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The wind bites like a man - rough and unforgiving, pressing into Jeremy’s skin. He can feel a steady chill crawl over his face, battling the slow, unsteady warmth rising and falling in his rolling stomach. He focuses on the silhouette of dark spruce in the distance; he’s overthinking. His gauze-wrapped fingers twitch incessantly at his sides and he tries, desperately, not to think.
It’s cold. He thinks despite himself and wishes he was home.
“Your fuckin’ fault we got inna this mess,” Roy - Blue snarls, ruthless and harsh. His hands are moving, quick and angry and uncaring, and Jeremy can’t stop looking at the familiar gauze. His voice sinks into his memory and he doubts it will leave. “Your fault, all of it - I didn’t do shit, was following the motherfuckin’ contract...”
Jeremy swallows, thick and slow. He thinks despite himself and remembers why he’s not home.
“Savin’ the life of a RED and then fuckin’ ‘em don’t sound like contract.”
He wonders when he started sounding so furiously blank. It’s tiring, this charade - it’s pulling at him, rending flesh from bone in its hunger, tearing at all he’s got left and dragging him to the earth a hollow, noiseless husk. He wants to scream; the anger swallows every drop of ugly sound. He wonders how he can sink and splutter and fight at once; he wonders if he can choose to drown.
“Fuckin’ - fuckin’ shithead, we wern’ on the clock. Oh, unless ya wanted me to just watch ’cha getting the shit kicked outta ya by a fucker more drunk than Demo on a Saturday. Ungrateful fuckin’ shit,” Roy hisses everything out in a puff of impolite breath - it colors the air with feeling. His ruddy face is flushed and Jeremy hates how he can see all of it; he beholds freckled cheeks and aquiline nose and opens his mouth to scream.
He takes a step forwards, tries to yell out, and can’t. Roy lets out a stubborn, irritated - downright ugly noise instead of falling back, and Jeremy thinks it’s not fair.
It’s not fair that he’s got to swallow things down and Roy can just breathe and scream and find him again at the bar and talk to him like they don’t know each other, like they’re two men who live and breathe and don’t kill people who’ll come back in a minute.
It’s not fair he can laugh at what Jeremy says too loudly, can buy himself a drink too many, can press into Jeremy in the alleyway and breathe his vodka-cranberry breath into his mouth.
It’s not fair he can drag him into the forest at four-forty A.M. on a Sunday and expect things to be resolved with screaming and violence.
He’s overthinking. He’s twenty-something and he’s too fucking old to complain, to expect things to be fair.
“An’ now - oh, now they know,” Roy continues, and takes a step forward. Dead leaves crackle underneath his boots; Jeremy notes his breath smells like cotton candy bubble gum when it doesn’t stink of liquor. The scent isn’t fitting - too childish and bright for anyone involved in the type of shit they are, but it smells good and above all the emptiness, the anger, Jeremy wants to taste. “An’ - an’ guess what? Guess how they wanna fix my ‘little prob’em?’ Kill ya off the clock so ya don’t come back, that’s how. Then - no more fuckin’ prob’em, they say.”
Roy tilts his face up and breathes his discontent to the sky; Jeremy blinks. Something stirs the warmth in his stomach; he pushes the backward feeling of wanting to throw up back down his throat and closes his eyes. He wants to remember - remember how those freckles tasted sizzling on his tongue.
He senses a catch hanging on Roy’s speech, an ending, unsavory or not, to this unfinished story. Jeremy’s never been one for self control; he reels in his scattered words all the same.
He blinks, and Roy brings himself back. Jeremy steps back - once, twice, and looks at him. He doesn’t want to feel or say but he hasn’t really got a choice.
“Why aren’ I dead, then?” he asks, abruptly slow and pliant, and feels as if he should know.
Roy doesn’t answer. The cold cracks his stone lips, his stone face; Jeremy watches leaves blow in the wind. The trees feel closer than they were before. The debris falls into his open mouth and digs into his throat.
He wets his lips and coughs. He doesn’t belong here, not beside BLU - Roy.
Jeremy steps forward again - once, twice, and looks at him. He wouldn’t be real if not for the rapid blinking and unsteady puff of his breath; it makes him want to reach out and run his palms over this stranger’s face and feel life thrumming beneath a weathered stone face.
This isn’t real.
He steps forward.
This isn’t real.
He reaches out to touch, and can feel Roy’s final defense finally rise to the challenge, a battered warrior facing the finality of a hopeless war.
“Fuck off,” he growls; he wonders if he can hear how he sounds. Jeremy can - he can sense the fear thrumming on his body, can taste the desperation spilling into rivulets on his skin. “Think I’m in love witcha or summin’?”
“No,” Jeremy responds. He wonders when he grew capable of speaking so softly and blames it on the smell of cotton candy and damp moss.
“..’Cau - ‘cause I’m not.” His face is red and Jeremy wishes, suddenly, with a sharp sort of longing, that things were different.
They aren’t; he’ll take what he can get.