Mouse stays that night. After a long silence where knives settle back into their scarred crevices and Mouse drags himself out of the numb heavy horror that slid off the black gunmetal into his veins, anchored by the warmth of Jay and Erin beside him, Erin tugs her phone out of her pocket.
"Order in?"
Jay and Mouse nod. They order Indian; Erin and Jay push up off the couch when they hear the buzz signaling the arrival of their delivery, using their eyes to order Mouse to remain still. They bring the food into the living room, and as has become frequent habit, they put on an episode of Doctor Who while they eat. Mouse puts aside his mind and sinks into the comforting familiarity of the stories playing out on the screen, smiles even sneaking onto his lips at Erin's flippant commentary.
It's Erin, this time, who fixes him in her gaze as the night draws on, and orders, "You're staying." So he does. It's only sensible really, with his car still at the district. He drags himself off the couch to change into a pair of his sweats that live in Jay's closet and an old shirt and brush his teeth. When he slumps back into the living room, Erin has laid out the couch for him, tugging the blankets into place. He smiles tiredly in thanks and sinks onto the couch. Erin passes behind the couch, trailing her fingers gently across his shoulders. Jay pads past from the kitchen and does the same, following Erin into the bedroom, and Mouse slides down, tugging the blankets over himself. Despite the returning achy anxiety in his bones, he drifts off to sleep quickly.
There are only two weeks left of the six months of their second tour. Two weeks until he and Jay ship home to base camp in Chicago again, leaving behind the sand, at least for a little while. They've spent the last two days preparing for this convoy mission, a five day trek round trip to deliver ammo and fuel to an FOB – arriving there on the third day, unloading, and getting the hell out of dodge and back to base. They've done many of these expeditions, long tense stretches of boiling sand under their treads. The very first time, they spent most of the trip in silence, gripping their rifles at every sound, prepared to be attacked at any second. Nothing happened on the way there. On the way back, they ran into a small group of rebels, and bullets dinged off the armour of the truck. Mouse and Jay shuffled out, using the vehicle and the doors as cover and the unit picked off their assailants. When the last gunshot cracked in the hills and silence fell, they climbed back into the truck, leaving the bodies to sink into the sand, forgotten.
Since then, they've learned how to balance caution with calm. Stories and jokes pass around the truck. Eyes are never long away from the world outside – eyes meet in passing fragments, faces seen in the flash of a cheek here, an eyebrow there. Mouse is intensely familiar with the view of Rev and Hollingsworth from the back, the bristled neck below a helmet, the breadth of a shoulder, the shape of an ear. What he knows best, though, are their voices; it is their voices that he will remember most.
They are up before dawn for the final preparations. There's a half moon in the sky, bleaching the sand grey, and despite the bustle of activity around the camp, it presses a blurred quiet down on them. The horizon is seeping the first beginnings of dawn when their convoy rumbles out of the camp.
They're in the lead Humvee, Mouse, Jay, Sticks, Hollingsworth, and Rev, driving as usual. The sun rises slowly, saturating the sand with red, glinting through the dusted windows, as they crawl across a seemingly endless track. Mouse absently imagines the bird's eye view of a vulture circling the sky, watching their ant's march, on and on. The convoy reaches their night stop just after the sun is swallowed by the horizon, climbing stiffly out of the Humvees. The FOB they've stopped at is reasonably well stocked and established, so they get warm meals and clean beds for the night. They're up before dawn again to eat, top up their water stock, and clamber back into formation, and rumble out into the smoky predawn.
"Mind if I drive a while today?" Hollingsworth to Rev, minutes before they set out for the day. Hollingsworth to Rev, face thrown in shadow in the dim world; Hollingsworth to Rev, a throwaway; Hollingsworth to Rev, not the first time, but the last. Rev: a shrug.
"Sure."
It's just after noon, sand on all sides, dunes rising up like rolling waves around them, no civilization in sight. Mouse sits between Jay, on his right, and Sticks on his left. They each keep their eyes out the side window; Mouse watches forward, occasionally craning his neck to check the glimpses of the procession behind them, disappearing into billows of dust kicked up by the treads.
"-so this guy is unbelievably drunk, and he pulls out his pistol to prove it, and all the other guys are egging him on, because they're all drunk as fuck too, and the barman is shouting, but the guy lines up the shot and everyone gets out of the way and he's wobbling all over and pulls the trigger. And nothing happens, because like any sane person, his girlfriend has taken all the bullets out without him noticing, and oh my god, the look on his face! He was so confused!" Rev laughs, the three of them in the back chuckling along, and Rev half turns in his seat, face illuminated by mirth. Mouse's eyes flick over to meet Rev's grin; and then there's a stabbing flicker of a metallic reflection somewhere to the left of the horizon, Mouse reaches out to grab the back of Rev's seat, leaning forward to call out-
A whisper. This moment would replay over and over in his mind the next weeks, tumbling over itself until he couldn't tell if the whisper was memory or mirage.
"I'm sorry."
The sky splits, or the ground does, weightless and tumbling and wrenching metal screams-
Mouse's eyes flash open in the dark living room. Body frozen and breath oddly even, he lays silently, becoming aware of the cold gathering of sweat at his temples, the hum of the refrigerator, searching his senses for what wrenched him out of the nightmare. Finally, his awareness settles at the doorway between the bedroom and living room. It's not any one specific thing that he could pick out that tells him that Jay is leaning against the wall. Mouse lays still, waiting for Jay to come in and click on the TV. After a minute, it becomes apparent that he won't, and still Mouse doesn't move, breathing steadily, staring up at the blank ceiling, until he hears Jay pad back into the bedroom and the swish of the blankets as he crawls back into bed. Mouse pushes away a strange sense of loss and tugs the blankets closer, closing his eyes and searching for sleep.
When it comes, it comes slowly, fearfully, and he falls into a different nightmare altogether. The kind that is frightening in its emptiness where he falls again into the hollow agony of lonely months dichotomized into highs and crashes, always dazed, skittering, greedy and guilty and aching. It is the kind of nightmare in which nothing happens, not really, but when the morning comes he wakes breathless.
Jay is already awake; he can hear him immediately, quiet puttering in the kitchen. Erin, he expects, is still asleep. Soon, though, her alarm will shrill in the other room and she'll come stumbling out. Mouse reaches a hand into his pocket, running his thumb over the warm metal of the coin, feeling the ridges on his skin, tracing circles. He sighs, then throws off the blankets and stands, stretching out his muscles, and wanders into the kitchen.
"Morning," Jay says, handing him a mug of coffee.
"Morning." Mouse takes the mug and takes a sip to stop any other words flowing out of his mouth unbidden. Words like "why didn't you come in last night?" or "are we okay?" or "I'm sorry." Words that he knows Jay doesn't want to hear, and Mouse isn't sure he wants to say. For the first time since they first met, there's something stiff in the air, an unbalanced tiptoeing. They've spent so much time on the same page, so exactly the same page, with their shared silence, the drive to be okay. Mouse wants to get rid of the strange energy in the air between them, wants to go back to before last night, before he brought up the thing they spent so much time dancing around. He wants to go back to being okay. But when silence is so much a part of how they got to okay, Mouse can't think of any words that would do anything other than more damage. So he takes another sip of his coffee and says nothing.
AN: Review!
