Frozen

by Jane St Clair

This is the first dimension he's seen where they weren't moving through some kind of ocean. There've been more colours than the light spectrum of their Earth allows, and there've been paradoxes that boggled even the most perfectly enhanced pathways of his brain, but they've always been encased by something resembling liquid, something to be sailed through. Here, suddenly, they're distinctly *elsewhere*. Because there's only the thinnest possible atmosphere around them. Because somewhere abstractly *up* there's a sky, if an inexplicable one without the infinitesimal curve that Earth's -- their Earth's -- sky has. Just infinite and silver-flat.

The Carrier, huge as it is, is dwarfed by the ice chasm they're moving through. Whenever they rise or sink in it, he's been able to count packed layers, see the blue shades of ice changing. Two hundred miles thick, more or less. The crevasse is seventy wide. A river at the bottom of the chasm moves with the grace of something not quite frozen.

There are trees embedded in the ice. All of them silver.

He wonders, if he was still human -- *only* human in that very normal sense -- whether he'd be cold sitting here in one of the Carrier's hundred of transparent eyes. Half-globes of something entirely unlike glass, the eyes are occupied as often as not, even when they're travelling in the absolute zero of deep space. So he supposes there must be heat containment. It must be safe for living things.

He doesn't know. He's always cold. But he hasn't told anyone that except Apollo, who knew already.
 

He was cold and naked when he came out from under the knife. Somewhere in the guts of whatever Stormwatch facility Henry Bendix had chosen for the site of that particular moment of perversion, he'd been naked and nameless, surrounded by other people who were naked and nameless but somehow less deeply *concerned* about those facts than he was. But maybe they didn't hurt. Their bodies looked like dolphin skins to him (and strange, horribly strange that he could remember dolphins, remember them swimming off the coast of Texas, but not his own name), silver-perfect and unmarked. Like nobody'd *cut* them to make them what they were.

A shimmering gold head bent down intimately close to the dragon-thing that Bendix eventually named Stalker. Gold-lashed eyes tilted over to him, where he was sitting with his back pressed against the wall and his knees pulled up in front of him. He remembers that huge body walking across the room and looming over him, too naked and too beautiful, then crouching in front of him and laying huge, warm hands on his shoulders. Hands that sent a wave of improbable warmth through him that he shouldn't have been able to feel, just like he couldn't feel, really feel, the ambient temperature of the space they were in or the stove-heated metal of the spoon he'd unthinkingly picked up yesterday in the galley, thereby adding another scar to the masses he already had.

Heart-shattering smile. Just a brief, 'Hi,' and he was gone, the person that Bendix eventually named Apollo.
 

He was cold and wet on some unidentified night in Boise, Idaho, when he and Apollo dragged themselves out of the desert, still too emotionally ragged to even carry on something like a conversation. The first night, he'd chosen north, because it was as good a direction as any, and pointed them in it. The second night, Apollo pulled together enough that they didn't have to walk anymore. Sometime after that, they'd entered high mountain country. And sometime after that, it'd started to rain.

It was one of the ongoing miracles of his existence that even in uniform, people didn't usually notice them. Just like there was nothing not-normal about a guy in enough leather to choke Batman hanging out with a human mountain wrapped in spandex. His natural (unnatural) stealth probably helped them. But the rest of the time, they were just not-there for most people, the way homeless people were.

Nobody in Boise looked at them when they dropped into the wet, dark downtown of the place. Nobody even turned to look at them. He suspected that he could have played in traffic instead of just crawling into the nearest alley.

He remembers finally letting himself sag against a building wall. He wasn't physically tired -- he wasn't ever tired, really -- but his brain ached and the cold place inside where he'd had human emotions once was aching like its tendons had been ripped loose. He stood pressed under the roof's overhang and watched the water pour off it in a steady wall. That transparent mass of hydrogen and oxygen between him and Apollo.

Who only looked at him. Still radiant, even after days in the high country with the misery of a murdered team between them.

Ragged, too. Dirty. Tired. Apollo still looked like he might cry. Which wasn't as weak as his own brain whispered it was. It was a *human* response. He knew that. He was going to have to work to get those back.

He must have shifted or something. Softened his posture, opened his arms. Because after a couple of minutes' silence, Apollo leaned through the wall of water and sagged against him. Buried that luminous face in the hollow of his neck and just shook.

He thinks they stayed like that for a long time. Standing first, then sitting, hidden from the street by a couple of dumpsters and a lot of bags of trash and the weight of a rain that even dogs shouldn't have been out in. His arms around that bigger body, just hissing softly because he couldn't think of any words of comfort big enough. Apollo's around him, clinging desperately enough that he could pretend that he wasn't scared, that he didn't need it, that he was only giving comfort and not taking it too.

Both of them breathing. Apollo's hair dripped water between his coat and his neck.

Apollo's hands were inhumanly warm against his face. They held him steady while the first fingertip pushed in under his mask. Like sex, that. Like how he remembered sex being -- that first second of violation before you loved it. Before it was really, really good.

It was still raining on them when Apollo pushed his mask back, and touched his whole face, and kissed him. Very gently, that first time, but not tentative. It wasn't a question. There was no possibility that he wouldn't accept it.

The second kiss was wetter, though not much deeper. Apollo's mouth opened over his, but didn't demand access. It mapped his face instead. Soft, often-mouthed kisses rubbed along the poorly-mended tears in his skin. Along his jaw and at the base of his throat where the unnatural, silicon parts of his brain screamed that he was vulnerable and shouldn't be touched.

He didn't count how many kisses got laid across his skin before they kissed deeply the first time. No, that's a lie, but he stored the number somewhere deep enough that he can't reach it easily, because it isn't fair to either of them for him to know. But he remembers the very bright taste that he found somewhere deep in Apollo's mouth, and the strange absence of whisker-burn, because neither of them had needed to shave since. Since. Since Bendix, he supposes, but really just Since. Because they must have shaved Before, like normal men do. He just doesn't have any personal connection to the kinds of memories he got to keep, so he has to extrapolate and calculate and guess.

Sometime after that (one hour, three minutes, thirty-one seconds) he put his gloved fist through a very dirty basement window and they spent their first night as lovers curled up together under his coat in a shallow concrete hole that smelled almost, but not quite, like rat fur burning.
 

Outside, he sees things embedded in the ice that he thinks must have been alive, once. More alive than trees. Trapped insectoid things that look a little like farmers. One of them has a tool in its hand that could be a hoe. Like they were overtaken by this ice age so suddenly that they didn't have time to even turn their heads.

Apollo says, "Are we taking bets on whether or not Jenny Sparks is spying on us?"

Midnighter turns just enough to raise an eyebrow and have it noticed, then goes back to staring out the Carrier's eye. The not-glass under his naked belly is unnaturally comfortable, as if the Carrier's used to having people want to doze there. Apollo said something earlier about frightening the locals, but there isn't anyone out there who isn't embedded in ice. If he wants to lie around bare-ass naked and watch the multiverse unfold, there's nothing to stop him.

And he did check. Every sense he had crawled outward in the ten seconds before he laid his mouth on Apollo's and made it very clear that the locals, frozen as they were, could go fuck themselves.

The Carrier's not-glass shell was soft underneath them when Apollo curled up against his back and pulled up one of his legs in the crook of an arm. Both of them on their sides, and Apollo pushing into him so slowly that Midnighter wasn't sure that he wouldn't just lose it. Too many senses, too much input. Apollo entirely too big and warm to be pushing so inexorably up into his body. To glitteringly remote be kissing the side and back of his neck while they made love. Taking it very slow, long strokes, Midnighter occasionally bucking back as best he could to get more.

Which eventually he did. Apollo eased his leg down and let him roll forward onto the glass, rolled with him and rode him, hard and deep and dazzling in the way that Apollo is even when he's out of view. His erection rubbed against the not-glass until he (whimpered) snapped at Apollo to help him.

That was good, too. On his back, semen dripping out of his ass, cat-slut sprawled against Apollo's huge chest, getting jerked off while they kissed. Long, deep strokes of Apollo's tongue in his mouth, and a couple of good ones that he gave back. His eyes were closed by then, but he's sure somehow that Apollo poured light into his mouth with that kiss. There's so much radiant energy loose in the eye-chamber now that they must have been star-bright in the moment of his orgasm.

If Jenny was spying on them, he hopes she found what she was looking for.

He doesn't get mad at Jenny Sparks, and not just because they owe her big. More because he figures she's suffered more than any ten people should have to. Because people do manage to live for a whole century, sometimes, and it doesn't break them. But they get old, and she doesn't, and most people don't have all the suffering of a hundred years carved into their psyches.

Maybe it helps if the time marks you. It might keep you from trying to do the missing damage yourself. In a different life, one without Apollo, he'd probably drink too.

Apollo leans over and licks Midnighter's back, very deliberately, from his shoulder blade down to the swell of his ass. It leaves a warm, wet trail that feels almost as good as the original tongue-stroke. Good enough that his whole body twists to follow it.

"Don't ignore me."

"Bit late for me to start now." Sarcastic, if only because Apollo would probably check him for fever if he forgot to be. But he curls into the offered body and pillows his head on one big, pale thigh. Apollo strokes his back and ass gently while the world under them compacts itself into new glacial layers.

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