Work Text:
Wasn't yours and you weren't mine
Though I've wished from time to time
We had found a common ground
Your voice was such a welcome sound
--Rogue Valley, The Wolves & the Ravens
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For someone fluent in eight languages, Sean is terrible with words.
He constantly has at least three dictionaries on him. He buys them in airports, usually, and reads them on flights, over and over again until they fall apart and he has to toss them. The more he reads the more he's convinced of the sheer inadequacy of language. His life is so full of experiences, sight and sound and touch, and finding the perfect word to describe any given moment is almost always impossible. (When it does happen, though, it's magical – he's still proud of "quintessence".)
So Sean has never even tried to name what he feels for Walter. A picture is worth a thousand words, or so the old cliche goes, and that's why he ended up hanging around outside the Time & Life building for three days until that perfect moment came. Sean knew the instant he clicked the shutter that this was it, the one photograph that would capture everything he felt – the admiration and respect, trust and love and dedication, and all those other words that somehow never quite seemed to be descriptive enough. He sent the negative directly to Walter because he felt that Walter deserved to see it first.
At the time Sean would never have dreamed that a few weeks later he'd be lying in a tent in the Himalayas watching Walter sleep beside him. The golden glow of sunrise illuminates the gray in Walter's hair, and Sean's fingers twitch with the urge to touch it. But he doesn't want to disturb him, so instead he just watches, memorizing the lines of Walter's sleeping face.
Eventually Walter shifts, makes a sleepy little mumble, and cracks his eyes open. Sean smiles at him and Walter smiles back.
"Were you taking pictures of me sleeping?" he asks.
"Nah," Sean says. "I wouldn't do that. Not without asking."
But since Walter is already awake, he gives in and reaches out for him, fingers in Walter's hair, thumb running along his stubbled cheek. Walter's eyes slide closed again; in the muted light it's hard to tell but Sean is pretty sure he's blushing.
Sean's disappointed about the loss of the negative, but it brought them to this moment, so maybe it was almost worth it. He just wishes he had some other way of explaining to Walter what it was they'd had all those years. Even things that should be constant, like measurements of time and distance, are so arbitrary; Sean knows how a single morning can seem to stretch for eternity, while sixteen years are somehow not enough.
"I have to get home," Walter murmurs, not opening his eyes.
"Yeah," Sean says, not sure if they're at an ending or a beginning. Maybe it's both.
"Hey, you know, it's funny," Walter says, rolling over so that Sean has to pull his hand back. His eyes are so bright and blue that Sean's breath hitches. "I still didn't get the negative, but somehow this time I don't really feel like I failed."
"Good," Sean says.
"You're still not gonna tell me what it was, are you."
"Nope."
"Ever?"
"Well." Sean grins. "Maybe some day."
"Will you keep in touch?" Walter sits up, but his gaze slides away from Sean's, as though he's suddenly gone shy.
"Sure I will," Sean says. "And, hey, I'll give you my addresses."
"Your what?"
"There are a few places I go back to every couple of months," Sean says with a shrug. "You need to get in touch with me, drop me a line. I'll even try to remember to check my email once in a while. If you ever want to find me again, it'll be a lot easier."
"Oh," Walter says. "Cool. Um, and if you're ever in New York, feel free to swing by."
"I will," Sean says. "That's a promise."
The end of Life doesn't have to be the end of him and Walter, after all. Sean's spent sixteen years knowing that wherever he went, Walter would be waiting in New York. A constant, he thinks to himself, a fixed point.
"Polaris," he says under his breath.
"Huh?"
"Nothing. Thinking out loud."
Later, when Sean has been sitting behind his camera for hours, he finds his mind drifting, lingering on the memory of Walter's goodbye kiss and on the current ache in his chest, sweet and heavy. He savors that feeling even as he shakes his feet to keep them from falling asleep, and even as the snow leopard reappears across the ridge. It regards him with a kind of mild disinterest and he clicks the shutter once, twice, and wipes his eyes with the heel of his hand.