Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/ works/445756. Rating: Explicit Archive Warning: Underage Category: F/M Fandom: Teen_Wolf_(TV) Relationship: Chris_Argent/Lydia_Martin Character: Lydia_Martin, Chris_Argent Additional Tags: Age_Difference, Plot_What_Plot, Knifeplay, Bondage Stats: Published: 2012-06-27 Words: 4129 ****** moments to know who you are ****** by summerstorm Summary "Do you feel in control now?" Notes I am aware this is a bit of a stretch for the characters/doesn't mesh with canon all that well. It is largely self-indulgent porn, and I am okay with that. Also, I didn't address the whole married issue, so you can make up your own mind about whether this is canon-compliant or AU in that regard. Anyway, if you want to blame someone, blame Jordan. I wrote this for a prompt she gave me. "So this is what hunters do, isn't it?" Lydia turns the key over in her hand, then lifts it up to the light, narrowing her eyes before sliding it into her back pocket. "Did I get it right? It's all in the details, so did I get those right?" Her voice is level, bordering on sharp, but there's a part of her that means these questions: she has all the equipment she could ever want, however old most of it is, but no experience using it and no clue how it should look. Chris—she's making a point; she can't call him Mr. Argent if she's making a point, plus that ship kind of sailed a while back—pulls briefly on the cuffs that are keeping him upright against the wall, and raises his eyebrows. "I honestly couldn't tell you. I don't like to drag things out." "Really?" she asks, the word devoid of inflection. "You've never tied someone up?" "Never said that," he says sharply. There's not much there for her to use, so she goes on with her original line of thought: "Never interrogated anyone? Tortured them to get information?" It's not a very pleasant thought, once it comes out, but she does her best to keep her face blank. No weakness. "Not without good reason," he says. His tone is on the edge of self-righteous, but falls short off the mark; it lands on matter-of-fact, but when he blinks his eyes stay closed a second too long. Lydia guesses at—not regret, but some kind of resigned shame. Debasement. She wonders if she should ask him to act scared, like she might actually hurt him; it must be harder to keep on at something when faced with actual terror. If she were in this position, though—she can't think of a single person she could conceivably stand before like this who hasn't been around a while. Stoicism seems to run in the job. Besides, she hasn't hurt him yet. She hasn't decided if she's going to; she hasn't made up her mind on whether he'd put up with it or rip the cuffs off the wall. The hold has been deliberately loosened, will break with a hard enough tug. It's the visual that matters. "You know, Allison can take care of herself," she says. "She's a lot better at this stuff than I am." He frowns, the edges of his mouth wrinkling. "Can we not bring my daughter into this?" "Okay," Lydia mouths, pressing her lips together. She's still feeling her way around him, figuring out how far she can push. If this were real, it probably wouldn't matter, but she doesn't want him to regret saying yes to being her test subject. There are always limits, anyway. Self-control is also worth practicing. Take two. "Do you know who I am?" She cocks her hips, eyes hard. "Do you know what I am?" "Do you know what you are?" he asks, an eyebrow going up. The truth is—the truth is she doesn't, and he knows that, and she doesn't know how to figure it out. She was bitten by a wolf, but she didn't heal; she blacked out, but she doesn't remember anything; and nothing seems different about her. Not even on full moons. (He's tried to help her—called a truce of sorts with Allison when he realized Lydia wasn't going to hurt anyone. Not deliberately, anyway, because she didn't even know she could. All at arm's length, of course, giving Allison things to try, skills to test, until Lydia got tired of being treated like a test subject, cornered him in his study and said, "I have a better idea." He turned her around by the shoulders and said, "Maybe when we've exhausted everything else," that way people say things when they mean never.) "What if I'd been lying? What if I knew exactly what that bite made me and I've been playing you all? I know this is not how you'd like to find out," she says, smiling sweetly. That strikes a nerve; he straightens up, clears his throat. It's not much, but it's genuine. At least the baseline is. "Not like we're getting anywhere any other way," he says, "but it wouldn't be ideal, no." The thing is, she may not be anything. She may just be Lydia, with a strange medical record and some confusing hallucinations to her name. And if she's just Lydia, she has no secret weapon; she has her human body, her brain, and the flip side of the reason anyone would go after her: the fear of the unknown. ("I hear people lose their filter during sex," she said a few days after the first time she threw the idea out there. No physical intimidation, no contact, just a statement from across the door. He raised his eyebrows and said, "Our biggest roadblock here isn't your filter," but it wasn't as determined as it had been the first time, and he still let her in, and it was—encouraging, in a way, because Lydia wasn't just saying these things. She definitely wasn't saying them to mess with him. Allison was too nice to go for the whole let's-cause-my-friend-a-panic-attack- and-see-if-anything-happens thing, and too involved with Scott to take Lydia's suggestion that they speed up her heartbeat in more pleasant ways seriously. Not that Lydia had brought it up, but she'd given it some thought and she'd concluded three things: she was more willing to stretch Allison's parents' relationship than Allison's, distracting Mr. Argent would give Allison extra leeway to go sneak around and be with Scott, and if it was getting a raise out of Lydia they were going for with this, well, Mr. Argent didn't even have to try. She'd get through to him.) Lydia takes a walk around the room, contemplating her options. She can't do much to him—she can point guns at him, and tasers and shit, but she can't actually shoot. She doesn't trust herself with a bow. The knives, though—those she can work with. The widest dagger calls out to her; it's small and thin, its handle well-worn, and the blade shines when she draws it out of the sheath, slow and careful so she won't nick herself. It's truly frustrating that she got the pain and the confusion, but no super anything, no strength, no instant healing. If she were in direct and complete control of the inner workings of her body, if she could manipulate her own biological makeup, she'd have rewarded herself for her continued survival. God knows it hasn't been easy. She passes the dagger from one hand to the other, feeling the weight, internalizing it. She rests the blade on her palm and curls her fingers around it, close enough to taste the edge of recklessness, cold as steel against her skin. Gingerly, she lets go, and steps closer to Chris. She should have taken off some of his clothes when they first got there, she thinks, wanting to touch the blade to skin that's covered by fabric, somewhere less risky or easy to see than his neck, his face. His sleeves are loose around his elbows, rolled over and aided by gravity, but she's wearing flats and she doesn't want to balance herself on her toes, doesn't want to have to reach. His heartbeat is steady when she presses her knuckles between his ribs, the point of the dagger only an inch away from the juncture of his neck and chin. He raises his face slowly, his mouth a thin line that Lydia would read as wary if she cared to read it at all, and a surge of power rises in her chest, makes her stand taller and straighter. She twists her fist, the outer edge of it losing contact with his shirt as the blade falls closer to his neck, slowly turning to a diagonal shape until her hand is hovering near his shoulder, the poor lighting of the basement reflecting off the metal. He inhales sharply when she touches the blade to the top of his neck, and she smiles up at him, a genuine, soft, warm gesture that reaches her eyes and catches her by surprise. She draws the blade a little lower. She blinks as her lips fall slightly open. "Do you feel in control now?" he asks. She breathes in deep, her chest rising with it, and brushes the edge of the dagger along the side of his jaw, subtle, careful, with calmness that feels close to snapping. She moves her hand away, and the dagger with it. "Maybe," she says quietly. Her arm falls until her hand's holding the dagger next to her hip, her fingers resting against denim. She takes a step closer, feeling his knees knock against the top of hers, and lets the dagger slide parallel to his thigh until the point makes a dent in the wall. "What if I drop it?" "I don't think that's a good idea," he says. "It would be kind of psycho. That's scary. Not knowing what someone may come out with." He laughs. "It's not worth it if I kick it and then kick you," he says, and she narrows her eyes at him. It's not a glare. Okay, it's a little bit of a glare. "That's why you immobilize the feet. Among other reasons." She shakes her head dismissively and lays her right hand on his stomach, stepping her left foot between his to shield her leg. "I'm going to drop it, and you're going to kick it away," she says. His brows knit together, and she turns her wrist so the blade is pointing away from him. "Okay," he says. "But it will be loud, and it will throw you off." That's the point; she's feeling careless. Still, she rubs her fingers over the handle, thinks it over for a second, and turns around. She slides the blade into the sheath and hangs it back where she found it, between a crooked knife and a sword. She grabs the handle of the sword for a second, lifts it enough to feel its weight. This she would probably drop in the middle of a fight, and it wouldn't be on purpose. She lets it down and makes her way back to him, stepping into the same position she was standing in before, one hand over his ribs, one resting on her own waist. "I return to you, weaponless," she says. "Deceptively weaponless," he corrects. She shrugs. "It's open to interpretation." Her fingers tighten around his shirt, dragging it down, and she feels her lips stick out into a thoughtful pout. It's not only strength and intelligence and the promise of pain that makes a person powerful. There is something else she knows exactly how to use to her advantage, and would under the right circumstances. If the scene she's playing out here were real, these wouldn't be, but they've barely even attempted roleplay, so she feels perfectly comfortable going up on her tiptoes and pressing her lips to his exposed neck, light and brief, just enough to leave a trace of lipstick and exhale over his warm skin. "No," he says, and she draws away. "That's not what we're doing here." "Isn't it? Because there's little that makes me feel more in control than this." He shakes his head a little, sighing. "That's not what I mean." "Oh, you mean—" She tilts her head and curls her thumbs around the waistband of his jeans. The feel of skin under her fingertips makes everything instantly better. "That's not true." For a while, he doesn't say anything, just stays where he is while she hangs off his jeans, letting her nails scrape along the dip of his hipbones, feeling the muscle under her touch shift as he breathes. "It could be," he says eventually, already a little resigned. "Sure," she says, rolling her eyes. "We've had sex three times now." "Two," he corrects, but he's wrong. It's been three. The first time only Lydia got an orgasm out of the deal, but it was his hand up her skirt, his fingers under the cotton of her underwear. It was no accident. It certainly wasn't discardable. "Three," she repeats. "And if once, according to you, is a mistake, and twice is a relapse, and three times is a pattern—what would four times be?" He breathes in sharp. It's the most cornered he's sounded since they started. "That," he begins, speaking slowly, reluctantly, "would be a bad habit." "How bad?" she asks. The buttons of his shirt come undone so easily, bottom to top. She stops halfway to splay her hand over his stomach, and traces the line down to the button of his jeans with a manicured nail. His lids drop for a second. When he looks at her again, he says, "Not good." "But secretly really good," she says, and opens his fly. "Wouldn't it?" Her hand fits easily into the open V of the zipper, and she looks straight at him as she rubs his dick through his underwear, feeling it harden against her palm. "Not much of a secret." His voice sounds strained already, but his tone is noncommittal. She shrugs an elbow. "Guess not." She draws her hand out of his pants and finishes unbuttoning his shirt. The position of his arms keeps it mostly closed, so she makes a point of tugging it off his shoulders until the fabric instinctively falls open. "Much better," she says, her hands above his hips. "What are you planning?" he asks. It's a much more superfluous question than she's used to from him, but then, she's used to people blabbering inanity when she's this close to them, and it only gets worse when they're this naked. "I'm not planning anything," she says, "I'm in control," and drops to her knees. She's careful to hit the floor as painlessly and quietly as possible, among other reasons because she loves to hear the reaction, the stunned gasp or sudden curse, and she's never had the pleasure of hearing Chris Argent's. If she hadn't been listening for it, she would've missed the sharp intake of breath; if she hadn't held onto him as she went down, she would have missed the slight shake of his knees. When he says her name, it sounds like there's something else on his mind, but all she hears next is the back of his head making contact with the wall. It's a message, in its own way, as is the way his hips jerk when she curls her fingers around both his jeans and his underwear and drags it all down to just above his knees. She smiles up at him, and his face remains blank except for the parted lips and the hot shine in his eyes when he glances at her mouth. She licks her lips, for real and for show, and leans forward. "I hope this isn't what you're planning to do to everyone who messes with you," he says. She smiles angelically up at him, which makes him hide his face in his shoulder. To her surprise, her face seems to betray none of her annoyance when she asks, "So what if it is?" even if her voice fully does. She waits for him to look at her again, to meet her eyes, and when he does, she fits her mouth the head of his cock and sucks. He presses his nose and lips to his shoulder again, but this time she's fairly certain he's not hiding from any perceived innocence. She has very little left, and frankly, she wouldn't be sad to see it go. She's relieved she doesn't have to keep eye contact; she would have just to see him break, but she likes to close her eyes sometimes, focus on other things—the stretch of her lips as she swallows him down, the texture along her tongue, the moment his cock hits the back of her throat and she wraps her fingers around the base to make up the difference. "Shit," he mutters, and she pulls all the way off, swirling her tongue around the crown and willing him to look down. She takes the chance to grab onto the back of his shirt for leverage, and slides her lips down again, sucking now, humming softly through her nose as her head bobs rhythmically and he starts to meet the back and forth of her mouth with his hips. Her body feels taut, intently aware of the weight on her knees, the hard tile intermittently brushing the top of her bent feet, the way her back arches and her thighs twitch every time her mouth rises off his dick. She pauses there, absently pressing the flat of her tongue to the tip, and then she sits back on her heels. He follows the motion with his hips for a moment, his cock bobbing before he snaps out of it and looks at her, closes his mouth, visibly swallows. He doesn't say anything. "I'm really enjoying this," she says, a rush of breath as she palms herself through her pants. They're convenient for kneeling on a hard surface, maybe not so much for other things. "And you're all tied up, so you can't exactly return the favor." He also can't stop her loosening her clothes, untying the strap that holds her top together, tugging her jeans down over her hips. She doesn't think he would, now, if he could—nothing's keeping him from speaking—but it's freeing just to do it without asking and without expectations, to be able to do whatever she wants. "Besides, I never had all that much patience," she says, and pushes her hand down her panties, reaching down two fingers to spread the wetness, to make herself slick. Her upper body sways with the movement and the pressure, and her breasts push against her strapless bra. She's sweating a little, drops gleaming along the top of her stomach, and she finds she couldn't care less if her bra slides or if it stays on. The smile she attempts when she looks up at him is shaky, her face too caught up in the current of pleasure flowing through her to do what she wants it do. She's not sure how she does look—unable to smile or close her mouth or keep her eyes all the way open, her lipstick smudged, hair sticking to the back of her neck—but however it is, he must like it, because he groans at the sight, and the tip of his dick gets a little wetter. She always feels powerful when she blows someone, but this is—this is electrifying, and she's not even touching him, not doing anything to him except letting him watch her. She can see every muscle in his body—his stomach, his thighs, his arms—stretch and relax, pull together and let go under a strain she's not physically putting on it. If it were her, she would've ripped the cuffs off the wall by now, but she doesn't even have to tell him not to do that. She knows he's not going to. She mutters fuck under her breath and shifts the angle of her fingers, increases the pressure. She's torn between pushing herself over the edge already—and she could do it, so quickly, so easily—and taking his cock in her mouth again, bringing him down with her. She settles on kneeling up, half kicking off her shoes as she mouths at his thigh, his hipbone, insinuating her teeth against skin until she's comfortable. She starts to move her fingers again then, close circles around her clit, and tilts her head back a little so she can get her mouth on him, licking messily up and down the length, most of her focused on getting herself off. The closer she is, the sloppier she gets, and when she pulls back again to get a look at his face, his hands are fists, his fingers fidgeting around his thumbs, and his lips are pressed tightly together. He's looking at her like he'd pick her up and fuck her if she let him out of the cuffs, and it's such a rush to open her thighs further apart and stick out her chest and look straight at him, take in the desperate want on his face as the pleasure builds and builds, until it's too much and her eyelids flutter shut, her body tensing and unraveling with her orgasm. She reaches for his shirt before she's even done, holding on to lift herself up, her thumb nail digging into his side as her nose brushes against his balls. She rubs her fingers against herself one last time before wrapping them around his cock, pulling it down so she can suck the head into her mouth while she strokes him. It's still sloppy, still messy, but enough to finish him off; she's still angling her wrist when he starts shaking, and she barely has the presence of mind to swallow, but she pulls herself together, because she has to go home after this and she doubts the plumbing in this place is functional enough for any form of thorough clean-up. The first thing she does when he stops wobbling is sit all the way back on the floor and extend her legs in front of her. Her knees are sore, but her feet got the worst of it, and it takes some kneading for her to stop feeling like she'll trip over her own toes the second she stands. She pulls up her jeans first anyway, just in case, and takes off her shirt. She lets her skin breathe for a little while before she puts it back on and ties up the belt. Somewhere above her, Chris says, "I don't want to fuck up the wall, give me the key." He sounds kind of entitled, if you ask her. "Hey," she complains weakly, and considers tossing the key up, seeing if he can catch it, but she has to get off the floor sometime. Besides, she guesses she kind of owes him for agreeing to be restrained in a creepy-ass dungeon for her benefit. She's been on this side of tying someone up enough times to know she's supposed to be reliable, sex or no sex. "You should be nicer to me," she tells him as she unlocks the cuffs. She's earned that much. "You didn't exactly let me," he says. If she were him, she'd check her wrists before getting dressed, but, well, she let Jackson tie her to his headboard once, before they realized that wasn't really their thing, and all she could think about was how annoying the rub of fabric was on her skin. That was a scarf. She has no plans to try out metal handcuffs on herself any time soon. "That is clearly not what I meant," she says. He raises his eyebrows. "And that was not what I thought I was saying yes to when I said yes to this, so let's call it even." "Fine," she says, crossing her arms over her stomach. He reaches out awkwardly, barely touching her elbow at first, then wrapping his hand around her forearm when she doesn't flinch. Those are some really ugly, really red marks on his wrists. No torn skin, but it's going to take a while for them to go back to normal. She kind of wishes she could take a closer look, check if they'll bruise. "Hey," he says, and she looks up, attempting a smile out of reflex and letting it drop when she remembers where she is—and with whom. "Did you get what you wanted? I had some suggestions I was going to give you, but then you—" "Blindsided you?" She's not sure if she feels guilty or annoyed. A little of both, judging by the standoffish sound of her voice. "—went your own way," he finishes. The corner of his mouth curls up a little. "I had to adapt. I'm not always the best at adapting." Oh. Right. He would have said something, then. It was actually good not knowing—it made her feel like it really was all in her hands. "You Argents are all kind of set in your ways, aren't you?" Her tone is curious more than anything. He doesn't dignify her musings with an answer, though; he just keeps looking at her. It's a little unnerving, but attention is—it's pleasant. She likes it. She likes that he's waiting for an answer. "Yeah," she says, smiling genuinely this time. "I got what I wanted." Please drop_by_the_archive_and_comment to let the author know if you enjoyed their work!