Solid As A... by Heliophile
Posting on behalf of heliophile_oxon...
Solid as a...
by Heliophile
“….‘s odd, innit?” Bodie mumbled around his latest mouthful. His mouth had been full for most of the last five minutes, and he hadn’t finished a coherent sentence since they’d left the sweet-shop with its row upon row of giant bottles, each one full of ever more irresistibly garish colours and labelled with increasingly improbable names. Lucky tatties, Irn Bru humbugs, soor plooms, for cryin’ out loud - what kind of a nation called its gobstoppers something like soor bloody plooms?
Ray glanced at his partner, expecting that - in his own good time, of course - some further clarification of this cryptic observation would be forthcoming, but Bodie merely continued to chew industriously, to all appearances content to let the matter rest. The uncharacteristically sun-drenched Royal Mile stretched out behind and rose before them, the Castle’s vast imposing bulk somewhere up there beyond that parade ground they called the Esplanade at the very top of the mount. It was hot, his lightest jacket was too heavy, and he couldn’t bloody take it off as long as he was carrying… Conscious of a rising prickle of irritation, Ray ruthlessly suppressed it - he’d wait it out, and the aggravating sod could do without him giving in and asking him what he was bloody on about. But the minutes went by, the unending stream of Festival tourists continued to eddy around them and get in the way like a flock of camera-carrying sheep - they didn’t have to wear jackets, but did they appreciate their luck? No, they just exclaimed over yet another bloody quaint shop front, yet another close, yet another sodding patch of cobbled street. And Bodie, immune to the heat and masticating blissfully, showed no signs of saying any more about it - and his mouth was full, anyway, so….
Sod it.
“What’s odd, you moron? How Marlowe got traced all the way up here, how we got lumbered with bringing him back or how you managed to tie your own laces this morning?”
Bodie smiled beatifically from around a generous mouthful of a hundred and ten percent refined sugar plus assorted undisclosed colourants.
“Well when you get it in Blackpool, right, or on the South coast, which is all chalk and limestone and - soft, you know, crumbly - it’s so hard it takes a sledgehammer to break a bit off. So you spend all day sucking it, which is all right I suppose. But up here -” Bodie gestured expansively, taking in the Mediaeval glories of the Royal Mile behind and before them, “which is basically one bloody great lump of granite, they do it all crumbly and - here, have one of the ginger bits, you’ll love ‘em.”
Doyle couldn’t help the grin that spread across his face. Surrounded by more history than you could shake a stick at, with the ghosts of Cowley’s ancestors more than likely glaring at them from beyond the ether and the spirits of whisky present just waiting to be discovered in every pub the length of every street, from tourist traps to dimly lit places with dirty windows and - Doyle hadn’t inspected too closely - probably bloodstains on the floor from last night’s chucking - out time - surrounded by all this, and what had Bodie found to exercise his intellect? Opening his mouth to refuse, he somehow found himself accepting a pale fawn lump of crumbling, gingery sweetness from Bodie’s fingers - cheeky bugger - their touch gone almost before he could register it, and he laughed round the awkward mouthful in wry acknowledgement of his partner’s tiny triumph over abstemiousness. As the taste bloomed across his tongue, Doyle felt for a second that this, and nothing but this, was the perfect match for the bright August sunshine, the eddying crowd of tourists and the light in Bodie’s eyes. Edinburgh rock.
-------------------
“Up the close and down the stair, but an’ ben with Burke an’ Hare…” Bodie’s would-be Scots accent was as lamentable as ever.
They were, in fact, not climbing but descending one of the tiny closes, with the buildings on either side so near one another that two people leaning out of the tiny upper windows could have shaken hands across the gap. Doyle took advantage of the straitened circumstance to walk even closer to Bodie than usual, their shoulders jostling slightly.
“But and ben?" Doyle glanced sideways. "Bet you don’t even know what but and ben means. You don’t, do you?”
Bodie smiled, unruffled.
“I know who Burke and Hare were, though. Reckon we’d ‘ve been after them then, wouldn’t we, back in the day? Dunno how they got away with it, selling bodies to a minister…”
Doyle burst out laughing. “’s’not the same Knox, you ignoramus! The one who bought the bodies was a doctor, they couldn’t get corpses to practise on. T’other one’s your minister. Probably hundreds of years apart, and -”
He caught a glimpse of Bodie’s eye, lit with mischief, and sighed explosively. Fallen for it again, hadn’t he. And him knowing perfectly well that Bodie liked to read odds and sods of history in his free time, in amongst the poetry - the bloodier the better; probably knew more about Burke and Hare - and Doctor Robert bloody Knox - than could fit in any number of those tourist guides to the Old Town that the nicer pubs were littered with this time of year, and which Bodie had laughed at over a pint at lunchtime. Bloody good pint, he had to admit - even if the barman had been as proud of it as if nobody outside Scotland even knew how to make beer.
They emerged into the sunshine at the bottom of the close, dazzled by the explosion of colour on Cockburn Street where, it seemed, most of the shops had embraced the décor and aesthetic of the Mysterious East with a vengeance. You could hardly breathe for patchouli.
Almost imperceptibly, the two men drifted a little apart and Ray straightened up, feeling with the flex of a shoulder to check that his holster was riding just right ...
“Let’s see if our pigeon is where he's supposed to be then, eh?”
And they walked into the shop.
--------------------
Three hours later, Ray was trying - without success - to get comfortable in the unforgiving chair beside Bodie’s bed in the Royal Infirmary. A glance out the window showed him the shadows lengthening across the Meadows, and he momentarily regretted the glorious pub-crawl that should by rights have been theirs that night. A pint in every pub the length of Rose Street! Or was that Thistle Street? Either way, a feat accomplished by no living man. Still, at least he wouldn't have to face the hangover...
Who’d have thought Marlowe would turn out to be so quick on the uptake, and such a fast mover to boot? A face full of incense, and Bodie had been condemned to repeated bouts of eye irrigation followed by any number of drops for painful-looking reddened skin and bloodshot whites. He would be effectively blind as a bat for hours if not a day or two - just long enough for Doyle to get lumbered with the report…
He’d had the nous to take the bugger down, though, even with his eyes shut and streaming, and hold onto him until Doyle could escape from the clutches of Janine “I’m just minding the till ‘til Sandy gets back” - convinced she was protecting the inappropriately named Eden from armed robbery, mainly by screaming but also by wielding a massive candlestick (in use as another bloody incense-burner; it’d take a week to get the smell out of his nostrils never mind out of his clothes), which was so heavy it would have cracked his skull in two if it had connected-and two safety-pinned young men in purple t-shirts and fatigues, with shaved heads (except for the Mohawks) and combat boots, who looked like total headcases and turned out to be the gentlest souls that e'er hugged tree. Doyle had managed to convince them all - without killing any of them, a fact of which he was inordinately proud - that even though he was, technically, a pig and therefore, in all likelihood, a radge bastard (which, as Bodie pointed out to him later, was also perfectly true) he was there not to harass those engaged in a little peaceful chemistry of the bong-smoking variety but to remove from their midst a criminal well-known for his extreme right-wing sympathies and a complete disregard for the welfare of small furry animals. As Doyle had pointed out - when he’d finally convinced Janine to stop brandishing the candlestick, made his peace with her two pals, cuffed the still-struggling Marlowe and got Bodie back on his feet - it was just like that sort of bastard to hide out amongst genuine peace-loving folk for protective camouflage.
He’d had to accept the assistance of two local PCs to take Marlowe off his hands while he got Bodie to hospital-and they'd complained vociferously about the mess he’d made in the back of their car, when he'd refused point-blank to wait ‘til they got to the Royal Infirmary and poured bottled water into Bodie’s eyes all the way while Bodie spluttered and swore in every language he could think of. Then they’d had a bedside visit from a dour DI, who listened to the story, checked their ID (again) and grudgingly admitted to having spoken on the phone to “your Mister Cowley” (who, his tone implied, was clearly a great deal more credible than the two of them put together). He finally cracked a hint of a smile as he left, observing that they’d left the back of the police car awash with water; it seemed to amuse him that the local uniforms - the “woolly-suits” - were going to be driving around in that for the foreseeable…
Three hours later again, Bodie released into his tender care with three bottles of eyedrops and the doctor’s assurance that he’d be fine (and they’d have little enough time to spare for him now anyway, with a Saturday night chucking-out time almost upon them), they were decanted back to their hotel door courtesy of a different PC in a thankfully dry car. Ray cast around desperately for something to cheer a disconsolate Bodie, deprived of the legendary drinking opportunities of Edinburgh on a warm summer’s Saturday night.
“Woolly-suits. Poor bastards. Mind you, I reckon we had it worse - you know, wooden-tops? At least they don’t have those bloody stupid helmets up here...”
“Shut up, Doyle.”
No, that wasn’t going to cut it. Well stuff going inside, the silly sod would just have to hold his hand and like it.
“Come on, your feet still work - no reason why we shouldn’t do at least the local on the corner before last orders.” And brushing aside all Bodie’s protests, Doyle manoeuvred them arm in arm - with a care that belied the stream of grumbling and complaints he knew it would take to keep Bodie happy, or at least resigned to the need for public hand-holding, even with the cast-iron excuse of a swathe of white bandages covering his eyes - into the cellar bar of what turned out to be a student pub with the late license everybody demanded at Festival time. There was live music - an eclectic mix of trad folk and jazz that Bodie complained about and had Doyle shelling out a fiver for a cassette - and there were pints of the beautiful dark 70 Shilling and half a dozen whiskies to choose from.
And after a while, with Ray having to get up to the bar for every round, and a girl at the next table - pity he’d no idea what she looked like - offering to “mind ye while yer pal’s gettin’ the bevvy in” - Bodie grudgingly allowed that it wasn’t too bad. The girl, who seemed to be neither attached nor unattached, chatting indiscriminately with both of them and with the crowd on her own table, was pleasant company and clearly not out for more than an hour or so’s enthusiastic enjoyment of the band. Oddly enough, that didn’t seem to matter. By two in the morning, as they negotiated their way back to the hotel with Ray’s arm firmly around Bodie’s waist - just for balance, mind - equanimity was more than restored and Bodie was content to ease the pangs of hunger on the way with a generously-proportioned fish supper. He ate it by feel as they walked, trusting to Ray’s arm around him to keep him from stumbling, savouring every chip and threatening to wipe his greasy fingers on Ray’s hair if he made any more “bottomless pit” comments, thank you very much. The Scots, he decided, knew how to appreciate a chip - witness the ubiquitous offer of “saut’n sauce,” infinitely superior to Ray’s usual lashings of vinegar. All that was missing, he decided as Ray closed the hotel room door behind them, was a mouthful of something sweet for afters…
-------------------
“Here, you’ve still got some of that - that ghastly chalk stuff you were eatin’. ‘s all sugar ‘n' colour, you know. Bet you can’t even tell what’s s‘posed to taste like, with yer eyes shut. Here, this one’s pink - what’s that then, strawberry?”
He held out a pale fawn lump, biting back an undignified giggle.
Bodie opened his mouth trustingly and accepted the rock. “You pillock, ‘s’ginger. Not strawberry. Ginger ones’r f’you, you dozy prat.”
“None left.” Gazing mournfully into the paper bag.
“Ah well. Never mind.” With a guileless smile, eyes inscrutably hidden behind all those bandages, Bodie was the soul of generosity. “You c’n have this one.”
Well ….. why not? Doyle rather thought they’d both seen this coming for a while now. And it looked like Bodie had finally made up his mind to let it happen .... Doyle felt a little shiver of anticipation; those bandages would be coming off soon enough - might as well get a little fun out of them while they were there.
The taste of ginger flooded his mouth like August sunshine.
-------------------
Title: Solid As A...
Author: Heliophile
Slash or Gen: Slash
Archive at ProsLib/Circuit: Yes please
Disclaimer: Bodie, Doyle and the CI5 universe do not belong to this author, and she knows it...
Notes: With thanks to byslantedlight for the prompt - In the medieval streets…and the beta!
Solid as a...
by Heliophile
“….‘s odd, innit?” Bodie mumbled around his latest mouthful. His mouth had been full for most of the last five minutes, and he hadn’t finished a coherent sentence since they’d left the sweet-shop with its row upon row of giant bottles, each one full of ever more irresistibly garish colours and labelled with increasingly improbable names. Lucky tatties, Irn Bru humbugs, soor plooms, for cryin’ out loud - what kind of a nation called its gobstoppers something like soor bloody plooms?
Ray glanced at his partner, expecting that - in his own good time, of course - some further clarification of this cryptic observation would be forthcoming, but Bodie merely continued to chew industriously, to all appearances content to let the matter rest. The uncharacteristically sun-drenched Royal Mile stretched out behind and rose before them, the Castle’s vast imposing bulk somewhere up there beyond that parade ground they called the Esplanade at the very top of the mount. It was hot, his lightest jacket was too heavy, and he couldn’t bloody take it off as long as he was carrying… Conscious of a rising prickle of irritation, Ray ruthlessly suppressed it - he’d wait it out, and the aggravating sod could do without him giving in and asking him what he was bloody on about. But the minutes went by, the unending stream of Festival tourists continued to eddy around them and get in the way like a flock of camera-carrying sheep - they didn’t have to wear jackets, but did they appreciate their luck? No, they just exclaimed over yet another bloody quaint shop front, yet another close, yet another sodding patch of cobbled street. And Bodie, immune to the heat and masticating blissfully, showed no signs of saying any more about it - and his mouth was full, anyway, so….
Sod it.
“What’s odd, you moron? How Marlowe got traced all the way up here, how we got lumbered with bringing him back or how you managed to tie your own laces this morning?”
Bodie smiled beatifically from around a generous mouthful of a hundred and ten percent refined sugar plus assorted undisclosed colourants.
“Well when you get it in Blackpool, right, or on the South coast, which is all chalk and limestone and - soft, you know, crumbly - it’s so hard it takes a sledgehammer to break a bit off. So you spend all day sucking it, which is all right I suppose. But up here -” Bodie gestured expansively, taking in the Mediaeval glories of the Royal Mile behind and before them, “which is basically one bloody great lump of granite, they do it all crumbly and - here, have one of the ginger bits, you’ll love ‘em.”
Doyle couldn’t help the grin that spread across his face. Surrounded by more history than you could shake a stick at, with the ghosts of Cowley’s ancestors more than likely glaring at them from beyond the ether and the spirits of whisky present just waiting to be discovered in every pub the length of every street, from tourist traps to dimly lit places with dirty windows and - Doyle hadn’t inspected too closely - probably bloodstains on the floor from last night’s chucking - out time - surrounded by all this, and what had Bodie found to exercise his intellect? Opening his mouth to refuse, he somehow found himself accepting a pale fawn lump of crumbling, gingery sweetness from Bodie’s fingers - cheeky bugger - their touch gone almost before he could register it, and he laughed round the awkward mouthful in wry acknowledgement of his partner’s tiny triumph over abstemiousness. As the taste bloomed across his tongue, Doyle felt for a second that this, and nothing but this, was the perfect match for the bright August sunshine, the eddying crowd of tourists and the light in Bodie’s eyes. Edinburgh rock.
-------------------
“Up the close and down the stair, but an’ ben with Burke an’ Hare…” Bodie’s would-be Scots accent was as lamentable as ever.
They were, in fact, not climbing but descending one of the tiny closes, with the buildings on either side so near one another that two people leaning out of the tiny upper windows could have shaken hands across the gap. Doyle took advantage of the straitened circumstance to walk even closer to Bodie than usual, their shoulders jostling slightly.
“But and ben?" Doyle glanced sideways. "Bet you don’t even know what but and ben means. You don’t, do you?”
Bodie smiled, unruffled.
“I know who Burke and Hare were, though. Reckon we’d ‘ve been after them then, wouldn’t we, back in the day? Dunno how they got away with it, selling bodies to a minister…”
Doyle burst out laughing. “’s’not the same Knox, you ignoramus! The one who bought the bodies was a doctor, they couldn’t get corpses to practise on. T’other one’s your minister. Probably hundreds of years apart, and -”
He caught a glimpse of Bodie’s eye, lit with mischief, and sighed explosively. Fallen for it again, hadn’t he. And him knowing perfectly well that Bodie liked to read odds and sods of history in his free time, in amongst the poetry - the bloodier the better; probably knew more about Burke and Hare - and Doctor Robert bloody Knox - than could fit in any number of those tourist guides to the Old Town that the nicer pubs were littered with this time of year, and which Bodie had laughed at over a pint at lunchtime. Bloody good pint, he had to admit - even if the barman had been as proud of it as if nobody outside Scotland even knew how to make beer.
They emerged into the sunshine at the bottom of the close, dazzled by the explosion of colour on Cockburn Street where, it seemed, most of the shops had embraced the décor and aesthetic of the Mysterious East with a vengeance. You could hardly breathe for patchouli.
Almost imperceptibly, the two men drifted a little apart and Ray straightened up, feeling with the flex of a shoulder to check that his holster was riding just right ...
“Let’s see if our pigeon is where he's supposed to be then, eh?”
And they walked into the shop.
--------------------
Three hours later, Ray was trying - without success - to get comfortable in the unforgiving chair beside Bodie’s bed in the Royal Infirmary. A glance out the window showed him the shadows lengthening across the Meadows, and he momentarily regretted the glorious pub-crawl that should by rights have been theirs that night. A pint in every pub the length of Rose Street! Or was that Thistle Street? Either way, a feat accomplished by no living man. Still, at least he wouldn't have to face the hangover...
Who’d have thought Marlowe would turn out to be so quick on the uptake, and such a fast mover to boot? A face full of incense, and Bodie had been condemned to repeated bouts of eye irrigation followed by any number of drops for painful-looking reddened skin and bloodshot whites. He would be effectively blind as a bat for hours if not a day or two - just long enough for Doyle to get lumbered with the report…
He’d had the nous to take the bugger down, though, even with his eyes shut and streaming, and hold onto him until Doyle could escape from the clutches of Janine “I’m just minding the till ‘til Sandy gets back” - convinced she was protecting the inappropriately named Eden from armed robbery, mainly by screaming but also by wielding a massive candlestick (in use as another bloody incense-burner; it’d take a week to get the smell out of his nostrils never mind out of his clothes), which was so heavy it would have cracked his skull in two if it had connected-and two safety-pinned young men in purple t-shirts and fatigues, with shaved heads (except for the Mohawks) and combat boots, who looked like total headcases and turned out to be the gentlest souls that e'er hugged tree. Doyle had managed to convince them all - without killing any of them, a fact of which he was inordinately proud - that even though he was, technically, a pig and therefore, in all likelihood, a radge bastard (which, as Bodie pointed out to him later, was also perfectly true) he was there not to harass those engaged in a little peaceful chemistry of the bong-smoking variety but to remove from their midst a criminal well-known for his extreme right-wing sympathies and a complete disregard for the welfare of small furry animals. As Doyle had pointed out - when he’d finally convinced Janine to stop brandishing the candlestick, made his peace with her two pals, cuffed the still-struggling Marlowe and got Bodie back on his feet - it was just like that sort of bastard to hide out amongst genuine peace-loving folk for protective camouflage.
He’d had to accept the assistance of two local PCs to take Marlowe off his hands while he got Bodie to hospital-and they'd complained vociferously about the mess he’d made in the back of their car, when he'd refused point-blank to wait ‘til they got to the Royal Infirmary and poured bottled water into Bodie’s eyes all the way while Bodie spluttered and swore in every language he could think of. Then they’d had a bedside visit from a dour DI, who listened to the story, checked their ID (again) and grudgingly admitted to having spoken on the phone to “your Mister Cowley” (who, his tone implied, was clearly a great deal more credible than the two of them put together). He finally cracked a hint of a smile as he left, observing that they’d left the back of the police car awash with water; it seemed to amuse him that the local uniforms - the “woolly-suits” - were going to be driving around in that for the foreseeable…
Three hours later again, Bodie released into his tender care with three bottles of eyedrops and the doctor’s assurance that he’d be fine (and they’d have little enough time to spare for him now anyway, with a Saturday night chucking-out time almost upon them), they were decanted back to their hotel door courtesy of a different PC in a thankfully dry car. Ray cast around desperately for something to cheer a disconsolate Bodie, deprived of the legendary drinking opportunities of Edinburgh on a warm summer’s Saturday night.
“Woolly-suits. Poor bastards. Mind you, I reckon we had it worse - you know, wooden-tops? At least they don’t have those bloody stupid helmets up here...”
“Shut up, Doyle.”
No, that wasn’t going to cut it. Well stuff going inside, the silly sod would just have to hold his hand and like it.
“Come on, your feet still work - no reason why we shouldn’t do at least the local on the corner before last orders.” And brushing aside all Bodie’s protests, Doyle manoeuvred them arm in arm - with a care that belied the stream of grumbling and complaints he knew it would take to keep Bodie happy, or at least resigned to the need for public hand-holding, even with the cast-iron excuse of a swathe of white bandages covering his eyes - into the cellar bar of what turned out to be a student pub with the late license everybody demanded at Festival time. There was live music - an eclectic mix of trad folk and jazz that Bodie complained about and had Doyle shelling out a fiver for a cassette - and there were pints of the beautiful dark 70 Shilling and half a dozen whiskies to choose from.
And after a while, with Ray having to get up to the bar for every round, and a girl at the next table - pity he’d no idea what she looked like - offering to “mind ye while yer pal’s gettin’ the bevvy in” - Bodie grudgingly allowed that it wasn’t too bad. The girl, who seemed to be neither attached nor unattached, chatting indiscriminately with both of them and with the crowd on her own table, was pleasant company and clearly not out for more than an hour or so’s enthusiastic enjoyment of the band. Oddly enough, that didn’t seem to matter. By two in the morning, as they negotiated their way back to the hotel with Ray’s arm firmly around Bodie’s waist - just for balance, mind - equanimity was more than restored and Bodie was content to ease the pangs of hunger on the way with a generously-proportioned fish supper. He ate it by feel as they walked, trusting to Ray’s arm around him to keep him from stumbling, savouring every chip and threatening to wipe his greasy fingers on Ray’s hair if he made any more “bottomless pit” comments, thank you very much. The Scots, he decided, knew how to appreciate a chip - witness the ubiquitous offer of “saut’n sauce,” infinitely superior to Ray’s usual lashings of vinegar. All that was missing, he decided as Ray closed the hotel room door behind them, was a mouthful of something sweet for afters…
-------------------
“Here, you’ve still got some of that - that ghastly chalk stuff you were eatin’. ‘s all sugar ‘n' colour, you know. Bet you can’t even tell what’s s‘posed to taste like, with yer eyes shut. Here, this one’s pink - what’s that then, strawberry?”
He held out a pale fawn lump, biting back an undignified giggle.
Bodie opened his mouth trustingly and accepted the rock. “You pillock, ‘s’ginger. Not strawberry. Ginger ones’r f’you, you dozy prat.”
“None left.” Gazing mournfully into the paper bag.
“Ah well. Never mind.” With a guileless smile, eyes inscrutably hidden behind all those bandages, Bodie was the soul of generosity. “You c’n have this one.”
Well ….. why not? Doyle rather thought they’d both seen this coming for a while now. And it looked like Bodie had finally made up his mind to let it happen .... Doyle felt a little shiver of anticipation; those bandages would be coming off soon enough - might as well get a little fun out of them while they were there.
The taste of ginger flooded his mouth like August sunshine.
-------------------
Title: Solid As A...
Author: Heliophile
Slash or Gen: Slash
Archive at ProsLib/Circuit: Yes please
Disclaimer: Bodie, Doyle and the CI5 universe do not belong to this author, and she knows it...
Notes: With thanks to byslantedlight for the prompt - In the medieval streets…and the beta!