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On the night the world ends, Andy Knightley sits in a field on a gently sloping green hill and watches his childhood home burn.
They sit there for hours in silence, watching fire and lightning battle to be the final destruction of Newton Haven. Andy tightens his arm around Gary's shoulders and pretends he can't feel the hot, silent tears soaking into the collar of his shirt. Sam and Steve mirror them a few yards away, watching the devastation below them with disbelief on their faces and blankness in their eyes.
Slowly the fires begin to burn themselves out as the pale grey light of dawn filters through the smoke and ash filling the sky. In the cold light of day they start pulling away from each other again, each of them separately coming to the same question.
Now what?
Like sleepwalkers they rise, all following each other by tacit consensus back into the ruins of the town. Here are there the empty shells of the Blanks lie like puppets with cut strings. They give them a wide berth. The danger might be gone, but that's not the point.
They stop off in a mostly-intact Boots to patch themselves up. Andy and Sam and Steve see to each other with bandages and plasters and anything else that's going. Gary grudgingly accepts an antiseptic wipe for the cut on his forehead — swollen to an ugly purple-black and crusted with dried blood — but absolutely refuses to let anyone take a closer look at him despite the bloodstains on his faded t-shirt and the ginger way he's moving. Andy doesn't push it. Not now he knows why.
When they're finished Steve sweeps everything salvageable into a singed kit bag, and on Sam's suggestion they aim for the big Asda on the edge of town. It's far enough out to have escaped the worst of the blast, and if they're going to head back to London — he's not sure when heading back to London became the plan, but somehow of course it is — they'll need supplies for the trip. And from there it's south again, away from what's left of Newton Haven, along the road into the grey, smouldering countryside.
They walk for hours and hours, ash drifting down like snow as they follow the lines of once-familiar country roads made alien by the passage of years and the blasted devastation all around them. They walk unseeing, like sleepwalkers, 'til they're stumbling with exhaustion and the grey sky is slowly growing dim again.
Around a long slow bend in the ash-coated road they come to a lone farmhouse standing in a scorched field. The windows have all been blown out and the roof is missing some slates, but Steve surveys it with a critical eye and declares it structurally sound. Inside it's deserted, ash and shattered glass strewn across the floor by the emptily gaping windows. Andy climbs the creaking stairs to check the upstairs bedrooms for signs of life. By the time he comes back downstairs Sam has coaxed a small fire into life in the cavernous fireplace.
The place is eccentrically furnished, apparently by someone who couldn't quite decide which century they wanted to be from. There's a — now ruined and smoking — flatscreen plasma TV mounted on the wall. There's also a sword on a stand on the mantlepiece; Gary pokes it curiously, only to yelp and snatch his hand back. "S'sharp," he mumbles around the bleeding finger jammed into his mouth.
Abruptly Andy comes to a decision. "Come on," he says, looking pointedly at Gary as he lifts the kit bag of salvaged first aid gear in one hand and a torch in the other. "Upstairs and let's check you're still in one piece." Sam and Steve exchange faintly puzzled looks but wisely choose not to question it. Gary hesitates for a moment before following him up the stairs and into one of the tiny bedrooms.
Andy sets the kit bag down on the end of the bed. Gary shrugs out of his coat and strips his t-shirt off over his head without protest. He looks more resigned than anything else. Andy cleans up the cuts, picking out the odd shard of glass in the process, and applies antiseptic and plasters where necessary; Gary sits still and silent on the edge of the sagging iron bedstead and lets him. The bruises are darkening already and cover most of his torso. Andy probes the worst ones with cautious fingers, noting the way Gary stiffens, a pained breath hissing between his teeth. He's no medical professional by any stretch of the imagination, but he's had enough adolescent drunken misadventures — most of them wholly Gary's fault — to recognise cracked ribs when he sees them.
He stops, looking the other man over. Gary glances up and quickly looks away again, eyes empty and posture defeated. Now that he knows it's there he can't understand how he didn't see it before; the cracks in Gary's facade, the naked desperation behind them. A few days ago he'd looked at Gary King and seen a self-centred arsehole who'd never grown up, still buying his own propaganda. He's not sure what he sees now. Maybe still that. Maybe a man with nothing to live for clinging to the last time he remembers being optimistic and happy. Maybe a bit of both.
For all that he'd spent years hating Gary it's still strangely painful to see him this lost and empty. His mental image of Gary is still eighteen, all smart mouth and bulletproof self confidence. He might still have the look, but something's missing. The thoughtless self-assurance is gone. They'd all wished fervently for Gary to be taken down a few pegs enough times over the years; seeing that wish come true, he can't help but feel a little guilty.
"What were you thinking?" he asks, shaking his head.
Gary blinks at him. "What?"
"When you got us all back together, brought us back here. What were you—" He has a hunch, but he wants to hear it from Gary. "Just...why?"
Gary looks down and half turns away, clearly unwilling to meet his eyes, instead examining the ash-dusted windowsill as though it might hold the answers he's looking for. The bruises blossoming on his back are vivid blue against his skin. "I don't know," he says quietly. "Suppose I thought...I just..." He waves a vague, inarticulate hand, snorts, and stands abruptly, pacing across to the window. "It doesn't matter."
"Yes it fucking does!" Andy snaps, crossing the room in two furious paces to close the distance between them. "We followed you. After twenty fucking years, after what you did, we still fucking followed you. I want to know why. I want to know what the fuck you thought you were doing. I want to know—" He can't finish the sentence. The choking tightness in his throat won't let him. He wants to know if he ever really knew Gary King at all, if this blinding egotism has always been a mask to hide the man slowly falling apart behind it.
"I don't fucking know, do I?" Gary bites back, and for all that Andy kind of wants to punch him it's a relief to see anything other than apathy and despair on his face. "If I knew— if I'd ever known what the fuck I was doing, would I even be here? I thought if I did it right this time I might get another chance at going on from here, but everything's even more fucked than it was before."
"We saved the world last night," Andy says.
Gary gives a harsh, humourless laugh, eyes flickering pointedly toward the ash drifting in through the broken window. "Oh yeah," he replies with a grin that's bordering on hysterical. "It looks saved."
He turns sharply away, throwing his hands up in disgust and Andy grabs him before he can consciously register what he's doing. He catches Gary's wrists in an almost perfect mimicry of how he had back in The World's End, the loose-woven fabric of the bandages coarse yet soft to the touch, and Gary freezes. His eyes are guarded and fearful. Andy relaxes his grip slowly, simply holding rather than restraining, and some infinitesimal fraction of the tension flows out of Gary. He doesn't try to pull away.
He's always been skinny but never this unhealthily so, bones sharp beneath the skin as though he might break apart under Andy's hands. He unwraps the bandages slowly and carefully, with infinite gentleness, hands steady even as he feels Gary trembling. The last layer is stained and comes free with a tug. The scars are an angry half-healed red; the skin around them is smooth and unmarked. There was no messing about, no working up to it. This was the single sure act of a man who really and truly didn't want to live any more.
He wants to say not a cry for help, but looking back, he can't help but wonder if Gary's whole life wasn't a cry for help.
A few of the stitches are torn, down by the lower end of the wound at the heel of the left hand, still bleeding sluggishly where the removal of the bandage had torn away the tacky layer of dried blood. He guides Gary across the room and sits him down again on the edge of the bed, and cleans and rebandages the healing cuts as gently as he can manage.
"We did the right thing, right?" Gary asks, apparently of his own boots. "I mean we couldn't just... They would've got rid of all of us in the end."
"Yeah," Andy says, and he can't tell if he's trying to convince Gary or himself or if he even believes a word he's saying.
And as he ties off the last bandage, Gary's blood still sticky on his hands, it occurs to him that for someone who clung so desperately to the past...when he'd been offered everything he should have wanted, he hadn't taken it. He'd been offered the chance to go back, to be young again, to only remember the good, and he'd told the Network to fuck off without a second's hesitation.
"Yeah," he repeats with more conviction. "Yeah, we did the right thing." Gary closes his eyes.
Even now, even like this, there's still something magnetic about Gary. He's always had a charisma about him, the uncanny ability to sweep people up into his wake as he plunges headfirst into whatever insanity has his attention at any given moment. When they were teenagers Andy had admired and envied him for it in equal measure. Now...well, after everything that's happened, you couldn't pay him to be Gary Fucking King.
"I know I was a dick," Gary says, still contemplating the toecaps of his scuffed doc martins. "You were absolutely right to be pissed off at me. But I always...I really did lo—"
"Don't," Andy snaps out, cutting him off mid-word. "Don't you fucking dare. Not now. Not after all this time when I'd finally convinced myself I didn't give a shit about you any more. You've no right to just...bring it all up again."
"Right, right, I'm sorry. I just...I wanted to say..."
"Don't. Just...don't, okay?"
"I'm sorry," Gary says, and kisses him.
Wrapped in the shocking numbness of a couple of days that can't possibly have been real, it seems like the most natural thing in the world to just go with it, to pin him down and kiss him back and see if he still whines high in the back of his throat when his neck gets bitten. Everything's been insane since Gary King waltzed back into his life, but this at least is simple. This at least is familiar. Except they're not a pair of randy teenagers any more, fooling around and laughing it off as nothing. He knows exactly what he's doing, even as he knows that he shouldn't be—
("Please," Gary whispers, eyes shut tight and sweat gleaming on his tattoos, desperate rapture written all over his face. Andy grips his hips hard enough to bruise and obliges.)
Afterward they lie together in the tangled sheets of a dead man's bed, sweat cooling on their skin. The world's ended and somehow here they are again, like when they were eighteen and fearless with the world at their feet and the future ahead of them in all its terrifyingly limitless possibility. Andy opens his eyes to the darkness of the derelict farmhouse, the silence broken by their breathing and the creak of the sagging bedsprings. Gary is curled into him, head down and eyes closed like he thinks he can hide from the world in Andy's arms, every bruise vivid and swollen over his too-prominent ribs. Andy tightens his arms around him and wishes things could have been different.
"I am sorry," Gary says very quietly, head still bowed. Andy thinks of that field. Of sprawling there drunk and laughing as the dawn breaks and the future rolls out bright and beautiful ahead of their sweet, naive, stupid teenage selves; of Gary crying silently into his shoulder as the volcanic aftermath of the explosion consumes the town below.
"I know," he replies. It's all he can say. It's all he can bring himself to say. Truth be told he stopped really being angry at Gary a long time ago; stopped being angry at anything other than his own stupidity for expecting more when he should have known better. Looking back, Gary was always a car crash waiting to happen. "Go to sleep."
When he wakes in the cold light of morning, Gary's dressing quietly, betrayed only by the creaking of the ancient floorboards. Andy watches him in silence from the nest of blankets, watches as the fingerprint bruises on his hips disappear beneath his jeans. He doesn't say anything. There's nothing to say, really. Gary shrugs on his battered coat and turns back toward the bed, everything he's never going to say written all over his face and eyes. Andy gives a tight, mirthless smile. He knows. Maybe he already knew it last night. How absolutely fucking typical of the unbelievable bastard to turn their lives upside down and promptly fuck right off again. Gary Fucking King doing what he does best even now, and fucking off to deal with his own shit as best he can.
"You're an absolute bastard, you know that?" Andy says conversationally.
"I know," Gary replies.
And then he's alone with the first aid kit on the floor and a bloodstained Sisters of Mercy t-shirt draped over the headboard. He lies back and stares at the sagging plaster of the ceiling as the creak of the stairs retreats into the distance.
He dresses stiffly, the aches and pains from the fight for Newton Haven reasserting their presence with a vengeance, in a mix of any of his own clothes still mostly clean and intact and anything stolen from the dresser that looked like it might fit. Downstairs Steve is making a valiant attempt at breakfast over the embers of the fire, while Sam roots through the cupboards and drawers for anything useful to add to their supplies. She looks up at him with a frown creasing her brow, but doesn't say anything. Steve is glowering determinedly at the fire.
Andy glances toward the fireplace and has to muffle something that could be a laugh or a snort or a sob or a mix of the three in his sleeve.
The sword on the mantlepiece is gone.