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I’m torn from the tranquil depths of sleep by Malcolm shaking my shoulder with enough force to wake a mountain.
“T.F.? T.F. — Tobias, are you — ”
“Nghuh?” I blink furiously, trying to make some sense of, well, anything. All I’m getting is that Malcolm looks urgent and wild-eyed, like something’s on fire that oughtn’t be.
At seeing my eyes open, he gives a sigh of relief that sounds like it’s been punched out of him and slumps heavily against the mattress, though his hand is still locked in a vice-like grip on my shoulder as if he’s afraid I’ll drift away if he lets go.
I stare at him in sleep-addled confusion, then glance around for context clues suggesting that we might have to do a quick skipping of town in the dead of night — it wouldn’t be the first time, and I’m sure it shan’t be the last. Occupational hazard. Everything else is calm, though, the room exactly the way it was when we fell asleep, quiet and dark but for a sliver of moonlight slithering past the half-drawn curtains. My hand, having instinctively slipped under the pillow for the card I keep stashed there in case of emergency, withdraws still holding the card, now glowing only a gentle gold with leftover magic as my adrenaline spike settles back down.
Resting his hand on my cheek, he guides my face back towards him again, his eyes urgent on mine like he’s searching for something in there.
I put my hand on top of his, too worried to be annoyed about the indecorous awakening as I look back at him. “Th’ fuck? Malcolm?”
A shiver moves through him and his eyes clear a bit, as if he’s coming back into focus, waking up. I realize distantly that he’d been just about as still half-asleep as I was. For a long moment he’s eerily unmoving, staring at me like he’s been frozen in place, or enthralled by magic. I half start to worry that the card had gone off and stunned him before I came to properly, after all. But then something changes in his face, a look of pain crossing it on a wince.
“Shit,” he says in a surprisingly small voice, and then he makes a sound like a wounded animal and lunges forward to wrap me up in his arms, so tight that it sends the breath wheezing out of my lungs at first, the glowing card tumbling out of sight among the tangled sheets between us.
I blink into the solid if clammy line of his shoulder, not displeased at this development, exactly — pressed up close to his bulk is probably my favorite place in the world to be, I’m a simple man in some key ways — but definitely feeling like I’ve left my brain in the other room and am still stumbling around in the dark, bumping my shins against furniture on the way to retrieving it. “Hmnuh?”
Having broken free from the petrified stillness, he’s breathing like he’s fresh from narrowly escaping drowning to death, warm puffs of it where he’s got his face buried in my hair, and it has me wrapping my arms protectively around him in turn before I can even think about it. Cold sweat lingers on his skin.
“Malcolm?”
“Fuck, Tobias, never do that again, you scared the shit outta me,” he pants, cupping the back of my head with his hand.
“Whu?” I manage, petting a comforting if confused hand over his back because I have literally no idea what’s going on right now, but I can feel the tremble moving through his body all the same.
“Of all the silly godsdamn things to get it into your head to…” he mutters darkly, trailing off into an incomprehensible rumble as he tightens his hold on me even more for a moment.
Finally reaching my limit, I give a squawk of indignant protest. It’s one thing to be shaken awake in the middle of the night by your wild-eyed partner, it’s quite another to be pelted with vague and reckless accusations before you can even get your eyes properly open in the process. “Wait, wait, what? What am I even supposed to have done this ti — ”
“You jumped from the fucking Butcher’s Bridge, you sodding lunatic!” he barks, pulling back so he can look at my face, his hand moving restlessly through my hair and along my face like he wants to make sure I’m still there. It’s a bit like being frisked by the tenderest imaginable doorman of reality.
I blink. “Huh?”
He’s glaring at me, the ferocious expression incongruous with the gentleness of his big callused hands. “What the hell were you gonna do if you missed that rope, huh? Even if you’d managed to hit the water instead of solid stone at the end of it all — here’s a newsflash for ya: you can’t fucking swim, T.F.! I wouldn’t’ve made it down there in time to fish you out, you’d be done for either way!”
It takes another few moments before some stuff clicks in my head. “Oh, that time.” Honestly, I keep that one filed away as ‘that time I had to ruin my best boots’ more than anything, the rest of it worked out eventually. Never got the serpent spleen, the blood, or the ash-sticky seawater out of those hand stitched seams afterwards, though. Some nights I still pour a drink out in their memory. They were good boots. They didn’t deserve that.
He blows out a heavy breath and buries his face against my shoulder again, shuddering. “Yeah, that time.”
I’m doing my very best not to burst out laughing — talk about delayed reaction, it’s been, what, five years at this point, maybe longer? — because that’s probably not the right response from a supportive partner neither in crime nor life. Instead I move us so that his face is safely tucked against the line of my throat as I cup the nape of his neck in my hand and stroke soothingly through the hair there, turning my face to kiss the top of his head. The amusement fades quickly to the background as I become more awake and hear how his breath is coming choppy and harsh, the way it does after the nightmares that still haven’t gone away completely. His arms are nearly painfully tight around me, but I let him hold on as hard as he needs to. I know the past gets stuck in him in some strange ways sometimes after the Locker, gathers in stagnant pools and eddies only to rise like a tide and flood him at the least likely of times. It used to… annoy me a bit, before I realized what it was — it ain’t a nice feeling to talk to your partner like normal in one moment, and in the next to someone who’s convinced you’re one breath away from stabbing him in the back, no matter what you say or do. I can’t imagine it’s any nicer to be the person having their mind turned around on them on a dime.
“Bad dream?” I ask eventually.
He gives a grunt of confirmation and one of his hands loosens its grip just a little, enough for it to start running slowly up and down my back.
“That’s okay,” I murmur, nuzzling down into his hair. “That’s okay. I’m here.”
“Yeah,” he says gruffly, and finally he sighs, rubbing his face against my skin as some more of the tension leaves him.
The nightmares have released the worst of their hold on him over time — used to be they were a near-nightly occurrence when we first started running together again, and now it happens only once in a blue moon and doesn’t seem to leave him shaken for as long after he wakes anymore. I pretend I haven’t noticed it started getting better for real after we took up sharing a bed. When we were young, Malcolm would always be out like he’d been hit over the head with a sledgehammer the moment he settled on the pillow, and proceed to sleep with an ease and ardor that I — having been chasing sleep like a lepidopterist desperately waving a net around for an evasive and precious specimen of great rarity for months at a time from the age of about twelve — had simultaneously faintly envied him and also found strangely reassuring. There’s probably nothing in the world that’s seen me safely along my troubled path to slumber more often than the sound of Malcolm’s snoring across the room. Sometimes when he wakes with haunted tired eyes, I feel bruised on his behalf that it was taken from him, my hands suddenly seeming so clumsy and useless in their inability to steal back all he’s lost and return it to him.
I remember it too, now, that night — the wind tugging on my hair and coat, the wild reckless thud of my heart against my ribs, the dizzy abyss of the harbor stretching out so far below me in the night that it almost didn’t feel real. Malcolm’s voice in the darkness — “Tobias, step back”, a brusque eulogy for both people I thought I’d left behind long ago, and how much I’d rather fall than turn around and face either of them. And then the plunge.
“That was a weird night, wasn’t it,” I say pensively.
He fumblingly fits his hand to the curve of my ribs as if to feel them move as I breathe, and murmurs: “The fuck were you thinkin’, anyway, swan divin’ off of there like an idiot?”
“Well, pardon me, I was rather doing my best not to shuffle off this mortal coil by any means possible, I’m sorry you don’t approve of my methodology,” I drawl, then at his mutinous look: “You were tryin’ pretty hard to kill me at that point, Malcolm.”
“Yeah, well. Doesn’t mean I wanted you to die.” I’m still staring into thin air trying to puzzle that one out in my mind when he adds wretchedly: “Look, it was complicated, okay, I dunno how to explain it. I wanted you to look me in the eyes and admit what you’d done and then pay for it, not…”
He grunts and waves a helpless hand like he’s trying to swat flies out of the air, clearly frustrated at not finding the right words.
“We need to take some time to help you optimize your ‘actions towards desired outcome’ pipeline one of these days,” I tell him, gently stroking his face. “But yeah, I think I get it.”
Mumbling something indecipherable under his breath, he turns his face into the touch so he can press the curve of his cheek into my hand, though he’s looking away from me like he can’t bring himself to meet my eyes.
“What was that, again?” I ask, keeping my voice as soft and non-demanding as I know how so I won’t make it even harder for him.
He sighs and closes his eyes.
“I don’t like to think about it,” he says. “How close I got to…”
Oh.
I don’t particularly care to think about that night too deeply myself, to be honest. It’s a hell of a thing, thinking you have… if not left the past behind, exactly, then at least gotten the worst of the shrapnel out of yourself and changed your name and your face many enough times that you lost your own trail two towns back, that you thought you’d created a decent forgery to replace the self that got lost back then — covered over the damage well enough that even you can pretend you’ve forgotten the scars beneath, as long as you take care to angle your gaze just right and don’t scrape at the new paint. Only to then have the past quite literally kick your door down out of the blue one day, brandishing a shotgun and a serious grudge. Don’t get me wrong, he’d still been the most welcome haunting I can ever imagine, a bonafide unlikely miracle, hissing mad and gunning for me in both the literal and metaphorical sense as he was, a revelation wrapped in wrath and a little bit of seaweed still — but, well, you know. Like I said. Hell of a thing.
Even so, at the end of it all, the real thing I remember and will never forget, even if I’d wanted to — even if it could have been disentangled now from the fabric of my soul — is the fire dancing on the water, and Malcolm’s shoulder almost touching mine.
“You didn’t, though,” I say, running my finger along the outer edge of his eyebrow, carefully following the line where a scar has left a nick in it. He opens his eyes and looks at me. “Plenty of times you could’ve — you shot a card right out of my hand, you could’ve taken most of my arm along with it, easy. But you didn’t.”
He’s quiet for a long time. “Does it count if I still don’t really know why I didn’t?”
I chuckle. “Well, my fully intact — and, dare I say, famously talented — right hand sure would like to think so, and I hope you would too, or it’s the last you’ll see of it for a while.” I hold the hand in question up and wiggle the fingers, which at least gets a snort of laughter from him. He reaches out his own hand in a hesitant question, the tips of his fingers brushing against mine, and when I answer by twining our fingers together he squeezes gently, a reassuring pressure. Then he brings our joined hands up to his face and rests his forehead against them.
“Can’t have that,” he mumbles. “You’d drive me irreconcilably nuts in three days if you couldn’t cheat at cards and pick pockets no more.”
“Oh, I’d still find a way to do those even if I lost both hands,” I say with the calm assuredness of absolute, incontrovertible self-knowledge.
He laughs, low and scratchy. “Yeah. I reckon you would.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” I repeat, holding his hand between my palms. “You didn’t, and then you saved my life, twice. Thrice, maybe, I lost count somewhere along the way. Now I ain’t an accountant or anythin’, but I’d say that math checks out.” Then, in the name of fairness, I add: “And also I did set fire to a house with you still in it, even if I was pretty sure you’d make it out okay. I think we can call this one even. Some bygones are better off as bygones, right?”
He tilts his head on the pillow in acknowledgement. “Yeah, fair enough, if we start comparin’ dick moves there, neither of us are gonna come out lookin’ great, you may have a point.”
“One day you’ll learn that I always do, and heed my advice accordingly,” I say piously, which makes him blow a raspberry and snicker.
“Keep dreamin’, Tobias. Though in the end we did fuck Gangplank over more than we managed to fuck each other over, so I guess from a certain point of view… we could chalk this one up as a win.”
“Your fine eye for silver linings is an intrinsic part of my devastating attraction to you, Malcolm.”
The drawn look on his face has started to soften as he’s waking up properly, though his hair is still damp with cold sweat and clings a bit to his forehead. “Heh. Bet you say that to all the boys.”
“Nah. I’ve always saved all my best lines for you,” I say and comb the hair away from his face with my fingers. He smiles at that, tired but boyishly sweet in that particular way that should settle weirdly on his thug’s face, but somehow always looks exactly right, exactly like him. I bite my lip, brush my thumb along the side of his hand. “You wanna get up and get some fresh air, or try to go back to sleep? Whatever you want. I’m… Is there anything I can… what do you need?”
“You’re already doin’ it,” Malcolm says, huddling even closer to me under the sheets. “It helps. When you talk. Which I realize is playin’ with fire, divulging to you like that for nothin’, I ain’t never gettin’ a moment’s quiet ever again. But it’s true.”
Relief and something else, even warmer and softer, unwind themselves from the knot that had stuck in my chest. “Then I shall speak, as I am called to. But just so you know, if you find yourself regretting this decision, my silence can be bought,” I say.
“Uh-huh. At what price?”
Waggling my head in mock-consideration, I say: “For 8000 silver serpents a month I will shut up. With additional payments commensurate with how many loopholes you want me to close off in the process, of course.”
“Gods, your grifter’s instincts do a man good to see,” Malcolm says, faintly awed.
“Aw shucks. I learned it all from watching you, I can’t take all the credit. But hey, if we are talkin’ about questionable decisions that night… right back at you, then — what the hell were you thinkin’, opening fire in the warehouse? What was your genius getaway plan afterwards, when you’d already woken the whole town by shooting up Gangplank’s precious treasure hoard in such a characteristically loud and indiscreet manner? Confused me then and confuses me now, honestly.”
His eyes are doing that flat, fondly forbearing thing they do when he finds my dedication to ‘overthinking’ — as he consistently insists on considering it — confounding yet amusing. “There was no plan.”
I snort and press a kiss against his forearm, the hair there tickling my nose delightfully. Man, I love his arms. And his hands. And his broad hairy chest and belly. And his thighs. And his big dumb blunt face. And all the other parts of him too, but while in bed is a good place, it’s probably not quite the right time for deeper contemplation in that direction right now. “You know, in hindsight I should have seen that comin’. That one’s on me.”
He shrugs. “Wasn’t nothin’ to plan for, once you turned up on cue. Nothin’ else mattered but you.”
Decades of a perfectly trained poker face be damned, it doesn’t save me even a little from the small sound that escapes from my throat, nor from what my expression might reveal around it.
“Surely that ain’t a surprise,” he says. “Thought I made myself pretty clear at the time.”
“Mostly you were makin’ it clear that you wanted to strangle me, everythin’ else got sort of lost in the background. As it might.”
He shrugs again. “You were still the most important thing. You… you always were. Fuck, I… I dunno why all of this came floodin’ back for me tonight, it’s just — it was a long time ago, and you’re right here, so why… I don’t get it.”
There’s a note of confession to that that makes me stop for a moment and pay extra attention. I furrow my brow and stroke his hair for a while, looking at him, thinking.
Finally I say: “Y’know, when my family left me behind, I… I didn’t really realize it for a long time.” He blinks at me a couple of times, and I clarify: “I mean, I knew it had happened, obviously. But then one day, years later, I suddenly… realized. All that time some part of me had just been — been waitin’ for them to come back for me, I guess. And that was when it hit me bad, somehow. When I realized they hadn’t, and they never would.” I run my fingers through his hair, focusing on that rather than letting myself get pulled along by the treacherous current of memory that still runs somewhere deep in me of that day, that branches off like tributaries to different times, different river banks. When I’m alone, that’s hard. I never was much of a swimmer. When he’s here like this it’s easy. I’ve never met anyone else quite as real as Malcolm; he makes for one hell of an anchor. “I don’t know that the mind always knows what time it’s actually in. Maybe it ain’t so strange if bits of the past come bobbing to the surface sometimes, even when the timing doesn’t make sense right away.”
He’s quiet for a while. “Huh.” His hand smooths along my side and down to the small of my back, absently drawing me a bit closer to him. I smile crookedly at the nakedly protective gesture. He’s got a decent enough poker face too — always did, and would have had to develop one even if he didn’t in pure self-defense, after playing opposite me for so many years — but his hands sometimes betray him, if you know where to look. “Sounds like it sucked.”
“It wasn’t the greatest time,” I allow, knowing it to be the coward’s way of lying through elision to avoid something difficult, and knowing myself well enough by now not to begrudge myself for it.
“...I don’t like thinkin’ about that either,” he says, using his thumb to brush a lock of hair away from my cheek and tucking it behind my ear.
“About what?”
“You bein’ all alone like that.”
Somehow that — his words, the old tired sadness in his eyes as he looks at me like he can see the kid standing alone on the riverbank still in there somewhere — breaks through all the artfully constructed numbness I’ve erected around it in my heart, sends grief crashing through in a cleansing wave. Not enough to completely unmoor the elaborate lack of feeling from its firmaments all in one go and take me out at the knees in the process, thank fortune and good luck, but… I don’t know. Easing some of the strain that made building it necessary in the first place, perhaps.
“Yeah. I guess I was alone for a long time.” I look at him, making my face very serious, a somber, thoughtful mask of portent. “Then something awful happened, though.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. My luck changed.” I grin, tangling our legs under the covers and fitting my hand to the back of his neck. “I met some deplorable fellow in a bar somewhere, got myself a partner. And then nothing else really mattered after that.”
It takes a moment for the answering grin to settle over his face, but when it does… how the hell could I ever want anyone else, when Malcolm smiles like a conspiracy, like we’ve been running a long con on heaven and gotten away with it clean? Nah. I know exactly who I wanna run with, in this world and the hereafter.
He wraps his arms around me tight, tight, and it’s still the best place in the world to be, close enough to him that we’re heartbeat to heartbeat with nothing to get in the way. I put my arms around him in turn and laugh as he peppers my neck, my temple, my shoulder with kisses, in that unleashed ardent way he has when he clearly finds his emotions too big to contain in his body or his words, seeming to hope he can just — hold me until it’s somehow all said anyway. And in all honesty — which is not a habit I risk taking up lightly, I assure you — in that way he’s the most eloquent man in all the world, and I wouldn’t trade him for anyone.
Squeezing me to him and nuzzling at the curve of my neck with his beardy face and palpable fondness, he demands: “Promise me you ain’t gonna jump from the Butcher’s Bridge again, you bastard.”
“Well, I mean — that’s a big ask,” I say, straight-faced, and he huffs an unimpressed breath and pokes me between the ribs to make me laugh-yelp and curl up on myself. “Aaaaarhg, this is exerting undue influence on the — ”
“Oh, this is perfectly due, you’ll know it when I go undue,” he says, tightening his arms around me to stop me from wiggling away as he tickles me again.
Still gasping for breath between torrents of leftover giggles, I wind my arms around his neck and brush our noses together. “Okay, compromise: I’ll only jump from the Butcher’s Bridge again if I’m already clutching one of those liferings you get down in the harbor sometimes, before someone thinks to nick them. Then I’ll just bob gently around in there until you can come fish me up all heroically.”
He grunts in satisfaction, pressing a kiss to the corner of my mouth. “Deal. The razorfins’re gonna have gobbled up most of your toes by that point, though, you realize.”
“I never said it was a perfect plan.”
With a look that rapidly approaches shrewdness, he says: “And if I use this occasion to reopen my case in support of swimming lessons…”
I sigh from the very tips of my toes. Outmaneuvered, and so easily, and to top it all off I don’t even mind it. This is what love does to a man. “Well, fuck, yeah, I can give it a try, I suppose. But you gotta promise me you won’t let go of me because you got momentarily distracted by somethin’ else or ‘cause you thought it’d be funny or for any reason whatsoever.”
“Hell, we’ll start you out in a paddlin’ pool with two feet of water and me holdin’ on to you like a vice the whole way until you stop seizing up the moment you touch the surface, if that’s what it takes,” Malcolm says, twining his leg with mine under the covers. “Whatever baby steps will help keep you from freakin’ out, I’ll toddle ‘em with you every step of the way and I won’t even make fun of you. That much. See, we’re both makin’ sacrifices here. I’ll keep my shirt off the whole time too, if that’d help your morale any,” he offers, chivalrously.
“This pot is starting to sweeten,” I admit.
“It would open a whole new world of skinny dippin’.”
With a laugh I bump my nose against his again and then kiss him lightly on the mouth. “Damn, I’m not made of stone. We’ve got ourselves a deal.”
His rumble of laughter in return vibrates through my own chest when we’re pressed this close. We lie like that for a while, his eyes slipping closed and his breath slowing down as I brush my fingers through his hair and let my own breathing match up with his. At one point he jerks and stirs, fighting to get his eyes back open as if to search for me — the effect is not unlike watching a puppy struggling in vain to stay awake.
“Don’t worry,” I say, kissing his forehead. “I’m gonna be here. You can sleep.”
Malcolm makes a snuffling sound and wriggles even closer to me, letting out a long contented sigh as he goes heavy and lax once more, his arm slung over my waist. The sleepy sprawl of his body is calling mine back to drowsiness too, the way nothing else really can.
For the few minutes before I follow him into sleep, I lie there watching him, loving him, until it seems unlikely that any heart should be able to hold something like this without collapsing under the gravity of its own matter, the way the Shuriman astronomers say even stars do eventually. No one ever said the laws of physics knew anything about love, though.
I think about his shoulder barely brushing mine — about my shoulder brushing his, and hearing him laugh again for the first time, even as the ocean burned all around us.
“The truest thing about my life will always be that you were there with me,” I tell him, quiet enough that it won’t wake him again from hard-won rest, loud enough to be heard in the darkness.