He knows he has no reason to be nervous about this. It's not like it's an offensive question, and fuck, it's not like Lennox is even likely to say no. But he's never asked a question quite like this, not even proposing, if what had happened on the beach could even properly be called a proposal, and his fingers are feeling a little twitchy as he heads toward the Hamlet and Lennox's hut, and once he's there he pauses outside it.

He's not nervous. That's fucking stupid. If he's nervous now, how the fuck is he supposed to handle the real day?

"Hey, man," he calls. "You around?"

"Daddy, found tarfish," Mack calls merrily, crouched down in her sundress and poking at something in the sand. Mike leans over to peer at it, a greenish round thing, and shakes his head, grinning. Beside him, Flo is filling her hat with sand and shells with extraordinary concentration.

"That's a sand dollar, honey," he says. "Not a starfish. Leave it alone, it's alive."

"Kay," Mack says, looking mildly put out but forgetting all about it when a long conical shell catches her eye. She picks it up and turns it in the sunlight, blue eyes following its elongated spiral. "Pretty," she murmurs, and Mike tugs at her hat.

"You're pretty," he says, and she bats at his hands and laughs.

"Wan' lunch," Flo announces, looking up from her hat, and Mike ruffles her blond curls. It's not yet high noon, there's a fresh breeze, and the sun feels good on his bare back.

Perfect. Pretty much.

"Daddy Tom'll be here soon," he says, glancing back up in the direction of the boardwalk. "We'll have lunch then."

He's not sure what wakes him. It could be any number of things. It could be the light on his face, the air moving over him, the shift of cloth against skin where before it had just been the cool of the sheets and the heat of two bodies. It could be the hard ground under his back, which would also explain the aches in him as consciousness drifts closer. He's gone soft, he thinks sometimes, fallen out of the habit of sleeping well on the ground, lost in the embrace of Tom's big bed. But he still roughs it sometimes, so at first the fact that he's clearly outside doesn't sound any alarms.

But it's the kind of outside. It's not the light but the quality of that light; not warm and glowing but thin, pale, anemic. When he opens his eyes it's not the trees swaying over him in the morning breeze but what they're like, them and the other plant life, still thickly growing and untamed but bad. Unhealthy. Sparse where it shouldn't be and dense where it shouldn't be. No birds, no fucking birds at all. The hints of a world knocked out of balance and gone horribly wrong.

There's a cold wet nose pressed against his cheek, and a weight pressing into his arm, numbing it. He rolls, pulls it away and sits up, shoving Neil harder than he meant to. Dexter steps back, whining softly, and Mike stares around and then down, absorbing it in quick shocked bursts. The car. The campfire, smoking ashes. Dexter. The two figures, curled together on the ground. Tom's old and ragged sweater. His own pants. Camo. Boots. The itchy feel of clothes that haven't been washed for a while.

His gun.

There's no mistaking what this is.

He doesn't want to wake them. As long as they're still sleeping, this is his nightmare and his alone. Maybe they never have to wake up. And yet he has no idea what's really worse: being back here or being back here on his own.

"No," he breathes, barely above a whisper. No louder, because he's honestly afraid that he might scream. "No. No. Fuck."

[continued from here]

He stumbles out of the club mostly backwards, hands on Neil's hips and grinning at Tom over Neil's shoulder. He wants... he doesn't even know what he wants. His skin is warm and buzzing and what he really thinks he wants is to touch them both all over, to be touched.

"You think we can make it back?" he asks, laughing and pulling Neil in for a kiss once the shadows of the trees cover them a little more. He can still hear the music from inside, and there's something soft and sensual in the night air that's entirely summerish.

He waits a little before he goes to find him. He takes the girls back, feeds them lunch, plays with them, puts them down for an afternoon nap and leaves Neil and Peter with them, and only then does he think he's ready. It takes him a little while to find Tom--not at the Compound, clearly not at the tree, but finally someone directs him down towards the beach and there he finds him sitting up against a tree with a book in his lap, and that in itself is a little unusual.

Not necessarily a sign of something wrong. But possibly a sign of something.

"Hey," he says softly, dropping into a crouch beside him, bare feet in the sand. "You want some company?"

It's not like it happens that often. Since seeing the movie, it's been even rarer. But lately it's been better, and now when it rears its head he feels comfortable, finally, going with it. Letting it run wild a little.

He's a hunter. He likes to hunt.

He follows Neil to the hut, moving slow and quiet and just close enough to keep him in sight. He's spent enough time stalking game by now that it's second nature. He finds himself working to stay upwind, even though there's no way Neil would scent him.

He has to wait for a while, but he doesn't mind it. Waiting is part of the anticipation, and the anticipation is part of the payoff. He waits off in the shadows of the trees and he thinks about the slight curve of Neil's spine, the tender flesh where his thighs meet his hips. He has a slender, wiry build, like a deer.

His breath catches and his pulse quickens slightly when he sees Neil emerging, waving a goodbye, setting off through the trees again, and he follows at a distance. Has to wait until they get far enough away that if there's any screaming, Joe won't come running and force there to be some awkward explaining. But gradually he gets closer, closer, feeling the spring muscles starting to coil.

Not yet. Soon.

[from here]

"God, just fucking..." He's laughing again, tugging at the hem of Neil's shirt, because it's a warm night and he wants to feel bare skin under his hands. They could do this mostly clothed, and it might be a little safer that way, but if they're going to fuck on the goddamn Compound roof he doesn't see much point in doing things in half measures.

"You're amazing," he murmurs, hands moving hungrily up Neil's back.

He treasures these mornings, especially as they come so rarely. This time Neil's doing them the favor, taken the girls up to the Compound and leaving the two of them to stay in bed, tangled in the sheets and each other. On some mornings like this they doze, on some they fuck nice and slow, on some they talk quietly together. This time they're just lying there in the bed that's Tom's gift, making pillows of each other, touching slowly and feeling the sun move in shafts across their skin.

He never used to have this, he thinks, and it's important to remember that always. Even if they'd had each other in the Realm the way he'd wanted it, it would have been all quick fucks and stolen minutes. None of this. No enjoying each other, nowhere really to be.

It takes him a little while to figure out that anything's weird. He stirs, yawns, stretches, rolls over and slings an arm over Tom's waist. Too comfortable to get up just yet. Everything feels good. He turns his head slightly, reaching up to rake long hair off his face so it stops tickling his nose--

Long hair. He manages to open one eye but now he doesn't need his eyes open to be conscious of what's different. And yet familiar. He feels smaller, lighter, and his skin is smoother between the sheets. His hand passes down over his chest, really just confirming, and it's confirmed with a slight jolt that runs right down between his thighs.

And that confirms it too.

He laughs quietly, stretching more luxuriously this time and arching against Tom's back. The mattress itself feels softer, and the sheets, but he doesn't have the attention for it right now. Last time this happened, he wasn't really in a position to take the kind of advantage of it that he is now.

This time Tom can look at his tits. He can look all he wants to. And he doesn't have to stop at looking.

-32" 1080p Samsung LCD TV
-DVR, featuring movies and programming TBD.

There are mornings where Tom does him a favor, and once the girls start to fuss and hammer at the bars of their crib, Tom gets up, takes them to the compound for a bath and breakfast, and lets him sleep in. This morning it's even more than that, because as Mike stretches and turns, his arm curls around Neil's waist, and he murmurs something incoherent against the back of Neil's head.

Sleeping in is a luxury these days.

Too much of it is more than he can afford, however, so after a few precious minutes he drags himself up and swings his legs over the side of the bed, looking around bleary-eyed for his pants.

Half dressed, yawning, scratching absently at the scar on his side, he walks out into the main room of the house... and stops, staring and entirely uncomprehending at the thing on the floor.

It's been a long time since he's seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, but he can't help thinking of that now. By most standards, the TV isn't that big. By TV standards, by his standards, monolithic is really the only word for it. He feels a faint thread of something that might be awe. There's a couple more things next to it, but he doesn't have eyes for them. Only for the screen, wide and black and beautiful. It has to be from the future, or from what he would call the future. Televisions like this didn't exist in the world he'd left when he'd gone to the Realm.

"Shit," he breathes, still just standing there. In a second or two he'll work up the guts to go over and touch it. Once he's sure he's not dreaming.

So he goes hunting, but even that doesn't help. The ritual of waiting, moving, stalking and springing doesn't do anything to soothe him. He stands in the snow with his breath a cloud in front of his face and he listens to his heart beat, unsure of any word for what he's feeling. He's lost a lot. Maybe more than this, before. Maybe he shouldn't be feeling anything; Lennox has more right to be a mess than he does.

But he's not a mess. He's hunting.

He goes through the motions like he's been programmed: the flash of moving brown through the trees, the crouch, the aim, the sharp crack of gunfire, an explosion of red above the eye and the quick spasm of death before the elk drops. It's cold, cold as the snow around him. It's a lot of meat, and he's gotten as far as stringing it up from a tree by its hind legs before something just... breaks.

He's cutting from the hole where the genitals used to be down to the throat, making the same incision he's made so many times before, and the metallic smell of blood is sharp and sweet and hot in the chilly air, and the blood dripping onto the snow is shockingly red. He's got his knife in his hand, and it's been a long time since it was an instrument of violence any more than this, but as he stares down at it and at the blood smearing the blade it's all he can see, and he starts, almost methodically, to stab.

It keeps taking things from him. It's taken Danny and Clay, and Sirius, even if it's brought him back again, and Stu and Jeroen and so many other people. It's taken Eostre and now it's taken Chris, and what's most terrifying is just how much he still has left to lose. And it did that, too. It gave him all this. It made him want it. It brought him here and gave him a life he never got as far as hoping for, and this is what it does to him.

The crack of the ribcage as he kicks through it is almost as loud as the gunshots but he hardly hears it. He drops the knife and reaches into the steaming viscera, still hot, still almost pulsing with life, and he beats and tears at it with his hands, and he might be screaming something. The elk is the Island, and he wants it hurt it in as many ways as he can think of before he gets too tired to do any more.

When he looks down again the elk's heart is in his hand, huge and glistening with fresh blood, one side of it torn open, and with a snarl he turns and smashes it against a tree trunk until it's a crushed mess, and not all of the blood on his hand is the elk's.

He steps back from the blood-spattered trunk, shaking his hand and hissing with pain he's only just starting to feel. It's like the world comes slightly back into focus, and he sees the mess in the clearing: so much blood, strings of guts all across the ground, splintered bone and the battered carcass of the elk, still dangling from the tree, still swinging lightly in the breeze.

The elk is not the Island. The elk is dead and far beyond anything he can do to it. He's filthy with blood and Chris is still gone, and it seems only fitting somehow, in the darkest possible way, that his reaction to that fact is violence.

He makes a quiet, defeated sound and leans back against one of the trees, staring down at his hands. There's no winning against this. There's no fighting it. It just is.

It's a hot night. Too hot. He's left Tom dozing with the girls on the basement floor and come up to look for a glass of water and something to take his mind off things. Even in the air conditioning, the days of heat have gotten to his brain and he's found himself more distracted, more short-tempered even than usual. Certain things in his mind feel too close while others are far too far away.

He wanders into the rec room and finds it fairly sparsely populated, considering. A couple people look like they're napping, but he figures they won't mind if he watches something if he keeps the volume low. Glass in hand, he heads over to the shelf and looks the selection over. Saving Private Ryan. Full Metal Jacket. Platoon. All of it mostly the same old shit, no interest, until a title catches his eye.

Mysterious Skin.

Does he know it from somewhere? It's tickling something in his brain like he does. He looks at it for a few moments and then puts it on, takes a seat on the couch and a swallow of water, and really he's only half paying attention until Neil says, "The summer I was eight years old, I came for the first time."

And that's where it starts.

It takes him a little longer to be certain that it's Neil and not just a Neil clone, and by then he's sure that he's seeing things he shouldn't be seeing, but he can't look away. The rest of the world fades into the background until the world on the screen is all that's real. Neil as a child. Neil having that... thing... done to him. The first threatening waves of nausea. Jesus. Jesus Christ.

It's not all horrible. There's moments of sweetness, with Neil's mother (Not bad, he thinks distantly), and moments of familiarity, and he remembers what it had been like to be riding the crest of puberty and feeling the first stirrings of things it would take him years to fully understand. Seeing someone he's fucking as a child is a little weird, but he's seen Tom that way and he'd gotten over it.

But there's things he doesn't want to see. And he sees them. And they don't stop. It's like being caught in a cyclone, whirled up and out of control; he sits and watches with the glass forgotten in his hand and if there's anyone around him now he doesn't know it. It all blurs together. Neil. Neil hooking in the park. Neil's friend Brian, looking so desperately for answers. Neil's friend Wendy, standing with him in the gently falling snow. Neil with his johns, and in some ways that's the hardest, because Neil as a child is still somehow alien and distant, a face he doesn't know. But he's seen Neil's face like this many times now, screwed up or lax with pleasure, and seeing him with these men feels like an obscenity. It makes him angry, even as it draws up a treacherous little snake of possessive arousal inside him. They can't have you. They can't ever have you like I do.

And then time folds back on itself.

It starts with a feeling of slow dread as Neil rides along with the beefy older man. He's not even sure where it's coming from, but he hasn't felt a stronger urge to look away, get up and turn the fucking thing off and try to pretend he's never seen it at all. He watches, horrified, fascinated, and Neil is raped in front of his eyes.

He doesn't remember anything after that. When the world comes back into focus he's standing, the screen is blank, and when he looks down there's glass all over the floor and a single huge, glistening shard sticking out of the meat of his palm, blood dripping onto the floor with a quiet pat pat.

And his mouth tastes like gun oil.

He's making wreaths out of the red blossoms. They're rough and half falling apart, and he's doing it without giving much thought to it, weaving the stems round each other, and the flower petals are crushed between his fingers, leaving red stains on his hands. On either side of the doorway, the little vines are curling tender green lengths cautiously upward. The girls are sleeping in their crib. The sun is lowering into late afternoon.

Somewhere, the leaves are changing and shaking off the branches in a cold autumn rain. Even here the days are getting shorter. It feels appropriate, that it would really begin after she was gone. Soon it'll be winter and she won't be here to watch the girls play in the snow and fill the kitchen with baking smells and roll her eyes at Christmas. She won't be here to warm him.

He has a feeling that he'll be warm anyway. But there's still an ache. Under his breath, he's barely singing something he remembers hearing her sing in her own tuneless voice, some time a long time ago.

She cuts the grain and harvests corn
The kiss of fall surrounds her
The days grow old and winter cold
She draws her cloak around her

It won't ever stop hurting, but he's not bitter. It was more than he ever deserved. And what he has now... It still is.

It used to be he could go for days on a few hours of sleep. It's a learned skill, training your body to simply need less, to more efficiently use what it gets. But here, he's lost it, gone soft, and after four days with hardly any sleep he's starting to feel ragged around the edges, wavering and uncertain in everything. Eventually, he's sure, exhaustion will take over and he'll be able to make up the time, but for now it's a waiting game. He'd looked into the mirror this morning and been distantly horrified at how old he's starting to look. He's not sure one good night of sleep could fix that.

He's sitting on the steps on the Compound, coffee mug in his hands, Tom left back at the World Tree to get what little sleep he can. Sometimes he wonders if Tom is staying awake out of sympathy. At any other time he might resent it but now he's just glad for the company.

Sitting here just like on his birthday, which seems centuries in the past now. He sighs and rubs at his eyes. Maybe a nap later, but not just at the moment. He has things to take care of. He's waiting for someone--and presently he sees him, and he hails him with a wave of the hand.

This would be easier if it didn't feel so final.

The tree is still blooming and it's still raining. The wind's lashed the branches, scattering hundreds of flowers onto the ground around it, and with a carpet of white it looks like an early winter has come to this little corner of the jungle. Which is almost funny, considering.

Tom has gone out to get food and fresh water and Mike's left with the girls on Eostre's wide bed, watching them nap fitfully and wondering if he might be able to sleep too. Last night he hadn't for more than an hour or so and when he'd woken his pillow had been wet. He doesn't know if Tom had slept. He thinks probably not.

He'd lain in this bed before with her warm and glowing with the banked-down coals of their sex and the rain against the side of the house like it is now. He'd lain in this bed with her and Tom next to him and listened to them breathing. It hurts so much to lie in this bed now but he's not sure where else he could go.

Flo's breath hitches in her sleep. He remembers a song he thinks he'd heard Eostre singing to them once when they'd been fussing, just a snatch of it. Her voice had been fairly tuneless, he knows that, but it had always been lovely to him.

I gave my love a cherry that has no stone,
I gave my love a chicken that has no bone,
I gave my love a ring that has no end,
I gave my love a baby with no crying

He sings it faintly under his breath, and Flo stills, but he's sure it must be a coincidence.

"Better use the time I have, then," he breathes, the hand at Neil's cheek sliding around to the back of his neck and tangling in wet hair, dragging his head back just a little to expose his throat. In the water all his movements are at half speed, and he slowly rolls his hips forward, already starting to harden, pressing Neil's legs further apart with his body.

"Know what I did here for the first time?" Because he's just remembered it.

He's not sure why he should feel so tired. He's taken it easy today, spent time with the girls in the morning, checked his snares, sat with Neil for a while on the ballfield, sat with Florence for a while on the beach. He shouldn't be tired, but he is, and maybe it comes back to Florence's face, the pain in it, the loss, though he knows she was trying to be strong and he has no doubt that she'll succeed.

He doesn't actually want an eventful life. He hasn't since leaving the Guard. After that, he would have been happy with three hots and a cot somewhere, and a lot of time to think. But that's never been what life has in store for him and he's not sure why it should start now.

He shifts in bed, turning half on his side and closing his eyes, weariness aching in his limbs. Waiting for Tom, and for Neil, if Neil decides to show up, though he doesn't think he'll be good for much besides sleep. Might even be asleep before anyone even gets here. It's early yet, barely past dusk, but it's late enough, too.

No simple life for him. Not even when he's sleeping.