Home
A rumination on the H1VE and the meaning of home.
H1VE has a base of operations. At least, that's what they call it around other people. Cicada said he thought it would lend an air of legitimacy to their operations, and B0UNTY said it might be good for morale to call it a proper base too. But most of them don't call it that amongst themselves. They tend to call it home.
Because that's what it is. It's a shitty two-bedroom apartment that they rent, on the very fringes of what's technically considered Oldbrush Valley. And it's home to their little found family.
They weren't always in that same apartment. When it first started, when it was just PR1ZE and Cicada trying to stay alive, they'd been in a different apartment in the same building. One bedroom, a bathroom, and a living room. Technically, according to the landlord, there was a kitchenette too, but neither of them really liked the look of the stove - and they weren't exactly cooks either. They microwaved their food and told themselves it could be worse.
They'd initially planned to rotate out who would sleep in the bed and who would get the couch. That plan lasted about three weeks. After that, they'd given up on pretending they weren't together. They shared the bed after that.
The place was garbage. Bad water pressure, the ugliest and least comfortable couch you've ever seen, walls that had been damaged and that the landlord either didn't care or couldn't afford to get contractors in for. It reminded Cicada of Matt's house. And that stung for more reasons than bug felt comfortable unpacking.
But it had one thing Matt's house didn't have. It had PR1ZE. And that was enough to make it home.
B0UNTY and Scarab had made their way in a few weeks later. They were there to help, and Cicada and PR1ZE accepted them in. They didn't mind sharing the couch, and they didn't ask questions about Cicada and PR1ZE sharing the room. It didn't escape either of their notices that B0UNTY and Scarab had matching rings on their fingers.
They managed to upgrade to a two-bedroom apartment after that. Lord knows where the money was coming from. None of them were employed exactly, and time travel wasn't lucrative. But somehow they managed to scrape it up every month. (Cicada once suggested that they try to apply for government relief, and Scarab very patiently pointed out that neither of them had a social security number and that PR1ZE and B0UNTY were legally dead. Xhey ceded the point.)
The two-bedroom was worse somehow. They were all pretty sure that it violated about a dozen different regulations - but it meant that the landlord accepted payment in cash and didn't ask why none of them had a credit history or any ID, so they didn't press the issue. It was theirs as long as they had the money. None of them could tell exactly when it started feeling like home, but somehow, unmistakably, it was.
And then Jessie and Jessica joined them and it started to feel foreign again. The girls slept together on the couch when they first moved in, and everyone was very awkwardly aware of how the apartment was much too small for six. This was made worse by the fact that they were still trying to figure each other out. Cicada confided in Scarab that bug worried Jessie and Jessica were just there to try and steal H1VE's calculator. Scarab promised to keep an eye out.
Jessie was the one to break up the tension of that first week. It came back to the apartment at eight in the morning with three grocery bags loaded under her arms. She complained jovially about how poorly stocked their kitchen was, then offered to make biscuits and gravy as an apology for waking everyone up. Cicada and Scarab agreed before haw was done with the sentence.
Jessie wasn't really a great cook. She was a passable cook, which is all you need to convince someone that you're a great cook - as long as you're confident, and the person you're talking to is hungry and doesn't know anything about cooking themself. She worked the dough, chopped onion, and mixed spices into her gravy with the sort of body language that projected self-assuredness. Jessica was pretty sure it was an act, but it was a good one, and the other four warmed up.
Their table was barely big enough for three. A few of them had to sit at the couch while they ate. PR1ZE spilled gravy on the cushion. None of them noticed. They were too busy talking.
Scarab noticed during a lull in the conversation that - with the smell of black pepper, sage, garlic, and onion in the air, and six gently smiling people talking about nothing at all and eating good food - that the place felt like home again. That was nice.
The cowboys warmed up to each other pretty quickly after that. Scarab started using yee/haw pronouns after Jessie explained its reason for having them, and Jessie made haw a pronoun patch for haws jacket, to match hers. Cicada and Jessica commiserated over how Western the whole place was getting, but of course neither of them begrudged their iterations for their happiness.
At some point, Jessie started sleeping in B0UNTY and Scarab's room. At some point, they started calling haw Capybara. At some point, B0UNTY gave the three of them matching stick-and-poke tattoos - a design of a capybara and a fox curled up together, with a scarab beetle on the capybara's head.
Jessie hadn't had something that felt like a home in a long time. Not since before she'd been displaced from her future and sent back here. Not since before she became a cowboy. Not since before she'd gotten dragged back into the world of time travel. Not since before she'd killed herself in an attempt to escape WOE.BEGONE. Not since before she moved to OVER. Not since before her third challenge, when she died. But it knew that it was home now.
It took Jessica a bit longer. Move nights with PR1ZE and Cicada, dinners shared between the three of them, her desperate attempts to teach them some basic kitchen skills, to no avail. Learning their little injokes and references and adding her own to the pile. Getting used to their macabre and gory tastes in horror, introducing them to her favorite psychological horror movies. PR1ZE went along with whatever - Jessica suspected he was much more interested in the company than the movies - but Cicada had strong opinions and wasn't afraid to make them known. They ended up doing a lot of good-natured bickering over the movies they'd just watched. They bonded over how overrated Skinamarink was, but she couldn't get him to see the light on how the merits of The Babadook.
And then suddenly she was no longer Jessica, PR1ZE and Cicada's friend, but rather one third of a trio. PR1ZE and Jessica and Cicada. It happens in pieces until she's not sure where she stands with them. She's always been bad at the "what are we" talk, and she suspects that they aren't the best at it either. It's a mess, and she doesn't know how to untangle it, but there are some things she does know.
She knows that PR1ZE leans against her one night while they're watching a slasher movie and that she lets him. She knows that she doesn't mind when Cicada starts calling her Capybara. She knows that at some point, hearing PR1ZE's voice is enough to make her feel safe. She knows that when she's holding Cicada against her chest and she calls him Bug, she can feel xhem soften in her arms.
She knows that she kisses PR1ZE first. She knows it's Cicada who invites her to share their bedroom.
She knows she's home.
