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These past few weeks, Riz has begun to appreciate the silence of the sea. It’s quiet at night, when most of the crew has gone to bed, when there’s just the occasional whistle of a crewmate, the creak of the wood and the rigging as the boat sways through the waves. Riz’s quill scratches against the map he’s been marking up for days now, trying and failing to figure out the configuration of the triangle they’re stuck in. He never payed attention to math in school, though, and unfortunately Fabian hadn’t either, and they’re stuck on a ship full of gay people who are just as bad at trigonometry and angles as they are, if not worse. And, yeah, gay people can be really fucking awesome at math, but those gay people are not the same gay people who decide to join a pirate crew.
He winds up back at the equation he knows they covered in pre-calc so long ago during junior year. But he’d only attended about two weeks of that class in total, what with the Night Yorb and the other half a dozen things he tries not to think about now, so he’s just staring down at the quill in his hands, dripping ink onto yet another series of meaningless numbers.
The sound of water echoes behind him, dripping distinctly into a larger basin, and Riz automatically turns around, although he’s not sure what he’s expecting. Or, more accurately, he’s not sure what he’s not expecting, because he’s been sharing these quarters with Fabian for a while now, for long enough to develop a routine and assigned sides of the shared bed. So he turns around and has to swallow for a moment, when he sees exactly what he knew he was going to.
Fabian’s bare skin shines dully in the cabin’s lanterns, light flickering and dancing over a myriad of scars that crisscross over his back and weave out of view beyond his shoulders. He’s turned away from Riz, stooped over the exorbitant bowl he keeps for washing in the bedroom—Riz has knelt over it before, in those days after the battle, has wet rag after rag in that basin and wiped the blood from Fabian’s side even as it pooled again, refusing to clot. Fabian stands now, stripped down to his waist, and the sound of a washcloth dipping into the water and running across skin in repetitive motions has Riz’s ears folding and twisting a little as he tries to map out the movement of Fabian’s hands.
His muscles shift, pulling, and the edge of the washcloth appears over the curve of Fabian’s shoulder, right over the edge of a scar that’s all jagged and wrong and not healed over right. And Riz… Riz has never seen that scar before. Fabian must have picked it up in those awkward years, between the start of college and the beginning of this imprisoned boat ride, where they were no longer FabianAndRiz but just Fabian. Just Riz. Friends who talked on the phone during larger group calls, and sent letters occasionally until one of them stopped responding and the other stopped trying. Friends who remembered each other, thought about each other, but who lived only fleetingly in their actual day to day movements.
Riz’s breath catches a little in his throat as the light and the muscles shift and he realizes just how many of those scars he doesn’t recognize, just how many Fabian has picked up over the years he was not there to protect him.
He doesn’t say anything before he does it, because he’s not really thinking, hypnotized slightly by the lilt of the ship and the way it makes Fabian’s skin appear molten in the light. Riz puts his dripping quill down and stands up, inadvertently using stealth as he pads across the floor to stand directly behind Fabian. His face comes up to the middle of Fabian’s shoulder blades, the same space he occupied all those years ago, and this feels so familiar, so right deep in Riz’s chest, that he just raises his hands and presses his fingers over the first line of unknown, rigid skin.
Fabian immediately tenses against him, the sounds of the washcloth halting. Riz sucks in a breath and presses his fingers up, tracing the path of the scar as it swoops around in a curve towards the top of Fabian’s bicep.
“I’m sorry,” Riz says, once he gets to the end of it, redirects his fingers to the next—a little knick the size of Riz’s thumb in a straight line across the back of Fabian’s neck.
“It’s okay, The Ball.” Fabian’s voice sounds shaky. Riz is both grateful that he can’t see Fabian’s face and hates the fact that Fabian gets to look away from him for any longer than he already has, any longer than the years and years they’ve spent off. Those years were neither of their faults, were necessary for them to grow as people, and Riz knows that, but he can’t help but feel a little bitter anyway.
If Fabian’s skin feels this comfortable under his hands, if Fabian feels this correct in front of him, Riz has to wonder why they weren’t just doing this all along.
He’s mindful of his claws as he works his way across the skin of Fabian’s back, his eyes tracking the paths of barely-there knicks of old swords wielded by high school bullies and glorified squids with revenge fantasies. Fabian takes a shuddering breath, rolls his shoulders back, and Riz pauses for a moment, fingers pressed to the deep gouges of a mace over his side.
“How many are there?” Riz asks, blinks slowly as Fabian shrugs even though Fabian can’t see it.
“Hundreds?” Fabian says, softly. The washcloth is finally lowered to the bowl and Fabian’s hands are coming up, glistening with water and empty, wrapped around the backs of his shoulders with his elbows disappearing somewhere into the darkness in front of them. “Probably not that many. I don’t keep track.”
“I’ll count them for you,” Riz presses his palm flat against a large, angry burn scar that looks like it was healed with equally burning celestial magic and then never treated again.
“You don’t have to.”
“I want to.”
“...Alright.”
Riz loses track quickly. There probably aren’t hundreds, but there are many. Many different marks and memories of the ways people have hurt Fabian, etched into a mostly permanent map across his skin. Riz’s hands shake as he reaches the tops of Fabian’s shoulders, finally touching that jagged scar that had started it all.
“Can you reach?” Fabian asks, and his voice sounds low and sleepy, sticking like humid air between them.
“Fuck off,” Riz mumbles.
“I can sit down. So you can reach better.”
A pause, Riz brushes his hand against the side of Fabian’s neck and watches as he sucks in a breath. “Yeah, that would work.”
Riz steps back. His hands tingle at the loss of Fabian’s skin against them and his heart is beating both too fast and too slow, and then there’s the scrape of a stool and Fabian is sitting down, lowering himself enough that now it’s his head which comes up to the middle of Riz’s chest.
They still haven’t faced each other.
Well, Riz thinks, at least some things haven’t changed.
When he returns his hands to Fabian’s shoulders, it’s like a spell has been dropped, and Fabian’s whole body sags into a sigh, his head tipping back against Riz’s chest. Riz feels the brush of Fabian’s head against his bare skin—damn these pirate shirts and their ridiculous boob cuts.
As Fabian’s body relaxes into him, Riz lets his fingers wander over the tops of Fabian’s shoulders, down around to his collarbone and the front of his neck. There are more concerning scars here, a bullet wound just beside his heart, the tell tale sign of long and jagged teeth marks against his throat, and Riz, either due to the late hour or the closeness and muchness of all of this, feels tears prick against the backs of his eyes.
Fabian’s hand comes up, almost as if he can tell the reason for Riz’s faltering movements, and wraps comfortingly around the sliver of skin exposed at his wrist. Riz’s eyes are pulled to the way Fabian’s thumb drags across his skin, tracing little circles around his wrist bone. Time seems to slip around them, inconsistent and syrupy, like they’re sinking deeper and deeper into the ocean, beams of sunlight growing dimmer and darkness slipping its way inside.
Riz is not afraid of the dark. He’s walked down a long hallway through the layers of Hell. He’s heard what voices whisper from dark places. He’s seen what comes from the shadows those voices hide behind.
He is not afraid as his fingers start to move again, resting right over Fabian’s heart and pressing lightly into the skin there. Fabian’s heart is pounding against his fingertips, moving so fast it feels like it will leap from his chest. Riz presses his fingers in more firmly, not to hurt but to hold that unruly heart in place, to keep it safe and warm.
“Riz,” Fabian says.
Words, Riz has found, can tell a lot about a person. Unfortunately, he’s never been very good at identifying those intricacies, always too caught up in remaining one step ahead to notice what is being unveiled right before him. Fabian is not just any old target, though, he’s Fabian and it doesn’t matter how many years pass, Riz will always be able to understand him.
So, Riz can’t parse every single layered emotion under the name that sounds more like a confession in the dim light of their shared room. But he knows what it means.
Riz wraps his arms more fully around Fabian’s shoulders, pulling him in and back and letting himself just feel Fabian’s body against his. Muscles and scars and every single missed memory guarded by them.
“I’m sorry,” Riz says again. He still isn’t sure what he’s apologizing for, just that he needs to say it.
“Don’t be. I’m sorry.”
Riz ducks his head down, buries his face in the top of Fabian’s hair. His fingers rest along the curved lines of swords and spells and suffering. His eyes drift shut and he breaths in Fabian’s smell—more ocean and liquor and sweat than in high school, but with an undercurrent of something distinctly Fabian, something that Riz didn’t even know he’d been missing but now that he’s got it back he just wants to bask in it, wants to let it fill up his lungs until he’s high or dizzy from a lack of oxygen.
As he smooths his hands down and up Fabian’s chest, careful to remain near his shoulders or his sides and away from the clean, faded lines of his top surgery that Riz has known as a fact of Fabina’s body since their first year as teenagers too gangly for their own emotions, Riz wonders whether or not he’d been solving the wrong map, the wrong sets of coordinates and directions.
Maybe he should have been paying attention to what was right in front of him all along.
Or, maybe, they were right and this… thing, this evidence of their lives and their loss, needed time to grow. To mature. To add scars and forget old ones.
They won’t ever really know which way will end up better, because they just have here. Have now. Have years of intense friendship and years of stuttered silence, and now weeks of shared closeness again, weeks of fighting back to back and eating with their sides pressed together and sleeping across from one another over a sea of blankets, just like when they were young and hurting and struggling to stay afloat.
Riz’s hands still, back up on the tops of Fabian’s shoulders now. He pulls away, slightly, just enough to watch the way Fabian’s back moves as he breathes. Deeply and contentedly.
“The Ball?” Fabian asks.
“There’s a lot of history here, huh?”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“I don’t know,” Riz answers, truthfully. “Should it be?”
Fabian makes a sound, either a sigh or a noise of contemplation. “I don’t think so. I think it should be whatever we want it to be.”
“I don’t want it to be a bad thing,” Riz says, again, truthfully.
A breath. “I don’t either.”
And Riz is far enough away to see, but close enough to feel, the exact moment when Fabian twists around to look at him—finally turned towards each other, both of them holding their breaths.
The hand on Riz’s wrist pulls it away from Fabian’s body, intertwines their fingers together in the air.
And so begins the rest of their lives.