Chapter Text
Finn is supposed to be working.
That is the story he tells the room, and the story he tells himself, because it feels safer to call devotion “work” than to call it what it is.
The laptop is open on the desk. A half-finished tracklist glows on the screen, file names stacked like small secrets. There’s a guitar leaned against the chair, a notebook with pages dog-eared from being turned too quickly, pencil marks smudged where his hand kept returning to the same lines. The apartment is quiet in the way it only gets at night, when the city noise becomes a far-off hum and even the lights feel tired.
Noah is asleep in the bedroom.
Finn can hear him, not loudly, just enough to feel. The steady rhythm of breath, the occasional small shift like Noah is dreaming his way through something warm. Finn doesn’t need to see him to know what he looks like right now. He knows the exact way Noah’s face changes when he sleeps. How the constant brightness softens into something peaceful. How the lines of effort disappear. How Noah’s hand always ends up searching for contact even in sleep, as if his body refuses to accept distance for long.
Finn tells himself he’s only listening because he likes the quiet. Because he likes knowing Noah is safe.
That’s true.
It’s also not the whole truth.
Because it always circles back, no matter how far Finn tries to walk away from it.
Noah is the reason the songs exist.
Finn stares at the tracklist again and feels that familiar, almost embarrassing ache in his chest. It isn’t sadness. It’s gratitude with teeth. It’s the simple fact that if you spend long enough writing about the same person, you eventually have to admit you’ve been orbiting them the entire time.
Finn scrolls through his notes.
A folder labeled “Album 2” sits at the top. Beneath it are older folders, the ones he doesn’t open often because they feel like diaries someone else wrote. Voice memos from years ago. Lyric drafts that never made it out of his bedroom. Demo files with vague names like “blue1” and “late” and “don’tdelete.” A few of them are named with a single letter.
He clicks one almost by accident.
A low hiss of static, then a teen voice clearing its throat. Finn’s voice, younger, thinner, trying to sound casual. A few chords that fumble, then find themselves. Then a line, half-sung, half-spoken, as if the person recording wasn’t sure he was allowed to want anything that badly.
Finn listens and feels the past open like a door.
It’s humiliating, in the way sincerity always is. He wants to laugh at himself for thinking he could ever hide it. He also wants to reach through time and shake that kid gently and tell him to stop apologizing for his own heart.
Because the thread is there, bright and unbroken.
Noah.
Even when Finn didn’t understand it, even when he was calling it friendship and loyalty and protection and normal attachment, it was always Noah.
It started early, like most lifelong things do, before anyone is wise enough to name them.
Finn remembers the first set days as a blur of noise and adults and rules that felt too big for kids. He remembers Noah, small and bright, walking into rooms like the world would be decent. Like people would be kind because it made sense to be kind.
That was the first thing that got under Finn’s skin. Not the beauty, though there was always that too, even as a kid, the open face and the green eyes that looked like they’d never learned to guard themselves. It was the expectation. The innocence that wasn’t stupid, just untested.
Finn had been older. Older enough to know the world could be sharp. Older enough to recognize a soft thing walking into sharp places.
He remembers thinking, very simply, someone should be near him.
Then it became: I should.
Then it became so automatic it felt like breathing.
The songs started because Finn couldn’t say it out loud.
Not back then.
He could tease Noah about height, make him laugh, correct him, feed him snacks, keep a hand on his shoulder in crowded hallways. He could do the work of devotion without having to call it devotion.
What he couldn’t do was look at Noah and say, I want you. I want you so much it scares me. I want you in a way I do not yet know how to be responsible about.
So he wrote.
He wrote the way some people pray. He wrote the way some people confess. He wrote the way someone tries to hold water in their hands and figures out the only way is to build a vessel.
When Finn thinks about the early songs, he thinks about how careful he was with his own words.
He never used Noah’s name, not in those first drafts. He used metaphors, because metaphors feel safer than truth when you’re fourteen and trying not to be obvious.
He has a page in an old notebook where he wrote, almost angrily, sun at the top, then crossed it out and wrote light instead, then crossed that out too, and finally settled on weather like he was bargaining with himself.
The lyrics were clumsy, but the feeling was clear.
> You walk in like the air is kind
and I keep my hands clean anyway
I stand where the door can’t reach you
and call it nothing, call it luck
Finn remembers writing that in a hotel room while Noah slept across the hall, probably wrapped in a blanket he’d stolen from somewhere, because Noah always loved nesting and making comfort out of whatever he could find.
Finn’s first songs about Noah were not romantic in the obvious way.
They were protective.
They were full of quiet scanning, of exit signs, of hands on shoulders, of the constant decision to stay near without announcing why. Finn wrote about doors and crowds and how the world can look harmless until it isn’t.
He wrote about Noah as a kind of light he couldn’t stop moving toward.
And that’s the thing Finn still struggles to admit even now, even after everything.
Noah has always been the sun in the orbit Finn built for himself.
Finn doesn’t mean it in a worshipful way. He means it in the honest physics of it. The way the sun pulls without effort. The way it becomes the constant point of return.
Finn’s life has always bent toward Noah.
Sometimes subtly.
Sometimes not at all.
Finn flips to another demo.
This one is later. His voice is older, the guitar cleaner, the lyrics more sure. Still coded, still careful, but less apologetic.
He remembers the era that song came from too.
The messy teen years.
The years where everyone else started dating and breaking up and having drama, and Finn and Noah stayed in their strange little orbit, too close and too familiar and too unnamed. The years where Finn’s want got sharper and Noah’s obliviousness stayed infuriatingly intact.
Those were the years Finn wrote the angriest songs.
Not angry at Noah.
Angry at the world for existing between them. Angry at himself for being careful. Angry at the part of him that wanted to take more space in Noah’s life than was technically his to take.
Finn wrote songs that sounded like storms and called them art.
He wrote songs about restraint like it was heroism, because he didn’t have another word for the way he had to hold himself back from being obvious.
He remembers one draft he never released, titled Exit Plan, where the chorus was basically a confession disguised as logistics.
> I don’t raise my voice, I raise the door
I don’t fight, I move the room
I don’t say your name like a prayer
but I say it like I’m coming back
That was the era where Noah would laugh too much at other people’s jokes and Finn would smile like it was fine and then go write a song at three in the morning because he couldn’t stand the feeling.
It wasn’t jealousy in a dramatic way. Finn didn’t want to fight for Noah like a cliché. Finn didn’t want to compete.
Finn wanted to remove.
To close doors. To end access. To be the quiet wall that says no without making Noah feel like he’s done something wrong by being kind.
Those were the songs where Finn’s darker edge lived.
Not as cruelty.
As certainty.
As the inability to accept Noah being treated like public property by people who thought they could take his warmth because it was offered with a smile.
Finn’s self-control in those years was almost inhumane.
He can admit it now in the quiet of his own desk. He can admit it when Noah is asleep and there’s no one to impress.
He had to build that control like a religion.
He had to be civilized on purpose.
Because he was old enough to know what obsessive love can become if you don’t discipline it, and young enough to feel obsessive love like a fever anyway.
He didn’t want to scare Noah.
He didn’t want Noah to feel trapped by the fact of being wanted.
So he kept it contained. He turned it into songs and structure and watchfulness that looked like friendship to everyone else.
He told himself it was fine because it kept Noah safe.
That was true.
It also kept Finn starving.
The irony, the part that would almost be funny if it didn’t make Finn’s chest ache, is that Noah was always doing his own version of the same thing.
Noah would get clingy without naming it.
Noah would steal Finn’s hoodie and act like it was an accident.
Noah would hype Finn’s music with an earnestness that made Finn embarrassed and pleased in equal measure, and then pretend it was normal to want Finn’s name in credits forever.
Noah would look at Finn like Finn was the coolest person in the world and then laugh it off like he didn’t mean it.
Finn wrote songs about that too.
He wrote about the way Noah could be bright and innocent and also quietly possessive without knowing he was.
He wrote about the way Noah’s love was always there, just unclaimed, unspoken.
Finn looks at his second album tracklist again and sees how the themes cluster like constellations.
He hadn’t planned it this way, but he can’t deny the pattern.
Song after song returns to the same motifs: home, return, habit, light, the way someone can become the place your nervous system settles.
It’s embarrassing, almost, how many of his songs are about Noah without ever using Noah’s name.
It’s also inevitable.
Finn has always been trying to capture a feeling that refuses to stay still. Noah’s laugh, Noah’s warmth, the way Noah breaks apart snacks like a chipmunk before committing to eating them, as if he needs to inspect the world first. The way Noah’s eyes light up when Finn comes home like Finn has been gone for years instead of minutes. The way Noah’s green eyes catch light and look unreal, even now, even after all these years.
Finn has always been captivated by the smallest things.
It isn’t saintly. It isn’t polite.
It’s obsession made domestic.
Finn thinks about the adult songs, the ones he started writing after they finally stopped pretending.
It wasn’t a single moment. It wasn’t a dramatic confession under fireworks.
It was a slow shift into honesty.
One day Noah asked for the truth without softening.
One day Finn stopped pretending he could live on restraint alone.
One day Noah said something like “my man” with shy confidence and Finn’s brain rewired itself around the sound.
Now Finn has songs that aren’t coded anymore.
Not fully, anyway.
He still can’t bring himself to put Noah’s name in a chorus, because that feels too vulnerable, too direct, like writing someone’s true name on a spell.
But the new songs are less careful.
They are about devotion as a choice, not a secret.
They are about wanting and being wanted back.
Finn has a file called HOME (NOAH) in his drafts, a song that started as a joke and became the most honest thing he’s ever written.
He reads the lyrics and feels that familiar warmth and ache mix together.
> I used to call it luck
the way you’d fall into my side
now I call it home
because it keeps happening, because you keep coming back
and I don’t want to be cured of it
There’s another song, newer, one he hasn’t shown anyone yet, not even Noah. It’s written in the blunt simplicity Finn uses when he’s trying not to be cheesy.
The title is short: Constant.
He wrote it after watching Noah asleep one night, face soft, hand curled into Finn’s shirt as if even in dreams Noah refused to lose contact.
The chorus is barely four lines.
> If there is a next life
I’ll find you earlier
I’ll learn your laugh again
and call it the only constant I trust
Finn would die before he admitted out loud that he believes in reincarnation. He would laugh and roll his eyes and call it sentimental nonsense.
But sometimes, when it’s quiet, when Noah is in his arms and the world is finally not asking anything of them, Finn’s mind drifts into those thoughts anyway.
Not because he’s trying to be poetic.
Because the feeling is too big for one lifetime.
Finn’s love has never been neat.
It has always been a little territorial.
A little insane.
A little feral under the civilization.
And Noah doesn’t just accept that. Noah matches it, in his own softer way. Noah wants Finn to stop sanitizing his devotion. Noah wants all of Finn, including the darker edges, including the hunger.
Finn thinks about that and feels that strange, steady gratitude again.
To be loved like this, fully, without being asked to become less.
To be seen.
To be remembered.
Because that’s the other thing Noah has always given Finn, even when Finn didn’t realize he needed it.
Around Noah, Finn never had to perform.
Noah laughed at Finn’s worst jokes. Noah hyped Finn’s music like it mattered. Noah looked at Finn like Finn was worth loving, even when Finn was moody and tired and trying to be indifferent.
Noah made Finn feel like himself was enough.
Finn closes his laptop partway and leans back in the chair.
He lets himself think the thought he doesn’t say out loud.
It was the greatest blessing of his life to grow old with Noah.
Not just to be with him, but to get to move through time together, to watch each other change, to build a shared language of touch and habit and inside jokes that feel like home.
Finn is not naïve about love. He’s not the kind of person who thinks love fixes everything.
Finn thinks love is something you build with attention and patience and discipline.
He also knows he would sacrifice almost anything to keep Noah.
Not in a dramatic martyr way.
In the quiet truth of it. If you asked Finn what he would protect first, what he would choose first, what he would never allow himself to lose, the answer is embarrassingly simple.
Noah.
Finn’s Noah.
The one constant.
The sun his life bent toward.
Finn is not calling himself the moon in a poetic way. Finn is calling himself the thing that reflects. The thing that borrows light and makes something out of it.
Noah’s radiance has always been real. Finn’s life has always shone more clearly when Noah was near. Finn doesn’t mind that. Finn likes it. He likes being Noah’s captive. He likes being the man who can’t stop writing songs because he keeps trying to capture the feeling of Noah existing.
Finn sits there at the desk, listening to Noah breathe down the hall, and he thinks about the second album again.
He sees the tracklist not as a collection of songs but as a timeline.
The early tracks are wonder and watchfulness.
The middle tracks are restraint and storms.
The last tracks are home and vows.
He adds a new title to the list, something simple and private: Warm Side.
Not because of the bed jokes. Because Noah always finds warmth and drags it into Finn’s orbit like it’s instinct.
Finn types a few lines beneath it.
> You’re warmth with a name
and I’ve been learning it my whole life
I used to call it coincidence
now I call it the only place I rest
He saves the file.
Then he stands, quietly, like he doesn’t want to wake Noah. He moves through the apartment with that careful calm he always has at night, as if he’s walking through something sacred.
In the bedroom, Noah is curled on his side, blanket pulled up, one hand tucked under his cheek, the other reaching out like it’s searching even in sleep.
Finn’s chest tightens.
He sits on the edge of the bed and watches for a moment, letting himself be sentimental in private where nobody can accuse him of it.
Noah shifts, half asleep, and his hand finds Finn’s wrist immediately, fingers closing like it’s instinct.
Finn exhales softly, almost a laugh.
Of course.
Finn leans down and presses a gentle kiss to Noah’s hair, then slides under the blanket and pulls Noah close. Noah settles instantly, face pressed into Finn’s shoulder, breath easing as if his body just found the correct place again.
Finn holds him firm but gentle, the way he always does, and feels that quiet, warm truth settle into him.
He will keep writing about this.
He will keep trying to capture it.
Not because he needs to prove anything.
Because Noah is everything, and Finn is the kind of man who turns love into songs the way other men turn love into prayers.
Mine, Finn thinks, tender and territorial all at once, and Noah shifts closer like he heard it anyway.
Finn closes his eyes.
He’s already thinking of the next line.