Fic: Green
Dec. 28th, 2010 10:54 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
ailcia.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
discoveredinaljCan't actually believe I managed to get this written (might have consumed a great quantity of Quality Street to do so). Merry after-Christmas, everyone! Such lovely stories and this is my contribution for the season - but this is my first time in a long while writing, let alone Pros, so I ask you to be gentle! :D
Bodie’s fingers drummed absent-mindedly against the hard plastic of the steering wheel. He peered out across the scuffed front-garden grass, looking for signs of life within the small, shabby house, blinking and frowning a little as his gaze wafted over the entire pebble-dashed exterior.
Nothing there. Not a sausage.
He considered getting out of the car and going to check it out for himself. But he didn’t want to run the risk of being spotted - all hell would break loose. So Bodie satisfied himself with flicking the dashboard with his finger and sinking deeper into his thoughts, as he often did these days.
He’d started picking up on them a few weeks ago, the warning signs.
Not that he was any sort of expert at this sort of thing, but… Well, he sort of was, wasn’t he? Closest anyone could conceivably get to be, anyway.
Him and Doyle had been going at each other for a good few months now, and had been mates much longer than that. Didn’t really feel that long, though, and, to be honest, Bodie wasn’t the type to keep count of the days. Especially days that were perfectly acceptable and normal and just plain *right*, in his opinion, no matter what any bugger else said. Or would say if anyone knew about them and their shared days.
Still, he liked to think very highly of himself for having finally got something he actually wanted in life, something he had realised he’d wanted for ages (once he’d known what the hell it was). It was the first time in his life he’d pulled something completely off, seemingly without any further complications, and it was as strange to him as it was good. He’d never felt like that before, achieving something - never been that desperate for anything, even in his darkest moments in jungles all around the world.
He’d spent an age wrung-out on some unknown feeling and, once he’d cracked it, he had been keyed up to the gills on this new sense, this new feeling he wasn’t used to. Bodie’d put his all into pursuing it. And he’d got there, in the end, with a good deal of ingenuity and inventive thinking on his part, thanks very much. A lot of blood, sweat and completely non-existent tears for the pair of them. He’d got his man, in the end.
In doing so, he had liked to think he’d cracked it. He had thought he knew how Doyle worked, alright. How far they’d come together by that point just went to prove that in Bodie’s mind.
But even he - the Great Interpreter - couldn’t fathom this mood of Ray’s, this singularly dark and solitary mood. The warning signs had been coming thick and fast, unconsciously at first, just a snifter on the wind, and then with greater and greater passing. Perhaps he was just being paranoid - it was in his M.O., after all - or maybe he’d just started noticing the little things between them a bit more.
Nothing had actually come to pass, Bodie was sure of that. Aside from anything else there just wasn’t enough room in their lives to be distant or oblivious with each other. Just a bit ‘off’, sometimes. Like an engine with a lop-sided cog that kept catching.
The door slammed, and Bodie looked up to see Doyle trudging down the scrappy path from his front door.
Course, he didn’t have his head down or shoulders up. Nor was he looking right miserable or anything like that. Too bleeding obvious by half, that would be. No, mardy arse had on his usual morning face: ruthless, bitter from the coffee and always a scowl for the new sun in the sky. He’d be cold in just that t-shirt…
Nothing to see here, officer.
Bodie looked the other way as Doyle launched himself by his bum across the car bonnet. Eejit.
The car dipped noticeably as Himself hurled his body into his seat and put his scruffy feet up on Bodie’s glove-box.
In another age, the battle would have been considered commenced, but this morning Bodie - in keeping with his recent mood of retrenchment and self-preservation - decided not to say anything about his partner’s poor vehicular etiquette. Instead, he cleared his throat of the cheerful ‘good morning’ he’d been about to emit, and settled for a nod of acknowledgment and a turn of the keys in the ignition.
He’d learnt to back off, by now. It was immensely frustrating, of course, but it just wasn’t worth the aggro, anymore. Each and every time Bodie had tried to face this new mood head on - to confront it, whatever it was, in any small way - Doyle had basically bitten his head right off. And the mood had always darkened still further, to the point where Bodie was now reluctant to push anything at all. Least of all foisting himself on him.
Not that he would admit to being upset by this new, strange turn of events. He was prepared to wait it out till Doyle felt better about whatever it was that was getting to him. He’d done it before, countless times - coiled and ready to be of use, standing guard in the wings, waiting to pick up the pieces of his partner. He was used to waiting. He was used to being able to help.
To a point, mind. He was no saint and Peter himself would have had a time of it, the way it had been.
Bodie let out an explosive sigh.
Sly eyes slid sideways, and he could feel the side of his cheek burn.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Bodie muttered. “Just yawning.”
Doyle shifted slightly in the seat he was scrunched into, and sighed himself. Bodie knew his mate got irritated with his own irascibility sometimes, how quick he was to jump the trigger finger and kill the person behind it. Bodie would have like to think that maybe that was all this was - an extended bout of the usual self-loathing. But, unfortunately, he knew better.
“So… You have a good night?” Doyle offered, though he wasn’t looking in Bodie’s direction. It sounded like it hurt him to be that pleasant.
“Yeah,” Bodie said lightly, willing to take anything. “It was alright. Not much to it, you know. Sat in.”
He didn’t care what Doyle thought of him - whether he’d smirk and laugh at him for spending an evening in on his todd, or whether it’d startle him, worry him… Bodie was a realistic old soul and he didn’t flatter himself enough to think either his presence or pathetic evening plans could pierce Doyle’s self-indulgent haze when he was off on one. He had no delusions of grandeur, and he didn’t think he often had any real influence in life at all outside the bedroom or on the battlefield. Least of all with regards to one Ray Doyle.
“You?”
A small pause and the feeling of hackles being raised. “Read me book.”
“Well, neither of us were setting the world alight last night, then, eh?” Bodie smirked to himself more than anything, but was validated by a snort of amusement from across the car.
“Nope, suppose not,” Doyle assented. He brought his feet down from the dashboard, and chafed his forearms in their shirtsleeves, loosening up some. “So, what do you reckon Cowley’s got in mind for us, today?”
“I don’t know… You never know, do you? But we’d know by now if it was anything worth knowing, you know…”
Bodie hadn’t been concentrating, his mind entirely taken over with trying to sense Doyle’s unseen movements whilst simultaneously trying to navigate a tricky set of traffic lights, so it took him a while to realise what he had said was a) ridiculous and b) the cause of a certain silence. He looked round.
Doyle was looking at him with intense amusement, his wicked eyes alight and his lips pursed as if he’d been about to say something and then had thought better of it.
Bodie began to grin, feeling himself flushed with success, unable to refrain from looking from the road back to his partner every few seconds. After a moment, though, Doyle shook his curls, turned with a mild smile and stared out of the window for the rest of the trip, as if content with Bodie’s efforts.
With a sense of relief pumping palpably through his veins and unwilling to disturb the fragile peace, Bodie let it all lie and hoped that today would be one of those better days.
-----
It had been a frosty day, the day they’d fallen into bed together. Almost a year ago, now. Right in the run-up to a Christmas they never did notice pass by. Must have been all the emotion running high.
T’was the season.
The air had been nipped and cruel as they’d guttered out of the pub that night. The last remaining bright green leaves lying on the pavement twinkled upwards as they kicked past, shambling along together, arm in arm.
Bodie couldn’t actually remember all that much from the evening, now he looked back. He’d had to down enough rum and orange to sink a battleship just to dutch his courage. But he’d done it, alright, and he still had happy, drunken snapshots of Doyle’s hacking laugh into his shoulder as they’d tramped along the canal on wobbly and weaving alcohol-filled legs.
The feeling of strong fingers tightening like a vice round his bicep as he stumbled over a stone on the pathway, lifting him up and away from the fall. The town lights shining a bright orange in the cold, blue night and cutting straight through the glitterbing snow.
The deep green of Doyle’s front door as Bodie had waited not-very-patiently-at-all for him to stop arsing about with his keys and just get the bloody thing open. The scrape of a day’s stubble across his chin as Doyle clumsily lunged right back at him. The feel of him braced hard against Bodie’s groin as he grabbed his thighs and pulled him right into the kiss as they clattered through the door into the dark house.
The filthy little sound Ray had made as he lay back, helpless, on the bed when Bodie’d kissed him right in the dead centre of his collarbone, with an assassin’s aim. Every single colour in every single strand of the coiled locks that sank, finally sated, onto his chest afterwards. The grin that had been on his face even before he’d fully came to, the following morning.
Like he said, he couldn’t remember much. Certainly couldn’t remember how they’d got there in the first place.
They sat across from one another in the minister’s anteroom, trying to suppress the urge to fiddle with his ornaments or wind up the pretty secretary quietly keeping to herself in the corner. At least, that’s what Bodie was doing. Doyle didn’t seem to be doing much of anything in particular. His face had that clouded, frowning expression it took when he was lost to the world, deep in his head. He had slung himself into the chair on Cowley’s command when they’d entered and had stayed rooted in that same position, hands flat on the plush green leather of the seat arms, staring off into nothing.
Bodie - who could admit to having been doing a bit of his own daydreaming - now took the opportunity to look good at him, to drink his fill of him. Brows together, long fingers idly and slowly furling and unfurling a tap against the side of the chair, what looked like the beginnings of a sulk that could suck all the air out of a room. The tantalising line where his t-shirt snugly dipped below his belt and band, and the movement along the tight-fitting fabric there. There was some element of him chomping at the bit; Bodie knew by the twitch that rose and fell in his strong neck, though Doyle didn’t give any other sign of agitation. He was too deep in thought.
With an inward sigh, Bodie let his eyes wander and roam across all the familiar sharp lines of the body that had now become a permanent fixture by his side.
Or, so he’d let himself think. Because the closer he looked at Doyle these days, the more alien and strange he appeared to be. With his odd bloody face and all his angles and his hurr. The more unfathomable and unmoving in his awkwardness, and so very far away from Bodie all of a sudden - though he was sitting only opposite, within grabbing distance.
But Bodie was learning not to grab.
Always very physical, it had been a long time indeed since Bodie hadn’t been permitted to touch Doyle in any way he’d wanted, or the freedom to do so. He made sure he got hold of a handful of Raymond every day. And so it had been a long time since he’d really felt that desperate, all-powerful urge that totally fixated his thoughts sometimes and occasionally made him resort to sitting on his itching hands during stakeouts.
He had been used to it - the constant denial, the constant internal grimace of self-refusal. Catholicism was strong in his blood, and though it was all a load of trolley, he knew he’d taken almost some grim sort of satisfaction from his own deepening misery, back then. It had been his one complete secret.
But he’d got past it, god damn it. Through sheer determination and brute force, he’d barged his way through that wall of his and knocked it all down. That look-but-don’t-fucking-dare-touch way Ray had had with him at first: the caution that used to flare crossly in his eyes whenever Bodie went near him, the hot suspicion when they were newly partnered.
All of a sudden, a great swell of loss filled his chest. He’d had everything he’d ever wanted - or, rather, the thing that had fixated him enough to root him to the spot these past few years. The thing that was fascinating enough to stay put for.
He hadn’t even the heart to feel cheated or betrayed by his partner, who was cruelly reneging on the unspoken deal they’d struck in that nippy bedroom all those months ago, their hands all over each other after months of no contact at all.
Now, Bodie only felt a sudden, total and utter lack of Doyle’s real presence.
He missed him and the way they had been awfully. It felt for all the world like the sun - however cold it might get in the winter time - going behind a cloud forever. He wondered whether he’d be like this on Christmas day: it was to be their first Christmas together outside of Doyle’s bedroom. He was never usually bothered by festive sentimentality all that much - he usually found it superficial to the point of sickening him - but this one was beginning to worry him. He wasn’t sure exactly how Doyle felt about the whole affair.
Bodie’s head was just beginning to droop down low when the oaken door opened and the minister strode out, his eyes on them already, followed less than a step behind by Cowley. Bodie and Doyle shot up to attention and all their nonsense went out of the window in favour of national interest.
----
It was near three in the morning on Christmas day when they got back to themselves. Two solid weeks of undercover work, a messy crescendo of a fire-fight: both crims dealt with but one agent never to rise again. Hard, hard work with no time for anything other than effort.
Bodie trudged up the stairs to Doyle’s house flat, too exhausted to even take that much of an interest in the tight bum wafting about in front of his face. Well, not *much* of an interest (he still had eyes in his head, after all).
Doyle had given him no indication that he wanted him there, following him up to his abode, or that he had even noticed his presence. But he hadn’t given him anything else, neither, and he must have noticed him there behind him. If there was one thing Bodie had never had to worry about in his relationship with Doyle, it was that he was noticed by him - he’d caught the coolly appreciative gaze sliding quickly away all too often; been saved by the uncanny knack they had for implicitly knowing one another’s movements; felt daily the thrumming strings of awareness that attached him to every inch of his partner. Oh, Doyle noticed him, alright.
He was just ignoring him, then.
Bodie sighed, but continued the slow bound up the stairs. Nowt to be done.
Doyle opened the door and a rush of frozen air near slapped them in the face.
“Fuck,” said Doyle, “that’s not right.” Starting forward he disappeared off down the dark hallway. There followed an irate shout. “Bloody heating’s bust!”
Bodie stepped inside and shut the door behind him. It certainly was a good five degrees colder inside than it was outside. Perfect. Doyle was kicking right off in the bedroom that had the boiler in it, and Bodie silently followed the sounds of his righteous indignation and came to stand in the doorway. Doyle was bent over with his bonce in the airing cupboard, furiously stabbing at buttons and pulling valves to no avail.
“Can’t bloody believe this,” he ranted, somewhat muffled from under a shelf filled with spare towels and bed sheets. “All I fucking want is a hot shower and a warm house to come home to at night and the useless bloody lump of metal conks out on me! Perfect sodding timing! What is the fucking point of working all day and paying your dues when everything breaks anyway? You just can’t trust British engineering, can you?”
With a final bang - which could have only been a fist impacting on the metal casing - he withdrew his head and turned round the glare at Bodie as if noticing him for the first time and knowing that the whole thing was his fault. “Can you?”
Bodie, used by now to just letting Doyle go on and on when he was going off on one, shrugged mildly. “S’abit Irish.”
Doyle grunted and looked about the room without seeing anything at all, really.
Bodie certainly knew this mood. The day had gotten on top of him, and Ray was now filled with anger so strong and so useless that he couldn’t do anything with himself, and would strike out at whatever took him first. Which would be Bodie, because it always closest. It would take him ages to wind back down again, and Bodie would have to use all his cunning and guile to help him while making sure not to get himself gutted in the process.
Bodie was suddenly struck with a sense of sympathy he often got when his partner was twisting himself up into a bind: it must be awful to feel everything so deeply as Ray did. Because he really did feel it. That was the problem.
Silently, Bodie turned and left the room (and the madman in it). He turned lights on as he went, and drew curtains, making his way towards the kitchen. He turned the electric cooker on, stuck the filled kettle on top, then went into Ray’s bedroom and reached under the bed to drag out the old sea chest he knew housed blankets and a hot water bottle in it somewhere.
He heard a loud crashing noise from the other side of the flat and suspected that the chair in the spare bedroom had been kicked over. Smirking, he pulled himself out from under the bed and continued with his duties.
Hot-blooded, sanguine creature that he was, Doyle could simply not put up with intense cold - he had a high tolerance for the fluctuations of the batty British weather (which he insisted came from being a ‘true Northerner’ rather than Bodie who was ‘as near to being Welsh as anything‘), but when it was this cold he was just plain miserable.
Within fifteen minutes, the coldness of the flat had had the edge took off it, just. Doyle had just slunk into the living room and hurled himself down, face like thunder and in something that was not quite a sulk but could not accurately be called anything else, either. But Bodie had had right enough of not being able to be there, and down righted hated the impotent way he felt around Doyle these days. And, well, it was Christmas. For some reason, he was willing to do anything to sort it out.
He did the only thing a man could. He unfurled the fleecy green blanket he was carrying with enough pomp and flair to put the Sun King of France to a blush. Striding forward like an arrogant French waiter, he crossed the room and wrapped the blanket right around a sitting Doyle, tucking it in at the back when he was finished.
Bodie pulled back, stood up straight, and raised a firm eyebrow. Doyle, who’s body betrayed him just then by giving him an almighty shiver of gratitude, couldn’t really do much about it. Bodie left him to it, and went and fetched the strong coffees, the port he managed to scrounge from the kitchen cabinet, and the filled hot water bottle. With the strength of ten men, he carried them all through to the living room in one go like a living hero.
Doyle hadn’t moved. He looked to be nodding off. Bodie couldn’t have that: there was words to be had. They could sleep when they were dead. They could sleep on Boxing day. This needed to come out and unravel now because he was tired and fed up and he needed Ray to be himself. Felt pretty queer saying such a thing, but it was the god’s honest (if he existed, which Bodie highly doubted) truth. Wasn’t as if they’d be able to sleep, anyway, amped up as they were on the last half-month of their damn stupid job. Might as well be sensible and as near to coherent as they could get.
He clanked the mugs down, followed by the big bottle of alcohol which made a pleasingly big, solid sound. He plonked the hot water bottle in Doyle’s lap. Pretty much just chucked it. Ray jumped to with a start, and caught it before it slid out of reach. He laughed, a high sort of helpless laugh he couldn’t help. But then he looked up at Bodie with his big green eyes, like he didn’t know what to do.
A small bit of Bodie lost his nerve, just then. But he was wise to him, and well steeled for those looks, despite the heel they made him feel. He just smiled pleasantly and, after rubbing his hands together and turning the telly down on low, stepped round the coffee table, retrieved the hot water bottle and got in under the blanket beside him. One efficient movement. No buts.
He felt Doyle stiffen up a wee bit when he got close, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going anywhere this time. Wasn’t going to retreat away and keep his lip. They didn’t even have to talk about it, if it really came down to it. But he wasn’t letting Doyle boot him out of this scant piece of warmth and comfort, not now he’d found it.
Bit girly, this, cuddling under a coverlet. All cozy, like. But he found he didn’t care. His caution was clearly in the wind. It was too cold to bother too much about it, anyway.
After a moment, Doyle unwound a tad, and eased with the heat of the hot water bottle, eyes on the flickering black and white images of It’s A Wonderful Life on the telly. Bodie knew Doyle had seen it a baker’s dozen times before, as had he and every right-thinking person in the world, or so he reckoned. But it didn’t matter nothing: they wouldn’t be watching it anyway.
Ray was chafing his hands were they rested on his side of the hot water bottle, movement under the blanket. Bodie took initiative and weaved his hand over, sneaky like, and wrapped it around the oddly cold fist Doyle was trying to rub back to life. The movement stopped at once, but Bodie kept his hand there, as gentle as he could manage to make himself.
Doyle’s tired eyes slid across to meet his own, and there was a hard sort of gratefulness, there, somewhere underneath all the dark smudges of fatigue. A gratitude that couldn’t be put into words even if it needed to be said. Bodie smirked a little smugly, and kept his hand as he reached for the fine bottle of port (a present for Cowley, who had clearly panicked in the supermarket and must think he had strange tastes) with the other. He was glad of it now, mind. It seemed strangely fitting, and all.
He passed the previously-opened bottle to Doyle, who took it without a word until after his first few chugs - well-paced but hard and fast. Then he rested his head back on the sofa, and shut his eyes. As near to contented as he’d looked in bloody weeks. It was like someone had cut his strings, taut strings that had held him up running for a good long while. Bodie hadn’t even realised how on edge and coiled Doyle had been until now, when the tension was slowly ebbing away.
“You’re not getting rid of me that easily, you know,” he drawled, leaning his face so close to Doyle’s he could feel the shades of heat from his cheek. The blanket pulled tight around them.
Ray’s mouth quirked, a line of humour appearing at one side of his mush. This only egged Bodie on, and he blew a quick puff of breath onto his unsuspecting face.
Doyle scowled and snapped his eyes open. “What you bothering me for?” he asked crossly, too near the point of no return for mere pleasantries.
Bodie couldn’t help it. “Just examining your face, mate. Trying to understand how it works, being that bloody cloudy all the time - not looked at it properly for a bit, and am just reacquainting myself with the strange sight of you enjoying yourself.”
“Bodieee,” Doyle’s tone would have been warning if there had been any strength in it. Bodie knew it was a plea to put arms down, just for now, and he found himself assenting. Where his determination to talk till dawn till it was done had gone, he didn’t know. He didn’t particularly care, but Doyle was pressed into his side and he couldn’t think of anything but drinking his fill of the unexpected contact.
“Look…” Unprompted, and halting, but the first long speech in a long time. “I just… I’m not very good at Christmas. Makes me go a bit Irish, myself. My ma used to get all excited about it, tried to make it make up for the rest of the sorry year, I suppose. She made bunting with little Christmas trees on it. Pretty funny, really, but… I’m always alone at Christmas. You used to go off to see your old army mates in the ’Pool, and I never have anywhere to go. And I’m certainly not decorating the place up for myself like a bloody old fool.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
Doyle softened. “I know that now, don’t I? Bloody great lump. Couldn’t miss you in a storm.”
He handed the bottle over with a healthy sloshing sound. Bodie felt it warm him up all the way down as he took his own swigs.
Doyle flitted his hand out from under the blanket just long enough to wipe his mouth on the back of sleeve, then he snatched it back into the warmth.
“Last year, I dunno, I just couldn’t take it anymore. You just had to stay put, someway. So I threw myself at you after the pub and I just… I can’t believe you’re still here this time round, is all. I'm a bit green to all this, you know. Especially when it actually means something to me.” His eyes fell away from Bodie’s, embarrassed.
Bodie raised his elbow and the bottle of port. He needed thinking time, a chance to breath - that’s how it had all happened, then. He’d often wondered. Silly get.
It was then that Bodie remembered the coffee. He pulled his hands away and put the port down, picking up one mug, then the other. He gave one to Doyle and held his by the handle. His partner was watching him very closely, giving him more of his attention than he had in yonks. Bodie basked in it; his gaze was clear for once, but uncertain and wary.
“Here,” Bodie said in a hearty, matey tone. “You’ll need this if we’re going to see in Christmas properly.” He held his mug out to clink with Doyle’s, and was delighted when he abided dutifully. He waited till he’d had a glug before he leaned even closer conspiratorially. “That’s a bit Irish, and all, I don’t mind telling you.”
Ray’s eyes shone with fondness, if you could believe it. Bodie saw them light up, himself. He gave another great shiver, but in doing so he moved closer and came to rest up against him, a warm weight in his own right, still holding his mug.
“All the best things are,” he said. And Bodie thought it was just about the best thing that had ever been said to him in all his days.
---
END
---
Happy New Year, and all, everyone!
Title: Green
Author: ailcia (Alice)
Slash or Gen: Slash
Summary: This is a typical half-domestic Professionals story. I'm pretty sure it's been done in various forms before by much better writers, but this is mine. I am a sucker for a sulky Doyle, sorry. Just wanted to write it! Hope you enjoyed.
Archive at ProsLib/Circuit: Yes, please!
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Bodie’s fingers drummed absent-mindedly against the hard plastic of the steering wheel. He peered out across the scuffed front-garden grass, looking for signs of life within the small, shabby house, blinking and frowning a little as his gaze wafted over the entire pebble-dashed exterior.
Nothing there. Not a sausage.
He considered getting out of the car and going to check it out for himself. But he didn’t want to run the risk of being spotted - all hell would break loose. So Bodie satisfied himself with flicking the dashboard with his finger and sinking deeper into his thoughts, as he often did these days.
He’d started picking up on them a few weeks ago, the warning signs.
Not that he was any sort of expert at this sort of thing, but… Well, he sort of was, wasn’t he? Closest anyone could conceivably get to be, anyway.
Him and Doyle had been going at each other for a good few months now, and had been mates much longer than that. Didn’t really feel that long, though, and, to be honest, Bodie wasn’t the type to keep count of the days. Especially days that were perfectly acceptable and normal and just plain *right*, in his opinion, no matter what any bugger else said. Or would say if anyone knew about them and their shared days.
Still, he liked to think very highly of himself for having finally got something he actually wanted in life, something he had realised he’d wanted for ages (once he’d known what the hell it was). It was the first time in his life he’d pulled something completely off, seemingly without any further complications, and it was as strange to him as it was good. He’d never felt like that before, achieving something - never been that desperate for anything, even in his darkest moments in jungles all around the world.
He’d spent an age wrung-out on some unknown feeling and, once he’d cracked it, he had been keyed up to the gills on this new sense, this new feeling he wasn’t used to. Bodie’d put his all into pursuing it. And he’d got there, in the end, with a good deal of ingenuity and inventive thinking on his part, thanks very much. A lot of blood, sweat and completely non-existent tears for the pair of them. He’d got his man, in the end.
In doing so, he had liked to think he’d cracked it. He had thought he knew how Doyle worked, alright. How far they’d come together by that point just went to prove that in Bodie’s mind.
But even he - the Great Interpreter - couldn’t fathom this mood of Ray’s, this singularly dark and solitary mood. The warning signs had been coming thick and fast, unconsciously at first, just a snifter on the wind, and then with greater and greater passing. Perhaps he was just being paranoid - it was in his M.O., after all - or maybe he’d just started noticing the little things between them a bit more.
Nothing had actually come to pass, Bodie was sure of that. Aside from anything else there just wasn’t enough room in their lives to be distant or oblivious with each other. Just a bit ‘off’, sometimes. Like an engine with a lop-sided cog that kept catching.
The door slammed, and Bodie looked up to see Doyle trudging down the scrappy path from his front door.
Course, he didn’t have his head down or shoulders up. Nor was he looking right miserable or anything like that. Too bleeding obvious by half, that would be. No, mardy arse had on his usual morning face: ruthless, bitter from the coffee and always a scowl for the new sun in the sky. He’d be cold in just that t-shirt…
Nothing to see here, officer.
Bodie looked the other way as Doyle launched himself by his bum across the car bonnet. Eejit.
The car dipped noticeably as Himself hurled his body into his seat and put his scruffy feet up on Bodie’s glove-box.
In another age, the battle would have been considered commenced, but this morning Bodie - in keeping with his recent mood of retrenchment and self-preservation - decided not to say anything about his partner’s poor vehicular etiquette. Instead, he cleared his throat of the cheerful ‘good morning’ he’d been about to emit, and settled for a nod of acknowledgment and a turn of the keys in the ignition.
He’d learnt to back off, by now. It was immensely frustrating, of course, but it just wasn’t worth the aggro, anymore. Each and every time Bodie had tried to face this new mood head on - to confront it, whatever it was, in any small way - Doyle had basically bitten his head right off. And the mood had always darkened still further, to the point where Bodie was now reluctant to push anything at all. Least of all foisting himself on him.
Not that he would admit to being upset by this new, strange turn of events. He was prepared to wait it out till Doyle felt better about whatever it was that was getting to him. He’d done it before, countless times - coiled and ready to be of use, standing guard in the wings, waiting to pick up the pieces of his partner. He was used to waiting. He was used to being able to help.
To a point, mind. He was no saint and Peter himself would have had a time of it, the way it had been.
Bodie let out an explosive sigh.
Sly eyes slid sideways, and he could feel the side of his cheek burn.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Bodie muttered. “Just yawning.”
Doyle shifted slightly in the seat he was scrunched into, and sighed himself. Bodie knew his mate got irritated with his own irascibility sometimes, how quick he was to jump the trigger finger and kill the person behind it. Bodie would have like to think that maybe that was all this was - an extended bout of the usual self-loathing. But, unfortunately, he knew better.
“So… You have a good night?” Doyle offered, though he wasn’t looking in Bodie’s direction. It sounded like it hurt him to be that pleasant.
“Yeah,” Bodie said lightly, willing to take anything. “It was alright. Not much to it, you know. Sat in.”
He didn’t care what Doyle thought of him - whether he’d smirk and laugh at him for spending an evening in on his todd, or whether it’d startle him, worry him… Bodie was a realistic old soul and he didn’t flatter himself enough to think either his presence or pathetic evening plans could pierce Doyle’s self-indulgent haze when he was off on one. He had no delusions of grandeur, and he didn’t think he often had any real influence in life at all outside the bedroom or on the battlefield. Least of all with regards to one Ray Doyle.
“You?”
A small pause and the feeling of hackles being raised. “Read me book.”
“Well, neither of us were setting the world alight last night, then, eh?” Bodie smirked to himself more than anything, but was validated by a snort of amusement from across the car.
“Nope, suppose not,” Doyle assented. He brought his feet down from the dashboard, and chafed his forearms in their shirtsleeves, loosening up some. “So, what do you reckon Cowley’s got in mind for us, today?”
“I don’t know… You never know, do you? But we’d know by now if it was anything worth knowing, you know…”
Bodie hadn’t been concentrating, his mind entirely taken over with trying to sense Doyle’s unseen movements whilst simultaneously trying to navigate a tricky set of traffic lights, so it took him a while to realise what he had said was a) ridiculous and b) the cause of a certain silence. He looked round.
Doyle was looking at him with intense amusement, his wicked eyes alight and his lips pursed as if he’d been about to say something and then had thought better of it.
Bodie began to grin, feeling himself flushed with success, unable to refrain from looking from the road back to his partner every few seconds. After a moment, though, Doyle shook his curls, turned with a mild smile and stared out of the window for the rest of the trip, as if content with Bodie’s efforts.
With a sense of relief pumping palpably through his veins and unwilling to disturb the fragile peace, Bodie let it all lie and hoped that today would be one of those better days.
-----
It had been a frosty day, the day they’d fallen into bed together. Almost a year ago, now. Right in the run-up to a Christmas they never did notice pass by. Must have been all the emotion running high.
T’was the season.
The air had been nipped and cruel as they’d guttered out of the pub that night. The last remaining bright green leaves lying on the pavement twinkled upwards as they kicked past, shambling along together, arm in arm.
Bodie couldn’t actually remember all that much from the evening, now he looked back. He’d had to down enough rum and orange to sink a battleship just to dutch his courage. But he’d done it, alright, and he still had happy, drunken snapshots of Doyle’s hacking laugh into his shoulder as they’d tramped along the canal on wobbly and weaving alcohol-filled legs.
The feeling of strong fingers tightening like a vice round his bicep as he stumbled over a stone on the pathway, lifting him up and away from the fall. The town lights shining a bright orange in the cold, blue night and cutting straight through the glitterbing snow.
The deep green of Doyle’s front door as Bodie had waited not-very-patiently-at-all for him to stop arsing about with his keys and just get the bloody thing open. The scrape of a day’s stubble across his chin as Doyle clumsily lunged right back at him. The feel of him braced hard against Bodie’s groin as he grabbed his thighs and pulled him right into the kiss as they clattered through the door into the dark house.
The filthy little sound Ray had made as he lay back, helpless, on the bed when Bodie’d kissed him right in the dead centre of his collarbone, with an assassin’s aim. Every single colour in every single strand of the coiled locks that sank, finally sated, onto his chest afterwards. The grin that had been on his face even before he’d fully came to, the following morning.
Like he said, he couldn’t remember much. Certainly couldn’t remember how they’d got there in the first place.
They sat across from one another in the minister’s anteroom, trying to suppress the urge to fiddle with his ornaments or wind up the pretty secretary quietly keeping to herself in the corner. At least, that’s what Bodie was doing. Doyle didn’t seem to be doing much of anything in particular. His face had that clouded, frowning expression it took when he was lost to the world, deep in his head. He had slung himself into the chair on Cowley’s command when they’d entered and had stayed rooted in that same position, hands flat on the plush green leather of the seat arms, staring off into nothing.
Bodie - who could admit to having been doing a bit of his own daydreaming - now took the opportunity to look good at him, to drink his fill of him. Brows together, long fingers idly and slowly furling and unfurling a tap against the side of the chair, what looked like the beginnings of a sulk that could suck all the air out of a room. The tantalising line where his t-shirt snugly dipped below his belt and band, and the movement along the tight-fitting fabric there. There was some element of him chomping at the bit; Bodie knew by the twitch that rose and fell in his strong neck, though Doyle didn’t give any other sign of agitation. He was too deep in thought.
With an inward sigh, Bodie let his eyes wander and roam across all the familiar sharp lines of the body that had now become a permanent fixture by his side.
Or, so he’d let himself think. Because the closer he looked at Doyle these days, the more alien and strange he appeared to be. With his odd bloody face and all his angles and his hurr. The more unfathomable and unmoving in his awkwardness, and so very far away from Bodie all of a sudden - though he was sitting only opposite, within grabbing distance.
But Bodie was learning not to grab.
Always very physical, it had been a long time indeed since Bodie hadn’t been permitted to touch Doyle in any way he’d wanted, or the freedom to do so. He made sure he got hold of a handful of Raymond every day. And so it had been a long time since he’d really felt that desperate, all-powerful urge that totally fixated his thoughts sometimes and occasionally made him resort to sitting on his itching hands during stakeouts.
He had been used to it - the constant denial, the constant internal grimace of self-refusal. Catholicism was strong in his blood, and though it was all a load of trolley, he knew he’d taken almost some grim sort of satisfaction from his own deepening misery, back then. It had been his one complete secret.
But he’d got past it, god damn it. Through sheer determination and brute force, he’d barged his way through that wall of his and knocked it all down. That look-but-don’t-fucking-dare-touch way Ray had had with him at first: the caution that used to flare crossly in his eyes whenever Bodie went near him, the hot suspicion when they were newly partnered.
All of a sudden, a great swell of loss filled his chest. He’d had everything he’d ever wanted - or, rather, the thing that had fixated him enough to root him to the spot these past few years. The thing that was fascinating enough to stay put for.
He hadn’t even the heart to feel cheated or betrayed by his partner, who was cruelly reneging on the unspoken deal they’d struck in that nippy bedroom all those months ago, their hands all over each other after months of no contact at all.
Now, Bodie only felt a sudden, total and utter lack of Doyle’s real presence.
He missed him and the way they had been awfully. It felt for all the world like the sun - however cold it might get in the winter time - going behind a cloud forever. He wondered whether he’d be like this on Christmas day: it was to be their first Christmas together outside of Doyle’s bedroom. He was never usually bothered by festive sentimentality all that much - he usually found it superficial to the point of sickening him - but this one was beginning to worry him. He wasn’t sure exactly how Doyle felt about the whole affair.
Bodie’s head was just beginning to droop down low when the oaken door opened and the minister strode out, his eyes on them already, followed less than a step behind by Cowley. Bodie and Doyle shot up to attention and all their nonsense went out of the window in favour of national interest.
----
It was near three in the morning on Christmas day when they got back to themselves. Two solid weeks of undercover work, a messy crescendo of a fire-fight: both crims dealt with but one agent never to rise again. Hard, hard work with no time for anything other than effort.
Bodie trudged up the stairs to Doyle’s house flat, too exhausted to even take that much of an interest in the tight bum wafting about in front of his face. Well, not *much* of an interest (he still had eyes in his head, after all).
Doyle had given him no indication that he wanted him there, following him up to his abode, or that he had even noticed his presence. But he hadn’t given him anything else, neither, and he must have noticed him there behind him. If there was one thing Bodie had never had to worry about in his relationship with Doyle, it was that he was noticed by him - he’d caught the coolly appreciative gaze sliding quickly away all too often; been saved by the uncanny knack they had for implicitly knowing one another’s movements; felt daily the thrumming strings of awareness that attached him to every inch of his partner. Oh, Doyle noticed him, alright.
He was just ignoring him, then.
Bodie sighed, but continued the slow bound up the stairs. Nowt to be done.
Doyle opened the door and a rush of frozen air near slapped them in the face.
“Fuck,” said Doyle, “that’s not right.” Starting forward he disappeared off down the dark hallway. There followed an irate shout. “Bloody heating’s bust!”
Bodie stepped inside and shut the door behind him. It certainly was a good five degrees colder inside than it was outside. Perfect. Doyle was kicking right off in the bedroom that had the boiler in it, and Bodie silently followed the sounds of his righteous indignation and came to stand in the doorway. Doyle was bent over with his bonce in the airing cupboard, furiously stabbing at buttons and pulling valves to no avail.
“Can’t bloody believe this,” he ranted, somewhat muffled from under a shelf filled with spare towels and bed sheets. “All I fucking want is a hot shower and a warm house to come home to at night and the useless bloody lump of metal conks out on me! Perfect sodding timing! What is the fucking point of working all day and paying your dues when everything breaks anyway? You just can’t trust British engineering, can you?”
With a final bang - which could have only been a fist impacting on the metal casing - he withdrew his head and turned round the glare at Bodie as if noticing him for the first time and knowing that the whole thing was his fault. “Can you?”
Bodie, used by now to just letting Doyle go on and on when he was going off on one, shrugged mildly. “S’abit Irish.”
Doyle grunted and looked about the room without seeing anything at all, really.
Bodie certainly knew this mood. The day had gotten on top of him, and Ray was now filled with anger so strong and so useless that he couldn’t do anything with himself, and would strike out at whatever took him first. Which would be Bodie, because it always closest. It would take him ages to wind back down again, and Bodie would have to use all his cunning and guile to help him while making sure not to get himself gutted in the process.
Bodie was suddenly struck with a sense of sympathy he often got when his partner was twisting himself up into a bind: it must be awful to feel everything so deeply as Ray did. Because he really did feel it. That was the problem.
Silently, Bodie turned and left the room (and the madman in it). He turned lights on as he went, and drew curtains, making his way towards the kitchen. He turned the electric cooker on, stuck the filled kettle on top, then went into Ray’s bedroom and reached under the bed to drag out the old sea chest he knew housed blankets and a hot water bottle in it somewhere.
He heard a loud crashing noise from the other side of the flat and suspected that the chair in the spare bedroom had been kicked over. Smirking, he pulled himself out from under the bed and continued with his duties.
Hot-blooded, sanguine creature that he was, Doyle could simply not put up with intense cold - he had a high tolerance for the fluctuations of the batty British weather (which he insisted came from being a ‘true Northerner’ rather than Bodie who was ‘as near to being Welsh as anything‘), but when it was this cold he was just plain miserable.
Within fifteen minutes, the coldness of the flat had had the edge took off it, just. Doyle had just slunk into the living room and hurled himself down, face like thunder and in something that was not quite a sulk but could not accurately be called anything else, either. But Bodie had had right enough of not being able to be there, and down righted hated the impotent way he felt around Doyle these days. And, well, it was Christmas. For some reason, he was willing to do anything to sort it out.
He did the only thing a man could. He unfurled the fleecy green blanket he was carrying with enough pomp and flair to put the Sun King of France to a blush. Striding forward like an arrogant French waiter, he crossed the room and wrapped the blanket right around a sitting Doyle, tucking it in at the back when he was finished.
Bodie pulled back, stood up straight, and raised a firm eyebrow. Doyle, who’s body betrayed him just then by giving him an almighty shiver of gratitude, couldn’t really do much about it. Bodie left him to it, and went and fetched the strong coffees, the port he managed to scrounge from the kitchen cabinet, and the filled hot water bottle. With the strength of ten men, he carried them all through to the living room in one go like a living hero.
Doyle hadn’t moved. He looked to be nodding off. Bodie couldn’t have that: there was words to be had. They could sleep when they were dead. They could sleep on Boxing day. This needed to come out and unravel now because he was tired and fed up and he needed Ray to be himself. Felt pretty queer saying such a thing, but it was the god’s honest (if he existed, which Bodie highly doubted) truth. Wasn’t as if they’d be able to sleep, anyway, amped up as they were on the last half-month of their damn stupid job. Might as well be sensible and as near to coherent as they could get.
He clanked the mugs down, followed by the big bottle of alcohol which made a pleasingly big, solid sound. He plonked the hot water bottle in Doyle’s lap. Pretty much just chucked it. Ray jumped to with a start, and caught it before it slid out of reach. He laughed, a high sort of helpless laugh he couldn’t help. But then he looked up at Bodie with his big green eyes, like he didn’t know what to do.
A small bit of Bodie lost his nerve, just then. But he was wise to him, and well steeled for those looks, despite the heel they made him feel. He just smiled pleasantly and, after rubbing his hands together and turning the telly down on low, stepped round the coffee table, retrieved the hot water bottle and got in under the blanket beside him. One efficient movement. No buts.
He felt Doyle stiffen up a wee bit when he got close, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going anywhere this time. Wasn’t going to retreat away and keep his lip. They didn’t even have to talk about it, if it really came down to it. But he wasn’t letting Doyle boot him out of this scant piece of warmth and comfort, not now he’d found it.
Bit girly, this, cuddling under a coverlet. All cozy, like. But he found he didn’t care. His caution was clearly in the wind. It was too cold to bother too much about it, anyway.
After a moment, Doyle unwound a tad, and eased with the heat of the hot water bottle, eyes on the flickering black and white images of It’s A Wonderful Life on the telly. Bodie knew Doyle had seen it a baker’s dozen times before, as had he and every right-thinking person in the world, or so he reckoned. But it didn’t matter nothing: they wouldn’t be watching it anyway.
Ray was chafing his hands were they rested on his side of the hot water bottle, movement under the blanket. Bodie took initiative and weaved his hand over, sneaky like, and wrapped it around the oddly cold fist Doyle was trying to rub back to life. The movement stopped at once, but Bodie kept his hand there, as gentle as he could manage to make himself.
Doyle’s tired eyes slid across to meet his own, and there was a hard sort of gratefulness, there, somewhere underneath all the dark smudges of fatigue. A gratitude that couldn’t be put into words even if it needed to be said. Bodie smirked a little smugly, and kept his hand as he reached for the fine bottle of port (a present for Cowley, who had clearly panicked in the supermarket and must think he had strange tastes) with the other. He was glad of it now, mind. It seemed strangely fitting, and all.
He passed the previously-opened bottle to Doyle, who took it without a word until after his first few chugs - well-paced but hard and fast. Then he rested his head back on the sofa, and shut his eyes. As near to contented as he’d looked in bloody weeks. It was like someone had cut his strings, taut strings that had held him up running for a good long while. Bodie hadn’t even realised how on edge and coiled Doyle had been until now, when the tension was slowly ebbing away.
“You’re not getting rid of me that easily, you know,” he drawled, leaning his face so close to Doyle’s he could feel the shades of heat from his cheek. The blanket pulled tight around them.
Ray’s mouth quirked, a line of humour appearing at one side of his mush. This only egged Bodie on, and he blew a quick puff of breath onto his unsuspecting face.
Doyle scowled and snapped his eyes open. “What you bothering me for?” he asked crossly, too near the point of no return for mere pleasantries.
Bodie couldn’t help it. “Just examining your face, mate. Trying to understand how it works, being that bloody cloudy all the time - not looked at it properly for a bit, and am just reacquainting myself with the strange sight of you enjoying yourself.”
“Bodieee,” Doyle’s tone would have been warning if there had been any strength in it. Bodie knew it was a plea to put arms down, just for now, and he found himself assenting. Where his determination to talk till dawn till it was done had gone, he didn’t know. He didn’t particularly care, but Doyle was pressed into his side and he couldn’t think of anything but drinking his fill of the unexpected contact.
“Look…” Unprompted, and halting, but the first long speech in a long time. “I just… I’m not very good at Christmas. Makes me go a bit Irish, myself. My ma used to get all excited about it, tried to make it make up for the rest of the sorry year, I suppose. She made bunting with little Christmas trees on it. Pretty funny, really, but… I’m always alone at Christmas. You used to go off to see your old army mates in the ’Pool, and I never have anywhere to go. And I’m certainly not decorating the place up for myself like a bloody old fool.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
Doyle softened. “I know that now, don’t I? Bloody great lump. Couldn’t miss you in a storm.”
He handed the bottle over with a healthy sloshing sound. Bodie felt it warm him up all the way down as he took his own swigs.
Doyle flitted his hand out from under the blanket just long enough to wipe his mouth on the back of sleeve, then he snatched it back into the warmth.
“Last year, I dunno, I just couldn’t take it anymore. You just had to stay put, someway. So I threw myself at you after the pub and I just… I can’t believe you’re still here this time round, is all. I'm a bit green to all this, you know. Especially when it actually means something to me.” His eyes fell away from Bodie’s, embarrassed.
Bodie raised his elbow and the bottle of port. He needed thinking time, a chance to breath - that’s how it had all happened, then. He’d often wondered. Silly get.
It was then that Bodie remembered the coffee. He pulled his hands away and put the port down, picking up one mug, then the other. He gave one to Doyle and held his by the handle. His partner was watching him very closely, giving him more of his attention than he had in yonks. Bodie basked in it; his gaze was clear for once, but uncertain and wary.
“Here,” Bodie said in a hearty, matey tone. “You’ll need this if we’re going to see in Christmas properly.” He held his mug out to clink with Doyle’s, and was delighted when he abided dutifully. He waited till he’d had a glug before he leaned even closer conspiratorially. “That’s a bit Irish, and all, I don’t mind telling you.”
Ray’s eyes shone with fondness, if you could believe it. Bodie saw them light up, himself. He gave another great shiver, but in doing so he moved closer and came to rest up against him, a warm weight in his own right, still holding his mug.
“All the best things are,” he said. And Bodie thought it was just about the best thing that had ever been said to him in all his days.
---
END
---
Happy New Year, and all, everyone!
Title: Green
Author: ailcia (Alice)
Slash or Gen: Slash
Summary: This is a typical half-domestic Professionals story. I'm pretty sure it's been done in various forms before by much better writers, but this is mine. I am a sucker for a sulky Doyle, sorry. Just wanted to write it! Hope you enjoyed.
Archive at ProsLib/Circuit: Yes, please!
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Date: 2011-01-11 10:01 am (UTC)Am ever so chuffed that you read it and liked it enough to leave such a lovely, cheering comment! Thankyou so very much! :D