Disclaimer: I don't own Mutant X or said characters. Yes, I realize I've probably taken liberties with characters and surroundings . . . deal. Um, if this has been done before . . . I'm really sorry! I probably stole the plot bunny. Set sometime in Season One, with all of the characters assembled if not accounted for. Warning: Slash. This means a same-sex intimate relationship of some kind.
Rated: PG-13.
*****
A slip of the knife and the blood is almost immediate, a thin red line that all too quickly spills over onto his pale skin and trickles down his hand. He holds it to his mouth without thinking, a man of flesh and blood and bone so easily forgotten in between the moments that he is invincible.
Adam is there. He tugs the hand gently down away from Jesse's face and looks into his eyes, concerned. "Let me help you with that," he says, and leads him to the med lab.
Cool blue light washes over the two of them as Jesse sits quietly, an obedient puppy dog waiting for the word from his beloved master. There is a smudge of drying blood on his lips, but he is too absorbed with the cut on his hand and the dull throb he's suddenly feeling everywhere instead of just where it hurts to wipe it off. He avoids Adam's eyes so that Adam might not notice the desire pumping through Jesse's veins along with his blood.
Adam dabs with feather-light fingers at the broken skin, dismayed by the cut but secretly glad that Jesse has been hurt physically. He's not keeping up his barriers as much. He's letting people love him. Things are able to get under his skin.
He cleans it thoroughly with antiseptic, the sharp smell making them both aware of their own surprisingly present physical discomforts. Adam swallows a constricted throat, the little air getting into his lungs making him light-headed. Jesse licks his lips, enough to moisten the bloodstain but not to dissolve it. The room feels warmer. They wonder if the other feels the same.
Gentle fingers wrap a bandage around Jesse's hand, unconsciously kneading the skin around the wound in a soothing massage. Adam brings Jesse's hand to his lips and kisses the new break in the invincible man before he can stop himself.
Jesse brings his eyes up to face him, like a headlight-caught deer beautiful in its mix of serenity and fear. The moment to apologize, to attribute it to reflexes and nothing more passes, and every sound seems louder in the all-consuming silence.
The blue glow of the lab only accentuates the paleness of Jesse's skin, and the purple smudge still on his lips drives Adam over the brink. He grips Jesse's shoulders, to hold him up or away neither knows, as the younger man leans into Adam, passive. Submissive. Willing to be led.
The first kiss is soft, so light that if their eyes were not open they would doubt it had happened at all. And as their lips meet again with more force and passion, sight becomes the forgotten sense. Their hearts are pounding in their ears, the rush of adrenaline heard only as a gust of hot and heavy wind. The scent of antiseptic and cold sterility invaded by sweat and cologne and the smell of something so like them alone the sudden multiplicity of it is staggering.
The touch of their lips is a gut-twisting friction, the roughness of uncared-for flesh and five-o'clock-shadow rubbing near-madness. The taste of blood is bitter but sweet.
They are dying for each other. Neither knew it, because like two ships in the dead of night, they never touched. Touch has exploded them, and things will never be the same.
P>HOMECreated on ... April 29, 2003