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By all rights, Jesper should be asleep. He's told himself that every night as he stares down the hours of darkness, his whole body pleasantly sore from the day's work, and it hasn't worked yet.
Certainly, he's tired enough. Life in the Dregs was its own kind of hard, but running and shooting and clambering over the tilted architecture of sinking Ketterdam couldn't compare to a day of farm work under the Zemeni summer sun, and he's only notionally in the Dregs anymore. These past months, between Ravka's Little Palace and the Van Eck mansion, his exertions have been cerebral and his lifestyle luxurious. He worried, on the long trip here, that he'd forgotten, that he'd come back to the farm and find himself as soft as Wylan.
That fear, at least, proved unfounded. He settled back into life and work on the farm like he'd never left. Except, no matter how hard he works during the day - and there is always work to be done, even with how insistent Colm is that he and Wylan are both guests - he ends up right here each night: lying in his parents' bed, staring out at the fuzzy darkness of his parents' room, struggling to let sleep pull him under and popping back up at the slightest sound or movement.
When he was young, his parents' bed was an ocean of rumpled sheets, large enough that Jesper could wiggle in between them without waking either of them up. After his mother's death, it grew vaster each night as the last vestiges of her scent - her sweat, her perfume, the oils she used for her hair and the lotion she used for her skin - slowly faded, while he and his father clung to each other in it, adrift. These new days, it's somehow too small, and he and his father can't avoid each other.
His own bedroom is just down the hall, Wylan presumably sleeping like a baby there in the bed his mother built him. Sometimes he does sleep quite like a baby, if Jesper's admittedly brief experience with the two currently under Alys's care is anything to go by, waking up screaming and all, but the walls in this house are thin enough that Jesper's sure that hasn't happened since they arrived. If it does, maybe he can use it to convince Colm to let them share a room.
Behind him, his father turns over, the old wooden bedframe - solid as the house itself and older than Jesper - creaking as he does. A moment later, hot breath washes over the back of Jesper's neck, standing all the little hairs on end.
An unwelcome but undeniable stab of irritation follows. Maybe tomorrow he can point out that there's no way he and Wylan could get up to any hanky-panky in his childhood bed, which was built for one and creaks even worse. Or he could say what Wylan suggested just the other day, that he tell Colm it's too late, his virtue belongs to Wylan Van Eck by contractual obligation. Or he could spit out the ugly, resentful thought that keeps souring his belly: that whose bed he shares or what he does in it is none of his da's damn business.
Stupid, when he's the one who told Wylan, back before they even left Ketterdam, that Colm would likely make them sleep separately. "He's old-fashioned," he said with a shrug, and watched Wylan consider arguing and decide not to.
More than a year since their last meeting, Jesper was still a little angry at his father, but he didn't want to be. He wanted to bury the hatchet and make things good between them. Probably Wylan could see that in his face, hear it in his voice, that he was willing to give a little, bend a bit, show he could do more than take. Earn the forgiveness he'd been so easily handed.
Or maybe Wylan just has good merchling manners. Either way, he hasn't made a peep of complaint except to play along when Jesper does. Like he did the other day, straddling Jesper in a drover's hut with his shirt unbuttoned and slipping off his sunburnt shoulders, when he said, "Tell him this is one of the things I pay you for, and you're in violation of your contract."
It hardly makes a difference as far as keeping the two of them chaste goes, but it sure as hell is making a difference in Jesper's ability to sleep. He still thinks of this room and this bed as his parents', but after his mother left them, he slept here more often than his own room, so it's at least half as much his as theirs. He didn't think it would be any trouble to bunk with his da again.
Except these past three weeks, there has been no comfort for him here. Once, this bed was sometimes the only place Jesper felt safe enough to sleep, and in the long, dragging years after his mother's death, it became the refuge he and his father shared against each day without her. Now, every shift of his father's weight behind him or brush of his father's body against his jerks him out of sleep and makes his heart race like he just heard the telltale tinkle of a window breaking.
Colm shifts again. Something - and Jesper cannot say honestly that he would know a hand from a knee from a twisted-up corner of blanket - prods against Jesper's ass.
Fear hits him like a bullet to the gut and blooms there. He chokes, not on blood, but on a sudden cascade of memory: a dozen bleary dreams he's tried for years to forget, now as clear as the exquisite glass in Wylan's cupboards.
They're all the same dream. In it, he lies in this bed, feigning sleep, while a wide, leathery hand squeezes his tender breasts and some stiff thing keeps pushing and rocking against his ass and his thighs and his back and hot, panting, humid breath hits the back of his neck. In it, it's all he can do not to let those disembodied parts become the whole man. In it, he is terribly frightened, but he never says a word.
All that fear is in him now, all of it.
Two things happen so close to simultaneously that even later, Jesper won't be able to say which came first: the brief, light pressure against him disappears, and he blurts out, tight and panicked, "Da."
"I wasn't," Colm says.
And Jesper believes him. Behind that honest, sun-worn face is an honest, straightforward mind. His da has lied, but never to him. Jesper believes him, and so he must believe, too, the tacit admission he's just been given. Those weren't dreams. They were real, and so too the hand was real, the cock was real, the breath was real, and they belonged not to some beast conjured by his subconscious but to his father.
Jesper thinks, as if the thought is a hat he might pass in a shop and try on, I know what my da sounds like when he comes.
He wants to spring from the bed and go pelting away like the rabbit his mother always said he was. Out of this room, out of this house, past the fields he used to wake up barefoot and half-dressed in the middle of some nights, until he finds a place he's never seen before where he can become someone new. Some strange palsy has overtaken him, though, and it's all he can do to drag himself up enough to sit.
On the other side of the bed, his father sits up too, his pale skin grey in the darkness. The moon doesn't shine brightly enough through the window for Jesper to make out any details, but it's enough to see the weary slump of Colm's shoulders and the way he turns his head away. Jesper still feels small before him, though, small and rawly naked in this bed, in his old nightshirt with its stretched neck and its missing buttons.
"I won't," Colm says, very softly, each word an obvious effort. "Not again, Jes, I pr-"
"Stop." And Colm does. The only sound now is Jesper's fast, whistling breath. He tried his best to simply dissolve when it happened, to not be there, to be asleep the way he pretended, and he never dared to say a thing, because if he did and Colm didn't stop, it would have killed him. Maybe it would have always been this easy. Maybe he has only himself to blame that there was ever a second time, much less a third or fourth or -
"Would you -" Jesper doesn't want to ask this or hear the answer, but his tongue goes on tripping over the words without permission. "Would you have - before, if - would you - if I said - would you have stopped if -"
"I always stopped when you woke up." Colm's voice is quiet and plainly ashamed.
There's some hint of pleading in it, though, some prickle of defensiveness, that sends a jolt of anger through Jesper so hot and clean it drives the weakness from his muscles enough to let him stand. He clambers gracelessly out of bed and trips across the room like a fresh colt taking its first steps, still shaking, afraid he's going to throw up with each step, but he makes it to the door.
Hand on the knob, eyes fixed on the dark grain, he pauses. His powers aren't the only thing his da taught him to lie about. "You stopped when you noticed I was awake."
Before Colm can respond, he darts out and slams the door behind him hard enough the whole hall shakes. He jumps too, like he didn't realize he was going to do it until he did.
At the other end of the hall, the other bedroom door swings open and Wylan emerges, tousled and yawning. "Is something - oh." His tone sharpens, becoming cautious. "Are you asleep?"
"What?" Jesper draws up short, and only then realizes he's halfway across the living room with no memory of having moved.
How many such awakenings does he remember having out in the fields, or the barn, or some ways down the long dirt road that wound towards their closest neighbor's farm? More than the number of times he remembers lying still while a hard, hot hand groped at him, which is more than the number of times he remembers waking up with his shirt half open or his da's hand inching up his belly and being shushed guiltily back to sleep.
It beggars belief that he could have forgotten. He wants to forget again, to push this awful understanding of his own life forward through the years to be picked up by some older version of him, a wiser version within whom there will be room for the pain of it.
"Oh," Wylan says again. He's beside Jesper now, and again, Jesper doesn't remember having seen him move. "I thought you might be sleepwalking. Is… everything alright?"
He has noticed, of course, and tried doggedly to mediate Jesper's growing irritation with his father. His dedication to repairing Jesper and Colm's relationship shames Jesper sometimes and irritates him at others. He's not your father, he's had to keep himself from snapping more than once.
Wylan loves Colm. Wylan grows towards Colm's patience and kindness like a sun-starved flower. Two thoughts unfurl inside of Jesper, equally terrible: that Wylan won't believe him, and that Wylan will and he'll have taken away the closest thing Wylan has to a father.
Not telling Wylan is preferable, but feels impossible. Already the secret is trying to wriggle its way out from under Jesper's skin, crawling up his throat to force open his lips and escape them. He grits his teeth to keep it caged, and tries to think of what to even say. Neither of his languages are sufficient for the task.
"Jesper?" Wylan touches his elbow. He's close enough for Jesper to see how wide and worried his eyes are.
"We didn't have a fight or anything," Jesper says, which is, for once, the truth. Colm agreed with him, after all. Admitted to it. Left no murky corner of plausible deniability for Jesper to hide from it in any longer.
"Alright." Wylan's tone is doubtful, but he doesn't push it. He's good at dropping things when they need to be dropped, but he never forgets them, so Jesper is sure they'll talk about this again tomorrow. "Well, do you want to come to bed with me?" He asks it like a question, but he's still firmly pulling Jesper towards his room, so it isn't, really.
"Yes. Please." What he really wants to do is go bounding outside until he finds a ditch to break his legs in, but helping him defuse those urges is one of Wylan's specialties. A weight drops off his shoulders the second the door closes behind them. His father is still there, twenty feet of straight-shot hall away, but cocooned in the quiet of his childhood bedroom, he feels almost safe.
"Take off that shirt," he tells Wylan. It's Colm's, although he doubts Wylan knows that. If he had to guess, he would say Wylan is wearing it because he found it in Jesper's wardrobe, and that Wylan went through Jesper's wardrobe because he missed sleeping together and wanted something that smells like him. Under any other circumstances, Jesper would have quite enjoyed that thought.
"Uh, sure." Wylan does so, eyeing Jesper in that careful way he has when Jesper does a bad job of pretending to be fine and he's waiting for him to give it up.
"I'm not in the mood," Jesper assures him, even as he hooks his thumbs in the waistband of his pants and pushes them off too and stands naked as the day he was born. He doesn't give Wylan much time to ogle; as soon as the clothes are off, he dives into bed, accompanied by a chorus of squeaking and rattling.
"Should I take my pants off too…?"
"You should come here and lay on me. Whether or not you have pants on while you do is up to you." Jesper rolls onto his back and pats invitingly at his chest. Which is its own sort of admission: that he has the itch in him, that his blood is buzzing with the urge to hurt himself just to feel something, and that he needs Wylan to come anchor him back down.
Thankfully, Wylan doesn't comment on it. He just climbs into bed beside and then on top of Jesper, settling his full weight down and tucking his head beneath Jesper's chin. It took a bit of coaxing before he stopped worrying about silly things like hurting Jesper - as if Jesper couldn't still pick him up and swing him around, even with the weight he's put on since he took his place as head of the Van Eck family - but when he's in this sort of mood, Wylan pressing him down into the bed is almost as good as a night at the tables.
He wonders at the fact that he does feel better now, somehow less exposed naked under his childhood sheets with his pretty, clever merchling draped over him than he did fully dressed in his father's bed. There's no stripping off the skin his father touched, although very nearly the first thing he did when he had the money for it in Ketterdam was pay a Grisha to remove all that soft, squeezable flesh from his chest and make it a flat plane, but shedding the pajamas he always wore feels a little like that. And it never happened in this room.
An echo in his mind of Wylan saying nearly the same thing: "It never happened in here." That was when Jesper finally put together, far later than he ought to have, just what sorts of things Councilman Jan Van Eck did to his son in the privacy of their mansion. A dozen thoughts sprang into his mind, clamoring over each other, but the one that made it out of his mouth first was, "We've been sleeping in his bed!"
Even drawing such a comparison in the privacy of his own mind makes Jesper curdle with shame. Wylan's father ordered him beaten while he watched. Wylan's father raped him. Wylan's father did things he might never tell Jesper but which still wake him up screaming some nights. How peurile, how selfish, to try and claim that being gently fondled now and then is anything like what Wylan went through.
As if he can sense the unpleasant direction of Jesper's thoughts, Wylan softly murmurs against his throat, "Jes?"
I won't. Not again, Jes, I promise. Like a shame-faced little boy being scolded.
Jesper wraps his arms around Wylan's reassuring bulk and squeezes, probably too hard, but he receives no complaint, just a surprised wheeze. "Hey, let's get out of here. Not now, I mean, but once the sun's up, let's go into town and find a hotel. Or a room for rent. Or a hayloft, if you feel like slumming it a little. People are always renting out their haylofts around here, it's a great way to make sure your daughter ends up running off with a handsome stranger."
There is a long silence, during which Jesper becomes terribly sure Wylan is going to try and make him say it, but then Wylan just says, "Sure." Before Jesper can feel any relief, he adds, "But now I really don't believe you didn't have a fight with your father."
"I really didn't," Jesper insists, without much heat. He supposes he might be lying again. The last thing he said before he left that room was surely meant to do nothing but wound. "We talked. It wasn't -" His throat tightens, making his voice crack. "Not right now."
He hates it when he's cornered, unable to deflect, forced to simply say outright, Something is wrong and I don't want to talk about it. Wylan, brilliant little devil that he is, has become quite adept at maneuvering him into that position.
"That's alright," Wylan says, because he's also sweet enough to let Jesper go on kicking the can down the road a little longer. "Not right now. Tomorrow?"
"Pretty sure it's already tomorrow." Dawn will start bleeding into the sky in a few hours. They'll have to be up soon to - Jesper catches himself and stops that thought in its tracks. They won't be doing anything other than riding into town. The coming day's work will all be Colm's to do.
"Later today, then?"
"Sure," Jesper says, which is definitely a lie, but not one he has it in him to feel bad for just now. By now, Wylan ought to know that when he says sure like that, what he means is no. "But if you keep me up asking questions, then I'll be too tired, so shush."
His heart and belly are both still sick and his mind races. The inside of his head rings with the memory of his father's voice, his father's hands, the unyielding press of his father's body flush to his, his father's cock hard and hot as a brand through both their clothes. He gets caught in a loop, hearing Colm say I wasn't and crying out for only himelf to hear now, afterwards, Why did you ever? Why would you?, and wondering what it was that touched him, and straining to recall if he spoke first or if Colm pulled back from touching him first, and he doesn't even notice as it pulls him down into sleep.
It's Wylan who wakes him up the next morning, dressed now in one of the soft, silky nightshirts he brought from Ketterdam. As soon as Jesper opens his eyes, he knows it's too bright and therefore far later than it ought to be. Either Colm let him sleep in or Wylan insisted and he didn't argue. Both suggest a guilty conscience.
"Uh, your father said he made breakfast. Earlier. He's out in the fields now, I think, but I went ahead and got your clothes from his room."
Jesper flinches briefly, ridiculously. As if by simply stepping foot in that room, Wylan knows now, like he saw it, like Jesper's gangly fourteen year old self with the tits she'd just grown and already knew she didn't like was trapped there, being felt up in that bed forever.
He longs, with every inch of skin and bone and muscle in his body, for last night to have never happened. Or for Colm to have woken him in the dim blue-grey of pre-dawn to go feed the horses and the chickens like normal, pretending nothing at all happened so that then Jesper could pretend as well. Or for it to have all been a dream of dreams, to still be a dream which he would any moment be awoken from, not by Wylan with his worried blue eyes, but by Colm shaking his shoulder and then climbing over him and cheerfully telling him that the day's not getting any shorter or the work any easier, so hop to.
"Thanks," he says, and slides out of bed to get dressed. "So, what do you think about the hayloft idea? We could make it out to the frontier and back that way, see the sights, meet the people - not as many people speak Kerch inland, but don't worry, I'll translate for you - and just imagine the stories you'll have for Miss Marya when we come back -"
"A hotel," says Wylan firmly. "Or a room, I suppose. That could be fun. Will we be having breakfast before we leave?" He's getting better at packing his own things, since he's had to do it himself so often this past year. It's still slow going, though, and gives Jesper plenty of time to think about how much he really doesn't want to leave.
Breakfast almost breaks him. He eats mechanically, barely aware of what he's putting in his mouth, busy instead looking at the kitchen like he's never seen it before. The counters his mother carved and polished, the woodstove his parents bought when he was seven and crowed about for weeks, the knives all hung up along the wall - he used to sharpen them with his fingers, a trick his mother taught him, one he used at dinner once to show off to Marya. There are two handprints sunk into the grain of the table, one small and one large, too smooth and perfect to have been carved.
Jesper lays his hand over the larger one and sees with a pang that his fingers are longer, now, and his palm wider than his mother's. It occurs to him to wonder if he's taller than she was. In his memories, she's as tall as the sky.
His mother is here, from her bones beneath the tree outside to all these ghosts of her in the house itself, and she is nowhere else except in Jesper himself. When he leaves, he'll be leaving her, and unlike last time, he isn't sure he'll ever come back.
"We don't have to go," Wylan says, startling him from his reverie. "If you don't want to, I mean. I don't know what happened, but if you just need some time to yourself, I can talk to your father for you."
What an image that was, Wylan shuttling back and forth between him and Colm on opposite sides of this little house, carrying messages. He would, too, Jesper knows.
"No," Jesper says, although saying it feels like pulling some vital organ from his own abdomen. "We do."
And he wants but can't figure out how to say that this isn't him ducking his head and plugging his nose and hoping if he can't smell the shit he's in then it'll go away. Already he can feel himself trying to believe that he imagined it, that everything which passed between him and Colm last night needs to stay there in the dark. If he doesn't get out of this house now, he never will. If he sees his da again, if their eyes meet, he'll let himself choke on it until it kills him.
He doesn't say any of that. He can tell, from the way Wylan frowns across the table at him, that he doesn't understand. Thankfully, though, he doesn't argue or try to force Jesper to say anything. He just shrugs and says alright again and keeps eating.
Wylan will ride to town with him, even though he doesn't sit a horse well or like riding much. Once they're in town, he'll bicker with Jesper about the best place to stay, not that they have a wealth of choices, here in this no-man's land between the bustling Zemeni coast and the placid interior. He'll pay for it, because he likes paying for things for Jesper, even though he also pays Jesper enough to do it himself.
And he will, at some point, demand an accounting of exactly why Jesper plucked them from the rustic comfort of his father's home, which is only fair. Jesper hopes he'll have figured out how to put it to words by then.