Fantasy/romance short. A train conductor begins a relationship with a regular passenger.
7k, rated M, M/M. Some sweet autistic 4 autistic love and affection with a build to the relationship and some fantastical elements on the side. Adapted from a TweetFic.
CWs for past domestic abuse, physical abuse, scars, and implied ableism.
Roy sees the same man on the train on his commute pretty much every weekday he’s working. He always sits at a table — he likes to book a seat in advance no matter what, and Roy knows he’s not scared of insisting a seat is his when he has booked it — and does the most complicated papercrafts Roy’s ever fucking seen.
He does incredibly detailed, delicate work with paper and a scalpel, makes whole sculptures fold perfectly out from a page like it’s nothing at all.
He always works very neatly, and he has a little handheld dust buster in his satchel that he uses to hoover up the lingering flakes of paper that fall free from his work. He’s fastidious about it, never leaves a mess, never even leaves a single piece.
Roy doesn’t know his name.
Whenever he books his seat, he somehow sets it up so his name isn’t on the ticket — it just says the name of the company he works at. Roy is always too nervous to ask about it anyway, the papercrafts — the man never looks at him as he comes by anyway, let alone talks to him, just slides his ticket over so that Roy can punch it and then takes it back.
He dresses business casual and has a very neatly trimmed beard. Sometimes, Roy thinks about his beard, and wonders if he uses the same dust buster to clean up the bits of hair in his sink when he trims it down.
One morning Roy comes down the train to find that the man is not sitting forward and doing his papercrafts as usual — he’s asleep, and the table in front of him is empty.
Roy leaves him be.
The next morning, the man says as Roy comes by in a tone of complaint, “You didn’t punch my ticket yesterday.” He has an unexpectedly low voice, hoarse and crackling at its edges, as if it’s been used a lot for shouting.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” Roy says. “Do you want me to punch today’s ticket twice?”
“How ridiculous,” says the man. He is carving Big Ben from yellow paper. “Yes, please.”
Roy does. He should move on immediately, feels prickling warmth creep under his skin and feels just slightly unsteady on his feet, but he forces his mouth to move despite the instinct to move on. “What’s your name?” he asks.
“William. My mother calls me Bill, which I’ve never liked.” He has somehow pinned paper hands to the clockfaces which turn when he pushes them. “What’s yours?”
“Roy.”
“Hello, Roy.”
“Hello, William.”
Roy can’t think of anything else to say, and so he moves on.
William lingers, as ever, on his mind.
* * *
Moving forward, William greets him by name every morning, but Roy always finds himself tongue-tied, has no idea what else to say. He doesn’t want to bother him by asking about the papercrafts, has never been good at small talk, and William doesn’t seem particularly motivated to make small talk either, never looks up or starts a conversation himself.
After weeks of working up the courage between “Good morning”s and answering, “Hi”s, Roy manages to say, “You’re very good at that.”
“Yes,” William agrees. He adds a few seconds after, as though it didn’t occur to him initially, “Thank you.” He has quite severe features, or at least, he wears them severely: he’s a short man, plump, and apart from his neat-trimmed beard, his eyebrows are thick, his nose very carefully carved with sharp angles on it. He is almost always frowning in concentration.
Now, he smiles.
It’s like seeing the sun rise on his face, his hazel eyes catching the light as he looks up to meet Roy’s gaze, his mouth curving into a handsome, close-lipped crescent.
“My father wanted me to be a surgeon,” says William. “I’m very good with a scalpel, as you see.”
“You’re a doctor?”
“Good Lord, no,” says William, clucking his tongue, and turns back to his work. “I hated my father very much and I hate the idea of cutting people open even more. I picked this up out of spite.”
“Oh,” says Roy. “I’m sorry.”
“Why? I’m sure you don’t know him.”
“I — No,” says Roy. His tongue feels frozen and clumsy in his mouth, won’t work, and then William begins to hoover up his little bits of paper, the engine buzzing in his hand, and Roy quickly walks away.
* * *
On a rainy morning in late May, water streaking the windows on either side of the train carriage, Roy finds William sitting alone at a table with no papercrafts open in front of him, his arms loosely folded over his chest, his ticket already waiting on the table.
“No papercrafts today,” says Roy haltingly.
William shakes his head.
He’s in his thirties, Roy thinks, or thereabouts — there are one or two grey hairs in amongst the dark brown of his neatly-cut hair, and some of the hair in his beard lightens almost to ginger.
Roy hesitates, feeling rooted to the spot even as the tracks rumble by beneath them.
“You seem sad,” he says finally, and William looks up from where he’s been staring out of the window, studying the thick drops and streaks of rain as they cling to the window beside him.
“Yes,” he decides.
The grey of the rain and the sky outside is at odds with the humid heat of the compartment. Roy adjusts his collar, tugging his shirt away from his neck, and he puts William’s ticket back down.
“We’re all sad sometimes,” says William distantly, looking out over the passing fields. “Even you, I expect.”
“I suppose,” says Roy. “You don’t like rain?”
“I like it well enough. I like my coat when it’s raining, though.”
“It must get your papers wet, when you’re doing crafts on a day like this.”
“Oh, I don’t worry about that,” says William dismissively, and draws one hand from under his armpit to gesture with it. “I recycle most of it.” His hand is wrapped in a bandage, around his knuckles and wrist again and again. Roy forgets to even ask about the papercrafts in the face of it.
“You hurt yourself?” Roy hears himself ask before he can think about it.
“Yes,” William says, and laughs ruefully. “On somebody else.”
Roy doesn’t know what that means, but William is looking at him, and it makes him feel hot all over. “See you,” he says gruffly before he can start sweating, and moves to check the next ticket.
“See you,” calls William behind him. Roy can feel the sweat streaking down the back of his neck.
* * *
He next sees William on a Saturday. This surprises him, because he takes a moment to recognise him wearing a camel coat and sitting outside of a coffee shop instead of sitting in a train seat.
Roy realises, watching William tear a croissant to pieces so that he can eat it bit by bit, that he has never seen him eat before, or even drink. It feels like he’s witnessing something too intimate, something he has no right to lay eyes on.
William has noticed him looking.
“Hello, Roy,” says William.
“Yes,” says Roy, and feels himself inwardly cringe.
“… Yes,” repeats William, smiling faintly, and chews a piece of his croissant. “Are you running errands?”
“Just… walking. I walk,” says Roy.
“Me too,” says William.
Roy is sweating again.
“Where do you walk to?” William asks, and even as he hears him starts the question Roy continues blurting out his own, not able to stop himself, “Are you alone?”
William blinks at him slowly, his stern features indulgent, somehow.
“Yes,” he decides. “Unless you join me.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I’m not sharing. But you’re invited to sit.”
Roy takes halting steps closer, doesn’t take a seat but rests his hands on the back of the chair across from William. The wire frame is cool under his sweaty hands.
“I just walk,” says Roy. “I get restless. I get… I walk a lot, at work. I don’t feel right if I don’t. I look at flowers sometimes.”
“Flowers?” William repeats.
“In the beds. They all have names, you know. Every one of them — in Latin, or English.”
“Do you pick flowers, Roy?”
“No,” he says. He squeezes the back of the chair, feels his palm slide against the metal. “I just like to look at them. If you pick them, they shrivel, they die.”
“They’re dead as soon as you pick them, really,” William tells him. “They just don’t know it right away.”
Roy parts his lips, then closes them.
“Do you have a favourite?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t have a favourite anything.”
William smiles at him, tilting his head slightly to the side, and puts a torn piece of croissant in his mouth, chews it, swallows. It’s a nice smile. Pensive, distant, somehow. He says softly, “I don’t have favourites either.”
His hand is still bandaged, and Roy looks down at it, at the white gauze layered over and over around his flesh, tightly bound.
“How did you hurt it?” Roy asks.
“I punched a man with a very hard jaw.”
“Why?”
“He was threatening my employer.”
Roy frowns. “Why?”
“My employer upsets people. She does it on purpose, but I take offence when people escalate matters.”
“What does your employer do?”
“She heads a charity.”
“You work there?”
“As her assistant.”
“Oh. So… It’s a good cause?”
“We do pro bono legal work. For tenants.”
“The man you punched was a landlord?”
“A bailiff. Or a bailiff manager, anyway — I don’t think he had ever been punched before. It seemed to take him by surprise.”
“Have you punched people before?”
“Yes, many times, but never someone so close to my height. I misjudged my angle.”
Roy asks, “You normally punch people shorter than you?”
William gives him a very sceptical look, keeps his gaze on Roy’s face as he asks, “Have you met a great many men who are shorter than me, Roy?”
“No,” Roy admits. “So — you punch like me?”
William raises his eyebrows? “Like you?” There’s something so tender in his voice Roy feels like he might melt. “No. Never.”
This makes Roy embarrassed for reasons he can’t explain, and he fidgets, glancing down the street. The sun shines in the puddles.
“Have you ever been punched?” asks William.
“No.”
“I’m not offering, you needn’t look so nervous. You’re afraid I’ll punch you?”
“You said you don’t punch men like me.”
“That’s right.”
“You’ve been punched before, though?”
“Very many times.”
“I’m sorry,” says Roy.
“Why?” asks William. “Perhaps I deserved them.”
“Maybe you didn’t,” replies Roy.
“Maybe I didn’t,” agrees William quietly, and chews the last piece of his croissant. Roy watches as he finishes the last of his tea, wipes his hands with a wet wipe produced from a pocket. He folds his paper plate into quarters to put in the coffee cup, the wet wipe too. His table looks entirely clean as he stands to put the stack into the recycling bin.
“Will it bother you if I walk with you?” asks William.
“I don’t know yet,” says Roy. “I don’t think so.”
They walk in silence for some time.
William gestures to a purple plant that hangs down over the edge of a raised bed wall. “What’s this?” he asks.
“Baptisia,” says Roy. “False indigo. It smells nice — bees like it. Pollinators.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yes.”
“What about this one?”
They continue in this vein.
“I’m not keeping you from anything, am I?” asks William thirty minutes later, gently fingering the petal of a Black-Eyed Susan.
“No,” says Roy. “I don’t have anything.”
“You live alone?”
“With room mates. I don’t really talk to them. You?”
“I live alone.”
“Do you like that? Living alone?”
“I don’t know,” says William musingly. “I’ve lived alone for quite a long time. It hasn’t occurred to me to like it one way or the other. Do you like living with room mates?”
“No,” says Roy. “They make a lot of noise.”
“Annoying,” William remarks. “A lot of people are terribly loud. Not you.”
“I am,” says Roy. “I’m clumsy, I make a lot of noise when I move. It annoys people.”
“Your steps aren’t all that heavy,” says William softly. “It’s not as though you stamp your feet. I had to learn to walk the way I do.”
“You walk like a cat,” says Roy. “So quietly. I bet you never make footsteps anywhere.”
“Yes. You don’t walk that loudly, really, though, even in comparison. I wouldn’t lie to you — I have no reason to.”
Roy is embarrassed by this too, but he nods his head. “You’re kind,” he says.
“No,” says William. “Just honest.”
They walk until they reach the road Roy’s house is on. Roy lingers on the pavement, William standing beside him.
“You don’t have to com in,” says Roy.
“I don’t feel any obligation to,” replies William.
“But you — can. If you want.”
“Do you want me to?”
Roy looks nervously up the path, wondering if Caroline is home. She never says anything nasty, not really, but she always makes pointed comments about how people shouldn’t have guests in the common space, says it makes it inhospitable, says it’s inconsiderate.
Roy’s room is a mess.
And it wouldn’t give the right impression, he doesn’t think, bringing William into his bedroom. He wants to give a good impression. He wants…
“You’re good-looking,” says Roy.
“No, I’m not,” is William’s reply.
“I don’t know what to say now.”
William reaches out and plucks a piece of lint from the breast of Roy’s coat, and then slides his fingers over the fabric, smoothing it out. His hands are quite big for what a little man he is, and they’re strong, muscled. They’re scarred in places, even under the bandage.
He has to reach up for Roy’s chest. Everyone does — not that many people do — but William especially. It doesn’t seem to intimidate him at all. He isn’t sure that William is intimidated by anything.
His palm lingers on Roy’s breast.
“I haven’t dated in a few years,” says Roy. “I was never good at it. At dating. At anything.”
“That’s alright,” says William, tugging on his lapel and neatening it. He rearranges Roy like Roy is one of his papercrafts, perfects him. “I don’t expect I’ll have cause to grade you.”
Roy’s mouth is dry, and he looks down at William, just concentrates on the feeling of it, of William’s hands touching against his clothes, and thinks what it might be like to have his hands on Roy’s body instead.
“Are you hungry now?” asks William.
“Hungry?”
“It’s nearly two. We met at eleven. Are you hungry now?”
Now that he is asked, it occurs to Roy that he is hungry — he hadn’t really thought about it until now. He would have, if he was alone. He thinks.
“I’m inviting you for lunch,” says William.
“Oh,” says Roy. He’s distracted by William’s hands stroking down his chest, smoothing out his coat. “Yes.”
“Yes, you understand I’m asking you, or yes, you’d like to?”
“Both.”
“Good. Let’s go, then.”
They walk together, and Roy looks down at William’s hands, tucked into his pockets. He wonders if William is the sort of man who holds hands.
He doesn’t ask.
They get lunch.
William has lived in Cardiff his whole life, and he says he likes the commute to Bridgend. He lives in the old family home, alone, and his mother lives in Spain and has done for many years. He has two younger brothers, and no pets. He is allergic to strawberries.
Roy takes all this in like a leaf takes in sunlight, feeling himself revel in the way that William tells him things very frankly, very plainly, and asks him similarly frank, plain questions.
When prompted, Roy tells him that his parents live in Swansea, and he doesn’t speak to them much. He has no siblings and no pets, but one of his neighbour’s cats climbs in through the window and sleeps on his knee sometimes. He has no allergies, but he’s slightly lactose intolerance. He’s scared of clowns.
“What frightens you most about them?” William asks.
“I don’t know,” says Roy.
“Would you be frightened of someone in the makeup, but not the hair and outfit?”
“I don’t know. Do you like them?”
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t like mimes, either — I don’t like hyperbole. That’s all clowns are, really. Exaggeration from every angle.”
“Maybe that’s what frightening about them.”
“Maybe.”
“Your father was a doctor?”
“Mm, yes. A surgeon.”
“He wanted you to be a surgeon too.”
“Yes. And my brothers.”
“Are they?”
“No. Thomas is a nurse, and Curt fixes cars. Or… Or sells them. Both, maybe. I don’t much understand what he talks about, but I gather he likes it.”
Roy nods slowly.
Like he had with the croissant, William has painstakingly pieces apart the whole of his meal, cutting the chicken he’d ordered into small bite-sized pieces.
“Does it bother you?” he asks when he sees Roy looking.
“I like it,” says Roy. “I like that you do it, and you’re not embarrassed. I get embarrassed a lot. I don’t like when people look at me.”
“No one looks at me,” says William confidently.
“I do,” says Roy.
William, to his surprise, falters, and his smile is surprised. “Ah,” he says softly. “Yes, you do.”
Roy isn’t sweating too much this time.
“You don’t have to listen to him anymore,” says Roy. “Your father.”
“Certainly, I don’t. He’s been dead for quite some time.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You say that an awful lot.”
“It’s what you’re meant to say.”
William scoffs. “Is it?” he asks, but Roy doesn’t think he’s really asking.
“Is your mother better than he was?”
“Than my father?”
“Yes.”
“It’s… complicated. I love my mother. I love her best when we’re far apart.”
Roy nods.
“And yours?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Maybe. It might be simple. I never really understood my parents.”
“That’s not uncommon,” says William. “Sometimes you’re better off not understanding them than the alternative.”
Roy nods. A few minutes, he says, “The papercrafts you do.”
“I do them on the train, really. I like my hands occupied.”
“You don’t do them at home?”
“Not often.”
“They’re very good.”
“Thank you.”
“I can’t do anything like that,” says Roy. “I can’t do anything.”
“Have you tried?”
“What?”
“To do anything?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“The papercrafts, for example. Have you tried doing those?”
“No. I’d cut myself.”
“You needn’t have a scalpel,” William says. He pushes their plates to the side, doesn’t seem to notice how it makes people look at them, and takes two pieces of green paper out of his bag. “Copy me,” he says. “Fold in half first, like this.”
Roy likes the excuse to look at his hands, even though he’s clumsy in following his movements.
“It’s a frog,” Roy murmurs once it’s turned over, and William nods, pressing his thumb down on the but of his frog and making it hop forward. Roy laughs breathlessly despite himself, and flicks his own so that it gives a little jump.
“Origami,” says William. “I learned to do it in school.”
“They taught you at school?” Roy asks, and William looks down at the frog, taps his thumb against the paper back of one of them like it’s a real animal, like he’s petting it.
“They taught me, it wasn’t a class. I had anger issues — it was meant to calm me down.”
“Did it?”
“No.”
Roy laughs again, and he covers his mouth with the inside of his wrist. William gives him a rueful smile.
“I got into a lot of fights at school,” William says.
“With other kids?”
“Oh, teachers too. A nurse once.”
“Did you win?”
“Frequently. Origami was their last resort.”
“Didn’t you get in trouble?”
“Oh, yes. My grades were very good, but in other aspects I received very poor reviews. The word “feral” appeared in school reports of mine more than once.”
“What changed?”
“You think something changed?”
“You’re a PA at a charity.”
“I punched a man at work.”
“A bailiff,” demurs Roy, and William smiles slightly as he leans back in his seat. His jumper looks soft, made of dark orange wool, patterned with zigzagging stripes. Roy considers what it might be like to touch him back.
“I cleaned myself up in time for my GCSEs. Calmed down. Did quite well at my A-Levels — even went to university.”
“You didn’t expect to?”
William shakes his head. “No.”
“I didn’t do very well at school,” says Roy. “I found it hard. I couldn’t have gone to university if I’d wanted to.”
“Did you want to?”
“I wouldn’t have fit in there. I don’t fit in anywhere.”
“Where do you want to fit in?” asks William. It’s asked directly, genuinely, but that doesn’t mean Roy knows how to answer.
Roy stares at him. “I don’t know,” he admits. “Somewhere.”
William nods. “I can’t fault that.”
Before they go, William says, “Give me your phone,” and Roy obeys before he even has time to consider it, to even think why William might be asking.
He watches William program his number into Roy’s contacts.
William Butcher.
“Don’t you have better people to talk to?”
“No,” says William.
Roy waits for an explanation.
William doesn’t give one.
His face feels hot and he’s damp with sweat.
“See you on Monday,” says William, and Roy goes home.
* * *
Nothing much changes as Roy clips William’s ticket each week day. He works from 11 until 7 most days — his boss hates mornings.
William texts him. Sends him photos of the papercrafts when he finishes them. Sends him pictures of the paper shop, where he has an account.
“Perhaps we could go out to dinner this week,” he says on Tuesday morning. “Thursday?”
“Yes,” Roy agrees.
They go out on Friday, too.
It’s easy to talk to William. In conversation, Roy is normally quiet, lets other people talk and listens to what they say. He never knows what to say when people ask him questions — people always ask strange, indirect questions, ones with no real answers.
Small talk.
Roy is a big man, and he’s bad at small talk.
William, a little man, doesn’t seem to believe in it.
William looks at him directly and says things like, “Can you ride a bike? Do you listen to the radio? What are your nightmares about?”
(Slowly; not really; he doesn’t often have them, but when he does, clowns.)
“Are you a virgin?” William asks, and Roy chokes on his trifle.
“Do I look like a virgin?”
“I don’t know. What does a virgin look like?”
“Like me.”
“You are?”
“No,” Roy says. His ears feel like they’ve turned red, which they probably have. “No, I’ve… had sex. Not for a while. But I’ve… yes.”
William nods his head.
“You’ve had sex.”
“A little,” William agrees, giving a neat nod of his head. “Do you like it?”
“I think so. Don’t you?”
“It’s nice. I wouldn’t rearrange plans for it though.”
Roy’s never had a conversation about sex that went like this.
“Sleep at mine,” says William. “Tonight.”
“You want to have sex?”
“Tomorrow, maybe. I’d like to lie in bed and watch a movie with you tonight.”
“Oh,” says Roy. “That sounds nice.”
It does. He wonders if he’s dreaming as they walk out of the restaurant.
* * *
It’s not a big house, but it’s a big house to have just one man in it, Roy thinks. There’s a dining table in the kitchen that has four chairs around it, and the living room has two long sofas and an armchair. There’s no television in here — William has one TV, and he keeps it in the bedroom.
The two other bedrooms upstairs are closed.
“Your brothers shared a room?” he asks.
“No. They used to, when they were younger, nine and ten. When my father died, we concerted the attic so that they could each have their own.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
There are photos of the boys and William’s mother on the walls, but none of his father. In the photos, William is sometimes smiling, but mostly not.
It feels like a family house.
William looks even smaller here.
His bedroom is very neat, a large double bed with black sheets, and every one of the bookshelves is stuffed with books. Some are about papercrafts and origami, but there’s a lot of variety — books about trains, legal texts, books about socialist theory.
A lot of it seems beyond Roy, but he’s uncertain whether he should be looking directly at William, who has already stripped off his jumper and is beginning to take off his trousers. He wears boxer shorts, until he doesn’t.
Roy is trying not to look at him, at the round curve of his hips and thighs, at his backside. Roy is about to feel insecure about the hair on his back until William pulls off his shirt and he sees the scars on his.
Roy forgets not to look.
There are scars layered over William’s back, mostly his shoulders, the tops of his ribs, criss-crossing flat lines, and now he knows to look for them he sees fainter ones on the backs of his thighs too.
There are other scars on his arms, his torso, smaller ones.
“Are they from fighting?” asks Roy, mouth dry, feeling a bit sick.
“I wouldn’t call it that,” says William, and stands up on his tiptoes to slide Roy’s coat from his shoulders. He’s warm.
Roy lets himself be undressed, not quite able to believe it’s happening, as William slides his jacket off his shoulders, unbuttons his shirt and puts that aside too. When he kneels on the floor to unbuckle Roy’s shoes — he’s never been good at laces, and he hates slide-on boots — Roy holds his breath.
He feels extraordinarily big, looking down at William like this, too big, too liable to hurt him by accident.
“Step out, please,” William instructs, and Roy does. His hands, clammy with sweat, go to his jeans, but they fumble on the belt, and William pushes his hands aside to unbuckle it for him.
Roy’s heart is thumping hard in his chest.
“You don’t have to be naked if you don’t want,” says William. “You seem nervous.”
“I’m always nervous,” Roy points out, but he’s grateful anyway, and when they climb underneath William’s quilt he finds the fabric is very heavy.
“Oh,” he says.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?” asks William quietly. “I made it in Textiles.”
“You sewed at school?”
“Upset my father no end, seeing how impeccable my stitches were through stiff fabric and knowing I was doing no sciences to spite him.”
“You really didn’t like him?”
“I hated him,” William agrees, and moulds himself against Roy’s side, wraps one arm around half of his belly and splays hand on his torso, rests his cheek against Roy’s shoulder. “He deserved what he got in the end, and more. Do you want to pick the film?”
“You pick.”
He falls asleep almost immediately. He doesn’t mean to, but William’s bed is comfortable and the weight on his chest — between the blanket and William himself — is very calming. It’s nice, it’s warm.
When he wakes up in the middle of the night, William has curled even closer.
One of his legs is hooked around Roy’s, his knee pressed up against his thigh, and his hand is loosely fisted in the fabric of Roy’s t-shirt. In the dim light of William’s digital alarm clock, his face looks relaxed in sleep.
Roy feels himself smile.
* * *
Roy’s never really dated seriously before. He’s gone on dates that have always fizzled out one way or the other, with people that invariably seemed disappointed in him — in how he looked, in his personality, in his job.
William cooks him an omelette in the shape of a train.
“You have a cookie cutter for this?” Roy asks.
“Didn’t need one,” says William. “I’m good with a knife.”
Bacon forms a smoke stream, and he’s put cut capers on the wheels. When Roy looks to William’s own plate, he sees his omelette forms a frog.
“You like frogs?” asks Roy.
“I like omelettes,” William answers. “It amuses me to cut them into shapes. My brothers used to like it, until they got a bit older. I’m a man who appreciates a healthy amount of whimsy.” He’s looking at a point past Roy’s shoulder, smiling faintly, and Roy looks, but there’s nothing there.
“Don’t mind me,” says William. “You like eggs?”
“Yeah,” says Roy, and they eat together.
Roy doesn’t eat the capers, and it makes William laugh: he reaches across to spear them all with his fork, and puts them on his own plate.
“Sorry,” says Roy.
“Why?” asks William.
“It’s ungrateful.”
“It’s honest. I don’t want to watch you eat food you don’t like.”
Roy nods. After a minute or two, he asks, “Do you have nightmares?”
“Every night.”
Roy opens his mouth. Closes it.
“You were going to say you were sorry,” says William.
“Yes,” says Roy. “People tell me I do that a lot.”
William smiles.
* * *
They go out bowling, which Roy is actually not so bad at, although he doesn’t think he’s gone since he went on a school trip as a child. William is so bad at it he needs the shields up to hit the pine at all.
“You have to be bad at something,” says Roy.
“Spoken like a man smug in the face of his victory.”
“I’m not smug,” says Roy. “But I am a winner.”
“Do you believe in aliens?” asks William later on, when they’re both in a bar.
Roy has a beer, but William doesn’t drink — he gets a non-alcoholic cocktail and asks for two umbrellas. He puts the second one in Roy’s drink.
“I don’t know,” says Roy. “Don’t know enough about it.”
“Statistically it’s unlikely that we are the only intelligent life in the universe,” says William. “But I posit it’s equally unlikely other intelligent life is nearby, or that it should be able to communicate with us.”
“What about UFOs?” asks Roy.
“There’s a great deal of unexplained phenomena in the world. Lights in the sky have been reported long before aliens in spaceships were a thing people worried about.”
“Really?”
“Of course. Hauntings, fairies, monsters beneath the bed. Could be aliens too.”
“Or ghosts.”
William’s gaze flicks up from his cocktail umbrella, which he’d been idly twiddling with his fingers, to Roy’s face. “You believe in ghosts?” he asks.
“Don’t know.”
“You ever see one?”
“I don’t think so. I was scared of stuff as a kid but I never saw a ghost that I know of. Have you?”
William smiles. “All the time,” he says. “Ghosts are the marks of history.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It’s nothing important,” says William. “If you’ve never seen a ghost, I doubt they’re likely to bother you now.”
“I don’t think it’s right,” says Roy. “People who are dead should stay dead.”
William’s smile turns wan. “I don’t disagree. But they say ghosts are formed by traumatic events. Some hauntings are earned.”
“Earned?”
“Mm.”
William’s hand slides across the table and it curves around the top of Roy’s hand, squeezes.
“Can’t you get rid of them?” asks Roy. “Ghosts? Do an exorcism or something?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What about unfinished business? That’s a thing in films.”
“Funny thing about that in films,” says William. “It never accounts for those whose unfinished business is causing suffering.”
Roy doesn’t know what to say to that, but William seems sad, so he puts his hand on top of his this time, and squeezes back.
He sleeps over again, and on Sunday they don’t do anything at all, but they do it together.
Weekends become a routine, after that.
* * *
Roy doesn’t disbelieve that William has nightmares, but they never seem obvious to him. William sleeps, when he sleeps, like the dead, doesn’t move much, doesn’t fidget, doesn’t snore or mumble. Roy feels bad, because he moves around in the night, but William doesn’t care.
He doesn’t know if he believes in ghosts still, but William seems to. Watching him, it seems that he moves strangely in the house sometimes, steps out of the way of someone who isn’t there, or seems to watch people who aren’t there either.
The neighbours’ cat does this sometimes too, and the thought makes Roy smile, but he’s worried it will embarrass William if he says it.
He wonders if the ghosts are his brothers at first, but Curt calls William once a week, and so does his mother.
Thomas and William don’t speak.
Roy isn’t sure if it’s an official estrangement or just habit, and so he asks.
“My relationship with my family is complicated,” says William. “I said that before. Curt has quite a mechanical mind, like mine. He can be distanced. Thomas can’t.”
“Does he see ghosts too?” asks Roy.
“I don’t know,” says William. “It occurred to me several times to ask, but I always made the decision not to.”
Roy tries not to ask any hard questions for a while after that.
They go to the museums, to the cinema. They go to all the normal places people go on dates, places Roy wouldn’t normally feel at home.
Roy is uncomfortable in crowds, so William says they don’t need to go to very crowded places.
It feels unequal until William admits after Roy shows him a brochure for a haunted house that he gets very uncomfortable with events on Halloween, and Roy is able to surprise him with a picnic basket and an assurance they can stay home the whole weekend.
William smiles so warmly that it’s like he’s shining, somehow, and he clambers into Roy’s lap, rests his forehead against his sternum and his hands up on Roy’s shoulders.
“You’re very good to me, you know,” says William.
“You deserve it.”
“I don’t.”
“Agree to disagree.”
Roy hesitates before he squeezes William tightly, presses a kiss to his forehead. It’s getting easier to believe he won’t break William just by holding him.
“I brought DVDs,” says Roy.
“Luddite,” replies William.
The nightmares start a little while after that.
Roy never usually remembers his dreams, but he remembers this one: it comes to him in flashes, stumbling into the house, tired after a long day’s work, getting to the top of the stairs.
William, on the top step, looks tall, because he’s so many steps above him. William, acting cold all of a sudden. Cruel.
He says things that hurt Roy, although he doesn’t remember them, later on. He only remembers that they hurt, and then he pushes, hard, and Roy is going backward and it feels like the fall will never stop, the whole world tipping with him —
And then it does.
He wakes up feeling sick and confused, and William isn’t in the bed with him, and he feels his heart skip in his chest until William comes upstairs with a mug of cocoa in his hands.
He looks surprised to see Roy awake.
There are marshmallows in the cocoa. They share it.
“Do you want to talk about it?” asks William.
“I don’t think so,” says Roy.
William doesn’t seem surprised by that. He gives a slow nod of his hand, lips pressed loosely together.
“You look sad,” says Roy.
“Do I? I’m not. I’m glad you’re here with me.” His lips smile. His eyes don’t.
“I had a nightmare,” says Roy. “I don’t normally get them.”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want,” says William.
“About you. You pushed me down the stairs.”
William sighs. “I’m sorry, Roy,” he murmurs. “I thought you wouldn’t get them.”
Roy shuffles forward on the bed, so that William’s knees are bracketed by Roy’s own, and Roy lingers in place for a few minutes, looking at William’s face.
“Do you think all crimes can be forgiven?” asks William.
“I don’t know,” says Roy.
“I like that about you.”
“What?”
“If you don’t know the answer to something, if you don’t have an opinion, you say you don’t know. It’s honest. Genuine.”
Roy passes the mug of cocoa back, watching the way William drinks from it. He sips things delicately — he does everything delicately.
“This has happened to other boyfriends?” asks Roy.
“I’ve never really had boyfriends,” murmurs William. “It’s never been allowed to get that far.”
“Because of the dreams?”
“Among other things.”
“He beat you. Your father.”
“Yes.”
“Thomas and Curt too?”
“No. He wanted to. But no.”
“Your mother?”
“My mother’s strategy typically involved not being home when my father was due to arrive. She would synchronise her evenings out with the end of his late evening shifts.”
Roy doesn’t quite understand this, but he feels himself frown, feels his brows knit together.
“She would leave you?”
“Yes. She didn’t want the difficulties of fending my father off. Better to let me do it.”
“So you killed him?”
William blinks, and Roy feels an anxious twist in his gut.
“Sorry,” he says. “I said it badly. I didn’t mean — ”
“It’s alright. I killed him, yes. I waited for a night he had been drinking more heavily, and when he came home and came up the stairs I pushed him back down them. He broke his neck.”
Roy is quiet, slowly nodding his head. “That’s good,” he said thoughtfully. “So it looked like an accident.”
“Are you always this blasé when a man confesses to murder, Roy?”
“This is my first time.”
William laughs. “You do make me feel special.”
“You are,” says Roy.
“I walked down the stairs in the dark, waited until his breathing went from shallow to still. I had heard his neck crack, but I wanted to make sure. When I walked back up the stairs, Thomas and Curt were waiting — they’d heard him shout as he fell. They looked at me…” He exhales, and shakes his head. “They were frightened, naturally.”
“Didn’t they know what he was like? Why you did it?”
“I spared them the worst of it,” William says. “Ensured he didn’t touch them, but they were getting older. He was getting… sterner. He thought of it as discipline, expected a keen control.
“He’d backhanded Curt six months before and I broke his nose in retort, but he didn’t learn. I think it was a miscalculation on my part — I wanted to show him I would harm him if he hurt them, but I think he just realised I couldn’t be harmed the way I used to, which only made him want to hurt them more.
“I was less enticing a target once I showed I’d fight back. He started to drink more, spiral more. He became sloppier and angrier. I decided I wanted him dead before he really went for Curt or Thomas.”
Roy reaches up, cupping William’s hands in his own.
“They knew,” William says quietly. “Of course, they did know. They’d seen me belted before. Thomas’ first experience in nursing was when my mother would dress wounds on my back. But knowing isn’t the same as knowing. To me, my father was a danger, a threat.
“If anything, I seemed… They felt I provoked him, that I spurred him onto violence when he wasn’t at heart a violent man, particularly when I was so angry at that age, as I told you. To them, he wasn’t that — or, he wasn’t only that. But for the one occasion he hit Curtis, the worst he would do was say a few unkind words, be a bit too stern or demanding. He’d play games with them, he’d read their essays, help them with their homework.”
“He never did that for you?”
“Perhaps he did, when I was younger. I don’t remember. I don’t believe so. It seemed to me he hated me from the outset, but I really don’t know. My mother says I look like him — perhaps that’s why.”
“My parents weren’t good,” Roy says. “I don’t think. I don’t… know. But they were bad, sometimes. They didn’t like the way I did things, did anything. They thought I was too shy, and too big. They wanted me to be less stupid.”
“You’re not stupid,” William says sharply.
“No, I know, um,” Roy says hurriedly. “I mean… the way I — They wanted me to be better at school. Academically. And at… at other stuff. But they didn’t hit me ever.”
William sets the mug aside and slides between Roy’s thighs, lets Roy wrap him up tightly in his arms. He curls his hands in William’s hair, grips tightly at his curls, rubs their noses together. William doesn’t like to be kissed on the mouth and it’s a relief, because Roy’s never liked that either.
“Why the dreams?” asks Roy.
“I expect to show you I’m not worth loving.”
“I’d want you to push me down the stairs,” says Roy, sliding his hands up the bare skin of William’s back and feeling the rough parts of skin mixed with the shiny-smooth ones. “If you thought I’d hurt you. If I wanted to hurt you. He deserved it.”
Something rattles and falls downstairs, makes a clattering sound.
“What’s that?” Roy asks.
“A dead man’s temper,” says William mildly. “He can’t really do anything else — he’s as impotent and ineffective dead as he was alive.”
“Can’t we kill him?” as Roy.
“Again?”
“Get rid of him, I mean. Make him go away.”
“I don’t think so. I have tried — not very hard, I admit.”
“Why not?”
“Murder is a capital crime,” says William. “Life is tremendously sacred, Roy. And so long as his ghost lingers, I suppose I haven’t really killed him.”
“You haven’t stopped him either,” Roy points out. “From hurting you.”
“Killing him was never really a matter of protecting myself,” says William softly. “My priority was my brothers. They’ve always been my priority.”
“They don’t live here,” says Roy. “You do.”
William sighs. “Must you be so wise, Roy?”
“I don’t know. I just say what I think.”
“They’ll get worse, you know,” William murmurs. “I’ve never told anyone before so plainly, but I like you very much, Roy. They get worse.”
“We could research it,” suggests Roy. “And find a way to do it. It’s your house now.”
“And if we find a way?”
“We’d have to look for a while.”
“Why?” William is looking at him, baffled.
“Well,” Roy says. “Some of the ways must hurt worse than others. Don’t want to waste it.”
William laughs, does a sweet, surprised giggle that Roy has never heard from him before, and makes him feel giddy. “Oh,” he says.
Something downstairs bangs.
“I’d like to have sex now,” says William. “We can start looking on Saturday.”
“Okay,” says Roy contentedly, feeling himself smile, and lets William push him down onto his back. “William?”
“Yes, Roy?”
“I like you a lot.”
“Oh, the feeling is mutual, Roy,” murmurs William, and straddles his thighs.
FIN.
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