golden retriever puppy allowed onboard by accident (ruminate) wrote in warrantlogs, @ 2015-12-01 01:24:00 |
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A part of Hector had hoped that things would go back to normal, eventually. People fought. Sometimes fists flew. Among sparring partners, that sort of thing wasn't unusual, and blowing off steam with a few bruises didn't hurt anyone in the long run. But his fight with Sawyer hadn't been normal. It had been extreme, and unnecessary, and not a fight so much as a vicious, unwarranted attack. He had to admit that: he'd gone to the captain with his confession, to receive penance and come clean about his misdeed. He'd waited longer than that to see if Sawyer's frozen demeanor would start to thaw over time, but it was reaching an intolerable point. Sawyer fled every time he walked into a room and barely met his gaze, much less going so far as to visit him in the engine room. Exactly the way he'd asked: Sawyer left him alone. He got his peace and quiet back. At a high price. He knew what he had to do. It was late at night, well after most of the crew was asleep, when Hector finally messaged the medic and asked to speak to him in person. A few doors separated their rooms. He didn't knock, so that his entrance wasn't announced through the entire hallway, simply tested the lock and let himself in when he found it open to his touch. The medic's back was pressed to the wall. His legs, clad in red pajama pants, folded neatly above his bedclothes; feet on the mattress, arms on his knees. Not unlike a scene anyone would find, come late night in Sawyer's room. More palpable differences were the tension haunting the back of his neck and over his shoulders. The fact that every trinket, every little memory ensconced in a shell or a picture frame or a figurine, even posters of women, had been carefully removed from sight. And more than that, on the edge of his dresser, not within arm's reach but there nonetheless, was Sawyer's sidearm. His weapon of choice. The only way he ever really got one up on another human being. Some presentation of the threat he was accepting. He had been satisfied, then, that his room didn't reflect the person anyone'd expect it to. Furniture, walls, piece, and a pile of blankets underneath him and his jimjams. Staring back at Hector with more indifference than he really felt. Of course the gun was the first thing Hector noticed. Before the slash of red cloth, before the walls stripped bare, before the way Sawyer was looking at him: his gaze snapped to the gun, and his hand hesitated on the door. Slowly, he closed it behind him, deliberately. Leaning back, he squared his shoulders against the exit, the way he'd promised. Only then did he properly look around, eyes narrowed as he swept the nearly naked room, the empty bunkbed above Sawyer. The medic himself stood out in sharp contrast, pale, freckled skin almost luminous against the cold, metal walls of the Kamikaze. It struck him how obviously he was invading Sawyer's space, and he regretted his choice, but there was little other option. Nowhere on the ship was so private and secure as this, right now. Finally, hands linked behind his back, Hector bowed his head and cleared his throat. "I came to apologize," he began. "Like I said, I reported myself. And now I'm here to apologize to you." Sawyer could only stare. His demeanor as a whole since the other man had walked in had been wary, tense, uncertain maybe. But now, with the way he stood tall against the door he'd just shut and every word fell stiff and rehearsed and formal, it was burning him up inside and he didn't know why. He reported himself (when Sawyer had bent over backwards to make up a story), and now he'd come to apologize (and how, Sawyer was sure, the apology would be heartfelt, how it would mean anything beyond righting the course.) "Okay," he said, quietly, swallowing the burn, and didn't move. This was what he came here for. Let him do it. Okay. He had permission. Sawyer was listening. For all his education, words had never been his strong suit. Certainly not when they pertained to his feelings, his emotional state. And yet he'd come here in an attempt to give Sawyer some perspective so that he might understand — not why Hector had acted the way he did, but why he'd been wrong. Why everything he'd said had been wrong. "I'm sorry." It was quiet. Too quiet: he started again, a little louder. "I'm sorry," Clafton, "Sawyer. I lashed out at you for no good reason. I attacked you for reasons that had very little to do with you, or what you were saying, and I...chose to make it about you, and that was unfair. Selfish." His chest rose and fell with a heavy breath, and he shifted uncomfortably, locked his hands more tightly behind his back. He couldn't leave the door. He'd promised. "I'm sorry for the things I said, and for hurting you, and for making you afraid. I have never hurt another member of this crew before, and I swear it will never happen again." The younger man sat still, impassive, through every word of it, his only motion the movement of his arms gathering at the top of his knees. Even for long moments after he'd finished, the man standing rigid at the door like the trained soldier he was, Sawyer only let the silence go on, his eyes focused on the bedspread, before, finally, "All right." Beat. "Thanks." As if it were a gift he hadn't asked for. And Sawyer didn't make a move, crack a smile, or even look up. Hector's jaw tightened. There was dismissal in those words; it was his cue to leave, to drop it. He'd done exactly what he'd come here to do and delivered his apology. It wasn't his fault if Sawyer refused to accept it. Or — it wasn't his fault anymore, because of course it had been his fault to begin with, his fault this was happening in the first place. "What I said," Hector spoke up again, finally. "About you not being…" He grimaced; he couldn't help it. "About you not being a friend." He had friends, he just never called them friends. It was a word that sounded strange in his mouth, uncomfortable, awkward. Yet he managed, this once. "Was uncalled for. I'm sorry for that, as well." His shoulders lifted and dropped in a painfully long motion, for the first time showing evidence of just how much it affected him. Sawyer disliked this. All of this, the need for it at all, the pulling away—far away—from where they'd settled, and now trying to find some kind of resolution… what, because he felt he should? "You don't have to be sorry," he said, on an echo of that previous, painful shrug. This was what he'd wanted. "We're not friends. I get it now." He'd left him alone. "We work on the same ship." "No," Hector interjected, sharply. "That's what I'm trying to say." He paused, forced himself to take another breath. Trying to force his apology down Sawyer's throat wouldn't help anyone. "Yes, we work on the same ship," he continued, evenly. Calmly. "And yes, in the past, I have...complained about your presence, when you saw fit to...hover uninvited." One hand finally rose from behind his back, and Hector scrubbed irritably at his eyes as he tried to improve his choice of words. It was difficult to be diplomatic. It was difficult to not make the damage worse than it already was. He knew one wrong sentence, and he could fuck this whole thing up, irreparably. "What I'm trying to say is that I don't like the way things are now, between us." His knuckles glided against his jaw, stubble tugging at his skin. "I realize that I'm solely responsible for that. And maybe it's unfixable. But I'm trying to apologize so that you can understand that I would...like, if possible, to return to the way things were. That was fine. It was better. Than — this." Hector gestured to the air between them. The space. The tension. (The gun on the dresser.) Sawyer's eyes rose, finally, to find him: to follow the quiet unsettled way he rubbed knuckles against his jawline, the board-straight posture. His eye was near-healed by now, but still yellowed; some vicious part of him wished it was still purple, so he could more clearly see what Hector felt about it. "I did want to thank you," he finally said, strong, a little angry underneath the half-healed spaces still. "For what you did in the jail. I was grateful." There was a 'but' lingering, one he hesitated to vocalize even now. But I didn't think you'd want me to, but I didn't know how you'd react, but I didn't know what to say. "And you told me to shut up, for once," he concluded, a little flat. "So I have. I left you alone." "I know," came Hector's reply through gritted teeth. "But — listen." He closed his eyes for a moment, bracing himself. He owed Sawyer a better explanation. "The teammate who lent you a hand in jail — that's who I am. That is who I am, with this crew. But after we were released, I had an…" He groped for the appropriate word. "An incident, with my family. I'm not telling you this to try to make excuses for my actions. I'm trying to tell you that it wasn't anything you did or didn't say. It didn't matter to me what you were saying, really. I went after you because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, trying to talk to me, when the people I really wanted to go after were — not there." He started to push off against the door, hesitated, and settled back stiffly again. "I was wrong to reject your gratitude. And I would help you again, if you needed it. I see the way you look at me now, and there was a time when I would have seen that as...good, but that's not who I am anymore. I don't want you to be fucking afraid of me, Sawyer." "You can move off the door," came the mutter, a concession. The medic looking down at his hands as if they might have answers on them as to what to do now, what to say to that. Some part of him had known, maybe, somewhere deeply stubborn inside him, that he would forgive Hector when he came up here. If he were sincere. If he were half as sincere as he'd ever been. "So that woman," he started, looking up at Hector again. "The one you went off with, afterward, that was your sister." His words were slow, careful. Unseemly in their concern. "And you, you don't get along with your family." This he knew, this he confirmed, now, cautious. "You were seeing them, not me, when I was... " Hector met his gaze, then, crossing his arms against his chest as he came forward out of the narrow doorway. He didn't move far; just deep enough to lean against the wall instead of the door. "I wasn't seeing things." He felt the need to make the correction, though it was somewhat besides the point. "I was just — reacting to things that were said to me earlier, not things you were saying to me." He found himself looking away again, eyes drifting slightly to the side towards the bare walls. He didn't want to talk about that conversation, didn't want to reveal these personal details, but it was hard to avoid, now that he'd opened that particular door. He hadn't said anything about it to anyone. Your sister? his friends had asked, and he'd shrugged, cut them off, sharply. I'm fine. But Sawyer had gotten the brunt of how obviously not fine he'd been. "I wanted her to stop getting involved in my business," Hector sighed. Still he was studying his hands, not the shape of the man hovering in his doorway, the way his shoulders heaved with that sigh. "I like you, you know," his voice very soft, barely audible. His eyes on callouses that marked hard places on his palms, work and time that made him somehow proud. "That's why I don't leave you alone, like you'd always tell me to." When the next beat passed in silence, he just repeated it, mumbling, "I like you." And you hit me. "I know," Hector frowned, still staring at the wall, his knuckles against his jaw. "You want to be my friend." A beat. "Like me?" With a huffy chuckle that turned Sawyer's head, shaking it ever so slightly, more in disbelief (at himself, for speaking), he answered, "Not your friend. I want to be…" he straightened up now, though his eyes were still on his hands, running them over one another rather than look him in the eye, "significantly more than your friend." A number of thoughts blew through Hector's mind like racing ships. He wasn't certain which one was winning: they all seemed rather important, all questions demanding to be answered. He opened his mouth, wordless, and closed it again, one hand rising to press knuckles against his lips. He grimaced behind it. "You," came his words at last, slow and incredulous, "want to be more. Than friends. With me." Just in case there was any confusion: "Me, who hit you in the face." "You said that was never going to happen again," he answered, in a low voice. "And if it doesn't, then yes. And if it does, then I don't even want to be on a ship with you." Still he didn't look up at him, eyes tracing the lines of his wrists, the grain of cloth, anything else. "No." The word escaped from Hector's mouth almost before he could stop it, his head shaking hard, definitively. "No. Did you hit your fucking head?" He moved away from the wall, but it wasn't to approach Sawyer: he was restless, suddenly, and somehow angry, and he paced across the empty space between them. "Aside from the fact that you're clearly out of your fucking mind, how long have you been on this ship now? Seven, eight years? And have you ever once — even for a second — seen me express interest in being more than friends with anyone?" He paused, but when an answer was not forthcoming, he went on. "That's because I don't. I don't get involved with people. I don't do more than friends. I barely fucking do friends, if you hadn't noticed." His tone was undeniably aggressive, again; it was hard to remember that he'd come here to apologize. "You know what I do? I fuck who I want, Sawyer. I don't do this I want to get to know you bullshit that you've been pulling since the beginning. I don't waste time screwing around. And I definitely don't get into complicated —" He waved his hand, gesticulating sharply between them. "Whatever the fuck this is." "You're pacing," he told him, still quiet, though finally Sawyer's slate grey eyes had found him again, and this time there was no fear in them. Not of him or for him. "I've seen you stand your ground against thugs and criminals and other RAC members, and right now, you're pacing." You're afraid. "Because I'm tense," came Hector's forcibly even, tight response as he rounded a sharp turn and threw Sawyer a narrow-eyed glare. "This is making me fucking tense." "You stop to think about why that is?" His voice was ever softer, an easy contrast to Hector's dramatic tension. "If it's complicated bullshit, why you don't just let me ignore you for the rest of forever?" "Why?" Hector looked like he'd bitten into something unpleasant, and he growled low in his throat as he ignored the rest of Sawyer's question. Muttered, half under his breath: "I already have to see a fucking anger management counselor, now I have to deal with this shit?" On the roll of a chuckle, Sawyer looked up at him with a tinge of helplessness. "I like you," he managed, like a confession. "That's why I acted the way I did. The way you want to go back to. And I'm saying it, because I trust you when you say you're not going to do that again, what you did in the medbay, and because if we're going to go back to it, I'm going to make sure—you know what we're going back to." Hector rounded on him then. It was impossible to stand there and just listen to the younger man say those things — I like you, I trust you. "Give up," he demanded. And heard himself in the medbay: I want you to stop. Just fucking — stop. He took a deep breath, held it. One. Two. Three. Exhaled slowly. He was not going to lose it, again. He was going to be civil and calm. "In case you haven't noticed," Hector said, choosing his words very clearly and deliberately, "I have some...emotional issues. Whatever you think is going to happen here — whether or not you go back to what you were doing before — what you want is not going to happen." "Why not?" The question was open, naive. Curious. Sawyer looked at him with furrowed brow, pulling his legs into criss-cross, holding at his bare ankles as he leaned forward. And Hector stared back at Sawyer, sitting cross-legged on his bed in his red fucking pajama bottoms, staring at him with clear curiosity and unrepentant interest in his eyes. A million reasons, he wanted to say, but the one that came to his lips was the most condescending. "Sawyer," the engineer told him flatly, "you couldn't fucking handle me." The flash of hurt was the first thing: it spread across his face for less than a second, and yet it was unmistakable, blind and unexpected. But then his brow furrowed, and his fists grabbed handfuls of the sheets and he lifted himself, pulling legs together so that he was kneeling, then, at the edge of the bed, staring the other man down with the intensity normally reserved for surgery, for needle and thread, for life and death and blood and guts. "You," he started, low, "don't have any idea what I can handle." Stalking forward, Hector closed the distance between them in a few long-legged strides that ate up the ground. His hand caught Sawyer's chin, grasping it tight between his thumb and index, holding him with the strength of a man who fought iron and steel on a regular basis and won, the raw potential of a man who killed with his bare hands. He'd thought that Sawyer had seen that in him, nakedly stripped of all civility, when he'd stared up at him from the medbay floor. Apologies or not, promises or otherwise, he was not a safe man. He held everything inside, controlled, coiled, but it was still there. Ready to maul or murder. Sawyer's cheek was rough with pale stubble against his hand, and this close, he could see the faint yellow ring still staining the rim of his high cheekbone, the socket around his eye. He dragged his thumb down the edge of Sawyer's jaw, feeling his callouses catching on skin, and his eyes narrowed. It wasn't as though Sawyer was not attractive. Pale, freckled, sun-dappled even in the vast darkness of space, like a golden retriever puppy allowed on board by accident. His shoulders were broad and he could see the muscles down Sawyer's whittled waist, sinking into the lip of his red pants. But there was that innocence in him — for all that his jaw was strong under Hector's touch, he still felt too goddamn breakable, too fragile. "Yes. I do." He had withstood all the examination, the grip on his chin, the eyes tracing his jawline and his stubble and what marks of abuse were left from Hector's latest mistake. Sawyer had been still, something coiled in him then too, something readied and waiting at the barely-there space between them. He had closed the distance, this time: he had come this far, not Sawyer constantly pushing for more. The engineer had stepped willingly forward, had looked him over with deliberate (if hardened) attention. "Stop insulting me," he came back, easy, dismissive. Like that decisive opinion meant nothing: like he knew nothing yet. With Hector's grip released to trace that jawline, it was easy to catch—and the word was catch—his disparaging lips as though the words were an invitation. Hector nearly bit his mouth. It was a close thing: for all that half of him was aware of the tension between them, the crawling amplification of heat as it rose, he wasn't prepared. Sawyer caught him unaware, and his brows drew together sharply as he forced himself not to snarl into the kiss, just to adjust to lips against his and the way Sawyer tasted like the sun and, was that wine? The next heartbeat: his hand was on Sawyer's throat, pinning him down to the bed. His grip was firm, but not tight, and Hector's knee pressed between the medic's legs, holding him in place where he knelt over the other man. His teeth found the edge of Sawyer's jaw, brushed against it, and swept slowly across his skin until he found the place where Sawyer's pulse beat swiftly against his thumb, like a snake seeking hot blood. Steadily, one breath at a time, Hector's palm pressed a little more firmly into his windpipe, taking the air from him. Every little choking noise that escaped the medic was a struggle: against the grip of his fingers over his air supply, against the implication that he couldn't handle Hector, that he was weak or soft or ignorant. It was disgustingly intimate, the control and the submission, the willingness with which Sawyer accepted the thrill of that grasp, the dark want he saw waiting in the other man's eyes, the same one he felt somewhere deep in his gut. And just as quickly as it had begun, it was over. Hector rose, letting him go and pulling free. If he was breathing a little more roughly, if his nostrils were slightly flared, if his fingers stayed curled at his side — he made no comment. "It's for your own good," Hector threw over his shoulder as he turned for the door. Coughing out a laugh, the abandoned medic only called after, "See you tomorrow, Hector," as his fingers traced new marks. |