Archive of Our Own

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He was born in the arms of a man who was crying.Snow fell all around them, whipped into a frenzy by the merciless wind. The one who had just been born wore heavy clothes lined with fur but the cold was still piercing. As far as the eye could see, there was only white.Language came to him. Gravity. A sense of instinct.Beyond that, there was nothing. Just this man’s face. And handcuffs, which held his wrists together tightly.Cold. Everything was much too cold. And dark and foreboding and filled with angry pellets of white hurtling from everywhere and nowhere. The universe had burst into existence with no warning and he could only blink and breathe.The other man’s gloved hands were clenching his shoulders. Round and imploring eyes gazed up into his. Their look was one of shock and confusion, which mirrored his own feelings precisely.‘Jack?’ he was saying. ‘Jack, can you hear me?’‘Yes.’He heard his own voice for the first time. It was deep. He felt the snow seeping wetly onto his skin where he was kneeling on the ground.A new look in the other man’s face. Hopefulness.‘It’s me,’ the other man said. ‘It’s Ollie. It’s – Jack, do you know who I am?’The man’s voice was low and sonorous; soothing even when it shook through his tears. He wore glasses that were flecked with snow. Thin lips and a delicate jaw. His short hair, curly and unkempt, had escaped when his hood fell back.A question. He had asked a question.‘No.’There was a pause filled by the howl of the wind racing down the mountain.And then the other man’s eyes welled with tears again. He hung his head and sobbed openly.The one who had no knowledge or recollection of the world beyond the past few seconds could only kneel there and wait, bewildered and miserable.But miserable on what basis? He had no point of reference. Nothing in existence against which he could know that this was misery.And yet the other man's tears had felt like his own.Minutes passed. During that time, he committed to memory the rhythms and fluctuations of the man’s grief.He watched the falling snow and noted how no two flakes fell the same way. He wondered where all that white came from. Why cold was so insistent. Why the warmth of the man seemed like the only thing to which he could cling, even though he couldn't do much with his hands held together.And then the other man drew back and looked at him. His eyes now spoke of a deep sadness that went beyond that moment.The one who had just been born needed help standing to his feet. Once upright, he noticed he was a lot taller than the man with the sad eyes.Without another word, the man with the sad eyes turned and walked away through the snow.He, the one who had just been born, followed.He noted how his legs moved with a grace that he hadn’t taught them. His feet knew to step lightly over the snow so he wouldn’t sink. But if he concentrated on his own feet, the muscle memory evaporated and he would sink and stumble.Whenever he did this, the other man would turn and take his arm and help him.They walked for a long time.The fire cast long shadows and bright light. Both at once. It was fascinating. Or perhaps it was that it cast only light and the shadows were the lingering effects of the darkness rushing for safety.He stared about the walls of the cave, mouth slightly open, trying to reconcile light and dark.A long time had passed since he had been led to the cave and the other man had started a fire, told him to sit and didn't say another word for nearly an hour. This left him alone to try to absorb the world for the first time.He had stared at himself first, at the thin strands of sandy hair that fell over his eyes. He had felt out the hard stubble of his face. The cracked skin of the scar across the bridge of his nose. The size of his legs and arms and chest. His huge, heavy boots, within which he wiggled his toes. The pale skin of his wrists, which he hurried to cover again when the biting cold touched it. His skin and hair, he noticed, was paler than the other man’s.‘My name is Oliver.’The voice, low and flat, snapped his attention back at once.The other man’s face was lit up by the flames. There was no longer any snow obscuring his face or his glasses. Small shadows danced across his face. His curls lay still and hung low over his face. He was no longer crying.His name was Oliver.‘Oliver,’ he repeated slowly.Even though he spoke the three syllables softly, they came back at him from the walls of the cave.‘Your name is Jack,’ the man named Oliver told him in the same even, deliberate voice. His steady eyes watched the other's every move. ‘Jack Moller. You’re a marine. You serve in the New Alexandrian army.’Jack. Jack Moller.They were just sounds to him. And very few of the words that followed had made much sense.But he didn’t want the man named Oliver to stop speaking. He remembered the deafening wail of the wind when they were outside, echoes of which were still audible at the mouth of the cave, and Jack wanted to hold onto the warmth of Oliver’s voice, whether he understood the words or not.Something in his face must have given him away because Oliver’s face changed subtly.‘Do you… do you understand what I’m saying?’Jack stared. He was suddenly aware of a gaping, clawing emptiness in his stomach.‘No,’ he replied finally.He regretted doing so almost immediately. Oliver’s eyes flashed and he looked away, his mouth set in a firm, unhappy line.‘I’m sorry,’ said Jack quietly. The words and the sentiment filled him. He knew their sound and their meaning more than he knew his own name.Oliver looked at him again. Reluctantly.‘Is there anything you -?’ He hesitated and tried again. ‘What do you remember?’Jack stared and tried to process a question which seemed impossible.‘Nothing.’Again there was a flicker of deep hurt in Oliver’s face.‘But you know words,’ he said. ‘You know what some words mean.’‘I –’He blinked hard. He hadn’t thought anything strange of his knowing language. It was as self-evident as knowing how to breathe or see.He couldn’t communicate this, however. Oliver waited for a while.‘So you don’t remember… anything?’ he said eventually. ‘Like how old you are? Or where your home is?’
Home?
‘No.’There was another pause. Oliver took a measured breath.‘Your name is Jack Moller,’ he said again. ‘You’re thirty-three years old.’
Years.
A fragment of an idea came to him. The sense of time. A year was a long time. And so thirty-three years was almost unthinkable.‘You’re a marine. A marine is a type of soldier. Your job is to fight to protect New Alexandria, your country. We’re in the middle of a civil war. There are rebels…’He had spoken slowly and clearly the whole time and yet he trailed off in frustration. Jack had followed his words diligently, and it made more sense the second time around.‘None of that matters,’ Oliver said in a different voice, as though to himself.His eyes were on the ground. Light from the fire reflected off his glasses in new shades. Jack cocked his head very slightly and watched it. He wondered how many colours there were.‘Are you also a soldier?’ he asked carefully.He felt a spark of relief and happiness when his words made Oliver glance back up at him.‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’m a doctor. An army doctor. I used to help you with –’He cut himself off again, abruptly this time, and looked at the metal cuffs that were still clamped tightly around Jack’s wrists.‘You used to be married,’ he said, swiftly changing the topic. He got up and approached Jack, rummaging through his pockets. ‘Your wife’s name was –’‘How old are you?’Jack had been torn between letting Oliver keep talking and wanting to know about him. Everything about him.‘Thirty-eight,’ Oliver replied as he took out a small silver key.‘Do you have memories?’Oliver undid the cuffs and stared at him. His expression was unreadable.‘Yes.’‘You have thirty-eight years of memories?’‘Yes.’
What are they? I want to know all of them. Tell me all of them.
Despite how little he knew, despite the few short minutes he had been in the world, he knew not to lend his voice to any of those new, sudden thoughts, even though they burned inside him as strongly as the fire burned outside. He knew, somehow, that they were too intrusive.Instead he thought about his own years. Thirty-three empty ones.‘Why don’t I have any?’The fire crackled. It was now large enough to singe Jack’s skin. He moved away slightly. Oliver stayed put.The silence dragged on for some time. The crackling fire pitted itself against the sound of the wind. Fire and ice, Jack noticed. Light and dark. The world was made of opposites.‘There are gods,’ Oliver said, his voice suddenly hard-edged. ‘They’re like us. Some are good, some are bad. And there’s a bad one. Called Kindle. He –’Oliver swallowed.‘He took away your memories.’‘Why?’Oliver got up suddenly and moved to one of their packs. The action caught Jack off guard and he felt the movement like a whiplash. The further Oliver moved away, the more he felt an obscure, simmering panic.‘Where are you going?’ he asked, hearing the tremor in his own voice.‘To get some food,’ Oliver replied without turning. ‘You’re probably hungry.’Jack felt a disproportionate amount of relief when Oliver returned, this time carrying cans and a small pot.He watched him work with guilt and gratitude and fascination all making an appearance for the first time. He wished he understood how Oliver knew to do all that. He wished he knew why the world was divided into the amber glow inside the cave and the icy blue outside. He wished he understood why he was trapped inside his own mind and Oliver was outside it.He wished he understood the looks Oliver shot him out of the corner of his eye.After they ate, Oliver explained that they lived in a town at the base of the mountain, about a week and a half away. It would take a long time for them to return because of the blizzard and the civil war being waged near its base.He also explained, without explaining why, that Jack had to sleep in his handcuffs. He snapped them back on without looking him in the eye.He then moved to the other side of the fire.Jack settled back in his sleeping bag. He tried to comb through the details of the past few hours. It was the first and only night in which that would prove to be a successful endeavour. The onslaught of new experiences and thoughts and questions that he would face in the coming weeks would be so overwhelming that it would be impossible to sift through them all, like he was doing now, at the close of the day.A few things stood out stronger than others.The shadows of the fire on the wall.The way each snowflake fell differently, like each one had mapped out its own path before detaching from the sky.The way the fire made new metallic colours on Oliver’s glasses.The slow, careful way Oliver moved and spoke.How Oliver had taken him to the mouth of the cave to relieve himself and it had struck him again that he was a lot bigger than Oliver. How he had then felt, for the first time, the strong urge to protect him from the snow-whipped darkness beyond the cave. He wondered about others. How many others there were. Whether they were all like Oliver. Whether they all carried the same sadness. He fell asleep for the first time.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

SIX YEARS AGO
'Tell them it happened, Jack!''How the hell would Jack know what happened?''He was in the tent next to mine. He would have heard everything.'A group of soldiers wandered into the reception area of the hospital, making themselves heard long before they were seen.'It's true, guys. I heard it all.''See! Fuckin' told you, didn't I?' The soldier's triumphant tone echoed in the room. 'How do you like that, you jealous motherf–?''Sure as hell remember the part where the girl said, Aww, look, it's so tiny!''Oh, fuck off, Jack!'Laughter abounded.A few hallways away, Oliver heard their brazen voices. Friends, most likely, of the marine who was recovering in Short Stay. In Oliver's experience, soldiers visiting their comrades in the ICU tended to be a lot quieter.He turned the corner into the reception, running over the bloodwork of Private Jessup in ICU, whose burns were far more severe than they'd originally thought. The doctor's face was grim. Of all the patients he had to deal with, the ones in the burn unit were the hardest for him to stomach.He rummaged through the file cabinet looking for Private Jessup's older diagnostics. One of the nurses turned and was about to offer a hand before she saw who it was and returned to her work. It was common knowledge among the staff at the hospital that Lieutenant Oliver Wolfe always preferred to do things himself.Behind him, the soldiers kept talking in their loud, unselfconscious voices.'I saw her the next morning. She was a peach, Freddy. If you can land something like that, almost doesn't matter about the size of your dick, does it?''Come on, man.'The abundant laughter that followed made Oliver pause. His fingers slowed to a crawl on the edges of the files.The soldiers kept it up, their banter and insults and short guffaws filling the echoing space. While listening to them, Oliver felt his heart lift just slightly, as though it was daring itself to hover just a few inches above the ground.He could only recall one other time it had done so in recent years. He had been sitting in the corner of a crowded pub – a location that Katerina had allowed him to select, feeling guilty for having dragged him out in the first place – and he still managed to feel self-conscious. Oliver remembered the unpleasant tang of gin and the dark circle of condensation his drink left on the wooden table. He remembered wishing he was somewhere quieter. Safer.Someone closer to the middle of the pub struck up a jaunty tune that was famous for having no lyrics. And suddenly, in no time, all the men of the pub joined in, beers raised, hearts open, belting out a lyric-less Ruskian aria.Oliver was taken by the loudness of the sound and the startling resonance of their voices. Katerina and the few other women in the bar, mostly nurses, beamed and listened, happy to defer to tradition where the song was for men alone to sing. Though he knew the tune, Oliver of course remained silent.The notes soared and caved, trammelling outwards like a balloon inflating and rising before gently floating back down. Even without lyrics, the song somehow spoke of men in their youth, in their prime, far from home, carrying their regrets and excitement and fear and solidarity and love for a softer, more beautiful gender. Every man who sang was suddenly painted the same colour. Their wide open grins, arms slung about their comrades, beer sloshing and spilling.It was careless abandon but also a glorious type of unity. It spoke of their strength as men, their soul-deep good humour and good-will. What struck Oliver most and, to his astonishment, almost caused tears to spring, was that the song spoke of their utterly charming, boyish, vaguely self-deprecating ignorance of their own beauty.That was the first time he had ever seen them like that. It was the first time he was able to rise above the darkness of his past. To see men only for all the good they were.The entire scene, the song itself and the textures and the smells of the pub, came to him in that moment when he searched for Private Jessup's file. He found himself turning around to look at the soldiers who were laughing.There were five of them. All dressed in camouflage, some with caps on, some wearing short sleeves in optimistic deference to the warmer weather that was, surely, just around the corner. They lounged about on chairs in the waiting area; confident masters of their little world.One of them in particular had a strong physical presence. He was huge. Sandy hair fell into his eyes and almost to his shoulders. Hands behind his head and legs splayed.From what Oliver had heard about the patient in Short Stay, their unit had just returned from a successful operation in the north. He wondered how much of their confidence and loudness owed to the rush of adrenaline; the very specific dopamine released in the aftermath of victory. Or perhaps, he thought, theirs was a type of good-will that, regardless of situation, came from –'Hey, Doll Face,' the tall one suddenly called out. 'What are you staring at?'Oliver started and glanced to the side, wondering which of the nurses he was speaking to. One of them was on the phone and the other was buried in paperwork. He then realised with a sinking feeling that he had been caught looking. That the soldier was talking to him.Every good feeling he had nursed during those brief few moments vanished instantly. It was replaced with a familiar, visceral anxiety.The blonde marine grinned. His eyes were an icy, dangerous blue.'See somethin' you like?'
SIX YEARS LATER
Oliver sighed lightly and let his dream filter away. The dappled camouflage colours of the snow leopard. Eyes like ice. Suspended between sleep and consciousness, he lay still for a few more moments.Then, with a start, he blinked and lifted his head. It was well past dawn. The blizzard had stopped and there was an eerie white silence beyond the mouth of the cave.He hadn't meant to fall asleep. Heart in his mouth, he scrambled upright in his sleeping bag.To his relief, Jack was still sound asleep, his hands clamped tightly together in cuffs on the outside of the covers. Oliver's short puffs of breath emerged in mist. The world around him was quiet again.Jack was still there. Still human. Which meant that Kindle hadn't lied about the deal he had made with Old Jack.A wave of bitterness swept in to replace relief. Kindle hadn't lied. At the very least, Kindle hadn't lied. At the very least, that twisted, vile, sociopathic –But Oliver pushed those thoughts away as soon as they made an appearance. After thirty-eight years, he still couldn't be sure whether the god that had tormented him his whole life could read his thoughts. There were times he thought that Kindle surely could, and other times where he didn't know.So he had always tried to err on the safe side. Each and every time Kindle took a piece of his soul from him, he always tried to push his hatred away. It was something that destroyed him twice over, every time.He moved out of his sleeping back and past the remains of their fire towards Jack.Jack, who lay there asleep. Who lay there as though nothing had changed. Oliver searched his face again as though looking for some kind of sign; a hint of the magnitude of what had happened. But it was all there. The same hair, jaw, the small scar across the nose, his mouth slightly open in sleep, his slight frown. It was Jack.Jack, who had slept in the exact same way beside Oliver for three long years.And then the foolish, treacherous thought crept in. Perhaps, just this once, Kindle had spared him. Perhaps, just this once, Kindle hadn't meant it when he said the memory loss would be permanent. This could be a new experiment of his; making some of his tricks short-lived. Maybe Jack would wake up and remember everything. Everything, beginning with that day in the hospital six years ago when they saw one another for the first time.Ignoring the cold, Oliver slipped his hand out of his glove. He touched Jack's hair. His ear and cheek.'Jack?'Oliver's face swam to him again out of the darkness, just as it had when Jack awoke for the first time the previous day. The mess of curls, thin lips, the huge eyes that were rounded in concern. The last time he had worn an expression like that, he and Oliver were kneeling together in the snow. And Oliver had sobbed into his chest.Jack sat up anxiously.Looking into his eyes was all it took. Oliver's momentary foolishness came crashing down around him. He let out a short exhale and pulled away.'Are you okay?' said Jack, his voice hoarse from sleep.It was Jack's voice. But it wasn't Jack.'Ol–Oliver?' Jack tried again.Oliver moved once more to his sleeping bag. At first, he had done so just to remove himself from the anxious, piercing gaze that was so unlike Jack. Then he remembered the handcuffs and began rifling through the bag for the key.'I'm fine,' he said without turning. 'Are you okay?' he added.'I – yes,' Jack replied doubtfully.Already knowing the answer, Oliver asked, 'What do you remember?'Jack took a moment.Oliver's eyes. Oliver's hands.'You,' he said.To Oliver's self-loathing, his heart gave a single loud throb.'And… and the fire.' Jack rubbed an itch on his face, his cuffed right hand trailing his left. 'And what you told me. About the war. And Kindle.''Nothing else?''No.'By the time Oliver looked around, Jack was sitting up. He seemed unsure of what to do with himself. He had bent his long legs at an angle and seemed remorseful when one of his boots brushed against the soot-covered remains of their fire. His eyes, uncertain and nervous, were trained on Oliver's every move, as though awaiting instruction.Pity and resentment. It lodged deep behind Oliver's chest like a hardened crystal. He knew it was utterly instinctive. It was irrational and misplaced. And it did nothing to soothe his slowly cresting grief.A whole year, Oliver thought. A year of waiting and yearning for Jack. For Jack to look at him and want him in the same way. The pain and anxiety and secrets that poured from him when Jack was finally his. The pain and anxiety of learning to mould himself to real love that was there and boundless and forgiving. The three years of unmarred happiness after that.It was all gone. All gone in a flash; in the careless whims of a god. He couldn't have it back and he didn't at all have the strength to do it again. To wait all over again.His Jack was gone.And he was left with someone whose eyes were filled with uncertainty and an embarrassingly open, earnest devotion. A child in a man's body.My Jack, he told Jack silently and spitefully. The real Jack. Would never have looked at me like that.After breakfast, Jack wandered over to the mouth of the cave, hearing the sounds of Oliver packing their gear behind him. He put a hand on the rocky wall and stepped out to take his first look at the world without the veil of snow.He was astounded.It seemed to stretch into infinity. The sky was a dome of blue, unmarked and pure. It stretched over a startling vista of white and grey. A series of snow-capped mountains receded in the distance. The valley that stretched between the mountains was covered in a thick blanket of snow as unmarked as the sky above. There seemed to be no end to either sky, snow or mountain.He heard Oliver draw alongside him.'How far does it go?' he asked.'How far does what go?''The world.'When Oliver didn't answer immediately, Jack looked down at him, again struck by their difference in height. He wondered whether he had finally asked a question that Oliver didn't know the answer to.Oliver, feeling a very specific breed of embarrassment, the same kind he had felt the night before when Jack asked his naïve questions, tried to imagine how he might explain to someone in their thirties about the world being a sphere.'I'll explain later,' he said, lowering his pack to the floor for a better grip.He was vaguely troubled and even guilty about the look of disappointment on Jack's face. He swallowed that surge of emotion and handed Jack his pack.Jack's gaze was off in the distance again when he shouldered it. Oliver felt another flare of hope when he saw the fluidity with which Jack did so. Almost as though a part of him remembered how. Like shouldering a pack was as natural to him as talking or breathing.Muscle memory, he thought. Perhaps, then, there was a chance –There's a certain amount of guesswork here.Kindle's sharp voice from the night before came to him suddenly.
Muscle memory he'll have. We don't want him falling around like a toddler, after all, do we?
Oliver grit his teeth and hoisted up his own pack.Kindle had designed it so. Of course he had.'Are you sure there are others?' Jack said as they left the cave behind and picked their way over rocks towards the valley below.'Others?''Other people, like you said? A whole lot of them, called New Alexandria?''Yes,' said Oliver.His chest and throat felt constricted. He couldn't spare the effort of elaboration. He was barely keeping himself together.Jack strained his ears and kept his eyes peeled. But all he heard was the soft crunch of their own footfalls and the strange ringing silence of the mountains. He saw nothing but ice and rock.'The world must be really big then,' he concluded vaguely.Oliver barely heard him.Jack turned to him with a smile, on the point of asking about the types of people there were, but the look on Oliver's face made him fall silent.'I don't meant to sound pompous, but I believe I'm the first of my kind to erase memory so completely.'Kindle's smile was lazy.'So there's a certain amount of guesswork here.'Oliver had recognised his tone. He remembered how the panic had started bubbling. He tried phrasing his pleas. His debasement. His offering of something, anything, to spare Jack as he was.But he knew it was too late.'I've preserved language, so you won't have to start him from scratch with any of that nonsense. Muscle memory he'll have. We don't want him falling around like a toddler, after all, do we?''Please –''Plus he'll retain an adult's intelligence, though what that is without memory will be interesting to see, won't it? Plus he'll have self-preservation and basic instinct, which your kind seems to have retained in great big helpings since the dawn of time.'Kindle's eyes glinted. He had taken the shape of a beast of some kind – a creature that resembled a lynx if not for the tongue that licked back and forth through his teeth like a flame each time he spoke. His tail was long and curved and, Oliver thought, contained traces of a snow leopard print. As though the whole thing was nothing more to him than a tremendous joke.Kindle sat in the snow, the blizzard picking up around him and never so much as bristling his fur or whiskers.In a physical sense, he was behind it all, as Oliver had learned to imagine it. Kindle was always somewhere behind everything, in a place they couldn't fathom. A dimension that hurt the back of Oliver's teeth on the few occasions that Kindle tried to explain it to him. Or worse, show it to him.Kindle sat there, somewhere behind it all, and explained in his high, even voice what he had already done to Captain Jack Moller.'It may appear paradoxical, but he is, in essence, a fully functioning male in his thirties who is completely devoid of memory,' he said, with a strange smile that was both feline and human. 'And it is that paradox I'm most keen to explore. Aren't you?'Every time. Every time he was on the point of doing something awful, he had always asked Oliver for his opinion. The rhetorical nature of it, Oliver's utter powerlessness when asked, was something that had always intrigued him.'Kindle, please. Please, I beg you –''Muscle memory, as well as the other things I've preserved in Jack, must be based on something, after all. And so there may be instances where things I didn't foresee may crop up.'He smiled at the look on Oliver's face. The flicker of hope that kept everything alive. The blizzard had picked up around them.In Oliver's arms, Jack lay in a deep slumber of Kindle's making.'But rest assured,' Kindle said as he stood up, his feline shape morphing into something more humanoid. 'No matter what paradoxes and unforeseen episodes may lie ahead, one thing you can rely on is that his memories are gone for good. He's not your Jack anymore. Your Jack might as well be dead. You might as well just leave him here in the cold, all alone.'Oliver tightened his grip on Jack's coat, holding back tears. He would hold them back until Jack awoke. When he began asking questions Jack didn't know how to answer. And then the tears would come. They would pour numbly over this, the latest thing that Kindle had taken.Before Kindle took his steps into the air, around the corner of reality, he mused aloud. He hadn't once raised his voice and yet, throughout their entire exchange, Oliver had heard him louder than the howl of the blizzard.'His memories are gone for good,' Kindle repeated, his voice assuming an almost playful lilt. 'Will that be death? Or maybe birth? Who knows?'And so, over the next few weeks, Lieutenant Oliver Wolfe and Captain Jack Moller made their way down a cold, snow swept mountain.The sky was clear on the first day. But Oliver spied clouds gathering in the distance and suspected they were in for a long stretch of foul weather. He estimated that it would take them the better part of a month to reach the bottom of the mountain.New Jack, the name by which Oliver had started to think of him, had coped remarkably well with the harshness of their lifestyle. Though perhaps, Oliver realised, it was due to the fact that he didn't know any other life.In the morning, if the weather permitted, they would hike their way down the mountainside, the trail winding and disappearing before them and Oliver relying on his compass and his complex topographical maps to help them.Oliver would often tell him to slow down, for fear that they would lose their footing or come suddenly upon a crevasse, and so it would sometimes take them hours to cover very short distances. They would stop for a midday meal before continuing. At night, if there was no shelter to be found, Oliver would pitch the large army-issue tent, with Jack's help and pray that another gale-force blizzard wouldn't start up in the night to whisk it away.And Jack learned. His eagerness was only tempered by his fervent desire not to upset Oliver in any way. When he sensed that Oliver was in the right mood, he would bombard him with questions of all sorts.A child in a man's body, Oliver would think with an internal sigh.But recently, those thoughts, his constant visceral resentment of New Jack, had started to mix in with something new. It began on the second night in their tent, when Jack had battled silently for minutes with his own shoelaces. It seemed as though muscle memory disappeared whenever Jack concentrated.It occurred to Oliver how much Jack needed him.
He's not your Jack anymore. Your Jack might as well be dead. You might as well just leave him here in the cold, all alone.
Oliver watched him struggle for another few seconds, his huge fingers fumbling around the knots. Then he reached over to help.Jack would lie in the tent and listen to Oliver breathing. Sometimes Oliver would roll over in sleep so that an arm or the side of his leg would strain against his sleeping bag.Whenever this happened, Jack would guiltily move himself a touch closer.Warmth was something he knew from fire and from the trapped heat of his own body and from the sunlight as it melted the snow into water. But he also remembered the warmth of Oliver's hands from the first night. Since then, he noticed Oliver hadn't once touched him. And though he understood that this was most likely how the world worked, he was curious about the warmth of another.He wondered about warmth in general. It seemed impossible that the very same world around them, the one that was covered in ice and snow, could be warm all the time, as Oliver assured him it was during summer.From warmth to summer to seasons to plants and animals, he tried to compress everything he had learned over the past few days. Everything Oliver had told him, in that slow, patient way of his. He was most amazed to learn that their town, Olympus, was one of many in their nation of New Alexandria, which one of many nations in a world which was one of countless billion worlds, though Oliver wondered whether his imagination was yet able to stretch that far. Jack would stare and stare at Oliver's maps whenever he could.New emotions and thoughts came to him like he had wandered into hidden caves in the mountainside. From the first night he had known the basic dichotomy of wanting to please Oliver and wanting badly not to displease Oliver. But it had grown secondary and tertiary shades, and then become things so complex he couldn't even be sure what they were.He knew, in the back of his mind, that there were others. Oliver spoke of them often; his comrades in the marines, friends and neighbours. He even understood vaguely about his own ex-wife, Elise, who had evidently been his companion once.And yet, no matter how much he understood the concept of other people in theory, a huge part of him couldn't let go of the belief that he and Oliver alone existed in the world.Their progress down the mountainside was hindered for several days in a row when a second blizzard moved across the mountains. By then, it had been nearly a week since New Jack first awoke.On the evening of the third day, the blizzard died down. Clouds carried the storm beyond the line of mountains closer to Troy, the capital, which sat comfortably far from the war being raged at the nation's border.That evening, Oliver and Jack had stepped out of the cave to a wondrous sunset.The deep orange cast by the sun was most profound on the side of the mountain directly opposite them. There, it was painted in stunning shades across ridges and turrets thanks to a thin sheet of snow that only too gladly served as a canvas. Beyond this, the rest of the peaks were lost in a dusty, faun shadow. The breeze, when it started up again, bordered on just too cold.Oliver then broke a silence that had lasted hours. He explained to Jack in a strained voice that they, he and Jack, had been close for years. And that Jack – Old Jack – had taken off into the mountains one day, weeks ago, to find Kindle. To make some sort of deal that Oliver didn't want to talk about.'I wanted to stop him,' Oliver said. 'But I didn't find out in time. And that's why you…'He hesitated.'That's why,' he finished.Jack had turned to see the breeze ruffling Oliver's hair. He saw the way his eyelids seemed to be weighed down by something, in the way that Jack had seen a tree branch weighed by snow.And he understood, finally, the source of Oliver's sadness.He had always carried the uncomfortable knowledge that his own existence, somehow, had a huge part to play in it. But it was during that sunset, hearing Oliver's voice take on a new timbre of sorrow, that he understood for the first time how much the previous Jack had meant to him. How much the previous Jack had hurt him when he left Oliver alone.That was when the first tendrils of resentment began to take root.
FIVE YEARS AGO
Oliver had accepted the position very reluctantly. It didn't seem to matter that he had studied psychology for only a year before he switched to a medical degree. They needed a fill-in psychiatrist to speak to any soldiers exhibiting signs of PTSD ('Thanks to the new hippie they just elected in Troy') and Oliver was practically ordered to play shrink to an entire unit of soldiers who had just returned from a harrowing operation.He had quickly brushed up on the symptoms of PTSD and other related issues before sitting down with his first patient.Though it was clear that the lieutenant didn't want to be there, Oliver had managed to gently coax a few pertinent words from him regarding what had happened. At the close of the hour, despite the slow progress, Oliver had been rather pleased with himself.The following day, he was scheduled for a session with the commanding officer of their unit, Captain Jack Moller. He opened the file, saw the profile photo and his stomach flipped over. He recognised him immediately.It had been a year ago when the marine had so casually humiliated him in front of other doctors and soldiers alike.
Hey, Doll Face! What are you staring at? See somethin' you like?
Oliver had tried to make a stuttered excuse before the marine had laughed at him.
Getting tongue-tied too? See, Freddy, that's how you do it. I've even got guys falling over themselves for me.
Some of the soldiers had laughed raucously, others uncertainly. Oliver had blushed to his roots and left without the file he had come for. The marine's drawl carried loud enough for Oliver and everyone else to hear.
He had a pretty face, didn't he boys? Almost prettier than Freddy's girl.
Before he had a chance to process the year-old memory, the door swung open and in strode Jack Moller, his hair caught in the breeze of the door and one hand deep in his pocket.Oliver was again taken aback by his sheer size. Six foot five or thereabouts, with an immense shoulder span and heavy arms, he seemed to fill the entire doorway.For a split second before he looked up, Oliver wondered if he saw something drawn and haggard about the marine's face; something he hadn't seen a year ago. He wondered whether, perhaps, enough had happened in the intervening year for their little brush in the hospital reception to have been completely forgotten.Jack's eyes, a blue so light they were almost off-putting, alighted on Oliver's face. And his face broke into a wide grin.'Hey, hey,' said Jack, the shadows of his face vanishing behind a broad smirk. 'It's Doll Face. Didn't know you were a head doctor.'Before Oliver even had time to blush, Jack had dragged the chair right to the front of the desk and sat. He propped his legs up beside the lamp and folded his hands on his chest.'Look,' he said matter-of-factly, 'I don't want to be here and I can already tell you don't want to be here. Freddy said you weren't half bad, which is great and all, but I ain't about to start crying about my momma to, no offence, a complete fuckin' stranger. Even a stranger with a face as pretty as yours. So let's just shoot the breeze for an hour and then we can both go home and fuck our wives. Deal?'Oliver could only stare and pray that he would eventually come up with a response.Though he knew it would only result in more heartbreak, Oliver tried to find Old Jack in Jack.He thought he saw him in fleeting, tantalising snippets. In the way that Jack grasped his cup. Or how he squinted in the wind. Things so small that Oliver couldn't be sure if he had imagined it.There were other things too. Jack's responses to things, his reactions to everything Oliver taught him, were sharp. His responses were meaningful. Like Old Jack's had been.'So the rebels want their own land? And that's why there's a civil war?''Yes. They believe they're entitled to an entire section of New Alexandrian land and coastline.''Are they?''Depends who you ask.''I'm asking you.'The spoon paused in its stirring and the beans gurgled hotly. Oliver looked at him in surprise.'I don't think they are,' he said.Jack watched how, in the absence of stirring, bubbles formed and burst on the surface of the beans. As though they missed the soothing motion of the spoon in Oliver's hand. He tried to switch his focus back to politics.'Then they're probably not,' he said. 'I don't think you'd get it wrong.'At that, Oliver couldn't help a small smile from crossing his face for the first time in weeks. Old Jack had said almost the same thing to him once, though his words had been dripping in irony.When, in the coming months, he tried to pinpoint the moment it all changed, Jack found he would always come back to the moment he had seen Oliver smile for the first time.It was after Oliver had carefully explained the civil war to him. He still struggled to understand the more nuanced parts of the politics, but the morality of it was clear enough. And he had deferred to Oliver's seemingly boundless wisdom.Which, to his surprise, had inspired the smallest, most ephemeral of smiles. It was gone in a flash but Jack had seen it.And it made pride and happiness blossom in his chest like the flames of their nightly fires.He hoped he had hid his reaction, which seemed somewhat excessive, from Oliver, who had simply turned back to the pot and continued stirring.Since that day, he had started to notice little things. Things like the way Oliver's cheeks would redden when the cold wind whipped at them. Or how his hair would catch the snow in intricate little webs and patterns, and those same places would take on a darker brown than usual after the snow melted.He would start to worry about his own reflection, which he scrutinised unhappily in the flat surface of the pot, paying particular attention to the ugly scar across the bridge of his nose.Above all, he started noticing Oliver's skin. It was darker than his. A colour that more closely resembled the bronze tinge of the sky at dusk. He had seen it with a sort of detached curiosity during the first few days, especially when Oliver crouched in the corner of the tent and peeled off the layers above his waist to scrub himself with a wet cloth. In the beginning, Jack had only spared a quick glance before he turned to do the same. But two weeks later, he would crane his neck with a distinct feeling of guilt. He would drink up the sight of Oliver in the same way that pieces of his crackers would soak up the soup at the bottom of his tin. The soft golden colour of his skin was now a source of both captivation and a strange new discomfort; a kind he hadn't yet known in his two weeks since awakening.Once, he thought he spied some sort of scar tissue running up the side of Oliver's back and along the length of his arm. Like gentle ripples. He turned back hurriedly when he saw Oliver begin to look round.And then, suddenly, more thoughts began to pour in like a deluge. Thoughts he didn't understand. They hailed from the part of his mind that knew to eat and move and talk. Thoughts of Oliver twisted and gasping beneath him. All mingled, somehow, with the desire to own and protect. And mark.'Jack?'Jack looked up. Oliver was ahead of him, climbing a ridge of snow that had formed between two rock walls.'Are you okay?'The concern in Oliver's face brought a lump to his throat. He almost flushed, wondering if his thoughts had transmitted somehow. Though he had no way of knowing for sure, he suspected that his reveries over the past few days were deeply illicit in some way.'I'm fine.''Do you need a hand?''No.'He trudged up the incline and drew alongside Oliver, who was still watching him closely. Jack tried to avoid his eye.What do you remember? Oliver had asked him on the first morning.You, Jack had replied. And the fire.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

They reached a level plain at the bottom of the slope. Ahead of them, the dark peaks of the mountain range were visible in patches beneath heavy snowfall. A velvet night was creeping up on them despite the peach glow of dusk on the horizon.‘We’ll set up here,’ said Oliver.Jack wordlessly swung his pack to the snow. He knelt beside it and pushed back his hood. A few long strands of scraggly blond hair, lighter at the tips than at the roots, hung near his forehead. The rest was pulled back behind his head. He hid his face from view as he unpacked.Oliver had noticed the recent shift in Jack’s behaviour. The usual bombardment of questions about birds and animals and plants and trees and seasons had ceased. Over the past few days, his childlike curiosity had been replaced by a sort of nervous sullenness. Silence that stretched for hours at a time.Dropping his own pack to the floor, Oliver turned and headed off towards the husks of frozen fir trees nearby. He hoped they were dead and dry enough to use as kindling.Jack glanced up as Oliver walked away.‘I’ll do it,’ he said suddenly.Oliver turned.‘What?’‘I’ll get the firewood. I know how.’‘It's okay, I can get it.’Jack stood up and walked past him towards the mountain face. His long, heavy jaw was set in a way that was so familiar that Oliver’s heart skipped a beat.‘I’m taller,’ Jack said stiffly. ‘So I’ll reach more of the branches.’It was a voice Oliver hadn’t heard before, in either Jack or Old Jack. A kind of gruff defiance that was completely removed from Jack’s usual wide-eyed curiosity and Old Jack’s casual, lazy arrogance.‘Okay,’ said Oliver, a little surprised. He watched Jack heading up the slight incline towards the fir trees.It had been a little over two weeks since they began their steady trudge down the mountain. And only a few days since Jack's change in behaviour.What Jack was going through was undoubtedly extraordinary. Oliver had come across a handful of amnesiacs in his career, but none whose transformation had been as complete as Jack’s. He knew there was a bounty of knowledge and insight about human nature that could be gained simply from observing him and tracking his progress.But Oliver's grief was only two weeks old. Its pull was too great. He couldn't think of anything else but the sudden and overwhelming loss of Old Jack. So he couldn't once bring himself to ask Jack what it was like for him.Jack returned some minutes later carrying stiff, brittle branches and twigs. He prepared them on the ground the way he had seen Oliver do. He asked Oliver to pass him the lighter, which he did.After a few dry clicks, Jack succeeded in lighting the fire beneath the stack of kindling.Oliver looked on in silence. Jack only glanced up once, as though to ensure the silence was one of approval and not discontent, before going back to stoking the flames.Heavy shoulders, made even larger by the many layers. Huge feet planted in the snow, legs bent in a crouch. Oliver took it all in like his eyes were tracing out what was familiar in a new light. He barely understood what he felt anymore when he looked at Jack. At New Jack. It was never a simple emotion.It didn’t quite read like a tragedy, and Oliver Wolfe had read his fair share. In tragedies, there was a braid of tension and happiness, interwoven, and something unthinkable at the end.There were warring families and ancient feuds and lovers and balconies and the moments were sweet and the challenges, in their own way, were sweet as well. And then of course, the moment where the poison and dagger do their bit. The tragedy was the end of the braid.But for him, the tragedy began at the very start. Since Oliver was four years old. Since the night his father caved to an instinct he had kept at bay for years and years and crept into his room like a shadow.Kindle saw. And Kindle was intrigued. And Kindle followed Oliver for the rest of his life.So it didn’t quite read like a tragedy. It started with one, and the tragedies only built from there. The braid was a tangle. The only light that ever came into his life would be put out with the next fold. The next pleat. Oliver had resigned himself to that life.Then he met Jack.
Hey, Doll Face. What are you staring at?
Jack was the light that shone so brightly that Oliver began to doubt whether even Kindle could put it out. When years passed and their happiness seemed invincible, Oliver even let himself believe Kindle had gotten bored with them and left them in peace.And then, with almost no warning, Jack’s light was put out with the next fold.And now, Jack, New Jack, was staring at him, eyebrows up in expectation, wondering exactly what to do with the tent now that he had unfurled it from the pack.Sometimes Oliver would look at Jack and fool himself into thinking it hadn’t disappeared; that Jack’s overwhelming, enveloping light was still there somewhere. Sometimes it almost seemed as though he might simply need the right words, the right trigger, and every moment they shared would come flooding back to him.It was an illusion, and Oliver knew it. Just one look at Jack was all Oliver needed to be reminded of reality.So he knelt in the snow and showed Jack how to rig up the tent; a skill that Jack himself had taught him. He avoided Jack's eye, as he often did when the bizarre injustice of his situation caught him off-guard, and turned to stamp out the remaining embers of their fire.Two weeks earlier, in the cave where New Jack contemplated light and dark for the first time, Oliver had spent over an hour in silence and pieced together his resolution. He would make it to the bottom of the mountain. He would find Elise and tell her what happened to Jack in a way that didn’t have to invoke gods or curses and he would bid Jack a tired, bemused farewell. Then Oliver would go home and try his best to forget. He would lie there motionless in bed for hours or weeks or years and wait for Kindle to knock quietly at his door again.With the tent up and a bitter wind gathering speed, they crawled inside. The mountain’s voice howled and buffeted against the canvas. Oliver lay on his back, panting from the effort of hammering pegs into the frozen ground. Jack sat up nearby, presumably listening to the wind.He smelled the same, Oliver thought. He smelled just like –But he banished those thoughts as soon as they came.With a sudden exhale, Jack moved towards the tent flap. He unfastened it and let in a whirl of icy air.‘Where are you going?’Jack searched for the phrase and found it sitting somewhere in the corner of his mind, like it had been waiting for him to remember how to use it. He found it often happened to him with language.‘Taking a leak.’He ducked out of sight. Oliver heard his footsteps crunch away through the snow.In his sudden solitude, which had been rare to come by in the past two weeks, Oliver closed his eyes and breathed deep.He thought of Jack as he had once been, sitting up beside him in his bed. The memory was coloured a deep, dark green, possibly due to the colour of the sheets, or possibly the colour of the walls in Oliver’s old flat. There Jack was, lifting up the side of his shirt to find the source of the pain. Gingerly touching the healthy skin around Oliver’s burns, leaning over his body to pick up the tube of powerful anaesthetic cream from the nightstand. The come of the angels, Jack used to call it, though the term would change each time.
Sounds like you need more of that angel jizz.
The crassness of the joke almost cut through Oliver’s pain. After Jack gently applied it with those huge fingers, the cream would burn at first, and then cool and settle. And Oliver would gasp and pant and settle. The burning that felt miles beneath his skin would slowly start to lift up from the depths and out of him. As though Jack’s fingers had drawn it out.
Better?
Oliver nodded.He opened his eyes in the tent.It took Jack a whole year, even with everything they went through, to return Oliver’s feelings. They went through so much before that day, which now came to Oliver in a dark-green tinted memory, where Oliver lay in bed, grunting into his pillow, his face scrunched up in pain, while Jack tried to nurse Oliver’s burns as carefully as he could.And so hope died with Jack’s memories. Beyond his fleeting hopes that Old Jack was lurking in there somewhere, Oliver never once fooled himself into thinking he would find those feelings again in New Jack, whether now or ever.Meanwhile, outside the tent in the gathering gloom, Jack crouched low, trying to ignore the icy wind and praying furiously that his erection would subside.They came without warning. They came all the time. Often, they came at the worst of times, like when he and Oliver were sharing the confined space of the tent or tiny maws in the mountain where they would huddle until blizzards died down.It was a surge of electricity. Something that rushed through his entire body before being channelled straight to his cock.At first it took thoughts of Oliver to spark it. At first, he almost brought it on himself simply by following the thought wherever it took him, almost eagerly pursuing it. Fantasies of Oliver pressed beneath him, entirely his. His. His, like his own hands were his. He didn’t quite understand the concept of ownership but the instinct was there.But after a few days, even innocent things were enough to trigger the rush of blood to his groin. The colour of Oliver’s skin in the morning light as they ate breakfast. His scent, which was both earthy and sweet. Sometimes even just the slow, measured way he would do things.And just then, in the tent, the way he lay panting on his back, his lips slightly parted. Jack had borne it for as long as he could before he lied about needing to take a leak and left the tent.He didn’t know what to make of it. Instinct told him of its urgency. That Jack had to do something about that hardness. That straining. But reason told him it was illicit. He had never once seen Oliver in such a condition. And for Jack, it only ever came about because of thoughts of Oliver that he knew, somehow, weren’t right. They were possessive and intimate. Violent and violative.And then thoughts of Old Jack would creep in, on cue. Oliver didn’t have to speak of him for Jack to know how much Oliver was still longing for him. For the one who had come before him.His worst fear was that Oliver would find out. He couldn't imagine what might happen if Oliver knew his Jack was not only gone but replaced by someone with such monstrous urges.Oliver might even leave. Jack might wake up one day alone on the mountainside.He pushed the chilling thought away and tried to think of other things. Things that were also beautiful but in a way that wasn’t painful and urgent. Things like the swoop of a hawk against a technicolour blue sky. And the smoothness of a flat, round stone he had unearthed in the snow, which he was sure had been designed like that. He remembered his surprise when Oliver told him it had been moulded to such smooth perfection by nothing other than the forces of nature. Forces that Jack didn’t think he would ever understand. But forces which Oliver tried to explain to him in his slow, patient way.Oliver had explained so much. He had even talked about the more complex elements of the war that Jack had been too overwhelmed to understand at first. Jack now understood that the rebels had joined forces with the indigenous folk who originally roamed the land. Oliver explained they had been promised their own rights and ownership if they helped the rebels overthrow the government. Jack had wondered if he heard a note of something like righteousness in Oliver’s voice when he spoke of the Indigenous. Perhaps not; Oliver told him he didn’t agree with what the rebels were doing. Perhaps Jack was hearing things in Oliver's voice.The voice that was so different to other sounds Jack knew, like wind and birds and silence. The voice that would come out in short puffs when they rigged up the tent or walked over an incline or when he lay panting inside the tent –Jack grunted, feeling himself stiffen again. He longed to rub himself against something, against the soft wet snow, his own hand, anything, just to release it. Instead he waited. And after more thoughts of birds and pebbles and snow, it eased. He breathed easier and stood up.Oliver was already asleep by the time he crawled back into the tent. Relieved, ashamed and a little lonely, Jack tried not to look at him as he crawled into his own sleeping bag. He faced the other way.Try as he might, Jack never awoke before Oliver. It was something he had striven to do over the past few days but each time he awoke alone in the tent or the cave and often Oliver would have breakfast already cooking.That morning was no exception.'Are you up?'Jack lifted his head and squinted at the tent opening. Oliver was there in the harsh glare of morning sun reflecting off snow. His glasses were flecked with white again. Large eyes on Jack.'Yeah.''Eat something. We have to get going soon. Storm clouds.''Okay.'He moved away towards the fire and Jack sat up stiffly. The cold seized him in a tight grip every morning.The time Oliver spent to himself in the morning bothered Jack. He wanted to know what Oliver was doing. Where he was. What he was thinking. Jack didn't want to be left in the dark or feel less... just less.It had occurred to him over the past few days that he needed to prove himself. He didn't know why he felt the sudden need; only that the instinct was there. He became aware of feeling like a fledgling in Oliver's care and he wanted that to change.But Oliver's secretive mornings and his long silences and sad eyes made Jack feel like he would forever be trailing in his master's wake. No matter how many tents he pitched or fires he stoked. He didn't know the world like Oliver did. He marvelled at how much Oliver seemed to know. And despaired at the thought that he was in a place Jack couldn't reach.And the new feelings, of course, piled on top. The urges. The snapshot fantasies. And the growing resentment of some mythical version of Jack who had abandoned Oliver with nothing but a shell of who he once was.He sensed it somehow. That his lack of memories made him a shell. His knowledge of language allowed him to recall the word, again like it had been sitting in the corner of his mind, waiting for him to apply it to himself. Something empty and curled-in and husk-like.I'm a shell, he told himself.You're a shell, Oliver's looks would tell him, though Jack couldn't be sure if he was imagining it.But I feel full, he would counter with himself sheepishly.It made no sense.And so he pushed those thoughts away, held to the back of his mind with ropes like those holding their tent to the icy ground. And he blinked in the light from the sun that streamed into their campsite. And he ate what Oliver gave him and tried not to imagine that he was feeding an empty, curled-in, husk-like shell.He left the remnants of soggy biscuits at the bottom of the beans.Later, Oliver held Jack's cup, glanced into it and smiled.The sight was so rare Jack couldn't help but stare, even though he had learned recently that staring too long at Oliver led to uncomfortable thoughts.'What?' he asked tentatively.He stamped out the fire as Oliver cleaned their dishes out with a damp towel.Oliver glanced up quickly and his smile vanished. Jack's insides gave a small, hollow thud of disappointment.'Nothing.'After tipping out the remnants of food, Oliver began cleaning the cup. Jack kicked a bit of snow onto the remnants of the black, charred twigs and stared at the side of Oliver's face.'Is it... is it because I left some? I just don’t like the taste of the wet biscuits. But I know, I remember you said not to be wasteful -''It's not that.''Then what?''It's ...'There was a small pause where Oliver’s eyes darted to him and back again.'You used to do that,' he said. 'You - I mean he...'Jack's teeth clenched subconsciously when he realised whom Oliver was referring to. It was rare for him to ever bring him up. And if he ever did, Jack's reaction, though always inward, was always volatile.'You used to hate the taste too.'
Fuck that, Doc. I'd rather starve than eat anything that tastes like it drowned.
The memory of his drawl was what made Oliver smile, more so than the fact that New Jack had inadvertently brought the memory about in the first place.But now he looked at Jack and wondered. How much was nature and how much was nurture. Even though Old Jack was gone in almost every way and sometimes he showed in the smallest of details.Their moment passed as abruptly as it arrived. The quiet mountainside was punctured by the soft but deliberate sounds of crockery being packed and the tent bring flattened. They left their campsite behind and resumed their trek towards Olympus. Storm clouds gathered like a grey afterthought on the edge of their vision.They trudged for miles with only the landscape changing gradually around them.As the hours passed, Jack sensed a change in the quality of the air. There were more stiff fir trees standing in clumps rather than in straggling loners. There were entire patches of rocky mountain devoid of snow. The peaks in the distance loomed above rather than ahead.‘We have to be careful,’ Oliver warned him. ‘The closer we get to the base, the closer we’ll be to rebel camps.’He explained that most of the hostilities between the New Alexandrian army and the rebels took place on the south side of the mountain’s base and they were on the north side heading into town. Still, they had to be vigilant. Jack still had trouble imagining the existence of other people, but he took Oliver’s words to heart as he always had.Jack fell into the sort of trance he had come to expect of his days on the mountainside. His breath came out in regular, rhythmic patterns. His breath and his footfalls and Oliver’s footfalls were the only sounds in the world. Oliver walked slightly ahead of him. His small form moved through the snow in a way that –
I want to pin him beneath me.
Jack clenched his teeth again at the thought. He quickly diverted his gaze to his own feet. No –I want to grind it against him. And buck over him while pinning him. I want to buck over – no, into him. Into him, somehow –Another white-hot flare of excitement that came to a head straight in his cock. The thought of bucking his urgent need into Oliver was bizarre and impossible. Violent. Awful.
Stop it!
‘What’s wrong?’To his mild dread, he looked up and found that Oliver had noticed yet again. Like he was tuned to every change in Jack’s breathing. Wide eyes, softly green, searched his face. Gentle, excruciating omniscience. He knew everything else, so was it really that much of a stretch that he could read Jack's thoughts?You're disgusting, Jack told himself. You’re a… deviant. Again, it was like the word had been waiting for him. You’re disgusting.‘I’m fine,’ he said again.‘You sure?’
Please stop looking at me.
‘I was just – I was wondering…’ Jack said falteringly, casting his eyes about for a distraction. ‘Where – where the mountains came from.’The words had tumbled from his mouth before he could stop them. He froze a little in their wake, with a vague inkling of how ridiculous he sounded. And then he realised it had been something he had been wondering for some time.Oliver was surprised yet again. It had been days since Jack had asked questions like that. He was further surprised to find that a part of him was relieved. Perhaps he had begun to settle into his pseudo-parental role already.A strange pang of guilt at the thought.‘The mountains?’ He cast a look to the east where the storm clouds were broiling over white-capped peaks. ‘It’s… complicated. They come from the Earth. When huge plates of Earth move against one another, the disturbance created the mountains. A very long time ago.’It sounded near-mythical to Jack.And, ridiculously enough, the thought of anything moving so roughly against anything else almost triggered the same instinct he had been battling.‘But,’ he said, with a little effort, trying to focus on Oliver’s reply to distract himself. ‘What about the… the plates, then? The whole Earth? Where did it all come from?’Oliver hesitated a little, trying again to shift into a role that seemed surreal. ‘They say the Earth was formed –’Jack sensed his answer well enough to skip ahead, ‘Where did the first thing that ever existed come from?’A ponderous silence fell.Oliver almost smiled again at the thought that such thoughts whirled at the core of Old Jack too. Thoughts he had covered in layers of cynicism and crassness and his own charmingly obnoxious take on existence.Perhaps, beneath it all, he had been like a child clutching a handful of questions.‘No one knows,’ Oliver answered finally. ‘There are theories, but they’re all like we’re… grasping at straws.’He outlined the singularity and how it came from nothing and exploded into everything. Jack’s question, however, still applied.‘Some think the gods created it. The singularity. On a whim,’ said Oliver. ‘They live – they’re in – a dimension that’s above or behind us. We can’t really understand it. And so maybe everything we can see came from a place where the physical world is just another dimension to them. They can manipulate parts of the physical world to their liking, or something like that. So maybe they created it.’‘Is that what you think?’‘I don’t know what to think. Most people don’t even believe in the gods anymore. They think the gods are old superstition.’‘But they’re real.’Another silence.‘They are,’ said Oliver gravely. He wondered how much of their conversation Kindle was gleefully keeping track of.Jack hesitated.‘Did… did I know they were real? I mean, him… Did he know they were real?’Oliver gave him another of those swift, darting glances that almost always accompanied questions about Old Jack. Questions that Oliver almost always skirted.‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘You… he had his own run-ins with a god. A goddess, actually.’Jack could tell by the quality of Oliver’s voice that it was unwise to press the issue.‘But no one else believes in them anymore?’‘Not a lot of us, no.’ Oliver remembered Jack’s old grievances. ‘It was an argument you used to have with your ex-wife a lot.’‘Elise?’‘Yes.’Elise Moller. Whom Oliver had tried to describe for Jack, when Jack was consumed with the idea of having once had a lifelong companion. On what basis had she picked him? Had they picked each other? What had driven them apart? Thanks to Oliver, by then Jack had a vague picture of kindness and quick wit and red hair.Oliver hesitated. He had been planning to keep it a secret but the silence between them suddenly seemed damning. He opened his mouth and closed it before trying again.‘Jack,’ he said. ‘When we get to Olympus, we’ll go and see Elise.’‘Okay,’ said Jack, missing the strange tone in Oliver’s voice.Snow crunched underfoot.‘And then – and I think it would be best if you stayed with her. If she… looked after you from now on.’Jack’s eyebrows pulled together just slightly.‘But you’ll be there too, right?’Silence.‘Oliver?’‘No, I… I won’t. I don’t think I’ll be able –’One pair of footsteps ceased.Oliver took a few more strides before he noticed. He turned and met Jack’s cold blue eyes which were wide again, this time in blunt confusion. The scar across the bridge of his nose stood out prominently. Stubble and chapped lips.‘Jack?’‘I want to stay with you.’A sharp tug in Oliver’s gut.‘We – you can’t –’
I need time to grieve his loss. Real time. You’re not him. And the longer I’m around you –
‘I want to stay with you,’ Jack repeated, his voice solid and unmovable. He sounded both old and young at once, Oliver thought helplessly.‘Jack –’ he began again.He was so caught up in the way the wind caught Jack’s hair beneath his hood and the sudden guilt of his predicament that he didn’t realise where they were.The snow had melted in many patches and the wind had been left to howl further up the mountain where the crags and rock fissures weren’t as plentiful. There were caves on shelves above and below them that provided perfect shelter from the mountain's cold horrors.And where rebels often took refuge.It felt less like an ambush and more like a singularity in itself; people and guttural shouts and clothes and guns suddenly bursting into existence from absolutely nothing. In a glaring palette of features and colour and sound. An affront to senses which had become accustomed to the mountain’s silence.And for Jack, it was more terrifying than anything he could have imagined.There could have been fifteen or fifty, in that moment, it was all one and the same. They sprang from around the crags and crevices, they lined the upper overhanging rocks, guns pointed and voices overwhelming and threatening.Fear clutched at Oliver’s heart.Several of them, wearing dark, heavy, patchy clothes that smelled even from a distance, surrounded them and moved in, machine guns at the ready, barrels shining like promises.
‘Don’t move! Don’t move! Hands up!’
A voice that was worse than the wind’s howl to Jack’s ears. He saw a mesh of faces in various shapes that he barely had time to absorb.And suddenly, Oliver was directly in front of him, between him and the ones in front, but there were still those ones behind, and above, and everywhere. And they were close now. So close. God, so close and so many and so loud –But Oliver stood before him, shielding him, gripping his wrist tight, Jack could feel it through his clothes, and it was the first time Oliver had touched him since that first time when he awoke and he wished he could see Oliver’s face so he could be reassured but the bulk of Oliver’s pack was pressing into Jack’s chest and stomach.‘Don’t shoot!’ Oliver was calling, his voice rising in a sort of controlled panic. ‘Please, we’re only travellers! We’re just -!’‘It’s him!’A voice that rose sharply above the discord. One of the men who was nearest was squinting at Jack above his gun. A prominent chin and brow, long nose and thick lips.‘What?’ another called.‘It’s him!’ He sounded almost dumbfounded. ‘The big guy! It's him – the marine! The one who ransacked Brinehead.’Oliver recognised the name of the place. Old Jack’s last mission as the head of his unit. Months ago, before he had taken off up the mountain in search of Kindle.Jack blinked in shock, his mind a shambles, anchored only by Oliver’s near-painful grip on his wrist. He wanted to shrink and cower behind him.‘No!’ Oliver said, his overall dread giving way to a very specific fear. ‘No, it’s not him! It’s not –!’That was all he managed to say before the man nearest him pressed the gun right in his chest, ordering him to step aside. And still he didn’t let go of Jack until he was pulled away forcibly.‘Oliver –’ Jack called suddenly, his voice shaking, his hand grasping.The safety was clicked off a gun and the barrel aimed at Jack.‘No, don’t!’ Oliver yelled, panic filling his head and chest.Jack felt the distance between him and Oliver more than the heavy strike across his face. Or the knee that was thrown into his gut, bruising him somewhere deep and leaving him in a heap on the ground, buckled and winded. Like something empty and curled-in and husk-like.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Please stop!
They kicked him again.
Please! It hurts!
They were saying things. Demanding things between the beatings. But Jack was lost to the extreme pain blossoming everywhere in his body. And just when he had found the breath to overcome the latest blow, another would land somewhere else, tender and raw.And they were saying things.‘When's it happening?’Something metallic was pushed hard into his temple. Blood ran, rich and wet, over his lips. His ribs sang with pain.‘When? Tell us when or we’ll blow your head off.’
Please stop...
Jack tried to form words but his mouth wouldn’t move. So he begged in silence. He curled further into himself.Oliver had explained the war just enough for Jack to understand that people could be driven to violence to fight for what they believed in. But Oliver hadn’t explained to him the extent of the darkness that hid in the soul. How sometimes people caved to their baser natures and lost their humanity.And so each time they kicked Jack, each time they shouted in his ear and followed it up with hard strikes with the butt of their machine guns, Oliver felt it too. Jack was just a child. He had stared up at hawks with his mouth open in a slight smile, eyes flashing in the sun. He had stared as Oliver described Olympus with its bustling streets and its single river which would swell over its banks in the rainy season. He had asked questions about biology and patriotism and life cycles and weather patterns in the same breath.He was just a child.And Oliver had known firsthand what it was like for a child to suffer at the hands of an adult.‘Stop it!’ he begged. ‘Please stop hurting him.’The rebels had taken them to their base in a small network of caves. Khaki coloured tents were erected on the rocky ledge outside the mouth, with some of them billowing in the wind. A handful of jeeps were parked nearby, some tires buried deep in snow, some sitting at the end of fresh tracks. The group seemed about fifty to a hundred strong, with about twenty of them having ambushed Oliver and Jack on the other side of the mountain.In the mouth of the cave, their packs were taken from them and in the process of being searched. They were then brought before the man who seemed to be in command.The man's clothes were in no better shape than the others’; tattered boots and frayed army jackets, stubble on his face and his bald head. His dark, thick eyebrows were drawn together. An oval face that hinted at jowls to come. He had barely spoken a word when one of his men explained who the captives were and where they had found them. And who one of them was.With a single look, Jack was dragged further back into the cave while Oliver was held near the front.Men stared at Oliver with hate in their eyes. The grip on his arms were cruel. He was entirely at their mercy. All of his traumas would have come flooding back, and in fact threatened to do exactly that, had it not been for his overwhelming, sickening fear for what they might do to Jack.The leader, whom the men simply called Benedict with no rank or honorifics, began speaking for the first time as he stood over Jack. While the others beat and kicked him, Benedict remained still and upright and delivered the questions.‘We know the army’s planning the next strike soon,’ he said, his voice guttural but calm in stark contrast to the way his men yelled warnings into Jack’s ear between beatings. ‘Tell us when. Tell us where.’Jack grunted and cowered, still curled on the ground. His hands were curled over his head.‘Check out the pussy on this guy,’ one of the men called out. ‘Some big fucking marine he is.’The cave’s interior was decked out in a rustic imitation of a military strategy tent. Makeshift desks and chairs fashioned out of boxes and crates. Maps stretched out on available spaces and even tacked onto the walls. Remote light fixtures ran along the length of the cave’s ceiling.Around a dozen men filled the space, all with guns at the ready.‘When will the strike happen?’ Benedict asked again. ‘We know you’re a marine. We know you were scouting our base. Tell us now and we’ll spare your life and you will be taken prisoner and no further harm will come to you. If you don’t talk –’‘Please!’ Oliver yelled, his voice echoing off the rock walls. ‘He’s not – he doesn’t know!’Several of the rebels including Benedict turned to him. The man holding a gun to his head cuffed him sharply on the back of the head.‘Shut your mouth.’Oliver's head throbbed but he kept talking.‘He doesn’t remember! He doesn’t know anything, I swear. We weren’t sent by the army, we were coming down off the mountain –’Another blow to the back of his head, harder that time. His glasses nearly came off.‘I said shut your fucking face!’The blows, mercifully, stopped. Jack raised his head slightly, his vision blurry and his mind filled with pain. He blinked through the pain and raised a hand to his nose. His fingers came away bloody. He knew only that when Oliver began speaking, it had somehow caused the men to stop hurting him. He lowered his arms and craned his neck up.And his blood ran cold when he saw Oliver being struck by the man who held him.Something flared in the pit of Jack’s stomach. Something that almost drowned out the pain. Like a small singularity, another one, ready to blow.Benedict seemed to hesitate for a moment before turning to the rebel who had captured them outside.‘You’re sure they’re marines?’‘Don’t know about him,’ his man replied, indicating Oliver. ‘But the big guy, definitely. Saw him in Brinehead with my own eyes. Hard to miss, isn’t he?’Benedict eyed the large blonde marine writhing on the floor.‘You have ten seconds to start talking,’ he said, drawing out each word clearly. ‘Or I’ll order my men to shoot both you and your friend.’Kindle, Oliver found himself silently pleading, as he often did when he was at his most pathetic and desperate and he turned to his own tormentor for help. Kindle, please. Please help him.Jack looked into the cold, dangerous glare of the one named Benedict and offered no reply.Benedict narrowed his eyes. ‘Kill him.’One of the men near Jack aimed his gun steadily at Jack’s head.
‘No!’
Oliver twisted out of his captor’s grasp and but didn’t succeed in taking a single step before he was grabbed again. He was punched hard in his solar plexus, making him double over and gasp. Jack watched and his breathing quickened. Oliver's mouth was punched again, this blow sending him to the floor, clutching his jaw. His glasses flung off and skittered away on the ground. His cry, sharp and short, reached Jack’s ears.And then the singularity exploded.Neither Benedict nor his men saw it coming. They had seen men of all kinds, whether marine or not, become reduced to snivelling heaps when they faced the wrong end of a gun. What they didn’t expect was for the man who had done nothing but buckle and whimper to suddenly rise from beneath their feet.Distracted by the commotion from the other prisoner, the man who had aimed the kill shot at Jack’s head barely felt the gun get yanked from his hand before the bullet tore a hole through his leg.Jack barely heard the man's strangled cry. For him, the pain was still there but it had been edged into the background. His ribs were bruised, not broken. His nose was sore and bleeding, not broken. His face and chest and arms were tender but still supple and full of memory. Muscle memory. And the only thing his entire being was focused on was the way Oliver had first folded forward when he was punched in the stomach, and then how his glasses had left his face. The sense that Oliver had been violated, the senselessness of it, had created a swell of fury that he could barely control.He had pushed up off the ground and grabbed the barrel pointing at him. He surrendered completely to the movements of his hands, which were both lightning fast and heavily decisive. His finger had slipped in front of the trigger and pulled like he had been born to do nothing else. Something else, something feral and growling, had taken over.Another round of shots sent more men nearby to their knees, either gasping and clutching their wounds in agony or simply lifeless. Still in a crouch, he counted six down, three dead. Benedict and his men tried to both duck for cover and turn their guns back on him at the same time. The cave was a mess of panicked orders and men rolling away behind desks and crates.In those few, crucial seconds of confusion, Jack had gotten to his feet, taken a few steps and knocked the gun out of Benedict’s hand; Benedict who had had hesitated before ducking for cover. Once his gun clattered away, Jack had grabbed Benedict’s arm and twisted it behind his back. He pulled them backwards until they were pressed against the cave wall. He breathed in the musty smell of Benedict’s clothes. He was a lot taller than the rebel leader but from that range, it would be far too risky for Benedict's men to aim for one and not the other. Jack’s gun pressed painfully hard into Benedict’s temple.Benedict was thinking only of the unflinching, cold glint in the marine’s eyes as he deftly disarmed him. By then, the other men had gathered themselves and were face-to-face with a situation turned on its head. Their commander was being held at gunpoint. The rebel closest to Oliver hadn’t once moved his gun away from Oliver’s head.Shouts of ‘Let him go!’ echoed around the cave, complemented by threats against Oliver if Benedict wasn’t freed. Guns were pointed tension flooded the cave and the camp beyond, where men stood to attention, weapons also drawn, wondering what was going on.Oliver had dreaded the worst when the gunshots rang out. Ears ringing and heart in his mouth, he had lifted himself onto an elbow and, to his utter confusion, was met with the sight of Jack pulling Benedict up against the rock wall. He forgot to breathe.
Jack…
The flurry of shouts had taken on a new tenor.
‘Let him go!’

‘Drop it! Drop the gun! Let him go!’
As Jack panted against the rock wall, he could almost feel the physical effects of muscle memory petering out of his limbs. Each move had been as automatic as his lungs drawing breath. They came from elsewhere. He suspected they came from him.But now it caught up.He discovered in that moment that Oliver wasn’t small. He, Jack, was just exceptionally large. He towered over Benedict and every man there.And even though he had it - he had it - just a moment ago, he suddenly realised he had no idea what to do next. There was just enough left over for him to know he shouldn’t at all ease the grip on Benedict’s arm or the gun.The men lying on the floor, dead or wounded, suddenly caught up to him in one hit. A wave of nausea overcame him. There was too much. There was just too much. From the whiteness of the mountain to the mustiness of the cave and the multiplicity of the people around him. So many people –He stared at Oliver, who was still on the floor near the mouth of the cave, bleeding from his mouth, and a gun to his head.The look of shock on Oliver’s face was enough for Jack to find his voice.‘Let – let him –’A brief silence fell as the men tried to hear what the blonde man with the absurdly deep voice was trying to say.‘Let him go. Let Oliver go. And – and –’Jack heard Benedict’s ragged breathing. He tried wildly to compute. He tried to switch gears and slip into whatever he had been moments ago.‘I’ll let him go. But only if – if Oliver – if you don’t hurt Oliver. Anymore,’ he finished uncertainly, his voice loud and echoing and contained a slight tremble, one which the rebels attributed to his being out of breath.But one which Oliver understood. His heart was rent at the sound.Silence reigned. The midday sun was slowly being blotted out by the clouds Oliver had spied on the edge of the sky that morning.‘Shoot him,’ Benedict commanded his men. His eyes were steady, his voice was strong.Oliver’s pulse spiked. But Benedict’s men didn’t fire. Oliver didn’t know how valuable the commander was to the rebels. But given their sudden urgent orders and even more urgent silence, he wondered at the possibility that they might escape alive. As though to reinforce the point, the man with the prominent chin and brow who had recognised Jack, and who was presumably second in command, gave a terse nod to the man nearest Oliver.The gun was lifted away from Oliver’s head. He glanced up, his stomach and face still throbbing from the recent impact. Dazed, his muscles thrumming with anxiety, Oliver shakily got to his feet.The rebels cautioned him not to do anything stupid. Their words glanced off Oliver, who only wanted to pull Jack to safety. He tried to get the throbbing in his head to ease so he could think his way out. He was still struggling to come to terms with the speed at which everything had happened. Less than ten minutes ago, he and Jack had been steadily making their way down a quiet mountainside.‘Jack…’ he said, his mouth dry.Jack held onto Oliver’s voice like an anchor. He remembered how he had clung to it the day he had awoken.‘Come this way,’ Oliver said, as reassuringly as he could. ‘Slowly. Don’t – don’t let go of him.’After a slight pause, Jack forced his feet to move. He pulled Benedict with him. They approached the corner of the cave.And from there, things happened both slowly and quickly. Oliver found his glasses, which only contained a thin crack on the left lens, and quietly demanded a jeep. He assured them that they weren’t marines or soldiers and they hadn't been sent by the military in any capacity and that they simply wanted to leave unharmed. Though they didn’t believe a word out of his mouth, especially after Jack’s display, the rebels reluctantly acquiesced. Oliver suspected their love of Benedict was bone-deep. It reminded him quite poignantly of how much Jack’s men had revered him.The jeep was slowly driven to them.The back of his neck burning under dangerous gazes, Oliver hoisted one of their packs into the backseat. He was too anxious to go back and retrieve the other pack. He expected bedlam to erupt again at any moment.Throughout it all, Jack’s hold on Benedict was as firm as ever. The gun was fixed against his temple. But on the inside, Jack was about ready to break.Oliver then gathered together the remaining courage he had and delivered a last, steady threat; any jeep or soldier that was seen following them would result in the immediate execution of their leader.With the bodies of their fallen comrades still littering the cave floor, no one questioned him.The rebels watched as the two strangers piled their commander into the jeep and drove slowly past the line of tents and around the path that would already be partially obscured by the next snowfall.‘Jack?’‘Yes?’‘Are you okay?’‘Yes.’‘Do you think you could keep pointing the gun at him?’‘Yes.’‘Okay. Keep doing that, okay? Don’t let him take it from you.’‘Okay.’Benedict listened to this bizarre exchange. He sat against the far window and watched as the huge man, who sat across from him, aimed the gun fairly steadily. The uncertainty in his eyes gave him away, however. Eyes that carried a kind of naivety he hadn’t seen before in any soldier worth his salt, let alone a marine. He wondered for the first time if they had been telling the truth. Then he remembered what had happened in the cave. The bodies of his men.No longer knowing what to think, Benedict fell silent and kept his eyes on the small round hole in the barrel of the gun. He wondered how many minutes he had left to live.Half an hour later, the storm was nearly upon them. Oliver’s mind whirred. He had planned out what they would do with the precise efficiency that he applied to complex surgeries.He pulled over beside a rocky cliff edge. Benedict was ordered out of the car. He stared out across at the snow swept landscape and towering peaks marching off into the distance. Only a days’ drive below was Olympus where he had once had a wife and child. He thought of them during his last moments. And then, entirely unexpectedly, he was handed the pack that had been thrown into the back of the jeep. He was told, in clear, clipped words, that there was enough food there for the hike back, and that his men would probably come after him in due time and he could most likely meet them halfway.Benedict stared as the man with the glasses climbed back in the jeep and took off.Oliver drove off the path as soon as Benedict was out of sight. He knew the detour and would add several days to their journey but he couldn’t risk being overtaken by the rebels again. He didn’t think their luck would hold out a second time.He glance in the rear-view mirror where Jack sat and stared into space, looking blank.Denial? Shellshock? Oliver couldn’t be sure.He tried to keep his mind on putting as much distance between them and the rebel camp as possible. He tried not be overwhelmed by the memory of Jack’s lightning-fast transformation in the cave. He tried in vain not to jump to conclusions.Muscle memory, he told himself. That’s all it was.Instead, he thought of the one named Benedict. He knew it would have been easier to shoot him. He knew that Old Jack would have done it without a second thought. But Oliver couldn’t bring himself to. At that moment, his weakness curled into a little ball in his gut. He imagined what Old Jack would have to say about his decision.But he kept his eyes on Jack, this Jack, whenever he could. It helped him focus.The snowfall this far down the mountain was thin enough that Oliver could safely take the jeep most of the way on the rocky stretches into Olympus. The maps hadn’t yet let him down. But the blanket of clouds above them had just begun to release their burdens. Snow began falling in heavier curtains. Oliver knew the snowstorm would be on them soon. They would have to find someplace safe and off the path to wait it out, and to wait for the sun to thaw the snow enough for them to keep driving. But they had more than enough supplies left, even with the food Oliver had just parted with. And constant shelter in the jeep. He estimated that their fuel supply might be just enough.The panic and anxiety of their few terrible minutes in the rebel camp were slowly melting into something that resembled hope.‘Oliver?’His stomach flipped at the sound of Jack’s voice. Jack hadn’t said a word in almost an hour.‘Yes?’‘I feel sick.’Oliver glanced in the rear view mirror and saw that Jack's face was drawn and pale.‘Okay. I’ll stop.’He cast an anxious glance at the gathering storm outside the windshield but brought the jeep to a halt. Jack struggled with the handle before he swung the door open and almost fell out of the car. The gun tumbled from his lap onto the snow. On all fours, he heaved and retched. By the time Oliver reached him, he had already thrown up.Oliver's chest welled with pity at the sound of his short, startled grunts and the sight of his huge form crouched over and shaking. He held Jack’s long hair back and secured it in a tie just as Jack retched and vomited once again.‘So many,’ he mumbled, sounding overcome. ‘There were so many.’‘There were,’ Oliver agreed, trying to understand what it would have been like for him.‘I killed them,’ Jack said, turning imploring eyes on Oliver.Jack’s closeness suddenly struck him. One of his eyelids was swollen and his jaw was bruised. His eyes were piercing. Oliver couldn’t think of what to say for a few seconds.‘You had to. You had to, or they would have killed you.’‘They hurt you.’Oliver's heart skipped a beat.‘They hurt you, so I killed them.’It was uttered again in mild shock. Statement and question and observation and principle.He heaved and turned his face away and emptied his guts completely. Tears ran down his cheeks, shining on his stubble. Oliver couldn’t tell if it was from the effort of throwing up or what just happened.He guided Jack back to the jeep and let him sip some water. With Oliver’s help, Jack stretched as much of his long body on the back seat as he could. Bruises started blossoming on his skin. He finally felt the tremendous ache in his ribs.Oliver carefully placed the gun on the passenger seat and got back behind the wheel.Jack dreamed.He didn’t dream of what had happened at the rebel camp.He dreamed of when he was hunched over, vomiting into the snow. He dreamed of Oliver hovering nearby, touching his hair, and Jack's gloved hand was grasping snow, snow clenched and spilling between his fingers like he wanted to clench Oliver’s hair between his fingers and watch those small brown strands curl around his knuckles, knuckles white, Oliver’s eyes wide, his body laid bare and his –He woke up with a start.Unsure if minutes or hours had passed, he sat up in the gloom. Either the clouds lay thicker or evening was creeping up on them. Oliver wasn’t in the car.‘Oliver?’His voice fell flat in the small space. He sat up, wincing, his throat parched. The blizzard whirled all around the car. Grey everywhere. He couldn’t see far in any direction. And there was no Oliver in sight. Panic started to curl around him again. He pushed the door open and the wind and snow claimed him instantly. He was chilled to the bone. He bellowed Oliver’s name again.They had followed. The rebels. They followed and tracked Oliver down and dragged him off and shot him in the snow and Oliver was lying somewhere bleeding like the men Jack had killed. Or Oliver had stumbled into a crevasse and was lying with broken legs in a place Jack could never reach. Or Oliver had left him, just left him and gone far away –
‘Oliver!’
He took a few steps away in any direction. His hood had fallen and the wind whipped snow into his ears and hair.‘Jack?’He whirled around and the relief of seeing Oliver’s familiar shape, the hood of his coat and then his snow-flecked glasses, was so powerful that Jack almost retched again. He reached Jack in a few more steps, wiping his glasses with his arm. He didn't seem to notice the sudden pocket of air that Jack had fallen into without warning. ‘I found somewhere we can stay,’ Oliver said, calling above the wind. ‘Can you walk? We need to wait out the blizzard and the jeep’s thermostat’s not working so –’But he was cut short by Jack closing the distance between them and seizing his arms.Jack’s face was close. Too close. And the look there was something Oliver had both never seen before and something he had seen in Old Jack. A narrowed focus. Ice that burned. His mouth was open in a slight pant, eyebrows drawn. His eyes darted to Oliver’s lips and back.‘Jack,’ said Oliver breathlessly. Warningly.His voice returned Jack to his senses. He realised he had come close, so dangerously close, to letting Oliver see the horrible need that writhed inside. He let go of Oliver’s arms. Snow hurtled between them.‘I'm sorry,’ he said, hearing the words before he had even thought them.But Oliver’s hand reached up and held the hem of his coat before he could move further away. It took Jack a few seconds to register it.‘Sorry,’ he repeated stupidly, blinking down at Oliver. Curls framing his face with the rest hidden behind his hood. The cut on his lip standing out redly.Oliver stared up at him again and searched for that spark. Something he had never once thought to look for in Jack. Something he never thought he would see again, let alone so soon. And suddenly, without thinking, he had pulled Jack into a kiss.Jack didn’t understand. His eyes remained open as Oliver’s lips pressed on his. They were soft and dry and cold and the grip on the front of his jacket was strong. It was there, finally. The closeness he had craved. And yet it had come so suddenly that he couldn't align it with his fantasies for several long seconds. But then Oliver’s hands found his face. And he pressed against Jack with an urgency Jack didn't think him capable of.And Jack’s eyes closed of their own accord. His arms, which had been held stiffly at his sides, curled around Oliver’s back and drew him in even closer. There was nothing between them. Nothing at all, not air or snow or space or even room to breathe. Then he was holding the back of Oliver’s head and the hood was in the way, so he tugged it off and his glove was still on but he didn’t have the patience to pull it off too and Oliver’s curls were clutched in his hand like he had envisioned only minutes ago.Only minutes ago. He tasted Oliver’s mouth. His tongue. He wanted more. He pushed and probed. His nose pushed Oliver’s glasses up so they were slightly skewed. He pushed his lips against Oliver’s so hard that he made a small sound and his body arched backwards just slightly. And there, on cue, Jack’s cock began to stiffen.And he pulled away. And the blood pounded loudly in his ears at Oliver’s expression. The dazed look in his eyes.Oliver had forgotten the jeep and the little rock den and even the blizzard. The kiss had been both familiar and not. His taste was the same. The feel of his lips. And even something in the way he moved that was Old Jack. He thought of the way Jack had sprung into his old self in the cave. Muscle memory.But there was something else there that was different. Oliver couldn’t say what.‘Jack –?’‘Sorry,’ Jack said yet again, like he had forgotten any other words.He brought his hands back and ran one through his hair in agitation, wanting simultaneously to step back and to take Oliver in his arms again and press tightly against him so the swelling would find release.‘If you keep – if we keep…’He didn’t understand what this meant, but some kind of instinct was again telling him this was illicit.‘If we keep doing that, I’ll have – I won’t be able to stop the... bad thoughts.’Oliver stared. ‘Bad thoughts? What do you –?’ And when it occurred to him what Jack meant, blood rushed to his face in stark defiance of the cold.Jack noticed the flush of colour on Oliver’s face and felt himself sink further into shame. He regretted saying anything at all, even though he knew he had to say something or he would have pushed Oliver to the snow and violated him there. Ground against him and pawed at his chest and neck and licked the inside of his mouth like he had just done.Oliver breathed heavily and stared. He hadn't once asked. He'd had no idea what Jack was going through. When he saw Jack shiver in the cold, Oliver shook himself and tried to think clearly. He flipped his fallen hood back over his head, feeling numb.‘Listen’ he began, trying to bring some strength into his voice. ‘It’ll be too cold to stay in the jeep during the snowstorm. We need to take the supplies to the rock face. I’ve started a fire there. I need you – I need you to help me carry it all in. Can you do that?’Jack took a moment before he nodded. They moved to the back of the jeep in silence. The snowstorm picked up speed around them.The cavity in the rock face was lit like a beacon. It was only a short distance away but the storm had almost completely obscured it. Snow lay too thick on the ground for their jeep. Jack followed Oliver towards the bright orange glow, past a small grove of shivering fir trees. Once there, they had to squeeze through a narrow opening in the rock, just wide enough to admit them one by one. The wind couldn't follow them inside.It was a cramped space, one that was warming up by the heat of the fire that was already blazing at its centre. A pile of unused kindling was left nearby. Jack wondered how long he had been asleep for Oliver to have found the time to have done everything. He wondered how Oliver even knew to find it. He wondered how much more about Oliver he would never know.He wondered about the way Oliver had gripped the front of Jack's coat. He wondered about the taste of Oliver's mouth. Their moment by the jeep had already taken on the feel of a surreal dream. He was still half-hard.The supplies they had wrapped in blankets were lowered to the floor. Oliver unwrapped the single sleeping bag for Jack. The other had remained with the second pack in the rebel camp. He would make do with blankets. Oliver knelt and Jack crouched. There was an arm's length between them. He felt Jack's eyes on him and his pulse skyrocketed. He didn't know what to do. Or what any of it meant.'Are you - are you hungry?' he asked, out of sheer nervousness.The question hovered in the air like a strange mist. Then Oliver looked up into Jack's gaze. He saw the desire there, burning again in a way that managed to make him feel winded. Something he had waited for a year to see in Old Jack was suddenly there in a heartbeat within only a few weeks. Beneath it all, he also saw the guilt. Bad thoughts. The fire crackled loudly in the silence. Oliver only had to look at him. And suddenly Jack had taken Oliver's face in his hands. Lips and tongues and clashing teeth. Jack leaned into him, forcing Oliver to throw an arm back against the ground.And finally Oliver caved to a thought that was as untrue as it was dangerous. Jack, his Jack, was still there. He was right there and he wanted Oliver and Oliver was suddenly remembering the feel of Jack moving inside him. Marking him deeply, carving into him and spilling inside him. It wasn't him. But in that moment, he wanted him, whoever he was, in the hopes that he would find the one he was looking for.In the relative silence of the den, Jack heard more of Oliver's sounds. The heavy breathing and small, staccato moans. It was alarming how powerfully those noises concentrated in his cock. Any more and he would lose control completely. And then all would be lost And so when he reared back again, he prepared to move away with the same stammered warnings and apologies.Oliver spoke first. He saw again that strange guilt which reminded him poignantly of who Jack was now. But perhaps, Old Jack was there somewhere beneath it all. Perhaps Oliver could find him with the right touch.'They're not bad thoughts,' he said breathily. 'They're - it's okay to have them.'Jack's eyes darted between Oliver's. He understood the words but he wasn't prepared to believe them. It would mean, firstly, that Oliver knew what his urges were. And if that were the case, it didn't make any sense that Oliver would condone them in any way.'But,' he tried. 'But I -'
But I want to do such awful things.
'It's okay,' said Oliver gently, like he had coached Jack earlier that day in the terrifying impasse with rebels. 'It's okay. Look.'He slipped Jack's left glove off. He stared at its familiar size and shape for a moment before kissing the fingertips.Jack's cock throbbed at the sight. His breathing came out ragged. He touched Oliver's face with his bare hand for the first time. His skin was warm. Gold in the firelight. And then he was kissing Oliver again, with a renewed hunger. One that was unreined and dangerous and was slipping very fast out of his control.Oliver clung to his shoulders and felt that switch flick inside Jack. He breathed hard against Jack's lips and felt Jack's bare hand slip beneath the layers of his clothes. Are you remembering? Or is this new?It took Jack only a few seconds to understand that he needed to have Oliver naked. He need to see him bare, in nothing but his skin. And this need ran into others he didn't see coming, like snow slipping from tree branch to tree branch before hitting the ground.He pulled Oliver's coat off and then his jacket and then the layers beneath. His hands were so forceful Oliver was pushed closer to the ground with each new layer that was stripped. And then Jack was pressing him flat on the partially unfolded blanket beneath, Oliver's bare chest rising and falling. He felt exposed and in danger and the shame crept up like small vines over the deformed body that was open to Jack.Jack's eyes drank him in like he might disappear at any second. Oliver's skin was the burnished bronze of his fantasies. Laid bare for him. There were the soft, rippling burn scars covering Oliver's left side. And something new Jack hasn't seen before. Across his stomach were four long, parallel slashes, scarred over and deep and glossy. Jack was overcome.
Can I touch you? Is this really okay? Can I touch you everywhere?
But he couldn't ask. His hands roamed without permission; over the smooth skin of his chest and the rough skin of the slashes and the charred skin of the burns. He bent low and tasted him. Ran his tongue over his chest across the nipples and buried his face in Oliver's neck. He had no idea what he was doing.And then his arm brushed against the front of Oliver's pants and elicited a quick gasp. A little bemused he reached below Oliver's belt. Oliver was hard. He was hard, just like Jack. Jack looked up in surprise. Oliver's eyes were lost behind a cloud of lust.Jack sat up and tore Oliver's pants and underwear away. Oliver's face burned with embarrassment at the way Jack was staring. And when Jack grasped his cock, he turned his head to the side and let out his first real moan. Jack crawled forwards again, their chests close, as though seeking out the source of that sound. His hand remained on Oliver's cock as he kissed him, pressing Oliver into the blanket.Recovering his senses just enough to reach up, Oliver tried undoing buttons and pulling at zippers until he could see Jack's pale skin through the layers. It was hard to do with Jack's hand still firmly gripping his cock.'Help me...' Oliver said breathily. 'With your coat. Take it off.'Jack obeyed. His clothes came off and his huge torso hovered above Oliver, catching the firelight in new shades. Oliver then reached down and deftly freed Jack's erection like he had done countless times before. But for the first time, when he held Jack's cock in his hand, it brought about a look of unparalleled surprise and desire. Jack's mouth fell open and he hung his head. He bucked into Oliver's hand.Oliver gripped him hard, the head already slick with pre-come, and let him thrust. He heard Jack's short, tortured grunts near his ear. There was nothing in the world that could ever feel as good as Oliver's hand on his cock. Everything was reduced to that single point of contact where the raw heat spread throughout his whole body. Here Oliver was, pinned beneath him, and Jack was grinding and bucking over him just as he wanted. His head swam. The thought that Oliver wanted it too, on any level at all, drove him wild.And so when Oliver let go of his cock and spread his legs wider, when Oliver slipped his own fingers into himself, fingers shining with what Jack's cock had released in his overwhelming need, Jack didn't know what to think. He watched as though mesmerised when Oliver pushed two fingers into himself. Deeply. His back arched off the ground and his moan was both soft and urgent.Jack's hand went to his own cock almost subconsciously. He rubbed himself at the sight of what Oliver was doing to himself. Oliver glanced down at the look on Jack's face and added a third finger, his face flushed. Just a little more and he would be ready. Just a little more -But Jack abruptly moved his hand away. The question had come at Jack from out of nowhere. He held Oliver's wrist tightly.'You and me,' he said, his voice heavy with lust. 'Did we - did you use to do this? With him?'Oliver paused and stared. He didn't know what he was reading in Jack's face.'Yes.'His nervous reply hung between them. And he saw something change in Jack's eyes.The voice he had been keeping at bay revealed itself completely.He's mine. I want to buck into him. I want to fuck into him. I want to fuck him. Until he cries and begs me to stop. But I won't. He's mine. Not his.He held Oliver's legs apart and lifted his hips slightly off the ground. And suddenly there Jack was, looking for a way in. Pressing. Pushing. Oliver hadn't prepared himself enough. He wasn't stretched enough, there wasn't enough lubricant, there hadn't been enough time.'No, wait -'But Jack breached him.Oliver's moan was loud. Torn from the depths. It burned.'Jack, stop -!'Jack pulled back a little and plunged again until he was buried halfway. His hips took on a life of their own. Memory they had that he didn't. All he knew was that Oliver was twisted and gasping beneath him and moaning so sweetly with every thrust and he was so, so tight and Jack needed to lean down and kiss him and so he did just that and he held Oliver's hands back so he couldn't stop him and oh, yes plunge into him again and again until he was all the way in and Oliver was his and he moaned so sweetly.Oliver gasped. Memories swooped in like vultures, like Oliver was carrion now that he was being held down and his cries unheeded. The men and the dark rooms and the sour breath. They swirled in his head and swelled and filled the den. He thought he heard Kindle's laugh.
'Stop!'
Jack looked at him. He was still inside. Oliver's body was still pulsing and squeezing around him. But he didn't move. The muscles of his arms bulged on either side of Oliver's head. He looked down and pressed his forehead against Oliver's, trying to come to grips with his most depraved of fantasies come to life. When he focused, he saw the thin crack in the left lens of Oliver's glasses. He let go of one of Oliver's wrists to reach down and touch the cut on Oliver's lip.And suddenly, for a reason Oliver couldn't explain, the vultures no longer circled. The men and the rooms that smelled of mildew and the memories of Rikard Svendt all filtered away. There was just the firelight and Jack, his Jack or New Jack, but Jack, his familiar eyes and jaw and the yellow hair that fell far enough that they brushed Oliver's cheeks.It was a transformation so complete that Oliver was struggling to breathe again. How many more volatile lurches in emotion would he be able to bear that day?The pre-come that had leaked copiously from Jack now coated Oliver's insides completely. Like Oliver's desires had morphed into a physical form. Something that would let Jack in further and faster and deeper.'I can't -' Jack panted as he lay still, eyes lost to the creature within. 'I can't stop now.'An apology and a warning and a promise.And so Oliver held on.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Sore, bruised, his skin stinging near his burns, Oliver gently removed himself from Jack’s hold and sat up.Jack slept with a slight frown on his face and with his mouth open. He had dropped off less than a minute after coming – after he had stared into Oliver’s eyes with an intensity that made Oliver anxious. He had then remained on top of Oliver, holding his weight mostly on his right arm and side, so Oliver wouldn't have to bear too much of it, but with his arms wrapped about Oliver as though resolved in his childish decision to pin him there indefinitely. Neither of them had said a word. And then Jack’s eyes had closed slowly.And Oliver almost felt like smiling, remembering how Old Jack had been the same, in that small way. He never lasted long after he came.But Oliver didn’t smile. Because it wasn't Old Jack. It had all been new to Jack. Every texture, every sound, every sensation. All brand new; that much had been clear. Meaning Old Jack was still gone and Oliver had just been with… with someone else.The fire beside them was burning steadily. Oliver watched it and his face coloured a little at the memory of the past few minutes. He remembered how he had been on the point, many times, of asking Jack to slow down. To stop biting him. To ease the grip on his legs, hips, chest – wherever Jack’s fingers dug in like they were trying to plunge beneath the skin.Instead, he had kept silent. He knew it was his fault that Jack was like that at all. And so he bore it. He clung to Jack’s shoulders and curled further around the body that was invading his so powerfully. He shivered each time Jack looked at him with a strange, savage glint in his eye which told Oliver he was about to be bitten somewhere, deeply, in a way that would leave small marks on his skin and make him try to jerk away and cry out but also made sparks race through his body and fill his head. He remembered, most of all, the way Jack had breathed in his ear, staggered, broken and hot. Old Jack had always been in control. But this Jack –‘Oliver,’ Jack had gasped once, the first word he said since he began. ‘Oliver… I’m – I think something’s…’Oliver felt himself on the brink too. He wondered if Jack even knew what was happening. He stared into blue eyes consumed by lust. The few tendrils of hair hanging from above Jack's forehead were dark with sweat.‘It’s okay,’ Oliver said, hearing the strung-out quiver in his own voice. ‘It’s okay. Come.’Jack had blinked in confusion. He felt the unfamiliar welling in his gut, somewhere dangerous and on the brink of being released. It felt scalding.‘But it’s – it’s hot,’ he said, in something that sounded again like a plea and a warning.Oliver let out a sharp exhale and held onto the back of his neck. Even as he spoke Jack hadn’t stopped thrusting.‘It’s okay,’ Oliver repeated, pressing his forehead to Jack’s. ‘Come. Let it out.’He had never been vocal like that with Old Jack. He had never needed to be. He felt his face burn again with the unfamiliarity of the words. But Jack only hung his head near Oliver's ear and came. Oliver felt it, the heat of it, and it pushed him over the edge himself. Jack had drawn back and looked at the semen that spilled between their bodies with something like dazed lust.Oliver allowed himself a quick glance at Jack where he slept. The frown was still there. His left eye was still coloured from the beatings earlier. There were coloured patches on his immense torso and arms. How much he had been through in a single day. Oliver felt the guilt slowly trickle in.The only thing Oliver knew for sure was that it wasn’t Old Jack. He, Oliver, was new in Jack’s eyes. A stranger, despite being the only person Jack knew. And yet, it had only taken Jack weeks. A mere few weeks to feel this way. To want Oliver like that. How was that possible?‘How thoroughly entertaining.’When he heard that voice, Oliver’s insides seized up and knotted like they always did, like they had done for years and years since he was four years old. He felt his willpower draining almost immediately, like it was preventing him from trying to put up any sort of fight. It was reminding him to submit. Submit. Submit.‘What a riveting few weeks, Ollie. And you cap it off with the tumult of this past day. I couldn’t let it pass without saying something.’Footsteps sounded from behind him but Oliver didn’t turn. Kindle slowly came around the other side of the fire and sat heavily on the ground. He cast a shadow. His feet scuffed the floor. He was real, this time. He wasn’t behind it, this time. He was in it.Oliver almost made a move to cover himself, he was still bare from the waist up where the blanket was pooled, but he knew it would make no difference. He looked at Jack who was still fast asleep. His huge hands were slightly curled before his face.
Don’t hurt him.
Kindly had taken the form of someone Oliver had known once, though the memory was vague. Dark hair and a narrow face. A tweed jacket over pants with neat, thin creases. A teacher, perhaps, from Oliver’s youth. But his eyes were too glassy to be human.‘The paradoxes are quite intriguing, don’t you think?’ Kindle’s voice echoed loudly but Oliver knew that no matter how loud he spoke Jack wouldn’t hear him and neither would another living soul. Kindle was for Oliver, alone. ‘How language seems to be waiting for him to remember to use it. Language and... other things.’The lascivious way in which he spoke made Oliver think he was referring to their intimacy earlier. But Kindle went on casually enough, leaning back on an arm.‘The way his muscle memory took over today when you were in danger was quite something. I didn’t anticipate that at all. I suspect it’s cellular memory, which goes even deeper than muscle. Something deeply subconscious. Triggered in waking moments by the rarest of occurrences.’ He smiled at Oliver. ‘He cares for you a great deal. How moving.’‘Please,’ Oliver said in a whisper. ‘Please don’t hurt him.’‘Why would I do that? He’s performed spectacularly well. I don’t need to intervene for your arc to remain interesting. Very pleasing aesthetics so far.’Oliver almost felt heady with relief. Even though Kindle might have been playing another of his tricks, another little experiment, he had learned that when Kindle invoked notions of art and aesthetics, he often meant what he said.‘Have you given any more thought to what might happen when you reach Olympus?’‘Yes,’ said Oliver quietly.‘It will break his heart, you know.’Oliver didn’t say anything.‘Strange that your love for Jack – Jack as he used to be – should be so overpowering. Surely any Jack is preferable to no Jack at all?’Oliver hated when Kindle tried to empathise with him. When he tried to softly ease his way in.‘I suppose I underestimated how much your connection with Old Jack meant to you. There are things you told him, things about what I’ve done, that you swore you would never tell anyone else. They died with Old Jack, didn’t they?’Oliver clenched his jaw. He wanted to turn his head or move away or move closer to Jack. But he had learned that keeping still was the safest course of action. Any move he made would be seen by Kindle as a symbol of some kind. A subconscious manifestation of something that Kindle might then see realised in a terrible way.‘But even after the events of tonight, you’re still thinking of leaving him in the care of an ex-wife who continues to love and miss him?’Silence again.‘You still feel guilty about taking Jack from Elise, don’t you?’‘I didn’t take him.’ Oliver was surprised and dismayed that he had been goaded to talk back.Kindle smiled brightly. ‘I knew you still felt guilty about that,’ he said, his voice rolling in a pleasant cadence. ‘I knew you were capable of such nuanced feeling, Ollie. I’m proud of you. So,’ he intoned slowly, arching his neck to stare up at the ceiling. ‘You’ve always harboured a layered guilt for drawing a married man’s affections and making him leave his wife –’‘He left her before he was with me,’ Oliver said, his tone still low. Still submissive and inoffensive.‘Ollie, come on. We both know Jack was yours long before he shared your bed.’Oliver felt angry tears welling somewhere. The guilt, the old mistakes, the old longing all bubbled and tried to reach the surface. He battened it all down. Held it down fast.‘So, as I was saying. You’ve always harboured a layered guilt, tempered by obvious denial,’ Kindle repeated, with an addendum, ‘for drawing a married man’s affections and making him leave his wife. And so, when you lost Old Jack’s love, you decide you’ll return him to his first love and resume your life of stoic solitude. Have I missed anything, Ollie?’A small pause.‘Perhaps you’ve realised you never deserved Old Jack’s love in the first place. That you’re too broken for any kind of love. So Jack’s loss of memory is almost a sort of… validation?’Silence. Flickering firelight. Jack shifted slightly in sleep.‘I should urge you,’ said Kindle, flipping his hair back with an idle hand. ‘To reconsider abandoning Jack.’Oliver glanced up.‘Doing so now, especially after what just happened, will almost seem like you’ve left things… unfinished. And you know how much I loathe unfinished arcs.’The fire blazed brightly for a second as Kindle spoke the word ‘loathe’. Oliver felt a tingle run through the burns of his side and arm.‘On top of all that, things are heating up between the army and the rebels.’ Kindle lifted a hand to the fire and caught one of the flames. It flitted back and forth between his fingers like a trapped, skittish animal. ‘Not my doing, of course. But they’ll be looking for Captain Jack Moller to lead the charge. Will you really leave him alone to face their questions and their demands?’The flame in Kindle’s hand turned into the shape of a rabbit, small and fiery with fearsome glowing eyes. It leapt to the ground, leaving trails of fire that flickered and disappeared behind it with each movement.‘There’s a lot left, Ollie,’ Kindle said softly. ‘You can’t run away from it.’The rabbit hopped closer to Oliver. Curious. Eager. Eyes bright with an unearthly glow. Oliver felt its heat on his foot and he pulled away, his heart beating. Smoke and screams. The burns on his back and arm prickled again.‘It just wants to say hello,’ Kindle insisted, his playful tone offset by his intent gaze.Oliver stared at it fearfully, at the flames of its ears. He began sweating. Its fiery little nose was inches from his leg.Kindle chuckled softly. With a small flick of his fingers, the rabbit hurled itself into the fire.Jack let out a soft grunt and turned in his sleep. Oliver turned to look at him for a brief moment, as though assuring himself he was there and Kindle hadn’t whisked him away while they were speaking. As Oliver turned, he subconsciously lifted a hand to the bite mark Jack had left on his shoulder and regretted doing so almost at once.‘He’s quite savage, isn’t he?’ Kindle said lightly, his smile entirely too wide for a human face. This time there was no confusing what he was talking about. ‘Quite the animal. Ironic, I would say, that he should be so only after we removed the creature within.’Before the words had time to sink in and leave an impact, Kindle’s eyes lit up with a sudden thought.‘Being treated like that by Jack, physically,’ he said, his voice high and thin, like it was creeping along a precarious edge. ‘I would imagine it would have taken you back, wouldn’t it? To what happened with all of the others? Rikard, specifically?’Oliver looked at him once, briefly, before looking away.‘No,’ he said.‘Don’t lie,’ Kindle warned, eyes flashing.‘It wasn’t like that,’ Oliver insisted.He was being honest. Aside from when Jack had first entered him, aside from the burning of those first few moments, he hadn’t once thought about any of it. As rough as Jack had been, it had been completely different from the terrible things that others had done to him.‘Pity,’ Kindle lamented.In the end, Kindle’s words themselves were silent. But Oliver’s slightly ragged breathing in Kindle’s wake was enough to rouse Jack. He heard the sounds wafting to him as though from the other side of the mountain. He turned onto his back and took a deep breath before opening his eyes fully.‘Oliver?’A little startled, Oliver looked at him and then over his shoulder where Kindle had vanished, folding seamlessly behind the physical dimension.‘Why are you crying?’ Jack asked.After a beat or two, Oliver tried to wipe the tears he didn't even noticed he had shed. Jack’s pulse surged. He sat up and hovered at Oliver’s shoulder.‘Are you hurt?’‘No.’But Oliver refused to look at him. Jack glanced down at the slight discoloration of Oliver’s skin near his neck and shoulder. Marks he had left.Following swiftly on the heels of guilt was the simple, burning desire to do it again. Everything that had happened that night came to him in fresh, unreal, effervescent bursts of memory. The feel of Oliver’s body beneath him and around him. His warmth and smell and sounds. Without thinking, he had brushed the back of Oliver’s neck with his fingers. It still amazed him that he was able to touch something as untouchable as Oliver’s skin. He the leaned close and pressed his lips against the same place he had touched.Oliver suppressed a shiver and felt Jack’s huge body looming behind him; both a comfort and a threat. ‘Jack –’But Jack’s arms had snaked around Oliver’s chest and waist. He kissed Oliver’s shoulder and cheek because he could. Because he had discovered not only that he could but also that Oliver wanted him to. He forgot that Oliver had been crying. He turned Oliver’s face and held his curls in his hand again as he kissed his mouth. It happened, again, almost without Jack’s control. His arms and mouth and fingers moved of their own accord. He only knew that he wanted to make Oliver his again, piece by piece.Oliver’s body was drawn to him, pressed against him, their hips lost in a tangle of blankets that Jack tried to undo.‘Wait...’It was the last word Oliver got in before he lost to Jack’s strength. He was on the floor again and a flash of blue eyes was all he saw before Jack crouched above his hips and peeled the layers of blankets away. He stared at Oliver’s cock, half-hard in the firelight, between the lithe muscles of his thighs.Jack held a hand on Oliver’s abdomen, both to brace him and to hold him down as he took Oliver’s cock into his mouth for the first time. He was rewarded with a loud moan which Oliver quickly muffled with a hand. He held Oliver’s cock in his mouth for some time before moving, simply tasting it and running his tongue along the tapered length. Then he discovered that whenever his lips or tongue created friction against the head, Oliver would writhe a little more beneath him.After a while, he moved lower and pressed Oliver's legs apart. Again, Jack was heeding only the voice that told him to probe further, to open up as much of Oliver’s body as he could. He had the strange, urgent feeling he might not have the chance again. He lapped at once at Oliver’s hole, the place where he had entered him before. His own cock stiffened almost painfully from Oliver's reaction; the gasp and the tightening of fingers in his hair. He thrust in with his fingers, first one, then two, and then with his tongue, as deep as it could go. He wanted to reach the place where his cock had been. He wanted to see how far he could fill Oliver.Oliver's world was consumed by the movements of Jack's fingers and tongue, to the extent that Jack's cock thrusting into him came as a surprise; another cresting wave of pleasure and pain. But suddenly Jack was there above him and inside him and his hair was loose and Oliver ran his hands through it and arched his back and moaned. Jack traced the slash marks across Oliver's stomach and then the burn marks on his side. They disappeared behind his back and Jack suddenly wanted to see more of them. He wanted to map every inch. So he pulled out almost subconsciously and turned Oliver easily onto his stomach he outlined the scarred, glossy skin where it spread almost to his shoulder blade. More beautiful, golden skin on his back and down to his cheeks, firm in his hand. And he pulled him up and spread him wide before sheathing himself again in Oliver's heat.
'Ah!'
Oliver's cry rang throughout the den.The new vantage point gave Jack a new thrill; it was yet a new way to mould Oliver beneath him. He wondered how many others there were. Oliver tried to gather himself, to pull up onto his elbows, but Jack's weight wouldn't let him. He held onto the blankets and his glasses jolted until they came off. Jack's hands on his hips and his neck and his shoulder. On his dick.'Ugh... ngh – Jack...'Every sound that Oliver made sparked something new in Jack. Like a newly shaped pebble lurking under the snow, perfect and polished and all his. Oliver felt Jack suck on the skin of his shoulder blades and let out a sound like a growl. And then teeth. Another bite. Oliver felt tears sting his eyes and he made a strangled, muffled sound. Did it remind you of Rikard and the others? Before he let Kindle's voice pull him back into darkness, Jack kissed his neck and a started grunting in tandem with his thrusts. He was close. 'I'm going to come.''Oh! Ugh, Jack... Jack!' Oliver cried and slumped and Jack felt him spill between his fingers. The fact that Oliver was buckled and spent beneath him, the way Oliver had gasped Jack's name, drove him to his own climax in only a few more agonising thrusts. He bit Oliver's neck once more as he came and felt Oliver jerk away instinctively from his mouth. He collapsed onto the blanket between Oliver and the fire. It was suddenly hot in the little den, despite the fact that the fire was steadily running out of kindling and the snowstorm outside was still gathering speed.It came to him finally through the haze, in the immediate aftermath of his climax, that he had done things Oliver didn't want. That perhaps out there, in the fabled real world that Oliver spoke of, they didn't treat others the way he had just treated Oliver. Perhaps it was a hunger that others were able to control better than he could. But he couldn't articulate his uncertainties. His apologies. He simply lay there for long seconds on his side with his left arm outstretched, a little apart from Oliver so they could both catch their breath.And felt an absurd, overwhelming love take hold when Oliver, after a few seconds, turned himself and rested his head on Jack’s arm. Like it was the most natural thing in the world. Jack’s heart beat wildly and he felt the feeling crush him and send him soaring at the same time. He tried to understand the look in Oliver’s eyes. Oliver’s lips were parted and his breaths were still a little uneven. His face in the firelight, his large moss-coloured eyes half-lidded with fatigue, tugged painfully at Jack’s heart.He tried, finally, to articulate. ‘It felt like…’ Jack said, his voice sounding rough and raw in the small space. ‘Like I was hurting you.’Oliver met his gaze. He still felt the sting of bite marks and the throbbing flash of his hips where Jack had gripped him much too tight. And the strange, pleasant ache deep inside him where Jack had been.‘You weren’t,’ he said.Jack seemed doubtful. He reached out hesitantly to touch the hair near Oliver’s ear. ‘You wanted me to do… all of it?’After a pause, Oliver nodded. He was almost too worn out to feel any form of embarrassment. The only things he could focus on were Jack and Kindle’s words that flitted about in his mind like menacing sprites.‘But you were crying before.’‘It wasn’t – that wasn’t because of you.’‘Then why?’He felt his heart fall a little when Oliver sank into one of his silences. Yet another thing he refused to answer.But he had plenty to be happy about. Dazedly happy about, in fact. Oliver lay in his arms, only a few inches away from him, and his eyes were on Jack.‘How long have you had thoughts like this?’ Oliver asked at length.Jack hesitated.‘A few weeks.’Oliver stared. It had barely been a month since New Jack awoke.‘Is… that okay?’ Jack asked nervously, without really understanding what he was asking.Oliver nodded again, himself unaware what he was validating. And knowing, deep down, that it most likely was not okay. That it meant something was wrong or Jack had made a mistake. There was no reason for Jack to have felt like that so strongly. Not when it had taken Old Jack so much longer.Jack wondered if he dared ask.‘You said we used to be like this. You and him.’ He paused. He could never quite rid himself of the strange sensation that it hadn’t been him at all. That Old Jack was someone else; a father or an older brother who had had Oliver first. ‘For how long?’There was a small pause.‘Three years.’Jack’s eyes widened slightly. ‘Years?’‘Yes.’‘I – he got to do this to you for three years?’By then Oliver had recovered enough of his senses for his cheeks to colour faintly.He’s so lucky, Jack thought, in part wonder and part resentment.He ran his fingers along Oliver’s jaw to his lip where it was swollen from the cut. From where another man had hit him. The thought caused a tight ball of anger to form in his gut, which he directed at Old Jack.‘Did he love you as much as I love you?’A small, sharp intake of breath. Oliver drew back and stared with a look that was close to dismay.Jack’s heart sank, wondering what he’d said wrong.‘You don’t –’ Oliver started. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’Jack was confused. ‘I don’t?’‘Do you even know what that word means?’Jack thought of the feeling that had swept him up only minutes ago. Looking at Oliver’s face made him feel despair and elation all at once. He had the sense that he had been handed something precious and the happiness it gave him had almost hurt.‘Yes. I think so,’ he said.Oliver had only moved away a little but Jack again felt the distance hyperbolically. Before he lifted away, Jack curled the arm that Oliver was lying on, so he could keep Oliver against his chest.
Don’t leave.
‘Don’t,’ he managed, his voice tight. And then he added, ‘I’m sorry if I… said it wrong.’Oliver held back tears again. There was nothing at all of Old Jack in anything he was saying. But he did know that Old Jack loved him, even if he had never once said it. He had loved Oliver deeply. It was the only reason any of this had happened. And so he lay there silently, breathing against the light gold hairs on Jack’s chest, and before he knew it, he felt himself drift off. Kindle’s cackle sounded from somewhere both above and below.Early the next morning, a fully clothed Oliver urged Jack awake. He said the storm had died down and it was time to leave, to put as much room between themselves and the rebel camp as possible. If not for the bite marks that were visible on Oliver’s neck before he pulled up his hood, Jack would have easily ascribed the gold-tinged memories from last night to a cruel and vivid dream.They squeezed one at a time through the narrow opening in the den. The air outside was eerily still. Jack felt the momentary paranoia that the men from the camp would suddenly swarm at them from out of nowhere. He swallowed and hurried in Oliver’s footsteps, carrying the sleeping bag and blankets.He sat in the backseat out of habit. He said no when Oliver asked whether he was hungry and wanted a quick breakfast. The jeep gradually wound its way downhill. If they used the roads, they could conceivably reach Olympus by dusk. But the off-road path Oliver had chartered using the topographical maps would take a few more days.Each time Oliver glanced in the rear view mirror, Jack was staring out the window, his expression blank. Only once their eyes met and Oliver felt a searing in his chest before Jack looked away. Neither said a word.A few hours later, they paused in order for Oliver to peer over the edge of the cliff face to get a bearing on where they were. He returned to the jeep and, for no real reason, his heart skipped a beat to see Jack climbing out. He waited until Oliver drew alongside. Before he had a chance to say anything, Jack had pulled him close and kissed him. Oliver’s hood fell back as Jack turned him and held him against the jeep, his hands roaming and his breath coming in puffs of steam and warm on his skin.His protests were lost, like they fell on deaf ears. Nothing about the rebels or the future seemed to matter to Jack. Jack, who had spent the past few hours thinking only of what had happened in their den and the thought that perhaps he didn't have to battle his hunger anymore. He could indulge it. Old Jack had done so for three years, after all. And his instincts and his hunger were rewarded when Oliver succumbed almost without protest. With protests about their being in the open, that it was too cold and dangerous; protests about things outside of them, there. And they, there, were all that mattered.He grunted in frustration when his fingers, numb from cold, didn’t co-ordinate well enough to strip all of Oliver’s clothes from him. He fumbled and probed and tried to ease his way in with his fingers as best as he could. Oliver’s anxieties and desire merged in a heady current when Jack lifted him easily against the side of the car and his cock pushed in. He hung his head and moaned Jack’s name.Jack was insatiable. Whenever Oliver wasn’t driving, each time they paused either to start a fire and cook a meal or to sleep in the jeep itself, Jack would pull him close and kiss him hard on the lips or beneath his ear and begin to take his clothes off as though in his mind they were both already undressed and he was urgently pushing reality to catch up.Twice more in the next day, Jack had pinned him to the side of the jeep.Once he had intercepted Oliver on the way from gathering firewood and Jack had turned him around against a jutting rock where Oliver had held on and heard his own cries echo warningly from the mountain face.Sometimes Oliver would catch that icy, dangerous glint in Jack’s eye in the rear-view mirror and his pulse would skyrocket, knowing what was to come when he stopped.Once, only once, Jack clambered over the seat back into the front.‘Jack –’‘Stop the jeep,’ he said, his voice urgent rather than forceful.He had held the back of Oliver’s head and kissed his neck and slid his large hands over Oliver’s chest and down over the front of his pants.And so Oliver, his mind already beginning to fog over, had stopped and only barely managed to pull the handbrake before Jack began peeling off his coat and gloves.Oliver always noticed that it was never enough for Jack to simply fuck him; he needed to see Oliver stripped as well. Often he wouldn’t do anything until every stitch of clothing had been removed and he had run his hands over Oliver's whole body, burns and scars and all.He only reluctantly acquiesced outside, in the snow, when Oliver breathily told him he would succumb to frostbite if Jack stripped him and Jack had taken him against the rock with only Oliver’s pants pushed to mid-thigh.Later, towards dusk, the sun was sinking but it had thawed a lot of the snow ahead of them. Jack thought he caught glimpses of green between melting patches. The grass only swam through the white in bursts as the jeep rolled on, but he had never seen so much. They were a different shade to Oliver’s eyes, brighter and more garish. But green.‘Are you still going to leave me with Elise?’Another surge of anxiety. Oliver’s grip tightened on the wheel. He was still sore from what had happened earlier.‘You’ll be happy with her,’ he said.Jack’s hopes, which had lifted cautiously, naively over the course of that day since the previous night, fell with a resounding thud.
Why do you want to get rid of me?
‘Why do you want me to stay with her?’‘She still cares about you.’‘But you said we got a divorce. That means we stopped wanting to be together.’The words came to him choppily, which they often did when he was frustrated.‘It doesn’t mean you stopped caring about each other.’‘Then why did we stop being married?’Silence.‘Oliver?’Oliver closed his eyes briefly. He slowed down when they reached a patch of ground that was still slightly icy and he manoeuvred the jeep over it carefully.Jack thought of the handcuffs he had been wearing the night he awoke. He thought of the deal he had made with Kindle, whatever it was that had made him lose his memory. He thought of Oliver’s sadness that he carried behind his eyes, a sadness that only went away when Jack was inside him. Or when Oliver smiled, which had happened so few times he could remember each one.‘You never tell me anything,’ Jack said into the window. ‘About the past.’Oliver looked over his shoulder, regret and guilt pulsing through him. He had always suspected that his silences upset Jack, even though Jack had never before spoken about it.‘There’s a lot of bad things there, Jack,’ Oliver said, his voice sounding like it had been beaten down beneath the weight of memory. ‘In the past. Both mine and yours.’I don’t have a past, Jack was on the point of reminding him.‘Tell me,’ he said instead.But Oliver kept his gaze trained out the windshield.By that night, Oliver’s body was stinging beneath his clothes. There were pleasant dull aches and sharp, pointed aches and places on his skin, especially near his burns and the slashes on his stomach that were tender to the touch.He couldn’t stop Jack even if he wanted to. He had allowed himself to be pulled in by Jack, time and time again, and he clambered out no longer understanding what he was doing anymore. What either of them were doing anymore. He only understood that Jack’s desire for him was bordering on need. It was most likely dependence and infatuation. And a part of Oliver craved it so much that he almost scared himself.He had barely started a fire beside their jeep by side of the mountain face and spread the tarp over steadily melting snow before Jack had pushed him to the ground yet again. Oliver’s body sent warning flares to his head.‘Jack, please don’t.’His voice was slightly different. Jack grunted in frustration and need so strong that he had to blink through it.‘Why?’ he asked, his voice hoarse, almost afraid of the answer.‘I’m still sore from… before.’Jack palmed his chest and searched beneath the layers and his lips clumsily sought out Oliver’s before finding them and latching on. Oliver’s heart thudded in his chest, feeling again at a loss. He broke free.‘If we do it again, I’ll be really hurt, Jack. Please.’Jack blinked again, hard. He tried to identify his hunger in that moment. He tried to channel it elsewhere. And his hands again slid beneath Oliver’s clothes.He saw Oliver’s eyes rounding in anxiety behind his glasses.‘Okay,’ Jack said breathlessly. ‘I won't. I just – I need to see your skin. Please…’And so he removed Oliver’s coat and jacket and shirt and thermals until he was bare beside the fire again and Jack could touch his golden scars and skin and tease his nipples with his teeth and lick the hollow in the base of his throat. He breathed in Oliver’s sweet, earthy scent until his head was swimming in it.All the while, Oliver gripped the tarp or the back of Jack’s head, hoping Jack would stop there. True to his word, after a few minutes, Jack paused, his head on Oliver’s abdomen. And slowly rolled off and onto his back.The tires of the jeep were only a few feet away. The stars clustered between patches of clouds. It was a still night without any wind or any snowfall. Jack closed his eyes and tried to quell the fire. Touching Oliver like that had been both a release and a slight, insidious kind of torture. Regardless, he turned on his side and slid Oliver close to him, like they had done in the den the previous night. He dug his hand deep into Oliver’s hair and watched, mesmerised, as the dark curls wound around his fingers.And so they lay on ground on the tarp, both panting and unsated and Oliver wondering, again, what he was doing. In less than two days, they would be in Olympus and Oliver would leave him at Elise’s door. He ought to separate himself from Jack now, at least now, after a day where he had done nothing but succumb to his own guilty desires.Instead he let Jack fold him against his chest again and felt his eyelids begin to close.‘I hurt you too much.’Jack’s low rumble made Oliver open his eyes. It was again both a question and statement. Oliver saw the guilt in Jack’s gaze which made him feel guilty in turn.‘No,’ he tried. ‘I'm okay.’‘But you said you’re hurt from before.’‘Only a little. I just needed... a break.’Jack struggled with his next thought. ‘I must be hurting you,’ he said, his eyes averted and his voice tense, ‘because when I imagine someone else doing that to you, I get really… upset. And angry.’Oliver looked at him in surprise. He realised what Jack meant and heat rose to his face. He wondered how he might explain it.‘That’s something else. That’s not because you’re worried they’re hurting me. You’re – it’s called being jealous.’The word made itself known as soon as Oliver spoke it. Jack associated it with his abhorrence over the thought of anyone else touching Oliver in any way, whether they hurt him or not. Oliver was his and no one else’s. Not even Old Jack’s.‘Did Old Jack get jealous?’ he asked, even as a bitter taste crept into his mouth at the thought.‘Yes,’ said Oliver, suddenly finding he had to rein in a smile at the memory. But he didn't say anything more. He watched Jack grit his teeth in a way that was familiar.‘Then I will be too,’ said Jack.
I’ll be more jealous than he was. I’ll be more everything than he was.
And just like that, to Jack’s surprise and confusion, Oliver smiled. He smiled and pressed his forehead to Jack’s and, even though Jack instinctively knew that the smile wasn't for him, he felt like he had lifted a few inches off the ground.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Subtle and stark. Both subtleties and starkness in both similarities and differences. Oliver kept note of them where he could, surreptitiously, almost guiltily. The similarities were in Jack’s twitches and mannerisms. In things like the foods he preferred. The way he walked. Even the way he coughed.And there were differences in the way he looked at Oliver. The way he stared attentively before he spoke. The way he touched Oliver. The way he kissed. The way he fucked. Old Jack's quieter, steely dominance compared to Jack's frantic, urgent need. Oliver had never emerged from Old Jack's touch with bite marks.The quickness with which Jack responded to things, the way he seemed to understand and store everything Oliver taught him, reminded him time and time again of Old Jack's shrewdness. Oliver began to understand that things like that - tastes and intelligence - were things that Jack had simply been born with. Other things, like outlook and temperament, were definitely those that Old Jack must have built over time, in response to everything that happened to him before Oliver even met him. Those things were gone. And they were things that new Jack was building up again in his own way.Oliver wondered whether the best way to summarise him was that he was Old Jack with a clean slate. He never had nightmares. He would never lapse into dark silences. Memories made people. He had always known it, ever since Jack woke up over a month ago, but it was as clear as ever, during that moment when he lay next to Jack exactly like they had done for years beforehand. The difference was no less real than if Jack was a different person standing in a different point in space-time.Jack knew this too, from a different perspective. He realised it in a way that only reinforced his strange jealousy over a father or older brother who had died.They lay in the back seat of the jeep after abandoning their fire to the wind. Twenty minutes ago, Jack had loomed over Oliver, bare-chested but with his pants and boots still on, and spent many long, torturous minutes licking him, thrusting his tongue deep into Oliver's heat. He had done it for so long and with such intensity that Oliver had been on the brink of begging for more.Afterwards, after he had his fill of Oliver and then filled Oliver in turn, Jack lay on his side with his back pressed against the seat back, curled around Oliver who faced away. He cocooned Oliver in his arms and legs.They were parked against the mountain face. Unable to find any shelter nearby, it was a night they decided to spend in the jeep. They were near the base of the mountain and the cold wasn’t so unbearable that they needed a fire or a working thermostat throughout the night. They were only a day away from reaching Olympus.That day, they had passed terrain with less snow and trees trying on a deeper shade of green. Jack had stared at small clumps of flowers, yellow ones that Oliver told him were weeds, that grew amongst the green. He found it bizarre that people had the power to decide that such marvellous little things were pests. Now, the wind steadily died down and the world was silent around the jeep, dark and still, like the snow and the mountain and everything else had dropped away and the jeep was floating through the darkness of space.Jack propped his head up on his arm so he would have a better look at Oliver. From there, he could see the curve of Oliver’s jaw. He saw a curl near his forehead. He tried to stare for as long as he could without touching him, as though it were a little game or a test of endurance. To help distract himself, he stretched out an arm and groped about on the floor of the jeep for Oliver’s glasses which must have fallen off. He found them. Oliver held out his hand, a little drowsily, but Jack brought them close to his own face and tried them on. The world was instantly blurry. There were only shapes.‘Why do you wear these?’ Jack asked.Oliver glanced over his shoulder, a little surprised. Almost amused. ‘My eyesight is poor. I read too much when I was young. Those help me see better.’ He watched Jack squinting and frowning through the thin, black frames. ‘What you’re seeing when you wear them is how I see the world when I don’t wear them.’Jack took them off and stared at them in wonder. Sometimes it was like there was no difference between what people could do and what Oliver had told him that the gods could do. He also wondered about the world through Oliver's eyes. It seemed sad to him, suddenly, that the world should be so shapeless and distant to Oliver when he awoke in the morning, before he had the chance to put those on.He then carefully slid the glasses over Oliver’s face and settled them gently against his nose. For some reason, seeing Oliver wearing them gave him a sort of comfort. Perhaps it was because that was how Oliver had looked when Jack first came into the world. Oliver’s face, like that, was the first thing he had ever seen.Oliver was surprised at the tenderness of his touch. He stared at Jack’s face for a few moments before turning back to face the front of the jeep. He reached down to pull the blankets up a little further over their bodies. Jack, sensing what he wanted, complied. He covered them both and pulled Oliver in closer. He felt all the places along Oliver’s body that touched his. He felt like he could fold his body around Oliver’s completely and there would still be more of him to spare.‘Why am I so big?’ he asked sleepily.‘What do you mean?’‘Your body is small. It’s nice.’Oliver had to rein in a sudden smile. ‘I’m perfectly average. You’re just… very tall.’Jack remembered how huge he felt in the cave surrounded by others. When he wanted nothing more than to disappear, he had stuck out horribly. He had loomed and people had looked up at him.Oliver waited, sensing Jack was on the point of asking something.‘Do you… do you like it?’‘That you’re big?’‘Yes.’He ran a hand over Jack’s huge arms. He felt the wide expanse of Jack’s chest behind him. He thought of how he could spot Jack from a mile away. He thought of how he felt like he could lose himself in Jack and forget. Forget Kindle. Forget his past. Forget everything. Nothing could get past Jack.‘Yes,’ Oliver said quietly.Jack fell asleep feeling pacified at least on that count.The next morning, he tried to prepare himself for the reality of what would happen at the end of the next day. They would reach their town, which Jack pictured as a flat, open plain filled with streets intersecting at right angles and houses and shops in rows. And Oliver would leave him. As much as he tried to accept, it didn’t seem like it would really happen. They sounded like words. Like the gods. An idea in Oliver’s head that wasn’t real. Even though Jack knew they were real. Oliver’s decision to leave him. The gods. All of it.‘Will there be other people like you in Olympus?’ Jack asked.‘Like me?’ Oliver asked with a quick glance in the rear-view mirror.Jack knew he probably wouldn’t be able to word it properly. He just wanted confirmation, in some small way, that there was no one else on Earth that he would ever want as much has he wanted Oliver.‘People I want to be with. Like I want to be with you.’Another strange question. Oliver tried to understand it even as he felt another sharp tug of guilt at the way Jack had phrased it.‘Before… before me, you wanted to be with women.’
Women.
A vague picture came to him. Softness and curves. Just enough for him to know what the word meant. Not enough for anything else.Oliver watched him, realising his pulse had picked up just a little. The look on Jack’s face was one of concentration.‘Do you… feel anything? Remember anything?’‘No. I don’t know.’He lapsed into a thoughtful silence.‘Maybe I’d have to see how they moved.’‘How they moved?’‘I like how you move.’Silence fell between them. Small, hopeful shoots of grass and shrubs rolled by beneath the tires and a weak yellow light streamed through the clouds. To their left, the mountain stretched out into a valley of trees.Oliver’s heart was beating loudly again. Jack was Old Jack without a filter. Without anything holding back his words. And so Oliver, eyes darting to the rear-view mirror and back, asked his question with the odd sensation that he was taking advantage of something.‘How do I move?’ he asked, trying to sound off-hand.Jack tried to articulate. ‘Slowly,’ he said. ‘No, more like… carefully. Like... like you’re moving underwater.’Only that morning, Oliver had taken him to a small, bubbling creek to wash their breakfast things. It was warm enough that Jack was able to slip off his glove and put his hand in the water – chilly but not freezing – and moved it about in fascination. He was still thinking about that when he answered and he didn’t seem to notice how a hint of colour had touched Oliver’s cheeks.If Oliver spent any length of time thinking about it, he knew he would lose all resolve. He would cave and tell Jack to stay with him and forget all about his decision to spend time alone to grieve for Old Jack. To spare the new Jack from the mess that was his life. To return Jack to the woman with whom he belonged in the first place.He didn’t know what their past few days together meant. Only that it felt, to him, like he had slipped and fallen. As much as it looked like he had been taken and used physically by Jack, he knew, deep down, that it had been the other way around. He had used Jack, and those past few days, as a final goodbye.Still, he didn’t think about it. He didn’t think about it, or Kindle’s implicit threat that Oliver shouldn’t leave him, or the way Jack’s eyes had looked in the darkness of the jeep the previous night.He gripped the steering wheel. Only a few more hours.Later that day, when they stopped for a midday meal, a small mistake was made that turned into something bigger. Oliver was packing their things away into the jeep and Jack had walked a little further out until the mountain gave way beneath his feet. It rolled on, dotted with trees, until it met something silvery and sparkling.A creek. No, a river. The word came to him when he saw it. A river was like a creek but bigger; wider and longer and stronger. Though he knew how important it was that they get to Olympus, he wondered whether there was a possibility that they might be able to drive near it or even alongside it. He tried to imagine how it would look flashing by his window, reflecting the sun. He could only imagine the kinds of birds and creatures he might see that lived near it. Things that Oliver had told him about. He thought it even might help keep his mind off what would happen when they left the mountain behind. He turned and headed back to the jeep.‘Oliver?’He didn’t seem to have heard. Jack took a few steps closer.‘Ollie, do you think we could –?’Oliver suddenly spun around and the look in his eyes made Jack stop short.‘Don’t call me that.’Jack blinked. There was an iciness in Oliver’s face he hadn’t seen before. He was briefly stunned.‘Why?’‘Just – just don’t do it.’Oliver walked back to the fire and stamped it out. Jack stared, feeling his anxiety pulsing through him as well as a dangerous kind of defiance.‘Why not?’Oliver turned to glare. Jack tried to hold his own.‘You never tell me anything,’ he said suddenly, choosing that moment of all moments to bring it up again. He felt like he was creeping precariously close to the edge of something. ‘You never tell me anything that matters. About me. Or you.’‘Just leave it, Jack,’ Oliver warned.‘No,’ Jack insisted, surprising even himself.Oliver stared.‘Tell me why you don’t want me to – to call you that,’ Jack insisted, with only a slight falter. He hoped he sounded braver than he felt.Surely this, surely this small part of himself, Oliver could give him.Oliver tried to quell the strange and painful mix of emotions that had come to the surface, sudden and hot, when he heard Jack call him Ollie. He knew it was irrational. He knew Jack didn’t know any better. So he tried to take a breath.‘Kindle calls me that,’ he said, his voice sounding a touch more like himself. ‘So I don’t – I don’t like it when anyone else does.’ He hoped Jack would leave it there.But Jack remembered. He remembered the night he awoke more clearly than things that had happened even the previous week. He remembered every word of what Oliver had said to him.
Jack? Jack can you hear me?

It’s me. It’s Ollie.
‘He used to call you that too,’ Jack said, almost to himself. ‘Old Jack. Otherwise you wouldn’t have said it that night.’Oliver needed a few moments before he understood which night Jack was referring to. Then he stared helplessly. How on Earth could he explain to Jack why that name was Old Jack’s alone, even more than it was Kindle’s?‘That’s because –’ he stammered. ‘It’s hard to explain.’‘I want to know.’‘We should get going or we won’t reach Olympus by nightfall.’Oliver averted his gaze and walked past Jack towards the jeep, ears ringing.‘If I was him, you would stay.’The words were again said with that same mixture of defiance and uncertainty. They were enough to make Oliver stop and turn. Jack hadn’t moved and his face was angled towards Oliver slightly, hands in fists.‘What?’‘If I was Old Jack, you would stay with me. You wouldn’t leave him with Elise. It’s because I don’t remember anything that you don’t want me like you wanted him.’Oliver’s stomach churned. The words were bare and simple. And true.‘Jack –’‘I can try to remember,’ said Jack abruptly. Quietly. Like all of his defiance had melted away. ‘I can try… I can try to be like him again.’Something threatened to bubble up from the depths. Oliver tried to keep it down.‘We have to go.’‘Oliver –’‘I said we have to go. Get in the jeep.’‘Please let me stay with you.’‘I can’t.’‘Why not?’‘Jack, please just leave it.’‘Tell me why not!’And then it finally broke the surface.‘Because you’re not him!’ Oliver snapped, his voice louder than Jack had ever heard before. ‘You’re right! Every time I look at you, I keep thinking that maybe there’s a chance I can - I can find him again, somewhere in there. But you’re not him. You’re someone else. I want him. Do you understand?’His tone, his eyes, his mouth, even his hands; all imploring and angry at the same time. Angry at himself. At Kindle. But all of it was directed, in that moment, at Jack.Jack, who stared at him, feeling like the ground had dropped out from beneath him. He had always suspected, a small voice had always, always told him so. But the words pierced him regardless. It was strange to think that the idea of driving beside a river had given him so much hope only moments ago.‘I love you,’ he said, unhappy to hear that his tone had dropped into one of sheepishness.Oliver clenched his teeth and his breath came out into the air in a small burst of steam.‘Stop saying that! You don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t know anything else but me. There’s more to the world than me and – and those awful people in the cave.’‘Old Jack used to love you as well,’ Jack tried, his voice getting weaker. ‘You said he –’‘But he saw the world first. He saw even more of it than I did.’Another spike of jealousy; the worst one yet. Jack was about to say he would see the world too if that’s what it took to stay by Oliver’s side.‘And it took him years to want me,’ Oliver went on, without giving him a chance. ‘Years! It didn’t just… just happen like this.’A small whirl of confusion. ‘Why did it take him years?’Oliver looked at him in exasperation as though he had completely missed the point.‘He – it doesn’t matter why. He was… confused –’‘I’m not confused,’ Jack interjected, his voice suddenly strong again.‘That’s not what –’‘I’m not confused. I love you. Only you. I want you all the time.’‘Get in the jeep.’‘Oliver –’‘Get in the fucking jeep!’It was the first time Jack had ever heard him swear. Jack stared at him in shock. Oliver’s face was flushed and his eyes were fiery. Jack obeyed.They drove for hours in silence. Jack was too afraid to say anything else. And Oliver didn’t once look in the rear-view mirror. The jeep moved slowly over an uneven terrain of tall grasses and shrubs.
‘Perhaps you’ve realised you never deserved Old Jack’s love in the first place. That you’re too broken for any kind of love. So Jack’s loss of memory is almost a sort of… validation?’
Oliver never deserved Old Jack’s love. Certainly not this Jack’s love. Kindle was right. Kindle was always right. But Jack didn’t know any better. He had just borne the brunt of Oliver’s anger without knowing where any of it came from.‘Are you hungry?’ Oliver asked. It had been a long time since lunch.Jack almost jumped. He looked at the side of Oliver’s face warily.‘No,’ he said.There was a short silence. Jack wondered if perhaps Oliver was going to pretend it didn't happen. He didn't know whether he wanted the same thing or not. He then remembered, out of nowhere, how Oliver had nervously asked him the same question once, in a den in the mountainside, right before Jack touched him for the first time.‘I’m sorry,’ Oliver then said, his tone soft and genuinely contrite. ‘For what I said. And for - for shouting.’Jack hesitated.‘You’re not angry anymore?’ he tried cautiously.‘No.’The relief that claimed Jack was immediate and powerful. The tight knot in his chest slowly loosened but didn’t go away completely. Oliver’s words reverberated painfully inside him.
You’re not him. You’re someone else. I want him.
Oliver, meanwhile, was thinking of all of Jack’s questions that had gone unanswered over the weeks.‘I know it’s hard when I don’t tell you things,’ Oliver said carefully. ‘It’s just that… there are some things that are really hard for me to talk about.’Jack tried to understand why that might be. He thought back to his single trauma. The men and the guns and the shouting. The pain that still lingered in his ribs. He didn’t like thinking about it, certainly not talking about.‘I think I understand,’ he replied. ‘It’s okay.’Oliver looked at him then in surprise. Jack’s hair fell about his huge shoulders. A body made even larger by his many layers. Long legs folded up to fit behind the seat in front. His eyes were out the window. It was a moment of uncharacteristic maturity and empathy; a trait that Old Jack had never even had. The look on Jack’s face made him Oliver feel a rush of love that he didn’t anticipate.
I like how you move.
Jack, meanwhile tried to put his new jumble of feelings into words. ‘Maybe if I stayed with you,’ he said quietly, trying again, his tone caught somewhere between hope and dejection, ‘maybe you could… show me how to be more like him.’He didn’t expect Oliver to reply, but the silence managed to hurt him anyway.The air tasted and felt different the closer they got to the mountain. Oliver explained that it was because they were driving not walking and they could sense the shifts in the altitude more drastically. Closer to sea level, he explained, the air was thicker. More breathable.It was also sweeter. Jack got out of the car at the edge of dusk and breathed it in. He smelled new smells like earth and moss and something even more pungent and sweet like wood-rot. They had stopped the jeep on a short incline that levelled off a bit before dropping away again. There was a line of pine trees to their right, and another cluster of them below. The land was rugged and uneven and covered in bristly pale grass. Here, snow only dappled the landscape in small patches.As he often did, Jack wandered away, still within sight of Oliver. It amazed him at how unforgivingly uniform colours could be. Further up the mountain everything was always white and blue. Ground and sky. Now it was all green. And then all thoughts of uniformity flew out of his head when he looked at the sky, where streaks of orange and red cut through the dark violet swathe that covered the world.When he took a few steps further away, he saw a small configuration of something on the floor. A pile of smooth, perfect stones, each no bigger than his palm, all piled atop one another in a sort of pyramid shape that was about a foot tall. He was intrigued. They were the same rocks that he had found further up the mountain; the ones that Oliver assured him hadn’t been designed to such perfection by anything other than the forces of nature. So perhaps the pyramid shape they were arranged in also owed to chance. He crouched down and picked up the stone at the top of the pile. Ovular, grey-black and quite beautiful, with a single bright streak of ochre running through the centre. Perfection marred by something that only heightened its beauty.‘Like you,’ Jack said softly, speaking to Oliver. He imagined the look on Oliver’s face when he told him so. He always liked to see the way Oliver reacted when he said things like that.There was another similar pyramid shape not far from him. He got up and started walking towards it. After he took a few steps, there was a gap in the trees to his left. And he saw something which confused him a great deal. Small twinkling lights he was used to seeing above, not below. He then realised in a moment of clarity that he was looking at the lights of Olympus. They were so close. They would be there in no time, in another hour perhaps. The excitement and despair gripped him as one. Then he heard Oliver shouting.And then he fell.Moments ago, Oliver stood towards the rear of the jeep, tipping the contents of the final barrel in through the nozzle. He kept an eye on Jack for a few seconds before turning back to the drum. He also breathed in the same scent of forest; earth and wood. He heard crickets and tree branches moving in the wind. He thought of everything Jack knew, and everything he didn’t.And then the world stopped. The wind stopped, as did the smells and the sounds. Everything was mute. Frozen. His own body was immobile, the fuel was in a frozen liquid state between drum and nozzle. He couldn’t breathe, his heart couldn’t pump blood. But he was alive. And he knew what was coming.‘Ollie,’ said a high, pleasant voice.Oliver stared at his hand holding the drum – the place he had been staring when everything was frozen – but he could still see Kindle in his mind’s eye, in a sort of foreground space of black that had appeared. Kindle was a large serpentine creature, with a fish-like body and gills and scales, shiny and icy-blue. He swam slowly back and forth across the black foreground of Oliver’s vision.‘Do you like it?’ Kindle asked, though no part of his body moved in order to accommodate speech. ‘It’s like I’m moving through water, isn’t it? Jack, for one, seems to like that sort of thing. I found that quite endearing.’There was not much Oliver could do but wait for Kindle to unfreeze time. It had happened before, on a handful of occasions, and rarely boded well. He prayed Jack was alright.‘You’ve forgotten something, Ollie.’Oliver’s mind raced. He felt a chill that he couldn’t possibly feel in the frozen state of time. What had he forgotten?‘You were so careful, further up the mountain, to warn Jack about crevasses. But you’ve been so preoccupied lately with your silly decision to leave him that you forgot to warn him about something very similar.’Crevasses? But they were far from areas of thick snowfall. There was no way that something like a crevasse –And then he realised.‘Trapping pits have come a long way,’ Kindle said lightly. ‘The Javano do a marvellous job hiding them. Elk and deer don’t stand a chance, if they’re unlucky enough to wander too close. A rather hideous death, being impaled on the skewers at the base. Trouble is, they’re so well camouflaged that people rarely see them. The only thing that stops your own kind from wandering over one are the markers. You know, the little pyramids of stones that the hunters leave to warn others.’Even without being able to draw breath or feel blood pound, Oliver’s fear was able to take over. He wanted to make a noise, any kind of noise. He wanted to beg for Kindle’s help, to call out to Jack. Anything.‘He didn’t know what the little stones meant, Ollie. In fact, he wandered over the pit because he wanted to look at them more closely. Lovely little irony there, isn’t it? And here’s the best part. He was doing it for you. The stones reminded him of you. Or so I gathered from the strange little thing he mumbled to himself.’Oliver tried to ignore the way that Kindle used past tense. He told himself that Jack was fine. There was still time.‘I assume if you could speak you would be rather willing to make some sort of deal. Am I right?’
Yes! Please!
‘I loathe unfinished arcs,’ said the slippery, glossy blue creature, its voice sharpening. ‘You are not to leave him when you return to Olympus. Do you understand? I will give you just enough time to reach him if you make that promise.’
Okay! Okay, anything! Please…
‘Though, I should warn you, I might not be able to time the unfreeze properly. I’ve never had to do it with so much precision before. Better run, my darling Ollie. Good luck.’And the world unfroze. Crickets and wind and the smell of earth. The drum of gas fell to the floor, fuel gurgling out of its mouth. Oliver bolted, shouting Jack’s name.
‘Jack!’
Jack turned. And at that same moment, he fell.In the moment the ground gave way beneath him, Jack remembered how similar the feeling was to when Oliver had yelled at him. Though he only had a split-second to feel it, it gave him the distinct impression, both times, that he had only been luck to have found ground strong enough to support him thus far, and that he was always destined to fall eventually.In fact, Kindle hadn’t timed it properly. If Jack hadn’t turned, he wouldn’t have had anything to hold on to. But his arms flung outwards and he grabbed what he could; the tough, roots-heavy shrubs and grass at the edge of the pit. The walls weren’t completely vertical, which allowed Jack to scramble for a foothold of some kind as he slid, but each time he tried, he only felt crumbling dirt. He craned his neck over his shoulder and saw darkness and wooden stakes and he felt panic and nausea and unreality in one hit. He was sure it was a nightmare of some kind, and that he would wake and Oliver would slowly explain to him what the dream meant and why he had it.Oliver came to a skidding halt in front of him and Jack, through his panic, saw his face and the hands trying to pull him back up. But he was too heavy. And the shrubs were leaning and groaning and about to snap.‘I'm falling!’‘Jack! It’s okay, it’s okay, I’ve got you. Just – just get a hold of something with your feet.’‘There’s nothing!’‘Don’t let go, okay? You’ll be fine! Just try to pull up.’Jack grunted and strained.‘Don’t let go!’ Oliver warned, his voice steady and strong.And somehow, through sheer force of will, with the grace of the surrounding shrubbery and the strength of Oliver’s grip, Jack scrambled back up over the edge of the pit. Oliver thought he heard kindle sigh somewhere above him, as though disappointed, and wondered whether he had any hand in Oliver’s momentary strength in having been able to pull Jack to safety.They sat at the edge of the pit, Oliver clinging to Jack and panting, and the silence of the air was punctuated by the steadily crumbling of the dirt that Jack had disturbed. It took Jack a few confused seconds to notice that Oliver’s grip on his back and shoulders were vice-like. And that he was trembling.‘Oliver?’Hot tears swam before Oliver’s eyes. Over their close call, a close call that was utterly Oliver's fault and utterly stupid and unnecessary and could so easily have ended in tragedy, exactly as Kindle liked. But the tears also came from everything else. From their month on the mountain. For his loss and love of Old Jack. His grief and his desire and his love, surely, his love for Jack as well. This Jack. And the quiet despair and relief over the promise he had made to Kindle.Jack remembered how strong Oliver’s voice had been when he was pulling him up. It was like that façade broke cleanly in two right after Jack surfaced. He allowed himself the thought that perhaps, this time, the tears were for him.‘I’m okay,’ he said in slight bemusement. His instincts and his very real recent panic told him to scramble far away from the big mouth that had opened up in the Earth. He wanted to get away from it and he wanted to make sure Oliver was okay. He tried to pull back to look at Oliver’s face. But Oliver held on, face buried in Jack’s neck.‘Oliver –‘‘I’ll stay with you,’ Oliver said suddenly, his voice shaking and slightly muffled.Jack barely heard him. He was still reeling from the brief but powerful adrenaline rush.‘What?’‘I’m staying with you. When we get back. Okay? I’m not leaving you anywhere.’Before the words even had a chance to sink in properly, Jack forgot about the pit and about the perfect stone in his pocket he had picked up to show Oliver.Oliver sat with him in the backseat and his training kicked in. He inspected Jack's face and hands and arms closely, then his ribs, through his clothes, to make sure he hadn’t hurt himself. Jack had withstood as much of it as he could, a guilty part of him even enjoying the fussing, before he had to pull Oliver into a kiss, the words Oliver had mumbled to him earlier still echoing in his mind.And only a few minutes later, he held Oliver beneath him and wondered whether every thrust was reaching a place so deep that it was pushing out those sounds from Oliver’s throat without Oliver even being conscious of it. He licked and sucked at Oliver’s neck and heard Oliver’s moans rising in a crescendo.Then Jack stopped suddenly. He hovered and stared. Oliver blinked, trying to see clearly. Jack was still inside him, fully, and his body clenched and released around Jack's length.‘What’s wrong?’ he gasped. Perhaps he had missed something when he checked Jack for injuries earlier. ‘Does something hurt?’Jack shook his head. He didn’t know how to tell Oliver that he was simply overwhelmed. He knew that perhaps he had his bizarre, split-second near-miss at the trapping pit to thank for the fact that Oliver was his and might even continue to be his, but he couldn't be sure.Oliver sensed it. He lifted up on an elbow and gently pushed Jack backwards until he was sitting up against the seat back. And Oliver carefully swung a leg over his lap. He reached behind him and eased himself over Jack, letting out a slow, mournful sigh. Jack watched as if entranced. He watched Oliver come and the sight finished him off only seconds afterwards.They were only an hour away from Olympus and neither felt the need to hurry back.Jack's grip on him was tight again. As they lay there in the quiet of the jeep, Jack was just about ready to drift off. But Oliver was turning things over in his mind. Kindle had wanted this. It meant they were still in danger. But a part of him couldn’t help but be relieved. Happy, even. He wondered what it meant.There were things he couldn’t talk to Jack about. Things about his own past that he had been able to tell Old Jack only because he knew it would be the first and last time he would ever have to relieve the trauma. But there were some things he could tell Jack. Things that Jack probably should have been told from the beginning. He owed him that much.‘Jack. I want to tell you about why you lost your memory.’Jack’s eyes sprang open. Oliver’s breath caught in his throat at the sight of them. The blue that was like fire and ice. They stared straight through him, as though seeing it all already. Oliver swallowed and wondered where to begin. He was silent for several moments.Beside him, Jack’s heart was in his mouth.And then, slowly and carefully, Oliver told him everything about Captain Jack Moller. Everything, including the snow leopard.