[#19]: Liam & Seven
“Yeah, me too. I’m glad, I mean. To see you.” The breadth and ease of Liam’s smile was like a trickle of something heated and thick sliding down the column of Seven’s spine, a broad touch, and it had the corners of Seven’s own mouth hitching up into a wider smile before he even knew it was happening. Liam looked good, up close. Really good. He looked whole and happy, if a little uncertain about - well, all of it, probably. The weirdness of the night, the weirdness of them.
A moment’s pause to blink and he realized he’d been staring, clearing his throat with a soft chuckle and dropping his gaze to the table spread out with supplies. He reached out to grab a flashlight each for them, one small enough to fit into the utilitarian pockets of his jacket but still with enough heft that he knew it would be powerful, with a good weight to it. He held the second light out for Liam, smile still fixed in place but spread out a little more so that it crinkled the corners of his eyes. Caught up in Liam, how good it was to see him again, all together instead of frayed.
“Yeah, looks like it. You want to grab a basket?” He glanced up and gestured with his beer in a random direction, one not too crowded with other hunters. Waited until Liam had picked a basket for them to share and started to head that way, glancing over his shoulder once to make sure that the other man was following before he pulled the flashlight back out of his pocket and clicked it on. The light was extraordinarily bright as he’d expected, stark white and swinging as he cast the beam over the grass and the thin scattered of young trees around them.
He was trying to think of something that wasn’t completely weird to start talking about, not just the weather or their jobs or something inane and playing too fiercely at ‘normal’. Not that there was a normal between them, hadn’t been for some time. So he’d settled on just opening his mouth and blurting out the first thing that came to mind. “So, have you—”
And that’s when it hit him like a cinder block between his shoulder blades, knocking his air into nonexistence and buckling his legs under him so that he was flattened to the dew-slick grass, wheezing with the agony of windless lungs that couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe, he was seeing iridescent pinpricks of dancing stars in his vision and the flashlight and beer bottle each went flying. And then it wasn’t just the pain, it was claws, shredding through the thick canvas of his jacket like tissue paper and digging into the meat of his shoulders, and he wanted to scream but he didn’t have air, couldn’t get air, couldn’t get - couldn’t -