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you-dont-look-so-good · 2 years ago

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costume grade

making contribution to the td/dk moment because those guys are my favorites on earth!!! tags/warnings: allergies (dust/feathers), stifles & failed stifles, exhibitionism, voyeurism, themes of parasocial celeb worship, twitter threads (LOL), m*neta is mentioned (sorry) disclaimer: pro-hero era w/ ages in mid 20s - it's said in the first paragraph or so but will mention here for comfort words: 3.8k

With a clumsy and urgent haste, Shouto jerks to the side with his left arm swung in front of his face and right hand still holding the convention’s state-issued uncapped holographic pen. His lungs pull in a sharp gasp.

“eht’nKdt!”

He faces the jittery fan on the other side of his table for half a second of repentant eye contact, then his vision unfocuses against his will and he twists away again.

“eh’Tzsh’u!”

It catches him off guard when he doesn’t feel relief afterward. Outside of extenuating circumstances, he’s usually good for one or two. He’s felt this type of fluttering, surface-level itch before, albeit sparingly, every once in a while if he spends a long enough time in an unswept building and that one time when Izuku was gifted a European cologne for a promotional event and a handler had sprayed it all over their clothes. It’s confusing for the sensation to show up here.

“Sorry, excuse me,” he says, sniffling against the irritation and constructing his best version of a smile. Experience suggests it won’t go away, but he’ll have some time before it becomes unbearable. The person in front of him looks nervous. “You wanted me to sign this, right?”

“Yes, thank you so much!” she says. There’s a large bag swung over her shoulder, and she fiddles with the strap and stares down at the table’s surface with a wobbly smile.

“You’re welcome. Have you been to any of the other booths yet?”

Shouto has practiced making small talk during this part, so that fans don’t stand in silence and get the wrong idea that he’s disinterested instead of at a too-familiar loss for words. He was prepped long ago, back at U.A. during his third year, with a list of prompts to make a starstruck civilian feel more at ease in front of him. Asking how they’re enjoying the convention, complimenting their costuming choice, or displaying simple curiosity goes a long way. He still feels stiff and awkward, but he isn’t the worst at it after several years of practice.

Still, with something else pulling at his focus, Shouto prefers the leeway of silence.

“Yes I have! We’re doing lots of shopping today,” the fan says, and Shouto scrawls out his signature and a short, encouraging message. He listens as she describes the merchandise being sold a few rooms over, doing his best to take a mental note of which collectables Izuku might like. Once he’s done with autographs, maybe he can change clothes and pick some up before he leaves.

He’d initially been grateful that the organizers had assigned him Hawks’s outfit to wear for the collaboration swap event. It’s much more modest than some of the other options and not too difficult to move around in, despite the bulk. Now, he’s starting to reconsider his luck.

Shouto manages to slide the laminated poster back to its owner before he needs to duck away and—

“hhH’EHTsh’iu!”

When he comes up, a bustle of red fluff swirls around his shoulders and falls on the table in front of him.

“Bless you,” the fan says. “You’re not getting sick from all the activity this week, I hope?”

“No, I’m all right,” Shouto answers after a moment, sniffling fiercely against the itch to keep himself composed. “I wouldn’t have come if I was unwell.”

“Okay, good! Glad to hear it!” she says as she slips the poster into a large messenger bag and waves goodbye. “Take care of yourself, Shouto-san!”

“You too,” Shouto says politely. He watches her walk away for just a moment until the next patron is brought forward, dressed in plain civilian clothing and a hat with Shouto’s boyfriend’s name on it. He can’t help smiling a little. Deku fans are always extra nice to him.

And they’re everywhere, but Shouto never feels less proud when he sees one.

“I’m so happy to meet you,” the fan says with a friendly, beaming smile as he approaches. “You look great!”

Does he? Fuyumi told him once that light brown didn’t flatter his coloring well. It’s always been difficult to figure out how to match both sides.

“Thank you,” Shouto says anyway. He sniffles. “I like your hat.”

“So do I,” the fan says, smiling wider. “I bought it at last year’s show! I heard he’s selling more colors this time, but I’m not sure which one to get.”

“He was really excited about the blue one that says ‘hat’ on the front,” Shouto says. “He wore a lot of stuff like that in high school. I don’t know if they’ll sell a lot, but I think he’d be happy to see someone in it.”

“Oh, wow,” the fan responds. “I didn’t know that! Can I tell people? That’s awesome trivia.”

“Sure,” Shouto answers. It probably isn’t a secret – he’s sure there are old photos of the entire class out there somewhere.

“I’ll share it with a picture of us for proof that it was you who told me,” the fan says. “Oh! I know! Can I take a picture of you wearing this one? Wait, can you sign it for me first, though?”

“Sure,” Shouto says again. “What’s your name?”

“Nazomi,” the fan says, removing the hat and holding it out to Shouto with both hands. “Can you write it in English?”

Shouto nods and lifts his hands to accept the item, but lets go when he feels the crest of the itching along the bridge of his nose.

“H-hold on—” he says, then swivels to face the wall as he gasps into the back of his wrist. “hhNXst-!”

“Oh, are you–”

Despite him holding his breath in resistance, Shouto’s body interrupts Nazomi a second time—

“hhDHTsh! hd’IHshh’iu!”

—and then a third.

It takes him a second to recover, but letting that last sneeze escape did a good enough job of devolving the itch from a wildfire down to a spark. He sniffles again, thicker than before, and frowns.

“Are you alright, Shouto-san?” Nazomi tries again.

“Yes,” Shouto promises. He really is, aside from the incessant buzzing inside his face. It isn’t going to go away, so he may as well push forward. “I’m okay. Sorry.”

The felt tip of the pen scratches against the canvas fibers as he writes Nazomi’s message on the front of the hat, then holds it back out to him for approval.

“Thank you!” Nazomi says and pulls out his phone. Using the camera screen as a mirror, Shouto positions the hat so that his signature is displayed clearly. He observes Nazomi for guidance on how to pose, watching him hold his fingers up in a peace sign.

Shouto is about to follow his lead when Nazomi starts pressing the screen rapidly, taking a series of active, blurry pictures as he grins and waves his peace sign up and down. Then, as though he hadn’t just taken a dozen selfies of the two of them, he says, “Perfect! Ready?”

The excitement creates enough wind to blow a couple more cheap feathers off of Shouto’s costume, their structures breaking apart and sending fuzzy threads amok.

It may be from the sight of them or just coincidence, but either way Shouto needs to sneeze again.

“No, one second—” he admits breathlessly, then holds a hand in front of his face as a wobbly shield and pitches forward. “hhGHTsh’u!”

When he opens his eyes, he notices Nazomi’s expectant and curious gaze upon him through the camera. Shouto wipes at the corner of his right eye, careful not to use too much pressure because if he starts rubbing at his face, he knows it will feel next to impossible to stop. At least his nose isn’t visibly running.

“Okay. Sorry,” Shouto says, leaning forward over the table so that his posture is level with Nazomi’s. “I’m ready.” He’s able to hold off sniffling until his photo is captured and his fan is sliding the phone back into his pocket.

“It’s great! We look great!” Nazomi says with another bow as Shouto passes the hat back to him. He caps it onto his head and says, “I’m gonna hit up the Deku merch now. Hopefully I’ll be tricked out the next time you see me!”

“I hope so too,” Shouto says. “Say hi for me if you run into him, okay?”

“Wow,” Nazomi breathes.

Sometimes their fans get excited when Shouto asks for small favors like that. Izuku had done it first, and Shouto was confused when a stranger appeared before him and told him that Deku had a message for him. Izuku later explained that those things can make their fans feel included in something special, humanizing them so that their hero status doesn’t make them seem so distant and unapproachable. Shouto is continually surprised at how easy it is to make the fans so happy.

“I will!” Nazomi says before he heads off. “Feel better, Shouto-san! Thank you again!”

The others waiting in line had definitely heard him, and Shouto wonders whether he should try insisting that he isn’t sick so people don’t worry so much. He’d probably have to confess to the effect of the feathers, though, and that might not be so good either – they’d make him take them off, which would ruin the point of the entire costume. He’d just be a man in a brown jacket and brown pants, and that wouldn't be very interesting.

He doesn’t have time to consider any plans in solving his conundrum before the next fan is brought forward, this time with a half dozen artifacts for him to sign, and Shouto worries about accidentally sneezing on them for the several minutes it takes to sign and discuss each one. He eventually surrenders and wipes his nose on his own sleeve to make sure he keeps everything else clean. He uses the same sleeve moments later to press against the side of his nose and quell any unfortunate urges.

It doesn’t go well. Holding back a sneeze rarely does. Unless a situation is dire, he doesn’t usually bother, and Shouto doesn’t have enough practice to pull it off successfully – especially when he’s this badly irritated by something he can’t get away from. He knows that if he touches his nose too much it’s going to become dry and pink, which will either blemish his photos or necessitate a makeup break, which he doubts will do anything but exacerbate the problem. He wonders briefly whether this is happening because something is wrong with him, or if sitting in a whirlwind of scratchy, fibrous fluff would make anyone sneeze in such a short amount of time.

Before long, sniffling stops cutting it and Shouto’s diction is beginning to blur with congestion. He doesn’t mention it unless one of his fans brings it up first, but most of them do, so he gets used to apologizing.

One person brings over a package of tissues, which Shouto thinks they want him to sign until he turns it over and sees Grape Juice winking at him.

“No, it’s for you!” they correct. “It sounds like you need them. I actually have a couple of new posters I wanted to ask about, though…”

Once they’re gone, Shouto considers the branding and realizes why Mineta must have signed off on a deal with Kleenex. That’s unpleasant to think about, but he’s desperate and the material inside is the same, so he blows his nose as politely as possible when he gets a moment between meetings. At least there’s a trash can by his feet.

Nearly an hour goes by, and Shouto is considering asking for a break to clean himself up. The meet-and-greet line stalls, and he wonders whether he’d spoken aloud as he watches one of the handlers pull the velvet rope in front of his table and hold a hand up to indicate that his booth is closed for now.

Only a few of them start to disperse. The rest begin waving at something behind him, so Shouto turns around, too.

“Hi!” Izuku says brightly, just to Shouto at first, then tips his chin up and waves widely to the crowd in his breathtaking Creati costume duplicate. “Hi, everyone! Thank you all for coming! Just saying hello, we’ll be with you again shortly, don’t worry!”

“Izuku,” Shouto says. He sniffles and moves his head to see him better, awestruck at the magnificence of his boyfriend's build in the promotional outfit. Shouto feels a welcome pressure as Izuku puts his hands on the thick material of his jacket and rubs the side of his arm.

“Hey, baby,” Izuku says just to him, softly, making the space between them feel private despite the exposed nature of their atmosphere. “Are you okay? Everyone’s saying you’re sick.”

Oh, shit.

There really is no winning. He forgot how fast word can travel at these things – there are reporters everywhere and people are probably talking about every last detail of the event on social media. Is that why someone gave him those tissues? Were they sent by Mineta himself?

Shouto is used to ignoring whatever eyes and cameras are trying to capture a glimpse of him, and Izuku flusters easily but is getting the hang of it, too. Thinking about it too hard makes the publicity uncomfortable, but they’re good at distracting each other without really trying. They weren’t supposed to see each other for a few more hours, and the unexpected interlude feels like a salve.

Izuku pulls out the empty chair at Shouto’s table once Shouto has gestured for him to sit down. They angle themselves toward one another without having to move the chairs or turn their backs to the distant crowd. Izuku leans forward even further, with an elbow resting on the table and his head tilted sideways.

“No,” Shouto says, trusting Izuku to believe him. “I’m not sick.”

“I didn’t think so,” Izuku says. “You seemed fine this morning, and during the photo shoot, too. Usually it doesn’t hit this quickly for you when you do come down with something, but you don’t really look good right now – did something happen?”

“It’s the feathers on these replacement wings.” Shouto blinks hard and sniffles some more, trying not to jostle them. There are sticky shreds of crimson caught along the fabric of his jacket and probably in his hair, although he can’t confirm that part. The camera screens are always too far away for him to see that kind of detail. “I’m just – I keep sneezing.”

“Oh, I see…” Izuku frowns and his eyebrows curve in sympathy as he reaches out to touch the wings of Shouto’s outfit, rubbing a couple of the feathers between his fingers and then inspecting his fingertips. “Whoa, no wonder. I think these must have been sitting in the wardrobe closet for a while, they’re really dusty!”

That does it. Shouto’s dam breaks and he inhales in a sharp staccato, bending forward with an arm at his face to spare Izuku’s bare chest.

“EHT’dzshh!”

“Bless you!”

“EDT’dtsh’u! Sorry, it’s–”

“Bless you!”

“–it’s been like that since I got here. Thank you.” He presses on the side of his nose, just briefly, to keep himself under control, but a third round tumbles out anyway. “ht’CHshh’iu!”

“Bless you, Shouto, jeez…” Izuku smiles a little, then plucks a couple of stray feathers from Shouto’s jacket, careful to keep them contained in his palm so they don’t float in the air. “You weren’t kidding, were you?”

“No,” Shouto says. He tries breathing through his nose and produces a humiliating wet and strangled sound as it struggles for airflow. “I feel bad for the fans. They didn’t buy tickets to watch me have an allergy attack.”

Izuku chuckles behind his hand, using the other one to pass him a tissue. “You’d be surprised.”

He pulls his phone out of… somewhere, Shouto can’t imagine where he’d be keeping it with his clothing so scant, and moves in closer. He holds it out to Shouto to hand it off.

“hhH’GZSHh’iu!” Shouto rocks forward and feels Izuku’s hand on his spine. He’s able to use the tissue this time, sniffling in the aftermath with the sheet wrinkled into a ball and held underneath his nose. Finally feeling safe enough, he leans in and takes the phone with his free hand.

“Bless you.” Izuku rubs his back and sets his chin close to Shouto’s shoulder so they can read together. “Here, look at your hashtag– no, not your account tag, baby, they’re talking about you, not to you. It’s the pound– yeah. Yeah, there you go, found it. See? They’re being really nice!”

The first account he sees is Nazomi’s, with a series of photos from the convention. Shouto scrolls until he sees a shot of the two of them, with their faces in focus and the background a haze of fuzzy shapes. Shouto’s expression is blank, waiting for a cue, and Nazomi is holding his blurry hand in the air. The photo is captioned: “he had to sneeze in this one ❤️🤍🤧”

That’s unflattering, but at least he looks like himself. Shouto sniffs and clicks on the picture.

↳ @profanh3ro: Good pix as always. Is he ok?

↳ @Nazomiii: he said so! i hope so! we talked for a bit. longer post later! ��

↳ @profanh3ro: Ok

He clicks the back button and reviews a few of the other posts under his name. There are some more pictures, mostly without much commentary, but only a few are from the booth. Most of them are photos of his merchandise and other promotional materials from the agency, and others are far-away shots taken of him from further back in the line.

@kikodaily: Waiting to meet #proheroshouto. Seems like he’s getting sick?

↳ @jezjob: Maybe that’s why they have him wearing the Hawks parka? Lol

@S0BAL0VE: #proheroshouto came to convention even with a bad cold 😭 We don’t deserve him

@IchikaBibo: got #proheroshouto ’s autograph and he told me to buy his bf’s merch

↳ @u_sagi: He banking on Deku paycheck Shout barely licenses his own stuff

↳ @IchikaBibo: there’s always #bootlegs

↳ @u_sagi: He said he buys bootlegs sometimes #donttellnobody

↳ @IchikaBibo: NO 💀💀

@kengwuin: FINALLY GOT MY ART TOUCHED BY #PROHEROSHOUTO!!!!! he sneezed like 10 times while signing the margins

↳ @may1112day: now you prolly have his dna…

↳ @IchikaBibo: U are being a creep. stop it

@karubagel: um @Shouto why is ur line the longest here #proheroshouto #shouto

↳ @redestiny: ik right i didn’t think he would be chatty but its worth it

↳ @karubagel: did u meet him yet??

↳ @redestiny: yeah he’s rly nice @Shouto #proheroshouto

↳ @karubagel: UGH I WILL WAIT FOREVER THEN

↳ @IchikaBibo: guys dont @ him he wont see it just use hash

@queenUrav1212: Off to #dynabooth after #proheroshouto. He seems miserable. I hope he goes on break soon.

↳ @S0BAL0VE: 🥺Poor thing lol his voice was all messed up too

@so0bachan: Waiting in back of #proheroshouto line. Is it weird I want to see him sneeze 😣

↳ @1200going: Yes it is he’s only human

↳ @jtopspin: Not weird. It’s kind of like a rite of passage

↳ @1200going: Yea yea fangirl

@promiseme4: Tell me why this guy looks so good in #Hawks costume

↳ @c0fffeecan: i wouldn’t mind catching a cold from him 🤤

↳ @promiseme4: 😂🤣🤣

@b1ig_percent__: Finishing at merch and off to get autos!! #proheroshouto is first

↳ @Chargebolt ✅: @big_percent__ i dare you to give him these [photo]

↳ @b1ig_percent__: @Chargebolt Where??????????

↳ @core444: WHY IS CHARGEBOLT IN THE SHOUTO TAG

↳ @kumakillz: what r these

↳ @sonijob12: chargebolt can you say happy birthday to me my birthday is tomorrow

↳ @Chargebolt ✅: @b1ig_percent__ get them free at gj merch booth 🥳😜

↳ @Chargebolt ✅: @core444 @kumakillz get them free at gj merch booth! 👀💟💎

↳ @Chargebolt ✅: @sonijob12 happy birthday! 🎂🖤⚡

There’s a lot of excitement directed toward Kaminari underneath that one, and Shouto figures he’s seen enough to get the gist of it. Social media may as well be a landmine and always makes him feel weird. It’s hard to predict fan behavior, and Shouto doesn’t check it without prompting from his more digitally-active colleagues or friends. That must be where the information came from this time, because Izuku tends to tuck his phone away during events.

Shouto clicks off the screen and hands it back to Izuku, who smiles at him and says, “That’s basically the gist of it. Nobody’s upset, though! And I’m sure you’ll feel better after you change into something else this afternoon, and then they’ll all stop worrying. Do you think wearing a mask might help? Or taking an antihistamine? Not the kind that makes you drowsy, just one of the regular short-acting ones, to get you through the rest of the event.”

With another tissue tented over his nose, Shouto says, “Hawks doesn’t wear a mask – so it wouldn’t make sense, would it?”

“No, but he also doesn’t, um…”

“Have a sneezing fit in public for half an hour. …Probably,” Shouto concedes.

He actually doesn’t know whether that’s true or not. But the promotion is more about appearances than authenticity, and there’s no clearer display that someone might be ill and contagious than an out-of-place medical mask, even if it might give him a little relief.

“Medication might help, though,” Shouto decides, then looks over toward the edge of the booth where a handler is murmuring something into a headset. “I’ll see if the staff can find some.”

“Oh, no! No, you don’t have to— um– there’s definitely a bunch of random meds in the dressing room backstage,” Izuku says. He stands up and holds his hand out for Shouto to take. “We’ll just have a break until it kicks in, okay? It’ll give you more privacy anyway.”

“Okay,” Shouto says. He hadn’t thought about the dressing room. For some reason he’d always assumed it was off-limits when he was scheduled to be on the floor, but it makes sense that it could act as a resting place in case of emergency.

He stands to the side while Izuku talks to the handler, gesturing casually and smiling like the sun as he updates her on their plan. Shouto is positive that he could have anything he asked for with a smile like that, which is also how Shouto had gotten pulled into this event in the first place.

They both wave to any fans who are still watching them, and Izuku calls out, “Just taking a break! We’ll be right back!”

He pulls on Shouto, who follows him into the backstage hall without hesitation. It’s impossible not to.

“Okay, let’s—”

“hEH - hh - DZSHH’U!”

“Oh! Bless you!”

Something about being behind a closed door pushes his body toward the uninhibited. It’s a little more relieving, but his throat is starting to feel scraped up.

“Thank you,” Shouto says in a muffled echo behind his hand as he scrambles to retrieve another tissue. Izuku waits for him while he blows his nose.

“The room’s just this way,” Izuku says. “Let’s get you out of those wings.”

#other people's fics #snzfic 😋#i dont go here but this was 👌🏾

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you-dont-look-so-good · 2 years ago

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repeat occasion

yes my tr/gun au strikes again take it or leave it!!! tags/warnings: sneeze fetish romance :), char w kink you'll never guess who, allergy stuff & other stuff, connecting scenes, pre-relationship lots of flirting, some talk about money and class disparity, m//eryl is there for a sec words: 4k (sorry!!!)

It’s impossible not to laser focus on Nicholas at 9am in the elevator, when he grabs onto the railing behind him and abruptly bends in half.

“huhiIHZSHyu!”

His cadence is strong and definite as though he were trying to rush it out, and the mirrors lining the walls offer Vash an opportunity to watch his expression despite Nicholas angling away from him. His dark eyebrows crumple with displeasure as he recovers, and he moves his nose back and forth against his sleeve before resurfacing.

Just as abruptly, Vash forgets all ounces of their conversation. With nervous enthusiasm, he says “bless you!” and matches the volume out of habit.

“Thanks,” Nicholas mutters, then huffs self-consciously with a roll of his shoulders. “It’s your creepy brother’s cologne, man. Must’ve sneezed in front of him at least six times. He wasn’t as nice about it as you are.”

Maybe Vash will start attending those staff meetings after all.

“I’m sorry about him,” Vash says, which is a common sentiment on the hotel campus, despite his efforts to convince Nai to treat their staff with more of the compassion Vash knows he holds somewhere in his bones. Perhaps they’re both too headstrong. “Does it bother you that much? I can try to get him to stop wearing it.”

“It’s not…” Nicholas falters, then freezes with a silent gasp. “–IHSZHyu! Not that serious. Don’t worry about it, Blondie.”

“Okay,” Vash replies placatingly. “Bless you.”

“Thanks.” There’s a deep, dry sniff, and then Nicholas clears his throat. “I’ll try to split before morning next time, so he can’t harass me with all his weird orders when he’s freshly doused in the stuff. ’Least I’m off the clock now, huh?”

“Nai really likes smelling expensive,” Vash explains contemplatively. He wonders if anyone else has ever had a reaction to Nai’s perfume like that before.

Or if…

“Does that usually happen to you?”

It’s an appropriate question. People love small talk, and so does Vash, and they’re more likely to relax with him when he asks about their quirks or shares one of his.

Nicholas says, “I might just be allergic to money,” which doesn’t give as much detail as Vash would have liked, but he takes the answer with a friendly laugh and a flap of his hand.

“Yeah, well! I guess we all have our—”

“huh’IEDSHyu!”

“Bless you!”

“Shit. Sorry. It doesn’t usually last this long.” A well of moisture sits just above his waterline, and Nicholas rubs it away when he slides his fingers from the outer corners of his eyes all the way toward the bridge of his nose and pinches between his eyebrows. “Don’t worry about it, alright? I know you wanna.”

“I own the resort, too, technically,” Vash states with hesitant remorse, hoping it’ll put Nicholas at ease enough to be worth the awkwardness of the reminder. “And— we’re friends, Wolfwood. I want to make sure you’re comfortable.”

“I’m good,” Nicholas says immediately, lighter but without any buoyancy. He’s nervous.

The elevator stops on floor seven because a guest apparently needs to get in and ride down with them to the lobby. Vash waves at them and wishes them a good morning, but they only nod back, and then Nicholas extends his arm to hold open the sliding door.

“I’ll catch you later, Blondie, yeah?” he says.

“Oh, uh, this isn’t the…”

Nicholas staggers out into the hall with both hands in his pockets. Vash can’t tell whether he got off early due to misguided offense at their power differential or simply as a flustered mistake.

Everything’s normal when they see each other two days later and hang out between shifts. Most of the workers tend to avoid Vash when they find out he’s not just a lounge musician, but Nicholas finds ways to stick to him.

“Take me to breakfast. I know you eat free,” he says one morning, when he’s coming off of a night shift and beautifully wrinkled with manic exhaustion.

“Are you still moping about that? Drink this and get your mind off of it or you’ll break my heart,” he demands sardonically when one of Nai’s trusted executives gets arrested for fraud.

“You suck at shuffling. Just sit with me and look pretty or all my customers are gonna leave,” he requests with a smile after Vash gets lost in the casino. Nicholas positions Vash humbly behind the center card table where he works, promising to escort him back to his suite eventually.

“Come on! Show me how to play something. The place is empty. I bet I can learn real fast,” he asks before the indoor restaurant opens, tugging on Vash’s arm with playful, pleading eyes and the sharpest, sweetest grin. Vash doesn’t know whether he’s serious or not until Nicholas slides on the bench beside him and knocks their fingers together without grace.

Nicholas is polarizing. Some staff eat him up and others spit him out, and he seems to enjoy interacting with the latter the most. He pulls Vash with him to harass Meryl at the concierge desk, and invites himself to her tourism specialty events with Vash as his plus one. She says she doesn’t like it, but she’s always loved Vash somehow and Nicholas knows how to use him as a proper weapon against her.

She never says no, which means she must enjoy Nicholas at least a little. She could always just take Vash by himself.

They’re tagging along to a museum opening in town when he finally hears Nicholas sneeze again.

“I can’t accurately describe these places to our guests if I haven’t been there myself,” Meryl is explaining on the bus ride over, which is supposed to take between fifteen and forty-five minutes. Public transportation isn’t great on the island. The resort patrons can afford cabs or the shuttle, so it doesn’t usually matter, but Vash doesn’t have anything to do today and he hates to waste the driver’s time.

He’d offered to pay for Nicholas and Meryl to take a car there, but both of them had refused and Vash didn’t push it because he’s never gotten to ride the bus with friends before.

“Yeah, but how much is there to say about a place that shows off a bunch of wooden barrels?” Nicholas asks from the bench ahead of them, perched on his knees and leaning dangerously over the backrest. He reaches forward to try and snatch the itinerary from Meryl’s lap and gets smacked on the hand.

“They’re wine presses, and… and aren’t you supposed to be a bartender?” Meryl crosses her arms and accidentally bumps elbows with Vash. “Maybe you could stand to take some information from the exhibits. Why don’t you try and learn something?”

“Well,” Nicholas replies with an exaggerated slump, “because it sounds boring.”

“Nobody’s making you go to this, Wolfwood.” Meryl stares out the window, insulted, until her eyes sharpen and her brow rises. “In fact, you were the one begging me to let you come!”

“There might be free wine,” he says provocatively. “And Needlehead was going. I didn’t wanna be left out.”

“Just because you have a crush on Vash doesn’t mean you need to drag me and my research into it,” Meryl says.

Instead of denying or deflecting, Nicholas says, “He doesn’t mind, do you, Blondie?”

Vash musters the will to psychologically tenderize his stony muscles as Nicholas dips his gaze down to meet his eyes.

All Vash can come up with is, “The museum might be interesting.”

“Ever the optimist, aren’t ya,” Nicholas says.

“…And I think our guests love things like that, so I’m glad they decided to give us a free tour.”

“I’m sure you’ll find some way to keep each other awake,” Meryl says. She rolls her eyes and ends the argument when she takes her phone out of her bag, and Vash watches her earrings swing back and forth in tune with the wobble of the island’s uneven roads.

As it turns out, both Meryl and Nicholas are correct in their predictions. Vash loves a good compromise.

Poor Nicholas is bored instantly, and Vash can’t keep his attention on the docent’s complicated lectures either. His lids start to become heavy until he hears Nicholas sniffling next to him in light, staccato sweeps, and then Vash wakes up all over and stares straight ahead, hoping the others will believe he’s suddenly become incredibly interested on the metallic contraption in front of him.

Whatever their guide is saying may as well be in an interdimensional foreign language. If Meryl tries to talk to him about the tour later, he’s toast.

The group’s footsteps clack on the brick floors of the museum as they move into the next chamber, asking friendly questions that are difficult to hear. Nicholas loiters, walking slowly, and Vash optimistically lags behind in case he—

“HUHGDZSH’eu!”

Dreams do come true.

“Jesus,” Nicholas says afterward on a sigh as he unfolds himself. “You ever feel it in your abs when you do that?”

Vash is pretty sure he says something back before they catch up with everybody else, but his memory is overwritten by the copied reprise of the sound on prickling repeat in his brain until he makes it home.

Despite all of the time they spend together, Vash is fortunate to hear one sneeze a week.

It’s more than enough, and would be even if he’d only heard it once in his life – just knowing that’s how Nicholas sounds is enough for Vash. Being with Nicholas at all is more than enough for Vash.

After a while, Nicholas touches him differently. He’s always been physically generous, unafraid to storm whoever’s personal space whether the people around him seem happy with it or not, as though his own body is a natural instrument of communication. It’s enviable, sort of, if not a little inconsiderate sometimes, especially when people like Meryl try to shove him away and he insists on hooking himself around her for antagonistic emphasis.

But he starts touching Vash outside of conversation after a while, more gently and without excuses. Vash is inclined to resist for Nicholas’s own good, but he doesn’t, and sometimes scolds himself for the selfishness of it all.

Regardless, the normalcy of Nicholas’s hands on him is why Vash doesn’t get any alarm bells when Nicholas headily claps his shoulder in the hallway on a Friday afternoon. It takes a second, but Vash nearly jumps when he realizes what’s going on.

Nicholas bundles the fabric of Vash’s shirt in his fist, then angles to the side and wrenches toward his arm with a pronounced “EHdIZSSH’u!”

“Oh – bless you,” Vash manages. He keeps himself balanced in case too much enthusiasm will scare Nicholas away from doing that again.

As he lifts his hand and rights his posture, Nicholas wrinkles his nose around an irritated sniff. Vash doesn’t look away.

“Somethin’ in the air,” Nicholas explains, waving his other hand around and then patting Vash on the shoulder. “Allergies maybe. Thanks.”

It’s the first time Nicholas has referred to allergies in plural, at least in front of Vash – he’d admitted to being bothered by some nebulous, unpredictable irritant months ago, and Vash wonders whether Nicholas has recently figured out a pattern, come to terms with having hay fever in a general sense, or lied to Vash in the first place.

He probably doesn’t remember, so Vash refrains from indulging with an ask. His life goes on.

Vash has long been familiarized with his brother’s choice of fragrance, but it’s Nicholas who prompts him to realize that at some point, he must have gone entirely blind to it.

“The big boss disgracing himself with a visit to the first floor? I don’t believe it,” he says to the front desk, where Meryl is growling and clicking at a computer like crazy. She’s by herself this morning, her usual workspace looking lonely and sad across the lobby while she takes over check-in.

“This isn’t what I went to school for,” she’s muttering to herself, ignoring both Vash and Nicholas while she tries to get orientation videos set up to train one of the new hires.

“Huh?” Vash asks as he looks around the lobby for a sign of Nai, whose schedule rarely has allotments to speak with any guest-facing staff or even visit their stations. “I don’t see him anywhere.”

“I’m sure he’s long gone by now,” Nicholas says, “but I can smell the bastard.” He taps on the top of Meryl’s monitor and says, “Seriously, that doesn’t drive you fuckin’ insane?”

“I don’t have time for this, guys,” she says. “This program’s stalled and nothing I do is working. What are you talking about?”

In accidental demonstration, Nicholas uses Vash as a steadying pole and holds onto his arm, bending at the waist behind him instead of away this time.

“huhH’EZSH’YU!” It jostles Vash as a welcome casualty, and he feels Nicholas tense with a second, rhythmic inhale just before he’s hit again. “hhdtEHSHH’yue!”

“Wolfwood’s allergic to Nai’s cologne,” Vash discloses with a cruel, secret thrill in his gut. Meryl smiles like it’s funny.

“Hm,” she replies, pausing to sniff the air. “It’s Clive Christian, I think – really big twenty years ago. My friends’ dads used to wear it all the time. Didn’t yours?”

“No,” Nicholas answers shortly with a damp glare. “Move over, lemme fix your computer.”

He swings himself behind the counter, and Vash follows to get a look at the action.

“No! Stop it, you’re going to mess it up!” Meryl protests as Nicholas smoothly slides her rolling chair to the side and hunches himself over the desk. “I mean it, what— Hey. Oh. Oh, my god, Wolfwood. How did you get that to unfreeze so fast?”

“Magic touch, little lady,” he says with a heavy, fierce sniffle. He twists to the side. “HUH’ISSCHue!”

“…Bless you,” Meryl says, and Vash tentatively rests a comforting hand on Nicholas’s shoulder.

“Uh-huh,” Nicholas says with a blunt, vocal exhale as he waves his hand, gesturing vaguely. “Hey, grab me a…”

Brilliantly, Meryl knows to hand him the box of tissues from her side of the counter.

“ …Yeah,” Nicholas says, all breath and no voice. He mumbles a curse, pulls out a sheet immediately and crushes it to his nose. “iihTZSHHiuh!”

“Jeez.” Meryl passes him another tissue while he’s still buried in the first one. “That’s interesting. It doesn’t bother me or Vash at all.”

“Quit bragging,” Nicholas says as tosses his used tissue and then accepts the new one from her, holding it expectantly near his face. “It’s stronger back… hdISSHyu! …back here.”

“Did he talk to you?” Vash asks, then looks down at Nicholas with his tented kleenex and says, “Bless you.”

“Um, yeah, for a few minutes,” Meryl answers. “Just some stuff about the new girl, though. Nothing weird.”

“It is weird,” Vash disagrees, “that he was here at all. Wolfwood is right. He doesn’t usually come down to the first floor.”

The insistent squish-click of Nicholas rubbing his nose back and forth through the tissue has Vash really wishing they weren’t talking about his brother right now.

After squeezing his nose and pulling downward to try and clean himself up, Nicholas says, “Heaven forbid he mingle with the commoners,” and sounds exquisitely stuffed up, all pinched and congested to the point of distorting half his consonants. It’s so cute on him. Vash crosses his legs.

“He’s probably just trying to keep me on my toes,” Meryl dismisses as she scoots her chair closer to the screen, scanning Nicholas as he sniffles over and over and types something into a command bar and breathes through his mouth. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Nicholas grunts, then pushes himself up from the desk and straightens his back. “Try it now. You’re welcome, college girl.”

Frowning, Meryl reopens the training program that Knives had paid thousands to produce specifically for the resort. She clicks through some of the rubrics as Nicholas walks a few steps down and blows his nose.

Vash is careful to keep his eyes on the screen and not on Nicholas, whose shoulders must be scrunching up with the effort it’s taking to try and get his head clear. He pretends to understand what’s going on with the computer for a couple of seconds before giving up and asking, “…Is it working?”

“It… is, actually,” Meryl says. She throws her voice toward Nicholas and says, “How did you do that?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Seriously. I want to know in case it gets messed up again. Have you worked in IT?”

“Hell no.” Nicholas sniffles and wavers back over, grumbling as he presses up against his nose so hard that there’s a wrinkle across the bridge, right above the tip. He clears his throat. “Just leave it like that though, and it won’t get all glitchy again.”

Meryl sighs. “Fine. But don’t you think—”

“huhEHDSHh’iu!”

“Bless—”

“hhJSHhUH! Fuck. I gotta get out of here,” Nicholas announces. “Let’s hold off on the interview.” He swipes the tissue under his nose, then throws it out a moment too soon. He ducks into his arm. “hehh’IEHZSHuh!”

“Okay. Good idea,” Meryl says as she scrutinizes him, and Vash rushes to his side. “But come over again when you have your lungs back and teach me how to troubleshoot.”

The grunt Nicholas hums in reply is difficult to decipher.

“Let’s get you some fresh air,” Vash adds. “See you later, Meryl, okay?”

“Yup,” Meryl says, flat and distracted and already nodding back to her screen. “See ya.”

Careful to choose a path with some privacy, Vash guides Nicholas through the back rooms with a hand on his back, his mind set on one of the outdoor cocktail bars that doesn’t open until noon.

It’s a complicated maze of hallways, but Nicholas is mostly compliant. He knows his way around the place, too.

“Sorry again,” Vash says once they’re outside, when Nicholas is leaning against the sandy edge of the empty cabana and messing with his face. “I didn’t know it was this bad.”

“Last time,” Nicholas says thickly, “I think it lasted at least ten minutes after I ditched you. So don’t feel like you gotta stick around for the show.”

“Ten minutes?” Vash repeats. He wants to say That’s it? but understands the risk of sounding disappointed, and appreciates that ten minutes of sneezing nonstop is afflictive and embarrassing. Shame on him for wishing it could last even longer than that.

“It lingers sometimes,” Nicholas explains with the back of his wrist pressed against his nose. He sniffles and grasps the whole of it with one of the tissues he’d snagged on the way over, enticingly wiggling it back and forth. “Pretty sure it ain’t dangerous or anything, just makes me sneeze like crazy.”

“Yeah,” Vash agrees with a dry, dry mouth. Nicholas is likely too preoccupied to notice the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows.

It would be wonderful if he weren’t so astounded and nervous. Rarely does Vash feel this way around Nicholas, who brings out a boldness in him that he doesn’t get with most people he meets. Sometimes it feels like they’re a pair of trapeze artists, throwing and catching one other with the kind of unteachable, inherent synchronicity you can never seem to find when you’re looking.

Nicholas must feel it too. Eventually, they’ll cross the threshold and talk about it.

He gives Vash a fraction of something else to think about after he blows his nose and says, “You know Shortie was protecting you back there, right?”

It’s really messed up how unabashed he is with eye contact while holding a tissue to his face like that. Vash has to look at him to have a conversation while Nicholas massages his nose, and it’s just as overwhelming as staring into the sun.

“No,” Vash answers. “Why would she do that?”

“For one? Your brother was definitely being weird and trying to intimidate everyone. He’s always a freak on the first floor,” Nicholas says. He sniffles in that squeaky way that moves the congestion around but doesn’t get any air through, which makes him cough delicately into the tissue he’s holding. “But she knew saying that would make you go up there and yell at him.”

“Of course I would,” Vash says right away. “He’s the owner; he can’t mistreat the workers.”

“It’s not worth getting in a fight over, man,” Nicholas says. “He’s not around often enough.”

“Sounds more like she’s protecting him.”

“I guess, but she doesn’t wanna upset you.”

Nicholas coughs again, light and itchy to imply that having a runny nose has irritated his throat, and then he pulls a loose, half-smoked cigarette from his pocket. He stuffs the disheveled tissue there to replace it, then lights himself up and inhales.

Smoke falls out of him as he says, “Don’t pout.” He clears his throat after he inhales a second time. “You’ve never had a boss before.”

“You don’t know that,” Vash says while he stares.

“C’mon,” Nicholas says, and he’s smiling.

“Okay,” Vash yields. “So?”

“So they’re all like that, Blondie,” Nicholas tells him. “Especially the rich ones. They’re maniacs. She’s got an old man manager so she doesn’t have to deal with him most of the time, but if you get all worked up about her then he might start paying her more attention.”

And she doesn’t want that – nobody does.

“Why are you telling me, then?” Vash asks.

“I don’t like when you’re in the dark,” Nicholas says. “I keep wonderin’ how long it’ll take ’til you see through me. Might as well be honest and save myself the hassle, too. Hold this.”

Vash takes the cigarette from him without thinking. He stares at the embers while Nicholas retrieves his tissue and bends downward his chest to blow his nose with both hands, then grimaces as he comes back up for air.

“That usually helps,” he complains, then plucks his cigarette from Vash as he attempts an unproductive, sticky breath through his swollen sinuses. Vash visualizes the turning of wheels in his head as Nicholas squints at himself in thought.

“Come upstairs and use my shower,” Vash volunteers. “It’s really nice and you’ll feel better if you wash everything out of your hair.”

Nicholas rolls his eyes. “Be serious, Blondie.”

“I am serious!”

“Okay. You come with me, then.”

Vash nearly sputters. “You be serious.”

“I’m always serious.”

“No?” Vash says. “No, you’re not, Wolfwood.”

It’s a challenge, the way Nicholas looks at him, like he’s waiting for Vash to read something in a language he’s never spoken but always understood.

“You don’t know that,” Nicholas says. The echo seems more friendly than mimicking, but Vash’s mind has yet to retrieve all of its cylinders.

So he says, “Are you making fun of me?”

“Yeah,” Nicholas answers. “Come on.”

He’s still sniffling by the time they return to the elevator, but it’s sounding thinner, which means it’s getting easier for him to breathe. Could he have meant the cigarette was supposed to help?

The bell dings. Gallantly, Nicholas holds his arm out for Vash to step through the doors first.

“What floor?” he asks, finger hovering in front of the buttons.

“…Forty-three,” Vash says, and Nicholas whistles lowly and off-key. “Stop that!”

“We’re in for a ride, man,” Nicholas replies. He steps backwards so he’s next to Vash in the corner. “Didn’t know you lived in the sky. It ever make your ears pop?”

“Uh,” Vash says. His status here has been an elephant in the room for his entire life, every time someone finds out his status as Rem’s heir. Try as he might to pay it forward, discomfort always follows his honesty.

But Nicholas isn’t being shy about it now, and his posture denies any resentment. In the mirror across from them, Vash notices the tease of his grin.

“Yeah,” Vash says with a matching grin, “sometimes.”

“Right on,” Nicholas says, and once he leans his head back, he meets Vash’s eyes in the reflective array of the opposite wall.

This time, they finish the ride together.

61 notes · View notes

you-dont-look-so-good · 2 years ago

Text

Distance & dial tones

→ modern!au/non-mentor & mentee!au obikin

→ 3k words and no knowledge of sw needed

→ based on this post because it's been bopping around my head like a ping-pong ball since i first read it. i would eat this post if i could.

-------------------------------------------------------------

The door of the hotel room shut behind Obi-Wan with a resounding click, and honestly it couldn’t have come even a moment too soon.

Yes, he enjoyed meeting up with colleagues that he rarely got to see as much as the next cosily tenured and domesticated academic, exchanging thoughts about each others’ research in their respective fields, hearing about the latest with their spouses, kids and pets they had running around, and having his mind ‘broadened’ in between persistent bouts of boredom as the conference rolled on and on and on.

Just for today however, day three of the whole get-together, if he had to shake one more hand or rehash the same conversation yet again, he may just consider jumping out the window if it hadn’t been rather ominously nailed shut. Fair enough, he was seven storeys up.

Catching himself and his own crabbiness, Obi-Wan mentally chastised himself. With a deep yawn he switched on the lamp, the soft yellow glow filling the darkness, and settled into the armchair by the dressing table, pulling out his phone. There was only one remedy really for listening to other people talk about their families and the lingering ache it accentuated.

He lingered on that feeling for a moment, turning it over in his hand and considering it. As curious as he was about the world, he’d always been a homebody.

After a few sets of long, anticipatory rings, the line finally connected and Anakin’s voice emerged on the other side.

“Hello?” he answered, sounding mostly there but… not quite all the way? Eager, but definitely distracted. They exchanged pleasantries and Obi-Wan listened intently as Anakin gave him the general rundown of his day.

“The usual. Classes, coffee date with Ahsoka, eating instant ramen alone on your couch since you’re not here to cook dinner for me…”.

Obi-Wan couldn’t help but roll his eyes at that last part. You couldn’t let the facade fool you, Anakin was actually extremely proficient in the kitchen when he could be bothered, and was a much more intuitive cook than he himself who had to follow along exactly as one of his many numbers of cook books instructed him in order to cook anything half decent.

Listening a little closer however, Obi-Wan could identify the relatively unobtrusive but persistent featherlight sound of click-clacking on a keyboard as Anakin spoke. Without interrupting Anakin’s report about this girl in Ahsoka’s poli-sci class that she oh so totally doesn’t have a crush on, Obi-Wan glanced at the time on the alarm clock across the room on his nightstand.

“First of all,” he started as soon as Anakin was finished. “We all know she does, but that’s also none of your business so leave her alone. Secondly, it’s nearly half past 11, what are you still doing working?”.

There was a beat of silence, followed by a heaving sigh. The clacking came to an abrupt stop. “Nothing…” he said, edged with a ready defensiveness, before softening a little as he continued, sensing his partner’s dissatisfaction with that answer. “My next dissertation draft is due with my advisor soon and I thought what we were discussing today in seminar would help get past this part I’ve been stuck on but the pieces still aren’t damn well coming together…”.

Obi-Wan’s eyebrows pinched together at the affected pitch of his voice, worrying bubbling up in his chest at just how exhausted and stressed out he sounded. He supposed it came with the territory, mere months out from finishing up his masters degree in aerospace engineering as Anakin was, but knowing that didn’t help Obi-Wan’s feelings of helplessness when situations like this arose; when things seemed to all pile in on top of him. His own field of study being classic literature, he had little scope to help Anakin in any meaningful way other than the basics - making sure he ate, slept, and took proper care of himself. Sometimes, in relation to the latter, that meant taking the burden upon himself to do it for him.

Maybe it was the quality of the reception in his hotel room making him sound strange? Although, even if the cell reception had been out of whack, the sound hadn’t been tinny or muffled or anything vaguely technical like that. Just… heavy. And rough; in an organic sort of way that felt like more than just bone-weariness. His scepticism peaked as a moment from their text exchange a couple of days ago suddenly resurfaced in his mind; the day that Obi-Wan had left for the conference.

Anakin (09:34am): the next person that sneezes in this class is getting drop-kicked out the window

Anakin (09:35am): everyone on this campus is sick right now, istg

You (09:38am): Oh dear.

You (09:38am): Regardless, is it not a bit early for threatening cold-blooded homicide, darling?

Anakin (09:40am): not when i'm being provoked

Oh dear, indeed.

Being a professor himself, Obi-Wan knew all too well the horrors of college campuses throughout the duration of cold and flu season. Incessant coughs, sniffles and sneezes were a persistent background tune across every lecture hall, lab, seminar classroom, library, and coffee shop from around mid-autumn through to late winter/early spring. Not to mention the extra added element of stress around the time of midterms just before Christmas break. You were one of the lucky ones (faculty unfortunately included) if you didn’t end up with at least one dose of stress-lurgy during that time.

Waiting on Obi-Wan’s response on the other end of the line, Anakin took the opportunity to attempt to clear the accumulating thickness from his throat, a telling sniffle tacked on just for good measure, both of which managing to be caught by the receiver.

However, regardless of any not so latent inclination of Obi-Wan’s to want to fuss a bit over it, Anakin was a complex being. Forcing care and attention upon him before he was ready to give into the realisation of needing it, of wanting it, despite how much he clearly liked it, rarely went over well and would only serve to worsen his potentially already dour mood.

In resignation, Obi-Wan let the issue go, opting instead to move the conversation on. It had been a strange couple of days without Anakin, and Obi-Wan had genuinely missed the other man’s presence, as well as just simple conversation with him. His sarcastic barbs that still caught Obi-Wan by surprise with their dry wit and wry delivery, his droll but affection-laced complaints about Obi-Wan’s fastidiousness and particular quirks and habits, even his quick temper and admittedly amusing little outbursts. Obi-Wan missed the cup of his favourite tea that Anakin knew how to brew and would bring to him on the mornings they were blissfully able to actually sleep in together. The odd shoes and miscellaneous bits of deconstructed parts of machinery left scattered around Obi-Wan’s apartment. It went without saying, obviously, that he also missed his dear Anakin’s beauty and the perpetual furnace-fire heat of his body in bed next to him (arms or legs or body just in general often half on top of him); warm, loving, deeply knowing touches and intense, unflinchingly longing looks, silky soft golden curls between Obi-Wan’s fingers…

They spoke for a while longer about this and that between Anakin’s increasingly periodic sniffles. In the midst of some of Obi-Wan’s considerations, shame on him for letting his mind wander, he hadn’t immediately heard how Anakin’s speech had caught in his throat, voice giving away one, two near silent hitches, before tumbling into one near-silently stifled expulsion.

“h’GHT’x”.

Near, being the operative word.

“Bless you-” he hazarded after a moment of hesitation, before cutting himself off as he heard Anakin’s breath catch yet again.

“huh’UHGXT’sh” A little more insistent, and a little less expertly held back.

“Ble-”

“hiH’EH’DTZ’ssh!” he sneezed again, still pinched curtailed, but marked with an evidently sickly damp squish, bookended by a quiet groan that echoed through the phone’s speaker and a condensed snuffle that betrayed descending congestion.

“Bless you, darling…” and because he can’t help himself, “Are you alright?”.

“Fi’dne” Anakin had quipped back quickly, sounding slightly distant, as if having stepped away for a brief moment, his return marked by another encumbered, but singularly determined sdnfff. “Sorry. What were you sayidg about S’hhah…”.

He was stubborn in his efforts to hold back the oncoming and, frankly, inevitable tide; to ignore the developing cold he so clearly was coming down with and continue their conversation about something or other one of Obi-Wan’s colleagues had discussed with him about a rogue first edition he was trying to hunt down.

Something that, honestly at this point, Obi-Wan couldn’t care less about.

Anakin had seemed to manage to head off the tickle, even if the heaviness of his careful, strategic, breaths in and out gave away that the need had not fully abated, not even close, and that the urge was itching and lingering away in the background, never too far away.

Goodness, Obi-Wan shifted uncomfortably in his seat, suddenly feeling the urge to cross one leg over the other even in the privacy of the very much empty hotel room. He wasn’t going to stop until he’d let himself sneeze properly, and they both knew that.

“Anakin” Obi-Wan said, voice suddenly serious, but gentle. A question, a request, a command, and a plea somehow all melded into one word. A few beats of silence followed.

Suddenly aware of his position between a rock and a very hard place however, with no real alternative, Anakin gave in, his frantic gulp of an inhale breaking the silence.

“hhUH’EHDJSSHeu’oo…. hh’eH…. h’EHDSSSHh’uh!”.

The third one teased him for a tortuous few seconds, before coming on the cusp of a sharp, watery inhale “heH’EHDJSSSZ’yue!”.

They left him in a hurry and scraped his throat up on the way out, full, guttural, and unmistakably viral, echoing with encroaching misery. From the sounds of it he’d clearly pulled the receiver away from his face and angled the sneezes away from it, though such considerations hadn’t stretched to making any effort to cover or muffle the messy shower each evidently resulted in. Why would he bother, when he was alone? In their place, likely laid up sick in their bed all by himself stuck now with tending to himself until Obi-Wan got home.

Who very much wished he was there already.

However, regardless of whatever more… ardent (but unuseful) feelings he may have felt under the surface in the depths of his carefully wardened hindbrain, or bemused annoyance at the need Anakin felt to try and hide that he was taking ill in the first place, in that moment as he listened to his partner still trying to snuffle away any evidence of actually being sick, Obi-Wan couldn’t find it in himself to be anything other than kind.

“Oh, Anakin…” he breathed, his tongue clucking against his teeth in genuine sympathy “You’re not well at all, are you?”.

All he got in response was a pitiful, thoroughly stuffed up, wet little hum in seeming concession, a crackling cough catching in his throat. Despite his needling, the last of the fight leaving him made Obi-Wan’s chest ache a little in sympathy.

“You sound like you really need to blow your nose, dear one.”

The smooth, honey-like warmth in Obi-Wan’s voice, though cautious in its approach, seemed to erode whatever rock-like facade Anakin had been holding, the sound of him letting go of the last of his fortitude audible in his tired sigh.

“You wouldn’t thidk so with the amount I already have done today,” he griped, clearly leaning into self-pity, testing its waters. Obi-Wan tilted his head, shifting himself into a slightly more comfortable position in the armchair. “Hmm, really? Oh dear.”

Emboldened now by the chance to finally complain a little about how he felt in the company of a kind ear, Anakin continued, voice edging on a whine. “I feel like I’ve done ndothing but sdneeze, feel like I’m about to sdneeze, or blow my nose all. Day. Been able to concentrate on nothing.” Sdnff.

And oh, wasn’t that a pretty picture to paint.

For a fraction of a selfishly indulgent, yearnfully lonely moment, Obi-Wan can see it in his mind. He can imagine the sweetly rounded curves of his partner’s soft button nose caught all pink around the edges and twitching, shiny with a hint of sheen and unendingly drippy in an omen for what was to come when the cold fully settled in. His stormy blue eyes teary and a little swollen with illness as they flutter and twitch with the incessant urge to sneeze.

“Torture.”

“Right?” Anakin said. He left the sentence hanging though and Obi-Wan heard the phone being set down, the mutter of a congested curse uttered under his breath followed by a clipped apology. It seemed even he’d ran out of patience with his own worsening sinuses, having weighed up the value of sounding gross for a moment and properly clearing himself out (at least somewhat) versus continuing to actively sound gross for longer, coming out on the side of the former.

He emptied the contents of his nose in a long, productively gurgling blow, before rather impressively continuing on in nearly the very same breath as he’d finished. To his credit his voice did come out sounding marginally clearer; something closer to how he sounded when he first answered the call, like he could almost deny he was even ill at all (if you’d not just heard such a display).

“Oh! And just to top it all off, M’bace actually kicked me out of kickboxing earlier, can you believe it?”

Obi-Wan did a double-take, his mind screeching to a halt as it approached the hurdle of the other man’s audacity. “What?!”.

“I know! Sent home for a bit of what was just starting to be a cold? Like c’mon.”

Obi-Wan let out a long-suffering sigh. Honestly, why was he surprised? Genuinely, what was shocking about Anakin disregarding his own health for the sake of his beloved kickboxing class? Not a single thing. He was about to tell him so too, only-

“L…l’iH’ke…you cad’t ju’hH just st’ohp.…. hUH’IHDZSSSCH’hue! heh’H? …. h’uH’IHDSSZ’hue!”

The sneezes wrench out of him with an impressive force, thoroughly and undeniably cold-laden, and the resulting sniffle afterward made it clear that every ounce of previously purged congestion had all come flooding back in, and then some. Although, in a strange, masochistic way, after all the forceful holding back Anakin was likely to have been doing ‘all day’ (in his own words), he’d kind of sounded like he’d needed them.

“Ow”.

The little, likely involuntary, groan of pain melted away whatever was left of Obi-Wan’s exasperation, leaving only warm, bubbling sympathy and a gnawing sense of longing to be there with him now.

“Bless you,” he answered emphatically. “You sound so awfully bunged up now, poor thing.”

Anakin gave what sounded like an attempt at an unimpressed, little hmph sound, followed by a mild utterance of thanks as Obi-Wan heard him moving around - into bed properly, he was hoping, with laptop and textbooks set firmly aside for the night. It might have put Obi-Wan off delivering more affectionate fussing of a similar kind, if he did not know the other man as well as he did, and how he could preen under the weight of the praise and attention.

“I mbiss you.”

The words emerge from the pregnant pause on the other end of the call, small and ringing with a vulnerable honesty that made Obi-Wan ache down to his bones. It almost acted involuntarily to pull his body into action, even though there was nothing really he could physically do to help where he was.

A swell of affection flooded his chest like a tidal wave at the image of Anakin in his mind, alone in their bed, and of the desire to be there with him, before the tide quickly retreated back from the shore in resignation. Yes, he wouldn’t be home until tomorrow evening, but he was plenty capable of taking care of him, even if it was just a bit, all the way from here. Take him firmly in hand like he so needed every now and again.

“You’re in bed properly now, yes?” Obi-Wan asked, calling upon what was referred to as his ‘teacher voice’, every ounce of it emitting “I’m going to say this once and only once”.

It wasn’t all that much different to his normal voice, truth be told, just… firmer. Edged with discipline and left little room to be argued with, despite how Anakin liked to, shall we say, test his boundaries. The recognisable tone of it sent pleasant shivers up Anakin’s spine in an instant, and he simply hummed an affirmative response.

“Laptop, books, study materials and the like away for the night? You need to rest, darling. This is probably how you’ve ended up with this awful cold in the first place.”

“hiH’AEHDSSSZ’chuh!”

“See, listen to that. Mace Windu’s a smart man and knew what he was doing, sending you home, didn’t he?”.

Anakin’s cheeks burned at the hint of disparagement in the perfect mix of Obi-Wan’s chiding but affected tone, his blood beginning to boil under his skin.

He lay back and let his entire body relax as the shroud of Obi-Wan’s care washed over him, muscles suddenly loose that he was just realising had been holding tense and rigid since the beginning of the day.

“And no more of this business of holding in sneezes, hm? That sounded so terribly painful before I’m surprised you didn’t burst a blood vessel.”

Anakin’s lips ticked up into a knowing, bleary-eyed smile, his hand coming to rest on his chest, fingers absently stroking himself. “As a favour to mbyself, or to you?”.

There was a beat of stillness between them, where Obi-Wan could’ve chosen to be embarrassed for Anakin’s recollection of that little… thing. Well, quirk. But with both so far away from each other, craving comfort, what was the point, really?

“I guarantee it’ll make us both feel a great deal better.”

#other people’s fics #this was 🥵🥰#snzfic

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you-dont-look-so-good · 2 years ago

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these vanilla responses 😅

#theyre not wrong tho LOL

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you-dont-look-so-good · 2 years ago

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petal and thorn

yay more t/gun from moi and i'm sorry to use a french word just now and to post a modern AU but i promise it'll make sense hope you all forgive me! tags/warnings: SNEEZE fetish!!!! literally warning every time!!! deal with it!!!!! i love sneeze!!, character with fetish and yes it's v/ash, voyeurism themes, allergy stuff words: 2.7k

Vash doesn’t realize he was moved to in the same area as Nicholas until he hears him sneeze once, clipped and noisy, over the ringing keys of his piano. It takes all of his practice in professionalism and self-control to keep from looking up through the open lid to see whether he’s serving drinks or shuffling cards tonight.

Regardless, it means they’re near one another, so Vash gears up for a nice evening because of it – the kind with playful breaks and free drinks passed over to him in secret. Without a setlist for the evening, Vash is tempted toward jauntiness and lively improvisation as the patrons drop heavy coins into the stained glass tip jar nearby.

Every ten or twenty minutes, Nicholas will sneeze again, sounding progressively emphatic and undoubtedly him in a way Vash can recognize despite only seeing him do it up close a couple of lucky times before. Once in a while, Vash hears him talking to one of the resort guests to flirt boundlessly or talk about alcohol, and while he can’t make out the details of what anybody is saying, Vash can also hear something off in the tonality of his voice when Nicholas excuses himself every time a sneeze yanks on the reigns of his shallow, easy conversations.

He wonders if anyone has ever seen Nicholas like this before. Vash takes his break early.

“Been a while, Blondie,” is what Nicholas says from the bar when Vash approaches him to say hello. With all of the fingers on one hand, he beckons Vash closer as the other rearranges something underneath the counter. “They transfer you out here?”

“Uh-huh, at least for now,” Vash answers. He sits down and looks Nicholas over, excitedly trying to figure out what’s wrong with him. “People forget their wallets when they go to the beach, though, so I don’t know if I’m making as much in tips.”

“With your pretty face? I don’t believe it,” Nicholas says without giving Vash an opportunity to blush or stammer a deflection or even point at himself in surprise. His voice is clearer than Vash expected. “Was kinda looking forward to the fresh air myself.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, but they have me all over the goddamn place lately. I had no idea it changed so much out here. Kinda miss the tarot booth.”

“Huh,” Vash says. “I didn’t know you went in there.”

Nicholas blanches with a bottle of pink moscato in his hand, stilling the cloth that had been polishing its label for display.

“I didn’t know you knew it existed,” he says as he sets it down alongside the other wine-and-beer options on his side table, all marked up a dozen times over in exchange for the convenience of the lounge’s nestle on the beach. “Supposed to be word-of-mouth only.”

“Well…” Vash pouts. “I talk to a lot of people.”

Nicholas sniffs – not sniffles, it’s dry – and uses the side of his palm to press on the side of his nose. He blinks one eye shut for just a second with an endearing and irritated frown.

“Okay, mister popular.” Nicholas drums the fingers of that same hand on the counter near Vash’s elbow, looking him up and down. “How come you never stopped by, then? I’m set up for eleven, if you want to learn your future.”

“Don’t you have… you know, clients or something?”

“First come, first served. Initial reading free of charge,” Nicholas says. He planks a glass down in front of him and pours out something clear and quiet until it’s halfway full.

“Really?” Vash says as he watches the waterfall of liquor splash against the edges of the cup without ever truly spilling. “That doesn’t seem like a resort policy.”

Nicholas drizzles something dark against the liquor, then shakes a handful of herbs into the cocktail and stirs.

“We’re independent,” Nicholas tells him. He slides the drink over. “Kind of a complicated system.”

Vash points at the cup. “Is this for me?”

“Yup.”

Vash wraps his fingers around the textured glass, prepared to thank his friend and take his first sip. He freezes when Nicholas unfocuses his gaze and parts his lips before his chest swells with erotic promise.

Thankfully, Nicholas doesn’t turn around all the way when he lifts the inner part of his arm to his face. He swivels to the side, his profile in view as his eyebrows knit together and he buckles in half.

“hHD’IHSHHyu! –fuck,” he breathes out, then straightens up immediately with a hard blink.

“You okay?” Vash says. “Bless you.”

“I’m not sick,” Nicholas insists, then sniffles for real, nice and sharp before he looks back to Vash. “Fuck me, there’s just something…”

He waves his hand around in the air, gesturing at nothing and everything and sniffling again.

“Something driving me crazy out here. Dunno what the hell it is.”

“Aw,” Vash replies. The sympathy is real, because the guy does look genuinely uncomfortable, but it unfortunately looks lovely on him. With a bold swirl of authentic concern and sinister arousal, he asks, “You don’t have allergies or anything, do you?”

“Who…” Nicholas shakes his head and lifts his arm. “hIHDZSH’yiu! Who fuckin’ knows, man. Happens sometimes but I can never track down a reason.”

When he reaches for one of the scratchy little cocktail napkins, Vash wants to faint. It barely covers the bottom half of his nose, and Nicholas rolls his eyes at himself when he realizes it won’t be good for much more than blotting at some excess moisture.

“Sorry,” he says plainly, crumpling up the paper and tossing it into the trash can beneath him. “Any tissues in that fancy suit of yours?”

“I don’t think so,” Vash says. His pocket square probably wouldn’t cut it any more than the napkin had. “Maybe I could check in the lobby?”

“Nah, it’s fine.” Nicholas sniffles a couple more times, harsh and obviously irritated. He holds the back of his wrist underneath his septum and points his chin toward the drink in front of Vash. “Hey, tell me if that’s any good or not.”

“Oh! Y-yeah, okay.” Vash tips the glass into his mouth and feels the burn of gin and sticky coat of honey as he swallows. There’s a soothing bitterness with the aftertaste that he can’t place but doesn’t mind, although he coughs against the liquor as he takes a breath to speak. “It’s great! I like it.”

“Not too strong for ya?”

Nicholas chuckles and Vash takes another wincing swallow.

“Nope,” Vash says with his gentlest smile. “What is it?”

“Called a mint… somethin’,” Nicholas says. “Shit. Uh, I forgot what they named it. Honey’s added in extra special for you, though.”

Vash can’t help but appreciate the excess of alcohol when Nicholas curls a fist back up toward his nose, blinking hard and wet. Vash watches him hold his breath against the threat of a third sneeze, and without meaning to, Vash holds anticipation in his own lungs alongside him.

They both relax when Nicholas exhales, mimicking the release of two strings once held taut. Vash quickly downs more of the concoction in front of him, hiding his face and giving Nicholas privacy to recover.

“Thank you,” he says. “The honey was a nice—”

“hHdEZSHh’yeu! Jesus Christ.”

“Bless you!”

“Ghh. Thanks,” Nicholas mutters, and the next set of sniffling is a lot thicker. “Couldn’t decide if I wanted to sneeze or not.” He clears his throat. “What were you saying? It was a compliment, right, Maestro?”

“If you…” Vash pauses to swallow the last of his drink. “Did you say if you wanted to?”

“It’s supposed to feel good, you know, scratch at the itch,” Nicholas says in a drawl. “But this just…”

He scoffs, dark humor in the bounce of his sternum, looking to the side like he’s considering something. The pause sets off Vash’s nerves.

“I can never control it, when it happens to me,” Vash shares without thinking.

“Then I guess you don’t have to worry about the burden’a choice, huh?” Nicholas says. He takes the glass from Vash and plunges his washcloth inside of it, moving all around with his hand in preparation for one of the busboys to take back to the kitchen. He looks up. “You want another?”

“Something a little lighter, please,” Vash admits. As much as he needs the loose nerves to participate in this conversation, he can’t play an instrument if his head is swimming, and he doesn’t even remember how much more of his break is left.

On the edge of a chuckle, Nicholas says, “Thought so. Ever have a Queen Mary?”

“What is that?”

“Think you’ll like it.”

During the second half of Vash’s ten-minute break, Nicholas serves him a weird glass full of beer with sweet cherries and doesn’t sneeze again at all. It’s a disappointing relief, or maybe a relieving disappointment, because even with the alcohol Vash isn’t sure how much more of the topic he can handle. They talk about other things, mostly patrons that Nicholas has discreetly been observing and is indiscreetly warning Vash not to trust (“because I see you being nice to them and it’s bad for your karma,” he’d insisted and probably kind of meant it) and then suggesting covers of raunchy songs for Vash to play as a trick to see whether any elegant and out-of-touch resort guests knew any of the lyrics.

A lot of the notes Vash’s fingers stomp out during his set are attributed entirely to muscle memory, because it’s hard to think about anything other than the moment before they parted, when Nicholas plucked a cherry from Vash’s drink and twirled it between his teeth before sending him back to his post.

By a stroke of terrible coincidence, Nicholas is sneezing again less than an hour later and Vash has nothing short of a dreadfully obstructed view. He pretends to get into the music so he can sway along with it and snatch a glimpse past the nice family at one of the tables between them, and he gets to see Nicholas gasp twice in a row before he bends down with a terrific shudder ripping through his spine.

He catches Vash staring and nods toward him, characteristically crooked grin worn sheepishly, and Vash smiles back and looks back down to his keys.

While Vash has mostly processed to the guilt that comes with his body’s delighted response to another person’s misery, there’s an overriding urge within the rest of him that demands he take care of Nicholas. It’s heavier and more primal than his urge to take care of others in general, like it comes from somewhere beyond just his values or a basic sense of empathy. It’s something he can almost place, maybe if he thought about it hard enough, but that’s not a headspace Vash is sure he can deal with having access to in the middle of his job.

Besides. It feels so much better to play music instead of thinking, to serve Rem’s hotel by providing something pleasant to the atmosphere. His alternative was working upstairs and listening to what Nai has to say about the status of their profits, and the conference room makes him nervous. If he doesn’t screw up the music thing, Nai won’t try and get him to move.

Vash spends the next couple of songs trying to theorize about what could be making Nicholas sneeze, which gives him a secondary thrill but isn’t the objective of the exercise. Vash isn’t trying to manipulate anyone. He has as much authority here as Nai does, technically, and if he can find a way to use his power without Nai finding out then he could keep Nicholas comfortable and maybe schedule more of their shifts together inside and not feel so guilty about wanting to stare at him.

What if he and Nicholas tried to figure it out together?

Vash nearly freezes. He really, really can’t think about that right now.

He picks a complicated sonata, suited well for ten in the evening, and focuses on transferring the rush of his blood back to his fingers.

It works until the next sneeze comes, and Vash can hear it a lot more clearly because most of the evening chatter has died down as the patio clears out.

“EHT’DSCHH’UE! hh-!”

There’s a pause, and then a groaning sigh. Someone says something to Nicholas at the counter that Vash can’t quite hear.

“’Scuse me. Thanks,” Nicholas responds to them, and his voice is rougher than before. “Yeah, uh, you can just leave those… Yup. You got it, dear. Perfect. Take care tonight, huh?”

His final customer bids him farewell, and Vash hits his last note before sliding the piano’s glossy cover over its keys.

Nicholas is usually keen enough to spot Vash right away, but he’s distracted with his closing tasks and jumps when Vash shows up to check on how he’s doing.

“Sorry, sorry,” Vash says with his palms out. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

Nicholas hums lowly and says, “You’re good, Spikey, Jesus, just don’t frown at me like that.”

“Sorry,” Vash says again. “How are you feeling?”

With apparent permission, Nicholas sniffles deeply. He scrubs at his eyes using the side of his forearm.

“Yeah, been better,” he says. He points to the criss-cross of wicker planks on the ceiling. “I think it’s whatever those things are. I don’t remember them from last time.”

“Oh, the wisteria?” Vash says, following his eyeline. The blooming vines are indeed a recent installation of Rem’s, hanging in abundance over the dining area in elegant white and pastel violet. They were expensive and required a special kind of florist’s instruction to make sure they’d rain down onto the patio just right. “We just got them in a week or two ago.”

“Awfully pretty,” Nicholas muses. He takes something off of his tray – a silk, crimson dinner napkin, beautifully folded with the intention that guests use it to set on their laps. He keeps eye contact with Vash even as he tents it around his nose. “Havoc on allergies, though. You like ’em?”

What a question that is. As guilt spreads heavy and sweet in his chest, Vash remembers helping Rem pick them out, unknowingly sentencing Nicholas to a shift of itchy interruptions. He watches Nicholas blow his nose and uses the moment to recognize the adventure the wisteria have been bringing to him all evening, and whether Vash would be terrible to thank them for it or not.

“They’re nice to look at,” he agrees. “Sorry they’ve been so much trouble for you, though.”

“I started getting extra tips from people who thought the boss was making me work through a cold,” Nicholas says. “So, y’know. Not all bad.”

Vash can’t tolerate thinking about Nicholas, not with the guy right in front of him. If he were different, Vash could take the topic somewhere truly vicious.

What would a normal person say instead?

“I’m sure you’ll feel better when you’ve gotten some real fresh air, right? We could go for a walk before you have to be at the tarot booth.”

“Shit. You…” Nicholas stops and clutches his napkin in one hand, bending down toward it without fully immersing himself in the fabric. There’s a wrinkle above the bridge of his nose, right below his eyebrows, when his expression warps with a sneeze. “hhEHDSH’UE!”

“Bless—”

“hhDZSHH’YUE! You really still wanna do that?”

“Bless y— what?” Vash flinches, confused by the potential rejection and devastatingly distracted by the way Nicholas is massaging his nose through the cloth. He can see the shape of the tip as it’s pushed up and down, and only a sliver of his imagination is needed in order to understand what the whole thing looks like under there getting all crushed and prodded and pink. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not great company right now, Blondie,” Nicholas says, “clearly.”

“I disagree,” Vash says. “Was that not obvious?”

Their gazes connect for all of half a second before Nicholas smiles again and his eyes lift to the sky.

“Wonder if I’ll ever be able to say no to you,” he answers, and he looks to Vash without moving his head. The shadows from the patio’s lowlight sharpen his jawbone and glint the moonlight on his teeth. “Come to the shore with me, then. I need a smoke first.”

#this is immaculate #oh my golly goodness #other people’s fics #snzfic 😋#whew 🥵🥵🥵

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you-dont-look-so-good · 2 years ago

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Swan

Not really anything special, just an idea I had. This is just a self-indulgent, tipsy, silly, sneezy Vashwood fic (not my best work but hopefully you guys enjoy!!). Featuring Vash's wings which hopefully turn into beautiful swan feathers in s2 : )

Vash lounges across the full length of the couch, playing absentmindedly with a strand of his blonde hair. The TV is on, an old episode of Bake Off with something about Bakewell tarts, but he isn’t really paying any attention. He’s too busy waiting for Wolfwood to text him.

He’s playing house husband tonight, all by himself. Wolfwood had been invited out to drinks with old school friends, so he’d gone straight to the bar after work, leaving Vash with the whole flat to himself. Seeing as Vash didn’t have any plans, he decided to stay home to clean, cook dinner, do laundry, and catch up on his favourite baking show. He doesn’t expect Wolfwood to be back until late.

His eyes dart to his phone the second it dings awake. The phone lockscreen (one of a shirtless Wolfwood at the beach) lights up with a text.

10:07 WW:

baby

That was the first text, a clear indication that Wolfwood was already tipsy. He never dolls out the affectionate pet names until he’s two drinks in, minimum.

10:08 Vash:

Yes wolfie ☺️

10:19 WW:

i hate wolfie

He doesn’t. And Vash knows he doesn’t, because he had found a screenshot on Wolfwood’s phone of the first time Vash ever called him Wolfie by text. He’s just playing tough, he’s so secretly sentimental.

10:19 WW:

D’you miss me?

10:20 Vash:

Of course! I miss you lots 🥰 Are you having fun?

10:25 WW:

10:25 Vash:

Aw, why? 🥺

10:26 WW:

dont feel good

some woman’s perfume is driving my allergies crzy

going 2 leave early

can u leave door unlocked

10:26 Vash:

Oh really?

Are you okay?

10:27 WW:

yes

leaving soon

Thirty seconds later, Vash’s phone pings with another text. He opens his conversation with Wolfwood to see an audio recording sent through. It’s only twenty seconds long. Huh, maybe he’d sent it by accident. He doesn’t normally send audio messages, that’s usually Vash’s thing.

He clicks it anyway. At first, there’s only loud music and indiscernible conversation, and classic bar sounds. He almost stops listening, assumes it was a mistake.

But then, out of nowhere, he hears Wolfwood’s breath hitch once, twice, three times, followed by two wet, drunk sneezes instantly after. They sound so rough, tired, as though he’s done it several times and he’s fed up.

10:30 WW:

< “h’eDtSSHh’yue! h’eZzSHhh’chuh! Guhh.. snff, ngh….”

“Gross, Nicholas. What’s that, like, number thirty?” > Says one of his friends.

Thirty?!

The audio cuts off there, right at the sound of a gurgling nose blow, likely directed into cheap bar napkins. Vash plays the recording about five more times before he saves it to his phone. As soon as he saves it, it notifies their conversation that the audio was saved, and Wolfwood texts him again.

10:33 WW:

knew youd like that

1 more drink n im leavin

she jst sprasyed her perfume 4 her friend right nxt to me joly shit

10:35 WW:

u wld lose ur mind i jyst sneezed like 3 tomes ina row duck

*duck

*duck holy shit

***FUCK

10:40 WW:

i see u reading my texts

u arentg gonna say bless u?

baby

i Like whem u say it

Oh, he’s definitely plastered. His texts are nearly unintelligible. Vash is having fun just letting the texts roll in, giggling to himself.

10:40 Vash:

Bless you 🥰

Get home safe, I’ll wait for you.

The texts stop there, so Vash decides to listen to Wolfwood sneeze one more time before he resumes watching his show. He’s practically buzzing with excitement, and he’s hard already just from listening to the audio. Not only is his boyfriend coming home early, but he’s going to be drunk, and miserably sneezy, and will probably let Vash cuddle and dote on him all night long (and, if he’s lucky, take it even further).

At 11:00, someone comes stumbling to the front door, cursing under their breath as they cross the threshold. They announce themselves with a loud, unrestrained, throat scraping sneeze that bends him over at the waste.

“Heh’IHTZssHhh’ue!”

Vash jumps a little out the sound, startled, his hand gripping the remote and raised in defense. He doesn’t know how much good a tiny remote will be against an attacker, but he’s got nothing else.

His brain catches up with him and he realises that it’s just Wolfwood, so he relaxes back against the cushions as his partner saunters in.

“Welcome home,” Vash says sweetly, taking in Wolfwood’s appearance. His hair is a little wind swept, his nose a furious, deep shade of cherry red. It looks like it’s been irritated from being rubbed on bar napkins all night.

“Hey,” Wolfwood drawls, shedding his coat and tossing it haphazardly onto an armchair. He pads over to the couch and wastes no time cuddling into Vash’s lap, curling his body around his boyfriend’s as though they are two puzzle pieces that slot perfectly together. He rests his head against Vash’s shoulder. The fact that Wolfwood’s ass is now seated in his lap does nothing to help the growing bulge in Vash’s sweatpants

The smell of perfume is thick and heavy on Wolfwood’s clothes.

“You smell good,” Vash says, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. He smells like a mixture of saffron and cedar wood? Vash knows it is his heightened plant senses that are able to pick these thin wisps of scent up, like a bloodhound. Wolfwood probably doesn’t even know he has traces of the perfume on him.

“Mmm. Cad’t smell andythigg. Must be the perfumbe.”

Vash wraps his arms around him and pulls him close, hooks his elbow under Wolfwood’s knees. He’s so cold from the outside air. Wolfwood presses his freezing nose to his bare throat and a sharp chill runs down Vash’s spine at the touch, freezing him to the bone.

“You’re so cold,” Vash observes gently, carding his hands through Wolfwood’s dark hair.

“Yeah. Sat outside. Was too busy inside,” Wolfwood mumbles. He snuggles closer, snuffling against Vash’s neck. The blonde can smell the warm, syrupy scent of whiskey on every exhale. On his dark sleeve are shiny patches, like dried slicks of dew, where he’d been rubbing his nose before he’d likely stolen a wad of napkins from the bar.

Vash pulls the thick blanket off the back of the couch and wraps it around Wolfwood, tucking it in around him. Wolfwood just snuffles and silently burrows into the fold of the blanket, eager for the warmth. Poor thing. He’s so drunk and so sniffly. Vash feels a strange concoction of adoration, concern, and lust at the sight of him.

When he still doesn’t warm up after a few moments, Vash decides to uncurl his wings to encase them both. He knows how much Wolfwood likes being embraced in his fluffy white feathers, so he leans forward and inhales a deep breath. As he breathes out, his large, white wings unfurl from his back, as elegant as a swan’s.

Vash brings them forward and wraps them around them both, trapping in any escaping heat. Wolfwood often likes to joke that he feels like a chick being coddled under a mother hen when this happens. It always makes Vash giggle a little.

“Mmm… y’showin’ off?” Wolfwood asks, one hand coming up to stroke a long white feather. He pinches the plume between his forefinger and thumb, then smooths it back out against the others.

Vash watches his nose twitch, a forewarning of what’s to come. Wolfwood’s always been allergic to down pillows, and sometimes Vash’s own feathers make him sneeze if they bother him enough, but the perfume must be making him extra sensitive tonight.

“Huh…” A soft, hitchy breath flutters directly against Vash’s neck. Vash’s heart skips a beat. Wolfwood shifts slightly in his arms as his hand comes crashing down against Vash’s chest.

“H’eNGTSshh’yue!” He squishes his nose against Vash’s throat, attempting to stifle but horribly failing. A warm, dense spray blooms against his skin, like lily petals opening up to the morning sun.

“Bless you,” he says sweetly, rubbing Wolfwood’s back through the blanket. Heat floods to his groin, thick and warm. The brunet replies with a deep sniffle and then rubs his nose with the edge of the blanket.

“How are you feeling?”

“Drunk,” comes Wolfwood’s half-hearted reply. He looks up at Vash with bleary, love drunk eyes, and the sweetest of smiles turns the corner of his lips upwards when their eyes lock together. Wolfwood just stares at him for a moment before he chuckles.

“Y’re so pretty.”

Vash almost bursts out laughing. “Jeez, how much did you drink?” He asks, pushing back Wolfwood’s bangs from his forehead. Wolfwood leans into the touch, like a cat eager for scratches.

“Mmm… six? Seved? Dunndo.” He sniffles again and looks back up at Vash, as if he knows the answer. His eyes are so unfocused and his nose is starting to run. He looks so cute.

“Seven? You were only gone for a few hours, though.”

“Yeah… but the guys kept orderi’gg drignks, and…” He sniffles back his congestion again. “And I could’dt say ndo.”

“You’re so funny when you’re drunk.”

Wolfwood scoffs and gives Vash’s wing a gentle smack with the palm of his hand. The playful touch backfires, though, when Vash smacks him back with the wing and the feathers brush against the underside of Wolfwood’s nose.

The effect is immediate. As much as Wolfwood loves his wings, he’s so terribly allergic to its plumes. Wolfwood’s features scrunch up again, twisting in irritation.

“Hhh… hih..!” His breath staggers. Brown eyes crinkle shut as his nose seems to take over. Vash can only watch, transfixed, while heat unravels in his belly. Wolfwood is the perfect image of sneezy irritation.

“H’ehYSsHhh’ue!” Droplets of spray coat Vash’s jaw, his chin, as Wolfwood pitches forward into him. His hand rises up half-heartedly to cover, but he doesn’t make it in time. His nose collides with the curve of Vash’s throat again, painting more mess against his skin. “H’eDZzSHhh’uue!”

Vash’s face is bright red. He replays the memory of Wolfwood’s sneezes in his head, tries not to let the blood rush to his groin. He has to remind himself to breathe as Wolfwood shudders in his arms, his hands crashing up against Vash’s chest.

“H-’ehTZSHhhh..! Eh’dTSHhhYUE!” He curls in on himself, sneezing directly into his hands now, but Vash can still feel every muscle contract, every breath, everything.

“Heh’ebTSHhh’ue!” The next one comes directly from his nose, coating his hands with mess. Vash swallows, his throat tight and thick with desire.

Vash has to stop a scream from escaping his throat when Wolfwood leans his head back, exposing his throat. He looks up at Vash with teary, irritated eyes, his eyebrows slanted. He’s done this before, these little looks, when he knows Vash is extremely turned on by his sneezing. It’s like he’s saying “Fuck me”and “Help me” and “I’m going to sneeze again” all at the same time.

His eyes slip shut again, a warning of what is to come.

A final crescendo of breaths, thick and warm and needy against Vash’s chest, before— “Heh-h… hh-EhZTSHhhh’ihh!”

He crashes against Vash with the final sneeze, his hand covering his mouth. Mess is most definitely dripping across his upper lip right now, the sneezes had been too wet for it not to.

Vash has never seen him sneeze like this before in his life. They’re so unrestrained, so messy, so clearly irritated. He needs to find out what fucking perfume that was.

Wolfwood blushes as he seems to finally come to. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a napkin that looks like it’s been used one too many times. He blows his nose into it, the sound heavy and wet with congestion, before balling it up in his hand and curling against Vash again. His upper lip is still dewy with moisture, his nose a vibrant shade of rosey pink. Vash can’t help the way his sweatpants are growing increasingly tighter.

Wolfwood sighs against Vash’s throat, the sound heavy and staggered. “The fuckigg perfumbe. And I’b so allergic to your feathers,” he explains, a little humiliated, as though he needs to provide an explanation for that.

“Sorry, sweetheart. Bless you.” Vash kisses the tip of his cold nose, but he doesn’t contract his wings. He wants that to happen again and again and again. “Let’s get you into the shower and in bed. You need to sober up.“

“Mmmmnoidon’t…” Wolfwood tucks his face back under Vash’s chin and shuts his eyes. He wants to stay here, wrapped up in Vash’s wings, maybe even fall asleep. Or maybe he’ll make use of the growing hardness under his ass and let Vash have his way with him. It could go either way, really.

Vash makes a mental note to remember the scent of the perfume and try to find it sometime. If it had been strong enough to set Wolfwood off like this, he definitely wants to use it for later.

Eventually, Vash’s baking show comes back from commercial, and while normally he would cart Wolfwood off to the bedroom and rip his clothes off after a fit like that, his poor partner is already drifting off in his arms. Vash supposes they can stay here for a little while. Just till the show’s finished. Wolfwood doesn’t seem to mind either, because after a few minutes, his breaths begin to deepen and the dull fuzz of the alcohol lulls him to sleep. His cheek is pressed heavily against the crook of Vash’s shoulder and soft, congested breaths whisper against Vash’s skin. When the show’s over, Vash keeps him in his arms and carries him to the bedroom. He’ll let Wolfwood sleep tonight, because tomorrow he’s going to go out and find that perfume.

#this was some GOODDDDDTTTTT shit #other people's writing #snzfic 😋#the way i wouldnt know how to act if i had a bf as allergic as WW

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you-dont-look-so-good · 2 years ago

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off script

first tr/igun fic & huge enormous massive thank you and shout out to finnpeach who blazed trails and wrote the first "vash is a gentle top and has the sneezing kink" fic on here and gave us inspo and courage for eternity tags/warnings: SNEEZE FETISH CONTENT!! YOU'VE BEEN WARNED LOL!!!, character w kink (vash), common cold, bed-sharing, foreplay/sexual activity (explicit but not graphic), some d/s and praise kink type of stuff flipped back and forth... words: 3.5k

“Are you even actually ordained?”

With a hand on her hip and a scandalized curiosity in her gaze, Meryl holds herself wide-stanced in front of the others as they watch Wolfwood push aside ornamentals and artifacts atop a rickety altar. An empty metal candlestick rolls off the side, and he scrambles to catch it before it hits the ground.

He dusts off his hands and places them on either side of the podium, rocking it back and forth to test its balance. Over the upper hinge of his sunglasses, he makes eye contact with her and says, “Does it matter?”

“It should. And you know, this is a temple,” Meryl continues as Wolfwood approaches his weapon. “They probably have a real cross lying around somewh—”

The clang of the Punisher against the stone table up front echoes against the shelter’s high ceilings and shabby wooden walls. Vash jumps, and Meryl shuts her mouth. Wolfwood steps back with his arms extended forward, prepared to right the cross should it tilt.

“I’m just saying. Some people want things done a certain way, depending on the branch of religion they’re practicing,” Meryl insists, and Wolfwood gestures grandly to the empty seats around them.

“You see anyone complaining?” he challenges.

“I don’t see anyone at all, yet,” she says. “Maybe consider asking for a little info on the departed, out of respect?”

“Look, shortie, you wanna get your head outta the gift horse’s ass for a second? They asked for a funeral. If they didn’t specify anything else, it’s on them.”

“I’m just trying to make sure we get paid. Not like we’re swimming in cash or anything.”

“What do you mean ‘we’? Last I checked, I was the only one working today.”

“I’m sorry, whose car have you been riding in these past two months?”

“Consider it payback for the fee you still owe me. Now leave the job to the professional before I take you under next.”

“That a threat, burial boy?”

“Guys.”

They both look over their shoulders at Vash, who has a thumb pointed at two of the temple patrons standing behind him. Neither one of them looks happy.

Meryl yields with a huff, returning to one of the splintering pews and sitting with her arms crossed.

“…Sorry for your loss,” she says to them lamely.

Roberto sits next to her and whispers, “Do we even know who died?”

“Uh,” Meryl says, which is the extent of her intel.

“Thought so,” he replies. It’s doubtful whether Wolfwood knows either.

Apparently someone does, because the rows behind them start to creak and bend with the weight of the covenant. There can’t be more than a dozen of them, but the air in the room shifts as their hushed murmurings fill the space.

Vash’s voice is among them, on Meryl’s other side, close to the inner-aisle with the best view of Wolfwood’s clumsy off-mark eulogy. With his hand shielding half of his face from the townspeople, Vash says to his crew, “I think his name was Artemus.”

Despite Wolfwood’s obvious ineptitude at her old friend’s funeral, the innkeeper offers to rent him and his rag-tagalongs a couple of rooms above her tavern in exchange for a discount on his exorbitant fee. She throws in a few meals and begs him to stay until Sunday.

He agrees with a grin, the desert sky dark enough to hide the playful malevolence in his eyes. Meryl knows it’s there regardless, and once they’ve reached the safety of their upstairs quarters, she says, “You don’t feel bad about scamming these poor people?”

Wolfwood shrugs and says, “If there’s a hell, I was headed there anyway.”

“My god,” Meryl says, and retires behind her door.

Roberto is shacking in the suite next to her, his seniority having earned him the privacy, and Vash drops his things on the floor of the room across the hall. It’s the last one left, and he and Wolfwood are sharing. It’s been the standard since early on; Vash had insisted upon the arrangement, but it had been on Wolfwood’s behalf. He’s never quite gotten used to sleeping alone, especially behind a closed door.

Politely, Vash refrains from interrupting as Wolfwood surveys the sparse, tight quarters. He did this last time, too, insisting it was in the best interests of everyone that he check for traps, as though the townspeople he’s taking advantage of are already trying to retaliate. He calls it precaution, but Vash calls it guilt.

“You take the bed, okay?” Vash says as Wolfwood begins to shake the grit from his jacket.

“The hell’re you talking about?” Wolfwood says. “Thing’s big enough room for two. Quit it with the sacrificial crap. It bums me out.”

“Your throat hurts,” Vash says with the matter-of-fact seriousness of somebody’s boss reciting a business itinerary, stern tonality without room for nonsense. “I heard it while you were up there.”

Wolfwood blinks at him.

“Huh?” he says. “So?”

“If you’re getting sick, you should have the bed. That’s all,” Vash says. “Don’t wanna lose your voice before Sunday mass, right?”

A crooked grin becomes Wolfwood in lieu of the argument he might offer to any of the others. His chest bounces once with a cocky chuckle.

“You watchin’ me that closely, Blondie?”

“I guess I am.”

“Well knock yourself out,” Wolfwood says with a grunt, clearing his throat. “I’m just fine.”

It’s hard to tell which one of them is the cat and which is the mouse, but the back and forth has been there since the beginning and its fiery undercurrent had grown quickly until it engulfed the both of them. Wolfwood teases, ready to pounce, and Vash flips him belly-up and bats him around happily. There’s satisfaction in knowing Wolfwood enjoys it. He wouldn’t keep provoking the game if he didn’t.

So Vash watches Wolfwood, not only because he’d promised but because he’s nice to look at, too, and Vash’s reward comes when Wolfwood turns his head away and Vash’s prophecy comes true.

He’s seen it before. Wolfwood has the kind of sneeze that demands one’s attention, even for those unlike Vash, disinclined to snap ravenous eyes toward him upon that first desperate, penultimate gasp. His sneeze overwhelms the senses of his company in volume and visual, loud and intense with so much of his voice in it, always pushing him around with antagonistic tenacity that would probably show beautifully on his face if he didn’t have the manners to bend forward with behind a tight hand or loose sleeve.

Wolfwood chooses the sleeve this time, holding his arm in place by gripping his shoulder with the opposite hand. It wrings him out with a loud, pronounced “HD’IHZSHH’yu!” and deflates his shoulders when he’s done.

It’s cute on him, because despite all of the brazen renegade costume he wears, Wolfwood doesn’t seem to prefer the commentary that it pulls. Vash shudders, positive that he realizes everyone else on the floor must have heard him through the cracks in the walls.

“Sure you’re not sick?” he asks.

“Never said I wasn’t,” Wolfwood replies irately before he sniffs once, testing. “Just said I was fine. Can’t kill a mission for a little cold.”

“Huh. Is that what it is?” Vash replies.

“Guess we’ll see.” Dressed down to the comfort of an undershirt, Wolfwood gestures to the bed. “So. You comin’, or you wanna look me up and down all night instead?”

Vash can happily do both. Fifteen minutes later, he’s shifting Wolfwood from his back onto his side to try and quell the disruption of his snoring.

Morning swats its ruthlessness all over them. Wolfwood squints at the scratchy light prying deep into his eye sockets, and Vash frowns when he hears the damp, squeaky grumble of congestion in Wolfwood’s sinuses. Whatever he’d been coming down with has obviously taken hold.

He isn’t even vertical when the first sneeze hits, and the most he can do is roll away from Vash and contain the worst of it in his hand.

“H’EHNDZSHhyue!”

Vash feels the entire thing shake Wolfwood down to his bones and the mattress down to its springs.

“Bless you,” Vash says.

“My line this week, Blondie,” Wolfwood says, then sniffles and sighs out with a groan. “Fuck. Uh, thanks.”

Vash watches him get out of bed and fumble with his shirt, which should probably be washed and ironed before he goes on display this weekend. Wolfwood presses a palm against one side of his nose, then inhales shoddily and coughs.

“You said you’ve been to this town before,” he says.

“Uh, yeah,” Vash says. “A long time ago. But it was pretty different back then.”

“They got a drugstore anywhere?”

Vash frowns. “What do you need? Medicine, or…?”

“Nah, just…” Dismissively, Wolfwood flaps his hand and says, “Don’t worry about it.”

Uninterested in taking orders from Wolfwood and concurrently wishing to avoid riling up while he’s sick, Vash lies and says, “All right.” He can justify his worry eventually. Wolfwood would do the same, and Vash isn’t above taking an eye for an eye when it’s for the sake of somebody’s well being.

For ten minutes, Wolfwood avoids sneezing in front of Vash again. He finishes arming himself with enough accessories to dupe the fools downstairs, down to the rosary beads hanging out of his pocket like a sloppy wallet chain. A couple of used handkerchiefs sit in a pile next to his only other shirt, waiting to be laundered by the innkeeper’s family, none of his belongings extraordinarily filthy but still swamped with sweat from the bleakest hours of desert sun.

Wolfwood stalls behind Vash when they head downstairs, allowing him to walk in front and waiting with his hand against the wall after he turns the corner to the tavern’s dining area.

“HD’IHZSHeuh!” Whoever is in the other room can hear him anyway, but Wolfwood is at least unattended to as he staggers half an accidental pace forward with his head bent toward the ground.

He waits so as to not make an entrance of it, and to ensure that a second sneeze won’t barge through his sensibilities. The reflex feels sensitive and is stubborn in all directions. He expects the whole thing to be a pain in his ass until he can shake the cold for good.

Aside from Meryl, Roberto, and the innkeeper herself, the tavern is unoccupied. There’s a spread set up family-style in the center of one of their wooden tables, along with a metal pitcher of what’s hopefully beer and more likely water. He sits down next to Vash, whose plate is still empty.

“You waited for me?” Wolfwood asks.

“I wanted to make sure everyone got enough first,” Vash says. Wolfwood scoffs.

“Didn’t need to,” he grouses, then reaches for a slab of skillet bread, crudely rips it in half, and thunks it onto Vash’s plate. He takes the rest for himself and rains crumbs onto the tabletop in front of him with his first tasteless bite.

No one says much for the rest of their meal. It’s easy to get caught up in good food, and the innkeeper’s is decent, although the tavern’s divey impression suggests that it’s not the kind of place people seek out when they’re hungry. She minds her business while they replenish themselves, stopping by once to drop off a plate of dried fruit and offer a stack of napkins.

Once she walks away, Wolfwood can’t help sneezing again. The napkins, peaceful and still, mock the way the urge freezes him in place too much to grab one in time.

He turns away with a slow, silent inhale, then jerks his upper body toward his arm. Painfully, the sneeze scrapes against his throat, tight and loud. “IIH’DZSHh’yu!”

Roberto speaks before Wolfwood can recover.

“Got a cold, undertaker?” he says. His tone is gruff and dry but his eyes are jeering, like he’s getting a kick out of it.

“That or a bad omen,” Meryl adds.

“Nah. I heard him at it all last night,” Roberto reports. “He’s sick.”

“Guess so,” Wolfwood acknowledges with phony indifference, then clears his throat. “Don’t twist your face up like that. It’s a head cold, you ever had one before?”

“Too many times, so don’t get the rest of us sick too,” Meryl says. She thins her lips. “Though I guess Vash might already be a lost cause, with the both of you sharing a bedroom.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Vash placates. “I’m pretty sturdy.”

“Yeah, sure,” is Meryl’s flat reply. She pushes herself up off of her chair and says, “Either way, I wasn’t planning to spend much time with either of you today – there’s some stuff I wanted to pick up in town.”

“Stuff?” Vash says. “What stuff?”

“We’re low on supplies,” Meryl explains. “Detergent, especially, if we’re going to use their laundry machine. Do you guys need anything?”

“Uh…” Vash says. He turns to look at Wolfwood, who makes hazy, expectant eye contact with him over the napkin tented around his nose. “Hey, you said you wanted something from the store, right?”

“–hhIEDSHyu! Fuck me,” Wolfwood replies blearily. “…What’d?”

“From the store in town,” Meryl repeats with a grimace. “Bless you.”

“Maybe some cold medicine? Or tissues?” Vash says. “Is there anything that makes you feel better when you’re sick?”

Roberto and Meryl remain silent while Wolfwood stares at him, trying to figure out whether Wolfwood is confused, insulted, or something else. Vash holds the eye contact comfortably.

At last, Wolfwood says, “No.”

He pulls two bills from his pocket and passes it to Meryl, who manages to take it without touching his hand.

“Just, ah. Whatever they got,” he concedes. He makes a show of pulling out an extra bit of currency and waving it in the air before he sets it down in front of her. “And get yourself something pretty for the trouble.”

“Yeah right,” Meryl says. “As if we can afford any luxuries right now.”

Wolfwood shrugs, then blows his nose. Meryl gathers the money carefully and wraps it up alongside the rest of their budget for the week.

She waits for him to finish, then tilts her head. “I am keeping the change, though.”

“You really are okay, aren’t you?” Vash says when they return to their room an hour later, after sorting out the itinerary and scheduling a round of confessions in the chapel booth for the evening. Apparently the devout in the village are aplenty, and they’ve been without a priest long enough to forget what religion is supposed to look like.

They wouldn’t have bothered with Wolfwood otherwise.

“Good god, you people care too much,” Wolfwood says. “Yeah. I’m…”

When he looks over at Vash’s post on the bed, it clicks for him what Vash has been trying to do all morning. He looks like an angel sitting there, but his expression is rotten with mischief.

“Can’t believe I fuckin’ forgot,” Wolfwood says. “You’re pretty filthy, Stampede, are you all right?”

With fond eyes shut, Vash laughs.

“I don’t know,” he says contemplatively. “It’s not really that weird, is it?”

“Sorry to get you so riled up.” Wolfwood snuffles against the back of his wrist, then squints half of his face up in a wince when it squeezes the pressure in his head. “Though I don’t think I could’ve done anything different if I’d remembered, anyway.”

Vash takes him by the wrist and pulls, careful to move himself to the side so that they don’t crash into each other before he’s ready. He lays on his side, ankles crossed, head propped up on his hand as he looks Wolfwood up and down.

“I know,” he says. “You’re so loud, though, a guy can’t help but wonder.”

“Shut up.” Wolfwood shoves him, and Vash retaliates until Wolfwood’s flat on his back. The movement shifts some congestion and he sniffles to keep his nose from running, which devolves into a sneeze. He turns his head to the side. “HEHT’DZSHh’iuh!”

“Yeah, like that,” Vash says with saccharine, teasing gratitude as Wolfwood glides the back of his wrist underneath his septum. Vash arrests Wolfwood’s hand, curving their fingertips into the spaces between each other’s knuckles, holding it hostage. “Let me see next time.”

Wolfwood grins, eyebrows askew, and says, “Never met anyone like you in my life, man.”

“You don’t think so?”

Wolfwood can’t answer, both because it’s too much to think about and because he has to sneeze again. It swirls out his breath in a set of quiet, uneven gasps, tingling all the way up to his eyes.

He squeezes Vash’s hand with the intensity of it, and bows his head into his shoulder.

“hhEHDZSHH’ue! –fuck…” He reclaims his breath with a heavy sniff, the kind that can’t quite haul in what it needs to, so he sniffles once more and clears his throat. He distracts himself by feeling up Vash’s leg until he reaches the firmness he’s looking for. “Nope. You’re easy.”

“That’s not always true,” Vash says. “Bless you.”

“Thanks.” Wolfwood indulges in more sniffling, more moving his hand. The excitement in Vash’s pulse is damp under Wolfwood’s palm. “Shortie’s right, you’ll probably catch this.”

“Maybe. It’s weird that you’re sick and nobody else is,” Vash says.

“Yeah, lucky you, huh?”

“Lucky me.” Vash runs his thumb near the puffy ridge under Wolfwood’s eye, wiping away moisture. “Do you always sneeze this much when you have a cold?”

“I could,” Wolfwood says, irritated at the reminder until Vash’s body heats up against him and invites his own blood to rush south in kind. “It never really goes away. Best I can do is…”

He blinks, eyes unfocused, brows crinkling together. His free arm starts to rise out of reflex, and Vash gently urges it back down.

“HD’IZSHyue! …stave it off.” Wolfwood sniffles before nodding back up to search Vash’s face, immediately reacting to the arousal there and the way it matches the expression in his groin.

“Good,” Vash says warmly. He mirrors Wolfwood’s touch. “Bless you.”

“Uh-huh,” Wolfwood gasps, twitching his hips into the pressure with a stuffy groan. “Ghh. Thank yhhhhhh—”

Freely, he caves to the insistence of the sensation, jolting in place and rubbing himself against Vash as a welcome byproduct.

“hddIHZSSHHiuh! Damn it,” he mutters, also out of reflex, embarrassed as he realizes his nose is running. “Dunno how I’m supposed to run a confession unless it lets up.”

“Poor Father Nicholas,” Vash chuckles.

Wolfwood’s face freezes and his entire body trembles with a shudder that knocks the wind out of him. “Fuck,” he says.

“Oh – did you like that?” Vash says. He releases Wolfwood’s hand and reaches up to tilt his chin so their gazes can reconvene. “Hey. It’s okay. Show me.”

“Pushy,” Wolfwood comments, but he meets Vash’s eyes. They maintain the connection, answering the challenge as Vash slides his hand down further and further, in time with the crescendo of Wolfwood’s lungs. When Vash stops at the hem of his pants, Wolfwood says, “What, you shy all of a sudden?”

“No,” Vash replies pleasantly, and lifts himself backward when Wolfwood tries to bite at his throat. “You sound like you’re about to sneeze again.”

“Yeah, get used to it.” Wolfwood sniffles, blinks, and looks down and to the side in estimation. “I said it’s always on the cuhhh– the cusp, when I catch these things.”

“Aw, jeez, don’t say stuff like that,” Vash whines, admiring and delighted.

“hhEHDSCH!– hh-! huhEDZSHHyue! Jesus.”

“Bless you,” Vash praises. He takes one hand regrettably off of Wolfwood’s body and slips it into his own pocket. “Are you okay? Here.”

After snatching the handkerchief for himself, Wolfwood cleans up his face and says, “Hope you don’t want it back. Uh, unless…”

Vash’s next laugh is stuttered, short and playful and humble and self-conscious. “No, that’s okay. We’re doing laundry later anyway, but… you should probably hold onto it.”

“htDZSHHIU! Jesus. Yeah, okay.” Wolfwood sniffs, averts his eyes away, then coughs into the borrowed cloth. “Thanks.”

“Uh-huh. Look at me again?” Vash catches the shadow of awkward insecurity as Wolfwood emerges from the cage of white and crawls his eyes upward. “Good. Thank you. Sorry, just– you look nice like this.”

“Dunno if the masses would agree with you, there, Needle,” Wolfwood says.

“Good thing they’re not the ones in bed with you, then,” Vash says. He risks cupping his hand around Wolfwood’s cheek, thumb barely missing the edge of his nostril as it flares. Wolfwood keeps eye contact from below, unblinking even as he struggles to squeak wet breaths through the swollen tissue in his sinuses. His mind seems clear even if his head isn’t, seemingly trying to decide something, so Vash says, “What is it?”

Wolfwood squints. “Just tryin’ to figure you out, Stampede,” he says.

Vash shrugs and says, “There’s not much you don’t already know.”

He gestures downward, between their bodies, indicating at the pause they’ve taken just to talk.

“Doubt that. But I’m a quick study,” Wolfwood says.

“Yeah?” Vash says.

“Yeah.”

Wolfwood pulls Vash on top of him, squashing the emptiness and eliciting an agreeable hum. Wolfwood moves his face up closer, craning his neck and offering the vulnerability of his throat. His voice is thick in several measures, rasping and hungry as he speaks.

“So show me something new.”

#other people’s writing #this is that GOOD SHIT #the more i read about these two guys the more i fall in love with them even though i have no idea of the context #snzfic 😋

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you-dont-look-so-good · 2 years ago

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long day late night

dropping my self indulgent 4k buddy daddies fic. I don’t know yall I got caught up yesterday and now I am feeling feral!!

ummm basically Kazuki comes home from a job with a high fever and Rei gives him a bath

warnings in tags // read on ao3

At any given moment, there are a million things running through Kazuki’s head. He’s always checking his surroundings, trying to think ahead, wondering about Miri, worrying about money, about what food he needs to use before it goes bad, about how he can preserve what he has right now. He can’t be sure when he started viewing life as a series of checklists, new tasks and worries always collecting faster than he could take care of them, but he’s never thought twice about it. It’s been his normal for as long as he can remember, and he’ll admit, the pressure of maintaining his life with Rei and Miri keeps him from ruminating on how fragile it all really is.

But despite all that planning, he can’t escape his own humanity.

And yeah, it’s kind of his fault for remembering that Miri had a field trip today, but forgetting that Rei would need the car, and yeah, he didn’t need to stay up making her a nice lunch when he’d already been sleeping poorly all week to begin with, but he so rarely got to do that after daycare had started, and one of his greatest pleasures was arranging the pieces of her bento into something beautiful, even if he knew in the end it was meant to be demolished.

And yeah, maybe he should’ve thought ahead and checked the weather, and yeah, maybe he should’ve considered bringing extra painkillers for his head on the off chance that his target would deviate from his usual habits and stay an extra four fucking hours at the office than he usually did so that he wouldn’t have had to wait all that extra time in the rain with his temples throbbing. But they had to make ends meet, and he’d volunteered for this job, hadn’t he?

By the time he’s on his way back, it’s well past one in the morning. Stray puddles are collecting on the sidewalk, washing the concrete with blurry reflections of the street lights. Kazuki’s head is killing him.

Keep reading

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you-dont-look-so-good · 2 years ago

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pharmacology

take my b//uddy d///addies fic!!!! tags/warnings: SNEEZE FETISH!! (rei is the star), sex scene (nothing graphic), some mess (nothing graphic), drugs mention, allergies, pre-canon words: 3077 read below, or clean version on ao3 :)

Kazuki watches Rei’s upper body go taut before trembling in place once, twice, three times, and then a fourth before he slowly exhales. There isn’t even a gulp of sound to it, which is pretty impressive given the intensity behind the…

Well, he can’t call them outbursts, technically. More like very uncomfortable, unhealthy implosions. But it’s not his job to tell the guy how to sneeze. Probably.

“Uh,” Kazuki says instead, “bless you? Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah,” Rei replies, flat and breathless, the first intentional noise he’s made since getting into the passenger seat ten minutes ago and confirming that it would be Kazuki driving them home.

He sniffles once, watery and graphic.

“Warn me next time,” he says. “About a job like that.”

“What?” Kazuki says. “We work jobs like that all the time – It was a quick target on private property, barely took us twenty minutes.”

In the dark, Rei sighs like he’s annoyed. Kazuki thinks backward and concludes that he hasn’t done anything particularly annoying, which means Rei must be annoyed with himself.

“The Japanese cedar in Nagano,” Rei says, a brief, ticklish cough pushing itself through the middle of his sentence. “I’m allergic.”

“What?” Kazuki says again, then allows himself to proverbially chew on the revelation, recalling the way Rei’s posture had changed as soon as they left the city and drove out past the mountains. Their idle chatter had declined and Rei had separated himself from Kazuki more swiftly than he usually does, and while he had maintained perfect precision down to the final shot, he’d taken longer to meet back up with Kazuki at the car.

The address had been on their assignment papers, but Kazuki had suspected that Rei doesn’t always read those.

“Does Kyu know?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Oh.” Kazuki stares ahead so as not to veer the car off the road as it curves sharply around the mountain. “Okay, uh, then why would he send us to–?”

“It’s fine. I have something I can take for it,” Rei says. “I just … hk’tschh! ihTSSch’u! … need to know ahead of time.”

“Sure, yeah,” Kazuki agrees readily as Rei scrubs at his eyes. “I’ll remember that, too. Where does Japanese cedar grow, exactly?”

Rei sighs. “Everywhere.”

“Everywhere,” Kazuki repeats flatly, used to his partner’s unhelpful hyperbole. He listens to Rei blow his nose into the travel tissues from the glove compartment for the rest of the drive down.

His inspection the next morning proves that Rei wasn’t lying about a secret stash of allergy meds. There are three boxes in the back of their first aid drawer, two of them unopened and the one on top half-full. There’s a tinted bottle of pills next to them, which Kazuki is holding up to the light for inspection without considering whether meddling is a good idea.

“Huh. You weren’t kidding,” he says.

“Put those back,” Rei tells him. His expression depicts something vaguely unsettled, but the somber edge to his tone only feeds Kazuki’s curiosity.

“Why? What are these? There’s no label.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t you think I should know?” Kazuki challenges, lowering the bottle and making eye contact. “I mean, in case you run out or something? Are these even for your allergies, or is there another health condition nobody was telling me about?”

“Calm down,” Rei says. “They’re stimulants.”

“Oh,” Kazuki says. He’s seen enough controlled substances to recognize instant-release as he holds the bottle closer to his face and shakes it around. “Amphetamines?”

“Uh. Yeah,” Rei replies. “Low dose. For the side effects.”

Kazuki slides the bottle back in the drawer with a placating grin and actually feels a little bad for the guy.

“Sure, sure,” he says.

“I’ve been taking them since I was a kid,” Rei continues, and Kazuki suddenly feels as though he’s poured too much tea into a cup and caused it to overflow. “I see the look on your face. It’s not a big deal.”

It’s just – that’s kinda dark, isn’t it? Kazuki doesn’t necessarily like the idea of a kid taking illegal, black-market substances so that he can be a better shot.

But it makes sense, like the other slivers of Rei’s childhood Kazuki occasionally manages to come by, and antihistamines aren’t important enough of an issue for him to bother pushing it. Their job is dark, Rei’s talent is dark, and the history that honed a talent like that on such a young man is obviously going to be dark, too.

“Sure it isn’t,” Kazuki answers in surrender, shutting the drawer and moving to the kitchen. Rei keeps a suspicious eye on him before assuming his own post in front of his laptop on the couch. “Mackrel’s almost done, so don’t go anywhere!”

“No leeks this time,” Rei demands blandly.

“They were on sale!”

“It’s been three days. I’m sick of leeks.”

“They’re good for you, Rei!”

Rei huffs, and for the first time today, Kazuki feels like he’s won.

The intel fades from Kazuki’s mind pretty quickly. Hay fever isn’t actually that big a deal, all things considered; a lot of people get sniffly when the flowers start to bloom in the spring, and Rei seems to have a handle on what most of the population considers an innocuous non-issue of a situation. It’s not like he’s going to somehow blow their cover in the middle of a job. He’s obviously lived this long without a life-ruining debacle, pollen-related or not, so Kazuki decides not to bother him about it when he hears Rei sneezing just once from the couch two days later.

It’s nothing short of his usual: an urgent gasp, followed by a crumpled-up, squeaky grunt, and then a frustrated little noise off the tip of his tongue. Equal parts subdued and dramatic, like Rei himself.

“hhH’KGXT!jh…”

The sounds from the TV suggest that Rei hadn’t even paused his game for it. Impressive, but not surprising. Kazuki doubts he’s even still conscious that it happened, it’s so dismissable.

But a careful, placid commentary falls out of him anyway.

“You okay?”

“Fine,” Rei says immediately. There’s a quick, dry sniff. More video game noises. Nothing interesting or worth paying attention to at all.

So Kazuki tries not to, but success doesn’t stick to him for long.

It happens again further into the week, this time while they’re having sex.

The surrounding circumstance, once again, is pretty routine. It isn’t their first time doing something like this with each other. For Kazuki it’s a way to blow off steam, especially after working a role that gets him riled up with no release. Today’s assignment had been one of those, his only task being to flirt with some mistress for information on a bigger picture, and the way she’d pressed herself up against him had really made it difficult not to take the gig further than he was supposed to.

Or at least it should have. Knowing Rei was back at home made it easy to end things once he’d finished off his third beer and gotten what he needed from the woman on the stool next to him. She’d looked disappointed when she realized he was taking off, but Kazuki couldn’t get himself to care.

He and Rei barely exchanged a dozen words before they were in Kazuki’s bed with their shirts off and pants undone.

They aren’t kissing, but the nature of their positions has their faces close enough for Kazuki to smell the shampoo he’d bought for Rei a few weeks ago. It wafts further toward him as Rei’s head snaps down abruptly, throwing his hair in front of his eyes and past Kazuki’s nose.

Rei’s shoulders scrunch up with a sudden, sharp, “hihTZSCH’iu!” that seems to take him by surprise. It must, because he doesn’t even bother to direct it off to the side like usual.

In his defense, it’s impossible to cover his mouth with his wrists pinned down, and the result sprayed across both of their chests is a natural consequence of…

“ihtKZSHh-!”

That one’s a little more bitten off, but he’s not able to keep it to himself like he obviously wants to. And for some reason, Kazuki doesn’t really mind.

Fleetingly, he thinks it must be because he’s used to dealing with the general byproducts of Rei. Cigarette smoke, candy wrappers, stray wiry strands of black hair sticking to Kazuki’s clothes, messy blankets when he naps on the couch and wet footprints after he takes a bath. He doesn’t remember when it stopped bothering him so much, but at some point it must have, because a normal person would be a little bit put-off at being sneezed on.

“Fuck—” Rei says, sounding more angry than embarrassed, but Kazuki interrupts because he apparently isn’t a normal person when Rei is involved.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, because Kazuki is bothered at the idea of stopping what they’re doing. He resumes sliding off his jeans and accidentally makes eye contact, recognizing the confused surprise on the edges of Rei’s features.

He blinks at Kazuki and schools his expression, then says, “Okay. Keep going, then.”

They keep going and Rei’s athletic shorts make proper acquaintance with the floor on top of the nest of denim awaiting them. He’d actually thrown them down like he was mad at them. The hair on his legs is sparse and soft as he wraps them around Kazuki’s calves.

Kazuki grins, satisfied, and grinds closer in accordance with their routine. Sex is easy. Straightforward. Reliable. He prepares himself to bask in the faultless indulgence of it.

It’s pretty easy to do. Rei’s no expert, but he’s obviously familiar with male anatomy and much less selfish in bed than Kazuki had initially expected.

And he’s nice to look at, which has always been more than enough for Kazuki.

He tries to keep from losing himself in Rei as they move together, but more and more, he’s impervious to distraction until Rei jerks beneath him for a reason other than pleasure.

“hih’TSSh! –TZSSh’u!”

He kind of aims away this time, leaving a faint mark on his shoulder and the sheets beside him, but there’s no avoiding the aftermath that ricochets onto the side of Kazuki’s bicep.

“Heh. Bless you,” Kazuki says with a grin, nice and smooth and playful like he would if this were an easy hookup with a stranger, reassurance that he’s enjoying himself even at the expense of the other person’s dignity.

It feels different this time, though.

“I…” Rei starts to say, but his gaze unfocuses again and he grabs hold of Kazuki’s hand and tries to tug it away. Kazuki grips him tighter and Rei shakes his head. “ht’IHSZH’oo!”

Rei sniffles afterward and something clicks the wrong way in Kazuki’s body, because there’s a bizarre sort of thrill mixed with an urge to take care of this guy, and he doesn’t know which feeling he’s supposed to lean into. Which feeling he wants to lean into.

“Ugh. Let go,” Rei says. “Something’s wrong.”

Kazuki wants to challenge him like usual, but he releases Rei and leans back, giving him room to sit up and reach for one of the tissues on the nightstand that Kazuki rarely uses.

He doesn’t even make it in time, hand hovering near the box when he needs to twist away near the headboard with his forearm covering the lower half of his face.

“IHTSHh’yeu!” Another sniffle, and then he finally gets to the tissues, wastefully grabbing two of them and pressing them against his face. “hehIHZSH’OO!”

Kazuki has never heard Rei make a sound so exuberant. He’d consider it out of character if it wasn’t so like Rei to be this annoyed at having to sneeze a few times. He doesn’t have much tolerance for discomfort.

“Fuck,” Rei comments once he’s blown his nose, now holding the tissues in a wrinkly ball near his face like a shield braced for an onslaught of bullets. “What is that perfume?”

Without thinking, Kazuki says, “What are you talking about? What perfume?”

“Your…” is Rei’s breathy attempt to explain himself, before he rolls his eyes and hits the mattress before gasping and folding himself in half. “HihTZSH’u! It’s all over you.”

That’s right! The lady from before!

Well… whoops. Kazuki had kind of forgotten about her.

“Oh, shit.” He honestly hadn’t realized, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have predicted it’d be an issue. He grabs a tuft of his bangs and fluffs it up, sniffling the air in front of his face as it falls with a cloud of fragrance. “You’re allergic to it, aren’t you?”

Rei rolls his eyes again, at Kazuki this time instead of his own immune system.

“hhIHTsh’iu! Yes,” he says. “Jesus, don’t do that.”

Through a sheepish smile, Kazuki says, “Right. Sorry. Bless you.”

Rei blows his nose again. Kazuki doesn’t reach out to rub his back or anything, but he does click his tongue at the piteousness of it all. Rei is a dichotomy of heartbreaking helplessness and fierce competence, and the former is on eye-catching display right in front of Kazuki.

He feels the same pull as always: to do something about it, to take control and fix it while Rei passively waits and watches.

“Your meds are in the other room, I’ll go get—”

“Don’t bother,” Rei says. “It’ll knock me out. And I can’t get it up if I take the stimulant. It’ll just waste the day.”

His consonants are thick and fuzzy, which Rei must also notice because he blows his nose again and groans.

“All right, how about this,” Kazuki says patiently. “I’ll start a load of laundry, go rinse the rest of this out in the shower and you step outside and get some fresh air. C’mon.”

He rocks himself off of the bed and takes a fresh t-shirt out of his closet. Rei catches it without looking when Kazuki throws it his way.

“iehTSSH’ioo!” And then sneezes into the collar as soon as he’s pulled it over his head, despite the used tissues in his hand and fresh ones in the box right next to him. He pulls out a couple more and scrubs underneath his nose while Kazuki tries not to feel whatever the hell he’s feeling when he realizes Rei is wearing his clothes. “Get the – hahISHHiuh! – the name of that stuff so we can avoid it.”

Kazuki really doesn’t know how he’s supposed to do that. Find the woman whose john they’re about to off just so he can find out which version of Dior she was wearing six days before he pushed up daisies?

He can take other precautions, though, so he asks: “Are you allergic to anything else?”

Rei stares at nothing for a moment before drawing a slow breath, gasping, and then pressing his too-many tissues hard against his septum and rubbing it back and forth. His eyes are wet.

“Talk to me about that later,” he says with a fierce, crackly sniffle. “Go ahhhhnd… hihTSSSh’uh! shower until you smell like yourself again. This is too ridiculous.”

“Yeah, that’s fair,” Kazuki concedes. He gathers up their clothes in preparation for his newfangled storm of chores, leaving Rei sitting on Kazuki’s bed, wearing Kazuki’s shirt, sneezing into Kazuki’s tissues and evoking a bizarre sense of possessiveness that Kazuki can’t shake from the dregs nor the edges of his mind.

“It’s just pollen, I think,” Rei says once they’ve actually resumed and finished and cleaned up, once Kazuki has managed to feed him some decongestants because despite Rei’s insistence, they did have a stash on hand since the last time Kazuki stocked up just in case, once they’d resumed their respective positions in the common area where everything was familiar and comfortable. “And whatever was on you before, I guess. There’s really no way to figure out what it was?”

He seems kind of anxious about it.

“I mean,” Kazuki says absently, only half-serious as he rummages through the cabinets for dinner inspiration, “we could go to a department store and sample different bottles until we recognize it?”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Even if we did figure it out, I don’t really know how we’d go about avoiding it.” Kazuki finds a bottle of curry spice and sets it down. That’s an option. “It’s not like we can go around checking what kind of fragrances people will be wearing. Maybe you could start wearing a mask?”

Rei grimaces. “Not doing that either.”

“I don’t think it’s worth stressing about,” Kazuki says. “After this job, I doubt you’ll run into it again. You haven’t until now, right?”

“I don’t like being caught off guard.”

“I noticed.”

“It’s annoying. It gets in the way.”

“At least you’ve got something you can take for it, right?”

“More or less. But still. It can be dangerous.”

“Yeah, I guess you were sorta…”

“And it happened twice this week. Maybe I should have told you before. Sorry.”

“Uh…”

And there’s that sensation again, the cup spilling over. And just like he’d do in any other situation, Kazuki rushes to wipe up the excess damage that he’s done.

“It’s really fine,” Kazuki says. “I mean, I know now, so I’ll just keep an extra eye out for the pollen counts and whatever. Your breathing doesn’t get messed up or anything, does it?”

“Do you mean like, asthma? No,” Rei says, shifting on the couch. “Not for a long time. Probably at least ten years.”

“Okay. What about air purifiers? Do you have anything like that?”

Rei groans, and Kazuki is half-satisfied that he’s back to himself and half-irritated that he’s about to be uncooperative.

“It’s fine,” he says. “I just sneeze for a few hours and then sleep for the rest of the day, if I’m not working.”

“That sounds uncomfortable,” Kazuki comments. “I’ll get one on my way back from the market.”

“You…” Rei clears his throat. “You don’t have to do that.”

Kazuki shrugs, even though Rei isn’t looking at him. “Not like we can’t afford it. You don’t like clean air?”

“Seems like you do.” Rei stares ahead at his ashtray, squinting at its emptiness. “You’re going to be weird about this.”

“I think you secretly like it.”

What Rei does like is shutting Kazuki down using as few words as possible. So when he hums absently in response instead, Kazuki holds the victory close to his chest.

Figuratively. Because that’s all he can do for now.

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