forthedog | And carve your name and hearts into the warhead

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And carve your name and hearts into the warhead

Somewhere between finding out the news and hitting the tarmac in Newark, he decides not to go to Neil immediately.

Some of it is fear, plain and simple, though he'd only come out and call it that under extreme duress. But it's not fear of Neil, not really. It's both more complex and more horrible than that. It's fear of disappointing him. Fear of what it might mean that he's afraid of that. Fear of commitment. Fear of not committing. Fear of being hurt. Fear of becoming someone who can't be hurt at all, because they don't feel anything.

At Newark he rents a car for a day and drives into Trenton; it's a sad little town in a lot of ways, that sign on the bridge somehow reproachful rather than proud--the world takes everything from us and leaves us with nothing--but something about it speaks to him all the same. It's not New York. It's not really like anywhere he's lived.

After about half an hour, it occurs to him that probably the closest it comes to is Hutchinson.

Shortly after that, leaning on the hood of the car and watching rain drip sullenly into the gray river, a cigarette burning down to a stub between his fingers, he comes to another decision. It doesn't take him very long. Really, he thinks maybe he's already made it, and the hard part was just realizing that it was made.

He picks up a local paper, finds three places that he can look at that afternoon, and jumps on the third one. It's small, old, clean. Is it all right if he pays for a few months in advance? He has to go overseas for a while and won't actually be living in it until he returns. Yes, it's fine. A modest and unspent inheritance and years and years of intensely minimal expenses mean that he has money. Really, he has more than he knows what to do with.

And now he knows.

He signs the application, agrees to come back in a day or two to sign the lease itself, hits the road. It's getting dark and raining harder. He takes a detour and stops in front of the gates of Fort Dix, looks at the lights in the early gathering twilight and thinks about what might have been. What won't be. What will.

It's late when he gets into the city itself, and though Neil's told him where the bar is he gets lost twice, the streets becoming oddly maze-like. Parking should be a nightmare but once he finds the place itself, there's a spot across the street, and he slides into it, dumping change into the meter without counting the time.

It's a hole in the wall, but it's got good atmosphere, dim and smoky, music too loud. The kind of place he likes, as a rule.

It's not too crowded but it's small, and people line the bar, and he only catches sight of Neil when he pushes his way to the front. For a moment he doesn't speak, doesn't breathe, and there's the fear again. Is he making a huge fucking mistake? Is he giving up too much for someone he still hardly fucking knows?

Is there a name for this? One he can use?

He catches Neil's eye, taps the bar and manages a thin smile. "Whiskey. Straight."

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"I'm being nice," he says, giving the back of Neil's hand a quick pinch as he pulls into the parking lot. "Don't go challenging that."

The actual transaction takes no more than five minutes, the clerk looking a combination of contemptuous and bored the way desk clerks at every motel like this seem to do, barely even looking at him as he hands the key over. The room itself is small, old, and slightly musty, but when he flicks on the light it seems clean enough.

He doesn't wait or pause, or glance at Neil. He collapses onto one of the two double beds and lets out a long breath. Everything feels like it's hitting him at once, continually.

Though, at least now he's not alone.

"Fuck."

Once the door's kicked shut behind me and my backpack's tossed into the old, rickety chair in the corner, I strip out of my shirt, coughing out a laugh at him while I kick off my shoes and pop open the button on my jeans.

"I hope you don't want me to take the other fuckin' bed," I tease, dropping down onto the bed and practically draping myself on top of him.

"No? Fuck," he murmurs, sliding his hands up over Neil's hips, hooking arms around his waist. Neil's a familiar weight on him, comfortable and warm, and he feels a wave of conflicting weariness and lust. "I wanted the room."

He hooks one leg over the back of Neil's. "Oh, well. Guess if you're already here..."

"Bullshit," I mutter, working a hand up under the hem of his shirt, palm splayed out on warm skin, but then I settle, my face in the crook of his neck and our legs tangled together.

The last time I just lay there with someone, with no real intention of having sex, without the exhaustion that comes after getting off... Actually, I don't know if I've ever done that. Coach and me... Well, there were hours spent on his bed, side by side on his soft blue sheets, staring up at that speckled ceiling of his, but that... Those memories aren't the same as they used to be.

"Yeah, we're both pretty much full of it," he murmurs, hands moving slowly over Neil's back and sides. He feels the warmth and the solidity, bone and muscle, shapes and angles that are more familiar than he ever believed they'd be.

More soothing. More comfortable.

He sighs, stares up at the water-stained ceiling and blinks a little hard. "I don't... remember being scared like this, last time."

I'm quiet for a long moment, surprised that he's admitted so much. "It's different this time, though, right?" I murmur, shifting back far enough from him that I can see his face.

"Peacekeeping or whatever the fuck it's gonna be... It's gonna be different than it was in Germany."

"I wasn't talking about Germany," he says softly. Normally he'd be squirming rather than admit this much, admit fear--he hadn't even wanted to admit it to himself. But maybe this is a good time to start being honest.

Maybe that's what this is all about, anyway.

"I was in Kuwait. Iraq. I saw people die there."

"Oh," I murmur, feeling kind of like an asshole for misunderstanding him, even though I couldn't have really known. He didn't talk about this kind of shit... Not before.

"So... what's different this time?"

"I dunno." He rolls them both over in a smooth, easy motion, legs still tangled and his face finding the crook of Neil's neck--and he realizes as he does so that he's looking for comfort, directly, not hidden behind a desire for sex or for anything else. One hand slides up over Neil's belly and chest, feeling for the thud of his heartbeat.

"Maybe I just have a better fucking idea of what I'm getting into now."

"Yeah," I murmur, bunching his shirt up under his arms, only so I can feel more of his skin against mine, my hand splayed out just below his shoulder blades.

"We should just, like... run off to fuckin' Canada or somethin'," I tease, but there's a part of me that wishes it could be that easy. There's a part of me that wishes we could just hide in this fuckin' hotel room until they forget about him and leave him the fuck alone.

"Too cold," he breathes, arching up under Neil's touch, wriggling after a few moments and lifting the top of his torso just enough to get the shirt off over his head. "Too fucking polite."

He pulls them back together again, mouth against the soft skin under Neil's jaw. "I need to do this," he whispers. "I just... need to. Before I'm done." He doesn't know how to explain it, the monumental betrayal it would be to just cut and run, the way he feels like he's on the edge of one now.

The way he's now seeing the daily betrayal he's been living with for years.

"I know," I murmur, one hand in his hair, the other sliding in a mindless rhythm up and down his spine, and I realize, belatedly, that I'm trying to offer comfort. Like my body just knew that he needed it, even if I never would've thought that was an instinct I even still had anymore.

Lips grazing his brow, I say, "'s just a couple months. That's nothin'."

"Yeah," he breathes, feeling himself uncoiling under the touch, letting it happen... ignoring the fact that it might not be a couple months. That it might be longer. That nothing feels certain anymore, that the few things he thought he was sure of are melting away like ice in a spring thaw--and what's under the ice?

Anything that can still grow?

He lets out a quiet noise and tilts his head, tongue flicking against the skin of Neil's throat--tasting, letting all of it pour into his senses, like he's afraid of losing it.

Because he guesses he probably is.

"Neil." He takes a breath, feels suddenly and almost painfully raw. "I want... Fuck me."

"Jesus," I breathe, my hand tightening in his hair, tipping his face up and dragging him into a deep kiss, one that manages to be slow and warm and demanding at the same time.

If it wasn't about sex before, it sure as hell is now, but there's an undercurrent of something else, something driving me to hold him close and take my time prying his lips open with my tongue.

I pop open the button on his jeans, but instead of tearing them off of him, I let my hand slip down the back of his waistband, hand splaying out over his ass through his underwear and using the leverage to haul him closer.

He thinks--as it happens, as he lets it happen, helps it happen, pushing up under Neil's hands with a neediness that startles him in how intense it is--that he's never been comfortable being weak like this with anyone else. He's never been comfortable being weak, period--all his training has been against that, every second of pain and stress and terror ending in a hard, determined wall. Nothing can touch him. He won't allow it to.

But that's not true anymore. And as he spreads his legs, wriggling to slide his pants down further and sucking gently at Neil's tongue, he thinks that what this amounts to is a betrayal of something that he doesn't even believe in anymore.

Huffing out a breathless laugh, I shove at his waistband one-handed, fumbling a little to get the elastic of his underwear down around his thighs, my other hand curled around the back of his neck, like I even need to hold him there for the kiss.

Finally, I push him away, breaking the kiss with a gasp and murmuring a hoarse, "Come on, get these off. There's too many fuckin' clothes."

"Didn't say I wanted you to fucking order me around," he murmurs, suddenly playful in a tense sort of way, pulling at what remains of his clothes. Because he did, sort of, even if it wasn't in so many words. Take over. Let me not have to think for a while. And he's doing exactly what Neil wants, and knows he'd do much more if it came to it.

Even if part of him still wants to fight a little.

He kicks his shoes away and jeans and boxers with them, hooking a leg over Neil's hip and arching up naked under him, eager and hungry and every bit as forceful as he is when he goes in fully intending to stay in charge. But now there's an unsteady edge to it, like he might topple over if he's just pushed in the right way.

"Bullshit," I laugh, prying open my own jeans and shoving them down my hips, a hand splayed out on the middle of his chest, holding him back, holding him down, like I'd ever really be able to overpower him through strength alone.

"You got a rubber?"

The question confuses him momentarily, like he's forgotten that such things even exist, much less that he'd have any reason to have them around. He frowns, trying to focus around the solid press of Neil's hand in the center of his chest, looking up, the vulnerability like a thing he could sink into and be gone.

Then he remembers, coughs out a laugh and nods across the room. "Jeans," he murmurs. "Back pocket." He'd been prepared, yes. But maybe not that prepared.

"Fuck," I laugh helplessly, climbing off of him and stripping completely out of my jeans along the way. I bend down, bare ass in the air, and fish a condom out of his pocket, wobbling back toward the bed on shaky legs.

Dropping the condom onto the bed, I press a kiss to the inside of his knee, the soft part of his inner thigh, and that tattoo on his hip, my hands framing his hipbones and holding him down.

He presses up under Neil's hands but it's just a token resistance, just enough to get Neil to hold him more firmly, letting out a hard sigh with his arms stretching back over his head. Neil's mouth is hovering everywhere except where it really needs to be, and he clenches his fists in the sheets to keep from grabbing him and forcing his head down.

"Such a tease," he mutters, and laughs. "C'mon, I'm going to war. Be nice to me."

"'m bein' nice," I murmur, breathing warm across his dick, grinning with his hips pinned harder to the sheets. "You wouldn't want me too nice."

Crawling between his legs, I nip at the soft skin at the juncture of his thigh, then I turn, painting a stripe down the length of his dick with my tongue.

"Maybe I--" he starts, and then the words melt away into a kind of laughing moan as his hips stutter upward, wanting more of what Neil's tongue is promising. One hand slips out of his control and downward, fingers combing into Neil's hair and palm cupping the back of his head. "More of that," he breathes, and his eyes flutter closed. "Please."

Yeah, he'll beg. Yeah, he'll probably do just about anything. God.

Batting his hand away halfheartedly, I practically nuzzle at his dick, nose buried in coarse hair, my tongue swiping over his balls. Then I trace my way up the length of him, tongue circling the tip.

When I suck him down, it's slow, like I'm savoring every fuckin' inch, like it feels as good to me as it does to him. And in a way, it does.

There aren't any words in the sound he makes, even half-formed ones; it's loose and liquid, and he feels his face twist into a grimace that might look like pain--but Neil's mouth is heaven, it has been since the beginning, and he lets go against it.

His hand has left Neil's head but not the rest of him, and his fingers trace a broken line across his shoulders, nails digging briefly into his skin in a way that's more instinctive than intentional.

He'll come back for this, yes. But the truth is that this is only part of what he'll come back for.

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