Archive of Our Own

Technically, Trunks isn’t doing anything illegal. It’s not like he’s committing a crime. In fact, he’s probably doing Goten a favour. Yeah. That’s the self-righteous explanation he’ll land on. He’s weeding out the detestable​​, that’s all—ultimately, any girl who chose three hundred thousand zenni over Son Goten isn’t worth Goten’s time or affection in the first place, Trunks thinks as he slides the hefty envelope across the coffee shop table he’s seated at the edge of.

“It’s all there,” he says lightly, taking a sip of his drink and watching the girl he’d easily managed to corner squirm beneath his blue gaze. She knew who he was—which girlfriend of Goten’s wouldn’t, with the way Trunks was always velcroed to Goten’s side, one hand inconspicuously ghosting over Goten’s hip in the case of the unimaginable? Trunks isn’t an idiot. He knows he’s handsome and a charming bastard to boot, so it isn’t uncommon for Goten’s girlfriends to indulge in ogling him once or twice through the relationship whenever they thought he wasn’t looking, as though he were both an unattainable fantasy or an extension of Goten’s likeness. That second possibility doesn’t piss Trunks off too much.

Naturally, the poor girl who’s sitting across from him hadn’t protested in the slightest when he’d rounded on her the second her final class of the day was over, smiling all too wide and inhumanely neck in neck with her exact schedule. Nobody ever suspects him. Once he’d thought about killing a guy who got too handsy with Goten at a frat party and when he realized he could get away with it easily, the appeal of bloodlust had faded considerably. He’d just punched him in the face hard enough to break his nose and maybe even permanently bend it out of shape and then took Goten back to his place, making sleazy love to him as if to erase the indent of another man’s hands on him for good.

“... I don’t get it,” the girl says, slowly, her voice shaking just slightly. Trunks doesn’t remember her name—just has all their faces automatically imprinted in his photogenic memory, a soulless kingdom in his subconscious where Goten still reigns supreme. She chews on her lip as she stares at the envelope of money. “Why would you pay me this much to break up with him?”

Trunks smiles kindly at her, pleather fake up to the crinkle of his eyes. “Because I want you gone,” he says bluntly, his fangs flashing towards the tail end of his blunt statement. “And I know just asking without any sort of reward isn’t going to cut it. Goten’s the whole catch, isn’t he? Cute and respectful and—sweet. Blegh.” He scoffs a mean laugh into the rim of his mug. “You ladies can’t get enough of it.”

“I get that, obviously.” The girl blinks slight tears that must have manifested out of sheer shock from her eyes and then fixes Trunks her best glare, which almost makes Trunks laugh at her again. “I’m asking you why you want me to break up with him, Trunks.”

“Is that any of your business?” Trunks’s grin turns condescending in a matter of seconds, shadows depressing upon his mouth even if it’s early evening and the sun is still high up in the sky, a cosmic hint telling her she’s not dealing with something of this world. “Look. Take the money and tell him it’s over, or go ahead and refuse it if you’re so upstanding.” He snorts out a laugh at the way her gaze turns hungry with human greed as it drops to the envelope. Pity. But: understandable. “What, is it not enough for you? Not quite the price you’d put on Goten’s head, huh?”

The girl stammers. “I—”

“Here.” Trunks slams another four hundred thousand on the counter, watching her eyes go so wide they might pop out of their sockets. “That makes seven hundred thousand.” Jeeringly, he reaches into his pocket with a sneering smirk on his face, and fishes out two dimes. His eyes are mocking as he sprinkles them down onto the table, over the fat stack of bills. “... And twenty cents.” His smirk widens for every second she spends stunned, tapping his index finger on the table. “What do you say? Should we up it to a million?”

“You’re fucking crazy,” the girl swears at him, her face flushing with what appears to be humiliation. He’s throwing money at her like she’s something to be bought off, an object he’s bidding for at an auction, but they both know it’s not her he wants to go home with. Her eyes sharpen. She’s already made up her mind to reap him of his wealth, he knows, but still, she regards him with the intention to make a final ploy before surrender. “So, that’s it? I take the money, break up with him, and there’s no other catch?”

Trunks laughs, balancing his chin on the back of a hand. “I knew you’d come around. Smart girl,” he muses, undoubtedly getting a kick out of how she bristles. “Yeah, that’s really all there is to it. Don’t worry. There’s no strings attached. I’ll make sure it won’t come back to haunt you. All I need from you is to break up with him as gruesomely as possible. Really break his heart. Make sure there’s no hope in him left for getting back together. Okay?” His teeth glimmer beneath the seam of his lips. “You’ve got a week to get it done.”

She’s already started to gather the money into her hands, the bills spilling between her manicured fingertips. “... I thought he was your best friend,” she says, a little absently, dazedly. “Why would you want to hurt him like this…?”

Humming, Trunks slips his wallet out of his back pocket and skims through his credit cards. He’ll pay for both of their drinks—he’s a gentleman, after all. “It may hurt him now,” he says vaguely, not willing to afford her anything fleshier, “but it’s for his own good. I always know what’s for his own good. I’ve known the guy since we were tots, you see.”

“Are you saying I’m not good for him?” The girl quirks a brow at him. “What’s so bad about me? I really love Goten, you know!”

“You’re saying you love him while your hands are full of the cash you accepted to break up with him, huh?” Trunks snorts. This time his grin is genuine as he watches her purse her lips shut with the embarrassment. “Hey. Don’t feel bad, sweetheart. You’d have to be a fucking saint not to accept this much. And you’re doing me a favour.”

The apples of her cheeks redden. She looks at him impishly from beneath her lashes. “Doing you a favour…?”

He doesn’t answer her. Just smirks, secretive and taciturn, and apparently that makes her frustration return from the dead.

“Does he even know you think of him like this?!” she yells at him as he stands to pay the waitress, who’s making a face like she’s thinking, I don’t get paid enough for this shit.

Trunks beams back at her as he pulls his card out of the reader and waves the waitress off when she asks if he wants the bill. “Like what, baby?”

“Don’t call me that.” The girl’s nostrils flare—rapidly, she has regressed back into an animal from millenia of civilization right before his eyes. “Like a… a thing. Something you own. You’re not his friend. No good friend would do something like this—so what is he to you, anyway?”

Trunks stands from his seat and tucks his chair back in for good measure. As he passes her, he rounds on the back of her seat and drops another three hundred thousand zenni on the table just to see her come to livid life beneath him. “Buy yourself something nice,” he murmurs, low in her ear, his breath tickling the shell. He tugs teasingly at the plunging neckline of her blouse, feeling her breath hitch and her skin burn beneath his touch. “Start by throwing this thing out.”

He’s gone before she can even turn around to cuss him out, the only proof he was ever here in the fortune laid out before her.

The Goten who comes to Trunks in his dreams is a bit different from the Goten in real life. He has a halo over his head and his skin shimmers to the touch—the first time Trunks dreamt of him, he’d screamed, “Holy shit, is this a prophetic dream? Has my time to be a hero finally come? Are you the Goten from the future? Are you gonna be all like, ‘Trunks, you’re the only one who can save me! Look at me, I’m soooo deaddddd! You’ve gotta take revenge for me, Trunks!’”

He was promptly punched right in the face after that. Between snorting chunks of blood out of his nose and struggling to breathe, all Trunks could focus on was the precipice of Goten’s angelic expression—entirely inconspicuous, the lilt to those glossy pink lips and those honey brown eyes, like Goten’s fist wasn’t drenched in Trunks’s blood.

“You dumbass,” Dream Goten had said, and yeah, Trunks thought, he was right. Trunks really was a dumbass.

Tonight, Dream Goten is back. His halo brings its iridescent glow down to the gulf of his doll face. He sits cross-legged next to Trunks, looking thoroughly unimpressed. Mm, Trunks has seen that look before. Probably this morning at breakfast when he’d taken a bite out of Goten’s sandwich for no reason at all besides wanting the addictive frequency of Goten’s attention when he’s annoyed.

“Hey,” Dream Goten starts, his arms crossed over his chest and his brow furrowed, “why can’t you just tell me that you’re in love with me?”

Trunks grins at him. “I tell you that all the time,” he shoots back, laying back on the floor of nothingness that stretches throughout the expanse of his dormant mind. “Oh, come on. Don’t look at me like that. Fuck.”

“I mean in real life, idiot,” Dream Goten snarks, kicking Trunks in the shin. The pain is dull, spacey in the galaxy of subconsciousness. “Grow a pair of balls and tell me already. I already know from all my rummaging around in your brain that you want me, you know.”

“Oh, Goten, baby, honey, sweetie,” Trunks drawls mockingly, snickering at the narrow of Goten’s eyes. “Let me let you in on a little secret, dude: you’re a figment of my imagination. You can’t speak on what the actual Goten wants. Okay?”

A pop-up window appears before the two of them in the sky like the prelude to a nasty hard drive crashing virus, illuminating them in its overbearing fluorescent light. Burning directly into Trunks’s retinas, it blinks in technicolour.

Dream Goten straddles him. His thighs crush Trunks’s hips. “You know, you haven’t been one hundred percent you since we fused as kids,” he says matter-of-factly. “Maybe it’s gotten to the point that the concepts of you being you and me being me are subjective. Face it, Trunks. There’s still some of me left in you. The parts of you that tell you what I’m thinking of twenty-four-seven.” He taps the shudder of Trunks’s sternum with two knuckles, still blood stained, frozen in time within Trunks’s awareness of him. Maybe he’ll still look like this, fresh-faced and twenty, when Trunks dreams of him decades later with his own hair starting to gray. “Right here. You know I want you. You hear it when your heart beats.”

Trunks inhales. Sure, he does know that. Maybe he’s known it all along, actually, that Goten’s reciprocated his feelings since the beginning of time. It should have been one of the givens of the universe. As obvious and set in stone as the seasons. But for some reason, the affection past fucking won’t weasel its way out of him. Telling Goten I love being inside you is infinitely easier than telling Goten I love you. The truth is, Trunks has an angel and a devil on his shoulder and he also has a third other guy who looks just like his dad. He tries not to look at him, but he knows he’s there. Looming over him. He’s often wondered if Goten fares similarly through the days and months and years of his life. He’s never once asked. It’s all too sore.

Trunks chases those thoughts away. He looks up at Dream Goten. Maybe, Trunks thinks, Goten gets to be the angel because he’s always been the better person between the two of them. “Get off me, man,” he mutters, pushing at Goten’s hip. “You don’t know shit.”

Goten reels his fist back and socks Trunks in the mouth. Viciously, viscerally. Trunks’s mouth is a fountain of red, his blood gushing out of him like it’s trying to escape the prison of him.

“Fuck you, Trunks,” Dream Goten snarls, fading out of clarity. Disappearing back whence he came. When Trunks wakes up, he tastes iron in his mouth.

As expected, Goten comes to him crying around two business days later. Girlfriend #3 works fast, is the first thing Trunks thinks when he opens his apartment door to a teary-eyed-snotty-nosed Goten on his doorstep.

“Hi,” Trunks says, side-stepping to let Goten barrel right past him and into his apartment, closing the door behind his trail of fury. “Gotennnnn. What’s wrong, buddy?”

He’s such a fucking asshole for asking. He already knows what’s wrong. Still, he wants to see it. He wants to see Goten whirl around with the tears like pearls dripping out of his bambi eyes, and see it he certainly does. Trunks can’t suppress the grin that’s spreading across his face when Goten finally turns to look at him, his features trembling across the plane of his angel face like he’s trying to construe them into something angry and failing miserably; verily, the tears slipping down his cheeks and catching in his cupid’s bow, the dip between his collarbones at the centre of his v-neck shirt, it only confirms the fact of the matter. Trunks just stares at him, attempting to hide the self-centred upwards nick to his lips.

“You shithead,” Goten warbles, and then he fucking hiccups—Trunks could kiss all those tears away right now, hold Goten down and make him forget about everything else. “Violet broke up with me.”

Ohhhh. Her name was Violet. Trunks leans back against the wall. “Who?”

“Jackass!” Goten spits, clearly just looking for something to vent his misplaced frustration out on, entirely unaware that he’s really hit the mark. “Fucking—asshole, I was dating her for six fucking months—”

“Hey.” Trunks grabs Goten by the shoulders, having to grapple with him a little with how he’s trembling out of his own body. He presses a thumb roughly into the dimple of that pert chin and tips Goten up by his pretty little head. “Let’s sit you down, yeah?”

“Fuck you,” Goten warbles miserably, pushing at Trunks’s chest with hardly any of his bottled up capability, all bark and no bite. He whimpers when Trunks thumbs at the pucker of his bottom lip. So pretty when he cries, Trunks’s baby boy. “I don’t wanna fucking sit down. I don’t even know why I came here. It’s not like you’d fucking console me.”

Trunks’s eyes narrow, just slightly. His mouth twitches into a tiny grin, touching the snide settle of a smirk. “Of course I’ll console you,” he coos, all soft and comforting, tender like a blood red herring. Still fleshy and fresh. The hand that isn’t holding Goten’s muzzle slips off the sleight of Goten’s shoulder and drops to his waist, his hip, the indecent parts of him—kneading him there and eclipsing his frame, making him flush beneath Trunks’s gaze. A lavender hair falls into Trunks’s line of sight. It blurs immediately with the way Trunks’s eyes are night vision trained on Goten. “Come on. Why’re you making all this fuss over some girl, ’Ten?”

“She’s not just some girl,” Goten snaps at him, glaring at Trunks as fiercely as he can muster. “She was— fuck, dude. I was gonna introduce her to my parents and everything next weekend.”

Trunks stiffens. Goten can’t see it because he’s still sniffling with his stare downcast, but there’s a certain quality to the way Trunks is looking at him now. His eyes like twin blue flames, burning around the coal of his pupils and distilled with the pure desire he feels for his whole world shuddering in his arms. “That serious, huh?”

Goten swallows through another wheezy whimper. “Not anymore, I guess.”

“So, what?” Easily, Trunks walks the both of them back into his bedroom. He takes Goten by the hips and meets him halfway down with a grin when he glowers up at him. “Goten, man. There’s no need to be so serious about dating. You’re twenty. Only guys like Gohan have fiancés by the time they graduate high school.”

Goten shoves him again, but if he really didn’t want to be caught between the bedframe and Trunks’s chest, he wouldn’t be, plain and simple. “Not everyone is a fucking playboy like you,” he growls, his lips trembling through the act of a snarl. “Some of us want stability. Screwing around gets old after a while.”

“Yeah. Guess you’ve always been like that.” Trunks’s grin turns meaner for every second Goten’s eyes spend flooding to his lashes. “The first time a girl confessed to you in high school you thought you’d end up marrying her.”

“Shut up!” Goten’s face flushes red, and oh—he’s gorgeous. So sweet and precious, sweat dripping off the tail end of that shaggy mullet when Trunks just keeps rubbing his lower back, biting down into his bottom lip halfway through a hiccup he fails to conceal when Trunks’s fingers dip beneath the hem of his shirt. Trunks is already all in. Goten only gets this mousy when he’s pretending he doesn’t know it. “You shitty jerk. I shouldn’t have come to you.”

The truth is, Trunks can’t comfort him in earnest. He’s unable to, physically. All he can do is hide his grin in the slope of Goten’s shoulder while he lets him cry in his arms.

Trunks’s thumbs press into Goten’s hip bones. His middle fingers round on the dimples that freckle Goten’s lower back and sit just above his plush little ass. “Aww, why?” It’s insane, Trunks thinks, how Goten’s body was tailor made to clash with every crevice and nook of Trunks’s. Maybe something about their physical makeups had changed as much as the mental when they’d broken apart from that childishly invincible fusion as kids, and they’d ended up growing into two halves of a whole even when they were apart. Maybe it was just predestined from the very start. Either way, Trunks will find some poetic way to justify getting in his guts if it’s the last thing he does. “No good getting advice from a playboy, huh?”

“That isn’t—” In a flash, Goten strips himself of his anger. He’s too good. Too good for Trunks, too good for anyone.

Of course, that isn’t going to stop Trunks from doing everything in his power to keep him all to himself.

Goten chews on his lip. He looks so guilty it’s hilarious. “Trunks. I didn’t mean that, I’m sorry.”

Trunks is tempted with the bruise on that tender, pure heart. Wants to press on it until it yields and bleeds.

“No, no, you’re right,” Trunks laughs, patting Goten on the shoulder and then the waist, drawing back just momentarily, only to see the way Goten’s eyes water at the loss of his touch, that kind of physical contact that came as naturally as breathing from someone in your life you’d never expect to take a step away from you. “But hey, I mean, you know I know how to keep a girl before I feel like dumping her. You should’ve come to me for tips on getting Miss Heartbreaker to stay weeks before she left. Keep yourself ahead of the game. You know?”

Goten bristles at Trunks’s condescending tone. “I don’t want to hear what kind of fucking tips you’d have for me,” he mutters darkly, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. A sign of warning. The first strike of lightning through the clouds in a storm.

“Yeahhhhh, bet you wouldn’t,” Trunks chuffs, shirking his hands into his pockets, visualizing every which way he could pin Goten down to his bed, a queen-sized cataclysm just for the two of them. “But let me let you in on something, ’Ten. That old fashioned way of fucking her you’ve got down pat where you just go through the motions of it and she’s not even all the way naked underneath you, that stops cutting it after a while.”

At that, that blunt and slightly too graphic mention of sex and its function, Goten flushes like a wild cherry. “What the fuck are you—”

“Girls are more perverted than they let on. You think they’re all innocent and soft and sweet, but most of the time they’re just waiting for you to realize what they actually want.” Trunks is saying that, but he’s not talking about girls at all. He hasn’t thought Goten was all innocent and soft and sweet since maybe fucking high school, and he certainly only has himself to blame for the slow corruption of the tender boy he grew up with, the gradual clipping of those angel wings—but still, Goten’s the one guy he can never read down to the bone. Trunks’s many faces are rendered useless before him. The meaningless attachment of their bodies has never been without meaning.

Goten can’t seem to decide what he’s feeling, either. “Fuck you, Trunks, don’t fucking talk about her like that, she’s not like the chicks you like to fuck around with—”

Mockingly, Trunks squeezes Goten’s shoulder. Kneads the space between Goten’s neck and collarbones, towers over him. “You know you can come to me for anything, don’t you, ’Ten?”

Goten’s breath hitches. He’s berry blushed around his gorgeous honey-doe eyes, the colour spread across the apples of his cheeks and down past his bitten-raw lips, his shivering throat. His pupils dilated to bottomless pits as he searches Trunks for his true intentions. He won’t find them. He never does. “Trunks…”

Slowly, Trunks thumbs over Goten’s bottom lip. It shimmers and puckers beneath the pressure. Trunks’s fingers slip beneath the waistband of Goten’s jeans. “I see the way your ladies look at me,” he husks in Goten’s ear, holding the bristle of Goten’s body by his fevered lower back, “I see the way you look at me.”

“You’re full of crap,” Goten spits, but he doesn’t pull away—he tilts his head back when Trunks drops a kiss on the side of his neck, melting against Trunks’s chest. With a frustrated noise, a cross between a growl and a whine, Goten slams a fist right into the centre of Trunks’s sternum. The impact of it vibrates through Trunks’s entire skeleton. “Just comfort me, you piece of shit!”

Trunks grins along the warmth of Goten’s skin. One more step backwards to free falling off the cliff. “I’m just saying. There’s no line you have to worry about crossing between us, is there?” Again, he tips Goten up by the chin, re-introducing himself to every part of Goten’s body, staring down into those half-lidded glazed-over eyes with a cocky smirk. “Maybe she would’ve liked having both of us between her legs, hm?” Grinning, Trunks tilts Goten’s head jeeringly this way and that, left and right with every second Goten takes to process what he’s just said. “You could have kept your pretty little girlfriend.” His breath ghosts over the plush of Goten’s lips. “And you could’ve had me inside you while you were inside her. Not a bad deal, is it?”

Apparently, that’s all it takes to break him. Goten swings for Trunks’s face and punches him right in the nose so quickly Trunks doesn’t even see it coming—physically, at least. Mentally, it was long overdue. Trunks stumbles back under the force of the blow, laughing low in his throat through all the blood he chokes and snorts out of his mouth and nostrils. Swiping a fist beneath his gushing nose, he looks up at Goten—shaking, sobbing, sweetheart Goten—and smirks, drawn out and bloody and lined with every one of his teeth. Life imitates art. Trunks is punch drunk and seeing double; the Goten who’s real and the Goten who lives in his head, dancing along his cranium, in the space between his ribs, they separate and slide together.

“You’re such a self-centred fucking prick,” Goten warbles, the tears falling faster now, like he isn’t the one who’s just cracked the bridge of Trunks’s nose. His fist is stained in Trunks’s blood, dripping onto the hardwood floors. “Why do you have to fucking act like that…?”

Why, indeed. Trunks wishes he knew the answer. He just chuckles, slamming his fist into a nostril and snorting out a decently grisly chunk of blood. “Sorry, I guess.”

“No, no, you don’t just get to say fucking sorry,” Goten heaves, swiping at his eyes in a frenzy and getting smudges of Trunks’s blood on his porcelain face in the process, like he’s embarrassed about how much he’s crying. “You’re always like this. One second you’re so close and then the next you’re far away. It’s so hard to tell if you even—if you even care, sometimes. I thought you were my best friend. I thought…”

Those two fucking words. Best friend. Trunks fucking despises them. He plops down on the edge of his bed, swiping the back of his hand under his bloody nose. Staring at Goten wordlessly as he cries it all out. Finally only saying, “Goten.”

“What?” Goten hiccups, still glowering through the tears, his teeth bared in a puppy snarl and his fists trembling at his sides. “What the fuck do you want, Trunks?”

Trunks grins. His gums bleed down his teeth. “Goten,” he coos again, spreading his arms wide, “come here.”

Fortunately, it’s always easy to reel him back in. Goten crashes into his lap with an especially loud wailing sob, straddling Trunks’s hips and throwing his arms around Trunks’s neck. Trunks laughs under his breath and goes down all too pliantly when Goten tackles him back against the mattress with a whimper, licking his lips as he stares up at his pretty perpetrator. Goten’s picture perfect on top of him, panting rabidly. Trunks can see the way his nipples grow more pebbled and pronounced through his Mortal Kombat t-shirt for every heave of his chest, his lips swollen pink and his fluttery lashes elongated with the wetness of tears, all spread legs and rolling hips on top of Trunks for miles.

“I hate you,” Goten mumbles, leaning down so he’s practically draped all over Trunks’s chest, taking Trunks’s face in his hands and kissing Trunks on the cheek. “Is your nose okay?”

Trunks snickers, taking his palmfuls of Goten’s ass in his hands. “Goten, baby,” he says, putting the theatrics into sounding all hurt and whiny, “it hurts reaaaallll bad.” He pouts when Goten pulls back to roll his eyes down at him, gripping Goten harder by those hips until the pressure makes the younger boy gasp. Against his own will, as if on instinct, Trunks’s voice lowers in his throat by a hungry, gruff octave. “Guess you have to nurse me back to health, huh, ’Ten?”

Goten shudders. The divots in his waist fit perfectly in Trunks’s hands when Trunks slips his hands up his sides. “Shut up,” he whimpers, making fists in Trunks’s tank top. “I-I’m still—mmmhhhnnn… ’m still mad at you, y’know…”

Trunks hums, unzipping Goten’s jeans and getting them down with his boxers to pool around his shaky thighs in one smooth motion, grinning at the way Goten clumsily kicks them off his ankles like a newborn foul. Kneading Goten’s bare hips, and watching him flush everywhere Trunks touches him. “I’m sorry, Goten,” Trunks purrs, shamelessly pulling those plump asscheeks apart when Goten whimpers into his mouth. “I really am. I don’t know why I said all that shit. I’m sorry, okay?”

He’s not. He doesn’t regret a single thing. He’s never been more deliberate in his ministrations than he is now, when he just barely ghosts a single finger over the quiver of Goten’s twitchy entrance. When he destroys Goten’s entire world until he’s the only thing left in it.

“Trunks,” Goten whines, his eyes filling with tears all over again, his hips rutting senselessly, like he doesn’t know where his own body ends and Trunks’s begins. “P-Please—inside me—”

“Get up here,” Trunks coaxes him, giving that lush ass one last squeeze before he swipes his tongue over the top row of his teeth, and he must look fucking voracious, because Goten flushes and bites his lip and suddenly looks so shy Trunks really could just eat him up. Leaning back and grinning like a fucking sleaze up at him, Trunks husks, “C’mon, baby. Sit on my face for me. I’ll make it feel good, I promise.”

Goten whimpers. Slowly, he crawls up the plane of Trunks’s willing body, and burns redder, fidgets by his pretty, wagging hips and his twitching, pale fingers, when he makes it so he’s just barely hovering over Trunks’s mouth. His soft thighs spread open and his red-pink hole winking down at Trunks like it’s calling to him. “Trunksssss, th-this is…” He sniffles, a tiny little hiccup leaving his glossy lips. “This’s embarrassin’...”

Trunks smirks. “Lift the shirt up over your chest for me,” he instructs, grinning at the way Goten blushes and squeezes his eyes shut as he follows the order—whimpering under his breath as he preens under Trunks’s perverted gaze, slowly hiking his shirt up his quivering tummy to fully expose the curve of those hips and the dip of his waist, those full pecs that are always unbearably soft in Trunks’s hands. Trunks licks his lips. “Atta boy…”

Goten whines at the praise. He’s so easy. Like sugar dissolving in coffee. “L-Like this?” he whimpers, holding his shirt up over his perky-pink nipples, strip tease shy, finally opening his eyes so he can timidly seek out Trunks’s approval, flushing and trembling as Trunks shamelessly rakes his stare up and down his ripening body. “Trunks, d-don’t stare…!”

“Easy,” Trunks purrs, catching Goten by those rocking hips. “Bite the hem, baby. The way I’m gonna have you, you’ll drop it in seconds if you keep holding onto it like that.”

Goten moans out loud at the promise, kittenish as he stuffs the hem of his shirt past his teeth. His mouth is already so spitty he’s drooling all over that haphazard bundle of cotton fabric, gazing hazily down at Trunks beneath the peaks of his plush tits. Gorgeous. “Mmmmphhh…”

Trunks grins, bringing his index finger up to his mouth and tapping on his bottom lip exactly twice. “Go on,” he grunts, pulling Goten’s hips down gently barely by a millimetre. “Sit on it, ’Ten.”

“Nnnnmmphhh—” Goten mewls under his breath as he lowers himself onto the furl of Trunks’s mouth. “Mmmnnnn…”

“There you go,” Trunks breathes, digging the pads of his fingers into those meaty hips and thighs until the flesh bruises, until Goten’s already arching his back when they haven’t even come together yet, until it drives Trunks nervous— “just sit back and relax for me, baby…”

“T-Tuh—Trunkkkssshhh—!” Goten warbles, all muffled into the clump of his own shirt he’s still obediently biting down into, squealing as he rides Trunks’s face, trembling with the flick of Trunks’s tongue along his twitchy hole. “U-Uuuuhhhnnghh—mmmnnhhh—!”

Trunks makes the mental note to himself to gag Goten properly, one of these days. He just sounds so cute, gurgling and babbling and squeaking when he’d usually be telling Trunks off through the moans, unable to talk shit when he’s too busy taking it. Thrusting his tongue at a steadily lapping pace out of Goten’s puckered rim, Trunks teases, “So how’s the weather up there?”

Goten mewls something incomprehensible, his fingernails sinking right into Trunks’s chest when he leans back on his ride, whimpering out a laboured, “F-Fuuucgghkkkk—y-youuu—!” as Trunks slides his index finger in past the wet pucker of his hole, pumping down to the knuckle. “Mmmmphhh—Trunkssss—!”

Goten’s wet hole clamps and flexes around Trunks’s tongue, around the piston of Trunks’s fingers when he slides a second digit into that squelching entrance. Trunks doesn’t need to look up at him to know his cock must be spitting pre all over his tensing tummy, Goten’s pretty little head thrown back to top it all off. Trunks chuckles under his breath and just focuses on taking him further apart, stretching Goten out, sinking the pads of his fingers all the way down to that sensitive gland at the heart of his favourite boy.

“T-Trunkssshhh—hhhnnn—!” Goten whines, his hips flouncing and twisting with every prod against his prostate, his cock leaking like a broken faucet from that twitchy little cherry tip. “A-Aaahh—aaaahhnn—!” His eyes squeeze back shut as he grinds feverishly down on Trunks’s tongue, getting closer to breaking Trunks’s goddamn neck with every hot lick along the squirmy flex of his inner walls. “Mmmm—h-hic—! ’M s-so—clooseeeesshhhh—”

Trunks is nothing if not a prodigy in making Goten feel debilitating pleasure. He licks a wet stripe along that winking, red-pink rim, and then slips right down into him, taking the clench of Goten’s thighs around the sides of his head as a signal he’s doing fucking spectacularly. Scissoring that tight little pussy open further with two spit-slicked fingers to that spit-slicked hole, maintaining that rhythm, stuffing Goten full of his tongue and his fingers and then emptying him out, snapping his pace quicker until Goten’s prostate swells along his tongue and Goten’s clamping around him so taut it’s almost hard to keep it up.

“Trunks, T-Trunks, Trunkssss—!” Goten slurs, shaking his hips for it and biting down irreparably harder into his own shirt until his teeth tear through the fabric, his pretty tits practically bouncing from all his squirming, his entire body possessed by the pleasure. “Gonna, g-gonna, ’m gonna—hhhuuuuhhhnnn—”

One last thrust into him, that’s all it takes. Goten orgasms explosively, his hole rippling around everything Trunks has pushed right into him, rutting his hips down on Trunks’s face without a care in the world, his cock splattering him from his belly all the way up to his chest, his lips, his cupid’s bow, the tip of his nose. Homerun. Evidently, it’s as though Trunks’s fingers and tongue inside him were the only things keeping him upright, because as soon as Trunks slips out of him, Goten’s falling forwards with another whimper, his shirt sliding out of his mouth and his pecs pushed right in Trunks’s face, straddling Trunks’s neck with those numb legs and whimpering into the crown of Trunks’s head. “Truuuunksssss…”

A low, drawling laugh, slow like honey, leaves Trunks’s mouth. It reverberates between Goten’s thighs, crawling over the stretched-sore quiver of Goten’s dripping hole, sending shivers up the entire plane of the younger boy’s body. Trunks grips him back at the hips, the heels of his palms pressing into Goten’s sticky stomach. “Goten. You still with me, buddy?”

“Mmmhhh,” Goten whimpers incoherently, his hips twitching. “I— a-ah—!”

He doesn’t get the chance to finish making his point. Not when Trunks flips him over, between his legs and on top of him, starved like a wild animal. Goten whines, wrapping his legs around Trunks’s waist, his fingers knotted through Trunks’s hair. “Trunks, p-please…!”

“Please what?” Trunks mocks him, even if the way he’s fumbling to get his cock out just at the sight of Goten underneath him like his, legs wide open, flushed and whimpering—that should tip Goten off to the fact that Trunks isn’t control of the situation in the slightest. A cruel grin splits Trunks’s face as he lines the tip of his throbbing cock up with that cute little pussy Goten’s got between his legs, growing more teeth for every squeaky-panting hiccuped breath that leaves Goten’s lips. “Come on, ’Ten. Talk to me.”

“Shut up,” Goten mewls, his eyes crowding with the glazed-over film of tears, “shut up and fuck me, it’s the least you can f-fucking do—”

It really is. Sure, Trunks thinks as he bottoms out in one dirty, deep thrust, he might be the one pulling Goten’s strings, on the surface. He was the one who’d brought him here tonight, even if Goten thinks he came to him out of his own pure volition. But at the end of the day, it’s Goten at the helm of it all. Goten’s big brown eyes and Goten’s pretty pearl drop smile, Goten’s arms around Trunks’s neck like a dog collar. Trunks would do anything for him. He doesn’t remember a time where Goten wasn’t his everything personified. So he fucks him good and hard, makes a religion for himself out of the way Goten’s hole squeezes flushed and rosey around his cock, the way Goten throws his head back and keens Trunks’s name.

“Trunks, T-Trunks, oh my God, Trunksssss—!” Goten wails, his nails dragging down Trunks’s back and his ankles digging into Trunks’s tailbone, his tongue falling out of his mouth as he babbles around all the cock stuffing him full. “H-Harder—nnnnghhhhh—! T-Trunks, fuck me harderrrrr—hhhaaaahhhh—!”

Something animalistic takes Trunks over at the high-pitched and girlish way Goten cries for him, manifesting in the unhinge of his jaw as he leans down to bite right into the pale, shivering column of Goten’s throat, leave a smatter of hickeys all over him, show the world who he really belonged to. “That’s it, baby,” he growls, plowing into Goten over and over again, making a pathway for himself through those seizing guts around him, his teeth dipped in Goten’s blood and his hands all over Goten’s hips, “come on, take my cock just like that, ’Ten—”

They might break the bed with how they’re making it squeak and creak, slam against the wall, but somehow Goten’s moans and whimpers, his keening sobs, they’re the only frequencies Trunks can really make out among the chaos. Goten’s fingers curl into Trunks’s biceps and he hiccups when he feels them flex beneath his touch with the effort Trunks is putting into screwing him stupid, his back arching and his dick leaking between them. “Oh God, Trunks, r-right fucking there—” His toes curl when Trunks slams into him impossibly deeper, splitting him down the middle in the shape of his cock, “f-fuck, fuck, fuck, g-gonna cum againnnn—”

Trunks already knew that. From the way Goten’s hole is rippling and clamping around the base of his length to the way Goten’s dick is spurting pre all over both their abdomens, it’s been evident since the dawn of time. He shaves Goten’s hips off the mattress so he can jackhammer into him closer, harder, watch Goten’s eyes roll to the back of his head and then dip down to kiss him right on the mouth. “Just a little more,” he grunts into Goten’s parted-panting lips, his hips meeting the plush of Goten’s ass in a tectonic slide of bodies, all the way sheathed in those sugar-glazed insides and unable to ever look back. “Just a little more for me, ’Ten, gonna make you feel good—”

“T-Trunks,” Goten warbles into his mouth, outright sobbing by now, his tears like melted corn syrup rolling down his cheeks in baby fat droplets, sweet to the taste when Trunks licks him clean. Goten’s legs squeeze tighter around Trunks’s waist, his arms thrown around Trunks’s neck, his crying indistinguishable from his moaning. “Trunks, make me forget about it all—”

A white-hot bolt of lightning strikes Trunks’s bones in technicolour. Make me forget about it all. Trunks rolls his hips on autopilot, and pounds Goten into the mattress until it makes him go blind. “Shhh, baby, gonna make it all go away,” he rumbles, tapping into some primal register at the bottom of his throat as he sinks his cock into the coax of that aching pussy, “yeah, c’mon, Goten, you’re so—”

(Do you think he’d ever even look at you again if he knew what you did?)

Trunks ignores that voice nagging at the edge of his mind. He focuses on Goten, Goten, Goten. Weaves the mantra of it into his fucking, his thrusting, hammering Goten into the comforters until his angel’s drooling underneath him, screaming Trunks’s name.

(Shut up. Yeah, he would. He’d never leave. He should. But he won’t.)

(... For some fucking reason.)

“Trunks, Trunks, Tr-Tru—uuuunkksssss—!” Goten blubbers, his hole clamping down around Trunks’s cock and his teeth almost chattering, his nails breaking skin across Trunks’s shoulders and his cock throbbing across his belly. “Oh God, oh my God, I-I’m so—I’m gonna—”

His body goes taut as a bow, and the rest is history. Goten’s spilling all over himself for the second time and he’s clenching around Trunks as he goes, cum shooting out of his dick and splattering over the drying remains of his previous remains as he’s fucked through his high, splashed over tears he’s still crying. Six feet underneath Trunks, buried in the rumple of silk sheets.

“O-Oh, Trunks,” Goten moans, his eyes fluttered shut and his hips still rocking weakly, “Trunks—nnnhhhnnnghhh—!”

Not enough. It’s never enough. Trunks throws Goten’s legs up over his shoulders and leans forward on his haunches, burying himself irreversibly deep in those cloying, squirming guts. “Think you can go again, ’Ten?” he husks, his voice so low he hardly recognizes himself, watching Goten squirm under his gaze like he’s turned into something else entirely with the extent of his ravenousness.

“A-Asshole, prick, f-fucking jerk,” Goten babbles, his toes curling in the air and his arms thrown over his head, arching his back when Trunks starts to the find the rhythm in ramming into him, when Trunks leans down to take his nipple between his teeth. “Mmmfffhhhnnghhh…! O-Oh, fuuuckkkk, y-you’re so—hic!—d-deeeeepppp—”

“Yeah,” Trunks groans, one of his hands sliding under Goten’s already dribbling cock to find his abdomen and press right down on it, bottoming out in the squeeze of those guts and gripping Goten’s thigh like a vice, “yeah, baby, I’m—I’m right here, right here inside you, ’Ten—”

“O-Oh my God,” Goten keens for the umpteenth time, his hips jerking and his cock twitching, the velvet squeeze of his hole siren luring Trunks into a climax so explosive it’ll kill the both of them, “I-I’m so full of you, ’m s-so—a-aaahhh—! Trunks, fuck me, yes, yes, yes—”

As if Trunks was made to anything else but fuck him. Satisfy him. Not when their bodies fit together this well—not having sex would be an injustice to the way they were created.

The pads of Trunks’s fingers bruise the inside of Goten’s thighs and he layers kisses down the trembling-taut expanse of Goten’s calf in apology, all but reaming Goten into the spring of the mattress. “Fuck, Goten,” Trunks snarls, clenching his jaw when he sees Goten panting below him with his little bunny tongue stuck out of his spitty mouth again, slamming a veiny hand down above the halo of Goten’s hair and bracketing Goten in against the bed as he leans down, “keep that mouth open for me,baby boy—”

“T-Trunks—!” Goten whines, squeaking when his throbbing-red overstimulated dick is promptly crushed between their abdomens, wailing through another thrust so hard it rearranges his insides into the shape of Trunks’s cock, splits him in two down the middle. “Trunks, Tr—uuuunkksss—mmmmphhhnnn—!”

The kiss Trunks crushes to his lips is sloppy, clumsy, lazy. Spit-slicked where their tongues meet in a sticky swirl, Goten’s back arching off the mattress because there’s no one in the world who likes being kissed while he’s fucked more than him.

“O-Ohhhh, Trunks,” Goten moans into the humid press of their lips, tugging at Trunks’s hair and squealing when Trunks folds him sharper in half at the waist, sliding into him deeper still, “’m a-almost—mmmm, f-feels so good, T-Trunks, I-I’m gonna cummmm—”

Trunks rocks his hips, a bead of sweat dripping down the nape of his neck, shivering when he feels Goten’s fingers follow its delirious path. He’s buried all the way inside him, those clamping-syrupy walls enveloping him down to the fucking balls—and muttering right against Goten’s kiss-swollen lips, a man on a mission: “So cum.” Gripping the inside of Goten’s knee and losing his mind, Goten’s forehead like a forest fire against his own as Trunks grinds down into the pyretic squeeze of those seizing guts. “Cum for me, ’Ten, cum all over this dick, baby, you know it’ll feel even better—”

Goten has one last breath to take, a shivery squeaky gasp—before he’s just throwing his head back and sobbing uncontrollably, his legs kicking and his calves banging on Trunks’s shoulders for mercy, orgasming so hard it might take him under. “Cumming, ’m c-cu—cummingggg, I-I—” He’s mauling into Trunks’s back and breaking skin anew over old scars, arching his back and lifting his shaking hips as he damn near covers himself in his own cum. “F-Fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuckkkk—”

Trunks is no saint. Even he can’t hold out this long—not after Goten’s cum twice around him, squeezing him tighter by the minute, looking prettier by the second. “Goten,” he groans, his head falling against Goten’s shoulder, cuddled up so close to him they’re sharing body heat, “Goten, baby, let me—”

“Cum inside me,” Goten keens, picking Trunks’s face right up and squishing his cheeks beneath his palms, looking him right in the eye because he knows he’s got Trunks wrapped right around his fucking finger, “i-inside me, Trunks, cum inside—”

Making him ask for it twice is a gravely mortal sin. Trunks growls through grinding teeth, and empties himself right where he belongs. Melting into Goten’s embrace as he fucks them both through it, burning Goten from the inside out as he spills into him. Goten whimpers into his ear and rakes his fingers over Trunks’s scalp, drops his legs from Trunks’s shoulders to squeeze them tighter around his waist, giving Trunks no choice but to finish it all inside him. It’s always more corrosive trying to come down from a high then ride it, Trunks thinks, when it’s between Goten’s legs. Trunks presses a spitty smooch to Goten’s lips, murmuring low and gruff against that soft tongue, “Good boy.”

Goten whimpers. “Trunks…” His skin burns with a blush when he looks down between his thighs as Trunks pulls gently out of him, moaning at the dribbles of cum that leak from his stretched hole and follow Trunks the whole way. “Fuck…”

Laughing, Trunks flops onto his side next to him. “Wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Goten smacks him on the shoulder. “Fuck off,” he huffs, but there’s no venom in his voice. “Um, sorry.”

Trunks turns his head to raise a brow at him. “Huh? For what, man?”

“Everything.” Goten fidgets, squeezing his thighs together and biting his lip, avoiding Trunks’s eyes. “Punching you in the face. Getting off three times. You only came once!”

Trunks snickers, pinching Goten in the hip. “I deserved that punch. And once is enough for me,” he assures him, shrugging against the comforters.

A silence that should, on all accounts of existence, be comfortable falls over them. But it’s tinged with an uncertainty. Trunks can sniff it out like a bloodhound.

“Trunks,” Goten starts again, blinking away brand new wetness that shimmers in his eyes, “I can’t keep doing this.”

Trunks has the decency to hold his stare. His palms always clam up when they’re finished holding Goten. When it’s all said and done. “Do what?” he asks, playing dumb, even if Goten doesn’t know the extent of his greed to begin with.

Goten sighs. “All of it. This… push and pull. It’s exhausting.” He turns onto his side. “Maybe it’s nothing to you. But it’s something to me.”

Trunks looks at him. He has no right to make the exasperated sound that he does. “Goten.”

“I wish,” Goten continues, his voice getting a little choked up, breaking Trunks’s tiny heart right in two, “I wish—things could be simple the way they were when we were kids. When we were younger. When did it all get so screwed up…?”

Trunks stares right at the ceiling.

EXT. GOTEN’S PRESCHOOL - MID DAY

FOURTEEN YEARS AGO - YES, STANDARD YEARS - WHAT DOES IT MATTER ANYWAY, WE’RE ALL HUMAN HERE, AREN’T WE?

AREN’T WE?

“... The way they were when we were kids?” Trunks repeats, back in the present. Present day, present time. He sits up, raking his eyes over the quiver of Goten’s lip. “Goten. We’re not kids anymore, though. How could you expect it to always be the same?”

Trunks’s hands make fists in the comforters. Do you want to go back to the way it was before I realized I was in love with you? He doesn’t have the courage to say it out loud. He’ll never get the hypothetical answer to his hypothetical question. Before either of us realized we could be anything more than friends?

“I know,” Goten sniffles, his lashes fluttering. Seducing Trunks’s heart and mind endlessly further. It all belongs to Goten. “I know. I’m sorry. I just feel like—you’re miles ahead of me, sometimes. And I’m just—” He swipes a fist over his dripping nose. His chest heaves with his whimpers. “I’m just some stupid kid following after you. Like always.”

“Hey.” Trunks scoops him up, his arms wrapped around Goten’s waist as he tows the younger boy right into his lap. “It’s never been like that.” He thumbs over the tears speckled across Goten’s cheek, rubbing his back up and down, between the shoulder blades and then across his tailbone. “Okay, Goten? Never. We’re just the two of us. We’re always going to be the two of us. That’s never going to change.”

Trunks is never going to let it change, frankly.

Goten’s smile is wobbly. It spreads across his face all wrong. “Okay,” he whispers, his fingers brushing the buzzed nape of Trunks’s neck again. He shifts his hips along the half-hard twitch of Trunks’s cock, flushing down to his chest. “Trunks, could you…” He whimpers when Trunks’s hands grip him back at the hips, his thighs trembling. “Inside me, Trunks…”

Trunks doesn’t have to say anything. He just pulls Goten closer, and slides his way home.

It’s not a surprise in the slightest when Trunks opens his eyes after drifting off into his restless dreams and finds Dream Goten staring down him once again.

“I knew you’d be here,” Trunks mutters, suffocating under the weight of Dream Goten straddling his hips and goddamn liking it.

Dream Goten looks at him like he’s crazy. “You knew I’d be where?”

“I’m not in the mood for philosophy,” Trunks chuckles, leaning his head back with a humourless grin. “I wish I could take you back to the real world with me. Maybe that’s a bit manipulative of me, wanting a version of you that’s been personalized like a fucking toy. Does that even still make you Goten, or would you be somebody else?” He seems to be philosophizing just fine, despite his earlier rebuttal. “But I think I’ve done worse. It’s not like the real Goten knows.” He works his jaw. “He’ll never know, will he?”

“You paid my girlfriend to break up with me. That’s pretty shitty, you fucking jackass.”

“Sorrryyyyyyy.”

“You don’t sound sorry at all. Asshole.” Dream Goten cocks his head curiously. “What’s not real about this world, anyway?”

Trunks smirks at him. It’s the only way to hold out. “It’s only in my head,” he hums, sliding his hands up the slope of Goten’s thighs. “And I want it to be real.”

Dream Goten crosses his arms over his chest. He makes that expression Trunks remembers Goten making since they were little tots, his eyes shut haughtily and his nose in the air, about to huff out a lecture and a half and looking just like his fucking mother. “I’m just as real as

Trunks’s eyes snap wide open.

The darkness his room is submerged in greets him. So does the weight of Goten, the real one, smushed against his side. It’s the middle of the night, and Goten’s sleeping like the dead. Slowly, Trunks turns to look at him. His sight sharpens automatically when it’s put to the test upon Goten’s body. Oddly, Trunks feels entirely at peace as he watches Goten snore into a pillow, cuddled up against Trunks’s arm. Trunks pulls the covers up over Goten’s shoulders, and slips back easily into slumber. There’s nobody waiting for him in his dreams. It’s the best sleep he’s had in a while.