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changehistory[ooc: Sylar/Gabriel is ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heroslayer and used with permission and by request. Any mistakes in characterization are mine alone. Set 500 years in the future in Firefly/Serenity/![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
dontrightly_die 'verse immediately after the Unification War]
Fear not what you can't see
The pulse
The pain
The ecstasy
A hollow space
An empty grave
The best laid plans are meant to fade - "Yohoho" - KMFDM
They danced around it for centuries with a lingering curiosity of what might have been, in another place, another time, if they'd met on a different ground or playing field, before their hearts had been otherwise claimed and their darker instincts curbed in a spirit of self-preservation if nothing else. What if it had been one brother instead of the other in the cell on the other side of the wall? How might the world have changed? How might they have? The man who liked to hurt, and the man he couldn't kill, who welcomed the pain as a reminder he was alive. But it remained just that--a dance they engaged in now and then when darker moments hit. A glance of understanding when fury sparked in the other; a commiserating look at something particularly naive that came out of Peter or Mohinder's mouth; a meeting they told no one about to wreak a bloody vengeance on someone who did something to piss one of them off. Those were the moments the speculation flared highest, at least in Adam's mind, because for all that he'd never had someone like Peter who stayed by his side, he'd never had the opportunity to have someone like Sylar either, and gods but what a pair they could make. The world would tremble in fear before them, and no one would stand in their way. He could feel it in the air, the hot thickness of the idea of it, pressing in against all those restraints he'd erected around himself to keep the things in his life that he'd convinced himself he needed.
It should have broken in an alley drenched in blood, some unworthy on the ground beneath their feet. More than once, it had been close, crowding in on them, and Adam half expected to feel brick at his back, scraping his hands as he pushed back against the invisible force pinning him there, but the moment never came. The world spun on, years passed, then decades. People lived and died, and populated the Earth evermore, congesting it further. They rose above it, their money allowing them places in ivory and golden towers that reached toward the sky, and then on the finest ships that left it, abandoning the place they had called home, and still it never came, that explosive moment to cut through the tension that continued to build. Time faded all things, didn't it, Adam thought, more than once, but this curiosity seemed to grow, especially in his bitterness as they were forced to find a new home a new planet and he wondered how long it would be before they wrecked this solar system as well. It had all happened before; it would all happen again, and his solutions were always deemed "too drastic" or just got him a look from those puppy brown eyes.
They'd survived centuries with only minor separations, coming back together in unifying purpose, but this new place found the first true schism growing. Adam, Julian and Mohinder threw their lot in with the burgeoning Alliance of planets. Adam would be damned if he didn't have a say in how these new worlds were run, to institute something, anything, of what he saw best. Julian wasn't going anywhere again he couldn't get a decent glass of wine, after dealing with the migration period, and the labs of the Alliance were where the brightest scientific minds worked--where else would Mohinder want to be? But the others...When the war came, Gabriel and Claire went to fight on the other side, much to Adam's annoyance. It would make things messy, when he had to clean up associational messes, and he would. It felt like he was losing control. After five fucking centuries, he was losing the control he had so carefully crafted. They were rebelling, just like their fucking parents had, and for all that it would seem that five centuries should have dulled that feeling, five centuries of working together, of family ties should have made him just roll his eyes slightly in amusement at their idea that they could possibly win and wonder why they would even want to...it was amazing the scars that lingered from those thirty years, even now, no matter how irrational.
His first reaction was a betrayed rage that simmered beneath the surface for the duration of the war. There wasn't worry, of course. They would both be fine. But the first time Gabriel came back after it was over, after Mohinder had been called back to his lab, Adam sat at the table over the remains of dinner and watched the former killer with an icy gaze. Gabriel returned the look with a slightly confused one of his own, though if Adam was still fairly good at keeping his thoughts hidden, the emotion simmering around the room wasn't hard to pick up on.
"Did you really care that much about the war?" Gabriel finally asked, when the silence had stretched to the snap or smother point. He watched Adam closely, as if trying to read from him some sort of reasoning for the coldness that lingered.
"It was an exercise in futility, which I believe I pointed out from the start," Adam said, reaching for his wineglass and curling his fingers around it.
"People have said that about other wars that got won against all odds," Gabriel pointed out.
"And if you had won, then what?" Adam asked, with the slightest sneer on his lips. "People on the border planets starve because there's no one for them to turn to? They continue to lag behind in technology and medical care in the name of, what? Freedom? Please...that isn't freedom, and after all this time, I would think that you would realize it. What we're doing here..."
"We?" Gabriel interrupted. "We who, exactly?"
"All of us, or I thought so," Adam snapped back. "We failed on Earth. We're out here, now, because we failed, but we have a chance to be part of molding a new society here, of guiding humanity from the ground up in their new home..."
"Is that what you think the Alliance is doing?"
"It's what I think I am doing," Adam said, staring at him. "Governments come and governments go. Politicians rise and they fall, because they are mortal, but we are not, and the system that the Alliance puts in place? A unified system throughout an entire system, reaching all of humanity? How can you not see the potential in that? Julian and Baileigh and Mohinder are in positions of tremendous potential power. The work I have done these past decades, the groundwork I have laid...do you think I've just been amusing myself? And then you--you who I thought I could count on above all the rest of them to see it, to understand--you have to go off and throw yourself in with a bunch of wide-eyed children who cannot see what is good for them."
Gabriel just stared at him, eyes shadowed, but a slightly stunned expression on his face. Adam lapsed into silence, staring back at him, only the rapid pace of his heart and the slightly quickened breath giving away that he was upset.
"So there's a plan?" Gabriel finally asked, voice giving Adam nothing to go off of to gauge his mood.
"Have I taught you nothing?" Adam asked in return, voice like ice. "There is always a plan."
Gabriel moved then, and it was with the predator's grace he'd always had only amplified since he'd fully integrated Suresh's ability into his own, pacing around the table to lean over Adam, hands on the arms of his chair. "And did it occur to you that, I don't know, letting the rest of us in on it might be a good idea? How well has it ever gone when you leave us out?"
Adam tilted his head back to meet his gaze, still angry, still cushioning himself in his hurt, wrapping it around himself like a shield, like some old blanket he hadn't yet figured out how to drop. Gabriel's eyes searched his, looking for something and, as always, seeing a bit more than Adam was fully comfortable with. Honestly, one telepathic empath to deal with was bad enough. Why was he cursed with two again?
"For someone with so much vision, sometimes you're a blind idiot, you know that?" Gabriel informed him with a bit of a smirk, not moving away.
Adam's eyes narrowed. "I'm not the one who went off to fight a war that hadn't the slightest chance of being won, let along being philosophically and pragmatically wrong on so very many levels..."
"Shut up," Gabriel told him, perfectly pleasant, then proved he had learned a thing or two through the centuries of watching Peter handle Adam, by following the words with action, lips settling over his with enough force to give lie to the pleasantness in his voice that said he wasn't as angry as Adam, though whether at having his cause or his loyalty insulted, or being left out of the scheming, or all of the above, Adam could only guess.
Not that he was thinking about it for long, shock at the contact taking his breath away for a moment before he returned it with force of his own, one hand wrapping around Gabriel's wrist on the chair's arm as if he could hold him there by will alone. But Gabriel didn't show any inclination to pull away. If anything, he pressed closer to Adam, his lips molding to the other immortal's before he parted them with ruthless ease, tongue pressing past to tease over the contours and ridges of Adam's mouth. A startled moan caught in Adam's throat as the kiss deepened, as he tilted his head to better meet Gabriel's assault with a parry of his own, trying to fight back from the surprise of the attack and marshal some sort of defense. There was a coiling tension twisting in his core already, fury and hurt transforming into heat and tension of a new sort, and he stroked his fingers up Gabriel's arm, letting them press into the skin of his neck before they wound tight into hair the boy really needed to get cut but which was, at the moment, long enough to get a very nice grip on.
Silky strands tangled between his fingers as he tightened his hold, keeping Gabriel close as he kissed him deeper, tasting the wine from dinner lingering on his tongue, but imagining underneath it all that dark power that had drawn him to the boy so many centuries before. Two sides of a coin, light and dark, and he'd tasted the one, let it be his "salvation," chosen that path, but all the other power swirled in the possibilities, no matter how taming the force of time. Given his present mood, it was no wonder he found himself opening up to that hint of violence in tongue and teeth, his own fingers nearly cruel in their grip, his other hand moving to Gabriel's waist to curl in his shirt, attempting to tug him off balance, pull him into himself.
Gabriel seemed to have other ideas. Adam had forgotten how fast he could be, how strong, when he chose to pull those abilities buried in the recesses of his brain back to the forefront. In the space of a breath, he found himself out of the chair and slammed into the wall, his whole body shaking from the impact, and certain there would be a crack in the plaster that would need explaining, if not an actual dent. His breath knocked out of him, into the space between them, but before he could catch it again, Gabriel was pressed in close, lean body covering him, teeth catching the crooked spot on Adam's lip where his own teeth had a habit of worrying. A spike of pain radiated outward, and the taste of copper danced on his tongue before the wound healed and Gabriel moaned slightly. It was another similarity Adam didn't want to let his mind linger on too closely, to bring into question, to let thought interrupt experience, but Suresh's ability had lent itself to interesting moments through the years and Adam found himself moaning in response to the vibration echoing through the body pressed against his.
It wasn't in him to just submit, though, even when Peter came home in a more predatory mood. The pain in his head from its contact with the wall cleared and he twisted, centuries of training working against strength and with distraction to knock Gabriel's feet out from under him and land them on the floor. He used the other man's body to cushion the fall, hearing the grunt beneath him as Gabriel hit the hard wooden floor with a certain satisfaction as he pressed atop him. Breaking the kiss he lifted his head to search Gabriel's face. Whatever ice he'd encased himself in at dinner had melted at least, to a fire, though there wasn't so much of a definable emotion beyond need. His family. His people. His home. And it had felt threatened, from within. One hand curled tight around Gabriel's wrist, though he was fully aware the boy could throw him across the room with a thought.
The moment strung itself out, tense, and he felt himself stop breathing as those dark eyes punched through the walls he'd put up, and saw him. He could almost feel the other's mind there in his own. While he was very good at keeping stray thoughts to himself, not projecting, they--both Gabriel and Peter--were too strong now for him to keep out if they wanted in. He was in there now, and it scraped against him, raw and wild, old wounds never fully healed, all the things he never said, things maybe time should have taken care of, but somehow didn't. Gabriel's free hand found his hair in a gesture far too tender for Adam to deal with at the moment, one that made him flinch back with a soft growl that broke the moment, a spike of anger flaring in the other man's eyes as well. The fingers followed, tangled, pulled hard, and Adam found his lips back against Gabriel's in a bruising kiss that seemed to be the only way he was managing to communicate at the moment, biting words or violent kisses.
There was a different tenor now, though, for all that the grip in his hair hurt. It was a point of focus, a locus of control, where he could center himself. The mouth under his returned violence for violence, teeth breaking skin that healed as well as that which parted under Adam's attention, but when he pulled his lips free to slide them along Gabriel's neck, to his surprise, the other man tilted his head, neck arching slightly up to meet his lips, and when his fingers roughly pulled Gabriel's shirt free and slid under it, over skin, he was rewarded with a gasp and a moan. He moved with intent after that, not daring to move them from their position on the floor. Clothes were an impediment to be overcome quickly and efficiently, haphazardly finding their way into piles out of their way. When he moved back briefly to remove the last of his, Gabriel watched him, still with those eyes that knew too much, until Adam settled over him, kissing him and they closed once more, blocking out whatever secrets he still held.
The need for care was something unnecessary between them. Where Adam had to be careful with mortal lovers...he smiled slightly as his teeth scored across Gabriel's skin and he watched it heal. Five hundred years and he had yet to cease to be amazed by those like him. The hiss of pleasure, the way the cock pressed against his hip twitched, the dig of the sharpened edges of bone spurs Gabriel had picked up from someone or another slicing across his skin were all the response he needed, and then he was pressing into him, hard and fast, the tiniest cruel glint in his eyes. The scratch of the bone spurs had hurt, after all, and that he was that much closer to the edge because of them was of no matter. Gabriel cried out, pain and pleasure both flashing across his face at the intrusion, eyes flashing to Adam's to catch that smirk.
Adam paused, watching him, holding his gaze for a long moment, and then he started to move. After that, things blurred into heat and movement and friction. His skin tingled from healed wounds, blood still slick between them, and Gabriel was in the same condition. Something feral lurked in the other man's eyes now and again when he met them, that comfortable familiarity he knew from another when they played too hard, and Adam smirked slightly before kissing him, focusing on the differences not the similarities in his lover's flip side. The way he moved under him, the force in his grip, how he let him take, but never submitted, the subtle feel that at any moment Adam could find his throat ripped out. Danger and darkness still lurked under the pale skin, and Adam mapped it with his tongue, teasing it out with each breathless moan, adding his own to the mix, moving faster, pushing him. His skin split again under the rake of those damn claws and he cried out against Gabriel's shoulder, his own meager nails digging in to his ass as he tugged the man's leg up, higher, around him, fingers stroking slowly down the back of his thigh with just enough pressure to make Gabriel twitch against his stomach.
Heat coiled in his core, persistent and familiar and he moaned in both expectation and a need to draw it out, to make this last, but Gabriel was meeting him with equal insistence, his breath uneven and eyes slightly glazed. Adam reached to slide a hand over him, moving as best he could in time with his erratic thrusts, and when the man under him tightened, arching, taut up off of the hardwood floor, spilling over his hand, a triumphant smile touched his lips. It lasted just a moment, brief and fleeting before it pushed him over the edge on its own, shuddering in a flash of pleasure that blazed out along his nerves and left him spent and trembling against Gabriel's body, gasping for breath that came in and out in something that sounded suspiciously like sobs.
Fingers slid up his spine, mercifully sans bone spurs, then Gabriel's palm pressed flat between his shoulder blades, holding him close against him. Spent, Adam couldn't pull away to protest the tenderness this time. After a moment, fingers slid into his hair, nails scraping lightly across his scalp, playing with his hair. He managed the lightest sound of objection, but Gabriel's grip tightened, the reminder coming once more that he really was far, far stronger than Adam.
"You're an idiot," Gabriel repeated, voice just a bit breathless from their exertions, but slightly smug with satiation as well, "If you think that any of us are going anywhere. When are you going to get it through your head that you're stuck with us?"
Adam closed his eyes.
"We've been here more than half your life," Gabriel continued. "Do you think that maybe it might be time to start trusting that?"
"You sound like Peter," Adam complained into his shoulder. "You're not supposed to sound like Peter."
"Peter occasionally has a point," Gabriel said, his voice dry, though even after all this time it sounded as if it pained him to admit it.
Adam snorted, but it was a weak sound, even as he wriggled free of Gabriel's hold, and rolled off of him onto the floor, feeling it's cool smoothness against his skin as he stared at the molded plaster of the ceiling. Gabriel propped himself up on his elbow, looking down at him with serious eyes, though his lips curved in the faintest of smirks.
"Now that you're over your hissy fit, why don't you tell me about the plan?"
Adam shot him a dirty look at the categorization of his mood, but found himself reluctantly returning the smirk, body tingling a bit too much in too many good ways to muster real temper again, and proceeded to outline what he had in mind for the coup of the century.
heroslayer and used with permission and by request. Any mistakes in characterization are mine alone. Set 500 years in the future in Firefly/Serenity/dontrightly_die 'verse immediately after the Unification War]The pulse
The pain
The ecstasy
A hollow space
An empty grave
The best laid plans are meant to fade - "Yohoho" - KMFDM
They danced around it for centuries with a lingering curiosity of what might have been, in another place, another time, if they'd met on a different ground or playing field, before their hearts had been otherwise claimed and their darker instincts curbed in a spirit of self-preservation if nothing else. What if it had been one brother instead of the other in the cell on the other side of the wall? How might the world have changed? How might they have? The man who liked to hurt, and the man he couldn't kill, who welcomed the pain as a reminder he was alive. But it remained just that--a dance they engaged in now and then when darker moments hit. A glance of understanding when fury sparked in the other; a commiserating look at something particularly naive that came out of Peter or Mohinder's mouth; a meeting they told no one about to wreak a bloody vengeance on someone who did something to piss one of them off. Those were the moments the speculation flared highest, at least in Adam's mind, because for all that he'd never had someone like Peter who stayed by his side, he'd never had the opportunity to have someone like Sylar either, and gods but what a pair they could make. The world would tremble in fear before them, and no one would stand in their way. He could feel it in the air, the hot thickness of the idea of it, pressing in against all those restraints he'd erected around himself to keep the things in his life that he'd convinced himself he needed.
It should have broken in an alley drenched in blood, some unworthy on the ground beneath their feet. More than once, it had been close, crowding in on them, and Adam half expected to feel brick at his back, scraping his hands as he pushed back against the invisible force pinning him there, but the moment never came. The world spun on, years passed, then decades. People lived and died, and populated the Earth evermore, congesting it further. They rose above it, their money allowing them places in ivory and golden towers that reached toward the sky, and then on the finest ships that left it, abandoning the place they had called home, and still it never came, that explosive moment to cut through the tension that continued to build. Time faded all things, didn't it, Adam thought, more than once, but this curiosity seemed to grow, especially in his bitterness as they were forced to find a new home a new planet and he wondered how long it would be before they wrecked this solar system as well. It had all happened before; it would all happen again, and his solutions were always deemed "too drastic" or just got him a look from those puppy brown eyes.
They'd survived centuries with only minor separations, coming back together in unifying purpose, but this new place found the first true schism growing. Adam, Julian and Mohinder threw their lot in with the burgeoning Alliance of planets. Adam would be damned if he didn't have a say in how these new worlds were run, to institute something, anything, of what he saw best. Julian wasn't going anywhere again he couldn't get a decent glass of wine, after dealing with the migration period, and the labs of the Alliance were where the brightest scientific minds worked--where else would Mohinder want to be? But the others...When the war came, Gabriel and Claire went to fight on the other side, much to Adam's annoyance. It would make things messy, when he had to clean up associational messes, and he would. It felt like he was losing control. After five fucking centuries, he was losing the control he had so carefully crafted. They were rebelling, just like their fucking parents had, and for all that it would seem that five centuries should have dulled that feeling, five centuries of working together, of family ties should have made him just roll his eyes slightly in amusement at their idea that they could possibly win and wonder why they would even want to...it was amazing the scars that lingered from those thirty years, even now, no matter how irrational.
His first reaction was a betrayed rage that simmered beneath the surface for the duration of the war. There wasn't worry, of course. They would both be fine. But the first time Gabriel came back after it was over, after Mohinder had been called back to his lab, Adam sat at the table over the remains of dinner and watched the former killer with an icy gaze. Gabriel returned the look with a slightly confused one of his own, though if Adam was still fairly good at keeping his thoughts hidden, the emotion simmering around the room wasn't hard to pick up on.
"Did you really care that much about the war?" Gabriel finally asked, when the silence had stretched to the snap or smother point. He watched Adam closely, as if trying to read from him some sort of reasoning for the coldness that lingered.
"It was an exercise in futility, which I believe I pointed out from the start," Adam said, reaching for his wineglass and curling his fingers around it.
"People have said that about other wars that got won against all odds," Gabriel pointed out.
"And if you had won, then what?" Adam asked, with the slightest sneer on his lips. "People on the border planets starve because there's no one for them to turn to? They continue to lag behind in technology and medical care in the name of, what? Freedom? Please...that isn't freedom, and after all this time, I would think that you would realize it. What we're doing here..."
"We?" Gabriel interrupted. "We who, exactly?"
"All of us, or I thought so," Adam snapped back. "We failed on Earth. We're out here, now, because we failed, but we have a chance to be part of molding a new society here, of guiding humanity from the ground up in their new home..."
"Is that what you think the Alliance is doing?"
"It's what I think I am doing," Adam said, staring at him. "Governments come and governments go. Politicians rise and they fall, because they are mortal, but we are not, and the system that the Alliance puts in place? A unified system throughout an entire system, reaching all of humanity? How can you not see the potential in that? Julian and Baileigh and Mohinder are in positions of tremendous potential power. The work I have done these past decades, the groundwork I have laid...do you think I've just been amusing myself? And then you--you who I thought I could count on above all the rest of them to see it, to understand--you have to go off and throw yourself in with a bunch of wide-eyed children who cannot see what is good for them."
Gabriel just stared at him, eyes shadowed, but a slightly stunned expression on his face. Adam lapsed into silence, staring back at him, only the rapid pace of his heart and the slightly quickened breath giving away that he was upset.
"So there's a plan?" Gabriel finally asked, voice giving Adam nothing to go off of to gauge his mood.
"Have I taught you nothing?" Adam asked in return, voice like ice. "There is always a plan."
Gabriel moved then, and it was with the predator's grace he'd always had only amplified since he'd fully integrated Suresh's ability into his own, pacing around the table to lean over Adam, hands on the arms of his chair. "And did it occur to you that, I don't know, letting the rest of us in on it might be a good idea? How well has it ever gone when you leave us out?"
Adam tilted his head back to meet his gaze, still angry, still cushioning himself in his hurt, wrapping it around himself like a shield, like some old blanket he hadn't yet figured out how to drop. Gabriel's eyes searched his, looking for something and, as always, seeing a bit more than Adam was fully comfortable with. Honestly, one telepathic empath to deal with was bad enough. Why was he cursed with two again?
"For someone with so much vision, sometimes you're a blind idiot, you know that?" Gabriel informed him with a bit of a smirk, not moving away.
Adam's eyes narrowed. "I'm not the one who went off to fight a war that hadn't the slightest chance of being won, let along being philosophically and pragmatically wrong on so very many levels..."
"Shut up," Gabriel told him, perfectly pleasant, then proved he had learned a thing or two through the centuries of watching Peter handle Adam, by following the words with action, lips settling over his with enough force to give lie to the pleasantness in his voice that said he wasn't as angry as Adam, though whether at having his cause or his loyalty insulted, or being left out of the scheming, or all of the above, Adam could only guess.
Not that he was thinking about it for long, shock at the contact taking his breath away for a moment before he returned it with force of his own, one hand wrapping around Gabriel's wrist on the chair's arm as if he could hold him there by will alone. But Gabriel didn't show any inclination to pull away. If anything, he pressed closer to Adam, his lips molding to the other immortal's before he parted them with ruthless ease, tongue pressing past to tease over the contours and ridges of Adam's mouth. A startled moan caught in Adam's throat as the kiss deepened, as he tilted his head to better meet Gabriel's assault with a parry of his own, trying to fight back from the surprise of the attack and marshal some sort of defense. There was a coiling tension twisting in his core already, fury and hurt transforming into heat and tension of a new sort, and he stroked his fingers up Gabriel's arm, letting them press into the skin of his neck before they wound tight into hair the boy really needed to get cut but which was, at the moment, long enough to get a very nice grip on.
Silky strands tangled between his fingers as he tightened his hold, keeping Gabriel close as he kissed him deeper, tasting the wine from dinner lingering on his tongue, but imagining underneath it all that dark power that had drawn him to the boy so many centuries before. Two sides of a coin, light and dark, and he'd tasted the one, let it be his "salvation," chosen that path, but all the other power swirled in the possibilities, no matter how taming the force of time. Given his present mood, it was no wonder he found himself opening up to that hint of violence in tongue and teeth, his own fingers nearly cruel in their grip, his other hand moving to Gabriel's waist to curl in his shirt, attempting to tug him off balance, pull him into himself.
Gabriel seemed to have other ideas. Adam had forgotten how fast he could be, how strong, when he chose to pull those abilities buried in the recesses of his brain back to the forefront. In the space of a breath, he found himself out of the chair and slammed into the wall, his whole body shaking from the impact, and certain there would be a crack in the plaster that would need explaining, if not an actual dent. His breath knocked out of him, into the space between them, but before he could catch it again, Gabriel was pressed in close, lean body covering him, teeth catching the crooked spot on Adam's lip where his own teeth had a habit of worrying. A spike of pain radiated outward, and the taste of copper danced on his tongue before the wound healed and Gabriel moaned slightly. It was another similarity Adam didn't want to let his mind linger on too closely, to bring into question, to let thought interrupt experience, but Suresh's ability had lent itself to interesting moments through the years and Adam found himself moaning in response to the vibration echoing through the body pressed against his.
It wasn't in him to just submit, though, even when Peter came home in a more predatory mood. The pain in his head from its contact with the wall cleared and he twisted, centuries of training working against strength and with distraction to knock Gabriel's feet out from under him and land them on the floor. He used the other man's body to cushion the fall, hearing the grunt beneath him as Gabriel hit the hard wooden floor with a certain satisfaction as he pressed atop him. Breaking the kiss he lifted his head to search Gabriel's face. Whatever ice he'd encased himself in at dinner had melted at least, to a fire, though there wasn't so much of a definable emotion beyond need. His family. His people. His home. And it had felt threatened, from within. One hand curled tight around Gabriel's wrist, though he was fully aware the boy could throw him across the room with a thought.
The moment strung itself out, tense, and he felt himself stop breathing as those dark eyes punched through the walls he'd put up, and saw him. He could almost feel the other's mind there in his own. While he was very good at keeping stray thoughts to himself, not projecting, they--both Gabriel and Peter--were too strong now for him to keep out if they wanted in. He was in there now, and it scraped against him, raw and wild, old wounds never fully healed, all the things he never said, things maybe time should have taken care of, but somehow didn't. Gabriel's free hand found his hair in a gesture far too tender for Adam to deal with at the moment, one that made him flinch back with a soft growl that broke the moment, a spike of anger flaring in the other man's eyes as well. The fingers followed, tangled, pulled hard, and Adam found his lips back against Gabriel's in a bruising kiss that seemed to be the only way he was managing to communicate at the moment, biting words or violent kisses.
There was a different tenor now, though, for all that the grip in his hair hurt. It was a point of focus, a locus of control, where he could center himself. The mouth under his returned violence for violence, teeth breaking skin that healed as well as that which parted under Adam's attention, but when he pulled his lips free to slide them along Gabriel's neck, to his surprise, the other man tilted his head, neck arching slightly up to meet his lips, and when his fingers roughly pulled Gabriel's shirt free and slid under it, over skin, he was rewarded with a gasp and a moan. He moved with intent after that, not daring to move them from their position on the floor. Clothes were an impediment to be overcome quickly and efficiently, haphazardly finding their way into piles out of their way. When he moved back briefly to remove the last of his, Gabriel watched him, still with those eyes that knew too much, until Adam settled over him, kissing him and they closed once more, blocking out whatever secrets he still held.
The need for care was something unnecessary between them. Where Adam had to be careful with mortal lovers...he smiled slightly as his teeth scored across Gabriel's skin and he watched it heal. Five hundred years and he had yet to cease to be amazed by those like him. The hiss of pleasure, the way the cock pressed against his hip twitched, the dig of the sharpened edges of bone spurs Gabriel had picked up from someone or another slicing across his skin were all the response he needed, and then he was pressing into him, hard and fast, the tiniest cruel glint in his eyes. The scratch of the bone spurs had hurt, after all, and that he was that much closer to the edge because of them was of no matter. Gabriel cried out, pain and pleasure both flashing across his face at the intrusion, eyes flashing to Adam's to catch that smirk.
Adam paused, watching him, holding his gaze for a long moment, and then he started to move. After that, things blurred into heat and movement and friction. His skin tingled from healed wounds, blood still slick between them, and Gabriel was in the same condition. Something feral lurked in the other man's eyes now and again when he met them, that comfortable familiarity he knew from another when they played too hard, and Adam smirked slightly before kissing him, focusing on the differences not the similarities in his lover's flip side. The way he moved under him, the force in his grip, how he let him take, but never submitted, the subtle feel that at any moment Adam could find his throat ripped out. Danger and darkness still lurked under the pale skin, and Adam mapped it with his tongue, teasing it out with each breathless moan, adding his own to the mix, moving faster, pushing him. His skin split again under the rake of those damn claws and he cried out against Gabriel's shoulder, his own meager nails digging in to his ass as he tugged the man's leg up, higher, around him, fingers stroking slowly down the back of his thigh with just enough pressure to make Gabriel twitch against his stomach.
Heat coiled in his core, persistent and familiar and he moaned in both expectation and a need to draw it out, to make this last, but Gabriel was meeting him with equal insistence, his breath uneven and eyes slightly glazed. Adam reached to slide a hand over him, moving as best he could in time with his erratic thrusts, and when the man under him tightened, arching, taut up off of the hardwood floor, spilling over his hand, a triumphant smile touched his lips. It lasted just a moment, brief and fleeting before it pushed him over the edge on its own, shuddering in a flash of pleasure that blazed out along his nerves and left him spent and trembling against Gabriel's body, gasping for breath that came in and out in something that sounded suspiciously like sobs.
Fingers slid up his spine, mercifully sans bone spurs, then Gabriel's palm pressed flat between his shoulder blades, holding him close against him. Spent, Adam couldn't pull away to protest the tenderness this time. After a moment, fingers slid into his hair, nails scraping lightly across his scalp, playing with his hair. He managed the lightest sound of objection, but Gabriel's grip tightened, the reminder coming once more that he really was far, far stronger than Adam.
"You're an idiot," Gabriel repeated, voice just a bit breathless from their exertions, but slightly smug with satiation as well, "If you think that any of us are going anywhere. When are you going to get it through your head that you're stuck with us?"
Adam closed his eyes.
"We've been here more than half your life," Gabriel continued. "Do you think that maybe it might be time to start trusting that?"
"You sound like Peter," Adam complained into his shoulder. "You're not supposed to sound like Peter."
"Peter occasionally has a point," Gabriel said, his voice dry, though even after all this time it sounded as if it pained him to admit it.
Adam snorted, but it was a weak sound, even as he wriggled free of Gabriel's hold, and rolled off of him onto the floor, feeling it's cool smoothness against his skin as he stared at the molded plaster of the ceiling. Gabriel propped himself up on his elbow, looking down at him with serious eyes, though his lips curved in the faintest of smirks.
"Now that you're over your hissy fit, why don't you tell me about the plan?"
Adam shot him a dirty look at the categorization of his mood, but found himself reluctantly returning the smirk, body tingling a bit too much in too many good ways to muster real temper again, and proceeded to outline what he had in mind for the coup of the century.
