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The Perimeter is sheltered from the storm-wind, but the rain chills the solid stone of the basin to ice.
Ren doesn’t feel it. Not like he did before.
The cold is a miserable ache in his skull. It's a slurry of fatigue and dizziness and slow creeping rot. He had thought it would get better here. The crown is gone; the Crastle is gone. There is no crushed velvet cloak to weigh him down. There are no potions to buzz ice-hot in the back of his skull. He sees Doc every day. They are friends again. They plant gardens together.
He’s not angry.
He just thought, maybe, beyond himself, that it would be better now. And it’s not. And he’s not angry, really; paw to his heart.
He had just… hoped.
And Doc is warm. That’s the other thing.
Doc is warmth. He’s hot wires and smoking metal and glowing furnaces in the night. He is the bold dry heat of the kaleidoscoping mechanisms around him. To Ren, he is wholly addicting - Ren, who has been cold for so long, who can’t feel it anymore, who can, who can’t. Ren considers him to be his rescuer, in a particular sense. Ren considers him to be his unmaker.
Ren considers him to be his friend.
He doesn’t have the courage to ask if Doc truly still considers him the same.
And Ren won’t be here forever, which is a third point that he’s been trying his very hardest not to consider. His tentative stay in the Perimeter is only scheduled to last as long as it takes to build the pillars of his own base - as soon as it’s livable was the timeframe, spoken quickly over a steady handshake and unsteady smiles. Truthfully, he could have built himself up a shack-shelter and been out of here weeks ago.
But. Well.
Ren still hopes, somewhere in the depths of his shivering chest. And he isn’t angry, and Doc isn’t angry, and so he stays, and procrastinates, and stays, and builds, and rests, and stays.
During the nights, he sleeps on a thin folding cot in the Hall of Goat. Doc had offered to carve out a space in the wall for him, somewhere, but he had refused. He’s had enough of frozen stone walls for a handful of lifetimes yet.
He wasn’t entirely sure where Doc slept at first; wondering but not wanting to ask, still feeling out the tender boundaries of their newfound truce.
Eventually, some weeks in, over the clumsily swept-up remnants of their most recent poker game (seven-card stud, and Doc had been winning), Doc is making to disappear to bed, and Ren’s curiosity finally gets the better of him.
Doc laughs, not unkindly. “I go wherever, man,” he explains. “I have, eh, a lot of different beds around here. I just sleep wherever it’s warmest.”
“Oh,” says Ren, feeling keenly disappointed by that answer for reasons he can’t place. Something sharp and slick with jealousy makes a home between his ribs, picturing with forceful clarity Doc curling up warm and dry and fluffed, somewhere among his work, somewhere under the earth.
Somewhere unfindable.
Ren decides to stop thinking about it.
Doc leaves, bids him a good-natured goodnight, and Ren places his lacquered poker chips methodically back into the case they had come out of. He tries to remember the last time he had felt warm at night. He comes up with nothing.
He crawls between the sheets of his own bed, later, his ears flicking involuntarily at the irregular echoing tap-tap-tap of raindrops upon the tiered roof of the Hall. He slips gradually into a fitful haze of sleep, his body chilled and tired from shivering in the wind.
And he’s bathed in sun, yellow and kind, smooth against his skin. His right side is blissfully numb. There is metal in his chest that breathes for him, that pumps his blood for him. He can’t feel the sand between his toes. And he is happy. He is so, so happy.
And he is in a wheat field, a borrowed scythe in his hand, doing good work for himself. He will turn this wheat into flour and he will turn the flour to a crust and he will fill it with sweet filling and it will be hot and steaming when he takes it out of the oven. And he will trade it for good money, and he will make another, and another, and another, and he will be happy when all of them have sold.
And he is in a tower, and there is a small, heavy crown on his head, with a beautiful green gemstone in the middle, and he will be happy when he has done right by his people.
And he is drinking something crimson and glowing, and it is so, so good, and it heats him through to his core, it’s the best thing he’s ever tasted -
And he is in a castle, and underneath him is a mirror-shined floor of white diamond, and above him are claws and teeth and choking red mist in the air and crawling around his back are the coal-stained hands of his lurching tangled shadow -
And he is in a castle, and underneath him is hard cold gray stone, and above him -
Above him, the Universe forgiving, is -
With a sickening crunch comes the blade of the scythe, carving through skin and flesh and bone and metal and writhing white branches like maggots sprouting from his shining ribcage, and he is choking on rotting leaves, choking on thick red liquid spilling from a crystal cup -
And above him -
“ - Up! Wake up!”
Ren gasps awake from his roiling dreams in a icy sweat, thrashing where he lies, his claws snarled in the thick fur of - of - of -
“Ren! Hey, man! Hey! It’s okay!”
Of Doc, his creased face bathed in the gentle red glow of his left eye, his mismatched hands braced before him disarmingly.
It’s him. It’s Doc. He isn’t an enemy anymore.
“Doc,” chokes Ren, his throat deathly dry, dizzying shame rushing in. “I - Oh. I - I’m sorry, dude. I didn’t mean to - “
“Hey, hey. Don’t worry about it,” soothes Doc. “I heard you shouting, man. I came to check on you.”
“I’m fine,” says Ren, and it comes out a shred harsher than he had meant. He ducks his head, pulling his hand away from Doc, missing the warm tangle of fur under his hand the second it’s gone. “Just a nightmare.”
Churning storm-winds howl lowly throughout the Hall of Goat, sheets of leaves pattering rhythmically in the downfall atop the angled roof far above. Around them the deep shadows of waking night flicker and shift. Ren shifts uncomfortably on his cot, still shaking off the unsettling vestiges of his nightmares. He reaches over the side of the futon and clumsily presses his sunglasses onto his face, dulling the contrast of his surroundings, taking that raw edge away from his vision.
“Are you really sure you’re cool with sleeping up here?” Doc asks. “It’s freezing out.”
“Is it?” asks Ren, and then he shrugs. “I can’t… I can’t feel it so much anymore. Spent too much time in that darn Crastle. Chilled me to my bones, if you know what I’m saying.”
“I… don’t know if I do,” says Doc slowly.
Doc gives him an odd appraising look, then, one that almost makes Ren’s hackles raise, despite himself. He is, intrinsically to himself, forever calculating, Doc - not maliciously so, but the tight fuse of Ren’s nerves has frayed to near nothing over recent times.
“You really can’t feel it?” Doc asks again. Past the evenness of his judgment there is a strange, softened look in his eye that Ren can’t quite pin down.
Ren, really, had stopped feeling it months ago. The cold had become an aching constant in his life, akin to some low-grade headache; a lingering sickness he just couldn’t kick, swallowed ineffectively by the burning cough-syrup medicine the potions had become. If he concentrates, if he is still for too long, he can feel the ice in his core, the fickle numbness of his extremities. It crawls to him even now.
“Nope,” he answers. “All good, my dude.”
“Hm,” says Doc, frowning. One of his ears flicks. “I… I think you should come with me.”
“Where?”
“Somewhere it isn’t raining.” Doc says, gesturing to the puddle-spotted floor around them, the drains built into the Hall’s infrastructure overwhelmed by the waters of the storm.
“I’m perfectly dry under here,” Ren protests halfheartedly, and he is, really, it’s not like the rain is over him. There’s only a stray blowing splatter every now and then.
“Don’t make me pick you up, man,” says Doc flatly.
Ren, knowing from experience that Doc is perfectly serious about that threat, sighs. Much as the implied proximity of the gesture squeezes unwelcomely in his chest, he has some shred of dignity left to retain.
Once he’s dragged himself out of his low bed, Doc turns away with an unreadable look over his shoulder and leads him to the bright clanking mechanical elevator. Ren rubs at his eyes as he steps onto the tiled platform. Doc takes them down barely a single floor before stopping it again - there’s an alcove carved here into the stone that Ren hadn’t noticed before, a flat plain room populated by scattered shulkers and shelves. One of Doc’s workshops, Ren assumes.
Doc leads him past that room into the doorway of a second, smaller one, plain walls lit by the soft yellow light of a working furnace. The cold isn’t quite as biting in here, Ren notes with some amount of muted surprise. He would have guessed the chill from the stone would only make it worse.
“Just burning charcoal in here,” Doc explains, gesturing to the machine. “I have it all automated downstairs, of course, but, eh. It keeps it warm.”
He turns back to Ren. All his angles are quietly blurred in the firelight. “You can stay in here tonight,” he says. “You should.”
Ren looks at the wide bed tucked into the corner opposite the furnace, the messy covers and the rumpled sheets, the indent in the mattress. This is your room, is what he wants to say, wants to ask, but his throat sticks; because he spent an eon in a room smaller than this with Doc, sharing a bed smaller than this with Doc, and he can smell him all over this place like gunpowder and rosemary and steel, and it sparks a fathomless piquing hunger-pain through his core.
“Where will you go?” He manages, a bit hoarsely.
Doc scratches the side of his jaw. “I have other beds.”
“Oh,” says Ren.
This was the warmest, is what he knows Doc isn’t saying. It swells up painfully in his throat. Numb with cold, he walks to the bed and sits down on the plush edge of it, trying to act like none of this is affecting him. He has a feeling it isn’t working very well.
Ren, for a fleeting moment, is caught with stark clarity between two worlds - this one, in which he sits still on the edge of the bed, and the next, in which he curls up into himself in the middle of a mattress still warm with the fading imprint of body heat, and Doc leaves the room and disappears into his maze of machines and doesn’t come out until morning, and Ren does nothing but shake and stain those rosemary sheets with hot salt.
“Wait,” he says abruptly. “I - “
And then he breaks off, because Doc is looking at him, and blinking at him, and he is whole and soft and the room is blissfully warm, and he’s right there, and it’s too much.
“Hm?” prompts Doc.
“I - “ stammers Ren. “I. Do you ever - “ a harsh swallow, “Do you ever remember - you know. This kind of reminds me of…”
Octagon. He can’t say the word much like he can’t reach out to Doc with his hands; pull him closer. It is not something within his ability anymore.
Doc huffs the ghost of a laugh. “Yeah. I know what you mean, man. Me too.”
Ren should be reassured by the admission that Doc, too, remembers, associates - but it just makes his chest ache.
Doc sighs quietly. Ren wonders if he ever aches the same. “That was a long time ago.”
“It was,” Ren says, and then, unbidden as anything: “You don’t have to leave.”
For a long, stretching moment, Doc is silent. He turns his head to look out the doorway, until Ren can only see that sheer black metal stretch of his face, that unblinking scarlet gaze, that motionless jaw. And for a moment, he thinks that Doc really is going to leave anyway; almost burns with self-inflicted humiliation.
And then Doc turns back to him, his golden eye scrunched and soft, and says, very simply, “Okay. But I want to be on the outside.”
“Okay,” Ren breathes. That’s how they had slept in the van, most nights - Doc was always coming in late, leaving early, slipping restlessly in and out of bed to tinker on something or other. Ren was the smaller of the two: he didn’t mind being pressed between Doc and the wall, securely boxed in while he slept. If anything, it was a luxury he hadn’t felt since, that kind of gentle shapeless security.
Doc half-turns to the room’s small side-table, shrugging his stained white lab coat off of his shoulders carelessly. Ren swallows, looking away from him, seized by some uncharacteristic pointless thought of modesty.
Haltingly, Ren fumbles his way to the back of the bed, kicking the covers down by his feet to get them out of the way. He freezes despite himself when he feels Doc’s steady weight shift the mattress behind him.
He turns to see Doc stretching out, his long feather-furred tail trailing off the side of the bed onto the floor. He turns away again before he can see Doc look back at him. He lets himself lean back alongside him, and they lie together like that for a stretch of time; shoulder-to-shoulder, not quite together, not quite relaxed. Ren tries not to let his breath shudder in his chest. His throat is dry again.
But his mouth is a betrayer like his heart is. “I lied earlier,” he croaks.
Doc turns his head. Ren can feel the heat emanating from his body.
“When I said I couldn’t feel the cold.”
He feels that shift of the mattress again, squeezes his eyes shut. His heart thumps like a jackrabbit in his chest, the hair on his arms spikes up; his thawed instincts scream risk risk risk.
“Ren,” Doc murmurs. And then there is a soft brush at his neck, his jaw - metal, warm and smooth - and it’s claws, it’s Doc’s hand, gentle, gentle. He’s slipping Ren’s glasses off. Ren opens his eyes to the featureless ceiling in surprise.
“You don’t have to do this anymore, man,” says Doc softly.
Ren swallows back a wretched little lump in his throat. “I wasn’t going to say - “
“You didn’t have to say,” Doc interrupts, and Ren hates him for it a bit because he’s right, and he’s right, and this is how it’s supposed to be, and his hands are freezing, and his eyes are uncovered, and his throat is still dry. They’re nothing like they used to be; and they’re here, now, and they’re together, and maybe, maybe Ren really doesn’t have to be cold.
Doc twists around to set Ren’s sunglasses on the table by the bed, and Ren looks at the tender care with which he sets them down and the lines in his fur and the edges of his scars and thinks maybe, maybe, maybe.
And Doc turns back, finally, and Ren sees him like the sun.
There must be something about it on his face, because Doc doesn’t say anything else before he puts his hand back to Ren’s shoulder, his back, pulls him closer, curls his tail up around them both.
And he’s warm. He’s so, so warm. Ren hears some tiny pathetic noise escape himself as he bridges that final gap. He can feel Doc’s heart beating past his ribs, past his thick soft layer of fur; can hear the quiet steady whirring of his chest cybernetics humming in time with his vitals, outputting their own heat as they do.
Doc’s metal arm is a bastion at his back, steadfast. Ren’s head fits into the crook under his chin, his arms folded up before him, helpless but to let himself, for a moment, be held; to sink into that glowing syrupy heat and never come up.
Through his skin, through his bones, he feels something catch in Doc’s chest, a stuttering click - and then it rolls, smoothes out into a deep rumbling purr. A burst of giddy warmth swells up in Ren at the noise, almost overwhelming in its intensity. He presses his face into Doc’s fur to feel the motion there, drink greedily the well of another beside him, around him, quelling his violent shivering. It’s heady, addicting; it fills his chest with the simmering heat of a thousandfold red swallows of strength.
Doc lets out a slight rasping huff at his enthusiasm, shifting, allowing him to wriggle yet closer. Ren feels Doc’s plush chest shake between low crackling inhales and thinks a bit deliriously that he, too, must need this, somehow - spoiled for warmth though he is always, maybe he craves coolness; maybe, to him, the weight of Ren’s icy limbs is a soothing reprieve. Maybe his holding is Ren’s held.
“I missed you, man,” Ren mumbles quietly into Doc’s fur. He feels almost beyond himself for the comfort; though his chest is lashed down by a tight knot of emotion, held back on its haunches like a hound-dog, like a silver spring.
“I missed you too,” Doc murmurs back to him. His voice is honey-warm and folded through with fondness.
“I’m sorry,” Ren says, though he can’t name what he’s apologizing for, and as though the words themselves burst some dam in him his chest starts to shake as he breathes. “I - I don’t know - sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Hey,” says Doc, “Hey, you’ve got nothing to be sorry for. It’s alright. You can stay here.”
“That’s not - “ Ren starts, but his voice gives out on him, and he presses his face into Doc’s chest again helplessly, his jaw strung painfully tight.
“I don’t,“ says Doc, and now he’s swallowing, too, now his rumbling purr is fading out. “I - I forgive you, man. It’s okay. You’re okay.”
“I almost ruined you,” manages Ren. His throat hurts desperately. “I almost ruined - us. This. I’m sorry. I missed you. I miss you.”
“I forgive you,” Doc says again. “It - it wasn’t your fault, you know? It was that - that place. It was doing things to you. It was hurting you.”
“I know,” says Ren. “I’m sorry.”
“Shh,” says Doc, and coaxes that deep rolling sound from his chest again, and Ren knows it is meant to soothe him, and Doc is so warm, and it’s all so horribly, achingly familiar, and his jaw is so tight that it’s almost a relief when the tears finally spill over.
He shudders until he is too tired to shudder anymore; not from cold but from love and grief and catharsis. He feels Doc shaking too, hears the hitch in his breathing. This is something that they share now. In the quiet depths of night, this is theirs, and only theirs, to bear.
But they are together. And they are warm. And to them, tonight, that is enough.