Special Episode: Golden Age (Part II)
This episode is part of a larger story, Soft Touch. If you haven’t yet, you can go back and read it from the beginning right here.
Floyd and Spencer stare at each other, equally at a loss.
Spencer was just beginning to breathe freely again, but now his chest is tightened up, his breath stopped in his throat. What Floyd just said shook him right down to his foundations.
But he doesn’t know what any of it means.
“W-what…?” he begins, stammering painfully, seizing Floyd’s hand. “Done with you? Me? What d-do you mean, you didn’t w-want to go? That w-was the worst day of my life!”
Spencer has always been the one easily pushed to tears. In fact, Floyd’s unbelievable ability to keep going with an undaunted smile on his face is one of the things Spencer admired and eventually adored about him. He was always still forging ahead, miles past the point where anyone else would have given up and broken down. And he didn’t mind if he had to drag Spencer in tears after him, which Spencer was deeply, inexpressibly grateful for.
But Floyd actually looks like he might cry as he tries to answer.
“Okay,” he begins, shaky and breathless, unable to look at Spencer. “Well, what I remember is that we always said that when the paper inevitably got tired of our shit and kicked one of us to the curb, we would walk out together, and start our bookshop…”
Spencer quickly drops his head, a jagged stab of pain piercing through his chest.
“And when that day finally came, and it was me who they fired,” Floyd goes on, his voice wavering, “When they basically told me that I had no talent, and that I was crazy… you - you stood there with all the rest of those assholes… right next to Jordan, actually…”
The memory sweeps into Spencer’s mind before he can fight it back, bringing with it a flash flood of overwhelming guilt.
He remembers Floyd walking through the bullpen with the box of stuff from his desk. The way an unnatural hush fell over the room as everyone stopped what they were doing and all eyes went to him. A few quiet, nasty snickers of laughter went up as he went past.
His cheeks were burning, his eyes blazing with fury and humiliation. He had a white-knuckle grip on the box.
Jordan, the owner of the paper, had fired him in the middle of the day. When everyone was at work. And by the time Floyd stormed out of Jordan’s office, someone had already packed up his desk. Jordan had even seen to it that all of Floyd’s press passes and credentials from the paper had been taken back. They were the last thing left on the desk, with a big red VOID stamp on the front.
It was a cruel, horrible way to let him go. Typical of Jordan’s management style.
Spencer didn’t know it was happening. He walked back into the office from picking up coffee just as Floyd made his exit. He had happened to stop right next to Jordan, who was scowling at Floyd with an incensed fuck off expression on his face that made it clear Floyd had told Jordan what he thought of him, too.
Floyd stopped in the middle of the bullpen when he caught sight of Spencer. He was pale with outrage, breathing hard, his blonde hair messed up and his tie half undone. But at the sight of Spencer, a tiny, relieved smile rose on his face.
He looked at him, beckoned with a slight toss of his head, and then waited, with complete faith in his eyes.
“You just - you just stood there with Jordan and let me walk out all by myself,” Floyd says hoarsely. “In front of everyone, you made me walk out by myself…”
And then Jordan made everything so much worse. Spencer was holding two coffees, one for himself, and one for Floyd. Jordan pulled Floyd’s coffee out of Spencer’s hand and took a sip of it, without breaking his contemptuous glare away from Floyd. And Spencer just… let it happen, without a word.
Spencer had dropped his head right after that, but too late. He’d already caught the expression in Floyd’s eyes. Burned into his memory, forever.
“You know, I…” Floyd clears his throat, but his words come out half-broken all the same. “I had always been afraid that there would come a day when - when you found someone who could give you what I couldn’t give you back. Who could love you the same way. And I knew that would probably be it for us… and I - I’d been trying to - prepare myself for that day for - a long time…”
Spencer had been staring helplessly at the bed, but now he looks up sharply, blinking hard.
“But I just - I couldn’t believe it was him.” Floyd really, really sounds ready to cry now. “I mean - him, Spence? And that’s how you broke it to me?”
“What…?” Spencer is so bewildered that all he can do is ask the question. “Who?”
Floyd looks up, too, his eyebrows dropping low in confusion. “What do you mean, who? Jordan.”
Spencer draws back so sharply that he nearly knocks his head on the wall. “Jordan?”
“I mean… yeah…” Floyd picks at the blankets on the fold-out bed, trying to take deep breaths, bouncing his shoulders a little like that might help. “We both hated his guts, but then suddenly you were - stopping in his office all the time to talk to him, and doing extra stuff for him, you took him up on that stupid lunch with the boss thing he did… you were staying late at the office even when I wasn’t… and I saw you - looking at him… and I could just tell that there was something you - weren’t telling me…”
Floyd trails off, swiping his hand under his nose, blinking hard.
“I was afr- I was wondering what was going on… and then that day, you stood by him instead of by me. And you looked at me like - like you were trying to tell me you were sorry. And then you looked at him.”
Spencer stares at Floyd with enormous eyes, then slumps weakly against the back of the couch.
Never once did the possibility so much as cross his mind. Never once did it ever occur to him that that’s what Floyd thought was going on.
“Oh m-my god, Floyd,” he stammers, sinking his head into his hands. “Oh my g-god, no…”
Floyd looks hard at him, like he can’t tell if he’s serious - then suddenly seizes his wrist tightly, his breathing picking up. “No?”
“No, fucking no, of course n-not!” Spencer cups Floyd’s face in one trembling hand, staring into his eyes. “Floyd, oh…”
His words come out fractured by his heartrending disbelief.
“You left because you thought I wanted you to? You - you thought that I ended things b-between us? To be with someone else?”
Floyd stares at him, struggling to understand. “Didn’t you?”
Spencer makes a small, involuntary, punched-out sound, pressing a hand to his forehead.
The entire room is spinning. Not a single word comes to him that he can manage to speak out loud. He begins to murmur something, then stops, painfully aware that he’s stuttering so badly that even Floyd can’t make sense of it.
Floyd catches his trembling hands and peers into his eyes searchingly, obviously desperate for him to answer.
“Floyd,” Spencer stammers, fighting to pull a breath into his lungs, “I hated Jordan just as much as you did! I started acting differently around him because I was investigating him!”
Floyd freezes up instantly. He looks at Spencer like he can’t understand.
“Think about it,” Spencer stumbles on, all in one breath. “We know why Jordan axed m-most of our stories, right? Because they were too negative.”
Despite the situation, a flare of old, burning frustration flashes through Floyd’s eyes.
“I always thought that shit was so backwards,” he grumbles angrily, picking at the blanket again. “I thought it was optimistic of us! Why would we have spent all that time highlighting shit that was wrong unless we believed it could be fixed? Or at least made better…”
“Okay, and I agree, but the point is - why did Jordan kill my story about the expensive houses that were used for smuggling bases? The ones tied to the wife of a police official?”
“Because…” Floyd shrugs his shoulders uncertainly, trying to work out where this is going. “Painted a true and ugly picture of the fuzz?”
“Yeah, but that was a fucking bombshell story, Floyd. It would have been worth it, for the paper to break that story. Even Jordan would have known that. Even if he’d hate for you and me to have a victory, he should have run it.”
Floyd narrows his eyes at Spencer, at a loss.
“I only started thinking about it way later,” Spencer forges on, despite his trembling voice. “But he killed a bunch of our stories that it made no sense to kill. And they were all related to various criminal investigations we had d-done for the paper.”
Floyd drops his eyes to the bedding, deep in thought - then snaps them sharply back up to Spencer.
“You think he was on somebody’s payroll? Or - involved, somehow? He was one of them?”
Spencer answers with his eyes, and Floyd stares at him, stunned all over again.
“Oh my god…” He slaps a hand to his forehead, suddenly almost shouting. “Oh my god! Why didn’t I think of it myself? I thought he did it purely for the pleasure of ruining shit for you and me, getting to watch our faces as he threw our work out and made all the effort worthless!”
“That was probably a big part of it, too.”
“Even the editors were confused about why he cut some of those stories!”
Spencer nods at Floyd, then forces himself to keep going, in a rush to get it all out.
“Once it occurred to me that Jordan could be connected, I started retracing my way back through the criminal stories we tried to break. There was a pattern, and I could sense something linking it all together, but I didn’t know what. Or how Jordan fit into it. So, I-”
“Started investigating him,” Floyd realizes out loud, then closes his eyes in disbelief. “Investigating…”
It’s a while before Floyd’s soft, wavering voice breaks the silence again.
“Why the fuck did you keep me in the dark on this? What, you - you didn’t - trust me…?”
“No, it w-wasn’t that!” Spencer frantically waves his hands at Floyd, alarmed purely by the suggestion. “They were dangerous people, Floyd! You know that! I had already put y-your life at risk before, roping you in on one of the linked cases! I didn’t know what w-would happen if someone found out that I was looking into it, I - I just didn’t want it to happen to you. I w-wanted to keep you safe by keeping it to myself, at least until I had something solid, material evidence, p-proof - I just knew that I would never forgive myself if-”
“But - hang on - so - so - wait a minute, so…” Floyd trails off, his voice dropping to the barest stammer and his eyes opening very wide as the implications finally break over his head. “Spence, you never - that wasn’t you telling me…?”
“No! No.”
Floyd goes utterly silent, staring at Spencer like he can’t believe his ears. Like he’s putting in a superhuman effort to hold himself together at the understanding that just crashed down on him. Struggling to absorb the shock.
Rapidly losing that battle. It’s written all over his face.
Spencer knows how he feels. What little composure he had left is crumbling apart too fast for him to grab onto any of the pieces. He pulls in a few ragged breaths, trying to stabilize his wild heartbeat.
“I had no fucking idea that Jordan was going to f-fire you,” he stumbles on desperately, wincing at the intensity of the tremor in his own voice. “I didn’t know what to do. If I walked out with y-you, I wouldn’t have the access or resources to keep investigating Jordan, and I thought I was getting close to a b-break. I had to make a d-decision on the s-spot.”
Shit, this is so difficult for him to talk about. Every word he speaks cuts at him from within, but he needs to say this.
“I tried to think of what you w-would tell me to do, Floyd. And you - you always told me to stick with the story. I knew that you were gonna be really upset, b-but I thought when I got home that n-night I could just explain everything to you. I thought that we could break the story on Jordan together, and we would come out on top in the l-long run - I thought that everything w-w-would be… I - I really thought that - that I was doing the right…”
The lump in Spencer’s throat is making it hard for him to talk. He stops, takes in a big, heaving breath, then pushes on, not looking at Floyd.
“But I shouldn’t have done it,” he rasps, dropping his head, dragging a hand beneath his nose. “I should have just walked out with you. It was a huge fucking mistake, the worst mistake I ever made. It was way more goddamn important for me to walk out with you. To send a message about Jordan firing you. Especially b-because - that was always one of the things I l-loved and admired most about you, you were a fucking incredible journalist - just - brilliant, and b-brave, and - willing to take a stand, even when-”
“Spence.”
It’s hard to say from his voice whether Floyd is laughing or crying, or both. Spencer looks up to check.
Both.
Floyd takes Spencer’s hands again and squeezes them tightly. He looks rocked, like everything he thought he knew just came crashing down around him. But in a way that’s put a radiant, shining light in his eyes. Early golden sunlight is streaming in through the angled windows, but that glow is coming from within him.
It slowly dawns on Spencer that after all the time he spent wishing more than anything that he could just explain himself to Floyd, he finally got the chance to do it. And this is the result.
His own suffering expression melts into a big, tear-filled smile. He squeezes Floyd’s fingers back, maybe harder than he should. He opens his mouth, but no words come out, so he closes it again.
They’re both quiet for a long moment.
“It wasn’t what you thought,” Spencer manages eventually. “I would n-never have ended things with you. I thought that you ended things with me. B-b-because I didn’t walk out of the paper with y-you. When I got home, you were just - gone…”
Floyd shakes his head, then lets out a slow, dazed breath.
“I thought you wanted me gone.” The smile falls from his face, and his gaze drops back to the bedspread. “Honestly, the time right after - for a while after… it’s a blur. Like I was walking around, but my mind was switched off. I - wasn’t really myself. I felt stranded, I had nowhere to go. But we had talked about moving to Greenrock or Port Sitka for our bookshop, and I guess - you always sounded like you were leaning towards Greenrock, so I - went there…”
Spencer bites back a pained little sound. Goddamnit. He went to Port Sitka because it sounded like that was what Floyd was leaning towards.
“And I was fucking furious when I heard you opened the bookshop,” Floyd goes on, wincing deeply. “You - you know what I thought, now. I thought you had done that, and then started our bookshop without me.”
Spencer stares at Floyd, thunderstruck, completely expressionless. Then he drops his head into his hands, trying not to wail with despair.
“Floyd! I opened the shop because I couldn’t fucking find you! I thought if you heard about it, you might come find me here, you’d realize it was all ready and waiting! I set it up exactly like we talked about, it-”
It was all for you.
Even with Spencer keeping that last part to himself, Floyd looks staggered by what he said. It takes him almost a solid minute to recover.
“Okay, well, I didn’t know that,” he answers unsteadily, avoiding Spencer’s eyes. “So, um - that’s why I showed up and shouted at you and didn’t give you a chance to say anything and then stormed off and opened up my own bookshop in direct competition with yours. Which - I’m assuming is why you’ve been angry at me?”
“Yeah, but honestly, the main reason I was angry is that you never gave me a chance to explain m-myself.” Spencer shakes his head, blinking back tears. “I couldn’t believe that you wouldn’t give me even one more chance. And I felt like you should have had enough faith in m-me to realize there must have been an explanation for what I did. I didn’t know you thought you’d already figured the explanation out… It n-never occurred to me for one second that you thought I wanted you gone. Probably b-because that was the farthest possible thing from the truth...”
He fades off, and Floyd doesn’t move to fill the silence. Both of them are struggling to cope with everything they’ve just finally understood.
For a long time, not a word is spoken between them.
“Floyd, how could you think-?” Spencer takes a slow, shaky breath, staring at Floyd in total disbelief. “How could you ever think that I would…? Don’t you know how much I l-love you?”
“How could you think that I would have left over just that? Don’t you know how much I…?” Floyd draws back, gives Spencer a wounded look. “You didn’t believe me. When I told you how much.”
“Clearly you didn’t believe me, either!” Spencer lets out an agonized sound, pauses, then looks searchingly at Floyd. “Maybe… maybe the problem is that it’s a hard thing to b-believe. For - both of us?”
Floyd doesn’t answer right away, but the look on his face says enough. Spencer nods in understanding, a wrenching burst of pain cutting through his heart. He had hoped Floyd wouldn’t know what he meant. He’s so easy to love, at least to Spencer. How could he not know that?
Spencer blinks in surprise as, very slowly, a big, bright smile spreads across Floyd’s face. He lifts his eyes to meet Spencer’s, then winds his arms around his own knees, tapping his thumb on his wrist.
“This means you meant it, though,” he says wonderingly, staring at Spencer with wide eyes. “Every time you said it. You always meant it.”
Spencer can feel the blush mounting in his cheeks, but love is emanating from him in every way right now, and Floyd can see it regardless. No point in trying to hide it.
“You meant it, too,” he blurts out defensively, then blushes deeper. “In a different way, I know, but you meant it.”
Floyd nods earnestly, then squeezes Spencer’s hand again, looking into his eyes.
Spencer stares at him for a long moment. Stops himself just short of locking his arms around Floyd and kissing him.
That was close. He used to be better at holding himself back, waiting patiently to be offered whatever Floyd felt comfortable offering. He’s going to have to get back into practice.
The thought makes him glow from within. A sense of perfect, blissful contentment comes over him, rocking his soul gently. He lets out a soft, happy sigh.
He and Floyd look at each other, smiling, suddenly exhausted. A day and a night have gone by since they last slept. A lot has happened in that time.
They both laugh tiredly, leaning into each other.
“When am I actually gonna process all this?” Floyd asks, closing his eyes.
“I don’t know,” Spencer says dazedly. “I’ll be amazed if I ever do.”
Floyd laughs, gives Spencer’s arm an affectionate squeeze, then gets up out of the bed. He goes over to the window and closes the curtains, muffling the brilliant glow of the sunlight. Then he does the same to the other window, casting the room into cool semi-darkness.
Spencer had let Naomi out for a little roam when they got back to the apartment. She’s crawling along near the bed when Floyd returns. He bends down and carefully scoops her up into his hands.
Spencer hastily starts to reach out in alarm, but - Naomi doesn’t hiss at Floyd, or retreat into her shell.
“Sweet little friend, aren’t you?” Floyd lifts her on his palms so he can look at her tiny face, smiling warmly. “We’ll have to get to know each other. I’m looking forward to it!”
He gently sets her down on a rock in her tank, then comes over and gets back into the bed next to Spencer. He stretches out on his back, closes his eyes in obvious exhaustion.
“Tomorrow,” he says quietly, tentatively, without opening his eyes. “We’ll - talk about plans for our bookshop?”
Spencer’s toes curl happily at the end of the bed. “Yeah. Definitely.”
“Dynamite, man… I can’t wait…” Floyd is smiling, his words slowing down, starting to melt together. “I’m gonna sleep so differently, I think…”
He trails off, leaving Spencer staring down at him, feeling helpless with love.
This is how they used to fall asleep all the time. Right in the middle of talking. Straining to keep speaking and listening to each other until sleep took them by force.
Spencer can think of so many times. Him trying to stay awake long enough to tell Floyd something he’d been reading about the meaning of tomb paintings and engraved mirrors found in ancient Etruscan archaeological sites. Floyd stretched out on his stomach and propped up on his elbows, listening eagerly even as he passed out. His head slowly slipping off of his palm, his blonde hair falling forward over his eyes.
Spencer gently takes Floyd’s perfectly round glasses off of his face and sets them aside. Presses a kiss onto his lined forehead, smoothing his silver hair back.
Then he curls up next to Floyd, folds his arm beneath his head, and gazes at his peaceful face in the soft half-darkness of the room.
A quiet smile slowly turns up his lips.
He thinks of all those nights he spent without Floyd, after he first left. How sometimes the fact that he was gone would hit Spencer all over again, so painfully that it made him gasp. He would have given anything to hear Floyd’s voice again, to hear his name said with Floyd’s specific inflections, his warmth. All the silent tears Spencer cried, hurting so badly that he wished he could be anyone but himself. Wishing there was anything, anything he could do to put things back to how they had been before.
And now, here Floyd is, stretched out on the bedspread beside him. Cozy and close, the way the two of them always used to sleep together.
Spencer feels giddy, almost delirious with happiness.
“Spence,” Floyd murmurs suddenly, in a voice slow and slurred with sleep.
“Mmm?”
“What happened with your investigation into what Jordan was up to? Did you get him?”
“No. Told you I knew I made a big mistake not walking out with you. The next morning I went into Jordan’s office and made it pretty clear how I felt about what he did to the legendary Floyd Little. I - really didn’t hold back.” Spencer blushes, slightly shamefaced at the memory. “He threatened to call the cops before I was done.”
Floyd’s mouth drops open, then curves up into a big, sleepy grin. He lets out a quiet laugh, shaking his head on the pillow.
“It’s so good to have you back, buddy,” he sighs softly, half asleep.
Spencer presses his nose into Floyd’s shoulder and closes his eyes, his heart overfull. “You too, m-my love.”
It’s a day like any other outside on the street. Warm and bright, the air glittering with a soft flutter of fine, sunlit rain. The chattering and footsteps of a few people walking past, the dry sound of someone brushing the sidewalk outside of their shop.
But Spencer is going to sleep in a completely different world from the one he woke up in. So much of what he thought he knew about his own life has turned out to be so wrong.
After all, somehow here Floyd is, back in his bed again. His again.
Spencer is slowly registering the shock of it all. It’s going to take him some time to grasp. Deep earthquakes have shaken the foundations of his reality. The kind of immense seismic activity that reshapes the whole landscape, that makes volcanoes go off, destroying the preexisting geography.
But what happens after those? he thinks drowsily, his mind drifting towards sleep. Volcanic eruptions form new grottoes, new coves and lakes, new mountains, new valleys and springs. Deposits of precious metals. Huge forests in the mineral-rich earth.
New growth. New life.
He becomes distantly aware that there’s very soft music playing in the apartment. Unchained Melody, by The Righteous Brothers. It’s coming from the radio. Strange, because Spencer doesn’t remember turning it on, and he always turns it off before he gets into bed.
Oh…
“Hey, Little,” Spencer murmurs, sleepily prodding Floyd’s arm with a fingertip. “You left the radio on again…”
He trails off, and falls asleep smiling with his whole face.
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