Missed Connections (53 page)

"I didn't get any emails," Cyril protested, persevering over Sophie's snort of disbelief. "I didn't! My accounts were wiped! I had no way to get in touch with you."

"You should have
found
a way! Goddammit, Cy, it was
terrible
, it was just… " She raised her hand to punch him again but he caught it, and after a moment of fighting she folded and threw herself into his arms instead. "It was so terrible," she murmured into his shoulder. "So hard for him. He never smiles anymore, not even now. Not really, the way he used to."

Cyril knew exactly what smile she was talking about. It lit up Scottie's whole face, from his forehead down to the point of his chin. "I'm sorry," he said stiffly. "I should have tried harder."

"Oh god, it isn't your fault," she sighed. "It just… everything was going to be perfect, and then nothing was."

"I know."  He patted her shoulders, awkward but sincere in his desire to comfort her. "I know exactly how you feel."

Sophie, apparently, was the gatekeeper to seeing Scottie, because not a week later Cyril was called in to discuss something with the "Cryogenics Department," which consisted of Scottie and a medical doctor. They were working on a new method of freezing living creatures so that they could be restored at a later date with no lasting side effects. Hospitals used similar technology for brief periods of time, but perfecting a method for transport through the rigors of space was a much larger problem. Needless to say, Scottie came to the meeting alone.

He didn't say anything. Neither of them said anything. The words of apology, the feelings of remorse all froze on Cyril's tongue. He could only stare at Scottie helplessly, hands dangling useless at his side.

Scottie had changed, that much was clear. His handsome, youthful face had new lines on it, a furrow between his eyebrows that didn't use to be there, a spider-web lattice at the edges of his pale grey eyes. He stared at Cyril like he was a ghost, barely breathing, and Cyril just stared back.

"Scottie."  It was the only thing he could get out, and it seemed to break the standoff. Scottie moved closer, hesitant steps gaining in length until he was close enough to touch, and once Cyril laid his hands on him he couldn't let go. They wrapped each other up so tightly that it hurt, Cyril's whole body ached from the shudders, but he would rather have killed himself than moved.

"Cy," Scottie whispered, and it was a broken sound that made Cyril hold on even tighter. "Jesus Christ. You're really here."

"Yes," he managed around the lump in his throat. "Yeah, I am. I'm here."

"
How
are you here?"

"I'm working for my father now. I'm Konstantin International's new mission liaison."

Scottie shook his head. "No. You hate your father."

"I hated not seeing you more," Cyril confessed.

"I can't believe… " Scottie pulled back just far enough to see Cyril's face. His eyes were wide and frantic. "The last time I saw you, you were dying. You were on your back in bed with tubes everywhere and your brain had swelled and they said you'd never wake up, and then I had to leave you there, and less than a month later your father took you away. I was going to come back to see you, but the doctors said you'd been discharged into private care and wouldn't tell me where, and… "

"I should have found a way to tell you when I woke up," Cyril said. Regret pulled at his veins, making them feel heavy enough to tear right through his skin. "I wanted to but I thought you had moved on, and I'll never be able to come back, not really. Not now."

"But you
have
come back."  Scottie pressed their foreheads together and shut his eyes. "You came back, you're right here. If this is all we can have, it's still so much better than nothing."

"But it isn't what we wanted," Cyril said. God, could his heart actually break? It felt like it was trying to. "You'll go to Mars, and I'll stay here on Earth."

"It's not everything we wanted," Scottie agreed. When he opened his eyes, though, they were bleak with honesty. "But it's more than I ever thought I'd have again, and I'll take it, Cy, if you're offering. I'll take whatever you can give me."

"I'll give you anything you want."

"Oh, love isn't there to make us happy. I believe it exists to show us how much we can endure."   --Hermann Hesse, Wer lieben kann, ist glücklich. Über die Liebe

It wasn't easy between them anymore. They were two strangers now, strangers with devoted hearts and plenty of memories, but very little future to rebuild a solid foundation on. Every day that passed was one day closer that Scottie came to leaving, and Cyril threw himself into his work, requisitioning additional rockets in case of emergency, formulating plans for what happened when a piece failed, and driving his science staff mad with his innovations and demands. Scottie, for his part, was still quiet when they got together, like he didn't know what to say anymore. Cyril would have given him everything he had, but Scottie didn't ask for anything.

Sophie was the one who helped them move past the stricken, icy stage of unfamiliarity they seemed trapped in. She hosted them both for dinner in her quarters, sat them down at a table with wine, a rose on each of the two plates and a candle in the middle, and said, "There, luvs. Atmosphere. The chicken can come out of the oven in an hour. I think you should take the time before that to get reacquainted, hmm?"  She kissed both of them on the cheek. "Don't be idiots, now."  Then she left.

They stared at each other for a long moment before Cyril blurted, "Do you even still want me? Like this?"

Scottie's mouth dropped open. "Of course I bloody want you, what kind of question is that? I was waiting for you to say something, and you didn't!"

"
I
was waiting for
you
!"

That did it. That triggered the laugh that Cyril had started to think he'd never hear again. It rolled up from Scottie's belly, forceful and loud and consuming, and Cyril could have cried hearing it.

"We… we are complete and utter bollocks at this, Cy," Scottie gasped between laughs. "My god, we're thick. Fuck this."  He pushed his chair back, jerked Cyril up to his feet and smashed their lips together. It was hard and ruthless and not in the least romantic, and Cyril moaned into it, desperate for more.

Apparently they were the type to make up for too much subtlety by abandoning it altogether. Scottie pressed Cyril to the wall, still broader, still stronger, and Cyril wrapped his legs around Scottie's middle and let the other man hold him up as he devoured Scottie's mouth. They rutted through their clothes, groaning and gasping into each other's mouths until pressure and heat and sheer need had them coming. Scottie staggered over to Sophie's bed and fell onto it, still holding Cyril in his arms, and they fought to catch their breath.

"Asshole," Cyril panted. "We finally get a chance to fuck and I end up getting dick burn instead."

"We've got time for more," Scottie said, sounding more cheerful than Cyril had heard in recent memory. "Evergreen doesn't leave for another, what, fifteen months? More than enough time for us to fuck each other up, down and sideways."

"As long as
some
sort of fucking happens," Cyril groused, but he lifted his head to kiss Scottie, a bit gentler now. "You ought to know you can't count on waiting for me to come around. I'm about as good with people as you are with machines."

"I'll have you know," Scottie drawled, "that I haven't caused a random machine to spontaneously combust for almost five months now. The curse is broken, luv, I'm cured."

"A five month dry spell doesn't a cure make," Cyril said.

"Don't talk to me about dry spells," Scottie groaned. "Do you know who the last person I had sex with was? You, the day of the crash."  He tried to shrug, but it didn't really come off from his back. "Suppose it makes sense that the day my dick decides to come back to life it's with you."

"That… is a long time to go without," Cyril said carefully.

Scottie rolled then onto their sides and looked into Cyril's eyes. "Can you honestly tell me you were having fun whoring it up in Moscow and Nowhere, Alaska while we were apart, Cy?"

"No, I can't."  Pleasure sparked in Scottie's eyes, and Cyril went on, "But I was unconscious for a lot of that. It's not the same."

"I think it is."  Scottie's tone didn't brook any disagreement, and honestly Cyril wasn't interested in trying to convince him that he thought Scottie's celibacy was anything other than flattering. Cyril wasn't that good a person. He craved the evidence that he'd been missed, that the time he and Scottie had spent together had been more than friendship and stolen hours of intimacy.

"You realize your life is about to become massively complicated," Cyril warned him. "You can't hang any hopes on me, Scottie. I can't go where you're going."

"I know that."  Scottie was quiet for a while before he said, "Sophie's going, so I have to go. She was all I had for most of my life, and I can't imagine losing her."

"I know that."  Cyril had always known where he stood with the siblings. If he were still headed to Mars it wouldn't have been an issue, but now that he wasn't there was no contest at all. "And at least you have experience with losing me."

He had tried to make it funny, but it wasn't. "Let's not consign me back to that unhappy place quite yet, all right?" Scottie said evenly. "After all, we've only just started making messes of our pants together again. I'd rather not confront the idea of letting go until after I've had my dick inside of you at least a few dozen times."

"Agreed."

"Speaking of which… " Scottie rummaged in the bedside table for a moment before emerging triumphant. "Aha! My favorite lube and a decent brand of condoms. Sophie knows me so well."

"The fact that your sister anticipated you invading her privacy to look for lube is frightening to me," Cyril said.

"The mitigating factor in there is
her
anticipation, Cy," Scottie said cheekily. "It's not creepy if she's in on it."

"If you say so."

"I do. Why don't we put these to use?"

The chicken ended up burned, the candle's hot wax made a mess of the table, and Cyril bought Sophie a brand new set of sheets to make up for state they left hers in. She took their apologies as gracefully as someone who was related to Scottie could.

he·don·ism:

1) Pursuit of or devotion to pleasure, especially to the pleasures of the senses.

2) The ethical doctrine holding that only what is pleasant or has pleasant consequences is intrinsically good.

3) The doctrine holding that behavior is motivated by the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

In the last year before Evergreen's departure, Cyril let his life be ruled by Scottie's merry sense of hedonism. In Scottie's eyes there was no reason to hold back, no time for regrets, because sooner rather than later this thing that they had careened back into, this strange, overwhelming intimacy would come to an end. They both knew that. The time for hoping was over; the moment for thinking about the future had passed. There was only now, and they translated their subconscious desperation into a sense of hunger for each other that they couldn't hide, and didn't care to. Nothing prevented them from having a relationship as long as it didn't affect mission readiness, and they both still did their jobs just fine.

The psychologists didn't like it. The final year of Project Evergreen's prep was a psych-intensive time for all of the team, with as much as half of their day spent talking and processing and preparing themselves for their new red horizon, and the permanency of the move. Out of a hundred people who had started this training, more of them dropped out in this last year than had left in the previous four. By T minus one month, seventy-nine crew members were left. All of the crucial functions were still covered though, and so the mission went forward.

"After all this bloody time, we'd better go forward," Scottie complained to Cyril one night in his quarters, doing shots of some truly exquisite vodka sent by his father that Cyril hadn't been masochistic enough to throw away. "I haven't put myself through all this hell to get turned away at the gate."

"Hell, huh?" Cyril asked, downing his own shot. It burned smoothly down his throat, cold and crisp.

"Utter hell, luv. God, all that horrendous running, and the innumerable write-ups I've had to do for my damn cryogenesis chambers, not to mention learning to live without the lovely things to which I've become accustomed… I'm being serious here, why are you laughing?"

"Did you just call me a thing?" Cyril chuckled.

He wasn't quite prepared for Scottie to reach for him suddenly, to pull him forward into his lap, heedless of the open bottle of vodka, which crashed to the floor.

"Do not," Scottie said with gritted teeth, "make light of yourself to me. Don't. I can handle everything, Cy, I can handle leaving it all behind, but when I think about you…"  He shook his head. "I can't be reasonable. My therapist almost disqualified me based on my 'attachment issues,' it took me weeks to work my way back into her good graces, I can't… I can't think about it, Cy. And I can't laugh about it."  He nuzzled into Cyril's neck. "Please don't make me."

"That's not healthy," Cyril said, feeling his stomach swoop uncomfortably.

"It is what it is. I'll deal with it, but I can't just… " Scottie cradled Cyril's face in his hands, and Cyril looked at him and let himself see everything in Scottie's expression, let the love and the pain and the anger sear his memory. "Fuck me," Scottie said. "Fuck me, make me forget. Just for now."

Switching was something that happened more and more the closer they got to the end date, Cyril desperate to be inside his lover and Scottie more than willing to accommodate him. Cyril had never felt this kind of carnal need before, and it just got worse and worse with each passing day. He hastily undid his dress shirt, then stepped back and shucked his exquisitely-tailored pants down into the pool of vodka. "I won't go slow," he warned.

Scottie was already laying back naked on the bed, having gotten out of his sweats a lot faster than Cyril could with his buttons and zippers. One of the advantages of being in the program was the fact that there really was no such thing as formal wear any longer. Of course, given the way that Scottie looked at Cyril in his suits, that might have been more of an advantage for him.