Archive of Our Own ^beta

The world towered on top of Oyster Bay. Built and built, ramparts and portcullises and crenels, tall and wide and stone and impregnable as foretold by Bay mothers and fathers. Don’t dream so high, they advised. The teachers too, looked at a bespectacled ten-year-old on Career Day and classified his ambitions as gibberish. Pick another dream, the teachers barked, and sit down.

Their children listened.

Reed is the only one Ben’s ever known to not.

He waves past the ramparts and men on the crenels, walks through the portcullis and into the world they built from afar. A hundred floors up and in the sky and higher than ever dreamed, Ben whispers, “Reed, look at this place.”

Look at it glisten and glow and move as fast as Reed’s brain. Look at its loud and its flare. Look at it screaming at the sky because only space is big enough. Look at it starve for more.

“You belong here,” Ben affirms, nods to himself, yes, yes. “Been here two minutes and I already know that.”

“I’m just going to school here. It’s where I’ll be working,” Reed clarifies, fiddling with the Swiss Army knife, and Ben wishes he weren’t so dismissive. Wishes he’d look at it and see it too and realize he made it.

You got out, you’re free, he wants to shout. Wants to throttle Reed by the shoulders and jump and rejoice and rub off on him some of the joy that sets like fool’s gold in Ben’s chest. He shakes his head, reaches for Reed’s hand and twines their fingers and it’s the least he can do, the last tether before someone cuts it. “It looks like you’re home, buddy.”

Is that why he feels off?

(Off: like he’s dropped Reed at the airport without seeing a roundtrip ticket in his hand. Off: like the stone of him, that permanent place for Reed to collapse, is being chiseled away until he’s gone back on his right side of the wall and renamed nothing.)

Is that why his stomach is sour?

(Because Reed’s leaving.)

Ben doesn’t get out (didn’t ever expect to).

They talk every day.

Then every other day.

A few times a week.

Then voicemails.

Texts.

Pictures.

Reed’s not sleeping. Ben can hear it in his voice.

It’s ragged if barely there, rough from talking too much and not drinking water enough and not resting at all. He slurs a couple times, trails off in the middle of a sentence a few more than that, and sometimes vanishes entirely on the other end.

Ben is used to this, sure. He spent a summer’s worth of sleeping in Reed’s bed just so he would too, just so he’d do anything but breathe on his teleporter before ten every morning in preparation for, well, exactly this. Because, for all of Reed’s genius and resourcefulness and a wealth of things that will take him to infinity and beyond like the Buzz Lightyear action figure he kept on his desk, his common sense to mandate things like eating and sleeping is sorely lacking.

So Ben goes. No one tells him to. Asks him to. He just goes. Snatches up his wallet and shrugs on a puffer vest the first night he has off from work. Picks up two sandwiches from the nearest deli and hops four trains to skip up Baxter’s front steps ten minutes after eight on a Thursday night.

And that’s as far as he gets.

Through the door and past the metal detector, a planet of a guard clips a velvet fucking rope in front of him, barring his passage and grinning smugly while he does it. “You’re not on the permitted visitor’s list,” he says. “No one put your name down and no one’s here to escort you.”

A growl rumbles in Ben’s chest. “I’ve been here before,” he insists, the takeout bag crinkling loud as his knuckles curl against his leg.

“You’re not on the list.” This guard, this Jameson as identified by the badge, shrugs. He claps a clipboard on the desk, skittering an empty and crumpled peanut M&Ms bag over a stack of papers.

“Then you must be looking at the wrong list, because I was with Reed when he moved in. I watched him put my name down.”

“If I didn’t see it then it didn’t happen,” Jameson says and again with that grin. Ben’s fists tighten, imagines punching it off the man and making a run for it. He wonders how far he’d get before security hauled him up and out the door.

(Not that he’d try anyway. He wouldn’t embarrass Reed.)

Jameson swivels around, knees knocking on the desk and the chair squeaking and laboring forward. “I can call Mr. Richards and have him verify your identity.”

“This is supposed to be a surprise,” Ben explains. “And calling him down here would detonate the surprise part of it, don’t you think? Call the Storm guy instead. The bald one with glasses. Has a goatee. He’ll recognize me.”

“Dr. Franklin Storm, you mean?”

“Yeah, yeah, him. Call him. He’ll recognize me,” he reiterates and prays to God it’s true.

He knows his aptitude for science is about as impressive as Reed’s baseball swing, but Ben hopes a ten-minute meeting wherein he introduced himself and then didn’t say another word fused itself somewhere in Franklin Storm’s memory. He hopes it’s enough to fix his name to his face and conjure both to the front of the man’s mind. He hopes it’s enough to be ushered into Baxter’s secret sanctum.

It is.

The saint of a man signs Ben into the building, his fingers scribbling something nonsensical in the log, and as a shaking hand lands on his shoulder Ben wonders if sleep deprivation is merely a circumstance of working there or if someone siphoned the magic elixir and served only decaf coffee the rest of the day.

Ben follows Franklin down the granite staircase, jogs and skips to keep up with the man’s long stride down a hall and around a corner, shoulders brushing the walls encroaching narrower and narrower as they go. Two men in lab coats stop at a snack machine vacant of everything but two slots of peanuts, and Ben and Franklin squeeze by them

“You’re Reed’s friend, you said?” Franklin assesses.

“Kind of,” Ben answers honestly, then, “Yes, sir.”

“That’s good.” Franklin rounds another corner, slimmer and slimmer still. “Truthfully, I’m a little worried about Reed. He’s pushing himself so hard to finish the Quantum Gate. Too hard, the way I see it. I don’t think he’s sleeping much, either.”

“Yeah,” Ben sighs, “I picked up on that the last time we talked.”

Their shoes squelch on the tile floor as Franklin steers him around yet another corner, and it’s like getting right up close to the beehive his neighbor kept in his backyard. The sheer hum of hundreds of people thrums into Ben, vibrating the floor under his feet, reaching up his legs and into his chest and out his fingertips.

Franklin pushes on the doors and they swing, and Ben crashes headfirst into the hive. “Here we are,” he announces and falls away, backwards, grasping the rail of the lattice bridge carrying him to the shuttle.

It’s entrancing and mystifying and so much more ferocious than the prototype Ben helped mold for the past seven years. It’s the mother and the queen and the heart of the lab, and Ben can’t not stare at it. “Go down those stairs and turn right,” he hears Franklin instruct. “You should find Reed working at one of the computers.”

“Is it okay that I brought food?” Ben inquires, holds up the bag he brought and notices only then that the potato chips are crushed at the bottom.

Franklin nods, of course, of course, points back out the doors and says, “The soda machines are free so have anything you like.”

Hand tight to the chipped yellow railing, Ben trips down the stairs and sweeps right, out of the way of a beeping forklift, careful over the litter amassing on the floor. He learned to tread delicately from years in the blast zone of Reed’s latest experiments and even more in the lab itself, knows one cord snagged on one foot can cause a spark like the one that burned down Reed’s garage when they were fifteen.

It’d be a shame to burn down this lab, to be the accident who craters something so grand and silver and gleaming. People crawl like ants about the room, scribble on whiteboards and initiate scanners and trace their fingers over the shuttle’s blueprints tacked to a reversible cork board. They should’ve gone home by now but who haven’t yet glanced at the hour of their clock. They should be out having dinner with their families or at a bar celebrating an early start to the weekend they won’t allow themselves.

They should be freezing their asses off on the streets of New York, not sucked into sweaters in an office building.

But you can’t lure ants out of their hill, bees from their hives.

Reed sits exactly where Franklin suspected: among them, toes tucked under a chair and hunched over a keyboard, so still the screen reflects on his glasses.

He pushes the sleeves of his Caltech sweatshirt up to his elbows, and Ben smiles, tilts his head and doesn’t want to move from the spot. He’s always loved watching Reed in his element, as entranced and mystified by the sheer ability of him as what he crafted to fruition.

Ben sets the takeout bag on a nearby desk and creeps up on Reed’s left, sneaking on the tips of his toes. The blonde girl from the science fair – Sue, right? – quirks a brow at him, fingers stilled on an environment suit sleeve, and he pushes his fingers to his lips, begging her silence. A small smile breaks onto her face.

A foot from Reed, he bends over, planting his hands on his knees and –

“Nerd!” he blares, right in Reed’s ear, right at the whole room. Loud and long, and Homer Simpson would be so proud.

Reed flinches, jerks, glasses knocking askew, and Ben ducks out of the way of a flinging hand. He hears Sue snort behind him, hears its outburst and its smothering, but he doesn’t look anywhere but at Reed. Whose whole attention cylinders to him, surprise and adoration and joy pinging onto his face, and if Ben ever goes cold and limp it’ll be Reed’s smile that revives him.

“Hi,” Reed breathes and is up, wrapping his arms around Ben’s neck and rising into the fierce embrace that wobbles both on their feet. “What are you doing here?”

“Selfies weren’t good enough. I missed you,” Ben admits. Reed coos at him, and he rolls his eyes, growls shut up and scrapes his fingernails under Reed’s shirt. “Plus, I could tell you’re not sleeping. And I bet not eating. So I’m here to enforce both.”

“I don’t need to sleep,” Reed protests, unconvincingly at that.

Ben stares pointedly at him. “Tell that to the Nightmare on Elm Street kids.”

“I don’t need to eat, either.”

“Okay, so I shouldn’t have brought you dinner, then?”

Reed flushes all the way to his ears, to his toes, Ben imagines. “You brought me food?”

He spots the bag. Collapsed in on itself, a splotch of marinara sauce blooming on the paper, brushed closer and closer to the edge.

Grinning, Reed yanks the rolling chair around and fell on his knees like a kid flying in a shopping cart, launches across the bay. He bumps into the desk with a rattling thunk, scoops up the food and sets sail back to Ben, who props his foot out and spins Reed to a stop.

Reed pries the bag open and inhales, face dunked inside. “You take such good care of me,” he remarks, setting it aside.

“Don’t get too excited,” Ben warns. “It’s nothing special.”

Before, there was no telling what missing him would feel like. Missing Reed and his silly pictures and constant jabbering and blinder focus most of the time on his work but always on Ben too, and now it’s been almost three months and they don’t see each other every day and learning what it’s like to miss Reed, how to miss him and why, it’s burned a hole in Ben’s stomach nothing can cauterize.

Even now, level as he is, perfectly Ben’s height and his wrists locking around Ben, even as they still find a way to fit, Ben wonders how much longer until Reed’s edges start to chip away to something different and they don’t fit as well anymore.

(He knows Reed will never let that happen, will never tire of Ben and of doing everything with him, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.)

Reed tilts his chin up, asking, begging, and Ben never learned to not, cants his head and squishes his stab of a nose against Reed’s cheek, and their lips slot together.

Slow and lingering and procrastinating the moment one of them has to go because the older they get, the farther separated by jobs and school and trains, the less time exists for what their adolescence granted them an eternity for. Deep and digging and into their veins to feel each other clear to tomorrow and on until they’re back here again.

“I missed you too,” Reed whispers against Ben’s lips.

And Ben pinches the curls on the back of his neck, smiles and laughs as Reed cinches him in closer. “You won’t distract me,” he says between kisses.

He fists a chunk of Reed’s curls as those lips drop like embers off a whetstone over his jaw and up to his ear and down his neck, impressed, however, that he’s adopted the tactic Ben used so liberally when Reed’s blinders closed in tighter. He moans despite himself, crushes Reed’s shirt in his hand, and no, he won’t survive if this ever ends. He won’t survive without it.

“Nice try,” he commends, pulling on Reed’s hair, “but that’s not going to work on me. You need to sleep.”

“I’m fine,” Reed groans.

Ben scoffs, quirking a brow up to his hairline. “Have you looked in a mirror lately?” he asks. “You look like you went a few rounds and lost. Big time. You’re tired—”

“I told you, I’m not,” Reed persists, his hands stealing under Ben’s vest and under his Henley, cold fingers creeping on the man’s waist. “And now you’re here so I’m definitely not.”

Rolling his eyes, Ben picks up the discarded takeout bag, roots through it and says, “As romantic as that is—”

“Thank you.”

“—you need to sleep, Reed. Since you got this scholarship you haven’t done anything but talk about what our lives are going to be like when we get an apartment and you change science forever. It’d be even more romantic if you stayed alive so we could have that. Here.”

An escaping meatball burns the soft pads of his fingers, bleeding through the wrap, but Ben holds the sub out for however long it takes Reed to accept it. Unfolding his legs out from under him, Reed collapses in the chair, it exhaling under him, and unwraps the sandwich in his lap.

“You worry about me that much?” he wonders curiously.

Ben pockets his hands, shrugging. The sub’s aroma wafts up to him, and his gaze flickers to the other sub in the bag. “Yeah, well. Actually, I prefer worrying about you eating and sleeping to you walking into fights.”

Red suffuses Reed’s cheeks. Sue pushes off the desk, rolling into view, and her hair falls from behind her ear, curtaining the side of her face. She swipes at it, tucking it back, and chews on the end of her ballpoint pen. “You’ve walked into a fight?”

“Accidentally,” Reed argues.

Ben snorts. “’Accidentally’ my ass.”

“There is nothing accidental about your ass.”

This time Sue snorts, smothering giggles behind her hand. Reed grins, scar on his cheek triumphantly marrying the one by his ear, and Ben can’t help but smile. He’s missed those jabs too, the corny flirting that falls out of Reed’s head without filter.

Ben swipes at his head. “You are such a nerd,” he says.

“Yeah,” Reed drawls, “but you’re the guy who loves me.”

“Yeah, yeah. Eat your sandwich before it gets cold.” He does, a meatball squeezing out the other end and hitting the wrapper with a wet plop. Sauce smudges the corner of his mouth and Ben resists thumbing it off. Twists on his heels instead, crossing his arms at Sue. “So where do you white coats sleep down here?”

Sue sputters a response, a slow, “We have dorm rooms for that.”

“But if you had to sleep down here.”

“Ben,” Reed cautions, unearths a bag of potato chips and raises it, poised to throw it at Ben if need be.

“At least take a nap,” Ben urges. “I’ll set my phone for thirty minutes and then I’ll wake you up. You’re not of use to anyone if you pass out from exhaustion.”

Sue points over her left shoulder at a nondescript white door under the very stairs Ben clunked down, brass handle markedly untarnished compared to the rest of the handles. Everyone glosses past it without a glance or inclination of nearing it. “There are cots in that closet,” she answers. “I’d say you can’t bring them in here because the equipment’s too expensive, but…”

That won’t matter to you falls tacit between them.

She leans back in her chair, rolls that pen of hers between thumb and forefinger, and stares. As scrutinizing as the science fair. As calculating.

It’s a test, Ben knows. It’s as crucial for him to assimilate to the team as it is for Reed to (they’re a package deal, after all). For them to trust Reed they have to determine who he trusts, and who does he trust more in the world than Ben, the man who has rooted in Reed’s every being? And how deep does Ben’s loyalty to Reed go?

Despite knowing the equipment is too expensive for him to even look at, does Ben tow out a cot anyway? Just to look after his own.

Does that make him trustworthy (if Sue gets under the skin of his trust will he look after her too)? Or careless (is his objective easily clouded by personal matters)?

“I’ll set one up in the corner, if that’s okay,” Ben tells Sue.

She nods in turn.

“I feel unfairly ganged up on right now,” Reed comments, honk of a nose adorably crinkled and gaze switching between the two.

Ben pats his head. “You’ll get used to it.”

And then finally – miraculously – he sleeps.

Curls into a ball on the cot, Ben’s vest bunched under his head and snoring softly. The sound hums up Ben’s leg where Reed nestled his head, as steady as his breathing, as steady as Ben flicking the pages of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.

He’s not any further through the novel, not anymore attached to Captain Nemo, and considers dumping it once and for all and watching the shuttle’s construction bustle on close to midnight. But he looks down at Reed, slips his fingers over the annotations like frames of Reed’s memories of the man and his adventures.

It’s his third try of the book; maybe he’ll pick it up again in the morning. Maybe he’ll persuade Reed to read it to him instead.

He sucks on a Hershey’s square, melts it on his tongue, and as Sue approaches he offers the bar to her (Reed pillaged it from her personal cache, after all), peeling the wrapper back a smidgen more. Sue shakes her head, earbuds dangling from around her neck thumping together, and rolls a chair up to him, inching painstakingly quiet as not to disquiet Reed.

Ben thinks to say the boy sleeps like the dead, but swallows it with the chocolate.

“How long’s he been out?” she inquires, folding her hands on a file of papers in her lap.

“Uh…” Ben slides his phone from a pant pocket and flips it right in his hand, reports, “I said I’d set the alarm for thirty minutes and it’s been three hours, so.”

“He’s not going to be too happy with you when he wakes up.”

Reed’s black frames sit atop his head and as he rakes back Reed’s curls, they fall onto his nose. Keep falling, all the way and setting in his lips’ seam. Ben rips them off. “I can handle him,” he says, and embeds them on his head again. “Even the crazies gotta sleep, right?”

Sue shrugs, murmurs, “I guess.”

The lab smells like vaguely of meatballs, try as it may to scrub the aroma of coffee off the walls, off the mugs scattering the tabletops. Dinner’s leftovers are balled up between Ben’s feet, and when Sue leans forward he parries, kicks the ball clear past her.

Her eyes trail after it, follow to where it bumps against an overflowing trash can. She doesn’t turn back, but speaks to Ben anyway. “You don’t have to worry about Reed so much. He’s not going to forget you.”

Ben clears his throat. “I’m not worried about that,” he says, hears liar, liar hiss in his ear. He grinds his teeth.

“Yes, you are. I can tell,” Sue argues, and those eyes aren’t so soft, not how Reed described them. They’re hot coals in embers, and they seek to scar him with what she has to say. “Just because he’s here and surrounded by people who are like him doesn’t mean you’re replaceable or irrelevant. He’s in good hands here, but you’ve been with him for the longest and that doesn’t go away.”

“It does with distance.” It’s sad to hear, sadder to say it out loud and accept it as truth. He’s heard it like a distant bell ringing since graduation, louder and louder and louder since September. And now he can’t ignore it; it’s a foghorn, constant and debilitating.

Sue tilts her head woefully at him, and Ben wonders why she’s talking to him, why he feels engendered to put a voice to whole thoughts and talk to her when he isn’t brave enough to deluge them to the one person who deserves it. He’s never felt more like a coward.

“You know what happens when you grow up? You grow away. And it’s nobody’s fault. Like you said, he’s with people like him. People who understand him. That’s more than I can give him. I’m not like him and as much as I try to understand this stuff, I don’t. Not a lot of it.”

“I don’t think that matters to him.”

“Maybe it should,” he mutters.

Reed squirms onto his stomach, lets the vest loose, and though his elbow stabs Ben’s hip, though his leg is falling asleep and Reed drools sometimes and the lab is getting older as people retire for the night, Ben can’t find he heart space to care.

He skims his fingertips up and down Reed’s spine, and Reed shudders, pulls tighter to him. “He got out of our stupid town and I won’t be what holds him back.”

“I think you should talk to him about this if you haven’t already,” Sue suggests. “Because by the way he talks about you, you’re keeping him going, not holding him back. He might not be here without you.”

Ben shakes his head. “That’s not true. I could’ve never become friends with him or existed at all, and he would still be here. I had nothing to do with it.”

“That is what’s not true.” Sue mashes her lips together, then goes on tenderly, “Just from the way he talks about you, Johnny has a building-wide pool going on as to how long it takes Reed to figure out he’s in love with you. But it looks like he’s already figured it out.”

Ben nods, agrees, because they kiss and talk and sweetly are like they’ve been doing it for years, and they have. Since he coaxed Reed to his first party and they were shoved in a closet together for a round of Seven Minutes in Heaven.

Dumb as it was, juvenile as the practice and giddy as those who locked them in, Reed dove for the first kiss, messy and missed. His cheeks flaming, his head hanged and he rubbed his neck and prattled apologies, and didn’t see the smile he pulled from Ben. His heart excelled in his chest and he got right under Reed and in his sight, lifted onto his toes for the next kiss and the next and the next.

They didn’t stop when the door opened and haven’t yet and won’t if either of them have anything to say about it. Ben hopes he gets a say in it. “Has he ever told you about his parents?” he wonders. “About his mom and his stepdad?”

“We talked once about how I’m adopted and he said he felt like he was. I’m guessing he feels like the black sheep.”

Ben nods slowly. “For the longest time I was the only who loved him… Now he’s here and he’s making new friends, and I feel like I’m being edged out. And I hate it.”

“You’re not being edged out,” Sue assures him. “You’re not the only one who loves him anymore, but that doesn’t make you any less important. If anything, we’re all second to you. You’ll always mean the most to him. You’ll always be more important.”

“Maybe,” Ben whispers.

“Always. Talk to him about it. Hear it for yourself.”

Ben predicts it’ll take days, if not weeks, of chafing to corrode him into telling Reed.

He doesn’t expect hours.

Dawn creeps into Reed’s dorm room a millennia too early. The bed’s two occupants groan at being found, throw the covers over their heads to keep the world outside for even a minute longer, a second longer. The light travels about the room, dancing pirouettes on the shifting sheets and books stacked on the floor, high to the nightstand’s top.

Tacked to the wall over their heads like left over yearbook scrapes, the postcards and photos flutter in not a sway of a breeze, beg to be discovered and looked on and tilted towards the blue pallor. Once Ben discovered them he used to look on them, used to tilt them towards the lamplight and imagine the life of them. Wondered what led to the moments, to the smiles and the wish you were here, Victor.

The world felt so big then, he such a small part of it, so much else to the universe.

He pulls the world around him, traces the shadows slanting across Reed’s back, up over his shoulder and to the line of his jaw. Reed smiles, sleepy and loose and blissed, and Ben knows he’ll miss that forever.

The halls are quiet, the streets too, strange how still it is. Reed whispers, “Stay the weekend,” shaving what little space there is between their bodies and draping an arm across Ben’s chest.

Ben sighs further under down the bed, brushing their noses together. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I have a ten o’clock class—”

“Come after your class.”

“—and you have to finish getting yourself to space.”

Reed corrects, “Getting us to space. You’re going with me. You and me and Victor and Johnny, probably. We’re going to Planet Zero.”

The flannel button-down Ben grabbed for himself just after one is thin and worn and smells like Reed and he picks at its small buttons, can’t quite look at Reed because he knows what the sun looks like when it rises in his eyes. Like now and every time they talk about space, once so abstract but quickly vibrant in color.

“No, Reed,” he says, “that’s all you.”

Reed’s brows pinch together and he lifts up, arm slithering off Ben and tucking close to his chest. “What do you mean?” he asks, and Ben almost whispers, suddenly too cold, come back, come back. “We’ve built this thing together and you’re coming with me. That’s always been the plan.”

Ben shakes his head. “You know that’s never going to happen.” Those things he said earlier, they creep back up his throat, crawling out of the dark recesses of his heart and coalescing somewhere in the even darker ends of his mind. His insecurities feel all too real cocooned in a place like this, nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.

He swallows down what he really wants to say.

“Of course it’s going to happen,” Reed insists. “You’re coming with me. What was that thing you said once?”

“When?”

“Around beta eleven. Something like ‘you blow up, I blow up’.”

Ben groans. “Yeah, quoting Titanic wasn’t one of my finer moments,” he sighs, wincing.

“But it was true,” Reed says, “and it still is.” He releases his arms from their close binding and lies half on Ben, an arm under his shoulders to hold him there, hold him in place. Ben wraps a lock of Reed’s hair around his finger. “I don’t want this without you. Because you got me here—”

“That’s what Sue said, but it’s not true,” Ben protests.

Reed stills, cocks his head to the side. “When did you talk to Sue?”

“While you were asleep.” Ben bites on his bottom lip so hard it breaks. He mashes them together, nursing the sting. “She said to stop worrying so much about my role in your life and to stop trying so hard to stay there because I’ll always be important to you.”

“You are important to me. We’ve been a ‘we’ for almost eight years. That’s not something I’ll forget or let go of.”

“There can’t be a ‘we’ in a place like this because you belong here, not me. You’re with people who understand you and they’ll be who goes to Planet Zero with you. I’ll be here when you come back, but I can’t follow you there.”

Ben nudges his chin forward and Reed obliges, kisses him and, thank God, sinks into it. His whole body is lit with regret, furnace flames licking the whole of his skin, wishes he never said anything to begin with.

He pulls on Reed’s shoulders and then Reed is on top of him, Ben’s knees clamping to his hips and arching up against him and maybe they’re placating each other with this, a momentary reprieve, but Ben would rather distract Reed’s tongue with his own for now than have to answer questions he doesn’t want to face yet.

His fingers pinch the waistband of Reed’s boxers. Reed breaks the kiss, pressing his face to Ben’s neck. “How long have you felt like that?” he manages.

“Since I dropped you off, I guess,” Ben admits gently. He shrugs. “From the moment we walked in here I wondered how long until this place was your world and Oyster Bay – and everyone in it – was left behind. I don’t mean to sound like a needy fucking boyfriend, but…”

“It’s not needy,” Reed refutes, rests his forehead on Ben’s, “but we’re not done talking about this. I love you so much. You know that? I’m not letting you go until you want to let go of me.”

Ben shakes his head, breathes, “That’s not gonna happen,” and cups Reed’s face, reeling him back in. They kiss soft and slow, and it’s not enough to banish Ben’s insecurities, not by a long shot, but a start’s a start.

It becomes habit, Ben spending most of his nights off in the lab.

Enamored with how much more relaxed Reed is when Ben is in abundance, Franklin has a badge personalized for him, his name and picture printed and laminated on a lanyard or sometimes clipped to his belt. It pleases Ben to no end to see Jameson butcher his face with a scowl the first time he sees it, the first time Ben breezes past him without disruption.

The cot never moves, is never returned to the closet, and more than once Ben sees the other engineers using it. Reed becomes more and more insistent on a proper bed every time, not that Ben complains.

And then their two-year anniversary is upon them, and what a surprise Reed turns it in to. He carts Ben around the city and to one of the last Met games of the season and finally places a key to his dorm room (to him) in Ben’s palm. Dinner is forgotten, the bed damp and wrecked, interrupted by Johnny blasting Marvin Gaye from the other side of the door.

Ben’s sides ache from laughing, but it’s perfect.

“I’m not going without you.”