The Authority
Gods and Monsters
Twelve hours, seven minutes and forty-three seconds ago, they’d stopped the end of time.
Somehow, it didn’t seem to matter. Didn’t matter because sixteen minutes, thirty-eight seconds since saving the universe, the sun had still gone out. The sun had gone out, and now he was back here; back in the place he’d once sworn he’d never return to. The place where it was dark, where it was cold, and where there was nothing left – nothing at all – bar the blood and the death and the humming of tiny wires and the ticking of tiny clocks. Cold and dark and still and not human at all; just a tool. A weapon, waiting in the dark for the order to strike.
He didn’t deserve anything better. He’d thought differently, not so long ago now but oh God it seemed like an age, a Golden Age; lost and gone and destroyed and irredeemable.
Because the sun had gone out, and he had no-one to blame but himself.
Once upon a time, there’d lived a man who’d sold his name for a lie.
Sometimes, many years later, he’d allowed himself to think that maybe – just maybe – he hadn’t known it was a lie, and that when the Devil had extended razor-blade fingers and a honey-rotten smile, maybe he’d believed him. Believed that they really would be working for a better world. Sometimes he thinks that… but mostly he thinks that, really, he just didn’t care. That the Devil could have extended any offer, told any lie, and he would have taken it. Taken it because, well, when the Devil offers to make you a God, how could anyone say no, whatever the reason?
Maybe he’d had nothing to lose, maybe he was simply serving his country, and maybe he was doing it for the thrill. Maybe it mattered and maybe it didn’t, but either way he’d died on a dirty operating table in a haze of blood and pain and hadn’t realised until too late – though maybe, really, it had always been ‘too late’ – that he’d been lied to. The Devil hadn’t made him a God. Instead, the Devil had stolen everything that had made him a man, had made him human, and had left him with nothing but a head full of death and the heart of a machine.
The Devil had taken his soul and given him a name; the Midnighter.
So, in lieu of anything better, that’s who he’d been.
The first time he'd met Apollo, he'd hated the man. Hated him for what he'd been given; the gifts of a God. The bright, joyous light of the open sky and the clear dawn; a universe away from the cold, lonely dark that had replaced his soul. And he knew, really, that it was hardly Apollo’s fault. But he hated the man all the same.
Either way, they both dealt in death, and death had been the start of it.
It hadn't felt like it, at the time. It had felt like the end; the end of the world. Running across the country like ghosts, like dead men. Except they weren't men; they were weapons. Tools. Tools that'd done the unimaginable and stolen themselves, and if there was one thing they both knew, it was that the Devil did not like to share.
It had taken nearly two weeks for Apollo to finally convince him that they'd be better off in the air. He didn't need the wires in his brain to tell him it was the most logical choice; they'd be harder to track, could cover more ground. It was a good plan, and he hated Apollo for finally suggesting it. Because, of course, there was only one of them who could do it. Flight was not part of Midnighter's design. Was not, he supposed, a prerequisite for killing. Apollo could carry him, he knew –could do it almost effortlessly. That wasn't the issue. The issue was one of touch.
Midnighter did not like to be touched.
Hadn't ever since he’d woken up dead on that merciless table. Maybe he'd been the same before, maybe it didn't matter. What did matter was the screaming calculations that ripped through his wires at even the most casual brush; a thousand possibilities and a thousand responses, all worked out down to the tiniest decimal. Every touch was an attack, every attack required a defence. And a touch from someone as powerful as Apollo...
But it was a good idea. So he'd agreed.
The first time, it had been almost unbearable. Everything that he'd imagined and then some, because somehow in his initial panic he’d forgotten to take into account the height. Being held by a powerful post-human was bad enough; being held helpless a thousand feet above the ground, however...
The first few months had been a nightmare. Actually, the first few months would have been a nightmare either way; days of running and nights of hiding (the calculations came out better the other way around, of course, but Apollo was linked to the sun and they hadn't had much of a choice). Of living in and out of each other's proverbial pockets, of hard, filthy floors and days spent without washing. Long weeks of unbearable paranoia punctuated by the sharp staccato of death as they brushed again and again with discovery. It should have been hell.
Much later, looking back, he wouldn't have been able to say exactly when he'd finally come alive. Maybe there hadn't been a cathartic moment, no brilliant ray of piercing revelation. One month was full of fear and running and death, and the next month... it was the same. Except one morning when he'd wrapped his arms around Apollo’s neck and allowed himself to be pulled elegantly into the sky something had changed.
He'd been edgy all morning and Apollo had worn his ill-temper with his usual good humour, teasing Midnighter gently but always ready to take advice on when and where they should be moving. He supposed Apollo was still technically his commander, but – despite appearances to the contrary – the man wasn't an egotist and knew when to delegate; and tactics were almost always left up to Midnighter. They'd been heading south-east for the last few days, flying over what was mostly farmland, and things had been fairly quiet. He hated it when things were quiet; he was built for fast bursts of concentrated violence, not the kind of long slow seeping mundanity that sent him paranoid, finding enemies and threats behind every bush and under every cow. It was made all the worse because something had been bothering him for several days, something he couldn't put his finger on. It didn't feel dangerous, exactly, just different and...
He figured out what it was at exactly 1302, and the shock of it nearly made him lose his grip. And God help him if he hadn't only minutes ago been thinking that they'd been having far too good a run of it, that things were far too quiet.
The Devil had taken his soul, all right. Taken his soul and replaced it with a chip that spat out death and numbers and dangers all day, every day.
Except for now. He was twelve thousand, six hundred and forty nine feet above the ground with only a six-foot slab of muscle between him and certain death... and the computer was quiet. Well, as quiet as it ever was, he supposed; it was still spitting out random accidents (chance of strike by meteor from overhead; chance of sudden brain haemorrhage in Apollo; chance of random teleportation by hostile forces) but the probabilities were negligible and the mitigating factors were nil. The sort of lazy background noise he could easily ignore. But from the man beneath him, there was nothing. Nothing at all. And that was either terrifying or impossible or both, because it either meant he was broken...
Either he was broken... or the probability that he would be in any way injured or in danger from anything Apollo was doing or would do, for any reason at all, at any time, had just dropped to zero.
He wasn’t broken. They found out the next night when they'd run into a small cell of ops agents jerking about on another mission. The whole thing had been accidental on both sides, but it was two versus six and more-or-less over before it began. Afterwards, Midnighter had been forced to accept what he supposed he'd known all along; he was working just fine, and while doing so had assessed Apollo to be an absolute null threat. He was still aware of the man, of course, but aware of him in the way was aware of his arm or the knife strapped into his boot. Not something to be on guard against. Not something whose touches were barely concealed attacks.
Midnighter did not remember love. He supposed that, sometime, for some reason, someone must have loved him – at least a little bit – and that maybe he'd even loved them back. But the memories were gone, just like everything else, and all he had to go on was TV and some hazy, half-dreamed feelings. Of course, that left him with no baseline – no concrete example for comparison – but he’d weighed up the probabilities and on the face of it had decided that the feeling he was currently getting from Apollo was close enough. The whole situation was entirely mortifying, for more reasons than one. He hadn't realised, after all this time, just how good it felt to be able to touch and to be touched without flinching, without waiting for the pain. Of course, Apollo did not generally have any particularly pressing reasons to touch him on a daily basis – asides from flying, and really that was more the other way around – and it was with absolute horror that Midnighter realised that he had started to come up with a swathe of extremely spurious reasons to touch Apollo. No matter how much he admonished himself that he was not a blushing teenager with his first crush, he couldn't quite help the way his hands would sometimes just... reach out.
Either Apollo didn’t notice, didn't care, was too polite to mention it, or some combination of the above. He'd always been a fairly tactile guy – all big, warm hands and a welcoming smile – and maybe Midnighter was imagining it, but he was starting to become convinced that he wasn’t the only one initiating contact on a slightly-more-often-than-not basis. Just small things – like a touch on the shoulder instead of a call of his name – but somehow, and without really realising it, he was living for the small things. Life was still running and fighting and hiding, but for the first time he had become aware that he was running and fighting and hiding with someone, and things could have been oh-so much worse.
Months passed, things got better. They were still terrible, of course, but they were terrible and... better.
He couldn't have pinpointed the exact moment in time when he'd gotten comfortable enough to doze laid out against Apollo's back while they sped across states, but that's more-or-less what he'd been doing (not that he would have admitted it, of course) when he’d felt their velocity drop and their angle tilt downwards.
“What're you doing?”
“There's a cabin down there. From the snow banked up around the door I'd say no-one's going to come looking for it in a hurry. Good place to spend a few days.”
He'd wanted to argue, really, but... a cabin would mean shelter, maybe a bed, maybe a shower. Maybe he was going soft.
“Okay.”
There was, indeed, a shower. The water was cold and the electricity was off, but compared to what they'd both gotten used to it was the Ritz. So they showered and –after some debate – 'borrowed' a toothbrush they'd found in the cabinet above the tiny sink in the tiny bathroom. By sundown, they were both clean, wrapped in towels, waiting for their uniforms to dry and, ultimately, staring across at each from either side of the tiny den.
“If we turned the power on, we could watch TV.” It wasn’t the first time Apollo had pointed this out. He'd been like that back in the days Before, too, and Midnighter had always wondered – but never dared ask – exactly why it was that a man who could touch stars was so fascinated by mundane little stories about mundane little people living mundane little lives. Actually, now that he thought about it, maybe it did make sense.
He looked at the TV. He looked at Apollo. The computer in his brain whirred.
“It's too—”
“Risky, I know.” A brief stab of something he pretended not to feel at the way those massive shoulders sagged ever so slightly.
Fourteen minutes and thirty seven seconds later, he went outside and found the fuse box.
Awareness dawned slowly. It didn’t usually. Usually it was like alight switch; an instantaneous snap into alertness, into action. Cold and clinical.
This was neither cold nor clinical, but rather a suffusing feeling of warmth spreading outwards from the dark of unconsciousness and up into...
There was something warm against his right side; warm and big and ever so slightly moving and just beyond he swore he could hear what could only be the faint hum of clipped tones reading out the morning news. It was the hand in his hair, however, that was the real showstopper; big, warm fingers running lazily back and forth through his grown-out buzz cut.
Apollo would know he was awake – would have known it by the slight change in his breathing and his posture – and he figured he'd better think of a snappy reaction pretty fast. It shouldn't have been hard. Split-second decisions were his forte, were what he'd been made for. Except his computer was still coming up blank, and for the first time he could remember, he was at an absolute loss about what to do. So he did the working manually, painfully aware of the seconds ticking over. Tried running the scenarios through his meat-brain for once; not nearly as may as normal, of course, because he didn't have all millennium, but enough to keep all the major bases covered. This wasn't a life or death situation, right?
Scenario One suggested that it might quickly become that. Scenario One involved throwing Apollo through the nearest solid surface and yelling profanities. Near as he could tell, there were absolutely no positive outcomes whatsoever from enactment of Scenario One; either Apollo would fight back, in which case Midnighter figured he'd probably be fucked, or he'd simply fly off, in which case Midnighter figured he'd probably be fucked. Scenario One was quickly abandoned.
Scenario Two involved simply pushing himself upright and pretending nothing had happened. Which it hadn't, really; he'd just fallen asleep, right? A little embarrassing, maybe, but they had been on the road for a while now and this was probably the safest they’d been maybe forever, so you could forgive a guy for blanking out a bit. Scenario Two predominantly involved maintenance of the status quo. Not, he thought ruefully, that the status quo was particularly worth maintaining. In fact, fuck the status quo. Fuck it right in it’s leering, voyeuristic eye socket. And fuck Scenario Two as well.
Which left Scenario Three; the most terrifying of them all.
He yawned, sleepily, rubbing tired eyes with the back of his hand before blinking them open against the radiation blue gloom of the TV. The cabin windows were still locked up tight – not that anyone would be coming up here, but you never knew – and it occurred to him he could have been asleep for a few minutes or a few hours. The TV had moved from news back to cartoons.
“Time is it?” His voice sounded thick, rougher than usual; maybe more like a few hours, then.
“A little past six in the morning.” Apollo the human clock. This close, with his ear all-but against that massive expanse of chest, it sounded like the voice of God.
“Should be out getting sun. Might need to move...” He trailed off, somehow it just didn’t really seem important right now. “Did we really fall asleep in front of the TV?”
Apollo's laughter sounded like mountains going for a walk. “It's a bit... mundane, isn't it?”
“I can do mundane. Right now, I can really, really do mundane.”
With a kind of agonising, nerve-shattering slowness the hand in his hair moved far-too-casually down the side of his neck – and on God the feeling of those powerful fingers ghosting across such a vulnerable spot sent a jolt of something red-hot straight through his belly – and came to rest on his shoulder in what was absolutely, unmistakably an embrace. He sighed at the sensation, twisting ever so slightly to be closer to that incredible warmth and found his own hand sneaking up to rest against a powerful, towel-clad thigh. On the television, cartoon animals started singing about the alphabet and the whole thing was just about the most wonderful thing in the universe.
He felt the previously-unnoticed tension melt out of Apollo's frame a few moments later. Neither of them said anything; it was all too new, too different, too fragile. A dream maybe. Maybe acknowledging it would be to first step towards killing it off. Whatever it was. So they sat together, quietly, half watching the TV and half watching each other.
After a couple of minutes, Midnighter said, “I don't fucking get this show at all.”
Luckily, Apollo seemed to, and spent the next several minutes explaining a plot that seemed far too elaborate to be enacted out by a bunch of indeterminate anthropomorphs with giant mallets. Midnighter watched him while he explained; really saw him, the first time of many times. The man trapped in the body of a god, caught between elation and loathing. Completely untouchable.
And then Apollo turned, ever-so-slightly, and suddenly he was being watched as well, and so much for cartoons because right then there was nothing else in the whole entire universe. Nothing at all.
Execute Scenario Three.
He'd already managed to get a hand around the back of Apollo's head and brought their lips together before he realised he knew absolutely nothing about kissing.
It didn't seem to be a problem; Apollo had it under control, or maybe he was just as clueless, but neither of them could tell any different and it really, really didn't matter anyway. It was easy. As easy as falling. As easy as flying. Warmth and touch and big hands desperately cupping his cheeks, stroking his neck, in a way that ripped a moan from his belly and sent a desperate heat to his cock and with a shock he realised that for the first time in forever he felt warm. Beautifully, radiantly warm and when he dared crack an eye open the whole room was lit up like a desert noon. And he was sure his affections were clumsy and inadequate, but Apollo seemed not to notice, or not to care, and he wasn't sure which one of them was making that noise but it was encouraging either way.
Somehow, he ended up straddling Apollo's thighs – he wasn't really sure if he'd been pulled or had moved himself or both and it seemed a bit moot anyway – all pretence to modesty gone and he couldn't quite bring himself to feel guilty about the trail of slick precum he was trailing across that exquisite belly because he could feel the same against his own stomach and Christ no man had any right to be that big.
It didn't get much further than that. Too long spent forgoing even the briefest contact took its toll, and he felt Apollo tense underneath him – felt those arms tighten across his back with bone-shattering strength – and the thought sent him over the edge, too, and when he came back the room was dark again and he felt hot and sticky and everything was right with the universe because the gaze Apollo was giving him was absolutely the most wonderful thing he'd ever seen and he wasn't entirely convinced he didn't look exactly the same.
And then it was replaced by a look that at the time had been so wickedly, unexpectedly lecherous and which he'd never quite get tired of, and Apollo said, “So... I hear they're making them with enhanced endurance nowadays.”
The next day, he’d come out in blisters from the sunburn.
And that, more or less, was how it'd started.
And this was how it ended.
Alone and cold and, worse than that, a failure because he'd managed to fuck up the one thing he'd made for himself. The one thing that didn't involve killing or calculating or super powers. The one thing that had reminded him he was still human – somewhere, sometimes – if only a little bit.
He wished his jaw still ached. But it had healed far too quickly, and he wasn't even left with that. All that was left was a cold, empty room and the mocking, tearful red of the Bleed outside his window.
Twelve hours, seven minutes and forty-three seconds ago, they’d stopped the end of time. He was beginning to wonder why he’d bothered.
He was wondering so hard, in fact, that he missed the psychedelic yellow of the door opening– right behind him and a little above. Missed the powerful, white-clad arms until they'd wrapped, vice-like, around his chest and by then it was too late to move anyway. The pull was backwards and upwards and he’d been ripped through the door before he'd had a chance to react. It would have been embarrassing, really, except for the fact that his chip hadn't worked right against Apollo for years.
Besides, what would be the point?
And so he let himself fall back into whatever fate and spurned gods had in mind.
The door closed. The world was dark.
Once upon a time, there'd lived a man who'd sold his name for a dream.
Sometimes, many years later, he'd allowed himself to think that maybe – just maybe – the dream hadn't been a selfish one, and that when the Devil had extended razor-blade fingers and a honey-rotten smile, he really had been doing it for a better world. Sometimes he thinks that… but mostly he thinks that, really, he'd simply gotten greedy. That the Devil could have extended any offer, told any lie, and he would have taken it. Taken it because, well, when the Devil offers to make you a God, how could anyone say no, whatever the reason?
Maybe he’d had nothing to lose, maybe he was simply serving his country, and maybe he was doing it for the thrill. Maybe it mattered and maybe it didn’t, but either way he’d died on a cold, clinical operating table in a haze of dreams and wanderlust and hadn’t realised until too late – though maybe, really, it had always been ‘too late’ – that the Devil had been telling the truth. The Devil had made him a God. Had stolen everything that had made him a man, had made him human, and had left him with nothing but a head full of frozen heat and the heart of the sun.
The Devil had taken his soul and given him a name; Apollo.
So, in lieu of anything better, that’s who he’d been.
Feeling the sun on his skin for the first time had been a hit harder and more beautiful than any drug and the first experience had left him reeling with the power of it. Standing in the middle of the observation bay as they slid back the roof and he'd felt the heat rush straight to his groin and he knew he must have looked absolutely ridiculous, rock-hard underneath his flimsy gown, arms outstretched and crying and laughing and reaching up, up higher because he had to get closer or he thought he just might die.
He was halfway through the roof before he realised his feet weren't touching the floor and at that moment he was sure he must have been dreaming; that he hadn't survived after all, that he'd died and this was Heaven but he couldn't for the life of him think of anything he could possibly have done to deserve this.
There was only one way, and that was up and he laughed and laughed and cried when his body obeyed his desire and the ground fell away at a dizzying speed. This was life! With the wind whipping through his hair and that great glowing eye getting closer and closer and he was halfway out of the atmosphere before he realised he'd been staring right in the heart of it without blinking or squinting or pain. Staring at the sun; the ultimate act of rebellion against a mother he could no longer remember, and he didn't know what he'd thought about her before, but in that moment he loved her more than he could ever have hoped to express.
He hadn’t noticed he’d left the atmosphere completely until he’d caught sight of the moon from the corner of his eye, looming huge and heavy and impossibly close and with terror he realised he was hanging in the middle of space; the Earth spread out below like a child’s globe. And it was here, without the warm blanket of the planet's atmosphere, that his euphoria had melted away and he'd first been struck with sheer, unadulterated terror at what had been done to him.
People liked the sun; that happy yellow smiling cartoon face. It bought warm days and ice-cream and other pleasant things. But that was all a lie, really, because the sun was only warm when it was a million miles away, hanging tiny and untouchable. Up here, the sun wasn't beautiful or warm or smiling; it was cold and huge and alien, a thousand million trillion Hiroshimas burning all day, every day, for so long it might as well have been an eternity. An indifferent and uncaring god of destruction, dying ceaselessly in the frozen vacuum of space; always watching, always alone.
He'd descended so quickly he later learnt the doctors had thought he must have over-extended himself in space and simply died. For awhile, he wished he had, and he'd been catatonic for nearly a week after that first trip; holing himself up in rooms with no windows, screaming uncontrollably whenever the doctors attempted to expose him to sunlight.
In the end, he'd been given an ultimatum; either start working – they'd even said it like that, like he was some kind of broken tool – or risk being labelled a failed experiment and destroyed. That night, he'd almost considered it; would have considered anything to be able to get away from the terrible, alien eye that pulled him as much as it repulsed him. He felt it set, felt it as it slithered silently across the other side of the planet, felt it as it lurked just below the horizon.
They'd found him outside, hovering slightly above the compound and staring unblinkingly at a breathtaking pink and orange sunrise. So he’d been declared a success, and introduced to the others.
Things got worse. He'd been somewhat surprised to find himself a charismatic and likable guy, and he'd quickly begun to form tentative friends amongst the other post-humans. For a while, he'd been hopeful that maybe things wouldn't be so bad after all; that the terrible vast loneliness he thought he'd felt in space had been nothing but his brain coming down off the euphoria of his first flight and the lingering effects of the operation that had made him. He'd been talking with some of the others one night, listening to them complain – albeit guardedly, since they were always being watched– about the drawbacks that had come along with their powers. So, carefully, he'd told them about the sun; about the sun's cold, destructive indifference and his fear that maybe he'd wind up the same way.
He'd known almost as soon as he'd finished that it had been the wrong thing to say; the flat, disbelieving stares of the others told him everything he needed to know, that by confiding his fear he'd enacted a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“But you can fly!” he’d been told. “You’re practically invincible and can shoot lasers from your eyes and everyone says you're the greatest thing they've ever produced! We'd all kill to be you!”
So that night, with a hard heart, he'd decided to be just that. To be warm and friendly, to be idolised and adored and worshipped, to be the pinnacle of post-human potential and to be absolutely, completely, untouchably alone.
He been absolutely miserable, though of course he made damn sure no-one knew. It had almost worked, and he'd almost managed to convince himself that he was prepared to live like that forever...
Then he met the Midnighter, and the bastard had ruined everything.
Apollo might have traded his entire life to become a god, but it hadn't taken him very long to work out – surrounded all day, as he was, by fit young men and women wit ha tendency to wear very little – that he was absolutely, positively, flamingly gay. It had only been an abstract sort of realisation at first, but he'd held it closely and guarded it ferociously as the one last little piece of humanity left to him. Something they could never take away... and something he would never give, either. Which was fine, because though he'd figured out that women were very definitely no this thing, there were no men around who did it for him in any real sense either.
Until Midnighter.
It was a ludicrous cliché, really, and he'd almost been tempted to think someone out there had planned it that way, just to taunt him. The man had everything; tall, dark and handsome, in the kind of roughed-up action hero way that sent Apollo weak at the knees and kept him warm at night. He moved with a lithe, economical grace and when he was fighting – or training, or shadow-boxing, or sitting down doing nothing at all – Apollo found it hard to look at anything else.
There was one tiny problem; as far as Apollo could tell, Midnighter absolutely hated his guts. He wasn't exactly a chatty guy to start off with, but he had an extra-special loathing silence he reserved just for Apollo. It probably should have been a problem, that the object of his secret affections held such hatred for him, and it had for a little while, until Apollo had worked something out. And that was that, really, while Midnighter might act like he couldn’t stand to be near Apollo, the person he really couldn’t bear was himself.
But that was okay, because Apollo liked him, even if he'd never dare say it out loud.
So he tried to let him know in other ways, not that Midnighter ever seemed particularly appreciative, but Apollo was stubborn and, perversely, he was even beginning to enjoy being the object of the other man's scorn. Which is maybe why, about a month after they first met, Apollo confessed part of his anger at what had been done to him, how just because he'd been given the ability to fly he was suddenly no longer entitled to complain about anything at all. He was supposed to just stand there, and take it, and be fucking grateful because it he could fucking fly and that made up for all the other shit, forever and always. For a moment, Midnighter had just looked shrewdly at him from the side of one eye before finally saying, “Huh.”
And that was it. No, there'd been a slight grin there too, and it was such a small thing but it had been like daybreak and in that moment – the moment Apollo had first fallen in love – he knew that, no matter how bad things would get, they'd be okay. Because he'd made contact – real, honest to god human contact – with what was probably the least likely person on the planet. And it was all okay.
And then it all went to hell.
Sometimes, when it was dark and no-one was watching, Apollo felt secretly glad that it had been the two of them that had survived. The destruction of the team had been horrific, except… except it had freed them, too. He would never, ever regret that. Not if he lived for a million years.
Midnighter was, as always, completely insufferable. Flighty and paranoid and sometimes Apollo was convinced he pushed them harder than Bendix ever had. Spending all-day-every-day with the man was an exquisite kind of torture, in more ways than one, but Apollo weathered every brooding snit and every dreary put-down with a kind of irrational good humour. Because if truth be told he was watching. Watching for that moment when Midnighter would say something particularly callous or cruel, and would finally realise he might just have gone to far; Apollo would watch the brief flash of unvoiced panic in those otherwise lifeless eyes, the infinitesimal tensing in anticipation of the last straw, that maybe this time Apollo would leave – just fly off into the sun – and Midnighter would be on his own. Alone. And fucked.
As sad as it was, he lived for those moments because they reassured him that, underneath everything, Midnighter would still rather have had him around than not. That the snark and the brooding were just the man’s way of being, well, a little bit emotionally retarded. Apollo could deal with that. He could deal with not taking it personally for the rare chances he got to glimpse the man that hid under the elegantly ruthless machine. That man – the bit of Midnighter that was not, in fact, Midnighter at all but was rather the now-nameless person who’d come Before – was a little bit shy and a little bit awkward with a razor-sharp dry wit that had the capacity to put Apollo in stitches. And the hopeless romantic in him – the part of him that was not Apollo but rather his own nameless Before-self – couldn’t help but dream that his friendship was appreciated, at least a little bit, because it allowed them to be something other than just weapons with the audacity to escape their owners.
Midnighter’s moods seemed to come in cycles – Apollo occasionally caught himself tracking them against the moon, before telling himself to stop being quixotic –and he’d been going through a particularly bad bout of ‘Angry Paranoiac’ when everything had taken a turn for the weird. The whole thing had been like a light-switch; one day the man had been teeth-gratingly insufferable, the next… nothing. It wasn’t that he’d flipped over into Captain Broody McNotouch, exactly – Apollo had seen that particular mood before and this wasn’t it– but rather it was like someone had snuck in during the night and just ripped out the part of Midnighter’s personality that made him an intolerable asshole. Actually, for a while that’d been more-or-less exactly what Apollo thought had happened; a thought which had distressed him to no end, not so much for the end result (which, honestly, was a lot more liveable) but rather the notion that someone would physically be able to do that. It wasn’t until a random chance encounter with near-discovery that Apollo had finally figured out what was really going on. The realisation had nearly floored him; if he was being honest with himself, maybe the whole brain-sabotage-by-remote-enemies thing would’ve been more believable.
They’d been crouched against a wall, watching a group of ops agents slowly patrol the warehouse they’d been holed up in for the last few days. Midnighter had had his eye on a group of three, while Apollo had just noticed a second group emerging from around the other side. Talking was out of the question, so he’d reluctantly tapped the other man on the shoulder to warn him.
Touching was always a last resort. Midnighter hated being touched. Apollo didn’t take it personally; holding something like that against a guy who’d been programmed to treat all invasions into his physical space as hostile actions to be subdued with physical force would have been kind of petty, after all. So he’d always tried to keep his distance. The few times that touch was unavoidable had always reminded him of why; Midnighter flinched. Every time, without fail, he flinched; and if Apollo looked hard he would have sworn he could see the conflict in the man’s eyes as he tried desperately to clamp down against the impulse to violence. That conflict – brief and well-hidden though it was– was always harrowing to see.
Which is why, when he gently laid a hand against a broad, leather-clad shoulder, he had been absolutely stunned when Midnighter had simply turned. No flinch, no moment of conflict.
It was almost too good to be true. Because if Apollo was right – and he prayed to any god who would listen that he was, that he wasn’t just being a naïve romantic – it meant that Midnighter no longer saw him as a threat. And as far as Apollo could tell, in Midnighter terms, ‘not a threat’ may as well have been ‘friend’.
Things got weirder, and over the next few weeks it Apollo found himself wrestling with an absurd kind of hope. Because if he didn’t know any better – which, right now, he didn’t – he would have sword blind that Midnighter was not only no longer flinching at him touch, but was voluntarily initiating contact in situations where it was slightly less than absolutely strictly warranted. Apollo found himself wishing that he remembered more of his time Before – something he rarely did nowadays– because there was a tiny part of him that was very insistent that he was being flirted with, and that couldn’t be right. So, to test the waters out a bit, he flirted back, just a little bit. When he still woke up in the morning with his head firmly attached to his neck, he took it to be a positive sign.
It was shy and it was clumsy and awkward and sweet and Apollo thought his heart would burst from the beauty of it all. And it all made sense, too, when he thought about it. Because maybe Midnighter didn’t hate being touched so much as he hated what it made him feel, how it made him react. Take away that negativity, however…
It was about then that Apollo vowed that, the second he could find them someplace half-way suitable, he was going to have a little talk with his stoic, touch-starved companion about the whole matter. Or, failing that, simply hold him down and stroke him until he was catatonic from the pleasure. Either worked.
He got his chance about a month later. It’d been too perfect, really; a mountain cabin, abandoned for the winter, far away enough from town to avoid arousing too much attention but not too far away to be without electricity. So he’d started his descent, which had awoken Midnighter – the man had taken to dozing against his back when they were moving, not that he would admit it, which Apollo found adorable and pleasing enough not to mention– who had instantly started grousing. Apollo had been preparing a string of arguments in his head for weeks, just in case, and had been prepared to start pulling them out when Midnighter surprised him by simply agreeing. Apollo took it as a good sign.
Weeks of road dirt had quickly dissolved under a shower, which had been so overdue it wasn’t funny; cold or not. Since the idea of washing only to step back into filthy clothes had been most unappealing, they’d washed those too, which had left them in the awkward situation of having absolutely nothing to wear at all; the cabin’s occupant didn’t even come close to their size, which is how they’d ended up sitting in the tiny den wrapped in towels. Apollo wasn’t complaining, instead enjoying the unprecedented opportunity to surreptitiously eye up a mostly naked Midnighter; a very rare beast indeed. It wasn’t that the man was body-shy, exactly, but Apollo rather got the impression that his own body repulsed him and that small piece of vanity was equally disturbing.
Apollo, on the other hand, rather thought Midnighter should walk around naked more often, and he busied himself with imagining what it would be like to caress each and everyone of those jagged scars; some obviously old wounds, others that looked ominously like the ill-stitched results of surgery… and worse things. Caress silky-soft skin pulled tight across the ridges and dips of that impossibly-defined physique, kiss and worship every painful scar, nuzzle against the strong jaw line, run fingers through a slightly-too-long red-blonde buzz-cut and oh God he needed something to distract him right now or he’d be in so much trouble.
So he said, “If we turned the power on, we could watch TV.”
It was a dangerous suggestion, he knew, and Midnighter told him as much. So he tried to think of something else, which turned into a near-impossible feat with the other man sitting right there and looking so grumpy and delicious and…
It was an exquisite kind of torture, made all the worse for the object of his barely-concealed lust’s apparent indifference to his suffering. He wished madly he could think of something to talk about, but after months on the road his brain was failing to provide him with anything more appropriate than, Can I lick you? Hell, he was almost tempted to try it. Instead, he asked about the TV again and, unsurprisingly, got the same answer again. When, several minutes later Midnighter got up and vanished outside, only to return half-frozen but apparently no worse for it, flicking on the lights as he came, Apollo could barely contain his grin.
He didn’t sleep the entire night. Sometime after ten he’d heard soft snoring from the man sitting beside him, and just as the movie’s credits started rolling and he was considering finding a place to sleep himself he’d felt a weight against his shoulder that’d put paid to that idea. So he’d channel surfed for a while, expecting at any moment the man next to him to wake and dreading the potential awkwardness that would bring. Not that he’d done anything. Not that he was doing anything several hours later when he’d re-adjusted his arm across the back of the sofa. He wasn’t exactly holding Midnighter or anything who, incidentally, hadn’t woken up at the movement anyway which practically meant he didn’t mind, right? He was usually such a light sleeper, awake and alert at even the slightest indication of wrongness. But even when the temptation became too much and Apollo found himself running fingers through soft fuzzy hair, even then Midnighter didn’t stir; instead was sleeping deeper and sounder than Apollo could ever remember. And maybe it was just his imagination, but he thought that maybe – unguarded in sleep– a slight smile ticked the corner of one scarred lip.
Sometime a little after six, with re-runs of Animaniacs singings songs about the UN, Midnighter woke up. Apollo pretended not to notice, just as he pretended not to notice that Midnighter was pretending not to be awake, and they were both pretending neither knew it. He became suddenly, painfully acutely aware of the shiish, shiish sound his finger were making in the other man’s hair. Seconds passed, and it occurred to Apollo that it was simply not like Midnighter to be this slow in response to anything, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why.
Shiish. Shiish.
Or maybe he did know, really, but just didn’t want to think about it.
Shiish. Shiish.
And then Midnighter said, “Time is it?”
So far so good. Conversation he could do. Conversation wasn’t hitting, or yelling, or awkwardness. “A little past six in the morning.”
A brief pause, and then, “Should be out getting sun. Might need to move...” He trailed off, insistence on practical matters apparently from force of habit rather than an actual desire to be, well, practical. In a somewhat more focused voice he asked, “Did we really fall asleep in front of the TV?”
Apollo couldn’t help the chuckle that escaped his chest, nor the desire not to point out the small flaw in Midnighter’s assumption. Instead he said, “It's a bit... mundane, isn't it?”
“I can do mundane. Right now, I can really, really do mundane.”
And that was good, really good, because mundane was exactly what Apollo wanted right now as well. Except… except he’d been wrong. This wasn’t mundane, not for them. For them, mundane was running and hiding and fighting and killing and flying and blood and death and more running. This was not any of those things. This was, for both of them, entirely New and Original.
Without really thinking about it, he slowly moved his hand down the side of Midnighter’s face– noting with interest the way the man’s breath seemed to hitch a little, though not unpleasantly so, as fingers ghosted across his neck – and down to his shoulder. It was an embrace and they both knew it and when, a moment later, he felt a cold hand –Midnighter was always cold– rest hesitantly against his thigh in a way that could in no way be interpreted as ‘just friends’, Apollo knew everything was going to be all right.
It had been, for a long time. Better than all right, in fact; it had been perfect. It had surprised him, at first, just how affectionate Midnighter could be, after the man had gotten over his initial uncertainty. Always the pessimist; Apollo supposed he’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop, but when it hadn’t Midnighter had almost become a new person, at least with Apollo. He was still an insufferable asshole, of course, but he was… warm was the only word Apollo could think of for it. And that was enough, more than enough, really.
He supposed he’d had it too good for too long, precisely because Midnighter had always been such an asshole and had always seemed to have such a massive grudge against the rest of the universe. Apollo didn’t mind, since it had meant he’d had his lover exclusively to himself, and they’d both known it with a ferocious certainty.
Last week, they’d known it.
Today, he wasn’t sure what he knew.
It was supposed to have been about the end of time. He couldn’t even remember who’d explained that, now. Maybe the Doctor; it sounded like the sort of whacked-out new age thing the Doctor would bring back from the places he went. Time was ending, and it was taking hope with it. A little nudge here, a little push there…
He might not have been so angry if it hadn’t been for the fact that Midnighter had been right about it from the start. Of course no-one had listened, since Midnighter didn’t particularly like anyone, and they’d been short-handed and traumatised and time was ending and…
… and if anyone should have listened, it should have been Apollo.
The anger had burst through him like a supernova; violent and hot and, ultimately, brief. It had been jealousy at first, of course – how dare Midnighter even think of touching someone else after all this time – but it had been irrational, too, and as soon as his fist had connected with the man’s jaw he knew he’d fucked up. Maybe irreparably, and that had tinged his rage with shame to form the worst kind of pride. It was only now, with eternity unrolling out before them once more, that he could see just how much damage he’d done, just how pointless it had all been and how out of control they’d both let it get.
Because, really, it hadn’t been that much of a surprise. It wasn’t that Midnighter had been bested in exactly the kind of combat he was built to win; it had been the way he’d lost. He’d confessed it, voice unusually subdued and fearful, right before Apollo had put him through the wall. He’d lost because he couldn’t feel his opponent; he’d gotten no feedback, no input, no probabilities, no strategies, no nothing. An experience he only felt with one other person.
So it wasn’t that Apollo really blamed him for allowing himself to be kissed, or even that he’d been upset over Midnighter’s shamed confusion over the whole thing. The black hole that had opened in his heart after his lover’s confession had been more insidious than that, had touched on something Apollo had always feared; so much so that he’d never dared to express it, not even to himself.
Apollo knew –with the certainty that he knew the sun – that Midnighter loved him; the man was not afraid to say so, and often, when they curled together in the golden light of dawn. What he had never known as why.
It all boiled down, as these things usually did, to something exceptionally petty. And that was the fact that Apollo was pretty certain that Midnighter was not gay.
He certainly loved Apollo, and his heart would quicken and his pupils would dilate at all the appropriate times – he loved to watch Apollo fight, especially, hanging haloed and raining fire down onto enemies below – but as far as Apollo could tell, that was it. Midnighter showed absolutely no interest whatsoever in anyone else; male or female. Apollo had always thought himself faithful, but he could still appreciate the odd man who was not his lover; the shallow rushes of lust that would vanish like stars against the daylight when compared to what was his. He knew Midnighter noticed, even enjoyed the forceful possessive streak it bought out, and they would joke about it sometimes… But from Midnighter, Apollo got nothing.
It wasn’t that he thought Midnighter was straight, exactly – he would’ve been as surprised as anyone else if a string of ex-girlfriends had suddenly sprung from the woodwork – so much as completely asexual. And that was leaving Apollo with a problem, because Midnighter certainly liked him, he just couldn’t figure out why.
In the end, it had all come down to touch. Because that was the one thing that separated Apollo from everyone else; Midnighter tolerated his touch. Enjoyed it, even, but it had all started with tolerance. And maybe that had made Apollo complacent, safe in the knowledge that it was him; only him, forever and always. And it had been cruel, in a way, and one-sided and shallow and that – more than anything else – had been what had ripped the rage and the jealousy away. Because when it came down to it, what gave him the right to demand something from his lover that he himself didn’t give? Midnighter trusted Apollo enough to allow his wandering eye to always return quickly home. It shamed him now, deeply and powerfully, that he hadn’t been strong enough to be able to return that faith.
And it was that shame – that cold, dark star that burnt in his heart – that kept him out here now. Had kept him hanging just slightly out of Earth’s orbit, staring straight into his namesake for almost half a day. The heat and the power had built up under his skin to near painful levels but he ignored it, focused as he was in forcing himself to feel the frozen emptiness of space and remember the alien loneliness that had so terrified him the first time he’d seen it. This was life without Midnighter, the place he’d sworn to himself never to revisit. The place he was so close to returning to, if his plan failed. Because he did have a plan; it had taken him almost four hours to come up with it, though it may as well have been an eternity. Apollo knew he was not generally kept around because of his brains; he was their heavy artillery, their poster boy. He hadn’t minded too much, because he’d always had someone to come home to; someone who had loved him as a man rather than as a God. Someone he would lose, if this didn’t work.
It wasn’t just shame that had kept him from reaching out to Midnighter earlier than he had; it had been fear, too, and with the future lying dead hope had bled away and let that fear consume him. So he’d waiting too long, and when he’d finally found the courage to reach out – a simple brush of fingers, nothing outrageous, just an apology – he’d realised it had been too late. The damage had already been done. He’d reached out, like he had a thousand times before, and though Midnighter had reached back, ever so slightly, Apollo had still felt it, and thought in that moment he should have died. Because he’d done the unthinkable, and hit the one man he’d sworn never to hurt, and when they’d touched again…
Midnighter had flinched.
He hadn’t resisted when Apollo’s arms had wrapped around his chest, nor had he struggled when he’d been pulled out and back through the door. In fact, it wasn’t until Midnighter caught sight of his breath forming clouds in front of him that he’d started to…not panic, exactly, because Midnighter did not panic, but struggle. And that was making him hard to hold. Up here, hard to hold was not good, and the icicles blooming out across the leather of his coat – the icicles that were melting quickly and slickly under Apollo’s warm grip – weren’t helping any. There was not a lot of air, and it was very cold.
“Apollo, what the fuck!” He was just shy of actually lashing out, Apollo knew; still pulling punches for old time’s sake, and only partly through fear of falling. They were high enough up that he’d have time to call for a door, though the transfer of momentum might prove only slightly less fatal than going all the way down the natural way.
Apollo was not worried. Instead, he said, “Stop talking, you’ll run out of air.”
Midnighter looked up, something very akin to horror creeping into the corners of eyes that looked impossibly wide and impossibly white against the worn black of his mask. The mask Apollo was almost as familiar with as Midnighter’s own face, currently all blotchy red and blue and outraged.
“You’re going to fucking kill me you bastard!” He wasn’t quite done being angry yet, but the snap-frozen temperatures and thin atmosphere were getting to him, and Apollo could feel the heart beating very quickly under his arms.
“Do you really think I would?” It was an unfair question, considering where they were, and they both knew it; Apollo could see it in the other man’s eyes, all rage and bile. Rage was good, rage wasn’t shame or guilt or self-pity, and Midnighter finally stilled in his arms. Tense– and every now and again his hands still flexed as he fought down the urge to free himself – but forcing himself to trust, and Apollo closed his eyes and lost himself in the steadily slowing rhythm of Midnighter’s breath and his heartbeat and the furious humming of the wires in his brain.
He didn’t know quite how long he hung there, watching his husband die; Midnighter was the one who could count time down to the nanosecond, Apollo could only guess by the sun, and up here it was always high noon. Eventually, however, he could hear the other man’s heart get a little too slow and the noise in his nerves and his wires get a little too quiet and so he said, “Door. Bedroom.”
They fell backwards. The Carrier caught them.
As soon as his arms let go, Midnighter rolled forward, coughing harshly against the sudden influx of air and still too overwhelmed to start yelling again. He wanted to, though, and Apollo couldn’t help the way his hands reached out again to lay across the broad, leather-clad back.
“And th-they think… I’m the… psychopath.”
A smile formed at the barely-muttered words, Apollo nuzzling his cheek against the back of a violently-shaking neck and working his hands underneath Midnighter’s half-frozen coat. He encountered no resistance, and a moment later the black leather hit the floor with a thick, wet thump. The mask came next, and the skin underneath felt like cold steel. So he got to work warming it up, pleased by the shuddering sigh his touches bought to the other man as he ran strong fingers across a throbbing jugular. A second hand reached down to sneak underneath the hem of Midnighter’s dark shirt, running opened-palmed across that incredible stomach; feeling every muscular ridge, every jagged scar, every barely-perceptible line of subcutaneous wire. He savoured the reveal of the rest of his husband’s torso, silently marvelling – as he always did – that Bendix and his teams of soulless surgeons could have crafted something so exquisite. That thought kept him going, sometimes; such perfect beauty coming from such terrible horror.
With a low growl, Midnighter ripped off his own gloves; they and his shirt and his boots quickly joined the slowly growing pile of black on the floor. He spun in Apollo’s lap, pushing them both down on the bed, all hungry mouths and strong hands. Apollo pushed a thick thigh between long, powerful legs and found Midnighter already hard and ready to return the favour; one of those cold hands had wound its way down and was currently rubbing him skilfully through the scandalously thin material of his own clothes. That had – for good and for ill – always been one of the man’s… things. Something about seeing him erect-and-constrained under gleaming white and Apollo was not complaining, even if it often meat a lot of otherwise unnecessary washing.
They were not gentle with each other; rolling over and over on the bed and it was almost a shame, really, that the evidence of their ferocious affections vanished almost as quickly as it was laid down. Midnighter had managed to unzip the back of his suit somehow and was currently removing it with the sort of vigour that suggested he was just shy of cutting it off. Meanwhile, Apollo went to work on belts and buckles and the thousand and one small weapons his husband kept strapped in various places and with each flick of sharpened steel came the growing realisation that nothing mattered other than this. Not saving the world, not a single kiss, not a day’s worth of doubt, not the hole in the wall the Carrier had somehow patched up between then and now; everything faded, paled into insignificance by the force of this moment, right now, half-undressed and so close to the edge from little more than rough kisses and inelegant friction.
A clatter and a thump and finally they were both stripped, breathing hard and staring at each other from across the bed; close but not touching, not yet, and oh God it was the most delicious sort of torture being so near and using every one of his heightened senses to take in what was so obviously and completely his and his alone. Midnighter in full fighting regalia was terrifying. Midnighter stripped naked was incredible; perfectly and powerfully male, not marred by any of the hints of femininity that Apollo knew graced his own features. His was instead a mish-mash of jagged scars and short, tousled red-brown hair and that thick, curved, slightly-leaning cock Apollo could never get enough of. Every inch perfect and powerful.
They fell upon each other again, the brief struggle for dominance decided when Midnighter allowed himself to be rolled over, both hands clasped above his head in one of Apollo’s own while its pair traced the soft, vulnerable spots on the trapped man’s belly. The touch elicited another frustrated growl, this time accompanied by tilted hips and spread thighs whose meaning could absolutely not be missed. So he let go and found his own hips pulled forward by powerful fingers and, a moment later, groaned wantonly when he was swallowed into a hot, wet heat with the kind of talent that was considered a weapon of mass destruction on at least five continents. He lost himself for a while, up on his knees with fingers gripping painfully in soft hair, fighting the hands that held his own hips for permission to thrust.
He whimpered unashamedly when that heat withdrew, though his distress didn’t last long as he was guided back down again and this time when the heat returned it was tight and hard and he felt Midnighter’s teeth draw blood on his shoulder as he bit down against the pain of such an unprepared entry. The bite was a kind of permission, and Apollo took it gladly; thrusting hard and deep and fast, savouring the growls and curses and moans they were both making. When he got going, Midnighter liked to fuck the same way he liked to kill – hard and fast and en masse – and Apollo was not at all reluctant to indulge him in that. Was not ashamed of the finger-shaped bruises he knew he was imprinting on muscular hips, nor the oval blooms of broken blood vessels that he trailed up and down a thickly straining neck. It was a confidence born from the thousand other times they’d been here, experimenting and learning and teaching until they’d finally fallen into a rhythm that was perfect for both of them; trust and dominance and it wasn’t as if Midnighter was submissive, exactly, so much as he liked things… forceful. Because here, in the safety of Apollo’s powerful, sun-warmed embrace, he could afford to do the one thing he could never afford at any other time.
He could lose.
Release hit him like the shuddering of a dying sun, and – as always – he couldn’t quite help the corona of flaring light that crackled across his skin and haloed his head. He felt the body under him shudder forcefully a moment later; hot, sticky cum splashing across their bellies and chests, the violent contractions sending aftershocks rocking through his own body and for a moment there was nothing but heat and closeness and the booming of beating hearts and the rushing of air past kiss-swollen lips.
About half a minute later, the silliness set in, as it always did; breaking through the warm afterglow when he remembered once more that here and now, he knew a secret. Something not one single other person in the whole entire world knew.
Because in the few minutes right after coming down from orgasm, Midnighter was ticklish. Really ticklish, and Apollo just couldn’t help himself. So he blew gently into one exposed armpit…
“Bastard!”
He couldn’t help the laughter, and was still laughing when he was rolled over once more, Midnighter still straddling his hips but this time he was the one whose hands were behind held – fingers interlaced– out of harm’s way. So he grinned and giggled and so did Midnighter and that was the reason Apollo did it – every time, without fail.
Nose-to-nose and grinning like loons, and Midnighter said, “You… are such… a cocksucker,” and punctuated each word with a kiss.
“Ah, I knew I was good for something.” He arched his hips up again, cum-sticky and times like this always made him glad that both of them were near-hairless. Midnighter’s eyes slitted with feline pleasure and Apollo knew things would get a lot messier before they got cleaner. But not right now; right now, was time for something else.
The grin faded from his face as he worked one hand free, bringing it up to trace the scar that ran down one whole side of Midnighter’s face. The other man instantly sobered also; recognising the gesture from all the other times his husband had performed it, always as a prelude to Serious Business.
“We’re allowed one each,” Apollo said, and then, “I’m such an idiot.”
Midnighter turned slightly into the hand still cupping his face. “Only and idiot would put up with someone so fucked in the head,” he agreed, and they kissed; slow and infinitely gentle, and when they finally broke away Midnighter added, “I love you so much.”
Apollo bit back a whimper, holding onto his husband with a ferocity that was eagerly returned and he knew that this was how it had all started – what seemed like a million years ago now – and if he didn’t say it now, then everything would have been for nothing.
It was still hard. It was always hard, getting the courage, finding the moment; those few hours of the day they were allowed to spend together alone, stripped and raw, when Apollo could let himself believe, just for a little while, that he was needed. Not just to do the heavy lifting, or to start fires or act as a supersonic air courier; needed just because, for no particular reason, and by someone so powerfully and confidently self-contained that it was almost blasphemy to imagine he could never need anything. Except Apollo.
Because he knew it was true, but that didn’t stop the doubt. Only hope did that.
So he said, “I love you. Always.”
And, in that moment, it was the simplest thing in the universe.