Page 81 of Gunpowder

“You got it?” Felix asked, bringing the muzzle under his chin to tilt his head up.

The gun no longer felt cold. The room no longer felt warm. It seemed to be someone else using Blair’s voice to say, “Understood, Boss.” Everything was numb.

“You have until tomorrow,” Felix said.

22

GREY

Blair stared at the two disassembled pistols in front of him. He had stripped them on autopilot, and now they were just an array of metal, pins and springs laid out on his coffee table. Every time he tried to concentrate on something else his mind just swiveled back to the same thing that had kept him up most of the night save for a couple disjointed hours of restless, nightmare-plagued sleep. Maybe that’s why he was unsteady. Maybe it was just his emotions getting the better of him. He didn’t know anymore. He ran his hands up his face, feeling the faint tremors in them on either side of his nose. His hair slipped through his fingers and back on to his forehead. I need a haircut. He almost laughed, if he’d had the energy, at the thought of having time for something so mundane and normal.

No matter how many hours he’d spent awake trying to find a way around it, he’d realize there was no way the day could end with Wren and him still together without Wren being in danger. He could just ask Wren if he planted the wire (not that Blair believed for a single fucking second that he did, regardless of who his father was) but it wasn’t like the boss would take Blair’s word for it. Blair could tell Wren exactly what Felix had told him, and that they were going to have to take a break until things with Phantom were over and Felix calmed down, but he had a feeling as soon as Wren knew he had been threatened, he would probably go confront Felix himself and get a bullet between the eyes for it.

What Blair wouldn’t give for needing a haircut to be his biggest problem, instead of the fact he had to abandon the person he wanted more than anything, just to save him.

One Month Earlier

It was the stage of exhaustion in which all sound put a terrible pressure on Wren’s ears. It was too much like pain to be mental and too intangible to be a physical issue. It was nothing he would give such thought to except when he was so exhausted, with his thoughts floating aimlessly through his mind without ever connecting to each other. He drifted with them from place to place. His rounds were almost over.

Wren looked at the chart on his way into the room. He remembered this one, who he’d given stitches to. Gunshot wound. He grimaced as he pulled the curtain aside to enter. The hospital was too unremarkable to dislike on most days, but at times like this he wanted to rip the fluorescent bars out of the fucking ceiling. He rubbed his eyes under his glasses.

“You here to cut me loose?” the patient asked.

Wren clicked his tongue. He had hoped the patient would be asleep so he didn’t have to speak. “You’re not going anywhere just yet.”

He soldiered through conversation, forced to find responses to his stupid questions until the patient said, “Man, your bedside manner needs some work.”

Wren blinked. He was entirely aware of that, and didn’t care. He just wasn’t used to people commenting on it. “I’m sorry.”

He wasn’t.

Wren told him Reymond would take care of his discharge, or Dr. Garrett as far as this guy was concerned, and kept working his way down the list. He knew the font size on these damn things didn’t shrink according to how tired he was but it seemed that way. He was filling it out mostly from memory. The words were little more than faintly letter-shaped black dots that might have been legible to someone going on more than four hours of sleep in the last two days.

A chuckle drew his eyes up, and then, “You are my sunshine.” The patient again. He was so loud, for absolutely no reason.

Wren concentrated on taking the man’s pulse. Maybe if he ignored him he would go away. That approach hadn’t worked on the rest of Wren’s problems yet, but it usually worked on people just fine.

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine? You know, from the song? Cause sun is bright, and you’re kinda, you know, gloomy...it’s a joke...no? Okay.”

Usually worked on people. On rare occasions such as these, he found a spectacularly dumb specimen with all the social awareness of the window next to them. “I am most assuredly not your sunshine.” He got up and tried to keep the discomfort from showing on his face. His feet were killing him, but not literally, of course, as his body would never do him such a kindness.

“What are you then?” the patient called as he was trying to leave.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Wren looked back. “Pardon?”

Focusing his eyes wasn’t as bad from a distance. Wren observed his annoying patient. Now that Wren was looking at him properly, he realized the man was pretty fucking attractive. He had a youthful face and an unusual combination of red hair and tan skin. Yes, Wren was working and there was a level of professionalism he was expected to adhere to, but he was also gay. Sue him.

Then the patient opened his mouth again and spoke right into the splitting headache between Wren’s temples.

“If you don’t want me to call you Sunshine then you should give me something else to call you.”

Wren pulled the curtain aside. “This is the end of my rotation with emergency medicine, you won’t see me again.”

That persistent voice followed him. “You never know.”

He put the clipboard back on the wall. Finally, he could leave. Wren glanced at the top of the sheet. The patient information was larger than the list on the next page, easier for his blurry eyes to read. “Blair Kennedy,” he murmured.

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