A/N: Written for my dear friend Pippin because she pointed it out first. I know it's an unusual pairing. Discworld is not mine, constructive criticism encouraged, flames discouraged, etc etc etc. Also, contains background sex. It's not important to the plot or anything, so you can ignore those bits.
It's strange, the way Fate sometimes causes mismatched people to come together, muses Sam Vimes as he completes another slow thrust. Take himself and the man lying moaning and sweating beneath him. Gutter trash pulled up to the highest echelons of Ankh-Morpork society, sleeping with a nobleman living in self-imposed poverty to escape his family's shadow. The irony of it baffles Sam and vaguely worries William, who knows that ironic isn't quite the right word but uses it anyway.
The sheer disparity of their lives, their personalities, ought to have driven them apart long ago. Several times now it nearly has. They push each other's buttons, and the longer they've been together, the better they've gotten at finding exactly the right combinations to press. Still, they meet discreetly every week or so and. . . push. Sometimes it's an argument, sometimes it's sex, and sometimes it's just being around someone else who knows how mad the world is.
Sam grunts and thrusts harder, feeling William react, tighten, shudder below and around him. He doesn't know why they're still doing this. After all, he has Sybil and William has Sacharissa- two very good reasons to end the relationship and forget it began. But Sam isn't going to end it. He's too addicted to this, the clandestine meetings, the sex, even the fights. He also knows that William feels the same way. This isn't ending soon.
William climaxes, and a few minutes later Sam does the same. Lying together afterwards, touching each other's faces and just talking, both men are wondering if maybe this is why they stay, for these precious moments when the world seems still and empty, as if the Great A'Tuin has paused in his cosmic journey. But even that doesn't quite justify it.
No, neither man will realize the reason for their relationship for another week, or month, or year; Sam when he's on night watch and even Carrot has gone home, and William some day when Sacharissa is out reporting, the dwarfs are doing dwarfish things, and the press has, for once, fallen still. Then it will hit them- the blank, empty loneliness that makes up their oh-so-different lives. A sudden silence in the Watch House or the press room only reflects a shared silence between them, a gasping chasm that they fill up with backstairs sex and public contention.
They stay together, they realize, because even the silence is better than being alone.