Chapter Text
It started with a button.
Not a special button. Not a novelty button with some ironic slogan printed on it, not a vintage button from a thrift store with somebody's grandmother's name etched into the back. Just a button — small, slightly convex, the particular shade of pale yellow that only exists on old things that used to be white. Four holes. A tiny chip on one edge, like it had argued with a hard floor and lost.
Chase found it on his desk on a Tuesday morning.
He stood in the doorway of his own bedroom in his own house, staring at it. He had not put it there. He was fairly certain he did not own anything with a button like that. He did not have a grandmother. He did not, to the best of his knowledge, have a ghost.
He did, however, have Buddy.
Chase went back downstairs and looked at the living room, where Buddy was sitting cross-legged on the couch with a bowl of cereal balanced on one knee, watching something on the television with his full, unguarded attention. His hair was still doing that thing it did in the morning, all loose and unbothered, falling a little in his face. He had not noticed Chase noticing. He looked, as he often did these days, precisely like a person who had always lived here and found the whole arrangement perfectly ordinary.
Which was a strange thing, Chase reflected, considering that three months ago Buddy had not technically been a person at all.
He walked back to his desk. He picked up the button and turned it over in his fingers. Pale yellow, four holes, chipped edge. He set it back down.
"Buddy," he called.
"Mm?"
"Did you put something on my desk?"
A pause. The cereal spoon clinked against the bowl. "The button?"
"The button."
"Yeah."
Chase waited. Nothing else came. He waited a little longer, in case Buddy was building up to an explanation, a reason, some context that would make this make sense. The television played a jingle for something. Buddy ate another spoonful of cereal.
"Why?" Chase asked finally.
"Found it," Buddy said. "Between the cushions." He gestured vaguely at the couch cushion he was currently sitting on. "You should probably keep it. In case something loses a button."
Chase looked at the button. Then at Buddy's back. Then at the button again.
"Right," he said.
He put the button in his top desk drawer, because it seemed wrong to throw it away when someone had thought to give it to him, even if the reason made absolutely no sense, and he went to make coffee, and he did not think about it again for four days.
…
The rock appeared on the kitchen windowsill on a Saturday.
It was not a dramatic rock. It was not geologically interesting — Chase had, briefly, in the second grade, gone through a rock phase, and he still retained enough of that childhood vocabulary to say with confidence that this was not quartz, not mica, not anything with visible crystals or exciting color variation. It was small and smooth and brown-gray, the kind of rock that rivers make out of larger, more confident rocks over a very long time. It fit neatly in the center of a palm.
It sat on the windowsill like it had always been there, like the kitchen had grown it.
Chase picked it up. He turned it over. It was heavier than it looked, in that satisfying way that smooth stones often are, with a slight warmth to it from sitting in the afternoon light.
Buddy was in the kitchen with him, leaning against the counter eating an apple — he had developed, since becoming human, an almost aggressive relationship with fresh fruit, like he was making up for lost time — and watching Chase with the expression he sometimes wore, the one that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one, waiting in the wings.
"The rock?" Chase asked.
"From the park," Buddy replied, gesturing in the general direction of the park. "By the fountain. There's a whole patch of them next to the second bench."
Chase set it back down. Then he picked it up again. "You just... took it."
"Picked it up," Buddy corrected, with the faint air of someone who found the distinction meaningful. "I was going to put it back, but then I thought you might like it."
"Why would I like it?"
Buddy tilted his head. He looked at Chase with those eyes that had always been a little too direct, a little too certain, even back when Chase had been trying to convince himself that he wasn't looking back. "You pick things up when you're thinking," he said. "Pens, your phone, the corner of papers, et cetera et cetera. I thought you could have something better to hold."
Chase stood very still in his own kitchen, holding a small smooth rock from the park by the fountain, next to the second bench.
"That's…" he started. He stopped, then started again. "That's a weird way to think about it."
Buddy shrugged and took another bite of his apple, unbothered.
Chase put the rock on the windowsill. It stayed there. He found himself, over the following weeks, reaching for it when he was reading something complicated, turning it over in his hand while he thought, and he did not mention this to Buddy, and Buddy did not mention it either, and somehow that felt like its own kind of conversation.
…
Three weeks after the rock, Chase came home from work to find a length of ribbon on the coffee table.
It was a deep red, the kind of red that was almost brown in certain lights, about eighteen inches long, and it had clearly come from something — one end had a clean cut and the other frayed slightly, like it had been separated from a larger piece by someone who wasn't quite sure how ribbon worked. It was not tied into anything. It was just lying there, slightly coiled, being a ribbon.
Buddy was in the shower. Chase could hear the water running.
He sat down on the couch and looked at the ribbon for a long moment. He thought about the button in the drawer and the rock on the windowsill. He thought about how, before Buddy, his apartment had been very clean and very quiet and had contained exactly the objects he had put there for specific purposes. He thought about how that was still mostly true, except for a growing collection of found objects that served no purpose he could name.
He picked up the ribbon and wound it loosely around his fingers, then unwound it.
When Buddy emerged from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, toweling his hair, Chase held up the ribbon.
"This one from the park too?"
"Bakery down the street," Buddy hummed. "It was on the ground outside. I think it came off a package." He looked at it. "The color's nice."
"It's a ribbon."
"It is," Buddy agreed, with the serene confidence of someone who considered this a complete answer.
Chase looked at the ribbon. He looked at Buddy. He thought about all the things he could say — that he didn't need a ribbon, that the house was not a museum of discarded objects, that there was a concept called ownership and another concept called purpose and together they generally determined whether you brought something home.
"I'm going to put it with the button," he said instead.
Buddy smiled — not the careful smile he sometimes used when he was still figuring out how to be in a body, in a world, in someone else's space, but the real one, the one that reached his eyes and made Chase feel like he'd passed a test he hadn't known he was taking. "Okay," he said.
Chase put the ribbon in the top desk drawer, coiled on top of the button. They looked nice together, he thought, in a completely useless way.
…
Spring had properly arrived by the time the coin showed up.
Chase was pretty sure it was not currency from any country currently in existence. It was thin and small, with a slightly irregular edge that suggested it had not been mass-produced by a modern mint, and both sides were worn almost smooth — he could make out something that might have been a woman’s profile on one side and something that might have been text on the other above what looked like a bird, but nothing legible, nothing identifiable. It was the color of old silver, warm and a little dark.
It appeared in the pocket of his coat, which had been hanging by the door.
He discovered it on a Thursday evening when he reached into the pocket for his keys and found both the keys and the coin, and he stood in his own entryway for a moment with a coin of unknown origin in one hand and a mild, familiar exasperation in the other.
Buddy was on the floor of the living room, lying on his stomach, reading something — he had taken to reading with an intensity that Chase found both endearing and slightly alarming, like he was trying to consume the entire contents of the library before someone changed their mind about letting him in. He looked up when Chase walked in.
Chase cleared his throat, holding up the coin.
Buddy's expression did not change, which meant he had put it there and was not remotely sorry. "Found it on the sidewalk on Tuesday."
"You've been carrying it for two days."
"I kept forgetting to give it to you." He paused. "It might be old. I thought maybe you'd want to look it up."
Chase looked at the coin. He turned it over. The worn side, the worn other side. Something like a face. Something like words in a language he didn't recognize.
The thing was — and this was the part Chase did not examine very closely — it was interesting. He did, a little, want to look it up. He had not thought he was the kind of person who was interested in old coins, but there was something about the weight of it, the way it had clearly passed through many hands and many years to end up on a sidewalk in their city and then in Buddy's hand and then in his coat pocket, that made it feel like a small mystery.
He was a detective. He was professionally inclined toward small mysteries.
"I'll look it up," he said, in the tone of voice he used when he was conceding a point without admitting he was doing so.
Buddy smiled and went back to his book.
Chase sat at his desk and spent forty-five minutes down a rabbit hole of historical numismatics (whatever those were) and did not find a conclusive match but found three interesting possibilities, and when he finally went to bed he left the coin on the corner of his desk where he could see it in the morning.
…
"Is this a marble."
It was Sunday afternoon. Chase was standing in the bathroom, having just discovered a single glass marble sitting on the edge of the sink next to the soap dish. It was blue-green, the color of shallow ocean water, with a small white swirl caught inside it that you could only see when you held it up to the light.
Buddy appeared in the doorway, leaning against the frame in the way he had that made him look like he belonged in every room of the house, which Chase was still in the process of either accepting or arguing with, and it was an open question which one he was winning. "Yeah," he said.
"...Where?"
"Sidewalk on the way back from the grocery store." Buddy paused. "There were actually two of them but I couldn't figure out where the other one went."
Chase held the marble up to the bathroom light. The white swirl caught and glowed. "You think someone dropped them?"
"Maybe. Or they've been there for years." He shrugged. "Marbles get lost. Doesn't mean they stop being marbles."
Chase looked at him.
Buddy was wearing the gray henley and had clearly made no effort whatsoever with his hair, and he had a small red mark on his left wrist from where he'd leaned against the grocery basket, and he was looking at the marble in Chase's hand with the calm certainty of someone who had found a thing and given it to the right person and considered the matter resolved.
Chase wanted to say: You know this is strange, right? You know most people don't do this? He wanted to say: I have a drawer now, with a button and a ribbon and an unidentified coin, and a rock on the windowsill, and now a marble on the bathroom sink, and I don't know what I'm building but I know you're building it with me. He wanted to say something that would require him to understand what he was feeling, and he did not yet fully understand what he was feeling, so.
"Doesn't stop being a marble," he repeated instead.
"Right," Buddy said, very gently.
Chase put the marble on the windowsill next to the rock. They looked good together — the warm gray-brown and the blue-green, the solid weight and the small fragile glass. He stepped back and looked at the windowsill for a moment.
"You're going to run out of room eventually," Buddy said from behind him.
"Then we'll have to figure something out," Chase said, and left the bathroom, and pretended he didn't hear Buddy's quiet laugh following him down the hall.
…
Chase came home one evening to find Buddy sitting at the kitchen table with a very long feather and a somewhat guilty expression.
The feather was spectacular, objectively. It was black, blue-black really, the kind of black that shifted to iridescent blue-green in the light, and it was pristine — not a single barb out of place, tapered to a neat point, longer than Chase's forearm.
"Crow," Buddy said before Chase could ask. "Or raven, maybe. I looked it up but I can't tell the difference."
Chase set his bag down. "Did the bird give that to you willingly?"
"It dropped it on the path in front of me."
"And you kept it."
Buddy turned the feather slowly in his fingers. The iridescence shifted, blue to green to almost violet and back again. "It's extraordinary," he said simply. "I wanted you to see it."
Chase sat down across from him at the table. He looked at the feather. Up close it was even more extraordinary — the individual barbs catching light in sequence, the hollow shaft strong and translucent at the tip. He thought about how it had been attached to something living this morning, something that flew, and now it was here on his kitchen table, having passed through Buddy's careful hands to get to him.
"You know," he said slowly, "there's a superstition about ravens. If you find one of their feathers and keep it, the raven knows. It'll recognize you."
Buddy looked up. "Is that real?"
"No," Chase admitted. "I made that up just now. I mean, the keeping part. They’ll recognize you regardless."
Buddy's expression was extremely flat for a moment, then collapsed into something that wasn't quite a laugh but was headed that direction. Chase felt something loosen in his chest, the way it sometimes did at unexpected moments — not dramatically, just a quiet shift, like something settling.
"Where do you want it?" Buddy asked.
Chase thought about it. "On the shelf. In that little clay pot that doesn't have anything in it."
They went to the living room together. Chase found the small clay pot on the shelf — he'd had it for years, had always meant to put a small plant in it and never had — and Buddy slid the feather into it, and they both stepped back and looked at it.
The feather stood upright, its black-blue length slightly curved, extraordinary and improbable on Chase's ordinary shelf.
"Good," Buddy said.
"Yeah," Chase agreed.
…
It was late June when Chase found the sea glass.
He hadn't, technically, found it — it appeared on his nightstand overnight, and when he asked Buddy about it at breakfast, Buddy said he'd gotten it from a man at the park who collected sea glass and had given him a piece when Buddy admired the collection, just given it to him, freely, the way some people are moved to hand beautiful things to strangers who appreciate them.
The sea glass was the color of old sage, soft and frosted, edges worn to safety. The shape of a very small cloud.
Chase sat with it at the breakfast table for a long moment, turning it in his fingers. Buddy ate his toast and didn't look at him, which Chase had learned over these months was how Buddy gave him space to think — not by leaving the room, but by making himself very still, very present, not demanding.
"Can I ask you something?" Chase questioned.
"Mm."
"Why do you keep giving me things?"
Buddy set down his toast. He looked at the sea glass in Chase's hand. He didn't answer immediately, which was also something Chase had learned to wait for — Buddy thought about his words more than he used to, took them seriously, placed them with care.
"When I was the way I was before," Buddy said, choosing each word like it mattered, "I noticed everything. That was — that was sort of the deal. I was in the world in this very specific way, everything was always right in front of me, and I noticed all of it. The things people dropped and didn't pick up. The way light hit things. The small stuff."
Chase didn't say anything.
"And then things changed." Buddy glanced up. "And I was in the world a different way. And I still notice everything. But now I can pick things up." He paused. "And there's — there are a lot of things that don't have anyone to belong to. A button that fell out of something. A coin that's been walked past for years. And I think about how they're just... there, not being anything in particular. And then I think about you."
"You think about me."
"Of course I do. You’re my… boyfriend." Buddy still hesitated when saying so. He was slowly getting over it. "I think about how you hold things when you're thinking." Buddy's mouth curved slightly. "How you looked at that coin for forty-five minutes. How you put the rock exactly where the light from the window hits it in the afternoon. You pay attention to things too. The things just need to end up in the right hands."
Chase was quiet for a moment. Outside, the early summer morning was doing its thing — birds, traffic starting up, the particular quality of light that came through his east-facing windows before nine.
"You're saying you've been giving me lost things," he said. "Because you think I'm the right kind of lost thing person."
Buddy looked at him steadily. "I'm saying I notice things, and I notice you, and those two things keep ending up being related."
Chase looked down at the sea glass. Sage-colored, frosted, the shape of a small cloud. A gift from a stranger to someone who admired a beautiful thing, and then from Buddy to him, hand to hand, across whatever distance there had been between them before and the much smaller distance there was now.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay," Buddy agreed.
Chase put the sea glass in his coat pocket, which felt right, and they finished breakfast, and outside the summer went on being summer.
…
If Chase were to make a list — which he did not make, but which existed in the back of his mind in the way that unacknowledged things have a habit of existing — it would look like this:
Top desk drawer: one pale yellow button (chipped, four holes); one length of deep red ribbon (one clean edge, one frayed).
Kitchen windowsill: one smooth river stone (brown-gray, palm-sized, warm in afternoon light); one blue-green glass marble (white swirl inside, visible when held to light).
Living room shelf, clay pot: one crow or possibly raven feather (black, iridescent, pristine).
Coat pocket: one piece of sea glass (sage color, frosted, cloud-shaped).
Desk corner: one old coin (provenance uncertain, possibly nineteenth century, three plausible identifications, none confirmed).
Total: seven objects. Each one found, noticed, carried, and placed in his hands. Each one useless in the way that only the best things are useless — not serving a function so much as simply existing, being what they are, asking nothing.
He had not, at any point, asked Buddy to stop. This had not been a difficult decision; there had not really been a decision. The first thing had shown up and he had put it in a drawer, and that had somehow been the whole agreement.
He thought about this sometimes, in the quiet part of the evening when Buddy was reading and Chase was supposed to be working and the apartment was full of the easy silence of two people who had learned each other's rhythms. He thought about the fact that this was not normal, the gift-giving, the small found objects, the careful noticing of how he held things and where the light fell. He thought about how it had never felt strange, even when it should have. He thought about how he'd had the clay pot for years and it had always been empty, and now there was a feather in it, and somehow that was how it had always been supposed to go.
He thought about how Buddy had said: I notice things, and I notice you, and those two things keep ending up being related.
And he thought about how that was possibly the most precisely accurate thing anyone had ever said about whatever this was.
…
The storm hit in late July and lasted most of the night.
Chase woke up to gray-washed quiet and the smell of rain through the slightly open window, and the particular post-storm stillness that felt like the world had exhaled. Buddy was already up — he had always been a morning person (kind of — he woke up early naturally and was grumpy about it half the time), which Chase resented in principle and had made a certain peace with in practice.
He found Buddy in the kitchen making coffee, and there was something on the counter that had not been there the night before: a small, irregular piece of driftwood, silver-pale, about the length of a hand, with a single small hole worn through one end by water and time.
Chase sat down at the kitchen table and looked at it.
"Storm brought a lot of interesting stuff up," Buddy said, handing him coffee. "There's a bit of creek behind that park three blocks over. I went and looked after the rain stopped."
"You went looking in a creek at—" Chase checked the clock on the microwave. "—six in the morning."
"Five forty-five," Buddy said, sitting down across from him.
Chase picked up the driftwood. It was absolutely weightless, as driftwood always was, and smooth in the way that only water and years could make something smooth. The hole at one end was perfectly round. He held it up and looked through the hole at the kitchen light.
"You could hang it," Buddy said. "If you put a string through the hole."
"Or I could put it with the other things."
"Or that."
Chase put it on the table between them and wrapped his hands around his coffee mug. The morning was gray and cool and the apartment was quiet except for the drip of leftover water from the eaves outside the window.
"You went out at five forty-five in the morning," Chase said, "after a storm, to look in a creek."
"The creek," Buddy said, "was full of interesting things."
"And you brought me a piece of driftwood."
"I almost brought you a particularly good stick," Buddy said, perfectly seriously, "but I thought that might be a step too far."
Chase looked at him. Buddy's face was entirely straight for about three seconds, and then it wasn't, and Chase laughed — a real laugh, sudden and unguarded, the kind that surprised him — and Buddy's expression went warm in that way it had that Chase had stopped pretending not to notice.
"Thanks for the driftwood," Chase said, when he'd gotten himself together.
"You're welcome," Buddy hummed, like it was simple.
It was, Chase thought. It really was.
…
There was only one time Chase asked.
It was an accident, more or less. They were walking together in the late afternoon, the particular golden-hour light that turned everything into a painting, and Chase saw something in the gutter — a small, perfect spiral shell, cream-colored, no bigger than a thumbnail, sitting there improbably intact in the city street far from any ocean.
He noticed it and kept walking. Two steps past it, he said, "Huh," and stopped.
Buddy looked at him.
"There's a shell," Chase said.
Buddy turned and looked at the gutter. Then at Chase. Then at the shell.
"Yeah," he said.
"It's—" Chase stopped. He did not say It's the kind of thing you would pick up. He did not say I was just wondering if you were going to notice it. He said instead, "It's pretty, is all."
Buddy walked back two steps, crouched, and picked up the shell. He turned it over, examined it briefly, then held it out to Chase.
Chase took it.
It fit exactly in the center of his palm, the spiral winding down to a perfect point, cream shading to pale gold at the tip. It was unmarked, improbably whole, and it smelled of nothing, not ocean or salt or anything — just a shell that had traveled a very long way from home and ended up here.
He closed his fingers around it.
They kept walking. Buddy had his hands in his pockets and was looking at the light on the buildings, doing that thing where he watched everything with the same quality of attention — nothing more important than anything else, all of it worth seeing. Chase walked next to him with the shell in his fist.
Later, walking home, Chase said: "I have a question."
"Mm?"
"When you were—" He thought about how to say it. They didn't talk about before very often, not because it was off-limits but because there wasn't a good vocabulary for it, a way to reference what Buddy had been that wasn't either too clinical or too strange. "Before. Did you notice the stuff? The small stuff. The same way you do now."
Buddy was quiet for a moment. "I noticed it," he said. "But I couldn't — there was no one to give it to. It just passed through. Button on the sidewalk, nice stone by the creek. Noticed, and then gone." He paused. "I didn't have hands. Not that way."
Chase thought about that. A long time of noticing everything and not being able to hold any of it. Not being able to press a small smooth stone into someone's palm.
"Does it ever feel like too much?" Chase asked. "Now? Having hands."
Buddy glanced at him, sideways. "The button in your drawer? The rock on your windowsill? The feather in your pot?"
"Yeah."
"No," Buddy said, and there was something very simple and very sure in it. "It feels exactly right."
They walked the rest of the way home in the golden light, and Chase had a shell in his fist, and on the shelf in the living room there was a feather in a clay pot that had always been empty and somehow hadn't known it, and in the top drawer of his desk there was a button and a ribbon that had been lost and been found and been placed with care into the correct hands.
And Chase thought: This is what it is. That's all it is.
And it was enough. More than enough. It was, in fact, exactly right.