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It started on a Monday, which felt unfair.
Mondays were supposed to be ordinary. Derek had come to rely on ordinary, had built a careful architecture of it over the past months, stacked it up like blocks with good grain direction, tested the weight of it daily and found it sound. Breakfast. Coffee. The plants. Avery's voice from the other room. The laptop, the world called Forward, the slow accumulation of a life that fit inside an apartment and asked nothing cosmic of him.
Monday started fine.
Derek was reading, an actual book, paper, something Avery had left on the coffee table that Derek had picked up without intention and found himself forty pages into, when it happened.
The book mentioned stars.
Not unusually. It was a novel, there was a scene set outside at night, the character looked up and noted the stars, it was two sentences, it was nothing.
Derek's brain opened.
Not all the way. Not the way it had, not the full crushing weight of everything that had ever existed flooding in at once. Just, a crack. A seam. Light coming through from somewhere it wasn't supposed to be, and with the light: knowing. Specific, sharp, uninvited knowing about the stars mentioned in the sentence, about their distances and their ages and the particular quality of their light by the time it reached any eye that had ever looked up at them, about the civilizations that had named them and the civilizations that had not survived long enough to name them, about the ones that were already gone and whose light was a ghost, about the particular human habit of looking up and feeling small and finding that feeling somehow useful, about—
Derek put the book down.
He pressed both hands flat against his knees and looked at the wall and breathed.
It passed. It always passed now, the cracks sealed themselves, the light went back to wherever it came from. He was left with the ghost of it, the knowledge fading at the edges, blurring back into the comfortable not-knowing of a human brain operating within its correct parameters.
He picked the book back up.
He did not read the rest of the chapter.
Tuesday: the word threshold in a crossword Avery was doing, sprawled on the couch with the newspaper folded into quarters, and three seconds of knowing everything that had ever crossed one, every door and every border and every ending that became a beginning, the full weight of what threshold actually meant to a universe that had been crossing things since before time had a name.
Derek had been in the kitchen. He had stood at the counter for a moment with his hands around his mug, let it pass, and come back into the living room and said: "Seven letters, celestial body. Starts with N."
"Nebula," Avery had said, not looking up.
"Nebula," Derek had confirmed, and sat back down, and did not mention the threshold.
Wednesday: a documentary on the television about deep sea creatures, which was fine and interesting and genuinely something Derek would have chosen to watch, until it wasn't, until the narrator mentioned pressure and Derek had thirty seconds of understanding pressure in a way that had nothing to do with oceanography and everything to do with the kind of knowledge that didn't have documentaries made about it. The kind that pressed from the inside out.
He had gotten up to make tea. Avery had paused the documentary and not commented on the timing, and when Derek came back it was unpaused and they watched the rest of it and the deep sea creatures were, objectively, remarkable, and Derek had managed to find them remarkable without the knowledge intervening again.
Thursday: nothing. Thursday was clear and ordinary and Derek had moved through it with something approaching ease, had filmed a short video with Avery about the Minecraft world, had eaten dinner and read and gone to sleep without incident, and he had lain in the dark thinking: maybe it was just a few days. maybe the architecture held.
Friday morning Derek was making coffee and the kitchen was full of morning light and Avery was at the table with his laptop and the radio was on low, playing something forgettable and good, and it was fine, it was all fine, until Avery said: what do you think we should have for dinner tonight, and Derek opened his mouth to answer and instead of an answer he got a flash,
Every meal. Every meal that had ever been made in every kitchen in every home in every civilization across the full span of human existence, compressed into a fraction of a second and pressed through the crack that was still there, still thin, still letting light in when the wrong word landed on it. He saw, not literally, but in the way of the knowing, in the way it had always worked, kitchens in clay and stone and steel, fires and hearths and gas rings and the quiet ceremony of feeding people, the particular human gesture of I made this, eat this, you matter enough that I made this repeated across all of history in every language and every form it had ever taken.
He stood at the coffee machine with his hand on the mug.
He stood there for forty-five seconds.
"Derek," Avery said.
"Sorry," Derek said. He poured the coffee. "What were you asking."
Avery was looking at him. He could feel it without turning around, the quality of that attention, specific and careful. "What do you want for dinner," Avery said.
"I don't mind," Derek said. "Whatever you want is fine."
He heard Avery's laptop close.
He did not turn around.
The thing was, Derek knew what was happening.
He was not, had never been, someone who lied to himself about data. The data was clear: the knowledge was fading unevenly, had always been fading unevenly, and sometimes the fault lines showed. Sometimes a word or an image or a concept landed on one of the places where the knowledge had pressed hardest, where the wall between what he knew and what humans were supposed to know was thinner, and light came through.
He knew the mechanism. He knew the name of the process, though the name for it that existed in human language wasn't quite right, wasn't precise enough, didn't capture the specific texture of it, which was less like remembering and more like having a door opened in you that you didn't put there. He had, after all, briefly understood every mechanism of everything. Some of that understanding had not fully departed.
What he could not do, he was discovering, was explain this to Avery.
Not because Avery wouldn't try to understand. Avery would try, would listen with the full attention he brought to everything Derek said, would ask the questions that helped and not the questions that didn't. That wasn't the problem.
The problem was layered, and Derek had spent four days examining the layers with the analytical precision of someone who had once decoded a cipher stack in seventeen minutes and was now applying that same precision to his own reluctance and finding it more complex than expected.
Layer one: explaining required looking at it directly, and he had been carefully not-looking at it directly all week, and there was a part of him that believed, not rationally but persistently, that looking at it directly would make it more real. That the fault lines would widen under the weight of being named.
Layer two: he did not want Avery to look at it directly. He did not want Avery to have a clear view of the inside of what the King had left, because the inside of it was, it was not comfortable to show. It was the part of him that was still not entirely his own. It was the part that the King had touched and that Derek had been quietly, determinedly, patiently rebuilding a wall around, and showing it to Avery felt like admitting the wall was thinner than he had been presenting.
Layer three, which was the one he had identified last and liked the least: he was ashamed.
This was irrational and he knew it was irrational and knowing it was irrational did not make it less present. He had been doing well. He had been doing genuinely, measurably, demonstrably well, the therapy he hadn't sought yet, the progress that had been real, the life that had been accumulating around him like evidence. And now a word in a novel had cracked the wall and he was forty-five seconds gone over a question about dinner, and the shame of it was specific and unhelpful and very much there.
You were doing well, said the part of his brain that was not helpful. You were fine and now you're staring at walls and you can't explain why and Avery is watching and you are—
He knew where that sentence ended. He had heard it end in various ways over the course of the week. He did not find any of the endings useful.
So he said I'm fine and sorry, just thinking and it's nothing and moved through the week with the careful steadiness of someone navigating a room where the floor was mostly reliable and he could not see which parts were mostly.
Avery noticed.
Of course Avery noticed. Derek had long since accepted that Avery noticed things with a different instrument than Derek did, not the systematic cataloguing, not the trap-setting and the data-tracking, but something more instinctive and less nameable, something that operated below the level of logic and was often more accurate for it. Where Derek noticed the grass block has spread, therefore something loaded the chunk, Avery noticed you've been making your coffee a different way this week and you're not reading the book you picked up Monday and something is wrong.
He didn't say any of this.
He said nothing, which was its own kind of saying something. Derek knew the shape of Avery's silences by now, the comfortable ones, the thinking ones, the ones that were waiting for Derek to be ready, and this one was the last kind. Patient. Present. Not pressing.
He stayed close.
It was not, Derek thought on Thursday morning, watching Avery angle himself on the couch so their legs were overlapping without making a production of it, a performance of closeness. It wasn't I am being close to you because I have noticed you are struggling and I want you to know I have noticed. It was more organic than that, more Avery than that, just the natural result of someone who loved you adjusting their gravity slightly in your direction when the week was heavy.
He left coffee where Derek would find it. He kept the television on low so the apartment didn't feel too quiet. He misted the fern in the mornings and reported its dramatic overreaction to slightly insufficient humidity in a running commentary that required no response and provided enough ambient sound to make the silence comfortable rather than weighted.
On Wednesday night he reached over in the dark and found Derek's hand without looking for it, the way you reach for something you already know the location of, and held it loosely and said nothing, and Derek had lain there in the dark looking at the ceiling and thought: this is the thing. this is exactly the thing. I don't have the right word for it yet but this is the thing.
He held on.
By Friday afternoon the week had accumulated in the way bad weeks did, not dramatically but insistently, the way water found its level, gradually and then all at once, and Derek was sitting on the couch looking at the middle distance and he was tired.
Not the tired of not sleeping. He had been sleeping, adequately, with Avery warm beside him and the particular peace of the apartment at night. Just, the tired of holding something carefully for five days without putting it down. The tired of the fault lines and the light and the shame about the fault lines and the light and the careful steadiness, which was its own kind of effort.
He was very tired of being careful.
Avery came in from the office at half past four.
Derek heard the chair push back, heard his socks on the hardwood, and looked at the middle distance and thought: I should say something. He had been thinking this, in various forms, since Monday, and had not said something, and the result had been a week of forty-five second silences and threshold moments and the particular loneliness of being in a room with someone who loved you and carrying something they didn't know you were carrying.
Avery sat down on the couch. Not too close. Just present, in the particular Avery way.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," Derek said, to the wall.
A pause. The comfortable weight of it. Avery breathing beside him, unhurried, not filling the silence with anything it didn't need.
"You don't have to tell me," Avery said. His voice was careful the way he was careful about things that mattered, not cautious, not tiptoeing, just: measured. Honest. "What's happening. You don't have to explain it. I want you to know that first."
Derek looked at the wall.
"But I want you to know I've noticed," Avery said. "And I'm not, it's not scaring me, okay? I'm not worried in a way that needs you to fix it. I know the difference between worried about you and worried for you and this week I've been the second kind, not the first. You're not-” he paused, finding the words— "you're not broken. You're not going backwards. You're just having a week, and I've been watching you carry it alone, and I don't think you have to."
Derek breathed.
"I'm just here," Avery said. "That's all. I'm just here, Derek."
The wall was beige and uninteresting. The afternoon light came through the window at an angle that caught the sunflower, which had been moved to the larger pot last week and was growing toward the glass with the steady uncomplicated confidence of something that had decided what it wanted and was doing it. Derek looked at it. He thought about the seed in the small pot with its Latin label and the eleven days it had taken and you're late, but you're here.
He said: "The knowledge keeps coming back."
Avery went still beside him. Not tense, just: listening.
"In fragments," Derek said. "Not all of it, not the way it was, just, pieces. Cracks. Something opens and for a few seconds I know things I'm not supposed to know and then it closes again and I'm-” he looked at his hands— "I'm here. I'm fine. But while it's open it's-”
"A lot," Avery said softly.
"A lot," Derek agreed. "And I can't-” he stopped. Looked at his hands. "I can't explain what it's like. I don't have the right language for it. Even having had access to every language that has ever existed, I don't have the right language for it, and I find that-”
"Frustrating," Avery said.
"Deeply," Derek said. "Yes."
He was quiet for a moment.
"I've been trying to hold it quietly," he said. "I didn't want to, I didn't want you to see the fault lines. I thought if I just-” he paused— "if I was careful enough, it would pass. And it does pass. Every time it passes. But I'm tired," he said, and heard how true that was as he said it, the tiredness of it, how much space the carrying had taken up. "I'm tired of being careful about it."
"Okay," Avery said.
"I'm tired of not saying it," Derek said.
"Okay," Avery said again, the same word but softer.
"And I think-” Derek paused. He had been thinking this since Wednesday, since the documentary about deep sea pressure, had been approaching it from various angles and finding it true from all of them. "I think I need to talk to someone. About this. About what it left. About the fault lines and the, all of it." He looked at Avery. "Professionally. Someone whose job it is to hold things."
Avery held his gaze. His expression was doing the warm thing, the careful undone thing, and underneath it something that looked like, relief. Not the relief of a problem being handed off. The relief of someone who had been watching a person they loved carry something heavy and had just seen them put it down.
"I know a really good therapist," Avery said.
Derek looked at him. "Of course you do," he said.
"She's-”
"Avery." Derek's voice was soft. "When."
Avery was quiet for a moment. "Three weeks ago," he said. "I looked her up three weeks ago." He looked at his hands, a small gesture of something that might have been self-consciousness. "I wasn't going to say anything. I didn't want to make you feel like I was, waiting for you to need it, or like I thought you were going to fall apart, because I don't think that, I've never thought that, you're one of the most-” he stopped, reorganized— "I just wanted to have it ready. In case. Just. In case you wanted it."
Derek looked at him.
Three weeks ago. Three weeks ago the sunflower seedling had been two weeks old and Derek had been adjusting its pot every morning when he thought Avery was asleep. Three weeks ago they had filmed the Skywars video and Derek had died thirty-four times and called each one a temporary inefficiency and Avery had laughed until he had to pause the recording. Three weeks ago the world had been fine, or fine enough, or at least fine-presenting, and Avery had looked up a therapist.
Just in case.
Without saying anything. Without making it a thing to be reassured about or a problem to be navigated or a moment to be had. Just: quietly, practically, in the way Avery did the things that mattered, the coffee left where Derek would find it, the sunflower mug handed over every morning, the hand found in the dark without looking for it, he had done the thing and had it ready and had waited.
Derek felt something in his chest do something very large.
He had been told, at various points, that he was not easy to love. He had accepted this as accurate data, had filed it without particular feeling, had understood it as a natural consequence of being the specific kind of person he was. He thought sideways. He noticed too much. He expressed things in the wrong order or through the wrong medium or not at all, and then expressed them all at once through the medium of a Minecraft library with someone's name on a sign above the fireplace.
He was revising the assessment.
He was revising it substantially.
"Avery," he said.
"It's not a big deal," Avery said, which was such a specific Avery deflection that Derek felt the almost-smile before it formed. "I just, I had the thought and I looked it up, it took like ten minutes-”
"Avery."
“-I just wanted to have the information in case-”
"You looked her up three weeks ago," Derek said, "and said nothing, and waited, and when I said I needed it you had it ready."
Avery looked at him. "Yeah," he said. "I mean. Yeah."
"That's-” Derek searched through every language that had ever partially existed in his brain and found, as he sometimes did, that the most accurate thing was also the simplest. "That's one of the kindest things anyone has ever done for me."
Avery's expression did the full undone thing.
"It was ten minutes on my laptop," he said, which was both true and completely beside the point.
"It was three weeks of having something ready," Derek said, "because you were watching me carefully enough to think I might need it, and you didn't make it a thing, and you didn't ask me to perform gratitude about it before I was ready, and you-” he stopped. "You just had it ready."
"Derek," Avery said softly.
"I know," Derek said. "I know it was ten minutes."
Avery looked at him. He was smiling now, slightly, the small precise smile of someone feeling something too large for the size of their face. "Do you want me to send you her details," he said.
"Yes," Derek said.
"Okay." Avery reached for his phone. "I'll send them now."
Derek watched him look up the contact, copy the details, send the message. He watched the familiar angles of Avery's profile in the afternoon light, the sunflower on his hoodie, the slight furrow of concentration as he typed. All of it very specific. All of it very real. All of it, somehow, his.
His phone buzzed. He looked at it.
Dr. R. Okafor. Phone number. Email. She has a slot on Wednesday afternoons. You don't have to use it but it's there.
Derek looked at the message for a moment.
Then he looked at Avery, who had set his phone down and was looking at the window, giving Derek the space to read without being watched, which was such a specifically correct thing to do that Derek made a note of it.
"Thank you," Derek said.
Avery looked at him. "You keep thanking me," he said.
"You keep doing things worth thanking," Derek said.
Avery pressed his lips together, the thing he did when he was trying to contain a feeling and not entirely managing. "I'm going to say something now," he said.
"Okay," Derek said.
"And I want you to just, receive it. Without deflecting. Can you do that."
Derek considered this. "I can try," he said honestly.
Avery looked at him. His expression was very settled, very sure, the expression Derek associated with Avery having decided something and being at peace with the decision.
"You are doing so well," Avery said. "I know this week was hard. I know you've been carrying it and I know it cost something to say it just now, and I know the fault lines are real and scary and I know you don't have the right words for them yet." He paused. "But Derek. You are doing so well. You came so far. And asking for the thing you need is, that's part of it. That's not you going backwards. That's you going forward."
Derek looked at him.
He thought about the world called Forward. About the name and whose idea it had been and what he had meant by it without saying what he meant, because he often said things without saying what he meant, and Avery often knew anyway.
"Okay," Derek said.
"Yeah?"
"I received it," Derek said. "I'm, I received it."
Avery nodded. He shifted on the couch, and Derek opened his arm without being asked, and Avery settled against his side with the easy certainty of something finding its correct position, and they sat there in the Friday afternoon light and breathed.
The sunflower was on the windowsill. Hastur was on the windowsill. The pothos, recovered, was on the windowsill, its leaves green and growing and no longer drowning.
"It has a name," Derek said, after a while.
"What does," Avery said.
"What's happening," Derek said. "What the King left. There's a name for it, apparently. Not a perfect name, not the right language, but, a framework. Something to put it in." He paused. "I looked it up."
Avery was quiet for a moment. "Does it help? Having the name?"
Derek thought about cipher stacking and the way a code became solvable once you knew what kind of code it was. He thought about classification on a wet pavement and the relief of the right word for a thing.
"Yes," he said. "Surprisingly."
"Names help," Avery said.
"They do," Derek said. "I'm, I'm still learning that. How much they help."
"You're good at learning things," Avery said.
Derek's mouth curved. "I have been told."
"Seventeen minutes," Avery said.
"The cipher was a known format once I identified the stacking," Derek said. "This is less-”
"You'll figure it out," Avery said. "You always figure it out." A pause. "And you have somewhere to put it now. Wednesday afternoons."
"Wednesday afternoons," Derek agreed.
He looked at the window. At the particular angle of the late afternoon light, the way it fell across the windowsill and the plants and the small ordinary domestic landscape of a life that had been, block by block, built into something that could hold weight.
"Avery," he said.
"Hm."
"I'm glad I'm here," Derek said. "I say that, I know I say it sometimes. But I want to say it specifically. I'm glad I'm here and not-” he didn't finish the sentence. Didn't need to. "I'm glad this is what there is."
Avery tightened his arm around Derek's waist. Not dramatically. Just: there.
"Me too," he said. "Every day, me too."
Outside the city moved through its Friday evening, unhurried, ordinary, enormous in the way cities were enormous and small in the way evenings made them small. Inside the apartment the light did its slow orange work and the plants grew toward it and Derek sat with the fault lines and the week's exhaustion and the Wednesday appointment and the name for the thing and the person beside him who had looked it up three weeks ago just in case, and he thought:
Manageable.
Not fine, not yet, not entirely. But manageable. Real and present and workable, the way most things were workable if you had somewhere to put them and someone to sit with you in the Friday light while you figured out how.
That was enough.
More than.
The first Wednesday came.
Derek dressed in the particular deliberate way he dressed for things that mattered, which was the same way he dressed for everything but with slightly more attention, and drank his coffee standing at the windowsill and looked at the plants.
"I have an appointment," he told Hastur.
Hastur was angled toward the light in the companionable way he had been lately.
"I know," Derek said. "It's practical. Don't make it a thing."
Avery appeared in the kitchen doorway with his own mug. He looked at Derek. He looked at Hastur. He said nothing, which was the correct response.
"I'll be back by six," Derek said.
"I'll make dinner," Avery said.
"You don't have to-”
"I want to," Avery said. "That's different."
Derek looked at him. He thought about all the things Avery had said were different, I want to, that's different, said about toast and grocery lists and staying and being here, and thought that Avery was right, that the distinction mattered, that wanting was different from having to in ways that Derek was still learning the full shape of.
"Okay," Derek said. "Thank you."
"You're getting better at that," Avery said.
"At thank you?"
"At letting things be done for you," Avery said. "At letting things just, be good. Without checking whether you deserve them."
Derek looked at him for a moment. He thought about the library and the sign and so we have somewhere to put things we want to keep and whether he had believed, when he wrote it, that he was also something worth keeping.
"I'm working on it," he said.
"I know," Avery said. "I can tell."
Derek picked up his keys. He looked at the apartment, at the sunflower reaching toward the window, at Hastur companionable on the sill, at the forty-seven-thousand-subscriber laptop on the coffee table, at the couch where he had slept for a week before it stopped being technically accurate to call it his sleeping arrangement.
At Avery, in the kitchen doorway, mug in both hands, sunflower on his hoodie, watching Derek with the look that meant: I see you. I have you. Go.
Derek went.
He came home at six eleven.
He stood in the doorway of the kitchen for a moment and Avery looked up from where he was doing something to pasta, the butterfly kind, which had become a staple, which Derek had a theory about, and didn't ask.
Derek said: "It was hard."
Avery nodded.
"And useful," Derek said. "In the way that hard things are sometimes useful."
"Yeah," Avery said.
"She has a framework," Derek said. "For the fault lines. It's not, it's not the right language, there isn't right language, but it's a framework and it's something to work with." He paused. "She said the naming helps. The having a name for it."
"Does it?" Avery said.
"Yes," Derek said, with the mild surprise he had felt in the office, sitting across from Dr. Okafor who had listened without the expression people got when Derek said things that were hard to hold, who had just held them, cleanly and without flinching. "I think it does."
"Good," Avery said. "That's good, Derek."
"I have another appointment," Derek said. "Next Wednesday."
"Okay," Avery said.
"And the one after that," Derek said. "Probably for a while."
"Okay," Avery said again, the same word with the same steadiness.
Derek looked at the pasta. He looked at Avery. He said: "Thank you for looking her up."
"Derek-”
"Three weeks ago," Derek said. "Just in case. Thank you."
Avery looked at him. His expression did the thing, the warm undone fully-received thing, and he said: "You're welcome," and meant it as simply as Derek had meant the thank you.
Derek sat down at the kitchen table.
Avery made dinner.
The sunflower was tall in its pot and reaching and outside the city did its ordinary enormous thing and inside the apartment was warm and specific and real, and Derek sat in it and thought about Wednesday after Wednesday after Wednesday, about the framework and the name and the somewhere to put things, about fault lines that were real and mappable and, with the right tools and enough time, something that could be worked with rather than around.
About a person who had looked something up three weeks ago just in case and had not made it a single thing more than what it was, which was: I see you coming, I'm getting ready, here.
He thought: I am going to be okay.
Not as a hope. As a data point. As the kind of thing you could say when the evidence supported it and the evidence, he was finding, supported it more every Wednesday.
He was going to be okay.
He was, in fact, already more okay than not, in the specific and ordinary way of someone sitting in a warm kitchen while someone they loved made butterfly pasta on a Wednesday evening, with a therapist's number in his phone and a name for the thing and a sunflower on the windowsill and a succulent that had once been a god and was now, companionably, just a plant.
That was the shape of it.
That was, it turned out, a very good shape indeed.
Six months later Derek would mention therapy in a video. Not as an announcement, not as a revelation, just in passing, the way you mentioned things that were simply part of your week. "I have an appointment tomorrow," he said, in the middle of a sentence about something else, and kept talking. Avery, off camera, said nothing. The comment section went the particular quiet it went when something true had been said without ceremony. The top comment, three hundred thousand likes: "he said it like it was just a thing he did on Wednesdays. it IS just a thing he does on Wednesdays now. i don't know why that's making me cry in a grocery store parking lot but here we are." Derek read this and showed it to Avery and said "I didn't think it was remarkable." Avery said "I know. That's why it is." Derek looked at the comment for a long moment and then looked at Avery and said "she says I'm making good progress." And Avery said "I know. I can tell." And Derek said "how." And Avery said "you thanked me for dinner last night and didn't immediately say it was nothing." Derek considered this. "That's a low bar," he said. "It's a bar you cleared," Avery said. "That's what matters." Derek thought about that for a moment. Then he said: "She also says I should practice saying things without immediately minimizing them." Avery said "how's that going." Derek said "I'm working on it." Then, after a pause, more quietly: "I think I'm getting better." He said it without qualifying it. Without adding at least I think so or it's a small improvement or any of the other mechanisms he used to make good things smaller than they were. Just: I think I'm getting better. Avery smiled at him across the kitchen, full and certain, the smile of someone who had been watching this particular thing happen and was glad to see it arrived. "Yeah," he said. "You really are."