Chris doesn’t fall in love with Darren, he crashes headfirst like it was a biological imperative, like his body’s set of chemicals that create euphoric attachment were waiting to flood his veins for just him, and no one else. The primal, physical attraction he harbored on the cute guy with the curls singing about Harry Potter before Darren was ever a flesh and bone person in his life didn’t help. It was a tremulous, unstable setup just waiting on a catalyst. But with Darren there, talking to him and laughing with him, that simple attraction is watered and fed and grows and grows into something more, something big and daunting and scary in its strength and solidity, and Chris just - he tries not to let it get in the way. Of his job, of their friendship. Somewhere between year one and year two, it just gets hard. Their relationship evolves, like all do over time, but instead of adapting they teeter on the brink of extinction, leaving him (them) brittle and breakable. Fondness spikes into bitterness, and when Chris can’t have it all he stops wanting any of it. They can’t exist like that. Maybe that’s when - maybe that’s why - Darren starts to want him back. He’s never lied to Chris about the fact that in the beginning, he didn’t feel anything. Chris was too young, he thinks; young and not what Darren considers attractive, and personality can’t overcome everything. They had chemistry, sure; that’s why Darren was cast, that’s why the show got so much attention for it, why audiences and critics had such a reaction. But sometimes a solution that doesn’t react at room temperature needs a little heat, needs to encounter just the right environment, and maybe they needed that push that that Chris growing distant gave to them. Since the beginning they were teeming with potential, and evolution can’t be undone, so all that’s left to do is evolve again and then again, to constantly readjust together, to find what makes them last and most importantly, hold onto it through changes of season and time. Darren says it wasn’t that he wasn’t attracted to Chris to start with, but Chris can’t convince him he doesn’t care. He’s done with feeling broken and flawed right down to a molecular level, done with how the curse of being unique always hung over him, this predisposition for never quite having the same experiences of love and growth as everyone else. He’s done lingering in the shadows when he can be turning his face to the light of what he has right now. Darren likes the man that he is now, who he has become and who his surroundings and all the love and loss and hurt and rejection have bent and shaped him into. And, eventually, Chris sees it too. The length of his tenacity, the solidness of his surety of self, the curve of his off-center wit, the finished product of a hundred billion chemical processes and made entirely of celestial debris, and finds he loves himself, too.