May 28, 1895 — Very Late — Dean's House

Don Juan did return to the party after he left Samuel Griffith at the top of the astronomy tower, but only briefly. He was too jittery to make conversation with anyone; he couldn't focus on anything anyone said. It wasn't the nervous, anxious sort of jittery, though. He felt good. He felt every inch of his skin. His blood was pumping fast and hot. He felt alive; obsessed with and distracted by his own vitality.

(He felt high. He had so far avoided thinking the word but he was acting it. He'd turned down a drink because something in his brain instinctively felt he was up and didn't want to mix in the cool down of liquor. He cut conversations short so straight-laced sorts wouldn't catch on that there was something different about him. He smiled wider than he should have. Staying in a room full of people was unsustainable. He bolted at the earliest permissible departure point, just after the fresh debutantes left at midnight).

It was several hours later when he came in through Dean's floo, but the feeling hadn't faded.

"Hudson," he called, heading straight for the bedroom on the assumption that Dean was already asleep. Most people were. "Hudson! Wake up and kiss me, please."

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Dean Hudson

M for sex stuff!

  

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Dean had been vaguely aware that the Hogwarts Coming Out Ball was this evening, but despite his attendance in the past and intention to go, he'd gotten back from Egypt late in the afternoon and hadn't had the energy to drag himself to the school for the evening. Plus he rather thought he should give Hanna a little more space at events, mostly for her benefit, not his. He was terrible at watching her struggle and tended to intervene, which really was only to her detriment.

So it had been a nice quiet evening in, with a mystery novel, a glass of wine and an early bedtime. Merlin he was getting old. Or maybe it was content? Hard to tell.

Whatever time it was that Don Juan decided to come calling up the stairs, Dean had been dead asleep, sprawled out on his bed facedown like a starfish. He barely registered the first intrusion to his dreams, but by the time he was somewhat awake, Don Juan was in the room and hard to ignore. Not that he wanted to. He rolled over, pulling the sheets with him haphazardly, eyes still heavy and having a hard time focusing in the darkness, but he held one hand out anyway in invitation. There were far worse reasons to be woken up than this.

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Hudson was asleep, as Don Juan had suspected, but that didn't slow him down. He only stopped long enough to kick his shoes off, during which Hudson had waved him on, and then he was climbing straight into the bed and straddling Dean's waist. "Wake up wake up," he said in an impatient sing-song tone. He was sure he could rouse Hudson one way or another — if his words weren't enough to manage it he'd get a hand under the sheets to help. On that subject, he was already working his jacket off and tossing it to the floor by the bed. "I want you to kiss me. No," he said, shaking his head as if to correct himself. They could start with some heated kisses, but that wasn't what he'd actually come woken Hudson up in the middle of the night for. He started working through his shirt buttons and simultaneously ground his hips against Dean's. "I want you to fuck me. Hard. Like before. The way we used to before I was —" Broken. Traumatized. Whatever the word, he wasn't that tonight. He shrugged his shirt off, leaving his suspenders dangling to either side, and leaned down either to kiss Dean or to whisper something dirty in his ear, or both. "I want you to ride me so hard you leave bruises."

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In that hazy space between awake and asleep, Dean's body reacted normally, but his brain, still fuzzy was slower to catch up. He chuckled at first, at the enthusiasm, groaning a little at the immediate friction; it was hard not to, he didn't often sleep with any clothes on, so he was immediately at the mercy of the sensations. It wasn't something to complain about certainly and he would have happily followed through with whatever it was Don Juan had in mind, if he hadn't been what he said aloud.

Concern furrowed his brows and Dean finally woke up enough to register that something was off. This wasn't just the conclusion of a few days of separation, something was definitely not fitting their new normal. "Hey, hey, slow down." He hated to do it, hated the way his body had already reacted before the rest of him caught on to the shift in Don Juan's behavior, but it had to be done. Gently he put his hands on Don Juan's hip, holding him still for a moment. "Where's all this coming from?" Not the midnight sex— that was fine, it was the intention behind what he was asking for that had Dean pausing. He wasn't even positive he could follow through with that request at this point in time.

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Don Juan leaned in to the hand at his hip. He hadn't interpreted it as stop, not when he could already feel the shape of Dean's cock beneath him. He had parted his lips with the intention of licking Dean's neck by the time he heard the words slow down.

Where was it coming from? Nowhere Dean would understand. Nowhere Don Juan knew how to put into words. He felt electric. A large part of him wanted to brush the question away with gratuitous platitides, sweet nonsense coupled with enough friction that Dean would stop asking. It's coming from I love you; it's coming from I've missed you; it's coming from I've missed this.

But distantly there was a warning bell, the same one that had kept him from talking to anyone too long at the ball. There was a danger here that if he acted too strangely Dean might think he was high, and that had harsher consequences than someone at a party spreading rumors about him. He shifted his position on Dean — more friction, which hadn't been his explicit intention but wasn't a side effect he was displeased by — so that he could sit up again. "I'm done feeling fragile. I want to move on. I want things to be like they used to be. And I feel — it's like — it just hit me tonight that I'm alive. I'm alive and that wasn't a guarantee and that's — that's pretty fucking fantastic. And I don't want to waste it, waste time trying to be — being afraid of what almost happened."

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Maybe he was still slow to process, but Dean sifted through the ramblings and it only gave him pause. Don Juan hadn't really answered his question about where it was coming from. Something had to spark the change and Dean had the sneaking suspicion that would really dictate his next move.

Once he could detach his dick from the situation that was. He couldn't go thinking with that at the moment. So Dean followed the motion of sitting up, putting them on a more even plane. "Being alive is pretty fantastic," Dean agreed cautiously. "Why the sudden... enthusiasm?" Dean didn't really know how to describe it at the moment, because he wasn't sure it was a natural response to whatever had happened and so he was treading carefully. "What almost happened?" Was he talking about last December or something different?

Dean laid his hands gently on Don Juan's lower back, looking up at him curiously. He had taken such great care to rewire his brain; to rework how he did things, slowly, gently, with more intention and less instinct so that everything felt more natural without having to worry about the cadence of each interaction. This was going against everything he'd figured out in the last half of a year and it made him a little uneasy.

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Ugh! Nothing he wanted to talk about. Nothing Dean wanted to hear about. Don Juan was once again seized with an impulse to distract with contact, to kiss the question away. The point was that it wasn't important anymore, because he'd decided to move past it. But he probably needed to offer some kind of further explanation to Hudson. It would have been hard to accomplish what Don Juan wanted tonight without his enthusiastic participation.

"Nothing happened," he said, pressing himself up against Dean. He laid his head against Dean's neck, his still-damp hair pressing against Dean's skin. "Just all the old things. It's not — I was just thinking about it. About where I could have been, compared to where I am."

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Dean was half-convinced, but something just wasn't sitting right with him. It only briefly crossed his mind that this might be some sort of induced-euphoria, but in all the times he'd recognized the drug use, Dean couldn't really place this within that scope. Still, it was incredibly hard not to let himself get swept up in the touch and ignore this more rational side of his brain. He shivered against the contact, starting to lose the battle as he tried to collect enough of his wits about him to get to the bottom of this.

"I'm glad you're feeling more... yourself. But it's a little sudden," Dean admitted, taking a deep breath. "I need time to readjust, I think." It wasn't a strict no, but how else could he slow this down without making his skepticism abundantly clear? It wasn't too far from the truth either, it wasn't like a switch he could turn back on instantly when he had tamped it down for so long.

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The slightest hesitation before Hudson said yourself was provocative. It was difficult to tell whether he meant it, or whether he believed it. Don Juan wasn't sure about the word choice either. Did he feel more himself? There was something elevating in the idea that this was who he was meant to be, and this was how he was meant to feel, but where was the evidence for a claim like that? He felt virile and powerful — this was, if anything, the opposite of himself.

"I saw him again." The words came out in a rush like a confession. Don Juan regretted them immediately. If he could have literally swallowed them back from midair he would have lunged for them. He didn't want to talk about this. He didn't want Dean to think about this. It was too late now. He flushed. "That's what — had me thinking."

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Dean couldn't help it, he froze. Of all of the things that could have sparked this situation, he hadn't expected this. There was no mistaking who Don Juan could be referring to and though Dean had no name and no face, he still felt his blood begin to boil.

He sighed heavily, and with great effort, unearthed himself from beneath Don Juan, sort of tossing him unceremoniously onto the bed next to him while he scrambled out of it to pull on his pajamas. He'd been right to be uneasy, to be wary and now he could feel it settling uncomfortably into his chest. "I can't," He ran his hand through his hair, shaking his head, trying to figure out which way was up. Five minutes ago he'd been sleeping soundly and now he was half-dressed trying to parse out what was going on.

"I can't connect the dots here," he managed, still confused and unsure as to what could possibly do it for him.

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Hudson said I can't and Don Juan braced himself for something unpleasant. He half expected to be dismissed for the night (I can't do this right now); half expected to be dismissed more permanently (I can't deal with your baggage anymore). Compared to where Don Juan had been expecting this to go, Dean saying he couldn't follow what Don Juan was trying to communicate was fairly mild. And not unexpected — Don Juan himself wasn't entirely sure what he was trying to communicate, or why he'd thought sharing that detail would do any good. He couldn't take it back now, though, so he was just going to have to muddle his way through an explanation of some sort.

He shifted on the bed and crossed his legs beneath him, looking at his ankles for a moment. "I was scared of him," he said eventually. "That seeing him again would... be bad for me." Bad for his sobriety, bad for his mental state, either or both. That Griffith would use legilimency on him again or offer him the same drug or would try to blackmail him. That Griffith wouldn't have to blackmail him in order to get him to do what he wanted. "But I saw him tonight and afterwards I walked away. And I feel like I'm — like I can just decide not to be afraid anymore. And that's what I want to do."

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Dean perched himself on the window sill, hands wrapped around the wood for something to hopefully ground him through whatever was about to come next. He could feel that uneasy itch in his hands again and it irked him. He'd tried so hard to contain the reaction, to bury it, that it surfacing so easily was frustrating.

Don Juan's explanation didn't make all that much sense and Dean suspected it didn't exactly work like Don Juan was hoping it would. Dean was relieved that the interaction had left Don Juan unscathed, but he highly suspected it had brought everything that had started to fade back to the forefront and that was what was fueling this reaction. It was hard to disagree that the outcome could have been worse. Dean had also feared that if Don Juan had ever run into the man again that it wouldn't end well, but he didn't think this was particularly good either. Nothing good would ever come of it.

The change in perspective was perhaps a good shift, but Dean worried that it might set up unrealistic expectations. The trauma was rooted so deeply that it would be hard to just decide to move on, just like a scar would never fully go away. He struggled over what he could possibly say right now that wouldn't spark a fight. He knew he worried too much, that he could be overbearing, but this whole situation always set him on edge. Dean had never contemplated murder before, but this always had him wondering.

Sighing heavily, his shoulders slumped a little. "I think maybe we should still take it slow and work up to it," he was physically incapable of switching so fast, not after everything that had happened. "If you really feel that way." He was still hesitant, but could work on it.

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   Don Juan Dempsey

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A part of him was worried that if he didn't capitalize on this feeling now, it would desert him; that the relief from the hooks of the past was fleeting at best and illusory at worst. But he could hardly entice Dean to do something he wasn't interested in. His powers of persuasion were not on best display tonight. He'd been muddling every attempt to convey things with words, so he certainly wasn't going to win an argument about it. If Dean wasn't going to stay put long enough for Don Juan to seduce him through body language alone, there wasn't much to be done.

"Alright," he agreed. He moved over on the bed, making an obvious space as an unspoken invitation for Dean to rejoin him. "We can take it slow."

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