Midnights and Velvets

DISCLAIMER: Don't own Gulcasa, Roswell, or Nessiah (Sting does). I own the idea for this living situation, though. I learned about Happy Roses from the lovely photographer Lilyas, whose beautiful rose and dewdrop work can be found on DeviantArt.

(10pokes prompt #3 – blue; a rose by any other name would)

That day, Roswell came in with his usual stack of books supported in the curve of one arm and a long-necked crystal vase in his other hand. He had a great deal of difficulty getting through the door, and both Gulcasa and Nessiah had to come help him with his burdens. However, Gulcasa found himself having to bear the weight of all the books as Nessiah latched quite suddenly onto the vase Roswell had brought home—or more properly, the rose in it.

"Will you look at that?" he murmured, sounding completely fascinated. (Gulcasa almost replied waspishly that he couldn't possibly, as he'd been left to deal with the books, but managed to bite his tongue for long enough to put them down.) The rose was quite blue, its petals brushed over in a pale, pastel shade; the vase was so long that only the rose itself and the tip of one of its leaves poked from its neck. "I thought no one could breed these yet, Roswell…"

Roswell nodded. "Scientists have been trying to come up with a good genetic combination, but so far all they've been able to successfully produce is a deep royal purple—which is pretty enough in its own right. Until they find out how to do a real blue, florists cheat."

"Cheat?" Gulcasa repeated, stretching—those books had been heavy.

"This rose started out white," Roswell explained. "It's given dye in its water, and the dye filters through to its petals to stain them blue. This is how green roses are made, too—I'm told there's a way to blend dyes to create a rose with petals in all the colors of the rainbow. I don't know how that would work, but I'd love to try it sometime."

"However it's made, it's beautiful." Nessiah had eyes only for the rose; leaning back against the door, he held its petals barely an inch from his face to savor its fragrance.

--

It was hopelessly charming, the way Nessiah would toss his jaded and unimpressed façade for the smallest—and sometimes strangest—of things. He babied dandelions, sprinkling them with sugar water when people weren't watching, and set out saucers of milk and leftover meat for the neighborhood's skittish stray cats. He collected books of all kinds, never even touching many of them, and he had a small chest filled with bits and pieces of old and broken jewelry, knickknacks anyone else would've thrown away.

"The cats I understand, and I've known a lot of packrats, but the weeds? What's up with that? They're going to take over the yard," Gulcasa had said to him once, back when they'd been sharing the old house with his little sisters.

Nessiah just shrugged. "Dandelions are flowers, too; they just grow in places some people find inconvenient. And, well—I know what it's like to be unwanted."

He might well, Gulcasa supposed. A little after they'd started dating—their two-month anniversary, actually—Nessiah had told him how he'd been brought up as a ward of the state, a charity case at every school or institution that ever took an interest in him. He'd been orphaned when he was only a few months old, he'd said, and he'd never found out how his parents had died and never managed to find so much as a photo of them. He'd never been adopted, never even been successfully fostered. Too old for his age, he said with a smile. Too negative, too strange. Then he'd closed his eyes and leaned back and said he hadn't minded all that much—he liked his solitude. The only thing he'd hated about his childhood was the way he'd never felt good enough, always felt thrown out and abandoned.

Gulcasa hadn't known quite what reply he should make, and Nessiah must've sensed that because he started laughing and said that at least the government had given him a free ride to college—but there'd been something pained and desperate in his voice, so Gulcasa had shut him up with a kiss and a fierce embrace.

So Gulcasa understood about the dandelions, and even though his sisters had complained that he was ruining the yard, he'd helped Nessiah mix the sugar water every morning.

Nessiah was just like that, after all. Maybe he was just too unapologetically eccentric to ever be fully accepted by society, but all his little quirks just wound their way into the corners of Gulcasa's heart until they felt like they belonged there and he knew he might be falling in love.

Sometimes Gulcasa liked to try to find out what kind of ethnic background Nessiah might have. It was like one of those puzzles that could never be solved, and it gave him a good headache whenever he attempted it, but he couldn't help wondering. What precise combination of ancestry had produced that marble-white skin, that soft and eternally messy dirty-blond hair, those sapphire eyes that had all but made Gulcasa's heart stop the first time Nessiah had ever looked at him? Where had his short stature and his incredibly delicate constitution come from? He was smaller and frailer than most of the women Gulcasa knew, and so breakable—like porcelain, like glass.

Gulcasa had worried about it for a while, and when Nessiah had started hinting that he was ready for their relationship to go further, he'd brought it up. It troubled him, after all—Nessiah was more than a foot shorter than him, and so small; it seemed as though Gulcasa wouldn't be able to help hurting him if they became lovers. And Gulcasa didn't want to hurt him.

Nessiah had been silent for a moment, and then—God, Gulcasa would remember it every day for the rest of his life—he'd sank softly into Gulcasa's arms and looked up at him out of those amazing eyes and said, "I want you to be the one who can break me, but doesn't."

And after that, they'd gone to bed. Gulcasa had never felt the kind of tenderness he had with Nessiah with anyone else; it tempered their passion and brought out a deep, gentle kind of sensitivity in them both. Neither had he ever physically needed someone so badly or so much. Nessiah was always so unguarded, so vulnerable when they slept together—Gulcasa wanted to protect and cherish him forever.

Not to say that they were never wild with each other, or frivolous, or carried away—it was just that afterwards, that feeling never changed. Gulcasa would always watch Nessiah drop off to sleep curled up against him and wonder how in the hell he'd mustered the luck to wind up with something so precious.

--

There were never such doubts about Roswell. The first time Gulcasa had wondered aloud, the young man had smiled and pulled out his wallet to display a picture of his parents.

"My mother was French, and my da was Irish," he explained easily. "They met in Britain, and moved to America while they were getting ready to have me. Mostly my surroundings have determined the way I talk, but people tell me I've still got a bit of the brogue." And he'd shrugged. Gulcasa nodded, because it was true, and now he had Roswell's looks and his hint of an accent answered.

That had been before—way back when Gulcasa and Nessiah were first getting together, perhaps the first time Gulcasa and Roswell had ever met. Nessiah had mentioned before—laughing over it the entire time—that Roswell was basically his mother without the curves. Looking over the photo Roswell had shown him, Gulcasa had realized just how true that was; he and his mother shared stature and facial structure and even the same silken ash-brown hair. The only real difference—other than gender—was the fact that Roswell's mother had gray-green eyes, where Roswell had inherited his father's laughing summer-sky blue.

It had to have been a few weeks after that initial meeting that Gulcasa had finally asked Nessiah frankly about his history with his pretty friend; Nessiah had laughed and answered him honestly.

"We were at college together, and we hit it off right away," Nessiah had told him. "I'd never met anyone who could get nearly as stupid over books as I do. And yes, we were lovers, although primarily we were friends. It wasn't because we were in love or anything, although we certainly did have chemistry. Roswell's parents died about a year after we met—it was a hard time for him, and he needed someone in a bad way. He was my best friend, so of course I let him into my bed. It only lasted for about another year—our schedules couldn't take it. We'd see each other maybe twice a week if we were lucky, and we were only getting into bed once every other month by the end of it. Eventually we just decided we weren't cut out to be lovers and went back to being just friends, with minimal regrets."

There were times when Gulcasa still didn't know quite what they were doing, all in the same house together. He'd never minded Roswell, but they'd only known each other distantly in the past. Now that they lived together, Gulcasa found that he liked Roswell's wry humor, his gentle and tolerant disposition, and his effortless mastery of domestic skills. But he still wasn't quite comfortable with the fact that he and Nessiah were living with an old lover… especially the way things were now.

On the one hand, it always made Gulcasa feel a little angry, a little jealous and possessive when he saw the two of them close. He didn't really want to share Nessiah with anyone, and he knew full well that Nessiah still slept with Roswell sometimes, just the two of them together. He would come home after a job to find one naked in bed and the other with that dazed and pleasured expression, and black spite would boil up in him until he left the house again.

But on the other—God, Gulcasa was sure that without Roswell, his own relationship with Nessiah would never have recovered. That night when autumn was becoming winter had been terrible enough before a tired doctor had come in to do his tests and tried to slip that cold metal device between Nessiah's legs and he'd all but gone crazy and cried and fought until he'd had to be sedated. It was all the proof the hospital had needed, but they'd still checked to make sure and the tests had come back positive.

For a while after that Nessiah had been shaky and scared and hesitant and tearful, and frustrated with himself for being so. Between the two of them, Gulcasa and Roswell had had to get Nessiah completely re-accustomed to being touched, had had to teach his body all over again the difference between what was a good touch and what was bad. Roswell had been patient even when Gulcasa had despaired, until finally Nessiah had brought him to bed while Roswell had been out and they'd tried and gotten through it.

I need you both, Nessiah had written in the hospital, and he most certainly had.

The way things were now—Gulcasa just didn't know anymore. He loved Nessiah with the whole of his heart and didn't like that Nessiah felt for both him and Roswell, but—when Roswell kissed him, his body wanted so much it hurt, and when the three of them went to bed together…

Roswell was teaching him things about sex and lovemaking, about Nessiah's body, about his own body that Gulcasa had never been aware of. For instance, he'd known since the first week he and Nessiah had become lovers that Nessiah's back was highly sensitive and just a few touches in the right places were enough to arouse him; he'd also been aware that Nessiah was a bit ticklish along his sides and belly. But he'd never really known how to take advantage of those things; Roswell had shown him that.

And Roswell himself—he was experienced and easygoing, liked to have his shoulders kissed and went helpless at the ghost of a touch along the insides of his thighs. He was unusually flexible, had wicked and inventive hands, and gave excellent head—a skill Gulcasa and Nessiah had never really been able to master.

Worse, he seemed to completely understand the way Gulcasa felt about their strange living situation, and always gave Gulcasa space to have Nessiah to himself when he started getting overly jealous.

Either Gulcasa would eventually come to terms with the three of them as a relationship, or… he supposed Roswell would become unnecessary one day, and leave.

Until then, Gulcasa just had to… try to bear with things, and keep up with the situation even when he didn't fully understand it.

--

"You should bring home more of these sometime," Gulcasa remarked as Nessiah was persuaded to set the vase down on the table. "A big flush or—bouquet or whatever you call it—of blue roses would be nice in this room."

Two pairs of blue eyes lifted and locked on his own—the sapphire that made his heart turn over with love, and the aquamarine that pulled at his belly and confused him terribly—in a mix of curiosity and amusement.

"Wouldn't you rather have red or black?" Roswell asked, arching one eyebrow as he named Gulcasa's favorite colors.

"I like blue, too," Gulcasa said, running a hand through his hair self-consciously.

Nessiah smiled, and he looked away, feeling his face go red.