Chapter 1
The smell of frying bacon and coffee wakes Wade up. Good coffee, too—it doesn’t have that acidic, slightly chemical smell from the cheap crap he usually buys.
This only meant one thing, and that One Thing was that Nate was there.
He wriggles out of his blanket cocoon eagerly.
“Oh Natey-poo, breakfast for little ol’ me? Why you shouldn’t have...shouldn’t have moved me to a second location, holy shit! I mean, holy fucking timeshares, Batman!”
He’s in a strange bed in a strange bedroom. It’s a hell of a location, all right.
And not only is Nate not there, in a Kiss the Cook apron and nothing else, with coffee and a huge pile of bacon on a tray in hand (fantasies be damned).
The bed is massive, and he’s lying under a quilt, little red, gray, and white squares arranged to make a design that looks like a gingham picnic tablecloth.
“Like Dorothy, but sexy, because it’s red,” Wade says. “All right, Sexy Dorothy Sheet, let’s see where we are, ‘cause I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore~” he sing-songs.
And then throws a leg out of the blankets and realizes he’s only wearing a pair of boxers underneath.
Wade gets up and shucks the quilt off the bed and wraps himself in it a la Lenny Kravitz and his knitted blanket he was insisting was a scarf.
He has no idea where they are, and can’t see any skyline to even be able to guess.
He knows it’s not any of Nate’s usual city safehouses, either on the East Coast or the West. There’s no ritzy view over buildings with a distant park just in view; there also isn’t a barred warehouse window with a view of a sliver of dirty water and some docks and derricks. Just three windows, covered by white curtains with a decorous little red windowpane plaid design. When Wade wanders over to twitch the curtains aside, he sees a simple, regular city street: red brick buildings with little postage stamps of green out front, and tiny two-chair porches under whitewashed awnings. In the sidewalk planters, the trees that have already dropped all their leaves.
From the angle of the winter sun, it’s mid-morning.
He steps away from the window, and scratches his head with one hand and his butt with the other.
Nate’s huge, weird-looking hard-light BFG is in its case against the far wall, with the lid propped open. Beside it, more of their gear is piled up—the battered duffel Nate brings around with medical gear and clean clothes, and the long case he’d given Wade for his pistols. Apparently just securing them and then chucking them all in a red Power Rangers backpack was ‘not a safe way to travel with your weapons, Wade’. To compensate for the loss of his Power Rangers backpack, Wade had covered the pistol case in Hello Kitty and Mario Kart stickers. Nate had rolled his eyes, but Wade knew a smirk when he saw it. He’d very kindly offered to share his stickers, but Nate had declined.
His katanas are in their sheaths, poking out from behind the duffel.
Wade goes over and roots in Nate’s duffel for a pair of sweatpants, squeeing a little when he gets to cuff them twice.
His own suit, however, is nowhere in sight. He can’t recall, but figures it was probably destroyed in the fight he can’t remember. But that’s fine; it’s not like this is his first underwear-only rodeo. It must have been a hell of a fight, and he’d probably lost most of his head or brain. Regrowing all of it was always a pain in the ass, neck, and other assorted body parts. That kind of damage often gives him memory problems, and those sometimes linger for a few days. In the old days, with Weas and Al, it had been...interesting.
Presently, though, he figures it’s a good sign that he remembered that he often forgot, and decides to leave it at that.
The bedroom door is already ajar. He sees a faint glimmer of blue static touch the knob, pushing it wider, before he hears Nate’s voice. “Wade? Are you awake?”
He adjusts the quilt-turned-Kravitz-scarf and pads in the direction of Nate’s voice.
“Yeah! Just admiring your new décor.” He walks down a dark hallway, with framed black and white prints of trees on the walls. The floor underfoot is dark hardwood, and the baseboards and crown molding are a matching frosting white. Coupled with the light brown walls, it gives the overall impression of being inside a gingerbread house.
He passes a door on the left (a glance inside tells him it’s a second bedroom—empty and therefore boring). Another door to the left opens into a nice bathroom, cedar cabinets and little white hexagon-shaped tiles. The hallway opens onto a staircase landing, where a dark wood bannister with white spokes that match the crown molding curves downwards.
All of this is...important, somehow. He feels like he’s walking through a dream, or an incredibly crisp VR episode of an HGTV show. For some reason he can’t explain, it feels like he’s seen this episode before.
He goes down the stairs, sniffing the bacon smell and feeling like he should be in a dog treat commercial, wearing golden retriever mask.
“Bacon bacon bacon! Bacon--”
The living room stretches away to the left (brown and red flannel sectional couches, overstuffed armchair more expensive than a LaZBoy, Absolutely Massive Flatscreen TV). And to the right is a big kitchen, all exposed brick and gleaming stainless-steel countertops, and appliances with European and Japanese logos, like a chef’s wet dream.
He stops to whistle.
“It’s This is your new décor, right? Some rich, lonely thirtysomething gay banker isn’t going to come back and be really shocked to find a cyborg centerfold dream boat cooking breakfast in his kitchenette—” the word ‘kitchenette’ dies in his throat.
Nate is wearing a lot more than an apron—damn!--but he IS wearing the next best thing: one of his shitty old t-shirts, so thin it’s translucent in places, and clings like damp kleenex. He’s also wearing a pair of baggy blue sweatpants with popped waistband elastic, riding low on his hips.
Wade stands there on the last step, with the weird sense of what-the-hell-is-going-on combined with Me-and-Nate-are-in-our-jammies-together-Yay sloshing around inside him. For a moment it feels like everything is spinning around him, like he’s on the world’s axis, and if he takes a wrong step, he’ll fall backwards and keep falling forever.
Then Nate raises his eyebrows at him, and the spinning feeling evaporates when he speaks, “There you are! Good morning. Now come on, come get some of this before it gets cold.”
Nate turns back to the stove, which is some German thing in black metal with actual brass knobs. He’s frying eggs in a skillet. There’s already some food ready—a platter of bacon, crisp and pink-brown and still sizzling, and another platter with a small mountain of toast. Wade can see that it’s the fancy whole-wheat bread that Nate likes, which tastes like molasses and honey and has sunflower seeds in it. There’s also a big bowl of sliced fruit—kiwis, strawberries, bananas, and blueberries. He looks over his shoulder at Wade, and a concerned look flashes across his face for a split second. It’s gone almost as quickly as Wade sees it; Nate’s face relaxes into a smile.
Nate’s got a good 3-day stubble on his face, and his hair is sticking up, and at some point the shirt got damp enough that there’s a little patch on the right side of his chest that’s stuck to his skin and entirely transparent. Wade’s stomach does something complicated that is only partially hunger. The warm-n-fuzzies run through him again, as gently as a slow wave in a shallow ocean.
What is there to worry about? Who hasn’t had their head blown off and had a little bout of vertigo afterwards? Not him, that’s who!
He comes closer, adjusting his impromptu cape, and Nate sighs a little in exasperation, but doesn’t tell him to take it off or put it back.
Wade has locked in on the bacon like a pork-seeking missile, and gleefully says, “It’s BACON!” and immediately snatches a handful of slices off the top of the platter.
And then he has to do a little ouchie-ouchie-I-burnt-my-fucking-fingers dance, because they ARE still sizzling hot. He solves this problem by cramming two slices into his mouth, and holds the others between his thumb and forefinger.
“These are WAY better than Beggin’ Strips,” he sighs dreamily. “Speaking from personal experience.”
“I”m going to geuess that Beggin’ Strips is some processed bacon-flavored pork food product?” Nate asks mildly.
Wade is trying to both chew and blow off a mouthful of bacon at the same time, and he nods, and goes for a few more slices.
“Kind of,” he says, with bacon still in his mouth. “But like. For four-legged Americans. You know.”
Nate gives him one of this ‘are you fucking with me’ looks, one of the real forehead-wrinklers, and Wade licks most of the bacon grease off his lips and grins. “What?”
“Nothing. You sleep OK?” Nate asks. He puts a strawberry in his mouth and chews, and watches Wade watch him lick the pad of his thumb.
“I...think so? I’ve had dreams like this,” Wade says, faintly. “I almost feel like this is a dream. Except you aren’t in your suit, and Spidey, Wolverine, and Ellie aren’t here. So probably not…”
Nate hums a little, and reaches for him.
Before he can run much farther with the thought, Nate’s cupping Wade’s face in his hands. One big and warm and callused, and the metal hand warmer and the live metal as raspy as a cat’s tongue. Nate carefully turns Wade’s head, looking into his eyes, clearly studying him--with tenderness rather than any sexual intent.
Wade pushes down the worry that has started to crawl up his legs like a bunch of particularly hungry housecats, because Nate’s hands on him feel good.
He’s missed this.
Why has he missed this?
He feels a stabbing feeling of desperation so hard that it made his chest clench up.
“Or it’s just angina. Blood cancer will do that to you. What domesticity bug got you, Nate?” Wade said.
He leans in for a kiss—and also mashes their crotches together, because Nate is making him breakfast (which can only mean that yes, they are safe) and Little Wade is now wide awake and frisky.
He doesn’t step away, though, so they stay pressed together, Wade’s crotch against the meat of Nathan’s organic thigh.
Wade may have started grinding against Nate’s leg. Just a little.
Nate still isn’t pulling away, though, and is in fact still giving him an amused little smile.
“Having fun?”
“You smell like bacon and Old Spice and hot metal,” Wade says happily, and smushes his face into Nate’s chest.
But Nate made a soft, considering hum as looked down into Wade’s face, still studying him.
“Really, Wade.” his hands are on Wade’s biceps, pushing him back slightly, which Wade decides is Not Okay. He wraps his arms around Nate’s torso and clings like an anxious octopus. After a moment, Nate makes an exasperated noise and lets Wade squeeze him around the ribs, which makes his voice sound faintly strained when he speaks next. “How are you feeling? You’re having chest pains?”
Wade blinks up at him a few times, feeling his pulse start to ratchet up in the really unfortunate way it did when Nate used that tone of voice while touching him literally anywhere.
And so he stops to listen, and answers seriously.
“Not bad. Also not gonna lie, I have literally zero idea what we were doing before this, so a refresher wouldn’t be unwelcome...maybe after…” he leand a bit closer, and Nate finally, finally kisses him back.
“Actually,” Nate says gently, and tries to pull his hand away. “About this…”
“Nate, baby, we all know how it goes. I get blown up, or stabbed, or shot, or run over, or I piss Wolvie off really bad and he cuts me in half and throws my torso one way and my legs the other—”
“Wade—” Nate says, reproachfully. But Wade continues.
“We’re safe now, right?” Wade asks, changing tracks.
And Nate hesitates, looking at him like he’s studying him again, and Wade decides he hates it after 2.5 seconds, and leans in to kiss Nate again.
It starts as a chaste press of lips and quickly shifts (as quickly as Wade can shift his legs and get a thigh between Nate’s, and Nate chuckled a little, his voice deep enough that Wade could feel it in his ribcage. Wade feels that same hot, melted-butter feeling, the weird mix of safe-happy-horny he rarely gets to be—and really only around Nate.
And Nate is kissing him even with morning breath/bacon breath, and letting him hump his leg like a particularly enthusiastic dog.
He starts skimming his big hands up and down Wade’s sides.
Wade can feel the big jerk smirking against his lips when Wade wriggles and flinches as he passes over sensitive, ticklish spots on his sides.
Wade’s response is to hike one leg up a little bit, squirming closer, so that Nate has to brace both legs on the floor to avoid falling over.
And then Nate palms his ass and squeezes, and—and the man did NOT have small hands, and Wade was only human, okay? And he was sensitive, and anyway having his butt played with always did things to his cock, even when his brain HADN’T just finished regrowing and rewiring all its circuitry from the stem up.
The boxes he’s frantically defending himself against are quiet, though. Maybe they weren’t in this story?
“Maybe it’s just a fic. She doesn’t know how to format text bubbles in this,” Wade mumbles, half into Nate’s mouth and half against his chin when Nate pulls back to give him a perplexed look.
“Wade, who are you talking about? I know you know angina is a medical condition, not a person,” Nate says.
“You don’t know that. Maybe there’s a drag queen or unfortunate kid somewhere, whose mom heard it on some hospital drama and thought it sounded neat. Everybody’s doing kira-kira names now, Nathan Christopher Charles Kiss My Face Priscilla Askani’son Summers.” He rolls his hips against Nate’s with every name he says.
This gets an actual laugh and an eye-roll.
And it gets Nate to kiss him again. Nate’s tongue is hot and wet in his mouth, and one of Wade’s hands slips under Nate’s waistband, and the other slides back up Nate’s magnificent back. The dips and ridges between his organic side and the TO are fascinating, but the real show was how Nate reacted when Wade touched him there. Skimming his knuckles over the sensitive seam where it’s eating into Nate’s organic flesh makes Nate shudder and gasp a little, and Wade gets to feel Not-So-Little Nate jump in Nate’s pants, hot and thick against his hip.
This would be great in the shower, maybe with a dildo suction-cupped to the wall so he could just lean back and have it in his ass, Wade thinks. They don’t seem to be in any hurry. The mental image of Nate reaching back to feel how his hole would be stretched around the toy was enough to make Little Wade twitch, hard, in his sweatpants.
Which Nate must feel, because he lightens his grip and moved his hands back up onto Wade’s hips, then the small of his back again, leaving behind the sensation and heat.
Wade’s mouth is already watering.
His own hands wandered south, and mercifully this wasn’t the comics, where sometimes the artists drew Nate with a truly tragic pancake whiteboy booty; seriously, though, the man was built like a brick shithouse, and all that running and kicking doors in while carrying around Big Fucking Guns meant his legs and ass should be just as beefy as the rest of him. And because this writer clearly loved him, or was about to set him up for a massive rug pull prank, Nate had a fantastic ass.
He got two handfuls and squeezed, and made a happy little noise in his throat.
Nate mirrored what he was doing, which made Wade actually GRIN.
“Oh, yeah, baby...knead those buns…” Wade mumbles happily.
Nate’s laugh is a huff of warm air against the side of his face. “You’re ridiculous sometimes.”
“You’re literally poking me with the proof that you love it.” Wade grins.
“Yeah,” Nate says.
“I’m really sensitive/Some would say it’s a plus/Plus it’s your fault you were touching my butt,” he sings a little, which just makes Nate laugh that soft little huff of air again.
“It’s definitely a plus, Wade,” he said. “But we should eat breakfast first, before we do anything about that.”
When Wade starts to whine a little, Nate gives him another dainty little kiss, and steps back. Wade leans after him, but winds up pressing his face into Nate’s shoulder: Nate had already turned to wash his hands in the sink.
“Nate, baby, come on…” he starts, and draped himself over Nate’s back like a uniquely lumpy leather coat. The soap is cinnamon-scented, too. What the fuck. Someone is laying it on really, REALLY thick.
“It’s not Christmas anymore, is it? I think this was originally written to be a Christmas story.” Wade says.
He has no flashes of insight about anything else, though. And this time, the ever-thin fourth wall is just a regular wall. There is an impressive full-length wrought iron rail mounted to it, holding enough fancy copper pots and pans that Wade feels like he’s in a Williams-Sonoma, about to be asked to please leave the store because No, sir, we don’t sharpen swords here, and please put that back in its sheath.
“Breakfast first,” Nate says with fond laughter in his voice. “And then I’ll see about finding something for you to unwrap.”
Wade yelps a little, and then moaned, when he feels an invisible TK hand wrap around his balls and squeeze gently, at the same instant as a single TK finger slipped over his asshole and presses in just enough to feel, before vanishing.
“That’s not a confirmation or a denial about the date, you know,” he says, wagging a finger at Nate.
Nate shakes his head and eats another piece of strawberry while making lethally sexy eye contact with Wade, like some kind of debauched food fetishist.
As payback, Wade climbs up under Nate’s arm and keeps one hand in Nate’s pocket while he finishes cooking.
Nate doesn’t shoo him away even once.
…
They eat breakfast in the kitchen nook, at a table that is a really nice one-piece slab of wood, with 4 chairs to match.
Nate insists he eat some of the fruit salad first, which he has tossed with something that makes them tart and sweet at the same time, and which Wade doesn’t even complain about.
(“It’s just a simple apple cider vinaigrette, Wade,” he says, amused, when Wade makes a face and accuses him of somehow making unprocessed fruit taste like sweet-and-sour candy.)
There is honey and butter to go with the toast, and no pop-tarts or cereal anywhere to be seen. Nate had snorted, part disbelief and part fondness, when Wade had asked.
“Why the hell would you want some hyper-processed crap that was made in a factory and is designed to rot your teeth? What, nature’s very own tooth-rotting sweets aren’t good enough for you? You wouldn’t believe what I had to do, to get a taste of real honey for the first time, in my own era.”
Wade snickers around a mouthful of honey-slathered toast and bacon, and manages to work all the half-chewed food into one cheek to say, “But it’s part of a complete breakfast, Nate!”
Nate gives him a deadpan look and says, “According to United States grain and dairy lobby propaganda from the 1950s, sure. I’m surprised you like the stuff so much. Don’t tell me you don’t know about how Dr. Kellogg invented corn flakes and graham crackers specifically to dull people’s libido.”
“Are you leveraging random historical facts against me? Over breakfast? About libido?” Wade goggles.
“I suppose it’s ironically good, that some of the ingredients actually increase heart function and erectile function. Not that Kellogg knew that. And the modern processed cereals, packed full of corn syrup by-products, are a far cry from his dried, crushed corn…” Nate muses, feigning being deep in thought.
“But, see? Complete breakfast!” Wade insists.
“How about I give you something better to complete your breakfast, after you eat it?”
“A big sausage for my buns?” Wade asks.
Nate does his snort-laugh thing into his coffee, and spills onto the table, and it’s Wade’s turn to laugh at him, for once.
And the thing is, this is nice.
It’s so nice that Wade...doesn’t really want to ask what they’d been doing before. Honestly he’s starting to wonder if it matters.
He can remember something vague about some gun-runners—some VERY naughty, very shitty men with shaved heads and lightning bolt tattoos--who’d laid hands on some hard-light prototypes and were in the process of reverse-engineering them.
He can also remember something about them busting up a human trafficking ring that had been abducting mutants to steal and sell their blood; really, that had been enough to almost jolt him into reliving bad memories from a character Ryan played in a whole other movie franchise. That had been fascinating, in multifaceted, uncomfortable way The Boxes will probably be needling him about, soon.
There are other missions that he can think of, too; but the thing that should worry him—that he doesn’t want to look too hard at, right now—is that he can’t remember any specific details.
Usually when somebody manages to Get Him, he sees them first. Or at least, if they weren’t actually THERE—whether it was due to something like a booby-traps or self-destruct systems—he lives long enough to see what trap it was that he walked into. Plenty of times he’s taken out whoever Got Him while he was in the process of bleeding out, or in the process of being burnt into walking charcoal, or receiving several new and inappropriately-placed orifices all over his torso, courtesy of whatever high-caliber weapon his current enemy was shooting him with.
This time, though, there’s nothing.
And maybe this should worry him.
But it’s gray and overcast outside, and it’s warm inside, and this place is nicer than most hotels he’s stayed at, and Nate made him toast and fried eggs and probably-very-expensive coffee (which Nate definitely didn’t pay for) and fruit salad and scrambled eggs.
There is one thing, though.
He adjusts the folds of the Kravitz serape quilt and wipes crumbs on the table runner, instead of the borrowed sweats, because while he might not be a classy guy, at least he has basic manners. Sometimes.
“Hey, Nate, love of my life and gooser of my ass—love that, by the way, you really do know how to wake a guy up and show him you care—Listen. I know I don’t normally dig too much about how you get your safe-houses, but uh...how did you manage to land a place this nice? It’s a lot homier than the places you normally get. Like, I get it, the whole ‘Spartan 90s Futurism’ thing is probably, like, way easier for the artists to draw, ink, color and stuff, and it probably makes formatting pages way easier—less clutter and shit—but A. I think this might be a fanfic, and B. You don’t normally spring for places that are so...furnished.”
He looks up for good measure, at the lamp that hangs overhead, which is a miniature chandelier made to look suburban-industrial: three oversized incandescent bulbs in burnished brass cages. Aside from the filaments glowing and looking pretty, they don’t do too much in the way of lighting, which is fine, since the end of the table is nestled perfectly into a bay window overlooking the street.
“You don’t like it?” Nate asks. But he’s smiling at Wade, amused, and does not break eye contact as he takes a long swallow of coffee.
Wade wants to be the liquid in the mug, and wants to put his lips on Nate’s throat to feel him swallow, and wants to climb him like a less chylamydia-riddled koala and hug him so he can feel the warmth seep out of the big man.
“I mean. There’s a chandelier over the breakfast nook. This just screams ‘let’s have messy sex on the table and I can kick my jock off and it will ‘artfully’ end up draped there, because of Trope Laws! Where, because of other Trope Laws, it will then be found by this place’s real owner, who will Freak Out—can you hear the capital letters there—”
Nate sets his coffee cup down and curls his TO hand around it, the fingers making tiny, porcelain clinking noises where they touch the mug’s surface, and Wade blurts, “God I wish you’d wrap your hand around me like that—“ Nate raises an eyebrow and Wade amends his statemnt with, “I mean—not like THAT—haha...unless…?”
“You’re worried about the safehouse? The owner never even uses the place. I’m pretty sure all the furnishings are whatever the hired decorator brought in to set up. The man is a Bitcoin millionaire, and this place is just another entry in an investment portfolio for him. Mainly he rents it out for AirBnB—I still can’t believe you all let those scams take off in this timeline—and all I did was...move a few digits around online. He has about a hundred others.”
Nate pauses a moment, and is giving him another thoughtful, weirdly GENTLE look, and Wade doesn’t know, and can’t parse, why that makes his insides so warm and yet so squirmy at the same time.
Sometimes, he recalls, Nate gets all...tender like this, after HE has had a bad time in a fight.
But this time Nate looks like he’s totally shipshape; not so much as a scratch or worrying silver scab anywhere on him that Wade can see (and he intends to see a lot MORE of the big fella, as soon as possible, so he can check in more depth—heh!--later).
Nate also gets like this a LOT, after fights where Wade has done something that he calls “self-sacrificing and stupid behaviors” and which Wade calls “common sense unkillable meat shield behaviors” and Nate is VERY killable, and anytime he gets injured, the virus currently trying to make him into a bootleg T-800 eats just a little bit more of his organic body.
So maybe, Wade thinks, he’d done something like that. Probably he’d intercepted some projectile with his own face to save Nate’s.
Maybe that was why Nate kept looking at him all soft like that, and was being and all careful and restrained with his touches.
Wade can’t decide if he loves it or hates it, but he does decide that remembering what is causing That Look was a problem for later-Wade.
Then Nate looks him up and down and says, “He also won’t be interrupting us, at all.”
When he slips his foot on top of Nate’s, the taller man does that crinkly-eyed smile thing again.
The TK touch that had been gently squeezing his balls comes back; four fingers, the sensation identical to Nate’s actual hand, a mild warning or playful graze.
Wade has never been any good at paying attention to warnings.
He runs his cold left foot up the inside of Nate’s leg, under the strong curve of Nate’s warm calf muscle, and Nate sucks a little surprised breath through his nose. The invisible fingers gently smack Wade’s nuts, with just a little weight behind it—enough that Wade twitches and bites back a little ouch-happy noise. Then the TK fingertip slips over his ass again, and this time the noise makes it out, a soft, breathless little moan.
Nate watches him hungrily, pretending to give a shit about buttering his toast.
The contrast makes Wade feel like his brain is swimming in his skull.
“Finish your breakfast, Wade. Those strawberries are organic. It never ceases to amaze me, the sheer variety of types of produce you have here. I think those hybrid varieties went extinct some time in the 2070s. The ones we have when I’m from are the smaller alpine types, and they’re a delicacy reserved for special occasions…”
And while he talks, the TK hand stays there, gently stroking and sort of...petting Wade between his legs. It makes slow, careful strokes up his cock, while the other keeps playing with his balls, almost idly, the way you would roll a pair of plums around in your hand at a nicer farmer’s market.
“So...um…” Wade begins. “This is new...is this, like, a service they offer at bed and breakfasts now? Handjobs and Hot Cocoa?”
Nate hums noncommitally. Damn the man’s perfect poker face!
He goes back to his toast.
Wade tries to get the hand under his ass to do more than just feel him up.
When no amount of subtle scooching around on the chair yields any results, he gives up and just sits down, and eats a plate of food, resigning himself to being petted the whole time. Nate, the beautiful stone-faced bastard, seems to be entirely unfazed.
He swallows the last of a piece of toast and is about to just ask aloud, when the TK finger that had been teasing his asshole pushes inside.
He curls over the table, moaning a little, and narrowly avoids headbutting the fork.
The hands petting him between his legs are joined by two more, which hold his knees apart with the same gentle, inexorable force. All he can do is make embarrassing noises around his food and squirm in the chair, not even able to properly move his hips.
Nate could do that with his dick, he thinks. He totally could. He could use his actual organic dick, even!
“Not without interrupting you. And you need to get some food into your stomach.” Nate says. Wade wonders how much of that last paragraph he’d said out loud, but Nate is just looking at him, chin rested against the beat-up, scuffed metal knuckles of his TO arm. Each knuckle is articulated like organic bone, and the ‘veins’ on the arm are metal cables as thick as Wade’s fingers, corded up and down his arm. Three thinner ones spider across the back of his hand. His whole arm gleams dully in the light, like the front of a freshly-buffed industrial refrigerator, if H.R. Giger had ever designed for Frigidaire or General Electronics.
“You can interrupt me like this, anytime!” Wade goes for a saucy wink which is spoiled when the finger in his butt does a little twirl and punctuates the motion with a come-here kitchy-kitchy-coo gesture that sets his whole belly shivering in pleasure, and gets him both wet and hard enough to pound nails. His eyes flutter closed and a little half-swallowed noise leaves his throat, as he can feel the not-so-little spurt of precome immediately start leaving a spot on the pajama pants.
Nate laughs, his eyes crinkling into crow’s feet at the corners, the scars around his right eye puckering slightly. His face goes pink, too, and god, he looks so fucking good, it makes Wade’s chest and stomach hurt a little.
“That’s the nicest way anybody’s ever compared me to a fridge,” Nate says mildly.
“Are you reading my mind! Since when can you do that? What am I thinking about right now?” Wade puts his fingertips on his temples like a certain bald professor, and projects a thought at Nate as hard as he can.
“You want me to play with you all over while I fuck you,” Nate says, “With my ‘actual organic dick, even’.”
Wade goggles at him. “How are you—with my cheese brain—I thought—”
“Wade, half of what you ‘thought’ was out loud,” he says. “Finish your breakfast and then we’ll see about that roll in the sheets.”
“Oh, right, right. Right. Food.” Wade says. “The food. The food that was specially prepared for me. My food.” he pauses. “Don’t get mad, but I said the word ‘food’ too many times, and now I’m like Freakazoid and that damn bowl and the word doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. I—oh, breakfast…” he trails off as the hand between his legs strokes up his belly, then side to side across his chest. Even with his scars and uneven skin, he still has spots that are incredibly sensitive. The TK hand smooths over these, up to rub gently around the base of his throat, and then back down, the thumb dipping into his navel as it goes. The cool, immaterial touch leaves goosebumps in its wake, and Wade squirms and makes embarrassing happy noises and feels himself make more of a mess in his boxers.
Nate, meanwhile, is polishing off another plate of fruit and toast, pretending very hard that this isn’t affecting him too. But Wade has known him for too long not to see the tells: there’s a flush spreading up Nate’s neck, and he bets that if he got closer, he could smell Nate’s warm-metal-ozone-overheated-retro-subwoofer smell he always had as he got hot and bothered. (Or was in the middle of a good fight. But that was a thought for another day...)
Another invisible hand slides up between his legs and pins his cock between his thigh and the invisible palm, and moves against him in slow, back-and-forth slides. He can see the way the thin gray material bunches and shifts beneath the immaterial knuckles, and--
“This isn’t what it means, to get your salad tossed, by the way,” he says. “Unless that’s, like, ancient slang and you guys are calling rimming something...else...”
Nate takes another bite of toast. The finger in Wade’s ass evaporates and reforms and he tries to squirm back onto it, and then away from it, but he can’t move: Nate’s smiling at him just with his eyes, now.
“Are you playing with my twig and berries because you want me to eat yours?” Wade asked. “Because I like mind-mojo and some light CBT as much as the next guy, but you really don’t have to sweeten me up to get me to eat a nice breakfast, Nate. Or to get me to suck your dick. Weren’t you always telling me to be more direct?”
And Nate laughs again. Really laughs, in the way that made the corners of his eyes crinkle up and the dud eye throw blue and yellow iridescent flashes.
“I figured it couldn’t hurt. To be a little...indirect, sometimes.”
And it’s good, and—okay, he’s a dumbass, and yeah, his brain is swiss cheese, but even HE can see that whatever happened in their last mission has scared Nate pretty bad, because he’s being cuddly and cute and hasn’t even mentioned the (failed?) mission once.
It’s not like Wade has ever been the ‘responsible’ one anyway; what does it matter if he ‘s...skirting the issue, here?
He decides to wait until Nate wanted to bring up whatever had gone wrong.
~
Wade finishes breakfast with what he considers a heroic effort not to cream his boxers, or in the borrowed sweats.
His reward, as Nate promised, turns out to be a sprawl on the couch, with the Kravitz serape quilt thrown over them for warmth.
And then the rest of the morning (and most of the afternoon) is just them, tongue-fucking each other’s mouths, and jerking each other off, both their cocks held in one of Nate’s massive hands.
“I thought you were gonna mind-mojo me in the ass,” Wade mumbles, a little reproachfully. “You promised!”
Instead of rolling his eyes, Nate gives him another one of those impossibly fond looks—Wade is starting to get used to them; he can’t recall if Nate has given him That Look that many times, in as many months before this. It makes Wade feel too warm all over, like he’s been in a sauna long enough for it to fuck with his blood pressure, and falling asleep would be dangerous, but it feels so relaxing and nice...
“Deep breath,” Nate says, or rather breathes into the side of Wade’s head, and Wade is about to say something fittingly sarcastic, he really is, but what comes out instead is, “I love it when you get all shmoopy like this. Did I ever tell you that? I mean, don’t get me wrong, you being all Guns Akimbo, Gruff, Buff, and Ready to Bust is very Woof, but when you get like this, it’s always like a special treat, and I feel like a princess, and I—ah,”
The other thing about Nate is that he normally uses the TK so sparingly, that when he’s willing to indulge like this, Wade has learned not to press too much about it.
It’s too good.
Right now, for example, he can FEEL the head of a cock pressing insistently against the rim of his asshole; the magnificent, terrifying TO hand is still palming his ass, alternating between just holding him and squeezing hard enough to sting, and he can feel the way Nate’s flesh-and-blood cock is pinned against his hip, throbbing insistently with his pulse.
Nate’s organic hand is cupping the back of Wade’s head, his thumb smoothing up under Wade’s ear, where he can feel several hard little nodules, including his own lymph nodes. Presently those are swollen and would be uncomfortable, if Nate was applying any real pressure.
“Come on, Wade. We talked about this. Deep breath. In…”
“Oh my god, I hate that you make following directions so hot,” Wade says, in a rush, but then he does as Nate says, and on the next inhale he feels two of Nate’s TO fingers brush his asshole, slicked already. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a tube of lube go floating back towards the coffee table, to land on a gray shirt Nate had tossed there.
“Do we really have to do the One-Finger-Two-Finger-Three-Finger-Penis Yaoi Tango?” he says, and tries to bat his eyes at Nate fetchingly. “I promise I’ll only make x-rated noises in lower-case if you just give me the mind-mojo sausage right away!”
“You love fingers in your ass, Wade,” Nate says, teasing, affectionate, and gives him an annoyingly wet, sweet kiss on the bridge of his nose. “You were telling me earlier just how much. Remember?”
As he is speaking he slips one fingertip in—“Really, genuinely just the tip?” Wade says sarcastically, which makes Nate actually bark a sharp laugh at him.
“Yes, Wade. Because one of us knows how to savor things...” he says, levelly.
While sliding his finger into Wade’s ass, so slowly he has time to feel each indiviual dip and ridge, enough that the sensation makes his whole body light up and all up and down his back the skin prickles with heat and exitement. “And the other should learn, too.”
“That kinda tickles…” Wade mumbles, pressing his cheek to Nate’s huge chest.
The TO is shaped vaguely like muscle, and lies in the same direction as muscle fibers, but striations are deeper here. In a few places where the virus has fucked off with even pretending to resemble human anatomy, the fibers separate slightly. They open in weird, tantalizing little gaps that lead deeper into Nate’s body, where they mesh together more tightly. He has a perfect mental image of being able to look inside Nate’s body—into his chest, you pervert—and see his heart, the furious, clenching machine at the center of him, probably glowing like molten gold.
It makes him dizzy, the thought looping back on itself, that he could get his face in there and kiss Nate’s heart, and then—or, well, maybe not his WHOLE head, but, as a little cartoon Deadpool with devil horns appears on one shoulder and points out, his tongue would fit between the gaps. Maybe not all the way, but isn’t it the effort that counts?
That angel never shows up on the other shoulder, but the little cartoon Shoulder Devil puts a halo on and blows Wade a kiss, and then vanishes.
If Nate notices his hesitation, or if Wade forgets to keep his internal monologue internal, Nate doesn’t say anything.
Wade starts squirming happily, kissing Nate wherever he can reach—chin, lips, cheeks, the absolutely massive swells of his chest, even listening to his Shoulder Devil and trying to stick his tongue between two of the metal TO muscle cables, which earns him a flinch, a snort, and a pinched tongue as the sections pull back together and pinch him.
Nate freezes long enough to apologize and make sure he hasn’t drawn blood—and he hasn’t—and then he doesn’t ask why the hell Wade would do something like that, which is a good thing, because Wade has no idea, except that he is Not Normal about Nate, and very much wants to rub himself all over the other man, and would happily spend an hour or three or twelve with any part of the man’s body inside him. Anything Nate wanted to give him.
“Wade,” Nate says, half speaking, half laughing, and holds him still a moment.
“Yeah,” Wade says, “You can give me Number 2 whenever you want, bee-tee-dubbayoo. I’m good/And I’m gonna be fine/And I’m gonna have the best freakin’ night of my life…”
“Maybe we should make a sex tracklist so I can keep track of these references,” Nate says, musingly.
Wade whines a moment later when he pulls the finger out—the single tease of a finger!
“That’s so unfair! Nate...Naaaate, baby, please—” Wade takes Nate’s big face in both his hands and tries to do a fair approximation of a puppydog look, and hopes he doesn’t look too much like the last thing a Fallout vault dweller would see when waking up unexpectedly.
This train of thought is very neatly plucked off the tracks, crushed into a giant, solid steel dildo, and lovingly slid into a nearby tunnel, when the TO hand resumes its half-gentle, half-crushing caress of his ass. The TK cock makes its reappearance, too, and now it feels impossibly, perfectly slicked.
“Take a deep breath, Wade,” Nate says, patiently, and Wade scoffs.
The phantom press of the perphect cock goes away, and Wade squirms backwards after it, whining, only for Nate’s metal hand to grip his ass harder.
“Stay up here. Come on. You know I’ll give it to you,” Nate says.
The ‘when you do as I say’ part is silent. As it usually is with him.
Wade tries to get annoyed, and fails immediately when he feels TK hands skirt gently up and down his back. That gentle grip settles around his balls and cock again, high against the base. The tips of two of the TO fingers are back again, just rubbing at the rim of his ass, even as the invisible grip starts rhythmically squeezing his balls.
“Like a free magical ball-cuff,” he says.
Nate rumbles an affirmative noise, and then, “Nothing hurting?”
And, okay, if he was in any state to think about things in more depth, he’d have pounced on that, because Yeah, at this point he’s pretty sure he beefed it in a really gory, graphic way he hasn’t remembered yet, because that’s the only way he gets such a Soft Nate.
“Nah,” he says.
Nate looks down at him—and for a split second the easy affection is set aside, and he’s looking at Wade like he’s studying him, really hard; but before Wade can get uncomfortable, Nate kisses him again, this time one one eyebrow ridge, and says, “Good. Now, I believe I asked you to do something…”
Wade rolls his eyes for real this time. “Yes, s—” he doesn’t finish.
The words feel like they’re being pressed out of him, along with every other coherent thought, as Nate pushes IN with his TK cock.
The head is slightly thinner than the shaft, which means he feels it widen and stretch his ass by increments, and Nate, the beautiful, magnificent bastard, is moving so slowly Wade has time to squirm and swear and try to back onto it and then, when he realizes it’s getting THICKER, to try to move AWAY, anchored in place by that terrible, lovely metal hand’s grip on the meat of his thigh. Nathan’s flesh-and-blood hand goes petting over his head, his neck, his back, stroking him almost the way some people pet cats, and--
“Am I your raw chicken cat, Nate?”
Nate looks completely floored for a moment, long enough that the TK cock loses integrity and fades into a much more faint sensation, before he snickers and shakes his head, a grin spreading across his face. “You know what? I’m just going to go with ‘yes’. Is that a good answer? And after we finish, you’re going to explain just what the hell a ‘raw chicken cat’ is.”
And THERE’s the TK cock again, full-mast! Wade gasps, splays his thighs wider across Nate’s hips, and moans, failing spectacularly at trying to rub their cocks together.
“Sphynxes never reveal their secrets,” Wade mumbles.
Nate moans, low in his chest, and his hand speeds up on their cocks. “Keep them.” he says roughly, and then mashes his mouth against Wade’s again.
A moment later, Wade comes up for air and starts rambling, and Nate’s eye flashes, blue an an opal, and Wade doesn’t even know what it is he says, but the TK cock falters and fades, and a moment later Nate flips them and ruts down onto Wade, moving urgently.
And if the way he’s holding Wade is more possessive and hungry than usual, Wade tells himself it’s okay. He doesn’t mind being Nate’s Emotional-Slash-Sexual-Support Merc at all.
He wraps his legs around Nate’s waist and holds on for the ride.
Nate makes a hoarse noise into Wade’s scalp, and Wade feels his cock jump against his belly. The first spurt of Nate’s cum hits him under the chin, and he has a quip on his tongue when he feels the TK cock back again. Now it’s much more fluid and flexible than a human cock, as fat as Nate’s organic one, and it’s moving like it’s a giant tongue licking inside his ass.
Between that and the way Nate starts kissing the crown of his head—Wade’s head cradled on his arms as he does—Wade lasts all of two more minutes before he makes a liar of himself, and yowls as he comes, too.