Ford forced a small chuckle, but without any sound. It was nice of Ty to say, but the first part of his lover's response nagged at him and made it impossible to really appreciate the second. It was so bleak, so hopeless... and Ford didn't want to accept it. There were people who weren't happy, people who maybe would never be happy, but he still wanted to believe it was possible. Otherwise what was the point? If nothing he was doing now would lead to Grace or Clementine living happy lives, if Verity's life was ruined and she would never be happy either, then why was he doing any of it?

"We were happy," he insisted gently, running the backs of his knuckles down Tycho's bare chest. "I was happy with you."

---

  

---

Set by Lady!

"Blissfully, sinfully happy," Tycho could not help but agree. He sighed heavily as he caressed Fords shoulders. "Which means the ache and grief are equal in its intensity." And he was a poet. He felt everything a lot more keenly, his soul both somehow flourishing and dying from the torment he was being put through in the most contradictory of ways. At least he was not going to be trapped into a marriage like Ford was. Hell, he was never going to marry. People put too much stock in the institution.

"Kissed as we have kissed, but never parted as we two are fated now to part," he recited from Keats instead. "Yet I am not sorry that I loved you -ah! what else had I a boy to do?" He was omitting lines of the poem and only reciting the relevant ones of the moment. "

Ah! what else had I to do but love you? God's own mother was less dear to me,
and less dear the Cytheraean rising like an argent lily from the sea."

  

---

Ford sighed in contentment. Tycho quoting poetry to him could never fail to please him, whether it was his own work or someone else's. It made his chest feel full to think that he reminded anyone of poetry, even if it was of a melancholy sort like this.

"Like Tennyson, too," he agreed. "Better to have loved and lost — though that was just about a friend." A friend who had died; Ford remembered having read it in the wake of his first separation from Macnair and feeling the lines resonate with his own current heartbreak, and he remembered comparing it with what he knew of Cash's background and feeling guilty that he was putting such soulful lines on such a trite situation as his own. This didn't feel trite, though — he and Tycho had been very seriously involved, and though neither one of them was dying in two weeks the separation was still, in some senses, forever. It was unlikely Ford would ever stop being married, unless he happened to outlive her; it was even more unlikely that Tycho would still be waiting around for him in that case.

"Do you think we could still be friends?" he asked, with a frown. "Not right away, but someday?"

---

  

---

Set by Lady!

"Mmm," Ty hummed in agreement when Ford mentioned Tennyson. He agreed with the sentiment. He always had lived by the philosophy that it was best to act now, regret later. Not that he always impulsively did things - with Ford, for example. He had been careful to not do anything that would ruin their friendship if Ford turned out to not reciprocate. Which happily, he had.

Ty shrugged. "Society knows us to be quite close friends," he mused aloud without actually answering the question. "I can't answer that right now because I don't know." Right now the answer felt like a 'no'. This was a realm he had no experience in since he had never loved anyone the way he loved Ford before.

  

---

Ford had been expecting that answer, and he didn't know that he could have given a different one if he had been in Tycho's shoes — but it made him suddenly, desperately lonely all the same. It was one thing to lose this, what they were doing now lying in each other's arms after having been intimate. It was another thing, a much deeper thing, to lose Tycho as a friend forever. They had been friends longer, friends first — and even after they'd become more than friends this had always been so much more than sex.

Maybe it wasn't better to have loved and lost, Ford thought as his chin trembled. If he had never kissed Tycho, if they had never said I love you, then would he have been able to keep him, at least in some capacity, after he married? Or maybe it wouldn't have been any different after all — it wasn't as though they had only started loving each other because they had kissed. They'd loved each other for what felt like forever. It was difficult to imagine any version of the future where they could interact as friends, because there would always be the hurt of everything they didn't have — but it was just as difficult to contemplate losing even that.

"Kiss me," Ford pleaded, moving to straddle Tycho because he needed the distraction. If they kept talking about it, if Ford kept thinking about it, he was certainly going to cry.

---

  

---

Set by Lady!