forthedog | 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 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.

The kiss is like being pulled back, back to what's real, back to what matters. This was never real and it's not real now. It was a nightmare, and he woke up from it, and he can wake up again. He reaches up with his clean hand and cups Tom's cheek, holding on. Breathing.

"We should get back," he murmurs when he finally pulls back a little.

"We should get water, first," Tom said, the ghost of a smile popping up on his dirty, tired features. He turned his head, kissing Mike's palm before rolling to his feet with a groan.

"Florence might start to suspect."

"Right," he says, feeling a flush of combined frustration and guilt. They shouldn't lie to her, even a lie of omission. They shouldn't have to. Probably they don't.

He steps back, tucking himself back in and wiping his hand on his pants. As dirty as they are already, it's not like it even makes any difference. He nods to the right. "Just down the hill, I think."

"I'd almost forgotten this," Tom admitted, tromping down the hill ahead of him, still feeling sweaty and dirty, actively keeping his mind from why they were out here, in the rough, searching. Neil. Neil McCormick. All they had to do was get him and get safe, where ever they could.

"Like a nightmare, you know? I was getting to the point where I couldn't even remember details."

"It was always a nightmare," he says softly. "It was just one you couldn't wake up from." Until they had. By some mercy, they had, so maybe they will again. The alternative is to horrible to contemplate.

Not that that ever really stopped him before.

He hears the water up ahead, sees a thin, grimy shimmer in the darkness. No flashlights, if they even had any. Nothing to call attention to themselves. Even the fire had been a risk.

He swipes a hand down his face. "I still dream about this place."

Tom knelt down at the water, filling the canteen against the current and glanced up to catch Mike's profile against the scant moonlight.

"I know," he said softly. He'd felt Mike twitching in his sleep, sharp breaths, more so since Eostre had gone away. It was how it worked, post traumatic stress and guilt. They'd left a broken world behind them, but there was still shrapnel stuck in their bones.

"But here..." he said softly, "Here we have to dream about home."

Because that's where we're going. It had to be true.

He ducks his head, silent assent. The cynic in him wants to ask what the point is, how it can be anything but even more painful, but he knows that. And he knows why they have to do it. He knows enough to not ask at all.

He watches Tom fill the canteen with a hand on his gun, unconsciously protective. Just like old times. Almost as if they hadn't just been pressed up against a tree a few minutes before, hands down each other's pants.

"Walk ahead of me going back," he says. "I don't trust... fuck, anything."

Tom nodded. He didn't like it. He wanted to be bringing up the rear, standing guard over Mike, keeping them going. But...these were old roles and there was no arguing now. Filling up the third and final canteen, he led the way back to the campsite, passing the tree they'd been pressed up against moments before without glancing at it.

The trip back didn't seem to take as long. Amber light between the trees and the smell of smoke.

Tom looked back over his shoulder just once. "I love you," he whispered, catching Mike's eye. And then he was stepping forward, into the realm of firelight, back down into hell.

Derailment

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