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urbancateGeneral Disclaimers: Lies, Lies, Dirty Lies. I own nothing, nada, nichts, nitchevo.
Pairing: Karl/OFC
Rating: R
Prompt: Karl in suspenders, tight-ish jeans, and a white wifebeater
The Wardrobe Mistress Always Wins
It is new American noir. Deep in the Delta. Sticky, steamy, sweaty. Sex.
It is Tennessee Williams meets True Blood meets Crazy something. It is going to take him to Venice and Sundance and Toronto. It is going to take him to the next level. Artistically speaking, speaking of awards.
This is his agent’s view of the thing.
Karl’s view is that he picked a helluva time to start listening to the careerist slant an agent is obligated to throw into the mix every so often, even if they have an understanding: that Karl will do what he wants and have fun doing it, and a cheerful fuck off to the rest of the game.
So here he is in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the Deep South, in a smaller but pivotal role in a small but bound-to-be-critically-loved movie, no, correction – film.
His hair hasn’t been this long in years, his face is covered in five-days of perma-scruff, and he’s wearing a wifebeater and jeans. And suspenders.
The suspenders have just been the subject of an argument with the wardrobe mistress and the creative director and then the director himself. An argument Karl has lost. So he snaps them a little, still hating the damn things because they belong on a man with a beer gut and a bald spot and he has neither of those things. The character doesn’t either. Cheerful “Fuck you”s to everyone, he thinks. Snap.
He does the scene, snaps the suspenders and snarls through the drawl and innuendo and leaves the innocent female protagonist a little less innocent and a lot hot and bothered.
He is heading back to his trailer when he sees her, the damn wardrobe mistress. Renee, who everyone calls Nee, who just bested him in an argument about his own fucking character. She is headed in the opposite direction and they pass within a foot of each other. She looks away, avoiding his eyes, as if she feels bad about winning the argument. Which he thinks his strange. Or maybe he really has been that badly behaved.
Before he even knows what he’s doing, he’s grabbing her upper arm before she is out of reach. She turns around at his touch. “I’m not going over it again, Mr. Urban.”
Ouch. He has been beastly today, he acknowledges to himself. Ill-tempered and bratty, prima donna shit he generally avoids.
He sucks in a breath, takes in the tight knot of dark blond hair at the nape of her neck, the sweat skimming across her collarbone. Okay, so the scene has left him hot and bothered, too, because he wants to taste her sweat, undo her hair. Maybe he just wants to win.
“I’m sorry,” he says, shrugging a little.
“Thank you.” She smiles.
“Want a drink? Cry pax over something cool?” He nods in the direction of his trailer, snaps a black suspender as if he is still the character – sinful and unapologetic.
“Sure.” He thinks she knows.
The door is barely closed behind them and she grabs the suspenders and he knows she knows.
“You have no idea how fucking hot these are, do you?” Her breath feels cool against his skin.
“I just might be starting to to understand.” He twists his fingers into her hair, breaking it free.
She pulls on the damn suspenders and he pulls on her hair and their mouths collide, as if this is the natural evolution of the argument.
Life imitating art, or something, because he is sinful and unapologetic and the scene is sticky, steamy. The scene is sex.
Laid out on the couch with her skirt pushed up around her waist, she is pleading. He is tasting her, taking his damn sweet time, because she is sweet and all that whimpered begging means he is winning. It’s not pax, but she cries out something as she comes across his tongue.
She pushes the suspenders down as he rises over her, unbuttoning his jeans and pushing those down, too. He might think about it later, the irony of fucking the wardrobe mistress while he is still in wardrobe, while they are both half-dressed. But all he is thinking about now is the sex and the sweat and the heat, stroking in and out of her wet, focused heat as she begs some more.
And then even those thoughts stutter and stop as he comes with a groan and collapses into her.
She pulls on a suspender.
Snap.
Pairing: Karl/OFC
Rating: R
Prompt: I start to forget but she will always remember
the kind of girl who laughs and says
get up off your knees
The Moment Is Enough
It always happens this way. Somewhere halfway across the Atlantic he will start to think of her. Of Robynn. Of a fifth-floor pied-a-terre in Marylebone across the street from a church and a bench under twin trees in a tiny strip of adjacent cemetery.
And it always confuses him a little, reorienting himself to the different rhythm, the different song that he becomes when he comes here.
From Heathrow there is a car to take him to Mayfair, to the hotel. From the hotel he walks a block, disappears into the Tube, reemerges on a heading to her. He is here for different reasons, of course - specific publicity and the schedules he hates being tied to. But all he needs when he is here, all he needs when he is in London is her.
She opens the door dressed in jeans and flat boots and a black bra, dropping a cigarette into the ashtray on the side table and simultaneously reaching for him and laughing. The laugh that is the difference.
Her hair is different this time, it is always different; today a sleek red bob, three months ago a wild black tangle. But her mouth is the same, open and inviting. She will taste of honey and smoke.
“Karl!” She laughs again before he takes her mouth, closing the door behind him and turning her around, backing her against the green-painted wood, pinning her there, the better to devour her.
“Mm, Robynn,” he drawls against her neck, licks at her pulse, across the line of her collarbone, while her fingers run through his hair and then down to his shoulders, scraping a little through the fabric of his shirt.
She will not say that she missed him or that she needs him; there are things they just don't say. Instead, they do, they live in the time they have.
He finds the path across her skin with his lips and tongue and teeth, the downward spiral with a goal, leaving flush and fire in his wake, the pitch of her sighs becoming more urgent. He dips his tongue into her navel, looks up and is rewarded by her laugh and the push of her hands on his shoulders.
“Get on with it, then,” she teases.
“So pushy,” he replies. But his hands are already unzipping denim, sliding inside and pulling it down. He leaves her panties, black like the bra, loving the tableau she makes for him – entirely wanton woman against a door.
He does as much as can through and around the restrictions of the jeans around her knees and the black silk covering her. Silk that slides, adds to the friction and teasing of his fingers and mouth. Her thighs are trembling a little and she is close, so close, he could have her coming with just the right pressure. But she pulls on his hair, pulling his focus upwards, slides her hand to cup his chin.
“Get up off your knees,” she laughs. “I want you naked.” She pulls him to his feet with just the touch of her fingers on his face, kisses him hard.
She shimmies the jeans back to her hips and leads him to the bedroom.
It is unfair, he thinks, that he forgets this. The slide and softness of her skin, the motion of their bodies beneath and above the simple linens of her bed, her taste and her laugh and her freedom. It is unfair to her. He wonders if he is robbing of her something, some portion of himself that should be more permanently hers. But she would never ask it of him. She only asks him for this. And what she asks, he gives.
Pairing: McCoy/Uhura
Rating: PG
Prompt: So good on paper
So romantic
But so bewildering
The Doctor Sees Too Much
He thinks he was the only who saw it, at least at first, on that first mission, the maiden voyage where he almost got sucked into a black hole. He thinks he is the only one who noticed Uhura and Spock. The way her eyes followed and her body would betray her eyes every so slightly. Worlds were disappearing into blackness and everyone was arguing strategy, but McCoy found time to notice Uhura and the way she loved the Vulcan - utterly.
That it was mutual and real and – surprise – passionate, is something it took him longer to observe. Belated and bewildered gossip from Jim helped with that, too. But set out on a starship with people and eventually you will learn to read them, even the stoic Spock.
So it is part of his world, the family that he moves through and takes care of, that Uhura and Spock are together and in love. This only concerns him in that he is the Chief Medical Officer and anything concerning the wellbeing – physical or emotional – of the crew of the Enterprise is his concern.
Until the day he is on the bridge and sees that her eyes are no longer following, they are avoiding. It is so subtle, he wonders if he imagines it. But there is the tiniest indication from Spock, as well. A tone, a current, something that upsets the normal flow of dry and logical information. Jim doesn’t even notice.
Maybe the lovers have had a fight.
That is what he tells himself when goes back to sickbay.
For a week, that is what he tells himself as he goes back to sickbay after visiting the bridge. Uhura and Spock have only had a fight and they will figure it out.
Until the day he sees even more in the liquid eyes avoiding the Vulcan. The more being shattering heartbreak and a minute struggle to maintain composure.
Damn and shit and everything else, he thinks.
Never, ever, has he seen Uhura be anything but naturally composed and balanced and totally sure of herself.
So he drags Jim into a conference in the ready room.
“Goddammit, Jim! Do you have any idea what’s happening on your own bridge?”
“Whoa, Bones. What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about your Science Officer and Communications Officer, you unobservant idiot!”
“Spock? And Uhura?”
It’s all McCoy can do to not cuff Jim upside the head. “Who else, do you think? Jesus Christ, Jim. There is trouble in paradise.”
“Oh.”
“Exactly. And you need to make sure it doesn’t blow up all over your command control.” Not that he thinks either party in question would ever behave unprofessionally, but that look in Uhura’s eyes, it haunts him because it is familiar. And Jim, brilliant and excellent captain though he is, needs to pay more attention.
“Okay, okay. Thanks for the heads up, Bones.” Jim leaves, looking thoughtful.
McCoy stalks off to sickbay and plants a word in Chapel’s ear, too, that maybe Uhura could maybe use a friendly ear, isn’t that what female friends are for.
“Of course, Doctor.” Chapel agrees and he knows she’ll do something because she and Uhura really are friends, but she’s looking at him with that you’re-kind-of-a-crazy-old-man-sometimes look she perfected in the second month of their service together.
So he stalks off to his office and broods about broken brown eyes as he fills out paperwork, endless goddamn paperwork.
He watches ever so carefully over the next few days and some part of him breathes a sigh of relief to see that while her eyes are still avoiding Spock, they at least look alive, unbroken.
Another part of him itches to do more, fix more somehow, but he’s done his duty in maintaining the health of the crew, so he tamps the rest of it down.
It is part of his self-assigned “I will stop freaking out about hurtling through space” therapy that he spends some time every week on the small observation deck, watching stars go past, willing his brain to will his stomach to be calm. He knows what times the observation desk is usually unoccupied; he doesn’t need witnesses. And usually he pays more attention as he enters, but he is distracted tonight and doesn’t see the slim form in red at the far end of the window until he is fully in the room.
Her arms are folded around her torso as if she caving in on herself, trying to take up less space. She blanches at the sound of his intrusion and looks at him.
Broken brown eyes.
“You’ve been trying to fool me, girl, and doing damn well at it.”
“You see too much, McCoy.”
“Not enough, I’d say.” He is stalled in the center, halfway between the door and Uhura. He wants to fix this, fix her, unbreak her, but he doesn’t know what part of him is directing that want.
“Nobody would know if you hadn’t seen it.”
“And where’s the point in nobody knowing? You’ve got people who care about you here.”
“More like pity, Doctor. I don’t want, or need, pity.”
“No, you don’t. But I’m not offering pity.”
She turns at that, pauses with question on her face. There is still half a room between them. He pauses, too, unsure of what he’s just done, what it is he’s offering.
It is her eyes that decide it, her eyes that propel him forward so he is closing the distance and placing gentle hands on her bare upper arms. The slightest quiver moves around her eyes, ripples to her mouth; she is trying not to cry.
He answers the question she didn’t voice. “Whatever you need. I’m here.”
She moves, curls against him, and his arms wrap around her. If he can hold her together, he will. With her head tucked into his shoulder and his chin in her hair, she shakes a little, sheds silent tears, and he just holds her.
For a long long time, he only holds her.
