FIC: Dawn (Equilibrium, Preston/Partridge, PG)
Title: Dawn
Fandom: Equilibrium
Pairing: Preston/Partridge
Rating: PG
Words: 1000
Disclaimer: Kurt Wimmer owns whatever parts of the movie make sense.
Summary: Preston thought he had trodden Partridge's dreams into dust, but he was wrong.
Notes: Beta-free. Written following juleskicks' AnonyMeme at the request of muccamukk, who said, "I would like something else from Equilibrium, something fluffy and in blatant disregard of canon." It doesn't get any fluffier or more blatantly disregarding than this. Comments here.


John Preston always knew, but did not think to question. So often he chose to ignore the evidence of his own eyes... with Viviana, with their children, with Partridge and particularly with Dupont. The clerics had called him intuitive, but his hunches had been based in facts, not nebulous emotions, and to live with facts required that Preston practice blindness. He had not wanted to see his wife's culpability, nor his son's, and he had only faced up to his partner's when Partridge's actions made him feel (feel) that there was danger, not to Father and the Tetragrammaton, but to John himself.

The nature of that feeling was such that John did not dare to give it a name. He could admit that he was drawn to Mary without quite allowing himself to recognize her scent, not only in the perfume bottle of the wild-eyed woman he had arrested, but as the elusive sweetness that had occasionally filled his nostrils when he stood close to Partridge. In his dreams, Viviana transformed not into Mary -- Partridge's lover -- but into Partridge himself.

Even then, John would not see, though he had shot Partridge dead. He saw the bullet pass through the book and into Partridge's throat. Yet when he went to the morgue, his partner lay still, unblemished and peaceful, no paler than he had been in life.

Yes, John Preston knew. He had seen. But he could not believe, not until the smoke cleared over the city and the smiling man stepped through the haze to embrace him.

"Errol," John whispered, hardly daring to believe. Perhaps he had gone insane, perhaps the flood of emotion after so many years of Prozium was more than...

"John," Partridge murmured in his ear, and Preston no longer cared whether he was sane or mad. For surely it was madness to take Errol's face in his hands and kiss him just as Viviana had kissed John before they took her away. Madness to feel tears welling in his eyes, the same uncontrollable passion that had overwhelmed him after Mary had died, but tears of joy this time.

"Shh, shh," Errol murmured, wiping John's face with steady fingers, cradling his head in a broad palm. "It's all right. It's over now." He returned the kiss with less force yet no less hunger, the slide of his lips speaking silently of comfort and pleasure beyond any that John had ever imagined.

"But how..." Even if he had not choked on his own tears, if Errol's lips had not brushed once more over his own, John might not have continued. How didn't matter. As Jurgen had said, the Resistance was everywhere, in greater numbers and with greater power than Dupont had ever imagined. Somehow they had freed John of his Prozium, and somehow they had saved his partner.

His partner. Who knew how to evade a bullet as well as John himself. Who was in John's arms now, stroking through his hair, dissolving fear and shame like mist in the gray city with the warm promise of his smile. "I'm sorry," Errol told him with all the feeling John had lacked when he said the same thing to Errol just before shooting him. "I wish I could have explained. You had to feel all of it so that you would understand."

"I know." John had tears on his face, his lips felt swollen from kissing, and he felt light all through, as if that rainbow of the first morning of his life had burst through his window to fold him in its colors. "You shouldn't be sorry. I'm not sorry you did it. Only that I..."

"Shh," Errol soothed again, breath warm against John's face. He held him the way John had rocked Lisa when she had been a baby, when she had screamed in the night and only being cradled against a warm body would quiet her. "That's all past. It's a different world now. You changed it."

That was pride, that musical lift in Errol's voice like the powerful notes of the Beethoven recording, and John felt something rise in his chest at the sound. "We both did. Everything I did, I kept finding myself quoting you, doing what you would have done..."

"I know." Errol pulled back to look at him, satisfaction and something else radiating from him. Was it laughter? John's own lips tugged up, though he didn't understand why. "They were watching you very closely, Jurgen and the others. They knew what you said to Brandt." Abruptly John found himself caught in another exuberant embrace. "Thank you. Thank you for remembering me."

"I could never forget you. Even when I dosed..." John's throat threatened to close over again. He swallowed and repeated Errol's words, as he had done so many times in the past days: "It's all right, it's over now."

Strong fingers closed firmly around his own, and John found himself being turned and tugged forward, back to the spot where he had stood staring out at the city that was unmaking itself so that its people could rebuild it into what it always should have been. "Look," said Errol, pointing past the soot and embers in the direction of the Nethers. Small fires had sprung up, not like the burning blocks after the factories had exploded, but gathering places with steadily tended blazes. "We've already begun again."

Squeezing the hand that held his, John nodded. There was still so much to do, and he had not yet even located his children. But for now it was enough to stand here with a man he had thought he killed, raised up by the negation of that sacrifice over his regret for countless others. "I want us to begin again," he said. "As partners. As..."

Errol's thumb brushed across the back of his hand, making him shiver. "We will, John."

Clouds of smoke shifted over the city and sunlight trickled through, as if a thin cover needed only be torn away for its full radiance. In time it would illuminate the dreams spread at their feet.