@thestrayco

In retrospect, the first time might have been perfectly innocent.

Thing is, even if you fall in love with your best friend, you don’t really expect there to be a next step. It’s a thing that can happen when you’ve got a lot of shared history; just a little brain fart, some transference, whatever. It happens and it passes and you move on.

But when instead your rational brain takes a holiday and your said best friend giving you his blessing to date his ex-girlfriend results in a complicated series of events, starting with kissing in a locked on-call room and followed hours later by dragging him from the room of a dead cancer patient and somehow adopting a dog?

Honestly, there’s no rulebook for that.

So when, the next day, they have to burst the bubble just enough to make it to work — yeah. Conrad borrows a shirt. Too big for him by miles, especially at his current weight of… seventh grader. Gaping at the neck so after thirty seconds Jude could draw Conrad’s collarbones from memory. It’s appealing. And it’s sort of hot. And it might be — in fact it probably is — perfectly innocent.

But time goes by.

Though they still nominally live at separate addresses, it’s been a while since they spent a night apart, when they weren’t both working. (Or a day. Whatever, it’s shift work, you make do.) A while since they haven’t made some agreement about whose place to go to when a night shift ends, even if it means sharing a bed for a couple of unconscious hours before someone has to sneak out and back to work. After a few weeks like that, the wardrobes are thoroughly mixed, and Conrad always has a pile of clean laundry at Jude’s place.

So borrowing a t-shirt which reveals not only those gorgeous collarbones but the bruises Jude left on them the night before? Yeah, it’s not innocent, and it’s hot as fuck.

Not like Jude hasn’t been aware of his possessive streak since he started dating, but no one’s ever brought it out of him like this.

“You don’t mind?” Conrad’s eyes are all crinkly, but there’s a testing note in his voice as well. They’re still navigating things. Jude’s throat is dry. So is his mouth.

“I don’t mind,” he says, evenly, stretched out on the bed, sheet barely keeping him decent.

He needs sleep, yes. He needs Conrad more.

Conrad doesn’t kiss him on the way out the door. It’s calculated. He just smiles that smile and Jude knows he’ll be on his knees in the on-call room in a handful of hours making sure Conrad knows exactly what Jude thinks about his boyfriend borrowing his clothes.

—

On the one hand it feels like moving in together is nothing more than a convenient technicality; Jude could, he supposes, rent a storage locker while he is away, but leaving Conrad those few items of furniture he likes enough not to post on Craigslist (the coffee table shaped like a cartoon bacteria cell, the old chest, both of his bookshelves) and his clothes makes it feel more like a promise that this isn’t just an informal breakup. He’s coming home, and when he does, this apartment will be his home. Conrad is his home, all ribs and determination and ingenuity.

—

Conrad is a relatively young vampire, turned in the mid-seventies while he was at medical school. He is not exactly a model vampire. While he dislikes animal blood, he refuses point-blank to bite humans. In direst emergency he’ll take blood from the hospital. But it has to be seriously dire, which overall leads him to not eating enough. He is not as strong as he should be, although he’s considerably stronger than human, and very wily. He has no memory of being turned. He woke up in a morgue, and attacked the morgue attendant, the first and last person he ever bit. The man did survive, as Conrad came to his senses before he could drain him completely.

Jude was in his first year in college when during a football game he tackled an opponent who, unbeknownst to anyone, had a brain aneurysm, a ticking time bomb. The guy died instantly. No one except Jude blamed Jude, but the sense of responsibility was enough so that his werewolf gene was triggered. He left college the day before the next full moon. He spent the next few years on the fringes of werewolf society, uncomfortable with how they lived their lives, but not willing to live completely in human society either.

When Jude brushes up against Mystic Falls, he is instantly drawn to the place, though he has no intention of staying. He feels instinctively that this is the birthplace of werewolves in North America, and it’s interesting, but staying anywhere seems dangerous, and he can smell vampires.

One night he scares a vampire away from a campsite where she’s been munching down on a couple of campers. Jude puts them in the back of their own car and takes them to the hospital, where he meets Conrad. He can smell vampire, but he can’t smell human blood, and since Meredith Fell, Conrad’s colleague, seems to know her shit, he decides to trust him. Unfortunately, once they’ve scented each other, there is an inevitable couple of weeks of essentially stalking one another all over town because they both smell so fucking good to each other, despite being natural enemies.

They start accidentally stalking each other all the way to the Grill at least three times a week to challenge their very powerful livers with huge quantities of bourbon, and eventually stop fighting fate. Soul mate bonds rarely happen between species, but they do happen, and the love they have for each other is a lot stronger than any ancient feud. As powerful allies, it becomes the sensible thing to do to step in and negotiate between the vampires and the werewolves when necessary, and takes steps to eliminate problems when humans are at risk of getting hurt.

Bonus; Conrad survives very, very well on werewolf blood, and Jude never misses it.

Jude was born a werewolf. He and his father were in constant conflict, so he left the Maine pack he was born into, severing all ties, and slowly made his way until he found a pack he was comfortable with. They were themselves a messy little tribe, and he liked that. Although he could have challenged for the Alpha position, he had no interest in doing so. Clay treated him with respect, and like an equal, so he saw no need to try to advance beyond his station.

Conrad had the very great misfortune to attract the attention of an Alpha female who was without a pack. A literal lone wolf. She wanted to be a mother, so she seduced him, and bit him. Her reasoning was that if he survived turning, it proved he was strong enough to sire her children. He did survive, but he was smarter than she gave him credit for. He ran, and fortunately, got close enough to Jude’s pack so they smelled him, and pursued to check it out.

There was some debate between Clay and Nick about what to do with him, until Jude arrived home from a trip into the city, and they saw each other. No one even bothered to discuss things any further. Everyone knew the scent of a bond. Jude and Conrad were inseparable after that.

The pack is on the fringe of the Council, who keep other wolves in line, particularly lone wolves who are endangering humans. It took Conrad a couple of years to admit that the female Alpha they were looking for, who had bitten a string of young men (all of whom looked startlingly like Conrad, and all of whom had died in transition) was probably his old mentor. Nick and Clay left for a few days, and returned quiet. Her name was never mentioned again.

Conrad’s wolf form is a white gold, with softer fur than the average. Sometimes that makes him a target. Fortunately, his appearance is deceiving. No one has ever made a second attempt to mess with him, even if they are (un?)fortunate enough to survive to tell the tale, probably missing a limb. Jude is enormous, bigger even than his Alpha, with black and brown fur and scars that proclaim him a survivor.

Jude didn’t really know what he wanted to do with his life beyond helping people. He wanted to study medicine, but couldn’t get a scholarship and had no support at home towards tuition; he didn’t have the resources to think he could handle the college loans, and knew he’d have to move out to attend. It was the dream, but it wasn’t feasible. He did a lot of different jobs for a while and saved as much money as he could, thinking community college might be his way in to something else. He was working in a bar and trying to decide what to do with his life when there was a retirement party for a firefighter and he liked that they all seemed close, like a family, and that they had the courage to run into a burning building when everyone else was running out of it, so he decided on that.

Jude was a lieutenant when Conrad, fresh from the Navy, signed on as a firefighter/paramedic and was assigned to Jude’s crew. They got to know each other over the first few months, often while Jude taught Conrad to cook, or sitting up late during overnight shifts. They had a mutual attraction but did nothing about it.

Jude was injured when he fell through the floor in a building that was alight. He was hauled unconscious out of the building fifteen minutes after Conrad and his partner Nic had headed to the hospital with a couple of people who needed treatment for smoke inhalation. When Jude woke the next day, Conrad was asleep next to his bed, holding his hand, and Jude realized they meant more to each other than just bros being bros. This became even more clear when Conrad decided to stay with Jude in his loft for a while to ‘make sure he was okay’, even though they both knew he was fine, and only needed a few days off work on concussion protocol and to ease the aches and pains in his muscles, and the bruising everywhere.

Conrad sort of just… stayed. Physical affection easily made way for kisses which lead really effectively to sharing the bed, enthusiastically and athletically. They never really discussed it, until Conrad casually asked what his half of the rent was, and Jude just answered. 

By the time they were both pretty damaged physically, and both had a lot of experiences that were worsening Conrad’s untreated PTSD and leaving Jude with symptoms of his own, and they had their twenty years each, they decided to retire and opened a bar of their own. They bought a place where they could live upstairs, and fostered and then adopted two siblings who were two and six at the time. They talk sometimes about getting married, but if it ever happens, it will be because they need an excuse for a really great party, not because they don’t consider themselves married now.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Resident (TV 2018) Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Jude Silva/Conrad Hawkins Characters: Conrad Hawkins, Jude Silva Additional Tags: DS themes, gentle bondage, negotiation Summary:

Jude's never really talked about it, but he really wants to try.

You don’t do this shit without negotiating, and it’s not okay that it’s even crossed his mind not to. It might not be a huge gesture but he has Conrad’s wrists pinned against the wall, and he’s got a lot of strength on the guy.

Conrad turns as if to try to figure out what’s happening. Jude doesn’t let go of his wrists, not right away. He rests his head on Conrad’s shoulder, and releases the pressure a little at a time.

randoms. – @thestrayco  – conrad.

Conrad likes the physical therapy room at night, when there’s no one around. No one ever seems to catch him here. He likes to leave most of the lights off, and do his thing, with no one offering patronizing pseudo-support or telling him when it’s time to stop. And it’s not a bad way to while away an hour or two when Conrad is working.

And now he has a leg to practice using.

He is careful, checking each corridor as he goes, tapping in the entry code (it hasn’t been changed since he was at Chastain in a white coat instead of worn old sweatpants and a gym t-shirt with the letters cracking), prosthetic laying across his lap.

He doesn’t have the hang of fastening it to his stump. He makes it too tight, and then too loose, arranging and rearranging the buckles until he has it settled right, swearing under his breath. He sits in the chair by the end of the parallel bars, once he has it settled, and stares for a minute or two.

His arms are sore. His wrists are very sore. But every minute he spends lying in that bed upstairs instead of practicing to get off his ass for good seems like a waste of time. He’s tired, that’s all, and tired is one of those things that can often be overcome by expending some energy.

(He ignores the voice in his head, that sounds suspiciously like Conrad’s, saying that rest is also a solid strategy. It may be true, but Conrad… Conrad doesn’t know. Sleep, sleep sucks, sleep is when he hears those sounds, when he feels his own leg disintegrate again, when he smells his own flesh burning. Until that shit stops happening, Jude will keep putting off sleep until he is too exhausted to dream. Healthy? Alright, no. But who even gives a shit. One of the nice things is that no one really expects him to be alright. And being sort of okayish, on the surface at least, seems to be enough to keep everyone from paying very much attention. Anyone but Conrad, anyway, with his sharp little elf eyes and astonishing capacity to sniff out a lie.)

Jude pushes himself up out of his chair, wincing as he puts pressure on the stump. They’d been saying, what, a quarter of his weight on the leg, the rest through his arms and into the bars. He has to get used to the way his leg has to move, to force a step. One, two. Three, four. Shuffling along a foot at a time, battling frustration and pain. One, two. Three, four.

And then something happens. It’s really not clear what. But he’s on the ground with his leg folded painfully beneath him. Ugh, it hurts, but the tears that spring to his eyes have very little to do with that. Everything is just so fucking slow.

He rearranges his limbs and decides to spend a few minutes feeling acutely sorry for himself. Staring at the ceiling. Feels like he belongs here, actually.

The lights come on.

Jude scrubs a hand over his face.

How much trouble he is in depends very much on who turned the lights on. He listens hard, and breathes a sigh of relief. He’d know those footsteps anywhere.

“What are you doing?” Conrad asks, as he crouches down. Jude opens his eyes.

“Feeling acutely sorry for myself. It’s a nice break from trying to teach myself how to walk.”

Conrad sighs. “Come on. Let’s get you on your feet,” he says. Conrad is strong, stronger than he looks. A little wrangling and Jude is on his feet, supporting himself against the bar. Feeling kind of sheepish, actually. Busted. He rests there a moment, and then forces himself to meet Conrad’s eyes. It’s really time he told Conrad he shouldn’t have to do this. He can go. It’s alright. But he can’t. Looking into those big, brown eyes, as selfish as it is, Jude can’t let him go.

He opens his mouth, and Conrad reaches out, pinching his lips together.

“I love you. You enormously stubborn pain in the ass.”