Work Text:
At first he'd thought it was a dream. No such hope. Whatever the fuck it was was too real, real enough to make waking life seem like a grainy memory. The water he ran through was clear and elemental, and felt like it flowed through his clothes, under skin, inside the joints of his toes, within him, a shock every time he rolled or stumbled or ducked under.
His memories of the day had faded as if with the setting sun. He was used to that, fumbling after memories, trying not to hate his own feebleness - but he didn't feel feeble now. He'd been resting, slouching on a chair in muddy clothes, Sunny's puppy snuffled against his feet - she'd been working in the garden with him all afternoon, trying to plant trees faster than the dog could mess them up. He'd been tired - she'd done far more work than he had. He could hear her singing. She and Hal were cooking dinner while he rested, and it smelled, for once, like something other than a complete wreck. He'd closed his eyes, knowing they'd wake him soon enough.
The next thing he knew, he'd fallen in the river.
Bruised and drenched into awareness, sight shot to greyscale, bones rattled, eyes transfixed by a black figure rising above him. He pulled himself to his feet, and the creature's boots hovered at his eye level. Looked up into blackness and whiteness and a single drop of red.
"I know you. You said - said the spirit of -"
"Of the warrior, always with you. Always. And now that spirit must know the sorrow of the fallen."
Hope it's a dream, but always assume it's a mission until proven otherwise.
The water flowed, and he walked against it, and then they came. A group of six substanceless men walking close together, men bleeding from shots to the chest or head - they looked at him, those that still had eyes, and he knew he mustn't touch them. He dived between them, dodging into the riverbank, thinking to climb out but met with a wall of jagged thorns. Another soldier lurching at him, another stagger to the right. He was unarmed. He couldn't do anything but run past them.
They didn't look back. But as they receded into mist, he realised he'd recognised their uniforms. Iraqi military.
Well, shit.
There were more people coming. More recognised uniforms, more history, and oh god, now a clutch of skull insignia and a tall merc with a shotgun - Shotmaker - His body kept moving, but his mind had curled into a tight, frozen ball. This was Outer Heaven, and it had never lost the power to affect him.
Every time he brushed against one of the fallen, he felt himself become a little more like them.
He was starting to see how it worked. Water - water displaced by whatever you cast in it, flowing around obstacles, past corpses. Each ripple was a curved moment. The Sorrow was still above and outside this, barely noticed amid mist and conscience. The water flowed much faster through the empty months where he hadn't killed anyone - and then they came again in ones and twos. CIA wetwork. They didn't look at him as he stepped around them; most had never seen his face the first time around. After them, a run of river as empty as those years between.
He ran through it, current tugging against his knees, because taking time to think would always damn him. He ran all the way to Zanzibarland - a throng of mercs, troopers, and roiling water. Near their head was one he'd known well, wrapped in black, staring at him in despair - Goddamn.
It wasn't going to get easier.
Finally, that unmarked shadow, fast and faceless and deadly as it had been in life - Night Fright. He rolled into the water and half-swam to the space beyond those distorted legs, his hands clawing over a smooth pebble-bed that he realised, abruptly, he did not want to think about.
They never looked back. He raised up from his stoop, head still bowed, hands still thrust in the water, memories flowing through them. His mind felt clear for the first time in years; his soul, never murkier. He knew who he had to face next. And he had never refused to accept what had happened, what he'd done, but that acceptance didn't make it hurt any the less.
"I told you."
He realised, dimly, that the water had stopped flowing.
There were people who always moved against the current, as if immune to the laws that governed the rest of the world. There were voices so strong that they cut past death, and he had known for ten years that his was one of them. He looked up. There, leaning on the thorned riverbank, long legs crossed in the water, arms folded, smiling face caked with blood. "I told you I'd be here for you - remember?"
Beyond, a long stretch of empty river; five years of killing no one, except for himself, one drop at a time. Water barely moving. He stepped forward, his heart so full of words that he didn't have a damn clue what to say. The already-known - You were never my enemy - the irrelevant truth - There's someone else - or the whole story - Your sister fucked us up and saved the world, again - He reached for Gray Fox's outstretched hand and his touch passed straight through it but he let that life go, let his mortal strength drain into their contact.
The honesty beyond bitterness - Being hurt by you was always worth it.
The wild question - And how long were you stuck here? Did you walk for five years, finding no rest from what you'd done, before you came back to ask me to kill you again?
Water beginning to run, just a hint of current ebbing between their feet. The never-spoken - "I love you."
Frank leaned forwards, their faces brushing close together. "This isn't the place for that," he whispered, smile falling from his face, grey eyes still shining under shattered orbits. He was slipping downstream. "Neither was life, though, was it?"
He shook his head. "It was worth it. You - you were worth it." No other way to say it, with his heart burning in his chest and the river sucking at his legs. No time, no words, to explain everything that Frank had given him and everything he'd saved him from. Love and living would have to be enough, because there was no other way to hold on to him. Never had been.
The ghost nodded and dropped his broken hands into the water, as if the rushing of time would, in the end, make them clean. No way to make the moment longer - Frank turned away into the slipstream, leaving him to face the torrent alone.
Not one of them had looked back, but Frank did, watching him over his shoulder as he drifted into the mist. "David," he said, voice fading into the running of the water. "I love you."