Work Text:
The book I've been reading
rests on my knee. You sleep.
It's beautiful out there -
fields, little lakes and winter trees
in February sunlight,
every car park a shining mosaic.
Long, radiant minutes,
your hand in my hand,
still warm, still warm.
-- 'On a Train', Wendy Cope
*
He remembers the campaign bus, years ago. He hardly remembers anything. There are mostly voices in his mind, when he tries to think back, usually arguing, always insistent, seldom correct. Josh would heckle the bus driver; CJ would try to make him stop. Leo would roll his eyes and roll his voice out underneath them, pulling up their bickering from under their feet, leaving them breathless, staring at him. Thank you, he would say, voice echoing in deep bounces back and forth against the walls. Ringing in your head until you couldn't help but stop and listen to him. The kind of voice Toby always wished he had.
He - the kid, the new boy, the deputy he never wanted, the protégé he never wanted, the young man with the black hair and the red lips: Sam - sat in the corner, silently. He isn't afraid to open his mouth, but still he doesn't very often, as though he is unsure of the air, wants to listen before he commits his words to it; to see if they are too heavy or too light, too full up with sunshine, too insubstantial or too thickly wrought out of his own dreams. It is this which makes Toby, finally, like him.
Not the dreams, most of which he finds almost wilfully foolish. Beyond pie-in-the-sky; Mr. Seaborn has opened a restaurant in cloud cuckoo land. They agree seldom, because Toby is a pragmatist and Sam isn't, yet. He hasn't had idealism burnt out of him and replaced with failure yet, so there is no way he could understand Toby, who never had any idealism to begin with. At least, not that he remembers.
But Toby likes the silence that stays on Sam's lips. It draws his eye. It keeps it there. He is staring when Sam looks up at him and smiles. Much too honest a smile. Not enough guile to survive; none at all. Toby shifts his gaze; Sam looks, he thinks from what he can catch out of his peripheral vision, disappointed. Diminished, almost. Toby looks back up at him then, suddenly feeling a kind of loss in his belly which he does not comprehend. But Sam has looked away too. And now his face is covered with shadows as they pass underneath a cluster of trees standing by the road, covering his face with darknesses not thick but significant. He no longer looks happy. Toby frowns, and allows himself to think about brushing those shadows away, but stops when he realises he is not the right man for the job.
Later, the same night. Toby slips out of the bus, now stationary, to call his wife.
Andrea's voice on the phone is a rich, velvet sound. Her breath hums down the line. He imagines that breath against his skin, and closes his eyes. She's saying something he ought to be paying attention to but can't - too many thoughts are exploding in his head at once. He says it on impulse, to make the thoughts stop:
"I miss you."
She takes a breath in, then out. The crackle over his cell doesn't make him flinch, but hold the phone closer to his ear. "Is everything ... "
"Yeah," he says, too quickly, "Everything's fine. I just ... "
"Okay, Toby."
"I should -- "
"Get back on the bus, honey. You sound like you're shivering."
"It's cold," he says, through lips that weren't numb until just that second.
"Sleep tight," she says, in a whisper. He opens his mouth to return the words, somehow, and as he does hears the click of her hanging up the phone. He sighs.
They have stopped, just for a few hours. The driver needs to sleep. They all need fresh coffee, fresh food. He needs a cigar badly. It's not that late, but the night is black enough to fool you that all the good hours of the evening are gone, and nothing is left to them now but the time when reasonable people should be in their beds. Toby sighs into the air again, tries to see his breath disappearing. It's too dark.
"Was that your wife?" asks a small voice, mostly filled in with the sound of the wind. Sam.
Toby nods, and then wonders if Sam will be able to see him well enough to appreciate the nod.
"Yeah."
"Yeah," Sam says, like an echo. Toby remembers, distantly, Sam saying something about a fiancee, a wedding postponed, a house in New York, a leaving he chose without choosing. He wonders if Sam is lonely too.
"What're you doing ... out here?" Toby asks, gently.
"I stole a cigarette."
Toby frowns. "You don't smoke."
"I was thinking about taking it up."
"Why?"
Sam doesn't answer. Toby can see, having adjusted to the darkness now, that he is sitting on a two-foot cut of dead tree trunk, not far from the side of the road. In his fingers he is twisting a small, filter-tip cigarette. One of the Governor's. One more habit they will need to coax him out of. Toby crosses the road, goes to stand close to Sam, almost close enough to feel the heat of his body, in flickers, across his hands, his thighs.
"I don't have a light," Sam says, quietly, sadly.
Toby narrows his eyes in the darkness. He fumbles in his pocket, draws out his own lighter, flicks it with his thumb and illuminates the boy's face with a tiny, half-inch flame.
It seems to eat the darkness. Sam's face in yellows and reds and sodium whites, turning his eyes grey, with a spark of starlight.
"Just one, okay?" Toby says, listening to his voice sound like far-off thunder.
Sam nods. He raises the cigarette to his lips and his eyes to Toby's. Toby lights the thing, and can't help the small lick his tongue makes over his lower lip; whether agitation or as evidence of temptation, he isn't sure. Sam, still slightly lit by the glowing tip of his one and only cigarette, takes a long draw of smoke, then starts coughing, hugely, strangely. It's been a long time since Toby's first inhalation and he doesn't remember whether he coughed or not.
"Good?" he asks, sardonically.
"Not really, no."
Toby draws the cigar he originally came out here to smoke from inside his jacket pocket. It is one of two. He lights it, then inhales, slowly. The smoke is sweet, and reminds him of his wife. He breathes it out in one long, sad exhalation.
"You have to get used to it."
Sam coughs a little more. "Yes."
"You're doing well."
Sam coughs again, as if on the praise. "Yeah?"
"In the sense that you're not puking your guts up in the snow."
"Right."
"Is there ... room on the rock?"
"It's a stump."
"Is there room on it?"
"Sure."
Toby nods. Sam shifts up until he is almost falling off the end of the log. But as Toby sits down his thigh brushes Sam's and his shoulder rests against the boy's and then they are sitting quiet, with smoke clouds crowding their faces. Toby leans against him, slightly, pressing their arms together: a test, of what, he is not sure.
Sam takes perhaps three more puffs, in and out, then grips the cigarette round the middle and drops it to the ground, twisting the toe of his shoe over it. Toby feels sadness well up in him once more and takes a long draw on his cigar as comfort.
"You're shivering," Sam says.
"It's cold," Toby says.
"We should get back on the bus."
"Yes."
Neither of them move. Their arms are pressed together tightly. The warmth of Sam's body makes several tiny pressure points in Toby's, making him want to move, desperately; making him feel as though he is about to be caught, trapped, as though he should run away. He stays sitting, very still. Sam sighs, shifts a little on the log, then moves closer to Toby. When he drops his head into his hands the entire line of his side presses against Toby's ribs, hard and hurt and secret. He already knows he will be required to never mention this to anyone else; that this is something lost between the two of them. He's happy enough with that.
Toby lets his hand first rest, then rub Sam's back. He doesn't think Sam will tell him, if he asks, what the matter is. So he doesn't ask. He rubs the palm of his hand into the centre of Sam's back, learns that he can feel the vertebrae standing out there and the branching of a few ribs. Then he slips that hand around Sam's waist.
Toby is shivering; Sam is taking in deep, pained breaths. Toby doesn't think he is crying, but wonders if he would be, if he was by himself. But he isn't. Toby wonders what is keeping him here, with this boy he wasn't even sure he liked until a week ago, offering comfort which was never asked for, as unwilling to move away as Sam seems to be to ask him to go.
This then is movement: motion towards responsibility, a first step taken with this man who Toby doesn't yet know, down a road which might lead somewhere glorious, or nowhere at all.
The door of the bus opens, loudly, breaking their silence. Sam's head jerks up; Toby's arm slips away.
"We're gonna set off again, fellas," CJ says, in a voice which sounds tired with argument.
"We're coming," Toby says. He hears his voice travel in darkness, like a promise. He stands up, and then Sam stands up. Their arms brush as they turn back towards the bus. Toby drops his cigar in the dirt and twists the toe of his shoe over it; Sam waits on the steps of the bus, smiling.
The bus drives, on and on.
*
Years later, on a train, in another country, moving away from the one which has forgotten them now, as all loved things must. Outside the window: hot sun, dust, the curving red mountains they have come here to see. Toby doesn't know why, only that Sam wanted to, so he said: yes.
He can't breathe very well: the air up here is thin, it tastes bitter, stretched. It means he cannot sleep through the train ride, though he thinks it's unlikely he could have anyway - the rail is full of bumps and dips which feel more like ravines and dead animals, lying over the track. His right hand is clenched on top of the book he is reading - poetry, the kind he finds painful and too honest and Sam finds too anodyne:
I do not want to know whether he loves me.
I want to go with whom I love.
Toby feels vaguely guilty for not being able to read the German, but not guilty enough.
Sam is asleep. The altitude doesn't seem to bother him, nor the rocky ride. He has been asleep for the last hour: quiet, looking sombre in sleep as he never does when awake, even now.
His head has slipped from Toby's shoulder. Still sleeping, about fifteen minutes ago, he murmured something, coughed a little, and shifted his head down to Toby's lap, making himself comfortable, in a place where he is seldom uncertain of a welcome. Toby transferred his book to his right hand, smiled. Sam shifted, burrowing in against Toby's body, getting warm, nuzzling, like a dog, or a child. He only stilled when Toby laid his hand over Sam's head and stroked, in one long pass, from the black hair now threaded with white just above his ear, to the hard square rock of his shoulder.
He repeats this, enough times to lose count. Sam sleeps on; Toby continues to read.
They are perhaps an hour from the end when Sam wakes. He raises his head up into the motion of Toby's hand, disrupting the hot, fragile air around them. His face is warm, flushed, still covered in sleep. He opens his eyes but slowly.
"Hello," Toby says, smiling.
"Hi."
"We're not there yet."
"That's okay."
"Did you sleep ... well?"
Sam smiles. "You have comfortable thighs."
Toby raises an eyebrow.
"Which is a good thing."
"Yes."
"How much longer?"
"An hour?"
Sam nods. He sits up, slowly, like the middle-aged man Toby can't believe he now is. His eyes still out-blue the sky. There are few lines on his face, and those the ones made by smiling too much. His shoulder bumps Toby's. He reaches for Toby's left hand, the one still feeling the memory of his smooth, black hair; the pulse beat in his neck; the solidity of his shoulder.
Sam's hand is warm in his, still warm. There are years there, worn into his skin. Nights passed together with work, in drink, chastely and not so; nights in grief, and in celebration. A night when they said goodbye and believed it would be forever.
Toby squeezes Sam's hand inside his own. Sam angles his head up, back, exposing a neck once white and now tanning, and kisses Toby's cheek.
The train climbs, up and up.