discoveredinalj | Day 36: Fic - "Let Nothing Ye Dismay"

byslantedlight.livejournal.com posting in

There's been a little juggling at this end of the calendar I'm afraid - below be fic that was never meant to be here, but managed to shoehorn its way into the prompt in a mad rush across several time zones tonight!

Let Nothing Ye Dismay
by Slantedlight and

erushi

The living room of the seaside cottage was a landscape of misshapen forms and bulky figures, draped in off-white canvas and dove-grey dust, foreign creatures trapped in the confines of pastel wallpaper and cheap cotton curtains that had been twitched apart by impatient hands. In the wan light of the fading December day, holiday became inertia, innocent became ominous.

Too knackered to ponder the significance of omens and portents, Doyle sank into what he hoped was an armchair with a heartfelt groan. Disturbed dust rose obligingly in a mushroom cloud before resettling, a thousand never-alive insects hovering in midflight and making him sneeze. In the sniff punctuated silence that followed, the absence of a grinning “bless you” was strangely conspicuous.

Bloody Bodie.

The heavy thunk of footsteps on planked wood seemed to agree with his assessment readily enough, the other man a study of deliberate insouciance as he made his way to the blue-tiled kitchen at the back with five days’ worth of perishables threatening to spill from carrier bags hanging on curled fingers, stretched folds and twice-rumpled creases of plastic rustling as they were settled on the counter. It was an expression Bodie had worn all through the previous night’s CI5 Christmas bash – since the morning of Christmas Eve, now that he thought about it, just after the Devonshire op had finally ended on a successful note after coming a hair’s breadth to finishing belly-up – and while that expression did have its appeal in the eyes of certain birds, Doyle heartily believed that it did not become his normally jovial partner one bit.

"Old mate from the SAS has a place down south, wouldn’t mind lending it to us for a bit." Christ. Fine way back in July, but why he'd let Bodie talk him into driving down at the fag end of December was beyond him. Then again, everything felt beyond him right now, far easier to let Bodie make any decisions that needed making, to follow him to the ends of the earth - or Bournemouth - without question or argument.

Bloody Bodie, insisting they make good on their agreement to have a much postponed seaside holiday together, only to spend the first day being a bullish bear with a sore head.

Last night they'd eaten quickly, cheese on toast and sausages charred a black-red-brown, silence and the imperious rattling of coastal winds on the window panes punctuating careful spoonfuls of heated soup from a dented tin. The only bed in the cottage was a double, newly covered with cotton sheets extracted from storage, smelling of mothballs and camphor and damp, their bodies unnaturally delineated by precisely placed jackets and coats of crisply folded tartan and leather, for extra warmth. When they finally slept it was with stiffly arranged limbs and at least five inches between them.

And now - now Doyle sat in the ghosted parlour, and he didn't know what to do. His bones jangled with a tension that had not relaxed in their room, in their bed, last night, and his voice felt unworkable, his throat too tight to let through words that might make a difference, that might save them.

"You want a cuppa?" Bodie called from the kitchen, unexpected in so many ways that Doyle jumped.

He nodded, forgetting that Bodie couldn't see him, then remembered and managed a creaking affirmation after all, turning his head just far enough that the lowering grey clouds caught his eye, their seaside a world of crashing waves and dooming skies, and the dying of the year. Bloody Bodie.

He heard vaguely the click of the kettle as it came to the boil, and a clattering of teaspoons, then Bodie was in front of him, holding out a Kiss Me Quick mug that was all cracked glaze and jokey cartoon characters that he didn't recognise.

What the hell were they going to do, stuck together like this in a draughty holiday house by the sea? It should have been different, it would have been different the way they'd originally planned it - just them, the sultry heat of July, and a town full of the joys of sun-kissed skin and warm beer by day, locked doors and the double bed by night. They might have invited others to share it - he remembered the first time he'd seen Bodie up to his balls in a woman, remembered the way Bodie's hand had clenched in his own when he came, so that Doyle came too, at just that moment, and it had nothing to do with Cathy or Sally or whoever's lips they'd been around his own cock.

He remembered seeing that, and feeling that, and now there was nothing but emptiness where he should have been yearning to get it all back.

They were finished.

In the end he drank his tea and fell asleep, there in the chair, in the dustsheets and the cobwebs, so that he awoke stiff and sore as well as hungry, a buzzing headache behind his eyes, the world sour in his mouth. He stood up and stretched, grimacing into the five o'clock darkness, feeling his cautious way across the room to find the lightswitch and grimacing harder when he'd flicked the electricity to life, and it pounded through his eyelids, his eyeballs, burrowed into his headache and lodged itself there.

He had aspirin somewhere in his toilet bag, but that would mean going upstairs to their bedroom, to where Bodie must be. He detoured to the kitchen, rinsed out his mug and filled it with cold water that slid down his throat like honey, that he could feel washing into his stomach, waking him up. He opened the fridge, gazing in at the lamb chops and beef steak that Bodie had bought, at the cauliflower and beansprouts and carrots and broccoli that he had insisted on putting into the shopping cart. He could cook, and they could eat in front of the telly, watch something inane and - and then they'd have to talk about it, talk about whatever it was on the box, say things to each other because there was no one else there.

Pub. They'd go out to the pub.

He wouldn't have to talk at the pub, because they couldn't talk about work with all those people around, not surrounded by men and women whose worst hours involved filling in the wrong forms, or short-changing someone by ten-pence, or being expected to work an extra half an hour past five thirty.

He wouldn't have to think about the dead women in Devonshire, or the sniper who'd been waiting for them, her long dark hair hanging freely around the sight of the SP66 as she watched, waited for Bodie to move into his position, waited for him to crouch down and settle himself. He wouldn't think about the way he froze, standing there behind her, watching the sway of her hair as she shifted backwards into place, as she took her time sighting.

The way she squeezed the trigger, even as he finally called out to her, identified himself, gave her a chance.

The way the back of her head exploded outwards when his bullet hit it, the way her hair flew up and - he wouldn't have to talk about that.

Pub.

o0o

The noise was the first thing that struck Doyle as they edged their way past a group of leather-jacket-clad loiterers and into The Old Commodore, all babbles of conversation and spikes of laughter and A pint of lager for me, luv, and one more for my mate ’ere, ta. There was no footie on the tiny television perched in the corner, and the quiz show which flickered on the grainy screen could barely be heard in the dimly lit interior. It was busy for a Tuesday night, the jukebox blaring over everything, and the one thing they were not was alone.

The bar was all polished cherry wood and smoke which made his eyes sting while he stood waiting for their pints, and for Bodie to order the food. There was a strange, unhealthy warmth to the place, to being amongst this crowd of post-Christmas cheer-ers, and Doyle felt stiff and cold in contrast, out of place. He let Bodie lead them to a table in the back corner as it came free, defending it from a trio of spotty and giggling teenagers with a quick frown, and then he leaned back and supped his pint, and waited vaguely for their dinner, which eventually arrived via a cheery young man with a smile that was too bright.

Huddled at their tiny square of age-pitted wood and across from his partner, knee-touching-knee and foot-brushing-calf, Doyle found himself, ridiculously, feeling sympathy for the battered and fried piece of cod lying, smothered in sauce, on the plate before him alongside a golden heap of chips. Smothered, he decided between salting his chips and reaching for his cutlery, was precisely how he felt, though he imagined “stifled” might have done equally well: the din and air of the too-crowded pub seemed to weigh heavily on his shoulders, and the dozen witty things he imagined he could have said to the other man to break the strange awkwardness they seemed to have tumbled into all caught at his throat again, words scrabbling weakly against the confines of his larynx.

In the careless hurly-burly that was their surroundings and the clink of metal cutlery on chipped china, Bodie’s silence was a tangible guest at their table and about as unwelcome; Doyle found himself almost sighing with relief when his partner absently snuck a sip from his bitter and then offered him a chip too soggy with vinegar, reminiscent of years of pub lunches and dinners shared. Bodie’s fingers on his own were warm, the chip suitably salted if a little too sour, and Doyle was careful to flick his tongue across his lips, which tasted of salt and grease and vinegar and maybe, if he imagined it hard enough, Bodie.

“Look, I – ”

“Don't.”

The fingers of his partner’s hand reached across and tightened around Doyle’s lower arm, blunt-cut nails digging through leather and flannel to surely leave tiny crescents on flesh. His startled curse however, was forestalled by the steady rise of voices two tables to their left, the gist of which currently included angry references to certain parts of the human anatomy, both male and female, and the world’s oldest profession, and finally "Let go of me, Colin, you bloody bastard, don’t you bloody dare".

Somehow, Doyle wasn’t too surprised that his hands were suddenly fending off one of the many ladder-back chairs of the pub as it tumbled to the scratched and sticky floor with a sharp crack, and that Bodie had an armful of distressed female. A thin, moustached man glared at him balefully before transferring the full weight of his unhappy regard to Bodie. “So, you’re another one. Well you can keep 'er!”

Bodie tried a smile, "You've got it all wrong mate..." but whatever had happened was over too fast for explanations, and the man had turned his back and stormed out, pushing clear a path through the suddenly still room and slamming the door behind him.

The silence that had fallen heavily around the pub wrinkled into whispers and then cracked, as the first threads of conversation were tentatively picked up by its patrons once again. Doyle looked down at the chair still in his hands, over at Bodie still holding the woman where a moment ago he'd been holding Doyle. He'd been right, they wouldn't have any time to themselves in a pub, only now his fingers still felt the brand of Bodie's own, the salt of Bodie's chip was still a tang on his lips, and now he resented the interruption.

"How dare he say that, how dare he say it?" Bodie's woman began, on a rising note. "I 'aven't got another feller, and he oughtn't to say that I 'ave!"

"That's alright love," Bodie was saying, though he cast a glance in Doyle's direction, "he probably doesn't mean it."

"He does mean it, he does! He thinks... he thinks..." The woman hiccoughed, then turned her face into Bodie's shoulder and began to cry in earnest. Bodie patted her half-heartedly on the back, appealing to Doyle with a look.

Doyle rolled his eyes. It'd serve Bodie right if he left him to it, but it was raining again outside, coming down in sheets against the window behind them, a little echo of what Doyle had been feeling when they first came in.

"Have you got a friend you can call, love?" he asked, peeling her away from Bodie and sitting her down on the bench at their table.

"N-no. Claire's away and Sarah doesn't like Colin anyway, and - and what if he doesn't come ba-ack?"

"He's bound to, pretty face like yours," Doyle said, staring at the mascara-streaked horror in front of him. "What's your name, love?"

"M-mary-"

"Well Mary, why don't we call a minicab and - "

"But he still won't believe me," Mary sniffed, reaching for Doyle's still folded paper napkin and using it to dab delicately at her eyes. "If only we could get it back then maybe he'd believe me!"

"Get what back?" Doyle asked gently, trying to pretend that Bodie wasn't frowning at him across their garish and congealed dinner.

"Get back the baby Jesus and the donkey-"

"Right." Doyle wanted to go home. He wanted to go home so badly that he ached with it, wanted to breathe the slight smell of damp and gun oil and the polish that he used on his bike, and the towels drying on his radiator and the tea and spices in his kitchen cupboard. He wanted to pretend that the last fortnight had never happened, that he and Bodie hadn't drifted apart amidst the carnage and death, and mostly that they weren't stuck here in this miserable town with nothing but the Capri keeping them together and this woman spluttering between them.

"The nativity set from in front of Colin's pub, The Cock and Bull," Mary said, leaning towards him. "Someone stole the baby Jesus and the donkey, and Joe and I were only trying to get them back, because 'e reckoned it was Charlie Wagstaff from up The Waylander, only he's always been jealous of our nativity and Connie swore she'd seen him carrying something in a big sack on Monday night, and- and-"

"Alright love, alright. Well why don't you call Joe and get him to talk to... to-"

"Colin," Bodie filled in for him impatiently.

" - Colin, and explain about the- "

"Baby Jesus and the donkey."

Doyle didn't bother pretending this time, he shot his partner a look made up of all the frustration and anger of his own, his forehead furrowed, his eyes narrowed, his lips thin. "Thanks, Bodie."

Bodie's lips, the bastard, twitched upwards.

"Colin won't listen to Joe, they'll only 'ave a punch up, and Colin's got ever such sensitive skin, he bruises ever so easily..."

"Does he?"

"'ere, are you making fun of me?"

"Hey?"

"You are, you're taking advantage and making fun of me... You're not gentlemen, you're..." The table scraped along the floor as Mary stood up and pushed her way between it and Doyle, to stand, hands on hips and eyes flashing, in front of him. "Well, to hell with the lot of you!"

Doyle sat back, startled, as she balled up the paper napkin she was still holding and threw it at him, so that it hit his forehead, bounced off his long-cold fish, and vanished beneath the bench, no doubt to lie amongst the dust and cobwebs until next Christmas.

"Rejected again, sunshine," Bodie said from the other side of the table, and suddenly Doyle had had enough.

"Something to say to me, mate?" he hissed between clenched teeth, feeling his hands tighten to fists by his sides, wanting nothing more than to punch them into Bodie's face, to shatter his unnatural calm some other way than by amusing him. Who did he think he was, anyway, to be so indifferent to everything they'd seen and done the last month, to the blood and the bone, to Doyle?

And Bodie, damn him, gave him a look which suggested that he had started speaking Greek, or maybe Chinese; I could call you Lao Tsu, though Confucius has a mighty fine ring to it. You’re being ridiculous, mate, the raised eyebrow seemed to say, Bodie-speech at its finest. Stop it.

Behind them someone twittered nervously, two glasses clinked across the bar. The collar and front of Bodie’s jacket were warm to Doyle's touch, from its wearer, from the heated pub; it stuck to the pads and creases of Doyle’s fingers, and the twist-folds of leather were sticky-slick with the sweat of his palm. In the process of retrieving his pint, Bodie’s arm had paused mid-ascent, fingers pressed white against the curve of clear glass and golden lager.

A pan sizzled somewhere behind the bar and out of sight, beer-battered fish in fat and oil, or perhaps chicken, maybe onions. In the stuffy confines of the pub, the smell of grease and spices was suddenly cloying. Standing nose-to-nose with his partner, feeling heat, breathing the thick air, Doyle became painfully aware of two and a half dozen stares pinned on the evening's next spectacle.

Slowly, ostentatiously, he released his hold on the leather; knowing he shouldn't, but taking immense pleasure in the way that Bodie stumbled two steps back before managing to catch his balance, the way he winced as his hip connected with the corner of a sturdy table.

The door had been installed with a soft, hissing device to stop it slamming, so Doyle had to make do with the heavy arc of its swing as he let himself out.

Outside it was still raining, silver needles spreading into sheets and puddles, glistening on the cobblestones. When Doyle eventually paused, shivering, he did so beneath a streetlamp that had just flickered to life, clockwork-like, one in a line of fuzzy halos, butter-yellow-gold in the dimming evening. The lamp was barely a dozen doors away from The Old Commodore, but except for the occasional group of two or three passers-by, huddled beneath umbrellas or the raised collars of their coats, he was quite, quite alone.

And yet he knew that he wouldn't have to wait for long.

“Never seen you in such a strop over a bird, mate.”

Afterwards he remembered thinking that the meaty thud of his knuckles against Bodie's flesh was justified, was appropriate, was satisfying, and for a moment, as he always did, he hated himself for it.

Bodie retaliated, of course he did. It was what they'd both wanted, after all, what they both needed, a straightforward punch-up: fists and elbows, the undersides of cheekbones and jaws, scuffling feet, the soft muscle-hardness of a belly, an occasional knee. Them. They painted each other: bruised knuckles, a green and yellow and purple stain for Bodie, four finger-breadths wide on the upsweep of bone away from his chin, a dark-red split lip for Doyle.

Ducking a well-aimed hook meant he tripped on the curb, and when they tumbled backwards and sideways in a tangle of grimaces and limbs he discovered anew the chill of a black-painted metal and the sharpness of concrete corners as his back met with the stand of the streetlamp and his hip its pedestal. Fuck. Bodie’s fingers braceleted his wrist and pulled him to a sitting position; pink-edged now and pale with strain, they left red marks like handcuffs.

“C’mon, Doyle, what’s wrong with you? She’s just another bird. Christ.”

“What about the one before her?”

“What the hell are you rabbiting on about?”

“You know: five foot six, dark-haired, had legs that went on forever. You bought her a drink at the pub. The next night, she followed us back to the warehouse.”

Bodie’s fingers loosened their grip, and Doyle felt his fingers tingling as blood rushed to fill arterioles and capillaries once more. Bodie’s lips tightened into a thin line.

“Why care? She’s dead now.”

“Why shouldn't I care? Because I shot her. And what if I hadn’t? What if I’d missed? Didn’t suspect her, you know. Thought she was another bird like all the rest, just another bird. Took a while before my eyes convinced my brain. And in the end – ”

“And in the end, we’re both here.”

Silence stretched.

Somewhere around the corner and out of sight a child stumbled into a puddle and squealed. In the otherwise deserted street it sounded louder than it should, magnified. Their relative closeness made an easy task of watching each other despite the dense curtain of rain, chests rising on the inhale and breaths pushing out in warm puffs on the exhale. And suddenly, Doyle felt an inexplicable urge to grin. So he did. “Standing on a sodden street knockin’ seven bells out of each other?”

“Yeah.”

A riot, that, because Bodie was smiling and smiling and smiling in the yellow cast of the streetlamp, the corners of his eyes crinkling and rainwater pausing in the creases of his cheeks, and Doyle thought that he'd never seen him look so beautiful.

“C’mon, sunshine. Let’s head back.”

o0o

Inside the cottage it was cold and vaguely damp. "At least the Electric's still smiling on us," Bodie had remarked, three seconds before the overhead light – a hideous affair with a shade of lurid green and scalloped edges – flickered once-twice-thrice and then blinked out with an air of finality.

Ascending the stairs was something of an adventure, Bodie deciding against any need for candles or a torch, that they should feel their way, and upstairs the bedroom was a study of sharp-edged shapes shadowed blunt by the ubiquitous storm-brought darkness, but no less painful for that. They left their soaking jackets at the bottom of the stairs, Doyle's dripping cotton shirt hung limply on the banister, heedless of the yellowed varnish chipping off the age-worn wood directly underneath, Bodie's shirt ended up spread across three steps, his trousers draped across the bedroom doorway.

The sheet was cool beneath his back, and Doyle shivered again, the air chilly on newly-bared hips and groin and legs, but Bodie was a solid weight above him and his hands were wandering eagerly across soft and hard planes of muscle and skin, and Bodie’s lips were parting, warm and soft and pliant, and Doyle decided on a sigh that maybe it would be alright, really, very much so in fact.

When they finally stilled they did so curled into rumpled sheets and blankets and each other, Doyle's head tucked beneath Bodie's chin, his arm carelessly slung over Bodie's chest, his leg across Bodie's thighs. "Keep each other warm," Bodie had said, and then softly "Good night, Ray." And Doyle murmured agreement, and listened to Bodie breathing, a heated hoompf-hoompf that skitted across the shell of his ear and fled into his curls, more intimate even than Bodie's caresses, and then they slept.

January 2009

Title: Let Nothing Ye Dismay
Author: Slantedlight and Erushi
Slash or Gen: Slash
Archive at ProsLib/Circuit: Certainly
Disclaimer: Not ours, never ours, we love them anyway...

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From:

ma-donna196.livejournal.com

...A riot, that, because Bodie was smiling and smiling and smiling in the yellow cast of the streetlamp, the corners of his eyes crinkling and rainwater pausing in the creases of his cheeks, and Doyle thought that he'd never seen him look so beautiful...

Oh Lordy! I could quote the whole fabulous thing. Dear writers, I may weep. Can one weep for joy? Such is my love of this little gem that I had to read it twice. That last beautiful sentence will linger long in my mind and heart.

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Day 36: Fic - "Let Nothing Ye Dismay"

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