[It drags a quiet giggle out of him, and Mike's movements squish Chuck's cheeks together until he looks like a really weird and apparently long-haired fish.]
Miiiiikey... [He pinches Mike's cheeks in retaliation, laughing loudly at the weird expression he manages to set on Mike's face by just doing that. He wonders if he looks just as silly, if not more.]
Yes, Chuck--le... [The chuckle grows into a laugh, and Mike pulls lightly at Chuck's nose and cheek at the same time, then presses the skin of his cheek upwards to make another weird face.
He sticks his tongue out, making his own even worse.]
[The sound turns into a snort, and then into a chuckle, and he crosses his eyes in response (glad his hair is falling back on his head instead of covering his face as usual), exaggerating his own facial expression to match up to Mike's. Then he takes one hand from Mike's face to cover his own mouth as he laughs at the silly of it all, and at the both of them.]
[He laughs louder, crawls over the bed to his usual side while pushing Chuck's by the face - always gentle and with the familiarity of childhood friends - to lay back down again. The towel is forgotten somewhere, and he keeps snickering until he rests on his stomach on the mattress.]
[Chuck follows, laying back down where he'd been before, turned to the side so that he's facing Mike. He combs his hair away from under his cheek, shivering a little at the cold feeling they'd given him just then.
He's not even a little tired yet. But he could swear he felt the tension slip away from his shoulders, run down his arms and leave him, settling somewhere else in the room, in one of the dark corners that never matter whenever him and Mike are together.
He sighs, curling up a little because he's only wearing his boxers and a large t-shirt he took from Mike's drawer at random - he didn't even bother to steal a pair of Mike's socks along with it.]
[Mike folds and bends a little to reach low and grab the bundled blanket on the foot of the bed, pulling it up over them both. He shifts his weight for comfort and warmth, resting his head on the pillow with his arm slipping underneath it for better cushioning.
After a bit of just comfortable silence and staring, he snorts at a certain memory.] Oh, man, the time Stronghorn picked up 9Lives. How did Texas even think of that?
[Seemingly random, the memory makes Chuck look at Mike with some surprise, before it turns into a grin, and an amused voice that made it sound like he was talking and laughing at the same time.]
I think the point is he doesn't ever think. [Dumb luck, literally, made some of Texas's plans work sometimes, and under very specific conditions. And when they did, the whole thing going down always looked to them like something out of this world.]
[He doesn't need to tell Chuck that, he already knows. And he knows at times Texas can be a little inspiring in the most unusual ways.]
Yeah, it was kind of awesome. But lucky it didn't go south. Guess the reinforced body really was a good idea for Stronghorn.
[And it had been Texas's idea too (though not in those words exactly, more in the lines of making it manly, strong and hard on the outside). Go figure.]
[Mike smiles and reaches to ruffle his hair.] You and Dutch did a great job on that, bud.
[It's true. Mike's well-aware that if it weren't for their hard work in continuously making their cars stronger, faster and more efficient, there wouldn't be any Burner left. It's one of the reasons he never gets tired of thanking and complimenting them. He's just that thankful that no matter all the crazy stunts they [he] pull[s], no matter how many times their hard work ends up in a complete wreck, they're still there to build everything all up again, with even better new features.]
Yeah, we... [He smiles, glancing down with a little awkwardness to it, in spite of himself, and no false modesty either. He's well aware of his own genius, but Mike always finds an unexpected way to bring it up, to compliment him out of the blue, that more often than not leaves him at a loss for words.] We were pretty great with that too.
[He doesn't try to swat Mike's hands away, even as he scrunches his nose with a muffled whine. But after Mike's done messing with his hair, he combs it back again. He knows what it'd look like next morning if he'd let it dry like it was.]
[He lets him, relaxed, happy and oh so very comfortable. Letting his hand rest on the spot between their pillows, he sighs deeply, raises his head to turn and watch the bobblehead, which had stopped bobbing. He smiles as he rests back down, facing Chuck again.] Guess Mutt's already asleep.
[He doesn't really want to sleep though. He should, but he's still inwardly thrumming, like a car on hold.]
Figures. She's gotta be more tired than the both of us together.
[He grins at his own joke, and reaches over to pat the bobblehead one last time. It's not difficult to reach, Chuck's arms are long and he barely has to shift from his place to make it.] Good night, puppy.
[Mike can't help but let out a soft guffaw and a stream of laughter. He likes it when Chuck interacts with the bobblehead, mostly because it was something that rubbed off from Mike himself. He pushes half his weight off the mattress to nuzzle Chuck's nose, snickering.] Good night, Chuckles!
[And for old times' sake, he leans in to kiss his cheek. May as well.]
[Chuck lies back, his eyes wrinkled shut, and even though he tenses slightly, he still grins, feeling his hairs rest over the pillow, to both sides of his head. This is good, he knows it's one of the very few times Chuck truly gets to relax, to let everything else go, his brain discarding unimportant information, storing it in a box until the next crisis emerges and he has to dig through it all again, worry himself to exhaustion, until his nerve endings are numb and restless.
He tilts his head just a little, so that he can feel his own nose brushing, first, then pressing against Mike's cheek, and he breathes out any tension he had accumulated in his shoulders for that brief moment just then.] 'night, Mikey.
[Chuck's breath brushes over his ear, and Mike takes his time. He frowns, feeling, more than seeing, the skin surrounding his shoulders, down the triceps to his elbow, making the joint there itch, slowly crawl with goosebumps. It's the shirt, he thinks for a fleeting and foolish second. Something in the conditioner was tampered by Jacob's new concoctions and he was coming with some sort of reaction to it.
He knows it's not, though, because he's focused on how one of Chuck's freckles isn't a freckle but a light mole by his ear. He's never been one to fool himself. He took whatever came to him and rolled with it, even if those were well-aimed punches or...
a sudden need to hold his best friend tight against him for the entirely wrong [wrong? why wrong?] reasons.
He wants to tilt his head and nuzzle him further until his head turns, until he presses fully against him, until he nips at the earlobe that barely peeks from under Chuck's mane--
[At the motionless silence, Chuck opens his eyes. He opens his eyes, and they settle immediately on Mike's, suddenly all too aware of the distance, or lack thereof, between them. They always kept close in many ways, but this was a different kind of physical closeness, a new step in the progressive way they seemed to invade each other's personal space without even thinking about it. And Chuck knows, because he's not that naive or that oblivious, what this distance, and this pause meant. Mike's sudden approach and his breath suddenly settling against his own skin, that quiet hitch that Chuck could swear matched up with the noise his heart makes the exact moment it catches in his throat. And it stops beating - or maybe it's beating too fast, so fast he can't even tell it's still going anymore.
But he doesn't move. His breath shakes its way out of him, and his face burns like a curtain of fire rushing across his skin, but he doesn't move. Whether in a show of fear, courage or pure instinct, maybe all of them mashed together, he doesn't know, but he's there, and it's unaware and at the same time relentless the way he chooses not to move away.
[And he lingers there, breath slipping into his mouth and throat just as Chuck is breathing out, and he merely rolls his shoulders for comfort, eyes widening just slightly with the subconscious knowledge that he just swallowed something of his.
He wants to stay there, like that, for a while, watching the skin on the top of Chuck's cheeks flush, darkening the dust across his nose; the times and speed he blinks, and how his pupils suddenly widen just a little.
Mike could say that he knows Chuck's face like the back of his hand, but that would be a lie. He doesn't know the back of his hands as well: he never really looked at them closely, nor spent so much time watching them.
He tilts his head, watching him react to absolutely nothing, and everything caused by dead-on proximity, what it brings and what it takes away. Mike's trying to figure out his own reactions to that, but he doesn't stop looking, eyes drifting from the plane of his forehead to the grove of Chuck's chin, just below his lower lip.]
[Chuck settles his eyes on Mike's still, mostly because he's stuck. Like they drove to this one moment, to this exact second, and then they hit the breaks, they pressed the pause button and they can't do anything but linger their sight and their breath on the other.
He watches the wrinkles around Mike's eyes tense and expand, watches as they reveal themselves with every shift of Mike's gaze, and when it lowers to that curve in his jaw, and before Chuck can help himself, he's licking his own lips nervously, leaving them barely parted.
He feels his own body tense up again, shoulders riding up the sheets and hands clasped one over the other in an awkward hold over his chest. He doesn't dare move more than that, even though he feels the urge to, the urge to lean closer and snake his fingers around Mike's neck, bringing their breaths and their skins closer together.]
[And that doesn't escape from his gaze, he watches closely, notices how the shadows deepen when Chuck's shoulders angle higher, how his lips glisten in the dim light at the sudden dart of his tongue.
He barely bites his own, just tugging at the inner skin of his mouth as his eyelids lower.
Because Chuck doesn't seem to mind this, even if he's tensing and he's coiling in himself. Even if all of the sudden the air between them has thinned and Mike needs to remind himself to breathe a bit deeper.
The thought "I can't do this" doesn't run in his mind. It's that it doesn't that he's amazed at. So he can, and he will, as he shifts his weight onto a shoulder, reaching to where Chuck's hands are clasped, eyes wide.
"Are you having trouble breathing, too?" he silently asks.]
[His knuckles flex under Mike's touch, and Chuck feels the hairs up his arms and at the back of his neck raise and tickle, responding to something, a heat wave, or Mike's warmth spreading through touch or the mere breath that Chuck feels settling against his lips.
He inhales, quick but quiet, and holds it back, like he holds back his hands and the need he has right now to reach for arms, shoulders, for all of Mike and pull him even closer. He lets it out eventually, in one long hot shaky breath, and he can tell it's hot because it hits against Mike's mouth and chin and reflects, still between the both of them as if encased in that small space.
He doesn't even notice the corners of his own mouth twitching upwards, just barely; he drops his eyelids too, and the answer to that question is obvious in the way his chest heaves under his hands.]
[It's impossible not to reply back in the same way, in a light quirk of Mike's lips. It's almost empathic, the way they relate, the way they connect to most things, to each other. It's always been this way, ever since the first time they met, instantly clicking no matter their evident differences. His hand over Chuck's looks even darker against the paleness of his skin, and yet he finds he likes the sight of it.
It's as if he knows what Chuck is thinking. Which he doesn't, but once again, what they've wanted ends up crossing, over and over, braiding every now and then despite how far the tangent goes. He wraps his fingers over Chuck's wrist, pulls it gently, takes it to his own chest.
Mike has never been the type to think thoroughly: that was up to Chuck, most of the time. So he doesn't find it odd that he's doing something objectively random. He's just doing what his gut is telling him to and Mike really wants Chuck to touch him.]
[Most of the time is a good way to put it. Chuck finds that, whenever he's about to work it all up too much in his head, when his brain concocts the most insane outcomes and by then they're so far off the mark that he's not even sure what they're trying to accomplish anymore, it's when Mike reaches and touches him, anchors him down to reality (which is funny, because Mike's sense of 'reality' was always a little skewed and inconsequent as far as Chuck could tell) that Chuck snaps out of his unpleasant kind of reverie, and it gets him to focus on the real things, the ones that don't need thinking at all. On the fact that he'll do whatever it takes to help his friends, to help Motorcity, regardless of how terrifying those odds could be.
The next breath comes with a small hiss, and Chuck almost says Mike's name, but it dies out in the first letter. Mike wants Chuck to touch him, and it turns out to be a compromise, because touching Mike was all Chuck was thinking about ever since he could feel Mike's scent travel up his nose and glue itself against Chuck's brain, with an apparent promise to never leave.
He stretches his hand out, palm pressing over the shirt and sliding upwards just enough that the tips of his fingers are touching the hot skin exposed right over the collarbone of Mike's shirt.]
[He breathes in and the motion makes his chest rise - or drop, considering his position - following Chuck's hand. He can feel calluses on his skin, barely there but there nonetheless, and the motion of his lungs falls shorter than he intended, hitching at the end, exhaling deep right afterwards.
He lets his thumb brush his wrist once, tells him it's alright, even if his eyes are curiously observing all the little nuances in expression running across Chuck's face, even as he drops his hand back onto Chuck's chest. He's intently leaving it several centimeters lower, right at the beginning of his stomach, fingertips touching at his ribs. Right now, he's so curious about all of this, about this new proximity they've somehow broke into without knowing where they were going anyway. And it's so new to him and to Chuck that he finds himself wanting to know everything that they can draw out from this new stage, from each other.
Whatever that means. At the surface of his mind, Mike's only thinking he wants to watch and feel Chuck a little more.]
[As far as proximity goes, they'd been closer before. He'd clung tight to Mike, whether in fear or relief, and sometimes when they fell asleep together he'd wake up, arms wrapped around him, sometimes a little too tight. Something would linger back then, an itch or a tingle, but either him or Mike, whoever woke up first, would slip out of the hold before he could give himself the chance to try to scratch it out of him. And most times they were yanked awake by the alarms firing off anyway - those times he had no time to even remember that feeling.
This is different, though, but at the same time all too familiar. Mike's hand burns through the fabric of his shirt, and leaves an imprint against the skin, Chuck is sure of that. The muscles twitch and tense at the touch, and he sighs audibly, his legs shifting and the rest of his body moving only barely, half a centimeter if so much, closer to Mike's touch. He rests his other hand on Mike's other shoulder, only riding farther up, his cold fingers feeling the warmth of Mike's skin that covers the exposed neck, his thumb settling in the curve of Mike's jaw just underneath his ear.
He feels hot to the touch, Chuck realizes. Especially because, unlike his face, Chuck's hands are cold and the contrast makes it all the more noticeable. He shivers, and he looks up into Mike's eyes again, this time actually managing to murmur something. Even if coherence could be argued.] Mike...
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Miiiiikey... [He pinches Mike's cheeks in retaliation, laughing loudly at the weird expression he manages to set on Mike's face by just doing that. He wonders if he looks just as silly, if not more.]
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He sticks his tongue out, making his own even worse.]
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[The sound turns into a snort, and then into a chuckle, and he crosses his eyes in response (glad his hair is falling back on his head instead of covering his face as usual), exaggerating his own facial expression to match up to Mike's. Then he takes one hand from Mike's face to cover his own mouth as he laughs at the silly of it all, and at the both of them.]
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He's not even a little tired yet. But he could swear he felt the tension slip away from his shoulders, run down his arms and leave him, settling somewhere else in the room, in one of the dark corners that never matter whenever him and Mike are together.
He sighs, curling up a little because he's only wearing his boxers and a large t-shirt he took from Mike's drawer at random - he didn't even bother to steal a pair of Mike's socks along with it.]
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After a bit of just comfortable silence and staring, he snorts at a certain memory.] Oh, man, the time Stronghorn picked up 9Lives. How did Texas even think of that?
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I think the point is he doesn't ever think. [Dumb luck, literally, made some of Texas's plans work sometimes, and under very specific conditions. And when they did, the whole thing going down always looked to them like something out of this world.]
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[In fact it had inspired him to do that drive over Stronghorn on reverse that one time. But he won't tell that to Chuck.]
He's the type of guy who'll go with his gut, anyway.
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Yeah, it was kind of awesome. But lucky it didn't go south. Guess the reinforced body really was a good idea for Stronghorn.
[And it had been Texas's idea too (though not in those words exactly, more in the lines of making it manly, strong and hard on the outside). Go figure.]
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[It's true. Mike's well-aware that if it weren't for their hard work in continuously making their cars stronger, faster and more efficient, there wouldn't be any Burner left. It's one of the reasons he never gets tired of thanking and complimenting them. He's just that thankful that no matter all the crazy stunts they [he] pull[s], no matter how many times their hard work ends up in a complete wreck, they're still there to build everything all up again, with even better new features.]
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[He doesn't try to swat Mike's hands away, even as he scrunches his nose with a muffled whine. But after Mike's done messing with his hair, he combs it back again. He knows what it'd look like next morning if he'd let it dry like it was.]
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[He doesn't really want to sleep though. He should, but he's still inwardly thrumming, like a car on hold.]
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[He grins at his own joke, and reaches over to pat the bobblehead one last time. It's not difficult to reach, Chuck's arms are long and he barely has to shift from his place to make it.] Good night, puppy.
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[And for old times' sake, he leans in to kiss his cheek. May as well.]
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He tilts his head just a little, so that he can feel his own nose brushing, first, then pressing against Mike's cheek, and he breathes out any tension he had accumulated in his shoulders for that brief moment just then.] 'night, Mikey.
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He knows it's not, though, because he's focused on how one of Chuck's freckles isn't a freckle but a light mole by his ear. He's never been one to fool himself. He took whatever came to him and rolled with it, even if those were well-aimed punches or...
a sudden need to hold his best friend tight against him for the entirely wrong [wrong? why wrong?] reasons.
He wants to tilt his head and nuzzle him further until his head turns, until he presses fully against him, until he nips at the earlobe that barely peeks from under Chuck's mane--
He takes a deep, slow and silent breath.]
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But he doesn't move. His breath shakes its way out of him, and his face burns like a curtain of fire rushing across his skin, but he doesn't move. Whether in a show of fear, courage or pure instinct, maybe all of them mashed together, he doesn't know, but he's there, and it's unaware and at the same time relentless the way he chooses not to move away.
And he waits.]
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He wants to stay there, like that, for a while, watching the skin on the top of Chuck's cheeks flush, darkening the dust across his nose; the times and speed he blinks, and how his pupils suddenly widen just a little.
Mike could say that he knows Chuck's face like the back of his hand, but that would be a lie. He doesn't know the back of his hands as well: he never really looked at them closely, nor spent so much time watching them.
He tilts his head, watching him react to absolutely nothing, and everything caused by dead-on proximity, what it brings and what it takes away. Mike's trying to figure out his own reactions to that, but he doesn't stop looking, eyes drifting from the plane of his forehead to the grove of Chuck's chin, just below his lower lip.]
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He watches the wrinkles around Mike's eyes tense and expand, watches as they reveal themselves with every shift of Mike's gaze, and when it lowers to that curve in his jaw, and before Chuck can help himself, he's licking his own lips nervously, leaving them barely parted.
He feels his own body tense up again, shoulders riding up the sheets and hands clasped one over the other in an awkward hold over his chest. He doesn't dare move more than that, even though he feels the urge to, the urge to lean closer and snake his fingers around Mike's neck, bringing their breaths and their skins closer together.]
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He barely bites his own, just tugging at the inner skin of his mouth as his eyelids lower.
Because Chuck doesn't seem to mind this, even if he's tensing and he's coiling in himself. Even if all of the sudden the air between them has thinned and Mike needs to remind himself to breathe a bit deeper.
The thought "I can't do this" doesn't run in his mind. It's that it doesn't that he's amazed at. So he can, and he will, as he shifts his weight onto a shoulder, reaching to where Chuck's hands are clasped, eyes wide.
"Are you having trouble breathing, too?" he silently asks.]
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He inhales, quick but quiet, and holds it back, like he holds back his hands and the need he has right now to reach for arms, shoulders, for all of Mike and pull him even closer. He lets it out eventually, in one long hot shaky breath, and he can tell it's hot because it hits against Mike's mouth and chin and reflects, still between the both of them as if encased in that small space.
He doesn't even notice the corners of his own mouth twitching upwards, just barely; he drops his eyelids too, and the answer to that question is obvious in the way his chest heaves under his hands.]
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It's as if he knows what Chuck is thinking. Which he doesn't, but once again, what they've wanted ends up crossing, over and over, braiding every now and then despite how far the tangent goes. He wraps his fingers over Chuck's wrist, pulls it gently, takes it to his own chest.
Mike has never been the type to think thoroughly: that was up to Chuck, most of the time. So he doesn't find it odd that he's doing something objectively random. He's just doing what his gut is telling him to and Mike really wants Chuck to touch him.]
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The next breath comes with a small hiss, and Chuck almost says Mike's name, but it dies out in the first letter. Mike wants Chuck to touch him, and it turns out to be a compromise, because touching Mike was all Chuck was thinking about ever since he could feel Mike's scent travel up his nose and glue itself against Chuck's brain, with an apparent promise to never leave.
He stretches his hand out, palm pressing over the shirt and sliding upwards just enough that the tips of his fingers are touching the hot skin exposed right over the collarbone of Mike's shirt.]
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He lets his thumb brush his wrist once, tells him it's alright, even if his eyes are curiously observing all the little nuances in expression running across Chuck's face, even as he drops his hand back onto Chuck's chest. He's intently leaving it several centimeters lower, right at the beginning of his stomach, fingertips touching at his ribs. Right now, he's so curious about all of this, about this new proximity they've somehow broke into without knowing where they were going anyway. And it's so new to him and to Chuck that he finds himself wanting to know everything that they can draw out from this new stage, from each other.
Whatever that means. At the surface of his mind, Mike's only thinking he wants to watch and feel Chuck a little more.]
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This is different, though, but at the same time all too familiar. Mike's hand burns through the fabric of his shirt, and leaves an imprint against the skin, Chuck is sure of that. The muscles twitch and tense at the touch, and he sighs audibly, his legs shifting and the rest of his body moving only barely, half a centimeter if so much, closer to Mike's touch. He rests his other hand on Mike's other shoulder, only riding farther up, his cold fingers feeling the warmth of Mike's skin that covers the exposed neck, his thumb settling in the curve of Mike's jaw just underneath his ear.
He feels hot to the touch, Chuck realizes. Especially because, unlike his face, Chuck's hands are cold and the contrast makes it all the more noticeable. He shivers, and he looks up into Mike's eyes again, this time actually managing to murmur something. Even if coherence could be argued.] Mike...
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