“Could you be happy, here, with me?” and “I can hardly stand myself.” for darkstache
3. “Could you be happy, here, with me?” and7. “I can hardly stand myself.”
The day dawns pink and soft, watery light struggling its way through wispy clouds. Dark blinks at the ceiling and does his best to stretch. His legs are pinned down by Wilford’s legs, so he can’t do much.
Wilford is still asleep. His face is relaxed, jaw slack. There is no mania, no quiet lostness in his eyes. Sometime in the night he’d managed to shift so that he was sleeping more on Dark than on the bed, but Dark can’t bring himself to mind. Rare are the nights when they both can sleep untroubled by nightmares. They are few enough to be treasured.
Dark tries to gently extract himself from Wilford’s sprawl, but he must jostle Wilford slightly too much, because Wilford sits bolt upright with a wild expression. His eyes search the room and he takes a few gasping breaths before he registers that everything is safe.
“Damn,” he mutters, and slumps back to the bed.
Dark sighs. He’d been mistaken to believe that they’d escaped the nightmares.
“Release me,” Dark says, prodding Wilford’s legs. Wilford does no such thing, instead grabbing a fistful of Dark’s hair and pulling him down to lay next to him. Dark rolls his eyes but goes without a fight. He allows Wilford to hold him close and matches their breathing. Dark doesn’t really need to breathe, but he does it for Wilford.
“Stay with me a little while,” Wilford says, more of an order than a plea, and something in the back of Dark’s head remembers a colonel, a military man, shouting good-natured commands at a man in a suit, who laughed and complied.
“Bad nightmare?” Dark muses, and Wilford laughs.
“Aren’t they all?” he says darkly, and Dark can’t not agree.
“Generally,” Dark says, and they go quiet.
It takes a long time for either of them to speak, but eventually Wilford sighs and says, “I can hardly stand myself.”
Dark does not respond. There is nothing to say.
“Sometimes I remember being someone else,” Wilford says. “Sometimes I remember a big house, and people I loved. But then I wake up and you’re here instead of them.”
There is something akin to sadness brewing in Dark’s throat. He pushes it back aggressively. He has no room for emotions.
“Sometimes I think I’m entirely mad,” Wilford says sadly, and that is the breaking point.
There is a thing that lives inside of Dark. It sleeps in the broken bones of his neck and howls when he has nightmares and flinches away from gunshots, from Wilford’s gun. It shouts with joy when Wilford almost calls Dark by that other name, the one he doesn’t use and couldn’t use. The thing screams at him, tries to take his arms and put them around Wilford, tries to take his mouth and use it to say soothing words of love and promises and reminders. It beats on the cage he’s built for it in the back of his mind and batters itself raw trying to make itself known.
For one millisecond, it gets free.
“Could you be happy here, with me?” Dark’s mouth says, and he crams the thing back where it belongs, back in the blackness where he stores emotions and sentiment.
Wilford stares at him with confusion.
“Of course I could,” he murmurs softly. “I’m always happy with you. Sometimes I can’t remember why, but I am.”
The thing manages to get control one last time, and Dark presses a gentle kiss to Wilford’s temple.
