Timê (2/2)
Timê
part one & headers
Venice, 1606 C.E.
Gabe hadn’t been lurking, precisely, in the back of the theatre during the rehearsal, but he certainly hadn’t made his presence known. William spotted him anyway.
“I thought we said England,” he offered by way of greeting, head tilted inquiringly but smiling nonetheless. “Have you become geographically confused?”
“What, and miss this?” Gabe scoffed, pushing off the wall he’d been leaning against to come and give William a proper hug. “The rebirth of an all-musical form of drama? You must be joking. How long have you been here?”
“Seven years,” William admitted, pushing his hair back behind his ear. “I came to Italy as soon as I heard about Dafne. What happened to Italy being boring?”
“Welcome to the Renaissance,” Gabe replied, spreading his hands and grinning. “Italy got a lot more interesting. Not that England isn’t, but Italy has this, and it has you, so here I am.”
“Here you are,” William agreed, with a fondness Gabe didn’t think he was at all imagining. “So you’re writing an opera? Will you be premiering it against mine?”
“Better,” Gabe answered, relishing both the announcement and the look of confusion on William’s face. “I’m working on yours.”
The confusion turned instantly to wariness. “How are you working on mine?” William asked, gaze searching Gabe’s face for clues. “I’ve already finished the music and I’m writing the libretto.”
“Yes, but what you don’t have,” Gabe declared jubilantly, “are intermezzi.”
William was quick on the uptake, Gabe had to admit. “You’ve been commissioned to write the intermezzi for my opera,” he said, rather than asked. “How does that arrangement work into our competition, exactly?”
Gabe hooked his thumbs into his waistband. “People love a good intermezzo,” he pointed out, enjoying the moment. It was playing out even better than he’d hoped. “Sometimes even more than the work it interrupts. I’d say it’s a fair show of skill. You have five acts of your opera, I have six intermezzi.”
“One cohesive story against six disjointed spectacles,” William said dryly, but he didn’t protest. Gabe had expected him to put up more of a fuss, but that only meant that he was confident. Well, Gabe was confident too.
“Fantastic spectacles,” he replied merrily. “Enormous, awe-inducing spectacles. I’m using dolphins and mermaids.”
“You can’t have dolphins,” William said immediately. “My opera has dolphins, you’ll ruin the surprise.”
“I need dolphins, they pull the aquatic chariot,” Gabe responded, waving his hand dismissively. “And a chorus of angels descending from the clouds.”
“You - ” William began, and then clearly reined himself in. “Very well,” he said, holding out a hand for Gabe to shake. “Let the contest begin.”
“It’s been over three thousand years since it began,” Gabe called back over his shoulder as he walked away, leaving William with his hand outstretched and looking somewhere between perplexed and incensed. “Catch me if you can, or I’ll be leaving you in the dust.”
“I’m still winning!” William called after him as the door swung shut. Gabe walked out into the sunlight grinning harder than he had in decades.
-
Gabe walked into the theatre whistling, which earned him a glare from William even before one of the gentlemen backstage mistook his songbird impression for a cue and sent a painted sun crashing into one of the sturdy platforms disguised as clouds.
“Rehearsal going well?” he asked cheerfully, swinging into an empty seat.
“Yes, thank you,” William answered, managing - to Gabe’s disappointment - to hold himself in check. “How are your spectacles coming?”
“Brilliant!” Gabe answered brightly, which was not strictly a lie. The light from the thousand floating candles surrounding the barge had been pretty radiant. The Turkish costume that had caught on fire as a result had been less so, but that was what rehearsal was for. “Ready for tomorrow?”
“The performance is in two days,” William said with perfect calm, only part of his attention on Gabe while the rest supervised the three singers climbing into a boat which Gabe divined was about to go down over the onstage waterfall.
“Right, so it is,” Gabe agreed, only mildly put out that William was refusing so steadfastly to rise to his bait. It wasn’t that he had any desire to sabotage William’s rehearsal, honestly, it was just that he was bored, and everything was more fun with William around. Wandering the city alone didn’t have the same appeal; he’d grown bored this afternoon after only two hours. “Shouldn’t you be up there? You will be performing in your work, won’t you?”
William gave him a look which suggested inaccurately that Gabe was somewhat simple. “Not in one of the leading roles,” he answered. “I prefer my anatomy intact, perfect voice or no.”
“Good. I was hoping you hadn’t decided to go castrato.” One of the men onstage gave Gabe a haughty look and a sniff, clearly dismissing him. Gabe considered giving him a lazy Italian salute in return, but decided it wasn’t worth it. Men who didn’t have their balls anymore should be pitied, not taunted. In lieu of such entertainment, Gabe waggled his eyebrows at William. “It would make certain things a lot less fun, and I seem to remember you being rather fond of them.”
“Shouldn’t you be rehearsing?” William inquired, although Gabe saw the faint stain of a flush redden his throat and cheeks, so at least that comment had hit home. Good; Gabe wasn’t planning on spending his time alone tonight.
“Finished,” he answered. “Well, until tomorrow, when we get to work in the theatre for the run-through.”
William turned, waterfall forgotten, and stared at him. “There’s a complete run-through tomorrow?” he repeated.
“Yep.” Gabe leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms behind his head. “That’s why I asked if you were ready for it.”
The boat tipped over the edge of the artificial waterfall nose-first, and promptly dumped all three singers out into the shallow onstage river before righting itself and bobbing away downstream. The castrati came up spluttering and inhaling water, which couldn’t be doing much for their singing voices.
“Hey,” Gabe said mock-sympathetically, watching one of the drenched singers pull himself out of the water and immediately start screaming at the man in charge of the boat, “Just remember, it all comes together in the end.”
“It’s coming together just fine,” William said firmly, raising his voice to call backstage. “Let them dry off, let’s rehearse Deianira’s wedding song.”
It took Gabe a few seconds for the name to click, but when it did, the context didn’t elude him. “You’re writing about Achelous,” he said accusingly, pointing at the river dominating the stage. “You’re writing about us.”
“The opera is about the eleventh labor of Heracles, which is perfectly sound dramatic material,” William replied, maddeningly casual for someone who was dramatizing his own life story in five acts. “There are hundreds of contests in classical mythology, and the last time I checked, we weren’t fighting over a woman.”
“You can’t win using me,” Gabe objected, as the castrato onstage began to sing about how his (or her) hero had traveled the world and been granted the greatest gifts, touched by the very gods. “That has to be cheating.”
“You wrote a song about me for the Almohads,” William countered, bringing Gabe momentarily up short. “I heard it. They sang it in Al-Andalus.”
“That was about someone else entirely,” Gabe said immediately, and didn’t meet William’s eyes when one brow arched meaningfully in his direction. “And anyway, that was different. This is for the contest.”
“It wasn’t,” William pointed out, nodding in approval as the gods descended from the cloud platforms to praise the slightly-damp Heracles and the many virtues of his new bride. “You were the one who showed up in the middle of it.”
Gabe opened his mouth and then shut it again. “You’re still cheating,” he insisted. Then he left William to his rehearsal and went to write a new afterpiece for the final intermezzo of the opera.
Someone had to make sure the story ended correctly, after all.
-
“The eleventh labor of Heracles was not meant to teach us about the bonds of friendship,” William said after the premiere, as soon as he’d found Gabe among the various members of the academies. “And Achelous was not a messenger of the gods sent to promote harmony and understanding.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Gabe said glibly. “My intermezzi had nothing to do with your opera. They serve as their own contained dramatic episodes.”
“They sounded awfully familiar,” William drawled. “And the costumes they were wearing looked suspiciously like togas.”
Gabe waved a hand. “Classical fashion is all the rage,” he dismissed. “Hardly any correlation.”
William continued favoring him with that look that said I’m onto you, but he didn’t have any proof and Gabe wasn’t about to give it to him, so he wisely let the matter drop. “Are we calling on someone to judge this for us?” he asked instead. “What should serve as the deciding factor?”
Everyone from the academies appeared to know William, which didn’t surprise Gabe at all. He would have been still less surprised to find that William had found his way into one years ago when all of the opera madness began.
It was a good thing, then, that Gabe didn’t need to call on them as judges. “I’ve received seven invitations to perform my intermezzi at various courts and academies across Italy,” he said, producing a handful of cards to wave in William’s direction. “How is your opera doing?”
William opened his mouth to respond, then paused and shook his head. “Excuse me,” he said politely, and set off across the room, making a beeline for the same gentlemen who’d approached Gabe about a production in Florence.
Gabe took a drink of his wine and called cheerfully after him, “Taste the dust yet?”
Gabe excelled at social commentary; William should have known better than to compete against him in a culture currently so mad for it. Another gentleman cornered him almost immediately to engage him for an entertainment across the continent in Paris. Gabe listened attentively to the new offer, and didn’t worry when he lost track of William in the crowd. It didn’t matter if they didn’t catch each other again here. They still had a standing appointment in Brittannia.
-
-
Atlantic Ocean, 1821 C.E.
“Welcome aboard,” the first mate said as soon as they’d pulled Gabe out of the rowboat he had been previously occupying and installed him on board one of His Majesty’s Ships.
“Yes, welcome aboard,” another voice echoed. Gabe actually had to blink a few times to make sure the sun hadn’t gotten to him, but when he’d finished William was still standing there, lounging against the rail and offering him a dry shirt.
Gabe took the proffered item of clothing slowly. “I’d like to point out that this ship is heading away from England, rather than toward it,” he said finally.
William shrugged one thin, more-tanned-than-usual shoulder at him. “I get back every once in a while,” he replied. “And I didn’t think it was time yet. Clearly neither did you. Or were you planning on rowing all the way back across the Atlantic?”
“I could have made it,” Gabe answered lazily, flashing a grin. “But no, actually, my former vessel ran into some difficulties. French ships are not so popular at the moment, in case you hadn’t heard.”
“I wonder why,” William drawled, and reached down to toss a pair of fresh boots over as well. Gabe took the hint and started stripping.
“So you’re a sailor now?” he asked, and then had to stop to laugh. William didn’t appear all that amused, so Gabe rephrased, “I mean, a sailor. You? Really?”
“I’m doing a fine job, thank you very much,” William returned. “And it was the easiest way to get to the New World.”
“You could have gone along as a colonist,” Gabe pointed out. “Free ride, less work.”
William rolled his eyes. “I can pull on a few ropes,” he said. “And so will you, shortly. I don’t imagine they’ll just let you stow away for nothing.”
“That’s fine,” Gabe replied, rolling out his shoulders and appreciating the feel - and the smell - of cloth that wasn’t stiffened by dirt and salt water. “I’ve been a sailor before. Within a century, even.”
William looked interested, but didn’t comment beyond, “And now you’re heading to the New World.”
“Been there, too,” Gabe said, grinning wider. William’s look sharpened more intently into interest, along with a touch of envy.
“When?” he asked, but they were interrupted by the bell sounding the change of shift, so William stepped reluctantly away. “We’ll talk later.”
“Tonight, by the forebitts,” Gabe called after him. “Bring your pipes.”
-
After eating enough for three meals and sleeping for what felt like a year, Gabe finally dragged himself up on deck to where the crew was clustered around the forebitts, mending gear and socializing. The forebitts was the one part of the ship seafarers universally reserved for recreation in their off-hours, which was why the songs performed there were gifted with the same name.
Gabe spotted William easily enough and made his way over, claiming the spot next to him. “I still can’t believe you’re a sailor,” he remarked, shaking his head.
“I had a craving to learn the hornpipe,” William replied. He glanced sideways, giving Gabe a once-over. “It’s a long trip to the Americas, we don’t have to do this tonight. You don’t even have an instrument.”
“I’ll borrow one,” Gabe said easily. “It looks like the men have a fine assortment. You probably have five or six stowed away.”
“Three,” William corrected, and then added casually, “I should warn you, they love me here.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Gabe returned, holding out his hands in request for the mandolin one of the crew had been plucking idly into some sort of tune. He smiled innocently. “Doesn’t mean they won’t love me more.”
“Don’t play that, it’s a travesty,” William told him. “I have a mandora you can use. Strictly foc’s’le songs, or should we set broader terms?”
“I like its sound,” Gabe lied, plucking the strings enthusiastically to watch William’s facial contortions in response. “Three forebitters each?”
William reached to the side and claimed his aforementioned mandora. “After you,” he said politely, gesturing grandly. “Since you’ve already tuned.”
William was right, the sailors did love him. They were, however, ready to pledge their unborn children to Gabe.
“It’s not an insult,” Gabe said afterward, as they sprawled on the deck cleaning gear and sipping their daily ration of alcohol. “You’ve spent too long in England, they know your songs. I’m new and exciting, they’re not bored with me yet. And I know thirty-seven verses to that last song.”
“You made up twenty-two of them on the spot,” William retorted grumpily.
Gabe rolled in toward his side, bumping their shoulders together. “Don’t be a sore loser just because I’ve had a…” He had to stop and calculate, finally coming up with, “six hundred year winning streak.”
“Be prepared for it to end,” William told him seriously, but the reluctant smile that Gabe coaxed out of him immediately afterward ruined the effect.
“Why, because you’ve never been to the New World and they’re not bored with you yet?” Gabe asked, snorting. “They’re not bored with me either.”
William pillowed his head on his arm and watched Gabe, features soft in the moonlight. “When were you there?” he asked. “Recently?”
Gabe shook his head and leaned back on his elbows, looking up at the stars. “Not since Spain arrived,” he answered, unable to completely disguise the sadness in his voice. “I was there long before mainland Europe knew there was something to discover.” He drained the rest of his cup and set it aside on the deck. “I first came across as a vikingr, and kicked around for a while. This was before you became a Christian and broke my heart,” he said sorrowfully, giving William a woeful look and receiving a kick to his shin in return.
“You’re still not letting that go,” William complained, sounding much more put-upon than Gabe suspected he actually was.
“And never will,” Gabe agreed. “It’s an error that will follow you for the rest of your days.”
“You were in Judah for decades,” William objected. “And you traveled with the Seljuqs.”
“That was entirely different from what you did,” Gabe informed him, shuddering dramatically. “Celibacy.”
William’s eyebrows rose. “I hate to break this to you,” he said slowly, “but we’re on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. Exactly what would you call this?”
Gabe sat straight up. “Oh, no,” he objected, to William specifically and the rest of the deck in general. “No, no. That’s entirely unreasonable.”
“Where precisely do you suggest we find the privacy to do anything that won’t get us thrown off the side and back into your charming rowboat?” William asked mildly.
Gabe groaned and flopped back onto the deck. “I hate this century,” he complained. “And the one before it. And the one before that.”
“You loved the one before that,” William argued, smiling softly. “You just object to the shifting morality of old world culture.”
Gabe rolled onto his side, propped up on his elbow above William’s familiar face. “I object to anything that won’t let me kiss you right now,” he said seriously.
“I would have been too old for you in Greece,” William murmured, reaching out to trace the line of Gabe’s arm, into the sensitive skin at the crook of his elbow. “We would have been a scandal anywhere.”
“Thebes,” Gabe returned, leaning in closer and still not enough. “I could have been with you in Thebes.”
“I miss Thebes,” William said, smiling again.
Gabe groaned softly, and William laughed and touched his arm again, light and knowing. “You know what I miss?” Gabe mused. “Rome. Specifically, the baths.”
William laughed again, head tipping back and eyes closing. “That’s how I always found you, you know,” he teased. “I followed my nose to the oasis in the midst of the unwashed masses.”
Gabe growled a little with the desire to bite William’s exposed throat, and William’s eyes slit open like he knew precisely what Gabe was thinking. Then again, he was probably the one subconsciously encouraging Gabe to think it in the first place.
Gabe leaned back to give them some more distance and forced himself to relax a little. “You know what I miss?” he said with relish. “Mycenaeans. And India, centuries ago. When the women all went around bare-breasted and flaunting it.”
William looked startled, then torn between similar nostalgic appreciation and annoyance. Gabe laughed at him and tugged William’s unkempt hair lightly when he predictably bristled.
“I would trade any of them for you in a heartbeat,” he murmured. “Entire civilizations, even.”
“It’s why I stay away so long,” William replied, laughter touching the corners of his eyes. “So you remember to miss me.”
“You’d trade civilizations for me, too,” Gabe challenged, poking the soft curve of William’s stomach. “Don’t pretend you wouldn’t. You’d get rid of the Aztecs.”
William made a low growling noise in his throat that Gabe really shouldn’t have found as arousing as he did. “I hated the Aztecs.”
“I know you did,” Gabe laughed, leaning forward enough to bump their noses together, resisting further temptation than that brief moment of contact. “You weren’t even there.”
“You were,” William replied, fingertips playing idly with the hem of Gabe’s shirt. If William really didn’t want them thrown off this ship, Gabe thought, they both needed to go to separate areas of the deck soon. “That’s where you were when I was in Ghazni, wasn’t it?”
Gabe frowned, distracted from the speech he’d been about to give about the Inca and the Maya by that nugget of information. “You were in Ghazni?”
“Focus,” William ordered, laughing, and Gabe couldn’t stand it anymore, he grabbed William’s wrist and pulled him up off the deck. William tripped along behind him, confused but willing enough. “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere private,” Gabe said, navigating the capstan and nodding to sailors as they passed. “For at least forty-five seconds, all of which I plan to thoroughly make the most of.”
William’s hand brushed against him in a way that could have been passed off as entirely innocent and definitely wasn’t. “That reminds me,” he said idly, close enough for his hair to tickle Gabe’s neck. “Are you all that set on going to the New World right away?”
Gabe turned, searching William’s face in the dim light. “Why?” he asked, intrigued when he perhaps should have been more wary, considering the sly look on William’s face. “What did you have in mind?”
-
-
Port Phillip, 1822 C.E.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Gabe said. “A didgeridoo?”
William gave the instrument a thorough inspection, checking the rim and sugarbag with every sign of being completely serious. “It’s quite possibly the oldest wind instrument in existence,” he replied, peering down the length of the enormous piece of wood. “It’s fitting for the particular nature of our contest, don’t you think?”
“What are we judging, who can make the most noise with it?” Gabe asked, rapping the solid exterior with his knuckles, prompting William to look up from his investigations to glare at him.
“Who can play it the longest,” William answered, brushing Gabe’s hand out of his way. “And who can play it well. The Bunurong clan who manufactured it has expressed wholehearted willingness to listen and judge for us.”
“Oh, I’ll bet they have,” Gabe said, wincing. The way colonial relations were going, he was surprised the clan hadn’t immediately volunteered to spear the two of them with pointy sticks. Making fun of them attempting to blow sound through a tree trunk was more of a pacifist approach, but the intent still seemed the same.
William looked up at him with a grin, and Gabe’s chest did a weird thing that it really shouldn’t still be doing after this much prolonged exposure to that smile. “We have a lesson with the instrument maker,” he said. “If you want to brush up on your skills.”
“This is going to be a catastrophe,” Gabe said cheerfully, but he wasn’t about to say no to that look on William’s face. Naturally it had more to do with the spirit of competition than with anything else. Gabe wasn’t one to walk away from a challenge.
“The first thing we learn is circular breathing,” William said, nearly straight-faced but with a twinkle in his eye that let Gabe know in no uncertain terms how he was imagining that ability might later be put into use.
They’d been at sea for a long time. Gabe curled a friendly hand around William’s elbow and steered him in the direction of their waiting tutor. “Lead on.”
-
They were abysmal. They were worse than abysmal; they were excruciating.
Gabe couldn’t deny it was fun, though. Both of them eventually got the hang of circular breathing - centuries of playing wind instruments all over the world had to be good for something - and while neither of them could sustain it for a particularly long time, they managed the correct vibration of their lips needed to produce the desired harmonics.
After listening to them make horrific amounts of noise for an hour, their tutor started demonstrating various animal sounds and how to mimic them through the instrument. Gabe turned out to have a fairly brilliant dingo impression, but when he attempted the same thing while playing the didgeridoo, the resulting blat of sound was so startling that William actually fell off his bench and onto the ground laughing.
“I dare you to do better,” Gabe defended, his lips still buzzing from the vibration and swollen into something like a constant pout. William’s mouth was looking similarly affected and particularly luscious, which wasn’t something Gabe could dwell on in the presence of a wrinkled sixty-year-old man huffing into a tree trunk.
William stood up, dusted himself off with dignity, and somehow - neither Gabe nor their tutor could actually believe it - produced a pitch-perfect replication of a laughing kookaburra through the droning didgeridoo.
Gabe took a second to get over his dismay, then broke into sincere applause and stood up. “That’s it,” he announced. “I declare you the winner. Fuck knows you’ll never be able to do that again, and I’m ready for dinner.”
William protested, and they did in fact spend another hour hanging around trying to repeat the sound, but neither of them could get it and their attempts were clearly degenerating the longer they tried, so they finally abandoned their lesson as the sun was sinking low on the horizon. Their tutor played as entertainment during dinner, and Gabe took turns with William playing the dilma in elaborate patterns to keep percussive time, which they were both considerably better at than playing the didgeridoo.
Gabe did his dingo impression anyway, and when William threw back his head and laughed, Gabe couldn’t honestly remember why he cared about anything but this.
-
“You let me win,” William accused late that night, when they had fallen to the ground in their guest bough-shelter naked and hopelessly entangled. “You didn’t even let someone else declare me the victor.”
“I didn’t let you win,” Gabe said honestly, hands roaming all over William’s pale, bare skin. “That was a fucking amazing kookaburra, you deserved this round.”
William settled solid and warm between Gabe’s legs, rubbing against him in a way that promised more athletic activities in the very near future. “You could have argued your case,” he pointed out. “Played with more resonance, sustained the sound for longer.”
“You were just as good as I was,” Gabe said, nuzzling his throat only partially because it was a distraction, and mostly just because it was there and he couldn’t resist. “It would have been a toss-up.”
“So you made sure we stayed tied,” William replied, clearly not distracted enough yet. “So that there was a final round.”
Gabe stroked William’s throat, squeezed lightly with just enough pressure to make William shut up. “You won,” he murmured against William’s still-swollen lips. “Enjoy the victory.”
It wasn’t until much later after that, when they were both sated and spent, sweat cooling rapidly as the desert night fell, that William spoke up again.
“If it had been the other way around,” he said softly against Gabe’s shoulder, the rest of him completely still and calm draped over Gabe’s naked body, “I think I would have let you win, too.”
Gabe pressed a kiss to William’s damp forehead, and didn’t bother to answer.
-
-
Honolulu, 1942 C.E.
It wasn’t a surprise at all to find William in a USO dance hall, a glass in hand and foot tapping absently along with the band onstage. The clothes he was wearing were more of a shock.
“You’ve enlisted,” Gabe said, sliding up next to William at the bar. It wasn’t a question; even with the draft, William could have dismissed anyone trying to make him do something with a single thought. Gabe leaned against the bar to take it in, the uniform and the short-cropped regulation haircut. Everything about it was new and gleaming, the buttons and shoe polish shining too bright in the well-lit room.
William’s hum of acknowledgment was absent, but affirmative. Gabe waited him out, let him tap his brand-new boot sole against the polished wooden floor a few more times and come around to it on his own.
“It’s a cause I believe in,” William said, without looking at him. “I don’t want to sing songs about what’s happening in Europe now. I don’t want to write the words for all of that grief.”
“We’ve lived through worse wars than this,” Gabe reminded him. “We’ve watched the world tear itself to pieces around us almost more times than I can count.”
“I know,” William answered, and finally met Gabe’s eyes. He looked weary; more tired than Gabe could remember seeing him. His smile was wan when he said, “Maybe I’m just tired of watching.”
Gabe wanted very much in that moment to kiss him. He settled for brushing William’s cheek with the back of his knuckle, and drinking in the sight of William’s eyes fluttering closed at the touch.
“It’s still not your fight,” Gabe said, as if that could make a difference or change William’s mind.
“Don’t try to pretend you’ve never gotten involved,” William chided, but gently. “I know you were at Montevideo.”
“That was different,” Gabe protested. “I just happened to be there.”
“And happened not to leave,” William said, smiling, which was also true. Not the whole story, but still true.
The band started another song, bright with brass, signaling a jitterbug on the dance floor. Everything in the hall was incongruously upbeat; soldiers looking forward to glory when all they would find was death, and war brides too in love to realize that most of them would become war widows. He wondered how many of them William would get to know by name before they met their ends.
“When do you leave?” he asked, voice low and gravel-rough.
“My unit ships out tomorrow,” William answered, opening his eyes again. He studied Gabe’s face for a moment, and then said quietly, “We both know I can’t die over there.”
Gabe swallowed against the desperation clawing at his throat, and let his hand fall, seeking automatic comfort by curling around his glass sitting on the bar. “Maybe not your body,” he admitted, and wondered how long he could hold this moment, if he never saw William again; if he never saw him like this, still young and shining so brightly from inside that it almost hurt to look at him. “But war can kill your soul.”
William’s hand found his, their palms pressing hard together. “I’ll find you again,” he promised. “It’s not forever.”
Gabe’s fingers curled around William’s, briefly, before he pulled them away. “Stay with me tonight,” he said, swallowing again to clear his throat. “Before you leave.”
William smiled at him, too soft for Gabe to look at directly, and tossed a bill onto the counter before stepping away to follow Gabe out the door.
-
They were still exchanging kisses at dawn, slow and lethargic, the passion of hours past finally run down into exhaustion and quietude.
“Tell me when to meet you,” William whispered. His mouth was wet and red from Gabe’s tongue, their skin still sliding damply with every movement. “Tell me, and I’ll be there.”
Gabe had to think about it, but not for long. “The turn of the century,” he decided, fitting his palms to the familiar angles of William’s hips, his ribs, the secret curves of his elbows. “It’s been a while since I watched the birth of a millennium with you.” He couldn’t wait another six hundred years this time, or even a hundred. He could barely wait sixty.
William’s eyes were too knowing, the way they always were. “I have to go,” he murmured, as dawn finally broke over the horizon and spilled harsh golden light through the blinds and onto the pillows, painting dark streaks of shadow across William’s pale skin.
“You don’t have to,” Gabe argued, more of a token protest than anything real. William knew it, too, his fingers brushing back a stray curl, the touch simple and soothing.
“I do,” he said softly.
Gabe leaned down and kissed him again.
-
-
Chicago, 2001 C.E.
Gabe rang in the new century with all the fanfare it deserved and then some, but he did it alone, and trying not to think too hard about that fact. His skin itched with the need for music, but he was sick of solitude and craved company, so he found a band and a sound and made the kids weep for joy at their shows.
William showed up in the pit at a concert somewhere in Illinois, and for a second Gabe didn’t even believe it was him, convinced his mind was playing tricks. Then he missed a chord and William smiled, like the sun breaking through the clouds, and Gabe sang to him for the entire rest of the show.
“You’re late,” he said by way of greeting when William found him outside in the back alley afterwards. And young; William couldn’t have been more than seventeen now, and maybe not even that. “Your aim was a little off this time.”
William just shrugged one shoulder, careless and unheeding. “I’m here now,” he said. Gabe pressed him against the brick wall and kissed him.
He kept kissing him even after one of his band mates not-so-subtly cleared his throat, after the flurry of whispering from the mouth of the alley, after the aggrieved complaint from his drummer, all the way up until William started laughing too hard for Gabe to suck on his tongue anymore.
“Dude,” Rob said from a reasonable distance away, politely disbelieving. “Dude.”
“What?” Gabe growled at William, who’d started laughing anew. “North American culture has come a long way in sixty years. They might not be throwing bouquets at weddings yet, but I don’t have to hide you in a locked room somewhere. This isn’t illegal.”
William tipped his chin up, smiling wide and innocent. “I’m sixteen,” he said.
Gabe didn’t see the point in this delay, and wasn’t afraid to show his displeasure with it as he leaned in and started nuzzling William’s pale throat. “So?” he mumbled.
William’s slim frame shook with laughter under his hands. “I’m underage,” he said, and Gabe pulled back to stare at him with an expression of complete disbelief.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Gabe said darkly. The irony of the situation - that William was now considered too young for him by the human infants passing judgment on them - was not lost on him one bit.
“Dude,” Rob said again, with slightly more insistence.
“Fuck,” Gabe said, and tangled his fingers with William’s. “You couldn’t have come a little earlier? A little older?” He leaned in for another kiss, because fuck Rob’s maidenly sensibilities, William’s mouth. He murmured, lips against lips like a secret, “Where have you been?”
William’s hand curved over his jaw, sliding up into his hair to soothe stray curls. “I needed to start over,” he said softly, and his eyes were so old in that moment that Gabe didn’t believe anyone could have been fooled by his skin. “I just didn’t realize that was what I needed until it was too late to catch up and meet you.”
Gabe understood that. He understood that all too well. “You’re coming with us,” he declared, pulling William gently away from the wall into his arms, turning to lead him back to the loading dock and the van. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
-
“So you have a band,” Gabe pressed, because as willing as he’d been to let the competition drop in Australia, having William back here now made his bones thrum with the possibility of it.
“I have a solo project,” William corrected, eating another of Gabe’s french fries from the greasy diner special they were calling dinner tonight. “You and I have never brought in other people before.”
“Venice,” Gabe reminded him, but William waved a hand as if to say that wasn’t the same thing at all, and Gabe couldn’t really argue. “Fair enough. You want me to lose the band?”
“No,” William said slowly, thoughtful. “I think I’ll make one, too.”
“Tomorrow night?” Gabe asked, dipping a fry in ketchup before William’s quick little fingers could make off with it. “Next week?”
William rolled his eyes. “How long did you have to put this together?” he asked, gesturing toward the rest of Gabe’s band, chilling together in another booth. “I’m going to need a little more than that.”
“You can take as long as you like, you’re never going to beat me,” Gabe said confidently. He felt like he couldn’t lose, now. Like no matter what happened, there was no possible way he wouldn’t come out on top. “Ten years?”
William rolled his eyes. “I’ll find you again,” he promised, lips curling up in a slow smile. “You’ll know.”
-
“I’ve won,” Gabe crowed, doing a little victory dance of a spin in the disaster zone of their green room. “You’re opening for me. I have a bus. Admit it, I’ve won.”
William hummed his thoughtful, noncommittal hum and flipped a page in his magazine, which featured Gabe and Gabe’s band in a rather prominent display. “I’m not finished yet,” he replied. “You got a head start.”
“You were late,” Gabe corrected, but he didn’t push the matter any further. If William wanted to stick around for a while, Gabe wasn’t going to stop him. “How long do you want? Another tour? Another album?”
William cocked his head and looked at Gabe, considering. “Another year,” he said finally. “One more year.”
“Fine,” Gabe agreed easily, magnanimous in the face of certain victory. “But I’ll still have won.”
William hummed again. Gabe cackled to himself and broke open a celebratory bottle of vodka.
-
Gabe’s band imploded. William’s band, on the other hand, gathered momentum and vision like he was soaking it up from the stage beneath his feet every night and waking up to it every morning.
William’s band had a bus.
“I suppose you think you’ve won now,” Gabe said, with ill spirits but a cursory show of good grace.
William opened his new magazine, unsubtly displaying the spread of his band and their album on the glossy pages. “I think I still have a band,” he pointed out smugly.
“You haven’t had as much time to annoy each other,” Gabe retorted. “Give it another few years, we’ll both be back to solo projects.”
William shut his magazine and looked at Gabe over the cover. “All right,” he said finally. “That’s fair. You have more performance experience in this century, and I have more familiarity with this group of musicians. Shall we start this round over?”
Gabe gaped for a second, then realized the chance he was being given and started patting himself down for his phone. “You’re on,” he called over his shoulder, tucking the phone under his ear as he muttered to himself, “Three and three. Deuce.”
-
His first attempt at putting together a new band was minimally successful. William listened to him rant, offered less-than-helpful suggestions, and even sang on his first single, although that was technically promotion for both of them.
After the chemistry on that endeavor went sour - and William was right about familiarity with the group being an advantage - he located Victoria.
“I’m not a muse,” she told him, cool and perfect in the New York morning. “How do you think I’ll help you, exactly?”
“You’re a siren,” he answered, grinning back at her. “You just do what you do. Trust me, it’ll help.” And in the meantime, it would also make William crazy knowing she was around him constantly, which was an added bonus. Gabe had somehow never quite gotten over his enjoyment at seeing William riled.
“You know,” Victoria purred, examining her gorgeously-filed nails, “that threesome can still be arranged.”
“I am on it like you wouldn’t believe,” Gabe told her. Even if William didn’t go for it, there was still a good chance it would prompt a hell of a reaction. Gabe sensed he would win either way.
“Fine,” she sighed. “I’ll sing for you. No longer than a century.”
“Deal,” he promised, and they clasped hands to seal the bargain.
“Musical victory is ours,” he whooped, and went to see about supporting William’s band on tour.
-
Gabe’s band was nominated for an MTV award, and their song was played on every pop station and clothing store mix-tape in the country.
“Admit it,” he said, straddling a chair and leaning forward to grin at William. “I’ve won.”
“We didn’t set a time limit,” William replied, calmly enough for someone who must have seen the music charts lately. “My band is just gaining renown more gradually.”
“How much longer do you need?” Gabe asked graciously, coming over to where William was standing, leaning in with a hand braced against the wall.
William’s gaze turned thoughtful, then secretive. Gabe wanted to know everything he was thinking, what and when and why. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. He smiled, a tiny curl of his lips, and said, “I like it here. I was thinking about sticking around for a while.”
Gabe thought back over four thousand years of memories, to his first glimpse of William standing pale and untouched in the Mesopotamian sun. “Yeah?” he said, leaning in to taste William’s lips, trace the shape of his jaw beneath Gabe’s fingertips. “That’s been my plan all along.”
part one & headers
Venice, 1606 C.E.
Gabe hadn’t been lurking, precisely, in the back of the theatre during the rehearsal, but he certainly hadn’t made his presence known. William spotted him anyway.
“I thought we said England,” he offered by way of greeting, head tilted inquiringly but smiling nonetheless. “Have you become geographically confused?”
“What, and miss this?” Gabe scoffed, pushing off the wall he’d been leaning against to come and give William a proper hug. “The rebirth of an all-musical form of drama? You must be joking. How long have you been here?”
“Seven years,” William admitted, pushing his hair back behind his ear. “I came to Italy as soon as I heard about Dafne. What happened to Italy being boring?”
“Welcome to the Renaissance,” Gabe replied, spreading his hands and grinning. “Italy got a lot more interesting. Not that England isn’t, but Italy has this, and it has you, so here I am.”
“Here you are,” William agreed, with a fondness Gabe didn’t think he was at all imagining. “So you’re writing an opera? Will you be premiering it against mine?”
“Better,” Gabe answered, relishing both the announcement and the look of confusion on William’s face. “I’m working on yours.”
The confusion turned instantly to wariness. “How are you working on mine?” William asked, gaze searching Gabe’s face for clues. “I’ve already finished the music and I’m writing the libretto.”
“Yes, but what you don’t have,” Gabe declared jubilantly, “are intermezzi.”
William was quick on the uptake, Gabe had to admit. “You’ve been commissioned to write the intermezzi for my opera,” he said, rather than asked. “How does that arrangement work into our competition, exactly?”
Gabe hooked his thumbs into his waistband. “People love a good intermezzo,” he pointed out, enjoying the moment. It was playing out even better than he’d hoped. “Sometimes even more than the work it interrupts. I’d say it’s a fair show of skill. You have five acts of your opera, I have six intermezzi.”
“One cohesive story against six disjointed spectacles,” William said dryly, but he didn’t protest. Gabe had expected him to put up more of a fuss, but that only meant that he was confident. Well, Gabe was confident too.
“Fantastic spectacles,” he replied merrily. “Enormous, awe-inducing spectacles. I’m using dolphins and mermaids.”
“You can’t have dolphins,” William said immediately. “My opera has dolphins, you’ll ruin the surprise.”
“I need dolphins, they pull the aquatic chariot,” Gabe responded, waving his hand dismissively. “And a chorus of angels descending from the clouds.”
“You - ” William began, and then clearly reined himself in. “Very well,” he said, holding out a hand for Gabe to shake. “Let the contest begin.”
“It’s been over three thousand years since it began,” Gabe called back over his shoulder as he walked away, leaving William with his hand outstretched and looking somewhere between perplexed and incensed. “Catch me if you can, or I’ll be leaving you in the dust.”
“I’m still winning!” William called after him as the door swung shut. Gabe walked out into the sunlight grinning harder than he had in decades.
-
Gabe walked into the theatre whistling, which earned him a glare from William even before one of the gentlemen backstage mistook his songbird impression for a cue and sent a painted sun crashing into one of the sturdy platforms disguised as clouds.
“Rehearsal going well?” he asked cheerfully, swinging into an empty seat.
“Yes, thank you,” William answered, managing - to Gabe’s disappointment - to hold himself in check. “How are your spectacles coming?”
“Brilliant!” Gabe answered brightly, which was not strictly a lie. The light from the thousand floating candles surrounding the barge had been pretty radiant. The Turkish costume that had caught on fire as a result had been less so, but that was what rehearsal was for. “Ready for tomorrow?”
“The performance is in two days,” William said with perfect calm, only part of his attention on Gabe while the rest supervised the three singers climbing into a boat which Gabe divined was about to go down over the onstage waterfall.
“Right, so it is,” Gabe agreed, only mildly put out that William was refusing so steadfastly to rise to his bait. It wasn’t that he had any desire to sabotage William’s rehearsal, honestly, it was just that he was bored, and everything was more fun with William around. Wandering the city alone didn’t have the same appeal; he’d grown bored this afternoon after only two hours. “Shouldn’t you be up there? You will be performing in your work, won’t you?”
William gave him a look which suggested inaccurately that Gabe was somewhat simple. “Not in one of the leading roles,” he answered. “I prefer my anatomy intact, perfect voice or no.”
“Good. I was hoping you hadn’t decided to go castrato.” One of the men onstage gave Gabe a haughty look and a sniff, clearly dismissing him. Gabe considered giving him a lazy Italian salute in return, but decided it wasn’t worth it. Men who didn’t have their balls anymore should be pitied, not taunted. In lieu of such entertainment, Gabe waggled his eyebrows at William. “It would make certain things a lot less fun, and I seem to remember you being rather fond of them.”
“Shouldn’t you be rehearsing?” William inquired, although Gabe saw the faint stain of a flush redden his throat and cheeks, so at least that comment had hit home. Good; Gabe wasn’t planning on spending his time alone tonight.
“Finished,” he answered. “Well, until tomorrow, when we get to work in the theatre for the run-through.”
William turned, waterfall forgotten, and stared at him. “There’s a complete run-through tomorrow?” he repeated.
“Yep.” Gabe leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms behind his head. “That’s why I asked if you were ready for it.”
The boat tipped over the edge of the artificial waterfall nose-first, and promptly dumped all three singers out into the shallow onstage river before righting itself and bobbing away downstream. The castrati came up spluttering and inhaling water, which couldn’t be doing much for their singing voices.
“Hey,” Gabe said mock-sympathetically, watching one of the drenched singers pull himself out of the water and immediately start screaming at the man in charge of the boat, “Just remember, it all comes together in the end.”
“It’s coming together just fine,” William said firmly, raising his voice to call backstage. “Let them dry off, let’s rehearse Deianira’s wedding song.”
It took Gabe a few seconds for the name to click, but when it did, the context didn’t elude him. “You’re writing about Achelous,” he said accusingly, pointing at the river dominating the stage. “You’re writing about us.”
“The opera is about the eleventh labor of Heracles, which is perfectly sound dramatic material,” William replied, maddeningly casual for someone who was dramatizing his own life story in five acts. “There are hundreds of contests in classical mythology, and the last time I checked, we weren’t fighting over a woman.”
“You can’t win using me,” Gabe objected, as the castrato onstage began to sing about how his (or her) hero had traveled the world and been granted the greatest gifts, touched by the very gods. “That has to be cheating.”
“You wrote a song about me for the Almohads,” William countered, bringing Gabe momentarily up short. “I heard it. They sang it in Al-Andalus.”
“That was about someone else entirely,” Gabe said immediately, and didn’t meet William’s eyes when one brow arched meaningfully in his direction. “And anyway, that was different. This is for the contest.”
“It wasn’t,” William pointed out, nodding in approval as the gods descended from the cloud platforms to praise the slightly-damp Heracles and the many virtues of his new bride. “You were the one who showed up in the middle of it.”
Gabe opened his mouth and then shut it again. “You’re still cheating,” he insisted. Then he left William to his rehearsal and went to write a new afterpiece for the final intermezzo of the opera.
Someone had to make sure the story ended correctly, after all.
-
“The eleventh labor of Heracles was not meant to teach us about the bonds of friendship,” William said after the premiere, as soon as he’d found Gabe among the various members of the academies. “And Achelous was not a messenger of the gods sent to promote harmony and understanding.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Gabe said glibly. “My intermezzi had nothing to do with your opera. They serve as their own contained dramatic episodes.”
“They sounded awfully familiar,” William drawled. “And the costumes they were wearing looked suspiciously like togas.”
Gabe waved a hand. “Classical fashion is all the rage,” he dismissed. “Hardly any correlation.”
William continued favoring him with that look that said I’m onto you, but he didn’t have any proof and Gabe wasn’t about to give it to him, so he wisely let the matter drop. “Are we calling on someone to judge this for us?” he asked instead. “What should serve as the deciding factor?”
Everyone from the academies appeared to know William, which didn’t surprise Gabe at all. He would have been still less surprised to find that William had found his way into one years ago when all of the opera madness began.
It was a good thing, then, that Gabe didn’t need to call on them as judges. “I’ve received seven invitations to perform my intermezzi at various courts and academies across Italy,” he said, producing a handful of cards to wave in William’s direction. “How is your opera doing?”
William opened his mouth to respond, then paused and shook his head. “Excuse me,” he said politely, and set off across the room, making a beeline for the same gentlemen who’d approached Gabe about a production in Florence.
Gabe took a drink of his wine and called cheerfully after him, “Taste the dust yet?”
Gabe excelled at social commentary; William should have known better than to compete against him in a culture currently so mad for it. Another gentleman cornered him almost immediately to engage him for an entertainment across the continent in Paris. Gabe listened attentively to the new offer, and didn’t worry when he lost track of William in the crowd. It didn’t matter if they didn’t catch each other again here. They still had a standing appointment in Brittannia.
-
-
Atlantic Ocean, 1821 C.E.
“Welcome aboard,” the first mate said as soon as they’d pulled Gabe out of the rowboat he had been previously occupying and installed him on board one of His Majesty’s Ships.
“Yes, welcome aboard,” another voice echoed. Gabe actually had to blink a few times to make sure the sun hadn’t gotten to him, but when he’d finished William was still standing there, lounging against the rail and offering him a dry shirt.
Gabe took the proffered item of clothing slowly. “I’d like to point out that this ship is heading away from England, rather than toward it,” he said finally.
William shrugged one thin, more-tanned-than-usual shoulder at him. “I get back every once in a while,” he replied. “And I didn’t think it was time yet. Clearly neither did you. Or were you planning on rowing all the way back across the Atlantic?”
“I could have made it,” Gabe answered lazily, flashing a grin. “But no, actually, my former vessel ran into some difficulties. French ships are not so popular at the moment, in case you hadn’t heard.”
“I wonder why,” William drawled, and reached down to toss a pair of fresh boots over as well. Gabe took the hint and started stripping.
“So you’re a sailor now?” he asked, and then had to stop to laugh. William didn’t appear all that amused, so Gabe rephrased, “I mean, a sailor. You? Really?”
“I’m doing a fine job, thank you very much,” William returned. “And it was the easiest way to get to the New World.”
“You could have gone along as a colonist,” Gabe pointed out. “Free ride, less work.”
William rolled his eyes. “I can pull on a few ropes,” he said. “And so will you, shortly. I don’t imagine they’ll just let you stow away for nothing.”
“That’s fine,” Gabe replied, rolling out his shoulders and appreciating the feel - and the smell - of cloth that wasn’t stiffened by dirt and salt water. “I’ve been a sailor before. Within a century, even.”
William looked interested, but didn’t comment beyond, “And now you’re heading to the New World.”
“Been there, too,” Gabe said, grinning wider. William’s look sharpened more intently into interest, along with a touch of envy.
“When?” he asked, but they were interrupted by the bell sounding the change of shift, so William stepped reluctantly away. “We’ll talk later.”
“Tonight, by the forebitts,” Gabe called after him. “Bring your pipes.”
-
After eating enough for three meals and sleeping for what felt like a year, Gabe finally dragged himself up on deck to where the crew was clustered around the forebitts, mending gear and socializing. The forebitts was the one part of the ship seafarers universally reserved for recreation in their off-hours, which was why the songs performed there were gifted with the same name.
Gabe spotted William easily enough and made his way over, claiming the spot next to him. “I still can’t believe you’re a sailor,” he remarked, shaking his head.
“I had a craving to learn the hornpipe,” William replied. He glanced sideways, giving Gabe a once-over. “It’s a long trip to the Americas, we don’t have to do this tonight. You don’t even have an instrument.”
“I’ll borrow one,” Gabe said easily. “It looks like the men have a fine assortment. You probably have five or six stowed away.”
“Three,” William corrected, and then added casually, “I should warn you, they love me here.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Gabe returned, holding out his hands in request for the mandolin one of the crew had been plucking idly into some sort of tune. He smiled innocently. “Doesn’t mean they won’t love me more.”
“Don’t play that, it’s a travesty,” William told him. “I have a mandora you can use. Strictly foc’s’le songs, or should we set broader terms?”
“I like its sound,” Gabe lied, plucking the strings enthusiastically to watch William’s facial contortions in response. “Three forebitters each?”
William reached to the side and claimed his aforementioned mandora. “After you,” he said politely, gesturing grandly. “Since you’ve already tuned.”
William was right, the sailors did love him. They were, however, ready to pledge their unborn children to Gabe.
“It’s not an insult,” Gabe said afterward, as they sprawled on the deck cleaning gear and sipping their daily ration of alcohol. “You’ve spent too long in England, they know your songs. I’m new and exciting, they’re not bored with me yet. And I know thirty-seven verses to that last song.”
“You made up twenty-two of them on the spot,” William retorted grumpily.
Gabe rolled in toward his side, bumping their shoulders together. “Don’t be a sore loser just because I’ve had a…” He had to stop and calculate, finally coming up with, “six hundred year winning streak.”
“Be prepared for it to end,” William told him seriously, but the reluctant smile that Gabe coaxed out of him immediately afterward ruined the effect.
“Why, because you’ve never been to the New World and they’re not bored with you yet?” Gabe asked, snorting. “They’re not bored with me either.”
William pillowed his head on his arm and watched Gabe, features soft in the moonlight. “When were you there?” he asked. “Recently?”
Gabe shook his head and leaned back on his elbows, looking up at the stars. “Not since Spain arrived,” he answered, unable to completely disguise the sadness in his voice. “I was there long before mainland Europe knew there was something to discover.” He drained the rest of his cup and set it aside on the deck. “I first came across as a vikingr, and kicked around for a while. This was before you became a Christian and broke my heart,” he said sorrowfully, giving William a woeful look and receiving a kick to his shin in return.
“You’re still not letting that go,” William complained, sounding much more put-upon than Gabe suspected he actually was.
“And never will,” Gabe agreed. “It’s an error that will follow you for the rest of your days.”
“You were in Judah for decades,” William objected. “And you traveled with the Seljuqs.”
“That was entirely different from what you did,” Gabe informed him, shuddering dramatically. “Celibacy.”
William’s eyebrows rose. “I hate to break this to you,” he said slowly, “but we’re on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. Exactly what would you call this?”
Gabe sat straight up. “Oh, no,” he objected, to William specifically and the rest of the deck in general. “No, no. That’s entirely unreasonable.”
“Where precisely do you suggest we find the privacy to do anything that won’t get us thrown off the side and back into your charming rowboat?” William asked mildly.
Gabe groaned and flopped back onto the deck. “I hate this century,” he complained. “And the one before it. And the one before that.”
“You loved the one before that,” William argued, smiling softly. “You just object to the shifting morality of old world culture.”
Gabe rolled onto his side, propped up on his elbow above William’s familiar face. “I object to anything that won’t let me kiss you right now,” he said seriously.
“I would have been too old for you in Greece,” William murmured, reaching out to trace the line of Gabe’s arm, into the sensitive skin at the crook of his elbow. “We would have been a scandal anywhere.”
“Thebes,” Gabe returned, leaning in closer and still not enough. “I could have been with you in Thebes.”
“I miss Thebes,” William said, smiling again.
Gabe groaned softly, and William laughed and touched his arm again, light and knowing. “You know what I miss?” Gabe mused. “Rome. Specifically, the baths.”
William laughed again, head tipping back and eyes closing. “That’s how I always found you, you know,” he teased. “I followed my nose to the oasis in the midst of the unwashed masses.”
Gabe growled a little with the desire to bite William’s exposed throat, and William’s eyes slit open like he knew precisely what Gabe was thinking. Then again, he was probably the one subconsciously encouraging Gabe to think it in the first place.
Gabe leaned back to give them some more distance and forced himself to relax a little. “You know what I miss?” he said with relish. “Mycenaeans. And India, centuries ago. When the women all went around bare-breasted and flaunting it.”
William looked startled, then torn between similar nostalgic appreciation and annoyance. Gabe laughed at him and tugged William’s unkempt hair lightly when he predictably bristled.
“I would trade any of them for you in a heartbeat,” he murmured. “Entire civilizations, even.”
“It’s why I stay away so long,” William replied, laughter touching the corners of his eyes. “So you remember to miss me.”
“You’d trade civilizations for me, too,” Gabe challenged, poking the soft curve of William’s stomach. “Don’t pretend you wouldn’t. You’d get rid of the Aztecs.”
William made a low growling noise in his throat that Gabe really shouldn’t have found as arousing as he did. “I hated the Aztecs.”
“I know you did,” Gabe laughed, leaning forward enough to bump their noses together, resisting further temptation than that brief moment of contact. “You weren’t even there.”
“You were,” William replied, fingertips playing idly with the hem of Gabe’s shirt. If William really didn’t want them thrown off this ship, Gabe thought, they both needed to go to separate areas of the deck soon. “That’s where you were when I was in Ghazni, wasn’t it?”
Gabe frowned, distracted from the speech he’d been about to give about the Inca and the Maya by that nugget of information. “You were in Ghazni?”
“Focus,” William ordered, laughing, and Gabe couldn’t stand it anymore, he grabbed William’s wrist and pulled him up off the deck. William tripped along behind him, confused but willing enough. “Where are we going?”
“Somewhere private,” Gabe said, navigating the capstan and nodding to sailors as they passed. “For at least forty-five seconds, all of which I plan to thoroughly make the most of.”
William’s hand brushed against him in a way that could have been passed off as entirely innocent and definitely wasn’t. “That reminds me,” he said idly, close enough for his hair to tickle Gabe’s neck. “Are you all that set on going to the New World right away?”
Gabe turned, searching William’s face in the dim light. “Why?” he asked, intrigued when he perhaps should have been more wary, considering the sly look on William’s face. “What did you have in mind?”
-
-
Port Phillip, 1822 C.E.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Gabe said. “A didgeridoo?”
William gave the instrument a thorough inspection, checking the rim and sugarbag with every sign of being completely serious. “It’s quite possibly the oldest wind instrument in existence,” he replied, peering down the length of the enormous piece of wood. “It’s fitting for the particular nature of our contest, don’t you think?”
“What are we judging, who can make the most noise with it?” Gabe asked, rapping the solid exterior with his knuckles, prompting William to look up from his investigations to glare at him.
“Who can play it the longest,” William answered, brushing Gabe’s hand out of his way. “And who can play it well. The Bunurong clan who manufactured it has expressed wholehearted willingness to listen and judge for us.”
“Oh, I’ll bet they have,” Gabe said, wincing. The way colonial relations were going, he was surprised the clan hadn’t immediately volunteered to spear the two of them with pointy sticks. Making fun of them attempting to blow sound through a tree trunk was more of a pacifist approach, but the intent still seemed the same.
William looked up at him with a grin, and Gabe’s chest did a weird thing that it really shouldn’t still be doing after this much prolonged exposure to that smile. “We have a lesson with the instrument maker,” he said. “If you want to brush up on your skills.”
“This is going to be a catastrophe,” Gabe said cheerfully, but he wasn’t about to say no to that look on William’s face. Naturally it had more to do with the spirit of competition than with anything else. Gabe wasn’t one to walk away from a challenge.
“The first thing we learn is circular breathing,” William said, nearly straight-faced but with a twinkle in his eye that let Gabe know in no uncertain terms how he was imagining that ability might later be put into use.
They’d been at sea for a long time. Gabe curled a friendly hand around William’s elbow and steered him in the direction of their waiting tutor. “Lead on.”
-
They were abysmal. They were worse than abysmal; they were excruciating.
Gabe couldn’t deny it was fun, though. Both of them eventually got the hang of circular breathing - centuries of playing wind instruments all over the world had to be good for something - and while neither of them could sustain it for a particularly long time, they managed the correct vibration of their lips needed to produce the desired harmonics.
After listening to them make horrific amounts of noise for an hour, their tutor started demonstrating various animal sounds and how to mimic them through the instrument. Gabe turned out to have a fairly brilliant dingo impression, but when he attempted the same thing while playing the didgeridoo, the resulting blat of sound was so startling that William actually fell off his bench and onto the ground laughing.
“I dare you to do better,” Gabe defended, his lips still buzzing from the vibration and swollen into something like a constant pout. William’s mouth was looking similarly affected and particularly luscious, which wasn’t something Gabe could dwell on in the presence of a wrinkled sixty-year-old man huffing into a tree trunk.
William stood up, dusted himself off with dignity, and somehow - neither Gabe nor their tutor could actually believe it - produced a pitch-perfect replication of a laughing kookaburra through the droning didgeridoo.
Gabe took a second to get over his dismay, then broke into sincere applause and stood up. “That’s it,” he announced. “I declare you the winner. Fuck knows you’ll never be able to do that again, and I’m ready for dinner.”
William protested, and they did in fact spend another hour hanging around trying to repeat the sound, but neither of them could get it and their attempts were clearly degenerating the longer they tried, so they finally abandoned their lesson as the sun was sinking low on the horizon. Their tutor played as entertainment during dinner, and Gabe took turns with William playing the dilma in elaborate patterns to keep percussive time, which they were both considerably better at than playing the didgeridoo.
Gabe did his dingo impression anyway, and when William threw back his head and laughed, Gabe couldn’t honestly remember why he cared about anything but this.
-
“You let me win,” William accused late that night, when they had fallen to the ground in their guest bough-shelter naked and hopelessly entangled. “You didn’t even let someone else declare me the victor.”
“I didn’t let you win,” Gabe said honestly, hands roaming all over William’s pale, bare skin. “That was a fucking amazing kookaburra, you deserved this round.”
William settled solid and warm between Gabe’s legs, rubbing against him in a way that promised more athletic activities in the very near future. “You could have argued your case,” he pointed out. “Played with more resonance, sustained the sound for longer.”
“You were just as good as I was,” Gabe said, nuzzling his throat only partially because it was a distraction, and mostly just because it was there and he couldn’t resist. “It would have been a toss-up.”
“So you made sure we stayed tied,” William replied, clearly not distracted enough yet. “So that there was a final round.”
Gabe stroked William’s throat, squeezed lightly with just enough pressure to make William shut up. “You won,” he murmured against William’s still-swollen lips. “Enjoy the victory.”
It wasn’t until much later after that, when they were both sated and spent, sweat cooling rapidly as the desert night fell, that William spoke up again.
“If it had been the other way around,” he said softly against Gabe’s shoulder, the rest of him completely still and calm draped over Gabe’s naked body, “I think I would have let you win, too.”
Gabe pressed a kiss to William’s damp forehead, and didn’t bother to answer.
-
-
Honolulu, 1942 C.E.
It wasn’t a surprise at all to find William in a USO dance hall, a glass in hand and foot tapping absently along with the band onstage. The clothes he was wearing were more of a shock.
“You’ve enlisted,” Gabe said, sliding up next to William at the bar. It wasn’t a question; even with the draft, William could have dismissed anyone trying to make him do something with a single thought. Gabe leaned against the bar to take it in, the uniform and the short-cropped regulation haircut. Everything about it was new and gleaming, the buttons and shoe polish shining too bright in the well-lit room.
William’s hum of acknowledgment was absent, but affirmative. Gabe waited him out, let him tap his brand-new boot sole against the polished wooden floor a few more times and come around to it on his own.
“It’s a cause I believe in,” William said, without looking at him. “I don’t want to sing songs about what’s happening in Europe now. I don’t want to write the words for all of that grief.”
“We’ve lived through worse wars than this,” Gabe reminded him. “We’ve watched the world tear itself to pieces around us almost more times than I can count.”
“I know,” William answered, and finally met Gabe’s eyes. He looked weary; more tired than Gabe could remember seeing him. His smile was wan when he said, “Maybe I’m just tired of watching.”
Gabe wanted very much in that moment to kiss him. He settled for brushing William’s cheek with the back of his knuckle, and drinking in the sight of William’s eyes fluttering closed at the touch.
“It’s still not your fight,” Gabe said, as if that could make a difference or change William’s mind.
“Don’t try to pretend you’ve never gotten involved,” William chided, but gently. “I know you were at Montevideo.”
“That was different,” Gabe protested. “I just happened to be there.”
“And happened not to leave,” William said, smiling, which was also true. Not the whole story, but still true.
The band started another song, bright with brass, signaling a jitterbug on the dance floor. Everything in the hall was incongruously upbeat; soldiers looking forward to glory when all they would find was death, and war brides too in love to realize that most of them would become war widows. He wondered how many of them William would get to know by name before they met their ends.
“When do you leave?” he asked, voice low and gravel-rough.
“My unit ships out tomorrow,” William answered, opening his eyes again. He studied Gabe’s face for a moment, and then said quietly, “We both know I can’t die over there.”
Gabe swallowed against the desperation clawing at his throat, and let his hand fall, seeking automatic comfort by curling around his glass sitting on the bar. “Maybe not your body,” he admitted, and wondered how long he could hold this moment, if he never saw William again; if he never saw him like this, still young and shining so brightly from inside that it almost hurt to look at him. “But war can kill your soul.”
William’s hand found his, their palms pressing hard together. “I’ll find you again,” he promised. “It’s not forever.”
Gabe’s fingers curled around William’s, briefly, before he pulled them away. “Stay with me tonight,” he said, swallowing again to clear his throat. “Before you leave.”
William smiled at him, too soft for Gabe to look at directly, and tossed a bill onto the counter before stepping away to follow Gabe out the door.
-
They were still exchanging kisses at dawn, slow and lethargic, the passion of hours past finally run down into exhaustion and quietude.
“Tell me when to meet you,” William whispered. His mouth was wet and red from Gabe’s tongue, their skin still sliding damply with every movement. “Tell me, and I’ll be there.”
Gabe had to think about it, but not for long. “The turn of the century,” he decided, fitting his palms to the familiar angles of William’s hips, his ribs, the secret curves of his elbows. “It’s been a while since I watched the birth of a millennium with you.” He couldn’t wait another six hundred years this time, or even a hundred. He could barely wait sixty.
William’s eyes were too knowing, the way they always were. “I have to go,” he murmured, as dawn finally broke over the horizon and spilled harsh golden light through the blinds and onto the pillows, painting dark streaks of shadow across William’s pale skin.
“You don’t have to,” Gabe argued, more of a token protest than anything real. William knew it, too, his fingers brushing back a stray curl, the touch simple and soothing.
“I do,” he said softly.
Gabe leaned down and kissed him again.
-
-
Chicago, 2001 C.E.
Gabe rang in the new century with all the fanfare it deserved and then some, but he did it alone, and trying not to think too hard about that fact. His skin itched with the need for music, but he was sick of solitude and craved company, so he found a band and a sound and made the kids weep for joy at their shows.
William showed up in the pit at a concert somewhere in Illinois, and for a second Gabe didn’t even believe it was him, convinced his mind was playing tricks. Then he missed a chord and William smiled, like the sun breaking through the clouds, and Gabe sang to him for the entire rest of the show.
“You’re late,” he said by way of greeting when William found him outside in the back alley afterwards. And young; William couldn’t have been more than seventeen now, and maybe not even that. “Your aim was a little off this time.”
William just shrugged one shoulder, careless and unheeding. “I’m here now,” he said. Gabe pressed him against the brick wall and kissed him.
He kept kissing him even after one of his band mates not-so-subtly cleared his throat, after the flurry of whispering from the mouth of the alley, after the aggrieved complaint from his drummer, all the way up until William started laughing too hard for Gabe to suck on his tongue anymore.
“Dude,” Rob said from a reasonable distance away, politely disbelieving. “Dude.”
“What?” Gabe growled at William, who’d started laughing anew. “North American culture has come a long way in sixty years. They might not be throwing bouquets at weddings yet, but I don’t have to hide you in a locked room somewhere. This isn’t illegal.”
William tipped his chin up, smiling wide and innocent. “I’m sixteen,” he said.
Gabe didn’t see the point in this delay, and wasn’t afraid to show his displeasure with it as he leaned in and started nuzzling William’s pale throat. “So?” he mumbled.
William’s slim frame shook with laughter under his hands. “I’m underage,” he said, and Gabe pulled back to stare at him with an expression of complete disbelief.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Gabe said darkly. The irony of the situation - that William was now considered too young for him by the human infants passing judgment on them - was not lost on him one bit.
“Dude,” Rob said again, with slightly more insistence.
“Fuck,” Gabe said, and tangled his fingers with William’s. “You couldn’t have come a little earlier? A little older?” He leaned in for another kiss, because fuck Rob’s maidenly sensibilities, William’s mouth. He murmured, lips against lips like a secret, “Where have you been?”
William’s hand curved over his jaw, sliding up into his hair to soothe stray curls. “I needed to start over,” he said softly, and his eyes were so old in that moment that Gabe didn’t believe anyone could have been fooled by his skin. “I just didn’t realize that was what I needed until it was too late to catch up and meet you.”
Gabe understood that. He understood that all too well. “You’re coming with us,” he declared, pulling William gently away from the wall into his arms, turning to lead him back to the loading dock and the van. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
-
“So you have a band,” Gabe pressed, because as willing as he’d been to let the competition drop in Australia, having William back here now made his bones thrum with the possibility of it.
“I have a solo project,” William corrected, eating another of Gabe’s french fries from the greasy diner special they were calling dinner tonight. “You and I have never brought in other people before.”
“Venice,” Gabe reminded him, but William waved a hand as if to say that wasn’t the same thing at all, and Gabe couldn’t really argue. “Fair enough. You want me to lose the band?”
“No,” William said slowly, thoughtful. “I think I’ll make one, too.”
“Tomorrow night?” Gabe asked, dipping a fry in ketchup before William’s quick little fingers could make off with it. “Next week?”
William rolled his eyes. “How long did you have to put this together?” he asked, gesturing toward the rest of Gabe’s band, chilling together in another booth. “I’m going to need a little more than that.”
“You can take as long as you like, you’re never going to beat me,” Gabe said confidently. He felt like he couldn’t lose, now. Like no matter what happened, there was no possible way he wouldn’t come out on top. “Ten years?”
William rolled his eyes. “I’ll find you again,” he promised, lips curling up in a slow smile. “You’ll know.”
-
“I’ve won,” Gabe crowed, doing a little victory dance of a spin in the disaster zone of their green room. “You’re opening for me. I have a bus. Admit it, I’ve won.”
William hummed his thoughtful, noncommittal hum and flipped a page in his magazine, which featured Gabe and Gabe’s band in a rather prominent display. “I’m not finished yet,” he replied. “You got a head start.”
“You were late,” Gabe corrected, but he didn’t push the matter any further. If William wanted to stick around for a while, Gabe wasn’t going to stop him. “How long do you want? Another tour? Another album?”
William cocked his head and looked at Gabe, considering. “Another year,” he said finally. “One more year.”
“Fine,” Gabe agreed easily, magnanimous in the face of certain victory. “But I’ll still have won.”
William hummed again. Gabe cackled to himself and broke open a celebratory bottle of vodka.
-
Gabe’s band imploded. William’s band, on the other hand, gathered momentum and vision like he was soaking it up from the stage beneath his feet every night and waking up to it every morning.
William’s band had a bus.
“I suppose you think you’ve won now,” Gabe said, with ill spirits but a cursory show of good grace.
William opened his new magazine, unsubtly displaying the spread of his band and their album on the glossy pages. “I think I still have a band,” he pointed out smugly.
“You haven’t had as much time to annoy each other,” Gabe retorted. “Give it another few years, we’ll both be back to solo projects.”
William shut his magazine and looked at Gabe over the cover. “All right,” he said finally. “That’s fair. You have more performance experience in this century, and I have more familiarity with this group of musicians. Shall we start this round over?”
Gabe gaped for a second, then realized the chance he was being given and started patting himself down for his phone. “You’re on,” he called over his shoulder, tucking the phone under his ear as he muttered to himself, “Three and three. Deuce.”
-
His first attempt at putting together a new band was minimally successful. William listened to him rant, offered less-than-helpful suggestions, and even sang on his first single, although that was technically promotion for both of them.
After the chemistry on that endeavor went sour - and William was right about familiarity with the group being an advantage - he located Victoria.
“I’m not a muse,” she told him, cool and perfect in the New York morning. “How do you think I’ll help you, exactly?”
“You’re a siren,” he answered, grinning back at her. “You just do what you do. Trust me, it’ll help.” And in the meantime, it would also make William crazy knowing she was around him constantly, which was an added bonus. Gabe had somehow never quite gotten over his enjoyment at seeing William riled.
“You know,” Victoria purred, examining her gorgeously-filed nails, “that threesome can still be arranged.”
“I am on it like you wouldn’t believe,” Gabe told her. Even if William didn’t go for it, there was still a good chance it would prompt a hell of a reaction. Gabe sensed he would win either way.
“Fine,” she sighed. “I’ll sing for you. No longer than a century.”
“Deal,” he promised, and they clasped hands to seal the bargain.
“Musical victory is ours,” he whooped, and went to see about supporting William’s band on tour.
-
Gabe’s band was nominated for an MTV award, and their song was played on every pop station and clothing store mix-tape in the country.
“Admit it,” he said, straddling a chair and leaning forward to grin at William. “I’ve won.”
“We didn’t set a time limit,” William replied, calmly enough for someone who must have seen the music charts lately. “My band is just gaining renown more gradually.”
“How much longer do you need?” Gabe asked graciously, coming over to where William was standing, leaning in with a hand braced against the wall.
William’s gaze turned thoughtful, then secretive. Gabe wanted to know everything he was thinking, what and when and why. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. He smiled, a tiny curl of his lips, and said, “I like it here. I was thinking about sticking around for a while.”
Gabe thought back over four thousand years of memories, to his first glimpse of William standing pale and untouched in the Mesopotamian sun. “Yeah?” he said, leaning in to taste William’s lips, trace the shape of his jaw beneath Gabe’s fingertips. “That’s been my plan all along.”