Untitled
Author: Anon
Pairing: NB/KD
Rating: Just a kiss but
NC-17 for incest
"That was the stupidest
fucking idea you've ever had." Kelly grabs the beer as soon as Nick opens
it, sucking down half before Nick can even get the 'Hey!' out.
"Hey!" Nick says belatedly,
whapping him on the arm. "My beer!"
Kelly looks at the can.
Shrugs. Hands it back to Nick, reaches across him, pops another one out
of the plastic ring. Nick doesn't fight him for it, but smacks him on the
back of the head before he sits up again.
"It was a good idea,"
Nick quickly drinks what's left of his beer, one careful, watchful eye
on Kelly over the rim. "It could've worked."
Kelly thinks he might
break something rolling his eyes as he turns to look at Nick. "D'ja forget
that we look the same, dumbass? How in the hell did you expect us dressing
alike to make us *less* noticeable?" He makes a face and plucks at the
thin black muscle shirt Nick bullied him into that morning. He should be
grateful Nicky didn't insist on matching plaid, but he feels like a castoff
from a Loverboy video.
Nick winces. Kelly turns
a dirty look on him before the confession even hits air. "Wasn't really
as much about being unnoticeable..."
"As what?" Kelly demands
when Nick falls silent.
Nick shrugs a shoulder,
looks away, fiddles with the tab on his empty can with one thumb. "I just...
thought I could, you know, pull the whole, 'No, it's not me, I'm just his
twin' thing for once."
"Thing? Thing?" Kelly
rubs one eye till he's seeing purple and yellow sparks, then drinks half
of his new beer before he dares speak. It's that or knock sense into Nicky
- literally - and that never goes well. Joss already hates him for the black
eye of September 2000, not to mention the Great Sprained Ankle Escapade the
summer before that. Like it's *his* fault Nick never quite mastered the
art of drop and roll.
"It's not a 'thing', Nicky.
You're the one that wanted to be famous, not me. Why should I have to...oh,
say, twist my knee running away from a bunch of squealing, stupid girls..."
Kelly stops and rubs said knee ostentatiously.
Nick waves one hand at
him dismissively, reaches for another beer. Doesn't even offer Kelly one,
the ungrateful fuck.
After a moment, Nick elbows
him out of his bitter. "Oh, come on," he says when Kelly looks at him.
"Not like you don't get anything out of looking like me."
"You mean like food tossed
at me and people chasing me and the complete loss of sleeping-on-airplane
privileges? Thanks, bro."
Kelly finishes his beer,
then smashes the can on the floor between them and drops it in Nick's lap.
He settles back against the couch and pulls his sore knee to his chest, starts
picking at a loose thread on the inseam of his jeans. Nick glances sideways
at him, clearly anticipating the lean-reach-grab for another beer, but
it can wait. No doubt the perfect moment for maximum irritation potential
will present itself soon. Kelly decides to help it along. "You look like
*me*, anyway. I'm-"
"Three minutes older,"
Nicky finishes with him. "You know, I think that might've been your first
sentence. I'll have to pop over to Mom's this weekend, see if I can find
the baby book."
"Asshole."
"Dickwad."
"Bastard."
"Cocksucker."
"Not so much an insult
as a statement of fact," Kelly observes, and the tension dissolves as they
laugh.
Nick maneuvers to his
knees to toss both their beer cans at the trash can snugged against the
end of his kitchen counter, and Kelly spies a lump in Nick's back pocket
that looks interesting.
"Holding out on me, Nicky?"
he asks when he comes up with a shiny silver lipstick, complete with a
phone number written on the side in what looks like black Sharpie marker.
"What? No, that's nothing."
Nick grabs for it; Kelly keeps it away from him easily until Nick shoves
a hand in his face. Startled, he closes his eyes reflexively, drops the lipstick.
He opens his eyes again just in time to see Nick tucking it away in his
pocket.
"Oh right, it's nothing."
He leans hard into Nick, shoulder to shoulder. "Give it up."
"It is." Nick doesn't
look at him as he pops open his can and starts to drink it slowly, carefully.
Like he's going to be graded on it or something. And the Emmy for Casual
Beer Drinking in a Living Room Scene goes to...
Kelly swings over Nick's
lap and straddles him, pinning down his free hand, deftly snagging the
lipstick while Nick's busy swallowing. "You won't mind me keeping it, then,"
he says, tapping the tube on the end of Nick's nose. "Since it's nothing."
Bluff called.
Nick grabs for it, but
Kelly's got a pretty firm grip on his arm and he's wasting too much energy
trying not to spill the beer on his expensively new sofa, so he comes up
empty. "It's not like you even know what the girl looked like. You might
as well give it back."
Kelly snaps him on the
forehead with two fingers, then plants the heel of his hand there and keeps
Nick at a distance while he eyes the lipstick speculatively. "It's not
like you'd've kept it if she was a dog."
"Prick."
"Greedy son of a bitch,"
Kelly says amiably. "I get the grief, least you could do is share the girls."
"Like I don't. And you
get all the boys."
It's true, but Kelly ignores
it. He pulls the top of the tube off with his teeth and spits it between
his knees. His other hand is firmly in the center of Nick's forehead, keeping
him at arm's distance while Kelly pretends to ponder the rich, gleaming
red. "You know, it's not a bad color. Might look good on me."
"Right."
"It'd look better on me
than you," Kelly challenges, just to make Nicky wriggle and grab for it
again. Kelly's knee is twinging pretty hard, and Nick would probably have
the damn lipstick already if he'd put the beer down, but Kelly doesn't bother
to point this out.
Kelly looks from the lipstick
to Nick's face. Cocks his head, then forces Nick's head back just far enough
to put his mouth at a better angle while Kelly considers.
Nick waits for judgment
to be passed with a thunderhead of irriation in the lines around his eyes,
then waits no more. "Well?"
"Sorry," Kelly says after
a loud sigh and a shake of his head. "You're just not the lipstick-wearing
type."
Nick's left eyebrow moves
under Kelly's fingers. "I'm heartbroken."
"Marsters can wear the
lipstick, Tony can wear the lipstick - hell, even Dave can wear the lipstick,
but don't tell him I told you about that - but you just don't have it in
you, Nicky. Sorry."
"Oh, come on. Dave?" Nick
is incredulous and... offended?... and Kelly doubles over, coughing to
cover his laugh. Sometimes it's too easy. "There is no way David looks good
in lipstick but I don't."
Kelly forgets to guard
his prize in between hitching giggles, only noticing his mistake when Nick
pokes him on the top of the head with something hard that turns out to
be the bottom of the tube. Nick cuts off his protests with another poke,
hard to the middle of his chest.
"Just. No. Way," he insists,
emphasizing each word with ungentle prodding.
"Fine, fine, fine." Kelly
waves his hands, knocks Nick's pokey finger away. "You'd look better."
Nick sets his beer down
on the endtable, flips the lipstick around and thrusts it at him; Kelly
lets his eyes do the um, what the fuck? on their own.
"I want you to put it
on me," Nick explains with something that might pass for patience in a
dim light.
"What?"
Nick waggles the lipstick
again. "You threw the gauntlet. I'm picking it up. Hit me."
It's a tempting offer
at this point. Kelly considers it while he takes the tube and wonders
where Nick's digital camera is.
"Come on," Nick urges,
jiggling one leg like that's going to make Kelly go faster.
His legs sparks pain again;
he retaliates by pushing Nick's head back farther than he needs it to be,
deciding the perfect angle's been achieved when Nick lets out a pouty "Ouch".
"Baby. Hold still."
"Says the guy whose neck
is currently *not* bent back at a ninety-degree angle."
"Wah wah wah. Now shut
up, or you'll be washing-" Kelly checks the bottom of the tube "-Burgundy
Waves off your eyelids for the next twenty minutes."
"So get on with it already."
Kelly gets on with it,
obediently and with great care, albeit still with one hand forcing Nick's
head back into the sofa as far as he dares. Fair's fair, after all, and
he's going to be limping for at least the next twenty-four hours. A sore
neck never killed anybody.
It's more difficult than
he expected, applying the lipstick to Nick's mouth. Not like he didn't
learn how to color in the lines when he was in second grade, but the lines
of someone's mouth aren't as clearly defined: he keeps giving Nick Madonna-lips
and has to stop every few seconds to smudge away the extra with the side
of a finger, running through clean ones until his hand looks like he dragged
it along a newly-freshened sidewalk curb in defiance of common sense and
'wet paint' signs.
"Well?"
Nick waits with more of
that obviously-unrestrained impatience, head tilted belligerently to the
side. The platitudes gather, mass just behind the barrier, waiting for
their chance to roll merrily down the primrose path, when the light fading
in through the patio door hits the side of Nick's face just right and throws
his mouth into sharp relief. Sharp, glossy, wet relief.
The world shifts, rearranges
itself with a cracking noise Kelly hears deep in the sudden ache in his
gut. He moves, tears himself away, escaping to the relative safety of his
back against the hard front of the couch before the tremors hit.
"Kelly?" Nick's face pushes
into his confusion, shiny red lips sending him further askew. Shaking his
head clears nothing. Nick frowns. "That bad, huh?"
Another shake. "No, no."
Short, quiet laugh. Sounds like wry. "You look great." Nick snorts the snort
of the yeah, right. Kelly chokes out another chuckle. "No, really, Nick.
It's... you win. Dave's got nothing on you, trust me."
Instead of preening or
arguing, Nick plops himself in Kelly's lap. Kelly jerks, knocks his elbow
on the wood strip running down the front of the arm of the couch. "What
- what are you doing?" he asks as Nick fishes the lipstick out from where
it rolled when Kelly dropped it.
"I want to see how I look,"
Nick replies calmly, twisting the lipstick up farther. It glistens in his
hand, echoing the sheen on his mouth.
Kelly pulls his chin back
as far as he can. "There's this thing. Called a mirror?"
"Nah." Nick smiles the
smile of the truly evil. "That's what you're for." He echoes Kelly's earlier
move and suddenly, Kelly's staring at the ceiling while Nick paints his
lips. Heavy and thick like the air around them. Cool like his blood isn't.
He wishes Nick would hurry up and get the fuck off him. His elbow echoes a
faint shadow of the pain in his knee, but it's a welcome distraction now.
Too many weighty seconds
of Nick's fingers rubbing around the corners of his mouth later, he's apparently
satisfied with the results. Kelly sits up, doesn't quite meet his eyes.
He can see the puzzlement on Nick's face anyway. "Huh. It'll never be the
next big Schultz thing, but we're not hideous. What was your problem?"
The sun's sinking rapidly;
light bounces off the metal on the slide for the pool and Kelly winces,
turns his head away from the wall of glass behind Nick. Nicky's quiet "Oh"
makes him brave the glare, and his breath claws its way out of his lungs
when he sees his own earlier realization reflected back at him. "Wow."
Nick's voice is low, wondering,
but there's no cringing in it. Nothing like the rioting panic Kelly's feeling
in Nicky's face, oh no. Which is actually scarier than if there had been.
"It was a stupid idea." He wants to move, get up, find a washcloth. Find
some sanity.
Nick brushes all coherent
thought away with a slow swipe of his thumb along the bottom of Kelly's
lower lip. "No," he says slowly, sending Kelly's heart racing. "You were
right." His fingers hook under Kelly's chin, push Kelly's head up and back
again until Kelly has to close his eyes against the sun. "Much, much better
than Dave."
There's quiet, and waiting.
Kelly's afraid to look, and he really, really wants to go home now. Go
home and get drunk and pass out in a thick, forgetful cloud of not-thinkingness.
Nick's weight shifts and lightens and Kelly's heart goes with it, because
yes, logic returns and he's so out of here, but the pressure on his lap
is quickly replaced by pressure on his lips and huh. That's new and not and
more than a little frightening, all rolled up into one slipping, sliding kiss.
Kiss.
Shit.
Kiss.
Kelly can't even deny
that it's a good one. Nick's fingers are warm and strong, braced at his
chin and the edge of his jaw, a couple of them doing their own thing in
the back, stroking goosebumps down Kelly's neck. Kelly's own hands are playing
good and digging tufts out of the carpet rather than brave familiar territory
in new and unfamiliar waves, but his mouth clearly has a mind of its own.
One that it's lost completely, obviously, since the kissing is not only continuing,
but progressing, until his hands say the fuck with it and join the mutiny
in one long, hot slide up Nicky's arms to shoulders that fill the curves
of Kelly's palms perfectly, and damn.
These shirts were a good
idea after all.
-End
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