Laundries, Brunnhold
The passive had been working himself hard today so that he could feel something other than the worry gnawing away in the pit of his stomach. Aching muscles were good. Sticking his hands in cold water and keeping them submerged as he scrubbed at protein stain after stain was also good, especially when it reached a point where bending or straightening his knuckles sent pain lancing through them — a strong sensation in otherwise chill numbed hands. Outward physical sensations were good, better than hurting inside. It was probably why he hadn’t stopped the other youth from kneeling before him and undoing buttons. It wasn’t as if he’d said yes but he hadn’t said no either. Given that he had his fingers firmly tangled in brunette strands and drawing him nearer rather than pushing him away, the middle Madden couldn’t be said to be complaining.
Pleasure was a good distracting sensation — you could drown in it.
None of this was intentional, he certainly hadn’t come into the laundry store room with the idea of getting fellated by a guy who he was familiar with but whose name he couldn’t even remember. Terrence? Thomas? Fuck if he knew and honestly, who clocking cared?
The teenager had been worried yesterday but he’d done everything he could to excuse his concerns about Lars. He’d wandered around actually looking for him, asking a careful question or two but no one had seen him yesterday. And so he had finished his work for Keyes the previous day and come to the laundry afterwards, had inserted himself into the work and he had looked.
But there had been no sign of his former roommate.
Today, the fear had set in a bit deeper, clutching tightly at his heart. It had been much the same as yesterday but with greater distraction, greater worry and more thoughts about what might have happened.
Sometimes passives just disappeared. If they died — even if it was by their own hand — then you knew about it; at the very least, there was a whisper. Sometimes they were reassigned but again, you heard about it — usually to envy those who were going on to greener pastures beyond their daily drudgery. But there were always one or two who just… vanished. Not just physically gone but not talked about again, often as if they’d never existed. It was why the stories about Moore and Devlin luring passives away — passives who never came back — had some credence.
The last time Lars had gone missing after Fionn had almost killed him, unbeknownst to the teenager he’d been dragged off campus by Harper Moore to spend a few days in Muffey. Maybe it was something like that. It didn’t have to be a sign that he’d been- He wasn’t truly missing, just… temporarily elsewhere.
When he’d thought that the blond had died, he hadn’t been able to go to Laboratory Beta, not straight away. He’d been too frightened to find out the end result of Ayden’s coercion. True, by not investigating at the time, he hadn’t known whether Lars had survived or not but the lack of confirmation had also meant that he could hope. It was probably why he’d gotten halfway to Laboratory Beta today before he’d turned back — he hadn’t been able to face hearing a truth that he might not have liked.
So he’d fallen into a similar pattern as the previous evening. He’d come a bit later this time though, asking a few more questions first and so it was a bit quieter when he’d arrived in the laundries — the graveyard shift. Even as he worked, more passives dribbled out in pursuit of food and baths. Two overseers became one and two dozen workers almost halved, the remaining Matron pitching in to help. The idea was to finish up the washing for the night, allowing items to dry until morning when they’d been ironed and pressed and sent off. What were left were lower priority items and those passives that had been working all day had been let off, whereas those who were left now had started a bit later.
Fionn wasn’t part of the regular shift here and so he hadn’t been dismissed, a number of them hadn’t including Terrence/Thomas and Aurelie. He’d seen the redhead but he hadn’t really looked her way — hadn’t really looked anybody’s way — as she wasn’t Lars. The Hessean’s distinctive blond head wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere and that was why he’d been basically rubbing his skin off in the cold water tub.
The middle Madden hadn’t paid any attention to others but apparently Terrence/Thomas had been watching him, drifting in after him when he entered the storeroom for… something unimportant probably. Once he walked in, he didn’t fully remember why he’d come in. And that’s when the other young man had come in after him.
“Hello. You uh… are you doing okay?”
“Hi… Fine, yeah,” he’d muttered distractedly before drifting off to one side, fingers moving over items on the shelves, wandering aimlessly.
“You seem tense. Really tense…” the other had murmured, moving close to set a gentle hand on the blond’s arm. Fionn hadn’t looked at him, he’d just had other things on his mind, hadn’t wanted to converse—it hardly felt like the time for pleasantries—and then the tentative hand had found his shoulder and he’d begun massaging the tension out and his fingers had brushed his collarbones through his shirt and-
Things had sort of just… happened. He really had no idea how things had reached this juncture, the events scrambled and disjointed in his mind. Was he going to end up screwing this guy in the laundry storeroom when anyone could enter—unlikely at this hour—and catch them at it? No, probably not, he didn’t think he had the will for that kind of carry on because right now he was—hilariously—passive. This was something that was happening to him rather than something he’d initiated and he might have been misremembering but he didn’t think that Terrence/Thomas was the kind to take the lead on these things.
Someone could walk in on them like this but he didn’t care about that either. What was the worst that could happen? The only one who could get them into real trouble was the Matron and she would have her eye on the others. It was only if they were gone too long…
Anyone else would just turn around and walk straight back out again or pretend that they’d seen nothing. It wasn’t as if they were immediately visible or anything, in amongst some shelves but if someone came in and moved down that way then they’d get a surprise. Although there were definitely some sounds, soft, clandestine but audible, recognisable if you knew what you were hearing.
But he wasn’t thinking about getting caught or where this was going though. Fionn was just trying to cling to the moment, just the sensations, anything so that he wouldn’t remember kissing Lars in this room, wouldn’t think about how distant he’d been from the Hessean of late, wouldn’t have to think about how something terrible might have happened to him and here he was-
Brown eyes closed, breath sawed in and out of his mouth before he bit his lip, stopping himself from vocalising anything. His head tilted back against the wall, one hand stroking the other boy’s shoulder while the other one remained firmly planted in his hair. And he would have rode out the moment to its blissful conclusion, leaving room for the sourness of the action to come later, if it hadn’t been for the new presence.
Fionn could sense nexi and he could also distinguish individual ones. The boy kneeling before him didn’t have a nexus that he could have picked out although he’d have some vague familiarity now like catching sight of a half-remembered face. Some people were very well known to him though. Anybody who came in, he’d know about it but for most, the youth wouldn’t have bothered to pay attention to them, would have acted as if they weren’t there because they’d beat a retreat soon enough anyway.
So when he sensed it, he basically tried to swat it away mentally like a nuisance insect. It wasn’t that simple though and whether he wanted to pay attention to it or not, the essence of personhood that permeated the nexus was horribly familiar, even if he was slow to respond to it.
When he did, his eyes flew open in shock, some animation returning to his features although it had been largely absent up until now as he registered the terribly close presence of which his companion had no awareness. He managed to feel something as well, something outside of the Lars situation or the rather physical sensations of the moment.
Shame.
Guilt.
Self-disgust.
Aurelie had seen!
Fionn has thought he didn’t care if he was disturbed or who by but he’d been wrong. Of course, he hadn’t wanted Aura to see this and the apology radiated from his features. It wasn’t as if he- This wasn’t- It didn’t mean that he didn’t want-
Fuck!