Comfort
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to DC, or is properly attributed and public domain. Please don’t sue me.
Comfort
“What passing bells for those who die as cattle?”
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen, 1917
What people often forgot about the Titans was that their line-up changed as often as it did, not because members grew older and decided to leave, but because they fell along the way. Only the Titan’s Tower had a hall of fallen heroes, those children that were culled like cattle or sacrificed themselves for the greater good. It was never the full grown heroes that were cut down like wheat, and it was never the adults that sounded their own private bells of grief.
Tonight the Titans mourned not one, but two, of their own.
Lilith had been broken like a china doll and then discarded.
And Donna, who had been the best and brightest of them all, had not even felt the blow that felled her. She was a warrior princess to the last.
The waters of San Francisco bay seemed uncaring. Slowly shifting and dancing under the twilight sky. The sky at least was sympathetic, it appeared to bleed down into the waters of the bay. The water was cool and deep, tossed about by winds and drawn by tides. Garth knew water. He understood water. But he knew that the water changed him. He needed the water, but it didn’t need him. The water simply was; it was him that changed.
Dick sat on the rocks staring out over the cold water, his knees were pressed to his chest and he had his arms wrapped around them. His expression was set and Garth knew that he stared into the water searching for answers the water wouldn’t give him. It was just water, just as the sky was just air.
“The sky looks as if it is bleeding.” Garth said tremulously. He was nervous being here with Dick but he didn’t want to be alone and the others had their own ways of sharing their pain. Roy was with Lian, finding hope in her life. Starfire, Cyborg and Changeling were with the new Titans, comforting them. Dick was alone. It was easier to be strong for someone else and share in their healing than to be strong for yourself. Dick had told him that. “It is as if the sun realises just how hard it will be for this day to end.”
Dick turned and looked at him, but said nothing. He looked as if he had been broken. The scrapes and scratches on his face didn’t detract from his beauty. It was the lack of joy in his blue eyes that cut Garth bare. Dick was always laughing, always smiling. Everything was an adventure to him, even, Garth supposed, death. He didn’t fear it, he jumped towards it with same mad energy he gave to everything. That was gone. He appeared as empty as the horizon he had stared at so intently.
“If it ends then we must say goodbye, that is the custom in Atlantis, to honour the dead during the day of their death.” He lowered his eyes to the eddying water, the way it broke against the rocks. “I don’t want it to end, I don’t want to say goodbye.” Dick looked away then and said nothing when Garth sat beside him on the rocks. “I loved her too,” he said nothing to the head that leaned itself against his shoulder, or the slow inexorable warmth of another body next to his own. “If you go into that water I will be forced to dive in to save you, and I can breathe underwater.” It was a subtle chide.
“How did you?” Dick questioned, shocked, and then lowered his eyes back to the water, to the still, the calm. Garth could see how it appeared inviting. Oblivion always did. “It doesn’t matter, I wouldn’t.”
“I know.” Garth said quietly, “but it doesn’t mean that we don’t want to.” His hand reached out to absently play with the short hairs at the back of Dick’s neck. He had done this when it had been long, his fingers playing with the strands knowing it would give them both a respite. That it was a simple, mindless task that meant a lot to both of them. They had even done it before Robin had become Nightwing and Aqualad had become Tempest, and they had changed. They had played with each others hair as they sat together, it meant nothing.
Almost unconsciously Dick leant against his shoulder, he just slowly exhaled into the position. The sense of relaxation was almost palpable. It was almost something that Garth could reach out and hold in his hands. He wasn’t sure, though, to which of them it belonged.
They just sat there for an immeasurable amount of time, Garth’s fingers playing with Dick’s hair as the sun set into a boiling sea and the shadows grew longer until they melted into one another to form a single darkness. The sea was inky black and the sky had a satin sheen to it, pierced through with a smattering of stars.
It might have been minutes or hours later when Dick turned his face to Garth’s so slowly, and tilted the thin lines of his mouth and pressed them to Garth’s. This was a new thing for Garth, not sex, but this, this desolation between them that spawned some chasm- something that they would do anything to fill; something left by Donna’s death that they couldn’t understand or begin to comprehend. It was something that the kisses seemed to ease.
The kisses were soft wet things, lips pressing against each other, shifting and sliding. Dick tasted wet and salt sharp, whether it was the tears he couldn’t express yet or the spray of the sea Garth didn’t know. He just knew that this was nothing of passion, that there was only this, the slow drag of flesh on flesh, the tang of salt and something other that must have been Dick and that Dick needed this, and more than that, so did he.
The fingers at the back of Dick’s neck were still twisting through the soft black hair, and Dick stared into his eyes, without any desire or passion. The kisses were simply kisses. The caresses were simply caresses. They were not intended to inflame, to overwhelm, merely to be. Garth learned something under the salty sweet mouth of his best friend, that sometimes sex wasn’t about passion or love or desire, that sometimes it could be about friendship and comfort.
Dick’s skin was cool and slick at the back of his neck, but his mouth was hot but not demanding. He took the kisses he was offered and nothing more. It was Garth that lifted his cold hand and placed it on the line of his skin beneath his sweater. It was Garth that used the hand at the back of his neck to tilt his face for a better angle. It was Garth that first moved his tongue to touch Dick’s. The first kiss had belonged to him, everything else he offered for Garth to take. Garth wondered briefly if they should not do this, if this wasn’t just another way to hide from the grief, from the image of her body as perfect in death as it was in life, but then Dick stroked the tip of his tongue the length of Garth’s and decided that that thought was irrelevant, that they should do this not because Donna was dead, but because they had loved her.
“Not here.” Dick murmured into his mouth, his breath scalding hot and salty sweet. Although his skin was chill to the touch Garth could feel the heat radiating through his jeans and the simple tee he wore, it was black with a slogan Garth did not linger on. “Inside.”
There was no urgency to this, no overwhelming passion that overrode reason, it merely was, and that was all that there ever could be, and that was enough.
Garth’s room in the tower dorms had been painted to look like one of the rooms in Atlantis, although the years meant that the paint looked kind of grubby in places. The golden arches had faded to a wheat brown and the pink marble floor had settled into a dull grey. Nevertheless it still had the look of what had been his home. Donna had done it for him.
Just about everything that had been done in the tower had been done by Donna.
The bed was wide and freshly made. The bedding was the colour of the sea after a storm, piped with a silvery grey that was the same shade as a cloud pregnant with rain. Dick sat on the edge of it nervously. He rested his hands between his thighs and looked at the painted floor. They had only chosen this room because it was nearer, and it didn’t mean walking past Donna’s.
Garth stepped towards him and outstretched his hand, meaning only to place it on Dick’s shoulder, to remind him that he wasn’t alone, Dick snatched the hand and pulled him close. “I don’t want to be alone,” Dick murmured, though it was possible he was saying it for himself and not for Garth to hear. Dick pulled him down unto his back, pressing the entire length of his body against Garth’s, pressing his thigh between Garth’s. The denim clad length was hard and firm and hot. The hand that Dick wasn’t using to pull at Garth found its way to the curve of his ass, stroking the heavy grey felt trousers that he chose to wear.
His lips were hot and demanding now, his tongue flickering back and forth against Garth’s own, but still there was no fire, no passion. This was for comfort, not for desire.
In Atlantis they said that fucking was the fire of a volcano, that it was heat and pressure and eruption. In Atlantis they said that sex was the great wave of a tsunami sweeping aside all in it’s path, demanding and forceful. In Atlantis they said that making love was the soft lapping of the waves upon the shore. Garth understood that now.
Dick’s hands were hard and strong as they pushed under the sweater Garth was wearing. He could feel the calluses of hands used to gripping a bo, the lines from the decel cables, even though he wore gloves. He could feel the tiny scars on the tips of his fingers against his back, the splits in his lips though they had healed years before. This was not the body of a man, but of a soldier. He wondered how his skin, equally scarred and torn felt to Dick’s hands. His back was a mess of cuts and abrasions from where he had struck the fire truck hard enough to crush it. He was lucky he hadn’t been hurt more. “There was a moment when I counted you amongst the dead.” Dick whispered, pressing the rough edge of his cheek against Garth’s ear. His breath was hot and wet, he reached out and took the edge of the lobe of his ear between his teeth and pulled it into his mouth, sucking on it gently.
Garth allowed his lips to trace the rough skin of Dick’s neck, scraping his teeth against his jugular because he knew that Dick liked it. They weren’t gentle men of soft words and imagined actions. They were warriors, soldiers, for them there was no softness. There would be no comfort for them in gentle caresses. There would be no comfort for them in whispered sweet nothings. There was only fire.
Dick’s hands were hot on his skin, his breath was like steam, salty sweet and foul all at once. It was what he wanted. It was what he needed. He leant into the touch, he pressed himself against the long lean length of Dick’s muscles; Against the gentle fabric of his tee and the rough male kiss of denim. He took the hem of the tee and pulled it quickly over Dick’s head to reveal the delineation of muscles, the silvery pink of scar tissue, the dusky revelation of his skin. Garth trailed his lips over the slashes and puckers where Dick had been wounded and healed, all the marks on his skin that proved him for what he was, a soldier, a warrior, a hero.
Garth knew his own skin was as scarred and marked as Dick’s own. But Garth knew the history of each and every mark on his body, Dick’s scars spoke of something other, something mysterious. Some of them were from his time with the Titans, some were still healing from their last terrible battle but some of them were older, some of them were from Gotham, some from the ‘Haven. He wanted to ask how he had gotten the long thin line along his ribs, the shiny coin shaped burn just beneath his nipple. Garth sat back for a moment and just appreciated the beauty spread before him at the end of the bed.
Dick was less patient than Garth, and hooked his hands under the hem of the grey sweater that he was wearing, tugging it up over his head. The skin was peppered with Band-Aids, the only concession to medicine that Garth still allowed. He knew that instead of cologne that it was the lingering smell of antiseptic and arnica that twined through his hair and followed along behind him. Dick reached up, arching his back and pressed his lips against each bared scrape and scratch. He flicked the top of his hot tongue against each bruise as he pulled Garth towards him, the rough tips of his fingers hard and demanding against the open graze of his back. There was a bandage tight around his two broken ribs. He was lucky to have survived the blow that felled him, that he had not been badly hurt.
Two of them had been killed.
He had broken two ribs.
Dick wasn’t even that badly injured.
The slight pain of pressure was sweet, and he knew that Dick knew that, that that was why he had done it, as he brought Garth down to reclaim his lips. It was intoxicating, to kiss him so desperately, so wantonly, needing to chase the elusive flavour through the salty sweet tang of sweat and sea. Part of his mind reminded him that this was his best friend, the one person he trusted more than anything and that was why he wanted this, why only Dick could do this.
He wasn’t even sure when he turned him over so that Dick was above him, pushing himself hard against the thigh against his groin and knew that it felt good. That there may not have been desire, but there was need, there was want, there was comfort.
His fingers fumbled with the button fly of Dick’s jeans and the impressive bulge inside. If they were going to stop this they already would have. It would have ended with the kiss on the rocks. It would have ended on the way to this room. He was a confident man robbed of words by the smell of sweat and embrocation, of the sight of golden Romany skin marred and painted through with pink scar tissue, of the elusive taste of Dick’s mouth.
Dick moved his hand away, batted it away and popped the buttons himself with a confident jerk of the wrist and a smile that was so playful, so very Dick, that Garth just had to kiss it. He pushed his hand into the gaping maw of his fly and felt the hot flesh inside. Dick flipped him over, as agile as a squirrel, without moving either Garth’s mouth away from his own or his hand from his crotch. He took the opportunity to undo the twin buttons of the felt trousers and the pressure within pushed down his fly. Dick launched at him with the same passion that he fought with, groaning along Garth’s tongue, panting into his mouth.
Garth moved his hands to the waistband of Dick’s jeans, pulling down, Dick arched his back lifting his hips clear to allow him to tug them clear, the cotton of his shorts caught with them leaving Dick naked as the jeans went flying behind him. Pulling away for a second Dick took the opportunity to scoot up the bed. “You going to join me?” he managed to say, leaning across to reach into the bedside cabinet, tugging open the drawer.
Garth needed no second invitation. He stripped himself naked as efficiently as he was able and climbed up the bed on his hands and knees, as quick as a cat. Dick lay sprawled in front of him of the dark blue coverlet like a feast. He had no intention of abstaining.
Dick’s mouth found his again, quickly. Homing into it like an addict, like it was his wellspring, that like the elusive taste that maddened Garth drove him on until there was nothing but it in his mind. That the bed was illusory, that even Garth was, all that remained was the lingering taste of him in his mouth. His hands were predatory, grasping and hot. They were everywhere and nowhere. Garth’s followed a similar pattern, touching anywhere they could, trying to grab but Dick’s skin was slick with sweat and need. His cock was engorged and weeping. With a smile that Garth hadn’t felt himself capable of he brought his mouth to the tip and flicked across the tip with a broad sweep of his tongue. Dick’s strong hands found his jaw and instead of pressing him down as he expected they pulled him up, brought his face level to Dick’s own and stole that mouth for his own with slow sweet kisses.
His hands were determined, bringing the tips of his fingers between his thighs, into the cleft of his ass. It was flesh so sweet that Garth could think of no words for it, this offering was above and below what he could understand. “Prepare me.” Dick murmured through the kisses, mouthed against his mouth, a bottle of well used lube was pressed into his hand.
He flicked open the bottle with the ease of practise and squirted out a healthy amount unto his palm before discarding the bottle unto the coverlet. He pressed his palm into the cleft of Dick’s ass, rubbing the rough skin into the pucker, and then sliding his index finger up to the knuckle. There was a small groan and Dick bucked against his hand, demanding more. He groaned into his mouth. He breathed his breath. He stroked the tip of his tongue along Garth’s tongue. There were no words, there was only this.
Garth slipped his finger in deeper, searching. “Hurry.” Dick gasped, “I can take a little pain.” The scars on his body were evidence enough of that. He pushed in a second finger and scissored them open. “Sometimes I even like it.” he murmured. Garth just sucked on his tongue. They were unable to pull their mouths apart, just having some connection that their kisses made sense of.
Dick ripped his hand out of the way and flipped him over so that Garth was on his back and straddled his hips. “Beautiful,” Dick murmured into his mouth. He lifted the lube and squeezed some out, running his slick hand over Garth’s erection, swallowing his moans, and then pushed himself against it until, under prepared as Garth thought he was, he accepted him into his own body with a gasp. Dick was hot and tight and his kisses were soft.
This was maddening, it was the slow lapping of the ocean, inexorable and divine. Dick’s kisses weren’t passionate, they were comforting, they consumed him with a slow fire. His body was white hot, tight and like a hot bath. Slowly Dick started to push down, drawing more of his cock into the vise of his body, without slowing down or stopping those elusive tasting kisses.
There was just the slow friction as they pulled against each other, their hands lingering over the muscles of their arms. Their lips pressing and sucking against each other. Garth stared into Dick’s eyes, eyes that reminded him of the colour of the depths of the ocean, eyes that reminded him of home.
When Dick came it was almost with a grunt of surprise and a widening of his eyes. It was the last straw to the maddening divine friction that Garth needed as Dick arched his back, forcing him in further and pulling out his bottom lip with a sucking kiss. Garth came, spasming silently, grabbing unto Dick as if he thought he might be torn from him. They remained kissing, the kisses slowing and eventually slipping into sleep, shielding each other against the dreams of Donna.
In Atlantis it was customary to mourn the dead on the day they died, and to say goodbye to them with the sun. The sun had sunk into the boiling sea hours before.
In San Francisco two young men found a new way to deal with their grief, with the slow lapping of the waves upon the shore.
Heaven
Rupert Brooke, 1913
Author’s Note:
The quotes that bookmark this are both from WW1 poets, ironically, Brooke was the first to die, and Owen the last, but I thought them appropriate for what I wanted although as my beta is determined to point out Heaven is a satirical work on man’s ability to make god in his own image and therefore create organised religion and persecution, not to create an allegory about the creation of something immortal, changing the context so that land could be substituted for death. But as I pointed out to him, it’s my story and I’ll use it out of context if I want to!
Also I was a bit sneaky and there are all sorts of quotes from the two poets through the story, just fragments and phrases, ‘coz it makes me sound not dumb.
This is my first (and possibly only) DC fan-fiction, so be kind.
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