Archive of Our Own ^beta

Adam has routines.

He gets up at 7AM every morning and makes the bed. If Nigel is in it, he makes the bed with Nigel in it. Then he goes to make breakfast. He cooks eggs for Nigel, bacon and hash browns. Toast that is so dark it’s nearly burned, and filtered coffee - he will not budge on the coffee machine - black as he can get it.

Then he goes to take a shower, while the tempting smells from the kitchen waft through to the bedroom and rouse Nigel swearing and staggering to eat. After a shower, he makes the bed properly, he puts on something comfortable for the day and goes to make himself cereal.

Those are his mornings, have been since the brash and rough man had made this apartment his home, with Adam. They rarely deviate from the norm unless Nigel is away - in which case Adam barely sleeps - or Nigel wakes up in a mood.

‘Moods’, Adam has calculated, come up if the man had recently come back from being away, if he is not so hungover that even the smell of food can’t pull him from the blankets, or if Adam parades before him in one of his shirts, ‘accidentally’ pulled from the laundry pile in his rush to get everything done on time.

Adam has routines, but he enjoys orchestrating variations.

He walks from the kitchen, now, a pale blue shirt with dogs facing every which way on it buttoned only from his navel down, over red briefs, and into the bathroom to turn on the shower. He smiles when he hears the telltale groan from the bed before it shifts as Nigel vacates it.

Adam’s only bent over, thumbs set against the waistband of his briefs, when he’s snared backwards by a finger looped through the top of them. Nigel pulls the kid back against him, and he’s all hands, down Adam’s open shirt, up across his belly, down the fine trail of dark hair into his underpants. He gropes Adam shamelessly, fondling his still soft cock with gentle tugs, and he rumbles a deep, resonant purr against the back of Adam’s neck when he feels his cock start to fill.

“What are you doing, darling?”

Adam lets out a sigh, almost a laugh. “I’m going to take a shower.”

“Are you.” It’s a statement, not a question.

“Yes,” Adam answers anyway. “That’s why the water’s running. There’s breakfast -”

“I don’t want fucking breakfast,” Nigel snarls, closing his mouth against the back of Adam’s neck, his knobby spine, nuzzling up into his hair. “I want you.”

Adam smiles, like he always does, still that pleasant shiver through his entire being at knowing that Nigel wants him this way, that he becomes entirely blind to logic or reason when he’s like this.

All because of Adam.

Adam arches into the rough hand circling him and ducks his heaead to watch. It’s almost pornographic, and Adam feels himself grow harder at the thought of it, Nigel’s hand down his pants as he holds Adam back against his own cock, hard, always, in the mornings. Adam drops a hand back over his head to tug Nigel’s straight hair until the man growls, presses teeth where his lips had been moments before and Adam shivers.

“Shower with me,” Adam says, and it’s as much a demand as it is a suggestion. He knows that even if he had suggested they go about their routines alone, this would still happen. Because he wants it to. Because it is never an accident when he borrows Nigel’s shirts from the dryer.

Whatever Nigel says in Romanian no doubt involves both a curse, and an agreement. He jerks Adam off for a moment more, tugging in a tight squeeze inside his little briefs, and only reluctantly lets go. His hand grasps bare belly, his other fingers pinch a dark nipple to hardness, he wants to touch every part of him and only grudgingly stops, enough to shuck his boxers to the floor.

Adam knows that’s exactly where they’ll stay, until he picks them up later.

Heavy-lidded and still drowsy, a deep sleeper beyond reason, Nigel turns away enough to rest an arm above the toilet and steady himself to piss. It hurts, the switch from wanting to fuck to needing to empty his bladder, and another slurry of curses escape him. Adam turns the water a little warmer, knowing Nigel takes his scalding, and he finds a balance between that and a reasonable temperature - hotter than Adam would prefer, cooler than Nigel would.

“It’s fucking cold,” Nigel complains as he steps inside after Adam.

Adam just hums and wraps his arms around his shoulders to tug him down again, as hungry for the kiss as Nigel is in giving it. He wonders if it is because they’re both relatively young, already in their sexual peak, that they do this so often. In truth, it just feels incredible, and Adam is happy to fall into bed, or be pushed to the floor or wherever they end up landing, for this.

“You’ll get used to it,” Adam mumbles against him, smiling as Nigel presses him to the wall with another growl of displeasure. “It isn’t good to scald your skin as you do, you damage the first -”

It doesn’t matter.

Nigel doesn’t care.

And Adam doesn’t really care either, pushing up on his toes against the man before he’s lifted, and with a high sound of surprise, Adam wraps all his limbs around the man in front of him as he’s rutted hard against the wall for his trouble.

“Damage the first fucking what, Adam?”

He laughs and nuzzles against Nigel’s neck, and the sound becomes a moan as their cocks contact, slicked by water and made hot where they rub senseless against the other. “The first layer of skin, the epidermis -”

“Epi-fucking-dermis,” Nigel mutters. He occupies his mouth with Adam’s collar bone, tongue spread fat across it before he closes his lips over the stiff bone to suck.

“You’d have to have it much harder to do permanent damage, or for any medical degree of burn, but -”

“But what, darling?”

“You scald off the oils from the stratum corneum - you know, the keratinocytes -”

“Fucking what?”

“It makes your skin dry,” Adam finally says, and Nigel holds him under his ass with one hand, and snares his jaw with the other to fill Adam’s mouth with his tongue instead of words.

Adam’s toes curl and splay out again as he rocks against Nigel, moaning soft into his mouth at how good it feels. The water cascades over them both and neither will get clean, Adam is certain. Nigel is single-minded when it comes to fucking, he is very thorough in the execution, for which Adam is entirely grateful.

Adam draws nails down Nigel’s back to leave marks and grins when the man bites Adam’s lip for it, tugging it before letting go and kissing him again.

It would be easy enough to rut to completion here, to have Nigel rub and rock against him, whispering sweet words and dirty words against him, sucking bruises into his skin that Adam’s collared shirts won’t hide. It would be easy, and it already feels so good that Adam is almost tempted to let it play out that way. But something else tugs at him, as he grasps Nigel’s hair, as he shifts against him as though to climb the man higher, heels hooking against Nigel’s thighs.

“You are always so -” Adam searches for the colloquialism, having picked up a fair few from Nigel over their months together, practicing in using them instead of the full and obvious names for things. It’s not penis anymore, it’s cock - it’s not having sex but fucking, and not aroused but - “Horny. In the morning,” he chastens softly, grinning when Nigel’s eyes narrow and he pushes a curse and an argument against his neck.

He holds Adam against the wall, to free his hand from supporting his ass and grope it instead. Between water-slick cheeks Nigel rubs, downward, and when he feels a moan pull Adam’s hole tight beneath his finger, he grins.

“se Whosefucking fault is that, angel? Hmm?”

He rubs cheek-to-cheek, feline, touching kisses back along Adam’s smooth jaw. Possessive, marking his territory, claiming his mate, every possible euphemism Nigel’s ever seen on the nature shows comes to mind. He likes to watch them when it’s the middle of the night and he’s strung out, unable to sleep for all the powder drying out his nose. He likes the violence and remorseless savagery of it. He likes the fucking, he likes the hunting, he likes thinking of him and Adam like fucking creatures of the veldt, fucking cheetahs or jaguars, slaughtering all the spindly little antelope in the world.

Sometimes it’s enough to make him horny, right then, and send him slinking into bed to have Adam again.

Adam’s saying something that Nigel hasn’t heard, but he cuts him off anyway, with a brusque shove of his cock against Adam’s soft stomach, his own rubbing coarse friction enough to crack Adam’s voice into a whimper.

“You know what we have, darling?”

Adam blinks at him.

“Fucking symbiosis,” Nigel purrs.

Adam just groans, smile pulling free across his lips listening to Nigel incorporate words - correctly, for a change - from things he has read or seen. He wonders if Nigel believes him, yet, that he is not stupid. He wonders if there is anything else he can do to make the man see, because he is anything but.

Adam slips one hand between them to stroke Nigel up, rough strokes and a twist of his wrist - a slightly more violent groping than what Adam enjoys but they have had time to learn each other well enough that it’s easy, now. Another routine.

Adam tugs.

Nigel curses and leans in to murmur sweet nothings against Adam’s neck.

Adam arches forward and up, setting one heel against the small of Nigel’s back, the other against the soft skin where his ass joins his thigh, his free arm under Nigel’s arm to hook over his shoulder, holding them pressed hotly together as he rubs his nose gently against Nigel’s.

He is unreal, an absolute wonder, limber-limbed and lithe, glistening wet and blooming scarlet all along his cheeks and neck and shoulders. Nigel watches him, endlessly, he could spend the rest of his fucking life doing nothing but watching Adam do anything - eat cereal, match his socks, tap on the laptop - and it would be a life well spent. He pushes in the tip of his finger, rumbling approval when Adam’s body yields to him, and rocks it deeper, off-tempo with his own thrusts into the delicious pressure of Adam’s hand.

The water skitters across their skin, breathless they press together, fingering Adam’s ass, fisting Nigel’s cock, wholly content to rut like schoolboys. Nigel wants to rub against Adam’s prostate - he knows that’s what it’s called now - until he whimpers. He wants to suck him until his legs shake. He wants to turn him around and eat his ass until Adam is all but sitting on his face and letting out pitched little moans.

Everything, all of him, there is nothing about Adam that isn’t a fascination to Nigel. Even his moods - those times that Nigel fucks something up or sometimes even when he doesn’t - are a puzzle to be solved for Nigel. Sometimes it takes holding him, tight, and whispering hard-soft words in his ear. Sometimes it’s the heavy - weighted - blanket and long, rambling stories about fucking Bucharest until he sleeps. Sometimes it’s letting Adam have his space, to knock over a lamp or shove some books off a shelf, to hear something break.

Nigel knows that feeling, and knows how much it matters that he’s there to clean up the mess after and let Adam recover.

“Fuck,” Nigel whispers, but the constant curse of choice has little effect on slowing Adam. He tightens his legs and rests his head back against the wall, muscles tightening around Nigel’s fingers - both now - with a groan.

He stops finger-fucking him, stops trying to come all over his tummy, just stops.

“Adam, fucking - fucking stop for a second,” Nigel murmurs. He swallows, mouth dry, and watches Adam with all the awe and disbelief he always feels, but more. A sudden and stark realization that it’s more. “Adam, I fucking love you.”

Adam makes a little noise, squirms as he’s held, and bites his lip, eyes open just to slits to watch Nigel in front of him. He’s panting, entire body taut with pleasure, with the familiar buildup of arousal in the pit of his stomach, between his legs, in the way his chest aches.

He lets the words filter, shifts them around until they make sense in context, until they make sense from Nigel, and smiles wide. The feeling in his chest doesn’t ease up, it flares to desperate heat and pounds with his heart. He draws his thumb just lightly over the swollen head of Nigel’s cock, filled with blood and hot against his palm. He watches Nigel’s brown eyes slowly close, flicker open again as he waits.

Adam knows what the words mean.

Now he knows how they feel.

He leans in to kiss him, a slow and deep thing, humming a breathless little sigh against Nigel as they hold together, still for a moment in body, though their hearts hammer tattoos beneath skin and over ribs.

“Now I know how to describe that feeling in my chest that I get when I wake up next to you every morning,” Adam mumbles, kissing Nigel again. “I love you.”

Nigel swears a long, rushed blasphemy, forcing his legs to strengthen as Adam holds him rapt on the precipice of release, with his body and his words, his mind and his heart. An inappropriate exclamation, maybe, but Adam kisses him anyway. Adam always kisses him anyway, no matter how trashed Nigel wants to be that night or how anxious - he knows now, anxiety leads to anger - he is about a shipment or how much he curses or smokes or any of the fucked up things that Nigel does for peace and pleasure.

Adam always kisses him.

He always loves him.

Nigel tucks his face against the crook of Adam’s neck and breathes a laugh. Another day, another constant wonder as to how Nigel got so fucking lucky as this.

The least he can do, he supposes, is fuck him properly.

He works his fingers deeper, spreads them wide enough that Adam’s legs shake around him, curls them to rub against the wrinkled nub inside his ass with enough pressure that Adam can’t moan, can’t breathe, just gasps in a little, high sound as his eyelids flutter closed. They rest their heads against the other’s shoulder, cling with scrabbling hands to stay upright with water slippery down their bodies.

Adam squirms, voice pulling free to echo in the small space they share as the water continues to pound against them and fill the bathroom with steam. He squirms to get Nigel’s fingers deeper, squirms to press closer to him, drawing nails up and down his cock until he grasps it in his fist again and strokes.

“Feels so good,” Adam whispers, flushed and grinning. His eyes close in cat-like pleasure as Nigel continues to finger him, always entirely awed that something so simple can work Adam to a frenzy completely.

“We’re not gonna get clean,” he says suddenly, and laughs, voice hitching as Nigel continues to touch him, play with him until Adam is just entirely helpless to it all, mind buzzing and filled with white noise.

“Fucking filthy,” Nigel agrees, grinning against Adam’s throat. The kid is perched on him, pushing his legs down against Nigel’s hips to raise himself up and feel Nigel’s hand squeeze his cock, rocking back down again to plunge Nigel’s fingers deep inside. Nigel watches, breathless, stealing kisses as Adam’s legs begin to tremble, as his fingers spasm tighter, as his eyes hood and lips part and he pants, high and eager over Nigel’s mouth.

“Come on, darling,” he begs. “Come for me, please, angel. Right on my fucking chest, Adam -”

Despite his protests, Adam has always loved dirty talk.

His legs clench and he shoves his shoulders to the wall, body tense, rigid with release that spurts slick against Nigel’s stomach, his chest, nearly his throat, dripping thick and white through his chest hair. He snares Adam’s breath with a kiss, mouths crushed together, tongues twisting and teeth snaring between them, until Adam’s heart feels as if it’s going to burst and he shoves Nigel back, shaking, laughing.

“I love you,” Nigel tells him again - because he can, because he wants Adam to know it. He glances downward, then up again, and adds with a snort, “Even if you are a messy little shit.”

"You made me," Adam laughs. He seeks the floor with his toes, smiling when Nigel lets him down. Holding onto him still, trembling from his release, Adam grins when Nigel kisses his cheek.

"Damn right," he growls, delighted in seeing Adam regard his own mess with something like awe. Then, slow, those beautiful eyes lift and Adam sinks to his knees without a word, stroking Nigel once before taking his cock in his mouth.

"Fuck, Adam - fuck -"

Hands slap against the wall for the man to steady himself as Adam takes him deep. Tongue and teeth and lips work him with expert practiced precision, so fucking fast Nigel’s dizzy before anything even happens.

Adam flicks his eyes up and pulls back just to lick over Nigel, savoring his throbbing pulse through the thick vein on the underside of his cock, the heady smell of the man damn near undone by Adam’s fucking everything. Adam hums, and sucks just the head before slipping his lips lower to take Nigel into his throat again.

“Fucking angel,” groans Nigel, rocking his hips forward. Adam has approached this scientifically, just as much as everything else in his life, practicing taking Nigel deeper and deeper until he learned how not to gag. Even now, as the tip of Nigel’s cock brushes the back of his throat, he feels it tense but Adam swallows further, a slick, warm pressure tugging Nigel’s stiffened fullness down until it breaches his throat.

And when he lifts his eyes, impossibly blue and wide, with glistening damp lashes from the effort of it, Nigel expels a curse and blows, hard and hot, pulsing again and again. Adam’s throat shifts, only to swallow but milking Nigel fucking dry with the movement. The older man’s hands tremble against the wall, shake against Adam’s cheek when he tugs him gently back and watches swollen lips part stringed with spit from around his dick.

He lets it slip, dragging down Adam’s chin, and leaves a pearlescent trail shining sticky.

“You made me,” Nigel grins, crooked and once more half-asleep. Drowsy and pleased, he sticks his hands under Adam’s arms to lift him to his feet again, and smear their mouths together in a sloppy kiss.

After that, they do wash, Adam’s hands gentle but thorough in cleaning Nigel up, accepting the little kisses against his face and shoulders and hands when Nigel can land them. Adam allows himself to be washed in turn, teasing touches and warm laughter against him when he squirms.

By the time they get out, the water is cooling a little - for Nigel’s taste, anyway - and his breakfast is cold. Adam makes the bed, finds something to wear, and moves to the kitchen to make cereal as Nigel works his way through his eggs.

"Your flight is at three, and please don't take the wrong passport this time," Adam puts the lid back on the milk and sucks a drop of it from his thumb as he raises his eyes at Nigel.

Nigel’s gaze hangs a moment more on Adam’s thumb as it peels from his lips, eyes hooding in pleasure before he returns to demolishing his breakfast.

“Says a fucking lot about security theatre that they let me fucking through,” Nigel snorts. “Fucking asked me why your picture looked so different from me, told them I’d been working out.”

Adam blinks, and grins a little before turning to set the milk away.

“Thank fuck I remembered the name on it,” Nigel snorts, swallowing half his cold coffee at once. “This is why we pay for the good ones, darling, they don’t give a fuck about the look of it so long as the fucking chip clears their fucking scanners.”

Adam hums and returns to the table with his bowl before curling a leg on the chair and sitting gracefully down onto it. He pushes the cereal down beneath the milk, over and over, before finally taking a spoonful and chewing thoughtfully. If he’s honest, he doesn’t want Nigel to go. The Russians are notorious for shady deals and for their lack of care when it comes to sharing. He worries. His worries had been kissed away by smoke-dry lips and quieted, so Adam hadn’t mentioned it again.

"All the contracts are in your bag. The satchel bag, Nigel, so they don’t wrinkle. You can take it on the plane with the other one, first class doesn't have a limit on carry on for this flight. Just don't forget it on the plane."

"You'd still find it, though, darling, if I did."

"Yes but it would take a lot of effort and calls to the plane directly and I don't like talking on the phone, Nigel."

"Would you, though? For me?"

Adam raises his eyes, cool displeasure there but no genuine anger. The smug look he gets in turn warms his cheeks and Adam ducks his head before the smile seeps across his face.

“Thought so,” Nigel mutters, before sitting back with both hands around his mug.

Fucking Russia. It’s only to Vladivostok, saving him another nightmare flight across the fucking steppes to fucking St. Petersburg, but still entails a flight from New York to California, and then onward across the Pacific. To get to fucking Russia, of all unconscionable hellholes. Terrible food, miserable weather and worse people waiting for him. Nigel wonders if it isn’t some hereditary dislike, bred into his bones from the Soviet occupation. Or maybe just growing up where every adult spit after mentioning the country took its toll.

But he’s been. Plenty of times, he’s been, and it’s always a fucking drag.

“I hate Russia,” Nigel declares, apropos of nothing spoken out loud. Adam regards him, inputs the statement, and with nothing to say in response, continues eating. Nigel swallows the rest of his coffee with a grunt of displeasure, sifting out a cigarette from his shirt pocket to hold between his lips as he clears his dishes over to the sink.

Warm fingers wrap through Adam’s curls as he passes by.

“When do I get there?” He calls back, voice muffled around the filter as he sets his lighter to the other end. Smoke billows up to the tin ceilings as he takes up his bag, packed orderly and neat by Adam, and sifts through it.

Adam turns his eyes skyward, then towards his cereal once more. “It’s approximately sixteen hours flying time.”

“Motherfuck.”

“You’ve got a stopover in Los Angeles.”

“Fucking Los Angeles.”

“That’ll add another two hours to it.”

“Fucking Russia.”

“So with all of that, and time in the airport here and customs there,” Adam finishes, dabbing his mouth with a napkin, “you’ll get there in less than twenty-four hours.”

“Less than -”

“By an hour, maybe two. Twenty-two hours.”

“I fucking hate Russia,” snarls Nigel.

“There’s a smoking outlet in Los Angeles,” Adam tells him. “It’s near your gate, so you can go there instead of sitting inside.”

“Just smoke on the fucking plane,” Nigel decides instead.

"You can't smoke on the plane, Nigel."

"You could in the ‘80’s."

"It's 2015."

"Of all the fucking things to change," Nigel mutters. But arguing this is like playing chess with a computer. You will lose. He will get nowhere beyond potentially frustrating Adam, and he would rather brave the sixteen fucking hours without issue than upset Adam.

He exhales smoke to the ceiling and pushes himself to stand again, wrapping an arm gently over Adam’s collarbone so he can rest against him and the kid can still eat, spooning cereal into his mouth and slowly chewing.

Adam doesn’t say anything, just enjoys the weight of Nigel against his back. He doesn’t think how he will need to dig out his weighted blanket once Nigel goes, how for twenty-two hours he will be awake and tense and fretting until Nigel calls to say he's landed.

Nigel knows, how little Adam’s voice is when he calls him from far-away, how he all but fucking vibrates with anxiety - Nigel now knows to call it - at having him gone. He leans heavier over Adam, enough to earn a noise of protest, but Adam doesn’t ask him to move or try to unsettle him. Nigel slips his arm a little closer around Adam’s throat and - holding the cigarette extended away from them, nuzzles into Adam’s hair. He sighs, feeling the way the heat of his breath spills back against his lips, rubbing his cheek over the soft curls that tickle his skin.

Heavy and present and there, pressed against his darling.

“I’m going to fucking miss you,” he murmurs. “I hate this.”

Adam hums, setting his spoon back into the bowl and pushing it gently away before he leans back more into the reassuring weight of Nigel against him. He will miss him too, he always does. And while he knows Nigel can handle himself, drugs seem far more tame compared to arms dealing. Russia has never been a good client for cocaine either. Too pushy. Too impatient.

"When you come back we can close the curtains and you can sleep the jetlag off." Adam never schedules anything for the days after Nigel gets back. Those days are special. "I like that you sleep on me when you get back. It feels good."

Nigel rumbles low feline pleasure all through his chest. “Extra weight for your heavy blanket,” Nigel murmurs. “Lovely little sparrow. You’ve got my number right?”

“I activated the phone, I took the number down then.”

“Good,” sighs Nigel. “I’ll flip on the burner as soon as I’m able, okay? In fucking Los Angeles or Vladi-fucking-vostok. Leave me messages if you need.”

“I won’t need to, I’m not going to leave the apartment -”

“Not if you need, then. If you want. If you want to leave me fucking messages.”

“Do you want me to?” Adam asks, lifting his chin to look up at the man looming over him. Nigel blinks, and with an unusual feeling that he recognizes distantly as embarrassment, he nods.

“I like hearing you.”

It’s enough for now, choked by sentiment and resistance, and knowing he’s got no fucking choice, it doesn’t do to get all fucking soft when there’s a flight to catch. He holds Adam’s chin in his palm, tilts him upward a little further and kisses him upside down - like an astronaut, he said once, thinking himself very clever until Adam explained that one doesn’t have to be upside down to kiss in space, necessarily, and Nigel shut him up with another.

Their lips hold, until Nigel strokes a thumb over Adam’s cheek and Adam reaches up to scrape his fingernails across Nigel’s scruff in return.

Fucking Russia.

“Be good, darling,” Nigel tells him, splitting reluctantly apart to take up his bag. “I’ll be home as soon as I fucking can.”

Adam just nods, watches Nigel flit from one room to the other, collecting things he should have packed but didn’t, things Adam would have packed if he had found them where they belonged and not behind one of the bookcases or on the windowsill where they didn’t. He watches the whirlwind and the smoke that follows Nigel from room to room, the curses that ride shotgun alongside every exhale.

It’s when he’s by the door that Adam makes a sound in his throat, stands up and moves to the corridor.

“Nigel!”

“Yes darling?”

“We’re -” Adam laughs, smile wide and dimples up against his cheeks making him look so, so young. “Please buy more condoms when you get home.”

Nigel hesitates for an instant before his grin splits wide. He reaches out to grasp Adam’s cheek, fingers slipping to the back of his neck to tug him closer. With one arm, his bag in the other, he hugs Adam to his chest and kisses his brow.

“Fucking burned through a value pack of them, did we?”

“Thirty-six,” Adam confirms, and his smile is stolen by a warm kiss, held long, until he sets his hands to Nigel’s chest and pushes him just gently. “Go, if there’s traffic on the Grand Central, it’ll delay you.”

“That’s what traffic does,” Nigel agrees.

“So go,” says Adam again, with a reluctant smile.

“I don’t fucking want to.”

“You’ll make the Russians angry if you don’t.”

This, at least, speaks to Nigel’s sense of self-preservation, and with a laborious sigh, he teases a kiss to the corner of Adam’s mouth and turns to go.

“Fucking call me, do you hear?”

“I will,” Adam says. “If I need.”

“Or?”

“If I want.”

“Be safe, angel.”

And with dragging footsteps and another cigarette, Nigel pulls himself down and out into the city to seek a taxi, watching Adam through the apartment window until it pulls away.

---

The call comes thirty-one hours and seven minutes after Nigel’s plane takes off, and Adam is barely awake enough to do more than push the button and groan into the receiver. Through it comes static, the kind on a badly tuned radio, and after a few moments of listening, Adam realizes it’s breathing, heavy breathing against the receiver enough to distort the sound entirely to a hiss with jagged edges.

He blinks, frowns at the phone and swallows.

“Nigel?”

“Darling,” he sighs, his voice that of a drowning man seeing land too far to reach. He swallows hard enough that Adam can hear it, across thousands of miles and a bad connection, and he sits up in bed.

“What took so long?”

“Bad turn,” Nigel manages.

“On the plane?”

“With the fucking - shit,” he grunts, as anger pulls his body too tight. He shoves his lips together, works them into a frown, jaw tight, and looks at the spill of scarlet through his fingers. He’s ruined the fucking bed, but he supposes that’ll be the least of the cheap guesthouse’s concern when they find him fucking dead in it.

Adam feels himself shiver and holds the phone a little closer. Nigel has different levels of anger, different sounds of anger. There is the anger of being late, of being tired, of being duped and being sassed. There is anger at reading a book he doesn’t understand. Anger at upsetting Adam. Anger at being hurt.

Adam hates that he knows how the last one sounds.

“What went wrong?” Adam asks him.

“Didn’t want to fucking deal,” Nigel hums. It was always a long-shot anyway, a good fucking foot in the door if they had been cooperative but they were Russian. Miserable fucks, all of them.

“I don’t care,” Adam breathes, checking the time and rubbing his eyes as he tries to wake up. “What went wrong?”

“They’re fucking Russian, Adam, what’s ever gone fucking right with them? Besides stomping all over fucking Eastern Europe,” he complains, grimacing and swallowing back a groan so Adam doesn’t have to hear it. With pain that rings like bells in his ears, he turns to his side, to try and keep the blood inside that way, maybe. Gravity.

“We got into a disagreement,” Nigel tells him.

Adam just swallows. He knows what that means. Knows to read further into that word than just an implication of an angry conversation. He knows how dangerous disagreements are, how bad they are with drugs. This. This was the reason he didn’t want to get into arms dealing.

“Nigel, where are you?” He asks, sitting up to pull his laptop to the bed, opening it and holding it down with his leg to adjust the screen as it loads and he taps his password quickly into it. He can track Nigel from the plane but only as far as his hotel, booked under another name, and for only the one night before he goes to another, a third booked for the duration of the trip and made most obvious, most clear, for anyone wanting to track his progress as well.

They wouldn’t find him at that one.

“You’re not at your hotel,” Adam frowns.

Nigel doesn’t ask how he knows that, he knows that he knows and that’s what matters. He rattles a sigh, a curious sort of mourning in his words as he says, “I’m sorry for waking you, angel.”

“Nigel.”

“I didn’t fucking want to, I knew you’re asleep -”

“Nigel.”

“I just wanted to hear you.”

Adam huffs a sigh, his own frustration snapping sudden and fierce enough that he starts to shake. “Nigel, shut up,” he exclaims. “Stop talking about that, tell me where you are.”

A pause, line humming, before Nigel gives him the street name. “Some fucking suburb, I don’t fucking know, I don’t read their fucking scribbles. Outside Vladivostok,” he says, teeth clenched as he lifts his hand to study the thickening blood on it, clotted black across his fingers. “It doesn’t matter, darling, just talk to me - please, baby. I want to hear you.”

Adam hums a sound, lifts his eyes to the window and watches New York for a minute, two, before swallowing and ducking his head to the computer again, levering his phone up against his ear with his shoulder as he types.

“I can see a star today,” he says. “It isn’t cloudy.”

Nigel snorts, bites back a groan that such a simple motion brings and settles again as Adam keeps talking, about the cars in the city, about the people he knows are on the streets even though he can’t see them. Something about object permanence or something, how babies acquire it only after several months.

All the while the quick typing filters through the receiver as Adam seeks through outskirts and Nigel’s known aliases, through street names in Cyrillic he doesn’t understand but can associate once he has an IPA translator working quick as code on the side of the page.

He talks and Nigel listens, just the constant rhythm of Adam’s voice is a comfort, and he sighs, tilting his head back and letting his eyes close.

“Nigel?” Adam’s voice is just the same tone, just as quick and almost breathless in his desire to get all the information out at once. “Are you still there?”

Nigel makes a sound, just a hum, lulled to light-headed drowsiness by the patter of Adam’s voice against the phone. “I’m here, sparrow,” he murmurs, smiling a little when he hears Adam sigh on the other end. “Probably a fucking plane.”

Adam’s fingers pause, for only a moment, before he asks, “A plane?”

“No stars in that fucking city.”

“It wasn’t moving,” Adam says.

“Maybe then,” Nigel answers. “I hope it was.”

“Do you remember anything else?”

“It’s all in fucking bullshit, Adam.”

“Anything - was there a lake?”

“Fucking water everywhere, it’s -” A Romanian curse snares his words, rattles his breath as Nigel pushes harder against his side. “It’s a fucking dock town.”

The bleeding has slowed, at least, that or Nigel’s fingers are going numb, but when he lifts them it’s sticky, not slick. Maybe it’s not as deep as it seemed. Maybe he’s just bled it all out. Displeasure curls a growl out of him anyway.

“There’s a bridge,” he says. “We didn’t cross it, but I saw it. I remember thinking they were going to throw me off it into the fucking bay.”

“Okay,” Adam sighs, checking for a different landmark now, finding the local sleep-outs, inns, motels, anything. Anything that could house a man needing to go underground without breaking into someone’s barn to do it.

Adam frowns.

“You are in a legitimate place, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“You didn’t break into anywhere?”

Nigel laughs, a breathy, harsh thing, and curses. “No, Adam, I didn’t fucking break into anywhere. I booked a fucking room.”

“Okay.” Adam adjusts how he’s sitting, one foot numb from where he’s bent it beneath himself, wincing as he stretches it out now and flexes his toes thoughtfully, watching the computer run another search.

He runs every alias.

He can’t find him.

With a thick swallow, Adam says his name again, listens to Nigel tell him how beautiful he is, and how he misses him already.

Adam blinks, tilts his head, types in another set of names and laughs softly when one gets a hit.

“You’re in under my name,” he sighs.

“Am I, darling?”

“Luke Brandon,” Adam confirms. “Vlad Motor Inn.”

“Fucking Vlad,” Nigel snorts, almost a laugh if it wasn’t so uncomfortable. “No more Russians, Adam. Barely through fucking customs and they’ve got a knife in me.”

Adam’s pulse picks up, quickening from the rising flutter of his heart. “A knife?”

“Got a few of his teeth, though.”

“You’re hurt,” Adam repeats. “You’re cut.”

“Darling,” Nigel murmurs, his voice suddenly warming, by force of will alone. “Breathe. Not the fucking first time.”

“You’re hurt and you’re in Vladivostok in the middle of nowhere near a bridge - do you know how long it will take me to organize an ambulance to you? They might not even find you -”

“Adam.”

“I might see if there’s a helicopter that can come -”

“Adam.”

“You’re bleeding and you’re far away and I’m not there,” Adam tells him, surprisingly steady, just as sharp in his own warning without, perhaps, trying to be. “I am not there, Nigel, so I need to find a way to help until I am.”

“I don’t want any fucking Russian doctors sticking their fucking fingers in me,” Nigel snarls. “I just need to rest, Adam, I - what do you fucking mean, until you are?”

“Until I am in Vladivostok,” Adam answers, tapping to a new window to check flights.

“Adam,” Nigel sighs. He considers his words carefully, for once, a rare moment of tact that’s no doubt the byproduct of exhaustion and blood loss, shock and anger that lead him to beat to a choking mess the man who was stupid enough cut him. “Darling, you hardly leave the fucking block, let alone the city - the fucking country - I’ll be fine, please, angel, don’t fucking do this.”

“There’s a flight in four hours,” Adam mumbles, expertly ignoring the groan from the other end of the line. “With a stop in Singapore for three hours - no.”

Eyes almost unseeing with the speed they skim the screen, and Adam pulls up another flight, another, over and over, until he finds one, from a minor airline, that flies to Moscow, a half hour stopover until one from there goes to Vladivostok. He books it without a word.

“Less than twenty-four hours,” Adam tells him. “Less than twenty, if I can clear customs like I clear you through customs. I should look into getting you a diplomat visa, they never go through customs, they have immunity overseas as well. That’s a lot of paperwork, I can look into it on the flight over -”

“Adam."

He stops, swallows, works over the keys to send his ticket to the printer in the next room and listens to the hum as it lights up to work.

“Darling, you don’t have to come, I’ll be fucking fine. I’ll put a fucking plaster on it.”

“A plaster won’t do anything, Nigel.”

“A bandage then, whatever. It’s stopped already.”

“There could be internal damage -”

“He didn’t get deep enough.”

“You don’t know that,” Adam murmurs, and for a moment both are quiet, before Nigel says his name again and Adam shivers with it, drawing his knees up and closing his computer and just holding the phone close to his ear.

Nigel’s concern is evident, in the actual spaces he allows between his words that aren’t cluttered with curses and hisses and snarls. A long pause passes before he sighs, and speaks in a low, comforting rumble - across seas and countries and continents - to his angel, his Adam.

“Darling,” he murmurs, “you hate travel. You don’t fucking travel. It’s a fucking wonder you came up to the Bronx to meet with me -”

“I’m glad,” Adam interjects. “I’m glad that I did.”

“But what - what the fuck,” Nigel sighs. “What the fuck will you do when they don’t have your cereal at the airport? When you don’t have your bed or your - your heavy -” A pause, a correction. “Your weighted blanket. Adam -”

“I’ll have you,” comes the answer, swift enough that it would be thoughtless from anyone else, who doesn’t think clearly through every possibility, every outcome, every word.

“I can call someone,” Nigel says. “There’s got to be somebody I fucking know here who’s friendly, I’ll get them to come. Darling, don’t do this to yourself.”

“It’s Russia,” Adam reminds him, feeling his lips tilt a little, trying to convey the same tone Nigel had hours before. “You hate Russia.”

Nigel snorts, a few panted breaths of discomfort as he shifts on his back now, looks at his fingers again.

“Miserable fucks,” he agrees, closing his eyes as he hears Adam breathe a sweet little laugh into the receiver at that.

---

Adam doesn’t sleep on the flight, he plugs in his headphones and listens to a recording of Central Park he had made one night, sitting on the bench, staring into the sky, just letting the city breathe around him. He listens until the track ends, and then he repeats it, and again, and again, a constant loop of traffic and barking dogs, his own breathing and the shivers of leaves around him where he had sat.

Before him, on the computer, he sees only code, a quick input for a search and it’s off, set to the table against the seat in front of his, running information while Adam stares, eyes glazed, dinner untouched beside him.

He had set a bug into the system, something small, something so common it was hard to track, but developed enough that once it got where he wanted it to go Adam could control it to do whatever he needed it to. It was easy enough to find the operation they had planned to deal with, easy enough to find their financial records, their names and their connections. And easy enough, to, one by one, begin to dismantle them. Money from one account to another, where it doesn’t belong. A name dropped to the local paper with a false accusation beside it. Little things. Little bugs.

Like termites.

Adam calls from Moscow, pushed into a bathroom stall with his eyes closed and his free hand against his other ear to keep all the noise away as Nigel talks to him, tells him he’s better, though his voice still sounds pained. He waits long enough for the flight to be called, and boards, returning his headphones to his ears as soon as they’re in the air again.

Vladivostok is dirty. It smells entirely unlike New York city and Adam doesn’t like it. He passes folded directions to the cab driver and shrugs when the man asks him something in Russian, shakes his head when in terse and broken English the man asks if he wants to go to another hotel instead.

Adam doesn’t. He wants this one.

He sees the water, grey as the sky this early, sun rising through cheesecloth clouds, diffuse and faded. He sees the cranes and the boats in the bay, loaded dense with cargo, one of which might have been their own. He sees the bridge, two solemn cement spires joined by sprays of evenly spaced cables across its length.

And he sees the Motor Inn, inconspicuous in the same sense-dulling grey as everything else, just as the driver asks if he’s sure this is where he wants to go.

He’s sure.

Adam doesn’t bother with the desk inside, eyeing them as they eye him in return. Bag held against his chest, he fishes his phone from his coat pocket, bundled thick against the cold, and dials.

It rings.

It rings again.

A third time, and Adam feels the room spin just as the fourth ring is cut off not by a chirpy voicemail, but Nigel.

“Fuck.”

“I’m here,” sighs Adam.

“Fucking what?”

“What room are you in,” he asks, again balefully glancing towards the desk staff.

“Fucking fuck if I know, you’re fucking where?”

Adam hangs up, and swallowing down the dryness of his mouth, he squeezes his bag closer and steps to the desk. “Luke Brandon,” he says, slowly.

The boy behind the desk, near his own age, flips through the notebook that suffices for a record system, and points, down the hall. “Third.”

The door is unlocked as Adam reaches it, after crossing the world to find Nigel, after choking on his own racing heart the entire time, upsetting all his systems and rhythms and habits and patterns into an oblivion that will swallow him whole if he allows it. All for this, for Nigel curled on the bed, peeking with dark eyes across his shoulder.

“You little shit.”

Adam closes the door with his back and fumbles with the lock and only then pushes forward to set his bags aside on the floor near Nigel’s. He crawls into bed behind him, pulling his arms around Nigel’s neck to hug him close, burying his face against the soft hair at the back of his neck.

“I was scared,” Adam admits, softly. “I was really scared that I would not find you here when I arrived.”

“You’re laying in fucking filth,” Nigel tells him, but it doesn’t stop him from lifting a hand to Adam’s arm and squeezing. It doesn’t stop him from ducking his chin beneath Adam’s arms and kissing, languid tugs of lips against his coat sleeve. It doesn’t stop him from asking, “Are you actually here?”

“Yes,” Adam tells him, closing his eyes.

“Where?”

“Vladivostok.”

Nigel hums, and grinning, murmurs, “Because I was sure with an angel like you, I’d fucking died and gone to Heaven. Or someplace better than fucking Vladi-fuck it.”

“You’re not dead,” Adam tells him, but his words are just as small as they are on the phone to Nigel when he’s far away, just as cautious in wanting to imagine he is close. And he is lying in filth, and he knows he is. And he knows Nigel can’t be. Not with something that could get infected.

“You need a bath.”

“Will you join me?”

Adam wonders how much powder Nigel’s had to have him so entirely pliant and contented. He doesn’t wonder about how much pain he’s in that he would need to take so much. He can’t, right now.

“Yes,” he promises, seeking back to the floor with his feet before turning Nigel gently over to his back to see him.

A spatter of curses spits loose when he’s turned, but eases quickly - this, in itself, as worrying as the swearing. Nigel releases his hand from his stomach, shirt cut through, skin beneath split, his side stained where he’s bled and laid in it and bled some more. It’s stopped now, mostly, but for the fresh beads of bright red that swell to the surface from twisting to his back.

“I missed you,” Nigel tells him. He starts to uncurl his fingers towards Adam’s cheek but stops, blinking as if surprised to see them brown with dried blood. “Shit.”

Adam unbuttons his coat, unzips the one beneath, sheds them both to the polyester chair in the corner of the room, and tries not to look at how dark Nigel’s stained the bed. He goes to the bath, instead, to start the water running, and listens as the bed creaks with Nigel’s movement.

“Did you eat, baby?” He calls out, grimacing through the haze of opiates and uppers to peel his shirt from his skin. Nigel’s words slur, thick in his mouth. “I was worried about you. I am still fucking worried - did you bring me cigarettes, darling?”

Adam says nothing, he tries to coordinate the timezones to understand if he’s taking his bath on time or if he’s off by a few hours and how he can compensate. He hasn’t slept, he doesn’t think. He knows he hasn’t eaten. He doesn’t care much beyond the fact that he needs to clean that dirty wound and dress it, like Nigel had taught him, like Adam had researched about and practiced.

He bought a first aid kit at the airport.

He also bought cigarettes. Packs and packs of them, at the duty free.

“In my bag,” he calls, testing the temperature of the water and plugging the cold metal tub for it to start to fill. At least it’s large, heavy enough that it won’t shift if they both get into it, and standalone in the corner of the bathroom by the toilet.

“You’re more than a fucking angel, Adam, you’re a fucking saint,” Nigel declares. He pads barefoot, pants open from where he didn’t bother to close them after struggling to the toilet for a piss the night before, and flinching bends to dig in Adam’s things.

“Angels are higher than saints,” Adam answers, as the water fills.

“Smart ass,” the man mutters, dropping the wrapper to the floor and finding the matches they gave Adam when he stocked up. He pops one, flaring bright enough to make him squint into the kaleidoscope of light, and drags in until his lungs burn and he’s sure he’ll tear his side open again. Smoke fills the little room quickly, and with stiff steps, he wanders to the bathroom.

Adam is bent, seated on the edge of the tub, with his fingers working loose the laces on his sneakers. A miracle, then, a fucking god - the heavenly fucking host sent to save poor fucking idiots like Nigel himself, who bring with them gifts of care and kissing and cigarettes. He ashes his cigarette to the floor, and rests his head against the doorframe. How Adam managed to gear himself up enough to get to fucking Russia, how he overcame his own anxiety and need for consistency, is enough to make Nigel marvel at the fucking strength of him.

“God, I fucking love you,” he breathes, eyes nearly closed and swaying drugged where he stands.

Adam looks up, eyes wide and rimmed in red from exhaustion, dark bags heavy beneath them from this entire endeavor. But he’s here now, he’s here, and he can see Nigel and touch him and make him okay. He can try.

“I love you too,” Adam tells him. He pushes his shoes off and aside beneath the tub before leaning back to check the temperature of the water. Warm enough for him - Nigel will complain it’s too cold. Adam turns off the cold water tap entirely, lets the rest fill with hot until it steams. He can endure that. Hot water is nothing to what Nigel is suffering.

Adam turns off the water before walking over to Nigel and nuzzling under his neck. Just pressing close until heavy arms settle over his shoulders, he can feel Nigel’s heart hammering steady and slow against his palm.

“We’ll need to book another room,” Adam murmurs. “You can’t sleep in that bed again and I don’t want to. I want to make sure you’re clean, I want to make sure you sleep and -” I want you safe.

“You need to fucking eat,” Nigel grumbles.

He doesn’t give a fuck about the bed or the mess, he doesn’t give a fuck about getting clean or sleeping. He doesn’t give a fuck about the wound leaking clear from his side, shivering a trail down his skin. He gives a fuck about Adam, only, ever, and drags a drug-lazy kiss across the side of his throat.

“Get in the bath,” Adam tells him, and Nigel grunts a protest.

“I’ll make the water dirty.”

“And yourself clean, Nigel, please,” sighs the kid, lifting an imploring gaze to Nigel that sends him pleasantly swaying on his feet. He kicks out of his pants and touches a kiss to Adam’s brow, his cheek, his nose and the corner of his mouth and goes, muttering, to set one foot into the water with a wince at the movement, and then the other. He’s nearly covered by it when he slides in, cigarette perched between his lips and face constricted in pain.

Adam watches him a moment more before - certain he won’t drown - leaving the room again. It’s dark in the bedroom, Nigel having not been bothered to turn the light on at all, so Adam does. The mess looks far worse and he almost considers turning it off again. Getting another room would be suspicious, people would ask why, they would see this room and know why. Adam swallows, shakes his head and moves to the bed.

The sheets he rolls up and tosses to the wall, they can get rid of them later, the mattress he turns to the other side, the blood - thankfully - not yet seeped through to this side and well-enough hidden. There are no other sheets to make the bed with, so Adam doesn’t try. Instead, he returns to the bathroom, regards the water Nigel lies in as he gingerly cleans the dried blood from his wound.

“Is it still bleeding?” Adam asks him softly, padding closer over the cold tile, arms crossed over his chest as he watches Nigel with wide eyes. He is so tired that he is beyond tired, and holds out a hand for Nigel when he seeks one with wet fingers, cigarette in the other hand.

“Not supposed to soak it,” Nigel answers, but makes no move to stop from doing so. He prods gingerly across the cut. It’s long, curving from his side down in a loop towards his navel, but blessedly shallow compared to how deep it might have gone, into his stomach, bowels… “I think he caught my fucking rib and that stopped it. Fucking idiot.”

He brings Adam’s hand to his mouth, spreading his lips over the kid’s palm, sighing when Adam curls his fingers a little. “Not really bleeding,” Nigel confirms, lifting dark eyes from under damp hair. “Oozing. Fucking - you know. Leaking. You shouldn’t have come,” he says, but he doesn’t mean it, fingers tightening around Adam’s hand as if the admonition might actually be enough to drive him away.

“Does it need stitches?” Adam asks.

“Could use them. Don’t fucking have anything, of course, but as long as I don’t keep ripping it open it’ll just be a nasty fucking scar.” Nigel stuffs the filter back between his lips and speaks around it, soft and slurring. “I took some shit.”

“Took what?”

Nigel gives him a rueful look, but it won’t do to start being all ashamed and secretive now that his sparrow’s flown halfway around the world for him. “Painkillers - ‘codones and such. Coke to stay awake. Vicodin to balance that out. Probably need alcohol.” Adam draws a breath but Nigel takes the cigarette away, sighing smoke. “For the fucking cut, Adam, Christ.”

“There’s some in the first aid kit,” Adam says quietly, distracted. It is entirely overwhelming to be here, in another country, in another timezone, in a place so dirty and frightening Adam would howl for it if Nigel wasn’t holding his hand. How does he go to places like this? How does he do it voluntarily? Why?

“I will find a way to make the business digital, so you don’t have to travel again, so you don’t have to go anywhere or meet anyone who might hurt you again, I can -”

“Adam.”

“- I turned the mattress over, and we can sleep on that until you feel you can move but then we’re going home. We’re going home back to New York and we can watch their entire operation collapse from the apartment instead of here. I don’t like it here. I don’t like you here, alone, hurt, for three days, Nigel, three days. I -”

“Breathe, darling.” Nigel ashes the cigarette over the side of the tub and pulls Adam closer, until he’s crouching beside the bath, so he can wrap wet arms around him and hold him close as he starts to shake. “Breathe for me, angel, that’s all I need you to do right now.”

Adam tries. Little shallow inhalations, eyes wide and then closed tight, turning his face into Nigel’s arm and shivering as the water settles to his skin and drips down his back, cools him as it dries. He slips to a kneel, sitting as close against the tub as he can so Nigel can stroke his hair and cup his face, hold him close.

Adam breathes.

Nigel lets the smoldering cigarette fall from his fingers to the floor and burn itself out. It doesn’t matter - Luke Brandon won’t be allowed back at this shithole, of course, but Nigel couldn’t care fucking less. He slips both arms around Adam’s neck, and breathes hot and smoky against his cheek. Fingers splay wet through Adam’s hair, pulling his curls straight and letting them bounce back into place. He kisses slowly, clumsily, towards Adam’s mouth until they’re sharing air together.

Touching their foreheads together, Nigel blinks, trying to focus on Adam so near, his gaze distant and penetrating all at once. A slow grin builds, curling crooked over sharp teeth, and he asks, “What was that about watching them fucking collapse?”

“I hacked into their systems from the plane,” Adam mumbles, just turning his face over and over against Nigel’s. “Laid a false trail for money withdrawals and adjusted some accounts. Some are slowly trickling empty, others are flowing into the accounts of minor members of the establishment to make them think they’re stealing,”

Adam frowns. Hums. “I couldn’t sleep on the plane, it was too loud.”

“God, fucking angel, I fucking love you,” Nigel snarls against Adam’s mouth. His teeth sink into Adam’s soft lower lip, tugging it between his own to suck, to spread wide into a kiss. He grasps Adam’s hair a little more firmly, wanting, suddenly wanting, through all the fuzziness of poorly balanced substances and the haze of pain and exhaustion.

He tries to turn to his side to kiss Adam harder and the kiss splits with a hissed oath sworn against his cut. It’s enough for Adam to catch Nigel’s wrists and slip them free, to hold them and tell him, “Wash first, please. Then I can put alcohol on it and -”

“I don’t want it,” Nigel growls, stubborn. “I fucking want you. I want to fuck you so hard, Adam, fuck -”

“You’re not in the condition to -”

Nigel makes another sound, another half growl of petulant displeasure, and Adam decides to go with logic, here, instead of coercion, despite Nigel usually being one for the other instead. He slips a hand under the water, still warm, and between Nigel’s legs, eyes on Nigel when the other grins at him.

“You’re not hard,” Adam points out gently.

“Fuck you,” comes the immediately response. Adam simply tugs, fingers curled around Nigel’s softened cock, and the older man hums a warning.

“Intoxication, exhaustion, shock, pain -”

“Fucking smart-ass.”

“Any one of those things can cause a temporary erectile dys-”

“Don’t you fucking say it,” says Nigel, eyeing Adam balefully. “Give it a fucking minute, you keep touching me like that and -”

“Wash yourself,” Adam tells him, touching a kiss to Nigel’s temple and standing to move away before Nigel can grab him again. “Then you might feel better.”

Nigel curses, unable to do anything else, really, and taking up the little bar of soap from beside the bath, he washes. Briskly over everywhere except his wound, and gingerly there. It doesn’t look as bad as it feels, once all the blood’s washed away. He wonders how bad it might have gotten without Adam there to help.

Brave little bird.

Adam offers a hand at least to help Nigel stand when he’s done, and Nigel of course refuses it, levering himself up instead with shaking hands planted to the side of the bath. He stands bare and takes up the towel from beside the bath, rubbing dry his face and arms, his hair, avoiding the cut, and finally padding out in a trail of wet footprints to follow Adam back towards the bed.

Adam’s laid out clothes for him, things he had grabbed from the apartment, unsure if Nigel would have taken his bag with him when he fled or had it stored somewhere in a safe lockup. He finds, though, that the man cares little about the clothes, little about anything but kissing him again. That desperate, deep, needy way he has when he wants to devour Adam entirely, tease and suck and kiss him and have him near-sobbing with pleasure before he even thinks about fumbling for a condom.

Adam shivers, hands careful against his hips as he kisses back.

“You need to rest,” Adam tells him softly, smiles when it’s met with a growl, with another rough kiss. “You need -”

“I fucking want you.”

“Nigel.” Resigned and pleased all at once, and Adam can do little more than just keep kissing him, stepping close to feel Nigel just as soft as he was in the bath, mind and body reeling with chemicals and hormones he can’t break through to have it function properly.

“Touch it again,” Nigel pleads, senseless and adoring, his pain numbed, his heart wanting what his body can’t provide. Adam fans graceful fingers across Nigel’s cock, lifting it and pulling soft skin long across the head, slipping it back. He squeezes gently at its base, thick hair damp against his hand. He dips lower to cradle Nigel’s heavy balls in his palm.

“Fuck,” sighs Nigel, resting his cheek against Adam’s hair. He doesn’t rock into the touch, he couldn’t without fucking hurting himself again, but it doesn’t fucking matter.

Apparently.

Intoxication and exhaustion and blah blah fucking blah.

“Goddammit,” he adds through gritted teeth, as he curls a hand over Adam’s own to tighten his grip. There’s a panic to the man, uncharacteristic, in being confronted with any sort of weakness in his body, let alone this.

There.

“I need to clean the cut,” Adam tells him. “Put some gauze on it and wrap it up to keep it clean, then we can go to bed, okay?”

He catches Nigel’s hand, still desperate in its grip, and gentles it away. He knows it’s the body responding to everything in it, understands that no matter how much Nigel wants it mentally, physically he will have to wait for anything to happen. He knows, too, how much Nigel loves waiting.

“Sometimes,” he starts, takes a breath, moves to the first aid kit so he can work while he talks, so he can get something done before this new idea settles and starts to take root - if it does - in the man’s mind. “Prostate stimulation has proven more effective than simply the will for an erection to happen. It is a much more sensitive area, especially when it has never been stimulated before -”

Quick hands wet a cotton bud with antiseptic and clean the cut, ignoring Nigel’s hiss. A cream follows on top, slippery and clear, before Adam gently places the gauze against it, gets Nigel to hold it there as he gets a soft bandage to work around his middle.

“It’s how I get hard again after you’ve made me come,” Adam explains, eyes up to Nigel’s again, smile warm as his cheeks grow a little darker. “You love to do it, I’ve seen you deliberately play with me that way. It feels very good.”

Nigel squints at him, jaw working in a rare moment of silent thought. He’s not so fucked up, with injury or drugs, that he doesn’t know what Adam’s suggesting. He knows that he’s talking about putting a finger in him. Two, maybe. He knows that Adam at least loves for his prostate to be touched, sometimes as hard and fast as Nigel can manage, sometimes pet in slow little strokes. He lets his eyes slip closed as Adam winds the bandage around him to hold the thicker one in place. Imagining the swell of Adam’s ass as Nigel kisses that soft skin, how tight he feels, the laughing little whimpers he makes when he’s overstimulated, how sweet those sounds become when Nigel gives him release from it and just licks him instead…

Nothing.

He cracks open an eye and looks down past Adam’s hands to his cock.

Useless.

“You want to stick your fucking fingers in me,” Nigel accuses him, only mildly.

Adam raises his eyes again, expression far from impressed, and pulls just a little tighter with the bandage before clipping it carefully together to hold, the cut now away from more mess and germs and dirt, Adam’s mind now freer to focus on the man in front of him.

“I can not,” he offers. “And we could sleep.” He knows the response he’ll get before Nigel even makes that plaintive and displeased sound at him. “Or I could try, and if it works then -”

“But,” Nigel protests, glancing down to his bandaged body, then back to Adam before following him towards the bed. “You haven’t even tried putting your mouth on it, gorgeous, you know that always works -”

“I’m tired,” Adam responds. “And that would take a long time, if it worked at all.” It’s not stubbornness, it’s a factual statement, and Nigel presses his lips together in dismay.

He settles to the bed, carefully, after Adam does, slow movements not to undo the treatment Adam’s given him, and bare but for the strips of cotton looped white around his skin. There’s nothing he can fucking say, is there? That it’ll fucking hurt or feel fucking terrible or that he doesn’t particularly want anything up his fucking ass, even Adam. It’d be a poor fucking argument to make considering how much of any given day Nigel devotes to sticking various parts of his anatomy into Adam.

“You think it’ll work?” Nigel asks, muttering and plaintive all at once. “Fucking stupid thing.”

Adam just leans over him to kiss him gently, lips barely parted as he does, eyes hooded as he watches Nigel beneath him.

“I think you should sleep,” Adam tells him honestly. “I think you need to keep warm and drink something other than whiskey so your body starts to properly recover. And I think that you will swear at me if I suggest it again so -” A breath, held and released. “I think it will work. If you will let me try.”

Nigel’s only agreement comes in the form of a wordless grumble and a lack of protest. He watches Adam almost warily, but the soft hands across his chest settle him back to the bed, fingers touching over his lips ease out a sigh. Adam touches back down again, careful to only skim across the bandages, and he waits with a hand on Nigel’s thigh until the man finally relents and lets his legs tip wider apart.

“Don’t fucking tell anyone,” Nigel mutters, and rarer still than this acquiescence, the quiet, the relenting of an immoveable stubbornness, is the blush that darkens dusky beneath his eyes.

Adam just smiles, entirely fond, entirely too tired, and brings a hand up to rub the heel of his hand against his eyes with a sleepy sound. He sets his knees against Nigel’s thighs, just enough for the contact, for the closeness, to hold him gently spread as he is, before Adam leans down to rummage more in the bag he brought with him.

He pulls a little pot from the pocket, rarely used for dry lips in winter but always there just in case, the Vaseline cool as he scoops a little onto his fingers, rubbing them together to warm it, to slick it more. He thinks of how the first time Nigel had touched him this way he’d been similarly nervous, unsure of why this should happen, how it would feel.

He doesn’t know how to talk someone down from worry, he can rarely do it to himself, so he just arches deeper, bends closer to kiss against Nigel’s chest, just above the bandage, up over his skittering heart to take a nipple between his lips and suck. He slips one finger down to stroke over Nigel’s hole, just enough for him to stop tensing, to stop the whispered curses that come more from fear than anywhere else.

It's cold. It isn't bad, but it's fucking cold, and Nigel squirms a little until Adam sets a hand to his belly to still him. The older man settles, letting the drugs warm and weigh his limbs, letting Adam do what he thinks best. That's all he can do, now or before or ever - trust that Adam fucking Raki knows what should be done.

He always does.

Nigel reaches for him, and as Adam slips his finger slowly inside, he brings the kid to him for a kiss. Mouths parting the way his body does, with a growl resonant in his chest, he focuses on the feel of Adam's tongue in his mouth more than his finger.

Fucking Adam.

It feels like a lot of things that Nigel doesn't want to think about, when he's trying to get hard, desperate enough to be inside Adam instead that he'd allow this. It isn't pleasant, the pressure and stretch, but it isn't painful either, and Adam is slow and patient as he turns his touch in a slow circle to stretch.

The second finger only surprises Nigel in how little it surprises him.

Altogether, his cock still hanging soft against his hip, Nigel's not particularly fucking impressed by this. Adam, though, he's very impressed by Adam that he can take a finger, two, three sometimes when Nigel's feeling especially needy. His cock, swollen thick and veiny. His tongue, pushed deep past sucking lips. Nigel feels a stir, he thinks, at least in his belly.

And he certainly fucking feels one when Adam curls his fingers and rubs.

"Fucking hell," groans Nigel, eyes drifting closed as his body tightens into a familiar pleasure, and his cock shifts, skin pulling taut, where it rests. "Holy fucking hell, baby."

Adam just smiles, adjusts how he bends over Nigel before stroking him again, lips pressing together as his cheeks darken, as Nigel starts to properly respond to this, as Adam thought he would. Another kiss against his jaw as Nigel bucks up, sensation still foreign, still unwelcome, but the pleasure spiking through him so sharp he can barely breathe for it.

“This is what it fucking feels like?”

Adam hums, spreading himself over the man as his hand continues to work, nuzzling his chest as he closes his eyes.

“When I crawl into your lap while you’re working,” Adam murmurs, still stroking, touching, gentling against Nigel. “Because you work late and I can’t sleep and I want you to touch me… you do this.”

Another gentle curl up, fingers on either side of the raised nub until Nigel curses from it, hard, now, properly, against his stomach as Adam keeps kissing him, wet sucking little things against his neck, behind his ear.

“And it feels so good,” Adam whines, tired and needy and wanting something familiar as he draws his fingers free. He clumsily passes the little pot of slick to Nigel instead as he straddles him properly, rocks them together, cocks caught between, rubbing and leaking and hot against each other.

“And my fingers never go so deep when you’re not home,” Adam continues, breathy and aroused, as impatient as Nigel is, now, for each other. “And I miss it.”

“You get so fucking squirmy,” Nigel grins, chasing Adam’s mouth, laughing low and careful when Adam tilts his head away, sweet and coy. “Fucking gorgeous, you are. My little sparrow, my angel, who fucking flew to fucking Russia for me.”

“Who made you hard,” Adam adds with a wider smile, and this Nigel finally takes, with a hand against the back of Adam’s neck and mouths pressed together in a languid kiss. He smears his fingers in the little pot set on his chest, stroking his cock between them, battered knuckles teasing Adam’s to even stiffer hardness. It’s only then that he stops, breaks the kiss with not a curse but a breath.

“I didn’t get fucking condoms yet,” he groans. “This fucking country - I wouldn’t fucking need them here, I didn’t fucking get any.”

“Neither did I,” Adam muses, still arched over Nigel, kissing against his stubbly cheek, over his sharp cheekbones and soft eyelids, nuzzling into his hair and touching him however his hands can as he seeks down with eager hips and taut thighs, rubbing and twisting and moaning softly for this.

“Doesn’t matter,” Adam decides finally kissing Nigel again and spreading for him, humming when the man hesitates and kissing against his cheek when he turns away. “I haven’t had penetrative anal sex with anyone but you. I had no transmittable diseases before,” Adam tells him, always logical, always clinical, always soft. “Do you?”

Nigel’s first reaction is one of panic, eyes blinking wide at the question that nearly kills the erection Adam’s just worked out of him. But as he works backwards, he settles a little, further back, a little more.

“Fucking hell,” he says. “Have I not fucked anyone since I met you?”

“I don’t know,” Adam answers, and Nigel shakes his head.

“Rhetorical fucking question - I don’t think I have,” he says. “Jesus.” Adam just watches him, head tilted, cheek flushed against his shoulder as he splays his fingertips across Nigel’s dark nipple, stiffening it. “I don’t think I do.”

“You don’t know?”

“I fucking know,” Nigel declares, but relents as quickly as he roiled. “I don’t get fucking spots, do I? I don’t stick anything in my veins. Nobody puts anything up -” A pause, and he snorts, eyes rolling towards the shitty ceiling overhead. Beige. Of course it’s fucking beige. “They ran my blood when I went to - fucking - where the fuck was it?”

“I don’t know,” Adam says, again, contentedly lost in Nigel’s rough rambling.

“Fucking - you do know, they gave me the shots.”

“Oh,” exclaims Adam. “Abidjan.”

“They ran my blood then before they gave me all those fucking shots. They’d have seen anything bad, right?” Nigel asks, vaguely wary, as he always is, of things he can’t see and therefore can’t hurt to defend himself.

Adam just hums, enough of an answer for Nigel usually, though he still watches him, the little coiling motions of the kid above him, eager and familiar and utterly fucking wonderful. Hesitation is rare, for Nigel. He doesn’t like it.

And then Adam makes a sound, that little purring thing of utter contentment.

“I trust you,” he breathes.

Nigel has never, not once, thought of Adam as anything less than brilliant. In that moment, he doubts it for a heart beat, and realizes just as quickly in some drug-addled moment of profundity that his doubt is truly towards himself. Adam, by contrast, is fucking perfect.

“I fucking love you,” he sighs, words coarse as they scrape from his throat into a groan, when he grasps his cock and sets it to Adam’s entrance. “You’re sure, darling?”

“I trust you,” Adam whispers again.

Nigel couldn’t resist him if he tried.

He works upward, with a liquid twist of hips, biting back a grimace at the movement and then releasing it with rapt pleasure as his lips part, sharing breath with Adam. He doesn’t let his eyes close, loses himself in that wondrous blue, and lays back lazy on the bed to just watch as Adam sets a hand to his shoulder to hold him there, and works himself down instead.

It’s a stretch but it’s good, it is familiar, a grounding point amidst the uncertainties and broken routines and filthy hotel rooms. Adam groans, soft and barely voiced and pushes himself to sit back, gasping quietly at the way he shifts, at how much more full he feels, at how vulnerable he is in the showiness of it all.

He and Nigel have learned quickly that any sex is good sex no matter where in the apartment it is, whether Adam is facing Nigel for it, on all fours, on his stomach, on his side, it hardly matters. But this, Adam rarely allows himself to consider even trying. Too awkward, too fumbling and flushed and inexperienced to put on any kind of show beyond moving up and down on trembling thighs.

He looks down the length of Nigel’s body, over the white bandage, still pristine, to his chest, to his neck and up to the man’s eyes, hooded and warm with genuine pleasure.

Adam doesn’t voice his uncertainties, knowing that Nigel won’t see them until Adam points them out, choosing to be blind to the things Adam sees as glaringly unattractive, in himself. In truth, he is so grateful to the man for it.

He shifts, just one roll of his hips, a twist one way, a turn another, squeezing his muscles tense before pushing up onto his knees with a quiet moan of pleasure.

Nigel murmurs in Romanian, but Adam knows the words aren’t swears, from the way he says them and from having heard him curse in the language enough. Praise, from deep enough inside the man, dizzied with drugs and relief and desire, that Nigel can’t be bothered to find the English for them. Adam blushes anyway.

Broad hands cradle sharp-pointed hips as Nigel rides his hands up higher to Adam’s waist. He spreads his thumbs across his soft belly, sighing when he feels it tense each time Adam lifts himself, unfurl each time he sinks down again. In his eyes, black with pupil and nearly obscured by heavy lids, Nigel watches him, takes in every stretch of skin and curve of bone. Adam looks away, just to Nigel’s tattoo, for something else to focus on.

It’s hard to think when Nigel looks at him that way.

It’s hard to think that Nigel looks at him that way.

“Your hips,” comes rough English from the older man. “Twist them again like before. Slow, darling, nice and slow, gorgeous.”

Adam does, a turn as he raises himself, muscles squeezing tight as he sinks back down, head back on another sound so deep in his chest it hums against his bones. He smiles, feeling Nigel’s nails gently grip against his skin before he eases the hold and lets Adam move as he wants again, already working a pattern of gentle rocking and that delicious tension.

Nigel reaches higher, careful not to rock up against him, the cut pulling when he does, and groans when he can’t get farther than the base of the kid’s sternum. Adam moves one of his hands to grasp against him and Nigel tilts his head back with a feral, growling sound.

“Use your hands, baby, touch where I can’t reach.”

Adam’s brows furrow, cheeks reddening in the most beautiful way, and he does this, too. Fingers splay over his chest as he rocks forward, up to his throat as he sinks down, fingertips pressing against his pulse until he gasps, lets go, draws nails down over his own chest again, over sensitive nipples and down to his stomach.

Hoping, nervously hoping, that he looks appealing, that he’s doing it right. That Nigel likes looking.

His lips are parted, panting, as he watches, Adam’s words ringing through him from earlier - that he touches himself, when Nigel is away, that he works his fingers into his ass and wishes they were Nigel’s. Cheeks heated dark, eyes hooded, he raises his head moaning when Adam pushes a little lower, fingers teasing the thatch of curls between his legs where his cock stands stiff, curved pink and rigid.

“Please,” Nigel begs him, breathless. “For me, let me see you. Little bird, my sparrow, my fucking angel, I love you.” He swallows, throat dry, and sighs shaking. “I love you, Adam fucking Raki.”

Adam bites his lip, smile curling the corners of his mouth anyway. He is being looked at, being seen this way, entirely exposed where he usually lies beneath Nigel, breathless. It is new, it is thrilling, it is terrifying, and Adam circles the head of his cock before stroking, shivering immediately at the contact, shoulders hunching forward, toes curling, muscles squeezing around Nigel where he lies.

“Oh.” Just that, just ‘oh’, just a brief exhale of pleasure and surprise, that he can touch as Nigel touches him, that he can ride the man and bring him to incoherence in both his languages. Adam strokes up again, squirms in delight atop Nigel, now, before leaning over him to kiss him again, falling, pleased, into the hungry hot devouring of the man’s mouth.

Adam continues to move, even as Nigel draws his nails down his back and pulls him closer, even as he groans beneath him, unable to get to Adam as he usually does, unable to flip him over and take him, unable to control. Adam grins, presses a hand against Nigel’s chest as he pushes himself up again.

“No,” he sighs, draws his free hand through his hair and tugs it. “You asked. Stay. Watch.”

Nigel laughs. He can’t do anything else. And so he lays back, he stays, he watches, he shivers at the echo of Adam’s no, stern and demanding in his high little voice. Nigel relaxes his hands against Adam’s thighs, instead.

His cock held fast by the pressure of Adam’s body, a wonderful yielding heat that surrounds him, Nigel lets his eyes lower to Adam’s hand, curled around his cock. He’s never seen him like this, never asked him to do it because why would he, really, when he could touch Adam himself. He knows his darling’s embarrassed, he knows from how hot his cheeks are, and Nigel wonders if maybe that’s what’s jerked his heart into unsteady spasms and pulled his groin so tight he’s fighting back the urge to fucking come already.

Adam, who would confess himself as having his syndrome and not understanding people and blah blah fucking blah, came across the world for him.

Adam who’s just told him no, which few fucking people in the world have ever survived doing.

Adam who’s throwing his head back with a shaky moan and jerking himself off with Nigel buried in his ass, fingers gathered firm around his bright pink cock.

Nigel hasn’t fucked anyone else only because he hasn’t had time to do it. Nigel hasn’t fucked anyone else because there’s not a fucking person, man, woman, or anyone, on fucking Earth that could ever compare to Adam.

“Please,” he whispers, squeezing Adam’s hips to stop his hands from trembling. He lifts his gaze from the glistening slick head of Adam’s cock to meet his eyes instead, his full pouting lips painted crimson with arousal. “Please, darling, for me -”

Another moan, louder than the others, another press of white teeth against those red lips and Adam shivers again, the motion pulling his shoulders straighter, his back tall, his chin up. It feels good, this thrill, this strange new thing, this humiliation roiling with pleasure and the familiar. A conditioning, of sorts, that sends Adam into a warm purr of laughter as his hand speeds up, as he twists his hips against Nigel again, as he arches and bucks and sits back hard against him.

“I missed you,” Adam whispers, brows draws and mouth open in a beautiful trembling ‘o’ as his body tenses entirely and he bends forward over Nigel, pushing whimpers and moans and little tiny pleas of his name against the man’s ear so as not to pull the entire hotel running - though it’s loud enough.

Adam holds his hand cupped against himself, to keep it off the bandages, off of Nigel’s freshly washed skin. He’s trembling, flushed, humming that sweet, soft laugh against the man’s tattoo before he sets his lips to it.

“For me?” He asks, pushing back against him more, spreading his knees wider where he sits.

The pull of Adam’s body undulating tight, snaring fast, around his own - the words, his panting and his moans - the sight of him luminous and lovely and yes, a fucking angel - Nigel chokes back a groan. He catches Adam’s wrist, tugging it free of his cock to smear across his mouth instead, tongue spreading wide across his palm to lick it clean.

Salt singes acidic over his tongue and Nigel looks to him, Adam’s fingers pressed over his mouth, enthralled to him and fucking happy to be so.

He tenses, thighs clenching and toes curling. He tenses and he pushes just a little deeper to bury himself, a little deeper to spill his seed inside his Adam, his darling -

“I love you,” breathes Nigel, trembling as another pulse of slick heat unspools from him. “Adam -”

They hold close together, on the dingy mattress, in the dirty hotel room in a corrupt city. Adam presses more soft kisses to Nigel’s neck and his jaw and his cheek, and smiles as the man licks against his fingers. He squirms at how strange it feels to be filled in such a way, when he never has before.

And carefully, he works himself from the man, gasping and laughing against Nigel’s face as he does, kissing him over and over in nuzzling, needy little pushes.

“I need to wash you again,” Adam chastens him, smiles more when Nigel holds him close around the waist and stops him getting up. “I need to wash me, now,” Adam adds. “And empty the bath. And -”

“No,” Nigel answers, eyes closed already as he tips Adam to the bed and gingerly curls up to face him. “You didn’t come all the fucking way to fucking Russia to clean the fucking bath.”

“But -”

“No,” Nigel tells him again, rubbing his nose alongside Adam’s. He nuzzles, tender and warm. He sighs against his mouth. He slips his hand down the sinuous curve of Adam’s back and parts his ass, to feel the hot wetness leaking from him. Adam squirms a little harder, blushing, and Nigel kisses him.

“Stay,” murmurs Nigel. “You wanted me to fucking sleep, didn’t you?”

“After,” Adam laughs, a little.

“Now,” Nigel decides instead. “And then a bath. Food. A fucking cigarette. And tomorrow you’ll book the first fucking flight out of this shithole.”

Adam makes a sound, mild displeasure at being made to remain dirty, but he doesn’t move beyond slipping from over Nigel to rest at his side instead. He turns his face into the man’s arm as his other hand continues to gently probe against him. It’s that same spark of thrill, that same mild humiliation at being seen this way, touched like this.

He shifts further around to rest on his side and watches Nigel instead, still flushed, eyes still blown wide from this. He seeks between Nigel’s own, dark and hooded and pleased beyond measure.

“Bath when we wake up,” Adam confirms, “and we can find food at the airport, once I book us the first flight out of Vladivostok.”

Nigel sighs utter bliss at the promises. He wants to be home, not here. He wants to be whole, not wounded. And more than any of that, he wants Adam to be fed and content, with his macaroni and cheese and his blankets. He wants Adam in their home, searching for stars through the light pollution. He wants Adam, sated and happy. And even if it takes a gutting to get there, Nigel will make sure Adam is returned to that life.

As soon as they sleep, anyway.

“No more fucking Russians?” Nigel asks. He lifts a hand to cradle Adam’s head as his little sparrow nudges against him, and with as much of his body as he can, Nigel seeks to cover him, to keep him weighted, to keep him safe. It’s when Adam speaks again, in a murmur, that Nigel relaxes again, into a laugh:

“No more fucking Russians.”