Derek Des Anges Fanfic Repository and General Mocking Station

YOU WANT THIS MORE THAN YOU WANT AIR - ISBN: 978-1-4452-6946-7

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:06:38 GMT

OF ALL THE THINGS YOU DECIDED TO PUBLISH FIRST YOU WENT WITH A *POETRY ANTHOLOGY*?

Yeah, it's here. It's there. It's on Lulu.com and when their asses are suitably up to speed it'll be on Amazon.com too.

THAT'S RIGHT.

IT'S A BOOK.

A BOOK OF POETRY.

THAT YOU CAN HOLD IN YOUR HANDS.

AND BE ALL HEY, I KNOW THESE PEOPLE.

What is even better than that?

It has a Facebook page, which means that even if you're too poor to buy yourself a book of AMAZING POETRY, and your friends and family just don't understand that buying a book of AMAZING POETRY for you will make your life COMPLETE... you can still suggest the page to everyone you've ever spoken to. A few clicks and POW, you will have annoyed, baffled, and ultimately enriched the lives of all the people you know on Facebook.

Hate someone?

Buy them our book.

What better way to say "I hate you" than with some of Amy Kreines vitriol-laden diss-poems?

Love someone?

Buy them our book.

In this book you will find as many different kinds of love poem as there are stars reflected in the eyes of the beautiful person you love. What better way to lavish affection on someone, be they your newly-born daughter or the guy you've loved all your life, than with a collection of funny, heart-warming, and intelligent poetry?

Don't know someone?

Buy them our book.

Giving a book of poetry to a stranger is a quirky and unique ice-breaker.

Can't read?

BUY OUR BOOK.

Look, I'm not going to judge. Some people don't like poetry. That's okay! This has a really nice cover and it's pretty much the right size for a mouse mat! Also the paper's good for scribbling on, and there's space in the margins for doodling crap. You'll look well intelligent with a poetry book in your bag, and seriously, people dig that sensitive shit.

HURR DURR DERP DERP?

BUY OUR BOOK.

IT WILL IMPROVE YOUR LIFE.

BUY THIS BOOK

Mon, 22 Dec 2008 10:54:04 GMT

I personally read it as a gripe about people doing the "if you do X, you're Y" and vice versa where even though you know you can't please the entire universe, there's always a bunch of people who just are so serious business about being sahnsitive to other people that someone in the middle wonders "well sheesh, I can't do all this or I'll be running around in a circle". Kind of like the pinheads during the Democratic primaries who were going "If you support Obama, you're a misogynist" and "if you support Clinton, you're a racist". - moonjaguar

Well, I suppose I can say that one person who isn't actually on my flist got what I was talking about, so it's not a complete and total failure. But it is odd that "I didn't want this linked to in metafandom and someone nominated it as a link using the most inflammatory section - ie, the bit that insults metafandom - as the summary and to me that smacks of trying to generate wank" has garnered continual accusations of not being able to take criticism (informed criticism yes, bilious flames from people who don't have the whole picture I'm not actually obligated to allow). Also, judging by the comments on f_d, a whoooooole lot of new stalkers (hey, why don't you read the fic while you're there and see how appallingly I treat female characters by writing them as funny and intelligent and strong individuals when they're relevant to the plot-- no? You'd rather just decide that I'm a hatefilled misogynist because I get snappy when people try to start drama? Cool).

So there have been a lot of people outing themselves as, uh, clearly thinking that they're the kind of people I was complaining about (I don't know, I don't bloody know any of them, so I don't know if they genuinely are the kind of people who value sociopolitical message over, say, accurate characterisation and a good story, or if they're just getting defensive because of the typically bombastic nature of my peeve), circling my journal and yelling every time I lock something, post a strop, make grandiose gestures, or generally act like a prodded beehive after being prodded.

TBH as I told Shira last night, I'm weirdly grateful for this; over the course of the weekend there has been some RL shite which significantly lowered my opinions of (straight, at least) men (old male friend/also my father apparently CANNOT LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE), and having this going on here on the interwebs does at least provide me with the reminder that it's not a gendered thing. Women are just as prone to being idiots as men, I don't need to react by charging off in one direction or another, and I can get back to writing my Christmas porn without worrying about it for much longer.

(NB: the possibility of being misinterpreted for my fic *is* occasionally a paralysing factor if only because the misinterpreters have such vocal clout and the whole fandom is a COMMUNITY deal, but it's never actually *stopped* me writing something; story > community, imo, as regular readers will know. Story > pretty much anything, which doubtless sounds like I'm trying to be - quoth one commenter - "loledgy". Is there anything more depressing than the idea that because someone else doesn't subscribe to your way of expressing themselves [ie, lengthy academic hand-wringing verses swears and threats of violence followed by a cooling off period and backpeddaling] it must be do out of the need to project a particular image? Well, yes, the constant significant erosion of women's body rights is fundamentally a lot more depressing, but as we all know it's more important to never lose one's temper. That would be ... unladylike.

... wait, isn't the imposition of stereotypes of acceptable female behaviour a fairly powerful tool of female oppression?

No?

Okay)

Actually, that provokes an interesting question. Am I projecting an image? What is it?

[also FYI: the reason I screen comments from non-friends is a hangover from the Niqab furore, and a couple of other occasions when people were offensive, other people took them to task, my LJ turned into a quagmire of flaming and I got annoyed because it was distracting me from looking for a job]

X-posted.

Heros (MYLAR)

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 22:04:34 GMT

Title: Stockholm Syndrome
Fandom: Heroes
Word Count:
Rating:
Disclaimer: Heroes characters are not mine.
Notes: Weirdly, the title for this one came first, rather than being pulled out of my arse at the last minute. Thanks to Suzy for the beta.

He had learnt from his mistakes, and this time he was cautious. About everything: the dose, the thickness of the glass, about estimating the man's capabilities. The suppressant was stronger this time, to a power of fourteen, and it came now in gas form. He'd insisted.

The funny thing was finding the answer to disrupting the communication of mutated brain cells not in the brains of those who possessed these prodigious abilities (he refused to call them mutants, the term the laboratory was beginning to favour), but in his own blood. It was as though his mother and father had produced an antithesis to bookend their daughter's abilities and illness, to complement her.

It was too bad she had died before that could happen.

Mohinder Suresh gazed passively through the triple-thickness reinforced glass at Sylar's unconscious body, restrained not only by thick mental-hospital straps but by a powerful paralysis-inducing drug, the air and his lymphatic system both flooded with the potent suppressant.

Mohinder had not been there for the capture, for the triumphant moment when a knocked-out and badly injured, sewage-slimed Sylar was dragged to the street at last on the end of a steel cable – he'd had a more important engagement (Molly Walker and Micah Hawsey were having - a joint twelfth birthday party and Mohinder had cancelled his speaking role at the genetics debate panel in Geneva to attend – he wasn't about to let The Bogeyman interfere with seeing his favourite children either) – and a year ago he would have baulked at the inhumane methods they were using to contain Sylar.

But a lot can happen in a year, both in the world and in the mind of a man, and now he simply watched and waited, as patient, still and unforgiving as a statue.

On the third day Sylar regained consciousness. His paralysis was not total, and so with the holding cell wired for sound Mohinder was treated to a half-hour non-stop stream of foul language and threats before Sylar lost both breath and consciousness.

When he came around again the man tried reasoning with his unseen audience, and Mohinder listened with folded arms and a closed face. They could not fit him with a gag, tempting though it was, for he would be subject to many interrogations and the only alternative to speech was telepathic "digging". No one wanted to put their mind near Sylar's.

On the fourth day Sylar started asking questions. The only one Mohinder answered was, "Mr. Bennett no longer runs this facility. I do," and Sylar smiled his queer little smile of anticipation into the ceiling camera. "Don't think this means you'll be having an easy time, Gabriel."

The smile vanished. "My name is Sylar."

"Your name is Gabriel. Get used to hearing it – you'll be hearing it (this actually sounds a bit, maybe a rephrase?) for a good long while now."

Sylar's discomfiting little smile returned. "I'll get out," he said with blunt confidence and a low, soft voice. "You'll fuck up."

Mohinder did not mirror the smile – his eyes glittered black and politely empty. "Not this time."

On the fifth day Mohinder turned off the power holding Sylar's restraints taut and watched dispassionately as the man battered himself unconscious against the walls of his prison. He gassed Sylar paralytic again for good measure before having him retied. "How can such an intelligent man reduce himself so easily to the level of a wild animal?" Mohinder mused as the man in question woke.

"Fuck you," Sylar spat, his eyes bloodshot and his gums blood-laced. Mohinder made a mental note to have his captive's dentistry examined.

"Only if you're very good," he said, and gassed Sylar yet again.

He had been in the cell a week and a half before he began to answer to "Gabriel".

Mohinder took a walk in the light rain that evening and spent the night reminding himself, like a mantra, that not only did observation change the thing observed, but also the one observing.

The problem with Sylar was that when he wasn't trying to kill you, he possessed a very worrying breed of awkward charm. The sly and unsettling smile eventually gave way to one that seemed quite genuine, a little apologetic, the smile of a watch-maker and a not a murderer, and it was with difficulty that Mohinder reminded himself just how many people the man had killed. And which names were listed among those dead at his hands. How he had manipulated a more naïve, trusting Mohinder in leading him to new prey. It would not do to be deceived like that again.

Mohinder did not usually find masturbation a satisfying or worthwhile use of his time, and by the time he got he to bed most nights he was too tired, but when he returned to his modest apartment (it need not be, for the money he was earning now, but it seemed wasteful to be otherwise) and peeled away his damp clothes he felt the need like a weight on him.

He fixed his eyes on a water patch on the ceiling and tried to empty his mind, but with each up stroke, down stroke, his mind's eye flickered between Sylar's devious smirk and the supposed open smile of Gabriel-the-watch-maker; when he came, hot and unexpectedly copious over his belly, it was an afterimage of both that burned shamefully on his retinas.

Contrary to his expectations, Mohinder slept well that night, and if he dreamt he did not remember what of.

In the holding cell, Sylar was once again free to roam. He had stopped trying to beat through the glass with his bare hands and had taken to drumming idle rhythms on it instead – or rhythm, rather, for there was only ever one – possibly in some sort of attempt to drive Mohinder mad.

Mohinder did not think it prudent to explain that he could shut out certain frequencies through the channels or that no noise travelled through the panes – between the second and third was a thin but perfect vacuum – when it kept his captive occupied so neatly and gave him the opportunity to observe the man's movements.

"Are you willing to co-operate in a second medical exam?" Mohinder said into the microphone.

"Second?"

"You were not conscious during the first, and it is of use to us to know how well your muscles respond to cerebral stimuli as well as to reflexive stimuli," Mohinder said carefully. It had been a mistake bringing his coffee into the observation room – the smell of it was distracting him. It had also been a mistake allowing the glass to be two-way – Sylar was peering at his face with a disinterest that was too total not to be feigned. Mohinder knew it masked a calculating sweep for information. He kept his features as smooth and blank as a wall, and thought about the fractal complexity of the lotus blossom.

Finally Sylar shrugged and got to his feet. His height still intimidated Mohinder, though he was loath to admit it. They had measured the man upon his arrival and found him exactly six feet and four inches from crown to sole, a daunting six and a half inches – a hand span – taller than Mohinder. His face would fit against Sylar's throat.

Mohinder shook the thought from him with a little surprise.

"What now?"

"Undress. Movement of the muscle groups cannot be observed through your greens, Gabriel."

For a moment Sylar simply stared at him through the glass and once again Mohinder found it necessary to deploy his poker face, his features composed in the very picture of scientific detachment while his heart, his treacherous heart, sped up and demanded he recalculate the security of the barrier between him and the man Molly had rather accurately dubbed The Bogeyman.

Then Sylar's intense gaze abated and he was undoing the rubber buttons that held his thin, antiseptic green hospital pyjamas closed. Mohinder felt something like a pressure headache growing with each fresh inch of skin exposed. He breathed more deeply, trying to disperse the weight on his cortex, and when he opened his eyes again Sylar was standing naked in an approximation of Da Vinci's famous anatomical diagram.

"Now what?"

"Turn." Mohinder indicated the direction of motion with a silver paint-marker pen.

Sylar revolved like a plate in a microwave (Mohinder had seen enough of them in the last year to know his comparison was wholly accurate), the muscles of his back, thighs, and shoulders all strangely relaxed, as though he was unfazed by being stripped naked and made to perform for his commands(?). As Sylar completed the slow pirouette Mohinder noted down his appendectomy scar, the birthmark or other discolouration over his left hipbone and (privately) the slight puffiness in his pectoral tissue, around the nipples – as though the flesh there had been made tender, irritated in some way. Mohinder wrote on the back of his hand in the silver pen (a bad habit from his college days; it wasn't as though the observation room was short on notation devices or even proper pens), review footage from cameras 5-7, check straps for abrasion.

"Can I get dressed now?" Sylar's mocking tone might have been Mohinder's imagination; then again, it might not.

"No, this examination is far from over. Please face the opposite wall and flex your deltoids."

Sylar gave him what Mohinder suspected was a deliberately vacant look. "My what?"

He indicated with indicated with the pen, inadvertently smearing silver paint over his shirt collar. "Hunch and unhunch your shoulders, then raise first one arm and then the other over your head."

Sylar did as he instructed, his back arching like a cat about to hoark up a hairball as he hunched. Had Mohinder been forced to estimate, he would have placed the man at around 12% body fat from appearance. Fortunately, the sophisticated of tests they had put Sylar through after his capture made estimation on most fronts superfluous; he had 13.54% body fat, a percentage that increased for every day they kept him immobile, presumably.

"Now what?" Sylar asked in a bored voice, his arms above his head as he cut through Mohinder's thoughts. The man began to bounce on the balls of his feet.

"Bend over and touch your toes," Mohinder said absently.

Six feet and four inches of superpowered serial killer doubled at the waist and, knees together, touched his toes with the tips of his long fingers. Mohinder noted the uneven stretching in his hamstrings, the small twitch in the back of one knee, the dark hair deepening the shadows that fell between his slightly parted buttocks …

"Are you by any chance getting off on this?" Sylar drawled, and this time the mockery was unmistakable.

It seemed Mohinder's cheeks flared and his head ducked of their own volition, "Gabriel," he said when he trusted his voice to remain steady, "you agreed to cooperate with this examination. If you have changed your mind – " he found his throat uncommonly dry, "- you should be aware that the floor you are standing on is metal and that it only takes a switch to send a very high current through that floor to knock you out."

Sylar straightened up slowly but did not turn. "And why wouldn't you just gas me again, Dr. Suresh?"

"Because," Mohinder said through carefully gritted teeth, "that wouldn't hurt you."

Later, reviewing the footage from three cameras in an effort to see if Sylar's restraints were liable to rub either a hole in his flesh or worse, through themselves, his subject's words echoed unpleasantly in the silence of his apartment. Was he getting off on this?

The apartment was already cool, verging on chilly, but Mohinder turned the ceiling fan on anyway, for the noise it made and for the faint but reassuring feeling of home. It was childish to need that comfort – he might as well buy a box of crickets and set a dehumidifier in reverse and have done with it – but nonetheless, Mohinder listened to the steady whumwhumwhum of the fan's blades as he pawed over hours of footage and fell asleep in his chair, one hand resting lightly and unnoticed in the crack between his pants’ waist and underpants.

Safely bound in new and firmer straps, Sylar lay awake on his table, in theory to answer Mohinder's questions. In practice it seemed that in the absence of a much-needed gag, Sylar was keen to be as invasive and irritating as possible; on days like this it was only possible to keep calling him 'Gabriel' when Mohinder remembered how much Sylar hated it.

"You'd have more luck if you came in here and asked me these things face-to-face," Sylar cajoled, pinned to the table even by a strap over his forehead, in addition to the powerful paralysing agent in his blood.

"Thank you, S – Gabriel, but I'm not stupid," Mohinder sighed, getting out of his seat and setting his forehead against the glass. "Although I'm starting to suspect that, outside of your two narrow and rather disparate areas of interest, you very well may be."

"Personal abuse isn't very scientific, Dr Suresh."

"Assessing your ability to learn and adapt is extremely scientific, Gabriel, and it makes up a decent part of this study. For example, how will your attitude change when I tell you that you have an implant in your heart?"

"What does it do?" Sylar's face on the ceiling-cam monitor was very still.

"At present, nothing. Should it cease to receive transmission of my vital signs from the implant in the back of my neck, however, it will cause a fatal arrhythmia." Mohinder watched Sylar's expression change only minutely as he processed this information, his thick brows twitching inward over his nose. "So, you see, killing me will also end your life. An important fact for you to consider."

Sylar sneered. "Most people would just have settled for a gold band and a priest, Mohinder."

Mohinder turned away from the window, concealing his anger against the racks of monitors. "Being facetious does not constitute cooperation."

"It's about the only pleasure I have left."

"You shouldn't have any," Mohinder said sharply. "You are here for what remains of your life because you are a murderer, Sy – Gabriel. Pleasures are reserved for good people."

He was almost waiting for Sylar to ask why he denied them to himself if that was the case, but of course with the inhibiting agent in place Sylar could only guess at his circumstances; he couldn't know about the single, narrow bed, the microwave meals, the abstemious lifestyle. For all Sylar could know he had a girlfriend and a house the size of a baseball field.

Instead, his subject smirked unpleasantly straight at the camera and began humming something. Mohinder couldn't quite place where he knew it from until he realised it was the same thing he heard Sylar tap out with his fingertips on the glass. "If you want to take them all you'll have to find some way to stop me having wet dreams," Sylar drawled. He emphasised each letter of 'wet dreams' carefully, especially the Ts.

Mohinder kept his shoulders low and relaxed and his face away from the window, both with some difficulty. "Your nocturnal emissions are not my concern," he said, affecting a loftier stance than he felt he truly occupied. His night after the walk in the rain came back to him unbidden and constricted his throat.

"You would if you knew who they featured," Sylar said, and started humming again. He added, "It's so nice that you tied us together like that, Dr Suresh. Think how much we have in common already."

Though obeying Sylar was the last thing he should be doing, Mohinder thought of the audio cassettes of Sylar's interviews with his father, the desperation as Gabriel (as he truly was back then, not this painted-on attempt to civilise a monster), tried and failed to hold Dr. Chandra Suresh's attention. Just as Mohinder had tried and failed to hold his father's attention. Perhaps there was a link there.

On the other hand, Mohinder thought, angry at having been manipulated even so briefly, when he had been pushed to one side by his father, he'd just buried himself in his studies, and later his work. He hadn't been moved to bash the doctor's head in against the side of his own taxicab.

"I have no more common ground with you than the rest of the human race," he said softly.

"Less," Sylar agreed, directing his piercing gaze directly at the ceiling camera again. "I'm a superior individual, aren't I, Dr Suresh? I'm the next stage in evolution."

"Are you? I'm not so sure." Mohinder fiddled idly with his silver paint pen. He'd found silver behind his ear yesterday, a sign that perhaps the cap was leaking.

"Your father said I was."

"My father didn't know you were socially defective," Mohinder said, applying one of his colleagues' favourite criticisms of him without irony. "He said that in the belief that you would function as a normal being, and pass on your genes." Mohinder picked up his coffee – it had ended up in the observation room again despite him telling himself to leave it behind – and permitted himself a small smile as he sipped.

Sylar's expression on the monitor was that of someone who had just been handed an unexpectedly crooked piece of the puzzle, someone who was having to alter the whole picture to fit in this new information.

"Not all mutations are successful, Gabriel – most aren't, in fact – that's why we don’t see races of eight-fingered humans and the like. For evolution to occur, the new mutation must be as successful, if not more, at allowing the individuals with it to survive to breed. And their offspring to do the same." He sipped some more of the coffee. It was Hawaiian Kona – not his usual brand – and he rather suspected he had picked up someone else's coffee by mistake. Fortuitous mistake, though; it tasted much nicer.

On the screen Sylar appeared to be greatly troubled by this new information, so Mohinder pressed his advantage. "Species that kill every one of their kind that they encounter, as you have – they set back the course of potential evolutionary change, Gabriel. They reduce the number of breeding pairs." He blew steam off the quite delicious coffee. "And as you cannot possibly hope for personal immortality, you must have turned your thoughts to what happens when all your cells wear out, yes?"

"I suppose."

"You die, Gabriel. You die, and apart from case studiesd and nursery tales, you are wholly forgotten."

"And what about you?" Sylar asked with an unpleasant glint in his eye. "Are you going to advance the cause of human evolution by standing around in a bunker drinking coffee?"

"I already have," Mohinder said, refusing to be rattled. "By taking you out of the equation."

"My skills might have been the key," Sylar pointed out.

"Perhaps. Perhaps they were intended to prevent other neurological knowledge from being lost in the face of untimely death. Perhaps you were meant as a great teacher to others like you. But you chose not to be." He sipped the coffee again. It was mostly gone now. "Unstable mutations are rarely repeated, Gabriel, especially when they do not breed. You remember Ted, I assume?"

Sylar's slow and nasty smile said that he did.

"Even if you had not decided it was necessary to remove the top of his skull," Mohinder began dryly, "he would not have passed on his abilities to another generation. His wife died – any children he had would have met with the same fate."

"Unless he bred flame-retardant babies," Sylar pointed out.

Mohinder found this unaccountably funny. As soon as the snort of laughter left his lips he was horrified – too much time interacting with the monster had evidently affected his own humanity. "I'll leave you to think about that," he said, and switched the microphone off.

The main obstacle to the progression of his studies was the MRI imaging of the brain. In order to pinpoint the location of the brain areas responsible for triggering these powers – individuals in whom the effects were not constantly in action, like young Clare Bennett – the subject needed to be scanned while conscious and utilising their abilities. So far, after Matt had refused, the Hawsey family had been as helpful as could be expected under the circumstances, but Nikki's powers were not consciously controllable (and Jessica did not like the MRI process), D.L. tended to fall through the scanner and Micah usually distracted the machine; whenever he went in, it ended up returning pictures of new trainers or whatever else Micah was fantasising about this week, rather than scans of his brain. Mohinder still had no idea how he did that.

To scan Sylar while conscious would not be a problem as such, but to allow him control of his powers even for a second was tantamount to global suicide. His purpose in this project was trickier – Mohinder knew Sylar could locate the area of the brain that triggered those changes, that was how he had acquired all these additional abilities. This conscious knowledge could advance their work by years if only he could be persuaded to divulge it.

But how could Mohinder reason with a monster? And how could he trust whatever Sylar did tell him?

"There was a spike in your brainwave activity last night," he told Sylar, without preamble. It had been a week since their evolution conversation; Mohinder thought he'd had long enough to consider his future. "Around four A.M. Do you have any explanation for that?"

"I had a good dream," Sylar said sarcastically, his eyebrows coming together over his nose as he smiled.

"Tell me about it."

"What, you're my psychiatrist now?" Sylar sneered. Mohinder had tilted his table into the upright position; the hospital pyjamas had become stuck in the restrains, riding up to reveal the black hairs below Sylar's navel.

"Right now, Gabriel," Mohinder said gravely, adjusting the room temperature to a setting too warm for his captive's comfort, "I am your everything. Now tell me about your dream. What caused this spike?"

"I dreamed about you," Sylar said with what sounded suspiciously like a derisive snort.

Mohinder took a note of this. "That doesn't seem unlikely. You have had no contact with anyone else for – " he checked himself before he finished with "nearly a month". In the bunker Sylar would have no concept of time passing, and it would not do to give him any information, " – quite a long time."

"You could absorb things through your skin," Sylar went on. He was constantly checking Mohinder's face for his reaction, probably reading his pose and tension as Mohinder read his. He was going to get nothing out of Mohinder.

"Did these objects distort my skin?"

"No, they just sank into you and disappeared."

"And were you in this dream?" Mohinder made another note.

"Of course," Sylar smiled at him; the disturbing smile, not his more human watch-maker's smile. "I killed you and stole your powers."

Mohinder couldn't help rolling his eyes a little. "I see you've made tremendous progress in your mental attitude, then," he said, his voice thick with sarcasm. "Were you able to control this new power?"

"No," Sylar frowned.

"No?"

"No. I had to revive you and ask you how you did it."

"But I was dead."

Sylar rolled his eyes this time. "It was a dream," he said in a Talking To Undergraduates And Other Idiots voice (this was what Mohinder had always thought of his version of the voice as).

Three days later Mohinder found himself breathing the same suppressant-laced air as Sylar for the first time in well over a year; the best he had been able to come up with was a lie detector test. Precautions had been taken, of course: Sylar was paralysed from the neck down not only by a staging amount of drugs but also by a neural interrupter in his spine where it connected to his shoulders, and he was so full of the suppressant that he more or less sloshed when the orderlies manoeuvred his heavy unconscious body into the chair and attached the myriad wires.

In comparison to the measures they'd taken to keep Sylar still and harmless while Mohinder questioned him, the lie-detector looked positively prehistoric, all dials and graph needles, like a Victorian seismograph. It might as well have rosary beads hanging from it for all the good it was likely to do. But it was the best they could find, and truthfully, the machine was not the purpose of the exercise – the small white hypodermic lying on the table beside Mohinder's chair was.

"Hello," Mohinder said as Sylar's eyes fluttered open and he gave the groggy stare typical of the recently-sedated. "We're having a change of pace today." He made the effort to keep his voice low and soothing, like a hypnotist.

"I can see that," Sylar mumbled, his lips apparently still numb. Mohinder thought perhaps he should not speculate too long on that matter. Sylar's lips were not his concern.

"I'm going to give you a minute to clear your head so you'll understand the questions I'm asking a little better," Mohinder said in the same soothing voice. "And I want you to know that any attempt at aggression will be met with this." Mohinder raised the little hypodermic. "Are you aware of how opiates work on the brain?"

Sylar eyed the hypodermic but said nothing.

"They work by blocking the pain receptors," Mohinder said, answering his own question, "making it impossible to be hurt. This substance was developed by the Chinese government six months ago, while you were still crawling around in the filth under New York. It does the opposite, Gabriel; it stimulates all the pain receptors at once. Do you understand?"

"It's a torture drug."

"Precisely. Without ever harming your flesh, we can make you experience pain that will make your gunshot wounds – " Mohinder gestured to his shoulder, " – seem quite tolerable."

"You have changed," Sylar said with something like admiration. "Have you been taking lessons from Bennett?"

Mohinder ignored the question and peered at his clipboard.

"I think you represented my Id," Sylar said thoughtfully.

"I beg your pardon?"

"In that dream I had, where I killed you. I think you represented my Id. The force of hedonism – "

"I know what the Id is, thank you," Mohinder did not ask by what logic he represented unfettered self-indulgence when he rationed out his microwave curries as though there was a war on and hadn't had sex since he left India the first time, and he asked instead the more interesting question, receiving the much more interesting results." When were you ever a student of psychology, Gabriel?"

"Oh, I wasn't. Zane Taylor was."

Mohinder had to choke himself with his tongue to prevent his face from lighting up like a pinball machine. "So in addition to his unusual skills you adapted some of his memories? Interesting. Were they in the same part of his brain as the elements you were trying to emulate?"

Sylar's look of dismay was alone worth the afternoon's work. He clearly realised he'd given away something important, something he might have used to bargain with (as though such a thing was possible), and with this he clammed up like a door slamming. According to the lie detector, his pulse was racing.

"Decrepit though this machine may look, Gabriel, it knows your mind as effectively as any telepathic individual might," Mohinder said, watching Sylar's eyes dart over the alarming array of wires. "So you see, I do not need you to answer, even, to get the information I require; I simply need to ask the right questions and you will betray yourself." He waved the hypodermic slowly at Sylar. "And if you do try to withhold, I will know. And this will be your reward."

"Think how easy all this would be if you just had a voice like your girlfriend did," Sylar said with another of his aggravating smirks. "You could just say, 'tell me everything' and I'd have no choice."

Mohinder frowned. "I don't follow. To which girlfriend do you refer?"

Sylar laughed. "Don't pretend you don't know. That girl with the voice that could make you do anything. You were in love with her."

"What girl?"

Sylar sighed. "Short hair. Big eyes. I think she slept with your father. She came to make me kill myself, but …" his wretched smile came back. " … I'm stronger than she thought. Or she was weaker."

"Eden," Mohinder whispered, rather surprised. My neighbour who kissed me so beautifully did not fall into the same mental category as that girl you were in love with. Perhaps she should have done.

"Was that her name?" Sylar sounded bored. "She ended up putting a gun to her own head to stop me from having what she had." He caught and held Mohinder's gaze. "Bitch," he added without great animosity.

Mohinder had jabbed Sylar in the neck with the hypodermic before he knew he was on his feet. As the rage subsided he watched Sylar begin to scream and thrash the only part of him that he could move.

After a moment or two of hoarse, animal screams, Mohinder started to remove the patched and wires from Sylar's immobile body, feeling like a cleaner bird in the mouth of a crocodile. This had not been how he'd intended for the session to go; the drug was only meant to be used as a threat at this early stage, but he supposed it would be all the more effective now that Sylar had proof that it worked.

He pushed the machine out of the cell, re-bolted the door and walked thoughtfully into the observation room. Give it maybe ten more minutes before he gassed the man out of his misery; the truly wicked thing about the drug, the feature that made it so utterly banned for use anywhere in the world outside of this bunker, was that it bypassed, inhibited, the body's natural response to acute and unbearable pain, and would not allow the victim - recipient - to lose consciousness under his or her own steam. Quite ingenious, in a horrible way.

On his way out of the bunker, Matt greeted him with a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. "Sylar giving you trouble? You looked exhausted."

"Of course he's giving me trouble. It's what he does. How is little Mark?"

Matt launched into a detailed account of his son's prodigious inability to sleep ever, and Mohinder commiserated. When he got out into the parking lot and unchained his bicycle he finally relaxed; Matt spent so much time taking information from people's heads without their permission that he often forgot to stop around his colleagues. Mohinder had long since developed the habit of thinking loudly about polar bears until Matt realised what he was doing and stopped probing.

When he got home he ate the remaining half of yesterday's aloo chop cold (it was still wrapped in the plastic bag from the take out), turned the fan on even though he already had goosebumps on his arms, and spent a while thinking about Eden as the television flickered noiselessly before him.

Had he been in love with her? She had apparently liked him, liked him enough to kiss him, but he'd been preoccupied. He had always been preoccupied with one thing or another, and either that or conflicting ethics had usually been the death knell for his relationships.

After a little of this circular thinking he knew he would not sleep unassisted, and scrabbled in the decidedly unscientific mess in his bedside drawers for the pill box, sifting aside unanswered letters and a packet of three prophylactics that he didn't remember buying but which must have been acquired in a fit of extreme optimism. He took four of the pills – twice the recommended dose but still well within safe parameters – and it was only when his heart gave an unpleasant lurch and started beating like a jackhammer that he remembered what else was in the pill box.

After the second hour of lying awake with his hair racing Mohinder was getting annoyed. The trouble with having a medical doctor who would prescribe you anything you asked for – whether by name or by the more nebulous "I need to stay awake for longer. Caffeine isn't cutting it and I appear to be allergic to amphetamines" - was that one got whatever one felt one needed at the time. In large quantities.

Mohinder gave in and looked through the pill box again, with the lights on this time. He found the large round pills that looked like what he was after and subjected one to careful examination until he found the brand name stamped in the paper skin.

"One of these," his doctor had told him (his doctor was a tall, laconic red-head with the improbable name of Tomaas Mar, who had apparently exorcised the "Van De" part of his name for the same reason he'd not specialised in tropical medicine as intended: "I couldn't be assed with it"), "One of these will knock you out cold no matter what else you've taken. If you take more than two, or that 'what else' includes alcohol, you're knocked out permanently. Be careful."

If Mohinder's middle name hadn't been the masculine form of his sister's name, it would have been "Careful". He snapped the pill in two with some difficulty, and gulped half down dry, returning the other to his pill case (it had a photo of a cat on it. He couldn't remember where he'd got it but suspected his mother had sent it to him).

About ten minutes later he was plunged into a half-waking dream world where very large ape-men, Neanderthal men, strapped him to the table in his classroom back at the university and proclaimed that he would have been the next step in evolution if he wasn't afraid of girls.

Even while this was going on Mohinder's conscious mind was moved to make a sneering remark about the lack of subtlety on the part of its darker twin. He rather wished it hadn't: after that the room filled up with monkey corpses, bloated and decomposing in great detail, until he suffocated into a deeper sleep.

Understandably, perhaps, he was not feeling refreshed or rested when he awoke and found that if he really hurried and traffic was good he'd only be ten minutes late.

"You're late," Matt pointed out, pulling up behind him as Mohinder panted and wheeled his way up to the bike rack caked in drying sweat.

"So are you."

"Ah, but I'm always late. You could set your watch half an hour in front of me. Are you okay? You look … well, kinda how I feel after another night of His Tiny Lordship's yelling fits." Matt sighed. "He has learnt the word 'NO' and he likes it."

"Didn't sleep either," Mohinder said, because it sounded less pathetic than 'bad dreams' and less of a firing offence than 'substance abuse'. He chained his bike, nodded to Matt, and set off to the lab at an ungainly scuttle.

He ended up simply holding onto a cup of someone else's coffee as though it was the lifeline to sanity and salvation, counting pages in his latest report while Sylar – still and huge in the room adjacent – slept the unfairly deep and calm sleep of the unjust and conscienceless. He made it through to fifty-three pages before realising he'd miscounted somewhere and chideding himself for his uneven knowledge: create a neurological inhibiter working blind with only blood samples as a base? Done in eight months. Figure out the autonumber feature on Microsoft Word? He'd been trying since the stupid thing was introduced. Wasn't this why doctors in actual universities had grad students, to deal with menial nonsense like this –

He stopped himself. This was selfish, overcaffeinated, Western thinking. He was not a damn physicist; he did not have that level of entitlement. He would just start at the beginning again and take more time.

Half-way through his second recount (the numbers varied wildly, leaving Mohinder very grateful that the computers dealt with his important numerical data. One simply couldn't afford mistakes of this wretched magnitude – of any magnitude – in his work) Mohinder fell asleep over the table, his silver paint pen leaking over his hair from its resting place behind his ear.

He was woken three hours later by Sylar calling him a bad name from behind the glass. Mohinder sleepily considered just shutting off the sound channel and getting some more much-need rest, but that would be irresponsible.

"Abuse will get you nowhere, Gabriel," he said, disappointed to find that his voice was clouded with dreaming still. He did not sound alert at all, and Sylar noticed it.

"Bored with me already, Dr Suresh?"

"Unlike you, my friend, I have to work through the night, often. This takes its toll on the body," Mohinder looked a little forlornly over at the empty coffee mug, "and coffee can only achieve so much."

"When was the last time I drank anything?" Sylar asked, and Mohinder glanced at the IV stands surrounding his table. Yes, it had been quite some time since Sylar's digestive system had had anything to occupy it.

They seemed to catch up with Mohinder's strange slip at the same time: at any rate, Mohinder thought did I just call him 'my friend' without due sarcasm? roughly as Sylar said in an amused but slightly shocked voice, "Did you just call me your friend?"

"It was sarcasm," Mohinder lied awkwardly, plucking the paint pen from behind his ear and banging it distractedly against his upper lip to calm himself. "Why would I befriend the man who killed my father?"

"And your girlfriend," Sylar added, looking pleased with himself.

Mohinder did not correct him on either the "Girlfriend" or the level of involvement Sylar had. He simply repeated, "Why would I befriend the man who killed my father?" more to himself than to Sylar.

"Maybe you didn't love him so much," Sylar suggested. It was obvious that he was being facetious but that didn't stop Mohinder from feeling stung.

"I loved my father as much as any son can," Mohinder snapped. Sylar's words touched perilously close to the bone. How was it possible to love a man so completely immersed in his work and in his memories? Step forward, Eden.

"He didn't love you, though." Sylar's voice was a scalpel, a Listor knife under Mohinder's skin, carving below his breastbone.

"That Chinese synthetic antiopiate," Mohinder said in a low, shaking voice as he forced himself not to shout and bang on the glass in his acute and sudden fury, "comes in gas form."

Sylar took the hint and closed his mouth so hard the click of his teeth was a thunderclap over the loudspeakers. Their conversation went no further that day.

Two days later Mohinder finally cleared the use of the MRI and supervised the insertion of a second implant into Sylar's person, this time directly inside his skull. This delicate process completed, a wholly sedated and strapped-down Sylar was wheeled into the MRI suite.

"Good morning, Gabriel," Mohinder said over the loudspeakers when the room had been cleared and Sylar's heart rate reached "waking" on the monitors.

"Where I am?" Sylar's eyes roved the ceiling of the room as Mohinder switched on the conveyor. The interrupter sat on his spine once again and the suppressants coursed through his body, but even so no one would stand in the room while he was conscious.

"The MRI suite. We're going to take some pictures of your brain in its resting state, then some while you attempt to perform certain tasks."

"I'm fucking paralysed." Sylar sounded rather irate.

"That makes no difference to the impulses in your brain," Mohinder said, leaning closer to the microphone. "I know you're thinking of refusing, Syl – Gabriel, so I want you to know this: inside your skull, just inside your meninges, is a small receiver and implant. If you are uncooperative, I can release a controlled dose of the drug you so detest directly into your brain. I am sure you recall the effects."

"Fuck you," Sylar spat.

"Gabriel," Mohinder said warningly. He watched impassively as the images of Sylar's "resting" brain were recorded. His colleagues – he had forgotten the name of the black doctor, Omar something, but he came highly recommended as a neurologist – murmured at them as though surprised by the lack of deviation.

"Try to kick," Mohinder instructed.

"Kick what?" Sylar snarled from inside the gleaming white bowels of the machine. "I can't move."

"Try to kick something," Mohinder said impatiently. "A wall, a ball … my head, whatever takes your fancy."

Mohinder could not see Sylar's reaction, but he guessed there had been another of his unfriendly smiles. Shortly afterward the images of Sylar's brain demonstrated activity in the areas associated with deliberate leg movement.

"Very good," Mohinder said as the neurologists nodded over the images onscreen. "Now I want you to try using your powers."

"You want me to what?" Sylar's voice sounded loud and incredulous over the speakers. Around Mohinder the two neurologists gave him horrified looks and glanced at the door and Mohinder frowned. This lack of faith in his suppressants was a little insulting, when they had been a hundred percent successful so far. As though Sylar would never have tried to use his powers before he was asked! As though all that was needed to overturn the influence of powerful chemical suppressants was an act of will. How disappointingly superstitious for men of science.

"Do whatever it is that you have to do to utilise those prodigious abilities of yours," Mohinder said patiently.

"Why?"

Mohinder Suresh valued transparency in his work wherever possible, as far as fear of plagiarism and the strictures of government confidentiality would allow, but sometimes impatience with the human element of his work got the better of him. And he really didn't like Sylar enough to feel he owed him anything, least of all an explanation.

"Because if you don't I will release the antiopiate," Mohinder said flatly, and the neurologists looked at him in blank horror. Mohinder began to wish they weren't there; how could they, these men who spent their time dealing with digital images of the brain and never meeting the people those images came from, how could they know what was required when you worked with an insane serial killer? Fortunately he outranked them by some considerable number of rungs in the laboratory ladder.

"How are you going to know whether I'm trying or not?" Sylar asked. There was more than a hint of a sneer in his voice.

"Do as you're asked."

"Asked?"

"Gabriel, you are testing my patience and I have the button for release under my finger," Mohinder leaned close to the microphone again, too close, and his upper lip scraped on the wire mesh. The neurologists were staring again, backing very surreptitiously away from him; Mohinder actively resented their presence now. "I would very much like to leave you in considerable pain for half an hour while I go and have some fucking lunch."

"I'm thinking about squashing your heads with my mind," Sylar said in a conversational voice. The images appearing onscreen seemed to verify this, and the neurologists – thank all the many and mighty gods – were quite excited. The patterns emerging were entirely new and yet logically related to their expectations.

Now Mohinder felt obscurely proud, as though he had personally created Sylar, rather than almost accidentally uncovered some of his less-buried secrets.

"Try a different one," he instructed.

"Didn't that work?" Sylar asked, sounding as though something was troubling him. Mohinder did not relieve his apparent burden with any form of answer to his question.

"Try something else," he repeated with a little more urgency.

"Turning your blood to ice," Sylar informed him. "And your saliva and your sweat and your spunk."

"That will do," Mohinder said as the neurologists both turned to give him a searching look.

The digital images betrayed the same pattern again, the same centres of illuminated brain activity. The two neurologists (who, had they not been of different races, might as well have been twins for the amount of divergence they had from each others' opinions and the party line) made note of this and nodded to Mohinder.

"One more, different, attempt," Mohinder said, rankling a little at being nodded at in this dismissive fashion. "Try something quite physical, perhaps."

"Melting this stupid fucking machine," Sylar said. The MRI scanner beeped and threw up the same patterns and – as soon as the microphone was off – his neurologist colleagues raised a cautious cheer.

"You know what I'm thinking of now?" Sylar asked, and Mohinder realised he hadn't shut off the speaker channels. He shot a glance at the images, but they made little sense to him; an enquiring look to the neurologists resulted in an unexpected and vulgar crotch-grabbing display from the white doctor. His black partner raised a worried eyebrow, then said a little gravely:

"Some sort of sexual fantasy."

Mohinder coughed awkwardly into the microphone, switching it on. "That's quite enough," he said, and waved for the neurologists to go. "Send the orderlies down," he told them, and pressed the communication button again as they left. "I see you haven't stopped, Gabriel."

"It's an alluring image. Can you blame me for keeping it up?"

"Implant," Mohinder reminded him shortly, watching the red blush flaring on the digital images. He put the conveyor in reverse. "You will be returned to oblivion soon," Mohinder continued, hitting the communication button, scraping his lip again on the microphone.

"Then I may as well enjoy it while I can," Sylar said, his feet and ankles emerging from the machine. "Don't you want to know what I'm thinking about?"

"No," Mohinder lied as Sylar's thighs, hips and in-concealable erection came into view. He hit the gas button with a mixture of relief and, strangely, regret.

"He has strong primitive instincts," Mohinder pointed out, as his colleagues nodded wearily over their own copies of his report, and of their own findings. "And combined with our results from other study subjects this is beginning to suggest that if our friends – and enemies – with these parahuman abilities are indeed the next step in our evolution, there is perhaps a little backsliding taking place as a race. Although their capabilities spring from the brain, there is evidence that their existence is more predicated by the intuitive, bestial areas than the portions commonly thought of as cerebral or advanced." He scratched his neck-stubble absently. "Whether this is a sign we must rethink our definition of sophisticated mental construction or a sign of devolution, we cannot yet be sure." He sat, shuffling the pages (seventy-five exactly, including citations) pages of his report into a tidy oblong as the chromosome team got up to deliver their extended addition to last quarter's report.

Five hours later he finally got back to the observation room and spent a while trying to remove the inexplicable coffee stains from the front of his lab coat.

"You look like you need a day off," Matt told him as he made his way unsteadily to the bike rack under the orange glow of night lighting. "If only to deal with the beard you've goting coming."

"That would take at least a week."

"Take it," Matt suggested, getting into his car slowly and with little grace. "You must have earned it by now."

"Don't have the time," Mohinder pointed out, unchaining his bike and brushing rain from the seat, carefully avoiding the question of whether he felt he'd earned anything. "And besides, people with families – " he inclined his head to Matt, " – get first refusal."

"I didn't know we got any refusal," Matt snorted, closing the car door. He wound down the window and added, "get sleep, Mohinder. Shave. Eat a real meal sometime. It'll help."

Mohinder didn't doubt that it would, but his days never seemed to have enough hours in them, no matter how long he dragged them out. Even when they days had thirty-eight, forty hours, they weren't quite long enough to allow for things like shaving, cooking, or remembering the layout of his home.

He went through the motions; the beard came off to prevent Matt from commenting on it again and he absently rang out for food he knew he wouldn't eat. Mohinder had barely taken a bite from the Masquerading-As-Murgh-Jaipur before exhaustion knocked him out as effectively as any pill.

When he arrived the next morning with a thin crust of almond-hued marinade still adhering to his eyebrows Matt gave him a proper father-of-a-small-child lecture on work/life balances and Mohinder nodded politely and contritely and took in maybe two words.

"Another spike in your brain wave activity," Mohinder observed, doodling on the back of a lever-arch folder with his silver paint pen. "This one seems to have lasted longer. Dreaming again?"

"No," Sylar said, his smile that old ugly sly thing again. His table had been placed in the upright position in the hope that reciprocal eye-contact would render him more voluntarily co-operative, but so far it had only succeeded in making Mohinder very uncomfortable. "I was awake this time."

Mohinder gave first the recordings and then Sylar a bemused look. "The spike is identical to your dream's shape, the duration is just longer."

"I was lying last time," Sylar said lazily. Mohinder could have had his eyes shut and his back turned – he could have been behind eighty sheets of glass – and he would still have felt those frighteningly intense dark eyes crawling over him like a lecher's hand.

Mohinder reached over and turned the recorder off with an audible click. "Did you hear that?"

"Yes."

"That, my friend, is the sound of confidentiality. Tell me what you were doing or trying to do." Mohinder made a show of putting his clipboard and pen to one side.

"I was thinking about fucking you," Sylar sneered.

Mohinder sighed. "I was trying to give you the chance to co-operate with your dignity a little intact. I do not enjoy setting off potentially lethal anti-opiates in anyone's brain, and I suspect it is not an experience you are keen to repeat."

"I wasn't being flippant," Sylar said, all trace of his sneer gone, his face naked with honesty that hinted at the presence of Gabriel in him still. "That's the truth."

Mohinder favoured the Mad Professor approach to his lab coat, filling up the pockets with all kinds of useless rubbish: an Alice band for his increasingly unruly hair, a five-clip paper-clip chain, three red ballpoints all on their last legs, a sachet or so of medical lubricant for examinations, a walnut shell of uncertain age and provenance, two ticket stubs for a movie he hadn't wanted to see and which his not-exactly-date had been so enthralled by that she declined to ever see him again, and a large quantity of fluff, or possibly lint. What his pockets didn't contain was any object or substance that could make sense of what Sylar had just said.

He left the observation room, opened the external door to the holding cell and locked himself in a small room with the most dangerous living man in the Western hemisphere.

"What," Mohinder said shakily, pointing his index finger in a figure of eight that contained Sylar somewhere in its circumference, "did you just say?"

Sylar wiggled his fingers and toes and remarked with some surprise, "hey, the paralytics have worn off."

Mohinder ignored him. "What did you say, Sylar?"

Sylar's smile was slow and syrupy as molasses, a complicated melee of signals. It said at last and oh shit and what exactly is happening here? It was confused and threatening and anticipatory and something fairly base that Mohinder did not recognise.

"Tell me," Mohinder said, covering the intervening space without noticing he'd done it.

"Untie me and I'll show you," Sylar said in a rumble that was half-whisper and apparently had claws in Mohinder's primary motor cortex.

Mohinder's hands moved like glaciers on the straps. Almost as soon as Sylar was freed his hand shot out – wrenching the IV from his arm – and closed, huge and hard, around Mohinder's thin brown neck.

He might have been afraid, but Mohinder had faith in his inventions even if none of the other staff did. "Have you forgotten the implant in your heart, Sylar?" he said calmly even as he began to grow light-headed from lack of air. "Have you forgotten what it can do?"

"You can suffer a lot without dying," Sylar said, not letting up but not tightening his hand any further either. "You taught me that."

Mohinder could barely swallow. "So can you," he said gently, "and the implant in your skull is still active. Still functional. Would you like me to prove that?"

Sylar glared into his face, searching for some kind of tell that he was bluffing. Mohinder stared back, thinking of what he might come back as. A python would be fitting. A doctor again would doubtless prove just as unhealthy. Sylar let go, leaving Mohinder to stagger back and massage his crushed and abused skin.

"I can leave you in indescribable agonies in less than a minute," Mohinder reminded him.

"Then I'd better make the most of the time I've got," Sylar growled, and he moved like a gunshot – the words had only just reached Mohinder's ears before Sylar's hands had seized his head.

He was unable to form a single coherent thought before Sylar's dry-seeming mouth crammed itself clumsily over his and the weight of his body propelled them both into the padded wall.

It was not a good kiss. It was, in comparison to any other kiss he'd received in both style and skill, a bad kiss. Other kisses did not involve the scrape of three-day stubble on his shaving-tender face. Other kisses had not crushed his lips, knocked teeth hard on teeth, squeezed his head or caused him to bang his elbow. It had been a long, long time since anyone had been moved to kiss him, true, but even so he didn't remember it being so invasive, so forceful. And he didn't remember such prior kisses turning him to jelly from the neck down, vibrating with the frantic thumps of his overexcited heart.

When Sylar's mouth uncovered his he found he was panting for breath, and somehow deprived. He raised his hands to push him away - of course to push him away – and instead took a double handful of Sylar's hospital greens and pulled him closer again.

No one else had ever lifted him almost off the floor to kiss him. No one else had made his skin burn or his heart race orand his legs shake; he'd always thought such symptoms to be the province of bodice-ripper heroines, but it seemed that desperation, involuntary celibacy the and accompanying loneliness could produce a similar cocktail of physical weaknesses. It was very hard to keep thinking.

Mohinder felt Sylar's fingers dart into his lab coat pocket and his stomach swooped unpleasantly. Of course this must just have been some clever ruse to retrieve his keys. Of course, of course. A ruse which could not have worked with some other doctor, a doctor with a family and a wife and some other focus to his life besides Sylar.

But Sylar withdrew not the keys but the metallic lubricant sachets, two bubbles of water-based substance joined in the middle with a perforated hinge and each stamped with a use-by date. He held them up to Mohinder's face and smiled a smile that was half-shaken and half shake-inducing. "Aren't you the little boy scout." He pressed his mouth against Mohinder's throat, and over the static that was encroaching on his mental processes Mohinder felt the barest scrape of teeth on his skin before Sylar licked him. "You taste like how I thought you would."

"How I - ?" Mohinder struggled for air and coherency.

"There hasn't been a lot to think of in here," Sylar murmured, his hands doing something ingenious with the back of Mohinder's neck and the small of his back, the sachets of lube dangling over the edge of Mohinder's coat pocket again. "Sometimes I think about killing you," Sylar went on, his fingers creeping to the buttons of Mohinder's untucked shirt, "and sometimes I think about you underneath me in quite another way."

Mohinder undid his own shirt. His chest seemed intent on this unnecessary heaving. His brain appeared to be on strike or on a vacation on the moon for all the help it was offering him. His legs did not seem able to take his weight. And he wanted to be kissed that way again.

Sylar passed his palm over Mohinder's sternum and pushed him flat against the wall, his blessedly harsh, uncomfortable kiss coming on like a bad weather front. Mohinder made a sound – what kind he could not tell, for it was lost somewhere in the excess of saliva and the rustle of his clothes as he raised his arms and buried his overworked fingers in Sylar's thick, soft hair.

It was uniquely terrifying; not for the fear that Sylar might forget the implants at any minute and kill him as easily as a bug, although that thought swam unavoidably in the oceans of Mohinder's mind, but of how far off the chart of his experience he was travelling. This was moving to New York, culture shock layered on culture shock wrapped in worry and underlined with visceral desire: then for revenge, now for …

He paused with his hand clasping the third rubber button of Sylar's absurd hospital greens. Now for what?

"Stop thinking," Sylar muttered into his mouth, and if Mohinder wanted to protest he couldn't because Sylar's tongue had invaded and this was nothing like anyone else's kisses, ever. He undid the third button and nearly lost his footing on the metal floor as Sylar jerked the shirt and coat from Mohinder's shoulders at the same time, leaving his back naked, sweating minutely in the warm room as his skin temperature rocketed.

There was a moment of silence and stillness, like the second at the crest of a breaking wave before the roar and the foam begins, and in it Mohinder saw as clear as if he were viewing it from above: what he was doing, why he was doing it, all the consequences thereof, lined up in little avenues of possibility as though he had ever had any foresight at all.

That the next words out of his mouth were, "do it, dear gods, just do it," did him no credit as a supremely moral being, but certainly affirmed his basic humanity. And those words made Sylar shiver down the length of his black-haired spine and rub his huge body against Mohinder's in a kind of spasm, almost. How was he to argue with that?

Mohinder had always believed in respecting his lovers. In assuring a mutual bond between his intellect and the woman's mind underlay the whole sordid business of physical encounter, even if he couldn't quite get the hang of saying 'I love you' on command instead of six months (or years) too late.

Now he found he believed very fervently in the static of body hair on body hair, in the kind of slippery mess produced by two packets of medical lube and a penis that was as over-eager as it was present (he had never had occasion to think the word 'pre-ejaculate' before, but here it was, and plenty of it) and embarrassing.

He believed, a little later, very firmly in the existence of his prostate and the rightness of its contact with other persons' body parts. He believed very much in Sylar's fingers and their place in the universe, which was currently up his rectum to the third knuckle as his spine bent awkwardly against the floor and sweat dripped from Sylar's forehead onto Mohinder's stomach like the tears of a statue.

"This is what I was thinking of," Sylar said, his voice uneven.

"Just – " Mohinder's voice betrayed him, got stuck to his tonsils and failed to gain strength. " – just your fingers?" he gasped, giving the lie somewhat to the 'just'.

"I am large and you are small," Sylar pointed out, and Mohinder couldn't really argue with that. "Narrow hips," Sylar elaborated, using his free hand to stroke the side of them for emphasis, making Mohinder shiver again. "If I damage you, I can't do this again."

Like the dawning of a new sun over artic winter Mohinder realised something wholly unprecedented and shocking: Sylar didn't want to kill him. Yet, anyway. It was a strange revelation, and one he had no idea what to do with until Sylar's hand brushed the skin at the base of his penis - be reckless, Mohinder, say 'cock' - at which point it became very clear, if only because everything else in the world had blurred.

"I would risk that," Mohinder said rather breathily, hips almost cracking under the pressure of their unnatural position. He tried not to think the word "stoma" or how badly he might end up needing one.

"On your stomach," Sylar muttered, and to Mohinder's great regret those warm, long fingers slipped from him, and both of Sylar's hands (one slippery as an eel, the other rough and – but for sweat – dry) clutched at his hips as if to turn him bodily.

Mohinder rolled onto his knees, skin sticking to the metal floor, and as soon as he was steady Sylar's hand caressed the join of his thighs, the valley of his buttocks. Mohinder swallowed his next words in a pre-vocal whimper and tilted back, knowing that he spread like a flower.

It was easy, but it hurt; it hurt, but it was pleasurable; it was pleasurable but made him hiss with pain. Mohinder had never contemplated the possibility, before this bewildering sensation of something so thick and so … body-temperature (odd grammar) moving up his insides like this, that sexual activity could be so paradoxical.

Sylar said something, but the words were garbled. The tone seemed to suggest a certain possessiveness and a not-inconsiderable level of arousal. Then there was the matter of Sylar's chest brushing hard against the back of Mohinder's shoulders, which produced a feeling somewhere between dizziness and nostalgia, and opened him up even further.

Then there was the business of Sylar's hand closing snugly around Mohinder's - say it - cock, and that was pretty much it for rational human thought; from then on it was just movement, sweat, indistinct cries, the tightening of skin and blessed, blissful release …and wallowing.

By the time he regained something that could be identified as a thought, Mohinder was feeling very smeared. There didn't appear to be an inch of him that wasn't sticky. He was expecting to find Sylar gone and the keys with him; fearing it, certainly.

But they weren't, and he wasn't. Instead there was an overlarge hand resting on Mohinder's thigh, belonging to a face that was giving him a look best described as 'hungry'.

He was not vain enough to suppose he had tamed the beast, but it did appear that he'd found a way to distract him – and Sylar, too.

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:53:17 GMT

HALP. I need a Heroes-beta for about 10-12k of Mylar fic. HALP HALP HALP.

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 20:14:12 GMT

IT NEVER GETS OLD. NEVER.

PART TWO.

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 18:08:27 GMT

PART ONE

The rain was still lurking threateningly about the grounds come Monday, ambushing Jack every time he made a move towards the tennis courts even in jest, and drenching him in a brief but thorough shower when he took the dogs out. He had fundamentally resigned himself to a day of squishy socks and the evocative smell of wet wool in his nostrils when the sun came out in a blaze of glory and nearly blinded him with the thousands of reflections from every puddle.

Dazzled and damp, Jack returned to the house for breakfast and found Lady Diana nursing a hangover. "One too many nightcaps," she explained, looking comical in her dark glasses – especially as she'd still apparently taken the time to set her hair. "No laughing or I shall … visit dire punishments on you. I can't think of any now – too tired – but trust me they will be every bit as ghastly as this headache."

Jack viewed the two places set for breakfast with a discreet eye, and raised his eyebrows at her.

"Worn out, apparently," Lady Diana supplied. "So I have you to myself today. Normally I'd jump at the chance," she didn't sound particularly enthusiastic or sincere, "but – well." She grimaced. "Go and organise the library or something. You're breathing too loudly."

Jack saluted sarcastically and trooped off, making a point of marching as heavily as he could until Lady Diana shouted, "ARSE" after him and flinched at the volume of her own voice.

The library was in a state of continual and advanced disarray – Lady Diana admitted that she'd never really got into the habit of putting books back on any shelf when she'd finished with them, never mind the one they'd come from, and so stack upon stack and slithery pile overlapping scree of hardbacks littered every available flat surface amongst the almost-bare shelves in the high-ceilinged room – but Jack was in no mood for playing librarian. He wasn't sure if he'd ever been in the appropriate mood for a task that involved quite so much tedious shuffling about and caring about order.

Jack made it through most of the maze of papers before something caught his eye – an oversized sheet of yellowing paper spread out over a desk, tucked away at the back of the room. It turned out to be a family tree. Jack assumed it must have been a project of the late Mr. Beckett (his title having temporarily slipped Jack's mind) as Lady Diana showed a refreshing lack of interest in genealogy.

With a rapidly sinking heart he scanned the bottom line of the chart until he found the date he was looking for; there, John Clemens Fairford, Lahore, a date almost exactly nine months after his affair with Ann Parker had ended. Shit.

Jack thumped the family tree in frustration and part of the paper crackled off. There was no guarantee it was the same woman, he thought desperately, and even if it was – she was married, and from what he remembered of smirking politely at her cuckolded husband, to a hale and virile gentleman (with enormous moustaches of the kind Jack could never grow). It was entirely possible that, after his little incident on the train had forced him to flee to Calcutta, that 'Ann Parker' had thrown herself back into her marriage by way of consolation. Not just possibly but wholly likely.

He gently relaxed his clenched fists into looser shapes and took a steadying breath. It was fine. He was not littering up time with his illegitimate brood. For all he knew the thing that had rendered him unable to die had also left him infertile – it would after all be poetic justice that he be incapable of creating life now that he couldn't lose his own.

Jack backed away from the chart as though it was an adder he'd disturbed and decided that his time would be better spent – he looked out of the window at the miserable sweat-inducing drizzle – clearing weeds from around the outhouses at the bottom of the field.

Returning to the house around five to change for dinner, he was greeted with an exasperated, "I had no idea the library was so muddy. Is that goose-grass in your hair?" from his patron, but no real issue was raised over his absence. In fact, she looked positively refreshed to have been free of him for the majority of the daylight hours.

Jack bathed slowly, until the water in his tub was quite tepid, and dressed just as sluggishly. The bow-tie amused him, and he spent a moment or two informing the mirror that his name was Bond, James Bond – once he'd finally knotted it correctly. Or thought he had – he stepped out into the corridor just as Staveson was passing, and the old man groaned as though Jack had punched him in the stomach, and made him stand still while he retied it.

Lady Diana seized upon him before he could get to the bottom of the stairs. "They're not here yet," she muttered, which Jack had rather guessed, since she wasn't down there making nice to them. "But I want to give you a friendly warning – do not fuck this up for my nephew. The Cunninghams are vulgar people and frankly I'd rather not associate with them at all, but they are very wealthy and God only knows this family is need serious need of a financial kick in the posterior, by whatever means necessary. The old man has fifteen glue, varnish and polish factories all churning out goods – " she gave him a slightly hunted look, " – he will go on about that for hours. Bloody hours. His daughter has air for brains and her laugh goes right through my head but she's pretty enough and Johnny will blasted well get engaged to her –"

"Does he know this yet?"

"He's been primed," Lady Diana said grimly, "and you are to tell the Cunninghams you served with him. He saved your life or something of that ilk."

"I'm his character reference?" Jack asked, a little delighted by the sheer underhandedness of it all.

"Bingo." Lady Diana patted him on both upper arms like a mafia don. "If you want to continue living in my house, using up all my hot water and emptying the larder at all hours of the night, Jack, you'll co-operate."

Jack kissed her abruptly on the mouth, and she batted him hastily away. "Not in public, you ass."

"Operation Get Johnny Married is go, ma'am."

"Don't you ma'am me," she cocked her head. "Hear that?"

"Car engine?"

"They have a brand new motorcar," she sounded utterly disgusted. "Absurd. As if the roads around here were remotely suited to it." Lady Diana adjusted her stole and rapped Jack in the chest with her knuckles. "Remember. Best behaviour. Make my boy look good."

"Yes, Lady Diana," Jack saluted, and she sighed and hobbled down the stairs at a speed that belied her uneven gait.

The Cunninghams were a strangely-matched menagerie, Jack thought as he was introduced to them. Albert was a frumpy, stolid beach ball of a man who'd tried to grow a patriarch's whiskers and failed, from the looks of things, and had to settle for a toothbrush on his upper lip instead. Most unfashionable (Jack currently sported a pencil, the cutting edge of facial hair), and he looked like he'd learned his manners from a book at short notice.

His wife, the lovely Mrs. Sarah Cunningham, gave the very definite impression of showgirl done good. It was there in the way she moved her head and the way she wore her make-up – thick, as though she was used to applying it herself to withstand the glare of footlights and stand out in a dim club.

Their daughter – Jack could almost see Johnny's soul shrivelling up in horror as the two were introduced – was spot on eighteen, a bottle-blonde with thick eyelashes and a look of mania gleaming under her modestly-dressed exterior. She looked like she wanted to cut loose and do something irrational. She looked like she was itching for a cigarette if not more. She looked like she belonged in parties in London where half the party-goers got arrested for sodomy and indecency; in short, Elizabeth Cunningham looked like Jack's kind of girl, and like she was all wrong for a man who still had the creeping horrors every night.

He introduced himself politely and distantly, but he saw her flush and twitch and smile at him with a look of distinct interest that had been absent when she greeted Johnny. Fuck. Lady Diana was going to pulverise him.

"Fish-based and horse-based so far," Mr. Cunningham said over the soup course, "but we're looking into oil derivatives and expansion into lubricants for engines. The mechanised age is here to stay, in my opinion."

Elizabeth fidgeted in her seat and all but yawned into her glass of water; beside her, Johnny gazed miserably through his soup as though hypnotised by it; Lady Diana made a pained noise of encouragement to Mr. Cunningham, and to Jack's left Mrs. Cunningham asked him with a sad-eyed smile if he had ever been to New York, and how he found life in England.

With a healthy (and perhaps unwise) dollop of the usual charm Jack told her he'd never been to New York, he came from Chicago (pulling names out of nowhere), and he began singing England's fulsome and not entirely deserved praises as he kicked Johnny's foot under the table, just as Lady Diana pinched him surreptitiously in the side.

Johnny jerked upright guiltily and asked Elizabeth to pass the pepper. It was, Jack thought wearily, a start at least.

The fish course did a little more for the dinner table conversation: showing a surprising degree of sensitivity, Mr. Cunningham diverted the topic from fish-based adhesive manufacturing and onto the business of motorcar maintenance, a subject on which Elizabeth proved to be quite passionate and often loud enough that Jack felt her mother's leg whip out under the table to catch her in the shin. With this amount of foot-based conversational guidance going on, they were sure to all be too crippled to socialise by the end of the meal.

Jack watched Johnny strike up cautious conversation about the merits of the Bugatti Type 23 over the Delage CO, heaved a sigh of relief and buried himself in the business of eating. Eating, and trying to avoid Mrs. Cunningham's inviting hand on his thigh.

After-dinner drinks served as the warning beacon for the downhill turn of the evening – Johnny mumbled something about needing to step outside for some air, his face flushed, and Jack followed him without caution or excuse.

He discovered the young man just beside the ugly pillars that flanked the front door, vomiting explosively into a rose bush. A moment or two of back rubbing later Johnny was composed enough to croak, "I told you I couldn't hold my drink," and sink onto his toes in a wobbly crouch.

"How much did you have?" Jack asked, sitting down beside him on the step in a manner intended to be responsible and comforting and not at all paternal.

"Not much. Less than you."

"I have a cast-iron stomach. You don't want to try keeping up with me."

"I had noticed," Johnny passed his hands over his face, unsticking his sweaty hair from his forehead. "At least I kept my mouth shut, eh?"

"Oh?" Jack asked carefully.

"Yes," Johnny said, slurring just enough that Jack know the confidence he was about to receive was one he shouldn't be hearing, "before we came over mother got blind at the embassy – absolutely rotten, and told me – " he slid down on his heels until his back touched the pillar behind him and his head bounced off it with a crack like a rifle shot – seemingly without him noticing, "She told me I'm a bastard." He covered his mouth with his hand. Jack couldn't tell if he was ashamed of the word or nauseous again. "Some soldier, she said." He looked wistful.

"How did she know you're not … you know … your father's?"

Johnny made a face. "Apparently my father – " he hiccupped painfully, "an otherwise excellent man, mark you – has a little bit of a problem with the old chap." Johnny demonstrated precisely what problem with a surprisingly vulgar gesture involving a limp wrist. "Not what I wanted for my nineteenth birthday. Happy – hic – birthday, Johnny, you're ille –hic- git – ti – ma - … a bastard."

"But the Colonel – "

"Long as no one else knows, I'm his son, right? He wanted one," Johnny said, leaning back again and nearly missing the pillar this time. Jack grabbed him by the elbow to steady him and ended up putting a supportive arm across his shoulders. They sat this way for some time, the cold night air blowing through Jack's hair and stirring Johnny's.

"I say, Mr. Harkness," called a dampened voice from the doorway. Elizabeth Cunningham peered around at them and said with a glint in her eye that would have showed up in a coal cellar, "I say. D'you and your friend want to come to a rather terrific party?"

Jack glanced at Johnny, who had his eyes shut and looked positively deathsome, and was about to tell her regretfully that they'd have to pass on the offer when Johnny, without cracking open an eyelid, muttered:

"Please yes dear god."

"Are you sure?" Jack asked, peering at Johnny's pale, sweating face with genuine concern. "You don't look up to it."

"I'm sick of the quiet out here," Johnny explained, doing little to break it, "I want to go somewhere with dancing and people who aren't looking at me as though I'm contagious."

"That's the spirit," Elizabeth said cheerfully. "It's at Stourhead. The way I drive we'll be there in two hours at the most."

"You're driving?" Jack asked, helping Johnny to his feet. The lad's skin was clammy and his heart racing. Jack had never seen someone take a few drinks so badly before.

"It's my car. Of course I'm driving." Elizabeth produced a pair of diving goggles from her handbag. "I do hope that's not going to be a problem, Mr. Harkness. I didn't have you pegged for a kill-joy at all. I don't want to have to leave you here to your own miserable devices."

"Do your parents know you're taking their car?" Jack asked warily, sliding into the passenger side as Johnny sprawled over the rear seats in a rather endearingly ungainly manner.

"Of course not. It wouldn't be half as fun if they knew!" Elizabeth snorted. As the car began to coast gently down the approach she added, "We shall have to stop before we get to the house so I can change out of this frumpy old rag – it just wouldn't be the thing to show up at one of Enid's evenings looking like an old maid, it's just unthinkable."

"Stop where?" Johnny asked from behind them. Jack turned. He seemed to be benefiting from the cold wind on his face.

"A bush, a tree – " Elizabeth made a dismissive gestured and clamped her hand back on the wheel. "- does it matter?"

"A bush?" Johnny said faintly.

"I'm sure that, both being perfect gentlemen, you'll avert your gaze while I whip this old thing off and put on something a little more daring."

"Perfect gentlemen," Jack echoed. Elizabeth's hand was heavy on his leg.

"Jack, be a darling and have a look in my handbag? There should be a gold compact with a swan on it in the front compartment. I rather fancy some cocaine."

"While driving?" Jack asked incredulously, rooting about in her back and feeling very silly doing it.

"It's medicinal!" Elizabeth said without even an attempt at being convincing. "It helps me concentrate."

"I don't doubt it," said Jack, who did. "But what I meant was – won't it get blown everywhere by the wind?"

"Dash it, I hadn't thought of that. Open it below the screen, there? That's right. Now get up a spoonful – bigger than that, I'm not an infant! – and press your thumb over it so – "

Jack did as he was told, and by a curious process not wholly unlike feeding peas to an obstinate and finicky toddler, got the required amount of cocaine to their driver.

For the rest of the journey Jack learnt an awful lot about Elizabeth, Elizabeth's stridently-held opinions (who knew it was possible to be passionate about being undecided?), Elizabeth's friend Molly ("She's American too. Maybe you know her? I can't remember her last name but she's simply divine, you must have met,") who was a singer, and most of all about Elizabeth's hair-raising driving. He cast occasional envious glances back at a dozing Johnny in the brief moments when Elizabeth paused for breath.

He let her hand crawl all over his leg like a stoned arachnid and leapt out of the car to push the machine out of the ditch Elizabeth had driven it into – twice. The third time it was a field, mercifully empty of livestock, and Johnny came down to help, and they both got plastered in mud up to the knee.

"Marvellous," Elizabeth giggled as they set off again, "this is just perfect! I can tell Enid I found you both growing in a field of soldiers and plucked you up for her party."

Johnny and Jack exchanged a pained glance but held their peace.

They stopped inside the grounds but outside the house so that Elizabeth could dart behind a spectacular folly and emerge twenty minutes later wearing a knee-length thing in shimmering gold that made her look like a twelve-year-old boy in make-up. Jack applauded nonetheless.

Their guide slapped the doorknocker impatiently, cigarette-holder poking out of her mouth like a porcupine's quill, and the door was answered by a tired-looking footman and a drunk-looking woman in her late twenties who was carrying a small dog. "Lizzie! Splendid! We were just getting started and wondering how fashionably detained you were going to be. Just wouldn't have been the same without you, darling."

Elizabeth simpered unexpectedly; Jack had not pegged her for the kind of woman who simpered. "I brought some chaps along. I'm afraid they're a bit grubby from my driving – "

"Well, at least they're still alive," Enid drawled. "So I suppose you must be improving." She waved an admonishing finger under the young lady's nose and smirked. "You'd go a deal better if you opened your eyes when taking corners."

"Oh, where's the thrill?" Elizabeth flapped the advice away with her cigarette smoke. "Anyway, this is Jack Harkness – "

Jack dipped to kiss Enid's hand and the small dog growled at him, so he made a big show of taking the little bastard's forepaw and kissing that, too. It showed him his teeth. Jack showed his back.

"- and – blast! I've forgotten your name."

"Fairford. Johnny Fairford."

"How very excellent," Enid pulled them inside and shut the door, raising her voice to an immediate wall-shaking bellow. "GILLARD! Where are the drinks for my new guests? Hop along, you old goat."

"None for me, thanks," Johnny said. "Just point me at the music."

"This way," Enid took Johnny's hand and dragged him down the hall like a dog on a lead. Trapped between her arm and her breast, the tiny Yorkshire terrier began yapping indignantly. Jack took Elizabeth's arm and followed.

There came a room filled with cigarette smoke and the scent, under this, of rose water. Somewhere in the gloom two string instruments – a bass and a piano – were engaged in a deadly musical battle while a giggling trumpet refereed; now and then Jack caught a glimpse of the musicians but the partygoers for the most part blocked his view. They wore suits and costumes, and very little at all: one young lady had apparently come as a Muse and was lounging about with one breast hanging out, and a man of maybe nineteen was darting about dressed as Cupid, his heavily made-up eyelids drooping narcotically over dark brown eyes.

Jack found himself filled with a feeling like a kind of contented homecoming. This was his natural environment. Throw in an orgy a little later and perhaps a gunfight and it would be a truly swinging party.

As the acoustic battlefield settled into some epileptic jitter that was only dance music if you had five legs, Jack seized Johnny by the hand and said, "care to dance?"

And dance they did. Johnny danced like he'd been taught to dance by people who weren't meant to be teaching him anything, and later learnt to not quite cover it up with something more decent – he looked like the two-way cultural fight of colonialism embodied in arm movements. He looked good. Jack forgot himself and forgot anachronism and just threw himself into the music like a lunatic against an asylum wall, every flat and squeak and bum note just another way of touching rhythm. He danced until sweat stuck his shirt squarely to his back, until his feet felt like wings.

Until the song, or approximation thereof, ended, and one of the musicians wandered off to stuff more "naughty salt" up his nose, and the remaining two couldn't keep up quite the same tempo even with guests tapping encouragement on whatever flat surfaces they could find.

Johnny put a hand against the wall to steady himself, a movement which would have been more effective had said wall not been eight feet away, and said unsteadily, "I think I need to lie down now."

Jack refrained from saying "I told you this would happen" and instead grabbed Enid unceremoniously by the elbow as she passed. Her rotten little dog snarled at him but they both ignored it. "Do you have a guest room we could – uh. That doesn't sound very good."

Enid smirked – it seemed to be her only expression – and said, "up the larger stairs, third on the left, has a bolt on the door for precisely guests like you Mr. – Harken, was it?"

"Something like that," Jack said with an appalling smile, not bothering to correct her on either front. He got a hold of Johnny's upper arm instead and gave it a tug. "Come on. I found you somewhere to sleep it off."

Johnny shambled and bowed at the knees but otherwise made his way relatively unsupported – Jack kept a steadying arm on his shoulder, just in case – and leant heavily on the wall while Jack wrestled the stiff door open.

"There," he said, shutting the door behind them. "I should probably get back down to the …" he didn't want to, of course, but there was the not incurring the volcanic wrath of Lady Diana to think of. He trailed off, though, because Johnny had straightened up and tossed his hair out of his eyes, looking the very picture of sobriety if not of sanity.

The change was sudden and electric, and Jack permitted himself a low groan; things like this tended to go one of two ways, and he really hoped it was heading for the ending with the sweaty grunting nudity and not the one where Johnny peeled his face off and turned out to be something that needed shooting before it laid eggs in Jack's spinal column. He was quite fed up with that ending.

"I thought you wanted to lie down," he pointed out carefully.

"Eventually," Johnny said, taking off his dinner jacket and throwing it at the chair by the bed. He gave Jack the kind of smile that Jack recognised from that time he'd accidentally-on-purpose time-looped himself and ended up having good but extremely narcissistic sex with himself.

"Oh I see," Jack said, flashing the same one back. "What happened to 'couldn't possibly' and 'psychiatric doctors'?"

"I just gave a very convincing performance of still being blind drunk, and you half-carried me up the stairs," Johnny said, holding Jack's gaze as he moved closer. "If tongues do get excitable they'll say you took advantage of an inebriated and confused young man," Johnny went on with a mock sigh of pain, "I am frequently drunk and confused, and taken advantage of, Jack. They'll understand. You might not be so lucky."

Jack shrugged and put his hands on Johnny's hips, pulling him across the remaining distance with a gentle but deliberate tug. "I have my own ways of avoiding trouble." He peeled one of Johnny's braces off his shoulder and laid his hand where it had rested, cupped his fingers around the back of Johnny's neck, danced agonisingly slow patterns on the soft skin there, and pulled Johnny's mouth towards him.

Johnny stiffened. "I don't kiss – "

"You do now," Jack said, and kissed him. He put everything into it – A Jack Harkness Knicker-Dropper Glory, they called them the first time he'd been around in the second World War. He pressed his lips to Johnny's, slid his hand from Johnny's hip to the small of his back, half-opened his mouth and – bingo – there was the buckle in Johnny's knees, there was the surrender in his mouth.

Jack softened up, pulled away a little, and was rewarded with an open mouth and a delicately probing tongue, and just the barest hint of a moan into his mouth. Jack pulled back abruptly, hands still in place, leaving Johnny temporarily gaping for him, and whispered against his cheek, "Let me guess, all those other drunken moments: brief and hard against the wall of the mess? You're a fool, Johnny." He snatched a swift kiss and once again left the man chasing his mouth as he pulled away. "Did you never want anything more than that?"

"There is nothing more for men like us," Johnny said a little sadly, his hands working on untucking Jack's shirt which, without unbuttoning his high-waisted trousers, was not going to be a magnificent success.

Jack seized Johnny's wrists in his hands and bashed them together. "You," he said, his mouth brushing Johnny's with each letter, "are so wrong about that I can hardly tell you." He released Johnny's wrists, plucked the other brace from his shoulder and stood back (keeping himself from burying his hands in the man's hair, his lips in his neck and his hips against his arse was proving an effort of supreme will). "Undress," he said pleasantly.

"All of it?" Johnny looked perplexed.

"I'm not about to make love to your trousers. Yes, all of it," Jack said, and nearly inhaled his lower lip as he bit on it, trapping the sigh as Johnny unbuttoned down over his chest and stomach, removed his collar and cast it aside, and undid the first of his trouser buttons; as he revealed the curve of his breastbone swathed in vest, the almost-concave expanse of his stomach and – as he struggled away his sleeves – the pale, slightly bony hemispheres of his shoulders. His lightly-freckled collarbone. His throat. Jack swallowed hard.

"Why must I – "

Jack stopped his mouth with another kiss, which unfortunately also put paid to any more of this bizarre and clumsy strip-tease. He undid Johnny's trousers himself, forcing his hands steady, forcing himself to take it slow and calm instead of bashing their hips together, instead of sliding a hot hand inside his underwear the minute he could and making a beeline for Johnny's cock. Jack untucked his vest, yanked it upwards, and as they broke the kiss, as Johnny raised his arms above his head to help Jack wriggle him out of the off-white undergarment, Jack was struck by the brief but powerful image of helping a little boy get undressed for his bath, helping his son –

No, Jack thought firmly, and pulled Johnny's trousers down to his ankles.

By the time Johnny stood naked and shivering a little under the dim electric light, his erection pointing towards the ceiling but not quite scraping his lower belly yet, Jack was giddy and breathless with the effort of self-restraint, sweating and rumpled but still dressed.

"Aren't you going to – " Johnny began uncertainly, all his former self-assurance gathered up on the floor along with his discarded clothing.

"All in good time," Jack said rather shortly, and with a light shove to his sternum sent Johnny reeling back onto the bed. He shrugged off his own braces as he crawled on after him, took Johnny's ankles in his hands and was a little bemused (if somewhat gratified) to find that the lad drew his legs up and apart like celandine petals at dawn without any prompting from Jack at all.

He looked a moment, kneeling between Johnny's legs with his shirt buttons all but flying off in nervous haste, to take in the sight of territory he'd not yet conquered, to drink in Johnny's peculiarly open face, the slight tremble in his thighs from the strain of their position, the way his stomach moved as he breathed, the way his skin looked healthier under electric light than daylight (or perhaps it was that here it contrasted against white sheets instead of dark clothing?).

Jack pulled his own vest off over his head and received a rather pleasant surprise when Johnny's hands rose to his chest to read its contours like Braille. Johnny looked strangely awestruck – Jack supposed it was the oddness of bridging the gap between furtive glances at naked bodies while bathing and the quick, abrupt, furtive fucks behind darkened sheds and in dank outhouses. Nothing furtive about this. Jack bent awkwardly over to kiss him again, and this time Johnny's mouth was eager and alive, his hands skating to the small of Jack's back and crushing their bodies together.

Johnny's cock hot and stiff against Jack's stomach. His hands rough and – longer fingernails than he'd expected – sharp on Jack's back, his shoulders, his neck, his scalp. Hungry hands, starving fingers, and a thirsty mouth.

Jack pulled back. "All in good time," he panted, unbuttoning his trousers. No sooner had he unhooked the relevant hooks than Johnny's hands were on him again, tugging and worrying at his waistband. "Patience," Jack said, as much to himself as to Johnny, and ducked to bury his face against the back of Johnny's thigh.

Johnny made a sound like a hiss of shock when Jack began licking. He tasted familiar (Jack shoved Johnny's hands gently away from his own cock), of sweat, mostly, with an undercurrent of gentlemen's soap almost entirely faded, and that intoxicating more-scent-than-taste of arousal seeping from his pores. Jack's tongue drew fat wet highways through the soft hairs on the underside of his buttocks, circled a lazy whirl around his arsehole and as Johnny said in a very worried voice, "what are you doing?" he began rimming him in earnest.

It was a gesture as much anything else, a demonstration that there was more to this heady business of fucking than hand jobs in privies buggery in stables; an important one that excused the slightly sewagey taste (debates raged in the future involving words like 'tang' and 'spicy' which Jack had always found a little disingenuous; sticking your tongue up someone's arse tasted of shit. The trick was, as an old friend of his had wistfully said, not minding that it tasted of shit). That this gesture resulted in Johnny going boneless and making a sound like a newborn kitten was obviously only an enjoyable side-effect and not the point of the gesture at all.

Jack paused to slide two of his fingers into his mouth and coat them liberally with saliva.

Johnny barely even twitched when Jack slipped them both in together, his body already so relaxed that resistance was nominal at best; he did sigh and grope for his cock again, and Jack was forced to use his spare hand to shove Johnny's away once more. Johnny's hips rippled like a cracked whip, driving him down onto Jack's fingers as his legs splayed even wider, and Jack allowed himself a moment of frustration, a bitten lip, as he didn't lower his head to suck Johnny 'til he came as he so badly wanted to.

He waited instead until Johnny was more or less fucking his hand, until Johnny was clutching at his own hair and chest and making minute sounds with each ragged breath – and removed his fingers. Johnny's eyes flew open; Jack pulled down his trousers and underpants in one smooth, movement and Johnny reached down to pull the cheeks of his arse even further apart.

Holding back was an exercise in levels of willpower Jack didn't know he possessed – Johnny's arsehole was at that moment the single most inviting thing in the universe. It would be so easy to sink himself balls-deep in him, to feel Johnny warm and wet and tight as a glove around him; the sounds he'd make. The weight of Johnny's legs on his shoulders. Collapsing spent and slick over another man's stomach for the first time in – oh, weeks now. But no. No.

Jack held himself back with immense difficulty, and Johnny grabbed impatiently, ineffectively at his waist. "Aren't you going to fuck me now?" Johnny muttered, his words coming out blurred at the edges and just a little whiny.

"No," Jack said, stroking the back of Johnny's leg, briefly eyeballing the not-terribly-discrete bottle of oil on the bedside table (Enid evidently had some number of these highly disreputable parties), "You're going to fuck me now."

He'd thought there was nothing left in Johnny to surprise him, but it seemed the man was his fath – no – but there was. The speed at which he rolled out from under Jack, the force with which he slammed him, face-down, into the mattress – all suggested Jack had wound him up a lot tighter than he'd imagined.

"You'll excuse me if I don't piss about like you do," Johnny said a little roughly, his knee between the back of Jack's thighs like a wedge, oil flying everywhere like particularly indecent rain. "But – oh" his fingers slipped easily inside Jack, momentarily inside Jack – and made him gasp despite himself (because this, the last time of this, had been months ago, nearly a year ago), "I've been patient," he continued, the head of his cock nuzzling Jack's arsehole. Jack swallowed and lifted up, trying to force Johnny down into him. "I have been patiently not even trying to fuck you for four bloody days and you made it so obvious," Johnny all but whined, guiding himself in. "Ah."

Jack echoed him, arching up as Johnny steadied himself by grabbing his shoulder.

"You made it so clear," Johnny whispered, his chest hot against Jack's back, his breath hot by Jack's ear, his voice uneven and his cock like a steel rod inside him. "Watching me all the – un – sodding time," Johnny's teeth rasped against Jack's neck as he muttered, and Jack had to admit he wasn't paying that close attention to the actual words anymore, "did you think I wouldn't notice?"

The next few minutes – maybe five, maybe forty-five – passed as a kind of dynamic montage of sweat, mild pain, intense pleasure, hands, lips, teeth, a litany of anatomy, somewhere between fighting, fucking and even lovemaking.

By the time Jack collapsed into the dishevelled pillows, lying in a small pool of his own come with no thought for the sheets, Johnny sprawled on top of him like a heavy but effective eiderdown, the bite marks on the back of his neck were already beginning to fade.

Johnny slid off him like oil off glass and lay on his back panting a little – Jack took this opportunity to roll onto his back and stretch – and patted Jack in a sort of friendly fashion on the stomach.

"Alright, you won," he said sleepily. Jack smiled at the moulding on the ceiling and shut his eyes but said nothing. Johnny added in an aimless murmur, "Jack Harkness. Were you named for your father?"

"No," said Jack, who had stolen his names from a pilot in 1941, couldn't remember his own and had never met his father anyway.

"Jolly good, that could have been a little delicate," Johnny rambled, rolling over until his arm draped over Jack's diaphragm in exactly the least comfortable spot. "Still, I suppose 'Harkness' is a common enough name."

"What are you babbling about?" Jack asked, feeling his insides flip from warm post-coital soup to frozen suspicion in the blink of an eye.

"My father," Johnny yawned, "the soldier, I mean. The soldier my mother was carrying on with. His name was Jack Harkness too. I thought, when we were introduced, 'that's a funny coincidence and if I play it right that'll be two generations of us carrying on with a Jack Harkness.'"

Three, Jack thought, recalling Lady Diana. Lady Diana was quite hard to forget.

"Not the same one, obviously."

"Er," said Jack. He opened one eye and squinted at the contented face half on and half off his chest, at the red marks on his skin where Jack had occasionally forgotten to be as tender as he'd intended, and thought: oh fuck it. It wasn't like everyone else at the Agency had been so fucking scrupulous in ensuring they didn't strew offspring all over the timeline – one guy even ending up having his granddaughter become his grandmother, which had provided months of locker room humour for the rest of his team. "Actually," he said, toying absently with Johnny's hair, "it was."

"Was what?"

"The same Jack Harkness," Jack said, lacing and unlacing his fingers through Johnny's thick brown locks. "Me."

Johnny snorted. "Don't be absurd. You're not old enough. You can't be a day over thirty-five."

"Hey," Jack protested, a little wounded, then: "I guess I have quite a lot of explaining to do."

1. Research is for people who care.
2. La la la see previous footnote.
3. Yes, Jack, you are still Captain of the Innuendo Squad. Go you.
4. The ancestor, no doubt, of The Unfortunate Welland, in some capacity. If you have no idea who The Unfortunate Welland is, read 2soldiersinlove.

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 18:07:22 GMT

Title: Not Much Like Father, Like Son.
Fandom: Dr Who/Torchwood (tangentally)
Word Count: 13,895
Rating: NC-17
Notes: Thanks to derryderrydown for prompt and close beta and I suspect some research monkeying as well – any mistakes in there were probably ADDED by me in the final edit. Lattiford House is a real place, although details on the layout have been slightly massaged/vagued out – it's the building that I went to school in for five years so I know it and the area quite well. Stourhead is also a real place. Everyone in this apart from Jack and the few dead poets mentioned is my own creation.

Lattiford House was not a particularly imposing pile, as stately homes went. It was neither especially stately not, if one was honest, much of a home. It was low and modern in red brick and squatted rather in the grounds like an angry toad, although the approach was impressive enough a sweep despite this.

The main building had adequately housed the soldiers training there during the conflict, and the building's owner, the Lady Diana Beckett, had been swift, gracious and almost eager in her assistance whenever needed. Jack Harkness (formally without rank until the next big skirmish, but he always thought of himself as Captain Jack, and it showed) suspected from the gleam in the old lady's eye that her motives were as much prurient as they were altruistic, but he could hardly hold that against her.

Indeed, three weeks after Armistice he sent her a letter thanking her once again fro her kind accommodation and assistance in the war effort, and not entirely to his surprise she responded with modesty ("just doing my duty"), fulsome praise for the Army and enquiries after his health (Jack opted not to tell her about being shot, blown up, gassed, hanged when he was mistaken for someone else and burned alive when he was correctly identified). Two more letters were exchanged and she invited him to visit.

It was clear, had been crystal all along, what Lady Diana (a mid-fifties widow with what had once been shockingly black hair, a broad mouth, and the kind of strong chin aristocracies only wished they could breed for) sought from dashing Captain Jack (he declined to give his age, she guessed twenty-seven and he laughed and thanked her, since the truth was he was older than her). Jack did not mind – there was something about women of Diana's age and status, a confidence unfettered by socialised coyness, married to a cynicism that could fell trees. Lady Diana Beckett had been around long enough to know that life was all about death and sex; now that the former was drawing nearer she was determined to get on with as much of the latter as she could, and Jack admired that goal.

What did surprise him was that his role apparently carried the welcome addition of confidant with it too. Lady Diana had been a gossip and a bitch in her heyday and now that she was stranded in Somerset without a soul with her calibre of wit within miles she took to Jack like a duck to water.

By April 1920 Jack and Lady Diana's geriatric butler were on nodding terms, if not exactly very friendly, and he had walked Lady Diana's four lumbering dim-witted wolfhounds (Monty, Algy, Fred and Phoebe, named for her ex-lovers and "a girl I had a pash on a very long time ago. I suppose I should be glad nothing came of it – she married the Earl of Gloucester and became quite unbearable") around every inch of the neighbouring countryside.

"Bad news, I'm afraid," Lady Diana said abruptly as Jack returned from the kennels with dog hair stuck to his coat. She gestured at a telegram on the table, stuck between the toast rack and the coffee pot. "My idiot niece and her dreadful husband are imposing themselves upon us for a month. A whole month. Can you imagine?"

Jack shook his head sympathetically. Lady Diana rarely had anything good to say about any of her few remaining relatives, but she did seem to harbour an especially deep contempt for her niece Angela, who had married "some Colonel or other" and "buggered off to India" only to spend her time "sending me whingy letters about the heat. If you will move to the tropics you must jolly well learn to put up with things like dysentery and tigers and lepers trying to steal your purse."

"The only alleviation to this burden is that after they leave they're going back to Madras and there will be no further threat of them 'popping down' from London. 'Popping down', I ask you. How middle class. That man's been a terrible influence on her."

Lady Diana gestured for him to join her at the breakfast table. Jack hastily removed his coat and passed it to Staveson, who managed to combine a disapproving sniff with a put-upon sigh, all without attracting Lady Diana's attention. Jack sat and helped himself to toast. "When are they coming?"

"In two weeks. But I'm afraid our little tête-à-tête breakfasts –" Lady Diana nodded to the small table with its very restrained and Continental spread, " – will have to cease as of Friday as they're sending Johnny down before them."

"Johnny's their …" Jack wracked his brains. He was sure Lady Diana had mentioned him, but he couldn't recall her precise insult so perhaps not – it was unlikely she'd have held off on bile over a family member. "Their son?" he hazarded.

"Angela's one and only decent contribution to the world is her darling boy," Lady Diana confirmed, glaring at her soft-boiled egg. "He's been in hospital since Armistice, more or less. Neurasthenia. Apparently the doctors think his nerves will benefit from some rest out in the countryside, unspoken implication being 'and away from his parents'. First intelligent thing I've heard from a doctor in years." She turned her attentions to the coffee. "Personally I think he'd get on a lot better if there was someone around who knew what it's like out there in those dreadful fields." She eyeballed Jack steadily from over the top of her glasses – Lady Diana only wore them to read the mail and to admonish people – "You will keep an eye on him while he's here, won't you, Jack?"

"Sure," Jack said easily, spreading about a foot of crab-apple jelly on his toast in the mistaken belief that it was rowanberry. "Johnny, was it?"

"John Clemens Fairford the second," Lady Diana said with more than a hint of sarcasm. "Captain with the ________¹ Regiment, if I remember correctly. The silly bugger arrives in England, promptly enlists and as soon as he's trained ships off to France and nearly gives his poor mother a heart-attack. Of course that man thought it was marvellous – following in his father's footsteps, as though Colonel Sloth has ever done anything more taxing than having a few natives peppered for looking at him sideways."

Jack gave her a tentative smile. "I promise I'll take care of him, Lady Diana."

"You better bloody had, he's all this family has left." Lady Diana sipped her coffee, grimaced, and returned it to the table to tip another three heaped sugars into it. "Neurasthenia," she repeated, giving Jack a shrewd look. "Now how do you do it, Jack? Why aren't you waking the house up with night terrors and hallucinations and all that nonsense?" Her eyes glittered, and Jack realised he was going to have to tread very carefully to avoid insulting her great-nephew's constitution.

"Just lucky, I guess."

"Hmm," Lady Diana said rather suspiciously, stirring her coffee.

Friday morning was cold but, after the dawn fog had cleared, bright and promising. Jack had risen at sunrise to shoot rabbits (Lady Diana's gamekeeper having been claimed by the soil of Ypres), returned in time to acquiesce to Lady Diana's whims regarding uncovering the tennis courts – "maybe I can keep the blighters occupied with sports" – and was taking the dogs for their mid-morning constitutional when the unfamiliar sound of a motor car sent Algy, Fred and Phoebe into a barking, bouncing frenzy (Monty was deaf). Jack leaned over the fence to the drive, a collar in each hand and his thigh inexpertly holding back a third dog, and watched the new-looking car struggle up the drive laden with trunks. Evidently the Fairford family didn't believe in travelling light.

He caught a glimpse of their visitor as the car passed slowly by where he stood and was a little surprised to see the young man looking so healthy; he'd been expecting a thin, pale example of the chinless classes who looked like he might buckle at any minute – the kind of captain Jack had carefully shepherded as first a sergeant and then a lieutenant – but aside from a certain pallor to his cheeks from being too long indoors the only signs of ill-health from John Clemens Fairford the second were the dark circles under his eyes.

Jack started back towards the kennels, dogs lolloping aimlessly around his legs. There had been something awfully familiar about the young man's jaw line, about his thick brown hair – familiar and handsome. Jack dearly hoped this wasn't going to be one of those awkward situations where he'd met the guy before (known him before) and simply forgotten all about him. He opened the gate to the kennel yard and patted the dogs inside; he'd have to have a pretty good excuse for forgetting a face that lovely so quickly. If he'd met him it wouldn't have been long ago, the guy was – what had Diana said? – twenty, twenty-one. Very young.

The dogs safely locked up, Jack washed his hands in the courtyard basin and bounded down toward the house, wiping his palms on his cock. He arrived by the front door just in time to see John Clemens kiss his aunt warmly on the cheek and enquire after her health.

"Oh, moderate," Lady Diana sighed, and caught sight of Jack. "Ah, there you are. Johnny, this is Jack Harkness, formerly Captain of _________². J – Mr. Harkness, this is my great-nephew Johnny, John Clemens Fairford. Mr. Harkness is currently very kindly filling in for about five of my household staff for me and providing protection, Johnny."

"Protection?" the young man asked incredulously. He had fine, strong bone structure, Jack noticed, a slightly cleft chin and very blue eyes. He still looked achingly familiar but Jack couldn't place him and he was beginning to suspect it was merely wishful thinking.

"I'm a weak old woman and easily frightened," Lady Diana snapped, not sounding perhaps her most convincing. She smiled at her nephew and took his hand. "Do you still play tennis, my dear? I had the courts opened up especially after your mother's telegram." Jack noticed she didn't say who by.

"Did you?" Johnny looked momentarily embarrassed, his cheeks flushing. Jack bit his lip and forced himself not to stare. "In that case I certainly still play."

"I suppose you must have trained her?" Johnny asked, radiating a polite lack of curiosity as he handed Jack a racket. Jack began unscrewing the frame as the thought how to correct this assumption without resorting to mentioning Lahore or the dreaded 'I'm older than I look'.

"I was training new recruits," he said eventually, removing the frame and giving the racket a couple of experimental swings. "I wrote to your aunt after the war to thank her."

"That was uncommonly polite."

"Your aunt was uncommonly kind." Jack flexed the muscles in his back. It had been a long time since his last game, and there was something about the tennis clothing of the time that made him feel in equal parts ridiculous and sexy, when what he was hoping for was ridiculously sexy. He swung the racket again and caught Johnny giving him an amused smile out of the corner of his eye.

"You don't play much."

"Not for a while," Jack admitted, "I'm more of a pugilist myself."

"Really? I'd have taken you for rugger myself." Johnny gave his racket a few strings, testing the weight, and Jack felt a small bubble of envy – Johnny was leaner, lither, and much more at ease on his feet. "Do they have rugger in America?"

"Not exactly, no," Jack smiled.

The game was over more quickly than he'd have liked – Jack won by an unexpected hair's breadth, giving him the opportunity to offer a rematch, and what with one thing and another and the odd conversational titbit they forgot lunch and played right through 'til five.

"I'm afraid," Johnny panted, scooping up the balls between his foot and the racket and tossing them into his hand, "I really can't go on. Would you mind if we postponed until tomorrow? I don't have your stamina."

"My stamina for losing," Jack said cheerfully, fitting the frame back over his racket, "which I'd happily trade for some of your skill. Did I win any of those games, barring that fluke of a first?"

"No," Johnny smiled, tightening the screws, and as he walked past Jack he added, "Because you were letting me win. Don't think I didn't notice."

Jack threw his hands up in mock despair. "I thought it would be the decent thing to do with a new guest! I can promise to give you a sound thrashing tomorrow, if that's what you want³ ?"

"I don't want to be coddled," Johnny said warningly as they started up towards the house. "Mother and Father have been tearing themselves this way and that – well, mostly Mother, Father has been busy trying to pat my shoulder into some manly oblivion or other – trying to keep tiptoeing around me as though I'm made of china. And all over a few bad dreams." He laughed somewhat bitterly.

Jack suppressed the urge to give him a fierce hug and tell him not to be so fucking brave about it.

Dinner was a quiet, restrained affair – Johnny had evidently inherited the same appetite as Lady Diana, bird-like and picky, leaving him and the woman in question to carry the weight of the conversation while Jack made heavy work of the lamb chops and ate twice as many potatoes as the two of them put together.

"My dear Mr. Harkness, you shall be quite the rotund gentleman in your old age if you continue like this," Lady Diana said with considerable, if shielded, amusement. Her mouth tended to purse when she was having fun at someone else's expense.

"I look forwards to it," said Jack, who rather doubted it, "as we can't all age as gracefully as you, m'lady."

"Your lady?" Lady Diana said with raised eyebrows and a decidedly vinegar-laden tone. "Your nationality is showing, Mister Harkness."

"I beg your pardon," Jack said gravely, as much for Johnny's benefit as Lady Diana's. "However can I make it up to you?"

Lady Diana raised her eyebrows a second time and gave a quick, pointed look at her nephew. "Perhaps when we have finished you would be so good as to employ your talents on the piano in the drawing room? I hear music aids the digestion."

"As good as done, Mrs. Beckett," Jack said cheerfully, ignoring her frown as he bisected another potato. He was showing off badly, he knew he was showing off, but it was one of those habits he couldn't seem to knock on the head.

Sat behind the little upright half an hour later he regretted somewhat his blithe offer. All the songs he could remember how to play were deeply anachronistic – he was almost certain that Jerry Lee Lewis had not been a household name in Somerset in 1920 – and of them all The Green Fields of France was not only out of its time but also grossly inappropriate too, but it still stuck in his head like gum to a shoe sole and he found himself humming it as he tried to think of something else.

"It appears you're not quite the virtuoso you've been leading me to believe, Mr. Harkness," Lady Diana said rather cattily. "If you're stuck for inspiration there's a stack of primers in the piano seat. I'm sure Johnny and I can suffer through Three Blind Mice played with one finger, although goodness only knows what effect it will have on our digestion."

Jack made a face and played the opening bars to The Dance of the Cygnets. "I trust Tchaikovsky is acceptable after-dinner face?"

"He will serve, although I rather wish you'd pick a different ballet. As long as you don't descend to the level of Brahms at any point I'm sure we will be adequately entertained." She settled back on the high-backed chair and steepled her fingers, looking for all the world like some gender-bending Bond villain.

Just to be spiteful, Jack played The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and Lady Diana threatened to throw a slipper at him if he 'indulged in any further twee caterwauling'. Johnny rose abruptly and joined him at the piano seat, scuppering Jack's intention to switch to Holst by derailing his mind entirely, the warmth of Johnny's thigh pressed inadvertently against Jack's causing him considerably more respiratory distress than it really ought.

"Something a little less intellectual?" Johnny suggested, and he offered the name of a music hall song that had been popular about thirty-five years ago, one about a fish-monger's daughter and her ghost, which Jack had only ever heard sung since by soldiers with most of the already worrying lyrics substituted for even more lewd ones.

He played, Johnny assisted with the occasional note further up the scale, and they sang a little out of time and a little out of tune, both with the melody and with each other; all along Jack felt the steady warmth and weight of Johnny's leg against his own and found it almost impossible to concentrate on the keys.

"Well," Lady Diana said when Molly Malone had wheeled her wheelbarrow off to heaven at last, "I don't know if I shall be able to sleep after that atrocity, but I intend to try an early night for the novelty value." She rose and gave Jack the smallest of nods.

"I'm afraid my sporting exertions and long losing streak today have worn me out rather," Jack said, addressing Johnny, "so if you'll excuse me?"

"Help yourself to the library," Lady Diana told her nephew as she left. "I seem to recall your mother lamenting your bookishness."

The pathetic fragments of moonlight from an underfed moon glittered across the landing as Jack made his way stealthily back from Lady Diana's rumpled bed to the hard single one in which he habitually slept; he was only a foot from his bedroom door when he heard the screaming. Frantic and hoarse and desperate, like a siren, but senseless.

For a moment he was back in the trenches, crouching despite himself, Private Welland's⁴ arm twitching feebly by his face. The rest of the Herefordshire lad was nowhere to be seen, the deafening blasts of shell after shell rocking the earth like a giant's hand had seized the foundations of the world and was giving them a good rattle. The scream had the same feverish pitch and inhuman cadence as his Lieutenant's when the poor boy (because if he was nineteen then Jack was a Judoon) lost his head and had to be pried out of a latrine and packed off to Craiglockhart; Jack knew where to look for the source of the sound.

He ran into Staveson on his way to the guest bedroom. "This way?"

"It would be preferable if you returned to bed, sir," Staveson said through his teeth. Jack had never met a man who could make "sir" sound so much like "scum".

"Leave this to me, please," Jack growled back. "He's suffering from War Neurosis, okay? I know what to do about that, I know – "

"I have been in service for forty years," Staveson said sharply, "I think I know how to console a distressed guest."

Jack glanced at the vial in Staveson's hand. "Is that laudanum?"

"Yes." Staveson sounded like he'd have happily punched Jack's lights out had he been a younger man. How anyone made one syllable sound so venomous was quite a mystery.

"Won't work," Jack said shortly. It might work, sure, but it was never a good idea. Drugging yourself out of the way of bad dreams was the kind of thing he did. "Will just make it worse." He pushed the door open and, taking the candle from Staveson without receiving a protest, threw light on the night-shirted figure huddled by the wardrobe with his arms over his head.

For a moment now the memory was so complete that Jack could smell gunpowder in the air. He passed the candle back to a perplexed Staveson and reached into his jacket pocket for the small metal whistle he still carried there.

The shrill peep had precisely the desired effect: Johnny stopped trembling like a blancmange and went rigid instead, squatting to attention. "You did fine," Jack said, crouching beside him and putting his hand firmly on Johnny's hunched shoulder. "Drill's over. I need you to get back to barracks now."

Johnny nodded dumbly but otherwise gave no indication that he had any idea where he was or what was going on.

"C'mon," Jack patted Johnny on the back as jovially as he could. "You did well – " shit. The lad's surname had completely slipped his mind. " – son," Jack substituted, not missing a beat. "You did well."

"Thank you, sir," Johnny muttered, and went limp. Jack nearly panicked, but it appeared that he had just lost consciousness, passed into a deeper sleep that didn't allow for dreaming.

"Give me a hand here, Staveson," Jack murmured, hefting Johnny back into the bed with some difficulty (he was a lot heavier than he looked) and with very little assistance from the aged butler.

"Very impressive, sir," Staveson said dryly once the door had closed behind them.

"I hope all that yelling didn't wake Lady Diana." Jack smoothed his jacket down. It smelt faintly of someone not him, and the unfamiliarity of it was unsettling.

"I believe, sir, that Mr. Fairford's nightmare has probably awoken most of Somerset. Biers will doubtless be tending to her ladyship," he added, giving Jack an ugly look with his jaundiced eye. "So you might wish to return to bed."

Jack rolled his eyes and saluted. "Yes, sir."

"Don't make fun of me, sir," Staveson said coldly. "Her Ladyship considers me indispensable. Can the same truly be said of you?"

"Don't threaten me, Staveson," Jack said with a dazzling and icy grin, "I am mighty hard to dispense with."

No one said a word about the incident the next morning, though everyone looked preternaturally tired and Lady Diana kept shooting worried glances at Johnny as though he might explode or start screaming again. Johnny, for his part, seemed to remember none of it, which fitted with what little Jack could remember of War Neurosis and night terrors from his long-ago reading. The three of them sat in silence, chewing gamely on slightly raw toast.

"I had considered," Lady Diana said suddenly, making Jack nearly drop his coffee, "inviting a few of the more bearable people from Yeovil around for dinner on Monday." She gave the air in front of her a speculative look. "What do you think?"

Jack did not say, "I thought you said the only bearable being in all Somerset was a pony," just looked to his left and pretended to think she was talking to Johnny.

Johnny swallowed his toast and gave his great-aunt a slightly aghast look. Evidently he was far from thrilled by the notion, but he merely lifted his coffee to his lips and said, "I'm sure it will be delightful."

"Excellent," Lady Diana said grimly. "I shall tell the Cunninghams that Elizabeth is especially welcome." She narrowed her eyes across the table at Johnny.

Jack winced at his expression, the realisation dawning swiftly across the young man's face like a weather front that he had only two days of relative freedom and one of church before painful match-making started in earnest.

You didn't think you could escape it forever, did you? Jack thought with a little twinge of sympathy as Johnny excused himself. Of course Johnny must have thought that – young men rarely gave a nod to the idea of the future until it was upon them.

The day's tennis passed quickly and, for the most part, without conversation. Johnny did not appear to be in a chatty mood, and Jack was having difficulty dragging his gaze from the young man's pale legs as he ran for shots, enough trouble that talking would have been beyond him anyway.

Over dinner Johnny asked if they'd either of them – Lady Diana or Jack – had the chance to read much of Sassoon's poetry, and Lady Diana said, "Wasn't Sassoon that little egomaniac who sent that awful declaration?" and announced that poetry began and ended with Pope and Dryden.

Jack, who had snatched a few strangely beautiful moments in a barn with the dark-haired author of Anthem for Doomed Youth only to have himself addressed as "Siegfried" at a crucial moment, tried not to pull a face. "I always found it a little flippant," he said eventually. "Much preferred poor Owen."

Poor Owen and poor Owen's stutter and poor Owen's small, steady hands on Jack's naked back, that he certainly took in preference over continual tales of What A Great Captain Sassoon Is.

"I was thinking of one piece in particular," Johnny said rather stiffly, "which I do not believe is at all flip. Have you ever read The Dugout?" Johnny toyed aimlessly with his largely unfinished meal, "Jack?"

Lady Diana's eyebrows more or less shot up into her hairline at this and had Johnny not been regarding him keenly Jack would have shrugged at her. First name terms, out of nowhere. Well, well. Evidently Captain Sassoon had his uses.

"I'm not familiar," Jack admitted. He sensed Johnny was gearing up to a recitation, and with a pang of regret pushed the remains of his rabbit pie away to indicate he was listening. Lady Diana frowned.

"Would you object terribly to being introduced?"

"Perhaps after dinner," Lady Diana interjected, much to Jack's relief, "I can't imagine that Captain Sassoon's finest is likely to settle the stomach or increase the appetite."

In the sitting room, a small fire spluttering and popping a little indignantly in the grate, Jack tried to keep his eyes open despite the stupefying influence of apple crumble and a thick custard; truth be told he didn't care one way or the other for poetry – the only words Jack traditionally had any interest in were "yes", "more", "all of it" and "I'm arresting you on suspicion of –" – but he felt he should make the effort, especially as Johnny looked uncommonly like a Renaissance saint, stood there in painful earnestness with his top shirt button inadvertently come undone.

The mere fact of this accidental indecency was in danger of making Jack light-headed. That was the thing about this era of straitened morals, Jack mused as Johnny spoke very seriously of Sassoon's incredible wit and talent, because everyone was so trussed up all the time even the tiniest exposure took on an erotic charge. If they'd all just walked around naked …

" – begin. Is that all right?"

"Oh do get on with it," Lady Diana said in a bored voice. "My foot has gone to sleep and I think my head's about to join it." Jack stifled a snort of laughter and Johnny flushed.

He cleared his throat. "Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled – "

A fierce look stole over Johnny's face as he resisted like flame licking at a piece of newspaper, and Jack listened with rapt attention as Johnny stopped stumbling over the words and finished with his, "and when you sleep you remind me of the dead," ringing like a cathedral bell. Jack had half a mind to applaud, but Lady Diana seemed less impressed.

"That cheerful fare is hardly going to take your mind off things, is it?" she grumbled, lightning a cigarette. "Hie thee to the piano, the pair of you, and play something upbeat." She pointed the spent match threateningly at Jack. "Any more Tchaikovsky and I'll knock your block off, too."

Sunday dawned bright, clear and cold after a night free of terrible yells; Jack did however encounter a harassed-looking Biers hustling along with ammonia-scented sheets in her arms, and a few seconds of Harkness Charm soon confirmed his suspicions. Johnny still looked guilty after breakfast, when they set out for the two-mile walk to the nearest church, a tiny little thing squirreled away in a village whose name Jack had forgotten the moment it was told him.

Jack hadn’t actually been to the little church before – "Tongues will wag," Lady Diana had said sourly, "if I show up accompanied by some American serviceman," – and had been instructed to tell curious parties that he was a pal of Johnny's, visiting with him. That apparently wouldn't induce tongue-wagging; an indication to Jack's mind, that the country still lived in more sheltered times. Whether that was good or bad was hard to say, although it did make buying linseed oil a less fraught experience.

They were half-way to the village, Lady Diana walking on ahead with Staveson in tow for moral if not physical support (and her cane held discretely in his hand), when Johnny leaned closer to Jack and whispered, "Are you sleeping with my aunt?"

Jack thought about this for a while; trying for the most part to ignore the smell of talcum powder on Johnny's skin and the way his eyelashes got lighter towards their tips. He said in a low voice, "would you be very perturbed if I said yes?"

Johnny made a face, looking uncommonly like an overgrown schoolboy in his Sunday best – very overgrown, for he stood an inch taller than Jack, making him nearly six foot tall – and said very, very quietly, "she is rather old."

"Age is merely a matter of perspective," said Jack, who had been thirty for forty-eight years now.

"Are you sleeping with my aunt?" Johnny persisted, digging his hands into his coat pockets and utterly ruining the line of his rather nicely-tailored (if for someone with a little more weight on him) suit.

"No, Mr. Fairford, I am not sleeping with your aunt," Jack said with a thin smile. It was not exactly a lie – Lady Diana had been firm from the start of their adventures on the subject of who slept where, and Jack was more than happy to comply. For one, the old lady snored like a warthog and for another he knew himself to be a very fidgety sleeper. His male lovers may have just about put up with an occasional elbow in the stomach or knee in the groin but usually girlfriends tired of such things quickly and made him sleep on the floor.

"Will you two get a move on?" Lady Diana snapped from ahead. "I'm a cripple and I'm still outpacing you. Anyone would thing you'd lost your ruddy legs. Quick march!" She led them at a near-canter down to the little church, getting there just in time to get to their seats in the front pew and not look too obviously rushed about it.

Jack fell easily into his Church Survival Routine (part of the appeal of Christianity, Jack had often thought, was that you didn't really have to pay attention or even stay awake but you still got to feel pious about it): stand when everyone else does, sit when everyone else does, amen whenever the vicar does, try not to concentrate too hard on the actual words in case you feel the overwhelming urge to laugh about their talk of everlasting peace and heaven.

Beside him, to his left, Lady Diana droned quietly along to the hymns – her singing voice was not exactly dulcet – and to his right Johnny's Sunday suit brushed occasionally on Jack's, the friction of wool on wool sending parks through spots of Jack's brain that unfortunately were all too active even in a place of worship.

By the time they had stuttered through to the final amen Jack's stomach was growling again and Lady Diana looked dangerously bored; Johnny had surreptitiously dozed off, Jack noted with some satisfaction. All in all their row was far from the most devout, but to hear the vicar greet them one might have been excused for thinking them the family of some archbishop.

Jack watched with a faint smile as Lady Diana skilfully navigated difficult social waters and invited the vicar and his wife to what was rapidly becoming a dinner party; luckily they declined. For his part he answered the questions put to him – "Paschendale, Ypres, the Somme, Anvers, Arras … yes, I think I did just about," and "no, Canada originally," and "I'm afraid they're no longer with us," – and only lied a little; Johnny answered in more subdued tones, "not yet," and "foot soldiers," until the reverend finally left them to trek back to the house.

Half-way through the journey rain set in, and they arrived on the steps of Lattiford House soaked and cold. As Johnny set off for his room for a change of clothes, Lady Diana remarked apparently without guile – although it would have been the first time for it – "You know, he puts me a great deal in mind of you, Jack."

Jack watched Johnny's retreating form meditatively, realised that he was simply ogling and not observing, and pulled himself up short. He forced a smile. "You think so? I was hoping I had a little more meat on my bones than that."

"Give him time," Lady Diana said cheerfully as Biers appeared with a blanket and a worried expression, "I'm sure by the time he's your age he'll be the spit of you."

"Poor chap," Jack smirked. "Still, I suppose the exercise will do him good."

"Exercise?" Lady Diana grasped the balustrade carefully. "What exercise?"

"The beating women away with a stick, or fleeing their amorous advances," Jack grinned.

"You are entirely too full of yourself, Mr. Harkness," Lady Diana said, her smile so ghostly as to be almost invisible.

"If I was full of anyone else you'd complain," Jack retorted without thinking.

"If you were full of someone else I should call the police," Lady Diana said sharply from a little way up the stairs.

Stupid backwards decade, Jack thought peevishly, dripping wool-filtered rainwater onto the polished wooden floor.

The day grew steadily wetter after lunch, until all the windows were streaming and Lady Diana and her guests were forced to mill about inside without aim or thought until the hostess was moved to snap, "oh for goodness sake, go and play billiards or something."

"I didn't know you had a billiards table, Aunty," Johnny said with some surprise and, Jack thought, perhaps a little sarcasm.

"I don't. Just …oh, go and do something elsewhere. You're beginning to grate on my nerves, the both of you." Lady Diana pinched the bridge of her nose. "Ja – Mr. Harkness, there are some badminton rackets in the attic, if you would be so good? Else find something to entertain you that isn't too noisy. I feel a headache coming on. Probably this bloody weather."

Jack made a mental list of the things he could do to entertain himself with Johnny, crossed off the ones that hadn't been invented yet, and with some regret crossed off the ones that would land him in prison too. The remainder were not exactly enthralling.

"Would that preclude tinkering with the piano?"

"I don't know, I don't care, go away," Lady Diana said shortly, "And if you run into Staveson tell him I want two aspirin and a large scotch."

The piano was currently set up in the sitting room, which seemed a little too close to where Lady Diana was currently sulking her way through an afternoon headache, so Jack very awkwardly collected up the "portable" gramophone in his arms and gave Johnny a nod, "my piano repertoire is running low," he said, "I figured – thought – this might be better. Maybe in the ballroom."

"I only have Musetta's Waltz and the Blue Danube," Lady Diana said in a low voice, "if you play them more than once within my earshot I will set the dogs on you and you will be duly licked to death."

"You shan't hear a thing," Jack assured her as they left.

The meagre ballroom (barely large enough for four couples, or five if they were feeling intimate) was darkened by rain and smelt faintly of mushrooms and soldierly flatulence; Jack surmised that it hadn't been aired out since it was used for training. The room looked very different without the maps and lists tacked to the wall – all that remained of the three year occupation were scuff marks on the floorboards. He settled the gramophone clumsily on the edge of the stage (and the echo brought back memories of long-winded speeches, of boot polish and stiff backs) and smiled awkwardly at Johnny.

It ought to be easy. He ought to just ask him to dance; there was however something missing, something which he usually regarded as cheating but which would make the whole process a lot easier and give the lad a healthy case for plausible deniability should the whole situation come to light later: alcohol. Jack held up his index finger. "Won't be a minute – " and bolted out of the room.

He skidded out of the side-door in the vestibule by the sitting room, took the short-cut to the kitchens through the stinging nettles and brambles he had not yet cleared (not to mention the aggressive rain), dived into the pantry and picked up the nearest bottle he could find, which on inspection turned out to be apple cordial. Jack swore, grabbed a bottle of gin, and bounded back through the weeds like a steeplechase champion. Almost at the door he realised he hadn't any glasses and had to dash back for them.

When he returned to the ballroom Johnny was fiddling with the gramophone but not actually playing anything. Jack pointed the bottle at him in silent inquiry.

"I'm afraid I take after my mother," Johnny said abruptly, and this non-sequitur left Jack floundering somewhat until Johnny helpfully added, "She can't take her drink very well. It loosens her tongue, then she flops all over the place like a landed carp." He grimaced "I probably shouldn't have told you that. However, I'm much the same –" Jack began pouring him a small-by-Jack-standards measure regardless, "- used to be something of a figure of fun for it in the mess. Out By Eleven, they called me," Johnny said ruefully. "Of course, one doesn't pay much attention to these things," he continued, although it was very clear that he did. Jack handed him the gin and Johnny clasped the glass between his hands without taking a sip. "I mean," he went on; "while I was training they all called me 'Sussex'."

Jack nearly choked on his drink. "Is there a story behind that name?"

"Not a particularly edifying one," Johnny said a little sourly, swirling his glass as though he were drinking (or rather failing to drink) scotch instead of gin. "When I arrived I couldn't correctly identify Sussex on a map of England. They took it as an indication that my intelligence was below par."

"It's not," Jack was very careful not to phrase it as a question, but Johnny answered it as one just the same.

"No, it's bloody not. I was born in Lahore, I grew up in Kerala – the first time I'd ever set foot in England was when I started training, more or less. I'm sure they couldn't have found Bangalore on globe, but you know how people are." He smiled suddenly into his drink, which was (to Jack's irritation) still untouched. "Sorry. Silly thing to be annoyed by, isn't it?" His expression grew grave. "Most of them, most of the chaps who called me 'Sussex' and 'Out by Eleven', they're dead now."

"You're not," was the best comfort Jack could think of.

"And neither are you," Johnny said, looking up with a very Diana-like expression. "I heard that list you gave the vicar. You seem to have been everywhere without once getting shot. Do you have 'Death's Appointment Book' too?"

"Huh?" The phrase sounded familiar but Jack couldn't pinpoint its origin.

"Ambulance-driver I met used to claim he had Death's appointment book, and that was why he stayed out of trouble and out of the way of bombs and bullets," Johnny elaborated, sniffing at the gin but not drinking it. "He was a queer one. Very fair hair, but dark eyes. Called – "

"Latimer," Jack blurted as the name came back to him. "Timothy Latimer."

Johnny started. "You knew him?"

Biblically, Jack thought, but all he said was, "Arras."

Johnny nodded. "Strange. Perhaps you stole the appointment book from him," he added rather flippantly.

An early bluebottle buzzed and skated around the room, echoing against the rain-glossed windowpanes, as Jack recalled crawling on his belly through mud and corpses, his left leg attached only by skin, the world exploding around him again and again, and still thinking it easier than that first war he'd been in, far away in time and space. "Just lucky, I guess," he said without conviction. He'd woken up half-slumped over the lip of a dugout that time, being used as a makeshift sandbag – scared the piss out of the poor lad who'd been using him as cover.

"Lucky," Johnny echoed, finally taking a sip of his gin and pulling face. "Funny how one's view on luck change."

"We're alive and in one piece and there's even music," Jack said philosophically, risking a nudge to Johnny's ribs. "For some people that's luck."

"That's a very pragmatic attitude, Mr. Harkness."

"Anything else would make it impossible to live. And please, I thought you were calling me Jack now?"

"I don't think I should," Johnny put his glass down on the stage with a dull click. "Much like the gin, it's a tempting but risky proposition." He got to his feet without grace. "You're a charming and interesting man, Mr. Harkness. Jack." He offered his hand for Jack to shake, which Jack did with a sinking feeling. This was not going the way he'd intended, not in the least bit. "And I suspect a very dangerous one to know."

"Not in small doses," Jack said with his most devilishly suggestive grin.

Johnny sighed. "Which is why." He put his hands in his pockets. "I should like to be your friend, Jack, but I don't think that's possible. I don't think I make it possible." He rocked on his heels and said in a low, shamed and hollow voice, "Neurasthenia is not the only reason I have been enjoying the attentions of a psychiatric doctor, Jack. Mr. Harkness. Think about that before you accept any overtures of companionship from me."

With that, he was gone, leaving Jack alone with a gramophone, two glasses of gin and the sense that he'd missed something vitally important and fucked up rather badly.

Under the circumstances he might as well get drunk.

Jack passed out on his bed an hour later, having consumed the remainder of the bottle, thinking vague thoughts of Siegfried fucking Sassoon and, for some reason, boeuf bourguignon. He woke sometime after dinner with a headache and had Biers raid the pantry for him.

Because he had a blinding hangover and his thoughts were now doggedly pursuing Havelock Ellis around some internal bookshelf to no real end, Jack spent an hour cajoling the maid into sucking him off and once he'd finished the remains of the shepherd's pie from the pantry he was still no closer to knowing quite what it was he'd done, but he felt a little less like he'd been mown down by the twentieth century all at once.

Lahore, his brain said urgently, and something quite horrible occurred in the back of his mind. Was Johnny twenty or twenty-one? It was suddenly a very important distinction.

Lady Diana hit him impatiently in the shoulder at least three times during that evening's love-making and accused him of being distracted; Jack charmed her off the subject but, as he was pulling his trousers back on, was struck with another unwelcome thought.

"What was your name before you were married?"

"What kind of question is that?" Lady Diana asked, rather surprised. She groped for something to throw at him, and he ducked automatically.

"Just curious," Jack hedged. Angela Fairford was, if he remembered the interminable conversation correctly, Diana's brother's daughter, and for some reason the woman he'd known back in India had insisted on going by her maiden name when she was with him – to minimise the chance for him to cause a scandal, he supposed – though he did recall her being called Anne or Annabelle but probably not Angela.

A strangled, sobbing scream split the night in two and Lady Diana sighed expansively. "Go and do your thing, your trick with the whistle," she said crossly, "I want some sleep tonight."

"Your wish is my command," Jack said, giving her a mock salute from the doorway.

"Oh and Jack," Lady Diana called after him as he left.

"Yes?"

"It was Parker."

"Parker?"

"Parker."

Parker, Jack thought guiltily. Still, it didn't prove anything, necessarily. She might have been an entirely different Miss A. Parker. It was a common enough name.

All the same, when he came to manoeuvre the comatose former young captain back into his bed with Staveson's minor assistance, he was certain – scrupulously so – to refer to him as "Fairford".

PART TWO!

Petrellicest.

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 21:08:38 GMT

"Think of it as a gift," he said, touching the little boy on the forehead with his thumb. "So you can do a little good in the world before your time comes."

"A little morbid, don't you think?" Mr. Petrelli said, as his wife watched the exchange with an unreadable expression.

"He's destined for great things, Mr. Petrelli," Linderman said, ruffling the child's hair as he straightened up. "Briefly."

Nathan didn't think of it so much as saving the world as not losing Peter's respect. As doing something to actually make him worthy of it.

When he'd thought about dying in a nuclear explosion – and he had, as Clare's words ("your own brother") and his mother's certainty and Hiro's whisper ("in the future, you hated each other") ran into each other in his mind – he'd thought it would be agonising, but only for a second before his consciousness was stripped from him and oblivion came.

He awoke in a field of wildflowers, a cold breeze blowing over his naked body as the stems rubbed against each other with a rushing sound like the sea over loose shingles. Nathan opened his eyes to an unblemished blue sky, framed with nodding flower heads, that seemed to stretch on to the ends of the earth.

"I don't believe in an afterlife," he said, his voice clear in his ears. The ground soil was making his back itch and he could feel some sort of insect walking over his left forearm in an exploratory manner, possibly thinking about where to lay some eggs. It didn't seem exactly heavenly.

"It's not heaven, it's Montana," Peter said from beside him. Nathan tried to sit up, but his body protested hard and kept him pinned to the floor. He settled for straining his eyes – Peter sat cross-legged in the grass, wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and a beatific expression as he tapped a rye-head against his mouth and his hair raked this way and that over his face in the light wind. "Stay still," Peter added, watching him with familiar concern. "You need to rest."

"I'm supposed to be dead," Nathan pointed out. He felt right through every cell the burst of white-hot light that tore him from himself and scattered him through the atmosphere like atomic rain.

"You were," Peter said calmly, brushing his hair out of his eyes to no great effect, the rye head abandoned and forgotten. "I brought you back."

"What? How – " Nathan tried to struggle up again, but it was like a thousand cold heavy hands held him down against the ground, and fighting them made him dizzy. "How did you do that? Peter, you exploded. We should both be dead."

Peter shrugged and said, "I'm indestructible," as though he was saying, "I'm Italian."

"But I'm not – " Nathan's lungs backed him up by setting him off on a coughing fit that made his eyes water. He felt woozily better when it was over, although his throat ached. The thought came to him as suddenly as the coughing had: "Linderman."

"He visited us when I was four, you remember? He came to talk to Dad about something and you were just about to go out to softball practice."

"And you absorbed …" Nathan inhaled and tasted a multitude of pollen species on his tongue like flavoured sugar. He felt if he thought hard enough he could probably identify all of them just by guessing, which … Nathan frowned. It wasn't as though botany had ever been an interest of his, never mind a strong point. "You've made changes."

"Only small ones," Peter toyed with a daisy head. "I put you back together. It took a long time. I thought maybe I should give you something to convince you didn't dream the whole thing."

"How long?"

"I didn't mind, Nathan."

"How long?"

"About ten years," Peter said easily. He might have been saying "ten minutes" for the inflection he gave it. Like he was talking about waiting for the subway, or steak to cook.

"Ten years," Nathan choked, in case he'd misheard him. He scanned as much of Peter as his prone position would allow. As far as he could see Peter looked as absurdly young as he had when he expl – when the incident occurred – and a little less tired. Certainly not he face and hair of a man who'd spent a decade rebuilding his brother from the atoms up.

"I met a lot of people with a lot of different powers while I was … finding you," Peter explained, batting a fly away from his face, "and one of the first was a hundred and fifty year old boy. He hadn't aged since he was twelve."

"It must have been hell for him buying liquor," Nathan frowned. "Did you just read my mind?"

"Sorry. Habit."

"Ten years," Nathan stared up at the unblemished expanse of blue - he still couldn't move, and straining his eyes to look at Peter was beginning to hurt them – and felt the tide of his blood moving steadily through his veins. Every bit of him felt very distinct and very new, like a shirt just put on for the first time or perhaps more appropriately the skin beneath a scab when the scab is knocked away, all pink and fresh. "Why didn't you just forget about me and move on with your life?"

"You're my brother," Peter said, the same way he'd always said it – that ringing finality, the conviction that the bonds of siblinghood overcame and explained everything. "You are my life." Nathan had always thought Peter put far too much stock in family and their Mom had partially proved it, but here he was, not dead, because Peter believed in him still. "Also," Peter said in a much less intense voice, "You did kind of save the world. Maybe I thought I owed you the rest of your life back."

"I saved the world?" Nathan muttered, a little surprised. Ever since Mom had strong-armed him he'd been thinking of himself as the one who nearly destroyed it, and what Hiro said hadn't helped at all.

"Sure it was you. Nathan, you flew into space with a human bomb in your arms and let it blow you to bits, that's kind of the definition of saving the world."

Nathan tried to sit up again and this time the pressure on his body receded enough to let him prop up on his elbows and turn his head. "Does saving the world entitle me to some clothes, too?" He gestured down at his body – his appendectomy scar was missing, he noticed, and the absence of it made him feel oddly unbalanced – and half-smiled at Peter to show he wasn't mad about being naked in a field in Montana.

"There's some back at Gert's hut. She said we can borrow the place while she's away but she wants us out before we get back.

"Who's Gert?"

"A friend," Peter said shortly, getting to his feet. They were bare, streaked with mud, and he was wearing what looked like Bermuda shorts. Hardly appropriate attire for Montana. "If Gert's still there when we get to her place you mustn't stare at her, Nathan. It upsets her." He half-crouched and offered Nathan a hand up. "I mean it. It's hard not to at first but you have to try. She's been very kind."

Nathan used his brother's hand as a fulcrum to lever himself to his feet, acutely aware of his nudity and the soil clinging to his buttocks. He brushed some of it off and tried to figure out if cupping his genital while he walked was more or less dignified than just pretending he didn't mind being so exposed. "Is … Gert's … hut far?"

Peter pointed down the hill into a shallow river valley. Just before the land got flat and level with the river sat a wooden structure the colour of molasses with a washing line just visible at the back and a tin chimney poking out of the roof. There was no road leading up to it, no road anywhere in sight.

"Good," Nathan massaged his throat, which left like someone had jammed sandpaper down it. "I'm kind of thirsty," he said, meaning to explain his impatience away.

Peter held up his hands cupped in a bowl shape, and in the flesh vessel Nathan saw water shining.

"How did you – "

"Just change the structure of the air – make water molecules out of the oxygen and hydrogen that's already there," Peter proffered the water to him and Nathan bent awkwardly, slurping cold, thin-tasting water down with haste from his little brother's hands. " – It's so simple when you realise how. It can make it rain, too."

"Simple for you," Nathan followed him down the hill, trying to keep an eye on where his bare feet fell and not catch the new soft skin of his soles on any hidden rocks or worse. Peter didn't seem to care where his feet landed, and Nathan got the obscure sense that things were moving out of his way so as not to be under them when they fell.

The hut was further than it looked, and Nathan's body was new and stiff; by the time they started up to the single door in the four walls (concrete, Peter said, clad with wood inside and out, originally belonging to some eccentric 1960s survivalist millionaire who'd drunk himself to death long before ever seeing anything like the nuclear holocaust he was so afraid of) Nathan's thighs ached and his feet were very tender indeed, and his legs were pink-marked and stinging from the slaps of the long grass and wildflowers against them.

Peter pulled the door open without touching it and Nathan hastily tried to preserve what was left of his modesty as the owner of the hut blinked at them from the doorway.

"Peter," she said, staring at Nathan. "I was just leaving."

Gert – Nathan assumed this was her – looked like a dung heap that had been allowed to fester until it developed sentience; every inch of her skin (and all of was exposed) was covered in mouldy-looking blue-grey protuberances that looked like plague buboes. Her eyes were less bloodshot and more bloodwashed, as though the vessels had all broken at once, and she stood as though she had been kicked simultaneously in the back of the knees and the neck. Gert stared at Nathan as though he was an exhibit at a very strange museum and Nathan averted his gaze quickly. "This is your brother?" Gert asked eventually.

"This is him," Peter agreed, employing an apparently irresistible combination of Petrelli charm and bad grammar. It seemed that a lot went unspoken in that sentence, and Nathan wondered just how long Peter had known Gert, what secrets had passed between them.

Gert sniffed.

"Don't break anything important," she said, slipping past them both and – Nathan started, and then felt stupid for doing so – sank into the earth like a rock into a pond. He watched the ground for a long moment, but Gert did not reappear. He realised that he was watching for bubbles, like he used to when Peter dived into a pool, and felt even more stupid.

"She's off to Colorado for a week," Peter explained, gesturing inside the hut, "visiting her boyfriend. He's in hospital. He has emphysema – I offered to help them but she won't let me near him." He pulled a strand of hair out of his eye as he led Nathan inside. "Gert's very superstitious. She thinks I'm marked with death now, and all the time I spent working on you means that anyone else I touch will – " he shrugged.

"That's insane," Nathan said, looking around the distinctly homely two-room building for some sign of clothes.

"Gert talks to earthworms. When I'm not here they're the only company she's got," Peter said. "Insane isn't even a start." He put his hand on Nathan's shoulder. "Lie down. You're still weak."

"How do you know?" Nathan asked more belligerently than he'd intended. It was always possible that Peter had acquired the ability to read vital signs by telepathy or heat-vision or something.

"Your legs are shaking," Peter pointed out.

"Shit," Nathan said, and sat down. He pulled the flannel blanket over his lap and looked around. "So. 2017." Things didn't look very different, although he guessed that was because they were in Buttfuck Nowhere, Montana. Civilisation had never kept up with the rest of the world in places like this.

"No, 2008."

"What?" Nathan frowned.

"I brought us back. About six months after I …you know," Peter said quietly. "I can bend time. And I didn't want you to be too disoriented when I brought back from – when I woke you up. 2017 is too weird for someone who just died. It's too weird for anyone."

Nathan thought about his family; six months of believing him dead must be preferable to ten years. They wouldn't have forgotten him yet. He wondered how Heidi was getting on. If she was still walking now –

"I watched her start training for the New York Marathon," Peter said with a slightly sentimental smile."

"Stop doing that."

"Sorry. She's fine, Nathan. Mom's taking care of her and the boys."

"And Clare?"

"Back with her father."

"I'm her father."

Peter shook his head. "C'mon, Nathan. Noah - Mr. Bennett – is her dad. You know that. She might have your genes but she's his daughter." He sat down on the bed next to Nathan, the warmth of his proximity like a beacon in a dark room. "How're you feeling?"

"Weird," Nathan said without thinking. "It's not normally you taking care of me."

"I'm a nurse," Peter reminded him, "it's what I do."

"How fast can you nurse me back to full health then, Peter Linderman?" Nathan asked a little sarcastically. "I need to get back to Heidi and the boys."

Peter shook his head, looking alarmed. "You can't do that."

"Can't do what?" Nathan gave his brother a dangerous look.

"You can't go back to them, Nathan. Do you have any idea how many people are looking for us? What will happen to them, to Mom, to you, if anyone has the slightest inkling we're still alive?" Peter sighed. "Lie down."

Nathan stared. "Who is looking for us?"

"All of Dad's associates, for one. All the ones who aren't dead, anyhow." Peter looked momentarily distraught and added, "Mr. Bennett's been taking a hard line in cleaning house."

"Cleaning house?"

"Dismantling the company. He has a few people – Candice, that Haitian guy, people who aren't too stable – locked up somewhere he says is secure and the rest of the company he's putting a stop to. A really permanent stop."

"Why?" Nathan recalled Mr. Bennett, a deceptively mild-looking bespectacled man, and the incredible lengths he was prepared to go to –

"To keep Clare safe," Peter said simply. "I don't think we want to get in the way. There isn't really any kind of limit to what he'd do to protect her."

Nathan swung his legs clumsily onto the bed and lay down, soft blankets dipping beneath him. It felt almost like being cocooned in silk. He hated to admit it, but he felt tired to the very skin and lying down was proving an immeasurable help.

"I'm going to get us something to eat," Peter said, standing up. "You get some more rest, let your cells regenerate properly. They're going to be doing that for a while – well, I mean they're going to be doing that constantly for the rest of your life, but they need to get up to speed first."

Nathan reached out and grabbed his brother's wrist as he passed. Peter came to an immediate halt, which was pretty funny considering all the ways he could have just carried on right on walking. Some of them would have left Nathan with his own arm intact, even. "Peter."

"I'm still here."

"Why did you do this?"

"I told you. You're my brother. You're the only family I've got I won't endanger just by talking to." Peter put his hand over Nathan's at his wrist, and gave it a friendly squeeze. "I needed you."

Nathan's laugh was a little hoarse and very sardonic. "You're about the most powerful person on the planet, Peter. You don't need me or anyone else."

Peter peeled Nathan's hand off his wrist and placed it gently back on his own chest. "Not everything is about power." He leaned down at the waist to plant an almost fatherly kiss on his brother's forehead. His lips were hot.

When he had, he paused above Nathan's face as though struck by a thought, and gave Nathan a brief and searching look before kissing gently on the mouth.

It had been a very long time since either of the Petrelli brothers had been moved to kiss each other thus – Nathan vaguely remembered his grandmother's funeral in Naples, the heavy rain turning his juvenile suit an even darker black, pulling a sobbing Peter to him under the cover of an umbrella and kissing his round child's mouth in imitation of the old lady, to quiet him – but Nathan was sure it never made his breath catch before.

Peter pulled back again and performed another deeply searching look on Nathan's eyes, his hand resting on his shoulder as light as a sunbeam. Nathan put his hand to the back of Peter's neck, meaning to bump foreheads and tell him everything was okay now; somehow his mouth found Peter's instead and this time their lips were parted, parted enough for breath to pass from one to the other and pretty soon parted enough for Nathan's tongue to bridge the gap.

His tongue-tip had touched Peter's tongue-tip when the electric jolt of blood to his groin made him pull back uneasily – but reluctantly, reluctantly – and murmur, "Christ, Peter, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean – " without taking his hand from Peter's neck. Perhaps that robbed the statement of a little of its sincerity.

Peter's only answer was to bump noses and whisper against his mouth, "I needed you back. I wanted you back," their lips grazing with each word, hot breath seeping from Peter's lungs to Nathan's. His kisses were heavy and thick, like blows to the head, but soft, soft s a girl's; and each time Peter seemed like he was yielding a little more Nathan pressed his mouth harder against them, his tongue driving deeper into Peter's mouth.

Peter scrambled onto the bed without breaking their kiss, an awkward operation of moments that involved them smacking teeth at least once and Peter elbowing Nathan in the sternum, and Nathan found himself cradling the back of Peter's head in his hands, his fingers deep in his brother's dark hair. Peter pressed his whole body against Nathan's like a blanket, rippling over him, and Nathan felt a pang of worry and shame because surely, surely Peter could feel Nathan's erect penis sticking into his stomach as he moved, rubbing over the head of it with sometimes his t-shirt and sometimes his bare stomach. Nathan felt Peter's hand on his penis – a brief, reassuring stroke – and thought to himself that of course Peter knew.

"This is wrong," Nathan muttered half-heartedly as Peter's mouth broke contact with his, moving instead to his jugular and making his pulse race even more.

"Tell me you don't want it," Peter breathed, his hand sweeping over Nathan's penis again, making him hiss and arch involuntarily.

"You know I can't," Nathan sighed, slipping a hand up the hem of Peter's t-shirt to caress his stomach, his flank, his spine; the taut skin under his fingers like velvet. "But you shouldn't – I shouldn't – "

"There's not shouldn't here," Peter said, cleaving to Nathan's touch like filings to a magnet and in the process sending white-hot sparks into Nathan's brain. "Here, now, Nathan, you can do whatever you want."

Nathan kissed Peter's neck rather feebly.

"You can do whatever you want to me," Peter added, his voice thick and low, and all at once Nathan had rolled them both over and pinned Peter to the bed. Which was ridiculous, because Peter could snap Nathan in half like a Q-tip without even trying, but he seemed content – more than content, judging by the tenting in his shorts – to let Nathan slam him down against the hard mattress like he was helpless.

Nathan's fingernails dug into Peter's shoulders from the front, like shovel blades into soft earth. He felt like an electric wire, all primed up with no idea of what he was to do, Peter's thin clothed body squirming beneath him while his brain dithered between a thousand possible outcomes.

Peter took Nathan's wrist again and dragged his hand to his throat, closing his fingers over Nathan's until Nathan was clutching Peter's neck. He took Nathan's other wrist and locked eyes with him, whispering, "do it."

"Peter …" Nathan shook his head. There was the kind of wrong where your god-like little brother brought you back from the dead, apparently for sex, and there was the kind of wrong where you, naked and aroused, kissed your little brother (who could bend time and reverse death and walk through walls but who pretended he couldn’t say "no") passionately and at length, and then there was this, which was a whole new genus and species of wrong. "I'm not going to choke you."

"I want you to."

"I can't – Peter – this really is wrong. I've spent my whole life trying to make sure no one hurt you, I can't – " Nathan muttered, but his hands tightened minutely around Peter's neck. His skin felt inviting, soft and warm, and like it would bruise at the merest pressure. Nathan realised he was staring to squeeze and forced himself to stop.

"You want to," Peter breathed, eyes still locked to his brother's. "I can see it. I can hear you thinking it, I can hear it in your blood and your heartbeat. I can smell it in your sweat."

"But I'm not going to," Nathan insisted softly, his thumb stroking absently the line of Peter's windpipe while the other pressed lightly, lightly, into the hollow at the base of his throat.

"I can make you," Peter smiled, his hands lazy in his own hair now. Nathan could feel his brother's erection against his thigh, driving his own even harder and more insistent.

"Please don't," Nathan whispered, but it was too late.

In a voice like the hand of God upon his mind, like an army chanting in time, Peter said, "choke me, Nathan. Choke me 'til I pass out or die."

Nathan's body moved like the most graceful marionette ever made, completely beyond his control; his hands tightened and Peter's breaths became ragged and short. Nathan tilted his hips against Peter's stomach as Peter's hands wound deeper into his own hair and his face began to change colour and a sound like a stuck drain came from his mouth –

NOTHING.

Nathan's hands were his own again. He snatched them from Peter's throat and used them to check his breathing. His pulse. The movement of his pupils in response to the light –

NOTHING.

Then, like a clap of thunder, Peter's gasp for air, his panicked pants off-setting a look of bliss; - he came. Nathan could feel the rush of warmth and wetness against his body – and for a moment he tried to jolt upright. Instead Peter jerked his hands from his head, cupped them around Nathan's unresisting face, kissed him slow and languorously, and fell back on the bed with a look of satiation that was so total as to be almost obscene.

"That," Peter said with a dazzling smile – Nathan was startled by how unfamiliar it looked, having been away for so long – "that was amazing."

"You died," Nathan croaked.

"Coming back to life is …" Peter looked down at the sticky mess gluing their lower bodies together with a thin veil of sodden fabric between. "It's unbelievable."

"You've done that before," Nathan said suspiciously. Peter didn't look shocked enough. He didn't seem like it had been a risk to him.

"Well, yeah."

Nathan felt something like a fist strangling him from the inside of his windpipe. His face went hot. "Who?"

"You."

"… what?"

"Future-you," Peter said, as though that explained everything perfectly. Unfortunately, it actually kinda did. "That's how I knew I was going to succeed. He's – he's used to doing that, I guess."

"Future-me strangled you to death as some sort of sex thing," Nathan said, trying to straighten it out in his head, or possibly make it sound a little less freakish. Now his preternaturally prolonged existence contained incest and time-travel and killing for orgasms, and there was still always the chance that the day could somehow get even weirder.

Peter's only answer was to peer at him through his eyelids and stroke his cheek with the tips of his fingers. Nathan turned his head instinctively and took them in his mouth for a brief kiss, let them trail from his lips wet and suggestive. His cock throbbed, his balls ached, and Nathan's heart lurched and skipped in his chest.

"Nathan," Peter murmured, raising himself up on his elbows.

"Huh?"

Peter reached down between them and – pushing Nathan gently away (either with his hand or his mind, Nathan couldn't tell) for a moment – he rolled off his sticky, ruined shorts, leaving Nathan's gaze to wander leisurely over his soft-but-not-yet-soft cock, and up over his bare belly and chest as Peter pulled his t-shirt off.

"Nathan," Peter repeated, drawing his legs up around Nathan until his knees were level with Nathan's head, "are you going to fuck me or am I going to have to use the voice again?"

"No need for the voice again," Nathan said hastily, his hard cock brushing accidentally on Peter's thigh and making them both shiver. The Voice bothered him. "I was just … I was just worried. We don't have any lube."

"We won't need it," Peter assured him, pulling his legs higher and further apart. "You won't believe the things this body can do, now."

He was right.

Fic Index

Thu, 31 May 2007 17:17:49 GMT

Band of Brothers

“Three Things That Never Happened To Lewis Nixon And Certainly Not In This Order”
Breaking A Fever
You Don't Remember Paris, Hon
Five Different Approaches To The Same Problem
Kiss Me Like You Mean It
Small Claims
I'm Not Trying To Undress You: I Want To Intellectually Impress You.

Heroes

Little Deaths
Stockholm Syndrome

Dr Who and/or Torchwood

Not Much Like Father, Like Son (Part Two!

Band of Brothers (7)

Thu, 31 May 2007 17:15:10 GMT

Title: I'm Not Trying To Undress You: I Want To Intellectually Impress You.
Pairing: Speirs/Nixon
Fandom: Band of Brothers
Word Count: 2,867
Rating: NC-17

Lewis Nixon is wrapped up tight in post-VE celebrations dreams of garden parties. He's not overly fond of garden parties - they involve linen suits, which he loathes, and his father being drunk and obnoxious, which he loathes all the more for knowing it's very much like him, and they involve an endless revolving selection of filthy looks from his wife as he fails to behave in a manner befitting of ... something. He is dreaming of how the sky above West Virginia will fill with the jellyfish shapes of falling infantry and how the grass has caught fire when something jabs him in his ribs.

"Grr," Nix says as coherently as a man with a sock for a tongue can, and wraps himself more tightly in his borrowed eiderdown.

The next thing he knows he's on the floor and aching and the eiderdown is gone. Yanked away. He's not sure if the ache or the memories of similarly rude awakenings at school hurts him more.

Nix squints at the boot beside his face.

"Get up," says Captain Speirs, a few thousand miles above Nix's aching head.

Nix says something arch and grumpy about assaulting a superior officer which he doesn't entirely mean, and Speirs toes him none-too-gently in the shoulder with the tip of his very shiny boots.

"Didn't you get demoted for -" there is a clink, and Nix suspects Speirs has poked the bottle mortuary surrounding his temporary bed in order to make his point. Many, many bottles of champagne and assorted other fine beverages have met their doom in recent hours at Nix's hands - about the only things that ever have apart from his marriage.

Nix says nothing but considers moving into a more defensible position. Perhaps the foetal one. Anything to stop his head aching.

"Get up," Speirs repeats.

"I'm not moving," Nix groans. "I can't. And there's no reason to, the war is fucking over. Leave me alone."

"You still have responsibilities," Speirs reminds him, giving Nix another insistent toe-prod. "The occupying army has to be kept in check. The occupied civilians have to be dealt with. You have to go out and take surrenders."

"I'm not sure I can manage being surrendered to," Nix grumbles. It is cold down here on the floor, while he's naked and hungover, but he's sure moving will make him throw up, so he settles for squinting at Speirs' knees and hoping for compassion. "Surrendering I can do. I will surrender like France if you just let me go back to bed for an hour."

"That would hardly be appropriate," Speirs says gravely, and pokes Nix with his toe again, which Nix is pretty sure is hardly appropriate either. "Of course, if you want to bargain with me - "

"I don't have anything left," Nix explains to Speirs' knees. "I drank ... I think I actually drank all of it."

"No cutlery?" Speirs prods Nix again. Nix considers rolling out of the way of his foot, but rolling involves moving and moving involves vomiting and he's been doing too much of that lately. "No candlesticks?" Another prod, this time in the sternum. Nix barely sees the foot move, but it's not a hard enough kick to bruise him. Just persistent and unbelievably annoying. "No photograph frames?"

"Nothing," Nix confirms irritably.

"Then I guess you're just going to have to get dressed and start collecting up revolvers. Those officers won't surrender to NCOs, Captain Nixon." There is a long pause, during which Nix thinks don't you "Captain Nixon" me, and sounds petulant even inside his own head. And Speirs adds in a friendly voice, "or you could do me a favour."

"Uh-huh ... " Carefully noncommittal even when he was hugging the carpet, Nix thought proudly. Because who knew what kind of favour Speirs had in mind? Not that he believed any of the stories, of course, but soldiers weren't exactly known for their conventional and genteel behaviour.

"Lick my boots."

"What?"

"You heard me, Captain Nixon."

"They don't look dirty," Nix points out. He can actually see his reflection in them, in fact, and he rather wishes he couldn't because it's not an attractive sight.

He rolls onto his back at last and looks up at Speirs' I-Was-Just-Fucking-With-You grin, and realises that he's going to have to get up anyway.

"Fine, I will."

"What?"

Nix rolls back onto his stomach and puts his face to Speirs' boot, his probably very stinky morning breath clouding the pristine surfaces. Speirs puts a lot of work into those boots, and Nix has a tongue that could rival the mouth of the Hudson for grossness and smell right now. "I said fine, I will lick your damn boots."

'Bloody-minded, and frequently perverse' has been a favourite descriptor for Lewis Nixon since he was old enough to say "NO" and pout. His teachers used it, his parents used it, his wife used it, his employers used it. Even Dick has found cause to roll his eyes and suggest that Nix is being too stubborn for his own good. Right now Nix knows very well that he's doing this because Speirs thought he wouldn't, not because he even gives a shit about getting any more sleep. His head feels like it's been rolled around in some kind of industrial machinery and his stomach is threatening immediate evacuation through any means possible (he wonders if it's possible to sweat vomit), but that isn't stopping him from extending his pink-and-yellow tongue and licking tentatively at Speirs' boot.

It tastes of wax.

"Er," Speirs says above his head. It is the first time Nix has ever heard of Ronald Speirs hesitating. He is not a man of indecision or inaction; rumours or rumours, that much is definitely true. "I didn't mean that ..."

Nix ignores him, and struggles his arms out from under his chest, cupping the boot by the heel and the ankle and hauling his face closer to it. He decides to got town on it. Lick like a damn dog. You thought I wouldn't, huh? He brings his lips into it, starts frenching on the boot, half eating icecream with his mouth and half ... he's not really sure what the other half is. His mouth probably looks like that Aldbourne girl's did when she was ... that was a thought.

"Are you still drunk?" Speirs sounds uncomfortable. Nix is surprised. Discomfort isn't something the perfect soldier displays under normal circumstances either, and while having a naked captain frenching your toe isn't exactly normal circumstances Nix knows they've been living under much, much more extraordinary times than this.

Nix runs his tongue along the stitching, feeling each groove and bump against that wet muscle. He appreciates that these are very ordinary boots, made by the thousand, and that they're worn by a very extraordinary man – and he's pretty sure they broke the mould when they made Captain Speirs. The man in question has shifted his weight but seems to be in no hurry to yank his pristine boot away from Nix's less-than-wholesome mouth, so Nix goes right on, outlining letters on the toecap. Mouth to boot in a kind of footwear cunnilingus.

There's some rustling above his head, and Speirs' trouser legs bunch up above his boots, slide down. Nix ignores it. He can't ignore the rasp of rough palms on skin, though, and he pauses in his unconventional spit-polish to look up.

Ronald Speirs has his trousers down around his thighs and a full hard-on dragged from his thermals, nestling in his hand. He's stroking it lethargically and he looks Nix in the eye casually, like Nix licks his boots every day and he's breaking some sort of faith by glancing up, and says, "Don't stop," in a conversational tone. Conversational for Speirs, anyhow: the tone that always sounds as though he has something on his mind.

'Bloody-minded and frequently perverse' Lews Nixon does as he's told, turns his face back to Speirs' toe and imagines it's skin – the buttocks of some girl, maybe. He slobbers with renewed enthusiasm, marvelling a little that there is not the smallest trace of boot polish on his lips, or mud.

Captain Speirs is a conscientious man, a thorough man, and it shows in his boots; and he, Nix, is a slapdash and emotional man, and it shows in his nudity and his position right now.

"You look like a maggot," Speirs informs him. His tone is dispassionate but his voice is breathy, and above the thud of his own heart Nix can hear the rustle of Speirs' sleeve brushing over his clothing, the slap of skin on skin.

Nix proceeds to surprise himself by wishing it were skin on his skin, and covers his confusion by "accidentally" tugging Speirs' trousers down a little as he changes his grip on the size nine standard (everyone's a size nine, but Speirs is the shiniest size nine).

"Are you trying to undress me, Captain Nixon?"

Nix just nods unapologetically and keeps on licking. This exercise is making his tongue raw. He could soothe it with some of that Dutch gin he's pretty certain Private Webster has. Or he could soothe it in some other way.

Speirs squats suddenly, grabs Nix's hair in a thick, black, unwashed and greasy handful, and says flatly, "I won't be brought down to your level."

"You just were," Nix points out mutinously. Speirs' trousers are still down around his thighs, the waistband straining over his thigh muscles, and in the fold of his waist Nix can see the man is still hard. He wrenches his gaze upwards and tries to outstare him instead; foolish move, he realizes almost right away. Speirs could outstare a mirror.

Speirs sighs like Nix just put his rifle together back to front. "You can suck my cock now," he says. It doesn't sound like an insult, or an offer, or even an order. It's just a statement of possibility, the observation that cock-sucking is there on the horizon, if Nix were a cock-sucker. Nix is pretty sure he's not the kind of man who habitually sucks cock, although he's not been too choosy about who has sucked his in the past.

Speirs' knees are spread and just between his thighs, just above, Nix can see the head of his cock with its sole eye staring at him like a challenge. Bet you can't, it seems to say, and that's all Nix needs right now. He's feeling reckless.

Fuck it.

He grabs Speirs by the knees and pulls himself, like an invalid on a staircase, towards Captain Speirs' cock.

The good captain sprawls back on the carpet in surprise, saved only by his elbows, and Nix – naked, triumphant – takes some small mean pleasure in having wrong-footed him. You are at my level, he thinks, and slithering like a hairy hungover eel – a gold watch-wearing eel with a Yale degree, an eel with a divorce and three jumps behind him – he shoves himself between Speirs' thighs.

He grabs Speirs – suppose he'd better be "Ron" if they're about to be on cock-sucking terms – by the hipbones like they're handles, a railing to steady himself on. Grips the base of Ron's cock in his fist and finds it strange how strange of all of this isn't, this soft-skinned thing pulsing in his hands like a fallen fledgling rescued from the family cat, all power and vulnerability wrapped up together in velvety smoothness and surrounded by wiry dark hair. The hair gets caught between his fingers.

He does not look at Ron's face for a reaction, just licks down the underside of his cock the exact same way he just tongued the man's boot.

It doesn't taste much nicer – genital hygiene's hardly a wartime priority – but anything's better than a hungover mouth, and it's kinder on his lips than leather is. Nix bestows a hesitant kiss to the very tip of Ron's dick and it jumps beneath his mouth like a skittish horse.

Nix opens his mouth and corks it with cock. Sucks like it's a bottle of best matured from Inverness. It's kinder on his cheeks than those glass necks; and when Ron's hand touches the place where his hairline starts, brushes a sigil of encouragement there with gun-calloused fingertips – when Ron touches his nape, that's kinder on him too.

He's used to kindness from Dick – perhaps too used to it, perhaps he's started taking to for granted that Dick will always offer him kindness – but Ron's kindnesses are few and far between, and tend to be of the 'shoot the lame horse so it doesn't suffer anymore' variety.

Nix quits thinking about it so much and keeps on opening his mouth until his lips touch the first finger of his fist, and the head of Ron's cock nudges the grooves and ridges of Nix's mouth, fits there so well Nix wonders if the strange inner structure of his mouth was secretly really designed for holding it. It's a weird thought. It's weird how much he likes this; he can feel his own cock leeching the blood from the rest of his body, stirring against his thigh.

The taste of unwashed cock (sweat, dried urine just at the tip) is negligible as Nix recalls his Aldbourne girl's tender lips, and tries to mimic the way she'd flicked her tongue through the trough where his cock split. The curl of her tongue as, like a palm, it cupped his shaft. He rolls the sides of his tongue up to envelope Ron's cock, sucks his cheeks in, and as he bobs his head up, down, the length of Ron sliding in and out of Nix's mouth as easily as any girl's, he moves his hand in time. Can't swallow one whole, Nic thinks hazily, remembering bizarre fraternity games with hotdogs.

Nix's own cock is hard and sore, pressed between his stomach and the floor. He shifts his weight, feels the rough woolen fibres rake over his tender skin, and something hot and driven traverses his spine. Nix thinks his face is probably quite flushed now, but most of it his hidden by Ron's groin and his shirt.

He ripples his hips awkwardly, rubbing his cock back and forth over the rough carpet. It hurts, and it tickles, but it is friction and right now Nix is too wound up for anything but that to matter, and right now –

- right now is when Ron starts pushing up into Nix's mouth, his cock stabbing the roof of it and sliding away. For a while – Nix has no idea how long, time has trickled out of his field of perception like sweat from his shoulders – they are a perfectly synchronized caterpillar of flesh, Nix's hips and his head and Ron's hips all working in time like a line of can-can dancers, accelerating towards some grand finale -

Nix has a moment of dreadful moment of clarity: I'm humping the floor with a dirty penis in my mouth; and it's over, it's over.

Nix comes slowly, each new jet of come smearing up his stomach and down over his thighs, soaking into the carpet and probably staining it with all those would-be mini-Nixons forever and ever. A second or so later, a breath or a heartbeat, just as the post-orgasm horrors are beginning to set into, Ron comes, driving his hips up, half-choking an increasingly reluctant Nix on his cock.

Bitter, coffee-tasting stickiness the consistency of glue fills the back of Nix's throat. He feels like he's drowning. What the fuck do I do now? He thinks in a panic as Ron's cock – sticky, still hard but beginning to droop, pumping a little leftover semen down over itself like the last defiant shots of a retreating army – falls from his lips.

His Aldbourne girl had spat into a china mug on her windowsill with an apologetic smile, wiped her mouth on a handkerchief and offered him a cup of tea before he left; there is no mug within reach and the stuff is beginning to spill over the corners of his mouth like toothpaste-laced spit. Nix swallows.

It is very bitter.

He sits up and tries, awkwardly, to arrange his hair. It's a job for a comb and a vat of Brylcreem, not his shaking fingers.

Ron – Speirs, now he's dressed again – is once again impeccable and implacable. "Awake now, Captain Nixon?"

"Yes," Nix admits cautiously.

"Don't you think you ought to get dressed?" Speirs suggests. He is almost out of the door already, his familiar not-smile with its air of smugness strewn across the lower half of his face like Nix's belongings across the bedroom floor.

"Fuck off, Ronald," Nix says evenly, and Speirs smiles a quizzical half-smile at him before doing just that.

There is a stuffy silence to the room after he has left, and Nix sits naked on the floor, contemplating his navel and the drying smear of sperm on the carpet and whether or not he'll ever be able to look Speirs in the boots again with a straight face.

Probably best not to put the question to Dick.

So, who wants to play "spot when Derek got over her allergy to the word 'cock'"?

Band of Brothers (6)

Thu, 31 May 2007 17:12:29 GMT

Title: Small Claims
Fandom: Band of Brothers (TV Series)
Rating: Er, PG-13?
Word Count: 1,229
Pairing: Webgott.
Disclaimer: Not intended to represent the actual people or even the HBO presentations of them in any way. Am not making money off this and should in fact probably be kicked in the head for writing this.
Warning: CONTAINS GROSSNESS.

They are standing at the side of the road, mud climbing the sides of their boots – a couple of hundred men relieving their bladders and stretching cramped muscles, joking and shoving because the way was on the turn and they knew it. David Webster jiggles impatiently as what feels like the entire Nile River flows out of him.

"You been drinking some private stash there, Web?" Liebgott jokes from beside him, giving him a too-hard friendly elbow in the ribs. Then – and Webster cannot quite credit that it has happened at first, the act is so uncalled-for – the guy turns and pisses on Webster's boots.

What the fuck do you think you're doing?, he doesn't say. Even having his boots spuriously pissed on will not lead him into the kind of language his fellow soldiers – Webster hesitates his self-narration and thinks with an underline – his friends use. Instead he says, "Hey!" but Liebgott has already vaulted back onto the truck and is enthusiastically telling Luz something that involves a lot of gesturing.

Luz makes a variety of choice faces and pulls a cigarette out from behind his ear.

Catching Webster's eyes on him, Liebgott winks extravagantly and makes a gun-click sound with his tongue and his cheek. Webster has absolutely no idea what this is supposed to mean, so he ignores it as gibberish and climbs up beside Perconte.

A lot has happened to make "why the hell was Joe Liebgott pissing on my boots?" an insignificant question. There are other, bigger "why"s hidden in the forest outside the town, angry, tearful ones. Like everyone else, he feels helpless as a newborn child, as much from watching a friend crumple and lose his voice as man's inhumanity to man and knowing there are no words to haul him back to normality, as for the pajama-clad skeletons he cannot stand to look in the eye.

Everyone else is drinking with a hard determination to strip their minds as clean as parade-ground rifles.

Joe Liebgott has his head in his hands, his fingers clasping the back of his skull as though he is trying to keep his brains from exploding out. Jude, Jude.

David Webster finds himself tongue-tied with rage; he wants to tear something down with his hands, because his oft-ignored gut tells him that this will unstarve the hungry and unfreeze the half-naked stick figures that have imprinted themselves on his mind. He wants to pick up every resident of the town and shake them until their bones snap and rattle against each other, shouting, "WHY? HOW? What is wrong with you?" in every language he knows.

He wonders if he even feels a tenth as bad as Joe Liebgott must feel.

By the time they come rolling towards Berchtsgarden things are as normal as they've ever been out here. Men in trucks, like laughing cattle, singing and telling jokes. Everything has changed now; a kind of lightness runs through them all and as Webster will later observe, 'it is as though the weights upon us have drained away in a flood of good will'. Cigarettes change hands, and Webster is still musing on the changed mood when Liebgott punches him impatiently in the upper arm.

He realizes that Joe has been talking – Jewish girls with soft titties, white picket fences, dozens of children – and gives a guilty start.

"Not boring you, are we, Harvard?" Liebgott doesn't wait for an answer, just grins almost emptily. "Watchagonnado?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know?" Liebgott gives an incredulous snort. "You got all that college learning and no long-term plans. Me, I got long-term plans."

"If you can call 'em that," Luz interrupts. "Maybe we'll be overrun with little Joe Liebgotts and they'll eat everything in America and we'll all have to move to Mexico."

"PISS BREAK!"

The truck judders to a halt and men begin pouring out off the tailgate. Joe slaps Webster on the back as he passes. "Quit day-dreaming," he suggests, apparently oblivious, with his future-wife and future-kids, to the inherent irony of his instruction.

Webster is still trying to work out how best to phrase the perceptible and near-total change in tempo and mood that has come over Easy when the splatter of liquid on his bootcaps catches his attention. He looks down as a stream of urine perpendicular to his own peters out over his feet. He looks up at Joe Liebgott's unfathomable, lop-sided smile.

Joe winks, gun-clicks his tongue, slaps Webster on the arm in a sort of 'bye' gesture and hauls himself back onto the truck.

What the hell? Webster thinks, tucking himself back in.

In Berchtsgarden things are different. There are flush toilets, for one (a luxury Webster is shocked to find himself thinking of as almost excessive), which means there are limited opportunities for certain San Franciscans to piss on his boots and unsettle his equilibrium. There are also limited opportunities, at first, for asking what the hell he had been playing at.

As it happens the explanation comes from a different conversation entirely. Joe is a little drunk; they are all a little drunk, all the time, at the moment. Joe is doing better than most despite some legendary hangovers, while Webster has found that while there is good liquor to be had in the town, it has already mostly been had by the officers. Between Captain Speirs (who can find anything that can be sold like a bloodhound finds a criminal), Harry Welsh (who seems more like a grin with a man attached these days) and the bloodshot, bristling specter of Nix, the good stuff is accounted for.

Joe is a little drunk, and waxing lyrical about his post-war plans. Webster will not be drawn into this discussion; he feels it is tempting fate, but he does not say so. He does not mention accidental discharges of weapons and the possibility of the Pacific, but when Joe has finished outlining how his twelfth kid will be a lawyer and George Luz has passed out, he does say: "What about plans for now?"

"Eh?"

"You're full of long-term plans, but there's a lot that could change right now."

Joe gives him an incomprehensibly sly (and slightly unsteady) look and says, "I got plans."

"Good," Webster says, "we're in a beautiful country we'll probably never see again. We should all make the most of it."

"Not that sort of plan," Joe smirks. "I mean, I'm planning to keep pissing on your boots."

Webster frowns. "Why?" It's hard to keep the exasperation and confusion out of his voice, and he's not sure he manages it.

Joe grins and affects wounded innocence. "I heard Harry Welsh saying when a dog pisses on a hydrant it's saying 'that's my hydrant'," he says, as though this explained everything and Webster is being offensively stupid.

Other than concluding that by this reckoning Harry Welsh owned large areas of France, Belgium, Holland and Germany and also other people's pants legs, the first thought that enters Webster's head is also the first one out of his mouth. "You want my boots?"

Joe sighs. "I said I planned to keep pissing on your boots …" he leans across the intervening space – which Webster does not recall being so very narrow – and finishes his sentence in a wine-scented whisper, "… and for you to keep on liking it, David."

NB: This is TOTALLY unbetad and probably enormously inaccurate in many places. If anything is particularly jarring/outright factually insane could you please tell me so I can fix it?

Band of Brothers (5)

Thu, 31 May 2007 17:10:12 GMT

Title: Kiss Me Like You Mean It.
Fandom: Band of Brothers
Rating: PG-13. Possibly R if you're really sensitive.
Word count: 2,296
Pairing: Winters/Nixon
Disclaimer: This is speculative fiction based on the HBO miniseries, and is not intended to a) earn money or b) depict or in any way demean the real men the series was based on.
Notes: Sequel to Five Different Approaches to the Same Problem, which was the sequel to You Don't Remember Paris, Hon (But It Remembers You. Also, Emo!Nix!

It took most of Sunday for Nix to crack. There was silence through Saturday, and silence through breakfast on Sunday. Silence and hedging met his every attempt at conversation until he was feeling less contrite and more aggravated. He finally cornered Dick as he returned from dealing with letters, probably interrupting a long over-due report that Nix couldn't have cared any less about if it had been detailing the contents of Eisenhower's sock drawer.

"Dick."

"Mmm?"

"Look, I'm going crazy here," he said, the words coming out in a rush of held breath. "Whatever it was I did, it obviously bothers you. Will you please tell me what I've done to offend you so I can apologise for it properly?"

It didn't prove the crowbar he needed to get an open response, though. Dick just looked at him with a coolness Nix had never experienced before and said calmly, "If you really don't remember I think it's better for you if you don't know."

Ice ran down Nix's spine like condensation down the side of a beer glass. He swallowed. "Was what I did really that terrible?" And behind the words he couldn't help the mute pleading that crept into his eyes; please don't let it have been what I think it is. Don't let me have broken this friendship. In that moment he considered becoming a devout man, just so he could petition God for clemency. So he could make this not be as fucked-up as he suspected it was going to be.

Dick's face softened a little, and Nix allowed himself to breathe. "It's not what you did, it's what I did."

Nix held his breath again.

Dick sighed. "I lost control. It won't happen again. I don't want to spoil your good opinion of me, Lew."

Nix realised it was time to play his hand. "Dick." He bridged the gap between them, putting his hand on his friend's shoulder almost regretfully. "I found teeth marks. On my ass. I want to know what happened or it's going to bother me for the rest of my life."

Dick's face went as red as his hair. "I suppose I do owe you an explanation," he acknowledged, not catching Nix's eye. He did remove Nix's had, very gently, as though it was made of paper, with both of his own. He let Nix's hand drop away from him.

"Well?"

"It all started because you were adamant I should see Montmartre," Dick began. He didn't seem to know what to do with his hands, and settled for clasping them behind his back.

"What was I doing in Paris anyhow? I thought I was back to Aldbourne to look up Mary …"

"You said someone had to make sure I had fun and didn't spend all weekend worrying about supplies," Dick said with a wry smile, "and apparently this was to involve Montmartre. You went on a tear when we got there, trying to find absinthe, and wouldn't listen when I told you it was outlawed years ago."

"Christ, I'm sorry," Nix licked his lips. So far, so typical. "Go on."

"You were kinda into it by then," Dick said with one of the small, fond smiles that Nix felt he'd been missing all day, all weekend since they'd returned. He felt a little better. "So I thought it was best to find us a hotel and put you to bed to sleep it off." Dick sighed. "But you didn't want bed, and started telling me you were going to find a prostitute."

Nix buried his face in his hands in dismay, but from between his fingers said only, "Go on."

"It would have been okay," Dick said, surprising him, "but you were insisting that we find you a boy -"

"What?"

"Yes. 'A nice French boy to fuck senseless' is what you said. About four times," Dick went on, going red as the f-word hit his palate and still managing to sound unimpressed.

"Christ, Dick, that word sounds obscene on you."

"It is an obscenity."

"On you it's worse."

"It didn't sound pristine on you either. I managed to convince you that … your plan … was a recipe for blackmail and court-martial, so you calmed down a bit and agreed to come to a hotel with me and get some sleep."

Nix took his face out of his hands and nodded for Dick to continue, but it was a wasted gesture. His friend was staring at the ceiling and all but wringing his hands. Nix cleared his throat. "Go on."

"The proprietor was very understanding," Dick began, and his voice cracked. He stopped, composed himself and tried again. "I was intending to put you to bed."

"Didn't you?"

"Oh I did. Eventually." Dick's cheeks were burning like coals. "Look, can I skip this part? It makes you sound complicit."

"Maybe I was," Nix shrugged, and said in a very serious voice, "Dick, I want to know."

Dick nodded almost wearily. "I thought you would, but I had to try." He clasped his hands behind him like a pastor and went back to studying the ceiling. "I was helping you get your boots off," he went on, "because you were having difficulty with the laces. And you …" he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and Nix started. It was a very un-Dick gesture, and his hand wobbled as he did it.

"I what?" Nix prompted, staring at Dick's hand.

"You tried to kiss me, Lew. On the mouth." Dick didn't sound as disapproving as he might, as the words came out in a rush – but Nix's blood still ran cold in his veins, and his head began to feel detached from his body, from the room, the way it always did when something too emotional happened near him. He'd gone through his entire wedding ceremony feeling like his brain was on the moon.

"And then what?" he said, trying to sound jovial. "You socked me one, I suppose. My face is still kinda sore. I definitely earned that, though." Nix felt his jaw; it hurt a lot, and there had been a hint of a bruise that morning. He thought, poor Dick and did not challenge the rationality of it.

"Ah, no," Dick said softly, not looking at him. "No. I'm afraid I … I kissed you back, Lew."

He looked distraught, guilty, red as beets, but Nix couldn't help laughing. "That's it? That's all? Geez, Dick, you had me really worried … for a minute … there …" he trailed off, remembering the tooth-marks. One look at Dick's averted face was all it took to confirm it, and he sobered immediately. "That's … not it. Is it?"

"No." Dick wouldn't look at him at all, apparently mesmerised by the ceiling rafters. "No, it's not."

Nix chewed his lip. "Go on."

"I'm not sure I can."

"Dick, please."

Dick spread his hands and sighed. "Your face hurts because I held it too hard while I was kissing you. Very enthusiastically, and, I suspect, not very well. As up to this Friday I hadn't exactly kissed anyone before. Not like that. And certainly not … a friend." Dick struggled for words, his eyes searching the beams as if looking for some celestial dictionary. "And although you were the worse for drink –"

"Or better," Nix said, half-heartedly. It was taking a great deal of effort on his part not to gape like an idiot.

"Lew," Dick said sternly, "you are never the better for drink."

Nix thought about it. "Yeah. Go on."

"Well, you clearly had." Dick looked so uncomfortable that Nix wanted to pat him on the shoulder and tell him everything was going to be okay, even though he was kinda sure it wouldn't be. Instead he smiled inanely and said:

"I am married."

"You were also raving about rent boys less than thirty minutes before," Dick pointed out.

"Ah. I, uh, I have some explaining to do, don't I?" Nix said, his breath catching in his throat. Who had heard him, while he was too drunk to have any sense of propriety? And what the hell had Dick thought of it?

"So do I," Dick reminded him, flushing pink again.

"Right. You do. Go on." Nix swallowed, ran a hand through his hair, completely failing to flatten it, and waited.

"Are you sure you want to hear this, Lew?" Dick murmured, staring intently at Nix's mouth now. It was an improvement on the ceiling, anyhow.

"Goddamnit, yes," Nix said impatiently. "All of it."

"You weren't as drunk as I'd thought, or you're better at undressing while inebriated than your penchant for sleeping in your clothes when you don't need to suggests," Dick went on, smiling again. It was brief and sudden and warming, cutting the sting from his words.

"I've had a lot of practice," Nix said, almost sour.

"But all of sudden you were naked and I … wasn't." Dick looked distant; Nix wondered if he was calling the memory to mind and, if he was, how it made him feel. His hands had clenched into tight fists, the knuckles turning even paler than usual. "And – Lew. I really don't want to tell you this –"

"Dick, please."

"It … excited me," Dick said, his face as red as Russia. He seemed stuck on the words again, choking them up past his tonsils with considerable difficulty, as though the shape of them hurt his mouth. "You naked. Me clothed." He twisted his hands around each other, and took a deep, shuddering breath apparently to stabilise himself. "God help me, it … I pushed you down onto the bed."

Nix felt something stir in his insides; if Dick was excited by this, or had been, there was simply no word for what the idea of such a situation was doing to him. He hoped he at least looked more together than he felt.

"And," he said, managing by some miracle to keep his voice steady.

"I took your …" Dick made a helpless gesture, and finally caught Nix's eye in passing, his gaze on its way to some other point of distraction, "Your …your Johnson in my mouth." He looked fidgety, unstable. It was beyond shocking to see him like this, but Nix was having a much harder time concentrating on not letting on how much even this hesitant, fumbling account of events was getting to him. His clothes felt too small – too warm, and too heavy. He wondered if this was what had prompted him to undress in Paris, this feeling of being constricted by layers of suffocating wool.

"Oh," Nix said, helpfully. "You, er, you – " he seemed to have caught Dick's primness, or lost the ability to connect actions with words. His hand worked its way up into his hairline at the back of his head, trying to dislodge his language skills. "You …"

"Blew you," Dick said, going even more scarlet. The phrase sounded so fantastically profane on his lips that Nix nearly went cross-eyed. On anyone else (except maybe David Webster, who wasn't much given to swearing even though he's frequently looked like he wanted to be) it would have seemed natural and unremarkable, just another foul moment in the daily dirty discourse, but on Dick it sounded outlandish.

"Christ," Nix murmured, and then, "So how did I … the teeth marks?"

"I really don't think I can explain," Dick said, looking and sounding as though he'd been sentence to a particularly warm purgatory. "I can only hope you'll forgive me. We both behaved in a manner unbecoming of an officer. Can we leave it at that?"

"You could show me," Nix said. He hadn't intended for it to come out at all, let along for it to be such a breathy, throaty whisper. "That is – oh, fuck -"

"I really don't think it should ever happen again," Dick said, somewhere between wistful and guilty, his cheeks glowing like beacons, so red it was a wonder they didn't burst. "Once was dangerous enough."

Nix noticed that he didn't say he hadn't liked it.

"I want it to," he said, aware that he sounded petulant and that he was potentially getting them both in more trouble than either could handle, potentially sabotaging both of their careers and destroying his family's reputation. The latter would almost be worth it on its own, he thought. "I want to remember this time, damnit, or it's just not fair." He segued into an uneasy laugh that had more than a tinge of hysteria in it. "Dick?"

The next thing he knew he'd been pinned to the unplastered wall by Dick's hips, rough stone digging into his spine, and a tongue halfway down his throat while Dick's hands clasped his chin to hold it steady.

"Ow, my face – " he blurted, pulling away.

"Sorry," Dick said breathlessly, though he did not sound very sorry at all. He kissed Nix again, pressing him into the wall, his hands touching on a hundred different smouldering hot spots all over Nix's body, like irons singeing away his uniform. He was a bad kisser, Nix noted with surprise, but he guessed that was lack of practice. There would, he hoped (as Dick's hands pulled at his shirt buttons), be plenty of time for practice now.

"Jesus," he added, as Dick's mouth slipped to his throat and he discovered that what seemed wrong and sloppy on his lips was ingenious against his unshaved neck. "Dick – " he lapsed into incoherence again, lost for words for once and reduced only to holding onto the back of his friend's head like a drowning man. "Fuck me," he managed, the right words finally falling into place, "dear God, please –"

Band of Brothers (4)

Thu, 31 May 2007 17:07:32 GMT

Title: Five Different Approaches to the Same Problem
Rating: PG for kissing
Fandom: Band of Brothers
Word Count: 734
Pairing: Winters/Nixon (of course)
Disclaimer: You know the drill. They're not mine, this is not intended as disrespect, the horrible demons in my head made me do it, etc
Note: Sequel to You Don't Remember Paris, Hon. I've decided to give in every single time I get a Band of Brothers plotbunny and the result appears to be that I write really short fics but I write them more-or-less constantly. I hope that's not what you want. :P

One.

So Lewis Nixon would say, in a contrite voice, "it can't have been that bad, I haven't been court-martialed," and it would turn out that Dick Winters had just been screwing with him and nothing weird had happened and it'd all be fine.

Except Dick didn't screw with him, and Lewis Nixon was worried that maybe Dick's silence was the only thing keeping him from being court-martialed for something he didn't even remember.

Two.

Maybe Nix could offer him something to drink, which he wouldn't take, and Nix'd decide not to drink anything either (just this once, until the conversation was over, or at least until Dick wasn't looking) and in that moment of unexpected companionship Dick would say something warmly and it would transpire that Nix had just fallen over in the street or sung something embarrassing and that would be that. Or if it was worse, Dick would tell him and he could actually apologise knowledgeably and with the appropriate phrasing.

Because God if he wasn't sick of the sterile coldness between them now, of knowing almost every word in several languages except the right ones.

Three.

The problem with trying to extract information from Captain Richard Winters, reflected his good friend Captain Nixon, was that it was fucking impossible. The man was a stone. He'd obviously made up his mind not to tell anyone, including or especially Captain Nixon, what had transpired in Paris. What had left Captain Nixon aching in unusual places, most notably his heart as he discovered that he needed this easy, ha, friendship like he needed air. Air and scotch.

All his ins were joking, and he wasn't sure joking was what would break the silence. "It can't have been that bad. I mean, I did behave in a manner almost befitting a soldier, didn't I?" being the best he could manage, and what if -

If he didn't, if it had been that bad, and everything between them hereafter was strictly business and chilly politeness, Captain Nixon wasn't sure he could stand that. Maybe he'd come to treat the certainty of Dick Winters as a crutch as much as the booze but he was damned if he was going to give up either. Somehow, somehow, he was going to have to find a way to make the two of them coexist comfortably.

Four.

I am forever "That Idiot From Intel, he thought miserably, to me even if to no one else. And That Idiot From Intel has clearly made a truly intelligent mistake that he really intelligently can't remember, and how can someone this stupid be doing my job? I should ask for a transfer to The Blundering Idiot division, but they'd probably just think I was angling for a promotion.

The glass was empty again. He rooted around in Dick's footlocker, refilled, and sat back down.

That Idiot From Intel should probably consider not stashing his booze in his buddy's locker. That's probably a good start. Though Dick would say That Idiot From Intel needs to just stop having a booze stash at all, although he wouldn't call me "That Idiot From Intel". And certainly not now.

He drained the glass. He's not calling me anything now.

Five.

Or Lew could skip the introduction and wait until they were truly alone and just slide his hand onto the back of Dick's neck in a friendly-and-then-some gesture, let his fingers linger a little too long at the place where nape became coarse red hair. And if Dick took that without flinching maybe Lew would press with his fingertips until dick turned his face to his, and maybe he'd touch his lips to Dick's as soft and slow as lighting a fire. And maybe Dick would open his mouth just a little, and Lew could kiss on safe in knowledge that if he lost himself in kissing he'd still find himself again in his friend.

And maybe that's what he'd done in Paris and that's what kept Dick's lips pressed together in a grim and heart-sinking line, the depth of his entirely platonic affection for Lew the only thing keeping the stupid imposition a secret.

Or maybe he should try. Maybe it'd go okay.

Lew stared into the bottom of his empty glass, his shoulders hunched against the rain falling outside the building. And maybe pigs would sprout wings and mount an air attack on Berlin.

Band of Brothers (3)

Thu, 31 May 2007 17:03:05 GMT

Title: You Don't Remember Paris, Hon, But It Remembers You
Rating: PG
Fandom: Band of Brothers
Word Count: 400 ish. Tiny!
Pairing: Implied Winters/Nixon
Disclaimer: You know the drill. They're not mine, this is not intended as disrespect, the horrible demons in my head made me do it, etc

When Lewis "What Do You Mean I Drank All The Scotch, There Was A Fucking Crate Of It" Nixon woke he was a little surprised to find himself back in familiar barracks. He'd been certain he was going back to Aldbourne, and he wasn't quite sure which day it was or whether he'd been. There was a troublesome gap in his memory that could have been one evening or a week, and his head felt like a whole company had used it for doing jumping jacks on.

That wasn't the surprising part, of course. Having a thumping headache and his stomach threatening to crawl out of his nose if he didn't open his mouth was standard procedure for the mornings; what was odd was that the sun was shining, the birds were singing, and Captain "Five Litres Of Bordeaux Makes A Good Dinner" Nixon had this hunch that he still had some of his weekend leave left.

Dick was looking at him with the usual blend of amusement, mild sympathy and censure, tinged with what looked like wistfulness, although Nix could never really be sure because his identification of subtle facial expressions was never brilliant before breakfast. And anyway, this was Dick. It was some sort of physical requirement with him to be completely unreadable.

"This doesn't look like Aldbourne," Nix said, stretching under his blankets and feeling – with considerable alarm – unexpected aches and soreness in his shoulders and back and thighs. What the hell had he been doing? Had he taken it upon himself to lead PT while drunk, instead of applying his pay to the business acquiring the affections of young ladies? If that was the case he might as well get his head examined or filled with lead.

Dick's expression fell. It was, as ever, subtle, but it was there. Disappointment was one of the emotions Nix's dear friend found it hardest to conceal, and usually that was a driving force for the company – no one wanted to disappointed Captain Winters.

"You don't remember?"

Nix struggled upright in the narrow bed and tried to claw his brain back to functioning by rubbing at his eyesockets with his fists, with limited success. "What did I do?"

"You really don't remember?" Dick sounded – well, he probably sounded normal to anyone who didn't know him as well as Nix – quite displeased. Unhappy, even. His face was as composed as ever, but there was something Nix wasn't getting.

"… What did I do?" he repeated, and added, "and why does everything hurt?"

Dick turned away and examined the ceiling thoughtfully. "Let's just say that while you may not remember Paris, Paris is going to remember you for a long time."

Notes: "The Night You Can't Remember (The Night I Can't Forget)" by Magnetic Fields made me write this. I'm not smart enough or well-enough acquainted with wartime Paris to come up with whatever it was that occurred. Maybe someone else can.

Band of Brothers (2)

Thu, 31 May 2007 16:58:47 GMT

Title: Breaking A Fever
For: zellamsee
Pairing: Speirs/Lipton
Rating: PG-13/R
Disclaimer: This is a work of speculative fiction intended to feature the fictionalised rendering of events in the HBO/BBC series; it is not meant to disrespect or otherwise injure the real individuals named within.
Notes: The book says schnapps and Apfelstrudel were the cure, but I like to think this was a much more efficacious remedy.

While on the road, Sergeant Lipton became ill, with chills and a high fever. […]

Lieutenant Speirs and Sergeant Lipton had a room in a German house for the night. (Alsace, on the border between France and Germany, changes hands after every war. In 1871 it became German again, in 1945, French.) The room had only a single bed. Speirs said Lipton should sleep on it. Lipton replied that it wasn't right; as the enlisted man, he would sleep in his sleeping bag on the floor. Speirs simply replied, "You're sick," which settled it.
Band of Brothers, "The Patrol", pg 224.

After spending so long under fire it was hard not to think of the arrival of a less explosive but equally insidious enemy in the aggressive light. Bombarded by uncontrollable sneezing, 0800 hours, Lipton solemnly reported to himself. Advance of high temperature followed shortly afterward. Only possible course of action: cover nose and mouth while spraying boogers everywhere, so as not to infect rest of platoon.

The house had the warmth of a building only recently vacated; further down the broad street soldiers knocked sharply on doors and gave their mangled interpretations of "Du hast fünf Minuten zu ausgangen " to the families inside. Carwood Lipton made a mental note to be even more grateful for shelter when the walls of the room had stopped pulsating and his sinuses didn't feel like they were being marched on.

"We're in this room," Speirs said, appearing behind him like a wraith, and Lipton found the only response he could really manage was a tired nod. After a prod in the small of the back he got it together to follow the Lieutenant up a wide wooden stairway and into the smallest of three bedrooms. The room was more luxury than he'd been expecting, the wallpaper still intact and winking clean and blue; a stark contrast to the bedraggled and exhausted soldiers steaming gently in the middle of it. Speirs had a streak of mud on his forehead; Lip wasn't sure he didn't have the same, and knew damn well he hadn't shaved in too long.

There was a single narrow bed against the far wall, still made, a light dusting of ceiling plaster on the eiderdown the only sign of any artillery activity in the town.

"Yours," Speirs said with typical economy of words, already sitting on the floor and making the smart move of unlacing his boots to air his socks while he still had the chance.

Lip frowned; it hurt his face, and the whole set of features felt strange - calcified, kinda like his nose had paralysed the rest of it or turned it into a mask - and much too cold. "Sir, I'm only an NCO – give me a minute to get my sleeping bag. I should be on the floor." The bed looked like a thing from a hotel, and after foxholes and trucks and bunks the only way it could look more inviting was if there was a roast dinner next to it and a cute girl in it. But no matter how inviting the bed looked, there was no way he could sleep in the bed while any Lieutenant – especially not Lieutenant Speirs - took the floor.

"Lip," Speirs said, looking up from removing his second boot with an unreadable expression, "you're sick."

There wasn't really much Lip could say to that, although his cold sweats took a moment to suggest that pathetic gratitude on his part would probably be appropriate if not very dignified or well-received. Speirs had already stretched out on the floor, his boots lined up perfectly with his feet, and stuffed his hands behind his head by the time Lip got stiffly into the bed.

Exhausted as he was, Lip still found it hard to sleep. The bed seemed to close around him like a giant mouth – probably just that it was so much softer than anything he'd slept on for months, he thought, but it didn't help him settle. He was sweating into his eyes and shaking all at once. He felt half-ashamed: the mud and the fever-sweat on him would ruin the sheets. When he was gone the family they had displaced would have to return and throw away these previously pristine pieces of fabric, now all stinking of sick Sergeant Lipton.

Somewhere in between this thought and the next almighty shiver he was pitched into a dream: crawling shoulder-deep in mud and corpses, the suffocating sludge falling back on top of him and the ever-present thunder of shells slowly drowning out as the muck filled his ears, his nose, his mouth – so he struck upwards like a swimmer for shore, knowing as he did so that he had just given his position away. That any minute now a bullet would zip through his shoulder or the back of his neck – his helmet was missing – the hands of the dead clutched at his shoulders, begging him to stay down -

"Shh, before you wake everyone else up," Speirs said patiently, holding a single finger over Lip's dry mouth. Lipton stared around him quickly; it had to be later in the night now, since the moon was fully up and shedding a razorblade of blue-white against the opposite wall, through the gap in the incongruously laundered curtains. Speirs was awake, alert, bent over the bed with one hand holding in Lip's panicked cries and the other stretched back to hold his kicking legs down.

Shame flooded through him as swiftly as the nightmare's engulfing mud had flowed over him. "Sorry, I –"

"Fever dreams," Speirs said dismissively. "Not your fault." He looked poised despite the bland tone of his voice, ears pricked, head cocked, listening to the sounds of the house, the scrabble of mouse claws on wooden floors. Like a fox disturbed in the night. Lip tried to will himself back into unconsciousness, but the feeling if not the clear memory of asphyxiating in a soup of the dead and of the earth still clung to him. "What were they?"

"What?"

"The dreams."

"I don't remember." Lip frowned; the only clear thing that remained was the feeling of something disgusting against his skin, and that could just as easily be the sweat that swamped him. Speirs was still hung over him, his hair tumbling over his forehead like ivy, his eyes sweeping Lip's face with a kind of dead-eyed curiosity. Lip's hair – what there was of it, Lipton thought wryly – laid plastered flat against his skull. "Was I yelling?"

"Just thrashed about a bit." He was lying – skilled as he was at keeping a poker face, Speirs was in too close to hide the way his pupils expanded, contracted, expanded again. Lipton felt every dreamer's cold twist in his stomach of worry for what he might have revealed. Unless it was the fever. A second later he quashed it as ridiculous; he had nothing to hide from anyone in Easy, least of all its commander.

"You should go back to sleep," Speirs said, not making a move. He'd not moved his hand far from Lip's mouth after shushing him, and the pressure of his palm over Lip's knees was still there, warm and strong and unaccountably comforting. His eyes bored through Lip's, back into his mind, right through the back of his skull. What hell it must be to be on the wrong side of this man …

"We both should," Lip said; his voice cracked at the end of the sentence and, after too long a pause to swallow, he added, "Sir."

There followed a silence so long and heavy that Lip wondered if Speirs had somehow fallen asleep standing up, with his eyes open and his hand still clenched over Lip's kneecaps. He wouldn't have put it past him. But it was not the case, and Speirs roused himself from whatever reverie had detained him, and gave Lip one of those impenetrable smiles he'd been offering recently. Y'had to wonder if he'd been taking lessons from Captain Winters – he was the only other person Lip could think of who smiled like that - and he'd not quite gotten it right. Winters gave these warm half-smiles that made you feel like you'd done your best and you were gonna go on doing even better than your best, just to make sure his confidence in you wasn't misplaced. Speirs … Lieutenant Speirs made you uneasy and relaxed at the same time. Sometimes one of those brief smiles was a reassurance that whatever it was he'd been thinking about, it wasn't kicking your ass; sometimes it was like he was wondering whether or not he could get away with serving you up as company dinner. That was the right word: hungry.

Y'had to wonder, lying on this stupidly soft bed, that hand giving his knee a friendly and reassuring squeeze, whether he smiled like that at anyone else. Probably. Probably he'd smiled this quick, sharp smile at anyone who'd warranted it, and it was only fever that made him think it made Speirs look like a half-starved fox faced with a plate of pork.

"Okay, Sergeant?" Speirs was frowning at him. "Thought you were going to pass out for a minute there."

"Okay as any other man," Lip said, giving Spiers his wryest smile and his hoarsest voice, trying to straighten his shoulders while flat on his back. Better than Frank Perconte, still limping around with his ass wound and refusing to sit down – not, of course, that he actually could. "Thumping fit, sir." He was rewarded with a snort and a hand on his forehead, testing his temperature with all the diligence of someone's mom.

Hard to say whether the hand was warm and his head cold, as it felt at first, or his head boiling and the hand mercifully cold, as it more likely was. Either way he knew he kind of wanted it to stay there, a small patch of sensible heat against the ravages of whatever it was that was gluing him to the sheets. Because goddamn but this sickness was making him selfish. Trying to make the Lieutenant stay put when he should be sleeping.

"You have some funny idea of 'fit for service'," Speirs informed him, his hand pressed against Lip's forehead still, "burning up like that."

"Maybe if I was at home I'd take to bed and lie around grousing," Lip said more pointedly than he meant to. "But the men need me here –"

"And the officers," Speirs said quietly, giving him another lightning-fast smile that, this time, even reached his eyes and shed some of the deadness that usually filmed them. "A good NCO is hard to come by." He looked like he was going to say something else, but cut it off. Lip's cheeks felt rosy. "High fever or blushing like a girl." His hand did not move.

Lipton averted his gaze.

Speirs' hand was above his knee now.

"I shouldn't be depriving you of a bed," Lip croaked, eventually.

Speirs gave him an unreadable look – and damn, was he good at those – and said, "I thought I told you that you were sleeping in the bed, Sergeant. Didn't I make myself clear?"

"Actually, sir, you said I was sick."

"Aren't you?"

Lip conceded that he might be, still shivering under the warmth of his uniform, these borrowed blankets and the weight of Lieutenant Speirs, who was now half-sitting on the edge of the bed. He might be, with his skin clammy and his mouth drier than road grit.

"Then you are sleeping in the bed, Sergeant Lipton." Speirs jerked another incomprehensible smile onto his face and added ahead of Lip's protest, "And that's an order. Getting out of bed for any reason before dawn - besides pissing - will result in dire sanctions. I expect my NCOs to set an example." Only the tiniest twitch at the corner of his mouth said that he wasn't entirely serious; the way his thumb fell from beside his hand and tentatively, surreptitiously stroked Lip's eyebrow said something else. It said something Lip wanted to claim he didn't understand, even though he understood very well. He understood military prison and court-martial pretty damn well too.

What he should have done was turn his head away and pretend to fall asleep: so that anything that happened wouldn't be his fault, so that if conscience started pricking Speirs could claim he was a liar that much more effectively. But what he did do was to breathe out, sinking deeper into the bed, and look the company C.O. in the eye, hoping his assent was visible in his face, hoping that it wasn't.

For too long a moment he thought he'd imagined it – Speirs sat stone still, his thumb unmoving over the point of Lip's eyebrow; downstairs someone coughed, knocked over a tin mug, and woke up whoever else was sleeping down there. They listened in motionless silence as undefined voices grumbled and griped at each other, slowly disappearing back into breathy speechlessness, the even, hushed air of sleeping soldiers. Speirs's thumb resumed the same startlingly tender arc over Lip's eyebrow, and he lowered his face to Lipton's ear. In a whisper so low that it could have been mistaken for the rustle of clothes, the Easy Company C.O. murmured to his First Sergeant.

"You'd better be sure you want this."

Lip thought his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. His vocal cords didn't seem capable of giving an answer – yes and no were both unthinkable, the consequences of either appalling – and so he said nothing, his breath faster and his heart seem louder than it had been through any amount of shelling.

Speirs looked searchingly at him, decoding the set of his jaw and the slackness of his mouth. He reached the right conclusion, and the wrong one; the answer that appeased the mounting pressure in Lip's throat and belly and made his heart beat so that he thought they must be able to hear it in Berlin.

Ronald Speirs had lips like a boy half his age, a slight pout and a little too much of a curve in the upper to look as masculine as anyone reading his service record might expect. They tasted of coffee and sleep, unbrushed teeth and awkwardness. Carwood Lipton had lips that were made, right now, to be kissing them. He was giddy, now, Speirs' hands – hand, the other was even higher up his leg – against his cheek, and it was the fever that made him dizzy, it was the fever doing all of this.

Their noses bumped, their teeth clashed, Speirs' stubble felt abominable against Lip's, like it might start a fire … and it was the fifth, maybe the sixth, kiss he'd ever had in his life. The first to make him drop his jaw like a whore's drawers and act all passive while someone else pushed their way into his mouth; the first to make him mount a counter-attack that made his kissing partner groan. Come to that, he'd never heard a man groan before, except in pain or because Luz had told them a joke - not that pain and George Luz's impersonations weren't pretty darn close to each other.

But he was hearing the sound now, muffled by his own mouth, his own tongue, and he reckoned maybe half of this low, rumbling of lust was coming from him and not Speirs. Speirs who was kissing much like he smiled, fast and hungry, his teeth unexpectedly sharp against Lipton's lower lip. Speirs whose hand was groping blindly now through the blankets and layers of woollen clothing over his dick, just enough pressure reaching him through all that to stir it up – like the kissing hadn't been enough – and make him hard.

Lip wanted to jerk the blankets away - fuck being sick - and feel Ron Speirs, lithe and strong and unfathomable, moving against him. He wanted to clamp the blankets around his head and pretend none of this was happening, that this was another horrifying fever-dream and that any minute now he'd wake up. His hips, answering to a different drummer, rose up against the palm of Speirs's hand.

And now he was shaking as well as shivering, his breath coming in thick, deep gasps that finally reached the bottom of his lungs, his nose clear out of sheer willpower, because hell if he was going to take his mouth off Speirs's for something as trivial as breathing. He sat up, holding Speirs's face as his was held, but both hands cupping his jaw, his neck, the rough beginnings of a beard scraping the calluses on his hands and urging him on.

As it turned out, he didn't need to struggle free of the blankets – Speirs grew impatient with them and tossed them on the floor with an inelegant kick, twisting to be sure he did not have to slide his tongue free of Lip's mouth. The next few moments were a flurry of sensation, and no matter how he wanted to remember them in detail all he could grasp of it was that he was still clothed, his whole body pressed against Speirs, and then there was a kind of horizontal dance, a grinding of hips and a clutching of upper arms and shoulders, and that he was so goddamned horny that he was starting to lose control of his mouth. Starting to mutter thankfully mangled endearments, pleading requests, anything, anything, into that clever mouth. Half of this barrage turned to wordless moaning; the other half was swallowed down in the crush of lips against his mouth, and his hips had a mind of their own, and Speirs was like a goddamned six foot eel against him. His uniform seemed to grow nerve endings and every brush against it made his stomach knot itself up even more.

And then the shaking and the feverish shivering was over, and he was gonna have to scrounge a cloth tomorrow morning. All too soon, Speirs gave him a final, almost chaste kiss – certainly compared to the ones they had been exchanging – on his half-open lips and slipped back onto the floor. Handed him his blankets with an almost rueful look and stretched back out on the carpet.

"You do know what this means," he said, as Lip pulled the blankets around himself and tried not to think.

"Nothing?" Lip hazarded, turning to face the wall.

"Yes," Speirs said firmly, closing his eyes. "Nothing. Nothing changes."

He didn't need to add that it was an order. He didn't need to add that it could never happen again. He didn't need to tell Lipton he needed to forget. Whatever else he was (and he wasn't sure now that he knew), First Sergeant Carwood Lipton was not stupid.

He fell into a deep sleep. In the morning, his fever had broken, his energy had returned. He went to the medical officer, who could not believe the improvement. The doctor called it a miracle.
Band of Brothers, "The Patrol", pg 224.

Band of Brothers (1)

Thu, 31 May 2007 16:57:29 GMT

Title: “Three Things That Never Happened To Lewis Nixon And Certainly Not In This Order”
Pairing: Winters/Nixon
Rating: PG-13? I’m useless at ratings.
Word Count: 1,348 (including subheadings)
Disclaimer: Oh, you know it. This is speculative fiction derived from the television series and is not meant as any kind of realistic depiction of or insult to the real men of Easy Company, etc, etc.

one: letter

Of course he doesn’t know, when he picks up the envelope and sees the postmark, that it means anything other than what it usually means; stories from home. Maybe a photograph. So he opens it in no particular hurry, unfolds it over an unsatisfactory breakfast (aren’t they all?) and reads it with the last hard crumbs still clinging to his teeth.

He’s doing fine until he gets to the part where she calls him Lew and he knows something’s up.

I was cleaning behind the trunk in the spare room

What the hell for?

And I think I found something of yours.

Ah.

I know it was a long time ago, Lew, so I guess I don’t see why you’d be keeping them still. I know she was just some girl from a real long time ago, but … I wish I hadn’t found them. It makes me ask all sorts of questions I didn’t want to think about.

Then why the hell was she cleaning down the back of the trunk in the spare room? Who in their right mind does that? He doesn’t realise he’s pacing, doesn’t realise that across the wooden floor Dick is giving him a half-concerned smile, doesn’t really notice much besides the next sentence:

But I thought about it, Lew, and I think I forgive you. I mean, it was a real long time ago, and it’s me you married. So I guess I don’t mind so much.

He’s not sure whether he’s relieved or angry. He settles for a compromise, goes for drunk. Shoos Dick off his own footlocker and hauls the bottle from it with one hand, trying without success to fold the letter with his free one.

“Good news?” Dick asks, watching the piece of paper whir uselessly in the air as Lew manages much more successfully at one-handed bottle-unscrewing. But then, he’s done that before.

“I don’t know,” Nix admits, drinking straight from the bottle. “I don’t know.”

two: rifle

He is not paying attention as he rounds the corner, and later he will kick himself for this. The woods are silent and Christmas-cake white, studded with ghostlike firs and shivering men hidden like hibernating bears beneath too-thin blankets. He’s thinking about a lot of things, sure, but none of them relate to the path in front of him and really most of them are wondering if he has any cigarettes left.

So he’s not keeping a close eye on what’s going on around him, which is okay, because in the eerie silence and smothered paths and the falling snow anyone making a movement would stick out a mile, and perhaps he’s got enough tobacco left at the bottom of the paper packet to roll one. His hands are cold. The air’s like knives, and he pulls his scarf up over his mouth to warm it before it hits his lungs.

At first he doesn’t register what he’s seeing, so sudden is the shock. Two glass-blue eyes staring at him from two feet way, maybe less. Close enough to bayonet him right in the guts. The German’s hands aren’t holding a bayonet, just two sheets of paper, and he’s got that startled-rabbit look that says he’s been interrupted sneaking off to whatever passes for the little boys’ room out here.

Lewis Nixon takes all this in, in under a minute. Time stretches like taffy, and he sees the snowflakes caught in the kid’s eyelashes – because he can’t be any older than eighteen, look at him, he hasn’t even the slightest suggestion of stubble or the scrapings of a razor - and Nix’s eyes take this in, takes in the dilated pupils and knows that they are both frozen like this, frozen in time like a pair of goddamned icicles, because one of them has to die.

He doesn’t want to die.

The hands that raise his rifle don’t feel like his own. The cold click of metal on metal comes from so far away he is not certain that he is hearing it at all. The deafening blast that shatters the Christmas-card woods and the silence and douses him – too close to use a fucking rifle, of course – with the German kid and his … comic book pages … that’s real, though. That’s so real there’s no room for anything else to be real again for a real long time, and he finds himself trotting forwards, his breath hanging in the air in waves, before he knows it.

When he arrives back at the officer’s tent Dick is reading a report. He can tell by the change in his friend’s face that something has changed about him.

“Nix,” Dick says softly.

Nix tries to look enquiring but can’t get the muscles in his face to play along.

“You have blood on your face.”

three: respite

Lewis Nixon will never know just how much like a gargoyle he looks, squatting up to his armpits in blessedly hot water and scowling at the air in front of him like it’s personally responsible for the entire war. The church decoration pose is offset by the bottle dangling from his right hand, outside of the bath, but not by much. He runs his hand through his too-long-in-need-of-cutting black hair and it stays when he lets his hand drop. Just stays, unlike every-fucking-thing else. He swings the bottle up, swig, and down again without thinking about it.

“You’re supposed to be pleased that you’re not being shot at,” Dick says, by way of introduction.

Nix doesn’t look up. “I don’t get shot at.”

“That’s right.” Dick offers, closer to the bath. “Rub it in.”

Nix looks up now, briefly. Dick is shirtless, working on the complicated business of removing his trousers. His arms and chest are paler than the whites of Nix’s eyes, though less bloodshot. Hah. Nix finds himself counting freckles and stops himself with another drink; they’re not landmarks, they’re not troops. They don’t need reports made on them. Thank God.

“Move along,” Dick says, naked as a baby and paler than the shade of Death.

“There’s enough hot water for two baths,” Nix says, as reflexive as the swing of his bottle.

“But not for two baths and showers for the men.” Dick has already dropped to a crouch, to sit, his legs sliding the length of the enamel on either side of Nix.

Nix has to concede that he has a point. He sighs and swings his bottle up again, but it never makes it to his mouth. The neck, and his fingers, are caught in Dick’s hand, and he hasn’t the heart to pull. He looks to his friend to frown, and Dick gives him a tiny disapproving quirk of the mouth. “Not in the bath, Nix.”

He lets the bottle drop to the floor (and damn right it lands on the base and doesn’t spill any or crack, he’s not stupid) and rocks his weight back onto the balls of his feet. Hot water on his muscles, uncoiling the aches and stripping the sweat with steam.

Dick’s shut his eyes and he’s letting the warmth reduce him to bonelessness. Nix envies him, right there; how he can relax so completely without a single drink and how Nix is sitting still stiff and sore after four. Or five. Perhaps it was six.

He looks down the length of the bath at Dick’s half-asleep smile and his arms, draped over the curved edges of the bath, and his chest, dog tags floating in front of it like heralds. Wants, without warning or reason, to rest his head there and soak up the calm, like it’s transferred by osmosis. Like he can just putting his head against Dick’s collarbone and then he’ll be just as peaceful, for a minute. Right now.

Nix sits back on his heels and runs his hand through his hair again and watches Dick’s chest rise and fall slowly and he says nothing and he does nothing and …

“What are you waiting for?” Dick asks from mostly-closed lips and mostly-closed eyes.

Fair warning.

Thu, 31 May 2007 16:53:48 GMT

I am about to spam the shit out of this journal with fanfic. Apologies in advance.

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:03:12 GMT

YOU try explaining to people that you're moping because Brutus is dead.

Since LJ is still down and I need to make sure these are up somewhere

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 21:06:06 GMT

Fri, 22 Oct 2004 17:39:22 GMT

Why is everyone creating troll journals and hating on each other? Some sort of freakish astrological misalignment?