When he’d arrived, he’d lived with a sort of promise of his life ending. When he drank, he drank to unmake himself; the cigarettes were a promise he swore, an oath, die fast, die painfully, die soon. Death in life—he’d operated with this assumption that all parts of him were destined to decay. And he wanted that, had wanted it so fiercely. He was tired of his name, his past, all of the things in him which he hated, all of those items of personal proof that he was worthless. And it had felt good to give in to that, to demand finality. A frenzied farewell.

And now—now he had Jack, up the hill, up the narrow stairs, tucked away in a shitty apartment with the crumbling plaster, the tiny shower, the cracked mirror like the fragmented pieces of their selves. The records they listened to together, and the sugar on the counter. And he didn’t want to follow up on that promise of death anymore; he figured he had something to live for.

In this half-awake moment, his muscles sore and languid, his mind taxed, nicotine, caffeine, he let himself ease into thoughts of Jack like slipping into the sea. Waves pulling him, taking him out, pushing him back to shore, back into his shell which had begun to splinter. Those thoughts carried him through the day like a secret in the back of his mind, a fire which he fueled with desire and his longtime longings met. Fulfilled.

Sometimes the days were hard, the nights confusing, Jack holding parts of himself back. They argued sometimes, screamed; Theo threw things and Jack stared at him with irate stubbornness. Theo knew that that might always be true—if they ever returned to Baltimore together, it might still be hard. It might take Jack some time to tell everyone, to let their childhood world in on this new thing, them, two pieces of one whole. To invite his friends and adoptive family into the new normal. Theo—he wasn’t sure what his own welcome would be, and his mother might be disappointed or angry or—and Jack’s friends, Margaret and Darius and Quinn, they might still resent him for the bastard he’d been.

But he would do it. He would apologize, he would humble himself, he would show that he had changed, he would stand in front of his mother and say, Yes, this is who I am, love me, or don’t. Because he had Jack. And everything else was just a step on their unified path.

His legs pumped, the long walk up the hill adding tension to his slow-moving flesh. He didn’t walk quickly; he delighted in this feeling, like being drunk, high, like waking up with the fatigue of too many manic days. Energy thrummed in him; he kept it collared.