Chapter Text
Milo had never had very good luck.
Everyone who knew him, even just a little - everyone who had even heard of him - knew this about him. Milo was a bad luck magnet. The opposite of a rabbit’s foot. Broken mirrors occurred in his house every day, often multiple 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠 a day. He was a black cat walking under a ladder indoors with an open umbrella. He was a jinx. He was cursed. So was his father. It was just a thing. A little thing called Murphy’s Law, which stated that, at any given moment, anything that could ever possibly go wrong in that moment, would indeed go wrong.
Especially around Milo.
But after dealing with this little condition all his life, he was used to it. He had his never ending backpack with three times as many items as he could ever need - and he had pretty much used them all. But he never let it get him down. He knew that anything that happened wasn’t his fault. He knew that there wasn’t anything he could do to change it - but he was okay with that. In fact, he didn’t want to change it. Life without Murphy’s Law would be boring. Why ride the bus to school when you could run through the woods chased by a herd of stampeding wildebeests in tuxedos being ridden by monkeys playing yellow flugelhorns at 8:30 in the morning? It was way more fun. Dangerous - he had ended up with a sprained ankle, and neither Zack nor Melissa had gotten away completely unscathed either - but so much more fun. Milo loved Murphy’s Law. It made life interesting. And he was always prepared for any eventuality. There had hardly been a time where a situation actually caught him off guard.
Which was why he was awake at 2:51 in the morning on a Tuesday, laying spread-eagle on his back on the floor, staring up at the ceiling with a giddy smile, eyes glazed and thoughts racing.
Milo was finally out of his comfort zone.
For a normal person, that would be scary. But not for Milo. No, being out of his comfort zone meant he had finally run into something genuinely surprising. Which meant life was about to get even more interesting than normal.
He was in love.
And this wasn’t just his previous little middle-school-level-crush-on-Amanda attraction, no. This was full-on giddy thoughts, blushing smiles, twitching fingers, lovestruck puppy kind of attraction.
This was 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒.
It was beautiful, overflowing, captivating, enchanting, clumsy-footed light-headed ditzy-brained absolutely-over-the-moon kind of love.
He was absolutely, positively, 𝑠𝑚𝑖𝑡𝑡𝑒𝑛.
And it was 𝑤𝑜𝑛𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑓𝑢𝑙.
Milo had never felt love like this before. He had never been as absolutely infatuated with a single person as he was now - not when he had a small crush on Melissa in elementary school, not when he realized he liked Amanda, not during any other crush he’d ever had before. This was the first time he had ever experienced such true, raw passionate 𝑙𝑜𝑣𝑒 for one person. One special, beautiful, absolutely 𝑎𝑚𝑎𝑧𝑖𝑛𝑔 person that he adored with all his unlucky heart. A person he had never expected to fall in love with, but wasn’t exactly surprised, nor was he complaining at all. A new person, who had come into his life unannounced, who had simply appeared one day and made his entire existence a hundred times better. A 𝑏𝑜𝑦.
Milo Murphy was in love with Zack Underwood.
And he was 𝑠𝑜 ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑦.
Milo didn’t even know he liked boys. He didn’t think it was possible for him to like boys - it was just never a thought that crossed his mind. He‘d only had girl crushes - how could he like boys if all his crushes had been female?
But then one day, while out for pizza with his friends, Melissa had said something witty that was just so Melissa of her to say, making the boys laugh like they hadn’t in a while. When his laughter fit was over, in a fleeting moment of sudden giddiness, Milo had looked over at Zack. He had looked over for a single second. Just a quick, accidental glance.
And he had felt his heart melt.
In the dingy yellow light of the pizza parlor, with a muddied shirt and a scrape on his cheek and a glimmer in his eye and a laugh on his lips, Zack had looked absolutely 𝑏𝑒𝑎𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑓𝑢𝑙.
Milo was blushing when he turned away.
He had realized then that he had been sneaking glances at Zack far more often than he realized. That his skin tingled wherever Zack touched him and it had been happening for a while now. That Zack’s laugh continued to ring in his ears hours after he heard it. That Zack’s smile was burned into his brain so perfectly he could see it clearly in his head. He had realized then that these things had been happening for a long time. But was only then that it dawned on him just how hard he had fallen.
He had absolutely 𝑝𝑙𝑢𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑡𝑒𝑑, and he was still falling fast.
He was used to falling. He had been in way too many situations where free-falling through the air was safer than any other option, and he had always come out from it okay. But this time was different. This time, he was just falling, with no way to stop himself. This time, he was completely out of control.
But as he laid there on the hardwood floor at 3:07 AM Tuesday morning, doing snow-angels with zero snow in sight, absolutely overflowing with nothing but affection and wonder and joy for his best friend, Milo thought that maybe, just this one time, he was okay with being out of control.
His life, his happiness, was in Zack’s hands.
And he wouldn’t have it any other way.