Erika, once again, you've got the Munch-ster down. With a side order of "ow."

Okay, I'm'a try this again. It's my first-ever non-drabbly, finished, batverse fic. But all you really need to know, canon-wise, is: Dick used to be Robin. Tim is Robin now. And they once spent an entire issue blindfolded and talking about sex. And just where do you think my mind is going to go with that?

Let Me Be Your Side Track

"You have some kind of thing about redheads, huh?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You know, you do the worst Bruce impersonation ever. And, seriously — Kory, Barbara..."

"Just try to concentrate on the train, Tim."

"... Wally, Roy..."

"There's a curve coming up, feel it?"

"Yeah, I feel it." Tim braces himself to stay standing as the train sweeps around to the left, and then he's thrown against Dick as it veers right. Dick catches him before he loses his balance.

"... It was an S-curve."

"Gee, thanks, Batman." Tim's mind is already racing ahead to just how much fun he can have torturing Dick this way, but his next quip stops short in his throat when he realizes that Dick's hands are still there, one just above each hipbone, not so much holding him in place as making it perfectly clear that he's not going anywhere else until Dick decides he will. He finds himself thinking — and he doesn't even want to know where this thought's coming from — that those hands are probably another area where Dick has more in common with Batman than he'll ever admit.

"You've got to look out for the switchbacks." And Dick's voice is a shade hoarser than usual as he lets Tim go.

It takes a moment for Tim get his balance back; he has to force Dick's voice out of his head (swimming just a little) and make himself focus on his legs (weak) before he can get his weight centered and start to ride the train like a surfboard again. Once he's done that, he can let his mind play, and after the third involuntary grin, he realizes it's a good thing they're both wearing blindfolds. Still, he isn't absolutely sure that Dick can't feel the heat rising off his full-body flush.

They throw themselves onto their bellies as the train slips into a tunnel. The air in here is cool and damp, and the sound of the train warps and echoes around the tunnel walls until Tim loses the sense of orientation he'd tenuously put together outside. He's just thinking it's a good thing he's lying down when he feels Dick's weight shift and realizes that they're a hell of a lot closer to each other than they were when they hit the deck. Close enough that he hardly has to reach out at all before he's resting a hand on Dick's side. He pulls his hand back, as if he didn't mean for it to be there, but Dick hasn't moved away at all. Tim's going to have to think some more about that later.

***

Dick hears a tunnel coming up, and he drops to the train roof, relieved to hear Tim land a few feet over. He slides alongside him, and he knows when he hears Tim turn toward him in the dark that Tim felt the same jolt he did back at the curve. Inches from his ear, he can hear Tim catch his breath even over the howling in the tunnel, and when Tim reaches out to touch him, Dick is waiting. Tim flinches away. Dick doesn't.

The hardest thing in the world is waiting for the split second it'll take Tim to absorb what just happened, but when it does, Dick is pretty sure there won't be any hesitation.

Instead, Tim says, "You never answered my question," and it occurs to Dick that he could just knock him off the top of the train.

"I don't think you ever got around to asking one."

"Sure I did. The one about whether you have a thing for —"

"— Youthful sidekicks. Right." And he hears Tim breathe in sharply.

"Not what I —"

"Sure it's what you meant. Unless you were looking for haircolor advice."

Tim laughs — actually giggles— and Dick reaches across the gap between them. Slides a gauntleted hand under the waist of Tim's shirt and wishes to god they were out of costume so he could feel with a bare hand the warm flesh cooling as it came into contact with the underground air. He pulls Tim towards him. They're both breathing hard as they kiss, biting and sucking at tongues and lips, and Dick isn't sure anymore whether the vibrations he feels are coming from the train.

"I do, you know." They're close enough to talk softly in spite of the noise.

"Like guys in tights?"

"No, redheads. You're lucky I'm wearing a blindfold."

Dick reaches for Tim again, one hand pulling their bodies together as the other grabs at a handful of Tim's hair. This kiss is slower, but no less urgent, and as Dick traces the tip of his tongue across the bony ridge of Tim's palate, he's rewarded with a moan that he can feel.

***

The only thing in the world right now is the movement of the train and their hands and their bodies pressing together. They're tearing at each other's clothes, desperately seeking any way they can find through well-built armor.

Tim doesn't think Kevlar was ever meant to be a kink, but then when Dick's glove traces the lines of his body and a finger-seam catches at his nipple, he reconsiders the possibilities. A few moments later the rough fabric runs up the underside of his cock, and he thinks he could be a costume freak from here on out. Until he changes his mind.

Tim can't figure out when Dick's hands were off him for long enough to remove a glove, but this time, it's bare flesh reaching for him, and the touch of warm skin with a cool film of sweat explodes in his head like fireworks. So when Dick grasps his cock — no, both their cocks together, and, yeah, he's definitely done this before — there's no way this is going to last very long. The orgasm hits him like a wave; he can feel an answering shudder go through Dick's whole body a moment later, and then they're still again.

The sun is a warm shock when the train leaves the north end of tunnel. There's a bre

The sun is a warm shock when the train leaves the north end of tunnel. There's a breeze kicking up that smells of Gotham Harbor, and Tim figures he can take off the blindfold now.

hoooooBAH.

That is smoking hot.

And that's with me knowing virtually no canon at all. No canon needed.

Dayum.

t g Thanks, love. It was great fun to write -- I've been backing off the smoking hot forever, as I find the smut terribly hard to write, but these boys have such great quippy chemistry that I just had to do it.

Yeah, well, it worked. No one would guess you have difficulty with it.

Nice to have good dialogue, too, may I say?

It really fits the tone of NW 25 too. (If anyone cares you can read NW 25 in the tpb: Love and Bullets.)

Yeah, really. And thanks. I'm still precocious. I can be as cynical as somebody almost twice my age.;)

WH 40K fan fic

• *****************

No matter where Hope of Eidilla was, its shipboard time changing to what system it was in, Hoya always managed to wake five minutes before the morning bell. Usually he would use the showers before the rest of the troopers in the hall rushed into them. Other times he would lay in his bunk, mentally organizing his day, considering each detail so nothing would surprise him again. The murmurs and mutterings of still-dreaming troopers still lost in the missions that had brought them here were the only distraction.

On this day he did the rarest of his morning rituals, quietly leaving his bunk and going to the lockers at the end of the hall to open his and dig out an old dog-eared copy of the Infantryman’s Primer. Opening it revealed a cavity, made by glued-together pages, containing a primitive spear point.

Officially, none of the troopers were supposed to have weapons off duty, especially not in their barracks, to make sure that fights didn’t get out of hand. There were always a few ship’s armsmen willing to turn a blind eye, but this was something Hoya felt unwilling to leave to the mercy of an armsman’s judgment.

Just touching brought back the memories of a gaggle of young boys, bored with the schola’s endless routines - all intended to make them the finest stormtroopers that the Imperium had ever seen (and that they would be, they had no doubt.) Still it seemed like the routines were also intended to bore them to death, and their one diversion had been teasing the old auroch bull on the schola’s farm. A whole set of rules for scoring arose. Soon they had to throw rocks from inside the enclosure and scramble out just ahead of the auroch’s horns to even begin to score points.

It was Hoya’s suggestion that led to the coup stick. He had a distant uncle from his mother’s tribe that would visit from the foothills every few seasons while on trade missions. The uncle had been a Rough Rider in the Imperial Guard and had shown Hoya some of the gear he had kept. Among them was a coup stick which warriors would use to prove their bravery by touching their enemies and leaving them alive.

The rest of the boys told him that he was the lucky one, that he still had someone living.

Within a week they fashioned the spear point out of stone and scrap metal, attached it to a pole and Kilchii marked the auroch on the shoulder from inside its pen. Quickly the pole became a stick and most likely they would have soon been using just the spearpoint itself when a passing Sororitas teacher spotted them, nearly getting Nik killed by distracting him while he was in range of the auroch’s hooves. They had all gotten a beating for wounding the auroch and it was only by some clever and impassioned quotations of the Emperor’s Beautitudes that they remained on the stormtrooper curricula rather than becoming Ecclesiarch castrati.

Sometimes Hoya wonders if it would have been better if they had left the stormtrooper curricula then. Not to become castrati, there was no way he could justify that, not even in jest, but anything else would have been better than what finally did happen.

Hoya put away the spearpoint and forced himself not to look at Kilchii as he did so. Kilchii never looked his way, even though his bunk was right by the lockers and he had taught Hoya the early rising habit, but he continued to steadfastedly refuse to get out of the bunk early or even acknowledge him. Hoya doubted Kilchii even knew that he had kept the spearpoint from among Nik’s things when they were both packing the rest of the squad’s effects.

Hoya was already shrugging on his dutyjacket when the ship’s bell woke the rest of the troopers in the hall. It still felt odd to see the ship’s insignia where the regimental one once had been, the fabric slightly discolored around the edges because the different patch shapes aged the fabric differently.

Kilchii smoothly got out of the bunk with no hesitation when the ship’s bell rang, confirming Hoya’s suspicion that he had been lying awake.

They nodded to each other, painfully formal despite years of easy familiarity. Like always, Hoya had to begin the conversation. That hadn’t changed, at least.

“We have to mount the new bolters today.”

“The ship’s chirugeons want the squadron’s extraction medics this morning, they have some new procedures they want to go over.”

A simple nod on Hoya’s part continued the conversation, even though he wasn’t sure Kilchii had seen it. “I’ll start working on the new mounts then. Join me when you finish?”

Kilchii gave an affirmative grunt, one that Hoya could still easily decipher from when Kilchii tried to avoid speaking for several months because his voiced had changed last and had taken an especially long and embarrassing time to do so. Kilchii cut off the chance for further conversation by turning away to head towards the showers.

As Hoya left, resigned and trying to figure out how to reach Kilchii, the traitorous thought that he had lived with for the last six months returned, ever since he and Kilchii returned to their barracks to pack the rest of the squad’s effects and were summarily told by a Munitorum aide that they would be reassigned to an Imperial Navy squadron since just two survivors of a stormtrooper squad were of no use to the regiment.

The rest of the squad had been the lucky ones.