Ola! I bring new chapter, finally^^ Kudos to my lovely fiance Nat-Nat (;P) for betaing this chapter!

Enjoy!

Chapter 21: This is not a love song

It took Reno ages to charm fridgeboy out of his fridge. He tried talking, ordering, pleading with the dirty creature, luring him with rats, bugs and a strange 'toy' he had spontaneously created out of bones and other stuff that he had found nearby (it distantly resembled a doll). The latter had piqued the boy's interest long enough to open the fridge door a few inches, examine the toy with a brief look and greedily grab it in the blink of an eye.

Then he had wordlessly shut the door in Reno's face and no pleading or threatening could prompt him to leave his damn, rusty fridge-home.

After a while, Reno gave up. He didn't know what had crawled up the boy's butt and died (he didn't want to know) but there was nothing he could do about it for now. Thus he paid a visit to the bathroom, had a rat and lay down on the floor to ponder their awkward sexual encounter.

Reno didn't have much sexual experience with other boys, save for that one time during his teenage years when he had jacked off with his then best friend. They hadn't touched each other, just had done it together, and that was that. Otherwise Reno had never felt a particular attraction to other males. Some of them he found pretty, when they were all glamoured up and retouched in magazines, but in this case, they usually looked rather androgynous. And it wasn't as if he had sexual fantasies about them. Why, he didn't know and he had never thought it over. But thinking about it now, he couldn't even remember what kind of girl he had gone for, in his other life. Had he liked large breasts? Narrow waists? He couldn't tell anymore. It seemed too far away, too deeply buried in his past.

What Reno did remember, though, was that he had been picky and that he had never slept with a girl more than once. He loathed that kind of commitment, he wasn't made for monogamy. He'd been constantly on the prowl, a brilliant strategist when it came to luring women into bed. He'd prided himself in the number of girls he'd fucked, and the ways he had entrapped them in his sticky net. How much effort he had put into planning tactics to hunt them, catch them, use them and cast them away. Analyzing them, finding the right words, getting the hints and responding accordingly. It was all a long, delicate chain of actions and reactions and if you just made the slightest mistake, you were off the game.

In retrospect, that seemed incredibly stupid and a huge waste of time. Not that Reno didn't like sex but the whole charming and playing games appeared so foolish and redundant now. Why hadn't they just fucked? Reno knew he had wanted nothing else and the girls hadn't either. All that elaborate and fancy playing hard to get, concealing their true urges and putting up a front... But he had to pretend and play along, because if you didn't meet your partner's expectations they would just go somewhere else.

Now the situation had taken a whole new turn. Reno didn't have a choice, no menu to choose from. There was only fridgeboy.

And Reno couldn't say that his companion was particularly... attractive. At least not in the common sense of the word.

True, with a make-over, hair combed and detangled, a good scrubbing and decent clothes, the boy would have been killer. Reno couldn't even begin to imagine it, lest his mind crack. But fridge boy was also incredibly creepy and unpredictable, dirty, violent, untamed and most people would probably rather get a heart attack than a boner at his sight.

Reno shook his head and, absently poking at the dirt with a stick he had found, continued his musings.

So fridge boy was kind of sexy and beautiful, in his own disturbing and twisted way. He was also a creature of base needs and urges, who didn't know shit about conventions and proper sexual orientations. Reno didn't even know if fridge boy found him attractive. To the little rascal that probably didn't matter...

Well, down here, there were no women. And even if there had been, it wouldn't have mattered much. Gender became obsolete here, annoying even. Scripted roles complicated things down here, where anarchy ruled, and if you couldn't adapt, couldn't detach yourself from your old life, couldn't be flexible – you died.

Reno nodded to himself as he finished his crude dirt picture. It didn't matter whether fridgeboy was male, female, a hermaphrodite or a toast. What mattered was that Reno cared about him and craved the physical contact, and, surprisingly, the emotional satisfaction this contact provided. Due to the circumstances, Reno's libido had died at first but as he had gotten slowly used to his new life and established familiar routines, his basic needs gradually resurfaced too. Granted, they would have to figure this out through trial and error, but they were two (more or less) healthy human beings with an apparent sex drive and no moral qualms, so why shouldn't they have sex?

They would be mates now, Reno decided.

The only immediate obstacle they had to overcome was getting fridgeboy out of his fridge. But sooner or later he would have to go pee or something.

Reno flopped down on his side, propped up his head on one hand, and lazily watched two rats trying to copulate (which appeared to be difficult, since one of them had a head on both ends of its body).

At some point later, the boy finally deigned to crawl out of his sanctuary, scratching the back of his head with his foot as if he hadn't had a mental breakdown just hours ago.

"Welcome back, honey."

The boy graced Reno with an empty look, muttering "OneYyy" in that raspy, deep voice of his.

With a long sigh and a mental shrug, Reno watched him go about business as usual. As always he had no idea of what went on in the empty head of his roommate; but he had given up trying to figure it out. It was for the best; had he even had an inkling of how fridgeboy was ticking, Reno would have declared himself officially and thoroughly insane. It wasn't the first time fridgeboy had thrown a fit and then had just proceeded as if nothing had happened at all. Whatever his issues were, he seemed to have dealt with them, so Reno was good with them, too.

Fridgeboy finished scratching himself and yawned, showing his white teeth and pink gums to the empty, dilapidated room. Then he stretched like a cat, walked to the skeleton bed on all four and sat at the edge to examine closely the 'doll' Reno had made for him.

"rEnO," he purred, and the man in question got up with a grunt, walked over the dead bed and leaned against the rusty frame, grabbing the doll and showing his mate how to play with it.

"Damn, it's dark in here!" Elena suppressed the urge to rub her shin through her biohazard suit. Breathing was hard in that thing and her vision was obscured by the murky shadows that lingered in the former research center.

But even under her helmet she caught the dark look Tseng shot her and she shut up with an elaborate sigh. She focused her flashlight on the path in front of her instead, letting the stream of light sway over abandoned medical equipment.

"You found something yet?" Elena asked after a too long time of stubborn silence. The other two kept their mouths tightly shut as if their lives depended on it. Rude didn't even look at her but just kept walking. Elena bit her lips but followed with determined strides. She was a bother to them, she knew that. Hadn't it been for her, Tseng and Rude wouldn't even be here in this stinking hole. Their presence was their way of saying that they did care for her.

Probably.

One could never be too sure when it came to stoic Tseng and unreadable Rude.

They entered one of the empty rooms, routinely and quickly checking it for any indication that someone had come here recently. Letting the light of her torch wander over the dirty walls and dusty floors with unwavering patience, the blond Turk examined every inch of the lab.

"I think I saw something," she piped, cutting through the silence, even though that was a lie. But this stillness was suffocating. And she was clinging desperately to every ray of hope. Even if it was fake.

After a long pause Tseng finally turned towards her, the light of his torch resting by her feet. "There is nothing there," he answered calmly. And with finality.

"No, I saw it! There, see? The dust's smeared, someone has been here!" The sudden panic rising in her chest made Elena choke on her words. She waved her flashlight frantically towards a fresh print on the ground .

"That was my boot," Rude pointed out. Elena hated the patronizing tone that had crept into his voice like a vicious poison that makes you numb and kills you later.

"I saw something." Her lifted chin had the two men exchange a brief but significant look, adding even more to the heavy, unnerving tension in the room . They were at their limits, their patience worn off by endless hours of stumbling through this creepy, endless maze of nothingness.

"Elena..." Apparently the two male Turks had wordlessly agreed on putting an end to this. "There's nothing here."

"How do you know?" She instantly flared, her small frame shaking against the stiff plastic of her suit. How she had feared that moment! But it couldn't be over yet, not now, they weren't done!

"How long have we been searching now ?" The unusually gentle tone Tseng spoke in frightened and irritated her even further. Elena abruptly lifted her flashlight and shone it right on the man's face, who in turn narrowed his eyes and lifted his arm to shield them. But at least, he spoke normally when he resumed, "This is not leading to anything. It is time to face the truth, however painful it may be. We cannot waste any more time and resources here."

"Waste any more resources?" Elena wanted to jump at him and tear his pale, perfect throat open. She knew that Tseng hadn't meant it like that - it was just his Tseng-way of pragmatically breaking the news to her that it was virtually impossible for them to sneak in here unauthorized every night in stolen suits without anybody noticing. Right now they were risking their jobs, their health and possibly their lives to search for someone whom they would, in all likelihood, never find. They had discovered more and more secret levels they weren't supposed to know of and they had no idea how much farther down this massive underground complex stretched, how many more endless tunnels would lead them deeper into the belly of the planet.

Even suppose they did find what they were looking for it would be nothing more than a pile of gnawed off bones.

"You know what I mean."

"No, no I don't!" Elena hissed. The light was finally withdrawn from Tseng's face as Rude stepped in and pulled her small arm down. At first she tried to resist, glaring at the big man to let her go, but he didn't budge and finally she surrendered.

"Look... let's just go for one more night. Just one more night. What's one more?" Her own helplessness and despair made her sick to her stomach, but she had to try, right? They couldn't just give up like that! "He's our friend, he'd do the same for us!"

There was another uneasy exchange of gazes but Elena didn't see what she was hoping for. They were exhausted, she could tell. They were tired of her dragging them down here, they were tired of getting lost, they were tired of looking for something that would not be found. They were tired of trying to be hopeful for her sake, telling her lies so she wouldn't snap.

"What is one more night going to change?" Tseng spoke. "Elena, it is time we face the truth. Reno is... was our friend. We all miss him. But the least thing he would want is for us to be here. He would want us to move on."

"Don't you talk as if he's -" Elena snapped, her chest heaving with agitation, but she stopped short, afraid to complete the sentence. Rude finished it for her, speaking the words she dreaded the most.

"Elena. He's dead. Reno is dead."

The wave of anger and frustration that crashed over her was indescribable. Thousand words of contempt flooded her mind and she was not able to screech a single one of them. She abruptly turned instead and ran out of the room, raising a cloud of dust that swirled up in the stale air and lazily settled back onto everything that couldn't escape quickly enough.

From the corner of her eye she saw Rude attempting to follow her and Tseng holding him back.

Then she was out in the corridor and for a while nothing but her own pounding heartbeat and her feet hitting the ground occupied her wounded mind.

Elena didn't know how long she ran through the dark hallways. She barely avoided the rusty beds and broken equipment that littered the corridors. Her flashlight became weaker and weaker as well, but she didn't even notice. It wasn't like she cared. She just kept on moving, trying to outrun all the fury and sadness that filled her and wouldn't let go.

Eventually she collapsed against a moldy wall, exhausted. Holding her side, she tried to breathe in the scarce air that felt like liquid fire in her lungs.

"Dammit, why did he have to say it?" Her legs felt too weak to support her anylonger and the blond Turk just slumped on her knees, hair hanging into her eyes. But her vision was already obscured by her tears and her hot breath condensing on the inside of her helmet anyway, so what did it matter. If she hated one thing it was crying, but even biting her lips to the point of bleeding couldn't prevent the inevitable.

Grabbing some dirt Elena hissed and then screamed in one long, angry wail. All the anger, all the denial, the failed attempts at coping, the immense and overwhelming loss of someone she had thought would be by her side forever - all that she screamed into the darkness where it floated away, leaving her a hollow, deflated sack of helpless resignation.

How many chances she had missed that would never come back. How many things she would never get to say. How many stupid things she had said and could never take back.

Reno had been like her brother; the emotional bond they shared was tightly wrapped around their hearts, pulling them close together. There were times when she hated him, for whatever stupid, insensitive thing he had said or done. There were times when she had worried about him. There were times when she had laughed at and with him so damn much her sides hurt and she thought she had ruptured something. There were times when she had protected him and he had protected her. There were times when she had just placed herself under his care, knowing that it was all right, that she could trust him. There were so many tiny, shared moments that had made them who they were, that had shaped them and their friendship, their way to see the world and to handle the future.

All of that was gone now, cut off forever from her life, left behind somewhere in the past and she didn't have the chance to foresee it, much less prevent it. In the blink of an eye, a part of her soul, a part of her self had been ripped from her, leaving a gaping hole that she did not know how to fill.

Now she had no more tears left now , no more anger nor the will to go on. Rude was right. What they were doing was stupid and dangerous and, had Reno known, he would have given her an earful. It was a miracle that both Rude and Tseng had stuck it out for so long. But they were worried about her, too. They did care, after all. And they were still here, and they were all she had left.

As that realization grew in her mind, slowly starting to fill the emptiness, Elena regretted her harsh words. Though they had been spoken out of desperation, they had not been fair. She sat up with a sight and just stared blankly at the tip of her boot for a while . Her head hurt from all the crying and it was hard to grasp a coherent thought. Well. There was no other option but to go back, apologize and put an end to it. She had a responsibility to keep her remaining friends safe too, and she couldn't risk their safety for her whims and childish denial any longer. Reno was dead and she would have to be strong and accept it. Not only for her sake, but for Tseng and Rude's too.

Just as she was getting up with a grunt, a sound stiffened her body in mid crouch.

"Hello?" She aimed her dying flashlight at the pitch black tunnel from where the sound had come, but the beam was too weak to pierce through the darkness.

"Tseng?" Keeping one hand on the slippery wall for support, Elena rose slowly. "Rude, is that you?" There was nothing there, her narrowed eyes couldn't penetrate the murky darkness.

In the pit of her stomach she felt that something wasn't right. Her instincts were on alert. A nameless fear gripped her and crept up her spine with sharp claws.

Something was watching her.

Elena took a step back and pointed the light deeper into the tunnel. The beam flickered a few times and went out. In a panic, she hit the flashlight against her hand, breathing through gritted teeth, "Come on!" All the while, her wide eyes kept searching frantically the darkness for whatever was closing in on her.

Where was it? On her left ? To the right? Now she couldn't hear a sound.

"Goddammit, work!"

As the torch suddenly flared back to life, Elena heard the noise again, threw her head back and looked up at the thick pipes running along the ceiling.

The last thing she saw was a frighteningly pale face and then everything turned black.

tbc?

This chapter was difficult for me but also very important. In April I lost my best rl friend, so writing Elena's part became a bit of a trial. But I hope I succeeded in expressing the feelings of loss that I felt then (and still feel now), only in another context.

Now I again need your help, dear readers! How should the story go on? Any suggestions, wishes? :)

Review replies:

Kage: l XD

natzilla: Hahaha, I'm glad he is! I think he's sometimes adorably ruthless and naïve XD

Rina: It does! The concept of reality is really interesting, and strange too, sometimes. I'm glad that he was relieved to not have eaten Reno, too, otherwise it might have given him strange ideas ;) I suppose humans as social subjects have a craving for comfort, and the fridge is closest to a mother. Rats and bugs can't be, or he would eat his own family... I'm happy you liked the sexy scene, though I'm not sure it was all that sexy XD Of course it wouldn't be about feelings of love and doing it prettily. As you said, fridgeboy is a creature of instincts^^

DamonWesker: Yes, you remembered right, beast boy was jacking off before. But he didn't have a sexual connection with someone else before ;) So for him this was quite different^^

bloodrippedcupcake: OMG, you reviewed every chapter! You're awesome, thanks so much for doing that! I loved hearing your thoughts and I'm happy you like the story! Now I'm curious: who do you think the beast boy is? XD I think I would have eaten the rat first, too. There's something really not so yummy about insects... shudder. Hehe, if the title of the story was Beauty and the Beast – who you think should be the beauty and who is the beast? XDD