Come as You Were

Usual disclaimers apply.

Rating: Mature Pairing: Bruce/Johnny

Word Count: 565

Summary: Well, Right before writing this I caught the beginning of a Cold Case episode (I haven't watched much) which involved a man who was killed and had cigarette burns on the bottoms of his feet. I remembered my fic What You're Allowed to See and thought I'd write something related. Instead, I saw my challenge prompt sleepless/insomnia. Well, I'm reading Stephen King's Insomnia as well as I can amidst all my homework. So I just started typing.

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Bruce once read a book about a man who began to see colors when he hadn’t slept more than a few hours each night for months on end. Ralph, he thinks that was the name, suffered a worsening insomnia with each day until he slept little more than two hours. No “cure” worked. As he resigned himself to this fact, Ralph started to see colors – auras. Strings of color drifted above people’s heads. Ralph’s touch left bluish fingerprints. Eventually Ralph saw strange beings, alien-like “little bald doctors” who left behind gold-flecked, green footprints. Ralph’s insomnia started after his wife died. Bruce’s starts after Miranda’s death.

Johnny takes it upon himself to shoulder the blame for her murder, even after Purdy revealed he’d held an envelope with her pre-death eulogy. Johnny doesn’t sleep much and when he does, he has nightmares. Thus Bruce doesn’t sleep. In the pre-dawn hours Johnny wanders the house, pale as a ghost and just as lost.

After breakfast – if they eat and if Bruce doesn’t have to leave for work – they have sex. Love-making is reserved for the bedroom. In the living room or against the wall in the hallway – once on the landing of the stairs – they have sex. Hard, intense, quick sex that sometimes borders on violent. Bruce refuses to go too fast, put too much pressure on Johnny’s bad hip; but he doesn’t stop his lover if Johnny speeds past foreplay and breaches him with little warning.

Anger, guilt, shame. The morning air is thick with a curtain of denial trying to cover a fount of emotions. Bruce sometimes steps outside simply to gasp in fresh air, thirsty for something untainted. He can’t convince Johnny to leave the grounds and is forced to do the necessary shopping himself. Walt tries to get the psychic more involved in cases, but Johnny will only accept evidence that can be brought to the house. Bruce knows that soon Walt will give up even trying – it won’t be worth it.

Sometimes, on very rare occasions, when they slip between the sheets and before the lights go out, Johnny rolls over and curves his arm around Bruce’s waist. The psychic’s lips gently mouth over Bruce’s neck and ear. Instead of raw physical copulation weighted with guilt and shame, Bruce is able to relive better days, moments less fraught with tension. As Johnny licks his chest he remembers when the psychic surprised him every day for a month with a “taste of the day.” He remembers Johnny’s eagerness to host Rose Lewis while she visited. He remembers the nervousness in the blonde’s eyes when he admitted to the elder Lewis that he loved her son.

When they make love and Bruce sits astride his lover, he sees a shimmer of light surrounding their clasped hands. Johnny’s hand leaves a trail of gold as he strokes Bruce’s cock. Bruce kisses Johnny’s face and watches the deep purple lip marks glitter and slowly fade. They don’t say the words; I love you was never something they often voiced, but now it is only in moments like this – the moments when Bruce can see the colors that he knows. As he reaches climax he gasps instead of crying, knowing that when he is spent, the colors will be gone and in an hour Johnny will be silent, somber.

On better nights he dreams of purple and gold.

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I'm working my ass off (or at least driving my stress level way up) with writing my fiction portfolio. It just so happens to be a Dead Zone fic. But because it's for class (thus shown to people with no background of the show) and also a horror story that stars Bruce and Walt rather than much of Johnny, well, there's no slash. Not even a hint. I was complaining to Nayrnn about it a few hours ago. I need my OTP, damnit! Thus - this. Was only supposed to be a couple hundred words.