fic: Pretty Close

[exeterlinden]

Title: Pretty Close
Fandom: Enemy Mine
Pairing/Characters: Jeriba/Davidge
Rating: PG
Summary: Once winter set in, it was hard for them to keep warm in the hut.

Author's notes: This was written for lies_d , for the 2009 Yuletide Treasure. I was happy to learn that I am not the only one with a nostalgic relationship to this movie :) Also, I am not embarrassed by this fic. Not even a little.


Pretty Close

Once winter set in, it was hard for them to keep warm in the hut. Jerry suffered more than Willis did: Dracs did not have much subcutaneous fat, their homeplanet being much warmer than Earth. With the pregnancy, Jerry seemed to be even more sensitive to the cold drafts that blew through the cracks in their cuca shell home.

He huddled up in skins, and made Willis put an extra log on the fire before they lay down to sleep. But as soon as the fire went out, he shivered and chattered his beak-like gums so loudly that he woke Willis up in the middle of the night.

In the end, Willis gave up on trying to sleep. Muttering to himself, he picked up his sleeping skins from one side of the fireplace and moved them over next to Jerry's.

"Okay, lizard, no funny stuff, this is just to keep warm."

"I assure you, D-davidge, I am not in the m-mood for fun s-stuff, right now," Jerry replied, misunderstanding him.

Willis rolled his eyes in the dark, and scooted up behind the Drac, throwing his skins over them both. Truth be told, he wouldn't mind a little extra warmth himself, not that he was going to let Jerry know, after teasing him about his frail constitution for weeks now.

The weird thing was, Jerry didn't really understand being teased. Or rather, Jerry could be a stubborn, oversensitive bastard, a lot of the time - but he never got it when Willis teased him about being weak, being hormonal, or being overemotional. It made Willis realize how much of he and his air force friends had poked fun at each other for being girls or women.

Whenever he slipped up and teased Jerry like that, the Drac would always reply with the greatest incomprehension: "Why would it be bad to be girly, Willis? You told me that you form life-long pair bonds with women. How do you seek to offend me, then, by calling me one?" And that was just -- Willis always got a headache trying to explain that one.

One evening, before they settled in for the night, Jerry was sitting by the fire with his sowing, humming in a high pitched voice, while Willis was sharpening a few pieces of scrap metal, in the hopes of being able to use them for arrow points or blades. He suddenly realized how much their relationship had changed ever since Jerry had become pregnant.

Before, they would go hunting together, spar together, fight sometimes - and somehow Willis had never questioned how much he perceived Jerry as male, even though Jerry had explained to him that Dracs had no gender.

Now, it was screwing with his head, to have Jerry be pregnant, to have Jerry talk and act like a mother-to-be. 

"Jerry?"

"Yes, Davidge?" 

"Do you feel like -- you've become someone else while you've been pregnant?"

"How do you mean?"

"Like you've become more... girly?"

Jerry chked softly, like he always did when he was entertained by what was to him an especially stupid Irkmann question.

"I am not more a woman now than I was before, and not less a man. I was never woman or man, Davidge."

Once he'd started thinking about it though, Willis couldn't let it go. He hadn't really acknowledged that he'd automatically considered Jerry a man - and now that he'd realized his mistake, he kept noticing the Drac's behaviour and trying to categorize it by gender.

He lay awake one night, unable to sleep. For once they had enough food and firewood to last them for several days. There was nothing to worry about, nothing to plan out for the next day. It gave him time to think about home, about his family and his friends - and all of a sudden he felt horribly lonely.

Next to him Jerry was sleeping, his soft, pulsating alien breath relaxed and even. Willis could feel his body moving through the layers of sleeping hides between them - not a steady inhale, exhale motion like a human, - more like a rapid, repeating roll - but it was comforting nonetheless. In the dark, Willis could see the back of the alien's head moving gently as the air sacks there expanded and contracted.

He hesitated for a moment, and then he dug his hand under the sleeping hides to wrap an arm around Jerry's sleeping form, scooting up behind him. He'd longed for physical contact for such a long time, and now he spooned up behind Jerry and pressed his nose against the back of Jerry's neck, put his palm flat over his protruding belly. He could feel the baby Drac, Zammis, kicking and it made him smile to himself as he fell asleep.

The next morning, Willis woke up to Jerry sitting up on the sleeping pad next to him, eyeing him curiously.

"Good morning," he mumbled, stretching, trying for casual, even though he could feel his cheeks burning.

"Willis, tonight you held me like a parent or a sibling, why did you do that? Only children curl up like that to sleep."

Willis frowned, trying to act nonplussed. "You don't like it?"

Jerry shrugged, or at least did the Drac equivalent - Willis was pretty good at reading Drac body language by now.

"I am not accustomed to it."

Willis avoided talking about it again. Still embarrassed, he made sure that they slept close, but under different skins.

But then a heavy blizzard hit, and they could not leave the hut for days to get firewood. They went to bed shivering, and once they'd lain down, Jerry said "Baby Zammis will be cold tonight, inside my stomach, can you hold me to keep us warm?"

The Drac slept curled up in Willis' arms, his face against Willis' neck, the top of his head tucked underneath Willis' nose. Jerry smelled, well -- good. Not sweaty and gross, like a human might after weeks without bathing, but almost sweet, and a little spicy.

Willis inhaled deeply, drew Jerry closer against his body, and slept better that he had in a long time.

After that it became routine. Every night Jerry curled up in Willis' arms, and Willis would keep both it and the baby warm in the winter nights. He didn't want to admit to himself how much he did it for his own benefit, as well.

Sleeping with Jerry in his arms reminded him of sleeping with girlfriends back on earth, even if Jerry was bigger and, yeah, a Drac.

It even made him feel something he had never experienced before, some big, tender, nameless emotion that kicked in whenever the baby Drac kicked him through their many layers of clothing.

In the daytime, he and Jerry still squabbled, still read the Talman together, still worried about food and firewood, still told each other stories about their cultures, their philosophies, their politics. But somehow it had all changed. Instead of looking at Jerry and seeing a comrade or a companion, Willis'd begun seeing a partner. Had begun looking at Jerry's hands moving over his pregnant stomach and thinking family.

"Jerry?"

"Yes?" Jerry was almost asleep already, the pregnancy exhausted him, lately.

"Do you like this - I mean, do you like me holding you like this?"

The Drac blinked slowly, both sets of eyelids gliding across his eyes, the Drac version of a yawn. "Yes. I like that Zammis is safe."

Willis snorted, frustrated, "No, I mean, does it make you feel happy? Laying like this, together?"

Jerry thought about it for a long time. "When Dracs are little, they may lie like this with their parent, or their sibling. When we grow up, we do not need warmth or protection, and so we sleep alone."

"But now, do you like it?" Willis asked, a little desperately.

Jerry thought abut for a long time "I think that even though it is not in our culture, it doesn't necessarily mean that it opposes our nature. This holding feels... safe. I think I do like it."

"Oh. That's good," Willis sighed, somewhat relieved.

But the damned thing was - he realised a couple of nights after - he himself didn't just like it, he loved it. He loved the freaking lizard.

And not like a sibling, or a parent.

Willis shook his head, annoyed with himself. God damned planet and god damn isolation, that made him fall in love with a lizard. After he started thinking about, he realised with a certain sense of horror that he'd started considering Jerry as a -- as a lover. Willis groaned.

That night he resolutely moved to the other side of the hut, but he almost didn't sleep all night, and he could hear by Jerry's unsteady breathing that he wasn't sleeping either.

The next night, Jerry asked him what was wrong, in it's own plaintive way, from the other side of the fireplace.

Willis tried to explain, but it was difficult. It pained him to see that Jerry was struggling to understand.

"You are telling me that you have started seeing me as a... woman?"

"Yes. No," Willlis realized, "It's not that, I know you're not a woman. I've just started... loving you... gavey?" he asked, switching into Drac.

"I am not sure I understand love," the Drac replied, and Willis' heart plummeted in his chest.

"But," the Drac continued, "I will tell you something. Something about Zammis."

Willis tried to pay attention, tried to put aside his own hurt feelings.

"Dracs do not decide with their mind or with a partner when they want to have a child. But," the Drac got up from his sleeping pad and moved towards Willis, "Our bodies are tuned to our surroundings. Our bodies do not begin to  reproduce themselves, unless it is safe."

Jerry lay down next to Willis. It brought one clawed hand up to touch Willis face, in an unusual gesture of tenderness. Willis could not meet its eyes.

"There is nothing about this planet or my situation here, that gave my body reason to start my pregnancy with Zammis... My spaceship has burned, we have little food, the winter is cold."

Jerry made the deep, clucking sound that Willis had learned to associate with deep contendedness, as he moved closer to Willis.

"There is no explanation, except for you, Willis E. Davidge.” Willis finally turned his face to look at the Drac.

“You make me feel safe," it said, with the unashamed straightforwardness it almost always possessed.

Willis finally gave in and let his body relax, let the Drac reach out and draw him in, for the first time - let himself be held.

"Is that not something like love, Irkmann?" Jerry asked, sleepily.

"Yeah," Willis replied, his voice a little thick, "Yeah, I suppose that's pretty close to love."