Boxing Day
Mar. 19th, 2011 05:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sonora_conejaPairing: BA/Murdock
Rating: R
Warnings: none
Summary: A fill for this prompt over at the kink meme
So, I have been just heartbroken over the images coming in from Japan. Horrifying that this happened. While watching there images of Chinook helicopters sent in for search and rescue. Also US Forces are going in to help.
This got me thinking. We have had so many natural disasters with so many powerful images of people needing help and air rescue. I got to thinking of how eager to fly these missions and help people Murdock would be. Got me thinking that seeing Murdock flying to rescue like that would effect the way BA thinks of him. So that is the prompt. Some sort of natural disaster happens or mission goes south and Murdock flies in to the rescue. Perhaps even with children who need rescuing involved. This effects BA and then leads to some lovely Murdock/BA action. :)
BA has to go find Murdock after a bad day during the Boxing Day Tsunami relief efforts in Thailand...
The air is still at night here, still and heavy, reeking of the jungles beyond the airfield’s edge. BA can’t pronounce the name of the place they’re staging out of. But it’s damn humid. And still. And he would swear, if anybody was around to ask, that he can smell that underlying tang of death in the air.
He can’t find Murdock.
They’ve been put up in one of the hangars tonight. Cots, mosquito nets, a hundred guys from air crew sleeping in the cramped space. Well, ninety-eight. Because Murdock wasn’t there when he woke up, fitful after the sedative he had to take on the return flight today.
And now BA’s out looking for their damn crazy pilot.
On the flightline.
“Excuse me, sir, but you’re not allowed to be out here,” a well-meaning Air Force airman says, M4 at tactical, coming out of the haze of the portable floodlights flown in from Kadena.
“Lookin' for the C-17s, fool,” BA growls at the scrawny teen, turning a little, knowing damn well his tattoo’s clearly visible in his wifebeater.
“But you’re not allowed out here, sir!” the airmen protests.
BA ignores him. The big cargo planes are at least half a mile down the way, so he breaks into a jog, hoping like hell he remembers the tail number of their transport.
It was a mistake coming here, or at least, that’s what BA thought when Hannibal did his recall thirteen days ago, the day after Christmas, and told that there’d been a tsunami in Thailand, that potentially tens of thousands of people were dead, that mobilizations had begun. BA and Face had looked at each other, and looked at Murdock, whose lips were pressed in a thin line, kind of leaning over Hannibal’s desk, looking right at him.
“We gotta go, sir,” he’d said.
Without a trace of the crazy.
Face was on the shit list for something he’d pulled on the wrong general and neither he nor Hannibal were allowed to leave Benning right now. But the boss had still called in a favor and gotten Murdock orders on one of the flight crews out of Charleston AFB, and BA had made sure he went along. Never knew what Murdock was going to get up to if he was left alone.
But this wasn’t what the military was for, BA had thought, before they got here ten days ago by way of Hawaii and Japan. Goddamn humanitarian disaster clean-up? No, their job description - blowing shit up and killing people - included absolutely nothing about this kind of thing. Nothing about handing out bottled water, or airlifting stranded people off the roofs of their houses, or pulling dead bodies out of ebbing pools in the middle of nameless towns in the goddamn jungle.
No, nothing about that at all, and BA had honestly thought it was a mistake that they were here. Other people, other agencies, should have been handling this stuff. Not the military.
But for the first nine days, reeling from the time change and the damn seditives, he’d done his job, everything he was asked, and grumbled goodnaturedly about the FRH-warmed MRE meatloaf, bottled water and anti-malarials they had for dinner. Made sure those junior enlisted kids, the lieutenants, were okay. Bitched about the weather. Told the resident colonel that everything was peachy. Just like any good NCO was expected to do.
And Murdock had flown supply runs back to Okinawa those first nine days. His usual cheerful, crazy self.
But tonight... he curses himself again as he reaches the first of the huge cargo planes and slows to a walk, rounding to the back of the line, checking the tail numbers for the designator that’s going to indicate the plane that they came in on.
Tonight, Murdock had been different.
Today Murdock had flown one of the relief choppers.
They had been passing over the reeking water still covering some village, heading back to base, part of a six-ship formation, supplies delivered, mission over for the day. Their chopper was carrying two doctors plus BA, the only non-Chinook.
BA gripped the seat nervously, getting weird looks from the docs, but fuck them. The open door of the craft reminded him far too much of Mexico, and with Murdock chattering on the headset with that Air Force lieutenant sitting as co-pilot...
And then the chopper veered and dropped out of formation, on its damn side practically, taking a hard turn to the right, nearly in the damn jungles and there was screaming on the intercom before the chopper righted, lowered, blades churning the water below, and there was Murdock, emerging from the haze of the sedative, right by his knee.
The pilot handed him his helmet, and grabbed the knife out of his belt and before BA or anyone else could react, he’d gone out that open door.
Hitting the water nearly thirty feet below.
It shook BA clean out of the drugged state he’d been in since take-off.
With the chopper still, hovering, locked in by the co-pilot who’d switched the intercom back on and was informing the three men in the back, in that errie, laconic calm pilots all seemed possessed of, that Captain Murdock had seen something and was going out to investigate. But that lieutenant turned around and gave BA a look but BA couldn’t do anything but stare back as he gingerly moved over to the door, scanning the water below for his teammate.
Who was swimming strongly towards a half-collapsed building.
Hand shaking where it was bracing him back on the open door, limbs weak from the sedative he had to take to fly, from the fear poking out under it, the corporal knew there was no way he could follow Murdock down. He wouldn’t have been able to make it back in the aircraft.
For the first time since joining Hannibal’s team, BA felt powerless. He collapsed back against the far wall of the chopper and closed his eyes, trying to block out the sensation of the roters overhead, the hum of the engines, trying to fall back into the numbing haze of the drugs. But all BA felt was the heat. His body, sweating through his rarely-worn ABUs.
Minutes ticked by.
Finally, he registered the feeling of descent, that little inner-ear shift, and he roused himself enough to crawl back over to the open door, and there was Murdock, three feet below in beaten foam, treading water with one free hand, hair slicked back and something dark in his eyes, holding a wide-eyed child up.
BA shouts at the pilot to get closer, and the lieutenant gets them another foot closer, and they’re hauling both of them in, Murdock by the scruff of his flight suit because the second he pushed the boy up, he didn’t have anything left to raise his own arms. And he collapsed on the floor, head propped up on BA’s lap while the doctors checked out the kid.
Murdock’s hair, uniform, bled dirty water everywhere, smelling of death and he clung to one of BA’s hands, grounding me the corporal remembered thinking, not the other way around. Hie teammate had been breathing so hard BA though his lungs might explode, and it was then, as they were taking back off, that he noticed.
That crazy fool still had his boots on.
Right now, BA catches what he thinks is the right number and dives around, saying a little thank-you under his breath that the plane’s on the ground and not on rotation back to Kadena AB right now. There’s a k-loader parked outside, the tail open, a few pallets yet to be taken off or put
Cargo bay wide and half-empty, he treads up to the cockpit stairs and inside. Light’s pouring in through the huge windows, and he can see everything. No Murdock.
“Hey, crazy, you in here?” BA asks softly, coming in and looking around. The air’s cool, the space is still. Nothing. Absolutely nothing, and, heart sinking, he turns to go. Dammit, he’s lost the man, and now Hannibal’s going to...
A sniffle, movement, and the corporal’s head snaps up. “Murdock?”
“No, no, no Murdock here,” the pilot clearly says, overhead. “He ain’t here at all. He’s back at Benning.”
There’s a bunk installed over the door BA realizes, and pulls up enough on the little recessed rungs to look over the edge.
And there’s Murdock, curled up in the back of the space, just big enough for two people, completely naked, and the cockpit’s not just cool, but icy-cold.
“No, ain’t no Murdock, Murdock ain’t here...” he babbles, and BA jumps back to the floor, getting his boots off as fast as he can, and climbs up in there, right next to the pilot.
Shit.
BA’s not sure what to do about this. Underneath the sock puppets and the bad t-shirts, he suspects, Murdock runs a lot deeper than any of them ever really give him credit for. And one more than one occasion, the corporal’s found himself wondering about that. What’s in there. What Murdock’s capable of. And today he saw it, saw the Ranger come out, and something else... because the captain spotted that kid from at least a hundred yards away and because there hadn’t been a glint of insanity in those blue eyes when he’d grabbed BA’s knife away.
So, what is in there, anyway?
He reaches out and finds soft hair meet his hand, still wet from a rudimentary shower he’d gotten in, right before the debriefing with that colonel, the one BA hadn’t been able to join in on. And that had hurt, because there’s a reason he volunteered to do this, a reason beyond the one he gave Hannibal. All these layers have him... curious, for lack of a better word. Definitely curious.
And it doesn’t hurt that Murdock’s kind of hot, in his own way.
His body’s on display right now, shivering on his side, all that lean muscle stretched tight beneath pale skin, and BA wonders at the strength that’s hidden there. Swimming that distance, pulling that kid from the rickety little building... he forgets, sometimes. He really does. But he’s never seen Murdock like that.
Not once.
But now...
“Hey, man, you okay?” he asks now, cautious, quiet, like Face gets when he’s trying to talk Murdock back from the edge. And he has seen this, seen what Murdock can do when he gets lost in his own head, and so BA doesn’t move in quite yet.
“I... I lost your knife, Bosco,” comes a sniffled reply, and BA doesn’t realize that he’s holding his breath until right then. It comes out, shuddering relief, and he pulls up into the bunk, reaching out. In the cool of the cabin, Murdock’s like ice. He blinks up at the corporal, though, his eyes refocusing. “Dropped it on the way back.”
“Did you need it?” They’re at arms-length from each other, one dark hand on a pale shoulder, and BA doesn’t really know what else to say, how close he can get.
Murdock nods.
“Then it ain’t a problem...” BA begins, but Murdock’s knees are drawing up, and that’s the start of something very bad, so BA does the only thing he can think to do; shuffle forward on that scratchy blanket, barely a foot of clearance over his raised shoulder, and grabs Murdock up in a bear hug, forcing one of his legs between the pilot’s, keeping them down, and tries not to groan aloud as those thighs grip down on his. “It ain’t a problem.”
“The door was stuck,” Murdock says, “but it was all rotten from the water so it fell away pretty easy and the roof was halfway gone anyway. The kid ran when he saw me...”
“Murdock, you don’t have to...”
But Murdock’s not listening to him at all. “... so I went in after ‘im, but part o’ the floor on the upper whatevers he’d been livin’ on gave way, and I saw the rest...” and he buries his face in BA’s shoulder, entire body heaving, “...all of ‘em, tucked under the floor like... like...bloated-up sardines...and their... their hands were...”
And BA doesn’t protest, doesn’t care at all, that Murdock surges up to wrap around him so tight he can barely breath. Sobs are starting up, breaking loose from that slender frame that’s so much tougher than it looks, that complex mind trying to process something at a level BA knows he doesn’t possess himself, wracking both of them, and BA holds him, hoping that maybe he can keep his teammate from shaking apart before this runs its course. The corporal knows the demons haunting this man are something he can’t comprehend, but he can do this.
It’s all he can do, so he just holds on, hoping like hell it’s enough.
He doesn’t know how long they stay like that, choked little sounds echoing through the cabin, the captain’s heart thudding against his own chest, before Murdock seems to shake himself through it, and it’s then that BA realizes the pilot’s crying, clinging to him like a child, just woken up from a bad nightmare.
"Why'd we come here, Bosco?" he asks, desperately present in the here and now, and BA's never heard him so lost. "Ain't nothing we can do for these people. They're all dead. Everybody jus' gone..."
And BA says the first thing that comes to his mind.
"We came here so you could save that kid. Never seen anything that..."
"Crazy?" Murdock sniffs against his breast pocket.
"...brave," he finishes quietly, stroking a hand up into the captain's still-damp hair. "Braver than me, man. Bravest fucking thing I ever seen.
And when Murdock looks up at him, eyes wide, the corporal really can't help himself, can't stop himself at all.
Can't stop the kiss.
Doesn't want to.
It’s nothing frantic, this kiss, nothing hot and crazy, like BA would have thought it would be. No, this is slow but without hesitation, Murdock slotting right up against the corporal’s chest, letting BA guide him right in. It’s closed at first, just a soft brush of lips, and it’s Murdock who opens first, sighing into it, breath tickling across day-old stubble, the most erotic thing BA thinks he’s ever felt. He kisses back, harder, needing to meet that subtle little challenge, the definite offer.
“Murdock, I...”
“It’s James, Bosco,” the pilot says, kissing a spot right under BA’s neck like he knows what it does to the big man. “You should call me James... if we’re gonna... if you...”
BA groans and runs a hand fully down that body, on display and begging for him in the confined little space of the aircrew bunk, feeling all the hard planes of muscle, remembering the swim, a deeply-hidden strength he was privilege to witness today. Shoulder to hip. hip to shoulder. Shoulder to hip, and gently around the front, to that hot space between them, curling around the silky flesh there, loving the way it pulses in his hand, harder and harder.
“We are, crazy,” he says, surprised by how husky his voice comes out, but loving the visible shiver in the other man. “I do.”
He twists gently, thumb tracing that throbbing vein, and Murdock’s long lashes flutter shut over those sea-green eyes, a delicious little noise escaping him that BA takes to mean he should keep going. He hasn’t done this with another man in a long, long time, but it’s the same, he figures, and from the little moan he manages to
A hand tightens up on his bicep and strokes up, playing up under the sleeve of his ACU blouse, around to the buttons. Murdock strips it off him, gentle, making sure neither of them hit the low ceiling. Then BA has to let go as Murdock tugs at his undershitshirt, gets it off. There’s no room for him to pull his pants off, not really, but long clever fingers undo the buttons of his fly, one by one, and together, they manage to scoot the damn things off. BA sighs in relief as his own burgeoning erection is freed, and the pilot palms his shaft almost reverently. The big black man kicks his pants off with his socks and wriggles back up.
But Murdock’s turned around, now, facing away, and the corporal has a sudden clench of fear in his chest, that the pilot’s curling back in, that he won’t come out again.
“You with me, James?” he asks softly, right against the other man’s neck, hoping those words are running into his ears, finding their way down to wherever Murdock’s hiding himself in that brain of his. “Need you here with me, right now. Can you do that?”
“Is this real?” he asks and arches back into him, captures one of BA’s hands and pulls it up and over his own hip, guiding those fingers back around his own cock. “You really here with me, BA?”
“I’m always here, crazy,” he says softly, loving the feel of their fingers, combined, stroking together. How Murdock’s somehow managing to get closer and closer. How his own shaft is trapped between them now, how it slides right into the cleft of Murdock’s ass right as he moves just so...
And both men moan.
“Right there, Bosco, right there...” Murdock pleads and pulls. BA’s hips buck in, keeping himself in that groove, pushing the pilot’s slighter form forward, driving his cock into their hands.
“Like this?”
“Oh... oh, yes, Bosco, like that, please...”
Pressure in front, pressure behind, a rhythm reached and a pattern established. It goes on for long minutes, pulling them both into the place where Murdock lives, where time doesn’t run right and things are what you make them, not what they are. And they both want this, BA thinks, both need to have the world narrow to this, to lock everything else out, to forget the jungle and the water and the debris of human existence beyond.
There’s no need for anything more, anything more than this, and soon, nothing else can break through. BA realizes he’s not the one flying this mission, that he’s not the driving this ride. It’s Murdock, Murdock who’s guiding, Murdock whose them both higher and higher, like those updrafts he talks about sometimes, spiraling up into the white clarity of it all.
My pilot, BA thinks. Mine.
And that’s what does it for him, that thought, wherever it came from, so welcome, gasped against the smooth sweep of Murdock’s shoulder blades as he comes across that strong back, hearing Murdock’s own cry of pleasure, spilling into their twined hands. And it’s Murdock that cleans them up, passing a soft t-shirt in broad sweeps and muttered apologies that BA doesn’t really understand right now, and pretty soon, those don’t matter either, the night washing everything else away.
+++++
He wakes in the morning with Murdock in his arms, untroubled and calm and loose, legs wrapped around one of BA’s own, nuzzling into his shoulder.
“Didn’t have no nightmares last night,” Murdock whispers, and snuggles closer, his head on BA’s outstretched arm.
“Yeah,” BA says, and kisses that forehead. “Yeah, I didn’t either.”
“We should probably get out of here. Think this thing’s on the ATO for the day.”
“You flyin’ it?” the corporal asks, staring up at the ceiling, so close to his face.
“No,” Murdock says softly, a kind of thoughtfulness in his voice BA doesn’t think he’s ever heard before. “On the Blackhawk again today.”
“When’d you...”
But the pilot shakes his head. “Asked, soon as we got back yesterday...” And then he crouches up, eyes sparkling, that usual manic glow back about them, and he slaps the corporal on his hip, rolling over him, and doesn’t even bother using the ladder to reach the ground. “Come on, BA!” he hollars. “We got more kids to go save!”
BA smiles, and grabs for his scattered clothing, making sure he throws as much irritation as he can manage into the obligatory, “crazy ass fool!” he yells down at the pilot and leans over the edge of the bunk.
Murdock stops mid-hop, one leg in his boxers, staring up as BA stares down. There’s something here, BA knows, where they have a chance to just dismiss last night as temporary, something they both needed, and leave it all right here.
But fuck that.
He smiles as he swing out, studiously using the ladder, and Murdock breaks out into a big grin and holds out his arms.
Anybody who watches them leave the plane, bickering and arguing, he figures, will never know about the way Murdock is tackling him to the floor right now, or how he straddles .
And that’s perfectly alright with him, BA thinks, circling those slender hips with big hands. Nobody else’s damn business anyway how Murdock does the things that he does.
Just his.
Rating: R
Warnings: none
Summary: A fill for this prompt over at the kink meme
So, I have been just heartbroken over the images coming in from Japan. Horrifying that this happened. While watching there images of Chinook helicopters sent in for search and rescue. Also US Forces are going in to help.
This got me thinking. We have had so many natural disasters with so many powerful images of people needing help and air rescue. I got to thinking of how eager to fly these missions and help people Murdock would be. Got me thinking that seeing Murdock flying to rescue like that would effect the way BA thinks of him. So that is the prompt. Some sort of natural disaster happens or mission goes south and Murdock flies in to the rescue. Perhaps even with children who need rescuing involved. This effects BA and then leads to some lovely Murdock/BA action. :)
BA has to go find Murdock after a bad day during the Boxing Day Tsunami relief efforts in Thailand...
The air is still at night here, still and heavy, reeking of the jungles beyond the airfield’s edge. BA can’t pronounce the name of the place they’re staging out of. But it’s damn humid. And still. And he would swear, if anybody was around to ask, that he can smell that underlying tang of death in the air.
He can’t find Murdock.
They’ve been put up in one of the hangars tonight. Cots, mosquito nets, a hundred guys from air crew sleeping in the cramped space. Well, ninety-eight. Because Murdock wasn’t there when he woke up, fitful after the sedative he had to take on the return flight today.
And now BA’s out looking for their damn crazy pilot.
On the flightline.
“Excuse me, sir, but you’re not allowed to be out here,” a well-meaning Air Force airman says, M4 at tactical, coming out of the haze of the portable floodlights flown in from Kadena.
“Lookin' for the C-17s, fool,” BA growls at the scrawny teen, turning a little, knowing damn well his tattoo’s clearly visible in his wifebeater.
“But you’re not allowed out here, sir!” the airmen protests.
BA ignores him. The big cargo planes are at least half a mile down the way, so he breaks into a jog, hoping like hell he remembers the tail number of their transport.
It was a mistake coming here, or at least, that’s what BA thought when Hannibal did his recall thirteen days ago, the day after Christmas, and told that there’d been a tsunami in Thailand, that potentially tens of thousands of people were dead, that mobilizations had begun. BA and Face had looked at each other, and looked at Murdock, whose lips were pressed in a thin line, kind of leaning over Hannibal’s desk, looking right at him.
“We gotta go, sir,” he’d said.
Without a trace of the crazy.
Face was on the shit list for something he’d pulled on the wrong general and neither he nor Hannibal were allowed to leave Benning right now. But the boss had still called in a favor and gotten Murdock orders on one of the flight crews out of Charleston AFB, and BA had made sure he went along. Never knew what Murdock was going to get up to if he was left alone.
But this wasn’t what the military was for, BA had thought, before they got here ten days ago by way of Hawaii and Japan. Goddamn humanitarian disaster clean-up? No, their job description - blowing shit up and killing people - included absolutely nothing about this kind of thing. Nothing about handing out bottled water, or airlifting stranded people off the roofs of their houses, or pulling dead bodies out of ebbing pools in the middle of nameless towns in the goddamn jungle.
No, nothing about that at all, and BA had honestly thought it was a mistake that they were here. Other people, other agencies, should have been handling this stuff. Not the military.
But for the first nine days, reeling from the time change and the damn seditives, he’d done his job, everything he was asked, and grumbled goodnaturedly about the FRH-warmed MRE meatloaf, bottled water and anti-malarials they had for dinner. Made sure those junior enlisted kids, the lieutenants, were okay. Bitched about the weather. Told the resident colonel that everything was peachy. Just like any good NCO was expected to do.
And Murdock had flown supply runs back to Okinawa those first nine days. His usual cheerful, crazy self.
But tonight... he curses himself again as he reaches the first of the huge cargo planes and slows to a walk, rounding to the back of the line, checking the tail numbers for the designator that’s going to indicate the plane that they came in on.
Tonight, Murdock had been different.
Today Murdock had flown one of the relief choppers.
They had been passing over the reeking water still covering some village, heading back to base, part of a six-ship formation, supplies delivered, mission over for the day. Their chopper was carrying two doctors plus BA, the only non-Chinook.
BA gripped the seat nervously, getting weird looks from the docs, but fuck them. The open door of the craft reminded him far too much of Mexico, and with Murdock chattering on the headset with that Air Force lieutenant sitting as co-pilot...
And then the chopper veered and dropped out of formation, on its damn side practically, taking a hard turn to the right, nearly in the damn jungles and there was screaming on the intercom before the chopper righted, lowered, blades churning the water below, and there was Murdock, emerging from the haze of the sedative, right by his knee.
The pilot handed him his helmet, and grabbed the knife out of his belt and before BA or anyone else could react, he’d gone out that open door.
Hitting the water nearly thirty feet below.
It shook BA clean out of the drugged state he’d been in since take-off.
With the chopper still, hovering, locked in by the co-pilot who’d switched the intercom back on and was informing the three men in the back, in that errie, laconic calm pilots all seemed possessed of, that Captain Murdock had seen something and was going out to investigate. But that lieutenant turned around and gave BA a look but BA couldn’t do anything but stare back as he gingerly moved over to the door, scanning the water below for his teammate.
Who was swimming strongly towards a half-collapsed building.
Hand shaking where it was bracing him back on the open door, limbs weak from the sedative he had to take to fly, from the fear poking out under it, the corporal knew there was no way he could follow Murdock down. He wouldn’t have been able to make it back in the aircraft.
For the first time since joining Hannibal’s team, BA felt powerless. He collapsed back against the far wall of the chopper and closed his eyes, trying to block out the sensation of the roters overhead, the hum of the engines, trying to fall back into the numbing haze of the drugs. But all BA felt was the heat. His body, sweating through his rarely-worn ABUs.
Minutes ticked by.
Finally, he registered the feeling of descent, that little inner-ear shift, and he roused himself enough to crawl back over to the open door, and there was Murdock, three feet below in beaten foam, treading water with one free hand, hair slicked back and something dark in his eyes, holding a wide-eyed child up.
BA shouts at the pilot to get closer, and the lieutenant gets them another foot closer, and they’re hauling both of them in, Murdock by the scruff of his flight suit because the second he pushed the boy up, he didn’t have anything left to raise his own arms. And he collapsed on the floor, head propped up on BA’s lap while the doctors checked out the kid.
Murdock’s hair, uniform, bled dirty water everywhere, smelling of death and he clung to one of BA’s hands, grounding me the corporal remembered thinking, not the other way around. Hie teammate had been breathing so hard BA though his lungs might explode, and it was then, as they were taking back off, that he noticed.
That crazy fool still had his boots on.
Right now, BA catches what he thinks is the right number and dives around, saying a little thank-you under his breath that the plane’s on the ground and not on rotation back to Kadena AB right now. There’s a k-loader parked outside, the tail open, a few pallets yet to be taken off or put
Cargo bay wide and half-empty, he treads up to the cockpit stairs and inside. Light’s pouring in through the huge windows, and he can see everything. No Murdock.
“Hey, crazy, you in here?” BA asks softly, coming in and looking around. The air’s cool, the space is still. Nothing. Absolutely nothing, and, heart sinking, he turns to go. Dammit, he’s lost the man, and now Hannibal’s going to...
A sniffle, movement, and the corporal’s head snaps up. “Murdock?”
“No, no, no Murdock here,” the pilot clearly says, overhead. “He ain’t here at all. He’s back at Benning.”
There’s a bunk installed over the door BA realizes, and pulls up enough on the little recessed rungs to look over the edge.
And there’s Murdock, curled up in the back of the space, just big enough for two people, completely naked, and the cockpit’s not just cool, but icy-cold.
“No, ain’t no Murdock, Murdock ain’t here...” he babbles, and BA jumps back to the floor, getting his boots off as fast as he can, and climbs up in there, right next to the pilot.
Shit.
BA’s not sure what to do about this. Underneath the sock puppets and the bad t-shirts, he suspects, Murdock runs a lot deeper than any of them ever really give him credit for. And one more than one occasion, the corporal’s found himself wondering about that. What’s in there. What Murdock’s capable of. And today he saw it, saw the Ranger come out, and something else... because the captain spotted that kid from at least a hundred yards away and because there hadn’t been a glint of insanity in those blue eyes when he’d grabbed BA’s knife away.
So, what is in there, anyway?
He reaches out and finds soft hair meet his hand, still wet from a rudimentary shower he’d gotten in, right before the debriefing with that colonel, the one BA hadn’t been able to join in on. And that had hurt, because there’s a reason he volunteered to do this, a reason beyond the one he gave Hannibal. All these layers have him... curious, for lack of a better word. Definitely curious.
And it doesn’t hurt that Murdock’s kind of hot, in his own way.
His body’s on display right now, shivering on his side, all that lean muscle stretched tight beneath pale skin, and BA wonders at the strength that’s hidden there. Swimming that distance, pulling that kid from the rickety little building... he forgets, sometimes. He really does. But he’s never seen Murdock like that.
Not once.
But now...
“Hey, man, you okay?” he asks now, cautious, quiet, like Face gets when he’s trying to talk Murdock back from the edge. And he has seen this, seen what Murdock can do when he gets lost in his own head, and so BA doesn’t move in quite yet.
“I... I lost your knife, Bosco,” comes a sniffled reply, and BA doesn’t realize that he’s holding his breath until right then. It comes out, shuddering relief, and he pulls up into the bunk, reaching out. In the cool of the cabin, Murdock’s like ice. He blinks up at the corporal, though, his eyes refocusing. “Dropped it on the way back.”
“Did you need it?” They’re at arms-length from each other, one dark hand on a pale shoulder, and BA doesn’t really know what else to say, how close he can get.
Murdock nods.
“Then it ain’t a problem...” BA begins, but Murdock’s knees are drawing up, and that’s the start of something very bad, so BA does the only thing he can think to do; shuffle forward on that scratchy blanket, barely a foot of clearance over his raised shoulder, and grabs Murdock up in a bear hug, forcing one of his legs between the pilot’s, keeping them down, and tries not to groan aloud as those thighs grip down on his. “It ain’t a problem.”
“The door was stuck,” Murdock says, “but it was all rotten from the water so it fell away pretty easy and the roof was halfway gone anyway. The kid ran when he saw me...”
“Murdock, you don’t have to...”
But Murdock’s not listening to him at all. “... so I went in after ‘im, but part o’ the floor on the upper whatevers he’d been livin’ on gave way, and I saw the rest...” and he buries his face in BA’s shoulder, entire body heaving, “...all of ‘em, tucked under the floor like... like...bloated-up sardines...and their... their hands were...”
And BA doesn’t protest, doesn’t care at all, that Murdock surges up to wrap around him so tight he can barely breath. Sobs are starting up, breaking loose from that slender frame that’s so much tougher than it looks, that complex mind trying to process something at a level BA knows he doesn’t possess himself, wracking both of them, and BA holds him, hoping that maybe he can keep his teammate from shaking apart before this runs its course. The corporal knows the demons haunting this man are something he can’t comprehend, but he can do this.
It’s all he can do, so he just holds on, hoping like hell it’s enough.
He doesn’t know how long they stay like that, choked little sounds echoing through the cabin, the captain’s heart thudding against his own chest, before Murdock seems to shake himself through it, and it’s then that BA realizes the pilot’s crying, clinging to him like a child, just woken up from a bad nightmare.
"Why'd we come here, Bosco?" he asks, desperately present in the here and now, and BA's never heard him so lost. "Ain't nothing we can do for these people. They're all dead. Everybody jus' gone..."
And BA says the first thing that comes to his mind.
"We came here so you could save that kid. Never seen anything that..."
"Crazy?" Murdock sniffs against his breast pocket.
"...brave," he finishes quietly, stroking a hand up into the captain's still-damp hair. "Braver than me, man. Bravest fucking thing I ever seen.
And when Murdock looks up at him, eyes wide, the corporal really can't help himself, can't stop himself at all.
Can't stop the kiss.
Doesn't want to.
It’s nothing frantic, this kiss, nothing hot and crazy, like BA would have thought it would be. No, this is slow but without hesitation, Murdock slotting right up against the corporal’s chest, letting BA guide him right in. It’s closed at first, just a soft brush of lips, and it’s Murdock who opens first, sighing into it, breath tickling across day-old stubble, the most erotic thing BA thinks he’s ever felt. He kisses back, harder, needing to meet that subtle little challenge, the definite offer.
“Murdock, I...”
“It’s James, Bosco,” the pilot says, kissing a spot right under BA’s neck like he knows what it does to the big man. “You should call me James... if we’re gonna... if you...”
BA groans and runs a hand fully down that body, on display and begging for him in the confined little space of the aircrew bunk, feeling all the hard planes of muscle, remembering the swim, a deeply-hidden strength he was privilege to witness today. Shoulder to hip. hip to shoulder. Shoulder to hip, and gently around the front, to that hot space between them, curling around the silky flesh there, loving the way it pulses in his hand, harder and harder.
“We are, crazy,” he says, surprised by how husky his voice comes out, but loving the visible shiver in the other man. “I do.”
He twists gently, thumb tracing that throbbing vein, and Murdock’s long lashes flutter shut over those sea-green eyes, a delicious little noise escaping him that BA takes to mean he should keep going. He hasn’t done this with another man in a long, long time, but it’s the same, he figures, and from the little moan he manages to
A hand tightens up on his bicep and strokes up, playing up under the sleeve of his ACU blouse, around to the buttons. Murdock strips it off him, gentle, making sure neither of them hit the low ceiling. Then BA has to let go as Murdock tugs at his undershitshirt, gets it off. There’s no room for him to pull his pants off, not really, but long clever fingers undo the buttons of his fly, one by one, and together, they manage to scoot the damn things off. BA sighs in relief as his own burgeoning erection is freed, and the pilot palms his shaft almost reverently. The big black man kicks his pants off with his socks and wriggles back up.
But Murdock’s turned around, now, facing away, and the corporal has a sudden clench of fear in his chest, that the pilot’s curling back in, that he won’t come out again.
“You with me, James?” he asks softly, right against the other man’s neck, hoping those words are running into his ears, finding their way down to wherever Murdock’s hiding himself in that brain of his. “Need you here with me, right now. Can you do that?”
“Is this real?” he asks and arches back into him, captures one of BA’s hands and pulls it up and over his own hip, guiding those fingers back around his own cock. “You really here with me, BA?”
“I’m always here, crazy,” he says softly, loving the feel of their fingers, combined, stroking together. How Murdock’s somehow managing to get closer and closer. How his own shaft is trapped between them now, how it slides right into the cleft of Murdock’s ass right as he moves just so...
And both men moan.
“Right there, Bosco, right there...” Murdock pleads and pulls. BA’s hips buck in, keeping himself in that groove, pushing the pilot’s slighter form forward, driving his cock into their hands.
“Like this?”
“Oh... oh, yes, Bosco, like that, please...”
Pressure in front, pressure behind, a rhythm reached and a pattern established. It goes on for long minutes, pulling them both into the place where Murdock lives, where time doesn’t run right and things are what you make them, not what they are. And they both want this, BA thinks, both need to have the world narrow to this, to lock everything else out, to forget the jungle and the water and the debris of human existence beyond.
There’s no need for anything more, anything more than this, and soon, nothing else can break through. BA realizes he’s not the one flying this mission, that he’s not the driving this ride. It’s Murdock, Murdock who’s guiding, Murdock whose them both higher and higher, like those updrafts he talks about sometimes, spiraling up into the white clarity of it all.
My pilot, BA thinks. Mine.
And that’s what does it for him, that thought, wherever it came from, so welcome, gasped against the smooth sweep of Murdock’s shoulder blades as he comes across that strong back, hearing Murdock’s own cry of pleasure, spilling into their twined hands. And it’s Murdock that cleans them up, passing a soft t-shirt in broad sweeps and muttered apologies that BA doesn’t really understand right now, and pretty soon, those don’t matter either, the night washing everything else away.
+++++
He wakes in the morning with Murdock in his arms, untroubled and calm and loose, legs wrapped around one of BA’s own, nuzzling into his shoulder.
“Didn’t have no nightmares last night,” Murdock whispers, and snuggles closer, his head on BA’s outstretched arm.
“Yeah,” BA says, and kisses that forehead. “Yeah, I didn’t either.”
“We should probably get out of here. Think this thing’s on the ATO for the day.”
“You flyin’ it?” the corporal asks, staring up at the ceiling, so close to his face.
“No,” Murdock says softly, a kind of thoughtfulness in his voice BA doesn’t think he’s ever heard before. “On the Blackhawk again today.”
“When’d you...”
But the pilot shakes his head. “Asked, soon as we got back yesterday...” And then he crouches up, eyes sparkling, that usual manic glow back about them, and he slaps the corporal on his hip, rolling over him, and doesn’t even bother using the ladder to reach the ground. “Come on, BA!” he hollars. “We got more kids to go save!”
BA smiles, and grabs for his scattered clothing, making sure he throws as much irritation as he can manage into the obligatory, “crazy ass fool!” he yells down at the pilot and leans over the edge of the bunk.
Murdock stops mid-hop, one leg in his boxers, staring up as BA stares down. There’s something here, BA knows, where they have a chance to just dismiss last night as temporary, something they both needed, and leave it all right here.
But fuck that.
He smiles as he swing out, studiously using the ladder, and Murdock breaks out into a big grin and holds out his arms.
Anybody who watches them leave the plane, bickering and arguing, he figures, will never know about the way Murdock is tackling him to the floor right now, or how he straddles .
And that’s perfectly alright with him, BA thinks, circling those slender hips with big hands. Nobody else’s damn business anyway how Murdock does the things that he does.
Just his.
