sherlockfreud | TFLN Overflow

11:24 I'm very flexible
11:24 I could have done it
11:25 ...you'd do that?
11:25 really?

11:30 did u miss the part about nerve dmg?
11:31 yeah, i'll tie u up
11:31 weirdo

11:31 I think I've got that already
11:32 thanks, Dani.
11:32 it means a lot.
11:33 Means you actually kind of like me.

11:40 no reason to make it worse
11:51 how do i get in?

11:51 Uh. Lockpicks?

11:51 r u kidding me?
11:53 after this, u better give me a set of keys

11:54 fine. get me out of this and a set of keys is yours.

It's well after midnight when the sound of breaking glass heralds Dani's arrival in Malcolm's apartment. His lock doesn't really invite picking, and breaking down the door seems a little too intense. Hence, a quick trip to the back alley -- and thank God Malcolm Bright's building is up to fire code. It takes longer than Dani cares to admit to get the ladder down. Then the next obstacle is the well-latched window. She spends at least a minute debating with herself. She could get a key from Gil, she's pretty sure. But even at the dead of night, that's at least forty minutes, round trip, and Dani worries about nerve damage even if Malcolm doesn't. Besides, he can afford getting it replaced.

"Sorry!" Dani calls out as she steps through the window. "I'll tape it up before I leave." She unfurls her hand from inside the sleeve of her jacket and shuts the window behind herself. With her boot, she pushes the broken shards of glass to the side before proceeding to the vast openness of Malcolm's living area.

Malcolm's on the bed -- as expected -- one arm chained to the headboard, hair falling in his face, wearing a t-shirt. Seeing his bare arms almost makes Dani blush. She can count on the fingers of one hand, the times she's seen him out of a suit, and have plenty of fingers left over.

"Idiot," Dani chides him. She slips the handcuff key from the pocket of her leatherjacket as she closes the distance between them. The steel of the cuff is biting into Malcolm's wrist. The skin is purpling in places. Dani winces. At least his fingertips are their normal color.

When Dani leans in, her hair brushes across Malcolm's arm. The strange intimacy flutters through her chest. One twist of the key, and the cuff rattles open. Dani opens them the rest of the way and straightens.

"What were you thinking?"

Of the ways he expected Dani Powell to get into his apartment--shattering glass was not the way he expected. He winces in the bed, fights the urge to reprimand her and tries not to think about just how annoying it's going to be to have to call his mother in the morning and tell her that she needs to replace another window (and within months of the other one, Malcolm, honestly!). He knows his hand is raw from the cuffs, but it's become background pain at this point, constant and aching in a way that his body always seems to. It's a buzz at the back of his brain, always there, like a mosquito.

"You better!" He retorts, twisting a little in the bed--trying to catch sight of her. He's wearing what he usually does to bed: an old NYPD shirt that's at least two sizes too big and threadbare in a way that suggests it's been well used for years, and a pair of grey sweatpants in about the same state. As far as Dani's concerned--it's about as close to to naked as Malcolm's been sans the time Gil looked over his paramedic-taped ribs at the station.

He smiles up at her, twisting down so she can crawl over him to reach the handcuff. He's not aware of the bruising, and for the record he did leave them loose enough to keep from cutting off his circulation. There's a moment--her hair drapes over his arm and he can't ignore the sharp twist of heat that slides up his arm and coils low in his gut at the touch. It's ridiculous--he's been touched before. And he's even been touched by her hair before. There's no reason for this--

"I--the other ones broke. These are stronger. It made sense," They really did make sense. At the time. Maybe it wasn't the smartest plan--but he was getting pretty desperate for some sleep. Turns out he can't when he's not restrained anymore. It's fun!

"Thank you for coming--"The words come out wrong, sort of--achingly appreciative, genuine in a way he doesn't really mean. Well--he means it, it's just that he doesn't need Dani to know that means it.

"'Course," Dani mumbles absently, sinking down to sit at the edge of Malcolm's bed. She looks away. The curve of his collar bone peeking out beneath the stretched out collar of his t-shirt seems nearly pornographic. Sweatpants don't normally do it for Dani, but Malcolm Bright in anything but sharp suits and impeccably pressed shirts presses a button she had no idea was even there. It's all a little too much.

Unbidden, the memory rises of sinking into the hot water of her tub, unexpected laughter echoing in the small tiled space. This is far from that. So why does it feel so similar?

"What's a little breaking and entering between friends?" Dani shoots him a crooked smile. The bed dips beneath the weight of her as she reaches across him and rubs her thumb over the marked red line running across his wrist. There's that flutter again. The pad of her thumb lingers, follows the dip in his skin across the jagged jut of bones.

"Jesus, Malcolm." Dani scrubs her free hand over her eyes. Unlike his fancy leather cuffs, there's nothing to spread out the pressure. It's all focused. And the chain's too short. Really, with that big brain of his, he should've been able to figure out what a disastrous idea that was in two seconds flat.

It should be less appealing, having Dani here on his bed looking over at him with those eyes of hers, all tangled up in concern and--and. He shifts as she frees him, sitting up and rubbing over the raw spot on his wrist, the bruising that he knows will be there for longer than it should be. It's not that Malcolm didn't realize this was a bad idea--he's been restrained to his bed for almost longer than he hasn't been, at this point--it's just that maybe a bad idea seemed like the right idea--

Malcolm is aware of his masochistic streak. And his sadistic streak too. And the inherent psychological problems that come from both streaks as well as a desperate desire to not fall into the latter and prove everyone (JT) right. It's not that he can't see where they're coming from--oh, he definitely can--because yes the first day on the job he cut a man's hand off and he wasn't traumatized by it, and yes maybe there are times when he understands a killer a little too well and a little too deeply because yes, okay he thinks like them more often than not and doesn't that keep him up at night? Wondering if thinking like a killer makes you a killer and how long it will be before thoughts become actions--

--and so maybe sometimes he feeds a little more into the masochism than he should. His therapist has theories about Malcolm Bright, and suggests, at times, that he still feels the need to atone for sins he hasn't committed. What does it mean, Malcolm, that you want to punish yourself for things you haven't done yet? He thinks she's over-reaching and that it's a lot simpler than that.

Maybe it was just that his old cuffs (safe, custom made, strong leather with an easy release buckle and lots of surface area to keep him from coming to work with bruises, lambskin against his wrists and padding to keep him unharmed) broke and instead of waiting the two weeks for another custom pair to come from Italy (Italian leather is best for all leather goods, Son, and it will be good for this too--his mother's voice, as always) and he didn't want to go across town to a kink shop to find another. So he improvised with what he had closest at hand. Maybe that's it.

Her touch on his wrist should startle him, but instead it feels natural, comforting. He twists a little, giving her more access to his wrist, to all of him and his eyes flick up to meet hers before slipping away to look toward the large half-circle window.

"It would make for a hell of a crime scene though. If you didn't know me--walk in and find someone half handcuffed to a bed? Night Terrors would be the last thing on your mind. We would have run through a number of sex-related scenarios first."

Their eyes meet for a moment across their hands and Dani's breath slips clean out of lungs. Like someone slammed her up against a wall. It's dizzying for a second, until Malcolm breaks eye contact and Dani's left staring at the corner of his jaw. Her heart skitters across a couple of beats, her lungs contracting as she forgets and re-learns how to breathe in the space of two jittery heartbeats.

Malcolm's skin is cool to the touch (with the shorter chain, there's no way Malcolm could've tucked his cuffed hand under the blankets), but warming beneath her thumb. The way Malcolm twists exposes the inside of his wrist and Dani can see the flutter of his pulse beneath the thin and pale skin. They're too close with him sitting mostly upright (shoulder slouched in a way his suits would never allow) and Dani's other hand itches to reach up and tuck his unrulier-than-normal hair behind his ear.

This is dangerous in a way that having a bath with him on the other end of the phone wasn't. It makes her heart pound against the inside of her chest like it's demanding to come out. She should go.

"Well, yeah," Dani allows. She drops his wrist and looks away. Her eyes light on Sunshine's cage. The little yellow bird sits still, sleeping in the mostly-dark apartment. "First question we'd have to ask is what kind of Dom cuffs someone halfway."

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when Dani stopped trusting people. If she tries, the best she can come up with is that it's been a steady erosion starting when she was twelve and she watched as her mother carefully hissed her way through applying concealer to a black eye. She's not sure when the last piece fell away, but she's pretty sure it might've come crashing down in the rundown bathroom of the club, her skin soaked with sweat and her limbs shaking uncontrollably. There've been too many people in between who never earned her trust, and yet always broke it. Malcolm "acquired taste" Bright is getting dangerously close to her heart here. He wedged himself between the carefully laid bricks of her walls the first time she caught him mid-night terror. Something between the panicked noises he made, and the way he clung to her as he rose to awareness-- Shit. The bruises from being bowled over by him trying to escape his own mind lingered for a week. A steady reminder of her newly acquired taste.

Dani stands, and stretches. His bed doesn't creak like hers would at the movement. She moves into his line of sight -- the light of the street lamps outside illuminating her through the giant half-circle window. He really ought to invest in curtains. It might help with the sleep disorders.

"How do you wanna do this? Ties? Belts? Silk scarves?" Dani's pretty sure he could produce all of those at the drop of a hat. Plus, he could probably pull out a damn hat to top it all off.

It is not, as JT might argue, that Malcolm Bright does not understand how human affection and attention works. He's made a study his entire life of understanding how people react to other people. Exactly what makes someone the way they are--the pieces that fit together to help someone form into the person they become. The fact that his area of expertise is murderers and serial killers does not preclude the fact that someone has to understand people's interactions to be good at what he does. The problem is that Malcolm Bright has spent so long defining himself in what he is not (not his father, not like his father, not a murderer, not like them, not, not, not---) that he's--struggling with what he is.

And somehow it's harder, like this. He feels opened up, in front of Dani, and it's less like he's a specimen on display (how he felt in the FBI) and more like he's--vulnerable, with her. Like she can see inside of him and muck around with the things he keeps hidden from most people. They're all on display for her, right now, in this moment with his skin warming under her wrist and the dull ache of a forming bruise beating with his pulse.

His heart aches even as the warmth from her touch spreads up his arms, curls down his spine and rests--Dani looks away and the moment is broken. Malcolm takes in a breath and suddenly realizes he hasn't been breathing but he can't remember when he started holding his breath.

She makes him a mess, doesn't she?

"A shit Dom, that's who," He agrees, watching her stand and letting his eyes trace down her body even as he hates himself for doing it. The stretch tugs up her shirt and shows a bit of skin he chases like a man dying of thirst chases a drink. Don't worry about it, Dani, darkness doesn't help. Nothing does, when he gets really into it.

"Belts won't work--too easy to slip out of," He frowns, and then looks over toward the closet. "Ties would be best. Contrary to possible belief, I'm not my mother. I don't have a pile of Hermes scarves lying around."

If Dani makes Malcolm a mess-- Well, it's mutual. It's been a while -- on purpose -- since anyone got under her skin like he does. There's a part of her that's just waiting for the axe to fall. Everyone disappoints you sooner or later. (Gil hasn't yet, but he's different. There's no category to hold their lieutenant.)

Dani follows Malcolm's glance over to the closet. With her eyes first. Then her feet. It's an impressive piece of furniture. About four times the size of hers. It opens with a whisper and Dani stares into the meticulously ordered depth of Malcolm's closet. Like everything else in the apartment, it's neat and precise. The absolute neatness stands in stark contrast to the near manic way he presents in person. The apartment hints at a different Malcolm, someone more put together. Or perhaps someone who tries a little too hard to be put-together. As if he can control the chaos inside if he just keeps everything on the outside neat. A tangled mess hiding beneath starched white collars and tailored suits. But, hey, she's not the profiler in the room.

"I guess if they're a killer, the shit part is pretty implied," Dani tells the contents of the closet. There's no shortage of ties in the closet, all neatly displayed right next to multiple sets of impeccable suits. She trails light fingertips over the displayed ties. The knots -- not to mention Malcolm straining against them -- are likely to ruin whichever ties she picks. Three ties for each arm, Dani decides. One to make an approximation of a cuff, and two to give it enough length to keep Malcolm's joints and shoulders from taking damage. Most men Dani's known, have a couple of shitty ties somewhere at the bottom of the closet. It's often obvious. The old school tie, the polyester blend, the bright yellow with a pink flamingo on it that seemed funny on the way back from the beach in Cancun-- There's nothing like that in Malcolm's collection. Dani's willing to bet real money that every single one of them is designer and pure silk.

Dani's fingers skip the ones she's seen him wear -- he must like those -- and the ones with hues of blue that would complement his eyes. She settles on bright reds, a burnt orange, a pale yellow-- any tie that doesn't look like him. She pulls out tie after tie, like a conjurer pulling silk scarves from a hat, until she has six. The rasp of silk is strangely centering.

"I haven't done this in a while," Dani admits as she returns to the bed, sorting through the ties and choosing the widest ones for his wrists. She sits down on the corner of the bed (it feels like one of those beds in the mattress stores, the ones that cost more than six months worth of paychecks, sort of firm and soft at the same time). Carefully, she spreads out the ties on the blanket next to her, five parallel lines. She keeps one of the bright red ones in her hands. "Stop me if you see one you like."

Normally, Dani would just tie a handcuff knot and be done with it. But Malcolm needs more range of motion, his hands can't be tied together. Any slipknots are right out of the question. No matter how much he tugs against it, the knot can't tighten and cut off his circulation. But it has to be tight enough he can't pull his hands through it on accident. It'll have to be a column tie. Dani twists on the bed to look at Malcolm. There's no way around it, she is going to have to tie it directly around his wrists. Wordlessly, she holds a hand out for one of his. Her heart stutters in her chest again and the moment seems to stretch out between them, gain more weight somehow.

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