"Yeah, do that," Onyx says, slipping out of his jacket and putting it around Andres' shoulders by pure instinct. No thought went into that. It's not going to fit, not really, but it will atleast cover a majority of his bare skin from the chill.

"I'll just make sure you get home safe," he says, in a much gentler tone than he's been using most of the night.

But his resolve was already starting to wear thin, thinking about the way Andres felt in his hands, tasted on his tongue. Too much could be an overdose.

They wait in silence for the Uber, and when it finally pulls up, Onyx does the chivalrous thing and opens the door for Andres, making sure he's safely inside before sliding into the seat next to him.

andres buenaventura
costume

☉

Onyx nods his head in agreement. If more Rocket higher-ups were as down to earth as Administrator Beckett, he thinks, maybe things would be a little bit smoother.

“Looking forward to it.”

He doesn’t, of course, know about such things as dead parents killed in front of their children, but then again, Onyx probably wouldn’t be quite so bothered. He’s done similarly horrible things in the name of Team Rocket.

“Do you have a type you prefer? I’ve always been fond of Dark-types, myself. They keep you guessing.”

Zia deposits a Pykumuku on the ground at Onyx’s feet. He collects it quickly, before it can Pyukumuk-away.

THEO BECKETT
flying/water
catch attempt pyukumuku or whatever
sorry noods

☉

His ears are ringing and he almost misses what Andres says.

"Going-- going home?" Onyx asks, trailing after him. He's not about to let him just fucking wander around, now. The idea of Andres making those noises, those faces, for anyone else is now upsettingly disturbing, incorrect. Like a secret that no one else gets to know.

"I can take you."

He's just going to make sure he gets home safe. That's it. That's all.

His rationale is solid, if not his willpower.

He gently guides Andres outside, into the chill of the early morning. "How did you get here?"

andres buenaventura
costume

☉

The weight of the cooler is heavy in his hand, the smell of iron and salt heavy on the ocean breeze.

“Yeah,” he says, flexing his fingers again just to ensure there’s still feeling in them, “yeah. I’m done.”

He cocks his head. “What’s good to eat around here?”

andres buenaventura
onyx.exe has stopped working

☉

Victory is sweet. Victory tastes like salt and sweat and Andres, smudges of makeup and body glitter on his skin. Victory isn't... exactly what he planned, but this is almost as good.

Onyx has a tremendous thought: that maybe this is all he wanted. Maybe, all this time, all the misdirected anger and rage; the punches and curses and hatred. Maybe all he ever wanted was Andres coming apart beneath him, because of him.

Another time, somewhere less public, when they're both sober, he'll take his time, dismantle him properly. There's still so much he wants to do, to touch, to taste. For now, this is more than good enough.

He holds him for a bit, after, as Andres trembles a little and stares, glassy eyed. Onyx reorients the skimpy costume as best he can with what little it has to offer. "You good?" he asks, hand on the span of Andres' upper back, imagining he'd just bounce back and go right back to partying, a little thrown by how affected he seems to be

andres buenaventura
costume

☉

Onyx bends down to grab the pearl fragment, rolling it over his bandaged palm.

“Something like that,” he says, extending his arm to offer the piece of beach treasure back to Andres, palm flexed.

“They come out rather easy with enough pressure. If you know where to hit.”

andres buenaventura
onyx.exe has stopped working

☉

He snatches up his phone without revealing too much of his lap from under the blanket, raising one eyebrow at the dog emoji and rolling his eyes at the same time. “Sassy is an understatement,” he says, referring once again to Chuchi, the demon living in the other room.

The men powwow around their injured friend, one of them throwing out a shortcut through the forest as a quicker way back to civilization. As though that could go wrong.

Andres times his toe-tap with the dramatic music on the screen but Onyx has been through scarier things than this on a normal afternoon. He doesn’t jump, merely diverts his eyes from the screen. He twists his knee, flexing the kneecap and giving an almost imperceptible bump back.

“It’s… yeah. It is better, for this.” This being sitting on a couch watching a movie, something he hadn’t done in a thousand years. And it’s easy how the admission comes without feeling argumentative, without having to be a knock-down drawn-out battle of wills, of stubbornness.

“Thanks.”

The men go into the forest.

andres buenaventura
local man feels things for the first time in 10 years.

☉

The growl that rips out of him is visceral. He's kissing Andres like he can burn away the taste and feeling of everyone who came before; he cants his hips forward, seeking the pressure, wanting to pull more noises out of Andres, wanting to make him cry for a different reason.

He slides his hand into his skirt, following the line of his stupidly small costume, trailing fingers feather light over his skin. The cheap fabric is rough against the back of his hand and he wonders how in god's name Andres has been wearing it for so long with nothing underneath.

Is he going to do this right here, right now, in this shady corner of this shitty club?

Yes. Yes, he sure as hell is.

andres buenaventura
take her away, kimbo
costume

☉

He goes willingly. This is what he wanted, he just wasn't willing to take (give?) easily. He doesn't care if it's out of anger or to prove a point, he wanted Andres to-- to feel something, for him, about him. He opens his mouth, allowing Andres full reign, except for a second he takes to nead Andres' bottom lip in his teeth, pulling it, letting it snap back before forcing their mouths together again.

Pressed against the wall he lets the hand at Andres' hip trail around to (finally) grab his ass; the other holds his head in place.

He doesn’t know how he got here, he really doesn’t. The evening has been nothing short of cataclysmic. Maybe he hopes Andres won’t remember most of this when he’s sobered up. Maybe he doesn’t know if that’s scarier than the alternative.

He doesn’t usually do this; he’s not prone to physical whims of fancy. But Andres drives him crazy, in more ways than one, seemingly without trying. Maybe he’d finally just hit a wall, and reached the end of his rope; maybe that’s what drives him to cant his pelvis and seek out the heated angles he does.

More likely, he flew too close to the sun; he overdosed on the emotions he was wringing out of Andres, and it has spilled off into this frantic lash of lip and tongue, the catch of his belt on the cheap fabric of Andres’ skirt, the way the buckles clink as they’re pressed into his lower abdomen.

andres buenaventura
costume

☉

Every breath Andres takes, every part in his lips (swollen from kissing other people), is heat straight through Onyx. He's really not thinking with this brain, now, as he reaches up and uses one hand to cup the back of his head.

"Yeah.”

It has a double meaning: yes, he has to be a dick about everything. Yes, he is so full of shit. Yes, this is what he wanted.

"Yeah, I know.”

And he pulls him down, presses their mouths together.

andres buenaventura
costume

☉

They move in tandem. Andres reaches up and grabs his jacket collar. Onyx’s hands find their way to Andres’ hips-- unbidden, a completely unintended motion, side-effect, product, result. Like failing brakes on a car he aims for a featherlight touch and fails, gripping once again, a mirror of what had happened in the bathroom.

“You’re so cute when you’re angry.”

A distant part of him wonders if he’s taken it too far. A larger, closer part, like the iceberg that sunk the Titanic, doesn’t give a flying fuck.

His smile is thick like honey, slow and steady to reveal itself.

“There’s no need to yell, sunshine. I’m right here.”

andres buenaventura
costume

☉

It was funny, this concept that Andres and Onyx were spiraling around the same drain: Onyx didn’t know why the fuck he’d gone and gotten involved, and Andres sure didn’t know why the fuck Onyx’s had gotten involved-- so who was driving the fucking plane?

Andres gets angrier. Whatever Onyx is doing, it’s working.

Because this is what he’d wanted, wasn’t it? A reaction. An emotion. Something to make Andres feel. And it didn’t so much matter what it was, just that it happened.

His face was blank but inside he was grinning like the cat that got the cream.

Andres shifted and stood taller. Onyx, instinctively, flattened his back against the wall, raising his head and looking up, defiant. He’d die like this, someday, he felt pretty sure.

“Conversation’s over, sweetheart,” he says, tone as flat as he could make it (even though inside he’s-- he’s definitely something, something terrifyingly close to turned on, but he’s so good at hiding it, he really is), “you told me everything I needed to know. I didn’t mean to throw off your groove, emperor, honest.”

He holds his hands up in mock surrender.

“Please, don’t stop fucking everything that moves on my account.”

andres buenaventura
costume

☉

Onyx’s heart does a stupid thing and he once more has to grab that feeling, wrestle it to the ground, and take it around back to put a bullet in it. But it’s getting harder and harder to do, each time.

He wrestles his phone from his pants pocket and tosses it down the couch to Andres, pushing up to stand and depositing the collection of comfy things on the couch in the process. As he stood, Andres… expanded, legs stretching down the length of the couch and Onyx had to turn and look away to avoid being reminded of just how big the guy was, now.

He was about to drop his pants in the middle of the living room and he really could not afford a boner now.

“Tch, yeah, like I can go in there. She hates me.”

Divesting the sweatpants from the Comfy Clothes Pile, he stepped around the back of the couch, figuring it was a lot of effort to actually go and hide when, for the moment, he had nothing to do so. It wasn’t like he was taking all of his clothes off, and, again, his brain could not go there at this precise moment.

The snaps on his jeans came free and they slid off his hips and to the floor, revealing a modest pair of black boxer-briefs, because boxers were too loose and briefs were too tight. He kept his eyes focused on the TV-- not on Andres, on the TV-- as he slipped into the sweatpants, letting them rest on his hipbones and having to catch them when they slid down a bit. He took his jacket off, too, and untucked his t-shirt.

Though the process couldn’t have taken more than 30 seconds-- and he’d manage to get through it with only baring his legs and the tiniest bit of happy trail, for a brief moment-- it still all felt entirely alien to him. It took every fibre in his body to continue with the motions and not stop to ruminate on how everything felt, as it had been so long since he’d felt… comfort.

Something dangerously close to an emotion spiked within him and he had to powerbomb it back through the floor.

As he sits down again, the men on the TV are breaking camp and heading out, as ominous storm clouds roll in, and thunder can be heard.

It’s so incredibly… domestic. Simplistic. And yet utterly foreign. And he can’t stop himself from touching his legs, touching the fabric, though he tries to do it sneakily. And then he realizes that he’s literally wearing Andres’ pants and quickly snatches part of the blanket to throw nonchalantly over his legs and lap, because he is a man of great resolve, but it can only last so long.

One of the men suffers an injury and goes down. The rest gather around him in concern.

andres buenaventura
local man feels things for the first time in 10 years.

☉