Work Text:
Those who were close to Bunny knew he had some odd habits; he had many peculiar (a nicer way of saying ‘offensive\) things to say on some days, and on other days he didn’t care for gossip and would be bouncing off the walls with something to do, some action. Maybe there was nuance there, in the subtlety of the turns his personality tended to take, not everyone picked up on it if they didn’t spend a considerable amount of time around him. Naturally, the more you were with someone…
Marion was quite familiar with Bunny’s tendencies to go from a pink-cheeked prankster to a moody sulker. Though these changes occurred understandably after their fights, there were indeed days where Bunny was withdrawn and sullen without the aid of Marion’s stern reprimands. She never let it bother her too much because she knew these caprices were fleeting and Bunny would bounce back to his chipper self soon enough. Their relationship was at the point where she knew him so well that she’d seen all shades of his personality.
Or so she believed, or so he let her believe.
Of course, there was much she didn’t know about him, with some things hidden intentionally, some not so intentionally— it wasn’t malicious deception on Bunny’s part. He showed different faces to everybody, and it was his understanding that this was not only his isolated truth, but a global truth. So what if Marion had never seen this particular side of him? He’d rather she never see it.
It was a universal truth that a man’s woman should never know him in his moments of weakness— she would lose respect. And the last thing any man wanted was for his own woman to belittle him. And so, when it happened, Bunny walked. He passed by the noisy dorms and through the emptying quads in a daze, turned into a spectre, trekking the empty roads. He trudged under the buzzing lamplights, and the flickering sign of the grocery store in Water Street, and he kept on trudging till he had made it– till he walked into the quiet, tidy apartment, where he let the spare keys clatter to the floor, and his feet carried him automatically down the familiar hall, inside the bedroom, towards the recently alerted figure, and then finally, into this alerted figure’s chest……
When Bunny trudged into Henry, he already knew this would be another skeleton in his closet.
“I really need to take the spare key away from you, Bun.” Henry murmured, his voice a deep, low rumble. “At this time of the night, even friends are considered intruders, you know.”
He noticed, and heard, the hoarse, shaking breaths coming from the quivering form of his best friend, but he said nothing. He’d seen this before…..a few months prior, when they’d been freshmen and hadn’t unmasked each other fully. He knew what this was and had a vague idea of what came next. His first prediction was a meltdown, and he yet came up with a second prediction when his first came true.
A sob punctured the silence in the dim room, Henry sighed. He lazily wrapped his arms around Bunny and soothed him, running his hands down his back.
“And who is the culprit this time, hm?“
Bunny didn’t speak for a moment, he was choking on the guttural sobs that were encroaching up his throat.
The intensity of his meltdowns always intrigued Henry— under that cold, scientific interest, however, was a sliver of concern. Any man, even a stone-hearted intellectual, would be put off by the gut-wrenching sounds Bunny produced when he was in agony. Even still, the fact that only yesterday Bunny had been as bright as the sun, bursting with rays of laughter, buzzing about with so much energy…..
Henry watched him, eyes half-lidded, observing how Bunny’s face was smushed against his chest, how he was slouched, much like the wilting roses Henry had just cut that day. Henry’s precise study of Bunny’s profile continued, and he noted how pale Bunny looked in this dimness. It was almost as if he had never been the sun before, as if he were an entirely separate entity from that son of Helios.
“Bunny,” Henry said finally, and he got no response or acknowledgment, so he said it again, and this time, firmly planted his hands on Bunny’s forearms. “Bunny. Breathe.”
Bunny nodded, a little delirious in his anguish. His eyes were puffy, red, watery, his entire face was soaked. He hiccupped in reply, with his fingers still bunched into the fabric of Henry's night shirt, his grip tight and desperate. He leaned into his best friend's broad chest as if he planned to merge their bodies together, to find solace in the comfort that was Henry Winter.
Henry was a man of elegance and poise— grand gestures of emotion disgusted, baffled and confused him. Ironic that he’d forge a bond (of such intensity, at that) with perhaps the most emotionally volatile creature of them all….
He pondered this as he took in the ruined sight of Bunny, his blond curls sagging and drooping, as though weighed down by their owner’s mood. How absurd. How absurd was everything about Bunny, from his dichotomies to his paradoxes to his shrieking extremes. How absurd that Henry had almost become attuned to him with such perfection that he could easily predict and fulfill Bunny’s needs. And right now, Bunny needed comfort (quite obvious), and Henry provided comfort, with his hand massaging the side of Bunny’s neck.
He gently lifted Bunny’s face once more. It was a pathetic sight.
The usually rosy-cheeked pallor was ghostly white now, his eyes were puffy and his nose was running. His lips, usually so full and inviting, were red and swollen. His entire expression was drawn in anguish: the furrowed brow, the trembling chin, the pinched, watery gaze.
Poor Bunny. What on earth could he have been crying about that much? The boy was so easy to rouse to tears, Henry was used to such displays, but this was beyond the normal.
“Well? Will you tell me what these theatrics are about?” Henry’s tone was not sharp, but oddly playful. He knew he had an awful understanding and grasp on situationally appropriate humor, but….
Bunny, thankfully, was too distraught to be bothered about his statement. He buried his face in Henry’s neck this time, beginning to cry again.
“I hate it, I hate it, Henry. I can’t take it anymore. Everything…just, everything….its too much…”
Bunny’s words were so indistinct, garbled by his tears, that Henry would normally say he didn’t understand. But he was well versed in the art of Bunny. He knew well that Bunny, in his most unguarded state, was a creature of pure feeling- of impulse and instinct. The same way an animal cannot reason, Bunny could not reason, could only feel. For him, everything was simply too much. The world, his own mind, his emotions– there was too much, too much.
Henry held him tighter, his hand coming up to cradle the back of his head.
“Shh, Bunny. Will you calm down and tell me the root of the problem? Did something happen?”
He rubbed the nape of Bunny’s neck again, as if he was petting a distressed animal.
“It just….” Bunny said to Henry’s neck, and then to his chest, “It got bad again. It was bad a day ago, and then it got good, and now it’s worse.” He was still crying, big, fat, hot tears streaking down his pallid cheeks. “I can’t stand anything, Henry. I just want to….” He hugged Henry tightly. “Everything hurts….i can’t…”
He’d seen this. It was Bunny’s usual pattern, a vicious cycle of bad and good, bad and good. Bunny, Henry had slowly realized, never had a healthy baseline— he was always one or the other, oscillating violently between extremes, throwing himself from one end to the other. He went through his ‘good’ periods like it was a high, and his ‘bad’ periods like it was the lowest circle of Hell.
And then there was the second thing Henry had learned over time— Trying to get Bunny to explain the reasons behind his meltdowns was fruitless. Bunny was never able to articulate exactly why he felt how he felt, he simply felt. Words could never do the anguish, the agony, of his mind justice. He felt it in his bones, in his blood, in his skin, in the soles of his feet. In his tongue, in the air he breathed. It was frustrating in a way, because Henry, a man of rational thought and methodical intelligence, could not understand the irrational.
Bunny was still babbling nonsense, half-sentences and gibberish words, his torment bleeding into his voice and twisting it into incoherence, trying in vain to answer Henry’s question until he just gave up.
Henry stroked his disheveled blond curls with a gentleness no one in the world thought him capable of— his fingers moved through the messy blond locks, catching in the drooping, wilted curls. He was quite literally holding Bunny together.
“I know. I know, shh. It will pass like it always does, Bunny.”
He hoped, against his own inability to know the right thing to say, that the reassurance came across as more comforting than clinical. Unfortunately, Bunny’s anguish was not soothed by this statement. In fact he seemed a tad more agitated in his demeanor of crying.
“It hurts, you don’t get it….”
Henry pressed a kiss against Bunny’s forehead, a gesture far too intimate if he paused to think about it, his hand coming to cup his face. He could never comprehend Bunny’s pain. It was all consuming, a constant, and it was something that would forever be unattainable for Henry. But he tried.
Bunny was clinging to him as he usually did on such nights, but like most nights, his pain was not ebbing. His sobs continued. He would pause abruptly every now and then— and the sudden silence was ominous in its intrusion— and then he’d start up again. He didn’t explain why. He didn’t articulate whatever thoughts were plaguing him— and that was because he couldn’t. He may not even have known a proper, concrete reason for his current condition.
In such situations, for Henry, there were usually many unknowns. But, deduced from late night moments of honesty, Henry knew that most of Bunny’s….. problems… were rooted in and growing from whatever issues he had faced in his childhood. The details he had, on lazy, languid nights, shared with Henry about his home were pitiful; the picture-perfect smiles that raised him, the smiles that covered for the dull, lightless eyes and cold isolation. Bunny’s aching need to be seen, to be loved, to be held, was a direct consequence of lack. What he had not received from his guardians, he sought from the world. But the world, for someone like him, was…..
Bunny, still in his delirium, was now exhausted. Henry glanced at the time and realized Bunny had been sobbing on-and-off for thirty minutes already. His hands were clutching Henry’s collar, and he was pressing tightly into him, as if Henry only had to crush his arms around Bunny to keep him together, to keep him from falling apart.
“Make me forget, Henry, please…”
Henry closed his eyes. Another plea for another thing he’d done before (and no doubt would do again).
Bunny wanted to forget. To forget his past, his anxieties, his worries, his thoughts, his insecurities. He wanted to forget himself. And Henry knew only one tried-and-trusted method.
He leaned Bunny backwards, pushing him down onto the bed. His long fingers grasped Bunny’s wrists, and he pinned them above his head. Bunny didn’t resist, he was compliant, limp, and pliable under his hold. His knee slotted between Bunny’s thighs, and Henry leaned down and hovered over him, their faces mere inches apart. Bunny’s watery eyes were trained on him, still filled with tears.
He was still crying.
His gaze was unfocused, vision blurred by the welling tears. But his legs parted easily, and his body arched towards Henry’s touch.
In that moment, an odd thought occurred to Henry.
No one else would ever see Bunny like this. No one else would ever have the privilege of having him under them like this, so desperate, so touch starved. This side of him was for Henry and Henry alone, and Henry relished it, his eyes dark and dilated, taking in the sight of the beautiful creature under him.
Henry leaned down and kissed the wet, stained cheeks— salty. And then he licked those fresh tear tracks, and he pressed his lips to the running rivers of Bunny’s eyes. This made Bunny gasp, and it made him cry even more (because everything made him cry), and his wrists turned in Henry’s hands.
Henry’s mouth moved from Bunny’s damp cheeks to his chin, where he sucked small marks into the unblemished skin, before his lips came to press against the hollow of his neck. Bunny was trembling, his gasps now turning into soft, whimpering moans, his thighs uncontrollably squeezing around the knee between them. Henry felt the pulse on Bunny’s neck with his lips, fluttering quickly under his mouth. He pressed open-mouthed kisses along the column of his throat.
Henry had taken to this, to taking Bunny apart with his own hands, slowly, meticulously, and he was exceptionally precise.
“Henry,” Bunny sobbed, his wrists free now that Henry had let go of them in favor of running his hands all over Bunny’s body. It was incredibly overstimulating for Bunny, whose softness made him a little too sensitive, but Henry was so finely attuned to Bunny that he knew those whining cries and sobs were not, in fact, expressions of disapproval. So he continued, sucking marks onto the soft skin, one arm hooked under Bunny’s lower back, pulling him up so it arched off the mattress, making him squirm and throw his head to the side in ecstasy and agitation.
Bunny felt his hips bucking up involuntarily, his hands grasped at the front of Henry’s shirt as the taller man continued to press him into the mattress. He was a mess already, his skin flushed, his hair tousled and matted with sweat, his eyes teary again. He was a sight to behold, and Henry was taking him in, drinking in his image.
He reached down, his fingers deftly unbuttoning the front of Bunny’s shirt.
Bunny sobbed again.
It was not a sound any man would like to hear in bed (or, well, most men preferred their partners to not cry, Henry could not account for all men)— at first, when it had happened the very first time, Henry had assumed he’d done something wrong. But now he knew those cries of anguish had nothing to do with him, although they did tend to come back when there were brief periods of pause during Henry’s given ‘distraction’— as though Bunny’s emotional mind went back into overdrive if Henry was not quickly using pleasure to snuff Bunny’s ability of thought.
He pushed the shirt off Bunny’s shoulders, and the soft skin was exposed to him in a pleasing sight, and then he undressed himself, and before long their naked bodies were rocking against one another.
Bunny cried out, Henry kissed him, he swallowed Bunny’s despair. Even now, Bunny was in the throes of his despair, and of Henry’s fiery passion, which drove their hips together, bucking and rubbing, the friction of each other sending them into a tunnel of bliss in which Bunny’s cries followed.
Henry could feel the hot tears, the desperate grip of Bunny on his back, the trembling of his body beneath him. Every kiss was a plea for more, every sound out of Bunny’s mouth was a cry for help. Henry held his soft hips in his hands, gripping hard enough to leave bruises in the cushiony flesh. He was rough, he was brutal, and his only goal was to drive out every thought from Bunny’s head, to burn him up with an ache that would consume him for the rest of the night.
Slowly but surely, it happened— Bunny’s leg, hooked around Henry’s waist, got limper, and the nails digging into Henry’s back stopped cutting into the skin. The tears hesitated to fall, and Bunny, brows furrowed and eyes shut, began to pant and heave and grunt instead of cry and sob and moan.
Beneath them, the steady creaking of the bed grew haphazard, the mattress jumping under Henry’s rapid, conquering movements.
Bunny was starting to feel the numbing bliss, the pleasure seeping through him, taking over and replacing his agony. His body was soft and slack against the sheets, his head tossed to the side, leaving the column of his neck exposed to Henry, who was now assaulting it with wet, sucking kisses, leaving red marks.
Bunny’s hands were scrambling aimlessly against the sheets, as if he didn’t know what to do with them.
“Henry, yes….Henry….” He was whispering, eyes closed, lashes glistening, sliding his hand occasionally between his own legs.
Henry kissed the shell of Bunny’s ear, and then pressed his lips to it, and exhaled hotly down the sensitive canal, and he licked the shell, and he rumbled Greek into it, and Bunny’s eyes rolled and his insides dropped, squeezed, and pulsed.
Henry’s murmurs were nonsensical to Bunny, but he made a habit of saying these things, whatever they were. Some of it was Greek, some of it was Latin— praises, endearments, filthy things that would horrify anyone with sophisticated capabilities (not to say Henry lacked sophistication but….well, he did momentarily flick it away whenever Bunny was concerned.)
He grabbed a hold of the back of Bunny’s thighs, gripping so hard that the soft flesh began to bloom pink, and he thrust roughly into the pliability, the warmth of him, driving his desires into him, pounding the bad thoughts out of that silly head of curls. He kissed the corner of Bunny’s trembling mouth.
Bunny’s tears were still spilling, not consistently, it seemed that he wasn’t even actively crying anymore, and that the drops running down his cheeks were collected tears escaping. He was moaning, and mewling, and his voice was strained as he begged Henry for something or the other. He tightened— Henry was gripped hard.
Henry’s head snapped back and a deep moan left him as he gasped, his pace and balance changed, his hips stuttered haphazardly. A rough, angry groan left him.
He was close, and he could feel the heat and the pressure building inside with each slam of his hips into Bunny. His hands moved from the bruised flesh of Bunny’s thighs to his face, and he cradled it softly, suddenly and without thinking, and he looked into Bunny’s teary, flushed face with his dark gaze, as if to say something. What it was, even he didn’t know. His eyes roved all over Bunny’s face, at the furrow between his eyebrows, the tears on his lashes, the parted, wet mouth, the flush of his cheeks.
He said nothing and kissed him instead.
Their tongues licked into each other’s mouths, coiled together— Bunny kissed him hard, and Henry drove his hips even harder, and then both of them gasped, mouths open against each other, and froze. Bunny’s leg tightened around Henry’s waist, their muscles tensed up, a white, hot flash overtaking their senses.
There, Bunny.
Slowly, Henry caught his breath; Bunny was still trembling beneath him, his chest heaving, his hands clutching the sheets as he tried to compose himself. He was looking up at Henry, his gaze hazy, his eyes still wet. There was a dazed look on his face, as though he was still floating, still somewhere else far from where they were.
For a moment, Henry continued to rest on Bunny, their bodies still intertwined. He could feel the sticky wetness between their bellies. Then, slowly, he lifted himself up, separating their overheated bodies, and sat back on his heels.
Bunny was exhausted, understandably so, from all that sobbing and then the physical exertion that had come after and during his meltdown. Henry had snuffed out all those thoughts for now, it seemed, and Bunny was eager to go to sleep and not talk or look at Henry because he just wanted to turn himself off to the world, lest he risk that horrible sadness coming back. Bunny turned on his side, and closed his eyes.
Henry leaned down and ran a hand over the dip of Bunny’s hip, and then up his side, until it came to rest on the back of his neck. He gave him a squeeze, all without expecting a response.
Then he got up to go and clean himself.
He returned from the en suite, wiping himself down with a towel, and saw that Bunny was asleep. There was not so much as a twitch when he climbed into bed behind him, and then moved in close, pressing the entire length of his body against Bunny’s, and wrapped an arm around his middle. He buried his face in the crook of Bunny’s shoulder, and inhaled deeply.
The night deepened, and the stars shone brighter, time slipped by; Bunny’s irregular breathing evened out slowly but surely, and the slight tension in his clenched muscles left him deflated and soft, and Henry had just been marveling at how soft Bunny felt when he himself was stolen by sleep.
An odd coincidence neither of them would discover; that night they both dreamt of each other. Bunny saw that he was a child again, and Henry was a child too (he somehow knew this dark haired child whose face he couldn’t quite see was Henry), and the two were in the school playground together, and all was well.
Henry dreamt that he was on a journey to Olympus, but taking a rest in a bright field populated by white rabbits. And there, by a stream, he found a familiar face and asked him what he was doing here of all places. In this dream, they had not seen each other for years. They rejoiced. Bunny went into the stream and pulled Henry in. There was laughter, and splashing; the Gods watched. And all was well.