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Xilarn’s scoff was immediate, but laced through more with amusement than with reproach. “I wouldn’t have believed you if you’d said as much beforehand,” he retorted flippantly. Though maybe… it wasn’t as far-fetched as Xil would have been inclined to believe. Damis didn’t have anything to gain from an obscure lie like that, and as far as Xilarn could presently tell, the younger man didn’t make a habit of fabricating tales. If it had mattered then, it only would have been a detriment to their progress, anyway. He didn’t know what he was asking for. He didn’t understand. He was just a boy. Xilarn ran a hand down Damis’ calf, pressing his fingers to the muscle and rubbing firmly.

But if it mattered now, it was only satisfactorily pleasing that no one else had done to him what Xilarn had done to him. To Damissan’s knowledge.

He leaned over, smiling and catching lightly at Damis’ lips before he murmured, “I’m glad I could make you happy.” And also more silently, secretly pleased that none of Damis’ previous partners had ruined the thought of bottoming for him. Because while Xilarn was not distinctly opposed to that role himself — he eyed the younger man’s smirk through narrowed eyes of his own — there were still a few things he wasn’t entirely sure he trusted Damissan with.

His a** was one of them.

“Boyfriends?” Xilarn repeated, the barest trace of something like disdain edging into his voice. The word sounded juvenile, like something suited to Damissan’s age group, but not so much Xil’s. ‘Boyfriends’ were teenagers casually touching and experimenting for the first time. He hadn’t had a ‘boyfriend’ since he was a teen himself, and as much as he didn’t want to be the one to take something from Damis that he hadn’t had the opportunity for yet...

Xilarn’s nose crinkled, and he shook his head. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t call us that,” he replied in a clipped tone. But at the risk of sounding like it wasn’t still exactly what he wanted, he threaded an arm around Damis’ neck and craned back to kiss his ear. “How about… you can call us ‘exclusive.’ I don’t know who you’d be talking to that you needed to say anything about our private lives, but if it’s something you’re keen on discussing with someone else, don’t make it sound…” How best to put this in a way that was understandable, yet inoffensive? “Weird.”

It probably wasn’t possible, and the more Xil thought on it, the more he realized he didn’t want Damis mentioning anything about them to a single soul. Instead of making further comment, he swallowed the thought down and stood from the bed to retrieve Damis’ bath towel. When he returned, he tossed the towel over the younger man’s stomach, and dropped unceremoniously down at his side.

“You’re such a tiresome kid.”

There’d been a time when the sound of Damissan’s laughter would have been irritating, annoying, aggravating, particularly when directed at anything that had come from Xilarn’s mouth, and there still was a piece of him that wanted to find the noise vexing. There wasn’t anything funny about what people were going to think of them (the worst, probably, as Xil expected most were inclined to do), and how Damis presented himself—them, and their relationship, though why he’d feel the need at all was beyond him— could make a substantial difference worth regulating his diction over, or…

But it didn’t feel pressing enough for the moment to comment on. Damissan wasn’t a fool, and Xilarn hoped he wouldn’t try to do anything to offend him. He was teasing now, so even though Xil wasn’t ever especially enthused to be on the receiving end of that brand of comedy, it wasn’t as offensive now as it might have been a handful of hours ago. They hadn’t even spent the full span of a day on agreeable terms, yet, and already Xilarn felt more inclined to just… let it slide. This time.

“Oh?” He prompted as he rolled to his side to face Damis and propped himself up on an elbow. “I didn’t realize your name day fell within the time we’d be traveling, or rather, I didn’t think about it, I suppose.” It hadn’t been important enough to be bothered with, before. “You’ll have to tell me when it’s getting closer, and I’ll think of something special to do.”

He had no idea what constituted as ‘special’ for Damissan’s standards, and likely no event he could plan while on the move to a place neither of them were especially familiar with would be as grand as anything his parents had done for any previous birthday, presumably, but it was worth trying, all the same. He tucked a hand beneath Damis’ chin to guide his mouth off his neck and his attention back toward his face. “Maybe then I’ll stop calling you ‘kid.’ Until then, I guess it’ll just have to be ‘weird’ between us.” With a swift peck to Damis’ nose, Xilan dropped to his back.

He deposited the now-thoroughly-used towel somewhere to the floor at his side, threaded an arm beneath Damissan’s waist, and gave him an encouraging tug to shift nearer and fit himself close. His palm shaped down the curve of the younger man’s spine, and Xil tipped his head to peer back at him. “Is it ‘weird’ for you?” He questioned, though didn’t try to specify beyond that.

A lot of their current situation was strange, yes, and it hadn’t been anything Xilarn would have expected of the journey. He doubted Damissan expected it, either. “You’ve never had a boyfriend, hm? So is that, this, ‘weird’ to you?”

It was something he noticed due to sheer proximity and contact, the quiet rigidity that would occasionally and briefly skirt through Damis’ frame. He’d caught it before, when they were tangled together so closely and his attention was nowhere except on everything about the younger man, and again just now. Xilarn’s lashes lowered, and he smoothed his palm over Damis’ skin. Maybe it wasn’t unusual, and Xil hadn’t taken note of it before because they hadn’t been so intimately attached, but he didn’t think so. ‘Uncertain’ wasn’t something he attributed to the other man, and it wasn’t something Xilarn wanted to be the one to bring out in him.

“Have you not?” Xil questioned as he thumbed over Damissan’s hip. Not that Damis should have been bedding people twice his age, and certainly not that Xilarn had expected him to have, but ‘a year or two older’ wasn’t quite as broad a window as Xil had imagined, because against his better judgement, he had imagined, off of only the fractions of information he’d gotten from Damis’ parents, and the likely-skewed (and often promptly ignored) fragments from Damissan himself.

Maybe he’d imagined worse than anything that had happened in actuality, but it had often sounded like, whenever Damis spoke of his ‘experience’ that anyone with a persuasive enough tongue or attractive enough body could and did have him, in whatever way was most convenient or entertaining at the time. Xilarn had found himself offended over that as much as anything else when it came to mind. “No,” he agreed, “I’m not ‘very old,’ thank you.” Xilarn huffed derisively and gave a warning pinch to the back of Damis’ thigh. “And it wouldn’t be so strange, if things were even a bit different.”

“It’s that you could have known him—Akiyal. You could have been just like him. Sometimes I can even see similarities, though it’s probably just general growing up, things most kids go through… Rebellious, headstrong, selfish, and always wanting more. It was worse when I didn’t know anything about you. You were both just ‘kids,’ and I initially thought I should try and treat you like I would treat him.”

He hesitated a beat as he considered whether or not it was worth saying, then shrugged and added. “It didn’t work out like that, though. You’re smarter than my boy, and… probably better looking. You listen well and have never been expressly against me, not running from me. But when I think about you, and I think about him, that’s what makes it strange for me. But other than that, I suppose I’m concerned that it will be strange for anyone else, as well.” He wasn’t one to look for reasons for strangers to dislike him, even if he already detested most of them. And it felt like this was just peculiar enough, even to someone who wouldn’t know more than a surface glance, to be suspicious.

He didn’t want to be in the same category as those ‘stranger and less pleasant experiences.’ They were both essentially in uncharted territory, and that meant pushing boundaries and edging at his comfort zone. Xilarn inhaled. “Is that why you’ve been acting so... hesitant?” He paused to meet Damis’ gaze. “You think I’m going to be disappointed in you?”

Unless they’re expressing envy. Xilarn tipped his head, gaze narrowing into a squint as he scrutinized the younger man. What a completely absurd thing to say and presumptuous to think strangers would be envious of what they had between them. While he was sure Damis knew a handful of people who were jealous of him in all his finery in Oba, this was not that. Although, maybe it was presumptuous on Xilarn’s part to assume anyone would bother to care at all enough to be offended, if they weren’t already important people in their lives, anyway.

Akiyal likely wouldn’t take well to the news. Xilarn couldn’t say for sure, but he somehow doubted his son would appreciate Xil being attached to an Oban boy close to his age in any way, let alone anything of the intimate variety. That is… if Xilarn ever found him in the near future, or if Aki bothered to speak to him at all, or if the younger boy even still cared about anything his father did.

Not that he’d ever cared especially much to begin with, usually only when he thought it negatively affected him. He took such things about as poorly as any spoiled six-year-old. Akiyal was probably more immature than Damis had been in years, and it couldn’t be anyone’s fault but Xilarn’s own.

He grunted stiffly and rubbed tiny, tight circles into the skin over Damis’ hip.

Damis’ next words, while not especially surprising in themselves— since Xilarn had been disappointed in him before, and it was no stretch to imagine anyone else had been, either— were still as wildly unpleasant from Damissan’s pretty lips as could possibly be conceived. It had always been unpleasant to see or hear him behaving more mutedly than what was the norm for him, even before today. Xilarn reached, threading his arms about the younger man fully, and tugging him such that Damis had his head against Xilarn’s shoulder.

“Sometimes I’m amazed at how full of nonsense you are,” Xilarn murmured as he touched a kissed to Damissan’s forehead. “Of course you’ve been disappointing before. You’re young and at an age where you should be making mistakes and learning from them. You’re not perfect, and it is occasionally dissatisfying when you don’t behave how I’d hoped you would.” That was at least a quarter of the part of being a parent. You’re kid did dumb things that you’d really hoped better for. Not that Damissan was his son, but that was the mindset he’d hoped to be in originally.

He soothed a palm down Damis’ back and up to massage his neck. “If I expect to be disappointed, it’s because you have many, many mistakes left to make in your lifetime, and I have many left to make in mine. Together, we’re bound to have some struggles, especially when I didn’t… give you the best start. If I’m anxious, it’s because I don’t want those mistakes to intimately involve me.”

“But you’re wrong in that I didn’t, or don’t, expect much of you. I expect we’ll run into difficulties. I expect there will be numerous opportunities for us to be disappointed in each other, and I don’t know exactly how this adventure or any other will end. But you’re passionate, hardworking, conceited enough that I don’t think you’d settle for going nowhere. You’ve already done more and gone farther than I or anyone else thought to give you credit for. I don’t know what to expect of you, but it isn’t ‘not much.’ I’m not so foolish as to underestimate the same person twice.”

He craned his neck to brush his lips against the younger boy’s and to meet his gaze. “While I do appreciate that you care enough to be concerned, you should know that you can do ‘disappointing’ things, and it won’t mean that I’ll decide to be done with you.” But Damis had as much reason to be skeptical of that as Xilarn had to be skeptical of Damis’ sincerity. He hadn’t done anything to prove that he could be more than just irritated at him. They’d spent almost the entirety of their voyage in some variety of terse state, with Xilarn adamantly refusing to acknowledge what he did like about Damis.

“Good. I don’t want to disappoint you, either. You can and should tell me if I do, and I will try and correct myself in the future. That is what I expect from you going forward, and I will do the same.”

That was better, Xilarn decided as Damis managed to shoot him a grin before closing his eyes.

And really, that was a decent term for much of the day: better. Maybe the morning had started rocky, but then all of the voyage up until now hadn’t been especially heartwarming. It had been rough, and fraught with all manner of aggravations and not-always-reasonable twists of his mood. He’d been angry, spiteful, unfairly biased against a boy that hadn’t done anything to him. That probably wasn’t going to all change in a day. Xil was sure he likely could and still would find reason to be offended at Damis’ antics. But maybe it wouldn’t so consistently feel like a personal slight, like everything the younger man did was specifically to get a rise out of him.

In the meantime, this was still an improvement. His life’s problems weren’t solved, and there were still a handful of matters that didn’t involve Damis that Xilarn ought to be giving his attention to. But at least for the night, those didn’t matter. They weren’t issues that could be solved during one evening. Besides, Xil felt more at ease now than he had in close to the full span of a decade, and that was worth one good night’s sleep over.

One good, comfortable, seamless night, where they didn’t need to rise too early or too quickly and didn’t need to move like they had somewhere to be.

Damissan seemed to agree. With the younger man drifting off at his side, Xil shifted his weight to settle more comfortably for sleep, himself. He hadn’t shared a bed with anyone the full night through in longer than he cared to admit, but it didn’t feel as odd as he might expect. In fact, more than anything else, it felt like a return to normalcy and peace. It was an absurd though, Xil knew, but he decided not to spend time questioning it for the moment, and instead just enjoy it.

With a soft sigh of an exhale, he closed his eyes, and drifted off with Damis at his side.

It had been a while since they’d slept in a bed, and longer still since Xilarn had slept in the same one as anyone else for the length of a full night. Despite that, it wasn’t entirely strange, or at least not so much as he imagined it would be. His most recent forays into that endeavor had been with ‘friend-of-a-friend’ types, people he wouldn’t have known at all if not for Janella, and then still not anyone he was especially familiar or comfortable with. But he hadn’t had much else going for him, and the Wind woman insisted it was ‘good for him’ (he hated the saying now, but he’d been piles less enthused by it then, when nothing felt like it deserved to be called ‘good for him’).

Even after an evening of getting to know each other and a night of becoming familiar with another body, most of those he’d spent half-awake, fidgeting, trying not to touch persons who were still essentially strangers, and wondering if his partner was as concerned as he was about contact. If he’d thought he still wouldn’t be comfortable being this close to anyone else while he slept, by the time the murky, dim light of a cloudy morning showed through the window, those fears were mostly dashed.

Damissan was next to him, tucked against his side, warm, relaxed, and- Well, maybe it wasn’t entirely Damis’ decision to be as such. Xil rubbed his palm up his captive’s back, and became aware fairly immediately that he’d likely been that way for some time, if muscle stiffness was anything to go by.

It was raining, they weren’t going anywhere today, and there was no reason to wake as early as they had been.

Except there was. He’d been thinking on it since the younger man had asked him specifically the day prior. ’Do you need to handle anything?’ Xilarn hadn’t known exactly what he would do at that point, except that he should do something, somehow. Sometime in the night, while his body slept and thoughts wandered, he’d apparently decided that, despite assuring him otherwise, he was going to leave Damissan. Not permanently, and for only as short a time as could possibly be managed, but he still didn’t know how the younger man would take it.

But it was morning, and he needed to rise. He didn’t think he’d be robbing Damis of anything, if he roused him now and at least made him aware of what they needed to do.

Although, if things went exceptionally poorly and something especially unfortunate happened to either of them while he was away, this could potentially be his first and last opportunity to have Damis sleeping at his side. Xilarn hummed thoughtfully as he ran his palm from Damis’ back, over his midsection, and up his chest to his shoulder and lightly against his throat. He certainly hadn’t made anything easy. “Damissan,” he murmured softly, leaning to touch his lips to the other man’s cheek as he spoke. “It’s time for us to get up.”

Xilarn had the sneaking suspicion that Damissan hadn’t been entirely asleep, given all the twisting about he was up to at this hour. Maybe he did as much every morning, and Xil had just never been close enough to notice it, or maybe he was just especially excited for the change in circumstance. Either way, when the younger man flopped over him, Xilarn let out a puff of a grunt and craned his head around to cast a narrowed gaze in Damis’ direction. “I don’t suppose you need to leave bed at all, unless there’s something of import that you need to tend to...”

Which he doubted. Still, Xilarn relaxed when Damis eased back and settled in more comfortably for the moment, since he supposed he wasn’t about to ‘leave bed immediately.’ It was raining, and that felt like it ought to be a deterrent from moving very far or very much, anyway.

He did want to rise soon, though. The sooner he made sure Damis was situated here, the sooner he could depart, the sooner he could see that his son was safe, and the sooner he could return. Maybe ‘one day’ didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but it was one less day he would spend feeling antsy and not knowing. Hopefully. Any number of things could’ve happened in the time between when he’d last seen Akiyal and now, and it distinctly felt like all of them were more likely to be negative than positive…

Particularly when none of the people Aki had went with felt inclined to keep him informed. Messages were a bit of a hassle, and maybe Janella hadn’t seen fit to continue writing him once they’d made it back home, but there’d never even been anything to assure him that their journey had ended. They’d just stopped rather abruptly. Janella could be carefree and nonchalant, but she wasn’t a fool or cruel enough to keep him in suspense where his son was concerned.

They could all be dead.

Xilarn took a breath. But they probably weren’t. Janella was experienced with the trip, familiar with Aki, and well-suited to handle any trouble he might cause. Besides, it was in their blood to travel, explore, and never settle. They were surely safe and fine. Surely. But it wouldn’t hurt to check.

He tipped forward to touch his lips to Damissan’s nose. “Anything that needs doing ‘now’ doesn’t care about the time or weather, and it’s hardly a need for now, if you put it off.” He shut his eyes and hesitated a moment before blinking them open and continuing. “I think I need to leave for a few days. Yera is large enough that you should be able to keep yourself entertained and occupied without my presence, and I trust you to not do anything too stupid while unsupervised.”

“I’d like to go home for a just a bit, to make sure everything's in order there. It’ll be quick enough if I take Gadot on my own, and it shouldn’t be more than a week.”