Archive of Our Own

The dreams are frightening, at first. 

Cinematic in their intensity, captivatingly loud and blisteringly, violently real—but unfamiliar, too. Vague, not quite fully formed landscapes rife with strange smells and stranger figures and voices he can't place, accents he doesn't understand, sounds he's never heard before. There's shouting. Gunshots. Lapping waves and whistling wind, clanging armor and creaking wood, the murderous cry of an eagle and the terrified whinny of a horse.  

Everything appears to him as a series of seemingly out-of-order snapshots, blurry and indistinct, like a jumbled stack of fading, ink-splotched Polaroids someone had forgotten they were in the middle of developing before deciding to toss aside. Bury in a junk drawer. 

The dreaming itself is hereditary, apparently, some kind of benign genetic anomaly that affects the part of the brain that stores subliminal memories, dead or dormant or otherwise inaccessible. His father takes him to an after-hours Urgent Care; and then an adolescent psychologist; and then an orthopedic surgeon, just to be absolutely sure; and then, finally, to a hard-to-find, over-eager specialist who asks about Marcus's sleeping habits and shines a penlight in his eyes and frowns, slightly, when she reads over his medical records. 

"Hockey," Marcus's father explains curtly, adjusting the knot of his tie with one hand and tapping at his BlackBerry with the other. "He's good. Really good. Getting scouted for junior teams already." 

There's a beat of noticeably tense silence, and then a few more questions about whether or not Marcus gets headaches, has mood swings, struggles with names or dates or phone numbers with any degree of regularity. Eventually, the specialist gives him a big, spiral-bound notebook with a white-yellow crescent moon emblazoned on the front and instructs him to write or draw in it every single morning, as soon as he wakes up. 

"Whatever you can remember," she says kindly. "In whatever order you can remember it." 

That isn't very much, it turns out.

The shackles around Marcus's ankles are too small.

He trudges along the sunbaked, rust-red road, two or three paces behind everyone else, and stares at the impossibly clear, impossibly blue sky, sweat beading on his forehead, mixing with the grime of another day wasted--dirt and dust and blood and worse, probably, not that he's fucked to care. Australia's proven to be a more efficient death sentence than a noose around his neck, and the irony of that might sting, a little, if he had any skin left that wasn't rubbed raw, scabbed over, or burnt to a ruddy fucking crisp.

"What'd you do?"

A glittering, purple-green beetle buzzes lazily around Marcus's ear, twice the size of anything he'd ever seen in England, and it takes him several moments to realize he's being spoken to--and that it isn't, for fucking once, by that sniveling toothless shite of a foreman, either.

"What's that?" Marcus demands, swatting at the beetle. "What d'you mean, what did I do?"

The man sidles closer to Marcus, maneuvering carefully around the chains of his own shackles, and--he's tall, Marcus thinks, tall and lean and broad-shouldered, but there's a hazy, heat-warped halo of sunlight floating around his head, casting shadows on his face, and Marcus can't make out much more than that. His hair is maybe light brown, maybe blond-red, maybe whatever color's in between; his hands are big, fingers long and palms callused, the grainy, weather-worn line of a tattoo peeking out from the sweat-stiff sleeve of his shirt.

"We all did something," the man says, and, well, fuck it all, he's Irish. "We're convicts. We were convicted."

Marcus scoffs. "What'd you do, then?"

"Oh, just, you know," the Irishman says, dismissive. "Got into politics."

"Politics," Marcus echoes, kicking at a stray pebble. His ankle twinges, bone scraping iron. "Right, so--part of that labor rebellion?"

The Irishman chuckles, slowly, slyly earnest, like he's got a secret to keep but could, under the right circumstances, be persuaded to share it. The sound is jarring, deep and warm and lilting and rich, and Marcus wonders if he isn't finally having one of those starvation-induced hallucinations, if he isn't lying half-dead in a hastily dug ditch back at camp, priest called and boots stolen.

"Not a rebellion," the Irishman says, lowering his voice to a near-whisper. "It's a revolution."

Marcus stumbles, tripping over the thorny, drought-dry husk of an acacia plant. 

"Oliver Wood." 

Marcus squints up at the asshole who's interrupting his nap. The scarred metal of the bleachers inside the practice rink is ice-cold against the back of his neck. "What?" 

"Oliver Wood," the guy says again, almost too eagerly. He has wide hazel eyes and a comically uneven buzzcut, high cheekbones and a perfectly square Superman jaw, and the vivid carnelian-red of his Letterman's jacket is clashing horribly, obliviously, with the plaid turquoise flannel he has on underneath. "That's—that's me. My name. Oliver Wood. I'm the captain. Aren't you here for tryouts?" 

Marcus snorts—more bemused than bitter, which its own kind of novelty—and stretches his legs out, pointedly yawning into his fist. "No." 

Wood flushes an annoyingly distracting shade of pink as he glances at Marcus's biceps. "Are you sure—I mean, you look—" 

"Like I could kick your ass, yeah, no shit, I could." Marcus pauses, cracking his knuckles one by one. "Isn't it lunch? Who the fuck has tryouts during lunch?" 

"I—I thought, maybe...maybe you were just early," Wood says, visibly deflating. His forehead creases in a frown. "I'm early." 

Marcus shifts around on the bench, bucking his hips a little, searching fruitlessly for a position that doesn't somehow make his headache worse, and Wood immediately clears his throat, tugging at the collar of his jacket. 

"Hockey, right?" Marcus asks. He smooths the heel of his palm down the front of his jeans, dangerously close to the inseam, and watches—idly, with an utterly surreal sense of satisfaction, fascination—as Wood's gaze sharpens, tracking the movement. "That's what your tryouts are for?" 

"Yeah. It's—we have a competitive team already, we usually recruit from a draft, but..." Wood swallows. Licks his lips. "Um. Anyway, a couple of the guys from last year, they—they graduated. So." 

Marcus hums, nonchalant.  

"Do you play?" Wood asks, drumming his fingers against the bend of his elbow. "You didn't say." 

"No," Marcus drawls, and it isn't technically a lie. "I don't play. Do you?" 

"Do I—what? Of course I play, I'm the..." Wood trails off, flustered. "Oh. You're teasing me." 

"Teasing, sure." Marcus smirks, unable to help himself. "If that's what you want to call it." 

Wood licks his lips again. 

And again. 

And again.

Violins are sad.

Marcus knows that isn't how other people describe them, obviously, the poets and the opera singers and the smarmy British bastards who keep hurling their paltry second-son inheritances at his father's cotton mills. No, they sip their smuggled French brandy, drag the tines of their fish forks across glossy white porcelain, politely murmur words like "piercing" and "evocative" and "wistful"--words that don't really cut to the core of the matter. Don't really grasp the totality of what the problem with violins actually is.

They're sad.

Violins are fucking sad.

"Why didn't they just--why didn't they just hire a, a, what's it, a string quartet like everyone else," Marcus mumbles, head lolling back against the red velvet carriage seat. Fucking red. Fucking velvet. God, he misses Boston. "Wasn't a funeral."

"You're drunk," the man sitting directly across from Marcus says, sounding amused. He's slouched sideways, head tilted so that his face is mostly shrouded in darkness, and his legs are long, long, long, spread wide and tangled casually with Marcus's. "What are you even talking about?"

Marcus flaps his wrist. "Nothing. I don't--whose wedding was that, anyway? Do you know?"

"Seriously?"

"No, not seriously, you adorable, gullible idiot."

The man heaves a sigh, nudging Marcus's knee with his own. "Shut up."

"Why?"

"I like you better when you're quiet."

Marcus barks out a laugh. "You don't, though, I've got the claw marks to--"

"Christ, can we just--can we talk about something else?" the man blurts out, jaw clicking shut.

"Like what?"

"Like how you didn't answer earlier."

"What?" Marcus peers out the slightly foggy window, taking in rain-slick cobblestones and the eerie, yellow-green glow of the street lamps. "Didn't answer what?"

"Your--your aunt, or your cousin, or your grandmother, I don't--whoever it was, when they asked you...they asked you when you were leaving. Going back to America. You didn't answer."

Marcus can still taste champagne bubbles on the tip of his tongue, popping and fizzing in time with the bumping lurch of the carriage wheels. He always drinks too much at weddings, ostensibly to avoid having to dance, but tonight had been more exhausting than usual.

"Oh," Marcus says blankly. "Right. That."

Wood is effervescent after the season opener, bright-eyed and beaming and positively thrumming with adrenaline. 

"Why do you even take naps?" Marcus asks, semi-serious, clipping and unclipping his car keys from one of his belt loops as he stares at the old penalty clock hanging next to the locker room door. "Like, shouldn't you be tired right now?" 

"Nope." Wood grins, teeth flashing white but not totally straight, and shoves an unused roll of stick tape into his bag. "Hey, what size shoe do you wear?" 

"First date and you're already asking me about my shoe size, huh? Bold." 

Predictably, Wood starts to fiddle with the laces of his sweatshirt, face turning pink. "I didn't mean—I just thought—I thought I could teach you to skate, maybe," he says, glancing shyly between Marcus and the stick rack over by the whiteboard. "If you were interested." 

Marcus doesn't flinch, or grimace, or scowl, or outwardly react much at all, actually, which he figures is probably the textbook definition of a moral victory. "You want to teach me to skate," he says, pushing off from the wall with the toe of his boot, sauntering over to Wood. "Why?" 

Wood scrunches up a threadbare towel, flexing his fingers, an entirely too bashful smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. "Just, you know. It would be fun. Like...skating dates. We could go on those." 

Marcus comes to a gradual halt in front of Wood, objectively too close. "Already planning a second date, too? Confident." 

Wood bites down on the inside of his cheek, like he's holding in another smile. "Bold, confident...anything else you want to call me before answering the question?" 

"Good." 

Wood blinks. "What?" 

"Good," Marcus repeats, closing off the remaining distance between them. "You're good. Two goals, man." 

Wood looks genuinely taken aback. "You—wait, you watched?" 

"You invited me." 

"Well, yeah, but I didn't think you'd—" Wood breaks off. "You didn't have to. I know it's not the easiest sport to follow, if you've never...I mean, I was planning—I was going to teach you, first." 

Dimly, Marcus registers a surge of awful, thunderous, hysterical laughter, building in the center of his chest, flooding his lungs, squeezing and twisting and choking him, practically. 

He ducks his chin, giving Wood plenty of time to stop him. 

And it shouldn't be romantic, what happens next, because they're standing in a fucking locker room, surrounded by sweat-soaked gear and cheap fluorescent lighting, talking about hockey, for fuck's sake; but Marcus backs Wood up against the wall, chips of pale blue paint flaking off of dingy gray cinderblock, and there's a brief, altogether too staggering flicker of familiarity, an almost intuitive kind of awareness of precisely where to put his hands, where to slot his knee, precisely when to lean in and close his eyes and hold his breath and— 

Their lips brush.

The sky is a cool, muted lavender, split into jagged chunks by the rocks and the palm fronds and the spidery copse of half-broken reeds on the far side of the riverbank.

"What are we looking for, exactly?" Marcus asks, yawning into his fist. "Some kind of box?"

Marcus's companion--not quite a stranger, but not quite anything else, either--scratches at his chest, the hammered bronze cuff around his arm catching a scattered ray of too-early sunlight. He's facing the water, the naked line of his back long and lithe and unfairly mesmerizing, hidden as it is under a dozen different swirls of permanent ink, shapes and symbols and letters Marcus is too embarrassed to admit he doesn't recognize.

"It's small," the stranger says, like that's helpful. "Round. The wood...it's red."

"Painted red?"

"No, just...red." The stranger hesitates, and a fishing barge drifts by, its slew of nets already out, spooking a colony of peacefully nesting herons. "The wood is red. Naturally. It's--there are trees, where I'm from, that are red inside."

Marcus crouches down, sifting sand through his fingers, grains shimmering white and pink and silver against the brown of his skin. "Like blood?"

The stranger coughs, startled. "What? No, not like blood, they're...they're pretty. Majestic."

"Blood can be pretty," Marcus says, thinking of his first battle, his first kill, the leather of his armor and the speed of his chariot and the meticulously balanced, undeniably deadly weight of his spear; and, more recently, too, the ring of fractured, purple-black bruises blossoming on his father's throat. "Blood is pretty."

"Well...maybe, I guess, I don't--"

"And how do you know your red trees aren't red from blood, anyway," Marcus goes on. "Those trees could be bleeding. They could be in pain."

"That's--they're trees."

Marcus shakes his head, absently scanning a nearby expanse of river grass. "Majestic trees."

The stranger emits a hilariously indignant little chirping noise, a breathless, helpless cross between a warble and a laugh, just as a breeze rustles through the underbrush, morning-gentle and summer-wild, warm with the scent of market spices, fennel and coriander and cumin and juniper berry--and there's a name on Marcus's lips, a name that likely isn't real, that fits too neatly in his mouth to be real, but that he badly, desperately wishes might be. Could be.

"Here," Marcus says instead, scooping up a small, round, reddish-brown box, brushing sand off the hinges. "Found it."

Oliver's sheets are a thick, heavy-duty flannel, red and gold plaid with threads of emerald and cobalt bolted through. 

"You know," Oliver says, frowning irritably at the notebook in his lap, "I've never seen you study. Or do homework. Or, like, mention that you even have homework to do." 

Marcus spits out the cap of his marker. "I don't, really." 

"What?" Oliver bleats, sounding appalled. "Why? How?" 

Marcus peers intently at Oliver's forearm, at the outline of his drawing, using his thumb to trace the corded slope of muscle and the intermittent patches of freckles and the delicate hollow of the bone in Oliver's wrist. 

"Uh. I mean," Marcus says, gnawing on his tongue, "I've taken all my classes before. Last year. I'm just...re-doing them." 

Oliver doesn't reply for a while, and Marcus tries not to let the silence between them fester. But there's an uncomfortable layer of expectation kind of hovering in the background now, lurking in the corners of the room, behind the dusty acoustic guitar case and the ancient, tape-tacky Gretzky posters, the overflowing wicker laundry basket and the beat-up, red-and-green felt dartboard that smells like stale beer—a figurative monster in a very literal closet. Marcus wants to explain himself, wants to share, which is new. Different. He isn't sure he likes it. 

"So, you were...held back?" Oliver finally asks, tentative in a way he normally isn't. 

Marcus inspects what he's drawn so far. It's a coat of arms, elaborately detailed and immaculately shaded, something he must've dreamed, at some point, but doesn't fully recognize the origins of.  

"Yeah," Marcus answers, belatedly. "Sort of. I guess. I was...yeah." 

Oliver opens his mouth, looking like he's going to say more, ask more; abruptly, though, he shuts it again, glancing back down at his notebook. A section towards the top of the page has been highlighted—a formula, maybe. Marcus can't read it from his position on the bed. 

"What are you, uh," Oliver starts, and then stops, and then reaches out to touch Marcus's shoulder, fleetingly, casually affectionate. It's one of those gestures Marcus doesn't understand, that doesn't lead anywhere, not to sex or to cuddling or to whatever the fuck else people in relationships are supposed to do. "Is that—oh, you fucker, is that a Sharpie? What are you even drawing?" 

Marcus shrugs. "I don't know. Must've seen it around." 

"Is it—it's a shield?" 

"Maybe, yeah." 

"It's, like, really good. Realistic." Oliver cocks his head to the side. "Weirdly realistic." 

"Mm." 

"Yeah." 

"That's probably for the best," Marcus says, considering the conspicuously empty interior of a fork-tailed banner; words are coming to mind to fill it, but they're in a language that's possibly dead and that he's definitely not fluent in.  

"What?" Oliver laughs, a little. "What's for the best?" 

"That you think it's good," Marcus clarifies, and then grins, far more smugly than he actually feels. "Because this shit's not going to wash off for at least five days."

Marcus's barbarian hostage is prettier than he is useful.

"Odin's balls, what are you doing?" Marcus snaps, snatching his very favorite axe out of the barbarian's hands. "Is this how you tend to your weapons in, in, where the fuck you're from? Saxony?"

The barbarian doesn't move from where he's kneeling next to the fire pit, but the slant of his shoulders changes, stiffens, the nape of his neck burning a bright, inexplicably endearing red. There's a gristly, newish scar notched towards the top of his spine, puckered and shiny like a pool of melted wax. Marcus fucking hates having to look at it.

"What's wrong?" the barbarian asks, carefully sounding out the syllables. His accent is harsh, guttural, only really palatable to Marcus's ears because he'd spent the past six godforsaken fucking months figuring out how to keep up with the too-fast, twittering grunt-squawks of the barbarian's own language.

"You're incompetent, is what's wrong," Marcus says darkly, before sighing, pinching the bridge of his nose, and begrudgingly softening his voice. "Here, fuck--just let me show you how to--"

The barbarian twists the upper half of his body around, and Marcus brandishes the axe, miming the correct motion for oiling the handle.

And it doesn't occur to Marcus--until it's too late, until the barbarian's gaze has darted, hot and curious and alert, to Marcus's arms, and Marcus's hands, and Marcus's bare chest--what it fucking look like.

"Fuck," the barbarian says, and that word, at least, is almost the same in every language.

"No, no, I didn't mean--"

"Yes."

Marcus pauses. "What?"

"Yes," the barbarian says again.

"You want to--" Marcus makes another, infinitely more crude gesture. "With me?"

A tiny crescent moon of a frown appears between the barbarian's eyebrows, the rest of his face bathed in the smoky grayscale shadows of the tent. His other scar, the twin to the one on his back, is an angry purple-red. Still healing. Still Marcus's fault.

"I want," the barbarian confirms, and then purses his lips, frustrated, indignant, like he's searching for the right words while simultaneously bemoaning the fact that he's never actually learned them. "You. I want you."

"You want me," Marcus repeats, nonplussed. "You--really?"

Instead of answering, the barbarian plucks the axe out of Marcus's grasp, carelessly tossing it aside, and tugs at the raw leather laces of Marcus's breeches, just as a winter-icy gust of wind howls through the gaps in the tent linen, showering the earth in a dizzying spray of red-orange sparks.

The fire hisses.

Oliver has a sensitive neck. 

Marcus presses his palm against Oliver's lower abdomen, teeth grazing a particularly tender spot below the line of Oliver's jaw, and Oliver's breath hitches, slightly, with a poorly suppressed, almost imperceptible shiver. Marcus is half-hard again, heat simmering low and languorous in the pit of his stomach, but there's something easy—something intoxicating—about just leaving his mouth on Oliver, about roving and tasting and exploring, directionless.  

"Jesus Christ," Oliver says, toying with the buttons on the TV remote. The glow of the screen is flooding the room with a strangely hazy, white-blue light. 

"Mm?" 

"We literally just—" Oliver huffs out a disbelieving laugh, and Marcus bites a smile into his skin, lips trailing lower, down his throat, to the divot between his collarbones. "I thought we were going to watch...whatever." 

"I told you to pick." 

"I'm trying to." 

Marcus swirls his tongue, planting a series of hot, open-mouthed kisses across Oliver's chest. 

"Oh, my god," Oliver gasps, voice strangled, shifting his hips enough that Marcus can see, can feel, that he's half-hard, too. "You're one of those—those psychopaths who records live sports, what the fuck." 

Marcus freezes. "Uh." 

Oliver thumbs at an arrow button, scrolling through the DVR list. "Basketball, football, boring, boring, what's...game three, Stanley Cup play—oh," he says dumbly. "I—oh." 

Marcus squeezes his eyes shut, point-blank refusing to think about how he can physically fucking hear the blood pounding against his eardrums, a bullet-quick ricochet that reminds him poignantly, painfully, of being cross-checked into the boards, of his vision tunneling and his skull throbbing and the overwhelmingly disorienting sight of his mouth guard lying on the ice, chewed-up and bloody. 

"You know, I remember this one," Oliver suddenly says—thoughtful, but not quite questioning. He moves his arm, draping it loosely over the small of Marcus's back, dipping his fingertips just inside the waistband of Marcus's boxers. "There was that bullshit interference call, right? At the very end? Went to overtime?" 

And Marcus continues to hold himself ridiculously, mortifyingly still for one moment, and then another, and then— 

He drops his head down, laying his cheek flat against Oliver's sternum, listening to the steady, improbably patient rhythm of Oliver's heartbeat. 

"Yeah," Marcus barely manages to croak. "Yeah, it went to overtime."

The siege is spectacularly fucking boring.

Marcus yanks his helmet off, wiping the sweat off his brow with the coarse woolen sleeve of his tunic, and then kicks at the stock of his crossbow, sending it skittering across the weather-worn flagstone floor. It's hot, for all that it's the middle of the thrice-damned night.

"You're going to get us into trouble," someone hisses from two posts down the battlement wall. The soldier's holding himself perfectly still, arrow notched, shoulders straight. "C'mon, mate, we've got one fucking job."

Marcus rolls his eyes and lifts his tunic up, fanning his lower abdomen. "Not all of us need an hour to take aim," he sneers, reaching for his wineskin. "Mate."

The soldier scoffs, but the sound gets lost in the brisk, decidedly loamy summer breeze. "As opposed to what, not taking aim at all? Which is what you're doing now?"

Marcus uncorks his wineskin, takes a long, lukewarm sip, and then pours the rest all over his face, nudging the soldier's ankle with the toe of his boot. "Talk that shite in the training yard next time, I dare you."

"So you can try to distract me while the armory's open?" the soldier retorts, amused. "No, thanks."

Marcus plops down on the ground, back to the rampart, and rests his elbows on his knees. "Distract you," he repeats, looking up at the sky. The stars are bright, the clouds wispy, the moon a skinny silver sliver in the distance. "How would I go about doing that, I wonder?"

The soldier shifts his weight from one to the other, but doesn't lower his bow. "It's dangerous to strut around half-naked when there are swords out, you know," he deadpans.

Marcus laughs, clapping the soldier on the back of the thigh, higher up than is strictly, technically friendly, just as the sound of a horse whinnying in alarm carries up to them from the barricade. 

"Right, Marcus murmurs, climbing to his feet, grabbing his crossbow, notching a bolt and returning to his post on the battlement wall. A small group of mercenaries are storming the fortress tower, a single torch burning red and orange amongst them, reflecting off the murky moat water. "Good thing we're both hopeless with swords, then, eh?"

The soldier lets an arrow fly.

Oliver is practicing slapshots when Marcus gets to the rink. 

His jersey is a silky, fire-engine red where it's draped over the bulk of his pads, and the ice is glistening under a patchwork quilt of spotty, industrial bar lights, his skate blades digging in, carving through, deftly navigating the small mountain of pucks floating around his feet. 

Marcus stands at the top of the bleachers, just behind the last row of seats, and stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets, fidgeting with his car keys, his lighter, the tattered paper edge of a frozen yogurt punch card. His phone's in his back pocket, and his thoughts are scattered, racing, like a rusty gearbox perpetually stuck in reverse—perpetually stuck in a timeline where he got to keep this. Savor it. Got to say "yes" instead of "no" when Oliver asked him if he was there to try out for the fucking hockey team. 

On the ice, Oliver fans on a one-timer, sending the puck skidding sideways before he corrals it with his stick. His lowly murmured, "Shit," echoes around the empty rafters, bouncing between the local sponsor banners and the outdated oak-veneered speakers and the grimy air conditioning vents, all of it musty with the lingering scent of popcorn, artificial butter, beer and soda and cigarettes.  

And Marcus just stands there, watching, clenching and unclenching his fists— 

He exhales heavily before jogging down the bleachers, footsteps rattling the rickety metal stairs.  

Oliver's head jerks up at the noise, and he yelps, wind-milling his arms. "Oh," he says, eyes huge behind the plastic of his helmet visor. "Marcus. Fuck. That was—really dramatic. Am I—are you early? Or am I late? What time is it?" 

Marcus props his elbows up on the boards next to the visitors' bench. "You hold onto the puck too long before you shoot," he says, squinting out at the ice. It isn't fresh, looks chipped and uneven and sluggishly wet in some places. "Like, way too long." 

Oliver wrinkles his nose. "What?" 

Marcus starts to lift his hand, but then he notices that it's shaking, and he laces his own fingers together, instead. "You wind up, right, and then you just—you let the puck sit there, on your stick, and no offense, but your shot's not hard enough to get away with that." 

Oliver stares at him, expression weirdly indecipherable. He doesn't look surprised enough, Marcus thinks clinically, but he also doesn't look defensive enough, either, doesn't look like he's taking Marcus's advice seriously, which is—it's fine. Expected.  

"My wind-up's the problem, then?" Oliver asks, leaning against his stick. "Too slow? Too big? Be specific, babe." 

Marcus quirks his lips.

The Thracian doesn't fight dirty.

It's a conclusion that doesn't take Marcus very long to draw, not after watching him, cataloguing the economy of his movements, noting all the crafty, clever ways he avoids cheating; no side-stepping, no side-swiping, no knees to the groin or elbows to the gut or teeth to the throat of his competitors. The Thracian dances, almost, gracefully, not violently, wields a spear like he's been doing it for a lifetime, not just the six months he's been stuck wearing chains. The mask, though--garishly painted, theatrical in nature--quite thoroughly annihilates the beauty of it.

Of him.

"What the fuck is that," Marcus asks, jerking his chin towards the strings dangling from the back of the mask.

The Thracian's knuckles go white around his spear, but then he shrugs. "What's it to you?"

Marcus crosses and uncrosses his arms, breath whistling through his teeth as he berates himself, again, for being too soft with this one. Marcus knows the rules. Don't pick favorites. Don't get attached. Don't bet on them being good enough, strong enough, because it's never going to be up to them if they are or not.

"You just look like a fucking idiot, is all," Marcus says bluntly.

The muscles in the Thracian's abdomen contract as he laughs, sharply, distractingly well-defined, glistening with sand and swear, and his smile--it's effervescent. There's a diamond-shaped tattoo on his hip, near the cut of his pelvis. Not a brand, or a scar, but something from before. Something he'd chosen.

Marcus thinks, wildly, about the unmarked ring of keys hidden beneath his bedroll, the plans he has that are three-quarters of the way formed and infinitely more treacherous than any arena could ever hope to be.

"You jealous?" the Thracian drawls.

"Jealous of what?"

"That I need a mask to look like an idiot and you don't."

Marcus licks his lips, chewing on the tip of his tongue as he tries--fails--not to grin. "You're not allowed to talk to me like that."

"I'm not?"

Marcus slowly shakes his head. His own scars--on his knuckles, his arms, in the aching remnants of pain that lance up and down his left leg if he bends his knee too quickly--he forgets about them, sometimes. He'd spent thirteen years slaughtering Gauls, far, far, far away from Rome, and the memory of that particular homecoming still doesn't compare to the relief he'd felt the first time he'd seen the Thracian haltingly raise his spear in victory.

"Going to have to get you a new mask," Marcus eventually says, clearing his throat. "A better one."

Marcus drums his fingers against the pebbled black leather of his steering wheel, yawning widely enough that his jaw creaks, vision blurring a little as he waits for the Honda in front of him to move. A static-fuzzy country song is playing on the radio, volume low. The electric-green numbers on his dashboard clock are beginning to squirm. 

From the passenger seat, a hunched over Oliver snores once, loudly, before bolting upright, startling himself awake. "Wait, what?" he rasps, rubbing at the string of drool connecting his chin to the window glass. "Sorry, did you—uh, did you remember to order fries?" 

Marcus snorts, and the Honda's brake lights stutter as it inches forward. "Fuck you, how are your ribs?" 

Oliver stretches his arms out, flexing his wrists, and then prods gingerly at his side. "Sore? I guess?" He pats down the pockets of his sweatpants. "Hey, do you have any gum? I can't believe you let me sleep that long, fuck you." 

"You were tired, you played, like, twenty-five minutes—yeah, there should be some in there. Tic Tacs, maybe? Something." 

Oliver digs through the center console, tossing aside flimsy brown fast-food napkins and pen caps and old, grease-splotchy gas station receipts, but then he goes uncharacteristically silent. Veritably fucking motionless. 

Marcus glances over, down and to the side, only to see Oliver clutching a business card, creased, faded, coffee-stained—except, no, no, Marcus realizes, stomach tightening around a stab of nausea, not a business card.  

An appointment card. 

Marcus can make out the looping black script of the date and time, as well as the sleek, silver-embossed font used for the address, the phone number, the last few meticulously stamped letters of the word "NEUROLOGY". 

Oliver crumples the card up, dumping it into a cup holder, just as the Honda squeals to a jerky halt next to the drive-thru window. The whirring, mechanical growl of Marcus's truck is almost deafening. 

"Look," Oliver says, and he doesn't sound tired, or sad, or disappointed—not really. He sounds contemplative. Honest. "I know you have your...your past, your stuff, I get it, you don't owe me—owe anyone—an explanation for it, but—" He cuts himself off, nostrils flaring, and the radio crackles, skipping through the chorus of a Tim McGraw song. Marcus wishes he'd had the fucking foresight to switch stations. "But are you ever going to want to tell me?" 

It's a deceptive question. 

An unfair question. 

And it makes Marcus feel hunted. Haunted. A lot like how he used to feel when his father would sign him out early in middle school, first for away games and then for CAT scans and then for monthly check-ups with the too-friendly specialist who chose not to hide her concerns; her suspicions. For Marcus, it's self-preservation and it's resignation and it's rage, it's guilt, it's sour and acrid and burning and unnecessary, roiling in his gut as he tap-tap-taps the rounded edge of his wallet against his thigh. 

The Honda disappears around the bend in the drive-thru, and Marcus eases his foot off the brake.  

"—malt, no whipped cream, extra cherries," the bored-looking guy at the window is saying. He takes Marcus's credit card. "You want a receipt, man?" 

Marcus shakes his head.  

Cracks his knuckles. 

Avoids Oliver's gaze.  

Reaches out, abruptly, blindly, to crank up the volume on the radio.

A twig snaps.

"Who's there?" Marcus demands, unsheathing his dagger. The forest isn't quiet tonight, not with the full moon, but there's an old saying, back in his village, about hiding in plain sight. Waiting to strike. Poisoning the well, not the cup. "Show yourself, or I swear to--"

The Celt appears at the tree line, torso covered in complicated, chalky blue runes, just as another twig snaps. He spins around in alarm, except he's weaponless, defenseless, and fuck it all but it's like he wants Marcus to accidentally kill him.

"You can't do that," Marcus says, exasperated, squinting through the gloom of the underbrush. "There's a fucking war on, not sure if you're aware, and--what are you--what are you fucking looking at?"

The Celt is standing stock-still, arms stiff, clenching and unclenching his fists. "I think I was followed," he answers. The runes running down his back are twisting nonsensically around the curve of his spine. "I heard..."

"I mean, I heard you coming." Marcus's scalp is prickling now, the previously welcoming restlessness of the forest dissipating with every rush of blood to his head. "Weren't watching where you were going, were you?"

The Celt's fingers twitch at his sides. "That wasn't me."

"What?"

"The--the footsteps. The rustling. That wasn't me."

Marcus sniffs. "A rabbit, then."

The Celt doesn't even dignify that with a response, which is fucking rude, in Marcus's opinion.

"Will you at least let me--" Marcus strides over, dagger in hand, grabbing the Celt's elbow and wrenching him backwards, behind Marcus. "I have to fucking do everything, don't I?"

The Celt huffs, sounding amused, but in a brittle way, like he's still anxious. Scared. Listening. "You most certainly do not do everything."

Marcus's cheeks burn. "Who'd--who would even be following you?"

"I'm not sure," the Celt says, after a moment's pause. "Your father...he came by today with some of his men to broker a--"

"A marriage, yeah," Marcus interrupts. "Or--an alliance, I guess. He's been angry you're not a girl for years."

"What?"

"If you were a princess, a girl, he could have me--you know, marry you--and he'd have fewer enemies...or something, I don't fucking know, isn't that how it works?"

The Celt chuckles and leans in, placing his palm flat on Marcus's lower back, his lips grazing the shell of Marcus's ear as he says, "I don't believe you'd like me quite so much if I was a princess, though."

"What makes you think I like you at all?"

Another twig snaps.

Oliver tries two wrong keys before he fits the right one into the lock on the guest house door. 

"Why don't you have these labeled," he mutters, looping his arm around Marcus's waist, half-carrying him over the threshold. "They sell those little fucking rubber key things, the, the, green for garage, red for mail, whatever—they slip on. I'll buy them for you." 

Marcus giggles, and then burps, tasting bile and acid and Jack in the Box and cheap, plastic-bottle vodka. "Hats," he says sagely. "Key hats." 

Oliver heaves Marcus past the snowy marble counters and the miniature stainless-steel appliances in the kitchenette. There's a trail of dirty laundry in the hall leading to Marcus's bedroom, most of it Marcus's, some of it Oliver's, and shoes. So many fucking shoes. 

"Yeah, babe," Oliver says on an impatient exhale. "Key hats." 

Marcus burps again. "Motherfucker." 

Oliver fumbles for the bedroom light switch, and the bulb in the overhead fixture—some kind of spindly minimalist bronze cage that the decorator had chosen and that has always reminded Marcus of a goal light—flickers, fizzles, and dies.  

"Motherfucker," Oliver agrees, and then grunts. "Jesus fucking—shit, you're heavy." 

Marcus kind of wants to protest that. He is bigger, bulky with muscle where Oliver is lithe and lean, but Oliver is still pretty capably fucking manhandling him. 

"Okay," Oliver says, ducking down, with obvious effort, to turn on Marcus's bedside lamp. "Okay, let's just get you undressed, and then we can—" 

Marcus trips over an empty Gatorade bottle, careening into Oliver, whose knees almost immediately buckle under their combined weight. The lamp falls to the floor with a clatter, unplugging itself.  

"Sorry," Marcus mumbles, mouth plastered to Oliver's neck. He smells like soap and pink lemonade and Burt's Bees and ice. Oliver always smells a little like ice. Clean. Cool. Agonizing. "I was just—I was trying to hug you. You deserve a hug." 

Oliver sighs and shoves Marcus onto the bed. "You're so—Jesus, why did you drink so much?" 

Marcus bounces his legs, mattress springs squeaking. "Maybe you just didn't drink enough." 

"Marcus." 

"I'm not even," Marcus starts, snorting out another giggle, "I'm not even supposed to drink." 

"Wait, what?" 

Marcus shrugs, indifferent, and then tugs at the bottom of his henley in a confusingly futile attempt to lift it up and over his head. "Help," he says pathetically. 

At that, Oliver cracks a smile. "Yeah," he says, smoothing the pad of his thumb over the stubble on Marcus's jaw. "Yeah, okay."  

It takes a minute, but they manage to get Marcus's shirt off and jeans unbuttoned before Oliver crouches down, brow furrowed in concentration, to untangle the laces on Marcus's boots. And it's dark, still, the only light in the room filtering in from outside, through the gaps in the shuttered white plantation blinds—but Oliver has the kind of face, the kind of bone structure, that people write fucking poetry about, the hollow cheeks and the pouty lips and the slightly upturned nose, the long, sweeping lashes and the large, wide-set eyes that are green and brown and gold and warm. 

"You look like you should be in a boy band," Marcus says. He thinks, inanely, that he'll probably remember to be embarrassed about all of this in the morning. "Like—like, the cute, wholesome one I'd always jerk off to, you know? The one who comes back for the reunion tour as a born-again Christian, or whatever. That one. That's you." 

Oliver sputters, laughs, and there isn't enough light to tell if he's blushing or not, but Marcus bets he is. Oliver's easy like that. For Marcus, especially. 

"Wholesome?" Oliver chokes out. "What?" 

"Mm. Cute and wholesome." 

"What does that even mean?" 

Marcus flops backwards, spreading his arms, and blinks up at the ceiling. "You know, like," he says, pursing and un-pursing his lips, marveling at the sensation; close to numb, but not quite there yet. "Loyal. Focused. Like you...like you really care about the integrity of the music." 

Oliver pauses. "Marcus." 

"Mm?" 

"You really did drink too much," Oliver says, voice soft but tone unreadable. "Go to sleep." 

Marcus's eyes are already slipping shut.

The basket of olives at Marcus's feet is overflowing.

"Hey!" he calls out, voice echoing across the grove and between the trees and right on down the steep, craggy hill that leads to the harbor. "What am I supposed to--where do I even put these?"

There's no response, just the sound of the birds twittering and the insects buzzing, the far-off lull of the waves crashing against the rocks, the beach, the fishing boats. And then:

"Just leave them for now," the farmer says, hopping down from what must be a particularly sturdy tree branch. His tunic is tight around his shoulders, straining at the seams, and his hair is a vague reddish-blond, dark with sweat, not unlike the searing splash of a sunset against the bleached white walls of Marcus's father's house. "Did you really...you didn't have to help, I was joking."

Marcus sits down, draws one knee up to his chest, and pops an olive into his mouth, chewing vigorously. "I knew that," he says, and it comes out sulkier than he intends for it to. "But I've got fucking manners, don't I?"

"No, you don't," the farmer replies cheerfully, scraping a handful of olives off the ground. There's a rake propped up against a tree, several empty baskets stacked nearby, and his arms are tanned a deep, golden brown, even in the shade. "You have aspirations."

"Oh?" Marcus ass, spitting out an olive pit. "And what kind of aspirations do I have? Exactly?"

"We're not defiling my olive grove."

"Did I suggest that?"

"You were thinking it."

Marcus reaches for another olive. "I was actually thinking that you should reward me for my fortitude."

"Fortitude. Really."

"In the face of adversity, yes." Marcus uses his tongue to dig an olive pit out from behind his teeth. "I've faced--lots and lots of fucking adversity today. Obviously."

The farmer bends forward at the waist, neck outstretched, legs splayed wide, grappling for the handle of the rake. It's...quite the sight. Quite the distraction. Marcus remembers, now, why he'd gone through all the fucking effort of trekking up here today.

"Harvesting olives is adversity?"

"Oh, no," Marcus says, feigning surprise. "The adversity was having to spend the better part of the day with just you and your shit company, sorry for the conf--"

The farmer throws his head back and laughs, throat bobbing, before he ducks his chin. "Piss off with that," he says, glancing at Marcus with a smugly amused slant to what little of his smile Marcus can actually see. "You're such a--oh, come on, you're eating them? After all that work?"

Marcus swallows, spitting one last pit out, and moves to stand up, brushing his hands off on his tunic as he saunters over to the farmer, preparing to pull him up, pull him closer, into a kiss--

The farmer swings the rake out, hitting Marcus's legs, knocking him to the ground with a swiftly jarring thud.

"Adversity," the farmer muses. "Yeah, I see what you mean."

The kitchen is cramped, galley-style, with faded vinyl cabinets and cracked, porcelain-tiled counters and a peeling linoleum floor that's checkered with crumbs and dust and sticky drops of grenadine. There's a vast collection of off-brand liquor bottles on the table behind an almost-empty roll of paper towels, and a stack of candy-red Solo cups clustered between two-liters of soda. 

"You know," Marcus says, grimacing as he curls an arm around Oliver, bending down to speak into his ear, "I can think of at least twenty better things we could be doing right now." 

Oliver looks at him askance, cheeks flushed, eyes half-lidded, the bridge of his nose bruised and swollen—and then grins. "Oh, yeah? Twenty?" 

"At least." 

Oliver leans in to kiss Marcus, and it's—honestly, it's barely even good, too sloppy, whiskey-soaked, slightly off-center, but Marcus still reciprocates, still cradles the back of Oliver's neck, squeezing, coaxing Oliver's mouth open with quick, teasing little swipes of his tongue. 

"I scored a hat trick," Oliver whispers, not pulling away so much as letting their lips drag and catch, his words melting into Marcus's skin. Oliver's happiness is infectious, always. Even when it's about hockey. Even when it's not. "Three goals. Three." 

"Yeah," Marcus says. "Yeah, I saw." 

Oliver sways closer, knocking their foreheads together. "A fucking hat trick, Marcus." 

Marcus lowers his hand, fingers trailing between Oliver's shoulder blades, down the arch of his spine, stopping right above the swell of his ass. "Twenty things, babe." 

"At least," Oliver confirms solemnly, biting down on the inside of his cheek to smother a smile. 

And Marcus kind of has to fucking kiss Oliver again, can't fathom not fucking kissing Oliver again, and there's an unfamiliar, bass-heavy rap song blaring from the shitty living room speakers and footsteps thundering from upstairs, rattling the popcorn ceiling, and a girl from Marcus's history class is calling for tequila shots, waving a canister of sea salt and one of those green teardrop-shaped bottles of lime juice, but Oliver is falling forward, kissing back with a reckless kind of euphoria that Marcus is greedy for, that's sweetening the air and slowing down the clock and bleeding out, affecting him at a molecular level, staining his lips and his teeth and his tongue, and it's innocuous, it's sublime, it's stumbling the five or six feet to the breakfast nook and allowing Oliver to push him up against the wall, a local realtor's promotional calendar to his left and an antique Coca Cola phone to his right. 

Oliver wedges his knee between Marcus's own, drags his mouth down the hinge of Marcus's jaw, snakes his hand down to the front of Marcus's jeans, tracing the belt buckle, the button-fly, the outline of his cock. 

Marcus comes up for air. 

Rolls his hips, rocks into Oliver's grip, fists the bottom of Oliver's shirt, jerks his head back at an awkward angle, thoughtless, careless, temple clipping the sharp metal corner of the Coca Cola phone. 

And then. 

And then. 

The pain isn't instantaneous, but the dizziness certainly is. 

"Shit," he gasps, or maybe just thinks he gasps, means to gasp, because his vision is already swimming, rot-fuzzy black dots appearing in his periphery, and his balance wavering, gravity upending itself as nausea churns and resentment spirals and it's stupid, it's dumb, it's so fucking unfair—

A seagull shrieks as it circles the sky above Marcus's head, shrill and mournful and disgustingly opportunistic.

"You're an ass," the figure lying next to Marcus suddenly says. He's flat on his back, tattered black tricorn covering the upper half of his face, and his lips are cracked, dry, bloodless with dehydration. His shirt's torn down to his ribs, gaping open, and his breeches are unlaced, rolled up to his calves, feet bare and pink and callused against the white of the sand. "You know that?"

Marcus makes a dramatic show of peering up and down the empty beach, shielding his eyes with his hand. "Oh--are you talking to me again? Is that what's happening here?"

The sailor sighs tiredly, auburn stubble glinting carrot-orange and crimson-red under the glare of the sun. "Couldn't've just let them toss me overboard, no, you had to start a fucking mutiny."

Marcus flinches, looking back over his own shoulder to inspect the oddly barren assortment of palm trees. The leaves are rustling, the grass patchy and sparse and not quite green enough. Fuck, but it's hot.

"Wasn't going to let them toss you," he says. It's a starkly unpleasant truth. "Fucked us either way, I suppose."

The sailor doesn't reply for a while, and the sea glitters, sparkles, stretches out and out and out in a picturesque swath of smooth, crystalline turquoise, about as pretty as it is deadly. Marcus misses the gray-blue waters of home, personally, the chilly white-caps and the soaring cliffs--just as pretty, just as deadly, but perhaps a bit more fucking honest about it.

"Probably shouldn't've called the commodore's wife what we did," the sailor says, scrunching his peeling, freckled nose up, jostling his tricorn. "Bit out of line, in hindsight."

Marcus snorts once, and then twice, and then barks out a loud, booming laugh, the sound of it tearing at his tonsils, ringing in his ears, causing a headache to splinter somewhere behind his eyes.

"I was the one who called her that, you were just--"

"Finishing your fucking sentence, yeah," the sailor says wryly. "Just that."

A second seagull joins the first, diving and swooping and grievously harassing the crabs scuttling around the tide pools, the poor bastards.

"Worth it, though," Marcus says, words threaded with something thick and careful that he refuses on principle to even acknowledge.

"Yeah?"

Marcus digs his heels into the sand and tries not to think about how close he'd been--how close they'd been--to everything they'd ever wanted. "Yeah."

The sailor licks his lips, like that's really going to fucking accomplish anything, and then he's taking a breath, steeling himself, it looks like, and his hand is flopping around, searching out Marcus's, and he's lacing their fingers together. Squeezing.

"Thanks," the sailor says, a little shakier than Marcus is expecting. "For the mutiny. It was--we put up a good fucking fight, eh?"

"Yeah." Marcus laughs again, helpless with it, fucking delirious with it, and tugs their entwined hands into his lap, rubbing his thumb over the sailor's knuckles as he stares out at the ocean. "A good fucking fight."

He sees it, then, miles away, seesawing along the waves, shimmering in the distance--a dream, a mirage, a rescue.

Black sails.

Marcus wakes up slowly; quietly. 

For a terrifyingly familiar split-second, he doesn't know where he is—doesn't recognize the sleek aluminum alarm clock on the nightstand, or the gunmetal chain-link trash can on the floor, or the dark green cotton sheets on the bed. There's a tissue box he can't remember buying, a body pillow he can't remember using, an expensive-looking silver watch he can't remember strapping to his wrist.  

It's dark.  

The door is closed, the lights are off, the blackout curtains are pulled down, and there's a hand on his head, fingers gently combing through his hair. It's that, of all things, that brings him back to reality.  

"Not gonna break," Marcus croaks. There's a sloshing sensation between his ears. Pain. Vertigo. He wonders, with an astonishing amount of detachment, of clarity, if he'd dreamed at all while he was out. If Oliver had noticed. "How long was I..." 

Hesitantly, Oliver scratches harder at Marcus's scalp. "A couple of hours? Maybe? I had to—I called your dad. I didn't know what to do." 

"I—oh." 

"He, um. He didn't pick up at first, I had to...but he said...I mean, he said this has happened before, and that—that you'd be okay." Oliver's voice is firm with disapproval, the fierce kind, the indignant kind, Marcus has to swallow around a screaming knot of understanding, bunched up and wrung out and lodged like a wishbone in the back of his throat. It's too big. Too much. Almost otherworldly. "I don't—I didn't know what else to do." 

Marcus keeps his eyes open, trained on the pretentious fucking Art Deco numbers printed on the face of his alarm clock. "Can we not—" He stops. Grits his teeth. "Can we not do this right now." 

Silence. 

Somewhere in the guest house, a heater switches on, a blur of background noise vibrating unevenly through the baseboards. He feels bruised, scraped down, like all of his past injuries—broken fingers and torn muscles and overtime losses, penalty minutes, brain scans and blood panels and his father's rapidly accumulated frequent fucking flyer miles—Marcus feels like they're on display, magnified and exposed.  

"Earlier, at that party, there was a kid with a, with a Metal Mulisha sticker on his car, just, like, hanging out in the driveway," Oliver eventually says, slightly too casually. "Which was, like—it was weird? You know? Because he was just blasting Garth Brooks, like, Marcus, babe, it was...it was loud." 

Something in Marcus's chest goes tight, then, crushing and suffocating, not a weight, no, but a pressure, a rubber band looped one too many times around his lungs, his heart, right on the verge of snapping. 

"When I was younger," Marcus says, headache fading, and then intensifying, and then fading again. Up and down. Down and up. "On the way back from tournaments, my dad—he'd always pick one of those old-school country albums and play it on, like, repeat. If my team won, I mean. Like, he thought it was an incentive to do well, can you fucking believe that?" 

Oliver massages the top of Marcus's head with his fingertips. "Does he have a Metal Mulisha sticker on his car, though, because that's the real—" 

Marcus rolls over, bracketing Oliver's body with his own, and doesn't force a smile so much as he sets one free.

Marcus stands at the window, hands clasped sweaty and neat behind his back, and gazes out at the mid-morning mist.

His doublet is new, an elegant bottle-green and uncomfortably ill-fitting, and his calfskin boots are pinching his toes. The chapel is on the far side of the manor grounds, the needlepoint spire of a cast-iron spire just barely visible through a torrential sea of wet, autumn-colored trees, and everyone else is already there, waiting.

It's his wedding day.

His bloody fucking wedding day.

He grabs for the goblet of wine resting on the window sill, gulping at it, ignoring the telltale tremble of his fingers.

"You were asking," Marcus starts, inwardly congratulating himself on getting the words out in the proper order, tethered together as they are with a toxic slurry of nerves and panic and dread. "You were asking me to leave with you, weren't you? That's what you...that's what you meant."

From behind him, he can hear the Scot shift around--the thump of a book being deposited on the escritoire, the creak of the floorboards and the whisper of the bed hangings. A sharp exhale. A sharper inhale.

"Yes," the Scot says simply. "That's what I meant."

Marcus takes another gulp of wine; it's bitter, dry, blood-red and rich, like a ruby. "And I didn't answer."

There's a pause, and Marcus isn't brave enough to look back. His father's Bible is propped against the lead-paned window, the once pristine gold-leaf lettering on the cover flaking off. It's a reminder. A bequest. The final fucking nail in his ugly Spanish coffin.

"Are you now?" the Scot asks, moving closer. Stopping. No. Moving closer. "Answering?"

Marcus eyes the seemingly precarious position of the sun in the sky, the angry gray sheet of rain clouds on the horizon, mentally counting the steps from this room to the east wing, to the servants' stairs, to the gardens and the stables and how quiet could horses even be, anyway?

"I should've said yes," he admits. "When you asked."

"And now?"

Marcus drains his goblet, swishing the wine around in his mouth, and nods his head towards the shadowy little alcove next to the wardrobe, where a large leather saddlebag is sitting. Food. Water. Money, mostly. His mother's tiara.

"I'm saying yes," Marcus murmurs, turning around, leaving the Bible where it is. He wonders why he feels like he's just taken a diving leap out of the fucking window, unsure of his own mortality. "If you'll still have me."

The lunch table is a dull, faded green, paint peeling at the edges, skeletal steel underbelly splattered with mud and rust and surreptitiously scribbled phone numbers.  

Marcus is rifling through his bag, ignoring his sketchbook, his journal, the felt-tip pens and the wadded-up gum wrappers and the well-loved, well-worn copy of Moby Dick that he'd stolen off a shelf in his dad's office and hasn't bothered to open since. His stomach gives a faint, rolling lurch when he finds what he's looking for. 

"What's that?" Oliver asks, slurping at a plain white Styrofoam cup full of sweet tea. Extra ice. No lemon. There's a glob of mustard smeared around the corner of his mouth, and Marcus is fucking itching to wipe it off. Clean it up.  

He doesn't. 

Instead, he drops a wrinkled, unmistakably ratty copy of TIME magazine on the table. "This is from a couple of years ago," Marcus says, tapping the date on the cover. February 14th. Fucking Valentine's Day. "Did you ever—hear about it? I mean, you probably did, everyone did, but did you—" 

"Dreamers," Oliver interrupts, reading out loud, setting his cup aside and carefully sliding the magazine out from under Marcus's hand. "Oh, right, the—that gene. It's, like, memory recovery, or whatever, right? The soulmate shit?" 

"Yeah," Marcus says, humorless. "Yeah, they call it the Matchmaker gene now. Like—like, what the fuck, right?" 

Oliver studies him for a while, and then squints up at the sky, blue and clear, and across the courtyard, towards the asphalt of the parking lot and the billowy gray windscreens tethered to the fences around the tennis courts.  

"You have it," Oliver guesses. "The gene." 

"Yeah." 

"Are there—um, side effects?" Oliver asks slowly, warily, like he isn't entirely sure he wants to know the answer. "Is that what..." 

Marcus flicks his eyes down to the magazine, to the dumb fucking stylized DNA helix plastered across the cover. "I played hockey," he says, which probably isn't news to Oliver, he's not actually as oblivious as he occasionally seems, but—"I played hockey, and I was really fucking good." 

Oliver wets his lips. "Oh." 

"And then—I started having these weird, really intense dreams. Like, I genuinely thought they were fucking nightmares for a while, they were that bad, and my dad—he took me to a bunch of different doctors, and everyone kind of assumed, I think, that I was making it up? Or, like—just fucking losing it? You know?" Marcus curls his tongue over his teeth. "Anyway. They tested me for it, eventually, and. Yeah." 

"Right." 

"And my dreams," Marcus says, gesturing vaguely to his head, as if that might adequately convey how massively fucking fucked his brain chemistry is, "they've never been—normal. There's supposed to be, like, a focal point? A person, usually." 

Oliver hooks his ankle around Marcus's under the table. "Soulmate shit." 

"Yeah," Marcus says, almost managing a smile. "Yeah. Well. My dreams...there's a guy. The same guy. But I've never—he's always looking away from me. I've never seen his face. It's not supposed to work like that." 

Oliver goes still. "Oh." 

"And the specialist I go to, she thinks that's—like, she thinks it has to do with post-concussion syndrome. I only ever had the one, but. Brain damage, you know." 

Oliver doesn't respond. 

"I've thought, though," Marcus goes on, hurries to add, because if he doesn't say it now he's never fucking going to, "I've thought—the guy I dream about—I've thought he might be you." 

"Marcus—" 

"And I'm never going to know, not for sure, but I don't—" Marcus breaks off, scrubbing his hand over his mouth, and swallows. Meets Oliver's eyes. Confesses, like he isn't fucking petrified of this, of doing this and wanting this and having it, even temporarily, even if it's only ever as real as he can will it to be, "I'm choosing for him to be you." 

Oliver stares at Marcus, lips parted, expression raw, and he isn't blinking. 

Time grinds to a halt. 

On the opposite side of the lawn, a huge group of freshman girls are sprawled out on a checkered black-and-white picnic blanket, listening to Taylor Swift on a portable Bluetooth speaker, eating pretzels and drinking Diet Coke and passing their yearbooks around and sneaking transparently flustered glances at Marcus and Oliver every few seconds. Marcus can't imagine being that young again.  

"Jesus Christ, you giant fucking sap," Oliver finally says in a voice that's gravelly and thick and just the tiniest bit desperate He leans over the table, punching Marcus in the shoulder, before grabbing the front of Marcus's shirt and yanking him into a kiss. "I'm going to get you a jersey with my name on it, okay? You can wear it on game days. And non-game days. You know what—fuck it, all the days, forever and ever, amen—" 

Marcus huffs out a short, embarrassingly elated laugh. "Oh, my god. What the fuck is wrong with you." 

"And a tattoo," Oliver continues, lips twitching, so close to Marcus's own, "you should definitely get, like, our initials tattooed inside a heart, or something, like, right on your bicep—no, on your chest, that's way more romantic—" 

"I've changed my mind, the dreams aren't about you." 

"Yes, they are," Oliver says, and he more than likely means for his words to come out smug, or arrogant, or playful, but they don't. They're earnest. Honest.  

"Yeah," Marcus breathes. "Yeah, they are."