*****

The van made low metallic noises as its engine cooled. Pike let it sing to him while he finished strapping the sleeping bag to his back and picked up the cooler. Familiar sounds. Familiar smells here too: of ocean, salt, sand, things living, things dying. He shouldn't been surprised; he really hadn't been away that long.

It only felt like it.

"You're being really mysterious, Pike," Benny said as he picked up similar gear.

"This is just a place I wanted you to see. If I tell you too much, I'll spoil it."

"C'mon, Pike. I'm dying to know. Even instant gratification is too slow for me; you know that."

Pike smiled, but the knot in his chest didn't loosen. "I can't yet. Besides, I didn't ask you to explain why we had to stop at that cornfield."

"You *liked* the cornfield." Brief pause. "Didn't you?"

//Now you're upsetting Ben. Get your head on straight.// "Yeah, I loved it, and you'll love this." Pike started to lead Benny down the hillside. "Do I have to get you back soon? I mean, we've been gone for days. Your parents must think your body's lying in a ditch somewhere."

"You kidding? After they finally notice I'm gone, they'll find my note and be so thrilled that I *have* a friend that it won't matter at all. The great thing about being abnormal is that normal misbehavior gets the parental green light."

"It's good to be a freak."

"Ain't it just? But hey, I thought there'd be a beach down here. We're going rock climbing at sea level?"

Pike smiled. The "beach" was more of a minefield of boulders than a vista of sand. "Nah. We're just heading out for the right rock."

"Suuure."

"Cornfield." "Okay already!" But Benny laughed.

Drowning in the past, Pike led the way in a haze of memory. As they walked across the boulder-strewn beach, Pike saw glimpses of a tall figure, big as all life, ahead of them. Peroxided buzzcut hair seemed to absorb the sunset. The figure turned to face them but still continued on by walking backwards. He could get away with it, because he was a ghost.

Having a ghost there didn't bother Pike, whose mind was full of them, representing people both living and dead who were no longer in his life. It was the ghost's identity that made him stumble.

"Hey, Pike, when are you gonna start mourning me?" Spider asked. The heavy, smudged kohl that made his green eyes look darker also made them look like they were floating in a skull's empty sockets. Pike had never seen him without it. He wore the same "Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" T-shirt he'd worn the day they'd met. His dogtags swayed as he walked.

Pike's heart clenched. "This is all in my head," he whispered, knowing it didn't matter to Spider how loudly he spoke, but it would to Benny.

"Does that make this feel less real?"

"You're not dead."

"If you thought I was really still alive, you never would have stopped searching."

"I never found a body."

"You think this is a fucking movie? Pike, you can't stop mourning me until a while after you let yourself start."

Pike shook his head and kept walking, following the ghost ahead of him as Benny followed him in turn. He didn't know it would hurt this much; at the time he'd only felt a deep ache in his chest, not this sharp tearing. But "at the time" he hadn't been entirely right in the head or heart either. Benny was slowly bringing him back to life, and usually that was a good thing....

Coming back here had been a bad idea.

When Pike looked up, Spider had disappeared. He couldn't decide if he felt relieved or disappointed.

"Pike? Hey, man, are you okay?"

When Pike looked back, he saw concern in Benny's face. "Yeah. Just memories walking, y'know?"

"Good or bad?"

"Both. This is our boulder."

"We have a boulder?"

"I did. Now *we* do. Climb on up. Put the cooler up first."

Benny shook his head but obeyed. "Things I do for you."

"Corn--"

"Yeah, yeah. Just let me bitch a while, okay? I enjoy it."

"And I enjoy listening to you do it. To a point, sure." Pike grinned to soften the words. Once they reached the top, Pike unrolled his sleeping bag.

"We're staying a while?"

"Is it okay with you?"

"Yeah. It's pretty here." Benny put down his own, then grinned as Pike zipped the two together into one large one.

They sat, snuggled in it together, passed Pike's silver flask around, and enjoyed the view. Sunset burned through the sky and painted the rippling ocean in red, yellow, pink and orange. Waves rustled against the shore and one another. The horizon looked so close and so far all at once.

As Pike sat there--warm and enfolded in Benny and the sleeping bag--he felt a lump of words and emotions stick in his throat. Ben sometimes half-joked about how secretive he could be, but he actually just tried to avoid thinking about his past as much as possible. Talking about it meant thinking about it.

But once he gave in to the compulsion to stop here, everything started to rush back. //Can I tell Ben everything? *Should* I?// He felt Spider lurking at the corner of his eye now and then.... Pike leaned into Benny's stroking touch on his hair and accepted a joint. //Don't think about it now.//

"Hey, Pike."

"Yeah, Ben?"

"Would you still love me if I got disfigured in a horrible accident?"

Pike smirked. "What kind of accident?"

"That makes a difference? Are you saying that whether you'd still love me depends on what kind of accident it is?"

"Some of those industrial accidents are really nasty."

"True. If acid ate my face off, I wouldn't still expect you to love me."

"I would anyway," Pike said quietly.

"Really?"

"Yeah."

"Okay." Benny's voice had turned thick. His next question strained to be light. "What if I were paralyzed?"

"Yeah, but I'm not cleaning up after you."

"No Nurse Pike in a skimpy outfit taking care of me?"

Pike almost dropped his joint choking on laughter. "Sorry."

"That's okay. I don't think I could deal with you doing that for me anyway. Would you still love me if I died and came back as a flesh-eating zombie?"

"Yeah, but I'd have to take zombie Benny's head off with a shovel."

"Uh, what?"

"Because it wouldn't be you, just something using your body."

"But with a *shovel*?"

"Well, with something else if there wasn't a shovel around."

"Suddenly, I'm really horny."

"You're *always* really--" Pike started, but Benny's mouth and hands going to work stopped him with kisses and caresses. He gladly lost his train of thought. Once he had a moment to breathe, he said, "I have to threaten to decapitate you more often. But we're going to set the sleeping bags on fire."

"And we'd probably roll right off the rock and break our necks in the fall." Benny nuzzled Pike's ear. "We could go back to the van. It would be safer."

They could go back to the van, have spectacular sex, and continue home. And Pike would never have to think about any of this ever again. He wanted to do that, but something kept him here. "I have something I have to do here. I have to stay the night."

"You know that you can tell me anything, right, Pike?" Benny's hand moving in slow, soothing circles on Pike's back.

Pike's heart hurt. "Yeah. I know. I just can't, not yet. When I can, I'll tell you... everything." //Will I really?//

"Cool. So we're rock-sitting."

"You don't have to--"

"*We're* rock-sitting. If I left, and you got attacked by a seagull or something, I would never forgive myself."

"Thanks."

******************************************************

"Pike!"

Pike groggily opened his eyes. Where the hell was he? And why was Benny up? "What?"

"Pike, the fucking beach is gone!"

"I don't think we got abducted, Ben."

Benny shook Pike and manhandled him into a sitting position. "We're surrounded by ocean on all sides! What the fuck is going on?"

The nearly full moon shone down on and gilded the midnight blue water that encircled the boulder. Sky and ocean both seemed to be the same color, all blue. It all seemed to go on forever and made Pike feel very small and very large all at once. When he looked to his side, he expected to see Spider there, the real Spider, not the imagined one he saw earlier. Instead, he saw Benny, who looked at him with such fear and concern that he felt guilty.

"It's high tide. In the morning, we'll have beach again."

"You knew this would happen?"

"Don't feel bad. My first night here I panicked so hard I nearly jumped off to swim to shore. I'm sorry."

"No, it's okay. Now that my heart is slowing down, I think I won't have a heart attack after all. Wait a minute, we're stuck here?"

"For a few hours."

"What if I have to take a piss?"

"We have the empties."

"Look at you: nature boy."

"I'm not... I'm not at all."

"Pike, what's going on? Who do you keep looking for?"

//My God, how the hell did he see that?// "Long story."

"Unless I want to swim for dry land, I have time. I want to know what's going on. I'm scared for you."

Pike breathed in deeply, feeling the salt air settle into his body. Something about the night, the ocean, Benny, demanded the truth. //C'mon, you knew you'd end up here sooner or later.// "Okay. It all... it all started with a beer bottle. That's my family all over, right? But this was the beer bottle to the back of my head." His fingers grazed over the scars at the back of his neck; his hair hid others. "I came to with my Aunt Karen stitching me up. Dad had left, probably to go to the bar and avoid killing me.

"Karen was a nurse, she'd married in to the family, she never patched me up any of the times before--" Pike breathed easier when Benny pulled him in close. "One of my uncles usually cleaned me up, but I guess he was out, so Dad called her in. She asked me what happened, you know, the way people do when they know what happened but really hope you'll tell them it's not what they think it is.

"I told her I'd walked into a door, then started packing my things to go.

"Before that, I had plans. I wasn't going to just run like a rabbit. I was saving money from odd jobs my parents didn't know about and keeping it hidden so it wouldn't end up going to Dad's booze or Mom's pusher.

"I really didn't have enough to leave yet, but that bottle strike while I was down had changed the rules. It showed me that Dad couldn't be trusted to stop in time any more. And... I wasn't right in the head. I didn't get a concussion, but something had happened to me when I got hit that way, something that left me a bit... crazy." Benny's hand squeezed Pike's shoulder. Pike couldn't look at him, not and keep talking. "Thanks, man.

"I would have left right then, but Karen made me come home with her to let her do an hourly check for a concussion. My uncle wasn't home, so she got away with it. She wanted to take me to the hospital, but I didn't let her. Would have drawn too much attention. I got to say goodbye to Coy and Luther at least."

"Coy and Luther?"

"Two of my cousins. Good kids. Anyway, Karen drove me to the bus station and gave me some more money. She was good folk. God, I hope Coy and Luther keep on taking mostly after her.

"If I'd just taken a bus to right past the state line, I would have had some money left, but I just couldn't stop. I had to keep going as far away, as far south, as I could. Like I said, I was fucked in the head. I rode until I didn't have anything left, and then I starved.

"I hunted through dumpsters, stole truckers' meals whenever I could get away with it, killed any small animals I could find. I would have done better with the hunting if I'd taken one of Daddy's guns, but I knew he would hunt *me* to the gates of hell itself if I took one.

"Hunger started to make me slow and listless. I lost track of the days since every one seemed like the one before. I kept walking, south I hoped. Eventually I just sat at the side of the road and stared. I just couldn't care anymore.

"The worst thing was that I still felt I was better off there, like that, than home.

"An ancient van pulled up next to me and stopped. This guy got out, and he was scary as all hell. Hugely tall and muscular, his eye sockets blackened in to give his face a skull-like look, bleached buzzcut hair, wearing fatigues, dogtags, and a T-shirt that had a picture of a zombie Navy SEAL cutting a guy's throat with the words 'Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out' around it. I didn't even fight him when he picked me up and put me in the passenger seat. No matter what he did to me, it would have to be a faster death than what I already had on my plate, right?

"Turns out I'd gone south and a bit west. He took me to San Francisco.

"I never found out why he decided to pick me up, though he was thrilled when he found out I could repair cars. The van always needed work, and he didn't have much money. He was a runaway too, getting away from his stepfather. He told me his name was Spider. I only found out his last name, Wojack, from his father's dogtags."

Pike went silent as he remembered the day Spider gave him the dogtags. He'd protested, "But they're your father's." Spider had answered that his father was dead and would want nothing more than to know that they protected one of his son's friends. The tags were a marker showing that Pike was with Spider and not to be messed with. The one person who'd ignored that had gotten his knees broken.

"Pike? Pike, you don't have to go on if you don't want to."

"I'm okay. I think... I think I have to go on."

Benny sighed into Pike's hair. "Then I'm listening."

"We lived in the van and did odd jobs for money. Spider... hustled sometimes. He wasn't pretty, but some people got off on having such a scary looking kid under their command. I wanted to help out--I felt like a burden--but he told me I just about had the word 'victim' scrawled over my head in neon. I'd draw all the predators. I'd get hurt."

Pike felt Benny's eyes on him and knew the question Benny wanted to ask. Pike made it so Ben wouldn't have to. "He... loved me. I could see it in so many little things. But I was so fucked up, numb or panicked all the time. I couldn't let anyone touch me at all. I could barely stand to sleep in the van with him; anyone else, and I wouldn't have been able to do it at all." In those days Pike occasionally got blinding headaches that came up from his neck and the back of his head, and the pain would be so bad that he'd just quietly lie in a corner under a blanket, unable to move or think. And Spider would sit with him and whisper stories. He would shadow stroke, a caress of the air two inches above Pike's face.

"One day, he went out and didn't come back." Pike pushed his words past a growing lump in his throat. "I quietly looked for him for a week, but I couldn't find him or even any leads, and people started to realize that he was gone, really gone." Pike laughed bitterly. "I got the most insane offers from people then, greedy- eyed, leering people who claimed that they just wanted to take care of me. They must have thought I was stupid. Or desperate. I never parked in the same place twice for fear that someone would organize an attack on me. I searched for another four days, but I couldn't find him, and there were people talking about how Spider had said that if he ever disappeared they would get his van.

"How he said they would get me.

"So I took off again in the middle of the night and never looked back. Whatever had been driving me must have decided LA was far enough south, because I finally got to stop there. Mike gave me a job. Counterfeit papers got me back into school."

"But what about--"

"What about here?" Pike couldn't stop the rush of words now; they seemed to have gained a momentum all their own. He felt like a marathon runner nearing the finish line. "It was kind of stupid of him to waste the money, but sometimes Spider just needed to road trip and get away. He took me here on a night like this and asked me what I thought of it. I looked around and let it fill me until I answered that it seemed infinite, so large it made me feel small. But since it was infinite, small was such a relative thing that I was actually bigger than I should have been. He said... he said he'd been waiting to find someone who could tell him what he was thinking when he was here." Pike's eyes and throat hurt.

Benny's voice sounded utterly blank. "And you feel like you failed him because you never found his body. Or loved him the way he loved you."

Terror struck Pike at the possibility of being so known. "I did fail him! Maybe he was still alive."

"If he was, he would have come back to you. You know he would."

"I don't-- Well, I still failed him the other way." Pike took a very good look at Benny and felt even worse. He knew what that glittering-eyed look meant. Jealousy. //This is why I never talk about myself.// "I never should have told you about any of this. I wasn't going to say everything I said; it's just this place, and my feelings, and I just had this stupid need to get this stuff out. I never told anyone else before. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"No! Shit, Pike, I'm... It's me, okay? Here you are, ripping open your scabs to satisfy my curiosity, and I'm.... This guy, he saved your life, he gave you those dogtags you still wear--yeah, I figured that out--he gave you the van... and, yeah, he did give it to you, because you know he wouldn't want anyone else to have it if something happened to him. And something did, and none of that was your fault. That's life on the streets, right? I know you, so I know you combed the city looking for him as best as you could. If you couldn't find him, he wasn't there to be found, okay? Anyway, he gave you so many things, and what have I given you? Dick."

Through his misery, Pike still couldn't prevent a shocked laugh from escaping. Benny shook his head and said, "Shit. Okay, not the choice of words I should have gone for. But, but... Pike, I give you shit all--"

"You give me--"

"Let me finish? Please? I give you shit all, and you gave yourself to me instead of.... You're not feeling guilty about that, are you?"

"What?"

"Being with me, when you couldn't let yourself be with him."

"I.... Fuck." Pike put his hands over his eyes. He wouldn't cry.

"God." Benny pulled Pike into a fierce hug. "I love you, okay? You're who you are, and that's the person I love. You could have been slut of the world back then--which you definitely weren't-- and it wouldn't make any difference to me. It makes me so fucking sick to think of what you went through, but I want to rip apart the people who hurt you. None of that is at you."

"O-okay." All of Pike's emotions shouted at him at once, so he wasn't sure what he felt, except... "I love you."

"And well you should." Benny kissed the top of Pike's head. "Since I do know you, I'm going to watch you to make sure you start working through the guilt and grief and everything."

Pike shivered. "Is that a threat?"

"A promise. I know this isn't over, and it won't be over for a while, since life isn't neat and all. But... I'm glad you told me."

"You *are* nuts."

"Hell, no. It helps me see you better. You make even more sense now."

"Impossible."

"I swear."

"Well, if you swear, I guess I have to believe you." Pike rested his head on Benny's chest and tried to let his friend's heartbeat lull him. "What... what do we do now?"

"We look at the scenery. You get all existential about it, while I sit back and listen."

"Sounds like a lot of work."

"Yeah, listening to you is-- I'm kidding, Pike. I know I'm high maintenance."

"You're good. I'm...."

"Pike...."

Pike smiled a tiny bit. "Okay."

"Tell me that bit about infinity again."

***THE END***