These Layers of Charnel Air by Slantedlight (Everyone)

[merentha13.livejournal.com]

Fandom: THE PROFESSIONALS
Pairing: Bodie/Doyle
Length: ~17500 words
Author on LJ: byslantedlight
Author’s Stories: Automated Hatstand; The Circuit Archive
Why this must be read: evocative writing and spot on characterization

Another of my favorite Pro’s writers is Slantedlight. She knows the lads inside and out. What makes her stories so special is the way she has with words. She doesn’t tell a story, she paints it. This bit makes me feel like I’m right there on the beach with Bodie watching Ray…


God, it was Doyle.

He didn’t look any different, at least not from this distance, this night-smudged angle. Perhaps it would show in his face, in his eyes, but his walk was just as strong, just as easy as ever. His shoulders too - he’d always had that way of moving as though everything was connected in just the right way, each muscle, each tendon flowing smoothly, in perfect time, with the next. As though everyone else had just been practicing the way to move, but he, Raymond Doyle, was the one who’d got it right.

That walk took them to the walled promenade, and through a wide gap into darkness beyond, where the sea - Bodie could hear it now, pounding above his own heartbeat - crashed its way onto the shore. Sand and rocks both, Bodie knew from his regular lunch time strolls, sent as the newest crew member to collect steak and kidney pies, sausage rolls and ham salad batches from the bakery on the front. The beach stretched southwards until the cliffs cut it off, rising chalked and grass-scattered from the crescent end of sands. In the other direction it became gradually more rocky, until you were scrambling amongst the pools and the rich brown ribbons of seaweed, eventually out and around the headland to where the lighthouse flashed its lonely beacon out to sea.

So which way would Doyle...?

In the end Bodie wandered casually over to the sea wall and leaned himself against it as though it was a summer’s day and he was taking the air. The wind at least blew the clouds across the waxing moon, at the same time as it blew salt water and sand into his face, and he finally saw movement at the water’s edge - the tall thin movement that was a man, rather than randomly blown flotsam and carrier bags. Doyle, hands tucked into his jacket, head still bowed, shifting his hips occasionally one way, or the other.

Restless, his Doyle, whether standing still or already in motion, asleep or awake, every part of him moved, as if pulled by the winds and the tides and the deep deep magnetism of the earth…

Yeah, Bodie, and you’re standing out in a gale watching him.

But he didn’t leave, didn’t head off to the comforts of his B and B, the warmth and fug of his own little room. He crossed back to the other side of the road, faded into the shadows, and waited.

It was over an hour before Doyle appeared again, and he walked more slowly this time, as though suddenly tired, as though cold and old and tired, but as he passed Bodie’s hiding place he paused, head still bowed, taking two steps where one would have done. He didn’t say anything though, didn’t pinpoint Bodie’s presence with a sharp gaze and a sharper tongue, he just took the two odd steps, and then continued on his way.
Slantedlight’s stories feature a great plot, action, angst, hurt/comfort and throughout it all, we have the lads as the hard men they are. When she writes the scenes that show their love for each other, their vulnerability exposed, she writes it without feminizing them. They stay Bodie and Doyle.

“Got it wrong, didn’t you?”

“Again.” He gave a sigh, Bodie felt it flow through him. “I screwed up by listening to Cowley in the first place, I get a second chance, and now I’ve screwed that up too.”

Still not like Doyle to be so resigned to failure, especially when he hadn’t, after all, failed. “Screwed up how?”

“You.”

“Nah,” Bodie said, realising that it was true. Didn’t matter that there was a part of him that he knew still resented what Doyle had done, that he was already planning torments, in the back of his mind, for Maguire, and anyone else who’d touched him, or that if he ever saw him again he’d tear Cowley limb from limb, because this, this moment, felt right again, as his world hadn’t felt for a long, long time. “Takes more than bloody Cowley to do that.”

“Simple as that is it?” Always one to eye up the dark side, was Doyle.

Bodie sighed in his turn, pulled him back in, and gave him a hard enough squeeze that it elicited a grunt, not to mention a twinge of interest from his own cock. “No,” he said patiently, “But we’ll work it out.”

Instead of saying anything right away, Doyle leaned in even closer, so that their foreheads touched, so that they lay chest to chest, skin to skin everywhere they could, and then he tucked his face just under Bodie’s, cheek to cheek as well, a still dance in the bed, in the gentling wind that blew outside.

A rough whisper in his ear. “I missed you, Bodie, so fucking much…”

Bodie kissed him then, on his cheek, because that was what he could reach, and then across skin to his lips, and then they just lay there.

“I woke up once,” he whispered, “That night. You kissed me, when you thought I was out for the count, and then you lay there watching me. I fell asleep again, to that. But I knew. Couldn’t figure out why you’d leave, after that.”

“That was the night you got back, just after Cowley’d hauled me up before the board for turning traitor. They’d just found me guilty. I knew I’d be so deep in, after that, that…”

“We work better together, you know. You thick bastard.”

“Yeah,” Doyle breathed into his neck, and Bodie felt the flutter of eyelashes against his skin. “I know.”

Beautifully described settings, moving scenes of angst and love… please give this one a try!

These Layers of Charnel Air