AN: Thanks for your patience, everyone. If I promise faster updates from now on, will you all promise to go sign the petition to keep Revolution on the air? (You can find it on changedotorg.) In the words of another show canceled tragically early, Revolution is "just too pretty to die!" ;-) Also, while that petition is loading, there's a review button down there, and you clicking it would pretty much make my day! lol.

Road Trip

Stairs. Fourteen stairs from the basement to the – where are they going now? Aaron's hands are sticky with blood, and it seems weird that some of it came from inside the guy who's dragging him along by the arm right now, and some of it came from inside a guy who died.

…a guy who Aaron killed.

There'd been this moment when Harold's eyes had gone flat, like his soul had just been sucked out the hole in his abdomen, and – oh shit, he's going to puke…

Something hits his shoulder – a wall – and he must have stopped, because Bass is yelling in his ear. They should call him Fuck-up Pittman. He couldn't even kill the right guy.

"…moving, Pittman!" Right. Movement. People coming to kill them. Well, coming to kill Bass, and him by extension. Aaron snorts with crazed laughter, and then nearly pukes again. Because he's the Snape to Bass's Voldemort.

"Goddamn, useless, fucking…." Aaron had heard the gamut of cursing – the part of language at which Miles was surprisingly articulate – over the last several months, but now it's becoming pretty clear that, of the two former buddies, Bass is, (linguistically, at least) the more creative.

"…on a shit sandwich!"

…

It's been less than forty seconds, and Pittman is already going to get them killed. The guy's moving – in that he's putting one leg in front of the other – but like an elephant shot with a tranquilizer gun, and this was a stupid-ass mistake, because any second now, one of Harold's guys is going to come around a corner, see Bass holding a gun and Pittman holding that briefcase and covered in blood, and jump to some pretty accurate conclusions.

…Like the conclusion that Bass is a big fucking idiot.

Somehow, they make it up the stairs without incident – apart from Aaron stopping to try to puke, twice – and Bass checks the hallway with a quick glance – clear – and drags Pittman down it into a side room.

A bathroom, actually. Fantastic. At least Pittman can puke all he wants while he's waiting for Bass to get back.

"Stay here; lock the door." Aaron blinks woozily up at him from where he's collapsed on the toilet, and Bass shoves the window open and drops out without waiting to see if he's going to follow through on his instructions.

It's freezing outside (or maybe it's just that he'd gotten used to the stuffy basement), and Bass immediately adds warmer clothes to the list of shit he's about to steal. He shoves the gun under his belt, the heavy metal cold against his lower back, and draws his swords instead. If they're lucky, he can keep any confrontations quiet enough that they can get out ahead of the shitstorm.

There's a six-car garage on this end of the property, near the back side of the house, which has probably been converted into a horse barn. Normally, he'd bet on it being heavily guarded, but he has a fuzzy recollection of coming in through a set of gates last night, so maybe Harold has banked on his outer security being good enough to make a guard here superfluous.

And maybe the Good Fairy will show up and sing Bass "Happy Birthday."

He takes the long way around.

Occasionally, as he crouches, or creeps, or kneels in the mud, he glances down at the bare skin of his left leg, feeling a twitch of that crawling, electricity-driven re-knitting, and an absurd, unsettling terror latches onto him. It's ridiculous. He's been primed by too many sci fi movies – Blade Runner, Terminator – but the idea of something electronic squirreling around in his leg, living and moving around inside his body – is several leagues beyond creepy. He tries to concentrate instead on the rush of moving on his own two feet again. Between that and this shittily-planned escape attempt, he's got enough adrenaline coursing through his system to run five or six marathons.

I mean, heck, who needs horses? he thinks, pulling the side door to the garage quietly open. On this kind of high, he and Pittman can just run all the way to fucking…

Suddenly, Bass stops short, halfway through the cracked-open door. It's pure instinct, and it takes his conscious brain a few seconds to tell him why. He stares, frozen, into the dimly-lit interior, scanning for threats, while it comes to him:

The garage smells wrong. It doesn't smell like horses, or hay, or leather, or dust, or mold, or fucking saddle soap, or any of the other weird-ass smells Bass has grown to think of as normal over the last fifteen years.

It smells like gasoline.

…

Aaron has finished feeling nauseous from shock and moved on to feeling nauseous from fear by the time Bass practically leaps back in through the window, grinning like a cat on speed.

"You are never going to believe this…"

Aaron blinks up at him, still clutching the briefcase in blood-coated fingers. "Wh…huh?"

"Hey." Snap. "Padawan!" Snap. Bass punctuates each word with a snap of his fingers in front of Aaron's face. "Ground control to Major Tom. Get up, move out, the Force is with us or whatever."

Aaron's not sure if it's the jarring snapping or the litany of pop culture references, but something finally clicks over in his head. He can practically hear the fans in his brain start whirring again.

"What…" He clears his throat, tries for something a little less squeaky. "What did you find?"

That manic grin changes Bass's voice into something less sinister and more reminiscent of a five-year old who's just been told he's getting a real live dinosaur for his birthday. "A motherfucking Jeep."

With one pull, Bass hauls Aaron to his feet and practically pushes him headfirst through the window. Once outside, he draws a sword, drags Aaron into a crouch, and taps the briefcase with one finger, still sporting that crazed smile. "And you're going to start it for us."

Because of course he is. Because this is Aaron's life now: sword lessons, murder, and a shouldn't-even-be-possible "best bros" road trip with the psycho dictator of the century.

If the universe has a sense of humor, Aaron's pretty sure he's the butt of most of its jokes.

…

It takes a very tense ten minutes to get the Jeep up and running. Bass loads extra gasoline – God fucking bless Harold, who had apparently been the only one in the whole goddamned Republic who'd actually believed Bass's talk about getting the power back on – two spare tires, water, oil, a tool kit (not that he'll know what the hell to do with it), and a case of ammo he'd taken off a guard he'd had to kill who got too close to the garage, while Aaron fiddles with shaking hands with the pendant. Finally – finally – the thing comes to life, and Bass siphons gas into the Jeep's drained tank, winds the garage door pulley around the trailer hitch and then forward to tie it off where they can cut the line, and then tests the range of the pendant by flicking the Jeep's lights on and off.

They work, and Bass's chest constricts suddenly. He settles into the driver's seat, and suddenly, he's transported back to Miles' Challenger, the night of the Blackout, the last time he sat in a car. He's there like it's now, booze on his breath, flickering phone in his hand, staring at Miles in the half-dark like a lost puppy, with no fucking clue that this moment heralds the beginning of the worst fifteen years of their lives. The aftermath of the Blackout was worse than Afghanistan, worse than Iraq, worse than any of the shitholes Miles and Bass had fought in together – warlords and cannibals and disease and starvation and civilian casualties numbering in the millions, and somehow, they'd come through all of that together and it had been Bass who'd driven Miles away.

But that night, they sit in – and then on the hood of – the Challenger for an hour before they decide to leg it back to base. Bass crosses his arms behind his head, the smooth chill of the windshield soaking through his jacket, the warmth of Miles' shoulder on one side making the temperature weirdly off balance.

Miles sprawls, lanky limbs stretched diagonally over the hood, knee cocked and heel resting above the left headlight. "What would you do, Bass – you know, if we weren't doing this? Like, say I decided to take up pole dancing, or – "

"Be your pimp, you fucker." Bass cuts him off with a lecherous smirk. Something about the way Miles asks the question pricks under his skin.

"– fine then, become a librarian – "

"Miles, you haven't read a book since the third grade."

Miles' fist thumps into his solar plexus, not quite hard enough to hurt. "Asshole." He sits up on the hood, shifting to look at Bass. "I'm serious. Say I didn't come back from – "

"Shut the fuck up," Bass rejoins automatically.

"…Well, what would you do?"

Kill myself. "Rule the fucking world, Miles. Play Halo and eat nachos all day. Who the hell knows? What does it matter?" Bass shoves himself up too, squinting out over the darkened highway, wandering people, corpses of cars. Miles doesn't answer, so after a minute, he asks, "Why? What would you do? You know, if I – " Snuffed it. " – decided to go deal cards in Vegas the rest of my life?"

There's a moment of silence long enough that Bass actually looks over at Miles, and catches just a flash of a brief, guilty look before Miles twists his face into a sarcastic grimace. "Probably go through with my pole dancing plan."

Bass laughs and punches him in the arm, feeling inexplicably like he's dodged a bullet.

The echo of that chuckle rings in his ears as he comes back to the present, his hands gripping the Jeep's steering wheel, a lump forming in his throat. Suddenly, Pittman's nasal tenor cuts through his torpor: "Are you going to put on your seatbelt?"

Bass just turns his head and blinks at him like he's a science experiment, and Pittman shrinks back into the seat cushions, holding up the pendant like a little shield. "Fine. You don't like seatbelts. Not like anyone's going to pull us over anyway, I guess…"

"You just keep that thing working," Bass mutters, then looks out the windshield at the garage door and back down at the ignition. When he reaches out, his hand is shaking worse than the first time he touched a girl. Fuck it. He twists the key with as much violence as he can manage; the engine sputters in time with his heart, and he slams down on the accelerator to keep it going.

The Jeep roars to life.

It's loud in the enclosed space, and Pittman covers an ear with the hand holding the pendant and grips the roll bar with his other hand. Bass whoops loud enough to hurt his own eardrums – they're hell and gone from subtle now, anyway – and drops the Jeep into gear.

Thankfully, his trick with the garage door pulley works – though Pittman almost doesn't cut the line in time and then almost falls out of the Jeep when he does – and they roar out the door and all the way to the back gate before anyone thinks to give chase. The gate is a wrought iron monstrosity, and Bass isn't an idiot; he'd scouted a weak point in the fence on his way back to retrieve Pittman and he makes for that now, spinning clods of grass and cutting tire tracks through the back lawn. If he weren't pretty sure they were about to be shot at, he'd pull some donuts, just for the sheer exhilaration of it.

BANG. The first shot whizzes past his ear, and if only Miles were here to see this, he'd fucking lose his shit. He doesn't have time to grab for his pistol before they're smashing through the fence, splinters flying and Aaron ducking and covering behind the dash, then there's eight feet of grass and rocks – he drops it into first and hears another shot ping off the roll bar – and then they're out on the dirt road and Bass is gunning it up to third, then fourth. They hit forty-five – which is at least ten miles an hour faster than any sane person would drive on this road – before Bass looks over his shoulder and decides that nobody's got a chance in hell of catching them. He's met a couple horses that can do this speed (met, not ridden – riding like a goddamn maniac was always Miles' thing), but they can keep it up for a couple minutes. The Jeep can do this for hours.

He hears a groan from the passenger seat and looks over at Aaron, who's slumped in a heap, clutching the pendant and the shoulder strap of his seatbelt in both hands. "Have I mentioned," he squeaks as the Jeep rattles over the ruts, kicking up a spray of dust that has Bass grinning and rubbing grit out of his eyes, "that I get really carsick?"

Bass looks at him blankly for a moment before Aaron raises a wry eyebrow over his glasses and Bass realizes that the chubby tech genius is joking with him.

And damn, it's been a long, long fucking time since anybody's done that.

He hears himself say, "I'll make sure to swing by a Walgreens and pick you up some Dramamine," and Aaron actually laughs – though it's kind of a tense laugh – and then reaches up and hangs the pendant over the rearview mirror like a pair of fuzzy dice.

And it's so much like something Bass himself would have done, several lifetimes ago, that he chokes on his next sentence and falls silent instead.

For the next thirty miles, they listen to the roar of the engine and the rumble of the tires spinning over dirt road. They roar through the bridge crossing at Trenton to dropped guns and open-mouthed stares, and Bass could stop – he's the goddamned President, after all, and they probably have intel on Miles' movements – but instinct just jams his foot down harder on the gas. For all he knows, Neville's passed this way already too, and he trusts the scheming bastard about as far as he could throw this Jeep.

Five miles before the outpost at the Raritan River crossing, Bass pulls off the road and shuts off the engine, ignoring the jab of fear in his stomach that maybe it won't turn back on. Pittman snags the pendant off the rearview immediately – so, for all his joke-cracking, there's clearly no trust lost there – and gives Bass a quizzical glance.

"Miles rode this way, and Neville must have followed him. They would have had to have fucking winged horses to make it any farther than this in a day, and since they don't know we're coming, and I don't feel like driving into an ambush before they realize they're shooting at their boss – " Or because they've been told to shoot at their boss, he doesn't say, " – we're going to stop until morning and then do some scouting on foot."

"We?" Aaron does…something, that powers down the pendant (too fast for Bass to see how), then unbuckles his seat belt and climbs gingerly down from the Jeep.

"Fine. Me. You're going to stay here and try not to get killed." At least not until Bass has figured out how to use that pendant. "How's your fire-building, Padawan?"

…

Bass makes him build two fires – one larger, to draw any unwanted attention, and within their line of sight…presumably so Bass can more easily murder anyone who stops to check it out. The second fire, they build tiny, under the edge of a big boulder that will reflect the heat back up at them. Bass grabs blankets from the back of the Jeep – and how bizarre is it to be able to say that again? – and tosses one at Aaron.

It's not really late enough to sleep, and after Bass wanders around a bit (he's either looking for Miles' or Neville's trail or setting some sort of perimeter traps…or maybe he just really likes extra long walks in the woods), he flops down across the fire from Aaron and stares into the flames.

It's just starting to get a little creepy when Bass suddenly looks up like he's just remembered Aaron is there. Frowning, he reaches down at his side, grabs his canteen, and tosses it to Aaron, jerking his chin at Aaron's hands. "Better wash that off."

Aaron looks down dumbly at his palms, his forearms, his sleeves. Dried blood looks so different; he could almost pretend it's dirt crusted onto the creases in his skin. But water turns it coppery again, and he almost gags at the smell. He scrubs slowly, watching the dirt in front of him turn black one drop at a time, scrubs the blood out of every wrinkle of his shirtsleeves, rolls them up to his elbows and starts in on his arms. He's still working intently a while later when Bass clears his throat.

"Might want to lay off there, Lady Macbeth."

Aaron looks down at his forearms, bright red in the firelight, covered in scratches from his scrubbing fingernails. There's no trace of Harold's or Bass's blood, but he can still smell it, tangy and stomach-turning and mixed with his own disgusting sweat. Bass holds out a hand, gesturing for the canteen. They lock gazes for an awkward second over the firelight, and he can see those intense blue eyes shift briefly to his shaking hands.

As Bass settles back against the rock behind him and resumes his creepy stare into the fire, he mumbles, "Don't think about it. It'll just make you crazy."

"You would know, huh?" The words tumble out in a sort of choked laugh, and Aaron wonders if he is going crazy. Hey, let's antagonize Sebastian Monroe – it's as much fun as poking a feral tiger with a stick! But Aaron's brain suddenly has no control over his mouth: "Does it get easier? You know, when you're constantly murdering people on purpose?"

Bass's eyes don't leave the fire, but the fingers of his right hand flicker. "Shit happens in war."

"Is that honestly what you tell yourself?"

One second, Bass is on his side of the fire, lounging against a rock. The next, he's got Aaron by the hair and is slamming his head back into the dirt, knife pressed against his neck. Aaron can feel a thin, paper-cut fire nicking the edge of his adam's apple. His blue eyes spark and his voice drops to a low, dangerously level whisper. "I know what you're telling yourself, Pittman. You're wishing your aim had been just a little bit better – that you'd had the balls – or the fucking coordination – to turn around and kill me instead of being a stupid fat bastard who stabbed the wrong guy just because he forgot to look where he was pointing his sword."

Before the last word is all the way out of Bass's mouth, Aaron hauls off and punches him in the side of the face.

For a minute, he's as shocked by it as Bass is. They both blink at each other in the shifting light, and Aaron absolutely can't read the other man's expression. Then Bass releases him – Aaron's head thwocks back into the dirt – …and busts out laughing.

The killer dictator touches a hand to the side of his face, where Aaron's punch has split his cheek, and continues to snort in disbelieving amusement. The knife abruptly disappears back into the boot from whence it came – so fast that Aaron hardly sees it happen – and Bass drops down onto his boot heels a couple feet away, cocks his head to one side, and examines Aaron like he's a previously undiscovered species. Aaron glares back at him, rolling his fear and howling frustration and anger at, well, pretty much everything in his whole godawful life, into that one look. After a minute, Bass stands, still grinning, and returns to his place on the other side of the fire, tossing over his shoulder a "You're gonna be all right, Pittman."

Aaron returns to his blanket in silence, trying to put a name on the unfamiliar feeling coursing through his bones. It takes him five full minutes, but finally he decides:

It feels like winning.