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weepylucifer · 4 years

Text

Let’s Go in the Garden - Ch. 5

Interlude: Thomas

(reader beware: mature content)

It was strange to say the least to have David here again after all these years. (All these years and not a bit of change.) Sometimes Thomas felt that he was hallucinating it (losing his mind at last) or dreaming. But then again, that couldn’t be the case. If this were a hallucination or a dream, things would be easier. They would be happier.

They would be happy.

Thomas had never liked to think - or hallucinate or dream - about how things with David had soured, towards the end. It had been easy to remember the good things exclusively, the companionship, the tenderness, the comfort and thrill and love. David had stayed a joyful memory, despite the tragedy of his (supposed) passing, somehow still an oasis in a desert of grief. Perhaps this had been idealization. It is easy to idealize a dead loved one. It is less easy to keep up that pretense in said loved one’s bodily, live presence.

It was strange, yes. How often had he wished in vain that someone, anyone would come back, just one of them, it didn’t even matter who? Just one other occupied room. Just one person to turn to, when things got rough. Just one person who would understand. Now someone had come back. And not just anyone. David, within reach again, to see, to speak to... to touch. But whenever his hands started reaching out, there was that memory again.

“Well, I just almost got myself and half the men shot for mutiny.”

“Shot for...? Thomas, what on earth did you do?”

“I retracted my opposition. Not willingly, mind you. I am to supervise the rearguard. You, Lieutenant, with your expertise, will most likely be part of the task force that’ll retrieve the actual library.”

“They split us up?! Thomas... do you think they know?”

“What is there to know?”

“Songbird, please...”

“You got what you wanted, Davey. You won. Operation Spatchcock is a go.”

And yet, still, despite all that, he could only ever curtail, never stop, the urge to reach and touch.

It was David, after all. David with that beautiful hair so good for tugging, with his eyes as clear as always, with those sweet, sweet lips. Those capable hands. It was David whose body Thomas knew. Touching would feel like coming home. Touching might piece something back together inside him, something that remained by itself, broken and abandoned and forgotten, for decades and decades.

And there was something scary in that thought. That David might break him open and unearth that hidden something. That there would have to be a breaking. Thomas could not afford to break another time.

So he left David to sit at the dinner table and stare holes into his plate by himself, went and fetched Peter’s finished Latin homework and attempted to peruse it in the drawing room. Peter’s Latin was coming along, at a sedate pace but nonetheless, but today it was abysmal. Clearly he’d had other things on his mind. And who could fault him? After puzzling through the first paragraph of it, Thomas crossed the room to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a glass of Scotch. The bottle was almost (but not quite) as old as he was, and had been nearly emptied slowly, over the decades, a glass or two every other year, because Thomas wasn’t a man who drunk to excess.

He found he couldn’t concentrate on the paper before him as well as he would have liked. Scraps of old, old conversations kept reverberating within his mind, loud today, understandable under the circumstances.

“You’re being paranoid, songbird. I understand, but... I am certain Folly command wouldn’t muster every last wizard of serviceable age just to send them off to die. It will be a tough mission, I’ve no doubt of that. But I’m convinced that we’ll come out on top.”

“Bullshit. It’s hundreds of miles behind the front, David. We’ll be cut off from any reinforcements. Nowhere to fall back to. According to intelligence, the place is a death trap.”

“And who do you know in intelligence? How would you have gotten an intelligence officer to relinquish that information, hm?”

“This is hardly the time. I don’t need to blow intelligence officers to see what’s bloody obvious. You think command cares if we make it through this one? It’s high time you got that pretty head out of your stack of books and faced reality. They’re willing to bet all our lives on this bloody suicide run on the off-chance that someone makes it home with that library.”

“There is considerable empirical value to that library.”

“Oh? That’s what it’s about, eh, for you? You honestly believe that I am going to stand here and let them slaughter my men for ‘considerable empirical value’. My men, David! I’ve got them this far! I’m not throwing them into the meat grinder for your fucking research.”

“Would you prefer seeing said research in the hands of the Nazis? God only knows what they’re doing with it!”

“I would see it in the hands of no one. Chuck a few bombs at the place and bury all of it. Damn you and damn your revenge and damn your research.”

Thomas sighed and poured another glass of Scotch.

Just then, the reason for his discomposure entered the room and sat down in a chair by the fireplace, his back straight, his face resolute, determined. Like he was going to make it work. It irked Thomas, and he didn’t know why, that David wanted to get to the fixing of things. There wouldn’t have been anything to fix if David hadn’t been so stupid as to advocate for the Ettersberg mission.

“May I?” David asked, reaching for the bottle.

“Get your own.” Waspish. Juvenile. Why couldn’t he stop acting like this? Why didn’t he feel like even wanting to try? Thomas lifted a hand to his temples. His eyes stung. He’d been getting very little sleep lately; the return of David shook loose memories, and the night terrors had come back.

David’s face looked soft in the firelight. almost like before the war, when it had been a little fuller. If Molly kept making pies at the rate she was going, he’d soon get back to normal. Thomas clenched his hands in his lap, and it was as if they were sending him little impulses: touch him, hold him, have him. But spurn him, sang his blood, don’t let him near.

It was easier when... he didn’t finish that thought. Didn’t say it out loud either, because that would have been the height of cruelty. It was a lie, anyway. It had not been easier when David had, for all intents and purposes, been dead. It had been... differently complicated.

Thomas went to pour a third glass of Scotch, reconsidered and took the last slug directly from the bottle. It got David’s attention, so he flicked his tongue against the rim of it, just for a split-second, just briefly enough to have plausible deniability. Back in the day, he would have winked. He didn’t now. Tease him, ignore him. Reel him back in, push him away. His heart was loud and clamorous and contradictory tonight. It was like being fifteen again, or no, scratch that, it hadn’t been... he hadn’t been nearly as complicated at fifteen. He’d only known that he found the boy who tutored him and sometimes came to watch the rugby exceedingly pretty, so he had brought him wildflowers plucked from the wayside, and cakes nicked from the kitchens, and helped carry his books and quizzed him for tests and took him along for nightly excursions and eventually asked to kiss him behind the shed for the cricket equipment.

For practice, he’d said. An experiment, David had said. It doesn’t have to mean anything, they’d both agreed. But then they’d actually managed, somehow, to bump their lips together, and Thomas had been thinking, oh, and yes and so good and I’m never doing anything else but this. And eventually they’d had to admit to each other that the experiment only ever yielded a need for repetition, and they weren’t practicing for anything. Neither of them actually desired a girlfriend like most of the other boys at Casterbrook. They desired each other, and kissing behind the shed for the cricket equipment, forever.

Oh yes, he had known at fifteen, at eighteen, at twenty that what they were doing could have seen them ruined, jailed, ousted from society. It had been a thrill to his young mind, a scandalous secret, an adventure. The glamour had worn off of it as they grew older, as their schoolmates were settling down with wives and children and summer houses in the country and Thomas and David were still sneaking around like teenagers, and ducking behind tiring pretenses and stupid rumours and Molly’s skirts for their safety. But that had just been what their relationship had naturally been like, a mundane fact of life, like taxes. And then there’d been the men with the pink triangles. The stark and final reminder that nothing about having to exist thus in secret was thrilling or mundane, that the people around them genuinely wanted them dead.

But everything had gone to hell in a handbasket by then anyway.

Thomas set the empty bottle down, and it hit the table a bit harder than intended. His hand-eye-coordination was already slightly off. Besides that, his face was starting to warm, in a way that told him that it was about time to retire from drinking any more before things seriously went south. But he didn’t want to listen to the voice of reason tonight. He wanted to listen to the voice that said, perhaps another glass.

So he traversed the room again and unearthed another bottle from the liquor cabinet. Walking straight wasn’t a problem - yet. Thomas wasn’t, usually, a man who drank to excess. But exceptions must be.

He had just poured the third glass when David asked, “What were you reading?”

Thomas gestured vaguely at the papers still spread out on the coffee table. “Tacitus. It’s Peter’s homework.”

“Oh,” David said. “Can I help you revise it? You seem tired, and I always had a hand for--”

“No,” Thomas cut in and poured the contents of his glass down his throat in one quick, decisive movement. “I told you before, and I was very serious: I won’t have you interfere with Peter’s studies.”

David sniffed. “But I am allowed to talk to him, aren’t I.”

“I suppose. I’m thinking about it.” Thomas looked from his glass back to David, meaning to give him a stern glare, but his eyes ended up roving, caught on the lines of David’s face, slightly unfocused. Here he was, back here, to touch. They’d kissed earlier, down in the lab, and maybe Thomas had hoped that after that, things would appear easier, clearer, somehow. But nothing was easier. He’d hoped, in secret, not even going so far as to articulate this to himself, that a kiss would put them back on an even keel, erase the clamour in his heart, restore tranquility to him. But nothing was tranquil. In fact, he hadn’t desired like this in a long time. He’d gotten one kiss, nowhere near enough to slake this suddenly recurring need.

“Come to bed with me,” he suggested.

“What?” David exclaimed with an incredulous little laugh. “You don’t trust me to go over your apprentice’s Latin homework, but you’d take me to bed?”

“Yes.” It really didn’t seem too extraordinary a stance to take. Peter’s studies were meaningful in the greater scheme of things. Sex wasn’t. “Personal is not necessarily the same as important.”

David shook his head. “I never could agree with you on that.”

To keep his hands and mouth occupied, Thomas poured himself another glass of Scotch, and downed it quickly. He was beginning to lose count of how many glasses deep he was. But that hardly mattered, because it made his lips tingle and it burned on the way down and the reasons why he didn’t want to touch David now were swimming out of focus.

“I had hoped it would be different,” David said, “our first time back home.”

Thomas couldn’t help it, he had to laugh. Our first time back home. “Davey,” he said, and it came out rougher than intended, “you’ve hoped for many things.”

“That’s true,” David murmured. “I suppose you were right, back then. It really was high time I faced reality.”

And this... was wrong, that David should suddenly talk like this. He’d much rather have naively optimistic David with his head stuck in a textbook than this broken, humbled version. Reach, touch, Thomas’s heart whispered, and it was easy to forget why it was a bad idea. Thomas reached, put a hand on David’s cheek, ran the pad of his thumb across David’s sweet mouth. David shivered, lips opening in a gentle gasp. It felt familiar in a way Thomas had forgotten things could feel. Like reaching back across the decades, and it was a miracle that his fingers remembered, even ever so slightly, what it was like to touch David’s face.

Suddenly, something dark clawed at his chest, something frenzied, almost like panic, because how could this be, this ghost of a sensation, remembered from all these years back, how could it be that this was real, brought to life again? Suddenly he feared that if he closed his eyes, and opened them again, David might have disappeared.

There was but one thing for it. Closer. More. Now their bodies were flush against each other, their lips crashing together, greedy, desperate, ungentle. Thomas fisted a hand in David’s hair - David whimpered so prettily against his lips - the other hand pulling up his shirt to get at the skin beneath, warm, living skin. The planes of David’s body pressed against his front, so familiar. His head spun, and fear threatened to drown him, choke him, so he sought salvation in David’s mouth, licking inside, kissing him frantically. Oh, he had been starved of this, and one kiss was not enough, so he kissed him another time, and another, and another.

“Mh... Thomas...” David disengaged, shifting back a little in his seat, a hand coming up to cup Thomas’s face. He sucked the index and middle finger into his mouth without hesitation.

“Thomas... shsh... you’re, this is not... you’re shaking, please stop, just a moment.”

David‘s other hand came to rest on Thomas’s shoulder, maintaining an arm’s length of distance between them, and it irritated Thomas, being so pushed away. Was he shaking? Maybe. But what did that matter? He could figure that out later, or never. He put a hand on David’s thigh and leaned forward against the hand gripping his shoulder, trying to chase David’s lips. “Now you’re complaining, Davey?”

“No, but...” David got up. Thomas, attempting to follow him, swayed into him, and steadied himself by in turn holding onto David’s shoulders. Whoops. Hopefully that looked like he’d meant to do that.

“See, you’ve been drinking,” David said. “It’s not right. Let’s just get you to your bed, okay, and I’ll get to mine.”

“Or...” Thomas flicked David’s chest with his index finger to stress his point, “we’ll both go to my bed and stay there and see what develops.”

David shook his head softly. “Another time.”

“What makes you think I’ll offer another time?”

“We love each other.” David’s voice was steady, his gaze clear and firm, and it rubbed something raw within Thomas, something that did not like being so exposed at all. “That is the one thing I am still sure about, even in this new world, even after the war, even after... that place. We will figure things out, but not tonight.”

Thomas laughed, a bitter, mirthless bark of a sound. Because he’d been impossible to David ever since he had returned, he hadn’t been able to contain any of the ugly slurry of his feelings, and he hadn’t been able to afford David even the slightest shred of courtesy, and yet here David was, talking about how they would definitely figure things out. “What if we don’t figure things out?” he asked, breaking contact, disentangling his limbs from David’s. “What if I don’t want to? What if I won’t want to figure things out with the man who led us all to go to Ettersberg?”

David bowed his head, his eyes now hooded, dark. “I’d understand that.” He took a step back, in the direction of the door. “Do you want to break up?”

It was a genuine offer. David was offering.

Do you want to break up?

Had he taken another step back? He was so far away. So, so far away. It was too dark in the reading room and he was slipping away, away into the past again, no longer in reach to touch, and maybe it was really just the darkness of the reading room, maybe it was Thomas’s vision going black around the edges, and he trembled, and he ached,

and he was close again somehow, hands clawed into David’s sweater, his head buried in David’s shoulder, breathing in his scent in horrid, flat, hitching gasps.

“No,” he muttered, when he had the air for it. “No. No, no.”

“Songbird.” David sounded saddened, startled. The nuances of David’s voice, suddenly again familiar. There was a hand down his back, a hand in his hair stroking along the hairline, fingernails lightly scratching his scalp in a way he’d forgotten he found comforting. David hadn’t forgotten. “Oh... Thomas. You’re not okay.”

It ought to have been ridiculous, you’re not okay. As much was evident. But he couldn’t recall ever hearing it said, and it did something to him, and he held on to David’s shoulder like it was the only anchor in a sea of chaos, and he didn’t know how to ride this out, so he clung and waited and the tide tossed him about and did not recede.

“I forgot what you smelled like,” he heard himself say, detachedly. “The sheets in your room lost your scent eventually, and then all your clothes did because I wore them, and it almost broke me a second time, because I was losing more and more of you with each passing day and you weren’t coming back to renew anything. I forgot what it was like to touch you. The sound of your voice. The feel of your signare. The feel of your hand.”

“Eighty years,” David whispered. “I’m so sorry... I didn’t understand.”

No, Thomas wanted to say, no you damn well didn’t, but he couldn’t. All he could do was cling to David’s shoulder and be battered by this, wrenched open by his care. Walking wounded.

“But I’m here now,” David continued. “I will take care of things.”

Somehow, Thomas found his voice again. It sounded strange to his own ears. “What things? What will you take care of?”

David looked at him, so earnestly it hurt to observe. “Anything needs must,” he said. “You.”

“But I am not for taking care of,” Thomas said. He didn’t know why he said it. Except... here is my duty, mine, alone. Do not suggest you will relieve me. There was never any relief. There will never be any relief.

“Oh, songbird, but aren’t you?” David asked. “The others, they all went into the country and attempted to heal, or they are at rest forever. When did you rest?”

“I...” Thomas tried to gather his resolve, put the walls back into place that David was wearing down with all these questions, and he found he couldn’t. He felt... once, as a child, he had watched Mother dispel slugs from her rose garden by pouring salt on the creatures. He, then five years old, had burst into tears at the sight of the slugs squirming impotently to get away as they succumbed to the fatal substance, and he’d tried to wrestle the jar of salt from his mother’s hand when tears wouldn’t stop her, and received a thorough scolding for it. He felt like one of those slugs now: soft and unwitting and utterly defenseless before an almighty fate. Tomorrow, the walls would be back in place. Tomorrow he would be The Nightingale again, unapproachable and aloof. But not tonight. Tonight he was soft and lonesome and powerless and there was nothing but the dark of the reading room, the alcohol making swirls in his head, and his boyfriend, sweetly returned from the dead.

“I... don’t,” he said. “I didn’t.”

“That’s not right,” David said. His hand was still in Thomas’s hair, stroking in a way that was infinitely soothing, blunt fingernails against his scalp. “That shouldn’t have been asked of you.”

Well, life doesn’t care about shouldn’t, Thomas wanted to say, it simply was asked of me, even when I was in so deep I could barely lift my head they were asking it of me, and not least because you weren’t there, because you ran away, but what he ended up saying, murmuring into David’s jumper rather, was “They needed me.”

David snorted. “Command? You never--”

Thomas shook his head. “The lads did.”

“Ah, yes. Your ducklings.” The smile was audible in David’s voice.

It had been a joke between them, Nightingale’s Ducklings. The younger and younger recruits they had kept sending down from London in the latter years of the war. Fresh-faced youths, barely of age, looking like they’d been playing dress-up in their uniforms. Some of them scared, some of them vigorous and over-eager to prove themselves to the more seasoned veterans, most of them now dead. Thomas had tried, whenever possible, to do his utmost to protect the boys, but tossed up against a place like Ettersberg, there had been no protecting anybody.

“And how are the chaps anyway? I’m assuming you’re still in contact with them all?” David chuckled. “Oh goodness, they must be old men by now!”

“I’d like to go to bed now,” Thomas said.

“Hm? Oh of course, of course.” Getting what he wanted, David was quickly distracted from his previous line of inquiry. I do know him so very well, Thomas thought disjointedly as David wrapped an arm around his waist. On autopilot - even still! - Thomas slung his arm across David’s shoulders in return. They’d done this on unnumbered pub crawls, then later on similarly unnumbered battlefields. “There we go, ay-up, Captain.”

“I can walk,” Thomas protested, even as his head dropped back onto David’s shoulder. Really, he wasn’t that inebriated. Slightly tipsy, that was all.

“In a straight line?” David questioned.

“That won’t be a problem.”

David sighed airily and nosed into his hair. “Let me have this, Thomas.”

----

Thomas tried again, when he had David in his bedroom kneeling before him (between his legs) at the foot of the bed, as David took his hand and unbuttoned his cuff and pressed one chaste kiss to his wrist. It made Thomas shudder, being so kissed, and seconds later he was reaching almost blindly for David’s face again, tugging him up, crashing their mouths together, wanting David’s lips on his, wanting David’s lips all sorts of places. But David broke the kiss and smiled at him, a smile full of such love as he didn’t deserve, and didn’t budge, even when Thomas slipped his right shoe off and ran his foot along David’s inseam.

David gasped, and twitched a little, but he said, “No, songbird. Another time.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Thomas said, which he hadn’t meant to, in a strange, rough voice that sounded much more 1940s than 2010s. Why on earth had he said that? Tomorrow he would remember all the very good reasons for not recommitting to anything where David was concerned. But tonight he was wanting, nothing else.

“I hope so,” David replied as he got up and smiled sadly, because oh, he knew those reasons too. He bent down one last time and ran his thumb across Thomas’s cheekbone, and kissed him again, a soft, small peck, a kiss goodnight. “Sleep well.”

And he went back to his own room.

So bereft of company and the warmth of David’s body, Thomas groaned and pressed the heel of his hand into his crotch. Somewhere along the way wanting had become needing, and now he was alone with it. As always, alone with it.

For a split-second he considered going and getting his entertainment elsewhere. Peter was in tonight, some few rooms over, perhaps this would be the night he finally tried to... but no, that thought was, as always, firmly tamped down, because Peter’s pregnant girlfriend was a woman of formidable power, and besides, there was never any use to any attempts upon the tragically heterosexual. He hadn’t considered Peter in such a manner at all lately, what with David around again, so perhaps this was one of these rare problems that solved themselves.

His pool of potential applicants already depleted, Thomas took himself in hand. He hadn’t felt the need to do this in a while, and didn’t expect to last any time at all. As if a tightly locked floodgate had been opened, his mind conjured up images of David, things he hadn’t let himself think about in decades and decades lest the grief make him lose his mind for good. But the memories were no longer tinged with grief now, because David was back, and his mind delighted in recalling again the lines and dips and curves of David’s body and being able to do so freely, without the crushing sadness of permanent loss.

David before the war, softer then, solid, (he still was too thin now) no shell-shock dulling the light in his eyes. The sensation of tracing the dip of David’s hips through the soft fabric of one of his jumpers, the hard line of him in his slacks, backing him up against a bookshelf in the mundane library (so risqué but oh, so thrilling) and listening to his breath deepen, sticking a hand down his pants, being greeted with the velvet heat of David’s cock, watching David’s face pinch and, eventually, release, going from biting his lips raw and red in an effort to not be overheard to slack-mouthed pleasure. David’s mouth just now, so pink and slick from their kissing, David kneeling between his legs and where that might have gone, in another, ideal world. While Thomas very much loved giving oral, he knew with David the receiving was just as sweet. He imagined them taking a night and just alternating sucking each other off until they collapsed in bone-deep, delicious exhaustion into dreamless sleep, and he felt his hips cant upwards into his fist with renewed need, and gripped himself just this side of too tight. Yes, god, he thought, my David.

At about this point Thomas noticed himself crying, a clear stream of tears down his cheeks, but they felt cathartic, so he left them. His heart was light. He had done this once or twice just after the war, brought memories of David to the forefront of his mind for this express purpose, simply exhausting any possibility of chasing a few seconds of relief from it all. The resulting crash and burn and slew of self-disgust when he’d inevitably remembered his boyfriend (supposedly) blowing his brains out in this very building had never been pretty. (He’d considered turning to drinking to excess then for a bit, until Molly had put her foot down regarding that.) Tonight he knew there would be no crashing and burning, because David was just down the hall, hale and whole and sleeping the sleep of the less-than-innocent.

He had flagged a bit, with the crying, so Thomas sped up his hand and remembered that week they’d spent at David’s father’s hunting lodge, the two of them alone in the empty countryside, free to share the bed in the master bedroom, free to wake next to each other and make early-morning love unhurriedly, free to prepare breakfast in the nude and take it back to bed. They’d been younger then, and made love almost unflaggingly, pausing intermittently to eat and generally observe life’s basic needs, only for this moment or that to start another round, and before they’d known it they’d come together again, fevered with need for each other, drunk on all this unobserved alone time.

My Folly now, Thomas thought disjointedly, we can do it in every room we never used to dare to, and he released another moan as he felt himself cresting, and the back of his head hit the headboard with a thunk as he came, came and came with the force of his lonely years, eking the moment out and stroking himself to overstimulation, until his hips twitched and his whole body shook with the pleasure-pain of it. And if he fell asleep in the wet patch before he could gather the resolve to get up and fully undress, half in déshabillé with himself still in hand, it certainly was undignified, but there was no one there to witness it.

#david mellenby lives AU #rivers of london #we change the pov character!!#there will be interlude: david also at some point and probably more than once #bc i want him to go off on his own a couple times #um idk what the f i did with the ending there #that was last night. it just kinda happened i'm still baffled by it

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