Author:
linaerys
Pairing: Nigel/Woody
Rating: R, for sex
and a little gore
Disclaimer: Not mine
Title: On
the Spot (Part 3/3)
Summary: Set sometime after "Second
Chances" and THAT scene. This is the final part of this fic, and
has the good stuff g
Woody was in no shape to go to any workshops that morning, so they decided to drive back early. Nigel had a train ticket, but one look at Woody told him that they'd be better off if Nigel drove. Woody barely put up a fight about Nigel driving, which made Nigel worry about him all the more. During the two hours Woody snoozed and Nigel listened to his iPod, refraining from singing along with some difficulty.
Around noon a Spring snowfall started; they had just passed through Hartford, the halfway point on the drive back to Boston. The snowflakes were light and huge, but fell thickly. The snow seemed to muffle the sound of the wheels, and the sun shining through gave an unearthly yellow glow to the forests that lined the highway. Something in the silence woke Woody up from his nap.
Nigel turned off his music when he saw Woody alert and looking around. "Feeling any better," he asked solicitously.
"I've been worse," said Woody. Then, after a moment he shut his eyes in pain, "ugh, but not much." He looked out the windows for a few minutes. "It's really coming down, huh? Wonder if it'll stick around enough for skiing this weekend."
"Probably not," said Nigel. "Bloody Massachusetts Springs. In England at least it's foggy and damp all the time so you know where you stand."
"So what's with you and Maria?" Woody asked after a few minutes of silence.
"Please," said Nigel, "a gentleman doesn't kiss and tell."
Woody snorted. "Yeah, well this is a long drive, and by the looks of it, getting longer."
"We're friends," said Nigel after a moment. "Sometimes more, but never less."
"Huh," said Woody. "I've never been able to stay friends with an ex. Too awkward."
"Well, she's not really an ex."
"Like a friends-with-benefits-thing?" Woody asked. Then, with a grin, he sang "'If you can't beeeee with the one you love, honey, love the one you're with.'"
"That's the basic idea," agreed Nigel. "I didn't peg you as a Crosby, Stills and Nash fan," he continued. "Your head must be feeling better."
"It is, a little. Anyway, I never got that to work either; it's always been all or nothing." Now it was Nigel's turn to snort.
"So I've noticed," he said. "You should give it a try sometime."
"I have tried," protested Woody. "There was this woman, Linda . . ." The weird snowy light was oddly suited to confidences. "It was supposed to be like that—easy and casual. But instead . . . well, you know the story. Young guy, older woman. I fall hard, she gets bored and leaves." He stared out the window for a few minutes. "I did anything she wanted. Anything."
Nigel could have said something; his own string of lost loves and stupid sacrifices stretched back across the years, and his flippancy was hard earned, but he wasn't sure how welcome that would be. Woody is still so young, he thought.
"Got any music in this death trap?" Nigel asked. Woody flung him a dirty look and dug under his seat and pulled out a thick book of CDs.
"Hmm, well, I've only got half of my Kinks CDs in here, and I've got a feeling you're not a Dave Matthews fan . . ."
Nigel fake-shuddered. "You've got that right. But the Kinks? You surprise me Detective Hoyt." Nigel caught Woody grinning out of the corner of his eye.
"Kinks it is, then." Woody slipped the CD into the CD player—the one thing on his car that hadn't passed its tenth birthday years ago.
"Of course, if we're talking British invasion, I like the Alan Parson's Project better," said Nigel, once the opening strains of "You Really Got Me Now" filled the car.
"Of course you do," said Woody. "But they'd never have made it without the Kinks coming first."
"Fair point," agreed Nigel.
They happily wrangled about music for the rest of the drive, even while traffic slowed and a false early night fell as the storm clouds thickened above, and the snow grew deeper on the road. When they finally reached the reached the streets of Boston, it was four o'clock, and the sidewalks had six inches of snow.
The moment they got off the highway Nigel's phone started ringing and then Woody's followed soon after.
"Body in the Commons," said Nigel after they hung up. "What's yours?"
"Same."
Woody turned the car toward the park. A few skaters were gamely trying to skate through the snow, but they went slowly and stumbled frequently over the snow building up on the ice.
"Just drive over the grass," said Woody.
A cop stopped them a dozen yards from the body, and Nigel pulled his leather jacket tight around his shoulders, hoping the snow wouldn't do it too much damage. The body was that of a young man, and from the set of the cold in its flesh, Nigel was pretty sure this had happened right after the snow started.
A few feet away Woody talked to the cop. "You're the only one here?" he asked.
"Yeah," said the cop. "The day was slow and they're talking about closing the roads. The chief sent home all except a few of us who live downtown. This freaky weather—only happens every few years, but it can shut down the city." As he spoke the wind picked up around them and drove a blast of wet snow into Woody's face.
Woody came over to where Nigel was kneeling over the corpse and squatted next to him. "Cause of death?" he asked.
"There are some stab wounds, but I'm not sure that did it," he said. "Not enough blood, and it doesn't look like anything vital was hit. It's hard to say with the cold, but I'm pretty sure if he'd bled to death there would be more. We'll have to get him back to the lab, but I think we're going to find that the cause of death is hypothermia, aggravated by the wounds." Nigel bent down over the body again, and felt the thinnest whisper of breath coming from the body.
"Woody!" he yelled against the rising wind, "Get help! I think he's still alive." The shot came out of nowhere, before Woody had a chance to stand up and open his phone. It came whistling in between them, a high-pitched whining that cut through the roar of the wind. It slammed into the victim's head and sent bits of bone, blood and brain flying out. Nigel sprang back in time, but Woody got a face full of hot gore spraying at him.
"Shit!" he yelled, wiping frantically at his face. Nigel sprang up and gave full chase to the shooter, but all he could see of him was a dark silhouette streaking across the snowy park. After a particularly daring leap, Nigel's shoes slipped and he lost the man from sight among the narrow streets of the Back Bay.
Back at the now definitely dead man, Woody was kneeling in the snow, trying, with some difficulty, to remove the fragments of blood and bone that had coated his face and hair. "This is disgusting," he said dully. "You never mention how sticky blood is."
"Usually I wear gloves," said Nigel, "And I don't generally take a bath in it either. Legends aside." His quips fell on deaf ears, and Woody looked like he was on the verge of passing out. "Come on," he said, hauling Woody up by the shoulders, "let's call the van, and get you back to the station."
They stayed until Bug and Macy arrived with the van and loaded up the corpse. At that point Nigel and Woody had become so cold that they were taking turns sitting in the car, but the meager radiator couldn't keep up with the growing winds. "Bugger," said Nigel to himself. "It's fucking April. This is ridiculous."
"Wait," said Woody, as Nigel started to climb into the back of the ME van. "You've gotta give a statement about the shooter at the station. Sorry." So Nigel bid bug and Macy goodbye and went around to the driver's side of Woody's car to drive them to the police station. Inside the precinct Nigel got himself and Woody cups of the execrable police coffee, but it tasted like heaven after the cold. In typical cop fashion, Woody was a terrible typist, so Nigel typed up his own report on the computer, printed out a statement and signed it while Woody attempted to clean the blood and bits out of his hair. Nigel was nervier than he'd thought—the stress of being shot at told in his unsteady hands.
Woody came back into his office when Nigel was nearly finished typing. "God, this stuff won't come out. Not with hand soap and paper towels, anyway," he grumbled. "I'm going home. Can I drop you off anywhere?"
"Sure. Home," agreed Nigel.
A few blocks out of the station's parking lot, Woody started pounding on the steering wheel. "Shit shit shit shit shit!" he said, uncreatively. "The super was turning off the water for maintenance today. With the pipes always crapping out in bad weather, there's no way I'll have hot water. This day just gets better and better."
"You can use mine," said Nigel wearily. He was very much looking forward to bundling up in a bathrobe and blanket, getting a hot cup of tea, and putting on a Buffy episode. The weekend had had its moments, but really Nigel just wanted it to be over. Still, he couldn't put Woody out in the cold.
Woody was stumbling and shaky when Nigel helped him up the two floors to his apartment. The abuses Woody had heaped on his body over the past twenty-four hours were starting to catch up with him. "Are you going to be okay?" Nigel asked.
"Yeah, just need to clean up," said Woody thickly, and Nigel looked at him, worried. After Woody showered he realized that one of the bits of bone had lacerated his forehead, and the hot water caused it to bleed again. "Do you have a first aid kit?" called Woody from the bathroom.
"Of course," yelled back Nigel. He got some gauze and tape and after knocking lightly on the bathroom door, went in. Woody had put back on his pants, but he still had his shirt off, and he was looking at the cut on his forehead in the mirror.
"Let me look at it," said Nigel. Woody turned around and leaned back against the sink. "It's not very deep at all," he said after looking at it for a moment, "so I don't think you'll need stitches, but since it's a head wound, it will bleed a lot." He cut a long narrow piece of gauze and some tape and started to clean the wound on Woody's forehead.
Being so close to Woody in the warm, moist air of the bathroom reminded Nigel again, that he'd just put his life in danger. He tried to focus just on the cut to avoid looking at the sweat beaded on Woody's upper lip, to keep from thinking about the heat from his body. In his days British Navy, there had always been some way to manage post-battle randiness—some willing soul in the same straights. But here in the civilian world, things weren't that easy.
Their faces were only inches apart. Get a grip, Nigel thought to himself, he's straight. Just put the bandage on him and send him home. Nigel reached up to touch Woody's forehead again, and said softly, "Never mind, it's stopped."
Exactly how it happened, Nigel could hardly remember, after, but it seemed that Woody grabbed him by the back of the neck with a strength Nigel wouldn't have credited after seeing him stumble up the stairs, and kissed him hard. Nigel barely hesitated a moment before kissing him back, and letting his hands run up that well-muscled back he'd been itching to touch.
I shouldn't be doing this, thought Nigel, as his hands and lips disobeyed him. He's straight, he's shocky, he's injured, he's hungover, he's in love with Jordan. Nigel knew he should stop him for a moment, ask if Woody was sure, but he knew too, that if he did that, Woody would stop, and this would never go any further.
And then he couldn't think at all, as Woody's hand ran down over the front of his pants. Nigel undid his fly and Woody's as quickly as possible, some part of him knowing that Woody wouldn't be quite as fast as him, and any delay might derail them. He pushed Woody's trousers just down over his hips and felt the same done to him, and then a hot slick hand was around his cock, and his was around Woody's and they both came fast and hard until Woody collapsed back against the mirror, sweating and his pulse hammering in his neck.
Nigel waited for just a moment unsure of what to do next. He'll bolt. He'll start saying "Oh my God, what have I done?" He'll blame me. Nigel's head rested on Woody's chest, but as Nigel stiffened and started to move away, he noticed that Woody did not say anything, did not try to move out of Nigel's sticky embrace. Instead he tugged on Nigel's neck, as if . . . as if to pull him forward for more.
"Guess I'll need another shower," said Woody, a little unsteadily, but cheerful enough, and he finished the job of stripping himself that Nigel had begun. Nigel looked at himself in the mirror for a moment, and took a deep breath. I guess I should know an invitation when I hear one, he thought, having offered up so many of my own, and then he joined Woody in the shower.
The next morning . . .
Bug came into the lab and heard the soft sound of Nigel whistling as he rearranged the cables in the back of the computer. "Why are you so cheery?" he said suspiciously. "You just got shot at."
"It's a new day," said Nigel, standing up. "The sun is shining, birds are chirping."
"They are not. The city's come to a standstill. There will be 50 unidentified frozen bodies coming in here in the next hour," said Bug sourly.
"At least they won't stink then," said Nigel. He walked over and hugged Bug's shoulders quickly. "Look on the bright side." Nigel walked down the hall whistling. Woody had left some time during the night, but much later. It might never happen again, he thought, but there are worse ways to spend a weekend.
