11th December - Unweaving the Warp by Heliophile

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Posting on behalf of heliophile_oxon...

Unweaving the Warp
by heliophile

All day it rained. Easily enough to float the ark, the QE2, the Cutty Sark ... Days and days of this unending gloom and grey and grit – no light, no heat, no Doyle. Spiders – even they had fled their tattered webs. Gently does it, the Cow had said – but Doyle was in there, damn it to hell! But his cover was solid … wasn't it?
There! There in the doorway! A reassuring hand on Khoury's elbow. Adjusting his scarf – all well, then! And the rain poured down, and the sun had never seemed brighter.

All the Cow's Capris and all the Cow's men could never put these broken people together again ... Bodie smiled grimly as he passed a handcuffed Khoury still furiously protesting his innocence, his diplomatic immunity, his impeccable connections. Easily the slickest, smoothest, most repulsively self-satisfied bastard they'd ever done for people-trafficking. Give him a few days without embassy staff, though, and we'll see how he likes the spiders in our basement for a change … and we'll still be handling him infinitely more gently than those poor kids he was selling. Rather shoot the bastard – him and his blue-blood customers.

There had been spider's-webs of pale scars across dark skin. There had been eyes that would not meet his own, no matter how gently he spoke; there had been the terrified, forced smiles of women and children hurt – casually, carelessly, routinely hurt – for not smiling. How many hundred days might it take before any of these people could breathe easily again? But just the chance some might was worth it all. Doyle felt steeped in filth after two weeks' feigned indifference to them as a customer's go-between – but he knew he'd do it again, if he had to.

There wasn't enough whisky in a bottle – hell, there probably wasn't enough whisky in all the world – to put those two weeks behind him. Doyle set his glass aside; no point courting fluorescent green spiders and the DTs to no good purpose. There'd be days – and especially nights – of this to come. Thank fuck for Bodie. For the way Bodie would let him break; for the way he'd know to fuck him hard tonight, when nothing could go easily; for the way he'd know when Doyle was fit to cope with loving gently again at last.

*************

All day it rained. Gently, easily, almost more of a mist than proper rain; the air warm with summer promise and full of the rich sweetness of moist earth and the scents of innumerable flowers whose names neither of them knew. Tiny spiders silver-carpeted the grass with a blanket of dew-laden silk each morning – Doyle even sketched it – and they could eat well, drink deep, forget London for now and love as loudly as they liked. They didn't mention Khoury (whose repatriation flight had inexplicably diverted to very much the wrong country …) and the sun tomorrow would be brighter.

Comments

[heliophile-oxon.livejournal.com]

Thank you - and thank you so much for posting it for me! I am always so convinced that somehow fate and gremlins will conspire to make me muck it up (I know, it's pretty daft of me - but I couldn't bear to mess up the dialj day!).

I'm so glad you like that ending *g* - and I hope you get those silver silk carpets springing up in the fields all around, once winter is over!