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There are island insects humming outside the window of his work room and he can't keep still. Dirk isn't listening to the insects - can barely hear anything. It's bad tonight; a bolt of lightning running up and down his spine, too much energy. Can't keep still. Upgrades Sawtooth's chassis. Takes it apart, dismantles it, re-assembles; runs a few tests. He wonders if he can spend all day tomorrow making C4 and building cases for depth charges. He wonders where the hell he would fire them. Into the ocean? No, into the volcano. See if he can make that sucker blow.
Jake might object to that.
Right. No depth charges in the volcano. But what if, what if he built himself a deep-sea diving bell and went a few hundred miles offshore and went to one of the red hot vents on the ocean floor, those cracked underwater wounds. Can't help wanting to pick at them. What if he tried sending a nuke down there, what if he sent a couple of nukes down there, they have so much uranium, they could spare it. What if he did it right near a magma chamber. What if he made a brand new island. Surely Jake wouldn't mind? Jake likes islands.
- might blanket the planet in ash and cause a small ice age. Can't accurately gauge the size of magma chambers; technology at his disposal is insufficient.
Make a note of that.
He's making notes of all of this, actually - scrawling in chalk and pen across the rock wall of the lab and all over the papers on his desk.
So, all right, the first order of business - figure out how to measure the precise size of these hypothetical magma chambers. Can you gague how big and how full a cavern is by the vibrations it sends back when you, say, detonate something small and harmless nearby? The fact that it's underwater adds a layer of complexity to the problem. Has anyone figured this out, yet? He'll have to run some tests.
Maybe -
His hands are moving too fast for him to keep track of them, he can't read what he's written.
Shit. Broke the chalk.
Can't sit still, can't fucking sit still - it was so much better when he had more than one body, somewhere to put all this reckless careening energy, all this furious thought. He feels dizzy. Too warm. Maybe if he got some air -
"Hey there, sport!"
- fuck!
Calm down. It's Jake. Put down the shitty katana, idiot.
English looks incredibly amused. He's also got his hands up around his head.
"You've been holed away in here since the flipping Cretaceous, Dirk, a fellow gets antsy."
Put away the weapon. Act casual. "Sorry. Working."
"Really? Getting anything done, then?"
He feels his jaw tighten. Shit, damn it, fuck. Can't stop fidgeting. What the hell is he doing with his hands? He's practically vibrating with tension.
"... No." No, he's been getting absolutely fuckall done.
Jake's eyes are very green, and he is sidling up to Dirk like being threatened with a deadly weapon is a perfectly reasonable form of greeting - an inside joke, perhaps, or maybe it's only funny when Dirk does it. Dirk isn't sure. Dirk's universe has narrowed to a point on a line.
"Right then," Jake murmurs, casually invading the no-man's land of Dirk's personal bubble like it doesn't even exist - the kill zone, the perimeter around his body that no one breaches. Dirk almost steps back - almost flinches, shamefully enough. He feels too dangerous to be around. He feels like a bomb. His tongue is sticking to the roof of his mouth.
Jake smells like sweat and gun oil and the brisk chlorophyll of trampled vegetation. He rests a hand on the work table, leans his weight on it, gets dirt on Dirk's notes. Curiously, Dirk loves him for it - an irrational swell of pure affection.
"Am I distracting you?"
Thrumming electricity in his nerves. Heart rate elevated. "... Yes."
Jake beams at him.
"Good."
Not quite sure if Jake pulls him into his arms, or if he just falls forward into them, like he's being compelled by magnetic force, like he and Jake are oppositely charged and it's inevitable. Not too far fetched. Surely. There are all kinds of metals in the body. Calcium is a metal. Technically.
- their teeth click a little and he finds that despite this reassuring evidence of Jake's calcium deposits it is very difficult to keep that train of thought. Jake is touching him. This fact is too loud, too overwhelming. It takes a terrible precedence over every other fact. He almost can't remember where he is. The dizziness doesn't go away, he's on fire, there's a shuddering knot in his chest.
"Steady there, cowboy," Jake mumbles into his lips, running a - hot, present, viscerally real - hand up and down his back, gently holding Dirk's skull with the other. Dirk realizes he's holding on too hard - fucking uncool, English is definitely laughing at him - but can't seem to stop. Can't really not hold on to Jake.
Sort of offended that Jake is laughing instead of kissing him. Jesus, English. Learn to multitask.
- fuck, okay, guess he did.
Jake is running his hands up beneath Dirk's shirt and grinning like an asshole and pressing their lips together, all 'QED'. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Unfair. Skin contact is deeply unfair.
His hands are clinging, still, but this is not exactly a bruising grip. Too much of a swoon. He feels all the force rushing out of his muscles and alternately flooding back into them - the frenzy in his blood, the storm, can't think straight, tilts his head into Jake's kisses, buries himself. Jake is so warm. Excellent circulation, elevated temperature. Solid, real body - maybe Dirk is melting. Maybe he'll never think a coherent articulate thought again. Maybe he doesn't mind that, so much, if Jake is touching him, with his hands, all over his back - fractal fireworks beneath his skin, too much, out of breath, god, the things English does to him.
"It's two in the morning," Jake whispers, and Dirk slowly parses his speech into meaning. Continues to gently stroke, up and down Dirk's back; tucks Dirk's head into his shoulder, overwhelming, Dirk finds his arms totally overwhelming, he can feel almost every muscle group corded together and they're all hugging him, it's, it's just. Tries to breathe. Everything smells like Jake; this is problematic. "You should come to bed."
Two plus two is some positive integer, he'll work on it later. "Okay," he hears himself say, thick and needy, and hates it a little. It's Jake, though. Surely he's allowed to need just one person. Surely it's not pathetic if it's just Jake. (It's pathetic, he knows. Refuses to hold hands in front of anyone else, unless he's wearing his gloves. Can't take it. Gets lost in memorizing Jake's pulse and figuring out when the valves slam shut, when the chambers fill. Inevitably distracting.)
Jake leans back a little, rests their foreheads together, peering at him with a sort of flushed delight. "Well, that was easier than I'd anticipated."
Dirk is silently glad - for the sake of his dignity - that Jake has not yet caught on just how head-over-heels stupid Dirk is for him. He knows Dirk loves him, and has professed a similar sentiment; but he hasn't really grasped just how bad this is.
"I'm not easy," he mutters into Jake's ear, feeling his stubble against his face, imagining that friction pressed between his shoulder blades, along his inner thighs. Sense memories. He has ninety nine problems, and they are all Jake English. "I'm very complicated and difficult."
"Right you are, rocketman," Jake says, sotto voice, and kisses his ear. Dirk inhales harshly. It is embarrassingly audible. "No doubt you're keeping NASA in business."
Jake slides both of his hands down the back of Dirk's shitty work jeans, and Dirk completely forgets what he was going to say. Can't think. Can't anything. For some fucking reason an antediluvian pop song is running through his head on repeat - hands on me, skin tight jeans - and he tries desperately to ignore it. Throat producing idiotic noises, right out of a porno. Voice: tremulous. Dignity: absent.
"We are not," Jake murmurs, squeezing and pulling Dirk closer into the burning arc of his body, "doing the deed in your workroom at two in the morning." His voice is husky, strained. He's deliberately grinding their hips together. Provocative jerk.
"... Prude," Dirk manages.
"Think of your back, darling," Jake says, insouciant, and wedges a leg between Dirk's thighs.
Corny as fuck. "- actually, you're a dirty old man."
Can't think straight. Doesn't intend to - never actually intends to get so carried away, but like the proverbial escalier, this keeps fucking happening. English ends up leading him to the transportalizer backwards because he can't fucking let go, his legs are shaking too much. Feels like a power surge in his head. No idea where the bed is. Let Jake figure that one out, he's the one with the decorum in this arrangement.
(And what a sad day for decorum, that its sole defender should be Jake fucking English.)
Eventually, sprawled on the bedspread, clothes discarded, shades taken from him. Beyond caring. He can't fucking breathe enough. Going to snap, needs stimulation - a leg between his thighs. Hand pushing his hair out of his face. Sweating, shivering. He is possibly dying of lust and trying not to just - rut against the warm body next to him.
"Go ahead," he hears. Hand on his - oh, fuck. Eyes rolling back. Hips jerking.
It takes for-fucking-ever and it is over too soon - one hard shout, and then the tiny seizure that blows through and wrenches the pit of his stomach.
Ruins the sheets.
Sweat-drenched, like he just ran a marathon. Jesus. It's two in the morning, the knot of tension is gone, he's -
- dimly, aware that Jake is jerking himself off. Jake, watching him, unblinking. Wonders, through a lazy fog, what he looks like. (A mess.)
Should help out, probably? Wants to touch, anyway - reaches, squirms closer, bats Jake's hand out of the way.
Jake isn't winning any awards for stamina, either.
That's okay, he decides, watching Jake come apart at the seams in fascination. Actually, it's more than okay. He doesn't care. Overwhelming fondness sinks through him like water.
Lucid, clear-headed. This was an excellent outcome. What the hell was he doing, anyway, if it wasn't this?
... shit, he said he'd come to bed earlier.
He distinctly remembers promising that one.
"... Sorry I lost track of time," he says, when Jake seems coherent enough to understand what he's saying. "I don't do this on purpose."
"You tend to retreat, instead of coming to me," Jake says. He doesn't sound angry - which would be bearable - or disappointed, which would be significantly less bearable.
"Habit." (An apology.)
"I know."
"I am difficult. I wasn't kidding." (Apologizing more.)
"Yeah," Jake says, tugging him closer, feeding him more of the human-contact opiate. He shivers. Almost too much. (This. And him. He's almost too much.) "But you're not impossible."
Inside Dirk's chest, something fierce and hopeful clicks into place.
... Right, if he looks up earthquake data and crust samples, he'll be able to get a better picture. Seismic waves travel differently through magma than through other states of rock. It affects the path and the intensity - he probably won't have to fire any charges at all, depending on how much data is available. He can look that up tomorrow.
... Jake is giving him a bemused look.
"Love you," Dirk says. He does. He loves Jake so much he is dizzy with it. It's awful that someone like him should demand so much of someone like Jake. His confession, too, is a kind of apology.
"I know," Jake says, gently, and kisses his forehead. "It's three in the bloody morning now. Go the hell to sleep."
Dirk leers. "You love me, too?"
"Of course," Jake yawns, yanking the blankets over them both. "Weren't you listening?"
He forgets why he wanted to look up the earthquake records by morning, but on the plus side Dirk remembers to get out of the lab at a reasonable hour for a good six weeks, so he rules the whole thing a success.