Chapter Text
Wakings have become gentle, the early morning light filtered through fluttering, butterfly wing curtains he touches again and again. To prove something, perhaps? To reassure himself? They feel real, and yet fleeting, much like the situation he’s found himself in these past months.
It cannot last, because nothing like this does. Nothing like this has, but…he wants it to. More than anything, anything, he wants this to be what brings him to heel and keeps him. This strange, beautiful world where he wakes–the rare times he sleeps so deeply–with a breath not laced in agony.
It has taken many months to trust it; that this will not shatter if he walks even a little too heavily amid the quiet. If he asks questions and tests its strength to hold him. But he is starting to believe. It’s an easier thing to do now, when he has the workings of wrist muscles on his mind and soap that smells like the ocean tickling his nose as he bathes. The latter, from Elizabeth. The former, a gift, from Victor. A gift…something miraculous, and he never…
A hand startles him from his thoughts, and though he jumps a bit, William remains steady, smiling at him.
“Apologies, Adam, I didn’t realize you hadn’t heard my knock.”
And there, the name that is also a gift. As is the way William looks at him with no fear or anger. More than that, his face is open with certainty and friendship.
I cannot judge of your countenance, but there is something in your voice that persuades me of your goodwill and kindness.
“I did not notice the time passing, I’m sorry. Do you need the bath?”
William shakes his head before he’s finished.
“No, no, not at all. Simply checking in on you. We woke around the same time, you and I, so I was a bit worried when I didn’t hear the bath refill. It must be cold by now?” It’s phrased as a half-question, and Adam’s quick assessment confirms William’s assumption.
It’s very, very cold, and he had hardly noticed, used to ignoring his physical state, but the chill makes itself known now. He shivers, shoulders drawing up, and William laughs boisterously, shaking his head.
“I thought as much. No, dear fellow, don’t get up! I will heat the water for you, or it will only be colder out here. Be back in just a moment,” he calls, already crossing the room to make more hot water, rolling up his sleeves.
Adam’s eyes follow him, and…and something is choking him. Something that makes tears gather there at the corners. Makes his throat work for air as it tries to swallow some unnamed emotion welling up from his chest.
Suddenly, William is too far away. Somehow, his friend being beyond immediate reach is cause for anguish, and some sound or another must come out of him despite how voiceless he feels, because William looks up in alarm, making an aborted movement towards him before he looks back at the water, only lukewarm, clearly thinking, and makes a quick calculation in his mind.
The basin stays behind, and William hastens to his side, taking the hand that is already reaching, reaching for–
He presses his wet forehead to William’s chest and receives no complaint despite the fact that it must soak through the expensive satin waistcoat and shirt beneath.
“Adam, Adam my friend, what is it? What troubles you?”
Would that he could answer, but it is all a whirl in his mind, and he wants to say that it is not distress that grips him. Nothing troubles him but that he is alive and he is here and William was getting him hot water.
Maddening, at times, the way emotions grip him like wolves with their sharp, sharp teeth that sink into somewhere deeper than flesh. No amount of blood spilled seems to be enough to be rid of it. The intensity of his feeling as incessant as the life pumping through his veins.
“Is he alright?” Elizabeth’s voice from the doorway is a soothing balm on his mind, and he instinctively quiets a little, that he might hear her.
“I’m…I don’t know what I did wrong, I…” No, no, that’s not right. It’s not wrong, it’s… “I was only heating more water…”
Adam reaches for Elizabeth with the hand not clenching and unclenching in William’s shirt, and she makes a soft sound of understanding as she kneels by her husband’s side. He can hear the smile in her voice, because she knows. She sees what he cannot voice, she always does.
“Yes, William. You were heating more water. For him. Just because he needed it, because it would bring comfort to him. Do you see?”
It takes a few moments, but William draws a sharp breath, and Adam can only wonder what look is passing between them when William understands the way Elizabeth does.
His face is taken gently from its haven, but he is not left bereft. Instead, it is turned, and William sinks down a little further beside the bath until they’re eye to eye. His hair is moved from where it’s plastered against his cheek by Elizabeth’s hand, and his eyes travel back and forth between their beloved faces.
“You, Adam, are a marvel,” William says, and with such wonder that it feels like a physical weight on Adam’s chest. “I would say that it’s only a bit of water, but… I do not wish to diminish its meaning, only…” He hesitates, looking to Elizabeth, but her face is carefully neutral. Simply watching. Witnessing.
“This is what I am for. Anything you need. This is what people who care for each other do for each other, you know.”
Elizabeth turns sharply, fixing her gaze on her husband, and Adam is distracted for a moment by what he sees there, but his attention returns when William squeezes his hand.
“I will not go far, and Elizabeth will be right here.” To lend truth to the promise, Elizabeth shuffles over to take his place when he stands looking awkward and directionless for a few seconds before he shakes his head, turning about to his task across the room.
There is something new and more open in her expression when she folds her arms along the ridge of the tub and places her cheek on it, looking at her husband. Adam rests his chin on her hair lightly, and she giggles, blindly reaching a hand up to pet his cheek. He leans into it, the tightness in his chest easing with her touch.
“I am learning things today,” she says cryptically, and Adam doesn’t ask what she means. She will tell him, if she feels like sharing.
“Something to study?” He does ask, and she nods with her limited movement.
“Something marvelous.”
When William comes back, beaming at them both and triumphant with his procurement of hot water, Adam looks between his dearest friends and feels something in his heart settle. A little beetle landing on a stick in the forest. The smallest thing, the largest thing in the universe, and all his. Entirely his, fluttering there, until he has to rub at his chest, trying to ease the love attempting to burst forth from it.
And when William miscalculates a step, slipping on the wet floor only to soak them all into shock and uproarious laughter, the thing in his chest takes flight, taking him up and up and up and…
Yes. Something marvelous.
—
Elizabeth’s gaze is making him nervous, she can tell. Nervous, and aroused, if the way William squirms is any indication.
The day passes with relative quiet, but it is only because she is thinking. She does not speak when she is forming a hypothesis. She observes, she watches, and she takes in everything. The smallest things, the details, the little strings people leave untugged.
Adam lays with his head in her lap, reading to her and William in his bedchambers. It is her favourite room besides her own. His tastes run simple, but there is a beauty and purposefulness in the way he arranges his little treasures. Rocks and leaves and flowers. Seeds and bones. The pinned insects she brings him that he enjoys looking at, the pieces of cloth William gifts that he loves to touch. A taxidermied mouse, in a place of prominence, when he couldn’t bear to let go of the tiny friend that had passed peacefully in the palm of his hand, safe as it ran back to its Creator.
Although he is reading Psyche-another favourite of hers–in that endearing start and stop and stuttering way of his, her attention is on other matters.
“Or o'er his guileless front the ringlets bright
Their rays of sunny lustre seem to throw,
That front than polished ivory more white!
His blooming cheeks with deeper blushes glow”
William sips his brandy, gazing back despite his seeming instinct to glance away, cheeks a similar reddened hue to Eros’, and she smiles a bit, just to see his shoulders ease. Few are the men like her husband, who look upon her with another man’s head in her lap, and are not only unjealous, but deeply contented with what they see.
Fewer still are the ones who look like they can’t decide which of them they would rather be.
Her hands sift through Adam’s hair, and he stalls in his reading for a moment, making a sound of pleasure, nearly a purr. He tilts his head back, exposing his throat to her, and she runs her fingers down the line of it, as he does to her when he wants to better understand the words she’s saying, even now.
And William’s eyes dart from her to him, his mouth parting as his legs do, just a little, but more than enough to tell her everything she wants to know.
When it’s time to bid Adam goodnight, she does so with a kiss to his forehead and one to each palm, and feels entirely, completely too powerful for her own good. If ever she could understand Victor’s madness, it is in moments like this, when she commands every breath and eye in the room, but not for such base things as simple desire.
The look in both of their eyes…this is worship, and though she is not the Divine, she does not think He would deny her such things in His name. She is His mirror, for she is made in His image just the same as any man, is she not?
Adam does not keep her there, though he could, but she can see that he longs to follow.
Soon, she thinks. Soon, I will be able to gift us both to you, beautiful creature. He is most worthy of them, and now, she thinks, perhaps they might be worthy of him.
William is silent as they move together towards their bedroom, not looking at her, but that is alright. He has much to think on, and she is in no hurry. The process of surrender is an art. One that men aren’t nearly as used to studying, but if there is one thing about William that she loves most of all, it is that he is more intelligent than anyone she has ever met in the ways of the heart. Shy and hesitant when he could be bold, sometimes, but when he is given room to grow, he fills the entire space. No longer kept short under the mad kind of brilliance inhabiting his brother; matching him wit for wit when Victor is at the estate. William is flourishing, and Elizabeth would be happy with her decision if she were not certain that they, together, could have more.
As if in confirmation to her thoughts, William quietly steps behind her. Unobtrusive and willing to step away again should she not be interested tonight. As though she isn’t wanting and wet between her legs, the smell of her heady enough that even Adam’s heightened senses aren’t needed to know how much she aches.
Her garments are shed, one by one. Her wings are set aside; there is no need for flight just now. She wishes to be pinned and set into beauty, only to be freed again. Choice, choice, choice, it is all she wanted in life, and now that she has it, it is no longer needed because the choice will always be them. This. Everything that is good, in this garden of theirs.
When William goes to his knees for her, she runs her fingers through his curls as she had done for Adam. She praises him as he feasts, the ache at her core clenching and easing with each moan he gifts her. His hands fist in the bedsheets, and so she moves them to her flesh, where she can enjoy the bruises later.
He doesn’t stop when she cries out his name and feels him lap up what she gives him in return. Doesn’t stop, only gently bears her up on the bed to flip her over and have his second course. His tongue spears into her while his fingers drive her to madness, opening her, readying her.
She wonders what his thoughts will be on her readying him, just before all rational thinking eludes her, shattered around the feeling of him turning her back to face him and pushing into her.
It takes a while to bring herself back together, while he moves with such purpose, and she takes his face in her hands to look at him. He is dazed and addled and she loves him, she loves him, she loves him.
She doesn’t speak. Only rakes her nails down his back to watch the beauty in the way he arches, chasing the sting, and in the choked breath that feels punched from his chest. Down, her hands wander. Down, gripping his ass to encourage him to drive into her harder. He moans her name, then whispers it, and then–
His hips stutter when her fingers part the cleft, and stop altogether when he feels her run them along his hole. He draws his face up from her neck, eyes wild and…
Fearful?
Her heart sinks.
Of her? Of himself? Of what she knows?
Another careful stroke, and his eyes close, his expression wounded. Has she miscalculated? Does he not want–
“Elizabeth,” he murmurs, voice tight, and dips his forehead down to meet hers. “Elizabeth, I beg you, don’t…”
She doesn’t take her hand away just yet. Doesn’t take his choices from him, because she won’t. She refuses to. His words will be her command, not her own assumptions.
He lowers himself again, resting in her arms, trembling. Still inside her, still hot and hard and…oh.
Oh, she understands, now.
“Don’t what, my love?” He is more exquisite, more marvelous than he has ever been.
She can feel him swallow hard, his arms slowly reaching over her to the headboard, stretched out and supplicant to her will. Still not meeting her gaze.
“Don’t…if there’s…if I can’t–”
He whimpers into her hair when she strokes that sensitive place again.
“Please, please Elizabeth, do not give me cause to hope if there is none. I…”
Tears, unbidden, in her eyes and his as she pets his chest. The skin over his heart is warm, and her lips soak it in.
“You are mine,” she says, with conviction in her voice. “And I am yours. And he is ours, as we are his. This I know above all things.” William gasps her name again, finally looking at her. Warring between trust in her and every experience to the contrary that came before her.
“‘This is what I am for’,” she quotes his words, and he sobs, kissing her neck in reverence and gratitude. “William, you are more than what you do for us. You know this, don’t you?”
He shakes his head, and she sighs, examining the length of his collarbone with her fingers.
“Then permit me to assure you. I want Adam. Completely, desperately, in every way I can have him. As we are now, as lovers, as anything at all, so long as he is mine.” She looks into his eyes and finds nothing but acceptance there. Resignation and understanding both. What a life she has been blessed with. What a generosity she is bequeathed when she thought the world could only ever take from her.
“But that does not mean I do not feel precisely the same way about you. My heart is vast, and it carries the both of you within it.”
Hope, that unquashable thing, is written in the set of his jaw and the lines of his forehead. She wants to nurture it. Help it grow.
“I think you know it to be true in yourself, as well. I see your eyes on him. They speak of a kindred hunger to my own. To judge you would be to judge myself, and only God can do such things. He delivered Adam to us. To name, to keep, to love. There is no Eve for him, he has been denied such, but not without recourse. ‘It is not good that he should be alone,’ and so we will be his companions to whatever end.”
She doesn’t say that she has seen Adam’s eyes on him as well. Let that be his discovery when the time comes.
Her lips find his, and he acquiesces to her touch. Nods when they part, trusting that what she says is true without speaking the hesitation lingering in him.
“And whether or not this love will come to pass in the way that I think it will, know this, William.” She grins playfully, pulling his attention back to where they’re connected by tightening her sex around him, delighted by the strangled sound he makes. “I will not leave my husband bereft of what he desires most.”
And he is moving in her again, finally, like a man possessed. Gasping his thanks when she reaches between them to gather her slick off his cock, onto her fingers. They come away soaked, because she is made for this pleasure and craves it, covets it, longs for it in all forms even beyond the physical and sexual. To be seen and known before she fades away; that is what she will choose every time.
When she dips her fingertips into him, he muffles a cry into her shoulder, arms flexing over her. He hasn’t half the strength of Adam, and yet he is glorious above her, making the headboard creak with his restraint. He leaves his pleasure to her choices, and she rewards him generously.
“It is this, is it not? Us, together, without pretense or obstruction?” She asks, and his affirmation is chanted like a hymn. Her fingers seek out what Victor’s diagrams have portrayed, and she thanks God for creating her hands to be that of a pianist when she strikes true and William jolts, cries out, and comes deep within her.
—
“Elizabeth,” Adam greets, like she is the foundation of existence, and William can’t help but agree.
And then…miracle of all miracles.
“William.”
Mismatched eyes turn to him, and William thinks that if he could hear the rumble of that voice curled around his name for the rest of his life, he could defy the curse of his namesake and die a happy man.
“Good morning,” he replies, fiddling with the pipe he is filling, because Elizabeth is watching them with knowing in her countenance. He doesn’t look directly at Adam. Cannot bring himself to, not just yet. Not when scant hours before, his wife had brought him to completion and commanded that it be another’s name on his lips when he did.
He only wishes he could give it half the justice Adam gives William’s name. Half the reverence, respect, adoration…
And it is that, isn’t it? Is he wrong to think that Adam says his name in a way that could…make a man hope?
Adam’s nose twitches, rising to sniff the air for a moment, and William firmly brings himself back in line. Not yet, they’d decided. Not until Adam came to them.
He’s not certain he can bear to find out that Adam does not care for them–for him, specifically, because of course he does for Elizabeth, of course he does–in that way, only when years have passed and his heart has yearned to the point of exhaustion.
For Adam, though, he will endure. He is a friend first and above all else, and he deserves far more than this world gives him, even now.
Sometimes, he feels useless. Helpless to bridge the gap that his brother created. There is such a deficit owed. So much that has been denied to Adam, and some days it’s all William can do not to scream into that space about how very unfair it is that once again, someone else is left bereft in cleaning up what Victor has broken.
He tries, very hard, not to include himself in that. What right does he have to complain when Victor was shattered first?
“It is a very f-fine morning,” Adam says, looking towards the open window with a smile. “But I can smell rain on the clouds. I would. Like to take a walk before it begins, if you would join me?”
Elizabeth’s immediate acceptance illuminates Adam’s soul, his large frame leaning like a sunflower towards her in delight, and William is so very in love with them both.
“Very good,” he says, stepping back. “I shall see you when you return, then.”
The light dims.
Doesn’t go out entirely, not at all, but…
“Will you nnnot be by our side?” Adam asks, and there is no subtlety to him. His heart is ever on his sleeve, and his disappointments evident. Endearing and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Wanted.
He is wanted. His company is…
A carriage rides away, again and again, carrying Victor with it, far from him.
“I do not want to intrude,” he murmurs, but already he can see the light returning. “If you wish to spend time with just Elizabeth, I can busy myself with other matters.”
Adam takes his hand, folding it into the crook of his arm, like Elizabeth taught him to do when they walk together, and if his heart would simply stop galloping away from him, he would very much appreciate–
“I would have you both with me, if it is my choice.”
William clears his throat, nodding, watching the boyish happiness as Adam offers his arm to Elizabeth in turn.
“Yes, of course, my friend. I would be delighted to accompany you. May I inquire where we are headed?”
Adam grins with all the mischief of a great faerie man, walking them towards the front hall
“You may, but I will nnnot tell. It is a secret.”
William clutches his chest, and laughter bubbles from within him at how very pleased Adam is with himself.
“A secret! You wound me, sir! Imagine, secrets between us! Elizabeth, I demand that you torture it from him post haste!”
“I would, my dear, but our Adam cannot be tortured into truth, for he is not ticklish in the least! I have tried.”
Adam giggles, of all things! A strange, precious hiccup of a sound, while he helps her into her cloak, and William finds he would do anything at all to hear it again.
“Ah, but Adam!” He leans in conspiratorily, raising a brow at Elizabeth’s warning look. She is not the only one who can play this wonderful, wicked game. “If you test at her sides, just below the ribs, you’ll find that Elizabeth very much is.”
Elizabeth’s shriek of defiance grows immediately fainter as she darts away and out onto the grounds. It leaves Adam stunned for a moment before he is suddenly in pursuit, his laughter loud and unfettered, blending with William’s as he runs her down.
Her own helpless mirth joins in when he catches her, fingers finding their marks until tears are streaming from her eyes with how hard she laughs.
“Nononono, Adam! Adam, that tickles, that–William! William, you dreadful man, save me!”
He merely raises his pipe to the both of them, wishing that every moment could be just like this one. He follows them out, trailing their game of catch and release, until it is his turn to flee them both, his wife hell bent on revenge.