Chapter Text
The heater is busted in the cab Bdubs takes from Calgary Airport to the tiny airstrip just outside the city. He tries not to take it as a bad omen, but it’s hard. His heart’s been hammering since he got on his flight in Michigan, and every minute of flight delay and every jolt of turbulence and now every bump in the road seems like the universe trying to hurl signs at him one after another: turn around, this cannot possibly go well.
Well. He’s in Alberta now, good idea or not. Rolling out of the cab onto the blacktop parking lot of Springbank Airport, the air’s chilly and smells like grass clippings, and the clouds above are wispy, and if there was ever a time to turn back, it’s passed.
There’s a tiny terminal building waiting for him. He takes a breath, grabs his suitcase, goes.
A guy is leaning against the front desk and talking to the clerk looks up when Bdubs walks in, and squints. He’s black, tall and attractive with a flannel shirt and worn, faded jeans on, short hair in loose twists. Bdubs thinks for a second Etho? before the guy opens his mouth and says, “Bdubs?” His voice is all wrong.
“You must be Jesse,” Bdubs says, and strides over to shake the guy’s hand. He’s got a firm, confident grip. Okay.
“Good to finally meet the guy I’ve heard so much about,” Jesse says, and smiles brightly. There’s not a thing about it that doesn’t seem genuine.
“Likewise,” Bdubs says, though Etho’s hardly told him a damn thing about his fiancé. “You can call me John.”
“John,” Jesse says, and nods. “Right this way, John. I’ll see you next week, Dana.” He waves to the clerk as he passes, headed straight through the terminal building to the tarmac out back.
Bdubs follows, feeling a little stupid pulling his wheely suitcase behind him. He follows Jesse out to a tiny, rinky-dink little prop plane, silver and green with the words Caphrees Air! painted on the side in cursive, and balks.
Jesse looks back over his shoulder and grins, wide smile kinda dazzling in the afternoon light. “You’re not scared of flying, right?”
“You know, I didn’t think I was,” Bdubs says.
Jesse laughs and claps him on the back, which is honestly a bit too familiar for Bdubs’s liking. “Don’t you worry, John. Flight’s only an hour, and I am a smooth operator.”
So it's an hour in the air as they chase the fading light northeast. Rinky-dink Caphrees Air! banks over fields and high into the mountains. Bdubs takes the headset Jesse gives him and spends most of the flight quizzing him about his job as a pilot. Trying not to throw up; trying not to think about where they’re headed. Flying’s a grab bag, according to Jesse—in the summer, he ferries rich holidaymakers wherever they want to go, then when the snow hits he snaps up the mail delivery and rarer aerial survey jobs that have him out over the wilderness taking photos of forests and rivers and deer. He only moved to Caphrees a couple years back when he got a good deal on a property with a run-down hangar and an airstrip.
Caphrees. With just one piece of mail, Caphrees went from a town Bdubs had never heard of to the name he turns over and over and over in his mind like a worry stone. Now, flying there, mountains lit up bright orange by the sunset and valleys blueing in the shadow, Bdubs kids himself that he can recognise the line of the mountains from his hours zooming in and out of them on Google Maps. A year ago, Bdubs’s geographic knowledge of the Canadian Rockies was zilch; since getting the invite in his mailbox from Etho—a slim, cream-coloured envelope that’d been a week-preceded by Etho asking, hey, what’s your address, and a minute-preceded by Nicole ripping open the letter and frowning, who do we know getting gay married in Canada?—he’s spent far too much of his life clicking on pictures of each lake and pass, wondering which ones Etho’s hiking trips have taken him to, where he knows like the back of his hand. Wandering up and down roads on street view. Here. Maybe here. Maybe here.
Caphrees comes into sight in the dusk: a couple hundred chocolate-box buildings huddled together by a smoky, slow-moving snowmelt river, lights from a narrow main street shining out in the night like a thread of gold. Jesse guides the plane to a landing strip Bdubs guesses must be a couple miles outside of town, and they touch down lightly as a bird on a lake.
“What did I tell you?” Jesse says, cracking open the doors as the propellers spin down. “Smooth operator.”
Bdubs laughs despite himself, and jumps down onto the grass on only-slightly shaky legs. “I shoulda taken your word for it. I spent the whole flight worried you were gonna do a barrel roll on me.”
“That’s next time.”
Bdubs is halfway through chuckling again when he looks across the grass to the house at the end of the airstrip. The door’s open, yellow light spilling out from inside, and there’s someone standing there, silhouetted. A man, arms crossed around himself against the cool air.
Jesse must see him looking, because he says, “you go ahead inside. I’ll get your bag. I gotta get this thing into the hangar for the night anyhow.”
“You sure?”
“I got it.” Jesse waves him off. “Go on, he’s probably letting all the warm air out.”
The grass is wet with rain, getting the cuffs of his jeans damp as he crosses it, heart beating out of his chest. One foot in front of the other. Heartbeat after heartbeat, step after step, towards the guy in the doorway.
Maybe he’s stupid, but he hadn’t looked. Back when he got the invite, with Etho’s real name stamped on it just after the You are cordially invited to the wedding of… Bdubs hadn’t looked him up. He’d intended to, he had, but his fingers hovered over the keyboard, spinning Etho’s first-name-middle-name-last-name around in his mind like wood on a lathe, trying to make sense of it.
A decade and a half of friendship—he’d made his peace with living with the gaps a long time ago. Etho didn’t share his personal life, and that was fine. Whenever anything came up, when it did rarely come up—photos people claimed were Etho as a teenager, a name and an address from an old doxx no one really believed was real—Bdubs averted his eyes and moved on with his life. He didn’t need to know. He didn’t want to know, because somehow even wanting to know felt like stepping over the line. He knew Etho in better ways. Why did he need to know something as mundane, as trivial, as a birth name or a birthday a face when he knew what Etho sounded like drunk at three in the morning, when he’d laughed along when Etho recounted last night’s dream, when Etho asked after his daughters’ grades and Nicole’s mom and knew what Bdubs liked to have for breakfast, about the last book that made Bdubs cry like a child and the pack of Swedish Fish he kept in his desk drawer.
And then, suddenly, the invite had arrived, and there was almost too much information attached to it for Bdubs to handle. A whole world in a five-by-seven inch cream card. Etho’s name—it’d taken some prodding on a call to work out that Etho wasn’t Jesse—and the address of the venue: Moose Lodge, Caphrees, Alberta.
It’s really called Moose Lodge? Yeah, yeah, Bdubs, laugh it up. What, what, that’s not funny?!
Bdubs found every photo hotels.com had of Moose Lodge. He trawled through hundreds and thousands of pictures of Caphrees: campsite brochures and Flickr pictures and Instagram posts tagged #Caphrees #Alberta #CanadianRockies and trail photos on hiking websites. Not almost; it was too much.
Too much to google Etho’s name as well. Too much.
And now, in the twilight, rain seeping into the cuffs of his jeans, he feels totally and completely unprepared.
“Bdubs!” Etho calls out.
Bdubs raises an arm up, a half wave. “Etho! Hey!”
Against the honey-yellow light falling out around him, the shape of Etho coalesces slowly from a molasses-like shadow into a person. Dark hair, jeans, a flannel over a t-shirt, a face. A face. A scruffy beard. Brown eyes.
“Hey hey,” Etho says. Bdubs wouldn’t have needed to see his face to know the trepidation written across it. He knows every tone of that voice, every quirk.
So Bdubs grabs in and pulls him into a tight, fierce hug. Etho’s tall, and he gangles even though he’s a grown man almost forty years of age, but hugging they stick together like magnets. It’s hard to let go, honestly.
“Glad you could make it,” Etho says when they part. “You want to see something?”
Bdubs grins. “Yes.”
Etho’s eyes sparkle. Months ago, he’d met Cleo for the first time in a hotel lobby and wondered if he’d recognise Etho as instantly as he had them. Now he knows. Of course he would. Of course.
Leading Bdubs into the house, Bdubs is too busy taking him in to pay much attention to the rooms they’re passing through, but he catches impressions. The house—Jesse’s place, he’d been told on the way over, since Etho still technically has his own place about ten miles outside of town—isn’t small, but it’s cosily cramped. All the furniture is a little old-fashioned and too-big for the space, everything warm-toned oak full of knots, some of it painted over in cornflower blue, nothing quite matching and nothing nearly new, like it was all bought in a hurry without much regard for how everything would work together.
They end up in an office at the back of the house, a desk wedged tightly between stacks of cardboard boxes. Etho glances back at Bdubs as he leans over the desk, a smile in his eye that doesn’t quite make it as far as his mouth.
The setup’s familiar—sideways mouse, mic awkwardly balanced on a book between the keyboard and the edge of the desk—but it’s not the one from those photos. The desk isn’t the same either, or the wall in the background. Different chair, no blanket. A copy of the original.
“Check this out,” Etho says, wiggling the mouse.
Minecraft blooms into life on the idle screen. Etho’s base, the square shape of Etho’s hand in the bottom right. Bdubs watches as Etho does something on screen involving a sulphur cube, a potion, and a trident that sends the mob about three times as far as it should, and the way Etho’s hair falls into his eyes as he leans over, the dimple in his cheek as he smiles at his work. Things impossible, totally impossible.
“Cool, right?”
“Yeah,” Bdubs half-breathes. “It’s really you, huh?”
“Mm-hm,” Etho hums, his smile slitting his eyes happily. “I hope you didn’t come all this way looking for someone else.”
There’s a joke Bdubs could make about that—about only buying the ticket to come because he thought Doc would be coming too. Thing is, the whole universe had contrived to make it a little funny: Etho had invited Bdubs, Beef, Scar and Doc to the wedding, but Beef’s sister’s own wedding by coincidence is also scheduled for this weekend, Scar’s health has taken a turn for the worse this month, and of all things the ash cloud from a goddamn Icelandic volcano erupting has cancelled most flights to and from Europe for the next three days. Some angel with a sense of humour had waved its hand and the hermit contingent headed to Caphrees, Alberta had reduced from four to one.
Instead, he says, “what, ten, twelve hermits at the charity event this year and I only finally decided to go last minute. But, hey, you’re right. Any one of them could’ve got me to Canada.”
Etho laughs again, and it’s stupid but Bdubs takes a second to appreciate the sound of it without microphone static or internet delay getting in the way. It sounds different, in the cramped space of the house’s little office. Not more alive, exactly, but more living.
Bdubs shakes his head and kicks off his shoes and scoffs at himself. More living.
“I hope you like chilli,” Etho says, just as Bdubs catches a whiff of it coming from the stovetop in the other room.
His stomach rumbles. He hasn’t had a thing to eat since his transfer in Chicago. “If you don't stop me, I'll eat the whole pot.”
He follows Etho through into the kitchen and, leaning against the kitchen table, watches Etho fiddle with the dials in the stove. His short hair looks sharp, like he got it cut just this week, but the rest of him is worn in: old jeans, the hem of his flannel fraying, crinkling lines around the corners of his eyes. For the last decade, Bdubs has been watching himself, with strained vanity, turn into a middle aged man. He always pictured Etho—when he dared to picture Etho—ageless.
He shakes the thought out of his head. Stupid. It’s the kind of mythologising that he’s always turned his nose up at when other people do it.
The porch door clatters and there’s the sound of Jesse stamping the dampness off his boots in the mudroom before his face appears in the kitchen doorway.
“Hey, baby,” he says, smiling with his whole face at Etho, and leans in to steal a kiss. Bdubs averts his eyes, and so almost doesn’t notice that Etho ducks his face away from where Bdubs can see after Jesse draws back. “Smells awesome in here. You had a good day?”
It’s funny, kinda, hearing Etho talking so casually about his life outside of the video game. He went to the cake shop—no, the house? maybe? of the woman making the wedding cake—in the early afternoon and his mom had stopped in a couple of hours ago, and he’d spent all his time between playing around with game mechanics (oh, the sulphur cube thing? Jesse says, did you work out if that was a momentum thing or a glitch or?) and tidying up the place.
“I’ll have you know, John,” Jesse cuts in, then, “that I left this place already spotless this morning.”
Etho snickers, and says, “you can tell yourself that.” Then, nose wrinkling, “John?”
Bdubs’s nose wrinkles right back at the odd sound of his real name in Etho’s voice. “Now, it’s weird hearing you call me that.”
Food gets dished up quickly, beef and beans piled into bowls with mountains of rice, hot and brown and plenty of it. Bdubs’s chair at the kitchen table doesn’t match the other two, feels a little wedged-in between the surface and the wall, like it’s an irregularity for two to become three in this house.
“It is funny, finally meeting you,” Jesse says. He’s poured himself a black coffee, thick as soup, to slurp down alongside his dinner; Etho had pulled a couple of cokes out of a cooler for himself and Bdubs.
“Do I even wanna know what he’s been saying about me?” Bdubs asks.
Etho’s eyes flick to Jesse, but Jesse just shrugs. “I’ll just say your reputation’s rolled out the red carpet for you.”
Bdubs lets out a half laugh. “I can’t tell if that means you used to watch my videos or not.”
“I’m more of a GTA guy.”
“He’s on the dark side, Bdubs,” Etho adds.
Jesse elbows him and chuckles. “Me and him, it’s like Romeo and Juliet. GTA and Minecraft, two houses both alike and all that.”
I know better than to ask who’s Juliet, Bdubs thinks.
“So come on, I want to hear it from you, Jesse. He’s never given me the goods of how you two actually met.”
Jesse’s eyebrows shoot up, but then he looks at Etho and the surprise melts away. Bdubs wonders, briefly, how private Etho is on this side of the computer screen. “It’s hardly a story, honestly. Nothing Romeo and Juliet about it, anyway.”
“I want to hear it.”
“I want to hear it too, actually,” Etho says, mischief in his voice. “If we’re going to be telling it forever I want to know you’re getting it right.”
As Jesse tells it, he’d been new in town, just over two years ago. About a month after he’d moved to Caphrees, he’d got beer with some of the friends of a guy he’d known from doing deliveries for some of the shops in town. Etho had been there, and they’d hit it off, talked mostly just the two of them all night. The next day, Etho had come over to help clear out his flowerbeds (I hope that’s not a euphemism) (Bdubs!) and the rest had unfurled from there, a beer on the porch had turned into another day out hiking had turned into Etho packing him sandwiches for his long flights had turned into Jesse giving him a ride home one night and—well, neither of them say it specifically, but Bdubs can join the dots. Jesse had been married before, when he was nineteen, a complete disaster that’d ended inside of six months. Being with Etho felt—
“—like I finally knew what I was doing,” Jesse said. “Feet on the ground.”
Etho looks at him. “Uh-huh,” he hums. “I thought you were saving all the gross stuff for your speech.”
“What can I say, baby? The sappy stuff comes natural.”
“Man, I just realised I have to call you by your actual name,” Bdubs says. He’s only ever tried it out once or twice, since reading it for the first time on that wedding invite. Feeling it out, rolling it around in his mouth like a marble, before deciding it sounded unnatural. Etho sounds so much better. “I’m guessing not a lot of people around here know about your channel. Don’t think I can get by just calling you baby like he does,” he adds, nodding to Jesse.
Jesse laughs, and Etho grins and looks down at his plate, shaking his head again, before his eyes flick up and meet Bdubs’s. That smile, just for him.
“Maybe not,” Etho says, stretching out the A, a little tease. And somehow, looking at him, Bdubs can tell what he’s thinking: and none of the other old pet names either.
There. That telepathy they’ve always shared, still in operation. Of course, of course. Why would it be any weaker in person than it is over radio waves?
Jesse turns the conversation easily to the wedding—the day after tomorrow!—and all the things left to do. Take the decorations up to the Lodge, pick up some stuff from Etho’s place, and in the morning there’s breakfast with both of their best men (oh, you’re gonna get on with them just fine, John) at a cinnamon toast cafe, and then Jesse’s got to do a quick flight just over the border into BC, and—
Bdubs listens and doesn’t listen, watches Etho and eats his chilli. The furrow of his brow when he’s concentrating on what Jesse’s saying, his crooked teeth showing when he smiles that crooked smile. The crinkles around his eyes, smile lines and age lines. Forty years old, give or take.
Forty years and fifteen years, give or take. Something about looking at Etho makes him feel thirty again, thirty and stupid. Thirty and in love, just married to Nicole, playing a game for a living. Starting something brand, brand new.
“Baby,” Jesse says, “I’ll clear up.”
It’s late by the time they turn in for the night—not surprising, knowing the hours Etho keeps, but still. Etho leads Bdubs to a back bedroom, the room next to Etho’s office. It’s small, just a double bed and a couple of nightstands, lamps, storage boxes. Bdubs’s suitcase already leaning against the foot of the bed. On the wall, there’s a framed photo: Caphrees Air! in black and white, banking steeply against a clear sky.
“This is you,” Etho says.
“Thanks.” Bdubs looks at him again, again. It’s impossible to get enough of looking, after all this time. “Fifteen years, huh?”
A huff of a laugh. “Long enough, right?” Etho says, and looks into the room, at the suitcase. “I’m really glad you came. I kinda thought, when the others called off—”
“Hey, no, they wanted to be here,” Bdubs says. Maybe louder and more insistently than he needs to, but. But. Etho needs to hear it.
“I know, I know. I—you know.” Another breath of a laugh, self-effacing. “I’m just really glad you’re here.”
Bdubs wants to pull him into another hug, almost to prove that he is here, he did make it even if the others couldn’t. Instead, he just says, “me too.”
Etho’s smile—some sight to see. “Night, Bdubs.”
“G’night, Etho.”
Closing the bedroom door behind him, getting into bed, it’s hard to believe what he’d just said. He’s here. Alberta, Caphrees, Etho’s spare bedroom.
He closes his eyes and turns over, pulling the thick down comforter up around him. Some part of his mind wanders to the next room, where Etho and Jesse are in bed together. Sleeping. Surely sleeping.
Is it bad to wonder what it’s like? His brain’s naturally curious—he’s spent years trying to piece Etho’s life beyond the screen together from scraps. Now, with so much new information, his brain’s still wandering into the few blank spaces left. Jesse’s arm looped around Etho’s waist, or Etho’s temple against his collarbone. Bdubs’s stomach tightens.
He wishes Nicole were here. Nicole always falls asleep quickly, dragging him down along with her. He pulls her flush up against him and focuses on her deep breaths and the slow cadenza of her heart, and turns off his brain. Her body fits against his. He still feels as grateful to have her now as the first time he ever did.
No way Etho and Jesse fit together that well. Not after only two years. What’s two years on the seventeen he’s had with Nicole? What’s two years on the fifteen he’s known Etho? That fierce hug on the porch… touching Etho for the first time, they’d locked together like that’s what they’d been built to do. Fifteen years of late night phonecalls and joint projects and shared jokes; of course, finally meeting, they fit each other like the teeth of a zipper. There was never any other way it could go.