HT100 FlashFic Challenge #61: Blessing
Title: Precious Illusions
Prompt #61: Blessing
Rated: PG13
Word Count: 2, 313
Characters: Beecher/Keller, O'Reily, Said, Sister Pete, Murphy
Summary: Toby knows better. That doesn't stop him from wanting it all.
Warning: Nothing worth getting hot and bothered about. Heads up that this is set after Keller gets shipped off to Cedar Junction.
A/N: I wrote this ages ago but let it spin its wheels until now. Don't ask me why. Hopefully it doesn't come across as stale. In any case it's been too long since I posted a Beecher/Keller story.
Toby knew better.
But knowing and doing covered both sides of the coin and Toby could swallow lies as easy as any shot or drug-burn first, bliss later. Besides, he told himself during relentless mindgames that came out of the shadows during lights out, if the lie was pretty enough, tasty enough, it quenched the needy hunger pains. Better than the truth with its jagged edges and unforgiving sentiment. Better than the dressed down reality of life in a box and partnerships based on mutual dislike and a willingness to turn a blind eye.
Nowadays he played, ‘Do you remember…’ with his conscience, bled Christmas into New Years and turned a fourteen day lockdown into a lifelong relationship. In high school an ex (who summered as a camp counselor) had explained how a weeklong relationship at camp was the equivalent of a month in the real world. It was her justification for why cheating on him was something she couldn’t control while they were apart (six weeks equaling six months or some bullshit like that), yet now it shed a curious light on what was seeded and cultivated in Oz. Surely a week was a year. With life and death on the line, with unexpected sexual leanings revealed, what was the alternative.
Prison broke him down, utterly and completely. Then it rebuilt him, stronger than ever, welded and bent, infected and fortified by the tree of knowledge.
He flicked his gaze at O’Reily sitting across from him, eyeing the chessboard while unconsciously stroking the tip of his index finger against his cheek as if an invisible mustache was begging to be twirled in Machiavellian fashion. Normally it would concern Toby (everything O’Reily did raised a healthy level of suspicion) but the odds said that as long as he wasn’t the intended target aligning himself with O’Reily was a case of ‘the devil you know.’ It was a bed Toby consented to sleep in-with one eye open.
With O’Reily hemming and hawing over his next move, Toby spared a look over his shoulder (not long enough to let O’Reily pull a cheat but enough to make it worth the risk) and caught Said’s intense gaze moving from face to face, lingering for a few seconds before continuing on, culminating with a shared nod between them.
Forget the meek inheriting the earth, it was all about the righteous-the right-keepers of the truth. In the midst of hell on earth, Said was a saving grace. Personal differences were set aside. They had to be. If the option in Oz was kill or be killed, make allies where you can, walk soft and carry a big stick, compromise became more than lip service, it became a state of being. How else to explain the biggest shift off centre in Toby’s life that still lay pungent on his skin and collected time in rogue thoughts.
Said was judgmental and prone to falling but picked himself up through thick and thin. It was that humbling quality Toby knew too well, the, ‘You’re not that much better than anyone else,’ refrain which locked them together reminding they were masters of their own demise while also giving hope in having a confidante who saw the difficult but enlightened path that lay ahead.
Fall together. Rise as one.
Sister Pete would appreciate the sentiment. The thought prompted Toby to glance at his watch and see it was time for work duty in her office. He waved off O’Reily’s irritated complaint, growing distant as Toby made his way out of Em City with Murphy in tow. He appreciated the CO’s quiet and usually professional countenance. It saved him the frustration Mineo or Lapresti (and definitely McManus) induced with crude pleasure. The near silent trek with Murphy gave off the scent of normalcy and much needed calm in the storm of madness that permeated every other minute of every hour of every day (save for actual sleep).
It was a reprieve. A respite. A few seconds of divine intervention.
Sister Pete’s office welcomed him five feet ahead. The squeak of the mail cart’s wheels around the corner flipped his stomach and he fisted his hands at his side before he realized it was growing fainter, moving away. He sighed.
Ready to work, to distract himself with the clatter of keystrokes and the stale smell of coffee, he froze in confusion at the sight of Sister Pete standing in front of her desk finishing up a conversation on the phone then holding the receiver out to him. It wasn’t until Murphy quietly nudged Toby forward and Sister Pete shared a smile over his shoulder that he took the phone in hand. More surprising was that they left him alone, closing the door behind them as they went into the hall.
Toby furrowed his brow while his brain synapses fired for an answer about the unrequested privacy.
“Toby?”
Like some ludicrous movie scene where time literally stops everything flew out the window until all that was left was-
His body reacted before his brain could compute. His breath caught between his throat and lips, heat flared across his cheeks and his dick twitched. He remained aware enough to turn around and put his back to the door lest Sister Pete and Murphy glance through the window and spy his abruptly compromised state. Tightening his grip around the receiver, it was a full five seconds until he could croak out a barely articulate, “Chris?”
A quiet chuckle on the other end. “Hey,” was the affectionate reply.
Puzzlement tripped Toby’s tongue and he managed as best he could. “How are-what’s-how did you…”
“It’s all Pete,” Chris said in a way that had Toby picturing him with a crooked smile, lazily rubbing the back of his neck with one hand while cradling the receiver closer against his face with the other, eyes sparked bright like he’s seeing Toby in return. “Maybe she’s giving us a Christmas present?”
Toby laughed, the sound nearly foreign to his ears. “You think she’d break the rules for us?” he joked.
“You tell me, you’re the teacher’s pet,” Chris mused.
Toby wrinkled his nose in disagreement and glanced at the door before walking around to the other side of the desk and perching half on the edge. He crossed his legs and folded his arms across his chest and curled the fingers of his free hand around his left bicep and squeezed and bowed his head into curve of the phone as if to pull Chris as close into his arms as possible. He gazed out the window at the snow gently drifting down. “I bet you were perfectly innocent in the matter.”
Silence. But Toby wasn’t concerned, not as long as he could hear the faint sound of Chris’ breathing and the memories it unpacked along with the feelings it unleashed. Suddenly, however, he was desperate to know what Chris was thinking, how he was doing, if he was surviving at Cedar Junction.
“I’m a regular boy scout,” Chris eventually said.
Far from it, Toby though and knew Chris was thinking the same thing. There was the rub, worn down beneath their calloused fingers, its rough edges smoothed yet ridged, its curves melted into bumps. It was their medal of dishonor, honourably bestowed as their scarlet letter.
Innocence hadn’t been part of their language since…ever. It was a fifty cent word tossed around with too much ease and though there was a time Toby clung to it with the deathly clutch of a drowning man, revelation broke his arms and legs and turned his heart into a haphazard patchwork hastily, fervently, stitched together.
Their volatile nature, bred in the bone, lay in wait until the siren’s call rose up and loosed it, lit the fuse Toby normally dulled with alcohol and any other vice he could soak through his tongue or snort up his nose.
They were a hurricane with a quiescent centre and a devastatingly destructive circumference. Chris’ surprisingly gentle approach to fucking found balance in the fiercely possessive way he claimed Toby for his own, whether it was just the two of them during the night or for all the world to see. It suffocated Toby and he bucked against it, tried to shrug it off and push him away, but Chris wouldn’t let go, not completely, and Toby loved him for it. He loved Chris for being the one vice he couldn’t kick and didn’t truly want to. And he knew, despite caustic indifference to the contrary, Chris felt the same.
When it came to survival, Chris was amongst the best. He never-well, rarely-let anyone get in his way. Life and death played roulette before him and the odds were what he made of them. With fascination Toby watched it unfold in every look, action and quip Chris dished out. Impersonally personal, Chris, like just about everything else, was a walking, talking contradiction. He hurt Toby to save himself. He punished Toby to remind them both the price of survival and the cost of their love.
Everything they had was sacrifice and pain and love without a happy ending. Everything was a test, a constant battle for proof-proof of change, proof of devotion, proof that it all hung by a thread (and the thrill of all or nothing-where all meant unparalleled and all encompassing, body and soul, and nothing meant mindgames built on hurting to feel and inflicting pain to rub in what wasn’t allowed but haunted like a poltergeist) which they fed into, leaping head first.
Proof of life.
Whether he was with Chris or in a battle with him, Toby rarely felt more alive or more in touch with his own mortality because each moment was to be held close and revered for fear it may all be gone tomorrow.
Without him, Toby had languished and felt bereft of hope. Their drawn out war wasn’t supposed to end with a kiss and a goodbye-
“You gonna make me talk to myself?”
Toby blinked to attention and realized Chris had been speaking the whole time.
“I like listening to you,” Toby recovered quickly, smiling into the phone, determined to hold onto every single second Sister Pete would allow them. “You always liked hearing the sound of your own voice anyway,” he couldn’t resist adding.
Toby heard Chris take a deep breath and imagined him grinning, biting back an instinctive sarcastic reply. “How much time do we have?” Chris asked, all at once dead serious.
Toby glanced over his shoulder to see Sister Pete peeking through the window. He held up his hand and she nodded, disappearing once more from view. “Not enough.” He turned back to stare outside.
“So stop wasting it,” Chris stated.
“You still trying to tell me what to do?”
“If I was wrong you’d hang up the phone.”
He was right. The comment may be said nonchalantly but the hint of respect in Chris’ tone suggested much more. Chris didn’t suffer fools wisely and, pain in the ass as Toby could be, his remaining in Chris’ fold, in his protection, within his discretionary consideration, was something no one else could claim.
And Chris pushed him, always past points of comfort and familiarity, angling for more until Toby put his feet down and not so sweetly reminded him that it was a two way street and that Toby wasn’t one to roll over and play dead, he was too damn stubborn, too much of a fighter.
“I miss you.”
Toby let the words hang unbound to anything else. He liked the silence they reduced Chris to a state away.
“Tobe.” It was said so quietly Toby almost didn’t hear it, but the sound of Chris saying his name in that tone, the way only he ever did, sent a warm shiver through Toby’s body.
He wanted to ask the obvious of Chris in return although he knew full well he didn’t have to. He bit his bottom lip. If he asked the question it would turn into one of those conversations and this was not the time or the place. But they don’t get lights out together anymore so what did it matter, and he wanted to hear Chris say it even if experience told him Chris would brush it off (save face in front of whichever guard was glaring at him) and if he did that Toby feared it would unintentionally taint the call and then-
“What are you wearing?”
“…what?”
Chris cleared his throat. “You forget how to do this already? Man, it has been too fucking long. What. Are. You. Wearing?”
It was an obvious distraction, a blatant change of subject-and it made Toby laugh, hard, in a way he hadn’t done in a long time. It was exactly what he needed to escape.
Toby considered his words carefully then licked his lips. “The question is, what are you going to do about it?”
All it took was a few seconds and the shutter of Toby’s eyelids and then Chris was ghosting his hands up and down Toby’s arm, settling them on Toby’s hips, sniffing Toby’s neck and lightly licking a small patch of skin then leaning in for a kiss (only to pull away right before lips touched) before moving to the other side of Toby’s neck and repeating the move. He pressed his groin to Toby’s and rolled into the strained pressure but not too much.
Time was against them.
Always.
But for a moment-one stolen or given them-time had no say or design on them. It bent to their will, broke through the walls of Oz and Cedar Junction, folded in the roads and towns and collapsed space until nothing existed to keep them apart.
Toby knew better.
But he could pretend with the best of them.
Prompt #61: Blessing
Rated: PG13
Word Count: 2, 313
Characters: Beecher/Keller, O'Reily, Said, Sister Pete, Murphy
Summary: Toby knows better. That doesn't stop him from wanting it all.
Warning: Nothing worth getting hot and bothered about. Heads up that this is set after Keller gets shipped off to Cedar Junction.
A/N: I wrote this ages ago but let it spin its wheels until now. Don't ask me why. Hopefully it doesn't come across as stale. In any case it's been too long since I posted a Beecher/Keller story.
Toby knew better.
But knowing and doing covered both sides of the coin and Toby could swallow lies as easy as any shot or drug-burn first, bliss later. Besides, he told himself during relentless mindgames that came out of the shadows during lights out, if the lie was pretty enough, tasty enough, it quenched the needy hunger pains. Better than the truth with its jagged edges and unforgiving sentiment. Better than the dressed down reality of life in a box and partnerships based on mutual dislike and a willingness to turn a blind eye.
Nowadays he played, ‘Do you remember…’ with his conscience, bled Christmas into New Years and turned a fourteen day lockdown into a lifelong relationship. In high school an ex (who summered as a camp counselor) had explained how a weeklong relationship at camp was the equivalent of a month in the real world. It was her justification for why cheating on him was something she couldn’t control while they were apart (six weeks equaling six months or some bullshit like that), yet now it shed a curious light on what was seeded and cultivated in Oz. Surely a week was a year. With life and death on the line, with unexpected sexual leanings revealed, what was the alternative.
Prison broke him down, utterly and completely. Then it rebuilt him, stronger than ever, welded and bent, infected and fortified by the tree of knowledge.
He flicked his gaze at O’Reily sitting across from him, eyeing the chessboard while unconsciously stroking the tip of his index finger against his cheek as if an invisible mustache was begging to be twirled in Machiavellian fashion. Normally it would concern Toby (everything O’Reily did raised a healthy level of suspicion) but the odds said that as long as he wasn’t the intended target aligning himself with O’Reily was a case of ‘the devil you know.’ It was a bed Toby consented to sleep in-with one eye open.
With O’Reily hemming and hawing over his next move, Toby spared a look over his shoulder (not long enough to let O’Reily pull a cheat but enough to make it worth the risk) and caught Said’s intense gaze moving from face to face, lingering for a few seconds before continuing on, culminating with a shared nod between them.
Forget the meek inheriting the earth, it was all about the righteous-the right-keepers of the truth. In the midst of hell on earth, Said was a saving grace. Personal differences were set aside. They had to be. If the option in Oz was kill or be killed, make allies where you can, walk soft and carry a big stick, compromise became more than lip service, it became a state of being. How else to explain the biggest shift off centre in Toby’s life that still lay pungent on his skin and collected time in rogue thoughts.
Said was judgmental and prone to falling but picked himself up through thick and thin. It was that humbling quality Toby knew too well, the, ‘You’re not that much better than anyone else,’ refrain which locked them together reminding they were masters of their own demise while also giving hope in having a confidante who saw the difficult but enlightened path that lay ahead.
Fall together. Rise as one.
Sister Pete would appreciate the sentiment. The thought prompted Toby to glance at his watch and see it was time for work duty in her office. He waved off O’Reily’s irritated complaint, growing distant as Toby made his way out of Em City with Murphy in tow. He appreciated the CO’s quiet and usually professional countenance. It saved him the frustration Mineo or Lapresti (and definitely McManus) induced with crude pleasure. The near silent trek with Murphy gave off the scent of normalcy and much needed calm in the storm of madness that permeated every other minute of every hour of every day (save for actual sleep).
It was a reprieve. A respite. A few seconds of divine intervention.
Sister Pete’s office welcomed him five feet ahead. The squeak of the mail cart’s wheels around the corner flipped his stomach and he fisted his hands at his side before he realized it was growing fainter, moving away. He sighed.
Ready to work, to distract himself with the clatter of keystrokes and the stale smell of coffee, he froze in confusion at the sight of Sister Pete standing in front of her desk finishing up a conversation on the phone then holding the receiver out to him. It wasn’t until Murphy quietly nudged Toby forward and Sister Pete shared a smile over his shoulder that he took the phone in hand. More surprising was that they left him alone, closing the door behind them as they went into the hall.
Toby furrowed his brow while his brain synapses fired for an answer about the unrequested privacy.
“Toby?”
Like some ludicrous movie scene where time literally stops everything flew out the window until all that was left was-
His body reacted before his brain could compute. His breath caught between his throat and lips, heat flared across his cheeks and his dick twitched. He remained aware enough to turn around and put his back to the door lest Sister Pete and Murphy glance through the window and spy his abruptly compromised state. Tightening his grip around the receiver, it was a full five seconds until he could croak out a barely articulate, “Chris?”
A quiet chuckle on the other end. “Hey,” was the affectionate reply.
Puzzlement tripped Toby’s tongue and he managed as best he could. “How are-what’s-how did you…”
“It’s all Pete,” Chris said in a way that had Toby picturing him with a crooked smile, lazily rubbing the back of his neck with one hand while cradling the receiver closer against his face with the other, eyes sparked bright like he’s seeing Toby in return. “Maybe she’s giving us a Christmas present?”
Toby laughed, the sound nearly foreign to his ears. “You think she’d break the rules for us?” he joked.
“You tell me, you’re the teacher’s pet,” Chris mused.
Toby wrinkled his nose in disagreement and glanced at the door before walking around to the other side of the desk and perching half on the edge. He crossed his legs and folded his arms across his chest and curled the fingers of his free hand around his left bicep and squeezed and bowed his head into curve of the phone as if to pull Chris as close into his arms as possible. He gazed out the window at the snow gently drifting down. “I bet you were perfectly innocent in the matter.”
Silence. But Toby wasn’t concerned, not as long as he could hear the faint sound of Chris’ breathing and the memories it unpacked along with the feelings it unleashed. Suddenly, however, he was desperate to know what Chris was thinking, how he was doing, if he was surviving at Cedar Junction.
“I’m a regular boy scout,” Chris eventually said.
Far from it, Toby though and knew Chris was thinking the same thing. There was the rub, worn down beneath their calloused fingers, its rough edges smoothed yet ridged, its curves melted into bumps. It was their medal of dishonor, honourably bestowed as their scarlet letter.
Innocence hadn’t been part of their language since…ever. It was a fifty cent word tossed around with too much ease and though there was a time Toby clung to it with the deathly clutch of a drowning man, revelation broke his arms and legs and turned his heart into a haphazard patchwork hastily, fervently, stitched together.
Their volatile nature, bred in the bone, lay in wait until the siren’s call rose up and loosed it, lit the fuse Toby normally dulled with alcohol and any other vice he could soak through his tongue or snort up his nose.
They were a hurricane with a quiescent centre and a devastatingly destructive circumference. Chris’ surprisingly gentle approach to fucking found balance in the fiercely possessive way he claimed Toby for his own, whether it was just the two of them during the night or for all the world to see. It suffocated Toby and he bucked against it, tried to shrug it off and push him away, but Chris wouldn’t let go, not completely, and Toby loved him for it. He loved Chris for being the one vice he couldn’t kick and didn’t truly want to. And he knew, despite caustic indifference to the contrary, Chris felt the same.
When it came to survival, Chris was amongst the best. He never-well, rarely-let anyone get in his way. Life and death played roulette before him and the odds were what he made of them. With fascination Toby watched it unfold in every look, action and quip Chris dished out. Impersonally personal, Chris, like just about everything else, was a walking, talking contradiction. He hurt Toby to save himself. He punished Toby to remind them both the price of survival and the cost of their love.
Everything they had was sacrifice and pain and love without a happy ending. Everything was a test, a constant battle for proof-proof of change, proof of devotion, proof that it all hung by a thread (and the thrill of all or nothing-where all meant unparalleled and all encompassing, body and soul, and nothing meant mindgames built on hurting to feel and inflicting pain to rub in what wasn’t allowed but haunted like a poltergeist) which they fed into, leaping head first.
Proof of life.
Whether he was with Chris or in a battle with him, Toby rarely felt more alive or more in touch with his own mortality because each moment was to be held close and revered for fear it may all be gone tomorrow.
Without him, Toby had languished and felt bereft of hope. Their drawn out war wasn’t supposed to end with a kiss and a goodbye-
“You gonna make me talk to myself?”
Toby blinked to attention and realized Chris had been speaking the whole time.
“I like listening to you,” Toby recovered quickly, smiling into the phone, determined to hold onto every single second Sister Pete would allow them. “You always liked hearing the sound of your own voice anyway,” he couldn’t resist adding.
Toby heard Chris take a deep breath and imagined him grinning, biting back an instinctive sarcastic reply. “How much time do we have?” Chris asked, all at once dead serious.
Toby glanced over his shoulder to see Sister Pete peeking through the window. He held up his hand and she nodded, disappearing once more from view. “Not enough.” He turned back to stare outside.
“So stop wasting it,” Chris stated.
“You still trying to tell me what to do?”
“If I was wrong you’d hang up the phone.”
He was right. The comment may be said nonchalantly but the hint of respect in Chris’ tone suggested much more. Chris didn’t suffer fools wisely and, pain in the ass as Toby could be, his remaining in Chris’ fold, in his protection, within his discretionary consideration, was something no one else could claim.
And Chris pushed him, always past points of comfort and familiarity, angling for more until Toby put his feet down and not so sweetly reminded him that it was a two way street and that Toby wasn’t one to roll over and play dead, he was too damn stubborn, too much of a fighter.
“I miss you.”
Toby let the words hang unbound to anything else. He liked the silence they reduced Chris to a state away.
“Tobe.” It was said so quietly Toby almost didn’t hear it, but the sound of Chris saying his name in that tone, the way only he ever did, sent a warm shiver through Toby’s body.
He wanted to ask the obvious of Chris in return although he knew full well he didn’t have to. He bit his bottom lip. If he asked the question it would turn into one of those conversations and this was not the time or the place. But they don’t get lights out together anymore so what did it matter, and he wanted to hear Chris say it even if experience told him Chris would brush it off (save face in front of whichever guard was glaring at him) and if he did that Toby feared it would unintentionally taint the call and then-
“What are you wearing?”
“…what?”
Chris cleared his throat. “You forget how to do this already? Man, it has been too fucking long. What. Are. You. Wearing?”
It was an obvious distraction, a blatant change of subject-and it made Toby laugh, hard, in a way he hadn’t done in a long time. It was exactly what he needed to escape.
Toby considered his words carefully then licked his lips. “The question is, what are you going to do about it?”
All it took was a few seconds and the shutter of Toby’s eyelids and then Chris was ghosting his hands up and down Toby’s arm, settling them on Toby’s hips, sniffing Toby’s neck and lightly licking a small patch of skin then leaning in for a kiss (only to pull away right before lips touched) before moving to the other side of Toby’s neck and repeating the move. He pressed his groin to Toby’s and rolled into the strained pressure but not too much.
Time was against them.
Always.
But for a moment-one stolen or given them-time had no say or design on them. It bent to their will, broke through the walls of Oz and Cedar Junction, folded in the roads and towns and collapsed space until nothing existed to keep them apart.
Toby knew better.
But he could pretend with the best of them.