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Tango
Hollow.
Tango wondered, during that first night, if this was Zed had meant when he’d mentioned the feeling, in the dark of his cave apartment, while they were tangled together after getting up to one thing or another. Tango was used to laying in the dark, not sleeping, especially when he was over at Doc and Etho’s and he had to at least pretend he was getting some rest, so he couldn’t be up and about, moving his hands trying to calm his restless mind.
This wasn’t the usual restless insomnia, though. This was…a strange sort of bone-deep weariness that didn’t much suit Tango.
He wasn’t jittery, he wasn’t desperate for a distraction, because if he closed his eyes and focused with all his might, he could hear it.
“I love you I love you I love you!”
He couldn’t get those last few minutes out of his head.
I had to do it.
Tango knew how much Zed poured into him, into them. Loved him so much, yes, Tango believed that wholeheartedly.
Tango loved him, too.
I love him way too much to put him in the dark.
Not again. Not after the first time. Look at what had happened when Zed had been wandering alone in an under-city that hadn’t been under the strain of this Bedrock Initiative.
Tango didn’t know what was going to happen down here. He didn’t know how long it was going to last.
His flares flickered dimly against his pillow, and his blaze-rods twirled lazily above his head as his mind wandered.
Yet he couldn’t rest.
Can’t rest.
Replaying it over and over and over again. Wondering. Tango knew Zed was probably in pieces right now…but he’d said what he needed too.
Tango believed Zed was stronger than he knew. He did. He believed every bit as much as he believed Zed loved him.
And there it was.
A sudden rush from his toes to the top of his head. His flares sputtered, and he covered his mouth with his hands as if that would somehow quiet them. The room was small, and the shadows his flares cast lit over the walls.
The ones sharing it with him were well used to it. Grian was curled up in his hammock completely beneath his blanket, clutching something tightly.
Tango was pretty sure it was an arrow. He was also pretty sure sleeping with something like that wasn’t exactly safe, but well, the avian had survived a bullet through the shoulder so surely it was alright.
He didn’t want to imagine the world in which someone tried to take that arrow away from him. Pearl had gotten back late, with windswept hair, frazzled features, and red-rimmed eyes.
And then, directly above him was…
“Hey.”
It was a hissed whisper. Tango propped himself up on his elbows and squinted up into the semi-darkness.
Jimmy was leaning over the edge of his hammock to look down at Tango. His golden little head-wings gleamed, reflecting the dim light from his flares, still sluggish as they chased a sleep that wouldn’t come.
“What’s up, buddy? Can’t sleep?” Tango whispered back, and Jimmy shook his head faintly.
“Figured I wouldn’t. You?”
“Same boat.”
“…s-same reasons, hm?”
Tango gazed up at Jimmy for a long moment. He couldn’t see his best friends face that well in the near-darkness of the room, but he could hear it in his voice. The tightness, the tenderness, the ache.
Peas in a pod, huh?
“Make room, big guy.” Tango sat up in his bedroom and then stood, and reached a hand up. Jimmy didn’t hesitate to grab it, and Tango felt the familiar fuzzy lightness of glamor over his skin. Golden glamor that seemed to sparkle against the shadows, and neither of the twins twitched. Pearl had seemed exhausted when she got home, and Grian was hiding completely under his blanket, after all. It was unlikely either of them would’ve cared even if they were awake.
It wasn’t a usual night.
It’s gotta have been…man, eight, maybe nine years since the last time all of us were sleeping in this room?
How strange, that everything changing caused some things to go back to being nostalgic, all the same.
Tango swung his legs to the side to land in the hammock alongside Jimmy. It was a tight squeeze, much tighter than when they were kids and they’d first pulled this stunt. Back then they’d both been able to fit with elbow room.
Now?
Jimmy was huge, over six foot, and Tango wasn’t a big guy, but he was certainly larger than he’d been when he was ten.
Didn’t matter.
Jimmy slung an arm over him, then a feathery blanket in the form of a golden wing.
“Comfy?”
“Yeah…” Tango mumbled, his claws gripping weakly into the fabric of the front of Jimmy’s sleep shirt.
He lightly pressed his forehead to his chest.
“…did we screw up?”
A long second went by before Jimmy was able to answer.
“…maybe.” He said finally, indecisively. Tango feels his large hand tightening against the back of his overlarge sleep shirt, nicked off of Jimmy at some point considering the two long slits in the back for wing roots Tango certainly didn’t have.
“…but even if we did, I can’t bring myself to regret that.”
Tango has to withhold the desire to flinch.
Then again, what had he been expecting? He and Jimmy had talked in the three days leading up to Bedrock Initiative reaching the point of no return, and yet, for some reason, Tango still had it in his head that Jimmy might accuse him of being in the wrong.
When we’d both agreed. When we’d both ended up doing basically the same thing.
One half of Tango’s mind trie weakly to justify.
At least he had the guts to do it to Scott’s face.
Said the other half, bitter as poison, and Tango felt something like acid stirring in his stomach. He gripped the front of Jimmy’s shirt harder and pressed his forehead to that familiar broad chest.
Fear in the nostalgia.
The familiarity. Who would have thought they’d all be here again, they didn’t even all usually sleep in the same room over holidays or get-togethers, usually Tango would go home.
Not this.
Yet Jimmy’s arm was wrapping tighter around him, and he could feel a quiver to his best friend's shoulders.
Is he…?
Pause.
Let him.
Tango wanted to cry, too. But he’d already done his fair share of crying, alone in the random tunnel near the labs where he’d been running laps to make Zed think, over the line, that he’d been running to meet him.
And what if I had?
Then Zed’s arms would be around him…but that would’ve been a crueler fate, no matter how Zed had wailed for him into that speaker.
Sounded like he was fracturing apart, and this time? This time, Tango couldn’t be the golden glue, couldn’t be mending the cracks, couldn’t be there.
As if I even was in the first place.
Jimmy made a small withheld whimpering sound that Tango recognized as a stifled sob.
“Hey…shhh, it’s alright…we’re gonna be ok. It’s all gonna be ok.” Tango said.
“Liar.” Jimmy spat from somewhere near his ear.
“If I don’t know it, it’s not not true.”
“Hnnn…” Jimmy whined incoherently and hugged Tango tighter.
Jimmy cried, Tango didn’t. He’d let out his tears alone, as he did with most things, and somehow, he got a feeling that ‘alone time’ wasn’t going to be easy to come by in the coming days.
Weeks, months?
In his mind, he could still see it. If he focused hard enough, he could still hear it.
Amethyst eyes and pale blonde hair and his sun-kissed stunner saying ‘I love you’.
It was there. It would always be there. Just another memory.