"Do my hands feel any different tonight," Sebastian asked as they sat by their window the night before he left for good, looking out to sea. It was springtime, and the days were longer. The sky was ablaze with brilliant colors, and they were reflected in the water. Antonio was drawn to the sea, Sebastian had noticed. He could only travel inland for so long before bringing them both back to the shore.

"Should they?"

"I've got calluses – look!" He had worked hard for them, too.

Antonio looked down at their joined hands. "I know you think I judge you for your soft upbringing, but I don't."

He did judge him, Sebastian knew, and it grated that Antonio would not admit it. "You mistake me, my friend. These changes are not to please you, they are to please me."

"Why do they please you?"

He rubbed his fingertips together. "I feel like I know something of life."

"We have not seen much of life on this journey."

"What haven't we seen?" Sebastian asked. Antonio smiled in his grown-up, infuriating way. "What haven't we seen?"

"All sorts of things."

"Like what?"

"Like things..." he shrugged, and his thumb rubbed circles on Sebastian's hand.

"Things I wouldn't be able to understand?" Sebastian had been sitting on the windowsill, one leg drawn to his chest. He swung it around and faced the man who was now avoiding his eyes.

"I never said that."

"You implied it." And to his credit Antonio did not deny it.

The sleeve of Antonio's shirt was untied, and it revealed one of the nastier scars Sebastian had seen. It snaked up his arm past the elbow. Sebastian traced it with his thumb. "How did you get this?"

"I never told you?"

"You never told me how you got any of your scars... some of which I'm sure I've never seen." For all of their intimacy, Antonio avoided Sebastian's gaze whenever it lingered on any of his many blemishes.

"That's true."

"How did you get them?" His face was still hard, determined. He wasn't a child anymore, and he wanted Antonio to treat him accordingly.

"All of them?"

"I'd like to know."

Antonio rose from his seat by the window and crossed the room. "What if I don't want to tell you?"

"I think you do." Sebastian crossed his arms. "But you think me too much of a child to face the truth."

They glared at each other long and hard. Antonio's mean look was intimidating indeed, but he had not grown up with a little sister. Sebastian simply stood with his arms crossed and waited, reciting his times tables and Latin conjugations until Antonio screwed up his face. "Fine!" He pulled off his shirt and began telling the tale of every mark on his body.

At first Sebastian flushed with the thrill of it all. Some of these stories were full of adventure, and he glowed with pride at hearing them, reliving them with his dearest friend so close to his side. Caught up in the adrenaline of memory, he clearly imagined metal and wood and human flesh and bone breaking his lover's skin. Over and over again.

He couldn't have been more than six when he ran in desperate worry to his father with a small cut on his hand. He had seen one the scars on his groom's arm and he was afraid he, too, would be left with mark, a constant reminder of his pain. He wouldn't be able to look at his hands without remembering his humiliating fall from the estate wall that he told Viola he could scale. His father assured him all would be well, and all was. The scratch faded without a trace.

These ugly, fat, and wrinkled patches of skin told the story of a man's life, and as Antonio removed item of clothing after item of clothing, Sebastian saw that it had been a life full of pain. He wanted to be ill.

He knew then that if he stayed to hear the whole story, he would never be able to see the world he had once known clearly again, that no matter what he wanted, he could never go back to the safe and beautiful life his father and family would have wanted him to lead.

"Stop!" he covered his face and ran out of their room. He ran down the street and towards the sea, but he did not cry. Antonio had taken the gilded house that he remembered so well, upturned it and shook the contents down onto the ground, and he hated him for it.

The sky was bleeding into the sea now, and darkness was falling. Reflected in the sea, Orsino's palace glittered with a hundred lights. It was not far, and his strong body could walk the distance in half a day. The castle was surrounded by warm, welcoming walls lit up against the night. He'd find another beautiful person there, a woman with fair hair whose only concern was her new gown, or a man, as it seemed his desires could tend, whose flawless skin was topped with a glorious layer of fat. He would be happy there, and he would never try to scale the walls again.

"Roderigo?" Antonio was running along the shore. He had forgotten his boots and his feet threw up a train of sand in his wake. "Roderigo, I am so sorry."

"No, listen to me, please – "

"No, listen to me!" He fell to his knees in front of Sebastian and took his hands. He kissed each one in turn. "I should have trusted you sooner. I should have told you those stories in turn, over weeks, not all in one night. And I could've been gentler with my words. Not all my stories are as bad as I made them seem. I was cruel, and you deserved not a word of it. Please forgive me. I love you."

The word slipped from his lover's lips in moments of passion or bliss, but Sebastian never answered it. He kissed Antonio until they forgot what the words had been about, why they were standing barefoot on the seashore as the stars winked on. That warm night Sebastian made love with a passion he hadn't known he'd possessed, and rendered his scarred lover speechless with joy.

And the next morning he left without a word.