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Entry tags:
.fic: Blue River - D/M 2.2
Title: Blue River
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: Danny/Martin
Rating/Warnings: R. Vaguely pornish, but not really. (And look! No angst! Well, maybe a little.)
Disclaimer: Without a Trace belongs to Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and very likely many other people.
Advertisements: The last in a series of fics set in some nameless future universe. Sadly, though it is short, it won't make much sense unless you read the first two (longer) pieces, A Long Time Coming and Every Distance.
Previous Parts: 01
Notes: Second and last part in what was supposed to be a one-chapter affair. Come to think of it, it's the twenty-second and last part of what was supposed to be a five-chapter affair. And that's just... wow. Don't know how that happened.
CHAPTER TWO
They end up needing the better part of the day to get down to the island, thanks to tourist traffic and heavy construction on US-1. Martin spends most of the trip looking out the window, watching the waves tossing out in the Florida Straits, wondering at the forty-degree difference in temperature and what Danny’s just shown him.
He doesn’t quite know what to do with it other than accept it, because he can’t change anything no matter how much he wishes he could. But then his mind starts wandering off down hypothetical paths and issues of messing up the space-time continuum by interfering with the past, and if Danny would be the same person – smart and sarcastic, frighteningly intelligent, passionate, human and amazing – if he’d had a father who wasn’t abusive, if his parents had had more money.
These are Star Trek questions, and he knows they have no answers – that’s the whole point, and he’s going to go crazy if he keeps asking them. Still, his mind worries at the paths of fate, turning over possibility, if this is the only way they could have ended up together, or if they could have started this that night in San Diego, or after he’d almost died, or at any time before or after.
These mix up with other issues that have been in the back of his mind, like his own parents and their reaction to Danny. He remembered the sharp spike of anxiety when his mother had called and issued her ultimatum – you and Danny will come for dinner sometime soon, or else I won’t leave you alone until you do – and the way it had only twisted in his gut as he and Danny had walked up to his house.
And his parents had made an effort to get to know Danny, to approve of him even if they didn’t understand him or what he and Martin were doing together. Both his parents, and he can’t quite believe it, can’t account for the absence of Victor’s habitual coldness or their hesitation when it came time to say good night.
Guest room for Danny, and he can understand that. Nothing is going to change overnight, and he knows it’s foolish to expect otherwise.
He’d slept with Danny that night anyway, not out of defiance, but because he’s coming to realize that’s the only way he can sleep well, hearing Danny’s breath, the quiet shift of him when he turns over to take Martin into his arms.
Key West passes in a blur of carnival and abstraction, and almost five hours after landing in Miami they turn in their rental car and board the ferry. It’s an impressive boat, made to carry cars back and forth, with worn-out vinyl seats on its observation deck and beat-up vending machines that provide the only form of sustenance on the two-hour ride. Martin has a brief vision of the ferry breaking down and starving passengers attacking the machines, mangling helpless Snickers bars and potato chip bags in their frenzy.
He shares this insight with Danny, and this earns him a “You’re twisted, Fitz,” and a dry grin. Not much, but it’s the first they’ve spoken since leaving Hialeah, so it’s something.
* * *
Blue River Key isn’t quite like the other places Martin remembers going on vacation. Mostly this is because he usually went on vacation with his aunt and uncle, who liked the mountains, and the first beach he ever went to was Nantucket, which is wild and windy, rock-strewn, and even in the summer the water is frigid. It’s also always packed, too many people crammed onto a tiny spit of sand, with stern warning signs keeping kids off private beaches, and Martin remembers a few occasions of willful trespassing, just to make a point.
Blue River, though, is a tiny, tiny island, almost all human habitation confined to the western end where the ferry docks. Six miles long, a good run for him, barely a mile across at its widest point and a scant thirteen feet above sea level at its highest, so narrow that Danny says a good hurricane can submerge the island for days until the water goes back down.
Martin wonders why people stay, if their homes are in constant danger of being swept out into the Gulf, and Danny shrugs and says that they don’t seem to mind.
The key, according to Danny, doesn’t actually have a river, only a small stream that goes dry some years, but a bunch of English pirates who’d run aground off the coast had been so relieved to find fresh water that they’d upgraded the stream to ‘river’ status out of gratitude. Then they’d fixed their ship and gotten out of there and no one else seems to have bothered much about the island, until a crazy old entrepreneur – who had suffered from delusions of persecution, according to local legend – had built a vacation home there (safely away from whoever was persecuting him), and eventually moved to the island full time.
The crazy entrepreneur is long dead, and his home is now a bed and breakfast, and there are a few more buildings on the key now – a surf shop and three small restaurants, a grocery store that doubles as a bait and tackle shop (this alarms Martin when they walk inside), a tiny school for the few kids whose families live on the island year-round. Other houses, of course, some of them vacation homes for snowbirds and some that the locals rent out.
Most of the island, though, is national seashore, and the house where they’re staying borders it, detached from the modest bustle of the town. Nothing but white sand for six miles, sea oats lining the dunes and birds nesting in the mangrove stands that dot the beach. The house sits on the southern side of the island, protected from the stronger northern gales that sweep down in mid-March, and there’s nothing but blue water as far as Martin can see, even though he knows Cuba is somewhere not far over the horizon.
“C’mon and make yourself useful,” Danny says from behind him, and Martin can hear him impatiently rustling the grocery bags, but he doesn’t turn around.
“Hey, anyone home?” The rustling has stopped and Martin can hear Danny moving closer, footfalls loud on the tile of the kitchen and then muffled by the carpet.
“Yeah, just looking.” The sun is far down in the west now – that’s how long it took them to get here, the better part of the day, and even this far south the wind is brisk as the day’s warmth fades. “It’s pretty cool.” That doesn’t really cover what Martin is thinking at the moment, but Danny’s satisfied laugh tells Martin that he’s heard.
“Taylor Travel Agency, at your service.” The words are murmured against his neck, blending into kisses and careful nips, Danny’s arms sliding low across Martin’s torso to pull him closer.
Part of him is still, is endlessly and will forever be, surprised that this is so, so easy, accepting the warm, steady strength of Danny at his back, feeling the subtle, suggestive shift of hip and thigh against him, liking the slow burn of arousal starting down deep and working upward. How Danny reads his body, hears it speak where Martin feels hopelessly deaf.
Danny’s fingers are creeping up his shirt, threatening the sensitive skin over his ribs, teasing the muscles of his abdomen. Martin shifts against him, body wanting more and frightened of it, and he shivers as Danny laughs, tickling huffs of air brushing across his skin. Before he knows it Danny’s encouraging his shirt upward, pulling it up and off in a whisper of motion, and Martin’s standing there on their front porch, late evening seabreeze cool across his chest, Danny wrapped around him now and telling him they still need to check out the bedroom.
* * *
He likes the house where they’re staying, all weathered wood and bare, the furniture simple. One story, two bedrooms and one bath that has twenty years’ worth of salt and sand crusted into the grout. A small collection of games and books that dismays him, until Danny points out that you’re not supposed to spend all day inside, that’s the whole point, and why would you want to, anyway, with all that sand and water out there? Honestly, Martin.
Out of reflex Martin brings a book with him on their first full day at the beach, a Grisham novel that Danny reads and critiques (both the plot and the legal proceedings) over his shoulder, until Martin threatens to put sand in his hair unless he quits.
This leads to Danny suggesting that Martin just try it, so Martin grabs a handful of sand and holds it up, expression meaningful and threatening, and Danny stands slowly like Martin has a gun, hands up in conciliation. Martin’s not about to be pacified, and as he chases Danny down the beach he realizes that Danny’s running slow enough to get caught on purpose, but that doesn’t stop him from hooking an arm around Danny’s waist and dragging the both of them into the water with a splash and twin gasps of startled breath.
* * *
Some nights Martin lies awake and listens to the waves and the birds, searching the darkness for the lights and sounds of the city. But he can’t even make out a car driving on the single road out to the NOAA observatory on the far end of the island, and the only airplane he’s heard was a Cessna their first morning there, strayed out from Key West for a day.
It’s so quiet, even during the day, the heave and sigh of the sea suffusing everything, becoming a white noise that Martin doesn’t try to decipher anymore, not when he’s exhausted from days of doing almost nothing and nights of doing… Well… He glances over at a sleeping Danny, sprawled elegant and naked across the bed. Yeah.
* * *
Even in winter, with the tourist season in full swing, not many people come out here. Most of the people on the island stay close to town, where the surf shop rents out canoes and surfboards and a few deep-sea charter boats congregate. Key West, larger and with more flash – better restaurants, more expensive hotels, JetSkis – keeps the lion’s share of the tourists for itself, and really, a two-hour ferry trip is too far to go for most people.
This is fine by Martin, and when he tells Danny so, Danny smiles.
So after trekking a half-mile or so through the sand, Danny and Martin are pretty much alone and can stay that way for hours. There’s an older, weather-beaten man who comes by religiously – ten every morning – and a newlywed couple from Arkansas with a Black Labrador that smells of salt and dead fish and likes breathing in Martin’s face before taking off down the beach, but for much of the day it’s the two of them.
And that’s fine by Martin, too.
They’ve tried making out on the beach, but it doesn’t work as well as it does in the movies; Danny got water up his nose and Martin got sand in his eyes, and in other places that Martin didn’t even know existed.
Despite their failure earlier that day, Danny makes him go skinnydipping that night, and hums the Jaws theme song as Martin scowls at him and works up the nerve to take his shorts off.
And Martin’s pretty sure he’ll never forget what Danny looks like with the moonlight on him, how he tastes – salty, mouth warm under the cool sheen of water, breath hot and sweet and urgent – when Martin kisses him, when he licks along the ridge of Danny’s collarbone.
It’s like a honeymoon, he thinks ridiculously, some magic space removed from the rest of the world, fantastic and impermanent, even as Danny, hard and real and here, begins to move urgently against him, bucking into Martin’s hand and murmuring fervently against his mouth – Spanish, English, nonsense syllables (bello… oh, amor, amor, God, Martin) that Martin can understand only when he makes himself stop thinking.
* * *
For the first few days, Martin goes running in the early morning, up and down the beach in his bare feet, which is hell on his ankles but he kind of likes it, the rough-smooth feel of wet sand sinking just a bit under his weight. He splashes through pools left by the high tide, skirting around shells and bits of coral, clean wind in his face and he can taste the salt, so unlike the air of city life.
By the fourth day, though, he finds himself hesitating before climbing out of bed, and watching Danny sleep. And for a person who is so vital, so intensely energetic in everything that he does, Danny is a remarkably quiet sleeper – almost perfectly still, almost impossible to wake up before he decides it’s time, so relaxed that before Martin thinks too much more about it he crawls back under the covers and curls himself against Danny’s back, smiling a bit when Danny sighs.
This is also the day he stops shaving in the morning, because the only person who’s going to notice is Danny, and Danny hasn’t been terribly religious about grooming since they got here.
Of course Danny tells Martin that he likes him a little bit scruffy, and Martin blushes ridiculously but is secretly pleased.
He shaves whenever they go out, even though most of the people at the three restaurants, the surf shop, and the grocery store look as sandy and sunburned and disreputable as they do – men with five o’ clock shadow and women hiding straggly hair under sun caps, kids in bathing suits and shorts. Danny’s prepared him for this by making sure Martin packs nothing with a button-down collar or that requires dry cleaning.
And just as Martin thinks that he could get used to this – because the first few days he’d been at a loss, wondering how hours manage to fill themselves without work to do it for them, and had been surprised how easily they did – they have three days left before they have to head back to Miami, and there’s so much left to do.
* * *
The one thing they haven’t talked about is what they’re going to do when they get back. Martin has to start back at the beginning of April, and Danny the day after he gets back to New York, and Martin knows they’ve been avoiding the issue. Haven’t talked about one of them moving in with the other, because even being together for a few days a week had seemed – still seems – unbelievably good, unexpected, and to want more than that would be stupid and dangerous.
But Martin wants more, needs it, because what he told Danny back in New York is still true; I can’t do this alone anymore, and he knows he wasn’t talking only about dealing with his abduction or catching Harris or coming to terms with his father. All of it and none of it, and more besides, the whole business of living that he’s suddenly found so complicated when Danny’s not around to remind him of simplicity.
Which city they’d end up in has, until recently, been a bone Martin’s chewed over in private. He’s had work and prospects in D.C. – a promotion coming, most likely, a track up and away from a field position that he’s started to rethink – but he can’t ask Danny to move away from New York. It’s his city, as Danny’s said so many times, his home, as much or more a part of him as that orange apartment complex and Hialeah’s back streets.
Danny would do it if he asked, he knows. Do it in a heartbeat, unhesitatingly, but that willingness makes Martin all the more convinced that he can’t ask that of him. He’s not very good at relationships, but he knows that there are things you can ask and there are things you can’t, and this is one of the latter.
He has a solution, maybe, but he can’t make himself bring it up, and it’s not that he doesn’t trust Danny, because he does, but that he doesn’t trust himself, the part of him that is too attuned to having Danny in his bed, that wakes whenever Danny gets up in the middle of the night, that counts down from Sunday to Thursday evening until he gets to Danny’s apartment again and has started to think of it as home. It’s asking a lot of the rest of him, the serious, solitary, detached parts of him he’s lived with for so long, to trust that, to give in to it.
And he really wants to say all this, but no time seems right, because the days are too long and lazy to do anything of importance, easy to procrastinate, and it’s kind of crazy that a trip to the store or the small town near the docks already seems like a huge event, let alone the announcement of a major development in their relationship. He’ll have to bring it up soon, though – he knows this, practically speaking, and he gets the sense that Danny’s caught onto his preoccupation.
Dinner tonight, he decides. They’re eating in, and Danny’s always relaxed after he’s cooked, especially when he’s made the dishes his mother used to make, swapping stories and memories with Martin, and worrying over the dish not coming out quite right, while Martin spends the meal trying to draw up exactly what it is he’s going to say.
And just as he gets up the courage to preface his speech with “Hey, I wanted to – ” Danny says “I was thinking – ” and they end up backpedaling, exchanging anxious ‘you first’s, looking at each other to figure out what’s on the other’s mind.
“Nah, you go ahead,” Martin says quickly, trying not to sound too relieved, and he hopes Danny’s going to produce a suggestion for something to do the next day.
“Well.” Danny takes a breath, steadying, and something’s working at him; Martin can see the subdued, tightly controlled twitches in Danny’s fingers, the tension in his frame that says Danny’s fighting the impulse to get up and move. “I was thinking.”
“Really?” Striving for levity, and going over like a lead balloon. “That’s a new one.”
Danny glares at him and takes another breath, deeper now. “I was thinking that we should… Well, it’d be a great idea if we moved in together, and I’ve been looking at some Washington firms – ”
“Wait. You’ve been doing what?” Not supposed to happen, and he winces at his tone of voice, knowing exactly how Danny’s going to take it. Move in together, Taylor? Are you insane?
“Look, Martin, we don’t have to, I’m just saying it’s – ”
“No! I didn’t mean – ” Martin makes himself stop, tries to gather himself even as he sees Danny closing off, suspicion and disappointment creeping into those dark eyes, cooling them into careful distance.
“I didn’t mean we shouldn’t move in together,” he says, the words almost exploding out of him, because he can’t see Danny’s face like that again – ever again – and once he starts it’s easier to continue.
“You remember when we went to the Bureau, the day we had dinner with my folks?” – “No, Martin, I don’t. Geez.” – “When I went to talk to Ed… I was – ” steady, Fitzgerald, steady “ – I was going to sign my transfer papers for the New York office.”
“What?” Cautious and disbelieving – not afraid of a lie, exactly, but more like Danny can’t quite believe this is true.
“Nick has to re-organize Chris’s team,” Martin says, “and they need a senior agent there now, with him gone. I applied… and I got it.” He watches as Danny absorbs this information in utter silence, still now, all tension and electricity gone. “I didn’t want to tell you in case it didn’t work out…” And because this is the biggest, the fucking most frightening thing I’ve ever done, and I still can’t believe I’m doing it. “But even if I hadn’t gotten the transfer, I would have moved anyway.”
Danny doesn’t say anything, only looks at Martin, everything out there on his face, so mixed up Martin can’t put a name to any of it.
And for the first time in maybe forever, he finds he doesn’t need to have a name for anything.
* * *
A year later, Martin still hasn’t found a definition for the way Danny looks at him, for all the shades that chase across Danny’s face and through his eyes when they wake up in the morning, when Danny’s making dinner and Martin wants to know how long it’s going to be, when Danny’s inside him and moving like he has all day to get off and Martin’s begging him to, please God, let him come.
Occasionally this bothers him, but like the nightmares and the memory of those few weeks, these lapses of definition come infrequently and catch him out, unawares, and throw him for a moment before he finds an even keel again. He’ll find himself wondering over it in the office when he’s supposed to be going over reports – and nobody ever told him how boring this would be – or taking the subway out to Queens, or in the seconds after Danny turns away to get something from the refrigerator.
That’s okay, and the day he decides that he can live with this not knowing is the day the wondering over it stops.
Sometimes he catches himself trying to sift out the meaning in Danny’s eyes, like running fine white sand through his fingers and finding it impossible to separate anything clearly – warmth, acceptance, love, admiration, searching (Are you okay? What’s going on in that head of yours?), finding, all of it inseparable.
And that’s okay, too.
-end-
Post-fic notes: Blue River Key doesn't actually exist, to my knowledge, and it's not modeled on any of the Florida Keys (as, bizarrely, I've never been to them despite spending most of my life in Florida), but rather Ocracoke Island, in the Outer Banks off of North Carolina. I've spent several vacations there, and can attest that it is a very cool place.
And once again, thank you all. :)
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: Danny/Martin
Rating/Warnings: R. Vaguely pornish, but not really. (And look! No angst! Well, maybe a little.)
Disclaimer: Without a Trace belongs to Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and very likely many other people.
Advertisements: The last in a series of fics set in some nameless future universe. Sadly, though it is short, it won't make much sense unless you read the first two (longer) pieces, A Long Time Coming and Every Distance.
Previous Parts: 01
Notes: Second and last part in what was supposed to be a one-chapter affair. Come to think of it, it's the twenty-second and last part of what was supposed to be a five-chapter affair. And that's just... wow. Don't know how that happened.
CHAPTER TWO
They end up needing the better part of the day to get down to the island, thanks to tourist traffic and heavy construction on US-1. Martin spends most of the trip looking out the window, watching the waves tossing out in the Florida Straits, wondering at the forty-degree difference in temperature and what Danny’s just shown him.
He doesn’t quite know what to do with it other than accept it, because he can’t change anything no matter how much he wishes he could. But then his mind starts wandering off down hypothetical paths and issues of messing up the space-time continuum by interfering with the past, and if Danny would be the same person – smart and sarcastic, frighteningly intelligent, passionate, human and amazing – if he’d had a father who wasn’t abusive, if his parents had had more money.
These are Star Trek questions, and he knows they have no answers – that’s the whole point, and he’s going to go crazy if he keeps asking them. Still, his mind worries at the paths of fate, turning over possibility, if this is the only way they could have ended up together, or if they could have started this that night in San Diego, or after he’d almost died, or at any time before or after.
These mix up with other issues that have been in the back of his mind, like his own parents and their reaction to Danny. He remembered the sharp spike of anxiety when his mother had called and issued her ultimatum – you and Danny will come for dinner sometime soon, or else I won’t leave you alone until you do – and the way it had only twisted in his gut as he and Danny had walked up to his house.
And his parents had made an effort to get to know Danny, to approve of him even if they didn’t understand him or what he and Martin were doing together. Both his parents, and he can’t quite believe it, can’t account for the absence of Victor’s habitual coldness or their hesitation when it came time to say good night.
Guest room for Danny, and he can understand that. Nothing is going to change overnight, and he knows it’s foolish to expect otherwise.
He’d slept with Danny that night anyway, not out of defiance, but because he’s coming to realize that’s the only way he can sleep well, hearing Danny’s breath, the quiet shift of him when he turns over to take Martin into his arms.
Key West passes in a blur of carnival and abstraction, and almost five hours after landing in Miami they turn in their rental car and board the ferry. It’s an impressive boat, made to carry cars back and forth, with worn-out vinyl seats on its observation deck and beat-up vending machines that provide the only form of sustenance on the two-hour ride. Martin has a brief vision of the ferry breaking down and starving passengers attacking the machines, mangling helpless Snickers bars and potato chip bags in their frenzy.
He shares this insight with Danny, and this earns him a “You’re twisted, Fitz,” and a dry grin. Not much, but it’s the first they’ve spoken since leaving Hialeah, so it’s something.
Blue River Key isn’t quite like the other places Martin remembers going on vacation. Mostly this is because he usually went on vacation with his aunt and uncle, who liked the mountains, and the first beach he ever went to was Nantucket, which is wild and windy, rock-strewn, and even in the summer the water is frigid. It’s also always packed, too many people crammed onto a tiny spit of sand, with stern warning signs keeping kids off private beaches, and Martin remembers a few occasions of willful trespassing, just to make a point.
Blue River, though, is a tiny, tiny island, almost all human habitation confined to the western end where the ferry docks. Six miles long, a good run for him, barely a mile across at its widest point and a scant thirteen feet above sea level at its highest, so narrow that Danny says a good hurricane can submerge the island for days until the water goes back down.
Martin wonders why people stay, if their homes are in constant danger of being swept out into the Gulf, and Danny shrugs and says that they don’t seem to mind.
The key, according to Danny, doesn’t actually have a river, only a small stream that goes dry some years, but a bunch of English pirates who’d run aground off the coast had been so relieved to find fresh water that they’d upgraded the stream to ‘river’ status out of gratitude. Then they’d fixed their ship and gotten out of there and no one else seems to have bothered much about the island, until a crazy old entrepreneur – who had suffered from delusions of persecution, according to local legend – had built a vacation home there (safely away from whoever was persecuting him), and eventually moved to the island full time.
The crazy entrepreneur is long dead, and his home is now a bed and breakfast, and there are a few more buildings on the key now – a surf shop and three small restaurants, a grocery store that doubles as a bait and tackle shop (this alarms Martin when they walk inside), a tiny school for the few kids whose families live on the island year-round. Other houses, of course, some of them vacation homes for snowbirds and some that the locals rent out.
Most of the island, though, is national seashore, and the house where they’re staying borders it, detached from the modest bustle of the town. Nothing but white sand for six miles, sea oats lining the dunes and birds nesting in the mangrove stands that dot the beach. The house sits on the southern side of the island, protected from the stronger northern gales that sweep down in mid-March, and there’s nothing but blue water as far as Martin can see, even though he knows Cuba is somewhere not far over the horizon.
“C’mon and make yourself useful,” Danny says from behind him, and Martin can hear him impatiently rustling the grocery bags, but he doesn’t turn around.
“Hey, anyone home?” The rustling has stopped and Martin can hear Danny moving closer, footfalls loud on the tile of the kitchen and then muffled by the carpet.
“Yeah, just looking.” The sun is far down in the west now – that’s how long it took them to get here, the better part of the day, and even this far south the wind is brisk as the day’s warmth fades. “It’s pretty cool.” That doesn’t really cover what Martin is thinking at the moment, but Danny’s satisfied laugh tells Martin that he’s heard.
“Taylor Travel Agency, at your service.” The words are murmured against his neck, blending into kisses and careful nips, Danny’s arms sliding low across Martin’s torso to pull him closer.
Part of him is still, is endlessly and will forever be, surprised that this is so, so easy, accepting the warm, steady strength of Danny at his back, feeling the subtle, suggestive shift of hip and thigh against him, liking the slow burn of arousal starting down deep and working upward. How Danny reads his body, hears it speak where Martin feels hopelessly deaf.
Danny’s fingers are creeping up his shirt, threatening the sensitive skin over his ribs, teasing the muscles of his abdomen. Martin shifts against him, body wanting more and frightened of it, and he shivers as Danny laughs, tickling huffs of air brushing across his skin. Before he knows it Danny’s encouraging his shirt upward, pulling it up and off in a whisper of motion, and Martin’s standing there on their front porch, late evening seabreeze cool across his chest, Danny wrapped around him now and telling him they still need to check out the bedroom.
He likes the house where they’re staying, all weathered wood and bare, the furniture simple. One story, two bedrooms and one bath that has twenty years’ worth of salt and sand crusted into the grout. A small collection of games and books that dismays him, until Danny points out that you’re not supposed to spend all day inside, that’s the whole point, and why would you want to, anyway, with all that sand and water out there? Honestly, Martin.
Out of reflex Martin brings a book with him on their first full day at the beach, a Grisham novel that Danny reads and critiques (both the plot and the legal proceedings) over his shoulder, until Martin threatens to put sand in his hair unless he quits.
This leads to Danny suggesting that Martin just try it, so Martin grabs a handful of sand and holds it up, expression meaningful and threatening, and Danny stands slowly like Martin has a gun, hands up in conciliation. Martin’s not about to be pacified, and as he chases Danny down the beach he realizes that Danny’s running slow enough to get caught on purpose, but that doesn’t stop him from hooking an arm around Danny’s waist and dragging the both of them into the water with a splash and twin gasps of startled breath.
Some nights Martin lies awake and listens to the waves and the birds, searching the darkness for the lights and sounds of the city. But he can’t even make out a car driving on the single road out to the NOAA observatory on the far end of the island, and the only airplane he’s heard was a Cessna their first morning there, strayed out from Key West for a day.
It’s so quiet, even during the day, the heave and sigh of the sea suffusing everything, becoming a white noise that Martin doesn’t try to decipher anymore, not when he’s exhausted from days of doing almost nothing and nights of doing… Well… He glances over at a sleeping Danny, sprawled elegant and naked across the bed. Yeah.
Even in winter, with the tourist season in full swing, not many people come out here. Most of the people on the island stay close to town, where the surf shop rents out canoes and surfboards and a few deep-sea charter boats congregate. Key West, larger and with more flash – better restaurants, more expensive hotels, JetSkis – keeps the lion’s share of the tourists for itself, and really, a two-hour ferry trip is too far to go for most people.
This is fine by Martin, and when he tells Danny so, Danny smiles.
So after trekking a half-mile or so through the sand, Danny and Martin are pretty much alone and can stay that way for hours. There’s an older, weather-beaten man who comes by religiously – ten every morning – and a newlywed couple from Arkansas with a Black Labrador that smells of salt and dead fish and likes breathing in Martin’s face before taking off down the beach, but for much of the day it’s the two of them.
And that’s fine by Martin, too.
They’ve tried making out on the beach, but it doesn’t work as well as it does in the movies; Danny got water up his nose and Martin got sand in his eyes, and in other places that Martin didn’t even know existed.
Despite their failure earlier that day, Danny makes him go skinnydipping that night, and hums the Jaws theme song as Martin scowls at him and works up the nerve to take his shorts off.
And Martin’s pretty sure he’ll never forget what Danny looks like with the moonlight on him, how he tastes – salty, mouth warm under the cool sheen of water, breath hot and sweet and urgent – when Martin kisses him, when he licks along the ridge of Danny’s collarbone.
It’s like a honeymoon, he thinks ridiculously, some magic space removed from the rest of the world, fantastic and impermanent, even as Danny, hard and real and here, begins to move urgently against him, bucking into Martin’s hand and murmuring fervently against his mouth – Spanish, English, nonsense syllables (bello… oh, amor, amor, God, Martin) that Martin can understand only when he makes himself stop thinking.
For the first few days, Martin goes running in the early morning, up and down the beach in his bare feet, which is hell on his ankles but he kind of likes it, the rough-smooth feel of wet sand sinking just a bit under his weight. He splashes through pools left by the high tide, skirting around shells and bits of coral, clean wind in his face and he can taste the salt, so unlike the air of city life.
By the fourth day, though, he finds himself hesitating before climbing out of bed, and watching Danny sleep. And for a person who is so vital, so intensely energetic in everything that he does, Danny is a remarkably quiet sleeper – almost perfectly still, almost impossible to wake up before he decides it’s time, so relaxed that before Martin thinks too much more about it he crawls back under the covers and curls himself against Danny’s back, smiling a bit when Danny sighs.
This is also the day he stops shaving in the morning, because the only person who’s going to notice is Danny, and Danny hasn’t been terribly religious about grooming since they got here.
Of course Danny tells Martin that he likes him a little bit scruffy, and Martin blushes ridiculously but is secretly pleased.
He shaves whenever they go out, even though most of the people at the three restaurants, the surf shop, and the grocery store look as sandy and sunburned and disreputable as they do – men with five o’ clock shadow and women hiding straggly hair under sun caps, kids in bathing suits and shorts. Danny’s prepared him for this by making sure Martin packs nothing with a button-down collar or that requires dry cleaning.
And just as Martin thinks that he could get used to this – because the first few days he’d been at a loss, wondering how hours manage to fill themselves without work to do it for them, and had been surprised how easily they did – they have three days left before they have to head back to Miami, and there’s so much left to do.
The one thing they haven’t talked about is what they’re going to do when they get back. Martin has to start back at the beginning of April, and Danny the day after he gets back to New York, and Martin knows they’ve been avoiding the issue. Haven’t talked about one of them moving in with the other, because even being together for a few days a week had seemed – still seems – unbelievably good, unexpected, and to want more than that would be stupid and dangerous.
But Martin wants more, needs it, because what he told Danny back in New York is still true; I can’t do this alone anymore, and he knows he wasn’t talking only about dealing with his abduction or catching Harris or coming to terms with his father. All of it and none of it, and more besides, the whole business of living that he’s suddenly found so complicated when Danny’s not around to remind him of simplicity.
Which city they’d end up in has, until recently, been a bone Martin’s chewed over in private. He’s had work and prospects in D.C. – a promotion coming, most likely, a track up and away from a field position that he’s started to rethink – but he can’t ask Danny to move away from New York. It’s his city, as Danny’s said so many times, his home, as much or more a part of him as that orange apartment complex and Hialeah’s back streets.
Danny would do it if he asked, he knows. Do it in a heartbeat, unhesitatingly, but that willingness makes Martin all the more convinced that he can’t ask that of him. He’s not very good at relationships, but he knows that there are things you can ask and there are things you can’t, and this is one of the latter.
He has a solution, maybe, but he can’t make himself bring it up, and it’s not that he doesn’t trust Danny, because he does, but that he doesn’t trust himself, the part of him that is too attuned to having Danny in his bed, that wakes whenever Danny gets up in the middle of the night, that counts down from Sunday to Thursday evening until he gets to Danny’s apartment again and has started to think of it as home. It’s asking a lot of the rest of him, the serious, solitary, detached parts of him he’s lived with for so long, to trust that, to give in to it.
And he really wants to say all this, but no time seems right, because the days are too long and lazy to do anything of importance, easy to procrastinate, and it’s kind of crazy that a trip to the store or the small town near the docks already seems like a huge event, let alone the announcement of a major development in their relationship. He’ll have to bring it up soon, though – he knows this, practically speaking, and he gets the sense that Danny’s caught onto his preoccupation.
Dinner tonight, he decides. They’re eating in, and Danny’s always relaxed after he’s cooked, especially when he’s made the dishes his mother used to make, swapping stories and memories with Martin, and worrying over the dish not coming out quite right, while Martin spends the meal trying to draw up exactly what it is he’s going to say.
And just as he gets up the courage to preface his speech with “Hey, I wanted to – ” Danny says “I was thinking – ” and they end up backpedaling, exchanging anxious ‘you first’s, looking at each other to figure out what’s on the other’s mind.
“Nah, you go ahead,” Martin says quickly, trying not to sound too relieved, and he hopes Danny’s going to produce a suggestion for something to do the next day.
“Well.” Danny takes a breath, steadying, and something’s working at him; Martin can see the subdued, tightly controlled twitches in Danny’s fingers, the tension in his frame that says Danny’s fighting the impulse to get up and move. “I was thinking.”
“Really?” Striving for levity, and going over like a lead balloon. “That’s a new one.”
Danny glares at him and takes another breath, deeper now. “I was thinking that we should… Well, it’d be a great idea if we moved in together, and I’ve been looking at some Washington firms – ”
“Wait. You’ve been doing what?” Not supposed to happen, and he winces at his tone of voice, knowing exactly how Danny’s going to take it. Move in together, Taylor? Are you insane?
“Look, Martin, we don’t have to, I’m just saying it’s – ”
“No! I didn’t mean – ” Martin makes himself stop, tries to gather himself even as he sees Danny closing off, suspicion and disappointment creeping into those dark eyes, cooling them into careful distance.
“I didn’t mean we shouldn’t move in together,” he says, the words almost exploding out of him, because he can’t see Danny’s face like that again – ever again – and once he starts it’s easier to continue.
“You remember when we went to the Bureau, the day we had dinner with my folks?” – “No, Martin, I don’t. Geez.” – “When I went to talk to Ed… I was – ” steady, Fitzgerald, steady “ – I was going to sign my transfer papers for the New York office.”
“What?” Cautious and disbelieving – not afraid of a lie, exactly, but more like Danny can’t quite believe this is true.
“Nick has to re-organize Chris’s team,” Martin says, “and they need a senior agent there now, with him gone. I applied… and I got it.” He watches as Danny absorbs this information in utter silence, still now, all tension and electricity gone. “I didn’t want to tell you in case it didn’t work out…” And because this is the biggest, the fucking most frightening thing I’ve ever done, and I still can’t believe I’m doing it. “But even if I hadn’t gotten the transfer, I would have moved anyway.”
Danny doesn’t say anything, only looks at Martin, everything out there on his face, so mixed up Martin can’t put a name to any of it.
And for the first time in maybe forever, he finds he doesn’t need to have a name for anything.
A year later, Martin still hasn’t found a definition for the way Danny looks at him, for all the shades that chase across Danny’s face and through his eyes when they wake up in the morning, when Danny’s making dinner and Martin wants to know how long it’s going to be, when Danny’s inside him and moving like he has all day to get off and Martin’s begging him to, please God, let him come.
Occasionally this bothers him, but like the nightmares and the memory of those few weeks, these lapses of definition come infrequently and catch him out, unawares, and throw him for a moment before he finds an even keel again. He’ll find himself wondering over it in the office when he’s supposed to be going over reports – and nobody ever told him how boring this would be – or taking the subway out to Queens, or in the seconds after Danny turns away to get something from the refrigerator.
That’s okay, and the day he decides that he can live with this not knowing is the day the wondering over it stops.
Sometimes he catches himself trying to sift out the meaning in Danny’s eyes, like running fine white sand through his fingers and finding it impossible to separate anything clearly – warmth, acceptance, love, admiration, searching (Are you okay? What’s going on in that head of yours?), finding, all of it inseparable.
And that’s okay, too.
-end-
Post-fic notes: Blue River Key doesn't actually exist, to my knowledge, and it's not modeled on any of the Florida Keys (as, bizarrely, I've never been to them despite spending most of my life in Florida), but rather Ocracoke Island, in the Outer Banks off of North Carolina. I've spent several vacations there, and can attest that it is a very cool place.
And once again, thank you all. :)
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