Reviewers!
Sphinx - Glad you approve. I needed intense for the story to work, so it went and got intense. Both of the things you mentioned (the weather and the trees) are very good things to pay attention to!
Stella - Thank you!
IX
Nate's slowly starting to trust them more.
That much is evident in the papers left scattered over his table when he goes back to his apartment to get something. Given that Nate's started to look even worse for wear – this morning, he staggered in with dark circles under his eyes and a serious case of the tremors that didn't go away until noon – they take this opportunity to poke.
Sophie stations herself so she can see his door, and Alec moves to looks through the papers. It's all math equations and time tables and diagrams and maps, technical jargon in paranoid, scratchy handwriting. He's seen those all before, so he just sets them aside, digging until he reaches the paper Nate had been working on last, the first picture he's seen with color.
It catches on his fingertips, left in the pile face down, and he glances at the apartment door before flipping it over.
And then he just stares.
Poison-bright green eyes leer up at him, surrounded by brown and green and tan and black blurs that suggest scales. It's all layered behind a misty spray of red that looks…pretty much exactly like blood, actually.
It's technically good, but he doesn't like the picture. He doesn't like the perspective. The only way anyone would see a raptor that close or from that angle would be if it was killing them.
Sophie hisses and the door to the lobby jangles open. By the time Nate's back to the table, the sketches are shoved under the diagrams and Alec's crossword is out and he's looking up expectantly.
Nate accepts him sitting there with the smallest of sighs and a look like might be resigned fondness.
"You only love me for my crossword skills."
"Oh, darn," Alec quips back, "you've figured me out!"
But really, his stomach flutters, just a bit, at that "l" word.
Nate drops the raptor picture when he's cleaning up hours later.
And of course Alec's there to pick it up, just as Nate's starting to reach for it. The young man looks at it and he doesn't seem as surprised as he should be when he stands, but he doesn't ask about it. Instead, he just says…
"You know, there's something really weird about the dinosaurs."
Nate looks at him, uncertain, because…well. Since the first time the dinosaurs came up in conversation, they've dodged the subject. And Alec seems like he's fidgeting, like he's trying not to shy away from something. Just thinking about the raptors makes Nate's gut hurt. He had hoped that drawing it, pinning the dinosaurs down on paper, would get them out of his head, maybe save his sleep tonight. He's now not sure that's going to work so well.
"You mean, besides the fact that they're even alive?" he asks, giving Alec a look. For a moment, it feels like answering Sam's questions.
For a moment, he doesn't mind.
"Yes, besides that. It's just…there's what. There's a tyrannosaurus and a stegosaurus, right?" Nate nods. (Granted, those two stay in the bots, instead of rampaging through the city like the raptors, but they'd still been on the news.) "They…never coexisted in the past. They were in different periods, you know."
"Yeah. I know that." He thinks about dinosaur books stacked high next to a hospital bed, and tries not to hug himself, but he can feel the claws and the imagined sensation's clogging his throat. And so he keeps talking. "H-How…how long have they been here?"
And now it's Alec's time to give him a strange look. "The reconstitution accident was three years ago. It was all over the news. You…don't remember?"
The dinosaurs have existed for eleven months (if you want to be exact), or for three weeks (if you want to be technical) but…of course Alec wouldn't know that.
"I…" Nate pauses, rubs his suddenly sore eyes as Alec sets the picture down on the top of the stack. "I had other things on my mind."
It's a weak excuse, a poor explanation, but Alec seems to take it anyway. He taps the picture instead. "You're an artist?"
Nate shrugs, awkward, one-shoulder, hands still tight on his last cup of coffee. "I was. A long, long…" he hesitates, adds (for the sake of accuracy), "long time ago."
"What a coincidence," Alec says, and now there's a grin around his mouth. Nate likes that smile, can't bring himself to mind when it's trained on him. "I am too."
"You're a renaissance man," Nate says, draining the dregs of his cup. "Baker, book collector, artist...is there anything you can't do?"
Alec pretends to give the matter serious thought, though the laugh-lines crinkling at the corners of his eyes give him away. "Well, I totally suck at football..."
His feet don't touch the floor, no matter how he strains – but he's not trying very hard. He can't try very hard, not with the way his vision is fading in and out, not with the way the wire cuts into his skin.
The garotte's a simple thing, some super-thin wire Sterling could have picked up from anywhere – but it's strong and wound tight and pressing against his windpipe and that rabbity thing is rising within him, panicked and wild and resigned at the same time.
He can't get up; Sterling's pulling too hard for that, his wire-wrapped knuckles pressing against the join of shoulder and neck. The desk's hard against the small of his back, and if he could just touch he could maybe find the leverage to get upright, but Sterling...
Sterling 's cold hand presses to the soft underside of Nate's jaw, and the abused skin throbs in response as Sterling strokes, gently. It's not right, it's horribly, horribly wrong, but at the same time…this is familiar. He knows this, and the waiting is done, and…
And it shouldn't feel like a relief, but it does.
"Yeah," Sterling breathes, and he makes it sound easy and Nate tries to inhale but nothing's making it past his throat; tries not to compare this to the last time he died, tries not to let himself think about how this is actually better.
"Yeah," Sterling says again, almost a reverent sigh, and when he pulls his fingers away they're bloody. "I missed this when I let the raptors play." He smirks down at Nate, eyes knowing, and adds, "And I don't think I'm the only one."