Work Text:
The snow was starting to melt.
Boyd watched through the iced-over glass as frozen trees bled melted snow like a man bleeds blood, all the while considering what this would mean for him and the man- the monster asleep beside him.
Ives looked younger while he slept, not that Boyd knew how old his cannibalistic partner actually was, just that he was older than the lines of his face indicated. He looked handsome in sleep, too, though that wasn’t totally unique. Ives had been handsome from the moment they’d met, eyes bright even as he spun false stories about being coerced into consuming human flesh by a tyrannical military colonel, leading their party to certain death in the wilderness.
As Boyd watched the early morning sun sparkle through a melting icicle, an arm was tossed around his waist, pulling him closer to Ives and the warmth under their covers. The feeling of skin against skin was hot like a brand and it made Boyd want to lay back down and never get back up.
During the days they’d spent healing after the beartrap incident, they’d stayed as close to each other as possible, laying together as the strength of dead soldiers knitted their wounds back together.
They'd ended up scrapping the plan to have Slauson join their ranks. Well. Boyd had. As Boyd had stumbled out of the barn, eyes wild, running only on adrenaline and blood from Ives' cracking lips, he'd crossed paths with the general and dispatched of him as quickly as possible, snapping his neck in an instant.
Killing had felt as natural as breathing and Boyd hadn't even had time to feel bad before Ives was coming up behind him and going "Hm. Nice work. I'll deal with the other one."
Without question or second thought, Boyd had followed, and watched in silence as Ives snuck up behind the general's aide and hit him in the back of the head as hard as he could.
It tasted good, that was one of the things Boyd hated most about what his life had come to. He had never had a great fondness for meat, even before the enemy camp incident. (He also hated that his life had now been cut into 'incidents', the times before and after horrid things had happened.) But the stew that Ives had put so much heart (not his own) into was better than any beef or pork that Boyd had ever eaten.
Even after the stew, both had still been exhausted, weak after the gauntlet they'd put each other through. What they had now wasn't quite a truce, but they were no longer locked in constant battle.
Boyd told himself he would kill Ives the moment he saw the opportunity; he would kill him and die trying. But he didn't. As Ives collapsed into the rumpled sheets of a bed that had been Boyd's at some point, Boyd couldn't find the will to put an end to it, to find one of the discarded swords or a cooking knife or a fire poker and drive it deep into the back of the monster- the man who was now his only chance at companionship. He was right, Boyd thought as he drifted off to sleep that first night, barely an inch separating him and Ives. He was right, it feels so easy.
The days and nights since had gone very much the same way. The two revolved around each other, moving through each other's spaces, never straying far from the other's side, until they fell into bed together at night.
The frankly bizarre thought that this must be a bit like marriage crossed Boyd's mind at one point as he brought in more wood for the fire Ives was cooking over. The frontier had been sold as a place for families to go out on their own, a place for a husband and wife to keep a home, a place to have children to help with the work and eventually build a community. This was oddly like the beginning of that, Boyd imagined.
He had never considered marriage all that seriously, one of the reasons the army had been the place he'd called home for most of his adult life (one of the only reasons, considering he wasn't much of a soldier and he had, until recently, abhorred the sight of blood). It had been easy to ignore how alien he felt in the rigid structure and hierarchy of the army; very few of his fellows were there because they were perfectly well-adjusted individuals who were going to be upstanding members of society when they went back to wherever they’d known before. It was easy to fumble around in the darkness with another soldier under the guise of missing a woman's touch, they never had to know that he had never sought that out in the first place.
Ives was of the same persuasion as Boyd, of course, but seemed to have no particular hangups about it, despite the rosary still knotted around his wrist. Ives didn't seem to have much in the way of hangups about anything and Boyd could admit it, now, in the solitude of the near-empty fort that he envied that quality deeply.
When they’d kissed for the first time, a real kiss, not the awkward press of open, panting mouths in the bear trap, Ives had approached it with the same hunger with which he did everything. The way he walked, like a stalking beast, the way he talked, in honeyed tones, the way he kissed, biting at Boyd’s lips, it was all done with a starving desperation that Boyd was beginning to love as much as he’d initially feared it.
Looking back on it, Boyd couldn't think of any attraction he’d had in the past that quite matched the sheer depth of his infatuation with Ives.
Love had always been a distant thing; he supposed his parents had been in love, in the most basic and uncomplicated sense, his sister had seemed quite in love with the young farmer she's married, but Boyd had always thought it was quite an unreachable thing for him, a dimming light very far off at the end of a very long, dark tunnel. But now, as Ives began to stir next to him, it seemed as though love could just as easily be in the violence of teeth tearing through flesh as in the kisses being pressed to his bare stomach.
“Get back down here… th’ fire’s not even out yet.” Ives mumbled, voice still thick with sleep. He pressed another kiss to a scar he’d once bestowed on Boyd himself, a spot where a blade had once run Boyd nearly clean through.
Boyd acquiesced to the request of his partner, pulling the blanket tighter around the two of them and looping an arm around Ives’ slender waist. “The snow’s starting to melt,” Boyd whispered, not sure Ives would even hear him.
“Is it?” Ives hummed, burying his nose in Boyd’s shoulder and breathing hotly against his neck. Boyd nodded wordlessly.
“Well, we’ll have to make some plans, then. Reconfigure. Adapt. We’ll make the best of it.” The surety in Ives’ voice brought the ghost of a smile to Boyd’s lips, even in the face of what horrors those ‘plans’ could actually amount to. “Later, though. C’mon, go back to sleep.”
It was simple enough to close his eyes, to simply ignore the melting of the ice, the warmer weather of the coming weeks, the imminence of dozens of settlers heading through the Sierra Nevadas, and whatever that meant for him and Ives. That could wait. For now, Boyd was content to lay down, his partner, his companion, his spouse in all but name, asleep beside him.
It was so easy.