Author's Note: Aaaand I'm back! I'm sorry about the extended hiatus, but I got my RL writing project done (albeit a bit later than planned) and I now have exciting plans for this story! Thanks for the break, and thanks to those of you who are hanging on for the rest of the ride – I promise it'll be a great one! - DYTR
Lug Nut
The last time Aaron Pittman slept so well was a lifetime ago, when he owned two jets, fourteen software patents, and a chain of private islands.
But the dreams haven't changed.
He's sitting in one of his jets right now, the thrum of the engines buzzing in his internal organs, just enough to upset his stomach. He never eats before flights. And it's not his jet after all, he realizes as he looks around and feels a sudden gust of wind ruffle his hair and tug at his glasses – it's a helicopter (and he hadn't owned one of those, but he really should have; he could've taken Priscilla to see the – oh, damn, this thing makes him queasier than the jet; thank God he never bought one….).
Rotor wash and wind whip through the open door, roaring in his ears, and Aaron squeezes his eyes shut against the sudden nausea. His heart's pounding all the way up in his Adam's apple – thump thump thump thump thump, in syncopation with the rotors – and if it pounds any harder, it's going to shake the meager contents of his stomach loose all over the floor.
Fuck. How can you be so nauseous in your dreams? Breathe in, nose; breath out, mouth. Shit.
And then a hand falls on his shoulder, everything lurches, and he barely holds it together as he swivels to face Neville, who – and of course he has; it's a dream, a dream, a dream a dream a dream, stupid – has been sitting next to him the whole time.
Neville grabs him by the front of his shirt, and Aaron can feel the fingers curling into the fabric, twisting the hair on his chest. Oh shit. Maybe it's real. It feels real.
And then Neville smiles…
…and throws Aaron backwards out of the helicopter.
He comes to with a yell and then grunts as his flailing hand connects with something painfully hard. Still jittering with adrenaline, Aaron blinks frantically in the darkness until he makes out the lean form of Miles Matheson, holding a sword in one hand, and rubbing his jaw with the other.
"Hell of a right hook, Aaron," Miles grunts.
"Miles? What are you doing here?" Aaron's brain is preternaturally fast ninety-nine point eight percent of the time, but woken from the middle of a sleep cycle, his code's not exactly running bug-free.
"Saving your ass, as usual." Miles looks over his shoulder like he's watching for someone, then unbuckles one of the two sword belts around his waist and shoves the pair of swords into Aaron's hands.
Two swords and a leather belt are a lot heavier than Aaron would have expected. Charlie must be building some intense arm muscles with these things. "What am I supposed to do with these?"
"They're Bass's."
Aaron's brain is moving a little faster now, but even he needs more than Miles' cryptic two-word explanation. "And?" he asks, trying not to sound pissed.
There's a noise in the corridor outside, and suddenly, Miles grabs the front of his shirt, hauls him over behind the door, and crouches in front of him, sword arm tensed. Footsteps pass the doorway, slow for a moment…and continue on.
Miles lets out a quiet breath. Aaron hasn't moved from where Miles backed him into the wall. The sweat on his shirt sticks to the drywall where it touches his back, and the swords he's carrying are jammed against his chest, but if he shifts them around, he's going to make a metric ton of noise or drop them all over the damn floor, so he just stays uncomfortable. Story of his life.
Miles pokes his head out the door for one of those impossibly-fast checks – that wouldn't be long enough for Aaron to blink, let alone ascertain possibly threats to life and limb – and taps Aaron on the shoulder, motioning let's go.
Aaron shifts the swords as quietly as he can onto his shoulder, and follows Miles out the door, down the hallway, and down a back staircase that's so long it's got to lead all the way underground. At the bottom of the staircase, they pass through a basement – filled with potbellied wood furnaces and a network of iron pipes that vent little hissing puffs of steam every few seconds – and into a short hallway with two doors on either side and a bookcase at the end.
Miles marches all the way down to the bookcase, ignoring the other doors, flips a hidden switch, and swings the bookcase wide open.
Aaron can't help it. "A hidden room behind a book shelf? Really?"
Miles gives a one-shouldered shrug. "Harold's a classics guy."
Aaron squeezes through the half-opened doorway and scans the room as Miles locks up the bookshelf door – which, he notes, is also a bookshelf on this side. A look at the first row reveals that For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Collected Short Stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and The Jungle Book and other stories by Rudyard Kipling stand alongside a row of technical manuals on steam engine fitting, clockworks, and steel-forging, and also, ludicrously, what looks like an old Batman comic book.
He's about to laugh and say something along the lines of "you weren't kidding about the classics," but then he turns to survey the rest of the room (small dining table, four chairs, two queen beds – it's a frickin' underground hotel room; what the hell?)…
…and the unconscious form of Sebastian Monroe is laid out on one of the beds.
"Uh, Miles? I don't want to seem ungrateful for the rescue or anything, but…what the hell is going on?"
Miles turns to him with that look Aaron hates. It's the look that promises bad news, and it's meant various things over the last few months: someone's dead, or going to be; someone's chasing them, again; they're out of food; they're going to have to fight their way out; the plan has fallen apart and they're about to do a lot of running…
When Miles does speak, his words are clipped and to the point. "Militia patrol showed up ten minutes ago at Harold's front gate. Tracked us to the road outside, then lost the trail and decided to stop here for the night to rest – irony's a bitch, huh? Harold stalled them and we cleared the hell out. Nora, Charlie, Rachel, and Danny are outside with horses."
Aaron gives Miles a long, level look, and asks the question he already knows the answer to: "Then why are we underground?"
"Bass –" Miles starts, then hesitates – "Monroe can't travel. Not on horseback, and not at the speed we need to move. Harold can't hide all of us down here, and I can't leave Rachel and her kids with only Nora to protect them – "
Aaron tries not to feel the familiar pain of Miles' unspoken assumption – because you can't protect anybody. "So you want me to stay here."
Apparently, Miles can't find his voice – or he's used up his quota of words for the day – but he nods, sharply.
"For how long?"
"Six weeks, seven maybe. Harold'll send food down for you. We'll take care of the patrol, go on Rachel's wild goose chase, and circle back when the coast is clear. Monroe should be able to walk by then – "
Yeah, walk over and strangle me and then walk right out of here. "So let me get this straight. You want me to stay here, alone, in an underground bunker for six weeks and babysit an injured homicidal maniac? Oh, if he doesn't kill me with these – " He waves Monroe's swords in Miles' face. " – the second he wakes up." His voice has risen to an embarrassingly high pitch, but really, who the hell cares? Charlie's been trying to ditch him since the start of this insane road trip, and her uncle, for all that his sword-swinging badassery has saved their lives more than once, has never been what Aaron could call "nice" to him, and clearly thinks he's a major liability. He'd made some progress on that front after busting Nora out of Drexel's place – and really, why should he be surprised by now that Miles always tries to ditch him with his violent-with-a-few-screws-loose-ex-friends? – but here they are again, with everyone trying to leave Aaron behind.
Maybe it's kismet, for what he did to Priscilla. And that's a beyond depressing thought. Thankfully, it's cut off by Miles' reply:
"The swords are for you, Aaron. I'd leave you a gun, but someone'd hear it." He grabs the sword belt from Aaron and drops it on the table, drawing the short sword in one smooth motion as it falls. He whirls it and hands it, hilt first, to Aaron.
"Miles, the last time I swung a sword was playing 'Legend of Zelda.'"
"It's not hard, Aaron," Miles says with a look that contains both the truth and the lie of that statement. He shoves the sword into Aaron's reluctant hand. "He tries anything, you pull the sharp edge across his throat."
"Because you can't?"
Miles stiffens, but Aaron's mad enough that he lets it carry him a little further. "You practically punched out Rachel for suggesting it was stupid to bring him along, but what the hell are we doing here, Miles? Kidnapping the fucking President of the Monroe Republic?"
Miles' eyes are darkening dangerously, but to hell with self-preservation now. He's about to be abandoned for six weeks with the most dangerous man on the continent; what's he got to lose? "This…this lunatic has killed more people than maybe anyone else since the Blackout, and you're asking me to what, protect him? Nurse him back to health? Kill him for you if he gets out of line? What the hell, Miles? At least you owe me a damn explanation for why we – " He doesn't get to say "aren't just dropping this nut job off a cliff" because Miles cuts him off with a hoarse shout:
"Yes! All right, Aaron! He's a fucking crazy asshole!" He pauses, taking a deep breath. Then, quietly, "And he's my friend. And I – " He looks like he's chewing through the words, they're so galling to say, "I need you to do this. …Please." He holds Aaron's look with hooded, dark eyes until Aaron mumbles a quiet,
"Fine."
Then Miles grabs a pack that he's stowed in the corner like he can't wait to get out of there, shoulders it, and heads for the bookcase door. As he unlocks it and steps through, he mutters, "See you in six weeks."
And he's gone.
A second later, Aaron nearly leaves a large Aaron-shaped hole in the bookcase as Monroe's strained, exhausted voice grits out:
"'Legend of Zelda' was fucking epic."