Title: Eye of a Hurricane (Listen to Yourself Churn)
Characters/Pairing: Ray Crisp/Telford Porter (Berzerker/Vanisher), brief mentions of Domino and Bishop
Summary: Everyone needed a little piece of sanity, that one thing that was normal and dependable in the midst of all this... Berzerker/Vanisher. Ray Crisp/Telford Porter. Non-explicitly slashy. Deleted scene from Episode 9.
Length: 2000+
Warning: Swears, mentions of M/M sex, slashy and a bit fluffy. Are you really surprised my fics contain this by now, guys? heh
Disclaimer: Yeah, if I owned this, season two wouldn't have been cancelled....::grumble grumble complainasaurus rex ::
A/N: If you like this couple, you should definitely check out Timeless by Jen Rock. : It's a lovely fic.
The shadows briefly disappeared from the cave wall in a brilliant burst of yellow light, followed by a string of swearing that would embarrass even a sailor. Telford was starting to get used to being woken up like this, and he wasn't entirely sure that was a good thing. He stretched his long limbs, rolling his head backward onto his shoulders. His neck popped satisfyingly. To hell with Bishop's time constraints; next time he teleported into the city for supplies, he was looking for a pillow.
"Mornin' Ray."
His team mate frowned. "Shit, did I wake you up again 'Ford?" He was perched on a large rock, trying to catch his reflection in the hunting knife he had jammed precariously into a crack. He knew how sharp Ray kept his knives. If that thing fell, Berzerker was losing a toe. Which would make three. The first had been to frostbite, and the other had gotten gangrenous from a seemingly innocuous wound during a Sentinel fight. Ray had made him cut it off, and Telford still felt guilty about it. He had the heart, he just didn't have the stomach for this that Ray did.
"Ehh, don't worry about it." Telford padded barefoot over to their supply backpack, untroubled by his nudity, extracting his vaguely damp briefs off the nearby ground as he walked. They had come across a fairly clean stream yesterday, which meant laundry and baths and filling up the canteens. They were almost out of iodine tincture. Telford added that to his mental grocery list as he put on his clothing.
Ray was already dressed, and Telford didn't know how he could stand it in the cloying humidity. Still, the cave was a few degrees cooler than the mid-July swelter outside. At least, it was probably July. Telford had wished he'd kept better track of the days when this all started. At the time, he had been more focussed on keeping himself alive. Now it was anyone's guess. People...they didn't do well without a way to track the passing of seconds and minutes and hours. Mastermold knew that. She--no, it, he forced himself to correct; he wasn't going to give that thing the satisfaction of anthropomorphism--got rid of books next. They had to claw their way through debris to find anything readable. Telford missed books the most. More than TV, more than the Internet, he just wanted some fiction to immerse himself in when fact was so sharply real.
"Big day, anyway. Can't spend it sleeping." Ray licked his palms, trying to force his hair up and straight. "I'm almost out of glue, man."
Bishop never failed to remind Ray how much of a waste his carefully groomed Mohawk was. To be honest, Telford never minded scrounging for glue or gelatin or eggs for Ray. Everyone needed a little piece of sanity, that one thing that was normal and dependable in the midst of all this chaos, and for Berzerker, it was his hair. For Vanisher, it was 'Zerk; though he was fairly certain Ray didn't know that and Telford sure as hell wasn't going to tell him.
Telford didn't hold Bishop's opinion against him; he was young. Sometimes, it was hard to believe that Bishop was only nineteen; at thirty-five, Telford had yet to reach that level of maturity. Ray swore another blue streak as part of his hair flopped into his eyes, and Telford grinned to himself; at thirty-one, Crisp was never going to. Telford didn't know what was tougher, being born into this life of constant struggle and survival against the Sentinels, or remembering what it was like before things went to hell. They were probably both bad, but in different ways. Everyone had it bad these days. Growing up, the hardest challenge he had dealt with on a daily basis was when one of the other teens in the halfway home got the remote before he did. He'd been a teenager when the Sentinels ripped the roof wide. He'd been running ever since.
It was hard not to get discouraged; more than half of his life had been spent fighting against these machines and they were no closer to victory than they were twenty years ago. The Homo sapiens went first, completely wiped out a decade ago. Ironic that Mastermold saw them as more of a threat, or maybe it was just that they had been easier to eradicate. Telford took no solice in the fact that Homo superior were proving to be the cockroaches of the human species. Oh, there were rumours of pockets of flat scanners tucked way up north in what had once been Canada, but Telford had learned fairly quickly not to trust everything he heard. The scar on his thigh was a testament to that.
It had been at least two years ago now, when he'd only been with the X-Men a few days. They were still using the cave where they found him, exhausted of his powers and half-dead from an encounter with prowlers, as a base. Ray had been cursing Bishop out, near frantic. He'd picked up a distress signal from the sewer system of what used to be New York and Bishop was refusing the send a group on the two-day trek to investigate it. Domino and Sarah were already out on reconnaissance and they were spread thin as it was. There was a good chance the signal was old, and a better chance it was a trap. He reminded Ray the team had scoured New York a dozen times before at his request and come up with no one new. Ray had told Bishop he was going, X-Men be damned. Telford had spoken up then, volunteered his power and his company in an effort to keep the peace. It was hard to tell whether Bishop or Berzerker looked more surprised.
Everyone was dead when he and Ray got there. Everyone. Kids. They'd vomited from the smell. Telford still felt sick about it. Ray had turned over one of the corpses, a woman with scars and an eye patch. It was not fresh. The telltale hiss of hydraulics as Sentinel units closed around them, a trap that they hadn't been the first to fall into. There was never any group there, just people following their gut instinct to help and hope and getting that crushed by Mastermold. Nothing new. Ray had just enough time to mutter, "Fuck," under his breath before the Sentinels opened fire.
Telford took a hit in his thigh and half a second too long to teleport them away. Imprecise from the pain, he overshot the base by almost five miles. Firey agony ripped through his leg first, followed by the almost worse tightness of the tourniquet Ray secured. He still only dimly remembered Ray carrying him back, slipping in and out of consciousness while Berzerker kept up a steady stream of curses and apologies.
Telford thumbed the circular scar idly, crouched over the backpack. "Did you eat yet?"
"Yeah, when I got up."
Telford dug an energy bar out of one of the pockets. They'd managed a huge score a few months back, a military bunker stuffed with a few unexpired non-perishables and a lot of ammo. The flat scanners they'd belonged to weren't using them. The supplies had almost run out now, he and Ray rationing more severely as the food dwindled, making it last. Telford counted six bars left, as many as there were last night after dinner; Ray was lying to him.
With a grunt of effort, he pulled himself up onto the rock where Ray was sitting, wedging his own shoulders between Ray's shoulder blades. He was softer to lean on than the the wall of the cave, at least. Telford was dwarfed by Ray, almost a foot shorter and fifty pounds lighter. Ray called him pocket-sized.
"Hell, 'Ford, you sharpen those elbows while I'm asleep?" Berzerker shifted slightly, but made no real attempt to move away. "You need to eat more, you're all fucking bones." He took the half piece of bar that Telford broke off for him, regardless, and chewed it swiftly and gratefully. "Thanks. You know, I thought I'd get used to it, but these things still taste like fucking cardboard."
"What I wouldn't give for some pizza."
Ray groaned, leaning his head back so it rested on top of Telford's. "Don't start with that nostalgia shit today, Prefect." Ford Prefect: a character from a book both of them had read a lifetime ago but neither could remember the title of.
It bothered Telford, the memories he found slipping away the longer this dragged on. Today was the day, though; the others were already in place inside the holding facility. It was going to be the beginning of the end one way or another, Telford just wasn't optimistic enough to think it wasn't a suicide mission. "Come on, we all gotta have dreams, Crisp. Mine just involve extra cheese.... And bacon. Oh, and those pepperonis that used to fold up like little bowls filled with grease. Remember that?"
"Yeah." Ray's voice was unreadable; Telford wished he could see his face. He really didn't mean to be such a downer. Ray reclined, forcing Telford to nearly fold in half under his weight. Typical Ray; you could always count on him to be charmingly assholeish whenever things got too serious. Telford swatted Ray's arm, trying to heave him off. Ray leaned up slightly with a chuckle, still keeping him pinned but allowing Telford to breathe at least. "Sorry, tiny, forgot you were there."
Telford teleported two feet forward, causing Ray to thud down hard with an undignified 'Oof'. He threw in a punch to Ray's shoulder for good measure. "Sorry, Sasquatch. forgot you were there."
Berzerker just grinned, stretching his hands behind his head in a caricature of relaxation. "You know, 'Ford, not that you deserve it, but this thing ever ends? I'm taking your skinny ass out for all the pizza you can eat."
Above anything, Telford appreciated Ray for his overwhelming normalcy. "Why Ray, are you asking me out on a proper date?" Telford wished he could be like that.
"We all gotta have dreams, 'Ford." Ray smirked wickedly and rose. "Come on, we should go watch for Dom's signal." He shouldered the backpack and rested his palm on the small of Telford's back. When it came to 'Zerk, Telford absolutely didn't mind that he needed to be touched to teleport with others. Ray winked at him. "I figure we'll have the world saved by sundown, which means I'll be fucking you on a Pizza Hut buffet table an hour after that at the latest."
Telford reached up and slid his arm around Ray's broad shoulders, bracing them for the 'port. "Maybe we can burn those cardboard protein bars for light."
Ray smiled at that, genuine and full. "Fuckin' A, Prefect." (And really, for a second, it didn't matter that the world was ending when Ray looked at him like that.) "Let's do this shit."