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eleanorfenyxwrites · 1 year

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I Wish I Could Quit You

(Brokeback Mountain Nielan) Excerpt 1

Less than three hours after I started the document...how about 3k words of The Tent Scene?

(cut to me wailing screaming crying etc about why can't I have similar bursts of inspiration for my ONGOING WIPS?!?! anyway it's fine I'm fine it's GRAND, I'M SO COOL ABOUT IT)

anyway, @wincestielfttfwin, @scarlet-gryphon, and @wishthatiwasnessiesgirl - here you go lol

--//--

The cold comes in as bitterly as the afternoon’s hailstorm had promised.

A little over an hour after they separate to go to sleep, the wind howls through the crags of the mountains enough to rattle the tent nearly off its pegs. When it dies down again in the darkest part of the night, its howling is replaced by the sound of Mingjue’s shivering just outside.

Xichen sits up, reluctant to leave the pocket of warmth in his sleeping bag but unwilling to let Mingjue continue this ridiculous crusade of his, acting like he isn’t freezing his ass (or really any/every other body part) off out there trying to sleep alongside the dead black coals of the evening’s fire. So Xichen sits up and he shivers even before he unknots one of the ties holding the oiled canvas together and parts it enough to just make out Mingjue’s hulking figure by the light of the moon.

“Mingjue,” he calls, sleepy around the edges. The shivering and chattering cuts off abruptly, guiltily. Xichen fights not to roll his eyes. “Just get in here.”

For a long moment, it seems like Mingjue’s going to pretend not to hear him; his stubbornness has already been made painfully apparent in the month or so they’ve been up here, Xichen wouldn’t be surprised if he stuck to his guns on this one and shivered through the night just to prove some ludicrous point. But in the end, after a long silence, he shudders to his feet and drags his paltry excuse for a blanket with him, enormous shoulders huddling inwards as he accidentally kicks their water jug with a tin-can clatter on his way back around the fire. Xichen makes short work of untying the rest of the knots holding the tent flaps shut with deft flicks of his fingers, and then there’s more shuffling and jostling than the poor tent should ever really be asked to contain as Mingjue hurries into the promise of warmth.

Xichen ties the tent shut again over and around Mingjue’s bulk as the other man tries to fold himself into the too-small space, and once it’s firmly tied against the weather he lays down again to scoot a little further into the one-man shelter in an attempt to give Mingjue enough room to actually manage it. It’s clear immediately, though, that such a thing is great in theory, but the reality of their sharing the space is just inevitably going to have to be more intimate than that.

In all their shuffling, Xichen ends up turned on his side, Mingjue’s enormous bulk pressed against him from head to toe. Literally. Mingue’s cold nose is buried in his hair, chest pressed to shoulder blades (closer with every breath, still touching on every exhale); hips to ass, thighs cupping thighs and ankles knocking, boots tucked up against boots where they both have to curl up in a space never meant to accommodate even one man their height, let alone two.

Xichen’s heart thumps hard in his chest as they settle.

He can’t remember the last time he’d been held, even for something as basic as warmth.

Perhaps never.

Mingjue’s hand, he realizes after a few more rustling readjustments as Mingjue attempts to get comfortable, is on the curve of his waist, too light and uncertain a touch for Xichen to have any hope of sleeping beneath it. This is an easier decision than the one to get up and untie the tent.

He withdraws his hand from the depths of his jacket, his sleeping bag, Mingjue’s blanket tossed over both of them, to curl his fingers around Mingjue’s ice-cold hand and drag it forward. Up.

He curls his fingers around Mingjue’s and presses the man’s hand to his chest under the open side of his jacket. If Mingjue can feel the too-hard ba-dump of his heartbeat pounding against the press of his palm, under the layers of his shirts, he says nothing of it.

Kind of him, in that quiet way Xichen is learning he has.

Mingjue’s hand warms in his slowly until it isn’t just cold skin pressed to his, it’s work calluses and blunt nails; it’s dips and valleys between the tall, craggy ridges of his knuckles that Xichen cautiously explores with a fingertip — the mountains around them in micro, held gently in his one hand and traced in reverence.

In the strange place between sleep and waking, he doesn’t fight the urge to feel them with his lips, lifting Mingjue’s hand to his mouth just to brush them with the sensitive skin. He barely applies pressure, and Mingjue’s breathing stays even and slow behind him — asleep then, in the warmth, the quiet, the safety of a shared space with him? Xichen hopes so. He wants Mingjue to feel safe with him. There’s no one out here to look out for either of them but each other, after all. They have to trust each other for the length of the summer, at the very least.

Xichen presses his lips against Mingjue’s knuckles with more intent. His skin is rough from ranching, from calf-roping, from leather reins looped over them, from the sun that beats down on him every day of his life. Xichen lets the roughness of it catch on the soft give of his lips and he closes his eyes to better feel it reaching down into his soul, this stolen intimacy.

Lips, warm now and chapped from the wind, press against the back of his neck just above the stiff fold of his collar, too firm to be anything but intentionally done.

“What are you doing?” Mingjue asks against his skin, breath tickling and slinking its way down beneath Xichen’s jacket, his shirts, to shiver down his spine. Warmth pools low in his belly, unbidden and unexpected, but not at all unfamiliar.

At the volume he’d used, Xichen can’t tell what Mingjue is feeling, what he’s thinking.

He has to trust him.

He doesn’t have a choice.

Xichen doesn’t answer with words — what is there to say? He releases Mingjue’s hand and turns onto his back with as little jostling as he can manage, and suddenly Mingjue is right here, not shivering out by the remains of their fire, not an unseen solid presence behind his back. His eyes are open, glittering in the dim light of the lantern Xichen had left burning in the corner for the spare bit of warmth it throws off, and he doesn’t look like he’d been asleep at all during Xichen’s little exploration. He looks…wary. Afraid.

Xichen doesn’t think twice about leaning up to kiss him.

For a heartstopping, breathless instant that seems to last an eternity, Mingjue does absolutely nothing about it. His mouth is still against the insistent press of Xichen’s, lips softly parted in shock but Xichen doesn’t take the opportunity to slip his tongue between them. He nips at the curve of his bottom lip, hungry for something he can’t name, and that, at least, gets Mingjue moving.

Mingjue lets his mouth fall open wider around a gasp like a sudden dousing of ice water and tries to shove him away, but Xichen knows. He knows that Mingjue is like him. It has to be true. He can feel it, the ache of it, the empty yearning of it, and so he grabs Mingjue’s shoulders, his waist, and yanks him in closer until he can roll the other man on top of him, his bulk pinning him down in the tangled mess of their blankets. He slides his hand up from behind Mingjue’s shoulder to the back of his neck to yank him in for a bruising kiss this time, all passion with no finesse, and he doesn’t allow Mingjue the space to attempt to pull away again.

Xichen’s ridden rodeo his whole life. He knows that the best way to stay on a bronco is to move with it — to know what it wants before it wants it, to expect the way that it wants to protest, and to become, very briefly, an extension of it that cannot be thrown. He’s a damn good hand at it, he wins most any competition he enters, and as Mingjue wrestles him without seeming to know what it is he even wants beyond an excuse to touch him in the only way that’s ever been acceptable — rough, violent, hungry for something unnameable — Xichen rides it out with him until the urge to fight fades, and when Mingjue tries to pull away again Xichen lets him only because he’s doing it to trail desperate, biting kisses down the column of Xichen’s throat.

“Mingjue,” he breathes around the pleasure of it, the thrill of victory entwining with the sweetness of being touched like he’s something worth savoring. “It’s alright. It’s okay, it’s…we need it, that’s all.”

Mingjue doesn’t reply, apparently too busy where he’s biting and sucking at the juncture of Xichen’s neck and shoulder to use words (not that he’s a man of many of them anyway). But then again, maybe he does reply, in his own way. Xichen flushes at the sound of jingling metal, the feeling of a broad, firm hand down between their hips muffled through their layers that in moments, he knows, won’t be a problem anymore.

Mingjue manages to unhook Xichen’s championship rodeo belt buckle he’d turned his nose up at mere days ago, and when it’s out of the way Xichen arches his back to help Mingjue in his apparent quest to get Xichen’s jeans down his thighs enough for whatever it is he wants.

The wool blanket rumpled up beneath him is rough against his ass, the tender backs of his thighs. The denim waistband of his jeans is too tight around his knees, and Xichen yanks MIngjue back up to kiss him again with hard hands in his hair, both of them gasping each other’s air and their bodies rocking together without thought (at least Xichen certainly isn’t thinking about anything beyond what it feels like to have Mingjue’s broad hands gripping his naked hips tightly enough to bruise, and he can really only hope that the same is true for Mingjue).

When Mingjue turns him over Xichen hisses for the scratch of the unconditioned wool against his cock, hard and leaking already and far too sensitive for this. Mingjue presses him down harder with an arm laid across his back, an iron band of pressure that Xichen has no interest in trying to escape from.

They don’t speak as Mingjue unbuckles his own belt, nor when he shoves his own jeans down. Mingjue ducks in to bite at his ear before he leans up to spit in his hand and use it to ease his way, Xichen’s entire existence narrowing down first to the obscene and familiar rasp of a rough hand against much more tender skin, and then to the enormous sense of weight and pressure he barely has time to brace himself for before Mingjue forces his way inside of him.

It aches, too sharp, too insistent. Xichen groans and reaches back blindly with one hand, clumsy between all their layers and the angle and the way he shudders for the intrusion somewhere he’s never felt such a thing before (well that’s not quite true, but it’s far from the same when it’s like this so it’s true enough anyway). He finds Mingjue’s hip and wastes no time in sliding his hand under the other man’s loosened jeans and around the broad plane of his pelvis until he’s got as firm of a grip as he can hope for at this angle on his ass.

A single squeeze, a gasp of Mingjue’s name, and a strangled, “Please,” is all it takes to coax Mingjue into finishing what he started.

Xichen tries to muffle himself in his sleeve, in the blankets, something, but Mingjue buries a free hand in his hair to yank his head to the side so he can lean in to kiss him as they fuck and Xichen can’t find it in himself to complain.

It’s quick, and it’s dirty, and it’s everything Xichen has never allowed himself to want.

He comes on the horrible scratchy blanket with a bitten-off shout for the way it tears something loose inside him, something he already knows even now he’ll never be able to put back exactly as it was. It’s pleasure so intense it’s more pain than anything else, and it leaves him feeling raw and exposed as Mingjue’s hips snap too hard once, twice, and then on the third he stays there as deep inside as he can get as Xichen feels his cock jerk inside him. Within moments the place where they’re joined isn’t dry enough to burn anymore.

Mingjue pants in his ear and Xichen’s eyes prick with overwhelmed tears he absolutely will not allow Mingjue to see, but the other man isn’t paying that much attention to him anyway. He doesn’t pull out as he rummages around for something beside them. When Xichen turns his head with an effort he has to bite back a smile upon realizing that it’s the blanket from outside; Mingjue tugs it clumsily over the both of them laying there spent and too tangled up with each other to bother untangling again tonight. Xichen falls asleep with chapped lips pressed to his cheek and an ache in his hips he can already tell will keep him off his horse for at least a day or two.

Morning comes early, birdsong and the peculiar damp coolness of dawn both stealing their way into the tent. The sweat (and other fluids) from last night have grown tacky and cold; Xichen shivers in the gray dawn haze and tries to huddle into Mingjue’s bulk, seeking warmth. An arm curls around his shoulders, but through their layers of cotton and denim and leather it offers little more than pressure. He presses the cold tip of his nose to the little bare patch of Mingjue’s chest exposed by the open top two buttons of his shirt, and he thinks he might receive a kiss to the forehead in return, but if so it’s too soft and his mind too sleep-fogged for him to be sure.

He wakes again properly when bright sunlight cuts across his eyes with a blast of cool, fresh air that doesn’t smell like wool and sweat and sex, and he sits up on his elbow, blinking, to watch Mingjue unfold himself from the tent into the morning and stretch. Xichen glances down at himself, alone once again, to find that his pants are still around his knees, their combined mess dried to flaking trails of white on his hips, the insides of his thighs.

He lays there for long, hazy moments contemplating how the fuck they’re going to talk about this when getting Mingjue to say anything much at all that isn’t about the sheep or the horses is such a challenge (a welcome one, but a challenge all the same). When his thoughts bring him no closer to an answer, and his stalling makes it more and more likely that Mingjue will simply leave him there at their camp to go tend to the flock for the day, Xichen shimmies his jeans back up and makes his own way out of the tent, standing with a soft, startled groan for the expected ache in his body. It radiates from navel to knees, and he finds he can’t bring himself to feel anything but pleased by it.

“Listen,” Mingjue says from where he’s focusing on saddling up his placid mare for the morning’s ride. He doesn’t look up from the girth he’s tightening. Xichen tries not to think about how he knows the shape of the calluses that other leather straps just like it, wrapped around his fingers too many times to count, have left. “I’m not queer.”

The word — dangerous, taboo, electrifying in its naked honesty — sends a jolt through his belly, though of what emotion, good or bad, he isn’t exactly sure.

“I’m not either.”

Mingjue looks up at him then, his eyes unreadable. “It’s just for the summer.”

Xichen nods, something like hope flickering in his chest though he tries not to let it show.

“I’ve got a fianceé back home, when we come down in the fall. This’s got nothin’ to do with her.”

“Of course, Mingjue.”

Mingjue nods. Tightens the girth with a final creak of leather, his mare sighing her displeasure but otherwise making no complaint. Xichen watches Mingjue check over his pack job one last time, his lunch and his canteen in a satchel hanging off the saddlehorn, the shotgun strapped behind the high crest of the saddle at the back on the patterned blanket beneath it that he tugs straight next, ensuring there are no wrinkles in it beneath the saddle. It’s his usual pre-ride check, Xichen’s seen him do it plenty of times now and he knows all the beats of it.

Mingjue stops with one foot in the stirrup, and Xichen drifts a little closer when he doesn’t actually mount up, concerned by the sudden break in routine. Before he can ask, Mingjue drops his foot to the dirt again with an irritated huff and turns around so quickly Xichen jumps. He doesn’t have time to react before Mingjue has stomped across their tiny camp to grab him by the lapels of his jacket — leverage he uses to pull Xichen in for a kiss that stings his bruised lips and curls his toes as he grips Mingjue’s collar in both hands to hold him still right there, just like that, just for a little bit longer.

“I’ll be back for dinner,” Mingjue tells him, mouths brushing together with each word. He knocks the tips of their noses together once, a gentle bump that might even be affectionate, and then he’s gone again, breaking Xichen’s tight hold easily to sling himself up onto the saddle and nudge his mare into a brisk canter without a glance back.

Xichen watches him go long past the time he’s lost sight of him between the trees.

#the untamed fanfic #nielan #Lan Xichen #Nie Mingjue #brokeback mountain au #I Wish I Could Quit You #does the Tent Scene happen so soon after the hailstorm? I can't remember #It does now #as per usual we're here for vibes y'all. Sad (and horny) gay cowboy vibes.

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