#jaime asks

TW: SA survivors navigating intimacy

Brown eyes stare up at him, and in the pool of moonlight from the window, Sebastian can see he is still with him. That, alone, brings immediate relief. But he can see that the mood, the moment, is behind them.

"Rooftop hotbox" is an absolute chaos document of an idea that @hold-him-down and I had brainstormed about once. (For Do No Harm)

Here's an excerpt:

The flood of sunlight momentarily stuns him in place, overwhelming after so long confined within concrete walls. His eyes don’t have time to adjust before Handler Smith sends him stumbling forward.

It’s a rooftop, he realizes. They’re on the rooftop of the facility. For a brief, horrifying moment, he expects to be dragged to the edge and thrown over the wall. Panicked, he tries to recount how many flights they walked, trying to determine his chances of survival.

It’s zero. If they want him dead, he will be.

But he doesn’t drag Jaime to the wall. Instead, he prods him forward, leading from behind toward a large, silver box in the middle of the rooftop. 

“What are we doing up here?” he finds the courage to ask. 

noncon beneath the cut

From the next chronological chapter:

“Has Julian—Handler Hernandez—ever hurt you?”

Jaime’s eyes snap to him. Ezra must spot the impending panic, because he raises a palm. “I know the rules against speaking about your training. I hope that you can still trust that we will never betray your confidence, but as I said, you don’t have to answer.”

“You can cry if you need to,” the man named Bryan tells him after, when their bodies are pressed together beneath the duvet. A hand sits low on Jaime’s stomach, making it impossible to relax his muscles. “I know it can be a bit intense sometimes.”

It feels like a dream.

The whole thing was over in minutes, which Jaime supposes he should be grateful for, but all he can think about now is how the room is suffocatingly warm and he is covered in someone else’s sweat and Bryan lied to him.

He lied.

“Shhh, there you go.” The heat of a whisper tickles just below his ear. “There you go. Let it out.”

It takes a moment to make sense of the words, because he hasn’t yet realized he is, in fact, crying. He closes his eyes and tries to pretend he doesn’t hear the pleasure in his Keeper’s voice.

Maybe this is just a dream.

CW: PANIC ATTACK

“Breathe in with me,” Sebastian says, level and practiced. “One… two… three. That’s it.”

He is down on one knee. Jaime sits on the toilet lid in front of him, clutching Sebastian’s hands with vibrating ferocity. He follows the instructions as best he can, but he is jittery on the exhale. When he clamps his eyes shut, Sebastian gives his hands a squeeze.

“You’re alright,” Sebastian tells him. “You’re here with me.”

“I’m here,” Jaime repeats, willing himself to believe it.

Weeks into the contract, the panic attacks still happen frequently, but they are getting better at identifying the things that trigger them and the ways to bring Jaime back to earth.

“Again?” Sebastian asks.

Jaime doesn’t trust his voice, so he nods, and Sebastian begins counting again.

He breathes in.

He breathes out.

He opens his eyes and clings to the green of Sebastian’s eyes like they will anchor him in place.

For Jaime

From this ask game.

“Taking away food,” he answers without much hesitation. “That was a common method of control in training.

“I don’t like pain, but there are ways I’ve learned to cope with it. Over time, with lots of practice. But there’s a certain level of hunger that just… Your body’s survival instinct doesn’t let you push it aside. It gets to a point where you’ll do anything—things you don’t think you’re even capable of—just to get something in your stomach.”