CW: 18+
The Vorkosigan books are © Lois McMaster Bujold. I obviously didn’t get her permission, but she is generally permissive of fanfic, and it suits me to take that at face value.
The world around him seemed slower somehow. Quieter. More.. remote.. despite the unchanging dimensions of the ship around him. Not long ago, it had seemed smaller and closer than ever.
It was battle, Oliver decided. Combat. Combat and combat nerves did strange things to your sense of time. Everything had seemed so slow at the start, and then it had gone so quickly. Quickly as commands were communicated through the computers, nav and com a pinch point that squeezed years into hours, hours into milliseconds, and left him feeling utterly spent at the end. Surely he’d aged a decade in less than half a day.
“With me,” a low voice growled under his ear. Oliver blinked slowly as he tried to focus on there here and now. The here and now that was tolerably slower. That was distant from the constant stream of shifting information, from the fluctuations of signals, from the panic shaking people’s voices as– Here. Now. Slow. Quiet. “Stay with me,” the voice repeated.
“I’m here,” he rasped softly. He really was there, even if it was half a lie. He was trying, dammit.
Strong hands and thick fingers worked along his biceps in a gentle kneading. That made it easier to try. He blinked slowly up at the metal of the deckhead, and then at the dark, piercing eyes set into the classically handsome face that had moved to hover above his own. Square jawed. Determined. Beautiful for the intensity of the stare burning down at him. Into him. Through him.
“We’re alive,” his beloved admiral reassured.
“I can feel that,” Oliver replied with a warm crinkling of his eyes. His hands roamed over the olive green of the undershirt stretched wide across the man’s broad chest.
“Good. I mean to make you feel a lot more.”
Oliver’s chest went briefly tight at that, and he felt the heat of delight and anticipation fill his spacer-pale cheeks.
“Good,” he rasped in return.
His nerves were still buzzing, thrumming with anxiety that wanted badly to turn to heat, but also kept dragging him back to slow-motion processing sights and sounds that had passed so quickly. Horrible, harrowing things. Even the triumphant blips of light meant hundreds dead, and–
“Oliver.” The word was quiet. Not quite stern.
Oliver blinked the world back into focus, just in time for it to turn blurry as dark eyes came closer. Noses touched, then lips, and he focused on the kiss. Focused on the warm body above his. Shorter than his own, thicker and more broad, but intimidating in its own right. The man’s aura all but filled the room, and Oliver felt himself being caught up in it. It had been a hard and determined thing when the admiral had been seated in command, but now it was soft, malleable, rocking over and through him, sparking along his skin—filling him, drowning him, resuscitating him back to the here and now, where the breaths given to him came from Aral’s lungs, and was surely all the better for it.
Oliver’s hands swept up from shoulders, into the graying hair kept military short as his own. He scrubbed his fingers over and through it, teased at scalp with blunted nails as tongues touched and dragged, lips working in unspoken agreement that here, now, there was only escalation allowed. He hummed and nearly smiled as he felt a hand sweep down his side to thrust between them, utterly unabashed. There was nothing sheepish about this man, who lived, breathed, slept command. Oliver hummed as lips chased the slight retreat of his own, and returned their advance. His own long, slender fingers caught on the man’s shirt for pulling it up in a twist of fabric. He wanted skin. He wanted.. steadily more of all of it, as the slowness began to surrender again to speed, as the quietude turned into a rushing in his ears.
The respite was over once teeth were involved. Combat had passed, and after the moment of stuttering lassitude, was being supplanted by something else—something that was making it increasingly easier to be here and now. They tugged and tore at one another’s clothes, forced to part their mouths from one another, breaths ragged and shared in their proximity. Buckles rattled, rank tabs threatening to slip from collars as tops were shed, insignia cast aside like so much fluff. Oliver laughed as his trousers got caught on a boot he hadn’t taken the time to shed, and Aral took advantage of his distraction in kicking them off in a tangled wad to launch the most delightful assault upon his neck.
Oh, but the friction. The friction was a delight, as hips found hips to grind close and strong, flexing and shifting, the scrub of cock against his own a most welcome thing indeed. Oliver planted a foot to the bunk to use as leverage, lifting into that inviting roll, moaning softly as Aral’s mouth left a bruise in the hollow beneath the narrow span of his clavicle. He hummed as Aral moved with him, then down and along him, the friction shifting to a drag of belly, palm, gripping hand—and then the warm, wet hollow of the man’s mouth.
Oliver stared at the deckhead above again, and then stopped seeing it altogether as his eyes inevitably rolled shut. There was too much vying for his attention, when all his brain really wanted was to focus on the pleasure licking along his spine, which seemed affixed somehow to the base of his cock, so that every shift of muscle and suction, every draw and plunge and gust of breath against spittle-slicked skin seemed to zip to his brain with no interruption, no diversion or filter—only pleasure, exquisite and flooding him with delight.
His fingers bunched the synthetic material of the blanket beneath him, thighs and ass hard as seconds stretched to exquisite minutes, yet also seemed to race themselves together in a wild, erratic jumble. Time was doing strange things again, slow and fast at the same time, leaving him reeling and shuddering—and finally grabbing after the man whose mouth had moved down and along, whose strong hands and plying thumbs were forcing some parts of him to relax, even as talented tongue and lips left him tense other places, gasping soft and lavish praise into the air.
But Aral knew. He knew just how far to take it before easing back, leaving Oliver’s body humming and alive in the aura of his presence, pleasure teetering on the knife’s edge of bliss. Oliver was left moaning again, somewhat in disappointment, mostly in pleasure, as Aral climbed his body. Hands passed over his skin, found and rearranged his limbs so that he was twisted to one hip, top knee drawn high, arms in somewhat awkward embrace as Aral lowered to take another kiss, give a second, a third, driving his longing into a muted frenzy before pressing into him at last, hard and thick and perfectly perfect.
Aral’s body moved into his, his into Aral’s, and they found a rhythm that left Oliver breathless and satisfied, gasping out his delight, calling it again and again into the soundproofed space as Aral kept him anchored here and now. Here and now and alive. Alive and moving, faster, but not too fast, driven into the bedding, into himself, rippling and rebounding and feeling himself swell and expand as Aral drew him out of himself and into the space between them. With him. With him and filling that space. With him and not in his shadow, but expanding beyond it. With him and not consumed by his aura, but interwoven with it. Breathy and breathless and sharing vocalizations as hums and grunts and moans and cries built and tangled to one last exaltation to the heavens through which they floated. Alive and satisfied, their hearts drumming and thrumming steadily slower, slower, at last into something truly quieter and calm as they settled together in a tangle of sweaty limbs and sedate, half asleep kisses. Alive. Here. Now. With him.