A/N: I think I have an unhealthy love of challenge communities. But they do... well... challenge me! Anyway, Gluttony is up first, a darker look at this relationship. And no, I couldn't be bothered to come up with another title.

Gluttony

Leorio knew he should deny him.

Those moments--they only came a few times a year, less than that. They never saw each other anymore. But when they did--then they always wound up in each other's arms, just for a moment or two, hurried and desperate and hidden behind closed doors. Those moments were stolen, they were short and fast, and Kurapika never wanted to talk during them. Leorio didn't really want to either. Neither of them were keen to discuss what they were doing, and there was no point asking about a future. There would be none.

This they both knew beyond doubt, and it made them all the more desperate. Somehow they never wound up going all the way--never enough time, never enough surrender. They would cling to each other, in dark corners or alleys away from the glare of streetlights, as close as they could--sometimes Leorio would lift Kurapika straight off his feet, press him against the wall, and Kurapika allowed it. Their kisses were deep and fast and sometimes bloody, their teeth clashing, their grip bruising.

Leorio knew Kurapika was reaching for much more than him. He was reaching for life, a life he would never get to live. Trying to fit all the things he would never have into these brief, gasping moments--kissing girls, kissing boys, late nights rolling around on a cheap sofa, dates and smiles and tears and making up all over again; that first time when he tucks the covers around you so gently afterwards. None of it anything Kurapika intended to live to see, and so he would take it all here, as much as he could, desperate to wring everything out of it that could be wrung because it was all there would ever be. Leorio didn't care when Kurapika hurt him, tugging his hair too hard or scratching him with his fingernails. He understood why he did it.

And still--he should have denied Kurapika. Should have forced him to live long enough to experience it all for real, should have refused the tacit understanding that this was all there was. There was suicide implicit in those searing kisses, and Leorio should have called him on it. But Leorio, too, was seeking in those brief encounters a life that he wouldn't have--the life where he would settle down with the person he loved, introduce him to his parents, become so used to sleeping next to him that they would have to work to rebuild their spark, tease him about his first grey hairs. Equally wonderful as all those things Kurapika wanted, and equally lost to him.

So he didn't speak, and he didn't make Kurapika speak either--he just went to him when Kurapika gave him that look at tilted his head slightly to the side. And then it began--the bruised imprints of their fingertips, the gasping breaths, the tears hovering at the corners of their eyes, the heat pouring off them in waves. Stealing as much life as they could, carving it out in huge, gasping chunks, consuming as much was possible. Until a clock chimed, or a cell phone went off, and then it was back to business and it might be a year or more until they saw each other again, if they ever did. Life was uncertain. Leorio knew full well that Kurapika had never been his. And yet, in those increasingly long months between meetings, he couldn't feel like he was starving every time he remembered Kurapika's desperate touch, his eyes that pleaded for silence, his suicidal kisses.