Archive of Our Own ^beta

The skiff is a patched tin thing that complains with every stroke. Kim rows anyway, steady as a metronome, the oarlocks squeaking in two notes—metal, salt, metal. The ocean lies around them like dark glass. No chop, no wind. The sky is the colour of an old bruise.

Harry watches the horizon. It doesn’t move so much as breathe. He can taste salt on the back of his tongue and a thin, stale curl of cigarette smoke that isn’t there.

“Cold?” Kim asks without looking up.

“A state of mind,” Harry says, and pulls his coat tighter.

Shivers: The coast holds its breath. The city is a dim necklace behind you. Out here, it’s just two men and something that knows your names.

Kim’s shoulders work under the jacket, precise, controlled. He has his glasses on despite the gloom. Harry could list a dozen details—frayed cuff, a scuff on the watch strap, the way Kim braces one heel for the return stroke—things you only notice when you’re already far too close.

They glide past a raft of kelp that looks like writing. The characters knot and unknot, unreadable.

“Don’t stare at it,” Kim says, softly. “It stares back.”

“I wasn’t—” Harry starts, and stops. He was.

Another stroke, another, and the squeak of the oarlock repeats exactly the same tremor as before, like a line looped on a tape.

Perception (Hearing): Again. The same squeak. Exactly the same.

Kim pauses mid-draw. The oar blade drips. One drop hangs, impossible, refusing to fall.

“Do you see that?” Harry asks.

“Yes,” Kim says. “I wish I didn’t.”

The drop falls. Time lurches forward a half-step. The boat rocks. Somewhere under them the ocean shifts—not a wave but a thought changing its mind.

They don’t speak for a while after that. The skiff slides toward the shallows, the water going from black to bottle-green to a pale, luminous colour that isn’t any colour at all. Beneath the surface something like a net lifts and sinks, the knots breathing in and out.

Harry thinks of saying, If I jump, will you pull me back. He doesn’t. He’s said too much like that already, and not enough of other things.

“Lieutenant,” he says instead. The way the word fits in his mouth feels important.

Kim looks up. His face is spare and alert. He’s beautiful in a way Harry only admits to himself when the ocean is listening.

The oarlocks squeak. Metal. Salt. Metal. Then—

—Kim is closer. The boat has closed a distance Harry didn’t see. Their knees are touching. The skiff should tilt but doesn’t. Kim’s hand finds Harry’s wrist and stays there, thumb on the pulse as if counting beats for evidence.

“Hey,” Harry says—he can hear how small it is.

Kim’s mouth is open like he means to say no, or don’t move, or we’re being watched. He doesn’t say any of it. He breathes out instead, and Harry feels the breath like heat on his cheek. It smells like coffee and the ghost of the cigarette Kim denies himself.

Harry doesn’t remember leaning in. He remembers the texture: the dry line of Kim’s lower lip, the split-second give of surprise, the quiet, decisive way Kim answers him—no theatre, no hesitation, just the unspooling of a held line. The boat shifts, belatedly. Fingers in his coat. Knuckles against his jaw. The squeak of the oarlock becomes a hinge in his chest opening.

Inland Empire: It has seen this in you. In both of you. It is curious how two solitudes solve for each other.

Kim makes a sound into his mouth, accidental, almost annoyed, like he’s displeased with himself for needing this. Harry laughs, a short helpless thing, and feels Kim’s hand slide to the back of his neck, as if Harry is the one keeping the skiff upright.

There’s salt everywhere: on Kim’s lip, on Harry’s tongue, in the damp cuff where Kim has curled his fingers. A soft tap of glasses against cheekbone, a brief adjustment; Kim takes the glasses off one-handed without breaking the kiss, and it’s so mundane and intimate that Harry nearly says Oh. He swallows instead. The world narrows to breath, and heat, and the slow, impossible stillness of the sea around them.

“You’re—” Harry says, and doesn’t find a word that isn’t everything.

“Don’t—” Kim says, and then, quieter, “—stop.”

Harry doesn’t.

When they do, it isn’t because of breath or reason. It’s because the oarlock squeaks again, exactly the same two-note complaint, and the sound is coming from somewhere else in time.

The skiff is as it was. The distance is as it was. Kim’s hands are on the oars, forearms tensed, knuckles pale. His glasses are on his face. The drip from the blade hasn’t fallen yet.

Harry is holding his own wrist where he remembers Kim’s thumb. He can feel the ghost of pressure there, steady as a metronome.

He looks up. Kim is already looking back. His expression is an almost-perfect copy of the one Harry knows from a dozen other moments—measured concern, a line of skepticism, that small private softness that only appears when he thinks Harry isn’t watching.

Except the softness isn’t hiding.

Kim blinks once, very slow, as if rebooting. He finishes the stroke. The drop falls.

“Did you—” Harry starts.

“No,” Kim says, too fast. Then, with meticulous precision: “Yes.”

They sit with that. The ocean does its quiet impossible thing around them, lifting nothing, moving nothing, making every part of the world slightly too attentive.

“Could be a phenomenon,” Harry says. “Shared to save time. Experimental romance.” He smiles like a man offering his own punchline as evidence.

Kim’s mouth twitches, then steadies. “If it was, we gave it the material.” He adjusts his glasses. The motion is so normal that Harry wants to laugh or fall apart or both. “We should proceed as if it happened and did not happen.”

“That’s a lot to proceed as,” Harry says. His voice is scratchy. He’s aware of his mouth in a way that feels unfair.

Kim looks down at his hands, then at Harry’s face, and there’s a question there that is also an answer. “Are you alright?”

“I don’t know,” Harry says. Then, because it seems like a place to put the truth where it won’t break anything: “It was… good.”

Kim sits very still. The oars rest on the water, not quite pushing. “Yes,” he says. The word is almost soundless. “It was.”

Logic: You cannot both be where you are and where you were. Therefore one of the states is false.

Inland Empire: False does not mean unlived.

They don’t try again. Not because they’ve decided anything, but because the ocean has. The water ahead brightens with that pale not-colour, and the sandbar of the Phenomenon Shallows shows its back like a creature surfacing. Something sinuous and tall shimmers above it, neither air nor water, a thought extruded into the weather.

Kim rows. Harry watches the horizon. Their knees knock once in the cramped space and don’t move apart. The skiff glides on.

“After,” Harry says, and doesn’t define after what.

Kim nods. “After.”

The boat kisses the shallows with a metal hush. In the distance the city is a line of patient lights. Overhead the sky is the colour of a healed bruise now, washed lighter at the edges. Under them, everything that is not them keeps thinking.

Harry licks his lip without meaning to and tastes salt and smoke.

Shivers: Tomorrow the coast will remember you two as shapes moving together across a flat sea. It will not know if it’s memory or wish. Neither will you.

Kim steps out first and holds the skiff steady. He offers a hand. Harry takes it. The grip is firm, careful. Their eyes meet for a bare second too long.

Then they let go, and the ocean pretends not to see.