What’s this?
Lewis/Clark slash?
*cracks knuckles* Yeah it’s been awhile, I know, but here’s a little something, continuing with “A Kiss with a Fist” as I work my way through the Florence + the Machine catalog (because, as Alicia and I have discussed in depth, every Florence song can be about either Lewis or Lewis/Clark. Every. Song.)
Anyway, I’m a bit worried that I’ve lost my touch. (What touch, Lynn? Oh, you know, the one that I never had.) But I needed to write. It’s been too long.
I give the usual warnings for this, primarly historical slash wtf, but also, although this is by no means graphic, it does get a little BDSM there for a minute. Kinky Meriwether Lewis. Also this sucks, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
My black eye casts no shadow
Your red eye sees no pain
Your slaps don’t stick
Your kicks don’t hit
So we remain the same
-
The effect of the journey on Meriwether Lewis was evident almost as soon as he settled in St. Louis—a perpetual restlessness, a melancholy that flirted with madness, a proclivity to self-medicate with pills and whiskey to ease the pain of civilization.
But it wasn’t so plain in William Clark.
He made his way through the daylight hours well and good, through the twilight and the early hours of night.
But it seemed inevitable that the dreams would start.
What were they, these dreams? He’d never dreamt like this before the Expedition. Were they the way that the wilderness, the vast lonely plains, the impossible Rocky Mountains had poisoned his mind? Was it some infection of bear, of wolf, of the native people that had taken root in him? Was it the beautiful ocean still haunting him from the continent away?
Was it Meriwether Lewis somehow, the love that it seemed Clark had lost despite the man himself sleeping in the room across a narrow passageway?
Clark could never be sure. All he knew was that he had never had dreams like these before.
Clark slept.
Clark dreamt.
First was the glare of orange, but it manifested itself into flame.
His bed.
In it, his wife, Julia Hancock Clark, lovely, sleeping peacefully as the flames ate into the feathers of the mattress around her and tore through the sheets. She only awoke when the fire licked at her body, but then she awoke screaming—Clark couldn’t hear the sound, but he knew she was screaming in horror, in agony—yet somehow unable to move from the bed, trapped there, prisoner. And in the corner stood Meriwether Lewis, not moving to help her, to save the tortured, dying woman, merely watching. His face blank, but his eyes flashing like stars in the glow of the fire; his arms crossed tightly across his chest. Clark started to move toward him, a silent yell of desperation and rage on his lips—
And Clark woke with a start.
Beside him, his wife slept peacefully, and more important, soundly.
Careful not to wake her, Clark slid out of bed, out of the bedroom, lighting the stub of a candle to make his way across the hall, opening the door to Meriwether Lewis’s room softly.
The man’s bed had been slept in, but was empty. Perplexing—Clark, anxious, angry, the thoughts of his wife waking and finding him in this room with this man leaving him shaking (or was that still the dream?), but he called out to him softly. Surely the man was somewhere in this room.
“Meriwether?”
A muffled groan from the floor on the other side of the bed, and there was Meriwether Lewis, wrapped in a buffalo robe and sleeping restlessly on the floor. Clark walked to him, nudged Lewis’s leg with his foot, kneeled beside Lewis and shook him into wakefulness.
“Meriwether.”
A soft movement of eyelashes, the slightest parting of lips. Lewis opened his eyes and looked at Clark, half in a dream of his own. “Billy.”
His eyes flashed like stars in the candlelight.
“Listen, Meriwether, I need to talk to you.”
Clark could see the cruel moment that Lewis woke to his reality—his face draining at Clark’s solemnity, as he remembered: William Clark had a wife. But still, Lewis tried for a temptation, pushing off the furs and rolling his hips subtly as he repositioned himself. A small move that once could (still did) inspire a mad desire in Clark, but tonight he could block against it.
“I … I’ve had a dream.”
A wife; always it would grate at him, and so Lewis would be biting, cruel as his waking to his lover (his former lover). “And so you felt compelled to wake me at—God, what time is it, even?—to inform me of this fact? Congratulations, Billy. You have had a dream.”
“No, listen, Meriwether, this is important—“
“Who are you now, pray tell? Joseph, with a brigadier general’s coat for your robe of many colors? Do your dreams predict the future, sir? Will your family raise you up and bow before you? Your wife, will she worship you?” Lewis’s soft voice, growing huskier with clear intention: “Will I fall to my knees before you, Billy?”
A moment of silence as they looked at each other, then Clark took a breath and spoke on. “I’ve had a dream. And in this dream, fire was set to my bed, and my wife burned on it, and you watched all the while without trying to save her, without moving, even.”
Lewis propped himself up on his elbows and stared into the flame of the sputtering in silence.
“Say something, Meriwether.”
“What do you want me to say, Billy? It was a dream.”
“Yes, but, I-I’m not sure. I suppose I want some kind of reassurance, some kind of promise that something like this could never happen.”
“Reassurance? A promise?” A disbelieving scoff. “What, that I won’t set fire to your wife? Very well, then. I swear I won’t set fire to your wife.”
To be able to snap back was a pleasure. “For God’s sake, you’re not taking this seriously!”
“Of course I’m not taking this seriously, it was a fucking dream.”
“It bothered me. Is that so difficult to understand?”
“Why should it? You are well aware that I don’t care much for your child-bride.”
“Go to hell.“ Unexpected to even him, Clark was hissing under his voice, suddenly furious, hands on Lewis’s shoulders and shoving him back to the floor, one hand slipping lightly to his throat.
The lean man’s body responded, hips lifting off the floor, eyes closing as he pressed his throat into Clark’s hand with something approaching tenderness. Hushed words escaped Lewis’s lips like a sudden onset of rain, like a desperate prayer. “Oh God, yes, treat me rough, what will you do to me, Captain Clark?”
Clark recoiled like he had been slapped.
“No, don’t stop.”
“Meriwether—“
“You could take me, right here, right now, your precious Julia would never know.”
“Please, stop this.”
“Why? You know that you want this, too. It’s been too long, hasn’t it, Billy?”
“I’m not joking.”
“Neither am I.” His hand was on Clark’s chest, trailing down his softening abs, his stomach, lower— Clark pushed his hand away.
“I said, stop it.”
“Be honest with me, Will,” his wife’s nickname for him, said with poison, “why did you come here tonight? What do you expect from me?”
“Reassurance.”
“You really woke me up in the middle of the fucking night for reassurance that I won’t set your wife on fire?”
“Yes. No. I’m not sure.”
Lewis watched him, the man trying to figure himself out.
“I was … worried. I was angry with you, for nothing that you’ve yet done wrong.”
“It was a dream, Billy.”
“It felt real.”
“You wanted comfort.”
“ … perhaps.”
“Well, I have none to offer you.” Lewis pulled the robe back over his body and lay on his side, preparing to go back to sleep. “But I have one last thing to say. I just want you to think about this, Billy Clark—you had a bad dream. You woke from it, anxious, worried, angry; you sought comfort. But did you wake your wife, the one sleeping next to you, the one your dream was about, the woman? No. You got out of bed, you came through the cold to find me. Why do you think that is?”
At the door Clark blew out the candle.