Work Text:
The farmhouse had its own opinions about October.
The pipes in the walls groaned when the temperature dropped below forty, which it had started doing with conviction around the first week of the month. The back porch steps had to be navigated carefully because the second one from the bottom had been loose since before Chase was born and Grandpa Ralph kept saying he'd fix it and kept not fixing it. The kitchen smelled permanently of coffee and the particular dust of a house that had been standing since 1952, and the upstairs hallway had a draft that came from nowhere anyone had ever successfully identified.
Chase loved it. He'd spent summers here his whole life, and now he lived here, which still felt like being handed something he'd been afraid to want. Him and Grandpa Ralph and Deacon, and now — in a way that had required some explaining and some careful omission of certain facts and one very long conversation with Grandpa Ralph that had ended with well, son, the heart does what it does — Nox.
Deacon had taken to Nox in the way Deacon took to most things he found interesting, which was aggressively and with a lot of questions. Grandpa Ralph had taken to Nox in the way Grandpa Ralph took to most things, which was quietly and with food. Within two weeks of Nox's arrival, there had been a standing arrangement where Nox sat with Grandpa Ralph in the evenings while he watched the news, and they didn't talk much but they were clearly in some kind of accord that Chase was not entirely privy to and had decided not to investigate.
Tonight, Grandpa Ralph had gone to bed early. Deacon was at a friend's place and had texted a string of emojis that Chase interpreted as don't wait up. The farmhouse was as close to quiet as it ever got — the pipes, the wind off the fields, the particular creak of the third stair that announced itself even when no one was on it.
Chase and Nox had the living room to themselves.
It was the good kind of quiet. The kind with weight to it. They'd migrated to the big armchair — technically Grandpa Ralph's chair, technically off-limits, technically something they both pretended they didn't do when no one was watching — in the way that had become habitual, Chase sideways across it with his legs over the arm, Nox fitted against his side. The lamp was on. The TV wasn't. Outside, the fields were dark and flat and going on forever, the way Iowa fields did, and the oak by the window had gone mostly bare, and the last of its leaves skated across the glass when the wind found them.
Nox had, at some point in the past two hours, stolen Chase's socks.
This was not new. This was, in fact, so established a pattern that Chase had started buying socks in bulk — two pairs for him, two for Nox, rotating — though Nox still took Chase's with a frequency and a lack of remorse that Chase had given up finding remarkable. Tonight's acquisition was a thick pair of wool ones Chase had been wearing since five o'clock, which Nox had simply removed from Chase's feet with a focused efficiency while Chase was looking at his phone and then put on his own feet without comment, tucking them up under himself with an air of completion.
"You know…" Chase had said, at the time.
"Mm," Nox had replied, and that had been that.
Now Nox's feet, in Chase's wool socks, were tucked under Chase's thigh for warmth, and Nox had his eyes half-closed, and Chase had his cheek against the top of Nox's head and was doing the reading-before-sleep thing he'd been trying to maintain, though he'd read the same paragraph four times because Nox had tilted his head at some point and Chase's attention had collapsed entirely.
The lamp caught the angle of Nox's face just so.
And Chase saw it.
Above his left eyebrow. A thin pale line, fine as a thread, running just at the edge of where his hair fell. Chase had kissed that forehead. He'd smoothed that hair back with his thumb. He had looked, repeatedly, with the specific attention of someone who knew they were lucky and wanted to remember it — and he had never, not once—
"You have a scar," Chase said, before he'd made a decision to say it.
Nox made a low sound that suggested he was not surprised.
"Above your eye," Chase continued, tilting to see it better. "How did I— I've never—"
"You weren't looking for it," Nox replied, reasonably. His voice had that particular texture of late evening, a little slow, unguarded in the way he was only when he'd stopped performing alertness. "People rarely see what they're not looking for."
"How did you get it?"
"Bar fight."
Chase leaned back to look at him properly. "A bar fight."
"I was eighteen. The man's opinion of me was unfavorable and he communicated it with a bottle." Nox touched the scar, briefly, with one finger, the gesture so habitual it was clearly unconscious. "I communicated my response with his face. I won." He shrugged.
"You were eighteen—"
"Legal, in Kansas, in 1888." A pause. "Sort of."
Chase looked at the scar. The lamp caught it silver, the way old scars got, the ones that had been around long enough to stop being pink and become just — part of the landscape of a person. He wanted to touch it. He did, one careful thumb, and Nox went still in the particular way he did when Chase touched him without warning — not flinching, just receiving, like he was still calibrating to the concept of being touched gently.
"How did I never notice?" Chase muttered, half to himself.
"Violet's disguise hid them all."
The sentence was quiet. Casual, almost. Like Nox wasn't quite tracking what he'd said.
Chase went still.
"Them," he said.
Nox glanced up at him.
"You said them," Chase said. "Plural. All of— how many—"
"I didn't mean to say that."
"Nox."
A long pause. The pipes knocked somewhere deep in the wall. The wind moved through the oak.
"Would you like to see?" Nox asked.
He didn't take his shirt off.
Chase hadn't asked him to, and Nox hadn't offered, and somehow that felt right — it was October and the draft from the hall was making itself known and there was something about the partial nature of it that felt more honest, more like something between them rather than a presentation. Instead, Nox shifted, and lifted the hem of his shirt — Chase's shirt, a soft heather-grey one that Nox had claimed in the same quiet annexation strategy he applied to socks — just enough to expose the lower half of his ribcage, and Chase leaned down and pressed his forehead gently against the warm skin at the edge of the fabric.
He found it almost immediately. A long scar along the left ribs, running horizontal, old and pale.
"That one," Chase said softly.
"Knife." Nox looked down at the top of Chase's head with an expression that was difficult to parse in the lamplight — not uncomfortable, but watchful, in the way of someone who had never been witnessed this carefully. "1886. A man wanted my coat. Good coat. Wool. I'd taken six months to save for it."
"Did you let him have it?"
"I did not."
"Good," Chase said, with a conviction that surprised him slightly, and pressed his lips to the scar, just once, very gently.
Nox made a small sound. Not pain. Something else.
"They've been numb for over a century," he said, his voice carefully neutral. "You know that."
"I know," Chase said, against his ribs. "I know that."
He stayed there a moment anyway, then lifted the hem a little higher, looking. There — on the soft skin below the opposite rib — a small, round, puckered thing. Different from the knife scar. Worse, somehow, in its shape.
"Nox."
"Yes."
"This one."
A pause.
"That one is from a gun," Nox said.
Chase lifted his head.
Nox met his eyes. "Police. I was sixteen. There was a—" he considered his words, in the way he did when he was editing for Chase's comprehension, for the gap between 1889 and 2005— "a disturbance. I was in the wrong place, which was, in those years, most places, for someone who looked as I did. Not to mention I stole from a man a handkerchief. I ran. One of them fired." His voice was the same as it always was. Even. "I kept running."
"You kept running."
"Well I couldn't stop." The faintest shade of something moved behind his eyes. "Stopping wasn't really an option."
Chase looked at the scar for a long moment. Then he leaned down and pressed a kiss to it, and this time he stayed longer, his forehead against Nox's skin.
"Chase."
"I know," Chase said. "I know they're numb. I know. I don't care."
Nox made a sound that might, in a different century, from a different person, have been the precursor to tears. From Nox it was just a slow exhale.
"The one on the inside of your arm?" Chase said, after a moment, pulling gently at the sleeve.
Nox let him. A thin line on the inside of his upper arm, running with the vein. "Barbed wire. I was crossing a property line I had no claim to." He paused. "I had no claim to any property lines."
"1889 Kansas wasn't exactly welcoming," Chase said, against the scar.
"1889 Kansas was hostile to people with nothing, and I had nothing, and it showed." No bitterness in it. Just like a statement about the weather. "The wire was new. The farmer had put it up that spring. I didn't see it."
Chase kissed the inside of his arm, and Nox looked at the ceiling.
"This?" Chase said, touching the scar on Nox's collarbone, visible above the shirt's collar.
"Fell off a roof." A brief pause. "Intentionally, to some degree."
"What does that mean?"
"It means a constable was on the roof and I chose the alternative." Nox's mouth curved. "I was seventeen. I recovered."
"You chose to fall off a roof—"
"From a single story, I should clarify. I'm not reckless."
Chase's laugh came out slightly broken. He pressed his face to the juncture of Nox's neck and collarbone, lips finding the scar without looking for it, and Nox let him, one hand coming up and resting against the back of Chase's head, not pulling him close, not directing — just there, the weight of it tentative in the specific way of someone who was still learning that he was allowed.
"What about your nose," Chase said, muffled.
A pause. "What about it?"
Chase lifted his head. He looked at Nox's nose with the same new attention he'd been applying to everything. It had a slight bend to it, almost imperceptible, that Chase had always assumed was just — the way his nose was. "It's been broken."
Nox touched it, the same unconscious reflex as before. "Street fight. 1888. Three men, which was frankly unfair, and I told them so."
"You told them it was unfair while they were fighting you."
"I was eighteen and I had opinions." Something that wasn't quite a smile. Chase noticed a slightly chipped canine. "I won, in the end. There were only three of them."
Chase scrubbed a hand over his face, caught between laughing and something that wasn't. "Buddy…"
"I had a good record," Nox said, mildly. "I wasn't looking for fights, not all the time. I made money pawning trinkets I stole. The fights more so had a tendency to find me."
"And the one on your shoulder?"
"Dog."
Chase blinked. "How big of a dog?"
"Large. It was a Great Dane, I believe. It was guarding a yard." Nox considered. "I was in the yard. So the dog had a point." He glanced at the shoulder in question. "It was the fastest I had ever moved."
That one did make Chase laugh, properly, and Nox's expression shifted in the small, pleased way it did when Chase laughed at something he'd said — like he was still, after everything, surprised that he could do that, make Chase laugh, be the source of something good in a room.
"Here," Chase said, tugging the collar aside and kissing the shoulder scar, and Nox went briefly, completely still.
"They've been numb," Nox said again. Quieter this time.
"I know," Chase said, quiet back.
"Over a century."
"I know, Nox."
Nox was quiet for a moment. Then: "I don't know why it—" He stopped.
"Feels like something anyway?" Chase offered.
A long pause. "Yes."
Chase didn't say anything to that. He just stayed where he was, face tucked between Nox's skin and the collar of the shirt, which smelled like him and like the farmhouse and faintly like Grandpa Ralph's coffee, because everything in the farmhouse smelled like Grandpa Ralph's coffee, and Nox had been sleeping here long enough that he smelled like home.
Eventually he pulled back and looked at Nox properly, and Nox looked at him with that expression — the one that didn't have a name, the one Chase had been cataloguing for months without finding the right word for it — that meant something along the lines of I did not expect to be here and I don't know what to do with how much I don't want to leave.
"Are there more?" Chase asked.
"Some. On my back." Nox thought about it. "One on my shin from where a horse stood on me. Briefly. The horse was also having a bad day. It stomped and was pulling a carriage." He paused. "One on my palm from a kitchen fire when I was fourteen. I was working a kitchen job. It was not a good kitchen."
"Did you like the job?"
Nox considered this. "I liked the food I could take at the end of the night." He glanced down at his hands, the palm in question, the scar there faint and old. "It paid a fair wage. The man who owned it was not kind, but he was consistent, which in those years was worth something."
Chase took Nox's hand and turned it over and pressed his lips to the palm, and Nox looked at him with an expression that was entirely unguarded, just for a moment, before he got it under control again.
"They've been—"
"I know," Chase said. "Numb. I know."
"You're being absurd," Nox said, and his voice had something in it that was not quite steady.
"I know that too."
Nox was quiet for a moment. "There's another on my bicep, if you'd like to see it."
Chase shook his head. It was too cold for Nox to take his sweater off. Nox had a hard time regulating his own temperature as is. Poor guy would be freezing. "What happened?"
"I was mugged. Or maybe I was jumped for my change—"
"It's the same thing, Buddy."
Nox nodded.
Chase laced their fingers together and leaned back into him, and after a moment Nox resettled — his head against the side of Chase's, the farmhouse around them making its small October noises, the pipes and the wind and the creak of the third stair with no one on it.
Nox's feet, in Chase's wool socks, found their way back under Chase's leg.
"I saw that," Chase said.
"You did not."
"You literally just—"
"I don't know what you're referring to," Nox said, with perfect composure, and tucked himself more completely into Chase's side.
They didn't say much after that. The lamp burned low, as it always had. Somewhere deeper in the house, one of the pipes settled with a long groan, and the oak scraped the window, and Chase stayed awake after Nox's breathing had gone slow and even, holding a hand that had scars on it from a kitchen fire when Nox was fourteen, listening to the farmhouse make peace with the cold.
He couldn't go back to 1889. He knew that. He couldn't stand between Nox and the knife or the bullet or the broken glass or the three men who'd thought three was a fair number. He couldn't give Nox a coat or a kitchen job that paid well or socks — God, the socks, the fact that Nox stole his socks, the fact that easy access to socks had apparently been enough of a novelty that Nox hoarded them like treasure—
He couldn't do any of it retroactively.
But Nox was here. Nox was here, and warm, and in the farmhouse where Grandpa Ralph had made room and Deacon had asked too many questions and Chase had, slowly and without planning to, built something he hadn't known he needed. And whatever Violet's disguise had hidden — all of it, all the pale silver evidence of nineteen years of surviving on nothing in a century that hadn't cared — Chase could see it now.
He could see all of it.
That had to count for something.
Nox stirred slightly. He pressed his face into Chase's shoulder. "I don't remember if the bullet ever exited."
"What."