3 AM (Matthias)

[Zephyr]

He’d spent the previous night at Nathan’s, had went to work straight from the other werewolf’s apartment and had been working for twenty four hours straight. Silas has always been a little more dedicated to his job than your average doctor. Not that other doctors aren’t dedicated, just…Silas has spent his entire career actively trying to avoid and free time he has been offered. The only time Silas really takes off work is when they force him to, and even then it might as well be kicking and screaming. He’s only been taking time off work recently to spend time with Nate and with Matthias.

Good think he literally has months of vacation time built up.

Vacation time is really the last thing he’s thinking about as he finishes up his shift. He still hasn’t put himself back on surgeries, but there’s plenty of goddamn paperwork to do that’d built up since he’d been gone. He’d been looking over so many figures and calculations that by the end of the day his eyes are burning and he kind of just wants to slam his head into his desk repeatedly. Reading isn’t fun. He drops his head to the desk with an audible thump. To his credit, he doesn’t actually slam his head down and he doesn’t do this repeatedly. He just sits there when Evelyn pokes her head in his office.

“Silas. What the hell?” Her voice is entirely too chipper for his overworked brain and he just lets out a growl, not bothering to lift his head. Apparently, he’s too overworked to actually form coherent words…thus the snarl. Of course, Even has never been and will likely never be dissuaded by Silas’ foul moods. He can actually feel the blonde’s all too cheerful grin as she approaches him. She pokes him in the back of the head and giggles a little when she feels him tense up under her finger. “Stay there any longer and you might fuse yourself to the desk.” She pauses for a second, seemingly letting the words sink in before she removes her finger and leans over the desk, balancing herself on her elbows and resting her chin in her hands. “On second thought, I kinda want to see that. How long do you think it’ll take? I have a shitload of work and…”

Silas has been dutifully trying to ignore the nurse for several seconds until her voice just grates on his nerves and he growls again. “What. Do you want, Eve?” Not that he will ever put it past her to come in here for the sole purpose of bothering him.

She’s silent for a second, until Silas thinks she might have left and lift his head. She’s still there, watching him with brown eyes. Her cheerful grin is gone and she stands, rolling her shoulders and shrugging vaguely at him. “Go home. Jesus. You’ve been here all day. The goddamn hospital can function without you, you know.” Silas glares at her, but she just rolls her eyes and smiles at him. “Don’t make me call Nate. I’ll have him come pick your fool ass up.” His glower is seriously vicious.

“You don’t even have his number!” He hisses at her.

Her grin is vaguely unsettling. “Wanna test that out? You know, you aren’t very careful with your cell phone.” She lifts her eyebrows and Silas sighs heavily, slamming his head against the desk again for emphasis.

“I hate you. So much.” The growl is mumbled against the wood of his desk.

“So I’ve heard.” She says brightly, walking away. “Just. Go home. Everything’ll be okay.” Then she’s gone and Silas takes a couple minutes to compose himself before he gets his stuff together and leaves.

The apartment is dark when Silas gets home, and a little cold. Matthias isn’t around…which Silas have expects since he’d been gone for a couple days. Sighing lightly, he drops his briefcase, hangs up his coat, makes a beeline for the bedroom and just face plants straight onto the bed without another thought. It’s been a long couple of days, and he’s just too exhausted to sleep, let alone care about anything at the moment.

So he doesn’t.

[Matthias Walker]

Mattie may be many things, but a house thief is not one of them.

He spends half a night at Silas’s apartment without him and then the restlessness settles in his bones and fingertips until he cannot stay put any longer. It is neither concern for the other man nor any real desire to find him that drives Matthias back into the streets and then to the bars: It is the simple, unyielding necessity of motion, of perpetually doing rather than being still, sedentary, waiting. Once he makes it to the bar, it ceases to matter where Silas is, or where, in fact, he is; the night shifts into the games of anonymity and easy smiles that Mattie is accustomed to and he does not think of Silas’s apartment, Silas’s bed, or Silas.

Except that he does.

His pride does not allow him to return to Silas’s apartment the next day when he passes and the other man’s car is still not there.

Instead Matthias goes to the library, wonders if this is going to be how it is, if they are always going to operate on different timelines. The temptation of going to the hospital lingers in the back of his mind briefly, is dismissed by fierce devotion to the bookshelves and the smell of paper and book glue; he is not going to be clingy. Whether Silas is with Nate or at the hospital or with someone else entirely (Mattie is not, after all, privy to the man’s friendships and family) is none of his business, and in any case the library is not as mercurial as Silas.

For the night there is a new bar and a girl with green eyes and mischief in the curve of her cherry-flavored smile. Morning finds Matthias wandering the streets of Boston; it is a bright day, cool without the chill of the wind, and he is, for once, looking for the sake of looking. Boston is, after all, more than a city of dark alleys and monsters in the shadows, and he has not allowed himself to admire for years: Easier to see cities and sprawling country-sides alike as the homes of supernatural instead of places worth living and loving.

It is nearing a quarter past seven in the morning when he finds himself back in front of Silas’s apartment. The sight of his car triggers recognition blooming in the back of his mind, surprise flickering in blue eyes before Mattie yields to the magnetism of his own curiosity and lets himself in.

He finds Silas sprawled out, still clothed, on the bed, facedown.

“Silas?” Softly. Matthias pads around the bed to kneel at Silas’s head, reaches up to card his fingers through the man’s hair. The touch is careful, more paternally concerned than romantic or even platonic, because, “Hey, man, you look like really disgruntled roadkill or death took a dump on your favorite dog—like, I have so many metaphors. Death warmed over is such a cliché, you know? C’mon, what the hell, most people don’t go into comas voluntarily. Puppy,” Mattie’s mouth quirks up at the corners, his voice cajoling, “Speak. You want sleep or you want coffee?”

[Zephyr]

He hears Matthias come in, but he can’t give a fuck to lift his head. Exhaustion drags him down, and he wiggles uselessly towards the head of the bed, not even starting when he feels the kid’s hands in his hair. It’s a strange touch, affectionate but not romantic. This is something different than what he’s been getting from Matthias, and he wants to look up to see what his expression is at the moment, but he’s so goddamn tired that he can barely move. He growls in response to the kid’s playful words, but it isn’t borne out of any real disapproval.

Silas can almost hear the shit eating grin on his face and he barks something out into the bed that’s supposed to be ‘both’, but it isn’t really recognizable for the way the bed muffles the words. Silas sighs heavily, realizing that this is the first time he’s seen Matthias in a couple days, and if he hadn’t been in the apartment when he’d come in at seven in the morning, that he probably hasn’t been there all night. And that probably means he wasn’t there the previous night, either. Suddenly, feeling like a massive ass, Silas rolls over to look up at Matthias from his place on the bed.

“Sorry.” He growls, the words soft and tired. “This probably isn’t what you expected when I asked you to stay.” Silas doesn’t normally apologize for shit, but at the moment, an apology is probably owed, for Silas flaking out on him and going to Nate’s and then straight to work from the other werewolf’s house. He hadn’t thought of how frequently he spends the night at Nathan’s house when he asked Matthias to stay. He was just preoccupied at the moment with trying to get the man to stay and not leave, because Silas is a selfish asshole who can’t seem to let anyone go, even if he doesn’t want any more out of him than a close friendship.

He feels like he’s leading Matthias along sometimes, and it absolutely guts him. It guts him that he can’t give the kid what he wants…and that his loyalty to Nathan is so complete that he feels bad about letting Matthias in his bed at night…but he just likes him, in a way he’s never liked anyone except the other werewolf, and that doesn’t happen often. “So, where’ve you been?” He asks without actually bothering to rise from his position under Matthias. He was just too tired to care. “ I’ve been at work for twenty four straight hours, so if anything I say starts not making sense, just let me know.”

Silas is used to working terrible hours, so he’s mostly used to being tired as hell. This level of exhaustion isn’t anything new to Silas, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to crawl into bed and sleep for three or four straight years…it just means that it’s so much easier for him to shove the tired away in favor of actually getting shit done.

He’s still going to totally sleep the next day away.

[Matthias Walker]

His smile tugs a little wider at the incoherent grumbling going on; knowing Silas, Mattie suspects that it is very thorough and unnecessary bitching, and makes a humming noise that is just this side of condescendingly amused. Fingers smooth down the cowlicks in the older man’s hair absently for a moment, and then pull away. This is the most exhausted he has ever seen Silas, and all teasing aside, peeling Silas out of the tired remnants of his suit and getting him properly in the bed to sleep off—whatever—is probably the nicest thing he can do now. And he means to, except that Silas very abruptly rolls over and Matthias blinks, owlish in his confusion, opens his mouth to say something like, Wow, I didn’t realize you were capable of moving just now.

Silas beats him to it.

“Oh,” Mattie says, instead, blankly, and frowns, eyebrows furrowing a little. The apology is unexpected and unasked for, and he doesn’t know what to do with it, sits there a moment turning it over in his mind. Is it—no, it is not what he expected, but then again, “I wasn’t really expecting anything,” he offers, raising an eyebrow at Silas and sitting back on his heels to tilt his head at Silas. “Nobody’s asked me to stay before, kinda need prior knowledge to start making stupid assumptions, and I hear you aren’t supposed to make those anyway…”

It is only slightly a lie. He had expected to make reparations and payments the same way he always has, but Silas has made no overt requests and Mattie is fine with it, suspects that it has a great deal to do with Nate. Still, the lack of expectations is painfully relieving—not because he wouldn’t go with it but because it is the distinction between Silas’s apartment and every other place he has stayed for five years, every other bed he has slept in and every other person he has slept beside.

Still. Work. It’s a viable, ready excuse: Silas has to work; Matthias has the benefit of choosing his own hours for the most part but that is simply the price he pays for everything else. He snorts softly, mouth crooking up in a faintly lopsided smile at the doctor, shrugs. “Nowhere. Everywhere. I don’t really remember—just around, I guess. Just trying to get to know Boston, if I’m gonna stick around I figure I should know where everything is, you know? So far I’ve got the library, the hospital, your apartment, and Nate’s memorized, and that is just about it.” (It’s easier not to mention the man he stayed with the first night and the girl the second; their names and faces are forgotten already, in any case.)

Everything in Boston blurs together, overlaid with memories of a hundred other cities, just familiar enough and just close enough to New York City that he keeps half-expecting to turn a corner and run into the bar they celebrated his eighteenth birthday at, the coffeehouse he took Natalie to on their first date and every weekend after that. Thoughtlessly, Mattie meets Silas’s eyes and says, “You should give me a tour or something. Show me your happy city beside the sea, whose roads lead everywhere to all—when you aren’t tired, I mean, you should probably sleep now. Did you say you wanted coffee? I couldn’t understand you what with the sheets being practically in your mouth.”