FicWad

Off you go, smeghead. It was fun.

Wasn't it?

Damn, I sure hope so, because I never heard from your lips one way or the other.

I get so wrapped up in being the last man alive, sometimes, that I forget you're the last man not-alive. I have survivor's guilt, m'self; I've read up onnit, and though they say it's normal, I look out on the stars and, once in a while, wonder what the smeg fate were thinking when they picked me as the last representative of humanity. They must be having a laugh. So you, you mess of a guilt-ridden man, what do you have when you look out of window at that same big, lonely starscape and your face sags, like every muscle has just given up, like I know mine must when it all hits me like a roundhouse punch in the ego; what are you feeling, non-survivor's guilt?

You're the only man I know who would be able to feel guilty about not surviving an accident.

Then again, I'm the one who felt guilty when his subconscious raped the man who feels guilty about not having survived. I guess we're even in the nutter department.

Yeh got some of the biggest, strongest fences around your psyche of anyone I've known. I don't know that I ever got yer to /talk/. I mean, for real. You love to pull down other people, and yer so easily pulled down yerself - it's like you know you're going to drown, so you're happy to just pull down whoever you can get your hands on so you won't be alone at the bottom.

But not being alone at the top is something I don't think yer ever considered.

Yeah, I'm a horny bloke, and the sex was great. And maybe that's all it was; you have a body that was made to be touched, for such an uptight virginal bastard, and you were so tight it made me scream, and once you got over yer nervousness, you knew just where to touch me, too. But...

I always did the reaching out, man. I tried. I was the first one to touch, the first one to kiss. I bloody well seduced you, the first time we.. went there. I just went forward as long as I didn't hear a no. But I never knew if that were a yes - or just not a no. That last step, that one place we never went - I didn't make that step because I wanted to know if you would. I forced every other step, dammit; I dinn' wanna force that one. I didn't want to be the first one to say I love you.

I dunno if I wanted you because I had been alone for so long and wuz desperate - or if I had been alone with you for so long that it finally opened me eyes to you. All I know is that the look of your face as you staggered out of bed, still half-asleep, fishing for clean shorts and socks on the floor before realizing you were dead and your clothes were in your mind, wuz so beautiful that it made my heart ache, and I thought I would burst if I didn't jest say it. Make you sit down in a chair and tell you how you make the stars dim; tell you how lovely you are until even you had to believe it. I would sit up, instead, and strain the dips out of last night's flat lager and take a sip, knowing it would make your forehead knot and your nostrils flare. And I would look outta the window at the stars, and try to see Orion. I never could see the constellations as they were supposed to be from Earth, but I see them everywhere out here, where they change all of the time.

Yer tall enough that it was usually more comfortable for me to put my head on your chest when we fell asleep. And it was odd, not feeling a heartbeat. You give off a thrum of electricity; it's soothin', but it was eerie. And not havin' a human heart beating away next to me - well, it couldn't help but make me wonder if there was a human there at all. If this... thing that we're doin' might be something Holly programmed in when he revived you, another aspect of keepin' me sane. If I asked if yeh loved me, would wake some dusty subroutine kept dormant for centuries against just that question, bringing out a preprogrammed 'yes?'

I just wanted to know, fer sure, no questions. You never let me know. So I let you go.

Sometimes, though, when I'm alone in my bed - again - and I can't sleep, I wonder if yeh would have told me if a hologram aches when he's alone, like a human does.

If I had asked.