Title: Covered
Author: aces
Warnings: No, I got no clue for this one. Making light-hearted fun of Darien's misery, perhaps, but that's nothing new, is it?
Rating: PG for language
Note: Actually written for the time constraint challenge on LJ's "contrelemonte" community but never posted there, and no this isn't really a very short short piece but I'm being lazy.

Covered

And this was it, no seriously, this was it, they were gone for sure, now they ded from big bad explosions made by stupid terrorists, and no his life wasn't bothering to flash before his eyes because it'd done that enough times already and was sick and tired of being remembered, so the only thing he saw was Bobby.

Bobby.

Bobby was still kneeling over the bomb, tension written all over him as he dug around in wires and chips and timers and more wires. He was still trying to save them, even though the timer clearly said they only had a minute and they were gonna die, man, die as in dead, dead, dead.

Shouldn't he have gotten used to this feeling at some point by now?

"Fawkes, help me," Bobby's voice was just a little on the tense side, not that he could blame his partner, he really couldn't blame him at all, and he didn't look up at Darien as he continued poking around in the bomb, tensely.

"What can I do?!" he yelped, and continued pacing frantically while staring at his partner.

"You can stop moving and get your punk ass down here!" Bobby's voice sounded just a little more tense, and he decided maybe it'd be a good thing if he got down there and knelt with his partner. He didn't want them to die on bad terms. That would kinda suck. Thankfully last time he'd seen the Keep they'd laughed together. That was good. And he'd been nice to Eberts. He was proud of that.

"Fawkes."

Darien slid down to the ground across from his partner and almost skittered back when he saw the timer had but thirty seconds left on it. "Crap," he muttered, "crap crap crap..."

"Shut up, Darien," Bobby ground out, and his fingers were still filled with wires as if he were some insane surgeon doing his thing in some mechanical body. "We are not gonna frickin' die here."

Darien stared at the top of Bobby's bald head in disbelief and said, "We are dead, man, dead as in dead."

"No we aren't."

And his life wasn't flashing in front of his eyes, but Bobby was kneeling right there, and they had ten seconds left until the end of their little corner of the world.

"I love you, Bobby," Darien blurted out.

Bobby glanced up at him then, glaring. "What?" he barked out, and he never let go of the wires splayed in his hands.

Darien kissed him, quick and hard, on the lips. He saw the timer blink down to zero. He squeezed his eyes shut.

It didn't go off.

The bomb was a dud. A deliberate one, 'cos the terrorists were playing with them. Last laugh was on them, though, 'cos Bobby went in and nailed their asses before they could set up the real bomb.

Darien went home and buried his head under his pillow in an attempt to asphyxiate himself. Unfortunately, he didn't have the heart to actually put himself out of his own misery and ended up watching gawd-awful infomercials at three in the morning instead. When even that didn't kill him, he despaired.

He called in sick the next day and huddled under his pillow again. This time he didn't bother trying the whole asphyxiation thing. He was just trying to drown out the sound of his partner banging down his front door and yelling at him to come out and stop being a fricking coward.

Coward? Ha. This was discretion being the better part of survival-fricking-instinct, my friend.

Eventually Bobby lock-picked the door and slammed it shut behind him and started yelling at Darien from inside the apartment instead of outside it. Darien just huddled further under the covers and pillow. It didn't do much to muffle the sound, though he supposed he was grateful the idiot agent had finally stopped drawing attention to himself. Darien hated it when the neighbors complained.

When Bobby pulled the pillow out of Darien's grasp, Darien burrowed deeper under the covers. When Bobby started tugging at the covers, Darien found the death grip (death grip, haha, isn't that funny, not) he'd misplaced with the pillow and clung on tenaciously. Eventually Bobby gave up with a disgusted snort and sat down on the edge of the bed.

Darien pretended to ignore him. He didn't bother pretending to sleep, as that would have been childish.

"Fawkes, you're being an idiot," Hobbes sounded aggravated. "Again. Would you just get off your self-pitying ass and help me get some work done?"

As part of pretending to ignore someone usually includes pretending not to hear them, Darien decided not to answer this.

Bobby tugged at the covers again, but Darien still had a firm grip and tugged viciously back. Bobby sighed. "Fawkes, the Official is breathing down my neck wanting to know where the hell you are, Monroe's bitching because she had to take up your slack, and Claire's pissed off with both of us for not coming in yesterday and getting you checked out by her. And Eberts is being all snippity-smug because I'm getting all the crap this time, frickin' little Eberts..." Bobby continued to mutter in this vein for a few minutes, lulling Darien into a false sense of security until Bobby said, "And just because you felt a need for a final dud-bomb-death confession yesterday or whatever doesn't mean you get out of doing your fair share of the work today."

Darien groaned, and buried his face so hard in his mattress he was sure his nose was gonna push a hole right through it. "G'way," he mumbled into the mattress, but Bobby occasionally had amazing powers of translation and understood him.

"Can't, partner," he said and tugged again at the blankets. Darien didn't have the strength anymore. Anyway, his face was buried in his mattress so it wasn't like he could see Bobby's far-seeing brown eyes staring steadily into his own or anything.

Instead he could just feel them boring into the back of his head.

Bobby gently laid a hand on his back, over his left shoulder bone. "C'mon, Fawkes." His voice was almost gentle, and that was really unfair and devious of him, and Darien just wasn't gonna play this time. "We got work to do."

"No." Darien shook his head into the mattress, and Bobby punched his shoulder. Darien squawked.

"I don't have time for your little whining pity-parties," Bobby snapped. "And neither do you, Invisiboy. If you feel a need to sulk, do it on your own time, not on company's time, and not on my time." He waited, but Darien didn't respond. "Fawkes!" he barked. "Get up now." He pulled the covers all the way off Darien, and started shoving at Darien, trying to turn him over and sit him up.

Finally out of pity for his partner, and for his own skin which was getting decidedly bruised, Darien rolled himself over and sat up on the bed. His hair stuck up all over the place like a trimmed shrubbery gone horribly, horribly wrong, and he was wearing mismatching pajama pants and top that looked like they should have only come in boys' sizes and not to fit his lanky body. Bobby ignored all that and blinked at his partner, steady brown eyes.

Darien closed his eyes and slumped.

"Look...Fawkes," Bobby said, but Darien didn't open his eyes. "It was, an, uh, an—emotional moment. You were under a lot of stress. You thought you were gonna die. People say...weird...things...in moments like that. I understand, kid. It's okay. Just forget about it and move on, okay?"

"Do people usually kiss other people in moments like that too?" Darien asked without opening his eyes.

"Uh...well, I don't usually, but I may be unique like that, my friend." Bobby sounded really, really uncomfortable, and Darien wanted to crawl back under the covers again. When he felt a touch on his arm, he blinked his eyes open, startled.

"It's okay, partner," Bobby said, looking at him.

Darien drew back slightly, staring at Bobby warily. "You're not gonna kill me? You're not gonna throw me over a pier? You're not gonna haul my ass into the Fatman hand-cuffed and demand you never have to work with me again?"

Bobby blinked, and frowned. "Why would I do that, partner? Look, I—uh—that is to say, I...well, I care deeply for you too; it's only natural, you're my partner, we've been through a lot together, bound to happen, nothing to worry about—"

"Hobbes," Darien cut across him tiredly, "you're babbling."

Bobby sniffed. "I don't do emotional scenes well, my friend. Ask my ex-wife."

Darien snorted, and sighed, and glanced at his partner. "So. Forgiven and forgotten?"

"Forgiven and forgotten," Hobbes promised, "but only if you get your ass out of this bed and get to work before Monroe or Claire kills us both." He rose from the bed and started for the front door. "And do something with your hair; it looks like a dog rolled around in it."

He shut the door behind him.

Fawkes stared after him, and thought again about that heart-stopping moment when he knew he was gonna die and that was the last moment he was gonna ever see his partner, and groaned, flopping back to bury his face under the pillow again. "Aw, crap," he muttered.

"Fawkes! Get moving!" he heard from just outside the door.

"Aw, crap," Darien groaned again and got up to face another day.