repost -John (and Rennet) and a sort of eventual proposal

[thatrcooper]

Okay so two people donated and asked for John and Rennet, and I just… sort of blanked under the pressure of two people I guess, so this took a while. What I am going to do it, is post this one and then the other one, and you guys can just have two stories dedicating to both/each of you. :) 

So this is for @selenographics and for Amanda on Facebook. And the next one will be too. 

Although this is really more of John’s bio than a story. 

Despite his fondness for firecrackers and small explosions, John had never thought of himself as a troublemaker. He didn’t cause mischief for the sake of maliciousness, he did it for a reason, even if other people didn’t understand why yet. Although he could admit, sometimes the reactions amused the shit out of him. The world he grew up in a lot of rigid, stupid, pointless rules and he thought someone should test them, bend them, and eventually break them, where necessary.

His teachers had noted it. He had a good mind, and ambition, but no respect, and a disregard for detentions. John was considered unusual, in a way that wasn’t welcomed in a small town.

He’d stood out in the army too, as much as anyone could. He asked questions. He read too much. He apparently insulted people by using words they didn’t know. His COs had also noted that.

He’d never understood why he was singled out, although he’d never minded much either, which might have been why. He was a B student with no money for university and no desire to go to the state college, so he’d joined the army. That wasn’t special.

John even looked unexceptional, a balding white man in a suit, approaching middle age. He had always looked that way, except for the balding part, and hated it as a teenager only to embrace it by twenty-seven. He had never been striking, or handsome, not even in his more physically impressive youth. None of which had ever stopped him from getting laid. Not after school with other scared boys, not in the army, and not afterward.

more John and Rennet after the cut.

Although a lot of that time was a blur to him now—the closeted army days and the slutty era afterward when in college on the GI Bill. He’d been free and aimless and finally found a place full of people like him. His parents had raised him to be his own person, but nonetheless had no idea what to do with him when he’d driven back for a visit and told them he liked men, he’d only ever liked men, and he didn’t see anything wrong with it.

After years in uniform, and the fucked up, ugly reality of service in the name of Reagan and US interests while seeing way too many men like him, boys, really, destroy themselves out of fear of discovery, John had not been inclined to hide that part of himself anymore.

His father had mumbled something about the Greeks. His mother had swallowed her words and told John to clean his plate. They hadn’t talked much since. John had never stopped feeling that wound, but he’d done what they had raised him to do. Been a scholar and a soldier, been his own man, never stopped learning, or fighting. In their way, he thought they were proud.

After that, John read a lot, and drank too much, and held any job that would teach him something. He lived in a shitty apartment on the border of the fairy village and old town Los Cerros, where queer humans had carved out a sort of refuge between outcast beings and elderly, usually poor, Latinos. Fairies liked him. He learned about shine, and glitter, and the dark shivering fear inside every fairy that they had no soul. They danced and fucked and stayed beautiful and hated themselves while the humans like them, the humans they loved, wasted away and died by the dozens, and then hundreds.  

In a city the size of theirs, the loss had been shattering. Across the country, the death toll reached the hundreds of thousands by the end of the decade. People scorned, feared, shunned, and left to die by the government John had risked his fucking life for. Running for office to fight for the rights of their small portion of the city had been an act of defiance. He wasn’t in the mood for any more lies, delays, or bullshit, and neither were the outcasts in his district who had voted him into office and then kept him there.

The framed photo of him in Los Cerros City Hall, as he’d been sworn into office, while wearing jeans, a sleeveless shirt, and a feather boa someone had thrown on his shoulders as he marched into the building, was, according to Rennet, the sexiest picture ever taken.

John supposed the younger body and slimmer build had something to do with that, even if he had been losing his hair already by then.

The first year on the council had been difficult. The next year worse as the backlash truly began.

Funny thing about that though. He’d loved it.

The drinking all but stopped. The fucking too, because he’d had no time. John had gotten into actual, physical fights with council members he’d later watched lose their seats, absorbed information and procedure, and with it who was who and what they really wanted no matter what their public posturing—cruising as practical experience for sizing people up.

John sometimes thought that a lifetime of reading and fighting and fucking had prepared him for politics in a way nothing else could have, no offense to poli sci majors. He knew a lot, and what he didn’t know, he could learn quickly. He wasn’t afraid of blood and dirt. He was adaptable. And there was very, very little that shocked him.

He got a nickname, and it stuck. Times changed. He was joined on the council by more women, and people of color. No one lisped at him, to his face at least. He was invited to lots of very full parties out on the bluffs and approached by old school genteel semi-closeted gays, the kind who would consider the fairy village a place to go slumming but now kissed his ass. He wore a suit to work and bought a pretty house in a neighborhood full of respectable citizens who didn’t know what to do with him. He expanded his library, and became more than just the outspoken queer on the city council, which he honestly thought was a shame. He had gotten away with so much when he’d been so consistently underestimated.

He was alone more and more, if he didn’t count colleagues. The queer humans of the village were wary of the limelight or disliked what they viewed the prostitution of politics. The fairies had left him long ago—they admired him, voted for him, but the attention he received made them nervous. They’d seen what happened to one of their kind when on the wrong side of a scandal. John missed them. He missed all of them, human and being. The sex, yes, but his human friends from that time in his life were mostly gone. It was the fairies and the occasional troll who remained, who would live on—who could live on.

And then there was Rennet.

John had a house now, and a busy job, which meant he had to hire people to do things for him he couldn’t manage alone anymore. So he called a number on a card for a handyman, and Rennet had appeared at his doorstep, the strangest combination of clumsy and graceful John had ever seen.

Rennet, with a body for sin, as the expression went, and a sense of humor best described as wicked, and hands that could carve and build like an artist but could also wrap detonator cord around a bundle of dynamite. Someone else, with a more conventional life, might have thought to themselves, I’m going to marry that imp, or, so this is love at first sight. John did not make plans with definite endings because definite outcomes were impossible, but he had watched Rennet move around his house and comment on the things he liked—the books and records, and the things he was certain were going to break or fail—the hinges in the backdoor, the corner of the roof over the garage, and thought how incredible it would be to see Rennet more.

The Incredible Unflappable Mr. Sunshine had no idea what he was in for. Thankfully, no one in his life except for his secretary had been close enough to notice him floundering.  

John didn’t make plans, he set goals, and now he had no idea how to achieve them, or even what they were for the longest time. Only that he liked Rennet in his life, and there had to be a way to keep him there somehow.

John wasn’t beautiful. He was an over-forty politician in a small city who lived alone, slept alone, and whose hobby was reading. Rennet was—not too good for him, but too much, too interesting, too different, to want that. He had a punk’s sensibilities but a faint aura of sadness, age that had come with wisdom but the eyes of a killer. He knew random facts that could never be learned in books. A dozen languages could trip off his tongue, in between references to legends that Rennet had known personally. He loved children. Of all the facts about Rennet that would have surprised those who feared him, that was the biggest. Rennet adored children and they loved him enough to spark something in John he hadn’t realized was there. Or maybe he had, but had never once allowed himself to think of it because he couldn’t have it.

It didn’t matter anyway. He was gay, and a workaholic who drank too much coffee, and two men couldn’t get married in his state, and human and being marriages were illegal too, and for a million other reasons, it didn’t matter. But that didn’t stop him from wondering while Rennet allowed small humans to tackle him to the ground and came up grinning.

Rennet absolutely had a soul, but tried to convince the world he didn’t.

I grew up around a lot of other kids, Rennet said once, and then went quiet, the way he only ever did when something reminded him of his childhood.

John had done the math, and made some guesses about Rennet’s past, but he watched and waited and didn’t push. In the meantime, Rennet begged John to fuck him, and ate his food, and cared for his house without charge like it was a pet project, and visited him at work, and never slept the night in John’s bed. He said not a word about what they were to each other, and could go days without contact before he’d reappear, and then smile tensely and disappear again whenever John would attend an event in the fairy village.

None of it made John want him less. Someone who didn’t try for the impossible every day might have given up and ended what they had the first time Rennet flirted with someone else in front of them.

John, in his darker moments, had thought that fighting against impossible odds was too ingrained in him to quit now. But the truth was he’d never been in love before. The truth was Rennet throwing himself with fists and teeth and a lashing tail at a racist drunk in a holding cell with him, or singing in soft French under his breath as he worked, or never, ever sleeping over despite how much John wished he would. The truth was Rennet had been alive for decades before John was even born, and there are years of trauma in him that he won’t talk about, and probably a trail of lost loves and broken hearts in his wake. The truth was, Rennet must have been in love before, and if he wanted to hold John close and brush his teeth next to him in the bathroom in the morning and fall asleep on the couch at his side with the TV on, or hell, even go out to dinner with John, he would have done so.

And he hadn’t.

A lifetime of reading and fighting and fucking hadn’t equipped John for the world of romance. Dating was such an unknown concept that he relied too much on popular media when he asked Rennet out, and it took him months of teasing and banter and fucking to realize that once the sex was over, Rennet was always out the door. He came back. He swaggered into City Hall and John’s office as though he owned the place, and visited John for reasons of his own, only to tiptoe out, without even a stolen kiss, as if fucking hadn’t been his goal at all.

John was known as a miracle worker, but even he couldn’t make someone love him. So he ignored the knowing looks from Margery as he stayed at work longer and longer, and he didn’t allow himself to call Rennet, and when he went to the fairy village and a fairy he’d never met before complimented his shine, John asked him to dinner.

He wouldn’t call it a mistake. He’d prefer tactical maneuver. Or more realistically, throwing a cat among the pigeons.

Or, even more realistically, waving a red flag in front of a stubborn, defiant, childish, irksome, hilarious, sweet, sexy bull, with wings and a penchant for black eyeliner.

Margery had been right. John had been stupid. And Rennet had been scared.

He spent the night on a mattress on the floor, tail slung over John’s hips, his face at the back of John’s neck. He walked into City Hall and came straight to John, like he always did, but this time his red eyes sparkled more than a fairy’s when he looked up. And he said, This human. This human, and no other, to stop John’s heart and replace it with fire and heat and flashes of lit gunpowder. Rennet loved him. Him, an ordinary man with an absorbing job and a tendency to light fires, but only under people who needed to get off their ass and do something. Maybe that was what Rennet liked—loved about him. The fucking was good—great—but there was no fighting, and no need for it and still John couldn’t get enough of him, and Rennet couldn’t seem to stop climbing onto him the moment they were alone. He didn’t want John for anything anyone else had ever wanted him for, and he worried for him like no one ever had, and confessed, in stops and starts, that he’d never stop worrying for John, and why that was.

His reasons were good ones. John could admit that, despite a passing moment of jealousy for the childish crush Rennet had had for someone long dead, who had left him with a burning devotion to bookish and rebellious soldiers.

Honestly, knowing Rennet thought of him that way had robbed him of speech for a while. Rennet had startled out of his reverie, then wriggled closer beside him in their brand new bed. Rennet had purred at him, teasing even while folding John protectively within his wings. Sunshine, don’t you know what you are? Don’t you know what you could do?

He stared at John as if he wasn’t the most remarkable person John had ever met, beautiful and not beautiful, and wicked and caring and the love of John’s life. He loved John, but he thought John was the exceptional one.

So John, who could not and would not hide, looked at him and said what he should have said the day he’d met Rennet, I could marry you.

He could admit to some amusement at the disbelief in Rennet’s expression, the shocked blinking and the utter stillness of his tail. But he hadn’t done it to be funny, or cruel, and when he waited, watching, without speaking, needing to know what Rennet would say before he could do anything else, Rennet gave him a reckless grin that meant John could ask again, ask him seriously, sometime in the future.

It was the most remarkable thing, and he was going to make it happen, and he would test, bend, and then break the laws standing in his way. It was almost as if he’d been born to do it.