Caught in Possession

Run

Warnings:

Firearms and threat to life of main character.

A/N: Just a quick note to explain I'm now working full time on site again (not from home at all any more) so chapters are a little slower to update. From now on, I will always publish a weekly chapter on either a Saturday or Sunday...and if I get any chance through the week I will try to add another. Thanks so much for sticking with me and being patient! Hope you're enjoying this story so far - please send any encouragement you can, it keeps me going when I'm tired!! Lore 🦋💕

Mew couldn't sleep. He had gone to bed the earliest that he had done in years - Big Ben not having yet tolled out the chimes of 10pm - listless, fractious, emotional tumult at the sight of four white walls and no Gulf.

The younger man hadn't even called. Just an apparently perfunctory text to inform Mew that he'd arrived safely to the hotel, and nothing since. Hell, the elder had even briefly entertained a ridiculous notion of contacting his own father to demand a general-yet-not-so-general team update - restraining himself only at the final moment, finger hovering over the green call button of his phone screen, as he failed to conjure any remotely convincing cover story for him requiring such information.

So the safety of the bed fortress it was - yet if anything, discomfort was only the more acute there. First Mew felt cold to the point of uncontrollably chattering teeth - padding grumpily through to the kitchen, defiant duvet wrapped around shoulders, to adjust the dial for the under-floor central heating, only to find himself perplexingly sweaty within minutes. Dial returned to zero once again, and he was soon swathed in icy veils of claminess. It was as if his inner thermostat was faulty - as if Gulf was that thermostat.

Mew's arms had nothing to hold on to. Just dangled awkwardly against the mattress, superfluous and unnecessary. His lips? Still pouting and maddeningly idle. Hands fidgeting, twitchy - could fingers be miserable?

He stroked the empty side of the bed - slight dip of Gulf's form still perceivable, carved poignantly into memory foam beneath the frigid, black satin sheet. And then without thinking, just feeling, Mew was pulling the younger man's pillow in to his chest - gulping dizzily for his lingering, cherry blossom shower scent, intoxicated, eyes closed as if visual sensory deprivation could short circuit his brain into believing that Gulf was there, really there.

But two hours later - smell having long faded from fabric and nostrils to leave behind only his own, alone - something still just felt...off kilter. A beautiful painting hung at a slight slant against the picture rail. The invisible string tugging relentlessly, like an anonymous voice of disquiet that he knew to be that of his own heart, whispering more insistently and urgently by the second...

Until at thirty minutes past midnight, Mew pulled on baggy jeans and a hooded jumper, scrambled blindly for his keys in the uneasy darkness, and slammed the front door behind him as he exited the apartment.

//

Dawn dew glistened, clinging as nature's exquisite diamonds to every blade of emerald grass as Gulf wound his way down the path from the hotel grounds towards the secluded banks of Lake Coniston. Despite the Summer month, the young footballer's exposed skin shivered into goosebumps against the lingering cool of retreating night, the sun yet too low in her arc and dozy at 5.30am to emanate that golden warmth as world's radiator.

Mew's mopily melancholic, doomsayer predictions prior to their parting of ways the previous morning had proven to be correct: Gulf had barely slept a wink.

From Kaownah's snoring in the twin bed against the opposite wall - or had it, in fact, been a rogue, stowaway Thai elephant trumpeting? - to the suddenly deafening tick-tocking of an offending clock and whining of an infuriating water pipe. An itch to Gulf's left ankle, a tickle in his throat, the twitch of a nerve beneath one eye. Then that same damn Porter knock-knock-knocking at the door, every excuse vaguer than the last - peering into the room, invasive eagle eyes, until registering Kaow's presence and withdrawing without further word. The man probably had 'Kittipat' stitched into the back of a Chelsea jersey at home and was seeking any opportunity to autograph hunt, Gulf reasoned distractedly.