"Right here, Angel."
She could hear his voice through the fog of sleep, the rough edges smoothed for her benefit, felt him climbing down and leaning in and stretching out next to her. The dreams had come back since the resurgence of the invasion, as had the narrow and crowded beds. Though most everyone kept dormitory style, Angie Harper and Ham Tyler were among the few exceptions. Like one or two other couples, they didn't mind the one-up-one-down bunks preferring a semblance of proximity to an imitation of chastity. And it wasn't as if there weren't other opportunities besides communal bedtime to indulge other forms of "normalcy", anyway.
He spoke again quietly, "After, huh?", and maneuvered on the narrow cot to reach one arm under her shoulders, tracing the fingertips of his other hand in light patterns along her face. It helped her focus, took her mind off the dreams until she could wake up completely.
"Uh-huh," Angie's still-sleepy reply as the visceral panic calmed almost before she could remember its substance. He was good at that, Ham was, driving away the demons before they could cross over into waking life.
Right here, Angel.
Few words, because few were necessary and more would accomplish nothing.
Tyler had learned not long after they'd met that in Angie's world the nightmares had distilled into two kinds: Before and After. After almost two years together, one in war and one in peace, she'd still offered only the barest explanations. He'd come to recognize them by other signs.
Before: Those dreams were about the times a couple years ago when the lizards were nearly finished with "making nice"; when everyone knew their days of normal life were numbered. In those dreams Angie found herself in front of a door, usually unfamiliar, but representing home in some sense, and her with no key, no knowledge of how to get in, no response to her pounding in the presence of approaching footsteps whose owners were never revealed. Those dreams were marked by frenzied hand motions, waving, pounding, thrashing as if in a confined space.
After: Those dreams were about coming home and finding her home a smoking ruin, her friends dead, her life gone. These were announced by little more than a subdued moaning whimper deep in her throat, often accompanied by a facial expression that combined confusion and despair in a single sorrowful grimace.
The dreams had disappeared entirely during the year between Liberation and the Second Invasion, yet even after so long the aftermath never varied. No hysteria or tearful replay of details from Angie, no empty baby-talk from Tyler. Few words.
He cradled her head in the crook of his arm. "They gone now?"
The demons, the ghosts of pain and loss. Hers he could drive away with this familiar ritual of waking and holding and quiet. His were never close enough to the surface for that, though the fact she tried to reach them anyway did help when she knew they were having at him again. And she always knew.
"Yeah, they're gone." Mostly awake now, Angie rolled tighter against him.
He marveled as always how that hard-wrought, battle-ready muscle and angry edge he was so proud of (well he was proud of the former, anyway) could morph into her only available refuge when he knew she needed it. The frequently hard, tight line of his mouth softened to press against her temple once, twice, as many times as it took. Gentleness, as a rule, came awkwardly to Ham Tyler because he'd found so little occasion for it. And besides, what he believed to be his natural talents lay elsewhere. With her it was different, as most things were. When one or the other of them was ready to crack under whatever strain had gained the upper hand, this kind of quiet connection was an oasis. He welcomed the unfamiliarity of offering comfort… hell, just realizing he was still capable of it, as he did when they'd first come together, kept him from an "edge" only he could see, though he knew Angie had a sense of it. She didn't crack often, but when she did he was the only one that could hold her together because he was the only one that would just be there, without comment. Like she was for him, except she always managed to head him off before the cracking point.
With few exceptions the others imagined Tyler got an ego jolt out of a woman taking refuge with him. It had been like that the first time around too, and neither he nor Angie wasted a moment's thought on the questions and musings and doubts of small minds. As before, many of these newly-minted, renewed, and wannabe rebels couldn't conceive of any other reason aside from desperation that any woman would want to be with him, let alone a bookish computer geek with little talent for guns and a razor sharp tongue that she hated to waste on half-wits. And of course there could be no reason except macho that Tyler would want her with him. Gooder got it, damn him, even if he didn't understand (and he probably wouldn't ever truly get his head around it) it seemed it was the only thing about Tyler he accepted without holier-than-thou comment. And Parrish, she'd always seemed to exhibit less bug-eyed disbelief that The Fixer could willingly hook up with a librarian type, and she with him. He guessed in Parrish's case it was because she usually was too unsure of herself to pass judgment on anyone else. On the other hand, Parrish couldn't resist wishing for more hearts and flowers, from him where Angie was concerned, and from Donovan where she was concerned. But flowers were dead, and hearts were coming a close second, especially now that the lizards were back in town.
It seemed to Tyler that Ruby was the only one who really had a handle on it, bag and baggage, before even he and Angie had figured it out. As casual as you please she'd told him, shortly before just as casually giving up her life for the Resistance, "I believe you have a great deal in you that people don't see because they don't bother to look closely enough. Everyone deserves to have someone who bothers to look closely enough to see what you have 'in you'. The way things are now, to waste any chance for that would be tragic."
Well Ruby was gone, but Angie understood, it didn't matter a leaping shit what anyone else thought.
Angie breathed a sigh against Tyler's shoulder. "Can you stay a while? I won't tell the housemother."
The stacked cots weren't designed for companionship, but when the dreams came... she hated waking up alone after that, but played it for humor because she hated being a wimp even more.
"The housemother can talk to my Glock," Tyler grinned coldly, playing along. Then, "C'mere." Another ritual expression in their spare, essential vocabulary. She wound closer, trying to take up less space.
"Don't worry, I won't push you out." He felt her breath jerk in a stifled laugh, then slowly return to normal. "Go to sleep, Angel, I'm not going anywhere," he whispered against her hair. It seemed to him the words held more weight when he talked that way, lips moving against her head as if tapping right into her brain, and that no matter how few or short she'd understand exactly what was behind them.
"Okay." She buried her face into the familiar smell of leather and gun oil that always haunted his t shirt and even his skin, avoiding the strap of the shoulder holster he hadn't taken off for days. She knew, like her, he hated the things that had brought them together, hated wondering if they'd even have bothered under other circumstances. Hated knowing they wouldn't have, that war was a shitty reason for anything but killing, and that their connection was just an accident of timing in the middle of it.
Funny how accidents of timing for the shittiest of reasons can lead you into something worth hanging onto while the other hand holds the gun, ready to protect it from anything.