Work Text:
“You stink,” Diego says one day, plainly, while the two of them are going through the motions of getting their dinner.
Ted shrinks in on himself a little. It’s not that he didn’t know or realize, because he did, and it’s true, but it still feels awkward having it out in the open like that. Diego doesn’t say it with any malice, obviously, but the slightest bit of hurt remains nonetheless.
“Trust me, I know,” he says in response. “What’s the probability of us finding running water?”
Diego snorts a little, and Ted’s shoulders relax. He digs through a bush, plucking off berries from every branch he finds them on. “Pretty low,” he hums. “Haven’t you ever bathed in a river or pond before?”
“Well, yeah,” Ted shrugs as he weighs a broken log in his hand, then ultimately decides it’s worth using for a campfire, “but I’ve also had running water before, which was nice. It was, like, forever ago, back when I still lived in the zoo, but it made things so much easier.” A pause. “Hygiene-wise, I mean.”
“I’d say so.”
When they finish collecting a small supply of food, Diego whips up fruit-and-vegetable skewers for them to roast over a small campfire. Ted keeps his arms close to his sides the entire time and knocks his knees together where he sits atop a log, watching the berries he’d collected burn and bubble at the skin. Their chat is normal, uneventful.
Diego packs the car and says they’ll find a river nearby to bathe in before morning. Neither of them are particularly tired by the time the sun sinks behind the horizon and the air gets just a little bit colder, so Ted nods his head and hops into the driver’s seat. Diego’s handy with a map, a better one they’d found in the rubble of an old tourist spot destroyed by the Nocturnals, and the sky has just turned indigo by the time the car is parked facing the rush of water.
“It’ll be cold,” says Diego.
“Obviously.” Ted holds his hand over the keys for a moment, a silent habitual ritual to keep the engine from dying at random. He twists them out the second after, tucks them away. As he pats the jumbled metal in the pocket of his pants, he realizes, “We should probably wash our clothes best as we can, too, while we’re here.”
“Would be good, yeah,” Diego agrees. They don’t have many things to clean themselves with, but they’d gotten lucky with an old supermarket a town or two previous; he fishes out a dented bottle of shampoo and half a bar of soap, both likely damaged by shelving mishaps.
It’s less of a river and more of a stream—the water isn’t running rapid enough to sweep either of them away, nor is it brimming with wildlife. Ted pulls his socks off and takes a step into the clear water, shivering with cold and wiggling his toes between smooth rocks and loose mud.
He sits himself back against the edge of the grass, pulls off his shirt and pants and bundles them all up beside him. Diego makes quick work of an oil lantern—another one of those lucky items of theirs, pulled off a corpse that had decayed long before. Ted had looked away when he yanked it out of the stiff hands and bones cracked unnaturally.
Diego sets the lantern down and warm orange light illuminates his skin. “Cold yet?”
“Horribly,” Ted huffs out a laugh. His ankles sway in the current of the stream and he feels some sort of foliage be carried off past the flats of his feet. “You want to go first, then?”
He gets a strange look, then, and Diego tossed the crumbly bar of soap between the palms of his hands. “We’re not taking turns, are we? You embarrassed?”
Despite not having even thought of that, Ted’s cheeks redden. “I just—I was being thoughtful! Polite,” he defends. “I didn’t know if it was a whole deal or anything like that.”
Diego snorts. “I don’t mind if you don’t, Ted.”
“I don’t mind,” Ted mutters. He glances away, then back again, and traces the fuzzy orange outline Diego has on him. Up his side, under his arm, over his cheek. Mesmerizing. “Can I ask you a favor?”
A pause. “As long as it’s not impossible, sure,” Diego decides afterward.
“Could you, um—could you get my back for me, then? And maybe my hair, too?”
“Do you struggle with that?”
Ted’s face contorts a little. “Sort of,” he admits sheepishly. “You know, it’s—it’s hard to reach some spots. I could help you, too, if you’d like.”
He considers it, tongue darting out over his lips. “Sure, that’s fine. We’ll take care of each other.”
Ted shuts his eyes at the wording, and stands. His arms stretch above him, reaching toward the bluing sky and its twinkling stars. His bones pop and he groans, then looks at the lantern and shivers.
He doesn’t like that memory.
It’s cold.
Ted’s down to his boxers already, but he’s not really sure if he should wash those, too. Logically, he thinks they both should wash everything, but emotionally, he’s not fully invested in being entirely nude in front of his…well, his Diego. He’s not quite sure what they’d call each other just yet.
“If it’s alright, I’ll wash these,” a vague gesture below his torso, hoping to draw as little attention as possible, “afterward. Alone, preferably.”
Diego laughs, but there’s an understanding grin spread across his lips. He’s in a similar situation, and there are cuts and nicks across his limbs that Ted hasn’t ever seen before. Hasn’t ever had the need or the reason to, after all. He almost wants to reach out and trace his fingertips across them, but resists and turns his back toward Diego when he dips the bar of soap into the stream and rubs it until the suds are lathered in his palms.
Still cold, but tingly too when he puts his hands over Ted’s shoulder blades. There’s a whisper of, “Going now,” that barely gives him a warning for it, but Ted opts to blame his own inattentiveness rather than Diego’s lack of volume.
The suds get rubbed into his skin in a way that makes Ted’s ears burn and has him questioning whether Diego knows his heart feels like bursting. He wonders if Diego can feel it thumping through the back of his neck, beneath the thin bumps of his spine.
He ends up clean, though, and that’s the most important part. Handfuls of water cascade over his skin and pull the soap bubbles down into the stream to be drowned and relocated elsewhere. Ted leans back into the water that Diego pours over him, mostly because the chills have dimmed into lukewarmth and it’s comforting. He hears Diego pop the shampoo cap a moment after.
“Tilt your head back a bit, Ted,” Diego instructs, and Ted squeezes his eyes shut when he does. Diego laughs again, a bit more directed this time, but it’s hard to be mad when he begins rubbing the shampoo into the greasy strands of his hair. His fingers work magic, massaging at his scalp like he’d been told exactly how and where to work the skin to have all tension flow out of him. Ted tries not to melt into him and flounder backward into the water. It’s a hard task.
He has to wash his hair twice, but Ted has no complaints about it. He thinks it’s probably the nicest bath he’s ever taken, and likely the only one he’s taken with another person. At least while being older, that is.
“That…was really nice, actually,” he breathes after he’s washed himself down from head to toe. Ted wrings the water out of his t-shirt and lathers some of the bar soap into it before rinsing and repeating. Blades of grass tickle his calves. “You get some tips from a masseuse or something?”
“I wish,” Diego scoffs lightly. “Just tried to be more relaxed with it, is all. I figured you wouldn’t want me to scrub at your skull like all hell.”
Ted tips his head forward. “You figured right,” he agrees. Then, flicking droplets of water from his fingers, adds, “Want me to do yours now?”
Diego looks at him. “Sure, yeah,” he says. “Thanks.”
The response is a hum of acknowledgement, and Ted does his best to replicate the same motions that Diego had done for him. He’s not as methodical about it, or as confident in how he works, but it’s not all bad. He gets Diego to roll his shoulders up against his hands and tilt his head back into his fingers a few times, and Ted counts those as little victories. He slots the mental images of sun-kissed freckles and long eyelashes into a file in his mind for safe-keeping.
“Good? Bad?” Ted asks as he pours one last cup of water through Diego’s dark curls. The water trickles through the gaps in his fingers as he holds it up.
“Good,” Diego answers. He lets Ted scrub out the last of the shampoo and then move away before he’s shaking excess water off him like a sopping dog. A yawn breaks his lips and floats into the air between them, to which Ted presses his lips into a line in a quiet need to not catch one of his own.
“We can get some rest now,” he says instead. “Or you can. I can stay up a little longer, wash both our clothes.”
Diego blinks at him—surprise or a fight against sleep, Ted isn’t sure. He hears an owl cooing in the distance, insects singing in a choir.
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I don’t mind. Best to keep watch a while longer, anyway.” Ted nudges his shoulder one direction, uphill. “Haven’t heard anything, but it’s not impossible that there could be Nocturnals lurking about.”
The worry is palpable, but Diego giggles in spite of it. “Shouldn’t that have been brought up before we started skinny-dipping in the river?”
Ted drops his head a little, shrugs his shoulders. “Lucky break. Third time, might be our last stroke of luck. I’ll clean and keep watch, okay?”
Diego huffs out a breath. He eyes their truck, the blanket they’d found and rolled up between the seats. He can feel it calling to him now. That would be a bad thing with anyone else. Anyone but Ted.
“Okay,” Diego says, and steps closer, places a kiss to Ted’s forehead. “Night, Ted.”
Ted’s skin turns rosy pink, red at the edges. He croaks out, “Night, Diego,” and suddenly feels the need to scrub out the sweat stains twice as diligently.