Small Drabble Inspired by Endlessly Running Island Expeditions to get Mounts that Refuse to Drop Ever
Flynn/Mathias Teen rated, no triggers
The Wind's Redemption is awash with champions and 7th Legion when Mathias Shaw returns from the Tradewind's Market with a sizeable box of takeout from the Copious Cuddlefish in one hand and a stack of reports from his agents imbedded around Boralus in the other. Notably absent from the nightly assortment is someone who should be there waiting for him seeing as the Middenwake is back at it's berth beside the 'Redemption already.
He has begun to look forward to the twice weekly reports from the Captain of the Middenwake after the duty was transfered to him when it became noted by the combined leadership of the Alliance presence in Kul Tiras that Mathias had a cordial relationship with the Captain after their team effort in the Zandalari Vault. This had not been worded as diplomatically when the duty was handed over, in fact Wyrmbane had broken professionalism to say that he was glad to hand Fairwind off to him since the man had never once shown up to a meeting on time or given a succint report when he did and he hoped he never had to deal with him again for the entire rest of his life. Jes-tereth had actually laughed hysterically when Mathias questioned why Fairwind's reports were not being handed to her.
While it was true the Captain's style of reporting was layered with flourishes and that the man preferred to give said reports in person, Mathias had found them very satisfactory. Or, if he was being entirely honest with himself, it was the company he found satisfactory, or more than satisfactory, perhaps to an embarrassing amount. Enough so that not seeing the Captain waiting for him on the deck of the 'Redemption had him feeling disappointed. Captain Fairwind never missed their dates, their very important work dates, where they share dinner while the Captain enthusiastically regals him with the last few days of Island Expeditions. Completely legitimate workplace professional dates. Where Mathias stares at his lips, the way his throat bobs when he swallows, the glint in sea-blue-sky eyes when he's telling a particularly good story, and the sunkissed tan of his skin, staring of course in a professional manner, entirely above board oogling.
"Champion!" He calls out to the tall night elf with the braid down his back. Seven heads turn his way, "The night elf mage." He clarifies, striding across the deck toward the tall figure. Beside the mage is a Pandaren monk and they both smile at him in greeting. "Weren't you two on the last Island Expedition?"
"We were indeed Master Shaw," The mage states with a laugh, "Freshly back from an elemental invasion, Tzuyang here had her work cut out healing us through all those fire elementals."
He glances at the Middenwake with a more critical eye now, seeing remnants of fire dammage now that he was up close, "Was the Captain injured?"
The night elf laughs softly, "He never gets off the ship so I doubt it." But his companion the monk now shifts nervously from foot to foot.
"We had not checked, I am sorry Master Shaw." The monk speaks softly, looking toward the empty deck of the Middenwake with worry, "Should I go check with Captain Fairwind?"
"No, I'll do it." He pushes his stack of reports onto one of his agents before turning on his heel and slipping back down the gangplank, ignoring the three champions who'd been trying to get his attention beside the war table, their assigned agents were not even due back till tomorrow anyway, they all just liked to obsessively check in on them.
The door to the Captain's Quarters on the Middenwake is left cracked, an improvement from when the Middenwake was first berthed in Boralus and did not have a door on the cabin at all. Mathias has watched the state of the Middenwake slowly improve along with her crew as Fairwind's pay trickles in, a clear symbol of the dedication the Captain has to his craft, even if the man is sloshed more often than not.
Even sloshed though, the Captain had never before missed one of their appointments. "Captain?" Mathias questions while simultaneously pushing the door of the cabin open.
Fairwind has his back to the door, stripped to his breeches and boots, the man's tattooed skin is an inflamed red across his back and arms, a low grade burn or heat rash raised to a painful state. The man's normal boar's tail has been pulled into a high bun, probably to keep stray strands off the painful looking skin. If the whole picture did not look so very excruciating and remind Mathias of torture tecniques he might have gotten lost at the play of muscles and sailor's tattoos in the flickering candlelight.
"Light, why aren't you at a healer?"
When Fairwind turns around, his front half is it's usual tan, albeit his face is twisted in a grimace. "Is that fish and chips?" Despite it all the man seems to perk up at the promise of food. "Almost smells like my skin, is it sick I'm even hungrier now?"
"Fairwind, you need to see a healer."
"I did, I went 'round to the market and asked for something to help with burning and the lass ran me off saying she was too busy with soldiers and people who weren't criminals to help with a case of crabs, and I told her, 'look lass I'm an important Captain' and she laughed right in my face."
Mathias stands still with the takeout in one hand, mouth slightly agape, "Excuse me?"
"And then so I went to one of the 7th Legion healers and asked very nicely, 'look bloke could you give me a little pick me up', and he called me a drunk, which fair that and all, not wrong, but heartless all the same."
"Fairwind."
"So I asked one of the Thornspeakers who go on the Expeditions sometimes, 'hey mate, could you perhaps please hit me with something to help with this'- and she hit me alright, with some kind of spell and took off, which, suddenly I'm rolling tops in dice all the time but not helping much with this burn, so I thought maybe I would just get naked and drink till I pass out."
"Wait, wait," Fairwind finally stops, "Oh tides, it's friday, it's our date, I was late for our date!"
"Lay down on the bed, face first please." Mathias drops the food on the Captain's desk.
"I- oh, tides, I-" Fairwind looks desperately around the cabin, and then to Mathias, "I would have picked up if I'd known this was the night."
Mathias is too distracted gathering a variety of herbs and ephemera from around the cabin to notice till Fairwind is down to his small clothes, "Your legs don't seem to be burned?"
"What?" Fairwind stills, hands on his hips, or Mathias thinks they're on his hips, he's trying very hard not to look that far down, professional, professional thoughts.
"Your legs? Are they burned too? You could have kept your breeches on otherwise."
"How would we-" Fairwind draws off, his gaze going down to the small mortar and pestle Mathias is now using to grind winter's bite, aloe, and carrying oil in, "That's going to be freezing cold."
"That's the point of burn salve?" Mathias tilts his head.
Fairwind falls face first onto his bed and begans to laugh hysterically into his pillows.
A half hour later and Fairwind is asleep, head turned to the side, smelling of sharp winter's bite and soothing aloe. Mathias divides the fish and chips in half, carefully covering the Captain's portion on his desk. He pulls the bedcovers up to Fairwind's hips before pressing the barest whisper of a kiss against the man's brow, slipping into stealth and leaving the Captain slumbering.
The fog starts at the very edges of the broker's domain, creeping like smoke, tendrils of it spreading over the lake and wooden bridge, pouring forth over the water like a blanket. Before long it is impossible to see even an inch in front of one's face and any travelers would have been hard pressed to navigate that oppressive veil. Inside the broker's tea house it is a world apart from the dreary night outside, a small island of light in an otherwise black expanse.
A memory plays along the edges of the fog, stalking low to the ground, and in the blink of an eye it slips easily through the cracks of a sliding door, tail flicking back and forth in anticipation, coalescing from smoke to something more, something whole but still lost.
"Wind sweeps the world and rain darkens the village," Melodic sing-song voice, the stalker hunts a familiar soothing sound, a former friend, a lost companion, an empty husk walking, "Rumbles roll off the mountains like ocean waves churning." There is no storm outside to compare save the one that is inside of the speaker, but the poem is familiar and safe, a prayer against the night and loss.
A memory has taken shape and padding on giant paws, it curls around the Broker, it's striped flank strong and sturdy, protective on this long lonely night.
In Jade's hands is a kitten, half-drowned, abandoned, cradled in a soft blanket he holds it to his chest while dipping an old rag into a bowl of milk. It's in this manner that he's been feeding the little mewling beast. At first nothing could stop it's crying, no manner of coaxing or prompting with the milk would silence it, but in time it had calmed under the steady rhythm of his voice.
His borrowed eyes cannot see the curious guardian of smoke curled around him, but that beast too is pacified by his recitations.
"The furnace is soothing and the rug is warm," Safe, a lie entirely, nowhere was safe, not from himself, not from Her, "Me and my cat are not leaving the house."
The milk is gone, the kitten asleep, the tiger nothing but a memory. The poem is another memory, written by a fellow exile, Lu You 陸游, it had been an appropriate choice for a night meant for staying inside. Save with the kitten now sleeping soundly and his hands no longer filled, the silence of the tea house has become oppressive. Surely there was an appointment scheduled, something that needed to be done, had he not been called on earlier that day with a promise of companionship tonight? His thoughts scatter and pool, like raindrops on a window pane, refusing to make more than vague impressions.
He is no longer in the tea house with the kitten, with the empty bowl, with his safer memories.
There is a man laying up against a hearse in a lonely graveyard, where his eyes should be are hollows, gory cored out holes, bloody tracks down a formerly lovely face. Jade opens his mouth to scream and laughs instead but it's not his voice it's Hers, and he makes a deal with a dead man and he is that dead man.
He raises his hands and they are not his own, but yet they are, he recognizes them even though he has never seen them, black twisted things, grasping clawed talons, for tearing flesh and inflicting the suffering that blinded man had wanted to spread like a sickness.
He is twisted and sharp, not just in hands but in body, in spirit, the desire to feast nearly overwhelms everything else, walking a blade's edge he grasps and clutches at his own sanity. Run, run from the memory, from the man who had wanted nothing more than vengeance and gave up everything to get it. Run till the rage is quiet, till the blood lust is left behind, till he's safe and sound.
The fine silk of his sleeves are ruined, muddy from where he's bent over panting in a dim alleyway. It was raining here, as hard and heavy as in Lu You's poem, but the lower classes can't afford to stay inside like an exiled courtier with his cat. Fear spikes through him like a lance at the sound of footsteps. He is out of breath, lost, disheveled from running, unbecoming and most of all weak. Pushing to his feet he trips over himself in the haste to hide. His hands, no longer monstrous claws, scramble for purchase against the wall, anything to help him balance himself, to find steady ground. There is a thin gap between two buildings and he shoves himself into it, backing up till the shadows swallow him whole. He just needs to breathe, to get his bearings, to find balance again.
There is something of the familiar about the cadence of the voices that pass him by. They speak in the tongue he was born to, with accents of lower birth than his own, except for now he falls in his own space, carved into the liminal, nowhere and yet still here. Something drives him to follow them, and again his body is not his own; however, it seems for now the purpose driving him is far less horrific.
They don't see him or hear him, his years wandering and his training in grace have lent him the skill to follow silently. He is not a curious person, it is not curiosity driving him, pulling him, but something deeper.
The small group stops under the overhang on the back of a shop, here they light fragrant cigarettes and chatter together, too soft to make out the words at this distance. Jade considers turning around, trying to find a way out of this walking dream but before he does one of them laughs. The sound is like a strike of lightning, it courses through him, lighting him up inside with memories that had been dulled for a reason.
He can't remember the boy's name. Once a dear friend, hand in hand into the night, the boy had taught him and befriended him and then ultimately ruined him. How much had that little boy understood of what happened? How much did he know, when he led his 'friend' to ruin?
He can't tell which one of them laughed, the group is so similar, lower caste, poor, clothing patch-work and muddy, faces blending together all sharp contrast from the shadow and unkept. His hands hurt and he looks down to realize he's been clenching them into fists, his nails pressing little crescents into the flesh of his palms. He wants him to suffer, he wants that man to suffer as he had, he wants to tear- no! No he doesn't want to tear his heart out, to claw out his eyes, to ruin him. He doesn't want that, he wants peace, he wants his tea house and his friends.
He is breathing so fast, shaking in fear, and taking a step backwards does nothing but increase the feeling of being trapped, of being closed in, shut into his own little burial chamber. The man who had once been a child, who had once been a friend, laughs again, and they're all laughing then, and before Jade can turn, that laughter becomes something else. Their screams all join together, in his panic all he can see is black or no, no that's not right, he can't see anything at all. But he can taste dirty rain in his open mouth and then a burst of something fresher, something delectable, an ambrosia made of copper-tang and sharp fear, and he gluts himself upon it. He thrashes, tears, takes - takes his fill, till the screaming stops, till that decadent flow stutters to a stop. His face is warm, not from tears, painted over red, the maw of his hungry mouth is buried in a wet sloppy hole, he's dripping with viscera and even as his locked up mind screams a purr rumbles through him.
So he screams and screams and screams inside until the guttering light of his own sanity finally dims and knows nothing but the black.
When he comes to his hands are soft and unmarred, the taste of blood on his tongue is banished. The carpet under him is not exactly clean though but he doesn't know where he is and he doesn't know who else is there, so he lays still and listens, carefully keeps his breath measured for sleep, his body lax and easy. The room around him is quiet save for the tick-tock of a clock. Dimly he can make out the sound of foot traffic and horses, muffled as it is here in the safety of this shut up room. He chances to look around and sees the foot of a bed, a well-traveled carpet, peeling wallpaper.
Pushing up to kneel, he looks at the disheveled bedding, the small spattering of blood stains, the dresser with it's lone mirror. The nausea rushes up and grabs him by the throat, he gags as memories surface and swim unwanted. This is not real, but it feels it, this place and the one before, he left far behind him tied up and weighed down with stones, he dropped those memories into a river to never surface again, yet here he is.
It is all catching up to him, digging it's claws into his memory, forcing him to see what he doesn't want to and he stands suddenly, railing against it with the same rage as a dying man in a cemetery. He slams the door open and runs out of the room only to find himself in a far better place than that bordello had been.
There is a level of performance required in all settings, a different mask to wear, he was raised with a handful of them ready to be donned, the rest he'd learned on his own. The one he wears when he is with the Countess is the most comfortable by far but after the night he's had already he is left scrambling to prepare it. The mansion is beautiful in the dark, unlit by lantern or candlelight, the moon casts it in a pale light that softens the bright edges.
He doesn't belong here though, not at this time of night without a chaperone, and if this is not a dream then getting found out would be very complicated to explain. A pool of anxiety sloshes around in his stomach at the thought of Countess Gaditano thinking him nothing more than a sneak thief. He is so set on finding his way out quietly that he nearly misses sight of the first feather. He likely would have if it weren't for the slick substance upon it, the way it glinted in the moonlight, red-black-red.
不可能.
Please, not her, please, anyone but her.
The first feather turns into another then another, the trail getting progressively longer. It tells a story, as the feathers are followed with the painted brush of blood on marble. Like the ink of a poet's brush, it flows over the floor. She ran and then she fought before she ran again. It was merciless as it came, hungry and wanting, mindless save for that one solitary desire, to feel the flow of blood down parched throat, the crunch of bones betwixt it's teeth.
It's her hat that is left of her and he kneels, holding it gently in his hands, his tears falling on the quaint feather, the pretty ribbons, the fine millinery. Is it kinder to him not to have to see her, eyes empty and staring in horror, to be left with nothing but scattered feathers and bloodstains? Kinder to him to not have known her at all, to not know any of them, to not have the tea house and this half-life?
If she'd never met him, she'd still be here, she'd be alright.
He walks listless and numb through the empty dark hallways, holding the hat in his hands. When he makes it outside he's in his own garden, the moon hanging high above him, peeking through the clouds. The hat isn't in his hands anymore, instead it's the soft bundle of cloth, the little kitten sleeping soundly, well fed and content. The flash of gold and silver from the lake is nothing more than the koi slipping silently through the water. The shadow stalking the edges of the garden beckons him. He turns from it, from his own reflection, from another mystery on this dark night.
The masked servant is sweeping shed fur off the floor and he resolutely ignores her, passing through to shut himself away in his personal room, coddling the kitten in his arms the whole while. It purrs, comfortable and content, safe in his arms, impossibly. He swallows down the terror of things that have not yet come to pass, reassures himself with the feel of soft fur under his fingertips.
On the morrow he'll call upon the Countess, he'll serve tea, he'll be the broker again, he'll tread water and try his best not to drown.
He won't think about blood on black feathers, on copper and rust on his tongue, on the fog rolling over the lake on a lonely night, and the tick-tock of his own clock running down. A laugh, feminine and cloy; sickening sweet, wraps around him, but it isn't really there, She isn't really here with him in the quiet of this room. It's all him, his fractured thoughts playing tricks on him, cruel laughter to remind him he is at the whims of something he'll never be able to outrun. The worst of it is the truth, that tonight was not any mischief of Her causing, but entirely summoned forth by his own psyche, his own sickness, fear and hunger both.
He lays his head down, till his ear is pressed against the little side of the kitten and he closes his eyes, listens to the steady beating drum of life, of trust.
Outside a memory stalks the grounds, large paw dipping into the lake to snatch at brilliant fish, waiting to be needed again, to bring home a wandering soul.
Miskatonic University had sent him away but Harvard was yet promising. The city of Cambridge was not so much larger than Arkham but the boarding house had proven far more welcoming. Wilbur would miss it when it was time to leave again, for in this place he had found some manner of acceptance, the only sort at all he'd had since the death of his Grandfather. Blind and frail, the woman who ran the boarding house had been kind to him, stating that his accent had reminded her of home. His size and strength was useful here, further setting him in the woman's good graces.
Alone in his room at night he thinks to himself, 'an iffin I was t'stay here, wouldn' that be nice, livin' on m'own and nothin' t'do but help out n'learn from t'books at Harvard?'
And then he remembers, he isn't alone, and the dread settles deep in the pit of his stomach. He is still at home waiting for his brother to return. Taking up all of the house till Wilbur had been pushed right out of it, no room left in his birth home for him, only for that which he'd been promised would be useful to him when the Time Came. When the Earth was clean and ready, then he'd really be alone, he'd really be free.
He wouldn't have to live in the old barn and stable any longer then, the whole of the Earth would be his throne and home; but, that also meant that the little blind woman would be gone and dead.
The Whateley family had sacrificed much over the years, social standing, land, wealth: what did any of it even matter, with the ultimate knowledge that it was Wilbur's Great Duty to break free his Father and cleanse the Earth once and for all? What was the sacrifice of yet another thing, so insignificant?
The day that Harvard turns him away the scent of fresh bread and hearty stew overpowers the stench of working men's sweat in the boarding house. Wilbur knows what they all whisper behind him, of his peculiar stature, his hideousness, his stench. But nothing smells as bad as humanity does, their filth filling the whole of the world. Their presumptuousness keeping him from accessing the one thing he needs most, that last piece of the text.
It is time to go, go back again to Miskatonic and take what they would dare to keep from him. In his fury he misses the first knock and the second, the third he hears and answers in a rush of frustration and rage; however, she is so small in the hallway, staring at nothing and everything, a tray in her tiny hands. - fresh bread and thick hearty stew.
She is what a Mother should have been. What his own Mother had not been, having only feared her own children in the end. When brother had wailed hungrily, when the cattle was too far, and the whipporwhil's screaming too loud: their Mother had finally served a purpose past bringing them into the world.
Taking the tray with a quiet murmur of thanks, he hopes her death will be swift and painless, a kindness.
In which I mash Dishonored and BFA together and have no idea what im doing
Mathias/Flynn no beta (of course)
King Wrynn comes to stand beside him, overlooking the docks. “I’m glad you’ll be going with her. I’m worried.” The ship Lady Jaina rose from the depths glitters with whale oil lanterns, ancient bones decorating the hull. If the general populace knew the power the woman held there would be an attempted witch-burning. As it was - a brokering with Boralus meant that the general populace was going to have to come to terms with a lot of religious changes.
Hand going reflexively to his wrist, Mathias squeezes till he feels the fine bones grind, the pain grounding him to the situation at hand.
“If it goes badly, I doubt we’ll be able to extract her, sir.”
“I have faith you will if it comes to that,I have to have faith this will all turn out for the best.”
Anduin is shorter than him, but Mathias considers he won’t be for much longer, Tifin and Varian were both tall, and despite taking after his mother, Anduin had some growing left to do yet. His faith, hope, belief - whatever one might call it, had seen the small country through rocky upheavals already. Many of which Mathias blamed himself for intimately. Looking down at him he feels a sort of apprehensive pride, misplaced, probably better suited to Greymane, but the former king of fallen Gilneas was already aboard the ship that Mathias himself would be sailing on.
“I will do my best to make sure that faith is not misplaced.”
So predictably, Jaina is captured as soon as she docks, Genn Greymane is held at swordpoint and mechanical contraption and it is only by the grace of the Harbormaster and the political landscape of Boralus that they manage to keep from being arrested as well. Not that Mathias was there to be arrested, by the time the ship had docked fully and port authority had boarded, he was on the rooftops of Boralus, scouting the situation properly.
As any good Spymaster would, he already has agents embeded on the island, and he navigates to a report cache and reads through it before he listens to the sing-song voice’s urging.
*Dark and Deep, and gone - but not forgotten.* She whispers, a voice long dead but she’s never steered him wrong, never given him false intel.
The shrine is not what he’s expecting, but he should have, he’d known of course. The Tidemother; founder of Boralus, had fostered the worship of Leviathan, so closely tied to the sea, so deeply entrnchened in void, but to see a shrine so well maintained is in sharp contrast to his life long worship in secrecy and whispers, following on his Grandmother’s footsteps to leave offerings, learning to carve bones in the shadows along with how to slice a throat.
It hadn’t been till his capture, till Varian’s death, till Amber - that he’d seen the Boy God for the first time. Not the last, certainly, but his gift - that had greatly aided Mathias and the Uncrowned too, and then Anduin. Even under their new king’s lenient rule, a shrine so beautiful as this would be unthinkable, the Overseers still had a stranglehold on the nobility of Stormwind.
Stepping through a beautifully shrouded archway, he carefully tiptoed between offerings in the hundreds, till he reached the altar stone. Laid out atop it was a bone efigy, hand-carved, with fish-like scales lining the edges - he paused in reaching for it, *A gift, a welcome, a peace offering.* She whispers for him alone, and he pockets the efigy.
“You still keep her with you?” He knows the voice, he doesn’t need to look to know who is floating impishly to his right. “Loyalty beyond death.”
He’d considered burying the remnant of Amber, when Anduin was crowned, when he’d fulfilled his debts to the Uncrowned. But he hadn’t, selfish, he knew, but her voice was a comfort in the months it took for him to recover from his torture. “Outsider.” He greets, nodding his head to the right. Empty void meets him, black eyes that look right through him, seeing and unseeing.
“I see rumors of your Death have been greatly exagerated.” He doesn’t bother to apologize for not coming to a shrine for months and months, he isn’t sure it even matters to the Boy God.
“Yes and no.”
“Cryptic as always.” There was something to be said for an entire guild of assassins and spies versed in the ways of the Void, in their gifts and portents. He isn’t sure if his grandmother had ever seen the Outsider, but the worship of him was rampant in the guild. As such it had perhaps prepared him for eventually meeting the God face to face, he always felt a bemused air when it came to the encrypted, codes, ciphers, and the yes-no dance of speech the Outsider favored, all the same. “I do keep her, yes.”
“You’re not the only lonely one.” The Outsider looks down at the amassed offerings but Mathias is sure he isn’t really seeing them, not for what they are, gifts for -him- offerings and pleas. “She sleeps and does not sleep. You won’t be able to save her.”
His heart falls entirely, “I have to try.”
“You do? Interesting.”
The hair on the back of his neck pricks up and he turns, right hand free, left hand braced on the hilt of his dagger. Beside him he doesn’t have to look to know the Outsider is gone.
A man is standing in the archway, frozen in place, sea-storm blue eyes wide in surprise, eyes darting over the Stormwind blue and gold of Mathias’ uniform, at his half-concealed face hidden under the avian mask.
“Fairwind?” A voice - familiar - comes from behind the man. When he peers around the broad shoulders he notices with some relief the void-touched witch that had come over on the ship earlier with Jaina. “Oh! Master Shaw, I…” in Stormwind this would have been incriminating for them both, he had a file on the woman as thick as an encyclopedia and had burned it to keep the Overseers from finding it, he can see she’s depserately casting around for a reason to be here, he isn’t supposed to know of course.
Instead he lifts up his hand and pulls his sleeve down, showing the marking brand embedded in his skin. The relief in her eyes is palpable, and a complex look crosses the Fairwind man’s face.
“I needed to charge my runes. King Greymane is sending me to scout out something we got into, this is Flynn Fairwind, he busted me out of prison.”
Ah yes, a name he recognized from the cache of files, important potential contacts. “Captain Fairwind.” He greets properly as the witch strides past him to lay out her carved bones on the altar after picking her own way across the many offerings.
“Master Shaw, as in Spymaster Shaw?” The man’s handshake is firm, a former pirate, reformed - vocally against the whale oil industry, a drunk as well, although the man seems sharper than the file had led him to believe.
“Please do take care of Lady Safadel, Captain.” The file had mentioned the man was a captain currently because he’d won his ship in a game of cards, considering things he wondered if the man’s luck had been aided in more supernatural manners.
“It’s a little bit the other way about, I’m absolutely useless.” The Captain grins and Mathias brushes past him and his charm.
He almost pauses, almost trips, when Amber’s laugh rings out so clear in his head, his arm burns where they brushed together, and he tries his best not to think about it as he makes his way to the Harbormaster’s office to state himself on the island properly.
The next time he sees Captain Fairwind, the man is tucked between Lady Safadel and Taelia Fordragon it has been a week and the man looks like he’s been tortured nearly to death. He vanishes into the ship and Mathias excuses himself from the conversation Overseer Wyrmbane and Lady Windrunner had dragged him into.
The healer is kneeling at the bedside and Lady Safadel is scrbling into a pad, Fordragon looks torn between worry and frustration - listening to Fairwind complain about the healer’s hands - but he’s already looking less peeky with the health poultice being smeered over his bare and battered chest.
“Oh Flynn shut up and let the poor woman work.” Fordragon snaps.
“You’re so cruel to me Tae, I took a right beating, nearly died to get all that information and this is how you treat me.”
Mathias moves silently to stand behind Safadel, reading over her shoulder - it’s a mission report drafted up for Genn, and he would have gotten it in about an hour but now he gets to skip the chain of command.
“Good work Lady Safadel, Captain Fairwind.” He cuts through the argument readily brewing, and it causes Fairwind and Fordragon to fall silent, both of them turning their attention to him. “Cadet Fordragon, Overseer Wyrmbane wished to speak to you.”
She gapes at him a little like a fish, and then gives him a sharp salute and rushes back above deck.
Lady Safadel gives him a warm and relieved smile, “Thank you, Master Shaw. I… would you like me to draft a copy of my reports for you?”
He wonders if the void whispered his desires to her, doesn’t dwell on it, “Yes, please.”
From the cot Fairwind hisses in pain, no longer complaining quite so loud, and Lady Safadel fidgets, turning her attention back to him and the healer tending to him. “He has some broken ribs I think.”
“Had, the S+J elixir took care of them, as long as he keeps still he’ll be fine in a few hours, you’re going to be sore for a few days Mr. Fairwind, don’t take too much elixir or you’ll end up with a headache worse than this beating you’ve been given.” After carefully tying up one last bandage on Fairwind’s arm she stands, “If the pain gets worse, come and ask for one of the healers here.”
He moves out of the way for her, watching till the door is shut closed.
“I’ll be back in the fray by tomorrow, Saffie, could you help me get to my feet and give me my coat from where that harpy threw it?”
Lady Safadel crosses to the cot’s side to pick up the fur-lined coat Fairwind had been wearing when he saw him at the Shrine.
*Warm whiskey, lost and in pain, a useful pawn, an honest game.*
Before she can help him up though, Mathias has stepped forward to gently pull the man up, this close and he can smell the blood and healing poultice, and when Fairwind breathes out in surprise, whiskey. *Tied to a post, this isn’t about lessons, it’s about revenge, pain and pride, what did we ever do to deserve this, Harlan?* “I will help Captain Fairwind to his ship, Lady Safadel.”
“Y-you will?” Fairwind trips over his words, takes the coat when Lady Safadel holds it out to him.
“You should go report to King Greymane.” It is a dismissal and she takes it for one, giving him a half bow before patting Fairwind’s arm and leaving the room, door open.
“I can make it to my ship, I’d hate to be a bother.”
Mathias wraps his arm around his broad waist, slings Fairwind’s arm around his shoulders, “I have an alterior motive, I want to talk to you.”
“Oh, oh well, lead on Master Shaw, I’m docked right next door.”
He doesn’t state the obvious, that he knows that, merely helps the man up the steps and then down the plank, around the dock, and finally up the next plank. The Captain’s ship is a small affair in comaprison to the Wind’s Redemption, lucky, seeing as he doesn’t need Amber’s secret whispers to tell him the Captain is in some amount of pain from the short trip.
The Captain’s quarters are tidy and warm, the bed looks cozy if unmade, not that Mathias can judge, he rarely makes his own bed. Before things get awkward he begins to help the Captain undress, ignoring the way the man’s face goes a bit pink.
“The Irontide leader, he was your first mate?”
There is only a brief pause before Fairwind jumps the track, “Aye, you got that from Saffie’s paper?”
Mathias considers lying, but a feeling deep down urges him not to, odd as it’s usually the other way around. “No, when I touched you I got an impression of what happened to you. Sweete will be a problem, I’ll take care of it.”
Fairwind drops back onto the pillows, staring at Mathias, eyes sharp and stormy like the sea, “You… you know nearly everyone here has tattooed some symbol or another of the Leviathan on them, and I have to admit I didn’t entirely understand what went on between you and Saffie at the Shrine but I’m starting to. Is it common for you Mainlanders to actually be gifted?”
“No, very uncommon, and kept very secret.” He tucks the thin quilt up around Fairwind. “I… would like to employ you, Fairwind. I need someone with a finger on the pulse of Boralus, someone I can trust. I would that this be kept between us, of course I will pay you handsomely and your contract with the harbormaster remains.”
“Trust? You don’t know me, I- I’m a cad and a coward.”
Amber’s laugh is warm, teasing.
He takes the man’s chin in his hand, holds his face, studies the bruising, the torn skin, the black eye, Fairwind’s little gasp quiets Amber down. “You’re smart, you know better than to lie to me.” He lets him go, “Rest, two days, I’ll see that you’re brought food.” He turns, almost to the door when Fairwind calls out to him.
“I never said yes.”
“Didn’t you?” He leaves, savoring the look of confussion and heat left behind.
in which a witch is met and mathias accepts a gift
He wakes slowly, his face pressed into the hollow of a decadently warm shoulder, when he moves his head to the side his mustache must tickle because Flynn rumbles a soft laugh. He hasn't slept this deeply in years, his limbs feel loose, his body warm, his mind refreshingly empty.
"Why do you feel so good?" His own voice sounds rough and raw, "Why do you have to be so..." too many words here and all of them damning, "Warm and soft?"
Flynn drags his hand down Mathias' back, knuckles rolling over his vertebrae and it pulls a deep groan out of him unwilling and unwanted so he hides his face against Flynn's neck only to have the man dig at a particularly thick knot in his shoulders. When he groans again it's straight against Flynn's skin and the response is perhaps not planned on Flynn's part if the little gasp that proceeds the bucking of his hips against Mathias' leg is any indication. The mumbled apology right after cements the notion though, Flynn does sound sufficiently sorry and even tries to pull the evidence of his morning arousal away from the leg Mathias has shoved against it.
An irrational part of Mathias urges him to grind his leg up instead and give Flynn something to really gasp about. He can feel the jump of the man's pulse beneath his lips and he literally cannot remember the last time he was in a bed with someone he was attracted to. Alright potentially a lie, as he remembered the last time, it's just he's had to kill most everyone he's ever been in a bed with - attracted or no. Usually being in the bed with them was a prelude to getting close enough to sink a dagger into them, actually.
He doesn't want to sink a dagger into Flynn, he wants to sink into the man and lose himself entirely, to taste his skin and hear him make more of those soft little sounds. To get him to lose control entirely and all for him. He wants more than he should, almost desperately so in that moment, for Flynn to sink into him too but literally. The thick heat of the length he can feel pressed against him, pressing inside of him instead, to feel him buried to the hilt. So he rolls himself away, leaving the warm nest of the bed to put more kindling into the stove.
When he turns back to the bed Flynn is watching him from beneath the weight of his lashes, eyes trailing the length of Mathias' form with a look of such hunger and longing it freezes him in place, quite a feat considering the air itself out of the bed is rather frigid and he wants nothing more than to get back under the covers a respectable distance from his bed partner. "By the tides Mathi, you're so beautiful." There is a soft honesty and dedication in his voice, a tremor of emotion that turns the words from flirtatious to longingly painful.
"I'm old and scarred, I don't think anyone would ever use that term to describe me."
"They must be blind then, come on love, you're going to turn into an ice pop standing there. I'll not touch you inappropriately. You're more than capable of cutting off any offending body parts anyway, but you're safe with me."
"I have no desire to cut anything off of you, or cut you at all." He's crawling under the covers before he's even finished talking and Flynn's body is better than a blanket wrapped hot brick. They both groan, tangling limbs back together, bodies pressed flush. "I'm not going to hurt you."
Flynn looks at him, that same soft painful longing but this time with something else mixed in - something that makes Mathias hurt for him, a kind of disbelief mixed with hope. He's heard enough about the man's exes, he's learned enough on his own too about Flynn's past. He realizes he shouldn't have said that, shouldn't have said he wouldn't hurt him, because with the way Flynn is looking at him right now, the greatest hurt he could inflict on him would be rejection.
"It's alright love, I'm used to it." Flynn smiles at him, a cheap trick, a mask sliding into place but he's nowhere near as good at it as Mathias is. It's all for Mathias this theater performance, absolution, forgivance before the wound has even been inflicted. So he takes the man's face between his hands and leans in, pressing chapped lips to equally chapped lips, swallowing the gasp when it comes. Mathias has been hiding behind one mask or another his entire life; right now he's tired, open raw from a near death experience, and pressed heart to heart with the man he's been wanting for months now, watching like a lovesick dolt from one deck to another across a negligible stretch of harbor.
When he tilts his head and lets slip his tongue against Flynn's lips the man blooms into the affection like a rose, barely subdued hunger and soft pressure. Mathias struggles to keep himself tender, to stop from biting a lip or pulling at the tangled mess of Flynn's ponytail. He ends up shivering with the restraint, having to pull back. His own breathing is wrecked and he isn't just shivering no, he's trembling over it all. Flynn's hands are petting over him, everywhere at once, and he has to close his eyes, ride through the shock of pleasure and the fire of his nerves all alight.
"Mathi?" Flynn's concern would grate on his nerves if it were anyone else.
"It's been awhile." He breathes it out along with an unsteady laugh.
"Was it alright?"
Mathias brushes their lips together again, chaste in comparison, before pulling back, "Perfect." Flynn himself is perfect. "But, I need to get an hour more of rest at least, then if possible I'll need to dig us out and go look at that encampment."
"I'll have to admit I was hoping you'd give up on that and stay in bed all day." Flynn grins at him, close enough to kiss, close enough to do quite a lot with. He slips one hand up to brush the hair back from Flynn's face, the other hand still cupping his cheek. Flynn flushes dark in response, the freckles banding over his nose and cheeks so sweet. "You're so gentle, love. No one's ever been this gentle with me." The soft wonder in his voice tears Mathias up inside, makes him want to rend and hit and tear apart - not Flynn, no, everyone who had hurt him before. He can't right now, so he moves forward and presses another chaste kiss to Flynn's softly parted lips.
"Is it in apology? You don't need to feel bad, I don't expect this to leave the cabin. I know it's the whole situation, right? No hard feelings, mate." Flynn whispers against his lips, his hands betraying his words in the way they clutch and covet against Mathias' back and hip. It was cruel for him to have called out the flirting as he'd done the day before, when he was the one who encouraged it all the time. He can't help but to think some of Flynn's doubt and apprehension now is his fault, as it is always his fault when communication breaks down. He's the master spy here, he should know how to handle one ex-pirate and his own huge crush on the man.
"Flynn?" His own voice sounds so wrecked, so he presses himself closer to the sailor, moves his face to hide against the skin of Flynn's shoulder again. The hold Flynn has on him tightens, his hands gentle and kind, petting and stroking him, obviously comforting and it works.
"Anything love, what do you need?"
You, is the answer, one he isn't sure he has the right to give, "It's not an apology, I won't ever hurt you if I can help it. I'm not prone to sweeping things under the rug in my personal life, I handle them as they necessitate the need to be handled. You're not a problem, you're beautiful and ridiculous and I've been fond of you for some time now."
"Oh." Flynn whispers, the sound full of wonder and tenderness. "I'm quite fond of you too, Mathias."
"You've been rather obvious about that, yes." He's tired, his body still drained from the night's trials. The comfort that he's given by the heat of Flynn's embrace is too much for him entirely to resist. He yawns, right against Flynn's skin, and feels the man laugh softly followed by a kiss against his hair. "You're in danger, just being familiar with me, it paints a target on you, Flynn."
Another laugh rumbles through Flynn, only succeeding in pulling him further into relaxation, "I'm already in danger all the time, getting touchy with the Spymaster isn't going to hurt my reputation anymore than sailing forth on Alliance silver is. In the places I came from before you met me we'd of called that 'blood money', Mathi." Flynn begins to stroke down his back again, less rubbing out knots and more a slow down and up along his spine like the brush of tide on sand, it's criminally relaxing, "Go back to sleep, love. I've got you. You deserve your rest, tides know you must be tired."
He drifts in and out, probably longer than an hour, at least it feels longer - when he does wake up entirely he feels energetic and back on his game. Flynn is asleep, still holding him, beautiful and open. He takes the liberty to brush the man's hair back, feeling the soft silk of those auburn bright strands and then giving into the desire to sink his fingers into it entirely.
Flynn has a beauty in him that makes Mathias ache to touch, one that isn’t just physical. The loyalty to his friends despite the betrayals he’s faced, the bravery he displays without even realizing, and a thousand other delicate things one shouldn’t find in the heart of an ex-freebooter. Life has not been kind to Flynn, he doesn’t need his dociers and files to tell him that; and yet, these cruelties have only shaped the man into an even gentler person. They are so diametrically different and Mathias shouldn’t feel the way he does, it will cause so many problems for him down the line, but right now on Winter’s Veil Eve, he wants nothing more than to give himself this one gift.
To not be alone, to have someone waiting for him and vice versa. But to ask that of Flynn felt like a sin.
With one hand in Flynn’s hair and the other trailing over his chest to lay against his heart, the man’s brilliant blue-green eyes blink open to meet Mathias’ gaze.
“Love?” Flynn’s voice is rough from sleep, whiskey smooth and it sends a thrill through him, just the easy way Flynn calls him that, as if it doesn’t hold such a deep and sentimental meaning, as if love wasn’t so dangerous for a man like Mathias.
“I’m about to go scout, just wanted to let you know.”
Flynn is suddenly wide awake, his eyes bright and sharp and his hand curling against Mathias hand over his heart, “You really think I’m going to let you go out there alone?”
He frowns down at the man, “Fairwind, I am a trained assassin and the Spymaster of Stormwind, are you really implying I cannot handle myself on a scouting mission?”
“No, it’s not that.” Flynn mirrors his other hand, reaching up to card his fingers through Mathias much shorter hair, “I couldn’t stand it if something happened to you and I was just here, waiting for you, would rather be there with you. I know I’m a coward, mate, but I love you. Can’t really hide that anymore and I’d rather go down with you, than never know what happened to you.”
“That’s why this can’t happen.” Mathias pushes away, standing to stalk over toward his clothing, but Flynn is right on his heels, and if Mathias’ body wasn’t such a traitor to him in concern to Flynn then the man embracing him from behind would have ended very badly for Flynn, broken bones the least of injuries Mathias had inflicted in the past on instinct alone. Instead he melts back against him, soft heat from Flynn’s chest and stomach pressed so enticingly against Mathias’ back. The toned strength of his arms wrapping around his waist, sailor’s tattoos shifting over muscle. “This can’t happen.” He repeats himself but it sounds weak and thin.
“Don’t run from me, please. I won’t hurt you, Mathi.” The words are placed against the side of his neck along with a brush of lips. Feathermoon had asked him if he was running from himself, it’s partway true, he isn’t running from Flynn, but from what might happen to him.
One gift, one impossible gift, that he shouldn’t give himself.
He turns in the circle of Flynn’s arms, pushing himself up even as Flynn tilts his head down. The kiss is slow and deep, Flynn’s tongue tracing Mathias’ lips and slipping past them as soon as they part. He kisses Mathias like he’s been doing it for years, perfect and slow, thoroughly ruining him. Flynn parts them, cupping the back of his neck and his hip, looks into his eyes and Mathias cannot imagine what the man sees in him that could inspire a look of such soft adoration. He knows Flynn doesn’t have false expectations about him which is what makes this all so painfully right. Flynn knows who he is and can still look at him like that.
“I’ll take whatever you give me, love. I’ve been a secret before, been someone’s mister too, whatever you want from me-“ he cuts Flynn off with another kiss, raw and wanting, he can’t stand to hear the rest, to hear the pain underlying that brittle hope. Flynn groans against his lips and begins to walk them backwards - back to the bed, but Mathias stalls them and pulls back.
“I want you, more than I should, more than is good for you. I’m lonely and I tried my damned hardest not to slow down enough to ever feel it, but your charm and dogged persistence on friendship with me has undone me. I don’t want a secret or a one night stand, Flynn. I want you, all of you, as mine, and I would that I be yours.”
The flush on Flynn’s tanned skin is decadent, the look of wonder in his eyes is breathtaking, if Mathias was a more poetic man he could have written sonnets about the beauty before him.
“I’m yours, love. Have been since I laid eyes on you to be honest. You’ve taken up my every idle thought, and the more I’ve been around you the more sure I’ve been that if I do one thing right in my life it will be to love you.” Flynn’s earnest confession and the hold he has on Mathias completely tears apart his every doubt and fear. “I know it might not work out, tides know none of my attempts have done so in the past, but I will give you my best try and you already have my whole heart.”
“If this is your way of convincing me to allow you to come with me, it’s worked.”
Flynn grins at him, fox-like and wicked, “Good. Now to convince you to let me follow you everywhere else. But we’ll take that one a bit slower.”
They dress quickly and Mathias even consents to letting Flynn do back up the job he’d undone of his armor the night before. It is painfully domestic and familiar and Mathias would think to ask how it was Flynn could be so familiar with his armor if he didn’t know the man had the hands of a thief and the eyes of a pirate.
The door is snowed tight up so Mathias ends up climbing out the cabin’s singular tiny window. Flynn can’t fit as much as he tries but Mathias is able to dig out the door for him. The blizzard has left everything covered in thick inches of snow, nothing untouched by winter’s blanket. Already he’s longing for the dusty bed and Flynn’s warm embrace.
When he’s got the door open Flynn tugs at his pauldrons, “Give me these, love.”
“What? No, stop that.” Mathias flushes over his own ineffectual batting at the Captain’s hands.
“You’re going to wear my coat, you’re not built for this weather, don’t argue with me.” Flynn grins at him while putting his finger playfully over Mathias’ parted lips. “Thought of it right as you slipped out the window or I would have put it on you before.”
He allows the coat to be slipped over his arms and ignores how it’s too large for him because it’s actually blissfully warm around him. Flynn ties it closed with one of his own belts and Mathias flips the fur-lined collar up to keep the chill from biting the back of his neck.
“Oh.” Flynn breathes out the word, a mixture of emotions but none of them particularly bad, “Tides I didn’t think what seeing you in my clothing might do to me.” The laugh that follows is tellingly nervous and Mathias’ eyes track down the man’s body to catch on the stiffy he’s obviously sporting.
“I don’t know how on Azeroth you’re capable of that in this weather but hold that thought till I’m off duty.” Mathias does perhaps tease him by slipping forward to kiss him, tasting the hungry groan fed past Flynn’s lips before parting to head south.
He doesn’t need to glance back to know Flynn is following him, if it weren’t for the trust he has in the man, the crunch of snow would have alerted him just fine.
Despite Mathias’ reservations about Flynn’s stealth abilities the man easily falls into the shadows alongside him, his steps going from loud and ringing to silent as a hare as they come closer to the coast the two Champions had indicated on the map. The late afternoon sun casts strange shadows through the winter-dead trees, shifting as wind blows their skeletal branches about, further aiding the play of darkness that obscures them from sight.
The first sign of trouble comes in the form of thick spiderwebs, laying like traps between the trees. Last night in the thick of that preternatural storm, unsuspecting travelers would have run right into them. Now they are easy to spot and the two of them silently weave between the traps of silken thread.
The first victims are spotted soon after, a thick cocoon large enough to hold a whole orc surrounded by smaller ones. Mathias passes near enough to one of the smaller ones to spot the outstretched hand, frozen solid and teal tinged from it’s likely original green. Having broken free of the spider’s snare only to freeze to death in the blizzard, what a horrible way to go.
As to the creatures that had laid these traps there was no sign. No long legs or skittering sounds, nothing but the wail of the wind.
Further in they find the encampment proper, the red and spikes favored by the Horde proper are half covered in snow and further cobwebs. There is a single large tent that Mathias reasons is the command tent and he’s about to pull back the flap to enter it when it flings open.
He moves quickly to the side, brushing Flynn’s arm as he does and effortlessly the other rogue follows him back to slide into the thick shadow beneath a nearby tree. Flynn moves his arm around Mathias and together they crouch down in the snow.
The figure to hobble out of the tent is one Mathias recognizes based on intelligence reports but never seen in person till now. At one point she would have been a woman like any other Kul Tiran lass, but now the Drust magic wrought through her has turned her into a child's nightmare. The hag woman wears a grey tatty dress and a shawl of greying lace that had been made in a winter theme of snowflakes although they quaintness it might have once held is made horrific by the dark blood and vicera staining the threads.. In the rats nest of her greying hair she wears a bough of holy and mistletoe - oddly festive considering her bloodied grotesque face and the arm she is gnawing on, of the size that would have belonged to one of the goblins. She stops then, eyes trained on the tracks of trampling footprints and most damning of all, the fresher set of their own dancing steps appearing fresher. She must of spent the night in the Horde's command tent, supping on her familiars' work. At least now Mathias is relatively sure that blizzard really was a supernatural work, and they're looking at the perpetrator.
She can't see them, or she's pretending she can't, because she spins a slow circle, casting her bulbous eyes around in attempt to find them. At his side Flynn's arm tightens a little against his waist.
"Tell Baba where you are, maybe she has gifts for you!" The old woman cackles, blood and spittle further staining her chin and the front of her dress.
Flynn moves closer to him, slow, his lips are hot against the shell of his ear, "Does your mother still live?" The whisper is such that not even an elf would have heard it, Mathias is sure. He shakes his head. "Stay here at first." Flynn directs him and Mathias grips his arm hard enough to perhaps bruise, only lessening his grasp when Flynn stalls in his standing. Turning to look at the man, Flynn reaches out to cup his cheek and mouths out the words Mathias desperately doesn't want to see, 'Trust me. Just for now.'
He lets Flynn go, turning his head from him because he cannot stand to watch Flynn leave the shadows and safety of his side. Instead he turns his attention back to the witch, and slides his daggers from their sheaths, only finding shallow comfort in the weight of them in his hands.
The crunch of snow is once again apparent as Flynn leaves behind his skills to cough nervously, drawing the old hag's attention. Mathias watches the man give a rather dramatic bow.
"Hello Grandmother, I am a poor orphan from Dampwick, what gifts do you have for me?" Flynn's voice betrays the strength of his performance, it's shaking with fear.
The old woman hobbles toward Flynn, training one of her eyes on him as the other rolls lazily around the clearing still, looking, tracking, watching. "Your mother loved you very much, let me see..." the woman's attention turns from Flynn, dropping the gored up 'treat' to sort through the bag slung at her waist, "Let us see what Baba has for her grandson, but first, why have you come out alone?" She wags her finger at Flynn, still digging through the bag - just like a matron scolding an errant child on the streets of Stormwind.
Flynn stands slowly, his frame looking ungarded without his coat, Mathias grips his blades harder. "I don't know what you mean, grandmother."
The old woman laughs and moves her hand from the bag, too swift to sharp, Flynn isn't able to get out of range of the seeds she scatters at him, and within moments thick brambles and thorns raise up from the snow-packed earth, chaining Flynn in place. "Come out, child. Or Baba will make a feast of your friend."
Mathias takes a steadying breath, stands, and sheathes his blades.
When he walks he makes no sound, but she still finds him quickly as the shadows let him go.
"Hello grandmother, I am an orphan from Stormwind, I only want for one gift and it's not in your bag."
The old witch looks him up and down and then smiles at him, it's sickening what with the black of her rancid mouth and the blood stains, "Your mother also loved you very much," the words sting him more than he would have thought they could, "Take your gift, but earn it. Give me your gloves." She holds her hand out, "Since you both cost me my sup."
He grits his teeth and quickly removes his uniform's thick leather gloves. Instantly they sting from the chill, but he hands them to the old woman. She watches as he takes himself to Flynn's side and kneels in the snow, applying himself to the task of freeing the man from his botanical prison. To the side the witch tosses herself back onto one of the tree stumps the Horde had left behind when they'd made their camp, cackling a little as she bounced down. He ignores the way Flynn looks down at him until the man starts to struggle, maybe to aid him and Mathias throws him a quelling look, "Stop. You're going to cut yourself."
"I'm sorry, love." Flynn whispers, but Mathias isn't mad at him and he reaches up to squeeze the man's thigh where brambles aren't holding him still.
The first cut slices open his thumb. They come fast from there, no matter how careful he tries to be, and he's capable of picking the most tricky of locks, clearly an enchantment - she really meant for him to earn his prize. He works quick and concise, ignores the prick and drag of thorns as they come, when his palm slices open he breathes in a hiss and Flynn throws a plaintive look to the witch.
"Please Grandmother, please stop. He's spilled enough blood over me and I'm not worth it."
"He'd spill more for you lad, let him work. He's almost done, see?" She must have done something as quite a lot of the brambles have fallen away, more than what Mathias has already removed at least. It only takes a few more minutes and then he is standing and stepping back to let Flynn move.
"I was going to give you a blessing of the sea, but instead I will let you leave with your lives. You've seen what you came for anyway, children." The witch beats her bare feet against the stump, still holding Mathias' gloves. "Wash his hands with melted snow and Winter's Kiss or infection will set in, child of Dampwick." She jumps from the stump and stoops to pick up the arm she'd discarded before. Hobbling over to them after she rights herself, Mathias pushes down the urge to pull his blades, his hands were practically useless anyway, dripping blood on the snow. She hands Flynn the goblin blood-stained gloves and then peers at Mathias sharply. "Child of Stormwind, you will lose everything if you stay the course. Listen to Baba, she has given you your gift, do not waste it."
Flynn tugs him off into the trees, beating a steady path back toward the cabin, he doesn't look back but Mathias does - only to see nothing but an empty Horde Encampment and their own footprints in the snow.
"What -was- that? My intel implied the Order of Embers routed out the coven working in Drustvar. Yet you seemed to know exactly what to do in that situation until you went and got yourself rooted." He's putting his gloves on as Flynn pulls them along, the insides are clean enough and will prevent him from leaving a trail of blood the entire way back at the least.
"The Baba Yaga are older than that coven, they're protectors of the woods and have a nasty habit of eating wee babes, but they're also fond of orphans, especially ones who lost their mothers at a young age and lacked a loving matronly figure. I had a hunch I knew which Baba it was but they're all hard to tell apart and if I got it wrong she'd of just turned us into pigs and eaten us anyway so it was worth a shot." Flynn's voice is still trembling and the laugh he gives off is nervous and lacks all warmth. He turns, stopping sharply and brings Mathias' hands up between them, cupping the backs of his hands to leave his palms skyward, and bending to kiss his temple Flynn breaks. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, love." He's crying, hot tears fall against Mathias' own cheeks, startling him.
Before Mathias can react Flynn is moving again, arm wrapped around him, his other hand still holding Mathias' hands up in front of them. Keeping them elevated, Mathias realizes. "It's not your fault she was a vindictive wretch, she didn't even care it hit the floor, she just wanted to watch us suffer for her amusement."
"Of course she did, but I shouldn't have tried to run, I panicked. I... have to say I hoped you would have left me there, Mathi." Flynn stops sharply and gentles his arm from around Mathias, "Stay right there, love." He heads right for a cluster of bright blue blossoms rising up from the snow, Winter's Bite his mind helpfully supplies. His hands are itching something awful in the confines of his gloves and he feels hot, his head aches. Of course the brambles had been enchanted too, or tainted in some other way. He realizes now why Flynn had begun to lead them back to the cabin instead of toward the nearest town. His skin has gone hot and he can feel sweat beginning to bead at his brow. Flynn's coat has become stifling hot, but he dare not take it off, knowing that this heat won't benefit from the cold winter air.
When Flynn returns, hand full of flowers, Mathias is swaying on his feet, "You know I would have rather liked our first date to be less work oriented, but thank you for the bouquet, Fairwind. I do trust you, you know, I do." The Captain stares at him, mouth agape, before he laughs suddenly, loud and lovely, the sound carrying over the quiet forest. "Better get me in bed before I fall over, darling." Too late though, Mathias pitches forward and it's all black, but somehow his last thought is certainty that Flynn caught him, he trusts him afterall.
cw: same as before but we’re adding on descriptions of borderline hypothermia to the mix
Mathias and Flynn find themselves up against the elements and get snowed in together
Posting the letters at the mailbox, Mathias waits till the flap goes back down, snapping into place as whatever odd Dalaran magic sucks the letters off and away. Moving towards the gryphon master he notes out of the corner of his eye, Fairwind shoving their mugs off onto one of the lodge workers. By the time he's finished arranging for Shadowtalon's return to Boralus after her rest the Captain has finished and come to stand at his side.
"But won't you be wanting to go with her?" The gryphon master asks, peering up at the dark sky, "If you plan to go on foot somewhere, I'd do it another day, this storm is going to turn nasty soon."
Mathias followed the man's gaze but only saw the same slow flurry of snowflakes that seemed to always fall this time of year near the mountains. "How soon?" It still paid to listen to locals, every bit of intel helped.
"By morning at least but you'd get better information from a Tidesage as to what the water wants to do."
"Not a lot of them about here right now, mate. Otherwise we would have had your fires put out in minutes." Fairwind smiles amiably at the man, "What sort of storm are we talking?"
"At least twelve inches of cover, likely. See how much colder it's gotten with the sun down?"
Used to Elwynn's more mild winters in comparison to Tiragarde, Mathias considered it was always colder here but did note that there'd been a sharp drop earlier. Thanking the gryphon master he checked his bag one last time, going to stand behind the inn as he did it, unsurprised that Fairwind had followed him there.
"Where are we going?" Fairwind asks, casually leaning against the side of the inn, the bustle of recovery efforts a hum behind him.
"This isn't a we. I'm scouting and you're not coming, Captain." He can't look at the man, he can't bring himself to, as if he knows if he does, his entire resolve will crumble.
"Have you ever scouted through Tiragarde on foot, Master Shaw? It's not easy, not that I'm doubting your abilities, Tides know you have enough of them, but when a storm comes on it's impossible to wayfind your way out unless you know the area intimately, even then it's a gamble. I'm sober for once," Fairwind laughs and Mathias turns to him against his better judgement, the man is suffused with warmth and good cheer, the colour of his eyes is hidden in the dark corner they're tucked into but the glint of them is unmistakable, the man is not just easy on the eyes, he is breathtaking like this - a private moment stolen, a view of the man that was entirely Mathias' and no one else, "And I know Kul Tiras like the back of my hand, let me be your guide for the night, you won't regret it."
That Fairwind could make that sound like a sexual invitation really doesn't surprise him, what does is his own response.
"Fine, but you need to keep up with me or I'll leave you in a snow bank to freeze."
He wouldn't really leave him in a snowbank to freeze and Fairwind seems to know this for he laughs softly as if it's a joke. Mathias realizes that maybe it is, seeing as he wouldn't just leave him. With Fairwind's steady stride and slightly longer legs it's not too difficult for the man to keep up anyway. By the time they're onto the road and skirting a field of ice elementals the Captain has told him about the history of the Lodge, the Wendigo that had devoured an entire encampment of guards in one night, and the time he fell off a horse and nearly broke his leg. Two of these things were regionally applicable, the horse bit had absolutely nothing to do with anything else happening and Mathias was turning mental summersaults attempting to figure out how Fairwind had connected it all together.
He's forced to give it up when the man asks him a direct question, "Where are we heading again?"
"I never told you actually, so there is no 'again' at all."
"Fairs that, so where are we heading?"
In the distance he can see the watchtower of Vigil Hill and above them the steady snowfall has continued, but it doesn't seem to be picking up much, if at all. "Down the Drustvar coast, some adventurers caught sight of a Horde encampment and I want to get eyes on it as soon as possible." He hears the apprehension in Fairwind's steps and manages to outpace the man by a few feet before the ex-pirate picks up his pace to fall alongside him again. After one run in with the Horde today, he's not surprised by the reaction, the Captain wasn't a soldier, he wasn't a fighter, he was a sailor who worked for profit and Mathias should have told him right off, it probably would have dissuaded the man entirely. "You can turn back or stay in Vigil Hill, I'll understand."
"Oh don't worry, you won't get rid of me that easily." The levity and bravado is back into Fairwind's voice and step and Mathias is warmed faintly by the courage in the man, or perhaps idiocy, save he doesn't think it is that - Fairwind is perfectly capable of measuring the risk to reward of any given task, it's what makes him such a good runner of Azerite, amongst other things. It's just not entirely clear what the reward is here, what has the man following him on a scouting mission at all. Certainly Mathias isn't such splendid company that it's reward enough to follow him into a potentially dangerous situation?
"Good thing I thought to pack some food to bring along, thought I'd need to bunk down for the night but they had it all well in hand by the time we even got there."
"Yes, Holton seems to keep things running smoothly."
"Should be enough to feed the two of us, hopefully. You could eat enough for an ogre when you get your mind into it." Fairwind's tone is fond so the comment doesn't rankle him as much as it would coming from someone else. Many things the man says would have caused him a bit of ire coming from anyone else, which just goes to show how compromised he's become concerning his feelings for the Captain. "Not that you look like one, has anyone told you lately how beautif-" Fairwind's words are cut off abruptly by Mathias throwing his arm out to prevent the man from walking his way off the path and into a ditch, but also because he didn't think he could handle hearing the rest.
"Oh, thanks love, wasn't watching where I was going, too busy watching you!" Fairwind laughs and throws him a charming smile which he turns his attention from entirely, although silence and ignoring him had never worked on Fairwind even once. He nearly trips when the full sentence catches up with though, the casual use of 'love' and the flirtatious turn of phrase - it is only the years and years of training that kept his footing stable.
"You would do best to pay attention to your steps, I'll let you tumble into the ditch next time."
"Wouldn't want you any other way, hardly yourself if you just follow me around keeping me out of ditches."
Mathias sighs, "Please do not make me regret allowing you to come with me."
"Do my best, love, but if you end up killing me and burying me in the snow, will you at least pour one out for me?"
Mathias throws him a worried and slightly confused look, "Why would I kill you? We're on the same side, Fairwind."
"Oh I meant, if I ever get on your nerves, or I suppose more of them than I usually do." The actual sheepish and self conscious tone of the man's voice sends a spike of guilt and something softer and sadder through him.
"You're charming and pleasant company, Fairwind." More than pleasant, Mathias had to admit to himself, he's relatively sure any number of people who knew him would have laughed at him for a number of things he'd done that day, from getting caught up in Feathermoon's trap to agreeing to let Flynn Fairwind himself follow him on a covert operation. Noticing the Captain has gone silent he glances to the side only to see a dark flush striping across Fairwind's handsome face. "Captain?"
The ex-pirate looks at him with an abrupt jerk, that curious flush tinting darker, "Oh, you're not putting one on?" The man cocks his head to consider Mathias and as such he's not watching where he's going and despite what he'd just said about letting Fairwind meet his end in a ditch he carefully maneuvers the man to cross into Vigil Hill without ending up in water. "Just a little hard to believe coming from you, mate."
"I like it when people can keep up with me in actions and words." The repartee they'd shared during the Vault job and after had been a pleasure, and Fairwind was capable of keeping up with him in many ways. He was perhaps overly lonely to have the company mean so much to him but the temperature was swiftly dropping and Vigil Hill was empty at this hour (and after much of the inhabitants had fled during the Ashvane funded incursion of pirates earlier in the year) so someone keeping up with him meant more than it probably should. They were ignored by the Night Watch, being just two men passing through, and Fairwind didn't bring attention to them by replying until they were out of the outpost and headed toward the northern point of the little isle.
Now far enough away from Kenning's Lodge the air lacked the acrid burn of smoke and instead set his lungs on fire via the cold. The snow was beginning to fall in a speed with which Mathias was starting to believe would be up to a gnome's knees soon. The northern end of Vigil Hill was home to a dock and moored there was a row boat and a lone watchman who stood from his chair as they made their way to him, grease lamp held high. "If you're looking for passage I'm not takin' anyone further than Hangman's Point."
"Come on, it's colder than a witch's tits and you won't take us down the coast?"
"Go get your own boat if you want to go further." The man looks old enough to be Mathias' father, not that he ever knew the man himself, still he could sympathize, the water looked ready to turn to slush and the man's spine was already bent, the cold probably wasn't helping.
"Just passage to Drustvar will do, thank you ferryman." Mathias cut in before Fairwind could make enough of a nuisance of them to have the man's mind change entirely about taking them over at all.
The trip over is uneventful after the aging boatman is convinced to let them row instead. Falling into a silent syncopation allows Mathias to center himself again and leave behind the Captain's flirtations.
When they disembark the ferryman holds his hand up to halt them. "If you're coming back this way you won't need a boat lads, the water will be frozen by morning, thick enough to walk on it."
"We will likely be taking a gryphon from the town north of here, thank you for the advice and safe passage." Mathias bows.
Fairwind, shaking out his hands gives his own farewell, "If it's going to be frozen you get yourself into a warm place then and take care crossing, you won't have us to feel guilty and row for you."
The ferryman laughs and his voice carries eerily over the water, the sound of the oars dipping into slush following.
Turning away from the water to look at the thick forest of Drustvar he felt more than saw Fairwind do the same as the man's arm brushed against his.
"Can't say I wanted to spend the day before Winter's Veil eve in Drustvar, but the company is worth it."
"Are you going to flirt with me the entire time?" Mathias turns, footprints left in the sand, looking for the nearest path to cut into the woods and away from the open air of the shore, the feeling of exposure sent a curl of chill down his spine which didn't help the fact that he was now freezing.
Flynn was remarkably silent for once when he strode to follow after him. "That coming from the man who just said he enjoyed my company. But I'll confess, I wasn't sure if you even knew I was flirting, mate. If it makes you uncomfortable I'll stop."
"It doesn't." It comes out before he even has a chance to stop himself, and then he's backpedaling, "But it's highly inappropriate and you should stop anyway."
Fairwind's footsteps falter behind him but then speed up and the man is at his side again despite Mathias trying very hard to outpace him at that exact moment. Damn his longer legs, damn all of Fairwind really.
"Inappropriate for who, or for why at that matter?"
There is a break in the treeline, what looks like a trampled path, maybe caused by animals, or maybe by men. He carefully pulls himself up the rocks before the trees, stopping only to turn and hold his hand out to help Fairwind as well.
Without pause, the ex-pirate takes his hand and uses the hold to help himself up. Standing suddenly chest to chest at the edge of the treeline, Mathias falls still and shivers.
"You're cold-" the Captain begins, only for Mathias to cut him off.
"You're not my subordinate, I have no rank over you, but I am the Spymaster and you constantly doing this in public, without me reprimanding you for it, will likely only result in people thinking I'm a pushover. No one is allowed to take those liberties with me, Fairwind. I do not allow it, if you were one of my agents I would have put a stop to it long ago."
They're still holding hands, still close enough to embrace.
"I'm not your agent." Fairwind smiles down at him, it sends a thrill through Mathias that settles like heat in the pit of his stomach. "No one could ever call you a pushover, love. No amount of rank and class is going to get me to stop, only you. You tell me you don't want it, and I'll stop, for you." He registers Fairwind's other hand coming up slowly, toward his cheek, before it can touch him a familiar and unwanted sound proceeds the sudden and sharp slash of air through the trees.
In Northrend, the howl of a blizzard was something he'd come to recognize. Even kept safe in the thick walls of the keep the wailing of nature was prevalent. Here, it hit with such sudden ferocity he grasped onto Flynn's arm for support, about to tell the man they needed cover when Flynn shouted it for him.
"If we don't get inside we'll be snowed under, love!"
He doesn't even need to spur them on, Flynn is practically dragging him along the path, and he kicks off at speed, rushing them along faster.
Maybe in Tiragarde the snow would have come down slower - there was something supernatural about the speed with which the forest was being buried by this storm. With local legends (or truths) about Witches running rampant and the Drust plaguing the place, it led credence to those thoughts. He could only hope that the Horde outpost to the south was being similarly affected.
Within minutes visibility was gone, their only boon was that the path they'd found kept them from needing to beat down the bush cover.
He hadn't been frozen before, not now that the howling wind was cutting him to the bone, the only source of warmth he could feel was the hand still clasped in Flynn's own.
When practical thoughts of survival turned steadily toward an acceptance of death, when he began to feel hot - he knew he was right about the magic in the snow. His pace was sluggish and yet Flynn still dragged him onward, he could hear the man howl something at the sky, but he didn't understand it, or maybe he was hallucinating.
The idea that he was beginning to slip became even more likely when he could swear he saw the impression of a building. Except then they were sheltered from the howl of the wind before it and Flynn was about to kick the door in so Mathias came to his senses enough to pull the ex-pirate back. He dropped their linked hands finally to go for his lock picking kit. The door's defenses fell away readily enough and the door was saved from having it's hinges broken. That his hands were shaking so much it put an extra few seconds on the lock no one could fault him for. It would have been unfortunate if they'd had cold air and snow blowing in on them.
Inside with the door shut against the intolerable chill allowed Mathias the moment to consider how he'd likely been ready to die. He'd have to take stock of that later, much later, and not now, and likely talk to one of SI:7's medics about his mental state. Or - or he could push it off till later and then never do it and throw himself into work as soon as he got back to Boralus. Not that he had experience doing that, oh not at all.
Realizing he'd been standing in the middle of a one room cabin doing nothing but mentally snarking himself for his workaholic solutions to every problem for a few minutes now, he finally moved to help Flynn with the potbelly stove in the corner. While the entire cabin had a fine film of dust upon it's furnishings, the precut wood by the stove was dry and between the two of them they had a fire going soon. Luckily the pipe was clean and so they didn't end up smoked out either.
"Mathias," Flynn drew his attention, forcing him to realize he'd been standing there in front of the stove holding himself and shivering for an extended amount of time, "We need to get you out of your armor." He also noticed that Flynn had somehow shed his own soaked-through clothing without drawing attention to himself and was down to his skivvies and nothing else. He stares, numb and perhaps stupidly, unable to do anything but stand there, even as Flynn comes forward and carefully begins to undo the clasps of his pauldrons.
He's kickstarted by Flynn's touch and follows his lead, hands shaking. Remarkably Flynn isn't shaking nearly as badly as he is. "H-h-how-" Mathias tries and then gives up, until his teeth stop chattering he doesn't have the patience for himself.
"Shh, love," Flynn's voice is so soft and low, worried maybe, and caring, "Just let me take care of you."
Maybe if he'd been capable of it, he would have flushed but he was too frozen right now. He moves his limbs as Flynn instructs him to and soon enough his armor is discarded on the ground and Flynn is pulling him under the dusty covers of the cabin's single bed. With his head tucked under Flynn's chin and his body tangled up with the ex-pirates he found some relief finally. Flynn was not hot so much as he was luke-warm but even that slight temperature difference was beautiful, rapturous, intoxicating. Like a blast of holy light flooding through him and for a man of the shadows it was almost too much - almost, but delicious enough to curb that overwhelming sensory experience.
"I take it you've never fallen into a frozen over river." Flynn speaks against his hair and Mathias makes a hum in the negative not that it's very clear either way. "Didn't think so." Flynn added so he must have understood him anyway.
As the pain and shuddering slowly abates bone-deep exhaustion takes it's place. He doesn't realize he's fallen asleep until Flynn is moving from the bed to put more wood in the stove and easily drifts off once more when he's back in Flynn's arms.
No beta here, this doesn’t follow the canonical plotline for them because I do what I want, if I never finish this please forgive me I am a flake
Read under the cut for the story
He watches Fairwind work on the deck of the Middenwake, muscles shifting under the linen of his shirt, his coat thrown somewhere and not on him for once, not surprising considering the work Mathias has been watching him do for the last bit of time. Heavy ropes coil and shift, and he's doing something with the sails that the Spymaster does not pretend to understand even a little bit. The lights onboard the ship illuminate him better than the setting sun, but even then Mathias would have been able to see the familiar frame just fine. Even with his wandering focus he can still feel someone watching him in turn and seeing as it's not Fairwind, he looks down from his dark little alcove to the deck proper to see what he expected to see - Shandris Feathermoon watching him, better than the Commander at least.
To stop what he is doing would be to admit guilt, so he turns his attention away from her and back to the Captain of the Middenwake, hip shifting to rest cocked against the wall. He doesn't hear her come, no surprise there, only knows she is there when she lets him know, the exhalation of a sigh.
"Humans have such odd courtship rituals."
"I'm not courting him."
She leans against the wall next to him, her arms crossing her chest, nearly mimicking his own stance, "Are you not?"
He does not want to be having this conversation and definitely not with Feathermoon.
Leaving is conceding ground, again - guilt he isn't going to admit. "I would be far more up front about it, if I were."
"So you've been standing up here, watching him for an hour, for no reason?"
Mathias turns to level her with a look that would have sent trainees in Old Town running, but he doesn't expect it to do much to her, and it doesn't. Partial commander of their forces here, and he himself too for that matter, not much could have cowed the sentinel, and certainly not one human a fraction of her life-span. "He's easy on the eyes." It's in itself a damning confession but there are few who know him by name that do not know his predilictions. It had been a political move mostly, no one would ravel him up in their machinations for marriage plots to better their station if he was confirmed to be unwedable because he was unlikely to produce and heir.
He could swear she rolls her eyes at him. "Odd, what did I say? Why do you not just go offer him your bed?" She motions toward the Middenwake, "He would accept, if that is what worries you."
Nope, nope - not having this conversation. He takes a steady grip of the rail and swings himself up and over, landing on silent feet on the bottom deck, startling a champion on her way to report to Commander Wyrmbane. He sidesteps around the woman with an apology, catching a glimpse of movement from the deck of the Middenwake he spurs himself faster and takes the gangplank, only to hear the footfalls of a night elf doing nothing to hide herself behind him.
Cursing under his breath he swerves rounding the dock, hoping to lose her in the crush of people outside the harbormaster's office but as easily as he weaves through the crowd, so does she. Night elves and their damnable grace, it took him an entire twenty years to learn this. "Are you running from me, or from yourself?"
"I would appreciate it immensely if you minded your own business, Feathermoon. Do you not have enough to do, would you like me to set you up a target practice range, find someone who needs killing?" They break from the press of people, hitting the ramp that leads up and along, but right as he moves to round the corner, he realizes his mistake, too close to the edge, nowhere to go, he runs right into the large form of a Kul Tiran sailor.
He's seconds away from breaking the steadying hold - hands on his arms, before he realizes the surprised face looking down at him is none other than the focus of his last hour's wandering gaze. "Captain." He only just sounds this side of breathless which is embarrassing enough.
"Aye Spymaster, you're going at a right clip." His grin makes Mathias' stomach do unfortunate flips, "Were you coming to see me?"
"He was." Feathermoon pipes up behind him.
Oh that damndable elf and her meddling, this is what he gets for abandoning his paperwork. "I wished to hear your report on the Azerite shipment from earlier today, first hand. I heard there was a dragon spotted?" He does break the hold now, easily stepping back but the heat of the Captain's hands remain burning on his bare skin beneath his pauldrons.
An admirable cover, he pretends he doesn't hear Shandris' sigh to the side.
Fairwind seems to only just have noticed Shandris and he does as passable a salute he seems able, nothing at all respectful about it, and his easy grin ruins the whole pantomime. "Were you coming to hear me tell all about the dragon too, General?"
She shakes her head in the negative, bouncing on her heels in a way he's seen her do when she's at ease, an oddly childish movement for a woman so very old. It just reminds him of how different night elves are to humans, and he wonders how old she actually is, not just in terms of years but in terms of her people's maturity. His wandering thoughts are interrupted by the sweeping and dramatic bow that Fairwind gives her.
"Then do you mind if I steal the Spymaster? It's not often he comes to talk to me of his own volition you see, and I was hoping I could convince him to get a bit of kip with me."
Food. Kip was food, Mathias opens his mouth to deny the invitation, but Shandris is quicker.
"Of course Captain, and well you should - I have not seen Master Shaw eat all day."
"Like a bird he is." Flynn spins on his heel, throwing a look back at them - mostly at Shaw. "Coming Spymaster? I have some victuals in my cabin you might find enjoyable."
"I'm sure he will." Shandris Feathermoon bounces on her heels again. Damned woman.
He easily catches up with Fairwind, following him the short distance to the Middenwake, berthed as it was directly across from the Wind's Redemption. "Have you really had nothing to eat?" Fairwind's voice sounds soft with concern.
"I skipped lunch, although General Feathermoon wasn't there to see me do so." He's annoyed at that, she'd guessed and it had been correctly, which grated on him. That she probably paid close attention to his routine to know the truth of it.
"You do that too often and I'll be able to throw you around."
The glare he levels Fairwind with lacks teeth, "You would be sorely pressed to try."
He finds where the man had put his coat once they're in the Captain's quarters on the ship, slung over the back of the chair seated at the man's very messy desk. The window is open to let in the breeze and also the sounds of Boralus outside. Lighting a number of lanterns and also putting wood in the stove, Fairwind bids him to sit in-between tasks, and Mathias obliges him by perching on the only other chair in the room not piled with things.
"So the dragon-" is how the story begins and Fairwind is a consumate storyteller, Mathias finds himself enjoying the journey despite the little barbs he puts in to tell the man to hurry up with it. He doesn't hurry up with it anyway, and so Mathias has been plied with a large number of hard meats, savory cheeses, and crusty bread, as well as a bottle of wine, "And then we had to avoid the Horde chasing us halfway back to friendly waters."
"That's the part I want to hear more about." It's been an hour maybe, there is nothing but darkness outside and the weight upon his shoulders has gradually lifted with the application of wine and company. "Did they open fire on you?"
"Oh no, no. We were a good bit out from them, it would have been a waste of cannonballs, if I were to take a guess I'd assume they wanted to see if we knew any other islands in the immediate area."
A blade's edge of anxiety leaves him then, and he doesn't even realize it was there until it is gone. "Glad to hear it."
When did it happen, he wonders on his way back to his berth on the Wind's Redemption. When did he begin to fall for Captain Fairwind? Was it the treasury? Before? Was it the man's docier on his desk? In the past it had been easy to bury it, send the offending person away, or himself away. But Fairwind wasn't one of his and he had nowhere to go to escape this slow descent into familiarity. He should push away, he knows. Too much at stake and more - he is terrified of the release in it. To let go of that control and what does he have but himself to master? Too many variables and one can never control them, but himself - he was good at that. At denial and the chains of servitude. He was born for this, bred to serve the Kings of Stormwind in blade and body.
But looking at the light coming from the Captain's quarters on the Middenwake stirs something in him. Dangerous as a knife to the throat it is a hunger inside of him for something more than he had been made for. He knew where that got him in the past, it bloodied his hands and broke his heart, it resulted in a man's head on his desk and the dagger at his side instead of the man who it had belonged to. What was right and what was moral? Not for him to determine, that was the work of greater men. Ripples in a pond and Mathias was the man who monitored them, sent them in the right direction when needed. He was not meant for soft things, for a warm body to come home to, or in this case - to be the warm body to return to. He was no man's home, and never would he be, as much as he might ache for it.
He looks up the gangplank and sees Shandris Feathermoon's back and he turns on his heel, something in him aching too much to be prodded and poked at right now. His mind is far away and he pulls it back, reins it in with the spur of his own physicality. He sets off at speed, kicking off the high wall, his gloved hands finding perfect grooves in the old harbor wall to pull himself up the distance. There is an exhalation of breath behind and below him, a vendor gathering their wares for the day, but he is gone before they even fully register he'd been there and likely their surprise will bleed into disbelief for he is nothing but a shadow. He is running the length of the wall then, high but not yet high enough. Age and strife has worn the brick work - nothing like Stormwind's pristine harbor wall, it's gleaming white masonry - so when he jumps gaps he's able to actually breathe without the weight of guilt in every step, and that freedom causes each leap to carry him further, like a bird nearly in flight. Too long grounded for a roof-walker, too long at desks and buried under bureaucracy.
He takes the gap from the wall to the rooftops as if he is weightless, barely do his feet meet the tiles before he's off again, running the length of the roof's crest on the strongest part of the structure. When he jumps the next gap he looks down to see the market below for that fleeting second, the milling merchantiers and the travelers from all corners of Azeroth, with him above them all.
He's passed the trade's district, passed the Middenwake now too, he's scaling the upper level of the bridge toward Mariner's Row when his lungs turn to fire. He pushes further, further, a snarl as he forces air into iron barrel of his aching chest. One long wide gap and he soars. The landing is rough, he rolls through it and pushes himself up, staggers forward, on, on, he's not done yet. Shandris' words come back to him, 'Are you running from me or from yourself?' He flings himself forward, off the bridge, only to catch his hands against the old stone, the leather beneath them burning as he slides, down and down - but it's enough friction to slow his descent.
On his feet he shakes his hands out, casually looking up to meet the stare of the guard stationed a few feet from where he'd landed. The man has his mouth hanging open in shock. Mathias pushes the hair falling forward onto his face back. "Just testing the structural integrity of the bridge." He murmurs, turning back towards the way he came.
Luck, or something like it, is with him when he gets back to the Wind's Redemption. The only people on deck are Wyrmbane and a couple of Alliance Champions all three of them focused on the campaign map. He moves to slip past them only for the paladin to look up and catch his eye, and before Mathias can nod and dismiss himself, the man is speaking.
"Master Shaw, these two have some information you might like to hear."
There is nothing but darkness and stars above and yet the work is never done so he comes to stand by the table instead of vanishing into the hold - as much as he wanted to just curl up with a pot of tea and his paperwork. One of them is a Ren'dorei in cloth and the other a human in leathers and he leans against the table with one hip, arms crossed over his chest.
"Master Shaw," the Ren'dorei man bows with the customary flourish of his ilk that Mathias still had trouble determining was sarcastic or not, but the man's words didn't betray any disrespect as he continued, "When my partner and I were flying over toward Drustvar we saw some suspicious Horde activity in the region between Tiragarde and the coast over there."
Here the human man took up the thread, "They had a landin' part right along the coast almost up to Fletcher's Hollow." The man had a thick Gilnean accent, "We couldn't see how many there were, but it was likely enough to give someone up there trouble."
Commander Wyrmbane looked to him, "It doesn't appear to be a full incursion." There was an unspoken request for input at this point and Mathias leaned over to look at the map, tracking where Wyrmbane had put a pin in to denote the Horde sighting. The little cove was protected enough by mountains and more, and he could only imagine the havoc that might be wrought by a raiding part with a good foothold there.
"I'll send scouts." But what he really meant was that he was going to go down, pack an overnight bag, and go out himself. "Can you tell me anything about the individuals you saw?"
"I know one of 'em was an orc. There was also a couple of goblins, or extra large green mice, we were fairly high up, I'm afraid." The Gilnean man rubbed his bearded chin, "Saw a lot of crates."
Mathias excused himself after reassuring the commander he'd have something to report to Wyrmbane about come the next day. Finally slipping away to below deck he went to his office and then pushed through the door to his private quarters behind. Lighting the lamp he hung it up over his bed and began to arrange his pack. Poisons, a gnomish spyglass, and a small ration would hold him for the night. When he came back on deck the only one out was the night watch guard on duty and he gave the woman a nod as he took himself down the gangplank again.
Stopping to fill his canteen at the fountain in town and slip in a bit of cleansing powder, he let the sound of night-time revelry from the tavern nearby pour over him. It would have been easy to assign an agent to the task, there were a number of them off-duty tonight, probably finding their pleasures and daily relief in that very tavern. But the thought of the cold air against his face, the thrill of flight, and the promise of a mission to get him out of his head was too tempting.
The gryphonmaster greeted him with a wave, hands full of straw, in the middle of packing it down onto the nest of the gryphon standing nearby. The dark blue and red creature greeted him too, with a headbutt to the shoulder that would have knocked him over had he not braced himself for it. He sunk his fingers into her feathers and gave her a good scritch. "She'll miss you when you've gone, Spymaster Shaw."
"Doubt that will happen anytime soon." The war felt like it would go on forever, certainly he'd been in Boralus more than he'd been in Stormwind for the past months. "I'll need her overnight if she's rested and fed."
"Shadowtalon just had her sup, so you'll be doin' me a favor taking her out. She'll only want to fly after that meal, I wasn't looking forward to have to fluff up her nest for hours to try and get her to settle."
Drawing away from petting under her beak, Mathias took himself to saddling the gryphon, "There's a girl, we'll get you up in the clouds soon." Glancing toward the other nests he noted that one of them was noticeably empty. "When did Cadet Fordragon leave?"
"Oh 'bout an hour ago, took off toward the south."
He hummed a soft sound and slipped effortlessly into the saddle, already Shadowtalon's body was tensed beneath him so eager to take wing. With a final nod exchanged he gave her the pressure of his knees and then she was off, strong wings buffeting the ground and knocking straw about, before they were zipping up into the cold night sky. While all the gryphons he'd ridden in Boralus had been exceptionally well trained, there were two he had a fondness for, depending on where it was in Kul Tiras he needed to travel. There is a duality in the gryphons he favours too, ebon and snowy-white, both good for different cover. But for tonight's trip Shadowtalon's ebon coat would disguise him best, and that's exactly as Mathias preferred it to be.
Tiragarde unfolded beneath him, the long edge of it's coastline and the lights of various townships. He was barely at the height he liked best to travel at when the first sign of trouble became apparent. Smoke rising up from the south, near the mountains that cut off the main body of the isle from Freehold. The amount of it was reminiscent of a forest fire or a town burning and he banked Shadowtalon back down low to skin treetops, the air currents holding them steady. The source of the smoke became clear soon enough as they rose over the crest of a hill, the little hunter's lodge tucked away on the edge of the mountains was being attacked. With no sight of backup from Bridgeport in view he leaned his weight forward and Shadowtalon swooped evenly toward the ground. A less trained gryphon would have balked at the heat and smoke in the air but she just shrieked shrilly, a call for battle and blood. They hit the ground running and she bowled over a man about to strike down one of the lodge's hunters with his bully club. With an effortless motion, Mathias dismounted and then clucked his tongue and pointed toward the treeline. The look of distaste showed in her deep brown eyes but she fled the battle as directed, if she ended up hurt he'd never be able to rent a gryphon in Boralus again.
The hunter with her broken crossbow scrambled to her feet and then kicked the club away from the downed man, Mathias caught sight of her removing her skinning knife from her belt before he was turning, already slipping into the shadows.
He worked best in the dark and the fires from the inn set ablaze and various tent structures only aided in the shifting chaos of shadows, helping to even further obscure him. Humans against humans always put a bad taste in his mouth, but it was easy enough to determine between sides here. The hunters and traders of the lodge wore traveling leathers or hunting gear and were also well warmed against the falling snow - the raiders in contrast looked like burly dock workers and were trying their best to loot during the ensuing chaos caused. Ashvane dockworkers, Mathias guessed. Out of work and on the wrong side of the war.
Shadow stepping behind a truly massive mountain of a man, he struck sure with his blade into the man's lower back. Swift and sharp, he hit with a kidney shot before kicking the man in the back, only managing to stagger him to begin with thanks to his blade work. Even still it didn't prove enough to put the man down and he rounded a circle, swinging his sword wide. Easily Mathias dodged back, and the next blow he easily parried and swept to the side with the cross of his daggers. "Little Alliance dog!" Spat out along with blood and frustration, and Mathias slid under another angry swing. The crimson bloom of flowing blood was spreading through the man's shirt now, but his adrenaline was keeping him going. Soon enough even that wouldn't save him though, Mathias merely needed to wait him out.
He didn't have the patience for that tonight, not with the smoke catching in his throat and the necessity of ending this soon before the fires could do any more damage. Fielding another blow he caught it with his blades but instead of bracing himself he let the blow carry him smoothly sideways, knocking the man off balance. As he raged and stumbled forward, Mathias followed after him and with one economically placed swipe, he opened the man's throat up, the arterial spray hitting another raider in the face - likely the man had meant to aid his friend, only to then be bathed in the man's blood.
Mathias watched as terror set into the man's eyes as he watched the corpse hit the ground and lay unmoving. The scream that ripped out of that man was one that Mathias has heard many times before. Loss, fury, fear, hoplessness. He braced himself for the impact of blade but instead the man turned and ran, fleeing for the treeline. Before he even made it three yard there was a crossbolt in his back, and then two more.
The battle was over, the raiders were trying to flee, and mostly failing. The workers of the lodge had set up a chain of buckets from the nearby stream to put out the fires. He's in the middle of cleaning his blades when a well built woman with greying hair comes toward him. "Well you came down like a very pointy avenging angel. Alanna Holton, my thanks for taking out their leader."
He took her offered hand and shakes it after sheathing his blades, "Mathias Shaw."
With the widening of her eyes he can tell the name is recognized. "Wait here, please Spymaster. I've got an inn fire to put out." She was off then, rushing on to help her workers organize.
Taking himself to the treeline he was barely in range of the underbrush when Shadowtalon trampled over a berry bush to reach him, butting her head into his chest with enough force to make him catch himself or risk falling over. "There there girl, you did well."
Holton finds him in the middle of watering and feeding Shadowtalon to calm her from the excitement, tucked in next to a lightly singed caravan near the Gryphon master's stand. "Thank you for your aid again, Spymaster. We've got some help coming in from Boralus now. Is there anything we can do for you, or were you just sight-seeing?"
With Shadowtalon beak deep in chicken innards, he considers the downtime this little sidetrack is going to cost. While swift and feisty, Shadowtalon was also prone to battle-lust, and he didn't much favor the idea of taking her on a covert scouting mission with her feathers ruffled like this. She might try and divebomb the Horde and that would not suit his needs at all.
"I was scouting something along the Drustvar's edge, but I'll need to wait now for my gryphon to recover."
Carefully reaching out the middle-aged woman gave Shadowtalon a pat, holding her hand there she was obviously testing the mood of the beast. With his own hand buried in the soft feathers under her cheek he could already feel what she was looking for, the fine thrum of energy and a creature well worked up. "This one of Boralus' Gryphons?" She asked and he nodded in turn, "I'll have my man tether her to a line and send her flying to wear her out for you and then bed her down. I'd offer you our gryphon on loan but we sent him off to Boralus to call for aid and he's down for his own recovery."
"Thank you, that will have to do."
"The inn isn't likely to collapse in on itself and the fires all out now, you're hardly dressed for the weather, Master Shaw, please go settle yourself by the hearth while we take care of your gryphon." She smiled at him and gave him a bow before she was off, her shouted orders carrying across to workers and hunters alike, with a tone that commanded to be followed.
It was not until he was in the quiet of the inn that the actual chill of the outside air hit him. With the heat of the room around him closing in like a firm blanket he found himself biting down a shiver. Sweat from activity and also the abated adrenaline left him trembling and he settled down near the hearth of the fireplace, sinking into a chair with a cushion settled atop it. Around him was the bustle of many being tended to. Bandages and burn salves, a lone priest doing his best to take care of the ones worse off. He watches, letting the scene roll over him, only to find a steaming mug shoved into his hands by one of the workers. Taking a whiff proved the beverage to be hot cocoa and he sipped at it, leaning himself back to then settle the warmth of the mug over his chest.
He'd have to go on foot, likely. Which meant sending word to Wrymbane about his change of plans. Pulling his map out he balanced his mug on one knee and planned the best route to take. The Old Drust road would carry him through to Vigil Hill, and from there he could cut over to the coast. On foot it would take a number of hours all told unless he wanted to run the entire way, which he did not - only now regretting the roof-top run he'd taken after dinner with Fl- Captain Fairwind.
Bringing out his writing kit he pens first a missive to Wyrmbane and then begins the more laborious process of encrypting messages to his agents in Boralus. Thrice his mug is refilled as he works, while the bustle of the tiny inn flows over him. The fireplace was kept blazing and in no time the cold that had permeated him fled to be replaced by bone-deep warmth and contentment, he would not relish leaving his place before the fire when it was time to go.
"Shift switch!" The strong commanding voice of Holton filled up the inn after some time and Mathias looked up to see the tired forms of Boralus dockworkers and guards come in, sooty and wet. To his surprise among them was a familiar form, Fairwind's sure frame coming to slump against a wall, charming smile alighting on the lady to hand him a mug identical to Mathias' own. And as if feeling the weight of his gaze, Flynn's attention turned from the inn worker to meet Mathias and hold, a look of pleased surprise passing over his ever-expressive face. Despite the way he'd leaned on the wall looking like a cat drug from the Stormwind canals he bounded up to Mathias' chair like an energetic puppy. His cocoa splashed over his sooty knuckles as he plopped himself on the stones of the hearth.
"Fancy meeting you here, Master Shaw, come often?" Fairwind batted his lashes at him and Mathias applied himself to sealing his letters. "Shouldn't you be asleep on top of your paperwork or something?"
"There's something I needed to check up on along the Drustvar coast." Draining his mug he handed it to Fairwind who was tricked into taking it, before standing.
"What am I supposed to do with this?" Fairwind asked, peering into the empty mug. Someone was trying to put a blanket around his shoulders but he was too busy scrambling up after Mathias to let them do it properly so they gave up on him.
"Whatever you'd like." He isn't much surprised to find Fairwind following his steps out, it was too much to ask that the man be exhausted from helping out, at least too exhausted to hound him.
Light knows we could all use a little cheer — Celebrate the week with some holiday FairShaw from Dec 13 - 19!
All forms of art are accepted (Fanfic, Fanart, edits, etc.) Just use the tag #Fairshawlidays and have fun!
PROMPT LIST:
Dec 13 - mistletoe / fireplace
Dec 14 - snowed in / bundling up
Dec 15 - decorating / terrible mishap
Dec 16 - sweet tooth / feast
Dec 17 - reunion / holiday party
Dec 18 - gift exchange / surprise
Dec 19 - snowball fight / snowman
Gordon gets medical treatment and has a nap (and the author steals from portuguese phrase sites to serve his own ends)
Part One | Part Two | Part Three below
Take a breath, and another, deep in his aching lungs, pull in air between broken lips. Trembling and raw, he looks up at Barney from his place seated on the cot. Something in his expression had caused Barney to relent and take on the medical treatment himself but Gordon's strength had given out when his friend had begun to try and treat his injured side. So clean enough, Gordon had been deposited on the cot and made to lay down, while Barney groaned to kneel beside him. He'd said he was fine but Gordon hadn't been able to shake the guilt of his friend putting himself in pain just to take care of his accidents. The Vortigaunts could have mended him maybe and yet Barney hadn't fetched one of them either. Perhaps it would have been practical but Gordon didn't think he could take it emotionally. Half of his break down was mental, not just physical, and the act of laying down as someone touched him without a mind to hurt him was doing wonders for his racing heart and the ache in his chest.
Barney's hands were sure as they gently soothed some sort of ointment over him, steady when they wrapped his wounds in clean cotton. When they caught each other's eyes, Barney smiled at him. "Once I get you all bandaged up I've got a shirt for you to sleep in, see if I can't find you some briefs that aren't too big either, I uh," Barney drew off, face flushing an adorable shade of red, "Usually go without these days, while I got the luxury of uniform skivvies back in the CP I'd always give 'em away to people who needed 'em more. Gets cold out in the wilderness."
"Not that they'd of fit you anyway." Barney patted Gordon's hip above where he was tending to the injury on his thigh, "Gained weight in my old age."
You look good.
Gordon's pulse jumps when Barney laughs self-consciously and strokes a circle into his hip with his thumb, "You don't gotta baby my feelings, Gord. I know I'm every bit fifty five and I look like I live off beer and ration packs, because I do."
He pushes himself up onto his elbows, the bandage Barney already applied around his arm stretching with the motion, it gets Barney's attention who then moves to try and push his shoulders back into the bed, Gordon expends his remaining energy to stay up which serves to put their faces inches away. Barney blinks in confusion and his surprise causes him to relent, leaning back a little but his hands stayed there on Gordon's shoulders, one dry and one slick with the ointment he's been applying to Gordon's injuries.
Talking is pretty hard at this angle, having to lean entirely on his elbows and bend his arms up toward his own raised chest causes his wound to press painfully against the cloth, probably would have been smarter to argue this while laying down.
You look really, okay and his body gives out, flopping back onto the limp and stained pillow, Really good, Barn.
"You still on the good shit, Gord?" Barney laughs softly, still leaning over him, hands on his shoulders.
No, my body hates me and everything is pain. You look really good.
Barney flushes, and then he curses under his breath, "Why didn't you say somethin' what a fuckin' good caretaker I am, lettin' you suffer! Dagnabbit!" He turns from Gordon to do something with the first aid box he'd dragged to the bed and Gordon turns his head to watch him, tired and drained.
Really good. Barney isn't looking at his hands, he probably doesn't even realize Gordon is signing. God, I love you so much.
"Here we go, somethin' to help with that." Barney comes up with a syringe and a glass vial, measures it out the old-fashioned way, no suit to shove it right into Gordon's veins. Despite the speed and numbness provided by the suit he far prefers the way Barney's sure hands tighten the strip of rubber around his upper arm and feel out a vein, the way he flicks his finger in a snap against the inside of Gordon's arm, the intimacy of alcohol swab and the soft voice that follows, "Little sting, darling." The prick is barely felt as he watches the single-minded focus on Barney's face as he slips needle to vein. The morphine hits him like a wave, splashes through his head with hot-hot-heat between one heartbeat and the next. Barney puts another bandage on him after loosening the rubber strip. "Better?"
Love. You. Gordon signs before letting his hand drop back to his side. He feels just fantastic. Just fuckin' fantastic.
Barney freezes up, eyes staring at where Gordon's hands had been, as if he could still see the sign pathing there, before he looks to Gordon's face and gives him a cryptic smile, "I'll be right back with somethin' comfortable for you to wear."
Gordon closes his eyes to shut everything out, to keep from seeing that cryptic smile anymore. He didn't say it back, but what was Gordon really expecting, after twenty years? Was he expecting Barney to return his affections now? Head full of exhaustion and morphine, it dulled the pain of rejection, but it still hurt worse than any of the wounds riddling his overtaxed body.
But Barney hasn't left yet, instead he places his hand on Gordon's chest - right above his heart, and Gordon opens his eyes to look up at Barney still in his Civil Protection uniform, blood stained as it is. "Tomorrow we're gonna talk about that. Can't just spring that on me right after I hit you with morphine, Gordon. Don't know what to think, you've got no idea how bad I've missed you." There is no amount of morphine, no amount of fatigue, that could obfuscate the look of loss and heartbreak that flickers in Barney's beautiful teal-brown eyes, "Missed you so bad, darlin' you don't know. Twenty years, and I," Barney's voice cracks and Gordon wants, needs, so much to pull Barney onto the cot with him, to hold him until that pain-thick sound is gone, but Barney is out of reach now, standing apart from him, hand no longer placed to pulse, "I've missed you. We'll talk about that tomorrow. See if you hold to that when you know what I've done, when you're thinkin' clearly."
Gordon really wants to tell him there isn't a single thing Barney could do or have done that would change the way he felt, feels, for him - but the man has slipped out of the room, leaving Gordon alone with his morphine addled headspace and every ounce of his exhaustion.
There is nothing Gordon can do against the dark when it claims him, only glad it's the old-fashioned slippery slide of sleep and not Him deciding maybe Gordon still has use yet.
"So, I take it I don't have much of a chance with you?" Alyx's voice isn't sad so much, it's sort of bemused. Gordon's hand tightens on the Zero Point Energy Field Manipulator in his tension. "I mean, if someone looked at me the way you look at him, I'd be a lucky girl."
Gordon flinches, she had to, she had to say the rest of it, didn't she?
Alyx makes a soft sound as he jumps down a steep incline, pathing to the next building, "Wait, Gordon! Hey, I - It's okay, I won't tell anyone." He hears her jump down after him, and when she goes to pull herself up onto the next platform he offers his hand to help her.
Momentary panic passing, he leans the really neat gun he was maybe way attached to now up against his leg, if only he'd had this thing back in Black Mesa, It wasn't okay, back then. Not really, not in the sector of the world I worked in.
"A lot has changed." She pats his arm and leans against the wall next to him as they both catch their breath, he had maybe started walking a little faster than the suit liked, "There aren't exactly enough people to get angry about who you love, not like any of us can get on the baby-making train anyway." Alyx laughs and Gordon rolls his eyes at her. "Oh come on, loosen up!" She digs her elbow into his side. "If it makes you feel any better, I'm sure he'd be really happy to know how you feel."
He smiles softly, Thank you.
Gordon wakes up to his pulse racing, nausea, blind-panic. He reaches out blindly and his hand hits a wall, he swings his arm and promptly knocks something across the small room. It is then that he realizes he is not alone in the room, and that the voice calling out his name is a familiar one. Before he ever recognizes it, his body is going limp, he begins to sob immediately. Gentle hands put his glasses on his face and he curls his hands around strong wrists. Barney is bleary above him due to tears. He looks so tired, dark circles under his eyes, scars and wrinkles, his grey-streaked hair disheveled and two days worth of beard-growth. He is the most beautiful person that Gordon has ever seen, he squeezes Barney's wrists a little harder, holding his hands still against his glasses, against the side of Gordon's face.
He can still hear Alyx's soft laugh, feel the ghost of pressure where her elbow had hit his side, except no, that's the wound pulling from the strain of his panicked breathing.
"You're safe, I've got you, you're safe Gordon."
His tears won't stop, his heart is going so fast, he can't breathe, looking up at Barney he drowns in his own guilt, his own pain. This was all his fault, every fucking part of it. His hands had pushed that fucking sample in, caused the Resonance Cascade that collapsed everything together and ended the world as they knew it, he was the fucking R.E.M song, it was him. Slash and burn, return, listen to yourself churn - fuck, god, what has he done? Oppenheimer had nothing on Gordon Freeman.
Barney pulls him up, wraps his arms around Gordon, less padding now without his Civil Protection armor but that just means that Gordon can feel the heat of him sinking through the layers of their shirts, the strong thick circle of his arms wrapped around him so tight. Barney whispers soft words into his ear, breath hot against his skin, and Gordon clutches to him like a life-line in the ocean of his own trauma. It isn't English, his burning brain informs him, and he clutches onto that fact. Focus, focus on the rhythm of words he has no hope of understanding, focus on this new data to trick his broken brain into leaving the panic behind.
"Amo-te com todo meu coração," Barney whispers, hand cupping the back of Gordon's neck, the other low on his back, chest to chest, and he's gently rocking him side to side, "meu coração é sempre seu."
Words flowing, and Gordon drags in each breath through painful burning lungs, one after another, until his chest matches the rise and fall of the one pressed to it. He shudders and collapses, held tighter still by the iron bracket of Barney's arms.
"Se eu fiz algo certo na minha vida," Drawing back, Barney's lips and words drag against Gordon's jaw, "foi quando eu dei o meu coração para você." The tears have stopped, and Gordon is breathless from his panic attack and the soft reverence of Barney's words, the raspy grasp that each syllable holds on his heart. He's in so deep, he's so scared, he doesn't know what to do with the stillness, with the pain turning him up inside, with the weight of his own love and the fragility of his own humanity. It was an accident, except it wasn't, orchestrated the whole way through, unforeseen consequences, except someone had known it all along, had set him up to take the fall and jump through every hoop.
Standing still in time and space and the anger that has kept him alive for so long, the rage that has burned in him for years, it's not enough to pull him through this moment. Barney's warm gaze, his strong arms, "You're safe, darling," that is enough to pull him through, "I'm right here."
Everything left behind, twenty years, six days. A whole world away from who he used to be, a whole two decades. A week ago he was a coward with his whole life ahead of him. Twenty years later and Barney has scars on his body and heart that Gordon wasn't there to protect his best friend from. Who has listened to Barney say he was right all along about aliens? Who has loved him while Gordon was sleeping? And if there has been no one? Does that make it worse that Gordon would step in now? Twenty years he left them all alone because he was the right man in the wrong place, and now Barney is comforting him.
I'm so sorry. For everything.
"You haven't done anything wrong, Gordon."
He's fucked up so much, so much that the eldritch-fuck-abomination took advantage of Alyx because he wasn't playing the good Agent of Cosmic Chaos. The Resonance Cascade and everything that had happened since, it was his fault for not out maneuvering the other pawns in this game of omniversal chess, and he was so sorry not that sorry would do fuck all.
I'll get her back, I'll fix everything, I'm so sorry.
Gordon watches Barney's heart break, no amount of age or change between them, nothing would be able to hide the emotion in his eyes. Gordon sinks under more guilt, building up that wall of pain and rage at himself, fuel for the fire in the hurt he'd caused Barney.
He feels Barney's hand tighten in his hair where a week ago there had been a ponytail until he'd cut it all off, the last thing to go in preparation for passing the final testing simulations. Barney moves his other hand to hold Gordon's jaw, his eyes heated and hard, "Listen to me, Gordon. This wasn't your fault, none of this was your fault. You didn't do this, you didn't take her, you didn't cause the shit to fly at Black Mesa. I was there, I was there too."
"It's time to let that go." Barney tells him, and Gordon wants to tell him it's too soon, but he can't. Not with Barney holding him so close, so intimately.
He tangles his hands in the front of Barney's shirt and falls into him, his words and his deep warm eyes, into his own love. Too strong to let twenty years matter, let alone six god-awful days. He loves him so much, he's loved him for so long, and he can't run from that anymore - no matter how awkward it makes things between them.
Barney loosens his grip and presses Gordon into the bed, laying down beside him, chest to hip, lowers Gordon's head to his chest. They lay tangled up on the slim cot and Gordon tangles himself around Barney even as Barney holds him tight. "You are so strong, Gordon. You've done more than any one man should ever have to." Soft words against his hairline.
"Close your eyes, think about those stars above Black Mesa. The cool desert air, feel me there with you?"
Gordon's eyes are shut tight, his ear to Barney's chest, a chin against the top of his head. They never laid like this together then, but he can feel him. The pinpricks of light from his eyes squeezed tight shut are the stars above them. He taps three times against Barney's chest, again with a pause, and then one final tap. Understood, he can see them, so clear that far out without light pollution from the city, most of Black Mesa's topside was dark this late at night.
"Nothing but us, no one else in the world." Barney is stroking his hair, petting his back, the steady beat of his pulse lulling him as much as the rumble of his words through the firm pillow of his chest. "Just the two of us here together, I'm not letting go, I've got you. It's time to rest Gordon. Up here far away from the rest of the world. Nothing to worry about, just us."
He is losing himself to the words and the picture Barney is painting with them. As White Forest fades there is just Barney and a nebulous desert sky. Bright stars and the promise of a future where he has all the time he needs to unravel secrets written in quantum code. He opens his eyes and the room comes back into focus but the steady core of hope burning in the painful prison of his chest remains, burns all the brighter to see Barney laying beneath him.
It's not too bad, after all. They're together again.
translations:
Amo-te com todo meu coração - I love you with all my heart
meu coração é sempre seu. - My heart is yours forever
Se eu fiz algo certo na minha vida, foi quando eu dei o meu coração para você. - If I did anything right in my life, it was when I gave my heart to you.
half-portuguese barney is @whitepointer 's HC and i love it and I love him okay thanks bye
CW: depictions of broken bones, drug use (via the HEV suit), mentions of former sexual partners, guns, consumption of alcohol
Flashback with us to the year 2000 where Gordon is a useless bisexual with a huge ass crush and hasn't yet been fucked around with by eldritch abominations with briefcases
also featured: a section that looks vaguely like a songfic, do you guys remember songfics? wow so old
part one is here read below for part two
He broke his arm, he thinks. Looking down at it does nothing to help him determine this because it's in the HEV suit, but it's also in the HEV suit at a very inhuman angle. He's not that kind of doctor, so he doesn't know, but again he's pretty sure. The refrain of 'morphine administered' hums through and he staggers a bit.
Dr. Cross' voice says something, and he is forced to loop his finger in the air to get her to repeat herself, her understanding of ASL isn't as strong as some of the other AnMat members but he can get his point across easy enough.
"I asked if you wished to stop the simulation, Dr. Freeman."
He shakes his head.
It takes a further half an hour of training and the chemicals that the suit chooses to pump him with cause him to vomit up his lunch but they clear it.
He is beaming with pride, his arm in a sling when he meets an off-duty Barney Calhoun at the bar in the town above ground and a bus-ride away. The one Barney loved most, with the fake UFO constructed on the roof and the bigfoot pictures on the walls.
"Hole-lee shit, what happened to you, doc?"
Gordon makes him order him a drink from the bar and return before he signs out a heavily edited version of events, the REDACTED blanks nearly hang in the air between them.
But I'll be fine in a few days, it's not as bad as it looks.
Barney takes a sip of his PBR and Gordon's eyes immediately track the way his throat works around it, the wide-breadth of his chest in the plain black t-shirt he's wearing. Due to experience with Barney's limited wardrobe he knows he's wearing the same worn Levis he always wears, and that his uniform boots are what those jeans are tucked into.
Gordon reaches out and drags the menu of bar appetizers over in front of him even though he has it memorized at this point. Something to do with his eyes that isn't stare at Barney Calhoun like an idiot.
He sips his hard apple cider and listens to Barney give him a less redacted version of his day's events - the usual, who locked themselves out of their office, who stole whose lunch, who broke the elevator. Gordon snorted and stopped him, holding his hand up.
The elevator just hangs so whoever hits the button is not who breaks it, Barn.
He could finger-spell Barney, he could, but using the English Sign for Barn/Shed the first time had caused Barney to laugh so hard he choked, so he's done it since.
"I don't know doc, I think it's a pretty good working hypothesis."
Gordon laughs again, the same huffy silent breath, the sound makes Barney's eyes light up, his frankly devastatingly attractive face break out in a sweet smile.
No more hypotheticals from you.
Gordon touches him, a lot maybe, the more drinks he gets in him the more tactile he gets, eventually he slides into the same booth as Barney when he comes back from the bathroom, makes an excuse about how it will be easier for him to see the book Barney has bought from the similarly themed book-store next door to the bar. He laughs at the bad science, points it out and corrects it, and makes Barney laugh or huff and try badly to defend whatever not-a-scientist researcher has to say. Barney holds his PBR, cheap-ass fake piss water for babies, far more than Gordon holds his alcoholic apple juice for toddlers, so that when they do hitch the bus back to the compound, Barney has Gordon's arm slung around his shoulders.
Barney doesn't live in the underground, but he follows Gordon all the way to his rooms - or rather he shepherds him all the way there, together they manage with the door lock mechanism and despite it being a massive breach of security, it's Barney who inputs the numerical code to open the door in the end when Gordon can't seem to manage.
Deposited on the cheap mass-produced couch, Gordon kicks off his shoes and pulls his khaki-clad legs underneath himself while Barney messes around in the tiny kitchenette. Gordon had worked himself up to having the seniority enough to get his own kitchenette, it was a crowning achievement here at Black Mesa. Even if you didn't cook for shit, having a kitchenette meant you were considered a vital enough investment to be allowed a heating element in your dorm that wasn't a coffee maker.
It was a bit like perpetually living in a motel, when one thought about it. Less the college life and more hundreds of identical suites.
Barney crashes down next to him and shoves a glass of water at Gordon's chest. It doesn't manage to slosh and Gordon notes that Barney has even politely put a neon-pink bendy straw in it just for him.
He sips the water obediently and Barney puts his feet up on the coffee table.
He wants very badly to turn Barney's face toward him, to see that soft please smile up close. He wants even more to press forward, chase the taste of blue ribbon from the edges of his lips, follow deeper. He wants to drag his hands - or hand as the case may be tonight - over Barney's broad chest, the softness of his stomach, the stretch of his shoulders. Maybe five years ago he would have. If he'd met Barney when he was in college, not that it was at all likely seeing as Barney went to school on the entire opposite side of the country but still. Definitely not now that Barney was, is, the best friend he's ever had.
They'd hit it off like wild-fire from day one, Barney getting his dry and dark humor and Gordon obliging his conspiracy theories and charming warmth. A few months in and Barney had invited him to sneak onto a roof in the middle of the night, Gordon had come, half expecting Barney to confront him on Gordon's feelings. Instead there had been a cooler of beer, a blanket stretched out on the ground, and Barney's grin. Gordon told him the names of constellations and Barney made some up. UFO watching, except it's mostly star-gazing, and Barney didn't confront him, hasn't yet, but he also hasn't closed the distance between them either.
Gordon isn't open about his sexuality, but he's had boyfriends and girlfriends both, and one memorable night in which he had been propositioned at a bar by a couple and had ended up the very intimate meat in a sandwich.
When he puts the water glass down and reaches out to rest his hand upon Barney's arm, the guard turns his gaze from the ceiling to Gordon's face - his smile still easy and open.
He's a coward, he doesn't move in, he doesn't press his lips to Barney's smile, doesn't trace the curve with his tongue.
Gonna head to bed, you can camp on the couch if you want.
"Thanks Gord, I think I will." Barney pats him on the leg, makes him take the water to the bedroom with him.
He finishes half of the water while he sways on his feet, undressing and leaving the clothes he strips to the floor. He puts the arm sling on the bedside table and studies the bruising on his mending arm. The bone had been a clean break and a cleaner thing to heal for the mess of chemicals and other things. He didn't pretend to think he understood what it was that Black Mesa was working with that could heal a broken bone. Or where they got the samples they worked with in AnMat. He wasn't paid to think about where anything came from, only to get excited over the prospect of working with it, and he was - is. His college thesis has already been expanded on here, exponentially. There is so much to observe, so much to theorize on and then potentially prove or disprove.
He loves his job, really he does, he knows he is honored to be working here.
But breaking a bone hurts like a bitch. He curls up on his side and clicks off the light, remembers to remove his glasses only after he's already smashed them into his face via the pillow. He thinks about Barney removing his boots and jeans in the other room, about the months they've spent going to that bar or sneaking places they probably shouldn't. Lauren Calhoun hugging him and thanking him for keeping her brother out of trouble. It was her birthday soon, Gordon knew because Barney was at a loss for what to get her. Gordon's suggestion of flowers had been taken well, he only hoped Barney knew what she was and wasn't allergic to.
Gordon is allergic to dandelions, not that they were a flower usually used in bouquets, they were a weed, but still. Not that anyone had ever even gotten him flowers? Not even Kyle, although it wasn't as if they were open about their relationship anyway. When Kyle told him he was getting married but that didn't mean they needed to stop fucking, Gordon had politely ended it with him. Gordon had really wanted to deck Kyle and call him a bastard but well, the ever-present anger simmering under the surface had never exploded yet and Gordon was a patient man, maybe he never would - fated instead to go on in life with a steady undercurrent of seething rage. Was that actually normal? He didn't know to be honest.
He's thinking of what flowers Barney would get him, when he falls asleep.
You look like, a perfect fit, for a girl in need of a tourniquet.
Gordon sways along to Aimee Mann in the shower, eyes shut and head tilted up to the shower's spray, washing his hair with one hand.
But can you save me, come on and save me.
Gordon prefers vinyl but the bathroom isn't the place for his record player, so he listens to the CD he mail-ordered. He hasn't actually seen Magnolia, but he's listened to the soundtrack on repeat more than once while working. It fits his hangover just fine today.
If you could save me, from the ranks of the freaks, who suspect they could never love anyone.
He hangs his head down for the rinse, mouths out the words as the hot-hot water slides soap over his shoulders. There is a bang on the door and Barney's informal, "I'm comin' in."
Over Aimee Mann's voice crooning out Gordon's emotional state of being a perpetual bachelor in need of affection and human connection is the sound of Barney getting ready for work, swishing Gordon's mouth-wash, cleaning his face, flushing the toilet. "If you stay in there much longer you're gonna be late again, Gord." Barney warns him.
Gordon flips him off by sticking his hand out of the curtain and Barney laughs before letting himself out.
Except the freaks who could never love anyone.
When Gordon goes to run out the door, shoving his arm back into the sling and gathering the read-outs he'd dropped off before heading out to the bar he notices the cup of coffee Barney had made for him, waiting right there next to the door.
It is painfully domestic and Gordon sips his coffee as the tram carries him toward AnMat, perfectly sweetened and mellowed out with a heavy scoop of non-dairy creamer. Creamer of which Barney liked to tell him could cause cancer, even while putting it in his coffee for him, but if Gordon is going to get cancer from anything it will likely be a computer monitor. Also, Barney drinks his coffee plain and black which clearly means he has no soul or taste buds.
The guard who lets him out at the tram is named Harold, which Gordon knows because he's beat him at beer pong in the Security dorms above ground an undetermined amount of times. "Did Barney hook up in town or was he slumming it down with you guys?"
Gordon grins at him which is answer enough, he raises his cup of coffee to the man when he keys in the code for him and does the retinal scan. Some days more of the security staff will talk to him than the science staff and he knows he owes that to Barney, who had somehow decided he belonged at their weekly gatherings. He wonders sometimes what they think of him, if he's the weird mute nerd, or if he's actually been accepted as it seems he has.
The guard on the front desk gives him his messages, Dr. Vance wants to check in with him on the training yesterday and his request to use the supercomputer to run computations has gone through. When he throws the empty paper cup over his shoulder and effortlessly lands it in the waste bin on his way out it is to a short shout of excitement from the guard and the combined looks of annoyance and confusion from the loitering scientists and techs. This is probably why he 1. wins at beer pong all the time and 2. has more contact with the security team than his own.
He scarfs down a cold poptart in the break room and buys a bottle of overpriced water from the machine because he's starting to actually consider Barney's theory about the onsite water treatment facility putting mind-altering drugs into the tap water. The aging microwave hasn't given up yet but whenever he microwaves his poptarts someone looks at him weird and points out the perfectly working toaster.
He's just setting up at his desk to bring up the schedule for the supercomputer when Dr. Vance enters and shuts the door behind him, not actually the usual protocol for a meeting, Gordon instantly worries he's messed something up and the older man is going to gently berate him outside of earshot of the rest of AnMat. He wasn't THAT late!
What did I do?
Dr. Vance's kind face immediately takes on a rather guilty appearance, "No, no Gor- Doctor Freeman, you're fine. I just heard what happened during your training simulation yesterday and wanted to check on you." Gordon is aware that Eli Vance is a father, he's never met his child but he has been the recipient of a few nearly fatherly interactions with the man. Relief pours over him as he realizes he is just being worried after and hasn't messed up an equation or something serious.
I'm fine.
"You know, if it gets too much, you can always pause your training." Dr. Vance says it gently like it's not the most terrifying thing Gordon has ever considered. Months, they'd lose months of time, would have to train someone else and no one is even near Gordon's placement. He has been training with the HEV suit and anomalous environments for months now, he's the youngest scientist in AnMat. He had literally been physically training for half a year already, numb with horror he shakes his head and something in his expression must be less blank than he'd like it to be, because Dr. Vance gives a soft sigh, "The tests will wait, Gordon, you have to think about yourself too."
I'm fine. He signs it harder this time.
"You don't have to burn yourself out, you're young yet."
Gordon wants to tell him he's not that much younger than him, that just because he's married and has a kid and has seniority in AnMat, just because Gordon is a shut in who wont kiss his best friend, doesn't mean Gordon needs someone to tell him he doesn't have to break his body to pieces to prove a point. Because he knows that's what this is, it's the time the professor he was TA to had to take him aside in his office, hand warm and comforting on Gordon's shoulder and told him he wasn't going to green-light Gordon's request to double up his classes. He could have graduated two years earlier, damn it!
Thank you Dr. Vance, your concern is very kind. But I really am fine.
Smile, smile through the rage boiling under the surface. Dr. Vance gives up with a kind smile and a shrug of the shoulders.
The rage stays, all through his early morning meetings, the equations he runs on the supercomputer, lunch taken in silence, and the remaining hours spent running computations on the newest materials borrowed from Lambda. The frustration mounts when Dr. Keller, who doesn't know ASL, comes to 'discuss' his work on the last batch of materials and 'really this one equation just seems off' and he has to use the white-board to argue with the man, not argue, discuss their disagreement passively and with an objective toward polite reconciliation and a working resolution. Dr. Keller cuts Gordon off a few times, hard to do when Gordon is mute, and yet.
He excuses himself when it proves that Dr. Keller is too fucking stupid to admit he's wrong, doing so with a polite smile and and an apologetic wave. Takes his lab results and himself and shuts everything out in his office.
Barney must have gone everywhere looking for him, when he finds Gordon in the security dorm's gym, running his rage out on the treadmill he looks a little out of breath.
"Want to hit the shooting range with me?" Barney asks, as if he knows, as if just by looking at Gordon's carefully passive face, tense shoulders, and discarded arm sling, what a shit awful day he's had.
He dumps the arm sling in the trash on the way out, his arm aches down to the very bone and they told him to rest it for a week but the break is mended and the bruises are hidden by the long sleeve of his sweater so whose to say he was even hurt at all? He catches Barney looking at his arm a few times but the guard, his friend, says nothing about it all through the shooting range.
It was a rarity, that they do this. Gordon had asked Barney to teach him when he'd followed him in a few too many times during a conversation and had to wait. Something more to do with his hands, and the familiar motions center him as he checks the chamber and loads the beretta m9. Barney leans carefully in the opening of the booth behind him as Gordon unloads five of the fifteen rounds perfectly into the center of the moving target. The security staff who had seen him shoot had told him his mantra of 'it's just physics' was bullshit but that's really all it was. Computational math of trajectory and environmental input. There wasn't anything like windspeed in the firing range, but the few times he'd gone with Barney to the open-air range in town had been similarly (un)spectacular for Gordon.
His body feels loose after the guns are checked back in and the sweat has dried on his skin. Barney trails alongside him through the quiet tunnels of Black Mesa, toward the Science housing. "I'm sure glad we're friends so when you inevitably go postal I might survive." Barney is grinning at him, and Gordon smirk softly back at him.
He doesn't have to ask Barney inside, the guard follows him in too, and before Gordon can offer him a drink, Barney shocks him.
Gordon is tactile, he touches people, mostly unconsciously. Grounds himself in physicality and has always been a kinetic learner, retaining information by doing. In contrast Barney largely keeps his hands to himself. Over the months he's opened up with Gordon, yeah, but when he gently takes Gordon's arm in his strong sure hands, it is completely unexpected. Barney pushed his sleeve up, all the way to his elbow and Gordon stares down in numb shock. The bruising is ugly and mottled on his pale freckled skin, contrasted with the tan of Barney's hands it looks even worse.
"Gord, you gotta take care of yourself." When Barney says this it does not cause the same stream of anger to flow down his throat. It is a thrill of cool ice-water down his spine, a tingle along his nerve endings, makes his stomach clench up and get all fluttery at once. "Lets get some ice on this for twenty minutes and then put a heating pack on it, this has to be hurting you."
It does hurt, but with Barney's gentle hands holding his arm, he can barely feel it. They should bottle this up, Barney's warm concern, because it does more for Gordon than 10 mgms of morphine does, fuck.
Barney sets him down on the couch and puts a bag of frozen green beans on his arm. They watch a bootleg tape of MST3K Gordon swapped on the underground tape-trading circuit while Barney carefully times out alternating heating pad and frozen vegetable usage. Eventually Gordon starts to fall asleep to the sound of Tom Servo crooning out 'Creepy Girl' only rousing when he feels Barney's hand gently brush his hair back.
It feels so good that he closes his eyes and leans into it, so Barney does it again, gently carding his fingers through Gordon's hair. If he wasn't so bone-deep exhausted he might even be freaking out about this right now, but Barney is touching him and doesn't seem like it's something weird.
He blinks over at his friend in the light provided by the tv screen and the kitchenette's overhead. Warm smile, soft eyes, dark hair and five-o-clock shadow. Barney ruffles up his hair and finally removes his hand, "You need to eat something."
Probably.
But all he wants to do is sleep. So he doses off while Barney does something in his kitchen. He listens to it, pots and knife to chopping board. He doesn't even remember what he has in the half-fridge but Barney must have found whatever something is. When he presents Gordon with a bowl of ramen that has been beefed up with a soft boiled egg and vegetables he isn't too surprised.
Thanks.
He laughs silently and Barney settles down to eat his own bowl, they watch the end of the tape and Gordon turns off the white-noise static of the TV.
"So, whatcha doin' this weekend?" Barney asks him.
Nothing yet, what do you have in mind?
Barney grins at him softly and Gordon turns his attention to the noodles floating in cheap broth, because if he keeps looking at Barney right now, he might do something really stupid. Might do something like close the distance and kiss him or ask Barney to please touch his hair again because he thinks he could get addicted to that feeling if he isn't already, he is though. Barney is terribly easy to get addicted to.
CW: injuries, ptsd, panic attacks, maths, drug use (via the hev suit)
Alyx is gone, Gordon is running on fumes, Barney picks up the pieces
The dark hits like a freight train, thick and deep. It pulls down, down, down unrelenting and eternal. There is nothing and then there is everything. The stop-start of His voice grates on the very edge of frayed nerves, unraveling them, he is a patient man but his patience is running out, and he has expended his usefulness to an entity incomprehensible. Everything goes from too slow to too fast and he gasps awake and alive, put back into a body he never left. Eli is standing in front of him and Alyx is standing nowhere, somewhere - somewhere they can't reach, they have work to do - the Combine are not defeated yet and there is a missing Vance to find. Free but for how long and at what cost? Gordon looks down at his hand in the reinforced leather gloves of the HEV suit and tightens his grip on the paint-chipping-gently-rusted-crowbar. A nod, of course, they have work to do, and he's the man to do it.
It is in this manner that Gordon Freeman has survived the past six days. Six. Six Days. Running, running, never stopping, and it is in this manner that Gordon is ready to continue, ready to go where Eli needs him to, to save the man's daughter and Gordon's new found friend. Or it would have been, would have been if someone didn't put their hand on Gordon's arm and still him.
"Eli, I don't mean to put a damper on the Save Alyx party, but your golden boy is bleeding through whatever shitty bandages he scrounged up." The southern drawl is familiar, it is maybe his recognition of this that keeps his overtaxed nervous system from ripping his arm away. When he turns to look at him, Barney is carefully not looking back, staring Eli down instead.
The older man pauses, looks at Gordon, or maybe it's better to say he's looking at the HEV suit, at the huge chunk taken out of the side of it, the rend on the shoulder panel, the rust-red discoloration. Her voice had gone silent with the end of combat but the thrum of morphine still settled along the edge of his vision, a welcoming gossamer blanket that dulled the fact that he had bruised ribs and a dozen or so minor lacerations. A med-pack and a power bank and he'd be good to go, really. The suit though, she had some abuse left in her, but he couldn't deny that the past four days had been rough on the Mark V.
"We are going to need Izzy to take a look at that, maybe machine some new parts." Eli's smile is apologetic and Gordon could scream, how can he look like that, Gordon should be the one apologizing, if he'd been more careful, more prepared, then they wouldn't need this downtime.
He isn't thinking clearly, he knows this somewhat, without a clear objective he was left adrift, unfocused. It's worse than when He had dropped Gordon onto a train with no fucking hope of knowing what the hell was going on. Twenty years, twenty years, and if it hadn't of been for Barney he'd have ended up organic byproduct.
Four days ago he had watched a Civil Protection officer remove his mask and found himself saved. Today, suddenly dead on his feet, he looks down at Barney and hopes that the imminent panic attack he feels encroaching upon him won't be too bad, even if it is four days late.
He is breathing too fast and his heartbeat is high enough that she's informing him about it, but the HEV suit is unfortunately out of the Make Feel Good Juice and Gordon is all out of helpful neurochemicals. Someone shouts something and Gordon knows it's not him because, well, he's mute.
When the black comes this time it is not the thick ink of that cosmic stasis, it's all too human and humiliating.
In high school Gordon had two entire friends. One of them was the head of the computer club, which meant the paper-punch-machine club actually, and the other was a quiet kid whose entire personality seemed to be based on being in color guard for JROTC. One day during a pep rally he'd forgotten to keep his knees loose and locked them during the stand at attention part of the presentation, Gordon didn't know what any of these things were actually called, he just knew his friend wound up with a bloody nose when he passed out because of the hypotension. Yet still, five years later, Gordon himself passed out while waiting for a train in Boston.
His head hurt far less when he woke up this time, perhaps because Eli, Barney, and Dog had all been there to catch him instead of the metal post he crashed into in Boston.
There are a number of hands on him, when he can focus and his flight or fight response isn't lashing out at these helping hands, he realizes he's managed to punch Barney in the jaw and kicked Dog off balance.
Barney surges forward and pins him down, which is when Gordon goes completely limp anyway due to his relatively short spurt of adrenaline wearing off and the fact that it's Barney Calhoun he just punched and if this man wanted to throttle him he would let him, deserving of it even.
Instead Barney just holds his chest down with one arm and gently grips Gordon's jaw with the other, forcing Gordon to look at him. This close and he can do nothing else. Barney's eyes have always been interesting but age has highlighted the color differences in his irises. Gordon's vision, while blurry around the edges thanks to the train-tunnel effects of his passing panic attack, is sharply focused on Barney, where Barney is keeping him.
He was so bad at art growing up but one didn't need to be good at art to know the science behind color. Barney's eyes were both the clearest most summer-day-water blue-green and the deepest autumnal wood. Brown and teal, unreal and so very Barney. There is a word for this condition but Gordon's grasping at straws right now and can't remember it. They're just very unusual eyes and Gordon is quite helplessly falling into them.
"You with me Gordon?" Barney asks him and Gordon nods, or tries to, attempts to, kind of hard with the former guard turned resistance commander still gripping his face but the attempt is all that matters and Barney lets him go.
He's laying on the ground, one of Barney's legs is under him, Eli's hands are on Gordon's own legs. Dog is huge and hovering. Face red from embarrassment now, Gordon pushes up onto his elbows in a reclining position and Barney takes his leg back.
He forms his hand into a fist and brings it to his chest, moving it in a tight circle around and around.
"No Gordon, I'm sorry." Eli gently stops his hand, silences him. "We have work to do, but you won't be able to do anything until we get you cleared by a medic and get Izzy to take a look at that suit."
Together they help him up, the HEV suit's finally powered down, but she'd been running on fumes for hours now. Unfortunately this makes his already aching and fatigued muscles scream out from being overtaxed.
"I've got him, Eli."
They're in the hallway outside the large hangar that comprises Eli's lab by the time Gordon realizes that he hasn't seen Barney since the train station back in City 17. When had he gotten here? Had he seen Eli die and then Not die, had he seen Alyx just stop existing? Because Gordon fucking hadn't, he'd been blacked out - again. Was Barney alright himself? Had he just arrived only to have to babysit him?
He spins his index finger around and around in front of himself, he feels drunk, his movements are slow and sluggish.
Despite Barney actively corralling him down the hall, his eyes are riveted to Gordon's hands.
"When?" He nods and Barney seems to chew over what Gordon is asking, "Oh, just a few hours ago, I barely get settled in and hear about a ruckus, you're constantly causing trouble aren't you?" The tone is teasing, warm, Barney's voice is like a balm, pours right over him like the decadent kiss of morphine without the accompanying very hot sensation in his head.
Six days, it's only been six days, but for Barney and Eli and -everyone- it's been twenty years. Without the pressing need to run, save Barney from sniper fire, or get shoved into another HEV suit, he is free to realize that an implied twenty year gap is doing absolutely nothing to curb the huge and inconvenient crush he has had on Barney for a year. A year for him at least. The streak of salt in his mostly pepper hair is also doing absolutely nothing to curb this crush either, in fact he would go so far as to consider it made it worse.
Unfortunately free of the effects of morphine, coming down off of a panic attack, and now feeling the full impact of his wounds, Gordon has to admit it's not a crush if you've been in love with someone for a year, that's just pathetic.
Now a resonance cascade, eldritch abomination cosmic entities Lovecraft couldn't have dreamed up, and a full blown occupation of earth had put Gordon out of the picture for twenty years. It had also caused him to be a near messianic figure to a whole race of alien creatures and the remnants of humanity - something he really didn't want to think about. Luckily when Barney looked at him he seemed to be seeing Gordon in the exact same way he did twenty years ago if the soft smile and warm honey gaze was anything to go by. Bemused, that's what he'd call that particular expression on Barney's face.
They stop suddenly, Barney bringing them to a halt, which is when Gordon finally looks away from him. They're in a quiet room, maybe a former storage room but now a private bunk. There is a cot up against the back wall, tucked between two mostly full shelving units. A heap of blankets has been dumped on the cot, as well as a number of packs placed on the shelves. There is a basin and a bucket of water for washing, and Gordon can spy some first aid packs and weapon caches amidst the cluttered shelves.
"I'm going to get you out of this fucking thing and then I'm gonna get you a medic." Barney informs him but Gordon is looking past him to the basin and it's bucket of water.
He puts his hands together and brushes them against one another in a mimicry of washing his hands. Clean.
"I'm sure the medic will know what's best for that."
Gordon, standing still in the center of the room, attention riveted on the bucket of water like it's a lifeline, repeats himself until Barney has to catch his hands - again.
"Okay!" But there isn't any hostility or exasperation in Barney's tone, no he's laughing instead.
"Far be it for me to judge a man's aversion to getting seen by the medics when I avoid them myself. We'll get you clean and go from there, that good?"
Gordon nods, and even though he knows he won't make it without Barney's assistance, he heads toward the basin and bucket anyway, grateful when he finds Barney is right there next to him.
Without the suit's charging station and hydraulic mechanism to quickly and mechanically free him, it is just the combined effort of their four hands and Barney's seemingly infinite patience to remove the thing. But even patience alone didn't account for how Barney seemed to know where the clasps and mechanisms were. Gordon is reminded that it was Barney who had gotten him 'into' the suit or showed him to it four days ago. These thoughts prove to be fruitless, without purpose, as the pieces of the very abused HEV suit are removed and the jumpsuit beneath them is revealed as are the injuries Gordon has sustained, the bandages he'd hastily applied in stolen moments of down time on his own or with Alyx's help. Barney pauses, the chest plate removed as well as the shoulder guards, and he seems to just stare at Gordon.
The last twenty years loom between them again, Gordon can't read his expression so carefully tooled to be neutral and blank, not the Barney whose emotions he wore plain for everyone to see unless it was poker night. There is a scar high on his left cheek, a number of smaller ones all over - and these are just the ones Gordon can see on his face.
"Oh Gordon, what happened to you?" There is such soft sorrow in Barney's words and when the man puts his hand to Gordon's cheek, he is helpless to keep himself from turning his face into the touch, closing his eyes and pressing his cheek and jaw into that gloved palm with all of his touch-starved needy heart. Barney's touch is no longer precise and perfunctory, it is gentle, when he draws his hand away Gordon almost chases it but manages to catch himself before he can further his own humiliation. Something has shifted between them and Barney won't let his slipping hands help anymore, just keeps batting them away, finally Barney grins up at him, "I've got you." He repeats what he told Eli but now it's completely different, personal and soft, just the two of them, "So stop makin' my job harder and just let me work."
Gordon lets him work, when he sways on his feet Barney steadies him. When he leans into him Barney catches him. The rest of the suit joins the other sections on the ground. When it's just the bloodied jumpsuit and Gordon's socked feet on the cold concrete, Barney's hands still.
A week ago and this fantasy would have played out differently, for one he wouldn't be riddled with defensive wounds and have obvious trauma, but also Barney wouldn't be looking at him with that mixture of soft worry and likely muted fury. He actually didn't know what Barney's aroused face looked like so his fantasies had always been a little body focused anyway but definitely no fury or worry in any of them. Barney's hand goes to his injured side, gentle against the tattered jumpsuit and the bandages. It's all dirty with blood and whatever else Gordon had been thrown into out there.
"Darlin' I'm gonna have to get you out of this."
Gordon nods, dumbly, hung up on the first word.
Barney's hands are so gentle and Gordon reels under their good works, he can't track where they are going only where they've been, the slow way they move, there is no predictive model here to tell him where to brace himself for kindness next. Actually seeing the mottled mess of his own skin through the rends in the jumpsuit is an experience that knocks him right out of his body entirely.
Where A and B are a pair of operators, with A representing speed and B representing placement - Gordon is a lone man set on a trajectory in the universe he has no hope of comprehending or tracking, the speed with which he has been traveling has slowed to a stop and yet he still feels as if he is going too fast. His body at stand still thrums with an energy he is powerless against and every time Barney's hands track against baring skin his pulse jumps. He cannot predict where he will be in a day, an hour, a minute, he is lost in this second, that drags and drags as Barney's eyes glance up to meet his face, undoing the line of velcro all the way down Gordon's chest and lower still. His head spins and he has to reach out to brace himself against Barney's firm padded shoulder, thick and strong.
He is adrift in a complex dimensional space that tracks over multiple planes of reality, his wavelength has resonated at a frequency that no one else on Earth has and yet he is still so uncertain of his place. Not too surprising when the equation clearly states that you might know how fast you're going but never where you are at the same time. Just usually it was on the quantum level, not one man against a time-space anomaly. His speed and location operators are held up between two brackets, and within those brackets are the estimated answers to his questions, yet if he's standing still how can he hope to theorize where he'll be next?
Where he'll be next is shivering in this bunk he's realizing is probably the one Barney claimed to stow his gear in, with the door shut and a man he has been attracted to for the longest time slowly undressing him. Logic states the probability that his next place will be embarrassing the ever loving shit out of himself but somehow, somehow he doesn't make a noise when Barney slides the jumpsuit down from his abused shoulders and down, down, till the man's hands are sliding over his hips and drawing the dirty green cloth past them. He doesn't move to grab onto him, to press his body into Barney's and just feel him, to test the strength hiding beneath the layers of his Civil Protection uniform. He does go very limp when Barney manhandles him to lean against the wall though.
All predictive models and the familiar Robertson-Schrodinger equation fall to the wayside when Barney strips his thick gloves off. Gordon watches the man's steady movements, the slow curve of his familiar smile despite time and distance. He could never hope to apply the uncertainty equation when all higher functioning is gone. He is no longer out of his body, he is in it, very much in it. Barney's hands are warm from the confines of his gloves, gentle as they tackle the bandages scattered on Gordon's now scrawny form out of the bulk of the HEV suit's flattering lines.
"You okay there, Gord? Look like you're about to be knocked over by a stiff wind."
He gives Barney a thumbs up.
Yeah, really okay, super duper okay. Barney's hands feel like fucking rapture. Warm and lightly callused, strong firm grip when they move Gordon's body every which way. Unwinding bandages that have clearly served their purpose, some of them stick and Barney apologizes under his breath, muttered words and quick movements. Gordon only vaguely registers the pain, it cannot hope to touch the surface of pleasure just having Barney's hands against him is causing.
He reaches out to brace himself against the basin's counter top, hip cocked under Barney's hand momentarily, Gordon tries to swallow around the thick lump in his throat. Warm hand skids up his side, bloody bandage that wraps across half his chest. Barney unravels it the same as he'd done the one on Gordon's right leg and his left arm, careful and quick. Dirty wounds and sepsis waiting to set in.
But despite the severity Barney doesn't dump him on the nearest medic, he holds to his word instead and brings the bucket of water up to the counter. A rag is fetched from somewhere and then Barney is cleaning him. Gordon would be more embarrassed about this if it were not for the fact that he only has one arm as the other is bracing him up to keep him from sliding to the floor as the HEV suit's power system isn't holding him up and pumping him with Go Juice.
Barney gives him a little grin, holding Gordon's abused arm over the basin to catch the blood-grit water as it drips off of him, "You're in pretty good shape for a man of science."
Gordon snorts his bemusement and gives Barney a look over his glasses. Barney would fucking know, he'd helped Gordon train for the months of HEV suit preparation after all. He worries for a second then, has it been that long, has Barney forgotten that much in the years Gordon has been absent.
His fears are laid to rest instantly, "Remember when you couldn't even run a full mile?"
Yeah, and look at him now. Well not right now, as he looks nothing like the implied messianic figure he's meant to be, but rather look at him a few hours ago. When Alyx was still there, making bad puns and cheering Gordon on, when she wasn't somewhere, in some place unknown and unfathomable and most of all not here. What would have been the next point of reference for them, where would they be right now if she'd remained? Did this count as time travel?
I feel like all I have done is run for six days.
Barney pauses, while Gordon had managed to explain his ageless appearance to Alyx, the rest of his old friends and colleagues weren't as in the know. "Six days?" Barney marvels, hanging there like a DOS box trying it's best to load badly written code, "It's been twenty years, six days?" Barney's voice is husked and worn when he repeats himself and he lets Gordon's now clean arm drop gently back down.
Gordon nods, Stasis, no time passed for me mentally or physically between the Resonance Cascade and you intercepting me.
"Fuck Gordon." Barney reaches up, takes his face in the slightly damp palm of his hand, holds him there and really seems to look at him. "Kind of thought you just aged really damn well, it was hard enough to believe the 'gaunts when they went on about you saving them, didn't... I didn't realize, something like this could happen."
Gordon has nothing else of substance to offer Barney to explain it. It would take far more research and model running to even begin to formulate a working theory about what the fuck He was in his plain grey suit and stilted speech. He figured in the coming days he'd have time to do that, now that it was Alyx who had been taken. Now that there was someone on the outside who knew.
What took Alyx, is what took me.
Eli had some understanding of this entity, he didn't know how, but he was certain he'd find that out soon too, just as soon as his fragile worthless body would let him.
Barney is still touching his face, still half holding him, when he finally notices he seems to come to his senses and applies himself back to the task of cleaning off dried blood and other muck. Gordon would miss the contact if it had not just moved onward to other parts of him. There are more cuts on him than there is water in the bucket but Barney focuses his attention on the worst of it. Barney's touch lingers on the surface of his skin even after he has moved his hand away, a burning path of warmth and water. Gordon realizes he doesn't want to go anywhere right now, he doesn't want to think of tomorrow or an hour away, he wants this moment to last.
He can breathe, painful but he can breathe and he is finally still. The Combine awaits, there is no knowing where Alyx is, how much time they have, but right now in this moment he can push down the guilt and allow himself the desire to remain here in this place with Barney eternally. The stroke of a familiar hand, the warm presence of someone who cares about him, the gentle teal-brown heat of his friend's gaze.
"You're back with us now and damned if I'll just sit around and let some kind of creature put you in a box for another twenty years. I've got you."
Gordon wonders how badly he's going to end up hung up on Barney's new mantra of, 'I've got you.' Trick question, he's already hung up on everything Barney.
Cw: graphic descriptions of panic attacks, ptsd, severe trauma, depictions of injuries, drugs
Gordon gets a weed card (this isn’t as funny as it sounds)
20 Hours after Xen
He can't stand it, too bright, too much sun, and too much dog. He likes dogs, and now that Sunkist isn't a jpg he even likes him a lot more, albeit if he stares too long sometimes he does seem a little... flat... off in the distance. After the third dog licks his hand and reminds him he has a right hand, he has to sit down. It isn't his fault it's intimately ingrained in him to offer sniff-hand as dominant hand.
Tommy drifts onto the bench next to him, not too close, not too far. If Gordon needed to he could reach out and graze his fingers against the tie dye t-shirt the young man is wearing. Wait how old is Tommy again?
God, he feels so fucking old, he's only 27, he's pretty sure Tommy is in his thirties, the birthday was JUST yesterday.
"Are you alright, Mr. Freeman?" Tommy asks.
"Just a little winded."
Tommy makes a soft humming sound, out here, out of Black Mesa, the strange static tint to everyone's words had faded, hearing Tommy in crystal clear clarity made the whole traumatic situation somehow seem like a bad dream. The glaring bruises that tugged at him whenever he moved were pretty much singing in neon lights, 'hey fucker you just went through hell.' He can hear the ghost of a pleasant female voice whispering 'morphine administered.'
"Tommy, I need you to check me into rehab if I start buying street drugs at any point." He says apropos of absolutely nothing.
"Of course, Mr. Freeman! Do you want me to help you get a medical marijuana card?"
Gordon pauses, remembers college - not sleeping for two days, hyper-focused on his books, ink stained hands and his roommate passing him the blunt, the bright incandescent feeling of anxiety melting away like the clearest blue - "Actually, yeah."
Tommy takes him to a chain clinic and fills out the paperwork for him while he walks around the strip mall with Sunkist, he's pretty sure that it would be illegal for Tommy to come out of there with a weed card for him without him ever setting foot in the establishment but also that he's killed an unknown percentage of the US military so what even is legality at this point.
Sunkist barks and takes off down the intersection between two strip malls and Gordon blanches, following at a half-trot, body angrily telling him, hey fucknugget what do you think you're doing moving like that?
Turning the corner he sees Sunkist has stopped, paws up on the edge of a concrete and pebble garden decoration. It's like one of those needless blocks of concrete they put outside malls and fill with non-native flowers. But this one has a tree planted in the middle, a fountain under the tree, and a large number of shrine-like objects Gordon does not have the cultural connotations to decipher the meaning of. Sunkist is watching the water pour down the fountain and stays propped up there for Gordon to finally catch the dog's leash.
When he notices the face watching him from around the tree he screams, breaking the nice quiet serenity of the hidden courtyard.
Benrey puts his hands to his ears, his helmet-less head covered by the grey hood of a jacket, inhuman eyes scrunch up in pain, "shh, why you do a big loud?"
Gordon doesn't say what's fire hot and klaxon noise blaring in his skull, he doesn't say 'you're dead, we killed you' he turns, with Sunkist's leash in the iron grip of his hand, and walk-runs away, panting, vision blurring, his chest hurts, fuck is he having a heart attack?
Some distant sweet song of logic informs him in a voice that sounds nauseatingly like the HEV suit's AI, panic attack imminent.
Yeah no shit, he's in it.
He doesn't get fully around the corner, he's heaving, looses grip of Sunkist's leash, he's spinning in circles it can't possibly be the whole world spinning instead. Blindly he moves his hands to brace for something, his vision collapsing in on itself like he's going through a portal, like he's back in Black Mesa.
There is a hand on his arm, one at the back of his neck under the hot-heat of his ponytail. The world is blue like a '98 vintage pop song.
When the edges of his vision clear, when he finds himself again, Sunkist is leaning against his legs and has him pressed up to a wall, the courtyard is empty - just the two of them.
Tommy's voice comes from far away like at the bottom of a well, Gordon registers slowly that no, it's him who is just fucked up not hurry lassie, Tommy’s fallen down a well. His hearing hasn't come back completely, still partially stuck in that hellish panic-tunnel. Sunkist keeps him from moving, from falling down, and then Tommy is there, nervously fidgeting in front of him, not touching, just anxiety incarnate. Or that was him, ha.
"Did you see him? Did you see that eldritch fucktruck?" Gordon slurs, looking, searching.
"Who?"
Gordon bites it down, he's too raw to admit he's probably hallucinating. Shakes his head, still trembling.
Tommy drops him off at home with overpriced pharmaceutical grade weed and the reminder that he's just a phone call away. Gordon has to assure him he's fine a total of 5 times. He's not fine, he's so far away from fine.
Listening to his son on the phone, his sister telling him about the craft fair she'd be working tomorrow, he lays on the floor of his living room and smokes like he did in college, till the world goes soft. His sister reminds him to eat enough protein before she hangs up. He hasn't eaten all day, but it's too late to get up now, the fucking world is melting.
When a hand touches his hair, the side of his face, he opens his eyes to see Benrey crouched over him, body tucked up above his head, looking down at Gordon not with a shit-eating grin or nothing at all but instead a look of anxiety and something Gordon is too fucking high to quantify right now. He laughs, a warm sound that rumbles through his chest, this doesn't seem to make Benrey feel any better, Gordon doesn't understand why, he thinks shit is hilarious.
"Yo, are you real bro?" Gordon asks.
"i coulda done this for free, i do it all the time, for you, be a cool, and what, you dont need me? gordon too good for black mesa sweet voice?"
"You said my name again." Is what Gordon chooses to take out of that exchange.
He's pretty sure when he wakes up later he's stress-hallucinating some kind of horror-terror. There isn't therapy for this, is there?
Cw: mentions of past suicide, gore, ptsd, severe trauma, depictions of injuries, drugs
Gordon begins recovering from Black Mesa, not that he’s aware that’s whats happening
4 Hours after Xen
Gordon is contemplating the tangled mess of his hair in his bathroom mirror. He'd had to cut the hair band out and with it had come a mess of dried-blood clumps and tangled hair. This is the last step before he can wash Xen off of him, wash Black Mesa clean from his skin. He's already pried himself out of the HEV suit, each excruciating piece after the other taking more time than the last as he'd gone from extremities to core.
The morphine injection site is a mottled bruised red from the sheer amount of drug the suit had been pumping into his system and it's a brilliant collar that rings his neck. It's the last thing his eyes focus on and the last thing that is sharp clarity when he takes his glasses off and carefully places them on the bathroom countertop. The spray is hard and hot and he closes his eyes against it and lets his body shift sideways till his weight is held up by the frankly freezing shower wall but he doesn't have the energy or ability to keep himself upright long enough for the arduous task of scrubbing away days of trauma. So it's the cold tile wall and the water running down the drain tinged red and slow mechanical movements.
He can't see them clearly for shit, but each swipe of the ragged washcloth reveals new bruises. The HEV suit had clearly kept him alive but at a toll he should have been recovering from in a hospital instead of his rent-past-due apartment.
Fuck that, he wasn't going to a hospital where the government could track him down and put a bullet in his brain.
Predictably it wasn't the state of his body that was the most arduous task to clean up but his hair. Matted up blood, viscera he couldn't even hazard a guess as to the source of, and torn strands all made their way down to the drain to clog it up for Future Gordon to deal with.
Stretching his hands, his hands fuck, both of them God, stretching his fingers through slowly untangling strands felt like literal euphoria. Almost as good at the first hit of morphine from the suit. Which fuck, that wasn't a pleasant correlation to make actually, was that going to be a problem for Future Gordon too? Had he managed to get himself dependent on morphine too?
A week wasn't enough to give him withdrawals most likely, and as the last big mat gave way so did the tangle of his thoughts. The water felt so good, just having something touching his skin that wasn't the skin tight pressure of the HEV suit, to feel the movement and sharp sting of air against him. None of the others had been very tactile and Gordon well, he was, is. Just the sensation of his own hands, of the brush of the cloth over his skin is enough to nearly bring him to tears. Finally managing to wash his hair does, and he cries silently, hanging his head under the fall of water.
He's safe, but he's not safe, he isn't sure he'll ever feel or be safe again. But this is enough for now, this singular moment in time where it is him, heat, silence. Joshua is with his sister in Arizona for the summer, he's safe and far away from Gordon and the mess he's made of his life.
He doesn't bother with a towel, he doesn't have the physical strength to prop himself up long enough to dry himself. Instead he crawls into his bed, wet hair on the pillows as if he could give a single fuck because it's an actual pillow, it's his pillow in his bed, in the relative quiet of his suburban neighborhood apartment in this small not-so-gated community.
Before he's even fully stretched out on the bed the thick scrambling fingers of sleep are reaching up to pull him down. Thick as gossamer, tangling and tugging on his consciousness. There is a moment of strange deja vu as the last thing his blurry eyes register is not the pain-red-brown-green of the bruising of his jugular but a faintly pleasant and nigglingly familiar blue. Sleep has a stranglehold on him and he's down before the slow caress of a hand down the bare expanse of his spine can even register.
18 hours after Xen
Gordon wakes up extremely dehydrated, his head throbbing, stumbling to the bathroom finds the rest of his body is a mess of similar aches and pains. When he's swallowing naproxen via handfuls of water brought from the tap to his mouth by cupped hands, he manages to catch sight of his blurry reflection in the mirror.
After putting on his glasses he finds he sort of wishes he hadn't. He looks in the words of a dead extraterrestrial or somefuck entity, a bit shit. He feels worse than he looks. His stomach is threatening to eat itself, his throat is dry, his skin is simultaneously on fire and numb. His nude form is absolutely painted with bruises.
In the bright mid-day light coming in through the frosted glass of the bathroom window he can make out the faintest ring of scar tissue around the circumference of his right arm.
While walking around his apartment naked had been the first thing a young adult Gordon Freeman had done when he rented his first apartment solo, he was begining to feel entirely too underdressed and unshielded. After finally getting the damned thing off, not having the thick layers of insulation protecting him against the rest of the world made him feel naked even with the pullover and slacks he pulled on. Summer in New Mexico wasn't a pleasant season to be pulling on a cardigan but he pushed up the AC to compensate, the sound of the overhead vents pushing out recycled air was familiar in a nausteating way.
When he was stuck in Black Mesa all he could think about was getting out, getting free, breathing the sun-baked air of the outside world. Standing now in his living room he could not fathom the idea of going outside. Loud, uncompromising, dangerous.
He needed therapy, probably way more help than even therapy, he needed a bleached brain. This wasn't like walking in to the garage to find his father in the family van, brain matter splattered on the driver-side window from where he'd shot himself in the head. This wasn't like the years of moving and pulling up roots, of never making friends for longer than a few months, this was so much more, so much thicker.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, and the quiet is closing in on him, the sound of the AC isn't enough, his own breathing is going fast, his heart feels like a violent creature burrowing into his chest, he's sweating and cold all at the same time.
He probably bruises his pelvis slamming against the kitchen counter in front of the wall-mounted telephone but whats one more bruise to a body full of them. His hands scramble against the receiver and the number pad, the dialtone is the counterpoint to his mental breakdown.
"Hello, this is Tommy Coolatta!"
"T-tommy, hey, hey bud it's, it's Gordon."
"Hello Mr. Freeman! It's so good to hear from you!" In the background there is a bark, Sunkist.
Gordon bends double against the counter till his forehead hits the faux marble, cool sinking into his skin, he laughs short shaky sounds, his heartrate crescendos, a cresting wave, it feels like rapture when it drops.
"Hey, how are you, how are you doing?" Please don't ask it back, he's not sure how he could even respond, he doesn't know.
“I’m really good! I was about to take Sunkist to the dog park, would you like to come?”
He doesn’t think his nerves can stand it but he says yes anyway.
The dreams start out pretty tame, memories of Black Mesa but slightly altered. Benrey is often there when he shouldn't be, or pieces, places, events happen out of the right order.
Their conversations start out antagonistic, riddled with Gordon's fears and paranoia and Benrey's complete and utter inability to make fucking sense ever. Yet despite this Gordon still can't help it when he reaches out, a hand on a shoulder a gentle shove, a nudge of elbow to rib but not hard enough to hurt or knock the air from non-exsistant lungs. He's a tactile person, he's always been.
Weeks of this go by and he never realizes it's a dream till he's awake until the night he leans back on warm concrete still giving off heat from a sun that set hours ago only to feel the bare skin of his arms touch the ground. He sits up abruptly to look down at himself, at his hands uncovered pressed to the roof, the stretch of his legs in the worn jeans he's had since uni with the rip on one knee, the t-shirt he wore around the house to clean in with the paint stains marring the already faded text of a restaurant chain he worked at while getting his doctorate.
"What the fuck?"
Benrey turns his head to look at him, the movement drawing Gordon's gaze. His eyes are half lidded and yet they glint oddly in the dark shadow made from his helmet.
"This is a dream, this can't be real." They'd just been talking shit to each other about something, but Gordon can't care less now, and the slow inhuman grin that stretches across Benrey's face gives him a mixture of feeling and bodily responses he really doesn't have the faculties to unpack right now.
"y... yeah man, yeah now we're... now we're talkin. finally caught up, failman."
