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| Details |
| Author: | Luridel |
| Summary: | Mordecai wakes up in the middle of the night the night before he's going to depart for Northrend. Entirely romance fluff, skip this one if that isn't your thing. ~900 words. |
| Rating: | M for Mature 17+ |
Chain: Morson
Mordecai doesn’t know what time it is when he wakes. He knows what time it isn’t: it isn’t time to get up. The room is quite dark, although the dull glow of the heater provides just enough light for Mordecai to see the outline of Colson’s sleeping face, and his imagination fills in the rest. Colson looks heartrendingly peaceful when he sleeps, which makes the nightmares, when they come, easier for Mordecai to detect. It’s rare for him to be awake at the right time to catch Colson having one, though, and perhaps this thought is what makes Mordecai keep his eyes open: if he waits, maybe he can stave off a nightmare.
For now, pressed up against Colson’s side, Mordecai can hear his husband breathing evenly. Colson’s skin is unfairly warm - comfortably so, to Mordecai, who tends to run colder in comparison. Full of Light. It likely won’t be half so warm on the ship, or in Northrend itself, as it is here in their heated Stormwind bedroom.
The water is rather pretty at dawn and at dusk, Colson had said. Perhaps they might get an opportunity to watch it together, if the deck isn’t too crowded.
Mordecai barely remembers his first boat ride to Kalimdor as anything other than an uneasy blur, but the trip back he remembers vividly: sitting alone in a tiny cabin barely larger than a closet, holding a rain-blurred letter, weighing the pros and cons of jumping overboard. The sailors would probably have noticed, he remembers thinking. Someone would have seen, and stopped him, and rescued him whether he wanted them to or not. The thought of his body sinking to the ocean floor holds none of the appeal it once did.
Unequivocally, without question, Mordecai wants to live.
He remembers that tiny cabin, though. The walls were so thin that he could hear the other passengers coughing and snoring. The only furniture, the bed, was attached to the wall in such a way that it couldn’t slide around even if the ship itself did. It was a human ship, and the bed was sized for a human, so he’d fit, but only just barely.
The thought of spending a week or two in a room like that again, except trying to fit two people into it instead of one… Mordecai has no idea how the two of them can comfortably occupy a bed that size, but he spends some time trying to imagine it. Colson would want the side closest to the door, of course, in case of danger, so Mordecai would get the cozy side up against the wall. That thought has an unexpected amount of appeal to it - having a literal wall on one side and Colson on the other, like a safety sandwich. Every bed the two of them have slept in together thus far has had open space on either side of the bed, with only the headboards up against the wall. This one here is the fifth such bed, not that Mordecai’s counting.
Fine, so maybe he’s counting.
There was Colson’s room in the townhouse, that first night, that had felt so strange and unfamiliar that Mordecai had practically begged his husband to stay with him. (Well, he’d asked. That was basically the same thing to Mordecai, at that point in time.) He remembers falling asleep almost instantly, the moment he was horizontal and in Colson’s arms. It had just been such a long day, and he was so tired, and the man he had married had told him (after the ceremony) that he loved him, and when he woke up in that bed the room had felt a little less strange, a little more familiar.
There was the inn in Shattrath, barely memorable, that they spent only a couple of days in, where the two of them dressed and undressed without looking at each other, thinking they were being polite.
There was the bunk bed in Telredor, which to this day Mordecai still misses fondly from time to time. He’s not sure why Colson didn’t just turn around and go ask if the innkeeper had a different room available, although he remembers that it was raining that day, and the two of them had needed to change, and by then, well, leaving the room hadn’t seemed worth it.
Their first time together as lovers (and even just thinking that word, Mordecai suspects he might be blushing) had been in Colson’s room in the townhouse - and still, to this day, Mordecai keeps thinking of it as Colson’s room rather than their room, despite how long he spent trying to make that correction in his mind.
After Telredor, when they switched inns to Telaar in Nagrand… Mordecai recalls that at first their inn room had seemed too large. There was so much empty space in the center of the room, and it had taken him some time to start feeling at ease there.
This bed, on the other hand…
Light, this is home.
Mordecai remembers their very first night here: they hadn’t bought the smaller heater yet, and he had been relying on the warmth from the fireplace and the blankets and Colson to keep him warm… but it felt like home already. (They have a home. The sheer joy Mordecai feels just thinking about that fact seems almost excessive.)
It smells like home now. Like Colson. Orange blossom, maybe? Something floral like that.
He might be tired. His thoughts are drifting. Boat bed. Safety sandwich. Soon.