bubosquared | (no subject)

Sixtuple drabble, longest bit yet. Follows Time, and has sex. Well, the boys have sex in it -- sort of. You know what I mean. The title keeps with my alphabetical order, too.

war

It's the worst battle yet, and losses are heavy on both sides. Derrick, Crabbe, Cho Chang, Katie Bell, the list goes on. Marcus holes himself up in his office for two days, going over plans and tactics and trying to see where he went wrong. Eventually, he falls asleep on his desk, waking up with Lee standing over him.

"Go to bed."

"I can't. I ..." gesturing towards the maps. "Thrirty-seven deaths, Lee."

"It's a war, Marcus. People die."

"And I'm supposed to make sure they don't."

"It doesn't work that way. Go to bed. They won't come back to life just because you collapse of exhaustion. You'll get another chance. The war isn't over yet."

"Yeah, I guess," and he lets Lee pull him to his feet and walk him to his room.

He hasn't actually been in his room for weeks, and before that even just to change clothes. He sits down heavily on the bed, and looks at Lee.

"Do you think we're safe here?"

Lee shrugs. "It's a war. The one certainty in war is that in an hour, maybe two, you either still be alive or you'll be dead. That goes for the people outside, but for us as well."

He doesn't know what to say at that, so he says nothing, but simply gets up and searches for the bottle of whiskey he vaguely remembers putting in the back of his night stand, months ago. He manages to find it, and two glasses, and holds up the bottle at Lee. "You want?"

"Sure." So Marcus pours them both a triple shot, freezes water from the tap with his wand, adds ice cubes, and hands Lee one of the glasses. It's a comforting ritual.

They sit down on the bed, side by side, almost touching.

"How did you do it? Go out there every day and ..."

"Kill or be killed?"

"Yeah."

Lee shrugs. "You do what you have to do to survive, I guess. You've done it yourself.

Marcus's jaw clenches. "That was different, though."

"Because he used to be your friend?"

He grins, a little bitter. "Bole didn't have any friends. He was a bastard even at school. Ter ... Ter used to make me sleep in the bed between his and Bole's, because I was the only one who wasn't terrified of that fucking psycho." He stops, a little abruptly, and looks down at his drink.

"He knew," Lee says. "Bole, I mean. He knew about ... about what we did, at school. Said that since I kept going back for more, I should enjoy ... him."

"Well. He's got a point," wincing, because that came out all wrong, but Lee seems to know what he meant anyway.

"There's a difference between rough and rape, Marcus."

"Is there?"

Lee's answer is to crush his lips against Marcus's, and mutter something that sounds vaguely affirmative. Marcus wants to say something, ask something, slow down, but Lee is insistent, and in the end Marcus just gives in. Lee is familiar in a way Marcus feels he shouldn't be, like putting on his old school robes. Familiar, but out of place, out of time. Familiar like a memory, except this isn't then, it's now, and it's real.

So Marcus concentrates on the now, on the differences. He memorises the scars on Lee's body, the way Lee's hands feel on his back, the raspy, slightly beard burn-like feeling of running his hands over Lee's head. He tries to be gentle, careful, something, but Lee won't let him, and it's been so long, and it's over so quick.

Outside, the war goes on.

The one certainty in war is that in an hour, maybe two, you either still be alive or you'll be dead. -- Obviously, I could never come up with something like this on my own. The quote is from the pilot of the sadly cancelled Space: Above and Beyond, in which they are spoken by James Morisson as Lt-Col T.C. McQueen. As such, are property of Twentieth Century Fox, Hard Eight Productions, Glen Morgan and James Wong.

And that's that.