the Dalaverse

Well, I managed it. Three W/N fics in just about twenty-four hours (though to be fair, "Moon to the Tide" was written before that). ANYWAY. This is dedicated to fabu for her crappy day. Holler if you spot the "To Kill a Mockingbird" reference (it popped into my head and then I had to go look up quotes and cry. Damn, I love that movie. Book too. But Gregory Peck was my movie daddy).





It was patently unfair that the commodore had such a comfortable bed, Will thought as he jerked himself awake once again. For three nights in a row he’d tossed restlessly about in his own bed; what little sleep he achieved turned out fitful and riddled with unhappy dreams. But this soft mattress with its mass of feather pillows and its blue brocade curtains was lulling him asleep even though he was determined to be awake when James got home.

Where exactly he’d gone, Will had no idea, and decided he wouldn’t worry about until he did know. If James had sought comfort in some tavern by the docks, well, it would be hurtful, but God knew the man could use it. Will had puzzled and fretted over his absence for the past several days before he’d finally learned of this morning’s double execution. Two marines had been caught, tried, and convicted for acts of sodomy. Will hadn’t known them, but he was sure the case was the reason keeping James away from the smithy. His anger at being slighted faded at the news and he made attempts to track the commodore down. He didn’t dare go up to the fort, and when he’d stopped by the house earlier, the manservant had politely informed him that the commodore had gone out. Will suspected James of shutting himself up in his study with an order to turn all visitors away, but in any case he’d been truly gone when Will climbed through his bedroom window around ten.

He sat up straighter in the bed, trying to keep his eyes open and idly drawing a pillow onto his lap. In a month or so of sleeping together and the previous weeks of mere friendship, he hadn’t once set foot in this room. James still stopped by the forge for the occasional meal and chat, but the vast majority of his visits now took place well after twilight. He slept in Will’s bed nearly every night, often slipping out before Will so much as stirred, to creep back to his own house while the streets were still dark. Although Will didn’t mind the arrangement, he had to admit that James’s room was much nicer than his own. If he’d not had the experience of courting Elizabeth, he might have been unnerved by the evidence of wealth. Fortunately, however, James’s home was not nearly as opulent as the governor’s. It was fine but not ostentatious, the master bedroom elegant and neatly maintained. It smelled of paper and leather from the books lining the walls. Now and then he caught a faint floral whiff through the open window, testimony to the garden below.

He let his chin droop onto the white pillow, inhaling the clean powder James used in his wig. He had missed that scent and the sweet, almost milky flavor of James’s fair skin in the odd hidden places, the insides of his arms, the hollow of his throat, his inner thigh before Will shifted his face in closer and breathed in a muskier, wholly male variety of scent...

Will dozed, dead to the world until a lamp being lit woke him and he found himself blinking up at James’s sternest face.

“Good evening,” he said with a smile, hitching himself up on his elbows.

“What are you doing here?” James asked in a clipped tone. He turned his back before Will could answer, propping his hat on the bedpost. Will hated to see the tight lines down his back when he shrugged out of his jacket.

“I heard,” he said simply. James went still, his hands at the queue of his wig. Will rose to his knees and plucked it off, handing it to him to place on a nearby stand. When James came back, letting Will balance with hands on his shoulders, his face was completely closed off.

Still, Will figured, he had come here to be with James in a time of duress, and that remained his intention. “Do you want me to stay the night?” He punctuated his question with a kiss; James responded slightly, but pulled away when he tried to deepen it.

“If you wish,” said James, his eyes sliding past Will to rest somewhere on the wall behind him. “But I’m quite tired.”

Understanding, Will tried to hide the hurt behind a nod. “We’ll go to bed, then,” he said, tugging on the buttons of James’s shirt. James brushed his fingers away and did the rest himself, stripping down to his breeches.

Will was uncertain now. He knew something was cracking and splintering behind that rigidly controlled expression, but if he couldn’t get James to open up, he’d be doing neither of them any good.

Running a hand through his hair, James went around to the other side of the bed, where he curled up facing the wall. Will sat back against the pillows and looked at his profile for a long moment, his skin in the lamplight as colorless and cold as his demeanor. Presently James lifted his head and Will brightened, but he merely said, “Put out the light, please,” and settled back in.

He leaned out of bed to obey, finding the room less cozy and charming under stark moonlight.

An arm tentatively slipped around James’s waist was allowed to stay, though he did not respond in kind. Disturbed, Will rested his cheek against James’s shoulder blade and tried to feel like less of an intruder. James had not turned him away, but he seemed to be doing everything in his power to make him feel unwelcome. It reminded Will of his miserable early years with Mr. Brown, unnoticed and unwanted by everyone in town except Elizabeth, who didn’t know any better and who probably would have scoffed at the whispers about the bad luck he supposedly carried as the sole survivor of a pirate attack if her father had let anyone share them with her. Eventually, because of his quiet good manners and his willingness to run errands for an extra shilling, he had become less of a pariah. But there was a time when he’d honestly wished that he’d been left to drown amidst the wreckage, because he had been unconscious before they rescued him and it couldn’t be such a terrible way to die.

James was not supposed to remind him of those days. James was cool weight atop him and hands at his waist, fingers curling in his hair, lips kissing regret from the corners of his eyes. He had the sea in him, as Jack did, as Elizabeth did, but none of their restlessness. Lying beside him should not feel so awkward. Although they had once or twice fallen asleep together without making love first – they both worked hard, and James had a tendency to become strangely loquacious in the dark – this was fostered by silence and hostility.

He had to break one to get rid of the other. “James?” he whispered. James didn’t answer or give any sign that he heard. Will held his own breath so he could feel the rhythm of the other man’s lungs working. It was even and deep, but not deep enough. James was feigning sleep in order to ignore him.

Will closed his eyes and held on for an instant longer before he drew his arm away and rolled over onto his back, not touching his bedmate.

It seemed impossible at first, but eventually he slept. He woke again to the same darkness and the sound of muffled sobbing. Turning, he saw that James had his face pressed into the pillow, his tears sinking into the cotton slipcover. Will reached out to push his hair back, trying to think of something to say; James crying in the sort of state in which he’d gone to bed seemed strange, even more so than his crying at all.

James leaned into his touch and Will breathed a sigh of relief, seeing that his eyes were still closed.

“Shh,” he whispered, pulling him close and kissing the salt from his skin. “You’re only dreaming, James.”

“Dream,” James mumbled, his brow wrinkling with distress. “Will...my Will...”

“Yes?” Will replied, stroking the back of his neck. If he truly was still asleep, it was the perfect opportunity to find out what he had been so reticent to share in the waking world. “Are you dreaming of me?”

“Always.” Despite his misgivings, Will smiled at the tone, which was slightly miffed as though he should have known the answer to his own question. But he had business to conduct.

Tracing a slow pattern of circles on James’s back, careful to keep his voice even, he asked, “Why didn’t you come to me earlier? Why did you not let me comfort you?”

James shivered, one knee drawing up reflexively between Will’s legs. “Afraid,” he breathed, burying his face in Will’s neck like he always did when he wanted to hide something.

“Why?”

“Afraid you’d see, you’d know.”

“That I’d know what?” Will pressed cautiously, unsure how long this half-awareness would last.

Another convulsion, this one almost violent. He spoke haltingly, as if he’d lost the ability to string sentences together or given up on them entirely. “Know what I am. That I am not a good man. And you’d go.”

Holding him tighter, Will kissed his brow and whispered, “But you are a good man, James, and I’m not going anywhere.”

“No,” said James, shaking his head and frowning. Will was no longer certain James was responding entirely to him. “No,” he cried again, struggling in Will’s grip, “you left, you did, I made you leave.”

“No, you didn’t,” Will corrected mildly, finding the hand that had been splayed across his ribs and squeezing it. “I’m right here with you. I’ll be here all night. And I will be here when you wake up in the morning.”

James fell still and his face relaxed, softening from its fearful twisting. “You may be only a dream,” he sighed, tucking himself back under Will’s arm, “but you are a sweet one.”

Will opened his mouth, but shut it again with a wry grin. Leave it to James to argue with his dreams. He seemed to be falling into deeper sleep anyway, his toes twitching against Will’s leg. Will slept as well, peacefully this time.

He woke much later than he was used to, sniffing appreciatively before he opened his eyes to behold a feast of a breakfast laid out on a tray beside him.

Anxiously watching his face, James pulled his lips upward in what was too quick and nervous to be called a smile.

Will stretched and reached out both hands, one to grab a slice of melon and the other to slide up under the nightshirt James had put on at some point in order to take possessive hold of his thigh.

Blushing faintly, James said, “I wanted to apologize for last night –”

“No need,” said Will as he munched on sweet, watery fruit.

Dogged as ever, James plunged on. “But I’ve been thinking and –”

Will stuffed a piece of scone into James's mouth, patting his puffed-out cheeks and grinning at the bewilderment in his eyes. “Did anyone ever tell you that you talk in your sleep, James?”

Comprehension dawned, then embarrassment. He chewed thoughtfully on his mouthful before asking, “Did I say anything I should be ashamed of? I don’t remember.”

“No,” said Will, shaking his head and then dropping it down into James’s lap. “Only what I had wanted you to say earlier, and what you’d say now.”

James heaved a great sigh of relief. “Good.” He offered Will a chunk of ham on a tiny fork.

“Mmph,” said Will before he remembered to swallow. Clearing his throat, he clarified, “So no more of this leaving nonsense, then?”

“No more,” James promised softly, chucking him under the chin. “Eat the rest of this, you’re too thin.”

“I am not thin,” Will replied with offended dignity, “I am slender.”

With a rare disregard for the mess he would make of the food, James tackled him to the bed. “Slender as one of your blades and twice as sharp,” he said, planting knees on either side of Will’s hips.

Will snickered. “Is this some fancy new way of saying good morning?” he asked, glancing down at the way their bodies fit together as neatly as if they’d been fashioned that way.

“Oh, I’m told it’s all the latest rage in Paris,” James said, his voice muffled against Will’s throat.

Will licked the jam smeared across James’s palm and felt very pleased with himself for the ‘closed’ sign he’d left on the smithy door the night before.