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“Uh, y-yeah sure,” Adam stumbles over his words, his brain completely short-circuiting as his voice cracks with need. He lifts his hips up off the driver’s seat and his large hands come down to help you tug both his jeans and his boxers down to his thighs. He lets out a shaky breath as he’s freed into the cool air of the car, completely exposed to you.

Before he can even process the view, you pool a bit of saliva into your palm, coating your hand before wrapping your fingers firmly around his cock. After giving it a few languid pumps, you eagerly take him into your mouth.

Adam lets out a shaky breath, his eyes blown wide as he watches you work at his cock in absolute awe.

His hands hover awkwardly in the air, twitching with the urge to touch you but unsure where to land in the tight space.

As he finally relaxes into it, he settles a hand on the back of your head, his thick fingers tangling in your hair just to ground himself.

Adam’s head hits the headrest with a heavy thud, a wrecked groan ripping from his throat the second you hollow your cheeks and sink down to the base.

“That’s- that’s really good,” he sighs. You let out a small laugh, sending a sudden vibration straight through him. His hips involuntarily buck up into your mouth and you gag on the sudden intrusion, the sharp sound instantly snapping him out of his daze.

“Oops, s-sorry,” he blurts out immediately, his eyes flying open as he tries to pull back a bit, completely flustered and worried he hurt you.

You can tell he’s getting closer by the way his thighs tense and his fingers tighten in your hair. You release his cock with a wet pop! and quickly replace your lips with your hand to bring him closer. Before he can even register the change, you press your lips to his, catching him in a sloppy kiss.

As he finally boils over, his hand slides down to cover yours, pressing your fingers tight against his skin to help you pump his cock. Adam completely melts into it, his body shuddering under you.

He spills all over your hand, a muffled, needy whine catching in the back of his throat as he pumps helplessly against your fingers, pouring himself out against your palm while you swallow down every last sound he makes.

Adrian wasn’t a sentimental man. 

He walked the tightrope of psychopathy with a grace that most sane people lacked entirely. He didn’t flinch when he took a life, when he hurt someone, when someone hurt him. That lethal indifference to the conditions of his physical body let him do what he did, let him keep the streets clean. He’d take a bullet if he had to. Would kill a kid happily if Peacemaker couldn’t manage it. Anything for the cause, anything to ensure justice was carried out. 

He wasn’t sure if he was someone who felt love in the way others felt it, but he felt an equivalent. When you stripped him down to bare bones and organs, there were names carved messily on his heart just like anyone else. People who had managed to win his disgustingly solid loyalty, his devotee tendencies. Chris had been the first, then John, and now you. 

You hadn’t meant to put your name there, hadn't even realized he’d handed you the knife until the wound was already bleeding. You were nobody special, certainly not someone capable of dismantling an alien race. You were just a friend of a friend, someone who existed in quiet pockets of solitude and occasionally visited Emilia when you knew she was nearing an edge. That’s how it started, how he’d cemented himself as an irreplaceable aspect of the life you now shared with him. 

You worked a job that normal people worked, being different from them only in the tremendous weight of your worry. Your co-workers weren’t dating the deranged defender of their homely city - that was just a you thing. Your co-workers weren’t completely consumed by the possibility of a criminal getting the better of their partner, of having to see headlines about it, of having to watch people celebrate it. 

You were. You could barely breathe with the gravity of it sometimes. 

When the butterfly threat had been neutralized, you were thrilled to have Adrian go back to thieves and dealers. It wasn’t ideal, but he loved it, and you loved seeing him fulfilled. More importantly, he could handle those threats. He made it look easy with how equipped he was for it

Post 11th Street Kids, you and him had managed weeks of peace and domesticity. Nothing deadly hung over your heads anymore, just quiet nights and shared laughter over the absurd headlines being written about him. It was perfect, and it was calm, and it was yours. Something the two of you had all on your own.

After Chris tasked your lover with helping him clean up the corpse of his doppelganger, you knew that time was over. Something new was starting, and at the core of Adrian’s involvement was, yet again, Peacemaker. 

You never liked him much. You’d been excited to meet him after hearing the man you love speak so fondly of him. How he was a legend, how he was a role model, how they were best friends. After you’d met him, though, you saw the acidic truth that Adrian’s dedication wasn’t always reciprocated. In this case, it wasn’t even respected. 

You’d tried your hardest to voice it, to tell him what you’d felt, what you’d seen. How it seemed like Chris enjoyed him only as long as he was useful, only for the purposes he could serve. He’d looked heartbroken before you even finished talking, so you stopped. You cleaned it up, said Peacemaker just wasn’t your kind of person, but that Adrian was his own man. If he valued the friendship, that was what mattered. You showed your distaste through pointed stares and flat tones whenever you saw him, letting his pleasantries rot in the air like neglected fruit. 

Chris had been the cause of your first fight in months. Something entirely too burdensome for such a late hour. He’d called for Vigilante a little after 9, saying that he needed something in the other dimension, and he wanted backup for it. You told Adrian that the request was ludicrous, that not only was it late, but that it wasn’t his problem. Whatever strife the helmet-clad asshole was dealing with was something of his own doing. He should stay, go to bed, stop running to Chris’ every beck and call. 

He slammed the door on the way out. You went to bed angry. Something you both had promised never to do. 

The door didn’t slam on his way back in. He shut it gently with the hands of a man who’d lost a battle. His footsteps dragged, presumably staining the floor of your holy place with inevitable sins of the outside. It woke you up immediately, the irregularity. He didn’t walk like that. He didn’t open things like they’d yell at him if he pressed too hard. He entered spaces as he was, grand and malevolent. It made you nearly question his identity, question whether or not it was him who’d just walked into the bedroom. His breathing was audible for a moment, sounding like his lungs were shaking the oxygen out instead of fondly pushing. 

You sat up when it was clear he was standing still, waiting for something. The room was dark, but light from the window made him decently visible to eyes that had been in darkness for hours. You saw his lips part, as though he was trying to speak, but he just couldn’t. 

The sheets were parting around you before you even registered you were moving, allowing your legs to straighten as you stood up. You moved over to his slouched form, all the accumulated rage from before dissolving into nothing but cold air. Was he hurt? Why wasn’t he saying anything?

“Woah, hey.” His neck was craned down, eyes drooping cruelly to the floor, like he couldn’t bear the sight of you. Your hands burned with the heat of his flushed face, tilting his head back up to eye level. “What happened?” 

The second he felt the heat of your fingers, the warmth of life, he collapsed into you, forcing you on to the wrinkled sheets of your shared bed. His arms wrapped around you like a ravenous snake readying the prey for consumption. His forehead met your shoulder, nearly crushing you with how close he pressed himself. His cheeks were wet, he’d been crying. 

That put the fear of God in you. Adrian Chase didn’t cry. 

“Saw you die over there.” You were surprised at how cohesive his speech was, although slurred and thick with bottomless horror. His arms gripped tighter, somehow. Like he was trying to tuck you inside his chest to stop the ending he’d seen. “I saw you in the street and some guy just…” 

You didn’t have words that could properly convey the hurt radiating off of him. You weren’t equipped to talk him off this particular ledge.

You put your hand on the back of his head, wrapping both your arms harder against him. Reassurance felt wrong, and comfort felt unreachable with how shaken he was. He could clearly tell you were still alive in the world that was his, but it seemed like he couldn’t digest it. Like your voice, and your smell, and your presence wasn’t enough to stop the fact from slipping through the cracks in his heart. 

“I’ve just been sleeping, Adrian. I’m okay.” 

You said it as softly as you could, not wanting to shatter the stillness of the air. He nodded against your chest, but he still shook like he was watching what happened play on loop. 

“I know.” 

You sunk your head down slightly, kissing the side of his head and further messing up his curls that had puffed from the exertion of his outing.

You felt his hands find home on your hips, pushing his fingertips into the pliable flesh in a very specific way. Something he only did when he was needy, when he was aching for the intimacy of being taken, of being seen. 

His name slid through your barely parted lips, a warning in the softest degree. He was mourning, barely holding himself together enough to tell you what happened. You didn’t want to hurt him, didn’t want him to do this and then regret in the morning. 

“Please, I know. Just need to feel you.” 

You went to object, truly. Some vague declaration of his ill mind, his sleep deprivation, his grief. The start of it met his ears both irrefutable and insignificantly. It didn’t matter what you’d almost said, because the latter half died off at the first roll of his hips. The attire you rested in every night was made of thinner material than the clothes you wore during the day, making it that much easier for him to catch you at just the right angle. 

A heavenly groan fled from his lips, settling as a tiny vibration against the skin of your neck. Your hands were gripping him tight. Tighter than anything that could be covered by the guise of comfort. 

This was greed. Something mindless and insurmountable found only in the childish grinding, in the shameful moisture once again flowing from his glossy eyes.

“Fuck - just like that. Just need this.” His head stayed put against the crook of your collarbone, as though you could shield him from whatever sights were hidden behind his eyelids. “Don’t even wanna be inside you. Just need you close to me.”  

Sounds you’d never heard yourself make were pouring mercilessly out of you, not even encroaching the territory of the man above you. He was pitiful, exhaling whimpers so sharp and so wonderful that they could have sliced your skin on impact. It was a magical thing to hold him like this, to be someone so deep within him that this was the result of seeing someone with your face fall victim to circumstance. 

He was evidently hard now, and you swear the material of his suit was even rougher when felt through more layers. It’s solid and it’s perfect. The friction of his pumping hips burns you in a way you’d never anticipated, licking stripes of smooth fire up the length of your spine. 

“You’re too good for me. ‘m sorry I need you so much.”

You couldn’t think properly enough to interject, simply resorting to shaking your head in disagreement. The pressure of his evident bulge made you continuously clench around nothing, made your inhibition pour out of your ears like soap. You could feel evidence of your own arousal soaking through your underwear. You needed him just as bad, just as carnally.

“But I really fucking do. Couldn’t live without you. Wouldn’t want to.” 

He was so strung out that his sentences were bleeding into each other, wobbly and coarse. He was certain of only one thing - you. Your state wasn’t proving much better, head dizzy and fingers tight in his hair. The rhythm you’d managed to find with him was innate, as though your body knew what his was doing before it’d even been considered. It felt so fucking good that you didn’t know how to be with him, didn’t know how to be anything in that moment except whatever he chose to make you. 

“Couldn’t live without you either, Adrian.” 

If someone had heard an isolated recording of that response, they would most likely assume you were inebriated. Some type of alcohol or laughing gas making your words loopy. Devoted, even. Like someone who’d found the keys to the universe. 

And being there with him, it felt like you just might have. 

“Shit -” 

You could tell he tried to warn you, tried to tell you that he was done for. He didn’t manage to get the cautionary remark out of his mouth, breathing one of the prettiest noises you’d ever heard into your neck like he was sealing a secret into you. Branding you with the time he’d cracked open before you, with the time you’d held his fragments in place. 

Maybe in the other world you were gone. A speck of dust to be blown away amongst all the other extinguished life. But here, you were his. 

And he was yours.