The Silence Of Metawin.

日本

The life they build together is a quiet one.

For Win, that's no kind of adjustment. Subtracting the commitments and the necessary daily interactions a life with a family entailed feels like a slow, gradual relaxing into a state of being he greets with relief. It's the place where he always felt most balanced. When he thinks back, he imagines his life with Third as a brief period spent in direct sunlight that, like a wolf in a meadow at midday, always felt exposed and unnatural to him. Like he was playing the part of a different, divergent Win Metawin. One whose mind hadn't split and travelled down an alternative route, decades back.

His life with Bright is the opposite of that life. Living as they do– in the deep shadows of the forest- Win feels a calmness and clarity he has rarely experienced before. He wakes at dawn every day with a mindful, fully present anticipation of the day ahead. His body, although deeply scarred by everything he and Bright have experienced together, feels strong and vibrant with life. The soles of his feet when he drops them to the bare floorboards, can sense every groove and hitch of the surface. Every morning he stretches his arms above his head and finds himself marvelling at the construction of them: the muscles curved tightly around the bones, the pale soft skin of his forearms, the fine chiselling of the ulna into his wrist. He twists his head to one side, and he hears and feels the corded sinews flex and crackle with a delicious discomfort. It's his morning ritual that doesn't feel like a ritual. Because he doesn't do it out of habit, only a kind of constant, daily, reoccurring wonder at being alive, fully and completely alive, and in possession of this body of his.

Occasionally- from the doorway of his room- he catches Bright watching him, and the wordless silence between them fills with an energy that Win always finds both disquieting and deeply familiar. Disquieting because his heart-rate tells him so, and familiar because it is and Win always be the natural state between this man and himself.

Bright watches him openly now, although he doesn't touch him or even approach him closer than necessity demands. In the days and weeks after their escape together, his hands on Win's body had become as familiar to him as his own. Bright had cleaned and dressed his wounds with the same deft efficiency as Win imagined he would an unfamiliar patient, wrapping and rewrapping his broken ribs in silence, with only the occasional professional enquiry into pain levels. He offered no words of reassurance, or indicated any satisfaction at his own work as the carefully sutured scars healed, only the most perfunctory of exams accompanied with as little eye contact as possible. It took two long weeks before he would hold Win's gaze for more than a few moments, and it was only when he finally did that Win understood why.

Bright was uncertain.

It was an emotion he had never felt or seen before in his hazel eyes, and yet it was unmistakable. And caught, identified and catalogued as he instantly understood he was, Bright finally stilled, and allowed himself to be seen.

His breathing, at first regular and deep, became almost imperceptible, his pupils widening fractionally as the moment stretched out between them, spun tight like a strand of sugar. Inclining his head fractionally, Win realised that he actually could hear Bright's heartbeat straining under his control, threatening to betray him, and then in the same moment he realised something else. That Bright was letting him hear it. Meeting his eyes again, he saw a tiny movement. Bright's lips had parted slightly, his jaw lifting a few millimetres while the rest of his body remained perfectly still. It was almost imperceptible, but seeing it Win found himself suddenly filled with a sense of wonder and fascination he couldn't even begin to find the edges of. Standing in front of him in that moment, holding his gaze, he knew with complete certainty that Bright had never allowed himself to be so completely vulnerable in his entire life.