Work Text:
There’s always a difference, Will thinks, between minds. The way people think. He used to spend his down time at the docks listening to the tourists speak, waiting for Uncle Sam to call him back for work. That in itself was entertainment, probably. Standing around pretending like you didn’t listen in. Most of the people spoke English, tinged with an accent, about the water. The colour of it. How strongly the waves beat into the shore—then the photographers. The highlight of all that waiting was when someone commented on something else: mostly the children.
“I wonder if sea monsters have fathers,” said a kid once, when Will was fifteen. Waiting for his mother to come fetch him. It made him remember Anna, then. How almost everything made her happy. That’s the thing about being the oldest sibling: you watch the people around you grow and forget to breathe in the pauses. Entire blocks of summers they spent working and carefully picking out what they could afford. Couldn’t afford. It used to be easy, entertaining them with stories. Absurd questions. That was before.
One morning, Derek says, “I didn’t know you had the patience for poetry.”
“It’s not so bad,” Will tells him. “I just can’t stand the—”
“—Fancy embellishments?”
Will shrugs a shoulder, “Maybe. It just seemed so serious.”
Interestingly: no one expected them to be this cordial with each other. The rest of the team say their congratulations, surprised at the gentle bickering they fall back onto. Will doesn’t blame them for the shock: they didn’t exactly get along in their first year. Everyone assumed that their personalities just clashed—but it was just the language that was out of place. Now he lets Derek call him Dex in front of as many people as he needs to, and Derek lets him micromanage everything on the basis that it’ll make him feel better, and they walk to Annie’s morning after morning just for the sake of routine —and honestly, Will had never thought that they’d be like this, either.
It’s never too quiet when Derek writes on him.
He likes it most when Will is shirtless, stretched on their mattress, earphones in. He only writes with felt-tip markers, no sharpies. “Tell me about something,” he’d whisper. “Anything.”
“Sand doesn’t taste good,” Will tells him, overheated one day in spring. “I tripped on the beach all the time, because the tourists never found out where to leave their junk.”
Derek clucks his tongue, distracted by a word. “Looks like we’ve got more in common that we thought.”
“If you paid attention more often,” Will says, then falls silent, leaves the thought stewing.
Derek prompts him. “If?”
“Let me rephrase the question,” Will meets his gaze, and smiles. “If you paid any less attention,”
“Ah,” Derek blinks, ducking his head. “Who’d be the shy maiden yearning for your rescue, then?”
Will kisses him. Once, twice, three times, because Derek likes rhythm and Will has cultivated his life around loving people, and trying his hardest not to let them do whatever they want. (He’s not very successful, on that front.)
“Next summer, I could pretend like I don’t know how to swim.”
Sometimes—Will is so homesick he bursts with the feeling. He misses his family, and the snow, and the small cafés where the baristas know his name. Maybe even the odd jobs he works, the rough labour where he doesn’t have to think, just has to listen. There’s always a kind of simplicity in Portland.
He doesn’t say anything to Derek about this—but he ends up with sea-blue ink on his arms anyway. He learns how to tolerate the strangers staring, fingerprints bright on his skin, and he makes sure not to wash them off until he goes back to the attic. Derek always grins up at him, tracing the words with a finger until they smudge into each other.
“Like waves,” claims Derek, and Will supposes that this is how he deals with things: he writes them down until there isn’t a reason for him to continue writing.
And Will—he hasn’t been a creative kid, not in a long time, so he plunges all that concentration into programming instead, until his eyes hurt from staring at the screen for far too long. But it’s comforting, when there’s logic around instead of emotion. Line after line of objectivity. This command is written out to execute this detail, no different meaning. But the personality is there all the same.
There’s not much passion in it, Will supposes. Not compared to Derek, who writes like there’s something missing.
(Maybe this was the primary difference between them: Derek was accustomed to wanting, and Will was accustomed to settling, and he’s not jealous; he hasn’t been jealous in a long time, but how nice would it be? To just want?)
At Annie’s, Derek leans into his space with the pen still uncapped, drawing a line on Will’s shirt, and requests again, “Tell me something.”
“I liked telling stories,” Will replies, trying his best not to smile at the ridiculous smear of ink on his shirt. “Used to do it all the time.”
“But you stopped,” Derek continues for him, feet tapping. “Why?”
Will breathes in. “Everyone around me grew up, and I thought I did too,” he says, and shuts down his laptop. “But I’m not so sure anymore.”
He calls Anna, after that. Asks about her school and everything else an older sibling should.
“I’m okay,” she says, cheerful in his ear. “When are you coming home?”
“Next month, maybe,” Will tells her, and meets Derek’s gaze. He’s scribbled anna? onto the empty margins, smiling softly.
Anna sighs, too heavy for her age. “That’s too far away.”
“What,” Will laughs, “You wanna fly here instead?”
“Sure,” Anna chimes, and he could hear her grin all the way in Samwell. “I’m going to turn into an angel.”
“Alright, angel,” Will allows. “Sounds like a plan,” and shoves Derek lightly when he finally hands the phone over, helpless.
“Hey, Anna,” Derek croons, and Will rolls his eyes, kisses his cheek before he leaves to grab another cup of coffee.
Will remembers—Anna wanted to be a mermaid first, when she was younger, before this current phase of acting. In the summer evenings he’d sit with her on the beaches, escaping home. Just watching the water recede and recede and recede. Talking all the while of everything that the tourists left on the shore. Giving them a background, sometimes, to make up for that anonymity.
“That’s how Ariel picked herself a prince,” he reminded her.
“So the ocean didn’t want him,” Anna reasoned. “He was junk.”
“Or just shipwrecked,” Will mused. “Or lost.”
“I don’t get something,” Derek says, slumping into the space beside Will, on the bench.
“It’s hard for you to get anything, really, so that’s not surprising,” Will shrugs. Cards his fingers through Derek’s hair when he lies on his lap.
“You like reading my poetry,” Derek points out, blatantly ignoring the insult. “But you turn your nose up at everything else.”
Will snorts. “I suppose that’s true.”
Derek blinks at him, once, twice. “But why?”
“Why do I like your poetry?” Will asks. “I don’t know, why does anyone?”
Derek rolls his eyes at him. If only he had any fucking patience—but then again, that’s Nursey for you.
“I didn’t read any of your poems until we started to get along better,” Will continues. “Remember?”
“Yeah—”
“—So I knew you better, too. And you didn’t turn out to be some insensitive dickhead who wrote poetry for the fun of it.”
Derek hums, turning his face to kiss Will’s inner wrist. A sign to continue.
“Poetry feels insincere, sometimes,” he clarifies. “Too much like playing at something people never necessarily understood.”
Derek laughs. “That’s slam poetry you’re talking about.”
“I guess,” Will shrugs, though he doesn’t really know the difference. “It feels frustrating when you can’t understand anything.”
Derek sits upright. “Is that why you like programming so much? Because you get a kick out of figuring things out?”
“Maybe,” Will says, wondering about line after line of code. Line after line of poetry.
Derek pauses, then, immeasurably quietly: “Is that why you like me?”
“No,” Will breathes out, a little too quickly. He rubs a thumb over Derek’s bottom lip, feeling the plushness of it, watching it give. “You’re not something to be solved, are you?”
If he’s honest, Derek reminds him of the docks. Standing there waiting and watching the current drag everything around, and how the water pushed back. Tasting the salt on his tongue happy just for the view—but even happier when someone mentions a thought plucked out of mid-air, perfectly preserved in its moment.
Different minds, Will used to think. But now he knows that it’s just Derek’s.
But there are some days, like today. When even Derek's favourite pens can’t coax any words out of him, and a Derek who hasn’t written a single word because of exams is bad enough, much less one that’s blocked, of all things. He’s pacing around the room, jaw clenched together, fingers trembling slightly, and it’s upsetting Will too, this lack of a tide. The angry black ink smeared across his face, all over his skin.
Derek’s tearing up paper, page after blank page, and it rankles at him. This waste of perfectly fine paper. The shreds litter the room—Will waits until he’s done to pull him in, to press their foreheads together. Will wipes away the spot of ink on his cheekbone, and lets Derek's train of thought leave without saying anything.
He’s dealt with four younger siblings. Will can handle a tantrum.
But Derek comes back, eventually, like he always does, shifting. Starting to get restless.
“Where’d you go off to?” Will asks, kissing his forehead, because setting him off again is just bad news for the rest of the Haus.
“Nowhere, really,” Derek mumbles, and Will raises an eyebrow at him. The stubborn motherfucker.
Derek tries again, a little sheepish. “Couldn’t write.”
“Then read it again,” Will says.
“I did.”
“There’s a mistake in there somewhere,” Will points out, as gently as he can manage. Lifts one of Derek’s hands to kiss his knuckles. “You’ve got to find it, first.”
“I can’t.”
“Then find it later,” Will smiles, then considers something. “Wanna hear a story?”