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It’s a quiet night on the Express.
Everyone has long past gone to bed, Dan Heng retreating to the archives; Himeko… probably still awake, now that Welt thinks about it; the Trailblazer bunking with March 7th for the night. The newest addition to the crew already made themselves at home, and Welt is glad for it—even if it means they’ve tried to get through the door to Welt’s bedroom.
They’re too curious for their own good. Welt is glad that he remembers to lock the door every time he leaves.
It’s not about trust. Of course it’s not; Welt trusts the Nameless implicitly. He isn’t at all worried about his possessions, let alone keeping anything to keep from the rest of the crew, but… they are an expanding group with limited space, and Welt covets his privacy.
The room—his room—is a cozy little thing, comfortably furnished with a few trinkets from various worlds. Himeko had offered it to him almost the second after he’d become part of the Express’ crew, though it hadn’t been an offer to him, so much as—
“So will you two want a room together, or…?”
“I—well—if it’s easier—”
“Together is perfectly acceptable, Lady Himeko.”
“Just call me Himeko! We’re all friends here, Void Archives… Are you sure you don’t have some kind of casual nickname?”
… It doesn’t matter what it started as.
It’s been just Welt’s room for a while now. It’s a private space, and it’s his, as so few things were when he first came here. He needs somewhere to work; to draw; to rest, and the room provides that—it provides a desk he has to clean off every few days, lest it’s buried under dozens of pieces of paper; provides a personal selection of books so he doesn’t bother Dan Heng when he’d like to read. It provides a bed.
Welt uses it for a great many things, this room. It, behind the Nameless, is a very big reason he’s so fond of the Express.
It isn’t just for the mundanities of his life, though, because of course it isn’t.
Welt is only human, with human needs and human weaknesses. He needs to indulge himself. Sometimes, this means spending more money than necessary on a souvenir or falling into a several-day-long animating spree.
Sometimes, that indulgence is meeting a man with blond hair and green eyes and inviting him onto the Express.
Welt has done it multiple times now; meeting people who he’ll never see again on worlds he’ll never go back to. It’s the freedom from commitment that lets him do this without guilt destroying him—if it weren’t for the impossibility of meeting his indulgences again, he never would have started in the first place.
Maybe that would have been for the best. It’s too late for him to stop, so he supposes he’ll never know if it really would be.
Himeko always notices.
At first, she’d been encouraging, telling Welt that she was glad he was moving on; branching out; taking it easy. He had smiled and agreed.
He’s sure she noted the consistency in the color palette by the third.
Now, she always gives him a long, long look after he walks out of his room with mussed hair and bruises on his neck. After the fifth, she had—
“Welt, this is getting…”
“I know.”
“They’re not him.”
“I know.”
Himeko doesn’t approve, but she doesn’t stop him. Welt loves her for that.
(He’s ashamed of himself for that.)
She hadn’t stopped him this time, either, when he’d brought Luocha onto the Astral Express; into his room; into his bed. He hopes Luocha hadn’t seen the glance Himeko had thrown at the two of them, but the man has already displayed how sharp he is—it would be easy for him to see something Himeko wasn’t even trying to hide.
Luocha hasn’t said anything yet, though. Maybe he doesn’t think it was notable. Maybe he took a different meaning from it—
A slender finger traces up Welt’s sternum. His breath catches.
“Is your head in the clouds, Mr. Yang?”
Maybe Luocha has higher priorities than wondering about a single glance.
There’s a man in Welt’s bed who’s blinking lazily up at him. His coat is spread underneath him. There’s a hand falling away from Welt’s chest and legs wrapped around his waist.
Maybe, Welt thinks, I should refocus my own priorities.
Welt shakes his head, clearing any vestiges of guilt from his thoughts. They’re awfully persistent, not unlike fog. Or cobwebs.
An apt comparison, that.
Welt thinks he prefers the fog; prefers the clouds that Luocha’s touch cloaks his inhibitions in. Cobwebs would mean he’s been stuck like this; stuck with the guilt and yearning and love for long enough that they’ve begun to waste away, and that’s—that can’t be true. That can’t be what Welt has been reduced to.
Priorities.
“It’s not every day that I get someone so gorgeous in my bed, you know.” His hands come to rest on Luocha’s waist. “Won’t you let me savor this?”
Luocha’s own hand falls back to the bed. Welt has to bite his tongue to make sure his next words aren’t a plea for Luocha to keep touching him.
“Savor,” Luocha repeats, mocking. Even as he’s pushing his hips up into Welt’s touch, his mouth curves into a smile. “I would be more inclined to believe that if it weren’t for how quickly you got me into your bed.”
It had been rushed, Welt can’t deny that. They’re both still clothed, and he’d almost forgotten to lock his door—not that it would have mattered, with almost everyone already asleep. They won’t be interrupted. They have all the time they need.
(Will Luocha still be there in the morning?)
Welt presses closer to the man beneath him, eyes fluttering shut for half a moment. It’s an instinctive response to the friction, he tells himself, and that isn’t a lie. Is it really relevant if he sees spiked hair if his vision is unfocused? “You can… think of it as being quick if you’re so inclined.”
“Is that to say you aren’t inclined to do so?”
Of course Luocha isn’t reacting. There’s barely even any pink to his cheeks.
Infuriating man.
Welt will just have to try harder, then.
He adjusts his hold on Luocha’s waist, pulling them flush together—cloth to cloth; heat to heat. “Quickly is crude. Wouldn’t a merchant like yourself—” He grinds down for emphasis, and God, Luocha is still just looking up at him; Welt is really just making this harder for himself. “—understand the—mmhn, the value of efficiency?”
Luocha is quiet for a long moment, letting Welt’s soft groans fill the silence between them, before—
“That’s quite the elaborate way of saying desperate, Mr. Yang.”
He reaches up.
Welt doesn’t know what Luocha is about to do—hit him? Grip his jaw? Pull Welt close and whisper I know you don’t see me; I don’t know who you’re thinking of; I know it’s not me—
Luocha rests his hand on the back of Welt’s neck, pulls him close, and kisses him.
He tastes like spiced tea.
(It’s nothing at all like Void Archives.)
“You’re quite the contradiction,” Luocha murmurs when the kiss lapses. He’s still smiling, damnably, and the stray thought of I hope he never stops strikes Welt before he can bury it. “You were so demure when you first started speaking to me, and now you’re so—ah, so eager—”
“Efficient, you mean,” Welt teases, but it’s only half a thought because fuck, he’s finally gotten a reaction out of Luocha and he wants more .
He repeats the action that prompted it—a twist of his hips coupled with tightening his grip on Luocha’s waist—and for his efforts, he earns a gasp and an arching of Luocha’s back. God. God, he’s gorgeous like this; angelic and debauched. Maybe Welt should visit the Xianzhou Luofu more often, if only for the chance to see this.
That’s a dangerous thought. He knows it’s dangerous.
In this bed; in a bed that cradles Welt and a man with blond hair and green eyes, he doesn’t care about things so irrelevant as danger .
Welt lets his gaze linger on those green eyes, unfocused as they are and pupils wide and dark with lust. They’re beautiful like this. (They always are.)
Fuck, no one else has looked this much like him before; what’s so special about this one man—
Those eyes are looking back up at him, searching; probing. Welt knows, logically, that he’s fully clothed, but a stare like that strips him bare and lays him on a dais.
It’s all Welt can do to freeze and stare back.
Welt doesn’t know what Luocha sees in his eyes, but it’s something that sends a tremor through him, rippling across his body. All the words Welt wants to say stick in his throat—an apology, or to ask what’s wrong, or—something, anything, but the tremor bubbles into a laugh.
Luocha is laughing, and it’s a dark, hungry thing, almost enough to give Welt pleasure all on its own.
He takes a deep breath; loosens legs that had tightened around Welt’s waist; looks up at him with such an achingly familiar teasing expression that Welt feels a pang in his chest—
Luocha crooks the fingers of his unoccupied hand, index and middle curled in a clear request, and Welt comes back to himself.
His glasses are sliding down his nose, he dimly notes. He can’t be bothered to fix them.
“Enough with the charade, Mr. Yang. There’s nothing efficient about this.” Luocha twines his fingers in the fine hair at the nape of Welt’s neck, gentle and demanding all in one. Welt’s breath catches. “Show me just how eager you can be.”
He may as well be asking Welt to tear open his chest and show him his heart.
“Happily,” Welt breathes out, and he doesn’t know which request he’s responding to.
His answer wouldn’t change either way.
Starting slow, Welt sets a rhythmic pace of gentle rolls of his hips and lets out a breathy sigh of his own when his back cracks pleasantly. It’s as if that first gasp had broken a barrier—in sharp contrast with Luocha’s earlier stoicism, he’s now almost…
God, there isn’t a kinder way to put it than wanting.
Almost every breath of Luocha’s trails off into a moan, and he’s grinding against Welt with a fervor Welt hadn’t anticipated from him—God, wanting really is the most polite way of describing it he can think of.
… Luocha seemed to have no care for crudeness earlier.
Maybe he’d like the less polite things Welt could say instead—desperate, as he’d called Welt himself. Needy.
In between gasps, Luocha has been managing the occasional “Faster,” that Welt can’t help but oblige, each increase in pace making another moan spill from Luocha’s lips. He thinks that Luocha has lost all words, save that, and teasing words are resting in the back of Welt’s throat—
Luocha focuses on him again. Pleasure-dark eyes send a jolt through Welt’s spine.
“Welt, touch me,” Luocha chokes out—demands—and ‘Needy,’ flakes into ash on Welt’s tongue.
How could he call Luocha needy when just three words make Welt fall apart?
Welt lets his hands wander for the first time tonight, tracing over the slopes of Luocha’s body with reverie and noting down the spots that elicit reactions—on his sides, just where he can begin to feel Luocha’s ribs; the backs of his thighs; the bones of his hips…
All of them pull shakey exhales from Luocha’s lungs. Welt—
Welt can’t resist that.
He dips down to capture breaths of pleasure in his own mouth, and that—the warmth of tongue and cheek, the messy exchange of air, the closeness—is what makes the two of them fracture.
The kiss sharpens, if only for a moment, teeth knocking together and any leftover poise forgotten as unadulterated lust floods over them—there are stars in Welt’s eyes, winking out in one moment and bursting into life in the next, and he can’t see, it’s too much—
—Only for it all to relax into a gentle slide of mouth against mouth.
Welt sighs into that mouth, gentle and utterly content.
He hazily wonders why Void Archives has kept his back arched for so long—why else would he feel a chest pressing against his own?—and it takes a… minute; two minutes, maybe, for Welt to register that he’s collapsed on top of Void Archives. The rise and fall of the man’s chest is raising and lowering Welt in time with his breathing.
He’s warmer than usual.
It’s probably because of the exertion.
(He never gets this warm.)
(Why does he taste different—?)
A delicate string of saliva still connects them when Welt pulls his mouth away from Void Archives’, glistening in the low light of Welt’s bedside lamp. It only takes a few seconds for it to snap, and with it, Void Archives’ eyes slit open.
With it, Welt’s heart stutters in his chest.
There is a man with blond hair and green eyes splayed out on his bed. His name is not Void Archives.
Luocha is smiling, and his gaze bright and tender and so deeply Void Archives’ but not—
He’s more looking into Welt than at him—
(Did he feel the skipping beat of Welt’s heart? Does he know; does he know; does he know—)
Luocha untangles his fingers from Welt’s hair. Welt doesn’t flinch, but every muscle in his body wants him to.
His paranoia amounts to nothing, though, as Luocha starts gently combing through Welt’s hair. He can’t imagine it’s all that pleasant—his hair isn’t particularly soft, and it has to be a bit damp with sweat at this point, but Luocha is still…
Welt swallows, pushing down any traitorous words that could try to crawl up his throat, and closes his eyes. Leaning into the hand that is and is not Void Archives’ is second nature. It’s so easy to sync his breathing with Luocha’s, gradually getting slower and slower until the rumble of the train begins to fade out.
If Luocha wants to give him this small mercy, Welt will treasure it. He… He’ll treasure all of this—even after he’s left the Xianzhou Luofu behind.
The hand in his hair stalls. Welt’s eyes blink open.
Luocha’s laugh—that damnable laugh—is breathy.
“Don’t fall asleep quite yet, Mr. Yang.”
To Welt’s post-coital sense of time, it only takes a moment for Luocha to flip the two of them over, Welt now being the one who’s pressed to the mattress, and Luocha—
Luocha is straddling him.
Even through blurred vision—his glasses are practically pointless by now, given just how askew they’ve gotten—Welt can see Luocha’s catlike grin, sly; satisfied. He shifts back, somehow—somehow—still elegant even as he’s—
God, even as he’s tracing gloved fingers over all the right places and making Welt arch off the bed.
“You can’t possibly think that I’d let you have all the fun,” Luocha says conversationally. Welt can only manage a strangled whimper in response as he stares, wide-eyed, at the man above him.
Evidently, that isn’t a deterrent.
Luocha unzips Welt’s slacks, drawing out his cock in smooth moments that reduce Welt to grasping at his sheets, and fuck, Welt’s still so sensitive—the texture of the glove is—
Luocha drags his hand down, languid and lazy, and any descriptors in Welt’s head are lost to a desperate groan.
“I was able to talk to you, Mr. Yang,” Luocha drawls out. Welt could swear that his voice is traveling through his arm; through his hand and into Welt’s body, just to make Welt whimper with the smooth vibrato of it. “Don’t tell me that you can’t manage that for me.”
Welt wants to—he needs to say something, he should respond—
“Please,” he chokes out—moans out—and he doesn’t even know what he’s asking for.
Luocha seems to know what he means, regardless.
The pressure of Luocha’s hand fluctuates from rough to feather-light, never consistent; never predictable. Whenever Welt is about to catch his breath, Luocha is right there, unbearably calm and with an all-too-obvious hint of a smile, to make him lose himself all over again.
(Just like—)
—And Luocha takes his hand away.
Welt’s breath comes in sharp staccato, as does his heartbeat; his thoughts—God, he had been just about to—he doesn’t—why had Luocha stopped—
He focuses on Luocha—as best he can, at least—with a question building on his tongue, and Luocha is—
Luocha is undoing his own slacks.
He isn’t fumbling; he’s too poised for that, but the way he pulls his cock out is the most rushed Welt has ever seen him be—fiddling with his zipper and careful to not let his glove catch in it; barely even taking the time to touch himself. If it isn’t fumbling, it’s as close as Luocha can get to it.
Welt is still trying to stumble through what it could mean when Luocha leans forward, slots their cocks together in his palm, and breathes out, “Just who are you thinking about, Mr. Yang?”
Fuck—fuck—He’s noticed—how did he—
Why isn’t he angry—?
“I—I’m—”
Any apologies Welt could give are lost in the slick press of skin against skin.
It’s the kind of friction that leaves Welt keening and twisting his hands in his sheets, practically delirious with want. He doesn't know how he thought before that Luocha’s glove was overwhelming—compared to the sweat-damp silkiness of the cloth now, that was nothing, and this is—this is—
“God—don’t—don’t stop, please, fuck—” He doesn’t care what Luocha thinks of him; desperate or needy or rushed, it doesn’t matter as long as he can get touched like this—
Luocha leans forward, hair hanging down and curtaining his face—curtaining both their faces, Welt’s and Luocha’s, caging Welt in and leaving him with only Luocha to look upon. Welt doesn’t—he’s not complaining, but why—?
Luocha’s smile curves like the crescent moon as he raises his wrist to his mouth.
Oh, Welt realizes. Oh, Luocha knows exactly what he’s doing.
Even with Welt’s attention being split between Luocha’s hands, he can see the way Luocha bites into the glove; how he drags it over his palm and exposes slender fingers. It’s—he’s—
It takes those fingers brushing over his mouth for Welt to realize he’s struggling to breathe.
His lips part for—for a desperate intake of air, he tells himself, and Luocha’s touch to them pauses.
“My, my, Mr. Yang, this isn’t quite what I had in mind,” Luocha murmurs. His fingers—index and middle—dip into Welt’s mouth, exploratory, and Welt moans around them before he can stop himself. He can’t—it’s not like there’s anything else he can do—
(All Welt can do is stare and stare and stare into Void Archive’s eyes—)
Luocha’s next stroke is particularly rough, and Welt’s moan tapers off into a whimper.
“You keep getting so distracted, Mr. Yang,” Luocha croons, entirely too close and not close enough—he’s just in front of Welt’s face, a breath away from touching him and not close enough, Welt needs Luocha to kiss him—
There’s a finger resting on his molar and another pressing down on his tongue when Luocha breathes—demands—
“Cum for me. ”
Luocha thumbs over the head of Welt’s cock.
He crumples.
Welt knows, vaguely, that he’s whimpering, any instinctive babbling muffled, but all he knows past that is pleasure-pressure- movement and he doesn’t know why; why is there still movement—it’s so much, so why—?
“So needy, ” Luocha gasps from somewhere above him, and Welt—
Welt opens his eyes—when had they closed?—and looks up at an angel.
Luocha’s face has flushed to a soft pink, frustrated lust narrowing his eyes and carving a furrow in his brow. There’s a bead of sweat trickling down his face. His lip is red as if he’s been biting it.
Welt’s never seen someone so beautiful.
(He has.)
… The thought is sobering.
When Luocha cums, it’s with a sibilant moan and spilling into his glove and finally, finally, letting go of Welt’s cock. It takes a faint hum for him to slide his fingers out of Welt’s mouth—not that the removal of it helps Welt breathe any easier.
God, he can’t—he’s—
Welt’s still sticky with sweat, clothes and hair in disarray and scarcely able to look at Luocha without flushing with mortification.
He feels filthy.
Luocha has to see that. He has to see how unclean Welt is, especially in comparison to him, still gorgeous—he practically has a halo, wisps of hair catching the light of Welt’s lamp. Welt doesn’t doesn’t deserve this—doesn’t deserve him—
God, what is Welt doing—?
He’s settling down on Welt’s chest, face nestled in the hollow between Welt’s neck and shoulder, and the weight is agonizingly comforting.
“Stop thinking so much, Mr. Yang.”
Welt breathes in, then out, slow and quiet.
“I…”
Luocha’s hair smells like vanilla and spices. Welt unclenches one of his hands—his fingers ache as he does it—and rests it on Luocha’s head.
His hair is as soft as Welt thought it would be.
“I’m sorry.”
Luocha’s laugh is quiet, now; short-lived and tired. “I’m sure you are.”
There’s nothing left to say after that.
Welt closes his eyes, shutting away blond hair and slender fingers, and surrenders to sleep.