Chapter Text
"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
— 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV)
The television threw blue light across the living room like something underwater.
Outside, February pressed cold fingers against every window in the Curtis house, the wind came in low and mean off the east side of Tulsa — the kind of wind that got under your collar no matter how many layers you wore, that found the gap between your scarf and your jaw and didn't let go. But inside, the furnace knocked and hummed in the basement, the radiator ticked against the far wall like a small, faithful heart, and the room smelled like chicken broth, Vicks VapoRub and the last faint warmth of the cinnamon toast Sodapop had made for Ponyboy that morning before work — the smell of it long since faded to just a suggestion, a sweetness that clung to the air the way comfort did, not loudly, but still there if you knew to look.
Ponyboy was not quite sick anymore.
That was the particular misery of it. He was in the gray country between sick and well — too tired to read, too restless to sleep, too stuffy to think clearly, and too proud to admit any of it. He'd spent three days in a fog of congestion, low fever and the specific boredom that came with being housebound, and now on day four his temperature was gone and his nose was only mostly stopped up and he felt like something that had been wrung out and left to dry on the line.
Limp.
A little gray.
Still faintly damp around the edges.
He was bundled on the couch under two blankets. One the old patchwork quilt that had been his mother's and smelled now, after all these years, only like cedar and something generic and warm, the memory of her long since washed out of it - which was its own particular kind of loss — and the other a yellow wool throw that scratched a little at his chin but held heat well. His hair was doing something embarrassing. He'd caught a glimpse of it in the bathroom mirror earlier: soft chaos, cowlicks going every direction, a little boy's hair on a face that was trying very hard to be something older. He'd wet it down. It had dried wrong again. He'd given up.
The cartoon on the television was old. Ancient, even — the kind they showed on Sunday afternoons when there was nothing else, black-and-white sketches of a world where animals played instruments, walked off cliffs and fell from enormous heights without consequence, always landing in a small cloud of dust, always getting back up. Ponyboy had watched these as a kid, really watched them, sitting cross-legged on this same floor in footie pajamas with his chin in his hands. He didn't know why Darry had put it on. He didn't ask.
Two-Bit was sprawled in the armchair to his left the way only Two-Bit could sprawl — boneless, enormous, one leg thrown over the armrest, his worn sneaker dangling off the end of it. He had a can of beer he wasn't really drinking, just holding, turning it slow in his hands, and his eyes were half-closed but tracking the screen in the way that meant he was actually paying attention, because Two-Bit Matthews was always paying attention behind those lazy gray eyes, always taking stock, always watching.
He'd showed up that morning without explanation, knocked twice, let himself in, found Ponyboy on the couch, and sat down. That was the whole of it. That was Two-Bit. He didn't ask if Ponyboy wanted company. He didn't make a big deal of bringing the company. He just was, present, solid and faintly smelling of his jacket — cigarette smoke, cold air and something underneath that was just him, some base note that Ponyboy didn't have a name for, just recognized the way you recognized your own front door in the dark.
They hadn't talked much. Ponyboy's voice was still a little rough, scraped raw at the edges, and he was embarrassed by it. Two-Bit had said, at one point, you sound like a frog that got into a fight with another frog, and Ponyboy had thrown a couch pillow at him, weakly — Two-Bit caught it, dropped his leg off the armrest to resettle himself, and wedged the pillow behind his head with the satisfied arrangement of someone who'd been angling for exactly this — and that had been that.
On screen, a cat was playing a piano. The animation was jittery, full of that old-fashioned looseness, the lines not quite steady, the cat's paws moving with exaggerated theatrical confidence across the keys. It built to something. It always built to something in these old ones — some elaborate structure of cause and effect, some Rube Goldberg chain reaction of disaster, and Ponyboy had been watching it long enough to feel it coming, the way you felt a sneeze before it arrived.
The cat reached for the highest key.
The stool tipped.
And then the cat went sideways off the bench in a full horizontal spin, the piano lid came down like a guillotine, and a trumpet sounded — bright, brassy and completely wrong for the moment — and Ponyboy—
Laughed.
Really laughed, the kind that came from somewhere below thought, below decision, from some helpless animal place in the center of the chest — and it got away from him, it got away, and somewhere in the middle of it, without warning, without mercy, without any possibility of intervention—
Snort.
The sound of it filled the room.
Nasal and sudden and deeply, catastrophically undignified. A honk. A snort. The laugh of someone who had no defenses left, who had spent four days sick and had now been ambushed by a cartoon cat, and his body had simply done what it wanted and his nose had announced it to the whole room and there was absolutely nothing to be done.
Ponyboy slapped his hand over his mouth.
The warmth that flooded his face had nothing to do with the fever. He pressed his palm flat over his lips and felt his cheeks go hot and stared at the television with the focused intensity of a person attempting to leave their own body, attempting to simply not have been there for the last four seconds. Maybe Two-Bit hadn't heard. Maybe—
Two-Bit threw his head back.
And roared.
Not a chuckle. Not a snicker. A full, delighted, helpless bellow that crinkled his whole face and made his shoulders shake and sent the beer can rocking on the armrest, and he laughed the way he did everything — completely, with his whole self, with a kind of radical commitment to the feeling that Ponyboy had never been able to understand and had always, quietly, ached for. Two-Bit didn't do things halfway. Two-Bit felt things all the way to the edges.
"That's a laugh," he said, when he could speak, when he'd pulled himself mostly back together — his eyes still bright and wet at the corners, his grin enormous and unguarded, the face underneath the joke open in a way it wasn't always open. He pointed at Ponyboy. At the hand still pressed to Ponyboy's face. "That right there. That's a real one, baby boy."
Ponyboy lowered his hand slowly.
"Shut up," he said. His voice cracked on the second word. Still froggy. Still wrecked.
"I'm serious." Two-Bit wasn't, technically, serious about almost anything, and yet — there was something in the way he said it, something that sat under the grin like a foundation under a house. Something that had stopped being a joke and become something else without Ponyboy noticing the transition. "That's the best sound I've heard all week. Maybe all month."
"It was a snort," Ponyboy said, with great dignity.
"It was your snort." Two-Bit pointed the beer can at him now. "And you looked like you were gonna keel over from embarrassment, which— don't. Don't do that."
Ponyboy looked at him.
Two-Bit's grin had gone softer. Still there, still him, but underneath it there was something careful, something that had watched Ponyboy for four days wrapped in blankets and trying to be small and okay and not too much trouble, and had been keeping its own quiet count.
"You got this thing," Two-Bit said, and his voice dropped just slightly, not quite losing its lightness but threading something else through it, "where you get embarrassed about being real. Like the real stuff you do is the stuff you gotta apologize for." He tilted his head. "The sneeze in front of people. The crack in your voice. The laugh that gets away from you." He gestured vaguely, the beer can catching the television light. "That stuff. You always want to put your hand over it."
Ponyboy didn't say anything. The cartoon had moved on to something else — a dog, a garden hose, a slowly escalating disaster — but neither of them were watching it anymore.
"Don't hold that back," Two-Bit said. Simple. Certain. The way he was certain about very few things, and those things, he was certain about absolutely. "Not in front of me."
The furnace knocked in the basement. The radiator ticked.
Ponyboy shifted against the cushions, the yellow throw slipping loose, his arm working free of the blankets to rest along the top of the quilt. He pressed one finger against a faded square of blue fabric, felt the thin cotton, the soft give of the batting beneath.
"It was embarrassing," he said, quietly.
"It was you," Two-Bit said. Equally quiet. Which was something. Which was its own statement about the seriousness of the thing. "Same deal."
Ponyboy looked up.
Two-Bit was watching him with those gray eyes that always saw more than they let on, that ran a constant, careful accounting of every person in the room and never showed the math. There was something possessive in it, the way there was something possessive in the way Two-Bit sometimes dropped a hand on his shoulder, or stayed an extra hour after everyone else left, or showed up on a Tuesday morning without explanation and simply sat — like Ponyboy was something worth staying near. Like the staying was the whole point.
"Okay," Ponyboy said. Barely a word. More like the sound a person made when something settled into place.
Two-Bit nodded, once, and looked back at the television.
On screen, the dog got hit by the garden hose. Spun in a full circle. Landed in a rosebush. A trombone sounded.
And when Ponyboy laughed — quieter this time, less catastrophic, just warm and real and rising out of that same helpless place — he didn't put his hand over it.
Two-Bit smiled at the television.
The furnace hummed. The room stayed warm. Outside, February kept pressing, cold and indifferent, against every window in the Curtis house.
Inside, for the moment, everything was exactly what it was.