Archive of Our Own ^beta

"My money's on air traffic," Frohike replied. He was the least breathless of the three of them, despite the fact that he was weighed down by damp clothes and a sodden backpack. On any other occasion Langly would have been over the moon about Frohike falling into a stream, but since he was the one who did the falling and dragged Frohike down with him, Frohike and Byers had made a silent agreement to just pretend it hadn't happened.

"Byers?" Frohike glanced back over his shoulder. "Thoughts?"

As far as mysterious radio broadcasts went, the one they were going off the beaten path to hunt down didn't seem like it would be the exciting kind. No speaking in tongues, not even a language that wasn't English—just a pair of voices reading lists of mundane objects back and forth. They had to get a recording to analyze, just in case there was some kind of code hidden under the boring surface, but for all they knew it was someone coordinating a shopping list.

"A numbers station, maybe?" The slope they were on had flattened out into a neat little plateau, peppered in shade by an uneven crescent of scraggly trees. Byers paused to unfold the map he was carrying and his pace eased to a stop. Frohike turned around and crossed his arms and Langly doubled over with his hands on his knees, wheezing. "This looks like the spot."

Langly dropped his backpack and collapsed with his arms and legs spread out across the soft grass, eyes closed against the glare of the clear sky. "Never again."

"Get up and help with the tent," Frohike scolded, helping Byers ease his bag off his shoulders.

Langly took his sweet time standing up again. By the time he wandered over to join them the tent was lying flat on the ground and Byers was showing Frohike how to snap the supporting poles together.

"The wire running through them is elastic, just unfold it and line up the ends..." Byers twisted one of the bundle of short plastic sticks upwards and it leapt into the socket of the one next to it. "Once they're all together they slot into little pockets at the corners of the tent. They bend pretty far, so don't worry about being rough with them."

"Man, I can't believe you actually like this stuff," Langly said, kneeling next to the bag that the tent was in and examining the remaining contents. He picked up the satchel of metal pegs and eyed them suspiciously.

Frohike shook his head. "You've been a rugged outdoorsman this whole time," he sighed, his voice heavy with fake seriousness. "You should have told us, Byers."

"I should have guessed it." Langly dropped the pegs with a clatter and wandered over towards the flat tent, presumably to find the corner pockets. He bumped into Byers' shoulder as he went, smirking. "You always get my tent pole up."

Frohike took a swing at Langly's butt with his actual tent pole. It connected, and Langly yelped with more alarm than pain as several of the parts popped out of place with a loud plasticky snap. 

"You can be horny later, for god's sake, stop trying to get out of setting this thing up." Langly rolled his eyes but set to fixing the parts that had been knocked apart. Frohike turned to Byers with a serious expression, eyebrows downturned just slightly and his lips drawn tight. "He's not wrong, though. The beard and flannel combo is pretty hot."

"Thank you," Langly said, vindicated.

Byers laughed, spluttering, and shook his head, but his face was starting to redden. He let the silence drag on for a few moments before he spoke.

"Do you think we'll hear the transmission tonight?" 

It was Langly's turn to spit out a laugh. "Hell no."

"I hate to agree with him twice in a row, but he's right," Frohike said, then quirked an eyebrow at Byers. "The tape recorder's definitely gonna have to field this one."

It felt empty enough without Jimmy around to break things with the best of intentions, and devoid of listening devices and cutesy passive-aggressive notes about getting better locks courtesy of Yves.

Langly's stomach felt hollow and sour and the back of his throat was burning. He kicked the blankets the rest of the way off the bed and stood up, then tiptoed out of his room and across the cold floor to the bathroom for an antacid. The temperature of the cement seeping through the linoleum was agonizing enough during the day, and at night it was unbearable.

Byers must have been the last one to buy more antacid tablets because they were the gross mint ones he liked. Langly crunched up four or five of them anyway and turned the faucet on to let the smell of cold water calm his stomach. Before turning the water off and stepping back out onto the cold floor, he splashed his face for good measure. It made him gasp but it didn't make the bags under his eyes feel any lighter.

Back in the ambient pale blue light of the kitchen, he paused. He really didn't want to go back over the freezing linoleum and past the missing furniture to get to his bedroom. Frohike's room was way closer, and he could see that the door was open just a crack...

But they didn't sleep together. Well, they did, but they didn't sleep sleep together. Frohike snored a little and Byers talked in his sleep sometimes, and Langly kicked and stole blankets. More than anything—and Langly was fairly sure they were all in agreement, even though they'd never actually discussed it—it felt kind of weird. Not that their current arrangement was normal, but that level of emotional dependency was a whole other can of worms. 

But, and Langly was positive they would be on his side about this too, the prospect of walking back through the gutted remains of their home was too daunting to face. 

As he approached Frohike's door he realized that the air was completely silent. He knocked despite it being open and pushed against it until he could see inside, though without his glasses there wasn't much of a point. 

"Hey," he tried, "you awake?"

"Unfortunately," Frohike grumbled back. it sounded like his face was half buried in a pillow.

"Thank god," Langly replied. He crossed the room in a few long strides and collapsed onto the bed, making a mess of the covers as he got underneath them and snuggled up against Frohike's back. "I can't sleep."

Frohike paused for a few agonizing moments. Surprised? Figuring out how to react? Before Langly's stomach could sink any further and set off his acid reflux again, Frohike rolled over and slung an arm around his waist. Langly squirmed closer immediately, even though he knew that would let Frohike feel how hard his heart was pounding with nerves.

They only laid together like that for a minute before there was another timid knock at the door.

"Oh, sorry," Byers stage whispered, "am I interrupting?"

"Let me guess," Frohike said, mumbling it into Langly's neck, "can't sleep?"

"Well," Byers replied, like there was an elaborate explanation coming, then paused. "...Yes."

"Get in here, you dumbass," Langly said, rolling his eyes.

Frohike sighed as Byers did as he was told, tightening his arms around Langly and shifting backwards to make more room. Byers settled behind Langly, one arm reaching over him to rest on Frohike, and Langly felt Frohike respond by lifting a hand off of him to hold onto Byers' arm. Langly wiggled around until he could get his hands on them too. It was incredibly warm with three people in one bed, and the pressure from the firm embrace was just enough to be comforting.

"When all this is over, remind me to get a bigger bed," Frohike mumbled.

First it was going to be when they found Yves. That was obliterated by the moments in which death was the only choice and he felt relieved, like he could finally get some rest. Thinking about the depth of that calm, the peace that was like being at the bottom of the ocean while a storm raged miles over his head, still kept him awake most nights. When he did sleep, his dreams were still and dark and he felt a freezing pressure easing down onto his chest until he gasped awake like he was drowning.

Frohike and Langly didn't sleep very much either. Not since they had been sick. Byers knew because they hadn't spent a single night in separate rooms since they woke up in the quarantined ICU. He heard them gasping in the middle of the night and saw them staring empty-eyed into the white void of the ceiling.

The goalposts shifted to just surviving. If he took it one day at a time and concentrated what little effort he could on purging the last of the death out of his body, things would get better.

And then Skinner showed up to tell them just what the situation was.

They survived, yes, but to the world at large they were dead. There was no possible way to go back to how things were, and even though the warehouse had become little more than a concrete shell it still stung to hear that they would never see it again.

They had two options; they could give up what little they had left and go into witness protection, or refuse Skinner's help and get released onto the streets with nothing and nowhere to go. He offered them time to talk about it but all it took was a glance to know that they were all on the same page—there was really only one option.

They recovered. Slowly and with plenty of complications, but somehow they did it. The goalposts shifted once again to relocating. As soon as the turmoil was over, as soon as they weren't moving around, as soon as they were safe, that would be the end of the closureless rollercoaster they had been on since the day they realized Yves was missing.

But of course it didn't stop there. As much as Byers wished it did, emotional processing didn't have a neat cutoff date.

Vancouver was a chameleon of a city. Some streets were familiar despite being completely new to them, and others they walked daily still felt strange and alien. It became instantly apparent that they were not normal, even in a city filled with eccentricity—new identities didn't erase old fears, the scabs freshly ripped off by months of constant worry and paranoia. Every new face, no matter how friendly, was a potential threat.

Possibly the worst sacrifice they had to make in exchange for safety was their work. No more conspiracy theories, no more shady investigating, no more newspaper. All of that died when they did.

Despite having three discrete beds in the single house that they had strongarmed Skinner into, they spent every night crammed together on the bed that folded out of the couch.

“I saw you typing like you were possessed earlier,” Frohike said one night, shifting his arm that was underneath Byers' head just enough to let him play with the ends of Langly's hair. “The hell was that about?”

Langly spluttered out a laugh and shook his head, nudging against Byers' shoulder. “Nothing serious or interesting, trust me.”

“Share with the class anyway,” Frohike said.

“I saw some kids at the library with a tabletop game and got all bummed out about it,” Langly conceded, mumbling. He was by far the most embarrassed about having trouble adjusting, even though they were all in the same boat. “They looked like they were having a blast. So I started working up a campaign I'll probably never get to use.”

“Oh my God,” Byers said, sitting bolt upright. He would have knocked Langly clean off the couch if he hadn't had one arm around Byers' waist. “That's it.”

Without looking up from his computer, Langly swiveled his chair around to face the copier and gave it a swift kick. Seven or eight papers flew out with a gear-grinding crunch and fluttered to the floor, and after a tense moment of silence the next paper fell neatly into the tray.

“Not anymore.”

Frohike sighed.

It was their first anniversary of living as conformist Canadians, and they had been back in print for four months. 

Fiction had been the solution to all their problems. They'd only been banned from journalism, not writing in general, and there had been no discussion at all about publishing something that wasn't a newspaper. And so, they started in on a fiction zine. As long as they didn't claim anything was true, if someone wanted to interpret it that way it was their prerogative.

Frohike was about to remind Langly for the umpteenth time not to bully the very well-used copy machine when Byers returned from the kitchen with three cups of coffee. “Was that thing jammed again?”

“Yeah,” Langly said with exaggerated nonchalance, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands behind his head, “but I went ahead and fixed it, no problem.”

“Thank heavens we keep you around," Byers responded, deadpan, and leaned down to give Langly a quick kiss before setting his coffee on his desk.

"Forget the jamming issue, we're gonna have to get a new one because of blunt force trauma at this rate." Frohike waited for Byers to lean over to deposit the second cup of coffee then tugged him into another kiss with a hand on the back of his neck. He made sure to muss up the back of Byers' hair and slip him some tongue before he was out of reach, leaving him rumpled and flustered.

"Get a room," Langly groaned, like the three of them didn't share one.

Frohike paused, then kissed the palm of his glove and blew it towards Langly. Langly dodged out of the way and swatted at the air around his head like he was being pursued by hornets.

"All that aside," Byers said, putting on his serious business voice. He set his own coffee down and stood behind Frohike, hands on his shoulders. He left his hair the way it was. "That's the last set of pages, right? Should I get the layouting table cleared off and the staplers out?" 

"We might need to make a couple extras, on account of..." Langly trailed off and gestured at the papers scattered across the floor. "Other than that we're ready to rock."

"Count 'em now so we can make more before we start."

Langly frowned at Frohike. "Why me?" 

Frohike sipped his coffee. "Because you're the genius who MacGyvered us into this mess."

Langly made a show of rolling his eyes, but stood and took his coffee with him to the copier. He picked up the printed ream and just stared at it, taking a long drink.

"Man. This is unreal."

There was a pause.

Byers was the one to break the silence. "...The coffee or the copier?"

"What? No, this. Everything. If you told me a couple years ago we'd be doing this I'd have laughed. I know it's not the dream, but it's at least halfway there, right?"

"It's not bad," Frohike said. "It's sure a hell of a lot easier on my back."

Byers pressed his thumbs into Frohike's shoulders and earned a contented hum. "I think we're lucky to have what we do, especially considering... the alternative," he said, faltering. They didn't usually discuss 'the alternative'.

"You ever feel bad for... I dunno." Langly's face set into a conflicted frown as he searched for the words. "Settling for less?"

Another pause, longer this time.

"I think Byers is right," Frohike said, his voice quiet and almost tentative. He was aware of what a weird tone it was coming from him. "We're still kickin', and we're doing what we can. That's more than nothing."

"Trust me," Byers said, "I've been wrestling with that question since about issue five. It's not anyone's dream life, but it's good. It's just... different."

Langly considered that for a moment. He left his coffee on the copier and paced over to Byers and Frohike, putting an arm around Byers and resting a hand on Frohike's chest. "Different's alright," he muttered. "I can do different." 

Frohike let them have a moment before he spoke, half for Byers' sake, because he adored that kind of sappy romance movie bull and he didn't get it from them very often, and half to let Langly think he'd gotten away with it.

"Yeah, yeah," he said, patting Langly's hand, "we love you too. Now stop trying to weasel out of doing your damn job. Those papers can't count themselves."