#this one is evil evil | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hauntedjpegcollection · 7 months

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wc: 4746 au: dishonored au ch: xavier, benji

For a long time after dying, Xavier does a commendable job of staying away from Benji. He has to be careful—conscious of the effort. Because more than once or twice, he’d felt himself in that between world, that nothing place, searching. Drifting, like a fishing boat meant to come to shore—right to Benji. He was home, wasn’t he? The lighthouse that was alive just for him. Then Xavier would snap into consciousness on the brick wall, all too ready to fall forward into the estate. He’d be at the dock where they’d shared their first kiss, knowing that Benji was only just behind him. If he was selfish (or brave) enough, he could go and get him.

Xavier tries to be good, because he swore that once upon a time, he was good. Benji had told him that, lips to his ear, hand pressed against ribs. So good. There was some sense of morality that he could still cling to, even as something cosmic was ripping apart all the stitching, all his seams that held in all that good. Xavier shed humanity day by day, with every hour he could no longer count.

He couldn’t even be considered human anymore, could he?

But he could be good.

What he’d found about himself—his new self—was nothing short of monstrous. Disgusting—terrifying, a nightmare, a myth. But Xavier could do one thing, for both him and Benji. And that was stay away. Occupy the same city and never see each other. Never share a bed again, never touch one another. Sometimes, Xavier is sure the kindness is cowardice in disguise—he cannot imagine Benji looking at the walking corpse of his once lover with anything other than horror.

And still.

It really is a long time. Until it isn’t. Until he slips. Purposefully.

—

For about the same amount of time Xavier went without seeing Benji, he also sought to find some sort of cure. Not the kind that would reverse what happened—becoming a lab experiment’s version of a God came with knowledge. Sometimes infinite, sometimes small. And Xavier knew, somehow, in the void that replaced his heart, that there was no going back. He would never be Xavier Wolffe—who got too freckled in the summer, who always forgot to lace his left boot, who loved his sisters and fought with his father, who wanted a sword because he wanted responsibility, who dreamed of a green house in the woods—again.

But he thought, maybe he could die again.

Maybe it would be permanent this time.

Maybe they could bury him, like they couldn’t before. His grave wouldn’t be empty any longer, the absence of him would no longer be a hole inside the chest of everyone who once knew him. Maybe there would be closure.

But it didn’t matter—no knife ever found his throat a second time. In every instance that it came close, there was this bone deep survivor inside him that made Xavier parry a poorly aimed blade. It became easy to take someone else’s life instead of his own. Killing began to feel good. It was righteous. He found and killed men, just like Gabriel—if one remembers, the man who orchestrated Xavier’s death entirely. And he killed the men protecting those men.

And it was a cycle that didn’t end.

Xavier thought he could live in that chaos.

But.

It’s not that different from dodging a blade, really.

—

“Only tonight,” he whispers. “Just one night.”

This is a promise he already knows he will break. Omnipotence not needed for that.

Still…

The blankets and sheets rustle as Xavier slides into Benji’s bed (and tries not to think that this is now Benji’s bed, and never will it ever be their bed again). It feels all at once familiar and completely new, because Xavier is not entirely Xavier anymore. All the memories of Benji are stark, bright. Like glints of sharp edged mirrors; he remembers nearly everything. Every word they ever shared together, every kiss or caress, every meaningless fight he would redo a thousand times if he ever got the chance. He knows he won’t.

Things are watery for Xavier. Hazy. He feels like his hand is almost always reaching into the fog; but Benji has always been clarity.

Yet, his body feels awkward and clumsy, trying to remember the way they used to fit together. This is a vessel not meant for intimacy. That’s the crux of the issue, because Xavier has been newly alive for years now and he has not held anyone since that painful rebirth. He’s never tried. It terrifies him to be close to something mortal, something that he isn’t hurting.

As Benji’s back meets his chest, and Xavier’s arms wind around his middle, just the same as they used to lay before it all happened—he cannot help but wonder if Benji has ever had another. If any man has shared this bed in those painful stretching years of silence; of when Xavier was dead in the sense that Benji did not know he was alive, and then of when Xavier was dead in the sense that he was simply trying so hard to keep them apart.

Not alive, still, by any means.

If Xavier tries, he can find the answer. It’s not always something he can easily control. Knowing everything, being everything (being nothing). But it also feels like a violation. If Benji wanted others, he could have them—what was Xavier going to do? What could he ever expect? Only, when he thinks of it, the windows in the room shake slightly. He presses his nose into Benji’s hair, closes his eyes, tightens his arms. Wills away thoughts of anyone ever touching his lover (his, always, his), because Xavier is constantly so close to not having control over something he barely understands.

“You still smell so good,” he finds himself admitting quietly. Benji shivers. The shivers turn to trembles. Xavier’s nose presses deeper into night black curls. He fills his lungs in a deep, hard inhale, and he can feel Benji in him then, like that. Xavier is full of him, instead of water and oil. His arms tighten on reflex. The longing opens in him like a wound down his middle, as though he’s been gutted with a fishers hook.

“You’re cold.” Benji’s voice is thick and wet at the edges. There is a brief pause. And then, Xavier moves apologetically, murmuring to them both as he turns to pull himself out of the bed. Mistake. He’ll leave. He’ll run away, and keep running and maybe not look back this time. Be good. Good. Only Benji’s hand snaps around his wrist as his arms unwind. He is so warm it is almost painful. It’s like a brand, rough fingers holding him so tightly. If he were human, maybe that grip would even hurt. But he isn’t mortal anymore; and instead it feels so good.

He doesn’t want to stop being touched.

“Don’t you fuckin’ dare, Xavier,” Benji whispers in a wounded hiss. He hasn’t moved at all, even as Xavier sits up. He lays there, on his side, face turned more toward his pillow. Strands of hair give him privacy, covering his face. The hand not holding Xavier’s pale wrist, clings around the edge of the mattress instead. His knuckles are pale with the effort.

“Don’t go.”

So Xavier doesn’t, even if he should.

There’s a brief and still crystal clear memory of the first time they slept together (not as children, when Maran, sweet but easily scared Maran, would ask them to sleep in his too big bed and they’d lay there all night instead while Benji made up stories that scared all three of them). This is Xavier cresting adulthood instead, this memory is one he revisits so often it would be yellowed at the edges if it were paper.

Xavier had laid behind Benji, just like this, in a bed not too unlike this one, too small for his too long body. Gangly at that age and Benji—he remembered Benji sleeping all curled up. Knees bent, arms tucked around himself. And for some reason, Xavier had hated it, made a joke as he wound himself around Benji like vines and forced him into something he found more relaxing. They’d only slept that night, but it had felt more intimate than when they kissed.

He lays back down, sliding his leg between Benji’s knees. His arms return, cradling this much warmer body closer. There’s a moment of silence until Benji’s shoulders begin to shake.

“You’re never cold.”

It’s funny; he remembers every time Benji had cursed about Xavier being the warmest man alive. Now Xavier realizes that every time Benji had said that, what he was really saying was I love you, I love how warm you are, I love being in a bed with you, it’s warm but safe. What he didn’t realize—What Xavier couldn’t understand was the loss of something so small and so significant to Benji.

All he could do was continue laying there, while one more piece of him was mourned and lost forever.

—

When he was human, he used to sleep so much.

Xavier remembers loving it; he remembers coveting it, stealing mid day naps when he could, sleeping in on prayer days (the irony not lost on him now, when he stands in front of his own altars and looks down at their offerings). He remembers blankets smelling like his lover, pillows that were flimsy and thin but somehow heavenly after a long day on the docks. He remembers laying in the grass under the thin excuse for sun that Dunwall had while Benji did garden work beside him.

He did not have the green thumb Maran did—but he was so strong. He was so strong. The grounds workers never turned down his extra help and Xavier?

Xavier would lay there, playing with a blade of grass, watching. Benji couldn’t ever help himself—he’d promptly kneel when no one was looking and press one sweet kiss to Xavier’s brow. Lazy, he’d say, but he’d never make Xavier get up.

Sleep is different now. He isn’t sure if it is sleeping. Sometimes, it feels similar, because he’s prone on a bed and not there for a long, long time. And there’s dreams too; nightmares often. It doesn’t rejuvenate because Xavier’s exhaustion is different now too. It’s not like the feeling in his biceps after hauling crab traps, or how the tiredness would spread through his whole body after a morning run. Xavier’s tired in other ways. And sleep doesn’t have the respite that it once had and he doesn’t want sleep the way he used to when he was mortal. Human. But he was asleep none the less, and then awake, when fingertips touch his cheek.

Benji faces him, when they’d fallen asleep with his back to Xavier’s chest. He’s on his side, a hand out stretched. Just the bare hint of a touch to a scar that goes across Xavier’s nose and down his cheek. Another that separates his eyebrow, that had nearly cost him an eye. He inhales sharply when Benji’s palm cups his ruined face softly. It feels like a moment that was penned for him to exist in and everything narrows completely to just Benji, and the hand touching him.

“The drug wore off,” Xavier explains. Once, he might have had a sleep rough voice that Benji would have mocked. They’d have woken up with well planted kisses, complaints about morning breath. Instead, Benji is staring at him, with wide eyes. Xavier shouldn’t talk about it because he knows every single word is going to hurt, but Benji stays quiet. Xavier can feel how bad he wants to know, wants any detail. As if knowing can somehow make it better.

“Underestimated how much they’d need, ‘cause I’m big,” Xavier laughs and slides a hand just below Benji’s ribs. Through the thin fabric of his shirt, he can feel the warmth of him. Blood, muscle, bone, life. His thumb rubs softly. He can see the expression on Benji’s face breaking just slightly. Imagining Xavier and a knife and a stranger. “I must have—I think I sat up. On the st-stone, when they were about to—and I scared them.”

Xavier doesn’t remember it, but in the way he knows everything, he knows that as well. And he knows it almost made them stop. A ruined sacrifice, face split open. But someone had said to keep going—that he’d be perfect when it was over, that it didn’t matter. Maybe the change hadn’t healed his wounds to his face and left scars instead because he wasn’t perfect. Because he hadn’t fully become what they’d wanted him to be.

And now here he was. A hideous, malformed accident.

Only Benji didn’t look at him like that—Xavier could see it in his eyes. Maybe they’d been apart for so long, maybe he wasn’t even human anymore, but there was something pulsing inside him, something that always knew what Benji was thinking. The part of him that would hold a hand out knowing Benji was already reaching for it, the part of him that knew Benji was cold and offered his jacket, when he knew Benji wanted to leave a social gathering because it was too noisy. The part that knew Benji wanted a kiss, or a soft touch under the jaw, a hug.

Xavier closes his eyes and rolls away from him.

The bed creaks and now he knows Benji has gotten out of it. He could recognize that shifting weight from mere memories alone, where he’d lay in bed while Benji woke up first. Because Xavier had loved sleeping in…

“You know I can’t,” Xavier says, as he sits up on the bed at the exact time Benji—

“Why not?” His anger is icy and smooth. It’s like running a hand down a cold, stone wall in the middle of Dunwall’s winter. Impenetrable and unbreakable. “You’re here, yeah? You came.” He stumbles over the last words. His voice wavers. He stands in front of Xavier, who comes up to his chest, their height difference stark even when he’s seated. Something still human inside Xavier feels tender and bruised.

“I’m being selfish.”

“You’re bein’—I want you here—”

“That’s why I shouldn’t,” Xavier’s teeth click together with the effort to keep his voice down. Benji has picked a secluded place, somewhere lonesome and wholly his own, far away from any other Giarizzo estate workers. But it isn’t just people he’s afraid of hearing him. “I shouldn’t be doing this to you.” He palms his forehead, elbows to his knees. Shame and disgust and self loathing broil underneath his skin. The only warm part of him left.

“Gwed, yeah? All your choice, not mine? Fuck that, Xavier.”

He stands quickly, but Benji doesn’t relent even though the physical enormity of Xavier is suddenly right up against his space. They’re as close as they were when they were sleeping. Benji’s chest heaves with hard, furious breathes—Xavier’s shoulders tighten like a cord has been strung between them and yanked. He stares down with a tilted chin and narrowed eyes. The wood inside the room creaks, like there’s a pressure from something pushing against it.

“It’s no ones choice,” Xavier seethes, raising his hands to gesture in his fury. “This isn’t good for you—this is wrong—I’m wrong. And being here is—it’s hurting you, because I can’t—”

“No one can!” Benji’s winter like anger finally snaps, arms thrown at his side. “No one fucking can, Xavier! Y’think what? I’ll find some bloke in this shit hole city? Go lookin’ in a bar and bring him here? Here?” His hand slices toward the bed they’d just shared. Benji’s laugh is more a snarl, just as cold. “That’s your bed—”

“No it’s not!” Xavier laughs and that’s a howl, like a dog barking. “I sleep on a pallet in a fucking clocktower.”

“Well who told y’to do that, dickhead?”

“Where the fuck else do I sleep?” Xavier’s voice raises loud enough that something in the room shakes and falls over. Something cold and slithering and ancient feels along his skin.

“Here!” Benji’s voice matches in volume. And then it softens. And the softness is louder somehow than the yelling. “Here.” He repeats, with the heels of his palms pressed against his eyes. His arms quiver. “Fuck you, Xavier. Y’could sleep here. You could.”

“Spirits, you’re mean to me,” he huffs nastily, snatching Benji closer. The space between them is feverish. His hands shake where they hold onto broad, strong hips. There’s only fabric between his palms and Benji’s skin. His warm, smooth skin. The memory of that skin haunts Xavier. “Always knew how to make me mad, didn’t you?”

“You started fights,” Benji replies in a hoarse voice. His pupils are coin sized, shiny and bright in the dark. There’s a flush to his cheeks, this sudden dark magenta color that is beautiful on his brown skin. Xavier feels a guilt that can’t be ignored because of how much he’s missed that color—how much he’s missed this closeness.

He’s always missing Benji. It’s a constant wound in his side, a thorn underneath a fingernail. Never leaving; the painful tug of it the only tether besides hate and vengeance and violence that Xavier has to this mortal world. Without it, maybe he would burn out completely and become the void he’s meant to be.

But there is so much shame because he doesn’t just miss Benji. He misses—touching. He misses holding. He misses running his tongue along the divots of Benji’s muscular chest. He misses feeling the stretch and burn and rocking motions of sex, he misses the sensation of their bodies sliding together. The taste of his tongue. Misses Benji’s whispered words and his strong hands and—

“You ended them,” Xavier murmurs back. He feels dangerously close to what it is like to be The Outsider. He feels violently close. His shoulders shiver with the anticipation, breathing deepening. The world groans once more around them. Darkness shutters the windows, preternatural. Defiant and cold. This is what he was afraid of. What he was worried would happen—what he knew would happen. Xavier can’t control whatever God sits right underneath the skin and Benji always made him feel feral. Even human.

But when he looks away—

Hands connect with his chest, sending him sprawled back onto the bed behind them. The suddenness of it surprises Xavier enough that a crack splits down the mirror in the corner of the room. Neither of them even notice, neither of them look anywhere but each other. Benji crawls onto the bed and the sight alone causes Xavier to whisper out a sound. He swallows a thick feeling in his throat, his hands raising to touch. Please, to touch. Benji continues his crawl forward, his eyes shiny in the dark of the room. His posture powerful.

Weight sinks onto Xavier’s lap, making him bite down another sound. It comes out strangled. The shifting body above him makes his eyes screw shut. Pleasure, long forgotten and ignored makes him moan. It feels so good it makes his head swim.

“I missed you so much,” Xavier admits and when he opens his eyes, Benji is seated, straddling his thighs. It feels hollow, because it cannot describe the actual sensation. The painful yearn that has flayed him alive.

I thought it was better this way. I thought I was making things better.

“I’ll stay,” he says. His hands take Benji’s thighs. He remembers the shape of them. They’re just as strong as his memory. He wants Benji naked, wants him striped of every barrier.

“Wasn’t gonna let you leave, Xavier,” Benji promises in a voice heated like metal.

There’s a man across the city praying at an altar with a dogs head painted above it—and there’s another in a manor paying for extra guards that will be useless in two weeks time when Xavier puts a sword through his heart. There’s a young girl scurrying the street because she’d painted the symbol of The Outsider across a wall, because she thinks He’s the only God worth worshiping anymore—and there’s another woman sitting at her desk, turning the pages of an ancient book, paper yellow at the edges, thin as flayed skin, thinking of ways to Undo whatever went wrong with Gabriel Giarizzo-Cohn’s mistake of a sacrifice—

And all the while that very Outsider is laying in a bed. Their bed. His pale, cold hands spread across thighs tight around his hips. He stares up with sea foam green eyes while Benji stares down at him. Not letting him go. Not again. Not for a second time. The world feels like it starts and stops there, Godhood forgotten in the glow of that hot stare.

Xavier is the first one to frantically move. To lift his arms above his head, the searing feeling of Benji’s palms across his torso and chest shoving the scratchy cotton material up. Words disappear, but sounds don’t. Benji groaning with the sensation of Xavier’s hands clutching desperately at his waist. Xavier making breathy, whimpering sounds from every kiss to his throat, his chest, the swell of his bicep even. Teeth replace lips and a tongue sooths over the little pleasurable hurts they cause.

The string of his pants is yanked open, fabric pushed down. Xavier’s body tenses and flexes, back arching from the bed. Benji’s mouth tucks into the hollow of his throat and he murmurs encouraging familiar words that have not lost an ounce of their heat; that’s it gorgeous, c’mon, Xavier, give me it, beautiful. He pants, head tossed back, eyes rolling at the sensation of Benji’s hand around him. Tugging faster. Thumb swiping a sensitive tip. Xavier is burning, his stomach muscles dancing.

And then he cums, so quickly it feels like a dizzying blow to the head. He goes lightheaded and breathless. Calves tightening, hips twitching. Benji’s mouth draws away. Weight shifts on the bed once more and all too quickly does Xavier realize how quickly that went.

“I—” he sits up, braced on elbows. The hot knife of embarrassment is surprising in his chest. It’s so human that he feels so unmoored and panicked. And those feelings too are so mortal, so definitively unlike what he’s slowly becoming, that it makes his chest flutter with uneven staccato breathes. “I’m sorry—I—” His words tumble thick and wet and ashamed until Benji darts toward him.

Their mouthes collide. It’s a messy, misdirected kiss that catches the corner of Xavier’s lips more than anything, but their heads tilt to capture each other better. A kiss, a real kiss. Their first since—their tongues slide together, Xavier’s hand tangles into inky black curls. They moan open mouthed against one another, wet and messy and needy. Benji’s desire tastes heady. His strong, warm hands roam upward, slide until they’re firm around Xavier’s shoulders. His strength is unexpected even teh second time as Xavier is flattened to the bed. His head hits the pillow and he gasps.

It feels so good—it feels too good. Shoved down, Benji’s hungry stare above him. There can’t be any humiliation then; just the basic human desire to be touched again. And again. And again—with someone who wants to keep touching.

Again and again and again.

—

He’s dozing. Its a sensation he almost forgot existed. Eyes fighting to stay open, breathing slowly evening and then hitching every time he blinks himself awake. It’s warm and pleasant, like bathwater warmed to the perfect temperature, like the giant tub Benji had once found and bought himself with his little funds just so they could both fit. Xavier’s cheek is pressed to Benji’s stomach, arms wrapped firmly around a body he never wants to let go of again. A dark hand cards through his sweaty, messy hair. The feel of his breathing is so soothing it nearly pulls him under again.

“The bed still creaks,” Xavier mumbles instead.

Benji, blessedly, fucking laughs. It’s a throaty sound, because they’d just spend the last few hours being anything but quiet with each other. His stomach moves with it and that just makes Xavier turn to face it. His nose nuzzles into the hair, broad abdomen. He moves to lathe his tongue from navel up to rib. There’s a scar there he doesn’t remember. It scares him, because he could find out. He could know, but—like dozing, he imagines daydreaming. Of laying in this bed forever and asking about every new part of Benji.

His gray hair included. Xavier’s eyes narrow on that spot of gray that blossoms from his temple. His tongue continues up as Benji groans out, low and appreciative, teeth tugging a nipple meanly until he settles his chin to Benji’s sternum.

“Sorry, never got ‘round to fixin’ the bed. Bit busy, yeah? Guardin’ Maran left and right from swarmin’ ladies that want to marry him for the oil fortune and all.”

“Oh, poor Maran.” Xavier puts a knuckle to his eye, pretends to wipe a tear, pouts.

“Told you to fix the bed, anyway, didn’t I?”

Xavier opens his eyes wide, innocent. Benji’s hands cup his cheeks. He doesn’t even flinch when thumbs brush the edge of his pale, jagged scars. He doesn’t stop to wonder if Benji might secretly think he’s the hideous replica of his dead lover. It doesn’t pop the bubble they’ve formed, for this night alone at least.

“I was busy.”

“Bein’ a lazy dog.”

“You dare,” Xavier growls, rising, bracing hands on the bed on either side of Benji. He curls back his lip, brows knitted, face a mask of pretend fury. “You can’t insult The Outsider.” Benji’s hands move from his face. Fingers dance down his throat, down bruises that Benji has left with his teeth and mouth. Bruises that shouldn’t ever have formed, loving marks that Benji never should have been able to place. Proof that The Outsider was also, sometimes, just a man.

“No,” he says as his hands move until they dig points into Xavier’s lower back. Until he shoves them together firmly once more and Xavier is between Benji’s thighs. It’s intimate, to be touching like this, to be wedged together, unselfconscious. Skin to fucking skin. “M’not talking to The Outsider. I’m talking to you, Xavier.”

I am The Outsider, Xavier doesn’t say. Not when Benji’s leg is hooking around his waist and pulling them that much closer. The sensual roll of his body upward is suggestion enough for what he wants. And maybe—maybe Xavier could just be—maybe in this creaking bed, on an estate that belongs to a man that had singled him out for ritual murder—maybe Xavier could just be a man in love and not whatever hate filled chaotic entity he was meant to be.

If anyone could tame something so wildly inhuman and so mournfully dead, it would be Benji.

Xavier’s hand nearly crushes the headboard with every thrust into him. The darkness never clears from the windows, but it doesn’t feel like an omen, but something protective. Benji’s arms feel stronger than nature around his shoulders, stronger than magic or sacrifice. They kiss, hungry devouring kisses that don’t pause or interrupt the furious rolling movement of their bodies.

After that one, they finally do actually sleep.

—

Benji forgives Xavier for not being there when sunlight breaks through clear windows. He can feel that from inside, wherever Benji lives. His heart, his pathetically mortal but beautiful heart that will solely beat because of the connection that no knife could have ever fully severed. He sits on the edge of that clocktower, a knee tucked under his chin as he looks at the murky, ugly horizon of Dunwall.

He feels sore.

It makes him grin, something like the old smile, even with the scar that wrinkles over his nose. He feels sore—it should scare him. No man or woman has ever managed to actually hurt him, since he was crashed onto the shores, onto the rocky wave breakers of the ocean. But Benji’s teeth are a ghost beneath his jaw, over his torso, on his inner thigh.

The wind ruffles his sex mused hair. His eyes close to the weighted feeling of sunlight on his skin.

#writing #dishonored au #xw #bp #xw x bp #this one is evil evil

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