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Title: Zen
Author: heartofslash
Fandom: post-Black Hawk Down
Pairing: Hoot/Sanderson
Rating: Adult
Disclaimer: Idle speculation about composite characters waaay after the events of the movie. Not the real deal.
Note: When your Hoot-muse starts talkin', you'd best listen.
Dedication: ennorwen is a wonderful woman who sends me amazing beautiful gifts and writes great fic and takes part in fandom on so many different levels. I'm in awe. And she's got this thing for Sanderson. Got it bad. So does Hoot. So, in honor of her love of Sanderson, and all things Bill Fichtner, here is Hoot doing what Hoot does, and Sanderson being who Sanderson is.
Zen
Hoot couldn't tell what time it was. It was dark, but that could mean anything – late night, early morning, curtains pulled tight – or he could still be asleep. In addition, he could be almost anywhere. He was used to waking up like that, so it didn't worry him.
He was naked, so he was reasonably sure he wasn't in a war zone. (He never got totally naked in war zones. Too risky.) His lack of clothing and gear was reassuring.
He groped in the dark for his watch. It was on a bedside table, walnut with a curved edge and a half-inch nick in the middle of the front. He couldn't tell it was walnut in the dark, but he recognized the nick, so he knew it was walnut because it was the table on the left side of the bed in the bedroom above the D-Tech offices. So he knew we was at home.
Naked.
And he felt good.
Not good. Better than good. Great. He felt fucking great all over. His whole body was humming, but not in a tense, anticipatory manner. It was humming contentedly. Calmly. Satisfied. But not sluggish. Every muscle was supple, every nerve alert. Even his skin felt great, and Hoot was not in the habit of noticing how his skin felt, let alone noticing when it felt great, except to check for wounds or infections that might have impact negatively on his combat effectiveness.
Hoot was combat effective. To the maximum.
There had to be a reason for that.
He was surprised he did not immediately know the reason, since every single part of him appeared to be operating at optimal capacity. Shouldn't he know WHY he felt so fucking great? So alive. So in tune with himself and his surroundings that he could have told you that his heart was beating at a steady 73 beats per minute and his temperature was half a degree higher than normal, but it always was when he first woke up, so that didn't count as exceptional.
Hoot thought about it further, and was not surprised to find that his brain felt just as great as the rest of him, in spite of his inability to pinpoint the source of the greatness. Sharp, but not jagged. Clear, but still solid. He hated it when his brain was so clear it went sort of vaporous and disappeared. Then he was acting without thought at all – everything was instinct and training. All instinct, really, since effective training was, in essence, manufactured instinct. It was an in-the-moment state that could easily be mistaken for Zen, but there wasn't anything Zen about it.
This was more like Zen. This was being at one with himself and the universe. He was so fucking here, here almost didn't exist. Almost. That was why it was like Zen and not actual Zen. There was something missing, something… to make it absolutely perfect. But it wasn't an emptiness, an ache, a glaringly obvious thing. He wasn't hungry, he wasn't tired, he wasn't injured, there wasn't any one thing standing out. He was just a hairsbreadth shy of being a state of total not-wanting. The absence of desire. Perfection.
That didn't make any sense. That was how he knew it was a Zen thing. Zen had never, ever made any sense to Hoot. Sanderson said that was what made Hoot Zen. But he probably just said that to fuck with Hoot's mind. Right now, his mind that was so unfucked that thinking about Zen didn't even fuck it up.
WHY??
There were no drugs involved, Hoot could tell that. This was natural.
Not that some drugs weren't natural, and not that he was opposed to drugs on moral grounds. He wasn't even opposed to them on health grounds, although most of them were bad for you in one way or another, but no worse than a lot of the other things Hoot often did. He didn't hold anything in particular against drugs, he just didn't like it when he'd had to take them. If his perceptions were going to be altered and his body functions skewed, he wanted it to be of his own free will and with his full consent and knowledge. He'd taken them when ordered or when it was vital to the mission – to keep awake, keep active, stay calm, keep fighting, running, functioning beyond natural parameters. That was part of the job. He hadn't enjoyed it.
Supplements, too. He'd taken those as ordered. Fuck, if he didn't like stimulants, he hated` the supplements. Toxic, that's what they were.
Maybe he'd finally been out of it long enough for all traces of drugs and supplements to be flushed from his body at the cellular level. Maybe this was what it was like to be creatine-free once and for all.
No. It wouldn't have taken so long.
He was clear-minded and alert because he'd just woken – naturally and non-traumatically – from a deep and pure sleep. Restful, rejuvenating and dreamless. No dreams. No nightmares. No danger lurking in every shadow, no mazes of back alleys buildings exploding roads turning into quicksand people reaching for him aiming at him bodies imploding shrapnel embedding. No dreams, just sleep. Rested.
He never woke fully rested after dreaming those dreams You're not rested after a night of constant tension.
Hoot had not mentioned the dreams to anyone. Not even to...
Jeff Sanderson lay beside him, one arm bent over his head, the other laying with his hand spread flat across his flat stomach. It was a ridiculously flat stomach. Sanderson was a decade older than Hoot but in better shape than most a decade younger. Strong, lean, toned. Toned like a fighter.
Sanderson didn't look like he went to the gym, but he did. He went to a boxing gym at least once a week, twice if he could, more if he had time.
Boxers have the best bodies.
When you box, everything has to be prime, everything in balance. Boxers have to be fast, but strong. Strong, but flexible. Flexible but tough. Tough, but graceful. And then there's endurance.
Endurance was the hardest part of any training. Anyone could take hardship for a little while. Short bursts. A minute under water. One punch. But long term, four minutes, a dozen punches, with kicks thrown in and no time to rest in between… okay, maybe kickboxers had the best bodies. Either way, endurance was the real test, especially for men.
Hoot hadn't had much work experience with women, but there was this one mission, this one woman, a big blonde from Wisconsin. Kelly, that was her name. She'd laughed a lot. Climbing up a sheer rock face after running ten miles, she'd shouted to him over the rain, "This is nothing! Try being in labour for thirty-one hours!" Hoot still sent a card to Kelly's daughter every year, on the anniversary of the mission. All the endurance in the world won't keep you alive after an explosion like that.
That was the kind of memory that led to the tense dreams. He'd watched that building go up, knowing a full third of the team was inside, undercover, unable to say or do anything about it without exposing the other two thirds to the same fate or worse.
It was miracle he and Sanderson were not basket cases after some of the fucked up shit they'd seen and done.
It wasn't only death. It was the inequality of it all, the unfairness. How many times had they gone into a situation with superior firepower, superior technology, wasting people who hadn't even seen it coming? And just as many times, sometimes at the same time, they'd gone in under-equipped, or ill-equipped, vastly outnumbered, or undercover in a sea of hostile forces, or with the wrong fucking maps, bad intel, just plain stupid instructions, facing insurmountable odds. Stupid odds. The kinds of odds no sane man would take.
But Sanderson was lying next to him, whole and healthy. And Hoot felt better than he'd felt in months, maybe years, so alive so alert, so in tune with everything around him, even his skin – he could have given you an accurate thread count of the sheet that was draped over his bare hip.
Of course he was naked. He was in bed with Sanderson.
Why was he in bed with Sanderson and still thinking of him as Sanderson?
It wasn't like Hoot ever called Sanderson Sanderson to his face. He called him Jeff. But he never called him Jeff to anyone else. Even when he was talking to people who knew them both, People who called Sanderson Jeff, Hoot called Sanderson Sanderson. Like that night Steele had surprised them, but not totally surprised them – Sanderson had been half-expecting Steele to return - and Steel had asked Hoot what he was doing when they were both in the kitchen and Hoot had said, "Sanderson needs protein after that kind of exertion," and he did – Sanderson was a lean man with a relatively fast metabolism. After strenuous activity like that – and what could be more strenuous than taking on both Hoot and Steele at the some time? – maybe he didn't need protein stat, but it would sure as hell help him recover quickly enough to be able to do it all again in the morning.
Hoot liked sex in the mornings.
Steel had given him a funny look and said "Jeff does like his midnight snacks."
Hoot could recall the jolt in his gut – something he'd been able to, accurately he thought, identify as jealousy.
Jealous that Steele knew that about Sanderson.
But now, with his clear mind and preternatural alertness, Hoot wondered if he might be jealous of Steele not over anything that had to do with Sanderson, but jealous that Steele, who was still in the army, was able to refer to men by their first names so easily, and Hoot, who was not only out of the army but had not been in the regular army for some time – he'd been Delta, man! they barely even used ranks – and Hoot thought of everyone, not just Sanderson, by their last name, and he himself was the only exception to that rule, except for Griz, but Griz had been the exception to a lot of things.
It wasn't just that everyone else called him Hoot. He thought of himself as Hoot. He would answer to Gibson, out of habit, but when he met someone else named Gibson he never thought there was any connection between them. It was just a word, a name. He wasn't really Gibson. He was someone named Gibson. He was Hoot.
His Uncle Matty had first called him Hoot. He had been too young back then to understand anything about Uncle Matty, who only visited once or twice a year, and about whom his mother had always got a little teary-eyed.
Uncle Matty had taught him that boxers have the best bodies. At the time, young Hoot had thought he was talking about old black-and-white movies and the newsreels with the boxers who always had beautiful, glamorous women hanging all over them. No matter how beat up a boxer got, some beautiful dame was always in love with him. Uncle Matty called them dames. Uncle Matty said he liked dames, and they liked him too, and Hoot figured the dames liked the boxers for their great bodies, like Uncle Matty said. It hadn't occurred to him until much later that it was Uncle Matty who had liked the boxers' bodies.
Sanderson went to the boxing gym at least once a week. Hoot had never gone with him. Now, looking at the clean lines of Sanderson's body, growing sharper as the sky began to lighten a bit at the edges, Hoot thought maybe he would. He would like to see Sanderson in the gym, going at the heavy bag, fists pounding, muscles pumping, hands taped. He would enjoy watching him jab, spar, fake, weave. Jump rope. He'd seen Sanderson jump rope a few times. Sanderson was fast, blindingly fast.
Hoot did not enjoy jumping rope. He wasn't bad at it, but it wasn't comfortable. In spite of his considerable fitness, Hoot felt clumsy with a jump rope.
But he could outrun Sanderson.
Could he outbox him?
Not a chance. He'd never want to hit Sanderson in the face.
Besides, Sanderson wouldn't really want to box Hoot. He wasn't a serious fighter. He didn't devote his whole life to it. No real bouts. It was fitness. It was a release. He said it got his blood circulating and he liked the energy in the gym.
It was a local gym, not one of those chain fitness centers. Old school. Dusty in the corners, not enough life. "Like you imagine a boxing gym from a movie," Sanderson had told him once. "Upstairs from an auto repair shop."
Hoot wanted to see Sanderson in that environment – rangy and sweaty, joking with some punch drunk old guy in the corner, showing some cocky young guy that age doesn't mean as much as he'd hoped. Hoot wanted to see Sanderson after an hour of jumping rope and sit ups and heavy bag work, a couple of sparring sessions, taking off his soaked shirt, grabbing a bottle of water and tilting his head back, drinking, letting the water flow over his flushed face and trail down his shoulder and naked chest…
"Jeff!"
Sanderson sat up, blinked twice, reached for his weapon beside his bed.
Sanderson did not have a weapon beside his bed. They didn't need weapons beside the bed anymore. His hand hit the top of a digital clock, which lit up and bathed him in bluish light. "What?" He turned to Hoot with one hand out, ready to check for wounds.
"I'm okay," Hoot said. "I'm great, actually."
Sanderson gave him one long look that went from the two inches of thick dark hair curling over Hoot's scalp down to where the sheet crossed his hip, revealing the top of his pubic hair.
"I know," Sanderson said, with enough of a tease in his voice to make Hoot know why he had woken up feeling so fucking great all over.
Full body massage. Oh, yeah. Sanderson's hands on him, pummeling him, sorting out whatever ailed him with the same precision and accuracy he used when he cleaned his weapon or arranged the tools on his workbench. His eyes were not unlike his eyes when he surveilled a target. Acute.
That was a good word for Sanderson.
Acute.
"Why do I think of you as Sanderson?" Hoot blurted out. Maybe his brain was not as clear as he'd believed it to be.
"That's my name," Sanderson answered.
"Sure, but you don't think of me as Gibson, do you?"
"No one thinks of you as Gibson, except for maybe some guy in payroll who used to sign your checks. You're Hoot."
"But why?… Do I need to distance myself or something?" That could have been it.
"You mean by calling me by my last name?"
"I don't call you Sanderson. I call you Jeff. I think of you as Sanderson."
"It's a military thing, Hoot. That's what we all do. Don't worry. You'll get over it in another decade or so."
"It's weird."
"No, it's habit. That's what the military is all about. Habit. You know that."
That was Sanderson. So practical. He never questioned things unless there was a reason to do so. And he usually knew when it was worth questioning.
"Do you think of anyone you ever served with by their first name?" Sanderson asked.
"Griz," Hoot said.
"That was a nickname, not a first name. Even now, do you think of Schmid, or do you think of Kurt?"
"Schmid," Hoot said.
"Me too. Do you think of Grimes or do you think of…" Sanderson's voice trailed off.
"Grimes," Hoot said decisively.
"So what's the big deal?"
"I don't sleep with Grimes."
"You better not. McKnight would kill you."
"And Grimes doesn't count anyway."
"Why not?"
Hoot tried to think of why not. Grimes had been a soldier. He was like any other guy. Except he wasn't. "Because you can't call him John. McKnight would kill you."
"Good point. Forget about Grimes. What about McKnight?"
Hoot laughed. "Can you think of McKnight as anything but McKnight?"
"Hell, no. I bet Grimes doesn’t either."
Hoot did not want to even think about what Grimes thought about McKnight. It was hard enough not to get hard around Grimes as it was.
"Shit, Hoot, what the hell is this about?"
Hoot couldn't remember. "I don't know. I woke up and I was seeing everything so clearly, but now I'm not so sure. I was just lying here thinking."
"About what?"
"Nothing. Stuff. You. I think you're beautiful."
"And I think I went overboard with the blowjob. I should have left it at the massage."
"No!" Hoot had enjoyed the blowjob very much.
Sanderson lay down again. "Go back to sleep, Hoot."
"I'm not tired."
Sanderson rolled on his side, away from Hoot, long, lean, strong back facing Hoot, with one leg forward and his briefs tight across his ass.
"I'm hungry," Hoot announced.
"So get a snack."
"Not that kind of hungry." Hoot grabbed Sanderson's shoulder and rolled him onto his back.
Just as he'd suspected. Sanderson was a little hard. Not all the way, but getting there. Maybe it was residual erection from earlier, when he'd had his hands all over Hoot, and his mouth in one place only.
Damn. Sanderson's mouth. Fucking lethal, that was. More lethal than his trigger finger.
Although… there were a few choice things Sanderson could do with his trigger finger that had nothing to do with conventional weapons.
Hoot's mind raced. The gentlemanly thing to do would be to repay Sanderson in kind. Hold him down, rip those shorts off him, maybe shred them (not strictly required, but it would be fun) and suck down that monster cock. It was a porn star cock. It made Hoot feel like a porn star every time he had it in his mouth. Or hand. Or ass…
A fuck would be even better, but it would not be gentlemanly.
The reason it would not be gentlemanly to demand a fuck was that it would be a lot of work on the part of Sanderson. Hoot liked hard fucking, and that was strenuous. He didn't doubt that Sanderson was up to the task, but it might be a little selfish to demand it of him this early in the morning.
"Hoot."
"What?"
"Reciprocal fire is not required."
"I was thinking more of an escalation." Hoot was actually thinking about several hours earlier, of lying on the bed with Sanderson's hands on his ass. He knew it was foolish to arbitrarily assign some sort of emotion to the action, but to him it had felt passionate. Heartfelt. Maybe a little bit possessive.
Hoot thought about someone, Sanderson, possessing his ass, or any part of him. He wasn't entirely uncomfortable with the idea, especially since for almost his entire adult life he'd been accepting of the notion that he'd been, more or less, property of the United States Army. But the army had never owned him entirely. It might have owned his bones and muscle and sinew, might have owned his mind, or at least the training and intel part of it, but it had never owned or controlled his sex drive. He may have had to curtail his sexual activities on account of the army, but he'd never stopped wanting.
He wanted. He wanted Sanderson's hands on his ass again. He wanted Sanderson's trigger finger. He wanted the whole monster porn star cock inside him, even though that was not an easy thing to do. He would have to force himself to relax and he would have to force himself not to force anything. He'd learned over the years that you can push almost every part of your body beyond its natural limits without doing lasting damage, but the temporary damage that occurs when you stretch your asshole beyond its limits takes pain and discomfort to an undignified level.
He also knew that if he did not force it, and if they used enough lube, Sanderson was more than capable of giving him the kind of hard fucking he liked. Wanted. Needed.
"Hoot, I can't fuck you."
"Oh, I think you can."
"Not now."
"I know. You're tired."
"No, I'm rested. But I've had this hard on ever since you took your clothes off last night. I wouldn't last a minute inside your ass."
Hoot thought about that.
The more he thought about it, the more he liked it.
"Really?" Hoot asked.
"Really."
"Okay," Hoot said.
"Okay what?"
"A minute. Hard and fast." Hoot reached for the lube.
"Seriously, Hoot. I put my dick in you and I'm gonna go off like a firecracker."
"Sounds romantic." Hoot squirted lube over his fingers. "Just give me a minute to grease up."
If there wasn't going to be prolonged fucking, he only needed to prepare for entry, not a long ride.
"Did you not hear me?"
"Loud and clear." Hoot twisted a couple of fingers inside himself. Then he considered the sheer size of Sanderson's cock. He added a third finger.
"Aw, fuck, Hoot."
"Now you're talking."
"Don't do that. Don't… not in front of me… you can't be… fuck! Four fingers!"
Hoot pulled his fingers out and squirted more lube onto them. "Get those shorts off, unless you want me to tear 'em into a million pieces."
The briefs hit the wall opposite the bed. Hoot slicked up Sanderson's cock, fast, not too much pressure. Utilitarianism at its finest.
Hoot got on his hands and knees. He'd always liked fucking that way. It was the animal thing. Animals have sex because they have to, not because they want to. Or maybe they did want to. How would Hoot know?
What Hoot did know was that Sanderson was behind him, looming over him, pressing against him, pressing into him, and four fingers had not, in fact, been enough, not on such short notice, but there was enough lube, so the burn wasn't enough to make him pull away. On the contrary. He pushed back. Hard. And Sanderson was all the way in, in less time than it took for Hoot's body to realize he was there, which was too late.
"Ah, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck," Sanderson said.
Hoot would have said something very similar to that had all the air not been forced out of him – not from Sanderson pushing in, but from his body clenching tight everywhere all at once, including, it would seem, around Sanderson's cock. Hoot couldn't really feel that part of himself, not with all the clenching and burning and just fucking greatness going on.
Sanderson managed to pull out and slam back in a half dozen times. Just when Hoot started to think it might actually be possible to die from getting assfucked, Sanderson slumped over him and grabbed his biceps and groaned.
Okay. That was… even worse. Sanderson's cock was pulsing inside him, with his body weight pushing it inside even more. And then Sanderson was dragging his teeth over Hoot's shoulder blade, and his thighs were shaking against the backs of Hoot's thighs. And he said, "Hoot," and Hoot said, "Jeff," and then they both crashed down onto the mattress.
And Hoot's mind wasn't clear anymore. Not clear at all. It was hazy and cloudy and swirling and opaque. It had only one vague thought in it, and that thought was that it did not matter whether he thought of the man whose cock was shoved up his ass by his first name or his last name or by no name at all, because all that mattered was that that cock was inside him and his whole body felt fucking great. And now he knew that what had been missing was considerably larger than a hair's breadth.
And for as long as that thought lasted, Hoot knew Zen.
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