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valmoraTitle: les rapports, la haine, la liberté (relations, hate, freedom. screw you, good titles.)
Fandom: Banlieue 13 aka District B13
Characters: Damien and Leïto. Passing mention of Lola.
Rating: a bit more than PG-13 but on the light side of R
Disclaimer: so incredibly not mine. i am writing this for fun, and am making no money.
Notes: I am guilty of having studied French for a number of years, so I attempted to incorporate a certain amount of Gallic syntax and cadence in the dialogue. There is also a moment where an assumption of gender is made by a participant in a conversation; this assumption is based on the French grammatical gender that would be employed in that situation. It’s not sexism; it’s linguistics.
Sequel to la jambe cassée.
Damien wakes to find that he has made himself into an animate blanket, sprawled over Leïto, pleasantly warm but sticky with sweat. Leïto never did take that shower.
Damien shifts away a little, planning to get dressed before Lola gets up and finds the trail of clothing he and Leïto left on their way from the couch to Leïto’s bedroom, the towel the start of it. He didn’t think to bring any extra clothes – he didn’t think he’d be spending the night.
He glances at the door, then realizes that the heap of clothing at the foot of it is in fact all his own.
Shit.
He rolls over, off of Leïto, who’s at the edge, and then crawls over Leïto’s feet, trying not to drag the cast on his leg. It mostly works, but Leïto tenses, wakes, rubs at his face a little. Looks at Damien, expression unreadable.
There’s a moment where neither of them talks, and then Leïto says, “When you get that cast off, go running with me.”
Damien grins, laughing a little. “All right.” He starts getting dressed, wrestling with his cast,when Lola shouts through the door, “Don’t feel like you have to start going anywhere just yet. It’s not even ten AM and you know it’s a weekend!” And then, a little more quietly, maybe so that the neighbors don’t hear, “Besides, I’m leaving for work in a moment, so you don’t have to worry about waking me up. This time.”
Damien winces, puts his face in his hands. Leïto collapses back onto the bed, grinning.
“I’m not hearing foreplay,” Lola sing-songs, and the door to the apartment slams behind her, the sound of her sneakers surprisingly loud on the concrete floor of the hall outside.
“I love my older sister,” Leïto says, as though to convince himself, and then repeats it.
“She did return my clothes,” Damien points out.
Leïto hums thoughtfully, then says, “You hungry?”
“Not really.”
“Me neither. Come back to bed.”
Damien obeys.
Eventually they leave the bed in order to eat lunch, and after that Leïto shows him the fast way to the exit from the banlieue. Damien’s car still runs, although someone has spray-painted something text-like and unreadable on the left side, where the rest of the design was on the wall. Damien figures he deserves it for leaving his car next to the wall overnight.
“Do you want to come back with me?” he asks. Leïto shakes his head.
“If I did, I might never leave,” he says, “and I have responsibilities here.”
Damien understands. He kisses Leïto goodbye, gets in the car, and drives off. This time, he knows he’ll come back in less than three months.
He’s back the next weekend. Leïto’s out when he gets there, and the guards at the door this week are different from the ones last time, so they don’t know that he’s safe.
He ends up waiting nearly an hour, wandering around the block so that the guards don’t get too nervous with him standing around waiting.
The end of the third circuit, Leïto is waiting for him at the door. There is no effusive greeting this time, just “Damien.” His eyes are dark, endless, unreadable.
“Yes,” Damien replies.
The guards let him past this time, and he goes up the stairs slowly, Leïto beside him. His skin is hot where it brushes against Leïto’s arm. By the time they reach the seventh floor, Leïto and Lola’s apartment, he is over-sensitive, all he can think about the soreness in his muscles and how badly he wants to already be touching Leïto.
“Is Lola here?” he asks, right before they open the door.
“No,” Leïto answers.
The moment the door is closed, Damien finds himself slammed into it, Leïto pressed heavy into him, his breath in Damien’s lungs, kiss messy and slick, Damien’s tongue tracing the shifting curve of Leïto’s mouth.
They don’t make it to the bed. They don’t even make it far enough away from the door that Lola can open it when she comes home.
On Monday night, after the building’s usual guard-schedule meeting, some of the guys come up to Leïto. Try to corner, more like. He makes sure he’s within jumping height of a pipe, just in case things get out of control.
“Who’s this guy you keep letting in?” Henri asks. “He doesn’t look like he’s from around here.”
Mahmoud nods. “I don’t trust him. You might vouch for him, but we don’t like strangers coming and going all the time. It’s not safe.”
Leïto isn’t sure how to explain Damien.
“He’s not from Banlieue 13,” Leïto says. “He – he’s a cop, but not like the rest of them. He helped me save Lola from Taha. He spends more time as a criminal than he does as a cop.”
Thanh’s lip curls. “He’s on the take, you mean.”
“No. He –” Leïto doesn’t want to give Damien away, but he doesn’t want this slur sitting around on Damien’s name. “He works undercover. Right now he’s injured, so he’s not working.”
All three of them wear similar expressions of polite disbelief.
“He helped me rescue Lola from Taha in exchange for my helping him prove that someone was trying to blow up this banlieue.”
Thanh raises an eyebrow in the most polite way possible and says, “Well, if he’s so trustworthy, then we’ll let him in from now on.” Somehow this is like getting slapped in the face in utter disapproval. Leïto doesn’t think it has anything to do with the neighbors hearing them having sex; it’s probably more just the fact that Damien, who lives outside the walls of the banlieue, could easily be seen as slumming it out of boredom, rather than visiting a friend while he’s off-duty.
Two weeks later, after his cast comes off, Damien’s cleared for a new undercover assignment by the department. Bad and good. When he goes to Banlieue 13 that weekend to visit he says over dinner, “I’m going undercover on Wednesday. I don’t know how long it’ll be. Maybe two months. Most likely more. I hope less than a year.”
Leïto nods and doesn’t ask him any questions. Lola asks more than he can answer without compromising his security.
The sex that weekend is different, less urgent, more thorough, as though Leïto is saving up memories. Or maybe that’s just Damien, projecting. He knows he doesn’t want to let go. It was difficult enough to leave the first time, and that was before Leïto opened his home and his bed to him.
Damien stays Sunday night and leaves Monday morning before dawn; he forces himself not to look back at Leïto half-awake, wrapped in old sheets.
At the unguarded exit of the banlieue, he touches his lips with the tips of his fingers, not a kiss, not quite, and presses his fingertips to the concrete of the wall. He thinks of writing, like a child, on the wall in chalk: JE L’M.
Not all his missions are exciting. Some tire the soul, wear it away, cover it in blood and grease and shit until Damien feels he’ll never be clean. This is one of those.
He is in the same arrondissement for four months, and for most of it he tries not to remember his other life, except inasmuch as knowing this will end. Some nights, when he is not so blinded by his assignment that to think would make him vomit, he draws through his mind a memory of Leïto, dark cloth-and-ink against a concrete wall, in motion, unsilent. Like an old sepia photograph left in the sun, the image grows sharper with use, then fades away.
Eventually it is over, the ringleaders locked up, the identity of Damien Tomaso shown again from beneath the mask of a criminal. He cannot bring himself to visit Banlieue 13 for almost a month, trying to let the muck clear from his soul. There is a difference between knowing the darkness and letting it overcome you; Damien has never come so close to the latter.
Damien returns without warning, no phone call ahead. He’s just there one day, sitting with his back to the concrete wall of the apartment building, arms draped over his drawn-up knees. Just waiting.
Leïto nearly falls six stories to his death, seeing Damien there. He manages to catch himself, pulling muscles in his arms and wrenching his shoulders. His blood heats; when he drops to the ground in front of Damien he holds there, kneeling, watching Damien’s face.
“I’m back,” Damien says.
“Without a cast, this time.”
“And no bruises from a stubborn asshole who thinks the French government is out to get him.”
Leïto grins. “No bruises yet.”
The tendons in Leïto’s neck are long and broad, hard against Damien’s cheek. The urgency of reunion has dissipated, remaining only in sticky skin, mussed sheets, a taste in Damien’s mouth. He doesn’t want to move, or think. Only breathe.
At some point he falls asleep without realizing it and wakes the same way. Leïto’s arm, like Damien’s, is pressure-red. He probably fell asleep too, but once Damien wakes up he starts tracing the contours of Damien’s spine with his fingertips, arm over Damien’s shoulders.
Damien swallows, breathes against Leïto’s throat: Move in with me.
“What?” Leïto freezes, palm flat on Damien’s back. His voice is rough from sleep.
Damien clears his throat, eyes on a discolored smear on the wall past Leïto’s chest. “I said, move in with me.”
“No.” He says it without tension, without emotion, without apology.
Damien’s throat feels hollow. “Why?”
“Because you would want me to leave this banlieue. You would want me to wait for you in strange parts of the city, isolated, like a woman, or your wife. Here, I’m free.” Leïto’s hands fall away from Damien’s skin.
“Free?” Damien pushes himself away, sitting up in the bed. “How are you free? Free to be ignored by the law, to be assumed a criminal, to be one man against the drug dealers and gun runners?”
“Running away won’t help the people who don’t have a friend who’s willing to give them a place to stay outside the walls.”
“You don’t have to stop trying to help. There are any number of groups working for integration of the banlieue, the reopening of the schools, trying to strangle the drug market.”
“And they’re all failing.”
“And what you’re doing works? Running around the banlieue, stealing kilos of heroin here and there?”
“At least I stop innocent people from getting involved. Show them how to protect themselves.”
“By giving them guns and telling them to guard the apartment building? That’s not stopping anything. It makes it worse – it tells people that violence is the only way to solve things.”
“When the law fails then violence becomes the only way to solve things.” Leïto’s eyes are hard and bright as he sits on the edge of the bed, feet on the floor. Damien is standing a handspan away from it, not quite pacing. The are both shouting; the sudden silence after Leïto’s answer rings, hard, in Damien’s ears.
Damien grabs his clothes off the floor and dresses again, too angry to speak. He’s always had recourse to violence before, his fists or a gun, to put his temper to rest. Now he has nothing. If he says something, it’ll be an outpouring of rage, ideas he doesn’t hold but entertains just because he wants to hurt Leïto.
He finishes pulling on his shirt and opens the bedroom door. In front of the door, Lola is standing, a bag of groceries, forgotten, hanging from her wrist. She must’ve walked in just when the shouting started.
“Afternoon,” he snarls, brushing past her and walking out the door.
Damien goes into work on Monday wishing he could go out on the streets and catch criminals who would resist arrest in violent ways. Instead he sits at a desk for six hours, with a break in the middle for lunch, and writes a report on his just-ended assignment.
He hands the printed document to his boss at four o’clock in the afternoon, then returns to his desk, only to have his boss walk up to him and put the report back on his desk.
“I think,” his boss says quietly, “you should rewrite this. I realize you spent a long time in this group, and that the experience understandably causes you great disgust, but you’re far too emotional. Tone it down.”
So he goes back and strips his vocabulary of emotional intensity, prints it out again, and hands it in at five on the dot.
He leaves the office and wishes he were undercover with an organisation like Taha’s, where he’d be able to beat up subordinates just because he felt like it.
Wednesday lunchtime, Nunez leans over the barrier between their desks and says, “Your girlfriend dump you while you were gone?”
“No.” The word grinds out from between Damien’s teeth.
“Shit.” Nunez props his head on his fist, on top of the barrier. “She waited until you got back. That’s better, but worse too.”
“No,” Damien says, keeping his voice down only through an effort of will, “I wasn’t dumped by my girlfriend, because I didn’t and don’t have one. I had an ideological disagreement with a friend.”
“He must be some friend,” Nunez drawls.
“My best,” Damien says. “Now do your job and let me do mine.”
He finally declares defeat and sends Leïto a letter, hoping the post office will deliver it to the banlieue.
A week later, he receives a postcard back: a picture on one side, a publicly accessible location not far from the banlieue, not far from his apartment. On the reverse, a time and a date.
He goes. What else is he going to do?
The first thing Leïto does is punch him.
“I don’t want your charity,” he adds, while blocking Damien’s return punch, struck by the kick that follows it up and stumbling a few steps back. “You think I want to be kept, like some whore of a pet from the bad parts of town?” He borrows Damien’s wrist long enough to try to throw him, foiled by Damien taking his elbow and sweeping his ankles.
“I think I wouldn’t mind being –” Damien loses his breath halfway through the sentence, elbowed in the stomach, “able to see you every day, instead of one day a week.”
“Then move to the banlieue,” Leïto suggests, from behind Damien, and then from above him while Damien throws him.
“How long is a cop’s life expectancy there?” Damien asks the concrete where Leïto was.
Leïto, holding his wrists, breathes in his ear, “How long is anyone’s?” Damien elbows him in the stomach and suffers getting yanked to the ground by his shoulders for the trouble.
Damien manages, right before throwing Leïto off him, “I’m not suggesting you abandon Lola.” He shifts his posture, sitting between Leïto’s legs, hands pressed into the muscles of his stomach. He watches Leïto’s eyes, his hands, in case Leïto decides to play jujitsu.
“The answer’s still no.”
“Never?”
“Maybe.”
“Just not now.”
“Right.” Leïto slides a hand up his arm, forces his elbows into bending, pulls him forward, and kisses him, there on the pavement, in the open.
Fandom: Banlieue 13 aka District B13
Characters: Damien and Leïto. Passing mention of Lola.
Rating: a bit more than PG-13 but on the light side of R
Disclaimer: so incredibly not mine. i am writing this for fun, and am making no money.
Notes: I am guilty of having studied French for a number of years, so I attempted to incorporate a certain amount of Gallic syntax and cadence in the dialogue. There is also a moment where an assumption of gender is made by a participant in a conversation; this assumption is based on the French grammatical gender that would be employed in that situation. It’s not sexism; it’s linguistics.
Sequel to la jambe cassée.
Damien wakes to find that he has made himself into an animate blanket, sprawled over Leïto, pleasantly warm but sticky with sweat. Leïto never did take that shower.
Damien shifts away a little, planning to get dressed before Lola gets up and finds the trail of clothing he and Leïto left on their way from the couch to Leïto’s bedroom, the towel the start of it. He didn’t think to bring any extra clothes – he didn’t think he’d be spending the night.
He glances at the door, then realizes that the heap of clothing at the foot of it is in fact all his own.
Shit.
He rolls over, off of Leïto, who’s at the edge, and then crawls over Leïto’s feet, trying not to drag the cast on his leg. It mostly works, but Leïto tenses, wakes, rubs at his face a little. Looks at Damien, expression unreadable.
There’s a moment where neither of them talks, and then Leïto says, “When you get that cast off, go running with me.”
Damien grins, laughing a little. “All right.” He starts getting dressed, wrestling with his cast,when Lola shouts through the door, “Don’t feel like you have to start going anywhere just yet. It’s not even ten AM and you know it’s a weekend!” And then, a little more quietly, maybe so that the neighbors don’t hear, “Besides, I’m leaving for work in a moment, so you don’t have to worry about waking me up. This time.”
Damien winces, puts his face in his hands. Leïto collapses back onto the bed, grinning.
“I’m not hearing foreplay,” Lola sing-songs, and the door to the apartment slams behind her, the sound of her sneakers surprisingly loud on the concrete floor of the hall outside.
“I love my older sister,” Leïto says, as though to convince himself, and then repeats it.
“She did return my clothes,” Damien points out.
Leïto hums thoughtfully, then says, “You hungry?”
“Not really.”
“Me neither. Come back to bed.”
Damien obeys.
Eventually they leave the bed in order to eat lunch, and after that Leïto shows him the fast way to the exit from the banlieue. Damien’s car still runs, although someone has spray-painted something text-like and unreadable on the left side, where the rest of the design was on the wall. Damien figures he deserves it for leaving his car next to the wall overnight.
“Do you want to come back with me?” he asks. Leïto shakes his head.
“If I did, I might never leave,” he says, “and I have responsibilities here.”
Damien understands. He kisses Leïto goodbye, gets in the car, and drives off. This time, he knows he’ll come back in less than three months.
He’s back the next weekend. Leïto’s out when he gets there, and the guards at the door this week are different from the ones last time, so they don’t know that he’s safe.
He ends up waiting nearly an hour, wandering around the block so that the guards don’t get too nervous with him standing around waiting.
The end of the third circuit, Leïto is waiting for him at the door. There is no effusive greeting this time, just “Damien.” His eyes are dark, endless, unreadable.
“Yes,” Damien replies.
The guards let him past this time, and he goes up the stairs slowly, Leïto beside him. His skin is hot where it brushes against Leïto’s arm. By the time they reach the seventh floor, Leïto and Lola’s apartment, he is over-sensitive, all he can think about the soreness in his muscles and how badly he wants to already be touching Leïto.
“Is Lola here?” he asks, right before they open the door.
“No,” Leïto answers.
The moment the door is closed, Damien finds himself slammed into it, Leïto pressed heavy into him, his breath in Damien’s lungs, kiss messy and slick, Damien’s tongue tracing the shifting curve of Leïto’s mouth.
They don’t make it to the bed. They don’t even make it far enough away from the door that Lola can open it when she comes home.
On Monday night, after the building’s usual guard-schedule meeting, some of the guys come up to Leïto. Try to corner, more like. He makes sure he’s within jumping height of a pipe, just in case things get out of control.
“Who’s this guy you keep letting in?” Henri asks. “He doesn’t look like he’s from around here.”
Mahmoud nods. “I don’t trust him. You might vouch for him, but we don’t like strangers coming and going all the time. It’s not safe.”
Leïto isn’t sure how to explain Damien.
“He’s not from Banlieue 13,” Leïto says. “He – he’s a cop, but not like the rest of them. He helped me save Lola from Taha. He spends more time as a criminal than he does as a cop.”
Thanh’s lip curls. “He’s on the take, you mean.”
“No. He –” Leïto doesn’t want to give Damien away, but he doesn’t want this slur sitting around on Damien’s name. “He works undercover. Right now he’s injured, so he’s not working.”
All three of them wear similar expressions of polite disbelief.
“He helped me rescue Lola from Taha in exchange for my helping him prove that someone was trying to blow up this banlieue.”
Thanh raises an eyebrow in the most polite way possible and says, “Well, if he’s so trustworthy, then we’ll let him in from now on.” Somehow this is like getting slapped in the face in utter disapproval. Leïto doesn’t think it has anything to do with the neighbors hearing them having sex; it’s probably more just the fact that Damien, who lives outside the walls of the banlieue, could easily be seen as slumming it out of boredom, rather than visiting a friend while he’s off-duty.
Two weeks later, after his cast comes off, Damien’s cleared for a new undercover assignment by the department. Bad and good. When he goes to Banlieue 13 that weekend to visit he says over dinner, “I’m going undercover on Wednesday. I don’t know how long it’ll be. Maybe two months. Most likely more. I hope less than a year.”
Leïto nods and doesn’t ask him any questions. Lola asks more than he can answer without compromising his security.
The sex that weekend is different, less urgent, more thorough, as though Leïto is saving up memories. Or maybe that’s just Damien, projecting. He knows he doesn’t want to let go. It was difficult enough to leave the first time, and that was before Leïto opened his home and his bed to him.
Damien stays Sunday night and leaves Monday morning before dawn; he forces himself not to look back at Leïto half-awake, wrapped in old sheets.
At the unguarded exit of the banlieue, he touches his lips with the tips of his fingers, not a kiss, not quite, and presses his fingertips to the concrete of the wall. He thinks of writing, like a child, on the wall in chalk: JE L’M.
Not all his missions are exciting. Some tire the soul, wear it away, cover it in blood and grease and shit until Damien feels he’ll never be clean. This is one of those.
He is in the same arrondissement for four months, and for most of it he tries not to remember his other life, except inasmuch as knowing this will end. Some nights, when he is not so blinded by his assignment that to think would make him vomit, he draws through his mind a memory of Leïto, dark cloth-and-ink against a concrete wall, in motion, unsilent. Like an old sepia photograph left in the sun, the image grows sharper with use, then fades away.
Eventually it is over, the ringleaders locked up, the identity of Damien Tomaso shown again from beneath the mask of a criminal. He cannot bring himself to visit Banlieue 13 for almost a month, trying to let the muck clear from his soul. There is a difference between knowing the darkness and letting it overcome you; Damien has never come so close to the latter.
Damien returns without warning, no phone call ahead. He’s just there one day, sitting with his back to the concrete wall of the apartment building, arms draped over his drawn-up knees. Just waiting.
Leïto nearly falls six stories to his death, seeing Damien there. He manages to catch himself, pulling muscles in his arms and wrenching his shoulders. His blood heats; when he drops to the ground in front of Damien he holds there, kneeling, watching Damien’s face.
“I’m back,” Damien says.
“Without a cast, this time.”
“And no bruises from a stubborn asshole who thinks the French government is out to get him.”
Leïto grins. “No bruises yet.”
The tendons in Leïto’s neck are long and broad, hard against Damien’s cheek. The urgency of reunion has dissipated, remaining only in sticky skin, mussed sheets, a taste in Damien’s mouth. He doesn’t want to move, or think. Only breathe.
At some point he falls asleep without realizing it and wakes the same way. Leïto’s arm, like Damien’s, is pressure-red. He probably fell asleep too, but once Damien wakes up he starts tracing the contours of Damien’s spine with his fingertips, arm over Damien’s shoulders.
Damien swallows, breathes against Leïto’s throat: Move in with me.
“What?” Leïto freezes, palm flat on Damien’s back. His voice is rough from sleep.
Damien clears his throat, eyes on a discolored smear on the wall past Leïto’s chest. “I said, move in with me.”
“No.” He says it without tension, without emotion, without apology.
Damien’s throat feels hollow. “Why?”
“Because you would want me to leave this banlieue. You would want me to wait for you in strange parts of the city, isolated, like a woman, or your wife. Here, I’m free.” Leïto’s hands fall away from Damien’s skin.
“Free?” Damien pushes himself away, sitting up in the bed. “How are you free? Free to be ignored by the law, to be assumed a criminal, to be one man against the drug dealers and gun runners?”
“Running away won’t help the people who don’t have a friend who’s willing to give them a place to stay outside the walls.”
“You don’t have to stop trying to help. There are any number of groups working for integration of the banlieue, the reopening of the schools, trying to strangle the drug market.”
“And they’re all failing.”
“And what you’re doing works? Running around the banlieue, stealing kilos of heroin here and there?”
“At least I stop innocent people from getting involved. Show them how to protect themselves.”
“By giving them guns and telling them to guard the apartment building? That’s not stopping anything. It makes it worse – it tells people that violence is the only way to solve things.”
“When the law fails then violence becomes the only way to solve things.” Leïto’s eyes are hard and bright as he sits on the edge of the bed, feet on the floor. Damien is standing a handspan away from it, not quite pacing. The are both shouting; the sudden silence after Leïto’s answer rings, hard, in Damien’s ears.
Damien grabs his clothes off the floor and dresses again, too angry to speak. He’s always had recourse to violence before, his fists or a gun, to put his temper to rest. Now he has nothing. If he says something, it’ll be an outpouring of rage, ideas he doesn’t hold but entertains just because he wants to hurt Leïto.
He finishes pulling on his shirt and opens the bedroom door. In front of the door, Lola is standing, a bag of groceries, forgotten, hanging from her wrist. She must’ve walked in just when the shouting started.
“Afternoon,” he snarls, brushing past her and walking out the door.
Damien goes into work on Monday wishing he could go out on the streets and catch criminals who would resist arrest in violent ways. Instead he sits at a desk for six hours, with a break in the middle for lunch, and writes a report on his just-ended assignment.
He hands the printed document to his boss at four o’clock in the afternoon, then returns to his desk, only to have his boss walk up to him and put the report back on his desk.
“I think,” his boss says quietly, “you should rewrite this. I realize you spent a long time in this group, and that the experience understandably causes you great disgust, but you’re far too emotional. Tone it down.”
So he goes back and strips his vocabulary of emotional intensity, prints it out again, and hands it in at five on the dot.
He leaves the office and wishes he were undercover with an organisation like Taha’s, where he’d be able to beat up subordinates just because he felt like it.
Wednesday lunchtime, Nunez leans over the barrier between their desks and says, “Your girlfriend dump you while you were gone?”
“No.” The word grinds out from between Damien’s teeth.
“Shit.” Nunez props his head on his fist, on top of the barrier. “She waited until you got back. That’s better, but worse too.”
“No,” Damien says, keeping his voice down only through an effort of will, “I wasn’t dumped by my girlfriend, because I didn’t and don’t have one. I had an ideological disagreement with a friend.”
“He must be some friend,” Nunez drawls.
“My best,” Damien says. “Now do your job and let me do mine.”
He finally declares defeat and sends Leïto a letter, hoping the post office will deliver it to the banlieue.
A week later, he receives a postcard back: a picture on one side, a publicly accessible location not far from the banlieue, not far from his apartment. On the reverse, a time and a date.
He goes. What else is he going to do?
The first thing Leïto does is punch him.
“I don’t want your charity,” he adds, while blocking Damien’s return punch, struck by the kick that follows it up and stumbling a few steps back. “You think I want to be kept, like some whore of a pet from the bad parts of town?” He borrows Damien’s wrist long enough to try to throw him, foiled by Damien taking his elbow and sweeping his ankles.
“I think I wouldn’t mind being –” Damien loses his breath halfway through the sentence, elbowed in the stomach, “able to see you every day, instead of one day a week.”
“Then move to the banlieue,” Leïto suggests, from behind Damien, and then from above him while Damien throws him.
“How long is a cop’s life expectancy there?” Damien asks the concrete where Leïto was.
Leïto, holding his wrists, breathes in his ear, “How long is anyone’s?” Damien elbows him in the stomach and suffers getting yanked to the ground by his shoulders for the trouble.
Damien manages, right before throwing Leïto off him, “I’m not suggesting you abandon Lola.” He shifts his posture, sitting between Leïto’s legs, hands pressed into the muscles of his stomach. He watches Leïto’s eyes, his hands, in case Leïto decides to play jujitsu.
“The answer’s still no.”
“Never?”
“Maybe.”
“Just not now.”
“Right.” Leïto slides a hand up his arm, forces his elbows into bending, pulls him forward, and kisses him, there on the pavement, in the open.
