Chapter Text
The call happens at night, because grief is cowardly like that. It waits until the house is quiet, until the children are asleep, until the walls have stopped pretending they are still a family. Eric sits at the kitchen table with the phone in his hand long before he presses the button. The wood is scratched and nicked from years of ordinary life. Heather’s mug is still by the sink.
It is stupid, the things that undo him. Not the hospital room, not the slow thinning of her body until she seemed to be receding from the world inch by inch, apologizing for it with her eyes. Not the moment the doctor said the words with that careful, neutral face, as if death were merely a scheduling conflict. No, it is the mug, the faint ring of dried coffee at the bottom, her lipstick long since worn away.
He presses call. On the third ring, Dylan answers. “Eric?”
For a moment, Eric cannot speak. “Heather’s… she died. Tonight.”
“Oh,” Dylan says quietly. “Eric.”
That is all. Not I’m sorry, not yet. Just his name spoken like a hand placed gently on a wound to feel how deep it goes. Eric exhales, and it turns into something close to a sob, though he hates that word and hates himself for fulfilling it. He presses his knuckles into his eyes. “I don’t know what to do,” he admits, and the confession terrifies him more than anything else he has said tonight. “Dylan, I don’t know how to do this. I’ve got the kids. I’ve got everything, and she’s not here.”
The funeral is small, because Heather had never liked crowds, and because grief has a way of narrowing the world until only the essential remains. Eric stands at the front in a black suit that doesn’t quite fit right, holding Chloe’s hand, she is whispering questions he cannot answer. Sebastian is in his other arm, heavy and warm, his small head tucked beneath Eric’s chin.
People speak. Words float past Eric like debris on dark water. She was kind, brave. She fought so hard.
He wants to scream that she didn’t want to be brave, that she was tired, that courage was something forced upon her like a punishment. But he says nothing. He nods.
When Dylan appears, it is like the sudden recognition of gravity. Eric turns his head to look at him, and Dylan sees it all at once: the hollowed eyes, the rigid posture of someone holding himself together through sheer force of will, the terror barely contained beneath the surface. “I don’t know how to be a father by myself. I’m scared all the time. I keep thinking what if I fail them? What if I already am?”
Dylan doesn’t offer reassurance. He doesn’t say you’ll be fine or you’re strong. He knows better than that. “You won’t be alone,” he says instead.
A month later, Dylan comes to Aurora.
The house is too big. That is the first thing he notices. Too many windows, too much space for sound to echo and then die unanswered. It is the kind of house meant to hold laughter that moves from room to room, footsteps on stairs, arguments shouted from kitchens and resolved in bedrooms.
Eric opens the door with Sebastian on his hip and Chloe clinging to his leg like a small, anxious satellite. He looks thinner than he did at the funeral.
“It’s… a lot,” Dylan says carefully, as he takes it all in.
“That’s one word for it.”
They sit at the kitchen table later while the kids nap or at least while Eric hopes they are napping. “I don’t think people understand that two kids is already hard even with two parents. But this is like trying to hold up a collapsing building with your hands. Thank god I work from home. If I had to commute, I don’t know what I’d do.”
“You don’t have to be good at all of it,” Dylan says.
“But I do. They don’t get a second parent. They get me. That’s it.”
There is fear beneath everything. Not grief alone, but responsibility without margin for error. Dylan hesitates, just briefly, because he knows what he is about to say will change things. Then he says it anyway. “I could move in.”
“What?”
“The house is big. Too big for one adult drowning in kid schedules and deadlines. I could pay rent. I’d help out. Mornings, evenings, whatever you need. I’m not saying I’d replace anyone, just help hold the place up.”
Eric stares at him, and for a moment Dylan thinks he has overstepped, intruded on something fragile and sacred. “I don’t want to burden you. This isn’t your responsibility.”
“I’m offering. There’s a difference.”
Eric closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them again, there is something like surrender there. “…Okay,” he says softly. “Okay. Yeah. That might help. A lot.”
Dylan moves in on a gray Saturday.
“This is Dylan,” Eric tells them, unnecessarily, as if Dylan has not already been explained and met many times, as if his presence needs formal justification. “He’s going to stay with us.”
“With us how long?” Chloe asks.
Dylan crouches so they’re eye level. “As long as you’ll have me.”
She considers this, then nods.
Inside, the house receives Dylan with a kind of quiet relief. The guest room is at the end of the hall, tucked away but not isolated. The door opens onto a large room with slanted afternoon light. There’s a bathroom attached, its own small sanctuary. “It’s bigger than my last apartment.”
“Heather’s sister stayed here once for three weeks after Chloe was born.”
The first two weeks pass the way illness passes through the body, slowly, painfully, and then all at once.
Dylan learns the rhythms by accident rather than intention: the precise moment Sebastian becomes inconsolable from hunger, the way Chloe grows silent before she cries, the hour when Eric’s strength gives out.
Eric sleeps whenever he can. Not the deep, restorative sleep of the healthy, but the kind that overtakes a person mid collapse. Dylan finds him on the couch still wearing yesterday’s shirt, the laptop closed beside him. Dylan does not wake him. He covers him with a blanket instead.
He knows Eric cries.
Not because Eric tells him. Eric tells him very little, but Dylan hears it at night, sometimes, through the thinness of walls and shared space, the muted, animal sound of a man trying to remain intact. Dylan lies awake during those moments, staring at the ceiling, counting breaths that are not his own. He never intervenes. He understands instinctively that grief must be practiced alone.
The children are relentless. Beautiful and exhausting in equal measure. Sebastian clings to Dylan now with a trust that feels undeserved. Chloe watches him with a sharp, uncanny attentiveness that reminds him uncomfortably of Eric. They both have Eric’s eyes. That, Dylan thinks one afternoon, is almost cruel.
At dinner one night two weeks in, maybe three; Dylan has stopped counting, Eric burns the pasta because he forgets it is boiling. They eat it anyway. Eric barely touches his food. Dylan watches him without meaning to. It rises like a submerged memory breaking the surface of a dark lake, cold and undeniable.
I love him.
The thought lands in Dylan’s mind with terrifying clarity, fully formed, unapologetic. Not I care for him, not I’m attached. Love – old, familiar, resurrected from a place he buried deliberately, carefully, over a decade ago. He remembers now the weight of it from youth, the way it once terrified him into silence, into distance, into pretending it had never existed at all.
This is not nostalgia, this is not confusion. This is the same feeling, sharpened by time and loss, made dangerous by proximity. And it is monstrously inconvenient. Eric is a widower, a father, a man drowning. Dylan has no right to this wanting, no claim to it, no moral defense. Across the table, Eric looks up and catches him staring.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Dylan says too quickly, and hates himself for the lie.
Eric nods, already retreating inward again, and Dylan realizes with a dull, sick certainty that he will carry this knowledge alone, as Eric carries his grief. He will help with baths and bedtime, he will clean the kitchen and pay rent. He will stay. He will not, under any circumstances, ask for more.
It happens in the smallest possible way, which is perhaps why Eric never notices it at all. The children are finally asleep, the house settling.
Eric sits on the couch with his laptop open, though nothing on the screen has changed for several minutes. He is slouched in a way that would have embarrassed him once, spine curved inward as if his body is trying to make itself smaller. Eric rubs at his eyes, tired in the marrow, and exhales. “I swear my brain just stops like someone pulls the plug.”
Dylan sits beside him, closer than usual. Eric doesn’t notice, his head tipping back until it rests against Dylan’s shoulder. Eric sighs softly, the sound of someone surrendering to rest, and stays there unaware, trusting. Entirely innocent of the way Dylan’s heart hammers at the contact, of the restraint it takes not to move, not to breathe too deeply, not to let the moment become what it so desperately wants to be.
The kitchen table is scattered with paper and crayons. Dylan sits across from Chloe, dutifully coloring within the lines of a lopsided house she has drawn and then immediately redrawn over. “And this is Mommy. She has wings now.”
“What kind of wings?”
“Big ones,” Chloe says, spreading her hands wide.
Eric appears in the doorway. Chloe looks up and spots him. “Daddy! Look!”
Eric comes closer, leans over the table, brushes Dylan’s arm. It is nothing. Less than nothing. Dylan’s breath catches anyway. “This is really good, Chlo. I like the wings.”
“They’re sparkly,” she informs him.
Eric stays leaned in, close enough that Dylan can feel the heat of him, close enough that Dylan becomes acutely, painfully aware of his own stillness, of the effort it takes not to move, not to turn his head, not to let this proximity become visible as longing.
For a moment, Dylan imagines the impossible version of events in which Eric looks at him then, really looks, sees what has been building in the quiet spaces, in the unspoken gestures, in the patience that has begun to feel like devotion. The thought is so vivid it almost hurts.
Then Eric straightens, oblivious, ruffling Chloe’s hair before stepping back to give her space again.
Dylan tries to cook. The sauce simmers on the stove. The kitchen smells good. He lifts the spoon, brings it close to his mouth, intent on tasting.
“Is it any good?”
Eric’s voice comes from behind him, curious, faintly amused. Dylan startles just enough to feel it everywhere, his pulse leaping. The spoon is already lifted. The moment is already here.
Without quite deciding to, without permission from anything sensible, Dylan turns instead and raises the spoon toward Eric’s mouth. It is an absurdly small gesture. Harmless. Domestic. And yet his hand trembles faintly as it crosses the space between them. “Here,” Dylan says, too softly.
Eric blinks, surprised, then opens his mouth. The spoon touches his lips. Dylan watches, helpless, as Eric tastes the sauce, watches the slight movement of his mouth, the way his tongue presses against the wood to clear it. “It’s really good.”
Eric steps back, already reaching for a glass, already finished with the moment. Dylan remains where he is, spoon still raised, heart pounding.
Spring arrives. The air softens, the light lingers. The yard, which had felt like an obligation through winter begins to offer itself back as a place where time can be spent rather than survived.
Eric sits on the back steps with a mug gone cold in his hands, watching Chloe. Dylan pushes Sebastian on the small plastic swing Heather once bought on impulse.
Sebastian has decided, with the absolute conviction only toddlers possess, that Dylan belongs to him. He toddles after him constantly, small hands grabbing at Dylan’s jeans, collapsing against his legs when tired, shrieking with delight when Dylan lifts him. When Dylan moves too far away, Sebastian’s face crumples with immediate betrayal.
Dylan pretends not to notice how naturally his body has adapted. How he bends without thinking, how his arms anticipate weight, how he has learned the precise rhythm that settles Sebastian when he fusses. These things frighten him if examined too closely.
Dylan lifts Seb out of the plastic swing. “Mommy,” Sebastian says to him.
Eric laughs. “Hey, that’s Uncle Dylan. He’s a boy.”
Sebastian frowns, processing this new information. The moment passes for Eric as easily as it arrived. He turns back to Chloe, but Dylan stands very still. Something in his chest aches open, not pain exactly, not joy, but a complicated, trembling mixture of both. He feels embarrassment first, then guilt, then something dangerously close to grief for a life he is not supposed to imagine. He tells himself it was confusion, nothing more. Toddlers misname the world all the time. This means nothing.
And yet...
The television murmurs, the lights are dimmed, not for atmosphere but for mercy. Little hands clutch Dylan’s shirt with surprising strength. Dylan lifts Seb,settling him into his lap. His eyes blink up at him, unmistakably Eric’s. One small hand reaches up, clumsy and earnest, and pats Dylan’s cheek. “Mmm,” Sebastian mumbles around his blue pacifier.
Eric leans over, smiling, and reaches out to tickle Sebastian’s belly. Sebastian wriggles once, a sleepy protest, then settles again, unconcerned. Dylan feels love so immediate it almost frightens him, and hurt so sharp it feels like trespass. This closeness, this quiet triangulation of bodies and breath and shared warmth looks like a family. It feels like one. And Dylan knows, with devastating clarity, that it is not his to claim.
Eric mentions his back almost as an afterthought. “I think I pulled something. Could you check? Just in case there’s a bruise or something.”
There is nothing strange about the request. It is practical. Normal, the kind of thing you ask someone you trust. They move into the living room where the light is better. Eric turns his back to him and lifts his shirt. Eric’s back is pale, unmarked at first glance, the lines of muscle and bone visible beneath the skin, spine a soft, vulnerable column running down the center.
Dylan steps closer, his hands hover for a fraction of a second, unsure, before he places them against Eric’s back. He is looking for bruises, evidence of injury. That is what he tells himself. The heat of Eric’s skin radiates up into his palms. Dylan has to swallow. “Does that hurt?”
“A little. There on the left.”
“I don’t see any bruising,” Dylan says, forcing calm into his voice.
Eric drops his shirt back down. The moment snaps shut.
Night settles. They are both still awake long after the children have gone quiet. “How’s your back?”
Eric rolls his shoulder, then winces faintly. “Still feels off, tight, like it’s not where it’s supposed to be.”
“I could try to massage it. Might help loosen it up.”
He expects refusal. Polite dismissal. Eric’s habitual reluctance to ask for more than he thinks he deserves. “Yeah. That’d be good, actually,” Eric stretches once, experimentally, then looks around. “Couch is probably too awkward.”
Dylan’s bedroom. Eric lies down on his stomach, arms folded under his head. Dylan stands there for a moment too long, acutely aware of the lack of distance, of the absurd fact that this is his room, his bed, his hands that are about to touch Eric again. He places his hands against Eric’s back. He keeps it practical, controlled, professional, if such a thing is still possible.
He tells himself to focus on mechanics, on pressure, on knots. But Eric keeps reacting. “Feels really good.”
Dylan swallows, adjusts his grip, spreads his hands wider along Eric’s back.
“You should’ve told me you were good at this.”
“I didn’t know,” Dylan replies, too quietly, and it’s truer than Eric could ever guess.
“Don’t stop.”
Dylan doesn’t. Eric trusts him. Eric is comfortable with him. Eric is here, alive, breathing, letting himself be cared for.