Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

K is dark eyed in the night, settled in the windowsill. He spends more time in Piety than he does at home, now; Prokopenko doesn’t know whether he should be worried or pleased by the development. He never did ask what K had to do to get his Dad to buy him the new Mitsu. (He may keep a Black Card in his pocket, but K was always on his father’s leash.)

“Come back to bed,” he mumbled, low enough not to wake Skov, asleep in the other bed, exhausted from soccer practice. Trying to get to state for senior year was a grueling test of endurance, and Skov’s bleached-white hair curled against his stark cheekbones on the pillowcase, making him look more like a specter than a real boy.

K grunted something, rubbing restlessly at his eyes with shaking hands. Proko sighed and dragged himself up, settled himself in the floor with his head resting on K’s bony knee. Immediately fingers began to sift through his hair, tugging lightly at knots. The hardwood was uncomfortable but this was better than being alone in bed.

“Dream me something,” K whispered, hoarse, more than half-asleep. “Dream me something.” He said again, and fell asleep like that, sprawled in the sill. Proko sighed, considered getting up to drag them both across the room and decided it was too much effort. His back would kill him tomorrow but he’d just whine until someone, probably Swan, rubbed the aching muscles out for him.

He closed his eyes, relishing the feel of K’s fingers still curled loosely in his hair, and drifted off to sleep.

Dream me something, K had said, and so Proko did.

Chapter Text

The women of 300 Fox Way reminded him more of the motherland than anything else in this Christ-forsaken hellhole town did.

Prokopenko had rung the doorbell with the intent to return the sunglasses that the cinnamon girl ( Blue, Blue Sargent ) had loaned him, nothing more. His grandmother had raised him with manners when it came to girls, and some of it had stuck. They weren’t just gas-station-bought shades. Brightly-colored plastic cat eyes, they looked like someone had deliberately pulled them from the very bottom of some thrift store barrel with a triumphant gleam in their eyes. Well-loved. Not something you borrowed and never gave back, and with K around, things didn’t tend to last very long just lying around.

He’d been peered at like a science experiment by the two women who had answered the door, and then shuffled inside quickly with hands on his elbows, deposited in a room already occupied by two cats and what looked to be an actual human skull but was, upon further examination, just realistically-weighted polymer.

I am here to see Blue Sargent, he’d said, and they’d exchanged spry looks, young enough yet to be coy but older than him by several years.

300 Fox Way was loud in a way that had him wishing for a Xanax even though he had cut down to only his actual prescribed dosage. Phones ringing off the hook, females shrieking, mood music playing, cats meowing. He kept very still and tried not to touch anything.

But still, there was an ease in him. The women who had deposited him in the cat-occupied space had been haughty and secret-eyed like young, beautiful women were in Russia. The women he saw in the hallways moved with precision, brows arched and hips swaying, powerful and cold the way that all the women of his homeland seemed to be. His grandmother had been that way, too, until they’d had to come to America, where weakness and fear and grief had seeped into her like a sickness.

Blue Sargent, with her dark eyes and carefully-disarrayed hair, was powerful and cold, too, a fact that Proko was reminded of when she appeared in the doorway to the room wearing a slinky, tattered dress the color of a tequila sunrise, trimmed in ragged scarlet lace. There was golden shimmer dusted across her cheekbones and dark purple circles beneath her eyes. She was still a mirror, and yet also a coiled animal ready to strike, compact and deadly.

She was striking to look at. Proko sat and took her in for a long moment, appreciative.

She didn’t seem discomforted by his stare, though she didn’t really return it. Her eyes remained on his, not roaming over his form.

“I came to return these,” he said, proffering the sunglasses and standing. She looked at them in mild surprise, as if she’d resigned herself to never laying eyes on them again.

“Thanks,” she replied, and took them from his hand. When their skin brushed it was like a thrumming cable plugged into the wall.

He was sure there was more to her than met the naked eye, but didn’t press her with questions.

He thought about asking her out, to go see a movie or drive around in the Jag. If there had been no K, he might’ve done it. She would say no, of this he was sure, but still. He would’ve done it. There was something soothing about her presence, something that smoothed down the tension in his forehead. It could be addictive, if given half a chance.

He nodded at her instead, and showed himself out.

K was sprawled expansively in the passenger seat of the F-Type, arm dangling out the window and cigarette in his mouth. “Hurry up, fucker!” He shouted when he caught sight of Proko, and carelessly flicked the dial on the radio so that its volume raised high enough to shake the whole frame of the car. Black Siemens, like they weren’t conspicuous enough already. Proko made a big show of rolling his eyes and flipping K the bird but didn’t turn it down when he got in.

“You get your fortune read?” K shouted over the stereo, over Pharoah rapping about Tommy Hilfiger and Volga.

“Didn’t have to,” he shouted back, and put his hand on K’s thigh, high up.

K grinned and took a drag off his smoke, indolent. “Take me home, asshole!” He bellowed, and Proko accelerated as he whipped a U-turn, heading back for the dorm.

Chapter Text

K shakes nearly out of his skin the night before graduation, and Proko doesn’t know what to do to hold him together, clutching him tight on the bathroom floor. “I can’t I can’t I can’t,” K stammers, over and over, fingers curled into claws and face pushed into his throat, burning up, sweating profusely. He is so far away from himself that Proko is fucking terrified.

He can’t say let’s go for a drive. He can’t say here, take this Xanny. He can’t do anything, because he’s afraid to let K out of arm’s reach. Afraid of what he might do.

“I fucking— wasn’t supposed to make it this long,” K spits, ferocious. “Fuck— I can’t fucking breathe —“ and Proko wants to kill K’s father.

Proko wants to kill him, and so he starts to murmur in K’s ear about it. A plan. He’s had a long time to think about killing people. Killing life-ruining men. The men who had his father killed. The man who killed him. Now, Boris Kavinsky.

As he elaborates, the tension in K’s shoulders dissipates. Falls away to nothing but his shudders, the wet not-sobbing breaths he’s taking in the crook of Proko’s neck. Listening. Clutching Proko tighter.

“—and that is when I will cut his fucking throat.” Proko finishes, and is unsurprised to feel K’s cock hard against the inside of his thigh. He opens his legs wider and helps K scrabble at his waistband, dragging his shorts down his hips and thighs until they’re off and there is nothing between him and K but K’s own shorts that he only shoves down around his thighs.

They fumble with the tub of Vaseline that Skov keeps in the bottom drawer beneath the sink, go too-quick getting Proko ready but it’s okay because he likes it when it hurts, and K does too. Proko’s short nails drag down his back, over his ass, and they pant into each other’s mouths, a parody of a kiss.

“Fuck me fuck me fuck me ,” Proko curses, and wishes that it could always fucking be like this, nothing but him and K and this awful, nebulous pleasure shuddering in their guts.

“Ilya, Ilya, Ilya,” K gasps, a broken record, wrenching Proko’s thick thighs further apart and not caring that the tile is hell on his knees as he pushes closer, closer, so close that his chain swings and taps Proko under the chin with every thrust, diamonds and gold a sparkling blur. Everything is blurry. Only Proko’s face is clear, eyes shut tight and mouth open, a prince. A fucking prince, the most gorgeous thing that K has ever laid his eyes on, and that is when I will cut his fucking throat, and Proko will do it, too. He doesn’t say shit unless he fucking means it.

K thinks about it, about his father being dead in the ground, the last of his childhood terrors buried with him, and comes with a shout.

Chapter Text

“Baby,” K says, suntanned and absent, soft around the ribs and thicker in the ass than he’d ever been in Henrietta or before, head ducked into the fridge. “Did you buy the fuckin’ eggs?”

It’s mundane; it’s possibly the most mundane thing that Proko has ever seen K do, and yet it makes him go so far into his feelings that he can’t even fucking breathe because of it. It’s like that sometimes, now that they’re as far away from Henrietta as they could be, living it the fuck up in California in a small-ass apartment, calling themselves Joey and Ilya to their fucking neighbors. They’re part of the damn neighborhood watch, for Chrissakes. Old ladies wave at them when they get home from work. K goes to fucking yoga class. He plays ball with all the neighborhood kids.

It’s so ridiculous and wonderful that sometimes Proko worries he’s asleep somewhere, on the verge of waking up alone.

“Forgot,” he says, and presses himself to K’s back, pushing a kiss into the top knob of his spine.

K sighs, pushes his ass back into the cradle of Proko’s hips, reaches a hand back to dig his nails into Proko’s thigh, dragging him in. Meanly , because K may be semi-domesticated and a hell of a lot less self destructive with his dad dead for two years and weed legal in a California, but he’s still Joseph Kavinsky.

The fridge is open; it’s a sharp contrast to the summertime heat so oppressively thick even with their A/C on full blast and half a dozen box fans on.

Proko kisses his spine again, pushes his hips forward. “Wanna?” He asks, mouthing the words against K’s skin, licking up salty sweat so there’s no mistake about what he’s offering. K never used to let him do it; K never did it either, preferring things harder and sharper, more painful. Not just sex, but everything else too.

Their lives now are almost laughably tame, easy, happy. Their shared life, Virginia almost-forgotten except in the smallest ways, Skov texting every so often and Jiang on Facebook living it up as a model in Japan, Swan driving down from Vancouver a couple times a year to drink all their craft beer and goad them back into shitty Natty Light for weekends at a time. Fucking Lynch, who sends pictures of his fucking bird, his harem of prep school survivors, Dick Cubed and ChengCheng and Adam Parrish. Blue Sargent, who called once last year to warn him that one of the psychics had foretold danger in his future. That was the day before he got clipped by a fucking bus and broke his leg, swearing the whole way down and trying to hold K back from beating the fuck out of the driver at the same time.

K hums. “Yeah,” he goads in his still-nasally Jersey accent. “Yeah, yeah Proko, y’gonna put that mouth to good use?”

Yeah, Proko is. Proko does.

He’s never done it for anybody that wasn’t K. Skov had done it to him, the first time, when they were freshmen and Skov had had a nightmare, woke up in the middle of the night frantic. Woke up slutty, and bent him over the back of his own desk chair while he took him apart with his mouth. His hair had been blue still, then. His face was baby-smooth. None of them grew stubble back then except Swan.

Now Proko kneels on the linoleum, bites the thick muscle of K’s ass viciously and kisses it better after, tangling his shorts and boxer-briefs around his bony, scarred knees. K doesn’t shave; it’s fine, it’s good, his skin is sweat-slick and Proko licks at him so fucking sweetly, nibbles as he scrapes his nails lightly down the insides of K’s thighs.

K cries out, loud and unashamed. He is worlds away from the broken thing he’d been and Proko is so fucking grateful he gets to have this. Have K and not be one step away from killing himself or them both. He doesn’t feel like he’s dead anymore; he doesn’t relish the thought of death.

He’d wanted to kill his demons, not the tender parts of himself, back then. He just hadn’t realized he could do one and not the other. But now here he is, and here K is, and he’s slaughtered all the ghosts and monsters belonging to them both, by himself.

“Your filthy fuckin’ mouth -” K groans, agonized, still half inside their fridge, scrabbling for purchase and knocking over condiments and their container of almond milk. Proko doesn’t care. He curls greedy fingers around K’s cock, blood-hot and thick, tugs lightly at the piercing just below the head that he’d done himself. The first PA he’d ever done during his piercing apprenticeship, after K got done with his shift at the bodega on the corner.

(Somewhere, the founders of Aglionby are rolling in their graves; they would have rather seen their graduates dead than working shitty blue-collar jobs. It makes Proko satisfied to think about.)

It made him possessive, like having his mark on K made indelible.

Indelible. He’s musing on commitment using SAT words on his knees with his face buried in Joseph Kavinsky’s ass, and Proko laughs. The vibration is enough to set K off, apparently, because he stripes the contents of their fridge with his cum. Fucking gross, but Proko doesn’t give a fuck, especially not with K turning and tackling him to the floor so he can spit viciously on Proko’s cock and jerk him off with a frantic energy that borders on violence.

It’s the way Proko likes it best, though, so it’s good, especially with K panting into his mouth and muttering the whole time ( fuck fuck baby so filthy for me only for me baby boy fuckkk ) voice coming from low in his throat, gravelly and almost-stoned.

After he comes they lay in a heap; Proko groans and rolls them over so he can kick the fridge closed. The motor whines loudly for a couple minutes more before it settles back down. Probably they didn’t fuck it up, leaving it open so long.

“D’you have to fucking come all over the tomatoes I just fucking bought?” He complains just for the sake of it, mumbling with his mouth full of K’s hair. K just snorts and pinches his nipple hard enough that there’ll probably be a bruise there tomorrow.

It’s good. It’s all fucking good.