A/N: Written for an anonymous Tumblr prompt which requested one-sided Pharoga where the Daroga loves Erik but Erik does not love him back.
He knows it is not real. He knows it. They are pretending at love, faking closeness as if they might try hard enough that it will become truth. (It is, for him, a truth that burns and twists inside his heart, stained with the knowledge of the façade.) They are only play-acting, making a mockery of what might be if only one of them felt different.
He shakes it from his mind, contemplates the man sleeping beside him. (They are never intimate in that sense. It would be too much, too overwhelming.) His face is slack in sleep, a rare sight, those eyes roving beneath the lids, and what is it that they see? What does he dream of? Him, them, in another life, in another world, in their youth, once upon a time? The loneliness of history that has brought them here? Or her, her that was sent away and it was best but he would have died over her, he would have died, would not now be lying here in peaceful sleep, twisted lips parted for the whisper of his breath.
Daroga (he thinks of himself as such, sometimes, so used is he to the curl of the title in that voice, and it is difficult to remember that he ever had another name, a proper name), Daroga sighs, and traces his fingers lightly over those twisted lips. How is it that he can love this man, of all men? This man who stays up all night making music or drawing, lost in the world of his own imagination? This man who wakes sweating from nightmares, a scream half-strangled in his throat? This man who for so long had not even been touched, never mind held or kissed? (They do not kiss very often. It is a rare thing though they are always close. It is as if such things cross a boundary not meant to be crossed, would be attempting too hard to define this—this charade.)
How could he love this man, who above all others could not love him?
He withdraws his fingers, curls them tight. It is wrong, somehow, to touch him so, too close, too intimate.
(He touched those lips, once, parted them and dribbled water between them to revive him, after her, and that is how they are here, now, in this bed, and he forces the memory away, takes a deep breath to ease the aching in his heart.)
The bed is warm beneath the sheets, and he wraps himself in them, careful not to touch him. And if he closes his eyes, and sighs, and lies just so, he can almost pretend that this is right.