Although she may be in denial about it, Darien Fawkes and Bobby Hobbes don't belong to Chalie; she's just borrowing them for a little while. Darien, Bobby, The Keeper, Alex Monroe, Eberts, The Official, and any other characters mentioned are the property of Stu Segall productions. No copyright infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.
Notes: Feedback is, as always, incredibly appreciated.
I can be reached at chalie@saintly.com,
and would really love to hear from you. Thanks to everyone who has sent
encouragement; you guys are fantastic.
Pushing Back The Dark
By Charlotte Ruocco
The door's cracking open, filtering the last of the sunlight by fractions
into the dark spaces, but Darien doesn't look up, doesn't notice the light
streaking across his neck, doesn't seem to realize that the momentum of
the van's movement has stopped. He sits with his back curved hard against
the metal wall, knees drawn up and long arms hooking them in close to his
body.
The door swings wider. "Fawkes," his partner tries again. "You gonna
come up front, or what?"
Darien's response is the same as it was twenty minutes ago: legs gripped in a tighter embrace, he's probably cutting off his own circulation but the tilt of his head no is the only sign that Bobby Hobbes' words have registered on any level, however intrinsic. He knows that Hobbes has tried this before, asked, before, tried to make him move to the front of the van. He knows because the last time Hobbes spoke to him the light was more pronounced, and the time before that, even more so. Now it's setting and coloring Bobby orange: orange on the white of his shirt, orange against the glint of the gun in his waistband.
"I'm coming back here, then," Hobbes says, and for a moment Darien hates him, hates his partner, hates him for saying that, hates him for not leaving him alone and closing the door and blocking out the light. But hate isn't something that Darien wants to remember. He hugs his legs in tight and keeps his head down, keeps his legs as a shield against Bobby's intrusion.
Bobby's body displaces the air around Darien, sliding down the van's inner wall to sit next to him. Bobby stretches out his legs, though. Pretends not to assess their length. "Nice day," he supplies, tugging at his shirt's collar as if sarcasm did something for heat that's settled heavy and thick around them.
Darien has nowhere he wants to go. Nowhere he needs to be. It's cooler here with his back pressed up against metal. He has a voice, though. He uses it. "Hobbes," so there's no confusion about it, now, "I don't want you here."
"My van," his partner replies.
Darien hates Bobby again. Hates him for his nonchalant tone, cool as the unfinished metal against his sweat-slicked shirt, hates him because he knew he was going to say that. Hates him for being right.
"Please," says Darien. His legs are starting to hurt.
Bobby leans over to tug the door shut and the sunset dies with his movement.
Darien closes his eyes. Multiplies the darkness.
"It wasn't your fault." Bobby's talking again, a disembodied voice at Darien's side. "It wasn't."
Darien should be laughing at him, he knows. Should be jabbing a playful elbow into his partner's side and accusing him of swallowing too much of that self-help bullshit. He means to say something about how Hobbes should look into a gig as a motivational speaker but what he says is, "I need you to not be here."
"I'm not leaving." It would be nicer if Bobby at least pretended
to consider his reply, at least took a pause for breath before plowing
through Darien's requests like they're fragile nothings, spun of cobwebs
and melodrama. But he doesn't. Of course. Darien can sense that his partner's
jaw is set, hear it in the battle-ready tone of the voice that he tries
to make gentle.
Darien presses his face in against his knees, pressure on his eyes
until he's seeing colors, flashes of random light patterning across closed
eyelids. It hurts, but pain, he decides, is okay.
"Fawkes..." Golda's tenuous hull creaks with Bobby's turn to face him. "Look, kid. It wasn't your fault. I know you, my friend. And that thing isn't you."
"Part of me," Darien answers automatically. It's an old song-and-dance routine, this conversation, between him and Bobby. "It was worse this time." He opens his eyes and there's little slivers of light slipping in from the front, little pathetic bits of light trying to push back the darkness that's flooded the van.
"Part of all of us," Bobby agrees, which is a deviation from the usual script. Darien looks at him. "Difference is you've got that piece of crap in your head that makes all of Freud's dreams come true. Simple as that." And Darien realizes with a start that his partner truly believes it: case closed. Stamped with the Bobby Hobbes seal of approval. Bobby believes that.
Bobby is a fool.
"I tore a man's throat out with my bare hands today," Darien tells him. "And I liked it."
Bobby might be a fool, but Darien belatedly gives him credit for not flinching. He tries to remember the last time he saw Bobby Hobbes flinch and can't, can't remember a time before today.
"It wasn't you, Fawkes. I'll say it again. It might use your body, but by then you -- the real you -- is always packed up and gone home for the night."
"I liked it," Darien says again. "I wanted to hurt people. I was planning to. I almost killed Claire."
"You didn't."
Darien lifts his shoulders, rolls them in a shrug. Hunches back down. "Doesn't matter. Matters that I wanted to."
Bobby considers. "You want to fuck around with your conscience and cry yourself to sleep, Fawkes, you be my guest. But that guy was low-life scum. Would have taken us all out and called it a day's work. Claire's okay. I'm okay. Whatever the hell you thought you wanted to do, you didn't do it. End of story. It's gone now."
"It isn't." The words hang heavy in the air between them, heavy as the bloated desert heat, and Darien regrets their sudden weight. "Hobbes. Please. Please, Bobby. Don't be here."
"What do you mean, it isn't?"
Darien shakes his head, tucks it in against his knees. Turns his face away from seeing Bobby's expression in the faint and fading illumination.
Bobby's expression says I'll beat if out of you.
Bobby says, "Fine by me, pal. I haven't got anywhere to be. I'm all for a nap until you decide you're ready to talk."
Darien clenches down on anger, clamps down on the sudden irrational violence that surges through his veins and makes him want to scream and choke on that scream at the same time. "Hobbes." His tightened voice is trying hard to transmit understanding. "It isn't gone."
Sharp intake of breath against the sudden silence. "You mean--"
Realization is staining Bobby's face like blood, blood spreading slow and thick against Darien's palms, blood under his fingernails and seeping into his shirt's tail, blood darkening his cheek and oh god --
"I can still feel it," Darien says. He holds his hands up to his face and smells alcohol there, inhales the sharply antiseptic scent that Claire scrubbed at him with, Claire scrubbing at the blood and looking everywhere but his eyes. "Counteragent's supposed to make it stop. But I can feel it all. Everything. Everything that I wanted to do. Oh, god." He forgets how to breathe for a long moment and can't decide if that's a good thing or not, if maybe it would be better for the rest of the world if he just permanently forgot.
"Resistance," is Bobby's hypothesis. Darien admires his partner's ability to keep his voice calm. It's more than he could do, he thinks, if he had just voluntarily climbed into the back of a van with a homicidal maniac. "The Keep's always going on about how you could build up resistance to that magic juice of hers. That's it, Fawkes. It didn't have the same affect on you as it should have, so you're feeling more of the--"
"Claire," Darien whispers. And again: "Oh, god."
Bobby's lips press a tight line. "She's okay, Fawkes. She's okay. Tougher than she looks. Fine enough to play doctor in the end, remember? Cleaned you up pretty good."
Darien tries to make himself small, tries to fit elongated limbs and sharp angles together into tight obscurity. Invisible. "You," he tries. Can't make it further than that, his mouth moving soundlessly.
"Me?" He can feel Hobbes' shrug, its attempt at regaining nonchalance. "It takes more than silver eyes to set Bobby Hobbes' knees a-knocking, my friend. A whole helluva lot more."
"I wouldn't have killed you."
"I know, Fawkes. I know. It's okay." Bobby's hand against the back of Darien's neck is meant to be reassuring; its grip tight, friendly, a partner's.
Darien flinches and flings away the touch. "No! No! You saw, Hobbes -- you saw what I was going to do, what I wanted to do--"
The air's abruptly heavy with implications. But Bobby insists, sounding more tired than Darien had thought: "I saw you quicksilver crazy, kid. That's all."
His hand reasserts itself, wants to comfort, fitting back in the space between Darien's hairline and the start of his spine.
"Hobbes." Darien can't even manage a whisper, his words sharp and rasping as shattered glass. "Please don't."
Stubborn idiotic fool bastard, tightening his hand rather than letting go. "You need to snap out of this, Dare. You need to--"
No, no, god, it's too much.
Screw the glass.
This time it's Darien shattering.
Darien recoils, snaps, snarls, grabbing Bobby's wrists and cinching his fingers around them, digging the pads of his fingertips into pulse points, shoving himself forward and rocking them both back so that he lands hard on top of his partner. Feels the vibration of the wind knocking out of Bobby's lungs against his chest.
Too much.
Bobby's head makes an unpleasant sound as it connects with Golda's floorboard, but when he blinks, dazed, up at Darien, Darien pressing him down, Darien trying to stop the circulation in his wrists with his hands' grip, Darien, eyes wide and wild and desperate and agonized, it's a blink without condemnation.
He'd tried to warn him. Tried to make him go away, back to the front of the van, back to where it's safe and away from Darien and the monster who lives in his head and is a part of him. Begged him, even, begged him to go.
Bobby Hobbes doesn't bail on his partner. The part of Darien that's screaming in protest as he pins the older man's body beneath his wonders why, wonders how he could have inspired so much devotion in someone and be so undeserving of it.
But. Warm.
Warm. Warm, that's Hobbes' body underneath his. Darien's been in stifling heat the whole day but there's a difference between hot and warmth, between discomfort and delicious.
Oh, god. The heat.
There is no romance in Darien's touches; not a dictionary in the world that could classify his hands' fumbling under the heading of a caress. Nothing sweet in crushing, besides the heady rush of power in being the crusher. That's it: he's crushing Hobbes, working against Hobbes, working out the essence of Bobby Hobbes and rubbing it against his skin.
Bobby's eyes, when he dares to look, are on him, curious, curious, curiouser. Just that. Showing nothing. No rage. No confusion, even. Just wide-eyed, wide brown eyes in the dark, dark under the weight of Darien's anger, Darien's need, Darien's body.
Solid. Warm. Warmth and solidity pressed against him, his body finally against a surface it approves of: no harsh plastic of the administering chair, this, no stretch of empty bed. Heated breath, startled breath, maybe, puffing out against his skin, cooling there, beading against the sweat: Bobby's breath.
Darien Fawkes moves against his partner and tries to drive out the darkness.
Drive out everything.
Driving down hard and heavy against the real living body he's found, caught, holds beneath him; driving out what he'd wanted to do to this man, what the thing that was him and wasn't him wanted to do, what his body ached for. What he'd never realized, never internalized, what had taken a detour into the psychotic for him to recognize.
What he'd flashed at Bobby, hours ago, lifetimes ago, projected from behind silver eyes and smile-teased lips, and seen his partner flinch for the first time when he understood.
Mad, crazy, freed, Darien wouldn't kill him. Wouldn't delight in adding Bobby's blood to the color that already stained his hands, his shirt, the blood of the man they'd been chasing when the madness had hit. The man he'd taken out, whose death left him alone with Hobbes and all of the things he suddenly needed to do.
Then Claire had arrived, counteragent clutched in her fist. Sliding down to save the day from her proverbial white horse.
Darien, furious, had gone after her. Hobbes was his. And the blue liquid in the syringe, he knew, would make him forget that. He didn't want to forget this fascinating realization. Knew he would, like all the other brilliant ideas that had come to him in moments of madness and then slipped through his fingertips like so much sand due to Claire and her needles.
Only this time it hadn't.
Darien squeezes his eyes shut, tight, tight against the sight of Bobby beneath him and the lack of condemnation in brown eyes. It's worse, he thinks, that Bobby's looking at him like he understands, like he sees the monster and he's not afraid.
Bobby's arms, twisting free, come up, around, and he holds onto Darien. The sudden band of pressure is snug against Darien's back, Bobby holding onto to him, holding onto him throughout the harsh rock of Darien's long body moving against the firm planes of Bobby's stomach, Bobby's thigh, Bobby.
Bobby steadying him even as Darien's desperate expulsions of air blow out hot and moist against his throat. Darien whispering inarticulate pleas in the interim between lip-bloodied silences, the momentum of his body tugged down, down, always down, anchoring him against Bobby, pressing and moving as he has no right to. Heat, warmth, hot, sweat, skin, touch of his mouth to Bobby's neck. Taste of Bobby, Bobby's scent between his teeth.
Darien's murmur, Darien's lips turning Bobby's name around and around
and wondering why the sound of his own voice makes him want to cry.
Bobby silent in the dark, fingers clinging together where they meet
at the small of Darien's back in a fragile hold on reality.
Darien still moving, moving mindlessly, shifting and straining towards the answer to a question that neither of them are able to voice. Making friction, always friction, working friction up into a sort of agony that is exquisite and awful and burns fiery trails through his veins, hurts him, drives him on, on and on and on, and through it all Bobby holds on to him.
Forehead fitting to the crevice under Bobby's collarbone, breath coming in ragged gasps, tearing at his throat, tearing at the heat and at his heart. Bobby's name again as Darien shakes with release -- of everything; of the anger, the fear, the wanting, of his body's tight-twisted desire; and then the sound of Darien pleading for forgiveness.
No. No.
"Oh, god." He shouldn't be allowed to speak, Darien decides; he isn't worth the air his mouth wastes to form words. He's repeating it over and over, like a litany, like a chance at the redemption he's just destroyed: "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
Touch of a suddenly awkward hand again at the back of his neck, and the support of Bobby's arms around him looses. "Fawkes." A whisper broken under Bobby's dry swallow. "It's okay, Darien. It's okay."
"I'm so sorry. I didn't want -- I mean, I hadn't meant -- oh god, Bobby--"
Darien's body rebels, reacts, violently, tries to shove away from his partner, stopped only by the hard clench of Bobby's stronger grip. He can feel his shoulders shaking crazily, feel the guilt that has become a tangible thing, alive and ready to choke him; imagines that Hobbes can see the horror manifesting in eyes gone black with fear and self-loathing.
"Darien," Bobby says, quietly, "If I'd wanted you off, man, you'd have been off."
Darien presses his face back down against Bobby's collarbone. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
Bobby's hand slides, awkward, hesitant, to pat against Darien's back. Through his shirt's thin material Darien can feel its tremble. "The broken record thing is getting a little old, my friend."
There's a part of Darien's mind that can't quite process the fact that Hobbes isn't letting him go, that it's his partner's hands keeping him from flinging himself away and over the side of the nearest bridge. Hobbes would, at this point, deserve the honors in shoving him over said bridge's precipice. But Hobbes, here, now, is still warm, not letting go, Hobbes with his hands in a fumbling attempt to soothe Darien, Darien who attacked him and held him down and...And. Darien still with Bobby's taste in his mouth.
"I don't know what's wrong with me," Darien whispers against the weave of Bobby's shirt. "Hobbes..."
"Kid. It's okay. It'll be okay. Partners...do for each other," Bobby says, ducking away before the faint light can touch on the flush of his forehead, the dark rush of blood against his cheeks.
Darien nearly smiles at the Hobbesian altruism in spite of himself; feels the jagged edges of his psyche being smoothed out under Bobby's hands, his eyes heavy with exhaustion and the weight of the day. "Bobby," he tries. "I didn't want to hurt you. I didn't want to, I--"
"There wasn't any hurting involved, kid," Bobby cuts in, and Darien wants to weep for his partner's stoic support, still, somehow, there for him. "Knocked some sense into me, actually. Head's as hard as a rock, y'know. Dense. That was a good move, back there. You wrestle in high school?"
"Hobbes. Don't. Don't pretend like I didn't--"
Bobby shakes his head, the movement fierce. "It's okay," he says again, says for a time approaching the dozens. "Go to sleep, Fawkes."
"What? -- No! Are you out of your mind?"
Bobby's grin is something like grim, the corners of his mouth quirking just slightly, like they're being propped up by an outside force. "Yeah," he says. "Yeah, I am. I could show you the prescriptions if you need credentials."
Darien fights the yawn that seizes up his face's muscles. "But--"
God. Jesus god. Bobby doesn't roll him off, doesn't push him away; instead, he simply nudges Darien to the side for breathing space but keeps his arms around him, hands on his back like he knows without that support Darien's lost. "Sleep, hotshot."
Darien is so tired that for a moment he lets the movement of Bobby's hands, still hesitant, halting, lull him into a sort of quasi-daze; it's so comfortable, so warm, here stretched out along the length of Hobbes' body, all slow-lazy warmth, that the angry movements and energy of moments before seem impossible, a bad dream in living color. "If I sleep--"
"Yeah. I'll be here," Bobby answers. His voice is tight, pained, like there's something making his throat thick. "We can talk about this later."
"I'm sorry," Darien murmurs, residual words, because as he squeezes his eyes shut the reason for his apology is fading, and though he is intensely sorry to the point of acute ache he could not, for the life of him, have said why.
For a long time Bobby's arms are locked around Darien, trembling with repressed intensity, listening to the harsh in-and-out breaths that press his chest until they grow steadier, slower, and loosening only then.
Staring up into the shadowed recessed of the van, Bobby Hobbes holds
his partner's weight against him and keeps back the darkness.
End.