Circuit Breaker

Title: Circuit Breaker
Pairing: Richard/Henry (yep, you read that correctly)
Summary: I could say that Henry has an electrifying experience, except then I'd have to shoot myself--and Richard doesn't like anyone touching his gun.
A/N: Dedicated to/blaming this on Tsurumaru, whose hawt pictures corrupted my mind, and to everyone out there who thinks the world can never have enough Braintree. I left out the XXX stuff, since the few times I mentioned this pairing on Y!gallery got tepid reactions at best. Of course, if enough Richard/Henry fans choose to come out of the woodwork and make their opinions known, I could be persuaded to write an uncut version... >3 That is, if the Walter/Henry shippers don't eat me first.

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Out of all Walter’s worlds, Henry hated the Water Prison the worst, but the Apartment was a close second. He had walked through here every day for the past two years, carrying groceries, thinking about the latest job he’d accepted, wondering what that cute brunette next door was doing, and now the halls were blood-daubed trails to the Devil himself. Their very familiarity was eerie and filled him with a nonverbal sense of…of wrongness, an animal aversion that goosebumped his flesh and fluffed the hair on his neck. Not being able to see around its countless corners made him paranoid, and he’d often stumbled into the very arms of this labyrinth’s countless Minotaurs in spots where he couldn’t even swing his hatchet. He had developed a loathing for enclosed spaces that bordered on claustrophobia.

Still, he didn’t have to listen to Andrew DeSalvo’s singing here. He cautiously prowled the stuffy hallways in silence, the revolver he’d picked guiltily up off Richard’s side table holstered at his belt. He wasn’t the world’s best shot, but it was more efficient than anything else he had—especially here, where the Apartment’s close quarters actually worked in his favor and made his bad aim irrelevant. Its sleek weight was comforting. Even if it was pulling his pants down a little.

A weird scuffling a few yards down the hall, around the corner, made his hand jump to the butt of his gun. Please don’t let it be that baby-head chicken thing… A pointless prayer—if it was, it’d be on him before he could draw. Still, his mouth twitched that prayer’s shape.

A deeper darkness threw itself over the dimly lit wall in the shape of a human. He relaxed, but only slightly. It could be some other, unknown person trapped in this hell with him, but it could just as easily be a ghost, come to viciously attack and bleed his life away with its unholy aura, or even the murderous Walter Sullivan himself. Henry planted his feet and waited for the figure to round the corner. This took a long time. He could see why; it jerked and jolted with every step, shaking like someone in the grip of a hundred-and-three degree fever.

At last a broad-shouldered man came into view, dressed in a suit minus the jacket and dragging what appeared to be a golf club. His features were vague in the dim light, but he could tell the man was looking at him. Both the features and the look seemed somehow familiar. Henry sighed in relief. I knew it couldn’t be just me and Eileen here. Finally, we’re not alone. The shudders lessened in violence as his halting walk sped to a stride, as if the surplus energy overloading his body was being burned up in motion. His head yanked to the side as he moved towards him and his shoulders rolled smoothly, then wildly, throwing his chest forward.

Henry’s hand dropped. He knew that face. And he knew that fucking Venus-de-Milo tie.

“…Richard?”

This couldn’t be. He’d seen him die in great, heaving seizures, blood gushing from his nose to streak his face and shirt. He’d tried to save him and failed and watched powerlessly as his speech choked off into silence. The Richard he knew would have broken his arm and pushed him down the stairs if Henry’d even touched anything of his, but he had taken the revolver without opposition of any kind. He had to be dead. Yet here he was, walking towards him, feet as solid on the ground as his were. The constant spasming was odd, but who knew what had happened to him after they’d met last?

Then he stepped into better light and Henry’s entrails chilled. It was Richard all right, but now he could see the wide splashes of rust on his clothes, the neatly red-daubed 19121 on his forehead, and, worst of all, the white-rheumed eyes like those of some diseased subterranean animal. His greying hair no longer lay flat but rose malignantly from his head like the crest of a raptor. The smell of ozone was obvious in the stagnant air.

This was no living man, however solidly he stood. This was a phantom.

And he wasn’t happy.

“You t-took my gun-nn,” he growled, advancing on Henry step by deliberate, shuddering step. If Henry ran, he could make it. Richard was so slow and practically unarmed. All he’d have to do was run. He knew he could get away from him.

So why couldn’t he just move already?!

“Where-re I come fr-rom—” He cut himself off with a spine-cracking convulsion that bent his back almost double. The golf club thumped to the floor. Henry managed to tear himself awake at the noise and bolted

only to be caught cruelly by the shoulders—body dissolved in a whirlwind wave of nausea—reformed and slammed against the bloodstained wall. He fought down his fear and his strong desire to vomit and saw faded brass numbers shining on an oak door: 2…1…0. They were right outside Room 210, an entire floor down from where they had been. Teleportation, he thought dizzily. Richard continued as if there had been no interruption.

“—we don-don’t just take other-er p-people’s thinnngggss-s…” He plucked the revolver from Henry’s belt. The Receiver put up no resistance, even when Richard pushed the muzzle lightly, almost lovingly into his stomach.

There was a rolling click as Richard drew back the hammer of the gun. Henry squeezed his eyes shut. His heart was attempting to tunnel through his chest wall to safety and in the process tying his already-roiling stomach into knots. The thought that he was going to die came to him with surprising lucidity. But when, after a long minute, his vitals had still not been blasted through his back, he warily cracked one eye.

Richard appeared to be considering something. Henry breathed heavily through his mouth and prayed that he wouldn’t throw up. The noise seemed muted in the dense atmosphere.

At length Richard spoke again. “But I-I suppose you nee-ed it, t-to fight tha-at baaasssstard. Don’t wa-ant you ki-killed too. Besi-ides, I’m n-not so good a sssho-ot an-anymore.” He threw his greying head back and laughed. It was a horrible, staccato sound like a talking children’s doll being annihilated with a baseball bat. Henry’s flesh crawled.

It took a conscious effort to stay still. But stay still he did. Walter was a freaky undead serial killer, unstoppable, downright inhuman, but he knew he was safe from him until the last Sacrament was due. With Richard, there were no such guarantees.

The ghost abruptly stopped and leveled his gaze back to Henry. He couldn’t help fidgeting under the intense milky stare; those featureless eyes seemed to bore right through his head and out the back. “So-o I’ll c-cut a deal wi-ith you, Town-ss-heeennd. Keep the-the gun. But d-do some-omething for me.”

A line appeared between Henry’s brows. It was a lot easier to think when he knew he wasn’t going to get a surprise bullet in the gut. “Like…like what?” He was dead, after all. What could he want? Free cable?

A wolfish grin was his only warning before Richard was almost literally devouring his mouth. Ozone immediately overpowered the stench of blood and disuse filling the hallway and forced everything inside out to leave Henry dangerously lightheaded. He gasped, unintentionally opening himself up further to the erratic assault of tongue and teeth, and flailed in panic…until he felt cold steel reassert itself, pushing into his belly harder than before. He hastily restrained his terrified revulsion. Richard could kill him at any time. If he wanted to live to see Eileen and tomorrow—not to mention get his damned revolver back—he’d have to cooperate.

He must not have been cooperating hard enough, though, because one of Richard’s hands left his shoulders to grip the back of his head, crushing their mouths together further, and the other tightly circled his waist. He unthinkingly pressed his body flush against the ghost’s to escape his pulping grip and was rewarded with a serrated purr. Tentatively, he draped his arms around his neck…and was rewarded with something entirely different.

It was as if he’d stuck his tongue into an electrical socket. Sparks of energy spread into him from every point where skin pressed skin, a shivering voltage that danced into his cranium and licked through his veins with a hot, skilled tongue. It vibrated his bones like tuning forks and lit up his every nerve. His whole body buzzed with pleasure, right down to the spaces between his cells. He sucked in a sharp breath and twisted in Chaos’ arms at the utterly novel, utterly bizarre, very agreeable sensations flooding him. He couldn’t help it; he arched and bucked and squirmed like a child with an itch until Richard groaned deep in his throat and Henry’s mouth bruised, then bled with the kiss’s sheer violence. The taste of his own coppery blood should have brought the Receiver back to his senses. It only made him throb for more and wrenched a single needy whimper from his throat. Richard finally let go of his waist, groped a healthy handful of denim-clad ass, and pulled them together forcefully.

Henry gave a startled squeak and then an echoing moan as Richard ground against him. His spasms had evened out completely and each grind was a deliberate, calculated torment; Henry felt the older man’s mouth twist against his in a wide smirk. The feel of the other’s clothed hardness against his added an intolerable thrill to the already-maddening friction. The thought processes he’d worked so hard to get back were vanishing into the way strong fingers curled into the narrow space between his buttocks, into every rough rock of their hips, every second that delicious current pumped through him. It shorted out his synapses and made him incapable of anything more than blissful cries. How was it that that mouth was still so warm?

“Mmm, Richard…” he mumbled, in between too-loud mewls of pleasure. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to say. It was definitely something—he was pretty sure of that—and it was very, very important. More? he thought fuzzily. Yeah, that sounds right. His speech centers had been temporarily disconnected, though, so he just moaned urgently and hooked his leg around the back of Richard’s knee. In moments the new angle had him whining in abject pleasure.

It made no sense. Richard had barely touched him, but it was like thousands of perfect hands were caressing him from the inside out, sliding over and between all the places that made him thrash and scream, stroking him into a fever until the feel of his own breathing was more than he could take. He felt possessed, so hot, so hysterical with sensation he was ready to overflow, and he should have been mortified but oh, God, it just felt so good— Richard abruptly left his swollen, bleeding mouth and attacked his neck with the same sharp-toothed hunger. The sudden slick tongue and teeth on his hypersensitive skin made him cry out. So close…!

And then the dead bastard pulled away. He didn’t pant—well, that wasn’t so weird, considering—but his tics rose back immediately to a noticeable level.
Henry gave a small, pathetic noise of protest. The heat, the friction, that intoxicating electrical buzz all through his body! Everything was gone and the empty feeling was unbearable. “What th—” he managed to complain before Richard gripped his biceps, there was that sickening rush again, and he was bent backwards over the bed in Room 207.

With effort, he opened his eyes to a sight that stole his breath and heaved his stomach. The ravaged corpse of his murdered neighbor bent over him, shuddering, streaked with dried black blood, dead eyes narrowed in a demon’s toothed and hungry grin. His arms were trapped. He panicked and struggled, despite the ozone that clogged his nostrils and left him gasping for oxygen. He was trapped and he suddenly comprehended just where and in what position. The ghoul hunched closer and its erection jabbed obscenely into the inside of his thigh. Henry actually retched.

A hot, leaden ache of frustrated lust weighted his body and he realized with horror that he was painfully hard, leaking with it. Oh, God! I was…and I… The acrid taste of bile filled his mouth. “NO!” He thrashed uselessly against unholy strength, trying to ignore the enticing friction his motions created. He only succeeded in exhausting his already-drained body. “No—god—dammit—let me—go!” Then the grotesque ghost crushed their mouths together again and everything slipped away in the face of that tingling rush of energy. His deepest, most wrenching revulsion and fear…oh, they were nothing.

Nothing.

Henry arched up, hungry, desperate, as far as he could with arms still pinned. He lost his mind, truly and for good, and moaned with the sheer ecstasy of it.

Richard growled possessively and set to work divesting Henry of his clothes. He wouldn’t be needing them.

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“So you took him out with his own golf club?” asked Eileen. She held a tepid cup of coffee in her good hand. The cast had come off her other only a few days ago and the muscles were still a little stiff.

“Yeah.” Henry sipped his own coffee noncommittally. Eileen blew a stray hair out of her face, not wanting to put down her cup or poke her unbandaged eye out with her awkward hand.

“And then what?”

“Sword of Obedience. My last one.” After an awkward minute or two, it was clear that he wasn’t going to elaborate further. She got up from the kitchen table to rinse out her cup in the sink.

After everything was over, they’d just spontaneously started dropping in on each other. Sometimes more than a week would go by before she’d show up at his door or he’d show up at hers; sometimes they’d pass in and out of each others’ apartments like they were their own. They’d talk of the everyday—stuff they saw on TV or the antics of their coworkers—or of It, or They, or Him, or nothing at all and they’d just sit together in silence. Usually it was Henry who lapsed into dark brooding, given his general nature, but it was her, too, who stared into her plate and remembered the crawling fog that had enveloped her heart and mind, the tattered doll she’d given a poor man on the street that had marked her for life. Sometimes it’d be both of them, and they’d look at each other and know they were thinking the same things.

Eileen left her cup in the sink and Henry staring into his cold coffee. There wasn’t much point in saying goodbye. She had a feeling she’d see him tomorrow.

A quiet smile stole across her face.

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Henry relaxed visibly as soon as he heard her apartment door slam. He got up to place his cup beside Eileen’s in the sink. It clinked sharply and he sighed. Thank God she bought that, he thought.


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