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Clouds heavy with rain hung low over New York and Alan was sick with anxiety. The city had always been like this of course, but he couldn’t help seeing it differently now. Spending so many terrifying years trapped in a rainy New York inside the prison of your own mind tends to change your perspective. So on days like this, Alan feels like a kid again, jumping at shadows, restless and irritable. His nightmares flare so intense it feels as if they’ve escaped his dreams and manifested in his apartment, casting a pall over his home and tainting everything he touches.
Thankfully, he’s found a way to cope. Or something like that.
"Take this," Casey had mumbled while thrusting a piece of paper into Alan's hands. "Y'know, just in case."
Alan glanced down at the paper, crumpled from Casey's nervous hands, the number scrawled across it barely legible. Alan fixed him with a suspicious look. "Just in case what?"
Casey couldn't look him in the eyes, couldn't look at him at all. He suddenly had a very intense interest in the shrub to Alan's left, the greenery of it just beginning to fade in Bright Falls’ autumn air. Alan also felt like he had been slowly drained of his vibrancy, wasting away in the darkness all those years like some deep cave creature. But the hint of red rising on Casey's cheeks was returning some of Alan’s color, too.
"Just in case," he reiterated. "Christ, Wake, just take the damn thing."
So Alan took it. The first time he called, it was pouring rain and he had been pacing a trench into the floor of his living room for the better part of the morning. The storm had him on edge, and Alice’s imminent departure for a photoshoot was only adding to his anxiety. The memories of their apartment in the dark place and the haunting truths it held plagued him as the storm raged on. Alice could sense his tension.
"Why don't you call up that Casey guy?" She'd asked far too casually as she crossed the hall into the bathroom, like it was an afterthought to a conversation they'd already been having.
Alan stopped dead in his tracks. "Why the hell would I call him?"
Alice emerged from the bathroom sometime later in a fitted suit with her hair pulled up into a loose ponytail. She was smiling a knowing smile, one that Alan had always hated and always loved. A smile that told him she knew his very soul, inside and out, and always would.
"You look gorgeous," he said.
"I know.” She leaned up to kiss him on the cheek. "Call Casey."
Alan was poised to argue, as always. It was his nature and even thirteen years in the dark place had not changed that. But she shushed him, kissed him again, and Alan knew he'd already lost that hypothetical disagreement.
"It's kinda cute y'know," she said on her way out the door. "Were you this nervous with me?"
He groaned in frustration, embarrassment, whatever other emotions come from crushing on the man who shared the name and likeness of a character you'd made up in your own head. Was it shame? Definitely. There was something else too, something dark and howling like a storm at the heart of him, something else he wasn't ready to face just yet.
Alice suddenly decided she would probably be gone allllll day - said with a dramatic wink that made Alan groan again into the crook of her neck - and she hoped that he wouldn't be too lonely while she was away - another wink - and that maybe he could even invite someone over to keep him company, just in case.
Alan glared at her. "Just in case what?"
"Just in case." And she was out the door.
That evening, Casey asked him no less than six times if he was sure his wife was okay with this, and Alan apologized no less than twelve times for being a nervous wreck.
“It's fine,” Casey said. “But Wake, I can't be responsible for ruining your marriage, do you understand? I can’t -”
But he didn't get to finish his sentence because Alan was pushing him up against the kitchen island and kissing him with all the awkwardness and desperation of someone who hadn't touched another human being in thirteen years.
Rainy day visits became their strange little ritual from then on out. It was mortifyingly Pavlovian to Casey. The minute the first drops of rain splattered against his window, arousal would flare in his belly and he'd spend the morning watching his phone like a hawk. Wake's call would always come around midday. Some days, Casey would make his way down to the subway just after breakfast in anticipation. Most days, he found himself praying for rain.
It was a good thing they had going, he thought. They’d drink, commiserate, talk. Fuck. Wake's wife never seemed to be around on those days, and Casey was convinced that he was cheating on her. One day he drunkenly joked to Wake that she was welcome to join their little pity party. The next week during a thunderstorm Casey was pressed between her and the writer like he belonged there.
Those times were rare though, as she insisted this be Wake’s “thing”. Casey secretly liked the sound of that, was thrilled about being Wake's. Alex Casey the character was Wake's thing, so why shouldn't Alex Casey the FBI agent be his too? They were inextricably linked now - by the dark presence, by the thick clouds over the city, by their bodies locked together in the writer's bed. Maybe they always had been. Maybe he was destined to belong to Wake. Either way, it was his shameful desire to bear.
Today, Wake had called first thing in the morning, leaving a rambling and shaky message in Casey's voicemail. He was clearly upset, more so than normal, so Casey nearly sprinted through the rain to catch a cab. Normally he’d grin and bear it on the subway, but something in Wake’s voice had triggered something inside him. An urge to protect, maybe. Or maybe it was more primal than that, something dark and nefarious and psychosexual. The tone of Wake’s voice was soft and vulnerable, and as Casey sat tense in the back of the cab, some deep, hidden part of him wanted nothing more than to tear at Wake with his teeth.
Some weeks before, Wake had slipped a key card to the elevator that led to the penthouse into Casey's pocket.
“What's this for?” Casey asked, fighting a sudden queasiness that had wormed its way into his guts.
“Y'know. Just in case.” Wake patted his pocket then kissed him unbearably gently.
Casey stared at him unblinking, unmoving. Just in case what?
“Just in case.”
When Casey let himself in, the writer was waiting for him, a nervous mess at the door. The elevator had scarcely closed behind him when Wake pounced, kissing him feverishly, like they'd been apart their whole lives.
Casey reckoned they had in a way.
“Rough one today?” Casey managed through ragged breaths. Wake could only nod. Casey ran a soothing hand across his broad shoulders, feeling the tension beneath the trembling surface of his skin. “Let's get you taken care of, yeah?”
Alan couldn't hear the rain through the sounds of his own gasping moans as Casey lay nestled between his legs. The slow, deliberate movements of Casey's tongue sent seismic shivers through him, rolling up his body like waves that broke upon the shore of his brain. Each crashing wave chased away the darkness settled there, drowning it and turning it into something new. Something bright and searing that made Alan's legs shake. The roughness of Casey's sideburns brushed the insides of his thighs, the friction adding to the fire already raging in his gut.
“Open up for me,” Casey rumbled, shoving Wake's thighs apart to lap at his core - trying to reach that dark, boiling anger that Casey knew was at the heart of him. Casey was drawn to it, because that same darkness festered inside him too. A tainted spot where the dark presence had touched his soul, it hungered for Wake in a way that made Casey feel like a man starved. So he ate his fill of Wake and drank his moans, savoring the taste of the darkness inside him.
Alan bathed in the afterglow. That's what it was all about, really. Chasing the ever-encroaching void away with the white-hot pleasure of sex. He'd explained that to Casey once in their post-coital haze, and Casey nodded as if he understood perfectly. Alan supposed he might. He'd been host to the dark presence too, and with it all of Alan's rage and resentment and pain. That made two people that were forced to carry the burden of Alan's anger.
Alice. She would be home soon. Alex. He would run into her in the lobby on his way out. They'd kiss maybe, their little secret, passing the torch that illuminates Alan's world. He felt selfish, like the self-important asshole he'd always been, that had nearly driven everyone away from him years ago. But those were thoughts for another rainy day, and there would be many, many more.
He lingered at the window, staring out into the dreary evening sky. The rain was coming down harder than ever, and he felt the darkness creeping back in like a bad habit. Casey's strong arms snaked their way around his waist, and Alan felt him go up onto his tip-toes to peer out into the night.
“Not letting up, huh?” Casey hummed into Alan’s freckled shoulder.
“Guess not.” Alan flexed his fingers, digging his nails into his palms. It didn't escape Casey's notice.
Casey sighed, pressing his still naked body flush against Wake's. “Guess I have to put in overtime then.” He slid a hand down the writer’s stomach, brushing through the sparse hair below his navel. “Can't have you going to bed like this.” His fingers slipped between Wake's folds with ease, warm and soft and still wet. Casey wasn’t sure if the wetness was Wake’s or remnants of his own, and a wave of dark hunger roared through him as he nudged the writer's legs apart with his knee.
So close to the window like this, Alan couldn’t see the city for his own distorted reflection. Just like the windows in his writer’s room - there was darkness and then himself, one and the same. He started to drift, feeling himself being pulled under into that abyss in his mind, when Casey appeared, brows furrowed in pleasure, over his shoulder. Their bodies warped in the double paned glass, the lines between them blurred by the streaking rain, and all around them, darkness.
But inside, there was the light. Burning, tearing through Alan like a wildfire as Casey rocked into him.
Casey was fighting his way into his shoes as Wake watched on with an expression that a few months ago Casey would have deemed unreadable. But he understood it now, understood all of Wake’s quirks and eccentricities. He knew what would upset Wake, what would calm him, what would send him on a tirade. It pissed Casey off, but he somehow knew the writer better than he knew himself. So he knew that Wake was about to speak, and exactly what he was going to say.
“You could always stay.” Wake couldn’t look at him when he mumbled it, his nervous gaze focused instead on the floor below Casey's perfectly polished Oxfords.
“Is that right?” Casey teased. He couldn’t help it. It drove Wake crazy, and Casey loved that he could so easily slip under his skin. “What for?”
Wake sighed, gesturing in exasperation at the windows behind him where the rain was just starting to subside. “Y'know. Just in case.”
Casey yanked the writer down for a kiss that ripped a pitiful sound from him. Their lips ghosted over each other, every panting breath from Wake shotgunning dark desire directly into Casey's lungs. That insatiable abyssal hunger flared inside Casey again, ignited by Wake's desperate need for him to stay.
He grinned. “Just in case what?”