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It's fate, or destiny, or at least something to do with the stars, because the piece of paper he holds crumpled in his clammy hand has led him to what might be the only place that's felt like home in years. (Since the small whitewashed cottage with tomato plants on the windowsills, maybe, or the one two houses after that that had the sort of fence you make friends over.) It's cramped, certainly, and has that distinct air of second- or third-best that everything at Backupsmore carries, but a home only needs something like tomatoes or a fence to make it feel right; the space is neatly split into two by the carpet pattern (gaudy patterns reminiscent of bowling alleys against subdued concentric circles, and he doesn't mind at all that he's left with the former), and on the side of the room that has already been settled into, someone stands in appraisal of a poster they've finished putting up a few seconds ago. Unless this is the wrong room (and he hopes, sweatily, that it's not), this must be his roommate. Stanford Something, freshman, who he can see has a taste for sweater vests, leather-bound books, and—borderline sensual posters of scientists, apparently. (He can't fault his taste, Fiddleford admits to himself. Carl Sagan's eyes burn into his soul, but in a reassuring sort of way.) He blinks.
"Uh, howdy! I'm your roommate," he says, miraculously smoothly and without cracks, but his looping and ungainly accent still manages to make him almost falter in the face of someone new. "Fiddleford McGucket." His name and voice combined makes him sound thoroughly southern and out of place in a university, he knows, and hopes (even more sweatily than before) that Stanford Something doesn't agree, that he might finally have someone who sees past the too-circular syllables and actually listens to the words. The world seems to crawl reluctantly by, even though it's only half a second before Stanford I-really-should-have-remembered-his-name Something turns to him, startled, and like he wasn't expecting anyone; his smile is just barely too late, so Fiddleford tactfully pretends not to notice that it doesn't reach his eyes. But Stanford maybe-it-started-with-a-P Something does smile, and that makes a good majority of the sweatiness rise out of Fiddleford's hands and hopes, and he lets his suitcase fall to the floor with a muffled thud.
"Stanford Pines. So good to meet you, Fiddleford!" Warm, and full, and husky enough to actually make him think the word husky—nobody outside of a cheap romance novel should use that word, not in the real world—all in all, a completely unfair voice to be greeted with. He can feel his cheeks going red, so he crouches hastily down to his luggage and starts to busy himself in unpacking, before he sees that Stanford Pines is holding a hand out in greeting and he's lying to everyone involved if he says he doesn't very much want to touch that hand.
So he takes it and smiles back sincerely and makes a valiant effort not to look smitten, but he doesn't miss the flicker of fear that passes across his roommate's face. Did I mess something up already? Why is he—Oh. It's not just fear, then, it's that refrain of please-don't-hate-me that Fiddleford is so familiar with feeling every time he opens his mouth. He ensures that the handshake carries on for exactly as long as it should, and he doesn't pull his arm back to his chest like so many others must have done, and he smiles with his eyes.
"Y'know, I've never had a six-fingered handshake before." (I'd very much like to have one again, because your hands make me feel like home, he doesn't say.) "It must be a full finger friendlier than normal, I reckon."
And oh, this time the smile isn't late, and it's so full of relief and gratitude that Fiddleford wants to keep it inside his chest forever.
The rest of the moving-in passes in a blur of discussion about majors and that resigned tone of voice that inevitably creeps in when talking about how one ended up at Backupsmore: through one unfortunate factor or another, it's never a first choice. Stanford is cagey when it comes his turn to share, and his face falls back into that expression of fear and reticence. "Family issues. I was down for West Coast Tech, but—you know." Fiddleford notices the way Stanford curls his hands in the shirt he's folding until his knuckles turn white, and politely looks away from his suddenly wet-bright eyes. "Anyway, Backupsmore is fine. I've heard the library here is pretty extensive, so you might not see me for a while." There's a short, false bark of a laugh which Fiddleford takes as a cue to meet his gaze again. He doesn’t, just yet, though.
“Financial issues for me, mainly. My ma couldn’t really afford to send me to anything more prestigious than this, see, but I’m not complaining. Anywhere I can find a roommate willing to put up with me and a professor that can teach me something new is good enough for me, I reckon.” He smiles at the ground, at the clashing colours, and doesn’t add But it sure would help if I wasn’t stumbling around like a kid with a crush, because sometimes you can feel these things in your bones before they really begin. “I mean, as long as you are willing to put up with me, Stanford.”
His tone is light, but there’s always the hint that it isn’t a joke—and there’s something in common already, past the surface-level things like how they both love Dungeons Dungeons and More Dungeons and probably would have met in the club if they hadn’t been assigned to living with each other, or the way they both open up a bit when there’s maths and science in the air: they both know what it’s like to be on the outside. They’ve both felt it deep enough in their stomachs, that slow-burning twist of exclusion, to put up the appropriate defences of sarcasm and distance and not really caring, no, not at all. They’ve both felt it enough to recognise it in each other, and to want to never cause that kind of hurt themselves; they’re both too guarded and too tender at the same time, and maybe that’s why they fall into such an easy rhythm together.
“Only as long as you can cope with me staying up until some ridiculous hour of the morning and swiping your spare pencils, mind,” Stanford replies, and brushes past him on his way out of the door to his Introduction to Quantum Physics lecture, hanging back just a moment to send a smile over his shoulder into the dorm (and right to Fiddleford’s stomach, where it does a happier equivalent to fester for the next week) and Fiddleford thinks he could probably pinpoint that as the moment he knew college would be alright, after all. Let it never be said that Fiddleford McGucket can’t find the silver lining in a veritable tornado of four years of disappointment and compromise .
Before he knows it, they’re living together again.
It’s different, of course, to live in a house rather than a cramped dorm (made no roomier, mind you, by the stacks of books and papers that Stanford had always insisted on storing on every available surface), because a house is—well, a house, and college is not that. The word house has a sort of magic to it that makes you feel like an adult proper, rather than a child playing at being grown-up; a house is made up of simple things, and those come together to make something altogether strange and terrifying, in the way that he wants to grab hold of it and never let go. Although, he thinks, that terror might also have something to do with that university crush that has thoroughly overstayed its welcome, and the fact that he loses all of his precious-gathered words whenever Stanford so much as touches his arm. But it’s easier to blame it on the space around them, rather than his own (thoroughly unscientific, not at all mathematically feasible) feelings.
Working on the portal is nice, really. It’s hard work, which he likes; he enjoyed making his own computers, and he still has some hopes that when this is over he can go back to Palo Alto and make himself a fortune. (He thinks about a future, sometimes, where he wears turtleneck sweaters and is famous and Fiddleford Computermajigs has a place in every household. The sweaters are integral to his success, but he might be swayed on the company name, if he was pressed.) Even if he has his doubts about the safety of the project or how Stanford managed to produce these grand blueprints that sometimes seem to have something otherworldly in their equations, he enjoys this little slice of technology and daring in the woods with his friend, and he only lies awake some nights, listening to the even breathing coming from the room down the hall.
So of course he notices the nights where the breathing isn’t there, and it’s replaced by a hushed conversation. (This isn’t his world, he thinks. Demons aren’t his business. Stanford knows what he’s doing.) So of course his eyes linger on the blood on Stanford’s skin some mornings, or on the jagged-edged absence he cuts some nights when he only comes home at the break of day. (Whatever he does, or shares, or experiences with Bill isno concern of Fiddleford’s.) So of course it comes to the kitchen table one morning when Stanford is bleeding out of his gums and nonchalantly trying to pretend the corners of his mouth aren’t rust-red. (At least it’s not like the afternoon when his eyes were too wide and yellow and his smile was too brittle and his voice was like glass shards in the air, he thinks.)
But there is something in the air, or his voice, or his smile, this morning.
“Morning, Fiddleford!” Oh, there’s something, alright: a subtle tightness in Stanford’s syllables, and the way he sits down too quickly. The chair scrapes across the floor slightly as he pulls his knees neatly under the table; he grabs the folded newspaper and shakes it open, eyes flicking across the pages in a passable attempt at pretending to read it.
Fiddleford puts down his coffee carefully and folds his hands together. “You know that’s upside down, right?” And there’s blood in your mouth, again, and don’t you ever wonder what a demon wants with your body, he doesn’t say.
What he can see of Stanford’s cheeks turns pink, just barely. “Oh! Yes—of course!” He refolds the paper, messily, and replaces it just out of reach of his twitch-click fingers. Fiddleford's seen him anxious enough times to know that this isn't his ordinary, sleepless-nights and calculations-spinning-in-his-eyes anxiety; there's an undercurrent of a dawning realisation in his bitten lips, and, if he tilts his head just so, he thinks he can see Stanford's eyes jitter-resting on him too many times in the span of a minute. (Wishful thinking, maybe, but after being love-sick and love-lost for years on end, he thinks he deserves to wish on the shooting stars he sees when their eyes meet.)
And then. And then, with the air of someone hurtling from a cliff and pretending there's a safety net at the bottom, Stanford reaches over the geometric-patterned tablecloth and slides his fingers across Fiddleford's. The coffee is, in this singular moment, very hot next to his knuckles.
His heart does a funny sort of hop-skip into the vicinity of his mouth, and his jaw suddenly goes very still in an effort not to bite through a ventricle, or an artery, or— or—the red-gray rest of it, contracting like clockwork: he doesn’t know enough about biology. It was never his strong suit, and wouldn’t that be tragic, the untimely end of Fiddleford Hadron McGucket turning out to be him slumped on the kitchen table because Stanford Pines touched his hand and gave him heart failure, or whatever the technical term for eating your own heart is, and he wouldn’t even know what part of the soft meat he bit into. His funeral would be a sordid affair, tearful eulogies all around, and the only one not crying would be his high school science teacher, somehow managing to mutter and exclaim at the same time, “Oh, if only he’d paid attention in Biology, rather than going off to dance with theoretical mathematics and portals and strange New Jersey men. How terrible, and sad, and so on.” Fiddleford almost says all of this out loud, and then remembers he isn’t talking so as not to pierce his heart (which is somehow still beating uncomfortably fast, even with it being firmly entrenched in the back of his mouth), and he thinks, It wouldn’t do to have both of us bleeding out the mouth, would it now? and he almost says that, too, but doesn’t. Stanford moves slightly, pressing the flat of his palm against the back of Fiddleford’s trembling, bird-in-a-cage hand, and then his heart dips from his mouth to somewhere near what he imagines to be his spleen, and the world turns sideways a bit. Are spleens a real thing, do you think, because I don’t know enough about biology to understand why my heart can keep beating when it’s next to my teeth, and I don’t know what a spleen even is, or does, really, but I’m sure you know all about spleens and hearts and everything else besides, do you? He almost says this as well, and only stops himself when the plane of everything tips a little more and then rights itself, dizzyingly straight, as Stanford removes his hand—jerks it back so quickly there's a jolt in Fiddleford's throat—and rests it on the table. No more heart behind his teeth or next to his spleen, he thinks, and takes an even breath to calm it where it sits, resolutely inside his ribcage.
"Sorry—that was—I mean, I don't know what I was doing. Just—" Stanford stammers and his eyes rove around the room as if he can find a suitable explanation in the wallpaper. It remains simple patterns and glue and refuses to give any answers to the situation, as wallpaper is wont to do. "Forget I did that. It never happened. Good morning, Fiddleford, it's a lovely day, isn't it?"
Oh. Oh. God, he must have thought I—
"No! I— I mean, yes, it's a lovely day. Sunny and temperate and all that. But—no, I don't think I can forget. You doing that, that is." The words rise clumsily, and it's not the first time he inwardly curses his southern accent for looping around the sounds, sentences falling inelegant in the air, but there’s a laugh twisting through all of his maybe-confession, too. "Do—are you really that inobservant, Stanford? You've known me for this long, and you haven't seen the way I—lose everything when you get close to me? I go all wobbly and red; it's disgraceful, really." He's rambling, again, like always, but he keeps his gaze fixed on Stanford and he grabs tight onto that unfurling hope he sees in his eyes and lets it take root in his heart, or his spleen, or wherever feelings are meant to grow.
His laughter—unadulterated by demons or stress—is one of the most beautiful things Fiddleford has ever heard. "Pretty pathetic excuse for a scientist, aren't I? If it took me this long to—you know, and it's not like I even realised it alone." (His blood freezes a bit, at the reminder that there's more than two in this world of theirs.) "I think it was something he noticed when he was glancing over my memories, or my stream of consciousness. Said it was adorable that I hadn't thought about it more. I guess I'm just not—good at this whole thing. Love, and so on." There's a vaguely frosty silence, for a moment, at least on Fiddleford's end; he supposes it's rather tropical on the other side of the table. But he steels himself, emotionally, and smiles through the cold. “It’s not as cliche as love at first sight, I guess, but when you work together with someone as long as we have, you tend to, um. Think about them a lot, even if you don’t realise it. I should probably apologise, honestly, because if I took my head out of the clouds once in a while I might have noticed that I’d fallen pretty viscerally in love with you ages ago.”
(It surely means something that he’s barely upset at the idea of however many missed months or years they could have had, but he’s having trouble forming any coherent thoughts around the elephant in the room with the word love imprinted on its inconvenient grey bulk.)
Somehow he manages to squeeze out some words, even with a trace of humour in them, although his brain is doing a spectacular job on autopilot. "Are we supposed to kiss, then? Not like I'm much better at it, considering my track record." The word divorce hangs in the air, unsaid, and Fiddleford's brow creases slightly like the echo of an official document.
"I suppose—for the sake of experimentation, and discovery, and science and whatever else, that yes, we should. If you want to."
Of course I want to, you fool of a scientist, Fiddleford doesn’t say, because he doesn’t want to be the one who will ruin the mood, which is ripe for the ruining; let Stanford be the horrible mood-ruiner, at least this time, and they can work out a schedule for the future. And those are his last orderly thoughts for nearly a minute, because now they’re leaning over the table, and then.
And then.
Kissing Stanford fills his lungs with galaxies and constellations and the cold vacuum in between, and he thinks that the solar system makes a nice home for itself between his ribs. (Somewhere in his chest, Carl Sagan watermarks the starry sky.)
He can even look past the blood, which is probably staining his own teeth by now.
Somehow they end up kneeling together on the hardwood floor, foreheads pressed together and twenty-two fingers in total ghosting over shoulders, at the nape of a neck, curled in the soft hair behind Stanford's ears. It all feels unreal, and yet so shockingly clear at the same time, and he thinks it's like coming up from the water when the sun is setting and the air hums with magic. They both silently take it in, and then Stanford dips his hands to his lap, and his gaze to his assistant's—partner's? —clavicle. There's a tiny ink stain there on his skin and a religious fervour behind Stanford’s eyes when he looks at it. He takes a deep breath.
"I don't know why you'd bother with me, honestly. I've got—there's just stars where my common sense should be. I can't cook, you know that, and I probably steal all the blankets at night and we'll argue about whether something is an anomaly or I just need more coffee, and you're better than I am at maths." The words fall haphazard in the air between their faces and he smiles through it, frantic, hungry. "I'll take you to the spaceship and set something on fire and forget to eat the lunch you packed. God, Fiddleford, I didn't even notice what was staring me in the face for the better part of a year, and before that as well, if you count college. You're the smartest man I know and I can't understand why you'd—" And Fiddleford cuts him off with a laugh and kisses him again, setting electricity through both of their nervous systems, until they're a storm cell all their own on the kitchen floor.
Loving someone, he thinks, is like freedom in the same way that falling from a roof is flying; the same way that melting into autumn is a fire sparking to life; the same way that blood in your mouth is friendship: for all the pretense that it's something different, he knows that the end is always the same.
But the meat of it, the torso of the beast, he can wrap his arms around and hold on until it slips away. He can avoid rationalising it, and let himself enjoy the shared touches and looks and words, and he can let it fill him up so there's stars under his skin, just for now.