When Solomon’s mother Maeve tells his father she’s with child, Django Little sighs noisily and says, “Can’t you just get rid of it, woman? I don’t want children.”

That winter when Solly is born, his pale, exhausted mother inspects his little toes and little fingers and murmurs, quietly disappointed, “I wanted a girl.”

As he grows, both of these stories are told to him. He’s spared no harsh details, and his feelings are decidedly not taken into account. These things he knows to be true: his name is Solomon, his father is a gypsy, and he was not a wanted or welcome child. He exists because his mother continued with her pregnancy out of spite, and because she’d been assured by a fortune teller that he was a girl.

They didn’t want him, but they’re stuck with him. So it goes.

Once he’s been caught roaming the streets alone and taken to a boys’ home, some weeks or months after the night he’ll never speak of, he tries to make nice with a boy who’s stuck sitting by him at their dismal mealtimes. The boy looks at him like he’s no better than one of the rats underfoot and says, “Fuck off, I don’t wanna be your friend.”

He’s beginning to see a pattern, here.

Older now and using another’s name, in a different time and place, he finds himself in love with a beautiful young man who he thinks returns his ardent passions. But after a month or so of seeing each other, when he suggests they should perhaps do something together outside the bedroom, the man gives him a pitying look and says, “It can’t be like that. I don’t want you that way.”

He becomes at least a dozen different people after that. He hasn’t truly been himself for a long time anyway, and taking on a new name, a new identity - in time it comes as natural to him as breathing. He’s a different man everywhere he goes. He studies the people he meets, he learns from them such that he can mold himself into damn near anything. He makes himself into what they want, or tries to.

But no new name or accent or faux life story will fix the hollow feeling in his gut. Nothing eases the creeping misery he feels up his spine when he’s a little too deep in his cups and can hear a voice whispering, poisonous, ‘nobody wants you.’ They don’t want the real him, the person he keeps carefully pushed down out of sight. They only want what they see. What he lets them see.

One fateful day he becomes John Silver, the cook. It’s harder than he thought it would be; turns out even an excellent mimic with a talent for reading people can’t quite fake his way into being a very good cook when he can’t so much as boil water for tea without incident.

Flint, he knows, sees this before anyone else does. There’s a look he gets when he can tell Silver is bullshitting him or anyone else, and just the thought of someone so skillfully seeing through his artifice is terrifying and exhilarating for Silver. He ramps it up, puts on a show, becomes the man they expect him to be (for better or worse). He consciously avoids letting his guard down around Flint, just in case. In case Flint glimpses him and doesn’t like what he sees.

But they grow closer, become something like friends, even. Silver no longer thinks of their relationship in terms of what he can use Flint for or what Flint might want him to be, and bit by bit he becomes more his true self in Flint’s presence. He fights it, at first. Doesn’t want to show Flint himself for fear that Flint will do what everyone else has done - take one look and say ‘no, I don’t want that.’

After Flint tells him about Thomas, though. After Flint reveals such a deep and personal part of himself apparently without fear of what Silver will think, he realizes he doesn’t have it in him to keep hiding. Flint has been so vulnerable and open with Silver, he owes him at least a fraction of that vulnerability in return. He doesn’t know what will happen, and he’s pretty sure it will end in disaster because hasn’t it always, but he can’t not try. He stands at Flint’s door in the middle of the night and knocks, feeling his heart leap into his throat when Flint answers wearing only a long white shirt with ridiculous billowing sleeves.

“Silver?” Flint asks, surprised, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “What is it?”

“I’m so tired of feeling unwanted,” he says abruptly, leaning on the doorframe, unsteady. His eyes sting with tears or exhaustion or both. “I’m just so tired, Captain.” He’d meant to say something else first, to gradually lead up to this confession or declaration or whatever it is, but some small, real part of himself has spoken up before the artifice can smother it.

Too late now. The silence is deafening.

Then Flint opens his arms to him and he goes immediately, unquestioningly, falling into Flint’s embrace. “I want you,” he hears Flint whisper against his hair, and he presses closer, desperate to believe that’s true.

They go to bed together, Flint’s bed. As they fit their bodies together and begin learning each other’s whys and hows, something passes between them that makes Silver feel like he’s jumped from a height into the sea and is just waiting for the water to rush up and knock the wind out of him.

After, he lies on his side curled partway around Flint, resting his head on Flint’s broad chest and listening with one ear to the steady thump of his heart within. He’s sated but nervous, feeling like there must be bats in his belly. He wonders if this encounter will end like so many have before. Does Flint want him, or want him? It’s a subtle difference but it means everything.

“You trust me, don’t you?” Flint asks after some time has passed, and he’s idly petting Silver, running one hand fondly over his hair and down his neck to massage one shoulder. He digs his fingers in right on the edge of pain like Silver needs. How does he know?

“Yes,” Silver says, and nuzzles into Flint’s neck with a quiet sigh. “You want me, don’t you?” he asks, making himself sound more certain than he feels.

“Yes. Oh, yes,” Flint murmurs, tucking a sweaty strand of hair behind the delicate whorl of Silver’s ear, and there: the feeling of being desperately unwanted, that dark cloud that’s been following him since before he was even brought unwillingly into the world, begins to dissipate.