Work Text:
The door closes behind Derek and Avery as they go down the steps. The front lawn spreads out wide, a field of perfectly-trimmed grass bigger than the entire square footage of their apartment. The seed mix for this yard is expensive, three species of fescue grasses selected for drought tolerance and disease resistance and a perfectly smooth emerald finish. Well over a thousand dollars a month in care to keep this sprawl looking improbably perfect. The soil is dying under this lawn, as Derek very well knows, pesticides and herbicides driving away and killing every other element of a healthy ecosystem.
In the sodium-gold glow of streetlights and little solar-powered yard lights leading along the front walk, the grass glitters like the Milky Way from the light rain.
"Thank you for coming," Derek says, adjusting his crutches and stepping down onto the paving stones.
Avery swings his lanyard around like a yo-yo. The keys on the end jangle. "Yeah, no problem. It was cool, I've never been in a house this big but it was, um, really cool!”
Derek has some extremely wealthy clients for his coding work, and this one invited him to dinner to celebrate a particularly successful project. The client invited Derek's partner along. Avery agreed, awkward and unusually shy, but enthusiastic as ever about an adventure.
The client called dinner casual, but Derek knew very well that "casual" means something completely different at this income bracket. Not at the level of suits-and-ties, but no shirts with big graphics or old jeans allowed—which eliminated Avery's entire wardrobe. They'd had to go shopping. Three thrift stores later, Avery looked crisp and refined and not entirely like himself. But it would do.
"I think I need to learn to cook better," Avery says thoughtfully. He swings the keys around in a circle. "I, um, I don't think we can go to Whole Foods often but there's stuff I can do to get better, right? Or hey, you know everything about food ever, so—"
"Knowing is different than doing."
"You can know, I can do! That'd work, right?"
Derek bumps his shoulder against Avery's. "Sure."
Dinner was delicious: grilled asparagus, a green salad, and cod breaded and fried and covered in a buttery, lemony sauce. There were capers involved and, when the client was briefly out of the room, Avery had put every one of the unfamiliar pickled berries on Derek's plate. In exchange Derek gave Avery the cherry tomato halves out of his salad. He can't stand the way tomato juice gets into salads. Avery calls it "loose juice" and that's exactly right. The swap got them through dinner politely. And dessert wasn't the Ben and Jerry's they share at home, but homemade chocolate gelato.
Somewhere in the darkness a great horned owl calls. A young member of an ancient lineage: the first fossil humans have found of owl ancestors is approximately sixty million years old. Its discoverers named it Ogygoptynx: the primeval owl, after a mythological king who ruled over a people who sprang from the earth itself to found the ancient city-state of Thebes. But that proto-owl is not the oldest of its lineage. Before an asteroid crashed into earth and ended the Mesozoic, the first birds showing owl-like traits appeared. Round, front-facing eyes in a large skull, a twisted metatarsus signaling zygodactylic feet, feathers with slightly serrated edges. As Tyrannosaurus rex held court in swampy forests, the ancestors of owls watched with round eyes from above.
"Hey you," Avery says. He kisses Derek on the cheek. "We're at the car."
Derek blinks away the vision of the Late Cretaceous. He’s standing on the curb beside the passenger door. Puddles spread out over the street, so still the sky is reflected in them. "At least I made it through dinner before that happened," he mutters.
"What were you thinking about?" Avery asks, leaning against the car.
"Owls," Derek says. "They're—"
The great horned owl calls again. Dizziness crashes over him. The ground lurches under his feet. For a moment under the streetlights there are great extinct beasts grazing on the dying lawn instead of the vanished plants they once ate, and then he makes himself wrench open the car door and get in.
The crutches knock against the glove compartment and his knees and his ankles. Derek makes an aggrieved noise. Without a word, Avery holds out his hands. Derek lets Avery move the crutches into the back seat. He tips his head back against the headrest and closes his eyes. The backseat door slides shut. Then Derek's door door shuts, not with Avery's usual enthusiastic bang but with a gentle thunk. Derek takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. He puts his seatbelt on slowly, focusing just on the movement of his hands, and not on the overwhelming emotions the kindness of that sound brought on.
"I'm hungry," Avery announces as he settles into the driver's seat and buckles up. "It's been, um, an hour since we finished eating, and the fish was really good but it was kinda small? I think I'm going to drive through somewhere, what do you want?"
Derek turns his head to see Avery smiling at him. "Culver's," Derek says. "Fried cheese curds sound great."
The line at the drive-through is absurdly long. In spite of the rain they both leave their windows down, filling the car with the scent of clean petrichor. Avery turns off the music so they can listen to the rain pattering down.
"Are you all right?" Derek asks, reaching over to take Avery's hand. "That was...a different environment than you usually live in."
"It was weird," Avery admits. "Not bad weird! Um, maybe? I don't know. My family's never been, you know, rich. I've never been in a McMansion before. The staircases in the, what did you call it, foyer? Were kinda epic, it was sort of like being in a castle, but they made me feel..."
Derek waits for Avery to find the words. The line inches forward. Rain patters down, twinkling over the asphalt parking lot. Reflected neon signs shimmer in puddles, nebulae in red and blue and green.
"They made me feel small," Avery says. He leans forward and rests his chin on the steering wheel. "Your client was nice. But it was..."
"Yeah," Derek says, when Avery doesn't finish his sentence. "I know."
They eat right there in the parking lot, windows still down even with the rain getting heavier. The fried cheese curds are still hot, the first one scorching Derek's tongue. Avery devours his chicken tenders so fast it seems like he didn't even chew. He insists on sharing his fries. Derek doesn't argue too hard. He opens his mouth obligingly when Avery taps his lips with a fry and smiles when Avery laughs.
The clouds break up a little as they settle in to drive home. Derek leans out the window to look up at the clearing sky. Light pollution hides most of it, turning the clouds smoky silver and bronze, but the red star Aldebaran is brilliant enough to see. It shines in the Hyades, brighter than all the other stars nearby.
"Six point four billion years old," Derek says, still looking up. "Not a part of the Hyades, it's too close. Sixty-seven light years to Aldebaran, a hundred and fifty-three to the nearest star of the Hyades. A hundred and ninety-two to reach the star humanity calls K2-136 and its red dwarf companion. A planet orbits that star which hosts a golden city by a vast lake—”
Somewhere in the dark beyond the parking lot, out in the trees, a great horned owl calls.
Derek makes himself stop. He breathes deeply. He slides back into the car and looks at Avery instead of the sky. Avery is looking back. The lights catch in his eyes and glitter there, ruby and sapphire and emerald. Derek forgets words, forgets stars and owls, forgets the eons of time pressing down on the planet.
"Let's go home," Avery says, and smiles.