Chapter Text
The house has been empty for a handful of months, a for sale sign out front and one of those lock boxes hanging from the door knob. Isak once spent a bored hour trying to crack the code on it, not because he wanted to break in, rather just to see if he could. An older woman used to live there, left to go live with her daughter somewhere up north, and took her fuzzy little dog with her. The one that used to sit in the front window and yap every time Isak walked by.
The sign disappeared a while ago, and so did the box on the door, and now, about a week after the longest day of the year, the empty house has stopped being empty.
Isak is sent across the street in the early afternoon, after the moving truck is gone, a barely fifteen year old ambassador. He didn't want to go, bitched, stomped around and made a big deal out of putting on his shoes and finding his snapback and finally giving in. Anyway, it's not like his mother can go, good day or not.
He crosses the street and stops when he gets there, standing on a sidewalk lined on both sides with boxes labeled kitchen and bathroom and E-bedroom, a tray of his mother's fresh baked cookies held balanced in front of him like an offering. The door to the house is open and there's no place to knock and this whole thing is starting out awkward and it's only gonna get worse, since socializing isn't Isak's strong suit and socializing with adults who aren't related to him usually comes with a blast radius.
"Hello."
Isak hears him before he sees him, feels him too, a hand on his shoulder and a quick squeeze. A touch that doesn't go away, just rotates as he circles around Isak and stands in front of him, closer than strictly necessary. Close enough that Isak needs to tip his head up to look at him. Bright, splash-blue eyes and a smile that makes Isak smile back, makes his heart do a foreign thing in his chest.
"You're new," the guy goes on, still smiling. "Even."
"Isak," he says, a little confused since there's nothing new about him, Even is the thing that is new here, and then Even hugs him when a handshake would do just fine, and the cookies nearly take a header before Even swoops in with a last minute save, grabbing the cookies, one of the boxes marked bedroom and every last shred of Isak's curiosity.
"Are you coming?" Even asks, already in the doorway, heading into the shadows, half up the staircase by the time Isak catches up with him.
Their houses are the same except in mirror image. A series of left turns where Isak is used to making rights. Someone is moving around in the kitchen and there's classical music playing and the house smells like old dust and new cardboard.
"You're in my room, only it's opposite," Isak says, dodging an open box and the parts that will make up Even's bed, looking at the closet and the empty shelves that were apparently standard operating equipment back when they built these houses.
Even seems delighted by this, or it might be his default to show a happy sort of interest when people share things with him, and he rushes over to the window that faces out front, elbows on the windowsill.
"Show me," he says, and Isak does. He points out his window across the street and slightly diagonal. The blinds on his window are crookedly at half mast, it's dark enough on the inside that they can't see the mess, and they crunch through cookies for a while as Isak introduces him to the neighborhood from their bird's eye vantage point. Boring stuff like the closest tram stop and convenience store, to less boring stuff like the tall apartment building a short walk away that never locks the entrance to its rooftop and the best movie theaters for sneaking in through the back.
"You're into movies?" Even asks, and bumps shoulders with Isak, then knuckles, and Isak's starting to figure out that being around Even is more of a contact sport.
"Of course," Isak says, "isn't everybody?"
"What are your top three? Don't think too hard, just name them." Even's looking at him like the fate of the world might very well hang in the balance.
He's been on a kick recently, so he goes with a few he's watched in the last month, the ones that pop into his head without having to work for it. The Shining, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Grudge. "Not the re-makes," Isak clarifies, "the originals."
"You like to be scared," Even points out, and they've been leaning so long on the windowsill that Isak might have permanent ridges on his forearms and his fingers are starting to tingle.
Isak pushes off, shakes some of the blood back into his hands. "It's more of an endorphin thing, I think. Besides, they're classics."
"So you watch them because Leatherface gives you a runner's high?"
"That's one way of looking at it, yeah. It sure beats actually running."
"We should watch it sometime," Even says, and it's casual, friendly, a promise that he doesn't want today to be a one-time thing, and there goes Isak's heart again. His tongue too, as he silently nods along, not wanting it to be a one-time thing either.
Isak tests the give of the mattress sagging against the wall, toes at the bedframe, and there's something about the way that Even stares at him that makes Isak not mind it at all. "Do you actually plan on sleeping in this thing tonight?"
And that's how they end up spending the next two hours, inserting tabs into slots and allen wrenching the whole thing together while they demolish the rest of the cookies. At one point Even's mother shows up, seemingly not at all startled to see a strange boy in her son's room, presently helping to hoist the mattress up onto the bunk, and that's when Isak learns the origin story of Even's smile, the slight asymmetry of his jaw.
Deed done, and the bed doesn't collapse under Even's weight when he climbs up to test it, Isak hovering close in case things swing south, and now they have pizza to put on top of all the sugar and Even starts going through boxes, passing things over to Isak to put on shelves. It's kinda personal, Isak thinks, how Even is allowing him to touch all of his stuff, choose where it's gonna go without giving him a lot of direction. He picks which drawer Even will use for t-shirts, helps him hang his jeans on the left and his few dress shirts on the right. Color codes them, and bets that Even will look good in that one dark red zip up hoodie when it gets cold enough for him to wear it.
Two boxes of books and movies, and Even gives him a running commentary, back-jacket descriptions of all of them and it's like he's giving Isak bullet points, an outline of himself, or at least the stuff he's into, which is a pretty good start. There are albums on actual vinyl, which doesn't surprise Isak. Even seems to be the type who would trade convenience for tangibility, the kinda person who would want to hold the music in his hands, touch it before he plays it.
Even hauls over a big rattling box of busted up parts and starts clunking through them. Cracked lenses, an old Kodachrome, wiring, cogs, reels and AV equipment, a bunch of things Isak doesn't recognize, a lot of it still labeled with handwritten, flea market price tags, and the question about the movies is now making sense.
"You like to fix stuff," Isak says, watching as Even stacks it all up on the shelves which in Isak's room still hold sports trophies from when he was younger. It's the one box Even unpacks himself, putting it in an order Isak can't riddle out, dusting some of it off on the front of his shirt.
Even shakes his head. "I'm better at taking stuff apart. Trying to figure out how it works. It's the putting back together that's the hard part."
It's late and they've been at it for hours, but the sun is still up when they finish putting a few posters on the wall. Star Wars, which makes sense, and Melancholia, which Isak's never heard of, and the television and record player are set up, and the room doesn't echo the way it did at first, now that all of Even's things are there to catch the sound.
"Home," Even says, turning a slow circle, hands on his hips, dust and the stain of newsprint packing dug into the grooves of his knuckles.
"It's a start, anyway," Isak says. He grins, and Even grins back.
"A good start." Even reaches out, touches Isak's nose and draws a finger down the slope of it. And Isak, who generally doesn't like most people, who rarely leaves the house without his headphones plugged in and a snapback he can pull down low, who often walks with his eyes on the ground and avoids as much human interaction as possible, likes Even. Likes him a whole lot.