ninefox | anchorage

Jedao's reflection is different now. The black and gold uniform is rumpled, and his hair is a tousled mess. His shoulders are hunched even as he leans toward the frame, toward Fives, and the look on his face is pinched, miserable, aching. But he listens, and he doesn't look away.

Sometime around finding something good, the reflection starts to cry. Silently, without moving or gasping, a trickle and then a steady stream, his eyes blinking quickly. If Jedao couldn't see the reflection as well, he would have no idea he was doing it.

"I want to," he says, voice thick with tears he can't feel on a face he doesn't have. "I want to so much. Fives, Fives, I've never wanted anyone the way I want you." He's strained, in the mirror, more than his voice shows, clenching and unclenching his fists on the edge of the sink, swallowing, biting the inside of his cheek. He doesn't know how to control his reactions when he isn't performing them consciously, can't even feel them; he never had to learn before.

"It wasn't safe," he says suddenly, recalling one of the first things Fives said to him, months ago, struggling with his own shame that Jedao could only half understand, hoping the echo carries something of the ingrained nature of the aversion, a different quality of risk than death on the field of duty. "Not for me or anyone I might - I know that's not a reason, I know you've faced so much, defied so much. I just -"

The Jedao in the mirror shudders, bites his knuckles, wipes his face. Breathes.

"I've never been good for anyone, before. You're going to have to remind me." Another echo, another deliberate one. Please, Fives. The choice he'll make on his own isn't the one he wants to make, is a lifetime of caution and fear choosing through him. Help him.

Edited 2017-08-23 21:33 (UTC)

Fives reaches out with one broad, blunt-fingered hand and settles it on the reflection of Jedao's chest. It's not the same as touching, of course, but it's... something. The closest thing to contact he can make. Something to do when there's no way to give in to the almost overwhelming urge to reach out and brush those tears away, to cup his jaw, to kiss him. And even if Jedao was physically there he couldn't do any of that anyway, not until (unless) they work this out.

His own eyes are suspiciously bright when he nods silent understanding. He knows what it's like for is this safe? to be a constant refrain in the back of your mind, for the answer to come back constantly, frustratingly, agonizingly, no. Having to balance the possible cost against the weight of want, or need, and how much more heavily the safety of a brother weighs in that balance than your own.

He doesn't think he's even capable of crying anymore, it's been too much of a risk for too much of his life, weakness he couldn't afford, but he feels the sharp ache of Jedao's almost instinctive fear and aversion, and he leans in over the sink, presses his forehead to the cool glass without taking his eyes off Jedao's reflection. "You are absolutely the best thing that has ever happened to me, ori'vod," he answers, quiet and solemn and utterly certain. "You've given me hope." Which might be a two-edged sword in a life of pain and fear and crushing powerlessness, but he's clinging to it with both hands, and he's not letting go. Of it or of Jedao.

It isn't quite the same feeling; different things were not safe with the Kel than with the Shuos, with Khiaz - not to mention the ever-watchful Vidona - and he could never be entirely sure which rules he was dealing with. Even ensconced within the Kel, long before fraternization was the shooting offense it rightfully became under formation instinct, the lines between not safe and not right were braided tightly and intricately together. But the instinctive recoil, the yearning, the agonizing consideration - that part was similar enough.

The reflection presses its forehead against Fives' forehead, spreads its hand against Fives' hand. There's no decision to do it; or if some part of him is deciding, it's a part of him he doesn't have access to. But he would; he wants to, and barely realizes until he sees his image doing it, is soothed by the sight. There's also vertigo mixed in with the comfort, like realizing he's had a blackout. It feels like walking along the precipice of madness, knowing he's divided so deeply within himself; at least this isn't against himself.

He makes a sound, when Fives says hope, involuntary and stricken, not entirely unlike the sound he might make after getting stabbed. Hope has always felt so far away for him, and yet so essential; people didn't know how to hope for better under the Hexarchs, and so they asked only to serve well while the world got slowly and inexorably worse. He knew he had to teach them, but after generations of watching, it was so hard, so hard to find the strength to keep reaching for unknown possibilities even as he always, always believed.

"You - Fives - you've given me -" He chokes. There aren't words for it, not simple ones. It sounds so small and awkward and stupid in his head, when I'm with you I mostly don't want to die. "I love you. Stars and sable, I love you so much."

Fives presses his hand more firmly to the glass, until his palm and fingertips go white from the pressure, and wishes he could feel the warmth of Jedao's skin against his. That he could reach his other hand up and curl it at the nape of his neck and hold him there... and tip-tilt his head just enough to catch Jedao's lips and kiss him breathless. He wants to know his taste, his touch, push his hands through that unruly hair not just in comfort but in passion.

He's loved so many of his brothers--intensely and unreservedly--and lost almost all of them, but that's never stopped him from giving his heart. But this... his love for Echo has come closest to this fierce, wild, achingly desperate thing he feels for Jedao. "You're mine," he whispers, and means it in any and all possible ways. "My ori'vod, my General, my Jed'ika. And I will never not love you."

He feels a striking, terrifying certainty, wordless and thoughtless, that he will outlive Fives just as he has outlived everyone else, that someday he will be a gibbering splintered thing at the end of the universe, all eyes and teeth and shadow amid the corpses of ancient stars. He will have willingly forgotten his own name, he is certain, that he was ever a thing like human, but he will remember Fives.

"You saved me," he whispers, "From madness and despair. You are the best thing that ever happened to me, too." He thinks Fives might be the best thing that could have happened to him.

Unless something can be done about Fives' aging (or Jedao manages to somehow, after all this time, get himself killed), he almost certainly will outlive him, even without Jedao's terror of an eternity of solitude and insanity. Even with his aging slowed to normal the odds of him living long in war are... slim. He doesn't want to die, he never has and never will, but when it comes to it his deeply ingrained instinct is to give no thought to his own life if sacrificing it will further his cause.

"I was going to ask for the chips to be removed, then go back and let them execute me," he confesses quietly. Because he couldn't imagine a life without his brothers, and he couldn't imagine any way to have a life with them. You saved him too, Jedao.

"No one gets to kill you but me," Jedao growls, reflexive and immediate, although it's a conception of death and possessiveness that includes war, includes getting him killed. Fives is his soldier and that makes his life Jedao's to spend, and Jedao's to hoard.

Fives sucks in a sharp breath at the growl, the intensity of it. The absolute, possessive conviction of it. It probably shouldn't be comforting.

"I'm yours." His voice hasn't risen, but it's gone rougher, a little choked. "Use my life well."

"I will, I promise," he says, still growling, but a little smoother now, steady and deep. "Vor'aka, vod'ika." I accept a mission - not the same as a debt, but no less solemn, no less seriously sworn.

Fives huffs out a quiet, choked laugh, and his eyes squeeze tight shut for a moment as a weight he hadn't fully realized was lifts from his chest. He was made to be a tool. A weapon, trained and honed and deployed against an enemy, for a cause. It's all he knows. But he's chosen the enemy he'll fight in a cause that's worth dying for... and the hands that will wield him.

None of those are choices he'd ever thought to have. And he absolutely believes, bone deep, that Jedao will spend his life if it's necessary, but that he'll never throw it away.

"Haat, ijaa, haa'it, ner'alor," he answers, quiet and solemn and with a burning intensity that could easily be terrifying.

"Haat, ijaa, haa'it, ner'verd," he murmurs, soft and unshakable. They've made promises before, when they first decided to go to war together, when the Mando words were still sharp-edged and new in his mouth. This time, it feels different. This time it means more.

In the mirror, Jedao's reflection pulls back a little, rises up - as though on tiptoe, though of course his feet are out of view - enough to press a silent kiss to Fives' forehead where it's still resting against the glass, the image slightly smudged on the other side by steam that doesn't exist.

Edited 2017-08-25 06:35 (UTC)

He draws in another slow breath, then another, and the intensity hasn't disappeared, but it's shifted to something softer and warmer. He can't feel Jedao's lips press against his skin, but it doesn't matter (it does, he wants to shake the Admiral and tell him to give him back), the intention is enough.

He's glad he taught Jedao Mando'a, glad that he took to it, and understands. Because hearing those words, in that language... there's so much more meaning to them. A depth and profundity and commitment that Standard lacks. Likewise with the one he whispers next, eyes slipping shut on a sigh, "Ni kar'tayli gar darasuum." This might be almost exactly the same words as the ones he'd said just moments ago, but there's a certain inexplicable weight behind them. I hold you in my heart. Forever.

The reflection touches the glass with his free hand, a careful brush of his thumb over the places where each of Fives' eyelids appear.

"Literally, at the moment," Jedao comments, his mouth tilted bittersweet; his voice wavers and cracks, just slightly, as if he were the one revisiting his time as a teenager. He is alive through Fives; anchored, held, given light if not breath, a voice if not shape, only because Fives is there to hear him, heart and soul.

"Ni kar'tayli gar darasuum, Fives."

He huffs out a soft, broken laugh. "At the moment," he agrees. "But these things never last for long." Though any amount of time is too long as far as he's concerned right now. Still, at least Jedao is here, with him, not anchored to someone else, and at least he's gotten this out of it--this moment, these confessions, the ability to hold Jedao to him even when his conditioning takes over and he waivers. The same as Jedao can hold him to his own vows.

Still, he thinks he could have lived without them, at least for a little longer, rather than have Jedao put through this. Though his resolve on that point waivers slightly with Jedao's final words, and he finds himself wondering if, maybe, tears aren't as much of an impossibility as he'd thought. The idea of it makes him stand a little more upright and press the heels of his hands into his eyes, the reaction visceral and immediate. Tears are a weakness he can't afford.

"What... ah, what would you like? To do? Now?" he asks, trying to distract himself, and his voice is definitely thick and a little wet. "Since you're stuck with me you should get some say."

"I'm glad we get to have this," he muses, quietly. "In a way. Maybe that's terrible." He never had an anchor who asked what he would like. The closest was - Cheris, leaving the light on.

It is a strange and terrible intimacy with a stranger and more terrible cost; but for four hundred years it was the only intimacy he had. He's been dependent for so long on anchors who neither liked nor trusted him, and never on one he could trust, already trusted, in turn. It eases something in him, pulls the loose thread running like a surgical stitch through his whole sordid history, leaves healing skin behind.

"I don't want to share you yet," he decides. Not right after all this. Fives will have to go to work eventually; will have to go to meals, will have to make excuses to Steve and Nico and Wiliams and Holden - although some of those are duties he can carry out through Fives, once they've negotiated their time. And he wants to fight someone, to watch Fives move in Jedao's style. But not yet. Not now.

Oh. Maybe it isn't so bad, then. for Jedao. It eases some of the vaguely amorphous sense of guilt for being grateful for this, to know Jedao's glad of it too. That it's not just a horror he's making the best of.

"I only mind it because it means you're trapped," he admits quietly, dropping his hands finally, to reveal too bright eyes but none of the dreaded tears. And it's a confession of sorts. Of how much he hates being alone, how comforting it is to know that Jedao is with him, completely and inextricably. And no matter how much he misses being able to touch, how much he wants to explore every inch of Jedao's body, and hear what sounds he'll make, see how he'll move, learn how he'll touch in turn now that it's a thing he's allowed, he realizes that some part of him will miss this when it's gone.

"Good." There's no way to miss the relief--and pleasure--in that one sighed out word, and his lips tip up into a smile as he meets Jedao's eyes in the mirror. "I think, whatever we do next, that I need to clean up first." And his smile goes a little wry as he glances down at his hand, with dried come starting to flake off it, and his face as well, now, where he'd pressed his hands to his eyes.

"And then clean your floor," he adds, and there's definitely a certain amount of self-satisfaction in his voice and expression as he turns the water on and sets to cleaning his hands. "And then," he continues, and his expression has gone a little predatory as he looks back up at the mirror from beneath his eyelashes before scrubbing at his face. "Maybe we could make another mess." And even if he weren't currently trapped in a body that's positively soaked in a hormonal stew of lust and aggression he'd still want that right now, he thinks.

He grins, first a small curl of his mouth, but as Fives goes on it broadens into something wide and fierce and toothy. The reflection leans its hip against the reflection of the sink, unmistakably sensual.

"Back in the bed this time," he half suggests, half orders. "Where you can still smell me."

Fives blinks the water from his eyes just in time to watch Jedao's reflection shift, and his mouth goes a little dry and his pupils go wide and dark. Calculated sensuality is... a fairly recent discovery, thanks to Clark, and he's found he likes it. A lot.

"Yeah." He breathes in through his mouth, almost as if he could smell Jedao, taste him on the air right now. "That-" He catches his bottom lip with his teeth and braces his hands on the sink's edge again, breathing through the spike of want, remembering what it had been like to feel this way almost all the time. "That sounds good. And, uh... maybe cleaning up can wait?" he suggests hopefully, because it is Jedao's room and Jedao's floor and-

He stills, eyes narrowing in sudden concern as he looks at Jedao's reflection. "Are you... can you, uh... does this... do anything for you?" Or is he forcing his masturbatory fantasies onto Jedao when he has absolutely no outlet for them himself.

The reflection's eyebrows climb almost all the way into his tousled, barely-regulation bangs. His dark eyes glitter and he growls through all his teeth, through a hungry grin. He doesn't have an outlet, but that doesn't mean he isn't into it anyway.

"Fledge. Get your unfairly perfect ass back in my bed and give me another show."

Oh... oh Force, he can almost feel the hunger in that grin, and that growl rumbling through his head apparently has a direct line to his cock. Because he's suddenly hard as kriffing durasteel, and he makes a low, almost embarrassingly needy noise in the back of his throat before snapping to attention with a lifetime of reflex behind it and only barely resisting the urge to salute.

"Yessir." He doesn't get off on being ordered around, but it certainly doesn't bother him either, and he gives Jedao one last, longing look in the mirror before he turns and jogs out the door and to the bed... where he throws himself down face first without hesitation, burying his face in a pillow and breathing in deep as he rolls his hips against the rumbled bedding.

It's not the obedience itself exactly - but it appeals to his possessiveness, appeals to something both more raw and more twisted, in the way he responds to the trappings of a soldier, his soldier. Jedao makes a needy, crushed-breath sound of his own at the sudden stiff-backed posture, at the eager yessir. His mouth in the reflection hangs a little bit open, like it needs to pant, literally as well as figuratively.

"I want to bite you all over. Your calves and your shoulders and your ridiculous ass, hound preserve me. Just get a good mouthful and dig in a little."

Fives arches his back and rocks down again, digging his toes into the mattress for leverage and shuddering at the almost too light friction. He can smell Jedao in the pillow he'd been using, can almost convince himself that he can still feel the residual warmth of his body in the sheets.

The most important point, though, is that he knows Jedao can see him, and Clark's been a very good teacher when it comes to the lesson of putting on the kind of show Jedao's demanded of him. So he spreads his feet a little wider, making sure to give Jedao a good view as he grinds against the sheet, letting Jedao's words shiver down his spine and fuel his want until he can feel the damp spot he's making in the sheets.

"Force, I want to feel you," he rasps, partially just gut-punched sincerity, but partly knowing that Jedao will want to hear it. "Want to feel your kriffing teeth on me, want to... want to pin you down and taste every part of you. Get your hands in my hair while I... while I suck you down."

One of the eyes glows, dimly, next to Fives' face on the pillow; more of the shadow must be falling over his back.

He hums, a low, deliberate, appreciative noise. "Your hands. Your big rough hands on my hips. Fuck, if I ever dream again, it'll probably be about your hands, I've thought about them so much. Would you tease me, sweetheart, like I teased you? Would you let me nudge you, coax you, teach you just how I like it? Or am I just hanging on to your hair in desperation while you swallow me down, while you take and taste everything you want until I'm screaming your name?"

Edited 2017-08-26 05:13 (UTC)

Fives can see the glowing eye out of the corner of his own, and it raises goosebumps along his skin to know it has to be laid out across his back, touching him even if neither of them can feel it. It's that voice that's wrecking him, though, low and warm and perfect, and filling up almost every corner of his awareness with images and ideas.

"Yes, Force," he groans, hands fisting in the sheets, glad for a moment that Jedao can't see his face as he struggles for breath, and anything like a coherent thought, at the idea of just taking what he wants, what he's wanted for so kriffing long. "Both... either... just... I just wanna make you go off like an ion cannon," he growls, abruptly shoving a hand down between himself and the sheets, curling it around his cock and squeezing. He doesn't want this to end as soon as it will if he doesn't slow himself down, kriffing hormones.

"What do you want," he asks after a moment spent panting into the pillow, breathing in their combined scents and making himself be... not still, but more restrained, more controlled as he slows his hips to a slower rock, muscles flexing in a sinuous ripple down his shoulders and back and ass and thighs with each movement. "It's your show, Jed'ika, what do you want to see?"

There's a pause, distracted, and then a rush of syllables, a low mishmash of dipthongs and consonant clusters, like a gurgling stream and tumbling rocks, that matches, somehow, an intensified version of the tones and cadence of his drawl.

"Fives. Fives, Fives, I can't think, you're so fucking beautiful. Get up on your knees for me - and tap the side of the bedframe, there's a pressure drawer, you deserve to be using actual nice lube, not that I wouldn't be happy to watch you lick your hand for, oh, I don't know, several months -"

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