forthedog | Derailment

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Derailment

He's not sure what wakes him. It could be any number of things. It could be the light on his face, the air moving over him, the shift of cloth against skin where before it had just been the cool of the sheets and the heat of two bodies. It could be the hard ground under his back, which would also explain the aches in him as consciousness drifts closer. He's gone soft, he thinks sometimes, fallen out of the habit of sleeping well on the ground, lost in the embrace of Tom's big bed. But he still roughs it sometimes, so at first the fact that he's clearly outside doesn't sound any alarms.

But it's the kind of outside. It's not the light but the quality of that light; not warm and glowing but thin, pale, anemic. When he opens his eyes it's not the trees swaying over him in the morning breeze but what they're like, them and the other plant life, still thickly growing and untamed but bad. Unhealthy. Sparse where it shouldn't be and dense where it shouldn't be. No birds, no fucking birds at all. The hints of a world knocked out of balance and gone horribly wrong.

There's a cold wet nose pressed against his cheek, and a weight pressing into his arm, numbing it. He rolls, pulls it away and sits up, shoving Neil harder than he meant to. Dexter steps back, whining softly, and Mike stares around and then down, absorbing it in quick shocked bursts. The car. The campfire, smoking ashes. Dexter. The two figures, curled together on the ground. Tom's old and ragged sweater. His own pants. Camo. Boots. The itchy feel of clothes that haven't been washed for a while.

His gun.

There's no mistaking what this is.

He doesn't want to wake them. As long as they're still sleeping, this is his nightmare and his alone. Maybe they never have to wake up. And yet he has no idea what's really worse: being back here or being back here on his own.

"No," he breathes, barely above a whisper. No louder, because he's honestly afraid that he might scream. "No. No. Fuck."

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Tom gave Florence a fleeting grin before letting Mike lead the way through the rough. They weren't safe, here. They weren't really safe anywhere in the Realm and it throws him. At home, they'd been relatively safe for years.

"How're you holding up?" Tom asks, sliding a hand up onto the curve of Mike's neck as the walked. "Okay?"

"I have to be," he says dully, though he shivers just a little at the touch. Wondering if Florence can sense it. Wondering how much she guesses. She had already guessed an awful lot before anything even happened. "He needs us."

He shoves a low-hanging tree branch out of the way and breaks it with suppressed frustration, getting a few seconds of pleasure out of its snap. "I just never wanted this. Never, fucking ever. Not again."

Tom watched the outburst calmly, blankly. He reached out again, more firmly now, and gripped Mike's shoulder.

"I know," he said softly, voice rough with commiseration and something a lot like grief. "God, I know, Mike but...we just gotta keep moving. And...deal with it on Tuesday."

He looked at him intently. "That was the deal, right?"

"That's the deal." But Tuesday feels so far away, and now he's not even sure anymore what day it is now--in the Realm, each day bled into the other and all of them eventually stopped meaning anything. Christmas. Thanksgiving. Birthdays.

He can hear the water flowing a little way ahead. Behind and distant now is the glow of the fire. He stops and tilts his head back, trying to breathe, because suddenly it's hard, his throat choked with everything he's pushed to the side since Neil vanished. Because you have to. Because here, grief is a luxury that the bereaved can't afford.

"I should've held on tighter," he whispers. "I should've..."

"Don't," Tom said, quickly and severely. He got in front of Mike, forced eye contact, and stared him down, not without compassion. "Listen to me," he said quietly, earnestly, schooling his face.

"We can't do that, we don't have time to do that. We have too much we have to do."

He laughs once, quick and bitter, because wonder of wonders, here's Tom Hobbes trying to get him under control. But a lot's changed. He touches Tom's wrists, closes his eyes, forces his breathing to ease and slow.

"You used to hate it when I told you shit like that," he says, smile and voice both tight.

"You used to hate it when you had to tell me shit like that," Tom said, giving Mike a slanted, tight grin.

Tom curled his fingers around Mike's wrists and leaned their foreheads together, matching breaths for a few restless moments in the middle of the night. Here, together, incomplete but doing all that they could.

"Come on..."

He nods slowly, because he knows it's true, they do have to keep moving, not least because if they're gone too long Florence might begin to worry. But it's hard to concentrate on the canteens. It's hard to concentrate on much of anything but what it feels like to have Tom this close, close in a way that he never could have been before, in this place.

Part of him is still missing, and it just makes him want to cling harder to what he still has. So he nods again and he nods their mouths together, slow at first and letting out a shuddering sigh, until the canteen hits the ground and his freed hand tightens on the back of Tom's neck.

"Hobbes..."

Tom leaned in, one hand on each side of Mike's face and hauling him in close for a long kiss, desperate and clinging, too much like grief to feel good, but too much of a comfort to push away.

"I love you," he said fiercely. "And I'm going to fix this. We're going to make this right."

"I know," he breathes, hands tightening more. The sound of water not so far away, and but for the old clothes and the exhaustion and the eerie lack of nighttime animal sounds, they could almost be home.

Almost.

"Look, just..." He clenches his teeth against something and rakes a hand up through Tom's short hair. "Just stay here. For a few minutes."

He looked down at Mike, some of the resolve and the necessary coldness slipping off his features, softening.

"We don't have very long," Tom said, looking back at camp. They hadn't spoken of Florence to each other. That kind of pain was almost easier to keep to yourself. "And we're not safe here."

He tipped his head forward, face resting against the curve of Mike's collar bone.

"But we can stay."

"I know, I know," he murmurs, pulling in another slow breath. His body is betraying him. Maybe it's just stress looking for a release, maybe it's pure shock, maybe it's too many memories of too many nights alone and aching with something he wanted so badly so tantalizingly close. Probably, in the end, it doesn't matter.

"Kiss me again." He tugs Tom's chin up with his fingertips, hurting and needy. "Please..."

This is foolish, this is ridiculous, it's selfish and it's going to get us killed. The thought flashes, and just as quickly, is gone, wrapped up in the smell of dirt and sweat and Mike Pinocchio and something that felt dangerously like loss. They only had this. Everything else was fucked, but this was still here, as undeniable as ever.

Tom leaned forward, almost rough, and let his fingers dig into Mike's shirt as he kissed him, twisting futility in worn fabric, bringing him as close as he could. Dumb. Foolish. Necessary.

It was easy to feel like this was all they had left.

He's not sure when exactly kissing turns into movement, but somehow he's walking them blindly back, kissing Tom like his life depends on it, because what the hell, it just might be the case. He stops when he feels Tom's back hit something that might be a tree trunk and then he's pressing forward, groaning deep in his throat and his hands pushing up under Tom's ragged shirt.

It hasn't been desperate like this since the days when everything was still bad between them.

There's that violent, coppery feeling to this that makes him remember a long way back, before Neil, before Eostre, before anything but hurt and confusion and a long road home at night.

He let himself be shoved, handled, and a few moments later he was pulling Mike's shirt from his back pockets and mumbling desperately into the kiss. Some things, you just can't question.

When he'd thought about this in the old days, when he'd let himself think about it, it hadn't been slow or easy or anything like romantic. It had been all heated, rushed fantasies, just enough to get him off in the brief periods when he had that kind of privacy, when he wasn't with someone else who could be blessedly distracting. Brief, because it hurt. Flashes of something like this, pressing Tom up against a tree and taking what he wanted. Crippled, because he was crippled, in his head if not in his body.

And now... he's not sure what this is.

"Fuck," he mutters between kisses, already dropping a hand between them and palming Tom roughly, feeling hardening flesh pressing back and fumbling with his zipper.

Tom gasped at Mike's hand, head snapping hard enough back against the tree that he saw stars, bark digging into his back and shoulders, feet slipping on the roots. He couldn't hear much beside Mike's staggering pants and the rushing of his pulse, and when he knocked Mike's hands away, getting his zipper open, it was sloppy, rough, almost tearing seams.

"Come on," he whispered mindlessly, "Come on..."

This is stupid. Their guards are down. They're making noise. He'd always known that, somehow, that there would be too much noise. So he clamps his mouth over Tom's to silence him as he shoves his hand into Tom's open fly and pulls him out, gives him a long, rough stroke as his other hand gets his own zipper down. Shut up, just shut up...

Maybe the Island never even happened. Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe this is all there was and all there will ever be.

Once, it might have been enough.

Tom breathed in deeply through his nose and reached out for Mike like it was defiant, an act of rebellion, and slid his hand inside of Mike's pants. This was all it too fucked up, too tragic, but it felt good, all pain, all exhaustion, and glimmering around the edges like a runner's high.

He bit the palm of Mike's hand, swallowing moans, and pushed his hips forward. All for the moment: now.

He bucks his hips against Tom's hand, aggressive in a way he hasn't been in years, desperate in a way he only remembers being twice before. His teeth rake down Tom's jaw, hand against his mouth, dirty fingers pushing past Tom's lips as he jerks at him. Maybe later he'll feel bad about this. Maybe. Right now he's pushing forward towards those precious few seconds of not feeling much of anything.

It's too easy to feel dizzy, lost, violent and pushing against something incendiary. He smashed his lips against Mike's, swallowing both their sound, hips and hands matching everything Mike gave him. There was nothing here but dirt and things that were dying, but god, he could remember gardens and hours and hours of light.

Quiet...quiet... The little glow of the campfire isn't all that far away. His hand moves faster over hot, tight flesh, his hips matching the speed, and it doesn't even feel much like pleasure. It's just release. Or it will be.

"Come for me," he grates, hissing it into the darkness. "Fuck you, come."

Dirty, gritty, far from charming, far from everything he's come to associate this with, but so fuckign in tune with the hurt and the pain and desperation that it was hard to treat it like a separate thing. The world was fucked and the were fucking. One thing bled into the next.

It was a hard order to disobey, especially when Mike's voice sounded like that. Tom gritted his teeth, and turned his face into Mike's neck to hide the sounds he made as he came, jerking unevenly against his stomach.

It doesn't take a lot more. Tom tensing up like that, hot and slick over his fingers, and something about the sheer desperation of it is pleasurable in a sick kind of way. Not a way he thinks he'd miss. But it's here and it's what they have and he comes into Tom's hand, shuddering hard and biting his lip. He can come near silently when he has to, a skill from long years in barracks and what felt like even longer years by dying campfires with the object of his fantasies asleep beside him.

"Fuck," he breathes when he can. He should step back, clean himself up and pick up the canteen, get back as fast as they can. But the closeness isn't something he can pull away from immediately. It's a kind of comfort, however much it hurts.

Absurdly, he feels like apologizing.

Tom slid his clean hand behind Mike's neck, curling the other in his shirt, and pulled Mike in for a slow, out of place kiss, all lips and teeth, slow and grasping. This hurt, all of this hurt, but this was one brief sunspot in the middle of a storm.

Disheveled, messy, Tom clung to Mike's shoulders for a few minutes, holding onto the sweetness of the kiss for as long as he could.

Derailment

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