1 . Name: Anne the Cat Detective & Toxo !lLp6kRoP4k @ 2012-04-02 01:58

Illustration for this fic is here: http://tf2chan.net/fanart/res/6122.html#6157

Tentacles wrap around Sniper’s shins, as he kicks his feet lazily through the water, inching up towards his knees, tickling him with the questing little kisses of each individual sucker.

“You will be careful?” The Spy asks, but it is with a surety and a smirk. He asks every time, and never worries. They’ve both played the game long enough, even if the Spy is out of it now.

“Nah, I thought I’d run headlong into danger this time and get myself all shot up.” The Sniper laughs, and pulls the lovely creature up from its pool for a long kiss.

“Oh, all very well for you.” A moue, a playful attempt to look truly put-out, and the Spy dodges back, but returns just as quickly. Lets the kiss take hold of him, it enters through the mouth and curls in his belly, warm and sweet. “You have all of the fun.”

“Have the best fun with you.” The Sniper shrugs, his fingertips play along the tentacle that rests over one knee. It’s a queer oasis, hidden away and hard to access. The one place he has, away from the war, these long weekends with his strange lover. The only vacation he cares for.

“I wouldn’t take kindly to someone else having my kind of fun with you, no.” Half-coy, the Spy admits--not to a jealous streak, no, he will always claim to not be the jealous type. He will always claim to be free, and open-minded, and unconcerned, but every so often he makes it clear that these are mere pretenses. With marks left on skin, with vague muttered threats against the imaginary men who might move in on his romantic territory--he could pretend to be unconcerned, once, but the Sniper knows how to read him now.

“Never met anyone else who could have your kind of fun with me.” The Sniper teases. “You’ll have to let me know if anyone else with tentacles moves in. I might expand my horizons.”

“Pervert. You will not.”

“Nah. I won’t. I like ‘em, though.” He lifts one from the water to run through his fingers, to wrap around his wrist, muscles bunching and writhing, squirming to tickle his palm with one narrow tip, a tease. “Yeah... y’know how I do...”

“I know.” A sharp grin, eyes glinting in the sliver of afternoon light that finds them. The tentacles surge up to cover more ground, winding around Sniper’s legs and arms in supple coils. Easy... so easy, it would be so very easy, to force his will. The tentacles are so much stronger than the man. Instead they limpen, cling for a moment, until Sniper gives some secret sign known only in the language that passes between their bodies.

Permission given, the grip of the tentacles tightens and roams. The Spy relaxes his control over them and lets them explore, with as firm a touch as each arm desires to take. The Sniper only chuckles and moans, and leans back to enjoy the ride.

The feeling of weightlessness is something he never got used to. Being pulled smoothly into the water, the sudden chill, the feeling of being suckled by a swarm of tiny mouths, the constant, thoughtless roaming of his lover’s arms--he has become accustomed to these things, over time. But the drifting, this unsettling sense of freefall as the creature invariably draws back, farther than you would think the tentacles could reach, and balances him there at the surface, as if he were a scrap of paper wavering on the fingertips of a multitude--this, he cannot take in stride, and every time, his stomach flips, his heart pounds, and he begins to tremble.

Sniper never could float on his own. When he was a kid, they told him everyone could float, that it was just one of those things, but as hard as he inhaled, he could never take in enough air to make his bony body buoyant. So it was the effortlessness that was unsettling, and the dependency on this loving, ineffable monster. His monster. The tide that buoyed him now, and twisted him softly in the water, it was if he were an apple being turned and bitten.

“Someday, perhaps I will not frighten you so.” The Spy sounds very far away.

“Doubt it.”

“Ah, well. Would you like to try some strokes?”

“No.”

“This is not how one learns to swim, cher.”

“I’m fine. I like...floating.” Sniper swished his fingers in the water.

“Do you know what this is called?”

“What what’s called?”

“What you are doing now. Just drifting there. It is called the ‘Dead Man’s Float’.”

Sniper could hear him grinning through the words, though his eyes were fixed upwards, his spine flexed taut, gasping in a novice swimmer’s fear. The chill of the water was beginning to weigh him down.

“I still have you,” The voice still sounds too far away to truly comfort, and he tries to focus on the feel of those arms holding him up. Tries, with the same desperation that had never helped him in the water before, to focus on anything but the open space around them.

He’d been getting ready to dress, to leave, and he forgets how he got to be here again, not-floating in the water, with the tentacles writhing around him, the constant, traveling touch he has to thank for the fact that he isn’t drowning. That among other things.

“I’m not sure how I let you convince me sometimes...” He says in a nervous laugh.

“You cannot resist me.” There is only cocky self-assurance in the creature’s laugh. It glides closer, long tentacles spooling out, looping stick-insect limbs.

The Sniper feels safer, then. The water feels less open, less deep, less vast, when he can reach out and touch his lover’s face.

“No, I never could.” He chuckles. “I never could... Give us a kiss, then?”

He is allowed to do his own exploring, as they do. He is allowed to touch, with feather-light strokes, the blushing fringe of gills, incredibly intimate, too much like being allowed to reach in and pet its very lungs. He is reminded of the velvet softnesses of girls, though he tendered them with more detachment, then, than the visceral need he feels now. It strikes him that his lover’s body is as alien to him--and in similar ways--as those girls’ were; their movements serene and unfamiliar, their skins always a little colder, a little more giving, than his own.

There is nothing he can give his lover in return for this privilege. His body is as stolid and terrestrial as any other mammal’s, and his arousal seems somewhat vulgar in this swirl of graceful limbs. Now that they no longer face each other on the battlefield, now that they no longer flay each other open, his own dusty skin seems a cage. He wonders, sometimes, how much of his insides the Spy has really seen, has really felt. He wonders, sometimes, if it’s a sign of sickness, how much he contemplates it. He finds himself wondering now, which of his interior textures those gloves probed, perhaps in the moments between his last heartbeat, and first fresh breath.

Sometimes, he misses the gloves. But of course, now there is the skin--a silkish grey, shading into its inviting blue-black along the forearms, so that the clawed hands look dip-dyed, or sunk into shade. Like the sky blackening at its zenith; and sometimes, in moments of hunger or fulfillment, the glitter of photophores--too restless to form constellations.

The tentacles spread his thighs, and he is disappointed, when it is merely a test of his range of motion. They move his arms as well, before his limbs are released, his body turned, and the Spy is beyond his reach again, sinking below the surface to watch him from below. ‘Swim’, he mouths, and the Sniper does, they move through the water together, as though the man beneath is some alien reflection. He can’t say how much of the propulsion is him and how much the Spy, helping him do more than float, but he can feel the resistance of the water, can feel that his own muscles do some good.

They lap their little pool once, before the Spy releases him at the shore, and pulls himself half out of the water for a more human embrace.

“You will be careful?” He murmurs.

“Already asked me.”

“But then I did not let you go.”

A sigh, a smile, a kiss. He shows every sign of not letting the Sniper go this time as well, and the Sniper has no complaints. He has some time...

“I will be.” He promises. “Whether or not you hang onto me.”

“And you will be back?”

“On the weekend. Always.”

“To learn to control your breathing.” The Spy nods.

“Sounds like you want to watch me flounder on my own.”

“It will be useful. If you ever need to swim in waters other than mine.”

“Never will. What’s in it for me, without you?”

A tentacle comes up to circle his waist, its tip stroking and tapping at his chest, and he returns the attention, a little stroke here before drumming his fingers gently there, caressing the skinny chest, tracing out the inky speckles of its skin.

“How long?” Another tentacle begins its crawl up his calf, his thigh.

“I can head back in the morning, ‘stead of tonight.”

The Spy grins, too many teeth glittering between orchid-tinged lips. He is so much more exotic, more alien, now, but the spy was always exotic... always something strange, that the Sniper felt on the verge of understanding, teetering on the brink, before tumbling backwards into cluelessness. Even now, without the war between them, he feels this failure to comprehend the man, but it has nothing to do with his lover’s strange shapes. Nothing, at least, to do with his tentacles. More to do with the parts of him that are still human.

And each time he comes here, another bit of the human, the mammalian, has broken away. The sentences are ever more terse, slurred through strange teeth, and sighs come more often from his gills than his lips. Sniper watches him sloughing his humanity with something like envy, as the former agent’s courtly manners buckle under the urgency of new instincts. Instincts he hopes to pique, now that the swimming lesson is over.

The slow swarm of limbs nearly obscures his legs now, and he looks down to see himself--not unlike his tutor--writhing from the waist down. He feels a familiar pressure at the corner of his mouth, and parts his lips to let in the ruffled tip of the hectocotylus--the doctor taught him that word, but not without suspicion--and begins to suck. His reward is a soft moan, and a transient shimmer of photophores. In the dimness of their grotto, the eerie light is dazzling. The arm flows into his mouth, coiling, stroking his palate and teeth. Sniper brings his hands to his mouth to grasp the delicate organ before it chokes him, and feels it reluctantly relax.

“You’ll kill me, doing that.” He takes a breath.

“Perhaps,” the creature responds. It turns away for a moment, stressing the lines of its neck. Waterglow plays along its shapes.

The gunman waits a long time to speak. “Do you want to?”

“Of course not.” He hisses, frowns, then smiles. “Only a little. Only a little... You know that I will never harm you...”

He does and he doesn’t. His trust is curious, in the wake of their old battles. He trusts that he is... treasured. But he has borne terrible punishments to his body before, for less pleasures than a tangle with the Spy would bring, and he is not afraid to bear more, in the name of love, or something like it.

“I only want to cage you, not kill you.” The Spy murmurs, his voice softer, thick with sweetness. “Away from the war. Away from the world. I miss you when you are away... and I have no one... I miss you...”

The tip of the hectocotylus returns, tracing his lower lip, and the Sniper’s tongue darts out with no hesitation. The other tentacles crush in on him, but never more than he can take. He prefers this smothering, loves the feeling even more than he loves the floating, of slowly becoming some kind of part of his lover, being folded into him. Better than any human embrace, those arms find all of him and hold him in, so that no panicked part can leak out, so that he will not fly apart with the rushing, frightened feeling of a man who doesn’t know what the hell he is doing.

He knows what he’s doing. Strange as it is, he knows it better now. He never knew what he was supposed to do with another man, only that he wanted to. With the Spy, the way that the Spy is, now that he is the Spy no longer, it was alright not to know anything. Alright to learn together, without the shame of being a too-old virgin. No one, after all, hangs his manhood on his expertise in the methods of making love to a monster. And they have been taking these weekends long enough, for both of them to learn.

Even as the Spy’s limbs press in on him, pin his arms and squeeze his ribs, he can feel the slick and ever-mobile body massaging at his aching cock. The lust has ceased to unsettle him; he knows what he wants. He wants the same things the Spy does, and he wants things he thinks no other man on earth would... He wants his lover, and that, he can tell himself, is not so strange. But then, also, he wants to be reeled in and pressed tight, too tight, until the boundaries between them feel they might burst and disappear, wants to live beneath the other man’s skin. And he wants the taste of sweet, cold lakewater, and the spicy musk of skin, however inhuman that skin has become.

So, Sniper muses, in this new surety between them, perhaps they will reach an understanding. He closes his eyes and lets his body go limp, as he never can in the water, knowing that those starry arms will be there to catch him.