A/N: Went for something different here, who knows if it worked. I decided to keep the nature of the relationship vague as, quite frankly, it is. Let me know if you enjoyed.
Mick looked at the colors and the swirling mass and the psychedelic shapes all twisted and flashing. Exploding and imploding all at once. Whisps separating, floating away, being drawn back and swallowed in a violent maelstrom of chaos. It was mesmerising. Haunting. A mass of energy and rolling lines. He stared, transfixed. Couldn't move, couldn't breathe. Just stared until the world fell away, sound ebbed and all that existed was the color right at the centre; a kind of sharp blue and white that had his mind reeling backwards in time.
He ran a hand up his arm, unthinking. Habit.
Prison jumpsuits. That's what it was; the blue that Len used to use to color his damn doodles with in the clink.
Cos Len was always great at drawing; he never spoke about it or acknowledged it. They didn't need to. But be it graffiti, doodling in the bibles they gave out at juvie or whatever he happened to be near at the time, he always managed to create something cool.
Mick always loved his drawings, always broke out in a shit eating grin that reached his eyes whenever he saw him pick up a pen or a piece of chalk, hell even a cigarette end to trace on a dirty sidewalk. He had a real eye for using something to its potential. Always knew how to take a piece of shit and make it sing.
Mick used to wake up in the morning on his state-provided squeaky bunk and come face to face with a wall full of gold the next day - aliens, monsters, prison guards with dicks up their asses, you name it, Len drew it.
All colored in the damn blue dye the jumpsuits came in. Len figured out if you soaked 'em in the toilet long enough the cheap colorant would just seep out and you had a vat of paint to do with what you wanted. Of course, he did. Asshole was like MacGyver.
Pigs always came and wiped it off the next day but Len didn't mind; just gave him a fresh canvas. Sometimes they gave them shit for it: less yard time, more chores, extra long lock up but it always made Mick smile - even so soon after his family had died. And if Mick smiled, Len smiled. And he just drew more.
When they got out, got some cash flow, Mick asked him to sketch him some sleeves for a tattoo; didn't have to be amazing or anything particular, just whatever Len wanted to do. Even when the drawings had turned to schematics and detailed plans he never forgot them, even when Len just might've.
So that's what they did.
Dragons, Amazonian women with huge hooters, tigers riding lightning, all the cool shit you saw on the side of old minivans back in the 70's and 80's eventually decorated Mick's arms. There was some dicks hidden in there too but Len wouldn't tell him that.
In full color, though, neither one of them wanted to see that god forsaken boilersuit blue again as long as they lived. Mick despised the stuff, still found flecks of the crap on his clothes long after they got out.
"Well get some new damn clothes, then!"
"I'm ain't throwin' out prime Motörhead leather for some... hobo to find! When I meet the devil in Hell I wanna be wearing it, proud, like Lemmy intended."
"Ugh. "
Despite designing it, Len was always fascinated by the sleeves. Mick would sit and shake his head as Len would yet again run his fingers over the designs; a light cool finger always found a way to his arms even when they were on stakeouts casing for a job.
Down the dragon's tail, over the grim reaper's scythe, under Jupiter's moons.
Mick always smacked him away, complained, "Your hands are too damn cold," or "I ain't some dog, Len," or some shit.
Len would always just smirk. The son of a bitch saw through him every time. "Who'da thought Big Balls Mick Rory was ticklish? Hmm?" Then the damn snark would arrive like clockwork. "You squawk like a hen."
He always got his own back for those comments. Face in the armpit usually worked like a charm.
It went on like this even when they were a bit older and greyer - or balder as Len would constantly remind him.
Until that day.
The day he'd lost control, the day the madness overtook him and the burning warehouse engulfed him, engulfed Len's art. That was the day he stopped smiling. The day Len stopped drawing. The flames had wiped those sketches away just like the pigs had with their cell wall. But now there was no canvas waiting in its place to fill again.
He'd ran, collapsed in a shitty abandoned apartment in the worst side of town, staring blazingly down at the new designs the fire had given him; charred black shapes, red raw lines connecting flesh still steaming and baking while he bit on a rag.
The cool fingers never came back even when his partner eventually did. Scar tissue didn't draw those hands to it like the spacemen and the lions and the motorbikes had.
He ran a hand up his arm, again. Shaking fingertips feeling what his arm could not.
Eyes still stared at the coiling blue blossom, snapping and twisting at the edges. He wouldn't entertain the thought of what it all meant. Couldn't.
The white noise in his ears eventually gave way to engines, to a team's shaking breath and the sound of the time drive working to get them away from the shockwave.
A chill tickled his spine when he recalled the numb feeling of the cool fingers briefly tracing a ridge of hairless scarred skin as they stood at the Oculus. The apology. The fist.
The energy reflected in the windows, sending the control room into cool tones while the Vanishing Point burned itself out; sea creatures fighting mermaids against a canvas of space and time.
He didn't feel their too firm hands on his arms, their hitched sorries. He was too gone. Too busy staring at that cell wall full of wonder for the first time in decades.
Mick never wanted to take his eyes off that boilersuit blue.