riptide_asylum (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
riptide_asylum) wrote2009-08-27 11:45 am
riptide_asylum) wrote2009-08-27 11:45 am
Entry tags:
"Good to Sea" (Out of the Dark, 1998)
Title: Good to Sea
Rating: PG
Summary: Either the least romantic anniversary in creation, or the most romantic one, depending on your perspective. Nick and Cody try to find their way back to the water.
In a hotel room in downtown Palo Alto, within walking distance of the Stanford University Medical Center, Cody Allen lay curled up on a queen-sized bed reading boat ads.
Earlier, he'd stocked the mini-bar, opened all the soaps in the bathroom, laid out the bathmat, hung his and Nick's jackets in the ample closet, and drawn the heavy dual-layered curtains against the daylight. Were it not for the fact that Nick was dry-heaving over the edge of the bed next to him, the afternoon would have been perfect.
Nick shook with the effort of bringing anything else up, the cords in his neck standing out under his skin. Cody extended a hand and then paused. Every time he'd touched Nick since he'd come out of surgery, Nick had managed a mute, tearful apology, then rolled over and thrown up.
This was not how Cody had expected to spend their anniversary.
Seventeen years to the day the two of them had taken possession of the Riptide and stared around them in a mixture of stunned pride and disbelief, before fucking each other's brains out on the floor of the salon, the wind blowing sea spray across their bodies through one of the broken windows.
And twenty-four years since they'd found each other again stateside, the day Cody had sat huddled in the bottom of a phone booth by the side of the Pacific Coast Highway, staring at the date on a stained and greasy newspaper trampled against the burning steel floor. Twenty-four years since he'd sat crying and hallucinating in the sun, staring down the barrel of his grandfather's service pistol. Twenty-four years since he'd put the gun down on the cracked, sandy ground outside, pushed himself to his knees, and found change enough in the coin return to call Nick.
Folding the paper back as quietly as possible, Cody winced as Nick began a fresh round of heaving into the wastebasket set nearby. Twenty hours earlier, Cody had squeezed Nick's hand, trusting his eyes and twenty-six years of history to say everything he couldn't as a squadron of nurses stole his best friend away. It was the only time in Cody's memory Nick had gone willingly to the OR.
In the nine hours that followed, Cody'd done a lot of thinking. First of all, he'd promised God that if he could just have Nick back, he'd call his mother without fail, every other Sunday. Then when a tired nurse paged him to the front desk and told him it'd be two more hours, easy, Cody'd amended his promise to include his cold and disapproving older sister, too. Anything.
He'd alternated between squirming in a hard-backed plastic chair and standing at the window, looking out over the hospital parking lot, staring into the past. At this point Cody felt he was an expert on hospital waiting rooms; the thought didn't strike him as being the least bit funny. Sitting, he'd skimmed through a trite military thriller written by someone who'd never been to Southeast Asia, and exchanged exactly 53 text messages with Murray. Keeping track of that number was one of the things that had kept him sane.
Cody quietly put the magazine down on the carpet and watched Nick try to sleep, curled up across from him on the hotel bed. His color was bad, pale with bright red spots high up on his cheeks, but at least he'd stopped throwing up.
Cody reached for Nick but stopped, his hand lying on the clean hotel sheets like a fallen bird. Getting Nick from Recovery to the hotel room was a period of time Cody would gladly tuck next to his Nam memories in the box he never opened. Nick was fine when he was motionless: in the wheelchair and on solid ground. The problems began anytime Cody moved the wheelchair or tried to pry Nick out of it. That's when the vomiting started.
Flowers, Cody thought, watching Nick's shallow, even breathing. The hotel lobby staff will likely be mollified by flowers.
Or they won't, was the next thought, and Cody found it refreshing that he didn't actually care. His fingers crept across the sheet toward Nick.
When Nick had finally confessed that he was getting the surgery, allowing the Army medical researchers to fill his battered, broken inner ears with the experimental counterweight tubes Cody had felt guilty with relief. Relief that there was something that could help Nick live aboard a boat again, relief that they could finally move out of the white-walled box in Pedro, and guilt that it meant Nick had finally given in.
Nick had fought the idea from the start. From the first time Colonel Harrington had mentioned participation in the project, while Nick lay weak and pale and nauseous in the Little Company of Mary Medical Center in Torrance (decently comfy chairs, free but terrible coffee, Cody thought automatically). Although Nick had been too sick to voice a protest, Cody'd known immediately what his partner's answer was, and with as much gumption as he'd dared, ordered Harrington to leave. Hell, it had taken Nick months to even admit something was wrong, but the third time he'd wound up hurling bile outside their stateroom, clinging to the floor for dear life, Cody'd made Nick talk, hounded him with threats of doctors brought aboard until the truth came out: every time the boat rocked, Nick's world spun. He'd been hiding the extent of his injuries from The Crash.
Memories of that day, their last case, arose in him unbidden and Cody rolled onto his back, eyes shut tight, swallowing hard. Jed's fucking Flying Service. He should have known. He should never have let Nick go up in something that wasn't the Mimi. For all her faults, the big pink rustbucket knew how to crash. Not like that ultralight whatever the fuck it was that dropped out of the sky like an ugly and expensive stone, leaving Cody staring at a radar screen full of nothing much.
It had taken four EMTs to keep him from the crash site on Fisherman's Key. Four of them pinning him, four of them threatening all manner of unpleasant drugs while Cody screamed and fought and--
He rolled over on one hip, rolling himself into the present with an effort, staring down at Nick's limp, inert body. Quiet for the moment, Nick lay fetal and motionless, curled in on himself, one hand outstretched. Cody reached for his fingers, aching for even the slightest touch, the smallest reassurance, then halted just milimeters away from contact.
This was the worst part, once he'd managed to get Nick up the elevator and into the room. as soon as Cody touched him, Nick threw up. That first time and every time since. It had broken Cody in ways he couldn't even begin to articulate. Touch was their language. When the nightmares came, Nick always rubbed his shoulder, or inscribed a "clear" sign on his palm, his chest. The slightest touch had the power to raise Cody up, bring him back from the darkness, quelling his fears.
Nick stirred with a murmur, and opened his eyes, meeting Cody's for the first time in nearly a day. "Love you, baby," he whispered.
"Love you too, Nick," Cody murmured. Hope grew like a rare and precious flower at Nick's smile, then Nick frowned as if remembering a forgotten errand, dragged himself back over to the edge of the bed and hung onto the plastic wastebasket for dear life. Cody availed himself of the opportunity to check the back of Nick's neck and startled at the heat there. Nick was burning up.
His heart filled with fear, Cody rolled gracefully off the bed, retrieving his phone on the way to the bathroom. Nick hadn't kept down even water in close to four hours. Shutting the door behind him, Cody dialed the number on the card the Army doctors had provided. Someone at the phones 24 hours a day, they'd told him. And just as with the three times before, the phone rang and rang and rang.
Cody sank down against the side of the bath and wracked his brains. In the room outside, he could hear Nick's futile heaving and the tortured groans that accompanied it. He didn't want to try moving Nick again, dragging him back to the hospital, didn't want anyone except the Army doctor messing with those things in his ears. Think, Cody told himself sternly. You must know someone who knows someone, or who can find someone. Because you have to.
Her name was Lea, she said, in their whispered conversation in the hallway outside the hotel room. She was a third-year resident with two kids her mother watched during the long, long shifts she had to complete to get her license. She had dark circles under her warm brown eyes, and a habit of tucking stray strands of long blond hair behind her ears. She'd listened to everything Cody'd said, but he worried she hadn't heard him at all.
Yet once she got inside the room, her manner was all professional, and after taking Nick's temperature, shining a light in his eyes and looking in his poor beleaguered ears, she'd walked calmly to the writing desk below the big mirror and scribbled, "They're infected. 100mg cipro, twice a day pd."
He'd written back: "pd ?"
Prescription pad in hand, Lea had paused in the writing of it just long enough to scrawl "pd = by mouth" before she returned to signing her name to a 7-day course of ciproflaxacin in Nick's name. Cody watched her form the jagged whorls of an incomprehensible last name with barely restrained anticipation. He was fairly sure he could get the bellhop downstairs to fill this, given the right motivation, and there was a Lucky's Drugs on College Ave, four blocks away. Nick stirred in his sleep, one arm thrown over his head, and despite how helpful Lea had been, how receptive to showing up at a stranger's hotel room at nine p.m. on a Wednesday night, Cody nearly carried her to the door. The end was in sight.
Four hours and three hundred dollars later, Nick lay curled up against Cody's chest, his hands fisted in Cody's thin blue sweater. The two of them were reading through the classified section of the San Francisco Chronicle, picking out a new boat. Ad by ad they went; sometimes one of them would stop and point, and the other would nod or shake their head. Nick still couldn't handle much noise, but he was keeping down water and Gatorade, and most wondrous to Cody's mind, he could handle touch again. Not just handle it, but the absence of it seemed to have created a lack, a void he was only too eager to fill. Every so often Nick'd lean against Cody's jaw with a momentous sigh, drinking him in.
Cody couldn't remember a time he'd been happier. Nick, his Nick, returned to him if not whole, then at least, soft and pliant against him, picking out boats Cody was sure they never could afford. Then again, after this, Cody was willing to give Nick anything. Just to stay whole and upright be his again. Cody kept derailing the whole process by turning and kissing Nick, lipping and nibbling while Nick grinned, eyes closed.
His Nick. Second Lieutenant Nicholas Ryder, who'd sat and had coffee with a scared-as-hell new recruit named Cody Allen, smack dab in the middle of hell, 1972. Who'd picked him up and nudged him over to a Sikorsky not unlike their very own Mimi in the middle of that fetid jungle; who'd only grinned when Cody'd consistently handed him the wrong wrench or dropped a bolt into the chopper's dark and oily innards. Who'd hung on to him for two decades, quietly loving him and putting his world back together every single time it fell apart. Who'd lain next to him in the Riptide's narrow bunks and whispered his enduring love, who read his body like an open book, making Cody shout down King Harbor, overwhelmed by the feeling of Nick's body against his own, Nick deep inside him, holding him close.
Cody grinned, giving Nick's arm a gentle squeeze. Nick looked over at him and slid his hand over Cody's own, lying back in the crook of Cody's neck with a soft exhalation.
Without looking, Cody could tell his eyes were closed, and he figured at this point he could choose any damn boat on the page and get the same wordless nod. It didn't matter. Whichever they chose, they were headed back out onto the water. Together.
Cody made a note of one final ad, then tossed the newspaper onto the floor and curled up around Nick, bunching the pillow under his partner's head before losing himself in those timeless, pale blue eyes. Nick smiled his thanks before settling down against Cody's chest, exhausted and in need of sleep. And outside the hotel room, the world went on without them.
Rating: PG
Summary: Either the least romantic anniversary in creation, or the most romantic one, depending on your perspective. Nick and Cody try to find their way back to the water.
"GENTLEMAN'S AGREEMENT: 42 Azimut Evolution; Twin 3126CATs 524 hours;2 cabin version; Full chain windlass; Bow sun pad with canvas cover; Full Bimini top with enclosure, navy; Ray marine radar, GPS, Plotter with repeater; Auto pilot with repeater; VHF with repeater; Teak cockpit; Rear seat canvas cover; Hydraulic gangway; DSS SAT TV system; Air Conditioning; Generator; TV Package, salon and master stateroom; High gloss cherry interior; Beige leather salon sofas; Custom mattress insert for second stateroom; Vacuflush heads; Battery Charger; Refrigerator; Hot water heaterStereo system; Interior carpet runners."
In a hotel room in downtown Palo Alto, within walking distance of the Stanford University Medical Center, Cody Allen lay curled up on a queen-sized bed reading boat ads.
Earlier, he'd stocked the mini-bar, opened all the soaps in the bathroom, laid out the bathmat, hung his and Nick's jackets in the ample closet, and drawn the heavy dual-layered curtains against the daylight. Were it not for the fact that Nick was dry-heaving over the edge of the bed next to him, the afternoon would have been perfect.
Nick shook with the effort of bringing anything else up, the cords in his neck standing out under his skin. Cody extended a hand and then paused. Every time he'd touched Nick since he'd come out of surgery, Nick had managed a mute, tearful apology, then rolled over and thrown up.
This was not how Cody had expected to spend their anniversary.
Seventeen years to the day the two of them had taken possession of the Riptide and stared around them in a mixture of stunned pride and disbelief, before fucking each other's brains out on the floor of the salon, the wind blowing sea spray across their bodies through one of the broken windows.
And twenty-four years since they'd found each other again stateside, the day Cody had sat huddled in the bottom of a phone booth by the side of the Pacific Coast Highway, staring at the date on a stained and greasy newspaper trampled against the burning steel floor. Twenty-four years since he'd sat crying and hallucinating in the sun, staring down the barrel of his grandfather's service pistol. Twenty-four years since he'd put the gun down on the cracked, sandy ground outside, pushed himself to his knees, and found change enough in the coin return to call Nick.
Folding the paper back as quietly as possible, Cody winced as Nick began a fresh round of heaving into the wastebasket set nearby. Twenty hours earlier, Cody had squeezed Nick's hand, trusting his eyes and twenty-six years of history to say everything he couldn't as a squadron of nurses stole his best friend away. It was the only time in Cody's memory Nick had gone willingly to the OR.
In the nine hours that followed, Cody'd done a lot of thinking. First of all, he'd promised God that if he could just have Nick back, he'd call his mother without fail, every other Sunday. Then when a tired nurse paged him to the front desk and told him it'd be two more hours, easy, Cody'd amended his promise to include his cold and disapproving older sister, too. Anything.
He'd alternated between squirming in a hard-backed plastic chair and standing at the window, looking out over the hospital parking lot, staring into the past. At this point Cody felt he was an expert on hospital waiting rooms; the thought didn't strike him as being the least bit funny. Sitting, he'd skimmed through a trite military thriller written by someone who'd never been to Southeast Asia, and exchanged exactly 53 text messages with Murray. Keeping track of that number was one of the things that had kept him sane.
Cody quietly put the magazine down on the carpet and watched Nick try to sleep, curled up across from him on the hotel bed. His color was bad, pale with bright red spots high up on his cheeks, but at least he'd stopped throwing up.
Cody reached for Nick but stopped, his hand lying on the clean hotel sheets like a fallen bird. Getting Nick from Recovery to the hotel room was a period of time Cody would gladly tuck next to his Nam memories in the box he never opened. Nick was fine when he was motionless: in the wheelchair and on solid ground. The problems began anytime Cody moved the wheelchair or tried to pry Nick out of it. That's when the vomiting started.
Flowers, Cody thought, watching Nick's shallow, even breathing. The hotel lobby staff will likely be mollified by flowers.
Or they won't, was the next thought, and Cody found it refreshing that he didn't actually care. His fingers crept across the sheet toward Nick.
"With new twin Crusaders extended platform fly bridge new generator back-to-back seating dual captain's chair w/ cushions pressure sink 2 burner electric range microwave V-berth A/C dinette aft cabin Electric head w/ macerator shower sink compass in-dash depth gauge Lowrance GPS VHF depth finder and much more...HAPPY HOOKER waiting for you!! Make offer!!!"
When Nick had finally confessed that he was getting the surgery, allowing the Army medical researchers to fill his battered, broken inner ears with the experimental counterweight tubes Cody had felt guilty with relief. Relief that there was something that could help Nick live aboard a boat again, relief that they could finally move out of the white-walled box in Pedro, and guilt that it meant Nick had finally given in.
Nick had fought the idea from the start. From the first time Colonel Harrington had mentioned participation in the project, while Nick lay weak and pale and nauseous in the Little Company of Mary Medical Center in Torrance (decently comfy chairs, free but terrible coffee, Cody thought automatically). Although Nick had been too sick to voice a protest, Cody'd known immediately what his partner's answer was, and with as much gumption as he'd dared, ordered Harrington to leave. Hell, it had taken Nick months to even admit something was wrong, but the third time he'd wound up hurling bile outside their stateroom, clinging to the floor for dear life, Cody'd made Nick talk, hounded him with threats of doctors brought aboard until the truth came out: every time the boat rocked, Nick's world spun. He'd been hiding the extent of his injuries from The Crash.
Memories of that day, their last case, arose in him unbidden and Cody rolled onto his back, eyes shut tight, swallowing hard. Jed's fucking Flying Service. He should have known. He should never have let Nick go up in something that wasn't the Mimi. For all her faults, the big pink rustbucket knew how to crash. Not like that ultralight whatever the fuck it was that dropped out of the sky like an ugly and expensive stone, leaving Cody staring at a radar screen full of nothing much.
It had taken four EMTs to keep him from the crash site on Fisherman's Key. Four of them pinning him, four of them threatening all manner of unpleasant drugs while Cody screamed and fought and--
He rolled over on one hip, rolling himself into the present with an effort, staring down at Nick's limp, inert body. Quiet for the moment, Nick lay fetal and motionless, curled in on himself, one hand outstretched. Cody reached for his fingers, aching for even the slightest touch, the smallest reassurance, then halted just milimeters away from contact.
This was the worst part, once he'd managed to get Nick up the elevator and into the room. as soon as Cody touched him, Nick threw up. That first time and every time since. It had broken Cody in ways he couldn't even begin to articulate. Touch was their language. When the nightmares came, Nick always rubbed his shoulder, or inscribed a "clear" sign on his palm, his chest. The slightest touch had the power to raise Cody up, bring him back from the darkness, quelling his fears.
Nick stirred with a murmur, and opened his eyes, meeting Cody's for the first time in nearly a day. "Love you, baby," he whispered.
"Love you too, Nick," Cody murmured. Hope grew like a rare and precious flower at Nick's smile, then Nick frowned as if remembering a forgotten errand, dragged himself back over to the edge of the bed and hung onto the plastic wastebasket for dear life. Cody availed himself of the opportunity to check the back of Nick's neck and startled at the heat there. Nick was burning up.
His heart filled with fear, Cody rolled gracefully off the bed, retrieving his phone on the way to the bathroom. Nick hadn't kept down even water in close to four hours. Shutting the door behind him, Cody dialed the number on the card the Army doctors had provided. Someone at the phones 24 hours a day, they'd told him. And just as with the three times before, the phone rang and rang and rang.
Cody sank down against the side of the bath and wracked his brains. In the room outside, he could hear Nick's futile heaving and the tortured groans that accompanied it. He didn't want to try moving Nick again, dragging him back to the hospital, didn't want anyone except the Army doctor messing with those things in his ears. Think, Cody told himself sternly. You must know someone who knows someone, or who can find someone. Because you have to.
"The elegant styling and impeccable workmanship makes MOON RIVER a modern classic. The Ultra-stylish salon is surrounded by vast amount of window space and beautiful high-gloss cherry woodwork with a galley down layout that is hidden from view. This vessel also offers a three stateroom, 2 head layout with a very spacious engine room."
Her name was Lea, she said, in their whispered conversation in the hallway outside the hotel room. She was a third-year resident with two kids her mother watched during the long, long shifts she had to complete to get her license. She had dark circles under her warm brown eyes, and a habit of tucking stray strands of long blond hair behind her ears. She'd listened to everything Cody'd said, but he worried she hadn't heard him at all.
Yet once she got inside the room, her manner was all professional, and after taking Nick's temperature, shining a light in his eyes and looking in his poor beleaguered ears, she'd walked calmly to the writing desk below the big mirror and scribbled, "They're infected. 100mg cipro, twice a day pd."
He'd written back: "pd ?"
Prescription pad in hand, Lea had paused in the writing of it just long enough to scrawl "pd = by mouth" before she returned to signing her name to a 7-day course of ciproflaxacin in Nick's name. Cody watched her form the jagged whorls of an incomprehensible last name with barely restrained anticipation. He was fairly sure he could get the bellhop downstairs to fill this, given the right motivation, and there was a Lucky's Drugs on College Ave, four blocks away. Nick stirred in his sleep, one arm thrown over his head, and despite how helpful Lea had been, how receptive to showing up at a stranger's hotel room at nine p.m. on a Wednesday night, Cody nearly carried her to the door. The end was in sight.
"The WHIPPERSNAPPER is a fine example of the Camano 31 fast-trawler, loaded with options, and in pristine condition. Powered with a single 200hp Volvo diesel (with 780 hours) the Camano cruises easily at 10-13 knots. Bow thruster for excellent handling around the dock. The flybridge with bimini top and storage cover features seating for 6 and a great view. The lower control station has excellent visibility along with the added comfort of heat or A/C depending on the season. Inspections and offers encouraged!"
Four hours and three hundred dollars later, Nick lay curled up against Cody's chest, his hands fisted in Cody's thin blue sweater. The two of them were reading through the classified section of the San Francisco Chronicle, picking out a new boat. Ad by ad they went; sometimes one of them would stop and point, and the other would nod or shake their head. Nick still couldn't handle much noise, but he was keeping down water and Gatorade, and most wondrous to Cody's mind, he could handle touch again. Not just handle it, but the absence of it seemed to have created a lack, a void he was only too eager to fill. Every so often Nick'd lean against Cody's jaw with a momentous sigh, drinking him in.
Cody couldn't remember a time he'd been happier. Nick, his Nick, returned to him if not whole, then at least, soft and pliant against him, picking out boats Cody was sure they never could afford. Then again, after this, Cody was willing to give Nick anything. Just to stay whole and upright be his again. Cody kept derailing the whole process by turning and kissing Nick, lipping and nibbling while Nick grinned, eyes closed.
His Nick. Second Lieutenant Nicholas Ryder, who'd sat and had coffee with a scared-as-hell new recruit named Cody Allen, smack dab in the middle of hell, 1972. Who'd picked him up and nudged him over to a Sikorsky not unlike their very own Mimi in the middle of that fetid jungle; who'd only grinned when Cody'd consistently handed him the wrong wrench or dropped a bolt into the chopper's dark and oily innards. Who'd hung on to him for two decades, quietly loving him and putting his world back together every single time it fell apart. Who'd lain next to him in the Riptide's narrow bunks and whispered his enduring love, who read his body like an open book, making Cody shout down King Harbor, overwhelmed by the feeling of Nick's body against his own, Nick deep inside him, holding him close.
Cody grinned, giving Nick's arm a gentle squeeze. Nick looked over at him and slid his hand over Cody's own, lying back in the crook of Cody's neck with a soft exhalation.
Without looking, Cody could tell his eyes were closed, and he figured at this point he could choose any damn boat on the page and get the same wordless nod. It didn't matter. Whichever they chose, they were headed back out onto the water. Together.
Cody made a note of one final ad, then tossed the newspaper onto the floor and curled up around Nick, bunching the pillow under his partner's head before losing himself in those timeless, pale blue eyes. Nick smiled his thanks before settling down against Cody's chest, exhausted and in need of sleep. And outside the hotel room, the world went on without them.
"No expense was spared when outfitting this 43 Flybridge. Highlights of the CELESTIAL TREASURE include full electronics, bimini top and enclosure, full A/V package with DSS, and bow thruster. Beautiful woodwork adorns the two staterooms and ample salon. All of the finishings are done in neutral tones and fine materials. A fine live-aboard set to provide safety, security and luxury for many years to come. Motivated seller ready to listen to reasonable offers; Slip 7, Half Moon Bay Marina. Ask for J.J."