Page 65 of Dirty Rotten Love

I am not a person given to dramatics. I have never described anything as the other half of my soul. I would not have known how to say it even if I tried. And Rory said it dangling over the North Sea in the worst storm in twenty years as if it was simply true, and it landed in me somewhere so deep that I am still feeling the impact.

He loves my quiet. He said so, specifically and clearly, I love your silence, which is never empty but always full of something worth waiting for. But I have been told my silence is uncomfortable and my silence is coldness and my silence is something people have to put up with. But Rory loves it. He loves the precise way I do things. He loves that I check things twice. He loves all of it, every specific careful quiet grumpy thing, and when he was listing them in the storm, it sounded like someone describing something rare and valuable rather than something difficult and exhausting.

I have never been described that way before.

I am still not entirely sure what to do with it.

Green Crew are doing what Green Crew always do, which is being loud and warm and completely unable to stay in any kind of order, and the sickbay is full of the specific overlapping noise of people who have been through something together and are processing it in the only way they know how, which is talking about it at volume. Tam is nearest to Rory’s gurney, sitting on the floor because there is no chair available, his back against the wall and his long legs stretched out, watching Rory sleep with the expression of a man who has been frightened and is still coming down from it. Frasier is in the doorway, arms crossed, not quite inside and not quite outside, which is very Frasier. Grigor is telling someone a story about something. Brockie is in the corner looking slightly overwhelmed by the noise and the smallness of the room, and Spanner is standing near him, not crowding, just there.

Whelan is talking about the satellite array repair, which apparently Rory did correctly before the slip, which is something I will acknowledge when I am not also thinking about the part where Rory climbed a tower in the worst storm in twenty years without the correct certification or training. I will deal with the certification issue. Later. When I have decided how to feel about all the ways this could have ended differently.

Dazza is sitting on the floor at the foot of Rory’s gurney and he has been very quiet since they got us inside, which is its own kind of statement. Dazza is not quiet. Dazza is constitutionally incapable of quiet in the way that some people are constitutionally incapable of sitting still, and the particular quality of his silence has been sitting in the room like something unresolved.

I look at him.

Dazza looks at the floor.

He carries it, that guilt. I have watched him carry it since the evening in the mess hall and I have not had the capacity to address it because I have been too busy being MacLeod, which is the thing I do when everything else is not available, and somewhere in the process of being MacLeod I have perhaps not allowed myself to consider that Dazza saying something thoughtless is something Dazza has been doing since the day he arrived on this rig and that it is simply who he is and was never meant to be anything more.

It was a dare.

I let myself think about it properly, in the warm, small sickbay with Rory’s hand in mine and Green Crew making noise around us. It was a dare, and I did not know that and I built something on a foundation I thought was one thing and turned out to be another, and the pain of that is real and I am not dismissing it.

But.

If it had not been a dare, Rory would not have knocked on my door. He would not have stood in that corridor at eleven o’clock at night with his wonky smile and his wide eyes, because Rory Gallacher, for all his sunshine and chaos, would not have approached me. I know this about him now in a way I did not then. Underneath all the performance is someone who does not believe he is enough, who would never have knocked on anyone’s door on his own initiative. Rory is someone who needed a dare to give him the permission.

The dare gave me Rory.

I am aware that this is a generous reading of the situation. I am aware that it would be equally valid to feel differently about it, and I have felt differently about it, extensively and in some detail, in a dark cabin over several days. But I am lying in the sickbay with Rory’s hand in mine and his face turned towards me in sleep and the things he said on the ladder are still moving through me like a current, and the generous reading is the one that is winning.

The dare gave me Rory.

I look at his face. At the particular way he takes up space even in sleep, completely and without apology, angled diagonally on the narrow gurney in a way that should not be possible, let alone comfortable, yet clearly is. At the bruise on his cheekbone from the ladder. At the way his hand holds mine with the easy certainty of something that knows where it belongs.

“So,” says Dazza.

The room goes quieter. Not silent, Green Crew does not do silent, but quieter, the specific quiet of people who have been waiting for something and can feel it arriving.

I look at Dazza. Dazza is looking at our joined hands with an expression that is tentative and hopeful and still carrying the guilt that I am going to have to do something about when the ribs are less distracting.

“Are you two.” He pauses. Looks up. “I mean. Are you. A thing.”

The room is very quiet now. Tam is not looking at the ceiling but he is very deliberately not looking at me, which is its own kind of looking. Frasier has come fully through the doorway. Grigor has stopped his story. Even Harris is studiously reorganizing something on the supply shelf that does not need reorganizing.

I look at Rory sleeping.

I think about the protocol that said wait and the harness going on anyway and a twenty-two-year-old from Edinburgh who knocked on my door on a dare and somehow, in the process of everything that followed, saw me. Not the performance. Not the version that functions. Me, the precise, quiet, grumpy, difficult man, and called me the other half of his soul.

I look at Dazza.

I feel something happen in my face that is unfamiliar and warm and entirely outside my control, and I think, from the way Tam makes a small involuntary sound and Frasier’s eyebrows go up, that it is visible.

I am smiling.

“Aye,” I say. “We are a thing.”

The noise that Green Crew makes is extraordinary. It fills the small sickbay and spills out into the corridor and is composed equally of cheering and laughing and several things being said at once by several people, and in the middle of it Rory wakes up, blinking, and looks at me with the soft, unfocused expression of someone who has just surfaced from a very deep sleep and is not entirely sure where he is.