fic repost: Skirmish (eight)
Title: Skirmish
Authors: neverwiser and sixtieshairdo
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Dear Reid (Or perhaps, dear Doctor Oliver. How far into one’s soul does a person have to be before you’re on first name terms?)
Previous chapters: prologue | one | two | three | four | six | seven
Authors' Note: As a general rule, neverwiser writes Luke and sixtieshairdo writes Reid. Warnings for angst.
luke,
you win.
you broke me apart. i am not going to question your actions because i already know all the answers. you won't stop until you get what you want. and i think, i believe, it is me you want. i'm yours luke. i've never left. i was always there, waiting, biding my time.
i can never belong to anyone else after being yours.
i told you this before. i want you. i want all of you. i hate sharing you. and now, you tell me you let a stranger take you like that?
you killed me. i want to fly back to you and slap you hard. and then kiss you and blow you and fuck you and make you mine mine mine all over again.
but i won't. and i can't. i am broken and hollow and empty and missing you so much it feels like my heart is twisted into bloody knots.
i miss you luke snyder. i miss you. i want you. i love you.
you drive me crazy, and the best part of it all is that you know it. you know how much you drive me crazy. you know how to keep me.
i ran, luke, i ran away because you scare me. noah was a big issue, but beyond him, it's you. you scare me because i've never loved anyone so hard in my life. you make me want to break appointments, let my patients die, and without remorse too! i left because i realized i've changed so much. and it scares me.
you scare me, luke snyder. you scare the fuck out of me.
before you, there was only reid oliver, medical genius, rude motherfucker who cares for noone.
after you came along, i've become more aware of life and love and people and babies and the sky and the ground and everything in between.
i've never wanted anyone as much as i want you and i'm scared that i might do something drastic. to you. to noah. and to myself.
it came to a point that i was so blinded with jealousy and possessiveness that i was convinced that i needed to take you away from this town so that we could be together forever, so that you'd be mine and mine alone.
do you know how much you mean to me? how hard it was to leave? how being away from you snapped me into two?
i love you. and that's why i left. because i wasn't waxing lyrical when i said i didn't want to hurt you any more. i meant it literally.
i love you. and that's why i'm staying here and not barging down your door to hold you and keep you.
i love you. and that's why i'm begging you, baby, please don't do this to yourself anymore.
please.
*
Only the strange tingle of tears drying on his face brings him back to the simple world of sensation.
His heart pounds, loud and heavy in his head, and through the mists of his tears he rereads the words and worlds on the screen. There is a pain in his chest, a clean sharp gunshot wound, and as the bullet careers out the back of his body, speeds on its fair way, he is crumpling, falling to his knees and dying.
Fuck. What has he done?
He’s shaking, physically shaking as he scrolls up and down the page. The words barely penetrate, so dripping as they are in blood. This is not like the other letters. This is not neatly worded or thought out, curving and tidy in Reid’s careful script. This is an explosion, a wound, a septic, pus-filled tumour that has burst in Reid Oliver’s heart.
Luke almost laughs, bitterly, like salt-on-flesh, when he realises that he’s done the unthinkable. Broken the unbreakable. Touched Reid Oliver’s heart.
But no. He touched Reid Oliver’s heart the second or third time they laid eyes upon each other. This is not a touch, or a murmur, or a stir. He’s ripped Reid Oliver’s heart to shreds and scattered the pieces like ashes across the globe. Somewhere in the desert, bloody strips of Reid’s love congeal.
He’s Luke Snyder. He makes metaphors.
He buries his head in his hands, curls into his chair and tries to hide from the bombs and blood and blaze.
*
When he gets to the airport, he’s torn. Suddenly, like a movie on fast-forward, he sees the future in forward motion. Buying the ticket, boarding the plane, a mad dash through Portland, Oregon, to find the hospital, or Reid’s apartment, or the end of his nightmares, the door swinging open, Reid’s haggard, beautiful face...
And then the movie cuts out.
Soldiers returning from war often experience partial or complete memory loss in relation to their traumatic experiences. The mind will not allow us to delve into fantasies or memories which are too terrifying, for fear that we will destroy ourselves from within.
In Luke’s mind, over and over, Reid’s face appears in the doorway. And then...
Silence.
Black.
The raining bullets cease.
Peace but with the electric vibrations of further fights to come. Luke doesn’t know if Reid Oliver will ever give him peace. Luke doesn’t know if he wants it.
He approaches the ticket desk.
*
The streetlights are painfully bright, and the figure who answers the door topless shields his eyes from them. But when he catches sight of who is standing at his front door, he lowers his hands, his handsome face twisted into a frown.
“Jesus, Luke, it’s two a.m.”
Luke moistens his lips nervously.
“Right,” he says nervously.
They stand in silence for a long moment.
“I should go,” he says eventually.
Noah sighs and rubs his face with his palm.
“For fuck’s sake, get inside,” he says roughly, and Luke awkwardly obeys.
In the miniscule kitchen, Noah makes coffee and Luke sits, watching. When, eventually, Noah sits back down, the wary look on his face robs Luke of all his words.
“Spill,” Noah says impatiently.
Luke forgives him his short temper. It’s two a.m.
He looks down at the mug of coffee, as if all of life’s mysteries may be hidden in his murky swirls.
Suddenly, like a sneeze, he coughs it out.
“I’m in love with him.”
Noah frowns, and he must have misheard because he glances towards the door shiftily.
“Luke...”, he begins awkwardly. “You and me...” he trails off, catching Luke’s blazing look.
“I’m in love,” he repeats awkwardly, “with Reid.”
Noah is silent. His eyes are hard and empty, but his bare chest belies the harshness of his breathing.
“I’ve been in love with him since I was twenty-two,” he continues clearly, as if the firmness of his tone might weaken his cowardice. “And I was in love with him every moment I was with you, and I’m in love with him now.”
Noah looks down, a long-suffering dimness to his eyes. At length, he opens his lips to speak, when they each hear a click and before they can see, a half-naked brunette is standing in the doorway.
Luke looks at him in surprise, and he returns the stare with a suspicious, cocked eyebrow. As one, they turn back to Noah, who is cringing. Twenty-two year old Luke would have found it hilarious. As it is, he somehow feels vaguely disgusted.
“Who’s this?”, a gravelly Southern voice asks.
Noah looks up and gives a small wry smile. He licks his lips and replies enigmatically.
“You know how everyone comes with emotional baggage?”
He indicates Luke.
“Jack, meet mine.”
Luke feels the drip of Jack’s gaze all over him. He’s being quantified, sized up, judged and deemed insignificant. He almost physically shivers.
After a seemingly arbitrary length of time, Jack shrugs, walks to the fridge, grabs a beer and heads back out. As he gets to the door, he glances back, saying “Don’t be too long” with a lascivious wink. When Luke looks back, Noah’s eyes have softened and he’s pink with pleasure.
Luke’s stomach sort of turns.
“Christ, Noah,” he says with some feeling.
Noah’s head snaps up.
“What.”
His voice is a warning.
It’s two a.m. and Luke’s gone through too much emotional turmoil to care about being polite.
“It’s just pretty fucking fast, isn’t it?”
Noah’s taken aback, stunned suddenly into silence. “Fast?”
Luke just gives him a sneering look. Noah’s cheeks begin to redden and Luke knows him well enough to know he’s dangerously angry.
“So, you’re allowed to have a ridiculous romance. You’re allowed to be stupid-in-love with someone else, and still fuck me, still fuck me around in the meantime, but I’m supposed to say chaste and single just in case, one day, you fancy turning up at two in the morning for, what? A fuck? Did you come all the way to Los Angeles to fuck me, Luke? Because I’m sorry, I’m taken.”
“No!” Luke says angrily. “I didn’t come here to fuck you.”
“Then why are you so offended that Jack’s here?”
Noah’s voice is angry, biting, steel bayonets. “I’m not yours, Luke. Not anymore.”
But you are, Luke wants to say. You’re mine. I own you.
When Luke doesn’t say anything, Noah sighs, his neck falling backwards in irritation. He shakes his head slowly, in anger or irritation or disbelief: Luke isn’t sure which.
“Luke,” he begins slowly. “Why are you here?”
There are some questions that are impossible to answer simply, but Luke tries. It’s harder than one might think, considering he hasn’t got a clue.
“We...” He bites his lip. “We could always talk, you and me. We were friends.”
Noah dips his eyes, because in the end Noah’s a good person and he’s got more forgiveness in him than he’d like to think.
“We are friends, Luke, it’s just...”
Neither of them really knows the words to the end of that sentence, but they both know what Noah’s saying.
Luke sighs.
“I think I just needed someone to talk to.”
There’s a silence. Luke can almost hear the tick-tick-tick of anticipation before the bomb goes off.
“Why don’t you talk to Reid?” Noah says, picking his way through the words like landmines.
Luke looks up at him with surprise, and suddenly, suddenly, the bomb goes off and his eyes are streaming and it all comes out in one, long, ridiculous rush.
“I can’t. I can’t. If I go to him, and ask him, and tell him how much I love him, and it doesn’t work, then that’s it. That’s it, forever. I am so in love with him, that it’s just become part of how I breathe. I need him to live. And if we try, again, and it doesn’t work, and it ends, then that’ll be it. I’ll never be able to love anyone, ever again. I’ll be dead. At twenty-seven. How do you tell someone that they hold your every heartbeat in the palm of their hand? What am I supposed to say to him, Noah? I can’t offer him anything. I can’t offer him anything more than emotional immaturity, and weakness, and desperation. I’m filled to the brim with love for him, but I don’t think it’s the love that he wants.”
By the end of it, he’s breathing shakily, his tears dripping childishly off the edge of his face.
Noah sighs, running his hands over his face once again. He seems to be resigning himself to the fact that, yes, he is going to pick up Luke’s pieces.
Again.
“What sort of love,” he says slowly, “does he want?”
Luke swallows. “He just wants to...own me. To possess every single part of me, and never let me go. He’s so scared of sharing me with the world that he ran away from me, from Oakdale, just to stop himself having to control me.”
Noah half-smiles.
“What’s so wrong with that?”
Luke looks up with confusion, spluttering ridiculously. “Well, you know, that’s...not what I want. You know, I don’t want to be his, I want to be...my own person, and I don’t...I don’t understand this need he has to constantly...have me.”
“Yes you do,” Noah says suddenly.
Luke’s eyes widen. “What?”
“You always wanted to control me. Possess me. Even now, you can’t bear to see me with someone else.” He pauses. “And you’re not even in love with me. You just think I belong to you.”
Luke bites his lip, the taste of blood pulling him back to earth along with Noah’s words.
“The truth is,” Noah says sighing. “You want him to own you. You just don’t want to want it.”
And the truth is like a ceasefire. And the truth is like a wound.
After a while staring into space, Luke becomes aware that Noah’s risen and is beckoning him into another room.
He points to a small futon sofa, and Luke looks back at him gratefully. He brings his hands up, gesturing no, gesturing don’t.
“Your family always had a bed for me. That’s the only reason you’re not looking for a very soft park bench right now.” He reaches under the couch for a somewhat worn blanket and tosses it towards Luke, who awkwardly catches it one-handed.
He curls up in the corner, and as bouncing-bomb-thoughts circle his mind, sleep finally overwhelms him.
skirmish: nine | skirmish: ten | skirmish: eleven
Authors: neverwiser and sixtieshairdo
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Dear Reid (Or perhaps, dear Doctor Oliver. How far into one’s soul does a person have to be before you’re on first name terms?)
Previous chapters: prologue | one | two | three | four | six | seven
Authors' Note: As a general rule, neverwiser writes Luke and sixtieshairdo writes Reid. Warnings for angst.
luke,
you win.
you broke me apart. i am not going to question your actions because i already know all the answers. you won't stop until you get what you want. and i think, i believe, it is me you want. i'm yours luke. i've never left. i was always there, waiting, biding my time.
i can never belong to anyone else after being yours.
i told you this before. i want you. i want all of you. i hate sharing you. and now, you tell me you let a stranger take you like that?
you killed me. i want to fly back to you and slap you hard. and then kiss you and blow you and fuck you and make you mine mine mine all over again.
but i won't. and i can't. i am broken and hollow and empty and missing you so much it feels like my heart is twisted into bloody knots.
i miss you luke snyder. i miss you. i want you. i love you.
you drive me crazy, and the best part of it all is that you know it. you know how much you drive me crazy. you know how to keep me.
i ran, luke, i ran away because you scare me. noah was a big issue, but beyond him, it's you. you scare me because i've never loved anyone so hard in my life. you make me want to break appointments, let my patients die, and without remorse too! i left because i realized i've changed so much. and it scares me.
you scare me, luke snyder. you scare the fuck out of me.
before you, there was only reid oliver, medical genius, rude motherfucker who cares for noone.
after you came along, i've become more aware of life and love and people and babies and the sky and the ground and everything in between.
i've never wanted anyone as much as i want you and i'm scared that i might do something drastic. to you. to noah. and to myself.
it came to a point that i was so blinded with jealousy and possessiveness that i was convinced that i needed to take you away from this town so that we could be together forever, so that you'd be mine and mine alone.
do you know how much you mean to me? how hard it was to leave? how being away from you snapped me into two?
i love you. and that's why i left. because i wasn't waxing lyrical when i said i didn't want to hurt you any more. i meant it literally.
i love you. and that's why i'm staying here and not barging down your door to hold you and keep you.
i love you. and that's why i'm begging you, baby, please don't do this to yourself anymore.
please.
*
Only the strange tingle of tears drying on his face brings him back to the simple world of sensation.
His heart pounds, loud and heavy in his head, and through the mists of his tears he rereads the words and worlds on the screen. There is a pain in his chest, a clean sharp gunshot wound, and as the bullet careers out the back of his body, speeds on its fair way, he is crumpling, falling to his knees and dying.
Fuck. What has he done?
He’s shaking, physically shaking as he scrolls up and down the page. The words barely penetrate, so dripping as they are in blood. This is not like the other letters. This is not neatly worded or thought out, curving and tidy in Reid’s careful script. This is an explosion, a wound, a septic, pus-filled tumour that has burst in Reid Oliver’s heart.
Luke almost laughs, bitterly, like salt-on-flesh, when he realises that he’s done the unthinkable. Broken the unbreakable. Touched Reid Oliver’s heart.
But no. He touched Reid Oliver’s heart the second or third time they laid eyes upon each other. This is not a touch, or a murmur, or a stir. He’s ripped Reid Oliver’s heart to shreds and scattered the pieces like ashes across the globe. Somewhere in the desert, bloody strips of Reid’s love congeal.
He’s Luke Snyder. He makes metaphors.
He buries his head in his hands, curls into his chair and tries to hide from the bombs and blood and blaze.
*
When he gets to the airport, he’s torn. Suddenly, like a movie on fast-forward, he sees the future in forward motion. Buying the ticket, boarding the plane, a mad dash through Portland, Oregon, to find the hospital, or Reid’s apartment, or the end of his nightmares, the door swinging open, Reid’s haggard, beautiful face...
And then the movie cuts out.
Soldiers returning from war often experience partial or complete memory loss in relation to their traumatic experiences. The mind will not allow us to delve into fantasies or memories which are too terrifying, for fear that we will destroy ourselves from within.
In Luke’s mind, over and over, Reid’s face appears in the doorway. And then...
Silence.
Black.
The raining bullets cease.
Peace but with the electric vibrations of further fights to come. Luke doesn’t know if Reid Oliver will ever give him peace. Luke doesn’t know if he wants it.
He approaches the ticket desk.
*
The streetlights are painfully bright, and the figure who answers the door topless shields his eyes from them. But when he catches sight of who is standing at his front door, he lowers his hands, his handsome face twisted into a frown.
“Jesus, Luke, it’s two a.m.”
Luke moistens his lips nervously.
“Right,” he says nervously.
They stand in silence for a long moment.
“I should go,” he says eventually.
Noah sighs and rubs his face with his palm.
“For fuck’s sake, get inside,” he says roughly, and Luke awkwardly obeys.
In the miniscule kitchen, Noah makes coffee and Luke sits, watching. When, eventually, Noah sits back down, the wary look on his face robs Luke of all his words.
“Spill,” Noah says impatiently.
Luke forgives him his short temper. It’s two a.m.
He looks down at the mug of coffee, as if all of life’s mysteries may be hidden in his murky swirls.
Suddenly, like a sneeze, he coughs it out.
“I’m in love with him.”
Noah frowns, and he must have misheard because he glances towards the door shiftily.
“Luke...”, he begins awkwardly. “You and me...” he trails off, catching Luke’s blazing look.
“I’m in love,” he repeats awkwardly, “with Reid.”
Noah is silent. His eyes are hard and empty, but his bare chest belies the harshness of his breathing.
“I’ve been in love with him since I was twenty-two,” he continues clearly, as if the firmness of his tone might weaken his cowardice. “And I was in love with him every moment I was with you, and I’m in love with him now.”
Noah looks down, a long-suffering dimness to his eyes. At length, he opens his lips to speak, when they each hear a click and before they can see, a half-naked brunette is standing in the doorway.
Luke looks at him in surprise, and he returns the stare with a suspicious, cocked eyebrow. As one, they turn back to Noah, who is cringing. Twenty-two year old Luke would have found it hilarious. As it is, he somehow feels vaguely disgusted.
“Who’s this?”, a gravelly Southern voice asks.
Noah looks up and gives a small wry smile. He licks his lips and replies enigmatically.
“You know how everyone comes with emotional baggage?”
He indicates Luke.
“Jack, meet mine.”
Luke feels the drip of Jack’s gaze all over him. He’s being quantified, sized up, judged and deemed insignificant. He almost physically shivers.
After a seemingly arbitrary length of time, Jack shrugs, walks to the fridge, grabs a beer and heads back out. As he gets to the door, he glances back, saying “Don’t be too long” with a lascivious wink. When Luke looks back, Noah’s eyes have softened and he’s pink with pleasure.
Luke’s stomach sort of turns.
“Christ, Noah,” he says with some feeling.
Noah’s head snaps up.
“What.”
His voice is a warning.
It’s two a.m. and Luke’s gone through too much emotional turmoil to care about being polite.
“It’s just pretty fucking fast, isn’t it?”
Noah’s taken aback, stunned suddenly into silence. “Fast?”
Luke just gives him a sneering look. Noah’s cheeks begin to redden and Luke knows him well enough to know he’s dangerously angry.
“So, you’re allowed to have a ridiculous romance. You’re allowed to be stupid-in-love with someone else, and still fuck me, still fuck me around in the meantime, but I’m supposed to say chaste and single just in case, one day, you fancy turning up at two in the morning for, what? A fuck? Did you come all the way to Los Angeles to fuck me, Luke? Because I’m sorry, I’m taken.”
“No!” Luke says angrily. “I didn’t come here to fuck you.”
“Then why are you so offended that Jack’s here?”
Noah’s voice is angry, biting, steel bayonets. “I’m not yours, Luke. Not anymore.”
But you are, Luke wants to say. You’re mine. I own you.
When Luke doesn’t say anything, Noah sighs, his neck falling backwards in irritation. He shakes his head slowly, in anger or irritation or disbelief: Luke isn’t sure which.
“Luke,” he begins slowly. “Why are you here?”
There are some questions that are impossible to answer simply, but Luke tries. It’s harder than one might think, considering he hasn’t got a clue.
“We...” He bites his lip. “We could always talk, you and me. We were friends.”
Noah dips his eyes, because in the end Noah’s a good person and he’s got more forgiveness in him than he’d like to think.
“We are friends, Luke, it’s just...”
Neither of them really knows the words to the end of that sentence, but they both know what Noah’s saying.
Luke sighs.
“I think I just needed someone to talk to.”
There’s a silence. Luke can almost hear the tick-tick-tick of anticipation before the bomb goes off.
“Why don’t you talk to Reid?” Noah says, picking his way through the words like landmines.
Luke looks up at him with surprise, and suddenly, suddenly, the bomb goes off and his eyes are streaming and it all comes out in one, long, ridiculous rush.
“I can’t. I can’t. If I go to him, and ask him, and tell him how much I love him, and it doesn’t work, then that’s it. That’s it, forever. I am so in love with him, that it’s just become part of how I breathe. I need him to live. And if we try, again, and it doesn’t work, and it ends, then that’ll be it. I’ll never be able to love anyone, ever again. I’ll be dead. At twenty-seven. How do you tell someone that they hold your every heartbeat in the palm of their hand? What am I supposed to say to him, Noah? I can’t offer him anything. I can’t offer him anything more than emotional immaturity, and weakness, and desperation. I’m filled to the brim with love for him, but I don’t think it’s the love that he wants.”
By the end of it, he’s breathing shakily, his tears dripping childishly off the edge of his face.
Noah sighs, running his hands over his face once again. He seems to be resigning himself to the fact that, yes, he is going to pick up Luke’s pieces.
Again.
“What sort of love,” he says slowly, “does he want?”
Luke swallows. “He just wants to...own me. To possess every single part of me, and never let me go. He’s so scared of sharing me with the world that he ran away from me, from Oakdale, just to stop himself having to control me.”
Noah half-smiles.
“What’s so wrong with that?”
Luke looks up with confusion, spluttering ridiculously. “Well, you know, that’s...not what I want. You know, I don’t want to be his, I want to be...my own person, and I don’t...I don’t understand this need he has to constantly...have me.”
“Yes you do,” Noah says suddenly.
Luke’s eyes widen. “What?”
“You always wanted to control me. Possess me. Even now, you can’t bear to see me with someone else.” He pauses. “And you’re not even in love with me. You just think I belong to you.”
Luke bites his lip, the taste of blood pulling him back to earth along with Noah’s words.
“The truth is,” Noah says sighing. “You want him to own you. You just don’t want to want it.”
And the truth is like a ceasefire. And the truth is like a wound.
After a while staring into space, Luke becomes aware that Noah’s risen and is beckoning him into another room.
He points to a small futon sofa, and Luke looks back at him gratefully. He brings his hands up, gesturing no, gesturing don’t.
“Your family always had a bed for me. That’s the only reason you’re not looking for a very soft park bench right now.” He reaches under the couch for a somewhat worn blanket and tosses it towards Luke, who awkwardly catches it one-handed.
He curls up in the corner, and as bouncing-bomb-thoughts circle his mind, sleep finally overwhelms him.
skirmish: nine | skirmish: ten | skirmish: eleven