christ. The knuckles are not supposed to be an erogenous zone. You think your eye is twitching.

“No, no, you’ve got such lovely hands, chum,” he whispers, like he’s not nipping your palm. Mixed messages. You tell yourself to focus on his potential delirium, and not the slick wet slide of his pretty, pretty mouth. Fucking Jake English.

“Just- go slow. Left hand should be fine. I’m ambi-”

“Too fiddly,” Jake mutters into your skin, breathing hard as he traces the blue line of a dorsal metacarpal. “I can’t- I could damage you.”

He’ll damage you a lot worse if you don’t get him blood soon. You breathe in sharply through your nose. “Okay. Somewhere, uh, somewhere else then?” Your voice hitches excruciatingly as he brings your knuckles back to his lips and then licks a finger into his mouth. “Dude-” fuck, he wasn’t kidding about those teeth being dangerous. “Dude! Mixed messages.”

“Mm, I think maybe you should shoot me, chum,” Jake says, muffled. His eyes are half-closed, his face tipped down over your hand, and you notice abruptly that his other hand is curled up into a claw at his side.

“What are you talking about?” You ask, breathy. You want to shoot yourself. You want him to keep sucking on your index finger like he thinks you’re fucking edible. You want him to shift his thigh just a half-inch and put you out of your misery at last.

“I’m sort of worried I’ll- grab you, or something.” When he pulls back an inch, there’s a glossy strand of saliva connecting his lips to your skin.

“You can do that,” you blurt, too fast, too impulsive, and god, you wish he’d just fucking kill you. You wish he’d shift his fucking thigh and realise what’s wrong with you and then just leave, because that’d be better than this endless waiting. You’ve been counting down the seconds since you met Jake English, and you can practically taste your time running out now.

“You’re a standup pal,” Jake tells you distractedly, which is something of a middle finger from the universe. Fate points and laughs. “But really, you should- you should stop me.”

“I already said it’s fine.”

You can’t tell whether he’s being sincere or not, but either way, he’s only getting closer. He’s all you can see right now, a gorgeous maelstrom of sensory input you can’t avoid: the scratch of his shirt under your nails, the ragged give-take of his breathing (does he still need to do that?), the mossy green smell of him.

Jake’s always smelled obnoxiously like hot boy: eucalyptus and rain-wet soil and soap. And sweat, which should be offputting, but it’s not. The rules don’t apply to him - sweat is attractive, and contact is never enough, and he’s a fucking vampire but he still looks so much more alive than you.

In a twisted way, you can see a symmetry to it. Maybe vampires are meant to be pale and anaemic and dusty, long-deceased, but it only makes sense that someone like Jake, so alive and vivid and ephemeral it hurts, would burn through life fast enough to require supplemental lifeforce. You’re all gods, now, so it’s not like you age (as far as you can tell), but there’s something cosmically understandable about Jake in particular staying young and heartbreakingly beautiful forever. It’s not like it’s subtle, as metaphors go.

He’s never been the type of person to be around consistently, though: an introvert pretending to be an extrovert. Depending on how much blood he needs, and how regularly he needs it, he might have to become one. There’s a sick kind of thrill to that.

Jake drags his head back an inch, and looks up at you with heavy-lidded, feral eyes. “Not a good idea, you’re right. I’d bite your wrist just there and then I wouldn’t stop.”

Surprisingly, you manage to keep your tone even. “God forbid. Can we talk, or do you have any other extremities you want to-”

You realise what you’re saying halfway through and snap your mouth shut, but the damage is already done. Jake takes in a rough breath and looks at you, and then there’s a hand on your sternum pinning you back into the wall, and it’s hard enough that you can feel something crunch.

“Jake-”

The fabric of your shirt creaks and tears as he yanks it down your shoulder, cutting into your skin. The rush of ensuing adrenaline is so startling that you’re genuinely too confused to be petrified for a second.

Then Jake English, blooddrinker and perpetual plucky ditz, scrapes his calloused brown fingers down the line of your ribcage and presses close enough for you to feel his breath. The threat of those fangs, deadly-sharp and right up against your chest, becomes unavoidable.

You’ll admit this: of all the potential ways to die you’ve considered, this is not one of them.

“Do you know what I want, chum?” Jake asks lowly - barely loud enough to be audible.

For what has to be the first time in your goddamn life, you do.

You lick your lips. “No, dude. Because you won’t tell me. You’ve been sitting on me for twenty minutes not telling me.”

He leans forward, tapping his finger right over your heart. “I can’t- I can’t have it.”

“Yeah?” You ask, breathless. Trying not to breathe at all, because this moment feels stranger and more vulnerable than every other moment before, and that’s a word that’s rarely intersected with Jake before.

“All I can think about,” he whispers, “All I- ever since I started, with the raw meat, and I can’t seem to stop.”

You hold yourself still.

“I just want to-” a line right down your chest, and he bites his lip. “-open you up. Crack your ribcage right in two - I think I could, right now.”

You let out a shaky breath.

“I think you wouldn’t stop me,” he says in a hushed whisper, so low you almost can’t hear it.

You wouldn’t.

“Then…” His hand splays over your skin, and there’s nothing awkward or timid left in his voice. “Press my teeth down. Eat your heart out raw.”

You stare at him.

He draws his hand back quickly, chewing his lip, and stares straight back down at your chest again. “Dirk.”

It’s a weird, broken noise. Animalistic.

You keep staring.

“Dirk,” Jake manages again, “I’m not- I can’t stop.”

“Yeah,” you manage at last, doing a passable impression of someone who hasn’t just been pulverised by a single sentence.

Your heart. Your heart. What the fuck is that about - oh, you know what that’s about. The primary blood-pumping organ, that’s obvious. But there’s irony, and then there’s cruelty, and then there’s this.

Your heart. It’s always been so fucking funny to be a Prince of heart. Like your whole life hasn’t just been calcifying and withdrawing and being as heartless as possible. Like it hasn’t been about constantly reinventing yourself, iteration after iteration, with the futile hope of finding someone who would want you in fragments. You’re what happens when a crack appears in a hall of mirrors - constant self reflection in all the worst ways, and there’s your heart in the middle: a fucking useless alien thing that bleeds red no matter how many times you try to wall it off.

And English wants it? Your fucking heart?

If you were on your own, you could probably sit here and spiral about that until the end of time. Fortunately or unfortunately, you’re not alone; you snap back to lucidity just as English laves across your nipple with his tongue.

Fucking Christ.

“Pectoral muscle obstructs bloodflow,” you blurt, and he groans, burying his face in your chest.

“You taste good.”

He bites you again on another stretch of skin just over your ribs, which is also obviously ineffective. At this point, you don’t think he’s looking for a vein. He’s just feeling you over like a fucking shark.

“Jake-”

“Muscle won’t stop me, pal,” he mutters, “Skin’s like- it’s like paper, and muscle’s just chilled butter. It’d take me seconds-”

“Okay,” you say, thin and almost steady. You get your hand up in front of his face and shove him back with the other, which probably only works because of the shock factor. “Jake.”

“I drained an elk on my way here, you know that?” Jake stares up at you, radiant and sickly, and you stare back like you’ve been hypnotised. “It wasn’t even bloody hard, chap, I just pushed and bit and took.”

“Jake-”

“Right from the bally source, I didn’t even realise until- and I felt it when it died,” his fingers cut into your hips, and he hauls you forward for a second like he’s going to shake you to emphasise his point. Instead, he closes his eyes and turns his face back into your chest. “It tasted rotten. Like it’d turned. Not like you.”

“I don’t taste…?”

You’re a narcissist. You’re a self-obsessed lunatic. You’re competing with an elk’s corpse for approval.

You’re fucking glowing.

“You taste good,” Jake repeats, and this time it’s significant. “Dirk- Dirk. Let me.”

“Let you?” You shouldn’t draw this out. Your heart is racing, and you have no fucking clue how that’ll impact the process of being fed on, and you don’t even know where he’s going to fix those terrifying teeth next- “Let me see your teeth.”

“What?”

He looks genuinely taken aback, like he can’t imagine why you might want to inspect the teeth he’s biting you with.

You want to make him beg. You know you’re not even going to make him say please. Maybe you just want something from him, anything to make it feel like you’ve still got control.

“Before I, uh, let you bite me again-”

Jake’s eyes practically flash, Jesus Christ, you’re swallowing your own heart down at this point.

“-let me see your equip- uh, tools.”

“…you want to see them?”

You try not to take satisfaction in how poleaxed he looks. “Jake, I can tell you right now that the odds of me letting you use those again without a cursory inspection are astronomically low.”

(Liar).

“Why?”

“I’m not looking to get rabies. Or,” you pause, fumbling for a coherent excuse. “…elk disease.”

Jake’s eyes flick between your eyes and the bare stretch of skin over your ribcage. You realise, suddenly, that his other hand’s slipped down to circle your wrist.

You wonder if the sound of your pulse under his fingers is driving him crazy. If it’s giving you away. His face is eerily, uncharacteristically blank.

You wait him out.

You don’t know exactly what you’re expecting; for Jake to refuse, ridiculously, or to lose his temper, or maybe even to show you a bashful glimpse of fang before ducking his head away. Instead, he stares at you through the dark fan of his lashes for a second longer, then slowly, carefully, draws his lips back.

“Damn…” You try not to look too shocked at the sight of the nasty little blades, but a hissed exclamation escapes you anyway.

His canines are sharp and curved like scimitars, thin-tipped, made for cutting and tearing soft-skinned mammalian prey. Viperine. That’s not the extent of it, though: you peer closer and see two smaller, auxiliary fangs, needle-like and spindly.

Those would be the hypodermics, you presume. You’re not well-versed enough on fang biology to figure out much more - not that you’ll be telling Jake that - but you expect they administer the coagulant.

(God only knows what else.)

“Can you…. Are those retractable?” You ask, peering closer. Jake lets out what might be a strangled noise of acknowledgment, but he’s dangerously still. You get the feeling you’re running out of time.

The very tips of the hypodermics are hollow, like syringes. At the old apartment, your brother left behind a collection of preserved reptiles - you never studied them enough to identify their teeth variations now, but you remember they were all differing degrees of venomous. In that clinical white space, snakes had always seemed more fantastical to you than frightening. Medieval, draconian. Sick.

Beyond everything else, there is something incredible about touching mythology like this: You reach over and cup his jaw, lift his chin as clinically as you can, swallow hard when he lets you move him without a hint of resistance.

Your face is uncomfortably hot. You can feel blood tingling in the most prominent locations, splashed scarlet across your cheekbones, and you know it must be obvious.

You need to hurry up before he decides to take a chunk out of your face. Would that be bad? You don’t even know. You slide a finger along the distinctly-inhuman rows of his teeth, and he lets you. You tip his head up, run your thumb under his lip to inspect his gums, and he lets you. You press your finger to the wicked-sharp of his canine, observe its point, and all the while Jake English just stays there and lets you know him.

If you weren’t experiencing a dizzying high off your own brain chemistry, you think that’d be your cue to move back fast. Jake really isn’t the kind to sit still, let alone tolerate inspections. You once freaked him out by trying to bandage his scraped shin.

That wasn’t really his fault, was it, though? You were the 16 year-old dipshit who thought it’d be a good idea to drop down on his knees in front of his straight best friend and start feeling him up.

There was a long time where you wanted to date Jake English, and it always felt like he could smell it on you. Or sense it, like a seal sighting a shark fin. Nowadays, your obsession’s worn soft and tired with age like a beloved shirt; cynical, patient, but no less violent or demanding. You want to eat Jake English whole, these days, and you haven’t figured out whether he knows that or not yet.

It’s worse than it’s ever been, but at least from the outside it’s probably harder to tell. You’ll take that.

Your fingers are still in Jake’s mouth, and you’re not paying attention. Love tears you apart, again: love sticks its shoe in your path and watches you eat shit. Absently, you test the strength of one of his canines against your finger, find it sharper even than you anticipated, and catch his eyes just in time to see them go blank.

It’s only a tiny bit of blood, from a shallow pinprick of a wound, but Jake’s grip on you is iron. It hurts more hitting the back wall than it did last time. There’s a ringing finality to it.

“Jake-” Your voice is still steady - you’re so good at this, being a detached automaton. You’re disgusting. He needs you. He’s about to eat you. Your brain is in whiplash. “Jake!”

“Where do I bite?” He asks you, raggedly. “Here, just- just, just, take this in case, Strider-”

He’s pushing a fucking gun at you. You take it, stare at it stupidly, and then on instinct toss it across the room.

“Dude. I’m a ninja, not-”

“You’re a bally idiotic bounder for all that genius, sometimes!” Jake snaps at you, and grips you by the shoulders. “Where do I bite. I can’t- I can’t wait.”

“Uh,” you say, thoughts moving molasses-slow. You’re supposed to be good under pressure. “Just- let me think about, about, anatomy-”

“Sod your bloody anatomy!” He hisses.

“Shut up, I’m thinking-” you yelp as he nips your shoulder, not quite hard enough to break the skin. “Not there, that’s a tendon-”

“Dirk-”

“No small veins, no arteries, no shoulders-”

He bites you again, harder. That’s going to leave a mark.

“Nothing close enough to the surface in the torso-” you pause. “Femoral vein.”

He tips back just far enough to look you in the eye. “What?”

“Uh.” Your eyes slide over to the corner. “You know the, uh, femur-”

Jake’s hand slides up your thigh so swiftly that it feels like a threat. “Your leg?”

Inner thigh, specifically. You’ve got no fucking clue what he thinks about that. Or what you think about that, at this point. You wouldn’t have even considered it, if he hadn’t been rushing you, so he’s only got himself to blame.

“You want me to…”

“Anatomically speaking,” you hedge. “It’s the most efficient proposal, but I don’t know-”

Jake apparently does know, because he starts unbuttoning your ironic skinny jeans before you’ve even finished your sentence.

You cough, lost for a second at this much-imagined sight in a never-imagined context, and look away quickly. “Aren’t you supposed to buy me a deliciously satirical American burger before you-”

Jesus, but he’s fast. Not as fast as you, obviously, and it’s not like there’s a ton of dexterity involved in shooting a gun compared to swordsmanship, but- yeah, well. He is unexpectedly deft when working your fly open.

“Seriously, what happened to dinner and a drink?” you rasp on, because there’s no way he hasn’t noticed yet, and there’s nothing you can do about it. You can pull the hem of your clawed-apart shirt down, maybe, but he’s not fucking blind.

Jake stops yanking denim impatiently down your legs to look up at you for a moment.

“You are dinner,” he says lowly, and your whole body sings with adrenaline.

You thought it couldn’t get worse than the visceral intimacy of letting a man bite you all over your arms and neck, and now here you are, untrousered and afraid. Jesus Christ, you wish Jake didn’t have to be the most beautiful person alive at all times.

He only tugged your jeans down enough to expose a modest stretch of leg to chomp on, but there’s still something horrifically vulnerable about it. He’s still in that goddamn vest, even, he’s barely shed a layer. Another power dynamic atop the pile.

“Shall we?” Jake asks, as buoyant as ever, like he doesn’t mean let me instead. Maybe he is blind, after all.

“Uh huh,” you say, and lean over to point at the faint blue wiring of veins above your knee. Technically, it’s not the femoral vein he’ll be chomping into, that’s still deep enough to be tricky. You’re indicating the great saphenous instead, which connects to the femoral vein, and is close enough to be worth biting into.

It’s also further away from your dick.

“Uh, can you see that?”

“You’re so pale,” Jake tells you, with vaguely-delirious fascination. “Translucent, really.“

“We can’t all be sun-kissed adventurebros,” you say wryly. “I-”

You’re cut off and caught off-guard when Jake, who you assume wasn’t listening, reaches down to grip your ankle gently and then yanks you towards him. Your back hits the floor and your head knocks lightly against the back wall; letting out a surprised hiss, you kick him at automatically.

Jake doesn’t seem to notice, surging sleekly forth to find the vein you indicated.

“‘S that it, dove? The femoral vein?”

“Great saphenous, technically, but-” he’s not listening to you. You lean back on your elbows and watch Jake English’s hand travel up your thigh. “…Careful. Too high and there’s muscle in the way.”

He takes a second to smile at you, and given the blood still glistening on his lips, it’s unusually and profoundly ghoulish. “That won’t be a problem, I reckon.”

Like chilled butter. Your heartbeat thunders in your ears.

“Yeah, well. I’d prefer to emerge with my ligaments intact, so.” Your voice skids as he moves his face closer. “And d-don’t hit the artery.”

“What?” He mumbles, absently.

“Dude. If you bite into the artery, I’ll die.” You tell him, and swallows down the tingle that thought brings. “Blood doesn’t keep long, so you’d be SOL next time.”

“I- and you’d be dead!” English says indignantly, finally flicking a gaze back up at you. “Really, priorities-wise-”

“Uh huh. Are you ready?” You cut him off less out of genuine disinterest and more because you can’t stand the tension of just waiting. Jake’s pretty, terrifying fangs have been hovering, shark-white, at the soft pale flesh of your inner thigh for what you can only describe as an eternity.

He darts his head in a nod, eyes not moving from your thigh. “Should I just…”

You’re not going to flinch. You’re certainly not going to scream, or worse, groan. You are Dirk Strider, walking machine, and you are going to endure this with a blank, slightly bored expression.

His lips are on your skin (don’t flinch). He curls them back (don’t be a pussy) and his canines are sharp (don’t you fucking dare) and-

You flinch.

When his canines brush your skin, it’s not even forceful enough to break through, but your shaky little inhale and wince has Jake jerking back like you’re streaming blood. “I’m so-”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” you say flatly through your gritted teeth. “Could you hurry this shit up? I feel like a virgin on prom night.”

You were hoping to scandalise him out of that train of thought, but it backfires on you. Incredible. The ghost of Hal cackles ironically in your ear about what a faglord you are.

“Well, this is my first time!” Jake blusters, and he’s- he’s got this brown-sugar skin that goes almost caramel when he’s flustered. He’s the one who looks like a fucking virgin. One of the most obnoxious things about English is his incredible talent to always look doe-eyed and blameless; if he’s going to do these things to you, you’d appreciate if he could at least look guilty.

He’s still talking. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he mutters, and your eyes snag on the quick pink flash of his tongue as it swipes over his lower lip.

“Dude. Get on with it.” You need him to get started before he notices how red you are.

Jake blinks at you for a moment, dubious. “But what if I hurt-”

“It’s an open puncture in my thigh, English, it’s going to hurt an approximate scientific unit of a metric shit-ton either way,” you snap. “Can you just hurry up? I have iron supplements I need to buy-”

“Oh, for Dicken’s sake,” Jake says, exasperated, and then rears in and bites you before you can even tense for it.

There’s a moment when all is silent, a white starburst of shock obscuring your vision.

Then the pain kicks in.

“Holy shit-“ you can hear yourself wheeze, but there’s a severed connection between your brain and body somewhere; you’re just dimly aware that you’re trying to yank away, braced against the floor and scrabbling like an animal, while Jake pins you there with unsettling ease. Black dots dance in front of your eyes.

The freezing pull into your circulatory system warms - boils?- and it’s suddenly as good as it is bad. There’s a degree to which that isn’t better - at a certain intensity of feeling, everything starts to feel awful, and this is about a thousand times blunter than the shivering euphoria of having blood sucked from your throat. You don’t like feeling this much, and you don’t like that it feels so good.

You’re used to squeezing pleasure out of scarce places, like blood from a stone. Rationing. It’s a reward, or an indulgence, and you usually like to budget those out and know their parameters. Long, hot showers and music, mostly; predictable and solitary. After you met the others, you suppose it was inevitable that your control start to slip.

This is still a shock to the system, though. A fucking deluge of a scarcity, confusing the shit out of your brain and robbing you of all common sense.

Your neck makes an alarming creak as the base of your head hits the floor again, and your back arches against the floor. Then, the claws you were digging into Jake’s shoulders release in soft, incremental movements. It travels through you, that singing, immobilising pleasure, and you unravel like a loosened knot.

At some point, your eyes must’ve fluttered shut, and it’s a genuine effort to focus enough to blink them open. Your head lolls back; you stare at Jake through the filmy lens of your half-closed eyelids, getting distracted by the way his dark hair curls over his cheek, the flashes of light glancing off his teeth, the expression on his face like he’s-

-like he’s enjoying this the same way you are. That’s…. Notable. You note it.

In the small part of your brain that doesn’t ebb and flow with every flicker of Jake’s eyelashes, you’re noting other things with detached scientific interest: the pounding gallop of your pulse, the tingling in your fingers and toes, the growing disconnect between your thoughts and actions. It’s almost peaceful - your head isn’t typically this relaxed, and your muscles are usually so tight it aches, and right now-

Jake murmurs something into your skin as he shifts, flicking a glance at your face momentarily, and your hips roll up without any inkling of intention on your part.

Well, there goes your last vestige of dignity. You imagine you’re going to wake up tomorrow and fall on your own sword.

Jake’s eyelids lower. That’s all you get - a hooded, significant look, before he returns to his task - but now the floodgates have opened, and it’s only getting harder to keep your mouth shut and your hands to yourself.

You flail one hand up and cover your face, peering at him through your spread fingers. He’s still looking at you. You’re making low, breathy noises, you realise with horror - oh god, how long? For how long?

Then one of Jake’s teeth catches in the ragged edge of the puncture, and a breathless moan falls uncontrollably from your mouth.

He pauses for a second. Just a second, but it’s enough to be confirmation that he heard it. There’s certainly an excuse about aphrodisiac venom here, should you choose to take it, but that won’t change the fact that Jake English has witnessed you writhing around on the floor and whining for him like a little bitch.

The worst part: it still feels fucking incredible. You curl your toes and flex your fingers and forget you’re meant to be keeping quiet.

You forget almost everything, actually. Enough so that it startles you when Jake draws back from you with an awkward sliding motion - making sure his teeth don’t damage anything on the way out, you assume, with the tiny fragment of sanity you have left.

It’s like feeling the tide go out, if the tide were made of gasoline and pixie dust and inimitability. An irrational disappointment lingers in its wake.

“You-” You lift your head up an inch, squinting at him, mouth moving autonomously. “You don’t have to stop, it’s fine.”

Jake blinks. “Sorry?”

“You don’t have to stop,” you repeat, and your own voice sounds alien. “Don’t stop.”

You only realise you’ve got a handful of his hair when he tries to lean back and can’t. You tell yourself to release him; instead, you hold him there, fingers curling over the nape of his neck, and neither of you looks away.

“I’m full,” he says finally, low and half-dazed. A crimson bead of blood is glistening on his jaw, pomegranate-dark and lustrous, from where it’s trailed down his chin. “That was…”

Full of you. You lose focus and feel your bottom lip split under your teeth. Jake’s eyes flash.

Somehow, after all that’s happened today, kissing Jake English still feels like a new bound of intimacy. You don’t see it happen, you just blink and he’s there: he leans over you haphazardly, one elbow down for support, and with his other hand he grips your face just-slightly too hard. The way he kisses is hard, too: wet and even and intense, like the gulps he was taking earlier. Slow, like he’s taking his time. Savouring a meal.

His tongue keeps returning to stroke along your rapidly-healing split lip. Once it closes, he pulls back.

Not surprising, still disappointing.

“That was-” Jake murmurs again, spit-slick lips brushing over your skin as he rests his head on your collarbone. Your hands come up to steady him, and there you are: lying on the ground with Jake English improbably warm and content atop you. It’s not becoming any less surreal over time.

“What do I taste like?” You blurt, which is a mortifyingly stupid question.

You can feel it when he smiles into your shoulder. “Mm? Oh, blood.”

“Right.” You’re going to set yourself on fire as soon as he leaves.

“Blood. If it was, ah, also crack.”

You snort. “There is precisely zero way you know what cracks tastes like.”

“I don’t know what sex tastes like either, but there was that too.”

You freeze.

“You asked, chum,” Jake says lightly. “You taste- well, I suppose you taste good.”

“Uh huh,” you manage. You don’t trust yourself to say anything else - you’re still so fucking hard you could drill a hole through a diamond, and you’re shaking like a wounded deer, and with the way he’s pressed up close to you, you have no idea how he hasn’t acknowledged either yet.

You’re thinking, sluggish and dizzy, about Jake English saying ‘sex.’ You are a Victorian man and he is the ankle. You wonder whether he meant it in the literal sense, or in the ‘flowery chocolate description’ way. You wonder if he tastes like sex, or if he has blood at all. You feel like if you bit him, you’d burn your tongue.

Then Jake shifts against you, and you’re made abruptly aware that you’re not the only one enduring the horrors of physiological stimuli. Thinking becomes much, much more difficult. That’s one question answered, you guess. If only you could remember what the questions were. Or your own name.

Your growing panic is only compounded by the realisation that Jake English is something close to relaxed. Stealing a glance down, the only movement you can see from him is the gentle rise and fall of his breathing.

(So he does still need to breathe; at the least, he’s still in the habit).

The last time you were grappling around and awkward boners happened, Jake absconded so fast he left his shirt behind. You didn’t see him for days.

It’s not that you don’t like this moment, a strange improbability preserved in amber as the two of you lie here. You just don’t trust it. Time isn’t amber; you can’t keep him here forever, and you don’t know how the fuck to proceed from here.

You’re not sure how long you stay there, trying not to breathe in the scent of Jake’s eucalyptus shampoo and rich, meaty blood. You’re this close to just ripping the bandaid off, you tell yourself, only-

Only when you shift uncomfortably again, this time Jake lets out a tiny noise.

“Ah,” he says, after, and pushes his face against your neck. “Do that again.”

“What.” You don’t mean to sound as harsh as you do, you’re just too startled to soften your words.

“I-” Jake pauses, like he’s just fucking noticed the situation you’re in. His hair rustles against your cheek. “Sorry. That feels- nice.”

Nice, he says. Nice. You’re going to pull out your hair by the roots and fucking eat it. You’re going to start screaming and finger-painting on the walls with what’s left of your lifeblood. You’re going to-

“Sorry,” Jake must hear your pulse galloping towards apoplexy, because he looks up at you for a moment with fat spacey pupils, then smiles slightly. “Sorry, chum, I just- well, I already told you how it felt.”

“Mm.” You say tightly, and try not to focus on every minuscule iota of him pressing into every minuscule iota of you.

“You don’t mind, do you?” Jake shifts back a fraction, still smiling, and there’s a strange, intimate lilt to his voice. “It’s your blood, after all.”

Your head blinks out for a second. Every part of your wretched husk throbs. It’s your blood. Your blood. English is full of your blood, and your blood is currently in his-

“Dirk?” He’s peering down at you now, and he’s raised a fraction back on his elbow. “Are you- you are alright, aren’t you?”

You raise an eyebrow at him, in lieu of forming a fucking answer. You hope it seems more intentional than desperate.

“Yep,” you say, a beat too late to be smooth.

“I didn’t mean to… Sorry,” he murmurs lowly, right up against your jaw, and you shiver under his warm breath. “I didn’t expect it to be, ah, like that.”

You snort before you can stop yourself. “No shit.”

You get a brief second to rue all your life choices before Jake pipes up again. He’s tilted his head curiously to the side, and those big green eyes aren’t looking so spacey anymore.

“What was it like on your end, then?”

“What?” Your face is burning. Stall, stall, stall.

“I told you how it felt for me,” Jake reasons, like you could’ve forgotten - like crack and sex isn’t reverberating through your head on a loop - and pins you with an expectant stare. “How was it for you?”

The silence hangs between you for a moment, as you lie under him, paralysed by your own intense panic. You know you can’t stare at him forever, you have to say something.

Words are your forte, usually. This is a fucking disgrace.

Then Jake turns his face into your neck and his lips brush the ripped skin there. “You didn’t look- oh, hell. I didn’t hurt you terribly, did I, chum?”

You can feel the words as much as hear them, and the slight drag of fangs that lurk behind them. You should be petrified. One wrong move, and you’re Dirk Kebab 2: Electric Bugaloo.

Instead, you’re hot and shivery and practically pulsing with your own idiotic desire. Again. Will you ever shed the humiliating trappings of mortal flesh? Or is Jake English the torment everlasting which dogs the transcendent mind?

Is Jake English just the shadow on a cave wall?

“No,” you say, and then, before you can stop yourself. “…Yes. But it wasn’t-”

He stares at you, all big dewy eyes like his hard-on isn’t ground right up against your hipbone. The things you do for this man. Ridiculous.

“It was. Similar. On my end,” you admit, jaw tight, unnervingly aware of every tiny facet of his expression, as your brain convinces your body that you’re under siege. “To your description.”

There you go. It’s on him to proceed now, cards on the table. You’ve given Jake English what he hates most: a simple binary decision with heavy emotional outcomes. Historically, you’ve had precedent for these.

You know how it goes. On your knees with a med kit, watching his back; post-grappling, watching his back; post-decapitated head kiss, feeling his eyes on your back as you left before he could. You’ve adapted through the years, in some ultimately doomed attempt at self-preservation - there’s a reason 16 year old Dirk, idiot though he was, didn’t ever get up the courage to ask Jake out. You’re astonished your friendship survived that kiss at all.

Maybe this is the time you always knew was running out, finally pooling in the bottom of the hourglass. But it’s Jake’s responsibility now, you and him and the half-inch space between your mouths.

“Oh,” Jake says finally, which is such an understatement that you feel briefly compelled to strangle him.

The powers of Jake’s selective focus are incredible. Maybe now he’ll recognise the boner you’ve had since he first stuck his teeth in you. Maybe he’ll-

“You liked it?”

“Yes,” you say quietly, not so much out of patience as out of sheer mortification. There are no words for you here, no elaborate labyrinth of metaphor and digression; there’s just his searchlight-green eyes, and you, pinned and rendered honest beneath them. “In case the- writhing and whining didn’t make it obvious. I did.”

“I was worried you were hurt.” Jake tells you, and you can’t work out whether he’s sincere or not.

“Uh huh.” You tilt your hips slightly - if it culminates in some sort of friction, that’s entirely incidental. “Really?”

Jake’s eyes flicker away for a second, his lip catching between teeth. When he looks back up, his eyes are dark again, and intent.

“You actually enjoyed it.”

“Yeah,” you breathe, and it’s slightly easier the second time. “I’m surprised too.”

Jake shifts against you, and this time it’s no coincidence.

“I thought I might be, uh, delirious, chum,” he murmurs, low and captivating. “It’s like- drinking, it’s- well, hunger and sex. I know I already said that, but it really is, it’s- it’s very confusing, to be dashed honest.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s half consumption, and half like- like touching oneself, so to speak, but not so, uh, individual? You’re- you’re a source of both, right now, and it’s-” he takes in a shuddering breath, and his hand curves heavy over your hip. “Confusing. Sort of perverse, frankly.”

“So, what, I’m like, a piece of steak you want to put your dick in, right now?” Dirk Strider: master of dirty talk. Plausibly deniable dirty talk, depending on whether Jake decides this is sex or just the digestif.

“You’re more than that, Strider,” Jake says, that tiny furrow between his brows returning. “But I want to- I want a lot of things right now, chum, and they all taste the same.”

“Mhm.” Jake English is hard and hot against your hip and he’s still here, telling you about hunger. It’s very hard to pay attention.

“Um.”

You look up at him. “Yes?”

“Dirk.” There’s an unusual intensity in his eyes.

“Yes?”

“You’re hard.”

You bite back the ridiculous urge to claim he started it. It’s not true, anyway.

“No shit, Sherlock.” You bump his side. “So are you.”

“It’s the blood for me.” He pauses, truly savouring his opportunity to make a fucking idiot of you. “You really did enjoy it, didn’t you?”

Fucking Christ.

“Obviously.” You rasp. “It’s probably the adrenaline. Is that a-”

Your voice suddenly trails off when Jake, abandoning all previous cautions and hesitancies, abruptly reaches down to take you in hand.

“You-”

“Agh-”

You clap a hand over your mouth, but it’s too late. Every part of your face pulses with heat when he looks at you.

“You’re attracted to me?”

Understatement of the fucking millennium. You’ve got no idea why he keeps acting like that’s some kind of surprise.

“Everyone’s attracted to you,” you say sourly, and for a moment, a strange flicker of something bad flashes in his eyes. “That’s not- I didn’t mean that.”

“Didn’t you.” He mutters, looking away.

If your limbs didn’t feel so heavy, you’d actually hold your lips shut. “Jake.”

“Don’t worry about-”

“Jesus, fine.” You sigh, exasperated, and prepare to flay off another layer of skin for him. “It’s not because you’re pretty, English. It’s not even the fucking venom boosting my circulation. It’s you. Alright?”

Jake blinks up at you for a long second, shiny-eyed and thoughtful. Long enough that you start to slip down inside the black hole of panicky over-analysis and tremulous guilt.

“Mm,” he says finally, and smooths his hand over your hipbone. The trails of his fingers leave sparks.

That, or the blood loss is hitting you harder than you’d anticipated.

“Let me do something for you, chum.”

That’s… that’s a disaster waiting to happen. You don’t want a favour from Jake English. You especially don’t want a reward.

You’re not going to say no, though. You can’t make yourself.

Instead, you stare up at the ceiling, holding your expression in check. “No offence, Jake, but that sounds like a fucking terrible idea.”

“Let me do it anyway,” Jake murmurs, and that’s the moment you give in. What are you going to do, tell him you don’t want anything he’d give you? Your poker face is good, but it’s not that good.

There’s a nostalgic feel to resignation, and it’s almost comforting.

“Sure.”

Jake’s hands are broader than your own, with a gunman’s callouses on the trigger finger and thumb, and a faint dusting of hair at the knuckles. You know them by sight - the advantages of half a lifetime of stolen glances - but you’ve never had the chance to really know them by touch.

You can’t see what he’s doing, but you can feel it. Fingertips tracing over your hipbones, the scrape of nails against tense skin, fabric dragged down your thighs.

Jake’s still in his fucking vest. You almost want to laugh.

When he pulls away, you’re expecting it to be for a better angle, or something. Maybe he just wanted to extract himself from the crevice of your shoulder. Maybe he’d prefer not to be so close, lest you misinterpret this entirely manly act of friendship.

You’re not expecting to feel the hot drag of his lips against your fucking navel. You’d kept your eyes fixed firmly on the ceiling, which means you’re blindsided enough to yelp with shock at the sensation, and then you’re looking down before you can stop yourself.

The sight of Jake English, crouched down between your legs, is unfortunately about as devastating as you would expect. There goes the hope that this’ll get it out of your system, you guess. That realisation distracts you from what Jake’s actually doing until, with a sudden jolt low in your stomach, you feel warm breath fan over your inner thighs.

“Wh-at the fuck are you doing?” You demand, voice high and pitchy.

Jake looks up at you, the tips of sharp white needles just barely protruding over that perfect mouth, and blinks at you.

“I- well, plum, I can’t think there’s much ambiguity to be had here.” He grins. “I said I was going to do something, didn’t I?”

You open your mouth to tell him that no, a fanged blowjob was mentioned a grand total of zero times in all the years of your acquaintance-

-but then Jake’s tugging you closer with one firm hand on your thigh, and his mouth is opening, and what you say instead is-

“Don’t- don’t fucking bite me there-”

Jake pauses, and grins at you with restored confidence. “I won’t bite.”

You boggle at him, caught somewhere between your libido and basic common sense. “Dude.”

“I won’t bite!” He insists, and then summons up the nerve from somewhere to wiggle his eyebrows at you and continue, “….Hard.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding m-” you begin, words abruptly transitioning into a strangled choke as his mouth closes around you.

You won’t lie and pretend that you’ve never imagined this. Obviously you have - you were a teenage boy and your best friend was Jake English. You’ve had thoughts about Jake that you wouldn’t admit to under torture. You’ve had confused sexual reactions to Jake that you’d rather die than acknowledge. He’s always had a fucking atrocious gift for making you feel completely out of control of your own brain.

He’s the only person who could get you to lie back and stick their dick in the supernatural equivalent of a saw trap. Compared to some of the things you’ve thought of, this isn’t that bad. You’d let him bite off your tongue and eat it, this isn’t-

But holy shit. You didn’t imagine it like this. There are little sparks of electric, animal fear tingling icily up your spine, and you’re past being able to tell whether your stillness is a victory of self-control or just a shock reaction.

It’s the kind of good that feels bad. His mouth is overwhelmingly warm and slick, and there’s something terrifying close about it; you’re not sure whether the physical sensation is just that intense, or if it’s the bizarre intimacy of being allowed into some private place within him.

You can’t describe the way he looks right now. You wouldn’t, anyway. Your name is Dirk Strider, and you’re the only one who gets to see this.

(His mouth is crimson and slightly swollen from all the biting. There’s- a lot of spit. It’s incredibly obscene. Fire ants are creeping into your epidermis.)

You can’t ignore the fangs, though. He’s doing a remarkably good job of keeping them slotted up and away from your most fragile extremity, but you can still feel them bracketing his mouth like silent wardens, a constant lingering threat.

That shouldn’t make it better. You’re a control freak. You’ve been getting off to the idea of Jake English coming to you and asking prettily whether he can make up for all the years of constant misery on your part for almost as long as you’ve known him. You don’t ever fantasise about being the one deconstructed by lust and pinned there by fear, helpless and abrim with nervous energy.

One wrong move, and you’re fucked.

Your toes curl.

Jake pulls back, tilts his head, smiles directly at you with all the golden force of a thousand suns. He’s looking at you like you’ve done something clever, or like you’re one of the people you’ve pretended to be over the years, and-

It hurts, looking at him. It never gets easier, but sometimes it gets sharper. It’s the stone in your pocket, the chip on your shoulder. You can feel that ache, now, a throbbing iciness that squeezes your heart in a fist until viscera squelches out between the knuckles.

Jake presses his mouth to your hip, and you buck into it without a thought. You realise dizzily that one of your hands is on his shoulder; he ducks his head down, almost pointedly, and your fingers are suddenly caught up in his dark curls.

“Jake-”

There’s a brief second of calm, and then a fang scrapes carefully up along your skin, until his fucking teeth are inches away from your dick again - oh god - and he looks up at you through his lashes, like he’s just remembered to be uncertain.

“You know, I’ve- I’ve thought about this before,” he breathes, almost too quiet to be audible, and your heart lurches.

He takes advantage of the way you freeze to sink those teeth straight into the painfully vulnerable skin of your inner thigh. It’s such a shocking burst of pleasure-pain that your vision goes fuzzy - a strangled noise bursts from your lips like a screech of radio static, and when you’re able to focus again, you see that you’ve got a vicious handful of Jake’s hair.

“Shit,” you mutter, and try to relax your grip. He bites you again, and when you look down, you see the reddened bow of his mouth curl up, amused, around your skin.

“You- ah- You said you wouldn’t bite,” you manage to get out, reaching for the brain that’s currently lost somewhere between your legs. “Dude.”

“You’ll find I said I wouldn’t bite hard, chum,” he tells you, slightly awkward with his fangs distorting the words. He ignores the gimlet grip you have on him to move closer, licking a stripe up your skin until you squirm.

“Don’t remind me.”

Jake gives you a look, then, something painfully close to fond exasperation, then bends back down and swallows you whole again.

You bang your hand into the floor instead of letting the noise building in your throat out. Your other hand claws desperately at the back of his neck; you wince, when sanity returns, and try to force your fingers to relax.

Jake mumbles something against your skin. “Do that again,” he clarifies, his eyes low-lidded and unfocused and- and fucking languorous, like a man content.

You think he likes this. Doing this, for you.

You fist your hand in the curls at the nape of his neck and yank before you even process the idea, and Jake lets out a noise so abruptly pornographic that you see stars. When you finally blink them away and look down, you’re somewhat gobsmacked to find him flushed and hazy-eyed, looking back up at you with barely a hint of green left around his pupils.

“Do you… like that?” You ask, your voice rasping out hoarse and husky, thick with arousal.

He pulls away for a second and hits you with the classic English grin - intensely bashful, ridiculously charming, almost more obscene in this context than the sight of him actually sucking your dick - and then says, dazedly, “Apparently so.”

It doesn’t take much longer for you, after that. Jake pins your hip down to the floor as works you over with his mouth, and the flashes of pulsing heat and horror that accompany the hint of his teeth are only getting more frequent, coalescing into a spiralling, unbearable pleasure. When you go over, it’s almost a relief - you feel the very top of a fang press close to your skin, just enough to shock, and experience a split-second of raw animal terror before your brain shorts out.

The ceiling of the room is white, once you blink the spots away. Your heart is pounding so hard that you can feel it reverberate through your body.

You feel like you’ve been cut open - someone’s peeled skin back and cracked your ribcage, pulled out something fleshy and unseen. Your skin fits over your bones wrong. You’re not in control of anything, right now.

Case in point: when you force your eyes away from the ceiling, they land on Jake, and the look on his face is unabashedly fascinated.

He hasn’t seen you like this before. No one has. It’s just another private, cringingly vulnerable piece of you that he’s yanked carelessly into the light. He probably doesn’t even know what’s he done.

Tomorrow, you’re sure you’ll feel resentful and bitter and sick off your own hideous yearning. Maybe you’ll even feel used.

Right now, though, with endorphins still settling warmly through your body, and Jake English looking down at you like he doesn’t ever plan to look away…

All you can think of right now is that there’s something in you Jake thought was worth taking out. Maybe if you ask really nicely, he’ll still rip your heart out and eat it in front of you - he’s already done that shit metaphorically, why not seal the deal while you’re still sluggish?

I’ve thought about this before.

The rush of sudden, syrupy affection sneaks up on you, like it always does, and you feel the corner of your mouth twitch up despite yourself.

That minuscule motion seems to startle Jake out of his reverie, and you watch a little helplessly as he draws back into himself.

He’s still hard, though.

You manage to get an elbow up under yourself and tip forwards, hooking your finger in his belt loop. It takes more effort than you anticipated, with all your joints feeling honey-loose and unbolted, but this close, you can feel the warmth radiate off him again.

“Allow me,” you say, with appropriate sardonicism, as you go for his fly. And Jake-

-Jake startles, shying back a step like a spooked horse. He casts a look down like he’s surprised to find himself hard, then flicks his eyes back up to you, buckteeth sunk into his bottom lip.

“Oh! You don’t have to, chum…”

And just like that, your joints are stiff again.

“What?” You ask, on reflex.

He fidgets. “I- I wasn’t expecting you to- you’ve done so bally much for me already-”

You let your hand drop and pinch your nose bridge, sighing. “…Jesus, Jake.”

“What?”

“This isn’t- this isn’t a fucking quid pro quo, man.” You fight to keep your tone even as your mood spikes. A dull throb of pain is starting to well up in your leg, your neck’s on fire, and your whole face is prickling-hot. “Could you phrase it any other way? Something that sounds less fucking transactional? That doesn’t- reflect well on me.”

English knits his brow at you. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m not extorting you for sexual favours in exchange for my blood, English,” you snap, feeling the inevitable consequences of spending time with Jake pummel you in a wave. “That’s- I- Tell me you weren’t just trying to repay the favour.”

“That’s not what I….” Jake trails off, which isn’t a good sign. He’s flushed to the ears, but god knows what that indicates at this point. You can taste acid in your throat. “I just mean, you’re- you’re still bleeding, and I couldn’t ask you to…”

“You can just say no,” you tell him, reaching your breaking point with unusual speed. You’re not just exhausted, you’re ignoring the growing weight of misery settling on your shoulders like snow on the trees. Every fucking time.

Sometimes, it’s nigh-impossible to restrain the urge to grab Jake by the shoulders and unleash a busload of vitriol on him. Sometimes, you want to hold him there and make him look you in the fucking eyes when you ask him if he knows how fucking mortifying it is, to have loved someone as long as you’ve loved him and for him to somehow still be finding new ways to get your hopes up. How fucking stupid he makes you. Sometimes you want to pull this twisting poisonous mass of emotion out of yourself like a parasite and force him to see it for once, to acknowledge what he’s done to you.

You don’t do that. Partially because it’d require you to bring up an uncountable number of off-limits topics, and partially because you’re genuinely not confident you’d be able to get through it without bursting into tears like a hormonal tween.

There’s a reason you don’t talk to Jake one-on-one anymore. He turns you into the worst kind of lovedrunk idiot, trailing around stupidly with a cruel, useless sense of self-awareness. You shouldn’t have let him in here - you shouldn’t have fucking touched him, let him see all the tiny little inadequacies that you consist of under the facade. You especially shouldn’t have let his lips touch your skin. You should’ve sent him to the room opposite and stuck a fucking needle in your arm. It’s what you’d have done for anyone else.

You shouldn’t have ever responded to that initial green pester in the first place. He ruined you, the first few months you met him; time keeps moving on but you’re trapped in the same fucking loneliness as when you were a kid.

“No,” Jake interrupts, loud enough to break you out of that train of thought. “No, look, I- I just, Dirk, you’re- I think I drank too much, and you’re shaking and I-”

“Dude.”

“And I just-”

“Got it,” you tell him flatly, trying to draw away.

To your surprise, Jake shifts closer, grasping your arm. “Dirk, I hurt you,” he says sharply, gesturing towards your leg. There’s an unusual hardness in his eyes, a guilt coiled under his words.

You glance down, assess the damage. It’s not pretty - that dull pain is sharpening to a pounding agony as the adrenaline recedes, and against your skin, the wet ooze of blood looks impossibly vital and stark. It’s started to clot again, faster than it should, but it’s still a ragged mess. It might scar.

You can’t make yourself care.

“I said you could,” you say, shrugging. “You needed to.”

Jake’s finger traces across your leg, to the livid bites marking up your inner thigh. They’re a lot neater, almost even, and already starting to purple.

“I didn’t need to do those ones,” he tells you darkly. “I just- I got carried away, chum. Like a wild bloody animal.”

“I didn’t stop you.”

“I don’t know if I would’ve stopped if you had!” Jake brings a hand up and yanks at his hair, jaw set. “I don’t- I thought it would be easier once I, you know, but- Strider, my self-control is bally contemptible right now, and it’d be reprehensible to endanger you further. Judas at a bloody hand jive, you’ve put up with enough.”

You stare at him, trying to figure out what exactly he’s saying. “Dude-”

“I-” Finally, he meets your eyes, words spilling louder and louder from his mouth. “I want- you’re so bloody- Strider, I just couldn’t forgive myself if you woke up tomorrow and told me I took advantage. You’re not- not clear-minded right now.”

Ah. The cycle resumes; your hopes rise, even as you try not to give in. That’s not an explicit no for no's sake, which might mean something.

“Are you serious?” You ask him flatly.

Jake twists his fingers together. “You’re so- you’ve been so kind, chap. You let me in and let me maul you and take all sorts of- liberties-”

Jesus Christ.

“And if you told me to stop, I might not,” he repeats, fisting a hand in his hair. “And you’re in no state to- I just- I wanted to, Strider.” He turns to look at you, mouth wet and shiny with the way he’s been biting his lips, and something of the predator from earlier gleams in his eyes for a split-second. “I’ve never had someone- I’m just, I’m worried I might, ah, you know.” He gestures at you like it goes without saying.

“Might what?” You press, voice fraying.

“Might bloody grab you,” Jake mutters. “And take more than I should.”

God forbid.

“Let me get this straight,” you say with exaggerated patience. “You don’t want me to jerk you off because you might’ve hypothetically not listened if I told you to stop when you were half-crazed from hunger.”

“It’s the principle.”

“Principle aside,” you pinch your nose bridge. “That didn’t even fucking happen, Jake.”

“It could’ve.” He blinks at you tragically. His hand is still on your thigh, a taunting warmth and closeness. “It- it could still.”

You’re so fucking tired.

“Your chivalry is appreciated,” you tell him, in a tone that indicates the opposite. “But it’d be sick if you’d stop acting like I’m some kind of helpless damsel you violated.”

Jake stares at you for a second, seemingly unable to respond, and you realise with a genuine pulse of discomfort that he might actually believe that.

Unbelievable. You spend years kicking Jake’s shit in almost every time you strife, and then the second he gets fucking vampired up, you’re Lucy Westenra.

“Oh my god,” you groan and rub your temples.

“I-”

“Bro. There are concealed weapons in every square inch of this house. If I tap the right combination on the floorboard, the taser’ll target anyone not on the list.”

“…it’s the principle,” Jake repeats faintly, but you don’t miss the relief in his eyes. “But thank you.”

Well. The moment’s passed. A crushing disappointment sinks in your chest, but at least you’re feeling less of an urge to bludgeon him around the head with a weapon made entirely of your own self-indulgent bitterness now.

Sometimes, you wish you didn’t care about his feelings. Unfortunately, you do. You’re grudgingly relieved that he was nice enough to give you an excuse rather than a flat rejection.

“Whatever, dude,” you say, and there must be something appeasing in your tone, because Jake takes your hands in his and stares you right in the eyes like you’re both about to break into song.

“I really do appreciate your- uh. All of it, chum.”

That’s probably as good as you can get, in a situation like this. You shrug, not quite able to muster the will to pry your hands out from his grasp, and quirk a brow at him.

“Don’t mention it, bro. What are friends for.”

For a good few moments, Jake stares, not responding. A strange frisson radiates through you - his eyes are dark, and they’re cutting into you like scimitars. For some reason, this feels dangerous again.

“Do you do this with a lot of friends, Dirk?” He asks, voice light and tone casual, and it does a very good job of camouflaging tensions. The words are heavy with suggestion, though, dancing ever-closer to the elephant in the room.

“No,” you admit, wryly. “Just you.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. You blink and then, overcome by the horror of what you’ve just implied to him, you snatch your hands away from his and look elsewhere.

There’s a pause. Jake, apparently incapable of interpreting your body language, leans against you and turns his face back into your neck.

You don’t say anything, but your whole body draws tight. You can feel his boner digging into your thigh. This is unbearable.

“I still get a kick out of that, you know.” Jake murmurs, his lip quirking against your jaw.

“Out of what?”

“You saying we’re friends.” His smile turns wry. “You must admit, chum, you bury the lead sometimes.”

“That’s not what that phrase means,” you say automatically, then pause, twisting to stare at him. “Wait. What the fuck are you talking about?”

Jake turns his head to look at you more fully, a strange openness in his face. “You don’t really talk to me much anymore, do you, Dirk?”

You sit up. “I- we talked yesterday, English.”

(You pester eachother regularly. You have a schedule - you worked out your average reply time, length, and frequency with other people. If you can’t be normal about someone, transfer normalcy from other sources).

“Not about you, though.”

“Sure,” you say, and paste on a little smile like you’re humouring him. “Anyway-“

“You’ve been closing yourself off,” Jake tells you, with a sudden and startling intensity. It’s a fucking hilarious thing to say, especially from him, especially right now. “I’ve- Ever since the end of the game, you’ve been trying to- to wall yourself up in here and keep people out. I suppose I miss talking to a person instead of your- bloody- inbuilt autoresponder.”

You sit up, bristling, feeling the loose pieces of your outer shell seal back together. He sets a hand on your chest and pushes you back down.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you snap, all too aware of the cracks in your monotone. “If anyone should be talking about emotional distance, Jake-“

“You’ve- you’ve gotten better at pretending you’re not human, over the years,” he says quietly, almost too low to hear. “Sometimes, you’re so good at it, I wonder if my version of you was real at all. But we used to talk. Didn’t we?”

Yeah, you’ve had enough of this conversation.

Grabbing his wrist, you twist it up and around, using the momentum to shove it far, far away. You’re furious, suddenly, hissing and spitting like a brindled cat; you lurch forward on your knees, turn to face him properly.

“I didn’t realise you came here for therapy, English. I thought I was food, not fucking-” your voice shakes and you cut yourself off abruptly, aching for your shades - why in the ever loving fuck did you take them off in the first place?

“You know that’s not fair-”

“-Fascinating that you bring up fairness. It’s pretty fucking incredible for you to start talking about communication, actually, Jake, considering everything about you - you're fucking - you’re always just disappearing into the woods for weeks with no warning, and I’m the one walling myself off?” That sounded too obviously hurt. Whatever. You don’t really have pride to salvage, at this point. “I’m not- fucking pretending not to be human, Jesus Christ. It’s called self-preservation, Jake, and-”

“Dirk,” Jake cuts in, and you hate him, you loathe him. His voice is shaking, and he’s so beautiful when he frowns, you can almost make yourself feel guilty. “I didn’t mean to- raise snakes- or anything, I just- it’s frustrating. You used to humour me, at least.”

“This entire evening has been dedicated to humouring you, English,” you snap, as flat and as cruel as you can manage. He draws back, lips twisting down, and for a second, it’s incredibly satisfying in a miserable type of way. You’re self-destructive, but at least you’re good at it - no one can twist the knife quite like you can.

“I know,” he says, and scrubs a hand over his face. “I’m sorry.”

Oh, Jesus.

“I’m being an asshole,” you mutter. “You know that.”

“Yes, well, you’ve always been dashed good at it,” Jake tells you through his fingers. “Doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

“I-” you’re started to feel nauseated the longer he keeps staring at the floor like that, with soft bruised eyes. “Goddamnit, English, you know it’s not true.”

“Do I?”

“Right. Because our friendship’s always been defined by you chasing after me.” And here he goes, making you twist the knife into your own heart again. At some point, it’s your own fucking fault for doing it.

He shrugs.

“Dude.”

“When was the last time you visited me?” Jake says, so quiet you almost can’t hear him. “Or texted me first, even?”

You freeze. It feels like you’ve been caught doing something shameful and explicit.

“You used to make me go ten rounds with an autoresponder before you’d talk to me, chum,” he continues, twisting his fingers in his lap. “You- you made me kiss your decapitated head during the game like it was a joke. You’ll let me in here - you’ll let me touch you - but you won’t- you act like this is what friends do.”

You stare, speechless.

“I’m not terribly smart, I know that, and you are. It’s not bloody inconceivable to think that you might just be humouring me when we speak. I suppose it’s better to know than to just keep chasing.” There’s a sigh in that last word, something bone-deep and strangely familiar.

Panic tastes acrid and sour on your tongue, like you’ve bitten into a power cable. You open your mouth, but you don’t have any words left; a shudder goes through you, a twitchy electrical pulse, and then you sigh, closing your eyes for a second, before you take him by the shoulder.

“Dirk-”

You kiss him, because it hurts in the same way the scars on your arms used to. If he wants- if he wants something from you, if he really doesn’t fucking know he’s got all of it, then you’ll give him something else. You’ve never wanted to be the person pulling someone else down into a kiss - it feels too vulnerable, too obvious, and any second now he could cut you off and start letting you down easy.

But he doesn’t.

He does pull back - it takes him a startled jolt and a good few seconds of muffled protest before he ducks his head away from you, panting, holding you by the jaw.

“I don’t- this isn’t funny, Dirk.”

“Does it look like I’m laughing to you?” You rasp, your tone not irony-flat but practically singing with desperation, and when you pull him back and kiss him again, he doesn’t try to stop you.

He still tastes like your skin, and after a strange tense moment, he sighs through his nose and presses you flat back into the floor again, pinning you under his broader bulk. You weren’t expecting him to go with it, so you just let him and hope for the best; he exhales, a hot growl right against your mouth, and brings down his hips to roll into yours.

He’s still hard. Obviously. It’s vindicating, anyway, feeling the undeniable shape of him pressed against you.

You don’t give him a chance to pull the maiden-fair routine this time - you hook a leg over his hip and grind up, startled by the noise that comes out of you when you do. It’s the same feeling as when he was drinking from you: a pleasure so intense it edges over the line into adrenaline, burns all the way down. You’re so close to him, you can hear your heartbeat and his thudding slightly out of rhythm, but it still doesn’t feel close enough.

Jake groans into your mouth and pulls back for a second, and you lock your ankles, filled with a sudden and unbearable certainty that he’s about to start retreating again.

“I swear to god-”

“No, no, let me- let me just,” he mutters, fringe in his eyes, mouth distractingly swollen. Then he readjusts his angle as he moves against you, and you let out a sound you didn’t know you were capable of making. He’s so fucking close. He’s almost as close as you’ve spent your life fantasising about, slotted between your legs like he belongs there.

Jake groans and drags you up against him, like he’s trying to fuck you through your clothes. A bolt of heat goes through you. You’re not sure you’d survive it. You think you’d let him try, anyway.

“God,” you mutter, trembly and alarmingly close to tears, and he lets his open mouth catch on your neck. “God-”

You realise Jake’s talking, a low breathless noise, but you can’t figure out what he means.

“What do you want,” you choke out.

“Let me-”

You’d let him do anything. He doesn’t seem like he’s capable of finishing that sentence, though - you watch him as he reaches a shaking hand out, curves it up your arm, and taps his fingers so-gently over the burning tear at the edge of your neck. You scream, a short raspy thing, as pain lances through you and your head swims, but he doesn’t stop, just tips closer and closer and-

You fumble a hand between your bodies and go for his belt buckle, because this is the closest you’ve ever gotten and you’ve never known when to stop. He clutches your shoulder, instead, his tongue caught briefly between his teeth, and then his fly is undone and your hand is slipping under fabric to touch hot, hot skin, and he shudders in place like you’ve burnt him.

“Dirk-”

“It’s okay,” you mutter at the ceiling, half to assure him, half because you’re not letting him back out now. “It’s okay.”

“Dirk, just, let me-” he pushes away for a second and you feel manic with it, incandescent with your own baited fury, until he slides his hand up your arm and down your wrist and catches your fingers up with his. “Ah.”

“Ah?”

Jake twists arduously to get your linked hands up to his face. Then, unexpectedly and completely inexplicably, he presses his parted lips to the weakest point of your palm. You have to pause for a second, choking, to breathe.

“What are you-”

“You’ve got such beautiful hands, chum,” he says, almost apologetically. “That’s why I- Bally selfish, honestly, but that’s half of why I wouldn’t bite there. I couldn’t, ah, couldn’t stand to make a mess of them.”

“…what.”

Jake’s grin, like this, is almost unsettling in its warm debauchery. “Clever hands, dove. Quite something to watch you work.”

You’ve got one hand wrapped around his dick and one on his jaw and he’s talking about the latter. Typical.

He twists and groans when your fingers slide over him, bucking his hips into your hold and pressing his mouth harder into your wrist.

“Ah- let me, let me just-”

Let me, let me, let me. It’s sparking in your head, not quite processed. Let me. Like this is him doing something to you. Let me. Like you’re letting him.

He’s licking your fingers again. You should probably be slightly worried about that - especially as his fangs flash at you, so close to the thin skin of your wrist. You’re too lost in the feeling of touching him like this. You’ve never- you didn’t think this was an experience you’d get to have with him. You haven’t been able to picture experiencing it with someone else. A guy tried to pick you up at a Carapacian bar once, and you got as far as him pinning you up against an alley wall before you panicked and punched him straight in the face - it was too much, too intimate, too unknown, and he was a fucking stranger, and he wasn’t the person you wanted him to be.

This is the person you wanted him to be. You’re kind of breathless with the sheer impossibility of it, the bruising grip English has on your elbow and the feel of his skin under your fingers.

There it is; the faint scrape of his fangs against your wrist. He’s mouthing right over a scar, now, a pale series of them - not deep, that wasn’t ever the point, it wasn’t anything - and you’re not sure whether you feel furious that he’s pressed himself into another level of your personal vulnerabilities, or just lovedrunk and stupid at the way he doesn’t even seem to notice.

“I won’t-” he pants for a moment, sweat shimmering on his brow, and his other hand bruises into your side as you touch him, sharp inelegant motions. “I won’t bite, I just want to…”

You’re not sure how safe it would be for him to bite you again. You were too out of it to get a decent idea of how much blood he took earlier - you could come up with a rough estimate based off your own blood pressure and the timeframe, but you’re fairly sure whatever’s in his teeth messes with your bloodflow, so it’s not exactly reliable.

This knowledge blinks up in your head one second, and is discarded the next.

“You can,” you gasp, and press closer, grind your hand against his mouth the same way you’re grinding your hand against his dick. He lets out a ragged noise and leans into you instead, biting his own lip like he’s trying to keep his mouth shut.

“Bite me,” you choke out, light-headed and overstimulated. “Bite me, do it, man. I want you to. I want you-”

He jerks forward and his teeth pierce his lower lip. He still bleeds red, like a human.

You wonder if some of that blood oozing out of his lip came from you. The thought feels like grazing a live wire - incredibly dangerous, indescribable, shocking.

You lick the blood out of his mouth on automatic, and Jake goes very still for a second.

(The thought occurs to you that it’s highly probable that whatever it is he has, it’s transmitted through bodily fluids. You can’t make yourself regret it - it’s too late now, anyway.)

You wonder if Jake makes that connection, too, because he seems to lose control in those last few seconds; the teeth come out, pressed a fraction of an inch from your mouth, and he grips his hand in yours over his jaw so hard that the bones grind together and then scream.

“You‘re- oh, Dirk,” he manages, voice raspy and fraying and beyond wild, and then Jake comes in hot streaks all over your stomach.

…Jesus, it must be love. That’s disgusting. You’d let him do it again. You’re letting him splay his hand out on your skin, tacky with come, like he’s admiring it. Disgusting. Disgusting disgusting disgusting. You need a shower like you need air. You’re so enamoured by the idea of his mark on you that you’re considering just sleeping like this. You hate the texture. It’s the hottest thing that’s ever happened to you.

“…”

And then it’s over. Twisted into eachother like an impressionist sculpture, gasping for breath, foreheads together. It’s like you’re the aftermath left in the wake of a natural disaster.

You’re stupidly, superstitiously scared to break the silence after what just happened. You tend to believe in cosmic balance, at least when it comes to Jake, and something like this is inevitably going to end with you taking more emotional damage than one prevaricating man should be able to inflict alone.

“You smell friggin’ fantastic,” Jake murmurs eventually, straight into your hair. Oh, god, you can’t even imagine what your hair looks like.

You blink at the ceiling. “Like jizz?”

“Like me,” he says, so low it shivers through you, and his lips are back to brushing your jaw with every word they shape. It’s another rare intimacy in a fucking plethora of them. You think this is the most protracted physical contact you’ve ever had with anyone.

Jake continues after a moment. “…and like- like tangerines. And metal. Like something bright and fresh and tart in a scrapyard. It’s- it’s, uh. Very good.”

You should ask questions about his sense of smell, how enhanced it is, what chemicals he must be detecting - but you don’t. You just lie there pinned under Jake English, warm and dazed from the post-sex hormones, and boggle. Is this how people feel when they win marathons? Like their insides’ve been taken out and blended up into something new and aching?

Slowly, drips of information percolate through your brain. Some of them are more relevant than others - Jake English likes your hands? - and some of them are just fascinating from a scientific perspective - his fangs seeming to pop out on their own as he lost control, much the same way his breathing went heavy - and then some of them-

“You’ve thought about doing that before?”

Jake turns his head to look at you. “Mm?”

“Earlier. When you… You said you’d thought about doing it. Before.” Your voice is practically robotic with all the emotion you’re keeping out of it.

You wait for him to stiffen. He does tense for a moment, but astonishingly, it appears that even Jake English has a melting point. Instead of pulling back and making his excuses to leave, he breathes slowly out and then meets your eyes.

“Mm. Yes, chum. Once or twice.” His lip ticks up, ever-so-slightly - bashful or secretive, you can’t quite decide. “Being conservative.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” That’s almost mischief, in the way he smiles. “…All I thought about when I was sixteen, really.”

“Oh.” You say, a word that feels punched out of your lungs with all the air.

“Yep.” He closes his eyes, like that’s the end to the talking and not a fucking landmine in the middle of the most honest conversation he’s ever had with you.

This is more than you thought you’d get out of him. If you were smart, you’d quit while you were ahead - he hasn’t even moved yet. His arm is a warm weight over yours, and his legs are tangled with yours. You could stay like this for a little while longer, if you keep your mouth shut.

“…you, uh. Never did it.” You say, because it’s in your nature to toss everything you love away in the pursuit of the bloody, bitter truth. Or because you’re an idiot with blood loss. Perhaps both.

“Mmhm.”

You wait him out.

“No,” he murmurs. “I suppose I didn’t.”

You take a breath. “Why not?”

A long, excruciating silence. You’re so past the line, you’re practically dancing the conga in his childhood trauma or something.

You can wait. You can wait.

“I… never really thought I’d actually do it,” Jake muffles, hot breath over your neck.

There’s something in his voice that stops your typical plummet into the abyss of self-loathing misery.

“…why not?” You repeat.

You can feel his tired smile, curving against your skin.

“Well, chum…” his eyes meet yours again. Poison-green, emerald-green, universe-green. “I guess I was worried it would make things a dash, ah… weird.”

You look at him. He looks at you. You take a moment to truly evaluate the situation - the harsh, pulling pain in your neck, the throbbing gash in your thigh, the path of devastation he’s trailed all the way down your body in bruises and bites. The knot your limbs make with his. The way you’re both crusted together with blood and other bodily fluids - god, the wet red mess of his mouth and how it got that way. You think your wrist might be dislocated.

And then, slowly and painfully through your bruised ribs, you start to laugh.

You’ve never been the type to drift out of sleep. Usually, when you wake up, it’s like a switch flipping; you’re used to falling asleep in strange places, slumped forward over your workbench, on the floor next to whatever you were writing, halfway to your bed after a few all-nighters. You’re not a rigorous bedtime routine kind of person.

You used to train yourself to go without sleep for days, just in case that was a skill you needed. You’ve never been able to shake the idea of sleep as an indulgence, as irrational and paranoid as that makes you sound. It’s a surrender, a triumph of the body over the mind, and it can always wait just a while longer while you finish something…

This morning, though, you wade out of sleep like you’re escaping a pool of molasses. It drags you backwards a few times, faint dizzy glimpses of your ceiling before you pass back out, and even when you do shake yourself awake, that tired fugue lingers in your mind.

Physically, you’re in a not-inconsiderable amount of pain. You feel like you’ve been lightly tenderised with a meat hammer, which is odd, because you also feel good. There’s a kind of satisfaction to the ache, an uncoiled tension in you, and it’s so unfamiliar that it’s almost alarming.

Emotionally, your brain is still processing. It won’t hit properly until you’ve had your first shot of caffeine.

When you try to move, a thousand different parts of your body wake up and scream. It’s a cacophony of pain. A thousand-man orchestra of nerve signals. A veritable panoply of ouch.

What also gets your attention, though, is the familiar taut stretch of fabric against your skin. You’re hit with a blur of memories, suddenly: Jake, first aid kit in hand and half-asleep himself, hissing out vague apologetic noises as he scoured you with antiseptic. Fixating on his hands as he wrapped your leg. Snickering dizzily when he was slap-dash peppering you with bandaids up and down your body, like a man trying to plug every hole in a sieve. Laughing harder when he half-carried, half-walked you to your bed.

…Pulling him down next to you.

You sit up too fast and your head spins. It’s about half the reason you’re abruptly nauseated and dizzy.

Fact: Jake English didn’t object when you fell asleep on him. Fact: Jake English is not in your bed now.

He might be downstairs. That’s the kind of thing Jake does - sleeping in a bed with someone is fine, but god forbid you wake up together. They might get the wrong idea.

You pinch your temples, a throbbing pain already swooping down upon you like some kind of evil bird, and groan. The conversation ahead is going to be long and awful - Jake will somehow find a way to accidentally cut you right to the bone, at least twice, and you’ll both be miserably uncomfortable.

Your wrist twinges, and you pause to look at it.

It’s…

Well, shit. It was dislocated. You suppose there’s a kind of irony there, Jake being so focused on not biting through your wrist that he accidentally vampire-squeezed it out of place instead. He must’ve cracked it back into place for you, because it’s not distorted or anything, but there’s a livid bracelet of oilslick blue raised around your skin, and you’re going to have to brace it.

Yeah, it’s probably for the best that he didn’t start biting as well. Just because you could build a robot hand doesn’t mean you want to.

(You’re a god. Your injuries will heal soon, and there’ll be nothing left of him on your body).

Jake English likes your hands. He likes them enough for it to be vaguely dangerous to you. The corner of your mouth twitches upwards.

Then your eyes snag on the table by your bedside, and it drops. There’s two aspirin on a saucer, balanced precariously between a lamp and your backup shades. Next to that it is a mug, carefully placed without disturbing you.

Jake’s not downstairs.

You sigh out a breath, an exhausted weight coming back to you all at once, and fold yourself out of bed with sharp, jerky moments. A starburst of pain goes off in your lower thigh; you curse, perch back down on the edge nearest to the table, and lean over to look at the mug.

It’s one of yours - not one of the sleek, white, utilitarian ones you bought when you moved in here, or one of Dave’s early-internet meme mugs that fade as soon as you look at them, but one of the china ones Jane got you as a house-warming present.

(Yes, Jane Crocker got you a set of crockery. They’re all patterned with hilariously uncool hipster moustaches; they’re great).

It’s full of coffee: lukewarm, black, but the few granules of sugar on the rim suggest he’s sweetened it. He knows you like sugar in your coffee, even if you never make it like that for yourself.

You breathe sharply in, and air catches on your lungs, rattling emptily around your ribcage.

The cup’s been sitting here for a while. You can picture him making it, an hour or two ago - shifting his shoulders anxiously in front of your coffee machine, chewing his lip, hand shaking as he spills the sugar, trying to be quiet. The warmth and weight of a physical presence in the walls only every inhabited by you and your spinning, obsessive thoughts, trying to do something for you. It’s thoughtful, you guess. It’s almost kind.

It’s the most thoughtful fuck you you’ve ever received.

You throw it at the wall.