#amerigasms

"gone but never forgotten." the sparkle in his eyes is cut by the glaring red light on the inhibitor collar, alerting them both to the elephant in the holding cell. it's not any tighter than clammy hands or thick forest air. consciousness faded just before his neck broke entirely & the familiar breeze of vought tower air conditioning almost knocked the wind out of him again.

surviving feels like nausea over any real relief. especially with the running feed for his funeral broadcast. his attention went to anything other the song encore. even the question of why he was still alive. with a shake of his head, he shed the folktale of a-train's importance for the messier truth.

✱˚｡⋆ ↪ THE 𝐒TAGES OF 𝐈NTIMACY. 

THEY SHOULDN'T ( isn't that always how these start? ). they do, like two magnets flipping from polarized to attracted so quickly she barely registers it happening. her palm situates flat between them, trapped up against his chest & so close it nearly crushes against her own ; she doesn't have to hike up to meet him with the spikes of her boot heels drawing her up so they're almost level. rough, sandpaper stubble that can't color any convincing scrape across her chin, his hot, angry mouth against her own. mean, the both of them, smearing together. tangled up in the ruff beneath his throat, fabric twined in her grasp & she doesn't know which side of the magnet she is: pushing or pulling. broad, sturdy, the grip roaming the dipping curve of her waist.

a coterie of actions that mean she doesn't have to think, doesn't want to think, because this is the way it actually started: hot-headed, in the midst of the type of bandying dispute so fueled by the ways they don't match. his voice, his stance, so gruff & unyielding & wrong, had stoked a dislodged irritation buried deep enough behind the wall she'd spent so much time thrusting up around herself that the force of it almost jars her into a stunning clarity. this kind of ire, though, overcomes, pulses her own roaring blood through her ears & sends red spiraling behind her fuming lids.

this, a clasping grip around her wrist ( to stay her? to reel her in? ) , & the dam of escalating tension doesn't just break, but bursts wide open.

but in lieu of any precious relief to assuage the throbbing thrum of fury still drumming at her temples, instead, they're engaging in a different sort of argument. she keeps that hand now clutching the scarf looped around his neck & turns it so that she shoves. she steps with it, bumping up against him, keeping them close ( she needs to, until this blood-red glaze casting her vision dark passes ), presses her thigh between his, a challenge that he meets.

they're kissing, that chalk-on-board scratching of enamel clashing together. the flesh of his bottom lip sinks beneath a vicious, tugging pull.

there's nothing soft, nothing to savor.

THERE'S A PROBLEM WITH HER TRAILER THAT NO ONE SEEMS TO BE ABLE TO SOLVE.

the hinges of her door — they squeak. the brass vocal chords stripped down from overuse into some ever-repeating squeal like she's got andy hardy for a stage door johnny. it's far from the most grating male attention she's dealt, but the fact is that this is only a symptom of the actual illness: her lock is broken, and nobody's willing to fix it. she's asked and asked and asked. pushed. demanded.

but there's an open-door policy when it comes to white diamond ⸺

when you want her, she's available.

the only person that's made an attempt at fixing it is @amerigasms, and he finds solutions the way a blunt object does: with full weight and a hard swing. in the case of her ever-revolving door, it's his shield rather than his body: the slant of concentrated tungsten lodged between the floor and the entry, leaving an indentation in both — like it does now, alerting her to turn around. the metal creaks at the impact, but doesn't give.

so far as bedpost notches go, it's a particular visible one. tacky for it. the grooves — multiple by now, demarcating time like violent tree rings — are going to be there until production inevitably hammers it back in or subs out the actual door. the indents his shield leaves are so deep that the raised lines go hot from sun exposure, the jutting metal soaking up the heat. she knows this because she touched one just last week, pressing her fingers to where it looked like metallic gills, the burn making her hand jump away in the same second.

"i don't have time."

she turns back to what she's doing, twisting the cap on a bottle of scotch even as she hears his footfall, but it doesn't matter. they call soldier boy the strongest man alive, and dove knows it to be true. has the experience to prove it: no matter what excuse she puts between them, he's capable of prying it apart.

"ben," he's warm even through the suit and the coat of her pride. she tries to sound cautioning, but her mouth pries open into laughter at the familiarity, the body's anticipatory giddiness of a heat it recognizes. craves, in increasing amounts. waves of nausea.

and then he kisses her. his mouth on hers once it's exposed, an impulse which is either like a soldier or an animal or, most likely, a man. like a woman, she folds into it. him. her eyes close, a hand moving up and over the expanse of his chest to where the last ring of kevlar is. she prefers touching skin; a predilection that's partially responsible for the establishing of this ritual. the vein in his neck is hot and immovable like those imprints on the outside her door. taut with strain. she lays a thumbpad over it and doesn't pull away.

that doesn't mean it doesn't burn.

there's a knock at her door, hesistant, that she doesn't address. she knows, same as he will, that in all likelihood it's someone from production. as an asset she's far easier to control than soldier boy; she knows this. she also knows that gets harder when they're together ⸺ vought holds the leash, but ben being near frequently emboldens her to slip it.

BECAUSE THEY'RE ANIMALS, THE PAIR OF THEM. some of the rarest on earth, and certainly the most deadly. it's why she isn't unaware of the fact that each time he does this, it locks her in with him the same way it obstructs others from entering, but why it doesn't frighten her either. they've been in an enclosure fenced off from the rest of the world for years. this is just the gate locking from the inside.

"you were late." she says into his mouth, not yet departed, her voice echoing from somewhere inside it. it's quiet and heady with the honey his nearness always thickens her blood into. "to set." which means they were all late. there's no movie without soldier boy, but they act like there's no america without him either ⸺ which is why he gets away with showing up so late to the goddamn set.

she puts her palms flat on his chest and pushes. that amount of strength does nothing to him, but it's not for him. she needs momentum to make herself separate.

✩ THE END STARTS NOW.

" so, it's true, " she says with a leading lean. her smile is all cold steel, unyielding & sharp. it stills, chilling in a wide, terse expression that doesn't touch the corners of her eyes, the sort of thing a camera wouldn't clock as anything but winning, but up close ---- it's mean, unfriendly. vermouth dryness skirts the terse pin of her teeth.

she's close enough to his ear that she can opine out of the corner of her mouth.

" payback is a little bitch. "

maeve rights herself, palm coddling the gauntlet ringing around her still-shattered wrist. at the time, she'd barely spared enough thought to catalogue stor.mfront as anything other than a nuisance, another marketing opportunity that might give her a much-needed boost in the numbers. but clara vo.ught?

her fingertips flex open as she drops her arm to her side but her fist still carries a reverberating echo of that kraut's jaw splitting against it.

𝗠𝗢𝗥𝗡𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗔𝗙𝗧𝗘𝗥 𝗥𝗣 𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗧𝗘𝗥𝗦 !

third  time's  the  charm  so  it  would  seem,  arm  resting  once  again  behind  her  head  with  fingers  grasping  lightly  in  ginger  locks,  steering  it  towards  him  with  a  fulfilled  countenance.  fulfilled  in  many  ways  she  questioned  even  his  own  son  could.  but  @amerigasms  suggestion  had  erased  those  thoughts  completely,  cyanic  orbs  gleaming  in  the  afterglow.

‘ღ’ rating @amerigasms with the following:

Send me a ★ and I’ll bold what applies to your muse.

"well. grady could be a bit of an ass." she speaks like she breathes. a low exhale as she shoulders graze the doorframe, not quite leaning. she looks past him, eyes sweeping the living room as if in silent inventory.