C&P/Crosspost - A Pros Thing (Reposted)

[dee_natsuko78]

Given the feedback on my last post, I'm going to copy/paste my Pros-relevant Tumblr posts to dW, crossposting to LJ. There will still be links to Tumblr if I'm borrowing a meme or replying to/reblogging another post, but this should make it easier for those of you not on Tumblr to respond to my Pros posts should you wish.

(Please let me know if you'd also like MCU, Cabin Pressure, BBC Sherlock, Stargate SG-1, SGA, writing or disability/mental health related posts crossposted. Any and all fic I post to Tumblr and - when I set the AO3 account I have an invite for - to AO3 [I'm trying to think of the right username] will be linked to/crossposted here, regardless of fandom.) All the really personal stuff about the UK and me will still be posted HERE not on Tumblr. I like F'lock and I'm afraid of Tumblr politics.

So here: So I’m supposed (for one definition of supposed) to be trying to write one of my longer fic for PicoWriMo. [Which is now over.]

But I dreamed about the Lads last night and had to get this out of my brain before my brain could fic.

So here, have 1300 words of un-edited, un-betaed Not Fic Bodie/Doyle (one-sided?) Doyle Introspection.

(Possible warning for period-appropriate attitudes to homo/bisexuality and period language. And swearing. Lots of swearing.)

 

It hits Ray at odd times, this thing with Bodie: they’ll be drinking together at one of their flats after a god-awful op, or collapsing in the rec room at HQ too knackered to drive home, or straight out the showers when Bodie has a towel on his head, or, most often, when they’re arsing about together – racing each other, scuffling, play-wrestling, goosing each other, jabbing at each other’s ticklish spots… (Not for the first time, it occurs to him that even for someone as AC-DC as he is, their friendship is more than a little queer.)

This thing is different from the major Thing he has for his partner. (It’s not a crush. Crushes are what teenage girls have on the pop-stars whose posters adorn their bedroom walls. And he has to be drunk to call it “love”. So. Thing.)

The Other Thing, though, that’s what he’s… well, brooding on. The one where Bodie will grin at him, eyes sparkling and looking mischievous and Ray can almost see an eight-year-old William, in short trousers and a tank-top with his shirt hanging out, all big grin and freckles across his nose and knobbly, scabby knees, looking like an illustration from a Richmal Crompton book.

And Ray’s heart will sodding SQUEEZE and he’ll feel an overwhelming surge of fondness and utter protectiveness.

Protectiveness.

For William Andrew Philip Bodie.

Agent 3-7.

Former British Army and SAS Sergeant.

A man who had been gun-running (and probably drug-running, let’s be honest, here) in the Congo before he was legally old enough to drive back home. Who had gone on to be a mercenary. Fought in other people’s wars.

And that was before he joined up for Queen and Country and was seconded into the SAS and then CI-5.

W. A. P. Bodie was deadly. A soldier. A warrior. A predator.

And Raymond Doyle could look at him and see a kitten. Playful and sometimes a bit lost.

And he just wants to wrap him up in the fuzzy blanket his mum crocheted when he was a kid – his sick-day blanket - and feed him home-cooked meals. Look after him. Tend him when he’s injured. Cuddle him.

He knows almost nothing about Bodie’s childhood, except that his parents died when he was pretty young and there had been a step-dad. He isn’t sure but he has an inkling that there might have been a spell in care. Whatever it was, and Ray knows his own youth wasn’t what you’d call stellar, it had been bad enough or indifferent enough that Bodie had run away to London and then to sea when he was fourteen. Which Ray can’t even really imagine.

He knows Bodie has been through some fucking terrible shit – seen things, done things and been done unto. He never talks about the time spent in a Congo jail except sideways. He never talks about any of it except hints and jokes and misdirection. What must it have been like to be in that world as not much more than a kid? At fourteen Ray had still been reading comic books.

Ray wants to fix it – not fix Bodie, there’s nothing broken about the man – but give him a taster of what his childhood and teens could have been. Though if Bodie had hung around Britain in the sixties he and Ray probably wouldn’t have been friends. He’d probably have had a Vespa, for God’s sake. And bought a suit on lay-away rather than a leather jacket.

But still. He wants – and he knows it’s fucking ridiculous – to give Bodie a happy childhood.

Not just for the cheeky schoolboy who still shines through, but for the rarer times when Bodie actually lets Ray see him hurting, emotions bleeding through the mask he must’ve learned to put up decades ago, and those big blue eyes are almost wet and he looks like a kid who’d just been backhanded and didn’t know why…

And Ray just wants. Wants to bundle him up in that blanket and hid him from the world, and spoon-feed him soup and spotted-dick and custard and Swiss Roll and just… fix it. Make everything better. Keep him safe. And his. Ray’s.

And that’s a fuck-sight more complicated than Thing-ing his best mate and wanting to fuck him through the mattress (or let Bodie fuck him, or give him a blow-job if he wasn’t up for fucking. Shit, at this point, he’d take mutual hand-jobs as long as there was some sort of sex. If it wouldn’t screw over their partnership, he’d take a drunken one-off – at least there would be touching and he’d have the memories to feed his fantasies for the rest of his life).

But no. Bodie’s body pretty much held no mysteries – the showers at the sports centre and HQ would have seen to that, even if they hadn’t had to share tiny rooms in cheap B&Bs for various ops. And Bodie even occasionally let him in behind the Feelings Wall. But Bodie and sex? That is behind a wall and a shut door. A secret, even after the hundreds of double-dates they must have shared over the past – what was it now? Seven years?

And Ray wants IN. He wants all of Bodie, even the bloody and the violent parts (it isn’t as if Ray isn’t violent, after all) even the less-than-legal past and the messy shit. All his secrets.

And okay. His body too. His muscles and his scars and his skin and Ray wants to feel those eyelashes against his skin and play with that thick hair that curls when it’s damp if Bodie doesn’t keep it short. Bodie has a thing about ruffling Ray’s hair, but hair-ruffles and hair-playing and stroking are very different things and Ray knows enough about the need to play it straight.

And Raymond Doyle’s a bloody coward.

Not when it comes to violence. Not when it comes to anger and blood and fights – with words, with fists, with knives, with guns. He’s taken two bullets to the chest. Physical pain is… not nothing, but deal-able. Bearable. You can get over physical pain.

He survived a bullet in his physical heart – but his emotional heart?

He doesn’t think he would survive losing Bodie, much less get over it.

And okay, Bodie’s fucking protective of him, too. And Bodie lets him in. Sometimes. And sometimes he gets a hint that Bodie’s not exactly straight as a ruler – his gay jokes and even camping up are sometimes whatever the opposite of “the lady doth protest too much” is. Hiding in plain sight, maybe. His gay jokes are never actually cruel – not like so many can be.

But God, if Ray’s got that wrong… if he makes a move on Bodie and he… even if Bodie laughs it off, makes a joke of it, or just says, “I’m not into fellas, mate,”… even if it doesn’t affect their partnership, doesn’t ruin their friendship… Ray thinks even the death of hope might be too much for him.

And he knows maybe it would be even worse to have one night which Bodie shrugs off as if it were nothing the next day. To have something with Bodie that was just physical and friendship.

But at least that wouldn’t be out-right rejection of what now feels like the core of who Ray is after all these years. Not the being bisexual thing – there are more important aspects of Ray Doyle than that one. But Thing-ing Bodie? Being in Thing with Bodie? That truth touches all the other truths about Ray. And if Bodie somehow can’t deal with that… if Bodie doesn’t want that… well, he doesn’t really want any of Ray Doyle at all, does he? He just wants someone he thinks is Ray Doyle but really isn’t.

And that would break Ray’s fucking heart in a way no surgeon could fix.