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The room is dark when Paul returns to their quarters, the only light the deep bronze haze of the Kiruani nebula through the viewport, vast and distant as the ship skims its borders, hurrying towards the mystery Starfleet has set them to chase. With the lights off, he could almost think Hugh weren’t here, except for the music that fills the air, the second act chorus from The Moons of Nech’hallee.He takes a step into the room, and the door slides closed behind him. He could ask the computer for lights, but instead he lets his eyes adjust to the dimness. Does everything slowly, carefully, because he’s promised himself not to rush, not to push, to allow this to take however long it needs to take.They have the time now, they’ve been given it back.Hugh is sitting on the floor, in the corner by the bed with his back to the wall, his knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around them. Curled in on himself. The body he returned in, the body that came through the transporter cocoon, is as broad and solid as his body ever was, as strong and healthy. But the way he holds himself, the way he moves, reveals the long months of solitary deprivation as clearly as if he’d been worn down to skin and bone. He looks so small like this. Paul has been trying not to show how terrifying that is. Hugh doesn’t need him to be scared.Hugh looks up at him when he rounds the corner of the bed and Paul smiles at him, in part to reassure, in part because he can’t help himself, because Hugh is here. It’s been nearly two weeks now, and he hasn’t even begun to be able to contain the joy that vibrates inside him, the wonder. Hugh returns the smile—muted, cautious, but it’s that same wonder, connecting them. Paul reaches for the connection, moves closer.“This part is beautiful,” he says, indicating the music around them with a gesture of his hand. He kneels down to sit on the floor in front of Hugh. Hugh’s feet are bare beneath the hems of his track pants, his toes only inches from Paul’s knees. Paul folds his hands in his lap, doesn’t reach out. Hugh hasn’t initiated touch since he came back; Paul isn’t sure what that means, but he doesn’t want to trample on any boundaries Hugh needs to feel safe.“You always hated it,” Hugh says. He tilts his head a fraction, questioning, and that’s comfortingly familiar. He’s not any more inclined to buy Paul’s bullshit than he’s ever been.Paul nods, agreeing.“I did. But I’ve listened to a lot of Kasseelian opera since…” He pauses, swallows down the lump in his throat. It’s still hard to contemplate, what happened, maybe it always will be. “Since I lost you. It made me feel closer to you, trying to learn to hear the beauty you heard. Some parts are difficult for me, some parts I don’t get, but this chorus is easy, it goes to the heart. I can see why you love it.”Hugh looks down at the floor. The music swells, softens, a complex change in key as the second theme becomes the main one. This bit always made Hugh catch his breath, his lungs expand with the sensations of the music. Paul did notice that, before, even if he complained about the opera being awful. He wanted to notice every detail about Hugh, everything that gave him pleasure. He’s thought a lot in the past few months about how many things he still must have missed, how much he was never going to discover. But now he has a second chance, the responsibility not to waste it.Hugh’s grip around his knees tightens at the dizzyingly long note that marks the turn in the music, his nostrils flaring on a sharp indrawn breath. The same physical reaction as always, though his body has been remade.Paul listens with him, on the floor in the dark, sits with him, sharing the music, the sound of his breathing beneath it.It’s a miracle to have him so close. There is a pause when the chorus ends, a stretch of silence in the recording between the second act and the next. The steady hum of the ship’s engines is for a moment restored as the loudest sound in the room, before the opening aria of the third act picks up, masking it again.The break in the music appears to lift Hugh from his deepest thoughts, and he shifts his weight, though he doesn’t move or change position. He glances at Paul, seems to hesitate. Paul waits for him, lets him take his time.“It makes things seem more real,” Hugh says at last. He’s looking down at his knees, his voice very quiet. “The music. There wasn’t any music, where I was, not after I convinced you to open your eyes and leave. So it helps me remember, when I forget, that I’m really here. That it’s not a trick of the mind.”Paul’s fingers curl, dig into his thighs, muscles tensing with the pain he feels for Hugh, with his frustration at his own inability to change any of what’s happened, to find Hugh sooner, to keep him safe from harm in the first place.“It is real,” he says. Calmly, with soft conviction. With joy at the fact of it. “We really are here, together. You and I.”Hugh lifts his chin a little, looks up at him from under his lashes. Quick, darting eye movements taking him in, scanning his body piece by piece as if looking at the whole too long would be too much.“You’re the hardest to believe,” he says. “I imagined you so many times, in there, when I was being eaten up and torn apart, when I was losing my mind with loneliness. Sometimes I saw you. And the rules are different in that place, the things your mind shows you, they can seem so real. Now, at night, I dream of being there, inside the pain again, and when I wake up, I think that world must be what’s real, and this must be the dream. You’re lying there, on the pillow next to me, and I’m afraid to reach out and touch you because I don’t want to discover that you’re not truly there. I don’t want you to be a dream, Paul.”It’s more words than Hugh has spoken in one go since his initial debriefing, and they come tumbling over each other, fast and urgent, as if Hugh has been wanting to tell him, has finally found a moment when he can, and now he needs Paul to hear him, needs him to understand. To help.Paul could lean across the space between them, could take Hugh in his arms. Bypass Hugh’s fear by acting for him, wrap him up in the reality of the touch he craves and hold him until he trusts the solidity of Paul’s grip, until he feels safe. He wants to do that so badly, his muscles twitching with the instinct to give comfort, to grab Hugh and not let go. But he’s done that. He did that the moment Hugh came back, did it over and over in the first few days when Hugh trembled with confusion or woke him screaming in his nightmares. And it hasn’t helped. Hugh still doesn’t dare to trust he is real. So perhaps what Hugh needs from him, what Hugh is trying to ask for, is something else,“It’s all right,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere, I promise.” And then gently, an offer as entirely without pressure as he can make it: “Do you want to try touching me now, while the music is playing to remind you what’s real? You can, if you want to. I won’t move, you can go as slowly as you like. I’ll just sit right here, okay?”Hugh squeezes his knees to his chest, worries his lower lip with his teeth. A second Kasseelian voice has joined the first, a deeper, rhythmic part underscoring the lyrical flight of the soprano. Paul thinks for a moment Hugh won’t give him an answer, that they’ll stay like this, sitting through the duet in silence. He shifts his weight, settles in for it. Then Hugh moves. Unfolds his arms, his legs, opening up his body towards Paul. Shifting onto his knees so that his position mirrors Paul, facing him, and he lifts his eyes to Paul’s face, slowly lifts his hand.It makes Paul’s heart crack open, how brave this man is.“I love you so much,’ he says.Hugh’s fingertips touch his cheek.A shiver travels through Hugh’s body, a jolt like electricity, like the punch to Paul’s system when his nerves connect with the spore drive. Reality turning on its axis, spinning into place.Hugh almost falls forward, shuffles closer on his knees, close enough to lay his whole palm against the side of Paul’s face. Eagerness, and so much open wonder in his expression.“You,’ he says.Paul smiles. He tries for supportive, reassuring, but he knows the twist of his lips is shaky.“In the flesh,” he says, irony in it, an attempt at a joke. His voice isn’t steady, either.“Yeah.” Hugh raises his other hand, cups Paul’s face in his palms. Trails his thumbs over his cheekbones, down the sides of his nose, traces the arches of his eyebrows with his fingertips. He tracks the path of his hands over Paul’s skin with his eyes, an intensity to his focus, as if carefully matching sensation to sight, committing observable data to memory. His touch is warm, soft. Paul keeps still. Beneath his uniform, his skin is breaking out in goosebumps. Hugh brushes the pad of his thumb over Paul’s lips, and Paul can’t help the way they part, learned reflex from years of Hugh touching him, asking his body to open. His breath catches, and Hugh’s hand stills, rests there, the weight of his thumb against Paul’s lower lip. The music of the opera sounds distant, drowned out by Paul’s heartbeat. Hugh’s tongue darts out, wets his own lips.He’s come closer, out of the shadows, into the faint light from the window, his face touched with gold from the haze of the nebula. He looks hesitant, poised for flight at the slightest provocation, but still, somehow, determined. Paul thinks of him surviving, alone inside the network, stubbornly refusing to give up the fight for his life. He knows that stubbornness, that determination: he fell in love with it the first day they met, and now it’s brought Hugh home to him, out of the destruction of death. Hugh might be frightened still, but it’s clear on his face now that he knows what he wants. All Paul can do is invite him to take it, show him that it’s safe, not spook him. He tries to project calm, openness, an absence of expectations. He wonders if Hugh can feel the breakneck speed of his pulse at the points where they touch.Hugh slides his hand lower, thumb slipping from Paul’s lip, his fingers feeling out the edge of Paul’s jaw bone, dipping below it, stroking the side of his neck, his Adam’s apple, coming to a stop at the collar of his jacket.Hugh glances up from where his hand has paused at the fastening of Paul’s uniform, looks Paul briefly in the eye.“Can I?” he asks.“Yes,” Paul says. “Anything, Hugh, anything you want.”Hugh is already looking down again, undoing the zipper, pulling it all the way to the bottom, until Paul’s jacket falls open. Concentration on his face, doing it carefully, and his hands are gentle as they push the jacket off Paul’s shoulders. Paul moves to help, shrugging his jacket off, dropping it on the floor beside him, then laying his hands palms down in his lap again.Hugh touches his hands then, strokes his open palms over the backs of Paul’s knuckles, over his wrists, up the bare skin of his forearms. The pale hairs there rise in the wake of the touch, coming alive with it. They’ve both been dead, Paul thinks, each in their own wasteland, but this is what living feels like, his body new beneath the newness of Hugh’s fingertips, recreated, atom by atom. He shivers when Hugh skims the insides of his elbows, strokes up beneath the sleeves of his t-shirt.“I want to touch you everywhere,” Hugh breathes. “I want–” He breaks off, as though he can’t find the words for what he’s asking, as though it’s too much, or too many things at once. “Please.”There are no words for this, for the vastness and necessity of it, but Paul doesn’t have to answer in speech. He reaches for the hem of his shirt, pulls it over his head. Hugh’s hands leave him just long enough for him to throw it aside, and then they’re on him again, stroking flat over his shoulders, down his chest, cupping the arc of his ribcage, caressing the soft flesh of his belly and the hard bone of his sternum, rediscovering him, retracing the shape of his reality, finding him again, piece by piece, carefully, so carefully putting the whole together into something empirically here, undeniably now. Hugh’s fingers circle the areola of his nipple, and Paul realizes with a sudden, sharp rush of heat that he is hard, his cock pressing up against the fabric of his pants. He hasn’t felt arousal in such a long time, not through the suffocating blanket of grief, and the vivid, bright ache of it is startling in its intensity. He is afraid for a second that it will scare Hugh away, that it’s not the kind of intimacy Hugh needs from him, nothing he has any right to impose. He bites his lip when Hugh rubs his thumb across his other nipple, tries to hold back the moan that wants to escape him, not quite succeeding.Hugh looks at his face then. Really looks at him–not the darting, cautious glances, but a long look of fascination, curiosity. Recognition.“You always liked that,” he says, musing, and Paul can see the memory sparking in his eyes, all the memories, years of nights when he’s touched Paul just like this and made him whimper, made him beg. He looks down Paul’s body, and when he strokes Paul’s nipple again, he must see how Paul’s cock jumps, stretching his uniform tight across his groin.Hugh lets out a breath.“Lie down,” he says. He doesn’t sound hesitant at all.The opera has reached the long instrumental section that traditionally comes before the finale. String instruments Paul still hasn’t managed to learn the names of weaving a harmony almost too complex for the human ear to grasp, a symphony of yearning played at the edges of the knowable universe wrapping around him as he stretches out on the bare metal floor beside the bed, lying back, feeling the vibrations of the Discovery travel up through his shoulder blades, the vibrations of the music sink down through his mind.Hugh reaches for the fastenings on his pants the moment he’s lying down, strips him of the last of his clothing until he’s naked in the light from the nebula, hard and open under Hugh’s hands, Hugh’s slow touches mapping the bones of his feet, the length of his shins, the insides of his parting thighs. Paul stops trying to be quiet.In the end, he’s arching his back, his body surging upward into every new touch, and Hugh leans over him. Straddles his hips and leans his weight on a hand placed by Paul’s shoulder, and Paul is surrounded by him. The nickname of their ship printed on Hugh’s t-shirt is elongated, stretched out by the thickness of his chest, his shoulders wide, his body open towards Paul. There is nothing about him now that seems small. He is more beautiful than Paul could possibly have remembered.“Please, Hugh,” Paul says, “please touch me,” and it doesn’t feel wrong or dangerous to ask, doesn’t feel like Hugh will break from it. It feels right the way it’s always felt right, as necessary as breathing.Hugh takes him in hand, fingers squeezing down, stroking the length of him. Feeling every inch of his hardness, root to tip, rediscovering this final part of his body, the most familiar of touches.Paul reaches up then, at last, wraps his arms around Hugh’s neck, needing his skin under his hands, needing him, thrusting into his grip around his cock, holding him with all the strength he has in him. And Hugh falls into him, his arm buckling, their bodies pressing together, Hugh’s cheek against his, Hugh’s lips to his ear.“You’re really here,” Hugh says, voice breathless and breaking with wonder and conviction. “You really found me.” His hand is working Paul’s cock, his mouth kissing his cheek, his own hard length pressing against Paul’s hip bone, grinding down. “You’re here.”Paul comes into the narrow space between them, shaking and trembling and clinging to every living, breathing cell of Hugh’s body. “I’m here with you,” he agrees, panting through the aftershocks. “You’re home.”Hugh rears up and kisses him. He’s never felt more alive.