Authors Note:

This is one of my 'Friday QuickFics'. In other words, its a story I've knocked off in an afternoon and published the next day as a kind of discipline, so its maybe not as polished or as in-depth as I might like. It may turn out to be part of a series at a later date. It depends. Anyway, its the first thing I've been able to write this year due to ill health, so I'm publishing it right off to celebrate the fact that I've actually been able to DO something! Yay!

This story owes a great debt to both 'Clandestine Liasions' by divingforstones and 'The Wanderer's Return' by wendymr.

His backpack presses against the flat of his pelvis. There are blisters there from three months of lugging it, but he doesn't care, doesn't even think about it really. There is simply an empty awareness of the chafing, and the jetlag.

What the hell time is it anyway? He has no idea. It doesn't matter. His body, his mind, his heart, all are outside time, outside reality, waiting for this moment, this final moment to arrive, knowing it will hit him like wind in a tunnel.

He is in a tunnel in fact, walking down this long, low corridor, glass on either side, blue carpet, duty free signs, posters of inviting destinations he has just left. There is only one destination he wants now. He knows he will probably never get there, but Hope, treacherous Hope, the Hope he went away to kill, the Hope he has been trying to strangle for the last three months under the blistering sun of the southern hemisphere, this eternal bloody Hope just won't die. And now, as he looks at his feet, labours to place one Chuck in front of the other, one in front of the other, time after time, he finds he doesn't want her to die now. She has kept him afloat these last miserable months, months that were supposed to be full of joy and adventure, and now all he feels is an emptiness, a deep well of dark nothing. But down in the deepest, darkest place, a tiny light shines, as bright as ever.

Hope.

Hope of Lewis.

They arranged it over the email just a few days earlier. Lewis would come and meet him at the airport.

JH: Just like old times, eh, sir?

RL: I'm not bringing a sign.

JH: I shall sulk if you don't have a sign.

RL: Don't need a bloody sign. Know what you look like, don't I?

JH: Ah, but do you? I may be in disguise. Or my appearance may have changed enormously.

RL: Hope not. Liked it the way it was. Cept for the hair of course.

JH: What's wrong with my hair?

RL: Always too short. Looks better longer.

JH: Will amend haircut according to your instructions. Am forcing more out of my follicles as we speak.

RL: Type.

JH: That too.

RL: Cheeky bugger.

It was such a shame he had shaved his head when he got to Thailand. It was too hot for all that hair he'd grown in the last months before Lewis's retirement, and it felt like the right thing to do. Something of the hair shirt about it. He felt more settled in the Buddhist monastery where he was staying, felt like he fitted in a little better with the orange-clad monks. He knew he was kidding himself even then, and not just because a six foot three corpse-coloured blonde is unlikely to fit in anywhere in South-East Asia. No, in fact; it was simply that he realised that no amount of hair-shirted head-shaving was going to help with the real problem. Still, he stopped shaving it when he reached Malaysia and had a Skype session with Lewis, who looked worried when he saw James's stubbly cranium.

'What's this? The Auschwitz look popular out there, is it?'

'Too soon for Holocaust jokes, sir.'

'Yeah, right. Have you been ill or something?'

'No. Just hot, that's all,' he had lied.

Skyping had proved a problem. It was hard to do it pokey little bedrooms in backpacker hostels, and almost impossible in the noise and hubbub of internet cafes in busy thoroughfares. James didn't want to look at Robbie anyway. It was too painful. Easier by far to do email or instant messaging, especially as Robbie himself was clearly uncomfortable with the technology of Skype. After a couple of stilted tries, they agreed to maintain text only contact forthwith.

James knew he shouldn't be in contact at all. It was agony every time he opened up his email account, but he couldn't help it, couldn't go cold turkey even if he'd gone to all the effort and expense of trekking to the other side of the world to get away from his addiction.

Addiction to Lewis.

Late in the day, and desperate, he had met a man in Sydney. Older. Slender. Handsome. Elegant. Erudite. A professor of Philosophy at the university. He had proved a kind and gentle lover for a young man trying to kick-start his sexuality after so many years of lonely longing. He was also far more clever than James, which was why he wasn't surprised when the man, whose name was Scott, had rolled onto his back afterwards, and asked:

'So, who is he?'

'Who?'

'I've been around the block a few times, kid. I know when a bloke is in bed with me because he's trying to forget someone else.'

It had been a relief to talk. He didn't have to protect Scott, after all, didn't owe him anything, didn't have to feel guilty. Scott didn't know Lewis, didn't know their history, didn't know James's own anguished past. He had no axe to grind, no particular interest except friendship. So James had spilled the beans in a way he had never done to anyone before, propelled on by post-coital haze, knowing he would probably never see Scott again, and the diaphanous fantasy that the man beside him could one day be his old boss himself, and not some kind stranger willing to play the role. And Scott had held him, and whispered, 'Go home, kid. Stop trying to run away. Just tell him.'

That was a week before his flight home, and three days before the email exchange in which they had decided that Lewis would collect him from the airport.

In the middle of the flow of fellow travellers, James draws to a halt. He stares down at the marbled slabs of the airport floor, pale and sparkling with chips of mica. He stares at his feet, at the tattered red canvas of his All Stars, at the once white laces now dyed ginger by the red earth of Vietnam. He feels the chafe of his backpack against his tailbone. He lifts his hands and looks at them too, at knuckles grubby with the ground-in dirt of travelling, the skin browned by the sun, the cuticles around the nails ragged from his nervously working teeth.

His hands are shaking. When he looks at them, they don't feel like his own. They feel like they belong to someone else, someone younger, happier, luckier. Someone coming home to a loving family and a warm, friendly home. Someone, in fact, who is not in any way like him. But in the back of his mind, Hope pricks up her ears and sends out her signal. For those hands are his and, she wonders through him, what would they look like splayed out like that, not in the air-conditioned corridor of the Arrivals Lounge of Heathrow Airport, but on the silken skin of one former Detective Inspector.

Hope just will not keep her mouth shut.

'I'm completely fucked,' he says under his breath to the backs of those sun-warmed hands.

The Arrivals Hall itself has a barrier across it, to hold back those eagerly waiting for travellers: families, lovers, friends, taxi-drivers, and on one notable occasion some years ago, one nervous, irritable young Detective Sergeant with a hastily scribbled sign that simply announced:

'LEWIS.'

Hesitating under the high, echoing ceiling, he is reminded of one summer afternoon when he was still a student, backpacking round France, and found himself in the Great Hall of Eleanor of Aquitaine in Poitiers. He had stared up at the arched ceiling, dazzled by the pale stone splendour, and understood how this building had arisen, the child of a court of troubadours, the offspring of Romance and Chivalry. It was called 'The Hall of Lost Footsteps', and now James, wistfully remembering the echo of his own feet on those ancient flags so many years before, long before even Lewis had entered his life, wonders if this hall too will swallow his footsteps, whether his echo will be lost like so many others, or whether the spirit of the great Queen's court will come for him at last, here in this pedestrian metal and concrete structure lined with branches of WH Smith and Sock Shop.

And then someone eager to meet their own destiny shoves past him and jerks him out of his reverie.

James scans the crowd, his gut churning. He has no idea how he is going to feel, how is going to react, when he sees that beloved face again. He has been so wretched and alone for so long that he may just embarrass himself. Or he may clam up like he usually does and behave like a complete arse. Please, God, he prays silently, closing his eyes for the briefest of moments. Please don't me behave like a total dickhead.

And then there he is, dark hair nicked with a little silver at the temples, that wide forehead, furrowed, and those bright eyes, searching. James feels his heart flip in his chest. It's like a bloody rom-com, he thinks. In a minute bloody Mr Love Actually himself is going to burst through the arrivals gate and it will be all sloppy music, and hearts and flowers. And I've no hope. No hope at all that this is going to work out. Because it doesn't for me. It never does.

And then Lewis's eyes catch his and a fritz of electricity skitters up and down his spine, and he freezes, sensing this is it, this is The Moment, right now, when his life will change one way or the other. He knows his face is open, showing everything for once, and he just can't stop it, can't take back the things he wants to say, the love that is making his eyeballs ache and his lips twitch.

Lewis's eyebrows lift. His eyes widen.

James's feet are glued to the ground. The weight of the backpack bears down on his pelvis. His heart is thudding in his throat.

So much is said in that moment of connection. So much that seven years of working together and eight of friendship have left unspoken.

James sees half a dozen emotions flee across those beloved worn features, one after another: delight, relief, surprise, hope, then comprehension, tenderness, love and then, at last desire. Real desire.

Unspoken, too, is the force that propels them both along the line of people that crowd the barrier until they reach the empty space at the end. Still yards apart, and yet an undeniable magnetism is pulling James in. Then, six feet apart, and he stops, can't move anymore, needs confirmation, another look, another sign.

'Are you for me,' he asks.

'Yes,' Lewis says. 'Yes.'

It is Lewis who makes the last few feet, Lewis whose arms wrap around him, enfold him, cradle him, Lewis whose breath is soft on his skin. He presses his face into the creased neck of the man he has longed for through so many long and bitter nights, breathes in the rich, deep scent of him, of allotment earth and hops and shaving foam and something else, a tang that is entirely Lewis's own. It is the smell of home, it is the scent of love.

'I missed you,' James manages to say into Lewis's throat, dizzy with the intoxicating fragrance. 'I missed you so much.'

'Missed you too, pet,' Lewis rumbles, and James feels it, the vibration of that big ribcage, that robust body, made more powerful now by a spring and summer of digging and hoeing and weeding and wheeling barrows about. It is the sudden materialisation of James's dreams, solid under his palms, of soft cotton shirt and muscle underneath, of a belly flattened by a season of fewer pints and takeaways and more exercise and home-grown veg, all pressed against his own body, his own belly, searingly, painfully real.

James lifts his head and looks down into his old inspector's eyes, and there he finds a question to which he only has one answer.

Lewis's lips are rough and a bit chapped, but they are pliant and hungry, and open willingly to James's tongue. James clings to Lewis's shoulders like a man drowning, holds on for dear life, because this, this, this.

In the back of his mind a thought occurs to him: to bystanders, up until that moment, they might have looked like two friends meeting, or a father and son long parted, now reunited. Right up until the instant when their lips met and they fell into each other, melting, becoming one, as they had always been, he realises now, since that first moment here, on these same flags, when Lewis had asked that same stupid question and James's heart had cried out, once and for all, 'Yes, yes!'

They come up for air, panting, lips smarting, dizzy and hungry, and James lets his fevered brow rest on Lewis's shoulder and begs:

'Don't let go, please don't let go!'

And Lewis growls. 'Never. Don't think I could anyway.'

A big hand, roughened by long hours around the handle of a spade, cups the back of his skull, cradles it, and for the first time in his entire life, James feels held, really held. Held like a precious thing, a sacred thing, a valued and beloved thing.

He is afraid. An instant clench as his gut tells him it will all go wrong, he will mess it up, he will ruin it, he will drive this beautiful man, this beautiful love, away. His fingers dig into Lewis's shoulders and he begs again:

'Please don't let me mess it up?'

'Hush, pet. If you haven't managed it by now, it's not going to happen, is it?'

Gently, he finds his head is being lifted, and kind eyes are looking into his with such love, such tenderness that tears start out, and he can't help it. He is such a gentle man, almost a stranger, this Lewis, such a sweet and tender lover whose fingertips skim James's cheek so delicately.

'Love you so much,' Lewis whispers.

And then, finally, after so long, and so many miles, James feels it inside his chest, feels Hope spread her wings.

James Hathaway is a man of words, a man whose world revolves around words. Walking to the car, holding hands with his beloved, after much too much public kissing, James has a delirious grin on his face. And then the word comes into his head. Finally. The word he has been searching for, or perhaps it is the one that has been searching for him all his life. Nine letters that he has pursued relentlessly and now, against all hope, has found in the arms of the man he has loved for most of his adult years. The word he never thought would or could be applied to him, the word which describes everything he now feels, now he is cradled in the affections of this excellent man who is smiling at him, and with whose smile the sun rises and sets. The word that will describe his future life. Nine letters are all that is needed for James Hathaway's happiness.

Cherished.

The End