Chapter Text
A rich and sunlit afternoon, Declan glaze-eyed but slackly tolerant. The cliffs mantled over them like worried mothers; clouds rubbernecked east to west and never piled up into a storm-tower. Gray went down the list. Circulation massaged back into hands and wrists; water, food, ibuprofen; an odd ceremonial hour nude in the lake as Gray rubbed Declan meticulously clean and kneaded the knots from his muscles at the lapping water’s edge. After the vomit, there was water, food, ibuprofen again. It was a sacrifice backwards, its ritual ablutions retroactive. By the end, wearing the sweatshirts and swim trunks from the pack, they both smelled like Dr. Bronner’s and sunscreen.
Gray indulged himself in any tender urge and got exactly one moment in return. Leaning to re-bandage all Declan’s wounds, Gray had run his thumb over Declan’s eyebrow and pressed a kiss to his hairline; Declan made a small sound and tilted his forehead to Gray’s shoulder for a little while, a day-and-shadow lull with clouds scudding past the sun. Gray rested his hand at the back of Declan’s neck. Noiseless tears leached hot into Gray’s collar.
With each exhale Declan sagged into stillness, like wind was wandering off from the wavering sail of his body. His full weight was adult; one arm loosely wrapped up to the back of Gray’s head with incongruous intimacy—a partner's palm, independent. Gray held him and murmured what he could until the tears were only breath again, not nearly long enough, and then the poise hardened Declan’s posture, and then it was done.
Gray'd known about this too, the slip back into the shell. He set Declan against a fallen log while Gray washed their clothes; Declan couldn't walk much, though you wouldn’t know it by the easy shoulders and the sterling jaw. Untroubled, he watched Gray lay out the laundry to dry in the sun. Shirts, pants, briefs, socks. Two companionable paper doll outfits. Blanks where eyes should be when Declan turned his gruesome face up.
“That was all of it, yeah?” Declan lifted two fingers vaguely down the shore. "No further wetwork." He hadn’t spoken since the tree, and his voice was a desiccated rind.
Grey found himself wearing a small smile. “That was it.”
Declan nodded. “Bring me my phone? Pack, right side.”
“Calling backup?” Who knew what Ronan could do after a nap, really. Gray brought. “You have a couple bars.”
“Email. I won’t be walking till tomorrow anyway.” He was already thumbing through.
Gray could bully him out of this, or get a book and settle him against his chest. Use his mouth, maybe, to see what happened. He’d have liked to have fed him again later regardless. Instead Declan went into the tent as soon as it was built and slept straight through, except for a cold half hour in the total dark, when he retched awake to heave spit into the dirt outside the tent flap. Gray rubbed his spine until Declan shuddered himself back under.
–
Gray swum at dawn. While the moon pulleyed the sun up, their lake-cradle couldn’t shake its dusk: the shadows stayed blue for a reluctant hour. Drip-drying down the shore from camp on a patch of moss, Gray spied Declan coming through the trees, long pale flame of a body wavering closer with a sleeping bag cape.
Overnight the beating had swollen and stained him with purple. He stood, wild-eyed and too young, too well-made, between Gray’s akimbo knees; he folded down and sprawled his whole bare leanness over Gray, thigh between thighs, a shocking weight and heat on Gray’s lake-chill. Declan was resentful and shaky already.
The sleeping bag formed a warm den for clasping close, for Declan tucking his face into Gray’s throat. All Declan's sleek muscle fretted. He scalded Gray's pulse with tears and then broke the words there—asked to be fucked and hurt again, made clumsy work of tugging Gray to hardness—and coursed with tremor the whole time. Declan had slicked his raw and swollen hole so thickly it overflowed between his thighs. Had planned for this, brought his nightmare to Gray’s bedside to be consoled. He was still untenably tight.
Gray didn’t get him ready: he split him slow on his cock, rocking. He kissed Declan from collarbone to earlobe and sucked lightly at his Adam’s apple and drove him gently down onto the pain when he jolted away. Silk, shocking heat, a gorgeous stuttered yield down to the root. Declan's cockhead slipped in its own wetness on Gray's stomach, and Gray laid his palm over its ruddiness, let Declan twitch forward and back inside light pressure. The sleeping bag slid off. All of his lover was precious and gilded-wet in the new light. Gray touched everything.
Declan curled his spine to lean his forehead to Gray’s, the narrow world made of a hot shuddering armful held safe. Tiny sweet noises as Gray hurt him. Declan brushed them uncertainly to Gray’s lips, sweeter with that shake. He cradled Declan’s face with his fingertips pressed into the bandaged gash; he was so partial to the blanch and the tear-spills and Declan’s lolling mouth.
The pain or the fuck stalled out whatever Declan wanted to say, so Gray only kissed him well and kept rhythm. It would have been mellow if Declan weren't still a ravage. Maybe if Gray were a little smaller.
Declan scraped it out anyway. “N-never going to call you Daddy,” he mumbled, right against Gray's teeth.
Gray dawdled their kiss for a mild point of a moment.
Only a moment—Gray liked to kiss. A corner of Declan’s mouth had bent; for that Gray sharpened his stroke and knocked long minutes of fresh tears out of him at the top until Declan’s spine began to give.
“Please,” Declan said, flagging sweetly, “please,” and Gray turned them, folded him, worked. Found his bruises and knuckled them. Declan clung.
Pain stretched and stretched. Gray, too fond and wanting, curved into Declan’s shoulder and kept them adrift on an undulation of ache and sting, teaching himself how to make Declan swear and scrabble and clench.
Blur-faced with flooding eyes, Declan clutched in Gray's hair. For a little while he fumbled with new syllables; “I w—n—god—“; Gray left room, would cosset anything.
But on the fifth or sixth try Declan cupped the back of Gray’s neck—not desperately. A claim, or a softness.
Gray’s air went quite clear. Sweat was cooling on his back and thighs.
“I—wish you’d had, had something to protect,” Declan hitched. His stomach muscles quaked and his wet jaw soaked Gray’s temple. “I wish that when he hurt you, it meant something.”
Gray opened his mouth against Declan’s chest. Wind roughened the water and creaked the pines.
He put the slow brutality back into the fuck. Declan started the keening fearful rhythm Gray loved best, the sound that spiraled up until it clamped and ripped. There’d been all that pain for Gray’s child-self, yes. Correct, that it was pointless. It saved no one. No end but a brother who’d have murdered him first.
"Gray—" Declan spat. Every muscle had locked like a sluice trapping water. "Can't—I can't—"
Exceptional, Gray thought, this eldest Lynch, who endured. Who looked and saw. When had anyone given Gray a grace he couldn't dispute?
The thinner morning clouds barely dimmed even the early sun. Letting his weight crush out Declan's air, Gray kissed the monstrous bruise on his sapling shoulder, and gathered violence to pour through.