Archive of Our Own ^beta

"Everyone, I'd like you to meet Theodore Uris. Starting today, he'll be studying with you."

Phil was absentmindedly dragging his pen across the notebook page, creating meaningless patterns, forcing himself not to yawn—he'd slept maybe three hours last night because he'd been reading this incredible comic about a guy who gets abducted and comes back with superpowers, and…

And right now, his new classmate, the excited murmur rising through the classroom, the monotonous voice of the homeroom teacher—none of it mattered to him at all.

He had an incredibly important math test coming up that Phil had honestly prepared for but seemed to have already forgotten everything, last period was gym with the strictest teacher in school, probably another exhausting fitness test—and he had absolutely no energy for it. No energy to think about math, no energy for running or, God forbid, jumping.

No energy to participate in what was happening around him—even less so.

This morning his parents had cornered him again over breakfast, his mom with that tight-lipped look she got when she was trying not to yell, his dad with the newspaper folded in half like a weapon. "If you don't get your act together, Philip. If you don't pull up these grades and get into college. Do you understand what happens then? Vietnam, that's what happens. They'll draft you so fast your head will spin."

The thought sat in his stomach like a stone, heavy and cold, but Phil had gotten good at shoving it down, packing it away somewhere he didn't have to look at it. What was he supposed to do, anyway? Suddenly become someone else? Suddenly care about trigonometry and the symbolism in 'The Scarlet Letter" when all he could think about was whether the government was really telling the truth about Roswell, whether there were things out there they weren't supposed to know about, whether the world was actually the shape they said it was?

His teachers called it daydreaming. His parents called it irresponsibility. Phil called it the only thing that made sense.

So yeah, he was tired. Bone-tired. The kind of tired that made the fluorescent lights buzz too loud and the teacher's voice blend into white noise. But he couldn't show it—couldn't let anyone see him dragging, couldn't give his parents more ammunition, couldn't be the kid who couldn't even stay awake in class. So he sat up straight, tapped his pen against the desk in a jittery rhythm, kept his eyes moving even though they wanted to close, and drew elaborate spirals in the margins of his notebook that might have been galaxies or might have been nothing at all.

"Choose any free seat and sit down. Rest assured, everyone here is glad to have you. We're a close-knit group," the teacher said, wrapping it up, and Phil heard the sound of dress shoes hitting the floor.

The sound approached, and the guy who'd been introduced to the class a couple minutes ago ended up at a desk not far from Phil—to the right, actually—making Phil finally turn around and pay attention. As scattered as he was, he wasn't that oblivious or rude, he was tired, that's all.

This "Theodore Uris," who Phil obviously had no desire to befriend—obviously—suddenly turned out to be the most striking person the seventeen-year-old had ever seen. And that realization made him forget everything that had been worrying him just a pathetic minute ago.

Tests, fitness assessments, the increasingly frequent bouts of insomnia—what else had he been occupying his thoughts with?—all fell defeated into second place the moment Phil looked at his new classmate, who, damn it, had such an odd kind of beauty that it was impossible to look away.

Theodore Uris didn't look like anyone Phil knew. He didn't look like the guys on magazine covers or the actors in the movies they showed at the drive-in on Saturday nights. He looked different—genuinely different, in a way that made Phil's fingers itch for his pen.

Wild light curls that looked like they'd never seen a comb, thick expressive eyebrows that gave his face an intensity even when he was doing nothing at all, and eyes—God, those eyes—that seemed to look at everything too carefully, like he was cataloging details no one else noticed. Not in a creepy way. In a way that made you feel seen.

Phil stared. He knew he was staring. He couldn't stop.

Theodore sat with his back straight, hands folded on the desk, gaze directed at the blackboard with an odd kind of focus that didn't quite match the blankness of his expression. He didn't smile. He didn't look around at his new classmates. He just was, and somehow that made him more magnetic than if he'd tried.

Who cared what the teacher was going on about? Who cared about anything, when Theodore was only seventeen and beautiful in a way that words just failed?

But on the page... on the page, it was possible.

Phil's hand moved before his brain caught up. He flipped open his battered notebook—pages dog-eared and stained, half-filled with doodles and conspiracies and notes he'd never read again—and started drawing.

Fast, messy lines. The pen skipped and bled, ink smudging across the side of his hand as he dragged it across the page. He didn't care. He drew the shape of Theodore's profile, the sharp angle of his jaw, the way his hair fell. He drew without thinking, the way he always did when something grabbed hold of him and wouldn't let go.

The teacher droned on about the Boston Tea Act or the Stamp Act or something Phil should probably care about but absolutely did not. All that mattered was capturing the strange pull of this kid's face, the way his eyebrows arched just slightly, the way he held himself so still it was almost unnatural.

Theodore glanced in his direction once—just once—and Phil's pen froze mid-stroke. For a second, their eyes met. Theodore's gaze was calm, unreadable, maybe a little curious. Then he looked away, back to the board, like nothing had happened.

Phil's heart kicked against his ribs. He didn't know why. He hoped it wasn't weird, and also—that this not-weirdness of his was something only he could see. You know, just in case. Just for the hell of it, really.

When the bell rang, the classroom exploded into noise. Chairs scraped, voices overlapped, bodies shoved toward the door in the usual chaotic crush. Phil shoved his notebook into his bag—didn't bother closing it—and stood, already moving before he'd fully decided to.

Theodore was still at his desk, slowly packing his things with the kind of precision that felt deliberate. Phil slid into the space beside him, grinning wide, talking before Theodore even looked up.

"Hey, man—Phil. Phil Malkin. You're Theodore, right? Teddy? Ted? What do people call you?" He didn't wait for an answer. "You just move here? Where from? This place is a dump, honestly, but it's not terrible once you figure out who to avoid. Like Alvin Marsh—total prick, don't let him sit behind you, he flicks shit at your head. And Mrs. Kowalski in the cafeteria, she'll give you extra fries if you're nice to her, but you gotta be specific about nice, like compliment her hair or something, she's weird about it—"

"Teddy's fine," the other boy said quietly, and Phil stopped mid-sentence.

His voice was even, steady, almost soft. He wasn't smiling, but he wasn't frowning either. He just looked at Phil with that same careful attention, like he was taking notes.

"Cool. Teddy. Got it." Phil shifted his weight, suddenly aware of how much space he was taking up, how loud he'd been. "Anyway, uh—if you want, you can grab a locker near mine. Mine's kind of shit, the door sticks, but it's better than the ones by the gym, those smell like death. Literal death. I'm pretty sure something died in there once and they just painted over it."

Teddy blinked. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay."

Phil laughed, a quick nervous sound. "Man, you don't talk much, huh?"

"Not usually."

"That's cool. That's totally cool. I talk enough for like, five people, that's what my dad always says, like, you know, that I should talk less, so we're balanced." He was rambling now, filling the space because silence made him itchy. "You eat lunch yet? I mean, not yet-yet, obviously, it's like ten in the morning, but like—later. You should sit with me. And my friends. Well, friend, singular. His name's Matty, he's cool, you'll like him. Or you won't. He's kind of shy. But in a good way. Mostly."

Teddy stood, slinging his bag over one shoulder. He was a little shorter than Phil had expected. Not by much, but enough that Phil had to glance down slightly when they were this close.

"Alright," And then, after a pause: "You draw."

Phil froze. "What?"

"You were drawing. During class." Teddy's gaze flicked to the notebook sticking out of Phil's bag. "You're good."

"Oh. Uh...yeah, I mean, it's nothing, just—" Phil's face went hot. "Just messing around, you know, keeping my hands busy, I can't just sit still and listen, I'll lose my mind—"

"It was me."

Phil's mouth snapped shut. The air left his lungs.

He saw it. He’s going to laugh. He’s going to call you a fairy right here in the classroom. The word would travel locker to locker by lunch. He’ll tell everyone what you are. That’s the end of you, Phil.

But Teddy didn't look upset, angry, or offended. He didn't look flattered either. He just looked at Phil with that same unblinking focus, and all of Phil's running excuses dried up in his throat.

"Yeah," he admitted finally, voice a little quieter. "Yeah, it was you."

Teddy nodded, like that made sense, like it was a perfectly normal thing to admit. "Alright. That was sweet." He adjusted the strap of his bag. "I'll see you later, Phil."

And then he turned and walked away, disappearing into the crowd of students flooding the hallway.

Phil stood there, rooted to the spot, his heart beating weird and arrhythmic in his chest. He looked down at his hands—ink-stained, smudged black across his fingers and the edge of his palm—and felt the ghost of Teddy's gaze still on him, heavy and strange.

What the hell was that?

He didn't see Teddy again until the hallway thinned out, the rush of students dissipating into classrooms and bathrooms and wherever people went between periods. Phil was at his locker, wrestling with the busted latch, when a voice behind him said:

"Are you exhausted?"

Phil jumped, spinning around.

Teddy stood there, closer than expected, hands in his pockets, expression calm. Too calm. Like he'd been standing there a while.

"Jesus— don't do that, man." Phil pressed a hand to his chest, laughing nervously. "You trying to give me a heart attack?"

"You're exhausted," Teddy repeated, and this time it wasn't a question.

Phil's smile faltered. "I...what?"

"Your eyes are unfocused. You're holding tension in your shoulders. You keep shifting your weight like you're trying not to fall asleep standing up." Teddy's head tilted slightly, studying him. "You didn't sleep last night."

Phil opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "How do you—"

"It's obvious."

"It's not obvious. I— no one else said anything."

"They weren't looking."

Phil stared at him. There was no smugness in Teddy's voice, no judgment. Just fact. Like he'd observed something simple and was reporting it back.

"Yeah, well." Phil rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly self-conscious. "I'm fine. I'm always fine. Just stayed up too late reading, that's all. No big deal."

Teddy stepped closer. Phil's back hit the locker.

"What are you—"

Teddy reached up, and for one wild, incomprehensible second, Phil thought he was going to touch his face. Instead, Teddy pressed his forehead to Phil's—gentle, deliberate, like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Phil froze.

Teddy's skin was cool. Not cold, but noticeably less warm than it should've been. And his eyes—God, his eyes—

Phil couldn't look away.

It was like staring into deep space. Not the sky at night, not the stars you could see from the backyard—actual space. The kind you only saw in grainy photographs from NASA, the kind that went on forever, infinite and incomprehensible. There were spirals of light, distant and flickering. There were shadows so deep they felt like they'd swallow you whole. There was movement,  constant and hypnotic, like watching galaxies spin in fast-forward.

Phil forgot how to breathe.

It wasn't painful. It wasn't even scary. It was just—too much. Too big. Too impossible. Like looking directly at something his brain wasn't built to process.

"Wow…" Phil thought, his heart pounding way too fast next to this guy—a thrilled, ridiculous, awestruck, painfully young rhythm that wouldn’t settle. This was nuts. He didn’t even know him.

And then, just as suddenly, it stopped.

Teddy pulled back, expressionless, adjusting the strap of his bag like nothing had happened.

Phil sagged against the locker, gasping, his heart slamming against his ribs. His hands were shaking. His whole body was shaking.

"What—" His voice cracked. "What the hell was that?"

"You'll be fine now," Teddy said simply. He turned to leave, then paused, glancing back over his shoulder. "You should sleep more."

And then he was gone, disappearing around the corner as quickly and quietly as he had appeared behind Phil moments before, becoming the sudden, singular reason the air felt both easier and harder to breathe.

Phil stood there, alone in the emptying hallway, his pulse still racing, his thoughts a tangled mess of what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck—

But the headache was gone.

The fog that had been sitting behind his eyes all morning, the heaviness in his limbs, the bone-deep exhaustion—all of it had lifted. He felt strangely alert, energized, and the day that had promised to be absolutely miserable was suddenly unfolding differently—good mood, grin tugging at his mouth, laughter bubbling up at nothing.

And the thoughts wouldn't stop. Thoughts about Teddy Uris, about that bizarre moment in the hallway, about the certainty that somehow, inexplicably, that encounter had given him exactly what he needed.

Maybe Phil liked him. In that way. 

In the way that made you flip through certain magazines at the back of Keene's drugstore when no one was looking, the ones wrapped in brown paper. In the way that made you pay attention when someone dropped "friend of Dorothy" into conversation like it meant nothing. In the way that made you think about dark corners of movie theaters.

The kind of way that made you whisper at the ceiling before sleep, frustrated and a little angry: Why does he have to be like that? And then, quieter, almost tender: impossible, unreal, magnetic.

Maybe Phil had fallen for him a little. Just a little. The giddy, outsized kind of feeling you get when you're seventeen and someone catches you completely off guard, when everything about them feels significant, when their presence alone does something to you that you can't name but recognize as dangerous.

A whole universe was expanding in his chest—one made entirely of feeling.

☄

A few weeks spent in a blissful haze later, to the list of descriptors—impossible, magnetic, striking, unreal—another was added: strange. But only in pencil, for now.

Not that Phil was watching him—of course not, he wasn't some kind of creep—it just kept happening that his attention would snag on Teddy and refuse to let go. Everyone else in the building became background noise, static, forgettable. But Teddy—Teddy was sharp and clear, a fixed point Phil's eyes kept drifting back to without permission. He told himself it wasn't because of the stupid crush, wasn't because of anything like that, it was just that Teddy was interesting. New. Unusual. And new, unusual people always drew attention, right?

Over those weeks, Phil had folded Teddy into his world with the kind of casual insistence he applied to most things. Dragged him to lunch, waved him over in the hallways, introduced him to Matty with a grin and a slap on the shoulder. Teddy went along with it. Didn't resist, didn't seem annoyed. Just followed Phil's lead like it was easier than carving out his own space, and Phil—Phil liked that. Liked having him there, within reach, close enough to watch.

But the more time they spent together, the more Phil noticed things that didn't sit right. Little things. Odd things.

Take lunch, for example.

Teddy never ate.

Oh, he'd go through the motions—pick up a tray, sit down with everyone else, arrange the food on his plate like he was about to dig in—but he never actually did. He'd move things around with his fork, take a single bite if someone was looking too closely, but mostly he just sat there, calm and still, while Phil and Matty inhaled their meals and bitched about how the meatloaf tasted like cardboard.

"You not hungry?" Phil asked one day, gesturing at Teddy's untouched plate with a french fry.

"Not really."

"You sick or something? Got a stomach thing?"

"No."

"There's nothing to be ashamed of, though. My cousin Larry had this ulcer thing, right, couldn't eat half the crap they serve here without turning green—"

"I'm fine," Teddy interrupted, and his tone was so calm, so unbothered, that Phil just shrugged and let it go.

But he didn't forget.

And then there was class.

Teddy, if Phil was being objective and honest about it, turned out to be shockingly knowledgeable. He never raised his hand unless called on, never showed off or acted smug, but when a teacher asked him a question—any question, on any subject—he always had the answer. History, science, math, English lit. Dates, formulas, quotes, explanations. He delivered them in that same flat, even tone, like he was reading off a script instead of pulling information from memory.

The teachers ate it up. Phil found it deeply unsettling.

Because it wasn't just that Teddy was smart. Plenty of kids were smart. It was that he never seemed to struggle. Never paused to think, never furrowed his brow in concentration, never flipped through his notes to double-check. The information was just there, ready to be retrieved at a moment's notice, like he'd memorized every textbook in the school without breaking a sweat.

Phil had never seen him study. Not once. No books open on his desk between classes, no studying in the library, no frantic cramming before a test. And yet—perfect scores. Every time.

Of course, there was nothing wrong with being smart. Phil wasn't the jealous type—never had been, really. But still. There was something about the ease of it that set his teeth on edge.

It didn't make sense. Seventeen-year-old kids weren't supposed to be that smart. Were they?

Phil started sketching him more during class. Quick, messy drawings in the margins of his notebooks—Teddy's profile, the tilt of his head when he answered a question, the blankness of his expression when the teacher praised him. Page after page, until the whole notebook was more Teddy than notes, and Phil had to shove it to the bottom of his bag so Matty wouldn't see and ask questions Phil didn't know how to answer.

And then there was gym.

God, gym.

Phil hated gym with a passion that bordered on religious. He wasn't terrible at sports—he could throw a ball, run a lap without collapsing—but he wasn't good either, and Coach Hendricks had a way of making every class feel like boot camp. Drills, sprints, climbing ropes, endless laps around the gym while the coach barked at them to move faster, push harder, stop being a bunch of weak little girls.

By the end of class, Phil was always a wreck. Red-faced, sweaty, gasping for air, his shirt clinging to his back and his legs trembling from exertion.

Teddy, meanwhile, looked like he'd been out for a casual stroll.

He didn't race. Didn't compete. Didn't try to show off or prove anything. He just moved—steady, never breaking a sweat, never out of breath. His face stayed calm. His posture stayed perfect. And when the whistle blew and everyone else collapsed onto the bleachers in various states of death, Teddy just stood there, hands on his hips, looking completely unbothered.

It drove Phil insane.

Not because he was jealous—okay, maybe a little because he was jealous—but because it didn't make sense. Nobody looked like that after running sprints in a stuffy gym for forty minutes. Nobody. And yet there Teddy was, like he'd barely broken a sweat, like his body didn't work the same way everyone else's did.

Phil found himself watching him more closely after that. Watching the way he moved, the way he never seemed to get tired or sore or winded. The way his skin stayed dry and cool even after the most brutal drills. The way he never complained, never grimaced, never showed even a flicker of discomfort.

It was weird. And the more Phil noticed, the harder it became to ignore.

And then there were the insults.

Phil had watched it happen more than once—some asshole, usually Alvin or one of his brain-dead buddies, would shoulder-check Teddy in the hallway, mutter something under their breath. Freak. Weirdo. Uris the Urine. The kind of shit designed to get a reaction, to make someone flinch or snap back or at least look hurt.

Teddy never did.

He'd just keep walking, expression blank, like he hadn't heard a thing. No anger, no embarrassment, no defensive posturing. Just—nothing. And somehow that made it worse, made the assholes try harder, get meaner, scrawl shit on his locker in permanent marker just to see if that would get a rise out of him.

It never did.

Phil didn't understand it. He'd spent his whole life flinching at insults, learning to laugh them off or hurl them back twice as hard, building up walls so thick he could barely see over them anymore. And here was Teddy, just... letting it slide. Not even pretending to care.

It made Phil feel something uncomfortable and hard to name. Not envy, exactly. Not admiration either. Something closer to worry, maybe. Or frustration. Or both.

He wanted to ask about it, wanted to pull Teddy aside and demand to know how the hell he stayed so calm, but he never did. Because what would he even say? Hey, how come you don't give a shit when people are assholes to you? Teach me your ways?

Yeah. That'd go over well.

Instead, Phil just kept watching. Kept noticing. Kept adding details to the mental list that was getting harder and harder to ignore.

Doesn't eat. Never tired. Doesn't react. Doesn't sweat. Knows everything. Feels nothing.

He stared at that list sometimes, late at night when he couldn't sleep, when his brain was too wired to shut down and his thoughts spiraled in circles he couldn't escape. He tried to make sense of it, tried to find a logical explanation that would make all the pieces fit.

Maybe Teddy had some kind of medical condition. Maybe he was on medication that suppressed his appetite, dulled his emotions, did something to his body that made him different. Maybe he was just weird, and Phil was reading too much into it because that's what Phil did—saw patterns where there weren't any, turned normal things into mysteries because real life was too boring to accept.

But the thoughts wouldn't leave him alone.

Because the thing was—the thing Phil kept circling back to, no matter how hard he tried to push it away—was that being around Teddy felt different. Not bad different. Not uncomfortable or wrong. Just...

When he was with Teddy, he didn't feel like a disappointment. Didn't feel like the family fuck-up, the kid who couldn't sit still, couldn't focus, couldn't be what his parents wanted him to be. He didn't feel like he had to perform or explain himself or apologize for taking up space.

Teddy just... listened. Really listened. Not in the half-assed way most people did, nodding along while clearly waiting for their turn to talk, but actually paying attention. Phil could go off on some wild tangent about government cover-ups or whether time travel was theoretically possible, and Teddy wouldn't laugh or roll his eyes or tell him to get serious. He'd just sit there, watching Phil with those intense, unreadable eyes, and when he did speak, it wasn't to mock or dismiss—it was to engage. To ask questions. To treat Phil's ideas like they were worth considering, even the batshit crazy ones.

And God, Phil loved that. Loved the way Teddy made him feel seen in a way no one else ever had. Like he wasn't just noise and chaos and wasted potential. Like he was interesting. Worth paying attention to.

It was intoxicating.

Dangerous, maybe.

But intoxicating.

Because Teddy Uris had a whole universe in his eyes, and Phil was drawn to that universe like a moth to a flame. Drawn to the mystery of him, yes, but more than that. Drawn to the way Teddy made him feel like maybe, just maybe, he wasn't as crazy-broken as everyone seemed to think.

As a mystery, Teddy fascinated him. As a puzzle, as something strange and unexplained, as a challenge Phil's brain couldn't let go of.

As a person, he wanted to add to the list. But that felt too vulnerable, too exposed, so he left it in pencil for now. Just in case.

Human or not?

The question haunted him. And the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that something was off. That Teddy wasn't what he seemed. That the strangeness wasn't just quirks or coincidence but something deeper, something fundamental.

People couldn't be this perfect. Smart, yes. Athletic, sure. Kind, composed, unflappable—okay, fine. But all of it? All at once, with no effort, no cracks, no flaws?

It didn't add up. It couldn't add up.

And the realization was driving Phil out of his mind.

He thought about it in the shower, water streaming over his face while his brain spun in circles. He thought about it at breakfast, shoving cereal into his mouth while his mom droned on about his grades. He thought about it on the bus, staring out the window at the blur of houses and trees, Teddy's face superimposed over everything like a ghost he couldn't shake.

His whole routine had become saturated with this thing, this obsession he couldn't control and didn't know how to stop. It filled him up until he felt like he might burst, like he was too small to contain a secret this big.

He couldn't stop looking at Teddy. Couldn't stop thinking about him. Couldn't stop drawing him, over and over, trying to capture something he didn't have words for.

Having a crush was one thing. Phil knew what that felt like—the giddy, nervous energy, the way your heart kicked when the other person smiled at you, the urge to be close, to touch, to be seen. Crushes were good. Crushes made life less gray, gave you something to look forward to, made you want to be better.

But this—this thing with Teddy—it wasn't just a crush. It was something sharper, more consuming. Something that felt less like affection and more like need.

Maybe that's why he couldn't let it go. Couldn't just accept Teddy at face value and move on. Because if he admitted that Teddy was just a regular guy—strange, sure, but ultimately human—then he'd have to admit that this feeling gnawing at his ribs was just Phil being pathetic. Just Phil falling for someone who'd never feel the same way, who'd never look at him and see anything worth keeping.

But if Teddy wasn't human—if there was something genuinely different about him—then maybe Phil wasn't crazy. Maybe his instincts were right. Maybe there was a reason he couldn't stop thinking about this boy with stars in his eyes and ice in his veins.

Maybe.

And that's why, one day after gym class, when most of the guys had already cleared out and the locker room was nearly empty, Phil did something incredibly stupid.

He'd been watching Teddy out of the corner of his eye, the way he always did now, and the wrongness of it hit him all over again. Teddy looked fine. Completely, impossibly fine. No sweat, no flush, no sign that he'd just spent forty minutes running drills in a hot, airless gym. His hair wasn't even messed up. His skin was dry and cool, and when Phil leaned a little closer—casually, like he was just grabbing something from his locker—there was no smell. No sweat, no deodorant, no musk. Nothing.

It was the final straw.

Phil's exhaustion, his confusion, his desperation to understand—it all came crashing down at once, and before he could talk himself out of it, he was moving. Crossing the space between them, reaching out, grabbing Teddy by the sleeve of his shirt.

"Hey," Phil said, voice tight. "Can I— can you show me something?"

Teddy turned, eyebrows lifting slightly. "What?"

Phil's face went hot. This was stupid. This was so stupid. But he was already committed, already in too deep to back out now.

"Your stomach," he blurted. "I need to see your stomach."

Teddy blinked. "My stomach."

"Yeah. Just— lift your shirt. Please."

There was a beat of silence. Phil braced himself for mockery, for Teddy to laugh or ask what the hell was wrong with him, but it didn't come. Instead, Teddy just looked at him for a long moment, something unreadable flickering across his face, and then he shrugged.

"Alright."

He reached down, grabbed the hem of his shirt, and lifted it.

Phil stared.

It was just a stomach. Just a normal, unremarkable stomach, pale and smooth, with a normal belly button sitting exactly where it should be. No scars, no strange markings, no gaping void where his organs should be. Just skin. Human skin.

But Phil's eyes snagged on other details before he could stop himself. The flatness of Teddy's abdomen, the faint definition of muscle beneath the surface, the way his skin looked impossibly smooth, like it had never seen a blemish or a bruise. And the coolness of it—even from a distance, Phil could tell. Could feel the absence of warmth radiating off him the way it should.

His heart did something painful and complicated in his chest.

"Satisfied?" Teddy asked, lowering his shirt.

Phil forced himself to look away, face burning. "Yeah. Sorry. That was— stupid. Forget I asked."

"It's fine."

But it wasn't fine. Because now Phil couldn't stop thinking about it. About how easily Teddy had complied, how unbothered he'd been, how he hadn't even questioned it. Like he was used to this. Like he'd been expecting it.

Phil shoved his stuff into his bag and bolted, leaving Teddy standing alone in the locker room, and his thoughts were louder than ever, sharper than ever, impossible to ignore.

Something was wrong with Teddy Uris.

Or maybe something was wrong with Phil, for caring this much.

Either way, he was in too deep to stop now.

Strange, Phil decided, shoving through the exit and into the harsh fluorescent light of the hallway. Strange as hell.

Not just in pencil anymore. In ink, maybe. Bold and permanent.

And he was going to prove it.

☄

That newfound resolve became the driving force behind everything that followed. Actions Phil couldn't always explain, even to himself, because from the outside they looked completely ridiculous.

He ditched Matty right after school let out, peeling off mid-conversation with some half-baked excuse about needing to pick up his sister from her friend's house—never mind that Suzie was thirteen and perfectly capable of walking herself home, never mind that Matty knew this and was already giving him a look that said what the hell are you up to—and then he was moving, shouldering through the crush of students spilling out onto the front steps, eyes locked on the back of Teddy's head as he disappeared into the crowd.

He hung back at first, keeping a safe distance, trying to look casual. But casual was hard when your heart was doing double-time in your chest and every instinct screamed that you were being obvious. He sped up when Teddy turned a corner, slowed down when he thought he was getting too close, ducked behind parked cars and chain-link fences and overgrown hedges like some two-bit private eye in a dime-store paperback. At one point he crouched down to tie his shoe—his shoe that was already tied—just because Teddy had paused at a crosswalk and Phil panicked.

Teddy walked with that same calm, unhurried stride he always had, hands in his pockets, gaze straight ahead. He didn't look back. Teddy slowed down a few times—just enough that Phil wouldn't lose him when a passing car blocked his view, just enough that the distance between them stayed manageable. And when he finally stopped in front of a small, neat house on a quiet residential street, he took his sweet time fishing his keys out of his pocket, humming something low and tuneless under his breath.

Phil, crouched behind a neighbor's azalea bush across the street, had to physically restrain himself from groaning out loud.

Come on, man. Just open the damn door.

But Teddy didn't. He stood there on the front porch, keys dangling from one hand, turning them over slowly like he had all the time in the world. Like he wasn't perfectly aware that Phil was right there, getting dirt on his jeans and probably about to get yelled at by some nosy housewife who'd spot him through her kitchen window and assume he was casing the neighborhood.

If Phil could do something stupider than tailing someone home like a low-rent stalker, it would be giving up now. Right at the finish line. After all this.

Teddy, apparently, disagreed.

"You want to come in for tea?" he asked—not loudly, but clear enough that his voice carried across the street. Then he turned his head, gaze landing directly on the azalea bush, and Phil's stomach dropped straight through the sidewalk.

Oh, you've got to be kidding me.

For a second, Phil considered just staying put. Pretending he hadn't heard. Maybe Teddy was bluffing. Maybe he was talking to someone else. Maybe—

"Phil," Teddy said, and there was the faintest hint of amusement in his voice now. "I can see you."

Phil closed his eyes, let out a long, defeated breath, and stood up.

Leaves clung to his jacket. Dirt smudged his knees. His hair was probably a mess. He brushed himself off as best he could, feeling his face go hot, and crossed the street with as much dignity as he could muster—which, let's be honest, wasn't much.

"You could've just pretended you didn't notice," he muttered, stopping at the bottom of the porch steps.

"I noticed at school," Teddy said mildly, finally slotting the key into the lock. "Seemed rude to ignore you after you put in all that effort."

"You're hilarious."

"I wasn't trying to be." Teddy pushed the door open, glanced back at him. "So. Tea?"

Phil hesitated, caught between embarrassment and curiosity. He should leave. He should. This was already humiliating enough without dragging it out further. But—

But he was here. Right on the threshold of Teddy's actual house, where maybe, just maybe, he'd find something that made sense of all this. Some clue, some piece of evidence, some confirmation that he wasn't losing his mind.

And besides. The idea of going home now, empty-handed, felt worse than the humiliation.

"Yeah," he said, shoving his hands into his pockets. "Sure. Why not."

Teddy's mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but close—and he stepped inside, holding the door open.

Phil followed.

The house was... normal.

Aggressively, disappointingly normal

No strange equipment humming in the corners. No walls covered in star charts or alien script. No ominous glow emanating from the basement. Just a tidy, modest home that looked like every other house on the block—floral wallpaper in the entryway, worn but clean furniture in the living room, the faint scent of something baking drifting in from the kitchen. A radio played softly somewhere, crooning some syrupy ballad Phil's mom probably liked.

It was so ordinary that Phil wanted to scream.

"Nice place," he said instead, shrugging off his jacket and leaving it draped over the back of a chair.

"You were expecting something else," Teddy observed, moving toward the kitchen.

"No," Phil lied. "I mean— no. It's fine. It's great. Very... homey."

Teddy glanced over his shoulder, one eyebrow raised, and Phil had the distinct impression he wasn't fooling anyone.

The kitchen was small and bright, sunlight streaming through gingham curtains over the sink. Teddy filled a kettle and set it on the stove, then reached into a cupboard and pulled out a plate piled with what looked like homemade cookies—pale, crumbly things dusted with sugar.

He set them on the table in front of Phil.

Phil stared at them like they might explode.

"My mom made them," Teddy said, retrieving two mugs from another cupboard. "She bakes a lot."

"That's— great," Phil said, not touching the plate. "Really great. I'm, uh. I'm not hungry, though."

Teddy turned, leaning back against the counter. "You sure? They're good."

"I'm sure."

"You haven't even tried one."

"Don't need to." Phil crossed his arms, trying to look casual and probably failing. "I'm just— not in the mood for cookies right now. That's all."

Teddy watched him for a long moment, expression unreadable. Then he said, very calmly, "You think I'm trying to poison you."

Phil's face went hot. "What? No. I didn't—"

"Phil."

"Okay, maybe I'm being a little cautious, but can you blame me? I don't—" He gestured vaguely at the plate, at Teddy, at the whole situation. "I don't know what's in those. I don't know if my body can even— look, I'm just being smart, alright?"

"By assuming I'd drug you."

"I didn't say drug—"

"You said poison."

"Same difference!"

Teddy exhaled through his nose, and for a second Phil thought he was going to get angry. But instead, he just looked... tired. Not physically tired—Teddy never looked physically tired—but deeper.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said quietly. "Why would I? We're friends."

The word landed like a stone in still water, ripples spreading out in every direction.

Friends.

Phil's throat tightened. He didn't know why that hit him so hard—it was just a word, just a simple statement of fact—but hearing Teddy say it, so easily, so certainly, like it wasn't even up for debate, made something crack open in his chest.

Because Phil had friends. He had Matty, who'd known him since they were kids and put up with all his weirdness without question. But this—Teddy—felt different. Felt bigger. And the fact that Teddy saw it the same way, that he'd just said it like it was obvious, like it mattered—

Phil didn't know what to do with that.

"Okay," he parted his lips, but his voice softened. "Okay, but— humor me. You try one first."

Teddy's expression didn't change. "I can't."

"What do you mean you can't?"

"I mean it'll make me sick." He said it the way someone might say I'm allergic to peanuts or I don't eat shellfish—matter-of-fact, unbothered. "I don't eat this kind of thing."

Phil's pulse kicked up. "What kind of thing?"

"Human food."

The silence that followed was so thick Phil could've choked on it.

"You—" He stopped. Started again. "You just said—"

"My parents eat it," Teddy continued, as if he hadn't just dropped a bomb in the middle of the conversation. "So I know it's safe. For you."

Phil stared at him. His brain felt like it was short-circuiting, thoughts slamming into each other too fast to process. Human food. My parents eat it. For you.

"What do you eat, then?" he asked, and his voice came out strangled.

Teddy smiled faintly. "You don't want to know."

"Try me."

"Trust me, Phil. You don't."

And the worst part—the worst part—was that Phil believed him. Believed that whatever the answer was, it would be something he wasn't ready to hear. Something that would make all of this real in a way he wasn't sure he could handle.

So he didn't push. He just sat there, staring at the plate of cookies, and tried to decide if he was brave enough to eat one.

In the end, curiosity won.

He picked up a cookie—slowly, like it might bite him—and took a small, cautious bite.

It tasted like butter and sugar and nothing else. Normal. Harmless. Delicious, even.

He took another bite. Then another. And before he knew it, he'd finished the whole thing and was reaching for a second.

Teddy watched him the entire time, sipping tea from a plain white mug, his expression soft and unreadable.

"Good?" he asked.

Phil swallowed, brushing crumbs off his lap. "Yeah," he admitted. "Yeah, they're good."

"Told you."

"Doesn't mean I trust you."

"I know."

But the thing was—Phil kind of did. Trust him, that is. Because Teddy didn't feel like a threat. He felt like someone who understood.

Like someone who saw Phil for what he was—messy, chaotic, too much—and didn't flinch.

Phil stayed longer than he meant to. They didn't talk about the cookies again, didn't talk about the strangeness or the human food comment that was still ringing in Phil's ears like a bell he couldn't un-hear. They just... talked. About school, about nothing, about the kind of pointless shit you talk about when you're desperately trying not to think too hard about the thing that's sitting right there between you, too big and too real to look at directly.

And the whole time, Phil's mind was spinning.

Because this was it. Teddy had practically said it, and Phil should've been ecstatic. He should've been pumping his fist, mentally screaming I KNEW IT, I FUCKING KNEW IT, already planning how he'd rub it in everyone's faces. His parents, his teachers, Matty, everyone who'd ever rolled their eyes at his theories or told him to get his head out of the clouds.

See? I'm not crazy. I'm not just some daydreaming screw-up. I was RIGHT.

But he didn't feel ecstatic.

He felt terrified.

Because Teddy had said it so casually. Like it didn't matter. Like he wasn't worried about Phil running straight to the nearest authority figure and blowing his whole cover. Like he trusted Phil not to do that.

And that trust—that quiet, unearned, unshakable trust—was heavier than any secret Phil had ever carried.

What the hell was he supposed to do with this?

If Teddy really wasn't human—and God, the evidence was stacking up so high Phil couldn't ignore it anymore, couldn't laugh it off or rationalize it away—then what did that mean? What happened next? Did Phil tell someone? Keep it to himself? Pretend he didn't know?

And what would happen to Teddy if people did find out?

Phil's stomach twisted.

This town was a hellhole. If people like Phil weren't safe here—if anyone ever found out, of course—what hope was there for Teddy?

He thought about the way people looked at Teddy sometimes—the wariness, the discomfort, the low-grade hostility that simmered just beneath the surface. The graffiti on his locker. The muttered insults. The way some of the guys in gym shoved him a little harder than necessary, like they were testing him, waiting for him to crack.

If they knew—if anyone knew—

Phil didn't want to think about it.

So he didn't. He shoved the thought down, buried it under layers of denial and distraction, and when Teddy walked him to the door, he forced a smile and said something stupid about seeing him tomorrow.

Teddy smiled back—small, almost sad, like he knew exactly what Phil was thinking—and nodded.

"You don't have to follow me, you know," he said quietly. "If you want to know something, you can just ask."

"I wasn't—"

"Phil."

"Okay, fine. Maybe I was. A little." He rubbed the back of his neck, refusing to meet Teddy's eyes. "I just—I'm trying to figure you out."

"I know."

"And?"

Teddy's smile softened. "And I'm letting you."

Phil didn't know what to say to that. So he didn't say anything. Just shoved his hands in his pockets, nodded once, and headed down the porch steps into the cooling evening air.

Behind him, the door clicked shut.

And Phil walked home with his head full of static, his chest tight, his thoughts a tangled mess he couldn't begin to untangle.

☄

Phil without his investigations barely tried over the following week.

Oh, he still watched. Still noticed things. But the energy behind it had shifted, gone from desperate curiosity to something more like avoidance. Like if he didn't look too closely, didn't confirm what he already knew, then maybe it wouldn't be real yet. Maybe he could still convince himself he'd imagined it. Misheard. Misunderstood.

He tested Teddy a few times—casually, almost apologetically. Bumped into him a little too hard in the hallway. Stepped on his foot during gym. Watched for a wince, a sharp intake of breath.

Nothing.

Teddy didn't react. Didn't flinch. Just looked at Phil with that same calm, knowing expression, like he understood exactly what Phil was doing and why, and wasn't going to stop him.

And every time, Phil told himself it didn't mean anything.

He's just tough. Guys are tough. Matty doesn't complain when he gets knocked around either, and he's definitely human.

Never mind that Matty did complain. Constantly. Never mind that most guys Phil knew swore up a storm if they so much as stubbed a toe.

Teddy was just... different. That was all. Different didn't mean alien. Different just meant different.

Phil clung to that logic like a lifeline.

His investigation—the thing that had started as a quest to prove himself right, to validate all those years of theories and conspiracies and wild ideas no one took seriously—had slowly, quietly transformed into a thousand and one ways to explain Teddy away. A thousand and one reasons why Phil might be wrong.

It even calmed him down for a while.

And then Phil accidentally nailed Teddy's fingers with a volleyball during gym class, and everything went to hell.

They were playing three-on-three—Phil, Teddy, and Matty against some juniors who took the game way too seriously—and Phil was doing what he always did: talking too much, moving too fast, throwing himself into every play like his life depended on it. He spiked the ball hard, arms swinging wild, and didn't think twice about trajectory or aim or anything resembling caution.

Phil hit the ball, but his aim was off. So it bounced off the net.

And slammed directly into Teddy's hand.

The impact was loud—a sharp, meaty thwack that cut through the noise of the gym—and the game stopped immediately. The ball bounced away, forgotten. Matty froze mid-step, mouth open. One of the juniors muttered a low, uncertain 'oh shit!'.

Phil's stomach dropped.

"Teddy—" He was moving before he'd fully processed what happened, crossing the court in three long strides, heart hammering. "Jesus, I'm sorry, I didn't mean— are you okay? Let me see, let me—"

Teddy lifted his hand, turning it slowly in the fluorescent light.

One of his fingers—the middle one—was bent at an angle that made Phil's vision swim. Not broken-bone-sticking-out bad, but wrong. Visibly, undeniably wrong. The kind of injury that should've had Teddy on the ground, clutching his hand and screaming.

Instead, he just looked at it. Curious. Detached. Like he was examining a piece of machinery that had stopped working correctly.

"Oh my God," Phil breathed, and his voice came out high and strangled. "Oh my God, Teddy, I'm so sorry, I didn't— I swear I didn't mean to—"

"Don't worry. It's fine," Teddy said calmly.

"It's not fine, your finger is—" Phil gestured helplessly at Teddy's hand, words failing him. "It's broken, man, we need to get you to the nurse, we need to—"

"Phil." Teddy's voice was steady, grounding. "It's fine."

But it wasn't, and Phil couldn't understand why Teddy was acting like it was. Couldn't understand why he wasn't yelling or swearing or at least wincing. Couldn't understand how someone could look at their own mangled hand with the same mild interest they'd give a scraped knee.

Across the gym, Coach Hendricks was screaming at a group of freshmen who'd been goofing off near the climbing ropes. He hadn't noticed. No one in authority had noticed. It was just them—Phil, Teddy, Matty, and a handful of students who were starting to crowd closer, drawn by the prospect of drama.

Phil made a decision.

"Come on." He grabbed Teddy's uninjured hand and tugged, hard. "We're going to the nurse. Now."

"Phil, you don't have to—"

"Yes, I do." His grip tightened, almost desperate. "You're hurt. I hurt you. So we're going. Okay? We're going."

Teddy didn't resist. Just let himself be pulled toward the exit, his expression unreadable, his injured hand hanging loose at his side.

Phil kept talking the entire way—rambling, really, words spilling out too fast to control. "I'm sorry, okay? I'm really, really sorry, I should've been more careful, I wasn't looking, I just—I got too into it, you know how I get, and I didn't think, and now you're—God, does it hurt? It has to hurt, right? We'll get you to the nurse and she'll fix it, she'll splint it or whatever, maybe give you something for the pain, and—"

"Phil," Teddy said quietly. "I'm fine."

"You keep saying that, but your finger is literally—"

"I know." Teddy glanced at him, something soft and almost sad in his eyes. "But I'm telling you the truth."

Phil wanted to argue. Wanted to shake him and demand to know how the hell he could be fine when his hand looked like that. But the words caught in his throat, tangled up with fear and guilt and the creeping, undeniable certainty that this was it. This was the moment Phil couldn't rationalize away.

They made it halfway to the nurse's office before Teddy stopped walking.

Phil took two more steps before he realized, momentum carrying him forward, and then he spun around, already opening his mouth to protest.

"Teddy, come on, we're almost—"

"Phil." Teddy's voice was gentle but firm. "Look at me."

Phil looked.

Teddy stood in the middle of the empty hallway, sunlight slanting through the windows and painting him in shades of gold. His injured hand hung at his side, fingers still bent wrong, but his expression was calm. Patient. Like he had all the time in the world.

"It's okay," he said. "Really. You don't need to worry so much."

"How can I not worry? You're—"

"Phil." Teddy took a slow breath, then lifted his injured hand between them. "Watch."

"Wait— what are you—"

Teddy gripped the broken finger with his other hand—carefully, precisely—and pulled.

The sound was awful. A wet, grinding crack that echoed off the linoleum and made Phil's stomach lurch violently. He flinched, eyes squeezing shut on instinct, bracing for the scream that had to follow.

It didn't come.

When Phil forced his eyes open again, Teddy was flexing his hand experimentally, testing the joint. The finger was straight again. Still a little swollen, maybe, but otherwise normal. Functional.

And Teddy's face was calm. Not twisted in agony. Not pale with shock. Just... calm. Like he'd done nothing more strenuous than crack his knuckles.

Phil couldn't breathe.

"See?" Teddy said softly. "I'm okay."

Phil stared at him. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. His brain felt like it was moving through molasses, sluggish and thick, trying to process what he'd just seen and failing spectacularly.

Teddy's brow furrowed. "Phil? Are you okay?"

"I—" Phil's voice cracked. He swallowed, tried again. "You just—"

"I didn't mean to scare you." Teddy lowered his hand, looking genuinely apologetic. "I'm sorry. I should've warned you, but you seemed so upset, and I thought—"

"You snapped your finger back into place," Phil said, and it came out louder than he meant it to, echoing down the hallway. "You just—you didn't even—how are you not screaming right now?"

Teddy hesitated. For the first time since the injury, he looked uncertain. "I told you, it's nothing."

"That's not—" Phil dragged a hand through his hair, gripping hard enough to hurt. "That's not normal, Teddy. That's not— people don't just—"

He stopped. Because what was he supposed to say? People don't just reset their own broken bones without flinching? People don't look at serious injuries like minor inconveniences?

People aren't like you?

Teddy watched him, waiting. Not defensive. Not angry. Just... waiting. Like he knew exactly where Phil's thoughts were going and wasn't going to stop him from getting there.

Phil took a shaky breath.

"We're still going to the nurse," he said finally, voice flat.

Teddy blinked. "Huh?"

"You heard me." Phil turned and started walking again, slower this time. "We're going to the nurse. She needs to check you out. Make sure it's... make sure everything's okay."

He didn't look back to see if Teddy was following. He didn't need to. He could hear the soft scuff of sneakers on linoleum, steady and unhurried, trailing a few steps behind.

The school nurse—Mrs. Smith, a squat woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a beaded chain—looked up from her paperwork when they entered, eyebrows rising.

"What happened?" she asked, gaze landing immediately on Teddy's hand.

"Volleyball accident," Phil said quickly, before Teddy could answer. "Hit him pretty hard. His finger got... twisted. We thought you should look at it."

Mrs. Smith stood, waving Teddy over to the examination table. "Let me see."

Teddy sat obediently, holding out his hand. The nurse took it gently, turning it this way and that, prodding at the joints with practiced efficiency.

"Does this hurt?" she asked, pressing on the knuckle.

"No."

"How about this?"

"No."

"And here?"

"No, ma'am."

Mrs. Smith frowned, leaning closer. "You sure? This should be tender if you hit it as hard as your friend says."

"I'm sure," Teddy said politely.

She looked at him for a long moment, then shook her head and reached for a roll of medical tape. "Well, it doesn't look broken. Might've just jammed it. I'll wrap it up to be safe, but you should be okay."

Phil stood by the door, arms crossed, watching the whole interaction in silence. He didn't trust himself to speak. Didn't trust what might come out if he opened his mouth.

Teddy caught his eye once while Mrs. Smith worked, and there was something in his expression—quiet, apologetic, maybe a little worried—that made Phil's chest ache.

"Alright," the nurse said, snipping the tape and patting Teddy's shoulder. "You're all set. If it starts hurting later, come back and I'll take another look."

"Thank you," Teddy said, sliding off the table.

Phil followed him out into the hallway without a word.

They walked in silence for a while, the sounds of distant classes muffled behind closed doors. Phil's thoughts were a tangled mess, too big and too loud to organize, and he didn't know where to start unraveling them.

Finally, Teddy spoke.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly. "For worrying you."

Phil laughed—a short, nervous sound. "You're sorry?"

"Yes."

"Teddy, you just—" He stopped walking, turned to face him. "You put your own broken finger back together like it was nothing. And then you sat there and let the nurse wrap it up like you actually needed it. Why?"

Teddy looked at him steadily. "Because it made you feel better."

Phil's breath hitched.

"And because," Teddy continued, softer now, "I didn't want to make things harder for you than they already are."

Phil spent the rest of the day in a fog.

Classes passed in a blur. Teachers called on him and he answered on autopilot, his mind somewhere else entirely. Matty tried to talk to him at lunch, cracking jokes and elbowing him in the ribs, but Phil barely registered it.

All he could think about was the sound. The wet crack of bone realigning. The calm on Teddy's face. The way he'd apologized—not for what he was, but for making Phil see it.

And underneath all of that, a quiet, insistent voice whispering the truth Phil had been trying so hard to ignore:

He's not human.

He's never been human.

And you've known that for a while now.

Phil was thrilled. He was incredibly, recklessly excited. But above all, he was frightened.

☄

Phil started acting differently.

Not dramatically. Not obviously. Just off. Like someone had taken the usual Phil Malkin and turned down the volume on him, muted all the colors until he was just a pale sketch of himself.

He still sat near Teddy in class. Still showed up at the same lunch table. Still answered when spoken to. But the ease was gone. The careless, unthinking proximity they'd built over weeks had evaporated, replaced by something careful and uncomfortable. Phil would start to lean over, elbow ready to nudge Teddy's arm during some shared joke, then catch himself mid-motion and pull back. He'd open his mouth to say something, then close it again, the words dying unspoken.

It wasn't that he was scared. He wasn't afraid of Teddy. This was messier. This was Phil realizing, with slow and creeping dread, that the rules had changed and he hadn't been given the new playbook. He didn't know how to be around Teddy anymore. Didn't know if he was supposed to pretend nothing had happened, or acknowledge it, or— what? What did you do when you were pretty sure your friend wasn't human and said friend had made it clear he knew you knew?

So Phil retreated into himself. Got quieter. More distracted. Spent class periods staring out windows or doodling nothing in particular, his mind a million miles away.

And Teddy noticed.

Of course he did. Teddy noticed everything.

But he didn't push. Didn't corner Phil in the hallway with some earnest are we okay? or try to force a conversation Phil clearly wasn't ready for. He just watched. Quietly. Patiently. Those space, implausible eyes tracking Phil's movements across the classroom, across the cafeteria, across the gym, like he was trying to solve an equation where all the variables kept shifting.

Every time Phil caught that gaze, something in his chest would twist painfully. He'd look away fast, face heating, and pretend he hadn't noticed. But he had. God, he had. And it made everything so much worse, because Teddy's expression wasn't angry or hurt or even confused.

It was just concerned.

Like Phil was the one who needed protecting.

Lunch was when it finally broke.

Phil slid into his usual seat next to Matty, who was already halfway through some rambling story about a girl in his English class allegedly throwing a textbook at Mr. Harrison's head. Phil made the appropriate noises—no way, seriously?—but his attention was elsewhere, eyes flicking toward the cafeteria entrance every few seconds.

Waiting.

Because Teddy always sat with them. Every single day since that first awkward introduction, Teddy had claimed the spot to Phil's right, quiet and unobtrusive, letting Phil and Matty fill the silence while he picked at food he never actually ate and occasionally dropped a comment so dry it took them both a second to realize he was joking.

So when Teddy walked in, tray balanced in one hand, Phil shifted automatically. Made space. Nudged his backpack out of the way and angled his body toward the empty seat in wordless invitation.

Their eyes met across the crowded room.

And Teddy looked away.

He slowed, just for a second, gaze sliding past Phil like he was deciding something. Then he turned and walked to a different table entirely. Sat down with a cluster of quiet, forgettable kids—the kind who kept their heads down and didn't make waves—and started talking like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Phil's stomach dropped so fast he felt dizzy.

He stared, frozen, trying to make sense of what he'd just seen. Tried to tell himself he'd misunderstood, that Teddy simply hadn't noticed him, that—

But no. He'd noticed. Phil knew he'd noticed.

"—so then she goes, 'if you're not gonna teach, I'm not gonna learn,' and I swear to God, Phil, I thought Harrison was gonna have a stroke—Phil? You good?"

"Yeah." Phil dragged his eyes back to Matty, forced something resembling a smile. "Yeah, sorry. Just spaced out."

"You've been doing that a lot lately."

"I know." Phil poked at his lunch tray, appetite gone. "Just tired, I guess."

Matty gave him a look—not quite suspicious, but close—then shrugged and went back to his story.

Phil barely heard it. All he could focus on was the weight in his chest, heavy and uncomfortable, and the voice in his head whispering "you did this, you pushed him away, this is your fault."

Because it was. Wasn't it? He'd been the one acting weird, pulling back, making Teddy feel like he wasn't wanted. And now Teddy was just—giving him what he thought Phil needed. Space. Distance. Permission to pretend they'd never been friends at all.

The guilt was suffocating.

Apparently, this day was meant to finish him off, because after lunch, Phil got called to Mr. Davies' office.

He wasn't surprised. His art grades had been slipping for weeks now—along with everything else—and Davies had a reputation for pulling kids aside before things got bad enough to involve parents. A pre-emptive strike, so to speak. Phil had been half-expecting it.

He just wished it wasn't today, when he already felt like he was barely holding himself together.

He knocked on the faculty lounge door. Once. Twice. Three times.

No answer.

Phil frowned, pressed his ear to the wood. Silence. He tried the handle—it turned easily—and pushed the door open a crack.

Empty.

For a second, Phil just stood there, one foot in the hallway and one in the room, caught between leaving and staying. Then he stepped inside, letting the door click shut behind him.

The faculty lounge was a cluttered, sun-drenched space that smelled faintly of coffee and old paper. Desks lined the walls, each one buried under stacks of assignments and grade books and memos about things Phil would never care about. One desk near the window had a pile of math tests spread across it, half-marked, red ink glaring.

Phil's feet carried him over before his brain caught up.

His test was near the top. Of course it was. Mrs. Dalton always graded alphabetically.

47/100, the red numbers screamed.

Phil's jaw clenched so hard his teeth ached.

He'd studied for that test. Really, genuinely studied—stayed up late going over formulas, let Matty quiz him over breakfast, spent the entire bus ride flipping through his notes. But the second he'd sat down in that classroom, pencil in hand, everything had just vanished. Slipped through his fingers like smoke, leaving him staring at questions he couldn't answer and a clock that wouldn't stop ticking.

His parents were going to lose their minds.

His dad would get that look. That tight, disappointed look that made Phil feel about two inches tall. His mom would do the thing where she smiled and said we just want you to succeed, honey in a tone that meant we're running out of patience.

And they'd both think the same thing they always thought: Why can't you just try harder? Just stop fooling around, pull yourself together Philip, how old are you?

Phil's hand moved before he could stop it.

He grabbed the pen lying on the desk and leaned down, squinting at the grade. Maybe if he could just change the 4 to a 7, make it look natural, like Mrs. Dalton's handwriting—

Footsteps echoed outside.

Phil's heart slammed against his ribs.

He dropped the pen, panic flooding cold through his veins, and looked around wildly. The door was already opening—voices filtering through, the sharp click of heels on tile—and there was no time, no time to think, so he dropped to his knees and shoved himself under the nearest desk.

The door swung wide.

"—remarkable, really," a woman's voice said, bright and conversational. Principal Fletcher, probably. "You don't see that level of aptitude very often."

"Mm." That was Mrs. Dalton. Phil would recognize her rasp anywhere. "Sometimes I'm amazed by what these kids are capable of. Especially the ones who've had it rough."

Phil pressed himself flat against the wall, barely breathing.

"We're talking about the Uris boy?"

"Theodore, yes." There was a rustle of papers, the creak of a chair. "Adopted, you know. His father's a rabbi. Mother works at the pharmacy downtown—Sarah, I think her name is. Lovely woman. Very quiet."

"I didn't realize he was adopted."

"Oh, yes. They took him in about—what, seven years ago? Eight? Unusual family, all things considered, but they've done well by him. The boy's a genius. Perfect scores across the board. If I didn't know better, I'd think he had a photographic memory."

Fletcher laughed. "Well, let's hope that's all it is. We don't need another cheating scandal."

Their voices drifted, shifting to budget meetings and staffing issues, and Phil stopped listening.

His head was too full. Too loud.

Adopted. Seven or eight years ago. Unusual family.

He'd suspected, of course. But hearing it confirmed—hearing it spoken aloud by people who had no idea what it meant—made it real in a way it hadn't been before.

Teddy had been adopted. By a rabbi and a pharmacist. By ordinary people who'd looked at this strange, quiet boy and decided to love him anyway. To protect whatever secret he carried. To give him a life where maybe, just maybe, he could pretend to be normal.

The women left eventually, voices fading down the hall. Phil stayed under the desk long after the room went silent again, staring at nothing, trying to get his breathing under control.

When he finally crawled out, his knees ached and his hands were shaking.

He looked at his math test, still sitting on the desk. At the pen lying beside it.

He left them both where they were.

The rest of the day blurred past like a film reel missing half its frames. By the time the final bell rang, Phil had made a decision.

He needed to talk to Teddy.

Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now.

Before he lost his nerve. Before the distance between them became something permanent.

He didn't know what he was going to say. Didn't have a script or a plan. But he knew he couldn't keep doing this—couldn't keep pretending everything was fine when it so obviously wasn't.

So he grabbed his bag, ignored Matty's shouted 'see you tomorrow', and went to find him.

Teddy was waiting for him by the school gates after last bell, leaning against the chain-link fence with his hands in his pockets, and Phil didn't even pretend to be surprised. He'd expected this. Of course he had. It was Teddy.

But his breath still caught, feet slowing for just a second as he calculated how ready he actually was for whatever conversation was about to happen.

Not very, as it turned out.

He forced himself forward anyway, adjusting the strap of his bag where it dug into his shoulder. Because you couldn't prepare for things like this—didn't matter how many times you rehearsed it in your head lying awake at three in the morning, or sitting in the tub until the water went cold, staring at nothing and trying to figure out what the hell you were supposed to say.

Phil had been thinking about this for weeks. And it still wasn't enough. It would never be enough, not when it came to Teddy, so there was no point in putting it off any longer.

Now or never.

"Hey," Phil said, and it came out rougher than he meant it to.

"Hey." Teddy's smile was small. He lifted one hand in a half-wave that never quite completed itself. "Want to walk?"

Phil shrugged, an awkward, noncommittal gesture that could've meant anything. Teddy took it as a yes. He pushed off the fence, straightened, and said quietly, almost conspiratorially: "Come on. I want to show you something."

And Phil followed.

They walked in silence at first, threading through the afternoon crush of students heading home or to after-school jobs or wherever kids went when they didn't want to deal with their lives. Phil kept his head down, hands shoved deep in his pockets, mind racing too fast to focus on where they were going.

Cold hands. Scanning gaze. Impossible knowledge. Fake emotions. Unnatural endurance. Strange diet. High pain tolerance. Doesn't sweat, doesn't cry.

He'd been cataloging it all for weeks now—scribbling observations in the margins of his notebooks, making lists he never showed anyone, building a case piece by piece. And under every entry, situations that backed it up. Proof.

Phil almost laughed. Turned out he wasn't such a terrible detective after all.

His methods were questionable, sure. But the results spoke for themselves.

Except for one thing. One glaring blank space at the bottom of every list, the question he still hadn't filled in:

What is he?

They'd been walking for maybe fifteen minutes when Phil finally looked up and realized where they were.

The Standpipe loomed ahead of them—a strange, ungainly structure that had always looked to Phil like something out of a fever dream. A massive iron water tank wrapped in weathered wooden slats, topped with a conical roof and ringed by a narrow observation deck that most people had forgotten existed. The stairs leading up to it were rusted and precarious, half-hidden by overgrown weeds.

Phil stopped dead.

"You're joking."

Teddy glanced back at him, expression unreadable. "What?"

"We're not going up there."

"Why not?"

"Because it's a death trap, Teds. That thing's like a hundred years old. The stairs are gonna collapse the second we put weight on them."

"They won't."

"You don't know."

"I do." Teddy's voice was calm, certain. He turned to face Phil fully, hands still in his pockets, and something in his gaze made Phil's protests die in his throat. "Trust me, Phil. It's safe."

Phil stared at him for a long moment, jaw working. Then he let out a sharp, frustrated breath and gestured at the tower. "Fine. But if I die, I'm haunting you forever."

Teddy's mouth twitched. "Deal."

The climb was worse than Phil had imagined. Every step groaned under his weight, metal shrieking against metal, and more than once he had to stop and grip the railing—which was also rusted to hell—just to keep his hands from shaking. Heights had never bothered him before, but there was something about being suspended forty feet in the air on a structure that probably should've been condemned decades ago that made his survival instincts scream.

"If I fell," Phil called up to Teddy, who was climbing ahead of him with infuriating ease, "would you catch me?"

Teddy paused, glanced down. "No."

"Wow. Thanks."

"I'm not a superhero, Phil. I can't fly. You'd fall." He said it matter-of-factly, like he was explaining basic physics. "That's just how it works."

Phil barked a laugh, sharp and humorless. "Then who the hell are you?"

The question hung in the air between them, heavier than it should've been.

Teddy didn't answer. Just kept climbing.

When they finally reached the observation deck, Phil bent double, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. His heart was hammering so hard he could feel it in his throat, and for a second he thought he might actually be sick.

Then he straightened, looked around, and forgot how to breathe for an entirely different reason.

The view was staggering. The whole Derry spread out below them like a model—streets and houses and trees reduced to miniature, the late afternoon sun painting everything gold. Phil had lived here his whole life, but he'd never seen it like this. Never realized how small it all was.

How small he was.

"Jesus," he whispered.

Teddy stood at the railing, looking out over the town with that same calm, unreadable expression he always wore. The wind tugged at his hair, his clothes, but he didn't seem to notice.

Phil moved to stand beside him, gripping the railing for balance. For a while, neither of them spoke.

Then Teddy said, very quietly: "You already know."

Phil's hands tightened on the railing. "Know what?"

"Phil."

"I don't—"

"You do." Teddy turned to look at him, and there was something almost sad in his eyes. "You've known for a while. You just didn't want to admit it."

Phil's throat closed up. He wanted to argue, wanted to deflect, wanted to crack a joke and change the subject the way he always did when things got too heavy. But he couldn't. Because Teddy was right.

"Yeah," Phil said finally, voice hoarse. "Yeah, I know."

Teddy nodded slowly. "Okay."

"That's it? Just 'okay'?"

"What else do you want me to say?"

Phil laughed—wild, a little hysterical. "I don't know, man. Maybe— I don't know, an explanation? Some kind of—of...proof that I'm not losing my mind? Something?"

"You want proof."

"Yeah. Yeah, I want proof."

Teddy studied him for a long moment. Then he said, very softly: "Look at me."

Phil's heart stuttered. "What?"

"You want to see this again?"

"I—" Phil swallowed hard. "Yes."

"Then look at me."

Phil turned, and Teddy was right there, closer than he'd realized, close enough that Phil could see the fine details of his face—the way his curls caught the light, the faint freckles scattered across his nose, the impossible stillness in his expression.

Teddy reached up, and Phil didn't flinch away this time. Didn't move at all. Just stood there, frozen, as Teddy's hands—cold, always cold—framed his face, thumbs resting gently against his cheekbones.

"Don't look away," Teddy murmured.

And then the world shattered.

It didn't hurt. That was the strangest part. Phil had expected pain, some kind of physical shock, but there was none. Just expansion. Like something inside him had cracked open and suddenly there was room for everything.

Stars. Galaxies. Nebulae swirling in slow, hypnotic spirals. Planets and moons and comets streaking past in silent, breathtaking arcs. The cosmos spread out before him—no, around him, through him—infinite and impossible and real.

He was flying. Or falling. Or both. It didn't matter. There was no up or down, no beginning or end. Just movement, endless and weightless, and the overwhelming, crushing certainty that he was witnessing something humans weren't meant to see.

Teddy's eyes weren't eyes. They were doorways. Windows into something so vast and incomprehensible that Phil's mind couldn't hold it all, could only catch fragments—a dying star collapsing in on itself, a black hole devouring light, a galaxy being born in a burst of impossible color.

It was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.

It was terrifying.

His lungs burned. He realized distantly that he'd stopped breathing, but he couldn't make himself care. Couldn't tear himself away. Couldn't—

Teddy's hands moved, sliding from Phil's cheeks to cover his ears, and suddenly there was sound.

Not sound, exactly. Not anything Phil had words for. But it filled him up, resonated in his bones, a deep, thrumming music that felt like the universe itself was singing. It stripped him bare, pulled every emotion he'd ever buried to the surface and held them up to the light—fear and wonder and loneliness and longing, all of it tangled together until he couldn't tell where one feeling ended and another began.

He was so small. So impossibly, ridiculously small compared to all of this. And it should've crushed him, should've made him feel insignificant, but instead it felt—

Freeing.

Like for the first time in his life, Phil didn't have to be anything except what he was. He didn't have to prove he wasn’t a screw-up, or joke his way out of disappointed looks, or pretend he cared about becoming someone “respectable.” He didn’t have to explain the wrongness that always seemed to cling to him, or apologize for it. He didn’t have to hide being “disgusting little friend of Dorothy” he had to keep buried. He could just exist, tiny and fragile and human, and that was enough.

A sob caught in his throat.

Teddy pulled back immediately, hands dropping away, and Phil gasped, stumbling, the world snapping back into focus with jarring abruptness.

He was on the observation deck. The sun was still setting. Teddy was still standing in front of him, expression carefully neutral.

Phil's legs gave out. He sank to his knees, shaking, one hand pressed flat against the weathered wood for balance.

"Holy shit," he choked out. "Holy shit, Teds."

"Are you okay?"

"No. Yes. I don't—" Phil dragged a hand through his hair, gripping hard. "I don't know."

Teddy crouched in front of him, close but not touching, and waited.

Phil's mind was reeling, thoughts crashing over each other too fast to process. It's real. He's real. Every doubt, every rationalization, every desperate attempt to explain it away—gone. Obliterated.

And underneath all of that, one thought louder than the rest:

I've been such an asshole.

"I'm sorry," Phil said abruptly. The words spilled out before he could stop them. "I'm so sorry, Teddy, I—I've been acting like a complete dick, I know I have, and I didn't mean to, I just...I didn't know how to—"

"Phil—"

"No, let me finish." He looked up, meeting Teddy's gaze head-on. "I got scared, okay? Not of you, just— of everything. Of what it meant. Of what I was supposed to do with it. And I pulled away because I thought that was safer, but I just made everything worse. I made you think I didn't want you around, and that's not— that's not true. That's the furthest thing from true."

Teddy's expression softened. "I know."

"You...what?"

"I know you weren't trying to hurt me. You were trying to protect me. From yourself, mostly. Because you thought if you got too close, you'd mess something up." Teddy's mouth quirked, almost a smile. "You're not very good at hiding what you're thinking, Phil."

Phil let out a shaky laugh. "Yeah. I've been told."

They sat in silence for a moment, the wind picking up around them, carrying the faint smell of woodsmoke and autumn leaves.

Then Phil said, quieter: "I don't want to keep doing this. The whole distance thing. Pretending I don't care. I do care. A lot. More than I probably should."

"Okay."

"That's it?"

"What else do you want me to say?" Teddy asked, echoing his earlier words.

Phil huffed. "I don't know. Maybe that you don't hate me for being a shitty friend?"

"I don't hate you."

"Good. That's...good." Phil hesitated, then pushed himself to his feet, legs still unsteady. He held out a hand. "Help me up?"

Teddy took it without hesitation, and Phil pulled him upright in one smooth motion. They stood facing each other, close enough that Phil had to tilt his head down to maintain eye contact.

Without thinking, Phil stepped forward and wrapped his arms around him.

Teddy went still—not tense, just surprised—and for a second Phil thought he'd miscalculated, crossed some invisible line. But then Teddy's arms came up, circling Phil's waist, and he leaned into the embrace with a sigh that sounded almost relieved.

Phil rested his chin on top of Teddy's head, eyes closed, and felt something inside him finally, finally settle.

"We're gonna be okay," he said, more to himself than to Teddy. "Right?"

"Yeah." Teddy's voice was muffled against Phil's shoulder. "I think so."

☄

Yeah, people definitely weren't like that. But Phil didn't need them to be. Didn't need anyone, really, except Teddy.

Because Teddy—he was extraordinary. And being his friend was the most captivating journey Phil had ever been on.

Every day, Phil learned something about the universe—the one they were both so impossibly, laughably small inside of—that he could never have found in library books or heard from the smartest professors or read in any newspaper. Because nobody except him and Teddy's family knew that extraterrestrial life existed. Nobody except Phil knew that it was sitting next to him in homeroom, borrowing his pencils, falling asleep during Mr. Harrison's lectures with its cheek pressed against a palm that never got warm.

He wanted to pinch himself sometimes. Every damn day, actually. Every second he spent with this otherworldly—literally, God, literally—boy, because sometimes he forgot. Forgot that Teddy wasn't human. And then something would happen, something small and impossible, and it would slam back into him and he'd freeze mid-step, mid-laugh, mid-breath, just staring, transfixed, his mind spiraling out into slow wondering thoughts about the distant and unknowable, and for long minutes his too-big heart would slam against his too-small ribs like it was trying to escape.

And Teddy Uris—his best friend, just his best friend—didn't just hold all of Phil's breathless, childish descriptors like impossible and magnetic and unreal. He was the best. In everything. Absolutely everything.

Teddy was simple, and when he looked at Phil with those wide, helpless eyes, scared and hunched in on himself under a sudden downpour one afternoon when they were walking home and the sky just opened up without warning, when he admitted quietly, almost ashamed, that he hated the rain—hated the feel of water on his usually dry skin, hated the thunder and the lightning and the wrongness of it clinging to him, making him feel trapped and strange—Phil thought he'd give up the whole world for him.

He'd protect him from every cruelty waiting around every corner. He'd build them their own universe if it meant this cosmic boy would never stop smiling. Because Phil was so desperately, hopelessly in love with him even if he couldn't say it out loud, even if the words got stuck behind his teeth every time he tried, and nothing could make that feeling go away. It was vast and warm and all-consuming and Phil wouldn't trade it for anything. Nothing could make him destroy what they had, this fragile, precious, living thing between them. Not even himself.

"Hey, you're okay," Phil murmured, reaching out without thinking to tuck Teddy's rain-soaked curls behind his ears. His fingers lingered maybe a second too long, and he knew it, felt the weight of it. "How about we just never go outside when it's raining again, huh? We can check the weather forecast before we do anything. Or we could just hang out at my place all the time."

He was rambling, he knew, but he couldn't stop. The words kept spilling out, about his parents loving Teddy, about how they wouldn't mind, about making it their thing. And Phil meant every word, would actually rearrange his entire life around Teddy's comfort without a second thought. The scary part was how easy that felt. How natural. Like of course he'd do that. Like there was no question.

Teddy looked at him for a long moment, water dripping from his hair, from his ridiculous perfect face, and Phil wondered if Teddy could feel it, that desperate wanting radiating off him like heat. Probably. Teddy seemed to feel everything when it came to Phil, seemed to tune into his frequency like Phil was the only clear signal in a world of static.

The thought should have been terrifying. Instead it just made Phil want to get closer.

Phil's parents adored Teddy, which was both a relief and deeply ironic in ways that made Phil want to laugh and scream at the same time. They thought he was the best thing that had ever happened to their disaster of a son. Always so polite and well-mannered. Always clean and put-together in a way Phil had never managed. His mom was constantly going on about what a nice boy he was, what a good influence, like Teddy was some kind of reformation project and Phil was the criminal being rehabilitated.

His dad actually smiled when Teddy was around, which was more than Phil could say for himself. Phil, who couldn't sit still for five minutes. Phil, who talked too much and too loud. Phil, who'd never quite figured out how to be the son they'd wanted. But Teddy? Teddy they loved.

And the thing was, Teddy was helping. Phil's grades had shot up because Teddy explained things in a way that actually made sense. Broke down complicated math problems into manageable steps. Helped him write essays that didn't sound like they'd been cobbled together ten minutes before class. They studied together at Phil's kitchen table while his mom baked cookies and hummed along to the radio, and sometimes Phil caught her watching them with this soft expression, like she was proud of him for once. Like he was finally doing things right.

It should have felt good. Should have made Phil happy that his parents finally approved of something in his life.

Instead it just made his chest ache. Because she had no idea—none at all—what Teddy actually was or what Phil felt for him. She looked at them and saw a nice boy helping her troubled son with homework. She didn't see the way Phil's heart stuttered every time Teddy leaned close to point text on the page. Didn't see the way Phil memorized the exact shade of Teddy's eyes in afternoon sunlight. Didn't see that Phil was so fucking in love it hurt to breathe sometimes.

And if she did see it? If she knew?

She'd probably have a heart attack. Probably kick Teddy out and forbid Phil from ever seeing him again. The thought made Phil want to laugh and cry at the same time because it was so fucked up, all of it. The way he had to hide this huge part of himself. Had to pretend Teddy was just a friend when he was so much more than that. Had to sit at the dinner table and listen to his parents praise their relationship while having no idea what it actually meant.

But his parents loved Teddy. Genuinely loved him. Thought he was saving Phil from himself.

And maybe in a way he was. Just not the way they thought.

One evening they sat at the kitchen table, textbooks spread between them, and Teddy was explaining something about polynomials that Phil's brain refused to retain. He was trying to focus, really he was, but Teddy was so close their elbows kept brushing and Phil could see the way Teddy's eyelashes cast shadows on his cheeks and it was completely unfair that anyone should look like that while talking about math.

His mom set down a plate of fresh cookies—still warm, chocolate chips melting—and Teddy thanked her politely but didn't take one. She didn't seem to notice. Or maybe she did and just didn't comment. Phil had learned that Mrs. Uris must have explained this to his parents, some excuse about Teddy's diet, some medical condition that sounded plausible enough that they didn't question it.

After she left, Phil nudged the plate toward Teddy anyway.

"You want one?"

"You know I can't."

"Yeah, but like—what if you could? What would you want to try first?"

Teddy considered this, head tilted in that way he did when he was genuinely thinking. Phil loved that about him. The way he took even Phil's stupid hypotheticals seriously.

"I don't know. They smell good."

"They taste better."

"I'll take your word for it."

Phil ate three cookies while Teddy watched with mild interest, and it should have been weird but it wasn't. Nothing with Teddy was weird anymore. It was just them. Their normal. The way Teddy couldn't eat and Phil made up for it by eating enough for both of them. The way they existed in each other's spaces like they'd always been there.

Later, when Teddy was packing up his books, Phil's mom stopped him at the door.

"Theodore, honey, you're welcome here anytime. You know that, right?"

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you."

"And thank you for helping Philip. His grades have improved so much. We're very grateful."

Teddy glanced at Phil. "He's smart. He just needed someone to explain it differently."

Phil's mom beamed. Phil wanted to sink through the floor.

Teddy's house became Phil's refuge in a way his own home never had. He started showing up unannounced—just walked in through the back door and called out a greeting—and the Urises didn't mind at all. In fact they seemed to expect it. Seemed to have wordlessly adopted him as part of the household.

One evening Phil showed up and found Mr. Uris in the kitchen making tea. David, he kept insisting Phil call him, though Phil could never quite manage it. Mr. Uris just felt more natural. Safer, somehow.

"Teddy's upstairs," Mr. Uris said, not looking up from the kettle.

"Thanks."

"You staying for dinner?"

"If that's okay."

"It's always okay."

Phil mumbled thanks and took the stairs two at a time.

Teddy's room was small and neat with plain walls and a narrow bed, and it smelled faintly of something Phil couldn't name—not cologne or laundry detergent, just the absence of smell, really, since Teddy didn't smell like anything at all. Phil spent so much time there that he'd stopped thinking of it as Teddy's room and started thinking of it as theirs. His comics ended up on Teddy's desk. His jacket ended up on Teddy's chair. His presence ended up woven into the space so thoroughly that Teddy had said once it felt wrong when Phil wasn't there.

Phil didn't know what to do with that information except hold it close and never let go.

There were sleepovers, which Phil knew was probably weird for seventeen-year-old guys but he didn't care and Teddy didn't question it. They stayed up too late talking about everything and nothing. Teddy asked questions about human behavior that Phil didn't always know how to answer—why people lied, why they hurt each other, why they cared so much about things that didn't seem to matter—and Phil did his best to explain even though he wasn't sure he understood it himself.

"Why do people say one thing and mean another?" Teddy asked once, lying on his back and staring at the ceiling.

Phil thought about it. "I don't know. Fear, maybe? Like if you say what you actually mean, you're vulnerable. Someone can hurt you."

"But lying seems more hurtful."

"It is. But people are stupid."

"You're not stupid."

"I'm the stupidest person I know."

Teddy turned his head to look at Phil, and there was almost sadness in his eyes.

"No, you're not."

And the way he said it—so quiet, so certain—made Phil's chest ache. Because Teddy believed it.

Sometimes Teddy fell asleep first, which was rare, and Phil would lie there in the dark listening to the sound of his breathing—slow, steady, impossibly even—and think about how human it sounded. How easy it would be to forget if Phil didn't know better. He'd watch the rise and fall of Teddy's chest and try to match his breathing to it, try to sync up, and sometimes it worked and Phil would feel this strange sense of peace wash over him. Like they were connected. Like they were part of the same organism.

Other times Phil fell asleep first and he'd wake up in the middle of the night to find Teddy still awake, sitting by the window and staring out at the sky with an expression Phil couldn't read. Longing, maybe. Or homesickness for a place he didn't even remember. Phil never asked. Just rolled over and went back to sleep, trusting that if Teddy wanted to talk about it he would.

Once Phil woke up to find Teddy's hand resting on his shoulder, fingers curled loosely in the fabric of his shirt. He didn't move. Didn't even breathe. Just lay there frozen, terrified that if he shifted even slightly Teddy would pull away and the moment would be over. The weight of Teddy's hand was cool and stead, and Phil wanted to memorize every detail. The exact pressure. The way Teddy's fingers curved. The sound of his breathing in the quiet room.

Eventually he fell back asleep like that, Teddy's cold hand anchoring him in place. In the morning neither of them mentioned it but Phil couldn't stop thinking about it for days. Couldn't stop wondering if it had been intentional or unconscious.

Phil showed Teddy his comic books one afternoon, spreading them out on his bedroom floor in a chaotic sprawl of bright colors and bold lettering. He felt embarrassed at first, like a kid showing off his toys. These were his escape. His way of making sense of a world that didn't make sense. And now he was showing them to someone who was the thing these comics tried to imagine.

He started explaining the plot of one—about an invasion and a plucky hero—and Teddy picked up an issue of The Fantastic Four and pointed at a particularly grotesque alien villain.

"This is what they think we are," he said after a while.

"Who, humans?"

"Yeah."

"Is it offensive?"

Teddy tilted his head, considering. "It's... inaccurate."

Phil grinned. "How so?"

"Well, for one, we don't all look like that." He pointed to a particularly grotesque alien on the page. "And we don't want to conquer Earth."

"Some of you might."

"Maybe. But I don't." Teddy set the comic down. "I don't even know if there is a 'we.' I don't know if I have a species. If there are others like me."

"That must be lonely."

"It is," Teddy admitted quietly. "But less so now."

Phil didn't know what to say to that. So he just reached out and squeezed Teddy's shoulder, and Teddy leaned into the touch, and they sat like that for a while, surrounded by comics that got everything wrong.

Later, Teddy picked up Phil's sketchbook—the one he kept in his bag, the one that was full of drawings of Teddy—and flipped through it without asking.

Phil's stomach dropped. "Hey, that's—"

"You draw me a lot," Teddy observed.

"I— yeah. I guess."

"Why?"

Because you're beautiful. Because I can't stop thinking about you. Because putting you on paper is the only way I can make sense of what I feel.

"You're good reference. Interesting face."

Teddy looked at him for a long moment, like he was trying to parse whether Phil was lying. Phil couldn't tell if he succeeded.

"Can I keep one?"

"What?"

"One of the drawings. Can I keep it?"

Phil's face went hot. "I... Yeah, sure. If you want to." 

Teddy carefully tore out a page—one of the better ones, Phil thought, where he'd actually gotten the eyes right—and set it on his desk with a kind of reverence that made Phil want to die.

"Thanks," Teddy said simply.

Phil didn't trust himself to respond. Just watched as Teddy smoothed the page out, adjusting it so it sat perfectly straight, like it was a jewel.

It took time but eventually Teddy told him more about where he'd come from. Not all at once but in fragments, pieces scattered across weeks and months that Phil collected and tried to fit together. They were in Teddy's room late one night, lying on the floor because Teddy's bed was too narrow for both of them, and Phil had asked about his memories, about whether Teddy ever tried to remember.

Teddy was quiet for so long Phil thought maybe he'd fallen asleep. But then he started talking, slow and halting, about waking up ten years ago with no memory of before.

"Just fragments," he said, staring up at the ceiling. "A capsule. Cold and white. Silhouettes moving around me in suits—hazmat suits, maybe. I couldn't tell."

Phil listened, barely breathing, afraid that if he made a sound Teddy would stop.

"I remember metal. Lots of metal. And lights—bright lights that hurt to look at. And this feeling of displacement. Like I was in the wrong place. Like my body didn't fit the space I was in."

"Jesus," Phil whispered.

"I don't remember how I got here. I don't remember if I had a choice." Teddy's voice went even quieter. "I just opened my eyes one day and I was in a hospital. People were saying I was going to be okay. That I was safe now."

"The Urises?"

"They took me in not long after that. Said they wanted to help. Wanted to give me a home." Teddy turned his head to look at Phil. "I've been with them ever since."

"Ten years."

"Ten years."

Phil wanted to say something comforting but everything that came to mind sounded hollow. So instead he just reached out and took Teddy's hand, threaded their fingers together. Teddy looked down at their joined hands like he wasn't sure what to make of it but didn't pull away.

They lay like that for a while, hands clasped, and then Teddy shifted. Sat up slowly. Phil watched him, confused, and then Teddy moved again, repositioning himself so he was lying back against Phil's chest, head tucked under Phil's chin.

Phil froze. His heart was pounding so hard he was sure Teddy could feel it. For a second he didn't know what to do with his hands, where to put them, but then Teddy took one of them and guided it up to his hair, a silent request, and Phil understood.

He started running his fingers through Teddy's curls, slow and careful. They were softer than they looked. Cool to the touch. Phil had never been this close to him before—not like this, not with Teddy's whole weight resting against him, not with his hands in Teddy's hair—and it felt monumental. 

"I don't understand emotions the way you do," Teddy said after a while, his voice quiet in the dim room.

Phil's fingers kept moving, gentle and rhythmic.

"What do you mean?"

"It's like everyone has a frequency," Teddy explained. "And sometimes I can tune into it. Feel what they're feeling. Really intensely. But other times it's just static. White noise. I can't read them at all."

"Does that bother you?"

"Not anymore. I'm just used to it."

Phil thought about this. About what it would be like to experience the world that way. So disconnected and yet so overwhelmingly connected at the same time.

"What about me?" he asked before he could stop himself. "What's my frequency like?"

Teddy was quiet for a moment. Phil could feel him breathing, slow and steady.

"Clear," Teddy said finally. "Really, really clear. Sometimes it's almost overwhelming."

"Is that good or bad?"

"Good. Definitely good."

Phil started moving his fingers again, tracing gentle patterns through Teddy's curls, and Teddy made a soft sound that might have been contentment. They lay like that for a long time, Phil carding his fingers through Teddy's hair while Teddy talked, slow and halting, about things he'd never told anyone else.

"I can't cry." Teddy shifted slightly against Phil's chest, settling more firmly into the curve of his body. "I don't have whatever it is that produces tears."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah." Teddy's hand came up to rest against Phil's ribs, fingers curling loosely in the fabric of his shirt. "The first time I saw my mom cry, I thought she was dying. Thought something was seriously wrong. It took her hours to convince me she was okay."

"That must've been scary."

"It was terrifying," Teddy admitted. "I still don't really understand it. Why leaking water from your eyes is supposed to help anything."

"It's—" Phil paused, trying to find the right words. His hand stilled again, resting against the back of Teddy's head. "It's a release, I guess. Like when you bottle everything up and it gets too much and it just has to come out somehow."

Teddy shifted, turning his face so his cheek rested against Phil's chest instead. "But I don't bottle things up."

"How do you know?"

Teddy went still for a moment, considering. "I don't, I guess. Maybe I do and I just don't realize it."

"What do you do when you're sad? Or upset?"

"I don't think I get sad the way you do."

"Come on, man, everyone gets sad."

"Maybe." Teddy adjusted his position, one hand still pressed flat against Phil's ribs. "But it feels different for me. More distant. Like I'm observing it from far away instead of experiencing it directly."

"That sounds lonely."

Teddy was quiet for a long moment. Then he lifted his head slightly, turning to look up at Phil, and the angle was awkward but his eyes were steady and dark. "Does it? I don't know. It's just how I am."

Phil looked down at him, at those impossibly blue-green eyes so close to his own, and his hand moved from Teddy's hair to cup the side of his face without thinking. "Do you ever wish you could feel things more? Like, more intensely?"

"Sometimes." Teddy didn't pull away from the touch. "But then I feel what you're feeling—when you're happy or excited or angry—and it's so big, Phil. So overwhelming. I don't know if I could handle that all the time."

"Is that why you're always so calm?"

"I'm not always calm. I just process things differently." Teddy settled back down against Phil's chest, pressing his nose against the soft cotton of Phil's shirt again. "It's easier that way."

Phil thought about this, his fingers resuming their gentle movement through Teddy's curls. "Does it bother you? That you're different?"

"No." Teddy's voice was quieter now, softer. "It used to. When I was younger. But the Urises taught me that different isn't bad. It's just—different."

"They sound like good people."

"They are. They saved me. In every way that matters."

"I'm glad you ended up here. With them. With—"

He stopped, the words catching.

Teddy lifted his head again, turning to meet Phil's gaze, and his expression was almost vulnerable. "With you?"

Phil's heart was doing that awful, wonderful thing in his chest. "Yeah. With me."

Teddy smiled—one of those rare, genuine smiles that made Phil feel like the air had been knocked out of his lungs—and pressed his forehead briefly against Phil's collarbone before settling back down.

"Me too," he said softly.

There were moments that caught Phil off guard. Moments when Teddy's alienness—not just physical but cultural—became glaringly obvious. Like the time they were walking through downtown and Teddy reached for Phil's hand, just grabbed it like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Phil yanked his hand back so fast he almost tripped.

Teddy stopped, confused. Maybe hurt.

"What's wrong?"

Phil's heart was pounding. He looked around wildly, checking to see if anyone had noticed, but the street was mostly empty. Still.

"You can't just—we can't hold hands, Ted. People will see."

Teddy frowned. "So?"

And Phil didn't know how to explain it. Didn't have the words for why two boys holding hands was wrong in a way that felt both universal and completely arbitrary. He tried, stumbling over his explanation, something about how people would think they were together, like together together, and Teddy just looked more confused.

"We are together, aren't we?"

"No, I mean—" Phil's face was burning. "Together together. Like..."

Teddy's frown deepened.

"I don't understand why that would be a problem."

Of course he didn't. Didn't know that loving another boy could get you beaten up or arrested or worse.

Phil tried to explain about men and women, about how society had these expectations, these rigid boxes everyone was supposed to fit into. Teddy listened with this expression of growing bewilderment, and when Phil was done rambling he just said, "That's the strangest thing I've ever heard."

Phil couldn't help it. He laughed. Because yeah, when you put it like that, when you stripped away all the cultural baggage and just looked at it objectively, it was strange. Completely fucking bizarre.

They kept walking, not holding hands because Phil was too scared, but close enough that their shoulders brushed with every step. And later Phil caught Teddy watching other people. Watching couples walk hand-in-hand. Watching groups of friends. Trying to parse the rules. Trying to figure out what was allowed and what wasn't.

It made Phil feel guilty and protective all at once. Like he was somehow complicit in this fucked-up system just by explaining it.

There were other moments too. Smaller ones. Like when they were at the diner and Teddy reached across the table to brush a crumb off Phil's lip, and the waitress gave them a look, and Phil shrank into himself. Or when they were at Phil's house and Teddy sat too close on the couch, knee pressed against Phil's, and Phil's dad walked in and Phil immediately shifted away.

Phil had to explain later, awkward and halting, about personal space and boundaries and how people perceived things. Teddy listened carefully, nodded, said he'd try to remember.

But Phil could see he didn't really get it. Didn't understand why a simple gesture of care could be seen as something illicit. Something wrong.

Honestly, Phil didn't fully understand it either. He just knew the rules. Knew what happened when you broke them.

And he was trying to keep them both safe the only way he knew how.

School became simultaneously easier and harder. Easier because Phil's grades were improving, because teachers were actually praising him for once, because he had someone to look forward to every day. Harder because he had to watch Teddy navigate a world that didn't make sense to him. Had to see the way some kids still wrote shit on his locker or muttered insults as he walked by.

One afternoon Phil was at his locker, half-listening to Matty ramble about something, when he saw Bowers shoulder-check Teddy in the hallway. Hard enough that Teddy stumbled. And Butch muttered something under his breath that Phil didn't quite catch but could guess from the way Butch's friends laughed.

Teddy just straightened himself and kept walking, face blank like always, like it didn't even register. But Phil felt hot and ugly pain twist in his gut.

He didn't think. Just acted.

Bowers was heading his way, still laughing with his buddies, and Phil shifted slightly, angling his foot out just enough. Butch went down hard, textbooks scattering across the floor, and the sound echoed through the hallway. People stopped. Turned. Started laughing.

"Jesus, Malkin, watch where you're going," he snarled, scrambling to his feet.

Phil raised his hands, all innocence. "My bad, man. Didn't see you there."

"Bullshit."

"Seriously. Accident." Phil's voice was light, easy, but his eyes were hard. "Maybe you should watch where you're going."

Bowers glared at him, but there were too many people watching, too many witnesses. He couldn't do anything without looking like more of an idiot than he already did. So he just grabbed his books and stalked off, and Phil turned back to his locker like nothing had happened.

When they were alone later, Teddy asked quietly, "Why did you do that?"

Phil kept his eyes on his notebook. "What?"

"Oscar. Falling."

"He tripped. Happens to everyone."

"Phil."

"Because he's an asshole."

"He's been an asshole before. You never reacted like that."

Phil didn't have a good answer. Or maybe he did but he couldn't say it. Couldn't say because I love you and I can't stand watching people hurt you.

So he just shrugged.

"Guess I was in a bad mood."

Teddy looked at him for a long moment, and Phil thought maybe he could see right through the lie. Maybe he could feel the real reason thrumming through Phil's frequency.

But he didn't call Phil out on it.

☄

Time passed in this strange, fluid way where Phil stopped keeping track of days and weeks and started measuring everything in moments with Teddy. Late night conversations that stretched until dawn. Afternoons at the Standpipe, sitting on the observation deck and watching the town below. Evenings in Teddy's kitchen while his mom made dinner and his dad read the paper and Phil felt more at home than he ever had in his own house.

Phil learned Teddy's tells. The way his eyes went distant when he was remembering something—or trying to. The way his hands stilled when he was concentrating. The way he tilted his head when he was confused by Phil's chatter. He learned what made Teddy laugh—dry humor, absurdist jokes, Phil's terrible impressions of their teachers. He learned what made Teddy uncomfortable—crowds, loud noises, being touched unexpectedly by people he didn't trust.

He learned that Teddy liked classical music but didn't know why. That he could solve complex math problems in his head but struggled with idioms and slang. That he was fascinated by art but didn't understand abstract expressionism.

Teddy was the universe, and it was possible to ignore his feelings for him even when waking up from dreams that left him hot and gasping became routine, even when Phil's brain spent hours cataloging every detail of Teddy's face, his hands, the way he moved. Phil could shove it down, could tell himself it didn't matter, could pretend the wanting wasn't eating him alive from the inside out.

Until Teddy asked, completely casual, "What would happen if I kissed you?"

And then everything became impossibly, devastatingly complicated.

Phil had shown up that afternoon on his bike, the sun beating down hard enough to make his t-shirt stick to his back, shorts riding up as he pedaled. May had hit like a wall, turning everything humid and sticky, and Phil was sweating by the time he skidded to a stop in front of Teddy's house.

Teddy was sitting on the porch steps, and Phil hopped off his bike and grabbed the box from the basket—rattling and heavy, full of tubes and cans.

"Special delivery," Phil announced, grinning.

Teddy stood, eyebrows raised, and took the box when Phil shoved it at him. He peered inside.

"Wait, it's my birthday today?"

"Nope. Just felt like it."

Teddy pulled out a tube of toothpaste, turned it over to read the label. Then another. Then a can of shaving cream.

"You got me toothpaste."

"And shaving cream. The really shitty kind." Phil was still grinning, stupidly pleased with himself. "Checked all the labels. Got the ones with the most chemicals and artificial crap. The ones that are basically poison for normal people."

Teddy's lips curled into a smile. "Thank you."

"Yeah, well." Phil shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. "Figured you'd be running low. And I know you hate going to the store for this stuff, so."

"You're the best." Teddy's smile widened, and Phil felt like he'd won a prize. "Come on, want some cold soda? It must be pretty hot for you here."

They ended up in the backyard, sprawled in the grass surrounded by Teddy's mom's flower beds and the ridiculous garden gnomes his dad refused to get rid of. The sun was starting to sink, painting everything gold, and the air smelled like cut grass and honeysuckle. Phil had a Coke, sweating in his hand, and Teddy had already eaten half a can of shaving cream, licking it off his fingers like it was whipped cream.

Phil was mid-sip when Teddy said, "What would happen if I kissed you?"

He choked. Actually choked, sputtering and coughing while cola burned up through his nose.

"What?"

Teddy was watching him with that steady, curious gaze. "I'm asking what your reaction would be if our lips touched."

"Jesus— don't call it that." Phil's face was on fire. "People just say kissing. You don't have to make it sound like a science experiment."

"But I am asking scientifically."

"That makes it worse, Ted."

Teddy tilted his head, genuinely puzzled. "Why?"

Phil dragged a hand down his face. "I don't—I don't know, okay? How am I supposed to know what would happen?"

But he did know. Had spent months imagining it. Had tortured himself with it.

"I'm asking hypothetically," Teddy said.

"Right. Hypothetically." Phil set his Coke down before he dropped it. "I'd probably— I don't know. I'd kiss you back, I guess."

"You guess?"

"I mean...yeah. I would. I'd kiss you back."

Teddy was quiet for a moment, and Phil could feel him thinking, processing.

"What if I did it now?"

Phil's heart stopped.

"What?"

"What if I kissed you right now?"

Teddy shifted closer, and Phil suddenly became very aware of how close they were. How Teddy's knee was almost touching his. How he could see the exact color of his eyes in the fading light.

"I—" Phil swallowed. "I already told you. I'd kiss you back."

"Promise?"

There was something almost nervous in Teddy's voice, and that was what did it. What made Phil's brain finally catch up.

"Yeah," Phil said, and his voice came out rough. "But you probably shouldn't trust me on that. I might be lying."

Teddy's mouth quirked. "Okay."

And then he kissed him.

Phil's brain whited out for a second. Then it came roaring back, every nerve ending firing at once, because Teddy was kissing him. Teddy's hands were on his face, cool and careful, and his mouth was soft and deliberate and there.

Phil kissed back. Hard. Probably too hard. He didn't know what he was doing, didn't have a reference point for this, but Teddy didn't seem to mind. Just made a soft sound and tilted his head, and Phil tasted mint—sharp and chemical, the toothpaste Teddy had eaten earlier. 

He thought distantly of astronauts, of what it must feel like to drift in space with nothing above or below, just endless black.

Teddy's fingers pressed a little firmer against Phil's jaw, and the world snapped back into focus—grass beneath him, sun on his skin, the smell of honeysuckle and cut lawn—but the feeling lingered, humming under Phil's skin like an electric current.

This was better than every dream, every fantasy, every stupid scenario he'd played out in his head at three in the morning. This was real, and Teddy was real, and somehow that made it a thousand times more impossible and perfect.

When they broke apart, Phil was breathing hard. Teddy wasn't breathing at all.

"So," Phil managed. "That's what happens."

"That's what happens," Teddy agreed.

Phil stared at him. At his ridiculous perfect face, completely calm like he hadn't just turned Phil's entire world inside out.

"Why did you do that?"

Teddy was quiet for a moment. Then he said, very simply, "Because I'm in love with you. Sorry. I tried to stop it but it didn't work."

Phil made a sound that was half-laugh, half-hoarse cough.

"You tried to stop it."

"Yes. It seemed inconvenient."

"Inconvenient," Phil repeated. Then he started laughing, because what else was he supposed to do? "You're in love with me and you think it's inconvenient."

"Isn't it?"

"Teddy. Ted. Jesus Christ." Phil covered his face with his hands. "I've been in love with you for months. Maybe longer. I thought I was losing my mind."

Silence. Then: "Really?"

Phil dropped his hands. "Yes, really. How did you not—" He stopped. "Wait. You can read my mind."

"Sometimes."

"So you knew."

"I suspected," Teddy corrected. "Your frequency is very clear with me. But I wasn't sure if you'd want me to acknowledge it."

Phil stared at him. "You're unbelievable."

"Is that good or bad?"

"I don't know yet." Phil ran a hand through his hair. "I'm still processing the part where you kissed me."

"Did you want me to?"

"Yes. Obviously yes." Phil looked at him, at the way Teddy was watching him with hope in his eyes. "Can you do it again?"

Teddy smiled. "Sure."

☄

Phil had gotten his acceptance letter in June—Derry Community College, nothing special, nothing impressive—and he'd felt relief and resignation in equal measure. Relief because he was staying. Resignation because he was staying.

Teddy had gotten into the same place. Had mentioned it casually one afternoon, like it was nothing, and Phil had felt something ugly twist in his gut that he still couldn't shake.

Because Teddy could have gone anywhere. Literally anywhere. With his grades, his inhuman ability to retain information, his test scores that made guidance counselors' eyes go wide—he could have had his pick. MIT. Harvard. Anywhere that mattered.

Instead he'd chosen a nothing college in a nothing town, and Phil knew it was because of him.

They were together now. Had been since May. Not in any way they could tell people, but together in the way that mattered. In the way that made Phil hyperaware of every accidental touch, every stolen moment, every time Teddy looked at him like he was the only person in the room.

They'd spent the whole day at the lake. Swimming and lying in the sun and kissing when no one was looking. Living in the narrow space between summer and whatever came next.

Now they were walking back through town as the sun set, both shirtless, hair still damp, sand stuck to their feet. Phil kept talking because that's what he did, filled silences with noise.

"Jesus, it was hot today. Like, genuinely unbearable. And the bugs—I'm gonna be covered in bites tomorrow. You didn't get a single one, did you?"

"No," Teddy said.

"Of course not. Alien blood probably tastes like poison."

Teddy's mouth quirked.

They walked in rhythm, shoulders brushing occasionally. The streets were quiet, most people inside for dinner. Phil liked this time of day. When everything felt private.

But his thoughts kept circling back.

"Summer's almost over," he said eventually. Kept his voice light. "Weird, right? Feels like it just started."

"It does."

"Everything's gonna be different soon."

Teddy glanced at him but didn't respond.

Phil kicked at a stone. "I keep thinking about that. How everything changes in the fall."

They walked another block in silence. Phil could feel the words building, the ones he'd been swallowing all summer.

"You could've gone anywhere," he said finally. Quieter than he meant. "You know that, right?"

Teddy slowed. "We've talked about this."

"I know. But I still don't get it." Phil stopped walking. Turned to face him. "You could've gone to any school in the world. And you picked this."

"I like it here," Teddy said simply.

"That's not the point."

"Then what is?"

Phil ran a hand through his hair. "The point is you're limiting yourself. Because of me."

"I'm staying because I want to," Teddy corrected.

"But you wouldn't want to if I wasn't here."

Teddy was quiet. Then: "Probably not."

Phil's throat tightened. "See? That's what I mean. One day you're gonna wake up and realize you gave up everything for some guy from nowhere."

"I'm here because I want to be," Teddy said again, firmer. He stepped closer. "That's not settling. That's choosing."

"But you're choosing wrong."

"According to who?" Teddy's voice stayed calm but there was an edge now. "Your parents? Society? I don't care about what I should want."

Phil stared at him. "But what if—"

"Phil." Teddy interrupted. "I don't think you understand."

"Understand what?"

"Sometimes I think I was sent here just to love you."

Phil froze.

"What?"

But Teddy didn't elaborate. Just watched him with those impossibly dark eyes, waiting.

"I'm not limiting myself," He continued. "I'm choosing what matters."

They stood there in the fading light. Phil looked down, tried to find words.

"But I keep thinking someone's gonna come for you," he admitted with a scoff. "That one day there'll be a ship or whatever. And I'll just be some guy you knew once."

Teddy's expression didn't change. "The probability is extremely low."

"But not zero."

"But not zero," Teddy agreed. "But even if they came...I'm not what I was before. I don't remember what that was, but I know I'm different now. And if they wanted what I was—" He shook his head. "They wouldn't want what I've become. I'm different. Human, in the ways that matter."

Phil looked at him—at his strange, beautiful face, at the way the fading light caught in his eyes—and understood what Teddy was really saying.

That his world was here now. Earth. This town. Phil.

And neither of them was going to let that change.

Phil didn't know what to say to that. So he just stepped forward and hugged him, and Teddy wrapped his arms around Phil's back immediately, solid and sure.

They stood like that for a minute. Maybe longer. Phil's face pressed against Teddy's shoulder, breathing him in. Teddy held him tighter.

I'm not giving you up, Phil thought. Not to anyone.

Teddy glanced at him. And Phil knew he'd heard.