Chapter Text
Through the Air
“When I try to open up to you I get completely lost
Houses swallowed by the earth, windows thick with frost
…
My heart’s an autoclave”
Autoclave
The Mountain Goats
It begins beneath the skin.
That protective layer that keeps the dirt and grime and gun residue from settling into your aching bones. The skin that stretches over sore muscles, that keeps the blood in, yet thin enough to be pierced by knives or pine needles or words--or something.
Yes, you see, it's a 'something' that has pierced through Yuugo’s skin today.
You’ll find him alone, as he often was and now rarely is. He’s in his room, late at night. White fluorescents fill the space, chasing the shadows out--that same harsh light his eyes have grown used to like a parasite makes its home in your intestines. His pack has been shouldered off onto his bed, a single bottom bunk here in his private room. His rifle is similarly abandoned.
Yuugo’s posture—head craning down, shoulders hunched up, fingers making tight fists in a dirty button-up shirt—can’t be comfortable. It isn’t. He’s here because he’s inspecting a wound, following the thin-line ache which has persisted over two days.
Where did the scratch come from? He doesn’t know. I don’t know. But I know this: it had to happen. Had to stretch across his lower torso, from his left hip to the middle of his stomach, thin as a thread, not bleeding but surrounded by inflamed, warm-to-touch skin.
And then there’s the sickly yellow within.
Yuugo knows few and many things, but there’s an inescapable fact of the life he’s lived that wouldn’t slip past him without a second thought: what an infected wound looks like. Feels like. And here, beneath the skin, there is the beginnings of a slow-simmer heat which speaks only of a coming fever.
“Fuck.”
He figures there are no little ears around to hear him.
He releases the bunched-up fabric of his shirt, relaxes his posture, and sighs with a fullness of his lungs. Then he leans down, grabs the heaviness of his bag and pulls its weight out towards the ground. Once it’s on the floor, he handles his gun with the carefulness that comes from truly knowing its destructive power, and sprawls himself on the mattress, limbs all crooked. Shoes still on.
It’s not comfortable here. He won’t linger. If he lingers, the wound will only fester, the infection spreading out through his bloodstream with its far-reaching, clawed talons. And if there’s anything Yuugo doesn’t need right now, it’s sepsis.
Watch as he stretches out his spindly legs to hold his weight, watch as he staggers to stand. How do his ever-faithful legs manage to move, run, hold the heaviness there? He doesn’t know.
The hallways are dark, dim fluorescents spilling out to illuminate its gunmetal grey walls--a long-familiar, uninspired shade. He heads into the pitch black without a second of hesitation, towards the infirmary.
A salve spread by trembling fingers over the aching stripe will do the job, or so Yuugo reckons. He sticks a plaster over it for good measure, though the actual wound is paltry.
How many times have I been here?
He doesn’t know.
The antibiotics are hidden behind locked drawers and childproof caps, but his thirteen-years-and-counting of experience in the shelter makes fast work of that.
Swallow the pills, and maybe they’ll cure the sickness quick, leave you good as new. Yuugo doesn’t need water to get them down. He needs the fester beneath his skin to abate, needs the heat burning through his body to even out like the anger once did, like everything once did.
The skin is too thin, even after thirteen years. Because of thirteen years, perhaps. These days he lets it be cut, but he doesn’t let the blood come out. He’ll hold a hand to an open wound with deflection, stick a plaster to it with a stuck-on expression, and wonder how to stop the heat from burning through every vein, leaving only ash behind. He’ll smile pretend-annoyance and dig his fingers into a new gunshot wound to match the rest.
It’s too easy to break the surface, but damn him if he ever lets it bleed out.
And so he goes back to bed, likely in vain. Sleep rarely visits him for more than a few hours on a good day. Managing yourself on so little rest is a skill that’s hard to learn, and one he’s perfected. When the fragmented recollections invade each of his dreams, even the good ones, he’ll wake up sweating through his shirt and struggling to breathe. Tonight, he woke up with an intensified ache in his abdomen.
A few hours isn’t that long until morning, at least for him. At least for now.
He sleeps better with Lucas by him, who doesn’t mind if he clings. The rise-and-fall of the other man’s chest, the steady heartbeat heard through an ear pressed close. A single, strong arm around him. But they don’t sleep in the same bed every night, especially when the little ones come crying to either of them about bad dreams inevitably caused by this godforsaken place.
Yuugo lies back down in bed and stares at the bunk above.
No morning is spent easy. This has always been the case, and though there’s an impossible breadth of difference between a shelter empty and one bursting to the seams with life, each has its own unique challenges. These days, Yuugo doesn’t have to struggle to get out of bed, but only because he’s scared the kids will set fire to something if he’s not up as soon as they are.
It does take him a moment, though, to pull himself from the sheets, because his fevered skin has only doubled in intensity during the long night. Yes, a fever--shivers wracking a sweaty body, hair and clothes sticking to skin, a haze descending upon your surroundings. Yuugo knows fever, though, and he knows these symptoms. There’s always a haze upon him, whether from a lack of sleep or illness or his mind punishing him, and so he has no trouble pushing through it, with the assistance of a splash of water to the face.
He’s helping set the table, or rather keeping a hawk’s eye on the children to make sure they don’t break anything, when a familiar hand touches his shoulder. His body responds before his mind with an instinctual jolt, then he turns around to see Lucas’s apologetic smile.
“Good morning,” he says, with enough gentleness that, in his fever-haze state, Yuugo feels like he’s been seized by the heart. In a way, he has.
“Morning,” Yuugo gets out.
Lucas’s hand trails down to grab his. The one with the glove. He interlaces their fingers smoothly, casually, and Yuugo tells himself the heat in his cheeks is just the fever, because he’s not a damn teenager.
This is a thing that’s still happening, against all odds.
Yes, it’s been a couple weeks, and their slow-going romance is progressing along at a steady pace. Yuugo isn’t entirely sure how to define it, how to box it up neatly into a category that makes sense compared to what he knows.
The great romances of the novels from his childhood prison were mostly fairy tales, tragedies, regency romances, and other books set in a world completely unlike his own. Not to mention all of them were between men and women. He’s read about people like himself and Lucas in non-fiction about culture and society, but it’s not the same as a grand tale.
At this moment, Yuugo is tentatively relying on the idea that this doesn’t have to fit into a box. That the straightforward path of meeting to dating to engagement to marriage is made for circumstances completely outside his own, and that there are no social expectations for the two of them to fulfil.
He berates himself for his worries, but can’t help but fall victim. It’s okay, he loves me and I love him. We don’t need anything else.
Even as he falls victim, they dissipate so easy whenever Lucas kisses him, or whispers far-too-affectionate words to him, or simply holds his hand.
Lucas is as unsusceptible to insecurity as he is convicted in his love for the people around him. It only took the assurance that Yuugo felt the same way to push him to reach out, to confess.
Lucas still reaches out. He reaches out a lot. He reaches out to hold Yuugo’s hand lying limp by his side, to lead him away from the kids so they can talk without any listening ears, to bring him closer to his side.
To bridge the gap between them. The expanse of air, the inches separating their bodies, which somehow have become even more unbearable now he can do something about it.
Lucas doesn’t want to make Yuugo uncomfortable. He doesn’t want a chance of a flinch or a jolt of surprise, even though it keeps happening. Even though he can’t stop making mistakes, even now.
“Are you free in an hour or so?” Lucas asks. “I’ve got Oliver and Zack teaching the younger ones today. The schedules have changed with the new kids assigned to the farm.”
Yuugo has to mentally kick his brain to get it working, but he manages to remember his plans. He’s got a lesson in the afternoon but he and Lucas should be done by then. “Yeah, uh, that should be fine.”
“Great,” Lucas says. “I’ll meet you in my room then.”
He gradually untangles their hands, and then leaves to go help with breakfast.
Yuugo lets out a breath he’d been holding for far too long and no real reason. Well, he’s glad that Lucas didn’t notice his temperature through the thick material of their gloves, preventing direct skin contact. The fever will pass, but if Lucas finds out, Yuugo knows that he’ll fret and worry over it for far too long and no real reason.
He was never like that, a long time ago. Instead of being an uncompromising worrier, he’d never think of the consequences before throwing himself into danger. Calculating (but not cold) Lucas is a new thing.
It’s a new thing for Yuugo.
The kids have always had constantly-worrying, overprotective, immeasurably kind Lucas. They’ve always had his one arm and his cane. They’ve always had his smiles which are soft instead of sharp, and his quietness in moments of rest.
Once, Yuugo didn’t have that.
Often, he wonders how he should feel about it.
~
It’s not surprising to anyone when Lucas finds him on the roof. Here, I won’t spare you the details. Perched up on the highest point, legs propped against the tiles, staring out at the hunting ground that’s lit only by the false moon.
“Dina’s looking for you,” Lucas says.
Yuugo jolts. His mind is an easy place to get lost in. He looks over to the other, who is smirking at some untold joke, then turns his head away, huffing. “Yeah, I know. But she knows I need a moment sometimes.”
He’s looking away but can feel Lucas’s body come sit by him, that reliable strength so familiar. He continues staring out at Goldy Pond instead of acknowledging it.
“Hey, for all the speeches you’ve been giving us, you look pretty nervous.”
Yuugo rolls his eyes, then turns to Lucas only to give him a playful shove. They both know Dina would get worried about that since they’re on the roof, but Lucas just laughs in response. “What? I’m just telling the truth.”
“We are going to survive,” Yuugo assures, that firm tenor returned to his voice, a newly found steel. “We’re smart and skilled and have survived this long, and William Minerva could show up any day now.”
“There he is,” Lucas says with a grin. “Well, you’re right, anyway. Those bastards are terrifying but can’t even defeat a bunch of kids with guns. Tomorrow is going to go just fine.”
The way Yuugo’s features fall is near-imperceptible, the sort of twitch-of-the-corner-of-the-mouth and shifting-of-eyes most people wouldn’t take note of, but Lucas knows well. Lucas frowns.
“You’re still worried, though.”
“I can’t not be,” Yuugo admits, words coming freely as soon as Lucas probes into his true feelings. The way it is always is. “I know all my speeches inspire you guys, and I mean every word, but… We’re still in a goddamn hunting ground run by man-eaters.”
“So?”
“So even though I know we can survive, and I can make sure you all survive, what if I ever make the wrong choice? What if I don’t live up to my own capabilities?” Yuugo says, in a soft, wavering tone of voice, a stark contrast to easily-bidden yet costly strength. “I need to be the best I can be. But what if one day, I’m not?”
In the dark of night, every breath feels like a vast expanse of time, full of every opportunity and no action. Full of chances not taken. The two or three inches between them feel like lightyears, even though they’re close enough to feel each other’s warmth.
In the dark of night, staring straight ahead at a village-death-trap, that warmth could’ve been anyone’s.
Then Lucas clamps a hand on Yuugo’s shoulder, as heavy as a weight. The moment breaks easily, the seconds dissolving into a lapse they forget easy now, but will contemplate some time again. “Come on. You broke us out of a fucking human farm. Do you really think these man-eaters stand any chance against us, even on a good day?”
Finally, Yuugo smiles. “Yeah. You’re right, I was just being stupid.”
“Exactly, dumbass,” Lucas says, a tension relieved in his chest. Here even he is fallible, because for all his talent at reading Yuugo’s expressive face and body, nobody can see what’s under the surface.
~
At this point, you might be able to discern he’s feeling unwell, if you’re playing close attention. There’s a grey pallor to his face. The rhythm of his breathing, while steady, is too heavy. But Yuugo’s staying away from most of the kids, who know not to bother him too much if he seems like he’s having a bad day. Cleaning up the dining room after breakfast doesn’t require much interaction, but that won’t last for long. He’s got someone waiting for him.
Yuugo should’ve said no, and he knows it. He should’ve told Lucas not today, he’s busy; he’s got lessons all throughout the day; he promised Chris that he’d help prepare for some upcoming birthday. He’s aware his partner would’ve been disappointed, but as endlessly understanding as he always is.
However, feeling Lucas’s gloved hand in his, his proximity, the warmth of his body so near, had made Yuugo overwhelmed to the point of no-second-thoughts. Why am I a damned lovesick teenager?
Lucas will notice the paleness and the breathing, the heat of his skin once they get close enough to properly touch. The image of Lucas’s face when he’s worried--drawn eyebrows, a faint downturn of his lips, a shine in his eyes that betrays his compulsive selflessness--appears spontaneously in his mind, and as much as Yuugo loves that man, he hates it when he makes that face at him.
There’s no avoiding it, though. It’s either Lucas noticing the obvious sickness evoked in Yuugo’s unusual manner and all the fretting that comes with it, or Yuugo standing him up. Despite his hatred for being pitied, it’s not even a choice.
So, Yuugo finishes his part of the washing up and glances at the time to confirm an hour has passed in the rush of the morning meal. He heaves a full-bodied sigh and leaves the kids with a blunt instruction not to break anything-- they probably will though, little brats don’t have any respect --so he can head to Lucas’s room.
He and Lucas are the only ones who opt to sleep in the old dorm rooms instead of with everyone else. Zack, also an adult (though barely), was offered a room but declined in a move that surprised nobody.
Though Lucas has been parenting these brats for upwards of eight years, he’s always had his own room, even in Goldy Pond. Yuugo reckons it’s because he doesn’t want his kids to see him waking up, shaking, from nightmares.
He knocks on Lucas’s door (just opposite his) though he doesn’t have to, since a voice he can hear the smile in immediately calls for him to let himself in. He does, to see Lucas sitting on one of the lower bunks, and Yuugo thinks he looks far too pleased to see him.
Here, in the small and quiet confines of a room with gunmetal grey walls, Yuugo is able to tell that Lucas is having a bad day with his leg. It had been one of the first things Lucas had confided in him--the good and bad days. Not even Oliver is fully aware of how his pain ebbs and flows like a particularly cruel tide, making him able to run with little issue on some occasions and barely able to get himself out of bed on others.
Yuugo knows Lucas is having a bad day because he’s leaning against the wall and has his left leg outstretched on the bed in a deliberate position that must ease the ache. His cane is leaning against the bedframe and only a few inches away, where his hand can easily grab it.
“How are you feeling?” Yuugo compulsively asks at the sight. Even as he hates it when Lucas does this sort of thing for him, he tells himself that at least he knows how to take care of himself to a reasonable extent. At least I don’t force myself to walk around when my leg is killing me, just so the kids don’t know anything is wrong.
“Oh? I’m fine,” Lucas says. “Just a little worse than usual, but nothing that I can’t handle.”
He wants to protest further, but instead grunts in acknowledgement and goes to sit down next to Lucas, who turns his head to face him. “What about you?”
“Fine,” Yuugo lies, compulsive as anything could be. As anything is.
“You know,” Lucas says, and Yuugo relaxes when there’s no further line of questioning. “It feels like things have settled lately. Settled into a good rhythm, at least.”
“Right. It took me a while to get used to, but I’m alright with it now.”
Lucas is smiling in that gentle-but-sad way which always takes a hatchet right to Yuugo’s weakened heart, cutting through the bone, the sinew, the dense muscle. He’s done so much damage there, and he doesn’t even know, and Yuugo will try his best to make sure he never does.
He reaches out his single hand, leans forward towards Yuugo’s body, breaking their parallelism, and he doesn’t lean back no matter how much he wants to. He knew this was going to happen.
By the time Lucas has a hand on Yuugo’s flushed cheek, he’s halfway through going in for a kiss, but he pauses when he feels its heat.
“You’re warm,” he murmurs, and with a gentleness that betrays his anxiety, he moves his hand to Yuugo’s forehead.
The heat bleeds through Yuugo, from the internal to the surface, and then through Lucas’ own thick skin. It speaks of multitudes. It speaks of sickness, and recklessness, and dishonesty, and a heart which bleeds out-of-control. It speaks of thirteen years.
“Shit,” Lucas says (no little ears around). “How--You shouldn’t be walking around like this. You should’ve said something. How long have you been feeling unwell?”
Lucas draws his brows as he inspects Yuugo’s ashen face closely. There’s a faint downturn of his lips. There’s a shine in his eyes. And Yuugo loves this man, desperately and entirely, but-- he hates.
He hates this.
He leans back, swats Lucas’s hands away from his face and ignores the reflection of hurt. “I’m fine. It’s just a little infection. I know what I’m doing.”
“Just a little infection?” Lucas huffs. “You can’t be reckless about this sort of thing. Show me.”
Though that expression is firmly instated on Lucas’s face, Yuugo rolls his eyes and pulls up his shirt to display the plaster he’d stuck over the scratch. There isn’t even any blood on it, but Lucas reaches out with his careful hand and pulls it back. Yuugo shivers at how cold his fingers are.
“When did you get this?” Lucas frowns as he looks over the wound, which is largely unchanged from this morning.
“I don’t know.”
It could’ve been yesterday, some unnoticed accident in the shelter. It could’ve been the day before, some branch scratching down his stomach without him even feeling it. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.
“Have you been feeling sick for long?” Lucas says. “You seemed alright yesterday… Was it hurting? Did you have a headache--”
“I’m fine. I said I’m fine,” Yuugo snaps. Lucas stills, and pulls back.
He stares squinted amber eyes at Yuugo’s pale face. “No, you’re not fine. An infected wound and a fever is at least enough for bedrest. You should take it easy for the next few days--”
“I know how to take care of myself,” Yuugo finds himself saying. Anyone might be convinced the words he’s saying aren’t twisting up his insides. “I took care of myself for thirteen years. You don’t need to baby me. I’m not one of your kids.”
“Of course you aren’t!” Lucas’s eyebrows draw lower. He leans forward again, cold fingers reaching out. “You shouldn’t have to take care of yourself.”
Yuugo stands before Lucas can reach him again. Another hatchet shatters one of Yuugo’s ribs, meeting its mark deep in his bleeding-out-of-control heart. Lucas’s expression turns far too vulnerable for a painful instant.
He finds himself raising his voice beyond where it should reasonably be elevated. “You shouldn’t have to take care of everyone. You shouldn’t have to give up your own wellbeing for other people! Don’t think I don’t see you limping around even when you’re having a bad day--”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Lucas’s expression hardens again, a poisonous reprieve. “I know how to handle my own body. But you’re sick. It’s different.”
Things twist up like thirteen years. There’s a breathlessness between them, something that hasn’t been accessed in a very long time.
“Take care of yourself, Lucas,” Yuugo spits, and he means it, and he hates this.
Lucas, at least, doesn’t follow him out the door. Instead he stares.
The first time Lucas hurt someone he loved, it meant little to him.
Glory Bell Farm. Lucas is five years old. He’s wrestling with one of the other kids (who?), who proceeds to fall and scrape their knee. There’s a quick apology but no tears. It’s forgotten within the hour.
There’s a similar pattern for the second, the third, the fourth time…
Then Lucas is inadvertently responsible for a hurt that will never heal, and a wound that will never scab, and his chest falls apart, and he bleeds and bleeds and bleeds.
“Do you really think these man-eaters stand any chance against us, even on a good day?”
Lucas reaches into his chest and remakes it in an entirely new order. New words, new definitions, new concepts take form.
Worrying.
Kind.
Protector.
For the first time in a long thirteen years, Lucas finds he really wants to slap Yuugo. The feeling is so unfamiliarly familiar within him he almost barks out a laugh.
Here he sees a trace of the blood on his single hand, its mark made from reaching out to Yuugo’s trembling body, but also can’t help but look down to gaze upon his own gaping wound.
~
Yuugo rewinds their happiness in his mind. He rewinds the blows done to him. Lucas may have buried that hatchet in his chest, but Yuugo is the one who gave it to him and guided his hand.
He hates, and he loves, but more than all of that complex stupidity, he’s tired .
He knows how to take care of himself, so once he’s re-dressed his wound, he’s well aware that he needs to throw himself back into bed. Because the fever comes for him so fast and merciless he wonders how he managed to be upright an hour ago.
Fever is a different state of mind, an override of your senses, transforming the world you once knew into a complete unfamiliarity. Yuugo’s vision swims and blurs and twists but he’s just staring up at the ceiling of his bunk bed, so that’s fine.
There are few coherent thoughts.
One is this:
I’m fucking thirsty.
Another:
I wish I could sleep.
But the worst are the ones that reflect not physical needs, not the sickness that’s spread through him and the fever that’s burning it out, but the deeper needs buried in his mind. Not the pounding, or the headache, or the impossible heat that feels as if his head is being melted and melded into something new. The needs all prompted by a horrid discussion not two hours prior (or something like that).
The worst are those which meld worries with memory.
Dina murmurs her love to him. Something his heart held and destroyed, merciless.
Lucas, carefree, grinning instead of smiling thin-lipped.
Dina worries. Yuugo watches as she stays up into the night, going over their plans for the next hunt, as she checks and double-checks their ration and weapon and medicine allocations. As she tells him when he needs to make a new speech, to bolster their morale.
As she tells off Lucas for diverting from his role, for being all-reckless.
(Shit, do I have a type? Kind-and-worrying? I’m more pathetic than I thought.)
The thought is nonsensical and half-full.
She dies from his own foolishness. From Lucas’s recklessness (something never to hold against him, never, never).
Now Lucas worries, and even as he breathes there are matching wounds in Yuugo’s chest.
I want you reckless.
I want you foolhardy and all-too-confident. I want you far away from me. I want you too close to breathe.
I want your worry. I want your disgust.
I want for you to leave me and never look back. I want your love and sorrow.
I don’t want to love you. I don’t want you to love me. It’s bad for both of us.
So, he thinks, perhaps not a good time to muse on his own selfish nonsense.
Lucas is kneeling by his bedside, just a few inches away. He’s brandishing a cool flannel, and Yuugo doesn’t have the strength or reason to pull away when Lucas places it carefully on his pounding forehead. But, he manages to croak out, “That’s bad for your leg. Kneeling.”
Lucas’s drawn eyebrows go up, and his slight frown is broken by a slight laugh. Yuugo stares.
“You’re in no position to say what’s good for me,” Lucas murmurs, and there’s a steel in it that wasn’t there before. He receives no response.
“Get some rest,” he instructs.
Now bereft of his voice, Yuugo simply gives an incredulous look. There’s another slight laugh that shudders through him like a good dream.
“Yes, alright. Move over, then.”
And Lucas hoists himself up onto the tiny twin bed. Yuugo doesn’t find the time to protest before he’s pushed up against the wall, a cool body now pressed up near him.
“You’ll get sick,” he wheezes out.
“It’s an infected wound. Unless I break my own skin, I think we’ll be okay,” Lucas says.
He leans closer to Yuugo, breaching centimetres previously unsurpassed. He adds, as if an afterthought, “I’ve hurt you.”
“Fuck,” Yuugo chuckles through his aching throat. “And I’ve hurt you more.”
“This isn’t a competition, dumbass.”
Yuugo laughs painfully into Lucas’s shoulder, who draws him ever-closer.
“You remember what I said to you?” Lucas murmurs his confession to him. “On the roof, the night before everything went wrong?”
The space between us was lightyears. Was unsurpassable, thankfully. Do you remember that? Lucas does not say.
I wanted to kiss you even then, Lucas does not say, because there’s no need to twist the knife deeper.
I wanted to reach out and hold you, mostly. You were more scared than I realised. I realise that now.
The space between us was lightyears.
“Of course I do,” Yuugo whispers back, all equally pained but in a way infinitely more discernible.
Barriers have been breached, here. There is no more space between them except their thin-and-thick skin, and Lucas has seen the blood. Yuugo has never been able to hold out for long, even with a throat twisted with barbed wire and sickness, even with hands pressed against bleeding wounds. He has not had the practice. He’s been bleeding out for thirteen years unfettered.
Lucas’s thick skin is rarely breached. If it ever is, he knows well how to keep the blood from flowing out. He knows how to keep it all internal. A perfect surface. The changes he made within his chest were permanent, and he will never again be able to reach inside and endeavour for a new configuration.
“I said,” Lucas tells him, “you don’t have to worry, because I’ll make sure everything will be okay.”
Even with his head pounding (despite the flannel), Yuugo frowns. “No… You didn’t say that.”
“I did.”
Lucas doesn’t elaborate, and his mind is too swimming-blurring-twisting for him to make sense of it at the moment. And so Yuugo feels the certainty of Lucas’s warmth, lets his eyes slip closed, and is asleep within the minute.
There’s a strong arm around him as he bleeds into the bed, but it won’t stay forever.