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When Jim shows up, he's in one of the corridors on the Rocinante, boots muddied, wind-whipped hair, eyes bloodshot with fatigue, dark circles underneath.

He stops dead. Wavering on his feet. Staring dully at what's in front of him like it can't be.

Slowly, his mind processes a somewhat-suppressed memory of a conversation with an ineffable being that runs a boat in space full of prisoners.
"Jesus fucking Christ.

"Jesus fucking Christ."

Somewhere in his exhausted brain and body, he reaches a reserve of adrenaline not yet depleted, and he takes the few steps to what-was-formerly-the-airlock-door at a run. Slams his hand into the release, and it opens onto the hallways of the Barge.

Like he knew it would.

Time seems to do a weird sort of skip, because suddenly his face is on the ground and he's not standing up anymore. And his vision has gone all sparkly. Not green, though. Not green.

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They were five floors apart when they were paired, not that it mattered after Jedao got spooked by Mikodez and moved into the Roci. Mikodez is gone now, too, but Jedao is back on the first floor, living out of Quentin's cabin instead of the cramped barracks and shipside berth that neither Fives nor he are quite willing to change. So - he hears and also recognizes the particular thump of a man-sized body collapsing. He slips into the hallway, out of curiosity more than alarm, nosy for gossip about who's shanking who in the corridors now, only for the bottom to drop out of his stomach.

"Spiderfucking hells -"

He knows people can have the same faces, let alone the same back-of-the-head. But he knows people by more than that, by how they move, how they feel, how they fit into the world - he's not moving - and he might not remember Jedao at all, even though it's him, it has to be him -

"James, we're going to take care of you," he promises, more honest than it's safe here or you're going to be alright.

Edited 2020-11-01 03:24 (UTC)

Jim's fine. He's fine. He's fine and he's going to start peeling himself off the floor and hey wasn't it great that this didn't happen while he was bashing death slugs with a shovel? That would have been a shitty end to Ilus. The land of the blind, and then the one-eyed guy gets himself killed by slipping and falling on his ass.

"Jedao?" He's squinting, and, hey, really? "What the fuck." He forces his eyes open, forces his focus back in front of him. Maybe he should try getting up?

"What the fuck yourself," Jedao grumbles back, in a rushing-out of relieved breath, but he's already closed the distance, crouching down to help. He can't smell blood - but -

"Am I carrying you to medical or the shower right now?" he asks, making a command decision.

"You're--" and Holden's hindbrain lights up with danger signals. Which, to be fair, has been blaring things about danger danger danger for at least four months, but there's always something especially keen when it involves someone Jim doesn't want to get hurt.

"Shit. No, you're not -- don't touch me." Which sounds bad, now that it's escaped from his mouth, but he can explain. That shit that's in everyone's eyes, it's probably all over Holden's skin, his boots, under his fingernails -- hell, up his nose? He might not be susceptible, but he sure as hell could be a carrier.

"Is it a problem that'll clear your system if I kill you?" Jedao asks, without missing a beat, although he doesn't go for his gun. He doesn't touch Holden, but he doesn't back away, either.

"You do not," says Jim, forcefully, "have permission to kill me."

But the concept does give him pause.

Would it? Holden thinks no -- if the contamination is outside him, it would still be on his corpse, right?

Ugh, that's a bad thought.

"I think," says Holden, "shower would help more than death." A statement that's true a surprising amount of the time, really. "I'm fine, I'm just. I'm tired." He pulls himself up, wavering, palm braced against the wall. The world reels around him. Okay, maybe he was running on more adrenaline than amphetamines. Turns out the body does actually pretty much run out of it, after a while.

"Take your time," Jedao tells him. "You can sit down again in the shower, but if you pass out in the hallway, I am picking you up."

Which is as much a bluff to gauge the seriousness of the prohibition as a threat to stop Holden from rushing himself too badly.

Holden slumps against the wall.

"Fuck," he says, "the Admiral can probably cure the weird alien blindness plague, right? I'm so sick of this shit."

Sick of being the guy wearing all the hats. The linchpin. The hero.

(Him being sick of that final one probably won't last too long.)

"Just been up for a while. A lot of..." He tries to calculate days in his head, realizes they're 30-hour days, tries to multiply and divide by 24, and comes up totally empty. "Bunch of. Time things." Oh, 'time things', Jim? Is that a new unit of measurement?

"Probably," Jedao agrees. "Plus, we have our own aliens. And magic. We've got this. Your shift is over, captain." He offers his hand again, his shoulder for him to lean on, even if the memory of blindness makes his heart skitter just a little. He'll deal with it.

"Yeah, well," he says, "you start seeing green around the edges, you let me know, okay?"

His arm goes over Jedao's shoulders. And then, instead of just leaning on him, Jim pulls him into a hug. A tight one.

"Or any slugs," he mutters. "Don't touch any slugs."

"I promise to vaporize any alien slugs I see," he agrees. He means to be gentle, to be careful, but it's Jim, after almost two years, and he hugs back just as tight.

"Beating 'em with a shovel works fine." The James Holden Technique (TM). "Haven't you escaped yet?"

And Jim will let go. Probably. Any second now.

Okay, he's letting go.

"This can be a hot shower or a cold shower, asshole," Jedao threatens with a huff, although he stays pressed right at Jim's side. "Come on, shamble."

Jim moans, softly, at the thought of running water. "Is it bad I kind of don't care?" He's been making do with a basin and a rag. And also weird gross alien rain probably full of weird gross alien things.

He's shambling, he's shambling. Damn, he should turn down the gravity to something civilized in here.

"And, is coffee on the menu?"

"You should sleep," Jedao counters, although they have some. Quentin drinks coffee, so Jedao has learned, only for love, how to brew it. "But if you get clean and eat something and can still keep your eyes open, I'll make you coffee."

The cabin he half-carries, half-leads Jim into is definitely a warden's cabin, a full house, the inside of a refurbished New York brownstone, of all things, neat but decorated in homey touches. There are stacks of paper books piled here and there, and pieces of Jedao's hand-quilting hanging on the walls. There are a lot of gentle colors, pastels and russets. Jedao shuffles him into the shower, which has bars and a bench for Quentin's bad back days, and starts the water.

"Hey, quick question," calls Holden, as he tugs his boots off, rinsing them in the stream of warm water -- they can hardly get more sodden than they are already, it's not gonna do any harm -- "but whose house am I getting naked in? It looks like my parents'."

Because he is. Quickly. There's streaks of mud and detritus and what-have-you all the fuck over him, and hopefully he won't leave this place a complete disaster zone.

"It's our house, but it's Quentin's cabin. He's got wards that have probably neutralized half your alien shit already," Jedao speculates optimistically, although they aren't really optimized for that, as far as he knows. "Can I burn these?"

Always his favorite part of biohazard protocols.

"Quentin," Jim echoes. The name rings a vague and distant bell, but he's gonna take a wild stab at it and: "Do what you want, as long as you don't leave me hanging with my bare ass out in your boyfriend's cabin."

He's honestly not that awkward about nakedness (though there's another reason he doesn't carefully pull the curtain all the way -- he's worried Miller's going to show up here, too). But it seems like it would be an awkward situation, in general.

And then he just has a minute to sit, with hot water -- not the warm gushy rotting salt water of the shock wave, not the perpetual storm, just real hot water.

He doesn't even scrub. He just closes his eyes and breathes.

Jedao putters, but leaves the bathroom door open when he goes too, half in case Jim falls asleep in the water, and half because Jedao is afraid he'll vanish again if Jedao can't hear or see him. He torches the clothes with his phaser, only burns his fingers a little folding the half-melted plastic laundry basket into itself. They can ditch the whole lump in the chute after it's cooled again.

He slips back in, still fully in uniform, heedless of both the water and the nudity, and starts to work on Jim's hair.

"I'm never gonna wash all this fucking planet off me."

Mud swirling down the drain. Dust condensing to dark smears, dripping off the hairs on his arms.

Whatever happened, Holden hasn't been deprived or starving for too long. His body is much the same as it was before -- except the curved triangle of the cancer treatment implant stands out bold under his skin on the outside curve of his shoulder again. Seems that cure was undone sometime in his transition between here and there.

And good fucking thing, too.

But he hasn't lost any flesh; he hasn't been starved. Whatever this disaster was, it was recent.

He sighs and leans into Jedao's hands. This should feel weirder than it does, right? It's the sort of thing that seems like it should be sexual, but Jim is about as far from The Mood as it's possible to be. If he were a little less far into sleep deprivation and amphetamine psychosis, maybe he wouldn't let it happen. But as it is, it's comforting.

Edited 2020-11-02 02:59 (UTC)

"Some planets feel like that," he agrees, thinking of that awful swamp campaign and the cache of frogs' eggs, reaching for the shampoo when he can't feel any more actual grit. "Someday you won't even remember its name." This is probably not true; hopefully Jim won't have his mind dissolved and reconstituted as many times as Jedao's has been. But it's at least possible.

He shakes his head. He doesn't say anything at first. Jim doesn't have four centuries to forget. He'd be astonishingly lucky to have four decades, given the way his life is going.

People will remember Ilus for a long while, he thinks. Because it's the first: first planet where humans breathed the air and looked at the sky and didn't see the stars at home.

Or maybe they won't. Maybe the explosion of worlds means everyone's gonna forget. Maybe there'll be a thousand different humanities before Holden dies, or maybe he won't be able to stop it when someone triggers the next galaxy-wide apocalypse.

It's too big to think about for too long.

"Nothing special to you," he says, rough-voiced. "But it was kind of a big deal to us. Is kind of a big deal." Maybe soon-to-be-was. He changes the subject, or his wandering brain changes the subject for him: "Ran out of amphetamines. I think I took a lot of them."

"If you forgot me, you can forget anything," Jedao counters, gentle ribbing in place of concession. In place of the question he knows Jim better than to ask, even if now were the time, and it certainly isn't. Jim did forget. He didn't choose to leave. Jedao has believed that this whole time, and there's no reason to get insecure now.

"This is a sober household, now. Coffee aside. Are you going to have any withdrawal issues if I just tuck you in to sleep it all off?"

His hands are gentle in Jim's hair, keeping the shampoo out of his eyes, lathering and combing out all the tangles - much easier, at this length, than it had been for Nidana's hair.

He shakes his head. "Didn't forget," he mutters. "Admiral kicked me out." And it might be all the drugs, but he sort of grasps why. Something about how he was going about it wrong. That his warden deal wasn't going to work the way he was thinking about it. Or maybe that's justification afterwards for some explicable semi-godlike-being bullshit.

"Shit, really?" Because he could use a drink, after the current set of substances works its way out of his system.

"World's worst hangover, that's all." The crash. Not withdrawal, but probably still pretty dangerous. His heartbeat's definitely still going faster than normal, and it's sort of heavy and jittery at once in a way that makes his chest uncomfortable.

"Mmmhm. We've still got the bar, but you can't bring it back here." He leans down, brushes a kiss over Jim's temple, and it's still not sexual. He feels nervous and grateful and tender. Jedao just wants to hug him and not let go, but that's not useful right now. He gets a washcloth, lathers that up, too.

"I'm dating the doctor now, too. Could probably talk him into a house call." A silly grin, gossip, and for all that it's completely true, he's playing the jester at the same time, trying to make Jim smile with his antics. "We'll take care of you." He's repeating himself, but it's true.

"You are," says Jim: "...how do you have time?" Mind-boggling.

When there's no risk of shampoo running into his eyes, or minimal risk, he engages himself in scrubbing off his arms, his legs. There's not much hair on his chest or his belly, so not many places for the mud to catch.

Though bending over almost makes him fall over.

"Fuck," he says. He has a feeling that he's going to pass out again and that it won't be nice helpful sleep he'll get at first but just plain unconsciousness.

"No stars to conquer here," Jedao muses, one hand strong and ready at Jim's shoulder to catch him when he wavers. "A man gets restless."

"Stars are overrated," mutters Jim. The world appears to be stretching and warping before his eyes. It's an interesting visual effect.

"Huh," he says. "Is the bathtub longer than before?" He swipes at the wall, and misses.

"Probably so. Come on, captain. Let's get you to bed." One of the advantages of joining Jim in the shower is that his uniform is washed entirely clean of anything the nanites haven't broken down already, and Jedao won't transfer any of the gunk back onto him as he hoists Jim up, encourages him to lean fully on Jedao.

"Is your uniform squirming?" No, that can't be right.

They've gotten most of it; Jim just couldn't last long enough without hallucinating. He thinks he sees the Montana house through the door, and he pulls against Jedao's grip.

"You shouldn't be here," he says. "If you're not real, I will find a way to kill you."

His mind is losing its grip on the sequence of events. He can't remember what just happened, and the only thing stopping him from panicking is that he literally has no energy for it. He has no energy for anything.

"Sure," he lies, to an invisible person telling him to sleep, and he can't remember why he's not supposed to sleep, but he remembers that he's not supposed to. "Just one more time around." Around what?

"James, that is a very interesting promise, but I'm the realest person you know. Come on, coffee's in the kitchen. Robe first, unless you want to be bare-assed for my boyfriends after all."

Jedao clucks soothingly, manages to drape a towel on Holden's shoulders without letting him fall over, and shuffle him into Quentin's bathrobe, which has the benefits of being closest to his size and particularly soft.

Partway through this process, Jim perceives the ground approaching him at a stately pace, almost friendly. He's too far gone to figure out if it's because his perception of time is gone, his perception of space is gone, he's managing to catch himself, or Jedao is catching him.

He's unconscious before he can figure it out.

And it is unconsciousness, not sleep. His breathing is shallow, and his heartbeat is fast and not totally regular. Skin is warm, but it might just be from the warm shower water.

As it happens, he'll be fine without intervention, because he would have been fine without intervention. But whatever last reserve was sustaining him during his interaction with Jedao, it's gone.

Jedao carries him into the room that's sometimes Quentin's quiet room, sometimes Tup's room, sometimes a spare room. It's small, and white: white walls, white sheets, white blanket.

Jedao putters and frets, checks his pulse and once or twice his pupils, but ultimately decides to wait it out. Whenever Jim returns to consciousness, he's still in the bathrobe and under a few cozy white blankets, on a mattress on a bare white floor. Jedao is a pillar of black and gold in the otherwise colorless room. He sits cross-legged, reading something on a tablet. There's a glass of water, a plate of fresh-ish blueberry and chocolate muffins from the dining hall, and coffee kept sacriligiously warm in one of Jedao's self-heating teacups.

When he comes to, every part of him is a knot of throbbing pain, and he is simultaneously ravenously hungry and dizzyingly nauseated.

He rolls over and presses his forehead against the mattress. "Oh, Jesus fucking Christ." He may have felt this bad once or twice as a result of high-G burns and fights, but he can't remember it if he has. "Oh fuck." His hands form into fists, not to fight, but just to squeeze on something. It feels like the worst flu of his life, like sore throat and fever and aches everywhere. He's shaking, shivering, but he's too hot at the same time. He's not sick, though; the antivirals he takes every three months make sure of that. He's just -- like he said, having the worst hangover of his life.

He honestly feels like he zeroes in on the water with some kind of extrasensory perception, because he couldn't have seen it while he rolled over, right? Whatever. He chugs the entire glass and curls back up.

Jedao pets his hair, very gently.

"More?" He keeps his voice soft and low.

"No more," comes Holden's muffled voice, "of anything, ever." This is an ultimatum, to the universe: please stop happening all the time.

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