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Two promises are made, one is kept
The letter crinkled in his hands. Should he show it to Hyacinth? Should he keep it? His mom would want to frame it.
The seal was crisp and neat and he couldn’t stop running his hands over the patterns. The writing was printed to look like handwriting, but it didn’t fool him. They wouldn’t have had time to hand write his acceptance. He wanted to pretend that they did.
Hyacinth was standing on the school soccer field, by the track course. Apollo smiled when he saw it and stood next to him silently. The letter was in his hand. Should he leave it in his bag?
“I’m glad you made it.” It wasn’t as though he was cutting time out of his day for Hyacinth. That would be ridiculous. He had learned. Even when he panicked and he was sure a relationship was moving too fast and he wanted to sabotage, even then, he made time. And that had been happening more and more with Hyacinth. His fear was choking and it was consuming, but it hadn’t stopped him.
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Hyacinth returned, and the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled was the purest form of art. The letter rustled like a bad omen.
Apollo ignored it.
A year ago, on this same field, he had made a promise. Less than a year ago, really. The end of last term. June. He had been laying on the field with his hair soaking up highlights and Hyacinth beside him. Hyacinth’s eyes were closed, but he didn’t fool Apollo for a second.
“What are we going to do next year?” Hyacinth asked. His eyes opened. The sun hit them and they were nearly glowing. Apollo grinned.
“This.” He squeezed Hyacinth’s hands. Their fingerprints felt made to fit together.
“I mean about college,” Hyacinth teased. He didn’t take his hand back. “I don’t want to be separated from you.”
“You won’t be. Ever.”
Hyacinth laughed, ringing and true, sharp and full of timbre. “I’m going to music school,” he decided. “I’m going to play the piano.”
Apollo raised their clasped hands to the sun, splaying Hyacinth’s fingers against his. “You have a musician’s hands.” He noted. And a dancer’s body, a body he knew better than his own.
“Come with me,” Hyacinth said.
“Where?” Apollo asked, before realizing it didn’t matter. To the end of time. To the end of the earth.
“Julliard.”
“Basic.”
“Cornell?”
“For music?”
Hyacinth laughed again. “Fine. We’ll figure out where later. You can come to college with me, and we can be roommates.”
Apollo grinned, turning his head to face him, propping himself up on his elbow. “You, all to myself?” He kissed him slowly, long and lingering. He could feel the sun on his neck. “Of course.”
They had decided on a school, Illium State, the one north of here. They had applied early and both gotten in and framed the letters next to each other. Hyacinth kissed him like it was the end of the world when they found out, and Apollo held him like his life was just beginning.
But he had applied somewhere else. Hadn’t they both? Hyacinth had applied to Juilliard and Apollo had laughed at him, and Apollo had applied to Johns Hopkins.
He hadn’t expected to get in.
Sure, he loved medicine. He was a receptionist at the local hospital. Sometimes, the interns would tell him about the surgeries they were learning, and he would imagine what that might feel like, to bare your chest to someone else and guide their hands to your heart and say ‘cut here’. Then again, he had been in love before, hadn’t he? Did he even have to imagine?
And now he had gotten in, and he had the note from the admission department– the letter, it was a letter, not a note, and he still hadn’t shown it to Hyacinth– and they offered him a scholarship. Could he really say no?
Could he break a promise?
He was drawn out of his reverie by Hyacinth offering something to him. It was clear and flat.
“Disc?”
“The soccer field is empty,” Hyacinth said, gesturing forward. “We can play.”
Apollo laughed. He had nothing this evening, nothing at all. So they would luxuriate in the sunset. “Great idea.” The letter could wait. He dropped his bag by the benches, the letter peeking out the top.
Hyacinth threw it, and Apollo caught. Apollo threw it and Hyacinth ran, laughing, throwing his head back and nearly toppling over when he caught it. He tossed it back and Apollo pretended to miss.
He could stay here. He could tell the school no. He didn’t have to do pre-med for undergraduate. He could do it later.
Couldn’t he?
He threw the disc, not paying attention, and it skewed left. Hyacinth ran after it anyway, catching it, stumbling into his bag and knocking it over.
The letter fell to the ground. Apollo ran over to him.
“Are you alright?” He asked, eyes flitting between the letter and the disc and Hyacinth, trying to decide what worried him more.
“I’m fine.” Hyacinth stood, brushing himself off, before seeing the letter. He picked it up. Apollo’s breath caught.
“Apollo?” He said. His voice sounded uncertain. Unsure. He opened the letter. Apollo saw it in slow motion.
He would open the letter and his brow would furrow. He would part his lips slightly when he read like he always did. Those musician’s fingers would tighten, and then he would look back up, with wine-colored eyes and blink. He would have no words.
Why did knowing something would happen not let him stop it?
“What–” Hyacinth paused. “Why did you bring this today?”
“I wanted to show you,” Apollo said, words tripping over themselves in a rush to explain it all away, to make it better. “I mean, that I got in. I haven’t accepted. I wouldn’t accept without–”
“Without?” Hyacinth paused. “I thought we were going to Illium– I mean, you said we were going to Illium.”
“We are!” Apollo assured. “Or we might. I don’t know. I didn’t think I’d get in. But of course, I’d talk to you and we’d have to discuss. Before I decided.”
“Decided?” Hyacinth asked. “We might? Were you joking when you picked the school?”
“Of course not!” Apollo shook his head. “Of course not.”
“Do you not want to go with me?” Hyacinth’s eyes were wide, and hurt, and it looked like something in him was broken and bleeding. Apollo wanted to sew it together again, but dammit, he wasn’t a doctor yet, was he?
“Of course I do.” Apollo said. “I just. I want to be a doctor–”
“More.” Hyacinth finished. Apollo wanted to argue. He was going to argue. He couldn’t argue. “You want to be a doctor more.”
“Four years of music school is a big offset,” he said weakly. He was trying to make this sound logical, but it was logical, it was painfully logical. “And expensive.”
“You couldn’t major in Biology?” Hyacinth demanded. “You have to get your undergraduate in something!”
“They offered a scholarship!” Apollo said, and he would have been holding up the letter except, of course, Hyacinth was holding it. “And it's renewable! If I go, they might cover my med school.”
“Might?” Hyacinth demanded. “You’re doing this on a might?”
“I’m not doing anything!” Apollo said, throwing his hands out, turning away. “I was considering. Considering, and you can’t even give me a day.”
“I can’t give you a day?” Hyacinth asked. “You want to be a doctor more than you want me. You think I’ll forget that?”
“Don’t you want to be a musician more than you want me?”
“No!”
Apollo froze, turning back to him. He had never considered that before, and the shock on his face proved it. How had he never considered that before?
It wasn’t something that he would do, ever.
“Oh my god,” Hyacinth breathed out, running his hands through his hair. “Oh my god.”
Apollo faced him, and it felt like his heart breaking, but the cracks were dotted lines. He already knew where they should cut. He had already shown Hyacinth; his hands had traced the wounds. This was always going to happen.
“What was my greatest crime?” He demanded. “Loving you? Or failing to?”
“You don’t love me,” Hyacinth snapped. “You love the idea of me, some naive boy who will give up everything to be in your shadow.”
“You don’t know me,” Apollo said, and it wasn’t an argument. It was a realization, and it hurt like hell. It wasn’t fair that he was still beautiful. “I don’t want shadows at all.”
“Will you deny it, then?” Hyacinth asked. “Wouldn’t you leave when it gets hard? We could do long distance, and then what? You’ll move on.”
“How could I move on?” Apollo demanded. “I’m not going to move on. For a year and a half I have only breathed your air. To move on would be to rearrange my own biology. ”
“Yours is the power of creation,” Hyacinth returned, and his eyes weren’t purple anymore. They weren’t any color at all. They were just pain. “You’ll find a way.”
“Have you ever considered that I don’t want to? I am exhausted with reinvention.”
“And you have too much practice.” Hyacinth said. “You aren’t even the person I met two years ago.”
“You made me better.”
“No.” He said, shaking his head. “No, no. You changed yourself, because that’s what you do. Gloss over every supposed imperfection. Warped and grew into what you supposed everyone in the room wants you to be. You were right. I don’t know you.”
“I don’t want to be right!” He said, and he hated the desperation in his voice, and he hated the pain hidden there. There was a truth, an undeniable truth that he had found in all his musing and music– that there was nothing lovely in pain. Catharsis could be brilliant and tragedy could be woven in gold thread, but base human pain was the same in every language. Heartbreak was muscle memory since the beginning of humanity. It was hereditary.
“Then be alone,” Hyacinth said. “And you can become whatever you want next.”
He was in shambles and he couldn’t argue. What good would it do? “You’ve made up your mind?”
“You made this choice.” Hyacinth said. “You did. When you wanted your fame more than you wanted me. When you thought ‘career’ meant ‘future’. When you hurt me.”
“When have I ever hurt you?”
“Every time you changed. Every time you viewed yourself as something to be put back together. I loved you just as you were, and you decided you were not good enough. You are a self-fulfilling prophecy, Apollo. You crack until there is something to fix.”
Apollo could feel the words die in his throat. That’s not true, he wanted to say, but of course it was true. Of course it was true, and it was awful, and he couldn’t breathe. Maybe that was just the oxygen fading out as Hyacinth left.
In the end, he kept one promise. That was better than none, wasn’t it?