I Only Dream of Thunder
Title: Gift
Word Count: 2164
Author's Note: First off, we have n3m3sis43 to thank for this because about a hundred years ago she asked me for a scene with these two. There was much joking about smut and whatnot and I'm not even sure why, but the conversation was there, and it didn't happen, and a hundred years later I'm writing this. SPOILERS ABOUND for I Only Dream of Thunder because I'm referring to characters by their real names here and it hints at a few things that probably don't matter too much if you haven't read the novel but... yeah. If you have you'll get what I'm saying. Canon-wise, this falls into pre-novel by a decent amount, and yes, it is canon. Written in third-person because I couldn't decide which POV to go with.
He is a clockwork creature, muscles wound like springs inside the cruel casing of his body, every bone-carved gear and tendon-cable packed into his scarred flesh until it appeared he would split apart from the strain of it, the tedious and precise machinations of his organs and the relentless and metallic tick-tick-tick of his heart. Swaddled in leather straps the same tone and texture as his skin he strains off the table like a thing possessed, sweat-soaked and furious at his imprisonment, clawing at rough sheets like a war machine abandoned at the end of the world, leaking fuel into the churned earth in its last piteous attempts to right itself.
The cocktail of sedatives see to it that his fight doesn’t last long. Strength bleeds from him until he finally lies still on the hard mattress, chest heaving, his fingers clenching unconsciously at the air as if searching for a handhold, for leverage, for an unseen weapon. Slowly he turns his head from side to side, blinking at the garish lights, malachite eyes uncomfortably alert with the feral light of an imprisoned predator.
“How long are you gonna stand there?” he asks.
He is marked with bleeding furrows, the mathematically precise incisions of his insanity, symmetrical trenches that add to the palette of shades on his skin, the wet red of his blood, raspberry pink of healing wounds, delicate rose of aged scars and the ashen white of marks long faded from memory. They angle themselves along the rippled surface of his stomach, trickles of blood trailing along the sloping curve of his waist and pooling in the harsh ridges of his hips before following the seductive slide to the band of the standard issue cotton pants. Like much of what he does, the intent of the injuries is a mystery, a riddle with no context and no solution, evident only in the scarred pictographs of his body and the confused meanderings of his thoughts.
Like his mind, his body is both terrifying and beautiful.
Christian checks the clock on the wall, the slow turn of the second hand spinning away the minutes, and smiles.
“Until you’re done,” he replies, calmly and quietly.
Like many of the others on the ward, Christian wondered if a world existed where, at some point, some time, Adrian Morrows hadn't been crazy, or if the insanity had been in his blood like a virus from the day he was born, manifesting in oddly inconsequential ways until finally it consumed him like a fever, melted away reason and the appropriate responses and emotions that were really just the fatty excess of normalized living. Maybe this was what everyone was beneath the skin, scarred and eccentric wraiths filled with madness and desperation.
He gave the drugs another five minutes before he pushed the metal cart to the side of the bed, his hands moving with a calm ease, a deliberate steadiness born not of textbook studies and classroom demonstrations but of the practiced day to day of his career. The litter collected in a small pile at the corner of the cart, paper packets and plastic wrap, sterile packs of gauze and creams and garish white bandages. Adrian's eyes followed every movement, every bend and flex of his fingers, with unblinking interest.
"It's more than last time," he says. There is a slight slur to his words now, a weariness, a dreaminess. And then, "You're new."
"I am," Christian confirms.
"The fuck are you doing here?"
"Cleaning you up." Through the fingertips of the nitrile gloves, Adrian's skin takes on an alien texture, damp with sweat and sticky with blood, patterned by angular scarring that forms stiff ridges along the equally stiff muscles. Even drugged into near-sleep, he is carved from stone.
"You know what I mean." He tries to sound annoyed but there is a curiosity about him. Christian's heard the stories, the casual conversation in the lunch room, the way his coworkers speak when there are no patients around to hear. The quiet contempt, the frustrations, the aggravation. The feeling that Adrian is more work than he is worth, that he disrupts the otherwise uneventful shifts, that he is like an electrical storm that brews in back corners and dark hallways. Perhaps that's how he always manages to get his hands on scalpels, on razorblades, on pocketknives that somehow manage to go missing from closed lockers. Faced with their obligation to care for him, the staff simply hope that he will take care of himself.
"It's all just moments, right, Doc?" Christian asks. He wets a thick pad with saline and carefully cleans the skin where the angles of Adrian's self-loathing cross each other, a beautifully even crosshatching over the center line of his body, the tight skin beneath his navel that disappears beneath the edge of his pants. The skin is so hot it feels like it burns him, like that storm of madness the others talk about in hushed tones behind the doctor's backs is trickling into his fingertips, sending a buzz into Christian's nerves that makes the hair rise on the back of his neck.
He thinks of the stories they tell of your body's reaction, the moment before lightning strikes.
"What'd you call me?" Adrian is blinking at him now, dazed, but there's still that sharpness behind his glassy eyes. It's an act, perhaps, a temporary complacency. If he feels any discomfort from the prodding at his wounds, from the tug and pull of the butterfly bandages, it is lost in translation.
"Doc." The confiscated scalpel sits on the cart, the bright metal marred by fingerprints and red spots that could be paint, could be fire, could be the inner workings of Adrian's thoughts, and when Christian picks it up and twirls it in his fingers the light blurs it all together. "Seemed fitting." Another row of bandages, another wound pinched closed. "You talk about moments, don't you? All the right here, all the right now." He enjoys, perhaps too much, the way Adrian's eyes narrow. "Right now, I'm cleaning you up."
"Don't fucking patronize me."
"I'm not patronizing you."
"They tell you to do this? All your fucking buddies down the hall?"
"No." With his hand pressed flat to Adrian's stomach, the blood seeping into the pad beneath his fingers, Christian can feel the twitch and quiver of every muscle, the echo of Adrian's pulse, the war his body rages against the drugs that fight to subdue him.
"Then why are you here?"
"Because of you." He lifts the pad to see if more blood wells to the surface. "Because you keep doing this to yourself." He finishes the bandaging and goes to the sink in the corner to dispose of the gloves and wash his hands, the water doing little to clear the heat of Adrian's skin from his fingers. He ignores the metallic tones of the restraints, the purr of leather sliding through clasps, the creak of the mattress and the metal frame of the bed. When he turns back and Adrian is sitting up, he is not even remotely surprised. "How are you feeling?" he asks, wiping his hands on a strip of paper towel.
"You know what I could do to you with this?" Adrian asks, holding up the scalpel. It gleams like a gemstone in his grip.
"Judging by your file, a lot."
They stare at each other, Adrian spinning the blade absently in his fingers like a distracted teenager twirling a pen, Christian watching him with a level stare that falters, only slightly, when Adrian slides off the bed and closes the distance between them until their bodies are only inches apart, the chill of Christian's fear and the fever-heat of Adrian's madness.
He wonders, then, if it was wrong of him to slip that one cuff loose, if the quiet suggestions in the back of his mind were possibly the fever that his body skimmed from Adrian's skin, if his reason is possibly still tracing the contours of Adrian's abdomen. He stares up from the shorter end of their height difference and it's like staring into the darkness in the corners of a bedroom at night, the elongated shadows that may be a man, or may just be the confused wonderings of your tired mind.
Had he dreamed of Adrian, before?
Adrian's fingers splay across his chest and he is pushed slowly backward, his white uniform shoes squeaking quietly on the floor, the only sound in the room, and when his back touches the wall his muscles recoil at the chill of the concrete through his shirt. He sees the scalpel raise in his peripheral vision but he won't look away, won't focus his attention anywhere but on the hollow eternity of Adrian's eyes, the unbearable pressure of the five fingertips against his sternum just barely holding him in place. When the blade bites so gently into the base of his neck, tracing a thin and aching line with flawless perfection, a surge of panic and a trembling wave of adrenaline that twists his spine, makes his hands hook into the creases between the painted blocks of the wall.
"Look at this," Adrian murmurs thoughtfully, dragging the scalpel along the length of silver chain that rests against Christian's chest, lifting his other hand to pull down the shirt collar. When it reaches the pendant, he uses the blade to lift it away, dragging it through the blood that moves in a lazy, ticklish stream along Christian's skin. "A good, God-fearing boy, are you?" he asks, turning the small crucifix back and forth in the light.
"No," Christian whispers, entranced by Adrian's stare and mesmerized by the stinging trill of the long, shallow wound. "It's my sister's."
"She dead?"
"You could say that. Aren't all of you?"
Adrian's eyes harden, become brittle, and the crucifix falls back against Christian's shirt, against the blossoms of blood that stain the sky blue fabric, and before a heartbeat can pass Adrian's hand is around his throat.
It is euphoric and terrifying, a moment that he'd always been told to consider when he began his studies, his career, something he'd been counseled on and warned about and told stories of, but none of the words and the lectures compared to the vice-grip of Adrian's long fingers, the snarl of his anger. In that moment he feels entirely reduced to sound, the roaring of his blood in his veins, the whistling rasp of his ragged breaths, the dizzying hum in his ears, and he wonders if this is how it's supposed to be. If the span of his life, whatever master plan his sister always spoke of, has condensed to this moment, that Adrian's hands are supposed to usher him into a different state of being, choke the life from him, render him unrecognizable like he has others before.
A small part of him hopes that it's true.
The rest of him claws at the bandages across Adrian's stomach, fingernails gouging into unprotected wounds still wet and fresh, tearing apart the small bandages so that the flesh yawns open. Adrian hisses in pain, wrenches back and away so that he can press his hands to the wound, leaving Christian gasping for breath and the space between them enormous, filled with acidic air and the alternating temperatures of their bodies and that storm, that eternal, rising storm that fills them both with a heady desire neither can understand.
After a minute or so his heart has calmed, and he steps away from the wall, touching his hand to the deepest of his new wound, the spot where the blade curled too deeply along his collarbone, where the skin spreads wide from the tension of his body.
"Are we even?" he asks, his voice betraying a throaty hoarseness that cries out to be crushed again. Adrian stares at him, for a moment mute with confusion, and then a smile cracks the stone of his face and he laughs, actually laughs, a noise sudden and beautiful.
"Suppose we are." He takes one of the gauze pads, pats it against his stomach. "You know," he says, quietly, "you think that uniform keeps you up here..." He raises one hand to hold it above his head. "... but you're no different from the rest of us."
"I know," Christian replies. "It's just good crazy and bad crazy."
"It's what?"
"Nothing. It doesn't matter." When Adrian places the scalpel on the cart, giving up his weapon for the second time, Christian shakes his head. "Keep it."
"You're kidding."
"Consider it a gift."
"You're just asking for another one, are you?"
Christian smiles at him, and something in his smile feels different, colder, as if something has been sliced away from it, crushed from existence.
"You got one," he said, tapping his fingers against the wet heat of the dripping wound at his throat. "You don't get another."
Word Count: 2164
Author's Note: First off, we have n3m3sis43 to thank for this because about a hundred years ago she asked me for a scene with these two. There was much joking about smut and whatnot and I'm not even sure why, but the conversation was there, and it didn't happen, and a hundred years later I'm writing this. SPOILERS ABOUND for I Only Dream of Thunder because I'm referring to characters by their real names here and it hints at a few things that probably don't matter too much if you haven't read the novel but... yeah. If you have you'll get what I'm saying. Canon-wise, this falls into pre-novel by a decent amount, and yes, it is canon. Written in third-person because I couldn't decide which POV to go with.
He is a clockwork creature, muscles wound like springs inside the cruel casing of his body, every bone-carved gear and tendon-cable packed into his scarred flesh until it appeared he would split apart from the strain of it, the tedious and precise machinations of his organs and the relentless and metallic tick-tick-tick of his heart. Swaddled in leather straps the same tone and texture as his skin he strains off the table like a thing possessed, sweat-soaked and furious at his imprisonment, clawing at rough sheets like a war machine abandoned at the end of the world, leaking fuel into the churned earth in its last piteous attempts to right itself.
The cocktail of sedatives see to it that his fight doesn’t last long. Strength bleeds from him until he finally lies still on the hard mattress, chest heaving, his fingers clenching unconsciously at the air as if searching for a handhold, for leverage, for an unseen weapon. Slowly he turns his head from side to side, blinking at the garish lights, malachite eyes uncomfortably alert with the feral light of an imprisoned predator.
“How long are you gonna stand there?” he asks.
He is marked with bleeding furrows, the mathematically precise incisions of his insanity, symmetrical trenches that add to the palette of shades on his skin, the wet red of his blood, raspberry pink of healing wounds, delicate rose of aged scars and the ashen white of marks long faded from memory. They angle themselves along the rippled surface of his stomach, trickles of blood trailing along the sloping curve of his waist and pooling in the harsh ridges of his hips before following the seductive slide to the band of the standard issue cotton pants. Like much of what he does, the intent of the injuries is a mystery, a riddle with no context and no solution, evident only in the scarred pictographs of his body and the confused meanderings of his thoughts.
Like his mind, his body is both terrifying and beautiful.
Christian checks the clock on the wall, the slow turn of the second hand spinning away the minutes, and smiles.
“Until you’re done,” he replies, calmly and quietly.
Like many of the others on the ward, Christian wondered if a world existed where, at some point, some time, Adrian Morrows hadn't been crazy, or if the insanity had been in his blood like a virus from the day he was born, manifesting in oddly inconsequential ways until finally it consumed him like a fever, melted away reason and the appropriate responses and emotions that were really just the fatty excess of normalized living. Maybe this was what everyone was beneath the skin, scarred and eccentric wraiths filled with madness and desperation.
He gave the drugs another five minutes before he pushed the metal cart to the side of the bed, his hands moving with a calm ease, a deliberate steadiness born not of textbook studies and classroom demonstrations but of the practiced day to day of his career. The litter collected in a small pile at the corner of the cart, paper packets and plastic wrap, sterile packs of gauze and creams and garish white bandages. Adrian's eyes followed every movement, every bend and flex of his fingers, with unblinking interest.
"It's more than last time," he says. There is a slight slur to his words now, a weariness, a dreaminess. And then, "You're new."
"I am," Christian confirms.
"The fuck are you doing here?"
"Cleaning you up." Through the fingertips of the nitrile gloves, Adrian's skin takes on an alien texture, damp with sweat and sticky with blood, patterned by angular scarring that forms stiff ridges along the equally stiff muscles. Even drugged into near-sleep, he is carved from stone.
"You know what I mean." He tries to sound annoyed but there is a curiosity about him. Christian's heard the stories, the casual conversation in the lunch room, the way his coworkers speak when there are no patients around to hear. The quiet contempt, the frustrations, the aggravation. The feeling that Adrian is more work than he is worth, that he disrupts the otherwise uneventful shifts, that he is like an electrical storm that brews in back corners and dark hallways. Perhaps that's how he always manages to get his hands on scalpels, on razorblades, on pocketknives that somehow manage to go missing from closed lockers. Faced with their obligation to care for him, the staff simply hope that he will take care of himself.
"It's all just moments, right, Doc?" Christian asks. He wets a thick pad with saline and carefully cleans the skin where the angles of Adrian's self-loathing cross each other, a beautifully even crosshatching over the center line of his body, the tight skin beneath his navel that disappears beneath the edge of his pants. The skin is so hot it feels like it burns him, like that storm of madness the others talk about in hushed tones behind the doctor's backs is trickling into his fingertips, sending a buzz into Christian's nerves that makes the hair rise on the back of his neck.
He thinks of the stories they tell of your body's reaction, the moment before lightning strikes.
"What'd you call me?" Adrian is blinking at him now, dazed, but there's still that sharpness behind his glassy eyes. It's an act, perhaps, a temporary complacency. If he feels any discomfort from the prodding at his wounds, from the tug and pull of the butterfly bandages, it is lost in translation.
"Doc." The confiscated scalpel sits on the cart, the bright metal marred by fingerprints and red spots that could be paint, could be fire, could be the inner workings of Adrian's thoughts, and when Christian picks it up and twirls it in his fingers the light blurs it all together. "Seemed fitting." Another row of bandages, another wound pinched closed. "You talk about moments, don't you? All the right here, all the right now." He enjoys, perhaps too much, the way Adrian's eyes narrow. "Right now, I'm cleaning you up."
"Don't fucking patronize me."
"I'm not patronizing you."
"They tell you to do this? All your fucking buddies down the hall?"
"No." With his hand pressed flat to Adrian's stomach, the blood seeping into the pad beneath his fingers, Christian can feel the twitch and quiver of every muscle, the echo of Adrian's pulse, the war his body rages against the drugs that fight to subdue him.
"Then why are you here?"
"Because of you." He lifts the pad to see if more blood wells to the surface. "Because you keep doing this to yourself." He finishes the bandaging and goes to the sink in the corner to dispose of the gloves and wash his hands, the water doing little to clear the heat of Adrian's skin from his fingers. He ignores the metallic tones of the restraints, the purr of leather sliding through clasps, the creak of the mattress and the metal frame of the bed. When he turns back and Adrian is sitting up, he is not even remotely surprised. "How are you feeling?" he asks, wiping his hands on a strip of paper towel.
"You know what I could do to you with this?" Adrian asks, holding up the scalpel. It gleams like a gemstone in his grip.
"Judging by your file, a lot."
They stare at each other, Adrian spinning the blade absently in his fingers like a distracted teenager twirling a pen, Christian watching him with a level stare that falters, only slightly, when Adrian slides off the bed and closes the distance between them until their bodies are only inches apart, the chill of Christian's fear and the fever-heat of Adrian's madness.
He wonders, then, if it was wrong of him to slip that one cuff loose, if the quiet suggestions in the back of his mind were possibly the fever that his body skimmed from Adrian's skin, if his reason is possibly still tracing the contours of Adrian's abdomen. He stares up from the shorter end of their height difference and it's like staring into the darkness in the corners of a bedroom at night, the elongated shadows that may be a man, or may just be the confused wonderings of your tired mind.
Had he dreamed of Adrian, before?
Adrian's fingers splay across his chest and he is pushed slowly backward, his white uniform shoes squeaking quietly on the floor, the only sound in the room, and when his back touches the wall his muscles recoil at the chill of the concrete through his shirt. He sees the scalpel raise in his peripheral vision but he won't look away, won't focus his attention anywhere but on the hollow eternity of Adrian's eyes, the unbearable pressure of the five fingertips against his sternum just barely holding him in place. When the blade bites so gently into the base of his neck, tracing a thin and aching line with flawless perfection, a surge of panic and a trembling wave of adrenaline that twists his spine, makes his hands hook into the creases between the painted blocks of the wall.
"Look at this," Adrian murmurs thoughtfully, dragging the scalpel along the length of silver chain that rests against Christian's chest, lifting his other hand to pull down the shirt collar. When it reaches the pendant, he uses the blade to lift it away, dragging it through the blood that moves in a lazy, ticklish stream along Christian's skin. "A good, God-fearing boy, are you?" he asks, turning the small crucifix back and forth in the light.
"No," Christian whispers, entranced by Adrian's stare and mesmerized by the stinging trill of the long, shallow wound. "It's my sister's."
"She dead?"
"You could say that. Aren't all of you?"
Adrian's eyes harden, become brittle, and the crucifix falls back against Christian's shirt, against the blossoms of blood that stain the sky blue fabric, and before a heartbeat can pass Adrian's hand is around his throat.
It is euphoric and terrifying, a moment that he'd always been told to consider when he began his studies, his career, something he'd been counseled on and warned about and told stories of, but none of the words and the lectures compared to the vice-grip of Adrian's long fingers, the snarl of his anger. In that moment he feels entirely reduced to sound, the roaring of his blood in his veins, the whistling rasp of his ragged breaths, the dizzying hum in his ears, and he wonders if this is how it's supposed to be. If the span of his life, whatever master plan his sister always spoke of, has condensed to this moment, that Adrian's hands are supposed to usher him into a different state of being, choke the life from him, render him unrecognizable like he has others before.
A small part of him hopes that it's true.
The rest of him claws at the bandages across Adrian's stomach, fingernails gouging into unprotected wounds still wet and fresh, tearing apart the small bandages so that the flesh yawns open. Adrian hisses in pain, wrenches back and away so that he can press his hands to the wound, leaving Christian gasping for breath and the space between them enormous, filled with acidic air and the alternating temperatures of their bodies and that storm, that eternal, rising storm that fills them both with a heady desire neither can understand.
After a minute or so his heart has calmed, and he steps away from the wall, touching his hand to the deepest of his new wound, the spot where the blade curled too deeply along his collarbone, where the skin spreads wide from the tension of his body.
"Are we even?" he asks, his voice betraying a throaty hoarseness that cries out to be crushed again. Adrian stares at him, for a moment mute with confusion, and then a smile cracks the stone of his face and he laughs, actually laughs, a noise sudden and beautiful.
"Suppose we are." He takes one of the gauze pads, pats it against his stomach. "You know," he says, quietly, "you think that uniform keeps you up here..." He raises one hand to hold it above his head. "... but you're no different from the rest of us."
"I know," Christian replies. "It's just good crazy and bad crazy."
"It's what?"
"Nothing. It doesn't matter." When Adrian places the scalpel on the cart, giving up his weapon for the second time, Christian shakes his head. "Keep it."
"You're kidding."
"Consider it a gift."
"You're just asking for another one, are you?"
Christian smiles at him, and something in his smile feels different, colder, as if something has been sliced away from it, crushed from existence.
"You got one," he said, tapping his fingers against the wet heat of the dripping wound at his throat. "You don't get another."