Work Text:
It was 1am and Coy wasn't getting water.
He had told himself, on the way down the stairs, that he was getting water. He had even brought the glass — Anthony's glass, technically, the one with the chip on the rim that nobody had thrown out because Anthony said the chip gave it character and everyone had been too tired to disagree. The glass sat on the counter now, empty, because Coy had been standing in front of the open fridge for somewhere between thirty seconds and three minutes without registering anything inside it.
The fridge hummed. He didn't move.
The kitchen at 1am had a specific quality. He had been cataloguing it without meaning to, for months now — the way the overhead light flattened everything by a quarter-tone and the tile felt colder than the rest of the house and the air handled differently, like there was less of it, or like it had been used up by everyone else during the day and what was left was just the residual. He had thought about saying this out loud once. He hadn't. It was the kind of thought that, if voiced, would arrive somewhere in the gap between that's nice and Coy please drink water, and he didn't have the energy for either.
He shut the fridge.
The footsteps came down the stairs the way they always did when it was Anthony — uneven, because Anthony took stairs the way he took most things, which was to say not on purpose. There was a small thump in the middle that Coy could have identified blindfolded: the second-from-bottom stair, which creaked when you stepped on the left half and didn't when you stepped on the right. Anthony stepped on the left half. Anthony always stepped on the left half.
Coy didn't turn around.
"Hey," said Anthony.
"Hey."
"You're not getting water."
"I'm thinking about getting water."
"Different activity."
"Different activity."
There was a pause. Coy heard the very small sound of Anthony rubbing one eye with the heel of his hand, the way he did when he had been up too long and was trying to convince himself he wasn't. The flight back from O'Hare had landed at nine. He had eaten leftover pad thai standing up. He had said goodnight at eleven. It was 1am.
"You're not asleep," Coy said, still not turning.
"Neither are you."
"I have an excuse."
"Which is?"
"I haven't decided yet. I'm workshopping it."
Anthony huffed something that was almost a laugh. Coy heard him move further into the kitchen — not toward the fridge, not toward the coffee maker, which was the give. If Anthony had come down for anything functional he would have angled for it by now. Instead the footsteps came to a stop somewhere behind Coy's right shoulder, close enough that Coy could feel the change in the air, far enough that if anyone walked in nothing would have to be explained.
This was, Coy reflected, becoming a pattern.
He finally turned.
Anthony looked tired in the specific way that Anthony got tired, which was that the looseness in his shoulders dropped about an inch and his face did less. He was wearing the grey shirt. Coy had, at some point in the last month, started keeping a quiet ledger of how often Anthony wore the grey shirt, and the ratio was higher than statistical chance allowed. He had not said anything about this to anyone. He had also not stopped counting.
"You good?" Anthony said.
"I'm fine."
"That's not what I asked."
"It's the answer to what you asked, though."
"Coy."
"Anthpo."
Anthony's mouth did the thing where one corner moved and the other didn't. He looked at the ceiling for a second, the way he did when he was deciding which version of the conversation to commit to. Coy had been watching Anthony decide things for almost two years and could see the shape of it now — the tiny pause where Anthony chose the easier door, the slightly longer pause where he chose the other one.
The pause was longer this time.
"I came down because you came down," Anthony said.
Coy looked at him.
"That's the answer to what you didn't ask," Anthony added.
"Cool. Cool. Adding it to the list."
"What list."
"The list of things you're saying out loud now."
Anthony made a small noise. Somewhere between hm and fair.
Coy turned and looked at the ceiling, because looking at the ceiling was easier than looking at Anthony when Anthony was being like this — which was to say himself, which was the problem. The stain was up there where it always was, slightly off-center above the cabinet, brownish and roughly the shape of a fist. It had been there when they moved in. It had been there in the lease photos. Nobody had ever called the landlord about it because every time anyone brought it up someone else said something funnier and the moment passed.
"It's a boot," Coy said.
"What."
"The stain. Berto says it's a duck. I'm telling you it's a boot... It's a boot."
Anthony tilted his head back to look.
"It's a duck," Anthony said.
"It's a boot."
"It's clearly a duck. There's the head. There's the —"
"That's the shaft. Of the boot."
"That's a beak."
"Anthpo."
"That's a beak, Coy."
"It's a boot."
"You can see the eye."
"I see no eye."
"There. Right there."
"That's water damage."
"That's an eye."
Anthony was, Coy noted, standing closer now than he had been three minutes ago, although neither of them had visibly moved. The kitchen had a way of doing this. The kitchen at 1am especially. Distances in here did not behave the way distances behaved in other parts of the house.
The kitchen at 1am was the room where Hanbon had once told him a story about her grandmother's funeral while pouring two glasses of water and not blinking. It was where Will had sat at the counter at three in the morning eating cereal with his hood up, not saying anything, and had let Coy not say anything either, and they had both done dishes in silence afterward like that was a thing people did at three in the morning.
It was where, six weeks ago, Coy had been sitting on the counter when Anthony had walked in and looked at him for a beat too long and said you're up, in a voice that wasn't a question.
It was where they kept ending up.
"Boot," Coy said, quieter.
"Duck," Anthony said, quieter back.
Coy lowered his eyes from the ceiling. Anthony was already looking at him.
"How was Illinois," Coy said, even though he had asked this already at the airport, in the car, over the pad thai. He had asked it three times today and was about to ask it a fourth, and they were both going to pretend this was a new conversation, because the fourth asking wasn't about Illinois.
"Fine," Anthony said, the way he said it at the airport, in the car, over the pad Thai.
"Fine like fine, or fine like —"
"Fine like the field is still there."
Coy looked at him.
Anthony scratched his jaw. "Fine like the field is still there," he said again, slower. "Fine like the light was. Fine like — yeah."
"Yeah," Coy said.
"Yeah."
The fridge hummed. Coy noticed that he had not looked away. There was a strange yet familiar feeling in the air.
He had spent — and this was something he had been actively not adding up — a significant portion of the last several months not looking away. He had clocked the math of it without intending to. The shape of how often Anthony had wandered into rooms Coy was already in. The way Anthony had developed the habit, around mid-October, of asking Coy for his opinion on edits before asking Hanbon, even though Hanbon was the editor and Anthony knew this. The fact that Anthony had not, in two months, started a single sentence with the words Coy, would you without finishing it.
There was, in a folder Coy had not opened in three days, a voice memo from Will that said bro, and then a pause of fourteen seconds, and then you know.
Coy had not deleted it.
"Will sent me a voice memo," Coy said.
"Yeah, he sent me one too."
"What did yours say."
"Nothing. Just bro. Then like a — yeah, just bro."
"Mine said you know."
"That tracks."
"Did yours say you know."
"No, mine was like —" Anthony gestured with both hands cupped, the universal come on. "Mine was just come on."
"Different memo. Same memo."
"Same memo."
They were both quiet.
"Hanbon," Coy said, like a sentence, and then didn't finish it.
"Yeah," Anthony said.
"She knows."
"She's known."
"Since when."
"Since — I don't actually want to know."
"August," Coy said.
"Don't."
"She said August. To Will. He told me."
"Why did he tell you that."
"I don't know. He looked at me like I should have figured it out from context."
Anthony made a small breath of a sound. "Hanbon lost a bet."
"What."
"With Will. About — yeah. By two months. She thought September. Will called it July. The actual answer was somewhere between." He paused. "She's mad about it. She's been mad about it for a week."
"Hanbon doesn't get mad."
"Hanbon gets mad like Hanbon does anything. You wouldn't notice unless you knew the baseline. The baseline shifted slightly to the left."
"She's been editing on her left," Coy said.
"What?"
"She's been doing rough cuts on her left monitor. She usually does them on the right. I noticed it Tuesday."
Anthony looked at him for a long beat.
"Coy," he said.
"What."
"You're worse than her."
"That's not — that's not a fair-"
"I'm just saying. You noticed which monitor."
"You wore the grey shirt seventeen times in November."
It came out before he had decided to let it come out. He felt the air change around the sentence the second it landed, the way it does when you say something you have been keeping in a small interior room with the door politely closed and the door is now open and so is the room and so, apparently, are you.
Anthony did not move.
"Seventeen," he said.
"Seventeen."
"Out of thirty days."
"Out of thirty days."
"Coy."
"Yeah."
"That's a lot of grey shirt."
"It's a soft shirt," Coy said, weakly.
"It is a soft shirt."
"Yeah."
"Coy."
"What."
"Come here."
It was not a question. It was not, exactly, an instruction either. It was the same voice Anthony had used at the LED room in the HVAC convention, the same voice he had used at the field in Illinois, except Coy had only heard about the LED room after and had only lived the field once. But he knew the voice anyway, the way you know a song before the chorus because the bass has already told you. It was the voice Anthony used when he had stopped workshopping.
Coy came here.
He didn't move very far. The kitchen wasn't very big. He took maybe a step and a half. Anthony took the rest. They ended up with Coy's back not quite against the counter, the empty water glass on his left, the ceiling stain — boot — over Anthony's shoulder, the fridge still humming, the overhead light still flattening everything by a quarter-tone, and Anthony's hand, light, on the side of Coy's neck.
Anthony's thumb moved once, on Coy's jaw. Once.
"Tell me if this is wrong," Anthony said.
"It's not wrong," Coy said.
"I haven't done it yet."
"It's still not wrong."
"You don't know what I'm gonna —"
"Anthony."
Anthony kissed him.
It was the kind of kiss that did not need a camera. Coy thought about this immediately, while it was happening, which was the kind of thought he had been having for two years and which he understood now, with a sudden clear quietness, was not actually about cameras. It was about the fact that he had been treating his own life like footage that would later be reviewed, and this — the kitchen, the counter, the boot, the grey shirt, the seventeen, the bet, the two months Hanbon had lost it by, Anthony's thumb on his jaw, the precise temperature of Anthony's mouth, the way Anthony's other hand came up to rest very lightly at the small of his back like he was checking that Coy was still standing — this part was not footage. This part was just the take that stayed.
Anthony pulled back maybe an inch. Not all the way. Coy could feel him breathe.
"Okay," Anthony said.
"Okay," Coy said.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
"You were gonna get water."
"I was thinking about getting water."
"Different activity."
"Different activity."
Anthony's hand was still on the side of his neck. His thumb did the thing again, once, on Coy's jaw. Coy was twenty-two years old and his knees were doing something he had previously associated with the second half of a musical he would never admit to having cried at.
"Did you —" Coy started.
"Yeah."
"You don't know what I was gonna —"
"Did I what."
"Did you decide this in Illinois.", Coy said.
Anthony looked at him.
"I decided this in October," Anthony said.
"October."
"October."
"You went to Illinois last week."
"I went to Illinois because you didn't go with me. I decided in October." A pause. "I un-decided once. In November. It lasted four hours."
"What was in November."
"You went on a date."
"I went on a half-date. With a person from college. It was thirty minutes. I left."
"I know. Will told me when you got home. I un-un-decided that night."
"You un-un-decided in our kitchen."
"I un-un-decided in our kitchen."
"At 1am."
"At 1am. Probably."
"Anthpo," Coy said.
"Yeah."
"You're worse than Hanbon."
"I'm aware."
Anthony kissed him again, briefly, more like a punctuation mark than a sentence. Coy made a sound he was not going to think about later. Anthony made a sound back. The kitchen continued to be the kitchen. The fridge continued to hum. The overhead light continued to flatten everything by a quarter-tone, except that Coy was no longer sure the quarter-tone was a property of the light as opposed to a property of every other room that wasn't this one.
Anthony stepped back half a step and leaned against the counter beside him. Shoulder to shoulder. The way they sat on the couch. The way they had stood in the LED room, according to a story Coy had only ever been told the back half of.
"Will's gonna lose it," Coy said.
"Will already lost it. Will lost it in July. Will was the only one whose answer was right."
"Are we — are we telling people?"
"I'm not telling anyone."
"Anthpo."
"Hanbon is telling people. Or — Hanbon is letting people figure it out by editing things in an obvious way. That's her version of telling people."
"She's gonna put us in the next video."
"She's gonna put a frame of us in the next video and then pretend she didn't and we're gonna find it on Twitter."
"Yep. Or Tumblr. Or, like... Reddit, which is funny."
"Yep."
A pause.
"Will showed his girlfriend the blind date video," Anthony said. "In Illinois. On his phone in the hotel breakfast room. He said he wanted her opinion on the edit and then he just — played it." A small face. "He talked about her once in September and then panicked, and I think this was him un-panicking."
"What did she say."
"She said the lighting was good. She said the lighting was good and then she paused and looked at him."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
"How is he."
"He's good. He's — he's doing alright. He's mad I didn't text him from the airport, but he's good."
"He doesn't get mad."
"He gets mad like Will gets mad. You wouldn't notice unless you knew the baseline. The baseline shifted slightly to —"
"Stop."
"— the left."
"Stop."
Anthony laughed. It was the laugh Coy had been keeping a ledger of without meaning to, the one that started low in his chest and climbed, the one Hanbon had cut into the gas station video at 2:47 because she said it carried the whole scene. Coy now had it from approximately ten inches away, in the kitchen, at 1am, with no camera. He understood, suddenly and with a kind of inconvenient clarity, that Hanbon had been right. It did carry the whole scene. He had just not realized he was in the scene.
"Anthpo," he said.
"Yeah."
"Why didn't you say anything."
Anthony was quiet for a beat. He looked at the empty glass on the counter, the one with the chip in the rim. He looked at the ceiling. He looked back.
"I didn't know how to do it in a way that wouldn't be a bit," he said.
Coy waited.
"I do bits," Anthony said. "I do bits about everything. The whole thing I do is bits. I do a bit about how to make eggs. I do a bit about my fridge. I do a bit about being from New Jersey. I would have done a bit about this. I would have made it a video. I would have called it like I think I'm in love with my roommate, ranked, and Hanbon would have edited it, and you would have laughed, and then we would have done dishes."
"Yeah," Coy said quietly, still trying to catch up.
"I didn't want it to be a bit."
It struck him then that Anthony hadn't posted much since Bunch of Friends started. Somewhere along the way, he had stopped turning himself into content.
"Yeah.", Coy said again, softer this time.
"I needed to figure out a way to do it where it wasn't a bit before I did it. That took a while."
"How long."
"From, like, last October to about ten minutes ago."
"You decided ten minutes ago."
"I decided ten minutes ago. The deciding-deciding was October. The doing-the-deciding was just now."
"Anthpo."
"Yeah."
"That is the most you sentence anyone has ever said."
"I'm aware."
Coy leaned his head against Anthony's shoulder. Anthony's shoulder, he discovered, was a known thing. He had been leaning against it in a thousand minor ways for two years. The difference was the permission, which was apparently a very small thing, and a very large thing, and the kind of thing that, having shifted, was not going to shift back.
"It's a duck," Anthony said, looking up at the ceiling.
"It's a boot."
"It's a duck wearing a boot."
"That's fair."
"That's the answer. Take it or leave it."
"I'll take it."
"Good."
The fridge hummed. As it didn't hum every minute post 1am. As if it didn't make itself present until someone got nothing to talk about anymore.
"I'm not getting water," Coy said.
"I know."
"I'm gonna go upstairs."
"Yeah."
"Are you coming."
A pause. Just long enough that Coy felt it as a pause and not as a hesitation.
"In a minute," Anthony said. "I need to turn the light off."
Coy was afraid that this was not about just turning some light off. There was another meaning to it, something else finally turned off that night. At least he hoped.
"Okay."
"Don't fall asleep before I get there."
"I won't."
"Coy."
"Yeah."
"Hey."
Coy lifted his head off Anthony's shoulder and looked at him.
"What," Coy said.
"Nothing," Anthony said. "I just wanted to look at you with the light still on."
Coy did not say anything for what was, by his own internal stopwatch, eleven full seconds. He had been on camera for two and a half years and he had never, in his life, had eleven full seconds of not having a single thing to say.
"Okay," he said, finally.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He walked to the doorway. He turned around at the doorway, because that was the kind of person he was and he was not going to pretend otherwise. Anthony was still leaning against the counter. The grey shirt. The chipped glass. The stain above his head, which was either a boot or a duck or, by recent ruling, a duck wearing a boot.
"Anthpo," Coy said.
"Yeah."
"For the record."
"Yeah."
"It's a boot."
Anthony grinned. The slow grin, the one Hanbon had once, on a Tuesday, paused a frame on and said that's the take,without specifying what take, and which Coy now understood to have been about him.
"Goodnight, Coy."
"Goodnight, Anthpo."
Coy went upstairs. The second-from-bottom stair creaked under his left foot. He had stepped on the left half on purpose. He was, he realized, smiling like an idiot.
He didn't stop.
Down in the kitchen, Anthony stayed at the counter for another minute. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at the chipped glass. He picked it up, filled it from the tap, drank it himself, set it back down.
Then he turned the light off.
hanbon → will you owe me twenty.
will → hanbon. i called july. you called september. neither of us called now.
hanbon → will. i was closer.
will → hanbon by two months.
hanbon → will by two months in the right direction.
will → hanbon fine.
hanbon → will venmo.
will → hanbon can it be a coffee.
hanbon → will It can be a coffee.
In the morning, Hanbon let herself in with her key.
She didn't live there anymore — her place was a few blocks down the road, close enough to walk at night, far enough that she needed the key — but the 'office' was here, and the footage was here, and mornings she was usually back by six up minimum and no maximum in specific. She made coffee. Two cups, because Will was generally the first one down.
Will came down. He looked at the cups. He looked at her.
Will sat at the counter.
"Did you sleep," Will said.
"Some."
"Did you edit."
"A little."
Which meant "yes, of course" and "I did something thus I did not sleep properly" at the same time.
"Did you delete."
Hanbon looked at him.
She had, in fact, deleted. She had opened the folder marked misc_bts for the first time in eleven days, and she had sat with it for forty minutes, and she had not removed all eight hundred and forty-seven clips, because that was not what this was. She had removed three. One was a clip of Coy laughing too long at one of Anthony's jokes in October. One was Anthony glancing at Coy off-camera during the gas station bit. One was a clip from the blind date video, the long take, the one she had paused on a Tuesday and known.
She had not put them in the trash. She had moved them to a folder she had made that morning, at 4am, in a fit of pragmatism. She had named the folder archive_no_longer_needed.
She had not deleted the folder.
She was not going to delete the folder.
But she had, for the first time since August, taken the clips out of the working file. They were no longer something she might cut into a video by accident. They were no longer something she was carrying.
"A little," she said.
"Okay," Will said.
"Will."
"Yeah."
"You owe me a coffee," Hanbon said.
"I know."
"Now."
Will sighed and picked up the mug she pushed toward him. "It's six in the morning."
"You're here. I'm here. The coffee is here."
"That's not how owing a coffee works."
"It is in this house."
Will got up. Will got a cup. Will poured himself coffee from the pot Hanbon had already made. Will pushed the cup, very slightly, across the counter, toward her.
"That's yours," Will said. "You made it."
"It is now coffee that you owed me."
"That's not —"
"Will."
Will sighed. Hanbon picked up the coffee. She drank it. It tasted, she decided, slightly better than usual, although she was aware enough of her own biases to acknowledge that this was probably not about the coffee.
He drank his. Upstairs, a door clicked open and then shut. Two sets of footsteps moved down the hall, paused, and then one set continued toward the bathroom and the other went back.
Will and Hanbon both heard it. Neither of them looked at each other.
"I'm not asking," Will said.
"I'm not telling," Hanbon said.
"Good."
"Good."
They sat. They drank coffee. The sun, which had been thinking about it for twenty minutes, finally committed to the kitchen window.
"For the record," Will said quietly, "the kitchen light was off at 2am."
"I know."
"That's never happened."
"I know."
"In two years."
"I know."
"Hanbon."
"Yeah."
"I think the camera was off."
Hanbon looked at him over the rim of her cup. She put the cup down. She thought about saying that the camera was always off, technically, when nobody was filming, and that Will knew this, and that what he meant was something else.
She thought about saying the camera sees everything.
She thought about saying the footage is always there.
She thought about the fact that her hands were not full.
She thought, instead, about the folder she had made at 4am, and the three clips inside it, and the fact that for the first time in five months her hands were not full.
"Yeah," she said. "I think the camera was off."
Will nodded.
The coffee was good.
The kitchen held them. The light stayed on.