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There are turkeys wandering the campus like goddamned prehistoric nightmare murder birds. In packs. Or… gobbles? A gobble of turkeys? They’re right in front of the door to the University Archives, where Alex needs to go to get the perfect source for his paper before they close for the weekend. There’s got to be another door, right?
As Alex circles back from the side entrance at a pace just this side of running, an attendant is flipping the sign on the door to “Closed”.
“No, wait – please, could I –”
The attendant turns, raising an eyebrow, and Alex stops talking. Blue, his mind provides helpfully, meeting the eyes of an unfairly beautiful man standing calmly in front of Alex’s sweaty chaotic mess.
“We’re closed,” says the man – the archivist, presumably – swinging the door shut behind him with a click. He’s wearing one of those jackets that Alex hadn’t thought actually existed before he came to Harvard, with actual elbow patches. The style is almost comically old-fashioned. He wishes he could say that the guy looks like an idiot, but that would be a lie.
“Hey, man,” Alex tries an easy smile. He’d extend a hand but his arms are full of the books he hasn’t had time to shove in his bag when he realized the archives were closing in ten minutes. He musters as much charm as he can while pretending he’s not slightly out of breath from avoiding turkeys. “I’m Alex.”
He pauses there, looking expectantly at the archivist, who practically radiates impatience.
Hope dwindling, Alex tries nonetheless. “I’ve got an assignment due Sunday and just found an amazing source you’ve got in there. Is there any way you could let me quickly –”
“I really, truly don’t have time for this,” the man cuts him off, running his hand through his hair, looking stressed. He huffs softly under his breath, shaking his head, then turns on his heel and quickly strides off. Weirdly quickly. Alex blinks and the corridor’s empty.
Huh.
–
When Alex gets to his study carrel the next day, the source he was looking for, the one from the university archives, is sitting there on his desk.
–
The next time Alex is checking out books, he casually asks a few questions. He learns that the blue-eyed archivist he’d bumbled into is Henry Fox, and he has a reputation of being uncannily good at unearthing sources that no one’s ever come across before.
“It’s wild,” the desk librarian, Paul, says as he checks out Alex’s books. “Like, stuff that hasn’t been digitized or sorted through, he’ll somehow always make an incredible find. On incredibly obscure topics, too.”
Not that that explains the book that appeared on Alex’s desk. He hadn’t even had the chance to tell Henry about his research, after all. So it’s perhaps illogical for Alex to hold on to a sneaking suspicion that Henry had something to do with it.
–
There are many drawbacks to moving to the northeast after living all one’s life in Texas. The sun setting at 4:30; bullshit weather that goes from gorgeous in the morning to rain and glacial gusts of wind that flip Alex’s umbrella in the afternoon; the buttoned-up unfriendly demeanor of your average New Englander. Not to mention some of the worst attempts at Mexican food he’s ever come across.
But. Catching sight of a flurries of snow as he emerges from class? Fucking magical. He feels his mood lifting at the sight of brick buildings coated in white, how beautiful the flakes look drifting in the pools of lamplight as the sun sets, and how strangely bright it looks at night because of the white of the snow.
Some German friends of Alex’s make mulled wine that they actually light on fire. Sipping hot mulled wine with friends in front of a fire with snow outside? Yeah, he could get used to this.
Alex is still feeling pleasantly blurred around the edges as he walks home that evening, for once okay with the frigid temperature when the campus looks like an honest-to-god winter postcard. Timeless in only the way some of these old universities manage, with brick pathways, brick buildings, old-fashioned lamps, and… people wandering around in 18th century soldier’s uniforms?
Alex blinks several times, wondering if he’s drunker than he thought. No, that really does appear to be someone wearing a revolutionary war uniform, casually walking around in the snow at 10pm on a Thursday. Hang on, isn’t that –
“Henry?” Alex says blankly. Because seeing Henry in the lamplight with snow quietly falling around him, dressed in a long blue tailcoat with a row of brass buttons on either lapel, obscenely tight pants, heavy black boots and a tricorn hat – that’s really doing it for Alex.
Henry, who had been striding quickly in the direction of the library, pauses and looks around. God, he’s gorgeous. If Alex hadn’t finally worked out that whole sexuality crisis retrospectively with Liam three years ago, one look at Henry dressed like this would have done it.
“Oh. You’re… Alex, wasn’t it?” Henry asks, for all the world as if he wasn’t doing anything even slightly unusual, dressed like that on a random evening. Happily, he doesn’t seem to question that Alex now knows his name. Which definitely isn’t weird of Alex. Just a bit… proactive. Inquisitive. Not stalkery, no matter what June says.
“That’s, ah,” Alex gestures a little wildly at Henry’s, well, everything, floundering a little. “Quite the… costume?” He ends on a question, then frowns. Weren’t the British soldiers in the revolutionary war called redcoats? “Hang on, shouldn’t you be wearing red?”
“What, because I’m British?” Henry scoffs slightly. “Bit on the nose, don’t you think?”
It’s a long moment before Alex can even begin to think of a response to that. He’s normally good with words but with the wine, and Henry looking like that, give him a break.
Before Alex’s brain comes back online Henry adds, “I’ve got to get to work,” and, nodding at Alex, is gone before he can say anything at all.
That was… odd.
–
Alex maybe becomes a little obsessed after that. Just, you know, casually decides to trail behind Henry if he sees him in the quad between classes. Chooses to eat lunch at the library cafe a little more often than he did before; finds out the green-haired person Henry eats lunch with a few times a week goes by Pez, and that they’re not dating.
Totally normal things to do.
“You’re obsessed, lil’ bit.”
June’s voice comes tinnily through Alex’s phone as he struggles to juggle phone, bag, and access card while wearing the heavy mittens he needs in order to still have use of his fingers by the time he reaches his next class.
“Look, it’s just weird! Anyone would be curious,” he defends, but he knows she has a point.
“Yes, you’ve said. You run into a hot librarian –”
“Archivist,” Alex mutters, though honestly he doesn’t know the difference.
“You don’t say anything about your research, but clearly when a book mysteriously appears on your desk, it’s from him.”
“No, I know that part doesn’t make sense. It was the uniform thing that threw me. Just, why?”
“So talk to him, don’t follow him around,” she says in the same tone she’s used since he was 10 whenever she thinks he’s being particularly obtuse.
“Yeah, okay,” he sighs, and he’s at his classroom so they end the call.
And Alex does try, but Henry seems to work wildly erratic hours, so his plans to waylay him for an actual conversation go nowhere over the next week.
One afternoon Alex lingers for coffee in the library cafe (no Henry yet again) and his eye catches on a phrase in the school newspaper someone left on the chair beside him – “American revolution.” He reads about new research by a history professor on women subverting gender roles to serve in the American Revolution. Alex is fascinated, especially when the professor specifically thanks Henry Fox for his help in finding letters from the period that have never been studied before.
Huh.
–
It’s midterms week and Alex is emerging from his carrel in the depths of the library, blinking in the daylight, when he finally catches sight of Henry again. God, he looks good – dressed in usual preppy form with a dark blue sweater with elbow patches and what looks like a small notebook tucked into his back pocket. He’s grabbing his things from a locker just outside the archives.
“Henry!” Alex speeds up, determined to catch him and finally have a conversation in which he doesn’t act like a prize idiot.
Henry, having just put on a (frankly adorable) hat, scarf, and midway through pulling on leather gloves, doesn’t seem to hear him. Alex speeds up, reaches out a hand to catch Henry’s arm, and –
Whoa.
The world jerks, like Alex has been pulled sideways and simultaneously squeezed until all the air is expelled from his lungs and his vision starts to go dark and –
In a blink, everything is normal again. That is to say, Alex can breathe again and the world no longer feels like it’s shifting around him.
Except now he’s outside. He’s outside in the middle of a crowd of people, not by the door of the archives. Plus the air is hot and heavy and feels like summer, not mid-January, and… what the fuck is going on?!
Alex looks around wildly and what he sees doesn’t make any sense. He takes in the hairstyles – long hair, styled extravagantly. Everyone’s wearing way more color than he’s used to. So many mustaches, belled jeans, and garishly colorful clothing, all of which he associates with the 60s and 70s. There must be hundreds of people crowded together in this outdoor park, and they’re loud. Chanting something, but Alex can’t tell what; the voices are competing with each other and he can’t make sense of them.
Alex’s palms go damp because of a combination of the heat – it’s definitely summer – and panic, because he doesn’t understand what the hell is going on.
As to where they are, it looks like the Boston Common – maybe someone’s filming some historical documentary? Which would explain the anti-war-in-Vietnam signs, but how did he even get here? And, hang on, where’s Henry?
There!
Alex spots him partially because Alex has become worryingly adept at picking out Henry’s head of bright hair from a distance over the last few weeks, and partially because of what he’s wearing. Henry’s now dressed in the loudest pair of yellow tartan pants Alex has ever seen and an obscenely tight button-up (and lord, if getting jerked through time and space hasn’t killed Alex’s libido that getup should do it. But somehow, on Henry, it works?).
Henry also stands out because in a crowd with a fairly single-minded focus on yelling anti-war chants toward the statehouse, he’s moving against the tide, threading his way unerringly toward something or someone Alex can’t see.
It feels a little like Alex’s brain has jammed – so many implausible things have happened at once that his mind has just given up trying to find a logical explanation and he just rolls with it. Alex decides he’s not going to think about the fact that he, too, has had a costume change and is now dressed in a colorful flowy shirt, tight white pants and brown flats. Nope. Not thinking about that right now, or where his winter clothing has gone. For now, he’s going to pursue Henry, as the only familiar thing in this madness and maybe, just maybe, the person who can explain what’s going on.
Alex follows him, trying not to get too buffeted by the crowd. He speeds up, not caring when he elbows people, and is about to reach Henry when the other man ducks and grabs some sort of leather-bound notebook from the bag at one of the protesters’ feet. Alex manages to grab his wrist again as Henry rises, eyes widening as he catches sight of Alex.
“Henry! What is going –”
Shit, not again.
The yank-squeezing sensation is back and then Alex is suddenly absolutely freezing, dressed like an idiot in 1960s summer clothes in the middle of campus on a January night. With Henry staring back at him, leather notebook in hand.
They blink at each other for a few moments. Henry opens his mouth but then closes it again, at a loss for words. Alex’s teeth start chattering.
“Come on,” Alex says, clenching his teeth to try and stop the shaking. “This the part where you tell me what the fuck just happened.”
–
They settle in a cafe with hot cocoa and ignore the questioning looks their bizarre outfits provoke. It’s cosy inside, sitting by the window with the snowy campus across the street, and in spite of everything Alex basks in the pleasure of having Henry’s complete attention for the first time since they crossed paths over a month ago.
Alex listens to what would have been an unbelievable story had he not literally just traveled through time and space.
He learns that what Henry used to think of as a knack for finding books became something a lot more dramatic and more like a literal superpower when he started working for the archives three years ago. That this new, dramatic ability didn’t happen all the time or with everyone. But sometimes, just sometimes, when speaking with a person about their project, he’s filled with a sense of certainty that he can find exactly what they need.
“At first,” Henry explains, “I thought it was as if… as if I was retaining things subconsciously, subliminally. A researcher would explain what they were looking into, and I would get a feeling – look in that collection, try that box. I spend a lot of my day in the catalog, so it felt believable, for a while, that my brain would throw up a card, so to speak, by association, recalling back something I’d seen. I’ve always been able to find the books I wanted even as a child, so I never thought much of it. My dad used to joke that I could find things in our home library in half the time he could, even though he was the one who organized it all.”
Watching Henry open up and warm to the topic is a delight. Alex knows that he’s a fairly quiet person even in the company of his exuberant occasional lunch companion Pez. He speaks with his hands, gracefully, sometimes quirking a little smile in the corner of his mouth. Alex could watch him for hours.
“... so when I moved here, I got used to trusting that feeling, following where it led. It doesn’t happen with every researcher, but whenever I felt that pull, I learned to follow it. Until one day the pull became, well, quite literally a pull – you felt it?”
“Unbelievable,” Alex says, not for the first time. “How many times has that happened?”
Only a handful of times, apparently. The pull doesn’t happen with everyone, and even when it does, it’s generally only after Henry works closely with a researcher for a while and guides him toward resources in the library, not documents displaced in time. A fact for which Henry is profoundly grateful.
“It was confusing with you, Alex,” Henry’s cheeks are a little flushed. “I was already following a hunch for someone else when I met you, and,” he huffs out a breath, sounding a little exasperated, “You hadn’t even told me what you were working on. But when I got home that night I couldn’t settle until I’d pulled that book for you.”
“Are you calling me irresistible, baby?” Alex grins. Henry smiles back, flush deepening a little, as Alex goes on. “My sister thought I was crazy when I told her I thought it was you who gave me that book.”
“If I’m being honest, I’ve wondered more than once if I’ve gone completely mad. Who ever heard of someone having a secret, magical knack for finding books?”
“That’s got to be the nerdiest superpower I’ve ever heard of,” Alex says, but he’s smiling and so is Henry and he never wants this evening to end.
–
A few hours later they do gather themselves to leave, though not without a new contact in Alex’s phone marked as “Henry <3”.
“I think,” Alex says carefully as they approach the doors to the dark, cold night. “That we should probably hold hands. You know, just in case you slip through time and space again. I want to be there for you.”
Henry’s lips twitch. “Alex, you don’t need an excuse to hold my hand.” He leans in and murmurs directly into Alex’s ear. “Or at least, I hope not. I’m not planning on giving you an excuse for kissing you, other than that you’re beautiful and I want to.”
Well, Alex thinks, as Henry gives him the promised kiss, lips warm and soft and hands firm and gentle on Alex’s face. Look at that. Good for more than finding obscure books, after all.