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When nobody answered on the third knock, Avery got to his knees on the porch and rummaged under the wormy welcome mat for the spare key he knew was stowed beneath it. It took a good bit of scrounging, but he eventually emerged victorious with only a few dust bunny stragglers — just in time to make terrible eye contact with the lady who lived next door.
“Oh. Uh. It’s not what it looks like,” Avery began, only for the lady to hurry into her apartment. The door slammed behind her.
Avery stared at it, then at his hand, and decided for once to let it go. He fit the key into the lock and barged into the apartment, calling, “Yo! Anybody home?”
Silence. The squeezed-tight living room was dark, but Avery could make out the thin line of light from under the door that led to the bedroom. He hitched his backpack higher on his shoulder.
“Knock knock,” he told the door. He waited.
After a beat, a voice rasped, “Hey.”
The bedroom didn’t have the cramped feel of the living room. All it really contained was a working desk, a chair, and a narrow twin bed, the latter of which was occupied by a rumpled heap of blankets. The light had come from the computer; it was set to a screensaver that rippled between pastel colors. Avery fumbled for the zipper on his backpack as he said, “In case you didn’t notice, it’s me.”
“Yeah. How’d you get in?”
“I broke in. Nah, uh, you told me where your spares are.” Avery gave up and dumped the contents of his backpack onto the floor. Setting his hands on his hips, he added, “Also, your Discord message was, like, evil. I wanted to check in on you.”
The blankets shifted aside to reveal a rat’s nest of hair and a slice of pallid face. Derek squinted over the edge of his covers. “How was it evil?”
Avery whipped out his phone. “something came up sorry,” he read out loud.
Derek’s eyes disappeared back under the covers. “Something did come up.”
His voice was a dusty scrape of itself. Avery felt his brows pucker. “Dude, are you okay? You don’t sound so hot.”
“Headache.”
Derek was hardly ever curt with Avery, not even when Avery knew he was being a menace; the brevity barely made a dent. He slipped around the mess he’d made on the floor and, quick as a snake, stole a hand over Derek’s forehead.
Clammy, and he was weirdly somewhere between too hot and too cold, but the bemused look that hit Avery below heavy lids was all Derek. He wasn’t bleeding out of any orifices, either, so as far as Avery was concerned this was a win. There’d been a point, earlier on, when Derek would abruptly stop messaging only to return twenty minutes later with a nonchalant Oh just started bleeding out of my ears lol and give Avery all kinds of new and exciting heart symptoms.
“Avery,” said Derek.
Avery realized with a start that he’d settled into the rhythm of his fingers in Derek’s hair and swiftly snatched his hand back. “Not my fault,” he said.
“...You don’t have to stop.”
“Oh. Oh!” Grinning hugely, Avery returned his hand to Derek’s hair. “For the record, I like your hair. It just, you know. Ate my hand.”
“That’s a new one.”
“Look, I’m so serious! Oof, ow, ouch! You might be growing new teeth.”
“At our age?”
“We can put it up there with crying blood and pressure migraines.”
Derek chuckled, low and raspy like the turning of a page. It was, bar none, Avery’s favorite sound in the world. How it rasped dryly over Derek’s throat, how it had to be coaxed out like a cat in the street, how it made everything feel very close. It was a perfectly vulnerable sound coming from objectively one of the coolest people Avery knew, and he was warmed head to toe every single time he heard it.
They sat there for a minute, smiling, not really at each other but not not at each other, either. Avery kept stroking his fingers gently over the matted locks of Derek’s hair, sieving the shocked white from the brown. It was getting pretty long in places, but unevenly. He said he’d lopped it off himself once during the ordeal, but it’s hard to give yourself a baller haircut when you can’t look at a mirror.
“Sorry I canceled,” said Derek, quiet. Avery dared to glance into his eyes: they were the kind of airy brown that edged into amber. “Thought I could make it.”
“It’s okay,” Avery replied instantly. “We can go another time. I mean, unless the cafe, like, explodes. But I don’t think that’s gonna happen, so we’re fine.”
“You sounded really excited.”
A new cat cafe had moved in on Main Street, and Avery had pestered Derek nonstop until he agreed to accompany Avery on opening day. “I was,” Avery allowed, “but the point wasn’t the cafe. I want to go with you. It doesn’t have to be anywhere special. I just want to go anywhere with you.”
It was Derek’s turn to blink a little fast and turn his gaze to the ceiling. Even the aggressive pallor of his skin couldn’t kill the roses that bloomed in his cheeks.
“I’m the same,” he said finally. One of his hands crept up to cover Avery’s in his hair. His palm was just as clammy as his forehead. “For the record.”
“Well. Good,” said Avery. It sounded lame even to him, but whatever. Not everyone could pull off badass around the clock.
A brief flash of teeth. Then Derek continued, subdued, “It came on fast. Usually worse, though.”
“Not a migraine?”
“Mm-mm.”
Avery stretched a leg out to toe the pack of Icy Hots back into his bag. “Good to hear it.”
“Just… feeling gross, I guess.”
Now that was a herculean admission from Derek, Mr. d3rlord3 himself, who had absorbed critically cognitohazardous amounts of eldritch knowledge and had never, not once as far as Avery could tell, let a word of complaint slip past his lips. He was so impressively blasé about what had happened that even Avery forgot sometimes that Derek had defied a death sentence, that every word they’d exchanged since that day was a miracle. He never forgot to be grateful, but from the way Derek carried on you’d think he’d merely experienced a minor inconvenience, like forgetting his groceries in the car.
Avery tussled briefly between passing the moment over and chasing the rabbit. It was hard to tell, sometimes, what would make Derek close up shop. Ultimately, though, he settled on, “Feeling gross how? Like in your body, or in your head?”
Derek went very lax under Avery’s hand. When he spoke again, his voice was somehow quieter, a hushed cupped balled-up thing that murmured, “Both. It’s… messy.”
“Messy. Like, uh, when you first read the book? When it all spilled over, that kind of messy?”
A secondhand tremor worked its way up the bones of Avery’s wrist. “Yeah,” Derek whispered.
Avery held still for a moment, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside Derek’s bed. His hand, on autopilot, remained carding absently through Derek’s hair.
“When was the last time you washed?” he asked.
Derek’s eyes emerged from the forest of his hair, that low and clear brown again. “Hm?”
“The last time you washed,” Avery repeated patiently.
“Oh. Um… couple of days. Why, do I—”
“You don’t smell,” Avery said hastily, preempting Derek’s pitiful attempt to sniff his pits while laid up in bed. “Just— uh, maybe it’s stupid, but I just thought maybe I could… I dunno, like, help you wash your hair or something. ‘Cause you said you feel gross. If that’s not awkward.”
Derek had been lying flat on his back with his face to the ceiling, but now he rolled onto his side, curled like a comma, to face Avery. He usually wore glasses, but those were conspicuously absent, and even on the reg they did nothing to soften the terse angles of Derek’s face, the truncated line from his nose to his top lip, the shadows so deep they bruised his eyes. Like this, in real life, Avery could see Derek looking at him, and see himself being seen in a way that transcended human knowledge.
“Only awkward if we make it awkward,” he said.
So Avery shoved himself under Derek’s arm and together they half-shuffled, half-limped through the dimmed apartment to Derek’s bathroom. Avery observed the row of 3-in-1 shampoos and bodywashes in the cabinet as Derek kicked out of his clothes, and then he turned back around to fiddle with the taps over Derek’s ridiculous clawfoot bathtub, which took a second to figure out because they were the reverse of Avery’s.
“It came with the apartment,” Derek said, of the bathtub. “I think an old lady used to live here.” He was squinting slightly, even though the only light in the bathroom came from the moon-shaped nightlight plugged into the socket next to the toilet.
“That tracks. I was like, this seems kinda not his taste, but then I was like, I mean, I guess I don’t really know anything about his taste in appliances, and then I was like, but nobody who uses 3-in-1 shampoo has the money to buy a vintage bathtub.”
“Hey, you don’t know that. What if I told you I was a secret millionaire?”
“Nobody who is a secret millionaire,” said Avery severely, “gets their brain eldritchly hijacked from playing Minecraft for thirty days straight.”
“Again, you don’t know that.”
The water was high and hot enough to fog up the mirror by that point, so Avery let Derek’s objectively incorrect opinions slide in lieu of grabbing the least offensive combination product from the cabinet and plopping himself on the lip of the tub. It took a bit of core strength not to slip, but luckily for everyone involved Avery was not exclusively a gamer and had also not been deprived of nutrients and sunlight for a few weeks straight, so all he did was flail a bit. Derek’s arms shot out of the water.
“Please don’t fall,” he said.
“It’s just water.”
“I don’t want you to get wet.”
“I cannot stress enough that it’s just water.” Avery poked Derek’s forehead between his furrowed eyebrows. “Now sit back and relax. I’m a master hair washer. Imagine you’re at the salon. I can do hair salon ASMR.”
“Oh boy. Whispered one-sided haircare roleplay.”
The bathroom had just the right acoustics for Avery’s voice to ring splendidly as he hissed, “Hi, welcome to Happy Hair for Happy Gamers, my name is uhhh xXApple_Bottom_JeansXx, I’ll be your waiter tonight, would you like shampoo or conditioner first?”
Derek was laughing, really laughing, so hard that the water lapped against the sloped edges of the tub. His whole head was thrown back, and his throat shone like ivory, and Avery’s heart punched hard suddenly against the inside of his ribcage. He swallowed and soldiered on, “My boss doesn’t want you to know, but since you’re a regular, I’ll let you in on a little secret, we actually only use 3-in-1 products, and we do three rounds just so our guests think they’re getting a new treatment every time, what can I say, there’s a sucker born every minute—”
“Mercy,” Derek gasped, pressing his palms to his eyes. “Oh my god, not the underhanded sales tactics. You could write a corporate intrigue story.”
“I told you, I’m great at this.” Avery scooped some water up in his cupped palms. “Lean your head forward.”
Derek obliged, his shoulders curling over his knees. Avery poured water over his hair, over and over, until the brown darkened nearly to black and made a flat, glossy cap on Derek’s head. Then, with the air of a kid with a bottle of chocolate syrup and a bowl of ice cream, he turned the 3-in-1 upside down and squeezed with both hands.
Derek yelped. “Avery!”
“What?”
“I— never mind.”
“It’s part of my creative process! Don’t judge me.”
“Me? Judge you? I would never.”
Derek had a way of making even the most mundane statements sound like the word of law. Avery hesitated, his hands hovering uncertainly.
When you looked at him dead-on, it was hard to tell that Derek had as much white hair as he did. From a bird’s-eye view, though, Avery could see how silver sprawled over Derek’s skull like the roots of a tree, grasping for the corners of Derek’s body.
Slowly, Avery dropped his hands into Derek’s wet hair. Derek tensed — Avery could see every bone in his shoulders and the top of his spine cinch up — and then, with a deliberate outbreath, he relaxed, dropping his chin onto his knees.
Shampooing someone else’s hair wasn’t really all that different from shampooing his own, and Derek had been right: it wasn’t awkward at all. Avery gradually relaxed into the unfamiliar texture of Derek’s hair, the way it was thin and slippery and barely held water. Working a stubborn knot out between his fingers, Avery asked, “What did you mean earlier? When you said you wouldn’t judge me?”
“I meant exactly what I said.”
“I just feel,” Avery said, “like out of all the people in the world, you’re, like, the most qualified to judge me. Because of the whole… knowing everything… thing.”
Derek turned his head, sending a ripple over the surface of the bathwater. Avery swiped his hair out of his eyes before the shampoo bubbles got into them, but Derek just blinked serenely and said, “Don’t you see? That’s why. I don’t have the right.”
“That… doesn’t make sense.”
“You didn’t consent to be seen. Neither did anyone or anything else. And I knew you, but you didn’t know me.” Derek’s fingertips eddied over the water. “Before anything else I wished you had known me.”
Avery felt, then, just as small and stupid as he had staring grim-jawed at the block of netherite that stood between him and the person who’d saved him. He hadn’t been able to figure any of it out, hadn’t been smart or fast enough, and he’d left the one person who thought he was good to die because of it. When he stood back to take it all in, his total incompetence took his breath away.
“I don’t understand,” he said, and heard his voice waver.
Derek’s gaze sharpened on a dime. “Stop,” he said, steel and stone. “Don’t think like that. You saved me. When the chips were down, you saved me. I would never have thought to save myself if you didn’t want me saved. That means something.”
“Yes, it does,” Avery said with equal vehemence, then balked at how easily Derek had turned his argument on its head. “I mean— yeah, it— you mean a lot to me,” he tried instead, “so I’m… glad that came through? But I still don’t really get why you… don’t think the same. Or do think the same.” Avery squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m confusing myself.”
“That’s okay.” Knuckles rilled idly beneath Avery’s palm. Avery’s eyes popped open to find that Derek had turned his face back toward the tops of his knees, but his hand had found Avery’s, earnest, tentative, very careful. Avery didn’t even stop to think before interlacing his fingers with Derek’s.
A moment of silence. They had a lot of those, come to think about it. They weren’t the sorts of silences Avery jumped to fill, though. When they called one another and things inevitably whittled into quiet, Avery always warmed, thinking how lucky he was, to have someone whom he could exhaust a topic with. Someone who would sit with him even if he had nothing interesting to say, just because sitting with him was so nice. Someone who didn’t think twice about letting him wash their hair when they were having a bad day.
Speaking of. Avery squeezed Derek’s hand once before letting go. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“Why did you save me? Like, me of all people, I mean. I keep thinking about that. You saw everything, and everything that might happen, and you were also, like, bleeding out of every hole in your face, but you still… chose me.”
“I don’t know.” Pause. Avery thought about it, then massaged another palmful of shampoo into Derek’s hair, because that seemed right. When he gathered Derek’s hair in his hands, Derek shivered faintly, then said, “I just knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That you were worth it.” The water poured off of Derek’s head in white, foamy rivulets, and his voice was a balled-up secret again, a secret just for Avery. “Worth everything.”
Avery slid off the lip of the tub to his knees on the tile. When Derek’s gaze darted to him, Avery said quickly, “I’m going to get wet, I made up my mind, so it’s fine. Can we hug?”
Derek’s mouth softened. “You can’t wait until after I’m dry?”
“No,” Avery said sternly, and lifted his arms.
The corners of Derek’s lips twitched. “Okay,” he said, and leaned in when Avery threw his arms around his body.
It was a spectacularly unsatisfying hug, but only because the angle of approach was weird. The hug was made better by the fact that it was Derek in Avery’s arms, clutched close to Avery’s chest and leaving a wet imprint where his shoulder was pressing into the hollow between Avery’s collarbones. His head fit perfectly underneath Avery’s chin, and between the hot water and the steady solidity of Derek’s body Avery was abruptly dizzy with gratitude, head absolutely spinning with it. He was already on his knees, but the weight would have struck him down if he hadn’t been.
He didn’t know how to put any of these feelings into words, but it felt like a crime to leave them unsaid, so he muffled directly into the top of Derek’s head, “I’m so glad that I found you.”
Derek’s shoulders hiccuped against Avery’s elbows. Slowly, like a cautious cat, he turned his face into Avery’s chest, his nose resting directly over Avery’s heart. His breath warmed Avery’s shirt, arrowed through Avery’s skin, as he replied, “That you did.”