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Title: Mutuality
Rating: PG-13 for some violence and darker musings
Pairing: Avon/Travis preslash. Yes. You read that right.
Disclaimer: don't own.
Summary: AU set just after Star One. If Avon and Travis never made it inside the base, and instead had to escape together after Blake sends everything to hell ... Put it this way. Anyone ever seen Enemy Mine?
A/N: Travis is more Travis1 than Travis2, despite timing. And this is crappy as hell, and I've never really revisited it, so I doubt it'll be continued.
It was nothing he would ever have expected, Travis mused, watching from above as the hunched figure of his rebel ally picked his torturous way over the lower plain. Oh, to die on Star One, that had never been in doubt. To face that bastard Blake and his motley crew, always a possibility. But to be shot down, by the tech, no less, before he'd even entered the base! To escape the destruction of Star One, only to discover that his ship was shared by a determined, armed, and very wounded rebel. That had been more of a surprise.
He should have killed Avon. Then and there. The ship was old, damaged. He'd known a crash was inevitable, had aimed for the nearest planet deliberately because of it. He would have had a difficult time surviving on his own, with his lazeron gun disabled by this very man. And certainly, the crash came closer to killing him than even Avon had. But not as close as it had come to killing the already injured rebel.
Maybe it had been the smile. That cold and confident grin, the humour the rebel seemed to find inherant in his own death as he lay bloodied and helpless in the wreakage, glaring up at Travis as he stood over him. Maybe he had felt a twinge, just the smallest hint of admiration for the man's courage. There had been few people lately in his life to show that kind of courage, the kind of strength he'd once associated with the finest of the Federation. Before Servalan disillusioned him, anyway.
To be honest, Travis didn't quite know why he had let the rebel live. He didn't know what strange urge had prompted him to try and help him. There were few medical supplies in the old ship, of course, and he'd used a lot on himself. And the wound ... the rebel shouldn't have lived. An open wound over broken ribs, preventing compression to staunch the flow ... He'd been forced to cauterize it with Avon's own weapon. And the surly tech had looked him straight in the eye as he did it, and laughed around the scream as he fainted. Travis had to admire him for that.
But all that was irrelevant. For whatever reason, their strange truce now existed. Their priorities were to survive as best they could, and make their way off this damned dustbowl of a planet. And that was proving ... difficult.
For days, once Avon was recovered enough for them to leave the dubious shelter of the crashed shuttle, they settled into their odd routine. During the day, Avon set the direction, slogging his slow, painful way over the foreign terrain, guided by some logic that Travis didn't understand, but accepted for lack of any alternative. Travis himself, being the only one armed, scouted around him for danger, keeping out of sight and making sure that if something came, at least one of them would survive, depending on which of them it happened on first.
As a rule, because of his greater health and mobility, it was Travis who invariably found water and food for the night, guiding Avon in to each fresh campsite whenever the sun was two hours from slipping under the horizon. What food either of them had managed to acquire during the trek was downed quickly, before Travis settled against a tree or boulder and allowed Avon to pull his tools from their disguised pockets and work on his arm until the light failed around them. It was a strange thing for the rebel tech to do, attempting to repair his enemy's weapon, but Travis could see, beneath the pain and pragmatism, the professional pride and curiosity of the man. It was something he could, in his own way, relate to. And he was not about to question the return of his weapon.
Avon, in pain, always bent to his task with single-minded absorption, so that each and every night, he only barely bothered to slip his tools back into their compartments before he tipped his head forward to sleep against Travis' shoulder. And every night, even though he knew the other man only slept against him from sheer exhaustion, Travis still wrapped the cool metal of his arm around Avon to draw him close, relishing without any specific attachment the first unforced human contact he'd shared in years. Avon, for his part, never complained or looked askance at him when, come dawn, he awoke encircled by metal.
It was on the third night out of the crash site that the curiously comfortable silence with which they'd surrounded themselves finally shattered. Perhaps it was because Avon, as he recovered slightly from his wound, or at least got used to it, was steadily regaining his personality from the pain. Or perhaps it was because Travis, after so long deprived, was softened enough by the steady contact that he let someting show through his usually stoic facade.
Whichever it was, when Avon's expertly wielded probe glanced off one of the cables of nerves that connected the prosthetic to his shoulder, Travis didn't stiffle the moan as he had the last couple of times this had happened. And Avon, his focus not nearly so all-consuming as it had been when he was fighting the greater pain of before, caught it.
Eyes flashing up in time to catch the flicker of something that was only partially pain as it passed over Travis' face, Avon stilled, magnetic gaze locking on and drawing Travis' eye. As he cautiously withdrew his hands, the wounded computer tech raised a slow, questioning eyebrow, and Travis, suddenly enraged at his unwitting admission of weakness, jerked his head away to stare blindly out over the dusk. Surprised, and unwillingly somewhat concerned, Avon cleared his dry, misused throat, and asked.
"Travis?"
Still furious, and conscious of a steadily deepening shame that he hadn't felt in years, the ex-Space Commander didn't answer. He remained staring away, and didn't notice Avon's gaze return to the open circuitry of his prosthetic arm, didn't see the confused, considering expression on the detached technician's face mutate into realisation and a slow, shockingly powerful surge of anger.
"I am a fool." The harsh, grating anger of the statement brought Travis' head around to stare incredulously at Avon's bowed head as he knelt beside him, at the hands that tightened convulsively around the probe. The rebel looked up at him, features locked impassive by rage. "I didn't think of it. I thought of the arm as mechanical."
Travis blinked. "It is."
"But connected to living tissue. Connected to you. I thought of circuits, but they're not. They're nerves. I have been playing around with someone's nerves." Though his voice was nearly as colourless as usual, not even Travis could miss the underpining of disgust.
He looked away again, his expression shifting from anger to resignation as he understood. "I wondered why it took so long." Avon raised a querying eyebrow. "Typically, disgust shows itself much quicker when people realise what I am."
"What, a psychotic, genocidal son of a bitch?" came the responding drawl. Travis turned a single flat, hard eye on him.
"You know what I mean."
Nettled, Avon shifted to square his knees combatively. "If you mean the arm, then disgust is not quite the word I would use."
"What would you say, then?" Travis snarled.
"At the minute, something along the lines of hatred. Who worked on you?"
Blinking at the non sequiter, Travis backed up his anger to try and reason that through. "What?"
"Who worked on your arm?" Avon repeated, flatly, impatiently.
"Numerous Federation neurosurgeons," Travis grated, equally impatient. "It took damage a lot."
Avon nodded, coldly. "Then should we ever get off this rock, I will need their names, and as much information as you have on their locations."
"What?" Travis was beyond confused, and that only made him angrier. "Why?"
"So I can kill them," was Avon's calm, measured response.
Travis stared. For once, he simply had no idea what to say. He knew this man was dangerous, had known it for a long time, at least intellectually. When Avon had threatened to torture him on Star One, there had been some doubt, but enough of him had thought it possible that he'd deemed it wiser to wait for a chance rather than scoff. Now, there was no doubt. The calm, implacable set of the other's face was the kind that could only be hiding true fury or hatred. Or pain. He'd seen men in pain who wore that look, too.
"Why?" The question was harsh, demanding.
Avon looked at him with eyes rinsed clear of any emotion. "Pain is acceptable. Shame is not."
Travis stared at him. He knew this man's record, as he knew the records of everyone who stood with Blake. Know thine enemy. If Avon truly believed what he was saying, then he shouldn't be alive, or at least still sane enough to say it. "How did you survive interrogation?" he whispered.
The smile Avon sent him was brilliant, painful in its intensity, terrifying beside the emptiness in his eyes. "By the time I reached interrogation, there was nothing in me that cared enough to feel shame," the computer tech replied, steadily, measuredly. A glimmer of humour reached his eyes, humour so black and bleak that it scarcely deserved the name. "A miscalculation that cost them their careers, I should imagine. But then, only puppeteers think to study the personal lives of their subjects. If they had thought to check, they would have known I wouldn't snap. After all, how can you break what is already broken?"
Travis swallowed. "You don't look broken to me." And I should know.
Avon tilted his head to one side, that wry twist to his mouth. "Death, of any kind, doesn't suit me." Involuntarily, Travis' eye was drawn to the wound hidden under shirt and bandage. The rebel followed it, then slid his eyes along the ex-Space Commander's prosthetic arm, to rest on his missing eye, and one eyebrow rose in challenge. Two of a kind.
Abruptly, something eased in Travis' chest, a tension that had gently strangled him for years slipping back a step or two, and a startled chuckle slipped past his defenses. Avon's wry smile broadened in response, cutting off Travis' shock at his own weakness before it began, and the chuckle became a laugh. Avon let out a little laugh of his own, and suddenly, without fully understanding why, they were laughing, loudly and almost raucously, harsh sounds that ripped the tension forcibly from their chests and tossed it in the dirt to die. It didn't last long. Travis was not a man naturally given to laughter, and in moments Avon's chest wound had him hunched over in racked agony from the exertion, but it did the job. Their comfortable silence, rudely shattered, slipped back around them with the twilight.
When he had recovered enough to do more than moan, Avon, conscious of the last of the failing light, closed over the bared circuitry of Travis' arm, and began to replace his tools. He ignored the trickle of blood that oozed gently from the corner of his mouth. It was happening with increasing regularity. But for some unspoken reason, for the first time, Travis didn't ignore it. Reaching out with his flesh and blood hand, the soldier brushed the red stain away firmly, but not harshly. Startled, Avon glanced up at him, but Travis' face was impassive. That challenging eyebrow was raised again, but Travis merely returned the stare, hand back by his side where it belonged, and after a moment Avon went back to his task, a glimmer of a wry smile lurking in the corner of his mouth. Neither of them said anything about it as Avon tipped his head forward to rest against Travis' shoulder, and sank like a stone into unconsciousness.
Wrapping the cool metal arm around the other man, Travis stared blindly out into the darkness for a long time, trying to ignore the knowledge that beat insistently at the inside of his skull. He couldn't deny it. He'd been a soldier too long not to recognise the truth, although recently the years spent with mutoid crews had dulled his sense of it somewhat. But Travis still knew. The man at his side was dying.
Slowly, in fits and bursts of pain, worsening as exhaustion took its inevitable toll, Avon's wounds were killing him. Either the press of rib against his lungs, or the infection from the burn, or the sheer fact of bloodloss, one or other of them would kill him. The day was going to come soon when Travis returned from scouting the route to find Avon curled motionless in the dust, or woke one morning to find that the metal of his prosthetic was warmer than the body it held. Avon knew it. He knew it. He'd known it since the crash, had taken a kind of perverse pleasure in delaying the inevitable.
What he hadn't known, had never thought to expect, was that somehow the knowledge would come to hurt. To have somehow reached that point in the seven days since he and the rebel had shot each other on Star One was impossible. To have abandoned the stark philosophy of years to care, even a little, for some sarcastic rebel was both unbelievable and incredibly stupid, something Travis knew should have been beyond him. But the fact remained that, in some forgotten part of himself that remembered what it was like to be truly human, he ached a little at the thought of what was coming.
And he no longer knew what he was supposed to do about that ache. He couldn't remember what it was like to actually care about losing someone. It had been there, once. He knew that. He knew that he'd felt pain, as a young commander, at the death of his men, pain he'd successfully hidden for the sake of his career. He knew, further back still, that he'd once had men he called friends, men it had hurt to lose. But the memories had faded. It had been so long.
Not knowing what to do, or even feel, made him predictably angry. Anger was familiar, something he knew what to do with. And, underneath it, came his precocious will to survive. Avon would die unless they either got off this planet, or found something on it they could use, and Travis probably wouldn't be far behind him, if only out of sheer boredom. If Avon had a reason for the direction he took, if there was any method remaining in his madness, then Travis would find out the next morning. Even if there wasn't, the intention hardened in him.
Tomorrow, he was going to find enough supplies to keep a man going for a couple of days, and he was going to leave Avon. At this pace, they would never get anywhere in time to do anything. If Avon was aiming for something, Travis would get there faster, and be able to bring back help. If there was nothing to aim for, then Travis fully intended to walk, and keep walking until this memory faded like all the others.
One way or another, he was not going to watch this man die.
