![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
solosundance.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
discoveredinaljThe following vignettes are not all Christmas themed. They don't all have chocolate in them, either, but are based loosely on either the name, the perception, or the advertising tagline of the contents of a 1980 Christmas Selection Box. I'll leave you to guess which is which :)
A Moment
“Here,” he said. “Here, here.”
Not that it did any good. Bodie was straining against him, agitated.
Doyle hung on tight. He uncurled the tensely hinged arm, turned the hand over.
Knuckles, teeth, impact.
“Gawd and Bennett,” Doyle said, jokey. “Not again!”
It was always Bodie’s fingers. Already knobbled with myriad fractures, now a pulpy mess. Lacy flaps of abraded skin, blood and bruising.
To be fair, though. The bastards who’d caused the mess all around them were a lot worse off.
Bodie’s nostrils flared. His Adam’s apple moved thickly. Doyle couldn’t glimpse much more expression as Bodie had turned away from him, wet lashes etched against the iron gray sky behind.
Yes, there were dead bodies. Innocents. It shouldn’t be. All of that.
But Bodie sailed through mayhem like this easier than almost any of them. Certainly far easier, apparently, than Doyle ever did.
Not now though.
“Where’s my cool, calm, metabolically unique other half when I need him, eh?” Doyle said in a low voice, the lowest he could use and still be heard. There were plenty of people milling about and this was nothing to do with them. Bodie was still twitching slightly with the emotion of his outburst. He was pulling against Doyle’s hold, not looking at him. Something definitely not right.
Doyle gave up the struggle for Bodie’s attention. He’d wanted to deal with the minor injury so the paramedics didn’t have to – it was something they tried to do wherever possible, especially when there were others in need. Now he saw Bodie was the one in need. But for something else.
“OK,” Doyle said. “Need a moment?” He let go completely. Let Bodie walk. It went hard against his instincts, but it seemed the thing to do.
Bodie walked with a firm stride towards the Capri. And then he just stood there with one arm leaning on the roof, his back towards the world. When one of the ambulance blokes made to go after him, Doyle arrested his progress with an arm, firm.
“Bloody CI5,” the man growled, combative.
“If you like,” Doyle snarled back.
He planted his feet, crossed his arms. The wind whistled across the car park.
Long as you need, sunshine, Doyle thought, hackles rising as a copper hove into view. Long as you need.
Pick Me Up
“Doyle, Doyle, can you hear me?”
Yes.
Yes, Doyle could. Bodie was clutching at him, on the edges of frantic. For the moment, Doyle couldn’t respond.
“Listen, I'm going to put something in your mouth.”
There was a pause, and Doyle felt a frown form on his wind-stiffened face.
“It's quite big, and you need to be careful of the nuts.”
In his fog Doyle searched for gleeful humour in the voice and couldn’t find any. Which was worrying.
“You're going to like it, all right? Open nice and wide.”
Doyle almost giggled at that himself. He obeyed, drunk with fatigue.
And caught a welcome whiff of sugar, the promise of instant, empty energy.
“Yeah, that's my boy.” Bodie sounded relieved, delighted, and Doyle couldn’t resist that. “Little bit wider… and there. You’re very good at this, aren’t you?.” A gruff-toned chuckle. “Careful, don't take too much at once or you'll bloody well choke.”
It had been a long way. A long, long way.
From the jogging-on-the-spot in Blackheath at crack of dawn to this – swathed in a tinfoil blanket being forcibly stuffed. From aspiring elite athlete to Christmas turkey in four hours and two point six minutes.
“If he’s not unconscious he shouldn’t be lying down,” a gruffly nagging voice said. It could have been George Cowley but it wasn’t. Some over-anxious steward in trainers and a luminous jacket, probably. Or someone keen from the St. John Ambulance Brigade looking for something to do.
“Yeah all right, I’ll deal with it,” snapped the more familiar voice – the much more familiar, dear, and welcome one. It was as brisk and salty as only its owner could be. Arrogance and efficiency bundled up in worry. Comforting Doyle's roiling stomach more than the chocolate. He let himself be raised to a tentative sit.
“Oh Christ,” he heard his own mouth mumble, full of masticated confectionary. His head was whirling. “Nothing in the legs.”
“Well if you will run twenty six miles after someone’s tried to kill you.”
“Got any fluid for him? Lucozade or something?”
“Yes. I told you. I’m dealing with it.” Bodie was clipped, holding his magnificent irritation in check. Doyle dragged his eyes fully open. And found him. He was waving a bottle of fizzy pop and a chocolate bar in a brown wrapper backwards and forwards in front of his face. Someone else was standing over them but they weren’t important.
“You made it, you silly bastard!” Bodie said in totally unselfconscious pride. His hair was clumped from the drizzle, cheeks flushed, eyes several breathtaking shades bluer than the leaden sky above.
Doyle knew he’d made it all right. He could feel it in his empty tank, the tightness of his muscles, the creeping euphoria. As he was hauled to spaghetti legs the tinfoil cloak fluttered to the pavement and Bodie bent down to pick it up before plonking it round his shoulders again. He was leaned against a hoarding, a bottle of something fearsomely orange slapped in his hand.
“Now drink some of that,” Bodie commanded. “Slowly.”
Doyle washed down the chocolate with a couple of gulps, realizing he’d probably throw up if he had too much. He was starting to appreciate the sound of the crackly PA system now, the noise of spectators behind the barrier beyond the finish line. The line he had somehow staggered over before sinking to the road like the dying swan.
“I did it!”
“Yes,” Bodie agreed, wry. “And please tell me you’ll never do it again. Know it was for charity and all, but I thought you were a goner when you went down like that.” There was just the hint of the panic he’d clearly felt.
Doyle pushed the lucozade away. Became aware, for the first time, of the medal around his neck. It was on a red, white, and blue ribbon. He could read ‘Gillette’ upside down. The Thames wiggled across the centre, which made Doyle remember the Cutty Sark, the cobblestones, Tower Bridge, the crowds along the Embankment...
“Too right I’m never doing it again,” he said with feeling. Another wave of euphoria went through him. “Your go next time.”
“Not bloody likely. Have you seen the state of you?”
“Well of course if you think you couldn’t run any faster,” Doyle said, and he knew he had him.
Day
A volley of automatic gunfire spewed from an upper window.
“Move! Move, move, MOVE!”
Murphy’s shout was standard, instinctual, not needed - Bodie and Doyle had moved anyway. The two of them had peeled apart. Bodie, with the rifle, was finding a spot from where he could set his sights on that bloody window and that bloody rogue shooter. Doyle, trainers slapping, was headed for the nearest way into the building. Murphy guessed his own role was back-up. Until real back-up arrived.
Christ, though, that would only be the local constabulary boys. They’d be going barmy down at the station right about now. World War Three broken out in Exmouth Market! Get the Panda cars on site, and tell ‘em to keep their bloody heads down!
Not much use really.
Murphy was sweating under his shirt. Splinters of wood had grazed his cheek. He mouthed a platitude to the stall-holders crouched in goggle-eyed terror behind two overturned trestle tables and a rack of Indian prints on wheels. The flimsy fabric was billowing in a gentle breeze. Like curtains.
Another bullet was discharged from a different window. It hit a puddle right at Doyle’s feet, sent him diving for cover.
“Right, now I’m really pissed off,” Bodie growled, which made Murphy grin.
As for Doyle, the silly sod, he wouldn’t stay low for long. Even now he was off, limber and lithe – the Denim Flash. When his back was to the front wall of the building, Doyle met Murphy’s eye across the yards. He gave one, barely perceptible, nod.
Bodie’s finger was poised, and Doyle was going in. A mix of admiration and adrenaline coursed through Murphy’s veins.
As work colleagues went, 3.7 and 4.5 weren’t too dusty really.
*
“There were six of them,” Murphy explained to Anson later in the Squad Room. “All armed to the teeth.”
Anson looked impressed. McCabe glanced up from the super, soaraway Sun, narrow-eyed with suspicion.
“I heard there were ten,” Jax offered from his spot crouched in front of the open, empty fridge as if he could summon something wonderful to be in there by force of will.
“Maybe,” Murphy smirked, touching a finger to the dressing on his face.
“Give it a rest.” McCabe was highly grumpy. “There were two of them. I heard the call-out.” He rustled the paper.
“Well, one of them had an AK-47, chum, so there might as well have been ten.”
“Where are they anyhow?” Jax demanded, finally giving up and rising to his feet. “The Bisto kids?”
“Weekend off.” Murphy peered into his empty mug. “‘spect Bodie’s blagging some bird down the pub even as we speak.”
Anson gave a lusty sigh. “And who knows what Doyle gets up to. Secretive bugger at the best of times.”
“Hey, do you reckon we can get Betty to go out for more milk?”
“Not bloody likely.” Murphy was amused at Jax’s daring. “She’d tell you to sling your hook and who could blame her.”
“Well someone needs to go.”
As one they turned to McCabe.
*
Standard day at the coalface, really.
A morning of poxy report-writing due in last Thursday. A quick tea-break. An afternoon firefight which called for pounding up some stairs after a henchman with a big pistol.
All done now, though. Two whole days off.
Doyle – showered, naked, relaxed – padded into the bedroom.
“Right,” Bodie said to him from the bed. He flexed his hands in the gloves. “Playtime.”
The Story of Us
Long before the years of doubt and hope, the bedded-in partnership, the bone-rattling miles of tarmac, the early retirement, the moving in together... long before any of that, before they’d stopped being plonkers and really understood... there’d been the blow jobs.
Bodie always claimed he’d been the first recipient, on a winter evening in Plaistow, Doyle going to his knees so fast he’d torn yet another hole in his jeans. Doyle disputed that. He said the first one was on Hampstead Heath and he’d been flat on his back looking at the summer stars before Bodie had given him so much as a by your leave.
They both agreed on what was said afterwards though – “You bastard, I can’t believe you just did that!” – and that there was instant reciprocation. Oh, and that it was bone-meltingly good, of course.
A mutual release of tension. Furtive, exhilarating. And soon as regular and downright essential as Saturday afternoon on the terraces or Sunday lunch-time down the Scarsdale. A favour, perhaps, that first time. Although even then, the fact that it was more intimate than hands, seemed significant. It was tongues, lips, tastes.
Sweat, whiskey, come, soap, lemonade.
Fizzy lemonade. Fizzy!
Bodie was such a big kid.
“Fruity,” he might say, eyebrows beetling.
“Sticky more like, you silly arse,” and Doyle would cuff him round the back of the head. Then stroke down his jaw, gentler.
There was a romance in it, too. Months of it, years even. Unrecognized, punctuating all the ops, all the successes and failures, the deaths and disasters, the occasional whiff of lavender. Whatever else happened, there was always that – a way to get happy.
Until they finally hit on an even better way.
“You know what, Bodie, I’m getting out of this game. For good.”
It was Ray, in the end, who’d said the words and finally meant them. He could be braver about things like that.
“Well fine,” Bodie had blustered. “I’m coming with you.”
“Ah, gentlemen,” George Cowley said when they knocked on his door. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Spaced Out
“Is he bloody well calming down yet?”
It was one among a sea of unfamiliar voices.
“Any moment now.”
Bodie, exhausted but not yet conquered, could sense a hand pressed hard against his chest. There were cops, paramedics, strangers, around him.
His heart was thumping in rage against his ribcage.
Where the hell’s Doyle? What have they done with Doyle?
A gossamer veil of stars twinkled across his vision, telling him he wasn’t in charge of his own faculties anymore.
“You should be feeling light as air, getting sleepy.” There was a distinct disconnect between the voice and the inflexible pressure of the hand.
The last, furious, thought Bodie had, which he couldn’t say out loud because his mouth no longer worked, was that he thought they were supposed to be knocking him out not bleeding well hypnotizing him.
Resistance trickled out through the ends of his fingers and he fell off the edge of the world.
*
Nothing made much sense when he clawed himself back either.
Worse than that, he couldn’t see properly. Something malign had scraped his throat raw, and he hurt down to the marrow of his bones.
There was a shape very close by, weaving back and forth.
“What’s wrong?” Bodie tried to whine at it, nauseated with all the movement. “What they do to you?”
He’d been battered and confused by all manner of dreams. Daleks had called him on the phone. There’d been fields of corpses, driverless cars. Even someone stroking his head as he floated in the ice-cold of outer space, a touch of singular and precious affection. Bodie thought if only they’d do it again right now he might not embarrass himself by sobbing.
The shape duly obliged. A single finger tracked down his cheek and tethered him firmly to earth.
Sophisticated Sharing
With all the briefings and general pre-op faff, there’d been no time to get a tree, so Doyle hadn’t. Nothing for Christmas dinner either. Not so much as a sausage.
His flat on Christmas Eve was barely seasonal. There were just a few cards on the mantelpiece, and Cowley’s annual gift of a bottle of pure malt was still sitting on the kitchen table. Doyle hadn’t yet taken it out of the shiny paper and tinsel that Betty had provided.
It was dark. Coolish, too, as the heating hadn’t been on in a week. Doyle’s rucksack, smeared in oil, was dumped on the floor by the garden door where he’d dropped it. It was stuffed with what Murphy called ‘mission smalls’, plus ammo which should have been returned to the Armoury. His boots, caked with Norfolk silt, were under the coffee table. They smelled of the beach, fish guts, and blood.
In the corner, opposite the sofa, his small Grundig television flickered. Doyle’s eyes were fixed, trance-like, on the screen as if, now they’d located a moving object, they couldn’t move again. His legs in their salt-encrusted denim were stretched in front of him, feet on the coffee table, still in their damp, two-day old socks. The socks were grey, although they hadn’t been to begin with.
Doyle’s right side was chilled, but his left was toasty. The warmth ran from his shoulder to his hip and all the way down to where his ankle was hooked over Bodie’s even grayer sock.
Four days running around the Fens in a sleety deluge. No sleep. No rest. Doyle’s ribs and face were bruised, he had a fat lip, and a bloodied, hairy knee poked through Bodie’s wrecked trousers.
They didn’t know what anyone was saying on the telly. The volume was too low, but it didn’t matter. Neither of them had ever sat willingly through a sappy musical in their lives, but it was bright and cheery, this, and there was a Christmas tree in it.
What they needed was hot water, a good dinner, and a ridiculously long sleep – preferably not waking up until Boxing Day.
But Doyle wasn’t about to budge. He couldn’t. In fact, he felt like he’d never voluntarily move again. It took superhuman effort to shove the tin of Family Circle to the right. Bodie, hand as heavy as every other limb in the room, fumbled yet another pink wafer. The tub of Twiglets slid back to Doyle in return. Doyle saw from the corner of his eye the crumbs showering Bodie’s lap. What he thought he’d quite like to do was lay his head in that lap and sleep for a week. Instead he levered out a fistful of twiglets and jammed the knobbly sticks in his mouth.
Salt, yeast, and more salt.
Doyle felt increasingly rubbish, but didn’t give a toss. He just shuffled his backside and ingratiated himself further into Bodie’s side than was really necessary. Frankly if they’d been able to climb inside each other’s skin at that point, Doyle thought they might have done.
“Fwigwets,” Bodie demanded, indistinct.
On the telly there was a little girl with a doll, Judy Garland in a sparkly headscarf, and a garden full of snowmen. Doyle knew he was in a bad way because he was utterly charmed. He exchanged Twiglets for jam sandwiches, reckoned he’d just about get to the end of the film before falling asleep on the nearest broad shoulder.
Bodie easily beat him to it, hand still in the tub.
Title: Selection Box
Author: JoJo
Genre: Slash
Pairings/relationships: Bodie/Doyle
Characters: Bodie, Doyle, Murphy, Anson, McCabe, Jax, George Cowley
Archive at Proslib or circuit: yes please
A Moment
“Here,” he said. “Here, here.”
Not that it did any good. Bodie was straining against him, agitated.
Doyle hung on tight. He uncurled the tensely hinged arm, turned the hand over.
Knuckles, teeth, impact.
“Gawd and Bennett,” Doyle said, jokey. “Not again!”
It was always Bodie’s fingers. Already knobbled with myriad fractures, now a pulpy mess. Lacy flaps of abraded skin, blood and bruising.
To be fair, though. The bastards who’d caused the mess all around them were a lot worse off.
Bodie’s nostrils flared. His Adam’s apple moved thickly. Doyle couldn’t glimpse much more expression as Bodie had turned away from him, wet lashes etched against the iron gray sky behind.
Yes, there were dead bodies. Innocents. It shouldn’t be. All of that.
But Bodie sailed through mayhem like this easier than almost any of them. Certainly far easier, apparently, than Doyle ever did.
Not now though.
“Where’s my cool, calm, metabolically unique other half when I need him, eh?” Doyle said in a low voice, the lowest he could use and still be heard. There were plenty of people milling about and this was nothing to do with them. Bodie was still twitching slightly with the emotion of his outburst. He was pulling against Doyle’s hold, not looking at him. Something definitely not right.
Doyle gave up the struggle for Bodie’s attention. He’d wanted to deal with the minor injury so the paramedics didn’t have to – it was something they tried to do wherever possible, especially when there were others in need. Now he saw Bodie was the one in need. But for something else.
“OK,” Doyle said. “Need a moment?” He let go completely. Let Bodie walk. It went hard against his instincts, but it seemed the thing to do.
Bodie walked with a firm stride towards the Capri. And then he just stood there with one arm leaning on the roof, his back towards the world. When one of the ambulance blokes made to go after him, Doyle arrested his progress with an arm, firm.
“Bloody CI5,” the man growled, combative.
“If you like,” Doyle snarled back.
He planted his feet, crossed his arms. The wind whistled across the car park.
Long as you need, sunshine, Doyle thought, hackles rising as a copper hove into view. Long as you need.
Pick Me Up
“Doyle, Doyle, can you hear me?”
Yes.
Yes, Doyle could. Bodie was clutching at him, on the edges of frantic. For the moment, Doyle couldn’t respond.
“Listen, I'm going to put something in your mouth.”
There was a pause, and Doyle felt a frown form on his wind-stiffened face.
“It's quite big, and you need to be careful of the nuts.”
In his fog Doyle searched for gleeful humour in the voice and couldn’t find any. Which was worrying.
“You're going to like it, all right? Open nice and wide.”
Doyle almost giggled at that himself. He obeyed, drunk with fatigue.
And caught a welcome whiff of sugar, the promise of instant, empty energy.
“Yeah, that's my boy.” Bodie sounded relieved, delighted, and Doyle couldn’t resist that. “Little bit wider… and there. You’re very good at this, aren’t you?.” A gruff-toned chuckle. “Careful, don't take too much at once or you'll bloody well choke.”
It had been a long way. A long, long way.
From the jogging-on-the-spot in Blackheath at crack of dawn to this – swathed in a tinfoil blanket being forcibly stuffed. From aspiring elite athlete to Christmas turkey in four hours and two point six minutes.
“If he’s not unconscious he shouldn’t be lying down,” a gruffly nagging voice said. It could have been George Cowley but it wasn’t. Some over-anxious steward in trainers and a luminous jacket, probably. Or someone keen from the St. John Ambulance Brigade looking for something to do.
“Yeah all right, I’ll deal with it,” snapped the more familiar voice – the much more familiar, dear, and welcome one. It was as brisk and salty as only its owner could be. Arrogance and efficiency bundled up in worry. Comforting Doyle's roiling stomach more than the chocolate. He let himself be raised to a tentative sit.
“Oh Christ,” he heard his own mouth mumble, full of masticated confectionary. His head was whirling. “Nothing in the legs.”
“Well if you will run twenty six miles after someone’s tried to kill you.”
“Got any fluid for him? Lucozade or something?”
“Yes. I told you. I’m dealing with it.” Bodie was clipped, holding his magnificent irritation in check. Doyle dragged his eyes fully open. And found him. He was waving a bottle of fizzy pop and a chocolate bar in a brown wrapper backwards and forwards in front of his face. Someone else was standing over them but they weren’t important.
“You made it, you silly bastard!” Bodie said in totally unselfconscious pride. His hair was clumped from the drizzle, cheeks flushed, eyes several breathtaking shades bluer than the leaden sky above.
Doyle knew he’d made it all right. He could feel it in his empty tank, the tightness of his muscles, the creeping euphoria. As he was hauled to spaghetti legs the tinfoil cloak fluttered to the pavement and Bodie bent down to pick it up before plonking it round his shoulders again. He was leaned against a hoarding, a bottle of something fearsomely orange slapped in his hand.
“Now drink some of that,” Bodie commanded. “Slowly.”
Doyle washed down the chocolate with a couple of gulps, realizing he’d probably throw up if he had too much. He was starting to appreciate the sound of the crackly PA system now, the noise of spectators behind the barrier beyond the finish line. The line he had somehow staggered over before sinking to the road like the dying swan.
“I did it!”
“Yes,” Bodie agreed, wry. “And please tell me you’ll never do it again. Know it was for charity and all, but I thought you were a goner when you went down like that.” There was just the hint of the panic he’d clearly felt.
Doyle pushed the lucozade away. Became aware, for the first time, of the medal around his neck. It was on a red, white, and blue ribbon. He could read ‘Gillette’ upside down. The Thames wiggled across the centre, which made Doyle remember the Cutty Sark, the cobblestones, Tower Bridge, the crowds along the Embankment...
“Too right I’m never doing it again,” he said with feeling. Another wave of euphoria went through him. “Your go next time.”
“Not bloody likely. Have you seen the state of you?”
“Well of course if you think you couldn’t run any faster,” Doyle said, and he knew he had him.
Day
A volley of automatic gunfire spewed from an upper window.
“Move! Move, move, MOVE!”
Murphy’s shout was standard, instinctual, not needed - Bodie and Doyle had moved anyway. The two of them had peeled apart. Bodie, with the rifle, was finding a spot from where he could set his sights on that bloody window and that bloody rogue shooter. Doyle, trainers slapping, was headed for the nearest way into the building. Murphy guessed his own role was back-up. Until real back-up arrived.
Christ, though, that would only be the local constabulary boys. They’d be going barmy down at the station right about now. World War Three broken out in Exmouth Market! Get the Panda cars on site, and tell ‘em to keep their bloody heads down!
Not much use really.
Murphy was sweating under his shirt. Splinters of wood had grazed his cheek. He mouthed a platitude to the stall-holders crouched in goggle-eyed terror behind two overturned trestle tables and a rack of Indian prints on wheels. The flimsy fabric was billowing in a gentle breeze. Like curtains.
Another bullet was discharged from a different window. It hit a puddle right at Doyle’s feet, sent him diving for cover.
“Right, now I’m really pissed off,” Bodie growled, which made Murphy grin.
As for Doyle, the silly sod, he wouldn’t stay low for long. Even now he was off, limber and lithe – the Denim Flash. When his back was to the front wall of the building, Doyle met Murphy’s eye across the yards. He gave one, barely perceptible, nod.
Bodie’s finger was poised, and Doyle was going in. A mix of admiration and adrenaline coursed through Murphy’s veins.
As work colleagues went, 3.7 and 4.5 weren’t too dusty really.
*
“There were six of them,” Murphy explained to Anson later in the Squad Room. “All armed to the teeth.”
Anson looked impressed. McCabe glanced up from the super, soaraway Sun, narrow-eyed with suspicion.
“I heard there were ten,” Jax offered from his spot crouched in front of the open, empty fridge as if he could summon something wonderful to be in there by force of will.
“Maybe,” Murphy smirked, touching a finger to the dressing on his face.
“Give it a rest.” McCabe was highly grumpy. “There were two of them. I heard the call-out.” He rustled the paper.
“Well, one of them had an AK-47, chum, so there might as well have been ten.”
“Where are they anyhow?” Jax demanded, finally giving up and rising to his feet. “The Bisto kids?”
“Weekend off.” Murphy peered into his empty mug. “‘spect Bodie’s blagging some bird down the pub even as we speak.”
Anson gave a lusty sigh. “And who knows what Doyle gets up to. Secretive bugger at the best of times.”
“Hey, do you reckon we can get Betty to go out for more milk?”
“Not bloody likely.” Murphy was amused at Jax’s daring. “She’d tell you to sling your hook and who could blame her.”
“Well someone needs to go.”
As one they turned to McCabe.
*
Standard day at the coalface, really.
A morning of poxy report-writing due in last Thursday. A quick tea-break. An afternoon firefight which called for pounding up some stairs after a henchman with a big pistol.
All done now, though. Two whole days off.
Doyle – showered, naked, relaxed – padded into the bedroom.
“Right,” Bodie said to him from the bed. He flexed his hands in the gloves. “Playtime.”
The Story of Us
Long before the years of doubt and hope, the bedded-in partnership, the bone-rattling miles of tarmac, the early retirement, the moving in together... long before any of that, before they’d stopped being plonkers and really understood... there’d been the blow jobs.
Bodie always claimed he’d been the first recipient, on a winter evening in Plaistow, Doyle going to his knees so fast he’d torn yet another hole in his jeans. Doyle disputed that. He said the first one was on Hampstead Heath and he’d been flat on his back looking at the summer stars before Bodie had given him so much as a by your leave.
They both agreed on what was said afterwards though – “You bastard, I can’t believe you just did that!” – and that there was instant reciprocation. Oh, and that it was bone-meltingly good, of course.
A mutual release of tension. Furtive, exhilarating. And soon as regular and downright essential as Saturday afternoon on the terraces or Sunday lunch-time down the Scarsdale. A favour, perhaps, that first time. Although even then, the fact that it was more intimate than hands, seemed significant. It was tongues, lips, tastes.
Sweat, whiskey, come, soap, lemonade.
Fizzy lemonade. Fizzy!
Bodie was such a big kid.
“Fruity,” he might say, eyebrows beetling.
“Sticky more like, you silly arse,” and Doyle would cuff him round the back of the head. Then stroke down his jaw, gentler.
There was a romance in it, too. Months of it, years even. Unrecognized, punctuating all the ops, all the successes and failures, the deaths and disasters, the occasional whiff of lavender. Whatever else happened, there was always that – a way to get happy.
Until they finally hit on an even better way.
“You know what, Bodie, I’m getting out of this game. For good.”
It was Ray, in the end, who’d said the words and finally meant them. He could be braver about things like that.
“Well fine,” Bodie had blustered. “I’m coming with you.”
“Ah, gentlemen,” George Cowley said when they knocked on his door. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Spaced Out
“Is he bloody well calming down yet?”
It was one among a sea of unfamiliar voices.
“Any moment now.”
Bodie, exhausted but not yet conquered, could sense a hand pressed hard against his chest. There were cops, paramedics, strangers, around him.
His heart was thumping in rage against his ribcage.
Where the hell’s Doyle? What have they done with Doyle?
A gossamer veil of stars twinkled across his vision, telling him he wasn’t in charge of his own faculties anymore.
“You should be feeling light as air, getting sleepy.” There was a distinct disconnect between the voice and the inflexible pressure of the hand.
The last, furious, thought Bodie had, which he couldn’t say out loud because his mouth no longer worked, was that he thought they were supposed to be knocking him out not bleeding well hypnotizing him.
Resistance trickled out through the ends of his fingers and he fell off the edge of the world.
*
Nothing made much sense when he clawed himself back either.
Worse than that, he couldn’t see properly. Something malign had scraped his throat raw, and he hurt down to the marrow of his bones.
There was a shape very close by, weaving back and forth.
“What’s wrong?” Bodie tried to whine at it, nauseated with all the movement. “What they do to you?”
He’d been battered and confused by all manner of dreams. Daleks had called him on the phone. There’d been fields of corpses, driverless cars. Even someone stroking his head as he floated in the ice-cold of outer space, a touch of singular and precious affection. Bodie thought if only they’d do it again right now he might not embarrass himself by sobbing.
The shape duly obliged. A single finger tracked down his cheek and tethered him firmly to earth.
Sophisticated Sharing
With all the briefings and general pre-op faff, there’d been no time to get a tree, so Doyle hadn’t. Nothing for Christmas dinner either. Not so much as a sausage.
His flat on Christmas Eve was barely seasonal. There were just a few cards on the mantelpiece, and Cowley’s annual gift of a bottle of pure malt was still sitting on the kitchen table. Doyle hadn’t yet taken it out of the shiny paper and tinsel that Betty had provided.
It was dark. Coolish, too, as the heating hadn’t been on in a week. Doyle’s rucksack, smeared in oil, was dumped on the floor by the garden door where he’d dropped it. It was stuffed with what Murphy called ‘mission smalls’, plus ammo which should have been returned to the Armoury. His boots, caked with Norfolk silt, were under the coffee table. They smelled of the beach, fish guts, and blood.
In the corner, opposite the sofa, his small Grundig television flickered. Doyle’s eyes were fixed, trance-like, on the screen as if, now they’d located a moving object, they couldn’t move again. His legs in their salt-encrusted denim were stretched in front of him, feet on the coffee table, still in their damp, two-day old socks. The socks were grey, although they hadn’t been to begin with.
Doyle’s right side was chilled, but his left was toasty. The warmth ran from his shoulder to his hip and all the way down to where his ankle was hooked over Bodie’s even grayer sock.
Four days running around the Fens in a sleety deluge. No sleep. No rest. Doyle’s ribs and face were bruised, he had a fat lip, and a bloodied, hairy knee poked through Bodie’s wrecked trousers.
They didn’t know what anyone was saying on the telly. The volume was too low, but it didn’t matter. Neither of them had ever sat willingly through a sappy musical in their lives, but it was bright and cheery, this, and there was a Christmas tree in it.
What they needed was hot water, a good dinner, and a ridiculously long sleep – preferably not waking up until Boxing Day.
But Doyle wasn’t about to budge. He couldn’t. In fact, he felt like he’d never voluntarily move again. It took superhuman effort to shove the tin of Family Circle to the right. Bodie, hand as heavy as every other limb in the room, fumbled yet another pink wafer. The tub of Twiglets slid back to Doyle in return. Doyle saw from the corner of his eye the crumbs showering Bodie’s lap. What he thought he’d quite like to do was lay his head in that lap and sleep for a week. Instead he levered out a fistful of twiglets and jammed the knobbly sticks in his mouth.
Salt, yeast, and more salt.
Doyle felt increasingly rubbish, but didn’t give a toss. He just shuffled his backside and ingratiated himself further into Bodie’s side than was really necessary. Frankly if they’d been able to climb inside each other’s skin at that point, Doyle thought they might have done.
“Fwigwets,” Bodie demanded, indistinct.
On the telly there was a little girl with a doll, Judy Garland in a sparkly headscarf, and a garden full of snowmen. Doyle knew he was in a bad way because he was utterly charmed. He exchanged Twiglets for jam sandwiches, reckoned he’d just about get to the end of the film before falling asleep on the nearest broad shoulder.
Bodie easily beat him to it, hand still in the tub.
Title: Selection Box
Author: JoJo
Genre: Slash
Pairings/relationships: Bodie/Doyle
Characters: Bodie, Doyle, Murphy, Anson, McCabe, Jax, George Cowley
Archive at Proslib or circuit: yes please
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2015-12-13 07:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-15 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-13 07:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-15 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-13 10:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-15 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-14 03:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-15 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-14 03:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-15 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-14 06:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-14 07:34 am (UTC)Well done - and something far beyond anything I could pull off in a couple of days. I've identified most of them and the last couple are probably from lack of familliarity. But Iwant to try to figure thm out myself, so am not going to ask. :D
Thanks for that! I really liked the stories.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-14 11:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-14 01:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-14 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-14 05:34 pm (UTC)Oh.
Just... gorgeous. And them. And unique. And perfect. And, um, thank you!
no subject
Date: 2015-12-15 08:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-15 10:39 pm (UTC)And what a treat to see original advertising from Christmas selections boxes from that era...
Well done 😊
Thank you. Paola x
no subject
Date: 2015-12-16 01:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-18 08:41 am (UTC)