Author's Website:

Disclaimer: Not mine, never will be, but they have a lot more fun when they play at my house.

Author's Notes: Just a bit of fluff that popped into my head one night.

Story Notes:

Quietude
By MR

It would be impossible for me to explain to anyone, Ray most of all, why I do what I do. Not that he has not known loneliness as intimately as I, but I believe I have known it to a far greater depth.

It sometimes seems as if I've always been alone. An absurd thought, but my memory of my mother is so faint as to be almost non-existent. My grandparents were good people, but they had lived a harsh life in a harsh land and were past the age of knowing what to do with a small boy. At times I feel as if I were born into the world middle-aged, already saddled with the legacy of my father. I envy other people when they talk about their childhood, for mine was cut short.

The loneliness is the reason I lie awake in the small hours of the morning watching Ray Kowalski sleep. The first time I did, I was amazed to find him as mobile and vocal at rest as he was awake, as if his mind never stopped working even though his body succumbs to the need for downtime. His nights are a litany of mumbling and movement, first here, then there. Nothing he says is ever truly clear, though at times I catch my own name, and it makes me blush, to think he dreams of me as I do of him.

I've noticed that since we became lovers, he's settled somewhat; as if having someone else in bed lets him truly rest. A childish fancy, but I allow myself the indulgence of it.

Why do I lie here watching him like this? Am I afraid that if I go to sleep he'll disappear? That I'll awaken and discover that Chicago, chasing Muldoon down, the quest for Franklin's hand, finding that he loves me as much as I love him, was nothing but a particularly pleasant dream?

The wind outside has picked up; howling around the cabin like a live thing. We'll be snowed in by dawn. On the floor next to the bed, Dief snuffles and gives a whine, his legs jerking. Still on the trail, I imagine, and the thought makes me smile.

I curl myself back around Ray and instinctively he moves closer. He's mumbling again and I realize that, if I listen carefully, I can make out what he's saying:

"Beautiful, Ben, so goddamn beautiful, never gonna leave you, never ever..."

I smile through the tears in my eyes, and drop a light kiss on his golden hair. "Nor I you, Ray," I whisper. "Nor I you."

FIN