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Midnights at Red Valley were something that Gordon used to know like the lines of his palm, until all sense of time and space was ripped away from him to be replaced with the thick fog of reeling in from hypersleep. When the world turned with Gordon in it, his post-midnight routine used to be something that he could recite from the top of his head. Often, in those endless stretches of time that he was left alone for months, he would call Aubrey from the comfort of his own room in the farmhouse and conspire over escape plans or how to source their new card game without gaining too much attention. Other times, when he had to be more discreet, he would retire in the solemn loneliness of the archives to compile tapes upon tapes until the sun came back up.
Those were, of course, not including the nights where Warren was released from whatever laboratory shackles that he had to submit to before knocking on Gordon’s door to take his dutiful place next to Gordon on the bed that transformed, throughout the weeks, into their bed.
Midnights now, Gordon thought, were much reminiscent of those infinite nights he spent with Warren all those years ago. Tucked into the warmth of a lamp light, safe in the knowledge that the whole world slept dreamlessly besides them, drunk on the exhaustion of persisting their drooping eyes in favor of spending just another ten minutes talking to each other about whatever stupid thing Gordon had on his mind that particular night, before passing out with fingers entangled into uninterrupted slumber.
Somehow, ever since he emerged, Gordon couldn’t feel a sliver of the comfort he felt on those nights now, even with the knowledge that they were both safer than they had been for a very long time. There was something sharp that turned in his chest every time Warren waltzed into his room unannounced with something for them to mindlessly spend the night with. Something that bothered him with the relentless, uncaring structure of this brave new world that didn’t care if Gordon came along, or if he was left behind.
“You’re much more… chipper.”
Sitting across him with a deck of cards in his hands, Warren actually laughed at that. Gordon remembered, suddenly, trying to figure out the subtle differences between his polite laughter and his real, bubbling authenticity. Piece by piece, night by night, bad joke over bad joke, slowly puzzling away at the reactions of Warren at the expense of repeatedly making a fool out of himself. How Warren wouldn’t make him feel bad at an attempt at light-hearted banter, eyes soft, how his thorns felt tucked away in the middle of the night where there was no one around to defend himself from.
How he wasn’t able to extend the same kindness back himself now, not even an inch, not even an ounce.
Gordon had been keeping Warren at an arm's length ever since he emerged. At first it wasn’t something intentional, just how the cards were dealt to them thanks to the intensive physical therapy that Gordon had to go through. Afterwards, when Warren started to increase the frequency of his midnight visits into Gordon’s shoebox room, the ease in their previous physical closeness had dissolved into something terrifying and bitter in Gordon’s mind, just as everything else did.
“Chipper?” Warren asked with a scoff. Gordon traced the easy-going lines that his smile carves around his mouth with his eyes, how relaxed his face looked without the constant furrow between his brows that he spent all his time trying to smoothen almost a lifetime ago.
“You know, more energetic,” he shrugged. Warren was trying to make things easy. He should’ve been grateful for that.
Gordon didn’t want easy. “Lively, almost.”
Warren looked up from the cards he was turning in his hands, their un-started game of top trumps now just entertainment for him to choose which cards were the most useless to feed to Waffles. From where he sat right opposite Gordon, leaning back onto some dusty boxes that he brought earlier full of clothes and music tapes and other knick-knacks if Gordon wanted them, Gordon could see the small glint in his eyes. It was foreign, he realized uncomfortably.
It was foreign, and it was absolutely beautiful.
“I’m just happy that you’re here,” Warren said then. The obvious factuality of it all made something inside Gordon twist sharp and sudden. “That’s all.”
The softness that claimed his face was lovely. It made Gordon want to lean in and cradle it in his palms for the rest of the night and just stare into this new warmth in his eyes, nothing but the two of them left in the world for just the night. In the cozy shadows of the desk lamp that he brought cast over his cheeks, Gordon could see the faded promise of a constellation of freckles that he once spent nights memorizing the shape of.
Warren seemed, for the most part, more animated than Gordon had ever known him to be. When he left the world to run past him forty years ago, most of their days were spent in quiet, restless slumber. Especially towards the end where the very existence of light was hostile, there was nothing to do but sit together in the darkness with pinkies intertwined for the tiniest bit of comfort. Gordon never even considered a reality where the roles could’ve been even slightly reversed, but here he was now.
“You were not so happy-go-lucky when I was still stuck in my pod?”
Warren startled a bit at that, something tugged at Gordon’s chest knowing that he was making this uncomfortable. A bitter, bigger part of him was screaming in his head that all he did for this last coherent week was be uncomfortable. He could invite Warren to join him in the cold resentment and worry that stuck clammy right in one’s chest, not easing away no matter how many times you swallow.
“No, I was… a bit lost, I guess. I couldn’t leave quarantine as fast as you did. It was lonely.”
His voice was quieter when he spoke, no longer gazing into Gordon’s eyes but looking at the deck of cards in his hands instead. Gordon forced himself to study the shape of the now-healed scar on top of his left hand, the one he bandaged over and over again, the one he never got to see through its entire cycle of healing. The last time he swiped a thumb over Warren’s hand, it had been an angry red colour, still scabbed over, throbbing slightly under his touch.
Gordon wondered how it would feel now, if he reached out and held Warren’s hand in his. He wondered if the bump would feel unfamiliar, out of place, sticking out like a sore thumb; just like how Gordon felt. He wondered if it hurt anymore, if Warren still sucked in a sharp breath if he were to accidentally press on it too hard. He wondered if it was hypersleep that fixed it, at the end.
“I spent a lot of time talking to GORD. Listened to your memoir, some of your haikus- it felt a little like going crazy.”
Slowly untangling his legs, Warren straightened his knee to tap lightly at Gordon’s knee with his foot. His eyes were looking forward again, searching relentlessly for something that was surely missing in Gordon’s eyes, something that was no longer his to find.
If he was disappointed, there was no show of it. “Made Aubrey’s life a living hell, bugging her about you all the time.”
Gordon hated all of this. He hated how soft Warren sounded, how honest he was now, how open. He hated how it was routine now to draw blood from chewing the inside of his cheek too much, hated how easy it seemed to tuck himself in the space between Warren’s neck and shoulder and just forget about everything.
Why couldn’t it be like this forty years ago? When Warren’s throat was raw from screaming aloud, why couldn’t he be honest then and tell him how scared he was? How scared they both had been? Gordon hated how easy it seemed now, with colour in his cheeks and meat on his bones, how easy it seemed for Warren to live on, move on, continue.
“I missed you like crazy,” Warren confessed. There was a tremor in his fingers that flipped the playing cards around that made the back of Gordon’s skull sting, his eyes water, his nose scrunch up.
“Seeing you up and about was all I ever wanted.”
He was supposed to lighten under the confession, he was supposed to dissolve under the warm lamp light into dust right into Warren’s hands and never ever solidify again. He was supposed to drop the entire conversation right then and there, lean over the stupid deck of cards and kiss Warren square on his lovely mouth like he wanted to do ever since he emerged. He was supposed to look up and see the smile on Warren’s lips, hoping for exactly this course of events to play out in the very next minute.
The sharp stab that throbbed in Gordon’s chest, on the other hand, still wanted to scream. If something in Gordon’s eyes betrayed his actual cause, Warren did not catch it in time.
“Why’s it taking so long for me but not you?”
He was mad. He was so mad, simply so angry that Warren came to his room day in and day out with a spring in his step he last saw a million odd years ago walking to his cryopod for the third or fourth time. He was so angry at the easy smile on his face, at the names he would recite like he knew them for a lifetime, at the mundane routine that he built in this foreign, ugly place.
Gordon was angry that Warren could joke with the Bluesky unit. He was angry that he could find some resemblance of actual, solid, real Gordon in the mechanic voice of the machine, as if the real one hasn’t been rotting away in a cryopod that whole time- and for what? To be brought back flawed, not being able to leave his room without making a complete fool out of himself, let alone walk properly.
Warren frowned, “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean,” Gordon trailed uncomfortably, there was the very known urge in his lungs to get up and pace around the room and the knowledge that he could not even do that. He knew he had to explain himself, put something solid between Warren’s fingers to look at and try to fix. He didn’t want to fix anything, though. He didn’t want solutions or condolences, or people walking on eggshells around him.
Gordon felt like he understood Warren better than ever, somehow. This was torture. And now Warren had to understand why it was torture for him too, in a completely different way, all those years ago.
His brain felt fuzzy and stuffed with cotton as he tried to carve out meaning to put into words. Warren looked like he was waiting for the actual storm to hit, so Gordon continued on.
“You’re so at peace with everything! Bryony, your ex-wife, mind you, is sitting in a windowless basement not so far away from us all. We feed her and clothe her and give her books to read, for Christ’s sake, and for what?”
He didn’t mean to start with her, but that’s where everything eventually ended. All of his nightmares, all of Warren’s too, he assumed, one way or another ended up in something that was undeniably touched by the hands of Bryony Halbech. She was woven intricately into everything that this place represented. The first time Gordon went out in a stupid wheelchair pushed by Grace, the familiar landscape with the snow-speckled trees and the foggy outline of the mountainside, it all reminded him of nothing but what he had to endure in here. What he saw when he looked in the mirror before going to bed was something that was carved out by the cruel hands that he somehow trusted himself with, not the face that Warren’s thumbs once padded out the outlines of.
There was nothing in this very world that he stood in that didn’t remind him something about the woman that shot him.
“Just because she’s a bad person doesn’t mean we get to meddle with her life, Gordon,” Warren mumbled in response. His gaze was too carefully locked onto Gordon’s now to offer any ounce of comfort.
Gordon knew he was doing his best not to react poorly, not to react at all. He wondered what Warren would say if he brought it up like this all those times ago. He wondered which one of them would have stormed off, and how far they could actually run away before the thread that bound them together eventually snapped off.
“That doesn’t mean we have to entertain her either. We just have to contain her, hell, we don’t even have to do that! We can just send her away!”
His face was red, Gordon was sure of it. There was the hot tingling of something bitter mixed with embarrassment that burned at the back of his neck, his eyes blown wide open as he stared at Warren. He used to feel like he was the only sane person left in this place, the only ‘normal’ one despite how far he could go with things, and now it was completely reversed. No matter what he did, no matter how much he willed himself to act upon the urge of it, Gordon could not force himself to become a part of this place.
Not again. Not when even Warren wasn’t on his side this time.
Warren sighed. There was something calculated but raw in his expression, as if he was trying to guess the course of their conversation before it happened. Whatever move he was planning, Gordon knew that it wouldn’t be right.
“Look, I know you’re hurting-”
“That’s such bullshit!” Gordon cut him off. He couldn’t even see straight from all the emotions blurring in front of his eyes. “I’m not hurting, I’m literally going crazy.”
He turned his gaze towards the ceiling in frustrated defeat, the last thing he wanted to do was to cry right now, right here, right in front of Warren in the middle of an argument. He didn’t want to be consoled, he didn’t want the hand that would definitely land on his knee within the next five seconds, he didn’t want the comfortable warmth and softness of it all. He wanted to fight some more, he wanted the burning, scorching heat, he wanted to feel the scream that was stuck in his throat finally out and about and leaving a flash of bile anywhere it landed.
He wanted to push Warren away. He wanted to watch him stumble, hurt expression in his face growing cold by the second like Gordon knew it would.
“Maybe you should leave,” he croaked instead, voice unsteady. Afraid to open his eyes again, he listened for the sounds that surrounded the room instead to see if Warren would actually get up and leave. Gordon supposed it would be for the best; there was the whisper of something unsteady growing stronger with each passing minute at the center of his chest, and no matter how much he wanted to hash things out with Warren at the moment, he knew deep down that Warren didn’t deserve that. If he got up and left right now, there would be time and space to wallow in his unstable silence again.
The room stayed silent. Everything was so much louder than Gordon expected it to be.
“Do you actually want me to leave?” Warren asked after another beat. Gordon winced at how raw his voice sounded. “I’ll leave if you want me to.”
That finally ripped a sob out of Gordon. All the composure that he tried to grace himself with for the past minute dissolved in an instant with the first shake of his shoulder, and after that, it all came crashing down.
“I don’t fucking know, Warren,” he heaved after a moment, arms wrapped tightly around his own core as if he was under attack from something much more violent than a man with limbs awkwardly tall for his torso. He lowered his gaze from the ceiling back to Warren, and the jumbled expression on his face that ranged from pity to confusion to raw sadness. Another sob cracked through his chest upon seeing Warren again, as if somehow seeing him like this wasn’t something he expected.
In a way, Gordon supposed, it was true. Tonight wasn’t meant to be anything out of the ordinary, a few hours of biting his tongue and going through the repeated motions of card games or nonsense talk filled with Warren’s laughter and nothing else from his side, excusing himself to wait impatiently for the dreamless slumber to claim him once again. To go to a place where he cannot be hurt, a place where he cannot hurt anyone. He wasn’t supposed to lash out like this, they weren’t meant to argue, not for real. Everyone knew that they wouldn’t ever fight for real. Everything with Warren, ever since he emerged, felt like pretend play.
Perhaps that was the problem. The suffocating plastic surrealness of it all. Warren reeled in the knowledge that Gordon was safe while Gordon could not escape the confounds of being someone and something real again. No cynical humour to generously hand out to old dictaphones anymore. No hand to hold while he slept, no matter how much he wanted it, no matter how much he hated the idea.
Warren slowly got up from the ground, expression clouded with something unreadable once again, reminiscent of old times, and Gordon thought for a second that he was just going to turn the handle on the door and leave without a sound like he asked him to. With two slow motions, Warren was across the room to approach where Gordon sat with his back to the wall and his cards sprawled all over the carpet surrounding him, and sat down beside him with a careful space left between their bodies. No knees touching or feet bumping.
Gordon couldn’t stop crying. He didn’t know whether he wanted to lean his entire weight on Warren and just cry it out, or compose himself and put an actual end to the conversation so that both of them could somewhat sleep that night. He wanted to reach out his hand and trace the sharp lines of Warren’s face like he did countless times before, to see if anything in the softness of his face was ripped away from him throughout the forty odd years. He wanted to get up, get out, and bury himself somewhere in the snow, all alone, and cold, and familiar; and sleep for another forty years to see if that changed anything in the alien feeling within his fragile bones.
When Warren spoke, Gordon was sure that it scared both of them.
“I’m like this because I’m out,” he started, not looking at Gordon but the opposite wall instead, at where he was sitting moments ago. “Because I will never be in hypersleep again. We will never be in hypersleep again.”
There was a shake in his voice that soothed somewhere terrified inside Gordon. He couldn’t help but close the distance between them by leaning his head tentatively on Warren’s too-far-away shoulder. Not leaving was Warren’s peace offering, so not scurrying away had to be Gordon’s own olive branch.
The point of contact undid something in both of their chests and Gordon sighed a teary breath out as Warren’s arm immediately shot up to wrap around his other shoulder; a firm presence in the wobbly curse of the night.
“It’s all I ever wanted to do,” Gordon choked out. “Warren, all I ever wanted was to get us out of here.”
It hadn’t worked. It never worked, no matter how long they schemed with Aubrey, no matter how many sleepless nights he spent trying to memorize how to get out of the tunnel on Aubrey’s end, no matter how many times he pleaded with Warren to let him help, let him in. Those nights that they would spend, frantic and completely frenzied, where Gordon kissed every knuckle on Warren’s hands as he cried and cried and cried. The more Gordon tried, the more Warren seemed to slip out of his hands until he was shot to bleed to death on the ground and there was nothing to try anymore.
“And now we’re back here,” he continued, breathing forced, “and you seem so content that I wonder if you even remember why we got stuck here in the first place.”
Warren’s arm around him tightened.
For the longest time Gordon thought that it was his fault, the reason they got stuck in this science fiction nightmare was him and his inhumane obsession rather than the reality of literally being in the wrong place at the wrong time. When he was left alone for sometimes months at a time, he had all the time in the world to muse on why they had to be sacrificed in the world's most stupid way possible for the likes of some rich folk that didn't even know their names. For the longest time Gordon blamed Warren, and then himself, and then when there was nothing left but a gunshot and silence, he didn't know where else to turn.
He had to get them out. He had to get them out, somehow, even if it killed him. He supposed that it did kill him, at the end, for them to be set free.
The first thing Gordon heard after he emerged was Warren’s voice shushing him back to sleep. Once he was able to stay awake for more than five incoherent minutes, Warren had told him, from that ridiculous twin sized bed all the way across the room, that he wanted them to get out of there. The following weeks were a haze of not remembering either waking up or falling asleep, figuring out that his legs did not even work properly to hold his weight for more than a few seconds, and confirming his suspicions that Warren was probably lying through his teeth about his scheme to leave this place, given all his mushy-jolly demeanor reciting his daily events whenever he visited a growingly miserable Gordon.
“I know I keep saying this, and I know it’s not helping, but it’s not so bad out there, Gordon. I’m only insisting because I think it would cheer you up a little. I didn't want to be there either, at first. You don't ever have to want to be there.”
Gordon could tell that Warren was trying his best. He didn't know if it would work, but nuzzled his face further into Warren's face anyway, like he was urging him to continue.
“But truly, the only thing I even remotely care about in this place is you. I waited days going out of my mind listening to your recordings when I first emerged just to get out, see the pod you were in, and indulge in the fantasy that you were safe.”
Warren’s other hand came up to brush Gordon’s hair out of his face, but didn’t linger on the spot. He continued, still staring at the wall in front of them, “I didn’t sleep for three days when you first emerged. Aubrey had to physically strangle me out of the room so that I would go get some sleep, and then put me next to you so that I could monitor everything. I didn’t care about everything, as long as I could see you breathing. It was all I needed.”
“I know it’s all bullshit. They come in and tell you good morning and it doesn’t even feel like a morning to begin with, and then they don't even tell you what the hell is going on out there, and throw a hissy-fit when you demand to go outside and see it for yourself. I know it’s bullshit.”
Warren’s cheek came down to rest on top of Gordon’s head. Gordon felt all the fight leave him, second by second. Warren’s next words sounded like he was speaking inside his head.
“I know, alright? But I need you to realize that there is nothing I wouldn’t give up in this world if I knew it would keep you safe and sound and awake.”
The silence grew languid and comfortable between them. Gordon found himself grateful for anything that wasn’t more fight and more headache, and waited for the words to form through the thick molasses in his skull so that he could answer. He knew it didn’t matter, whether he answered or not, but also that Warren would wait for decades to hear him speak back. He knew he would wait in return, to find the right words and echo back from millions of light years away, just a flicker of a star, just a speck, just a shoulder and a head and a deck of playing cards.
“The world should have stopped turning when we first met at my office,” he replied, then. It was the only thing he could think about. It was the only solution he could wreck his mind in and out for, to keep them both safe.
Warren chuckled. For all it was worth, Gordon thought it was a real laugh. “Yeah,” he mumbled, “but then I wouldn’t be able to do this,” and pressed his lips, soft, almost unreal, to Gordon’s hairline and pulled away to put some distance between them.
They stared at each other for what felt like hours to Gordon, just shifting their gaze between the lips and the eyelids and the cheekbones of each other like they were trying to get to know one another again, fresh from the start. It felt silly in a way, but the silent intimacy made Gordon feel human in a way that he longed to regain for so long that it didn't really matter if it was stupid to re-memorize freckles that you could connect in your sleep.
The dim light cast feathery shadows across Warren’s face from this angle, and he looked so serene and tired that Gordon didn't even think before asking.
“Would you… want to stay here tonight?”
Something in Warren’s gaze shifted into a puddle much softer, almost glossed over in a haze. His lips quirked up in a small smile, Gordon wanted nothing more than to just lean over and kiss him senseless until he forgot who they were and where they were and what year it was. He wanted nothing more than to just tangle all their limbs together in an intelligible mess until he didn’t know where he started and where Warren ended. He needed the sense of security that he, inch by inch, tried to hand out to Warren all those years ago, hidden within intertwined pinkies and brushing knees and shy smiles.
“Of course,” Warren replied, leaning forward without realizing. It used to be routine, Gordon thought to himself, the way they would tuck themselves into sleep each night, without even speaking about it first. Gordon would get the light and they would quietly file into the supposedly queen sized bed in the wanky, singular room in the farmhouse. It used to be routine, all of it, knowing where to return at night, knowing how to properly sleep.
“Do you still have your old sleeping bag somewhere or-”
“No,” Gordon chimed in, too quick, “I meant…”
His eyes wandered off to the double mattress that sat dejected in the corner, unmade and inviting. He hoped desperately, with an unfamiliar flush across his cheeks, that Warren would just understand and not ask questions. They hadn’t been doing this since he emerged, him and Warren, no matter how familiar it had been all those years ago.
It was absurd. Forty years ago, just a week or two prior, a lifetime before their very eyes, Gordon remembered waking up next to Warren on the very day they sat on the kitchen table trying to guess Gordon’s home country. He remembered waking up next to him the day before, and the day before, all the way up to his last emergence. He remembered waking up in a chair by his bedside in quarantine one time. He remembered quietly inviting Warren up to the bed for the first time from the sleeping bag on the floor.
I’m promoting you, he’d said, hoping desperately to be able to cover up how afraid he had been. Warren’s lanky frame had gone soft within his grasp like he had been waiting for this very moment his whole life.
Present day Warren looked like he was about to cry. Gordon didn’t quite know if that was a good thing or a bad thing and frankly, he couldn’t find it himself to care at that very moment to find out. He would ask in the morning, or afternoon, or whenever his muddied mind deemed appropriate to wake up. All Gordon wanted to do now was cocoon himself in warmth and darkness and the physical, solid presence of Warren, and finally doze off into a dreamless sleep.
“Yeah,” Warren breathed out, finally, and something in Gordon also finally unraveled. Breathing seemed like less of a task as Warren’s lips stretched into a thin, polite smile. “Yeah, of course.”
Then, because he was so nice and so kind, he leaned over the mess of cards between them, planted a firm hand on the floor, and kissed Gordon honey-sweet like he'd been wanting to do for ages. His other hand came up to rest on Gordon’s stubbled cheek, and Gordon could do nothing but close his eyes and let himself be held in this moment for just a little longer.
When he pulled back, Warren’s lips ghosted over his face to finally land on his right temple, close to his eyebrow, and then he was getting up from the ground and pulling Gordon with him with a firm hand wrapped around his wrist. Gordon stumbled into Warren for a second before balancing on his good leg, wincing slightly through his gritted teeth and plopping himself down on the mattress. The sharp pain that shot up his spine whenever he put pressure on his leg subdued generously as Warren leaned down to press another kiss on top of his head and let go of his wrist.
“Lay down,” he said, looking just a little worried over the way Gordon stretched out his bad leg. “I’ll be just a minute.”
Gordon knew the routine that was yet to come, so he tucked himself under the covers as Warren graciously took up the task of tidying up the place. Their places used to be switched back then, Gordon thought, peeking from the top of the covers as Warren collected all the discarded cards and popped Waffles into her vivarium. He used to be the one going around, picking up stray socks off the floor, piling up dirty mugs by the door as Warren curled up into a ball beneath the blankets waiting for him. He wasn’t mad at the change.
“Come here,” Warren mumbled when he finally dimmed the lights and crawled inside the bed himself. Gordon complied almost instantly, not a bone within his body even considering the opposite. He shuffled until Warren could wrap a tentative arm around his body, pressed close, Gordon’s forehead tucked into his chest.
“You’re gonna be here when I wake up?” he dared to ask, raising his head to brush his lips across Warren’s jaw. Maybe it was meant to be a joke, maybe a millennia ago it would’ve been mumbled into the evening with a playful chirp in his voice. Now, it barely seemed like an option. Every willing breath that he took made his eyelids drop even further.
Warren pulled him closer, somehow, sliding his other hand under Gordon’s torso to trace the outline of his spine through his tethering shirt. It felt like a reminder of his grounding humanity, the idea that they somehow shared the same curve of a spine. Gordon felt Warren’s cheek nuzzling into the mess of his hair, exhaling softly as if it’s all that was left in him. The air felt heavy. Gordon closed his eyes.
“I’ll be here,” Warren answered. His voice echoed and vibrated along Gordon’s skull until the words tucked themselves in a neat, warm corner between their slowing breathing.