Drabbles, and, uh, "squid pro quo"
(PSST: none of this falls in any timeline; it really just is random drabble/brainless playing! BUT THERE WILL BE STUFF. TIMELINED STUFF. COMING. SOON!)
ellnyx and I were talking nasdack, and in between lots of guilty feelings and a lot of random conversational tidbits, she provided this prompt: Balthier/Tseng/Rufus - inversion of roles/ceremony - love came in accordance with what he promised, and not only out of gratitude. And lo, I have written something:
~900 words. Tseng/Rufus/Balthier. Very soft R.
Children are laughing on the street, running past and through the weave of parked cars outside of Tseng's apartment block, their canvas shoes hitting tar and then pavement, tar and then pavement. It's drizzling. Grey clouds shadow skyscrapers, throw heavy, overcast images over glass and metal until the sun boils behind the cumulonimbus towers and hides. Droplets fall, splattering light but persistent. Tseng thinks about this world of his, wondering idly and without purpose if New York City really is just a snowglobe, taken and shaken by the hand of God. He stands on the sidewalk with his hands tucked neatly into his pockets, his fingers loose and his mind easily blank.
His hair is getting wet. Tseng closes his eyes for a moment. He breathes in. The cacophony of things around him rises to a comforting, deafening roar. The tap of heels, a woman walking past. Umbrellas blossoming. Cars, honking. He can smell exhaust. Hear the wheels turning. Bicycles. People on the phone, their voices rising, each language a new tangle in the already-crowded air. It takes a while for the rain to drum it all down and into submission. Tseng turns his face to the sky.
'What in god's name,' Tseng hears Balthier curse as the man comes out from the stairwell. He doesn't turn around. 'I leave you alone and you do this. An umbrella too expensive an investment for you? Get in the damned car; you're soaked. What will his highness think?'
Tseng hears Balthier reach for his car keys. Cracking open an eye, he says, 'When have you ever cared what Rufus thinks?'
Balthier, an arm raised above his head to shield himself from the downpour, looks at Tseng. 'I don't,' he says. 'Even though he pays my bills. It's just easier, man, to stop him from throwing a fit than to endure his whinging about how I treat his favourite chew-toy.'
Tseng arches his eyebrow, and curls his lips up into a smile. 'Would that be you, or me?'
Balthier straightens himself, his car keys held loosely in his hand. 'Are you standing in the rain just so you can be coy?'
'Perhaps,' Tseng says, evenly.
'You'll make a scene,' Balthier points out. 'Doesn't that go against your love for privacy and secrecy?'
'I'm the commoner in this relationship,' Tseng shrugs, taking a step closer. He puts on hand on the flat of Balthier's stomach, the fabric beneath his fingers going damp and translucent. 'No one watches my actions, or cares who I fuck in which hotels.' A look shared. 'Making a scene, as you say, is my prerogative.'
In front of the park, the children, the car and everyone, Tseng pulls Balthier's head down, and kisses him, lips wet and tongue as well.
Balthier manages not to fuck him in the leather backseat, but it's a close thing. By the time they make it to Rufus' penthouse, they're dripping all over the floor and onto Rufus' rugs and carpeting. The storm's risen to a low howl outside the windows.
Tseng doesn't offer any explanation when Rufus looks at him in askance. 'I'm sorry we're late,' he says instead.
'No issue,' Rufus replies, eyeing them both. He gestures with one hand towards the dining table. 'It's not as though I wasted the effort to do much more than call in some dinner.'
Balthier's busy wringing his shirt over Rufus' Italian designer furniture. 'Take-out?'
'In a manner of speaking,' Rufus says in the neutral voice of a man whose take-out cost upwards of a hundred dollars. 'Where have the two of you been?'
'On a romp.' Balthier stretches out, bare-chested, on the sofa. His words are light, but there's a brightness in his eyes. 'Tseng's feeling a little bizarre.'
'Bizarre?' Rufus reaches out to touch Tseng's wet hair.
Balthier's reply is a hum, deep at the back of his throat, as he sits up to watch Tseng catch Rufus' hand. 'Mmmhmm.' He doesn't say anything when Tseng slides, with slow grace, to his knees, nor does he make any comment when Tseng gently pulls the length of Rufus' belt from about his hips, and he does not speak when Tseng bends his head to kiss the skin at the base of Rufus' stomach, doesn't smirk when Rufus flinches from that touch, and doesn't look away from Rufus' blue, blue eyes when they catch each other's gaze and refuse to look away even as Rufus' fingers go white on Tseng's shoulder and his breath goes broken on a moan.
Tseng stays there on the floor with his forehead against the arch of Rufus' hipbone, his fingers tracing the hollow falls and gentle rise of Rufus' skin, silent, breathing, listening.
That night they put Tseng in the centre as they never usually do, as he never tends to allow; they fuck him so, so gently. Tseng falls asleep last, with Rufus' breath moist on his neck, and Balthier's lips warm on the dip of his clavicle.
He wakes up to kiss their fingers, metal cool against his tongue, watching their faces in the sunlight of a morning after a weathering storm.
THEN SOMEHOW, TENTACLES GOT MENTIONED. Mayhap it is because shoe-kink still is unfathomable to Nyx, she instead jumps forward towards tentacles:
(12:13:58 AM) nyx: b/t/r, TENTACLE SEX (12:14:00 AM) K: OKAY (12:14:02 AM) K: YOU ARE ON ... (12:14:11 AM) K: I WILL TENTACLE SEX THOSE THREE (12:14:16 AM) nyx: NO NONO (12:14:23 AM) K: WHAT IS THAT YOU ARE SAYING (12:14:24 AM) K: YES YES YES? (12:14:25 AM) nyx: THOSE THREE SEX THE TENTACLES ... (12:14:44 AM) K: RUFUS DARING BALTHIER OR VICE VERSA (12:14:45 AM) nyx: YES ... (12:14:52 AM) K: SUCKERS (12:14:53 AM) nyx: YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
Now that I have ascertained that this is NOT MY FAULT, I am here to enable. Here we go, tentacle porn. Or, uh, the closest I could get to it, anyway. NOT BRAIN SAFE. NOT HEAD SAFE. It's almost work safe. BUT IT HAS TENTACLES. FOR nasdack VERSE. If that doesn't warn you, NOTHING WILL! I blame the meds and 350am! CAVEAT LECTOR.
[edit] NOW KNOWN AS:
SQUID PRO QUO
Warnings for squick! ~900 words. R. Tseng, Rufus, Balthier/DRUG PRODUCING TENTACLE MONSTER.
'You have got to be joking,' Balthier says, his voice edging into actual disbelief.
Rufus shakes his head, sliding an access keycard through the last of what seems to Balthier to be a hundred security clearance doors. It hisses open. Rufus slips inside, and Tseng follows - like he always does - immediately afterwards, so Balthier is left with the choice of being either abandoned or forced to trail after.
'What are you calling this?' Balthier asks as he pads, unwilling, into the laboratory. The entire place smells like antiseptic and something fouler. 'Indulging in the sins of the father?'
'If you put it that way,' Rufus says ponderously, stopping at the last of the --- tanks. 'Father called it hard work, you know.' He reaches inwards and Balthier wants to retch or look away or call him out on charges of insanity that even the Bunansa family can't equal.
Tseng's face is blase, even when Rufus' fingers start to stroke the damn thing, and it wriggles, slides itself between Rufus' digits and squirms.
'Hard work?' Balthier echoes stupidly, his tongue thick in his mouth.
'The component of Mako that makes it truly addictive is chemically very complex,' Rufus elaborates, dry as if he's giving a lecture and not -- not -- 'It's a small component, but vital, and hard to reproduce in a test-tube. We usually extract them from adult, ovulating females, but their cycles are long and often unpredictable. Then we discovered another curious fact about these animals.'
Tseng makes a noise at the back of his throat, sarcastic. Rufus looks at him, and smiles like he's as young as he really is. The blond reaches his other hand into the tank and pulls the whole damned fucking thing out, and Balthier takes a full step back when Rufus comes up to him and says, 'Our scientists discovered that they actually secret hormones when they're aro--'
'Shinra, for the love of god,' Balthier breathes out. 'Don't bring that thing any closer.'
Its tentacles twine along Rufus' arms, and it's getting Rufus' expensive shirt soaked through, but he doesn't look like he minds. Rufus runs a thumb down the space in between the suckers on one of the larger arms and the whole creature spasms before a pungent, familiar smell hits the air, and a greenish secretion oozes onto the white of Rufus' sleeves.
Balthier swallows. 'No.'
'Think of it as an concentrated hit of Mako,' Rufus says. 'Organic, though, so with less side effects. Or are you not game?'
Balthier looks up, tearing his gaze away from the slick mass of the creature. 'You must have led a sincerely fucked-up childhood, Shinra.'
'Occasionally,' Rufus smiles, all teeth, 'it could be very enjoyable. Are you game?'
Balthier has to breathe once, twice, before he rolls up his sleeves. 'Fine,' he says. 'Fine.'
'Good,' Rufus says, and it's almost a purr, and when Balthier expects the creature to get placed in his hands, Rufus leans up and lets part of it slide off of his hands with a slick, sickening noise and onto the exposed length of Balthier's neck.
Balthier bites back an undignified noise, succeeds, and then fails a second time when the creature's suckers pinch onto the skin underneath his throat. There's a sensation of tightness, and then wetness, and gentle, promising strength. 'What next?' Balthier asks, through gritted teeth.
'Give it some time to play,' Rufus answers, slowly pushing the rest of the creature's tentacles off of himself. Balthier is assured now that he is positively evil, because the creature's winding itself around his neck and one small arm is working around the shell of his ear, tracing and dipping and fuck --
Tseng comes up beside him. 'Try not to make too many sudden movements,' he says, his voice so flat that Balthier has to believe that Shinra's done this before, the crazy little shit. Tseng's fingers tug in behind the coil of the tentacle around Balthier's neck; with slow motions he pulls it away, and Balthier breathes a little bit easier until he realises that Tseng's holding the writhing, searching thing up in front of his face.
'You don't honestly expect me to,' Balthier trails off.
'Organic Mako, I'll repeat,' Rufus says from somewhere to the side, and he sounds like he's torn between laughing and something else.
'When I'm done with this, I had better be higher than a fucking kite,' Balthier says. 'And when I am, Shinra, I am going to fuck you seven ways till --'
Tseng pushes the thing into Balthier's mouth and it moves like it's been waiting for this. The suckers feel entirely different on his tongue, sliding and slipping before wrapping around and engorging until it fills Balthier's mouth. The smell of ozone hits him so strongly than he staggers, but someone's catches him just before he falls, and the next thing he knows there's liquid squirting slow and warm, trickling and it's better than concentrated Mako. Balthier thinks he moans, but his mouth's too full for him to tell if either of the two hear it.
AND THEN K DECIDES THAT NYX CAN WRITE THE REST OF THE TENTACLE PORN IF SHE WANTS TO AND GOES TO SLEEP OFF THE MEDS LIKE SHE SHOULD'VE 1 HOUR AGO.
[edit] The LJ version has Nyx providing more tentacly... goodness...