Fic, Burger and Chips, Ryan/Blade, 15

[fredbassett]

Title : Burger and Chips
Author : fredbassett
Fandom : Primeval
Rating : 18
Characters : Ryan/Blade, Finn
Word Count : 2,575
Disclaimer : Not mine (except Blade and Finn), no money made, don’t sue.
Spoilers : None
Summary : Ryan is summoned to 68 Overstone Road when the housemates are concerned about Blade.
A/N : 1) Written for fififolle as her prize from the last team fest. 2) Matt Rees belongs to telperion_15 and Ross Jenkins was rescued from the BBC by bigtitch. 3) House!fic


Ryan turned over in bed and stretched, enjoying the fact that he hadn’t been dragged from under his duvet at the arse-crack of dawn on his day off to chase dinosaurs – or be chased by them.

They’d been short-handed for the past month, relying on occasional cover from Stringer and his lads while Blade and Ditzy had been off God knows where, pulled out of the ARC on orders from higher up. Matt Rees had run himself ragged doing double-shifts as their only unit medic and even the normally good-natured Finn had been snappy with the scientists and had been heard to say that the next creature through an anomaly would find itself on a taxidermist’s slab if it so much as looked at him funny. And he hadn’t been joking.

After lounging around for half an hour just because he could, Ryan followed a leisurely shower with a large plate of bacon, eggs, mushrooms and beans, all washed down with copious amounts of coffee. An uninterrupted meal was a luxury he’d almost forgotten. Despite the light drizzle outside, Ryan was contemplating going for a run when his mobile phone buzzed in his pocket.

He was confidently expecting to hear Stringer’s dulcet tones, so it came as something of a surprise when he heard Finn’s voice at the other end. “Boss, sorry to bother you on your day off, but…” Finn’s voice trailed off and he ended with another muttered sorry, when it wasn’t in the least bit obvious what he was sorry for, but coherence on the telephone had never been one of Finn’s strongest suits.

“Finn, stop apologising and get to the bloody point.”

“Sorry, boss, I mean… sorry, but has Blade called you?”

Ryan’s stomach gave an uncomfortable lurch. “No, he hasn’t. Is he back?” Despite doing his best to sound casual, Ryan knew perfectly well that he wasn’t fooling anyone, except possibly himself.

His fling with Blade after a night on the piss just before the other man had been posted abroad was an open secret amongst the lads.

“Some time yesterday,” Finn said quickly. “He didn’t call us either; he was just here when we got home. Ross is off somewhere with Helena today and Matt’s going up to Chelmsford to see his Nan, and I promised to ride shotgun for him.

Ryan grinned. He’d met Matt’s grandmother once, so it wasn’t surprising he wanted someone to watch his back around the old termagant. She had a line in sarcasm that made Lester look like a rank amateur as well as a disconcerting habit of quizzing people about their sex lives and not taking no for an answer, so Finn would be Matt’s way of keeping her off his own back.

“What sort of state is he in?” Ryan asked, still aiming for casual. Finn’s hesitation told him all he needed to know. “Bad?”

“I’ve seen worse,” Finn said. “But Matt doesn’t want him to be on his own, not until we know how the land lies, if you know what I mean.”

“I’ll be over within the hour,” Ryan said. “Is there any food in the house or should I stop off on the way?”

“We’ve still got that dead raptor in the fridge. The weather’s been too crappy for a barbie.”

Ryan rolled his eyes. Finn wasn’t joking, either. Ross had developed a strange urge to cook and eat as many extinct creatures as possible. It made accepting an invitation to dinner around there rather a dicey proposition, and clearly the fact that the last raptor he’d cooked had tasted like it had been stewed in drain cleaner for a week hadn’t put him off.

“I’ll stop at the Tesco Express.”

Forty-five minutes later, armed with a bag full of ready meals, plus eggs, bacon, bread and beer, Ryan used the spare key he’d been given to let himself into 68 Overstone Road, and carried the carrier bags through to the kitchen, yelling, “It’s me!” as he walked down the hall.

A moment later, adrenaline flared in his system as he found himself staring at the business end of a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife that Blade had clearly been using to hack the green bits off a loaf of bread.

The knife disappeared back into a leg sheath and Blade muttered, “Sorry, boss.”

Ryan dumped the bags on the table. “I’m beginning to think all you lot ever do is apologise.”

Blade had obviously not been expecting company. He was dressed only in a pair of black track suit bottoms that rode low on his slender hips, showing the dark trail of hair that led from his chest to his groin and displaying an impressive array of bruises, some old and yellow and some more obviously recent. He hadn’t shaved in at least a week and his normal growth of heavy stubble was well on the way to being a beard. A bandage around each wrist told Ryan much of what he needed to know.

“You look like you need a decent meal,” Ryan commented, his eyes taking in the fact that Blade looked a good deal thinner than he had been a month ago. “How does burgers, oven chips and onion rings sound?”

“Better than what’s in the fridge,” Blade said, his eyes wary and his body still radiating tension. “Since when did Helena start keeping her ex-patients in there?”

“It’s Ross’s latest craze. He’s gone all Delia on anything we don’t manage to repatriate. Christ alone knows why, although Matt thinks he wants to write a cookery book. The entelodont they barbecued just after you got posted wasn’t bad, but the most of the rest have been enough to make next door’s dog puke its guts up. Lester’s banned him from using the fridges at the ARC since one of the cleaners had hysterics. Even a three line whip to bring all the bits that don’t get eaten back for proper disposal doesn’t seem to have deterred him.”

Ryan was the opinion that Lester was only allowing it to wind Cutter up, but he had to admit it had provided an awful lot of amusement and had also stopped anyone trying to nick Ross’s lunch.

Blade looked at him in amazement. “Jeez. I swear this place gets more fucking crazy by the minute.” As an afterthought, he added, “What’s an entelodont?”

“A wild pig about the size of a rhino. I think there’s some more of it in the freezer. Ross was muttering about trying his hand at making sausages. God only knows why Helena puts up with him.”

Ryan slung a load of potato wedges and onion rings onto a tray and into the oven and stuck the burgers under the grill ready to be turned on.

“Coffee?” Blade gestured to the kettle. At Ryan’s nod, he filled it from the tap, failing to suppress a wince as he set it back on its base.

“What happened?” Ryan asked, nodding at the bandages.

“Lost a fight with some cable ties.”

That was as much information as he was likely to get, but it told Ryan an eloquent story. At some point the op had gone to hell in a handcart and Blade had ended up in the hands of the bad guys. But he was alive and seemingly relatively unhurt, and that was what mattered.

Blade had never been one for small talk, so Ryan simply filled the silence with edited highlights of what Blade had missed, including details of a couple of spectacular rows between Lester and Cutter and the time Finn had written off one of the Hiluxes by using it to herd something even bigger and thicker than himself back into an anomaly without allowing for the fact that herbivores had a proven habit of stopping abruptly if they saw something interesting to munch.

When the food was ready, Blade wolfed his down, even unwinding enough to nick a few onion rings off Ryan’s plate. The speed of consumption confirmed Ryan’s suspicion that he’d had very little to eat recently. He pulled a dark, sticky ginger cake from the shopping bag and pushed that across the table to Blade, knowing it was one of his favourites. They shared it between them and even made large inroads into a packet of chocolate Hobnobs.

“You look like you need some sleep,” Ryan told him. He knew from his own experience how hard it was to rest after a bad op, so he added, “I’ll stay down here and read a book or watch some telly.” He was tacitly offering to stand guard, and Blade clearly knew it.

“Thanks, boss, but you don’t need to worry, I won’t skewer the next person who walks through the door.”

“That’s not what it looked like from where I was standing when I came in, so stop being stubborn and stop calling me boss, or have you managed to forget that you had your cock up my arse the night before you went away?”

A swift grin lit Blade’s face like a chink of sunlight breaking through a covering of dark cloud. “I’m not likely to forget that in a hurry.”

“Good, because I was hoping you might fancy doing it again sometime.”

There was no mistaking the look of Blade’s surprise at that statement but nor did he look particularly unsettled by the idea. Getting involved with one of his own men probably wasn’t very wise, but Ryan had spent a long time being ruled by his head rather than his heart and it hadn’t done him much good. He now knew bloody well that in this job you needed to snatch what happiness you could with both hands, plus he’d had time to do a lot of thinking in the past month – in between dinosaur hunting and sleeping – and he knew that this was what he wanted.

“You can come upstairs with me if you want.” The offer was quietly spoken and there was an unmistakeable note of hesitancy in Blade’s voice. “I’m not up to anything strenuous but…” he allowed the sentence to hang in mid-air, his face betraying very little of how he was feeling.

Ryan simply nodded and followed Blade upstairs.

Without any ceremony, Blade pushed the loose trousers down over his hips and stepped out of them. He wasn’t wearing anything underneath other than another array of impressive bruises down his thighs. He’d been done over by experts, in Ryan’s opinion, and he wondered what other damage Blade had sustained.

Blade slipped under the duvet, the mask of impassivity gone now, replaced by a tired, vulnerable look that Ryan wasn’t used to associating with him. Blade was usually the scariest fucker Ryan knew and it wasn’t often that anyone saw a vulnerable side to him.

Ryan’s own clothes followed Blade’s into a heap on the floor and he joined him in the bed. It took some juggling before they were comfortable with each other, but eventually Blade lay curled on his side, with Ryan spooned behind him. Within a matter of minutes, Blade’s breathing deepened and Ryan found himself with an armful of sleeping soldier.

Used to sleeping anywhere at the drop of a hat, Ryan soon dozed off as well, and the pair of them slept until mid-afternoon until the need to get rid of the coffee he’d been drinking all morning drove Ryan out of bed. When he returned from the bathroom, Blade was propped up on the pillows, bandaged wrists tucked out of sight. The haunted look of earlier in the day had gone, but a few hours of sleep hadn’t done much to reduce the dark shadows under his green eyes. Blade looked like he needed to sleep for a week.

“Fancy some soup and a bread roll?”

“You make a wonderful nurse, has anyone told you that?”

“You make a crap patient, has anyone told you that?”

“My Nan, all the time. Soup would be great, but what I need first is a wash and a shave.”

Blade got up and made his way slowly across the hall into the bathroom. A few minutes later, he called softly, “Ryan? I need a hand with something.”

“I’m not holding your bloody dick while you take a piss.”

Blade was sitting on the edge of the bath holding a cut-throat razor out to him. “Can’t turn my bloody wrists properly. Can you do the honours?”

Ryan raised his eyebrows in surprise, but took the razor and quickly lathered some foam on Blade’s strong jaw. It was the first time he’d ever shaved anyone with a straight-edged blade and, to be quite precise, it was the first time he’d ever shaved anyone other than himself.

The thin, finely-honed blade slid easily across taut skin and he felt its owner gradually start to relax under his ministrations, head tilted back against Ryan’s bare stomach. As he dealt slowly and methodically with the beard that had grown up in the past few weeks, he could see Blade’s cock starting to harden and his own wasn’t slow to follow suit.

“Touch yourself, Niall,” he said quietly, continuing the long strokes up his throat and over his jaw.

Blade looked up at him, his eyes glittering with brittle amusement. “I can’t shave myself, so what makes you think I can wank?”

“You’re a bloke and you’re not dead.”

Blade spread his thighs slightly and stroked his half-hard cock until it was fully erect. While Ryan continued to shave him, Blade lazily fisted his cock, carefully minimising the movements of his wrist. Ryan couldn’t afford to turn his attention too far away from the wickedly sharp blade cutting through his friend’s beard, but he had a strong suspicion that it was the act of being shaved that was arousing Blade more than the ministrations of his own hand.

As Ryan worked carefully around Blade’s upper lip he was doing his best to ignore the fact that his own hard cock was trapped between their bodies and demanding some attention. But it was just going to have to wait.

As the last sweep of the razor’s edge ran over Blade’s cheek, he gave a quiet gasp and his cock shot come over the dark trail of hair on his stomach. Ryan put the razor carefully down on the sink and grabbed the small towel he’d left warming on the heated rail to wipe the remaining soap suds from Blade’s face and neck. When he’d finished, he used the same towel to mop up the mess on his stomach.

Blade stood up, pressing his body hard up against Ryan’s and pressing a soft kiss to his lips. Their tongues made each other’s acquaintance briefly then Blade pulled back and murmured, “Thanks, I needed that.”

“The shave or the wank?” Ryan dropped his hand to his own cock and brought himself off quickly and efficiently as Blade watched.

“Both.” He looked at Ryan under impossibly long, dark eyelashes, his eyes softer now, less like chips of emerald ice. “Do I get that soup you promised me now?”

“Chicken soup like your Nan used to make it?”

Blade grinned. “Tomato out of a tin’ll do fine.” Despite the sleep he’d already had, Blade stifled a sudden yawn with his hand. “Then will you come back to bed with me?”

Ryan kissed him lightly on the lips. “Yes. And I’ll even plump your pillows up for you.”