Written for the Bonfire Night "Discovered in a Skyrocket" challenge on the discoveredinalj Livejournal community.

Sweetly betad by PR Zed -- thank you!

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"Stopping over?" Doyle had asked him, meaning please stop over, which of course neither of them would ever say. So Bodie had just nodded, and it had only been partly because he couldn't bear to move another step after the day they'd had, couldn't bear to keep driving through the night back to his own flat and climb the mountain of stairs, and trudge the vast expanses of floor that would take him to his own bed.

Now he lay, heavy as the world, beside Doyle, and there was nothing either of them wanted to do but sleep. Doyle's shoulder brushed his, a small warmth of skin that they shared, and Doyle's breath came long and slow, and peacefully. Bodie tried to let it lull him, tried to concentrate not on his own breathing, but on Doyle's, safe and sound and there in the night, but there was something...

Neither of them had thought to draw the curtains, and there was a vaguely orange glow through the window, brighter than the city's usual light, somehow alive, moving, and Bodie suddenly remembered that Doyle's new place overlooked a park, and that since tonight was Bonfire night there was that bright offering to the gods flickering to life, pulling people in its wake, to its wake...

He turned onto his side, looked across Doyle's arm, across the gentle rise and fall of his chest, and on past the window sill, to where he could just see the flames beginning to reach higher and taller, towards a shadow on a pole, darker black than the night - Guy Fawkes, waiting to burn for his treachery, for his sins... There were voices too, he realised, the rumbles and dim shouts and cries of the crowd...

He was so tired, but when he closed his eyes he could still see the girl's face, and so he tried to keep them open, watching the fire and the shadows, listening to Doyle's breathing, waiting patiently until that moment when he would be so tired that his body just gave up, and snatched itself away from him. No use trying to force it, not after today, not after...

He remembered dark eyes, dark hair long and loose in the desert wind, face young and clear and laughing as he chased her amongst the strange stone towers and soft-jagged rises and slopes of the Wadi, her voice high and teasing. The sky was blue, cerulean blue, feathers of white cloud drifting slowly above them... Her skin was salt with the heat, but her lips were cool and welcoming as he pressed her against the orange of the rock, as trails of orange dust slid down her white shirt and across his fingers until she pushed him cheerfully away, laughed again, and vanished into the shadows...

...it was dim in the tent, the goat-hair tent, and he lay in the dark, on the last night of their welcome, holding her in his arms, his not-wife, this modern, laughing descendent of the desert. Tomorrow they would move on, towards the sea, towards another place where he would turn abruptly back into himself; but for tonight this place, this woman was his. The fire was low, but it was still too warm, stuffy and airless, and he stirred restlessly, brushed a kiss across her brow before sliding from under her limbs, stepping silently over the other sleeping bodies, out to where the cool night was a caress across his skin, the stars sharp and pinprick harsh in the sky.

There was no warning, just an explosion of light, bright, blindingly white, and he was thrown backwards, back against the harsh stone, less soft now, more jagged, and he felt time tick by as he lay there, unable to move with the shock of it all, with the raw, bright, pain of it all. This was wrong, it was just wrong, this shouldn't be happening here, they were away from the fight and the fear... but it was, and there were screams and there was shouting, and there was fire.

More explosions, and thick black smoke, and the smell of meat burning, which roused him from the sandy floor, which dragged him to his feet and in a nightmare stagger through the flames, into the flames when others were rushing, keening, in the other direction... Only, the tent was gone. There was nothing but a wall of orange, and the smell of searing flesh, and he spun away, through the maze of smoke and sand, to the other side of that fire, to where he managed to lift the edge of the tent, and that was when he saw her, saw part of her...

... only part of her left, her face as though asleep, her arms flung above her head, against the stone steps, a strange place to sleep though, on a bridge above the cold waters of the Thames, the smoke from the bomb blast still acrid in the autumn air, flames still licking their way around the remains of the van. Cowley was shouting at him, and he knew the rest of the bombers were not far away, and even as he thought it he saw them, caught below where the steps did not end in a path after all, but in a strange sort of jetty, and the river dark. He raised his gun, felt Doyle beside him doing the same, and the men were putting their hands up; but his gaze was ever pulled to the face beside him on the steps, the dark eyes closed, the dark hair long and loose in the autumn wind...

Impossibly and abruptly the air was rent with more explosions, sharp cracks and tears of them, loud in his ears, but surely too high... There shouldn't be anyone else there, they had them all, three of them alive and the girl, the girl lying on the steps, and all he could think was that Doyle was somewhere behind him, somewhere above him, maybe too close to the explosions, to the fire, to the wind...

Bodie turned restlessly, orange-dark behind his eyes, bright flashes of light too close, too close... In the distance he heard his name called, a voice low, a voice soft, and a shade fell across his face, a warm weight by his side. He turned towards it, and it moved against him, murmured his name again, stroked his face, his neck, his chest... It brushed down his body, burned a heat in its path, and a light and a fire. He reached out to it, drew it closer to him...

There were moans and there were whispers and all the time there was a slow-hard friction between them, a sweet ache that swept from Doyle to himself, pulling them together again and again... When Bodie opened his eyes Doyle was there above him, skin lit golden against the tawny shadows of the room, his lips parted with the effort of remembering to breathe, so Bodie took it from him, that breath, took it into his own mouth, took Doyle's lips, his tongue, his moans, the sound of his own name as Doyle sighed it into the night.

And all the time, a wave of movement between them, muscles tensed, thighs taut with it, all the way through groin, through belly, to the straining need of Bodie's cock, the sweet slide against Doyle's stomach, Doyle hard against him in turn. He kissed Doyle, kissed him hard and kissed him desperately, and Doyle's hands pulled him closer, pulled again, and again until his veins ran silver heat, and there were fireworks all the way through his body, and an answering cry in his ear, the most beautiful sound in all the world, and pounding hearts, and gasping breath, and warmth and quiet...

There was an explosion from outside, and bright green stars cascaded their gentle way to the earth. Bodie held Doyle against him, gazed at the smoke-filled night sky, at the next burst of fuchsia and of white-blue and of swirling gold. The crowd outside sang low and sonorous, oooh and ahhh and ohhh, and Bodie smiled. Their first Bonfire Night together, tucked close in bed, pleasantly sleepy, and the fizzes and pops had never sounded so gentle, such a game, such a treat.

He felt soft eyelashes flutter against his skin, as Doyle's eyes followed the final burst of colour into the night, drifted back to the stuffed figure at the top of its pole, watched it tumble at last into the roar of flames below. Oh, England, my England he thought, and tightened his arms around Doyle as the room dimmed again, and they fell softly into sleep.

-- THE END --

November 2006