Neither Curve Nor Circle
folder
1 through F › Bones
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
1
Views:
5,444
Reviews:
2
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Category:
1 through F › Bones
Rating:
Adult ++
Chapters:
1
Views:
5,444
Reviews:
2
Recommended:
0
Currently Reading:
0
Disclaimer:
I do not own Bones, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.
Neither Curve Nor Circle
Neither Curve Nor Circle
Author: Lostakasha
Fandom: Bones
Pairing: Jack Hodgins/Seeley Booth
Rating: NC-17
A/N: Slight spoilers through Season 2, Two Aliens in A Spaceship
Disclaimer: Don't own them. But you'd see this onscreen if I did.
Summary: Jack tells himself what he feels isn’t love. It isn’t circular, it isn’t perpetual, and it isn’t, has never been and could never be love.
Neither Curve Nor Circle
Looking at the tires on the ’57 T-Bird, Jack finds himself thinking about the circularity of love. His relationships have all been arcs, crescents, bright half-moons destined to rise and peak and fall, so smooth on the way up, so slippery on the way down.
His style of love is a curve to be climbed.
He wonders when impulse and instinct transform into something that withstands the curve to become complete. To roll on its own. To become love, if it ever does.
The whitewalls keep their secrets as he considers agitation and trigger points, the click of a key in a lock, the flood of gas to the engine, the hum and purr of change, belts and flywheels and pistons in perfect concert, coming to life. Taking that corner.
Jack believed his liaisons with Seeley Booth were destined to be neither curve nor circle, but a straight line.
At first they were gutted by lust so unexpected and unsettling that they barely dared breathe, held in by passion’s centrifugal force. Parting was silent and solemn until comfort came to call and they began talking in each other’s arms. Nothing at first, just brief discussions of mundane things, never questioning or seeking answers to anything greater than each other’s schedules or meal plans.
Then one afternoon they fucked and talked and fucked again, pressing the lightness of their bodies against the darkening afternoon, ignoring how the light settled into oceanic shades of blue and gray and swallowed their forms. Jack left Booth sleeping on his back at the cusp of midnight, arms open, palms up, glorious. Told himself that the heaviness in his limbs was the result of sexual acrobatics; told himself that there was no reluctance to leave on his part, just caution so he wouldn’t trip in the dark, knock something over, break something, or wake his host.
The next time they met, welcoming kisses melted into an embrace that neither man sought to break. It wasn’t the desperate clinging of drowning men, not the urgency of coupling after too long apart. It was the joy of breathing each other’s air, savoring warmth and texture and pressure and a cell-deep recognition of fitting.
Jack had never met a man he couldn’t stop touching until Booth walked into his life. And Booth reveled in it, polymorphously perverse, naturally affectionate, deeply sensual – and for a time Jack convinced himself that Booth’s reactions were just that – his reactions. Unfiltered, unsegmented, and shared equally with lovers of either sex.
Nothing special.
Not even when he lingered.
Not even when they took wild risks to be together, to touch, to share space, to chance the brush of fingertips on a blue lab coat or a worsted wool jacket sleeve in front of former and future lovers.
Not even in those moments when the words were close on their tongues and swallowed back whole, when the conversation moved out of an argument or fit of laughter or the afterglow of passion and neared the fringes of their agreement not to speak of who they were or might become together.
They’d agreed: there would be nothing to discuss. There would be no measurements of where they’ve come from to where they are, and no compass and protractor to illustrate that the track they are on is definitely not a straight line.
Jack narrows his eyes, peering into the polished chrome hubcaps and tells himself what he feels isn’t love. It isn’t circular, it isn’t perpetual, and it isn’t, has never been and could never be love.
The ache in his chest is the effect of a lungful of car exhaust in the closed, dark space, the offal of motor oil and vulcanized rubber settling in his lungs, or so he tells himself.
“Perfect,” Booth whispers, the snapcrack of cartilage in his knee punctuating his appraisal as he squats to look closer at the T-Bird’s tailfins. The sound echoes through the dark quiet of the garage and Jack lifts from his reverie to study him.
Booth could be nine or ninety, his age erased in the immediacy of the moment. Crimson shines beneath his splayed palm and metal skin shimmers under his smitten lover’s touch, skimming reverently over curves and ridges.
“It doesn’t need a thing,” he says, circling the front bumper, eyes dancing from the pristine white ragtop to the leather interior, caught in chrome reflections and the prisms of vintage headlight glass. “You said it needed work.”
Jack shrugs, taps the door handle. “It never sees the road. It should be driven.”
Booth shakes his head and laughs as he lifts the hood. Whistles through his teeth and passes his hands over the engine, mumbling something about being able to eat off the transmission. He’s bent over, shaking his head, speaking to the distributor cap.
“This baby is cleaner than my kitchen sink, man. How’s she sound?”
The answer comes with the turn of a key, a click, a flood of gas, and the languid growl of a vintage 312 V-8. Booth pops the hood down, curls his fingers over the top of the driver’s side door, and peers in at Jack.
He’s close enough to kiss.
Cologne blends with the slightest hint of motor oil, faint traces of coffee and peppermint on his breath and Jack breathes it in but doesn’t turn his head.
“What do you think?”
“I think you don’t know shit about cars, man. Just because it’s fifty years old doesn’t mean it isn’t in tip top condition.”
Booth swings back as Jack pushes the door open and steps out, flips the keys in the air. The jingling stops when Booth snatches them, palms them.
“It’s all yours, dude. Enjoy.”
Fingers catch the sleeve of Jack’s sweater, turn him around. He raises his eyes to meet Booth’s, but doesn’t see the pleasure he expects. Confusion sweeps his features, his look darkens to the depth of a piercing wound, evaporating his smile, thinning his lips and drawing the color from his cheeks.
“What the hell?”
It was meant to make him happy. It was meant to bring the light to his face, and yet Booth looks as though he’s been slapped, humiliated. The air between them thins, and Jack’s lungs begin to ache and his jaw throbs as if the dislocation of Booth’s reaction is manifesting there.
“I want you to have it.”
“You can’t just give me a car,” Booth hisses between clenched teeth, and Jack hears more than disbelief in his voice.
“It just sits here. I never drive it,” he lies. “Why shouldn’t someone who appreciates it have it?”
“Then sell it.”
Before the words leave his mouth he knows where they will fall but this has been happening to Jack lately, when Booth is near him, inability to censor, to hold back tides of feeling for better or worse, desperate to show him, make him understand, make him see…
“Fine. How much will you give me for it?”
“Jesus Christ.”
Whatever can be read between those words is read in an instant, and Jack turns away. First Brennan, making him feel like a cretin and an idiot, and now Booth, disgusted at the violation of some illusory social code that means nothing, indicates nothing, is nothing.
Booth steps closer, passes his hand over his face, his sigh echoing through the garage.
“It smacks of impropriety. I can’t afford a car like this on my salary.”
“Since when do you care about what others think?” Jack says, leaning against the metal tool rack, his father’s legacy, the dusty Car and Driver photoshoot-perfect assemblage of wrenches and ratchets that he’s never once touched and thinks he never will.
“Since I can’t explain why there’s a $75,000 car in my driveway that I didn’t pay for, for starters. God, what is the matter with you?”
“You’d rather have this sit in a garage, rotting, than take it from me? What’s the matter with you?”
It’s there, in the silence. It’s there, on Booth’s strong features, and Jack sees it, finally. It seeps through him from the ground up and he could be standing in a pool of motor oil, or piss, or his own blood. Doesn’t matter what slippery mess he’s standing in, he knows he’s destined to slip and fall.
“I get it,” and he does.
Flayed-pink skin beneath a green rubber band, such an innocent blossom on his skin until the feeling finds its way up and out and breaks the surface, shatters his composure and it doesn’t take any thought at all to reach for a pry bar and swing it into the ruby glass taillights.
It feels good in his hands, a leaden baseball bat that leads his shoulder and the arc is perfect when he swings again, smashing through the other fin, denting the back bumper, the lid of the trunk. It sounds perversely like the crack of wood on sewn leather and not quite like metal on itself so he swings again and lets it fly, fires it into the rear windshield in a spray of safety glass.
“Jack, what the fuck?”
A well-practiced grasp prevents Jack from swinging the wrench he’s grabbed, pins his arms to his side and he’s nearly off his feet when Booth tightens his grip and holds him still. Adrenaline floods him, fresh and seductive, screaming for release.
“It doesn’t mean shit,” Jack spits, teeth locked and grinding. “It’s a fucking piece of machinery that means nothing to me and I don’t want it.”
“It means nothing to you, but it’s okay for me, huh?”
Hodgins isn’t going to look into his eyes this time. He’s not going to see his own defiance reflected back from the wide, deep pools that study him, that absorb him, that watch every move he makes. Jack wrenches against Seeley’s grip, feels thumbs and fingertips part tendon as they hold him, hard.
“Don’t fucking twist my words. I don’t want the fucking car.”
Booth’s touch doesn’t ease even though he’s managed to hold Jack’s body steady and step closer. Close enough so Jack has to pull his face away to see him clearly. Close enough to taste his breath, to be tickled by a fine mist of spittle when Seeley opens his mouth to speak.
“Doesn’t sound like you’re talking about the T-Bird.”
Glass crunches beneath boot heels and Jack feels the press of metal against his back and the heat of Booth’s chest and thighs against his front. Biting his tongue, waiting for the break of thin skin and the salve of blood upon taste buds.
Torture is our common ground, he thinks, above them and out of his body, looking down at Booth pinning him against the ruined trunk. He bears the scars and I beg for them.
It’s not blood that wells in his mouth, then, but the salt tang of tears.
It’s been like this since he was buried in that car.
It’s been like this since the casual fucking and trash talk bled into long, quiet nights and touches that verged upon communion, nearly holy and never enough, leaving him living day to day for a stolen touch or the sound of his voice beamed from a satellite.
It’s been like this for awhile, but he hasn’t shown it to Booth and he hates that he’s about to.
Ruby red and crystal clear shards sparkle and sputter and grind to dust beneath their feet and Booth loosens the clench on Jack’s punished arms, pressing open palms against his back, careful and tender, urging him out of the accusation and into an embrace.
Eyelids lower to the shimmering cement floor, past the dark narrow space between their bodies and it’s better to kiss over the soft cotton of Booth’s shoulder, to glide mouth and fingers over cloth and the impression of the medal and chain beneath his tee-shirt than to have him see this part of his undoing.
Jack stoops and skims Booth’s sides with open palms, pulling mouthfuls of fabric as he unlatches the heavy brass belt buckle and pops buttons from their holes. Booth’s voice reaches as though they’re carried by the waves of heat rolling beneath the white knit that covers his still-soft cock.
“Hey, it’s all right,” he croons, stroking the back of Jack’s skull, curling one hand through his hair as he traces the smears of wet on his cheek with the other. “It’s okay. C’mon.”
Booth’s scent is so familiar now, so much so that Hodgins counts on it, craves it, and he presses his face hard against the cotton for the sheer comfort of his heat and he asks himself when it got this way.
When did he stop craving how Booth fucked him and start depending on how Booth held him? When did he stop falling to his knees for the rush and start kneeling for the worship, kneeling because his heart demanded it?
When did the line begin to curve?
Touch is touch is touch is touch and even in the depths of concern Booth isn’t immune. His flesh responds to the way Jack’s beard pulls the soft covering of his underpants, quickens beneath the heat of his breath and the dampness spreading from his mouth and eyes and he’s hard and aching and full before he can think to pull Jack from the dirty, cold floor.
Rectangles of shattered taillights score the square caps of Jack’s knees, remnants of a faraway collision as he breathes in ocean tides and warm, musky dough, nosing and kissing over bleached fibers and faint traces of fabric softener until Booth pulls the cloth away and frees his cock, steering and guiding with tear-stained fingers that slip with his own flesh into Jack mouth.
Sucking and licking and offering greedy praise and he loves the feel of Booth’s balls in his hands, loves the heat of his thighs and the green tomato tang of precome in the back of his throat and he loves him like this, when all Booth can see is the crown of his head and the way he moves to bring him to release.
When he can’t see what Jack knows.
When he can’t see his eyes beneath pale lashes, those perfect circles, complete.
~~end~~
Author: Lostakasha
Fandom: Bones
Pairing: Jack Hodgins/Seeley Booth
Rating: NC-17
A/N: Slight spoilers through Season 2, Two Aliens in A Spaceship
Disclaimer: Don't own them. But you'd see this onscreen if I did.
Summary: Jack tells himself what he feels isn’t love. It isn’t circular, it isn’t perpetual, and it isn’t, has never been and could never be love.
Neither Curve Nor Circle
Looking at the tires on the ’57 T-Bird, Jack finds himself thinking about the circularity of love. His relationships have all been arcs, crescents, bright half-moons destined to rise and peak and fall, so smooth on the way up, so slippery on the way down.
His style of love is a curve to be climbed.
He wonders when impulse and instinct transform into something that withstands the curve to become complete. To roll on its own. To become love, if it ever does.
The whitewalls keep their secrets as he considers agitation and trigger points, the click of a key in a lock, the flood of gas to the engine, the hum and purr of change, belts and flywheels and pistons in perfect concert, coming to life. Taking that corner.
Jack believed his liaisons with Seeley Booth were destined to be neither curve nor circle, but a straight line.
At first they were gutted by lust so unexpected and unsettling that they barely dared breathe, held in by passion’s centrifugal force. Parting was silent and solemn until comfort came to call and they began talking in each other’s arms. Nothing at first, just brief discussions of mundane things, never questioning or seeking answers to anything greater than each other’s schedules or meal plans.
Then one afternoon they fucked and talked and fucked again, pressing the lightness of their bodies against the darkening afternoon, ignoring how the light settled into oceanic shades of blue and gray and swallowed their forms. Jack left Booth sleeping on his back at the cusp of midnight, arms open, palms up, glorious. Told himself that the heaviness in his limbs was the result of sexual acrobatics; told himself that there was no reluctance to leave on his part, just caution so he wouldn’t trip in the dark, knock something over, break something, or wake his host.
The next time they met, welcoming kisses melted into an embrace that neither man sought to break. It wasn’t the desperate clinging of drowning men, not the urgency of coupling after too long apart. It was the joy of breathing each other’s air, savoring warmth and texture and pressure and a cell-deep recognition of fitting.
Jack had never met a man he couldn’t stop touching until Booth walked into his life. And Booth reveled in it, polymorphously perverse, naturally affectionate, deeply sensual – and for a time Jack convinced himself that Booth’s reactions were just that – his reactions. Unfiltered, unsegmented, and shared equally with lovers of either sex.
Nothing special.
Not even when he lingered.
Not even when they took wild risks to be together, to touch, to share space, to chance the brush of fingertips on a blue lab coat or a worsted wool jacket sleeve in front of former and future lovers.
Not even in those moments when the words were close on their tongues and swallowed back whole, when the conversation moved out of an argument or fit of laughter or the afterglow of passion and neared the fringes of their agreement not to speak of who they were or might become together.
They’d agreed: there would be nothing to discuss. There would be no measurements of where they’ve come from to where they are, and no compass and protractor to illustrate that the track they are on is definitely not a straight line.
Jack narrows his eyes, peering into the polished chrome hubcaps and tells himself what he feels isn’t love. It isn’t circular, it isn’t perpetual, and it isn’t, has never been and could never be love.
The ache in his chest is the effect of a lungful of car exhaust in the closed, dark space, the offal of motor oil and vulcanized rubber settling in his lungs, or so he tells himself.
“Perfect,” Booth whispers, the snapcrack of cartilage in his knee punctuating his appraisal as he squats to look closer at the T-Bird’s tailfins. The sound echoes through the dark quiet of the garage and Jack lifts from his reverie to study him.
Booth could be nine or ninety, his age erased in the immediacy of the moment. Crimson shines beneath his splayed palm and metal skin shimmers under his smitten lover’s touch, skimming reverently over curves and ridges.
“It doesn’t need a thing,” he says, circling the front bumper, eyes dancing from the pristine white ragtop to the leather interior, caught in chrome reflections and the prisms of vintage headlight glass. “You said it needed work.”
Jack shrugs, taps the door handle. “It never sees the road. It should be driven.”
Booth shakes his head and laughs as he lifts the hood. Whistles through his teeth and passes his hands over the engine, mumbling something about being able to eat off the transmission. He’s bent over, shaking his head, speaking to the distributor cap.
“This baby is cleaner than my kitchen sink, man. How’s she sound?”
The answer comes with the turn of a key, a click, a flood of gas, and the languid growl of a vintage 312 V-8. Booth pops the hood down, curls his fingers over the top of the driver’s side door, and peers in at Jack.
He’s close enough to kiss.
Cologne blends with the slightest hint of motor oil, faint traces of coffee and peppermint on his breath and Jack breathes it in but doesn’t turn his head.
“What do you think?”
“I think you don’t know shit about cars, man. Just because it’s fifty years old doesn’t mean it isn’t in tip top condition.”
Booth swings back as Jack pushes the door open and steps out, flips the keys in the air. The jingling stops when Booth snatches them, palms them.
“It’s all yours, dude. Enjoy.”
Fingers catch the sleeve of Jack’s sweater, turn him around. He raises his eyes to meet Booth’s, but doesn’t see the pleasure he expects. Confusion sweeps his features, his look darkens to the depth of a piercing wound, evaporating his smile, thinning his lips and drawing the color from his cheeks.
“What the hell?”
It was meant to make him happy. It was meant to bring the light to his face, and yet Booth looks as though he’s been slapped, humiliated. The air between them thins, and Jack’s lungs begin to ache and his jaw throbs as if the dislocation of Booth’s reaction is manifesting there.
“I want you to have it.”
“You can’t just give me a car,” Booth hisses between clenched teeth, and Jack hears more than disbelief in his voice.
“It just sits here. I never drive it,” he lies. “Why shouldn’t someone who appreciates it have it?”
“Then sell it.”
Before the words leave his mouth he knows where they will fall but this has been happening to Jack lately, when Booth is near him, inability to censor, to hold back tides of feeling for better or worse, desperate to show him, make him understand, make him see…
“Fine. How much will you give me for it?”
“Jesus Christ.”
Whatever can be read between those words is read in an instant, and Jack turns away. First Brennan, making him feel like a cretin and an idiot, and now Booth, disgusted at the violation of some illusory social code that means nothing, indicates nothing, is nothing.
Booth steps closer, passes his hand over his face, his sigh echoing through the garage.
“It smacks of impropriety. I can’t afford a car like this on my salary.”
“Since when do you care about what others think?” Jack says, leaning against the metal tool rack, his father’s legacy, the dusty Car and Driver photoshoot-perfect assemblage of wrenches and ratchets that he’s never once touched and thinks he never will.
“Since I can’t explain why there’s a $75,000 car in my driveway that I didn’t pay for, for starters. God, what is the matter with you?”
“You’d rather have this sit in a garage, rotting, than take it from me? What’s the matter with you?”
It’s there, in the silence. It’s there, on Booth’s strong features, and Jack sees it, finally. It seeps through him from the ground up and he could be standing in a pool of motor oil, or piss, or his own blood. Doesn’t matter what slippery mess he’s standing in, he knows he’s destined to slip and fall.
“I get it,” and he does.
Flayed-pink skin beneath a green rubber band, such an innocent blossom on his skin until the feeling finds its way up and out and breaks the surface, shatters his composure and it doesn’t take any thought at all to reach for a pry bar and swing it into the ruby glass taillights.
It feels good in his hands, a leaden baseball bat that leads his shoulder and the arc is perfect when he swings again, smashing through the other fin, denting the back bumper, the lid of the trunk. It sounds perversely like the crack of wood on sewn leather and not quite like metal on itself so he swings again and lets it fly, fires it into the rear windshield in a spray of safety glass.
“Jack, what the fuck?”
A well-practiced grasp prevents Jack from swinging the wrench he’s grabbed, pins his arms to his side and he’s nearly off his feet when Booth tightens his grip and holds him still. Adrenaline floods him, fresh and seductive, screaming for release.
“It doesn’t mean shit,” Jack spits, teeth locked and grinding. “It’s a fucking piece of machinery that means nothing to me and I don’t want it.”
“It means nothing to you, but it’s okay for me, huh?”
Hodgins isn’t going to look into his eyes this time. He’s not going to see his own defiance reflected back from the wide, deep pools that study him, that absorb him, that watch every move he makes. Jack wrenches against Seeley’s grip, feels thumbs and fingertips part tendon as they hold him, hard.
“Don’t fucking twist my words. I don’t want the fucking car.”
Booth’s touch doesn’t ease even though he’s managed to hold Jack’s body steady and step closer. Close enough so Jack has to pull his face away to see him clearly. Close enough to taste his breath, to be tickled by a fine mist of spittle when Seeley opens his mouth to speak.
“Doesn’t sound like you’re talking about the T-Bird.”
Glass crunches beneath boot heels and Jack feels the press of metal against his back and the heat of Booth’s chest and thighs against his front. Biting his tongue, waiting for the break of thin skin and the salve of blood upon taste buds.
Torture is our common ground, he thinks, above them and out of his body, looking down at Booth pinning him against the ruined trunk. He bears the scars and I beg for them.
It’s not blood that wells in his mouth, then, but the salt tang of tears.
It’s been like this since he was buried in that car.
It’s been like this since the casual fucking and trash talk bled into long, quiet nights and touches that verged upon communion, nearly holy and never enough, leaving him living day to day for a stolen touch or the sound of his voice beamed from a satellite.
It’s been like this for awhile, but he hasn’t shown it to Booth and he hates that he’s about to.
Ruby red and crystal clear shards sparkle and sputter and grind to dust beneath their feet and Booth loosens the clench on Jack’s punished arms, pressing open palms against his back, careful and tender, urging him out of the accusation and into an embrace.
Eyelids lower to the shimmering cement floor, past the dark narrow space between their bodies and it’s better to kiss over the soft cotton of Booth’s shoulder, to glide mouth and fingers over cloth and the impression of the medal and chain beneath his tee-shirt than to have him see this part of his undoing.
Jack stoops and skims Booth’s sides with open palms, pulling mouthfuls of fabric as he unlatches the heavy brass belt buckle and pops buttons from their holes. Booth’s voice reaches as though they’re carried by the waves of heat rolling beneath the white knit that covers his still-soft cock.
“Hey, it’s all right,” he croons, stroking the back of Jack’s skull, curling one hand through his hair as he traces the smears of wet on his cheek with the other. “It’s okay. C’mon.”
Booth’s scent is so familiar now, so much so that Hodgins counts on it, craves it, and he presses his face hard against the cotton for the sheer comfort of his heat and he asks himself when it got this way.
When did he stop craving how Booth fucked him and start depending on how Booth held him? When did he stop falling to his knees for the rush and start kneeling for the worship, kneeling because his heart demanded it?
When did the line begin to curve?
Touch is touch is touch is touch and even in the depths of concern Booth isn’t immune. His flesh responds to the way Jack’s beard pulls the soft covering of his underpants, quickens beneath the heat of his breath and the dampness spreading from his mouth and eyes and he’s hard and aching and full before he can think to pull Jack from the dirty, cold floor.
Rectangles of shattered taillights score the square caps of Jack’s knees, remnants of a faraway collision as he breathes in ocean tides and warm, musky dough, nosing and kissing over bleached fibers and faint traces of fabric softener until Booth pulls the cloth away and frees his cock, steering and guiding with tear-stained fingers that slip with his own flesh into Jack mouth.
Sucking and licking and offering greedy praise and he loves the feel of Booth’s balls in his hands, loves the heat of his thighs and the green tomato tang of precome in the back of his throat and he loves him like this, when all Booth can see is the crown of his head and the way he moves to bring him to release.
When he can’t see what Jack knows.
When he can’t see his eyes beneath pale lashes, those perfect circles, complete.
~~end~~