Work Text:
They dream together, often. Dream eyes switching from this point of view to that point of view, this angle to that angle of the hard expanse of the Cage, reaching out, touching, feeling with pure sensation more corporeal realms wouldn’t allow; newly back in their body on Earth and learning it all again, grace and soul crammed so tightly together that they press and jolt like fault planes, brushing soft and slick as they practice and practice and practice switching control, panting now in the body and sweat adding to the slick of their sliding essences, the press and the allowance and the yeses that begin to slip out of their mouth on sighs and whines, and that mouth so pretty—and that mouth theirs?—and that mouth scrunching up, and that mouth rolling their bottom lip between their teeth, and that mouth humming the exaltation of their shared vocal cords—
Adam wakes up gulping air, flushed and warm and so fucking hard in his stupid banana-print boxers that the fabric around the tip is stretched thin. Michael, inside, is so turned on he’s incoherent, stretching and trembling in their body and making sounds that, out loud, would turn the average human’s eardrums into pulp.
Adam settles himself back against the pillows, shaking, and chugs a good half of the water bottle on the night stand.
He grabs his phone, fumbles with the fingerprint scanner, and goes browsing the Internet, Michael, once coherent, peering, captivated, over his metaphorical shoulder.
-
“Our package is here,” Michael says as Adam clicks through the newest Civilization game (the people move around the map so smoothly!). Michael is pulsing soothing and pain relief across Adam’s shoulders and neck like a massage, keeping tabs on everything happening around them even as they relax, down to the nail polish chipping on the fingernails of the delivery driver turning at a stop sign a few blocks away. The thump of the package against their welcome mat reaches him without even the active intent to listen.
“Hmm,” Adam hums out loud, taking his headphones out and stepping out their front door. The package is there like Michael said it was, in a plain, discreet brown box like the website said it would be. Adam picks it up and brings it in to set down on their dining room table.
He gets to the clear plastic stage of unboxing and stops, feeling, suddenly, a bit blank. “I’m scared of it,” he admits.
“Maybe the Internet would have more information we could use,” Michael says, picking up some of Adam’s non-articulated reflections and anxieties and filling in the gaps. It’s a terrible facsimile of a conversation, but it serves Adam and Michael just fine.
They had gotten the (half a glance at the box) Kiiroo Onyx and Pearl because they had figured, in intense internal dialogue including some hand gestures from Adam and mental pictures of suggestive train and landscape imagery, that the best way they could tackle this two-mind body problem was in fucking themselves—as in both of them, together, in Adam’s body. Their body. Whatever. Looking at the sleek plastic and the touchpad and the wireless connections, though, Adam feels clammy and nervous, and Michael, though far less connected to the experience of being sexually socialized in early 21st century midwestern America than Adam, also radiates just the slightest bit of uncertainty gazing at the toy.
Adam knows it’s a little ridiculous to be scared of a sex toy, having endured literal hell for centuries, but it’s partly the Godzilla-batting-at-drones syndrome he’s annoyingly developed being slapped 10 Earth years into the future and partly the fact that what there is to fear regarding the Kiiroo toys doesn’t have anything to do with soul-splintering physical or metaphysical pain that’s driving his fear. It’s really just about discomfort and awkwardness, and why did he still have to do the whole first time song and dance when his potential sex partner lives in his body and he hadn’t so much as thought about sex in 1000 years?
Because it’s important, he knows. Not for some nebulous, cosmic reasons of sluttiness or clout—god, Adam couldn’t give less of a fuck about either of those things at this point—but so that they could get off to a good start together on this sex journey that could last for the rest of everything.
It’s not even exactly true that they haven’t had sex, as all of the dreams that have left Adam just itching to say fuck it and jerk himself raw keep reminding him. Michael gets huffy and blushy and makes himself as small as possible in their mind whenever Adam thinks of any of this as sex, but they’ve definitely done a few things—trying to figure out how to configure their grace and soul and the switching, oh, the switching—that haven’t been physical but have made the both of them shudder and tense and radiate with pleasure. It’s just that…it’s different with their body, which means something so special to them now that it isn’t being kept on proverbial ice in a corner of the Cage. They want to get this right—purposeful and good.
Just jumping into it isn’t going to work for them, not in the way they want.
-
Adam and Michael communicate—always. Check each other’s feelings, read their little quirks of expression, talk in idiolectic circles that somehow always manage to get across what they mean.
But they don’t talk.
Being who they are, what they are, how they are, there’s always so much implication in even the most casual things they do. This is the language of their shared living space—apartment and body-wise—, Adam letting Michael explore the Internet while he sleeps and Michael letting Adam manually brush their teeth every morning and every night: “I love you, my happiest place is by your side, I choose you in absence of danger or coercion.”
There is no implicit way to prearrange the details of a sexual encounter, at least according to their research.
‘Research’ having been scrolling through advice boards filled with stuff Adam hadn’t heard at all growing up—not that he remembers very well, but the vague impressions he has regarding this sort of thing don’t suggest that he did. “Sex is more than penetration,” the forums had said, “sex doesn’t have to be penetration,” and endless articulations of what sex could be. Then, there’d been the more in-depth stuff, talking about lube and prostates and clits and kinks, and that, at the end of one of their sessions, had somehow led them to a feminist porn website, where the performers had giggled and talked and had had body hair that decried the conventional boundaries of ‘normal’ or ‘attractive.’
Adam has his fingers locked together under his chin at their kitchen table, watching the fadings of the sunrise out of the corner of his eye. He can see any time of day he’d like now and not be tired. Michael’s apparition across from him looks sickeningly fond, patiently waiting for him to speak.
“I’ve been thinking about…our research,” Adam says carefully. Michael raises his eyebrows at him, encourages him to continue on. “I was thinking we could try out our body soon—sometime, whenever, if you want.” A swirl of grace runs between his fingers. Michael wants.
“Do you have something in mind?” Michael asks. He reaches a hand out to slot between Adam’s fingers alongside his less corporeal whisps grace, and Adam gratefully accepts.
“Yes,” Adam says in a small voice. He doesn’t know how to talk about this. He sends Michael an image of their shower. “Nothing too special at first, just, uh….” Under Michael’s free hand, an honest to god floorplan of their bathroom springs into existence. Adam honestly thinks it’s a pretty adorable manifestation of Michael’s way of internalizing the conversation they’re about to have, which speaks to how much he ought to get ‘in love with an archangel’ tattooed on his forehead. “I just want to get back into it first, if that’s okay.”
Michael tilts his head at him, not understanding. Cheeks tinged pink, Adam says, “Just, um, take a look,” tapping at the side of his head. Michael peers into the ancient memories Adam is only really half trying to recollect; he catches the patter of water against tile, up and down hand motions, little sparks of chilly air that Adam shifts away from into the spray of water. Michael understands. “But I also have this vision of it now in my mind.” Adam starts telling Michael about how he wants to actually shower first, how he never wants his wrist to ache or his side to get cold. Michael, pen appearing in hand, nods along, scribbling notes on the floorplan. “I want you there too, but I want…I guess…your presence. You can…watch, if you’d like,” Adam says, flickering a bit of his soul demurely against Michael’s grace.
“I think I will,” Michael says, smiling at him, a light blush dusting his apparition’s cheeks in representation of the restlessness that starts in his grace at Adam’s touch. A thought occurs to him, and his demeanor tweaks, just a bit. No one aside from Adam would notice it.
“What’s on your mind?” Adam asks.
Michael frowns. “I don’t mean to impose. This is important. What else do you imagine?”
Adam nudges the pen out of Michael’s hand and wraps his fingers around it as well, resting his elbows on the table between them. “Michael, what you think matters too,” Adam says, rubbing his thumbs over the representations of bones identical to the ones in his own hands. The blush on Michael’s cheeks deepens. “Tell me what you’re thinking about.”
“I was just wondering if, after you’re done, I could try too.” Michael could give a lecture on human sexual anatomy if asked, and yet, sitting here with Adam’s gaze on him, it seems impossible to arrange a set of words to tell his sweet, resilient love what he wants.
“You want to try…?”
“After you’re finished, I was thinking we could switch, and I could try….” Michael extracts a hand from Adam, loosely curls his fingers together, and pumps his arm up and down in the same way he’d seen someone in a video do during their research. Adam turns beet red and rests his forehead against the table, cackling helplessly in high-pitched peals so hard his stomach hurts. “You’re making fun,” Michael protests, and Adam feels him rumble in light irritation inside his chest.
“Sorry, I’ll be mature about this,” Adam says, lifting his head from the table, wiping at his eyes, and meeting Michael’s irritation with soothing soul-brushes laced with lighthearted apologies. “Yes, that is absolutely something we can do,” he says, “you’re in this just as much as I am.” Adam takes a moment to consider it, thinking about Michael surging forward to cradle him away from control, watching from inside their body as what his brain says is his hand reaches, amiable and welcome, without his command to stroke him to completion. “I like that a lot, actually,” he says, feeling tight in his chest.
“Is it a date, then?” Michael asks, flirtation filling his tone.
“Yeah,” Adam says, “a date.” He squeezes Michael’s hands once—a firm, lingering press—before letting go. A promise.
-
The ‘date,’ as is, is a midnight beach trip. Adam and Michael lie just beyond the waves, making out on the sand, illuminated by a few orangey street and house lights Michael has flicked on for their purposes. Michael, with awareness in, around, and through the waves, matches the swipes of Adam’s tongue at a pace mirroring the leisurely push-pull of the tide. Like everything with his apparitions, Michael can only feel the overlap of their tongues as neutral sensation but can feel the reverberations of how much Adam is enjoying it in his grace. Adam shifts his fingers in the sand, trying to get a steadier grip, and Michael nips at his lips. Somehow, sand has gotten into the collar of their shirt, and that uncomfortable sensation reminds Adam of his dick straining against his jeans.
“You wanna go…do something else?” Adam says with all the underlying meaning he can shove into it, rutting against Michael’s form.
Michael smiles at him and grips his arm with purposeful fingers. In a blink, Michael has flown them back to their apartment and rescinded his projection, leaving Adam standing sandy and desperately aroused in the middle of their living room—shoes miraculously by the door and emptied of sand. It’s warm in their apartment, pitch black outside, their living room window glinting with the reflection of their dimmed lights, and Beyoncé’s “Blow” from their ‘popular songs of 2014’ playlist humming through the air. It comes to Adam’s fingers with the utmost ease to slip off his shirt as he walks to the bathroom, sand shaking down to the floor.
Adam’s socks, pants, and underwear also shed sand as he peels them off in the bathroom, the showerhead running the perfect temperature the moment he turns it on. Adam and Michael nudge at each other, excitement, love, just a small check to see how the other is doing, and then, Adam steps into the shower, immediately starting to scrape the sand out of his hair. His dick flags a bit as he scrubs and washes himself, but the shower leaves him peaceful and relaxed for their upcoming ‘sexploration,’ as they’ve taken to calling it.
The moment Adam finishes rinsing the soap off his skin, the air feels different—thick with both Adam and Michael’s weighty anticipation. Michael is still firm, steady, and still, and Adam raises both palms up to rest against that spot low on his ribcage where Michael likes to gather the bulk of his grace. He closes his eyes, breathes deeply and deliberately, and remembers and feels inside of him those precursory pieces of Michael’s true form that day he had ascended upon him in the Green Room, when Adam had said yes and then, almost deliriously turned on by the unfathomable, all-knowing presence of the massive, bright figure that was Michael, had lost any grip on cogency or conscience as Michael had pushed into his body, filling and filling and filling him, firm and inescapable but not rough. His cock gains back the bit of stiffness it had lost while he was washing himself, and he reaches down, for the first time in literal ages, to grasp it. He feels a little shock that isn’t fully his own.
It makes him stop, just for a moment. He can’t recall down to this level of detail how this had felt a lifetime ago, but he knows he’d never felt another presence, watching, feeling, embellishing his own starting pangs of euphoria. Masturbation and sex. Toss this one to the guys in the cafeteria Wednesday evenings fall semester arguing where blowjobs ranked on that scale.
Adam moves his hand up from the base of his dick, slow and without all that tight of a grip, just remembering his own body. He sweeps his thumb over the smooth slickness of the head, pressing down a bit at the divot at the tip and feeling skin slip past the edges. Adam moves his hand down to roll the skin back all the way, tightens his grip, and starts up a rhythm, using his other arm to brace himself against the wall of the shower, the pleasant feeling of warm water never leaving him.
Adam smashes his face roughly into his arm and throws himself back into thoughts of Michael; he remembers Michael clashing with Lucifer early in their years in the Cage shortly, it had felt, after he first woke up—Michael’s full height straining against the walls of the Cage, his many eyes shining with concentration and rage, the whole of him so sharp and powerful it had made the approximation of Adam’s heart flutter. Adam starts to whine and groan deep in his throat, his hand speeding up in a hopeless effort to match the rush of pressure and boundless energy he’d felt rolling through his ‘body’ during those clashes, so firmly encased Michael’s grace. As Adam starts to roll his face from side to side against his arm, Michael only just remembers to soundproof the walls around them, in love and aroused to death over Adam—and just Adam, not the shared self they sometimes were in dreams—finding him so titillating. It’s all he can really do to stay as small and quiet as he can, throbbing nonetheless in time with Adam’s flushed cock.
Adam continues his short, fast strokes with water-slick fingers, precum rinsing through the gaps. He lets his body, for the first time, run with the deep, consuming ache he’s apt to feel in the breadth of Michael’s power, lets it chase it, down to the way his breath hitches when he feels the massive ball of righteous heat that is Michael shiver just a bit within the paltry box of his ribcage, and pressing his thumb just this side of too hard against his slit, he spills harder and longer than he probably ever has across the wall. He lowers himself down to sit in the tub, panting, feeling loose all through his pelvis. Not a single droplet of water catches him in the eye.
“Okay,” Adam says softly once he’s started feeling more like a person again and less like a sack of post-orgasmic flesh, “okay, your turn.” Their eyes flash, and Michael inherits their still somewhat loose and spent body. He feels brand-new, in a way, brought in such a lovely manner into the world of bodily pleasure, and he prods in studious awe at their dick, balls, hole, and all the tender skin around them. He tries to pump their cock like he saw Adam doing, and while it echoes that ecstatic orgasmic feeling, their body jerks and smarts—like slamming face first high speed into a mountain versus reaching the peak.
Moving his grace through this body he had watched and kept safe and repaired from the chronic effects of hellfire for over a millennium, Michael feels so newly attuned to it as he pays such close attention to and settles the nerves of these—as his early training in heaven would have it—utilitarian organs of reproduction. He can’t help but feel a rush of giddiness and glee as he wraps a hand around their no-longer-oversensitive cock, working it again to hardness and focusing intently on the feeling of smooth, vulnerable expanses of skin rubbing against smooth, vulnerable expanses of skin—the ability to grasp, to touch, and to do all of it with express permission, Adam’s soul humming gentle pleasure against his grace.
He follows wherever their nerves take him, pressing and twisting to explore the particular shocks that roll under their skin at those touches. Eventually, he cums too, and he delights in being the one piloting the body as their muscles go loose and tingly. He lowers them down onto their back, softening the floor of the shower, and with the presence of mind now to feel annoyed by it, shuts the water off, leaving the air warm and filled with steam.
They’re a bit afraid to talk to each other at first. Even just the constant gentle overlap of their grace and soul in their body is comforting enough to remind them that it’s just them, though, and they start to mesh a bit more, checking for any signs of discomfort or troubled thoughts before speaking. “Clothes are humanity’s most pointless and oppressive invention,” Michael declares. Adam’s soul swirls happily around his grace, high on the two orgasms he’d very much enjoyed and his body hadn’t forgotten how to have.
“We could just stay here,” Adam proposes. Michael meets it with a tendril of grace he twists just this side of tight around a piece of Adam’s soul.
“And explore our body forever, is what I’d presume the subtext to be.”
They switch, then, and Michael manifests his apparition so that he’s neatly in Adam’s lap, rushing forward to crash their lips and curl their tongues together. Adam meets him with equal enthusiasm, and with a few passing thoughts of Adam’s Michael picks up on, the tub they’re lying in fills with warm, bubbly water.
“I’m gonna request a lavender scent,” Adam says, and not only does it immediately tinge the air, sprigs of lavender dot the bath in a subtle circular formation. Michael had paid attention to all those movies from when they were in the Cage they’d been watching. Adam hides his face in Michael’s shoulder. “You’ve already got me naked!” he says. Michael chuckles at him and runs his fingers through his wet hair.
They sit for a while in each other’s arms. Adam is on the way to falling asleep when he says, “I really liked this,” half of the sound smashed into Michael’s shoulder.
“So did I,” Michael says. When Adam falls asleep, he gently moves his restful soul aside to front in the body and deposits them in bed.
-
A rabbit dashes across the road, and the regular postal deliverer, newly back from knee surgery, cusses as xe slams the brake hard midturn, pulling at hir stitches. With the rabbit safely off in the bushes, xe pulls into the apartment complex parking lot and stops, starting on the mail delivery routine for this particular set of residences. Inside one of the top floor apartments, Adam, given immediate news about the mail for the second time that week alongside a kiss on the cheek from Michael’s projection, waltzes into the kitchen and starts to munch on a peanut butter bar. Michael stands arms crossed, leaned against a wall, gazing outside.
“I’ve found what we’ve done together physically so far…incredibly desirable,” Michael says, eyes trailing over to fix onto Adam, cheeks full of food and one hand held under his mouth to prevent any crumbs from landing on the floor. He thinks he’ll find what they intend to do together physically after picking up the mail—neither of them idle inside—incredibly desirable too.
Adam finishes chewing and swallows before saying, “Have you?”
“Very much so,” Michael responds. He could detail this point—extensively—, but he brought this up for a reason. Communication. Idiolect. “My siblings would find it very strange.”
Adam takes another bite. “Something else to add to our Christian Mingle match page.” Michael smiles at him, fond and amused, and Adam finishes the bar and walks up to Michael’s apparition, loosely caging him against the wall. They kiss, tongues laving together in echo of gracesoul nudges until Michael snaps his projection away, leaving Adam leaning awkwardly against the wall. He whines, a ‘why did you do that?’ without saying as much.
“If we’d like to get our mail before we give this a try, we should stop now before we get too distracted.” Adam grumbles a bit but manages to wait patiently until Michael tells him that the mailperson has dropped off the mail and gone on to the next set of apartments.
Pulling two generally bill-shaped envelopes out of the mailbox, Adam is startled by a voice calling out, “Hey, Adam, you ever catch X-Men: First Class?” Switching quickly from Adam to Michael on reflex, they whirl around a bit too fast and see that it’s just their chatty bottom-floor neighbor leaving his apartment.
“Not yet,” Michael says, making his way towards the stairs. Adam doesn’t like it when he flits them back to their apartment and memory wipes whoever’s talking to them—he says it’s rude. And Adam sometimes enjoys talking to their neighbors. Sometimes.
“You’ve gotta get on that!” their neighbor, Josh, says, locking his door, “I know I keep telling you, but I’m dying to hear what you think about McAvoy and Fassbender’s takes on Professor X and Magneto. Hey, you never told me why you haven’t seen them—I’ve never heard of a fan of X-Men never having seen at least one of the 2010s movies.”
Michael has one of their feet on the stairs now, just edging his way out of the situation. Adam sends gentle waves of amusement then something a bit thicker, twisting his soul into the gaps between a set of spikes in Michael’s grace. Michael, with all his acute knowledge of everything going on around them, catches the toe of their shoe on the next step. Adam laughs inside their body, and Michael sends a slightly prickly tendril of grace after him like a nip.
“You okay?” Josh asks, and at this point, Adam has started to fill Michael’s mind with the fresh, high-sensory memories of their recent make-out session, so he decides to hell with politeness.
“We’re fine,” Michael says, winces, and makes Josh remember ‘I’m’ instead of ‘we’re’ as he walks up enough steps so that Josh can’t see them anymore. With that, he snaps them immediately into their bed, throwing the envelopes onto the floor as he switches control with Adam and brings his projection out to kiss at his neck. Adam giggles and hums, wriggling around under Michael’s attention.
Michael remembers at the start to soundproof the room this time; he thinks he’ll leave the magic up for this room even after they’re done.
Michael and Adam kiss for a while, Adam twisting his hands through Michael’s hair and Michael occasionally leaving Adam’s lips to mouth over his throat and collarbone.
“Come inside,” Adam says, low.
“Let me try something first?” Michael asks. Adam nods.
As subtly as he can, Michael draws some of his grace out of their body, distracting Adam from the sensation by brushing his hands under Adam’s clothes, making as if he’s going to pull them off and then vanishing them. Once Adam is naked, Michael sends him a heated gaze then vanishes his apparition at the same time as he plunges all the grace he had pulled out back into their body. Adam gasps, writhes, and leaks a thick line of precum.
“Fuuuuucccckkkk,” he whines, and even though Michael can snap them ready to go again if needed, he really hopes he can last through this sexploration of theirs.
“Let me try something else?” Michael asks, and Adam nods again, vigorously, hardly even able to form words in his head.
Michael maps the insides of Adam’s body, spreading his grace through blood vessels until he’s taut underneath all of his skin. He reaches through tissue and presses, palm-shaped, against the nerves in Adam’s thigh—an exploratory lover’s hands without the weight or sight of the lover. “Did you know you could do that?” Adam demands.
Michael traces the nerves higher, inching towards Adam’s crotch, leaving some nerves at the bottom now unpressed. “I’d had no reason to try—before. I take it you like it, then.”
“Yes,” Adam breathes out loud, and Michael places another phantom palm to Adam’s chest. Adam reaches a not-too-steady hand down to jerk himself off, smearing the precum around with his thumb, and Michael sends a jolt through the nipple he has his phantom hand over as Adam does. Adam shudders, tightens his grip.
The phantom, palm-shaped touches Michael runs across his skin make Adam hum, although he keeps his eyes wide open, staring down at his lone body. The sight of the slide of his dick through his fingers has never given him much of a thrill, but the visual confirmation that there is no one physically there touching him despite his nerves telling him there is makes his toes curl. One not-finger brushes along his balls, and Adam’s thoughts come to such a hard end that Michael stops, concerned, sending him a questioning nudge. What has struck Adam is an intense want that he isn’t sure is even possible, so he sends Michael a visual. Michael’s burst of pleasure runs through both of them, and Adam sees—in their body’s knuckles stiffening—the moment when the hand he has wrapped around his cock becomes Michael’s hand wrapped around their cock.
“Mmm, fuck,” Adam says, and his reflexive gesture to bring both hands up to run down his face only brings one.
Michael carves the impression of a smile into Adam’s mind. “Watch this, darling one.” And Adam only has a second to send Michael annoyancefondnessembarassmentsortofweirdlylikingthat before he feels hands-that-aren’t-there dragging over his skin again all the while Michael is jerking him—them—off. Adam twists his hand into the sheets.
Adam feels their body tensing, close to orgasm a few times, but he can sense that there’s something on Michael’s mind distracting them from it, so he gathers himself together enough to ask, “Alright, what is it, featherhead?” Michael transmits hesitance. Adam meets it with encouragement.
It takes Michael a second to decide how he wants to communicate what he wants. “I want to try….” He stops pumping their cock, making Adam whine, and trails his fingers down to first roll their balls between his thumb and first two fingers and then brush the pad of his index finger against their hole.
“Oh, okay,” Adam says in their mind. He thinks for a minute, using his hand to give their dick a few loose, absent strokes. It’ll be new, but so is this deep balancing of their nerves and consciousnesses. Adam is intrigued, wondering if it’ll feel anything at all like Michael’s grace pushing into him. “You can get our lube,” Adam says—a purchase they’d made following their sex research. It’s in the nightstand closest to Michael’s arm; Michael forgoes reaching for it in favor of popping it into his hand with a thought. Adam sends him the general feeling of ‘alright, smartass,’ but Michael is just as intent as Adam is to get this all right, and he pops the cap and squirts the lube clumsily onto his fingers in full view of Adam. As Michael moves his index finger down to slip inside, Adam shuts his eyes and, yes, tenses, but Michael sends tendrils of grace out to, firstly, relax their pelvic muscles and, secondly, watch with instead of their eyes. His finger slides in without an ounce of pain or discomfort but with enough resistance to feel true to the non-grace-assisted action. Michael is fascinated.
As Michael starts to thrust his finger in and out, occasionally crooking or twisting it, Adam hums and wrinkles his forehead, fumbling around on the bed for the bottle of lube. He does an even messier job of squirting some onto his hand and goes back to pumping their cock.
Michael miraculously replaces some of the drying lube on his middle finger and places it beside the finger thrusting inside of them. Adam sends him assent, willing to further explore this; Michael pushes that finger inside too, and that feels like something a bit above an experiment for both of them. “How’s that?” Michael questions in their mind. Adam nods along with it.
It’s not like he minds, per say, especially with his hand around his dick and grace shaped into palms tingling across his skin, but even with the second finger, this opening and entering of his body doesn’t feel unearthly, consuming, like it might stretch him too taut and snap him: it feels dull over mind-bendingly erotic. Michael picks up on this ambivalence and decides to make good on his knowledge of anatomy and their research; Adam feels a little swirl of something around his pelvis—Michael mapping out their body—before Michael’s fingers shift and press and a jolt of pleasure shoots through their body and makes their legs twitch. It rushes Adam’s mind with keener reminders of archangelic entanglement and makes Michael strain under his skin and lose control of the grace palms tracing their body; Adam’s nerves light up all over, and as he feels them rushing over the edge, he barely has the presence of mind to test out a little hunch of his—nudging and switching them the way he’d felt Michael do with their hands—before they’re coming all across their stomach, and the loud, trilling whine that rips from their throat is Michael’s.
Lungs and throat in his control, Michael follows their body’s instinct to breathe deep and heavy, feeling for himself how deeply it originates in their chest and how the flow of air feels through their throat and mouth. He closes their mouth and lets out a few humming moans. The vibration in their throat is delicious. “You can practice,” Adam offers, floaty and blissed out, and Michael catches the connotation of getting them hard again.
“Next time,” Michael promises, and what is on his mind now is how much he can’t wait to try out those toys they bought.
-
Michael and Adam have taken to sitting on Mars post-Cage. They had traversed the entirety of the planet a while back, exploring all of the volcanoes, mountains, icy poles, valleys, and craters and digging their hands through and analyzing the soil. What they enjoy most about the planet, though, is picking a high spot at night and watching the bright dot of the Earth move through the sky like a star. Adam shuffles his shoulders uncomfortably against the rocks; Michael flattens them and notes before Adam even has the chance to say it that he’ll set them back to how they were when they leave.
“Tell me about the time Lucifer convinced you to play hooky in the Tadpole Galaxy,” Adam says.
“When I thought my father might rip me from existence and start me over?” And Michael starts on the story, as he has 1001 times before. It’s the one that had made Adam realize that they had common ground, no matter Michael being, supposedly, the star of heaven and Adam being, supposedly, a speck in the muck of human history. Adam listens with as much interest as he has every time before, curling his soul up in Michael’s grace.
“What else would you like to do today, Adam?” Michael asks once he’s done telling the story and they’ve snuggled watching the Earth for a while.
“Could we go back to that pizza place in NYC?” Adam asks, and Michael sends them there to enjoy the evening and mildly creep out anyone else there who isn’t too absorbed in their own evening to notice them. When they get back to their apartment, it’s dark outside, and the dim, yellowish glow of their lightbulbs makes them both feel comfortable and content. Michael sends out his apparition and links his and Adam’s fingers together.
Adam leans in and places a series of gentle kisses to Michael’s lips. “Did you have something you wanted to do today?” Adam asks, and Michael untwines their fingers, manifesting the Kiiroo toys, still in their clear plastic half-stage of unpacking, into his hand. Adam blinks at him, knowing nonetheless from the feel of Michael’s grace that he doesn’t want to use them right this minute.
“I’ve been thinking about these a lot lately,” Michael says. He tightens his grip on the packaging, stares at them in that ‘warrior of god’ type way. “I want to tinker them,” he declares.
“Oh no,” Adam says.
“Manufacturers can’t really make these evocative of human organs and orifices—”
“Oh my god, stop talking like that—”
“—both because it would be prohibitively expensive and because keeping them constantly damp would be a microbial nightmare, but I’m not exactly a manufacturer.”
“Take me now with your sexy powers of sterilization,” Adam says, deadpan. “Is our next sexploration gonna be breaking into an O.R.?”
“Funny how I can’t quite take the former pre-med saying that seriously,” Michael says, sending back a playful nudge. “Anyway, what I’m wondering is if, for tomorrow, you’d like me to replicate our anatomy in the,” a glance to the packaging, “Kiiroo toys.”
Somehow, it had never occurred to Adam that Michael would be able to do something like that. “That’s an interesting concept,” he says, and he truly has to think about it. For him, he realizes, the appeal of this whole sex project lies more in the motions and less in the actual physicality of the toys themselves. It doesn’t really matter to him, Adam decides, but something from his past fully human life is telling him that it might skeeve him out in the moment. “I think I’m gonna have to say no,” Adam settles on.
Michael hums, seems, perhaps, a bit disappointed. They can revisit it after they’ve given the toys a whirl for the first time, Adam thinks. “Do you have any preferences, then?” Pause. “For the orifice and organ?”
Adam shoots him a glare for the last bit. “Do you?” he asks, because Michael has seemed more into that aspect of their sex life than he has thus far.
“I would like to try…many of them,” Michael says, slow and a tad embarrassed. Knowing that what he likes and how he feels is considered strange still smarts sometimes, just a bit.
“Why don’t you mix and mash, then? See what you come up with,” Adam says. Michael likes that idea.
He very much will.
-
“No, no, tell me again—what with the rogue cupid?” Adam is lighting a ring of candles across the tops of all of their dressers and such, the faint scent of burning wood pricking his nose and making him smile as he strikes each match.
Michael, grace molded into an apparition on the other side of the room, keeps snapping his fingers every few seconds, trying to decide on the perfect level of dimness and temperature for the room. “Yes, she was pairing up only people who couldn’t reproduce together.”
“Hmm. Good for her!” Adam says, sniffing one of the Sicilian Lemon candles before moving on to the next one.
“Looking back, I see that what she was doing was valuable. What was even more impressive was that, even though I elected to destroy her, I couldn’t find her anywhere when I looked. I think Lucifer or Gabriel had something to do with it—couldn’t tell you which one.”
Adam blows out a match. “Cupids had nothing to do with my parents hooking up,” he says, half an aside.
“No, and you have been, in every way, the happiest accident of my existence.”
“Is that why you never told me this story before?” Adam lights the last candle and barely has to think about it before Michael has sent the box of matches back to their kitchen. Adam flops himself onto their bed face first, disturbing the spiral of rose petals Michael had set out earlier. Michael doesn’t mind; he’d known from the start that they weren’t going to remain so pristine throughout the evening.
Still flipping through lights and temperatures, Michael says, “I never told you this story at first because I was afraid of what my changing perception of it meant regarding my feelings for you. After we figured that out…I’m not sure. But I’m glad I still have new stories to tell you now.”
“So am I,” Adam says, stretching his limbs as he waits for Michael to decide on the ambiance. One snap sounds out, then nothing for a while, longer than the silence between the other snaps, and then, Michael is straddling Adam’s back, the weight of what Michael lets him know is sugar cookie-scented lotion to the right of Adam’s hand. “You’re the best,” Adam says out loud, face half-smashed into the pillows. Michael crooks his fingers under Adam’s shirt, brushing skin as he goes, and Adam opens his mouth in a soft gasp as Michael silently questions whether he can vanish the shirt. “Please,” Adam tells him, and the shirt disappears.
Michael assures that their body never aches, but his hands massaging their muscles feels good no matter the lack of any specific hurt to combat. There’s a shift decisively not accompanied by the snap of a cap and then there’s grace-warmed lotion under Michael’s palms spreading slick across Adam’s skin. It reminds Adam of Michael’s phantom palms, and he groans, shifting his hips against the bed. Michael picks up on Adam’s mental image and lets less corporeal fingers split off his projection to trace staticky lines like little electric streams across Adam’s skin, helping spread the sugar cookie scent across his skin and through the air to his nose. Adam lets out a pleased sigh that turns more into an obscene moan when Michael feels along his spine and pops a starting-to-shift vertebra back into place with two quick, careful fingers. Adam’s soul writhes within their body just like their hips, finding what can loosely be described as friction against Michael’s grace. Michael writhes against Adam’s soul in return, feeling and returning each pulse of lust and bliss.
The massage lasts for quite a bit—because what is Earth time to them of all people—but devolves, at some point, into Michael merely tracing thin grace-patterns across Adam’s skin. Part of Adam thinks he might fall asleep, so he angles his hips to the side and slips a hand into his pants to tug at their cock. The two of them are excited, deeply, the emotion swirling through Michael’s grace and Adam’s soul. Michael loosens the weight of his apparition to let Adam roll over, a miniscule, throwaway alteration to physics making it so that the lotion drying on their back doesn’t stick to the sheets. Adam wraps his arms around Michael, and they kiss for a while before Michael links his apparition’s hands with Adam’s and retracts into their body, pushing against its physical boundaries as he goes. Adam sighs, wiggles his hips, and quickens his hand’s pace.
“Ready to show me what you came up with?” Adam asks, and Michael snaps the altered Onyx and Pearl side by side into their free hand. Adam takes his hand away from their dick to better examine the toys, and Michael rectifies the absence with pulses of ring-shaped grace along the nerves in their cock, making Adam jerk and take a deep breath to collect himself, precum gathering at the tip.
“Oh, wow,” Adam says, examining the toys closer.
The mold of the Onyx doesn’t feel like silicone, radiating its own warmth and missing any thin, flimsy tags of material or plasticky scents that would reveal it as artificial. Adam slips a finger inside, no pronounced ring of muscle greeting its entry, and the toy squelches and runs smooth against his touch. It feels so much like a human body—if not any particular human’s body—that Adam would probably be creeped out by it if he hadn’t lived through the Cage. Adam slips another finger inside, the toy’s ‘muscles’ relaxing to accommodate it, and starts thrusting the two crowded fingers in and out, mesmerized by the sight and sound and feel, the gentle, wet pulse. Michael does the grace equivalent of snapping his fingers at him to regain his attention, flattered nonetheless. Feeling that flattery, Adam forgoes formal compliments as he sets the Onyx down and reaches for the Pearl.
The Pearl is also warm in his hand, and Adam draws a careful thumb up its length, noting the shift in texture from shaft to tip. In form, like Michael’s Onyx, it also pretty well resembles a human body but not any particular human body; however, the toy is still bright purple-pink like the original. It curves just a bit towards his face, and when Adam questions the design choice, Michael sends him an image of him rushing through the fleshy and sinewy gaps in their body to find a nerve-encased gland, a just-a-bit-towards-their-face crook of Michael’s fingers, and a burst of mutual, ecstatic pleasure. “Hope you can give me a hands-on demonstration later,” Adam does his best to say seductively, his cheeks newly blooming bright red despite everything they’ve done so far. His thoughts foggily off in places of Michael traipsing through his guts, Adam absentmindedly squishes the Pearl’s head between his thumb and forefinger, and it leaks a thick white liquid. Adam starts. “What is this?” Adam asks, more intrigued than anything else.
Michael sighs, deeply, in their mind. He shows a picture of a webpage he had looked at while Adam was asleep—a clear container, 4.2 oz, $14.00. Cumlube. Adam snorts out loud. “You wanna cum in me, Michael?” he asks, spreading himself out in a way he has no idea if looks appealing. Michael goes quiet, the grace swirling around their dick quickening, and Adam gets the sense that Michael absolutely does. Adam sends him waves of support, suddenly a little more shy. A flutter rolls through his stomach as he says, “Well, then, open us up. I’ll get the toys ready.” Michael’s grace lights up with happiness, and he pops his apparition out to press a bunch of kisses to Adam’s cheek before grabbing control of their nondominant hand, slicking it up, and pressing a finger into their hole.
Adam is still new to iPhones, so it takes him a minute to get the app up, especially one-handed. Michael is new to iPhones too, but with as much time as they’ve had since getting the Kiiroo toys, he’s been able to figure out how to connect both toys to one phone. After getting everything set up, Adam experimentally thrusts the Pearl through his fist and watches as the Onyx clenches in time. “Woah, fuck!” he says. He can feel Michael peering at the toys too, excited and brushing needily against his soul. By now, Michael has a second finger in them, and if they were doing this ‘right,’ they’d probably need a bit more prep time, but they’ve got warm, semi-human-reading cyborg sex toys in their bed—they’re far from going to give any consequence to, if not remember, a tendril of grace loosening some of their muscles the next morning. Michael withdraws his fingers, grabs a pillow to shove under the small of their back, and returns control of the hand to Adam. Adam grabs the Onyx in one hand and the Pearl in the other and stares awkwardly down at himself.
“How do we even do this?” Adam asks with a laugh.
“Just go for it?” Michael suggests. Adam takes a deep breath. He adjusts his grip on the toys, lining the Pearl up to their hole and the Onyx up to their dick and does his best to push the Pearl inside at the same time as he lowers the Onyx. Adam’s arms start to shake; Adam and Michael both let out long, low whines—Michael in their mind—that surprise each other. Michael surges up to steady Adam’s arms, just settling his grace in them, and they both find it difficult to think as they bottom out on the toys.
They feel the drag of their cock inside the entire time they push in and push into the toys at the same time as they feel the Onyx clamping around them in pattern with the muscle reactions of their own body. Adam, experimental again, pulls the Pearl out, just a bit, and feels the Onyx slide over the head of his cock. “Fuck!” he swears out loud, precum dribbling into the toy, and he thinks he might cry with how turned on and rock fucking hard he is. “If you let us cum…” he starts, but he hasn’t thought of a barb to back it, and even the bones of what he was trying to say vanish as he thrusts into the Onyx and feels the Pearl match the thrust. Sweat sticks pieces of hair to their forehead, and when a groan vibrates through their vocal cords again, Adam finds that it’s not his voice at all. They’re spilling over each other, just a bit, and they want more.
“Come here, come here,” Adam whines, and as they twist and grind at their old body-pilot switch routine, they open their eyes to them both piloting their body, eyes in a perpetual glow. Adam reaches out to test this new means of interacting with their body at the same time that Michael reaches the same hand down to grab the Pearl’s handle, and it jerks and twitches with the conflicting set of instructions. They’re so close to each other it’s hard to focus, let alone hear, and Adam moves their other arm around to indicate to Michael that he can have the one they’re struggling with. Michael enthusiastically reaches down to start fucking them with the Pearl, and Adam, feeling the clench of their own body around their cock, sets up a pace thrusting into the Onyx, equal vibrations throbbing through the Pearl.
Within the deep, delightful, overwhelming sensation of fucking themselves—the endless nerve feedback; the simultaneous, consonant slide and clench of the Onyx around their leaking cock and push after unerring push of the Pearl at the sweet spot inside them; the way their legs, without Adam or Michael’s conscious effort, spasm and bend and press hard at the ankles into the bed in futile effort at anchorage—, Michael and Adam are also feverishly close, crammed together in straining synapses. The whir and grit and spark of Michael’s grace thrums and bumps up so close to the breeze and balm and flame of Adam’s soul that it feels like breath against skin on both sides, like there’s little discrepancy between them and this usage of their body, and it’s making them wild.
“Faster, please, faster,” Michael says, knocking against threads of Adam’s soul and sounding loud even in his own ‘ears.’ A trickle of blood drips from their nostril; neither of them notices. The first bucks of their hips into a faster pace come from Michael but Adam settles into the quicker pace, speedier vibrations running through the Pearl. Michael groans with their vocal cords. A layer of sweat makes Adam’s hand slip on the Onyx and slightly break rhythm, and Michael dries their hand with a thought.
“Come on, come on, please, come on,” both of them are variedly saying, and as their hips try with vigor to chase both the sensations of the Onyx clenching around their cock and the Pearl rocking into their prostate, they manage to time a hard squeeze to the Onyx with a vibrating nudge of the Pearl, and they spill so hard—their body into the Onyx and the Pearl into their body—that their vision briefly fizzles black, Michael shouting so loud in his true voice, even garbled with Adam’s human voice, that the lightbulbs above their bed shatter, raining glass down onto them.
All of the orgasmic hormones starting to filter through their bloodstream, their body starts to feel a bit grody, wet all over and dusted with shards of glass. Michael rushes the glass away and fixes the light, starting to reach down to pull the toys out of them, only to be met with a throaty murmur of protest from Adam. Michael catches traces of spotty, half-baked worry, and he sends back light confusion but lets Adam set their pace.
Adam breathes for a while then stretches his arms above their head before grabbing the Onyx and pulling it slowly off their softening dick. They both wince as its tight, plush insides drag along their oversensitive skin. The Pearl has a similar effect, Adam stretching his lips into a grimace as the toy moves through their non-aroused body, but Michael morphs that grimace into a gasp as he feels the leak of the cumlube out of their hole. That’d come from him—the squeeze of his grace at least—, placing him, too, as a physical presence in their sexual encounter. He pushes grace out of their body to see it for himself and bounces around with love and excitement at the sight. “Go right ahead!” Adam tells him sarcastically, rolling his eyes.
“How do you feel about it?” Michael asks, detangling himself from Adam and pushing himself fully out of the driver’s seat as he pulls his grace back inside their body. Like always, Adam shivers at the feeling, even so thoroughly fucked out as he is in the moment. The constant glow leaves their eyes.
“You like it,” Adam says simply. He doesn’t radiate any sort of distress, but he does wipe his hand on their sheets.
Michael removes the stain and starts to clean them off, starting with the sweat shining all across their skin and moving onto their dick, glossy with cum and lube. He sends grace down to clear away the cumlube, but Adam intercepts it. Michael sends him whisps of questioning, and Adam sends, in return, the equivalent of a wink before rolling onto his side, the cumlube shifting and smearing more across the inside of their thighs. Michael wraps his grace around his soul, quite content, and Adam smiles and nuzzles the side of his face into the pillow in physical response to all of the love happening within him. When Adam blinks his eyes open again, they both see blood smeared across the pillowcase; Michael cleans the fabric and their nose as Adam processes. Then, he smiles.
“Did we give ourselves a nosebleed?” he asks, laughing.
“Looks that way,” Michael responds and snuggles Adam’s soul deep into his grace. Adam drifts off to sleep with the fuzzy, lingering thought to see in the morning what they could do about blowing each other.