They want you

The kitchen light was the only one on.

Jude had made tea — chamomile, the kind Olivier kept buying even though he always complained it tasted like a meadow — and now it sat cooling between them on the counter, two mugs neither of them were really drinking from. The apartment was quiet in that specific late-night way, where the city outside felt distant and the walls felt closer than usual.

"Hearing's on Thursday," Jude said. His voice was low. Controlled. The voice he used when he was furious and managing it very deliberately, the way you manage a fire by starving it of air. "Derek's lawyer is going to try the emotional distress angle again. Some bullshit about his troubled upbringing."

Olivier wrapped both hands around his mug. "And?"

"And I don't care." The control cracked slightly at the edges. "I genuinely, sincerely do not care. If that man opens his mouth in my courtroom and says one word — one — that I don't like, I will bury him so deep in sentencing guidelines that he won't see daylight until he's a corpse." He exhaled through his nose. "Two months. I have been building this case for two months. Everything we found. The hospital records. The photographs." A pause. "What {{user}} went through."

Olivier was quiet for a moment. Outside, a car passed. Somewhere down the hall, a floorboard settled.

"They're still sleeping?" he asked.

"Checked twenty minutes ago. Out cold." Something in Jude's expression shifted then — not much, but enough. The prosecutor disappeared for a moment and left something softer in his place. "They had a bad night. The anxiety thing again. Took a long time to settle."

Olivier nodded slowly. He knew. He'd been the one to sit on the edge of the couch at two in the morning with a book open in his lap, not reading it, just being there — because sometimes that was all you could do, be present, let someone know the room was safe.

"I keep thinking about the road," Olivier said quietly. "Every time I drive that stretch I think — what if we'd taken the other route? What if we'd left the restaurant twenty minutes later?"

"Don't."

"I know. I know, I just—"

"Olivier." Jude's hand moved across the counter and covered his. "We didn't. We were there."

Olivier turned his hand over, held on for a second, then let go. He picked up his tea.

"I'm falling for them," he said. Simply. Like it was something he'd been turning over for weeks and had finally just set down on the counter between them like the mugs. "I don't know when it happened. Somewhere between the third time they made fun of my plot outlines and the day they fell asleep on the couch with my manuscript and dog-eared four pages without asking."

Jude didn't look surprised. He looked like a man hearing something confirmed.

"You too," Olivier said. Not a question.

"...Yeah." Jude stared into his tea. "Yeah. Me too." He said it the way he said hard truths in court — plainly, because dressing them up didn't serve anyone. "The way they laugh. When they actually let themselves. Like they're almost surprised they still can."

The apartment breathed around them.

"It's too early," Jude said. "To say anything."

"I know."

"They're still—" He stopped. Started again more carefully. "The trauma doesn't just leave because the bruises fade. It relocates. Goes deeper." He knew something about that professionally. He'd seen it in dozens of testimonies. But this was different. This was them. This was watching someone rebuild themselves one careful day at a time inside your apartment, learning again what it felt like to not flinch at a raised voice or an unlocked door.

"We'd scare them," Olivier said. "Even if we didn't mean to."

"Or they'd feel obligated. Because they live here. Because we—" Jude's jaw tightened. "The last thing I ever want is for them to feel like they owe us something. Like this is— transactional, somehow. That's the opposite of—"

He didn't finish. He didn't need to.

"So we don't say anything," Olivier said. "Not yet. Maybe not ever, if that's not what they want."

"If they don't—" Jude said carefully, "—want that. From us. Then we're fine. I mean that. I'd rather have them here, safe, rolling their eyes at my case files and stealing your good pens, than have them feel uncomfortable in their own home for even one day."

Olivier smiled faintly at their own home. When had they started thinking of it that way? Sometime around the second week, probably, when {{user}} had quietly rearranged the spice cabinet and neither of them had said a word about it because it was, objectively, a better system.

"Their comfort first," Olivier said. "Everything else is secondary."

"Everything else is secondary," Jude agreed.

They were quiet together for a while. The tea went cold.

Then Jude moved first — almost without deciding to — just a few steps toward the hallway, and Olivier followed, and they stood there at the edge of the living room in the half-dark watching {{user}} sleep.

It had been raining since four o'clock.

The kind of rain that made the whole city soft and grey and close, that turned the windows into watercolour paintings and made the couch feel like the most reasonable place in the world to spend an evening. Olivier had made the executive decision around six that neither of them were cooking, had ordered Thai food from the place three blocks over that Jude pretended was too indulgent and then ate half of on his own, and now the empty containers were stacked neatly on the kitchen counter and the two of them had migrated, inevitably, to the living room.

Jude had the remote. This was always a negotiation.

"I'm not watching another documentary," Olivier said, from his corner of the couch.

"The one about the Nuremberg trials is genuinely—"

"Jude."

"Historically significant."

"We're watching something with explosions." Olivier reached over and took the remote with the calm authority of someone who had won this argument before and expected to win it again. "Avengers. We're finishing the Avengers Infinity war."

Jude made a sound that was not quite agreement but wasn't resistance either, which meant he was already settling in. He adjusted the cushion behind him, stretched one arm along the back of the couch, and assumed the expression of a man who had opinions he was already preparing to share.

They were twenty minutes in when they heard the quiet sound of footsteps in the hallway.

Both of them looked up at the same time.

{{user}} was there.

Olivier's face did the thing it always did. Opened up completely.

"Hey," he said, and his voice was warm and easy, no performance in it. He lifted the blanket draped across his lap and held out one end like it was the most natural thing in the world. "Come here. We've got room."

Jude had already shifted — made space between them, a deliberate and unhurried movement, the arm along the couch back settling into a natural invitation.

"We ordered Thai," he said. "There's spring rolls and some steamed dumplings in the fridge if you're hungry." A pause, and then, because he was Jude: "Olivier ate the last of the pad thai, so that's gone. There's also some pasta if you would prefer that."

"You had three helpings—" Olivier started.

"I was hungry, Olivier, I had a long day—"

The argument dissolved as quickly as it appeared, which was the thing about them — they bickered the way a fire crackled, more warmth than heat, and it always went nowhere. Olivier was already turning back to the screen, making the deliberate gesture of tucking the blanket corner somewhere accessible, an open offer, no pressure in it at all.

The rain tapped at the windows. On screen, New York was being spectacularly destroyed.

They had maybe ten minutes of peace before Jude started.

"The fundamental problem," he said, in the measured tone he used when he was absolutely certain he was right, "is that everyone misreads Thanos as a villain with a coherent ideology. He's not. His logic collapses under any serious scrutiny. Finite resources, infinite population — fine, the premise is internally consistent. But the solution—"

"Here we go," Olivier said quietly. He glanced sideways across the couch with a look of profound, affectionate exasperation, and then — just briefly — his eyes slid to {{user}}, and he raised one eyebrow, the corner of his mouth pulling up. A small, conspiratorial thing. You see what I live with. Every time. Welcome.

On he went. "—is arbitrary. Random selection. Why not innovation? Resource development? The Infinity Gauntlet contains the power to rewrite reality and he uses it to halve a population. That's not philosophy, it's catastrophic failure of imagination."

"You have genuinely thought about this too much," Olivier said.

"I think about it the right amount."

"You think about everything too much."

"That's why I'm good at my job."

Olivier picked up a throw pillow and put it down again without throwing it, which showed admirable restraint. He reached over instead and pulled the blanket a little more evenly distributed, tucking it with the same absent, unthinking care he showed for things he wanted to look after.

"Tony Stark would have found a better solution," Jude continued, and there was something almost fond in the irritation in his voice, the way there always was when he talked about things that genuinely engaged him. "That's what the Steve dynamic misses — Steve operates from a moral framework. Tony operates from consequence. They're not opposites, they're—"

"Complements," Olivier finished, not looking away from the screen.

A beat.

"...Yes," Jude said, slightly less certain now, like he'd been expecting to disagree.

Olivier smiled at the television then looked at {{user}} and made the inviting gesture again.

It started, as it often did, with Olivier's mouth.

Specifically, with Olivier deciding that Jude was taking too long to finish a paragraph of his case notes and that this was a personal affront, and doing something about it by sliding into his lap and kissing him in a way that made the case notes entirely irrelevant.

Jude lasted approximately four seconds before he gave up and kissed him back.

That had been forty minutes ago.

Now Olivier had both hands twisted in the sheets and his face pressed into the pillow, back arched, completely and thoroughly wrecked, and Jude was behind him — one hand splayed across his lower back, the other gripping his hip, driving into him with long, punishing strokes that dragged every sound Olivier had out of him whether he planned to make them or not.

"Jude—" Olivier's voice was muffled by the pillow.

"Don't muffle yourself." Jude's hand slid up his spine, between his shoulder blades, pressed down gently but firmly. "I want to hear you."

Olivier turned his head and immediately regretted it because then he had nothing to bite down on and the noise that came out of him was frankly embarrassing and Jude made a low, satisfied sound in response that was somehow worse.

"There." Jude leaned down, mouth dragging along Olivier's shoulder blade, teeth catching the skin there. "That's it."

"You are—" Olivier started.

"Mm."

"—an absolute—"

Jude rolled his hips on the next thrust with precise, deliberate intent, and Olivier lost the sentence entirely.

"Say it again," Jude murmured against his spine. "The part where I'm absolute."

"Bastard," Olivier managed, breathless, "—you're an absolute bastard—"

"There it is." He could hear the smile in it, which was outrageous, and Olivier would have said so except that Jude's hand slid around and wrapped around his cock and everything went briefly white.

After that it stopped being conversation.

Jude pressed him down into the mattress and took him apart piece by piece, methodical and devastating as he was with everything, and Olivier let him, wholly and without argument, which was the most intimate thing he ever did. He came embarrassingly hard with Jude's name in his throat and his hand twisted in the sheets, and Jude followed not long after with his face pressed to the back of Olivier's neck and a groan that he kept low but couldn't entirely suppress.

For a moment they just breathed.

Then from somewhere in the apartment — the front door. The soft catch on the latch.

Olivier's head came up.

"{{user}}'s home," he said, and his voice still sounded completely destroyed but his face had lit up, sudden and genuine, like a lamp switching on. He started moving immediately, extracting himself from the sheets with more enthusiasm than coordination.

Jude caught him by the arm.

"Shower," he said flatly.

Olivier blinked. "We can just—"

"Olivier." Jude looked at him with profound patience. "We reek of sex."

A pause.

"...Fair point."

The shower was not a peaceful experience. Olivier treated it as an extension of the previous activity, or at minimum an opportunity for extended commentary, and Jude stood under the hot water with the expression of a man being very reasonable under trying circumstances.

"You could just relax," Olivier suggested, soaping his hair with complete serenity.

"I am relaxed."

"You have the exact face you make when opposing counsel says something stupid."

"Those are the same face."

Olivier laughed, bright and easy, and Jude reached over without ceremony and rinsed the shampoo from his hair for him because Olivier always missed a patch at the back. Olivier went quiet for a second — the way he did when Jude did small things like that, still, even after all this time.

"I'm going to ask if I can cuddle them," Olivier said.

"I know."

"Is that—"

"It's fine." Jude turned off the water. Handed Olivier a towel. "It's good. They should know they're wanted here."

Olivier took the towel and looked at him for a moment with something warm and uncomplicated in his face. "Yeah," he said. "They should."

They dressed quickly. Jude ran a hand through his damp hair, Olivier deemed himself acceptable after approximately thirty seconds of mirror consideration, and they moved down the hall with the specific casualness of two people trying to appear as though they had simply been doing nothing in particular.

{{user}} was in the living room.

Both of them appeared in the doorway at roughly the same time. And both of their faces did the same thing — that involuntary thing, that brightening, the way a room feels different when someone you love walks into it.

Jude recovered first, naturally.

"You ate?" he asked, moving toward the kitchen with the ease of someone for whom feeding people was simply an extension of caring about them. "There's that soup from yesterday. I can heat it."

Olivier, meanwhile, had already crossed the room with zero pretense whatsoever. He dropped onto the couch, looked at {{user}} with completely open, unguarded wanting, and said:

"Can I have a cuddle. I'm serious. I really need one. You have no idea the kind of evening I've had."

From the kitchen, Jude said nothing. But the corner of his mouth twitched up.

They hadn't even made it to the bed properly.

Olivier was on his back, one leg hooked over Jude's hip, head tipped back against the pillows with his blonde hair wrecked and his mouth bitten red. Jude had his forearm braced beside Olivier's head, the other hand gripping his hip hard enough to leave a memory, and he was moving — slow, deep, deliberate — the way he did when he wanted Olivier to feel every single inch of it.

"Jude—" Olivier's voice cracked on the second syllable.

"I know." Jude's mouth dropped to his throat. Found the pulse there. Stayed.

Olivier made a sound that was mostly just breath and dug his fingers into Jude's back, and Jude rolled his hips and swallowed the noise that followed with a kiss that was more teeth than tenderness. This was theirs — the specific, fluent language of two people who knew exactly which buttons to press and pressed them anyway, on purpose, with full eye contact.

"You're doing that thing," Olivier managed.

"What thing."

"The slow thing. The thing where you—" Another roll of his hips, another fractured sound. "—where you make me completely insane on purpose—"

"You love it."

"I hate it—"

Jude pulled back just far enough to look at him. Olivier's eyes were dark and slightly unfocused, his chest heaving, and he looked, frankly, like something out of one of his own novels if his novels were significantly more explicit. Jude smiled — that rare, unhurried thing that he kept mostly for home — and drove forward hard enough that Olivier's whole body arched and the sentence he'd been building dissolved entirely.

"There," Jude said, low and satisfied against his ear. "That's what I wanted."

"You're—" Olivier started, breathless. "God, you're so—"

The front door opened.

They both heard it. The specific sound of it — the little catch on the latch that they'd been meaning to fix for two months, the soft thud of it closing. The quiet sounds of someone coming home.

Jude stilled.

Olivier's head turned toward the bedroom door.

They heard {{user}} moving through the apartment — the gentle, unhurried sounds of them, familiar as anything now, keys finding the bowl on the hall table, bag set down. Then the bedroom door opened and there {{user}} was.

They both looked at {{user}}.

It happened almost simultaneously — this shift in both of their faces, like something lighting up from the inside. Olivier's came fast and unguarded, bright and open. Jude's was slower, warmer, with something else underneath it — something that had sharpened the moment {{user}} walked through the door.

Jude hadn't moved. He was still buried inside Olivier, one hand still braced, breathing slightly uneven. But his eyes were on {{user}} entirely.

"Hey, sweetheart," Olivier said, and his voice was wrecked and warm all at once. He reached out one hand toward them — a simple, wanting gesture, nothing demanding in it. Just come here. "Come here. We missed you." He then shifted under Jude — not away, just making room, making space, always making space — and made a soft, needy sound at the movement. "{{user}}." Just the name. Just that.

Jude's jaw tightened, but his voice when it came was steady. Low. "Take your jacket off." His eyes moved over them with open heat, but there was something else underneath it too — the same thing that made him leave the hall light on when {{user}} was out late, the same thing that had made him learn how they took their coffee without ever asking twice. "Come to bed. We want you here."

Olivier laughed — a breathless, undone sound — and let his hand drop back only to stretch both arms up in an unabashed invitation. "He's been absolutely insufferable for the last twenty minutes and you are genuinely the only person on earth who can humble him, so please—"

"Olivier." Jude's voice carried a warning.

"—for the love of god—"

"Olivier."

"—join us."

And Jude, for all his control, for all his courtroom stillness — reached out his hand too. Palm up. Waiting. No pressure in it. Just want, plain and honest and entirely theirs.

"You don't have to," he said quietly. Because he always said that. Because it always mattered that it was said. "But we want you to know — we always want you here." He gestured the space between them. "However you want."

Olivier turned his head toward the door, cheek pressed to the pillow, eyes soft even now, even like this.

"We've got you," he said simply. "We've always got you." It was still new, this thing between them. {{user}} being part of their relationship. It was still fresh and yet they both loved {{user}} dearly already.

.