Pairing: Beecher/Keller
Feedback: Yeah!
Notes: Written for the HT100 FlashFiction Challenge #7—Lit Up , which required either use or mention of alcohol or other "substances". The bones of this flashfic were actually contained in a little orphaned snippet I posted to my LJ over a year ago. Then this lovely challenge came up and I said to myself: Ah! My little orphan finds a home! So I worked on it a little more, and, well, here we go. Many thanks to Actizera and Mav for speedy, spiffy beta and advice. *g*

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It must have been a satisfying visit with Kitty, Toby thought, noting again the angle and placement of the still-visible red smear on Chris’ neck, just below the left earlobe. Because for the most part, Chris was a pretty in-the-moment kind of guy, not generally given to nostalgia. But he was in a good mood tonight, slouching long and easy in his chair as he finished his story with a sly grin.

“And then, I don’t know, we all wound up fucking in the back room.”

“The security guard too?”

“Ah man, I don’t remember,” Chris laughed. “Everyone was pretty wasted.”

Toby looked at Chris, sprawled out across the table from him, dark and sleek in one of those tight navy thermal-knit shirts that hugged every contour of his beautifully cut torso. And maybe it was because his own visiting hour had been spent with Angus, soberly and dutifully going through the checklist of how everybody back in the Beechersphere was doing -- but even though Toby knew damned well that Chris had just been scraping along by the skin of his teeth for a lot of it, he felt a weird kind of envy at the moment, for all the outrageous things Chris had done. Balls-out living, totally on the edge, utterly free of responsibility or obligation. Drugs, scams, fast rides in hot cars. All the women he’d fucked. All the men.

And sure, it was over now and he was stuck in here for... well, pretty much forever. But while he’d been out there, Chris had lived hard.

“You were quite the party boy for a while there, huh?”

Chris turned a smirk back at him. “Weren’t you?”

And Toby had to laugh at that.

“Somehow I doubt I had quite as much fun with it as you did,” he said, thinking with chagrin about how his drinking day had usually started: a belt of gin with a Scope chaser from the bottles in the bottom left-hand drawer of his desk before those godawful morning briefings with the partners.

“Tobe--” Chris shook his head, smiling as though he could tell exactly what Toby was thinking. “I just did most of that shit ‘cause I was bored. Didn’t mean nothing.”

Toby couldn’t quite disguise his skepticism. “Yeah? How about now?”

“What do you mean?”

“O’Reily could get you anything you want. You mean to tell me you’re not bored in here?” Toby waved a hand at the common room, at the glazed-eyed inmates staring at the television, Alvarez slumped asleep in his chair, Rebadow and Busmalis playing cards in slow motion.

“Nah.” Chris wrinkled his nose and shook his head. Then his eyes narrowed slightly as he kicked at Toby’s ankles under the table. “Found something better to occupy my mind.”

Toby knew that was kind of a bullshit deflection, and it shouldn’t have pleased him so much to hear. But it did.

“You’re such a fucking con man, Keller,” he muttered, looking down to rub at an imaginary mark on the table top.

“Let’s just stick with the fucking part.”

And Toby smiled automatically, hearing the lascivious grin in Chris’ voice. He glanced up and met Chris’ eyes. They just mainlined each other for oblivion now, didn’t they?

Well. It was always going to be something.

--FIN--

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