"Beat Still"

I decided to restructure the story a little- flashbacks get their own chapters, like they did in CMC.

Louisiana

Two years after the Fallout:

It was September, officially, and the air was thick with the stale heat of dying August. The feeling of it buzzed on the edge of his consciousness, dragging him back to battered memories of pulling on his uniform for another year of school, all obnoxiously thick cotton and starched ties.

Doc Worth stabbed a needle into a sunburnt arm, flicking quick stitches through the skin in a few ruthlessly efficient movements. Sweat was pooling around the creases of his eyes and running through the bloody gash over Hanna's triceps, making every little sensation feel inappropriately moist.

"What am I?" the doctor grumbled, "Yer goddamn wetnurse? Ya need a teat ter suckle next?"

"Ew," Hanna replied, preoccupied with the fetish he was clutching in his left hand. "And you can stop complaining now, seriously. This one wasn't even my fault."

Worth muttered something about fucking voodoo and swamp vermin and various mothers, but he could tell that Hanna wasn't paying attention. Took some of the fun out of complaining. In revenge, he yanked on his last stitch just short of hard enough to rip the whole thing out.

"OW!"

Tying off the end bit, Worth offered a toothy smile. "Next time, ya might think twice about rushin' in alone. Jesus kid, five minutes waitin' fer backup will not kill ya."

"Like you could know."

"Well, not waitin' nearly did kill ya."

Worth glanced over his shoulder at the black mass huddled under a knot of cypress trees, quietly steaming in the morning sunlight, and felt the length of his lips turning to a hard, thin line. They needed to get Conrad somewhere out of the light, somewhere that his now tiny form could be stashed away until the sun punched its clock for the day.

"Nearly got the furfag killed too," he pointed out, teeth skinning each other on the consonants. "Then I'd hafta bury the both'a you dumbasses, an' you'll end up sharin' a grave till kingdom come 'cause I got better things ta do than dig a couple holes in the dirt."

Hanna looked guilty for about a fourth of a second, and then he grinned like an even bigger idiot than he really was. "Yeah, and then you'd spend the rest of your life sniffling like an old widow 'cause you were always a dick to us and you never told us how much you loooove us."

"Fat fuckin' chance. I'll be retirin' ter someplace in Virginia. Any luck, governor's daughter's still got the hots fer me."

"Oh, you'll miss us. I guarantee it."

Worth raised one eyebrow and kicked the log Hanna was sitting on out from under him. "Well, the way I figure it don't much matter, since I'm goin' long before you two."

"Jeeze Worth, you're not that old. You're like… thirty something. Thirty-eight?"

The older man started stuffing things into his bag, pointedly not looking up.

"I'm goin' first," he said, flicking the clasp, "'cause I called dibs at the start'a this shit, an' if you so much as think about pullin' out ahead'a me…"

He stood up.

"We're gonna have ourselves one helluva a fight."

-TBC