Riley/Ethan: Pavlov's Bells
May. 2nd, 2004 02:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleIt's disjointed and I'm sure it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense but if I'm going to get my presentation done at all I need to get this finished in my head. Also it means that at some point I can give a decent amount of time and research to the first attempt at this (a totally different story about haunted Mayan ruins)
Title: Pavlov's Bells
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Riley/Ethan
Rating: edging into R
Notes: Late entry for the Rileyficathon for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jacklemmon. Written in sheer frustration when my other, gen attempt stalled at 2000 words.
Summary: A day after Sunnydale he's back in uniform and on a military flight to Belize, and three weeks after that he's in a dirty room above the post office in Punta Gorda with a girl on her knees beside him.
A day after Sunnydale he's back in uniform and on a military flight to Belize, and three weeks after that he's in a dirty room above the post office in Punta Gorda with a girl on her knees beside him, fangs buried in his right forearm because the veins in the left are starting to blacken and collapse. It's unbelievable that the doctors at base don't notice the scars, which means that they choose to ignore them or that it's on file somewhere that Riley Finn's a vampire groupie.
He has to go every night, or at least as many times a week as he can get away. When he doesn't his hands shake all the next day -
("What's up with that?"
"What's… oh, that? Took up smoking last year. Really is as tough to kick as they say." He's never smoked a cigarette in his life. His mom, her own mother died of lung cancer, she was always against it. Mom, he thinks, I'm sorry, I'll come visit as soon as I have leave. He suddenly misses Joyce.
"Thought it might be PTSD."
He means post-traumatic stress disorder. He means Buffy. "You're a riot, Graham.")
- and what good is he with a gun in his hand if he can't hold it steady? He could kill one of his own team, and that thought keeps him up nights. Two days without going to that room and the shaking gets worse and if there was a methadone for this he'd take it but he can't risk his people. So he goes back and the day after he's as clear-headed as he's ever been.
He works out a lot. Gets plenty of red meat, takes as many iron supplements as the sickbay will dole him out. He tells himself that it's only because they're deep undercover that he doesn't call his parents, doesn't call Buffy.
This isn't about her. He wonders if it ever was.
**
He doesn't spend much time in the labs. Briefings are given in the above-ground part of the complex and the research division reminds him uncomfortably of drugs in his food and a chip wedged under his skin.
This is how he goes two months without knowing Ethan Rayne is even there.
"Oh, look who it is." And the voice is familiar so he turns down the hallway and it's the man who turned Giles into a demon on Buffy's birthday, dressed in badly-fitting khakis and slouched against one of the regulation grey walls in a standard cell. The overhead lights glint off the reinforced glass that separates them.
"Rayne."
He pushes off from the wall, ambles the few feet to the glass. Riley remembers the brig, how he must have paced across it a thousand times, the claustrophobia and impotent rage at being confined. Rayne just gives him a sly up-and-down look and a cool smile and says, "Well. How have you been?"
The cell's eight foot square, at most. Thin cot, head, couple of quarter-sized holes high up in the partition and from the little that Giles told him this guy's a menace but he's not Hannibal fucking Lecter. "You've been here for more than a year?"
"Is that how long it's been?" Not fazed at all. Riley thinks he saw a flicker of something (anger? surprise?) in his eyes but it could just be this light.
"Ah, Finn," Doctor Roberts says, coming around the corner with a clipboard. "Were you looking for me?"
Ethan silently slips back to the bed, sitting down, knees pulled up beneath him.
Riley has to struggle to remember why he's down here. "My team brought in a new breed of Hostile last night," he says. "I was interested in the chromosomal analysis. We think it might have been a nesting female."
Roberts hmm's, flipping through his papers. "I think those results are back in the lab. I'm going to be busy with Hostile One-eight-six for a while, but Janice should be able to get you everything you need." He beams his friendly, vacant smile and unclips the cell's passkey.
"He's one-eight-six?" Riley asks before he can remind himself that he's back in the military and he doesn't ask those kind of questions, and once he's said that he can't stop the rest of it. "But he's a human."
"Oh, yes," Roberts agrees, his face all but shining with enthusiasm. "I've been doing extensive testing on individuals with his abilities, this so-called magic. It would be an incredible resource to harness."
Riley stares at the man in the glass cage, puts together the shaved head and the scar that he can see now that he's looking for it and the fact that Ethan's still here when someone who can turn someone into a Fyarl demon should have no problem with a Harry Houdini. "There's a chip in his brain."
Roberts slides the card down through the reader in the wall. "You have a degree in Psychology, don't you, Lieutenant? You should take a look at some of our results. I'm sure you'd find them fascinating."
He does. He watches Ethan docilely let himself be strapped to a table, and later he takes the thick file upstairs and reads until it's time for his shift the next day. His hands shake, for a couple of reasons.
**
"Is it boys or girls?" Ethan asks, the third or fourth time Riley finds himself outside the cell. "The vampires."
The raw skin beneath the bandaid on his arm starts to itch. If he was paranoid, if he didn't know that Ethan is physically incapable of so much as levitating a pencil without Roberts getting permission in triplicate, he'd think it was a hex.
"I don't know what you're talking about." The cell is almost certainly wired. "I have to go."
"Stop by any time," Ethan calls after him. "I'm almost always here."
**
"Ripper went for the girls. Most of them were out of Soho, on the game before they got turned. Knew what they were doing."
Roberts encourages Riley's interest in his pet project. He says that Ethan (although he says the number instead of the name) doesn't talk to many people.
Ethan talks. Riley stands or sits outside the glass and listens. This way it's only Ethan who's admitting that he's ever let a vampire bite him, only Ethan with dangerous addictions in his past. He talks quietly. No reason to make it easier for the hidden microphones than they have to. Riley leans forward to catch the words.
"The boys, though," Ethan says, "there was always something a little more hungry about them."
His regular girl calls him something in Spanish when he says he wants a guy, and then cowers away from him so fast that he tosses her a couple of dollars anyway. The vampire who takes him into the dirty back room is, he supposes, okay looking as far as men go.
It's the first time that he ever comes just from the bloodletting.
**
"Was it sexual?" His voice is schooled, detached. "What we were talking about yesterday. The vampires."
Ethan looks at him like he's gone crazy. "Of course it was sexual. Why else would we do it?"
Then Roberts comes to take him for more tests. Riley and his team stalk a group of demons through the rainforest until dawn. There's a note in his room when he gets back, telling him that Ethan swallowed his tongue during one of the rounds of ECT, and to not bother him with his interviews for a couple of days.
**
Even if they could speak openly, there are things he would never tell Ethan. It's strange enough hearing him talk about Giles (as a partner in crime, nemesis, lover, all roles Riley finds it difficult to imagine him playing); he would never tell him what happened with Buffy, just like he would never tell Graham about where he goes on the nights when he can get away, if he talked to Graham any more.
But he'd like to tell Ethan what he's learning (yeah, boys are better than girls, but the girl sucking him off while the guy takes the blood, that made him see stars) and what he's researching (exactly how the chip works, where Roberts keeps the pass card, the ancient Mayan ruins an hour away where he thinks there should be enough raw power for Ethan to get his magic back).
Too risky to say anything, so he lets Ethan talk and thinks about addictions, anarchy.
Title: Pavlov's Bells
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Riley/Ethan
Rating: edging into R
Notes: Late entry for the Rileyficathon for
jacklemmon. Written in sheer frustration when my other, gen attempt stalled at 2000 words.Summary: A day after Sunnydale he's back in uniform and on a military flight to Belize, and three weeks after that he's in a dirty room above the post office in Punta Gorda with a girl on her knees beside him.
A day after Sunnydale he's back in uniform and on a military flight to Belize, and three weeks after that he's in a dirty room above the post office in Punta Gorda with a girl on her knees beside him, fangs buried in his right forearm because the veins in the left are starting to blacken and collapse. It's unbelievable that the doctors at base don't notice the scars, which means that they choose to ignore them or that it's on file somewhere that Riley Finn's a vampire groupie.
He has to go every night, or at least as many times a week as he can get away. When he doesn't his hands shake all the next day -
("What's up with that?"
"What's… oh, that? Took up smoking last year. Really is as tough to kick as they say." He's never smoked a cigarette in his life. His mom, her own mother died of lung cancer, she was always against it. Mom, he thinks, I'm sorry, I'll come visit as soon as I have leave. He suddenly misses Joyce.
"Thought it might be PTSD."
He means post-traumatic stress disorder. He means Buffy. "You're a riot, Graham.")
- and what good is he with a gun in his hand if he can't hold it steady? He could kill one of his own team, and that thought keeps him up nights. Two days without going to that room and the shaking gets worse and if there was a methadone for this he'd take it but he can't risk his people. So he goes back and the day after he's as clear-headed as he's ever been.
He works out a lot. Gets plenty of red meat, takes as many iron supplements as the sickbay will dole him out. He tells himself that it's only because they're deep undercover that he doesn't call his parents, doesn't call Buffy.
This isn't about her. He wonders if it ever was.
**
He doesn't spend much time in the labs. Briefings are given in the above-ground part of the complex and the research division reminds him uncomfortably of drugs in his food and a chip wedged under his skin.
This is how he goes two months without knowing Ethan Rayne is even there.
"Oh, look who it is." And the voice is familiar so he turns down the hallway and it's the man who turned Giles into a demon on Buffy's birthday, dressed in badly-fitting khakis and slouched against one of the regulation grey walls in a standard cell. The overhead lights glint off the reinforced glass that separates them.
"Rayne."
He pushes off from the wall, ambles the few feet to the glass. Riley remembers the brig, how he must have paced across it a thousand times, the claustrophobia and impotent rage at being confined. Rayne just gives him a sly up-and-down look and a cool smile and says, "Well. How have you been?"
The cell's eight foot square, at most. Thin cot, head, couple of quarter-sized holes high up in the partition and from the little that Giles told him this guy's a menace but he's not Hannibal fucking Lecter. "You've been here for more than a year?"
"Is that how long it's been?" Not fazed at all. Riley thinks he saw a flicker of something (anger? surprise?) in his eyes but it could just be this light.
"Ah, Finn," Doctor Roberts says, coming around the corner with a clipboard. "Were you looking for me?"
Ethan silently slips back to the bed, sitting down, knees pulled up beneath him.
Riley has to struggle to remember why he's down here. "My team brought in a new breed of Hostile last night," he says. "I was interested in the chromosomal analysis. We think it might have been a nesting female."
Roberts hmm's, flipping through his papers. "I think those results are back in the lab. I'm going to be busy with Hostile One-eight-six for a while, but Janice should be able to get you everything you need." He beams his friendly, vacant smile and unclips the cell's passkey.
"He's one-eight-six?" Riley asks before he can remind himself that he's back in the military and he doesn't ask those kind of questions, and once he's said that he can't stop the rest of it. "But he's a human."
"Oh, yes," Roberts agrees, his face all but shining with enthusiasm. "I've been doing extensive testing on individuals with his abilities, this so-called magic. It would be an incredible resource to harness."
Riley stares at the man in the glass cage, puts together the shaved head and the scar that he can see now that he's looking for it and the fact that Ethan's still here when someone who can turn someone into a Fyarl demon should have no problem with a Harry Houdini. "There's a chip in his brain."
Roberts slides the card down through the reader in the wall. "You have a degree in Psychology, don't you, Lieutenant? You should take a look at some of our results. I'm sure you'd find them fascinating."
He does. He watches Ethan docilely let himself be strapped to a table, and later he takes the thick file upstairs and reads until it's time for his shift the next day. His hands shake, for a couple of reasons.
**
"Is it boys or girls?" Ethan asks, the third or fourth time Riley finds himself outside the cell. "The vampires."
The raw skin beneath the bandaid on his arm starts to itch. If he was paranoid, if he didn't know that Ethan is physically incapable of so much as levitating a pencil without Roberts getting permission in triplicate, he'd think it was a hex.
"I don't know what you're talking about." The cell is almost certainly wired. "I have to go."
"Stop by any time," Ethan calls after him. "I'm almost always here."
**
"Ripper went for the girls. Most of them were out of Soho, on the game before they got turned. Knew what they were doing."
Roberts encourages Riley's interest in his pet project. He says that Ethan (although he says the number instead of the name) doesn't talk to many people.
Ethan talks. Riley stands or sits outside the glass and listens. This way it's only Ethan who's admitting that he's ever let a vampire bite him, only Ethan with dangerous addictions in his past. He talks quietly. No reason to make it easier for the hidden microphones than they have to. Riley leans forward to catch the words.
"The boys, though," Ethan says, "there was always something a little more hungry about them."
His regular girl calls him something in Spanish when he says he wants a guy, and then cowers away from him so fast that he tosses her a couple of dollars anyway. The vampire who takes him into the dirty back room is, he supposes, okay looking as far as men go.
It's the first time that he ever comes just from the bloodletting.
**
"Was it sexual?" His voice is schooled, detached. "What we were talking about yesterday. The vampires."
Ethan looks at him like he's gone crazy. "Of course it was sexual. Why else would we do it?"
Then Roberts comes to take him for more tests. Riley and his team stalk a group of demons through the rainforest until dawn. There's a note in his room when he gets back, telling him that Ethan swallowed his tongue during one of the rounds of ECT, and to not bother him with his interviews for a couple of days.
**
Even if they could speak openly, there are things he would never tell Ethan. It's strange enough hearing him talk about Giles (as a partner in crime, nemesis, lover, all roles Riley finds it difficult to imagine him playing); he would never tell him what happened with Buffy, just like he would never tell Graham about where he goes on the nights when he can get away, if he talked to Graham any more.
But he'd like to tell Ethan what he's learning (yeah, boys are better than girls, but the girl sucking him off while the guy takes the blood, that made him see stars) and what he's researching (exactly how the chip works, where Roberts keeps the pass card, the ancient Mayan ruins an hour away where he thinks there should be enough raw power for Ethan to get his magic back).
Too risky to say anything, so he lets Ethan talk and thinks about addictions, anarchy.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Here off the rec in Enfaith's journal.
on 2004-07-06 05:36 pm (UTC)Re: Here off the rec in Enfaith's journal.
on 2004-07-06 05:39 pm (UTC)