Editing Surfacing

<span style="color:#800000"> '''''A little peace and quiet.  Thanks, Andy!''''' </span>



'''Monday, 06 Jan 2521''' <br>
'''Below the surface of Rubicon''' <br>
'''White Sun (Bai Hu) system''' <br>
'''0130hrs, local time'''<br>

It took two days of hard work but we got that shuttle gutted.  We had some tools at our disposal, all cadged from the mining rig: torch, arc welder, hover pallet, block and tackle. The first cut away pieces of the shuttle, the last lifted them onto the pallet, at times holding them upright as I cut them free.  And now lifting them off the pallet to the cut pile.  I hand-over-handed the chain, swung the first hunk of scrap free, and lowered it to the top of the pile.  The cavern had no shortage of loose rocks to shim the metal level, and rather like my father stacking wood to dry, I made certain the pile was stable and in no danger of sliding onto passersby.  A useless nicety, I had to admit, since we weren’t likely to come back for the scrap and anyone arriving after us wouldn’t give a good Goddamn, but still.  I got the last piece off-loaded and stowed the tools, job finally done.

The menfolk had turned in hours ago and out of habit and concern I sought out Joshua before grabbing some shut-eye.  He’d taken to sleeping in the cavern instead of retiring on the rig or in the unaltered shuttle, keeping himself from the others.   Counting the days since we’d left the ''Gift'', I knew he had to be feeling the lack of his meds.  Not entirely sure what I could do without a dose in my pocket, I thought bitterly of the extra I’d stashed in my quarters.  The ''Gift'' was impounded four worlds away on Londinium and my stash was as good as in the sun for all I could get my hands on it.  Such were my thoughts as I searched out Joshua.  If he stayed true to form, he’d be in the section of cavern where there was a sand deposit.  It wasn’t much to look at but it was softer to sleep on than the hard rock of the floor and as I rounded a group of stalagmites, I shone my torch in a sweeping arc looking for his blankets.

“Joshua?” I called, keeping my voice low.  Sound carried here, and I was grateful for the acoustic cover of the stalagmites. “You awake?”

'''***'''

Laying flat on the sand deposit with his face to the cavern ceiling and eyes wide open, Joshua heard Rina's voice calling his name. At first, he nodded in response, and then realized she wouldn't be able to hear a nod, although sometimes lately it felt like he could. "I'm here, Rina. Shouldn't you be asleep?" he quietly responded, not making the effort to sit up yet.

'''***'''

"Soon. I promise. Shuttle's finally done." I kept the torch from his eyes and sank to the sand next to him. "God, I'd kill for a hot bath."

'''***'''

He turned his head to look over at her. 2 days in the black dust and stale air of Rubicon, and she still looked good to him. ''I'm totally lost to her - Carter's a lucky bastard.''

"The creature comforts are a little short, tis true. I guess we can mark that in the 'Con' column when evaluating being on the run from the law." He put his hands down flat and pushed himself upright. "We are running from the law, right? I'm remembering that correctly, right?”

'''***'''

“You got that right,” I snorted softly. “At this point, Joshua, I think it’s safe to say we’re running from practically everybody. If the Feds don’t want us, Blue Sun does.  If Blue Sun doesn’t want us, Potemkin does.  If Potemkin doesn’t want us, you can color us dead and roasting in hell, because it’s the only outcome a Russian will accept for his enemies.”  

I switched off the torch and slipped it carefully in my pocket.  I didn’t want to lay it on the ground and get it clogged with sand or leave it behind.  ''Take good care of your tools, Rinusha'', Father’s voice whispered to me from my memories.  ''Treat them well and they will return the favor''.  For a moment I wondered what he and my mother were doing three worlds away on Sihnon, if they and my brothers were safe.  When the Cortex was still up and running, I could check my mother’s concert appearances, track my father’s instrument sales, follow my brothers’ careers.  It had been four months since I was last able to check for news of them and being in the Core made me anxious to stay below the Feds’ radar, to avoid visiting trouble on their heads.

''Not that I managed to do that, no.''  First, being implicated in an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister and second, successfully escaping custody so I could, third, make illegal landfall on a blackrock and hide out in a secret underground base.  Yeah.  Great job there of not attracting the Feds’ attention. I was tired and sore and thanks to our jailbreak, back in the ranks of the walking wounded.  I drew my knees up and propping my elbows on them, rubbed my neck.  

“As far as the comforts go,” I said aloud, careful to keep my voice low.  “How are you feeling?  Can I get you anything?”  There wasn’t much I could get him, aside from the water and the self-heats Blondie had stocked for her stay here.  Still, love and friendship demanded I ask.  

'''***''

"You can give me your company for a few minutes," Joshua replied. "Otherwise, I'm as okay as I'm going to be. A little floaty. A little disconnected. Pain level isn't bad, just aches and such. And of course, I'm not sleeping much." You don't sleep much when you don't want to sleep much, he thought. He wanted to avoid the dreams more than he wanted the sleep. 

He finished sitting upright and folded his legs underneath him. "How about you? Are you holding up?" She could obviously use a new set of clothes (couldn't they all?) but more importantly, she was wounded again. She ought to be resting, but he didn't feel up to that argument.

'''***'''

Knowing that he wasn't asking out of social convention, I took internal stock before answering. "Sore," I said. "Tired. Could use a break. Pretty weak, huh? Whining for a break after goldbricking an entire month getting here. I swear, Joshua," I added with a bitter breath of a laugh. "All this high livin' is turning me soft."

That was a close as I could come to admitting it: having Joshua as a lover was slowly eroding my self-sufficiency. Before Miranda, Mike was the only one I allowed to offer me comfort, had only allowed myself to expect it from him. After Miranda, after Christian and now, Joshua, I found it all too easy to give in, to be soft, and let someone else take up the reins for a while. I recalled what happened on Muir, how I'd surrendered completely. The Verse looked different after that. I was different and despite the month-long stretch between systems, I had only now begun to assess the change.

And I wasn't sure what to do about what I'd found.

'''***'''

Soft? Soft? She was soft in all the right places physically (as his thoughts took a brief pleasant diversion), but Rina was nowhere near soft mentally. She was tougher than him by an order of magnitude or more. "There's goldbricking," he said calmly, "and there's being sensible. It seems to me that the last month or so was the latter, not the former. You treat yourself much worse than you would treat your own tools, Rina."

'''***'''

"I...," I began and then my head caught up with the rest of me. "...do. I never looked at it that way, but you're right. I do." I stopped rubbing my neck and looked at him. How much farther did I dare go in my admission? I instinctively knew that if I went much farther, I would give in and lay right down with him and let nature take us as far as we could go. Did I want that? A large part of me did. A smaller part did not, distrustful of the eventual outcome.  Was I losing my edge? Getting blunted to uselessness by giving in?

What good was an edge if it was ground on isolation, sharpened by loneliness, turned on others to keep them at bay? What was the point of the exercise? I felt the years thus spent as a stone around my leg, pulling me beneath the surface of the oily lake we sat beside and I suddenly resented it. ''Time to surface''.

"I don't know, Joshua. Put that way, it seems pretty stupid."

'''***'''



Joshua smiled slightly, knowing how much it must have taken Rina to admit to being wrong. "It doesn't mean you can't use yourself as hard as you normally do, you know. Just means you need to be willing to spend time taking care of yourself. It'll pay back in the long run, like spending the extra time to fasten a bolt especially tight or calibrating a gauge extremely precisely."

He had felt up to the argument, after all. He struggled to stay focused though, his brain jumping from one subject to another faster than he could keep track of...not even thoughts, but just constant flashes of images. He took a deep sigh of a breath as he closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose for a minute. When he opened his eyes again, he apologized. "Head's a little spacey. Nothing to worry about though. Just needed to take a second to clear my head." Last thing he wanted was to provide something else for people to worry about. Everyone had enough on their plate as it was.

'''***'''

I'd seen him go without his meds before, once for as long as ten days. Currently at day five, I knew it would go rapidly downhill from here. There was no point in mentioning it. He knew better than I what we could expect and I wondered how he could face it so calmly. ''Think of something else. You could both use the distraction.'' Latching on to his mention of bolt fastening, I quirked a grin at him.

"You saying I've got some loose bolts that need tightening?"

'''***'''

"Are you coming on to me?" He put a mock innocent tone in his voice, raising the back of one hand to his forehead in an exaggerated swoon. "I am but an innocent assassin of hope you are seducing with your evilly attractive figure."

Joshua managed to put a small smile on his face, even though his head was still churning away. "While I would love to, um, 'tighten your bolts', I'm not sure it's a wise idea right now. I'm having a hard time keeping the door closed while I'm conscious and it's wide open when I'm asleep. 'Bolt tightening' is several degrees closer to sleep than it is full consciousness. I could end up really happy or really sad. Total gamble." Crap. He hadn't wanted to mention anything about his difficulty during sleep, but it had popped right out of him. No barriers between brain and mouth either, it seemed.

'''***'''

"So getting the oil checked is right out, huh?" The damned imp of the perverse had my tongue again. "Not that you couldn't use a transmission flush yourself." I could milk the maintenance analogy all night but after the first three or four, puns had the tendency to grate, so I dropped it.'"As much as that sounds like a lot of fun and I wouldn't say 'no' if you offered, those sorts of bolts weren't what I'd meant."

'''***'''

And Joshua blushed several shades of red at once. "Sorry. I swear that's not all I think about." He shook his head in disgust. His brain somehow managed to be one track despite him being unable to keep it focused for long. Now what had she said? It took a minute or two for him to pull it up to the front again.

"I just originally meant, you need to take care of yourself. It'll be worth your while." And he clamped his mouth shut before he said something else stupid.

'''***'''

Damned if I couldn’t hear him blush. It wasn’t completely dark down here.  We had the lights on the shuttles to keep us from walking into the walls and overhead some sort of bioluminescent fungi or mold glowed through the gloom, but still I could only make out the pale blur of his skin and the bulk of him against the dark.  Details were impossible to discern unless I moved closer.

So I moved closer and put an arm around his waist, giving him a squeeze and saying, “I know it’s not all you think about.  People who do are tedious jerks and you’re anything but.  So…what are you thinking?”  I could feel the shivers going through him, slight tremors betraying his discomfort and I wrapped my other arm around him wishing I could do more to dispel the effects of withdrawal. 

'''***'''

What was he thinking? 

"Everything. Nothing. I'm all over the place. It's getting a little hard occasionally to be sure I'm not dreaming, if that makes sense." The physical contact was nice. He hadn't realized how much he needed that grounding of human contact until she slipped her arm around him. 

'''***'''

Holding him, I could feel the tremors weaken and slow down, and on a hunch I caressed his neck to check his pulse: a little faster but nothing alarming.

"Is this helping any?" I asked, wanting to be certain I wasn't imagining things.

'''***'''

He nodded as tenseness he didn't know existed faded out at her touch. "Yes, it helps. Physical contact helps remind me it's all real. Just lets me relax. Relaxed Joshua can handle it all a little better than stressed out Joshua."

He reached up with one hand and softly caressed the back of her hand on his neck. "Thank you. I needed this more than I realized. It's too easy to lose myself."

'''***'''

"Lie back," I said with a little downward tug of my arms.

'''***'''

If there was one thing he was good at, it was following orders. He laid back, coming to a comfortable resting position, his arms loosely by his side. "I am at your mercy," he said, for he really was. Always was, if he was being honest with himself.

'''***'''

"You say that like it's a bad thing," I quipped, trying for a light mood. I pulled one of the blankets over to lie on and stretched out beside him. It didn't take long to get my arm around him again and I held him close, running my free hand through his hair. "See? Nothing of the sort."

'''***'''

"Didn't say it was a bad thing," Joshua said quietly. If he really worked his imagination hard, he could pretend the oily lake was clear blue water, the dull rock was green grass and the cavern roof was wide open sky. When he did that, they might be out on a picnic somewhere. That was a nice thought.

He yawned - small and almost silent. His lack of sleep was starting to catch up with him, he guessed. "Do you mind if I fall asleep for a little while?" he asked. "If my dreaming gets out of control or I bother you somehow, you can wake me up." He might be able to sleep for a couple hours with her next to him.

'''***'''

"Go right ahead." I kissed his forhead. "Sleep. I'll be here." How many times had I done the same for Lem, taking turns with Christian when the dreams got too bad? I squirmed against the blanket and the sand beneath, hollowing out a bed to settle in. "I might need my arm back before then, but you want me to wake you in eight?"

Assuming we'd be left alone for eight hours, it would mean the first real rest we'd had in days.

'''***'''

He nodded softly, his eyes already closing. "I won't sleep that long," he whispered in a half drowsy voice. "Dreams'll wake me before then."

As he started to fall asleep, he could feel the physical tremors stopping. The benefits of rest. Now if he only could avoid the downsides.

'''***'''

I listened as his breathing deepened, felt him go limp and heavy as sleep claimed him.  I kept up a steady rhythm stroking his head and shoulders, finding comfort in it.  ''You could have had this a long time ago. Too stubborn to let it happen.  Idiot'', my internal nag informed me. ''Better late than never'', I said back.  ''Now shut up.  Tryin’ to sleep.''  

With the sound of Joshua’s breath and the beat of his heart to lull me, I dropped off soon after.  Joshua didn’t wake when my arm screamed pins and needles and woke me so I could reclaim it, but murmured drowsily and pulled me closer.  I managed to find a position that wouldn’t end up leaving parts of me on the blankets when I rose and drifted off again.  When the racket of the others getting up woke us, I saw by my watch we’d managed to get those eight hours in and while I was stiff from sleeping on the ground, I didn’t hurt as much as I’d expected.  If I’d dreamt at all, I couldn’t remember and I knew better than to ask Joshua if he remembered anything from his.  I just kissed him on rising and helped him shake out the blankets and went to join the others to start our day.



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