"Here, I found something for you..." James is smiling shyly, holding something behind his back.

"You found something for me? What sort of a something?" Blackwater puts aside the harness he was mending, stretching.

"A keep-the-sun-off sort of something..."

The sadness was as bone-deep as ever, the images before him swimming under the influence of alchol and tears. Hardly the machoest of reactions, to be certain, but then he'd just seen.... What? What had he seen? It was all mixed up.

Fire. Sun. Embers and sparks and the match-flare of sweet heat along his spine. Ice and fear and a before-unknown rage, free from any other emotions.

But... Why?

He squeezes his eyes shut, swiping at the tickling trickle with a sleeve. He wasn't going to stay any longer than he had to. Couldn't stay. The girls... He'd had to tell the girls....

Had to tell them about... Whatever it was that had happened.

Beej hated waking up from these recent dreams. They always left him feeling unsettled, faintly unfaithful to his present, future and only (well, since whenever it was they'd discovered one another) love, and with a dull ache in the vicinity of his xiphoid process.

Speaking of Neets, -he- was still sleeping the sleep of the justly deserving of sweet dreams, one slender arm draped over his chest.

Neets... He turned carefully so as not to dislodge the arm and pressed closer, nuzzling at the nape of his neck with a soft sigh. Beej was still unable to remember the details surrounding James' apparent death, nor the circumstances regarding 'Timothy' or 'Aeron'. All he knew was what he'd gleaned from various scraps of writing in his many notebooks- logs kept of his travels, deals and contacts from the last six or seven years of his life, a majority of the passages concerning the three men seeming to be complete fiction.

Well, except for the fact that he'd begun -dreaming- about James.

If, indeed that's who the good-natured, shyly adoring, out-of-focus young man was.