Work Text:
The bunker door slams shut with a gravity that Rand finds himself missing, in the initial heat of the moment. He misses the way the deadbolt clicks and the airtight seal activates—a familiar sound, almost comforting in how it hasn’t changed since the last time he came down here, but it’s not a matter of familiarity that should have given him pause.
Sue him. He has much bigger—and heavier—things to worry about at the moment.
“Shit,” Rand bites out as he stumbles and nearly trips over a shelf, the deadweight over his shoulder shifting dangerously to one side, but he’s able to readjust in time. At a quick scan of the room, there is nowhere to set him down.
He grimaces. “Sorry buddy.”
Gently setting an unconscious body onto a bare stone floor when under extreme mental and physical duress is much harder than expected, as Rand’s vision doubles and he nearly collapses with the shift in pressure, but somehow, miraculously, he manages to lower them both safely to the ground.
For a longer moment than he realizes, Rand sits there and holds Rolan’s body. His fingers are stiff with blood and stress, curled into claws in Rolan’s shirt and jeans. Maybe if he stares at his hands for long enough they’ll loosen on their own, and make it easier on him. Make it so he doesn’t have to look directly at Rolan’s body. His head swims. Not now. Not now. Focus. “Later. There will be a later. Be present NOW, you fucker. For ONCE in your miserable life.”
His hands stick to Rolan’s skin in patches when he wrestles his arms free, dried blood (and something darker) leaving a thin crust of gore across his palms and clothes. Rand gently rolls Rolan onto his back and moves his arms into a more comfortable position—is anything comfortable for him? It’s not like he’s- Rand shuts down that train of thought before it can leave the station. He hasn’t entirely taken a good look at Rolan’s arm yet and god be damned he doesn’t plan to in the near future. The too-hard texture of not-flesh bumping into his hip as he carried Rolan through the woods was enough for now.
Instead, he looks at Rolan’s face. Unsurprisingly, he looks like hell. Rand probably does too, but he doesn’t have the luxury of ignorance. Both of them are absolutely soaked through with blood, staining their clothes and skin and creasing the fabric into uncomfortable sticky-stiff ridges as it dries. The blood makes it hard to be sure of the full extent of their injuries, but Rand can still vividly remember the places where he’d watched Rolan get bitten and slashed and otherwise kicked to shit over the past couple hours.
And yet, if Rand didn’t know any better, he wouldn’t have a hard time believing that Rolan was just a really deep sleeper, based on expression alone. How someone can look so serene after what they’d just experienced is so far beyond Rand. It certainly feels like there should be terror frozen in the curl of his lip, the furrow to his brow, in the cloudy eyeshine of trauma (or worse). Hell, the fact that his eyes are closed at all means that Rand can attempt to forget that first shift—how Rolan’s eyes had rolled over to a shiny black, how he’d raised his chin to the flesh-sky and started clicking, clicking, clicking— (how he’d asked Rand to shoot him if he lost himself—)
Rand presses his palms over his eyes and lets out a groan from deep in his chest. As the emotional hurt settles uncomfortably in his lungs like a pampered cat, the adrenaline fading from his body leaves no barrier against the deep, screaming ache that seems to chip away at his bones. Everything hurts, and he wants to throw up. He will probably throw up. It wouldn’t be the first time tonight—maybe he wouldn’t have anything of substance left.
Neither of them had escaped from that final conflict unscathed—he’d just been lucky to be conscious when the smoke cleared. Rolan, as close to the Queen as he’d been when the grenade had gone off, hadn’t been so lucky. It had taken nearly all of Rand’s strength to crawl through the bloody mud and get to Rolan’s body before he slipped into the Bayou (again, his brain supplied unhelpfully.)
Rand sniffs and digs his nails into his jeans, waiting for his body to catch up to what his brain has already clocked.
He has to make sure neither of them die. He has to do his best to patch them up. He’s not a doctor but he can’t just…he has to start somewhere. He can’t give up now. He has to keep moving. For Rolan. For Kian. Fuck- NO. Don’t THINK, keep MOVING.
Rand’s lip curls in a grimace as he hauls himself to his feet and scans the room for that first aid stash Mr. Dickman had pointed him to the first time he’d been down here.
It takes him longer than he thinks to find it. Time seems to ebb and flow between blinks, exhaustion and sick and terror fermenting in his mind and it’s all he can do to prevent himself from keeling over on any open part of the floor as he searches.
His hands close around the handles of the kit and it takes all of his focus to just lift the damn thing.
Rolan hasn’t moved since he left. Part of him is understandably worried by this, but there’s another, more paranoid, more familiar part that is relieved. As he sets down the first aid, Rand speaks to the corpse.
“You better not be waiting to kill me, Rolan. If I can bring you back and you immediately start clicking and stab me in the throat I’ll be so fucking pissed off at you. My ghost will haunt your ass forever,” his throat burns as he talks but it makes him feel a little better about how soundproof the bunker is. How he can’t hear anything from the apocalypse outside. He doesn’t know if it makes any difference—if the absence of being able to hear the sounds coming from the living cage over Galloway would make him lose his mind any slower. He supposes that if either of them die it won’t matter anyway.
“God, we are a fucking mess.“ Rand mutters, taking a lock of Rolan’s hair in his fingers and grimaces as he wrings out droplets of red liquid. “I mean, we knew that already, but I really did have myself convinced that you were the most sane of all of us. Never could have predicted ‘secretly a bodysnatched alien flesh bug’ in your list of quirks, but you can sue me on that one. My bad for not noticing, asshole.”
It might be his imagination (or his concussion) but a minute shudder seems to pass across Rolan’s body as he speaks, and it kickstarts a series of small inhales through his nose that Rand hadn’t realized that Rolan wasn’t taking until right now.
“Fuck me. Fine. I’ll get to work, man.”
————
It’s the finality of it, the realization that hits Rand as he’s washing his hands in the sink, the cold water numbing his fingers as he scrubs and scrubs and scrubs away the blood from under his nail beds and where it had crusted onto his skin.
The door closing behind them as the entered the bunker. It had an almost tomb-like quality to it as it had sealed shut, nothing like the first time he’d been down here with Kian and Dickman. It was as if the bunker itself knew that it was going to be their coffin, and they had just gone through all that trouble to kill an alien god only to die in an airtight box some indeterminate amount of time in the future when they ran out of blood, air, or courage. Maybe it was just his concussion again, but goddamnit that just didn’t sit right with him.
He didn’t want to die down here. Well, he’d say he didn’t want to die period, except he’d grappled with that song and dance for over a decade now, and was also now aware of very specific circumstances that would lead to his gruesome death in the pursuit of protecting his friends and family. Yeah, he’d be scared to hell and back and it happened, no shit, but if going down kicking and screaming is what it takes to give his loved ones the chance to escape? He’ll die a grateful martyr.
A voice in his head that sounds uncomfortably like Kian doesn’t so much say words as much as slaps him on the inside of his brain for thinking like that. Sorry I couldn’t do it for you, he laments, and the Kian in his head scoffs and kindly tells him to shut the fuck up and go to therapy.
It shakes Rand out of his morbid daydream and when he blinks back into reality he finds that his hands are red and numb from how hard he’s scrubbed them. As long as they aren’t red with blood anymore he’ll consider that a win, so he splashes some of the cold, cold water on his face and uses the shock to wash away his thoughts on death and dying. He draws the freezing water into his hair and lets it rehydrate the matted clumps of mud and blood until his entire body is shaking but his scalp doesn’t feel sticky and horrible anymore. The blood flakes away and spirals into the drain, and he says fuck it and shucks off his t-shirt and lets it soak in the sink basin. It was chafing anyway.
Rand stands at the sink, shirtless and trembling and covered in half-assed dirty bandages. He’s glad there’s no mirror above the basin. He’s not sure he’d be able to handle the full sight of himself right now.
He fills up a paint bucket with water and grabs a clean rag before hauling the bucket back over to where Rolan is lying. Something in his back twinges and he doesn’t want to think about that, or about the throbbing pain in his side. Not yet. That’s a problem for later.
As soon as he’s situated next to his friend Rand dunks the cloth in the bucket and suddenly wishes they had a warm tap as he starts to gently clean the blood from Rolan’s face. It takes a while, and Rand has to place a hand on his other cheek to keep him stable as he drags the cloth over Rolan’s forehead, eyelids, chin, and neck, leaving a trail of freezing water and an entire minefield of cuts and bruises in its wake.
Turns out, cleaning your maybe-dying friends’ wounds is a hell of a lot easier than thinking about mortality or whatever the fuck, and despite how he can sometimes almost convince himself he can feel the inconsistencies—the clear inhumanity—of Rolan’s bone structure under his skin, he almost gets lost in it, especially as he gets to massage the blood from Rolan’s short hair.
And then he feels something that makes him freeze.
Later, he’s not sure why it had taken him so long to notice. Rand’s fingers on Rolan’s face shift further down to hold the back of his neck as he runs the cloth over his hair, and his thumb brushes something slick and gooey—not blood, certainly. He gently moves Rolan’s head to the side to see and immediately gags.
Rolan’s entire left ear seems to have been completely melted down. What used to be the shell of it is plastered down the side of his neck in thin strands of cartilage, like the stuff that the bugs had been using to create their Hive. Somehow in the chaos of this entire day, Rand hadn’t noticed it. Rolan certainly hadn’t pointed it out either.
“God FUCKING damnit Rolan how did you manage this?” Rand retches but swallows it back down and closes his eyes, breathing through his nose until the dizziness goes away.
When he finally gets his squeamishness under control, he reaches a shaky hand out and brushes the cloth over the base of the strands, where Rolan’s ear now lacks a shell, skin peeling away around the base to reveal some of the musculature of Rolan’s cheek. To Rand’s disgust, the strands separate from his head almost immediately, and it takes him a minute to gather them all up in the cloth without letting them touch his hands. Rand stares at the gooey pink mess that once was his friends’ ear, but eventually he sighs and tosses the whole thing away. He’ll just get a new cloth anyway.
Rand doesn’t know if this is going to affect Rolan’s hearing in any way, but…god it could have been worse. Rand shudders at the images his brain conjures of Rolan’s melted nose or eye. It could have been so much worse.
He shakily dabs some antiseptic on the exposed flesh around the melted bits and after a moment of deliberation decides to tape some gauze over Rolan’s ear hole as well. It might be annoying if he wakes up but who knows—maybe the bugs hear from somewhere else, like their ass or something. The idea makes him chuckle a little, and he vows to remember to make that joke when Rolan’s awake.
Now comes Rand’s conundrum. Rolan’s suit is filthy, absolutely caked with gore, and also torn to shit in multiple places. Any sane person knows that if they want to get anywhere with treating wounds, it needs to come off.
And it’s not like they haven’t seen each other shirtless before, they all used to go swimming together and were in the same gym class locker rooms. It’s not much different than that, he reasons.
So why can’t he do it?
Rand sits there, flushed like a total chump because he can’t even get himself to take off his injured friends’ clothes without being squeamish about it. And of all things, it keeps making him think about Kian—(“well what if I do?!”)—and that’s messing with him in more ways than one. God, did he really like Rolan like that? His stomach clenches at the thought. Rand knew Kian was queer but…it would have made everything a lot more complicated…if he was…nope. Yknow what? Not gonna think about that.
Maybe he should go find a clean shirt of his own, first. Maybe that would make him feel less weird about stripping his friend. Maybe he’d feel less like he was being flayed, suddenly back in high school and feeling constantly watched by parents and friends who might say something, like they always said something to Kian. That they might decide to make him the target if he said the wrong thing, did the wrong action with the wrong person. It’s amazing how much four years of paranoia can fuck you up for life, he thinks dryly.
Or maybe, Kian’s voice says. You could stop being a little baby sucking on your internalized homophobia binkie and help him. Look around you and get it together. There’s nobody down here but you.
“Fuck you,” Rand breathes aloud, and after glancing over his shoulder for just a second, sets his jaw and shifts down to unbutton Rolan’s suit jacket.
Go to therapy, Kian gloats, blowing him a kiss.
Unsurprisingly, the sight of Rolan’s bare chest as he peels away his bloody undershirt is underwhelming, and he feels even more silly for his initial hesitance. He’s starting to resent the Kian voice a little…for being right consistently so far.
Rolan has always been a lanky guy despite his parents efforts to overfeed him as a child, and now, lying as still as he is, pale skin stained red and marred by that chunk that got ripped out of his sternum during their fight with bug-Kian, he looks downright corpse-like. Which makes sense, but yknow. Discounting the stress and injuries of the past few days, he actually seems healthy, frame more filled out than Rand remembers, a little softer, a little less toned.
Rand’s heart suddenly clenches, thinking about it. Rolan gave up everything to get out of Galloway. Rand can’t pretend to know how it really worked out for him in terms of how happy he was while he was away but on the physical surface he really was doing so much better. While Rand wasted away, breathing in smoke in his parents’ attic, Rolan really did make himself better in spite of what he was. He didn’t need the Hive to be happy any more than Rand did.
Hell, he didn’t need Rand to be happy.
There was a point in his life where that thought once would have made him so sad and angry he would have gotten up and stormed off for the rest of the day if he felt like it. But now, sitting here in his high school teacher’s prepper bunker, gently cleaning off the monster who he had watched crawl—bug arm and all—out of a flayed corpse after diving in the way to take a blow meant for Rand…the idea didn’t sting as much as it used to.
Once Rolan’s torso is mostly clean, Rand shifts his arms under his body and gently props him up against his own shoulder so he can wrap bandages around Rolan’s bite wounds. He can feel irregular breathing against his neck, and from this close Rand’s stomach does a small jump as he swears he can hear a low, familiar clicking coming from somewhere inside Rolan’s chest, like a clock ticking. He’s thinking so intently about that detail that he nearly forgets their proximity—until Rolan makes a soft sound in the back of his throat and those little shudders ripple across his body again, his sudden acute awareness of wet skin-to-skin contact making Rand nearly pull away out of habit.
But Rolan is still shivering, goosebumps forming over his human arm and back, and Rand sympathizes as the cold water lingers in his hair as well. The last thing they want is to get sick down here, especially if they want to heal. Maybe….Rand could continue this streak of sacrificing his discomfort for the sake of keeping them alive. Yeah. Yeah that’s what he’s doing.
He can practically hear Kian smiling wickedly at the two of them as Rand pulls Rolan’s body closer and holds him tight, trying to ignore how comforting it is to hear Rolan’s heartbeat over his own, to feel him quietly snore (and click) against him, for the shivers to finally abate and to feel his body warm in turn.
He’s cute, Kian says. Always has been.
Rand doesn’t say anything. He presses his cheek to the side of Rolan’s head without the melted ear and bites his tongue as he’s suddenly filled to bursting with foreign emotion.
He doesn’t know why, god knows that there are far too many reasons for it to happen, but something about right now that he can’t take anymore and it’s with gentle finality, holding the body of an old friend-turned-monster-turned-friend in his arms, that Rand finally starts to cry.