Work Text:
”How's one to know?
I'd meet you where the spirit meets the bones
In a faith forgotten land
In from the snow
Your touch brought forth an incandescent glow
Tarnished but so grand.”
✤
Sometimes, Marco finds it difficult to grasp certain things, no matter how raw and living and breathing, as real. Not just figments of his own head, fantasy. As a child, the concept of plants sprouting up from the dirt and unraveling in the light of the sun was an anomaly to him. The way rain fell down to earth. The simple cycle of night and day.
Maybe it had all been for this. The quiet way Jean's eyes catch the lamplight. The pale pink hue of his lips, still glistening with peppermint chapstick. Marco knows if it were humanely possible for someone's brain to combust into smoke, the room would've been filled to the brim with it by now. The ceiling would be blackened in ash, the seventh floor's fire alarms would wail, and suddenly Marco's innocent admiration from afar would lose all of its subtlety.
His mind is meant to be on political science, the logistics of things that don't quite concern the shade of rouge pooling into Jean's cheeks, the twitch of long, elegant fingers over lined paper. Flushed knuckles and bitten down fingernails. The draft of the half-open window invites stray pieces of dusty auburn across Jean's forehead, and very distantly, Marco's reminded of the bangs that used to fall in front of the other's eyes constantly as a child, a product of Mrs. Kirstein's coddling and a pair of crafting scissors.
Maybe that's all Jean is, an utter manifestation of all the pretty little things Marco couldn't quite digest as truth. Even like this, swallowed up by a corduroy sweater, sweatpants bunched up at his ankles, because Jean could never quite sit still to save his own life. It's the same reason the ends of his sleeves stay tattered, for the abundance of blisters on his palms and creases in his sneakers.
Maybe Marco has a soft spot for messy things.
The tendrils of daylight cutting through the window frame suggest it's approaching late afternoon. Which means they've been studying for nearly three hours, or Jean's been studying, anyway. Although Marco still feels that tired slump to his brain that entails he has. That light burn to his eyes from fixating on a single thing far too long to be considered healthy.
"Marco." And maybe he can mistake it for the wind rushing through the slats of the blinds. At least until his eyes have regained their focus enough to realize Jean's staring at him over the spine of his textbook. His mouth is twisted up into this half-grimace, his eyes blinking owlishly, naturally long lashes dusting the apples of his cheeks.
"Right." He says back, even though he's not entirely sure what he's responding to. He just assumed Jean had asked for clarification on a question or citation, at the very least cracked a joke regarding the source material. Something Marco probably wouldn't have understood regardless of whether or not he'd been listening.
He knows he's assumed incorrectly though, when Jean's eyebrows only pitch up tightly in return. When that pretty flush drains marginally from his face, and the ghostly pallor that usually drowns him out settles back into place.
"How long have you been out?" He chuckles, the air of it whistling quietly between his teeth.
Out?
Right.
Because they've met here with the intention of studying, not sitting cross-legged on the hard floors of the Smith Hall dormitories and staring—or being stared at. It's always the intention, never quite the endgame.
Marco huffs an awkward chuckle, rolls the inside of his cheek between his teeth like chewing gum. Pulling his eyes away from Jean is as much of a sport as always, but eventually his gaze drops back to the glaringly empty pages of his notebook. He sighs through his nose, bites down hard enough to draw out that sharp, metallic taste in the back of his mouth.
"How crazy of you to assume I'm not fully engaged in the fascinating world that is the science of politics." He replies.
There's an edge to his voice, only slightly dulled down by the crack of a half-smile across from him. Either Jean is gratefully unaware of the turmoil in Marco's head, or he's just found it in himself to humor the other. The pretty pink flesh of his bottom lip glows white in the spot he chooses to tug between his teeth.
There's a reason he always keeps a small collection of lip balms tucked away in his back pocket, why his lips are always slick with something exuding of mint or cherry. The delicate skin had suffered the gnash of his teeth and nails since elementary school, leaving the area always a little reddened and torn, but terribly appealing to Marco's eyes all the same.
"Of course, how could I think such a thing?" Jean jokes back, rolling his eyes good-naturedly. "This is totally the exact sort of thing I'm planning on dedicating the rest of my life to."
And Marco breathes a quiet huff of relief guised as laughter, ducks his head to his chest.
"Yes, how foolish of you." He mutters, more into the fabric of his shirt than to Jean.
Foolish, foolish. He reprimands to his own head.
"Well, as positively enthralling as it is, I think I'm beat for today." Jean groans, followed by the hollow thump of his textbook shutting. Marco hears the scattered pops of his arms being stretched over his head, and when he chances a look back up, his eyes stall on the pale stretch of Jean's midriff, shortly exposed by the way his sweater rides up slightly with the movement.
"Right." He says quietly, strained. "Probably enough exhausting ourselves for one day." Probably.
Jean's bones pull in one last satisfying crack above his head, then his arms are falling back to his sides in one heavy slump. He drums his fingers over the many sprawled out papers ahead of him, his eyes roving over them distastefully. "Stupid Mr. Ackerman." He grumbles to himself. He sweeps down the fabric of his sweats with his hands, shakes his head dismissively, then pulls himself to his feet.
"You wanna get something to eat?"
At the start, Marco had been able to pretend he didn't harbor feelings beyond the realm of platonic for his best friend. Moments when Jean wasn't sitting close enough beside him for their thighs to press together, their knees to bump awkwardly with the slightest shift of movement. When he didn't know the minty sharp smell of his breath or the callouses on the pads of his fingers like the skin sitting tight over his own muscles. Even though the reality stayed that any amount of distance between them didn't untangle Jean from the place he'd wedged himself into Marco's head. What started out as merely innocent thoughts quickly grew to something along the lines of infestation, ivy winding up stone walls.
There were days where Marco convinced himself Jean wasn't real at all. Just another pretty little figment of his too idealistic head.
Even when Jean's wrapped around him tight enough to compromise the flow of blood through his veins. When Marco's pressing at parts inside him even the sun hasn't had the privilege to touch.
Constantly he had to remind himself, that the boy sprawled out under him wouldn't dissipate into thin air. That he was real as much as he was invasive to every one of Marco's senses.
Jean's complicated. Marco had gathered that much over the course of the twelve years he'd been friends with him. He's difficult to read, a stark contrast to the way Marco bears his heart on his sleeve at all times.
The first time anything had transpired between them was around the time finals season had dwindled to a relieving close, leaving them both collapsed in Jean's bed at the end of the semester in that shared mental exhaustion. Jean was droning on about uptight professors and nineties music as they laid over the covers and stared at popcorn ceiling. As Marco elected to follow the slow swell and deflate of Jean's chest through a shirt instead, the odd twitch of his nose against the room's draft.
They'd discussed plans about returning home to spend the break with Jean's mother, because Mrs. Kirstein has viewed Marco as a second son since the moment he knocked on their door looking to make friends in the neighborhood as an overeager—persistent—child.
The bed is unsurprisingly narrow. When Jean's body sunk into the mattress in one heavy sigh some time after the chatter between them had dissolved into amicable silence, Marco had felt it where their shoulders were still pressed so tightly together.
"What's that?" Marco hummed.
And the muscles in Jean's arm tensed up against him. "What's what?" He asked.
"Exams are over, you know...don't have to wrack your brain to death as much anymore." He chuckled, crossing his wrists over his stomach if only to decrease the lack of needed space between them.
Ironic, hypocritical. Because Marco was more than guilty of the exact same offense each time his eyes so much as landed on the other.
An airy chuckle whistled between Jean's teeth, not quite an actual laugh, but enough to entertain the comment. "Right." He whispered back, in this low, jaded way as his eyes fluttered up toward the ceiling.
Marco had stared at the side of his face, as if it would beg something further, but Jean only proceeded to stare upward dazedly, lip pulled between his teeth.
It was more or less unconscious, the way his eyes coasted down from Jean's profile to the slow bob of his throat with each swallow. The clean angle of his jawline, slight stubble trailing up to the peak of his chin. The sharp definition of his collarbones where they peeked over the neckline of his t-shirt. The even square of his shoulders and the outline of his chest. Slim arms shrouded by the sleeves of a long, grey undershirt. His stomach rippled through the thin material, down to where it tucked messily into the front of his pants. The jeans he'd been wearing hugged the shape of his thighs and cut of his waist nicely, tapered down well over the bunched up white and black socks on his feet.
A collection of silver-pressed rings framed a few of his fingers, where they curled and unwinded against his palm. And Marco narrowed in on the way the mid-day light caught the metal through the window. His knuckles were dusted in black from his studio art's charcoal painting final, calloused in all the other places that indicated of an artist's hand.
Jean had such pretty hands, amongst so much else.
For the longest time, Marco had sort of convinced himself Jean was messy in just about everything he did, kissing not exclusive to that rule. But the boy who kissed him that day didn't demonstrate any of the sloppiness and roughness even that he'd come to associate with the other's fashion of doing things. He'd call the way Jean's hands cradled either side of his face, the shy swipe of his tongue over the seam of his own mouth as soft, tender.
A part of him still refuses to acknowledge it as truth, those sounds in his ear, those hands on his back. Because this can't be the same boy he's known like the back of his hand since grade school. The one with the unflinching scowl and the constant bruises on his knuckles.
The one he was before and after he chopped his hair over a kitchen sink, condensed the amount of letters that took up the top left corner of his worksheets in class. He was just as much the same in ballet shoes and plaited braids, purple flowers on the side of a plastic lunchbox. The only thing that changed over time was the way Marco felt about him, and that aspect could be entirely blamed on himself, and his own staggering inability to accept the truth that'd been blossoming out of his chest since the day he met the other.
But Jean, Jean's one in the same.
When the semester comes to a close this year, the both of them file into the beaten blue pickup Jean's been carting around since he turned sixteen to head home for the holiday season. Marco winds unconsciously toward the driver's side of the vehicle when they exit Smith Hall, and Jean smiles knowingly, tosses him the keys over the hood.
Snow crunches beneath worn tires as they weave through backroads, mindful to avoid the late afternoon rush. Jean kicks his legs up on the dash, drums his fingers along the center console to some folksy tune floating statically from the radio. They barely make it out of the city before Marco notices the faltering fuel dial over the wheel. And they wind up turning off into some remote gas station on the outskirts.
Marco fills the tank, trudges the hunkering thing about another mile or so before that sight of surrounding white woods and endless road is disrupted by a hand squeezing his right thigh. And he makes it less than another twenty feet more before a snow-covered shoulder beckons him a little too strong, and he veers the truck into the pull-off with a force that manages to rattle them both in their seats.
Because there are some things Marco doesn't see as terribly complicated.
The sleeves of patchwork tattoos that decorate the skin down to Jean's wrists, once he's wrangled them both out of the suffocating burden of clothes, and Jean's legs are cradling his lap in the driver's seat on some nameless backroad in wooded countryside. The crimson blush creeping over his collarbones and chest, where two twin bending scars cup either muscle. Jean had complained at the start about how they'd never fade away entirely to his preference, but Marco always liked the look of them. They reminded him of the sort of wounds roman gods would sustain in some ancient war. Lightning strikes to the chest, cross-sword swipes on the battlefield. Jean had scoffed in his face at the time, because he'd still been in so much pain from the procedure itself. But he'd come to entertain Marco's far fetched, historical analogies with time.
There's a slight dip to his figure where his waist narrows, a light dusting of hair trailing down from his navel. Always a little too fitting to the curve of Marco's hands.
And every time all the sight accomplishes is paying further testament to just how much Marco needs him, even if it's not quite in the way he would like.
Until Jean knows constellations behind his eyelids. Until he can't form words. Until his bones ache to the marrow with it, with everything Marco's capable of giving him.
He rocks into the other's space, on no accord of his own muscles, or bones, or body as a whole, and the unconscious action leads him right against that brewing heat. Soft and slick and delicate in a way Marco ultimately fails to put words to. A quiet groan vibrates against heart-shaped lips, and Jean's spine bows slightly up off the wheel at the contact. His thighs fall open further, give Marco a more obscene view of the mess between long, pale legs once his head has drawn back. And he feels a feverish sort of tremor shoot up the length of his spine at the display, in spite of it not being a foreign one.
His hips jolt forward, nudge that little bit more insistently against Jean's arousal. And Jean's thighs tense up, hands shaking in old, moth-eaten leather.
Wordlessly, he slips a hand down Jean's stomach, creeps it up along the soft skin of Jean's inner thigh, until his fingers can brush along brazen flesh. And Marco can feel the heat of that anticipation before he's even splayed his own fingers out to touch him.
He'd known the basic inter-workings of what he was dealing with well before anything happened between them, despite his staking inexperience with someone of Jean's...circumstances prior. What with all the times he'd busied his head sick with those exact scenarios. He'd always done his research. Not because he actually entertained the idea that he might be in the exact position he's found himself in now. Rather because Jean simply meant that much to him. Even in the secure bounds of his own fantasy and thoughts, he needed the clarity that he was imagining things right.
He drags his thumb up along the same place he'd just been pressed against, until he meets that budded spot that makes Jean's head spin, his stomach muscles wind up tight. He feels Jean choke on a sharp breath over him, thighs tensing. He digs the pad of his thumb against him there, begins to circle it in slow, attentive movements that no sooner have Jean springing up into his hold, hands shifting to claw at Marco's shoulders instead of further ravaging the seats.
Marco always grits his own teeth, trembling in his attempts not to rock up against the crook of Jean's thigh for his own friction. It never evaded him, that surety to focus entirely on Jean, and the spiraling, whimpering mess he never fails to quickly turn to under him, or over him, around him. He winds the other up just enough to have him curling in on himself with the tremors, nail beds buried halfway under Marco's skin. Then he pulls his hand away, settles it back on Jean's hip.
And Jean whines out some semblance of the other's name, Marco quieting his complaints with a hand stroking up the scape of his ribs, lips brushed along the reddened skin of his chest or his shoulder.
His name was never meant to sound so nice. It's one he's never found all that special or memorable to begin with. But when it's pouring off Jean's tongue in that soft, wanton way. Rounded lips and shallow breaths, it's just about the most beautiful word in the english language the way he sees it.
Marco's never used to the level of affection these moments bring out from the other, this gravitation toward being touched and handled. It encourages a fire beneath his skin he always feels might just singe him to pieces before he's even pressed inside the other. He's unendingly dizzy with it, that reality of Jean sprawled out over him, all pinked flesh and shaking limbs.
"C'mon." Jean whispers in his ear, hips pitching forward in eagerness, the springs of the car seat squealing in complaint with it. "C'mon Marco, baby."
And if Marco were a weaker man, he might've found himself collapsing at the sentiment time and time again. But it takes just as much weakness to fight off an action that'll only accomplish making an utter fool of himself in front of the other. He whines as much against closed lips, squeezes his hand around the bone of Jean's hip hard enough to discolor the skin.
Marco's never quite sure what to do with his hands. He'll drape one over Jean's chest, feel that stuttered rise and fall of Jean's breath under his palm, the sloping scar of Jean's left pectoral beneath his fingertips.
The slide itself is something so achingly easy, Jean's always so worked up. But Marco still sinks into him gradually, so terribly careful not to hurt the other. Even as that cradle seems to tug at him, beckon him in harder and faster, he upholds composure. Moves quietly and cautiously until he's pressed to the hilt inside Jean, a slick smack resonating in his ears as his pelvis meets the sweet skin of Jean's thighs. And Jean's head falls back toward the windshield.
And suddenly Marco can only breathe heavily through his nose, as pretty, velvet walls close in on him from all sides, swallow him whole. He can feel Jean's fluttering heartbeat through the fingers he has splayed over his flushed chest, but he can feel it just as much now through the delicate pulse that shudders all around him from the inside.
The picture is one he wants to seal in the recesses of his brain for life, crystallized in time.
"You feel so nice." He blurts out softly, the words coming out before he can find the structure to reel them back in. And that searing vice grows around him, hugs him even tighter as Jean all but writhes over him. It's the sort of sentiment he can guise as something heat of the moment, still more or less detached in the grand cycle of things.
He gives Jean that necessary moment to adjust, as much as he wants to throw caution to the wind and pump his hips back and forth from the other with abandon. Because there's something so indescribably vulnerable about Jean in these moments, but something so achingly appealing all the same. Marco wants to hold him soft in his own embrace, just as much as he wants to paint bruises on the underside of his lungs like handprints in wet cement.
And just like that, it's bewilderingly over-complicated all over again.
But in moments like these, he also doesn't possess as much of the mind necessary to care.
When he's surging up far enough to press flush, bruising kisses against the apex of Jean's insides, enough for his belly to bow outwards with the force of it. To make his whole body shake profusely, as if the sensation is too much for him to physically handle. The pale column of his throat bobs around shallow breaths, as well as the many pretty, broken noises falling like water from the slack of his lips.
"Yeah, I know, I know pretty boy." He pants just over Jean's ear, where his own head hangs limply in the crook of Jean's neck, every fiber of strength in his body channeled into the unceasing pendulum of his hips meeting the other halfway.
Jean tenses significantly around him at the sentiment, on a level almost suffocating. The noises rattling off his tongue are cut short with a long, silent scream. His legs, still sidling Marco's thighs with brute strength, tighten around him almost painfully.
And he blames the way his hand heels itself against Jean's lower belly on a need to make the moment feel as good for Jean as possible. Which rings true, to a certain extent. But that stronger, burrowed down part of him simply wishes to feel that ardent press of himself inside the other as he meets his own violent finish.
And Jean shakes. He shakes so bad, it almost rouses concern. Until it ends in one last tightening of all his muscles, and the bow breaks in one ceaseless blow and Jean's left slumped against the steering wheel in exhaustion soon after. Head tipped back, hair spilling over those leather gaps. Half-moon eyes and rose-colored cheeks.
And Marco hardly possesses the coherence to pitch his head against Jean's chest, trace the battle wounds with dry lips and breaths coming in long and slow.
That soft, fleeting reminder that of all the pretend things that wrack his brain at night, Jean's at least something approaching real.
Sweltered skin and fogged up windows to keep them both boxed up against the cold.