can_finish_them | Outside Milliways

Martin's not exactly used to being forcibly moved, but in this case he's not entirely displeased about it.

"Er-" He falters a little, and swallows before he can say anything stupid.

He peers down to his feet, back up to the target and back down again and takes note of where he should be standing. Right.

"So, is this the safety?" He thumbs towards the catch very carefully so as not to disturb it. He's still keeping his fingers well away from the trigger.

"Yes. It's on, don't worry - flick it up with your thumb to switch it off. When it fires it'll kick back against your hand; don't fight it, just absorb it."

She stays where she is for the moment - and leaves her hands where they are, too, since Martin doesn't seem inclined to object.

"Use your left hand to steady it, look along your right arm to line it up, flick the catch up, steady... and pull the trigger."

Martin brings the gun up to point at the target, leaving his elbow a bit loose, (he's heard it helps, though it might just be television lies again) and then brings his left hand around to steady the base of it.

Kaidy's hands being where they are is more than a little distracting, but he has a gun in his hand, which sobers him somewhat.

Martin breathes carefully and looks along his arm, along the gun to the sight, and then follows that to the target. He's very deliberate about the whole business, telegraphing to Kaidy exactly what he's doing at all times.

"Right." He says, once he's sure. "I think I'm ready."

"It'll be on the loud side," she warns, and smiles. "Keep your arm loose like that... and take the shot, if you think you've got it."

Oh yeah. He hasn't got any ear defenders. They always have ear defenders on telly when they're in shooting ranges. Mind you, he did just hear Kaidy shooting, and it wasn't too big of a deal.

Martin tries to brace himself for the noise without actually bracing himself and tensing up. It's difficult, and he's pretty sure he hasn't succeeded, but he tries at least.

He stands steady, attempts to put all thoughts of Kaidy at his back out of his head, and breathes steady again. Actually, it's possible his breathing's all over the place, but he can't tell.

He refocuses. Right. Gun. Yes.

He slides the safety catch off at glacial slowness and he's suddenly very aware that he's holding a live firearm. He bites his lip. Takes in a deeper breath and tries to push all the stupid, shaky, unhelpful thoughts out as he breathes out.

He stares intently at the target via the sight, and squeezes the trigger on an exhale.

It's shakier than he'd intended. There's a terrifically loud noise, and the recoil, whilst it's perhaps not as bad as he'd been expecting, is still something of a kick and slams into his hand with a thump. He blinks, huffs a sigh of very mixed feelings, and deliberately clicks the safety back on again.

"Wow! Okay. That was-" He laughs. "I'm not even sure. It was bloody loud, for a start. Louder than I thought it was going to be. And it's a bit terrifying and exhilarating all at the same time."

He turns to face her.

"How did I do for my first time?" He asks, beaming grin on his face and no particular idea of what words are coming out of his mouth right now.

...Well, then.

She bites her cheeks until the giggles stop... well, until most of the giggles stop.

Most. Ish.

"I'll tell you later," she promises instead. "As for how the shooting went..."

Right. Yes. She's, um, laughing. Er.

As Kaidy creases up Martin scrolls his brain back through what he just said to find out that it was that made her laugh. When he catches it, his blush, which had been creeping along anyway, flares up full force, as the weight of it hits him.

"I- Um. That's not-"

And then her reply catches up with him, and his brain is knocked for another loop, because well, yes. And that's something he shouldn't be thinking about with her right there and her gorgeous smile twinkling at him from under those wicked eyes.

He glares at her, ears blazing red and cheeks flushed.

"You are a terrible, terrible person. " He says indignantly, not meaning a word of it. "Just dreadful."

That only makes her laugh harder, until her mascara is in severe danger of becoming a casualty to her gigglefit and it takes her several moments to remember to take her gun back from him and re-holster it (with the safety back on, yes) so that she can cup his face between her hands and pull him down for a kiss.

(She still can't quite stop laughing, so it's a very light and shaky kiss, but she feels she should get points for making the effort anyway.)

"I am a truly appalling person," she agrees, dotting his lips with further quick, giggling kisses after every few words. "Would you like to see some more evidence of that?"

Martin lets her take the gun from him with her shaking fingers and then lets her kiss away his glare bit by bit, in-between her giggles.

He's been laughed at before, and kissed, but never at the same time, and he's finding that it's an awful lot better than he thought it could have been.

He kisses back, peppering her giggling, gorgeous smile with smudging kisses of his own.

He's not sure how to answer because he knows what she means at least in an overall sense, and obviously yes, but also he's not entirely ready, and isn't that strange how he can be both at the same time? It wouldn't be his first time ever. Even he's not quite that bad. But it'd be his first time in rather longer than anyone would care to admit, and he's somewhat terrified of making things go wrong.

He doesn't want to obsess, he really doesn't, just like he doesn't want to be pessimistic, it just happens that way. But he's trying to be not that person. Because if he expects bad things then bad things happen. And he likes Kaidy. A lot. Maybe more than he should, but they've known each other for a while now, and he misses her like crazy whenever he's back home in what he sort of thinks of as the real world, and well, he wants to. He's allowed to want to, it's not a failing on his part.

Martin's brain is a complex jumble of worries and fears, but even if he's not entirely sure that he deserves to be happy, he really, really wants to be.

He presses into a kiss slowly but definitely, his hands settling easily into their default position on her shoulders, and it probably doesn't last as long as he thinks it does, but it feels like forever before he pulls back to breathe.

He looks at her, takes in her beauty, her wicked cheek, her confidence and elegance. He can't believe how lucky he is.

He smiles, wide and happy.

"A-actually. Yes. I- Yes." He bites his lip to stop himself from babbling. There's nothing he can do about the blush.

Kaidy takes a deep, calming breath, firmly irons out (nearly all) the rest of her laughter, and grins up at him.

"Good," she says firmly, and then (because even for someone as spectacularly self-absorbed as Kaidy can be, he's not difficult to read, and the nervousness is broadcasting loud and clear) she leans up and kisses him again, slow and (for her) gentle, and slides her fingers up his jawline and into his hair.

Martin goes willingly into the kiss, his eyes drifting closed, and how could he not, when her fingers are skidding through his hair? He can smell-taste the faint cling of smoke from her cigarettes, but it's faint, and what he mostly tastes is just Kaidy.

He finds that his hands are in rather the wrong place, and without him really thinking about it his left resettles itself to her waist, while his right skids across from where it was just brushing the line of her hair, to the curve of her shoulder.

Without any especial input from his brain, his right thumb starts to stroke circles against her skin, bumping over the fabric of her top without really noticing the change in texture.

Mmmm.

Kaidy very much does notice the change in textures, as her faint shiver gives away, her fingers curling and opening reflexively in Martin's hair. Given that he evidently hasn't been picking all this up from practical experience then he's clearly an extremely fast learner, she decides, and makes an unmistakably encouraging sound as she nudges further into his touch.

She steps closer, closing all trace of the gap between them, and lets the fingers of one hand trickle down his throat to his collar, slow and stroking, to eventually play thoughtfully with his tie.

Edited 2013-10-10 00:24 (UTC)

The skritch of her fingers through his hair, involuntary though it may be to Kaidy, sends ice-trickles down his spine and makes him draw in a sharp breath through his nose.

His fingers skitter across her skin. Grip. Release. It's fast becoming a loop, a particularly nice one at that.

It's less that Martin is a fast learner, and more that he's not really paying attention to what it is he's doing, which means that he's not over-thinking it. Over-thinking is something that tends to ruin a lot of his plans.

The encouraging sounds are indeed encouraging. And very good to hear. For various reasons.

Martin swallows heavily, and a strangled sort of squeak escapes his throat even through the kiss. Everything seems to be rather too warm all of a sudden.

Well.

There's a great deal of good to be said about their current situation - especially the fact of his hands on her skin - but she can't help but feel that there's much that could be improved about it, too. And judging by the sound Martin just made (which also nearly gives her the giggles all over again), he feels more or less the same way.

And guess who just happened to enter the bar through her bedroom this evening?

So she finally - reluctantly - lets the kiss break, grey eyes flicking up at Martin's flushed face and her fingers still playing down through his hair as she smiles.

Softly, "Come back to mine?"

Martin's rather enjoying himself. And he's not entirely sure how he got into this situation. He can remember all of the things that happened to get him to this right now, with Kaidy, but he's still not entirely certain that it isn't all a dream. It wouldn't exactly be the first time.

As the kiss breaks he feels an awful lot like he's just surfacing from a great depth. His breathing is erratic, his heart's pounding, it's all rather dramatic, at least inside his own head. He almost misses her speaking because he's too busy focusing on the pink of her lips, but he sees them move and he hears the words.

He's unsure. Hopeful, but unsure. Does she mean-?

Martin licks his lips and takes a slow breath.

"Um. Do you-? Er... Yes. Please?"

He's not sure about the please, but right now he's not sure other words can actually make the trip from his brain to his mouth, so he settles for a smile and a nod.

She chuckles under her breath, smiling back at him as her tongue darts out to wet her lips and her hand trails down his arm to take his hand and squeeze.

She was actually quite tempted to give him another kiss just for the please, but at this rate they'll be here all night -- and whilst that idea does have its charms, so does its alternative...

"Come along then, Captain," she says, still in that quiet husky drawl, and tugs him back towards the bar. "Don't worry about the targets - they're usually out here."

Note to self, Kaidy: buy Ariel a drink later for having the spectacularly good timing to be on the nightshift this evening.

Martin really, really doesn't know how the hell this happened, but he's thanking his lucky stars (for once) that it has. Yes, he's apprehensive, worried that things will go wrong, (wrong in a variety of different ways, for Martin is nothing if not well prepared for disaster to strike, though not actually prepared for the consequences of said disaster) but he's also pleased and excited (again, in a variety of ways) and generally buoyant.

He follows Kaidy, hand-in-hand. She called him Captain. And her voice was, well...

If he were thinking clearly, he might also be excited about the fact that he's heading to her world, to the future, but he's got other things on his mind.

Edited 2013-10-11 02:52 (UTC)

Priorities: they're important!

It's rare - virtually unheard-of - for Kaidy not to look around as she enters the bar, but this time she barely spares the place a glance as she makes a beeline for her door. Martin gets one last quick, hard, laughing kiss - and then she tugs the door open and leads him through.

The room beyond is where she'd been going when the bar saw fit to break her journey: it's quite small and lightly furnished, with one wall straight and the other a long arch which forms both wall and roof, as if the room were part of a circular tunnel. The curved wall shows one large vidscreen, currently muted and showing only the time and date - 22:57, 11/08/33 - in large dulled blue characters. There's a vanity mirror and writing desk against the flat wall; the desk is covered by a tumble of papers and books lying slipshod over make-up and framed photographs, with Kaidy's favourite flying jacket hanging from the back of the accompanying chair. A wardrobe, apparently mostly held together by duct tape and photos of planes, lurches unsteadily at the other end of the room to the desk, and a small bookshelf holds a few more books on planes and flying, the Haynes manual for an Aston Martin, and the collected Sherlock Holmes and Jane Austen, bookended by a very large and expensive-looking wooden jewellery box. Above the books, half a dozen little Airfix models of planes (there's a Spitfire, a Sopwith Camel, and a few more recent designs) hang motionless from the ceiling like insects caught in amber. Most space is taken up by the bed, which consists of two big double mattresses piled one on top of the other and draped in a tumble of pillows, rugs, blankets and sheets in a general impression of messy comfort: if any bed could be described as déshabillé, it's this one. There are no windows; it's warm, and light comes gently from the vidscreen and the two upturned wall lights on the one flat wall.

"I'm afraid it's hardly five-star," Kaidy remarks wryly from just behind him, "But it'll do."

She carefully shuts the door on the noise and lights of the end of the universe, clicking the lock just in case.

Edited 2013-10-12 16:01 (UTC)

Martin barely notices any of it. There's a big clock, the roof is curved, it's a bit messy. In a vague sort of way, he notes the model aeroplanes and photographs, but most of the attention his brain is capable of keeps pointing out to him that he's in Kaidy's bedroom, and he loses any train of thought he might be on.

Everything blurs into insignificance given that Kaidy has just dragged him into her bedroom. It's clearly her bedroom. There's a bed and everything.

He hears the door click as she locks it, and turns back to look at her. His cheeks are flushed, but mostly from the rushing over here and alright, yes, partly due to the excitement of finding himself in this situation. She probably can't tell the difference. He mostly hopes that she can't tell. Except that he also sort of hopes that she can.

Martin is balancing very carefully on the line between 'oh my god what am I doing, this is going to be terrible' and 'oh my god, this is amazing, more of this now please'.

His smile is a mixture of all sorts of emotions, worry and shock and pleasure bundled up together. Mostly it's a good kind of shock.

"It, er-. It looks alright to me." He says, slightly hesitantly.

"Well, I'm glad to have your approval, Captain."

She smiles back at him, her eyes dancing as she squeezes his hand again in what she hopes is a universally reassuring gesture. She's not entirely sure of what to make of that look on his face, honestly, but she's made a career out of 'where angels fear to tread' and it's far too late to change her ways now. Oh well, if nothing else then going slow will be an interesting new experience.

"It's all right," she adds more gently, reaching up to frame his cheek with her free hand and give him a brief, light kiss. "Now, about that nice suit of yours..."

Edited 2013-10-13 23:36 (UTC)

That's not what he meant, but he's fairly sure she knows that and is just teasing him.

The kiss may only be light, but it brings him back down from the heights of panic to which he had been climbing. Yes, he is worried, but no he certainly does not want to wreck things with Kaidy, and more importantly he does not want to lose this chance. He breathes carefully and steadily.

Kaidy might have to take the lead on this one, but he's more than willing to be her co-pilot at this stage.

Martin looks down at himself. He'd rather forgotten that he was in his uniform. He smiles at her.

"What about my suit?" He asks, voice unwavering, but cheeks still pink.

She grins at him wickedly, taking his hat off her head and tossing it neatly onto her desk. There really are few things she likes more than making a mess of a man in a really nice suit...

"Well, fond as I am of it, I really could stand to see you in a little less of it," she tells him, and leans in to kiss him again as her hands reach to loosen his tie.

Martin instantly flushes, as he's almost certain was Kaidy's intention. He's also inclined towards stuttering even in his own head, so his thoughts scramble a little.

Even so, he's hardly going to stop her, and well, he is getting rather warm...

He presses into the kiss with no hesitation at all, and makes affirmative sounding noises. His hands gravitate to her waist again, thumbs smoothing circles across the fabric of her tank top.

After a moment or two (or it might have been much longer, he's lost all sense of timing right now) he pulls out of the kiss just slightly.

"In case you didn't, um, realise. I'm, er- I like this plan. Um. Yes." He's torn between embarrassment at his terrible ability to form words, and being pleased that he managed to get any words out at all.

A-hah. It really is considerably harder to undo a tie when you can't see what you're doing (and are distracted by kissing someone attractive), but she's finally got the knot to slip free and now Martin's tie is hanging loose around his neck.

When he breaks the kiss to speak, his words make her laugh under her breath.

"Good," she says, pressing another light, fluttering kiss to his lips as she tugs playfully at the top button of his shirt; no intent just yet, only toying with it, testing the waters. "Then enjoy it, Red."

Martin, working from experience, knows that it really is a much better idea to do what Kaidy tells you than not. He nods, smiles and leans in to kiss her again.

The awkwardness will certainly surface again when things like buttons and shoelaces become an issue, but for the moment Martin is mostly calm and definitely enjoying himself. (And anyway, everyone fails at shoelaces. And buttons are hard when you're not entirely paying attention.)

[OOC: And there we fade to black for the sake of my sanity. Because I am lame.]

Edited 2013-10-21 01:31 (UTC)

Outside Milliways

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