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It was a Tuesday in March, which was not a special day by any external measure, and Derek had been awake since seven doing the thing he did most mornings now without thinking about it: checking the windowsill.
The kangkung was in its third planting. The first had been Avery's mum's seeds, started in November and harvested in January, the leaves cooked the way Avery had shown him, quick, hot oil, garlic first, the specific motion of the wok that Derek had practiced four times before getting it right and that he still, eight weeks later, considered one of the more satisfying physical skills he'd acquired. The second planting had been their own seeds, saved from the first, which Avery's mum had pronounced, over video call, correctly saved, well done in the tone of someone awarding a small but genuine commendation. The third planting was eleven days in. It was doing fine.
The sunflower was no longer a seedling. It had cleared two feet sometime in late summer and was currently dormant for the season in its pot, waiting for spring, which Derek had researched extensively and understood the dormancy cycle of and had still, privately, worried about slightly until the first new growth appeared in February, at which point he had texted a photo to Avery's mum with the caption it's back and received, in return, a voice message that was just her laughing, warm and unguarded, for eleven seconds.
Hastur was Hastur. Hastur did not change. This was, Derek had come to understand, Hastur's entire personality, and he respected it.
The spinning robot was on the kitchen table, where it had lived for over a year now, where it would activate when something came within thirty centimetres and spin its perfect, unnecessary, exact circle and then go still. Derek had built four more robots since then, a small thing that sorted coins by size, a thing that folded paper cranes with mixed success, a thing that did nothing except open and close a tiny door at precise intervals which Avery had named the door guy and which Derek had not corrected. The spinning robot remained his favourite. He had never fully articulated why, even to himself, except that it had been the first thing Avery had stood in front of for four minutes, and some achievements held a particular weight regardless of what came after.
Fies was on the windowsill beside the kangkung, in the sun, at exactly the correct weight, having spent the better part of a year on a diet she had never once stopped resenting and had, with what Derek considered grudging dignity, eventually accepted. She still did the face. The face still worked, on a controlled and documented basis, with one treat permitted under specific conditions, logged faithfully in the notebook that said Fies & household on the cover and now ran to its third volume.
Derek made coffee. Sunflower mug, left hand, set down within reach of where Avery would eventually surface.
This was the morning. This was most mornings.
Avery came out around eight, hair doing the thing it did when he'd slept on it wrong, and made the noise he made, not quite a greeting, more a confirmation of presence, a small mm that meant I am here and conscious and pleased about the coffee, and sat down across from Derek with the specific unhurried comfort of someone who had done this enough times that it no longer required announcement.
"Sister sent a photo," he said, scrolling his phone. "Her pothos cutting. It's doing the thing where it's basically taking over the bathroom."
"Pothos do that," Derek said. "It's thriving."
"It's menacing," Avery said, turning the phone around. The photo showed a healthy, sprawling plant draped across what was clearly a bathroom mirror frame, vines extending in several directions with the confidence of something that had decided the space was now its space.
"That's good drainage and consistent indirect light," Derek said. "It's doing exactly what it should."
"It's eating her bathroom."
"It's thriving," Derek said again, with the specific patience of someone who had had this exact conversation before and expected to have it several more times.
Avery looked at the photo for another moment, then put the phone down and looked at Derek over his coffee with the warm, assessing, fully-awake-now look he got once the caffeine started working.
"You're doing the windowsill check face," he said.
"I check the windowsill every morning."
"I know. You're doing the face, though. The pleased one."
Derek considered denying this. He decided against it, on the grounds that it was true and that denying true things to Avery had a low success rate and an even lower long-term value.
"The third planting is doing well," he said.
"Yeah?"
"Eleven days in. Healthy growth."
Avery smiled, the specific smile, the one that had a lot in it, the one Derek had been cataloguing without quite meaning to for over a year now, and said, "Ibu's gonna want a photo."
"I'll send one after breakfast."
"You always send one after breakfast."
"The light is better after breakfast," Derek said. "For photography purposes."
"Sure," Avery said, in the tone that meant he knew it wasn't really about the light, and Derek let him have the knowing without confirming it, because some things were better left as a shared, unspoken accuracy.
The day went the way most days went, which was: well, and without much to report, which Derek had come to understand was its own kind of remarkable. He worked on the door guy for an hour, adjusting the timing mechanism, which was not quite right yet but was close. Avery edited footage at the kitchen table with his headphones on, occasionally laughing at something on his own screen in the specific way that meant the joke had landed even on the fortieth re-watch. Fies moved between three sunny spots over the course of the afternoon with the unhurried entitlement of an animal who understood the apartment belonged to her and they were simply permitted to live in it.
At some point Derek made lunch, eggs, the version he'd refined over the past year, slightly better than his original attempts, which Avery had once described as technically food in a tone of great affection, and they ate at the kitchen table with the radio doing its low background thing, and a French song came on, and Derek translated three lines of it without being asked, the way he sometimes did now, half-automatic, and Avery said, "Show off," without any real complaint in it.
"You asked me to," Derek said.
"I did not ask you to just now."
"You looked like you wanted to know what it meant."
"I look like that about everything," Avery said. "That's just my face."
"I know your faces," Derek said.
"Yeah," Avery said, "you do," and there was something in the way he said it, quiet, certain, a little soft around the edges, that Derek filed under the category of things worth returning to later.
The kangkung needed checking around three. They did it together, the way they had since the first planting, Avery's hands testing the soil moisture, the specific knowledge that was his, passed along the way you passed along the things that mattered to you, and Derek's hands doing the part that was his, the careful measuring, the notebook entry. It had become, without either of them deciding it should be, a small ritual. Eleven minutes, give or take, most days. The world did not require anything else of them during those eleven minutes, and they had both, separately and then together, come to value that.
"I think you've gotten better at this than me," Avery said, watching Derek check the soil.
"You taught me everything I know."
"I taught you the basics. You went and read four books about soil composition."
"The basics warranted further investigation," Derek said.
"You always say that," Avery said, "about everything," and he was smiling when he said it, and Derek looked at him in the afternoon light with dirt on his hands and thought, not for the first time, that he had not previously understood that a person could become this specifically, permanently necessary to the architecture of an ordinary day.
The evening was quiet. They ate dinner, Avery cooked, the kangkung in oyster sauce, the recipe perfected through repetition until it required no real thought, just motion and smell and the small adjustments of someone who knew a dish well enough to trust their instincts, and afterward they ended up on the couch the way they usually did, Fies inserting herself between them with her customary disregard for personal space, the TV on low, neither of them really watching it.
Derek had been carrying something around for a few days.
He had not decided to say it tonight specifically. It was more that the day had been ordinary enough, complete enough, that the thing he'd been carrying had settled into a shape he finally recognized as ready to put down. He had learned, over the past year, that some things were better said when they arrived rather than when they were planned, and this felt like an arrival.
"Avery," he said.
"Mm." Avery was looking at his phone, scrolling something idle.
"I want to say something."
This got his attention. Avery looked up, and something in his face shifted slightly, not alarm, just attention, the specific quality of someone who had learned, over a year, to recognize when Derek had something prepared and was about to deliver it.
"Okay," Avery said. He put the phone down. "I'm listening."
Derek looked at him for a moment. He thought about how to say it, the precise version, the accurate one, and decided, as he usually did with Avery, that precision and honesty were more useful than performance.
"A year ago," he said, "I didn't think I was going to get a Tuesday like this one."
Avery went very still.
"I don't mean that dramatically," Derek said, carefully. "I'm not trying to make it heavier than it needs to be. I just mean, factually. During the eleven days, and for a while after, I genuinely did not think there would be ordinary days. I thought, if I got out, the most I could hope for was managing. Functioning. Getting through them." He paused. "I didn't think there would be a windowsill with three plantings of kangkung on it. I didn't think there would be a cat at the correct weight, on a documented diet, still doing the face. I didn't think I would know how to make eggs you'd call technically food with genuine affection. I didn't think there would be a notebook in its third volume." He was quiet for a moment. "I didn't think there would be a Tuesday this unremarkable. I think I assumed, if anything came after, it would still feel like recovering. Like something to get through."
He looked at Avery.
"It doesn't feel like that anymore," he said. "It hasn't for a while. I wanted to tell you that. I wanted you to know that the unremarkable part, the part where nothing happens, where it's just eggs and kangkung and Fies on the windowsill and you laughing at your own footage, that part is the part I didn't think I'd get. And I have it. I have a lot of it. I have, by my count, three hundred and some ordinary days like this one, and I intend to have considerably more, and I wanted to say, clearly, while it's just an ordinary Tuesday and nothing is forcing the conversation, thank you. For all of it. For making the unremarkable part possible."
The room was quiet.
Avery's eyes were doing the thing.
"Derek," he said, voice not quite steady.
"You don't have to say anything," Derek said. "I just wanted it said."
"I'm going to say something anyway," Avery said, and his voice cracked slightly on anyway, and he pressed the back of his hand to his eyes for a moment, breathing through it the way Derek had watched him breathe through things for a year now, and then he looked up, eyes wet and clear and entirely open. "You say things like that," he said, "and you do it so, so plainly, like you're reading a weather report, and it's the most-” he stopped, breathed again. "I don't have the words you have. I never have. You're the one with five languages." A small wet laugh. "Six now."
"Six," Derek agreed.
"I don't have six languages' worth of ways to say it," Avery said. "I just have, this." He gestured, broadly, at the room, at the couch, at Fies between them, at the kitchen with its robot and its windowsill and its notebook. "All of this is the only way I know how to say it back. The eggs and the kangkung and the photos for Ibu and the documentary you fell asleep watching last week and the chair you don't need anymore because you just get in the bed now-” his voice caught again, "this is what I have. This is my version of the speech."
Derek looked at him.
"It's a good speech," he said.
Avery laughed, wet and real, and wiped his face with the heel of his hand, and Derek reached over and did it properly, the way he'd learned to, careful and unhurried, and Avery let him, the way he'd learned to let himself be taken care of in the small ordinary ways that had, somewhere in the past year, stopped feeling remarkable and started feeling like simply how things were.
"I have one more thing," Derek said.
Avery looked at him, still a little wet-eyed. "There's more?"
"A small thing."
"Okay."
"The folder," Derek said. "On your phone."
Avery's expression did something complicated. "Derek-”
"What's the count now," Derek said.
Avery looked at him for a long moment. Then, very quietly: "Two hundred and eleven."
Derek absorbed this.
"Two hundred and eleven," he repeated.
"The number keeps going up," Avery said, which was the same thing he'd said a year ago, the first time, on the couch in the rain, and Derek felt something in his chest do the specific warm thing it did when something circled back around to where it started and arrived somewhere fuller than it had left.
"Good," Derek said. Same word. Same weight.
"You always say that," Avery said.
"I mean it every time."
"I know," Avery said. "That's the whole problem." He wiped his eyes one more time, properly this time, and looked at Derek with the expression that had a lot in it, all of it, the whole accumulated year of it, and said: "I love you. Plainly. Like a weather report. No six languages required."
Derek looked at him.
"I love you too," he said. "In all six."
"Show off," Avery said, voice thick, and kissed him before Derek could say anything else, and Fies made her opinion known from the middle of the couch and neither of them moved her, and outside the March evening did its quiet thing, and the kangkung grew, and the robot sat ready to spin the next time something came within range, and the notebook waited on the kitchen counter for tomorrow's entry, and none of it needed saying anymore because all of it had already been said, in eggs and kangkung and screenshots and six languages and a chair that had become unnecessary because there was simply a side of the bed now, his side, theirs, settled and permanent and entirely unremarkable in the way the best things eventually became.
There was no video posted that night. Some things, Avery had learned, were not for the channel. He put the phone away early and didn't think about content for the rest of the evening, which had become, over the past year, its own kind of growth, knowing the difference between what got shared and what got kept.
The kangkung would be ready for harvest in another ten days. Derek would document it, as he documented everything that mattered, in his own quiet thorough way, and the photo would go to Avery's mum with the caption "ready soon," and she would send back a voice message, and somewhere in Edinburgh another mother would eventually get a similar message about a similar small, ordinary, accumulated thing, because both of them had learned, in their own way, that the people who loved their sons had room enough for two mothers' worth of pride.
Fies would, eventually, need to be moved off the couch so they could go to bed. She would express her opinion about this, as she always did, and then settle in her spot at the foot of the bed with the air of someone who had, in fact, known about all of this from the very beginning, and had simply been waiting, with great patience, for the rest of them to catch up.
She usually was.