No Such Thing
By Kytten
Beckington of a PG13 Nature
Implied Gillington
Cutler Beckett was by no means naïve. He knew there was no such thing as love. Marriage was a partnership, an agreement. Engagement was the handshake before the contract was brought out. And love, the illusion of love, was nothing more than a fool's dream.
He was a fool. Not a naïve fool, but a fool nonetheless.
He knew that when James shared his bed, it was not Cutler Beckett he saw. No, James saw his fiery haired lieutenant, a Frenchman with bright eyes and an easy smile. Brilliant, caring, and lost at sea.
He knew something of the crushing guilt James felt. At the very least, he was aware of the terrors that gripped James in the night. He knew that while the man slept, he was watching his lover die.
Cutler Beckett knew he had never been, and never would be, considered that lover.
Which was only to be expected. There was no such thing as love, or any variation thereof, lover included. No, they'd slept together. To put it bluntly, they'd fucked.
Because they needed each other. James needed something, anything to keep those sweet, dying brown eyes out of his mind. And Beckett…
Beckett was not what one would call a good man.
He had killed. Killing was commonplace here. If you had wealth, or sometimes even as little as a uniform, people looked the other way. And when finally, you grew too rich, too fat with your own power, people shut their eyes in the face of your hired men.
Beckett was not a religious man. Hell, he believed, was what you made it.
Beckett needed someone to pull him back from the pit of that spiraling abyss, to keep him from obsessing on his work— the one constant in his life. He needed James.
And, at risk of being a naïve fool, he loved him.
But he knew James' heart, if it was possible to give such a thing to anyone, belonged to a dead man. He knew that heart could not be given again, certainly not so easily as James had tossed that pulsing black bag upon his desk. And he knew that he was a hopeless fool, knowing James would only allow foolishness once.
So he took what he could get, and even affected a French accent now and again, knowing full well his blue eyes turned brown in James' mind, and that his black curls turned to copper waves when the candle went out.
He knew James came to him because there was nothing left for the former commodore.
But Cutler Beckett knew, more clearly than he'd ever been certain of anything, that he loved him with everything he had, however much of his tattered soul there was left to give.
And so he strived to see James' smile, to see some proof that James' life wasn't just as wretched as his own. A laugh, even something so small as a snort, was a prize to be cherished.
Beckett tried. He strived for James' happiness harder than he'd strived for anything. So when a sodden, redheaded bundle was found near death on an island off the coast of Tripoli, Beckett had him patched up and sent off to James.
And while neither man spoke of the time they'd spent together, there was a smile now in his Jamie's eyes. And in the end, that was all that mattered.
After all, a fool is entitled to his dreams.