Today
By Tiriel
NC-17, m/m, Cade-in-jeopardy (is that redundant?)
Disclaimer: They aren't mine. Cade, Eddie, Cain, Joshua, Gia...none of them. Well, except for Aaron, I guess. Although I don't really want him. I want Cade and Eddie. Solely for plot purposes, of course. And I wouldn't turn Joshua or Cain away either. But Cain's evil laugh *has* to go. Of course, they aren't mine. But damn it, in light of what I'm hearing about FW season three, maybe I should stake a claim. Okay, maybe not, but a girl can dream... and did I mention they aren't mine?
So I was putting a FW tape into the VCR to give me inspiration for Past Life, which is still in progress but delayed by a factchecking issue. And I made the mistake of putting in the ep "Tomorrow" (one of my favorites of the second season) which has that sad, sweet goodbye scene between Cade and Eddie (JUST KISS HIM ALREADY, DAMN IT!) and Cain licking all kinds of things. I've meant to do something with that ep for a while, other than the Journals series story, that is, and because I made the error of choosing that one to watch the other night, it started to come out of my head now rather than later. So this is ep-related, for the ep "Tomorrow" and I apologize. I apologize to Aithine for blaming her for one story that wasn't actually her fault for a change, to Ellie for reducing Cain's role in this from where it was when it was just in my head, and to everyone who's waiting patiently for more Past Life. Soon.
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Today
By Tiriel
I was frantic. Way more frantic than "usual," whatever that is. Foster was in the clutches of the Gua. When Joshua asked for a meeting, we were cautious. He'd screwed us that way once before, used us to get a computer disk from a kid who'd accidentally intercepted a Gua transmission. That time, Cade died. Sort of. Well, he did but then he came back, or he did but then he didn't, or something. Time travel makes talking about the past a real bitch. It's a good thing it hasn't happened since, or I'd be lost in verbal circles for days. Anyway, we didn't want to take any chances, so I planted a tiny locator and listening device on Foster's chest before he left. Good thing, too. Damn good thing.
It all sounded normal at first. Foster arrived at the meeting place and had just spotted Joshua. But then there were sounds of a struggle. A far-too-brief struggle. Foster can hold his own in a fight, but he's not invulnerable, as I know all too well from having to patch him up countless times. And from the sound of it, he'd been outnumbered and overpowered.
"Put him in the car. Quickly." Joshua's voice. The son of a bitch had sold us out. Or so I thought.
The car trip they took Foster on was short but educational. He was silent, knocked out or drugged I couldn't say. The Gua, however, were quite talkative.
"You were too slow, Aaron. Foster almost got away." Joshua's voice was a low growl, a little different from how I remembered it.
"But, Cain--" the Gua named Aaron began to protest. Joshua interrupted.
"This is an important mission, with no room for error." He chuckled, and my skin crawled. Then I heard a grunt and the familiar sound of an alien dissolve. Presumably the former Aaron. "Do the rest of you understand?"
"Yes, Cain," they chorused seriously.
Cain? Why were they calling Joshua Cain? I didn't know, but that question could wait. I turned my attention to the tracking data. As soon as they stopped, I'd go to work getting him out of there.
They didn't go far, just to an abandoned warehouse a few minutes' drive from the meeting place. I moved the trailer so I'd be closer to where they were, but a few hours later, I was no closer to an answer. Near as I could tell from what I'd been hearing, they'd hooked Foster into some kind of sophisticated computer simulation, VR maybe, with the goal of getting him to give up the location of the Nostradamus book. That part didn't worry me. I knew the book was safe. What had me scared shitless was the knowledge that once they thought they had the location of the book, they'd feel free to kill Foster. Their desire to find it had been the one thing keeping us both off of "kill on sight" status.
A direct assault on their location was out of the question. I had no way of knowing what I'd be walking into. It sounded like Joshua, or rather Cain, had dismissed all of the other Gua except for a female named Gia, but I couldn't tell for sure if they were just waiting outside the room or if they'd left altogether. And even two Gua to deal with was two too many. No, I had no way of knowing what I'd be walking into if I tried a direct assault, and, bottom line, I'm not the fighter in this partnership. So I stuck to what I know. They had a computer system, and from the sound of things, it was hooked into a network. Even the highest level of alien tech has to include a certain amount of earth-compatible programming and/or components to allow it to interface with human computer systems, phone lines, power sources, whatever. All I had to do was get enough access to deliver one of my special viruses and hope that Foster would be coherent enough to take advantage of the opportunity it would give him to escape.
At first, what I heard through the audio feed while I worked wasn't too scary, relatively speaking. Cain made some derogatory remarks about Joshua, whose husk he'd apparently taken over ownership of. They'd dosed Foster with something to get him there, and they spent some time hooking him into their machinery and taking baseline measurements while the drug wore off. Then they started their program.
I didn't have a lot of clues to exactly what was going on in the simulation. I only half-listened as I tried every trick in the book and then some to gain access to their system. I was running on pure adrenaline. I didn't even stop long enough to get a caffeine boost. I'd tracked down a point of entry. The trick now was getting in. I heard Cain's voice, and Gia's, from time to time, commenting on the scenario they'd put him in--some kind of future where the Gua had won. What first got my attention was when they mentioned my name.
"So he wants to find Edward Nambulous that badly," Cain said. "We were prepared for that possibility. Run the program variation that includes his little friend."
They were using me in their mindfuck. Me! Like they had a snowball's chance in hell of creating a simulation of me that would fool Foster. Regardless, I felt vaguely dirty, knowing that even a virtual version of myself was part of their little game. I didn't think it could get any worse than that.
But the Gua, as they so often do, proceeded to add insult to injury. Or injury to insult. Whatever. Cain and Gia started to discuss the very real possibility that this simulation of theirs could cause brain damage. I knew I had to get Foster out of there before they turned him into a turnip. And that wasn't all. Cain was high on salt and in between making passes at her he was telling Gia to take risky steps with Foster's mind, push the limits.
I heard Gia's voice, alarmed. "Cain, what are you doing?"
"Just wondering why it was that my predecessor had such a hard time killing Subject 117. Maybe when we've got the location of the book, I'll keep him around for a while and find out." Cain's voice was loud. He had to be close by. I stopped typing for a second, frozen, listening. The loud, almost animal inhale that followed gave me chills. Not Foster. Cain was...sniffing him.
"Cain!" Gia again, even more alarmed.
"I hate the smell of human bodies. This one, though, smells sweeter than most." Another sniff. Then, after a moment of silence, "Tastes better, too."
I was already pissed off and frantic. That made my blood boil and my hands shake. I didn't know if Cain had licked Foster or kissed him, and I didn't care. All I cared about was that he not do it again. "Get your hands off him, you oversexed alien scum," I hissed, even though I knew I couldn't be heard.
"Cain, don't."
"What, Gia? He's in the program. Didn't feel a thing. Unless you're jealous. Would you rather I did that to you?" His voice was moving away as he spoke.
"No," she said, a little too quickly.
"Oh, I think you would," Cain growled. The next thing I heard was a feminine moan.
I breathed a sigh of relief and went back to work. At least Cain was distracted for the moment. I didn't care what he did to her as long as he kept his paws off of Cade.
I paid close attention again when they brought Foster out of their simulation. After confirming what I'd already figured out about Joshua's consciousness being replaced by Cain's, Cain gloated a bit. I found myself wondering if he'd grown a moustache on the body I still thought of as Joshua's, just so he could twirl it. He could gloat all he wanted. Foster was a little disoriented, but he was alive and okay. So far. They put him back under, and I tuned out, mostly because they were talking brain damage again. Then I heard my name for the second time.
"There's his weakness. It's not you, it's Eddie. One-one-seven will give him the location of the book. Send him in for a little farewell visit."
Farewell visit? "You son of a bitch!" I shouted. They were using me to get to Cade, and they sounded dangerously close to killing him. My stomach turned. But I didn't have time for outrage or antacid. I was getting close to gaining the access I needed to deliver the virus into their system.
"We've got it. We've got the location of the book," Gia said. "What a great triumph for you, Cain."
They had what they'd been looking for. Time was running out.
I heard a rumbling chuckle. "Yes, and did you hear that, Gia? It sounds like Foster and his pet geek were more than just good friends. That gives me an idea."
"What?"
"This Eddie is more important to him than we knew. Let's break 117 completely. Delay the execution for a moment and show him the face of his betrayer. Then kill him. When that's done, we'll bring him out and we'll be able to get any information we want before we hand him over for dissection and purge." A full-on evil laugh followed that pronouncement, just as I hit the last keystroke and the virus was there. Or should be. It would work. It had to. I sat back in my chair and waited. Any second now.
Alarms went off, announcing my success. I cheered. "All right! Way to go, Eduardo! Now get out of there, Foster. Hurry." I listened closely and looked at the tracking beacon, willing it to move. And it did. He was getting away!
"'Pet geek,' my ass." But what had Cain meant by that "more than just good friends" comment? No time for that now, either. I'd parked just a few streets away, and once I saw where Foster was headed, I hopped into the Caddy and drove to meet him.
I spotted him running down the street and pulled up to the curb with a squeal of tires that I was sure had knocked a few things loose inside the trailer. At the moment, I didn't care. He got in, slumping down in the seat, and we sped away.
"Thanks, buddy," was all he said until later, when we'd gotten a safe distance away and parked. All things considered, he was doing pretty well. They'd done some serious messing with his brain chemistry, and once we'd covered the basic info--Joshua/Cain, the decoy book he'd unwittingly sent them after--we cut the lights for a nap. He'd been through the wringer in there, and I was pretty wiped from the work I'd done to save him. We were both ready for some shut-eye.
But as it turned out, neither of us could sleep. I listened to him tossing and turning on the couch. I'd offered him the bed, but he'd passed, saying he was too tired to even walk that far. He was already on the couch, and there he'd stay. I stared up at the ceiling as the last bit of sunlight that had been coming through the curtains slowly disappeared.
"Foster?" I asked after a while, knowing from the sound of his breathing that he wasn't sleeping, "He didn't--did he hurt you? I mean, it sounded like he was kinda pawing you a little for a while there." I felt like a moron. Couldn't say it right, but I wanted to know. I wanted to know if he'd kissed him.
"You mean...?"
"Yeah, uh, maybe sounded like he licked or kissed you or something." The words ran together. I was glad for the darkness, because I knew I was blushing like an idiot.
"Not that I remember."
"Oh. Okay." I waited a minute before continuing. "What *do* you remember?"
"Not much," he said, sounding a little irritated. "Go to sleep, Eddie."
So I tried. I really did. I was tired and it was quiet, except for the occasional sound of one of us shifting around, and I still couldn't sleep. It was a while later when he started to speak.
"I do remember a little. Just flashes, impressions, mostly. It was the future. Washington, D.C., and the Gua had won. It was a terrible world. I found you and we were going to build a resistance movement, but they caught me. I was going to be executed at dawn. We had one last visit, and they took me to die. You were there, you'd betrayed me. It must have been you that I told about the book, I guess. That's really all I know."
I knew there was more, but I didn't ask. "Yeah, it was me. I only got the parts they talked about, but I got that much. I'm sorry."
"Don't be," he said. "It wasn't you. You kept the book safe."
"Yeah."
He didn't say anything else for a long time. Then I heard his voice come out of the darkness again. "I do remember something else." He paused, and I held in the "What?" that was in my throat. His voice, his words, it had the sound of something that could only be said in the dark, when you're tired and not even sure the other person is awake to hear. I didn't want to stop him. Finally, he continued. "There was this moment. When you came to visit me and I was saying goodbye to you and you didn't even know it. I knew I'd never see you again, that I was going to die, but I decided not to tell you that. You were so hopeful. I didn't want to take that away. There was something else that I wanted to do. That I wanted to say. And I didn't. But that's okay, because he was the wrong person. He wasn't you. I didn't kiss you goodbye, Eddie. And I didn't tell you that I love you. I said it after you left, when I was alone again, but I didn't tell you."
My throat wouldn't work. I think the "What?" was still stuck there. My mind was racing. So that was what Cain had meant. And Cade had wanted to kiss me. My mouth worked silently as I tried to think of a response.
"Eddie? You awake?"
And there was my way out. I could pretend to be sleeping. Keep things as is. Pretend I hadn't heard. Keep what I already had, which was pretty damn good, more than I'd had in years. Or I could risk it all and go for the big prize. The brass ring. The whole kit and caboodle.
"Yes," I squeaked out, hating the sound of my voice--high and cracking.
An expectant silence followed. I tried desperately to think of something to say, but I came up empty. It was like I could hear a ticking clock, or the Final Jeopardy music. I had to say something.
"You, uh, you sure you're happy with the couch? You comfortable?" It wasn't quite an invitation, and it was a far cry from an "I love you," but it was the best I could do at the moment. I squeezed handfuls of the blanket in my hands and waited, hoping he'd understood.
I heard the soft thump of his bare feet hitting the floor, and he padded over to stand next to the bed. I could see the outline of his body in the dark, but nothing else.
"Well?" The smile I heard in his voice made me wish for more light. I wanted to see that smile for myself. Something told me I'd have another chance, though. And oh, yeah, I was supposed to be doing something.
I scooted over and lifted the blanket, making room for him in my tiny single bed. He got in, and we embraced, tangling our limbs together, wrapping around each other and snuggling close like we'd been doing this for years. I felt his breath against my face.
"Eddie?"
I finally choked out a question. "You're not going to be executed at dawn, are you?"
"No, Eddie, but I'm sure we could arrange for you to be," he snapped, and started to pull away. This was supposed to be our big moment, and I was fucking it up. He'd been through hell, and I hadn't managed to say anything to let him know for sure that I wanted this--wanted him.
I held on tight, not letting him move away. "I just--as long as it's not a goodbye kiss. You said you'd wanted to kiss me goodbye. I don't want that. I mean, I want the kiss, just not the goodbye."
"No."
"No, what? No kiss, or no goodbye?" Now that my mouth was working again, I just couldn't seem to stop talking.
"No goodbye. And no more talking."
I opened my mouth to say something else, and found that I couldn't because it was full. His tongue was halfway down my throat, and, I realized with a squeak, that was his hard-on pressing into my thigh. Not that I was exactly relaxed down there myself.
He retrieved his tongue from my mouth and started to unbutton my pajamas. "Eddie, I love you."
"Thought you said no more talking." I'd transitioned from fucking up to making jokes. I'd have kicked myself, but my legs were pretty tangled with his and we'd started to kind of rub together in a way that I didn't want to stop. He'd unbuttoned my pajama top and his hands were all over my chest and my back. I'd never thought anybody could make me feel that good just from touching me above the waist. Once he got to the bottom half of my pajamas, I might have some kind of major organ failure. I sucked in all the air my lungs could hold and used it to push out an important sentence. *The* important sentence. And I didn't even squeak. "I love you, too, Cade."
I felt the exhale of breath that accompanied his smile, and I started tugging at the undershirt he was wearing. We sat up to get rid of that obstacle and the top to my pajamas, and then we wrapped around each other again, leaning gently back into the bed.
We were kissing, the kind of kisses that make you forget everything else in the world. Everything except for the person who's kissing you and how good it feels, that is. That rubbing together thing I mentioned earlier started again, the feeling of it intensified by the fact that now our bare chests brushing against each other was part of the package. And speaking of packages, the making out and rubbing was so intense that I was starting to worry that I might come right there and then before we even got more than half naked.
"Foster," I gasped as he kissed along my jawline, "Wait--don't--I'm gonna--"
He listened to me about as well as he usually does. He pulled back a little, but it was only so he could stick his hand down my pants. All it took at that point was a couple of strokes of his hand, and even though I'd felt it building, my orgasm still somehow managed to take me completely by surprise. I may well have left fingerprints on his ass, as hard as I was hanging on to it.
"God, Cade, your hands," I whispered a minute later as he helped me out of my now-sticky pajama pants. "I predict we'll be spending a lot more time at the laundromat from now on."
"You know the future, now, do you?" His voice was rough with lust, amusement, and something else--happiness, maybe.
"Yeah. First off, the Gua are *not* gonna win. Secondly, I see a lot of laundry in our future. Sheets, mostly. Third, a lot more time spent in bed, and fourth, but maybe most important, no executions and no goodbye kisses. Ever." I rolled him onto his back and kissed my way down his chest.
"Now that's the kind of future I can live with, Eddie."
I smiled and mouthed his cock through his briefs. I wanted to get even by making him come in his underwear, but I wanted to be naked with him more. I got rid of the last of those pesky clothes, and he pulled me to him.
I think that leg-humping should be the official sport of the trailer. Or maybe tonsil hockey. I've heard that Cade used to have a pretty mean slap shot. Of course, I'm sure that there'll be lots of other options to consider later on, when we're less exhausted to start with. Wouldn't want to leave any out. For the moment, though, we were pretty happy with those two. I was memorizing his mouth with my tongue while he moved against me. When I felt his movements getting ragged, I pushed him back and slid down to take him into my mouth.
With a gasp of surprise and something that sounded suspiciously like a squeak of his own, he came. Chest heaving, he ran a hand through my hair and softly said my name. I moved back up and we tangled ourselves together again, a smile on my face and his taste still in my mouth. We kissed once more, sweet and gentle and full of hot promises for the morning and the future, and then we slept.
The End
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