STORY: "Killing Bobby Hobbes" - Invisible Man - Darien/Bobby
Title: Killing Bobby Hobbes
Author: Dorinda
Fandom: The Invisible Man
Pairing: Darien/Bobby
Length: ~4800 words
Notes: For the 2009 ficfest on hot_donuts. Thanks to merryish for title and brainstorming, and aka-arduinna, marycrawford, and merryish for beta help and morale.
Spoilers: For episodes "Tiresias" and "It Hurts When You Do This".
Prompt: The final exchange in "Tiresias":
Darien: You were wrong, old man. I didn't kill Hobbes.
Scarborough: Not yet, you haven't. Not yet.
Killing Bobby Hobbes
A mad, bad, and dangerous to know guy named Lord Byron once wrote a poem that started, "I had a dream, which was not all a dream." So did I, when I killed Bobby Hobbes.
Byron's dream was about the end of the world.
So was mine.
His fingers around Hobbes' throat felt so good, so good, that he didn't want it to end. He could have clenched and twisted, snapped vertebrae apart right at that sweet spot in the spine, but that would've spoiled everything. So he pressed just enough to make it slow, make it nice, his hands pressing into the hot muscles of Hobbes' neck just as his thighs pressed around the heat of Hobbes' body.
Darien woke, panting. For a minute it still felt real, and he hated himself. But then he finished waking up, realized it was all a dream... and hated himself. Or at least part of himself, if you wanted to call that gland in his head a part of anything. He preferred to think of it as a tenant. Of course, it was turning out to be one of those tenants who, if they got evicted, burned the place down on their way out.
When the events of the dream finally crept up on him in real life along with the quicksilver madness, it was like the worst case of déjà vu he'd ever had. They rose together, the headache and the red eyes, the squirming at the base of his skull like a sewer rat gnawing to escape, shadowed by moment after moment from the dream, blurring and doubling like a 3-D movie left slightly out of focus.
Hobbes' voice, though, he hadn't remembered that from the dream. "...Fawkes..." he croaked, "...oh God...," and Darien could feel the vibrations against his fingertips. It threw him off, somehow.
A shout behind him, as piercing as the needle-sting that followed, and it was all torn from him, dream and reality. He fell forward onto Hobbes' solid warmth and went under.
Darien went home from visiting Scarborough in jail with the beginnings of a headache over his right eye--a regular headache, he was pretty sure, nothing to do with the gland. He kept massaging the nape of his neck with one hand, though, as if the damn thing might wake up and get bright ideas.
The phone rang, painfully startling in the quiet.
"Hey, Fawkes."
"Hobbes."
"Yeah, so, I noticed you left early today, didn't see where you went. Keep said it wasn't like a sick day or nothin', but I figured I'd check."
Darien sat heavily on the side of the bed, pinching the base of his skull between thumb and forefinger. "Good to know you guys are keeping tabs on me."
"Listen, pal, if I was keeping tabs on you, you wouldn't know about it, all right? This is just a little partnerly concern."
"I don't think that's a real word. Just FYI."
Hobbes huffed impatiently at the other end of the line, the phone magnifying it into a gust right through Darien's ear. "Yeah, well, it is for me. So you're okay?"
His head hurt. Scarborough's words were festering in there somewhere, like a splinter. Like the gland was chewing on them, biding its time.
"I'm fine."
"'Cause I was thinking you might want to grab a beer or something, decompress."
If there was anything he needed right now, it was a little decompression. A frosty beer, him and Hobbes kicking back, maybe even laughing at that crazy old guy and his whole fake-psychic deal. Hobbes could hassle him about a waste of some perfectly good donuts, and Darien could end up promising him a gift certificate to the Donut of the Month Club for Hanukkah. "Oh, man, I--"
With your bare hands.
"--Iiii guess not," he finished awkwardly.
"Busy, huh?"
"Yeah."
"Busy with one of your whirlwind nights where you grow into your couch like a giant mushroom."
"Something like that." Darien moved the phone to his other ear and switched the hand he was using to rub at the base of his skull.
After they'd hung up, Darien threw himself backward onto the bed, snapping his head back to hit the mattress with tooth-rattling force.
"You happy now, you bastard?" he snarled. The gland didn't seem to have any comment.
He'd managed not to kill Hobbes for a little while, so he was starting to relax into things. Screw Scarborough, anyway, what did he know. Until, thanks to Darien's smart-ass idea to startle a couple of fleeing crooks at the top of a fire escape, Hobbes fell on his head.
Pacing the hospital hallway, Darien cringed at how blithely he'd forgotten all about Scarborough's promise--in between wondering whether getting someone kicked off a high place counted as killing him with your bare hands. He couldn't be sure; the logic was a little convoluted. But one thing he did know, which was that he wouldn't have had the super-bright idea to be funny with the bad guys if it hadn't been for the gland, and that was what had cracked Hobbes' skull open and pooled his blood in the dust.
When they finally let Darien into the hospital room, followed by the Official, he thought he was ready to face that memory-loss thing the doctor had talked about. And as the Official explained everything while Bobby picked at his breakfast, he came to feel like he could handle it. Somehow, listening to that terminally-grumpy voice lay out recent events as if they were nothing more important than a bad expense report made it all feel more manageable.
So eventually he walked the Official out, found the john, and then came back in to sit with Bobby for a while, his stomach starting to untwist itself a little bit.
"About time you got here," Bobby said, scowling.
"I was just gone a--" Darien stopped himself, slouching into the bedside chair. "Yeah. Sorry. How's it going?"
"Once I find my pants, I'm gonna go tell the Fat Man exactly how it's going, which is that I don't like it." He pushed at the blankets, and Darien hastily laid a hand on his.
"You can't, man--you need to stay right there, okay?"
"What for?" Bobby plucked at the hospital gown, making a face. "Keep's really gotta get something nicer for her lab rats to wear on Agency-physical days. I mean, this makes it look like I'm in some hospital or something." He eyed Darien up and down. "How come you got your pants back so fast? Heyyy, a little private deal with the doc, huh?"
"No--hey--Bobby. Listen." Darien tightened his hand over Bobby's. "You are in a hospital. We were doing a job, okay, and I thought-- I got in front of the guys and they went down and knocked you off the fire escape, and you kind of landed on your head."
Bobby considered it. "Nah, I don't think so," he said at last, tugging his hand out from under Darien's and peeling back the blanket again.
"What do you mean, you don't think so? I was there!" He leaned in and took hold of Bobby's shoulders, composing himself. "You were in an accident, okay? Just... You have to stay here for a while, let your head get better. Okay? For me?"
"Sure, sure, buddy, whatever you want," Bobby said, kind of patronizingly, easing back against the pillows under the pressure of Darien's hands. "You want me to rest my pretty head, I'm resting it."
"I'm going to... uh... find the Keeper for you," Darien said, letting him go. "You'll stay here, right?"
Bobby nestled back, waving him away. "Staying right here. Riiiiight here." He yawned. "You can bring Keepy in and she can explain why you get your pants back first." He wiggled his eyebrows.
Darien fled, but the Keeper was off meeting with her brain surgeon friend or whoever, and he could only pace the hallway for so long before he had to go back in.
"Hsst." Bobby's eyes were once more alert and a little too bright. "Where the hell you been? We escaping now?"
Darien flinched, and made himself sit down very slowly in the chair.
Later, driving a little too fast toward the deli for Bobby's pastrami on rye, he decided with a deadening kind of calm that this might actually be it. The bare-hands argument, if a little vague, could theoretically apply--and it was more than clear that he'd actually killed Bobby. The Bobby he knew, the Bobby who knew himself.
He remembered--couldn't stop remembering, unfortunately, even through the haze of quicksilver madness--pointing Bobby's gun at his own head that day. If only Bobby hadn't saved him from himself. Or, more to the point, if Darien had been quicker to stop the evil thing in his brain once and for all instead of hoping for the best. But now it was too late.
"Light on the mustard," he said. He clenched one fist in his pocket, stifling a powerful need to punch himself in the back of the head (and then the sandwich guy would call the hospital--hey, maybe he could room with Bobby). Hoping for the best hadn't gotten them anywhere. Bobby needed him now, but the day he--the day he didn't anymore... Just don't get too comfortable in there, he thought with venom. I know where you live.
Still no response.
After Bobby got cured, though, and they managed to get Sarah and the others fixed up, Darien breathed more freely. The damn gland really had helped, in the end--hell, all of Bobby's suffering had turned out to save the day, and Darien knew Bobby would've been happy to do it again if he had to. So: gland reprieve. Time passed, and to tell the truth, he sort of forgot about Scarborough, what with one thing and another.
Anyway, maybe it had counted, and Scarborough's prophecy was cancelled on a technicality. Bobby once was lost, but now was found: like dying on the table and being resuscitated, seeing the big white light but getting sucked back into the world. Seemed only fair. And there had been other times since then that it seemed like he might die for real, but he never did. Bobby Hobbes really did take a lot of killing, just as he'd promised. So Darien let himself relax... until the dream came back.
It felt a little different than it had before. He didn't remember it as clearly, for one thing, and there were definitely chunks missing; the whole event was covered in some kind of fog. But as far as he could tell, the climax was much the same: Bobby and his donuts, Darien tackling him, the air of the dream thick with something dark and perfect. Waking with a gasp, his pillow twisted and smothered beneath his body. And bingo, there it was, the old panic, rising up fresh and new like it had never gone anywhere.
"'samatter?" Bobby asked that night, as they were taking turns flicking popcorn at a Learning Channel special about Bigfoot that got everything hilariously wrong.
Darien drank beer to stall on answering the question, and choked on it a little bit. Very smooth. "Nothing," he said, wiping his chin.
"Uh huh." Bobby thumped one booted foot up on the coffee table. "For a cat-burglar-secret-agent, you make a terrible liar."
"I do not!"
"Do." Thump went the other foot.
"Well," Darien said defensively, "I mean, sure, to you."
"So why do you even bother?" Trouble was, he didn't ask it rhetorically or smugly. He was half-turned, comfortably ensconced on his side of the couch, open and listening. In short, he meant it.
"Look-- You ever think that maybe there are things that just aren't your business?"
Bobby appeared to give that some serious thought. But finally: "Nope. It's all relevant. All grist for my mill."
"Grist?"
"Mankind is my business, my friend."
Darien stared at him, the dream for the moment receding. "'Mankind is my--' You been reading up behind my back or something?"
"Oh ho, you're the only king of quotations here, is that it?" Bobby plucked a kernel of popcorn out of the bowl and brandished it. "Did we, or did we not, spend time throwing this exact popcorn at this exact TV the last time A Christmas Carol was on? Huh?"
Darien slumped back. "Maybe not this exact popcorn," he muttered. He watched Bobby, aglow with victory, eat his visual aid and dig in for more.
The return of the dream was suddenly more relevant than ever: it was clear that it would be a hell of a lot harder to keep Bobby out of harm's way by now, given how they'd fallen into spending most of their time together by default. After all, how many ways were there to kill someone with your bare hands in this very apartment? Or out at Bobby's favorite night spots? Let alone the bowling alley, the movie theater, the paintball maze, the roller rink, and the top of the Wave Runner slide at Knott's Soak City? And Darien suspected there were at least a dozen ways to kill Bobby at Disneyland alone, not counting methods involving giant cartoon-animal suits, because some things were just beyond the pale.
"Well?"
Darien started, snapping out of that last horrible vision. "Well, what?"
Bobby rolled his eyes. "Your problem. What is it."
"People've been asking me that for years," Darien replied, deadpan.
But Bobby just watched him, chewing, and Darien found himself saying quietly, "Nightmare, okay? Nothing you haven't heard before, promise."
Bobby had that gentle, listening look for another second, making Darien sweat, then seemed to relent. He pursed his lips in a sympathetic sad face. "Aw. Here, you want me to change this? Too scary for you?" He put up one hand and a beer to block the TV from Darien's view, and Darien hit him with a throw pillow, feeling much better.
After Bobby finally went home, though, Darien couldn't get comfortable. Every time he'd start to doze off he'd feel the dream pulling at him, and an adrenaline spike would jerk him awake. It was well into the wee hours before he gave up and made himself a pot of coffee.
"Gimme those," Bobby said, snaking away the binoculars.
Darien's head jolted forward and snapped back up. "Is he here?"
Bobby was looking intently through the windshield at the secluded little guesthouse, adjusting the focus. Sunset painted the hood of the van in stripes of rich orange and long shadows. "Not yet. Not that you'd notice if he showed up with a marching band, there, Van Winkle."
"Sorry." Darien ground both fists into his eyes and rubbed hard. It had only taken a few days of the 3 a.m. Coffee Diet to leave him pretty much a wreck. He'd slept some, technically, but only in fits and starts, and vague shreds and reminders of the dream were usually floating around when he woke up.
"Still having that nightmare?"
He peeked over his fists at Bobby, considered denial, had a good internal laugh at how ineffective that would be, and shrugged. "Oh yeah."
"Brought you something," Bobby said, waving one hand vaguely toward the glove box.
"You lay in some extra Ritalin for your best buddy?" Darien opened it, revealing a battered old Walkman with a set of headphones wrapped around it. "Ah...hey. Uh. Very nice."
"Look inside, funny guy."
"No, I mean it," Darien said, fumbling the thing out of the compartment. "Vintage." He did look inside, though, and saw it was already loaded with a tape. Popping the lid showed that it was a plain white cassette with the word "Relax" hand-printed on it in fading grease pencil.
He clicked the Walkman shut again, grinning. "Did you make me a mix tape?"
"You should be so lucky." Bobby propped his elbows on the steering wheel, still glued to the binocs. "It's a recording I got back in the day from one of my shrinks. Helps you fall asleep."
The grin froze and vanished, and Darien regarded the thing like a rectangular snake. "Thanks, but--"
"Not regular sleep, jeez. You think I don't know that's the whole problem? It's for the other thing, that lucid dreaming thing. It's where you figure out you're dreaming while you're still asleep, and it lets you take control of the whole deal. Good for nightmares. They use it sometimes for post-traumatic stress."
Darien looked over at him, but Bobby was still peering off at the house, his face mostly obscured.
Huh.
"So..." He hefted the Walkman in one hand. "How does it work?"
"You just lay back and listen." Bobby finally glanced over at him. "Go ahead, I'm on it."
It took Darien a second; he blamed the sleep deprivation. "What, right now?"
"You think we'll be able to keep your eyes propped open for the rest of this frickin' stake-out?"
Darien opened his mouth, closed it, spent some quiet time unwinding the headphones, and spent some louder time swearing at them while he untangled the knots. Once they were finally on and adjusted, he looked around nervously.
"Am I gonna pass out? No, hey, Bobby, this isn't gonna make me cluck like a chicken, is it? 'Cause that time at the magic show, I swear I wasn't laughing."
"That would only be fair," Bobby replied, his tone dignified, "but no."
"Okay. Okay. Uh... I'm going now."
After a couple of false starts, he finally pressed the 'Play' button all the way and slid down in his seat, leaning his head back. There was a fluttery feeling under his breastbone.
In a while, the fluttery feeling was long gone and all that was left was idle boredom. He'd been faithfully doing what the voice on the tape said, which had so far mainly involved closing his eyes, breathing in and out, tightening and relaxing various muscles, and now imagining he was standing at the top of a very long escalator. And this was from a doctor? Hilarious. If he hadn't felt so heavy and still all over, he would've yawned.
The voice reminded him that he was stepping onto the escalator now, so, hey, why not: on he went. He watched for the signs the voice told him were there, and repeated the floor numbers silently as he moved steadily past them, away, and down. Down. Further down.
This really was a long escalator.
Deeper and deeper.
He had trouble reading the sign with the number 5 on it--it was scrambled or upside-down, for some reason--but he just did what the voice reminded him to do and there it was, a 5 again. Good old 5.
4.
3.
2.
One.
Oh, here he was. There was all that fog, but he remembered what he'd been told: he could watch the dream safely if he wanted to. So he waved his hands slowly, then pursed his lips and blew, and the fog began to dissipate, trailing off into wisps.
"I got just the thing to calm you down," Bobby said, standing outside the van window. He wasn't wearing a shirt and sportcoat this time, but an undershirt, the kind they both liked, tank-style.
Darien lifted his arms and launched himself outward through the glass--except there wasn't any glass now, the window was already rolled down, and he didn't have to lunge, really, he just sort of...flew. He could feel the air buoying him up as he sailed along. Bobby didn't look scared this time. His arms came up as Darien reached him, and his skin was just as warm beneath Darien's thighs and hands, but he wasn't choking. In fact, Darien's hands weren't around Bobby's throat at all. They were...
...Oh. Oh.
Okay, this really was different.
Darien woke with a start and an indrawn breath. It sure beat shouting and thrashing, but he couldn't say he was entirely relaxed--he could feel that he was in an awkward condition. The sun had finished setting, and the sky over the guesthouse was that last deep blue before going black; he was grateful for the darkness inside the van, as well as the Walkman in his lap.
"You back?"
"Uh." Darien cleared his throat and blinked. "Yeah. Sort of. How're things?"
Bobby's shrug was just visible in the shadows. "No sign of him. Just a little longer, and then we should call it in."
"Good, great," Darien said absently, concentrating on box scores and those really dry news shows they had on public TV on Sunday afternoons.
"Or get ourselves some night-vision goggles," Bobby added.
Darien fidgeted.
Turned out, when they did call in, the guy wasn't coming back after all; he'd just been nabbed at the airport with a travel guide to Grande Comore Island and a suitcase full of fish food. They were officially off the clock.
"So?" Bobby asked, making a left turn.
"Hmm," Darien said. The crisis had abated, and he felt much less conspicuous now.
"Help any?"
Darien reflected. "Yeah, that's...kind of hard to say."
"I got another one at home you can try, if you want--it's a little longer."
"Sure," Darien said. He thought about Bobby and his tapes, and the beat-up Walkman, and the fading grease pencil. "Hey--thanks, partner."
Bobby looked over at him for a second, a passing streetlight reflecting the shine from his eyes, before he had to turn his full attention (with gestures) to the tailgater behind them, what is your problem, you trying to knock my muffler off?
Eventually, without incident or bulletholes or missing muffler, they pulled up in front of Bobby's place.
"You want to come in for a minute while I look for it?"
"No, I'm good."
Bobby opened his door and slid out, but hesitated. "You sure? Could take a while. And I got a kielbasa in the fridge, I could do that baked ziti."
"Nah, man," Darien said, running his fingers over the scarred surface of the Walkman. "I'd better-- I gotta get home. You know."
"Catch up on your sleep," Bobby said agreeably. He thumped his door shut and walked around the front of the van, but paused once he was on Darien's side to make a twisting gesture in the air with one finger. Darien, savvy to all of the secret spy handsignals, rolled his window down. "Should I bring back that book you lent me, the nervous-system one? 'Cause I'll tell you for free, that thing'll put anybody to sleep."
Darien couldn't help but smile back at him. "Anybody without higher brain functions, maybe."
"Yeah, you're higher in something, anyway," Bobby retorted. "All right, gimme a sec, I'll go get the thing. I bet this one'll help you."
He turned to head for his door, and Darien, draping one arm lazily out the window, watched him go.
I got just the thing to calm you down.
Darien shook his head sharply. It wasn't déjà vu, not quite... but it was something. Something weird, making the blood rush in his head.
"Bobby--" he said, louder than he'd meant to.
Bobby looked over his shoulder, but was still moving away.
"Bobby," Darien said again. He moved his dangling hand, but he couldn't remember any of his spy signals, so it just reached out and twitched.
Thank goodness someone in the partnership was an experienced agent, because Bobby was stopping, turning, coming back, twitch or no twitch. He didn't look scared, though, which was good, because--
Good, because--
All in one push-and-pull, Darien leaned his whole upper body out of the van window and grabbed a handful of Bobby's shirt, hauling him in close. Bobby stumbled, arms lifting to brace himself on Darien's shoulders, and Darien had to kiss him, so that's what he did.
The dream hadn't had the details of just how Bobby breathed, or how his fingers slipped up into Darien's hair. And it certainly hadn't had the little pained noise Bobby made as he pulled away, only slightly, to look Darien in the eye.
"Really?" Bobby said, breathing hard.
"Yeah," Darien said. "Yeah, yeah, I know it's-- I mean it's-- I didn't--"
Bobby nodded. "You better come in."
"I guess I better." He didn't slither all the way through the window--he opened the door and got out like a regular person. But he didn't feel like such a regular person while he was practically floating through Bobby's front door. Or while he was interrupting Bobby starting to talk by backing him up against the wall and kissing him some more, yanking at the buttons of Bobby's shirt until he could slip his hands inside and over the tight curves of his shoulders.
Even though Bobby literally had his back to the wall, somehow there was--something, an ankle and a hand and something else, and Darien couldn't breathe, not just because he'd been too busy, but because he'd come down on the floor hard on his back, and Bobby had him carefully but firmly pinned.
"Fawkes," Bobby said from a couple inches away. "You gone nuts?"
"No!" Darien said urgently.
"Uh huh." Bobby thought hard. "Did some bad guy secretly switch out that tape with, like, a post-hypnotic suggestion where I turn into a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model?"
"God, no." Darien bucked upward a little, but Bobby's pins always had been the best.
"I better get it to a lab, run some tests."
"Bobby, listen," Darien almost whined.
Bobby looked at him silently, then eased his grip just enough. Darien could have rolled Bobby off him and gotten up, but he didn't; the inside of his head was still rushing--his head and his chest and other places--and he put one hand on Bobby's hip to feel the heat there. The heat he remembered.
"I'm listening."
"I'll tell you." He put his other hand on the small of Bobby's back, where his shirt had come untucked.
"That don't feel much like telling," Bobby said, a catch in his voice.
Darien swallowed. "Then let me show you."
A silence almost too long, and then Bobby did let him. Even then, Darien told him, too, all the while, talking into his ear and his shoulder and his sweat-damp neck. There'd been dreams and realities, feared and guessed at and misunderstood--the nightmare he'd thought it was, the chance it really was. And when they were mirroring something of the dream, Darien's thighs twined around him, Bobby's voice rasping and low, vision and imagination and action all fused into one strange and perfect shape. He clenched his hand on Bobby's, and felt him grip back. Like always.
After, Bobby heaved him in a businesslike way down the hall into the bedroom and dumped him across the bed. Darien stared at the ceiling, wiggled his feet, and realized he was still wearing one of his socks.
The mattress moved as Bobby settled down, and a faint, high-pitched hiss revealed that he was opening a bottle of something.
"Water?" Bobby asked, waving a plastic bottle through Darien's field of vision.
"Nnn-nn."
"It's fizzy."
"Nnn." He listened to Bobby take a drink.
"Tired, huh."
Darien yawned in response.
"Well, look, before you fade on me, I have to say something."
Now that was a less restful thing to hear. Darien reflexively tensed up and lifted his head, even though it weighed fifty pounds. The way Bobby had reacted at last, he'd thought that maybe... Okay, it was strange, and not necessarily something they'd planned for, but when you considered that that also described the rest of their lives since they'd met....
"You mean to tell me," Bobby said, looking very calm and together and not wearing either of his socks, "that you had a recurring dream where I hold up a donut and you jump on top of me, and you didn't know what it was about?"
Then he cracked up laughing.
Darien let his head flop back down on the mattress. "Heyyy," he moaned. "Come on, sometimes a donut is just a donut."
Bobby wiped his eyes and kept bursting into little leftover snorts, and Darien rolled over and tried to frown at him, but he just couldn't. Instead, he crawled closer and tried for a frontal attack; it proved unwise. Bobby's pins remained the very best, especially on his home turf.
"Fawkesy," Bobby sighed, subsiding into hiccups. "You kill me. You really do."
Darien smiled lazily and let his eyes close. "I suppose so."
Oscar Wilde said that each man kills the thing he loves. Of course, he had good reason to take that seriously. But luckily, for me and Bobby, it's turned out to be a complete metaphor. Just like a dream. The good kind--the kind that might even come true.
Author: Dorinda
Fandom: The Invisible Man
Pairing: Darien/Bobby
Length: ~4800 words
Notes: For the 2009 ficfest on hot_donuts. Thanks to merryish for title and brainstorming, and aka-arduinna, marycrawford, and merryish for beta help and morale.
Spoilers: For episodes "Tiresias" and "It Hurts When You Do This".
Prompt: The final exchange in "Tiresias":
Darien: You were wrong, old man. I didn't kill Hobbes.
Scarborough: Not yet, you haven't. Not yet.
Killing Bobby Hobbes
A mad, bad, and dangerous to know guy named Lord Byron once wrote a poem that started, "I had a dream, which was not all a dream." So did I, when I killed Bobby Hobbes.
Byron's dream was about the end of the world.
So was mine.
His fingers around Hobbes' throat felt so good, so good, that he didn't want it to end. He could have clenched and twisted, snapped vertebrae apart right at that sweet spot in the spine, but that would've spoiled everything. So he pressed just enough to make it slow, make it nice, his hands pressing into the hot muscles of Hobbes' neck just as his thighs pressed around the heat of Hobbes' body.
Darien woke, panting. For a minute it still felt real, and he hated himself. But then he finished waking up, realized it was all a dream... and hated himself. Or at least part of himself, if you wanted to call that gland in his head a part of anything. He preferred to think of it as a tenant. Of course, it was turning out to be one of those tenants who, if they got evicted, burned the place down on their way out.
When the events of the dream finally crept up on him in real life along with the quicksilver madness, it was like the worst case of déjà vu he'd ever had. They rose together, the headache and the red eyes, the squirming at the base of his skull like a sewer rat gnawing to escape, shadowed by moment after moment from the dream, blurring and doubling like a 3-D movie left slightly out of focus.
Hobbes' voice, though, he hadn't remembered that from the dream. "...Fawkes..." he croaked, "...oh God...," and Darien could feel the vibrations against his fingertips. It threw him off, somehow.
A shout behind him, as piercing as the needle-sting that followed, and it was all torn from him, dream and reality. He fell forward onto Hobbes' solid warmth and went under.
Darien went home from visiting Scarborough in jail with the beginnings of a headache over his right eye--a regular headache, he was pretty sure, nothing to do with the gland. He kept massaging the nape of his neck with one hand, though, as if the damn thing might wake up and get bright ideas.
The phone rang, painfully startling in the quiet.
"Hey, Fawkes."
"Hobbes."
"Yeah, so, I noticed you left early today, didn't see where you went. Keep said it wasn't like a sick day or nothin', but I figured I'd check."
Darien sat heavily on the side of the bed, pinching the base of his skull between thumb and forefinger. "Good to know you guys are keeping tabs on me."
"Listen, pal, if I was keeping tabs on you, you wouldn't know about it, all right? This is just a little partnerly concern."
"I don't think that's a real word. Just FYI."
Hobbes huffed impatiently at the other end of the line, the phone magnifying it into a gust right through Darien's ear. "Yeah, well, it is for me. So you're okay?"
His head hurt. Scarborough's words were festering in there somewhere, like a splinter. Like the gland was chewing on them, biding its time.
"I'm fine."
"'Cause I was thinking you might want to grab a beer or something, decompress."
If there was anything he needed right now, it was a little decompression. A frosty beer, him and Hobbes kicking back, maybe even laughing at that crazy old guy and his whole fake-psychic deal. Hobbes could hassle him about a waste of some perfectly good donuts, and Darien could end up promising him a gift certificate to the Donut of the Month Club for Hanukkah. "Oh, man, I--"
With your bare hands.
"--Iiii guess not," he finished awkwardly.
"Busy, huh?"
"Yeah."
"Busy with one of your whirlwind nights where you grow into your couch like a giant mushroom."
"Something like that." Darien moved the phone to his other ear and switched the hand he was using to rub at the base of his skull.
After they'd hung up, Darien threw himself backward onto the bed, snapping his head back to hit the mattress with tooth-rattling force.
"You happy now, you bastard?" he snarled. The gland didn't seem to have any comment.
He'd managed not to kill Hobbes for a little while, so he was starting to relax into things. Screw Scarborough, anyway, what did he know. Until, thanks to Darien's smart-ass idea to startle a couple of fleeing crooks at the top of a fire escape, Hobbes fell on his head.
Pacing the hospital hallway, Darien cringed at how blithely he'd forgotten all about Scarborough's promise--in between wondering whether getting someone kicked off a high place counted as killing him with your bare hands. He couldn't be sure; the logic was a little convoluted. But one thing he did know, which was that he wouldn't have had the super-bright idea to be funny with the bad guys if it hadn't been for the gland, and that was what had cracked Hobbes' skull open and pooled his blood in the dust.
When they finally let Darien into the hospital room, followed by the Official, he thought he was ready to face that memory-loss thing the doctor had talked about. And as the Official explained everything while Bobby picked at his breakfast, he came to feel like he could handle it. Somehow, listening to that terminally-grumpy voice lay out recent events as if they were nothing more important than a bad expense report made it all feel more manageable.
So eventually he walked the Official out, found the john, and then came back in to sit with Bobby for a while, his stomach starting to untwist itself a little bit.
"About time you got here," Bobby said, scowling.
"I was just gone a--" Darien stopped himself, slouching into the bedside chair. "Yeah. Sorry. How's it going?"
"Once I find my pants, I'm gonna go tell the Fat Man exactly how it's going, which is that I don't like it." He pushed at the blankets, and Darien hastily laid a hand on his.
"You can't, man--you need to stay right there, okay?"
"What for?" Bobby plucked at the hospital gown, making a face. "Keep's really gotta get something nicer for her lab rats to wear on Agency-physical days. I mean, this makes it look like I'm in some hospital or something." He eyed Darien up and down. "How come you got your pants back so fast? Heyyy, a little private deal with the doc, huh?"
"No--hey--Bobby. Listen." Darien tightened his hand over Bobby's. "You are in a hospital. We were doing a job, okay, and I thought-- I got in front of the guys and they went down and knocked you off the fire escape, and you kind of landed on your head."
Bobby considered it. "Nah, I don't think so," he said at last, tugging his hand out from under Darien's and peeling back the blanket again.
"What do you mean, you don't think so? I was there!" He leaned in and took hold of Bobby's shoulders, composing himself. "You were in an accident, okay? Just... You have to stay here for a while, let your head get better. Okay? For me?"
"Sure, sure, buddy, whatever you want," Bobby said, kind of patronizingly, easing back against the pillows under the pressure of Darien's hands. "You want me to rest my pretty head, I'm resting it."
"I'm going to... uh... find the Keeper for you," Darien said, letting him go. "You'll stay here, right?"
Bobby nestled back, waving him away. "Staying right here. Riiiiight here." He yawned. "You can bring Keepy in and she can explain why you get your pants back first." He wiggled his eyebrows.
Darien fled, but the Keeper was off meeting with her brain surgeon friend or whoever, and he could only pace the hallway for so long before he had to go back in.
"Hsst." Bobby's eyes were once more alert and a little too bright. "Where the hell you been? We escaping now?"
Darien flinched, and made himself sit down very slowly in the chair.
Later, driving a little too fast toward the deli for Bobby's pastrami on rye, he decided with a deadening kind of calm that this might actually be it. The bare-hands argument, if a little vague, could theoretically apply--and it was more than clear that he'd actually killed Bobby. The Bobby he knew, the Bobby who knew himself.
He remembered--couldn't stop remembering, unfortunately, even through the haze of quicksilver madness--pointing Bobby's gun at his own head that day. If only Bobby hadn't saved him from himself. Or, more to the point, if Darien had been quicker to stop the evil thing in his brain once and for all instead of hoping for the best. But now it was too late.
"Light on the mustard," he said. He clenched one fist in his pocket, stifling a powerful need to punch himself in the back of the head (and then the sandwich guy would call the hospital--hey, maybe he could room with Bobby). Hoping for the best hadn't gotten them anywhere. Bobby needed him now, but the day he--the day he didn't anymore... Just don't get too comfortable in there, he thought with venom. I know where you live.
Still no response.
After Bobby got cured, though, and they managed to get Sarah and the others fixed up, Darien breathed more freely. The damn gland really had helped, in the end--hell, all of Bobby's suffering had turned out to save the day, and Darien knew Bobby would've been happy to do it again if he had to. So: gland reprieve. Time passed, and to tell the truth, he sort of forgot about Scarborough, what with one thing and another.
Anyway, maybe it had counted, and Scarborough's prophecy was cancelled on a technicality. Bobby once was lost, but now was found: like dying on the table and being resuscitated, seeing the big white light but getting sucked back into the world. Seemed only fair. And there had been other times since then that it seemed like he might die for real, but he never did. Bobby Hobbes really did take a lot of killing, just as he'd promised. So Darien let himself relax... until the dream came back.
It felt a little different than it had before. He didn't remember it as clearly, for one thing, and there were definitely chunks missing; the whole event was covered in some kind of fog. But as far as he could tell, the climax was much the same: Bobby and his donuts, Darien tackling him, the air of the dream thick with something dark and perfect. Waking with a gasp, his pillow twisted and smothered beneath his body. And bingo, there it was, the old panic, rising up fresh and new like it had never gone anywhere.
"'samatter?" Bobby asked that night, as they were taking turns flicking popcorn at a Learning Channel special about Bigfoot that got everything hilariously wrong.
Darien drank beer to stall on answering the question, and choked on it a little bit. Very smooth. "Nothing," he said, wiping his chin.
"Uh huh." Bobby thumped one booted foot up on the coffee table. "For a cat-burglar-secret-agent, you make a terrible liar."
"I do not!"
"Do." Thump went the other foot.
"Well," Darien said defensively, "I mean, sure, to you."
"So why do you even bother?" Trouble was, he didn't ask it rhetorically or smugly. He was half-turned, comfortably ensconced on his side of the couch, open and listening. In short, he meant it.
"Look-- You ever think that maybe there are things that just aren't your business?"
Bobby appeared to give that some serious thought. But finally: "Nope. It's all relevant. All grist for my mill."
"Grist?"
"Mankind is my business, my friend."
Darien stared at him, the dream for the moment receding. "'Mankind is my--' You been reading up behind my back or something?"
"Oh ho, you're the only king of quotations here, is that it?" Bobby plucked a kernel of popcorn out of the bowl and brandished it. "Did we, or did we not, spend time throwing this exact popcorn at this exact TV the last time A Christmas Carol was on? Huh?"
Darien slumped back. "Maybe not this exact popcorn," he muttered. He watched Bobby, aglow with victory, eat his visual aid and dig in for more.
The return of the dream was suddenly more relevant than ever: it was clear that it would be a hell of a lot harder to keep Bobby out of harm's way by now, given how they'd fallen into spending most of their time together by default. After all, how many ways were there to kill someone with your bare hands in this very apartment? Or out at Bobby's favorite night spots? Let alone the bowling alley, the movie theater, the paintball maze, the roller rink, and the top of the Wave Runner slide at Knott's Soak City? And Darien suspected there were at least a dozen ways to kill Bobby at Disneyland alone, not counting methods involving giant cartoon-animal suits, because some things were just beyond the pale.
"Well?"
Darien started, snapping out of that last horrible vision. "Well, what?"
Bobby rolled his eyes. "Your problem. What is it."
"People've been asking me that for years," Darien replied, deadpan.
But Bobby just watched him, chewing, and Darien found himself saying quietly, "Nightmare, okay? Nothing you haven't heard before, promise."
Bobby had that gentle, listening look for another second, making Darien sweat, then seemed to relent. He pursed his lips in a sympathetic sad face. "Aw. Here, you want me to change this? Too scary for you?" He put up one hand and a beer to block the TV from Darien's view, and Darien hit him with a throw pillow, feeling much better.
After Bobby finally went home, though, Darien couldn't get comfortable. Every time he'd start to doze off he'd feel the dream pulling at him, and an adrenaline spike would jerk him awake. It was well into the wee hours before he gave up and made himself a pot of coffee.
"Gimme those," Bobby said, snaking away the binoculars.
Darien's head jolted forward and snapped back up. "Is he here?"
Bobby was looking intently through the windshield at the secluded little guesthouse, adjusting the focus. Sunset painted the hood of the van in stripes of rich orange and long shadows. "Not yet. Not that you'd notice if he showed up with a marching band, there, Van Winkle."
"Sorry." Darien ground both fists into his eyes and rubbed hard. It had only taken a few days of the 3 a.m. Coffee Diet to leave him pretty much a wreck. He'd slept some, technically, but only in fits and starts, and vague shreds and reminders of the dream were usually floating around when he woke up.
"Still having that nightmare?"
He peeked over his fists at Bobby, considered denial, had a good internal laugh at how ineffective that would be, and shrugged. "Oh yeah."
"Brought you something," Bobby said, waving one hand vaguely toward the glove box.
"You lay in some extra Ritalin for your best buddy?" Darien opened it, revealing a battered old Walkman with a set of headphones wrapped around it. "Ah...hey. Uh. Very nice."
"Look inside, funny guy."
"No, I mean it," Darien said, fumbling the thing out of the compartment. "Vintage." He did look inside, though, and saw it was already loaded with a tape. Popping the lid showed that it was a plain white cassette with the word "Relax" hand-printed on it in fading grease pencil.
He clicked the Walkman shut again, grinning. "Did you make me a mix tape?"
"You should be so lucky." Bobby propped his elbows on the steering wheel, still glued to the binocs. "It's a recording I got back in the day from one of my shrinks. Helps you fall asleep."
The grin froze and vanished, and Darien regarded the thing like a rectangular snake. "Thanks, but--"
"Not regular sleep, jeez. You think I don't know that's the whole problem? It's for the other thing, that lucid dreaming thing. It's where you figure out you're dreaming while you're still asleep, and it lets you take control of the whole deal. Good for nightmares. They use it sometimes for post-traumatic stress."
Darien looked over at him, but Bobby was still peering off at the house, his face mostly obscured.
Huh.
"So..." He hefted the Walkman in one hand. "How does it work?"
"You just lay back and listen." Bobby finally glanced over at him. "Go ahead, I'm on it."
It took Darien a second; he blamed the sleep deprivation. "What, right now?"
"You think we'll be able to keep your eyes propped open for the rest of this frickin' stake-out?"
Darien opened his mouth, closed it, spent some quiet time unwinding the headphones, and spent some louder time swearing at them while he untangled the knots. Once they were finally on and adjusted, he looked around nervously.
"Am I gonna pass out? No, hey, Bobby, this isn't gonna make me cluck like a chicken, is it? 'Cause that time at the magic show, I swear I wasn't laughing."
"That would only be fair," Bobby replied, his tone dignified, "but no."
"Okay. Okay. Uh... I'm going now."
After a couple of false starts, he finally pressed the 'Play' button all the way and slid down in his seat, leaning his head back. There was a fluttery feeling under his breastbone.
In a while, the fluttery feeling was long gone and all that was left was idle boredom. He'd been faithfully doing what the voice on the tape said, which had so far mainly involved closing his eyes, breathing in and out, tightening and relaxing various muscles, and now imagining he was standing at the top of a very long escalator. And this was from a doctor? Hilarious. If he hadn't felt so heavy and still all over, he would've yawned.
The voice reminded him that he was stepping onto the escalator now, so, hey, why not: on he went. He watched for the signs the voice told him were there, and repeated the floor numbers silently as he moved steadily past them, away, and down. Down. Further down.
This really was a long escalator.
Deeper and deeper.
He had trouble reading the sign with the number 5 on it--it was scrambled or upside-down, for some reason--but he just did what the voice reminded him to do and there it was, a 5 again. Good old 5.
4.
3.
2.
One.
Oh, here he was. There was all that fog, but he remembered what he'd been told: he could watch the dream safely if he wanted to. So he waved his hands slowly, then pursed his lips and blew, and the fog began to dissipate, trailing off into wisps.
"I got just the thing to calm you down," Bobby said, standing outside the van window. He wasn't wearing a shirt and sportcoat this time, but an undershirt, the kind they both liked, tank-style.
Darien lifted his arms and launched himself outward through the glass--except there wasn't any glass now, the window was already rolled down, and he didn't have to lunge, really, he just sort of...flew. He could feel the air buoying him up as he sailed along. Bobby didn't look scared this time. His arms came up as Darien reached him, and his skin was just as warm beneath Darien's thighs and hands, but he wasn't choking. In fact, Darien's hands weren't around Bobby's throat at all. They were...
...Oh. Oh.
Okay, this really was different.
Darien woke with a start and an indrawn breath. It sure beat shouting and thrashing, but he couldn't say he was entirely relaxed--he could feel that he was in an awkward condition. The sun had finished setting, and the sky over the guesthouse was that last deep blue before going black; he was grateful for the darkness inside the van, as well as the Walkman in his lap.
"You back?"
"Uh." Darien cleared his throat and blinked. "Yeah. Sort of. How're things?"
Bobby's shrug was just visible in the shadows. "No sign of him. Just a little longer, and then we should call it in."
"Good, great," Darien said absently, concentrating on box scores and those really dry news shows they had on public TV on Sunday afternoons.
"Or get ourselves some night-vision goggles," Bobby added.
Darien fidgeted.
Turned out, when they did call in, the guy wasn't coming back after all; he'd just been nabbed at the airport with a travel guide to Grande Comore Island and a suitcase full of fish food. They were officially off the clock.
"So?" Bobby asked, making a left turn.
"Hmm," Darien said. The crisis had abated, and he felt much less conspicuous now.
"Help any?"
Darien reflected. "Yeah, that's...kind of hard to say."
"I got another one at home you can try, if you want--it's a little longer."
"Sure," Darien said. He thought about Bobby and his tapes, and the beat-up Walkman, and the fading grease pencil. "Hey--thanks, partner."
Bobby looked over at him for a second, a passing streetlight reflecting the shine from his eyes, before he had to turn his full attention (with gestures) to the tailgater behind them, what is your problem, you trying to knock my muffler off?
Eventually, without incident or bulletholes or missing muffler, they pulled up in front of Bobby's place.
"You want to come in for a minute while I look for it?"
"No, I'm good."
Bobby opened his door and slid out, but hesitated. "You sure? Could take a while. And I got a kielbasa in the fridge, I could do that baked ziti."
"Nah, man," Darien said, running his fingers over the scarred surface of the Walkman. "I'd better-- I gotta get home. You know."
"Catch up on your sleep," Bobby said agreeably. He thumped his door shut and walked around the front of the van, but paused once he was on Darien's side to make a twisting gesture in the air with one finger. Darien, savvy to all of the secret spy handsignals, rolled his window down. "Should I bring back that book you lent me, the nervous-system one? 'Cause I'll tell you for free, that thing'll put anybody to sleep."
Darien couldn't help but smile back at him. "Anybody without higher brain functions, maybe."
"Yeah, you're higher in something, anyway," Bobby retorted. "All right, gimme a sec, I'll go get the thing. I bet this one'll help you."
He turned to head for his door, and Darien, draping one arm lazily out the window, watched him go.
I got just the thing to calm you down.
Darien shook his head sharply. It wasn't déjà vu, not quite... but it was something. Something weird, making the blood rush in his head.
"Bobby--" he said, louder than he'd meant to.
Bobby looked over his shoulder, but was still moving away.
"Bobby," Darien said again. He moved his dangling hand, but he couldn't remember any of his spy signals, so it just reached out and twitched.
Thank goodness someone in the partnership was an experienced agent, because Bobby was stopping, turning, coming back, twitch or no twitch. He didn't look scared, though, which was good, because--
Good, because--
All in one push-and-pull, Darien leaned his whole upper body out of the van window and grabbed a handful of Bobby's shirt, hauling him in close. Bobby stumbled, arms lifting to brace himself on Darien's shoulders, and Darien had to kiss him, so that's what he did.
The dream hadn't had the details of just how Bobby breathed, or how his fingers slipped up into Darien's hair. And it certainly hadn't had the little pained noise Bobby made as he pulled away, only slightly, to look Darien in the eye.
"Really?" Bobby said, breathing hard.
"Yeah," Darien said. "Yeah, yeah, I know it's-- I mean it's-- I didn't--"
Bobby nodded. "You better come in."
"I guess I better." He didn't slither all the way through the window--he opened the door and got out like a regular person. But he didn't feel like such a regular person while he was practically floating through Bobby's front door. Or while he was interrupting Bobby starting to talk by backing him up against the wall and kissing him some more, yanking at the buttons of Bobby's shirt until he could slip his hands inside and over the tight curves of his shoulders.
Even though Bobby literally had his back to the wall, somehow there was--something, an ankle and a hand and something else, and Darien couldn't breathe, not just because he'd been too busy, but because he'd come down on the floor hard on his back, and Bobby had him carefully but firmly pinned.
"Fawkes," Bobby said from a couple inches away. "You gone nuts?"
"No!" Darien said urgently.
"Uh huh." Bobby thought hard. "Did some bad guy secretly switch out that tape with, like, a post-hypnotic suggestion where I turn into a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model?"
"God, no." Darien bucked upward a little, but Bobby's pins always had been the best.
"I better get it to a lab, run some tests."
"Bobby, listen," Darien almost whined.
Bobby looked at him silently, then eased his grip just enough. Darien could have rolled Bobby off him and gotten up, but he didn't; the inside of his head was still rushing--his head and his chest and other places--and he put one hand on Bobby's hip to feel the heat there. The heat he remembered.
"I'm listening."
"I'll tell you." He put his other hand on the small of Bobby's back, where his shirt had come untucked.
"That don't feel much like telling," Bobby said, a catch in his voice.
Darien swallowed. "Then let me show you."
A silence almost too long, and then Bobby did let him. Even then, Darien told him, too, all the while, talking into his ear and his shoulder and his sweat-damp neck. There'd been dreams and realities, feared and guessed at and misunderstood--the nightmare he'd thought it was, the chance it really was. And when they were mirroring something of the dream, Darien's thighs twined around him, Bobby's voice rasping and low, vision and imagination and action all fused into one strange and perfect shape. He clenched his hand on Bobby's, and felt him grip back. Like always.
After, Bobby heaved him in a businesslike way down the hall into the bedroom and dumped him across the bed. Darien stared at the ceiling, wiggled his feet, and realized he was still wearing one of his socks.
The mattress moved as Bobby settled down, and a faint, high-pitched hiss revealed that he was opening a bottle of something.
"Water?" Bobby asked, waving a plastic bottle through Darien's field of vision.
"Nnn-nn."
"It's fizzy."
"Nnn." He listened to Bobby take a drink.
"Tired, huh."
Darien yawned in response.
"Well, look, before you fade on me, I have to say something."
Now that was a less restful thing to hear. Darien reflexively tensed up and lifted his head, even though it weighed fifty pounds. The way Bobby had reacted at last, he'd thought that maybe... Okay, it was strange, and not necessarily something they'd planned for, but when you considered that that also described the rest of their lives since they'd met....
"You mean to tell me," Bobby said, looking very calm and together and not wearing either of his socks, "that you had a recurring dream where I hold up a donut and you jump on top of me, and you didn't know what it was about?"
Then he cracked up laughing.
Darien let his head flop back down on the mattress. "Heyyy," he moaned. "Come on, sometimes a donut is just a donut."
Bobby wiped his eyes and kept bursting into little leftover snorts, and Darien rolled over and tried to frown at him, but he just couldn't. Instead, he crawled closer and tried for a frontal attack; it proved unwise. Bobby's pins remained the very best, especially on his home turf.
"Fawkesy," Bobby sighed, subsiding into hiccups. "You kill me. You really do."
Darien smiled lazily and let his eyes close. "I suppose so."
Oscar Wilde said that each man kills the thing he loves. Of course, he had good reason to take that seriously. But luckily, for me and Bobby, it's turned out to be a complete metaphor. Just like a dream. The good kind--the kind that might even come true.