Work Text:
when it came to you
i didn‘t come here to make friends
we were born to be suburban legends
when you hold me it holds me together
and you kissed me in a way that‘s gonna screw me up forever.
Reim is not a jealous man, but sometimes he envies the sea.
He wonders, occasionally, if the feeling is mutual. If the sea yearns and longs and sighs the way he does every time Gilbert chooses not to be here, but there.
Reim and the sea are two sides of a coin that is elaborately tied around a neck, dangling loosely from a collarbone, meeting pale skin just so above a heart.
Heads and tails; Reim and the sea.
Reim is not a jealous man, but sometimes he takes the coin and tosses it in his head again and again and again, all day, until his thoughts spin and the waves crash against the shore of his restless mind, ruthless and unrelenting.
***
Reim never allows himself to expect Gilbert to be back, which makes it all the more sweeter when he comes home today and finds a familiar pair of black boots standing next to his own, washed out Crocs.
He stops in the door frame and releases the breath he’s been holding for the last three weeks.
Then he fully steps into his hallway and closes the heavy wooden door behind himself. It shuts with a quiet click and leaves Reim cut off from the outside world, alone in the silence of his boring, white-walled corridor, except there is no such thing as silence in his apartment, now that Gilbert is back. Reim can only hear it faintly, coming from the kitchen and accompanied by the unmistakable smell of something frying in a pan – the sound of someone cooking and enjoying himself immensely while doing so.
The noises that greet Reim are a delicious mix of sizzling oil, clattering pots and pans, and Gilbert lowly humming; enthusiastically off-key.
Reim carefully toes off his dress shoes and neatly puts them down next to Gilbert’s boots. His work bag has to endure a harsher fate – he carelessly drops it on the floor, intent on ignoring it until he has to drag himself to the office tomorrow. And what a bleak thought that is, now that his dark and empty apartment is suddenly filled with colour and love and the indescribable feeling of home again.
He trudges through the hallway on socked feet, his steps quiet on the hardwood floor. He passes the open bathroom door and catches a glimpse of Gilbert’s selkie skin, hanging over the bathtub to dry.
A fond smiles crinkles around the corners of his mouth. It has been so long since Gilbert felt secure enough to bring his selkie skin to shore with him, Reim is so used to the sight of the slightly battered, light grey and fuzzy pelt that he barely feels the urge to touch it anymore.
(Barely, as in – the urge will always be there because he knows how soft the fur feels under his fingers, has witnessed how Gilbert has to suppress shudders because he can somehow still feel Reim’s touch even when he is not actively wearing his skin, can remind himself that Gilbert is back again, still alive bar a couple of shallow cuts or tears in the thick coating.)
Reim can only guess where Gilbert has kept his selkie skin hidden before he brought it with him into the apartment for the first time, timid and unsure, but full of a trust Reim wasn’t sure he’s yet earned at the time.
It doesn’t matter. Gilbert has shown him this anyway, this naked part of himself.
Sometimes it still leaves Reim aching. The vulnerability that is stored in a damp patch of fur, hanging over a makeshift line that is tied to his shower curtain rod.
He moves away from the bathroom, ever closer to the kitchen door, slightly ajar in its hinges and letting the light behind the milky glass spill into the hallway. He nudges it open with his socked food, almost noiseless, just to bath in the peace that greets him for a few moments longer.
Gilbert is standing at the stove in a black jeans and t-shirt combo that couldn’t be more ordinary if he tried, expertly moving around the tidy space, stirring in a big pot with Reim’s old wooden spoon, switching over to scrape around in an equally big pan, fiddling with the regulators to turn down the heat, all while slowly swaying his own body to nothing more but the melody he is humming. Reim knows him well enough to confidently guess that it’s a Taylor Swift song.
He waits until the warmth spreads from his toes up his legs through his stomach into his chest up his throat and finally settles on his lips with a wide, ridiculously happy smile.
“Welcome back,” he says into the domesticity of it all, and immediately suppresses an amused chuckle when Gilbert flinches and turns around, cheeks and ears a burning red from the embarrassment of being caught in his guilty pleasure.
His face softens though, and it amazes Reim immensely – the way Gilbert can love so openly, so boundless.
“Welcome home!” he matches Reim’s greeting. “I didn’t know when you’d be back so I thought I’d already start dinner.” He beams up at Reim, his golden eyes rimmed by thick eyelashes that flutter just so when he blinks, and Reim almost stumbles back from the radiating peace of it all.
Almost. Instead, he takes a first, deliberate step into the kitchen, closer to Gilbert, closer to home, then another and another and another, until he has reached him.
He grabs Gilbert by the waist with one warm, the other hand going to his nape where he drags it up to the back of his head so he can grab a fistful of hair and pull Gilbert into a tight kiss.
Gilbert matches this, too, wrapping his arms around Reim’s back and pulling him closer still.
The kiss doesn’t make up for the last three weeks, far from it, but it mollifies Reim at least a little bit. He lets it turn from feverish to gentle, to almost slow. Lingering touches of lips on lips, tongue just barely brushing against tongue.
When Gilbert breaks away from him after what feels like an eternity but could have barely been a minute, Reim instantly regrets letting him ever go.
But he is too slow to catch his mouth again – Gilbert has already turned around and put his attention back on the dinner still simmering in its pot and pan.
“How was your day?” Gilbert casually asks and just keeps stirring what looks like vegetables in a peanut sauce in the pan. In the pot next to it, white rice is happily soaking up the final drops of water.
Reim swallows.
It is becoming harder and harder to talk about his daily life with Gilbert – because how could he ever explain his boring office job, the number of files that are pushed over his desk endlessly, the insignificant gossip he politely listens to at the coffee machine, the unnecessary meetings he attends, the times he has to suppress rolling his eyes at his boss, without ever talking about the thing that is decidedly missing from his day to day life: his selkie boyfriend.
How is he supposed to talk to Gilbert about this year’s theme for the company’s holiday party when he will never get to bring him as a Plus One, will never be able to explain to his colleagues where his boyfriend came from and what he does for a living (keeping peace under the sea, you’re welcome, by the way). Why his skin is just a little bit off-warm, just slightly too cold for normal human skin, why there is always and forever seaweed stuck in his hair and why his eyes are not just an unusual shade of brown, but a bright, ethereal gold, like sunlight filtering through a still ocean surface.
Reim swallows the heavy feeling of doubt and chases the molten heat of their kiss instead.
He steps up to Gilbert again and lays his hands on his hips from behind.
“I’d rather tell you about my plans for tonight,” he whispers into Gilbert’s left ear, punctuating his clear suggestion with a careful tug at his ear cuff.
Gilbert presses back against him with a delicious sigh that tingles over Reim’s skin and makes him shiver in his expensive suit.
“Careful, or you’ll make me burn the food,” Gilbert reprimands him playfully, all the while tilting his head in a clear invitation for Reim to leave wet kisses along his throat. Reim eagerly accepts, relishing in the feeling of Gilbert’s five o’clock shadow against his lips.
“Turn off the stove,” Reim says with just enough authority in his voice to make Gilbert shudder into his arms. He smiles against the damp skin of his neck. His hands wander lower.
And Gilbert obeys.
***
Gilbert is still a heavy weight in his arms when Reim wakes hours later to a dark night, the sea an even darker patch of black against the horizon, barely visible from the tall, floor-length window in his bedroom framed by white silken curtains.
They skipped dinner entirely and Gilbert is going to be pouting about it in the morning, sullenly trying to salvage his efforts from the evening before, but right now Reim can’t be bothered with such mortal thoughts.
He carefully stretches his legs, brushing up against Gilbert’s in the process, and relishes in the weightless exhaustion that sloshes through his body in a satisfied current. He buries his face in Gilbert’s hair, smelling sea salt and sweat, and finally lets go of his fear for the time being.
Gilbert moves closer to him in his sleep, sinks deeper into Reim’s embrace with a throated sigh. Reim pulls him even closer and pulls up the blanket to preserve the warmth.
These are the good times and Reim is glad he can hold Gilbert like this.
There were tougher times, too. Days when Gilbert came back from the sea stressed and exhausted, his second skin bloody and torn. Weeks, months when he didn’t come back at all, and Reim had thought he’d lost him to the sea and a battle that he will never fully understand, can never truly be a part of.
Reim will never truly understand what happened under the surface that summer, the intricate policies of a people that is not his, that only touches his life now because of that fateful storm that spit out Gilbert onto the shore and changed Reim’s life forever.
When Gilbert came back after the battle was won (or lost, neither side is too sure about that), Reim almost ended it. Instead, he pulled a shaking, overwhelmed Gilbert close and held him through the entire night.
When the sun came up, Reim looked out at the sea, dyed in red and orange and clear blue, and hated it, just a little. Then he thanked it for releasing Gilbert back to him.
They have come such an awfully long way.
“You’re thinking about something serious again,” Gilbert whispers against Reim’s collarbone, his voice still husky, his eyes fluttering between closed and open. “I can feel it in your heartbeat.”
His cold, cold hand leaves its place just above Reim’s waistband and travels along his side, up around his ribcage, leaving a trail of goosebumps and coming to a rest right above his heart.
“You’ll think yourself into a heart attack one day,” Gilbert scolds lightly. Reim snorts.
“That’s rich, coming from you, Mr. I-worry-about-everything-and-everyone-all-of-the-time.” Reim unearths one hand from under the blanket and flicks Gilbert’s forehead. “Besides, I eat healthy and I exercise enough, statistically it is very improbable that I’ll have a heart attack.”
Gilbert rolls his eyes fondly and kisses the spot where Reim’s throat meets his collarbone. “If you say so,” he teases and flashes his eyes up at Reim, clear and golden in the dark
Sometimes when they do it like tonight, hard and intense and Reim fully in control, like a powerful current, it takes Gilbert a while to swim back to the surface.
But then when he does come back up, he’s more solid in the present, the part of him that belongs to the sea finally tangible in Reim’s hands, finally for him to hold and cradle as he pleases.
“You’re being awfully cheeky,” Reim comments and runs his fingers down Gilbert’s forehead, tugging at soft locks and thumbing along his jawline before abruptly wrapping his hand around Gilbert’s throat.
He uses his legs to turn them around until he is hovering over Gilbert, his partner sprawled out beneath him, wide-eyed and mouth open in a surprised gasp.
Reim gently squeezes, until Gilbert’s eyes roll back into his head with a choked moan.
“Please,” he breathes, his back arching off the sheets and into Reim’s chest, begging for more or less or something else entirely.
Reim releases his hold and slowly leans down, catching Gilbert’s lips in a languid kiss, dispelling the tension and letting it melt into something softer, more delicate.
When they break apart, he sits up, straddling Gilbert but careful to keep most of his weight off him.
Gilbert looks up at him with starry eyes, a contrast of black hair and pale skin against Reim’s grey sheets in the moonlit dark.
“I love you,” spills out of Reim. Gilbert drinks it up with a smile. “I love you, too.”
Something flickers across his face, then, unrecognizable, barely there and gone again.
He pushes Reim off himself with a gentle shove and sits up, too. He leans over the bed and fishes for his jeans on the floor, rummaging through his pockets under Reim’s curious gaze. When he finds what he’s looking for, he straightens up again and knees down across from Reim, radiating a sudden nervousness.
“I brought you something,” he announces eloquently and holds out his arm.
Reim scoots closer and squints his eyes, vision blurry without his glasses.
From Gilbert’s white-knuckled fist dangles a simple silver chain with a sea shell pendant.
It’s a simple conch, coloured in a pink-ish apricot with sandy swirls curling along into the off-white of it’s inner centre.
Reim’s heart skips a beat. He reaches for the necklace and carefully touches the fragile shell between his fingers.
Does Gilbert know that Reim knows? And if so, does he know that Reim thinks that Gilbert knows that he knows? And does that mean that he knows that Reim thinks that Gilbert knows that he thinks Gilbert knows that he knows and –
He stops here because it’s getting too complicated, even or him, and Gilbert is a simple man anyway, so Reim just asks.
“What does this mean?”
Gilbert’s eyes turn impossibly soft. “Oz told me he told you.”
Ah.
Reim swallows.
He takes the necklace with shaking hands. The chain is long enough to fit over his head without opening the clasp and the conch falls right over the middle of his chest, where his ribs melt together under his skin. He looks down at the pendant over his chest and swallows.
“It’s beautiful,” he says, voice breathless, the words barely a whisper, muffled and raw, and slick from salty tracks running down his cheeks.. “Where did you get it?”
Gilbert laughs wetly through his own tears. “I swam down the deepest trench I could find. It took me four days and earned me a scolding from Oz, Vincent and Alice, of all people, for leaving without a word.”
They cannot get married. Not legally in Reim’s world, and not in the much less boring but way more magical way these kind of bonds are formed in Gilbert’s world.
But there is a power held in symbols, Reim knows ever since he saw Gilbert’s literal selkie skin hanging from his coat rack.
A conversation, not so long ago, shortly after the sea had spit out Gilbert on a blood red morning with the message of peace, at last, on his lips.
If marriage exists in your culture, how do you propose to someone?
Sea grass green eyes opening slightly, blond hair still wet and clinging to the forehead, a blinding white smile.
We offer a shell, gathered from a special place in the sea, earned with a difficult journey or a dangerous task, as proof of our devotion.
The sound of a girl laughing, water splashing, and Gilbert Gilbert Gilbert all around, everywhere, all encompassing and eternal.
I can never really have him, he’d thought as he’d looked out over the sea that crimson red sunrise. But neither can you, he silently adds today, the sea a dark blue and a tiny shell dangling around his neck.
In the present, Reim throws his life against the ocean rocks of his love.