HOIST THE COLOURS, MOTHERFUCKERS!

AI Fic: Don't Know When I'll Be Back Again (5/5)

2009-11-22T00:23:06Z

Continued from Part Four

David stretched, or started to. He paused when his fingers encountered warm skin, and opened his eyes. Archuleta’s eyes were already open. Somehow while sleeping they had rolled towards each other until they were only a few inches apart, and face to face.

“You have really pretty eyes,” David said without thinking. He expected Archuleta to leap back as if he had been scalded and stammer, not reach out and punch David hard in the shoulder. “Ow! You definitely learned that from Iraheta.”

“You’re funny when you’ve just woken up,” Archuleta said, smiling. He rolled away, stretched, and sat up. After a few more seconds of squirming and wriggling to wake the rest of his body up, David followed. He saw Kristy Lee lying very still and small on the opposite side of the fire, and thought that he was going to choke on one of those possibly broken ribs that he was carrying around.

“She’s still here,” Chikezie said. He sounded utterly wrung out; David wondered if he had even slept at all before he looked at the dark smudges under Chikezie’s eyes and realized that he’d be an idiot if he seriously needed to ask.

“You should have woken me up,” David said as he pushed himself up to his feet. Archuleta paused briefly by Kristy Lee--she confirmed that she was in fact alive and that Chikezie had not made a sleep-starved mistake by turning over and saying something to him in return--before he went down to the shore to splash some of the sleep off of himself. David watched him. Chikezie watched David.

“Don’t.” David raised his hand in warning.

“Not going to say a word.” Chikezie stretched and then put yet more wood on the fire, which was already burning so high and hot that it singed their forearms to get too close to it. He tilted his face up towards the clear, blameless sky as he did so, which was empty and blank as a china doll’s face. He sighed.

“Archie and I can try to find some more crabs today,” David assured him. The food had sharpened his head, made him feel stronger, but he already thought that he could still eat his weight in more without making a dent in his appetite.

“We ought to start thinking about produce, too,” Chikezie said. He threw down the stick he had been using as if he was suddenly disgusted by it. “Or else we’re all going to find our teeth falling out if we wind up here too much longer.”

“Archie and I can do that, too,” David said. “Since...”

“Since someone should probably stay here with Kristy,” Chikezie finished. He pursed his lips up towards the sky as if he was torn between cursing at it and a fear that doing so might jinx their chances of being seen by any plane that might be hiding up there.

“I’m not dead yet,” Kristy Lee snapped suddenly, pushing herself up onto her elbows and glaring at them both. David jumped; he had thought that she had gone back to sleep, she had been so still and quiet. Her arched eyebrow told him that he wasn’t fooling anyone.

“Sorry,” David said, but he grinned a little all the same. “I’ll grab Archie, we’ll head out before it gets too hot.”

“Might want to put your shirt back on, too,” Chikezie said mildly. “You’re fucking blinding all of us.”

“Ha, ha, fuck you.” David grabbed his shirt, shook it out in case there were any crab bits lingering inside that they hadn’t noticed the night before, and headed down to the water to rinse it all the same.

“You can always take if off again if you and Archuleta find yourself in a cozy nook out there.”

“Oh, fuck you sideways.” But David was grinning slightly as he dipped his shirt into the water, and still didn’t lose the grin even when he thought that he heard something and jerked his head up hard to scan the sky above them. It was clear.

*
By the middle of the day, thick, cottony gray clouds were swirling across the sky again, looking like a child’s finger painting against the blue. It changed the light that came down through the canopy, made it more sullen even if David couldn’t see that the clouds were doing a damned thing for the heat, and made David want to do nothing so much as swear up at the trees as if that was going to make a difference. He even caught Archuleta glaring upwards once or twice with his lips moving in patterns that David highly doubted were new song lyrics. They marched through the jungle some half-dozen yards apart, speaking little as they kept their eyes peeled for fruit trees, berries, anything that looked as if it could be eaten. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable; they often crossed close enough together again for their arms to touch when the thicket became too heavy.

“We’re close to the plane,” Archuleta said, startling David into leaving the ground by a few inches. They hadn’t spoken for nearly an hour, and David had gotten so used to hearing nothing more than the birds overhead and the rustlings of small animals through the ferns around and branches overhead that he had nearly forgotten that the two of the had voices at all. Archuleta laughed softly. That echoed like birdsong, too. “Sorry.”

“You’re fine.” David rubbed his hand over his face. He had stubble long enough to make a rasping noise against his palm, and to itch in the jungle swelter. “Jesus, you get into an altered state out here, don’t you? Now I know why people use sweat lodges.” He saw that Archuleta was looking off in the direction of the plane, marked by the broken underbrush that still had sap hanging from their ends.

“I want to go see it,” Archuleta said firmly.

“There’s nothing in there to see, kid,” David said firmly. He didn’t realize that he had fallen back into the old nickname until he saw Archuleta giving him a sideways look that was about as close to a glare as he ever came, but he still shook his head. “Trust me, Chikezie and I were in there twice, there’s not anything left that could possibly be salvaged. We looked.”

“That’s not why I want to see it.” Archuleta had only been in the plane for a few moments before he had abruptly left again on the night of the crash, David remembered now.

“Oh,” he said softly. “Yeah, sure. We can do that.” The corners of Archuleta’s mouth curved up slightly, almost gratefully, though he strode off down the path in a way that made it very clear that David’s permission wasn’t even an afterthought. As David followed, the sky finally opened up on the promises that it had been making virtually all morning long.

“Oh, motherfuck,” David blurted. He was nearly glad that the sky was doing the crying for him, since there was little doubt that he was going to give vent to it again just as soon as he had to look at the bodies, but being soaked through and through in the meanwhile wasn’t exactly what he would have called a capper to even the days that they were getting used to here. He broke into a run and caught up with Archuleta, who was himself just ducking to dive into the half of the plane with Carly and Michael. It smelled. It had not smelled like that even the day before; David’s feet stuttered before he could stop himself, and he didn’t want to go in there more than he had not wanted to do anything in his entire life. However, he wanted to let Archuleta dive into that charnel house alone even less, so he made his feet make up their goddamned mind already. It was dark inside with the rain falling down in one heavy sheet, so dark that David could only make out Archuleta by the way that his shoulders were moving with his panting breaths. That, and the faint outline of something else moving on the opposite side of the plane.

Where Michael and Carly were. David didn’t stop to breathe, let alone to actually think. He lunged across the cabin, barely registering that his feet were crunching across the glass from the shattered bathroom mirror, and heard a startled flapping of wings.

“Get out of here!” David yelled--nearly screamed. His throat would ache hours afterwards from the force of it, when he had actually calmed down enough to notice. The biggest, ugliest looking black bird that David had ever seen in his life, the color of spilled ink save for a rusty, sickly corona of red feathers about its head and neck, leapt back from the chair where it had just been starting to investigate the blanket that had been covering fucking Carly and squawked at David in a mixture of fear and rage. He screamed back at it without bothering to form words. The bird squawked again, hopped forward, attempted to dart to the side when it was clear that David was not going to let it pass into escape. He tried to jump sideways in order to keep the bird from getting out and around him, too, intent on doing nothing so much as wringing its ugly, mite-bitten neck for even daring to go near David’s friends.

We should have fucking buried them, David told himself. We should have dug the holes with our bare fucking hands, we should have found a way. He wasn’t going to leave this cabin again until they were rescued, if that was what it was going to take to keep his friends safe. He would wear himself right the fuck out doing wind-sprints between the planes until the tropical heat felled him. David felt Archuleta pulling at his arm and shoulder, and pulling hard enough that David nearly tumbled over backwards. It still took him more than a second to remember that Archie had been in the plane with him at all, and it was a second in which Archuleta very nearly got socked in the mouth for his trouble. David would never tell him that.

“Cook, come on, you’re going to get hurt!” Archuleta finally succeeded in wrenching David back and out of the bird’s way whether he wanted to come along or not, mere seconds before David’s forearm would have been laid open by a set of talons that didn’t look like they were any kind of joke, even in the darkened interior where they were lucky if they could pick out a silhouette. Shrieking the entire way, the bird unfurled its wings and flew back out into the jungle again, where the rain was stopping just like someone up above the canopy had turned off a switch. A few timid rays of sunlight reached back down for the floor.

David was in no mood for optimistic symbolism. “You should have let me break its goddamned neck,” he snarled in a voice that barely even sounded human, let alone like himself.

“And then you could have gotten cut up and infected like Kristy Lee, that would have been awesome.” Sarcasm. Archuleta had somewhere along the way learned actual sarcasm. And a damned fine innocent expression, going by the way that he managed to withstand David’s glare without even raising his eyebrow.

“Iraheta definitely taught you that,” David said. He wiped his hand over his face and was not certain whether he was clearing away sweat or tears. “I’m going to have to have a word with her.” Archuleta had begun moving quietly about the cabin. “What are you doing?”

Allison had definitely also taught Archuleta how to look at a person as if they were the single stupidest creature on the face of the planet and it was a wonder that he liked them and still manage to make it look cute, there was no other explanation for it. “I’m looking for something to bury them,” Archuleta said. David couldn’t see Archie’s throat moving up and down in the gloom, but it was still a pause that he knew well before Archuleta went on, “And the other half, too. You’re right, we can’t leave them like this.”

“Chikezie and I already went over the plane,” David said.

“Then you weren’t looking hard enough.” It was said with a quiet determination that dared David to argue with him. Nope, not against that immovable object, he decided, whatever irresistible force that he managed to muster was clearly not going to be able to stand a chance. He was just considering whether frustration and grief would be enough to make him Hulk right the fuck out and wrench one of the seats from the floor when Archuleta blurted out the first obscenity that David had ever heard him speak.

“Holy shit, I didn’t think you could actually do that.” David straightened and stared, and then stared some more when Archuleta hissed, “Shut up, oh my gosh,” at him while standing as stock-still as a statue at the entrance to the cabin. No, not quite, David corrected himself a second later. Statues didn’t quiver with their entire bodies as if they didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Seeing that Archuleta’s head was tilted just slightly to one side, David did the same, and heard a slight humming from way, way up in the sky.

“Oh, Jesus fuck me,” he blurted out.

“That’s a little much,” Archuleta pointed out, and then let out a startled, joyous yelp when David bodily lifted him up from the ground--no small feat, since Archuleta was always going to be short and a little wiry, but the same size he had been when they had met he was certainly not--and kissed him hard. “The plane, the plane,” Archuleta finally squirmed back far enough to mutter, and grinned when David snorted so hard that he thought he was going to hurt himself so that he would not start laughing hysterically.

“No, wait!” Oh, it couldn’t be, it couldn’t possibly fucking be, the universe was a bastard sometimes, but even it wasn’t this cruel. “The rain will have put out the fire, it’ll take Kristy Lee and Chikezie a while to get it high again.” Archuleta said the second obscenity that David had ever heard from him in his life. “Yeah, that.” He thought that he could double over and spill rancid crab across his shoes. David was sure that this was what Archuleta was actually already doing when he saw him abruptly bend over and start scrounging against the cabin floor. Something gleamed in Archuleta’s hand.

“You are the smartest person who has ever walked the entire planet,” David said breathlessly as he bent to scoop up several pieces of mirror himself without pausing to give a fuck that his fingers and palms were getting cut. Maybe this would fail and he would get infected the way that Kristy Lee had. In that case, David guessed that they were all going to die out here, one way or another, and the exact date didn’t matter so much.

The heat meant nothing, David and Archuleta went pelting out of the cabin and through the jungle at dead sprints, whooping and hollering up at the sky even though there was no chance that the pilot of the plane was going to be able to hear them. David’s throat felt so tight that he was amazing that he could force out any sound at all, let alone a yell. It made any nervousness that he had ever felt before stepping out onto his first stages as a teenager, and then his first stage on Idol, look small and ridiculous by comparison.

Their legs made it to the beach; they were led by the sounds of Chikezie and Kristy Lee screaming, also. David burst out of the jungle cover to see that the two of them were alternating between running up and down the beach and trying desperately to get the signal fire lit again. Kristy Lee was shrieking and flashing her compact at the outlines of a plane that could just barely be seen through the wisps of clouds that refused to let the sun scrub them away.

“Here!” David yelled. He threw a few of the spare pieces of mirror in Kristy Lee’s and Chikezie’s general directions and then followed Archuleta further out onto the beach, screaming and flashing the shards that he had left over his head. The mechanical whine sounded as if it was coming from farther away now; David was sure that he was going to double over and be sick. “Don’t, oh, don’t, please, you pretty thing--” The whine arced back around and dipped lower. David still wasn’t sure that he wasn’t hallucinating until he saw a small plane dip below the clouds, dip its wings at them, and then disappear again. A few seconds later, it was back, flying much lower.

David sat down on the sand as if all of the bones in his legs had been broken and screamed out a pure and animal sound of victory.

*
The plane disappeared long enough to alert a ship. When the four of them were brought aboard, David was later told that he fought with the captain, verbally, and almost physically, until the captain agreed to send a group of men back to get the bodies of everyone who had died immediately rather than sending a later party. David did not remember doing this. He was still not surprised.

*
David had the curtains drawn on his hospital room in Fiji. He could still see peeks of camera flashes coming in around the fabric, and more than once thought that he heard a helicopter. The outer facade of a hospital must be more fascinating than he had realized.

“Well, yeah,” Chikezie said from the chair beside David’s hospital bed. He was speaking very softly; David’s mother was sitting in the opposite chair, her head pillowed on her hand and breathing deeply. It was the first time that David had seen her sleep since her arrival. He hadn’t realized that he had spoken at all; they were giving him some pretty excellent pain meds for the damage that he had done to his hand and what turned out to be three separate broken ribs and a mediocre concussion. (David had initially refused to believe that he had anything short of a fractured skull, but the faces of the doctors as they had laid out his odds of surviving three days without medical treatment then had changed his mind.) He was going to leave some bitching scars, but no one within the hospital thought the damage was going to stop him from playing guitar. “They were calling it. They think we came back from the dead.”

“You snuck out again,” David said by way of answer. Chikezie still had his IV attached and standing docilely beside his chair, and a wide smile as his response. Since Archuleta’s and Chikezie’s primary ailments had been mild dehydration and raging hunger, the staff of the hospital who were already dealing with an unprecedented level of chaos in managing the crowd of press outside were keeping a much laxer eye upon them when it came to making them stay in their rooms. Chikezie in particular was taking full advantage of that; David had only seen Archuleta a few times since they had been whisked apart on the boat, and never alone.

If he was feeling a little ill-done by and altogether way too much like a jilted adolescent, David told himself, then it was only because he was attached to an insanely efficient morphine pump, and this particular cocktail apparently made him more maudlin than several shots of tequila.

“Had to make my rounds,” Chikezie said. He stretched out his legs in front of him to get more comfortable, accidentally bumping the chair of David’s mother in the process. She stirred; they both watched her until she settled down again without showing any signs of waking up. David was frankly amazed that Chikezie’s mother hadn’t found him yet; she had thus far proven herself to be much more capable than the nurses in discovering when her son had run off and bringing him back again.

“You were doing that on the island, too,” David murmured, as if Chikezie had somehow forgotten. “Keeping us safe. Thank you.”

Chikezie shrugged and lost the smile. “Told you. Just leftover boy scout training.”

“Dude, if they don’t give you an endorsement deal after this, you should sue.” David waited a few moments, fiddled with his hand to see how far he could flex it, cursed when it proved to be not very far.

“Dumbass,” Chikezie interjected mildly.

“Shut up.” David straightened out his hand again and asked, “How’s Kristy Lee doing?” He had not, thus far, shown any skill at all in getting farther than the door before he was caught again.

Chikezie sighed and leaned his head back against his chair. “Her fever’s coming down,” he said. “And they’re pumping her full of so many antibiotics that she probably won’t go into full sepsis. But she’s going to lose two of her fingers.”

“Fuck.” David fiddled with his own IV line. A hand reached out and tugged his wrist away: his mother. She had faded out again within seconds. David stared at her and said, “It’s amazing how they can do that, isn’t it?” There had been a very real possibility that he never would have seen her again. David knew that he cried at everything, but come the fuck on; he looked up at the ceiling and counted on Chikezie being gentleman enough not to mention it. It helped that when he glanced over, Chikezie didn’t look entirely stoic, himself.

“And on that note, mine will be water boarding doctors if I don’t get back soon.” He pushed himself up from his chair.

“No, she sent me to do it.” A man slightly younger than Chikezie and wearing the same eyes was standing in the entry to David’s room. Obinna barely let Chikezie get to him before he punched him in the shoulder and then hugged him hard. David had a feeling that it would be weeks, months, before the random clutching of family members ceased. “You only go one of three places, anyway, so it’s not hard.”

“If the music thing doesn’t work out,” David told Chikezie’s brother solemnly, “he’s considering a career in medicine. Respectability!” Obinna crinkled his eyes at him.

“He’s kind of stoned right now,” Chikezie told Obinna. “Believe it or not, I’ve gotten more record offers in the last thirty-six hours than I did in the past three years. Guess living through a minor miracle skyrockets your marketability.” He covered the rolling of the eyes; David covered the making of the face. Going quieter, Chikezie added, “Kristy Lee’s not going to be out of here for awhile. The bodies are already back in the US and everyone’s families are putting together the funerals--” David abruptly had to look at the ceiling again. “But Todd called me, said that he was talking to Syesha’s and Jason’s parents and they were maybe going to do a second, group memorial. For us, so we can be there.”

David was never going to be able to stop looking at that damned ceiling again for as long as he lived. His voice was still too hoarse to fool anyone, he knew, as he said, “Thanks. I’ll call him, too, and thank him.” He had already gone through several messages on Drew’s phone from the guys, all of them admonishing him for giving them a vacation at long last and then nearly getting himself killed, all of them failing to hide their relief with varying degrees of theatricality. He had a long list of calls that he needed to return, just as soon as he got off the mescaline-laced morphine.

“And just so you know,” Chikezie told David as he was finally unable to resist his sister’s attempts to drag him off any longer, “Archie would have been in here hours ago, but his family’s worse than mine, and that’s no joke.”

“Oh, shut your mouth,” David could still hear Obinna telling Chikezie fondly as they walked off together. “Or I won’t let you detour into Kristy Lee’s room again.” Chikezie didn’t have to answer verbally: sibling mortification was like a pheromone.

David sighed. For all that he had been forced to realize that Archuleta wasn’t a kid any longer, there were still times when he deeply, dearly wished that he could still be one. The second sigh was more ragged at the end than the first.

“Oh, sweetheart.” He had no idea how long his mother had actually been awake and simply choosing not to speak, but he doubted that he could have hid anything from her, anyway. “Come here.” Grown man or not, David still let her wrap her arms around him while he cried for his friends.

*
It hadn’t been the morphine. David still felt ragged and badly put-together two days later when he was released from the IV and told that he could now make his travel plans to get back to the US, the hospital was sufficiently convinced that he was not going to drop dead the very second that he stopped having at least three different beeping machines hooked up to him at any given time. His management was hinting, and then eventually outright stating, that he needed to get a statement out as soon as possible, either in Los Angeles or in Fiji, but David found himself digging in his heels for two separate reasons. Firstly, because the mere thought of getting back onto a plane yet--maybe getting back onto a plane ever--made him want to reach for a bottle of booze large enough to put all of Neal’s stumbling blackouts to shame, and secondly because Kristy Lee had had her surgery the day before and was in no condition to go before the press yet, and even without speaking about it the four of them had come to an agreement: whatever they said on the matter of the island, they were going to say it together.

Which left David wandering the hallways of the hospital at three a.m. in civilian clothes, his sneakered feet making nearly no sound over the floor that smelled like antiseptic and gleamed like the sand on the island had. They had only been there for a few days, David reminded himself. They hadn’t had time to settle in and feel what real survival would have been like. He still caught himself expecting to see the sea rocking from the corner of his eye, and both wanting to avoid the airport at all costs and slap down his credit card for the next available flight. He might be able to make it back to the states in time for the funerals, if he didn’t mind leaving everyone behind here. David guessed that he should not have been shocked when his feet took him towards Kristy Lee’s room rather than the exit, the paparazzi, and the car.

Kristy Lee had been either asleep or so groggy that conversation had been impossible every time that David had sat with her during the day; this late at night, he thought for certain that it would have been the same. She was sitting up in her bed, though, and staring down at her hand. Even under the bandages, David could tell that it was not quite the shape that it had been before. She was pale and had dark circles under her eyes that made her look as if she had been in a bar fight; since the hair at her temples was no longer slicked with sweat and he could no longer swear that he was seeing the actual seams in her school, she was as pretty as any model. David knocked on the doorframe before he entered, but she still jumped.

“Ow,” Kristy Lee said mildly. She bent her head so that she could examine the place where the IV needle had pulled against her flesh, while David felt his eyebrows crawling up towards his hairline. Whatever the doctors and nurses had had him on a few days before, it was clearly nothing compared to what Kristy Lee was enjoying.

“Sorry,” David said. He drew one of the room’s chairs up close to her bed. “I wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Well.” Kristy Lee looked back down at her hand. Emotions crossed her face like the pages of a book fluttering before she settled on a certain wry humor and said, “I was going to ask you to teach me how to play guitar in Sydney, too. I was going to see if it could get me a record deal.”

“You could play bongos still,” David put forth cautiously. He was not certain if he was going too far or not, but Kristy Lee let out a delighted peal of laughter and put her hand over her mouth. A nurse stuck his head in a moment later; they both waved.

“I could,” Kristy Lee admitted. “I could still do that.” She eyeballed David. “Do you know that RCA has actually been calling me again?”

“Tell me you didn’t.”

“Oh, hell no, fool me once and all that jazz. Got all of the yelling out of my system while I could still blame it on the painkillers.” Kristy Lee settled more deeply against her pillow and said, “What are you doing here, David? You could have visited me in the morning.”

“I wanted to make certain that you were really going to wake up,” David admitted. “You won’t ever have any idea how much you were scaring the crap out of us out there, Kristy.”

“Oh, I think that I have an idea,” Kristy Lee said in a low voice. She pondered her bandaged hand for a few more moments before she said, “Bet Archie’s staying at the same swank hotel you and Chikezie are.”

“Probably.” David looked at her sideways. Kristy Lee beamed at him. “So, subtle we were not being, is what you’re telling me.”

“David Cook, I might have been running about one-oh-four by the time that you guys brought back food, but I know what someone looks like when they’ve been kissin’.” She was probably going to blame her impish delight on the painkillers in the morning, too. On impulse, David leaned in and hugged her hard, noting as he did so that her skin was finally back to a normal human warmth. She didn’t hesitate before she hugged him back, hard. As much as the Top Ten of their season had all been family by the time that they had been shoved out into the world to scatter in their separate directions, a shared last name had never made him and Kristy Lee particularly close. Doubtless they weren’t going to stop clinging to one another like baby monkeys any time soon now, though.

“Brat,” David said. He pulled at the end of her ponytail before he released her and stood. “Okay, fine. I gotta get back, anyway, before my family sends out--” That joke wasn’t funny and never would be again. David swallowed it back, saw on Kristy Lee’s face that she felt the same way, and shrugged. “I gotta get back.”

“See you in the morning,” Kristy Lee said softly. A little more of her classic stubbornness returned with the set of her jaw and a, “And we’ll both be here in the morning, thank you very much.”

David walked down the near-silent and deserted halls of the hospital, waved thanks to the nurses who had turned a blind eye while he had been slipping through so far after visiting hours in the first place, and encountered the flashing wall of flashbulbs and shouts again as soon as he stepped out the supposedly quieter back entrance of the hospital. There had to be a car buried in their somewhere, David knew that this was where he had left it.

“You guys have to be using a police scanner,” David said amiably as the driver provided by 19E finally reached him and took his elbow to help him through. Half-blinded by the aggressive cameras after the dimmed lights inside, David was grateful for the help.

“Were you seeing Kristy Lee?” someone yelled to him. In the wall of media, David could not possibly pick out an individual voice from amidst the collective.

“Sure was,” David answered. The driver opened the door for him, and he was sliding inside before he realized that maybe that might not have been the greatest choices of words. Sure enough, the follow-up question came less than a second later:

“Are you seeing Kristy Lee?” This voice was female. “Any romances get started out there in that tropical paradise?”

That tropical paradise killed six of my friends and put all four of us into the hospital. David started to lurch back out of the car again, only to feel the driver’s hand, warm and insistent, upon his shoulder. “Sir, perhaps you are rather tired to be engaging with the press tonight.” He might have known that when 19E hired a driver, they were really going to be contracting an in-lieu manager.

“Yeah,” David muttered as he sank back down. “No,” he called out suddenly before the door closed, and saw the driver’s eyes widen. “I’m seeing someone else.” He took the door from the driver’s grasp and shut it with something more force than was necessary; they left.

*
He could have, and was more than willing, to knock on every single door in the hotel until he found Archuleta; it was a little disappointing when it turned out that the only thing really necessary was a trip to the front desk and every scrap of earnestness that he had in his body. Archuleta answered the door too quickly to have possibly been sleeping, though his hair and clothes were rumbled. Nightmares, most likely. David had seen the plane painted across the insides of his eyelids a few times himself.

“You’ll probably sleep better if you don’t sleep alone,” David said as Archuleta leaned up against the doorframe and blinked at him a few times. “And I should probably take you out on an actual date before I go throwing lines like that at you, huh?”

A slow, warm smile moved Archuleta’s face. “Probably,” he agreed as he settled more firmly against the door, crossing one ankle over the other in a stance that was very nearly cocky. “I’m not a kid anymore, Cook, that doesn’t mean that I’ve turned into a total--a total slut.”

David was more surprised by his laugh than Archuleta was. “I would never cast aspersions on your honor like that, Archie, come on.” He leaned close; Archuleta automatically inclined towards him. “They’re going to be asking us a lot of really shitty questions at the press conference.”

Archuleta’s eyes clouded. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “So I was thinking about that. I think that we should lead with something good.” He kissed David. David kissed him back.

Archuleta was quick to tell him the next morning that he was a liar, his presence hadn’t stopped nightmares from coming to either of them, but maybe he was right that they had not been as bad as they would have been had they been alone.

End

AI Fic: Don't Know When I'll Be Back Again (4/5)

2009-11-22T00:19:42Z

Continued from Part Three

They were actually letting him sleep that night. David didn’t waste any more time appreciating small miracles than it took to unlace his shoes and pitch them to the side before he dropped his body down into his own little hollowed-out space in the sand,. Part of his exhaustion was the earlier trek and the two sleepless nights that had preceded it, but part of it was just a flat-out simple lack of food; even with their careful parceling, the last of the pretzels and cranberries had been doled out before they had each settled down for the night. The gnawing feeling in his stomach wasn’t nearly as frightening as the sleepiness in his mind and limbs. They were going to have to do something, and do it as soon as the sun rose, because they were rounding into their third day and it was becoming more clear than ever that rescue might not be coming for a long while. If the people in the outside world thought that the plane had taken a dive into the water, by day three they were almost certainly going to be scaling back their efforts from a desperate search for survivors into a slower and more despondent attempt to recover bodies. They couldn’t live on dreams of pizza until someone came along. Especially not Kristy Lee, who was already getting the lion’s share of the water over her own protestations that she was fine without it, in order to combat her fever. But that would all have to wait until morning.

Or maybe not, David decided as he rolled over onto his back and stared up at a sky that was amazing clear and blameless for all that it had hurled down on them earlier that day. You didn’t see stars like that in Los Angeles. Fuck, you didn’t even see stars like that in Missouri. If he were seated safely upon the deck of a comfortable luxury liner, David was fairly certain that he would have been enthralled; as it was, he still couldn’t stop his mouth from falling open a little. The sky looked as if someone had thrown up a handful of glitter so high that it had miraculously stayed up there, twirling and winking to a logic all its own.

“Damn,” David whispered. He turned over onto his side and gave the wide-awake fire a few pokes with a long stick in order to make sure that it stayed that way, just in case a plane should fly overhead and yet not wake any of them with the sound of its engines and so that he himself would be able to find his way back without trouble, and got to his feet. The temperature that had pressed them all but flat to the beach that afternoon was much more temperate when the moon was high, and there was a breeze coming off of the water. David took his shoes off so that the tide coming in could lick at his feet and wandered away from their makeshift camp, trusting in the fire to bring him back. Who knew, maybe he would walk all the way around their island and reach camp again from the other side. If nothing else, he would be able to keep an eye out for an auspicious cluster of coconut or mango trees, or anything else that looked more invitingly edible than the feathery, nodding ferns that seemed to spring up wherever there was space.

He didn’t realize that there was anyone behind him until that person coughed softly; he jerked around faster than he would have done on the comfy deck of a cruise ship, too. “Archie, you scared me,” he said. Maybe if he actually put his hand against his heart, he would be able to pass it off as an affectation and not the real thing.

“I’m sorry.” The skittery kid that Archuleta had been once upon a time would have asked immediately afterwards if David wanted to be alone. Archuleta walked a few steps closer, until the two of them were wandering abreast. “You’re going to say that we have to stop meeting like this,” he said easily, and threw David a look from beneath his lashes that was almost shy.

“I was not,” David said. He was a good liar. Archuleta still looked at him. “Okay, maybe a little.” With someone else there with him, David found himself being much more mindful of the fact that they had no idea what or even who might be on this island, and angling his body slightly so that he was between Archuleta and the first run of the jungle as often as possible. Aww, damn, and whenever he an ex devolved into the screaming break-up fight, said ex always pointed out over-protective David could get. Oh, fuck him running, he might as well just get this over with.

Easier said than done; since there were next to no ways to say, “By the way, I’ve developed a raging attraction to you over the past forty-eight hours,” without coming off like a total creeper even out there in the real world, let alone on a deserted island when they ought to be focusing on what they had to in order to not die, David found the sounds dying in his throat.

“No one should go anywhere alone,” Archuleta said primly, one corner of his mouth tugging up as he looked David’s way. The moonlight did strange things. It made David forget, for a moment or two, where they were or under what circumstances. If he couldn’t speak, he could still at least touch, and caught himself extending his hand out towards Archuleta’s face. Archuleta saw what he was doing, but didn’t move back.

Something pinched David’s foot with enough force to send him straight up in the air on a startled yell. That did send Archuleta scrambling backwards on his own squawk, blushing slightly as he came back down to the ground in the way that only people who hadn’t left their adolescence behind long enough ago for the embarrassment of it to fade could do. His eyes widened as he looked down at David’s foot. “It’s a crab!” Archuleta said, pointing.

“It’s a fucking what?” David shook out his foot irritably; even though the animal had released him immediately upon learning that he was just slightly bigger and ornery than he had appeared initially, it had not gone far. David’s sudden movement sent it scuttling further back, a silver dollar running to and fro in the moonlight. “Fuck me, you’re right. Crab legs for a midnight snack.” David dove after the crab without thinking. It jerked away and finally turned to run in the other direction for real, while David hit his knees in the sand and immediately started swearing. Archuleta darted in front of him and cut the crab off before it could get to the water, letting out an exultant whooping noise that David had never heard from him in any context that did not involve music. The crab tried to tear off in the other direction, but by that time David had scrambled back to his feet again, and between the two of them they had the little animal fairly well cornered.

“What do we do now?” Archuleta asked, panting slightly while the crab crouched down between them and looked about as sullen as a crustacean possibly could. He looked as if he might just dive down on the crab and eat it raw if it kept presenting such a tempting target. In spite of the fact that his foot still stung, David wasn’t sure that he would let Archuleta have all of it without a fight.

“Here.” David whipped his shirt over his head and made short work of tying up the sleeves and the bottom hem, so that the only opening presented was the one for his head. Maybe he had been a crab-catcher extraordinaire his entire life and was only now getting the opportunity to put those skills to good use, who could tell? David started to give the bag over to Archuleta to hold while David himself did the riskiest part, but Archuleta shook his head and dove for the crab before David could speak. He grabbed it by one of its back legs and then flipped it into the sack in one movement so fluid and smooth that maybe he was the crab-catcher extraordinaire and had been practicing for just such an occasion.

“Yes!” Archuleta crowed when the chittering, angry animal was safely stowed away. He thrust his fist up towards the sky before retracting so that he could examine his fingers.

“Did it get you?”

“Only a little.” Archuleta’s face was so happy that David thought the crab could have pinched him to the point of blood and he would not have cared. “Do you see any more?”

David turned. The moon was high and ripe; under its icy gleam, he could see nearly as well as he would have been able to in the brightest daylight. “There.” David pointed towards a place a hundred or so feet off where the sand was rippling even though there was no breeze.

“Oh, gross,” Archuleta said when they reached the teeming mass of crabs, easily two or three dozen in all, and realized that the reason they had all congregated to one place was so that they could feast on the fallen corpse of a sea bird. A few feathers were picked up by the salt wind to drift towards David’s and Archuleta’s feet; they both leapt quickly to the side so that they wouldn’t be touched. David reached out to take the makeshift sack with its furious twitching and angry crab away from Archuleta.

“Here, I’ll do it so that you don’t have to get too close,” he said, but Archuleta tightened his fingers and refused to hand the shirt over.

“Cook,” he said calmly, “I watched almost everyone in my half of the plane die.” It was said with such an eerie lack of affect that David nearly flinched backwards, until he saw that Archuleta’s throat was working up and down in an effort to keep it that way. “A dead bird won’t bother me.”

If a dead bird was going to bother any of them by this point, then they would have been past the point of being able to fend for themselves, anyway. “Good point,” David said, but he still reached out as Archuleta passed him and tugged him into the kind of fierce, one-armed hug that had had Archuleta all but clinging the walls like a cat when they had first met, until he had realized that David tended to just drape himself over everyone without pausing to think about the consequences. Archuleta went stiff for just a second in that weird way that he had developed, and then suddenly hugged David back just as hard before releasing him and stepping away. David was going to go jump into the ocean just as soon as he and Archuleta had ensured that they weren’t all going to starve, he swore to God that he was.

Diving after the crabs was a little more complicated when it turned out that a hostile action towards one sent the all of the others fleeing in herky-jerky directions like a bead of mercury being slapped, but after fifteen minutes of darting back and forth across the beach and yelling directions at each other that half the time didn’t even make sense to themselves, let alone to an outsider, they had other a dozen of the little beasts hurled into David’s shirt. It was spasming as if it was about to give birth; David couldn’t stop grinning.

“Yes, yes, yes!” he exulted, spinning and pumping his fist towards the sky. It was a victory at last, goddamnit. After nearly three days, something was finally going right. David twisted back towards Archuleta, who was doing his own dance while wearing the brightest, silliest, most endearing grin that David had ever seen in his life. Shit, David needed to dart into the water and submerge himself until he came to his senses again. He needed to do it now.

Archuleta wheeled around again and, still laughing, kissed him hard. David’s entire body was removed from his control within one second of Archuleta’s mouth touching his; he felt Archuleta go still and hesitant in the same way, but only for a moment, before Archuleta made a startled sound--hey, you’re the one who laid one on me, buddy--grabbed the back of David’s neck, and pulled his head down hard.

Fuck, David thought, and No shit he’s grown up, alongside of And I owe Allison a fruit basket. He shivered as Archuleta finished up mapping out the inside of David’s mouth at his own pace and finally leaned back. His hand stayed against David’s neck, keeping him close, as if David would not have been too stunned to go anywhere even if that kiss hadn’t been...hadn’t been incredibly fucking good, frankly. Fruit basket and a shopping spree. If not for the shirt full of crabs still twitching irritably by Archuleta’s side, David would have been certain that he was dreaming. That detail was was just too weird for even his brain to pop up with on its own.

“Oh, okay,” Archuleta said. His eyes were bigger than David had ever seen them before. “So you’re not running away down the beach. That is really, really cool, because I thought a little bit that you might, but I couldn’t wait any longer for you to get over it and make the first move. Um, sorry?”

“You still have your hand on the back of my neck,” David pointed out, as if he could not have easily broken that contact if he had wanted to. Given how his ability to form rational thought had left him to go frolic in the waves, though, maybe Archuleta had a point. “I’n not going to run very far.”

Archuleta looked a little mortified before he collected himself and dropped his hand all the same. “I’ve been wanting to do that since you got on the plane,” he said. “I’m sorry if you didn’t want me to, I just kinda had to do it since you haven’t been shaving since we got here and I always wondered what your beard felt like--” There was a hard blush rising up on Archuleta’s cheeks as if he could not believe what he had actually just done and wouldn’t mind taking it back if he could.

David kissed him this time, determined to make it good. The blush was gone by the time that he was done, but Archuleta’s lips were full and swollen, so he was going to call that a mission accomplished. “I’ve wanted to do that since last night,” he said.

“Oh, gosh.” Archuleta rubbed at his cheeks, his jaw. “I always thought it would be bristly. It’s really soft.” Something seemed to strike him, and he tilted his head so that he could look at David sideways from beneath his lashes. “Since last night?”

“Why do you think I’ve been so damned weird?”

“You’re always weird, how should I be able to tell?” Blurting something out like that at seventeen would have mortified Archuleta so badly that David would not have seen him again for hours. At twenty, Archuleta looked at him with a slightly raised eyebrow, as if daring David to refute it. When David still didn’t answer, Archuleta insisted, “Well, you are.”

“I’m not denying!” David took the shirt back from Archuleta, even though what he really would have liked to do was kiss him again and maybe revel a little bit in the fact that he was turning out not to be a total creeper. “Before these little monsters chew straight through the fabric and take their revenge or something, we’d better eat them. Since the plane, huh?”

“Yes.” Archuleta was looking straight ahead, though, and the reverting back to monosyllables was making David wonder if it hadn’t started a goodish ways before that. He decided not to push. After a few moments, Archuleta added, “I just didn’t want to do anything about it even if it turned out that maybe you would be interested back, since you know...” His voice trailed off; David had not seen Archuleta this uncertain of himself since the day that they had met, when Archie had been the sixteen year-old sure thing with the voice bigger than his body. “It doesn’t seem right, somehow.”

While their friends were dead and they couldn’t even figure out how to give them a halfway-decent burial, now that it was looking more and more like it could be a while before anyone came to find them. David sighed. “Right there with you, kid,” he said, and for once Archuleta didn’t even seem to notice that David had called him “kid”, let alone become offended.

The fire was roaring along at a good clip by the time that they got back; Chikezie was crouching on the other side of it, stirring at the flames with a stick in order to urge them even higher. “Check out what we have!” David called as soon as they were within shouting distance, and Archuleta held up the twitching bundle, grinning wildly.

Chikezie didn’t smile. Maybe he couldn’t see that David’s shirt was moving, or didn’t realize that they had caught several somethings worthwhile to eat. “She’s worse,” he said. Or maybe not.

“I am not,” Kristy Lee protested. She was awake and sitting up, too, David noticed now, but his and Archuleta’s eyes had slid right past her. She looked smaller than she had when they had left, and not just because she was hunching over slightly so that she could wrap her arms around her knees. There were dark circles under her eyes. Chikezie turned and fixed her with a look without speaking, almost without changing his expression. For the first time since they had met each other, David saw Kristy Lee flinched. “I’m not a lot worse.”

“You are a lot worse,” Archuleta said. He looked Kristy Lee up and down, his expression almost aghast. “You guys couldn’t find anything on the plane?”

“Nothing but aspirin on my half,” David answered softly. He was deliberately keeping his voice pitched low, so as not to frighten Kristy Lee further. She looked at him across the fire with a slightly raised eyebrow, but the act didn’t go very far once he had already seen how scared she actually was, and how desperately she was fighting to hide it. “And the half that you guys were in--” Archuleta went pale and looked away. “Yeah, I figured you didn’t need to see that again.”

“Bad enough remembering it,” Archuleta said under his breath.

“Check this out, though,” David said, forcing some cheer into his voice. He held up the sack. “We caught crabs.” Kristy Lee snorted out a laugh that made her look infinitely less like a breathing corpse and put her good hand over her mouth; she left the bad one cradled in what was rapidly becoming its customary place against her abdomen. “I’m not rephrasing.”

“You shouldn’t corrupt a sweet young kid like Archie with your rockstar diseases,” Chikezie said, looking as if he was having to work hard to make the corners of his mouth even twitch upwards and towards a smile. Archuleta wasn’t even blushing, but was instead gazin at them all as if he was going to still be standing here just as soon as they all decided to pull it together and act like adults again. The idea of Archuleta being the sole grown-up of their group was even funnier, and David had to put his own hand against his mouth in order to keep from losing it as he handed over the shirt so that Chikezie could peek inside. “I was wondering why you had just up and decided to strip.”

“Can’t sunburn in the middle of the night,” David said. Chikezie threw him a look up and down as if he thought that David’s amazing lack of melanin might still manage to pull it off. “Shut up.”

“All right!” Chikezie pumped his fist in the air before reaching it into the bag, apparently too hungry to remember or care that he didn’t eat meat. It took several abrupt withdrawals and more than a few barely-smothered curses before he managed to snag one of the crabs by its back legs where it couldn’t get him and pull it out. “Does anyone have a knife or something?”

“Here.” Kristy Lee reached behind her and pulled a long stick from nowhere; David was going to assume that she had been poking at the fire with it earlier. With the dark circles painted under her eyes like shoe polish and her hair sticking to her temples and turned nearly brunette with sweat, she was more like a borderline la llorona than she probably would have appreciated if she had been able to see herself. She licked her lips, though, as she stared at the shirt. David was going to call that a good sign. She couldn’t be at death’s door if she was still hungry, right?

Chikezie and David took the stick that Kristy Lee offered to them and skewered as many crabs onto the length of it as they could possibly manage and still leave enough room at either end to avoid burning their hands, doing the best that they could to avoid cringing at the way that the legs kept right on kicking. If there was a humane way to club a crab over the head before they dropped it into the pot, then no one had ever told David about it. He shuddered and saw that Chikezie was mirroring the expression as the two of them held the wiggling animals over the fire.

“Fuck me,” Chikezie breathed, one of a very few times that David had actually heard him swear. “Do we actually have to do it like this?”

“They don’t have a head to bash in,” Archuleta said. David jerked and lifted his eyebrow slightly, but Archuleta was staring at the fire with a rapt expression and didn’t look. David swore that he was going to see the kid’s mouth watering at any moment.

“Well, he has a point,” David said. He and Chikezie kept turning the crabs until they stopped jerking, and then for a few minutes beyond that. He had never heard of crabs being spit-roasted before, but the smell that came off of them was making his mouth water as heavily as if he was sitting down to a cut of steak and a bottle of wine that had together cost more than his first car. It was a struggle when he and Chikezie finally pulled the first round of crabs from the fire not to shove the first one into his mouth, shell and all, rather than giving it over to Kristy Lee. She grabbed it from his grasp so quickly that David was suddenly afraid that she would be the one who decided that actually taking the shell off was for other people. She held it in her good hand and then struggled to peel the shell off with her bad one, managing for only a few seconds before she swore violently, sounding as if she was on the verge of bursting into tears and dropped the crab down into the sand. A little thing like sand wasn’t about to stop any of them at this point; she grabbed it up again immediately afterwards. After a few seconds of watching her not have any more success than she had managed on her first try, Chikezie gently reached out and took the crab from her. David privately thought that Chikezie was incredibly lucky that she didn’t go at him with her teeth, which were still in excellent working order so far as he could tell.

“Here,” David said quietly, handing one of the crabs over to Archuleta. Archuleta shook his head.

“I’m okay,” he said softly.

Yeah. He wasn’t injured like Kristy Lee was, and he was an adult just like David and Chikezie were. Considering that their faces had been attached to one another less than half an hour before, it might behoove David to remember that. He went back to watching Chikezie cracking open Kristy Lee’s crab for her. That seemed to bring her closer to tears than her initial failure.

“It’s not that I can’t do it,” Kristy Lee said. In spite of having only two eyes, she managed to glare at Archuleta, Chizekie, and David all at once. “I could do it, I could make my fingers move. It just...” She pressed her lips together and looked down. “It really hurts a lot, okay?”

“When did you change the bandage last time?” David asked her. Kristy kept her mouth in a hard line that altered the shape of her entire face and didn’t answer until Chikezie quietly took her hand and started unwinding the bandages.

“Oh,” Chikezie said softly when he saw, and Archuleta, “Gosh.”

David was not quite so sanguine. “Jesus fuck, Kristy!” he exploded in an angrier tone than he thought he had ever dared to use around Kristy Lee before, or at least not when she had had convenient projectiles near at hand. She glared at him; he was really past the point where he gave a fuck. David seized up her wrist and just barely remembered to avoid the burns that extended down her palm, too. Her burned fingers looked terrible. The blisters had burst and then sealed over, the dead layer of skin turning moist and gray. That wasn’t the bad part, though, David was fairly certain that that could be clipped away and the flesh underneath would be fine. What was worrying, what David was certain had to be causing Kristy Lee’s fever and overall listless, were the lines that were extending out like damning red threads from the burns, up Kristy Lee’s hand and towards her wrist. Shocked, David felt his grip loosen, and Kristy Lee took her hand back.

“What do you think?” she asked David in a toneless voice that he had never heard out of her before, not even when he had been having a three-way consoling phone call between her and Syesha after her label had dropped her. “Think you’ll be able to see it over the bandage by tomorrow?” She developed an affect again just long enough to make David think that she was on the verge of breakdown.

“God,” David said in a voice to mirror her own. “Chikezie, could you hand me the first-aid kit?” Like there was anything in there that could stop what was obviously a serious infection, what was--David could not make his fucking brain obey his commands and back off in time--a potentially life-ending infection.

“I’ll do it,” Chikezie said, his voice so low and gentle that David himself wanted to hit him. He couldn’t imagine what Kristy Lee herself thought about it.

“No, Chikezie, it’s all right.” Maybe he was right that he really couldn’t imagine what was going through Kristy Lee’s head, because her tone was gentle, nearly conciliatory. “I would--” Her breath hitched, making David think once again that there was a sincere possibility that tears were going to come spilling down his chest at any moment. “I would rather that David did this, okay?”

“Okay.” Chikezie’s tone and expression surprised David as he leaned back, halfway between chastened and fierce--David got a sudden impression of Chikezie swooping in on a white horse and gleaming armor, and saving all of them if they possibly could--before he turned back to Archuleta. “C’mon, kid, do you think that you guys caught these things so that you could look at them?”

“I’m not a kid,” David heard Archuleta answer automatically, but within thirty seconds he was tearing into his alloted share of the catch with such gusto that David was surprised he didn’t choke.

David dug through the first-aid kit and did his best not to swear at how completely impractical the first-aid kit was for the actual worst that could happen to that plane. In the end, he managed to dig up clean gauze and some serviceable burn cream. “Uh, tell me if I’m hurting you,” he said to Kristy Lee.

Kristy Lee answered, “It’s been hurting since we crashed, I can’t take any more aspirin unless you guys want to donate part of your liver to me.”

David looked at her. She attempted a smile. David said, “Oh, please don’t do that.”

“Got you,” Kristy Lee said before she looked down. It only made the circles beneath her eyes deeper. David slathered her fingers and palm liberally with the burn cream--and, damnit, they were running out of that, too--before he redressed the burns. That her skin was way too goddamned warm was an understatement. The fever didn’t stop her from nearly leaping upon her share of the food again as soon as David was done, though she did turn slightly green at a few points and make a sound from the back of her throat as if she might chuck across the sand at any moment. It was not the food; when David tried his own, the meat was sweet, and that much sweeter by the fact that he nearly bit off the tips of his own fingers a few times in his haste to get it down.

There didn’t seem to be much of anything to say after that. David noticed that Chikezie was laying more wood on the signal fire, stirring it into ever-higher flames, and offered, “Keep me awake, I’ll help tend it with you.”

Chikezie’s lips twitched, a smile that was more reflex than it was anything else. “Sure,” he said.

David still laid down and didn’t wake until morning, when he found that he and Archuleta had curled up against him in the night.

Continue to Part Five

AI Fic: Don't Know When I'll Be Back Again (3/5)

2009-11-22T00:14:51Z

Continued from Part Two

David woke up thirsty. That was not the remarkable part; they had managed to salvage only a handful of bottles of water from the cabin, and by mutual, unspoken agreement David and Chikezie had assigned to themselves the task of making certain that that water lasted for as long as possible without troubling Archuleta or Kristy Lee about it, never mind that they were both certain that the other two already knew and were simply humoring them in return. The air of the jungle was thick and nearly cloying with humidity whenever any of them had stepped back into it after making their triumphant trip to the beach, but if there was any fresh water to be had, then they had yet to find it. The food situation was even worse, but they could live a lot longer without that than they could without water.

David woke up hungry and he woke up thirsty, but the remarkable part was that he woke up at all, since he wasn’t supposed to be sleeping under peril of coma or his brain leaking out of his ears or something. The remains of the fire that they had ultimately sacrificed one of the flares in order to build was banked low, but not entirely out. God help them if that day should come; they only had so many incendiary objects with which to rebuild it. David calculated that they had been on the island for thirty-six hours and change, and while maybe it wasn’t time to start panicking and assessing their long-term options yet? If not, then it damned sure wasn’t far off. They had all been watching the sky and horizon until their eyes had burned, and not even a speck that could have been a ship had appeared.

Small wonder that he couldn’t sleep, then, even if he wasn’t supposed to be trying in the first place. David propped himself onto his elbows and stared at the embers of the fire, the two figures lying still on the other side of it. They were both the wrong size and shape to be Archuleta. Neither was he over on David’s side.

Oh, this was not good. David jumped to his feet faster than he would have dreamed that his body would allow, turning his way and that, and was just about to call out to wake the others wen he saw a figure walking slowly through the waves, about waist-deep out and turned into pure silver by one of the biggest moons that David had ever seen in his life. It was hanging so low that it looked as if it could be plucked like fruit. David was still considering waking Chikezie and Kristy Lee, remembering how quiet and withdrawn the kid had been all day, until he noticed that Archuleta was drifting to and fro in a horizontal pattern to the shore, and that he wasn’t going any deeper than this shoulders, frequently his waist. If he was thinking about killing himself, then he was either psyching himself up or he was really bad at it.

Archuleta was still so deep into his thoughts that he didn’t even notice that someone else had entered the water until David was nearly on top of him, and then only because David sighed before he could stop himself. Chikezie and Kristy Lee had been right, the water felt amazing, good without being cold and smelling sharply and cleanly of salt. David could feel the rancid sweat and dirt that he had accumulated throughout the day being disintegrating with every wave breaking against his shoulders.

“You’re supposed to take your clothes off before you go swimming,” David said. He didn’t expect Archuleta to laugh, and he definitely didn’t expect it to be a sly little giggle of remembrance, like, he really was going to have to make his peace with the fact that the awkward and amazingly talented kid that he had met three years previously was now an amazingly talented and only sometimes awkward adult, but the possibility that Archuleta had gone skinny-dipping at some point was a little much for his more brain to handle right now. David was willing to bet that it had been Allison’s idea; something surged through him hard enough that the next wave nearly took him off of his feet.

“Yeah, well,” Archuleta said. “If we get rescued tonight, I don’t want them to find me naked.” He lowered his voice. “Even sailors have camera phones, now.” And sounded so genuinely horrified by the entire idea that David could not help himself before he threw a laugh up to land around the moon.

“Good point,” David said. “God, I would hate for my pasty ass to wind up on TMZ.” For a few moments they were silent, David feeling the silt move beneath his feet when a new wave nudged past them and Archuleta sometimes standing, sometimes treading water when the depth changed on them suddenly. Each wave brought him a few steps closer to David as he found his footing again, until they were practically shoulder to shoulder. David realized how acclimated he had become to the water until Archuleta’s shoulder nearly scorched him, even through his shirt. He’s twenty now. Fuck him running, he had obviously hit his head a lot harder than anyone was willing to acknowledge. David coughed hard and pretended that he had just swallowed a mouthful of saltwater when Archuleta threw a worried glanced his way, turned to face the island a few dozen yards off instead. It was a dark hulk without a single speck of light to mark where human life might be hiding, the silhouette of her against the clear, speckled sky beautiful in about the same way that a sleeping dragon might be.

“Allison was the one who taught me to night-swim,” Archuleta said in a voice that was just slightly dreamy, and a much more relaxed than any that he had used since their plane had fallen from the sky. Without warning, he flipped up and onto his back, floating. David had to reach out and grab quickly for his ankle so that the kid would not wind up floating away, and the skin there was warm, too. “It’s better out here than it is on the island, thinking about everyone who’s dead.”

It was, even if they were measuring the distance only in yards rather than the thousands of miles that David wanted to put between them. He tugged lightly on Archuleta’s ankle, and Archuleta sighed and dropped his feet back beneath the waves. He looked at David from beneath his lashes, opened his mouth, closed it again. David could have told him to spit it out, already, there was pretty much no better place or person that Archuleta was going to be able to find to keep his secret for him.

Instead, he looked back towards the beach, too dark, the dragon in a deep sleep and the same to be said for the people sleeping perched up on her flank. “We shouldn’t have banked the fire,” David said. Archuleta looked slightly disappointed. David stubbornly looked towards the beach and only caught the expression from the corner of his eye. “A plane coming over at night won’t be able to see us.” He hadn’t heard any plane, but pretending that he could have was still better than pretending that he had not been looking at the kid-with-the-voice in a way that was decidedly unsuitable for children a few seconds before.

“Geez, yeah, we should have thought of that,” Archuleta sounded a little dejected, a little embarrassed, a lot like he was about to strike himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand. The moon was fucking huge out here, kid was practically glowing. David put his hand on Archuleta’s shoulder before he could think about what he was doing and then jerked it back again just as fast. He didn’t think that he had actually felt his cheeks burn like that since he had been a teenager. Archuleta stared at him with the same big, dark eyes that he hadn’t done any more of a job of growing into since David had been on the show with him and Archuleta had been legitimate jail bait. The universe did grant small favors, after all.

“Don’t worry about it,” David said instead, when Archuleta’s eyes weren’t getting any smaller and his expression was actually starting to become slightly concerned, like he thought that David had somehow hit his head on an extra-hard...wave, or something. “Even Chikezie didn’t think about it, and he’s the only one of us right now who’s even stumbling half-way towards a clue. Come on, let’s head back and tell them.” They waded back through the waves, David reaching out to steady Archuleta each time it looked as if a particularly tall one might crest over the top of his head. Each time he jerked his hand back hard as soon as he could, and each time Archuleta flitted him a little sideways glance as if he had done something wrong and couldn’t figure out quite what. David felt like utter and complete shit, and not least because the kid was still eight years younger than him, legal now or not, and David by rights probably should not be having these kinds of thoughts about someone that he could not stop referring to in his own head as “the kid.” You have several friends lying dead in that jungle, brother, do you really think that now is a good time to be thinking with your dick?

“Dear God,” David muttered beneath his breath as he and Archuleta stepped back up onto the beach, “please let there not be a god, amen.” Not unless a lightning bolt from on high would do a really good job of attracting a rescue plane, and then David would be willing to consider it.

Chikezie was already kneeling in front of the remains of the fire, building a new one on top of it and blowing softly on the embers until they caught the wood and started curling upwards. “Sorry,” David called to him. He glanced towards the trees and, hidden, the plane, where his friends were all alone in the dark. “We didn’t think about that.”

Chikezie shrugged as if the fire that might get them rescued was the very last thing on his mind, and then David knew it was very bad. He had seen people walking about with their shoulders set like that before. Chikezie turned and said softly, “Kristy Lee’s getting sick.”

It was her burned hand. As soon as the fire was large enough for them all to see clearly by, Chikezie roused her from her scooped-out little bed in the sand and tugged her forward, all the while ignoring her protests that she was fine, if her skin felt warm it was only because she had been standing out in the sun for a long time that day, she really had no problem kicking Chikezie’s ass for him if he pushed her to it. There was still a high, thready note in her voice that David also recognized from way too goddamned much practice. She was scared, and trying hard to hide it. Chikezie gently peeled the bandages back from her fingers to show that the blistered skin was an unsettling mixture of red in some places and watery gray in others, none of it the color that actual human skin ought to be. David halfway wanted to step in front of Archuleta so that he wouldn’t have to see it, too, before he remembered that the kid was long gone, and out in the water there had been a more than small part of him that had been responding to the man that had replaced him.

“That’s pretty red,” Chikezie said softly. He cradled Kristy Lee’s wrist as gently as he would a baby.

“Yeah, but it’s a burn,” Kristy Lee insisted. David had never heard a whine in her voice like he heard right now, and he wanted it to go away. Without saying a word, Archuleta went down to sit beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.

“Not this much,” David said gently. He went to take her hand from Chikezie and get a better look at it himself, but she jerked it from his reach and glared at them both.

“It’s just ‘cause you’re looking at it from the firelight,” she said.

“And you’re running a fever,” Archuleta said. David noticed that Archuleta’s arm was resting against the bare skin on the back of her neck. Kristy Lee nearly leapt to her feet in her haste to get away from him.

“You little sneak!” she exclaimed. More or less settling back into her place in the sand, and giving Archuleta a look like she might snap his wrist if he tried to touch her again, Kristy Lee went on, “Okay, my hand is infected, and I’m running a fever. What the hell do you think we can do about it?” David realized that she was nearly crying. That was worse than the burns themselves.

The fire was burning high and not by now. David tilted his head up towards the sky, searching for the lights of a helicopter or a search plane, but there was nothing.

*
They moved Kristy Lee further into the shade as soon as it was first light the next morning and told her that under no circumstances was she to do anything other than lie there and conserve her energy. Kristy Lee snapped back that they weren’t moving her nearly so much as they were making her walk, what with not having anything to actually move and all, and to stop treating her like an invalid, she was just running a fever, not dying. The “yet” went unspoken and yet was clearly visible on the face of all of them; the sky above didn’t even have a cloud, let alone a plane. Kristy Lee kicked at the sand especially hard before she settled down and started making herself comfortable. “And he’s a hell of a guard,” she declared, pointing her good hand out in Archuleta’s direction as he sat down across from her.

“I’m taller than you are now,” Archuleta said without appearing offended. “I bet I could get in a pretty good tackle.”

“And then I would elbow you right in the face.”

“The tackle would still count,” David said. He winked at Archuleta and turned away just as Archuleta began to blush and assume a strange expression, certain that Archuleta was reading every single filthy thought that had crossed his mind the night before as they started creeping back into his head. “Hey, Chikezie, let’s go, burning daylight.”

“Uh, David?” Chikezie finished loading up their hefty supplies of a couple of water bottles and handed one to David. “We’re at the equator, man. If there’s one thing we’re not lacking, it’s daylight to burn.”

“Whatever.” David started down the freshly broken path that had taken them to the beach from the plane without waiting to see if Chikezie was going to follow him, feeling the back of his neck prickle with the sense of being watched. “I don’t want to still be in the jungle rather than on the beach if there’s a plane going overhead.”

“Yeah, that’s it.” David looked sharply at Chikezie, but Chikezie’s face was bland and friendly as he looked back.

Never mind. David was pretty certain that Chikezie already knew, but David was in no way comfortable with the two of them acknowledging that David knew that he knew. He stomped sullenly forward and was almost glad that they didn’t have enough plane food for him to have eaten much, because he still thought that he might double over and throw up at any moment.

“How’s your head?” Maybe Chikezie was psychic. Maybe that was how he knew, unless David was like Kristy Lee and apparently broadcasting into space.

“Better,” David said grudgingly. He gave it a cautious shake from side to side and then swore as he realized how of a fucking moron that actually made him. “Not good, but better. If I was going to die of Natasha Richardson, wouldn’t I have done it by now?”

“I think so.” Chikezie sounded dubious. “Just be sure to tell one of us if it starts getting any worse.”

“Why?” David stopped among the ferns and flashed Chikezie a grim smile. “It wouldn’t make any difference if it did, and I did, would it? There’s not just a whole lot that we can do for head injuries out here. Any more than we can do something for Kristy Lee.”

Chikezie flinched for a second as if David had just slapped him and then muscled past him on the path so that he was now the one in the lead. “We might get lucky,” he said stubbornly. “Or at the very least, we can try to find some aspirin in someone’s bag, that’ll keep her fever down for a while.”

Even though Chikezie hadn’t actually said anything to that effect, David felt as if he had just been given the dressing down of his life for even hesitating for a second to think about petty bullshit between Archuleta and himself when Kristy Lee might get desperately sick or even die before someone arrived to rescue them. David didn’t know how long an infection actually took to travel up someone’s arm and kill them, but he could well enough remember the deadly fear of bacteria during all of the too-many times that he had been in a hospital room or waiting room. It wasn’t even the first time that he had been attracted to a man, to explain why he wanted so badly to flail in circles; nothing like a good kick-start to get one’s priorities back in order again.

“I’m sorry,” David said quietly as he sped up until he and Chikezie were walking side by side again. There were dark circles beneath Chikezie’s eyes; even though he had not made a sound as David had crept past him and into the water the night before, David would be amazed to learn that he had actually slept. “You’re kind of the only one among us who might at least be pointed in the direction where clues might be, I shouldn’t be snapping at you.”

Chikezie waved his hand at him in acceptance. “Aspirin’s just a stop-gap, anyway,” he said. “You think I don’t know that? And if you do have a serious head injury, all that Archie or I will be able to do is poke you with sticks so that you don’t go into a coma and hope that there’s a magical MRI machine around here, and someone to work it.” He sighed, from somewhere deep down where it sounded like it hurt. “Honestly, I’m hoping and praying that someone was coming down with a case of strep and their antibiotics managed not to get burned up. I might just start doing cartwheels.”

“Careful,” David warned him. “You might slip and land on a rock, and then we’ll really be fucked.”

“Archie as the only able-bodied person left among three invalids,” Chikezie said. “Won’t that be a nice touch.” He looked so genuinely worried that this might happen that David reached out and put his hand against Chikezie’s arm.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m not that bad off, all right? So I’m sore and I have a headache, big deal, I’ll pop some aspirin when we find it. Just tell me what you need me to do.” There was still a faint scent of jet fuel and something charred to let them know that they were approaching the plane well before either one of them could see it, and David’s stomach slunk downward six inches in the span of time it took for his heart to beat twice. He swallowed hard and told himself that there was no way Chikezie would believe that he was being sick from nerves and not the concussion if he couldn’t keep it together.

Chikezie looked about as queasy as David felt. “I don’t know antibiotics,” he said. “So I can look for prescription bottles, but hell if I know if I’m giving her something for high blood pressure or a toenail infection.”

“I had to cancel a few shows last winter because I came down with pneumonia,” David said. But not before he had overworked himself right into a short stint in the hospital and had only gotten off the phone from being yelled at by Carly for his recklessness long enough for Michael to call him and do the same. David swore that his shoes were sticking to the ferns, to make his feet so reluctant to go forward. He thought that he heard something from the sky overhead, but the canopy was too thick to tell if he was hallucinating. “Motherfucker, the second we’re gone--”

“David.” Chikezie actually grabbed David’s arm so that he wouldn’t sprint back to the beach. “Relax, man, it’s thunder. Not a plane, just thunder.” They parted through the foliage and saw the burned-out skin of the back of the plane before them. David shuddered hard; he had not had to look at it the night before, under the reasonable assumption that everything useful inside of it had probably been burned up, anyway, and none of them desperate enough yet to try again.

David shook off Chikezie’s hand and felt himself blushing. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I don’t want to be going anywhere near it, either.”

“We need to do right by them,” David said. They reached the skid-made path where the plane had broken into two separate pieces and by some kind of mutual, unspoken agreement turned towards the half where Chikezie, Archuleta, and Kristy Lee had all been. David knew that this made him just slightly a coward and didn’t care; he was close to everyone who had been on the plane and regarded them all as family, but they weren’t...Syesha had always used to give him such shit about it when they had still been on the tour and Carly had been forever protesting that it was ridiculous to chase a grown, married woman off of the guys’ bus like she was an errant adolescent looking to get her first glimpse of penis or something, always in that way Syesha had that had that made it difficult to tell whether or not she was joking. Syesha had called them the triumphant triumvirate, and said that anyone else hoping to get in to make it a larger group might as well pack it in and go home, all slots already filled. Chikezie had always laughed at that. He had usually been hanging out with Jason.

Yeah, David was a fucking coward. He was still glad that they were going to the back half of the plane first.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” David breathed before he could catch himself, never mind that he had been fervently hoping that there wasn’t a God specifically so that he could not be struck down for what he had been thinking about in that water the night before, as the back half of the plane rose up in front of them. It looked almost as if the barrel of a cartoon gun had exploded, eerily finger-like pieces of metal curling back from the place where the plane had finally given in and snapped in two, and sent Michael, Carly, and the pilot hurling half a mile further forward. The outer skin of the plane looked almost normal, if dented and torn, while the inner...the fingers along the edges were black with soot. David smelled melted plastic and something that he didn’t want to identify, but couldn’t stop himself until it was too late. He leaned over among the ferns and heaved until the bruised ribs felt as if they were just going to give in to the inevitable and crack, already. Chikezie stood quietly with his face tilted up towards the sky, though David noticed that he had his thumbs hooked through the loops on his pants and his knuckles drawn tight with stress.

“How did any of you live through that?” David asked when he was able to straighten up. His mouth tasted sour. He spat into the leaves and did not ask if he could waste a drink of water.

“I have no idea,” Chikezie said flatly. “Almost enough to make you believe in divine intervention, isn’t it?”

“Almost.” The two of them went gingerly up to the plane, but David didn’t even have to set his foot onto what was left of the floor before he knew that their chances of finding anything in here that might help Kristy Lee were roughly akin to their odds of also just happening to stumble across a fully-staffed Burger King on the way back. The fire had eaten the inside from the floor to the ceiling, and most of the doors to the luggage bins had popped open from the heat and were hanging down like dejected faces. All that David could see inside of them was ash.

“Jesus,” he said again, doing his very best to keep looking at the luggage bins and not at the seats. While he was standing gape-mouthed, he finally noticed that Chikezie could not look away from them and appeared as if it was taking everything that he had not to tremble. David angled his body to stand between them as much as he good.

“I don’t think that we’re going to find anything useful in there,” he said.

Chikezie took a few breaths and shook his head as he came back into himself. “No,” he said. “It was a waste of time, but fuck.” The obscenity came out angrier than David had expected to hear. “We had to try, right?” David nodded. After a few seconds, Chikezie seemed to calm himself down, and said, “You sure that you’re going to be able to handle the other half?”

No, not in the slightest, but living people didn’t get to die because he couldn’t bring himself to walk among dead ones. “You can shove me out of the way if I start to throw up on your shoes,” he said.

“There’s not going to be any asking permission, man.” They stepped carefully amongst the broken foliage; the birds were silent. Chikezie let out a low whistle. “I’ve seen this show. We’re not nearly hot enough to survive on it.”

“What about the little hobbity guy? We’re better-looking than him, definitely.” As much as David appreciated Chikezie’s attempt at even black humor, he still kept his voice hushed and felt the fine hairs on the back of his neck prickling up as if there really were eyes watching him. Chikezie drew his finger slowly across his throat. “Fuck.”

“I’m saying.” At the front half of the plane, there was no way that they could pretend that everything inside was too burned to be useful without checking. The light had been awful by the time that they had crawled inside the night before, and the flashlights that they had managed to find had only thrown thin, nearly ghostly beams. David braced his hand against the torn skin of the plane as he hoisted himself up and onto the floor. There were pieces of machinery sticking out from beneath the passenger compartment like entrails, and the metal hull was warm enough from the sun to feel alive. David stood uncertainly in the center of the cabin for a moment before he started opening the overhead bins and pulling luggage down, looking for anything that the four of them might have missed the night before. There was glass crunching beneath his feet; they had broken the mirror in the bathroom and then thrown it about the cabin. David didn’t want to think about how lucky he must have gotten to be hurled out before he could be riddled with shrapnel. He was so determinedly not looking in the direction of Carly and Michael that it took him a few moments to realize that Chikezie was standing in front of them. Alice had been placed down gently in a seat beside them, and covered the same way. Chikezie and Archuleta had made certain that the airline blanket was tucked as carefully around her head and face as putting a child to bed.

“It doesn’t look like they’ve been disturbed by wildlife,” Chikezie said. David could feel his mouth twisting, even though Chikezie had been trying to be soothing.

“Let me know if you a shovel or something, all right?” he asked instead. He didn’t care that it they had only been here one night, there was still plenty of time for a plane or a ship to find them before they started thinking long haul. It hurt to look at the seats.

“That’d be a ‘thank God for fireworks smugglers’ moment,” he heard Chikezie mutter behind him. David didn’t know what he was talking about and didn’t ask, just started pulling bags down from bins. The first one was a woman’s suitcase and didn’t look like Carly’s; not knowing whether it belonged to Brooke, Syesha, or Ramiele, or the near-stranger that Alice had been made David’s fingers hesitant. He jumped harder at the sight of a bra than he had at any point past the age of fifteen and hurried through the bag’s contents until he reached the makeup bag. Alice’s name was printed in neat letters on two prescription bottles. She had had a problem with anxiety attacks, and also with migraines. Though they weren’t antibiotics, David tucked the bottles away in the pockets of his jeans all the same. The screen of her cell phone remained sullenly dark when David tried to turn it on. “Find anything?” he called over his shoulder to Chikezie.

“Aspirin.” Chikezie sounded disgusted. “Damnit, couldn’t someone on this plane have had bronchitis?” David looked over his shoulder; Chikezie looked as if he was very close to throwing the aspirin before he took a few deep breaths, visibly calming himself, and slid it into one of his own pockets. David reached for another bag. The only victory in there was a small bottle of aloe vera. He didn’t look any farther to see whom the bag had belonged to, he didn’t want to know who had been looking forward to getting a deeper tan.

“Fuck,” David said. “I think we went over this place better than we realized last night.”

“That’s what it’s starting to look like,” Chikezie admitted. “I was really hoping that we had missed something. Like a working radio, a cell phone, something.” He looked towards the bodies of Michael and Carly, then back at David. David could feel the blood draining from his face.

Why the fuck are you asking me permission, he wanted to say, and then added just as quickly, Because you’re the closest thing to family that either one of them has here, dumbass.

“Check Carly’s purse first,” he said. Chikezie nodded and dug quickly through its contents, furtively as if he, too, could feel the boundaries that they were crossing, however necessary, and produced both another small bottle that he shoved into his pocket and her phone. He barely flipped it open before he was tossing it away again. “Smashed.” Chikezie looked at Michael and went faintly green.

How nice, ‘cause that might be the color that he is. David had never been prone to hysterical giggles, but there was a first time for everything. He breathed through his nose until the urge had passed and said, “I’ll do it.” He lifted up the airline blanket only as far as he had to in order to expose Michael’s pocket and part of his hand; he could not bring himself to look at his face. David got lucky, and the skin was not actually green. There was still no mistaking that it did not belong to a live person.

“I am really, really sorry for the way that I’m about to feel you up, Mike,” David said, mostly under his breath. “Wherever you are, think about how many girls would be losing their goddamned minds if they knew, all right?” Picturing how hard Michael would be laughing if only he were alive to know didn’t exactly make it easier, but it at least steadied David’s hand. He slipped it into the pocket of Michael’s jeans and cringed as he felt how cold the flesh was beneath the fabric, how startling it was not to feel all of the little shifts and tremors which marked a body that still had someone inside of it. There were beads of sweat standing out on David’s hairline by the time he managed to wriggle the phone out. The obscenity exploded out from between clenched teeth with so much force that it nearly sounded like a hiss when David saw the screen.

“That good?”

“Dead battery.” David started to chuck the phone against the cabin wall, only for Chikezie to snatch it neatly from the air.

“Maybe we can still use something out of it,” he said before he put his hand against David’s shoulder and guided him from the plane. David realized how crazy he must look for Chikezie to be deliberately trying to comfort him when they both had some damned good reasons to be in therapy for the next several years. What he was lacking at the moment was a good reason to care. They had barely stepped out onto the jungle again before the sky gave one final sulky rumble and then, like a zipper being drawn back, a wave of water fell straight down from the sky.

“Fuck!” David yelled, trying futilely to duck away from drops so fat that they stung even though their was no wind. “The bottles!” he heard Chikezie yell, dim even though the other man was standing only a few feet away. God, David would not have dreamed that anyone could manage to drown to death while they were standing on solid ground, but it was raining so hard that he swore he could feel it actually coming up as the ground became soaked itself and started rejecting it. He nodded so that Chikezie would know that he had heard, pulled out the water bottles that they had been drinking from on the hike back to the plane, and unscrewed the cap so that rain water could pour inside. He noticed that Chikezie was tilting a leaf to act as a kind of funnel so that the water poured directly in, but it hardly seemed necessary; David was halfway convinced that the two of them had wandered beneath a stopped-up waterfall that had suddenly found a way to fix itself.

There was no way of knowing how long the downpour was going to last, but David had already decided that the only way that he was going back into the cabin of the plane was if someone dragged him in and didn’t mind that he was going to lose a few fingernails scrabbling for the walls along the way. He and Chikezie trooped back towards the beach in a moody silence without much bothering to try to find shelter from the rain, which had an almost sentient ability to sluice directly between the leaves and branches above their heads, anyway. Once the shock of it wore off, David even thought that it felt kind of good, rinsing away what had to by now be five or six different cakings of sweat. It tapered soon, and was little more than a drizzle by the time that they heard the sound of the waves again.

Archuleta was sitting with his back against the tree around which their collection of sleeping hollows was clustered, shielding something in his hand and staring out at the beach with a worried expression. He leapt up to his feet again as soon as he saw that they were back.

“Oh, good,” Archuleta started. “I’ve been trying to make her come back in, but she won’t--” David grabbed Archuleta to him without saying a word and hugged him as hard as he could. He could feel Archuleta tensing up against him, but he wasn’t trying to get away, so David wasn’t about to let him go. “Um, okay.” He finally hugged David back, though with only one hand; the other was occupied with holding whatever it was that he was cradling far out from their bodies. Archuleta’s fingers dipped into the small of David’s back for a moment and then darted away again as if they were shocked at their own audacity. They left a lingering warmth against David’s skin and through his soaked and mostly useless shirt that he still felt for long after Archuleta had pulled away and was looking as if he even understood what was going on, but it was the doing something about it that was the problem. David was reminded again that Archuleta might be nearly a decade younger than him, but he was officially twenty years old and legally allowed to do nearly everything that was legal in the first place. He was kind of a horrible person, anyway, for just now noticing that Kristy Lee was lying flat on her back out in the sand. Chikezie was already jogging out to see her. David followed suit and could feel Archuleta watching him from behind.

Kristy Lee was sprawled out on the sand as if she was making a snow angel, close enough to the waves that they were licking lightly at her toes. David almost asked her when she had taken her shoes off, only to realize that there was nothing man-made out here on which she could cut her feet, anyway. He couldn’t tell how long she had been lying out on the beach, as there was such pitiful protection from the rain under their tree that they had claimed that she would have been soaked in any case. When the clouds parted, sullenly and promising that they could still return later, David saw that she was holding a makeup compact in her hand.

“Kristy?” Both the way that Chikezie called her name and the careful manner in which he set his feet as he approached suggested that he was not quite sure what response he was going to get. “You wanna come with us and get back under shelter?”

“Oh, shut up, I’m not crazy,” Kristy Lee snapped without lifting her head from the sand. She twitched the compact in her hand, sending a beam of reflected light flashing up at the sky. “And that tree isn’t much in the way of shelter, I didn’t even come out here to try until it had mostly stopped raining, anyway.” She twitched her hand again. Trying to signal something, David realized. Why she felt compelled to do it while lying flat on her back with her feet in the waves did not seem to be a part of the equation that she was willing to share.

“It’s better than nothing.” Chikezie stooped and put his hands beneath Kristy Lee’s arms in order to help her gently back up to her feet. There was sand in her wet hair as she stood again, and David would have known that her fever was worse based upon the glassy cast in her eyes even if Chikezie hadn’t grimaced at him from over her head as soon as he touched her skin. “Come on, we have some water and aspirin for you, maybe it’ll hold your temperature down.”

“Did you guys find any food?” Kristy Lee sounded hopeful. “Or a coconut tree, or the people from Gilligan’s Island?”

David didn’t ask whether Kristy Lee meant that the former passengers of the Minnow were likely to be more adept at helping them to find that elusive coconut tree, or that the four of them could eat the people. She was a hell of a lot hotter than she had been when they had left that morning, David discovered as he curved his fingers beneath her elbow. There had been precious little food salvageable from the plane, especially split among four people, so that rationing it barely seemed as if it had an actual point.

“Not so much,” David was forced to admit. He and Chikezie set Kristy Lee gently back down at the foot of the tree, and Chikezie produced the bottle of aspirin that he had put into his pocket. He frowned slightly as he popped the gap and looked inside; David could see what he was thinking. They probably ought to rationing the aspirin, too, or at least doing their best not to put Kristy Lee into liver failure before they got out of here, but rationing wasn’t going to do a whole hell of a lot of good if she didn’t get a high enough dose to save her in the first place. In the end, Chikezie shook out four pills, and offered them to Kristy Lee along with one of the refilled bottles. He took the cap off for her so that she would not have to use her injured, and by now slightly soggy, hand.

“Thank you.” Kristy Lee took both the offered pills and the water. After she had gulped down a healthy portion, she handed the bottle back and stared morosely at her hand, folded into her lap, and pressed her lips together hard as if she was trying to hold back a wince. “Fuck, it hurts even when I’m not doing anything with it.” Behind her, Archuleta carefully set down the small bundle that he had been cradling when David and Chikezie had come back, though he was keeping his body hunched over it so that David could not see what it was.

“How bad?” Chikezie asked her. He reached for her hand, but she jerked out of reach and then cradled it against her chest, glaring. The comparison to a wounded animal was strong, and David thought for a few seconds that maybe they should take Archuleta’s shoelaces from him and see if they could fashion one of those collars on sticks. Maybe he couldn’t blame Kristy Lee’s bout of black humor on her fever.

“It’s fine,” Kristy Lee said. Her voice broke; Chikezie and David rolled their eyes, and even Archuleta stopped what he was doing so that he could look over his shoulder with eyebrows drawn close together. “Okay, it’s not fine, but it’s not something you can do anything about, either, so just--” Smaller still. “Just don’t pity me, okay? I got enough of that on the plane before it went down.”

“We still need to change the bandage,” David said. Kristy Lee’s eyebrows went up, as if she was asking him if he really wanted to go through with an argument towards cleanliness when it was already clear that she was infected and well and truly fucked unless help arrived soon. David sighed. “Yeah, okay.” Cowardly or not, it suddenly hurt to look at her and be reminded of just how fucked all of them could have been if they had been unlucky enough to have injuries of their own that broke the skin. How fucked David himself could have been if he had been thrown down into the jungle just a little bit harder, and one of those broken ribs that he was probably carrying around had gone truly rogue and pierced a lung.

David tried to stop himself from wondering what the official cause of death was for Carly and Michael, lying so still and quiet with not a thing wrong with them on the surface. It didn’t work.

“Do you want to help me?” David startled hard. The first things that he saw when he came back down to earth were Archuleta’s liquid-dark eyes, worried but still a fuck of a lot steadier than David himself was feeling at that moment. He must have been standing lost and still for a while.

David rubbed his hand over his mouth and then glanced back over his shoulder at Kristy Lee, who had taken a seat that was near the tree, but still far enough out in the emerging sun so that she could keep flashing her compact. David couldn’t hear a plane, but there was still enough cloud cover and disgruntled rumblings of distant thunder that he could not be certain, and he wasn’t about to take it away from Kristy Lee in any case. While he watched, Chikezie settled down beside her. After a moment, she put her head down against his shoulder.

“Yeah, I’d love to,” David finally answered Archuleta. He settled down onto his haunches next to Archuleta. “What are you doing?” Archuleta had been cradling a few solitary coals on a bed of moss when he and Chikezie had come back, David realized now. He had now settled them down into a little triangle of sticks and was blowing on them, trying to get them to spring into life again.

“I saw this in a movie once.” Where Archuleta once would have sounded hesitant to the point of being outright bashful, his voice was now calm and steady. Growing up. “Rather than wasting all of our matches and flares, we need to protect the fire as much as we can, not let it go out.” For the first time, Archuleta’s voice and hands each developed a slight shake as he went on, “In case we’re here for awhile.”

“We’re not going to be here that long,” David said stubbornly, never mind that they were trotting right up to forty-eight hours in this place without hearing even a whisper of a boat’s or plane’s engine, and the ocean was such a big space to search that people could get lost in it for years, forever. He put his arm around Archuleta’s shoulders before he could think about it. It might have been awhile since they had seen each other before this mess had happened, but once upon a time he had just casually invaded Archuleta’s space--all right, fair enough, he did that with everybody, but there was something about Archie’s in particular that was even more inviting than most--near-constantly and rarely while even pausing to think about what he was doing. It was going to take more than one night swim and a few inordinately heated touches to change that.

The way that Archuleta went as rigid as if David had just poked him with a pin might just make him cancel that plan, though. David released him immediately. “Sorry, Arch, didn’t mean to startle you.”

“No, um, it’s okay, it’s fine.” It was most certainly neither okay nor fine. “Um” still might be a very accurate way of describing the mood between them now. Archuleta looked down at the few little coals that he had managed to save in the deluge, which were now smoking happily but not doing much in the way of putting forth an actual flame that they would be able to use. “Just, uh, could you help me look for some drier wood? This isn’t going to work any time soon.”

“I can do that.” Even better, doing that would take him a long way from Archuleta, who was still looking at him with worried eyes at the same time that David didn’t think Archie would mind all that much tearing off and down the beach in order to be away from him. David hadn’t received a rebuff that strong since he had been sixteen and it turned out that Amy Purdue hadn’t been inclining her head towards him in invitation, she had just gotten her ears pierced again earlier that day and the site was itching. David turned on his heel and dove into the first opening in the jungle foliage that he could fit his body through. He only barely remembered to keep the sound of the ocean on his left side so that he would be able to find his way back when he was done.

The worry of getting lost was outweighed immediately by a deep appreciation for how thick the growth here was, how it muffled sound and even sight with its overwhelming greenness. David took a few deep breaths and listened to drops of water plinking erratically down from the leaves above his head, felt one or two of them land on his shoulders. It was a good place to center one’s thoughts, even if David was so hungry at that point that the sight of all of that green was giving him a deep urge to just gnaw on something and then hope like hell that it didn’t wind up killing him. He took another deep breath. Appreciating rain forests from afar was one thing, but if he had ever needed more evidence that he was a city boy, this was it. The jungle would still be an excellent place, an isolated place, to bring some willing company for a little time alone.

David rapped his forehead against the trunk of the nearest tree, hard enough to remind him that his head had already had quite enough of that over the past few days, thanks for asking. “Get it together, asshole,” he warned himself before he resumed looking for wood that might have possibly escaped being soaked in the earlier storm. Finding it took long enough that he was at least reasonably certain that he was not going to jump Archuleta on site when he returned, even if Archuleta still looked at him sideways from beneath his lowered lashes in a way that was really, really not conveying the message in a way that David thought Archuleta had originally intended.

Continue to Part Four

AI Fic: Don't Know When I'll Be Back Again (2/5)

2009-11-22T00:10:06Z

Continued from Part One

David woke up to someone calling his name. He made a mistake, moved too quickly, and answered his visitor with a long, groaned stream of obscenity. “Oh,” a male voice said, sounding half-curious and half-shocked, and then a female answered, “You can learn what all of that means when you’re old enough.”

“I’m twenty!” David opened his eyes and saw that Archuleta was looking slightly affronted.

“You’re still not old enough,” Kristy Lee informed him primly. She nudged at David a few more times and then tugged at the front of his shirt, even though David was wide awake by this point and glaring at her. “You fell asleep.”

“That’s a side-effect of being exhausted,” David snapped back at her. He wanted to flop over again. Apparently sensing this, Kristy Lee wrapped her fist more tightly through the front of his shirt and answered his best glare with a serene expression. Evil. She was pure evil.

“Yeah, well, you have a head injury, suck it up.” They had managed to find a couple of flashlights and flares in the cabin, but by mutual agreement were not using them unless someone heard a plane or a helicopter flying overhead. David had to use the moon filtering down through the canopy in order to see Kristy Lee’s face, and she was thrown into alien shadows. Archuleta, having moved a few feet away once he saw that David was awake again, was even worse.

“I swear to God, your solution would be to suck it up even if I had been impaled on a tree branch.” Kristy Lee among them probably had the best reason to be frightened right about now, as David’s and Chikezie’s respective concussions could not get infected and David could smell mold growing and hear water dripping from where he sat propped up against a tree, but that didn’t stop him from looking past Kristy Lee to the prone form of Chikezie a few yards off and protesting, “Hey, how come he gets to sleep?”

“He stopped feeling dizzy,” Archuleta said. “We’re still waking him up every few hours.”

“I stopped feeling dizzy, too.”

“Shake your head at me and prove it,” Kristy Lee ordered.

“You are a bitch.”

“Just following orders.” Kristy Lee looked over at Archuleta. “He’s not good at being an invalid, is he?”

“She’s only in such a good mood because she’s feeding on our souls, Arch. Don’t let your guard down.”

Improbably, Archuleta smiled, and Kristy Lee exhaled softly as she turned to face David again. “Keep an eye on him,” she said without specifying who she was speaking to, and then went to wake Chikezie. He stirred with much more grace than David himself had been able to manage, but David decided that he was not going to hold that against him.

“You should be sleeping,” Chikezie told Kristy Lee as he sat up and pressed the back of his hand against his mouth to hold back a yawn.

“Can’t,” she said simply, and showed him her bandaged hand. “Hurts too much.” When Chikezie started to look sympathetic, she was quick to add, “Oh, I will knock the hell out of you,” and then got up to sit in the shadow of the plane.

“She’s even more of a ray of sunshine than usual,” David said.

“She broke up with Andy,” Archuleta said. After a moment’s consideration, he got up and moved to sit down again beside David. Chikezie laid back down among the ferns, though David could see that his face was turned towards them and he wasn’t closing his eyes. No one had even considered sleeping inside the plane. “Just a few days ago.”

“Shit.” David had figured that maybe Kristy Lee and her fiance were on some shaky ground when they still weren’t married three years after the actual proposal, but Kristy Lee hadn’t seemed depressed or anxious as she had boarded the plane, just cranky, and, well. “She didn’t say anything about it.” He looked at Chikezie. “Did you know?”

Chikezie managed to shrug without raising either of his shoulders from the ground. David made a mental note to ask Chikezie to show him the trick when it was daylight again. “Maybe it was a uteruses only kind of conversation,” he said, and David grinned at Archuleta.

“Hey!” Archuleta protested. “I heard her telling Syesha and Ramiele, they were going to take her out in Sydney so that she would feel better about it.”

“I hope that they didn’t tell you anything that your virgin ears couldn’t handle,” Chikezie said before he threw his arm across his eyes and looked as if he was drifting off again. David looked around for something that he could throw at him, under the justification that until he got to sleep, nobody got to sleep, but it was too dark for him to see the ground. Ferns just wouldn’t have the same effect.

“I’m twenty years old.”

“You’re going to be the kid forever, kid, you might as well resign yourself to it now.” Chikezie lifted his arm up again long enough to look at them both. “Do you smell the salt?”

David took a few sniffs at the air and said, “Yes. Maybe. I’m supposed to smell bread if my head is really fucked up, right?”

“I don’t know, how would I know?”

“Chikezie, buddy, you have demonstrated more of a clue so far than all of the rest of us put together.” While David had been speaking, Archuleta had been inching steadily closer to him until his side was pressed up against David’s. The one thing that the jungle hadn’t proven itself to be so far, not even at night, was cold, but David wasn’t about to push Archuleta away. All four of them had been alternating between bouts of shaking from nerves since the sun had set and the adrenaline had started wearing off, and being so eerily still that they frightened one another. David leaned more heavily against Archuleta and sighed.

Chikezie made a disgruntled noise and dropped his arm more heavily across his eyes. “Scouts,” he said. A few seconds in which the only sound was the night insects, and Chikezie went on, “No, I definitely smell salt, so we’re close to the ocean. We should start heading that way in the morning.”

Archuleta stiffened beside David, David himself went rigid so hard that his ribs took the opportunity to tell him that he was an incredible motherfucker, and he thought that he could even sense Kristy Lee straightening up from her position in the shadow of the plane. “You sure that we should leave the plane?” David asked. He probably shouldn’t be making any decisions more complicated than tying his shoes until the world stopped spinning quite so damned much, but still--but still. I don’t want to leave the all alone in there. Michael and Carly especially, but he was certain that first light would find him making a trip to the other half of the craft, too. “If rescue comes--”

“When,” Archuleta corrected softly. David didn’t even realize that he had placed a qualifier on it. Little early in the story to be getting emo, dude. He grimaced.

Chikezie toyed with a few pieces of moss and said, “I was thinking about that. You look at the canopy, we really didn’t make that much of a dent in it coming down. There’s no guarantee that anyone flying over it would see the plane.” David was completely willing to welcome his head injury for the time being, if it made thoughts like that too big to contemplate. “On the beach, though, we’ll be able to set a fire, signal to boats as well as planes.”

“Good idea,” David said slowly. “You sure that this is all coming from scouts?”

Chikezie smiled at him. “Scouts and disaster movies,” he said. He turned over onto his back, and that seemed to end the conversation for the night.

Especially when Kristy Lee roused herself from the plane and knelt to nudge Archuleta gently. “Get some sleep, sweetie,” she said. “Long walk tomorrow.” Archuleta sighed and muttered something about how he was never going to stop being the kid to them, was he, and David was almost certain that he heard a couple of words that Archie had certainly not known the last time that he had spent a significant amount of time with him. Kristy Lee settled down in front of David, legs folded beneath each other, her injured hand balanced awkwardly on her knee.

“Are you guarding me to make certain that I don’t sleep?” David asked her. “You know, I was joking about that being a bitch thing. You can stop at any time.”

Kristy Lee smiled at him sweetly and then slowly turned up her good hand so that he could see her middle finger.

*
His head felt better. On the one hand, fun bonus, he was probably going to get at least a little bit of sleep that night. On the other, oh, joy, there wasn’t a whole lot else that he could do other than think about the people that they were leaving behind back there, and how they should have done better by them.

“We could have--” It was really fucking hot, and David’s stomach was twisting even though he had refused his share of the little bit of peanuts, pretzels, and dried cranberries that they had found in the cabin the previous evening. He wanted to say that they could have done something more for the bodies back at the plane, but they had no digging tools, Kristy Lee had an injured hand, and he and Chikezie were both sporting head injuries. (David wanted to ask the universe why it was that he was getting the random nausea and double vision, and Chikezie was getting the scar that made him look kind of like a pirate.) David had Carly’s wedding ring in his pocket and didn’t intend to let go of it until they were rescued and he could personally hand them over to the spouse to which it belonged. He had Michael’s wallet for his mother and stepfather.

“Are you okay?” Archuleta asked him, leaning close and looking at David’s pupils, which were probably still doing a nice little out of sync rumba to every change in the light. The kid had been sticking by David’s side even more tightly than Kristy Lee and Chikezie, and since Kristy Lee was still stomping around and telling David what to do like a general without an army and Chikezie was too busy being the reluctant leader to realize how well he wore it, that was saying something.

“I’m fine,” David said. They were close enough now that he could smell the salt, too, or else everyone was wrong and incipient death from smooshed brain didn’t smell like bread at all, but David was going to focus on the important things, here. He caught Archuleta looking at him with dubious expression. “Really. I’m okay.”

Archuleta was silent for a moment, shifting the salvaged items from the cabin in his arms long enough to pick at a cuticle, and then silently held out one of the bottles of water to David. David had a feeling that he was being rebuked, there. He sighed and took the bottle, drank a quick gulp and then waited to see if his heat-queasy stomach was going to punish him for even that much, and then handed it back to Archuleta. Archuleta looked vaguely pleased with himself as he took it back in among his things. He had refused to allow David to carry anything on the grounds that David was having enough trouble keeping himself walking a straight line, while Archuleta was only screwed up “up here” accompanied by a vague gesture that was supposed to encompass his entire head. David hadn’t asked what the difference was between that and his own injury. He, Kristy Lee, and Chikezie had all had the good fortune to be unconscious by the time that the plane had started falling from the sky in earnest, he already knew.

“Are you all right?” David asked softly. Archuleta’s head snapped towards him and a blush started coming up his cheeks as though he was shocked, honestly shocked, to discover that he really was one of the crappiest actors who had ever walked the planet. David nearly could have laughed. Seventeen or twenty, there were some things that Archuleta was never going to grow out of, and David for one was glad of it.

“I’m okay.” Archuleta lifted one of his shoulders into a shrug and resettled the rest of his items more carefully.

“You’re being really quiet.”

That was the closest thing to a smartassed look that David was certain he was ever going to see on Archuleta’s face. “We were in a plane crash,” he told David.

“Yeah, but you were being way too quiet before we lifted off.” There was a breeze coming through the trees now. David was not certain entirely how, given that in front of them there was still a wall of green, but it was clean and fresh. Kristy Lee and Chikezie had ranged up ahead; David was only able to hear their voices when he strained for them. “I meant to ask you about it when we touched down.” David snorted out a laugh, no matter what it did to his ribs. “Guess we’ve touched down.”

Archuleta’s smile was so faint that David wanted to tell him it wasn’t even worth the bother if that was the best that he had, but then Kristy Lee and Chikezie started yelping excitedly ahead, and David was at a run before he even realized what he was doing. It was stupid, but hell, it was accomplishing something other than sitting beside a plane that, Chikezie had been right when David had taken a good look at it in the pure daylight, probably couldn’t be seen at all from the canopy above. He burst out of the tree cover to see Chikezie and Kristy Lee already at the shoreline, Chikezie splashing water up and over his shoulders and back, Kristy Lee primly removing her shoes and stripping the bandage off of her hand so that she could dunk first her scorched soles and then her fingers into the water. It was possibly the first dainty thing that David had seen her do in all of the time that he had known her, and he could not stop himself from snickering even as he pictured green mold shooting out of the blisters like snakes. The sand was nearly as white as sugar and was warm when David leaned down to run some of it through his fingers. The ocean was a vibrant blue-gray. He was shocked not to see patio chairs and umbrellas scattered across the shoreline to enjoy the view.

“Are you sure that you should be doing that?” David called to Kristy Lee. Archuleta stopped at the edge of the waves and watched them lapping at his shoes when he wasn’t watching Kristy Lee and Chikezie cavort.

“Salt water’s good for cuts,” Kristy Lee called back, sounding happier than she had at any point since the plane had crashed. That didn’t explain why she felt a need to suddenly spin around and kick a large bow of water in Chikezie’s direction, and then immediately turn around and put her hand back into the waves so that she looked too injured and pathetic for Chikezie to kick one back at her. “Jesus, David, don’t you know anything?”

“Maybe I should have grown up in the wilds of Portland,” David answered dryly. The sun was hurting his head, so he started retreating back towards the shade at the edge of the trees again, from where he could watch the water and maybe not feel quite so much like he about to throw up. Turning his back towards the jungle made him feel as though the dead in it were watching him. David had seen that show, though, and nothing about it had made any sense even at the very end, so he did his best to ignore the prickle at the back of his neck. Watching the ocean, beautiful and aquamarine as poured glass, he could not help but think on what Chikezie and Kristy Lee were not mentioning and what David hoped like hell Archuleta had not noticed: there was not a single vessel in sight for as far out as David could peer, not a piece of debris on the warm-sugar sand, not one sign that any human beings had ever been on this island before them or ever would be again. David didn’t realize how hard he had been counting on them landing on a remote part of Hawaii or some shit like that until it turned out not to be true, and he really wanted nothing more than to just like down and get some sleep until their situation stopped being so uniformly awful.

“She’s right,” Chikezie yelled up at David as David was settling himself. He splashed water up and against the cut on his cheek, closing his eyes and mouth tightly as he did so. “Don’t ask me if I know why, though.” When the first drops of water hit the open wound, Chikezie hissed so hard through his teeth that David heard him even from his position at the trees. “And I’m willing to bet that it stops stinging after awhile, too.”

“Eventually.” Kristy Lee was now stubbornly stomping up and down the shore, pausing every few minutes to dunk her hand again.

“Hmmm.” David didn’t see any good reason why he should move from the shadow of his tree, where there was a good breeze coming off of the water and the leaves were throwing shade down across his face. The sand underneath him was soft and warm.

David’s eyelids started drifting downwards, and then suddenly there was a person there to poke him gently but insistently in the side. Chikezie and Kristy Lee were both too far away to have raced up here that quickly, or without David hearing them; he groaned without opening his eyes. “Archie,” he said. “I expected better of you.”

“You can’t sleep yet,” Archuleta insisted. “What if you go into a coma or something?”

“Then the rescue ships will have to carry my fat ass aboard.” Archuleta said nothing, but paused for a moment before he resumed poking David, harder than before. “Kid. Don’t start that, all right?”

Even when they had been on the show together, Archuleta had always seen and put together a lot more than most people gave him credit for. Because he had also been cool and kind of stealthily funny long before David had been giving serious thought to what he was going to do if he actually won that shindig, David had kept the secret for him. “Yeah,” Archuleta said finally. “There’s got to be about a billion people out there by now, right? It’s only been a day.”

David thought about making a crack about how he thought that even they probably didn’t merit a seventh of the population of the entire planet combing the sea to look for them, only to realize that, hell, that might be happening. An entire year of the biggest media juggernaut on the planet just up and disappearing might be just that big. He flopped back into the sand and waved Archuleta off when Archuleta started poking at him again. “ARCHIE.”

“Maybe I’ll stop poking you if you finally stop calling me Archie.” Kid sounded downright sly.

David opened his eye a crack. “Archie. That’s devious.” Archuleta’s eyebrow went up. “Okay, Archuleta, it’s downright evil. Deal.” He could already feel his eyelids drifting shut.

“But you have to keep talking, though,” Archuleta was quick to add. “So that you don’t go into a coma. I’m not kidding.”

Someone needed to keep an eye on Archuleta for world domination at some point. David sighed and shifted around, but reluctantly opened his eyes again. Whenever they were closed, he swore that he could feel the jungle, and the people that they had had to leave behind in it, watching him. “So what’s up with you?” he asked, and felt Archuleta looking at him sideways. “Besides the plane crash, don’t be a smartass, Archuleta.”

“I didn’t say anything!” Archuleta protested. Chikezie and Kristy Lee were still playing through the surf. David thought about suggesting that Archuleta go and splash around, too, injuries or not, so that there could be at least one of them that didn’t reek of stale sweat. Archuleta seemed to have designated himself David’s official babysitter until David stopped being to addled to look after himself, though, and the company was nice.

“You say more than anyone else who doesn’t say anything than I’ve met before in my whole life.” David wiggled until he could nudge at Archuleta’s leg with his own. Archuleta stared down at their touching limbs with an expression that David could not read. “Come on. You were being way too quiet long before this whole trip went to hell in a handbasket, don’t give me that.”

Archuleta reached out for a solitary tuft of moss daring to grow this far out, where the sand was drier and the air more open, and then tore it into pieces with a frustration that David never would have guessed Archuleta capable of. “Allison and I broke up.” Spoken in a mumble so low that David nearly missed it, raised his head off of the ground too quickly, and then had to spend several seconds in a flurry of obscenity before he could even think of replying.

“Iraheta?” When Archuleta did something in David’s direction that was probably as close to a glare as he ever got, David went on, “Wow. Jumping straight into that cradle, huh?” There had been rumors in the tabloids about the two of them in the handful of months leading up to the Sydney trip, but David had glanced at the covers and then largely dismissed them as cranks with nothing better to do. Pay too much stock to those things, and you were bound to walk away with the impression that he and Kim had made up and broken up as many times as Brad and Angelina and had managed to hide an entire family of illicitly adopted babies somewhere, and furthermore than Lana, Lady GaGa, and Adam all fought over him on weekends. David never managed as many orgies as trashy magazines seemed to believe.

“She’s nineteen,” Archuleta insisted in a tone of great affront. “And only a year younger than I am, jeez.” Something about him seemed more than slightly deflated when he glanced David’s way again.

“Oh. Right.” David shifted around to make a more comfortable bed for himself in the sand and frowned up at their scant tree cover. David snuck a look at Archuleta’s hand, but that stupid purity ring that his management had talked him into wearing for a little while (“But I believe in it, too!” Archuleta had insisted, and gone very red when David had tried to tell him that he knew he did, and he wasn’t laughing at him) was so long gone that there wasn’t even a pale line in the flesh to mark where it had been. Feeling his face color and about to laugh into the sand over it, David turned his head away. It had somehow snuck up on him that Allison--whom he had met only a dozen or so times over the years but who always managed to, ah, make an impression--and Archuleta had gone and grown up.

“Well, that sucks,” David said as he realized that Archuleta had gone back to gloomily looking around him for more moss to massacre. “But, hey, man, if you broke up, then you did it for a reason. You’re only twenty.” Jesus fuck, Archuleta was twenty. “Someone else will come along.” Archuleta went first white, then very red, and then started kicking at the sand with more ferocity than David thought that he had ever seen out of him. “And suddenly I get the feeling that there’s more to this story.”

“There’s already a someone else,” Archuleta said carefully.

David could feel his eyes widening. “Archie,” he said, not caring if it earned him a retaliatory poke. “Tell me that you didn’t.”

“No!” Archuleta looked too aghast to even think about jabbing David in the ribs. “I wouldn’t--I would never cheat--” And he even looked hurt, too, which made David feel like about the worst person in the world. Archuleta pulled his legs up. “No, we broke up because I told her, I would never hurt her by actually doing anything about it.” He sighed. “Instead, I hurt her by not doing anything about it.”

“David.” Archuleta looked at him. David was fairly certain that he was not the most gravitas-laden figure at the moment, on his back in the sand and doing his best to burrow it down into a bed from which he never had to leave again, but he was going to try. “Trust me on this, telling her about it was the right thing to do. As someone who has been on the receiving end of both, it sucks a lot, lot less when the girl respects you enough to lay it all out on the table. Otherwise, you would just be using Allison as your safety net, and no one likes that.”

Archuleta looked unconvinced, but willing for now to let it go. “She said that she was going to burn all of my stuff as soon as we got to Sydney,” he said. “Even the stuff I didn’t give her. I didn’t get a chance to tell her that I knew she was joking.”

“Archuleta, you’re going to see her again, okay?” David said. “Look at me, man, we’re barely rounding twenty-four hours here. Mugs as famous as we four, they’re not going to stop looking for weeks.”

“Not if they assume that we just went into the water,” Archuleta said in that weird and detached tone that David already knew he did not like at all. “Planes hitting water just disintegrate.” Archuleta followed David’s gaze out to the wide expanse of ocean that no longer looked nearly as pretty and jewel-like, now that Archuleta had put it like that. “That’s a lot of water out there.”

David shivered and watched Kristy Lee and Chikezie continuing to splash, trying to take their minds off of the situation, and wondered if it wouldn’t be worth it to get up and move out into the sun, after all. There was a chill where he was lying.

Continue to Part Three

AI Fic: Don't Know When I'll Be Back Again (1/5)

2009-11-21T23:58:22Z

TITLE: Don’t Know When I’ll Be Back Again
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: Hard R
PAIRING: Cookleta
CONTAINS: Violence, language, sexuality, and character death. Contact me if you need or want to know more.
SUMMARY: “The plane fell out of the sky.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE: This was written for magic8ballz in return for her very generous donation in the AI charity author auction. I hope you like it!

After Idol’s tenth season wrapped up, there was a big concert scheduled for Sydney, an Idol Gives Back on a grander and more epic scale than anything that the show had ever done before. The ratings were finally starting to slip, Simon was getting bored and started to talk about leaving, and among everyone there was the sense that if this was going to be it, then it was going to be big. Bigger than any vehicle than came after it could even dream about approaching. As many contestants from the series run as could possibly be wooed aboard were being flown into Sydney on a series of private planes, like a convoy of royalty entering a castle. Hell, like David was going for one second going to turn down 1) a chance to do some major charity work and the thing that he loved at the same time, 2) throwing a couple of steaks back to the beast that had made him.

And, man, it had to be said: there was no expense to be spared on their assigned bird, and that included some truly amazing booze.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” David laughed, hooking one of his legs over the armrest of the leather seat and grinning at their flight attendant as she made an exasperated sound and deftly swatted his leg back down to the floor. They were hours across the Pacific, and she had rather given up on asking him nicely within an hour of leaving Los Angeles.

“What?” Michael was making a pyramid out of tiny bottles on the table in front of him. Carly was sitting next to him with her chin in one hand, the fingers of her other hand swinging idly back and forth, as if it was all that she could do not to knock the bottles over just so that she could see what Michael would do. There was a mischievous gleam in her eye. Damn, David was glad to around all of them again.

“It’s free, mate,” Michael continued. He waggled one of the bottles in David’s direction and then laughed when David sighed and didn’t pluck it from his hand. “And it’s high-quality, too. They’re sparing no expense on us.”

“You’re going to have to sing hungover,” David said.

Carly made a swat at Michael’s tower. Michael yelled out something that was half garbled obscenity and blocked Carly’s attack with his forearm, while the flight attendant--Alice, David remembered she had told them all her name before takeoff--rolled her eyes up towards the ceiling as if she was asking herself why she hadn’t just given in and agreed to become a kindergarten teacher.

“At the rate he’s going, he’s going to have to sing drunk,” Carly said.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Michael said, sinking a little further down in his chair and waggling another of the bottles slowly back and forth. He set it back down without opening it and gave Alice his very best butter-wouldn’t-melt smile. Slowly, reluctantly, Alice’s mouth curved back. The line around Michael’s finger where a golden band had been still hadn’t faded away entirely.

David put his hand upon Michael’s arm, eased it away from the bottle of bourbon as slowly as he dared, and nodded slightly at Carly. The bottle was whisked away and into her purse before Michael had time to take his eyes away from Alice. He blinked slowly and seemed almost, but not quite, sober enough to realize the ruse that had just been played.

“Atta boy,” David murmured to Michael, and then craned his head back to look over the rest of the passengers on the plane with him. The entire season seven cast was there, everyone who had made the Top Ten. Archuleta was towards the back, sitting between Brooke and Chikezie. He had been inordinately quiet throughout the entire plane ride. David kept meaning to go back and ask him if everything was all right, but then Michael would say something morbid about the failed state of his marriage and try to get even drunker, or Carly would say something hysterical in an attempt to distract him, and then David would forget until the next round of acute puppy eyes hit him.

David turned back around. Michael had confiscated David’s own empty bottles in order to add them to his pyramid and was frowning over how few their were. “You need to drink more, mate,” he informed David in a tone of undeniable, if slurred, authority.

“I don’t like private planes that much,” David said. “They’re all--” He made a rippling motion with his arm like a rambunctious snake. “And my stomach responds accordingly.” He looked back over his shoulder at Archuleta again. He had his head on Brooke’s shoulder. David was starting to think that his puppy had died immediately prior to Archuleta getting on the plane, which possibly made David the worst friend-slash-mentor who had ever walked the planet for waiting this long to go check on him.

David made a vague gesture back over his shoulder in Archuleta’s direction and started to rise from his seat. “I’m gonna--”

“I think that I’m going to hurl,” Michael interrupted in a voice that was just a little too calm for him to be joking.

“Michael Johns, I swear to God, if you spew on me--” Carly was half-laughing and already leaping up from her seat to get out of the way. The seatbelt sign hadn’t been on for well over two hours.

The plane fell out of the sky.

David yelled first in fear and then in pain as his entire body left the floor, connected with the ceiling, and then threw him back to the floor so hard that he was not even certain what had happened until he felt his mouth filling with blood. Carly was screaming, or maybe it was Alice, or maybe it was Kristy Lee or one of the other women towards the back. All that David knew was that it was a woman, and she sounded terrified for her life. The plane shook like a dog in a bath, and then dipped to the side so that David had to scrabble for the side of his seat in order to avoid another body-breaking tumble. Someone small flew by him; she was screaming, too, until she abruptly stopped when she hit the far wall with a horrible smack.

Fuck me, that was Ramiele. David couldn’t turn his head to look and see what was bad enough to make her stop screaming, he was too busy scrambling back into his seat as the plane flipped back horizontal for a few blessed seconds. Alice was on her feet at the front of the plane through some miracle, though she had her hand pressed against her side and her face had gone green with pain and fear.

“Please,” she said through clenched teeth. “Please fasten your seat belts and remain calm, I’m going to--” Alice seemed to realize that there was very little that she could actually say to them in the way of comforting lie and spun towards the pilot’s cabin. Her hand had just brushed against the door handle when the plane fell again, a sickening number of feet within seconds that David could not count but still managed to register within every inch of his body. She rocketed up and against the ceiling the same way that David had seconds before. When she came down, she did not get back up again and scramble into a seat. David was breathing very hard. He could hear the others behind him screaming, crying, a whispery and panicked cadence that might even have been Archuleta saying a prayer. Carly put her hand over his and then squeezed so hard that his knuckles popped; there was not a trace of blood in her face when he looked over at her.

“What--what is this?” she gasped. “Did something happen to the pilot?”

“I don’t know,” David whispered. The plane leveled, dipped again, and then fell into an outright plunge that tossed David up and against his seatbelt with such force that he was certain he was going to be cut in two, left Carly screaming in panic directly against his ear. Michael was the color of wet cement directly across from them but had somehow managed not to make good on his promise to throw up. He looked out the window and then away again, his eyes larger than David had ever seen them before.

“Oh, shit, oh, shit, oh, shit,” Michael said, and “Guys--”

A ripple of turbulence that felt like being shaken by an angry god came through the plane at the same time that the bright yellow oxygen masks finally fell down from the ceiling. The narrow table on which Michael had been building his altar to the booze gods came disconnected from the floor--those screws were made of fucking steel, David thought--and flew directly at his head. He ducked, but the edge clipped him all the same, and whatever happened afterwards, he was not awake to see it.

*
David’s chest and stomach ached, and his mouth was filled with the taste of blood going stale. It choked him, he coughed, and then yelled as the pain that only been circling and waiting for him to come to and appreciate it attacked in a swarm. David splayed his fingers in front of his face in preparation for the light that years of hangovers had already taught him was going to be a bitch and flickered his eyes open. There was way too much green in front of his face, it made him want to be sick.

“Fuuuuck,” David groaned. He flashed his eyes open again a few seconds later as he discovered that the urge to vomit was not going to go away simply because he wanted it to. David leaned over as far as he was able, gasping in pain as his entire midsection lit up like a pinball machine, and then heaved until he really thought that he would like to go back to being a human arcade game, please and thank you, because that had still been preferable to swearing that he was going to feel his ribs shooting out of his nose at any moment. He mostly managed to avoid his own shoes. When that was done, David struggled for several minutes to open his seatbelt, thinking that the clasp had warped and then realizing that it was his own shaking fingers. When he fell out of the seat, he got lucky and managed to mostly avoid the vomit for a second time.

It took David a long time to realize that what he was lying on was a bed of ferns. He was going to blame the head injury.

“Unless I’m still unconscious,” David whispered slowly, running his hand back and forth across the soft, feathery leaves, but his body hurt too much for that. He rolled over onto his back with the deep-seated suspicion that he was moving like an old man, because seriously, fucking everything hurt, and stared up at a canopy high above his head. The trees rustled slowly back and forth and birds called to one another. David pushed himself up onto his elbows by increments and looked at a leather-upholstered airline seat, sitting plunk in the middle of a damned jungle like it was meant to be there. It was a little worse for wear by this point. David was still willing to bet that he could dangle one of his legs over the side and annoy a flight attendant in comfort. He kept looking, but the scene refused to transform itself into a nice, sterile, slightly creepy hospital room with a nice, sterile, slightly creepy doctor telling him that he had been whacked in the head really hard but everything was just fine, he was hallucinating his ass off and should maybe look into finding roadies who weren’t going to hit him in the noggin with amps.

“Fuck,” David said again; that seemed to about cover it. He lay back down amidst the foliage. The deep smell of loam seeped into his nostrils and refused to let him sleep; there was a part of David that was still able to appreciate why this was a good thing. He had been hit in the head pretty hard, he was much too calm and feeling just a bit as though he was operating from under water. It wasn’t a smart plan for him to be alone, period, well before he took himself a nice little nap among the ferns from which he might not wake up.

David struggled to his feet and put his hand against a tree to brace himself when his knees were too wobbly at first to let him stand on his own. Fingers shaking, he reached into the pocket of his jeans, found his cellphone, and only got to have a few seconds of elation before he realized that digging deeper only gave him another part of his cell phone. Once upright, David’s head felt a little clearer, and he was able to try to put some order into his situation. Alright, the plane had crashed. By some miracle he was alive, even though he could not see any of the rest of the wreckage around him, and neither could he see a hole in the canopy above him through which he might have fallen. (Had he managed to survive falling all the way from the sky, David conceded to himself, he was fairly certain that it would have cured him of agnosticism for life.) The plane had had several other people on it besides him, the last time that he checked, his friends. They could all be epically boned and bleeding out somewhere in the jungle while he was standing here contemplating the moss-covered bark under his fingers.

Finding a goal went a long way towards clearing David’s head and getting him moving. He had been right that he had not been pitched through the canopy and somehow managed to land upright, relatively unhurt, and still with his fucking seatbelt intact in the center of the jungle floor. The path that his chair had taken as it had tumbled was well-marked by broken branches, crushed ferns, the strong smell of jet fuel. David could not hear flames or smell smoke along with it, but his skin grew cold all the same with the realization of how close an escape he had probably made. Maybe that agnosticism would still be cured, after all.

Even though the air was thick with humidity and hard to breathe and his throbbing head was giving him more trouble with balance and depth perception than he thought any nice, sterile doctor would have been comfortable with, it probably took him less than fifteen minutes to reach Carly and Michael. In a temperate climate, he might even have been able to see them from where he had fallen, but the thick undergrowth was both a veil and a snare, preventing David from seeing more than fifteen yards in any direction and snagging him hand and foot whenever he decided to pick up the pace beyond a slow walk. He was lucky that the path a falling plane made as it crashed through a canopy was not subtle.

Scratch that. Half of a plane. The sleek metal skin that had been so gleaming and imposing when they had boarded in Los Angeles hours before was wrinkled, torn, and showing the inner guts of the craft as if an animal had eviscerated it while it had still been in the air. There was no sound or movement coming from the craft; even the birds were muted. As the smell of jet fuel was still thick, David pulled the collar of his shirt up in order to cover his nose and mouth, barely noticing that it was damp with blood from his split lip, and crept forward. The plane had broken in half directly behind the place where David had been seated. Are you there, God, it’s me, Cook. He put one foot up on the remains of the cabin floor, bounced on it a few times to be certain that it was going to take his weight, and then crept slowly up into the carcass.

Michael and Carly had had time to get themselves buckled into their seats before the plane had gone down. They were exactly where David had left them. He checked the pulses of each, because it wasn’t obvious, and then immediately exited the plane again, where he first vomited and then cried. When his ribs ached and his eyes were raw, David pushed himself up to his feet again and re-entered the cabin. He deliberately looked at neither Carly nor Michael as he rummaged through the bins above the seats and managed to locate to blankets amidst the jumbled tangle of their luggage. Bins hadn’t even opened. It seemed wrong, and David’s knuckles were clenched white around the edges of the fabric as he shook out each of the blankets and then draped them over Carly’s and Michael’s bodies. It seemed the least he could do, both in ethical terms and in the matter of what his bruised and hurting body could handle.

“And rescue is going to be coming,” David murmured to himself. He didn’t know how long he had been out cold, but surely no more than a few hours. It had been light outside the plane windows when the trouble had started, and it was still light now that he bent and peeked quickly out the window again. The plane had a black box, right, even private ones? And they had to have been on radar when they went down; rescue was going to be coming.

David was halfway out of the remains of the plane again, seeing only Carly and Michael in the interior, when he remembered the pilot, and that Alice had not been able to get the door to his cabin open before the serious trouble had started. Starting back was more laborious each time that he had to do it; the edges of his vision were doubling at odd times and then refusing to stand still when they weren’t doing that. David shook the handle to the cabin when he could not turn it, and made the painful mistake of throwing his shoulder into it twice before he took a closer examination of the hinges and realized that the door was designed to open outwards, towards him, and that any attempts to batter it open were going to be entirely futile.

“And the sad thing is, you probably can’t blame that on your head,” David said aloud. He could feel Michael and Carly behind him, and even though both of their eyes had been closed when he had draped the blankets over them and he had been able to avoid that particular cliche, he swore that he could still feel them watching. If he couldn’t chase away the ghosts, maybe he could at least make them laugh.

David slammed his hand against the door to the pilot’s cabin several times and yelled, “Hey, are you alive in there?” A resounding silence echoed back at him. David rubbed at the palm of his hand for a few minutes and tried again, shouting, “Okay, if you can hear me, I’m going to find a way to get in there, it’ll just take me a little while!” He climbed down from the cabin and then went around to the nose of the plane, which had dug a deep rivet into the ground as it had slammed into the jungle. David was almost at an eye level with the same windows that had seemed impossibly high up when they had been walking around the tarmac in California, and it was impossible for him to miss all of the blood that was splattered across the inside of the glass, and the two still and obviously broken figures still slumped over their controls beyond that.

“Jesus.” David reeled backwards and for a few seconds debated between throwing up because he probably had himself the mother of all concussions and throwing up because there was no way that any two people, pilot and copilot both, on the planet could lose that much from their body and expect to live. In the end, he decided that it didn’t much matter why he was doubling over among the ferns, he just was and that was that. His ribs ached worse by the time that he was done and there was a sour taste in his mouth. David was pretty sure that he could find at least a couple of bottles of water if he clambered back up into the cabin, but now that he knew it was the makeshift coffin to four different people, he could not make his legs move. There was a trail of broken branches and ferns through the jungle marking the path that the nose of the plane had taken as it tumbled. David decided to follow it in the dim hope that maybe he would find the rest of his friends, maybe they had managed to survive the crash like he had. If it turned out that he was the only one still alive, then David would start to doubt that it was God who had spared his life, after all.

Alice was less than an eighth of a mile away from the cabin. She was not lying precisely on the path that David was following; he spotted her because her sensible navy heel was lying out in his line of sight. Going back to the nose of the plane for another blanket seemed like the most exhausting thing that David had ever faced in his life--better hope like hell that you either find someone or hear a helicopter, kid, I think that this is serious--so he slipped her jacket off of her cooling body as gently as he could and laid it down across her face. There was no need to check for a pulse; the angle of her neck obvious that Alice did not live in this house any longer.

David heard his name being called as he straightened, but he thought that he was imagining things. It was not until someone yelled at him for a second and then a third time, a female voice along with two male ones, that he realized that his head was not quite that badly injured just yet. He turned around just in time for Archuleta to nearly knock him down.

“Oh, jeez,” the kid said as he wrapped his arms around David and hugged him hard. He sounded as if he was either about to cry or had just finished; David tilted his face up towards the canopy, embracd Archuleta back as hard as he was able before his body started protesting, and told himself firmly that he was not going to start again. “We thought that we weren’t going to find anyone else.”

Fuck it, he didn’t care that his face was wet. Chikezie and Kristy Lee were standing directly behind Archuleta, the former with a bleeding cut across his cheek and probably no idea how lucky he had gotten when whatever it had been had missed his eye, and the latter cradling her left hand against her stomach. David saw that her fingers and part of her palm were blistered and pink only in the places were they weren’t an ugly-red black. David was barely releasing Archuleta before Kristy Lee was sweeping him up into a hug (only because she had managed to get there half a step before Chikezie had, and David was almost positive that he had seen her throw an elbow to make it happen), muttering all the while, “Ow, ow, motherfuck, ow,” but refusing to let him go. Chikezie examined David’s split lower lip and then pointed at his cheek.

“Hey, man, we’re twinkies.”

David let Kristy Lee go when his ribs began to protest on him, and then gently pushed her away when her first instinct was to dive straight back in again. “Do you feel like throwing up, too?” he asked Chikezie.

Chikezie rubbed his hand over his hair and said, “Ever since we stumbled out of there.”

“Everyone else in our half of the plane is dead, David,” Kristy Lee said. Her voice was strangely flat, even though she didn’t seem to have a head injury. “All of them. I tried to get Syesha out--” She broke off and glared very hard at her burned hand.

“Syesha was already dead, Kristy,” Chikezie told her gently. She switched to glaring at him instead. “Archie and I both had to pull her back.” And then at Archuleta, too, though he was too disconsolate and distracted to notice.

“Fuck. Motherfucker. Fuck.” David cast about for more obscenities, but there weren’t any large enough to encompass all of it. He rubbed his hand across his mouth and brought it away sticky with new blood. “How are--” He looked back in the direction that he had come. “Guys, how are we alive?”

“I don’t know.” Chikezie shook his head, then put his hand against it and winced. Later, he and David could try to find out if the drum sets being played in their respective skulls were in sync. “We were inside of the plane--” David sucked in his breath hard. “Yeah, that. There was a fire when I came to, I don’t know what happened before that, I--” Chikezie pressed the pads of his fingertips to the cut below his eye, probing it see how deep it was. The blood had barely stopped flowing before he and the other two had found David; it needed little encouragement to get started again. “I’m not sure what hit me, but I passed out. I don’t know how we’re not in pieces.”

“I was awake,” Archuleta said softly. Kristy Lee appeared to have designated herself the hugger of all peoples in need of it for the duration; Archuleta looked vaguely surprised to find her arm around his shoulders. “I saw it. The pilot was able to get us down--”

“I think he got us down just a little too well,” David could not stop himself from muttering darkly, and Chikezie snorted. Archuleta shifted for a moment before he went on.

“But it was all either jungle or water. The plane didn’t break apart until after we were hitting the trees. Then it lit on fire.” Archuleta looked at Kristy Lee. “I thought that it started over by you, did you see what happened?”

Kristy Lee grimly lifted up each of her feet in turn so that they could see how the soles were spongy and wrong-looking. “The floor,” she said. “It came from underneath the floor. Syesha was sitting next to me.” Her eyes bright. David hadn’t even known that Kristy Lee could cry, he had spent the last three years operating on the assumption that she had no tear ducts. Kristy Lee pressed both of her hands hard against her face,even the burned one. “Guys, what are we going to do?”

Suddenly, there were three sets of eyes looking at him. Wait, David wanted to say, and also back away and hold his hands up as though he were on the verge of being attacked. Don’t go immediately assigning leadership duties, he was pretty sure that winning a singing competition hadn’t done anything other than teach him how to run for a very long time on the absolute minimal amount of sleep. He couldn’t even run his tour bus without vast quantities of Cheeze-its, for fuck’s sake.
What David said was, “Is there anything still useful in the other half of the plane?”

Chikezie shook his head, went pale, and then said, “Please, someone slap me the next time that you see me starting to do that. No, man. The plants were too wet for it to spread past the plane, but that fire was something else. It took everything.”

“Even the bodies,” Archuleta said. David gave him a sharp look, wondering if Archuleta was about to have himself a nice little come-apart right there on the new path, because his tone was way too falsely calm to mean anything good.

“It’s going to be all right,” David said. Kristy Lee looked as if she severely wanted to call bullshit on him, and would have if Chikezie had not pinched her hard on her inner elbow, Chikezie merely looked as if he were thinking about it very hard, and Archuleta was somewhere else entirely. They were the merry little band of survivors already. “It will be, okay? Isn’t that what black boxes and radar is for?”

“Yeah,” Chikezie said in a solemn tone that David did not like at all. Chikezie had always been playing with electronics, his own or the other guys’, on the bus during their summer, and had mentioned once that he had built a computer just to see if he could. “That’s what they’re for. Come on, we should see if we can clear anything from your half of the plane.”

“Carly and Michael are in there,” David said quickly. He felt Archuleta’s arm around him before he even saw the kid move, and Kristy Lee had a look on her face suspiciously like she was thinking of hugging him, too. It looked very similar to the look that David imagined Joan of Arc must have worn before battle; he was not surprised.

Chikezie took a deep breath, let it out, and then said, “There might be a first aid kit in there, food. We need it.” He nodded as if he was convincing himself and then said, “I thought someone was going to stop me when I tried to do that.”

“You said only if you shook your head,” Archuleta said.

“From now on, stop me if I try to do anything with it at all.” Chikezie looked at David. “How about you?”

“The only reason I’m not puking right now is because I’ve already thrown up about four times and there’s nothing left.”

“Great.” Chikezie heaved another deep sigh and then started walking up the path. At Alice, they paused, and Chikezie looked for a long time at David’s attempt to do whatever right by her that he could while he had believed himself to be the only survivor. “Come on,” he finally said quietly. “We can’t leave her out here.” Chikezie bent to take her shoulders, first tucking her jacket more carefully about her face with a solemnity that bordered upon reverence. Even though his stomach was quick to warn him that he might not have food left in him but the bile supplies were doing just fine, David leaned to take her feet. Chikezie frowned at him. “You’re hurt, knock that off,” he said. “Archie and I can carry her.” Face pale, Archuleta nodded and would have stepped forward had David not refused to move out of the way.

“I got it,” he said.

“Bull.” Chikezie paused and held up a finger when David would have interrupted him. “Shit.”

David set his jaw and glared. “I got it,” he insisted. Alice was wearing thin stockings; he could feel how cold she was becoming when he curved his fingers around her ankles. “Chikezie, man, don’t, okay? I can handle it.”

Chikezie so clearly didn’t believe him that David could easily see why he had not been among the handful of former contestants to make the crossover into acting, but he still nodded. “Whatever, let’s go.” On a silent count, he and David lifted Alice’s body between them. David expected her to be heavier; he still felt himself go a little light-headed. Knowing damned good and well that the three others were watching him closely, he kept it out of his face. Even though they could practically see the other half of the plane from the place where Alice’s body had landed, he was still breathing hard through his nose by the time they made it there.

“Just--give me a minute,” David said before they could enter the cabin with Alice’s body. Chikezie looked at him hard, but nodded; David honestly thought that Chikezie had been nodding at him until Archuleta curved his fingers around David’s own and gently but insistently began pulling them off so that he could take David’s place. “Kid, really, I’m fine.

“I’m twenty, Cook,” Archuleta said. David spent a few seconds blinking and wondering when in the hell that had snuck up on him. “And you look like you’re about to cry.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” David said automatically.

One of Archuleta’s shoulders dipped and then fell. “A worse kind of crying this time,” he answered. David loosened his fingers so that Archuleta could take his place, and he and Chikezie were the ones to carry Alice into what was left of the cabin. David didn’t know how glad he had been to let them do it until they were gone. He sat down heavily among the ferns and put his head in his hands while Kristy Lee silently climbed inside to join the other two. He could hear a low conversation echoing out again, and then it sounded as if someone was maybe being sick.

Chikezie, Kristy Lee, and Archuleta came back out again a few minutes later, all of them noticeably more pale, each one carrying airline blankets and other items in their arms. David almost started to his feet before he remembered how many extra there had been in the bins while he had been going through them. In Kristy Lee’s hands were a familiar pair of shoes, and she herself was now barefoot.

Kristy Lee saw where David was looking and said, “I couldn’t...my shoes are all burned up and so are the other girls’, and Alice had on heels. I remembered that Carly and I wear--wore--the same size.”

“It’s okay,” David said, even though he was not convinced that it was, because Kristy Lee looked as if she was about to cry and he was fairly certain that that was one of the signs of the apocalypse. “How are your feet?”

“Not so bad as my hand.” Kristy Lee lifted up each of her feet in turn to show him that the bottoms were only slightly pink, not blistered and red like her fingers. She sat down beside him in the ferns and then struggled to put on her new shoes with only one good hand until David leaned over to do it for her. “You’re such a gentleman.” She sounded sincere, too.

“Kristy Lee,” David said solemnly as he fought with a lace and tried not to think about how he and Michael both had given Carly shit for wearing ratty sneakers with designer jeans and she had shot back that she was going to wear shoes she could stand to sleep in, thanks so much, “we are not going to get through this is you keep being all nice. It’s freaking me out, so I’m ordering you to be a bitch until rescue shows up.”

“I could go flick Archie?” David lifted an eyebrow at her, and Kristy Lee shrugged. “Think my tank is low right now, sorry.”

“You’re letting me down, Kristy.” While Archuleta was busy with blankets, Chikezie had emerged from the cabin holding the most prized possession of all, the first aid kit.

“Give it over,” he ordered Kristy Lee, holding his hand out for her own. Reluctantly and looking as if she wouldn’t mind socking him instead, she complied.

“Are you going to tell me that it’s only going to sting a little bit?” she demanded, and then yelped out a startled, “Motherfucker!” when Chikezie calmly popped the largest of the blisters on her palm.

“No,” he said calmly as he started smearing antibiotic cream across Kristy Lee’s palm and fingers. “Would I lie to you?” Kristy Lee glared and then gripped at the ferns hard with her other hand as Chikezie finished with the antibiotic and began wrapping her hand in gauze. “Some of these are third-degree.”

“Yay for me.” Though she had not made a sound of pain since her initial outburst, Kristy Lee was very pale, and she had her lips pressed together so tightly that David could not see them. The ferns and moss that she was tugging at were never going to be the same.

“Trust me, it could be a lot worse.” Though David could only count on one hand all of the ways in which it could actually get worse from where he was sitting, he took a sideways look at Archuleta, quiet and pale, and decided that Chikezie could blow all of the smoke up their asses that he wanted, David was not going to be the one to correct him. Chikezie looked at him. “How’s your head?”

“Dizzy.” Archuleta shifted and stared at him, so David was quick to add, “I think I’ll be all right. Yours?”

“Ringing, but getting better.” David didn’t know if Chikezie was telling the truth or playing the same game that David was so as not to frighten the other two.

“Are we going to be okay?”

It was the first time that Archuleta had spoken in several minutes. Finishing up with Kristy Lee’s hand, Chikezie kept his head down for a long beat before he finally lifted it, expression calm.

“We’re going to be fine,” Chikezie said, looking past Archuleta and meeting David’s eyes.

“Fine,” David echoed.

Continue to Part Two

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (20/29)

2009-11-08T15:17:39Z

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (19/29)

2009-11-08T15:09:33Z

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (18/29)

2009-10-07T00:40:36Z

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (17/29)

2009-10-02T01:09:00Z

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (16/29)

2009-09-29T00:02:02Z

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (15/29)

2009-09-24T01:36:36Z

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (14/29)

2009-09-22T00:56:37Z

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (13/29)

2009-09-17T23:30:26Z

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (12/29)

2009-09-13T16:08:21Z

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (11/29)

2009-09-06T18:56:51Z

TITLE: All That Time, Silent Still
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17
PAIRINGS: Mavid, Tiedam, miscellaneous hints of others both slash and het.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own this sandbox, and all of the sandbox games played within are entirely fictional.
SUMMARY: Civilizations have crashed before under the impact of one great catastrophe. Make it two, and what’s left behind is barely recognizable. Slavefic AU.
CONTAINS: Coercive themes by definition; sex, violence, language, and torture both onscreen and off. Contact me if you want or need to know more.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight
Part Nine
Part Ten

Part Eleven

The rain didn’t stop. It fell in sullen curtains for the next three days, making it nearly impossible to exercise the horses, feed and monitor the other animals, and bring in those crops that were ready for storage in the corn bin and root cellar. It turned everyone’s mood foul, David included, and gave him nowhere to go where he could vent that temper, not after what Michael had said to him in the carriage. Did it matter, that he would not do in anything in response to the fraying tempers of everyone else who lived in the house with him, if it remained forever that he could? If he could have them killed with as little need for justification--less--than he could the small herd of pigs that grazed on scraps outside? If he were to exhaust the estate’s winter food supply and had to turn begging to the House, then at least he would be chastised for wasting a resource. If he were to kill off all of his slaves and start anew, then the House would both receive its fair share of the taxes and be privately relieved of the burden of having to feed many mouths on a food supply that had said in all bluntness that it could not continue to feed more than a few several generations before David’s birth.

David was doing good work, he had wanted to spit back into Michael’s face as much as he had wanted to pull Michael back down into his lap and ravage his mouth further, stop being gentle and make Michael moan and writhe, turn him loose finally with his lower lip swollen and color rising high in his cheeks. He had to admit to himself that he wanted to pull Michael down by his wrists, not so hard that Michael could not tug himself free if he wanted to, but still hard enough that Michael would be examining the red marks left in his skin afterwards and wondering if they would become bruises. He had to admit that he wanted to take Michael, and he was not sure what that said about him and his supposed interest in doing good work.

He didn’t--he didn’t like to compare his confusion to Michael’s, but it was there. And David did not know what to do with it.

He spent those three days locked into his office, reading the fiction when he could stand it, going over the projected crop yields when he could not, listening to the government wireless always. It was a background hum most of the time, but David still perked and turned towards the tiny set whenever he heard of an accident amongst the high-noble set, waiting. It was never Carrie, and it was rarely fatal. Living on the fringes meant that people got hurt, was all. By the end of the three days, David knew that he was snappish and difficult to please whenever he came out of his office in order to deal with matters that could not be attended to from within, and Archuleta was going back to tiptoeing around him with a lean and hollow look whenever they crossed paths in the hallways, though he thank whatever God was out there who had allowed their world to come to such a state that he didn’t try to make himself available to David sexually again.

“Get out of my kitchen,” Carly said over her shoulder to David as David entered her sacred space and then stood watching her for several moments, leaning his hip up against the scarred, unfinished table on which Carly alternately kneaded bread dough, sliced vegetables and fruits both fresh and tinned, and turned meager amounts of meat into feasts that could feed an estate of twenty even though it only needed twelve slaves, at most, to keep it running. There were streaks of flour of David’s pants when he took his hip away again; it was bread day.

“Want to get technical,” David said. Carly threw him a look over her shoulder suggesting exactly what he could do with his technicalities. The meat tenderizer came down a little harder than was strictly necessary on the cuts of beef that she was preparing to bread and fry; with the miserable weather, they were all craving something hot and comforting.

“Fine.” David backed away from the table with his hands raised in a placating position. “I just--” Would really like someone to tell me that these supposed games of pretend that I’m playing actually mean something, please tell me that I’m doing good work for someone other than to salve my own conscience. Carly gave him another look which did not suggest that she would be pleased if he required her to hold his hand through whatever crisis he was undergoing. He had said nothing to any of the other residents of the house about what he and Michael had done in the carriage on the way back home. He highly doubted that Michael had remembered enough of his social skills or developed enough trust in the same people that he was sharing a dorm with in order to do the same. David was about to force the responsibility on her, anyway, so that she could yell at him, when the soft slushing of the rain against the window abruptly turned into something harder. He and Carly snapped towards the sound at the exact same second.

“Oh, fuck,” Carly said in a toneless voice as she twitched the curtains back and they both realized that what had been a cold rain moments before, irritating but not damaging to anything other than the people who had to work in it, was turning first into slush and then to outright ice before their eyes. She let the curtain fall back into place, hurriedly brushed the cut vegetables that she had been working with on the counter into a bowl, and raced for the women’s rooms deeper into the house so that she could throw on a coat and boots that could stand to see mud. David’s obscenities were softer as he wheeled in the opposite direction and towards his own quarters so that he could do the same, but he was willing to lay his side-by-side with Carly’s and bet that he was giving her competition when it came to outright creativity. They could not afford to lose the crop to an early storm. They could not. Not if that would mean going to the House, and begging, and--and revealing everything that David was doing and trying to do here, once the House realized how many mouths he was actually feeding against the number of people that he needed.

In his bedroom, David hurriedly threw on his oldest, thickest coat and pulled on the single pair of boots he owned that actually had rubber soles--it being difficult to even obtain goods from other portions of North America, let alone venturing further north or south than that--and raced for his door again before he even had the buttons finished. He nearly plowed headfirst into a small, dark form before he realized that it was there.

“Jesus.” David reeled back, put his hand over his heart. “You’re going to earn yourself a black eye with a doorknob, you keep doing things like that.”

Archuleta even looked affronted for a moment, before he remembered that it was his master that he was speaking to, and dipped his chin down towards his chest. “I am not quite that short, sir,” he answered, cutting his eyes up towards David to see if even that was going to be acceptable. David had to suppress a sigh. He reached out and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, encased in a thin shirt that was still probably not adequate even though he had been working inside all day. David was going to take his victories where he got them; in the earliest days, it had been a struggle to convince Archuleta that he was not displeasing David by keeping his clothing on at all.

“Close e-freaking-nough,” David said, and put his hand upon Archuleta’s shoulder. The tension in it was so close to what David had felt running through Michael’s shoulder like a current that David wanted to flinch back, and then he said he couldn’t take it any longer, and tugged Archuleta close to him again. Even though Archuleta had to tilt his head back in order to look David in the eye, he was right, he was not so short that David had to stoop. He was barely a boy; soon he was going to be a man. And what kind of world was he walking into, for the rest of his life, because there was only so much that David could or was willing to do?

It poured out of him in a rush. “Archuleta, I don’t believe in slavery.” The boy leaned back and stared at him, eyes wide. They only grew wider when David went on, “I think that it’s one of the most terrible things that one person can do to another short of killing them.” Given what he had seen the day before, both in and out of the carriage, there were many times when it was worse. “So I’ll say it again: I do not fuck children, not under any circumstances, and I do not fuck people who do not have the power to push me away and have it actually mean something. I have no reason to demand that you trust me on this, but it’s true, and I hope that someday you will. I hope like hell that I’ll be able to protect you enough to give you that time.” He thought that he might need to cup his hands beneath Archuleta’s eyes in order to catch them when they inevitably came rolling down his cheeks. “But until then: go put on some warm clothes. Go put on all of your warm clothes. The fields are starting to ice, and we are going to be eight different kinds of fucked if we don’t get enough to feed everyone inside before it’s ruined.” David squeezed at Archuleta’s shoulder for emphasis.

He could see the thoughts running through Archuleta’s brain and decided to call that a victory, that he could read them now. Finally, Archuleta went with David’s command, the part of the speech that was likely the easiest for him to cling to and use as an anchor. “Okay,” he said before he went tearing off down the hall towards his own quarters. David didn’t hear the fall of his feet as he went; kid had even been trained to run quietly. David ran in the other direction, towards the fields.

He went out the grandiose front door rather than the kitchen back; the ice hit his skin like needles and made him yelp. It was like being struck with miniature fangs, over and over again. David smothered the yelp with a curse when he saw that there were already others out in the field, bringing in crops, and flicked his collar up in order to protect himself as much as possible before he ran to join them. It was more akin to an awkward jog, as the recent rains had already left the earth a wet and sucking mess that wanted to pull at his boots and restrain him to his place. From the corner of his eye, David saw Michael working beside Kristy Lee, a woven basket between the two of them and already near to full with winter cabbages. Jason several yards beyond them, at the place where the vegetables gave way to the wheat, was driving two horses hitched to a thresher, cutting the grain. Archuleta ran out of the house a few paces behind David and, upon a few whispered words with Carly, began aiding in gathering the wheat before the ice falling down from the sky could wet it to the point of useless mildew. David took a knife from Noriega and began hurriedly cutting the asparagus stalks that were already turning dark as the moisture inside of them began to freeze.

Michael looked up towards David once, even though David had done nothing to signal his presence. David didn’t know what he was supposed to be reading there, only that it was unsafe for him to continue holding Michael’s gaze for too long without giving some signal as to what had occurred between the two of them in the carriage, and went back to cutting the asparagus with more force than was probably strictly necessary. He swore as he missed cutting his thumb to the bone by mere inches, looked up to see that Michael’s attention was focused firmly on task at at hand once again.

Even with the collar of his coat turned up and a hat on his head, David was soon soaked through and shivering hard, cursing the sky for the freezing slush that it was pouring down the back of his shirt and then holding against his spine, and the earth for soaking it all up so quickly to turn into a semi-liquid pudding that tried to suck everyone’s boots off of their feet and made their fingers stiff, stupid, and dangerous. David heard a faint yelp and looked to the side to see that Noriega had cut himself across the back of his hand with his own knife while struggling with a particularly tough stalk of asparagus. Cursing loudly enough to be heard until he was inside, he went to clean it up and returned moments later with a bandage wrapped around the wound so that he could begin working again. They could not spare anyone for anything less severe than a broken bone, and even then it would depend upon how severe the break, and whether or not it had taken place on the dominant hand.

David tried to take a special care with his own knife after Noriega’s accident, thinking of the antibiotics that Noriega would now have to take to prevent fever, but it was hard when so much of the world wanted to center down to nothing more than the amount of food that they had to bring in and the cold that wanted to prevent them from doing that. He was barely even aware of the fingers that he was trying so hard to prevent from damaging, so often was he plunging them into the mud, pulling them back out, plunging again, moving on to beets when they had retrieved all that they could of the asparagus. While the beets were more protected than the other crops from the falling ice, being below the ground, David looked up at the bullet-colored sky and predicted a hard frost heading their way on the heels of the rain, inexorably.

Which was going to have to do battle with the last remnants of the warmer season first, and would be throwing down all of the detritus of that fight onto the heads of them on earth while the two of them duked it out. David was not certain of the sound that he made when he felt the first hard ball of outright hail strike him in the shoulder like an angry animal, halfway between yelp and curse, and darted to the side on instinct. That hardly mattered when there was plenty of hail starting to fall there, too, and everywhere else that David cared to turn his eye. Rather than returning to the rhythm of pulling crops, hurling them into the nearest available basket, and then stooping to pull more crops that was at least keeping the core of him warm even if it was doing not much else, David leaned down to pick up a piece of the hail. It was already slightly larger than his thumbnail, and he didn’t see any of the other pieces falling to the ground and stinging him along his back getting any smaller.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” David whispered without bothering to keep it low. From the fields, he could hear the horses that Jason had harnessed to the thresher squealing and doing their best to kick at the sky in spite of their yokes. Dimly, it sounded as if Jason was doing some cursing of his own, too.

“What do we do?” Carly yelled at him, holding a fistful of beets by their leaves in one hand and trying to shield her head with the the other.

“Keep working!” David yelled back at her. If they were all sore and bruised tomorrow, well, they would cope with that a hell of a lot better than they would not having enough to feed everyone. He worked even faster than before, until he was gritting his teeth against the curious and thoroughly unpleasant sensation of cold-numbed and nearly useless fingers attached to arms that had fire running up and down them. His back was so cold and wet that he hardly even felt the hail falling onto his shoulders and spine, heard it more than anything else, and didn’t even bother to swear any longer unless he should feel a chunk of ice striking his head particularly hard or clipping him in the ear. And when the gardens had been picked so clean that even the rabbits venturing from their holes the next morning would be hard-pressed to find something to steal, David went into the wheat fields, and assisted the people who were already working there at bringing in bushel after bushel of freshly-cut wheat into the barns, and spreading it out across the aisles, inside of the scrubbed and unused stalls, even the offices. The horses stretched their necks out over their doors first in curiosity and then so that they could strain in attempts to lip up the nodding, sodden heads of grain. Coming in out of the rain, making some pretense of getting warm again, and then immediately heading back out into it was eventually worse than simply running around half-frozen to begin with, and David wondered how many would be laid up with their first winter colds of the season by the next morning.

“No heat,” David ordered as he helped to spread out his--he had lost track, all that he knew by that point was that his arms were quivering--one of numerous bushels across the aisle. Not with the humidity already as it was, not with the terror of mildew ruining all of the work that they had already done. He considered ordering all of the horses blanketed and then throwing open the windows and doors to bring the temperature more into an equilibrium with what was happening outside, only to dismiss the idea when he heard ice being driven up against the sides of the barn, too. There was no point in bringing the wheat inside in an attempt to dry it if the rain was just going to follow.

“That’s it,” Jason said an indeterminate amount of time later. There were blue shadows under his eyes and not a little amount of ice in the ends of his long hair where the body heat could not melt it away again. If David had told Jason that they had worked the entire day and night through, he did not think that Jason would have been surprised; until he glanced out of the stable window, noted the particularly evening quality of the air, and realized that there was no day that he could have worked through a day, a night, and another day without simply dropping dead to become a part of the mud that David quite believed that they had not done exactly that.

“We can’t bring any more in here,” Jason continued. He spread his arm out to indicate the solid floor of fresh wheat that was steaming in the relative warm and dry of the barn, and the horses who were enthusiastically trying to steal in. “It’ll pile up too high, never dry off.”

“And be completely useless,” David finished. At Jason’s sigh and slight lifting of the arms, David thought very hard about turning and driving his fist into one of the barn’s support beams. He probably wouldn’t even feel the knuckles tear. “Okay,” David said after he had spent several seconds standing completely still and with his eyes closed, waiting for the urge to pass. “Okay. Everyone inside, we’re done for the day.” And they would just have to hope that the wheat that had stayed outside was still good when they went to retrieve it in the morning.

David was certain that they resembled nothing so much as an army of bedraggled zombies when they all finally made it back into the house, covered in mud and not particularly giving a damn where they happened to track it. Carly made a few noises about them taking off their shoes when they were at least in the living room and standing on hardwood that could be mopped relatively easily, only to give up by the time the first four people had headed past her without even giving proof that they had heard. Eventually, David even saw her heading down one of the carpeted hallways without bothering to lift up her skirts to keep them from dragging. He wasn’t even certain that he could work his fingers well enough to unlace a pair of boots, anyway, and if the carpets were permanently stained then they were his to begin with.

During the flurry of picking and throwing, David had never paused to ask anyone where they were taking the baskets upon baskets of vegetables and few, solitary fruits once they had been whisked away and empty baskets put in their place. Upon entering the hallway which led to his quarters and discovering that he was going to have to pick his way carefully to avoid breaking his neck amidst the dark shadows, David raised his eyes up towards the ceiling and sighed.

“Tomorrow,” he promised the beams above his head. “Canning can wait until tomorrow.” He wondered if Michael even realized that David not only ate the products that came out of his own kitchen, but even knew how to preserve most of them. If not, then David dearly wanted to see his face when he figured it out.

The water in the house never rose to particularly warm, but David was still so chilled that even a tepid shower felt as though he was in danger of scalding. He watched the muddied water swirling down the drain at his feet and flexed his fingers until he could feel them again before he scrubbed down every inch of himself with harsh homemade soap rather than the smoother and infinitely more expenses brands that were available in the city. When it was all done and David stepped out to dress, he still thought that he could taste gritted dirt in his teeth.

He couldn’t think of doing anything else other than sleeping, but David still forced himself to eat a solitary meal in his study before he turned on the wireless to listen to how other estates in his region had fared after the sudden, devastating storm. “We’re taking over your living room,” Carly said as she brought it to him. There were purple bruises on her forearms where the hail had struck her; most of David’s were hidden beneath his fresh coat. “You’re welcome to join.”

They might be wearing the same bruises, but they were dressed in vastly different clothing and--damn him--David found that his mind was turning to what Michael had told him about the inescapable differences between slaves and masters, no matter how much David was trying to do something different here.

“I’m fine,” David said after a long moment. The quirk of Carly’s eyebrow said that he needed to improve upon his acting skills, but she only nodded and left him to his own thoughts. He ate, and then he turned on the wireless.

For once, the fact that David kept his estate overstaffed meant that he had fared better than his neighbors rather than having to struggle in order to keep them all from tipping over the boat altogether. He had more mouths to feed, but he also had more hands to bring in foodstuffs, and today that had worked in their favor. David remembered how he had cursed the wheat that was going to have to lie in the fields overnight without pausing to reflect upon how much was already in the barns, but most of the farms and estates surrounding him did not sound as if they had been able to manage nearly that much. The government-paid announcer was assuring her unseen audience that of course, the government would be able to feed all of its citizens throughout the winter, but David heard a faint upward lilt in her voice. He wondered if she would still be reporting the next time that he tuned in; they could all be replaced so easily, they were all so trained to sound exactly the same, that it was difficult to tell them apart. The reporter knew: it was going to be a very bad winter. The aristocracy would survive--David’s class always survived, and generally well enough that it was even called “living”--but the rest of the population would be having a hard time of it. The first ones to go would be the slaves.

David sighed, turned his gaze away from the radio so that he was instead gazing upon the rows and rows of books that he was not supposed to own, not supposed to have read, not supposed to admit to even knowing of the existence. He was fairly certain that the characters within any of those pages would be able to find a way out of this without losing a single life either on his estate or off of it, and probably so smoothly that the strings of the author would not be visible at all.

A knock sounded at the office door. Thinking that it was Carly, Kristy Lee, or perhaps even Jason, David called out without looking away from the shelves, “Oh, knock that off and get in here.” He understood why such a long beat of hesitation followed when it was Michael’s deceptively graceful form that slipped through the opening in the door like water and then shut it behind him.

David took his feet down from his desk. “Hey,” he said. Michael had bathed and changed clothing. There was color back in his face; everyone had been bleached the color of old clay by the time that they had gathered all of the crops that they could for the day and given up.

Michael dipped his head very slightly and, when David expected him to hover by the door and away from David, the way that he had during all of their other interactions, instead came forward so quickly that David found that he was the one to stand and take a quick step backwards. He always forgot how fast Michael could be until he did something like that.

“Is there something wrong with one of the horses--” he started to ask, but Michael then seemed to decide that the most expedient way to shut David up was to kiss him. Oh. Horses are fine. Good news. Once upon a time, Michael had known how to kiss, and right in the here and now, he knew how to reclaim lost skills. David still hadn’t entirely managed to shake away his last dream, but he put his hand against Michael’s chest and pushed him back slightly all the same.

“What.” David stopped for a moment in order to convince his mouth to make saliva again. “Okay, no, no. This has to...no.” His own voice was faltering and uncertain, and he saw that the corner of Michael’s mouth was crooking up, just slightly.

“So you’re confused, too?” Michael sounded pleased that they had common ground. “Do you--do you know how much you confuse me?” He was leaning into David’s hand, and David was wondering if he was still slightly chilled, if Michael’s skin was really supposed to feel that warm, but he was not attempting to kiss David again. “I thought that I knew how to survive with what I am and not think about anything else, but you--” Michael gave up on speech, seeming tired by even saying that much, and pushed his mouth to David’s again. He waited from that point forward, though, to see what David would do next.

He was going to hell. He was going to hell, and he was never going to make it out again. David let out a sound that didn’t know whether it wanted to be a sigh or a growl and hovered unhappily between the two, dropped his hand from Michael’s chest. Whatever disappointment Michael might have felt surely lasted no more than a second, because David tangled his hands through Michael’s hair and jerked him forward hard and against David without giving him the option of pulling away. It pressed David back against the desk, but Michael was the one who was pliant, leaning up against David’s chest for more. David knew what he was doing this time--he was glad that he had never put a lot of stock in heaven, anyway--and tried to keep his hands far away from the collar on Michael’s neck. He couldn’t help but brush against it a few times in spite of his best efforts, though, and he could not stop himself from noticing that, warmed by so much contact with Michael’s skin or not, he knew immediately what he was touching. He jerked his fingers away.

“Don’t stop,” Michael muttered to him. Slave or not, it was more order than plea; David let out a short laugh.

“Fuck being a good person,” David said against Michael’s mouth. “I won’t.” He kissed Michael slowly and deeply, the kind of kiss that unhinged his knees whenever it was done to him, felt Michael trembling with the same response. Okay. Okay. There was a fire roaring in the fireplace, damn the scarcity of the wood, and the rug in front of it was soft enough for their purposes. David fisted his hands through the front of Michael’s shirt and walked them both backwards until they were standing on the rug, being nearly scorched by the heat of the fire. Michael had no reason to shiver, but he was not the only one; David was trembling even beneath the sweat. He only took his hands away from Michael’s neck so that he could place them against the belt, pulling his sweater up and tracing the warmed skin underneath. The coarse trail of hair leading beneath Michael’s pants made David’s breath catch in his throat. He attached his mouth to the side of Michael’s neck in order to stop himself from tugging them both down to the rug and only kept them upright for a few more seconds. Michael sank down to the rug as though he was boneless, pulling David down on top of him.

“Do you--” David started as he realized that he was standing at the gate of something.

Michael’s mouth quirked. His eyes were gleaming, not as much as they were in David’s dreams, but enough to convince David that the person beneath him was solid, was real, and that should have made him pause, but instead it only spurred him on faster. He kissed Michael behind the ear, always avoiding the collar as much as he could and all but flinching whenever his chin or cheek touched it all the same. They only sat up long enough to draw their shirts over their heads before they were back onto the rug in a tangle. Michael had his hands on the small of David’s back and was opening and flexing his hands. It was a gesture that David did not understand until Michael shifted his knee between David’s thighs and flipped them over so that Michael was the one on top. Their pelvises were aligned and every slow slip of one body against the other, even through two layers of clothing, made it increasingly difficult for David to think. He didn’t even realize that Michael had started to move down until he felt the warmth of breath fanning out around his navel. He didn’t speak, but, attuned to every move that David made, Michael still felt him tense.

“I’m good at this,” he said in a tone that David wanted to point out was maybe just a little matter of fact, considering that the goal of this was some extremely satisfying sex.

That’s not exactly what I was looking for, David thought and was about to say; the warmth of Michael’s mouth around his cock was enough to bring his hips up from the rug and kill any doubts or protests that he might have still been willing to voice before they could escape his throat. He put his hands back through Michael’s hair and stroked at the nape of his neck, not able to avoid the collar any longer. For so long as they had been back inside the house and out of the elements, it ought to have long-since warmed to the temperature of Michael’s skin and yet still remained slightly cold. David wondered if it was uncomfortable to Michael, always being chill like that, or if he had become accustomed to it. Then Michael was drawing a slow, wet trail around the head of David’s cock and ethics were absolutely the last thing that he could think about, because he was coming out of his mind and body at the same time, and there were white coronas flashing behind his eyes. He sank back down to the rug with his hand still tangled into Michael’s hair, never mind that Michael was letting David’s cock slip out of his mouth and crawling back up the length of his body, his movements slightly uncoordinated as he clearly was not certain what they were supposed to do next.

Call David a lot of things, he figured, few of them flattering, but he had never been the type to kick a lover out of bed as soon as he had obtained his own orgasm, or else just kick them, whatever it was that Michael was expecting him to do. He rolled them over so that he was the one on top now without bothering to put himself away first and slipped his hand into Michael’s pants. Michael shivered when David took him in hand, and then arched, and made sounds that David wanted to hear him make again. David put his hand against Michael’s hip and pushed him back down while he ran his thumb across the tip of Michael’s cock and heard Michael hiss. He started to kiss Michael while he stroked him off, but soon leaned back so that he could look into Michael’s face, wanting to see exactly what expression he wore when he came. Michael had his head tilted back and his eyes closed, but there was no denying that this was a face with life in it. He shivered hard and didn’t make a single sound when he orgasmed.

David rolled to the side so that his weight was not centered upon Michael while Michael was coming down; they were both breathing faster. David could already see the expression of moments before fading away, and was certain that he was going to be called “Master” again within the next few seconds, or at the very least his name repeated in the tone that meant the exact same thing. David got up before he had to see it. There was a couch in one corner of David’s study, and a blanket thrown over the back of it for nights when David, or his parents before him, had spent so much time fretting in this office that even the walk down the hall and into the master suite was too far.

“Here,” David said as he settled back down on the rug beside Michael and threw the blanket over them both. “Seems like the warmest place in the house to sleep tonight, doesn’t it?”

For one of the rare handfuls of times since they had met, David saw the corner of Michael’s mouth quirk up. “Yes, David,” he said obediently, in a tone that could have meant absolutely anything that David wanted it to. Even though David had to wait a long time for Michael’s body to relax into sleep, he was still awake when Michael’s breathing became steady and even.

End Part Eleven

Continue to Part Twelve

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (10/29)

2009-09-06T18:19:26Z

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (9/29)

2009-08-30T19:34:26Z

TITLE: All That Time, Silent Still
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17
PAIRINGS: Mavid, Tiedam, miscellaneous hints of others both slash and het.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own this sandbox, and all of the sandbox games played within are entirely fictional.
SUMMARY: Civilizations have crashed before under the impact of one great catastrophe. Make it two, and what’s left behind is barely recognizable. Slavefic AU.
CONTAINS: Coercive themes by definition; sex, violence, language, and torture both onscreen and off. Contact me if you want or need to know more.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Part Seven
Part Eight

Part Nine

David rolled the body beneath his and pinned Michael’s hands down to the sheets before he kissed him, roughly enough that they were both going to have burns from the stubble. Michael squirmed up against him half-heartedly and snorted when David refused to let him up.

“Predictable,” he muttered, but he wasn’t truly trying to get away, and he was kissing David back every bit as fiercely as David was kissing him. David liked seeing him with his eyes sparkling. David liked it now that he knew they could.

“I’m becoming an old man,” David answered calmly. “Probably not going to develop any new vices at this point.” He felt Michael’s mouth quirking a smile against the side of his neck.

“I like your vices,” Michael confessed. He proved just how much he liked them by arching against David’s knee and gasping hard when David ran it up between his thighs, against his erection. David reached between his legs to grasp at him, and then woke up hard in sheets that were soaked in sweat despite the house’s chill and with a prick so hard that it was almost painful. He staggered into the shower, thanking his luck that this didn’t look like one of the mornings in which Carly was going to slide into his room for a pre-dawn chat, and turned his shower on as cold as it could possibly go. That was saying a lot; it felt as though needles were being driven into his chest, and his teeth were chattering nearly hard enough to drown out the sound of the water within seconds. It didn’t do a thing to wilt his erection or cool the steam running through his blood. David put his head against his forearm and jerked himself off, hard, gritting his teeth and barely managing to keep his knees from going unhinged as he came.

Hell of a subject to have a sex dream about, David told himself as he turned the water off and staggered out into his bedroom on shaky legs. Someone who can’t say no to you, so they sure as fuck can’t say yes. Not to mention someone who hated and feared him, and who at any rate didn’t look as though he had been the man with the light in his eyes for a very long time.

You were just getting yourself off. It was the only redeeming thing that he could think of as he drew clothes back across his shivering body. It was just his body responding to a pretty form, it didn’t mean anything, not unless he let it. And there were a lot bigger things to think about than his libido, right now.

David ate a quick breakfast that he barely tasted and then strode outside before his hair had even had a chance to dry completely, feeling the cold attack the remaining droplets on the nape of his neck and turn them into something that almost hurt. His breath steamed in the air in time to the breaths of the horses that he was watching in the pastures. A few figures were in the gardens, pulling the handful of asparagus and cabbage that was ready to come inside and be stored. The winter wheat had a ways to go, yet. They needed nearly nothing here, not even meat, and David was struggling hard to think of any believable reason for him or even for any of the people belonging to him, who might be trusted with the secret, to go to the dead drop. He could find none, not even if he were to purchase another slave, but he couldn’t--he couldn’t do nothing.

David was very aware that he didn’t have the first thing that resembled a plan and equally as aware that what he was doing constituted the very height of idiocy, but he still found himself storming into the barn with the intention of grabbing the first, the fastest horse that he saw and galloping all the way to Underwood’s estate. A pair of voices from inside one of the stalls was barely enough to slow him down, let alone check him, until he heard Kristy Lee call out, “Sir!” When David turned, it was to see that Kristy Lee was leaning over the door of one of the stalls; for a brief second, Michael joined her in the doorway before disappearing back into the interior.

“What is it?” David asked, reluctantly coming back down the aisle. In his mind’s eye, he could see Underwood going for a morning ride and not returning.

Kristy Lee lifted her eyebrow at David’s brusque tone, but apparently Carly was right about Michael not being a big talker, and he had not filled her in on the frank discussion that he and David had had the night before. David couldn’t see himself being all that much more open with Michael without outright laying forth everything that he was trying to do when he made those trips into civilization. If David and Kristy Lee could not talk like actual people in front of one another, then David guessed that his ass was already going to be handed to him by everything else that Michael knew.

“She’s throwing heat today,” Kristy Lee said in an aggrieved tone, stepping to the side so that David could see the same cantankerous mare who had nearly taken a chunk from him the morning before. She had her ears flattened against her head and was sulking in the back corner of her stall, steadfastly ignoring Michael as he knelt beside her and ran his hand up and down the foreleg that David could see even from here was swollen. She was only putting her weight on it gingerly, and she glared at Michael every time that his hand came near her hock or knee. Remembering how quickly Michael had moved the night before, David did not bother to call a warning.

“She looks like you,” David said as he leaned across the edge of the stall to get a closer look at the mare for himself. He was not as fast as Michael; Kristy Lee’s sock caught him squarely on the forearm. The mare shifted her weight irritably back and forth from one leg to the other, not looking as if she ever planned to pull her ears up from her head again, and even bared her teeth at Michael as if she meant to take a piece out of him for good measure. He drifted out of the way as lightly as a dancer.

David leaned against the top of the stall door, putting his weight upon his folded arms as he watched both the horse and Michael--mostly Michael. The stiffness that he had shown the night before, old injuries and David’s untrusted presence, was gone, he moved like a man who had once been used to grace. He must not realize how closely David was watching him, then. It was wrong, and it was terrible, and it was entirely possible that he was condemning himself to hell simply for what he was thinking, but David analyzed the grace and realized that it had not quite been there when had been dreaming about Michael before. Maybe it would be now, if he dreamed of Michael again.

David coughed, lowered his gaze as he felt two others come to settle on him. “Let me guess,” he says to his folded arms, “she has a pulled tendon?”

“That’s what it feels like.” Kristy Lee sounds testy. Good; that means that she did not recognize the rasp in David’s voice or the sudden dilation of his pupils. It had been a very long time since they had flashed those kinds of looks at one another, anyway.

“Have enough liniment for it?” David asked. This time Kristy Lee caught the wrong note in his voice, this time she looked up quickly with narrowed eyes to see what he’s up to, but she hadn’t put the pieces together quite yet.

“Barely,” she said. “Put in a call for more, but--” She lifted her shoulders into a shrug. No one put a priority on coming out this far, not with the Resistance growing more aggressive by the day even as they were supposedly growing weaker. David noticed that she glanced sideways at Michael as she said it, but his face was blank.

“Can we get a vet out here?” David asked.

He was carefully not looking at anyone, but that did not mean that he could not still feel Kristy Lee’s stare against the side of his face, sharp and shrewd like a butcher’s knife. “It’s a pulled tendon,” she started slowly, tilting her head to one side in the way that always looked just slightly like a threat.

“Yes.” Michael lifted his head from his scrutiny of the mare and looked at David, looked at him hard, in a way that was more plea than threat, no matter how much he used to be a soldier. He was no Kristy Lee; as close as he was to begging David, he was the one who almost turned David back. “But, hell, we need this horse--”

“Not until spring,” Kristy Lee insisted, her brow furrowed, not getting it other than knowing that he was up to something, while Michael was looking like he wouldn’t mind cracking David right across the face, if he dared. “Vet’s not going to come out here today--”

“Then we’ll take her in,” David interrupted. Kristy Lee’s eyebrows went up. David was aware that there was a dangerous, stubborn pitch entering his voice, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. Here was the way to get the warning to Underwood, and he knew that he would not be able to look himself in the eye for the rest of his life if she died because he didn’t take it.

“David,” Michael began, using the tone that still meant “Master”, but David was not going to chastise him for it when he was about to do the very thing that Michael had warned him of the night before. “If she has a pulled tendon as it is, the trip into town will only aggravate the injury.”

“Not if we go slow,” David said. He was talking mostly to himself now, ignoring the looks that both Kristy Lee and Michael were giving him. “Michael and I will take her in, just in case there are complications.” Michael was still, very still, while Kristy Lee knew damned good and well that something was up and also that she didn’t like it in the slightest. David ignored them both. “Let Jason know, all right?”

Kristy Lee paused in the stall with a dark line drawn down between her eyes, and David saw her glancing Michael’s way, weighing the wisdom of starting a real argument with David about what in the blue fuck he thought that he was doing. Not believing that Michael was a spy watching them was a far cry from regarding him as trustworthy enough to know that David was a spy himself.

No fool like a damned fool, David told himself, and clasped his hands behind his back in order to wait her out.

Kristy Lee very nearly decided to have herself a good “fuck it” and get into it with him then and there, anyway, David could see it in her eyes and the way that her lips parted to get moving towards the task at hand. Her teeth made a clicking noise as her mind thought better of it and reined her mouth back in again. “I’ll tell Jason, sir,” Kristy Lee finally said with a sarcasm that even the most obtuse free-born would not have been able to ignore before she turned on her heel and strode down the barn aisle again. There was a clacking noise; it took David a few seconds to realize that it was Kristy Lee drumming her nails restlessly against the butt of one of her guns.

“You don’t like to be called ‘sir,’” Michael observed softly as he exited the stall long enough to lift the mare’s halter from it’s hook.

“Nope. She’s doing it because she knows that it pisses me off.” David glanced into the stall in time to catch another of the looks that Michael could throw from beneath lowered lashes as he coaxed the halter over the mare’s ears, murmuring to her in order to keep them up, and her teeth out of his arm. “Yeah. Kristy Lee does that.”

“She belongs to you. You may be as permissive with her as you like.” But Michael’s lips were pressed into a thin line that David could not read as either anger or dismay, only sign he gave that he and David had had a discussion outside of this same stall the night before at all.

“I need you to come with me,” David said, and watched Michael’s head snap towards him. Anger. It was definitely anger, quickly masked by still glowing as a few solitary embers that the last five years had not been able to destroy. David wanted to blow on them, see what would happen. “To speak with the vet. You noticed the problem, after all.”

“I do whatever my master requires of me,” Michael said with a slight incline of his head, but David still noticed that his knuckles were white around the mare’s lead as he lead her from the stall. Jason had the carriage harnessed within moments; Michael secured the mare to the back of it, where she gave the wheels a few sour once-overs as if she would not mind biting them, either, if they gave her sufficient cause.

“No,” David said when Michael began to scramble onto the roof to sit beside Jason again. “Get inside. You don’t have a coat yet like he does, it’s too fucking cold for that.”

Michael hesitated only a second before he came down again, entered the carriage. “Your kindnesses--” he started again, still in a low voice as if he was not certain what the repercussions would be, as soon as David himself was inside and had the door closed.

“Are for me to dole out and me to divert attention from,” David answered immediately. He didn’t realize how much he sounded like a traditional master until he saw Michael lift his head and regard him with eyes that were suddenly much warier, and then he could have kicked himself if the carriage had been large enough for it. The best way to convince a wounded animal that you were not going to hurt it was surely not to get it into a confined space and then proceed to show your teeth. “And Jason knows. It’s fine.” Another flash from within those coffee-dark eyes, once again filling David with the perverse urge to make them do it again, just so that he could see who might have worn this skin five years previous.

And then you can dream about him again. That was more than enough to kill any mischievous thoughts that David had been entertaining. He turned towards the window and began fiddling with the wireless instead, while Michael sat across from him with a back too ramrod-straight and knuckles clenched too white to possibly be comfortable. Jason was driving the carriage slowly, leaving the two of them with that much more silence in which to sit and blink at each other while the wireless buzzed and prattled. It took David almost an hour to realize that most of the news was of government victories over the Resistance, and that Michael was watching the wireless as it swung and bobbed so intently that David rarely even saw him blink.

“Do you want me to turn it off?” David asked, quietly. He realized a second later that he was unconsciously imitating the tone that he had heard Michael using on the mare, and didn’t guess that it was all that far off the mark. They were traveling slowly; Michael might well make a leap right out the window if David spooked him too badly.

Michael’s mouth opened; David expected to hear once again about how, as master, he could do whatever it was that he liked and Michael would be equally pleased with it. After a long moment, Michael closed his mouth again and shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I knew everything that was happening.” And he went back to watching the wireless, a taut and intent expression upon his face. Little of the news being broadcast was good for the Resistance; David thought about telling Michael that the truth of it couldn’t be guaranteed, either, only to bite it back under the assumption that this would once again be showing those unbearable kindnesses that Michael could not seem to stand. He was looking out the window, and noticed the landscape changing abruptly from field to buildings, but Michael was still paying such close attention to the wireless that he surely must have realized that they had reentered civilization by the increasing sound around the carriage rather than by looking out the windows as David was doing. David watched closely, but Michael’s shoulders did not tighten up, and his face remained smooth. He hopped lightly, easily, from the carriage as soon as it had halted and began to untie the mare’s lead from the back. She was limping worse than she had been when they had left, David noticed, and barely suppressed his wince. It was a good thing that the only people who had seen how little she had actually been injured before were those that he had no interest in trying to fool, then. It didn’t stop Michael from flashing David a look just faintly triumphant from beneath his lashes, either, David noticed.

David paid attention to Michael for only a second or so, however, trusting that Michael would be able to walk a haltered horse the half-dozen yards of so to the vet’s stable entrance without major guidance, and instead stood stock-still so that he could sample the crowd and wonder if this plan of his had really been such a wise one, after all. The crowd was thicker than normal, though the ratio of pinwheeling color to the more somber, please-don’t-notice-me clothing of the poor free remained the same, and it was hostile. David could taste anticipation and anger upon the air when he parted his lips to breathe, and thought that perhaps leaving Michael to go alone, anywhere, was not the wisest path of action that he could choose. He walked hurriedly after Michael into the relative shadow and windbreak of the barn, ignoring the faintly surprised look that Michael cast him when he realized that David was by his side. Being on the estate and away from...from all of this, even for a few days, had obviously done Michael some good if he was no longer attuned to every mood and heartbeat of the free within a twelve-foot radius of him at all times.

The vet was a powerful man just starting to run to fat and gray of skin and hair; David had a mind that his original profession had been that of blacksmith or perhaps even butcher. Both were ways of learning equine anatomy quickly and on the cheap, and it was not as if anyone was going to ask him for credentials so long as his patients lived through and then improved after whatever he did with them. He was kneeling over to lift the mare’s hoof and run his hand lightly up and down her foreleg, trusting Michael at her head to keep him from being bitten upon an ass that was probably much more substantial than it had been when he had first begun his trade.

“She’s pulled a tendon,” the vet said, releasing the mare’s foreleg gently back down to the ground and giving David a curious look. “You raise horses, you ought to have been able to spot this right away.”

The smile that he was so good at, the one that made him just another manor lord who had inherited a large piece of property and hadn’t yet driven it into splinters based mostly on luck. “Yes, well.” David lifted his shoulders into a shrug. “We’re out of liniment and can’t convince anyone to come out to the estate in order to deliver more--” The vet’s face made it clear that he would have been one of those refusing, whether he wished to betray that message or not.

“And I didn’t want to wait until it had developed into something complicated,” David finished.

The vet was born of the poor free, David could tell by his clothing and the way that he still dipped his chin in very slight deference whenever he met David’s gaze, but he had been currying influence for too long to be entirely cowed by a bright cut of fabric. Not when worn by a lesser lord born of a politically scandalous family, anyway. “Might turn into something complicated now, that you’ve brought her all the way up here for a nothing,” he muttered beneath his breath. The chin came down further, took the eyes and the whole face down with it, as David subtly stiffened. He was not a Mayer or a Clarkson or a Cruise, but he had been born to a title and this man had not, and the House would still pay only the slimmest of attentions of David were to have him quietly removed.

“Make the liniment and wrap the leg,” David said shortly. “I have further details to attend to.” His voice was just hostile enough to make the vet visibly wonder if those details didn’t involve whispering a few words into a few ears, and David guessed that he was just bastard enough to not care. He touched Michael on the arm, so that Michael curved to follow him automatically. The vet had not made a single inquiry of Michael since his arrival, even though Michael had been the one holding the mare’s lead and was clearly far more her handler than David.

With so many people about outside, there was a crush of body heat that masked the cold wind snaking its way through the buildings, finding crevices like a sneaky child. David doubted that the handful of unclothed slaves in sight appreciated the courtesy of nature, as close quarters meant that even more hands were laid upon them while their masters either did not notice or took a quick scan of the political power and favor of the one doing the groping and decided that the benefits of remaining quiet were greater than the costs of taking offense. David put his hand upon Michael’s arm and tugged him closer, as Michael was wearing pants and a thick sweater, but the brushed-steel links peeking up above the wool said clearly that he was not allowed to protest against those who decided to take a liberty. And after a few more seconds in the open air, enough to taste it again and decide that he had not been indulging in adrenaline or any of those romantic notions that Michael had warned him about, David was certain and closed his hand more tightly about Michael’s arm in order to tug him closer still. The air was hungry. The people were shoving against him in their haste to get all in one direction at once as though they were a single creature that was for once made up of drab and well-worn browns and grays and plumage brighter than bird feathers all at once, and that animal was hungry for something. David could only think of a single reason that the lines between the social strata would be so abruptly knocked out of the way. Even beneath the wool, he could feel Michael’s forearm go clenched in tension, and knew that Michael understood what the beast wanted, too.

“You should go--” Back to the carriage, David wanted to say, where at least the slavering hunger in the air might not be so thick, but if even the private kindnesses shown on his own estate were a danger, then protecting the mental well-being of a slave in a crowded public place, and on such an occasion as this, would be suicide as complete as climbing up to the top of the sleek, silvery building that held the House and throwing himself from the top. “Go inside, talk to the vet. Ask him something. Ask him anything. Pretend I’m an idiot and can’t figure out what the stallion puts into the mare. It’ll give you a reason not to be outdoors.” He released Michael’s arm as Michael looked so suddenly and pathetically grateful that David’s stomach flipped, turned to go.

“Lord Cook!”

David’s teeth were clenched together too tightly for him to hiss out a proper obscenity, but that didn’t mean that the sibilant sound that snaked out into the air before he could call it back was by any stretch of the imagination a friendly one. He drew his lips back and upwards until some optimistic soul might be able to call it a smile and pivoted in the direction of the female voice that he did not recognize. Michael had gone properly still once the situation had changed, head bowed and hands clasped in the small of his back, awaiting the orders of a true master now that they were certain that someone was observing them. David still thought very hard about putting his hand into the small of Michael’s back and bodily shoving him into the relative shadow and safety of the vet’s stable again, curious eyes be damned.

The smile became slightly more real when he turned and saw the golden hair flowing towards him, attached to golden dress and glowing, tanned skin to create impression of a woman made of sunlight entire. Underwood’s teeth were white as the winter stars that David had been watching the night before, her eyes gleaming. She gave Michael a swift, curious once-over, noting that he was new, before she dismissed him in favor of David again. Underwood--Carrie, David reminded himself, that she had been before his family had fallen out of favor--still hugged him with a fierce warmth. Slim though she was, her arms were strong with hours spent riding horses and managing as much of her estate as possible by her own hand.

“You could have told me that you were going to be here today, we could have traveled together,” Carrie said as she released him and looked up into his face. David looked hard, but she did not show such much as a glimmer of worry about her own place, or awareness of his own. “Saved the extra horses and had another set of arms to shoot if need be, besides.” Another glance at Michael, an untested slave living on a remote estate. Owners had found themselves killed with far less opportunity.

David recovered himself enough to offer Carrie both a real smile and his arm, intending to use her as both an excuse to walk away from the flow of the rest of the crowd and to take the opportunity to get her someplace relatively quiet and issue his warning. She planted her feet when David first leaned against the tide, craning her head to see where everyone else is going. The tilt of her head as realization washed over her could have meant anything at all. Carrie slid her arm through David’s, but still began to guide them in the direction of the...festivities, and short of causing a scene David found himself with no other recourse but to go with her. He glanced back over his shoulder to see that Michael was following him as silently as a ghost, and with the same amount of color in his face.

“How’s business?” David asked Carrie, glad that the crowd around them obliged him to bend his head close to her ear in order to be heard, displeased that he still had to nearly shout all the same.

Carrie lifted up her dress with one hand so that the dust of a thousand eager feet would not mar the gleam of the fabric. “Booming,” she said with a small and self-satisfied smile. “The government is interested in my beef, I’m going to have to expand in order to make certain that I can deliver them fat enough.” David found a delicate blonde eyebrow being quirked in his direction. “I’m afraid that you received the last of my good ones, everyone else who comes calling is going to have to make do with range.” She sighed. “And they did have to come calling right when I won’t be able to get more winter hay for love or money, didn’t they?” Carrie cut herself off short, tossed a look David’s way that was more than a touch worried. “I am, of course, honored to help in the war effort however I may. The inconvenience of feed is something that I will simply have to...work around.” Meaning, David was able to read between the lines, that those estates surrounding hers that weren’t as self-sufficient as David’s one and did depend upon a web of trade in order to keep themselves fed might find that they were not living quite so fat and prosperously until spring brought with it a surplus of wild game again.

“Your sense of duty,” David said, not lying, “was never a question in my mind.” He took a deep breath, told himself that if he did not do it now he could have no idea when the opportunity was going to present itself again, and pressed his mouth against Carrie’s ear so tightly that she could surely feel his lips tremble. “However, you might want to be more careful about to whom you turn over your stock.”

Carrie stopped walking so quickly that she nearly stumbled over the hem of her dress and had to snatch it up so that she would not fall. She wore an uncertain look upon her face as she leaned back and scrutinized David hard. “Lord Cook,” she said slowly, her voice crisp and formal, giving nothing away, “I can assure you, my patriotism is impeccable. To imply that I shouldn’t be doing what the House is asking of me--”

David squeezed at her hand. “I would imply nothing like that,” he told her. “I was referring to your private sales.”

Carrie’s face cleared. She nodded once, still looking at David as if she was searching for something in him, and answered softly, “Thank you for the warning. I’ll see that I go through my ledgers as soon as I return to the estate.” Someone jostled her hard from behind; a woman wearing deep purple. One of their class, then, so that the most that Carrie could do in retaliation was thrown her an ugly look, but David did not think that they could receive any better reminder that the day’s festivities had rendered the city even more crowded than usual, and there were many more ways to be observed than the creaking cameras turning this way and that as they surveyed the human cattle in the yard. David looked over his shoulder to check on Michael and found him nearly standing upon David’s own heels, keeping close to avoid being separated in the throng. His face was milky.

Carrie followed the direction of David’s gaze when she realized that he had slowed down. “Your man doesn’t look well,” she said.

“He’s accustomed to rural estates,” David said. “Close quarters don’t suit him well, I think.” He clenched his free hand into a hard fist, torn between sending Michael back to the carriage and at the same time realizing that this was not a good day for a slave to be seen slipping through the crowd alone, and Carrie’s fingers entwined in his other hand were still pulling him inexorably forward.

“You mean, what we are about to witness does not suit him well,” Carrie corrected David, a crispness to her tone that alarmed him for the briefest of moments before he looked down at her and saw that it was not reaching her eyes. “You have a reputation for kindness, David.” David did not look back at Michael, because he knew that Michael, about to be sick across his own feet or not, would not be able to keep the glimpse of I told you so from wafting across his features. “Don’t worry, I won’t--” Carrie paused and looked ahead of them, where the dark twist of Lady Jolie’s hair was visible over the deep blue fabric and silver thread of her winter gown. She had her boy with her again, David noticed, and cared as little for the cold upon him as she had the last time. “I won’t mention it to indiscreet ears. I hate these spectacles, myself. I think that they’re cruel, but--” The slim golden shoulders lifted into a shrug even as Carrie’s face twisted in distaste. “I guess we all have to decide where our lines lie.”

David was not certain enough in the half-statements that had made up the conversation thus far to do any more than squeeze at Carrie’s hand in his own as they walked forward together, to answer softly, “Yes, we do.” The crowd was thick enough now, and David could feel enough of the hunger roiling off of them to ensure that he might never eat again, that he reached back to take hold of Michael and be certain that he would not be pulled off into the many-peopled jaws. Not by the hand, as he had done with Carrie; rumors were borne by the people who did not appear as if they were looking his way at all. He took Michael by the wrist and thought that he felt the tendons and skin fluttering beneath the sweater, thought that Michael might even be on the verge of reaching for David’s own hand if not for the crowd.

There was a scaffold that stretched far enough above the head and shoulders of the crowd that it was almost as impossible to not see as the steel of the House. It wouldn’t be wise at all to be seen looking away from it, so David made certain his stare was long, his expression blank. He didn’t break it until he felt Michael behind him jump with someone taking a liberty and spun about so that he could snarl, “Does he look as though he’s going to be a runaway when I have my hand about his fucking wrist?” It was a poor free, not a member of the aristocracy, and the blind fury in David’s voice was enough to send him disappearing into the bodies again with a flash of gray like a fleeing mouse. David pulled Michael even closer to him after that, with his hand half-resting upon the steel collar and half upon the warm band of flesh revealed at the nape of Michael’s neck. He thought that Michael might have broken his arm, had there not been such ample evidence in front of them as to what happened to slaves who misbehaved one too many times.

“You would think that a field slave would be more accustomed to the cold,” David remarked very loudly to Carrie after it had become clear that Michael’s shivers were not going to stop. He saw Lady Jolie’s head twitch very slightly in his direction, noting the remark. See and be seen.

Carrie only shook her head and continued to watch the scaffolding. “It’s not necessary to be so cruel,” she repeated.

The scaffolding was wood, and it was not permanent. The individual beams would be donated off to the poor free for their construction efforts in a raffle as soon as the bodies had been removed, and the poor free all the more grateful to the government afterwards for its kindness. It didn’t have to be anything more than temporary. Slaves didn’t often run, certainly not the three times required before the government would offer their masters the pittance price to sell them off for nuclear work or to Eastland. There were three bodies--people, still, though it hurt to look at them--on the scaffold with rough rope wrapped around their necks. Their owners had not seen need of the minor purse that they would be able to obtain by selling their slaves into dregs work. None of the people standing had all of their limbs left, and two of the three had facial mutilations that made their mouths twist up like a the rictus grins of skulls even though David could see their eyes blinking and knew that they were not dead just yet. It took a high amount of desperation to make a slave run three times.

Michael’s hands were twisting and clenching by his sides, as if he wanted to reach for something or someone but could not possibly decide what. David took a deep breath through his nose and massaged at the back of Michael’s neck, just for a second, the largest comfort that he dared to give. Michael cut him a look from the corner of his eye which made David think that Michael might even be angrier with him for having made the attempt at all. David couldn’t look away from the gallows at the crucial moment, but he felt the muscles in the back of Michael’s neck tighten as if he received an electric shock, heard the sharp inhale of breath. Carrie did her duty, and then turned away once the legs had stopped kicking in resistance and were only giving the spasmodic twitches of the body refusing to accept that the brain was dead.

“Cruel,” Carrie said with great finality. Her face was pale. She touched at David’s arm and said, “I have duties to attend to, but...”

“It was good to see you,” David told her, and meant it.

A touch of the color came back into Carrie’s face and her mouth lifted into a smile. “You as well, David,” she answered him. “Be careful of yourself?”

“Of course I will,” David answered her. He watched as the slender golden figure disappeared through the crowd and then took a breath, wondering if he should remove his obviously unwelcome hand from the back of Michael’s neck, wondering if it would be too obvious if he were to do so. “Okay,” he murmured. “Okay, come on.” But the direction in which he started leading the two of them was not back towards the vet or the carriage.

“Master.” David did not bother to correct the address, not in public and not when there was such a shining thread of strain winding through Michael’s voice.

“There’s one more thing that I need to do,” David answered calmly, and continued towards the alley, the same alley that he had visited with Archuleta only a handful of days before. Michael’s pulse was fluttering under his hand; it spiked hard at the realization that David was going to keep them in this place even longer.

“You can’t give her any stronger a warning,” Michael hissed at him in a tone so loud and vehement that it was all that David could do to keep from cutting his eyes from one side and then to the next, to see if anyone had overheard. “You’re already about to tip your hand. Master--David--please.” David highly doubted that Michael was thinking about the ramifications to David’s career as a spy, such as Michael had figured it out, or even what those ramifications meant to Michael’s own long-term survival, only that he was acting off of a pure, animal need to be gone. His voice had started to tilt upwards by the end, so that the crowd had heard him begging David and was now looking across the two of them with open curiosity.

David twisted his fingers through the links of Michael’s collar and twisted his head down hard, even though Michael was scarcely more than an inch taller than David himself. His hands were cruel and his face was hard, and he could feel Michael tensing up for the previous three days of his life to have been a lie before David’s lips touched against his ear. “Michael,” David said. “I know.”

“You don’t,” Michael said softly.

David continued as if he had not spoken. “But I know what I’m doing, too, and there’s one more thing that I have to do before we can go. Just trust me, please.” It was difficult to keep his face looking as if he would not mind striking Michael down right there in the street for giving the wrong response to his order and his voice at the same time as gentle as one he would use on a horse that was on the verge of spooking. He was not certain that he had succeeded until Michael let out a long, shuddering breath that was nearly a whistle and gave a nod so faint that David felt it against his cheek more than he saw it. He still jerked on the collar hard enough that Michael nearly gagged to get them moving through the crowd again, trusting in his black expression to keep poor free and aristocracy alike from taking liberties with Michael as he walked sometimes beside and sometimes behind. He skirted in as wide a circle from the scaffold as he could manage; there was a snarl to his lips that for once cowed back even the flower-bright fabrics of the upper classes from touching David’s property without his leave.

The alley that he wanted was a long way from the House and the travels of the wealthy, and its street even more sparsely-populated than the last time that David had walked it. He took a deep breath and kept dragging Michael along, certain that anyone who saw them would only assume that David was looking for a conveniently isolated spot from which to use his body slave.

“Where are we going?” Michael finally recovered enough to ask, even though David could still feel him all but vibrating beneath his fingertips and thought that this was merely the eye, not proof that the storm had passed in its entirety.

“Trust me,” David answered. He heard Michael make a breathy sound, quickly suppressed, and thought that it might be the beginnings of a bitter laugh. He dug in his feet so hard that it threw off David’s stride and nearly ended in him inadvertently strangling Michael when he saw that David was taking them into an alley. David didn’t respond until they were well inside the shadows, where no one from the street would be able to see what they were or were not doing, and then he released the grip that he had been maintaining on Michael’s collar the entire while. There were red marks etched into the skin from how hard he had been twisting it.

“Stay here,” David instructed Michael before he went even further inside, to where Michael could not see what he was doing, either, and removed the familiar brick so that he could slide another scrap of paper behind it. Underwood has been compromised. Get her out of there. Michael hadn’t moved when David returned to him, his eyes dark and fixed at a place on the opposite wall as if he meant to tear it down. It was a good show, and if there had not been tremors running through his body like the prelude to an earthquake David might even have believed it. He grabbed for Michael’s wrist rather than his collar and was proven right when Michael did not ask him what he had been doing in the far end of the alley, when the options were fairly limited.

Maybe he thinks that I’m the kind of man who can’t help but jack off after he watches a good execution. David doubted that his face was providing counter-evidence. He gripped at Michael’s wrist hard and stared straight ahead as he dragged him back into and then through the crowds, towards the carriage. He did not look at the bodies that were swaying slightly in the northern wind as they hung from the scaffold. Neither, he noticed, did Michael. Some of the slaves that David witnessed could not look away, but they were all mostly young. Meanwhile, for so long as Michael remained on his feet, David could still feel the tremors increasing in intensity. As soon as they were within distance of the vet, he shoved Michael towards the carriage. “Draw the windows closed.” It was the gentlest tone that he had been able to use in a long while, and he saw Michael’s stance change as he marked the difference.

If the veterinarian thought it strange that David was coming in to inquire after the mare himself rather than sending his man, he was experienced enough not to let it show. The pulled tendon had developed complications. She would need to stay rather than making the long trek back to the estate. “Wouldn’t have been complicated if she had been left in her stall to rest,” the vet could not stop himself from pointing out, choking back the words when David directed him with an icy stare in response.

Jason was pale, too, when David came back outside, even though he had been able to stay with the horses and hadn’t been forced to witness anything. “Just get us out of here,” David said to him as he opened the door to the carriage in order to climb in.

Jason nodded once, blue eyes already fixed on the horizon that would take them home and refusing to look anywhere else. “You got it,” he said before he snapped the reins, almost before David managed to secure the door.

End Part Nine

Continue to Part Ten

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (8/29)

2009-08-23T16:56:52Z

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (7/29)

2009-08-15T19:58:43Z

TITLE: All That Time, Silent Still
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17
PAIRINGS: Mavid, Tiedam, miscellaneous hints of others both slash and het.
DISCLAIMER: I do not own this sandbox, and all of the sandbox games played within are entirely fictional.
SUMMARY: Civilizations have crashed before under the impact of one great catastrophe. Make it two, and what’s left behind is barely recognizable. Slavefic AU.
CONTAINS: Coercive themes by definition; sex, violence, language, and torture both onscreen and off. Contact me if you want or need to know more.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six

Part Seven

It was full dark by the time that Mayer arrived with the others; even if not for the lights scattered down the road leading to the house, David would have been able to hear that many vehicles arriving from all the way back out in the barn, in the fields beyond that. He stood in the sitting room while Carly went to the door and opened it even before Jason could take the reins of the first vehicle, her face so blank and proper that David would not have believed it if he had not seen her do it many times before. Her skirt was a russet-colored pool around her feet as she curtsied until she was nearly in a full kneel, and gave the impression that she could hold the pose for the entire night if that was what was required of her, just another lovely piece of furniture. David touched her lightly on the back of the neck as he went to greet the guests, and she straightened again just as fluidly.

“We’ll want drinks,” he told her. David could not make his face as china-doll blank and pleasing as a slave’s, but he could fill it with all sorts of emotions that he came nowhere near to feeling. He smiled as he reached forward to take the hand of Lord John Mayer, a tall and dark-haired man whose eyes had a way of pinning David and making him think that all of his secrets were already catalogued and simply awaiting the moment at which it would be most advantageous to strike, then the hand of his wife. Lady Jennifer Mayer was a slender, dark blonde who had worn a slightly pinched look every time that David had seen her, and her hand was cool as she gripped back at David’s own. David was not certain that he would not be wearing the same looking if he were forced to live and share a bed with Mayer; he looked like the sort of man who took his work home, and there were rumors that he plucked low-hanging fruit regardless of the person to whom it already belonged. With the Mayers was Jennifer’s sister through her father’s second marriage, Renee, who wore the such a similar look of constant and scarcely-hidden anxiety that David hesitated to lay the full blame for the wife’s condition at the husband’s feet. Renee’s own husband, Harry, was a quiet man who had deferred to his wife by laid-back default every time that David had seen them together. The Lord Connick had brought money and land to the table in their marriage in exchange for Renee’s talent at business and favor; what the Lady Mayer had brought to her marriage with her Lord Mayer, David could not say. There was a chance that it might even have been love, and if that was the case then it was one of the saddest things that David had ever learned of another human being.

Mayer’s smile was easy as he released David’s hand and allowed his wife to slip her arm back through his. Even though he had been in David’s residence many times before, he always took his time looking about the sitting lounge, noting the decoration, all of it antique and very little of it managing to look that way. When it had become clear that there were going to be very few new things, people had begun taking very good care of the old. David had a mind that some grandmother or grandfather in his past had done so even before things had begun to go bad, out of care. “I was starting to think that I would never see the day when you became interested in government,” Mayer said.

David smiled back, waved his hand in the direction of the red silk couch, the chairs that sat opposite it. “Please, make yourselves comfortable,” he said before he decided to answer. He took a seat on the couch while Lady Renee settled herself down immediately beside him, and Mayer in a chair opposite that still managed to linger very close. Lady Jennifer took a place next to David on the opposite side as her sister, while Connick was in another of the chairs. David noticed that, while both sisters were perched on the edges of their seats rather than relaxing back, Lady Jennifer’s was as if she might bolt at any moment, and Lady Renee’s as if she could not wait to hear David say more. She was popular in the government in the same way that Mayer was, though not, so far as David knew, in the same occupation.

“I can’t stay out here forever,” David said finally. His lips moved into a smile. He gestured about the room and watched their eyes all follow. It was comfortable. He had seen much more lavish places, especially for the number of slaves that he had here to work it. “I have no needs that aren’t met, but...how long can you store potatoes in your root cellar before you realize that might have a few things that you want, too?” David shrugged. “And I’m the only one of my family left--” Across the rug, Connick stirred, so slightly that David would not have been aware of it if he had not put himself into the habit of noticing everything, and then went still again as if there was nothing troubling about what David had said at all. People died all of the time; it was a hard old world. “I need to start thinking of marriage and heirs. Right now I can offer a woman comfort--”

“They do enjoy that,” Mayer murmured, smiling at his wife with what looked to be a genuine fondness. Jennifer inclined her head very slightly and lifted her lips into an answering smile, a touch of the overbred tension leaving her.

“But I can’t offer her wealth,” David finished, lifting his eyebrow slightly.

“And they enjoy that more,” Mayer switched tactics without a hitch in stride, inclining his head very slightly towards Renee, who stiffened and narrowed her eyes. Her husband watched her for cues, but did not come to her aid. As Jennifer herself had not had much more to her name when she had agreed to be Mayer’s wife, David did not expect him to pursue the matter further, and continued after a sufficient lull had gone by in the conversation.

“This place is worth more than sentimental value,” David said, waving his hand about at the room again. “It’s about time that it started to produce more than it consumes. The woods beyond the pasture are growing thick enough for harvesting wood, and I can use the cleared land to till a bigger surplus over the next few years.”

Mayer was watching David with a barely veiled amusement. “You brought me all the way out here because you want to offer your services to the government as a farmer?” he asked.

David was aware that what he was really doing was barely more than baring his teeth. At the moment, however, he did not care. “I’m offering them wood, horses, and food,” he said, “to trade with Eastland or store for our own war efforts against the Resistance as they like--it might be wise to do so sooner rather than later.” When Mayer’s eyebrows went up, David went on, “You don’t believe any more than I do that Resistance raiders have been going out to the farms solely because they’re hungry. They know that the breadbasket is our vulnerable point as much as theirs.”

“And here I had you pegged as a bumpkin,” Renee finally spoke, sounding surprised as well as a touch admiring. David schooled his face even more carefully than normal when he turned towards her; her job was not Mayer’s because it was in many ways even more dangerous to him. “Imagine that, you are paying attention all the way out here.”

“I can get the wireless reports just as well as you can,” David answered. He allowed a slight testiness to enter his voice, just enough to make it sound real. How many poor free and aristocracy were dead because Renee Connick knew how to watch an entire room while she did not appear to be doing anything more complicated than enjoying a glass of wine? David had no way to say; the messes were generally cleaned up well afterwards. “And I have much more of a vested interest in seeing the Resistance dealt with than you do. How many slaves do you think that I have on this property, and how many guns?”

“You’ll want to deal with that woman one, if it takes her that long to make a tray of drinks,” Mayer said, glancing at his watch. David’s lips thinned, but he heard the door opening behind him and turned. It was all that he could do not to shoo Archuleta right back out again under whatever pretext that he could think of, and never mind that he would be leaving behind Mayer, who knew slaves, and Renee, who knew how to watch everything.

“My apologies, Master,” Archuleta said to the tray as he bent so that each person could take their glass, wine for the women and scotch for the men. “Carly is struggling with the entree, she asked me to bring these out for her.”

“I’ll deal with Carly and her lack of prioritization later,” David said as he held his glass to his lips. He thought that he saw Archuleta’s eyes flick up to his for a second, seeking clarification, and could have kicked the boy for being so open when Renee could see his entire face and Mayer was still in a position to at least catch his profile. Archuleta was wearing slacks and a thick sweater even though there was a fire in the room and the house would be kept at a comfortable temperature for several more hours yet. David wondered if part of the delay had not been that Archuleta had run to change immediately after Carly had requested his aid, after he had learned who it was that he was going to be serving.

Mayer caught Archuleta’s wrist as Archuleta bent to offer him his glass, and Archuleta went still immediately. Mayer’s grip was, for now, above the wool of the sweater, not touching the skin. “What is this?” Mayer asked, turning Archuleta’s wrist so that David could also see the sweater, as if it had not been obvious that the kid was clothed from the very second that he had entered the room. “Isn’t this your body slave, David?”

David didn’t dare hit Mayer’s hand away, not right now, however much he might want to. “Do you really think,” he snapped, “that I have the resources to keep a slave who doesn’t do anything other than keep the bed warm for me? He’s been outside.” There were points of color on each of Archuleta’s cheeks. David guessed that they could be mistaken for cold.

Mayer made a snorting sound and still did not release Archuleta’s wrist. Jennifer was looking at him very hard. “Then you need to trade him in,” Mayer said. “And get one that makes you never want to leave the bedroom, so you don’t mind leaving them in it. The Pitts have a man--” Jennifer went very still at their mention, and looked straight ahead into the fireplace while she took a sip of her wine. David could feel Renee leaning around behind him so that she could study her sister more closely and make certain that she was all right.

What the Pitts have is a boy, David thought as he remembered the dark-haired and dark-eyed kid who had been trailing them both like a half-forgotten pet the previous day. If David was being incredibly generous, maybe he would have guessed that the slave had been seventeen.

“I helped train him,” Mayer went on, the first mention that he had made all night of the business that kept him so thoroughly within the government’s good graces. Mayer’s slaves almost never rebelled, no matter how remote the estate upon which they lived was, or how good their chances were of being able to overpower their masters and get to the Resistance if they could get the collar off. “It was such a shame to let him go, but.” Mayer lifted his shoulders into a shrug. “Such is the nature of contract work, and I was well-compensated.”

“That boy was given to the Pitts as a gift,” Jennifer broke in. Nearly half of her wine was gone, and there was a touch more color coming into her face.

Mayer paused so that he could look at her for a moment. “I was still compensated for my work,” he said. “What wiser heads decided to do with him after that was not my business.” Jennifer shifted about and then finished the rest of her wine, her lips pursing slightly around the dregs.

“Bring the lady another glass,” David ordered Archuleta, which in turn ordered Mayer to release him so that he could obey. “Would you like something other than red wine, Jennifer? You don’t look as though you enjoy it.”

“Red is fine,” Jennifer said. She swirled her glass idly for a second before she handed it back for Archuleta to place upon his tray. “We’re having beef, aren’t we? I’d rather have something full-bodied even if it’s bitter.”

The door opened again, this time admitting Carly. She dipped once again into the kind of deep and perfect curtsy that David swore she had to be practicing in her spare time, in order for her to continue doing to so gracefully when she was not called upon to perform it often.

“The meal is ready, Master,” Carly told David while she held her curtsy.

David rose along with the others and told Archuleta, “Bring the wine to the table.” To Carly, “I’ll speak to you later about pushing your own reason for eating onto a boy that I had already given other assignments.” Carly was good, and David saw her face paling even though she already had the kind of skin that hated direct sunlight. She put her hand in the small of Archuleta’s back and all but shoved him through the doorway before his face could let it be known that David had given him very little to do that day, actually, other than be under Carly’s feet.

The same dining room table at which David had spoken to Michael earlier that day was an enormous cedar piece that took up the larger portion of the room, more than once making David think that it was going to catch fire with a careless spark thrown from the fireplace. It had been in this room since before David could remember, since he had been small enough to run beneath the legs without ducking, and he could not imagine moving it elsewhere and putting something more practical in its place. Especially when the furniture in the house still had such a power to impress, David noted when he Renee, the only member of the party who had never before set foot in his house, pause and take it in. The woods beyond the fields and horse pastures were finally dense enough to start harvesting, David had not been lying about that; it had still been generations since there were trees large enough for this.

“Please,” David said, waving his hand at them to take their seats as he did the same. He had been in homes before where slaves pulled out the chairs for the masters to sit, but he preferred for Mayer to remain guessing as to how many people actually lived here for so long as he could. Carly began entering with plates and bowls a bare handful of seconds later, Archuleta behind her with the fresh wine. When the light vegetable soup had been set in front of each of them and Carly and Archuleta retired for the moment, David returned to the conversation that they had been having in the sitting room as if they had never left it. “My parents, they--” Were good people. “They had some troubling ideas.”

Mayer paused in sampling his soup long enough to lean back, fold his hands beneath his chin, and look at David hard. “That’s a rather mild term for it,” he said in a voice that was so smooth, so dangerous, you didn’t know how deeply into the water you had gone until the riptide pulled you under. “What they were were borderline traitors.” Mayer’s eyes moved towards Renee, she who saw all and then hoarded the secrets to herself until she close to give them away again.

David didn’t realize how tightly he had come to grip his soup spoon until he heard a clinking noise; he had struck it against the china nearly loudly enough to chip it. The way that his lips moved didn’t feel like a smile, but no one at the table hopped up and ran screaming from the room. “And my brother was worse than borderline?” he asked, voice tight, knuckles aching. “That’s what you’re trying to say?” He watched Mayer’s face carefully, looking for a sign of recognition there. If Andrew had ever--if Michael was not the first that he had seen, then he would not be able to hide it, David was sure. Mayer was too proud of his own work.

No, David decided as he leaned back into his seat and forced himself to take up the spoonful of soup that had been growing cold while he had been holding it suspended in the air. He could have been tasting gritty water for all that he knew.

“It’s a matter of public record,” Mayer said. He didn’t pause or look away from David’s face, and David guessed that he ought to feel perversely grateful that at least Mayer was not trying to pretend to give a shit. “I’m not pulling any dirty family secrets out of you when they weren’t secret to begin with.”

“I know,” David gritted, and then said again, “I know.” He managed to sound more normal this time. When he took up a second spoonful of the soup, the others all stopped staring at him and began eating again themselves. He had six months shy of eighteen when Andrew had run away, and goddamned lucky that he had been the eldest son and it could not be said that his brother had tainted him, only implied that he ought to have seen the way that he was going and reined him back.

Clearing his throat a few moments later, David leaned back as Carly floated in like a ghost and took the bowls, Archuleta following her with the wine. He topped all of the glasses save for David’s without asking; David had hardly done more than touch his lips to the rim of the glass since the last time that the boy had come through. Mayer’s was nearly empty, and he lifted it up again as soon as Archuleta had backed away.

“When I marry,” David said to Mayer as Carly and Archuleta soon returned with the meal, steaks and potatoes and asparagus tips that had been braised in butter. The potatoes and asparagus had been grown on the land itself; the steaks were from Lady Underwood’s estate ten miles away. “I want to know that I’m not going to be bringing any heirs into...into a government who is uncertain as to their loyalties.” The way that they had been with him, and for a very long time--David wasn’t sure that they weren’t still suspicious of him. “So let me know what I can provide the House of Governance in the way of wood, horses, and food--” Let him know how much they were going to be needing of each over the course of the next year. “And I’ll make certain one way or another that I can provide it.”

“For a cost,” Mayer said slowly.

“For the sake of not having the Resistance sitting on top of my own land and the army conveniently occupied elsewhere,” David cut in smoothly. “That’s the price of my patriotism.”

“You’re being awfully bold, letting us know that it has a price, after all,” Renee said slowly. When she was thinking hard, she lost her slight squint and began to blink slowly, like a cat. David glanced at her.

“Prudent,” he answered. “I’m putting myself into your hands.”

“Mmm,” Mayer hummed, which was not an answer at all. David felt the fine hairs on the back of his neck starting to prickle before Mayer abruptly went on, “You picked up a new slave a few days ago. Don’t tell me that you’re going to keep him hidden away all night?”

“He works in the stable,” David answered with a careless wave. “He’s hardly suitable for dinner table company.” Still, Mayer had a glittering look that David had seen him where before, and it had always meant that he was not going to be going anywhere until he had gotten what he wanted. David coughed into his hand and, when Archuleta came up to him so quickly and quietly that David was starting to get the niggling sense that the kid was telepathic, and if that was the case then he had only thought that he was fucked and re-fucked if it turned out that he had been wrong in his assessment, quietly told him to have Michael come to the dining room. Archuleta was gone again with scarcely a whisper across the rugs to mark where he had been. David watched him go and said to Mayer, “Did you teach him to do that?” He thought that he heard his voice hitch, but he could have been wrong. Renee did not react, at any rate.

Mayer took another swallow of wine and put his hand over his wife’s briefly before he began to cut into his beef. Pleased color rose into her cheeks at the display of affection. “I taught him everything that a body slave needs to know,” Mayer said. “Briefly. I saw him only briefly, though.”

If it turned out that there actually was a deity in the heavens, then David guessed that he ought to be thanking Him or Her for small favors. He poked at his own meal for the scattered handful of moments that it took Michael to come to the dining room, much shorter than it had taken Archuleta to return with the drinks earlier. As soon as he stepped into the room and caught sight of Mayer, David knew that it was only because he had not known who the guests were. Had he, David had a more than passing suspicion that he would have gone out to the barn to see what was the matter and found himself missing both a horse and a slave, or even just a slave alone if Michael was really desperate and decided to go on foot. There was a look in his eye as he stood in the doorway that made David think, for a second, that he was really going to turn and try it. Then the mask fell down, and was gone again, gliding with the smoothness and grace of someone who had been trained as a body slave as he came across the room to David. David saw that, blankly controlled or not, Michael still tried to skirt out of Mayer’s reach as he walked behind his chair.

Mayer saw it, too. He was well on his buzzed and, with a little luck, drunk after that, but he had reflexes that were not to be underestimated. David thought that he was going to grab Michael by the wrist, still couldn’t bring himself to be entirely surprised when Mayer’s fingers found their way through the loops of Michael’s belt instead. Michael went to Mayer willingly in body alone; David didn’t have to remember Kristy Lee’s tutelage of years ago in order to be able to reach what the set of those shoulders were saying.

“I thought so,” Mayer said, looking Michael up and down. “He’s an ID number I won’t soon forget.”

“So you’re aware of his record?” David asked. He continued to push the food about idly on this plate, even though his appetite had fled for parts unknown as soon as Mayer and Michael had laid eyes on one another.

“Of course I am,” Mayer said, continuing to look up at Michael. He threw a hard, sharp glance David’s way that contained an unmistakable threat in it, and David was under no illusions that it was directed at him. “You haven’t been having...issues?” If Michael drew up any tighter, he was not going to be able to move.

“No,” David answered immediately. “But the scars, the price, you know.” He smiled at Mayer, who knew more about slaves than virtually anyone that David knew, and closed his fingers slowly about the stem of his wineglass. “It made me wonder.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mayer answered easily. He tightened his grip upon Michael even more fully and was on the verge of pulling him into his lap. Next to him, Jennifer was cutting her asparagus into dainty, ladylike bites without looking anyone. “The ones that take longer to break wind up breaking harder than anyone else, in the end. He’s quality.”

The stress that Mayer put upon the final word nearly had David breaking his wineglass against the edge of the table then and there. “He’s also not a body slave,” he said dryly, unmistakably adding unspoken in the pause, Nor is he yours. Mayer took much longer to untangle his fingers from Michael’s belt loops than he had to slide them in, and he was wearing a faint smirk as Michael immediately crossed over to David without being ordered to do so and slid into a perfect kneeling posture of obeisance beside him, wrists crossed lightly in the small of his back, eyes directed at the floor.

I didn’t want you to do that, David thought with a faint kind of horror, never mind that Michael could not have possibly thought that he was being brought into the room for any other reason than to be shown off once he had seen that there was company there, never mind that David could not possibly tell him to rise and send him off again while the trustworthiness of everyone else in the room, still possibly Michael included, was so very much in doubt. He grit his teeth together hard instead, and took a gulp of his wine now that he was no longer in danger of killing Mayer right there in front of his wife, sister-in-law, and friend.

“He’s been trained in a variety of disciplines,” Mayer said. He was two glasses ahead of David already, and he still accepted more when Archuleta ghosted in to refill them all again. The appreciative look that he cast over the kid was the same as that which he cast over Michael, and David didn’t think that it was an accident that Michael had settled down on the side of David’s chair furthest from Mayer.

Oh, I’m a fucking piss-poor protector if that’s the case, David thought, while Mayer added, “Your steak is going to get cold.”

And wasting fresh meat might as well have put a neon sign over his head. David smiled and began to eat again, saying to Renee as he did so, “You have contacts in the government. How friendly do you think that they would be towards an arrangement?”

She had barely touched her wine, giving David good reason to follow her example. Renee folded her hands together beneath her chin as she leaned forward to scrutinize him. “Very,” she said after a long pause. “Especially if you can provide winter crops, as well.”

David gestured towards the windows, which were covered in heavy curtains to insulate against the night chill, to the fields that were hidden beyond that. “Funny thing about raising horses,” he said. “You never lack for being able to fertilize a good wheat crop.”

Renee choked slightly and then put her hand against her mouth, though David knew that before her marriage she had lived on a working estate very similar to his own. Make your peace with dealing in death, he thought, startling himself when the strongest thing that he could bring himself to feel was annoyance, you kind of lose the right to complain about shit.

Michael beside him was kneeling as if he was either already in pain or expecting to be at any second. David put his hand down, idly, against the back of Michael’s neck without thinking, felt him tense even further until he was at the point of flinching. David wanted to jerk his hand away immediately, but forced himself to let it linger for a few seconds before he put it back around the stem of his wineglass. “Can you give me numbers?” he asked Renee. When she showed signs of falling back into those slow and dangerous blinks, David was quick to add, “I don’t want to aid in the war effort to the point that I’m not keeping my own estate fed.”

Still blinking, and now tilting her head to own side so that she could scrutinize him. David had seen Renee watch people far more surreptitiously than this. He hoped that that was a good sign, that she was so willing to get her interest in him right out there in the open. “I’ll have someone contact you,” Renee said finally. “That’s not information that lay people run about with at their disposal.” A dimpling smile. David smiled back easily, automatically.

“The beef is very fresh,” Harry said from the far end of the table, almost startling David as he focused his attention onto him. The man was not known for speaking when it was not necessary, preferring instead to let Renee run the building of their private empire while he provided the capital.

“It’s from Lady Underwood,” David answered, after a beat. “She slaughters on-site. I sold her a driving pair a few months ago and I’m still reaping the benefits.”

“Lady Underwood.” Mayer sounded amused as he lifted his wine glass to his lips. Michael lifted his head quickly, shielded from Mayer’s sight by David’s body, before he lowered it again. David still saw his expression becoming deliberately focused and intent before he was able to mask it again. If Michael was troubled by the sound of Mayer becoming amused by anything, then so far as David was concerned he would be an idiot not to follow that lead. He put his hand against the back of Michael’s neck again and for a few seconds even thought that Michael might flinch him off. “Call in the rest of your order now, David, and don’t expect any more from her in the future.”

David felt cold, and it was not until Michael shifted that he realized he had begun to restlessly flex his fingers against the back of Michael’s neck. He forced his grip to loosen, but could not bring himself to entirely pull his had away. “Is that so.” David coughed and tried again, hoping that his voice would sound more natural this time. “She’s annoyed someone it’s best to be on the good side of?”

Mayer laughed. David ran his fingers lightly through the hair at the nape of Michael’s neck, hoping to soothe him even after he had known within seconds that Michael was not going to be soothed until he was far away from David’s side again. Maybe he was trying to calm himself, then.

“We’ve all done that, and we’re all still sitting at this table,” Mayer said. The wine was putting twin points of color high up on his cheeks. Beside him, Jennifer made a fretful noise. “No, Underwood’s done a little more than that.” Mayer’s face twisted. “She’s been selling beef to the Resistance.”

David didn’t realize that his fingers had tightened upon Michael’s neck, or how hard, until he heard Michael hiss an inhale from between his teeth. Nor did he think that Michael was particularly interested in David’s stroking apology. “They have money?” he asked. “I was under the impression that they were starving out by degrees.”

Renee fidgeted first with the stem of her wineglass, then with the last remains of her roll, her hands not managing to remain still on any one object for more than a few seconds at a time, as she glared at Mayer. “She’s been giving it away,” she ultimately gritted out. A secret being pried from her hands before she could decide to release herself and to her own best advantage, David thought that it was a good thing for Mayer’s sleep that night that they were not going to be riding back to the same estate. “Does it matter, though? It’s treason whether she makes a profit or not. Though the fact that she’s doing it out of ideology rather than self-interest makes it worse, so far as I’m concerned.”

Michael’s head remained down, his wrists clasped behind him, his body one perfect, flawless line. David could not help but glance down at him and feel his mouth twist, just a little. He was struggling to keep his emotions to himself and he merely believed; how could someone who had actually lived it resist the urge to leap up and run about the room? “Will there be a trial?” he asked, and thought that he felt Michael shift underneath his hand.

Shocking nearly everyone at the table save for perhaps Renee, it was Connick who spoke, hands folded underneath his chin and staring deeply into the contents of his glass. He had waved Archuleta off nearly every time that the boy had come into the room; he ate and drank both with a deliberate slowness, weighing what he was doing, and brought the same mood to his words.

“No, there won’t be any trial for her,” he said, surprising David again with the slow-burning anger that glided beneath his words and made him wonder if perhaps he and Renee were not a more equal partnership than most assumed. “How could there be? With all of her land, with all of her slaves, with everything that the House has done for her--” Underwood’s family was older than the Cooks, and had never that David was aware of had even a far-off and secondhand shadow of suspicion cast over them. “Knowing that she even thought differently, even if she was caught, would be...highly unwise.” Harry lifted his gaze from the moody study of his glass. “All that the lower classes need is a spark, David, you saw that with the way that they went after your boy yesterday.” He tipped his head towards Renee, acknowledging her as a matter of course for the information, even though she had been nowhere near the scene that David had been able to see.

A quiet accident, then. David’s fingers had stilled on the nape of Michael’s neck as he thought. Underwood had several of David’s own horses and was an avid rider. It would hardly be looked upon with suspicion if she was alone and one of them happened to spook, if she was found with a broken neck. Fall harvesting was stirring up angry snakes who were trying to find hibernation places for the winter, it needn’t even be blamed on David’s horse. No one would know anything except for the House itself, and the people in this room.

Mayer broke the silence by saying, “I hope that you know what your being trusted with this information means, David.”

“That I’m being offered the government contract?” David answered back smoothly. Mayer’s smile let him know that he had won, that he had safely crossed the minefield with all of his priorities and secrets intact. Beside him, even though his legs had to be aching by now, Michael’s spine remained smooth and unbowed, and he did not lean up against David’s chair for support.

David steered the conversation towards inconsequential topics throughout desert and coffee, not allowing himself to turn back towards the topic of Underwood even though he desperately wanted to. They weren’t friends, precisely, but they had known each other since childhood and did a great deal of trading back and forth across the estates in order to obtain what each needed without the necessity of traveling into the city. She had never given him even a hint that she might be in a position similar to his own. David didn’t guess she could have, not with all of the effort that he had put into making certain that he didn’t betray himself to her, either. And she was going to die for doing the right thing. David could hardly keep himself still to his chair.

He considered it a blessing when he was finally able to call the evening to a close and walk his guests to the front door, make idle chat about gossip and gossip-mongers as he waited with them for their carriages to be brought back around. When he was watching the sleek shadows disappearing down the drive again, illuminated only sporadically by the lights set out at interval, David finally shut the door and leaned his forehead heavily against the wood before he drew the bolt.

He had given Michael no instruction before he had risen to accompany the other four out, but David still drew himself up when he reentered the dining room and discovered that Michael kneeling beside the chair where David had left him. “You’re still here?” David asked, more roughly than he had intended. “I thought that you would have taken the first opportunity to run.”

Michael looked up. “You didn’t give me leave to go, Master,” he said evenly.

“David,” David correctly automatically, barely stopping himself from shivering. After the evening, he didn’t want anything at all that reminded him of a status that he hadn’t earned.

“David.” The way that Michael said his name, though, did nothing to imply that there was any difference. David swore and saw Michael become warier without moving an inch from his position, watching David though David didn’t know what Michael meant to do if David did become hostile. Michael was his. He could do anything whatsoever that he wanted to him, whether that ranged from fucking or killing.

Looking at Michael like that while Michael looked back at him was more than David could take, suddenly. He swore again and strode forward so that he could take Michael beneath the arm, not missing the way that Michael went rigid in expectation of a blow. “I’m not--” David was loving these new minefields that he had to find as he muddled along, that even I’m not going to beat the hell out of you for no other reason that I’ve had a bad night had to be spelled out. “I’m not going to hurt you. Get up.” Michael was a little slow in rising, making David wonder how much of it was simple stiffness from forcing himself to remain so still for so long, and how much of it was the old injuries that David had seen when he had purchased him. He nudged Michael towards his own chair and, when Michael reluctantly took a seat, also put his own, forgotten wineglass into Michael’s hand. “And drink that. You’re too pale.”

There were tremors across the surface of the wine as Michael slowly lifted it to his mouth and took a sip, and then another when that earned him no punishment. “Ma--David,” Michael said after a moment. He looked as if he was building himself up to something. “So are you.”

David let out a short laugh and put his hand over his eyes. “Probably,” he admitted. “Yeah, okay. Definitely I am. You ever have to put all of your effort into playing nice with people when you would really rather smash the wine stem into their faces?” Michael paused, looked at David over the rim of the glass without speaking, and David’s words caught up to him less than a second later. He swore, he might have been able to navigate his way through the shark-infested waters that were dinner without springing a leak in his boat, but he had been drinking way too much that night to have any kind of meaningful conversation with a slave who still looked as if he thought that David might skewer him to the chair at any moment. “Of course you have. Finish your wine, I’ll scrounge around and see if I can find anything that’s actually stupider to say.”

Michael twirled the wineglass between his fingers in an eerie imitation of the way that Mayer had done during dinner before he said, very slowly and reminding David of a man extending his hand out to a feral dog, “I’ve heard stupider.”

David was tempted to pour another glass for himself, but his head already felt heavy and thick. “And we haven’t known each other long enough for any of them to be me, bonus.” Michael’s eyelashes fluttered for a moment as if he could have disagreed before he thought better of it. Once upon a time, you had a sense of humor, David thought, more warmed by the realization than he had expected. Worlds and wonders, there might even be whispers of a person still in there. He thought that there was a certain light in the dark eyes, shielded but not put out entirely, that had not been in evidence when David had first seen him the previous day.

That light disappeared as abruptly as if it had never been, and with it every trace of relaxation that Michael had managed to either scrounge up or fake since David had nearly shoved him into the chair, when David asked, “Was Lord Mayer the one who trained you to be a slave?”

Michael released the wineglass and pushed it away from himself, David rather thought so that he would not break the stem with the force of his grip. He laid his hands out flat against the table and said, “Some of my scars are his.”

“The one on your leg?” David asked, unable to stop himself even though every line of Michael’s body was nearly begging him to go back.

Michael looked up, held his gaze without turning it back towards the floor the way that a good slave ought. David didn’t think, but knew, that he was seeing a glimpse of the soldier that Michael had been before he had been captured, and he couldn’t imagine what Mayer must have done in order to put that different man in his place. “No, sir,” Michael said. David wanted to correct him, but didn’t. “That was from something else.”

“I’m sorry.” Michael blinked in more surprise than he would have if David had outright hit him. David stepped back from the table, against which he had been leaning his hip. “Enjoy the wine, Michael, and have a good night.” He left with Michael saying nothing, but feeling the man’s eyes following him all the way to the door.

End Part Seven

Continue to Part Eight

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (6/29)

2009-08-15T19:41:49Z

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (5/29)

2009-07-29T23:54:40Z

AI Fic: All That Time, Silent Still (4/29)

2009-07-25T23:55:46Z

AI FIC: hot as a fever, rattling bones

2009-07-25T19:30:31Z

TITLE: hot as a fever, rattling bones
AUTHOR: Mari
RATING: NC-17 and how.
PAIRING: Tiedam
SUMMARY: Adam’s vocal in bed. Neal’s not.
BINGO PROMPT: Gags.
CONTAINS: Bondage and explicit sex, power exchanges. Contact me if you need or want to know more.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Title from Kings of Leon. Haaaaaaa, moving through the Tiedam playlist is turning into an unofficial project for me.

Adam frequently tells Neal that he’s the quietest person that Adam has ever gone to bed with. That’s fair enough; Neal has never known anyone who makes everything that they feel and everything that they want known as much as Adam does. Neal’s piercings scraping against the inside of Adam’s thigh on the way to a blowjob are cause for gasps and sighs, Neal’s mouth on his actual cock for some of the filthiest endearments that Neal has had the pleasure of hearing in his entire life, and when he fucks Adam...Neal just took out the lease on this condo. He’d really hate if if he was asked to leave inside of three months.

Neal, however, follows a slightly different philosophy. It’s one of their things.

“It weirds me out,” Adam says one night, when they’re staying over at Adam’s place. Adam had been the one to fuck him that night, and his best efforts had still been unable to produce anything other than a few shuddering obscenities and one, “there, there, right there,” as he had made Neal’s entire body feel as though it was uncoiling to Adam and Adam alone. Neal doesn’t guess the fact that he was gripping back at Adam’s hand hard enough to leave bruises where Adam had been pressing him down into the sheets counts. “I don’t know where I’m going right.”

“Adam,” Neal says calmly, turning over in bed so that they’re facing each other. Adam has a privacy fence high enough in the new digs to thwart even the most determined paparazzo unless he’s willing to invest in a helicopter, and the night is unusually clear for Los Angeles. They left the curtains open while they had sex, letting silvery light wash through over them both in the afterglow. Adam’s eyes are the color of quarters. “Trust me, you’re doing everything right.” He puts his hand against Adam’s hip, where there might be bruises in the morning or there might not. Neal’s not entirely sure how much force he used when he grabbed Adam and bodily threw him down to the bed before Adam, laughing, had taken him by the wrists and flipped them both over so that he was then the one on the top.

Adam makes a frustrated noise from the back of his throat and does not look entirely convinced.

“Come over to my place tomorrow night,” Neal says.

*
Adam has a wicked grin when Neal opens the door to his condo the next night. There is a bottle of wine dangling from his fingertips. When Neal raises his eyebrow, Adam says, “If we’re going to get some noise out of you, I had a feeling I’d have to liquor you up first.” The smile turns dark and promising enough to make Neal shiver and just almost forget that he’s set up a script for the evening, a plan. Adam has a way of disrupting those. “And then I’m going to take advantage of you. It’s a vice.”

“You’re a bad man,” Neal rumbles before he draws Adam towards him and slams the door shut, hard. Adam startles slightly and glances at it with eyebrows drawn together before he allows himself to be kissed, thoroughly and hard. Neal doesn’t get aggressive, generally. He had to put so much effort into getting his temper under control after breaking his hand that it eventually just spread into every other avenue of his personality, too, not just the emotionally fraught situations. He doesn’t mind letting Adam take control; Adam’s good at it and clearly prefers it, and Neal is not about to complain when Adam’s causing his fingers and toes to curl up and making it impossible to lie in the bed without trying to touch every single inch of Adam’s body that he can possibly reach. But tonight, they’re going to do things a little differently.

Neal pulls the wine from Adam’s hand and examines it briefly. It’s red, it’ll be just fine on the counter. Neal sets it down and takes a grip upon Adam’s hand, tugs him towards the bedroom without taking no for an answer. Adam’s not resisting, but Neal doesn’t have to look around at him to know that there’s a confused line drawn down between his eyebrows. Nor does he have to peek to see it dissipate when Adam enters the bedroom behind Neal and sees what Neal has attached to the headboard. The bed itself is wrought iron; Neal had that Adam was going to outright do a backflip when Neal had been furnishing the new condo and he had first seen it. They haven’t gotten around to putting it to its full use yet. Well, Neal figures, there’s no time like the present.

“He-ey,” Adam drawls as he pulls free from Neal and goes to touch the leather restraints that are now dangling from the headboard. They already look broken-in, comfortably worn; seeing Adam run his fingers lightly across the buckles goes straight to Neal’s dick, and he takes a breath. Adam has a wicked little smile twisting up one corner of his mouth when he looks back at Neal. “And here I was thinking that I was going to have to sweet-talk you for weeks before this headboard got put to use.” Neal loves how Adam thinks that Neal’s not having been with the number of men that Adam has means that he’s vanilla. “Get on over here.”

Neal obeys, but it’s him who takes Adam by the wrists and holds him hard, it’s him who pushes his tongue into Adam’s mouth without asking permission and doesn’t stop until Adam is a series of nearly-boneless sighs pressed up against him. “We’re going to try something different tonight,” Neal says as he pulls away without releasing Adam’s wrists.

Adam’s eyes are dilated, silver-blue the slimmest of rings around his pupils. He sticks out his tongue and takes a slow swipe at his lower lip. He looks down at the grip that Neal is maintaining on his wrists, light enough that he could pull away if he really wanted to. Right now he doesn’t look as though pulling away is anywhere on his agenda.

“Okay, then,” Adam says. His laugh dispels any notion that Neal is the sole one in charge in this room. “Let’s get on with this, then.” He tugs himself free of Neal and draws his shirt off and over his head in one smooth motion, starts to work on his belt.

“No,” Neal stops him. “I’ll do that. Get on the bed.” He’s deliberately keeping his tone clipped and business-like. Adam lets out a shuddering sigh and then nods, once, before he obeys. He waits for Neal to buckle each restraint about his wrist, smiling a little as Neal inserts his finger between the leather and Adam’s skin to make certain that he’s not fastening them too tight.

“The clerk had to tell me about that,” Neal admits, breaking character long enough to flash Adam a little bit of a returning smile.

Adam twists and flexes his wrists as far as he’s able for a few seconds, and Neal watches the skin grow slightly red when he jerks hard. “Am I going to be doing a lot of bucking?” he asks.

“If you don’t, then I’m doing something wrong.” With each of Adam’s wrists buckled in behind and slightly to the side of his head, Neal throws his leg over Adam’s body so that he can straddle him, lay his entire body flush against Adam’s from thigh to chest, and then kiss Adam deeply enough to make Adam squirm up against him. Neal swears that Adam is doing that to torment Neal with his knee pressed between Neal’s thighs, rubbing slow circles and making it clear to Neal that even from the bottom, Adam still likes to call some of the shots.

“We doing anything that I’m going to need a safe word for?” Adam asks when they pause to breathe. Neal’s jeans are a fuck of a lot tighter than they were when he opened his door, and he can feel through their two layers of clothing that he’s not the only one. Okay, so maybe he gets why Adam digs being on top so goddamned much.

“About that,” Neal says, and reaches into the bedside drawer where he normally keeps the lube and condoms. He chose a small one, and it was just about the only time in the entire goddamned store that he caught himself starting to blush. Neal thinks that the clerk might also have had something to do with that; he understands why they would be matter of fact in the face of just about every kink that strolls through there, but he doesn’t understand why they have to be so fucking chirpy.

“Oh,” Adam says when he sees that what Neal is holding is actually a small rubber ball with leather straps dangling from either side, meant to be buckled into place behind Adam’s head. “Huh.” He tilts his head to one side and doesn’t look as if he’s saying no, quite yet, but neither is Neal hearing a yes.

He leans down and suckles at the skin directly behind Adam’s ear, hard enough to leave a mark that will still be there in the morning, bites at the lobe so that Adam jumps and swears. Neal is keeping a tally of the number of sounds that Adam has made already; it’s a lot. “You wanted to know why I don’t make a lot of noise in bed,” he whispers to Adam. Adam turns his head towards Neal more fully; their cheeks are resting against each other. “It’s because I like listening to other signals.” He reaches down, palms Adam’s erection hard and a little rough through the front of Adam’s pants, feels him jump and swear. “I like making you listen to other signals.”

“Wow,” Adam says, kind of breathless. “And it took you so long to let me know that you were kind of a motherfucker, too.” Neal takes his hand away from Adam’s erection. Adam looks very much as if he wants to swear at him again, but instead he eyes the gag. “I didn’t say stop. Okay, let’s do this. I want you to stop, I’ll--”

“I was thinking that you could probably just flip me off,” Neal says, smiling a little as he rocks back into his original straddling position.

Adam makes a whining noise from the back of his throat--the gag won’t stop that, and Neal really, really thinks that they should have broken in this bed correctly well before now--and answers, “You keep being a goddamned tease, and I’m going to flip you off, anyway.” He demonstrates. “See?” Neal scoots a little further back down on his legs. “Oh, you are an asshole.”

“But then I realized that I wasn’t going to be doing my job right if I spent all of that time watching your hands, so we probably ought to go with something that makes noise,” Neal continues as if Adam had not spoken. He can feel Adam shifting up against him in frustration, but he’s ignoring it for now. “Rap the buckle against the headboard three times if you want me to stop.” Adam tests out the signal, smiles when it makes an unmistakeable clanking noise.

“Bases covered, okay,” Adam says, and gives Neal one of the most wicked grins that Neal has seen from him in the entirety of them knowing each other. “Get on with this shit, son.” And thrusts his pelvis up against Neal’s, hard.

Neal’s grin back is if, anything, every bit as wicked. He slides the ball gag into Adam’s mouth, behind his teeth, and buckles the straps behind Adam’s head, taking care to make certain that they’re still not too tight. Adam is all but rolling his eyes at Neal’s care, but Neal’s not going to do anything to Adam that leaves marks unless he damned good and well intends it.

Adam’s exasperation stops when Neal bites at the side of Adam’s neck, a fuck of a lot harder than is their usual wont, and with enough force to make Adam gasp hard even from behind the gag. It’s audible, kind of, but mostly Neal is hearing it through the vibrations running up and down Adam’s throat, the way that he cannot keep himself from pushing up and against Neal, seeking friction. Neal shifts just far enough back to deny him that, against what ever nerve in his own body demands. His mouth keeps tracing lines down Adam’s neck, to the soft hollow where his collar bones met, down his chest. Adam’s chest was moving up and down more rapidly than even seconds before; Neal monitored the changes and listened to the buckles on the restraints clanking softly as Adam squirmed.

“You want to know why I don’t say much when we’re together?” Neal asks. He pushes Adam’s hip back down to the bed when Adam wants to squirm up on him, hears Adam trying to make a frustrated noise. The eyes are defiant. Neal bites down on one of Adam’s nipples, very lightly, just hard enough to see the semi-circles of red rising up when he leans back again. “Because that’s just one little thing on the human body, and I like to listen to everything else.” Like the way that there are tiny beads of sweat on Adam’s abdomen, pooling into his navel, and here neither one of them even has their pants off yet. Adam shivers up against him as Neal draws a circle around Adam’s navel with his tongue; Neal will not be surprised if he finds Adam’s legs wrapped around his waist in another few minutes. He should have known that Adam was never going to be the type to really give up control, not really.

Neal grins a little as he rocks back and hears Adam make a muffled noise. “Jesus,” he says. “We should have tried this a long time ago.” He slides off of Adam only long enough to pull off his own shoes and pants and then help Adam with his own; he’s already mostly hard, and his hands are shaking just a little. “Fuck me,” Neal says as he returns to the bed. He can see the smart-assed remark riding behind Adam’s eyes and, just for that, he lays his full body down over Adam’s again. Their cocks are lined up, sliding against each other on slick little beads of sweat and pre-come, and Neal’s entire body feels electric. He’s panting. It’s the loudest sound in the room.

“Almost feel like I need to be the one yelling for once,” Neal says. He kisses Adam’s face instead because he can’t kiss his mouth at the moment, traces his tongue along the black leather and then presses his mouth to the line of Adam’s jaw, biting lightly at the flesh again. He feels the shivering groan in the line of Adam’s throat, hears something that might be plea or protest as Adam’s jaw works.

“Not like that,” Neal chastises him as he moves downwards again. The restraints clank, but not three times; Adam’s trying to touch more of him. Neal twists his hands into the bedclothes so that they won’t shake. “Tell me what you want the way that I tell you.” A little unfair, when Adam’s hands aren’t free and Neal generally tells Adam what he’s doing right by grabbing Adam’s ass and forcing him deeper into him, as hard as he possibly can, but Neal thinks that he can be forgiven for being a little bit of a dick right now. So he traces his tongue around each of Adam’s nipples again, until they're rigid buds in his mouth, rewards each shivering clench of Adam’s abdominal muscles with a kiss. Adam parts his legs; Neal doesn’t guess that that’s an unclear signal. He starts to trail slowly southward again.

Adam makes a demanding sound from behind the ball gag when Neal moves too slowly, though, and that’s when Neal stops with his mouth hovering directly over Adam’s pelvic bone. He ignores Adam’s cock, fully erect and with a drop of pre-come glistening at the tip, and leans down so close to the flesh instead that Adam can feel his breath moving across the skin. Even though it’s warm, Neal still sees goosebumps rising up. He wiggles a little further down against the bedclothes and hisses when he feels the friction.

“That is not,” Neal says calmly, “what I told you to do.” He deliberately ignores Adam’s cock for now and keeps kissing his thighs, drawing patterns against the skin with his tongue that he then fills in with soft nips at the flesh, not hard enough to hurt, hard enough to make Adam jump and squirm with how close Neal is coming to even more sensitive flesh. Adam’s foot brushes up against Neal’s thigh, hip, waist as he starts kicking his leg slowly back and forth through the bedclothes.

That’s more like it, Neal thinks but does not say, against a silence that he now understands why Adam works so hard to break. He keeps kissing a trail down Adam’s leg to the crook of his knee and back again, grabbing the leg that Adam can’t seem to stop moving and rubbing his hand up and down the calf. Adam has squirmed as far down towards Neal as the restraints will allow and has stopped making any sound at all except for his breathing and the occasional low whimper that he cannot hold back. He’s baring everything that he has for Neal to take at all of it, without even seeming to realize how much that is. Neal puts a kiss to the underside of Adam’s knee and feels Adam startle when the expected love-bite does not follow. He rubs a circle on the outside of Adam’s thigh and whispers, “You’re doing great.”

It sounds like Adam swears behind the gag when Neal takes his balls into his mouth; Neal’s been denying what Adam wants most for long enough that he guesses he’ll give him that. Doesn’t stop him from smiling, though, as he runs his tongue across and around the sac until Adam is shivering and moaning all over again, never mind the instructions that Neal has given him, and then he finally rocks back far enough to take Adam into his mouth.

He has to put his hand upon Adam’s hip to keep Adam from gagging him, and push down hard; with Adam shifting and squirming and available beneath him, Neal can no longer help himself. He closes his hand around his cock, fucking finally, he swears that he’s the one who’s really being ordered to exercise his self-control here, and squeezes almost to the point of roughness in time to his mouth sliding up and down the length of Adam’s cock. Adam might be the first man that Neal has dated, but he’s not the first cock that Neal has sucked. He knows how to do it right. Neal twists his wrist a little bit as he keeps working himself, making his own calluses seem strange and foreign, like it’s someone else who’s doing this, and he hums. Adam’s hips come off of the bed so hard that Neal cannot push him back down again, shoving his shaft into Neal’s throat hard enough to make Neal gag a little in spite of himself. Neal told Adam to offer him everything and tell him what he wanted; looks as though Adam is heeding the order.

You son of a bitch, Neal thinks with affection. He licks a long stripe up the vein on the underside to hear Adam hitch and try to sigh, wraps his lips as far down the base as he can get and then sucks as he draws himself slowly back up to the sensitive head again. Adam is not making a sound. Neal doesn’t think that he would be able to even without the gag. Neal runs his tongue around the head of Adam’s cock and then flicks it across the slit, one hand wrapped around the base and his other barely even remembering to keep pleasuring himself. He feels a foot running up and down his thigh in a caress before the leg that it’s attached to drapes across his back, urging him further downward. A wet slurping noise escapes Neal’s mouth. He lets go of Adam’s cock only so that he can slide his hand beneath him, push his ass apart, slide his finger inside. Only the one, without lube, but apparently one is all that it takes; Neal barely even feels Adam tense in warning before his mouth is full of spunk and Adam is making a keening noise that Neal swears to God his fucking neighbors would be able to hear if they hadn’t taken that diverting little precaution first. Neal swallows it down and then coughs a little as he lets Adam slide out of his mouth and rolls over onto his back with legs sprawled to either side of the bed. He starts pumping himself with a renewed focus now, unable to stop the soft sounds that start coming out of his throat as he alters the strokes, imagines that it’s someone else touching him, that someone who is bound to the bed and rendered more artificially silent than Neal would have ever thought him capable. Neal glances up at sees that Adam’s cat-like eyes are fixed on him, unblinking, and that’s all that he can take before his head tilts back and he hisses hard from between his teeth and starts muttering things that even he cannot decipher. He comes across his own hand, part of Adam’s thigh where their legs are tangled together.

Neal lays at a diagonal on the foot of the bed for several moments in order to get his breath back before he pushes himself back up on his hands and knees. He releases each of Adam’s wrists first and rubs at the reddened marks that Adam has stamped into the flesh before he takes the gag out, watches Adam lick at his own lips and work his jaw to make sure that it still works. He’s a little surprised to see that there are teeth marks stamped into the rubber. Neal’s still not quite ready for it when Adam’s response is to fucking pounce for him and flip them both over so that Neal is the one on the bottom before he kisses Neal hard. His jaw is a little stiff, or maybe he’s just scraping at Neal’s bottom lip with his teeth on purpose.

“Do you know what you were saying when you came?” Adam whispers to him as he takes Neal’s wrists and easily pins them up and over his head when Neal tries to wrap them around his back, taking away the method through which Neal talks best just as Neal did to him.

Neal does, kinda, now that he thinks about it. He doesn’t want to talk about that right now, though. “Shut up,” he says to Adam instead, because he’s smooth like that.

Adam grins light and easy and lets it go, though he doesn’t take the pressure off of Neal’s wrists. “Your turn, sweetheart,” he says, and pushes Neal down against the bedclothes.

End

AI FIC: All That Time, Silent Still (3/29)

2009-07-22T00:53:54Z

AI FIC: All That Time, Silent Still (2/29)

2009-07-19T14:33:09Z