Surprise, I'm not writing Traught. This is... hate sex without the sex. Set in season 1, when the animosity between Roy and Artemis was at its peak.

Enjoy!

The Bruises Will Speak For Us

"I'm watching you," Roy calls out, just so she knows. Just so she feels the pressure, as heavy on her shoulders as the metric tons of stone the mountain around them is made of, or the weight of abandonment on his.

"Is that supposed to scare me?" Artemis's eyes are narrow, the twist of her lips snide as she tosses him a glance over her shoulder. The tilt of the delicate hipbone peeking out above the waist of her pants screams deception. She's got them all fooled with the bluntness of her words and the wounded act of her body.

He grits his teeth at her smugness, her arrogance, and puts his hand on her shoulder. It's meant to be a warning grip, nothing more, but suddenly they're connected. Skin to skin, flesh to flesh. It sends a jolt through him, and he can feel under the pads of his fingers the way her muscles contract, the way the heat seeps into his skin.

He should remove his hand, but there's an explosion coming, and any further move on his part might set it off. Something about the touch, feeling her real and solid under his fingertips, makes his gut curl. Every second he keeps his hand there ticks to the rhythm of his pulse, getting faster and faster, and he swears he can feel hers rising like a wave coming to crash into him.

"You gonna take that hand off, or you asking?" Her voice is low and dangerous, a fire's promise to burn. It's a dare, a challenge, and he's never known to how to ignore one.

"Don't know. You offering?"

And just like that her eyes flash. Maybe it was the mockery in his voice. Maybe it was something else. She yanks his arm and pulls him towards her and he barely has time to gasp before her mouth is pushed against his, driving him backwards with its force. He stumbles a bit, grabbing her waist for support, and she's steady and firm under him, eyes closed, her thumbs pressing painfully into his biceps. Her short nails manage to be sharp anyway, scraping his skin as she flexes her fingers and nips his lower lip harder than what is warranted. Roy holds back a yelp, growling instead because she seems to want to push all his buttons, and it's working. If she wants it to be like that, he can oblige. More than that, it's a relief, because he would never know how to be gentle towards someone like her. He hooks a thumb into the waistline of her pants for leverage, and pulls her roughly against him, grinding his hips into hers for the pure enjoyment of hearing the way her breath stutters against his chin and for the heat that flares under his jock.

The gulf of animosity separating them has sudden been overfilled with slushing lava, burning crisp, stinging lines of heat between them. There are no words to break the muffled moans. This isn't about pleasuring the other—it's about dominance. It's not about bending, it's about breaking.

It's about the way she rises on her tiptoes to push her tongue down his throat and her knee bumps roughly into his erection, hard enough that even his jock offers no protection, making him groan and double over, panting against her collarbone. It's about the way he returns the favor by digging his thumbs into her breasts, pushing the firm mounds and feeling the muscle underneath, kneading through the material of her uniform until she lets out a sharp whimper that he swallows immediately with the press of wet, slick teeth and tongue, no mercy. It's about the way he discovers that she writhes helplessly when his tongue digs into the shell of her ear and he files that away for future misuse. It's about the way she snakes a finger under the open sleeve of his uniform and pinches his nipple and he hisses in surprise. It's about biting and hair-pulling and all the primitive ways to make someone hurt. It's a give and take competition neither is willing to lose.

The lengths they could go to are enough to make his hackles go up when she suddenly leans back, eyes dark enough to suck him in, and drags him by the belt towards one of the dark, unused tunnels in the cave. He's not sure what they've started, but he has a point to prove and hell if he's going to let her get away with hers.

Bit different from what I normally go for, but I can't see them truly having a positive relationship early on, and all that tension had to be used for something, right?