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The dream always started the same way.
Not with the gates, that came later. It started with the torches.
He was in the tunnel again, the long mudbrick one that smelled like wet stone and something older, and the torches were going out behind him one by one, and the thing about the dream was that Derek knew it was the dream, knew it the way you know things in sleep, that distant theoretical knowing that does nothing to stop your heart from hammering, he knew, and it didn't matter, because his legs kept moving anyway and the torches kept dying and the whispers started low and then built and built until they weren't whispers anymore, until they were a voice, one voice wearing the sound of everything that had ever existed, and it said:
Your mind is strong, but I am beyond strength. I am.
And then the gates.
And then the light behind the gates, that specific terrible light that wasn't really light, that was just the visual form of knowing, of being crammed full of every truth the universe had ever kept from human minds, galaxies and deep time and the small ordinary horror of understanding exactly how brief and fragile and beautiful one human life was,
Derek woke up on Avery's couch at 3:14am with his hand pressed flat against his own chest, checking.
Heartbeat. Present. Accounted for.
He lay there for a moment, breathing. The apartment was dark except for the orange spill of the streetlight through the curtains. Somewhere outside a car passed. The fridge hummed. Everything was very normal and he could not feel any of it.
This was the part that the doctors hadn't quite named right, hadn't had a label that fit, this specific aftermath, where his body was clearly and demonstrably in a room that was real, and his brain simply refused to confirm it. Where he would press his hand to the couch cushion and feel the texture, the slight give of the foam, and some fundamental part of him would say yes but is this actually there, is any of this actually there, what if,
What if you're still in it. What if the library and the mountains and the halls full of yellow doors are still running somewhere underneath this, what if this is just another layer, what if real is just one more thing it showed you that isn't,
Stop, Derek told himself, in the calm internal voice he'd been practicing. You are in Avery's apartment. The couch is green. It has a small stain near the left armrest from when Avery spilled soy sauce three days ago and spent twenty minutes dramatically mourning it.
The soy sauce stain was real. Derek had witnessed its creation. He had a very clear memory of Avery holding the bottle with the expression of someone watching a natural disaster unfold in slow motion.
He focused on that. The specific, particular realness of Avery's soy sauce grief.
His breathing didn't even out.
He sat up. Put his feet on the floor. The floor was cold through his socks and that was real too, he catalogued it, cold floor, real floor, Avery's apartment, 3am, everything is fine, you are here,
The bedroom light clicked on.
A strip of yellow appeared under the door. Then the door opened, and Avery was there in an oversized shirt and the kind of sleep-stupid expression that meant he had just woken up and was running on instinct, squinting slightly in the dark.
"Hey," he said, quiet. "You okay?"
Derek opened his mouth. Closed it. He had a whole sentence ready, yes, sorry, I'm fine, go back to sleep, but what came out instead was nothing, just silence, which was apparently answer enough because Avery crossed the room without another word and sat down on the couch next to him.
Not too close. Just. Present.
"Nightmare?" Avery asked.
"Yes," Derek said. His voice came out rougher than he intended.
"The gates?"
"The torches first. Then the gates."
Avery nodded, slow, like this was useful information he was filing away. He pulled his knees up to his chest and looked at Derek with the careful, unhurried attention that Derek had come to understand was one of Avery's particular skills, the ability to look at something and not look away from it, the same quality that had kept him going through fifteen hours of impossible terrain, that had made him stay when Derek had told him to run.
"Are you here?" Avery asked.
It was such a simple question. Derek felt something in his chest clench around it.
"I'm trying to be," he said honestly.
Avery thought for a moment. Then he said: "What's the worst flavor of chip."
Derek blinked. "What."
"Worst chip flavor. Go."
"Avery-”
"I'm serious, this is important information."
Derek stared at him. Avery stared back, absolutely earnest, waiting. And there was something so specific about this, so Avery, so particular and present and real, that Derek felt himself take a full breath for the first time since waking up.
"Prawn cocktail," Derek said.
Avery made a face of profound agreement. "Okay, yes, correct. Good. See, you have taste." He shifted slightly, getting comfortable, like they were going to be here for a while and he had fully accepted this. "Okay. Worst food in general."
"Why are we doing this."
"Just answer the question."
"...Canned peaches."
Avery pointed at him. "I respect that. I disagree, but I respect it. Okay. Favorite color."
"You know my favorite color."
"Pretend I don't."
Derek exhaled. He was still cold, still slightly outside himself, but there was a thread now, Avery's voice, steady and a little bit absurd, asking him about chip flavors at 3am, and he was holding it. "Blue," he said. "Specifically the blue that happens right before the sky goes dark. Not navy. The one before that."
Avery was quiet for a second. "Yeah," he said softly. "That's a good one." Then, without shifting tone at all: "Best Skywars strategy."
"High ground," Derek said immediately.
"Wrong."
"It's not wrong, it's statistically-”
"It's slow, Derek, you can't spend half the game just building up while everyone else is-”
"I won," Derek said.
"You won once."
"A win is a win."
Avery made a noise that was extremely rude for 3am and Derek felt the corner of his mouth pull upward, involuntary, and that was real too, the specific muscle movement of a smile, the warmth of it, something his face was doing because it wanted to.
"Okay," Avery said, and his voice was a little gentler now. "Better?"
Derek considered being evasive. Considered saying I'm fine, yes, thank you. Looked at Avery's face in the low orange light, the sleep-rumpled hair and the careful eyes, and said: "A little."
"Do you want to go back to sleep?"
"Not yet."
"Okay." Avery unfolded from the couch and stood, stretching his arms above his head. "Kitchen floor," he announced.
"...Excuse me?"
"Kitchen floor is better for 3am conversations. I have a whole theory about this. Come on."
The kitchen floor was cold linoleum and Avery's theory about it, delivered while he was making two mugs of warm milk which Derek felt he should object to on principle but didn't, was that being on the floor made things feel more honest. "You can't be performatively fine on a kitchen floor," Avery said, with great authority. "There's nothing to perform. You're just on the floor."
"That's not a theory," Derek said. "That's just a feeling you've retroactively applied logic to."
"All theories start as feelings." Avery sat down cross-legged beside him, handing over a mug. "I learned that from a very smart person."
Derek looked at him. "You're quoting me to me."
"Was I wrong?"
Derek looked at his mug. It had a small sunflower on it, which he was beginning to think was less a coincidence and more a dominant theme of Avery's life. "No," he admitted. "You weren't wrong."
They sat together on the cold linoleum, backs against the cabinet under the sink, shoulder to shoulder in the way they'd settled into over the past weeks, a proximity that had become natural without either of them formally announcing it, like furniture that got rearranged gradually enough that one day you stop noticing it was ever different.
The warm milk was helping. Derek didn't tell Avery this because he was fairly certain Avery already knew.
"Do you want to talk about it," Avery said, "or do you want me to keep asking you about chip flavors."
Derek turned the mug in his hands. "Both," he said.
"Okay," Avery said. "Both."
So Derek talked, haltingly at first and then less so, about the torches and the voice and the specific texture of the dream's wrongness, the way it took all the things that had actually happened and stripped them of their ending, left him in the worst of it with no way out. He talked about the not-knowing-if-you're-real feeling, tried to explain the edges of it, which was difficult because the language for it was imprecise and kept sliding away from what he meant. He talked about how it was better than it had been, in those first days after the hospital. He talked about how better and gone were not the same thing.
Avery listened. He did not say I can't imagine or that sounds awful or any of the things people said when they were uncomfortable and filling silence. He just listened, and occasionally asked a question, what does it feel like, exactly, or when does it get worst, and when Derek ran out of words he asked okay what's your most controversial food opinion and Derek said watermelon is worse than no fruit at all and Avery's expression of absolute horror was so genuine that Derek laughed, actually laughed, and the sound of it in the dark kitchen felt like something releasing.
"That's a terrible opinion," Avery said, recovered, and deeply offended. "That might be the worst opinion I've ever heard and I've read YouTube comments for a living."
"It's a correct opinion," Derek said.
"It's an unhinged opinion!"
"Watermelon is ninety-two percent water with delusions of flavor."
"I-” Avery pressed his lips together. Shook his head slowly. "You survived an eldritch god to come into my home and insult watermelon."
"I survived an eldritch god," Derek said, "to do many things." He paused. "I'm glad to be doing them."
The words sat in the kitchen between them, simple and true. Avery looked at him with an expression Derek was still learning how to read, something layered, warm and a little undone, like Derek had said something that landed somewhere important.
"Yeah," Avery said quietly. "Me too."
Derek became aware, gradually and all at once, that Avery's shoulder was pressed against his and had been for the entire conversation, and that Avery's hand was resting on the linoleum between them, close enough to touch, and that at some point in the last ten minutes the cold had stopped bothering him entirely.
He turned his hand over. An offering, small and unambiguous.
Avery looked at it. Looked at Derek. Took it.
They sat like that on the kitchen floor, hands held loosely between them, while the apartment settled around them and the streetlight did its orange work through the window, and Derek breathed in and out and counted his heartbeats and found them steady.
"You know," Avery said, after a while, in the thoughtful tone he used when he was working something out, "you don't have to be okay, right? Like. I know you know that. But I want to say it out loud."
Derek considered this carefully, the way he considered most things. "I find it difficult," he said, "to let things be unresolved."
"I know you do."
"It feels inefficient. To be-” he searched for the word, "distressed without a clear path toward not being distressed."
Avery was quiet for a moment. "What if I'm the path," he said. "For now. Like. You feel the distress, and then I'm here, and then you feel it less. You don't have to solve anything."
Derek looked at their hands. He thought about the inventory check, what's in your inventory, what's in your inventory, what's in your inventory, and the question that had ended everything, and the way it had been a goodbye and a mercy and something he still wasn't entirely sure how to hold.
"I think," he said slowly, "that I'm not very good at accepting help."
"I know," Avery said. "You're getting better at it."
"Am I."
"You're on a kitchen floor at 3am holding my hand and you told me about the nightmare instead of pretending you were fine." Avery's thumb moved slightly against his knuckles, a small deliberate pressure. "For you, that's basically a breakthrough."
Derek felt the smile again, that involuntary thing. "High bar," he said.
"I work with what I've got," Avery said cheerfully, and leaned his head against Derek's shoulder, and Derek let him, and outside the city continued its quiet 3am existence and the fridge hummed and everything was very real and very small and very, specifically, enough.
Derek woke up on the couch again at 7:43am, which meant he had gone back to sleep after all, which was more than he'd hoped for. The morning light was the thin, preliminary kind, not fully committed yet. He lay still for a moment, taking inventory, floor, couch, apartment, morning, real, fine, and found that the taking inventory was easier than it had been at 3am.
Not gone. Just. Easier.
Avery was still asleep; Derek could tell from the quality of the silence behind the bedroom door, that particular held-breath quiet. He sat up, stretched experimentally, and looked at the kitchen.
He was aware that he had, over the course of the past several weeks, been on the receiving end of a frankly unreasonable amount of care. Avery made breakfast without being asked. Avery remembered how Derek took his coffee (black, one sugar, though Derek had started taking it with a small splash of milk because Avery's oat milk was actually quite good and he wasn't going to say this out loud). Avery steered him gently away from too-loud supermarkets and too-bright screens and conversations that went on too long when Derek's expression started doing the particular thing that meant he was approaching his limit.
Derek was not good at receiving this. He was trying to get better.
What he could do, he thought, looking at the kitchen, was make breakfast.
He was a competent cook. He knew this. He had fed himself for years without incident. Eggs, specifically, were something he was confident about, he had a reliable method, a predictable outcome.
He located a pan. He located eggs. He located butter, and the bread for toast, and after a moment's thought he found the small bag of cherry tomatoes Avery had bought two days ago and decided to add those, roasted, because roasted tomatoes took the meal from functional to genuinely good and Derek Hutchins did not do things halfway.
He put the tomatoes in the oven. He buttered the pan. He cracked the eggs with the efficiency of someone who respected the process.
Everything was going extremely well.
He was congratulating himself, privately, on having done this, on the domestic normalcy of it, on the fact that the kitchen felt warm and uncomplicated and real in daylight, on the specific small pleasure of making something for someone else, when he became aware of a smell.
Not the eggs.
The toast.
Derek turned, with a growing sense of inevitability, to look at the toaster.
"Oh no," he said, to the toaster.
The toaster did not respond. It simply continued to produce smoke at a rate that Derek's brain, unhelpfully, calculated was increasing at approximately fifteen percent per second.
He reached for the toaster. The smoke alarm reached its opinion of the situation first.
It was, genuinely, extremely loud.
Derek stood in the smoke-fragrant kitchen, holding a piece of toast that had achieved a color somewhere between dark brown and a philosophical concept, while the alarm made its feelings known at considerable volume. The tomatoes were fine. The eggs were fine. It was specifically, only, the toast.
The bedroom door banged open.
Avery appeared in the doorway in yesterday's socks, hair doing something spectacular, looking around the apartment with the rapid assessment of someone trying to determine if they needed to evacuate. His eyes landed on Derek. Then on the toast. Then on the smoke alarm, which was still going.
Then back on Derek.
Derek held up the toast. "I made breakfast," he said, with composure.
Avery's face did several things in quick succession. "Is that, is the toast-”
"There was a miscalculation," Derek said.
"Derek, that toast is black."
"It's very dark brown."
"It is black-”
"The eggs are fine," Derek said. "And the tomatoes. Only the toast experienced a setback."
Avery crossed the kitchen, waving smoke away from his face with one hand, and reached up to press the button on the smoke alarm. The beeping stopped. The sudden silence felt enormous.
He looked at the pan. At the eggs, which were in fact perfectly cooked, gently golden at the edges the way Derek preferred, with the tomatoes arranged beside them in a way that was, if Avery was honest, nicer than the way Avery usually plated things. He looked at the burnt offering Derek was still holding. He looked at Derek.
"You made me breakfast," he said.
"I attempted to," Derek said. "I succeeded at approximately eighty percent of it."
"Derek."
"The toast is a known variable. I should have monitored it more closely. I was focused on the tomatoes-”
"Derek."
Something in Avery's voice made Derek stop. He looked at him.
Avery's expression was doing the layered thing again, the warm, undone thing, more so than usual, and there was something at the edges of it that Derek's recovering brain was gradually learning to identify. He looked, Derek thought, like someone who was feeling something larger than the situation strictly warranted.
"You didn't have to do this," Avery said.
"I wanted to," Derek said. "You've been-” he paused, working out how to say it accurately, "you've been feeding me. For weeks. I wanted to reciprocate."
"You don't have to reciprocate. That's not why I-”
"I know it isn't," Derek said. "I wanted to. There's a difference." He set the toast down on the counter and looked at it with mild displeasure. "The toast notwithstanding."
Avery looked at the toast. He looked at Derek. He said: "Scrape it."
"What?"
"You can scrape burnt toast. Over the sink. You scrape the black layer off and it's actually fine underneath, it's just a little darker than usual." He was already getting a knife out. "Did you not know that?"
"I..." Derek paused. "No."
"It's a life skill," Avery said, and began demonstrating with the efficient confidence of someone who had burnt toast before and dealt with it. "See? You just-” scrape, scrape, "and now it's fine. It's not pretty, but it's fine."
He held it up. It was, in fact, now recognizable as toast.
Derek looked at it. He felt something in his chest doing the warm, slightly overwhelming thing it had started doing with increasing frequency in Avery's presence, which he had decided to stop trying to analyze and simply allow.
"That seems applicable," he said, "as a general metaphor."
Avery glanced at him. "Yeah?"
"Damaged on the surface. Functional underneath." He paused. "Improved with careful attention and the right tool."
Avery was quiet for a moment. Then he smiled, slow and certain, the kind of smile that knew something.
"Sit down," he said. "I'll do the toast. You did the hard part."
"The eggs and tomatoes were not hard," Derek said, sitting down at the small kitchen table.
"You were up until 4am and you still got up to make breakfast," Avery said, moving around the kitchen with the easy familiarity of someone in their own space. "That's the hard part."
Derek watched him. The morning light was more committed now, coming in fuller through the window, and it caught the edge of Avery's profile, and the sunflower on his mug on the counter, and the small crayon drawing on the fridge. All of it very present. All of it very real.
"Avery," he said.
"Hm?"
"Thank you. For last night."
Avery put two pieces of fresh, unburnt toast down and turned to look at him. "You don't have to-”
"I know I don't have to," Derek said. "I'm choosing to." He held Avery's gaze. "I'm not good at this. At-” the word was harder to say in daylight for some reason, in the clear morning, "at needing things. From people. But I think you should know that last night was..." he chose the word carefully, "significant. For me."
Avery's expression did the undone thing again. He crossed the small kitchen and sat down across from Derek and the table was so narrow their knees nearly touched.
"Okay," he said softly.
"You asked me about chip flavors," Derek said, which was not the most romantic sentence he had ever heard himself say, and yet.
"I did," Avery agreed.
"It worked."
"I know."
"How did you know it would work?"
Avery thought about this, tilting his head slightly. "I didn't," he said honestly. "I just knew you needed something small. Something specific. Something that couldn't be, I don't know, infiltrated. By the big stuff." He shrugged. "Chip flavors are very hard to make cosmic and terrifying."
Derek thought about this. "Prawn cocktail," he said.
"That's still a terrible answer."
"It's the correct answer."
"It is the wrong answer-”
"The data supports-”
"Derek there's no data, it's a flavor preference-”
"All preference can be-”
"Oh my god," Avery said, but he was laughing, already laughing, and Derek was laughing too, at the kitchen table over slightly-too-dark toast and eggs that had stayed warm and the gentle ordinary disaster of a burnt Tuesday morning, and the universe was enormous and mostly unknowable and Derek Hutchins was here, in a specific kitchen, with a specific person, arguing about crisps.
He was here.
He was here.
"Hey," Avery said, quieter, through the tail end of the laughing.
"Hey," Derek said.
"You slept. After. That's good."
"I know." Derek looked at the table. "It was easier. After talking." He looked up. "After you."
Avery nodded, simple and sure. No performance of it. Just: receiving it, and letting it be.
"Good," he said. "That's what I'm here for."
Derek thought about saying something precise and accurate about what Avery was to him, the specific and growing weight of it, the way it existed in his chest like the one piece of the infinite knowledge he'd been given that he actually wanted to keep. He thought about how to word it correctly.
Instead he picked up his fork and said: "The eggs are good."
"Yeah?" Avery picked up his own fork, pleased.
"I used the method where you take them off the heat before they finish cooking."
"I know that method."
"Residual heat finishes the job. No overcooking."
Avery pointed his fork at him. "See, you're good at cooking. The toast thing was just a lapse in vigilance."
"A temporary inefficiency," Derek agreed.
"Exactly." Avery took a bite of his eggs and then a bite of his slightly-too-dark toast and chewed thoughtfully. "The toast is actually fine, for the record."
"I know," Derek said. "I trusted the method."
Avery smiled at him across the small table, and Derek smiled back, and outside the morning finished arriving in full, and the smoke alarm stayed silent, and neither of them was in any hurry to be anywhere other than exactly here.
Later, in a comment on a video that hadn't been posted yet, a soft, unedited clip Avery almost didn't share of Derek scraping burnt toast over the sink with an expression of scientific focus, someone would write: "he is so normal about everything except cooking and it's making me insane" and 34,000 people would like it, and Derek would read it and say "I fixed the toast," and Avery would say "you burned the toast," and Derek would say "the toast was recovered, which is the same as fixed," and Avery would have absolutely no response to this because it was, unfortunately, a Derek Hutchins level of correct.