Fic: Beware of Bottles

[entangled_now]

Title:  Beware of Bottles
Author: Corona
Fandom: Moonlight
Pairing: Mick/Josef
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: In no way mine or anything to do with me. I own nothing.
Summary: There were health supplements and now the room smells like France and Mick is a zebra

"This may not have been one of your better ideas," Mick is not currently feeling at his most charitable.

"She said they were health supplements," Josef says carefully, from where he's sprawled on the floor next to Mick. "Health supplements aren't generally known for their terrible mind altering qualities."

Neither of them are currently making any effort to get up.

The last time Mick tried he couldn't shake himself of the disturbing notion that he was upside down.

Being upside down while laying down is much less distressing.

Josef is taking the whole thing ridiculously well. But then that's an annoying trait where he's concerned.

Mick's the one who worries.

"How could you not know, how could you not taste that something was wrong," Mick's voice swings in and out of existence and he thinks he's talking too loud.

"You didn't!" Josef says simply.

"You're older, you're supposed to know better."

"I'm supposed to know about health supplements?" Josef is half amused and half bemused by that. He pulls a face, slithers his head sideways on the wood. Mick wants to wince, because the last time he did that things at the edge of his vision kept swinging in and out of existence. Judging by the way Josef's eyes briefly cross he's having the same problem.

"What did she take, exactly?" Mick asks carefully, because that's how he works, he asks questions, he finds things out. He's good at that.

"Health supplements." Josef has always been notoriously difficult to question though.

"That's not helpful."

"I'm not an expert on pharmaceuticals," Joseph says sensibly.

"Well I didn't smell anything and I didn't taste anything but now I can't stand upright and the walls are melting!"

"Oh thank god I thought that was just me!" Josef says on one relieved exhale.

"What are we going to do just lay here until it goes away."

"Isn't that what usually happens," Josef points out.

"Yes when you have a blood system and adrenaline and body chemistry. I have no idea how that works."

"Wow, you can actually be dull and panic at the same time, who knew!"

Which doesn't help at all.

Mick swings an arm in his general direction, then realises he's not actually as close as he first thought.

"That was weird," Josef says carefully. "Do it again."

"No," Mick says, because to be brutally honest it made his arm feel really strange.

He thinks about moving, he even gets halfway upright, but it's really just too confusing.

"If this got into the wrong hands, we could be in serious trouble," Mick says honestly.

Josef is now watching his own arm slide back and forth on the floor.

It's a worrying sort of focus. Mick can't help watching himself from his position, just out of touching distance.

He suspects Josef is doing it on purpose, and he's horribly compelled to be a witness to the insane monotony of it.

"It's like I always imagined being possessed would be like," Josef says out of nowhere.

"You imagined being possessed?"

"It was the in thing for while."

Mick is still following the random movement of Josef's arm and he thinks his eyeballs are no longer entirely under his control. The sweeps vary from quick to slow, like Josef is dragging his hand through the world, messing with it somehow. Mick doesn't like it at all.

"Could you stop that?"

Josef rolls his head all the way right.

"My arm feels very strange, like it's-" he stops, frowns.

"What?"

"Like it's trying to escape."

Mick reaches out, then makes a protesting annoyed noise and slithers across the wood until he can catch the edge of Josef's sleeve and pin his arm still.

"Oh thank you!" There's a taste of honest gratitude in the words, and Mick turns his head too fast the wrong way, making the world swirl about in colour, and black and white and then just segments of movement and stillness.

It's like being inside a television screen in the absolute worst way possible.

"Don't move your head too fast," he says carefully.

But of course Josef very rarely takes good advice, and he hates not knowing things.

"Oh that's not good, that's not good at all!" Josef decides a second later and there's absolutely no movement from Mick's right at all for a long minute.

It's definitely a blessing that motion sickness no longer applies to vampires.

"You deserved that," Mick tells him.

Josef calls him something filthy, then frowns. "What do you smell?"

The question would have been odd if he'd been human, but he takes a moment to think about it, because he's been concentrating on what he can see and whether or not he's the right way up for the past ten minutes.

"Lightening, wet paint, new shoes, money, bananas-" Mick stops. "I think my noise is broken."

"I can smell France," Josef decides, which would have been an interesting non-sequiter. But Mick trusts Josef to know what France smells like. "And my face is numb," Josef adds in a confused, annoyed tone of voice. "Why is my face numb?"

"I don't know." Mick rolls his head across the floor and it's a long, strange noise of flesh on wood and the slow drag of hair.

"Am I making an expression?"

Mick frowns.

"You're always making an expression, you'd have no face otherwise."

"No seriously am I making an expression?"

Mick decides to humour him. "What are you going for?"

"Worried with a hint of amused," Josef decides.

"No, you're doing crazy fairly well though."

"That's not funny."

"You're smiling way too wide," Mick tells him.

"I'm smiling?" Josef sounds surprised, which for some reason is the funniest thing Mick has heard for a long time, and now he's smiling as well. Smiling in a way that's probably undignified.

He's smiling right up until Josef slithers up to an elbow.

He stays there for a long quiet second.

"Is the room still upside down."

"You really don't want to know what the room's doing now," Josef says carefully.

Then he...moves, slithers one knee under him and makes an attempt at verticality.

Mick flails, snatches a handful of pants, strangely horrified by the thought of Josef wandering off upright when he can't even orient himself into a sitting position.

"Where are you going?"

Josef sways a little on his knees, glares at the room in general.

"I'm going to go see what the other side of the room is like."

Mick tightens his grip on expensive material.

"Why?"

"I don't have the faintest idea, it seems like a destination that's worth investigating."

"It's a room," Mick protests.

The word room sounds strange in his mouth, round, hollow, empty. Like other words should fit in it but don't. Like it's been carved out.

"Mick?"

A big round word.

"Mick!"

"What?"

"Stop saying room."

Which really is kind of creepy, he shuts his mouth, then checks it's shut.

Josef is moving again though and since Mick is technically still attached to his four thousand dollar suit he's kind of stuck with being dragged across the carpet. The world is going way too fast.

"How are you doing that," Mick manages, and Josef makes an amused sound that's half distress and which breaks up into helpless laughter.

"I'm going to fall," he decides.

Which he does.

Mick ends up with his face in a sleeve and his boot has come off and the floor is not half as clean as he'd like it to be.

The world gradually slows down. Though it's not quite as strange to look at as it was before. It's entirely possible that the stuff if wearing off, maybe, he'll turn his head in a while and find out.

Mick suspects that whatever the hell this stuff is it's screwing with their senses, their perception. That's not reassuring at all, in any way, but it's nice to know things.

"I'm struck by the urge to do something stupid," Josef says suddenly.

"You can't fly," Mick tells him instantly.

"Now there's a thought!"

"Josef you can't fly," Mick says again, just to make absolutely sure. He's thinking about how best to phrase it a third time, he's fairly certain it will involve the words 'ridiculous' and 'stupid' possibly also the phrase 'as aerodynamic as a sack of cats'

"A sack of cats!" Josef blurts, in some odd blend of amused and perplexed. "And also you don't know that I can't fly. I might be able to."

Mick has been thinking aloud. Either that or Josef has deviously learned how to read his mind. Which is worrying, but unlikely.

"That is the most insane form of recklessness, and at the moment I'm not even sure I could stand up straight let alone go all the way to the elevator, go downstairs and make my way out of the building in time to make sure your bloody, shattered body wasn't found by a woman walking her dog."

Josef laughs.

"I love the way you really feel the tragic little stories you make up."

"Shut up!"

"No really," Josef says through a smile that's an inch too wide. "Tell me how this one turns out?"

"You like being reckless-"

"And you like worrying about me," Josef counters. "It gives you something productive to do and stops you morbidly obsessing about your own life."

"I have no life."

"Do you mean that in the literal sense or the figurative sense?"

"Both."

"Well then it's a good job I'm reckless enough for us both," Josef lifts an arm and mimes the clinking of glasses.

Which, Mick has to admit, is true. Because if one thing is true about him it's that every reckless thing he's ever done has turned out badly, has hurt someone, and is it any wonder he's taken to stopping at the edge and looking down.

Josef sways into his field of vision, all pale face and artistic hair.

"Don't look like that," he says quietly.

"Like what?"

"Like the sky is falling down, don't you know it's not a good idea to mix depression and health supplements?"

"You're finding this amusing," Mick says in rough disbelief. "You're actually finding this amusing, god why am I even surprised?"

"It's a new experience, I like new experiences, and there are precious few of those left for me."

"That's no excuse for an insane level of recklessness, if we'd been anywhere else, with anyone else-"

"Could you stop talking," Josef says past a frown.

"Why?"

"Because your mouth is moving slower than the words are coming out."

Mick stops talking, sighs instead. A great lungful of air that he doesn't need, and when he releases it Josef laughs at him.

"You match your floor, did you know that, you're a monochrome fixture in your own apartment. All stripes of black and white like a zebra."

"I am not a zebra," Mick says testily.

Josef's watching his mouth again and if he expects it to perform magic tricks. Though even if Mick did know how to repeat the curious time lapse he's not sure he wouldn't start noticing it himself. Which wouldn't be fun at all. But Josef is still watching him, eyebrow tilted like he's waiting for something.

"Would you stop that, it's creepy."

Josef shifts in one movement, all the way down and in, and Mick can't say anything anymore because his mouth is covered, and at first it isn't so much a kiss as something strange and unbearably close. Until a thumb drags over the edge of his jaw, tilting him just a fraction.

And then it's a kiss.

It's shocking enough that he opens his mouth to protest, but Josef is very quick to take advantage and there's a long moment where he doesn't do anything but take every curious push against and into his mouth.

When he's free he twists his head away, frowns at Josef from inches away.

"What are you doing?"

"Stopping your mouth from moving," Josef tells him and it's just a vibration of sound against his skin. But it isn't an answer, it isn't a real answer, not even close.

Mick think there's more, and he waits for it helplessly, waits for it because he has none himself.

Nothing even close until he knows why.

But there isn't an answer yet, or any more words. Josef trails his mouth across the edge of Mick's cheek, and Mick doesn't even know he's going to turn his head until he does.

Mick has watched Josef kiss a thousand women, and even a few men, but he's never been on the other end, he's never been one of them.

He doesn't know what this means.

He doesn't know, but he doesn't stop kissing him and the room doesn't smell like new shoes and banana's anymore. It smells like all the complicated scents that Mick trusts, and they're all Josef. It should jar, it should make everything wrong. But it doesn't, it doesn't it's easy. They slide together like they've done this before, like they'll do it again, and this time Mick opens a fraction of a second before Joseph pushes. Mick lets it go on for far too long, because it's good and it's familiar in a way that it shouldn't be.

He tips his head back, takes a breath, and it doesn't help, neither does the second.

"What are we doing," Mick manages something in the way of insistence because Josef has done more than a share of insane things since he's known him but nothing that skims quite this close to the line.

"Do you ever stop working?"

"You kissed me," Mick says like it's the craziest thing in the world, and honestly at this minute he can't think of anything crazier, and Josef is still eyeing him like his confusion is the most amusing thing ever. Like he doesn't understand the magnitude of this, or like he doesn't care, and Mick doesn't know which is worse. "We don't, we don't do this."

"You didn't protest,"

Josef's still too close and Mick's hands are folded round the curve of his waist, shifting under the fabric.

"You think this gives you an excuse," Mick says quietly. "You think tomorrow you can pretend it was a side effect and smile like it doesn't matter at all."

Half a second of expression is enough, more than enough to tell him that that is exactly what he was planning to do.

But Mick can't do that, he can't make this that simple.

"I can't-" He puts a hand under him, twists himself round.

But Josef catches him when he tries to rise, fingers curled round his wrist and the trailing edge of his shirt.

"Josef."

"It's not nothing," Josef says reluctantly, and it's clearly something he's annoyed at having to divulge. He spares him an irritated look. "If only because you're completely incapable of nothing. You like to make things complicated."

"And you like to keep things simple."

"With you there is no simple, But how about we meet somewhere in the middle hmm?"

There are fingers on the edge of his shirt, pushing it up his chest in one long slide, and Mick thinks he should say no, because he doesn't think he could deal with the fallout if this doesn't-

"Don't say no," Josef says quietly, and he sounds, god he sounds honest and everything Mick knows he should say dies in his throat.

There's nothing lazy or amused about Josef now. He's focused, intent, all push and shift on the wooden floor. Mick can hear everything, everything from every slide of fabric to the creak of floorboards underneath him to the thump of his boot shifting against the table.

His shirt is stripped over his head in one movement, flung hard enough that he doesn't see where it goes, and then there are hands on bare skin, hands that are familiar but not like this, palms sliding up his chest and pulling them together.

"Josef-" He stops, and his own hands are already pushing under the edge of Josef's shirt, picking the buttons free, pushing it up, and open before dragging it down his arms. Josef's hands slide all the way down, unbuttoning and unzipping his jeans, which is more than kissing, it's a whole lot more, and he can't help but drop his hands and catch Josef's wrists because there is so much, so far they could fall if they start this.

They've never had that sort of friendship and there's Beth-

"This isn't about anyone but us," Josef says quietly, and Mick honestly doesn't know whether the ease with which Josef reads him is a good thing or not now.

"That's more than enough," Mick tells him.

"Haven't you ever wondered?"

"Maybe we get along because we've never had sex," Mick protests

Josef's hand twists under his fingers, twists and turns and slides past the loosened waistband, under and inside and down and Mick pushes into it on reflex, pushes up, fingers digging in where they rest.

He's too hard and he thinks that gives away everything, everything. But Josef makes a noise that's surprised for the first time, hand pushing down, and that's a distraction that makes Mick gasp and sway up into him.

He shifts up to an elbow, fingers slithering into the waistband of Josef's very expensive pants and then uses them as a handhold to drag him higher, until he can catch the back of his neck and pull him down again.

"Changed your mind?" Josef asks against the edge of his mouth.

Mick kisses him to shut him up, and Josef lets him, lets him and then dares him to take more. Mick knows better than to react to that. Knows better than to let him use it. But Josef is...Josef is Josef.

Mick's fingers shift up into the short smooth weight of his hair and holds him there.

Josef smiles against his mouth, makes amused noises that somehow manage not to dig too deep. His hands are moving again, knuckles drag over Mick's hipbones and that's what nudges him back to the moment at hand. His jeans and shorts are drawn all the way down and off and go sliding across the floor of his apartment.

Mick can't help but feel that this is not only unfair but moving too fast for him to think. He thinks maybe Josef is doing that on purpose.

Josef is far more aware of the things he does than people think. He has a determination underneath the skin, something smooth and ceaseless that considers everything.

It's his common sense that sometimes seems to be broken.

"If you're afraid to be reckless then let me," Josef murmurs into his collarbone, hands clenching and releasing on the shape of Mick's waist.

"You're always reckless Josef."

There's a low laugh and Josef slides back up, smiling like the devil and Mick can't resist lifting a hand and dragging his thumb across that smile. That smile has gotten him into so much trouble, though nothing quite like this.

But it strikes him that he's always given that smile exactly what it wanted.

All Josef had to do was ask, and he's asking now.

Asking in a way that's easy enough to read.

Josef catches his wrists and pins them to the floor, completely ignoring Mick's theatrical noise of complaint.

"Stay there," he says, still amused and devious, though Mick has never had such a strange urge to touch him before.

But then Josef is sliding down, into the gap between his thighs, all half-warm hands and intentions and Mick can't quite swallow.

There's a sharp dig of nails in the back of his thigh and his leg twitches and swings sideways, curving around the breadth of Josef's shoulders and this is so very, very wrong.

So very wrong.

Josef doesn't seem to think so though. There's a tongue against the curve of his stomach trailing down and across is long wet lines, pushing and sliding in a way that's both frustrating and delicious. It's instinct that makes him take a breath and Josef takes advantage of the movement. Makes it a long wet slide that's impossibly slow, and Mick feels every inch of it.

He can't help tipping his head forward, tipping his head forward and watching, and once he does that he can't look away because it's the most obscene thing ever. It makes everything sharper, hotter and Josef, Josef knows he's watching because Josef knows everything.

He makes it dirty on purpose. Leaves Mick making short meaningless noises into the quiet of the room. His own voice shaking out of him, surprised and too loud, and maybe it isn't wrong, maybe it isn't wrong at all, and that's why it's so terrifying.

One of Mick's hands catches Josef's bare shoulder, sliding over the curve of it, nails digging into the skin occasionally, quick helpless movements that break the skin but don't seem to bother Josef.

It's not elegant, it's quick and fierce and nothing like what Mick thought it would be. Jarring against his expectations in a way that makes him groan too loud and push up when he can't help it.

He wants to say something, wants to say anything but nothing will come out and he's shivering closer and closer to the edge, thighs shifting restlessly against Josef's bare skin, hands daring to move sideways and slide through Josef's hair.

Which gets him an impossible, unbearable amount of attention, his hand clenches once and then drops, pushes at the edge of Josef's shoulder which gets him nothing but nails in his thigh and a quiet growl which curls all the way through him.

He can't hold it, he can't stop it, he gives in and lets go. One ragged shift of hips and he's groaning through his own release, and it doesn't feel wrong at all. It's hot and sharp and it hurts just a little. It's damn near perfect in a way it shouldn't be.

Mick's head falls back and hits the floor...he doesn't really feel it.

He does register the slide of bare skin up his chest, a hand pulling over the tingling edges of his hipbone.

There's a laugh against the curve of his cheek that sounds amused and smug.

Mick has nothing to offer but a chastising noise that Josef ignores in favour of sliding his thigh between Mick's bare legs.

"I think I can probably walk now, I might even be able to manage the stairs," Josef says and there's more than a flicker of enthusiasm, of possibilities, in his voice.

"I can't," Mick tells him, which might actually be true.

Josef tuts against his ear, which is very annoying. "I'll just have to mistreat you on these nice hardwood floors then."

There's a long moment of amused silence.

"Walking it is," Mick decides.