We are not traitors

I wish things were easier. He remembers saying it once, or he thinks he does, though he can't remember why or who he'd been speaking to. But he had wished that things were easier, and he still does, because they so seldom are.

And yet in the end they do happen.

He's not sure when Lennox had left him. One moment he'd been there and the next gone, but by that time he'd been ready to let him go. And then he'd closed his eyes again, and when he'd opened them some unknown time later the sun had been setting and he had been alone in the jungle with the shadows long and dark all around him.

He goes home. It seems like the thing to do.

Walking up the path towards her hut he feels tired, bone-weary, but it's a healthy kind of weariness, the kind that promises deep and long sleep. He feels cleaned out. Pleasantly empty. Ready to be filled with something new.

When you carry something for a long time, it can take putting it down to remind you just how heavy it is.

There are lights burning in Eostre's hut. He's not surprised to see them, but he does feel a touch of relief. He'd known that something was going on outside his own little corner of the world, though he hadn't known exactly what and had been too lost in his own mind to worry much. But now things are all right. He feels it deeply.

He doesn't knock, not anymore. He lifts the curtain that covers her door and steps inside, eyes closing for a few seconds as the light hits them.

[continued from here.]

"Jesus, look at you," he murmurs, nipping back, giving just as good as he's getting. "You always been this easy, or you just been drinking a lot of the water?" His shirt falls to the side and then his hands slide down Hobbes's back, moving to his sides, one hand slipping under the waistband of his shorts and groping at his hip while the other fumbles at his zipper.

In any case, full-on immersion can't hurt any. And the water looks clear and cool out of the corner of his eye, inviting. Suddenly his skin almost aches.

It hasn't made things any better. It's keeping him in bed and that's the best he thinks he can hope for right now.

At first he hadn't known what was going on; there had only been a sense of confusion and fear, people running through the halls, once or twice a faint scream. He hadn't know what was going on, and then all at once he'd come face to face with it, one of the doctors stopping and giving him a clipped explanation and then a flurry of panic and trying to get up and then some unknown time later... Chris and Lennox. And what they were carrying.

They'd put her in bed next to him. He had moved as much as he could. His leg is still painful, but moveable at least, if he's careful.

So it's happened before. So last time everyone was fine. So fucking what. This is Eostre and she's pregnant and he's fucking sick of the island doing this to him, making him feel this kind of fear.

He lies next to her and rests his head against her shoulder.

His hand hasn't left her belly in hours. He hasn't slept in he doesn't know how long. He counts his breaths and hers, and measures out the remaining time until he knows. One way or the other.

All things considered, he's never been good at giving people space. Clinging, he can do, and he's always been good at just turning around and walking the fuck out, and Eostre doesn't fit there, but there are a whole fuck of a lot of ways in which Eostre is the biggest exception to every rule in his whole life.

But Hobbes might be close behind now. So he says goodnight and he gives him space, and he wanders and works and thinks, and just as the sun is finishing its slow, red set he starts to make his gradual way home and it's only then that his resolve falters.

He had been meaning to wait until Hobbes came to find him. But he needs to see. He needs some proof that he didn't just imagine the whole thing, the whole beginning of what he doesn't quite dare to believe is a future.

He stops outside Hobbes's hut in the twilight, not quite wrestling with himself. It did happen, he knows that, he can feel it in his skin and bones and his fucking DNA.

But he needs to see.

So he steps inside without knocking, into the dimness, and says "Hobbes" softly, inquiring.

He had known that day with the dinosaurs that he had to do something, and the afternoon with the pot only solidified it. What he hadn't known, hadn't had any fucking idea about, was what. He had considered, again, a fight, only to dismiss it out of hand a couple of seconds later. Hobbes isn't Chris, that much is abundantly sure, and besides not feeling right, he's fairly certain it would accomplish nothing other than making them both angry and tired.

And things might get out of hand. He might lose control of something. It wouldn't do.

And talking really isn't an option. Because... because he just can't, because it's never been what they do and he has no idea how to start now, and what he has to say can't be said. It's too much. It's too cruel. It won't do either of them any good at all.

So maybe the only thing he can change is himself. Maybe it's time to just let go.

After he'd gotten the letter he'd toyed with the idea of burning it. Reading it hurt, holding it hurt, so getting rid of it completely seemed like the sensible thing to do. He'd built a fire and sat by it holding the slim piece of paper in his hands, words blurring in front of his vision, and he had almost thrown it in.

And he hadn't been able to. It was all he had.

But now... now there's no reason. Hobbes is here. He sees him every day. The letter is a piece of something that was supposed to die a long time ago, and as long as he holds onto it he'll never be free, and he'll fight, and fight, and it'll never go away.

So now he sits crosslegged outside his hut with a fire crackling in a little circle of stones and dusk starting to fall around him, and he holds the letter in his hands again. He doesn't need to unfold it anymore, doesn't need to see the words. Just because reading it hurts doesn't mean that he doesn't know every line by heart by now.

Things are harder without you.

I don't think I'm going to go home.

It's the worst thing, not knowing.

I can't let go of you.

I miss you.

This Hobbes didn't write those words. He doesn't remember Mike ever being gone. He never had to let go. He never missed him.

Next to Mike on the ground is the journal. It's not even close to full, and what's there is as much meditation and observation as it is any kind of communication. But if he had been writing it for anyone it had been for Hobbes, and that can't happen anymore.

He picks it up in his free hand, and it opens to the last page on which something is written.

Goodbye.

The flames swallow it. The paper flares and begins to blacken.

He holds up the letter then, and it falls open and the words blur in front of his eyes one last time. He closes them.

This is for the best. Really, it is.

Once upon a time Mike woke up quickly, moving from dead sleep to complete alertness in bare seconds, because often bare seconds was all that stood between you being a functional, living entity and being a fast smudge of blue light in the air. Things haven't been that way for a few months now; now he comes awake slowly and luxuriously, almost by degrees, taking time to enjoy the process.

In the past that's meant that it's taken him a while to notice certain things. Which is why he only notices that he's missing a fairly major (ha ha) portion of his anatomy once he moves his hand to scratch through the fabric of his boxers and encounters... well, something, but not what he'd been expecting.

Then he notices, eyes still closed, that he seems to have more hair than he did when he went to sleep.

And then there are the tits. He doesn't need to touch those to know that they're there.

For a second or two his mind freezes in panic, though there's still no outward sign that he's even awake. If he's... Eostre is quite pregnant now and while he dealt okay with it last time he's not sure how he would handle it at this stage. But when he slips an exploring hand up to his belly it's mercifully flat. And he doesn't feel that sense of presence that he had when in Eostre's body.

So this isn't that, then.

He stretches, again experimentally, feeling new muscles flex and coil, trying to get accustomed to the way everything feels just a little bit different. The sheet slips down to his waist and a breeze blows gently through the hut from the door. Finer, softer hairs on his bare skin are stirred, and a little shiver runs through him. It's pleasant. It's very pleasant.

There are things about this he thinks he might really be able to enjoy.