Privideniya – Chapter 35

Raiden had never believed in pleasant surprises. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing pleasant about a change in the order of things, an interruption to the rigid schedule by which he lived.

Even when he had been a kid – after he'd moved to America and locked the first twelve years of his life away in his subconscious - he'd hated it when they canceled school because of snow, or pulled them all out of class for an assembly about drunk driving or growing pubes or something. In seventh grade, he'd gone to spend the night at a friend's house. At three in the morning, he'd woken up on a pallet on the floor of an unfamiliar house, and he hadn't stopped screaming until his voice gave out.

It was that same feeling now, coming awake in a cramped boarding house bed with Vamp's arm draped over his waist. Raiden remembered everything that had happened, but he hadn't expected it to be like this. He had assumed that sleep would find a way to pull them apart again, to brick up all the holes in their defenses; in fact, he had been looking forward to it.

But he found now that they were even closer than they had been. The old respectful distance was gone, and what had taken its place was the leaden weight of Vamp's limp arm.

Raiden had never thought it would be so heavy. Of course, Vamp was no lightweight, not with all that muscle he had packed on him, but the graceful way he carried himself had always suggested the hollow bones of birds. They'd grappled plenty of times before, but Raiden had never had as hard a time shaking off Vamp's hold as he did this morning.

At last, he broke the grip of sleep-clenched fingers and bounded to his feet. He grabbed at his discarded clothes, snatching up the jeans before the boxers, the sweater before the shirt. When he heard a stirring of blankets behind him, Raiden did not look back. He felt a hot shock of panic go through. White spots flared up before his eyes.

He heard himself speaking in a flat, administrative voice that he hardly recognized as his own.

"That guy – Radu – said the car would be ready this morning. I want to get an early start. We've lost a lot of time already. You know, we left all the guns right in the back seat. Their covered up with a blanket, but there still out where anyone can find them. I don't know what we were thinking yesterday…"

He fell silent, the words cut off as sharply as if a hand had closed around his throat. There was no shuffle of settling blankets behind him, no careful sounds as Vamp rose to ready himself for the day. He dreaded turning to face him, and yet, somehow, he did.

The look on Vamp's face surprised him, for he recognized in it the shock of the recently betrayed. Raiden shuddered, his fists unclenching so that his clothes fell once more into an indistinguishable heap on the floor. He edged warily towards the bed, no longer able to predict what Vamp would do, no longer certain what he would do himself.

Raiden sat down on the bed beside him. Vamp's hand lay on the sheets between them, limp, his fingers uncurled. Raiden wasn't sure if he was offering it, but he took hold of it anyway.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, and then Vamp kissed him. And then they were kissing each other.

His fingers were clenched tight around Vamp's hand, as if longing for a grip that wouldn't let go even in death. He was still apologizing: tired weary words, almost automatic, almost bereft of feeling, surfaced between each kiss. Even when he couldn't speak any more, he felt them coming still; piling up on the back of his tongue, sticking uselessly in his throat.

The Jeep was ready just as Radu had promised. While he cracked the hood and showed Vamp the patch he had put on the engine block, Raiden crept around to the back and made sure that the cache of weapons under the seat was undisturbed. It didn't do much good because he couldn't say for sure what state they had left things in the day before, but he liked the feeling of being efficient and thorough.

Vamp counted out a stack of bills for Radu, and then come over to where Raiden stood. He didn't say anything at first, but he looked at Raiden as if he were waiting for something.

Raiden fretted over his inability to give him what he wanted.

"Are we done here?" he said at last, stiffly.

"We're done," Vamp said.

Raiden wondered if Vamp would ever really be done with this town. He was trying to find the right words to ask him if he wanted to see the church again – a way to phrase it that wouldn't make it sound like what he was really asking was whether Vamp wanted to go back to see his own name there on the roster of the dead – when Vamp moved away from him and slid in behind the wheel of the Jeep.

Feeling no particular emotion so strongly that he couldn't hide it, Raiden got in beside him, and they drove. Ten minutes later, they were over the hump of a snow covered hill and the town was lost from sight.

They drove ceaselessly all through the day, eating granola bars and only stopping long enough to piss in the ditch that ran along the side of the road. Raiden felt his ears pop as they ascended, watched the scenery change from easy green hills to pine forest.

He was thinking placidly of the trip his foster parents had dragged him on when he was in high school. His therapist – one of them, at any rate – had suggested it, and so they'd jerked him out of school for a couple of weeks, shoved him into the back seat of their Ford Explorer with the empty Burger King wrappers, and headed for the nearest coast.

What Raiden remembered the most about that trip was the days like this, when a pall of awkward, talked-out silence descended over the inside of the car and Raiden turned to the window to watch the scenery go by. He liked trying to find the exact spot where one place became another: the first scraggly cactus as they went down into desert country; the first clump of real trees as they came out the other side.

It made him feel small, humble, awed. As cliche as it was, it comforted him. Like maybe this was the one thing people couldn't accuse him of being weird about. Maybe this was the one thing they all shared.

"What's on your mind, Jack?"

Raiden looked over, startled. He was sure Vamp had called him by his given name before, but he couldn't remember when.

He opened his mouth to reply. He didn't know what he was going to say.

"I guess I was just thinking about how I had kind of a sad childhood."

Raiden laughed. That wasn't what he had expected, and it seemed pathetic and funny. He giggled like he would at a stranger's humiliation.

"Did you, now?"

Vamp wasn't laughing, though. His eyes were fixed straight ahead. On the road, Raiden thought, not the trees or the snow; the mundane majesty of it all. He probably didn't see the beauty in anything except for a hole he could stick his dick in, or a hole he'd just pulled his knife out of.

"No," Raiden said. "Not really."

They didn't stop until midnight. By then, they were well on the other side of the Russian border.

Raiden stumbled up to their rented hotel room, fell into bed fully clothed and blind with exhaustion. Vamp slipped in beside him, and they pawed each other for a while under the blankets. It felt mechanical, impersonal, but Raiden came about as hard as he ever had in his life. He buried his face in the pillow to stifle his cries. The walls of their room were very thin.

Afterwards, he lay awake in the darkness and listened to Vamp sleep.

He thought about the night in New York when they had agreed to team up. It had been an alliance of convenience more than anything. Raiden wondered if convenience was all there was to this part of their partnership, too.

Then he wondered why he had ever dared to hope otherwise.

The next day, they were both unrested and irritable. They breakfasted on cold coffee and stifled yawns, on anxiety about the full day that still lay ahead of them.

Almost a full week of hard travel had left Raiden exhausted, bleary. He would meet Revolver Ocelot again on four hours of sleep, if he was lucky; with muscles that were stiff from so long cramped in the car, a stomach that churned from infrequent bad food.

It didn't worry him. He knew that his exhaustion and all his small pains would be forgotten the moment he scented a fight.

"I'll probably sleep for a week when all this is over," he mumbled. It had seemed like a perfectly logical continuation of his thoughts, but when he said it aloud it seemed awkward and small in the silence of the Jeep's interior.

Vamp looked over at him. He was in the passenger seat, not even trying to sleep. There were dark circles under his eyes and his skin looked yellowish. He hadn't shaved that morning, and there was a shadow on his jaw.

He still looked good, Raiden thought. Good, but not great anymore.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I wouldn't have kept you awake last night if I'd known."

For a moment, Raiden was stunned. He couldn't believe that Vamp was actually talking about it. That thing they had done twice now, but under cover of darkness so that, in the harsh light of day, it hardly seemed to count.

"That was fine," Raiden said, going to great pains to make his voice sound even and unimpassioned. "I mean, how many more chances are we going to get, right?"

It took all his strength not to look at Vamp when he said it. He'd only meant it as a test.

"I hadn't given much thought to the matter," Vamp replied.

"I mean, when we're back home," Raiden said. He was aware that his voice was dropping, dropping. Becoming so soft it was barely a whisper. He seemed entirely unable to control it. "Can we really risk it? Even if it's just a casual thing? Even if… even if we really want it?"

"Is that what you've been trying to tell me all this time, Jack?"

"Adrian…"

"That you want it?"

Raiden shuddered, gripping the steering wheel tight. "I do. I guess I really do. But you make it hard for me sometimes."

"How?"

"By being you." Raiden tried to smile, knew it looked more like a grimace, and gave it up. "It's probably nothing you can help."

"Try me."

"No…"

"Please?"

Raiden glanced at him, taking his eyes off the road for a second, just long enough to wish in a crazed way that he'd hit a patch of black ice or a moose or something, just to put an end to this conversation.

"I guess what I want to tell you is that I was lonely before I met you. I couldn't tell anyone what I was thinking, not even someone like Snake who would have just sat there and not said anything and kind of looked sympathetic. I mean, the things I've seen - the things I've done – they don't really invite casual conversation, you know?"

Raiden felt a knot rising in his throat. He forced himself to keep talking past it.

"But you… I didn't even need to tell you anything. You knew Solidus. You had all this fucked up shit in your past. You had all that blood on your hands. It was like, in some weird way, you were already me, and I was already you."

Vamp was listening to him intently. Not looking at him, but listening all the same.

"You're not me, though. You're better than me, and you're worse than me. You're crazier, and you're saner. I don't really know all the little nuances or whatever. All I know is that the longer we spend together, the closer we get to the moment when you see something in me that makes you hate me. It took Rose a long time to decide that, but she ignored a lot of stuff. She didn't pay attention to anything that she didn't like. She didn't know what she was looking for, not like you do."

Vamp was quiet for a long time. Not like him at all, Raiden thought, and felt foreboding.

"I don't hate you, Jack," he said at last. "But, I think you are right. If you're going to keep bringing up the past, bringing up Solidus, then we ought not persist in this."

Raiden's voice trembled. "Are you saying that for my sake? Or…"

"You think too highly of me. I'm saying it out of a sense of self-preservation. I don't want to talk about Solidus. I don't want anyone to understand. I need it to be that way. I've tried everything else and I keep coming back to the same place. The same hard truths that I can't escape."

"But you brought him up before," Raiden said. He realized he sounded sulky and sullen.

"Yes." Vamp sighed. "I have these moments where I think that, if I could only make some kind of great leap of compassion, if I could only find a way to understand him, then I would be able to transcend him. It never works. In fact, there is very little to understand about that man. I'm sorry, though. I shouldn't have tried to drag you into my messes."

"The least you could do is not act so goddamn martyred when you're trying to break up with me."

"I can't seem to win with you today, Jack."

"I guess I'm just nervous," Raiden said sarcastically.

Vamp smiled. He reached over, and Raiden felt the brush of his callused fingertips on the inside of his wrist. It was right where his sleeve ended, right at the narrowest part of him. His hand convulsed around the gearshift, relaxed again, did not pull away.

"I'm glad I met you," Vamp said quietly. "Whatever happens, I'm glad I met you when I did."

"Whatever happens," Raiden echoed, but the words seemed foreign to him, bereft of context and meaning.