Chapter Text
Shane goes back to his hotel room with damp hair and a churning stomach. He tries, at least. His taxi driver is new to the city, and circles the block a half dozen times looking for the right entrance, asking Shane repeatedly if he knows where he’s supposed to be going. Shane’s only been to Toronto a handful of times, mostly for tourneys, and he was a kid being shuffled from bus to bus like a parcel, a basketful of coaches and trainers and billet parents always flanking them like vigilant mother geese. He has no idea where he’s supposed to be going.
Eventually, he just says “this is fine,” and hops out of the car with his gear bag.
“Why would you drive a taxi if you don’t know the city,” he murmurs to himself, blinking irritably, and swings around to try and find the Marriott CCM booked for him. None of the buildings immediately around him look like hotels, and he sighs irritably.
He could call his mom, he knows. She’d send a car to pick him up. But his nineteenth birthday was last month and he was the one who insisted on doing this shoot by himself and he’s moving into his own apartment in Montreal in six weeks and he’s starting to really chafe at the love that lays on the back of his neck like a collar sometimes.
He shakes his head and looks up at the dark, low-laid sky and crosses his fingers that he’ll find the hotel before it starts to pour.
The alleyway in front of him looks as promising as any other, so he ducks into it at a jog, bag bouncing at his hip. At least he’ll get another workout in.
He emerges from the alley to find himself between a coffee shop and a bookstore, and nothing looks familiar, but there’s a corner of giant glass windows peeking out around the next block, so he turns left hopefully, mumbling sorry, sorry, as he accidentally collides with someone.
When he turns into another narrow alley, hoping it’ll spit him out near where he thinks the hotel is, his shoulders drop in frustration at the slate gray wall of concrete in front of him.
“Jesus,” he says, as thunder rolls overhead, and turns to leave, only to feel something heavy meet the back of his head.
He drops to the ground like a stone, stunned into complete ringing silence by the impact. The pain hasn’t sunk in yet, and all he can feel is a vague dizziness and the bite of concrete beneath his palms.
The world spins. A weak, gritty sound emerges from his lungs as he tries to push himself to standing, or sitting, or squatting, or literally anything that isn’t laid out flat on his face.
And then something pins him by the back of the neck.
Fingers, narrow and strong, pressing into the sides of his throat, a possessive cradle of his carotid, and he can feel the bite of long, sharp fingernails at his skin.
“Please,” he tries, spit sliding out of his mouth and onto the ground, smearing along his lips, “please let me go, I don’t have any— I don’t have any cash, I’m sorry—” and he spares a thought to be irritated with himself for apologizing to his assailant for not carrying cash in the year of our Lord 2011, but there it is.
The person on top of him doesn’t say anything, but they inhale deeply, air rattling around oddly in their lungs. Shane’s not a doctor, but this person honestly sounds sick, like with pneumonia or something, pulmonary system cluttered up with wet, wheezy mess.
He tries to raise his head. He can’t budge. Whoever they are, sick or not, they’re very strong.
The wet, hissing sound coming from their throat rises in volume, and he realizes that they’re leaning down, coming closer to him, and his first thought is please don’t get me sick, I have training camp.
His second thought is oh, my God, that hurts so much, because then they bite him, deeply, violently. There are inhumanly sharp teeth tearing at the crook of his throat, so viciously he’s afraid to try and pull away because he doesn’t know if his veins can take it.
There’s a very loud sound, and his trachea burns, which probably means that he’s screaming. Only then does fear begin to penetrate, sick and twisting in his stomach, driving his pulse even higher, the wet spurting sound near his ear rising in pitch, and God, that’s his blood, that’s his blood, his blood is spurting out of him, spewing like a fucking fire hydrant, like he doesn’t need it, spraying all over the ground and the walls around him like it’s just a resource to be renewed, like he won’t die without it.
The pain continues, and so does the flow of blood.
Vaguely, he becomes aware that his vision is fading, that the corners of the world are going gray and his fingers and nose are very cold. He thinks that probably means he’s bleeding out, and he thinks of his mother and his Reeboks and he isn’t proud of it but the last thing he thinks before the world slips from his numb fingertips is that he’s really very sad that this is happening now, because he thinks maybe Rozanov was going to kiss him later, and he would have liked to know what that felt like.
When he wakes up, alone, in the alleyway, it takes him a long moment to realize where he is.
His legs feel stiff. He twitches his toes in his sneakers. He looks down and groans. They’re Nikes.
“Fuck,” he slurs, pushing himself to seated. He feels like shit, but he thinks that probably he should feel a lot worse right now, and then he wonders why that is, and then he thinks I just died, I think. Then he thinks he doesn't want to think anymore.
Shane won’t remember much after that. He’ll remember putting a hand to his throat and feeling enormous, searing pain. He’ll remember pulling it away and seeing blood and viscera coat his fingers. He‘ll remember a cold, iron taste in his mouth, realizing that somehow, the blood had made its way to his own mouth.
But then he touched his mouth and his fingers came away black. Black like midnight, black like Texas oil, black like death. It was so opaque and thick it completely eclipsed the beautiful, screaming red of the blood from his throat. Slippery, cold on his fingertips. Like nothing he’d ever seen before. But he knew somehow that it was blood.
He’ll remember stumbling around a corner, gear bag forgotten, and seeing the Marriott, its flat glass flank rising above him like a lighthouse.
There was no one at the front desk when he passed it, fumbling for the keycard in his pocket.
And he’ll remember peering at his own reflection in the mirrored walls of the elevator warily, squinting to see himself beyond the vague oily sheen that coated his eyes. He looked wrong.
He’ll remember all that later.
Right now all he knows is that something bad has happened to him, and he is standing in front of his hotel room door, and he is covered in blood, and Ilya Rozanov is looking at him like he’s killed someone.
“Hollander.”
“I don’t…”
“Hollander,” Rozanov says again, like he’s trying to prove a point. He’s standing in the middle of the hallway, frozen; he was probably just on his way to knock on Shane’s door. Shane thinks sadly about what this night could have been.
“I need to lay down,” he says stupidly. His head feels so light, to a point that leads him to recognize distantly that he’s probably not making the greatest decisions right now, but he shuffles forward in his bloody Nikes and opens his hotel room door, holding it open for Rozanov to noisily follow after him like he somehow knew he would.
Rozanov is talking very quickly in Russian, gesturing broadly at Shane with a panicked look on his face. He must not realize it, Shane thinks.
“You’re speaking Russian,” he says baldly. Rozanov stops, blinks at him a couple of times.
“What the fuck happen to you? What the fuck is this? You need to go to hospital, what are you doing? Hollander, this is prank?”
“I don’t play pranks,” Shane frowns, and moves into the bathroom, stripping. His clothes stink like garbage and blood.
“Yes, I know this, so why are you— what the fuck is going on?” Rozanov stands there looking horrified while Shane, naked and still covered in blood, cranks the heat all the way up to a hundred in the shower. He’s so cold, he shouldn’t be freezing like this in June.
When he steps in, the water scalds him to the point of searing pain, so hot it feels cold again, and he sighs underneath the spray, feeling oddly soothed by the sound of Rozanov’s endless chattering in the doorway.
Blood, black and red, disappears down the drain while he watches. Good. He just wants to forget this happened. If he really needs to go to urgent care or something he will, but all he wants is to wash this off of him and go home so he can focus on the pre-season.
“Are you alive?” He hears Rozanov ask when the water shuts off.
“Yeah.”
“What the fuck is happening.”
Shane ignores him and steps out of the shower, reaching for the nearest scratchy terry cloth towel he sees to wipe the water from his eyes.
It comes away white. His face is clean now, then, and the bleeding has completely stopped. He glances in the mirror, terrified at what he might find there, and sees—
Two deep puncture wounds.
That can’t be right. He leans closer, craning his neck and frowning. The thing tore his throat open, his neck was half gone, there should be a fucking hole where his jugular used to be.
But there isn’t.
There are two deep, narrow puncture wounds, parallel to each other, with sickly green bruising surrounding them.
He reaches up to touch them, fingers brushing gently against the skin, and finds only a vague soreness, similar to the way his hand ached when the IV was removed after his wisdom tooth surgery. He lets a short, choppy breath out.
“Hollander?” Rozanov says. He’s hovering anxiously by the sink, hands lifted ever so slightly away from his body; he seems to be nearly vibrating, a deep hum resonating from his core to land softly on Shane’s skin.
He’s still cold.
“What has happen to you?”
His gaze catches on Rozanov’s mouth, tightened in a nervous attitude Shane’s never seen it wear before, then, glancing down, on the heartbeat he can see throbbing in his neck. Shane feels his mouth fill with saliva. He takes a step forward, then another, staring at Rozanov’s throat.
He can’t stop. He can hear the thudding of Rozanov’s pulse, hear the blood moving through his veins, hear his heart pumping it back into his arteries, he can hear it all so well it’s almost like he can fucking smell it. He takes a deep breath, leans in closer. He can. He can smell it.
The gravity of his body feels like it belongs to someone else, some lesser god who’s been unfortunate enough to be forced into stewardship of Shane’s newly fucked up existence, and he can’t help it at all when he sways right into Rozanov’s space, opening his mouth to inhale the scent of his trapped blood.
“Whoa,” Rozanov says, leaning away from him, reaching up to cup his face in one palm. Shane makes a pitiful sound and lets all the weight of his head drop into Rozanov’s hand.
“Please,” he whines, face squished a bit. The fricative whistles through his teeth, catching harshly on his canines. He tongues the tip of his teeth, startled to find them— he stops breathing for a second. His teeth are sharper. Something about the awareness causes a warmth to drop into his belly, spreading and pooling without his permission.
“You— I— Hollander,” Rozanov says uselessly.
“Can you just let me— I just need—” he tries to duck in again, desperate to taste.
“Hollander, you need to go to fucking hospital, you are attack by a wild animal, Иисус Христос, мать его!” Rozanov’s fingers tighten on his face but he allows Shane to move in a little closer.
“I’m fine. I’m fine,” he says softly, and he feels— well, he feels like shit. He feels fucking awful, but he’s going to be okay. This isn’t going to kill him. He thinks a little hysterically that if he didn’t die in that alley that probably nothing in the world could kill him. Then his head throbs a little and he shuts his eyes, grimacing, and decides to move forward with a little more humility. There’s no way of persuading Rozanov that he’s going to be okay, he knows that, but there’s a preternatural understanding spreading through his chest that he’s honestly fine, that there’s nothing they could do for him at the hospital. That he’d be poked and prodded and held down and scraped and examined and spoken about as if he wasn’t there and the whole time he’d be thinking to himself I could just be in bed right now.
“I’m just so…” he trails off, staring at the smooth, soft skin of Rozanov’s neck. There’s a beauty mark right above the place where his jugular is carrying blood toward his heart. Shane needs to taste it.
He sways forward again, and this time Rozanov lets him, lets his face drop into the curve of his throat, still cupping him by the chin. Shane flickers his tongue against Rozanov’s skin, tasting salt and sweet and desire. There’s something sharp there, bitter like a grapefruit peel, pricking at the insides of his cheeks flirtatiously and then burning on the way down the way good ginger beer does.
“Please, please, Rozanov, please, I— I need it, I need—”
“Okay, okay, yes, we will— okay, Hollander,” he says. His hands are warm on Shane’s hips, they’re so warm, Shane doesn’t know that he’s ever felt anything so warm before. If his hands are this warm, the rest of him must be— Shane pushes in further, pressing his whole body up against Rozanov’s, curling his arms around the small of his back and then pushing up under his shirt to palm at his bare skin.
“Yes,” he says against his pulse, the feeling of a painfully hot bath subsuming him from his chin down. “Yes, thank you, yes. Yes.”
There’s no way to articulate what he wants, what he’s feeling. He can’t understand what he’s feeling, and he doesn’t know what he wants until he’s already reaching out to take it. It’s beneath his molars, spilling over his gums, tingling in his fingers— Rozanov’s skin, warmth, the smell of soap and sweat. Shane opens his mouth again and sucks the taste of it in, pouring it down his throat, gorging himself on heat and salt and vitality.
Rozanov doesn’t speak, but makes a small shifting noise in the back of his throat, a chair scooting out gently from the table, someone trying to be quiet because someone else is sleeping in the next room. Broad hands cup Shane’s shoulders, no attempt to move him closer nor tug him away. Just a touch, just a frame. Shane slumps. He draws more warmth into his mouth, digs the seal of his lips in with his teeth, scrapes them in and down and hopes for more and more and more.
“Hollander,” Rozanov says, when the sucking has gotten wet and messy and loud and Shane knows that logically, the next part of this involves consumption of some sort. He grips Shane’s hair which means that he’s moved his hand from Shane’s shoulder which means Shane is cold again, and he whines, that’s the one thing he can’t bear right now, he can’t bear it, why can’t Rozanov see that—
“Shane, let go,” is probably a command or a demand, and in this context, aren’t they the same? Isn’t it the same thing for Ilya to tell Shane to do something and for him to ask Shane to do it? Shane will do it. The question mark is unnecessary.
But then he’s being slapped across the face, hard, and he drops Rozanov’s neck the way a dog does a leather shoe.
Air fills his lungs with a wet, rattling gasp. Was he breathing? He blinks, spots swimming in front of his eyes, sick and spinning. Looking down, his arms are trembling, wrapped tightly around Rozanov’s torso, and the spot where his mouth was pulling on some intangible life preserver is shiny with spit and marked bright red in the shape of his teeth.
It looks horrific.
He’s never left a hickey like this, he’s never even seen a hickey like this in real life. Rozanov looks like he’s been mauled by a wild animal. Shane lifts his head and catches a glimpse of his reflection in the mirror over the sink: the light is too low for him to distinguish pupil from iris, but there seems to be altogether more black than there should be.
“I— I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“Hey, is okay, do not worry. I am fine,” Rozanov says, placing the hand he slapped Shane with gently on his cheek, running his thumb underneath Shane’s eye. He sounds so placating, voice a mellow soothe as if Shane is a fearful child. “You will have to do much worse to really hurt me, hm?” Even worried, disturbed, dim in the awful hotel lighting, his handsome face curves into a smile so smug Shane can’t help but find himself reassured. Sort of.
“Okay. Sorry.”
They’re silent long enough for Shane to remember that he’s naked, that they’re standing here alone together because they had plans, why they’re in the same hotel room somehow feeling comfortable enough to be wrapped around each other like long-lost lovers even as they stand quietly and avoid eye contact.
Obviously that’s not going to be happening tonight, he tells himself, not after you show up looking like a car crash and then make him talk you down from a panic attack, Jesus.
“Sorry,” he says again, feeling useless, and shrugs, tries to unspool himself from the warmth of Rozanov’s body, the comfort of a heartbeat near his own. “You don’t have to— I don’t want to keep you or anything.”
But Rozanov digs his fingers into Shane’s bare hip when he tries to pull away.
“Hollander, you do not look— you look bad. I do not want you alone.” He peers at Shane, concern creasing his face at an unfamiliar angle. He murmurs to himself, stroking a thumb across Shane’s cheekbone. “боже мой, что это, блять, такое?”
“It’s fine,” he tries, but Rozanov’s jaw clenches, and he makes a displeased sound in the back of his throat.
He pivots, looking around the room, noticing for the first time that it’s empty. “Where is your things? You have a bag?”
Shane blinks, slowly unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “Um. Yeah. I think.” Where is his bag? He had a suitcase. His gear bag is… somewhere down the block, if it hasn’t been made off with by now. “I think the front desk has it. My mom usually…”
His vision goes a bit spotty, and he closes his eyes and sways forward into Rozanov’s space. He’s braced by a pair of broad hands, and then manhandled onto the bed. His bare ass meets the starchy bedspread and he’s so tired and hazy he can’t even muster the energy to complain about it.
“Okay,” Rozanov says assertively, “I will get your bag. You will lay down.”
Shane nods, and as the door swings shut with a loud whoosh and a click, he thinks vaguely that Rozanov is handling all this quite well, considering the… everything. He does lay down after a minute, wincing at the chill of the pillowcase. Normally he likes it, the stiff cool linen hitting his head and neck like a breeze, but he’s just so fucking cold.
He lays there for several minutes, eyes unfocused and drifting, getting colder and colder as the night creeps in, before there’s a rattling at the door handle and a light knocking.
“Shane? I don’t have keycard.”
He frowns. Keycard. His head aches, his stomach cramps. Who doesn’t have a keycard?
There’s more knocking. “Shane, it’s me, I— it’s Ilya. Can you open the door?”
Ilya.
Rozanov.
Ilya Rozanov.
Ilya Rozanov, who saw him covered in blood and dirt and stayed, and let Shane suck on his neck, why did Shane suck on his neck? Why isn’t Shane sucking on his neck right now? He stands and goes to the door, and when he opens it he doesn’t see Rozanov, he sees Ilya. Brows drawn and mouth tight and eyes wide, looking all of nineteen years old when his gaze darts down toward the bruising on Shane’s own neck.
“You are all right?” he asks, closing the door behind him, reaching absently toward Shane’s throat, stopping himself before he makes contact. Shane stares at his hand. Then he stares at the very obvious hickey on Ilya’s neck.
“Did you go—” he starts to ask, then shuts his mouth with a click and shakes his head. Of course he went down there like that, how else would he have gone down there?
He went down there and spoke to the front desk worker with his neck all marked up for the whole world to see, and didn’t even think about what might happen to him. Shane frowns and runs his tongue over his teeth, reaching for the handle of his suitcase.
“Thank you,” he says, voice distant and off.
Rozanov watches him get dressed with that same hard-angled expression from earlier, and Shane, feeling the exhaustion and adrenaline drop dragging his limbs down with a thousand pounds of pressure, just lets him.
He rifles through his suitcase irritably, cursing under his breath at his past self for not packing any hoodies or sweatpants, thinking surely Toronto in June will be warm enough for shorts and t-shirts, and now here he is, naked and shivering in the freezing fucking cold, and he wrangles a shirt over his head and boxer briefs over his legs before he loses patience and stomps over to the air conditioning unit. He pokes furiously at the up arrow several times before realizing that it’s set to 23, 24, 25, 26, rising with every stab of his cold-numb finger.
Okay. Okay.
“Um,” he says out loud, and thrashes through his suitcase until he finds his pajama pants. It’ll have to do, he has nothing else. The closet next to the bathroom has an extra blanket in it, extra sheets, and he clumsily layers them between the duvet and the sheets already pulled over the mattress, breathing heavily, humidly, as his stiff fingers struggle with the cotton.
“Do you need—”
Shane jumps a foot in the air, heart choking him out as he turns to glare at Rozanov’s idle form.
He’s propped up against the wall across from the bed, watching Shane with an expression that seems to wish it was amused.
“No,” Shane says, finishing with the blankets. “No, it’s fine, it’s— it’ll be fine.”
“You are cold?”
“It’s— yeah. A little bit.”
Rozanov walks forward, one broad hand spreading across the small of Shane’s back, a startling heat. “Get in.”
“I need to—”
“Shane.”
He shakes his head, moving away reluctantly from the warmth, to grab his toothbrush travel bag out of his suitcase.
The spearmint tastes oddly metallic as he stares himself down in the bathroom mirror. His eyes are normal again, he thinks, and the soreness at his neck has begun to recede. This will all be over soon. He will get some sleep tonight, he will have blueberries and oatmeal for breakfast in the morning, he will get a taxi to the airport, and then he will fly to Montreal to meet his mom for the apartment inspection. He will not have sex with Ilya Rozanov, because that was an insane thing to think he could do, and he will forget that this weekend ever happened.
He throws up in the sink.
Nothing really comes up; toothpaste and bile and water hit the porcelain and then there’s a hand on the back of his neck that he’s waving off out of habit and he wipes his mouth and rinses it with water.
Rozanov is probably leveling him with one of those concerned looks that are rapidly becoming very familiar to Shane, but he doesn’t glance over at him, just brushes his teeth again in silence and then brushes past him to get in bed.
His whole body is shaking. He doesn’t remember the last time he felt this fucking awful; there must be a fever setting in, Jesus. He’s going to be that guy, sick as a dog on a flight full of people who are going to take it home to their families because Shane couldn’t be bothered to save the address of his hotel when his mom forwarded the booking email to him.
At least it’s a short flight.
The blankets don’t do much to alleviate the cold that seems to be emanating from inside of him. It feels like someone took his bones out and replaced them with those stainless steel cylinders his mom freezes to keep her omnipresent tumbler of Diet Coke cold.
He’s so busy trying to distract himself from the frigid numbness of his own body— thinking about the beach vacation his family took to Gulf Shores last summer, thinking about the wood stove in his parents’ cottage, about the perpetual mug of tea that lives on his dad’s end table in the living room every winter, about the spread of Ilya’s hand along his back earlier— that he doesn’t notice Ilya is still here until he’s pulling back the covers and sliding underneath them next to Shane.
“What— you d-don’t have t-to stay,” he tries, rolling over in bed and wincing when his feet drift forward of their own accord to tuck his toes between Rozanov’s shins.
“You are right, you seem completely fine. See you in September,” Rozanov deadpans. He just reaches an arm around Shane’s waist and tries to drag him closer.
“What are you d-doing?” Shane braces his hands against Rozanov’s chest and thinks about war crimes and childhood leukemia to avoid noticing the fullness of his musculature beneath Shane’s palms, the scratch of hair peeking out from underneath his wifebeater, the shifting warmth as he adjusts to Shane’s body, pulls him in even as Shane protests.
“Robbing you. успокоиться. Calm down. Is not illegal here.” He rolls his eyes; between the surety of his movements and the stiffness of Shane’s own body, he finds himself tucked into the broad expanse of Ilya Rozanov’s chest, cold nose pressed against his pulse.
It’s… nice. Shane curls his hands against his own sternum and inhales. Rozanov smells like new sweat and dry soap and some deep, foreign spice that Shane can’t help but chase a little, calling it down into his lungs with a deep breath so it can mellow between his ribs, fill his empty stomach for the night. Ilya relaxes against him in one soft motion, and then they are more one body than two.
The night moves so slowly.
Shane drifts in and out, never quite able to fall completely under, rearranging himself around the heavy angles of Ilya’s limbs every so often.
Each time he wakes, he finds himself either gravitating toward or already sucking on the bruise on the side of Rozanov’s neck. It’s like a baby’s soother, the way he can’t help but attach himself, like the loss of it might really push him to big, fat tears and wordless wailing. He just needs it, needs the warmth under his teeth, the flowing blood pulsing beneath his tongue. In a thousand years, with a hundred languages, he’d never be able to explain it to anyone else.
Somehow, though, Rozanov seems to see— even if he doesn’t understand the taste of this hunger, he understands the urgency, and feels some sort of obligation to keep Shane fed.
The first time his eyes open as Shane reattaches himself to what must be a throbbing mess of pain, his brows draw together in the dark and he hisses a bit, but he just places his hand on the back of Shane’s neck and strokes a thumb down the soft skin behind his ear. He’s asleep again in just a minute or two.
The next time it happens he doesn’t make a sound.
At one point, Shane wakes, chattering cold, limbs vibrating at an alien frequency, and turns into Ilya’s side, tossing a leg over his hips in an attempt to get closer. He wants to crawl inside his skin, he needs to be touching every part of him that has ever existed, he needs to become one of Ilya’s organs and live serene and wet and throbbing in the cavity of his body, charged with keeping Ilya alive and nothing more.
Again, his open mouth finds the crook of Ilya’s neck. It must hurt like fuck, the mottled red and purple marks that continue to bloom in this sunless space; Shane traces them with his tongue and thinks he’s never tasted anything sweeter than directed suffering. He nips at it, at the pulsing beneath the skin, the blood he knows is so, so close. It’s so close.
He drags his tongue over it. Rozanov doesn’t wake up.
Teeth, next, gentleness eking away, and Rozanov still doesn’t wake up.
His neck is already so marred, Shane tells himself, and doesn’t stop to wonder why it is he can see the bruises so easily with all the lights off and the blinds drawn shut, and surely if he was okay with Shane leaving all those marks he wouldn’t care too much if—
Spit is dripping from his mouth.
Shane doesn’t like horror movies very much.
Too much of the pathos relies on bad decision making and poor planning, which Shane simply cannot relate to, so he finds it hard to connect with the fear element. But there are a few he likes. His dad is a big John Carpenter fan— he saw The Thing in high school and didn’t like all the dog stuff, but the protagonists were resourceful and he really liked Kurt Russell’s jacket. And he liked Alien. He liked the setting, the isolation, the powerlessness.
The drool.
He remembers crinkling his nose watching globs and globs of clear, slippery spit drip and fall all over the ship, thinking it was so fucking gross, and he’s thinking that now, watching a glob of clear, slippery spit drip and fall from his own mouth onto Rozanov’s warm skin. It’s so fucking gross. He almost expects it to sizzle.
Leaning down to lick it back up is less of a choice and more of a caving-in, and his head hurts, and he’s throbbing all over, and he can taste it, just what he needs, right below the surface, and his mouth aches, gums tight. His gums, fuck. Smooth pink skin and it hurts so much, he wonders if this is why babies are always crying so loud.
Shane cracks his jaw, opening wide enough to hear a click and a pop and feel a minute slide of relief, and when he tries to close his mouth again it feels crowded, like his wisdom teeth grew back or something.
He doesn’t think about it very hard because all he can think about is that Ilya’s eyes are shifting under his lids so he has to be right in the middle of a REM cycle, he’s probably under pretty deep.
And he’s thinking that Ilya’s let him chew on his neck all night with little more than some soft noises of discomfort, so…
And then he’s leaning down and licking again at his neck, and his teeth are too many, and his gums hurt so bad, and he can’t do anything except what he knows he is going to do, which is open his mouth and sink his teeth right into Ilya’s neck until the skin breaks clean and his aching mouth fills with salt and heat.
Between one moment and the next, Rozanov is rocketing awake, choked-out surprise coming from his mouth, and his hand is on Shane’s face, pushing, and Shane’s only reaction, like a fucking street dog, is to growl and sink his teeth in deeper, shame pouring down his back as he does it.
“Fuck— fuck, Hollander— Shane, fucking—” Ilya stutters after a quick litany of formless Russian firing right into Shane’s ear.
“I’shry,” Shane tries to get out an apology but his teeth, too many of them, and there’s blood everywhere, all down his tongue, filling his throat, slipping on his cheeks and dripping down his neck. He wants to feel sick, he needs to feel sick, but the sweetness and the salt are filling him too quickly, too nicely for him to feel anything but utterly new satiety. He hums against Rozanov’s throat, feeling himself grow hard against his hip.
That, too, should drive a stake of guilt right through his gut. Teeth in Ilya’s neck, his pain loud in Shane’s ear, blood on the sheets, and Shane is turned on, Shane is already half-hard, Shane is rocking his hips into Ilya’s body as if this is just one more way Shane can consume him.
He tries to martial the will to pull away, even manages to unlock his jaw a bit, when he shifts and feels—
Rozanov is hard, too.
The surprise is enough to arrest his momentum; he withdraws, licking at Ilya’s neck as if in apology, when there’s a hand on the back of his head, curling in his hair, gripping at him, pushing him.
“Keep— боже мой, keep going.”
“I don’t—”
Fingers pressing in, hard enough to bruise, dragging him back in: “again.”
And the spit sliding down his teeth now tastes like Ilya, like earth, too bright and hot and near, searing. Shane closes his mouth around the wound and sucks.
A rapid-fire release of guttural Russian unloads beside his temple, sleep-hoarse and slippery with arousal. Rozanov rocks his hips up, catching the ridge of his cock against Shane’s on a sick, filthy grind.
Okay, so maybe he is having sex with Ilya Rozanov tonight.
Shane sucks a little harder at the blood still eking out of Ilya’s neck, desperate for another drag of the sweet, salt-tang, and the cock rutting against his twitches noticeably.
He moans against Ilya’s skin and the fingers in his hair curl, pull harder, until it hurts and his scalp brightens with a tingling pain and the sensation shoots right down between his legs. He rolls his hips, one hand moving from a tangled mess of knotted sheets to grasp messily at Rozanov’s hip, shoving his fingers just beneath the waistband of his boxers in hopes of a tighter grip to pull him in.
No point though, really, when Rozanov reaches down toward Shane’s own hip and drags him closer, rolling him halfway on top of his body with a rough gasping noise. Shane humps into the feeling, his body weight pressing him down harder against Ilya’s dick, and feels himself growing wetter and stickier with every movement.
He’s kind of wet and sticky all over, actually, blood slipping between their cheeks and going tacky along his jaw and throat. Rozanov doesn’t seem to mind, humming into his ear as Shane’s tongue darts down to collect a stray drop, gleaming dark against pale skin.
Dimly, Shane spares a thought to wonder about Rozanov’s state of mind.
Hookup interrupted, walking in to find Shane mauled half to death, herding him around the hotel room like a particularly bothered border collie, letting Shane put the world’s nastiest hickey on his neck as if it was a biological imperative— somehow the perfect recipe to instill in him some fucked up desire to get dry humped in the middle of the night while Shane tries to suck the blood right out of his veins.
Shane’s not really sure there’s much point in investigating Ilya’s logic over the last several hours given that most of it has led to his own victimization in some form or another, so he just settles his mouth back at the juncture of Ilya’s shoulder and pulls a little harder.
“Fuck— Hollander…”
He knows the flow of blood must be fairly slow given the fact that Ilya is still alive and writhing quite vigorously underneath him. It fills his mouth easily though, thick and hot, hitting the back of his throat and dragging a sigh out of his lungs.
Nothing to be done about it, then, he tells himself, rocking his hips downward into the feeling thrilling through him. His head is a bit spinny and he’s not sure whether to blame it on the sex brain clouding his judgment or whatever the fuck is going on with him that he feels the need to fill his mouth with blood so badly. Either way, it seems to be working for Rozanov, too, because they’re both moaning into it, bodies moving in sinuous unison, hands moving all over.
He tries to pull away to breathe, clawing at the air after a long minute spent sucking at Ilya’s throat, but Ilya doesn’t let him go far.
“More,” he rasps, breath labored, fingers curling in the short strands of hair on the back of Shane’s head. “Do it again. Hollander—”
Viscera sticks to Shane’s lips when he speaks. “You really like this?” The smell of blood hangs tapestry-heavy in the air, an intricate weft of metal and earth. He’s not really sure what he wants the answer to be.
Ilya rolls his hips upward, catching along Shane’s throbbing cock with his own, and Shane’s elbow collapses a bit, dropping him solid onto Rozanov’s chest.
“Fuck.”
“I like.”
The movement continues, driving circular, suffocating pressure from Shane’s groin up into his chest and throat until he whines, feels like he’s about to really spiral.
His mouth finds the wet wound again.
“Hollander?”
He can feel the bed shifting around, dipping as Ilya sits up next to him.
“Hollander.” A hand falls on his shoulder, and Shane’s forced to open his eyes when Ilya turns him over to look at him.
The entire sloping expanse of Ilya’s neck is completely covered in rust-brown blood. Shane’s gaze falls from tired blue eyes to the smear just under his ear; pale skin gone pallid in the morning light, grey creeping in at the edges. He feels sick.
Rozanov takes a short breath in, like he’s about to say something that might change things fundamentally. Shane closes his eyes, squeezes his whole face into a tight, painful knot.
“Hey, stop. Stop,” a hand grips his face, thumb dragging over the skin at the corner of one eye. He blinks them open. “Okay. You are okay. I am okay.” Rozanov sounds shaken but he doesn’t stop, stroking over Shane’s cheekbone with a startling, incongruous tenderness. “Everyone is fine.”
“You’re not fine, Rozanov, I—”
“I know, okay, I was there too, yes?”
It’s like a stone rolls right into Shane’s gut.
He looks up at Ilya, feeling so goddamn stupid he doesn’t even know what happens next. There’s dried blood all over his mouth and his underwear is full of cum.
“Are you gonna tell anyone?”