Who: Clark and Kyle What: The tension comes to a head. Where: Clark's office. When: Saturday, October 14; afternoon. Warnings: TBD; for sure some really angry kissing and references to BDSM.
Clark's office was a more intimate space than the lab where he worked on the weapons that he built for the Resistance and at the moment that was his most pressing problem.
If he'd brought Roth to his lab then he would have had a myriad of other things to distract him from the way that Roth's hair was never quite neat enough and always looked like it was just waiting for long clever fingers not unlike Clark's own to thread into it and yank back until his throat was bared. There would have been something to do with his hands; there would have been something to do with Roth's hands. He could have pressed him into some kind of service even if he wouldn't have trusted Roth with anything that actually required delicacy. For all that Roth talked about discipline and for all that he'd been placed in charge of a department all his own, his control was still crude. There was nothing elegant about the kind of combat that Roth and his department were experts at. Not for the first time Clark missed things that he'd never had the chance to use. The Finalizer. Starkiller Base. The kinds of weapons that could grant a clean and decisive victory.
There wasn't room for that sort of weaponry in the war that they were fighting now. This was a war for men like Kyle Roth. Kylo Ren. For men who would rather use brute force, whether physical or mystical, than take command of themselves and their impulses enough to wait until they could end entire star systems with the push of a button.
That was the sort of criticism that Clark kept to himself. Clark's problems with the Resistance wasn't how far they were willing to go for a victory; it was that they weren't methodical enough while they were getting there.
Not even his mental diatribe about the Resistance's methods was distracting him from the fact that Roth was right there and just as attractive a brat as he had been the first time that he'd sat in front of Clark. There was at least a desk between the two of them to keep Roth far enough away that Clark couldn't easily give in to the urge to put his hands on him while they talked. "My goal is to recreate a model of some of your earliest training." If Clark was correct, that was the training that had been responsible for Roth's loyalty to the organization that had been Core. "Which means I'll need your assistance in making certain that the programming is accurate." Not that he expected Roth to be able to accurately assess whether Clark's program was close enough to what he remembered; there would be a tell though. If Clark had narrowed down what kind of programming had been used on the very young Kyle Roth then there would be a reaction when it was repeated.
Someone else might have called it brainwashing. There were far too many negative connotations attached to that term. Clark preferred to think of it as operant conditioning. Behaviorism was a very well documented field of psychology. The uses to which he was putting its applied side would likely violate every code of ethics that existed for the discipline in the world but that was because they were all too short sighted to understand that there were times when the ends justified the means.
"I realize that this will require some... playacting." After all. Clark was expecting Roth to respond as he might have when he was a teenager. Younger even. He needed Roth to respond to him as an adult authority figure when the time came for him to run the simulation in full. Not that day of course; there was still far too much to set up and he had a feeling that Roth would need the time to get over one of his temper tantrums before he'd give in and go along with what he knew he didn't have any choice about to begin with. "I'll be taking on the role of your guardian and you will need to respond to me as if you believe that. If you think that it's beyond your capabilities..."
If Roth didn't cooperate then Clark wished that the consequence could be that he would punish him like the child he was pretending to be. He'd wanted that since he'd first met him and every time they'd spoken since... hence the problem with the intimacy of the office. No one would know what he did to, or with, Roth while they were behind a closed door.