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When they first toss him down into the cellar and tie his wrists, all he can think about is how awful the damn thing smells. He’s in an O’Driscoll camp, after all. Because of course, of all the shitty ways to die in this world, it has to be like this. A beaten, broken dog, too weak to stand. A workhorse with more than just a lame leg.
The place is quiet now, but that doesn’t change the fact that he can’t move, limbs too heavy and trembling too hard. No amount of gritting his teeth or forcing will help. Not when the pain makes him dizzy, combines with the starvation and the dehydration. It’s misery. He’s goddamn pathetic.
Quietly, he hears a sound. He strains to follow it, glassy eyes rolling to the side.
You.
You’re laid out on battered limbs too, cheek pressed flush to the bloodied and cold stone floor. Your breaths come in ragged little gasps, hitching and broken. He can’t tell if you’re looking at him, and his attempts to open his mouth only give weak rasps. But, he realizes with a faint touch of dread, you’re moving. Moving towards him, in aching little jerks. Crawling without lifting yourself, body too weak to do much more. He groans and rolls over, the effort alone making spots cloud his eyes.
You aren’t an O’Driscoll. Frankly, he doesn’t know who you are — most of the time it seemed your captors didn’t know either. While they came down here to try and wring him dry of information he’d never give, they appeared to delight in tormenting you without purpose. Taunting you with promises that made his blood boil with disgust, hissing things about how you’d die like a dog, never seeing the sun. There must be some kind of rationale, a distant part of his brain that plans whispers, but he’s long out of sympathy’s trembling clutches. You were hated by them. That’s enough. He doesn't care much for the details of why you earned their ire.
You were here when they tossed him in, tied him up. Already battered and — reasonably, he dryly remarked once, only for you to squack and sputter before laughing yourself sick around a mouthful of bloody spit — broken. But you’d been good for whispered conversation, at least, spoken dryly about this or that. You tossed idle insults to your captors as you introduced yourself, too spirited for him to accurately judge just how long you’d been here. Whether it was meant to be a warning or a promise of his future, you hadn’t given them what they wanted. He wishes he hadn’t learned your name, when you whispered it through a bloody little smile and a bruised winking eye. It just makes it harder to look at you, not that he supposes he can judge.
He remembers with an almost bitter amusement how you'd said something about wanting to stick out your hand to shake his, but couldn't. A little tied up at the moment, you said. Not all that funny and certainly not original — but a dry, haggard part of him appreciated the attempt anyway. If for nothing else than the fact that it displeased your collective captors so much.
Why they couldn't kill you, he didn't know. He still doesn't. All he knows is that you'd spent hours just like that, sitting in a puddle of your own blood, or heaving for breath and shooting him a smile with a missing tooth, and traded stories with him about better days. Better ones to come.
Must be nice to have people who care ‘bout you that much, Mr. Morgan, you'd said.
It is. M'real lucky.
You gave him such a wry smile. Nah. Ain't luck. Neither ‘f us has enough ‘f that to count. Jus' look at my poor face. He still remembers snorting at that.
You keep crawling. Wriggling, really. Your every breath sounds horrific; painful. He’s no better, but a part of him desperately wants to take in air. To hiss at you to stop moving, to stop hurting yourself. Stop making it worse. It’s futile, though. He knows it.
He knows that you’re dying.
Maybe it’s because he’s there for it — can track it. Catch it in his mind’s eye the way he does a wounded animal mid-leap, moving into clumsy free fall. He sees the moment the last bit of hope in your eyes dies. He’s there for it, tied up and heavy. One eye swollen shut, blood dripping down his lips. Humans are smarter than they let themselves be, most of the time. Smart enough to almost become animals again, raw with instinct and an awareness that borders on the celestial.
You’re inching toward him still, giving soft moans of pain. Whimpers and hitched sobs. It’s agony, it’s agony—
—but you make it. Of course you do, stubborn thing. He can only wheeze out something that might have been words once. He doesn’t have the energy for it. You don’t either.
Instead, you turn. Your back presses against his chest, and he can feel the way your body seizes with the pain of effort. You’re ice cold, clammy. You choke. To the best of what he can do, he leans forward, tucks his bloodied face into the crook of your neck, breath shaking. This close to death, it’s instinct to seek company. He doesn’t have words to comfort you. His arms can't move.
These days have been horrifically dark. He’s strong; he’s a brute. He knows where he belongs, stuck in the dirt and muck and clawing through the mess like he’s aiming for something higher; like he needs purchase to find a better angle to stand and sink. The world’s always been quicksand beneath his feet, dragging him down with it. For so long, he’s just tried to get the people who kept his head up from sinking under themselves. It’s what he owes.
He doesn’t know what he owes to you. To you, who would sneak your portion of old, rotten bread and water into his mouth when he was too hazy to twitch, much less tell if it was his own. You started doing it the moment he told you he had people to get home to; a gang that needed him. To you, who ran gentle fingers through his hair in the few moments you had between tied up hands and new bruises. A life debt, at least. Maybe two. Your heat against him is something that’s haunted his dreams. That heavy, aching pressure, settling sad and deep in his broken body. Coveting has made him cruel so many times over that this feels indistinguishable, but he doesn’t know another word to label it. It leaves him with words as rough as his hands, as his voice, as the blood that coats his teeth.
Want.
Oh, he wants.
He wants to hear you say his name without being out of breath from pain. Wants to see your smile in the dim light of a campfire, hands outstretched as you take a portion of something he caught for you. He wants to see you beside him, with his arms free to embrace you. Free to soothe the nightmares he hears rip themselves from your throat when you flutter between sleeping states, so raspy and ragged that it just about tears him in two.
Isn't it some kind of special misery that draws out these sorts of things? The kind that feel more like a fever dream, burning and painful and so goddamn hopeful that it makes him feel like a delirious, sick child?
It's only because you two are in this mess that he's thinking things like that, he knows. It's the only thing that makes sense; the only thing he can allow. Of course you've stuffed his stupid head full of dreams. Like he doesn't have enough to balance, enough stupid wishes to sketch. It's all too easy to make a fool hope, and the blood loss has made him as stupid as he is ugly, no matter how many times you laugh and cough something to the contrary.
You wouldn’t risk this. He wants to push you away, because to sit and take and relish means to admit what he knows. What you both already know, and have for a long while. He isn’t sure when. Closer to the start than he should like; than he should ever admit. You wouldn’t risk this, because nothing would give those goddamn bastards more joy than seeing how heavy and how far your desperation has driven you. Animals seeking comfort in terror, huddling in the dark. You wouldn’t risk giving an inch if you didn’t have to. This sort of hiding is the work of the underbelly; the work of scattered prey.
But you’re dying. And that has a way of absolving as many worries as it creates.
You’re dying, and he can’t save himself, let alone you. And that knowledge is a hell in him, claws into his guts like someone shoved a blade amidst his organs. He spits up blood like he can spare it, and continues when he can’t. Your body just presses closer, wracked with cold and pain and fear.
A strange part of him wants to beg you. He isn’t really sure what for; what good he thinks his pleas will do. It can’t be much. If he thought a fool’s pleas and wishes were worth half a damn, there would be more bastards in hell that he put there personally. But he wants, anyway. Wants desperately. He wants to beg, curled up there on his knees, and for you to look at him with those spitfire eyes and promise something. It feels like your promises would hold weight. Maybe that’s why you’ve never made any to him, save one.
You’ll make it out of here, Mr. Morgan. You’ll give ‘em hell.
He can’t see your face. He doesn’t know how to say that he doesn’t want that burden; doesn’t want your bloody hopes saddled on such weary shoulders. All he can do is breathe along your neck, and hope that he isn’t pressing on a bruise you’re too exhausted to flinch from. His lips are to your skin, tracking your sluggish pulse. Your name, and his gratitude. He whispers it. Whispers both. He never gave it much thought before now; but you told him once you'd like to die knowing somebody would miss you.
By the time the gunfire comes, you’re cold. So cold that he’s pressed up close to every inch of you, stiff and aching hands twitching uselessly behind him. Trying to push his own body heat into you; to repay at least one of those goddamn debts. Warm your bones that stopped shaking, soothe those silent breaths that rattled your lungs. The hands that pluck him up off the ground are too gentle for the thing he's become. He's dead weight. His legs won't gain purchase under him, for every inch that carries him up carries him away from you. Getting colder by the second, and with no breath left to complain, or snicker painfully, or smile.
You’re gone.