"A Lot Of Bad Behaviour", Spooks, Adam/Lucas
Title: A Lot Of Bad Behaviour
Fandom: Spooks [Half The Truth AU]
Pairing: Adam/Lucas
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2500
Genre: Slash
Copyright: Half The Truth, Kaiser Chiefs
Spoilers: 7x03
Summary: Adam bites down on his tongue because Lucas will want - will need - to pretend that this never happened afterwards.
Author’s Notes: I wrote chunks of this on a napkin from Pret A Manger, so you know, love to Pret. Plus, my Lucas icons finally become relevant! *pats his lovely angsty blood-spattered self* (I’ve seen this episode a few too many times; I made rather a few screencaps from iplayer in order to make my icons. I have other icons of angsty/bloody Lucas to offer up if anyone wants them). And no, I still haven’t got them into a sexual situation yet. I’m working on it though!
Underneath the glamour
There was always gonna be
Amateur dramatics.
- Kaiser Chiefs
“Where’s Lucas?” Adam demands, probably a little too fiercely, when he walks back onto the Grid from calming Jo to find his colleague gone.
Ben shrugs uncomfortably; he still looks hollowed out, too quiet, undercover gets you like that the first time and for too many times afterward, though it wouldn’t be kind to tell him that. Ben’s done well, the public aren’t dead, and eventually, he will remember all that and be glad.
“He got a call,” Ben offers. “From Marlin.”
Adam frowns; he’s not entirely surprised that it wasn’t him Marlin contacted (Lucas seemed to impress him with his I don’t need people speech), but he thinks it’s foolhardy that Lucas actually went.
“Did anyone go with him?” he asks.
“Don’t think so,” Ben replies.
Lucas has no sense of self-preservation because he doesn’t really believe there’s anything to be alive for other than, you know, being alive, but Adam is going to punch him later for being reckless. Well. He’ll think about punching him, anyway.
“Do you know where he’s gone?” Adam asks, trying to remain calm because it’s been a long day and if Lucas is killed or taken prisoner (again) they will have to deal with that and he is just too tired. And he can just picture Ros’s face and she will not be happy.
Ben shakes his head. “They didn’t speak long,” he says. “Marlin just said he wanted to meet, I think.” He glances at Adam. “But he’ll be fine,” he adds. “I mean, he’s Lucas.”
So apparently Ben hasn’t noticed that Lucas has hairline cracks running through him and the slightest nudge will bring him crashing down into little pieces; maybe Adam’s the only one who can see just how deep that damage runs. It’s probably for the best.
“Ok,” he murmurs. “See you later, Ben.”
Adam heads for his car as fast as he can; he is reasonably sure that Lucas can handle himself, but no one should go after a terrorist alone. It’s just stupid. And with no leads, Adam does what he can and heads for where they met before, hoping that he’s just being overprotective and paranoid because no one will be amused if Lucas is killed.
He abandons his car and runs, getting to the colonnade just in time to see Marlin pull a gun on Lucas. There’s no time for anyone to do anything; Adam can’t hear what Marlin is saying, but his real intent becomes clear as he turns the gun towards himself. Adam hears Lucas’ cry of no! and sees the other man reach for the gun, but it’s too late. The shot rings out loudly, sound bouncing off the stone, and Marlin’s body crumples too the floor, missing most of its head. Lucas reels back, raising a hand to his face and then dropping it, apparently with no idea what to do with himself.
That horrible moment of shock when someone dies that close to you.
Adam catches up to Lucas a moment later. The other man turns to look at him, blue eyes completely wild, mouth trembling. For a second, he looks like he’s broken.
“Come- come to check up on me?” Lucas manages after a moment, the corner of his lip curling. His face is covered in blood spray, shocking red and running a little. His voice is not quite steady, though it desperately wants to be.
“There was a possibility you were going to end up dead,” Adam points out. “Which would’ve been pretty inconvenient all round.”
Lucas nods, apparently not quite capable of speech yet. Adam lets him stand there, leaning against a column and breathing sharply, while he makes some clean-up-operation phonecalls.
“You have-” he begins, trying to indicate the blood that Lucas doesn’t seem inclined to remove. He’s not quite in shock, but he’s in that slippery stasis where nothing is quite ok enough and things could tip any sort of way. Lucas can’t afford to tip; he doesn’t have enough of anything left to compensate.
Lucas looks at him with enquiring blue eyes, but there’s a sort of blankness in them and Adam knows Lucas needs five more minutes. Anyone would need a few minutes, just to take the sharpness of death so damn near that you can smell it and pack it away somewhere in the dark spaces of your head where you never have to get it back out again.
Adam can see people walking in their direction, clearly ready to tidy up the mess and deal with all this.
“Come on,” he says quietly, jerking his head in the direction of his car. He’s careful not to touch Lucas, knowing that would be a stupid idea, but the other man follows him obediently enough. Lucas makes to get in on the passenger side but Adam shakes his head. “We need to clean you up first.”
He keeps antiseptic wipes in his glove compartment; this job is ugly and messy and the sharp, stinging smell of them is reassuring. Lucas may not be injured but get this as clean and clinical as possible and they may not have to think too hard about it. Adam has known Marlin a while, and it makes his head hurt when he thinks about different kinds of betrayal and desperation. So he will not think about any of that, and instead focus on the simpler, achievable things.
Lucas stares down at the white, damp wipe that Adam hands him, but makes no move to clean himself up. He leans against the hood, and still doesn’t say anything.
“Lucas,” Adam says, softly but clearly. The other man looks up, manages to meet his eyes. “I can’t take you back looking like that. We need to clean you up, and if you can’t do it then I’m going to have to, understand?”
Lucas’ fingers twitch but he doesn’t move, and Adam thinks that, later, he will beat himself up for this vulnerability. No matter that it happens to all of them; no matter that Jo is still chain smoking and muttering to herself, looking into men’s eyes before they exploded on her lips. Lucas has been so determined to be impenetrable, strong, blandly charming. He has all the right words in all the right places and none of them really mean anything, but he’s trying so very hard to be the man he used to be, the man he’d still kind of like to be, that everyone’s letting him get away with it and some people haven’t even noticed the thin layer of determined personality Lucas has pasted over himself to keep himself functioning.
Adam frowns. “Lucas?”
He doesn’t get a response, and carefully takes the wipe from Lucas’ limp fingers. The other man attempts to pull away as Adam carefully begins to dab at the red specks across his forehead, a noise of protest escaping his mouth.
“I have to do this,” Adam insists quietly. “You know I do.”
Lucas acquiesces after a moment, and Adam carefully continues to clean him up. The blood is still a little warm, and there’s a lot of it. Little red dots all over his face, in addition to larger dribbles, where there’s so much blood in one patch that it’s started running. Lucas’s eyelids flutter as Adam patiently removes the trail of blood from the corner of his right eye, eyelashes brushing Adam’s fingers. It’s a weird level of intimacy, and Adam bites down on his tongue because Lucas will want - will need - to pretend that this never happened afterwards. He wipes up a smear from beneath Lucas’ eye, careful not to let the antiseptic get anywhere it can cause temporary blindness because that really won’t be welcome.
The cool winter sunlight illuminates Lucas’ face, making the red stand out even more starkly and showing just how pale Lucas is; his skin is pallid, like he’s a plant that’s been kept in the dark, his eyes just a little red-rimmed from exhaustion. Adam carefully tips Lucas’ chin up, cleaning off the bloody streaks, stubble scraping against his fingers. Lucas still says nothing, glancing down through his dark eyelashes at Adam’s hands. He’s like a coiled spring; it’s clear just how uncomfortable he is with this level of contact, but he hasn’t asked Adam to stop or tried to take over for himself.
Adam carefully begins wiping at a smear high on Lucas’ left cheek, blotting a bead of blood. Lucas turns his head slightly, an almost involuntary movement; his breath rushes out, too warm against Adam’s hand, and his lips brush across Adam’s palm. Adam feels him inhale, lips opening a little against the heel of his hand, and then Lucas turns his head back again, swallowing. Adam knows that the whole thing was an accident and so ignores the effect that it has on his pulse, instead focusing on the task in hand.
There’s a little pile of reddish-pink stained cloth squares building up on the car hood beside Lucas, and Adam feels the other man tremble when he carefully turns Lucas’ head to the right to remove a spot of blood from his neck. Lucas’ heart is hammering, Adam can feel it vibrating through his jugular vein, fingertips pressed lightly there. He finishes the job with his thumb wrapped carefully in a clean corner of the wipe, following the curve of Lucas’ upper lip in a way that isn’t gratuitous at all, removing the final specks of blood.
“All done,” he says carefully, gathering the rubbish together and walking away to put it all in a nearby bin. When he gets back, Lucas is standing straighter and looking more focused and has stopped swallowing about fifteen times a minute.
“Thanks,” he slips, not looking at Adam, but there’s gratitude in his gruff tone.
“It’s ok.” Adam unlocks his car doors. “Come on, I’ll drive you back.”
Lucas obediently gets into the car. He’s looking pale and fallible right now, but a hundred times better than he did ten minutes ago and Adam knows he’s already most of the way to packing everything back up into its boxes and sealing them tight shut. It’s the only way Lucas will be able to survive; to not remember most of it, and to not think about the rest.
“Are you all right?” Adam asks, at a traffic light. “Stupid question, I know, but…”
Lucas smiles almost indulgently. The colour is starting to return to his cheeks, making him look considerably more healthy.
“I’m fine,” he says. “I… I remembered something about Russia that I thought I’d forgotten yesterday, so…”
Adam gets it. It’s horrible, the way memories lie in wait to ambush you, to leap back out and remind you that things are far worse than you want to think they are.
“Right.” He tries to find a way to phrase his question that won’t sound offensive. “So… you don’t remember everything, then?”
Lucas laughs without humour, a split of momentary sound. “Do you think I’d be able function if I remembered everything?”
Adam nods, a trace of an apologetic smile. “Point taken.”
They’re silent for a moment; then Lucas adds: “Pieces… the worst pieces… they come back sometimes. You know.”
“Yeah.” Adam doesn’t think Lucas wants him to empathise, and his careful tone indicates that he doesn’t really want a conversation about what he does and doesn’t recall. Adam thinks that pieces of it are classified, anyway, and he isn’t going to pry.
The traffic edges along, and Lucas stares out of the window at the street. He acts so calm and normal about everything that it’s hard to recall that he’s only been back in society for a fortnight. That so much of this must be unfamiliar, and even the things that are familiar have altered in the eight year space.
“I didn’t get much news,” Lucas offers, entirely voluntarily, as another light turns red. “It was isolated; we weren’t sent the Daily Mail or anything.”
Adam quirks the beginning of a smile. “Probably just as well.”
Lucas smiles minutely back. “True. But… we were given news if it was thought it could break us. Nine Eleven, for example.”
Adam tries to work out what it would be like, being told about the eleventh of September attacks while being held captive; Lucas had been gone barely a year, he calculates, and he can hardly stand to think of what the effect of that on a man’s psyche must be.
“And the seventh of July London bombings,” Lucas continues slowly, not looking at Adam. “I didn’t believe those for a while; I didn’t want to. Not here.”
No one wanted to believe it, Adam recalls. Central London a panic zone, most of the public on the streets without transport, everyone huddled around television screens and internet terminals, networks going down as everyone in London tried to call everyone else. Everyone terrified, numb and blank with shock.
And then he tries to think of how much damage it could cause Lucas; held prisoner for five long years, to find his country attacked, and being told constantly that no one wanted to get him back. He still says nothing, but he thinks he might understand a small corner of Lucas. One piece of the puzzle finally turned around the right way, though he still has no idea what the big picture is or even what the other pieces will look like, let alone how they will fit together.
“And then you get out,” Lucas sighs. “And you’re lying in a car boot with a sack over your head and it’s possible that you’re actually going home, and it’s impossible to believe but you start to wonder what it will be like anyway.” He laughs again, rough and hollow. “You think the world is going to be different, and it fucking isn’t.”
There’s nothing Adam can say to that and they both know it; Lucas has to get this out, sort it through, and then forget about it so he can go and rationally explain Marlin’s death. Later, they won’t talk about this, and it’ll be like it never happened.
A bus drives past, Daniel Craig looking determined on the advert on the side.
“Well,” Lucas allows. “James Bond is blonde now.”
His eyes flicker over at Adam for a moment, expression impossible to read so Adam doesn’t try.
“And they banned blue Smarties for a while,” Adam offers.
Lucas smiles slightly. “Well, yes. There is that.”
Some of the rigidity seems to drop out of his shoulders; he exhales slowly and Adam doesn’t think about how that breath felt against his skin because it’s not even the beginning of a possibility.
They finally make it back. Adam parks, and Lucas fumbles with his seatbelt.
“Adam-” he begins hesitantly, and there are unspoken words clinging to him. He still looks tired and shaken.
Adam smiles, genuine and smooth. “It’s ok,” he says. “I know. I know.”
Lucas nods, and gets out of the car.
Fandom: Spooks [Half The Truth AU]
Pairing: Adam/Lucas
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2500
Genre: Slash
Copyright: Half The Truth, Kaiser Chiefs
Spoilers: 7x03
Summary: Adam bites down on his tongue because Lucas will want - will need - to pretend that this never happened afterwards.
Author’s Notes: I wrote chunks of this on a napkin from Pret A Manger, so you know, love to Pret. Plus, my Lucas icons finally become relevant! *pats his lovely angsty blood-spattered self* (I’ve seen this episode a few too many times; I made rather a few screencaps from iplayer in order to make my icons. I have other icons of angsty/bloody Lucas to offer up if anyone wants them). And no, I still haven’t got them into a sexual situation yet. I’m working on it though!
Underneath the glamour
There was always gonna be
Amateur dramatics.
- Kaiser Chiefs
“Where’s Lucas?” Adam demands, probably a little too fiercely, when he walks back onto the Grid from calming Jo to find his colleague gone.
Ben shrugs uncomfortably; he still looks hollowed out, too quiet, undercover gets you like that the first time and for too many times afterward, though it wouldn’t be kind to tell him that. Ben’s done well, the public aren’t dead, and eventually, he will remember all that and be glad.
“He got a call,” Ben offers. “From Marlin.”
Adam frowns; he’s not entirely surprised that it wasn’t him Marlin contacted (Lucas seemed to impress him with his I don’t need people speech), but he thinks it’s foolhardy that Lucas actually went.
“Did anyone go with him?” he asks.
“Don’t think so,” Ben replies.
Lucas has no sense of self-preservation because he doesn’t really believe there’s anything to be alive for other than, you know, being alive, but Adam is going to punch him later for being reckless. Well. He’ll think about punching him, anyway.
“Do you know where he’s gone?” Adam asks, trying to remain calm because it’s been a long day and if Lucas is killed or taken prisoner (again) they will have to deal with that and he is just too tired. And he can just picture Ros’s face and she will not be happy.
Ben shakes his head. “They didn’t speak long,” he says. “Marlin just said he wanted to meet, I think.” He glances at Adam. “But he’ll be fine,” he adds. “I mean, he’s Lucas.”
So apparently Ben hasn’t noticed that Lucas has hairline cracks running through him and the slightest nudge will bring him crashing down into little pieces; maybe Adam’s the only one who can see just how deep that damage runs. It’s probably for the best.
“Ok,” he murmurs. “See you later, Ben.”
Adam heads for his car as fast as he can; he is reasonably sure that Lucas can handle himself, but no one should go after a terrorist alone. It’s just stupid. And with no leads, Adam does what he can and heads for where they met before, hoping that he’s just being overprotective and paranoid because no one will be amused if Lucas is killed.
He abandons his car and runs, getting to the colonnade just in time to see Marlin pull a gun on Lucas. There’s no time for anyone to do anything; Adam can’t hear what Marlin is saying, but his real intent becomes clear as he turns the gun towards himself. Adam hears Lucas’ cry of no! and sees the other man reach for the gun, but it’s too late. The shot rings out loudly, sound bouncing off the stone, and Marlin’s body crumples too the floor, missing most of its head. Lucas reels back, raising a hand to his face and then dropping it, apparently with no idea what to do with himself.
That horrible moment of shock when someone dies that close to you.
Adam catches up to Lucas a moment later. The other man turns to look at him, blue eyes completely wild, mouth trembling. For a second, he looks like he’s broken.
“Come- come to check up on me?” Lucas manages after a moment, the corner of his lip curling. His face is covered in blood spray, shocking red and running a little. His voice is not quite steady, though it desperately wants to be.
“There was a possibility you were going to end up dead,” Adam points out. “Which would’ve been pretty inconvenient all round.”
Lucas nods, apparently not quite capable of speech yet. Adam lets him stand there, leaning against a column and breathing sharply, while he makes some clean-up-operation phonecalls.
“You have-” he begins, trying to indicate the blood that Lucas doesn’t seem inclined to remove. He’s not quite in shock, but he’s in that slippery stasis where nothing is quite ok enough and things could tip any sort of way. Lucas can’t afford to tip; he doesn’t have enough of anything left to compensate.
Lucas looks at him with enquiring blue eyes, but there’s a sort of blankness in them and Adam knows Lucas needs five more minutes. Anyone would need a few minutes, just to take the sharpness of death so damn near that you can smell it and pack it away somewhere in the dark spaces of your head where you never have to get it back out again.
Adam can see people walking in their direction, clearly ready to tidy up the mess and deal with all this.
“Come on,” he says quietly, jerking his head in the direction of his car. He’s careful not to touch Lucas, knowing that would be a stupid idea, but the other man follows him obediently enough. Lucas makes to get in on the passenger side but Adam shakes his head. “We need to clean you up first.”
He keeps antiseptic wipes in his glove compartment; this job is ugly and messy and the sharp, stinging smell of them is reassuring. Lucas may not be injured but get this as clean and clinical as possible and they may not have to think too hard about it. Adam has known Marlin a while, and it makes his head hurt when he thinks about different kinds of betrayal and desperation. So he will not think about any of that, and instead focus on the simpler, achievable things.
Lucas stares down at the white, damp wipe that Adam hands him, but makes no move to clean himself up. He leans against the hood, and still doesn’t say anything.
“Lucas,” Adam says, softly but clearly. The other man looks up, manages to meet his eyes. “I can’t take you back looking like that. We need to clean you up, and if you can’t do it then I’m going to have to, understand?”
Lucas’ fingers twitch but he doesn’t move, and Adam thinks that, later, he will beat himself up for this vulnerability. No matter that it happens to all of them; no matter that Jo is still chain smoking and muttering to herself, looking into men’s eyes before they exploded on her lips. Lucas has been so determined to be impenetrable, strong, blandly charming. He has all the right words in all the right places and none of them really mean anything, but he’s trying so very hard to be the man he used to be, the man he’d still kind of like to be, that everyone’s letting him get away with it and some people haven’t even noticed the thin layer of determined personality Lucas has pasted over himself to keep himself functioning.
Adam frowns. “Lucas?”
He doesn’t get a response, and carefully takes the wipe from Lucas’ limp fingers. The other man attempts to pull away as Adam carefully begins to dab at the red specks across his forehead, a noise of protest escaping his mouth.
“I have to do this,” Adam insists quietly. “You know I do.”
Lucas acquiesces after a moment, and Adam carefully continues to clean him up. The blood is still a little warm, and there’s a lot of it. Little red dots all over his face, in addition to larger dribbles, where there’s so much blood in one patch that it’s started running. Lucas’s eyelids flutter as Adam patiently removes the trail of blood from the corner of his right eye, eyelashes brushing Adam’s fingers. It’s a weird level of intimacy, and Adam bites down on his tongue because Lucas will want - will need - to pretend that this never happened afterwards. He wipes up a smear from beneath Lucas’ eye, careful not to let the antiseptic get anywhere it can cause temporary blindness because that really won’t be welcome.
The cool winter sunlight illuminates Lucas’ face, making the red stand out even more starkly and showing just how pale Lucas is; his skin is pallid, like he’s a plant that’s been kept in the dark, his eyes just a little red-rimmed from exhaustion. Adam carefully tips Lucas’ chin up, cleaning off the bloody streaks, stubble scraping against his fingers. Lucas still says nothing, glancing down through his dark eyelashes at Adam’s hands. He’s like a coiled spring; it’s clear just how uncomfortable he is with this level of contact, but he hasn’t asked Adam to stop or tried to take over for himself.
Adam carefully begins wiping at a smear high on Lucas’ left cheek, blotting a bead of blood. Lucas turns his head slightly, an almost involuntary movement; his breath rushes out, too warm against Adam’s hand, and his lips brush across Adam’s palm. Adam feels him inhale, lips opening a little against the heel of his hand, and then Lucas turns his head back again, swallowing. Adam knows that the whole thing was an accident and so ignores the effect that it has on his pulse, instead focusing on the task in hand.
There’s a little pile of reddish-pink stained cloth squares building up on the car hood beside Lucas, and Adam feels the other man tremble when he carefully turns Lucas’ head to the right to remove a spot of blood from his neck. Lucas’ heart is hammering, Adam can feel it vibrating through his jugular vein, fingertips pressed lightly there. He finishes the job with his thumb wrapped carefully in a clean corner of the wipe, following the curve of Lucas’ upper lip in a way that isn’t gratuitous at all, removing the final specks of blood.
“All done,” he says carefully, gathering the rubbish together and walking away to put it all in a nearby bin. When he gets back, Lucas is standing straighter and looking more focused and has stopped swallowing about fifteen times a minute.
“Thanks,” he slips, not looking at Adam, but there’s gratitude in his gruff tone.
“It’s ok.” Adam unlocks his car doors. “Come on, I’ll drive you back.”
Lucas obediently gets into the car. He’s looking pale and fallible right now, but a hundred times better than he did ten minutes ago and Adam knows he’s already most of the way to packing everything back up into its boxes and sealing them tight shut. It’s the only way Lucas will be able to survive; to not remember most of it, and to not think about the rest.
“Are you all right?” Adam asks, at a traffic light. “Stupid question, I know, but…”
Lucas smiles almost indulgently. The colour is starting to return to his cheeks, making him look considerably more healthy.
“I’m fine,” he says. “I… I remembered something about Russia that I thought I’d forgotten yesterday, so…”
Adam gets it. It’s horrible, the way memories lie in wait to ambush you, to leap back out and remind you that things are far worse than you want to think they are.
“Right.” He tries to find a way to phrase his question that won’t sound offensive. “So… you don’t remember everything, then?”
Lucas laughs without humour, a split of momentary sound. “Do you think I’d be able function if I remembered everything?”
Adam nods, a trace of an apologetic smile. “Point taken.”
They’re silent for a moment; then Lucas adds: “Pieces… the worst pieces… they come back sometimes. You know.”
“Yeah.” Adam doesn’t think Lucas wants him to empathise, and his careful tone indicates that he doesn’t really want a conversation about what he does and doesn’t recall. Adam thinks that pieces of it are classified, anyway, and he isn’t going to pry.
The traffic edges along, and Lucas stares out of the window at the street. He acts so calm and normal about everything that it’s hard to recall that he’s only been back in society for a fortnight. That so much of this must be unfamiliar, and even the things that are familiar have altered in the eight year space.
“I didn’t get much news,” Lucas offers, entirely voluntarily, as another light turns red. “It was isolated; we weren’t sent the Daily Mail or anything.”
Adam quirks the beginning of a smile. “Probably just as well.”
Lucas smiles minutely back. “True. But… we were given news if it was thought it could break us. Nine Eleven, for example.”
Adam tries to work out what it would be like, being told about the eleventh of September attacks while being held captive; Lucas had been gone barely a year, he calculates, and he can hardly stand to think of what the effect of that on a man’s psyche must be.
“And the seventh of July London bombings,” Lucas continues slowly, not looking at Adam. “I didn’t believe those for a while; I didn’t want to. Not here.”
No one wanted to believe it, Adam recalls. Central London a panic zone, most of the public on the streets without transport, everyone huddled around television screens and internet terminals, networks going down as everyone in London tried to call everyone else. Everyone terrified, numb and blank with shock.
And then he tries to think of how much damage it could cause Lucas; held prisoner for five long years, to find his country attacked, and being told constantly that no one wanted to get him back. He still says nothing, but he thinks he might understand a small corner of Lucas. One piece of the puzzle finally turned around the right way, though he still has no idea what the big picture is or even what the other pieces will look like, let alone how they will fit together.
“And then you get out,” Lucas sighs. “And you’re lying in a car boot with a sack over your head and it’s possible that you’re actually going home, and it’s impossible to believe but you start to wonder what it will be like anyway.” He laughs again, rough and hollow. “You think the world is going to be different, and it fucking isn’t.”
There’s nothing Adam can say to that and they both know it; Lucas has to get this out, sort it through, and then forget about it so he can go and rationally explain Marlin’s death. Later, they won’t talk about this, and it’ll be like it never happened.
A bus drives past, Daniel Craig looking determined on the advert on the side.
“Well,” Lucas allows. “James Bond is blonde now.”
His eyes flicker over at Adam for a moment, expression impossible to read so Adam doesn’t try.
“And they banned blue Smarties for a while,” Adam offers.
Lucas smiles slightly. “Well, yes. There is that.”
Some of the rigidity seems to drop out of his shoulders; he exhales slowly and Adam doesn’t think about how that breath felt against his skin because it’s not even the beginning of a possibility.
They finally make it back. Adam parks, and Lucas fumbles with his seatbelt.
“Adam-” he begins hesitantly, and there are unspoken words clinging to him. He still looks tired and shaken.
Adam smiles, genuine and smooth. “It’s ok,” he says. “I know. I know.”
Lucas nods, and gets out of the car.