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A couple months ago K could have waved a wand and had a team of woodland creatures pack for them.
They tried, earlier, but nothing happened. Par for the course. Magic is broken now and no one knows why.
(Well, no one knows why as in cause and effect. Why as in fault is less opaque.)
Stepping away from her set up makes her feel itchy, especially on a day like this when the warning shots at Itsy are getting a little too close for comfort. A sloppy beginning is catching up to them, days where they thought a simple VPN was enough internet privacy, days before they started running errant of foreign governments and laws. They know now how to build sturdy firewalls, how to find the deepest hidey holes, how to weave their web thin enough to not be seen by anyone not already caught up in it.
But alas, moving around online doesn’t change that she is locked in place in the much more easily compromised meatspace.
The apartment, even at the surprisingly reasonable price point of Bibble’s Bog, is slightly cramped the way all three bedrooms are.
(There hadn’t been a discussion really, just the assumption that it would be a three bedroom: one for Sam, one for her and Evan, and one for… guests. Just in case. It was summer when they moved in. There was every possibility Jammer could visit. It became the best space to move her set up when she got her third monitor.)
Cramped or not, K’s stuff is woven through all rooms. Sloppy. Honestly this is long overdue, gathering the essentials in one place, in one bag.
The process of determining essentials is difficult and taking too long. They tap anxiously on a picture frame: Chimeron’s graduating class all gathered close and posed together. It feels essential. But her bag is already pushing at the seams. God, tulle takes up so much space.
“Do you think Evan prefers his fuzzy socks or his goat ones?” Teddy asks, scrambling up to the end table next to her and holding the pairs up.
They startle slightly.
“Teddy, don’t touch Evan’s stuff,” they say, grabbing socks back and pushing to their feet.
“I just think packing for him as well will be a nice gesture,” Teddy calls after her.
“Well, I think that Evan would not see moving his stuff around as a nice gesture,” she says.
Evan is very particular about stuff and space. Evan has his own dresser for his stuff, his own cabinet for his stuff, and his own go bag in the back of his own closet.
K tries not to begrudge him it. They know why Evan does his Evan things. Honestly it’s less his particularities about his stuff. He doesn’t like having things out of its designated place but never hesitates to offer them something they need.
The real problem is… He never touches her stuff without permission. He always asks to use the communal kitchen utensils, if he can ‘borrow’ some milk, if he can move her knitting stuff off the couch, no matter how many times she tells him he doesn’t have to ask, no matter how many times she reminds him that everything here is his.
They don’t blame him for the way his brain works. But they don't know how much longer they can grapple with the fact that their boyfriend clearly doesn’t feel comfortable with them.
“Do you want to practice?” Teddy asks, climbing up their leg as they scan Evan’s sock drawer for where these two should go.
He won’t be upset if things aren’t exactly how he left them. They’ve made a game of sneaking freshly knitted pairs into the drawer, to spare him the squirmy bashfulness of having to accept an unwarranted gift.
Or, well, they used to. They haven’t been knitting in a while.
“I don’t want to practice,” she replies, folding the socks and tucking them back into their place.
“Are you sure?” Teddy asks, up on her shoulder now. “Perfect may be an unhelpful goal in emotional situations, but practice is still a handy tool.”
They sigh and pinch the bridge of their nose. The headache these days is almost perpetual. (Lack of sleep, hydration, hunger, eye strain.) When they’re deep in the web though they don’t feel it. It’s easier to forget they have a body. It’s nice to forget actually.
“I… I don’t even know what I want to say to him yet,” they confess.
The choices are binary. Ask him to come. Leave.
Both are bad options.
Leaving him alone. After Jammer never came back from winter break. After Sam, still paying her share of the rent, but still being put up in a fancy London hotel by the BBC as they pitch her on show options. They don’t talk about it, about how a week trip has become two and a half months, about the texts to send another box of essentials, about staring at the ceiling some nights and wondering if Sam really believes she’ll come back or if they’re all lying to themselves.
No, they can’t leave Evan in a three bedroom apartment with his meager but growing collection of stuff and all of her and Sam’s non-essentials she knows he won’t bring himself to touch.
And it’s not that they don’t want Evan to come. It’s not that they haven’t stared at Airstream models and romanticized some 70's-inspired endless roadtrip fever dream, living out of each other's pockets, on the run from the Powers That Be. No more separation of stuff, no more long trips, just sharing everything, seeing Europe together, saving magic one post at a time.
But their fantasies never get as far as they used to. Not these days.
Evan loves the apartment, even with the empty guest room, even with the dwindling supply of Sam’s belongings. For all his trips these days, that is never in question. She knows what having a place means to him. She knows what it would mean to ask him to give up the stability of a familiar bed and a locked door for wandering again.
His response there is binary, as well, equally bad. Either he admits he needs the stability more than he needs them, or he lies and goes along with what they want so they won’t leave him behind.
A decision tree with no win state.
It shouldn’t matter then what they do, but… They don't want to know what choice he’d make there, they don't want to watch him end things and they don't want to watch him let quiet resentment eat them away.
“He’s not going to tell me the truth,” they lay out for Teddy. “Because the truth is that this whole thing sucks and it’s all my fault.” Teddy makes a noise of protest but she waves him off. “So I have to make the choice for us, if it’s crueler to leave him here or bring him with me.”
“Evan can make his own choices,” Teddy says. “Based on what’s important to him.”
That’s the problem. Evan isn’t important to Evan. Not the way he should be.
“What’s important to you, K?” Teddy asks. “What do you want?”
That’s easy.
“I want him to want to come with me because he wants to,” they say easily. They want magic to start working again, they want that eager rebel feeling that charged the air between them when they started this project, they want the nervous wonder in Evan’s eyes from the early days of their relationship, when they both believed that love was enough to fix everything. “But that’s impossible.”
“Maybe he does.”
They sigh again.
“Maybe,” they say, grinning tightly for Teddy like that will be convincing to a creature who’s telepathically connected to them.
K is getting oddly used to the face a chipmunk makes when it’s disappointed.
—
When he met K, Evan didn’t understand the goth-y teen apathy thing.
It was a feebly constructed facade, in minutes he could tell just how much they cared about things and to this day and likely forever, it’s one of the things he loves most about them.
It’s beautiful, the strength of her emotions, the boundlessness of her compassion, the determination and empathy that fuels her burning sense of justice. It was a revelation to him, so scared of big feelings, so used to big feelings always meaning big bad feelings and losing control and hurting other people and making everything worse. K’s big feelings were as beautiful as the rest of them, and he couldn’t understand why someone would try to hide that at all.
He gets it now, faced daily with K’s all-consuming guilt.
There’s still something miraculous, how their guilt can be extended to every single person in the world, how it can fuel them more than food or sleep in their endless quest to stitch the entire world back together.
They don’t deserve it, he wants to say sometimes. Not all of them. Actually, not most of them. Most of them don’t deserve all of you.
He’s not allowed to say that though. Not when K is consumed by the consequences of their mistake. Not when he doesn’t know how she can feel all that guilt without looking at him and thinking it’s his fault too.
It’s not that he doesn’t feel guilty.
But he doesn’t feel guilt like K. (He’s honestly not sure who could.) Not where he’s ever blinded to the systems that set them up to fail, not where he blames himself for breaking something that was always broken, not where he’s kept up at night over the hurt he’s caused people who hurt them first.
He still thinks it’s beautiful how much she cares. He thinks it’s awful to see her hurt herself over people who don’t deserve it.
Or even over the people who do.
“We promised people there was magic in the world,” they say in defense of another thirty six hour shift on the deep web, sleepless, mealless, eyes bloodshot and unfocused. “We gave it to them and we snatched it away.”
They promised you there was magic in the world, he wants to say. And they never told you it was broken the whole time, they never told you that all it would take to break it was trying to do something good .
But he can’t say that.
Something in the two of them broke when the magic did. Broke because the magic did. Because they watched something they did together, hopeful and bold and determined, ruin something in the world.
Evan feels guilt. He wants to help clean up their mess. He’ll jump at any opportunity Boodle offers, any thread he wants to chase, any potential to make sense of this new world and make it worthwhile.
Evan feels guilt most profoundly when he’s looking at K hunched at her command center, frantic and hazy and letting the guilt eat her alive right in front of his eyes.
He wants to pull them away from it and clean them up and feed them and put them to bed and have them wake up calm and content and guiltless. But Evan is not a caretaker. He wants to be like Sam and have that just right tone that can ease someone’s soul. He wants to be like Jammer and find the perfect pep talk that can walk his partner off this edge she tetters on. He wants to be anything but the constant reminder of their mistake, the personification of the unpleasant realities of the real world.
Evan knows guilt. His is not as righteous as K’s.
—
She’s still packing when Evan gets back.
She hadn’t planned to but hadn’t not planned to. There've been too many things going unsaid recently. She can’t let herself not talk about this, just because she doesn’t want to hurt Evan’s feelings, just because everything about being in the meatspace feels uncomfortable these days, just because the little problems online are the only things she can actually solve.
“K?” His voice is heavy, tired. It usually is these days, not that he’ll talk about it all that much, not when he thinks she’s more tired. They keep sorting through the pile of clothes on the floor of the living room like everything is very casual and normal, like it’s not a sight to see them away from their setup these days.
“Hey,” they say. He doesn’t say anything, just watches her continue to fold her favorite corset and tuck it carefully into the bag. It’s a natural stopping point, so she looks up.
Evan’s eyes remain on the bag, slightly unfocused. He takes a deep slow breath in and lets it out.
“What’s going on?” he asks flatly.
She hates when he gets like this, quiet and empty. She hates that it’s always a guessing game for what he’s feeling these days. She hates that he still doesn’t trust himself to feel his own feelings, and she hates that it really feels like he doesn’t trust her.
“Um… I got a concerning message today,” she says. More than anything she hates that she’s doing this to him. “I don’t think this place is going to be safe much longer. If… certain people know that I’m here.”
“Right,” Evan says. Something in him shrinks a bit, shoulders hunching, brow furrowing. It reminds her of the day they met. “Was it a… credible threat?”
They flap a hand at the bag. “I wouldn’t be… if I thought it was just bullshit.”
“So you’re leaving.” It’s not a question.
Their pulse ricochets anxiously. “It’s not safe.”
Ask me to stay, they urge, stupidly. It isn’t safe here. They have to leave the only question is if they’re doing it together or not. But she wants him to say it even if it’s cliche, to ask for something for once, to risk something and not just act like this was inevitable.
Where are we going? he could say also. She’d take that, heartily, happily. Any sign that he isn’t just rolling over, any self-advocacy for his place in this relationship.
“You could stop,” he says instead, eyes dropping away from the bag and towards the back window, the gray English sky through it.
“They need me,” they say, weakly, meant to be argued against, meant to be convinced otherwise.
Say you need me, she begs. Ask for anything. If he asks, for once, for real, she’d try as hard as she could to make it work. If she doesn’t have to keep guessing, if it would finally be the thing that he really wants.
Evan nods instead, lips pressed tightly together.
“Sam sent her rent for the month,” he says, practical and factual. “If we pay it in full early, it’ll be cheaper to break the lease. And your parents are guarantors so they’ll have to sign off on the termination.”
Like it’s that simple. Like that’s the priority in this conversation, breaking the lease as efficiently as possible.
“You just know all that off the top of your head?” they challenge, somewhere to put the burn in their chest.
He shrugs. Nothing more.
“I don’t wanna fight, K.”
“Why would we fight?”
He raises an eyebrow.
Their stomach turns over. Oh.
“You’re not coming with me?” they ask. It’s a fight to make it a question but they get there.
“Do you want me to come with you?” he asks.
“I asked you first.”
“Did you?”
“Evan.”
His eyes flutter shut, those long sweeping eyelashes that are so dark against his pale skin. It still makes their stomach go wobbly.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Say you’re coming with me. Say you want to. Say we’re still worth the sacrifices. Say you don’t have one foot out the door.
“I don’t want you to say anything,” she says. “I just want you to… God, Evan, what do you want here?”
He shakes his head. “I… want to go to bed,” he says, voice going slightly squeaky the way it does when he’s agitated. “I’m tired, K.”
“I want you to come with me,” she says, pointlessly. She’s tired too. “I don’t want you to be here by yourself.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” he says, like she knew he would.
You don’t have to, he’s said, over and over like a goddamn catchphrase. You don’t have to let me take the shower first. You don’t have to knit me another pair of socks. You don’t have to invite me to come with you. You don’t have to love me.
“I do,” she says, but it won’t convince him. She must sound too tried or angry or pleading or wrong even still, even now, that he just never believes her.
“K, I know how to take care of myself,” he says, with that thick irony, like she doesn’t know.
“You don’t have to,” she says, an old refrain, so overplayed they’re both sick of it. “It’s not a burden to take care of you, Evan.”
“Sure,” he says. He’s given up on trying to make it sound convincing. “You’ve got a lot on your plate.”
“I don’t want to be alone,” they try. They shouldn’t. Convincing Evan that doing something nice for him is actually what she needs is a tried and true success strategy, but she wants to be beyond this, she wants him to tell her the truth. They keep hiding between excuses and reasoning, two precocious intellectually minded emotional wrecks dodging the simple answers.
Either he wants to come or he doesn’t. If she wants to know the simple answer for real, she needs to stop trying to tip the scales to save something here.
“Really?” he asks before they can take it back, a wrinkle forming between his brows as he squeezes his eyes shut. “Because two weeks ago you didn’t even notice that I was gone for the weekend.”
“I apologized for that!”
“You don’t have to apologize I’m just saying—”
“Well, clearly I do,” she says. “I’m sorry, okay? In my defense I didn’t realize that it had been two days.”
Evan opens his eyes, tipping his head like she just made his point for him.
“I’m—” they hop to protest.
“Take a break, K,” he says. “Things will calm down.”
They splutter, fingers twitching, itching to type. As horrid as it would be, they wish they could be doing this over text. These days their fingers seem to know how to communicate better than their mouth, their throat always too dry, their tongue always too thick.
“Things will not calm down,” they say, vibrating slightly. “It’s the internet, Evan, nothing ever calms down on the internet. By the time I finish this sentence there will be another five scrillion new posts.”
“And you have to read all of them?”
“Yes!”
Evan makes that face, eyes wide, eyebrows raised, the Jesus Christ do you not hear what I’m hearing?
They do. They hear it, they know that they look slightly manic, they know that they’re standing in front of their boyfriend and it’s been five days since they’ve taken a shower. (Probably just five. They’re pretty sure it’s Thursday.)
“I’m… progress,” they stammer. “There’s… I’m making progress.”
She knows he doesn’t believe that either. It’s somehow easier to swallow than him not believing the rest (that she loves him, that he has a place here, that they can make things work) and yet also becomes the last straw, this final thing of hers that he doubts.
The only arguments they’ve ever had have been by proxy. He doesn’t see the progress in guiding one person to enough resources to float a feather. It’s all she has. And that is real. That’s magic. But he’s all theory these days, long conversations with Dr. B and skimming ancient tomes for clues of what happened and what to do about it.
Evan studies her for a moment. His eyes are so sharp, always calculating but never cold.
“Alright,” he says, instead of arguing for slowing down, for thinking things through. No, he’s just flat again, empty again. What did you find? they want to demand. What do you see in me that makes you just give up? “Sure, K. Do what you gotta do.”
“That’s it?” they ask.
Evan shrugs. “We should reach out to your parents.”
“Cool. Great. I’m gonna—”
They run out of steam, throat dry, tongue heavy, and abandon the packing project entirely, scurrying back to the guest room and closing the door behind them. Eyes burning, they take in the half empty room, the shuttered blinds over the small window, the empty move in boxes they threw in here for storage, their set up in the corner. It’s strange. They spend more time in this room than anywhere else at this point, and yet it’s almost wholly unfamiliar. It’s been a while since they’ve looked around.
For the first time all day it sinks in that this is it. Last looks, at this apartment, at this life.
Out of the corner of their eye, a notification bumps on one of the monitors.
Feel your feelings, a voice in their head that sounds like their mom.
Fuck that, they inch towards their desk and reach for their mouse. Meatspace sucks.
—
When they first moved in, they continued their tradition from Gowpenny, curling up together in bed after dinner with a movie or show on Evan’s Must-Watch Culture Curriculum. The early days were mostly about sharing their favorites with Evan, building up a shared bank of references so their conversations were slightly more intelligible.
By the time they moved in, they started to build up a sense of Evan’s taste, selecting things that were important touchstones but also things they thought he would like. (Found Family, Friends to Lovers, Fluff. It’s adorable.) There used to be a unique thrill to being correct, to having that little confirmation that she knew Evan to a predictive degree.
They haven’t watched anything together in… months. There are hours between dinner and bed (and hours instead of dinner or bed) and hours are a finite resource.
If it was up to K… well if it was up to K they would invent a form of caffeine that would replace the need for sleep at all. But if it was up to K, they'd keep working until they physically couldn’t anymore and then sleep until they woke up and then do it again. Honestly, it almost seems healthier that way, just let their body take what it needs and use the rest of their time how they need.
But Evan likes going to bed around midnight. And Evan doesn’t like to fall asleep if she’s not there. (Not that he told her. She’d just started to notice even in her half dead state at near five in the morning that his breathing wasn’t that even, that his phone was half tucked under his pillow, that his face wasn’t peaceful, just blank.) So now she goes to bed around midnight too, so her boyfriend doesn’t have to pretend to be asleep in front of her. She makes up for it by waking up as early as she can, at the slightest lightening of the sky, setting her alarm to ring in her headphones, mastering the art of slipping out of bed without waking Evan.
It’s a system. She can’t tell if it works but it’s hard to tell if anything works these days.
Tonight, she’s useless after ten thirty, burnt out from her retinas to her neurons. She slips into the bathroom and takes a hot hot hot shower, burning off the days of built-up grime and tension. When they pad into the bedroom, damp and clean and refreshed, Evan is already beneath the blankets, facing the wall.
It’s the haptic bump of an error message in her chest.
He waits for her these days, now that she comes to bed early. Honestly the little smile from him when she slips into the room is better than any amount of sleep or caffeine for making her feel awake and in her body again. The loss of it is keen.
She hovers awkwardly by the door for a couple moments, waiting, hoping for him to turn over and glance up and smile at her like that, just the corners of his mouth, just the softening of his eyes.
He doesn’t.
They fight the urge to run back to the office, to the monitors and the forums, to the places that are also devoid of the animal softness she’s used to in this room but that always have been. But for as refreshing as the shower was, they’re still ruined for the day and need to sleep and need to do it here in their bed they share with their boyfriend while all those things are still theirs.
They climb up into the bed in the dark, wiggle beneath the sheets.
Evan’s too tense to be asleep. They close the distance slightly.
“Evan?” they say, hand hovering over his side, far enough away from him so that he doesn’t have to feel the heat. “Can I?”
They watch his back move with a stuttering heavy inhale.
“I… I don’t want to feel you leave,” he breathes, almost a whine, like he’s embarrassed by it.
He’s always had a way of saying things that just perfectly break her heart. It’s never hurt like this before though.
“I’m not gonna leave,” she says. The yet is unsaid, doesn’t need to be said, not now when it could only be cruel.
“Okay,” he says. She wishes she can tell if he believes her or if he’s too tired to say no.
And there’s the agonizing, trying to read through every single micro inflection in his tone and body to guess what he really wants, what he really means, whether or not he’s just telling them what he thinks they want to hear. Whether they’re helping or hurting here. (Probably hurting, no matter what they do.)
Well, she’s not going to leave tonight so she wraps around him from behind, pressing her nose to the back of his neck, curling her hand against his over his chest.
He stays braced for a while.
Don’t take it personally. That he doesn’t trust you, even still. That he won’t tell you what he’s feeling right now. That it always always always seems like you’re making it worse.
Inch by inch he relaxes, fingers tentatively twining with hers.
“I love you,” they mumble, nosing their way into the place behind his ear that’s always warm and smells like soap.
“Love you too,” he says, just as shakily, tipping his head down to brush his mouth along their knuckles.
She can’t tell if he doesn’t believe her or she doesn’t believe him. She can’t tell which is worse. Maybe it doesn’t matter at all. If it all is going to end the same.
A weighty knot of hurt and sorrow sits in the back of their throat. They swallow around it and squeeze their eyes shut.
They both run cool, a blessing in the summer. Now in the winter, they usually both just end up shivering together beneath piles of blankets.
It’s better than shivering alone.
—
Evan doesn’t sleep.
He’s not a stranger to sleepless nights, but he’s also never not fallen asleep somewhere so comfortable. And there’s nowhere as comfortable as K’s arms. He loves being here, even when it took months to get used to someone touching him while he was unconscious, even when they wear that long sleeve t-shirt that’s just a little too scratchy on his skin, even if tonight he’s sure at any second they’ll pull away and walk out the door with their duffle bag and be gone forever.
He can’t begrudge them.
He couldn’t begrudge any of them. He knew this was coming. He knew from the second all his friends convinced him to stay that it would mean this instead, them leaving him, because God knows the only thing that could make him walk away was forgetting them entirely.
It was only ever a matter of time but he had foolishly thought he’d have more. Jammer has been gone for almost a year. Not gone, just home. Evan doesn’t blame him, could never.
Sam has been in London for almost three months. And Evan can’t blame her. The world is opening up for her exactly as it should. It’s nice that she sends pictures from landmarks and asks him questions about it.
He knew K would be last. Nothing about him has ever pushed K away. They look at him at his worst and somehow see something desirable and for all that can be uncomfortable (like stepping inside somewhere warm after miles in a blizzard, too cold to too hot in a second) there was also this hope there. Maybe. Maybe if K could look at him and pull out something uncomfortably true, if K was never put off by him and all his eccentricities, if K liked all of those wrong things about him…
Maybe a high school relationship could last.
It was a nice thing to dream for a while.
And then magic broke. Because of something they did together. It would only be a matter of time before they broke too.
K likes stories, and for all they’ve taken off their trope-colored glasses, they still have those narrative sensibilities for how the world should work. And this isn’t how stories are supposed to go. Their noble heroic actions breaking bad does not a happy ending make. It’s a discomfort she has to run from. He gets it.
He doesn’t blame K. He couldn’t. Not for an ending that was always coming. Not after trying their best and giving him some of the softest tenderest moments he’s ever been allowed to hold.
He can’t blame himself for this one either. They did their best. It’s not their fault that the world was stacked against them. So there’s nothing left really to do except stay awake, knowing this is likely the last time he gets to be in his partner’s arms.
It’s nice here. They’re so much smaller than him, but that never stops them from being enveloping. And their knees press perfectly against the backs of his thighs, and their toes poke precisely against his calves, and everything about them is so warm and so soft, the kind of feelings he thought he’d never get to have. Their slow quiet snores sound like what he thinks the ocean would sound like, full of life, relentless, soothing.
He’s never seen the ocean, never seen the tides, and that’s alright.
He was lucky enough to have this while he did, and it’s okay that it’s ending. He’ll make do without.
If there’s anything Evan Kelmp really knows, it’s hunger. His own. Something else’s. He knows how it feels to be inches away from something that wants nothing more than to consume you. He knows how it feels to have an empty stomach burn like it will consume itself if you don’t eat something anything now.
He knows that his body can ignore it if he has to. And he knows that the worst hunger pains he’s ever felt are after he’s been able to find just a bite.
He’s never been able to regret it, the single moment of pleasure of half a handful of chips from an abandoned bag, no matter the cramps it would cause later.
He doesn’t regret it now, on the precipice of being alone again, taking his last fill before he’ll be hungry, starving, again. It might make the cramps worse later, but the taste of this, of family on six in his mouth, of ‘I love you’ in a shared bed, it’ll linger like the taste of chips.
K shifts in their sleep but doesn’t pull away. Yet.
—
When they wake up it’s to something… shiny in their eyes. Very white and sharp…
Sunlight. A lot of it, through the window. It’s late in the morning. Too late.
They should get up, back to work, but instead their eyes squeeze shut again.
The sunlight is warm actually, despite the low temperature outside. The whole bed is warm. Evan is still here. She didn’t realize that she thought he wouldn’t be until this relief.
Overnight she’d climbed him slightly, tugged him onto his back and tucked into his side. His arm cradles her close. His hand strokes through her still slightly damp air-dried hair, tentatively like he doesn’t want to wake her, but he can’t help himself.
She needs a way to split her brain and her body, to leave herself here forever but project just enough of her consciousness into the internet to do the things she needs to do but have this still.
“K?” Evan says, his voice croaky from sleep.
“You’re missing work,” they note, even as they lean into his hand.
“It’s fine.”
Maybe it is fine. Maybe he means it this time.
They inch their eyes open, enough to take in his face in the golden light, something they haven’t seen in a while. Evan might look most natural in shadow, in pale light, but he looks beautiful like this too, in gold. It makes his hair look like the richest brown, catches the faintest flecks of color in his black irises.
She pushes towards him but can only crane her neck so far without actually moving. There’s a beat of hesitation, a hiccup, a stutter, but he does close the distance for her, hand setting against the back of her neck as he presses his mouth to hers.
It’s slow, tentative, not nearly as awkward as their early kisses but maybe as unsure.
Even still, it is a compelling point in favor of meatspace.
An eager hum builds in her chest as Evan smooths a hand down her side, pets gently at the base of her skull, handles her in that delicate precise way that makes her blood go electric. Each smart twist of his lips feels like… Angst with a Happy Ending, Miscommunication, Idiots in Love.
Her fingers trace along his sides and his shoulders and his cheeks and twitch with energy like typing, drafting the way through a fic or a reply or a post or an algorithm. The right answer can pour out of her, if she just types enough. If she gets it all out as fast as possible, the core of the solution will be there.
When they part it’s almost accidental, just a slow slip away until there’s space between them again and the space stays.
Evan clears his throat.
“Um, I was thinking and…” he starts, face scrunching awkwardly. “It’s not really fair of me to expect you to call your parents about breaking the lease because then you’ll have to explain why and I know that you don’t really want to talk to them about what’s been going on or about going back to the US. And like, I still think that you should talk to your parents but that’s just my opinion and it’s not my place and obviously we had your parents sign because they were the only options which was a lot of pressure to put on you. Basically, I’m saying that if you don’t want to talk to your parents, I could hypothetically forge your parents’ signatures on the forms we need to fill out. That is something I want to offer but at the same time I want to articulate that I would obviously never forge your parents’ signature without your explicit consent but I also understand that it’s maybe an uncomfortable skill to employ at all. So it’s up to you but we have options.”
Right. K settles back into this moment, this morning. The headache from the sun, the itch of being off the web, the churning anger and sorrow in her chest at how this is going.
Hurt No Comfort. (Past) K Tanaka/Evan Kelmp. No beta we die like the last little corner of hope in your heart.
“Right,” she mutters. She rolls off him slowly, pulls her hands away from him and into her chest. “Um… I’ll think about that.”
Get angry, a corner of her brain suggests. You know how this goes. One big fight where it all boils over, where you raise your voice, where everything gets hot and passionate and brimming until you both explode back into each other, tongues battling for dominance, hot and heavy and on fire.
They roll off the bed instead.
Evan doesn’t like getting angry, it scares him to feel himself lose control of emotion like that even now. No, Evan likes to know exactly how he feels about things and how he feels about them is done.
No, if she says something mean but true, it won’t be hot, it’ll just be cold. If he says something, if he says those things he’s too polite to…
(You don’t love me enough, K; you’re not enough to fix any of this, K; there’s something wrong with you, K, because everything you feel and do rots into something broken.)
It’s not sexy. And she won’t want to kiss him, she’ll just want to cry.
“Thanks, Evan,” she says flatly instead. “For the offer.”
She scurries to the office and reopens her tab of Airstreams.
—
It’s a week and a half before K finishes packing.
They spend full eight-hour nights curled together in the bed, but barely talk during the day. Evan turns down a trip for Dr. B for the first and only time.
“Do you want to say goodbye?” K asks the dark one night, the night after they confirm their order of the Airstream. He’s wrapped around them this time, another reason they can ask at all, always able to be more vulnerable when he literally has their back.
“That’s okay,” Evan says, like they’re asking if he wants the last takeout dumpling.
They can’t tell if he means it or not. They can’t tell what’s worse.
When they leave it’s in the middle of the day while he’s at work. They leave a note, their hand struggling to work its way around writing with a pen, years out of practice, and their key.
They steal one of his Scuppers jerseys, leave their entire collection of scrunchies in his sock drawer, and then they’re gone.
Evan comes home to an empty apartment and wakes up in an empty apartment, and he can’t deny that in that rational practical way, it feels right.
—
They never actually said it, but when K parks the Airstream for the first night, they call Sam and start sobbing the second she picks up. “Evan and I broke up.”
“Oh, honey,” Sam says, exactly as K knew she would and it is every bit the comfort they thought it would be, perfectly cliched even in the absurdity of sleeping in a van full of computer monitors.
It’s two days later when Evan, settling down to sleep on the used futon in the apartment’s living room despite having three bedrooms to choose from, gets a text from Jammer: hey man, heard you and K broke up? wanna talk?
And there they are, broken up, exes.
They skirt around each other in the group chat, but they are both still there, with vague update texts and birthday messages and the inside jokes from those first three months over and over.
Sometimes, when Evan can’t sleep, which is all the time, he scrolls back through the chat and pretends he doesn’t linger over their odd hour meme dumps and ‘miss you all’ voice memos. K’s consciousness is scattered across the web, but they always keep one tab open on the latest episode of Britain’s Got Magic and one on live updates of Roosevelt’s standings in the division. Evan Kelmp exists nowhere on the internet, but if there’s also always a widget up with the weather in Glasgow, it can blend into all of the other countless bits and bobs they track.
—
(Three years later, the Pilot Program settles down for a desperately needed sleep during the longest day ever.
It’s simple math to divide up watches so that everybody gets enough full rest. Evan, of course, insists he’ll stay up first. K takes the middle watch, more used to shorter sleeping stints.
They finish and wake Sam for the last watch, settle on the ground next to the air mattress and find themself facing down Evan’s back.
He’s not asleep. It’s almost a surprise that they can still tell. Almost.
“Evan?” they whisper, scooting closer so they don’t wake Jammer.
“Hmm?” he grunts.
“Why aren’t you sleeping?”
“Trying.”
“Oh.” They grimace. “Sorry.”
“S’okay.”
They settle more into the ground, tucking their curled hands beneath their head. For a moment they don’t close their eyes, just watch Evan’s back move with some nameless agitation. They know he’s going to speak again in the second before he does.
“Okay,” he exhales. “Okay, this… obviously this is a weird thing to ask, obviously, but I mean at this point, par for the course, right? Because of the circumstances and because ‘haha Evan’s being socially weird again’ but like obviously if it’s too weird then you’ll say so, and I’m… working on things so I’m just gonna ask anyway and then if it’s weird it’s not like the already weirdness of everything is going to hit a critical capacity because of it, right?”
“Right.”
He exhales like a wheeze. “Great. Okay.”
“I think you should just ask.”
He twitches again with the effort of forcing the question out.
“Could you… hold me?” he grits out.
There’s a strange tripping sort of shock, to hearing him say the thing they secretly hoped he would in a place so far deep in them that they didn’t even know until he said it.
It is a weird thing to ask, not weirder than everything else but maybe even weirder because of everything else. They start to double check, to “Are you sure?” before catching themselves.
Evan looks mildly constipated with the effort of even asking. Evan has never asked them for anything.
He’s sure.
“Okay,” they answer like it’s that simple.
Maybe it can be. They wiggle across the dirt until they’re close enough to drape an arm around his waist. They don’t press into his neck, don’t fit themselves against his back the way they would have three years ago. Evan doesn’t take their hand, but does lean back against them, just a little, just enough.
“This is so weird,” he exhales, like a laugh, but they can feel tension melt out of him.
“The weirdest,” they agree and close their eyes. There’s a delirious relief here, in finally feeling like they’re doing something right. In trusting for a second that if it stops being right that Evan will tell them. And until then they can hold him and get some much needed sleep.)