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“Would you rather listen to the same song on loop forever or watch the same movie forever?”
Gordon’s breath tickles the side of his face when he talks.
Warren frowns in consideration, “This one feels a little more relevant than the others. Dude, I’ve been listening to nothing but the sweet sounds of Pus Crank for months now. My options are a bit limited.”
“Aww, our number one fan,” Gordon sarcastically bites back, “At least you’re not screaming those ‘sweet sounds’ from the roof of the fucking facility anymore. And, you don't have any memory of the spectacular movie selection here, what if you'd rather watch those? I feel like you're not properly considering your options." He elbows Warren in the shoulder, nearly missing him in the dark.
"What if I just really like your band's music? Is that so hard to believe?"
They're on the floor of the farmhouse together. Gordon had gotten up and sat next to Warren after he stumbled in, restless and tired when he should have been sleeping in his own room at the facility. The sleeping bag Warren was borrowing is crumpled underneath them and Gordon’s second pillow is discarded somewhere to his left.
To be honest, Gordon hadn’t been sleeping either. He hasn’t slept well in a long time.
"Do you sell t-shirts or something? I could use a change from all the regulation overhead merch." He frowns and lifts the hem of his moss-green and fading sweatshirt. "They're bloody itchy too."
Gordon instinctively reaches for the fabric before snapping his hand back as if he was shocked. It was a dumb thing to do. He hopes Warren didn’t see anything. “Maybe it’s a wool blend,” he’s so nervous the words feel like they’re falling out of his mouth, “You’re allergic to that, right? I remember from the first time you woke up. Continued. Whatever.”
Warren shrugs and drops the sweatshirt, “Yeah, maybe. ” He stares at the ceiling and puffs a breath out of his mouth like a sigh, “That feels like ages ago. I don’t even get cold anymore. It’s weird.”
“Yeah…” Gordon echoes quietly.
The room goes silent. It's shockingly still in the too-early hours of the morning. There are no cars, no dogs or birds or people outside. It’s disordering. As if all the oceans on the earth went still at once. There’s no city beyond them to chime in a disorderly orchestra. There’s nothing.
Except for their breathing.
Gordon pauses to listen to the only thing he can, Warren’s breaths. They’re robotic and melodic and hypnotic and he could lose himself–
"I didn’t mind Prometheus," he blurts out.
"What?" Warren laughs a little. It’s a nervous, surprised sort of laugh, but amused too. As if that was exactly the sort of thing he was expecting Gordon to say and also not at all. “What are you talking about?”
“I listened to your tape from Christmas– when overhead was making you lot record logs each day for the testing. And, you watched Prometheus. And, you blabbered about how awful it was before resorting to… I don’t know… something about Robert Zemeckis.”
He feigns offense but the smile that tugs on the corners of his mouth is a dead giveaway, “Blabbered? Wait– Zemeckis?”
“Yes,” Gordon huffs, “Blabbered. Honestly, I think you’re just missing the point of watching a movie, which is to have a good time! Who cares if they’re complete halfwits about running away from some spaceship.”
“Maybe I’m just a terrible, awful arsehole who doesn’t know how to watch movies,” he jokes.
Warren hasn't stopped smiling.
It’s a rare sight, exponentially unbelievable with each minute that passes. It flits across his face, surges and lulls like waves on a beach, small and weak in one second and as bright as the sun in the next. This tiny light, this lantern in a winter cabin, he savors.
He looks better in the dimly-lit farmhouse, healthier. There’s no yellow tinge that sticks to his freckled skin like a shadow, no sickly drooping circles under his bright blue eyes. Gordon watches him blink slowly and wonders if he’s finally tired enough to sleep.
And Gordon swears for a second Warren is about to lean his head on his shoulder.
“Hey!” he exclaims, a little too loudly. Warren sits upright at that, blinking faster. “It’s your turn isn’t it?”
“Yeah…” Warren draws out, sleep still slurring his words. He moves away then, shuffling across the floor so they sit across from each other. “Here, I almost fell over on you there.”
The sleeping bag crinkles underneath him as he re-folds his knees, and it’s the only noise in the lifeless room for a second.
“How about… Would you rather eat a dead pigeon or be eaten by pigeons when you’re dead?”
“Man, can we go back to debating the existence of the soul or something?” Gordon shakes his head dramatically.
“Just eat the pigeon! You have no idea how it’s prepared, maybe it’s baked in a nice sauce. Probably tastes just like chicken.”
Gordon laughs at Warren’s absurd plan, “Well, what if it’s not? Shit, what if it’s got diseases? You’d end up dead anyway. Plus, getting eaten by birds after I die doesn’t sound half-bad. Sure, nobody would get to mope over my dead body or whatever but maybe I like the idea of giving back to the earth in a weirdly specific, fucked up sort of way.”
“How very spiritual of you, Gordon Porlock.”
“Thank you,” he smiles and lifts his chin proudly, “I try.”
Warren grins and rests his head in one hand, neck tilted, elbow on his knee. He reaches out with his foot, kicking Gordon lightly, “C’mon. It’s your turn now. Give me a good one.”
There’s a humming, buzzing silence as Gordon says nothing.
His recorder crackles softly between their legs, the static a frill to their silence. At least, Gordon thinks, the noise of this moment will be remembered.
The curtained windows of the farmhouse had faded to gray by now, white sunlight rising to fight with the tundra for victory in bleary endlessness. It's the next day already. Gordon wonders how many hours he has left with Warren until Bryony unpredictably seals him away again.
He wonders how many hours in total they have left together. Something has to break in their ecological equilibrium soon, the wolf could bite too hard, snap the rabbit’s neck any day now. It's only a matter of time.
Gordon steals time. He stays.
He wants to capture this moment perfectly, exactly like it is, and play it over a hundred times, a thousand. Their words, the way they’re sat, the way Warren is looking at him. The farmhouse is freezing and isolated and lonely on the best of days, and his work is monotonous and restless. The staff are unkind to him. Bryony probably wants him dead. But right now?
Right now, everything was worth it.
“Can I kiss you?”
The words taper off into a whisper. Like a flight down a set of basement stairs, uncertain and cold and dark the further you go down. Rushed. Silent.
He hadn’t meant to say that. Fuck.
Gordon doesn’t look up from the floor. It hasn’t even been a second but he can feel Warren staring at him like they’ve been sitting still for hours.
“That– that was really dumb. That was really fucking dumb.” He buries his face in his hands, fingers nearly toppling his glasses from the bridge of his nose. His long hair falls forward and he faintly considers tying it back with the hair tie in his pocket.
Nope. He’s hiding now. Gotta remember that, hiding. The Warden of the Red Valley, disappeared into thin air after he asked his best fucking friend–
A hand reaches for him, calloused and skinny fingertips brushing through the mess of hair.
Oh no.
“Gordon…” The paler hand circles gently around his wrist, pulling it from his face. He can feel the rough bandages around Warren’s palm from where he plunged the scalpel in spiteful rage. A moment of rare emotion tucked into this next one. It presses against his skin, the sterile stickiness overwhelming him even more.
Gordon feels tears pricking at the corner of his eyes. He’s tired. He needs more sleep. That’s it. It’s the fatigue’s fault.
“...So fucking dumb,” he whispers to himself.
Warren sighs, “No. It wasn’t. Just–”
The dictaphone clatters to the ground from where it slipped from his hand. It dings loudly on the metal floor, the only sound in the cryosleep chamber.
Warren looks up at the pod behind him. The tortoise sitting on it blinks slowly at him, eyes opening gradually from when she was peacefully sleeping.
“Sorry, girl,” he sighs.
Waffles lowers her head and appears to nod, returning to her nap. There are a couple of Magic cards scattered around, most half-chewed by Waffles, who seems to enjoy the particular taste of the cards no matter how many other treats they give her.
He sighs again and goes to scrub a hand over his eyes, before stopping himself and lowering his hand. It’s been three days since they let him out of quarantine. And they haven’t even told him why they woke him up yet.
He’s not allowed to cry.
It’s an issue he finds harder to manage every passing day.
Aubrey rushed saying something about cornea damage, then Hester interrupted and explained that his eyes should heal over a couple of weeks, no rubbing them, no exercise, and no crying. Or, try your best, she said. Like she understood.
She looked sad.
She was looking at him sad. They both were. Like he was the most miserable, pitiful product of scientific experimentation they’d ever seen. He doesn’t know what hurts more, that they think of him like that or that it’s probably true.
He’s also still getting used to looking at them. Warren didn't really know Aubrey from before, but 44 years had changed her significantly. Her voice is slower, perpetually tired. And she almost never made eye contact with him. He hadn’t noticed at first, but it became increasingly obvious as the days passed that she can’t stand looking at him.
It’s an awful feeling. It’s familiar too.
Hester also said he was lucky he was still able to feel, well, everywhere. That it’s incredible that all of his sensory receptors aren’t shot. It’s not like he could tell at first, really, with all the shit they kept him on.
He glances at the dictaphone. The buttons are worn, there are scratches all over the tiny screen, and the corner is banged in. Shit. That was an accident.
He’d have to apologize later.
Warren had found the old thing in his first days after waking, when he wandered the valley like a ghost that hadn’t settled, only ever stopping to rest in the cryosuite. He would bend over one of the pods like it was a grave he couldn’t quite crawl into. Wouldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep.
Now he visits the pod only occasionally, sitting on the floor for hours to lean on the unflinchingly cold metal and talk to the air, to nobody that could hear.
The recorder is Gordon’s. He found it in the farmhouse, right where they left it.
Warren has listened to the recording more times than he could count. It’s impossible to tell how many hours he’s wasted, back pressed to Gordon’s cryopod, fidgeting with the pause and play button while he stares off into space. He can barely keep a grasp on the passing days in this place.
It always cuts out in the same spot.
He doesn’t remember why. Maybe Gordon turned it off. Maybe the button got accidentally bumped in the dark. He doesn’t remember anything that happened, actually. It was odd the first time, hearing his voice say things he didn’t know he had said. Hester suggested that his short-term memory might be permanently damaged from the repetitive stress on his body.
But it’s the last conversation they had before everything went down, he knows that.
No more little gaps, those would be a blessing compared to what might be in store for his fraying mentality.
And it’s terrifying. And relieving. And confusing.
And most of all, Warren is done with being confused.
He picks up the dictaphone. The edge presses into the large cut on his hand, still fresh and tender even after 44 years. The rest of his arms aren’t in much better shape, permanently littered with bruises and plasters from the never-ending traffic of needles going in and out of his veins. He can remember Gordon wrapping the bandage roll around his hand, rambling about how fantastic he had been, about how stupid and dangerous it was, stabbing himself like that. What a moron. How brave.
He thumbs over the recorder weakly, so familiar with the indents of the plastic under his fingertips. Gordon’s dictaphone.
If he focuses enough, he can feel the ghost warmth of fingers where his are, clenching tight on this tiny box and its holy buttons. It must have been everything to him. All of their conversations, all of his research, everything that made him him.
And Warren was in there somewhere. A confused voice in the passenger seat of a car and a dazed fear when they first went underground and a hushed shouting match in an arctic cave. Just a little. Just enough.
He felt so useless, so small. Razed paper skin, surgically metal bones, a heat that dissolves in whispers right out of his chest. Who would ever hold him now, without warmth, without real blood? A tiny, breathing dot in the endless hallway of machines that don’t even know if he exists.
The REC button clicks softly, echoing in the empty, steel-reinforced corridor. He lifts his hand towards his face. Rubs some exhaustion out from his neck and jaw.
The silence crackles. Warren clears his throat, suddenly dry.
“Hi… It’s Warren, um– It’s been a while, right? Since we’ve talked? Um– Oh god, that’s a bad habit that brings back some memories. Well, uh… hello. I thought I’d record some stuff. Like when I first came here. For… therapeutic reasons, y’know? And Waffles is here too. Why don’t you say hi, girl? ...Yep– thanks. Anyway–”