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They’re 10, and Tom sees Alex go down, and instantly knows that it’s bad. The kid who ran into him is crouched next to him frantically apologising, and Alex is lying on the grass, his face screwed up in the way that Tom knows means he’s trying not to cry. Alex’s uncle is away on a business trip (again), and Jack dropped Alex off at Tom’s house so they could walk to the field together, and neither of them are picking up the phone.
No one complains when Tom tells their coach he’s gonna sit with Alex, probably because Tom’s short and scrawny and not that good at keeping the ball with him yet. Tom sits with Alex and tries not to look at the strange way the bones in his ankle sit under his skin, and they pull the blades of grass out from around them, while Tom tries to say anything to make him laugh.
They’re 12, and Tom’s parents have been arguing for years now, and Jerry’s already moved out to Italy, and Tom is just sick of it. He chucks some clothes and a muesli bar into his bag, slings it over his shoulder, and tells his parents he’s going to a friend’s house. They’re arguing too loud to hear what he said, or realise he’s gone.
Tom’s started walking, and the white hot rage he felt at his parents has cooled to a smouldering ember, and instead of angry, right now he just feels cold. He’s still walking without any real goal in mind when he turns onto Alex’s street, and he’s not quite sure what he’s doing as he walks up to the door, and knocks twice. Just as he turns to leave, a tired looking Jack opens the door, takes one look at him, and tells him to make himself comfortable on the couch. She sits with him as he cradles a bowl of microwave mac and cheese, and when the tears start streaming down his face, she lets him cry into her shoulder, until he’s so sleepy that she tells him to lie down, grabs him a blanket from the linen closet, and tells him to wake her if he needs anything.
Tom wakes up to Alex sitting next to him on the couch, poking his face with one hand, and holding a bowl of cereal in the other. Alex looks at him, and his face splits into a grin, and he asks “Do you want to come rock climbing with me? The gym has guest passes.”
They’re 14, and Alex is being fucking weird. Tom knows his uncle is dead, and he’s grieving, but grieving doesn’t mean you disappear and don’t answer your calls and then come back with a sick note for a disease that no one’s ever heard of! Tom might not know when Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, or what a mitochondria is, but he knows Alex, and Alex is being weird.
To be fair, Alex has always been weird, and honestly, Tom’s also a bit weird, so when Alex invariably turns up with an obviously fake excuse for disappearing for a month, Tom just nods at him and asks him if he wants to play FIFA. Tom knows he’s lying about something, that Jack is being weird, that Ian never stopped going on about seatbelts and now he’s dead from a car crash, but he doesn’t know what to do about it, so he just. Doesn’t. Tom doesn’t know many things, but he knows that he trusts Alex.
They’re 16 and Alex’s attendance is abysmal. People won’t stop asking him as if he has any idea what’s going on, and he’s a little pissed that he doesn’t, so he passes the time by lying. He’s managed to convince them that Alex has been either picked up by a modelling agency to be the new face of Burberry, is training to join the Ferrari Formula 1 team, and they were going to announce it any minute, and one day when he was feeling particularly grumpy, that he discovered his hidden ties to the royal family of Dubai and was currently engaged in a lengthy legal suit to reclaim his rightful title. No one really believes him, but they’re not entirely sure he’s lying either. Frankly, he’s offended that when Alex comes back and people start fishing about what it was like training with Michael Schumacher, he’s so zoned out that he doesn’t even realise what Tom has done.
They’re 16 when Alex tells him what’s been happening, and Tom’s world tilts on its axis. He still doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life, or when his parents are going to divorce, or if Jerry’s ever going to come back to England. What he does know is anger. He becomes intimately familiar with the type of rage that creeps into your bones and crawls into every cavity, the type of anger that eats at you from the inside, carving away parts of you whilst keeping you alive another day.
They’re 17 when Alex introduces Tom to his girlfriend, a pretty blond girl from his Physics class who asked him to their school dance. Alex introduces Tom to her, and Tom doesn’t hate her, not really, because all his hate is currently funnelled into planning MI6’s downfall, but the girl pisses him off. She doesn’t like that whenever she’s at Alex’s house, Tom just happens to be there, and Tom doesn’t have the heart to tell her that he’s basically living in their guest room and his parents haven’t come knocking yet.
“Mate, and she kept saying she felt like she didn’t know me, but we’ve only been together for a month? I feel like it’s not that big of a deal? And then you know what she said? She stood up and she told me that it was fucking weird I spend all my time in my bed rolling around with my best friend!”
“Maybe she’s never had a best friend?”
Alex laughs and shoves Tom, and they eat another slice of pizza, and honestly he doesn’t seem that upset he’s just been broken up with.
They’re 17 when Tom realises he knows what love feels like. Fuck.
They’re 17 when Tom realises he knows what love is, knows it’s Alex’s hair in the sunlight when it looks like spun honey, knows it’s the flecks of orange in in his eyes, and the way he grumbles when Tom beats him at FIFA, because for all his sneaky spying tricks, he’s never beaten Tom at FIFA.
They’re 18 when Tom moves out, finally leaving his parents behind. The flat is small and cramped, and he shares it with two others, because rent is insane. Alex splits his time off between Jack’s place and Tom’s flat, and he inevitably charms Tom's roommates.
“Dude, are you sure you don’t want to stay? We can kick Dimitri out, he keeps stealing food from the fridge and he leaves his dishes in the sink.”
They’re 18 when Alex turns up at Tom’s flat, because Jack is gone. Not because of MI6, or because she’s gotten kidnapped, or because she’s sick of Alex. She’s gone because Alex is an adult now, and he doesn’t need Jack looking after him anymore, and he knows that she’ll be safer in the states, that the geographical distance, although nothing for MI6 if they really wanted to find her, will at least put some space between them. They’re 18 when Alex tears out half his heart for the woman who raised him, and tells her to leave England, and promises he’ll be ok, refusing to cry even when her tears soak the shoulder of his hoodie at the airport, refusing to cry until he’s certain she’s landed safely in America.
He refuses to cry until he’s on the floor of Tom’s bedroom, picking at the fibre of Tom’s rug, when he finally collapses into Tom, and shakes. The fear that’s shadowed him since he’s 14 is gone, and it’s replaced with a yawning pit of grief. It’s not goodbye forever, but it’s goodbye for now, and it hurts just as much.
They’re 19 when Alex finally leaves MI6, too traumatised to stay in the field, with no interest in desk work. He finally moves in with Tom, and they find a quaint little apartment with one bedroom because that’s what Tom can afford with his job at the climbing gym and the café down the road, and Alex technically has a trust sitting somewhere, but accessing it would mean calls and paperwork, and really, one bedroom is fine. Tom, whose anger has calcified into a cold, bitter thing, holds Alex when he wakes up from nightmares, and the hollow inside him, carved out by all his spitting rage from the moment he found out, is being replaced with something small, something tender.
There’s a shoebox under Tom’s bed with recordings and photos and dates, but now is not the time.
They’re two months into living with each other when Alex falls asleep on Tom when they’re watching a movie, and Tom is carding his fingers through Alex’s hair, and presses a kiss to his forehead subconsciously. Alex looks up, sees the look on Tom’s face, and laughs.
“Shit, I’m sorry I don’t know why I did that–”
Alex laughs even harder, and presses a kiss to Tom’s lips.
They might not be happy forever, but they’re happy now, and it’s fucking worth it.