Chapter Text
By the time I was your age I'd give anything
To fall in love truly was all I could think
That's when I met your father, the love of my dreams
The most beautiful person that I'd ever seen
Pond told Permpoon the story the way he told him everything, which was in pieces, over years, adding details as Permpoon grew old enough to hold them.
He started at the beginning. The way you were supposed to.
By the time I was your age, he said, I wanted nothing more than to find someone worth keeping.
He said this to Permpoon at three, at five, at seven, whenever the boy climbed into his lap on a quiet evening and looked at him with those bright gentle eyes that had always undone him. He said it the way parents said things to children who were too small to understand, which was half for the child and half for themselves.
That was when I met your PhorPhor.
It was college. An acting class neither of them had wanted to take. A requirement, the kind of course you registered for because of its reputation as easy rather than its content. Pond had sat in the back row. Phuwin had arrived on the first day, looked around the room with the considering expression he had when he was making a decision, and chosen the seat next to Pond before they had spoken a single word to each other.
Pond asked him why, months later.
"You looked like you meant things," Phuwin said.
Pond asked what that meant.
"I wasn't sure yet," Phuwin said. "I wanted to find out."
That was Phuwin. Deciding on purpose, before he could explain himself, and then being completely right.
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The acting class made them partners for a project the first week. They were partners for the whole semester. They performed scenes and learned their lines and rehearsed in the empty hallway outside the classroom. They were, by the professor's assessment, an unusual pair: Pond too interior, Phuwin too deliberate, neither of them naturals at pretending to be something they weren't.
They got a decent grade anyway.
What the professor did not note, and what Pond only understood later, was that the acting class had taught them nothing about acting and everything about being seen. You could not rehearse with someone for a semester without learning the shape of them. Without knowing when they were performing and when they weren't.
By the end of the semester Pond knew the difference. By the end of the semester Phuwin had stopped performing entirely, at least around Pond, which was the most significant thing anyone had ever done for him without announcing they were doing it.
The semester ended. The class ended. They did not end.
Pond did not know how to explain this to a three-year-old. He told Permpoon: "Your PhorPhor looked at me one day and I understood that I had been looking back for a long time without knowing what I was looking for."
Permpoon, at three, was more interested in the toy car.
That was fine. Pond kept talking anyway.
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Now most of the time we'd have too much to drink
We'd laugh at the stars and we'd share everything
Too young to notice and too dumb to care
Love was a story that couldn't compare
The life they built was ordinary in the specific way that good lives were ordinary, which was full of small things done consistently.
Phuwin cooked. Not because it was his job but because it was his language. He cooked the way he loved, which was with attention and without announcement, appearing in the kitchen and producing food while Pond sat at the counter and talked to him. He had opinions about technique. He had opinions about everything, delivered without editorializing, as facts, take them or leave them. Pond always took them.
Phuwin came to Pond's gigs. Not the big venues, just the small ones, the basement bars and the late-night sets where Pond played for the love of it rather than anything else. Phuwin was always somewhere in the crowd. Not always visible, not always findable, but always there. Pond knew because he always looked, and when he looked he always found him.
Phuwin was competitive at games. This is the part Pond always told with the most affection. He had a specific expression when he was about to win, a slight tilt of concentration, the look of someone who was not going to concede anything he did not have to concede. Pond folded early. Phuwin won comprehensively. Neither of them pretended otherwise. Once, after a particularly swift defeat, Pond had accused him of cheating. Phuwin had looked at him with complete serenity and said he simply understood the rules better. Pond had laughed so hard he knocked his chair back. Phuwin had watched him with the expression.
The expression he thought he was hiding.
He was not hiding it.
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I said, can I tell you a wonderful thing?
I made you a present with paper and string
Open with care now, I'm asking you please
You know that I love you, will you marry me?
There was a night, Pond told Permpoon. A specific night that mattered more than most nights.
It was not dramatic. It was just them, in the apartment, after dinner, the dishes not yet washed. Pond had been carrying something in his coat pocket for three weeks waiting for the right moment. He understood eventually that there was no right moment. There was just the moment you chose.
He chose that one.
"I know you don't say it in words," he said. "I know that's not how you are. But I'm asking you in words anyway because I need you to know that I mean it completely and I want you to say yes."
Phuwin looked at him for a long moment with the expression he had when he was deciding something.
Then he said: "Yes." In a word. Directly. No ceremony. No performance.
And then he stood up.
Pond watched him cross to the bedroom. Heard him open the drawer that Pond was not supposed to know about, the one on Phuwin's side of the bed.
Phuwin came back. He sat down. He put a small box on the table in front of Pond.
Pond looked at the box. Looked at Phuwin.
"I was going to wait until your birthday," Phuwin said. "But you went first and I'm not going to sit here and let you be the only one who did something."
Pond opened the box.
He looked at it for a long moment. Then he looked up at Phuwin, who was watching him with the expression. The competitive one. The one that said: I also had a plan and my plan was also good and I would like acknowledgment of this.
"You've had this for how many weeks exactly?" Pond said.
"Three," Phuwin said.
Pond stared at him.
"Three weeks," Phuwin said again. "I had it before you had yours. I know. I simply chose to wait for a better moment and then you didn't, and now here we are."
"You were going to let me propose without telling me you already had a ring."
Phuwin considered this. "Technically," he said, "yes."
Pond put his face in his hands. From behind his hands he said: "I'm not even surprised. This is so you."
"I know," Phuwin said. "Will you also say yes?"
Pond took his hands away from his face. He looked at Phuwin, who was sitting across the dinner table in the apartment that would turn out to have always been too big for just one of them, with the ring and the expression and the complete serenity of someone who had been planning this for three weeks and had just won.
"Yes," Pond said. "Obviously yes."
Phuwin nodded once. Satisfied. The way he looked when something was settled.
Permpoon, at seven, wrinkled his nose at this part. "But who won?" he said.
Pond thought about it. "They both did," he said finally.
Permpoon looked skeptical. "PhorPhor had the ring first. By three weeks."
Pond looked at his son. At the competitive tilt of him. At Phuwin, looking back at him through his son's face.
"Yes," Pond said. "He did. He always wins."