For @shadowvalkyrie 39: “Oh no, you are not dragging me into this.”
“Peter and I are setting up a new experiment down in the lab,” David said. His eyes gleamed with adoration; Thomas expected them to start emitting actual cartoon-like sparkles any second now. “Peter has been such a great lab partner. With all he’s shown me and all the new equipment, we expect to make great progress, greater than I ever could have achieved on my own.”
“Indeed,” Thomas said carefully, glad that David had taken such a shine to Peter, but in the same breath hoping not to encourage a barrage of science talk.
Evidently, he had been apart from David for too long. He hadn’t calculated carefully enough, because David took a deep breath, adjusted the lapels of his lab coat, and started, “According to our calculations--”
As always when David started going on about his work, Thomas felt his mind beginning to drift, his head filling with elevator music. He loved David deeply, and he was trying to be interested in what he did, it was just so hard to keep track of it all...
“There is now a real possibility of obtaining definite proof - Thomas, are you listening, this is actually very exciting...”
I am what I am, I am my own special creation, Thomas’s mind supplied, Gloria Gaynor gradually drowning out David.
“...definite proof of the existence of allokosmi. For so long it’s been just another theory languishing in my journal but now, with Peter helping me...”
...So come take a look, give me the hook or the ovation...
“...And not just that! There will even be the possibility of artificially creating an opening which any fully trained Newtonian practitioner...”
...It’s my world, that I want to have a little pride in...
“So I think we should do it today! We should create a portal in the lab.”
...My world, and it’s not a place I have to hide in-- wait, what?
“You’re going to open a portal to another dimension?”
David beamed. “You were listening!”
Thomas met the beaming smile with his own deepening scowl. “You’re intending to open a portal to another dimension, in my Folly? Are you absolutely serious?”
David, not deterred in the slightest by Thomas’s stern expression, started bouncing on his feet a little, hands flapping in burgeoning excitement. “It’s perfectly safe! You don’t have to worry about a thing. We will contain it in the lab, we’ll only keep it open for a minute at most, it’s just to see if we can! Please?”
Well, at least he remembered that protocol required that, husband or not, as head of the Folly, Thomas should be asked for permission. “And if I say no?”
David didn’t pause his flapping even for a second. He had a contingency plan for that possibility. “I’ll call Peter up to lend me moral support.”
Thomas huffed out a frustrated breath. David’s hopeful smile was bad enough. Put Peter and his best beseeching puppy eyes next to it, and Thomas would turn into putty. In truth, he could tell neither of his partners no, not when it was one of their little passion projects, and they knew it. And surely Peter would talk at length about the necessity of this experiment, and how it would be useful to the Folly as an institution, and what astonishing insight they would glean from it, and on and on until Thomas would be reduced to staring vaguely at his lips as he spoke and ready to allow anything if it got him pinned against the furniture in the foreseeable future.
This was not a battle he could win.
“Oh, fine,” he said, lifting his chin, attempting to preserve his dignity. “If you must. You’ll guarantee that this is safe?”
“Of course!” David threw his arms around Thomas and squeezed him tight. “You have nothing to worry about.”
---
“Um, about the experiment. Down in the lab.”
It was - Thomas checked his wristwatch - exactly 43 minutes later. He lowered his newspaper and levelled another glare - this time - at Peter. “Yes?”
“We might... need you to come down there.”
Sighing, Thomas pinched the bridge of his nose. “Oh no, you are not dragging me into this.”
“Please? We kind of...”
There was a rumbling sound from underneath their feet, the ground quaked ever so slightly, making the teacups on the table rattle.
“What was that?” Thomas asked sharply.
Peter was starting to sweat. “I think that’s the... thing, the thing that came out of the portal. We need to get it to go back, and David says we need a fifteenth-order spell to make it leave...”
Well, so much for ‘nothing to worry about’. “You know, one of these days I’ll simply refuse to get you out of your messes.”
“Nope.” Peter ducked his head, but couldn’t quite suppress a grin. “You love us.”
sevenall replied to your post: Okay I can't remember whose post it was and I know...
Yes, please. Completely relevant to my interests and could I please have the full 250K of it? Yes, no, what are you insinuating, do I look like the kind of person who would read it all at once?
Unfortunately I am entirely serious when I say that I won't be writing this - not only because I don't think I could pull it off but also because it would involve a level of research and time that I don't currently have to expand on fanfiction projects. So if anybody would like to adopt this harebrained idea, by all means help yourselves!
How about Starlingale - 26. “Don’t move, it’ll be okay.” ?
It wasn’t often that a fleeing suspect got the drop on Nightingale.
Unfortunately, as he always tells me, being good at magic doesn’t equal being invincible, not by a long shot. There’s a lot that Nightingale can do, but people can shoot him from a distance. People can spring stuff on him. People can send a lux-blinding grenade at his face and then trip him, and then stab him point-blank as they make their getaway. If this sounds extremely specific, that’s because it had just happened.
I of course hastened to get to him. Our rogue practitioner could be arrested another day. Right then, I got to my knees next to Nightingale, who tried, weakly, to get to his feet.
“Sir, stay there, I’m calling an ambulance.” I put a hand on his shoulder while fishing out my phone with the other. “Don’t move, it’ll be okay.”
“Peter...” Nightingale murmured, and trailed off with a sigh. I looked at him, studying his face. His eyes were unfocused, trailing over me in an uncoordinated way. Was he losing too much blood? Our suspect had unfortunately pulled the knife out on their way out the door. Concussion? He’d hit his head pretty badly when repelled by that grenade.
I switched my phone on. “Better call Walid too while I’m at it,” I said, making my voice light. “He’ll be overjoyed to get to put you in the MRI again, sir. Can you apply pressure here?”
Nightingale’s hand slid over mine just as I pulled it away from the wound. I wiped the blood off on his suit jacket. It was ruined anyhow.
“Peter...” he repeated. “Tell me, is this it?”
Something cold grabbed my insides.
“Nnn-ooo,” I said, attempting to sound casual. “You’ve had worse, sir.”
And the fact that that was true - I’d seen Nightingale get shot before, and he had very much fought in a war - made this worse, somehow. This was not how Thomas Fucking Nightingale was supposed to croak, people.
Blood was oozing from beneath his fingers now; soon we’d have a pool on the ground. I didn’t think he’d heard me at all and, this alarmed me more than anything else, he was smiling.
“‘M I finally done? Can I go see everyone?”
Right. Okay. Look, that was just the concussion and/or the blood loss talking.
“Sir, your friends are going to have to wait a little longer. Keep putting pressure on there.” I dialed the number for the ambulance, my hands shaking.
Nightingale frowned at me, in that mildly disappointed way he does when I’m telling him about the next big variation of a forma I invented.
“I want to see David,” he whispered.
Right. I was officially in a panic now.
With the ambulance on its way, I put my phone down and pressed Nightingale’s hand back over the wound. “Absolutely not, sir, you’re staying right here with me.”
When Nightingale sighed this time, he sounded... put-upon. Like I was holding him back.
This wouldn’t do.
“Sir...”
His eyes stayed glassy and unfocused, his breaths too flat. He seemed to not hear me anymore. Or, worse yet somehow, he lacked the resolve to want to.
This wouldn’t do.
“Sir...” Internally, in some way, I steeled myself. “Thomas.”
He inhaled, sharp, rasping, surprised. He struggled now to focus back on me. Good.
“Please. I very much need you here still.”
Nightingale’s mouth opened and closed, as though he was attempting to form words. Only a vague sound slipped out.
“I mean it,” I said. “I need you.”
And, reeling with the frenzy of the moment, I leaned in and kissed him on the lips.
---
Later, when Nightingale woke in the hospital, I wondered if we were going to be doing that thing where we both ignored this ever happened. We’d go on with our lives as if I hadn’t kissed my boss on the lips, and things would go back to normal. And I was trying to figure out whether that was something I wanted, or something that would make me feel horrible.
What actually happened turned out worse.
Nightingale all but ordered me to his hospital room a little less than a day after he had regained consciousness. And he received me in his hospital bed like a Victorian lady of delicate health received visitors draped on her fainting couch. Not that Nightingale draped himself, mind. But he had the demeanor to it, and the pallour from losing a risky amount of blood, which only served to heighten this Consumption Chic look he had going.
When he spoke to me, though, his voice had returned to his usual, no-nonsense and just that slight bit aloof.
“Peter,” he said, “I must commend what you did for me back there.”
I figured it was his way of saying thank-you for calling him an ambulance, so I replied, “You’re... welcome?”
He continued, “I am glad you said and did what you said and did to keep me hanging about. I wasn’t thinking clearly, and in my right mind... I would never have considered abandoning my post. I have an obligation towards you as my apprentice.”
I could do nothing but blink mutely. That sure was... one way to interpret the words ‘I need you’. Maybe he did not remember the kiss.
But then he cocked his head, gave me a pale ghost of a half-smile and added, “Of course I won’t be expecting a repeat performance, so don’t worry about that.”
And that’s Nightingale for you. The mind bloody boggles. I mean, sure, I’d sort of been suspecting... Nightingale is, in his own special way, one of the most out-and-proud individuals I’ve the pleasure of knowing, and I know I’m - not to brag, but - I know he considers me easy on the eyes. But him thinking that I’d play that as some sort of trump card, to tell him whatever I thought he needed to hear in a life-or-death situation? Without meaning it?
And certainly, two roads diverged in this moment. In one trouser-leg of time, to say it with the great Sir Terry, I sort of nodded, thanked him for being so understanding, and walked out the door, taking my conflicted feelings elsewhere. But that sounded bloody miserable and stupid, so I stayed sitting where I was, in the horrible plastic chair by his bedside.
“Sir...” Well, in for a penny. I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Thomas. I’m sure it’s really great and noble, what you’re trying to do right now, but I did kind of actually mean it.”
Nightingale looked at me, completely silent for a moment. In a moment he’d speak up, I could see it coming from a mile away already, Peter, this is a horrible idea. We’re almost a hundred years apart in age, I’m your superior officer for goodness’ sake, also I thought you were straight?
But he just grabbed a handful of my shirt and hauled me in for another kiss.
David makes a mistake. Thomas makes an entrance. Peter deescalates.
The theatre was dark. The sun was fairly well set by now, and the streetlamps were flickering to life. The heat was easing up by increments, the air already less sweltering and humid than it had been all day. David popped round to the back entrance, as agreed upon, where Cora Watley let him in.
She looked wary. Also tired. She’d borne this secret all week... she’d borne her other secret inconceivably longer. David imagined it had exhausted her.
He nodded at her. “Ma’am.”
“You’re really... police?” she asked with no further preamble.
“I’m...” Well, this required some mental acrobatics, but technically David had never stopped working for the Folly, had he? “I’m a specialist with the...” What had Peter called it? “The Special Assessment Unit.”
Ms. Watley raised an eyebrow. “That’s... special.”
“That’s what Mamá used to say about me.” The joke... well, it didn’t quite fall flat, but she sort of winced. Perhaps in solidarity.
She gestured for him to head inside, so he did. The back door was a heavy steel monstrosity, and David almost got his fingers crushed as he pulled it shut. “Where is the object?”
“I’ve hid it in my dressing room,” Ms. Watley confessed. “Are you... sure you can handle this thing? Because someone’s been murdered over it and I don’t want to really... leave it with a normal person.”
“I’ve been handling objects like this one before your mother’s mother left the hill.” Well, perhaps that was a slight exaggeration. Fae have long lives. “What do you mean you left it in your dressing room?”
“It’s not been searched.” Cora gave him a pale smile. “Nobody bothers me overmuch.”
Glamour. David nodded. “Still, why did you not call anyone? I’m told the Folly’s relations to the demi-monde are rocky as ever, but surely not so rocky as to half-inch a murder weapon before even considering going to the police.”
Cora shook her head. “You lost me. The relations of what to what?”
They had reached the backstage and were proceeding to the actress’s dressing room. “The... demi-monde, people like you.” Was that not the term anymore?
The actress turned around to face David. “People like me?” In the dim light of the hallway, she suddenly looked very young. “There’s never been people like me. I never knew any... there’s always just been me.”
How lonely, David thought. How very lonely.
Cora’s hands shook as she pulled a ring of keys out of her pocket and unlocked her dressing room. “I’m the only weird thing I ever saw. Until that goddamned crystal ball that Deirdre brought.”
She let herself and David in, and dropped to her knees to rummage in the bottom drawer of her vanity. “She bought this thing at a flea market or garage sale or something...” Goblin market, David mentally inserted, “...but she said she felt weird about having it at home. Like... it was showing her weird things she didn’t want to see. So she brought it here, thinking maybe we could use it as a prop or something... but I started noticing how other people got... weird around it. Never me, though. So I talked to Deirdre, thought maybe I could get her to throw it out or give it away or we could smash it maybe, but she kept it in the props department... and then I found it next to her dead body.”
David couldn’t help his eyebrows shooting up. “You found the body?” He began patting down his pockets. Perhaps he’d thought to bring a notebook? He should probably write this down, like a proper policeman. Oh, or didn’t his new-fangled telephone have a recording device? He pulled it out.
“Yeah, I found it,” Cora said, still bent over her cluttered vanity. “Look, I knew someone was going to call the police. But the damned thing’s cursed or whatever. Was I gonna give it to just any police guy? They’d get got by the curse just like people here did.”
“There‘s special police for special cases,” David said.
“Well, how was I supposed to know?” Cora got up, in her hands a round object, wrapped in a silk shawl. “And heeeere we go.”
“Very good,” said a voice in David’s back, accompanied by a sound that rang awfully familiar from the war: the telltale click of a gun being cocked. “Hand it over, Cora, nice and careful.”
----
I was in the tech cave just finished feeding the interviews we had conducted during the afternoon into HOLMES when Nightingale swept in. It wasn’t quite a burst in, but not a normal entrance either: yes, a sweeping.
I was actually about to go home, but I clocked that something was off. Far as I knew he’d headed to the basement once we’d got back, and now he was here, and notably by himself. “Everything okay, sir?”
Nightingale clicked his tongue. “It’s David. He went out and left this... cryptic message and now he won’t answer his phone.”
He handed me a post-it with a scrawled-upon note. I read the cryptic message. “’Actress is a demi-fae’? Does he mean Ms. Watley?”
“I assume so.”
“He’s not... he didn’t go meet up with her or something, did he?” But a sinking feeling in my gut said he’d done precisely that.
Nightingale frowned down at his phone. “I’d know that if he’d answer any of my messages.”
And that... was worrisome. David had had a mobile phone for less than a week, but he was already startlingly adept with it, and he delighted in carrying it with him wherever he went. “Hey, maybe he’s just... out for a walk. Maybe he needs... time to himself.”
Nightingale now glared witheringly at his phone, probably so as not to glare witheringly at me. “Or maybe he put himself in danger.”
Just then, his phone beeped, alerting us to...
“What is that thing?” Nightingale asked.
I stepped up next to him and peered at his screen. “Oh, he sent you a voice recording. The app has a function that lets you record something and send it...”
“Oh, spare me,” Nightingale muttered, and looked at his phone in thinly-veiled disgust, so I took it from him and played the recording.
“Yeah, I found it,” we heard a female voice say. People often sounded different on the phone, but this was most definitely Ms. Watley. “Look, I knew someone was going to call the police. But the damned thing’s cursed or whatever. Was I gonna give it to just any police guy? They’d get got by the curse just like people here did.”
“Hrm,” Nightingale said.
I stood still, excitement mounting. If David had managed to get us a spoken confession...
“Would’ve thought most of the demi-monde at least knew of us by now,” I commented.
“There‘s special police for special cases,” David said.
“Well, how was I supposed to know?” Some rustling was heard. “And heeere we go.”
“Is she actually handing it over?” I asked. Nightingale shushed me.
Then we heard a clicking, and a male voice, empathically not David’s, said, “Very good. Hand it over, Cora, nice and careful.”
Here the recording ended abruptly, as if... well, as if something had prevented David from recording any further.
I looked at Nightingale. He’d gone pale, his jaw clenched, his eyes slightly widened. Other than that, he betrayed no emotion. He went... cold, rigid, all over.
“Shit,” I said.
“We must locate them.” Nightingale’s voice was calm, but only because he was expending considerable strength of will on making it so.
“Probably the theatre, right?” I suggested, but there really was no way to tell. If only I could track David’s phone. But we hadn’t exactly stuck a tracker on him, and why would we have?
“Is there a spell for tracking them?” I asked.
Nightingale shrugged. “Not that I know of.”
“Bev always knows where I’m at.” Later, I would ask myself what on earth I’d meant by saying that.
“Well, I’m not a river deity,” Nightingale snapped. “I can’t well scent my lover.”
Lover. That word, so casually, from Nightingale, somehow made me shiver. And was that what Bev was doing? Scenting me? “Technically, you’re... something, sir,” I argued.
Now Nightingale outright gave me the glare. “This is hardly the time.”
----
“Get behind me,” David murmured. He ignored how Cora hissed “What?” and cast his shield, only to remember... oh, right.
He couldn’t cast at all.
“What the fuck did you just try to do?” Cora hissed from over his left shoulder. This, David thought detachedly, was probably the first time she’d seen (an attempt at) Newtonian magic.
“I won’t repeat myself,” said the man with the hunting rifle, whom David vaguely recognized as Mr. Sheen, the theatre’s director. Behind him, a taller man - the janitor, right? - was looking on with a deeply conflicted expression. “Hand me that crystal ball, and no tricks, and we might just get out of this one with nobody getting hurt.”
“Howard, the damned thing’s cursed,” the actress said. “This isn’t hyperbole, I genuinely fucking mean this.”
Mr. Sheen waved his rifle. “Will you bloody hand it over already?”
It was good of Ms. Watley to warn her employer, David thought, but unfortunately useless. The signs were all there. Mr. Sheen was utterly enthralled by the enchantment permeating from the object. It was potent in a way that he had rarely witnessed, and only decades of experience prevented David from reaching for it himself. And it had apparently been in this building for a lengthy amount of time, several days at least. Being so exposed to the enchantment, a susceptible mind might be driven to lengths...
Ms. Watley took a deep breath in. Wisps of her glamour escaped from her, but David nudged her side. “He has a gun, do as he says.”
“But I can--”
“Your glamour doesn’t make you immune to bullets, you know.”
Slowly, extremely reluctantly, Cora handed the crystal ball over.
Mr. Sheen unwrapped it from the silk shawl that had covered it and, aglow with triumph, held it in his hands. “Finally someone sees sense here.” He turned towards David. “Now, who on earth are you?”
And David realized exactly what else it was the crystal ball did.
The enchantment enticing people to take it, to seize possession of it and own it, well, that was one thing. But it was not the object’s actual use.
He felt nothing as the director probed his thoughts (nothing but a sense of revulsion, of violation that was uniquely his own) but he certainly saw the man turn pale.
“What the hell...?” Mr. Sheen said. For a moment, he recoiled, startled, and David lunged.
It earned him the barrel of the rifle jabbed into his ribs.
“You better not try that again,” Mr. Sheen said. He gave the crystal ball an appreciative pat. “This little gizmo here alerts me to anything you’re thinking to do. Now, Derrick, if you’d please...”
The janitor stepped forward. In his hand, he was holding a roll of zip ties.
“One of you acts up, I’ll have to shoot the other,” Mr. Sheen proclaimed, and David couldn’t tell whether or not he was bluffing. Most civilians weren’t quite prepared to actually eliminate a person at close range. But on the other hand... that certain glow in Mr. Sheen’s face, the rigidity of his features, that frozen smile... he was deep in the throes of the enchantment, practically possessed. There was no telling what he would or wouldn’t do.
“Derrick, are you fucking nuts?” Cora demanded as the janitor pushed her into a chair and began tying her hands behind her back.
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Johnson whispered. “It’s just... he knows.”
Knows what? David wondered. But there would be time to find that out later. For now, he thought it best to not resist as his hands, too, were tied.
“Derrick, take their phones, will you?” Mr. Sheen commanded. David held his breath as his mobile phone was fished out of his pocket. Now they’d know he’d sent that recording off...
“Now what’s this?” Mr. Sheen asked, holding David’s phone aloft for everyone to see the screen. There were about half a dozen unanswered texts. “A gentleman caller?”
Thomas, David thought, and then tried his utmost to suppress the thought. But it was too late.
“Is this the same Thomas Nightingale who has been investigating this place? The same one I am seeing so prominently displayed in your memories?”
“I’m not saying anything,” David said.
Mr. Sheen shook his head. “An utterly futile effort.”
----
Suddenly there was a sound from Nightingale’s phone.
“Well, thank goodness,” he huffed, acting put-upon but poorly masking his actual pure relief as he took the phone back from my hand and glanced at the screen. The relief was short-lived.
“Sir?” I asked. “What’s the news?”
Wordlessly, he waved me closer so that I could read over his shoulder.
There were the unanswered texts that Nightingale had sent David’s way, in his usual flawless grammar and diction which has a way of looking weird in text message format. They ran,
David, this is extremely vexing. Where are you at?
You are utterly out of line. There is a very good reason why I prohibited you tampering with the investigation. Come home.
I am not mad at you, but we must address this along with everything else. Do not put yourself needlessly in danger. Do not take any unnecessary risks.
Answer your damned phone, Davey.
And below that, a picture that someone, empathically not David, had sent. It depicted David, back to back with Cora Watley, both zip-tied to chairs by their wrists and ankles. The background showed that this was clearly the stage that we’d only recently stood on during our encounter with the theatre ghost. While Ms. Watley looked enraged and scared in equal measure, David’s face showed, if anything, deep indignation at being so held. Someone else was barely visible in the very margin of the picture, little more than a hand and, unfortunately, the barrel of a rifle.
The text below said, “I’m sure we are all reasonable men here. The two of them will be set free upon your payment of a modest fee and a guarantee that I should be left undisturbed. Do not alert any further authorities. The consequences will be severe.”
Our mystery texter had included below the message proper the ‘modest fee’ they wished to be paid. (We would later find out that it covered the theatre’s various debts, plus a little extra.) It was a pretty high six figures.
“Shit,” I repeated. “This has become a hostage situation.”
Nightingale shook his head. “Unbelievable.”
“Sir?”
“A hostage? David “Gold Star” Mellenby, the scourge of the Wolfsstaffel, a hostage?”
“He... is wearing the cuffs still, sir.” I contained myself from asking what either of those epithets meant.
For a moment, Nightingale went very silent. Then he said, “Well, that is true,” but I got the distinct feeling that what he meant to express by that ran more towards “Fuuuuuuuck.”
“We’re heading over,” he said.
I nodded and grabbed my own phone. “I’ll call Belgravia for backup.”
Already in the process of sweeping back out, Nightingale paused. “You think we will have need of them?”
“It’s their murder case.”
“Quite frankly,” Nightingale said, “I don’t think the situation warrants extensive support. In fact, I’ll head in by myself.”
Woah, I thought, what? “Sir, there’s no way I’m not coming with you.”
This got me a steely, grey-eyed stare. “It’s one man, I’ll be quite able to handle myself.”
The expression on Nightingale’s face put fear into me. Not fear for him, or for myself, but for our very unlucky kidnapper. “Yeah?” I asked. “You will be?”
----
“This is insane,” David said. He strained against his ties a little, more for the look of it than anything else. Besides which, they felt uncomfortable around his wrists.
“Hush,” Mr. Sheen said.
They had been herded at gunpoint out onto the stage, and pushed down into two folding chairs that maybe served as props for the musical. Perhaps the actors just sat down here during reading rehearsals normally. David didn’t like it here. He felt put on the spot, and the, well, dramatics of having the hostages sit on the stage struck him as deeply overwrought and annoying.
“No, I mean it. This device you’re holding lets you sample my memories, no? So you realize this is going nowhere fast for you. You’ve seen what Thomas did in fall 1944 when we captured those two Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften officers and were civilly questioning them for intel and then one of them called me a Saujude and the other one grinned?” The memory was definitely at the forefront of David’s mind currently. “You’re seeing what Thomas did to another human being because he grinned? Mr. Sheen, you better let me out of here while you still can. I know my lover. Thomas will not pay a bloody ransom, Thomas will kill you.”
“Bluffing,” Mr. Sheen said calmly, but it was a projected calm. David could see the beads of sweat on the man’s brow. He reckoned that some part of Howard Sheen knew that he was in too deep and with no feasible way out, and that setting Thomas “The” Nightingale on his trail had been the dumbest decision he had made today or perhaps in his life, but the thrall of the object was stronger than reason. Besides which, the ‘modest fee’ (David wasn’t sure, if the idea was even being entertained, if the Folly budget would survive it) beckoned, promising an end to the theatre’s financial problems.
“I’ve also sampled your recent memories. Nobody’s coming to rescue you.”
David clenched his fists at his sides, and stayed silent. Oh, yeah... that.
“What the fuck is he doing,” Cora whispered. “Trying to blackmail a police officer?”
David nodded. “Said police officer happens also to be my boyfriend, so there is that.”
Is that the one with the walking cane? The one who made out with Roger? That’s nuts. That guy was radiating don’t fuck with me so hard I could feel it all the way across the hall.”
Briefly, David wondered who Roger was. Would’ve liked to see that. “That aptly describes Thomas.” These days, anyhow.
“What fucking is he? I tried getting him to leave this place alone and he just stared me down. I put on a show and everything. Most people just sort of do what I want them to when I do the... you know...”
“We call that a glamour,” David muttered distractedly. What was Thomas, these days? It was an interesting question. Of course, being impervious to glamour, especially a clumsily wielded one like Ms. Watley’s, could simply be chalked up to experience. Decades and decades of experience. But clearly nowadays there was more to Thomas. Why, for example, was he not aging? Did he not technically qualify as fae now, by virtue of that?
“I thought he might be... weird like me,” Cora contributed, as if on cue. “Because he resisted. No other people ever did that.”
“That’s a hypothesis we must certainly consider,” David agreed. Good gracious, if only he had his magic. He would have gotten rid of these plastic ties already. “But frankly, I don’t know. They have a medical professional trying to figure that one out.”
“You figured me out,” Cora said almost accusingly.
“It’s not so hard to unmask a demi-fae, if one knows what one’s doing.” Not just the ties, but also that rifle. And Misters Sheen and Johnson... well, suffice to say they wouldn’t be upright still. David was slow to anger. He considered himself a good-natured, mellow, even-tempered person. But he was beginning to grow peeved, and when that happened, there tended to be consequences, as evidenced by certain parts of the former Third Reich where grass would likely never grow again.
“Demi-what?”
David sighed. His mind was swirling with thoughts of Thomas, of his situation, of how on earth he was going to get out of this one. (Was there a way to get these ties gone without magic...? Unfortunately his pockets had been searched earlier, and even if he’d carried any useful little tools of escape artistry with him, which he hadn’t, those would have been gone by now.) And he wasn’t really all that confident that Thomas would come get him. Not after all that had happened between them.
But there was a man with a mind-reading device in the room with him, a man who might just shoot him if he deemed him useless, and answering Cora’s questions was at the very least a way to focus his thoughts elsewhere.
“Demi-fae,” he repeated. “That’s the scientific term for people like you. Or at the very least it was that when I was last active.”
“I didn’t know there was a scientific term,” Cora said. “Or more people like me. I’m a... changeling, that’s what I know. I’m weird and I can do some stuff. But I was always the only one I knew of. I just... kept my head down and tried to live like normal.”
David nodded. A pale, skinny young woman in drab, dark clothing who faded into the background - that was the look of a fae in hiding. Fae dress according to their chosen vocation, he remembered, and he thought of Oberon’s uniform jacket, Molly’s dress, Foxglove’s coat with its myriad paint splatters and so many pockets for pencils and paintbrushes - for a split-second, he even thought of Thomas’s suits. A theatre fae, he pondered, would likely be in costume at all times, with the most sparkling, fluctuating, dramatic personality. He looked at Cora and thought, how sad.
“Do you want to know what else there is?” he asked.
“Will you two stop whispering back there?” Mr. Sheen snapped. “I’ll have Derrick gag you, you know!”
The janitor, hanging around by the curtain, shifted uneasily.
Mr. Sheen resumed pacing, the crystal ball tucked under one arm. He had lots of room for it on the empty stage. Periodically he would pause, pull out David’s phone and glare at it.
“Thomas hen-peck-types,” David said helpfully. “Whatever reply he’s going to make, it’s going to take a while.”
He grinned, the cheekiest grin he could muster, and hoped it masked the thoughts he had. He’s not coming. No one’s coming for me. No one wants me.
----
We parked the Jag around the corner from the theatre. As we got out of the car, we were joined by what looked like half the murder team stuffed into two plain cars of about the same quality as my old Asbo. Apparently the call I’d placed well out of Nightingale’s earshot as I’d presumably gone to grab my gear warranted Stephanopoulos showing up herself.
“What are we looking at?” she asked, strolling over to us, all business.
Nightingale gave her an irritated look, like he was having to remember what on earth she was here for. “Ah, Miriam,” he said. “So you received... Peter’s call for backup.” The glare he shot me promised consequences later. I almost imperceptibly lifted my shoulders. I’d take the stern talking-to over whatever would have occurred otherwise.
Stephanopoulos scrutinized the dark building. “Looks calm for now.”
Nightingale nodded. “We’re dealing with one man, armed, two hostages, the suspect in possession of one, well...”
With respect to Stephanopoulos’ sensibilities, it seemed he didn’t want to say ‘magical object’ quite yet. “Of Falcon-contaminated hazardous material,” I improvised.
Stephanopoulos’ eyebrows rose. “Like a biohazard?”
“Something like that, I suppose,” Nightingale said.
“How come this is the first time I’m hearing of anything like this existing?” Stephanopoulos asked. Behind her, I could see Guleed peeking out of the car in curiosity, craning her head out of the window to hear.
Nightingale went as far as to click his tongue in impatience. “Perhaps something to be considered at a later date,” he said, neatly smothering that burgeoning argument. “For now, while the threat is imminent to non-Falcon personnel, I consider it low enough at present to handle it myself. I suggest your team guard the entrances while I head inside.”
“You want to head in by yourself,” Stephanopoulos said. “And do what? Do you intend to play for an exchange?”
“I do not intend to humour that man for anything.” Eyes narrowing, Nightingale also scrutinized the building. “I’m of a mind to go in there and set him ablaze, to be frank. Hell, if I had a clear line of sight at him, perhaps from a window, I could blow up his head from here.”
Stephanopoulos took a sudden, sharp breath. “What the hell, Thomas?”
I was very glad I’d decided to call her in.
Nightingale didn’t look at any of us. He gripped his staff so hard his knuckles were starkly white. “My... David’s in there.”
“And who’s David?” Stephanopoulos asked. Apparently she’d been left out of the loop regarding the last week. Her eyes strayed quickly to the car where Carey, the David she was probably thinking of, sat safe and sound next to Guleed. “Anyhow, I’m not having you go in there and irreparably harm our suspect.”
“I am not,” Nightingale said through clenched teeth, “going to stand here and do things by the book while someone’s got David at gunpoint.” He whirled around suddenly, face to face with Stephanopoulos. “God dammit, Miriam, what would you do if it was your wife in there?”
“I still wouldn’t blow heads up.” Now Stephanopoulos, too, was exposing teeth. “Also, what the fuck, Thomas?”
“Look, I am getting him out. I’m prepared to face whatever consequences later.”
Stephanopoulos grabbed him by the arm. “Even if your consequences turn out two dead hostages? Our kidnapper has murdered someone once before, and there is clearly a hunting rifle in that picture.”
Hunting rifle, hunting club, I pieced together. The director, then. At least one accomplice, seeing as pointing a rifle and taking a picture required more than two hands.
“And listen, if it were Pam in there? I wouldn’t rush into things and endanger her life.”
----
Most likely, David reflected, he was going to get shot here today.
He was going to get shot here today, and he didn’t feel the least bit... excited about it. What would he leave behind? A miserable little pile of notebooks, and no one who would mourn him, because no one wanted him in the first place. Thomas would go on with life as he had before David had woken from his long sleep. Peter would certainly not care overly much; they had barely gotten to know each other, and any sense of kinship between them had surely been a figment of David’s imagination. This was fine; this should have happened over seventy years ago.
But there was an innocent young lady here, a person whose life had only just begun, and she was also going to get shot here today unless someone did something. And that wasn’t right, and if David could prevent that somehow, he would.
But what were his options, really? He tried to fumble for the ties around his wrists, perhaps he could manage to loosen or undo them somehow. The unyielding plastic chafed at his skin, but he continued, hoping his efforts wouldn’t be noticed.
Magic was right out, unless he found a way to get the inhibitor cuffs off. The cuffs required Thomas’s word to open. They encircled his whole wrists. Having been forged by Thomas personally and imbued with Thomas’s magic, they would hold. Having also been forged in a hurry, they weren’t perfectly smooth. What with all his fidgeting at them for the past days, David was well familiar with every notch and ridge in the metal.
Perhaps, if he bent his wrist just right, he could get an edge of the metal to catch on the plastic of the zip-ties...
“What are you doing?” Cora hissed irritably. “Why are you squirming like that, do you need the bathroom?”
“No,” David whispered at her. “I’m trying something. Distract them, will you?”
He still wouldn’t have his magic. But he’d have both his hands free. There was a lot a man could do with both of his hands free, especially if said man had had experience on battlefields.
Cora glared at him. “Distract them how?”
“Well, you’re an actress, aren’t you? Make something up.”
“Make something...?” It must have been a wrong thing to say, judging by how mad she sounded. But she rolled her eyes and slumped in momentary defeat. “Ugh, I guess.”
“Howard?” Cora asked, leaning forward as far as her ties would allow, getting Mr. Sheen’s attention. “I know you’re not going through with this. You’re not killing your female lead a week before opening night. The understudy is a catastrophe and we both know it.”
This of all things got Mr. Sheen to pause. David shook his head to himself.
“Lindsay is a fine understudy. She knows her stuff.”
“She still keeps forgetting her lines.”
“Frankly, she brings a passion to the role that I often felt you... lacking, in rehearsal.”
“Passion?” Cora snarled and wrenched at the ties that bound her wrists to her own chair, back to back with David’s. “Bullshit! You really think you can kill me off and replace me with Lindsay Reilly because she has bigger tits than me?!”
As the theatre people argued, David stealthily flexed his fingers...
“Now, this simply won’t do,” Mr. Sheen said. “We’ve all wasted enough time here. Derrick, take another picture...”
----
Nightingale was still arguing with Stephanopoulos when his phone buzzed again.
It was a new picture, this time of the barrel of the rifle being pressed directly into the curls at David’s temple. If it weren’t so dramatic a situation, David’s facial expression, all disgruntled and annoyed at such dramatics, would have been deeply comedic.
“I’ve waited quite long enough,” said the voice in the recording that was sent along with the picture. “You know that Mr. Mellenby here is of the opinion that no one will come? He’s trying to mask it, but it’s at the forefront of his mind. He’s believing himself abandoned. Isn’t that sad? Anyway, I need a decision here, DCI Nightingale, and soon.”
Nightingale stood with his back to me. I was glad I couldn’t see his face. Suddenly, flame erupted from his closed fist, enveloping his phone in fire. The smell of burning plastic spread.
“Woah, sir,” I said.
Nightingale’s voice was low and quiet when he announced, “I’m going to light the fucker up.”
“Thomas,” Stephanopoulos said sharply, and I expected her to set him to rights, tell him he was being way out of line, but she added, in a kind of voice I’d never expected to hear out of her, “You’re scaring me.”
“Apologies, Miriam, but we cannot delay.” And, you know, Nightingale wasn’t wearing his combat boots this time - probably because he’d had no time to change into them - but he didn’t need to. He radiated the soldier so hard we all felt it.
“Sir,” I urged. “You know we can make a clean arrest of it. All we need to do is obtain the object that’s causing all of this. No one needs to be set on fire today.”
Nightingale half-turned and looked at me. It was horrible. I have already lost everything once, his eyes said, I might now lose everything again. That kind of look. The look of people who go dancing in the light of their blazing homes.
“Um,” I said. “Please?”
----
David was beginning to become seriously annoyed by Mr. Sheen’s, for lack of a better word, theatrics, plus the gun still pressed to his temple. It made thinking hard, getting up close and personal with the business end of a rifle like this. “Best take that away,” he suggested irritably. “You’re not going to shoot, and we both know it.”
“Oh, do we both know any such thing?” Mr. Sheen handed the rifle to the highly reluctant Derrick. That, in David’s book, was an improvement. Then Mr. Sheen took up the crystal ball again, gazing deep inside, probably meaning to intrude and scan David’s thoughts again.
David wasn’t going to make it easy for him. Out of spite, he thought hard of nazi corpses.
At first he thought it was that which made Mr. Sheen recoil and scrunch up his face in dismay, but then he turned to the janitor, back to the crystal ball in his hands, and then peered around the stage and asked, “What is... is someone else in this building with us?”
Mr. Johnson’s shoulders rose and fell. “I’ve locked up everywhere, there’s not... supposed to be anyone else here.”
“Then why is... what is this?” Mr. Sheen stared down at the crystal ball in confusion. “Whose... where do these thoughts come from? Are you two doing this in some way?” He pointed at the two hostages.
Truly, David hadn’t the faintest clue what was going on now. But any confusion was a good thing and was to be furthered. Perhaps his captor would slip up in some way... allowing him to take steps to escape or at least ensure Cora’s safety. “May I be of help, sir?”
“Why would--”
From somewhere behind the stage there was a sound, like something falling down, or a door falling shut. Mr. Sheen looked up, and suddenly there was fear in his eyes. “What the-- who is there?”
Derrick Johnson looked at him with a sliver of doubt on his face. “Um, something wrong?”
“Those images...” Mr. Sheen shook the crystal ball like a snowglobe, as if it would show different pictures then. “Whoever... whatever is making those images...” He looked around the empty stage, out at the empty auditorium, a slightly deranged look to him. “It shouldn’t be in the building with us. Derrick, hand me the... no... go search the backstage, will you?”
“Er...”
Another sound. Like footsteps? Footsteps on the creaking wood of the floor?
“I don’t know about this,” Mr. Johnson said. “Nah, you know what, fuck this.”
“Derrick...” Mr. Sheen said threateningly. “You want me to tell our friends from the police why this establishment is truly so chronically short of money...? Ah, of course you don’t. Now be a reasonable chap and go backstage.”
Johnson disappeared behind the curtain, rifle in his hands.
David, still with nary a clue what was happening, craned his neck to shoot a questioning glance at Cora. Are you doing whatever this is?
She shook her head. No.
Muffled and a ways off, they heard Mr. Johnson walk around, then, “Hello? Hello? Is someone... Oi!”
The curtain flew aside as Mr. Johnson was flung headfirst back onto the stage. David felt the impello-palma, so powerful it would punch through ten-inch sheet metal, and he knew that burst of magic. As familiar almost as his own.
Tears shot to his eyes, but they were of joy. He hadn’t believed it would happen...
Mr. Johnson went down hard and stayed down.
Then several things happened in quick succession.
With a gasp, Mr. Sheen ran forward, to help Mr. Johnson, David thought, but he disregarded his fallen accomplice and grabbed the rifle from him. As he scrambled back up to his feet, hands shaking as he attempted to cock the gun, Ms. Cora Watley suddenly flung herself against her ties, and unleashed the full force of her glamour.
Mr. Sheen stumbled, and even David reeled as he was overwhelmed; this was the stage, here were the actors, and the overhead lights sprang on and the fog machine whirred to life, and soon they were ankle-high in billowing mist, and an end of the curtain was lifted just ever-so-slightly by a delicate hand.
Up above their heads, the huge stage light rotated on its axis by itself, and the beam of a spotlight fingered across the auditorium, the stage, and came to rest on the new arrival. A grand entrance.
“Evening, all,” said Thomas.
“Yes!” Ms. Watley hissed in triumph. “Enter stage left! Love it!”
Thomas grinned - not in response to Ms. Watley, he was wearing the sort of grin that David usually knew exclusively from battlefields. The sort of grin that used to say, All you Jerries are about to die.
----
I entered the building and therefore the stage on Nightingale’s heels, but just this once, no one was paying attention to me.
I was right behind him when he sucker-punched the janitor, using his impello palma like brass knuckles, nevermind that the guy had a gun. He didn’t hesitate for a second, just flung the fellow out through the curtain. It was just on sight. Now, I’ve seen Nightingale attempt to rugby-tackle suspects before, in the heat of the moment and all. The pure, vicious force of that punch still blew me away. I took a second, I know not why, to actually tug at his sleeve, and he gave me one of these looks he sometimes gets that signifies he’s not fully here right now but trying very hard to be.
“Let’s proceed,” he said, rubbing some life back into his hand. So we proceeded, stage left.
What I now recognized as Ms. Watley’s glamour permeated the stage. The fog was swirling, the spotlights were bright upon us, and, brushing past the curtain, I felt the excitement and the trepidation again: an actor readying for the great entrance. But I was happy to cede the stage to Nightingale.
The director was stood blocking the hostages, and he’d picked up the rifle. Now he was holding it in shaky hands. “I’m warning you! Don’t come any further!”
Nightingale chuckled. It sent a dart of cold, primal fear down my spine. Of course he already had his shield up. Very courteously, it also covered me. “Oh, do try and shoot me, I beg of you.”
Even his voice was different.
Fuck, this was bad.
“How about this, then?” His movements almost erratic, Mr. Sheen spun around and pointed the rifle at David. David, for his part, only raised an eyebrow.
“You fucking moron,” someone said. With a start, I realized it was me.
Nightingale raised his hand. I could feel a forma coming, and I didn’t know what it might be, and I was afraid.
I gripped his wrist. Again, I don’t know what fucking compelled me, my arm just shot forward and grabbed his wrist.
“Sir.”
He gave me an indecipherable look again. His magic kept ticking away as he turned back towards the little tableau in front of him.
“Please don’t hurt anybody unduly,” he said.
“That’s a mighty lot of you to ask,” Mr. Sheen replied, mad triumph making its home in his face - prematurely, it would turn out.
“Mr. Sheen,” Nightingale said aloofly, and released his forma into the world, “I was not talking to you.”
At first, I’d thought the spell had done nothing.
Then I heard two tiny plinks of metal, like, well, like the clasps of two wristlets opening.
David got up, the zip-ties and inhibitor cuffs falling away. Before Mr. Sheen could even turn around again, David waved his hand and subdued him, all his extremities suddenly locking into place and sending him tumbling to the floor. Another wave, and a length of cord unspooled, came loose from one of the curtains and wound tightly around Mr. Sheen’s arms and legs.
David looked at me, a glint in his eye. “What do you say? ‘You’re nicked, chum’?”
Well, someone’s getting quite into thief-taking, I thought, and for a split-second I wondered what David’s future within the Folly and therefore the Met might entail. But still, as the great Blackboard Monitor Sir Samuel Vimes once said, it’s so embarrassing to hear civilians try to speak policeman, so I shook my head.
“No,” I said, “You don’t say ‘you’re nicked’. You say, Howard Sheen, you’re under arrest for the murder of Deirdre Maxwell and the abduction of Cora Watley and David Mellenby. You have the right to remain silent...”
The teachable moment didn’t last long, because by the time I got to ‘right to an attorney’, David was looking at Nightingale, who was in turn looking at David.
“I’m sorry for causing you such inconvenience,” David said quietly. He picked up the crystal ball, which had been discarded in all the confusion, and held it out to Nightingale. “Here. This should probably be stored in the Folly.”
Nightingale was across the stage in three long strides. His hands found David’s shoulders, his face, his hair, roving unsteadily, as if committing the shape of David to memory, as if searching for something, as if having to make sure David was really there.
“God, Davey,” he said, in a voice that was soft and wounded and seemed to belong to an entirely different person than the Nightingale I’d known for the past three years, “Don’t ever - ever - do that to me again.”
By chance, his hand brushed the crystal ball that David was still holding, and for a moment they both stood very still.
“Oh... Thomas,” David then said, shivering. “You... genuinely, still? After all I’ve done?”
“And you really believed I wouldn’t come? That nobody wanted you?” Abruptly, Nightingale pulled David closer and, abandoning all his usual restraint, stooped down to bury his face in David’s sweater, and then he just stood breathing for a minute. I felt like I was witnessing something secret and forbidden, something highly private happening, jarringly, in semi-public, something most definitely not intended for my eyes. So I went and checked if both our perps were secured, and then I untied Cora Watley, who gave me a grin.
“I don’t know what the fuck is going on,” she said, “But hell yeah, love wins.”
“It does at that, huh,” I said and helped her to her feet.
“I’m so sorry, Tommy,” David was saying, one hand cradling the crystal ball, the other one resting on the back of Nightingale’s neck. It might have been the first time I’d ever seen anyone touch Nightingale like this. “None of this was supposed to happen.”
I could feel something strange and magical happening between them, in the literal sense; I could feel things being poured into the receptacle between them, perhaps seventy years’ worth of things.
“I cannot lose you again, David,” Nightingale murmured, one hand resting on the crystal ball, the other one cupping David’s cheek as they leaned in for the kiss to end all kisses. “You’re my... you’re my sweetest thing.”
I must’ve been thinking something too, something to the tune of Well, what am I, chopped liver? (for NO reason, I assure you, I guarantee you) because suddenly I had two pairs of eyes on me. I saw as Nightingale and David exchanged a long and silent look.
“We... should probably put this thing down for now,” David said, his voice straining to feign lightness.
“Aha, yes,” Nightingale agreed. He still had his spare arm around David, and a bit of that rattled look about him that I suppose people have when their loved ones have just come out of being kidnapped. “Here, Peter, why don’t you hold on to it?”
I took the accursed object from them, tucked it under my arm, and then I left them to it, switched my phone back on and called Stephanopoulos, informing her that it was okay for her team to head in now.
----
I spotted the former abductees sitting out front later, having been dispensed a shock blanket each, David primly sipping his conciliatory cup of tea and chatting to Ms. Watley about what types of fae there were. I heard him offer to take her ‘round to some demi-monde pubs, if they still existed, which in all left her almost more grateful than saving her from the kidnapping. Disenfranchised fae, I thought, and wondered how many there might be out there. People with no connection to the demi-monde as such, people on their own wondering why the fuck they were so much weirder than everyone around them. I decided to bring that up with Beverley, who had a heart for stuff like that.
Not at all deterrent to the raised spirits was the presence of Nightingale, who hung about with David’s hand tucked into his and most reluctant to leave his side for anything, even when Stephanopoulos stepped up and demanded he head back with her for signing off on the arrest we’d made.
“No,” he said and it jolted me. Nightingale didn’t, I knew that, always love the Job, but he’d always unswervingly done it nonetheless.
Apparently it jolted Stephanopoulos too, because she said, “What?”
“No,” Nightingale repeated. “I’d rather be staying right here, if you don’t mind.”
“I get it, I do,” Stephanopoulos said. “But I sort of have to mind. Paperwork won’t do itself.”
“There will be time for that.” Nightingale picked up David’s hand in both his own and held it against his chest.
“Thomas...” Stephanopoulos shook her head and sighed. “Don’t make me dial Alexander.”
David had watched the exchange attentively. Now he gave Nightingale a light nudge. “Go do your duty, Tom. I’ll be fine here. And later on you can come by and slip under my shock blanket.”
Nightingale went as far as to lean against him again. “David, you’ve been abducted.”
“And? I’m about four weeks shy of a war zone, I didn’t overly mind a botched abduction.” David took another sip of his complimentary tea, looking truly unbothered. He then passed the cup to Nightingale. “Here. You seem to have some need of it.”
Nightingale did go then, but he also took the tea.
I saw them together again later, not actually sharing the shock blanket, but passing a cigarette back and forth. They were touching shoulders, supporting each other. I didn’t approach them. This was not a moment for me to take part in.
(Reader beware: explicit content. Actually, no plot here, just explicit content)
They approached the Jag hand in hand together. It had long since grown dark, and Thomas very much wished to return to the Folly. He didn’t know why, he had used no strenuous magic today, but the evening had left him tired. Apart from that, though, he was perfectly alright. And why shouldn’t he be? The situation had turned out for the best, nobody having gotten hurt.
He waited for David to stash the crystal ball in the trunk and get in the car on the passenger side. He then turned the key in the ignition, shifted into first gear, and found that for some godforsaken reason his hands shook too much on the steering wheel to actually start driving.
It wasn’t cold out, so Thomas really didn’t understand why, even after he took a second to rub the clamminess off his palms on his trousers, that tremor crept over his whole body. He must have made some sound, because David looked over at him and asked, “Thomas? Love?”
Thomas ran his hands across his face and stayed like that, for just a second he told himself, with the heels of his hands pressed up against his closed eyes. “Give me a moment, alright?”
“Is something wrong, love?” Oh, there was that worried voice. David had no place being worried, after all, he’d had a gun to his head very recently. By all rights, really, it should be David who should be a mess as of right now. Not that Thomas wanted that, in fact, he was impressed with how David was holding up. But it would have been the thing to make sense, not this… not the other way around.
“I can’t precisely say,” Thomas replied. He wanted to get himself together and drive back to the Folly, but it seemed… presently insurmountable. But why? Driving to the Folly was something he’d done more times than he cared to count. Why was it impossible now? Good lord, he just wanted to have a bit of a lie-down.
“Switch sides with me,” David said. “Come on. I’ll drive.”
“Why?” Thomas asked.
“Because you’re no good for it right now.” And here was the patient voice. “Do it, you can kip out here for a minute. I am still your lieutenant, you know.”
“Which still makes me the superior officer.” They were falling into their inter-battlefield routine of back-and-forth bickering. It should not have been half as calming as it was. Thomas took his hands off his face and saw that David was giving him a lopsided smile.
“A prudent CO takes the input of his noncoms under advisement,” he pointed out.
Well, that had never stopped being a truth. They switched sides. Thomas wanted to curl up in the passenger seat, refrained from it, and then thought, what the hell. This was David right there. What was he thinking to hide?
David was a comparatively calm driver. This was rather boring, but conductive to any kind of zoning out or drifting off that needed to occur at a given moment. Thomas came back to when David parked the Jag up front of the coach house.
He uncoiled his limbs and reached for the door-handle but David whispered, “Wait,” and slipped out of the car, came around and opened the door for him, and this once, Thomas didn’t find it in him to object. David gave him a hand up and slipped an arm around his waist as they walked to the Folly’s back door and it felt too good and familiar to be touching David in that way for Thomas to stop and insist he didn’t need any coddling. Sometimes, he supposed, there was nothing for it but to drift with the flow of the events and enjoy some nice, warm contact.
Good lord, he had come so close to losing David again today, too close for comfort. Never would he ever let that happen again. In the future, he would have to look out for that. But for now, David was right here and touching him and it seemed that things, for a given value of the concept, were turning out alright.
Molly had waited up for them with a very late supper, which they took in the dining room. She hovered a bit, but left them to it after a while, placing a candle on their table, which David smiled at and lit with a small flame from his fingertips.
The dining room had been meant to house the entirety of the Folly’s residents for mealtimes, back when there had been many. It felt strange for it to be occupied by two people only, but Thomas was used to that particular blend of strangeness by now. Well, two people was already a 100 percent increase from one, the way the status quo had been almost uninterruptedly for the last seventy years. Thomas remembered having a similar thought back when Peter (and later Lesley) had first arrived. But it was different still now, because it was David now.
They started out sitting opposite each other, not touching, but soon Thomas brushed his ankle against David’s under the table. They intertwined their legs, footsying a bit, simply because they were in this room and they could, and it would not have been possible to do back in the day.
“Feels funny doing this in here,” David opined, his voice light, but a kind of wonder sneaking in on the edges.
Thomas gave him a grin. “Know what else we can do in here now?”
And ah, there it was. David’s breath grew that almost imperceptible bit shallower, his pupils beginning to dilate already. “What?”
Grinning ever wider, Thomas ran a foot up David’s inseam. “Oh, just about anything.”
David put his cutlery down. “Quite,” he said eagerly, “Who’s to tell us no?”
“It is my Folly now.”
David laughed. “And isn’t that weird? I’m still getting used to it. My songbird, master of the Folly. Who could have possibly predicted that, hm?” Then his smile fell a little, and he hurriedly added, “Although I’m sure you’re doing splendid at it.”
“That depends on what you would consider splendid.” Well, the Folly hadn’t been overrun or fallen into disrepair during his tenure as head of the Society of Nothing Much, Anymore. But that was largely all he could boast until such time as a stroke of luck had led him to take Peter on. And what changes had occurred since, and would continue to occur, could truly be attributed to Peter and his seemingly endless fount of new exciting ideas, rather than any achievement on Thomas’s part. He harbored no illusions concerning that.
But getting into that now would derail the mood, which, so far as Thomas was concerned, was shaping up into something rather promising. “I was thinking,” he said, “every room in the Folly.”
David blinked at him in momentary confusion. “What about them?”
Thomas twirled his fork in his hand. “Oh, you know. We could take a floor plan. Pick out every room in which you’ve ever wanted to push me up against the furniture and have a go at it. And then we could do that. As you said, who’s to tell us no?”
David visibly swallowed. He fidgeted with his hands in that way that told Thomas he was growing elated. “Yes,” he breathed. “Yes, goodness, please.”
Thomas pushed his chair back. He was finished eating anyway. “How about we start in my bedroom for now?”
“Oh, you mean, fuck in the master bedroom?” David followed suit so fast he almost toppled his chair. “Well, don’t mind if I do.”
—-
By the time they made it up to Thomas’s bedroom, they were already making out against the door. It was like some barrier that had up until now rather haphazardly kept them apart had fully broken down. Thomas, with his back against the door, shut his eyes and simply enjoyed being kissed by David, so hungrily, so desperately. He plunged both hands into David’s hair, felt the texture of the curls beneath his fingers, and it was as David’s hair always had been. He could have wept at the familiarity, suddenly reawakened.
But he didn’t stay here for long. Soon he ran his hands down David’s back, then up his arms again, caressing his shoulders, his chest, his sides. David wrapped both his arms around Thomas’s waist again, gripped him by the small of his back and pulled him closer, so close that not an atom could have fit between them.
“Yes,” he sighed, breaking the kiss for a moment, “Now I’m truly home.”
This tore something out of Thomas that surprised and startled him, and he stifled a sob into David’s sweater.
Because yes.
David was home.
David was here.
“Davey–”
And just like that, there was a hand in his hair again, stroking it in all the ways that always were sure to calm him down. “I know, sweetheart,” David muttered. “I know.”
“Wait.” Thomas took a shaky breath. “Wait, you’ve been abducted today, you’ve been held at gunpoint, you… shouldn’t be doing this for me.”
David shrugged. “Life is strange sometimes. You… I mean no offense, but you seem to be needing it more than me at present.”
Something changed as David said that, he… tensed, his eyes grew wary, and he took a step back. And… I mean no offense. So formal. As if they were strangers just making one another’s acquaintance.
Thomas put a hand on David’s shoulder and reeled him back in. “Hey. Where are you off to? Stay here.”
“I’m sorry.” David lowered his eyes. Since coming back out of that theatre, he’d seemed so sure, almost serene, always with a handle on the situation. Now this seemed to evaporate. “I don’t mean to offend you by implying… I mean, I’m sure you’re perfectly on top of things.”
David didn’t sincerely believe that. Thomas could tell. David had never been good at lying. Why was he trying now?
Well, perhaps it didn’t go amazing for him the last few times he tried to get close, said a reasonable voice from somewhere in the back of Thomas’s head, a voice that sounded strangely familiar…
Oh. Peter. Thomas’s voice of reason sounded like Peter now.
And it wasn’t like said voice was wrong. Thomas’s mind chose this instance to replay what he had seen earlier in the evening, when he had laid his hand on that crystal ball. David’s thoughts had been loud, a swirl of joy and sheer incredulity that they had come for him.
He had assumed no one would. That he’d stuck his head out too far attempting to fix things, and that Thomas would not care anymore whether he lived or died. He’d settled into certain death. He’d been ready to embrace it, for real this time.
And his reasons for keeping David at arm’s length for all this time… Thomas couldn’t even remember them right now. How inconsequential they all seemed, when life was fleeting, and all it took was one idiot with a gun to tear David away from him again forever.
He pressed a kiss to David’s lips, and another, and another. “Davey…” The surprised puff of breath that escaped David’s lips, that tingled against Thomas’s mouth, was the sweetest sensation in the world. “David, I swear, no more of that. We will get into things, we will get into all manner of things. Everything you want to talk about, we will. No more running from this. If something happened…”
“Yes,” David said. “We must remember not to go angry.”
Back during the war, their company had had a superstition. Such things sprouted among soldiers, little stories and rituals to pass the day, a natural human attempt to turn the vast, encompassing and utterly chaotic machinery of war into something controllable.
Do not go angry, they had said. When heading into combat, beforehand, try to the best of your ability to clear up any open disputes, any conflicts, any grief with your mates. Going into battle in a state of anger and resentment with your comrades, it was said, invited the worst of luck upon a man. On a certain level, this was purely pragmatic. In the thick of combat, you had nothing to count on but the man next to you. You did not want the man next to you to be someone who bore an unresolved resentment against you, who would hesitate even a fraction of a second to protect your life with everything he had, because in the thick of combat, a fraction of a second was all it took sometimes. Unit cohesion had to be total. The bond between soldiers had to be steadfast.
Into Ettersberg, they had gone angry. This had had no bearing on the actual battle, seeing as they’d been assigned to different squadrons, but still it undoubtedly felt like the whole campaign had stood under the unluckiest of stars. There was a myriad of very real reasons for that, but the fact remained that also, apart from that, they had gone angry. They had not settled their dispute, and as things stood, they hadn’t gotten to do it until now, seventy years later. And between then and now there had been a bottomless chasm of grief.
“But let’s not think about any of that now,” David said, reaching up to cradle Thomas’s cheek in his hand. “You’re here. I’m here. Let’s have a proper reunion finally.”
Thomas kissed him.
Soon the kiss grew heated, then downright sloppy as their focus shifted to areas south of the lips. Thomas soon found David’s leg between this thighs, and in a dizzy little moment of objective clarity realized that he was already rutting against it, making urgent little hums from somewhere deep down his throat, all of a sudden utterly in need.
David cursed under his breath as he undid the buttons on Thomas’s waistcoat, and then had to move up again to start over with his shirt. “This,” he almost growled, “is worse than the damned uniform. Why have you got so many things on?”
Through gritted teeth, Thomas replied, “Just get on with it.”
David made a little, understated downward hand motion, there was that gush of air that Thomas knew as David’s signare, and all buttons on his shirt sprang off and rolled away across the floor. A perfectly good shirt ruined. Somehow Thomas couldn’t find it in himself to mind. Immediately, David latched on to the strip of bare skin he’d uncovered, sucking at the hollow of Thomas’s throat, leaving a burning brand of marks behind.
“Hickeys? What are we, fifteen again?” And yet, Thomas could not deny how he arched into the touch. These tiny, blossoming pains felt exquisite, a delicious edge to proceedings.
David detached just enough to laugh. “Above the collar,” he said. “Everyone should see.”
Thomas felt his hips twitch just at the thought. The possibilities of it all made his head spin. “Yes,” he gasped. “Everyone should see.”
David gripped his hips, tugging at his trousers. “Off.”
Somehow, through a common effort, they got to the bed, dropping an array of clothes on the way. Thomas, now in nothing but his undershirt and pants, made quick work of David’s light jumper, pausing however when his wrists were exposed, now bare of his shackles but rubbed raw and red where he’d chafed against them trying to get free in the theatre. He lifted David’s right hand up to his face and kissed his wrist, but David pulled away with a little hiss of pain.
“Ah… I’m sorry. Davey, I’m so sorry…”
David interrupted him by putting two fingers to his lips. “No. Shh. Not now. Let’s just… have this, for the moment, shall we.”
He reached down, unbucked his own trousers and slid them off, and what followed was the fairly unerotic moment known to couples everywhere in which he had to shimmy out of his socks. Thomas, meanwhile, pulled his undershirt off over his head and finally, finally felt David’s inquisitive hand on the wasteband of his underpants, pulling them down as well. For a second, they just stilled on the bed and looked at each other.
“Nothing you’ve not seen before,” Thomas said, but that wasn’t quite true, was it?
David had somehow made it through over five years in the field without getting grievously wounded; the usual plethora of scrapes and bruises on your average soldier had by now healed over. Thomas hadn’t been so lucky, and he’d seen sporadic bursts of action since in service of the Met. Most of these scars David had been present for, and known to expect, but not all of them.
Suddenly David was on top of Thomas, kissing him within an inch of his life, his hands roaming everywhere, seeming to want to map every bit of skin, the hunger for this flaring dramatically.
“Gorgeous,” he murmured between kisses. “Beautiful, you’re always… always so beautiful.”
Thomas found that beyond an ambiguous grunt he could make no reply as David kept on kissing him. There were hands everywhere on his bare skin, now on his arms, soon on his chest and thighs and not yet where he really needed them, and it was at once not enough and almost too much. He’d kept… sporadically busy during the interim decades, in short bursts interceded by long lulls, his appetite waxing and waning irregularly and without any semblance of rhyme or reason in whichever way the bubble of heavy nothing in his chest demanded. In recent years he’d stopped venturing out after hours for light entertainment completely, this maybe or maybe not being connected to Peter’s arrival at the scene. Be that as it may, it had been long since he’d last been touched like that, not just with intent, but with devotion. It ignited him and he burned, and felt his hips jerk upwards for any kind of friction.
Then David finally had mercy, wrapping a hand around him, giving him a few strokes, too brief and too soft. He withdrew too soon.
“Not yet.” He was breathing heavier now, his chest and face flushed. “Not yet. Do you have anything?”
Yes, Thomas had. After all, one never knew. Besides which, he did bring himself off on occasion. “Nightstand, top drawer.”
David draped all across him reaching into the nightstand, fishing for the lube. The heat of his body was beauteous to have on top and Thomas hummed happily, running his fingers down David’s spine, settling on his backside and gripping there, attempting to haul him in even closer. His cock gave off a twitch, already leaking against David’s abdomen.
“I know, songbird, just let me get this,” David said, coming back up with the lube in his hand. He unscrewed the cap and squeezed some onto his fingers, waiting the requisite moment to warm it up.
“Don’t make a huge production out of it,” Thomas warned him. “This… isn’t going to last long on my end.”
David pouted minutely. “But we have all this time now.”
And that was true, and novel to them. Their romance had begun at boarding school, and had for the most part continued here, in a densely populated Folly, never far from the public eye. Trysts had by nature been furtive, quick, with one party stealing away soon after, the ever-looming Damocles sword of discovery preventing any more leisurely approach. But now, with the Folly in Thomas’s purview and the law, for once, on their side, they could afford to take their time. The concept was alluring, but it also only fuelled his need.
“Well, we can do it again, more slowly, later then. Not now, though.”
David pondered this for a second, and nodded. He got back up, kneeling on the bed, making Thomas groan quite inadvertedly with the loss of contact.
“Alright. Turn over?”
“No. I want to see you this time.”
“Right you are.” David grabbed the pillow with his free hand, and motioned for Thomas to lift his hips. Thus elevated, Thomas spread his legs, inviting David to get on with it.
He winced as he felt David’s finger at his entrance, and squirmed a little as he was breached, this having been something he’d rarely done in a considerable while. For a moment, he feared he’d be out of practice.
But there wasn’t anything to it really, was there? Yet it felt like David was taking forever, and soon Thomas was arching up, wanting a second finger at the very least. To his satisfaction, his body was remembering well; he could feel himself opening up under David’s probing touch, so skilled as he’d always been. Slowly, too slowly and too carefully, David slid the second digit in, scissoring both fingers to spread him open, then crooking them both and going after his sweet spot directly. Thomas thrilled at this part, he always did, the slight stretch of it, promising more to come.
“More,” he demanded.
Predictably, David shook his head. “Not yet.”
“David.”
“I’m not going to hurt you, Thomas, we’ve had that debate many a time.”
Then David angled his fingers just right, and hit home, and Thomas keened and said and thought nothing more.
David smiled. “That’s the spot, then?”
“Mm,” Thomas uttered (an influx of sensation had the tendency to render him monosyllabic) as he pushed upwards again, wanting David’s fingers back just there, just like that. And David complied, stroking lightly, but steadily, the tips of his fingers not letting up, rubbing up against Thomas’s prostate unceasingly until his vision whited out, until he lay panting and writhing, hands clenching into the sheets. His thoughts whited out too, just pleasure and the demand for more pleasure chasing each other in an endless cycle.
This was exactly why he loved doing this so much: the opportunity it afforded to, for a few precious moments, think nothing. Remember nothing.
David added a third digit, and Thomas moaned. He could have taken three easily, in his prime, back when this had been a habit of some regularity. Now, it required some adjusting. David added more lube and finally slipped his pinky inside as well, by now probably as impatient as Thomas was feeling.
When David eventually withdrew his fingers, the loss was unbearable. Thomas wanted nothing but to move, to do something, to counteract this all-consuming emptiness, but he knew what was to come very soon now (finally, finally) so he held still, and he waited.
Then David lubed himself up and pushed inside, and by now Thomas was whimpering, probably looking so horribly undignified, but he couldn’t care less, because lord, did it ever feel like something - not just David’s cock but some deeper something - was sliding right home where it belonged. Thomas wasn’t given to sentimentalism, but it felt like something that had been absent so long he’d forgotten how to even miss it was slotting back into place, the reunion finally fulfilled in its completion, body and soul, they were one again. He cried as his hips twitched upward to meet David’s thrust halfway, actual tears down his cheeks, and David saw them, (and muffled a sob of his own), and didn’t hesitate and didn’t startle and didn’t try to wipe them away, because he understood. They understood it all. They understood one another.
Nonetheless, because some courtesies must be observed, David halted for a second, and asked, his voice trembling like Thomas was trembling, tears glistening in his own eyes, “Sh-should I…?”
“Don’t stop.” Reaching out, wrapping all his limbs around David’s body and pulling him closer, Thomas said, “Don’t you dare stop.”
And David curled up closer, covering Thomas again with his body, and picked up his pace again. His thrusts were shallow, the angle imperfect, but it didn’t matter; they simply had to be this close. Feeling David’s skin on his, David’s hands pawing at him increasingly uncoordinated as pleasure crested and David’s hold on the situation faded, David’s every breath against his chest, was wildly overstimulating, and Thomas loved it, and never wanted to feel anything but it.
He thrust up blindly into David’s body warmth, rutting against his thigh, so very needful, having to come, and soon. David, as in all things, understood him, and fumbled a hand between them, wrapping it around Thomas’s cock. David’s palm was not soft, had never been, his hands always marred by the work in the lab or, later, the more gruesome labour of war. Thomas knew this, had anticipated it, and loved it for its familiarity, loved that it was David touching him, loved that, against all probability, he was getting to feel that dearest of touches again. He wept still, half driven out of his mind, as he came.
His body clenched with the sudden shock of his orgasm, and David’s breath hitched sharply as he ground down into Thomas in some more shallow, frantic bursts of movement, and not a minute later he followed suit.
David went boneless as he came, (he so often did) his face sweet and open with the flooding sensation of it, and it fell upon Thomas to support his weight. He twined their legs and wrapped his arms around David’s shoulders, scraping his nails down his back lightly. I have not marked him up even a bit, he thought with a tinge of regret. But there would be time for that later. There would be so much time for so many things later.
For a moment David lay still, gasping, coming down. Eventually he moved off, his spend leaking after him, and Thomas enjoyed this too as a bone-deep lassitude began to take hold of him. David rolled off, but he didn’t go far. They stayed on the bed, side by side, catching their breath and touching each other, gently, quietly and with a sort of wonder, need giving way to post-orgasmic bliss.
“That,” David said eventually, still getting his breath back, “felt different.”
Thomas was never inclined to talk much in these moments directly after. “Than?” he simply asked.
“Than it used to.”
“Hrm.”
“We both cried.”
Thomas cleared his throat, willing articulation back into his languid mind. David seemed to want to discuss, while Thomas’s body demanded for nothing but sleep. “That was to be expected, I suppose,” he said.
“Still…” David sighed airily and said nothing further, so it fell upon Thomas to prompt him.
“What?”
“I don’t like this to be tinged with grief.”
Thomas propped himself up on his elbow, and used the other hand to caress David. “It wasn’t grief,” he said, “Not on my part. Just… simply so glad to have you back.”
“Glad to be back,” David muttered. “And I’m so immeasurably sorry you had to spend so much time alone.”
“Shh.” Thomas touched his index and middle finger to David’s lips. “Not right now, please.”
David kissed his fingertips. “My poor darling,” he whispered. “Wherever did you get your entertainment without me?”
Thomas huffed a little laugh. He could go into it all in depth, explain about the bubble of heavy nothing, (as far as he could explain that at all) elaborate about the times spent alone, and the other moments too, the wild times leading up to the legalization, when people were of a mind to seize their rights, and all the insubstantial flings in between, but he really was tired. So he only said, “Where I could get it, if I wanted it.”
David considered this. “And now? If not Peter…”
“Please. He’s seeing a river goddess. I might be inclined, but I’m not suicidal.”
“What about your colleague, that brawny policeman?”
This time, Thomas’s laugh was more of a snort. “Alexander? Hah. Shout me halfway across town if I tried.”
This got a chuckle out of David. “Well, maybe Alexander would calm down if he had a Hephaestion to soothe him at night.”
Thomas yawned. “Hephaestion at my age? That’s asking a lot.”
Mirroring his yawn, David moved to get up. Thomas grabbed his hand, attempting to tug him back down to his side. “Where on earth are you going now? Stay.”
“We should clean up.”
Thomas groaned but allowed it.
“And then… well… do I go back to my room?” David hovered, uncertain. The way they’d done things for so many years was now to become invalid: things were different now, and new traditions were to be made. Thomas had already been through that kind of culture shock before, courtesy of Peter. For David, it was only now taking place.
“Why?” Thomas asked. “Who would mind if you didn’t? Stay the night.”
A look stole into David’s eyes like awe. “The whole night... with you.”
“And wake up here in the morning.”
Quite without advance warning, David launched himself back into bed to pepper Thomas’s face with kisses. “Oh!” he exclaimed, “I love this new world.”
—-
The war stole back into Thomas’s dreams that night, turning them nightmares. This he was not surprised by, not after all these years. A day of action tended to bring these memories to the forefront. What did surprise him was that after a few hours tossing and turning, he woke to a hand on his forehead, petting his hair, a gentle voice murmuring hushed and nonsensical comforts, and a warmth beside him in bed as of another living body there.
Now, after decades of night terrors, Thomas was an old hand at them. They didn’t come with a moment of disorientation anymore they way they’d used to. He half-woke, cracked an eye open and knew that he was in his bed in the Folly and not in fact on any of his battlefields. But this, the warmth, the voice and hand, were new. Never before had he woken from a nightmare to anything other than a cold, dark room and his own hammering heart. Never before had there been someone else to caress him and tell him, by the sound of it, “Shh, it’s alright, we’re not there now, we’re home.” But apparently, tonight, this there was. What was that all about?
Oh, David, right, he then remembered. Only my beloved.
Well, that was quite alright and natural. Blindly, he nestled closer to that soothing warmth, and went right back to sleep.
—-
When he woke, he was alone.
This was the common state of things, nothing out of the ordinary, until he remembered: last night, yesterday, in fact the previous week. David. And where had David got to?
It was barely dawn outside, the curtains hadn’t been drawn, so a pale blue light filtered into the room. Thomas sat up and took it in, and a slight sense of unreality overcame him. Surely he had to have dreamt it? Yes, that bizarre week, that could not have been real. A dream. A wishful figment. David reappearing, them quarrelling for a bit, then at last reuniting into absolute contentment. How nice, but still not real.
Partially, he wanted to shut his eyes and go right back to sleep, hoping that dream returned. The rest of him swung his legs out of bed and reached for his robe and slippers. He got up - oh, well, the soreness in his muscles was real enough, and it felt like a remainder from lovemaking rather than exercise or the convulsions of a night terror. Besides which, he was missing his pyjamas. So might he dare hope…?
Still exceedingly drowsy, Thomas let his feet carry him away from his bedroom, across the hallway and down the stairs. On the stair he met Molly, who took in his frazzled state without him needing to say a word. She pointed downwards, indicating the basement.
Thomas nodded and passed by her. After seven decades in each other’s company, there needed to be no words. He knew she could read in his face whatever was happening inside him right now, better even than he could interpret it himself.
Quite naturally, he stopped at David’s laboratory. The door was cracked, so he swung it fully open.
David was bent over one of the desks, a leaflet open in front of him, some papers next to it, murmuring softly to himself, pencil in hand, marking up things and crossing other things off a list. While it was looking to be another warm and humid day out, the basement was still cool, and David had put on a jumper over his pyjamas, and draped a woollen blanket over his shoulders. With his eyes still heavy and sleepy, his curls untamed and springing every which where, he looked the picture of coziness. Cozy and so inviting, to dive into all these layers and uncover the warm skin beneath.
“What’s got you down here already?” Thomas asked, keeping his voice down for reasons he couldn’t even name. A tribute to the early hour, perhaps.
“Oh.” David looked up, blinking at him owlishly, evidently still half-asleep. “Didn’t know you were up yet.”
Not quite knowing why, Thomas replied, “I woke up and I was alone.”
“I beg your pardon.” David said this sincerely, with a good deal of genuine regret. “I was going to come up again. You know I love going down here first thing in the morning.”
Ah, yes. Indeed, that had been - was - one of David’s habits. He’d always been in the lab way before breakfast, getting an early start on his work. “It’s funny, I’m only just remembering. It’s been so long.”
David looked soft and sad for a moment. It was strange, their whole disparity - that David had not lived these past seventy years. Long enough to make Thomas forget so many of his lover’s quirks - along with his scent, the sound of his voice, the feel of his skin. David had had no forgetting.
“What are you up to, anyhow?” Thomas asked, hoping to distract. He didn’t want to think about all that too deeply now, when relief still overwhelmed him in the face of David being here at all.
“Inventory.” David waved the list he had been making. “I need new lab equipment.”
Thomas shrugged. “I’ll check the budget.”
David suddenly chuckled. “Right. Of course. You’re the one I turn to now for that.” He shook his head, took up a thread again from last night, “Still... you being in charge here now... head of the Folly...”
“Well. By exclusion principle.” The way David said it still made it seem like some sort of achievement. “I was quite literally the only man fit to serve.”
David crossed his arms as he leaned against his desk. “Or the only man willing.”
Thomas sighed. This also wasn’t something that he liked to dwell on. Perhaps there had been a handful of others who might have been able to stay on after the war, and had simply preferred not to. Who had simply wanted to break their staves and never bother again with magic and all the grief it had brought.
“I cannot fault anyone for wanting to have peace and be done with this place. How could I, after Ettersberg? The lads deserved to rest easy.”
David brushed the blanket off himself and draped it over the backrest of his chair. Then he came closer, stopped in front of Thomas and raised his hand to brush a strand of hair (he hadn’t combed it back yet) from his forehead.
“You deserved the same,” he said.
Thomas kept silent, short of a reply. He couldn’t say he had considered himself deserving of anything much. Oh, certainly, he probably subconsciously, by way of his upbringing, felt himself entitled to all manner of things. Working with Peter was making that clear to him time and time anew. But I deserve? The words rarely occurred to him. In the face of facts, what did that matter? Oh, he could have raged against the fates that put him in charge of the Folly even as he’d been recovering from a gunshot wound and everything else besides. Or he could have gotten on with things, and that he had done. Besides, there had been Molly to consider. Would he have left her alone, or with anyone else? Chauvinists the lot, lechers some of them, and barely able to conceive of a fae or a girl or a mute or a member of the serving classes as a full person altogether. Molly had done so much for them in the past, but even if she’d done nothing, casting her out or leaving her to an uncertain fate had simply never been something Thomas could have done.
“Never mind all that now,” he said. “Would you like to come up to bed again?”
David took his hand. “Why, always.”
—-
This time, in the pale morning light, David took a moment to peruse the bedroom.
“Grand,” was his initial verdict. “Much better than we had.” Thomas didn’t quite know which stage of their lives and sleeping arrangements David was referring to: boarding school and dormitories, their former rooms here in the Folly, not nearly as large as the master bedroom, or the war during which they’d slept in a ditch? Probably he just meant that they now had privacy, and the leisure to sleep together, and all the time in the world to do it.
He meant to ask after that, to clarify, but David was by now peering at the pictures on the walls, smiling fondly at the photographs of them with the lads, all in their uniforms, and, “Oh!” he trilled. “You hung up the Leyendecker!”
Thomas grinned. “I did at that. Present to myself on occasion of the legalization.”
He’d had the painting done during his stay in the states, at the tender age of 24. It depicted a youth he sometimes could scarcely remember being - in profile, one arm dramatically extended, a werelight rising from his open palm, a grin on his face communicating look what I can do. It wasn’t a nude, but not much was missing to make it one: a large Union Jack covered the most private bits, but that was it. In reality, the sheet the artist - dear Joseph - had draped over him had been a simple white linen, the circumstances having been quite ad hoc to start a painting, but that was artists for you. The dedication at the bottom of the canvas, half-covered by the frame, ran “To Thomas in gratitude for your ‘enchanting’ company. Sincerely, your friends J. C. L. and Charles.” The whole depicted what Leyendecker had encountered back then as the essential, British Wizard.
Life had quite beaten any surplus patriotism out of Thomas in the ensuing years.
“What was it like?” David asked.
Thomas cocked his head. “What, being painted?” He remembered getting quite fidgety with holding the pose, especially immediately post-coitus. But whenever he’d complained of it - still so full of energy that wanted somewhere, in his youth - dear Joseph had put the paintbrush down and wandered over to… relax him.
“No,” David said, “when you hung it up here. The occasion. The legalization…”
Thomas smiled fondly, recalling. “It was a singular time.” He leaned in and gave David a kiss. “Let’s catch you up on the history later, hmm?”
“Later.” David nodded.
This time, there were much fewer clothes to divest, and they did away with them quickly. In the pale light of the dawning summer day, they beheld each other, and then, with twin sighs of relief, sank into each other’s arms.
“How do you want it?” Thomas asked as they were back on the bed, lying side by side for the moment, touching all over. Though they had been inclined to experiment a bit within their history, they’d established routines by which they gave each other mutual pleasure, and, despite the occasional deviation, had stuck to them more often than not. When coupling, usually, David did the giving, Thomas the taking, but within that seemingly simple dynamic hid a wealth of potential variety.
So Thomas asked, again, “Well? Do you want me in charge, or not in charge?” He could domineer from the bottom, sometimes. Other times, he preferred not to.
David was resting a hand on his flank. He now stroked downwards. “I want to drive you a little wild, my love.” His hand slid up Thomas’s inner thigh, softly cupping his balls, taking hold of his cock, soft still, but things were happening there with rapidity. Thomas groaned unabashedly as blood rushed southward (it had really been a while, excepting the previous night, since he’d been touched intimately). David’s other hand reached around and fondled the cleft of Thomas’s arse. He twitched, already, deliciously, the residual hint of soreness from the previous go only adding to the anticipation for more.
“I want you on your hands and knees,” David went on to say. “Bum up in the air for me.”
And that was David for you: cute and seemingly innocent with his overlarge jumpers, his boyish curls and doe eyes, and then he went and said things like this, or invented a spell that made an opponent’s lungs fill with their own blood on the battlefield, while muttering in Yiddish about vengeance. He steamrolled people. He steamrolled even Thomas, still.
So Thomas assumed the position as he was bid, resting his weight on his forearms.
David dipped into the nightstand again, lubed up his fingers quickly. Oh, he knew what he wanted, didn’t David always, and Thomas felt hands on his cheeks - not indeed on his face - , gripping, kneading, massaging. Well, didn’t that feel awfully nice…
Still, “What are you getting up to back there?” he asked, craning his head over his own shoulder to try and catch a glimpse at his lover.
“I just missed this. Getting to take my time… getting to undress you and have you, here on the bed, and everything soft and nice…” Ah, yes. The last time, again excepting last night, they’d come together had been inter-war, even more furtive and rushed than their usual, in full uniform, probably in a foxhole somewhere, ready to split apart and start in on the action at any second.
Truly, this was better.
Then, a finger moving down the cleft of his arse, leaving a pleasant trail of lube. Downwards and around, David went, all the way across that space in between Thomas’s hole and his balls, and up again, and off for a second, and then back with more lube, until Thomas felt the moisture of it down his sensitive inner thighs. He hummed, shifted up into the touch, pleasured in a mellow way but wanting more than that. David kissed along his shoulder, down his spine, at the small of his back now, oh, he would… oh yes…
And now David was mouthing at his entrance, licking, suckling, kissing, making Thomas give way with just his lips, squirming his tongue inside, oh, that warm, wet, singular feeling…
“Hhhmmmmmnnn,” Thomas uttered, quite involuntarily, muffling it into the pillow.
David pulled off with an obscene smack. “Please,” he said, “make noises, darling. I do so love to hear you, and we are alone…”
Thomas sighed, head swimmy with bliss. An eternity beckoned. Eternity of making noise during this any time he wanted, who could object, what could threaten them now? He could be loud, even… “Yes. Yes… Davey…”
“Good.” David got right back to work, with his fingers now at first, spreading him open, then his tongue was back, and Thomas felt he should howl his elation to the heavens… did so, maybe… all was a blur… or maybe not. Decades of habits not so easy to break as all that…
There was nothing in the world now but this, the sensation of David’s clever mouth at work, this and the needful pulse of blood in Thomas’s cock. So heavy… aching, rather… perhaps he could shift his weight, get a hand down himself, or… lower himself down against the sheets… anything…
“Nn-uhh,” David’s noise, muffled against him but clear in its meaning, and then suddenly there was David’s signare, too, and god, Thomas knew what was to come seconds before it clamped around the base of his cock, not painful, just… tight.
“Oh,” Thomas breathed, remembering. Yes, David had designed this forma too, this one not for wartime exploits, and Thomas knew full well that his lover could hold this spell as long as it took, even rimming him into next Sunday.
He’d denied David his lengthy, drawn-out edging session yesterday evening, but now David was collecting his due.
David kept it up for what felt like hours, licking and stroking inside Thomas, bringing him closer, closer, almost, never quite satisfying, until Thomas was writhing, whimpering, seriously considering whether he should beg–
“Please… Davey, please, Davey…”
Again David pulled off, depriving Thomas totally of any sensation, and he keened–
“What, honey?” David asked, his voice rough, strained, surely he must be as impatient for it now as Thomas was…
“Fuck me now, do.”
David chuckled. “How demanding!”
“You’re wanting to, I know you do. Davey, it’s been ages, you must be wanting to get off as much as I do.”
“Granted,” David said softly. Thomas craned his head again to see what David was getting up to and, oh, David was touching himself. David was applying lube to his own cock. That meant any moment now… Thomas trembled with wanting. In another world, on some distant star, he possessed reticence, even gravitas. Imagine that. Now he was nothing but a receptacle of what David would put in him very soon very soon any second now–
–yearning for it, needing, gasping for it, so open, so ready–
–hard to the point of pain, his cock reddened and plump and so sensitive–
–and there it was, David’s glorious cock at last, nudging against his entrance, breaching him again, sliding inside.
This time, David had barely any difficulty. There was no struggle to ease his passage. Thomas was warm and wet and prepared for him.
David let out a breathy moan of his own, bent double and folding himself over Thomas as he slid further inside, so that he could mouth at his shoulderblade again, too scattered, too incoherent for a proper kiss, teeth digging in a bit, yes god. Now he was fully sheathed, in to the hilt, his balls against Thomas’s crack and they both groaned, nothing but mutual relief. Joined, properly, fitting together so well, David’s cockhead nudging Thomas’s prostate, sending showers of sparks through him with every small adjustment.
For a minute, they both simply stayed still, basking in their complete togetherness. Thomas arched his back, catlike, almost purring like one too. This felt good, better than he had in… oh, years, decades maybe. So hot. So full.
“You should move,” he suggested, after the appropriate moment had been taken. David complied, and his every thrust was heavenly delight, hard and fast the way Thomas loved it. He could hear David’s harsh breaths behind him, but not too loudly through the ringing in his ears as the sensations in him crested, as David’s hot length jabbed into him, withdrew, hit that sweet spot again, and then over, and then over…
…Thomas arching up to meet him halfway, needing David buried in him, filling him up, as deep as possible, and those sparks of pleasure, and he did try to pull at his own cock, but to no avail, David’s spell still held… and he was now making all kinds of noises, deep primal noises down in his throat…
But he needed to come. Had to. Now. Otherwise he’d burst, he’d go insane, he’d die.
David slammed into him once more… twice… growing erratic now, frantic, he was close… he was there, coming in spurts, and as he lost himself in it, Thomas felt the hold on his dick loosen. God, thank god, could not have stood another second, and he reached down, couple of harsh pulls on himself, and he spilled too, erupted more like, long streaks sullying his own abdomen. And it was everything, everything unloading all at once.
----
When David pulled out, he left a sticky commingling of lube and ejaculate leaking out after him, warm now but cooling rapidly, slippery and moist down Thomas’s thighs. Thomas rolled onto his back and appreciated it, trailing a hand through the mess, skimming his fingers gently down the length of his cock (it still felt so sensitive from being in that vice-grip earlier, still a little plumped, every soft touch an exquisite bloom of pleasure-pain), fingering the rim of his hole to trace where David had just been. So empty now, so deliciously sore. He barely resisted stuffing two fingers down there as a placeholder of sorts for whenever David would be up for it again.
David leaned over from where he’d been coming down from it, across on the bed, still panting a bit, and grabbed Thomas’s hand. “Leave it,” he said. “You’ll be sore enough as is.”
“Always so reasonable,” Thomas replied. “What if I want you again?” Because now his body was remembering again, oh yes, and it had been so long without. These embers, now stoked, would probably take a while to stop glowing.
He enclosed his free hand around David’s wrist, meaning to pull him off, but David hissed, a flash of true pain evident on his face as he wrenched his hands away. His wrists were still reddened, chafed, the skin looking raw in some places.
Oh. Right. That.
Very carefully, Thomas fetched David’s hands back, holding them gently up for inspection. “Oh, dear, your poor wrists. I’m so deeply sorry.”
“Please.” David took a shaky breath. “I don’t need an apology from you, Thomas, it’s fine, just maybe… maybe an explanation. Why the cuffs? Why all that time? Was it… vindictiveness, or…?”
“No. Nothing of the sort. It’s simply, being a practitioner, coming out of combat, it’s… prudent to go without for a while. I’ve experienced this firsthand.”
“What do you mean by that?” David asked.
Thomas took a deep breath. “When I was just a few weeks home, when things were… not settled yet within me as they are now… there were times when I wouldn’t quite… maintain control of my magic the way I ought to have. One instance, I was…” He halted. He hadn’t ever divulged the story of this incident to anyone. He’d never spoken of this, not even to Molly. Perhaps it was too much, perhaps it could never be said—But this was David.
David who was owed an explanation.
“There was a thunderstorm,” he said, his voice dipping into a whisper. “It sounded so much like mortar fire. I… confused it. Molly found me under the table in the dining room. Cover, you see. This hasn’t happened to me in, oh, decades. But back then… and Molly reached for me, which perhaps she should not have done. But what did any of us know about it? I didn’t recognize her. In that moment, I…”
He gulped. This had taken on an air like a confessional. “I hurt Molly.”
David held his hands, his eyes deep pity lakes. “Oh, Thomas. With your magic…?”
“Yes.” Thomas hung his head. “It haunts me to this day. Just imagine what might have been if she hadn’t understood. What if this instance had ruined our friendship? What if I’d hurt her worse? What if I’d…?”
He couldn’t say it. He couldn’t.
“I see,” David whispered.
“I didn’t want this for you. For your sake and others’, I needed you to be safe. At least until we could get a professional to assess you. But it backfired, didn’t it? Almost got you killed.”
“Don’t blame yourself.”
“Don’t blame myself for something I clearly did?”
David shook his head. “Your intentions were good ones. I know that now. But you have to trust me to know my own needs. To know how to handle my own combat fatigue.”
But how can you know that, Thomas wanted to ask. He certainly hadn’t known how to ‘handle’ his own ‘combat fatigue’ back in ’45. Would have been grateful for a guiding hand. For someone, anyone, anything to make sense of it for him. But he reckoned he could tell what David meant. He wasn’t claiming to have himself all figured out. That would have been a lie, anyways. He was simply asking not to have help forced upon him, and for Thomas to not presume that something that might have helped him would also be good for David. They were very different people still.
“But if you do need anything, you will ask me for it, won’t you?”
David nestled into his side, disregarding for a moment how sweaty and sticky they both were. “Will do, love.”
Thomas simply let that settle in the air between them, contented. They would face things together again from here on out. A double act.
Quite suddenly, he had to muffle another yawn. “Lord, but I’m tired still. Maybe we can go back to sleep.”
David moved against him somewhat. “We need a shower. You especially. And breakfast…”
“Perhaps we can ask Molly to bring a tray up.” It seemed ultimately slovenly/debauched/bohemian/libertine and any other number of such terms, taking breakfast in bed without being sick, the decline of steadfast English discipline. One took breakfast in the breakfast room, fully dressed for the occasion, come hell or high water. On the other hand… it wasn’t every day that the love of one’s life returned from the dead. They had nothing on for the day. And Thomas simply didn’t want to leave their (their!) bed yet, not when it was so comfortable and warm and something within him was still, even after being loved on so lavishly twice, watching the line of David’s body and giving off pangs of hunger that had nothing to do with breakfast at all.
He half-turned, capturing David’s thigh between both of his legs, slowly, lazily rubbing against it. Ohh- he was still very sensitive. He shuddered, half discomfort, half excitement.
“Really?” David raised a brow. “You cannot possibly be up for it again.”
“Maybe if we sleep some first.” Thomas smiled encouragingly, caressing David’s jaw, then wandering lower to the soft little hairs on his chest. “Have something to eat, as you suggested, and then… perhaps just spend the day in here.”
David laughed, and hugged him close. “Impossible. You are impossible.”
(Set in David Mellenby Lives AU, obviously. Tw suicidal ideation)
It was a cold January night, somewhere around midnight, when Thomas awoke to muffled sobbing from the other bedside.
David had been acting strange all day, absentminded not in his usual, really quite adorable distracted-professor-way, but in a manner that hinted at some trouble brewing, and distant and dismissive when questioned about it. Usually when David had a problem or was struggling with something, he insisted it be discussed and resolved immediately. That he hadn’t come out with it yet, and apparently waited to cry until Thomas fell asleep, was cause to worry.
“Davey?” Thomas asked softly.
David was seated on the edge of the bed, dressed in his pajamas, his favorite quilt draped over his shoulders. He was always cold these days, and layered on the blankets when he went to sleep until Thomas felt he must suffocate. Now David looked up from his hunched position, quickly scrubbing away tears, taking a shaky breath.
“Y-yes? Did I wake you?”
“Of course you did, going on like that. What’s the matter?” Thomas peeled himself out of the communal blanket nest and shifted closer towards David. When David didn’t give him a sign to back off, he rested a hand on his back.
David stared forlornly down at his hands. “It’s just... the anniversary is coming up. I can’t help thinking about it... all the time.”
Of course. Thomas tried to remember the current date. Were they really coming up on the nineteenth?
“Ettersberg.” It was a curse. The days leading up to the anniversary of the battle were never easy ones.
David nodded. “One feels... one should really put a bullet in one’s head. Properly, this time.”
Thomas couldn’t help but let his hand on David’s shoulder tighten for a second as he fought down a sudden wave of panic. David still had these thoughts sometimes, and Thomas wasn’t helping by making it all about him and how he couldn’t bear to lose David again, no, never again, he’d go insane.
“What makes you say that?” he asked, in a low voice, hoping to appear calm.
“When I think of Ettersberg...” David sighed, faltered. “You don’t know what it’s like for me, Thomas.”
Thomas cocked his head. “I very much was at Ettersberg.”
“No, I know that. But you were only doing as you were ordered, and trying to get the lads out. I wanted the mission. I wanted us to go there! When I think of Ettersberg, I think to how much I... contributed to that catastrophic loss of life there.”
Thomas stroked David’s back, attempting to soothe. David was sniffling again. “I don’t recall that being your decision to make.”
“I don’t just mean Operation Spatchcock.” David’s voice hardened, hollowed. “Without my research, my theories that I put into the world, Ettersberg could never have been built.”
Of course Thomas knew that. He’d known that since around about 1943, when some of the spells that practitioners from Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften were utilizing in the field to much devastation had started coming with a faint whiff of David’s signare, had started suspiciously resembling spells that David himself had designed.
David had shared much with his fellow scientists in the late 20s and early 30s, before Hitler had shown his colours. Theoretical stuff, mostly, as far as Thomas understood it, but the researchers of Geheimwissenschaften had, with that typical Germanic zeal, set to turning theory into practice. And, unlike David, they’d had no scruples to commit mass-murder to get there, to eviscerate and torture, to twist and malform and mutilate on a nauseating scale. They’d had so many ‘undesirables’ to experiment on, hadn’t they? What with Buchenwald, right there.
“I thought... I was convinced that the pursuit of knowledge, that scientific progress was in itself pure, free of ideological tint, that this should be furthered unfettered by ethical consideration,” David said. “How could science be bad, when it was my whole life? I was an idiot. What I saw... what we saw...” Tears were dripping from his chin now as his body heaved with sobs. “All those poor men and women... children... fae... the atrocities, the unimaginable tortures, all because of my ideas. Because of me. I did that. It could not have happened without me. It could not have happened if I had never lived.”
Thomas opened his mouth to protest, but it was impossible to get a word in edgewise. David groaned, burying his head in his hands.
“I’m a monster. I’m a monster.”
“David...”
Thomas looked at David there, bathed in moonlight from their bedroom window. David in his flannel pajamas, with his quilt and his sleep-mussed curls and that bit of pudge he’d gained back since the war. To an outsider, it would have been laughable, seeing the cuddliest-looking man in the world proclaim himself a monster. But Thomas had seen David in battle. He knew his lover; he knew this was no laughing matter.
“How could you have known?” he asked. “David, how can this possibly be your fault? Exchanging some theories with people you’d erroneously trusted does not amount to asking these people to build a concentration camp.”
“But I did what they did,” David sniffled. “I too made spells that would kill...”
“And I used them. Do you think me monstrous too?”
Finally, David turned around and faced Thomas. He looked horrible with the tear streaks down his cheeks, his face all red and blotchy from so much crying. Thomas felt a sting in his heart. He loved this man so much.
A long and silent look passed between them, and Thomas knew that David would not answer the question aloud. They had both, as a matter of fact, seen each other in battle. The answer was perhaps not wholly likely to be a heartfelt, truthful no.
“Would you do it again?” David asked.
And if it were Peter with him in the room, or most anyone else in fact, Thomas would take the cue he was being given and say no, no, of course not, those were desperate circumstances, and if I could turn back time I’d do it differently, do it by the book, reconsider, keep my humanity intact by remembering that of the enemy. But it was David, who deserved the truth, who got the truth.
“To fight the fascists? Yes,” Thomas said. “Without blinking an eye, yes.”
David nodded. Instead of recoiling, disgusted, he reached out, gripped Thomas’s hands and leaned in, resting his head on Thomas’s shoulder. Thomas embraced him, wrapping both arms around David tightly, relishing his warmth and his breath that was slowly evening out.
“I won’t have you hurt yourself,” he murmured. “Never on my watch.”
“Oh, Thomas.” David detached from his shoulder, giving him a watery smile. “As long as you’re with me, as long as you... understand, it’ll be alright.”
And they had their understanding. The war turned you monstrous, as it did me, and I love you, I love you, I love you.
Tucked behind a tree, out of sight from the rest of the men, they were allowing themselves a rare moment of privacy.
Normally this would occur at night, nestled in their shared foxhole, or sometimes, when they could get it, in the luxury of a tent, normally they would have been more careful, but tempers were frayed, and David found he couldn’t wait. Thomas had removed his helmet, and David tugged him closer, ran a hand through his hair. Gratefully, Thomas leaned against him, a solid weight in his uniform, loaded with all his equipment. They all wore so many layers nowadays which it was rarely safe to remove, and touch was so scarce. David felt keenly the starvation for it, felt it resonate within and reflected by his lover. Captain Nightingale was not invulnerable, no matter what the lads thought. He needed comfort just like any other man, and David was here to provide. A good lieutenant was an invaluable aide to his commanding officer, something David knew all too well.
“My songbird,” he murmured, let his hand slip lower, cradled Thomas’s jaw. “Do we have time, do you think...?”
“Not much,” Thomas said, even while he put a hand on David’s and lifted it away from his face to kiss the open palm. “Krauts might be aware of our position already. We can... stay, for the moment, just like this.”
“Right.” David kissed him, intending for it to be brief, but Thomas chased his mouth with his own, and he made that little... sound, and all caution was dashed. David wrapped an arm around Thomas’s waist, pulling him closer, flush against his front. Thomas embraced him in turn, kissing him hungrily, so needy for any touch, anything they could give each other in this brief, stolen moment, any gentleness that the war usually didn’t permit.
Just as they let go, ready to return back to the company and be soldiers again, as David looked up, he caught sight of a movement between the snowy trees. Startled, he stared over Thomas’s shoulder and directly in the face of one of their privates.
Not a Kraut, he thought in momentary relief as his mind identified the uniform as distinctly British, but the relief was short-lived, and pure panic followed on its heels. He saw us.
Thomas, having noticed him tense, took a step back. “What is it?”
David broke the embrace, stooping down to pick his helmet up and plunge it back onto his curls. “Nothing, sweetness,” he whispered. “Just wait here a minute.” No need to bother Thomas with this just yet when it might all get cleared up. Their Captain had so much on his mind. A good lieutenant was an invaluable aide.
The man had turned and gone, fled, rather, back to where they were dug in for the approaching night. David pursued, and caught up to the lad.
“Private, a word.”
The man’s steps didn’t slow.
Arkwright, David’s mind supplied. That was his name. Clive Arkwright. A replacement, first mission in the field. Barely of age, barely with the company a week. The staff in his hand all new and shiny. David rested his hand on the handle of his own, scratched-up, much-used one. “Arkwright!”
The private stopped and turned. “Sir.” It was almost a sneer.
David drew level, and caught him by the arm. “What did you see, private?”
“Don’t touch me.” The kid yanked his arm out of David’s grasp. “Once we get back to CP, I’m reporting this. Disgusting...”
The disgust couldn’t be helped. The consequences...
Discovered. Even as the horrors of warfare piled on, this still frequented David’s nightmares. For so many years they’d been so careful. Now David felt hot and cold all over, his heart hammering in his chest to the point of pain. Hell, hell, this must be what the hell feels like that the Christian boys always talk about...
“You will do no such thing, private,” he said, lowly and more quietly than he felt. “That’s an order.”
The kid spat at his feet. “I don’t take orders from a rug-muncher.”
He might as well have slapped David in the face.
For an endless moment, David was reeling, left to imagine the torment that would come. The court-martial and then, who knew what would happen then. At best, this would see them dishonorably discharged, ousted from the Folly, everything they had worked for in tatters, needing to start over somewhere far away with nothing of note. Neither of them had a huge inheritance to draw on. For an endless moment, David saw in his mind the pained faces of his parents. And this was the best of the possible outcomes. At worst...
At worst...
He imagined his beauteous songbird, who had done so much for King and country, locked away behind bars, now painted a deviant. Or worse, an institution, and people attempting to reform, to break and re-mold. G-d, please, David begged in silence, I don’t care what they do to me. But please, spare Thomas.
And within that endless moment--
A voice shouted, “Incoming!”
Muscle memory took over as the shells whistled overhead. David threw himself down beneath the husk of a dead tree, unclipped his staff from his belt and covered it with his body, the thin length of wood that was so vitally important to any serving practitioner. He cast his shield and then, eyes screwed shut, breathless, he waited.
Explosions, stationary bursts of light, tinged his world in red. Debris collided with his shield and bounced off. The sound of trees splintering, of shells whistling and finding home, someone shouting orders, urging the men to cast shields and find cover. And the screams. And the screams.
And after a minute, an hour, an eternity, the silence.
David staggered to his feet, not yet quite daring to extinguish the shield. Alive another time, miraculously alive.
The trees were -- gone, the untouched snow a grubby mess now. Splintered wooden ruins surrounded him, like some giant’s fist had hit the scenery and swiped it all away in one uncaring blow.
He had to get to the others. See if they were okay. Check for wounded - find Thomas.
In his dazed state, he nearly tripped over the body a little ways off from where he’d crouched to wait out the shelling.
Right, the boy. The boy he’d been talking with. The one who’d wanted to report them.
Clive Arkwright.
The boy hadn’t found cover fast enough. His legs were twitching, still attempting to get the body to its feet, perhaps simply convulsing in a desperate, senseless effort. Everything above the waist was mangled. Blood was gushing from a torn throat, the hand trying vainly to clutch it shut already weakened, growing limp. David stared at him.
It was not the first body he had seen, not by a long shot. Yet, he stared, rooted to the spot.
The boy’s mouth opened and closed a few times, but no sound escaped. David could imagine fairly well what word the numb lips formed. Could see the plea in the boy’s eyes.
And David...
...David, valorous, faced uncertain ruin, lifted honour over the intact lives of himself and his lover, his Captain, The Nightingale, this beacon of hope that the men so fervently relied on, he sealed the boy’s throat shut with a strong, steady hand, lifted him up on his shoulder, called for the medic, and maybe Clive Arkwright still died here, the wounds too grievous to salvage, but maybe by the slimmest of chances, a week later, Clive Arkwright awoke in a field hospital, and two weeks later, Clive Arkwright smiled at David and said, thank you, sir, and said, I see now, lieutenant, and sorry for what was being said, but maybe...
maybe not, because that was how it happened in fairytales, and life was not a fairytale, and Clive Arkwright still delivered a report, and David watched powerlessly as his love was torn away from where he was so desperately needed, as his love was torn away to rot...
...and David couldn’t take that chance.
David felt cold as he stared down at the young man, and the least he could do was force himself to wait it all out, bear witness until the last possible second, and he pressed his lips together and he did not look away as the young man’s eyes widened, perhaps in the pain of his death throes, perhaps in a horrible understanding of what was going to have to happen.
And the coldest part of David, the one part he forever flinched from, whispered, Oh, now you’ll take help from the likes of me?
He waited until the young man had stopped twitching. It was a matter of nary a minute. Then he called for the medic.
Then he crouched against the nearest intact tree and threw up what felt like everything he’d ever eaten, and couldn’t reach down quite far enough to purge his disgust with himself.
