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Chosen is trying to find the right ice cream.
He stands in front of the freezer aisle and stares at all the ice cream the supermarket has to offer.
Finding the right ice cream can be rather difficult no matter the season.
In the cold seasons, it's because there is no ice cream, in the hot seasons it's because there's too much ice cream.
There is too much ice cream right now. But none of the flavours he actually wants.
Thank the universes Dark is not here. He would want all the ice cream, and then would destroy all of the supermarket, and then all the ice cream would have melted!
There would have been a river of ice cream.
He laughs aloud at the thought.
A woman near him gives him a look.
"...sorry." He whispers.
He has learned, over the years, that laughing alone in supermarkets is one of the things people give you looks for. They are looks of judgement.
There is a long list of these things you shouldn't do. Nobody hands you the list. But you're supposed to know all about it. Everyone else does, maybe they were each issued a copy at some point when he wasn't looking. He is still working on figuring it out...
He suspects he will be working on it forever.
He goes back to the ice cream.
There's the chocolate one with pieces of other chocolate inside it!
That is their favourite. It tastes so, so good and makes Dark's face radiant. Dark says it tastes like winning.
This one will make him happy.
Chosen reaches for it–
Someone takes it.
He turns towards the person that took it. It's not someone he knows, just some guy, who didn't have any ill will.
Still, it's sad that the guy took away his ice cream.
No, he shouldn't think like that. It wasn't his ice cream yet. He hadn't touched it. It had been sitting on a public shelf in a public store, available to anyone, and the guy had simply... gotten there first, which is allowed. This is, in fact, how supermarkets are designed to work.
Well, it's still sad.
He stares at the guy in complete silence, unmoving, the freezer door still hanging open beside him. This is probably rude of him, it's rude to stare.
The guy notices the staring.
He pauses, tub in hand, and looks back at Chosen with a weird not-happy expression.
Chosen realizes he should say something. Saying something is right. Right? When you stare at a stranger for too long, you are supposed to explain yourself.
"That is a good ice cream," Chosen says, pointing at the ice cream.
The guy blinks. "...Yeah?"
"Yes. It tastes like winning."
A long silence. The freezer hums between them.
"You look great with it." He adds, to be polite.
"Okay," the guy says, and leaves. He leaves quickly. He does the fast walk people do when they want to run but don't.
Chosen closes the freezer door. He frowns, considers the interaction. He complimented the ice cream. Compliments are good, people like compliments. And yet...
He returns to the ice cream problem.
The chocolate one with pieces of other chocolate inside is gone now. The empty slot on the shelf looks wrong.
He checks behind the neighboring tubs, in case another one is hiding. Sometimes they hide. He has learned this. Supermarkets keep secrets in the back rows.
There is no second tub.
He closes his eyes, trying not to overheat. The sound of the freezer is a bit annoying.
Chosen stands in front of the freezer and thinks about coming home with the wrong ice cream.
Dark would not be angry at him. He'd be mad, but more at the world in general. He would say something loud and dramatic and then eat the wrong ice cream anyway, probably all of it.
But that isn't the point.
He wanted to see the radiant face. That specific one. The one that arrives all at once, the one this exact flavor produces and no other flavor does.
He had planned the whole thing on the walk over: the reveal and the face. It was a small plan.
He doesn't have many plans anymore, not the old kind, and he has grown attached to the small ones. To this little secret plan that he had.
He looks at the freezer a while longer.
Then, he goes to find an employee.
Employees are strangers whose job is to be asked things, which should make it easier, and somehow makes it worse, because there are rules, even for asking. And he's not used to them, so they are unwritten, like everything he's not used to.
"Excuse me," Chosen says, and the employee turns. They have a uniform and deep eye-bags "Do you have more of the chocolate ice cream? The one with pieces of other chocolate inside it."
The tired looking employee looks at him for a moment. "...the one with the brownie chunks?"
Chosen considers this. A few seconds pass.
"Possibly," he says.
A sigh.
"Lemme check the back."
They disappear through a door that says STAFF ONLY... one of the most honest things in existence. A door that simply tells you the rule. He appreciates that door.
If more of the world labeled itself like that door, his list would be much shorter.
He waits. He is good at waiting. It is possibly the thing he is best at. He starts to fidget with his hands.
Finally, they come back.
They are empty handed.
"Sorry." They say, "it's a very popular flavor."
Chosen looks down.
Of course it is. It tastes like winning. Anyone would want that.
"Okay..." He takes a deep breath, "thank you anyway. "
"Yeah. No problem, man."
He thinks about Dark's face. The radiant one. The one that was going to happen at approximately the moment the bag opened, according to the plan.
No radiant face because of the ice cream today...
He picks a different tub.
—
Dark is not home.
The apartment tells him immediately, it's way too quiet.
'Gone destroying. Stay alive, Cho-Cho!' That's what's written on the post it note.
Despite everything, he chuckles when he sees it.
They both do that sometimes, disappear for a few hours, with the implicit agreement to always come back.
He should be grateful, probably. Now he won't have to see any face.
The wrong ice cream goes in the freezer.
—
The hours pass.
He cleans the kitchen. The kitchen was already clean, but there are levels of clean, and he ascends one.
His hands like having things to do. His hands have always liked having things to do. Hands that did their job, endlessly.
By evening he has run out of tasks.
The post-it note is still on the counter. The same words still on it. Gone destroying. Stay alive, Cho-Cho!
He reads it again, even though he has already read it. It contains the same information as before.
"You could have waited for me," he tells the note.
The note does not respond.
—
He checks the window. Outside there is a sky. The sky is doing... good. It barely has clouds.
Somewhere under it, probably, there is smoke, and under the smoke there is Dark, having the time of his life.
His hands open and close at his sides.
He could cook something. But cooking makes food, and food wants someone to eat it, he doesn't want to eat, and the other someone is out destroying.
He could go out. People go out. But there are rules for going out, more of the unwritten kind, and besides, he has already spent today's supply of stranger interactions in that supermarket.
He sorts the cutlery drawer instead. Forks with forks. Knives with knives. The spoons were already correct. They are good spoons.
Then the drawer is finished, and his hands are empty again, and the apartment is exactly as clean as it was an hour ago, which was exactly as clean as it was the hour before that. There are levels of clean. He has run out of levels.
—
He sits down.
He hates being alone. He hates doing nothing.
No, no... he can do this, he knows how to do a day alone. He has done many of them, technically. Years of them even. Does that count as alone? Probably. Alan wasn't exactly company... he was a monster that only someone seriously messed up could miss.
He starts to scratch his arm. Slowly, the way his hands do when there is nothing else to do.
Only a messed up thing would miss its old horrible life.
He scratches faster and faster.
He needs to stop thinking about it, he needs to stop, he hates it, he hates it, he hates–
He looks down at his arm.
It's quite messed up now...
He could mess it up more.
—
It doesn't even hurt that much.
He pulls his sleeve down.
—
The freezer hums.
Chosen has been listening to it for a while now. He is not sure how long.
It does this small, irregular click that happens every so often at intervals he cannot predict. That is the problem with the click. It makes him wait for it.
Would he have been happier if he had the right ice cream? Or sadder, because he'd have no one to eat it with?
He should get up.
He doesn't need to.
Waiting is the thing he is best at, after all.
—
he is not thinking about anything. He doesn't want to think about anything. He has put the thoughts in the same place he puts everything in his mind. The place is getting crowded lately. He should organize it.
The freezer clicks again.
He flinches, even though he was waiting for it.
Waiting for a thing has never once stopped it from arriving and hurting him.
Everything is too much. The hum, the click, the pipe somewhere in the wall that ticks as it cools, his own breathing, which he can hear now, which he would rather not. His own skin hates his shirt. The tag at his collar tickles his neck.
His head fills with sounds and lights and fabric and days that go in and never seem to go out. There's a container in his head and it's only so big, and nobody issued him a bigger one. On good days the container empties on its own, but now–
...
—
Dark slams the door open.
"Chosen! I'm home! Are you alive?!"
It hits the wall the way it always hits the wall. Very loudly.
Today, it feels worse.
The sound of hurried steps hurts his head.
He stands up. His legs take longer than usual, as if they've been asked to do something completely unreasonable.
Then, the smell of smoke. It's normal, it's normal, he doesn't want to say anything–
Then Dark himself, filling the kitchen doorway, and then the kitchen, and then everything. Excited with whatever he destroyed.
"You should have seen it!" Dark says, and continues to talk. He goes on and on.
Chosen knows Dark is still talking, because Dark's mouth is moving and sounds are coming out of it. The sounds arrive. The meaning is somewhere that Chosen cannot reach.
Dark's laugh that spins all over his head.
"Welcome home," his voice says. It comes out correct. He hopes Dark will not ask if he's listening. "I'm listening..."
He is listening. That's the problem. He is listening to everything. He's just not understanding any of it.
"Liar!" Dark says, delighted. Lying is one of the things Dark finds charming, when Chosen does it, because Chosen is so bad at it. "Whatever! It doesn't matter, because–"
Dark holds up one finger. 'Wait', the finger says. Dark spins, digs into the bag he dropped by the door, the bag Chosen hadn't even registered as an object yet, and comes back holding something.
A tub.
The chocolate one. With pieces of other chocolate inside it. It's slightly crushed. It's sweating, the way ice cream sweats when it has been carried too far by someone who does not think about consequences. It is probably half melted.
It is exactly the right one.
"—the winning one!" Dark says. "A store had it. I saw it and I got it! Soo, what do you think?"
Chosen looks at the tub, looks at Dark again.
"You always do the thing," Dark goes on, wiggling the tub a little, "where you buy it and then you WATCH me. I love when you do that. You get all... watchful! So... Here. I wanted to do something for you this time."
Dark's voice is so much and so beloved and so loud and he knew.
He knew...
The whole time. Every small covert plan, every carefully casual reveal, every face Chosen thought he was harvesting in secret. Dark noticed this.
Chosen opens his mouth to say thank you.
No words come out of it.
The words are always there; finding them is effortful but they are there. It's like they're in drawers, and he takes them out and assembles them and people receive them. He reaches for 'thank you' and his mind closes on nothing. He reaches for 'yes, that's the right one' and nothing. He reaches for anything that may be appropriate and... and...
And the light it's too bright. The freezer hums. The tub sweats in Dark's hand, and Dark's face is starting to change, the radiance dimming into something less. Chosen is making it change, he has to fix it, fixing it requires words, there are no words. There is nothing.
His hands come up. He doesn't tell them to. They press over his ears, which doesn't help, because most of the noise is already inside.
He makes a pitiful, pathetic noise.
His legs fold him down against the floor.
"–the hell?! Do you not want the ice cream?" Dark's voice, baffled. Chosen would laugh at that if he could do anything at all, but he just shakes his head.
He can only shake and leak and press his hands against his head.
He's ruining everything. This was a nice surprise and he's ruining everything. He clearly doesn't deserve anything good since he can't even be happy for one good thing. Maybe Alan was right to–
Suddenly, the light behind his eyelids goes out. The switch, Dark hit the switch.
He hears the freezer open and close. The ice cream, he realizes. Dark is saving it. Somewhere in the noise, a very small part of him smiles. The ice cream is safe.
He hears Dark sit down on the floor. Not next to him. A little away. The floor creaks once under Dark's weight and then stops creaking, which means Dark has stopped moving, which is not a thing Dark does.
Dark does and says things the way the freezer hums, constantly, in a way that is usually wonderful but terrifying in these moments.
Chosen waits for the words the way he waits for the click, braced. But the words do not come. They keep not coming. He waits longer. Still nothing, and slowly his body understands that they will not come. That nothing is coming. That he can stop bracing, there is nothing to brace against.
Time passes. Chosen doesn't know how much. Time is one of the things that goes strange, always does.
He can hear Dark breathing. He can hear Dark trying to breathe quietly, which is not the same thing, and is somehow better.
The container is still too full, but nothing new is going into it, and that has not been true all day.
The freezer clicks. He flinches.
"Stupid freezer," Dark says, and it's not a problem. The words land soft. Everything else has been so quiet that even Dark's voice arrives at a survivable size. "I'll kill it later."
Chosen chuckles. It comes out wet and small, but it comes out.
"Don't..."
He lowers his hands from his head.
"Sor– sorry, I couldn't even say thank you. I reached for it and there was nothing in the drawer."
"You keep your words in drawers?"
"...In a way."
"That's so organized!" Dark says, it sounds like genuine admiration. "Mine are more like a pile. I just grab whatever's on top. And then I hear the words that I say right when I say them."
"Me too, I have my words in my thoughts."
They sit in the dark for a while longer. The freezer clicks. Chosen doesn't flinch this time. We'll, he does, a little, but it's the small kind.
"You didn't ruin anything, by the way. The ice cream is fine in the freezer being fine right now. So don't you dare be stupid about yourself."
Chosen opens his mouth to argue. Nothing comes out.
"Hey, Cho," Dark says, quietly, which is a volume Chosen forgets Dark owns. "I want to be closer. Is closer bad right now?"
Chosen considers the question. It's a good question. It's a better question than most people with two full drawers of rules would think to ask.
"Closer is..." He reaches into the drawer. There's something in it now. "Closer is good. If it's slow."
"I can do slow!" Dark says loudly, and then, catching himself, whispers: "I can do slow."
He shuffles across the floor. It takes him an eternity by Dark standards, which is about four seconds. Then there's a shoulder against Chosen's shoulder. Warm and solid.
Chosen leans into it.
"Your shirt smells like smoke.." Chosen mumbles.
"Happens when you destroy as much as me." Dark sounds proud of himself.
Dark shifts, and then in one decisive motion tips them both sideways, so they end up lying on the kitchen floor, Chosen's head on Dark's arm, Dark wrapped around him. He's warm. Chosen tucks himself closer.
The floor is hard and cold and objectively a terrible place to lie down, and Chosen can't think of a better thing that happened today. It feels so nice...
"You're nice today."
Dark laughs. "Shush! I have my reputation to keep."
"Tomorrow we'll eat ice cream..." Chosen says with all the happiness he has, snuggling even closer to Dark. "For breakfast."