Beneath Gunmetal Skies - Chapter 65
Marcus knows his role on his team: he’s the one who carries the gun, makes the hard calls - and takes the hits. He has no time or patience for anyone or anything else. But when Jake - a brand-new recruit Marcus has been tasked with training - messes up on his first mission and gets them both captured, nothing could prepare Marcus for the way his world quickly spirals out of control.
AO3
Masterlist
This is a series. Start here, continued from here.
Levy: (historical) the act of enlisting someone for military service
Contents: post-rescue, comfort, field medicine, pain medication, aftermath of torture, nonsexual nudity, bruises, trauma reveal, cracked ribs, protective caretaker, implied mouth whump, broken bones, amputee, touch starved whumpee, touch starved Marcus, guilt, angst, kissing
~
Once the bullet graze was sutured, Lars had Jake roll onto his back so they could take a look at the front of his body. With the dilaudid, it didn’t seem to hurt Jake nearly as badly. Lars cut away the sleeves of Jake’s shirt and lifted the scraps off of him. Marcus forced himself to hold very still as he saw that Jake had been whipped on his chest and stomach, too – multiple times, judging by the state of some of the marks. He kissed Jake’s hair, then pressed a kiss into his temple.
“Jeeeeesus,” Lars said as they gently ran their fingers over the massive bruises stretching across Jake’s ribs. “What the fuck did they beat you with, a crow bar?”
Jake’s throat bobbed. “Th-those were from them kicking me, mostly,” he said. “Steel-toed boots, I think. A f-few punches, too.”
Lars pressed gently on a bruise. Jake cried out and shied away.
Marcus’s lip curled. He glared at Lars over Jake’s body. It took everything in him not to tear their hand off Jake and keep tearing until it wasn’t connected to their own body, either.
They met his eyes. “Sorry, Jake,” they said. “I’m guessing you have some cracked ribs, maybe even broken.” They picked up a stethoscope and set it lightly against Jake’s chest. They moved it, taking a listen each time Jake breathed. Satisfied, they took it off. “Doesn’t sound like your lung is collapsing, though. You probably would have known it before now, but, you know. Never hurts to check.”
Jake whimpered softly and nodded. Lars turned their attention to Jake’s broken right arm. “Alright. Time to splint this, okay?”
Jake nodded again. “P-please,” he croaked. “It hurts.”
“Okay.” Lars got to their feet and went to the door. “It’s in my closet, give me just a sec.”
Marcus held Jake in the silence. Jake cracked his eye open and looked up at Marcus from the circle of his arms. Marcus leaned down and gently kissed Jake’s nose.
“How’s the pain?” Marcus said.
Jake’s lip trembled as he looked up silently at Marcus.
Marcus decided he would ask Todd later about the risk of rust. For now, he used his metal thumb to wipe a tear from Jake’s cheek, taking painstaking care to be as gentle as he possibly could. “You don’t have to be in pain anymore, Jake. If it still hurts, you can have something for the pain.”
More tears coursed down Jake’s cheeks. “Everything hurts,” he whimpered. “My head, my throat, my back, my ribs, m-my… everything.”
“Okay.” Another kiss. Maybe Jake would get tired of that soon, but until that happened, Marcus was going to keep on doing it. For as long as Jake let him. For as long as Jake had him. He lifted his head as Lars walked back into the room. “He needs more pain meds.”
Lars lowered themself to their knees beside the bed, carrying a brace in their hand. “Okay… Jake, how bad is the pain on a scale from one to—”
“Now,” Marcus snarled.
Lars’s eyes went a little wide. Marcus felt a scratch in the back of his mind at the sight of that – of their hands flinching the slightest bit with the sound of his raised voice, the briefest flick of their eyes to the open door of the bedroom. He felt the scratch between two halves of him.
One half felt… something uncomfortably close to guilt. It would be nice, if Lars learned to trust him. Good, even. Jake had learned to trust him, even after he had done so little to deserve it. Maybe he could do it again, with a second person.
The other half liked the fear; it got results. Fear was the most effective motivator he knew of.
He looked down at Jake’s beaten, broken body in his arms, tried to imagine what could have possibly kept him alive through six weeks of torture. He thought of how it felt when he pulled Jake into his arms for the first time since they’d been torn apart from each other, when Jake had heaved that first shaky, raw sob in his embrace.
Maybe fear was the second most effective motivator.
“S-sorry,” he forced out.
“It’s okay,” Lars said, already picking up another vial of dilaudid. “That was… kinda a dumb question. I can see that he’s in pain.” Once they had drawn up the medication, they injected it into the line of IV fluids. It was almost empty. Jake would need another bag soon.
“You’re getting more meds, Jake,” Marcus said. “It’ll be okay soon.”
Jake nodded. “Th-thank you, Lars,” he said, teeth gritted against the pain. “Thank you.”
Marcus’s stomach dropped. He hadn’t noticed it until now; one of Jake’s front teeth was chipped.
What the fuck did they do to you?
“Yeah,” Lars murmured. “My pleasure, Jake.” They reached for his arm. “Now, can I put this on you? It’ll help with your pain, okay?”
“And then… his back? You’ll stitch up his back?” Marcus chewed his lip.
“No.” Lars gently lifted Jake’s arm, their mouth turning down as he let out a twisted cry of pain. “Those wounds are too old. They’ll have to just heal and close on their own. I’ll keep them clean, keep an eye on them. But no more stitches unless he has some fresh wounds that are less than like… four hours old.”
Jake shook his head. “No,” he croaked. “I th-think that’s it.”
“Okay.” Lars tightened the Velcro straps on the splint and set Jake’s arm down on his chest. “I’ll just check your legs and then we should be good.”
“And then he can put clothes back on, right?” Marcus said, doing his best not to stare Lars down again.
They met his gaze. “Yeah. Jake, I’d like to get this blood off you first, and then I’ll bind your ribs. That’ll serve as a bandage for your back, too. Then I can get you into some fresh clothes. I’ll get the puppy pads out from under you and get a real blanket over you. That all sound good?”
Jake nodded. He didn’t look anywhere but at Marcus – as if he still couldn’t believe what he was seeing. As if there was a part of him that still believed it was all just a dream – or that Marcus was a ghost.
As Marcus cradled Jake, Lars pulled out a container of baby wipes and began gently scrubbing the blood from Jake’s body – from his face, from his neck, from his left arm and chest. The space blanket crinkled as they carefully tugged Jake’s pants off his hips and scrubbed where blood had soaked into his waistband. They drew Jake’s pants the rest of the way off, the corners of their mouth turning down as they checked Jake for injuries.
Marcus braced.
“Just a hell of a lot more bruises,” Lars said, as if to themself. “Fuck.” They let the blanket cover Jake’s body once more as they carried his bloody clothes out of the room. Huddled against Marcus’s side, naked and bruised, Jake felt unbearably tender to Marcus’s touch. He wasn’t sure what was worse: touching him with his metal hand, unable to feel how much pressure was too much… or touching him with his flesh-and-blood one, and feeling each pulse of blood under Jake’s bruises, each shudder of pain, each ripple of goosebumps. Touching Jake was like touching an open wound.
And yet Jake didn’t pull away. He only twisted closer, pressing his swollen face into Marcus’s neck and tangling their legs together. Marcus could feel the heat of Jake’s body through his own clothes, and wondered how Jake didn’t feel unbearably exposed even under the blanket.
He didn’t pull away, though. Jake had asked him to stay. Jake was reaching for him, he was… he was wanting this.
Beneath the exhaustion, beneath the fear of the past forty-eight hours and the six weeks of torment before that, though, swam the truth: Marcus was desperate for this, too. He needed Jake’s touch like oxygen, and he dreaded the moment when Jake would pull away and tell him he’d had enough.
I’ve done far worse than pull away, Marcus reprimanded himself harshly. I’ve…
He shuddered with the memories of shoving Jake away, of pulling his knife on him, of throwing his own pain in Jake’s face like a handful of sand. He shuddered with the guilt of having left Jake alone to suffer in the bowels of that horrible place, when the ticket to his salvation lived in a house just a few miles from here, building robots in his spare time – all because Marcus was too fucking afraid to ask for help from someone who had already helped him.
He felt Jake’s body heat as he curled against Marcus’s chest, and Marcus knew he didn’t deserve a moment of it. Jake could have been freed weeks ago – maybe just a few days after he’d been captured – if Marcus hadn’t been such a goddamn coward.
Marcus pressed his face into the pillow and let the fabric soak up the tears that burned his eyes. He heard Lars come back into the room.
“Got some fresh clothes for ya,” they said awkwardly. “I can, um… help you, if you want help dressing…”
“Could probably use the help, yeah,” Marcus said as he raised his face out of the pillow.
Lars knelt beside the bed. “Okay. Pants first.”
They reached under the blanket and helped pull on the soft sweatpants over Jake’s legs. They drew the pants into place as Marcus helped Jake lift his hips off the bed. Once that was done, Lars pulled the space blanket off the bed and spread a cloth blanket over the both of them instead.
“Alright,” Lars said. “Jake if you can sit up…”
Marcus helped him do that. Lars disconnected the now-empty bag of fluids from his IV and began to carefully wind a bandage around his chest, being careful to cover the cane marks. Marcus saw the worst of them as he kept Jake upright. His stomach burned with helpless rage.
Once that was done, Lars helped Jake into a large, baggy t-shirt, then reconnected the IV. They hung a fresh bag of fluids as Marcus cleared the stained puppy pads away, then helped Jake lay down on the clean sheet. He pulled the blanket over them both and pulled Jake into his arms once more.
“Marcus,” Jake whispered as his eyelids fluttered against Marcus’s throat.
“I got you, Jake,” Marcus said softly. “I got you. You’re okay.”
“You saved me,” Jake said, sounding more bewildered than anything else.
“’Course I did.” Marcus nuzzled into Jake’s hair. “My Jake. I’m… I’m so fucking sorry it took so long. But I have you now. I don’t ever have to leave you again, okay?”
Lars’s head snapped up. They’d been cleaning up their supplies, but they fixed Marcus with an alarmed stare. He stared back at them.
They pulled out their phone and typed something. When they held out the phone to him, the screen said: THE AMTEC TRANSPORT IS STILL ON MY FRONT LAWN.
Marcus swallowed hard. He nodded once. “Just… we can just rest for a little while longer, okay Jake? A few minutes, just you and me?”
“Y-yeah, Marcus,” Jake breathed, his voice fading into nothing.
Marcus raised his eyebrows at Lars. They gave a nod.
Another kiss to Jake’s forehead. Another to his hair. Another to his nose. Then Jake tilted his head and brushed his split, bruised lip against Marcus’s.
Marcus’s breath caught in his chest. “J-Jake,” he croaked.
“Sorry,” Jake whispered. “I know.” He tucked his head under Marcus’s chin once more.
Marcus’s eyes filled with tears as his arms tightened around Jake. He held him in the bed, felt his steady breaths whoosh in and out of him. He watched Lars as they picked up their trash and carried it out the door. Then he buckled down and started to hope with every bone in his body that, when it came time for him to leave, Jake would sleep through the whole thing.
Continued here
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