Work Text:
Chase found it on the kitchen counter.
He almost didn't register it at first — he was mid-sentence, mid-thought, still fizzing with the particular electricity that lingered after a really good rehearsal, the kind where everything clicked and the sound in the room felt alive, and he was telling Buddy about it with the animation that came over him when things went right, hands moving, voice already doing the thing where it climbed without him meaning it to.
"—and I finally got the bridge, like really got it, the whole thing just opened up and Simon actually stopped dancing to stare at me, which never happens, and then we ran it back three more times just because—" Chase turned toward the counter to set down his keys and stopped.
There was something next to the fruit bowl.
Small. Gray. Distinctly, unmistakably, extremely dead.
"Buddy," Chase said.
"Mm." Buddy was leaning in the doorway between the kitchen and the hall, arms loosely crossed, watching Chase with the particular quality of attention he usually reserved for books and the windowsill birds. Unhurried. Waiting.
"Buddy, there is a mouse on the counter."
"I know."
Chase pointed at it, in case the gesture added something. "A dead mouse."
"I know," Buddy repeated, in exactly the same tone, like both sentences had contained identical information and required identical responses.
Chase looked at the mouse. The mouse, understandably, did not look back. It was small and gray and neatly arranged — which was, somehow, the detail that Chase's brain snagged on most uncomfortably. It was placed. Not dropped, not forgotten, not evidence of some terrible incident. Placed. Intentional. Slightly to the left of the pears.
He stepped back one full step.
"Why is there a dead mouse on the counter," Chase asked the kitchen at large.
"For luck."
Chase turned and looked at Buddy directly, to make sure this was a real conversation he was having with a real person and not some kind of post-rehearsal auditory hallucination. Buddy looked back at him, perfectly composed, dark eyes steady, leaning in the doorway like a man who had done a normal and reasonable thing.
"For luck," Chase repeated.
"For luck," Buddy confirmed.
Chase turned back to the mouse. Then back to Buddy. He did this twice, which did not help anything but felt necessary. "Buddy. My love. The light of my life. There is a dead mouse next to our pears."
Something flickered at the corner of Buddy's mouth — not quite a smile yet, still in the process of deciding whether to become one. "The pears aren't involved."
"They are extremely involved! They are six inches away from a corpse!" Chase's voice reached a register it usually reserved for surprising spiders and bills arriving earlier than expected. "Where did you — how did you — is this from outside?"
"There's a gap under the back step of the building," Buddy replied, with the even, informative tone of someone delivering a nature documentary. "The cats use it."
Chase stared at him.
"I didn't take it from a cat," Buddy added, clearly reading his expression. "It was already — available."
"Available." Chase pressed both hands over his face. Through his fingers: "Buddy, why is an available mouse on our kitchen counter for luck."
Buddy was quiet for a moment. When Chase lowered his hands, Buddy had shifted slightly in the doorway — still composed, still unhurried, but with the particular quality of stillness he sometimes had when he was reaching back for something old. "It's a proper gift," he offered. "A mouse kept in the pocket, or placed in the home. It means good fortune for the year. Protection. It's—" A brief pause. "It's what you'd do. For someone you wanted things to go well for."
Chase opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at the mouse again, then at Buddy, then at the middle distance somewhere between them.
"When," he started, very carefully, "were people doing this?"
Buddy considered the question with appropriate gravity. "Commonly? Late eighteenth century. Into the nineteenth."
"We are in the twenty-first century."
"I'm aware."
"We have other luck traditions now! Horseshoes! Four-leaf clovers! Pennies!" Chase gestured expansively. "Things that have never been alive and are not currently on my kitchen counter!"
"I've given you a coin before," Buddy pointed out, which was true and which was not the point.
"That was a coin, Buddy, not a— a formerly living creature that—" Chase stopped. He breathed. He was, on reflection, being slightly dramatic, which he was completely entitled to be, because there was a dead mouse next to the pears. He looked at Buddy again, this time past the immediate horror and into the steadier thing underneath.
Buddy was watching him with that patient expression, the one that was not cold but was careful — reserved, close to the chest, the expression of someone who had learned to keep himself very still and let the world come to him rather than reaching. He looked, in this moment, like he fully expected Chase to say no, to send the mouse back to wherever available mice came from, to decline the gift.
He also looked like a person who had meant it.
Chase took a long, measured breath through his nose. Then another one. "You actually think this will bring luck," he said.
"I think it's a serious gesture," Buddy replied, after a moment. "Whether or not you believe in the luck."
"I think," Chase said slowly, "that is somehow the most romantic and most disgusting thing you have ever said to me."
Buddy's mouth did the thing — the flicker becoming the real thing, brief and warm, before settling back into composure. "So you'll keep it."
"I will absolutely not keep it on the counter." Chase turned back to the scene of the crime, squared his shoulders, and began opening kitchen drawers with the energy of a man on a mission. "Where do you put a — I cannot believe I am asking this question — where do you store a lucky mouse? Historically. Be specific."
"Pocket was traditional," Buddy told him. "Wrapped in cloth. Some people used a small box."
Chase found the roll of paper towels. He found the box of sandwich bags. He rejected both of these options as somehow wrong in different directions. He found, at the back of the junk drawer, a small tin that had once held mints and now contained nothing but the ghost of mint-smell and two rubber bands.
He looked at the tin. He looked at the mouse.
"I want you to know," Chase announced, holding the tin in one hand and the paper towels in the other, looking at the situation on the counter, "that I love you very much, and this is a test of that."
"It doesn't have to—" Buddy began.
"No, no." Chase steeled himself, tore off a length of paper towel, and handled the situation with the careful, two-fingered energy of a man who was not scared and simply had a lot of respect for the deceased. He got the mouse into the tin. He closed the lid. He held the closed tin at arm's length and stared at it.
"There," he said. "Done. Handled." He set the tin on the counter, then reconsidered, then picked it up again. "Where should I — Is there a correct place for this? Historically? In the home?"
"Near the door was common." Buddy had straightened out of the doorway and come closer, quiet the way he moved when he wasn't thinking about it, and he was watching Chase with an expression Chase couldn't quite read — or could, actually, but didn't want to examine too closely in the current mouse-adjacent context.
Chase carried the tin to the entryway. He stood in front of the little shelf by the door — the one that had his keys and an old umbrella and a small framed thing Buddy had given him two months ago that was technically a piece of metal he'd found but which caught the light very well.
He put the tin on the shelf.
He stepped back.
He looked at the shelf. The key hook. A framed light-catching metal. A small mint tin containing a dead mouse placed there by his Victorian-era boyfriend as an expression of deep sincerity.
"I feel like we should acknowledge," Chase said, to the shelf, to the room, to Buddy who had drifted into the hallway doorway again and was watching him with that faint warmth tucked under the composure, "that our home is genuinely unlike any other home."
"We have a crow feather on a shelf," Buddy offered.
"We have a crow feather on a shelf. We have river rocks. We have mystery coins. We have—" Chase turned to face him, gesturing at the new addition. "We now have a mouse tin."
"You don't have to—"
"I kept it, didn't I?" Chase said, maybe a little more quickly than he meant to. He softened it with a look, the unguarded kind he was still getting used to giving freely. "I kept it. It's on the shelf. It's next to the thing with the light." He paused. "I might need you to explain the luck part to me again, slowly, because I want to understand what I'm working with here."
Buddy was quiet for a moment in that way that meant he was choosing carefully. Then: "When I was young — when it was before — if you wanted someone to be safe and prosperous, you gave them something. Something that cost you effort or thought. A mouse meant you had been paying attention to the world, that you had found something, that you'd brought your best to someone else's door." A beat. "It wasn't about the mouse. It was about saying: I want good things for you. Enough to do something about it."
Chase stood in his hallway and felt something do a quiet, complicated thing in the center of his chest.
"I have a good luck mouse," he said. His voice came out softer than he intended.
"You have a good luck mouse," Buddy confirmed, something almost dry in it.
"And you put it next to the pears before I got home, instead of, say, just telling me you wanted good things for me—"
"I told you with the mouse."
"—because you thought I'd—" Chase stopped. He laughed, short and helpless. "You thought I'd like the explanation less than the mouse."
Buddy's expression shifted, just slightly. A question in it.
"I do like the explanation," Chase told him, clearly, the way he'd learned to be clear because Buddy sometimes needed that, needed the direct version, the one with no ambiguity for caution to hide behind. "I like both. I like the mouse and I like knowing why. I like that you keep finding things and bringing them to me and that some of those things are—" he gestured at the tin "—extremely unexpected."
Something settled in Buddy's face. The composure was still there, always would be, it was architecture not armor, but underneath it was the warmth, steady and present.
"You're not still scared of it," Buddy checked.
"I was not scared," Chase scoffed, with great dignity. "I was startled and appropriately cautious about an unexpected discovery." He paused. "Okay, I was a little scared of it."
"You stepped back an entire step."
"It was a corpse, Buddy, I stand by that."
Buddy made a sound in his throat that was probably not a laugh but was functionally identical to one.
Chase looked at the shelf one more time — the small tin, the light-catcher, the keys — and felt the warmth that had become so familiar it lived in him now, a permanent resident of the chest cavity, paying very reasonable rent. "If you find any more luck traditions from the eighteen-hundreds," he said, turning back toward the kitchen, "maybe give me a thirty-second heads-up before they appear in the house? Just so I can emotionally prepare."
"Reasonable," Buddy agreed, falling into step behind him.
"Especially if it's anything else that was previously alive."
"...Reasonable," Buddy said, after a beat that was perhaps a fraction too long.
Chase stopped walking.
He turned around slowly and looked at Buddy, who was wearing the expression of a man who had not said anything and was not currently thinking anything.
"Buddy."
"Mm."
"Is there anything else in this house?"
A pause. A very composed pause. "Not currently," Buddy answered, with the careful precision of someone navigating a specific technicality.
"Buddy."
"I was going to clean out my coat pocket before you found it," Buddy said serenely, and turned back toward the hallway before Chase could get a look at his face.
Chase stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment, alone with the fruit bowl and the memory of the mouse, staring after his extraordinary, impossible, nineteenth-century boyfriend.
"I need a thirty-second heads-up!" he called down the hall.
Distantly, warmly, Buddy laughed.
Chase put the kettle on. Outside the kitchen window, the rock and the marble sat in the afternoon light, and on the front shelf, the tin held its strange treasure, and the home was full of found things and the people who found them, and Chase thought, pouring the water, listening to the sounds of Buddy somewhere in the apartment being quietly, composedly, absolutely himself:
What incredibly good luck.