You must know of me then, Antonio, my name is Sebastian, which I called Roderigo. My father was that Sebastian of Messaline, whom I know you have heard of. He left behind him myself and a sister, both born in an hour. If the heavens had been pleased, would we had so ended! But you, sir, altered that, for some hour before you took me from the breach of the sea was my sister drowned.

~ Twelfth Night, 2.1

Sebastian of Messaline dressed hastily. He had said he would leave. For two weeks, he had told himself that he would leave, and today he would prove himself an honest man. He pulled his old clothes, the ones he'd almost drowned in, from his satchel. Antonio had washed the salt from them while Sebastian slept, in the days when he was half alive and all of him tears for Viola. They looked the worse for wear, but they made him feel different, and he wanted to feel different this morning. After three months of camaraderie as Roderigo with the kind of friend he could not keep, he wanted to feel like Sebastian again, the sort of man who would seek a place at Orsino's court and who didn't share a bed with a common sailor.

After wearing the loose-fitting clothes Antonio had bought for him, these pinched in unmentionable places, and the lace cuffs and collar itched. Sebastian held himself tall and looked in the bowl of water that was their mirror. His skin was darker, he noticed right away, but his freckles still stood out. His hair looked unruly and he liked it, but wondered if Orsino's courtiers would stick up their noses. But if they did he would bow to the duke in one smooth motion and explain that he, Sebastian of Messaline, his father's only son and the heir to his title, had been shipwrecked and had survived only by chance and the help of... What would he say?

The evening he kissed Antonio in the rain, Sebastian had decided there must be some property of rainwater that induced madness. There were too many stories of people kissing in the rain for it to be otherwise. He had prepared this clever explanation in case Antonio ever brought up the subject, but his friend never said a thing about it. Antonio would have appreciated his wittiness, and Sebastian moped at being denied the chance to show what he could do with words. He could turn reality on its head in a way that would spare both of them the need to understand what had happened between them.

That same night Sebastian couldn't sleep. He ran the clever explanation over and over in his mind, but still he tossed and turned. Out in that rainstorm he had felt joy for the first time since the shipwreck, but he had no right to find a new happiness if it meant forgetting Viola.

Emptying all those tears left a hollow space inside him, and his bed felt lonely. Alone in bed he had only his guilt and memories. He needed a present reality. He was naked – his only comfortable clothing was drying by the fire – and he knew his friend was as well, but that didn't bother him. And it was late, the time when logic often deserted him.

So he shook Antonio awake. "What?" the other man grumbled, moving his lips as little as possible, still clinging to sleep.

Sebastian couldn't decide what to say. May I join you? was simple and to the point, and made him far less vulnerable than I cannot be at peace with myself tonight, and thought I might be at peace with you. But his mouth would not open.

"What is it?" Antonio sat up in bed.

I can't intrude upon him in this way. I pushed him away today, and I cannot go back on that decision. Besides, it's cruel to ask anything at this hour... "I..."

"...can't sleep alone?"

"No, I can't."

Antonio pulled back the covers in his small bed, and when Sebastian lay down, put his arms around him, gently and unasked, as if he understood his emptiness perfectly. Sebastian fell asleep on his friend's chest, lulled by his steady heartbeat. Before he slept, though, he took in the feeling of his friend's smooth, hard body moving against his skin.

Antonio was a not a large man, and it seemed to Sebastian that he had borne the hardships of life all the more for it. His muscles were lean, but tough, and they strained at the confines of his skin. Soft golden hair gathered on his chest, but the rest of him looked absolutely smooth, and Sebastian felt sure one could be carried away by the ripples of his muscles like the motion of a powerful sea.

Lying beside a man like that, with all their clothes drying by the fire, who could blame Sebastian's thoughts for deserting the straight and narrow path? Who could blame him for imagining Antonio's calloused hands on his body, from his head to his naked toes? Or for imagining a part of that powerful man moving inside him? That thought brought a flush to his cheeks, but he couldn't shake it. He imagined Antonio kissing the back of his neck and shoulders and murmuring comforting words, and Sebastian's skin tingled all over just thinking of it.

When Sebastian had come down into the sailors' quarters, to ask where he could find the captain, and overheard talk of willing men and thrusting in what they had to offer, their words repulsed him. He spent the rest of that day quaking with disgust and wondering what anyone could find attractive about that act. Now that he remembered, Antonio had been there when he'd interrupted the sailors' talk and laughter, lying shirtless in his hammock, looking bored with the whole conversation. He'd seen ink wrapped around his arm and more peeking up from the waistband of his pants and wondered how much that would hurt. Why did poor men mark themselves permanently? Was it in an effort to add some beauty to their battered bodies? To give some meaning to their miserable lives?

He'd asked Antonio as much, in kinder words, six weeks into their strange new friendship. "I got these a few years ago," he answered, gesturing to where a picture of waves wrapped around his arm. He fiddled with the cloths that he always kept wrapped around his wrists and pulled his shirt back on, self-conscious. "So that I was marking my body, not just the rest of the world marking me." He stopped fidgeting, almost guilty. "It's a phoenix, the one you can't see." He gestured to his right thigh.

"A phoenix? Rising from the ashes? That's not too optimistic for you?"

He had sneered at that. "It's not intended to be optimistic. I just thought it looked beautiful."

Sebastian of Messaline shook himself, and splashed his face with water. It stung where he'd cut himself in hasty shaving, and his memories faded away. He decided against telling Orsino that he had wasted weeks in the company of a common sailor, wondering how he had painted his scarred body. That was something a younger Sebastian would never have wanted to know.

When one of their earliest tutors had impressed upon Sebastian and Viola the importance of knowing a person's place in the world and treating him or her accordingly, Viola looked confused.

"Why?" she had asked.

"Because you must not treat a servant like an equal."

"Why?" Her curls bounced as she shook her head.

"Because they will always be different from you. They will not understand you, and that's because they do not understand the nobler virtues of sacrifice and Christian moderation." Viola had wrinkled her nose, but Sebastian had drunk in the tutor's every word. Little Sebastian would be so disappointed in his elder self, who out of a desperate loneliness had crept into bed with a common sailor and stayed.

Sebastian knew he could have left for Illyria weeks ago with a kind thanks for the man who had saved him, and no one could have thought less of him for it. But the truth was he didn't want to. With Antonio, he felt safe, and with that safety, said things that he'd told no one else before. Losing Viola had left him empty inside – and he needed someone to fill that gap. That was all. But he had stayed far too long, long enough to admit that he wanted things Sebastian the nobleman had never thought to want.