Title: Holding out for a Hangman's Noose

Warnings: Character death; mentions of assisted suicide;

Summary: One of them is dying. Fisk can't tell which anymore.

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The walkway is cramped, ceiling at Fisk's shoulder making him crouch and shuffle. Moss swells slick and damp on the walls, cool against Fisk's fingers when he runs them along the corridor. There's must sitting thick in his throat, a foul taste on his tongue.

Michael continually checks behind as they flee, eyes a flash of bright in the dim. Followers, thinks Fisk, though maybe it's just to check that Fisk is still standing, still moving. Maybe he should reassure him that it's not so bad.

Just a cough, Michael. Just an ache in my chest and my arms and my hands. In my skin. There's not always blood, Michael. Sometimes I can even get a full breath.

Maybe he should just keep quiet.

They've been walking too long. Someone must know they've gone now. There will have been an alert, horses will be saddled, angry men with angry hands clutching sharp, indifferent, life-ending pieces of steel. They will be waiting for them at the end of the tunnel.

The sword will bite into Michael collar like nothing, cutting through flimsy fabric and vulnerable skin to get at the significant bits inside, and Fisk will have to watch. He'll have to watch them slay his only friend like yesterday's trash, like Michael means nothing, like the knight isn't the single most important thing, and then they'll drag Fisk back to his cell where he can die of cholera or pneumonia or heartbreak or whatever the fuck it is he has.

Fisk's knees stumble in their duty to keep him standing and the ground rushes in to catch him like a greedy lover.

"Fisk!" Michael half-shouts, seconds too late to make a difference but grabbing Fisk's shoulders anyway.

Fisk lolls his head, nauseous from the movement. He's tired. He hadn't notice that before. It feels like he's always been tired.

"Not our best getaway," he offers, hoarsely. Michael laughs, but it's clipped and false. Distracted.

The wrinkle between Michael's forehead is in full swing, the curl of skin burrowing in on itself. His hand is cool where it slides beneath Fisk's shaggy fringe of hair and possibly Fisk whimpers and pushes into the contact. The wrinkle gets worse.

Once (or twice or a million times), Fisk told Michael that he didn't worry enough. Michael is always optimistic, always expecting the best out of people. Well, at the very least, expecting them to have some sort of honor code.

"It'll be the death of you," complains Fisk after a job where they are offered the sharp end of a spear instead of the payment they have been promised. "You hand out trust too easy."

"If I expected the worst of everyone, Fisk," counters Michael, wincing as Fisk tightens a makeshift bandage around his arm. "I would have never met you."

Fair enough, but Fisk still wants to throttle him every time it happens, every time Michael ends up bleeding and Fisk ends up with his heart in his throat.

"It can't be much farther," says Michael and Fisk cannot decipher if that's determination or desperation he hears.

The thing about Michael is that he's almost incapable of giving up. Fisk does not suffer the same compulsion.

"I can't," Fisk tells him simply, sinking under the weight of the tunnel, the air a thick mass bearing down on his bones. "We gave it a good try."

"Fisk, we—"

"I'm sorry, Michael."

Michael sucks in a sharp breath. Says softly, wrecked, "Fisk."

Fisk is can hear a lot of things behind that.

This is my fault.

I'm sorry this happened.

I'm sorry I didn't come sooner.

His lips pull in into a delirious smile. If it has to end, at least he's not alone. So stupid, though. After all the danger he's put himself in, for the slow burn of disease to finally pull him under.

"Thought for sure it'd be a hanging for me," he tells Michael, wishing the room would stop blurring. His body is falling even while planted on solid ground. He shouldn't have stopped moving. Cold creeps in, an unwelcome guest.

"Shh," Michael hushes, hand returning to Fisk's face. He cups Fisk's cheek, rubbing a thumb like he's smearing paint on a canvas. Fisk's awareness zeroes in, the entire world shrinking to be contained across two inches of pale, clammy skin.

Michael isn't shy about contact, doling out handshakes and friendly shoulder claps like cards at a poker game. The first few times Fisk had almost flinched, the phantom clasp of Michael's fingers clinging to his arm long after Michael had moved away. Jack Bannister never touched Fisk unless it was for the job, unless there was something to be gained.

Getting that close to someone is just begging to be robbed.

But touching is a regular thing with Michael, with many people really, and Fisk let it grow on him like a bad habit. Michael changed a lot of things about Fisk.

"It was the best thing," Fisk says on a sigh, wrapping two shivering arms across his chest. "When you found me. The best thing ever."

The words are fragments, upside down and inside out, his mouth garbling the message. Misplaced panic floods him, sudden need for Michael to understand his meaning bowling him over as he scrambles to surface from this tilting, unfocused world. But Michael doesn't turn his head and scrunch his eyebrows, doesn't ask him to elaborate, and Fisk settles, shutting his eyes and smothering a metallic cough.

"'Tis the same for me. You were just what I needed," the knight replies, soft and reverent.

"You should get out of here," tries Fisk, last semblance of awareness making him voice the futile argument. "They'll be coming soon."

"I'm not leaving you."

A huff of breath, a helpless sigh. "I know."

The line of Michael's shoulders scream defeat, the curl of his hands in Fisk's matted hair spelling hopeless devastation. When their foreheads touch, Michael makes a gutted noise, body fixed taught at the edge of a breakdown, a week of searching and frantic worry and indescribable fear culminating in unacceptable failure.

One of them is dying. Fisk can't tell which anymore.

"Please don't." The last attempt of a desperate man, whispered like a prayer across a dead man's face.

Fisk tips his head, brushes their noses together. Language is a cruel mistress, disappearing just when he needs her most, and Fisk swallows against the wordless alternative. Michael is in pain and Fisk can do nothing; can offer him nothing but further misery because—

"I don't want to go back with them."

The clanging of steel and the sharp whinnies of fidgety horses echo into the cavern. Their hunters are nearing the mouth. Time seeps from between Fisk's fingers, stealing bravery along with it and leaving him empty. He breaks.

"Please, Michael. I don't want it to end with them. Please." There is no weapon with them now, no escape route for Fisk from returning to his cell unless Michael can get his hands on something sharp, something deadly, when the captors arrive.

"You can't," chokes Michael furiously. "You can't ask this of me."

Fisk laughs through a shuddered moan, borderline hysterical. "I know. I know."

"Would you do it? If I asked, would you do it?" The words crack through Michael's teeth, bitter like the cell Fisk spent his last days in.

"No." No, Fisk would sooner turn the blade on himself than watch it sink into Michael's flesh, his own palm heavy on the handle. But he doesn't have the luxury of sparing Michael this horror.

"They'll take me back, you know they will. This stupid fucking experiment. They want results, Michael, and I'm the only one still alive. They'll—"

There's something lodged in his throat; there must be. He's choking, gagging on it. He may be of age, but today he's just a child, scared and hopeless. Helpless. He touches Michael's throat, fingertips aiming higher but losing momentum halfway there. The knight's skin leaks desperation.

"Please, Michael." There's a sound coming from Michael that Fisk has never heard. It scrapes at his ears, crawling under his skin and lodging there, unwelcome. It tells Fisk that he's being unfair.

It tells Fisk that it's over.

The men will be livid; will slay Michael where he stands for releasing Fisk from this madness, but at that point it won't matter.

You can't kill a dead man.

There's a beat, a moment where the world stops and allows Fisk a slice of peace before the end. He breathes in, ignoring the ache in his lungs, the stench of trapped air. Moves his fingers slow and deliberate along Michael's pulse, the last thing he'll ever touch, the only thing he ever got to keep for himself.

"I love you," whispers Michael in a raw voice, lips passing harmlessly over Fisk's temple as the words curl warm and painful and true behind his ribs.

Heavy boots carry their foes forward, close now. Their shouting expands into the surroundings, moving purposefully into the empty area around knight and squire and suffocating the time they have left. Not long now.

Not long now before Michael will close his fingers around something cruel enough to do the job. Fisk is going to die.

He shuts his eyes and smiles wearily, breathing in his knight.

Fisk thinks of a soothing voice singing him to sleep; sweet tempered little sisters and the smell of a house full of books. Thinks of days on the road, nights warm with companionship, easy smiles directed right at him. Thinks of belonging.

Fisk is happy.

The world ends.

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(end)

It's been too long since I uploaded something for K'n'R. I may have stolen a line from one of my own story summaries. Oh well.

I was trying something new with this. A challenge to use only imagery to convey emotions rather than spelling them out. It's difficult to be sure, but has a nice outcome.

If the plot doesn't entirely make sense, I apologize. It was a lesser element of the story.

Hope everyone is enjoying their December!