"I used to wish that‑‑" Michael said, and David shook his head. He didn't want to know about Michael and Alec, didn't want to hear their story. Not now. Not ever. He knew that if he did he wouldn't be able to bear it. Michael nodded and there was understanding in his eyes. After that they didn't talk. They just looked out the window together, at all the perfect worlds laid out before them.
Michael came to see him every day. Every day he'd come and David would wait, a long while at first and then less as loneliness bloomed inside him, before he would turn away from the window and see Michael sitting there, a hesitant smile on his face.
At first Michael only asked if David needed anything, if he'd slept well. Polite questions, soft questions, and the first time David answered him the smile that lit Michael's face cast rainbows around the room, the ice that had coated everything cracking and yielding to the sun because David had never seen anything as lovely as Michael's smile. That day he let Michael take him to the gardens, walked through one laid out with trellises of climbing flowers and soft blue grass blowing in a wind that wasn't real.
After that Michael asked other questions. Nothing about David's life before, a kindness David resented and desperately needed, but he was endlessly curious about everything else. What colors did David like? What sort of foods did he dream of eating? If Michael showed him a map of the city, would David tell him what he thought of Michael's plan for a new harbor? And when David said he sang Michael didn't ask him to sing for him. He sang for David instead, created rhythm and words with his voice and smiled far away when he was done. "I always wanted to be a singer," he said. "That's how I met‑‑" He broke off and cleared his throat, then reached over and touched David's hand.
"I didn't mean to‑‑" he said. "I just‑‑when I'm around you, I can't think," and he meant it. David moved him past thought, past reason. It was there in his voice and it was easy to lean in close, to watch Michael's eyes flutter closed. The power of it was heady in him, rising dark and singing through his body. It was all he had now.
Michael's mouth was smooth and warm and tasted faintly of roses. David bit down because he knew he could and the rose taste faded into something warmer, flavored hot and metallic‑tinged, and Michael moaned, mouth opening wider under his. The walls frosted over and when they parted their breath came out as soft white clouds, mingling over and around them to fall freezing to the ground.
David put a hand on Michael's chest, over his heart, and watched Michael's breath catch. He curled his fingers and pictured cold stabbing through skin, past bone, into the soft flesh underneath. So easy. Such a little thing, a heart. So easy to break.
He moved his hand lower, heard Michael's breath start again, race rapid, form his name in wonder and heat and more than a hint of fear, and let loose the roaring darkness inside him.
Michael called him David but only when they were alone. In public he called him by names David didn't know but was told were his own, a long lyrical line of them that he learned to respond to only when he turned them into song, a string of words running together in his mind.
He told Michael that once as they lay curled together, sated and empty and tired of feeling alone, and Michael had laughed and kissed him, said, "But it's who you are."
Everyone else called him "Your Highness," and bowed low whenever he walked by. Only Michael's eyes were allowed on him although sometimes, when he was sitting by Michael's side during his morning meetings, he would feel Judith looking at him.
"David is‑‑it's like a secret," Michael said one night, the two of them lying in Michael's bed. It was a lovely bed, carved and tall and piled high with the softest blankets David had ever felt. "It sounds like one, don't you think? Something private. Something only we share." He kissed him and David opened his mouth, swallowed down words there was no point in saying. Michael gasped and arched into him, skin prickling with cold.
David called Michael by name when he came, sometimes, when the roaring inside him was a scream, when Michael was shivering and pleading and staring at him with dazed almost frightened eyes. The rest of the time he never called him anything, just closed his eyes or opened his mouth or smiled. Michael never noticed. He knew who he was and it was who he wanted to be.
Michael never mentioned Alec to him, never again tried to tell him their story or get David to share his own, and David was grateful for that. He wanted his memories to be his, hoarded them tightly inside himself, the one tiny place he could go and feel free. And Alec and Michael‑‑all he knew was that it had ended and that itself was too much, rubbed a raw place inside him that roared every time Michael smiled. He didn't know how Michael had found Alec and then given him up. He never could have done that.
If he'd had a choice, a real choice, he never would have.
Michael was proud of who David was. Of what he could do. The first time he told someone, David sitting by his side in a banquet room that spanned so far he couldn't see the end of it, David had been shocked, hearing everything he could do‑‑had done‑‑laid out, Michael's voice lilting as he talked of land that David had ruined, of how he could cloud the skies if he chose.
After a while, he grew used to it. He would listen to the stories of what he could do, what he'd done, and let his mind drift away. Sometimes he would see Judith watching him, a frown creasing her forehead as she looked at his fingers lying still and quiet within Michael's, being held but never holding.
***
Michael wanted him to be happy.
"I'm going to make you happy," he'd told him, not the first time David woke up to find Michael smiling at him but the second, the third, the fourth. He said it every time after that and eventually David said, "I am," and "You do." They were just words and they were easy enough to say.
Sometimes it frightened him, how everything inside him seemed hollowed out, gone.
And then one morning, standing silently while the maid who wasn't one watched the dressers hovering around him, a thought came to him. As it bloomed it was like a flame inside him. The tan door and Gladys living behind it. She would still be there. She might‑‑he stopped the thought before he could finish it.
The maid who wasn't one was watching him with flat eyes, and when he smiled at her she looked right through him. He could see Judith all over her.
He looked out the window. The gardens were as lovely as ever. He looked at the one shaped like the ocean and thought of the last time he'd seen Gladys, her red tired face and the look on it as she stared at what had been his door.
For the first time in what felt like forever, he hoped.
He asked that night and knew as soon as he did that he'd done something wrong because Judith smiled at him, the careful slow one she used when she didn't like what was being said, and let her gaze skim to Michael. He pressed his hands together and moved them off the table. Only the edge of the dish nearest to him was changed, a thin layer of ice coating over the roses that bloomed across it. It was hard to believe he'd once thought they looked beautiful.
"You miss her?" Michael's voice was as always, warm and kind. David nodded and then let one hand come to rest near Michael, close enough for the edge of his finger to curl up against one of Michael's hands.
Michael grinned at him. "You should go, then. Tomorrow, the day after that, as soon as you'd like." Judith didn't move at all but David watched her eyes flash.
"With an escort, of course," Michael added. "I don't want anything to happen to you."
"Of course," David said, and curled his finger around one of Michael's. He watched as Michael's skin paled, fading white.