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When Elias dreams, he dreams of strange places.
Always, always. One bizarre niche or another. Forgotten spaces, undiscovered ones. Abandoned rail yards, stood there at the intersection of the tracks, all threading through each other like some great, metal knot. Canyon floors, walking for miles along the banks of a river whose hunger is ancient and endless. Nameless forests, blackened and cleared by the gentle sweep of fire and flood.
It’s green here, where he is now. Green and brown. There’s water all around him, thick and opaque with moss and algae. It looks solid where it lies still. Like he could walk on it, step up onto the soft green carpet and stride across it. But the algae ripples in places and churns in others, and the trees that rise from the water are shiny and barkless. Elias looks down into the water and wonders if it has a bottom, somewhere. Elias looks to the tree nearest him and wonders how deep its root system runs.
He doesn’t know. He can’t know. That’s not what this is about.
He walks.
The ground is all mud beneath him, watery and strange, but his feet and legs stay clean, even as he leaves tracks dragging off behind him. He weaves the trees, tries to stay where the mud only comes up mid-calf. Deeper is dangerous. He can’t see here. He doesn’t know what’s in the water with him.
He walks.
He does not know where he is going. He isn’t supposed to. He stops in a place no different from any other — unremarkable save for the cypress knees that sprout up in a circle around him. Like a fairy ring, he thinks. He hopes the swamp will let him leave, later. Spanish moss hangs from the trees above, pale and grey and reaching. Light filters down through the canopy from a sunless, colorless sky.
It is quieter than it should be.
“Jonah.”
Elias turns. A wisp of moss touches his cheek.
Barnabas Bennett stands before him, hands clasped behind his back like the gentleman he never was. He stands in the mud just as Elias does, but it clings to his trousers heavy and wet. It isn’t so strange, really. Elias is merely visiting.
“Barnabas,” he replies.
Barnabas smiles at him. He always smiles. Smiled.
“You look different,” he says. Redundant. But he is smiling — as if to remind Elias that he can. That he did, once.
That, too, is redundant. Elias never forgot.
“I usually do,” Elias tells him. He steps forward. Stops.
Barnabas doesn’t move. His eyes never leave Elias’, not even a flicker. He does not blink; Elias doesn’t blink either. He suspects it is easier— easier for Barnabas to look only upon the thing he most recognizes. Easier to focus only on the last remaining vestiges of the man he once knew as Jonah Magnus
Elias wonders if, in this place, Barnabas might be able to see the rest of that man, too.
“Blond,” Barnabas says, sounding fair and amused and so very, very young.
“Gentlemen prefer them,” Elias says — and then laughs, because there is nothing to do but laugh.
Barnabas does not join him. Just smiles. His hands unclasp from behind him, lace together at his front.
He says, “You’ve been sleeping well,” and Elias sees his thumbs tap against one another in his periphery. He doesn’t look down to confirm the tick, doesn’t dare to. Barnabas always had beautiful hands (painterly, Jonah told him once, and Barnabas had agreed) but his eyes hold Elias fast like the sucking mud around his ankles.
He’s right, anyways: Elias has been sleeping well.
“Mm,” Elias hums, grinning the way he used to, the way he always used to, and Barnabas’ thumbs lose their rhythm. “Good sex will do that.”
“Good company will, too.”
Elias laughs again. Shocks himself with it, how it comes straight up from his belly. The muddy water ripples around him, rings stretching out farther than they should. The hanging moss bends toward him on a breeze that doesn’t exist. Something heavy falls into the water behind him, way back in the trees — the splash of it does not reach them where they stand.
Barnabas moves, then. Steps forward with a grace he ought not have, striding through the muck and the mud like it weighs nothing. Like he weighs nothing. The wetness soaks higher into his trousers, well past his knees. Elias stands still to receive him.
Barnabas was taller than him, once. And still is, Elias realizes, but Elias doesn’t have to lean his head back to look up at him, now. Doesn’t have to stretch up onto the balls of his feet. Doesn’t have to bare the line of his throat. Barnabas steps close to him, so close their knees might brush — their chests, their noses. So close that Elias can smell him, can smell the cold of his hair and the absence of his breath. Barnabas insinuates himself there, claims a space no longer molded to his shape. There where Jonah Magnus invited him once and welcomed him every time thereafter.
Welcomes him, still, despite himself.
Elias breathes deeply, takes interest in the way that Barnabas’ pupils neither constrict nor dilate. Barnabas reaches for him, hesitates. His hand hangs near Elias’ elbow, suspended like in water.
“It isn’t you,” Elias says. He sounds like himself and is thankful for it. “The good company. It isn’t you.”
Barnabas’ smile crinkles in the corners of his eyes, warm like the rest of him isn’t. There’s another splash in the water, closer now, like something heavy falling from a tree.
“I know,” Barnabas says. His hand brushes Elias’ arm, skates up to his shoulder.
“I know,” he says again. Elias doesn’t know who he thinks he’s reassuring. A third splash ripples through the watery mud, breaking around their legs. Barnabas tilts into him. He cups Elias’ face with his hand.
And Elias wakes to Peter’s weight shifting in bed as he turns over.
He opens his eyes in the dark, undaunted. The room is cold. His breath fogs when he exhales.
Elias curls himself into Peter’s chest, folds himself into the place Peter likes to keep warm for him, and falls easily back to sleep.