"If A Little Dreaming Is Dangerous", Frank/Dwayne, PG-13
Title: If A Little Dreaming Is Dangerous...
Author: likecharity
Pairing: Frank/Dwayne
Rating: PG-13. I don’t think it deserves an R, but feel free to correct me.
Warnings: Uncle/nephew incest. Implied underage sex. (Dwayne is fifteen, right?)
Summary: Frank has insomnia, and he watches Dwayne sleep. Dwayne seems to be having some pretty interesting dreams, and one night Frank asks him about it.
A/N: The quote in the title and the rest of it in the fic is Proust, of course. Oh, and this is not beta’d. My tenses are quite possibly a jumbled mess.
Frank suffers from horrible insomnia. He has done for ages, pretty much as long as he can remember. He hates going to sleep because he always has so many dreams, dreams where he is happy, happy and in love with someone who loves him back. It’s true he always tends to fall for the younger ones, and they never want him back (who would, he wonders - what young, beautiful boy is going to want a forty-something year old man with a brain that’s not quite right?). But in his dreams, they all want him, they love him, cherish him, kiss him and touch him and tell him they’ll never leave him no matter how hard things get. And that’s what Frank really wants. Only he always wakes up, and they always leave him.
So he stopped sleeping. He forced himself to stay awake all night, no matter how tired he got, how much his eyelids dropped, threatening to snap shut. He needed to stay in reality, because facing it after dreams was always too much of a shock - one that could drive him to do all sorts of foolish things he’d regret later. When he moved in with Sheryl, things were a little better. If he dreamt, he didn’t wake up totally alone, because Dwayne was always there. It was nice to have another person in the room with him. And that’s all it was at first.
In the winter it was all right. He could slip out of bed quietly, wrapping his blanket around him, and wander around the house. He could read, have something to eat, maybe even watch TV sometimes as long as the sound was turned down enough. He’d drift off sometimes for an hour or so, a light - and usually dreamless - sleep, and then sneak back into Dwayne’s room just before everybody started getting up.
In the summer things were much worse. The radiator in the living room was broken and was warm no matter what anyone did to the boiler, and the bedrooms were the coolest places in the house. Though that wasn’t saying much. Frank would lie awake, sometimes squinting in the darkness at a book, sometimes just doing absolutely nothing. Thinking was too dangerous. With nothing to distract him, he often ended up dwelling on things in the past, fixating on his regrets, and he couldn’t even count the amount of times he’d had to rush off and shut himself in the bathroom to cry helplessly until he could manage to calm himself down.
He can’t remember exactly when he started watching Dwayne. He guesses it was because it was something to do, something to occupy his mind. It only took three nights of it for him to realise it had been a terrible idea. Dwayne slept only in his boxers in the summer (far too hot for anything else) and by the time he was asleep enough for Frank to feel comfortable watching him, the sheets were almost always kicked off and tangled around his bony ankles.
Dwayne slept silently most of the time, and very, very still. Occasionally his eyelashes would flutter and he would begin to toss and turn, whispering incoherently and digging his fingernails into the mattress, but in seconds it was over and he was flat on his back, eyelids still and breathing steady once again. Frank found he wasted hours of the night just staring, propped up on his elbows, watching his nephew’s every movement in sleep.
It was the third night that he started to think this was not such a good plan. He’d caught himself thinking about Dwayne on several occasions throughout the day, remembering the way he’d looked in his sleep, a sheen of sweat across his skinny chest, his lips slightly parted, his cheeks flushed, rosy against the pallor of his face. By the fourth night he was staring at other parts of Dwayne’s body, letting his eyes drift downward where he hadn’t let them linger before (out of fear, worried about what it might mean if he did). He stared at Dwayne’s smooth white feet, curled around the sheets, his knobbly knees, and his pale calves and thighs. He stared at Dwayne’s hipbones, jutting a little, the waistband of his underwear stretched across them. Sometimes he could catch a glimpse of jet-black hair disappearing under the white fabric.
It was that night - the fourth - that Dwayne became hard during his sleep. He’d been thrashing around again, and Frank had turned to lie on his back, feigning sleep in case his nephew was to wake up. When it seemed safe for him to turn around, Dwayne was on his front, pushing down into the mattress. It took a second for Frank to work out what he was doing, and it was only when Dwayne rolled over again that it became completely clear. It was only another few minutes until Dwayne’s alarm clock went off for him to get up for school, and Frank forced himself to turn away.
It was almost exactly the same the next morning, only it happened later. It was a Saturday, and Dwayne slept in until eleven o’ clock. Frank was sitting up in bed, trying as hard as he could to concentrate on his book, but his gaze kept drifting back to his nephew. If a little dreaming is dangerous, Frank read, fixing his eyes on the little black letters as Dwayne started to wake up. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Dwayne yawn, and run his fingers through his messy hair. If a little dreaming is dangerous, Frank read again, furiously, as Dwayne swung his legs round over the side of the bed very slowly.
“Morning,” Frank said, his voice as casual as he reckoned he could make it.
“Oh! Morning,” Dwayne replied, flustered. Frank risked a look at him. Dwayne immediately grabbed the sheets and covered his lap. “I - uh…”
Frank bit his lip very hard, looked at the ceiling, and said, “It’s all right. Happens to everyone.”
Dwayne laughed awkwardly, then mumbled something about taking a shower, and left the room with incredible speed.
If a little dreaming is dangerous, Frank read for the third time, then shut the book abruptly and sank back down on his bed, unable to escape from the images in his mind.
As time went on, things just got more and more difficult. Frank could not stop watching Dwayne, no matter what he told himself, no matter how much he berated himself for it. He could not quite believe what had happened to him - what was still happening. The youngest boy he had fallen for before had been eighteen, but Dwayne was fifteen. And fifteen was not legal. Dwayne would not even be legal when he turned thirty, because Dwayne was his nephew. But no matter how often these thoughts invaded his head, others - much more enjoyable ones - fought them out and away. It was hopeless.
Dwayne’s nights seemed to be getting more and more restless. He would fidget in his sleep, turning over and over, twisting the sheets around his body and then unfurling them again. He was hard every morning, and Frank was struggling to face Dwayne’s blush and the way he stumbled over his words as he raced to the bathroom.
* * *
Which brings him to the night it all really starts. The night Frank can’t stand it any longer. Dwayne is grimacing, pushing his head into his pillow and grabbing at the mattress, and Frank pads over to him and kneels by the bed. He thinks, I have no ulterior motives, but he is not sure about anything anymore. He stays still for a moment, his heart pounding in his ears, and then he gently shakes his nephew’s shoulder. Dwayne awakes with a start, kicking out, then he grabs Frank’s arm and looks around blearily. He makes a noise in his throat, then coughs and says, “Frank?”
“You were dreaming,” Frank tells him lamely, then tries to pull himself together. “You looked like you were having a nightmare. Are you okay?”
Dwayne still looks a little confused. “No,” he says. “I mean, I wasn’t having a nightmare. It was just a dream. I’m okay.”
Frank notices he is pulling the sheets higher around his waist.
“What were you dreaming?” he asks before he can stop himself.
“I can’t say,” Dwayne mumbles.
Frank does not know exactly how to respond to this. “You…you can’t say? How come?” he settles on.
“I just can’t,” Dwayne says simply. He seems fully awake now, and he is picking at the skin around his fingernails.
“But you know you can tell me anything,” Frank says. He does not want to force Dwayne into anything - anything, he reminds himself - but something in the way his nephew is acting now has made him very curious.
“Not this,” Dwayne says, and laughs.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Frank tries.
“That’s not the bit that worries me,” Dwayne says.
“I don’t want you to worry at all,” Frank blurts out, then composes himself. “Have you been worrying about whatever-it-is for a long time now?”
Dwayne nods, then shuts his eyes. He takes a deep breath, then says, “Look, Frank, I can’t do this. I can’t - we can’t have this conversation. I can’t tell you, because I’m going completely insane not telling you, and if you keep on at me, I might cave, and then everything is going to be even more fucked up.”
Frank blinks a few times. He doesn’t know what to do now. He knows what it sounds like Dwayne is trying to tell him, but he is almost 100% certain that it’s only his own, pathetic little mind twisting Dwayne’s words and making them what he wants to hear.
“Well, Dwayne,” Frank begins, with no clue how the sentence is going to end. Lucky for him, Dwayne interrupts.
“You,” is all he says, and then he seems to realise that this doesn’t make much sense, and he clarifies. “I was dreaming about you, okay?”
Frank blinks again.
“And it wasn’t the sort of dream it should be,” Dwayne continues angrily. He whips the sheets away from his waist and indicates his obvious erection. “It was THIS sort of dream.”
Frank is suddenly forced to wonder if he is dreaming at this moment in time, because it certainly seems like it, but Dwayne’s voice brings him back to reality - and that is just what it is, reality.
“And now you can look shocked and disgusted, you can even hit me if you like, you can lecture me on how sick and twisted I am, and you can demand to sleep on the couch in the living room because you can’t stand to be near me ever again,” says Dwayne all in one breath. He looks away from Frank’s eyes and then continues. “You can, you really can, and I won’t be surprised, it’s-“
Frank reaches forward without even thinking, turns Dwayne’s head towards his own, and kisses him. It is a simple kiss, a quick one, the sort aunts probably give their nephews when they haven’t seen them for a long time, after the obligatory ’my, haven’t you grown’ speeches. But then, only a second later, Dwayne tilts his head back up towards Frank’s and presses their lips together again, desperately, wrapping his arms around his uncle as though terrified he is going to push him away and leave.
When they break apart (Dwayne’s hands still on Frank’s arms), Frank says, “I could never sleep on the couch in the living room. I think I’d probably fry in the heat.”
Dwayne laughs, and then on impulse kisses him again.
“This is how my dreams go,” he confesses in a whisper, “Only they go further. They’re worse. Better. I don’t know what I mean. They’re more dangerous,”
Frank sucks in a deep breath and presses a shaky hand to Dwayne’s crotch.
“If a little dreaming is dangerous,” he says, smiling when Dwayne pushes up into his hand, “the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.”
Dwayne does not respond for a moment. He appears to be thinking, and then, suddenly, he lifts his hand and slips it into the slit in Frank’s pajama trousers.
With a grin that Frank can only describe as cheeky, he looks up and replies, “Or to make the dreams come true.”
“That’s much better,” Frank agrees, and, deciding things do not get much better in life than having your dreams come true, he climbs into his nephew’s bed under the condition that they promise each other it will be a secret forever.
Author: likecharity
Pairing: Frank/Dwayne
Rating: PG-13. I don’t think it deserves an R, but feel free to correct me.
Warnings: Uncle/nephew incest. Implied underage sex. (Dwayne is fifteen, right?)
Summary: Frank has insomnia, and he watches Dwayne sleep. Dwayne seems to be having some pretty interesting dreams, and one night Frank asks him about it.
A/N: The quote in the title and the rest of it in the fic is Proust, of course. Oh, and this is not beta’d. My tenses are quite possibly a jumbled mess.
Frank suffers from horrible insomnia. He has done for ages, pretty much as long as he can remember. He hates going to sleep because he always has so many dreams, dreams where he is happy, happy and in love with someone who loves him back. It’s true he always tends to fall for the younger ones, and they never want him back (who would, he wonders - what young, beautiful boy is going to want a forty-something year old man with a brain that’s not quite right?). But in his dreams, they all want him, they love him, cherish him, kiss him and touch him and tell him they’ll never leave him no matter how hard things get. And that’s what Frank really wants. Only he always wakes up, and they always leave him.
So he stopped sleeping. He forced himself to stay awake all night, no matter how tired he got, how much his eyelids dropped, threatening to snap shut. He needed to stay in reality, because facing it after dreams was always too much of a shock - one that could drive him to do all sorts of foolish things he’d regret later. When he moved in with Sheryl, things were a little better. If he dreamt, he didn’t wake up totally alone, because Dwayne was always there. It was nice to have another person in the room with him. And that’s all it was at first.
In the winter it was all right. He could slip out of bed quietly, wrapping his blanket around him, and wander around the house. He could read, have something to eat, maybe even watch TV sometimes as long as the sound was turned down enough. He’d drift off sometimes for an hour or so, a light - and usually dreamless - sleep, and then sneak back into Dwayne’s room just before everybody started getting up.
In the summer things were much worse. The radiator in the living room was broken and was warm no matter what anyone did to the boiler, and the bedrooms were the coolest places in the house. Though that wasn’t saying much. Frank would lie awake, sometimes squinting in the darkness at a book, sometimes just doing absolutely nothing. Thinking was too dangerous. With nothing to distract him, he often ended up dwelling on things in the past, fixating on his regrets, and he couldn’t even count the amount of times he’d had to rush off and shut himself in the bathroom to cry helplessly until he could manage to calm himself down.
He can’t remember exactly when he started watching Dwayne. He guesses it was because it was something to do, something to occupy his mind. It only took three nights of it for him to realise it had been a terrible idea. Dwayne slept only in his boxers in the summer (far too hot for anything else) and by the time he was asleep enough for Frank to feel comfortable watching him, the sheets were almost always kicked off and tangled around his bony ankles.
Dwayne slept silently most of the time, and very, very still. Occasionally his eyelashes would flutter and he would begin to toss and turn, whispering incoherently and digging his fingernails into the mattress, but in seconds it was over and he was flat on his back, eyelids still and breathing steady once again. Frank found he wasted hours of the night just staring, propped up on his elbows, watching his nephew’s every movement in sleep.
It was the third night that he started to think this was not such a good plan. He’d caught himself thinking about Dwayne on several occasions throughout the day, remembering the way he’d looked in his sleep, a sheen of sweat across his skinny chest, his lips slightly parted, his cheeks flushed, rosy against the pallor of his face. By the fourth night he was staring at other parts of Dwayne’s body, letting his eyes drift downward where he hadn’t let them linger before (out of fear, worried about what it might mean if he did). He stared at Dwayne’s smooth white feet, curled around the sheets, his knobbly knees, and his pale calves and thighs. He stared at Dwayne’s hipbones, jutting a little, the waistband of his underwear stretched across them. Sometimes he could catch a glimpse of jet-black hair disappearing under the white fabric.
It was that night - the fourth - that Dwayne became hard during his sleep. He’d been thrashing around again, and Frank had turned to lie on his back, feigning sleep in case his nephew was to wake up. When it seemed safe for him to turn around, Dwayne was on his front, pushing down into the mattress. It took a second for Frank to work out what he was doing, and it was only when Dwayne rolled over again that it became completely clear. It was only another few minutes until Dwayne’s alarm clock went off for him to get up for school, and Frank forced himself to turn away.
It was almost exactly the same the next morning, only it happened later. It was a Saturday, and Dwayne slept in until eleven o’ clock. Frank was sitting up in bed, trying as hard as he could to concentrate on his book, but his gaze kept drifting back to his nephew. If a little dreaming is dangerous, Frank read, fixing his eyes on the little black letters as Dwayne started to wake up. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Dwayne yawn, and run his fingers through his messy hair. If a little dreaming is dangerous, Frank read again, furiously, as Dwayne swung his legs round over the side of the bed very slowly.
“Morning,” Frank said, his voice as casual as he reckoned he could make it.
“Oh! Morning,” Dwayne replied, flustered. Frank risked a look at him. Dwayne immediately grabbed the sheets and covered his lap. “I - uh…”
Frank bit his lip very hard, looked at the ceiling, and said, “It’s all right. Happens to everyone.”
Dwayne laughed awkwardly, then mumbled something about taking a shower, and left the room with incredible speed.
If a little dreaming is dangerous, Frank read for the third time, then shut the book abruptly and sank back down on his bed, unable to escape from the images in his mind.
As time went on, things just got more and more difficult. Frank could not stop watching Dwayne, no matter what he told himself, no matter how much he berated himself for it. He could not quite believe what had happened to him - what was still happening. The youngest boy he had fallen for before had been eighteen, but Dwayne was fifteen. And fifteen was not legal. Dwayne would not even be legal when he turned thirty, because Dwayne was his nephew. But no matter how often these thoughts invaded his head, others - much more enjoyable ones - fought them out and away. It was hopeless.
Dwayne’s nights seemed to be getting more and more restless. He would fidget in his sleep, turning over and over, twisting the sheets around his body and then unfurling them again. He was hard every morning, and Frank was struggling to face Dwayne’s blush and the way he stumbled over his words as he raced to the bathroom.
* * *
Which brings him to the night it all really starts. The night Frank can’t stand it any longer. Dwayne is grimacing, pushing his head into his pillow and grabbing at the mattress, and Frank pads over to him and kneels by the bed. He thinks, I have no ulterior motives, but he is not sure about anything anymore. He stays still for a moment, his heart pounding in his ears, and then he gently shakes his nephew’s shoulder. Dwayne awakes with a start, kicking out, then he grabs Frank’s arm and looks around blearily. He makes a noise in his throat, then coughs and says, “Frank?”
“You were dreaming,” Frank tells him lamely, then tries to pull himself together. “You looked like you were having a nightmare. Are you okay?”
Dwayne still looks a little confused. “No,” he says. “I mean, I wasn’t having a nightmare. It was just a dream. I’m okay.”
Frank notices he is pulling the sheets higher around his waist.
“What were you dreaming?” he asks before he can stop himself.
“I can’t say,” Dwayne mumbles.
Frank does not know exactly how to respond to this. “You…you can’t say? How come?” he settles on.
“I just can’t,” Dwayne says simply. He seems fully awake now, and he is picking at the skin around his fingernails.
“But you know you can tell me anything,” Frank says. He does not want to force Dwayne into anything - anything, he reminds himself - but something in the way his nephew is acting now has made him very curious.
“Not this,” Dwayne says, and laughs.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Frank tries.
“That’s not the bit that worries me,” Dwayne says.
“I don’t want you to worry at all,” Frank blurts out, then composes himself. “Have you been worrying about whatever-it-is for a long time now?”
Dwayne nods, then shuts his eyes. He takes a deep breath, then says, “Look, Frank, I can’t do this. I can’t - we can’t have this conversation. I can’t tell you, because I’m going completely insane not telling you, and if you keep on at me, I might cave, and then everything is going to be even more fucked up.”
Frank blinks a few times. He doesn’t know what to do now. He knows what it sounds like Dwayne is trying to tell him, but he is almost 100% certain that it’s only his own, pathetic little mind twisting Dwayne’s words and making them what he wants to hear.
“Well, Dwayne,” Frank begins, with no clue how the sentence is going to end. Lucky for him, Dwayne interrupts.
“You,” is all he says, and then he seems to realise that this doesn’t make much sense, and he clarifies. “I was dreaming about you, okay?”
Frank blinks again.
“And it wasn’t the sort of dream it should be,” Dwayne continues angrily. He whips the sheets away from his waist and indicates his obvious erection. “It was THIS sort of dream.”
Frank is suddenly forced to wonder if he is dreaming at this moment in time, because it certainly seems like it, but Dwayne’s voice brings him back to reality - and that is just what it is, reality.
“And now you can look shocked and disgusted, you can even hit me if you like, you can lecture me on how sick and twisted I am, and you can demand to sleep on the couch in the living room because you can’t stand to be near me ever again,” says Dwayne all in one breath. He looks away from Frank’s eyes and then continues. “You can, you really can, and I won’t be surprised, it’s-“
Frank reaches forward without even thinking, turns Dwayne’s head towards his own, and kisses him. It is a simple kiss, a quick one, the sort aunts probably give their nephews when they haven’t seen them for a long time, after the obligatory ’my, haven’t you grown’ speeches. But then, only a second later, Dwayne tilts his head back up towards Frank’s and presses their lips together again, desperately, wrapping his arms around his uncle as though terrified he is going to push him away and leave.
When they break apart (Dwayne’s hands still on Frank’s arms), Frank says, “I could never sleep on the couch in the living room. I think I’d probably fry in the heat.”
Dwayne laughs, and then on impulse kisses him again.
“This is how my dreams go,” he confesses in a whisper, “Only they go further. They’re worse. Better. I don’t know what I mean. They’re more dangerous,”
Frank sucks in a deep breath and presses a shaky hand to Dwayne’s crotch.
“If a little dreaming is dangerous,” he says, smiling when Dwayne pushes up into his hand, “the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.”
Dwayne does not respond for a moment. He appears to be thinking, and then, suddenly, he lifts his hand and slips it into the slit in Frank’s pajama trousers.
With a grin that Frank can only describe as cheeky, he looks up and replies, “Or to make the dreams come true.”
“That’s much better,” Frank agrees, and, deciding things do not get much better in life than having your dreams come true, he climbs into his nephew’s bed under the condition that they promise each other it will be a secret forever.