[Mature] Just as It Was

[Tom Cooke]

Home • Quarter Fords

Morning on the 28th of Yaris, 2716

D
on’t look back, he thought.

He did anyway, on the way out to the tap. Wanted to see it, he reckoned; the kitchen was still wreathed in shadows, soft with the morning, but out in the yard Yaris was sharp as a knife’s edge. Wanted to see it catch on all Aremu’s features – met his eyes, which’d been dark as black inside, and now sparked with reflections and seemed to catch a color even darker and richer than that.

He felt a smile on his face still, mung as a boch’s and softened by that kiss. He could still feel it on his knuckles. The warm knot of fingers at his side came untangled; he felt the last scratchy brush of gauze, and then he was gone to the pump.

Water slopped warm. In the corner of his eye he could see Aremu leaned up against the old fence, chest still bare to the warm sun. Don’t look, he thought, and looked here too – looked at him even though his eyes was shut, even though there was a look on his face Tom felt like maybe he’d not earned the right to be privy to.

Like a dream of freedom, he thought, watching the muscles of his throat flicker in the sun. Watching his shoulders ease back, seemed like, just a pina, his chest rising and falling.

Ne here, Tom thought, shutting off the pump; ne freedom. He smiled down at the old eschana, running his hand over the bulb of it, feeling the sloshing weight.

There was a pattern of swirls across the side, bordered by thick bands with some kind of swirling script he reckoned might’ve been wika Mugrobi. Markings’d faded now, blended together.

Aremu smiled at him when he came close; he wasn’t sure why, but the imbala reached out and took his hand again and held it. He looked at him – really looked – met his eye, and his lips parted slightly.

That he’d asked a question, Tom knew; but the words had got tangled up in all the other words, and when he managed to pry them free all delicate-like with his clumsy fingers, they was still covered in their scents and the lingering colors. So he tried to take them apart, just these words, from each other, from the sounds, from Aremu’s voice. They fell apart like waterlogged roots; he couldn’t’ve told which belonged to which.

“Oes,” he said, smiling.

He felt the smile; he saw it on Aremu’s face, and he didn’t have to look back or not look back, ‘cause it seemed to him almost like the imbala was leading him inside. And there was nothing to look back at, except the yard and the pump and a fence where a man’d been, now all full of sunlight.

Nor did Aremu go and sit when they came inside. His headache thrummed, but he’d not realized how strong the smell of kofi was in the kitchen, and he found it easing in the rich dark.

He began to scoop the grounds in. He could feel Aremu’s eyes following him; his sun-warmed skin prickled. “Strange dreams. Better, ‘cause you was there,” he added, more a soft grunt than anything, and turned to put the eschana on. He turned to look at Aremu, still smiling soft, a pina sheepish.

“An’ you?” he said, easing himself back to lean against the counter too.

There was a tie coiled loose by the window-sill; he reached to take it, put it in his mouth, started working at raking his fingers through his hair. He put his hair up into a tangled bun; he felt the sun on the back of his neck, and the breeze too.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Morning, 28 Yaris, 2716
Tom and Jaeli’s House, Quarter Fords

Aremu curled his fingers over the edge of the counter, and held on, feeling the firm press of it against the palm of his hand, the smoothness beneath against his fingertips. It was cool, still, inside, in the places where the warmth of the stove must have lingered but the sunlight hadn’t yet reached.

Tom’s answer had been enough; Aremu wouldn’t have asked for more. For all it was only a word, the yes had thrummed through his chest, and something he hadn’t known he felt fell away. He thought they’d leave it there; he didn’t think Tom would go on, or ask him, or at least he didn’t count on it.

Tom kept on, and for all that Aremu listened, intently, he didn’t know what to make of the words. They didn’t fit, not quite, with the reassuring lies he’d told himself the last day and a half. He doesn’t know, Aremu told himself, what you are, but even that protest crumbled away in the faint, soft light of the smile on Tom’s face.

“I dreamt, I think,” Aremu said, “but nothing I remember.” His fuzzy tongue found dry, cracked lips, ran over them; he folded them together, just a moment, gaze looking nowhere in the midst of Tom’s bare chest, watching the muscles move with the easy motions of his fingers through his hair. He looked back up at the other man’s face, and smiled, something shy in it.

“I was glad to wake with you,” Aremu said, quietly; he knew what Tom had said was true for him, as well, but he didn't want to be only a mirror, just then. His fingers tightened against the counter, then let go. Both of Tom’s hands were busy in his hair, so he didn’t make to reach for them, not just yet. He smiled a little more.

I don’t usually sleep well, he wanted to say, especially dockside. It’s one thing on the ship – we have long shifts, and some flights I scarce sleep at all. It works for me; I’ve never needed much, or else I’ve become accustomed to not having it. In the Rose, especially, when I don’t have space to move as I like, when my back and shoulders ache with the tension of being, I find it very hard.

I’ve ways that I deal with it; I go and look at the stars, mostly, or I get up and work. There’s always work to be done, on an engine. Sometimes if I’m too tired for either, I just lie there; sometimes I tell there’ll be nightmares, and I’d rather lie awake then face them. Does it make me a coward?

“Do you think a man can know the meaning of his dreams?” Aremu asked, softly, instead. “If he remembers them,” his smile went a little crooked, but still lifted the edges of his lips. He took Tom’s hand in his again, one large hand in his two long-fingered ones; he turned it over, slowly, tracing callused fingertips over scars and hair, once more, as if to check whether it might have changed. He found, too, the new scuff on the base of Tom’s palm, one he’d missed in the darkness the night before; he lifted it to his lips, and kissed it softly.

He lowered Tom’s hand, then, still cradling it between his. “I find sometimes they make sense,” Aremu said, “and sometimes they don’t. And so I wonder if it’s that I’m not ready to understand the latter, or if I’ve misunderstood the former.” He trailed off there, wondering, again, if he’d already said too much; fears aside, a little smile still played over the corner of his lips.

The smell of kofi was rich and thick in the air; it drowned out the rest of the spices, now. Aremu knew they were still there; there was nowhere for them to have gone. But for the moment, kofi was all he could smell, and he breathed it in deep, and felt the tight headache in his skull recede, just a little further, just for now.

[Tom Cooke]

Home • Quarter Fords

Morning on the 28th of Yaris, 2716

N
othing I remember, Aremu said.

A strand of hair drifted in front of his eyes, blurry; Aremu was blurry, too, behind it, out of focus, until Tom tangled those strands up with the rest and looked at him. He was smiling wider, and Tom smiled back. There was no picking apart the eyes from the lips, the smile from the touch, the bruises from the junia. Not without it falling to pieces.

But he breathed it in, rolling his sore shoulders and letting his arms drop, feeling Aremu’s eyes on all of him as he did it. Made him feel good, back then, on the wharf; made him feel strange now, with everything else mixed in. He felt the chill raise goose flesh on his chest and the warm sun prickle in the hair on his back.

The other man took his hand in both his. Tom felt the long fingers over the back of it; he didn’t have to look to know how the way it moved, turning his hand over, sweeping along the lines and then at the edges of the scuff. Sent a tingle through him, the dull sting and the light touch; again, when Aremu lifted it to his lips, and his warm breath tickled the raw skin.

The meaning of dreams?

Enough, he thought; it was enough, this, and he doubted the other man wanted to know what he thought. Thought to cradle Aremu’s face, to close what little distance the sun filled up between them, to rest his other hand in the small of his back and pull him closer – kofi be damned – and he thought Aremu’d want to, too, even if he’d liked waking up beside him, if only for all it promised.

Aremu lowered his hand, and he was suddenly glad he’d not disentangled them. He nodded slow-like. There was still a little smile at his lips, Tom didn’t know why; he was watching his face, now, and nowhere else. Tom listened, intent, smile fading.

He remembered the gasp, the jerk, without meaning to; he remembered last night. He half-turned, leaning his side against the counter, reaching to brush his other hand over Aremu’s two.

“Maybe some man can, someplace,” he said, softer. “Ne me.”

He tried to remember his. Some came easy; some never came. He remembered the rapping at the window, crisp like it’d been real, and the voice, and the voice was the haziest thing about it – the way he couldn’t remember it, not all the way, even after a few months. The way other voices’d drowned it out, would drown it into the Mahogany, someday, and he’d remember a shape and some words, and he wouldn’t even remember those right.

But he knew, in the dream, who it had been.

Jaeli says he can, he wanted to say; I ain’t so sure I believe he ain’t just misunderstanding, the more he thinks he knows. How d’you know you ain’t misunderstood, if you’re so sure you know?

I ain’t sure I understand it when I take chan or belladonna, I ain’t sure I understand it when I make love. It’s the same, ain’t it, that? You think it means one thing; you can’t scratch the fucking skin of everything it means.

He thought of Aremu’s face buried in his neck; he thought of holding him tighter in the night. He smiled down at their hands, his own knotted and furred as ginger against Aremu’s.

“D’you want to understand them?” he asked, looking back up at his face. The smell of kofi was rich and strong; it was ready, he thought, and any more and he’d burn it. “Sometimes,” he admitted, fair soft, all of his skin prickling, “sometimes I’m scared to. Sometimes I don’t know I’ll ever be ready.”

If I understand it, why I do what I do in my dreams – and he thought of all the bloodier ones, and he didn’t let his eyes roam to the bruise at Aremu’s hip – is that who I am? His fingertips were still on the back of Aremu’s unbandaged hand, and then he pressed it, warm.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Morning, 28 Yaris, 2716
Tom and Jaeli’s House, Quarter Fords

For a moment, Aremu thought he knew the look on Tom’s face, and he thought he understood, after all, where the question might lead. He wanted, too; Tom’s hand was warm against his lips, the soft brush of hair and the rougher scrape of calluses, by now, deeply familiar. He couldn’t have said why he hesitated, why he lowered Tom’s hand and went on about dreams instead of just leaning in to the inevitable, why he put it off, just a little longer.

This, Aremu thought, this too was like a dream, and he felt that it, too, would end in time, and he would wake up himself, as he’d always been, apart.

He didn’t quite draw away, but he didn’t draw them together, either, and when Tom’s hand settled, it was on top of his. He saw Tom smile down at their hands, but when his head bowed it was the furrow in his brow which lingered in Aremu’s mind, the way the shadows drew long over the thicket of his beard.

“I don’t know,” Aremu said, quietly. “I think it’d change a man to know, to understand what he tries to tell himself,” what the Circle tries to tell him, he remembered, suddenly, a voice long-forgotten from his boyhood, a rough hand on his forehead as he shook curled up in bed, a snatch of memory gone as soon as he’d glimpsed it, “when he sleeps.” Aremu went on, unbroken.

“Is it always better to understand?” Aremu glanced at the stovetop, where the smell of kofi was growing steadily stronger. Much longer, he thought, and it’d be burnt. He didn’t say anything; he thought he’d rather have kofi burned by Tom than anything else, just now. He looked back, and he told himself not to look again. “Sometimes it seems easier, at least, to just let dreams be dreams.”

Was not understanding just another form of lying? Aremu wondered, with a dull ache somewhere inside him. It blurred together, for him, these lines; he was only an imbala, he reminded himself. He was a liar, and soulless, and there was nothing in him that could begin to understand. Questions of honor were and always would be beyond him; he knew that thinking of them only seemed to hurt him.

Did it matter if it was a choice? Did it matter if you couldn’t understand, or if you simply chose not to? What if you weren’t sure? Then what? He couldn’t understand, Aremu told himself. This was a wound that would never heal, and there was no junia in all Vita for it, and yet he couldn’t seem to stop himself from playing with the bandage, again and again, teasing at the edges of it, lifting it up, and looking at the raw, empty flesh beneath.

Aremu’s hands were still wrapped around Tom’s, and Tom’s wrapped around his. Aremu looked down at it, and he thought he understood why Tom had smiled. At the very least, he was smiling too, and all the weight of their words couldn’t shake it.

“What did you dream of?” Aremu asked, softly. He knew the question for a bad idea as he asked it; he knew better. He thought he could feel Tom recoil the moment the question left his lips; he could picture it so easily that he couldn’t have said, for a moment, whether he saw the belief or the world before him.

He didn’t have any right to such questions, Aremu told himself. He looked down at their hands, again, and the canvas of their torsos beyond it, bare and scuffed, both scarred, his almost bare and Tom’s thickly brushed with hair, the color vastly, starkly different even in the midst of Yaris. He swallowed, a little, and he didn’t take it back, even though those words, too, clawed somewhere in the midst of his throat, and would have been terribly easy to speak.

[Tom Cooke]

Home • Quarter Fords

Morning on the 28th of Yaris, 2716

W
hat a man tries to tell himself. Funny way of saying it, all told. Tom was looking down at his hands, like maybe he could see through the skin and the scars, like maybe there was something in there he didn’t know about. Like maybe there was something inside Aremu’s bones he didn’t know about, too. He wanted to say something about it, but there was a lump in his throat.

What is it, he wanted to ask, what’s the part of you that’s telling you shit in your sleep? Is it your soul? He didn’t ask, ‘cause it was mung; he didn’t think Aremu’d laugh at him, ne, not ne more, but it was mung all the same. Still, he wanted to ask: what’s inside you?

The thought of a him inside him, separate but all tangled up so tight he couldn’t find it or pry it out, troubled him. Oes, maybe that was it. A kov’s an animal like any other, he reckoned, like a hingle or a banderwolf. Kov’s got something in his head that thinks, something as can pretend to be gentle – for a time – and maybe he even thinks that thing’s separate from the thing inside him that’s only good for fighting and running and tearing with its teeth.

Let dreams be dreams. Easier, oes; easy like letting sex be sex.

He shifted his hands, running his thumb over Aremu’s; he thought in the silence he might lift it to his lips, might fill the silence with his lips, maybe his hands and the rest of him too. Maybe the other man’d forget he burned the kofi, if it was good enough. Usually was good enough, he reckoned. Nobody’d much complained.

He glanced up at the question. Aremu was looking down at their hands, smiling. He looked back down; he wasn’t sure he could smile. What did you dream of?

Nothin’ I remember, he wanted to reply, with a cheeky grin that covered up the bite of anger. You want the kofi to burn, kov? A pina angrier; out of place, in the quiet warm space between the two of them. No – just kiss him, right now, whisper in his ear, You.

“Somebody I miss,” he said, ‘cause he was a fucking idiot. He was smiling, too; he was still stroking his hand. “Not a man,” he added quiet-like, “ne like that. Somebody else. Somebody who’s gone.”

Kofi was smelling fair strong. He smiled up at Aremu, taking a deep breath. Dreamt of you, too, he wanted to say, not olio, not with a kiss. Dreamt of you going in the night, and the bed all cold. He didn’t; he lifted his hand to his lips, kissed it, then turned to get the eschana off the stove, and the two battered metal cups from the cabinet.

What did you dream of? he thought to ask again. But it would’ve been wrong; kov’d already said he didn’t remember.

Kofi threw up a whirl of steam as he poured; he couldn’t tell if it was burnt, but he couldn’t tell much of nothing, except it was kofi and he could smell it. “Dream of the qalqa, more often, like all men do.” He shrugged. Easier answer. “Dream of old scars,” tearing open, he didn’t say, with a flicker of a grimace across his lips, “an’ how I got ‘em.”

He’d forgot to crush up the spices; he’d forgot to ask if he wanted any, or which. All this talk. When he handed the cup to Aremu, he let their fingers brush.

“Dream of fallin’, sometimes,” he said, smiling a lopsided sort of smile. Dream of being on that ship of yours, sometimes; dream of lightning off the balloon; dream of – “Flyin’, too,” he said. “You ever dream of flyin’?” Could've been cheeky; couldn't quite tilt his smile that way.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Morning, 28 Yaris, 2716
Tom and Jaeli’s House, Quarter Fords

Aremu hadn’t expected an answer, and he didn’t know what to make of the one he got. He nodded, slowly, thinking to say something back, something tender. But he’d learned already that the words one offered in Mugroba and the words one offered in Anaxas for grief differed, and he was not sure how to find the words that would make Tom understand how he felt.

That, and he was not so sure, anymore, that the Circle was kind, and the cycle too; it was hard to reconcile it all. There had never been anything like blame for him; he was what was he, and he lacked what he lacked. He had wondered all the same – he had gone so far as to ask, once, as a boy, whether if he had only been better –

He remembered his tutor, an imbala, one of the ones at the preparatory school who taught only the imbala boys in the class, had never looked at him quite the same, afterwards. He’d never known, then, what to make of it; now he thought might have been pity. No one told me, he might have said; but if he’d known to say that, he would probably have asked to begin with.

Tom was smiling, though, so Aremu smiled too, and then Tom brushed his hands with a kiss and set them aside. The eschana came off the stove, and Tom handed him the cup, their fingers brushing together in the passing. Aremu’s smile warmed, a little more.

He leaned against the counter, not quite finding it in himself to go back to the table. He wasn’t sure if Tom would follow; he didn’t want to risk it.

“Sometimes,” Aremu said with a little smile. “As if I’m a airship myself,” he lifted the cup of kofi to his lips and took a sip. It wasn’t bad; he smiled at Tom, cradling the warmth of it between his hands, and all through him. “And of scars, sometimes,” Aremu said, quietly.

Sometimes I dream I’m whole, he didn’t say, because Tom didn’t know the way in which he was empty, and he did not know how to put such a thing between them. He wished he did not remember telling Ipadi that he didn’t want to tell Tom now, as if there would be a time when he did want to tell him, as if the telling would be enough for Tom to understand.

I dreamt once that I could see it flowing out of me – the light which I should have had – leaking from my every pore, from a hundred thousand cuts too small to feel – as if a sieve, and not a man at all, for I could hold nothing inside me.

I don’t usually remember my dreams, Aremu wanted to say. Wasn’t it true? However he got there, in the end, wasn’t it true?

“I knew someone who learned to control her dreams,” Aremu said; he smiled at Tom, for all that he felt something ache at the edges of it. “She said she began with knowing them, with marking them in her waking mind, and that one she knew herself, she could know what was a dream, even when she was in the midst of it. It was the knowing, she said, that let her take the reins of the dreams in her hands, and to reshape them as she saw fit.”

He took another sip of kofi, shifting his hip against the counter. She told me, he didn’t say, that it would help with my nightmares, to face them. But she never understood, not really; she couldn’t. She’s gone, now, too. I don’t dream of her anymore.

What does Jaeli think of dreams? He wanted to ask, then, his mind wandering down the path of it, but it seemed strange to him, still, to speak of the other man; he took another sip of kofi instead.

[Tom Cooke]

Home • Quarter Fords

Morning on the 28th of Yaris, 2716

H
e nodded, slow, a little half-smile on his lips to mirror Aremu’s. Took a sip finally, resting back against the counter. It was rich and dark, thick – soft powdery grains clung to his tongue at first – but leastways not burnt; he watched Aremu take a sip and smile, and his own smile warmed as he looked back down into the kofi.

The metal prickled and burned against his fingertips. He held the handle with one hand, but the bulb with the other; it’d just cooled off enough not to burn, for all it was still white, numbing hot.

He’d smelt burnt flesh before, and not too long ago. That’d been poetry, oes; this – maybe it was a sort of poetry, too, the engines Aremu worked with, turning and scalding and full of pressure. He thought of the long strip of glossy flesh along the inside of his wrist, an older burn scar on his back, and wondered if Aremu dreamt of these. Tom’d dreamt of crawling round in the bowels of an aeroship once, since Breckenridge, the spaces getting smaller and smaller and hotter and hotter.

Price of flying, he reckoned. A man wasn’t, after all, a ship.

Wasn’t expecting Aremu to go on. Felt a pina silly for what he’d said, first – Aremu’d been quiet – felt soppy, felt like he was letting lines blur as needed to be hard.

But he looked up with a spark of interest, looking over at the other man, with the sun behind all sparking through his soft short hair.

“That so?” he asked. It came out soft; he saw something in Aremu’s face, maybe, pinching at the edges of his eyes. “Reshape ‘em,” he murmured.

Jaeli says shit like that, he thought to say, taking another sip. He wondered at this she; he thought he remembered something Jaeli’d said, vague, after he’d spent some time with Aremu. Ipadi’s laughing Mugrobi bubbled up in his head.

He thought more. His stomach gave a lurch and an audible growl; he cleared his throat, then set the kofi down.

Wasn’t sure what got him off track. Maybe it was Aremu’s eyes, as he’d handled the eschana; maybe it was him standing at the counter, just now, still watching and talking, like Tom was the sort of man as could do this sort of thing. He got a bowl, then found the dark nook by the cabinet where the eggs lived.

He crouched, breathing in the smell of slaked lime. He took four at first, delicate shells slippery in his hands. “Once knew a man as tried to do the same,” he said, “but wi’ chan, sometimes, an’ nightshade – managed to get a moss as grows in Gior for it, once. Said it helped him get to know himself. Know the part of him as woke up in dreams, an’ fell asleep in the waking,” he amended, his neck prickling.

He started, then thought of the night before and got two more eggs. He smiled at Aremu when he brushed by, setting the eggs on the counter, like he knew what in hell he was doing. Like dreaming, maybe.

He got down hama’s mant pan, started to heat some butter. The smell rolled out, mingling with the kofi. He stood halfway between the stove and Aremu with his arms crossed, eyes wandering across the counter. You ever managed it? he didn’t ask; he thought he knew the answer, nestled in Aremu’s pauses.

“Would you reshape ‘em?” he asked, soft. “If you could know ‘em so.” He looked at Aremu, eyes intent. If you could know yourself so, he couldn’t bear to say.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Morning, 28 Yaris, 2716
Tom and Jaeli’s House, Quarter Fords

It was Tom’s stomach that went first; Aremu’s came after it, grumbling low and steady. He grinned, sheepish, setting the cup of kofi down and smiling at Tom. The thought of the kofi waking it up was a pleasant one, after all.

After all we had last night, he wanted to say, I don’t see how I can still want. But he did; he knew he did. Tom wanted, too, Aremu knew; he didn’t doubt that.

Just now the other man was brushing past him, four eggs balanced carefully in his large, scarred hands. He took down a large pan, cut some butter into it. Aremu watched, smiling, not sure why the sight should please him so.

“The part of him as woke up in dreams,” Aremu said, his brows drawing together. The eggs were sitting on the counter, four, and then two more, six total. He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand, conscious of a prickle there. “Did he say it was a different one?” Aremu asked, quietly. “Some… other self?”

His soul, perhaps, Aremu thought, but he didn’t quite have the courage to ask it outright. He had somewhere, sometimes, if it would work for him; he knew Tsusi had thought it would, but he hadn’t been so sure, really. Maybe it was the doubt that mattered, Aremu thought, but it didn’t seem likely.

The smell of warming butter mingled with the kofi; Aremu’s stomach grumbled again, louder, and he grinned, sheepish. He took another sip of kofi, leaning comfortably against the counter, watching Tom and unsure what Tom was watching, with his eyes fixed on the counter.

“I don’t know,” Aremu said, looking back at the other man when he answered. He shifted; he adjusted the way his back rested against it, and set the kofi cup down. He smiled, wry. “Maybe if I were the sort of man who could, I wouldn’t need to anymore,” he said, quiet, “or else wouldn’t want to.”

If I had that now, he didn’t say; if I had the power of it, without the work – I suppose I would use it. What man wouldn’t? But an imbala knows better than anyone how wrong it is so to take something you’ve no right to, to use it without understanding, without intent. That he doesn’t have a choice, either, hardly seems to make it any better, or at least had never left Aremu feeling any easier on the subject.

“I suppose the question is whether it’s the understanding or the reshaping that matters,” Aremu glanced up at Tom with a little smile, not sure when he’d looked down, or when the smile had trickled off the edges of their face. “If I don’t know what they’re telling me, perhaps it’s wrong not to listen.” He took the kofi in his hands again, holding it there; he didn’t drink, yet, enjoying the prickle of warmth against his palms, and the rich, dark smell of it.

The butter was melted, now, a swirl of pale liquid just starting to crackle in the pan. By the sound and smell of it, Aremu knew, it was hot enough for the eggs; he didn’t say anything, not entirely sure whether Tom had some other way of going about it, or whether it was Jaeli, too, who made the eggs. If Tom had wanted him to help, Aremu thought, uncertainly, he’d have asked, or so Aremu supposed.

“What about you?” Aremu smiled at the other man. “Would you reshape them?” The light was brightening, a little, more yellow than pale gold, now, lightening to the sort of crisp, clear Yaris sun they’d had the day before. It washed over the kitchen more, now, and he wasn’t so cold as he’d been before; whether it was the light or the kofi, Aremu couldn’t say.

[Tom Cooke]

Home • Quarter Fords

Morning on the 28th of Yaris, 2716

W
as that how he sounded?

Hadn’t realized he’d said it so – hadn’t thought, ne really, how he’d said it, or if he’d said it much different than Aremu would’ve. He heard the difference, rolling out in Aremu’s Mugrobi accent; it wasn’t like the Tek, ‘cause he knew every bit of Tek he used, and this time, he couldn’t’ve said what the difference was. Just that it sounded different. Less –

Or more –

He didn’t want to find the words for what it was. He was looking at the table, his eyes out of focus, and he looked up again at Aremu. The imbala was rubbing the back of his neck; he resisted the urge to do the same, ‘cause it itched.

A different one; some other self, he was saying. Tom’s head came into focus, looking at Aremu’s thoughtful expression – he wasn’t laughing, ne; he never had – and he shook his head, slow-like.

He was about to say something when the growl of Aremu’s stomach sounded, and he caught the sheepish grin with a grin of his own.

“That self, dove?” he said, and laughed. “Ne,” he added, softer. “He never said. Called it him, whatever it was. Asked me once if I thought I was a different man, when I – drank,” he barely paused, “an’ I ain’t got a clue, still.” He was silent for a while.

Aremu picked up after a moment, and Tom felt his eyes and his words like a tug; he felt the way he shifted his posture, felt the soft vibration of the kofi cup on the counter between them, felt the wry line at the edge of his smile. The butter sizzled behind; he watched Aremu, rapt, and listened, even as the other man looked down and away. He realized he wasn’t smiling anymore neither, though he didn’t know when he’d stopped.

He paused at the question. He looked down, thinking hard, then back up, and he didn’t look away this time, studying the other man’s face. “What would I shape ‘em to?” he asked. “If you know what it means, you know it’s tryin’ to tell you somethin’, somethin’ important – if you understand the point it’s tryin’ to make…”

Shape them, he thought. Would he change it so his voice wasn’t stuck, so she found the key and came home? And then, he’d make her tea, knowing it was a dream?

Would he change it so she never came to the window at all? Would he change it so Aremu’d never left the bed? Would he change it so all the bloody dreams melted away, and he flew instead, and the blood didn’t bother him no more?

Pop from the stovetop. He grunted, turned; less butter in the pan than there’d been, and some of it’d browned, but –

Might’ve cracked ‘em all in, said fuck the way they looked; maybe they’d’ve been better if he had. Somehow, he found himself cracking ‘em on the side of the bowl, pouring ‘em in the pan like he remembered, fair slow, so the yolk plopped out on top. Thought maybe Aremu’d like ‘em like that, all pretty, like the sun peeking out of a white sky. Or leastways that he’d gone to the trouble.

Except the whites ran all round and blended together, and two of the yolks broke somewhere between the bowl and the pan, or maybe they’d broke before that, when his big hands was working at the shell.

They was all in the pan, now, sizzling easy-like, some of the slurry pale already gone milk-white. They looked – all right, like this.

“Maybe,” he murmured. “Don’t think I would.” He turned, though he knew he ought to be watching, and smiled at Aremu instead. “Old Yarrow, that was his name. He talked like there was a different self to understand, every time he took somethin’ new.”

It was where they’d meandered, then, when he’d buried his head in his hands, when he’d tried to leave along the edge of the wharf; it was where they’d meandered, when he’d asked him to stay. Tom’s brow knit, for all he smiled. He didn’t want to drive the other man off again, for all he hadn’t known – still didn’t know – why.

“Is it wrong, to want a happy dream?” It was fucking ridiculous, he knew, the moment it’d left his lips; the mungest thing a tough’d ever asked a pirate. “To want peace,” he added, quieter, and knew it even more mung.

[Aremu Ediwo]

Morning, 28 Yaris, 2716
Tom and Jaeli’s House, Quarter Fords

Aremu watched Tom crack the eggs in, one by one, careful, the yolks running on top of the whites. He smiled, more at the sight of Tom handling them so carefully, than the end result.

He didn’t, really, like eggs the way Anaxi cooked them, not especially. They were useful, as a food; one could buy them anywhere, and throw them together easily enough. He hadn’t eaten them much as a young boy, but he’d eaten plenty of them in his teens: scrambled, mixed with red onions, roughly chopped peppers, and diced tomatoes, tossed all together until just mixed through. Left to his own devices, he’d add more spices: cumin, paprika, coriander, whatever they had in stock. Peppers or zucchinis, if they had them, although he liked them just as well without, and sometimes other, stranger things. The challenge was keeping them creamy and soft with all of the additions.

When he made eggs, he stirred constantly; he pressed them back and forth around the pan, smooth and even, holding it steady with one hand as the other did the work. Tom had cracked the eggs in and stood, frowning uncertainly down towards them for a moment, before he eased away and looked at Aremu.

Aremu smiled back at him, and he didn’t look at the eggs, either. Something prickled down his neck again when Tom spoke of it; it might have hurt, perhaps it should have, but it didn’t. “Different selves,” Aremu said, quietly. “A man like a die, rolling to see where he lands? Or like a mirror, shattered, and something different reflected in every part.”

He ducked his head a little, feeling silly; he never quite knew what Tom made of him, for all that the other man seemed to like to follow the drift of his thoughts, to pick up the threads and wave them into something all his own with deft hands.

“No,” Aremu said, softly, when Tom asked his question; he looked at him, really looked, and he didn’t about it, and he saw something on the other man’s face that he couldn’t quite name, but he knew all the same. Aremu swallowed, his throat moving, and reached out, taking Tom’s hand in his once more. He didn’t trace it, didn’t study the lines or scars of it, not even the tufts of hair; he didn’t lift it to his lips and kiss it again, for all that he wanted to. He just held it, smiling a little, something just as soft and equally strange on his own face. "No," he said again.

To want a happy dream.

I shouldn’t wonder, Aremu wanted to say, if the looking might hurt; like a man knowing himself, each side of it, fractured or turned, however they lay, peering them over and fitting them into himself. It’s a painful process, isn’t it? It must be.

I don’t think I’d know where to start, Aremu wanted to say. Tsusi told me something of it, with dreams, but does it work the same way? Is it all about knowing, about watching and listening and remembering? Surely there must be something else to it; surely there be more.

I’ve a dream, at least, Aremu wanted to say; it’s bloody, sometimes, and awful others, but it’s mine, when for a long time I didn’t dare to hope for it. You’ve one too; I know you do, I’ve walked through it, the dirt and plants growing together. Maybe that’s what all men dream of, in the end: home, and all its strangeness and charm, or else the things that keep him from it.

The eggs popped from the stove; Aremu’s glance flickered over Tom’s shoulder. He smiled, faintly, and let go. “I’ve distracted you,” he said. He didn’t know what made him do it; he leaned forward, and brushed Tom’s cheek with a kiss, and eased away, once more, resting against the counter again.