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Chris flopped down next to Ash, making the mattress bounce and wiggle a bit where he landed, deciding to give up on having bones for a while and just be a puddle.
He was so different from everyone else he had slept with, and somehow Ash had to keep reminding himself of that.
Where Lorca had been firm and commanding, Chris was soft and patient, content to kiss his hair and lie next to him for as long as it took, even if it took forever, he’d promised. Ash wanted to believe him, but he also remembered a lot of false promises, and his mind was a traitor at the best of times and an un-unexpected enemy at the worst.
L’rell had kissed him when Lorca would have his fill and leave again, but she’d taken from him instead of letting him give in, and he couldn’t help but shift away, curling in on himself just slightly, when she was in the room.
Chris, on the other hand, had always let him kiss first. On the three (yes, they were few enough to count) occasions he’d been the one to initiate anything, he’d asked first. He always asked, whether it was a kiss or holding hands or resting his head on the pillow next to him to breathe in his scent. He asked if it was okay even if it was okay five seconds ago, or ten minutes ago, or a week or month ago.
But part of him was always tense and ready for a fight when arms wrapped around him, struggling against someone long dead and no more. His grandmother always told him that nightmares weren’t real, they couldn’t hurt him, when he was little, but his nightmares were choking him in his sleep and clung to him when he was wide awake.
“Hey,” Chris said, pulling him out of his thoughts and tucking his hair back behind his ear.
That was another thing Ash loved about him, that he didn’t let him overthink. Lorca had allowed him to relive his trauma each night, content to enjoy his own conquests and feel proud about himself. Chris pulled him away from the dark thoughts before he’d fallen too far in.
“Hey,” Ash replied, breathing in the vanilla-woodsmoke scent of Chris’s neck.
“We should take a shower before this dries,” came the reply into his hair, though getting up sounded as enticing as jumping directly out of an airlock and into a star right about now.
“Probably,” Ash agreed, wholeheartedly disagreeing.
But eventually they got up, and made it to the bathroom without stopping for round two, though it was a tempting idea.
Ash instinctively looked away from the mirror, not wanting to look at himself at all, let alone naked.
Chris understood.
He always understood, keeping the lights just barely on enough to see, almost as dim as they would go. He practically worshipped the scars on Ash’s skin, kissing them as he worked his way down. He’d never stared or been repulsed by any part of anyone, and for that, Ash was immensely grateful.
It didn’t change the feeling he got when he looked in the mirror, like someone was stabbing him in the gut with a serrated blade and then dragging it back out, again and again the longer he looked.
Klingons didn’t tend to have mirrors around, especially where Ash had been, but Lorca didn’t care what happened when he got up or when Ash left, knowing he wasn’t welcome for longer than however long it took to please his captain. If he ended up staring at himself in the mirror for another hour instead of sleeping, it didn’t matter to him.
But Chris rested his head against Ash’s, breathing into their shared air, and waited for him to connect their lips before kissing him thoroughly enough to make him forget about the mirror and his reflection and all the scars that reminded him of exactly who he was.
Ash said a victim. Chris was adamant about “survivor”.
They stepped into the shower together, resting against each other in the warm water and content to just breathe for a moment. There was never enough time to relax, between the real threats and the imaginary ones that paranoia, sleep deprivation, and crippling PTSD caused.
Ash hated everything about being naked.
He hated being vulnerable most of all, but he hated seeing himself and seeing all the scars too. He hated having to shower alone, having to touch his own arms, where one shoulder was just slightly out of place from trying to force his way out of Klingon prison and never healing right.
He hated the faint marks on his wrists and up his forearms where he’d been restrained, both for and against his own safety. When people said that, they didn’t really mean his safety. They meant everyone else’s.
He hated the ridged lines on his chest where countless blades had sliced him open, to see what was inside and to rearrange it with sadistic apathy.
There was a jagged, ugly scar on his stomach, just above his waistline and to the left, where he’d tried to fight back against a prison guard and he’d been stabbed clean through. He hated the way it felt, rough and infuriatingly present.
He hated the marks on his hips and his thighs where he’d been held down while someone had their fill, hated the idea of anyone having that much power over him.
Then there was the scar on his back, probably the worst of all. It was the remnants of a burn that no doctor and no regenerator could make go away, in stark contrast to the relative smoothness of the skin around it.
He’d looked at it in the mirror once, when he was feeling either particularly brave or particularly self-deprecating. It was ugly and made him vomit up everything he’d eaten in the past three days when he saw it.
The worst part was that he couldn’t remember what caused it.
Doctor Culber had seen it once, when Ash got himself stabbed on an away mission, and he’d heard the pain in the doctor’s breath. He remembered that soft sound of hurt that went deeper than any injury when he’d killed him, and that memory would never leave his head.
Chris loved him anyways, reminded him in words and in affection, staying with him after they’d had sex, coaxing him into the shower so he wouldn’t wake up gross.
And more importantly, he ran his hands over all the scars he knew Ash hated the most without fear, without disgust. He stood with him, soaking wet, read his trauma where it was written in half-assed code on his skin, and loved him anyways.
When they were done, which existed outside of time for Ash, somewhere between a moment and forever, Chris wrapped him in a fluffy towel and kissed him again, for the thousandth time in the last few minutes the way he always did, and kept his gaze anywhere but the mirror.
Ash closed his eyes and leaned into Chris, and didn’t feel the need to open them again and look over his shoulder, making sure the darkness creeping up on him wasn’t too close again.
Chris found him something to wear when they went back to bed, generic regulation underwear in shade of medium-dark gray number three thousand and seventy-two and one of his t-shirts, which was just slightly big on Ash and, more importantly, soaked in the smell of Chris.
He was not L’rell, and he was not Lorca, Ash firmly reminded himself as Chris pulled the blankets over the both of them, kissing his hair and wriggling around until they were touching as much as possible, and fell asleep with him, his own way of saying “I trust you” a thousand times over.
L’rell kept him as a toy, a plaything for her own amusement. Lorca craved only an outlet for his frustration and someone to fuck who wouldn’t run his mouth about it.
Chris, though, he cuddled with him at night, even when Ash hated himself the most and wasn’t in the mood for opening his eyes at all.
The first time they’d fallen asleep in the same bed, it had been after Ash sobbed in Chris’s arms for a while, hating every part of himself and wanting to melt into the floor and never reappear. Chris had held him and kissed his hair and told him only to let it out, not to explain it. He always understood.
And that first night, curled up together as close as they could be, Ash had dreamed of his grandmother. She was a little old woman wrapped in a thousand shawls, and the afterlife hadn’t changed her. She smiled, kissed Ash on the forehead, and said “keep him”.
He did.