Title: I Should Hope
Pairing: D/B
Rating: PG
Summary: If I were forced to choose between betraying my friend and betraying my country, I shoud hope I'd have the guts to betray my country.
I said "I love you" tonight.
I haven't before; I've been too afraid of what it might mean, what it might do to me, to us.
But tonight I did, because he deserved to hear it.
Tonight he deserved to know I didn't do what I did out of duty or loyalty or any sort of obligation. He deserved to know that I did it out of the only pure motivation a person's capable of -
I love him. With all my heart and soul, and if that means he's got me in chains I don't want to be free. If the cost of his arms around me is treason...well, I've paid my fee.
We're outlaws now, and the people who were once our peers are the hunters we must hide from. It's me and him against the world. I always said he was the only one I trusted...but now it's more than a blithe cliche.
He's all I've got now, and vice versa.
He's a trusting kind of guy - it bothers him that he's on the run. Bothers him that I'm the only person who can be with him. Scares him, a little.
Scares the shit out of me.
If they find us...we're both dead. They'll take his gland and I'll lose him, if they don't shoot me first.
I can't let it happen.
All my life, I've devoted everything to defense of this country, of that little square of cloth that symbolized everything I believed in. Until my reality shattered as I realized that none of those ideals were real, were enacted in anything but my own mind.
That's why it wasn't so hard to turn my back on everything. For Darien...no, not so hard.
Because he looked at me with eyes so full of terror and sympathy, and I realized he didn't expect me to help him. He wanted me to, but he didn't expect it. Because he thought that my years of practice as a patriot would outweigh my year of loving him.
He was wrong.
When I love I do it with all that I am, all that I believe in. The first night I made love to him I promised him something I don't promise lightly - my heart. And that meant I couldn't betray him any more than I could stop taking my meds. I don't think I could stop being with him for anything; he's become my sanity.
"Dare?" I murmur into the dark of the hotel room. The starlight reflects off his eyes as they blink open, and I know he hasn't been sleeping either.
"Yeah?" His voice is scratchy, full of a pain I can't take away.
"I love you," I tell him, firmly, my only offering of certainty in a world where all of a sudden everything has gone mad.
His eyes close again, and he says he loves me too.
And my choice is vindicated a thousand times over, because though Darien loves easily and often, he doesn't give his heart in any less measure than I do. So this promise, those words...
I've given up everything I always believed in, but I don't care. I have something new to believe in now.
His name's Darien.
Fin.
