Will tries forgiveness on like a cloak that won't fit him anymore. It is something that used to be snug, tightly wrapped over his shoulders to keep him warm, and loved; now it is nothing more than a scrap of fabric he tries to cover his naked body with.

He cannot forgive anymore, and he won't be forgiven for it.

Deanna won't look at him, and sleep is the key to a kingdom he has no right to inherit, a crown that is made only of thistle and leaves and blood-wine: it is not for him.

But somehow, sleep is made of him, so much so that it is inescapable, it is the colour blue, it is water that drowns him.

And always, it is the same dream.

He wakes in a shallow pool of water, at the edge of a lake, rising as though he has been resurrected. There is water leaking from his skin. Clothes that he has never worn before cling to him like a thick layer of scum, they are heavy, and sodden, and they drag him back into the water. Everything smells of salt.

Somehow, there is never any in his eyes, and he opens them always to look up into the sky, free of clouds and also of the sun. Even though it is light, there is never any sun.

He breathes in, and he is breathing in water.

And then suddenly, the scene will invariably change, and he is walking like a man possessed, with no clear idea of how on Earth he was pulled to his feet. He walks for miles and miles until only 5 seconds have passed, and there is a real ache in his feet. Still, there are beads of water that mix with sweat, and they leak, it seems, from his very pores.

He is a man made of water.

And then, the sky and the land become one, and all it's connotations are the same where he comes upon a cabin circled by one screeching crow, in the centre of an empty and vast field of heather. Long stalks of grass get caught in his fingertips, his arms, his eyelashes as he runs to it, sprinting, taken by the sudden desperate need to get in.

But the place never has any doors, or windows that he can see, and he finds himself running laps around it, listening to the abject silence that emanates from within. Something inside him is certain that she will be there, if he can just get to her. After so many more millenia, and he might as well be old and grey for all the seconds that have passed by, he finally comes upon a window, high above him and glowing like it holds the secret he wants.

Hands appear in front of his face, and he is scrambling to scale the wall and kick his legs out to shatter the glass. Despite how drenched he always is, it is never a difficult window to break.

And then, suddenly, he is within the cabin staring at her, stood in a pool of water that still leaks from him, and she has her back turned, unaware. There is firelight glaring off of all the walls, and somehow all the windows he couldn't see before, all the doors appear again - the place he came in from gone.

Outside, there are four crows in a row on the windowsill, preening the feathers of the one in front.

She turns to him, her eyes bright purple and howling, her face completely expressionless. And he tries to walk closer to her, but that would be too much like swimming, for all the water he continues to drip has formed an ocean under his own two feet.

Another jump in fantasy, and they are sitting across from one another at the dining table, and a window takes up the entire of his right side - outside it is black, the world he left behind now gone. She opens her mouth like a rattlesnake unhinging its jaw, and moths fly out, calamitous.

And everytime she says the same thing, her voice burning from the walls, her mouth silent.

Tell them I was the warmest place you knew.

An arctic wind freezes the water that leaves his eyes.

Tell them you made me cold.

Moths make it impossible to see her face, and somehow, it does not sound like her voice at all, distorted by the crackling of a flame he cannot see. Then the wind is gone, and the insects like dust fall away with it, until all that is left is the water. Always the water.

He looks into her eyes, but she is unfocused, and barely looking back at all, because there is water slowly bleeding into the room, through all the sealed fixtures. It rises up from beneath the floorboards, and seeps through the wooden skirting of the room, the cupboard handles, the wall paneling. A tidal wave breaks in through the chimney breast.

Suddenly, she is bleeding water too.

It is impossible to see anything other than water.

And then, she is in his arms, her legs wrapped around his waist and there is water running over her hair when he carries her to a bed that wasn't there before. Never anything other than a bed that will only fit one body, and so each night they stack on top one another, his knee holding her legs slightly apart for him. He never has to look to know she's naked.

No matter how he tries to hold back, he always seems to push too far, to push himself on her, in her, and they do something that he feels is only ever one word away from making love. But it is always too frantic, too silent, too desperate to be anything other than an animal in him he cannot ever control. They spend the nights drowning each other.

And when he wakes up, another few seconds later, he is underwater again, staring through wide open eyes at the blue sky above him, and the seven crows that caw overhead.

He stands, and repeats the whole thing again.

That is, until he wakes for real, soaked in a cold sweat in a bed he shares with somebody who is not her, a bed that he has never slept in before.

He blinks the fantasy away.

There are limbs this night, tangled all in his own, and he is flanked on either side by a woman, though he daren't turn his head to see who they are. He is heaving in breaths of oxygen that taste too much like salt water spray, and his body is difficult to hold down to the mattress without leaping up and running from them all. Recollection rushes back to him, and he knows who they are and how he ended up here, how he had roared in ecstacy, in a release he's had already for 3 nights before and will continue until he can't take it anymore.

He had been so sure they could fix him, so sure they would be the ones.

Of course, they are not.

And he hates Deanna for having turned him into this.

He hates her because she made him better.

A part of him might hesitate to call this therapy, all this sleeping around, but at some point, people begin to expect it of him, and at least he is not drinking, or doping up, just for the feeling of anger he cannot suppress.

Sure, he is a little rough at times, but there are individuals, whole species in fact, who thrive on his kind of love, who seek it out. He is usually more than happy to oblige.

He sneaks his limbs away from theirs, resurrects himself like a messiah, and stands on legs that feel alien without water to hold him up.

Their bed was much colder somehow than the air he finds himself swaddled by now, and he walks away like it is just another conquest - and it is. The late night memory of a wager he took years ago flashes through his mind, and the daring face of the federation ambassador he took it from, floats without tether. He'd already slept with the man's own daughter anyway, so what of a dead man's?

Will ends up fumbling for his uniform in the darkness, moving with a silence he has acquired through meetings like this. Back then, they had called Deanna the ice queen, called her unloveable. He'd laughed along, thinking it was all a joke, and he took the bet like an overzealous young child, thinking he deserved any woman he came upon.

He had thought himself irresistible.

His uniform clings to the sweat on his skin, in the same way blood used to cling to his knuckles in any number of fights he had in bars across the galaxy. Nobody would fight him on Betazed. Deanna punched him once, when he'd known her for five minutes and tried to grab her ass; she had skin softer than a peach, and a fist small like the point of a knife. He had bruised purple and black.

He struggles to find his socks out in the living area, they are black and hiding amongst the shadows. He finds himself patting against the floor for them, and it reminds him of how all that latinum had been scattered over the rug in his quarters, the federation credits still lingering for weeks after she had torn through like a hurricane. He had never meant for her to find out.

The socks are stuck in a sofa cushion, and he finds them like they are sweet relief, crouching down to get them on his feet without falling over and breaking all this silence in two. Loving her had been silent, and blind, she would never have to had said a word to him and he could have fallen in love with her. It was never what she said, it was how she was - is.

Something too much like a lead weight pulls his heart down into the boots he's strapping onto his feet, and even the memory of her is not smiling at him anymore.

A sleeping voice murmurs from behind him.

"Your absence won't break her, William,"

One of the women tells him, and she is his age, taller, thinner, more muscular. She is not a soft woman, nor is she human. She is the antithesis of Deanna - her wife too. Her fingers dig nails into his neck.

"She's too good a women to deserve you,"

Somehow, her words are venom, and truthful to their core; what they had was now just a mutual release, another of his casual encounters.

He doesn't even know her name.

"What in Shaman's name are you doing with us?"

Will stands, and everybody seems to be irritatingly wise, and he is just a dumb child missing his best friend.

He turns around, but there is nobody there, not even the ghost of a woman's scent. He shakes his head, blinks his eyes, screws his hands into fists that dig nails into his palms. There was never anybody there; the voice had been hers, and yet not.

A growl, low and guttural leaves his throat, and he is kicking off his boots, unzipping his uniform with fury. His body takes him to the bedroom, mind shut off once more, and he has woken the women with his noise.

They look up at him, their eyes glinting suggestion, staring down now at his straining underwear.

"Again."

He demands of them, throwing himself down into the sheets, kicking off the last of his clothes and kissing harshly at the neck of one, while the other runs her nails along his bare back. They squeal delight, and there is no thought cohesive enough to tell himself stop.

He doesn't even think he want to.