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Sean takes a seat next to Finn on the log and cracks open the beer he’s offered. He listens to Finn ramble, no more family… knew I had to cut everything off… start over all for myself . He notices how Finn stares straight ahead, stooped and hunched, never meeting Sean’s gaze while he spills his thoughts in that ever present slow and steady drawl. He tries not to watch too closely or too intensely, glancing peripherally until it strains.
Sean wonders how he can possibly help a caged animal without it running away the second he tries to inch inside.
Finn finally looks at him, waiting for an answer to a question that he didn’t hear. Sean is the one to break eye contact this time, angry with himself for the constant anxiety rising steadily inside of him. He desperately hopes that Finn can’t feel it, too.
“Finn…” Sean hesitates to bring up the words that he’s had to ask too many times.
Chris, it’s none of my business…
Lyla… are you and your mom okay?
Finn’s eyebrows furrow as he cocks his head, his thick hair swaying with the motion and mirroring the image of a dog that doesn’t understand what it’s hearing, why Sean isn’t responding like how he probably should.
“I know that it’s, none of my business, but… is everything okay with you and Cassidy?” Sean asks quietly.
Finn immediately looks away again when Sean’s eyes flick back up to him. The easy, open expression and soft half-smile he always seems to wear around Sean shutters behind a blank mask. His hands drop from their normal sphere of wild expressiveness to dangle between his legs, cracking his knuckles and then spinning his rings.
“Yeah,” Finn finally says, “Why wouldn’t it be?”
Sean pauses, struggling to find a way to word what he wants—needs—to say to Finn, what he feels in his gut and what his gut had been correct about every other time. Finn’s shoulders bow forward as the silence stretches on.
“I’m sorry, man.” Sean shifts more to face Finn on the log, wanting to stretch a hand out to his shoulder, to try returning the casual affection that Finn showers onto him. But, Sean doesn’t. He only turns just the slightest bit more until his knee is lightly touching Finn’s.
Finn’s face is hidden by his hair hanging down around him, but Sean can still feel his focus turn towards that one point of contact, that tiny spot that ties them, a speck of nothing compared to what Sean wishes he could say or do. Sean would transfer all of his thoughts through the soft press of bone on bone if he could, make it easier to wade through this conversation, and he would risk the potential embarrassment of Finn hearing just how much he lives in Sean’s thoughts if it could help in even the smallest way.
“I just…” Sean stutters, and then hates himself for it when he can feel Finn taking a deep breath, like he’s preparing to interrupt.
“Does she always react like that?” Sean rushes out before Finn could take that chance to jump in.
Finn exhales a small huff, what could be a silent laugh if there was any humor in it.
“When I’m being a fuckin’ idiot, yeah,” Finn replies, finally looking up at Sean through the corner of his eyes, lips slightly quirked in a twisted grimace that is begging to come through a broken mirror looking like a smile, instead.
“She said that, you just need your ass kicked, once in a while.”
Finn flinches back, a full body twitch that rolls up his spine, eyes darting away and then back too quickly. And when he sees that Sean is still close—still watching while trying not to—Finn attempts to lean further back into the recoil and turns at the waist to look behind the log they’re sitting on, as if that was what he intended in the first place. He rummages around a pile of beer cans back there, but they’re all crushed and empty.
“Yeah, well,” Finn says to the air behind them, “Prob’ly deserve it sometimes, that’s for sure.”
Sean struggles with hesitation, again, perpetually searching for the perfect words and so rarely finding them in time.
“Why’d you bring this up, Sean?” Finn asks evenly, turning around to actually face him and resettling with defensiveness poking through the cracks of his normal affability.
Because I can’t stop seeing the look on your face when Cassidy threw her hands up at you. Because I feel this stillness around you, frozen and lingering, from when you shrunk back. Because I saw her hand grab you so quickly, grip your arm so tightly, all I wanted was to snap her back and replace it with something softer, with whatever I had to do to bring your stupid smile back.
Because I care about you. Probably too much.
“Because…” Sean thinks back to what he said to Chris, to Lyla, to Daniel after his nightmares, to his dad when Sean accidentally stumbled onto him crying in the garage late one night when he was supposed to be in bed.
“You’re not alone.”
Finn squints at him through the cracks growing deeper and spreading wider across his mask.
Sean continues, “You said that you’re always trying to find a new—or new bros, I guess. And, I just hoped you knew that you have me. Or anyone, I mean. Like I know Daniel already thinks of you as bros. Definitely more than he sees me. I just…” He trails off, hoping that his frustration and inner eye roll at himself hadn’t shown outwardly.
“You’re not alone, and... I’m here, always.”
Sean lifts his hand up between them, but awkwardly lets it hang there when he realizes he doesn’t know what to do with it.
Thankfully, Finn meets him halfway and takes it, holding his hand tightly from below—the clasped grip of one trying to pull another from falling off the edge of a cliff. Sean feels as if one falls over then the other will have to follow, tumbling down together. He’s past the point of being able to let go and just walk away.
“You know,” Sean stops and inhales slowly, why can I never just fucking spit it out, for once in my life. “Brothers, or sisters, aren’t supposed to make you feel scared.”
Finn’s hand twitches, nails digging into Sean’s skin, before relaxing just as quickly.
“They don’t,” he says, “I told you, man, my brothers spoiled the shit out of me.” He looks away, gazing distantly out at something Sean could never see, tightening his grip. “Tryin’ to protect me from my dad when I fucked up, but still corrected my shit so I wouldn’t make that same mistake later,” his voice falls into a mumble at the end.
“I mean, they at least kinda tried to keep me fuckin’ safe, unlike our old man. Look where he got us, got me.”
What about your "sis’?"
Sean wishes he could skip the struggling thoughts and stuttering questions, wishes he could reach inside of Finn’s beautiful brain to gently coax out the things that he’s saying without saying, wrap around him until the lingering cloud of long stale fear dissipates and they are free from the weight of these words.
“But, is Cassidy the same?” Sean asks.
Finn’s head lolls side to side, silently exasperated. “What does that have to do with anything?” he asks, still with that slow, low drawl that never seems to leave his voice.
But then with a small jolt, Finn twines their fingers together, the chill of his rings contrasted by the warmth between them. Sean isn’t sure if it’s a distraction or a diversion, or how to even respond, so Finn continues without him.
“Sweetheart, look.” Sean’s heart flips in his chest at Finn’s words. “I’m sorry for that dumbass idea, I shouldn't've brought it up. I love the little man, love you guys, wouldn’t want anything to ever happen to you. Just wish I could do something more for you. You guys deserve… more than this shit life gave you ‘n more than it could ever repay you back.”
Finn pulls their intertwined hands in towards himself more, resting them on his leg. With his opposite hand he reaches across to lay it on Sean’s knee, broadening that first point of contact that Sean was so nervous and took so long to initiate. Familiar ease and comfortable affection returning home.
The movement turns his shoulders into Sean, bringing him ever closer, bringing more attention to Sean’s nerves than before. Can he see it in Sean’s eyes or hear it in his breath, the fear that he’ll move in even closer, the fear that he won’t?
I think I love you, too, Sean would say if this was a sketch in his notebook and not real life.
Sean can’t keep eye contact this close, but can’t break it anymore either, not when it’s so hard won.
Sean murmurs into the quiet breaths shared between them, “You just… you deserve more, too. You don’t need them to correct your shit, dude. Whatever bullshit correction they do.
“You don’t need to be punished to deserve love,” Sean breaks into a whisper.
Finn looks up him with eyes blown wide, stunned, a shaky breath inward, a hard exhale right onto Sean’s lips. His mouth slowly twitches back up into that soft half-smile, the genuine one he reserves just for Sean.
A long, much too long, pause. Wind in the trees and voices far away.
A rhythmic beating.
“You don’t make it any easier, sweetie,” Finn says quietly, finally, shifting forward.
“Make what easier?” Sean asks, distantly confused and trying his hardest not to flush at the pet name.
“Me…” Finn laughs under his breath. “Always getting obsessed over the people I meet.”
Finn lets go of his knee—no, too soon, come back—and touches Sean’s chest, a light tapping through his hoodie onto his wildly beating heart.
Oh.
“I’m sorry,” Finn says while leaning even further forward, not looking sorry in the slightest.
Sean can’t stop himself from looking down at Finn’s lips, the way his face is slightly shadowed from where Sean is blocking the lights, as they are pulled closer together in the way that the moon is always pulled by the sun. Sean has always seen Finn as the sunshine filtering through the curtains of his dark room, as the daylight that brings him out of his tent and into the warmth of a family, of a place that he can stop running away from and instead run towards for once. But, the way that Finn looks at him now, Sean feels himself being thrown into the sky, flying high, but tethered safe—grounded by someone who’s been searching for a glimpse of the sun himself.
An eclipse, solar or lunar it doesn’t matter, they still find each other eventually.
Finn’s slow inching into his space—the gentle, never ending push into an embrace that Sean has been craving since the moment they met, the moment Finn first leaned towards him—pauses. Sean hears his breath stop in the silence hanging between them, and Finn must’ve heard it, too.
“What are you afraid of?” Finn whispers.
“Nothing.”
They meet in the middle, an eclipse falling into place, the sun’s kiss upon the horizon of a dark night.
Sean hardly notices Finn letting go of his hand, as Finn’s arm comes around his shoulder and he’s pulled in impossibly closer. Their noses bump, their heads tilt. Sean feels the slightest touch of Finn’s tongue before it’s drawn away too quickly. He brings his hand to Finn’s thigh, less like the friendly touch Finn had given him in the past and more of a tight clasp onto something he can’t risk ever letting go of. He tips up into Finn and feels a whisper of his tongue again, chasing it back and following Finn’s lead. Sean thinks he would follow Finn anywhere. He would follow Finn to Merrill’s if he had to. He would follow Finn back to all of his demons, protect Finn from his memories. What’s another punch to the eye? Sean wants to do whatever makes Finn happy, whatever pulls his hunched shoulders up and out and above all of the shit surrounding them.
Finn withdraws from the kiss, withdraws too far, lips leaving Sean’s and the arm slipping from his shoulders. But a hand tightens on Sean’s knee, gravity pulling him back down. And Sean notices how it’s trapped his arm underneath, feels where he still has a hold on Finn’s thigh. The trembling under his skin and the pounding of his heart and the warmth in Finn’s eyes stop any thoughts of Sean breaking that hold.
Finn sits silently for a moment, patient and waiting for Sean to find his words.
“I… kinda want to do that again.”
“Okay then, shut up and kiss me again, sweetheart.”
Sean chases the light.