#archerofthe141

“What a wicked game to play, to make me feel this way. What a wicked thing to do, to let me dream of you. What a wicked thing to say, you never felt this way. What a wicked thing to do, to make me dream of you”

The realisation comes all at once, hitting him squarely in the heart, so hard that he’s speechless. Confusion, anger, betrayal are all emotions that swim through his head, a strange concoction that overwhelms him as he stands there, fingernails digging firmly into his palms. He feels lost, abandoned and most of all alone.

He’s only felt this kind of pain twice before. The first time he’d been in the hospital, a fifteen year old kid who refused to leave his mom’s bedside. The doctors had told him he was too young, that he was cutting school and every time his stepdad dragged him back home Chris would just come running back. His mom was his world, the light in his fuckin’ life and no one was getting in the way of that. No one but the cancer anyway. He still could feel the sting of that pain when her hand was limp in his when hours before its grip had been so tight. He could still remember the monotone drone of the EKG machine, could still feel his stepdad’s arms around him even when Chris himself was numb with grief. He’d been lost without her, without the only family he’d ever really known. He’d felt two feet tall, a tiny fish in a world that simply didn’t give a shit about him anymore.

The second time he’d felt this betrayed was when Jess left him for college. He’d always known that her family didn’t approve of him, didn’t see him as anything close to ‘boyfriend’ material. His life was going nowhere, stuck between shitty modelling gigs and his dismal grade point average in school. With his reputation no one had ever expected the school ‘bad boy’ would ever fall in love with the shy and studious Jess, always too lost in her after school clubs to ever notice anyone else. Without thinking, they’d both fallen hard and fast in love and a year later they’d imagined sharing everything together from marriage to even kids. Chris might had been Jess’ first for a lot of things and he was content for her to be his last. He didn’t even want to imagine a future that didn’t have her in it.

But then she left, all at once with so little explanation that it made his head spin. She needed to go to college, didn’t want to them to become some long distance failure story. All at once he was just reduced to being another loose end she needed to tie up before she packed her bags and left, the future they’d imagined together evaporating as soon as it was no longer convenient. For the second time, Chris’ heart had broken in two.

Then and there, Chris had decided that he didn’t need that kind of pain, that he could live on his own happier than taking his chance on ever including anyone else. He made himself an island, jumped between different groups of friends so that he never found himself too attached to anyone. Sex returned to being something casual and fun, his focus shifting back to seeing his partners as conquests rather than emotional connections. He was happy like that for a long time, even as he grew older, joined the 141 and found himself forced into a small town and even smaller team of soldiers. His walls broke down if only a little and he found himself making friends and connections again, a family of sorts that surrounded him. Some he slept with, others he didn’t, but that wasn’t important. He was no longer an island and yet he hadn’t given anyone the power to break him either.

Until Jeff.

They might have started as a sniper team, but they didn’t stay that way for long. They were complete opposites and in truth the day they’d been paired together everyone had thought that it was some cruel joke of MacTavish and Riley’s making. Chris the FNG, loud, brash, arrogant to a fault paired with one of the founding members of the task force, a man who was quiet, measured and perpetually angry. They clashed, argued, bickered like kids in those early days but instead of falling apart as everyone expected, their personalities worked somehow, like two very different sides of a coin. For a time they were just a successful partnership and then something shifted. They became friends, best friends. Chris told Jeff things about his life that very few other people knew and in turn Chris became one of the few to know about Jeff’s family life. Chris had never expected their relationship to go further than that, for the death of one of their brothers to force them together in a whole new way entirely, warm, drunken bodies searching for a way to comfort, a way to forget. But it had happened, kept happening in fact. And Chris was oddly OK with that. He trusted Archer, loved him, even though the thought terrified him to his core. He slowly became monogamous without even thinking and they drifted closer, the bond between them growing in strength every day. They never spoke about it and Hell, Chris was never even sure how Jeff felt about the whole thing, but even so he never dared question it. He didn’t want to jinx whatever it was that they had, didn’t want to even think about whether or not Jeff felt the same for him.

In the end, none of it had mattered. He’d woken up that morning, hungover as Hell, heading for the rec room to find Jeff to try and persuade him to make ply him with coffee. When there’d been no sign of him he’d headed for the range and then the gym after that. Still no Jeff. In the end he’d tracked down Riley and that was when everything changed. Archer had left, gone back home for an undisclosed period of time. No one knew when he was coming back and Riley was reluctantly to tell Chris why he’d gone. “I thought you knew” was the only thing he’d been able to tell him.

“I thought you knew.”

Now, Chris is standing in Jeff’s room, surveying the way the room is empty of most of the man’s possessions. Everything is so immaculate, as though Jeff had never been there in the first place. He’d come here looking for some kind of note or explanation, but instead he’s found absolutely nothing.

All at once he’s that lost teenager again, so angry, alone and afraid. He can feel tears prick at his eyes, confusion and sadness washing through him in equal measure. Frustrated, his hands grab at anything they can, tearing the sheets from Archer’s bed, throwing the few books and clothes he’s left behind across the width of the room. His right fist lashes out and collides with the wall, his knuckles burning from the hard impact. A gasp leaves his lips and he flops forwards, his forehead resting against the cool plaster.

He slides down the wall to the floor and pulls his knees up to rest under his chin and only when the world is quiet again do the questions start to flood his thoughts, taunting him with how he is so unable to answer any of them. Why did Jeff leave? Why didn’t he tell him? Does he think so little of him to think that Chris wouldn’t care? Or has he left because of Chris? Because he wants space or because it all has become too much? What made this the one thing that they couldn’t talk about?

The more questions he has, the angrier he becomes. The betrayal in his heart is tainting everything now and there’s a bitter taste in his mouth the more he thinks about Jeff. He thinks back to the nights where Jeff listened to him when he talked about his mom and Jess. Jeff knew how much he feared this, how terrified he was to lose everything that mattered to him all at once. Is the man so emotionally stunted that he doesn’t realise that he’s making Chris feel all of that again? Or does he simply not care whether this hurts him or not? Right now, Chris doesn’t know which reason he’d prefer.

The questions don’t get any quieter when he pulls himself up from the floor, his fingers hastily wiping at his eyes and nose in attempt to make himself presentable. He doesn’t have the answers to quieten his mind and so instead Chris consoles himself with the idea of forgetting, of losing himself in alcohol and music. The less he thinks the better and right now there’s nothing more tempting than a bottle of whisky and a bar where no one notices him. Maybe after enough drinks he simply won’t care either, just like Archer.