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(In the very beginning, on a rainy day, a young man finds himself with his back against the wall and his face bloody. His knuckles are raw, and he’s bruised all over. His reputation in the ring is at stake in a decrepit warehouse; roaring men surround him, threaten him, bet on him.
His life is at stake, and he’s about to lose it when the crowd becomes judge, jury and executioner, raising fists to end him. If he had had a little more money he wouldn’t have had to be here, but he closes his swollen eyes and surrenders. His name is Jeremy. None of the men know that.
Then there’s a voice that cuts through the din, and a man makes his way through the mass of sweat and anger. He is wearing a suit.
Jeremy sees his face and feels the strangest thing. A rush of relief. He has never met this man before, and yet –
And yet the man threatens anybody who comes any closer with death; He lets Jeremy bleed all over his fancy clothes and helps him get out, out, out. This complete stranger tells Jeremy that he won’t be abandoned, he won’t die.
And he has a job offer.
The man’s name is Geoff Ramsey).
(Months pass.
They are safe months in safe houses with people who become friends, then lovers. To put it that way makes it sound easy, but of course it isn't. There are also less safe months filled with gunfire and explosions and very unpleasant misunderstandings.
In the end, though, Jeremy has a room in a penthouse suite and five people who would die for him).
When Jeremy wakes up, he rubs his eyes and his hands come away wet. His pillow is damp, and he moves sluggishly to determine why until he realizes that he's been crying. There are still tears on his cheeks, running like in a movie, and a taste of salt in his mouth. His chest aches with a sob he doesn't let out. Sitting up, he forgets some images and retains others, keeping only glimpses of scenery.
He remembers a dream.
(He stood behind a curtain made of transparent silk. Green as spring, it fluttered in a draft. Footsteps echoed under the arched ceiling of the throne room as five people approached.
”No need to hide,” one of them said. Jeremy caught a glimpse of Michael and the grey mass of fur that made up his collar. His voice was calm. ”Come out.”
Were they friends? Were they here to kill him? Jeremy couldn't remember. All he knew was that his hiding place was terrible, and that they would see him sooner or later. He stepped out and felt utterly weightless, knowing the way you just know things in dreams that the moment was important – so incredibly important that he all but stopped breathing. He wielded a heavy sword.
Geoff appeared, looking so very old and tired. He, too, was holding a sword. He sheathed it slowly, and the others - Michael, Gavin, Jack, all a little off, not quite looking like themselves - followed his example.
"For peace," Geoff said. It might have been a greeting or a promise or a reminder: whatever it was, Jeremy was so glad to hear those words that he was about to drop to his knees and-)
"I had a weird dream tonight."
Jeremy rests his chin on his hand, slumped across the kitchen table as he inhales the scent of oil and camomile tea. Jack, hard at work across from him, does not take her eyes of the gun in her hands. She likes to clean her arsenal in the mornings, and she's so adept at disassembling, separating the parts and fitting them back together, that Jeremy can only watch in awe. Occasionally, he hands her a fresh rag or a bit of oil, or he picks up the screws that roll to the floor.
"Yeah?" she says.
"I think it's because I saw those twenty minutes of the Lord of the Rings before I went to bed last night..." Jeremy begins, playing with a cotton ball picked from Jack's cleaning set. "It was like... this royal fantasy place. It was something straight out of a movie. Felt like I was really there."
"Then what?" Jack asks in a detached tone.
"Everything was happening in a big kind of throne room, and I saw - I think I only really remember how Michael and Geoff looked, but I know I saw everybody."
"Is that the weird part?"
"I don't usually dream about people like that." Jeremy shrugs. "Anyway, they were dressed for the occasion. Big capes. Crowns.”
"Then...?"
"Then nothing. I woke up, and I almost couldn't remember where I was. You know those kinds of dreams? Where it feels like the dream is more real than this...”
Jack lowers her barrel and bore brush and looks more closely at Jeremy. ”That happens often?”
”It’s happened a couple of times." Jeremy says. "And I'm fairly sure there was something about the big portrait in the throne room being of Dwayne 'the Rock' Johnson, so there's that."
"I don't know about the last part, but you might wanna go to talk to Ryan."
"Why?"
”Ah, just do it. Trust me on this.” Jack glances only momentarily away from the next gun coming apart under her hands. There are oil smudges on her skin. "But I don't know where he is right now, come to think of it."
Ryan can be hard to find.
He keeps his own secret pathways through the city, faraway flats and a couple of phone numbers and addresses he's never explained to anyone. Sometimes he withdraws for space. Eventually, he always comes home.
He just never announces when he's coming. There’s no knocking on the door before the Vagabond arrives, no texts or phonecalls. Either you come back home to see him already on the couch, drinking your diet coke, or he comes during the night.
Last night was one such occasion. Jeremy woke around three AM to hear a door opening and closing. There were footsteps coming down the hallway and a sound of something dragging across the floor. Something heavy, like a bag or a tarp. Jeremy had turned to his side and closed his eyes. All the light sleepers among them knew that Ryan was back.
And now, this late morning, he's in the vault.
It's an odd word for what is essentially a little room off to the side of a barely-used office. Geoff has an old safe there, and they do store some valuables - trinkets they can't get fenced off, money they can't move at the moment. The combination lock has started to make weird noises, and Michael and Gavin are already discussing what explosives to use the day the safe no longer opens. (It's a matter with very technical considerations: How big a charge, where to place it, how not to damage the contents...)
The door creaks as Jeremy carefully opens it and steps into a room he rarely sees at all. Ryan sits by an old oak table in the corner. Usually, there's a potted plant there, but he has moved that to the floor so that he has somewhere to... Well, it looks like he's spending the morning cleaning, too. He's polishing something. A small shiny object in one hand and a wet rag in the other, he casts a glance towards Jeremy. His mask is not on in this sanctuary of his, but there is still makeup smeared around his eyes, across his cheekbones. He manages to command an intimidating presence even unarmed and in an old t-shirt.
He raises one eyebrow. "Didn't expect you."
"Jack told me to go find you," Jeremy says, the door falling shut behind him.
"Does she want something?"
"No, no." Jeremy raises his hands, palms outwards. The whole idea is starting to seem more and more stupid by the minute, and he's kind of regretting bothering Ryan by now. "I told her about a dream I've had last night and she... told me to go talk to you.”
A shadow falls across Ryan's face as turns towards Jeremy. "What kind of dream?"
"It feels dumb describing it. You were in it, kind of, and it was all medieval-"
"Oh." Ryan gives a sly smile. "Let me guess. A throne room. And you were hiding from the rest of us."
Even the small step closer Jeremy takes seems to lead to the air changing, the mood growing charged enough that small hairs on his arms stand on end. His lips feel dry and he nods, at a loss for words.
"Did you see Michael, maybe? Kind of wolf-y looking?"
”... Yeah.”
Ryan turns his back to Jeremy, looking again at the glittering thing he was sitting with before. "I've had dreams like that for a while."
"How long is that?"
"Ah - Three, four years maybe. No, wait. Probably longer, but I didn't realize at first." He shrugs, a sharp crease forming at the back of his shirt between his shoulders. "Always the same mood in those dreams. And the same people."
Jeremy reaches out to lay a hand on Ryan's shoulder, but then Ryan stands, facing him, and in his hands lie a polished crown. It has no big toy-like jewels, consisting of a thin gold band with only a few decorative details, but that is simply more proof of its veracity. Real gold, real value - and when Jeremy imagines it on Ryan's head, he feels a physical shock move through his body, from his head downwards like ice-water in his veins.
For a moment he sees an image that he knows he had previously forgotten from the night's dream. One of the people in the shadowy procession had been Ryan, and he had worn a crown not at all like this one, but still with that same shine of gold. His eyes had had a hard look in them, his lips drawn back into a tight grin, and he'd had a sword that had inspired a profound sense of both fear and wonder that comes back to Jeremy now like a punch in the gut.
Jeremy hears his own gasp, staggers back a step and says, "Okay - maybe I just remembered something. You."
Ryan smiles. Looks more like himself than any dream-image. That alone is calming, and then he says, "I thought so."
"This is weird," Jeremy says with conviction. "What's happening? We're having the same dream?"
"We dream about the same place and time, I think. But how much weirder is it really? Compared to our usual day-to-day stuff, I mean." Ryan sets off walking, headed back to the main apartment, common rooms and the others who are surely waking up by now. Following as best he can, Jeremy feels at once like he has been handed a new piece of the puzzle that is Ryan Haywood and like said piece is all corners and won’t ever fit anywhere.
The pass through a hallway with big windows to one side, creating a wall of glass through which the skyline of Los Santos menaces in the morning light. Jeremy winces and looks away. The view is pretty, but there is far too big a drop down to the street.
There are still burns on the steel-grey walls in the stairwell, and they go past the door that has been subject to so much lockpicking for practice. Ryan says nothing until they are right by the main room and within earshot of CNN, the clicking sound of someone typing, and Geoff and Gavin arguing merrily about something small they will soon forget.
"I thought I'd get back to them," Ryan says. He lays a hand on both of Jeremy's shoulders. "We'll talk about this again later, right? I, uh... I want to think about some things."
Jeremy just nods and does his best to hide some dissatisfaction that this had not led to some kind of big reveal, instead following Ryan as they join the rest of the crew in noise and light.
There weeks later, Jeremy has another odd morning.
This time, he wakes dizzy and makes his way to the bathroom while rubbing his eyes, going through the usual motions until he stops by the sink. There is a flash of red somewhere in his peripheral vision - a light outside the window, glowing, some TV-tower signaling - and he knows he dreamt of roses. The water in the sink appears like rust for a moment.
He keeps a journal now, and the thoughts that flood him find their way onto its pages.
"That was Ray, wasn't it?" he asks, sitting across from Ryan on Ryan's bed.
The Vagabond lives up to his name, leaving and moving too often for Jeremy's tastes, and he leaves few traces. Even now this room has few signs of him. There's a mask on the bedpost there and a make-up kit balanced on the windowsill. The crown lies on a high shelf, shining still; other, less-obvious trophies lie between rows on the bookshelf. Gavin has sworn he has seen human teeth lying around, and nobody believes that. Geoff's insistence that he's seen a cow's skull, on the other hand...
Jeremy has the scrap of lined paper in his lap. In blue ink, he has preserved words that seem nonsensical now that he is no longer on the cusp of sleep. And yet, they must carry meaning.
"The Rose King," he reads. Even reading the name makes him think of scarlet flowers and the red inner lining of a black cape. Jeremy does not find that odd even though Ray only ever wears the same purple hoodie in all the pictures and videos. And when the sniper appears on rooftops far away, like a ghost still haunting them to keep them safe when hell breaks loose - then he wears purple so that they recognize him.
(Jeremy's jacket has a purple lining,too, like a secret sign of continuity. Not that he's ever had to explain his choice of color to anybody. With orange pants and a cowboy hat, people just assume he has no taste).
But roses would fit just as well in Ray's hands as a pink rifle, Jeremy thinks.
"The Rose King," Ryan repeats. He looks strangely at Jeremy with something like a wordless apology, but for what, Jeremy isn't certain. Then the Vagabond falls onto his back, folding his hands on his chest. The skull mask keeps the moment from feeling too intimate. "As I said," he mumbles, "I’ve dreamt about the whole crew, which included Ray."
"And now that he's left?"
"Still there." Ryan takes a deep breath, made all the more audible by the barrier of the mask. "Still there in my dreams, same as always. There are consistent details from dream to dream, like the titles. Those are usually the same.” He goes through the list as if this is almost boring and ordinary. "Rose King, that was Ray. And Gavin – he’s either the Fool or the Green King, with Geoff being the First King. Others, I'm not so sure about."
"Me?"
"Not sure.”
"And... you?"
There's a heavy pause. "Maybe you'll remember it."
"Wait," Jeremy says. "Remember?"
With his back towards the wall, Ryan sits back up, now cautiously eyeing Jeremy.
And suddenly, Jeremy understands. Oh. "You think these are memories?"
"I don't know what else to call them," Ryan says. "It's far-fetched, but it feels like a memory. Like we remember the same events."
”So this happened in another life or what are you getting at? Re-incarnation?”
"…Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm a mercenary coping with all the bad shit we do by imagining we've all had different lives in a different time. But... you feel it's not ordinary dreams, too, don't you?"
"Don't you?"
The question repeats itself in Jeremy's head when the lights are off and the city hums outside his window, when he tries to sleep.
"Don't you? - Don't you? - Don't you?"
At last Jeremy pushes aside the covers and sits up, running his fingers through his hair. It's three in the night, and he suspects he looks miserable.
Michael appears in the doorway, and the look on his face confirms Jeremy's suspicions.
"Something up?" Jeremy asks. Thoughts of guns hidden under pillows and blue police-lights spilling across the pavement in front of the building flash through his head, they've found us, run-
"Nah." Michael shakes his head. "I could just hear you turning in here and wondered if you were asleep or what. The door was open."
"…I wasn't sleeping."
"Me neither."
Jeremy moves aside, gesturing for Michael to join him on the bed. There's just enough space for the two of them in the lopsided square of moonlight on the wrinkled sheets.
A sigh escapes Michael as he sits. He carries a smell of nitroglycerine and petrol into Jeremy's room where it mixes with fake pine from an air freshener stolen from a stolen car, torn right off the string. Mud and rainwater evaporates off of a coat slung over the back of a chair. Michael pulls his knees up to his chest, drawing his bare feet off the floor. He looks tired. Perhaps not mentally - too much coffee, too many exciting things looming on the horizon for his spirit to feel fatigue - but physically exhausted. He's forced his legs to run too far and his fingers to assemble too many bombs as they prepare for the next big thing. Some kind of heist.
Jeremy hasn't asked yet.
He can just feel it in the air.
He doesn't ask Michael, either, instead saying, "I've a question about Ryan."
Michael snorts. "Yeah, welcome to the club."
"No. I think you might know this. I mean, you've all known him for years now."
"Mhm?"
"Has he ever mentioned his dreams to anyone?"
Michael looks down at his hands, clasped around his lower legs, and then up at the wall. Black and white crime scene photos still hang in a conspiracy theorist's deliberate pattern, though there's no red string. Jeremy used to collect before he joined. Now he wonders if Michael sees former glory or past mistakes when he looks at his previous heists. And there Michael is, with the masked Vagabond in a bank, younger but just as reckless as now. He's giving the camera the finger.
"...He did," Michael says. ”You’re having them too?”
Jeremy hesitates, then nods.
"That so?" It is clear from his voice that Michael expects no answer. Suddenly, he lurches from the bed and goes straight to one of the photographs. He traces the white edge of it, then lets his fingertips seek his own pixellated face. It appears that he's a little confused in that moment in the past, perhaps unsure of where the exit is. Ryan's face doesn't appear at all. Just a black skull. "I think it wasn't long after this. That he told us, I mean." He turns towards Jeremy. "We made fun of him. God, we made fun about it for weeks. 'Oh, our Vagabond is so superstitious'. We told him to be careful every time he went under a ladder or crossed paths with a black cat because if he believed in dreams and past lives, he must believe in all that bullcrap too... We stopped, of course. He didn't like it." Michael raises an eyebrow and adds, "He takes it pretty seriously."
"I'm glad you stopped teasing him about it, at least."
"It just sort of happened." Michael shrugs. "I had a dream like his. It felt real. Then it was suddenly kind of close to home."
Jeremy feels his heart skip a beat. "You, too?"
"Yeah, me too, what of it?"
"I just didn't expect- Wait. Jack," Jeremy says. "Jack's dreamt it, too."
”We’ve all had those dreams, Jeremy. Those memories.” A few steps, and Michael is back by the bed, looking down at Jeremy. "Ryan's the only one who gets them often. And his is the clearest. The rest of us... Sometimes it's just feelings, too. Once you start remembering, it doesn't stop."
Jeremy presses his back against the wall.
Michael's face is expressionless, less like he is sharing a big secret and more like he's explaining a riddle Jeremy should have solved ages ago. He sinks down beside Jeremy, way closer than before, shoulder to shoulder. "Gavin's got the dreams... four times now, I think? A couple months in between, and always the oddest things. Like, he remembers a tea-cup or a horse or something."
"And you."
Moonlight cuts across Michael's face.
Jeremy lays his hands over Michael's on the bed, and Michael closes his eyes. He nods slowly, swaying a little. When he looks Jeremy in the eye again, there's nothing but relief on his face. "And me."
"What did you dream about?"
"Fur. Long canines. Dipping my fingers in war-paint, carrying a sword." His eyes are wide open, reflecting the sky outside as he seems to stare into a distant past that might have been. "Wiping blood off the sword. The woods - like nothing you've ever seen before, going on forever, and I just knew they were mine."
Jeremy squeezes his hand.
”More than that. Not always this royal, medieval shit. I've got some other stuff knocking around, too. Other time periods, other places… I always see Gavin, for some reason.” Then Michael's voice is quiet. "The rest of you are rarer. Especially you. I think Geoff saw you at one point. I remember him after he decided to get you in with us, saying something like how he just knew you were the right one. I don't know."
"It's okay," Jeremy says, only half-sincere, but mostly too taken aback by the sense of intimacy he feels when Michael smiles at him to really care. "I remember your cape, fur collar, and you were arriving to this castle with the rest of them-"
Michael shuts him up with a gentle kiss.
Ryan is sitting at the breakfast table with a clean plate and the day's first diet coke. Jeremy sits down opposite from him, knowing that they have about five minutes before Gavin has his hair fixed up and Jack comes back down for toast.
"So how insane do I sound if I say I believe you?" Jeremy asks.
"What convinced you?"
"Michael."
"Ah. I can see the hickey."
"Shut up." Jeremy's tone is joking, but he reflexively covers up the side his neck.
Ryan takes a long, long sip of coke.
One by one, the crew gathers. The conversation flows, steam rises as the kettle boils. When Jeremy looks around he sees all the small actions fit together like pieces of carved wood in one of those riddle-boxes with tabs and extra locks. Geoff pours his own cup of coffee and one that is made just as Jack likes it. Gavin is on his first can of Red Bull and will crash later in the day at which point Michael will be there to pick up the slack. Ryan will grow gloomy when the conversation turns to business, but Jeremy will find a way to make him pick up again – he checked the news for funny stories just this morning – or Geoff will find a job that they can do together and thus remind Ryan that yes, he belongs. They’ll all go into the city knowing that there’s a sniper somewhere in the shadows who will be inclined to give a helping headshot should the need arise. Chamomile tea, TV on mute, a map of Los Santos spread like a tablecloth.
Everything is as it should be, and could be no other way.
There’s a rush after breakfast where everyone settles into their role for the day, figures out who does what in which order, divides cars and spoils and responsibilities. There’s a lot of movement in and out of doors, up and down stairs. Gavin crashes into Geoff and only narrowly avoids falling flat on his face. Geoff knows exactly how to reach out and grab him before he loses his balance completely. (Sometimes, he doesn’t catch Gavin anyway, just for laughs).
Gavin knows that he isn’t the most graceful of them all. He takes the good-natured teasing in stride, but some part of him always feels like it isn’t fair. Every once in a while – when he falls really spectacularly, like down the stairs or from a car or something – the fall gets worse because he can’t stabilize himself. He just keeps flailing. After analyzing these mistakes, Gavin has come to the conclusion that his body instinctively tries to compensate for the loss of balance using weight that simply is not there. The way he angles his torso and throws himself back would only help him to avoid falling if he had a great weight just below his shoulders.
(He once paused in the middle of a robbery to stare at a renaissance painting of angles descending from heaven. Jack stopped with him, and he had asked her a question.
”What do you think it would be like if humans had wings?”)
In the early afternoon, Jeremy has the important, but boring job of scouting out the docks. A monolithic, grey and closed-off warehouse casts a long shadow on the brackwater, turning the greenish hues blacker. Even though the building is practically falling apart, Jeremy feels as attached to it as if he had built it himself. It is forgotten at the edge of the city, the perfect hiding place for all manner of guns and drugs and stolen goods.
He sits in the car, baking in the sun, keeping an eye out for any sign of police activity or suspicious loitering. If any enemy gangs have tagged a wall or broken a window trying to get in. There’s usually nothing. Their secrets are safe. Jeremy would usually relegate the task to someone lower in the hierarchy – he could bribe Matt with $10 worth of junk food – but today he had wanted to be alone and think things over.
He had had to call that off when Geoff unexpectedly invited himself along.
Now he is there, in the passenger’s seat working on a trucker’s tan, smiling at Jeremy when he thinks Jeremy isn’t looking. The rear-view mirror, however, reveals all.
They've been sitting quiet for about ten minutes before Geoff speaks up.
”I know you know. About this whole past-lives thing half the crew's enamoured with. I just wanted to tell you that’s all fine.”
”Oh,” Jeremy says. ”This is about that stuff.”
”I didn’t tell you at first. Just didn’t want you to think you had joined… a cult or something.” Geoff shrugs his shoulders. ”It’s all the same as ever, alright? There’s just another… layer to the whole thing.”
”It does make more sense now,” Jeremy admits. ”Like Michael and Gavin’s freakish bond and the way you all trust Ryan so much. The way I trusted him, too.”
Geoff looks out the window, the sun reflected as sharp splinters of light on the waves.
Jeremy takes a deep breath and asks, ”What do you remember about me?”
”I remembered your face.” With his own face turned just enough that the sun still shines on his profile, Geoff meets Jeremy’s eyes. There’s a mischievous glow on his expression. ”I remember a lot, actually. Not just the fantasy-novel shit. I remember you chopping down zombies with an ax.”
Jeremy restrains himself from laughing. ”What? Seriously?”
”I’m sure that happened somewhere, sometime. But what do I know.”
”C’mon. What else?”
”Mostly just a sense of relief seeing you come up a hill. That’s kind of nondescript, but with the sun on your face – you looked so good. Bloodstains all the way to your elbows, but damn.”
”When I saw you, all I could think what that I had missed you.”
”Makes sense now, don’t it?”
Jeremy is inclined to agree. They can smell the rusted steel in the air. The water beats against the concrete steadily, like it hopes to one day erode it all away.
In the evening, Geoff mulls over Jeremy’s dreams on the way to a bar. Unlike Gavin, who goes to real upscale places just because he can, Geoff is fine with the small and seedy hangouts he’s always known. Some nights he’s an incognito drifter, other times – like now – he likes to be seen for who he is. His status is not only marked by gold at his wrist or his chosen coat; it is also a matter of attitude.
Now, there’s a poor bloke beside him getting drunk on liquor from the lower shelf. The guy reeks of alcohol already, and sweat stains the underside of his sleeves.
Geoff wants to enjoy his drink, including the gentle aroma. He gives his best glare and says, ”Hey.”
The man looks up with a glassy-eyed stare. ”Wha’?”
”Could I get you to go sit somewhere else?”
The bartender draws closer, idly drawing a rag across the desk. This is the point where a rational individual would realize things are going badly.
The man keeps staring, shaking his head drowsily. He reminds Geoff of a goldfish.
”Listen. Do you know who I am?” Geoff asks.
”…No?”
He takes a swig of his whiskey and, with the liquor burning his throat, says, ”I’m someone you don’t fuck with.”
”-He’s right,” the bartender cuts in. ”Move.”
”Yeah, move! That’s an order!” Geoff declares.
And the guy slinks away into the shadows. Even the bartender steps further away after filling Geoff’s glass on the house. His fear is palpable, but mixed with the even more important respect and borderline awe.
”Right. I’m Geoff fuckin’ Ramsey,” Geoff says, rolling the r’s with tipsy joy. He turns to the bartender – ”You look like you’ve got somethin’ to say.”
”Nothing,” comes the answer. The rag continues it circular movements across the counter. ”Just something in your voice. You can sound like something straight outta hell, boss.”
Geoff shrugs, finishing his drink. ”Heh. Maybe.”
He’ll never show how much of his courage is the liquid kind. The intimidation comes naturally enough that he only rarely have to go through with his threats.
He relishes in the dry, hot feeling spreading through his body and the contrast this provides to the icy chill of the evening when he leaves. He watches his reflection in the display windows of shut stores. Stalking the street in a black coat, he can see what the bartender was getting at.
Hadn’t Ryan once dreamt about him with a pair of curved horns?
It’s not always dreams. Sometimes, stray memories manifest themselves in other ways.
The following day Ryan ends up in a firefight with the police, providing backup for Gavin who called squawking and panicked, asking for help. It’s Gavin’s fault sice he set up the bomb for an experiment, but he doesn’t deserve to take a bullet for it.
The bullet buries itself in his left thigh anyway, and the moment it happens, Gavin makes a choked noise in the back of his throat. He grabs onto Ryan’s sleeve. Blood drips from his fingers.
As Ryan carries Gavin to the car and from the car up the stairs, as he lays him on the kitchen table and calls Kdin to come patch him up – as he does his best applying pressure to the veins that protrude eerily – as he hears the rest of the crew panic and emerge from back rooms –
Ryan remembers the sight and smell of Gavin’s blood. He knows what Gavin sounds like when he dies.
And it isn’t this.
The realization lets a sense of calm take over.
He knows how it feels when Gavin dies. How his heart will beat like it's about to burst in his chest, his vision becoming clouded and blurred and marred by black spots. This does not happen.
Ryan focuses on Kdin’s instructions, applying bandages and the sound of Gavin swearing, combining British and American oaths into one flowing curse.
Once upon a time, Ryan killed Gavin. Struck a sword straight through him. It was a different time, and they were at war, and Gavin was a little different, too. Broken somehow by years that are painted only in broad strokes in Ryan’s memories, all ruined water-colours and emotions he can’t quite describe. Gavin did not look him in the eye, then. This memory is as clear to Ryan as any from this life.
He also remembers better times – though the term is relative. Pleasant deaths, huddled together in a warm corner as the rest of the world as their bodies grow steadily colder, last breaths spent on sweet words like I love you. And the times where death never came at all. Gavin on crutches – but where? In some universe where Ryan wore a kilt all the time and Gavin’s scarf was measured in yards…
Kdin pushes him away. Relegated to a corner of the kitchen, Ryan watches the proceedings. There’s a hand on his shoulder, and without looking he knows that it belongs to Michael.
”He’s not dying today,” Ryan says confidently. The problem is that it mostly sounds like ”He isn’t dying yet.”
Michael watches Gavin’s surgery without ever looking away. He has confessed before that guts don’t bother him much.
(”Maybe,” he said, ”I’ve been a surgeon myself in a previous life.”)
Michael pulls Gavin closer and lets his hand roam from a bony shoulder down the curve of his lover’s side.
”You OK, boy?” he asks.
”I’m fine.” There’s no more than an inch between their faces, Gavin’s breath hot on Michael’s cheek.
He’s all curled up and pressed against Michael’s body, not just because of the small bed they share. Michael knows that this isn’t how fine looks or feels.
There’s still a little dried blood on Gavin’s hands – they are motionless now, folded between his and Michael’s chests, but usually they are always moving. Gavin’s memories seem tactile, tangible, when he explains them. He remembers how it feels to turn the warm metal of a compass over in your hand, and he can describe in detail how a bow is drawn though he has never held one as far as Michael is aware. He doesn't know what different types of surgical tools are called, but if he takes a scalpel from Kdin's bag and holds it in his hand, he'll know what it's for.
”Did you think you were going to die?” Michael asks.
Gavin’s eyelashes flutter, and the green flecks in his irises have faded to a soft grey in the low light in the bedroom. Michael can almost hear his pulse, a steady, slow beat. It says that he is safe here.
”Did you?” he repeats.
Gavin nods.
”You know it doesn’t matter, right?”
”I remember.”
Michael smiles and lets his hand dip underneath Gavin’s t-shirt, finding suntanned skin and old scars in equal measure. ”I’ll always, always find you. I'll have to put up with you again and again. Everywhere.”
”The two of us,” Gavin says.
They lie together the way they’ve lain together in dreams a hundred times. When Michael cups Gavin’s cheek he remembers doing it to a much younger man dressed in green, carrying a bow; he remembers all the ambiance of a busy hospital and Gavin with bloodied hands and this grin that was just the same that morning. He remembers Gavin telling him that he was sure they had had a life in a ruined world, holding dirty, oil-stained guns, hiding in broken buildings. And Michael knows he has felt Gavin patch him up before, rough hands, first-aid kit scattered on the floor…
Their first kiss had not felt like the first. Gavin just knew how to angle his face and meet Michael’s lips.
Now, with his arms wrapped around Michael, Gavin fades into restful sleep.
Michael, for once, does not remember the past, but instead feels that he receives a premonition. When Gavin dies, it won’t feel as if it’s a final loss. Instead it’ll feel like an echo of that first time, wherever it was, whenever it was. They’ll both know that it won’t be a goodbye but see you later, and that’s something.
”See you later,” Jeremy says, shutting the door to the apartment behind him. He can still hear the muffled sound of a TV, of a friendly argument, of the kettle.
He takes the stairs slowly, one step at a time. No need to rush.
In the end, all he can do is live in the here and now, he tells himself, not a million hypothetical lives that rattle around in his head.
Jeremy does his job.
He does it well, with a calm and loved man’s steady hands, with a hurt man’s quick reflexes and heightened senses, with a hopeful man’s haste.
Then he drives. He makes his way through streets that he's pleased to think of as his. Past shadowy alleys where his name has weight, past parked police-cars that only make him a little nervous. Then out into the hills around town, on roads that'll take him to distant airfields and hideouts and lonely deserts if he lets them. He makes a turn that takes him to the top of the hill with the Vinewood sign instead, and there, he waits. He pulls his cowboy hat down in the front and settles in.
Eventually, Ryan arrives on a motorcycle with a trail of dust chasing him up the gravel road.
After a few minutes of making sure that there are no even helicopters or stray hikers near, Ryan removes his mask. He withdraws the crown from his backpack and settles down next to Jeremy on a boulder where there's an incredible view of the city all the way to the sea. The sun is sinking into the waves, and soon night will sweep across their kingdom. Street by street, lights turn on. Without either of them saying a word, Jeremy takes off his hat and lays it on his lap. Golden light is reflected in golden metal.
Ryan places the crown on Jeremy’s head.
Then they laugh together, barely audible above the wind rushing through the palm leaves. The whole situation looks a little silly, after all.