Who cares what picture you see?

[mortemscintilla]

WHO: Korra and Hei
WHAT: Two crazy kids catch a movie. This thread is about a millimeter deep.

[ A new Mover. Faster Nuktuk! Kill! Kill! The title alone doesn't bear thinking of. Scorpions crawling around in his boxers sound more fun. Hei has no idea why he agreed to go. But Korra assured him it wasn't a four-hour epic, and that if he got too bored they could slip away. With reluctance, but aware of certain unpaid debts of boyfriendly attention, he agreed. ]

[ Since Yin's return, he knows he hasn't been spending as much time with her as he ought to. Too busy setting up living arrangements for his friend, trying without words to bridge the gap of three inexplicable years, to make sure she's safe and -- yes, happy. Because she's wasted eerily away since they've been apart, a dull-eyed washed-out husk of herself. Too Doll-like to fill him with anything but dread. ]

[ The past few weeks, he's compensated by paying her steady attention. Until she understands that he's not going anywhere, until she feels entitled to his time as a friend should. He encourages her to listen to radio broadcasts for events, so she'll be prepared with suggestions about what they might do. He gets her audio books in cassettes, a small, ornately-carved zither to play tunes on, practices his increasingly-spotty German on her, gently coaxes her out to eat all sorts of unthinkable things: arctic hen testicles, jelly of turtleduck, thousand year old eggs. He's not sure the outings make a lick of a difference. But last week, Yin was actually the one to initiate their always-brief, one-sentence conversations, rather than the other way around. Hei takes that as a good sign. ]

[ Tonight, the air carries a chill, and Korra is sunshine temperature, a little waft of summer walking at his side. Hei lets his hand curl around hers, tucking them both with a habitual air into his coat pocket. Also with a habitual air, he scans the street as they drift through the crowd, checking ambush positions, logging exits and hideaways, with the practiced nonchalance of an ex-Syndicate op. Everything looks fine. ]

[ By degrees, he allows his tension to thaw, until it is no more than a small shard lodged in his guts. The theater lies ahead, its marquee of lights boxing in the words Nuktuk like the moral of a Sunday sermon on a church sign. A knot of people wait outside; families jawing amiably, children squealing, teenagers boiling over with hormone-driven energy, giggling and jostling one another. Surrounded on all sides by normal, Hei feels wariness tugging his brows like needle with a thread. But Korra's scent is a sweet tickle in his nose, her fingers delicate, yet comfortingly strong in his, and her soft prattle laps richly at his ear, grounding his scattershot senses. ]

[ Squeezing her hand, he edges in closer. His voice is wary, interest hidden under a hard shell. ]

Is this the theater where they use real butter for the popcorn?

Comments

[mortemscintilla]

[ She's not the only one. The sky is huge; the rain seems to be falling from a very great height. Its icy tattoo on his bare skin and the nerve endings beneath is a sharp prickle and a silky slide. Set astride him, Korra's hair is flattened ink-dark to her skull, face lined with trickles, an alluring cold-hot mess that fills him with both a sharp-toothed hunger and a bottomless tenderness. ]

[ He doesn't answer her. He just moves her, spills her on the moist sand without uncoupling, covering her with her skull pillowed in his right hand while the left skims down her body, grasping her knee and tipping it firmly back until he's lodged smoothly inside her, buried balls-deep. Gnawing at her neck, he takes slow hip-grindy thrusts, not gentle so much as relentless, his whole body a bridge of sleek hot muscle across hers, deflecting the cold downpour even as he luxuriates in the pulse of her blistering inner-heat. ]

[ His eyes are squeezed shut, the expression a curiously vulnerable self-absorption, a single-minded intent to bring them both off -- or, failing that, at least get one of them there. ]

[anatural]

What a gentleman. [She giggles, breathless and grateful for the cover he provides. She hooks her legs around him and pulls him in even deeper -- or perhaps it's more accurate to say she doesn't let him pull out. She squeezes him as tightly as she can with her entire body. Come on, she wants to whisper, except she doesn't have the breath. Come. She can feel her body getting tense, winding up like an animal about to pounce, climax an explosion of wild ferocity and need.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ The whole situation is pretty fucking ridiculous. Hilarity burbles up like groundwater through Hei. It's almost a sexual twinge, it starts so deep inside him, stomach muscles quaking, breath singing jitteringly through his teeth as he hides the sharp sickle of his smile into Korra's tender neck. It's amusement at the stupid weather, at their own dumbassery, at the dizzying lungfuls of rain-fresh air and the night of empty freedom and Korra's own wild-blooming aroma. ]

[ He can feel the orgasm gathering inside her, feel the pulse of his stoppered need all through his body's meridians. It's a building strain of countless muscles seeking to uncoil, soon and with violence, a tremolo stress in his architecture, a moist rhythmic grind of chest to chest, grappling arms and clutching fingers, the trembling widespread sprawl of Korra's delicious thighs against the buffer of his heavier muscle. ]

[ Blindly, water dripping across his face, slicking his hair like shiny tar, he catches her mouth with his. Kisses her, messy unbeautiful kisses with too much teeth and spit, his breathing louder than the rainfall, edging towards frantic, everything in him surging toward that neon-bright crest, then leaping past it, a juddering head-to-toe spasm that turns him rigid, dissolving into a hot gush, then collapsing in a heavy sprawl across Korra, boneless and drenched and blind-sided. ]

[anatural]

[Korra ripples and purrs beneath him, enjoying the last aftershocks of pleasure. But not for long. Being naked in the rain is not as delightful as the romantics say. She kisses him and then shoves him off.]

We'll get sick if we stay out here. Where'd you put my -- ah. [Her panties are full of sand. She uses a blast of air bending to clear most of it out, but they're still not wearable. Sighing, she shoves them in her pants pocket. Makes sure she isn't going to leak out spunk (the big problem with going raw) and then pulls on her pants. It's a good thing they don't live far from the water; she doesn't want to walk through the city streets like this.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ There's nothing delightful about being in the rain. Dragging on his soaked pants one-handed, Hei daubs the dripping water away from his eyes with the back of the other hand. Sand, the residue of seasalt, clings to him as a second skin, itching and moist. It should have felt good to reaffirm himself with a dose of spontaneous rutting in the great outdoors. Instead it's just tedious, as it's always been -- the grime, the clean-up. The only highlight is having Korra so close, watching her do that silly bendy-hoppy dance as she slings her clothes on, stuffs her unwearable panties into her pocket, and in general behaves like the heart-tripping, mind-melting, glowy-eyed one-girl-carnival she is. ]

[ With a half-smile, he watches her, drenched in the steady patter of the rain. Then a tiny crab crawls down his bare shoulder and onto his arm, its tread a whisper and a tickle, and he scowls and flicks it off. Bleakly, he realizes he'd left his shirt and coat at the apex of the statue. Considers fetching them, then decides -- fuck it. Both are easily replaceable. He's ready to go home to a hot shower, clean dry boxers, and a big bowl of ramen washed down by a few cups of sake. ]

[ Edging closer, he gently grabs a handful of Korra's hair at the nape, and the rear belt-loop on her pants, then drags her in to kiss the ticklish spot of her nape. Scoops up the unraveling loops of her sarashi, binding them around her torso with a practiced briskness, before helping her into her wet, sand-crusted blouse. There's always, he thinks, a strange intimacy to dressing her afterward -- almost as potent as the fucking itself, yet small and satisfying as a full-stop after a sentence. ]

[ Once she's presentable (or at least semi-decent), he nudges her shoulder, ]

Come on.

[ The faster they get home, the faster she can boil and drink those special herbs of hers. There's no warm afterglow for him after fucking her bareback, no masculine pride at the idea of her hobbling home with his spunk dripping down her thighs. Just a niggling anxiety, like leaving the oven on at home -- multiplied by a hundred. ]

[anatural]

[Sometimes she wants to tell him she can dress herself...and other times she deliberately goes slowly so he can do it. Which is what she does now. He binds her sarashi again and she bends the rain away from them, using a small movement she developed as a more subtle, if more energy-consuming, alternative to the traditional method of bending water away.]

Pushy pushy pushy.

[She kisses him, a silent Don’t worry so much.]

[mortemscintilla]

[ He watches her with something like an idle admiration, the dainty fan of her fingers and the potency of the bending itself like an invisible calligraphy, strokes and slashes that deliver so much meaning within their simple motion. What, he wonders, is it like to wield all that power so carelessly on your fingertips? A question that often arose around Pai -- but which he'd never asked her. ]

[ He doesn't want that power. Not even now, when Pai's energies are fused with his. Not even when, with practice and patience, he can summon the most mind-boggling death-charges with a snap of his fingers, disintegrate solid objects in an eyeblink. That brand of power makes him wary. It isn't hard to open yourself up and let the enormity of it flood in, shadows splashing up against the psyche, pouring from the skull, a tide of arrogance rising. What they don't want you to learn, the war-mongers, the godlings, the ubermenschen, is that power wants to flow. If you make yourself a door, it will open you. Fill you. Then unhinge you, once it's seeped past your limits of self-control. ]

[ He doesn't need that. Better to rely on what you can't lose -- sane or insane, crippled or whole. ]

[ Butting his head lightly against Korra, he responds to her silent message in kind. But that's my job. Threads her small fingers with his, and drifts with her through the watery curtain of rain, wistfully content in the way a traveler might be, as if he knows that his stay in a place like this -- even if the place is just in his head -- won't last forever. ]