"Damnit, Brick! You promised! You swore you'd stay back. Oh, fuck, Roland and Lil are going to kill me..."
Brick coughed. Pain split his chest like a vice, and he wondered again what happened, what the hell happened, why was he bleeding and dying on the ground. He had to be dying. Nothing less could hurt so badly. Mordecai was doing something, fumbling the cap off a long, terrible looking syringe.
"Don't," Brick said, but the effort of talking nearly forced him into darkness. Mordeca ignored his protest and jammed the needle deep into his chest.
At first the pain swelled, then receded. Tendrils of numbness crept out from the injection site.
"...didn't mean to...block your shot," Brick wheezed. He guessed that was why Mordecai was swearing at him, but he found it hard to think. Hard to breathe, too.
Mordecai produced a strange, choked laugh, like he couldn't breathe, either. Brick wouldn't understand until later that Mordecai had been crying.
"Idiot. Baboso. Please don't die. You piss me off so much."
Mordecai's mind and body seemed conflicted on that point, though, because even as he swore at Brick, he clutched one of the larger man's hands in both of his own. He kissed Brick's palm, right in the middle where the lines creased together.
It struck Brick as strange, too familiar a gesture for friends who hadn't known each other long. He'd only met Mordecai a handful of months ago. But the kiss caused something to flutter inside him, something like a bird- a skinny, arrogant, hot tempered bird, which would roost in his heart and refuse to be startled away, no matter how many times Brick shooed it.
He tried to shoo that feeling now, tried to be mad, because he finally understood that Mordecai had shot him. He found it impossible to be angry. He'd just fallen in love.
Brick shivered in the hot Pandoran sun, and one dream swooned into the next.
They were in the Fathoms (where I am now, an omnipresent Brick reminded), camped in the moonshadow of a Catch-a-Ride station. It was a bare shelter, only a few steel pylons to hold up a corrugated tin roof. It didn't matter. The weather was none, and Brick and Mordecai were the only living beings for miles around.
They pawed each other through their clothes. Eventually they managed to strip away their belts and bandoliers, to shed their shirts and unzip their pants. They frotted under an endless seabed sky, and Brick gazed into that bowl of stars while Mordecai panted against his neck.
They'd come to the Fathoms to work for Athena, but that didn't explain why they'd ditched Roland and Lilith, or why they'd driven off in the night, giggling like lovers across the desert. In truth, they'd come to the Fathoms to be alone: to fight, to fuck, to figure out what they wanted from each other.
His train of thought was interrupted by Mordecai asking him to screw him - demanding it, really - in a short, needy huff. They'd never done that before. Brick didn't know how, exactly. He didn't know where to plant his knees or how to hold Mordecai to line things up, but that was fine, because they fumbled through it together.
They did it face to face. So I can push you off if you get too rough, Mordecai explained when Brick asked him why, although he never did get too rough. Their height difference put them ear to ear. When they finally worked out the position, Mordecai wriggled nervously.
Go slow, please, take it easy, I've never...Oh.
Brick pushed into him as carefully as he'd asked, with aching slowness. Oh, Mordecai repeated between hard sucks of breath, again and again, softer each time. Oh. For as long as he lived, Brick would never forget the curve of that syllable in his ear.
They went like that for awhile, screwing with a kind of gentle amazement. Soon, Mordecai began to press back, making desperate little demands with his body and then with his mouth. He sobbed for Brick to take him faster, deeper, until they were rutting together in frantic, uncoordinated rhythm, Mordecai cursing so loud that all the bandits in the Fathoms might have heard.
Mordy, Brick gasped. Later, during one of his frequent fits of embarrassment, Mordecai would ask him not to say his name while they fucked. It's gay, he'd say, cutting Brick deep. But this time, he allowed it. This time, he clenched around Brick like a hot, humid night, moaning against his neck as he came.
He moaned a name. Brick...
Brick woke with a start, with tears drying on his cheeks and his dick tenting his pants. The former was easily wiped away, but the latter would be a more persistent problem.
"Brick?" came a whisper from above. "Are you awake?"
For a moment, he considered pretending to be asleep. "Yeah," he said.
"Oh, good. I...I'm a little homesick," Rocko said.
"For your bandit clan?"
"For my cell."
Brick laughed without meaning to. There was a hitch in one set of girlish snoring, then the steady honk-shew resumed. Brick breathed out. "Come down here," he whispered, as unexpectedly as he'd laughed.
There came a shuffling and shifting from above. Rocko grunted as he dropped down over the edge and sidled into Brick's bunk, rolling over his body to wriggle in between him and the wall.
"Hi," he said, flopping his arm around Brick's waist.
"Hi," Brick said, and wondered if Rocko had noticed his condition when he scrambled across. He didn't want the other man to think he'd called him down for sex. But he hadn't, or, if he had, he didn't mention it.
"Do you miss yours? Your clan, I mean," Rocko asked.
"It wasn't a...I mean...No," Brick said, surprised by his own answer, but it was the truth. "I wish I knew who...who didn't make it out, but I don't really miss bein there. I had friends, nobody close. I miss my dog, I guess, but he's dead."
"Ouch. Sorry."
"How 'bout you? You miss yours?" Brick asked, eager to change the topic.
"Just the king. Like I said, all the rest were crazy assholes. But, man, Stone was great. I would have done anything for him. We were kind of fucked up, but after he died, I was still fucked up, but I was alone, too." Rocko laughed shakily. "Forget it. Anyway, I don't miss my clan at all. It's amazing how people are. Whatever shit you're living in, that's just life. You can get used to anything."
Brick gnawed his lip and touched Rocko's hand, their fingers jumbling together. "What're you doin here?"
"I thought I told you. The other bandits sold me to the warden."
"No, not the prison. I was talkin about my cell."
"Oh!" Rocko laughed, then clapped his free hand over his mouth, as though surprised by the escape of that perfectly round syllable. "I thought...Well. You remind me of him."
That was honest, and Brick liked it. It struck him as a good reason for their tangled fingers, and legs that moved to do the same. When their lips crushed together in the dark, it was a good enough reason for that, too.
Rocko kissed differently than Mordecai, with practiced languor rather than clumsy passion, but it filled Brick with a giddy excitement that made him think, I cant take any more of this, I can't, until Rocko pulled away to kiss his cheeks and eyelids, soft little pecks that unfurled Brick's heart like the slow opening of petals. He found that he could take more, and their mouths met again.
"Can I?" Rocko asked, tugging on the hem of Brick's pants.
"Y-yeah," Brick said.
Rocko stroked him expertly. When he sunk down on the bed to take Brick into his mouth, he did that expertly, too, bobbing around his shaft in a smooth, steady rhythm. It still took Brick a long while to finish. Some self-sabotaging part of his brain wouldn't shut up about how skilled Rocko was. He's practiced, the voice nagged. He's done this a lot, with so many other guys.
Shut up, shut up, Brick begged the voice, and tried to focus of the feeling of Rocko's hot mouth around his dick, on the flick of his tongue against the underside.
But when he finally got there, it was because of another thought. Just a quick flash of Mordecai - the peculiar smoke and citrus smell of his dreads, and the tension of his narrow frame - breathing 'oh' as Brick pressed into him, fingernails biting crescents into his back.
Brick made no sound as he came, and felt a rush of guilt for not giving Rocko a chance to pull away. He doesn't mind. He's used to it, grinned that goddamned voice.
Rocko didn't say anything about it as he came up to kiss Brick again. Brick tried to reciprocate, fumbling with the hem of Rocko's pants, but was too sated and sleepy to manage. Rocko fended off his clumsy attempts with more kisses.
"You'll get me later," he said, whispering it against Brick's mouth.
"Yeah," Brick agreed. Sleep dragged him with insistent fingers. He drowsed, diving into the depths of sleep, Rocko's limbs still tangled with his own.