[Pinstripes] Wishes
Title: Wishes
Story/Character: Pinstripes / Samuel, Oscar
Rating: PG-13 (m/m)
word count: 2,139
Written for the brigits_flame prompt of "destiny". It's set in the same world as the last two prompts I wrote, but with a different set of characters. The whole world is one long epic but I deliberately wrote this piece as a stand alone short, so no prior knowledge is required for Flame readers. ^_^
* * * * *
There were those who claimed that fate was an immutable fact of life; that everything had a purpose, preordained and fore-written, and what was to be would eventually come to pass. Even in the Old Believer community, however, there were an equal number who said otherwise; who pointed to foreseers and the mutable possible threads of the future and said that it was human choice which shaped what was to come.
Samuel Avery was, quite possibly, the most accurate foreseer of his generation - certainly the most lauded one on Lawson's streets - and might have had a deciding view on the matter if he had only ever made up his mind which version he believed himself.
It had frightened him when he had been younger; frightened and thrilled him, all at once, with a shiver that had settled in his bones and kept him up more than once through a long night. It had been a heavy thing, at the age of eighteen, to know not only the time and circumstances of his own death, but the face of the family - not even met then - who would sit at his side through those days. It had been an amazing thing to know, with bedrock certainty, that there would be love in his life; he had sailed through the chaotic whirlwind of university parties and the weekly hook-ups and break-ups of his peers with a sort of detached serenity, assured that what they were all looking for was waiting for him, just around the corner of the future, in the quirking curve of a smile that he had never laid physical eyes on but knew as well as he knew his own face in the mirror.
It had all seemed so simple back then, laid out like a clear road through the years ahead, and if anyone had asked him then he would have said that of course he believed in destiny. It was all right there, clear as a scryer's crystal or a fairy tale dream. He would graduate, return home triumphant with degree in hand, eventually inherit the Avery company holdings, meet the man of his extremely accurate foretold dreams, and they would live together to a reasonable old-age, successful and comfortable. Destiny, clean and simple.
His father's unforeseen and unexpected death in the middle of his senior year - 'unexpected' because he hadn't thought to look - had broken up the fairy tale and dragged it into the gritty depths of real life. Samuel Avery, though people avoided speaking about it, didn't have a degree; he had never finished his last year of university, called home halfway through to take charge of a grieving sister fifteen years his junior and a house and company riddled with nepotism, doctored books, illicit business and relatives eager to skim off their own share while the opportunity was there. Destiny, he'd found, wasn't as clear cut after all, and rested more than some Believers might like to think on the choices made in the here and now.
All the same, at the end of it all there he was; secure, successful, even somewhat famous, loved, surrounded by family and friends and with a legacy worth passing to his sister when the time came. Despite every hardship it had all, somehow, come to pass, and he couldn't rightly say for certain if any hand had guided him through it except his own. Even a seer couldn't see the unseen and everything his teen-aged self had dreamt of had come to fruition, one way or another.
Wish-makers were things of legend and children's stories; even the most unscrupulous brewer and charm crafter in the Old Quarter couldn't claim to actually make wishes true. All the same, childish as it might be, he wished...
"Samuel?"
Oscar's voice was quiet but pitched at just the right tone to pull a wandering mind back to the present; Samuel opened his eyes, blinking against the light of the lamps, just as the other man leaned into view across the back of the sofa. Oscar was frowning a little, the tiny dip between his brows that meant business. "Samuel? It's half past six." The frown drew lower, echoed in the slightest downward turn of his lover's mouth. "...What day is it?"
The question, so innocuous and yet so vitally necessary in a foreseer's life, made Samuel laugh. "Twenty-third of Athyr," he replied, smiling. "Fifthday, and you're coming to get me because our dinner guests pulled up ten minutes ago. I wasn't Looking at anything; I was just resting my eyes."
There were little flecks of gray - honestly earned, Oscar claimed, and not just over the Avery finance books that were his fiercely guarded domain - creeping into the other man's dark brows, but the expressive lines remained the single best tell as to what was on his mind. A twitch upwards mirrored the slight narrowing of his eyes, and Samuel never had been able to hide much from him. "Headache?"
It was better to admit it than be caught in a half-hearted lie. "A little."
Oscar sighed, exasperated and fond all at once. "Samuel. Honestly. Would you just let me make you an appointment with the optometrist? Vanity be damned - reading glasses aren't the end of the world, and it would stop the headaches."
Samuel reached up, pushing the other man's gold-rimmed spectacles back into proper position on the bridge of his nose. "Says the man who resisted getting them for years," he noted, but he smiled to take any sting out of it and smoothed the pad of his thumb over the crease between the other man's brows. "Stop fretting."
"I," Oscar replied sharply, "had a perfectly serviceable pair of reading glasses all the way back when you met me. And it's not as though you'll need to wear them all the time." He pushed Samuel's hand away in mock irritation, but left their fingers interlace with a small squeeze. "You get these headaches too often. I'm not going to let you use them as an excuse to get out of work all the time, you know."
"Bitchy and pushy," Samuel noted fondly. "Oh, alright... You're going to keep after me until I go in, aren't you? Fine. But not now. Lords and Ladies, the Solstice season is starting and it's a madhouse out there. My eyes will keep until after the new year."
"You are so stubborn," Oscar complained, but the warm press of his fingers told a different story. "Have it your way, then, it's your head." He straightened, extending his other hand imperiously. "Come on, up you get. The Edisons and Mister Carter - whose dinner companion is only half his age this week, I'll add - are waiting."
"Slave driver," Samuel accused, but he reached up to take the other man's hand and let himself be pulled upright. "Council members and a company director - what a horrible waste of a perfectly good evening."
"We all have to make sacrifices," Oscar told him philosophically. His hands, blunt fingered and light and comfortable, were automatically brushing down the rumpled lines of Samuel's coat, straightening vest and tie and the points of his collar in quick gestures that the other man had been doing for decades.
"Decent?" Samuel drawled, spreading his arms wide.
"You'll pass," Oscar agreed with a brief, quick smile, hands lingering lightly on the lapels of Samuel's coat.
"Well, then." Sighing, Samuel fastened the last button of his coat and smoothed back a stray lock of his loose hair. Stepping around the sofa, he extended a formal arm to his lover. "Shall we?"
Oscar's brow swept up again as he regarded Samuel's arm, but the corners of his mouth were dimpled in tiny marks of pleasure as he slipped his hand around the crook of the other man's elbow. "You, sir, are flirting."
"I think I'm allowed," Samuel replied, leaning in for a quick kiss. "You're my husband, after all."
Oscar huffed in feigned annoyance but let himself be drawn into step, arm in arm, as Samuel headed for the door. It was the truth, and it wasn't - something never spoken of outside of the house, because Samuel knew only too well the price of success and how those nearest and dearest to him made easy targets. He covered the other man's hand with his own, thumb stroking over the bare place where a wedding band should have been. Oscar wore it on a chain beneath his shirt collar, because while one more ring on Samuel's already weighted fingers could go unnoticed, Oscar Wilson had traditionally never worn anything but an understated class ring.
It was one of the scores of things Samuel would regret when his life was done. He wasn't one to dwell on what couldn't be changed, and he knew far too much, first hand, of what manipulations could be made on the slippery threads of the ever rushing future, but all the same...
At eighteen he had looked ahead and seen a long life, a good one, and a quiet death, and been content with that. At eighteen it had seemed years and years, a whole lifetime, from the fleeting present.
At the top of the stairs Oscar started to draw back, pulling his hand away to drop a step behind into his habitual position as the Avery Shaman's personal assistant; quiet, professional, efficient and nearly invisible as befitted an employee of the household. Samuel, in an abrupt fit of pique, threaded his fingers through the other man's hand to secure it against his arm.
"Samuel," Oscar chided, but Samuel only stood his ground, refusing to be swayed.
It was the twenty-third of Athyr, less than a month to the Solstice, and only two and a half weeks after that to the New Year. And Samuel knew, had always known, with nothing but increasing clarity, the number of his own days. He would see the Solstice. He would see the New Year. And buried in the places he would never tell anyone, not even Oscar, was the surety that the dull pained pressure in his head had nothing at all to do with his still perfectly fine vision and everything to do with a tiny cluster of malignant cells that were doubling and multiplying, moment by moment, day by day, deep inside the depths of his skull. There would be a fight, eventually, when the truth came out; hot words coated in grief and pain about surgeries and doctors and treatments. But there wasn't a surgery in any of the fragile future lines that Samuel had ever glimpsed that left him with the use of his mind intact, and given that dubious choice death had always seemed the only real option.
Oscar was frowning at him, ever mindful of the business and propriety side of their public lives. "Indulge me," Samuel said, and it wasn't an order so much as a plea, and an underhanded one at that, because he knew Oscar wanted it as well. The other man's mouth drew tight, a sure sign that he knew very well he was being manipulated even if he didn't know why, and Samuel put on his very best mischievous smile and gave himself a shake, letting body and muscles slide into the looser, fluid and ever so slightly off-center stance of a long-time dreamweed user. It was an act he had perfected half a lifetime before, something in keeping with the Old Believer mystique that surrounded his title as the Shaman, and nothing new to any of their guests even if they had also all seen him in perfect sobriety.
His lover huffed. "Oh, honestly," Oscar sighed, but his hand settled warm and solid on Samuel's elbow, the perfect - and perfectly excusable - steady anchor for a man who seemed slightly off-kilter. Samuel beamed at him, stealing another quick kiss pressed to the other man's cheek, and started down the stairs.
He would see the New Year. He would even see the start of Lawson's typically wet and dreary spring. There was time left, even if it was counted in a bare handful of months. Samuel folded his fingers around his husband's hand, squeezing. He had known, he had always known, that the day was coming... He only wished, looking back with the hindsight of a life lived, that the passing years had been just a little bit longer.
But there wasn't any such thing as wish-makers, and whether it was destiny or fate or the best of a bad choice, the time was on hand. Samuel let his smile relax, eyes wide and just a touch unfocused as he dissembled, and let his shoulder rest warm and comforting against his husband's as they walked down the stairs to the brightly lit foyer.
Story/Character: Pinstripes / Samuel, Oscar
Rating: PG-13 (m/m)
word count: 2,139
Written for the brigits_flame prompt of "destiny". It's set in the same world as the last two prompts I wrote, but with a different set of characters. The whole world is one long epic but I deliberately wrote this piece as a stand alone short, so no prior knowledge is required for Flame readers. ^_^
* * * * *
There were those who claimed that fate was an immutable fact of life; that everything had a purpose, preordained and fore-written, and what was to be would eventually come to pass. Even in the Old Believer community, however, there were an equal number who said otherwise; who pointed to foreseers and the mutable possible threads of the future and said that it was human choice which shaped what was to come.
Samuel Avery was, quite possibly, the most accurate foreseer of his generation - certainly the most lauded one on Lawson's streets - and might have had a deciding view on the matter if he had only ever made up his mind which version he believed himself.
It had frightened him when he had been younger; frightened and thrilled him, all at once, with a shiver that had settled in his bones and kept him up more than once through a long night. It had been a heavy thing, at the age of eighteen, to know not only the time and circumstances of his own death, but the face of the family - not even met then - who would sit at his side through those days. It had been an amazing thing to know, with bedrock certainty, that there would be love in his life; he had sailed through the chaotic whirlwind of university parties and the weekly hook-ups and break-ups of his peers with a sort of detached serenity, assured that what they were all looking for was waiting for him, just around the corner of the future, in the quirking curve of a smile that he had never laid physical eyes on but knew as well as he knew his own face in the mirror.
It had all seemed so simple back then, laid out like a clear road through the years ahead, and if anyone had asked him then he would have said that of course he believed in destiny. It was all right there, clear as a scryer's crystal or a fairy tale dream. He would graduate, return home triumphant with degree in hand, eventually inherit the Avery company holdings, meet the man of his extremely accurate foretold dreams, and they would live together to a reasonable old-age, successful and comfortable. Destiny, clean and simple.
His father's unforeseen and unexpected death in the middle of his senior year - 'unexpected' because he hadn't thought to look - had broken up the fairy tale and dragged it into the gritty depths of real life. Samuel Avery, though people avoided speaking about it, didn't have a degree; he had never finished his last year of university, called home halfway through to take charge of a grieving sister fifteen years his junior and a house and company riddled with nepotism, doctored books, illicit business and relatives eager to skim off their own share while the opportunity was there. Destiny, he'd found, wasn't as clear cut after all, and rested more than some Believers might like to think on the choices made in the here and now.
All the same, at the end of it all there he was; secure, successful, even somewhat famous, loved, surrounded by family and friends and with a legacy worth passing to his sister when the time came. Despite every hardship it had all, somehow, come to pass, and he couldn't rightly say for certain if any hand had guided him through it except his own. Even a seer couldn't see the unseen and everything his teen-aged self had dreamt of had come to fruition, one way or another.
Wish-makers were things of legend and children's stories; even the most unscrupulous brewer and charm crafter in the Old Quarter couldn't claim to actually make wishes true. All the same, childish as it might be, he wished...
"Samuel?"
Oscar's voice was quiet but pitched at just the right tone to pull a wandering mind back to the present; Samuel opened his eyes, blinking against the light of the lamps, just as the other man leaned into view across the back of the sofa. Oscar was frowning a little, the tiny dip between his brows that meant business. "Samuel? It's half past six." The frown drew lower, echoed in the slightest downward turn of his lover's mouth. "...What day is it?"
The question, so innocuous and yet so vitally necessary in a foreseer's life, made Samuel laugh. "Twenty-third of Athyr," he replied, smiling. "Fifthday, and you're coming to get me because our dinner guests pulled up ten minutes ago. I wasn't Looking at anything; I was just resting my eyes."
There were little flecks of gray - honestly earned, Oscar claimed, and not just over the Avery finance books that were his fiercely guarded domain - creeping into the other man's dark brows, but the expressive lines remained the single best tell as to what was on his mind. A twitch upwards mirrored the slight narrowing of his eyes, and Samuel never had been able to hide much from him. "Headache?"
It was better to admit it than be caught in a half-hearted lie. "A little."
Oscar sighed, exasperated and fond all at once. "Samuel. Honestly. Would you just let me make you an appointment with the optometrist? Vanity be damned - reading glasses aren't the end of the world, and it would stop the headaches."
Samuel reached up, pushing the other man's gold-rimmed spectacles back into proper position on the bridge of his nose. "Says the man who resisted getting them for years," he noted, but he smiled to take any sting out of it and smoothed the pad of his thumb over the crease between the other man's brows. "Stop fretting."
"I," Oscar replied sharply, "had a perfectly serviceable pair of reading glasses all the way back when you met me. And it's not as though you'll need to wear them all the time." He pushed Samuel's hand away in mock irritation, but left their fingers interlace with a small squeeze. "You get these headaches too often. I'm not going to let you use them as an excuse to get out of work all the time, you know."
"Bitchy and pushy," Samuel noted fondly. "Oh, alright... You're going to keep after me until I go in, aren't you? Fine. But not now. Lords and Ladies, the Solstice season is starting and it's a madhouse out there. My eyes will keep until after the new year."
"You are so stubborn," Oscar complained, but the warm press of his fingers told a different story. "Have it your way, then, it's your head." He straightened, extending his other hand imperiously. "Come on, up you get. The Edisons and Mister Carter - whose dinner companion is only half his age this week, I'll add - are waiting."
"Slave driver," Samuel accused, but he reached up to take the other man's hand and let himself be pulled upright. "Council members and a company director - what a horrible waste of a perfectly good evening."
"We all have to make sacrifices," Oscar told him philosophically. His hands, blunt fingered and light and comfortable, were automatically brushing down the rumpled lines of Samuel's coat, straightening vest and tie and the points of his collar in quick gestures that the other man had been doing for decades.
"Decent?" Samuel drawled, spreading his arms wide.
"You'll pass," Oscar agreed with a brief, quick smile, hands lingering lightly on the lapels of Samuel's coat.
"Well, then." Sighing, Samuel fastened the last button of his coat and smoothed back a stray lock of his loose hair. Stepping around the sofa, he extended a formal arm to his lover. "Shall we?"
Oscar's brow swept up again as he regarded Samuel's arm, but the corners of his mouth were dimpled in tiny marks of pleasure as he slipped his hand around the crook of the other man's elbow. "You, sir, are flirting."
"I think I'm allowed," Samuel replied, leaning in for a quick kiss. "You're my husband, after all."
Oscar huffed in feigned annoyance but let himself be drawn into step, arm in arm, as Samuel headed for the door. It was the truth, and it wasn't - something never spoken of outside of the house, because Samuel knew only too well the price of success and how those nearest and dearest to him made easy targets. He covered the other man's hand with his own, thumb stroking over the bare place where a wedding band should have been. Oscar wore it on a chain beneath his shirt collar, because while one more ring on Samuel's already weighted fingers could go unnoticed, Oscar Wilson had traditionally never worn anything but an understated class ring.
It was one of the scores of things Samuel would regret when his life was done. He wasn't one to dwell on what couldn't be changed, and he knew far too much, first hand, of what manipulations could be made on the slippery threads of the ever rushing future, but all the same...
At eighteen he had looked ahead and seen a long life, a good one, and a quiet death, and been content with that. At eighteen it had seemed years and years, a whole lifetime, from the fleeting present.
At the top of the stairs Oscar started to draw back, pulling his hand away to drop a step behind into his habitual position as the Avery Shaman's personal assistant; quiet, professional, efficient and nearly invisible as befitted an employee of the household. Samuel, in an abrupt fit of pique, threaded his fingers through the other man's hand to secure it against his arm.
"Samuel," Oscar chided, but Samuel only stood his ground, refusing to be swayed.
It was the twenty-third of Athyr, less than a month to the Solstice, and only two and a half weeks after that to the New Year. And Samuel knew, had always known, with nothing but increasing clarity, the number of his own days. He would see the Solstice. He would see the New Year. And buried in the places he would never tell anyone, not even Oscar, was the surety that the dull pained pressure in his head had nothing at all to do with his still perfectly fine vision and everything to do with a tiny cluster of malignant cells that were doubling and multiplying, moment by moment, day by day, deep inside the depths of his skull. There would be a fight, eventually, when the truth came out; hot words coated in grief and pain about surgeries and doctors and treatments. But there wasn't a surgery in any of the fragile future lines that Samuel had ever glimpsed that left him with the use of his mind intact, and given that dubious choice death had always seemed the only real option.
Oscar was frowning at him, ever mindful of the business and propriety side of their public lives. "Indulge me," Samuel said, and it wasn't an order so much as a plea, and an underhanded one at that, because he knew Oscar wanted it as well. The other man's mouth drew tight, a sure sign that he knew very well he was being manipulated even if he didn't know why, and Samuel put on his very best mischievous smile and gave himself a shake, letting body and muscles slide into the looser, fluid and ever so slightly off-center stance of a long-time dreamweed user. It was an act he had perfected half a lifetime before, something in keeping with the Old Believer mystique that surrounded his title as the Shaman, and nothing new to any of their guests even if they had also all seen him in perfect sobriety.
His lover huffed. "Oh, honestly," Oscar sighed, but his hand settled warm and solid on Samuel's elbow, the perfect - and perfectly excusable - steady anchor for a man who seemed slightly off-kilter. Samuel beamed at him, stealing another quick kiss pressed to the other man's cheek, and started down the stairs.
He would see the New Year. He would even see the start of Lawson's typically wet and dreary spring. There was time left, even if it was counted in a bare handful of months. Samuel folded his fingers around his husband's hand, squeezing. He had known, he had always known, that the day was coming... He only wished, looking back with the hindsight of a life lived, that the passing years had been just a little bit longer.
But there wasn't any such thing as wish-makers, and whether it was destiny or fate or the best of a bad choice, the time was on hand. Samuel let his smile relax, eyes wide and just a touch unfocused as he dissembled, and let his shoulder rest warm and comforting against his husband's as they walked down the stairs to the brightly lit foyer.