Part Fourteen

Deacon looked around at the destruction in the warehouse and let out a low whistle. All of the lab equipment, all of the computers, the security cameras and lights…everything had been broken down into its most basic parts and then thrown around the room as if by a child in the middle of a particularly energetic tantrum. They were going to have to get in contact with Karen for an emergency supply of serum until they could get the lab set back up again, so that Blade would not save a tourist only to rip their head off a minute later.

"Fuck it," Deacon muttered, kicking at what looked as if it had once been the screen of his laptop before someone had brought their heel down on it, "we can see what's salvageable later." He trudged up the stairs, ignoring Whistler as well as he was able. As much as he had not enjoyed it when Whistler had continually stared at him as if he was only waiting for the right opportunity and a good place to hide the body, the speculative, watchful look that he was being subjected to now might even be worse. Deacon got more than his fill of that from another quarter.

Speak of the devil, and he shall appear. Deacon wondered if Blade was not thinking the same thing as Deacon opened the door of their quarters and slid inside, finding that Blade was already there and in a partial state of undress. "Fuck," Deacon said before he could stop himself, staring at the bruises and cuts that covered Blade's torso. His back looked like one entire mass of escaped blood, and that was after a few hours of his freaky accelerated healing had already taken place. Deacon remembered seeing a dent in the wall where it looked as if a person had actually been thrown into it and telling himself that it was impossible, that the person would have been killed. After he had seen Blade damned near be crucified and then rise from the blood as if he was emerging from his own tomb, maybe he should stop being so shocked when the impossible happened.

Deacon hated those moments when he got all introspective, and they were getting hard to shake off with time. He ground his teeth against one another.

Blade finished pulling off his armor and made a soft snorting noise before he answered. "They don't kill themselves," he said.

'Some of them do,' Deacon thought, remembering how Nyssa had looked as the first, fatal rays of the sunlight had touched her face. Anything that he could have said was swallowed by the way that Blade ran his eyes over him, taking in all of Deacon's own considerable bruises. It had been a bad fucking night all around. Deacon still flakes of dried blood on his chin and neck. Blade's eyes lingered for extra seconds upon those. So long as he wasn't pointing a gun at Deacon's head over them, though, he figured that they were doing all right.

Blade finished undressing and disappeared in the direction of the shower. Deacon paused long enough to swallow a palm full of aspirin, ignoring the acrid aftertaste, before he shed his own clothes and followed.

"You got the damnedest timing," Blade said mildly as Deacon opened the shower door and slid inside. He sounded a little surprised and a little amused, or so Deacon thought. Even now, it could be nearly impossible to tell.

"Don't flatter yourself," Deacon shot back as he titled his head upwards to the spray and let it wash the blood away from his face and neck. "I don't want to wait for the hot water to build back up again after you use all of it." The snorting sound that Blade made was almost certainly amusement this time. He nudged Deacon to the side and reached for the soap. The water swirling around their feet was already tinted pink with blood. "Besides, the spirit might be willing, but the flesh feels like it's been hit by a truck." Deacon could not stop himself from staring at Blade's wrists, where circles of scar tissue in the shape of roses still marked the skin. They would be gone by the time the sun set. Deacon wondered if it was time for lament #3541 yet, because he felt as if he was about to come right out of his skin.

They washed quietly, too tired to do anything else, rinsing their own blood and Nyssa's ashes from their skins before they left the shower, pausing only long enough so that Deacon could clean and redress his forearm, and then fell into a sleep that did not end until the sun had fallen beneath the horizon again.

---

Whistler thought that the philosophy of leaving the mess to be dealt with when they were not all numbed with exhaustion and pain was a perfectly good one, frankly, and the best one that had come out of Frost's mouth yet. As the previous couple of days had offered little in the way of time or inclination to sleep, Whistler had to poke around for a good deal of time, deliberately ignoring Scud's things so that he would not give in to the urge to destroy them all on sight, until he found his belongings. Whistler stared at the clothes, the weapons, the few family heirlooms, and wondered how long Blade must have stubbornly carried them around before he had known that his plan to bring Whistler back had more than a snowball's chance of working. He tried to reconcile that with the Blade who would tolerate Frost by his side and in his bed, even after Frost had shown that he was clever enough and tough enough that Whistler could not longer justify wiping him off of the planet altogether, and found that he could not. It was an uneasy sleep that he found.

He awoke the next evening to the sound of someone moving about on the main floor and immediately thought of attack. Whistler rolled over and reached for the first gun that he could find before he padded out to see whether the source of the sound was friend or foe. With their security system down, there was no way of knowing what might have crept through the gaps in order to wreak havoc.

'How about none of the above?' Whistler thought in response to his own question as he saw that the source of the sound was Frost bent over one of the tables and examining the computer parts that were strewn out in front of him. His expression was grim. Every now and then Frost would pick at a donut that was sitting next to him, almost as an afterthought. 'Or all of the above?'

Frost's bruises were if anything even more stark than they had been before, his lower lip swollen where Reinhardt had split it and the marks of fingers on his neck so dark that they appeared nearly black. He looked up as if he had been reading Whistler's mind, for Whistler had not made a sound, and said bluntly, "You look like shit, old man."

Whistler gave forth a rueful snort and took a few steps closer. "Same to you." He jerked his chin in the direction of the various computer pieces that were spread out in front of Frost, the language of which might as well have been Greek. His body let him know that even that very small action was not appreciated, given the pummeling that he had received the day before, but he pushed through it. "Is any of that fixable?"

Frost shook his head, his expression darkening even further. "Doubtful." When Whistler showed no signs of either speaking further or going away, Frost sighed and, looking as if he was marshalling up all of his internal reserves, held up the box that he was pulling donuts from and shook it in Whistler's direction. "Help yourself. Scud gets 'em airmailed in, but I don't think that he has sweet tooth left, wherever he is."

The way that the explosion had ripped through Scud, Whistler would have been shocked if there was anything larger than a tooth left. He blanched and heard himself say brusquely, "Think I'll pass."

"Suit yourself." Frost tossed the box back down onto the table and resumed his fiddling with the computer components that he had dismissed moments before as so much scrap. The set of his shoulders said that he did not appreciate Whistler lurking around in the background without saying anything. That was just too damned bad.

Finally Frost said, "In the beginning, I thought about betraying Blade at least a hundred times a day." Whistler went rigid, unsure of what he was supposed to do or say in response to that. After a moment, Frost went on, "Nowadays, I figure that I have it down to about a dozen."

"That supposed to make me trust you?" Whistler asked.

"No." Frost looked up at last with eyes that were the same cold color of razors. "The fact that I haven't turned a single one of those thoughts into action is supposed to make you stop looking at me like you think that I'm one bad day away from ripping the hand that feeds me entirely off."

"Aren't you?" Those eyes flashed, but Whistler was not in the mood to be deterred. "How long will it be before you snap and decide that you like it better where its nature red in tooth and claw? And how close will you be to Blade when that happens?"

Frost's expression was so dark and his face so white with anger that, were it not for the fresh wounds that covered his body, Whistler would have had no trouble believing that he had already made the human to vampire leap at some point while Whistler was not looking. "When that day comes," he told Whistler flatly, "I'll give you the first crack at me."

"When that day comes, I'll take it." Because, Scud or not, he was not sure that Blade would.

They were interrupted by the heavy sound of Blade's footfalls coming down the stairs. He paused when he saw the two of them, lifting one eyebrow very slightly. Whistler got the impression of a parent asking the children who had hastily stopped arguing upon his arrival if they really thought that they were fooling anyone. It was not a change in dynamic that Whistler relished. That Blade approached him first rather than Frost was hardly mollifying.

"You look like shit," Blade told him when they were standing far enough away from Frost to afford some measure of privacy.

It was all that Whistler could do not to roll his eyes. "That seems to be the going sentiment," he said, before taking a breath. "Blade, I'm going to ask you this one more time, and then I'll never bring it up again." Blade's eyebrow went up again, as if he already knew what Whistler was going to ask of him and had already known since before he had even come down the stairs. Before Whistler had left, Blade's eyebrows had not been psychic, either. Whistler fully intended to blame that on Frost, too. "Do you know what you're doing here?"

He had left the question vague on purpose. He might have known that Blade would be able to twig to the intended meaning immediately and as easily as if Whistler had asked it in the form of a neon sign. "He pulls his weight," was all that Blade said, leaving Whistler to look over his shoulder and see that Frost had taken a seat, gathered up a few more promising bits of technology, and now seemed to be inspiring them to work again by swearing at them. "That's all that you need to know."

There was both a finality and a warning in Blade's voice. Whistler supposed that all parents went through this eventually, this realization that the kid was now living and entirely different life and was free to tell their parents to fuck off at any time, and he did not hate it any less by reminding himself that he had never been Blade's father to begin with. Jesus, but he would have been a terror when the girls had gotten old enough to start bringing young men home for him to met, had they lived long enough for boys to be anything other than cootie-pelts.

"Duly noted," Whistler said, more gruffly than he intended. Likely Blade interpreted the rough note within his voice as anger. It was not; Whistler was not quite sure what it was. "If you don't mind, I'm going to go see if that shitbird mechanic of yours left any of my guns behind when he decided to sell you out. I don't like sitting open like this. Can't help but think of what happened the last time that we decided to work without a net." Whistler cut an ugly glance in Frost's direction as he said it. If Blade thought that he was going to cease reminding him of what Frost had been because Blade said so, then he had a rude awakening headed his way.

Blade touched at Whistler's shoulder before he walked away, "Good to have you back, old man."

"Good to be back, kid." Whistler found three of his guns still in relatively good repair, one handgun and two rifles. One of the rifles was a family heirloom that Whistler had never bothered to modify to the demands of his peculiar lifestyle, but had seen the demands of manifest destiny firsthand. He did not give Scud any credit for having spared the weapon. Likely the idiot had simply not known what he was holding.

Whistler returned to the main part of the floor and immediately felt as if he was intruding. Blade was speaking to Frost from a vantage point directly behind Frost's chair, and Frost had his head tipped back so that he could better listen and reply. Whistler was struck by how relaxed Frost was even as he was literally baring his throat to Blade, and the lightness of Blade's touch as he had his hand resting on Frost's Adam's apple and was tracing the outline of the scar with his thumb. Blade could kill Frost in that moment with a single well-placed blow. The thought did not seem to be crossing either of their minds.

Whistler cleared his throat to announce his presence and limped forward, carrying his gun in hand. "How long will it take you to get those computers back up?" he asked Frost.

Looking startled and struggling to hide it, Frost replied, "Couple of weeks, if I'm starting from scratch."

"Get on it," Whistler told him, and even managed to smile as Frost's eyes darkened. "It's been too long since this was a real operation.

Blade was smiling slightly, as if he meant to reply. When Whistler looked at him, his only response was to echo, "It's been too long," before turning and walking away.

End