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Peja's Wonderful World of Makebelieve Import
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Published:
2020-11-05
Words:
822
Chapters:
1/1
Kudos:
7
Hits:
1,570

Fluid

Summary:

Summary:  Eliot’s drowning.

Work Text:

Fluid
by Sam-Tony

 
He was drowning.  In water, in blood.  The mark…gone after the team…Parker, Sophie…a flare of red - rage and then pain…hot before the shock of a cold so complete it had taken his breath away…he had been shot…
 
Too much he couldn’t hold onto.  Too much he knew he should be paying attention to, should be reaching for…
 
…but the fog in his head was too thick.  The denim of his jeans, the corduroy and sheepskin of his winter coat pulling him deeper down into the depths of that sea of water and blood that was so much more like a blanket than a sea that the darkness was beginning to overcome him.
 
A voice.  Light in the darkness.  Calling him.  Calling *for* him.  Nate.  Must answer.  Try.  Too tired.
 
Eliot!
 
His eyes open, a flutter, nothing more, closing immediately on exhaustion and pain and the gallon of water he had taken in when he had dove into the lake half-frozen over in the early Montana winter.  Billy.  The mark had thrown the kid in the water…
 
“Come on, Eliot, stay with me.”
 
Too tired.  The water had been too cold; stealing his breath and freezing his muscles, his body, his lungs…
 
He had gotten the kid out, hadn’t he?  He thought he remembered looking up into the brilliance of the sun fractured on the surface of the water as his clothes and frozen body pulled him deeper…thought he remembered the small shadow breaking that light as he was pulled from the water…
 
He could kick up to the surface.  He should.  But he was too tired, too cold…and for once not moving was so nice…
 
But if he was drowning, why was he looking up into the sun?  Why was there hardness under his back?  And the brittle powder of snow under his twitching fingers?
 
It was only the faces that stared down on him - worried, anxious, pale - that Eliot realized he wasn’t drowning in water, but in *voices*.  Joining the one, calling to him.  Joining the hands, probably cold on their own but almost hot on skin that was almost blue, pulling him back, not letting the water take him.  Claim him.  They were there first; Eliot was theirs, the water couldn’t have him.
 
No and not the darkness, the blood, neither.  Parker.  Hardison.  Sophie.  Nate.  Anchors that buoyed him up instead of weighing him down.  Gave him a purpose; a focus for something other than the blood and violence that was a hitter’s life.  His life still, but now so very, very different.
 
Feeling lips on his, hard and cold all their own…breathing into him, for him…familiar, welcome…different lips, soft skin urgent and demanding, sugar and sweet replacing the faint taste of alcohol…pushing air into lungs that just now stuttered back to life in a body once more willing to fight…
 
Nate.  And Parker…
 
But why was Nate so cold?  He had…of course.  Someone had to have come in after him…
 
Awareness now dancing within reach.  He can hear Sophie, normally smooth voice high and thin, desperate, on the phone, demanding an ambulance…
 
Putting his will into the demand that his body move, his eyes flickered open, automatically searching for Nate, landing on the anxious figured huddled just off his right knee, huddled in a thick blanket, Hardison wrapped around him providing emergency body heat…
 
Blue eyes snapped onto his, intense, demanding.  Scared.  “Eliot?”
 
“Here.”  No that impressive, the croak relaxed the whipcord tension in the thin shoulders at least, Nate sinking back into the arms that held him.
 
“Up,”  Parker told him.  “Into the blanket.  Ambulance is on it’s way.”
 
“Billy?”
 
Nate lifted his arm, blanket and all, to show the nine year old huddled underneath.
 
But now that awareness was coming back, the urge, the instinct to protect was immediate, pushing his body up off the hard ground composed of dead grass and melted snow, his eyes shifting to scan beyond the skeletal limbs of lifeless trees and the silver landscape of churned up snow around the frozen lake.
 
“Addison?”
 
“Taken care of.”  Hardison’s voice, cold and flat where he sat curled around Nate and the kid.  A few feet away, Addison lay flat and still in the snow, duct tape wrapped in three or four strips around his body, short block taped firmly over his mouth.
 
“Blanket,”  Sophie chided, warmth and admonision warring together as she and Parker helped him shift across the foot or so of space, body still frozen heavy and awkward, until the other arm dropped around his shoulders, cocooning him in warmth and the scent of aftershave and orange soda.
 
Sophie snuggled in on his exposed side, Parker, too, and he let the part of his mind still locked in the dark of the deep, looking up into the light of the pale winter sun, rest, knowing he no longer had to fear the water, or the blood.
 
Knowing he no longer had to fear drowning at all because, for the first time in a very long time, he was swimming with a buddy.
 

End