had an idea (“this show is so stupid. what’s something deranged that would keep bucktommy separated for a year-plus.” also the perennial “would you still love me if i were a worm” query.) and decided to make it everyone else’s problem. this started out as crack & devolved into crack taken seriously. one-shot below the cut.
angst with happy ending. alludes to weewoo s8&9 events up to & including 9x13 “mother’s boy”, intended canon divergent after that. (not intended to be compliant with 9x15, though it could be, if you want, i suppose; ultimately, this is just a nice little respite from the horrors for both of them.) rated t apart from fanon-sal deluca-compliant profanity (also i gave him the danny williams tendency to call people babe). mysterious shifting affliction. hopeful ending. the back button is your friend; don’t like, don’t read.
— —
after the funeral, tommy goes home. alone. again.
he heats up a frozen macaroni and cheese (the good stuff) and some steam-in-bag broccoli and salts it with his tears as he rewatches bros for the nth time.
he falls asleep that night thinking about little chocolates and envisioning evan on an advisory panel for a queer museum.
it’s a welcome change from the usual evan-breaking-down-in-the-tunnel-at-the-lab, and tommy hates himself for it.
the next—well. he’s not sure if it’s morning. the light is weird.
no.
it’s his eyes that are weird.
it’s like—they’re not eyes at all.
he rolls over in a panic—and his arms do not stop him.
because he does not have arms.
instead, what he assumes are muscles expand and contract all along his body, which feels like it’s about seven inches long. (because he’s a human man, or at least he used to be, this means he’s now approximately five inches and change.)
(four and a half, if he cuts the bullshit for once in his life.)
his bed is adequate for a human—or two, especially if one is 60% legs and has feet like ice cubes and a birthmark that glows with the sunrise—but it’s an absolute swamp of cotton sateen and skin cells for an earthworm.
it takes him a bright and a dark and another probably half-bright to make it out of the bed and through the house to the utility room door with the shitty, loose sill he’s been meaning to fix.
he loses track of the brights after this.
there are no brights underground.
one evening—and it is evening, his human eyeballs tell him—he finds himself upending a grave-sized pocket of earth with his human body. fortunately, he’s still in his fenced-in backyard, and hasn’t transformed somewhere more hazardous. or obvious, somewhere he’d be ticketed for public indecency in his current state.
the air is warm, warmer than it was the last he remembered in this body. the full moon shines overhead.
he gets to his knees, then his feet, and oh, wow, walking is nothing like peristalsis. he manages to crawl to his back porch, fumble with the flowerpot that hides his spare key, without focusing too much on the probably five blaring alarms competing in his brain.
first task: figure out what the fuck day it is.
his wall calendar is no help. he doesn’t know what yesterday is. he only knows what he remembers last.
his phone, which is probably the most useful, is a nonresponsive glass brick on his kitchen counter.
now that he has walls to lean on, tommy pulls himself back to his feet and careens, phone in hand, down the hallway to his bedroom. once he plugs in his phone, the itch of dirt against his very human skin clamors for attention. it will be easier to deal with whatever his phone tells him when he doesn’t have yard dirt in his ass. he sits on the floor of his shower and scrubs behind his ears, trying not to think too hard about—anything. the worm thing. what day it might be. bobby. evan.
tommy’s fingers prune, so he takes that as his cue to emerge from the shower.
he was right. it’s a lot easier to deal with the fact that he’s apparently spent an entire week underground as an earthworm.
he stares at the red badge informing him that he has 9 new voicemails and 17 new text messages until his stomach growls. he’s both ravenous and flatly unappetized by the idea of eating.
he settles on some mushroom soup from a can and half a frozen burrito, which he eats on the couch because his dining chairs looked threateningly angular to what feels suspiciously like his worm-sense.
as he drifts off to sleep, he spares a thought of gratitude for having managed to move his plate from his lap to the coffee table.
— —
the thing about being an earthworm and waking up on a sofa for humans is that some humans like a leather sofa which is fine when a person’s sitting on it but gets chilly when it’s vacated by the warm heft of a human body.
it’s that chill, along with a more intense bright than he’s seen, that wakes tommy. he moves and stretches in his wakefulness and discovers that he’s back to his worm-self and desperately seeking heat in the sweats his human-self had put on after his shower the night before.
he feels his human sensibilities fading as the morning light registers more as “bright” than “8 am”; he knows the shiny brick thing his human self placed a cushion down on the couch the night before is important, but his worm-self sputters to remember why. it glares in the bright, and tommy knows he looks at it a lot, as a person, but as a worm, there’s not much to see. and besides. the—whatever he’s on right now, that smells like animal and chemicals and more chemicals and butts and feet and death and life, it’s cold, unlike the dirt that warms and cools with the bright and the dark.
this time, it only takes him until the bright grows dim again to make his way back outside, back into the dirt.
— —
he surfaces again in much the same manner, like a cursèd plant breaking through the illusion of lawn, under the clear, melancholy light of a full moon.
it’s june, now, his phone informs him once he charges it and powers it back on.
32 new voicemails. 173 new text messages.
he’s missed his disciplinary hearing. his anticipated return to work date.
(he will likely miss evan’s birthday.)
the microwave buzzes in sync with the ring in his ear; the microwave beeps to signal the readiness of his soup-and-burrito combo as the call connects.
“‘bout time you answer your fuckin’ phone, ya fuckin’ mook,” sal grumbles. never mind that tommy called him. “the fuck is wrong with you? disappearing like that after—you know what. i know you’re in the doghouse and all, but jesus christ, tommy, you don’t call, you don’t write, you don’t show up for your fuckin’ hearing like you don’t want your fuckin’ job back, your house is empty, except all your shit’s still there, what am i—”
“breathe, sal,” tommy exhales, deriving some comfort from the familiar nagging pattern.
“—supposed to think, don’t fuckin’ tell me to breathe, asshole, it ain’t a fuckin’ crime to worry about your stupid ass. i’m surprised that buckley kid ain’t busted down your door lookin’ for you, if this is how you’ve been with him for the past month. kid looked like a fuckin’ zombie at the funeral, babe, the only time there was any light in his eyes at all is when he was lookin’ at you when he thought nobody was lookin’ at him. what the fuck, tommy! you think you can just—”
“sal.”
“—disappear on us, just ‘cause you got in hot water with the feds? when have i never not had your back, huh? you say hey, sal, i like suckin’ dick, i say oh, hey, fine by me, pal, you know, my cousin frankie’s like that, he’s single, he makes a good living in the concrete business, you should give him a call. you say hey, sal, i’m gonna go fly death machines again, nothing makes me happier than flyin’ the death machines, i say, you betcha, take lotsa good pictures of sunsets and shit for me. gina loves that shit. you say hey, sal, you’ll never guess who i rescued out in the middle of the goddamn ocean in the middle of a goddamn hurricane last saturday night, oh, and by the way, i kinda kissed howie’s brother-in-law and want to have his babies, i say, well, gee, those kids are gonna be nine feet tall, better start saving up for their shoes now because you’ll never know peace. you say, hey, sal—”
“hey. sal.” tommy interjects sharply.
it does not work.
“—i fuckin’ threw away the best thing i ever had because the guy i’ve been ass over teapot for since he shook my hand and forgot his own name asked me to—”
“i’m a—a were-worm, sal!”
were-worm? tommy ponders in the precious moments of stunned silence on the call. not exactly, since he’s spent the most of the past month and a half in worm-form, only changing back into his human self during the full moon.
“the fuck do you mean—were-worm? jesus fuck, tommy, i swear to god, if you’re fucking with me—”
there’s the muffled susurrus of a gentle struggle for dominance that crackles over the line.
“hi, tommy,” gina deluca says in a tone that paints, very vividly, the image of that crease between her eyebrows and the wild edges of what some fools might call a smile. “i’d send you the bill for half of sal’s swear jar arrears, but i can tell he’s barely let you get a word in edgewise. you doing ok?”
gina’s not one for bullshit—god knows how she ended up with sal, how they’ve managed to make it work—but, unlike her husband, she doesn’t interrupt while tommy haltingly narrates the strange turn his life has taken. in fact, it’s so silent on the other end that he suspects the intervention of the mute button on the deluca side.
finally, noise from the other end filters back through, before gina speaks. “and you said you’re only human again the night of the full moon?”
tommy nods and clears his throat. “uh, yeah. at least that’s what happened last month. i was a worm from—after the funeral, to the next full moon. which was about a week. this month, i don’t—i remember falling asleep on my couch, as myself, then waking up small and cold, in the bright, and then going back to the dark. then waking up naked in the dirt in my backyard a few hours ago.”
gina hums. sal starts to speak, then stops himself, about eight times.
they might think he’s absolutely crazy. but by the time his yawns intensify, they’ve made plans to come over tomorrow morning and check on tommy.
in theory, at any other time, tommy would feel managed, but tonight, he’s just grateful.
tommy sleeps on an uncomfortable little pile of towels in the middle of his bed. just in case.
— —
the next morning, the bright is very…loud. there’s a high loud, and a low loud. a warm pokes at him, tries to pick him up. he doesn’t like that. the loud gets louder. strange, but familiar smells. not-flowers. not-wood. not-food. he hides in a—fabric-thing. a towel. the towel suddenly goes higher-up than an earth-dwelling worm cares to think about. low-loud laughs. he can feel that there is something funny—ironic—about that, even in his worm form.
he feels the pull to boogie to the dirt outside, the rich dirt that’s being warmed by the bright.
instead, he’s transferred into a container of some sort—one that once held food.
he hopes he is not destined to be food for these louds.
— —
it’s not so bad, tommy thinks, to live in a terrarium at sal and gina’s 95% of the time. it could be worse.
he could have been eaten by a bird, or squashed unknowingly under a foot, or been of interest as a mate to some other earthworm in his yard. blech.
in the afternoon of his full moon days, sal or gina or one of the girls will take him out of the pleasantly-heated terrarium and place him in the guest room, on the bed surrounded by stuffed animals and pool noodles and blankets so he won’t fall before he transforms, and will be comfortable as he changes. there are clothes for him there, and a snack, and a note pad with a few relevant items like the date and the weather and a doodle from one of the girls (or sal).
he has a routine now. he wakes, he orients himself, he bathes, he gets dressed, he goes downstairs to share a meal with the delucas and catch up on all he’s missed.
well. maybe not all he’s missed. he misses evan. but he can’t do much about that. what’s he going to say? “hello, beautiful, i regret walking out on you, i’m almost glad i’m a worm because when i’m myself i can’t stop seeing you collapse in that hallway, i’m sorry i ghosted you after the funeral, i’m a worm now, it was always ever for you, if you ever are in need of someone with worm powers, call sal, he knows where to find me because i live in a terrarium in his den and his daughters are learning responsibility by cleaning up my worm poop before they get to have screentime”?
hard pass.
it’s been eight months, now. almost ten, if you count the ones tommy spent alone.
he doesn’t want to scream much, anymore, when he thinks about this being the rest of his life.
it’s progress.
on his human nights in months three, four, and five, tommy and the delucas sat down with tommy’s cousin hank—the stress hives-prone accountant—and got to work. in month three, they planned. in months four and five, tommy was glad he’d wake up the next day without wrists because he signed enough forms to warrant a repetitive stress injury. there are still some things he has to sign on his human night, after they eat, after the girls go to bed. but the big things—his job, his house, his truck, his phone, his bills—are all taken care of.
the month before last, he’d locked himself in his bathroom on human night with a tub of rocky road and no spoon and screamed at sal and gina through the door to sell his house, sell his truck, why in the hell did they bother getting him a new phone number because who is going to call him anyway, and sobbed into his ice cream before eating it with his hands because he’d looked at his new phone with his new number without a contact for evan but that doesn’t matter because even being a worm 95% of the time can’t erase those ten digits from his mind but he can’t remember a fucking spoon for his fucking menty b ice cream.
last month, he thanked sal and gina for their support, for not selling his house or his truck, and went to bed early.
this month, tommy’s deep-cleaning his terrarium while waiting up for sal.
it’s pushing midnight when sal finally comes through the front door, his face drawn tight and his boots landing on the foyer floor with a tired thump.
“before you say anything,” sal sighs as he shuffles into the kitchen, “let me reiterate that i know you’ll be back to worm-self tomorrow, and i know you have a limited amount of time as your human self, tom.”
tommy knows that sal knows that under normal circumstances, with normal people, tommy hates being called “tom”.
“but i think you need to know this.”
sal doesn’t have all the information. the bones of it is: bobby nash had nominated evan and eddie (who’s apparently back in los angeles?) for the firefighter games in nashville—before. for some reason—sal waves his hands and rolls his eyes, which tommy seamlessly translates to “118 bullshit”—they were driving back, and were in a wreck, and evan was missing, and howie apparently hadn’t been real forthcoming with the details, but they found evan, and the guys were driving back—
“driving?” tommy interrupts incredulously.
“that’s what i said!” sal exclaims, too loud, waving his hands too big. “the fuck is diaz doing driving with a fucking head injury? howie was all, oh, they’re stopping to get out and move around every hour, since he’s got baby longlegs crammed in some tiny peanut car diaz bought for $800 in a diner parking lot, and god knows what kind of—anyway, tommy, you don’t need to hear all that shit—”
tommy growls, he absolutely needs to hear all that shit, it’s evan, but sal steamrolls right over him.
“—what matters is, those two idiots made it to howie’s and maddie’s in one piece, and hen’s taking them in first thing tomorrow to get checked out here. It’s a damn good thing, too. from what I hear, those local yokels damn near arrested diaz for murder, while buckley was out there being kidnapped by some other local yok—oh, shit.”
“ki—kidnapped? sal, what the hell!”
“shit, i wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”
“like hell! what do you mean, kidnapped? sal, if our friendship’s ever meant anything to you—”
“fuck you, kinard, you know it does, you’re the fuckin’ godfather of my precious darling babies—”
“—do you not have all the information, or did you just decide to not tell me all the information?”
sal’s silence speaks for itself.
shit. evan was kidnapped. tommy’s spent the better part of the past year in worm form, and too preoccupied with his own sad state on his human days to think too much about what evan’s life had been like without him in it. the little moments he allows himself to think about evan are usually summed up with, he has his people, he’s probably going out on dates with—people who aren’t worms. knowing that diaz is back has tommy wondering if evan still lives there, or if he moved yet again, and if he’s managed to unpack, wherever he is, put sheets on his bed for his—dates with people who aren’t worms.
“does he,” tommy croaks, “he’s not alone, is he? he’s got people, right?”
sal stares at him for a moment before crowding next to him on the couch and wrapping his arms around tommy’s shoulders. “he’s got his sister, and howie. and diaz and his $800 blue plate special, i guess. hen, she’s—shit, hen’s had health stuff, after she and athena went to space, but she’s getting back to normal. athena, athena’s kids, they’re around. harry’s at the 118 now. so. i don’t think he’s alone.”
tommy almost chickens out, almost takes the bait for hen having space flu or what the fuck ever, almost wishes he could speed up time until sunrise and retreat to the ignorant bliss of wormhood.
almost.
“i mean. is he. you know. seeing anyone.”
sal snorts. “not unless you count the gaggle of old people who won him at the charity auction. howie says he knits now. with his old people.”
tommy wants to laugh in relief and also scream because what.
“he always did like ‘em old.”
tommy jabs his elbow into sal’s ribs. “you’re older than me, you ass.”
“you’re the one who has a dedicated can of wd-40 in his truck in case his knee gets stuck.”
they devolve into quiet bickering for a while, as the gears in tommy’s very human mind churn.
it’s approaching 3 am when he resolves: “i think it’s time, sal.”
“you’re right. i have to be up in two and a half hours.”
“no, i mean—it’s time to tell them.”
sal sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “now? now is the time to tell them? tell him?”
“i didn’t—it didn’t matter, when it was just me. when i was the one who, you know.”
“quit his job, moved out of his house, disappeared into the wilderness for some mysterious, bogus job after failing to report for his disciplinary hearing with the lafd and at least three federal agencies?”
“he’d get over it, me being gone. i was gone already, you know? but—i almost lost him, permanently, from what you said, and i wouldn’t have known it. i’m scared, sal. i’ve been scared, probably since the day i met him. and maybe now is a really bad time to tell them. but i think it would be worse to wait to tell them until it was too late.”
the sun will rise in less than three hours.
tommy and sal spend the remainder of the time putting the cleaned terrarium enclosure back together & filling it with fresh dirt and detritus as sal films tommy explaining his situation while he works.
and then: it’s out of his hands. the sun rises. a familiar hand picks him up and places him in the inside-dirt as the bright grows.
— —
over the next month, he gets the sense that something is supposed to be happening. during the bright, usually, and into the dark, there are new louds nearby. new, but also—familiar. small, very loud louds who aren’t the usual small louds he’s used to, two who smell more like each other, and another two who smell more like each other, but they all sort of smell the same. a high-loud and a low-loud and two medium-high louds come with them. these louds smell like the smaller louds. two of these larger louds have smoother warms than the other two, but all of them are gentle. the low-loud picks him up and lets him explore the most often. there’s a low-loud who smells like the other low-louds and one of the medium-high louds but also sort of like plastic; this makes more sense when he’s placed into a sort of plastic dish with walls he bumps his front into. two low-louds come once. he’s not too keen on one of them, even though the tinge of motor oil on his warm sends a jolt of bittersweet through tommy’s worm body; like a friend hoped for, then lost. the other, whose low sound cracks sometimes, is all right. the sounds this low-loud makes curve toward the bright at the end.
and then—there’s the low-loud who shakes and trembles, like a warm earthquake, like leaves that quiver and fall and crunch into the dirt, who smells and feels like the bright. this one is familiar, though there’s new layers to the scent and feeling. something powdery—if worms could sneeze, this would do it—that makes him hungry; a bit of something sticky, that smells like the powdery stuff, around the hard, smooth, stubby surfaces on the warms these louds like to touch him with.
this one comes to visit last, but after the first time, barely a bright or dark goes by that this loud is not there, even for a short time. sometimes this loud is salty; sometimes the salt falls and splashes and tommy thinks distantly, gratefully, that he is not a snail. this loud smells hurt, and distressed, but not the sort of wild, distressed hurt of a threat. sometimes this loud brings a texture that leaves litte fibers that stick to tommy; the texture makes little clicking noises, and when this is going on, this loud is actually not loud at all, so the worm doesn’t mind the fibers too much.
one day, the loud leaves, but the texture stays behind. it doesn’t click anymore. it’s just warm, and smells like the bright.
— —
it’s close, today. the change. the big bright in the dark. it ripples not unlike peristalsis through his segments and sections.
he is almost, almost, too big for his body.
his favorite loud, the sweet and shaky low-loud who usually isn’t very loud at all, who smells sad and hurt and scared and beautiful, who brings the textures that click until they don’t, handles him gently in soft, calloused warms. he’s done this enough times now to know that he gets moved somewhere, for this change, and soon he will be back in a clean enclosure with the ghost of memories that are tall and loud and big.
the low-loud shakes and leaks salt as he finds himself in the big space, the weird space with no dirt and strange bright and the smell of not-flowers. one of the low-loud’s warms trails down his back; one of the hard, smooth, stubby plates catches on a segment, not tearing, just—a brief catch.
then the low-loud retreats with footsteps that reverberate through what must be the entire earth—
and then he is alone.
— —
tommy rouses once again, tall and four-limbed and with anticipation he doesn’t usually feel when he shifts buzzing under his very human skin.
there, on his bedside table, in lieu of the usual protein bar and glass of water, is what smells like a banana-walnut muffin, and maybe a vanilla latte.
both are warm.
that’s—curious. unusual. sal and gina and the girls know that tommy prefers something quick and boring now, after his shift, to give him enough energy to get through his shower and making himself presentable before their evening meal, which is the main event.
the muffin’s already unwrapped—that’s thoughtful—and the coffee is…well. it’s perfect. sort of like how—
how evan would order it, once he figured out tommy’s usual.
evan.
and, oh—tommy remembers.
tommy remembers what he told sal during his human night last month. he remembers, and he’s not sure if the dread or the anticipation is winning.
the muffin is divine, it turns out. he makes a mental note to ask gina if there’s a new bakery she’s found to frequent.
he showers, he shaves, he sniffs his armpits before he puts on deodorant, he shakes the wrinkles out of his chosen jeans and henley (maroon, tonight), he makes sure his socks don’t have holes because this isn’t a shoes-in-the-house house but he doesn’t want to risk having his pale, hairy toes out if he has—guests.
the siren call of lasagna drifts up the stairs and into tommy’s olfactory receptors.
he takes a deep breath as he carefully descends the stairs in his socks, promising himself that whatever happens tonight, he’ll be a worm again in 12 hours, so if it goes poorly, it’s on that poor sucker to face the consequences.
howie’s waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs.
he doesn’t say anything; he just grabs tommy into a hug, and tommy tucks himself small into howie’s neck the same as the first time 20 years ago. howie’s shaking; he hisses, you asshole, and it buzzes past tommy’s ear and into his spinal cord.
i know is the only thing tommy can manage to whisper in reply.
howie pulls back, looks him squarely in the eye, unblinking, for about 12 seconds, then releases tommy’s arms from his hands. he makes a big, dramatic, vanna white-style gesture in the direction of sal’s living room.
oh, tommy thinks.
he doesn’t quite feel real, as he steps quietly, gingerly, down the dim hallway toward the living room—and that’s saying something, for a guy who spends 95% of his time in the form of a were-worm.
gina’s there, in her favorite chair, and giulia and anna are adjacent, on the couch, next to—
oh, he really is beautiful.
evan’s there, in a cozy brown cardigan over a button-up chambray shirt. his hair’s longer, curls abundant if a little messy. the rational part of tommy’s brain says evan looks like hell. he’s pale, with deep purple circles under his eyes like he hasn’t seen sunlight in weeks or hasn’t been sleeping. there are remnants of scratches and scrapes and bruises on his face, and even here, in the safety of sal and gina’s comfortable home, evan’s practically wearing his shoulder blades as earrings. he flinches when he hears the sound of tommy’s footfall on the hardwood, but he shakes himself, and smiles at the girls, and turns to look over the back of the sofa.
at tommy.
both of them are crying, silently; neither of them make any noise louder than near-silent whispers of each other’s name, like they're both afraid of startling the other, before they crash against the wall beside the hallway in a desperate, weepy embrace.
tommy tightens one hand into the knit of evan’s cardigan and works his other hand under evan’s shirt, above the waistband of evan’s charcoal joggers, not to be fresh, but to assure himself that evan is here and alive. evan buries his face in tommy’s neck and holds him so frantically that tommy’s lungs burn with the effort of inhaling and exhaling. tommy barely registers the soft pat on the back, the urgent, quiet take care of each other that howie whispers as he brushes past them.
“why are they crying?” tommy hears anna ask gina. “are they sad?”
gina, to her credit, does not reply, because they’re both stupid, even if that’s true. “they just missed each other,” she says simply as she herds the girls toward the kitchen, as if that’s all that needs to be said. and really, it is.
“i did,” evan says wetly against tommy’s neck. “i missed you every day. since the first day.”
speech is presently beyond tommy’s capacity; he just cradles the back of evan’s head in his hand, until his tongue feels free. even then, all he can manage is a litany of i’m sorry, i’m sorry, i’m so sorry, sweetheart.
“i’m so mad at you,” evan declares as he tightens his hold on tommy. “i’m so mad at you i can’t stand it.”
“tell me,” tommy begs. “tell me everything.”
evan shoves his nose into tommy’s collarbone. “i can’t. it’s too big.”
“that’s okay,” tommy lies. it’s not okay. none of this is okay. it’s the most right and okay he’s ever felt in his life, holding onto evan like neither of them will ever be able to let go.
they somehow make it through dinner, pressed up against each other at the delucas’ back patio table like they’re in one chair that can fit both of them. evan had brought a homemade lasagna—not just homemade, but homemade down to the noodles and the sauce—and it’s a nice enough evening out that sal grilled some chicken and vegetables to go with it. the kids do most of the talking at the dinner table, but while there’s an underlying current of things we need to talk about, the tension is low and the sense of relief is high among the adults.
evan also, apparently, brought homemade spumoni for dessert.
“you remembered!” tommy asks, unable to keep the astonishment from bleeding into his voice.
“h-how could i f-forget, tommy,” evan replies as tears cloud his eyes. “th-there’s a lot i can’t f-forget. this is one of the g-good things.”
shit. “i’m, evan, i’m so sor—”
evan picks up tommy’s hand and kisses the back of it firmly, not meeting his eyes. “i don’t need your pity.”
tommy has the impulse to argue, but evan puts his hand back down on the table just as firmly as he’d kissed it, which shutters any discussion.
instead, he takes a bite of the pistachio segment—oh, wow, this is phenomenal—and tells evan just that; it smooths away the tension around evan’s mouth and eyes, and tommy’s rewarded with a hint of a smile.
“flatterer,” evan says, bumping his knee against tommy’s under the table. a pleased dash of pink flits across his cheekbones and over the tops of his ears.
after dinner, after they’ve all cleared their plates and done the dishes and put away the leftovers, evan pulls tommy aside.
“sal and gina said it was okay with them, i-if you wanted me to stay over,” he states while staring at the floor to the left of tommy’s feet. “sleep is—bad, for me, since…well. since.”
tommy nods, even though he doesn’t know the full extent of the since.
evan continues flatly. “i don’t know if i can sleep here. it’s—a whole thing. strange places. but. i miss you. a-and i’m tired of losing time with you. so if you want. i can stay, an-and—wait out the sunrise. with you.”
tommy feels tears stab at the backs of his eyes. “i’d—i’d like that. love that, actually.”
evan nods and finally looks up at him. “okay.” he shakes himself minutely. “you’re sure.”
“please.”
evan nods again, and exhales. “i’ll go get my bag.”
they end up on the couch. evan had quietly but solidly protested the pull-out sleeper part of the sleeper sofa, so they’ve taken the form of a many-limbed blob in sweatpants and t-shirts across the cushions.
(when tommy had offered his bathroom so that evan could change into his pajamas, evan had shaken his head near-violently and demanded quietly, don’t say that word.)
(that’s…new.)
before they settle, evan tunes the television to a quiet aquarium channel tommy didn’t know existed and pulls out an ugly, uneven, small knitted blanket that he spritzes with something that smells like an herb garden. as tommy curls up against evan’s side, evan rubs at his own wrists, muttering something low that tommy can’t make out. then, evan wraps his arms around tommy and presses his palms against tommy’s back and arms and neck, and weaves an ankle and leg between tommy’s calves.
“this okay?” tommy asks, uncertain in light of this new bedtime routine.
evan exhales shakily, a cool cloud of peppermint. “i think so. just don’t try to hold me down.”
tommy tucks his face into evan’s armpit, and if evan can feel tears soaking into his t-shirt, into his skin, he graciously doesn’t mention it.
“i had a good day today,” tommy whispers.
“me too,” evan replies, scrunching himself in closer. “the best. i missed you, tommy. so much. ‘i missed you’ doesn’t begin to cover it.”
“i know,” tommy says. “it’s the same for me.”
they lie there in silence for a moment before evan speaks. “what should i expect in the morning?”
tommy relays as much information as he can: that he usually is in his other form by the time it’s bright, though he doesn’t know what time it will happen; if he wears clothes to sleep in, they become his little earthworm nest in the morning. then, he’s a worm until the next full moon. he doesn’t know why. he only usually gets an evening and night as a human each month. yes, it’s weird; no, as much as it breaks his heart to admit it, he doesn’t expect evan to stick around for it.
evan sighs. “do you trust me? can you trust me?”
no, tommy thinks, but trusting evan is also the one thing he wishes most in the world that he was able to do. then, now, even more urgently than he wishes he weren’t a were-worm. he tells evan so.
“i can work with that,” evan yawns, and reaches up to play with tommy’s hair.
— —
the bright stabs at tommy’s eyelids, which are crusted together with sleepgunk. his head rests on a warm surface that bubbles and groans in time with the dulcet tones of evan’s buzzsaw snoring.
“b’by, you sh’ld see a doc’r ‘bout that,” he mumbles into the warmth against his face.
a chilly hand slaps gently against his nose. “stoppit,” it gripes. “tickles.”
“mkay,” tommy mutters as he kisses the palm of the hand. at least the snoring has decrescendoed to a manageable dull roar.
the clink of a plate nearby and the sweet aroma of syrup prods at his consciousness. he cracks one eye open—or, at least he tries to, and wipes the gunk away to complete the task—and sees sal standing over him, next to the coffee table, with his arms crossed and a smug expression on his face.
“whaddy’you want,” tommy grumbles and turns his head away.
“you’re right, sally,” gina chimes from the other side of the sofa. “they’re adorable.”
“they’d be more adorable if they weren’t 450 pounds of lump on my couch. what is this on my tv? fish porn?”
“sal,” gina hisses. “let’s just be glad that tommy isn’t a w-o-r-m.”
“guys, i can spell worm,” tommy huffs, before the last dredges of sleep are ripped away. “i’m—what do you mean, i’m not a worm!”
“quiddit,” evan orders. he smooshes tommy’s face into his chest. “no quacking. baby’s napping.”
gina smooths the hair away from tommy’s face. “we can figure it out later, baby,” she whispers, leaning over the back of the sofa. “but you didn’t change back this morning. maybe you had a good luck charm.”
tommy knows he did. evan is here. “mmhmm,” he agrees, doing cricket legs against evan’s ankles. he’s drowsy, with evan warm and solid against him.
“quacking,” evan mutters again petulantly before rolling over and squashing tommy against the back of the couch. “like to hear your heart. can’t hear with the quacking.”
there’s a brief clatter, then the sweet cloud of syrup-scent drifts away, followed by sal’s surprisingly quiet, harmless kvetching. “this is the thanks i get for making you french toast. i see how it is. two decades of friendship and saving your ass, and you toss me aside the moment you find some sweet thing.”
tommy’s right arm is free now to loop around evan’s waist. “got all the sweet i need right here.”
“liar,” evan whispers, sleepy and amused. “you have the worst sweet tooth i’ve ever met. insatiable.”
“agree to agree,” tommy replies as he sinks into the warmth and the bright and lets it carry them a little way further into this new day.
together.