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“Eiff—Doug, it’s your turn again. Wait, how many cards do you even have?”
Doug chuckled from behind his hand with all the menace of a six-year-old supervillain. “That’s for me to know and you to find out, Renée. Anyway, the theme is… retrograde amnesia.” The rest of the room went silent for a long moment, until Lovelace cleared her throat in a way that was supposed to be casual and failed utterly. “C’mon, guys, I can’t even joke about this stuff?”
Minkowski’s laugh sounded painful, but her shoulders sagged a bit and she started shuffling through her cards. “I wish I were as good at it as you are, honestly.”
Jacobi bit his tongue and stayed out of the awkward exchange, knowing Minkowski would probably glare daggers at him no matter what he said. Instead, he perused his own hand, which was down to only the creepiest of pictures at this point—not pleasant to look at, especially sleep-deprived and tipsy as he was, but they always made Doug laugh. In the end, he chose one that would get the best reaction from Doug, only to lose the round by a landslide when everyone went with Hera’s card. He was still convinced that she was manipulating them somehow.
Sweeping the round’s cards to the side, Doug stood up and stretched his lanky arms out behind him. “Anyone need some water? More cake? A stick of dynamite, Daniel?”
To his own chagrin, Jacobi felt his face heat. “If you can get away with it—”
“We’re fine,” Minkowski cuts in. Apparently the chance that Jacobi was serious was just too significant to ignore. “Thanks, though. Are you—oh.” Doug had already disappeared down the hallway and into the kitchen, leaving the attendees of his own birthday party to shuffle their cards and sip their drinks in awkward silence.
Minkowski had tried to convince him that he didn’t need to get them all drinks, but Doug swore up and down that it wouldn’t bother him; he didn’t remember his own alcoholism, so why should he care? As long as there weren’t extras around to tempt his curiosity. But Jacobi knew his false bravado when he saw it, knew the genuine fear in his eyes that flickered so often when Doug was confronted with something he thought he ought to know already. He was trying to push himself, and they all knew it.
So Jacobi wasn’t surprised when, thirty minutes later, there was still no sign of him. Lovelace had gotten bored of the card game right away and decided to play darts instead, using a decrepit copy of Pryce & Carter as a target. Minkowski still flinched at every throw, but they had a good time reading the absurd tidbits that their darts hit, and Jacobi would never complain about any excuse to destroy a little bit of Cutter’s legacy.
When Lovelace finally accepts defeat at the hands of their resident sharpshooter and settles back onto the sofa to gaze lovingly in Minkowski’s general direction while the other woman rambles about the resemblances between darts and harpoons, Jacobi slips away. He pauses with one hand in the doorway. “Hera, do you know where Doug went?”
“He’s not in the house, but that’s all I can give you,” she replied, her voice tender with concern. “I really wish the stupid HOA would let me put cameras around the block, but they keep saying it’s a ‘privacy issue’ and ‘very Big Brother’ and that I’m ‘gonna kill them all in their sleep’ as if—”
“Mhm. Yep, definitely zero precedent for that.” Jacobi has to stifle a laugh at the memory of Hera’s strongly-worded emails to the president of said homeowner’s association after they tried to reprimand them for their “egregious” use of lawn flamingos. He didn’t enjoy living in a shitty subdivision under any circumstances, but the sight of Lovelace lounging on a lawn chair absolutely surrounded by flimsy plastic flamingos, like an army of her own horrible pink minions, was almost worth it.
Before Hera could argue, Jacobi closed the door behind himself and took off down the block, heading in the direction that Doug usually went on his walks. After a few strides, he intentionally slowed his pace and focused on forcing himself to look calm and casual. It had only been two weeks since he reunited with the rest of the Hephaestus survivors, but his worry had only grown, even if he refused to admit it out loud. Minkowski, Lovelace, and Hera loved Doug so much and they did everything in their power to help bring him back into the modern world, but Jacobi could see the expectation lingering in their eyes every time they spoke to him. More importantly, he saw the way Doug would deflate, confused and frustrated, every time he failed to be the man they were expecting. And Jacobi wanted to do something, say anything, but who was he to get in the middle of this shit? He’d left. Even if he thought the others didn’t need him, he couldn’t ignore the way Minkowski’s face lit up with relief when he showed up on their doorstep, still dressed in the most funeral-appropriate clothes he could find after the weird ceremony for the only people in his life who had mattered.
Jacobi shook his head and pushed through a shiver at the thought. That was exactly why he couldn’t live alone right now—his ghosts were always waiting. Fuck if that didn’t sound ridiculously dramatic, but that didn’t make it any less true.
He had combed enough of the neighborhood to get genuinely concerned by the time he rounded a corner and found Doug. The other man was turned away from him, sitting on the curb beneath a flickering orange streetlight, hunched over to pluck random blades of grass from the ground beside himself. Apparently Jacobi had no control over his own feet, because he froze in place for longer than he had any right to, just staring at the harsh light outlining Doug’s curls like a ragged halo. His face was silhouetted so clearly against the dim sidewalk—his lips shifting like he was talking to himself, his tense brow, the bump in his nose where he’d broken it as a kid, doing something stupid that he could no longer remember. Jacobi soaked in every detail, then crammed them down into the hollow pit in his chest where he incinerated the rest of his emotions. Unfortunately, he had the feeling that these might come back up on their own.
Shaking off the thought, he stepped onto the pavement and around to Doug’s other side to avoid startling him before he sat down. “Too festive for you?”
Doug just shrugged and kept trying to braid a few blades of grass together. They kept breaking every time he tugged on one too hard, and his muttered curses made Jacobi’s stomach flip. After another couple of minutes, he gave up and brushed all the bits of grass off his lap, then turned toward Jacobi. “Did Renée send you to track me down?”
“Nope. Neither did Hera, though she’s apparently determined to turn the neighborhood into her own little surveillance state.”
“Yeah, she’s not used to living in something so… small.” Doug smiled down at his hands, but his eyes were still unfocused. “You just wanted some time alone with the birthday boy, then?”
Jacobi schooled his face into a neutral reaction, even though he could feel his ears flushing red. “Just didn’t want you getting lost in suburban hell. It’s dangerous out here. There could be—” he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper “— straight people.”
Doug really laughed at that, and Jacobi tried not to imagine how ridiculous he looked, grinning along at his own joke. “I think I can fight ‘em off.”
“Hmm.” Now that he was next to Doug, he noticed the way the harsh sodium vapor light turned his deep brown eyes nearly golden, and he quickly stuffed that thought somewhere he’d never find it again. “If you’re not actually battling the heterosexual hordes, then what are you doing out here?”
He sighed, and Jacobi absolutely did not think about the fact that he looked beautiful when his eyes crinkled at the corners. Daniel Jacobi did not use words like “beautiful” when describing other people in general. “I love them. So much. I’m so glad that I have people like Renée and Isabel to live with, and who knows where I’d be without Hera, but— fuck, I’m never gonna be who they think I am, y’know? It’s like everything I say is… is wrong, not just ‘cuz I don’t have the stupid references to use instead of real words, I’m just not—they don’t—no one gets it, Daniel.” He blinked tears out of his eyes, until Jacobi, running on perhaps his dumbest instincts yet, leaned into his space and let his head fall onto Doug’s bony shoulder.
“I know.” He cleared his throat and didn’t think about why it suddenly felt so tight. “I mean, I don’t know, obviously, but I see what you’re talking about. And they—I—it’s—it sucks.”
Doug snorted a laugh and shook his head, which Jacobi thought was a dismissal until he realized that Doug’s hand had floated over to wrap around his shoulders. “You don’t have to apologize again. You’ve done that enough.”
“If you say so,” muttered Jacobi.
In lieu of responding, Doug just bumped his own head against Jacobi’s, which made him all the more painfully aware of the fact that they were downright cuddling on the side of the road in suburban hell. And he wasn’t complaining. Doug’s hair brushed his forehead in rhythmic swirls as the late-night breeze gusted past them, while his hand on Jacobi’s shoulder rested warm and comfortable, and all of a sudden Jacobi was hit by a freight train of a realization that he really does want you here. In his life. He might even feel—he might feel the same—like—
“Why’d you really come back, Daniel?” Doug’s voice was almost quiet enough to miss. “I know you didn’t run out of money. Unless you spent every waking moment at funerals and strip clubs.”
“Oh, you know me. Cultured connoisseur of exotic dance, Daniel Jacobi.” Doug snorted. “Is it really that weird that I’d want some damn friends on this stupid planet?”
He got no response for a long moment, and then Doug’s face tilted down toward his, and wow they were close. “Is that really all you wanted, though?”
Jacobi swallowed. “I have no idea what you mean.”
Looking back on it, he’d appreciate how clearly Doug telegraphed his movements, giving him plenty of time to stand up and turn tail if he wanted to, but how could he ever want to? And then Doug’s lips were on his, soft and just barely parted enough to taste a hint of pizza. Jacobi would laugh at that if he had the breath to do so. The hand on his shoulder held on a bit tighter, while Doug’s other hand found the back of Jacobi’s head and tangled in his hair. If Doug weren’t holding him so close, Jacobi was positive that he’d be shaking uncontrollably. As it was, Doug finally let him go around the time that Jacobi remembered that he actually had a nose to breathe through before he passed out altogether.
“How about that?” Doug murmured when Jacobi finally opened his eyes, unwilling to return to reality. “That what you were looking for?”
Jacobi’s mouth opened and closed a few times, still struggling to remember how air worked, until he found the first words that came to mind. “Shut up, Eiffel.”
If Doug’s laugh sounded like honey to his ears, well, no one had to know.