#nickxtroy

Over the course of the past few hours, sweeping through a terrain which feels endless in it's monotony, the absence of sound has crept it's way up incumbent limbs. Nick doesn't realize he's been mouthing, then singing, in his own tuneless fashion, the words to songs thought long forgotten. It's only the chorus of another voice stumbling over the same verse, which rouses him from where he's been scrunched over into an impossible position in the passenger seat.

Troy smiles, his eyes squinting against a horizon rendered molten by the final throes of daylight. Laughter snorts its way out of him when Nick flares back, cursing with vibrancy, and blowing upon forearms which were baking against the heat of the battered door where he'd discarded all notion of them - lost instead in ill-remembered lyrics from another time.

"Good job you don't burn, Nicky."

His gaze never wavers, as a procession of dead wood, and rusting billboards drowns in the dust of their wake. But he's still grinning as if the joke is firmly upon his companion.

"Fuck you very much."

Nick bites back a groan, and inspects the welts speckling every inch of his left arm. They're already receding, but an uncomfortable sting of bothered nerves still remains. Troy's unfettered amusement is a welcome distraction, and even if he keeps right on smirking after a solid punch to the thigh, somehow it eases any lingering lament over the state of his damn arms.  

They sit in silence for five or so miles. At the crest of the trail the sun drowns her sorrows in a distant range of hills. Troy tries to fill the spaces with idle observations, as if they'll keep the encroaching night at bay. 

At seven miles they swap out.

Sure hands find the curve of tired shoulders, and for a moment Nick closes his eyes against it all. From the crown of his head, with it's perpetual itch, to the tips of numb toes, he's hollowed out - chemical comforts run dry hours back. The world, in all it's shit stained, reckless glory is in such focus that if his eyes weren't already closed he'd be shielding them. Those same fingers which have wrought terrible, awful things upon the two of them, they dig deep into the ache which sobriety brings. He leans back, giving over his burden to Troy, digs his heels into the dead earth, surrendering some small piece of this moment to him.

"You ever wonder what the hell we're doing?"

A snort disturbs his hair where it's refusing to cooperate in such incessant humidity. The untangling of knots pauses, and for a moment he thinks they'll leave it at that. Hesitating somewhere between a closeness which everyone else finds inexplicable, save for Alicia. She'd spelled it out without pretence, concern in her eyes, but a dull kind of acknowledgement clinging to each word. And pushing each other over a precipice, going willingly towards a madness that feels like home. 

"You like him."

Denying it wasn't something that occurred to Nick back there, even when the first cracks had started to appear, ready to demolish a fragile peace at a moment's notice. Even when Troy had taken complete leave of his senses, high upon the same kind of heady rush denied by circumstance to the man who'd persuaded, lied, and killed for him.

"You stayed at the ranch because you love me."

It was an aside, something to quench the mood, to segue seamlessly into a description of himself which felt like a hand sliding through the dirt upon a neglected mirror. Yet, again he'd never thought to protest.

Just as he drowns, slowly, but surely in these quiet instances. In the feeling of being in tune with someone who no one else would vouch for. Of losing themselves in their own story at the end of the world. It felt like free fall, like all or nothing. Then and now. The greatest adrenaline rush, coupled with the quietest his mind has felt in years.  

Just when he thinks his question has become an rhetorical one, Troy takes a step back. The weight of both feet conceded to their owner. He's a long streak of shadow against a dying sun, hands dug into the pockets of dusty fatigues, and smile something Nick doesn't have to see to understand.

"We're living. You and me."

And that's enough. It goes unspoken, and for once Troy stops running his mouth long enough to find himself crowded up against the back of the truck. The heat against his spine, sun scorned metal, is nothing compared to greedy hands as they pick apart the last of their control with ease. Nick kisses like he's been bit. Like every time is the last. Like he knows just what he's doing, and knows just as well that Troy doesn't.

They part only to breathe, and even then it's a tenuous span of seconds before Troy's the one who captures his lips again. Run ragged, and with all the buttons on both their shirts in disarray is how they face the encroaching darkness. Soft verses, softer laughter echoing out over the barren expanse beyond the road. Out here the only drug they need is each other.

Sunlight oscillates through a gap in the dirty floral sheets Troy rigged up to accommodate those times when the dawn is an unwanted prospect. It's too damn hot to lie tangled up together, limbs contorted into something resembling a comfortable position upon the worn, box-springs of the cab. But they endure each other's heat even as another day tumbles over the horizon. The risk of undressing, divesting of borrowed clothes, often a couple of sizes too big in Nick's case, is one they've ignored too many times to count. To say nothing of several questionable locations Troy's knowledge of human anatomy (and just how drenched with filthy intentions the eldest Clarke sibling can be), has been thoroughly expanded.

For a long while they just lie in silence, Troy's long, deft fingers carding through wilted strands of dark hair recently hacked into a messy cut. One which suits the face which it frames oddly well. It's been a few days since their last foray into the haze of chemical companionship, and Nick's slowly descended. Details of an unforgiving world are ground right up against one grubby cheek as if he'd fallen for it's tricks all over again. He smiles though, leans into that interminable heat when Troy presses a palm against his damp neck. Tells him in a whisper rendered coarse by sleep that his breath stinks. Iron and zombie brains.

After all, they're both disgusting, marinated in dried streaks of other peoples' blood which crumbles into the fabric of other peoples' clothes. The cab of the truck swelters with a mixture of sweat, rust, and fresh sex. With a laboured groan, he twists his body just enough to crack the nearest window open a fraction. Beyond the road is an absent serpent, adorned with the husks of livestock without owners, withered juts of desert wood, and dirt. Miles and miles of dirt.

A thumb calloused by years of hard graft, tending the ranch, playing soldier boy for a father whose faith in him was never a solid construct to begin with, rubs a crusted streak of gore from Nick's cheek. And there's a strange kind of poetry to how closely entwined violence and affection are between them. Wordlessly, he surges forward, without a care for the vile taste a mouth turned stale by lack of amenities. They kiss for just as long, muddled up in each other until the cool hurt of the shrouded window is pressed up against bare skin.

It's in these brief interludes where there's no one around to judge how healthy their attachment to each other is, that it hits home like a shovel to the face. Only a soft hiss of pain against the shell of Nick's ear, the sight of blood underneath his grubby fingernails, of Troy wincing as he rubs at the tiny crescents engraved upon his shoulder brings him back. As if the high never quite wore off, and this time it's got so little to do with the usual means that it's almost frightening.

Black sheep who've flocked together. Just the two of them.

Ephemeral. Reckless. Bitter.

He blames it on the come down, on whatever the fuck it is they're lacing things with now. Troy's hand cups the back of his head, his free arm tethered around a shaking back as the other man tilts his head back against the window. As if it can keep the weight of moisture gathered at the corners of his eyes at bay. Keep it locked away right along with the pit festering in his stomach which speaks of an awful fate.

"....you can sleep when you're dead, eh?"

That much dredges a fractured laugh out from ribs that feel like they're breaking right then and there. A silent vow comes in the form of hands, and fingertips, and that damn look in Troy's eyes that says he'll do all the terrible things Nick's already done to protect him.

Lie. Cheat. Murder.