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Kaelix has only been here a few minutes, which almost feels like less time than it takes to boil water for late night tea (it isn’t really, it’s been more like thirty) and already there’s an air of trespass to him because the kitchen is so undeniably someone else’s. The stacked ceramics in black or matte gray, the plain dish towels, a little herb plant on the small windowsill that Kaelix half suspects is an immortal cutting because he’s never seen it even slightly wilt.
Freo’s apartment isn’t overlarge. It’s a quaint walk-up with just enough space for one person who values order, which Kaelix can appreciate. Freo’s taste is evident in every corner of it: the sparse decorations, the clean lines of the sort of furniture he keeps, the absence of clutter for the most part. In the months they’ve been dating, Kaelix has grown familiar with this space over containers of noodles and dim sum, their relationship unfolding in mostly conversation over takeout boxes and the quiet in-betweens, just like this. In the late evenings, the after work, and just before the morning and day-to-day bustle. No one’s keeping tabs on them anymore, in fact, no one who really mattered ever did, but old habits of discretion die hard.
Kaelix stands shirtless at the counter as he waits for the kettle to click to life in front of him on Freo’s island counter. The kitchen is a bit smaller than the one at his own place. He makes a little production of unscrewing a canister of tea that Freo seems to keep a rotating stock of. Kaelix picks a soft, honeyed blend this time, and then, because it’s in his nature to let his mind play on its own, he stares into the leaves in the infuser and thinks about how this entire routine feels like a pantomime he’s seen a hundred times in commercials and never actually in his own life.
He doesn’t know if Freo’s done showering yet or is already headed to bed behind the thick wall dividing the apartment, one that does less to muffle sound than to announce who is and isn’t on your side of it. Kaelix thinks about crossing over to check, about the etiquette of knocking on a door that has technically been opened to you but never explicitly left ajar. He pours water over the tea leaves, watching the color bleed and cloud the glass, feeling the ghost of obligation crawl up his spine, left to his own devices for too long.
That used to be all there was: obligation. Before Freo, his life had been nothing but a series of checkboxes. For two years, every move Kaelix made was measured and laid out to him, sometimes in ink, sometimes in contract language, his body positioned just so for cameras, his smile calibrated to the exact specifications of whatever contract paid his bills that month. The modeling agency had its terms and then the society dinners had their own rules too. The engagement had its script complete with stage directions for how to hold hands convincingly with someone he barely knew. He could write a book for it, almost. There was a part of him that thrived in that sort of structure, that knew how to hit every prescribed mark. He got good at it until he wasn’t. Until that morning in late spring last year, when he’d found himself staring at Freo for the first time at the building of his old office, suddenly aware he’d been performing the wrong play all along.
He’s trying to unlearn all that now. Maybe that’s what this is. Standing in Freo’s kitchen with his hair still a little damp, steeping tea, looking around for something, anything, to make himself useful and not quite finding it.
He waits for the toast to finish nearby, pulling out the jam and the knives he now knows the places for in this apartment. As he arranges them, he stares at the hardwood underfoot, making a game of matching up the little cracks and scuffs to the sprawl of veins on his own hand. The aches of overtime have started to wear off and he feels less like a memory of himself and more like a person again, the way that only these evenings with Freo can do. Or maybe in the way Freo had specifically texted him earlier in the afternoon to ask if he wanted to come over after work. That was rare, possibly a first. And it had lifted the weight he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying all week—all month really—the constant worry that he was the only one reaching.
Kaelix leans his hip on the counter, catching the way the light in the kitchen squares itself against the opposite wall. The shadow is oddly reassuring; it means he’s here and not anywhere else.
He wonders, not for the first time, what exactly it is he’s doing here. The plan, such as it was, was meant to end with him standing beside a different omega, on a different sort of evening, with a different kind of future plotted out in old-money block letters and gold foil. That all fell apart just this spring in the space of twenty minutes after he walked out that door to what had felt like the gallows to him at the time.
He can still picture the exact look on Freo’s face when they locked eyes across the chaos, something quieter and complicated. Like a man who’d just watched the script he’d been handed get torn to pieces, leaving only blank pages and the terrifying threat of possibility. Maybe too much of it for two people who had already made such a thorough mess of each other with less.
Now, somehow, Freo is what’s left. Or, rather, chosen. Not quite yet in explicit terms, lest he run for the hills, afraid of the vast, hungry thing inside Kaelix, shaped by his want.
Kaelix wakes up these days, and his first thought is always about the work left over from the day before, but his second thought, if he’s honest, is always about Freo. About what he can do to make the other man’s otherwise quiet life slightly less stressful, or at the very least, slightly less monochrome, how he can inch his way into the rest of his days and make him forget the somewhat harrowing experience they had to go through to get here in the first place.
He’s about to lose himself in another round of his quiet inner turmoil when a door clicks open, and there’s the shuffling, dragging sound of someone moving across the room. He risks a look up and sees Freo at the doorway, wearing one of his old sweaters, cozy in a pair of loose pants after a warm, late evening bath.
For a moment, Kaelix just stares. He wants to say something witty, but he’s holding a tea strainer and wearing pajamas that are his and exist here, in this moment, because Freo permitted them to take up a bit of space in his drawer. He offers the only greeting that makes sense: “I made tea. And toast. You said you were still hungry?”
Freo blinks before his gaze flicks from the electric kettle to the mug, then to Kaelix’s face. His mouth does the faintest, most controlled twitch upward. “You finally learned how to use my kettle.”
Kaelix resists the urge to preen, but can’t help a little involuntary grin anyway. “Hey! I’m a quick study, you know.”
“Sure,” Freo says, but the deadpan is weaker than usual, softened by the evening hush. He steps past Kaelix, close enough that their shoulders brush, and takes the other mug.
The proximity is always nice. Kaelix likes to tell himself for all of five seconds he doesn’t want to read into it too much, how easy this seems to be getting, but he always does anyway by the seventh count.
They move through the next couple minutes in near silence, punctuated only by the scrape of a butter knife dragging jam across bread and the small, ordinary sounds of the kitchen around them.
Kaelix tries to come up with something to say, but nothing feels important enough to break the quiet. Eventually, he settles for the little inconsequential questions, “so, breakfast after dinner, huh? Didn’t eat much today?”
Freo, swallowing around a first bite, shakes his head. “I did. But I just… felt like something sweet, I guess. This sort of thing is fine sometimes.” He gestures vaguely at the spread, and at Kaelix, where the implication might be: this, the both of you, is fine.
Kaelix lets himself lean back against the counter behind him, letting the warm mug rest against his palms. “So. Anything exciting lately?”
Freo looks over the rim of his cup, eyes narrowing like he’s trying to decide whether to share a classified secret. But all he does is shake his head a little. “Nothing I’d call exciting, exactly. Just more turnover, I think, ” he says with a shrug. “I had a call with my mom recently, and I might go visit home for a bit later in the year. But that’s not for a while. You?”
Kaelix thinks about it. He should say something about his new job at Seible’s, or maybe about the interviews he’s being forced through for PR rehab even though they’re letting his contract lapse anyway and he’s not been entertaining getting signed anywhere else, but instead he just grins. “I’m making tea and breakfast at a strange hour for my favorite person. That’s pretty much my agenda for the foreseeable future.”
Freo tries to look unimpressed, but it doesn’t quite stay that way because his face colors first before he can deny anything. There’s a beat of eye contact, and then Freo steps forward and plants a very quick, perfunctory kiss on Kaelix’s cheek. “You know you don’t have to wait for me to ask you to come over, right?” Freo asks, voice softening. “I gave you a key for a reason. You can come over whenever you like.”
The words cut right through the static in Kaelix’s head. He’d spent the last hour over-calculating his right to be here. Either the man has developed a sixth sense for Kaelix’s specific brand of neurosis, or they’ve reached a point of honesty that Kaelix isn’t quite used to navigating yet.
Kaelix fakes a gasp, clutching his heart, in hopes that it’ll mask the sudden hitch in his breath and his heart. “You wound me. I have layers, you know.”
“Oh, I know,” Freo says, setting his tea down on the counter top. “I just wish you’d keep your layers out of my sock drawer.”
“Says the guy in one of them,” Kaelix laughs, and for a moment the kitchen feels lighter than it did a minute ago. He stays where he is, shoulder pressed to the counter edge, hands loose around the still-warm mug. The moment should pass like any other quiet night in this apartment, but the longer Freo lingers within arm’s reach, the less ordinary it feels. It starts small, in the way Freo’s scent gathers around him beneath the usual thread of cool mint and faint coffee. Kaelix knows the feeling almost as soon as it begins to draw him in, that familiar, unyielding gravity that still manages to catch him off guard even now.
He doesn’t so much move as he does surrender to that gravity, shifting his weight until he’s situated behind Freo, standing by the counter. Freo doesn’t pull away, leaning into his touch.
Kaelix lets his palm settle on Freo’s waist, thumb brushing the soft knit of the borrowed sweater. He dips his head and presses a slow kiss to the curve where neck meets shoulder. Freo hums once in acknowledgment, a quiet note that inches Kaelix forward.
Another kiss, then another, and the rhythm builds almost without thought. He noses along the slope of Freo’s throat, close enough that the pulse there brushes the edge of his mouth. Freo’s breath hitches and Kaelix feels that flicker of satisfaction unfurl through him.
“You’re starting trouble,” Freo murmurs, more fond than reprimanding. His hand finds Kaelix’s forearm, fingers curling there to guide him closer.
Kaelix smiles against his skin.
“Whatever do you mean? I’m standing in your kitchen,” he counters, though the angle of his mouth against Freo’s neck makes the words less innocent. “Hardly a crime.”
“It is when you do that,” Freo says, softer now, tipping his head just enough to grant better access anyway.
Kaelix takes the invitation, brushing a deeper kiss over the soft skin there. The movement draws something fuller out of Freo’s scent, sudden and low in the air between them, warmer than it had been a second ago and touched by a sweetness Kaelix doesn’t really know how to give words for yet, only that it catches under his ribs and makes him linger to breathe it in. It’s all the more arresting for the way it rises around being caught off guard. He flattens his hand over Freo’s stomach, fingers curving over the soft sweater. Freo gasps before he can take it back, and that sound goes straight down Kaelix’s spine.
He doesn’t mean for the next kiss to land at Freo’s earlobe, but he doesn’t resist the impulse either. A playful nip has Freo exhaling a shaky breath.
“Kaelix,” Freo says, and the warning would hold more weight if he didn’t immediately lean into the next kiss Kaelix presses beneath it.
The tea is forgotten in the next breath. Chairs scrape as they shift without coordination, only instinct, reaching for each other as though the kitchen itself conspires to push them together. A spoon clatters harmlessly to the countertop. Freo’s fingers knot loosely in Kaelix’s hair. Kaelix crowds him against the edge, swallowing the faint gasp that escapes when their hips meet through soft cotton.
He should slow down maybe. He’d promised himself he would.
But Freo’s lips part on a quiet, helpless sound, and Kaelix’s restraint isn’t for long. He lifts Freo effortlessly, the motion easy and natural to him from many nights by now that had gone similarly sideways, and Freo’s legs circle his waist on instinct.
“Bedroom,” Freo says against his mouth, though the word dissolves halfway through because Kaelix kisses him again, possibly too eager, but Freo answers with equal heat, fingers tightening at the back of his neck.
They make it down the short hallway in uneven steps, trading quiet laughter with breathless kisses, losing the thread of conversation entirely. By the time Kaelix sets him gently on the mattress, Freo’s sunset eyes are warm in a way that makes Kaelix’s chest tighten because he feels suddenly, dangerously close to allowing himself to hope that he can really start to expect more from this; that it’s fine for him to want as much as he does and ask for it.
He’s momentarily distracted by how Freo pulls him down by the nape. Kaelix goes willingly, letting the rest of the world slip away as they find each other again in the quiet fold of the late evening.
Kaelix kisses him. Freo’s mouth fits against his with a familiarity that still manages to surprise him, as if each kiss might be able to draw the landscape they keep trying to chart in daylight but only ever fully understand in this way. Kaelix shifts his weight, bracing one forearm beside Freo’s head as he settles his hips lower. Freo draws in a breath that lifts his chest against Kaelix’s.
The intimacy of it anchors Kaelix more than he might let himself expect. He likes to think he’s getting better at reading his tells. Like the deliberate, grounding way Freo’s hands move when they draw up from his side and then curl at his waist. He knows how to communicate with his body even when the rest of their conversations might otherwise tangle in places Kaelix has yet to figure out how to untie.
Kaelix trails another slow line of kisses along Freo’s jaw. He works his way down the column of Freo’s throat, lingering where the pulse beats close to the surface. Here, with his nose tucked against the warm hollow beneath Freo’s ear, he breathes Freo in with more intent and finds himself pausing on it.
There’s something different there now.
Not dramatic enough to startle him at once, and likewise not some abrupt change, but something gentler and harder to account for. Freo smells much sweeter these days, but Kaelix can’t explain it well beyond that, and he hasn’t exactly had enough experience with many other omegas to sort it neatly into anything more precise (or more that he’s never been with one long enough, but that is neither here nor there). He only knows Freo as he’s come to know him: the mildness of his scent, the way it used to come to Kaelix in softer layers, mint first sometimes, then that dark bitter-sweet trace of coffee, and, when desire or pre-heat pull him more open, the cool bloom of lilies.
Lately, the lilies seem to find him first.
It’s never something heavy; Freo has never smelled perfumed. Even now, it’s still a restrained, little thing, more like fresh flowers sitting in an innocuous corner far off in the same room than something poured over the skin. But these days it sits over his usual scent in a way that almost drowns the rest of it out, and Kaelix, breathing him in here with nowhere else to look and nothing else to distract him, wonders if his first impression of Freo had simply been blurred by circumstance. By want. By nerves. By all the other noise that had crowded around them from the start.
Or maybe it just really is different now.
The thought settles in him without shape, something more he feels than he truly understands fully. He kisses Freo again, slower this time, nosing lightly at his scent gland as if that might help him read what his body already seems to know.
Freo’s fingers tighten at his side, and his body lifts in an instinctive arc in response. Kaelix feels the effort it takes for Freo to steady himself, throat working, breath pushing warm against Kaelix’s cheek, and he answers it with quiet reassurance.
“Easy,” Kaelix murmurs, the word slipping out before he can think twice to. He kisses over the spot again, featherlight this time, letting the warmth of his breath soothe the tension gathering there. A slow swipe of his tongue follows, trying to ease the sensitivity he stirred.
Freo exhales a trembling breath and Kaelix sinks into the soothing calm of that sound, each ensuing kiss patching together the loose threads of his scattered thoughts. He lifts his head, brushing his cheek along Freo’s jaw, savoring the warmth of their closeness before finding his mouth again.
Kaelix pulls back just enough to study him. Freo meets the look head-on, open in a way that knocks Kaelix’s thoughts out of order for a breath. The space that sometimes grows between them doesn’t press in now; it feels narrow enough that he could cross it if he’d just keep himself steady, if he’d stop letting habit drag him toward retreat.
He finds himself leaning in again, kissing him slower but with the same intent, allowing that heat to build where their mouths stay close and their shared breathing push them forward. Freo’s hand slips up to the nape of his neck and draws him in, a quiet pull that tells him he doesn’t need to hold anything back.
Kaelix lingers there a moment longer, learning the give of Freo’s body under him, learning the way his scent lifts when he handles him with care. He doesn’t pretend he can understand any of all the recent changes, but this part, this closeness, this open pull towards him, he understands well enough to meet it more than halfway.
He lifts his head, brushing along Freo’s cheek until he finds his mouth again. The next kiss holds the heat they’ve been building, the pressure of it carrying the urgency they’ve both been sitting in. Freo tilts up into him with a focus that feels as clear as any spoken answer.
Kaelix moves his hands down, slipping under the hem of the sweater Freo’s wearing before pulling the fabric up. Freo lifts his arms, letting himself be guided out of it. Kaelix pushes it aside and comes back down over him, kissing along the line of his throat. Freo’s scent deepens, heat curling up from his skin.
Kaelix works his way lower, easing Freo out of the rest of his clothes, slow enough to read every twitch of his body. Freo shifts to help him, already breathing harder, already losing some of that composure he usually guards so tightly.
As soon as Kaelix has him bare, he doesn’t waste any time. He drags his hands up Freo’s thighs, palms firm, and bends to kiss along the inside of one. Freo shivers, hips meeting the motion, mouth falling open without a sound. Kaelix follows the trail that reaction sets for him, kissing higher, then nipping gently when Freo’s breath stutters.
Kaelix climbs back over him, bracing on his hands as he kisses Freo again, rougher, and hungrier too. Freo takes it all, fingers curling in Kaelix’s hair, his body softening under the weight of him. His legs shift around Kaelix’s hips, instinctive, asking for more without saying as much. Kaelix feels it hit him hard, the way Freo looks up at him, eyes blown wide, scent bright with want. It makes his thoughts skid, makes his pulse climb. He kisses down Freo’s chest, open-mouthed, leaving heat wherever he goes. Freo arches into him, breath already a mess, any semblance of focus from earlier slipping into something raw.
Kaelix settles between his legs, gripping his hips to steady himself. The heat in Freo’s eyes makes his throat dry, his pulse hammering so hard he can feel it in his fingertips where they press into Freo’s skin. A feverish desire burns through him, almost terrifying in its intensity—how easily it could consume his careful control, how desperately he wants to let it. Freo’s lips part slightly, his body yielding beneath Kaelix’s weight, and that silent invitation nearly unravels him.
“Freo…” Kaelix breathes, voice already wrecked.
Freo’s thighs only tighten around him. “Just... come here,” he murmurs. The words catch in his throat, scraping past something raw, his voice barely more than breath against Kaelix’s skin.
Freo’s already slick, dripping with need, and Kaelix doesn’t even have to work for it. He lines up, pressing the head of his cock against the wet heat of him, and pauses there. His muscles strain with the effort of keeping himself in check as he watches Freo’s face, the flutter of his eyelashes or how his lips part around the anticipation. Kaelix pushes in and Freo opens around him in a single, obscene slide. Kaelix groans, choking on the feel of Freo closing around him. He tells himself he should slow down and savor the way Freo takes him, but impatience claws up his spine, and the need to bury himself deep wins out.
He withdraws slightly, before he presses in again, deeper this time, feeling Freo’s cunt grip and pulse around him. That slick heat draws him in, demanding more. The rest of his paper-thin restraint fractures as he thrusts in earnest now, each stroke measured yet no less desperate, the wet sounds of their joining filling the space between their ragged breaths.
“Nngh—Kaelix,” Freo gasps as Kaelix drives into him, the force pushing him up the bed.
Kaelix’s hips drive forward in a steady rhythm that makes the bed creak beneath them. Freo reaches up, seeking Kaelix’s hand where it’s been braced on the headboard behind them, tugging until Kaelix relents. He guides Kaelix’s palm to his cheek and holds it there like he needs the anchor. He turns into the touch, mouth finding Kaelix’s wrist, right where the scent sits strongest.
Kaelix moans, loud and lost in it, at the sight of him like that. “You can’t do that, holy shit. Freo, you’re killing me.”
Freo’s fingers dig crescents into Kaelix’s shoulders, his lips parting with a broken “don’t ah—don’t stop,” as Kaelix thrusts harder, hips snapping forward in a punishing rhythm he can’t control anymore. Freo’s eyes fall shut, breath hitching as he inhales against Kaelix’s skin, like he’s pulling the scent straight into his chest, his thighs trembling where they grip Kaelix’s waist.
“Need it,” Freo murmurs against his skin, so soft that Kaelix almost misses it beneath the thundering of his pulse in his ears. “Keep going.”
Freo’s words sink into Kaelix’s skin like teeth, sending a shudder down his spine that he feels all the way to his fingertips, breath catching on a groan that starts deep in his chest and tears upward through his throat. His vision narrows to just Freo beneath him, pupils blown wide, lips parted and slick around his pleasure. Kaelix drives forward with enough force that the headboard knocks against the wall, and beneath him, Freo’s spine curves into a perfect bow, only his shoulders and hips still touching the sweat-dampened sheets.
“Is this—am I doing good for you, Freo?” Kaelix rasps, lowering himself closer. “You want more?”
Freo nods without opening his eyes, mouth parted, voice thinned out by his desire. “Yeah. Kaelix, please.”
Kaelix pounds into him, driving him open over and over, watching Freo cling to his hand like it’s the one steady point of contact he has that’ll keep him from going truly under. Freo’s breathing him in, scent-drunk, messy under him, and Kaelix feels something fierce and uncontrollable break loose inside him at the sight.
Kaelix leans down, the rush of want and everything he’s been holding back hitting him all at once. He kisses Freo wherever he can reach—cheek, jaw, mouth, throat—desire so untenable in this moment that he can’t choose or slow himself down.
“Missed you,” he says against Freo’s skin, the words tumbling out before he can catch them, like they’ve been waiting at the back of his throat this whole time. His hips stutter in their rhythm as he speaks, body unable to decide which need is more pressing. “Freo, I missed you so much.”
Freo’s chest stutters mid-inhale, and he nods, reaching up to loop his arms around Kaelix’s neck. His fingers slide into the hair at the back of Kaelix’s head, twisting into the strands until the gentle sting makes Kaelix’s scalp tingle. Kaelix groans at the pull, at the way Freo touches him like he belongs right up against him.
Kaelix rolls his hips forward in one fluid motion that doesn’t stop until he’s buried to the hilt, the slick heat of Freo’s body yielding and then clenching around him like it wants to keep him there. They meet in a kiss that barely holds together. Freo’s mouth opens under his, eager, hungry, but every time Kaelix withdraws and sinks back in, their lips slip apart, mouths missing by a breath before finding each other again.
“Kaelix,” Freo gasps into the next kiss, the sound swallowed by Kaelix’s mouth before he can really finish anything he means to say.
Kaelix just fucks him through it, each thrust dragging another broken sound out of Freo. Their kisses turn messier, desperate, losing their rhythm every time Kaelix spears into him and Freo’s head tips back with a soft cry. Freo drags him down again, mouth seeking his, pulling him into another deep kiss that falls apart the moment Kaelix sinks in hard.
A tight, hungry pull gathers in Kaelix’s chest as he watches Freo come undone beneath him, heat spreading through his limbs and settling low at the base of his spine. He’s always prided himself on his control, on keeping his alpha instincts carefully leined in even in moments like this. That kind of restraint has always come more easily to him than it seems to for most of his peers. He learned early how to sit with the pull without letting it drag him under or steer him anywhere he didn’t mean to go.
But lately, all that careful discipline has started to unravel, that hard-won composure slipping through his fingers each time they’re together like this. He doesn’t like when his feelings can be diluted to claim and mark and make Freo understand with his body what he can’t yet say with words. The consuming want Kaelix usually keeps buried has started to crowd in his throat, demanding more of Freo than he thinks he currently has permission to take. If he’s being honest, the idea of Freo as his mate has lived in the back of his mind for months, and especially in the lead up to whatever this is and whatever it’s turned into; the fact that it feels more tangible than ever has made it all the more tempting but likewise all the more fragile.
He’s gotten into the bad habit of mapping out the conversation before it even begins.
Kaelix knows better than anyone that he’s a large part of the exhaustion still clinging to Freo. If he pushes too hard or lets this outrun what they’ve only just managed to piece together, he could crack the fragile bit of peace they’ve finally managed to to carve out for themselves, and the potential for grief in that has become a physical pressure in his throat, a warning, that, one wrong move, or if he doesn’t broach this carefully enough, he could just complicate their lives all over again.
Still, the want surges regardless, hitting him with more force than he ever seems prepared for, and it hangs there between impulse and restraint, close enough to reach for if he had the nerve.
Freo’s eyes crack open, a flicker of concern passing through the warmth. “Kaelix? What’s wrong?”
Kaelix freezes for a breath. The words caught in his throat, but none of them make it out. He kisses Freo instead, urgent enough to cover the moment and enough to pull them both back under. His hips drive forward harder, the motion quickening before he can stop it.
Freo gasps when Kaelix suddenly shifts from languid to desperate, the change in rhythm jarring his body backward against the sheets, the headboard creaking in protest. “Wait, wait! Kaelix,” he says, startled, arms tightening around Kaelix like he’s trying to hold onto the question. “Talk to me.”
Kaelix shakes his head, kissing him again to swallow whatever else Freo might try to say, tongue sliding against Freo’s in messy distraction.
“It’s not—” Kaelix starts to say against his mouth, breath breaking. “Just let me—”
Freo’s body answers first, arching up into him. He tries for another thought, another protest maybe, but Kaelix thrusts deeper this time, and all the words between them just collapse into a choked moan shared between them. Freo clings to him, the conversation slipping out of reach as Kaelix fucks him harder, chasing the pace he’d been holding back from since the beginning.
Their bodies fall into a rhythm that Kaelix never lets himself take unless he knows Freo wants it. The tight, slick heat of Freo’s body pulls him deeper with each thrust, sending sparks down his spine that pool molten at the base. He revels in it. The salt-sweet taste of Freo’s skin lingering on his tongue; how Freo meets him with every push, legs tightening around his waist, hands dragging down his back while his breathing shakes apart.
“Freo,” Kaelix mutters, voice rough, hips snapping forward again and again. The scent of them together floods his senses. His fingertips are warm where they press into Freo’s skin. “Freo, you feel so good.” It almost sounds like a whine, the way he says this to him.
Freo’s head tips back, throat exposed, mouth open around a sound that dissolves into the humid air between them. “Kaelix—right, ah, right there, please—don’t stop—”
Kaelix drives in without a second thought for rhythm, a wild current surging between them that neither can resist. His focus draws down to just Freo’s face—the flush spreading across his cheekbones, the way his lips part softly with each gasp.
The sheets are twisted and damp against his knees. Freo’s nails rake lightly across his shoulders into points of pressure that send electricity down his spine. He needs Freo coming apart beneath him, needs to be the one who makes it happen. Their mouths collide and separate in a desperate rhythm, tongues meeting briefly before the next thrust tears them apart, only to seek each other out again in the spaces between breaths.
Freo’s voice cracks. “Kaelix. Kaelix, I’m—”
“Yeah?” Kaelix murmurs, his breath hot against Freo’s temple, foreheads pressed together as he chases the trembling in Freo’s thighs. “Just like that? Tell me.”
Freo’s eyes screw shut, body once again responding for him, arching beneath him. His mouth falls open in a silent cry that breaks into a ragged moan, fingers digging into Kaelix’s skin. Kaelix feels it building—the way Freo’s breath just snags now instead of forming any words, how his inner muscles flutter and clench in warning pulses, each one tighter than the last until suddenly Freo’s entire body seizes, his cunt gripping Kaelix with such exquisite pressure that Kaelix nearly loses himself right there too.
“Oh god, Freo—” Kaelix gasps, voice breaking. “This is, fuck—you feel so good.” His words nearly dissolve into another whimper as he feels the heat of him and slick and desperate clutch of Freo’s thighs trembling against his hips.
He’s dimly aware that Freo just came and he tries to swallow around a suddenly dry throat as he wills himself to pull back. But before he can, Freo’s thighs tighten around his waist, ankles locking at the small of his back. Freo’s palm, damp with sweat, finds Kaelix’s cheek, thumb brushing across his lower lip.
“Keep going,” Freo murmurs, eyes half-lidded and dazed.
Kaelix can only manage a nod, words abandoned somewhere between his brain and throat. All he can focus on is the slick sound of where their bodies meet, the rhythmic creak of the bed frame beneath them, and Freo’s shallow breaths against his ear. Each thrust pulls a wet sound from where they’re joined, obscene and perfect. His world contracts to just these few inches between them, to the wet friction of skin on skin, everything beyond fading to nothing.
“I—I can’t—” Kaelix’s voice hitches, cracking high with desperation. Any semblance of control falters as the pressure builds at the base of his spine, threatening to unravel him completely. “Freo, please, I need—”
“I know,” he whispers, palms sliding up Kaelix’s trembling back, slick with sweat. “You’re doing so good.”
Kaelix’s vision whites out as his eyes slip shut and when he pushes in deepest. He buries his face in the crook of Freo’s neck and breathes in his scent—salt-skin and the natural sweetness of him. He collapses forward, forehead pressed to Freo’s shoulder, breath coming in stuttered gasps that match the pulse of his cock as he empties himself.
Minutes pass, or maybe hours. Kaelix loses track, only aware of Freo’s hands sliding up his back, then down again, of his own mouth finding Freo’s collarbone, his chest, the soft skin beneath his ear. They move together in waves that crest and recede until Freo finally turns his face into the pillow, laughing softly.
“Okay, okay, enough, please,” he murmurs, voice hoarse. “I don’t think I’m making it to my 4:30pm tomorrow if we don’t stop.” His eyes flutter apologetically. “Sorry, I wish I could do mo—”
“Don’t you dare apologize for not being able to go a fourth round at—” Kaelix glances at the bedside clock, “—three in the morning. Whoa.”
Freo’s lips curve into a tired smile. In the low light, Kaelix can see the full extent of his exhaustion—the heavy-lidded gaze, the boneless way he melts into the mattress.
Kaelix leans in to kiss the corner of his mouth, then carefully shifts his hips, pulling out with a soft, wet sound that makes them both shiver. Freo winces slightly at the sensation. They lie tangled in the rumpled duvet, the room dim under the low glow of the bedside lamp. The light casts long shadows against the walls and catches the damp of their skin. Their scents are still tangled, warm and layered from hours of being on each other.
Kaelix drifts a little like this, his breathing slow as he presses soft kisses to Freo’s face, his forehead. Freo lets him, eyes half-closed, hand resting lightly on Kaelix’s shoulder. It feels easy, natural almost even though it’s the kind of quiet they don’t often get these days.
When Kaelix pulls back, Freo is looking up at him, thoughtful, a small crease forming between his brows. It’s the same expression Freo gets when he’s calculating venue costs or reconsidering a table arrangement—that quiet, inward-focused assessment that means he’s weighing words one by one and debating on whether it was worth saying or if he could just let it pass.
“What is it?” Kaelix whispers, brushing his thumb across Freo’s cheekbone.
Freo tilts his chin up slightly, allowing Kaelix to press another soft kiss to his lips while he seems to pull his thoughts together, the gentle contact lingering between them. When they part, Freo’s his expression settles into something more certain.
“I didn’t like that,” he says, a slight frown pulling at the corners of his mouth, but his eyes remain tender, his fingertips still resting lightly against Kaelix’s wrist.
Kaelix registers the earnestness in it, but he stills, immediately beginning a mental inventory of the last few hours, instincts coiling into panic. Was he too rough? Did he miss something Freo might’ve needed? Did he end up making this just about himself? The questions roll over him all in one go, loud and sickening, so much so that he feels his chest lock tight at the thought of how the answer to any of those, or all of them at once for that matter, might be yes.
“What… what do you mean?” Kaelix asks, voice small despite his effort to keep it level.
Freo blinks at him. The pause stretches long enough between them to nearly hollow Kaelix out. There’s something careful in how Freo’s expression softens, the way his hand comes to rest lightly on Kaelix’s forearm, a gentleness that only makes Kaelix’s stomach drop faster, because people only handle you this delicately when when they’re bracing you for something you won’t want to hear.
“I just… I don’t like it when you cut me off by distracting me.” Freo finally elaborates after a beat.
Kaelix swallows against the dry patch in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he says too quickly, the apology rushing out of him before he can dress it up into anything better. “Sorry. I know. I’m sorry.” The extra words follow on their own, smaller than what he actually means, and even as he says them he’s acutely aware of all the things he still isn’t saying, all the parts that actually matter and stay lodged stubbornly where he can’t seem to get at them in time.
Freo doesn’t press, or say anything more, he just lets out a soft sigh and shifts away, pushing upright with a tired effort. “I should clean up.”
Kaelix sits up fast. “No, no. Let me. I’ll do it.”
He’s already halfway off the mattress before Freo can disagree, finding his pants from earlier and getting them on as Freo heads to the bathroom for a quick shower and to get changed.
Kaelix bustles around the bedroom with the same keyed-up focus he’d had hours earlier, only now he channels it into stripping sheets and bundling blankets. He gathers everything into the laundry basket and heads for the small laundry nook off the hallway.
The moment he’s out there alone, with only the dim hall light and the muted hum of the apartment for company, he exhales and gives himself a quiet, internal dressing-down for the state of his nerves. At the rate he’s going, he’s not doing himself any favors, and Kaelix can feel how little room there is for carelessness if he wants to keep from undoing the small, hard-won progress between them.
By the time he starts the cycle, Freo is already dressed and in the kitchen for a glass of water.
Kaelix wipes his palms on his thighs as he heads toward the kitchen, trying to gather himself into something a little less intense before he inflicts the full force of his presence on Freo again. He’s not proud of how quickly he always seems to become too much where Freo is concerned. Too watchful, too eager, too full of feeling to wear any of it lightly. Freo, for his part, has probably given him more grace than he probably deserves already. The least he can do is make himself easy to be around or meet him with more of the care he keeps insisting he means to give. He resolves, quietly, to try and make it up to him. Somehow. Hopefully, properly.
He’s still trying to decide what properly might even look like when he steps near enough to see Freo clearly.
The color is going out of his face.
It happens quickly enough that Kaelix nearly misses the start of it—first the cheeks, then the lips, left slightly parted and pale. A faint sheen gathers at Freo’s forehead as he swallows hard around the water he’s just taken too much of at once. The glass gives a small, uneven tremor in his hand. Freo reaches for the edge of the counter, fingers closing there with sudden force, shoulders drawing in, trying to brace himself through it already. He manages to set the glass down, but he’s already breathing shallow and quick at the top of his chest.
Kaelix’s heart gives a hard, ugly jolt, and he crosses the rest of the rest of the space in seconds, before Freo’s knees can give out completely.
“Freo. Hey. Hey, I’ve got you,” he says, slipping an arm around him, letting Freo lean into his side.
Kaelix presses the back of his hand to Freo’s forehead, trying to get a read on his temperature, but he’s not so much hot as he is suddenly cold and clammy, a thin sheen of sweat over his brow. Kaelix gets a hand on his back, the other on his arm, steadying him through the sudden shake in his frame. Freo’s breath stutters, eyes pinching shut.
Freo tries to straighten up, but another rough sound pushes out of him instead. Kaelix shifts his grip and guides him away from the counter, keeping his body braced in case Freo sways as they make the short way over to the couch.
Freo sinks back into the cushions, hand pressed to his brow, breathing a little shallow. Kaelix watches as he uses the edge of his sleeve to blot the sweat from his hairline, the fabric darkening as it draws away the moisture. He works in slow, careful motions, but even then Kaelix can see the slight tremor in Freo’s hands. When the shaking persists, Kaelix gathers both of them in his own, applying firm pressure to his knuckles until the tension there begins to ease. Freo’s breathing eventually evens out under the contact.
“What’s going on?” Kaelix ventures as he massages warmth back into Freo’s fingers.
Freo keeps his eyes shut for a moment longer, like he’s deciding how much of an answer to give. “I just felt a little nauseous, is all.”
“Just?” Kaelix repeats before he can help himself.
That gets him a faint look, tired more than annoyed. “Kaelix.”
He lets out a breath through his nose and reins himself in. “Right. Okay. A little nauseous.” His thumbs keep moving over Freo’s knuckles. “Does that happen often?”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes,” Kaelix echoes, because Freo is being maddeningly economical again and he can already tell this is one of those conversations where the words are going to come one stingy spoonful at a time. “As in lately, or—”
“As in enough that I know what it is when it happens,” Freo says.
The answer is not nothing, but it is also very much not everything.
Kaelix glances over Freo’s face, trying to read past what he’s being given and not liking how little purchase he gets. “And you’re alright now?”
Freo gives a small shrug against the cushions. “I will be.”
Will be. Not am.
Kaelix bites back the next five questions before they can crowd each other on the way out. Freo’s fingers shift in his, no longer shaking quite so badly, but there’s still a guardedness to him Kaelix can feel even without looking. The whole exchange goes a little stilted after that, Kaelix asking as carefully as he can manage and Freo answering in short, tidy pieces that leave too much tucked away between them. Even so, Freo doesn’t pull his hands free, and Kaelix holds onto that much while the quiet settles around them again.
He’d thought, these past months, that he was learning how to read Freo—his body, his expressions, the various shades of silence between them. Now all he can see is the distance between what he knows and what he’s only assumed, and how badly he’s misjudged the size of it.
His thumb moves over Freo’s knuckles, more to steady himself than anything. Freo’s scent is stronger today. Kaelix had chalked that up to the sex, or maybe to the fact that Freo doesn’t bother with scent patches around him anymore. The change hadn’t seemed odd at the time and didn’t feel like something he should probe deeper into. But there’s a weight behind it now that he can’t place, something Freo hasn’t said, but likewise, something Kaelix hasn’t pushed for.
He isn’t entirely sure if it’s sadness or fear that settles in his chest. Freo’s still shaky in his hands and Kaelix has no real answer for why. All he knows is he hasn’t been asking the right questions. Not tonight and not in the last few months.
He clears his throat and adjusts his hold on Freo’s hands, bracing himself before trying again.
“Is this about everything going on?” he asks quietly, easing toward the answers the way he always does, although even now it still feels like he’s side-stepping it. “I know work’s been rough. The break you’re taking… I get it’s a lot to manage at once.”
Freo’s gaze shifts away. “It’s a bit of that,” is his soft response, but the pregnant pause after tells Kaelix he’s getting the truth in pieces.
Kaelix lifts one of Freo’s hands and presses a kiss to his knuckles, holding it there a moment before lowering it again between them, trying to reassure him he can say more. “You can tell me.”
Freo’s throat works. The scent of him stirs restless and warm in a way Kaelix has only caught in brief flashes since arriving tonight. Kaelix feels his pulse notch up as a thought forms at the edge of his mind, of a possibility he isn’t sure he’s brave enough to say out loud, at least not without hearing it from Freo first.
Freo wets his lips and looks at him for a long moment, searching Kaelix’s face like he’s testing for whether the ground between them can hold what he’s about to put there. His fingers tense in Kaelix’s own. He starts to speak, stops, and Kaelix sees the hesitation in the small shift of his mouth, in the way his eyes flicker briefly aside before returning to him as though there is nowhere else for this to go now.
“I…”
Kaelix doesn’t say anything. He barely trusts himself to breathe without breaking the moment open the wrong way. Freo inhales and exhales a grounding breath, and then tries again.
“I’m pregnant.”
Kaelix’s entire world lurches as the air in room goes perfectly still between them. He sits there with Freo’s hands in his, but his mind is already elsewhere—or it isn’t anywhere rather. His thoughts scatter in several directions at once. Into fear, disbelief, even a faint thrill he doesn’t yet have words for, all of it crowded by a rising worry that overtakes the rest almost as soon as it appears. His pulse kicks higher, unsteady enough to make him feel it in his throat, and he can do nothing but stare at Freo, eyes wide, as if looking hard enough might make the words rearrange into something easier to bear.
And in the space where Kaelix still says nothing, he sees Freo take that silence for what it must look like. The shift is small but unmistakable. Something in his face closes off; his shoulders draw in.
“You… don’t have to say anything,” Freo rushes to say. “I didn’t want to corner you about this. A-and I didn’t mean to. That was not my intention. I know this is… a lot.”
Contrary to what Freo thinks, Kaelix is of the mind that he really should open his mouth and just say something, anything at all, but he’s still trying to separate the shock from the flicker of excitement, from the fear of messing this up, and from the guilt that Freo had been carrying this alone.
Freo watches him closely, trying to read whatever Kaelix has failed to put into words. When he doesn’t seem to find it, his gaze dips, lashes lowering. The corners of his mouth draw in for a moment before he schools the expression there into something more neutral.
He draws his hands back a little, not fully pulling away but loosening his grip like he expects Kaelix to do the same.
“I’m not asking you for anything,” he says, softer, even now. “Really, I—”
Kaelix stays where he is for a beat too long, Freo’s hands still warm in his, until Freo gently eases them free and Kaelix lets him. The words keep circling in his head with no place to go. Freo straightens in his seat and Kaelix forces himself to breathe, to steady himself enough to speak properly and find a place to start.
“H-how far… how far along are you?”
Freo studies him for a moment. “Around four months. Give or take. Almost five, I guess.”
Kaelix’s stomach tightens. “Four??” he hears himself ask. “What the hell? And you didn’t—you hid it for that long?”
“I know,” Freo says quietly. “I know, Kaelix. I was just… waiting for the right time.”
“The right time,” Kaelix echoes, heat creeping up his throat. “I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure the right time was when you found out.”
Freo’s expression hardens at that, but he doesn’t look away. “When I managed to confirm it I… I didn’t want to add to everything else that was going on. You were about to get married. And then when all that passed… I didn’t want to do it until I knew you were in a place where you could think about it all clearly.”
“And you didn’t think that, regardless, I’d want to be there anyway? Like, not even once?” Kaelix asks, voice cracking as the words splinter between them. “So, wait a second. You taking a break… and then when you said you ‘might’ be going home later this year…”
The answers sit between them before Freo even gives it, in all the choices he’s already seemed to have made, all the months that have somehow existed without Kaelix in them in the ways that matter most. Kaelix looks at him, chest tight enough to ache.
“What exactly is your impression of me,” he asks, “and how is it that bad?”
“It’s not that,” Freo answers him hurriedly. “And you know how we used to talk about this. You said you wanted to take it slow.”
“Well—but this changes everything!” Kaelix fires back.
He runs a hand through his hair, his words stumbling over each other like he can’t get them out fast enough to keep pace with his racing thoughts. “And I only ever said that because I thought I’d scare you away if I asked outright for anything more after all that happened. If I’d known, Freo…”
“That’s exactly what I mean.” Freo’s tone stays even, but his jaw moves once, like he’s bracing himself, or perhaps holding himself back from a more fulsome outburst. “I wanted to make sure we were both in a position to think this through clearly. But, really, Kaelix. I mean it. You should sit with this before you do or say things you can’t take back.”
Kaelix stares at him, and he asks, baffled, “you really think I’d walk away?”
Freo doesn’t answer immediately. He chooses his words with care, as he always does. “I think… I think you’re still young. And we’re new. And your life is changing in ways you’re still getting used to, even now. I think you need to consider what you want your future to actually look like for you before you make any major decisions.”
Kaelix shakes his head. “I—that doesn’t matter anymore. And the right thing to do is to figure out how we want to do this together, Freo. I—”
Freo cuts in, still in that soft rasp of his, but likewise unwavering. “What do you mean it doesn’t matter anymore? Of course it matters. It matters a lot.” His eyes hold Kaelix’s steadily, not unkind but resolute. “This is just your knee-jerk reaction to the news, and I knew... I figured you would take it this way.” He exhales, shoulders lowering just a little. “I’m telling you, you’re not obligated to me. And you should think about what you actually want.”
Kaelix’s breath catches, and he feels the tell-tale sting behind his eyes. He blinks hard, refusing to let the tears form. Crying now would only confirm whatever Freo already thinks—that he’s too young, too impulsive, and not at all ready for something like this. Each syllable reverberates within him, sending shockwaves of confusion and hurt that twist in his gut, leaving him reeling in the silence that follows. He presses a palm to his forehead, leaning back on the couch, trying to ground himself. Four months. Four months of carrying this alone, of making assumptions about what Kaelix would or wouldn’t do. The thought makes his throat tighten with an ache he can’t swallow down, but he does his best to keep his face carefully composed, jaw clenched against the emotion threatening to spill over.
“What does that even mean, Freo?” He sits back up, fixing him with a look he knows might read as near-exasperation, bracing his hands on his knees. But he truly cannot see where Freo is coming from right now. “What I actually want? What is it about me and what I’m doing that isn’t clear here? Where is there any confusion about what it is exactly that I want?”
Freo closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them again. “I’m just asking you to take more time, Kaelix. Do you really think you’re ready to be a father?”
Kaelix’s throat constricts. His pulse thrums in his ears, a dull roaring that makes it hard to think. His fingers twitch against his thigh, and he fights the urge to stand, to pace, to do something with this restless energy suddenly coursing through him.
“So what you’re telling me right now,” he says, voice tighter than he intends, “is you’re just not sure if I’m ready.” He lets out a small, disbelieving breath, the shape of it bitter in his mouth now that he’s finally hearing it said plain. “Not sure of me, basically.”
He feels his jaw lock so tightly it almost hurts, has to press his mouth together against the strain of it before his lower lip catches briefly between his teeth. It does nothing to help. He can already feel the burn gathering behind his eyes, and the effort of keeping his voice from breaking only makes everything in him feel pulled too taut. “And that’s why you don’t want me here for it?” The question comes out raw, scraped from somewhere deep. “Is that it?”
“No, that’s not—” Freo sighs, sounding wrung out by their entire conversation. “All I’m saying, Kaelix, is that you don’t have to reshape your entire life just because of this. And that you have options.”
Kaelix feels his pulse jump at the word. Options. The way Freo says it doesn’t even strike as self-effacing. He’s trying to be fair and reasonable, as he often tends to be. Perhaps even practical for them both. But the idea that this future was just one choice on a list of many that Kaelix is supposed to weigh is one that doesn’t sit right with him.
Freo watches him, patient as he seems guarded in the same measure.
Kaelix finally looks away, thoughts spinning too fast for him to even latch onto one and voice it out. None of them feel right and whatever he might have to say right now feels like he’s toeing the edge of a line where if he trips over it with anything less than what he really means could spell the end of all this before it even really begins. He doesn’t argue point. Nor can he reassure. He just sits there with that fresh hurt working through him, unable to find a single sentence that won’t break him open if he tries to speak it out loud.
Before either of them can say anything more, Kaelix’s phone buzzes on the coffee table, the sharp vibration cutting through the tense quiet. He flinches, but reaches over to check the screen, and sees that it’s just work. He hesitates for a beat, glancing at Freo who only nods, urging him to just take it.
Kaelix answers. He keeps it mostly short, if a little clipped when he assures the person on the other end of the line that he’ll look into it and come in today, possibly head to the set to deal with the issue in question before the shoot for the client he can’t even remember right now starts at 6:30am. When he hangs up, the room falls back into that heavy, unsettled stillness.
Freo shifts his hands on his lap. “You should head out,” he says after a moment. It isn’t cold, but it does nudge the space between them even wider.
Kaelix lets out a rough sigh, the sound snagging on everything he isn’t saying. He gets up, gathering his things with careful, measured movements, his wallet from the side table, keys from the kitchen counter, giving Freo time if he wants to stop him. But Freo only follows a few steps behind, pale and wordlessly trailing after his back, like he’s walking himself through something he’s already decided.
At the door, Kaelix’s hand rests on the knob and stays there. He waits a beat, then another, for one of them to say the thing that might make leaving feel less like this. But nothing comes.
He turns back to him anyway, reaching out to cup Freo’s cheek for a second before pressing a kiss to his forehead. His thumb brushes the soft skin beneath Freo’s eye, a gesture done over from countless mornings before this one, easier mornings. Freo doesn’t pull back from it or flinch. Kaelix lets the touch linger, savoring the warmth of Freo against him, the familiar scent of his that still pulls at that latent part inside of him built to respond to it, even now, despite the impossible heaviness set alongside it too.
When he draws back, Freo’s gaze has dropped somewhere near the doorframe, then lower still, anywhere but Kaelix’s face.
“I’ll call you,” Kaelix says around a weak smile. The words feel hollow, but he can’t find it in himself to make them fuller without spilling into something messy again.
Freo nods. “Sure.”
Freo doesn’t say more except to offer him a small, “take care,” and Kaelix only responds with his own weak, “you too,” before he steps out past the threshold eventually, pulling the door closed behind him.
Kaelix’s childhood home sits on a tree-lined street like a postcard from another era, it’s decently well-kept and enough for the family of seven it housed at its most populated (it’s in the countryside so it’s nice and quiet too). He’s at the kitchen table now, pushing the last of a homemade stew around his plate, not because it isn’t delicious, but because the words he needs to say are lodged somewhere between his chest and throat, refusing to budge.
“You’re going to wear a hole in my good dishes if you keep scraping like that,” his mother says, reaching over to tap his wrist gently. Her eyes, the same bright blue-green as his own, though crinkled at the corners from years of laughter, study him with the kind of attention that always made hiding anything from her almost impossible. “You’ve been quiet all through lunch. What’s going on in that head of yours?”
Kaelix sets down his fork and attempts a smile. “Sorry. Just thinking.”
“Mm-hmm. Always that with you.” She gathers their plates, stacking them as she moves them from table to sink. “Thinking so hard I can practically hear the gears grinding. Is it work? Or maybe it’s that cute little omega of yours?”
“He’s not my—” Kaelix starts automatically, then stops himself. “I told you, his name’s Freodore. Freo.”
His mother’s smile widens. “Ahh, so it is the omega. The one you’ve been telling me about in little drips and drabs for months now.” She sets the dishes in the sink and turns, leaning against the counter with her arms crossed. “When are you going to bring him around, by the way? Your dad and I are starting to think you imagined this relationship up. We didn’t really get to meet at the wedding either...” She trails off, likely cognizant of the optics of it all.
Kaelix had not, in fact, wasted much time telling her. Once things with Freo had become impossible to pass off as anything less, his mother had been among the first to know—first in scraps, then in details that gave him away no matter how casually he tried to offer them. Some of his siblings had known even earlier and had been predictably insufferable about it. His mother had been less interested in teasing than in taking him to task. He’d gotten a stern talking-to about the recklessness of letting himself be carried along by Seible’s plan for as long as he had, even if it was his own life to do that with. Beneath it, though, had been relief that he was at least going to be okay.
Freo’s name had earned him another lecture altogether, though Kaelix had been quick enough to head part of it off himself. His parents needed to know, at least, that this hand’t been something Freo pulled him into, and Kaelix had no intention of letting them form the wrong impression of him out of loyalty to a timeline already in ruins. So he’d made it clear, almost immediately, that yes, he was the one who pursued this anyway, and no, Freo didn’t do anything to lure him away from some path Kaelix had otherwise been set on following—and, would have, in fact, willingly parted ways with him had things really come down to it. His mother had listened with the kind of expression that suggested she found his indignation both unnecessary and a little entertaining.
“We can only take your sister’s word for how cute he actually is for so long,” she says, cutting clean through the tail end of his thoughts as she reaches for a dish towel. She gives it a small snap before adding, “and I know she’s not immune to bribery by snacks, even at her age.”
Kaelix runs a hand through his hair, messing up the careful styling from that morning. “It’s… complicated.”
“Oh? All of a sudden?” she asks. And then, as an afterthought, adds, “well, love usually is.” She shrugs, although the simple truth of it makes something in Kaelix’s chest constrict. “But, hey, that doesn’t mean you have to face it alone. Come on, out with it. What’s bothering you?”
Kaelix takes a deep breath, trying to organize the tangle of thoughts that have been consuming him for the past couple of weeks. He wishes he had a better way to ease her into the news, or that he was saying it with more excitement for that matter.
“He’s pregnant,” he says finally, the words tumbling out faster than he intended. He keeps talking—thinks, just like ripping off a band-aid. “About four months along. It’s mine.”
His mother’s eyebrows shoot up, her mouth forming a small ‘o’ of surprise. For a moment, she’s silent, and Kaelix feels a wave of childish anxiety crash over him. It’s the same feeling he had when he’d come home with a report card full of less-than-stellar marks, or when he’d confessed to breaking a neighbor’s window with an errant baseball with two of his younger siblings.
But she only pulls out the chair next to him and sits down, the sound of her jewelry scraping against the marble as one hand finds his and squeezes tight. “Well,” she says, her voice warm but measured. “That’s certainty something.”
Kaelix can’t help the small, helpless laugh that escapes him. “Yeah. Something.”
“How do you feel about it?” she asks, and the simple directness of the question almost sends him keeling over.
“I… don’t know,” he admits, and even to his own ears it comes out with the worn edge of a whine. “Shocked, obviously. But also…” He searches for the words, and finds it closer to the surface than he expected. “Happy? I think I’m happy. Or I could be, if I knew he wanted me to be part of it too.”
His mother’s head tilts slightly. “He doesn’t?”
“It’s not that simple.” Kaelix stares down at their joined hands, at the rings adorning his mother’s fingers—tokens of anniversaries and milestones and a life built steadily over many years. “He didn’t exactly tell me right away. He’s been planning for months, figuring out how to make it work on his own. And when he finally told me, he kept talking about giving me ‘options’ and ‘time to think’—like,” he says, drawing his hands back, one cutting vaguely through the air, “I don’t know… like he was just expecting me to walk away as soon as I knew.”
A quiet washes over the room as his mother takes this in. After a moment she hums softly, thoughtful, and instead of offering her advice or anything resembling her own interpretation of the matter, she only says, “tell me about him again. This Freodore.”
Kaelix hesitates, then finds himself speaking, the words coming in the weight of his mother’s unassuming gaze. “Well, I mean, you know who Freo is.”
She urges him to go on with a nod, attentive to his words. “He’s always had this way of looking at you like… like he can see right through whatever you’re saying to what you actually mean.” A smile tugs at his lips despite the heaviness in his chest. “But for all of the ways he can seem almost intimidating and aloof, he’s also gentle in his own way. And he’s really attentive too. He’ll remember how you take your tea, or he’ll make sure there’s always an extra blanket set out on cold nights. He’s got a contingency for most things…” He trails off, getting misty-eyed just thinking about him. “…but he’s cute too when he’s clumsy. A-and it’s fun to see all the different sides of him. Reassuring too, because it just—he just—just always seem like he knows exactly who he is and what he wants.”
“Sounds like someone with a good head on his shoulders, and like someone I’d like,” his mother remarks, a knowing gleam in her eye. “And I can see why you do, too. But you might’ve left out that… What was that, from last time? He’s soooo handsome mom, and also the prettiest—”
Kaelix flushes slightly. “Mom! Come on, I know I talk about him a lot when I call but…”
“I’d be worried if you talked about him any less.” She grins, patting his shoulder, before standing up to pour them both fresh cups of tea from the pot on the counter.
She sits back down, stirring honey into hers. After a beat, she speaks again. “You know, I understand where he’s coming from.”
Kaelix looks up from his cup, surprised. “You do?”
She nods, tapping the spoon gently on the rim of the cup before setting it down on a small plate. “I had you young, you know this. I was barely out of college, and your dad was still in grad school. We weren’t planning on starting a family so soon.” Her smile turns wistful. “I’ll admit, I was scared. Even if I knew I wanted you from the moment I found out. It didn’t change the fact that any of the other plans we had were suddenly just… out of the picture, and there were more uncertainties about what the future held. That’s not always so fun at first.”
Kaelix wraps his hands around the mug in front of him, letting the warmth seep into his palms. “Did you ever…” He trails off, searching for a way to ask it that doesn’t sound as loaded as it feels. “Did you ever think about doing it alone?”
“Oh, not for a second, I told him the same afternoon I found out,” she says with a small laugh, the sound easy in the sunlit kitchen. “But like I said, I can see where he’s coming from. Pregnancy is a vulnerable time. Your entire life is literally upended and there are too many uncertainties that come with it. Your safety, safety of the baby. Whether you want to keep it or not. What comes next after deciding yes or no. If he’s a plans sort of person, as you say he is, then it’s more than likely he’s just making contingencies.” She reaches over, tucking a strand of white hair behind his ear in a gesture so familiar it makes his throat tight. “It just sounds to me like he’s trying to protect himself. Making sure you’re there because you want to be, not because you feel you should be.”
“But I do want to be there,” Kaelix says, indignant. “It’s my child too. Our child.”
“I know that,” she says gently. “And I think, deep down, he does too. But knowing something and believing it are different things, Kaelix.”
Kaelix sighs, shoulders slumping. “He thinks I’m scared of this too and I…” his voice breaks a little, not wanting to admit it, but also not being able to help himself anymore. “I really don’t want to agree with him on this, but I’m afraid that what he’s saying is that I’m not good enough.”
His mother’s laugh at that surprises him. “Oh, honey, of course you’re afraid. Having a child is terrifying. It changes everything.” She looks at him fondly, eyes crinkling at the corners. “But you know what? It means something that your dad and I didn’t stop until we had five of you—”
Kaelix groans, head in his hands. “Mommm.”
“I’m just saying,” she continues, unrepentant, “when something’s right, you’ll know. Even if it scares you. You’ll just know.”
“Sorry, I just… I’ve been all over the place lately,” Kaelix admits. “Working with Seible at his new thing, thinking about what else I can do… Just indecision after indecision. I’m sure he could see that and wondered.” He runs a finger around the rim of his mug. “But the weird thing is, I’m not even remotely disappointed about this. I mean, surprised still, yeah. But it feels like... like maybe this is what was supposed to happen all along. I don’t know. When I think about it like that, it honestly makes me feel a little insane. But it is what it is.”
His mother smiles, a soft, knowing curve of her lips, but doesn’t say more. She means to get up to clear the table, but Kaelix moves first, gathering the empty mugs and ferrying them to the sink. There’s something grounding in the familiar weight of them, in the gentle clink as he sets them in the sink next to the lunch plates.
“Oh, don’t worry about those,” his mother says, but Kaelix is already rolling up his sleeves, turning the faucet to let warm water cascade over the dishes.
“No, I’ve got it,” he insists. “You cooked. Served me up a nice, hefty piece humble pie for dessert too.”
His mom snickers at that. She watches him for a moment in that considering way she has, but nods eventually. “Alright. Well, I’ll go grab the stuff I said your sisters were asking for so you can take it with you later. I’ll be right back.”
Kaelix makes a noncommittal sound, already immersed in the simple mechanics of washing dishes—the slippery slide of the bubbly soap between his fingers, the methodical scrubbing. His mother’s footsteps retreat, then fade to creaks overhead as she moves through the upstairs hallway.
He’s halfway through the stack when he realizes he’s been cleaning the same plate for nearly two minutes, his mind elsewhere. The conversation about Freo, about the baby, loops in his head like a song he can’t quite get the rhythm of. Four, almost five months along already by now. Four more to go and he’ll be a dad before the year is out.
Dad. The word feels both too big and too small for what he’s facing. He thinks about his own and how he was, for the most part practical as he was steady, and had that streak of mischief that would surface in unexpected moments. The way he’d indulge Kaelix’s whining as a child, how he’d taught him how to iron a shirt properly or find constellations on clear summer nights. All those quiet moments of guidance and of presence.
Kaelix wonders what kind of dad he’d be. Whether he’ll know the right things to say or the right ways to be there. Whether Freo would even let him try.
He’s so lost in thought that he doesn’t hear his mother return until she’s setting something on the counter beside him with a soft tap. Kaelix blinks, drawn back to the present by the small, velvet-covered box now sitting next to the dish rack.
“What’s this?” he asks, rinsing soap from his hands and drying them on a nearby towel.
His mother hesitates, just for a second so brief that Kaelix almost misses it.
“A little pick-me-up,” she says, nudging the box closer to him. “Might help you make your case.”
Kaelix picks up the box. It’s clearly aged, velvet in deep burgundy worn smooth in places, the hinges slightly loose. It’s obvious what it is, but even when he opens it, he’s still not prepared for what he sees inside either way. Nestled in the lining rests a ring with a delicate silver band, polished to a soft gleam, catching the afternoon light. At its center is a round-cut diamond, held in place by fine prongs that lift it just enough to let breathe from the rest of the piece. On either side of it, two smaller stones cradle the centerpiece to draw the eye inward. He recognizes his mother’s engagement ring immediately, the one she rarely wears now except on anniversaries and special occasions.
“Mom,” he starts to say, but finds he can’t continue, his throat suddenly tight.
“Your dad and I saved up for this together, you know,” she says, tapping the box with a smile. “Back when we were just starting out. We couldn’t really afford much, but we wanted something that would last.” She reaches over and touches the ring lightly with her fingertip. “Mind you, we had a fight about it first, because your father, in all his wisdom, wasn’t exactly forthcoming about where the rest of his dwindling savings were going while we were in the middle of moving in together. And there was this whole thing about his respect for me as another alpha, doing things like that just because I was the one to get pregnant.” She laughs under her breath, clearly still entertained by it now. “And he just stood there looking terribly earnest. Swore up and down that he wasn’t trying to challenge me, he just couldn’t help being woefully sentimental and only wanted me to have something beautiful to look at during those long nights with a newborn before we could get married. And, well, you know me and beautiful things.”
There’s a joke thrown there about how he’s inherited that same proclivity from her, but Kaelix is too busy staring at the ring, at the way the afternoon light catches in the stones, sending little prisms dancing across his palm. It’s simple, but timeless in the way well-crafted things often are.
“Anyway, we decided the first one who bestows us with the title of grandparents gets it, so, congratulations, it’s yours now,” his mother continues. “For when you’re ready.”
Kaelix looks up, startled. “But this is your—”
“Oh, you know I have others now,” she interrupts, waving a hand at the collection of rings adorning her fingers. “Your father isn’t shy about anniversaries, as you know. There are the gifts from you and your siblings. But this one...” She touches the box again, her expression softening. “This one is special. It was the beginning of our family. Seems right that it should continue with yours.”
“Mom,” Kaelix manages, voice already watery from all his emotions welling up with no other place to go. She just laughs, pinching his cheek fondly before patting the same spot with a gentle hand.
“Thank you,” he mutters, head bowed to take the affection, before pocketing the box and shifting to stand in front of the wet dishes again to start drying them. She moves past him, humming absently as she bustles about the kitchen too.
He does a poor job of swallowing down the lump in his throat as he works through the last of the chores, feeling the weight of the box in his pants. He knows a ring won’t smooth over an argument, nor will it really convince Freo of anything he’s unwilling to believe, but it at least gives Kaelix a place to start.
As much as Kaelix would like to, he isn’t able to meet up with Freo again right away. He’s since had the ring adjusted but his days keep vanishing under mountains of work, legal meetings, and the long shadow of the case that still ties him to his ex-fiancée’s family. Every time he reaches for his phone to text Freo, or perhaps call, his courage collapses because he worries he’ll push too hard or that he’ll make things worse (as they currently seemed to stand). He worries about a hundred and one things that never seem to quiet down long enough for him to think clearly, the constant anxiety drowning out his resolve. And so, weeks pass before he realizes it.
The evening skyline glitters beyond floor-to-ceiling windows, city lights blink back among the pockets of dark, but Kaelix barely registers the view. His attention is focused on the small velvet box he’s been carrying in his pocket for close to three weeks now, turning it over and over between his fingers like a worry stone while the lawyers’ words about updates on the case and statements and whatnot faded into background noise earlier.
“Earth to Kaelix,” Seible says, waving a hand in front of his face. “The lawyer’s been gone like ten minutes. You can come back now.”
Kaelix blinks, fingers stilling on the box before he tucks it deeper into his pocket. “Sorry, just. Processing everything they said.”
“You said it,” Seible says, letting out a puff of air as he shakes his head. “But hey! It sounds like they’re wrapping up your part of it soon. That’s good, right?”
“Yeah. Good.” Kaelix’s voice sounds hollow even to his own ears. The litigation is predictably dragging on because it’s really just starting, his ex-fiancée’s family determined to extract some form of retribution for the canceled wedding and subsequent embarrassment. They’ve had to tread much more carefully around Seible’s end of it—an uglier matter with far higher stakes, well beyond the version of this they’d rather keep in play—so Kaelix has emerged, in their view, as the easier target. Which, thanks in no small part to Seible having prepared for that too, is proving less true than they’d hoped. Today’s meeting should have felt like a victory lap, with the lawyers assuring him the worst was behind them. Instead, he just feels emptied out.
Seible studies him for a moment, before getting up from behind his desk in his home office. “Hey, I know you’re not the type to unwind with a beer or anything, but I think I could really use one. Or three.”
“No, yeah, I get you.” He finds himself saying, and only realizes too late that his voice is rougher than he means for it to be. “I’ll have a little if you’re offering.”
“Who’s offering? It’s a moral imperative.” Seible’s already on his way to the kitchen, where the cabinets are as glossy as the piano in the living room and twice as unyielding.
Kaelix trails him, a few paces behind, allowing Seible the illusion of hostly authority. He loosens his tie, sinking into one of Seible’s plush kitchen stools. The kitchen’s always looked too clean to be truly functional, like an art director’s set-piece for a luxury cookware catalog. Kaelix has known Seible since he himself first entered this industry, back when his own net worth couldn’t cover a single shelf of the imported condiments lining Seible’s pantry. Some things never change. Seible’s complete inability to remember where he keeps anything in his own apartment, for one, has been as enduring as their friendship.
Kaelix stands at the edge of the island and watches the show. Seible opens three different upper cabinets (one holding a decorative tea service, one with unopened bags of gummy snacks, and the last just empty save for a single, unlabeled shaker bottle) before finally finding the liquor in a lower pull-out behind the bar. By the time he’s located everything he needs, Kaelix is leaning against the counter, amused in that tired, end-of-the-day sort of way.
“I’d offer you a glass of something fancier,” Seible says, holding up a bottle with a label that is undoubtedly premium, “but I’m legally required to celebrate the death of a contract with something that burns.”
“Dealer’s choice,” Kaelix says. He rubs at the base of his neck, the tension there solid enough to crack.
Seible splashes out two portions—one generous, one “generous” with air quotes. He slides the fuller glass to Kaelix and Kaelix doesn’t object.
“To freedom from your almost-in-laws,” Seible says, raising his glass.
Kaelix accepts the toast. It’s expensive stuff—Seible never skimps on the good things in life—and the warmth blooms in his chest almost immediately. “Thanks.”
“For the drink? Or for helping you escape from your arranged marriage?” Seible’s tone is light, but there’s an undercurrent of something beneath it that belies his own small worries over the matter. They’ve known each other too long for true levity about this particular topic.
Kaelix smiles despite himself. “Both. Mostly for still talking to me after I nearly married into your family.”
Seible winces. “After all this is over, let’s maybe never speak of that again.”
“Of course,” Kaelix echoes, grateful for the mutual agreement to bury the past where it belongs. He takes another sip from his glass. Whatever this is slides down with a honeyed warmth and it’s easy to let it linger on his tongue. The sweetness of it surprises him, although it’s still with just enough bite to remind you that it was alcohol after all, only mellowed with notes of vanilla and caramel. It feels like a small comfort against the aftertaste of the last two years. “This is nice. What is it, by the way?”
“I don’t know,” Seible responds brightly, taking a longer drink after. “It was a gift.”
Kaelix decides not to ask further.
The conversation slides easily into the kind of banter that only comes from years of knowing each other’s best and worst. Seible tells him about a new restaurant opening nearby, and Kaelix finds himself actually laughing at the story of a disastrous first date Seible recently had there. The drink warms his chest, loosens his tongue. He catches himself sharing a memory about a college party that he hasn’t thought about in years, the last time he saw two of his siblings, a few low stakes work-related things that Seible assures him he’s been handling well. The bottle between them empties steadily. His glass never seems to stay empty for long, though he can’t recall Seible refilling it. The kitchen lights blur into halos as the night stretches on, and Kaelix realizes his shoulders have finally dropped from what felt like a near-permanent hunch and tautness these days.
Eventually Seible’s eyes narrow, his brow furrowing as he watches Kaelix reach for the bottle again. “Whoa there, K-chan. That’s… how many glasses?”
Kaelix looks at his empty one, startled. He was on the way to reach for the bottle again. “Oh. Oh, no—sorry. Was I taking too much? I didn’t mean to finish it, I swear.”
Seible laughs, waving him off. “No, no. I just thought it was funny how I was saying you don’t drink much. You can have as much as you want… uhm, within reasonable amounts. And you seem mostly… fine?”
“Yeah,” Kaelix says, pouring again even though his hand wobbles slightly. “Mostly.”
Seible watches him drink, tracking his movements. He’s so focused that Kaelix finds himself looking away, back at the countertop, at his own wrist, at anywhere else. The words start to gather behind his teeth, crowding each other for space. The room goes still around the two of them, cut through only by the tick of Seible’s antique wall clock and the faint rattle of ice settling in the bucket on the counter.
Seible tilts his head, studying Kaelix with the sort of attention he wouldn’t be shy about voicing out if he had, perhaps, missed all the tension set in Kaelix’s shoulders.
“…you alright?” he asks Kaelix, quieter this time.
The question hangs there, nudging at whatever Kaelix has been trying to keep down. He swallows, throat tightening around the idea of keeping this private, the optics of telling your almost-brother-in-law your deepest worries about fatherhood (or not-fatherhood…) with someone else. But with consideration to their years-long friendship and that Kaelix hasn’t breathed a word of this to anyone other than his family wins out in the end. Seible, regardless, is adjacent, despite it all.
Kaelix takes a slow breath, willing himself not to fumble, and then tells him, “Freo’s pregnant.”
It comes out with the bluntness of a punchline that missed its cue. For a moment, neither of them says anything. The only sound is the soft thud of Seible’s slipper as it slips off his foot and hits the tile of the kitchen floor because he’s nearly knocked off his seat by the shock of righting himself to take this information in properly.
“Wh—oh my… I… since… uhm. Wha—” Seible’s face cycles through every possible reaction in the time it takes Kaelix to wet his lips and refill the glass.
“Five months by now.”
Seible stares at him before blinking himself back into the present, picking his jaw up from the floor. “Congratulations…!”
There’s a beat of silence that passes between them and it’s Kaelix who ends up speaking first. “He doesn’t want… He thinks I’m not ready for it.”
Seible’s eyes widen. “Oh! Oh. Wait—wait, hold on. You two haven’t been talking about, you know… Any of this? Like at all? Like, this wasn’t, uhm…”
“Planned?” Kaelix tries for a smile. He’s not sure it reaches his eyes, but he’s also not sure he cares for it to. He sets his glass down on the coaster and nearly misses the mark. “I don’t think I’d be drowning my sorrows in alcohol and talking about it like this if it was something we had planned for, Seible.”
“So you don’t want to—”
“No, oh my god.” Kaelix drops his head into his hands, and speaks into it, voice muffled and just shy of a whine. “Why does everyone think I don’t want this baby?”
“I didn’t say that! I’m just asking questions!” Seible lifts his hands defensively. “K-chan, relax. Just… Okay, so Freo thinks that then… That you aren’t ready?”
Kaelix nods, sighing before taking another drink that he definitely doesn’t need.
Seible shifts in his seat and sits with it for a moment before speaking again, his voice lowered now, stripped of some of its usual playfulness. “I mean, nobody’s ever really ready for this kind of thing, K-chan, so, I don’t know, maybe try not to be so hard on yourself. I mean, it’s always easier said than done but…”
Kaelix drags both hands down his face, stopping at his jaw where his fingers curl into fists. The frustration tightens in his chest like a spring wound too far. “That’s not—that’s not even the whole problem here,” he says, voice pitched higher than he means for it to be. “The problem is that he’s decided I feel that way. That I am that way. And ugh…”
Seible doesn’t try to talk over him. He doesn’t make a joke to soften it or steer him somewhere lighter. He just stays in his seat across from Kaelix, elbows resting loosely on the counter, watching him with an open expression that gives Kaelix space to keep going.
Kaelix lets out a long, ragged breath, his shoulders slumping as he cradles his glass between both palms. He stares into his drink, turning the glass slightly as if the answers might surface there. The alcohol has dulled the sharpness of his anger, but now the hurt underneath it all pulses with each heartbeat, demanding to be acknowledged. He takes another moment, feeling like he has to gather what he can of himself for whatever else he’s about to say.
“And while that’s eating away at me,” he starts, “what’s worse is that I think I get him. Actually I do get him. I’m not even sure I’m ready.” His voice cracks around the admission, heightened by the shame that creeps up his spine as he speaks all of his candid thoughts out loud. He drops his hands and stares at the counter.
“I’m not sure I’m ready,” he repeats, softer, a weary sigh punctuating his words. “But that matters less to me than wanting him to feel like he isn’t alone in this. But it seems like he’s already… there, you know? Just waiting for and making plans for that to happen.”
Seible leans against the counter, fingers tapping against the marble before going still again. The answer is no, Seible probably does not know, but he still doesn’t say anything to that, likely still giving Kaelix the room to empty himself out over his next few spiraling self-rebuttals, the guilt he keeps tucking under the rest of it. Kaelix rambles and can’t seem to stop, the exhaustion of the past few weeks urging him on.
Somewhere near the tail end of Kaelix’s aimless outpouring, the front door opens and closes. Neither of them really hears it until a familiar voice cuts into the heavy silence in the room.
“He told you already?”
Kaelix straightens fast enough that the stool legs scrape against the floor and make him wince.
By the time he looks up properly, Zeal’s already at the entryway of Seible’s kitchen. Kaelix blinks at him, mind slow from the alcohol and trying to reconcile the sight with the several layers of keypads and concierge checks Seible’s building requires just to reach the elevators.
Seible lifts a hand in a vague gesture, caught a little off guard by suddenly having to account for someone else in the room. “Ah, K-chan… he’s been helping me with a few things. Remember you put me in touch with Gin-chan about some music stuff?” He says it a little too fast, but Kaelix is near drunk enough that the explanation skims across the surface of his mind rather than settling anywhere useful. Besides, he has more pressing things to question.
Kaelix turns back to Zeal. “What do you mean by that?”
Kaelix watches Zeal’s gaze move methodically across the evidence of their evening: the bottle with its label facing outward, the amber liquid still swirling in his own glass, the condensation beading on Seible’s untouched drink. Something in Zeal’s expression shifts when he meets Kaelix’s eyes—a slight narrowing, perhaps cataloging the heat Kaelix can feel spreading across his own face, the alcohol-loosened muscles he can’t quite control. When Zeal glances at Seible instead, Kaelix recognizes that look—it’s the silent communication of someone deciding whether a conversation is worth having with a drunk man.
He takes a moment. Kaelix can almost see him sifting through possible answers.
“No, just… I was surprised to hear you’d heard by now, is all. I thought he was going to wait it out a bit longer.” Zeal steps closer, bracing a hand on the back of the opposite stool, posture loose in a way that gives him room to move if it might come to it and even Kaelix thinks it just might. Kaelix can only stare at Zeal, trying to line up the sentence with the tone it came in on.
There’s nothing dramatic about the way Zeal is speaking to him; he only offers what he has to say with the same casual weight of someone commenting on traffic that day or mentioning they’re out of coffee. It’s as he usually does to Kaelix too, and that alone throws him considering the subject matter at hand here. Kaelix’s insides are twisting themselves in knots amidst all that. Three weeks of sleepless nights, of staring at his phone wondering if he should call, of rehearsing conversations that never happened, of replaying how that first one could’ve gone better and pulling at each thread one miserable inch at a time—and here’s Zeal, posture relaxed, discussing Freo’s pregnancy like it’s a minor scheduling conflict.
“And,” Zeal adds after a beat, his gaze softening just slightly as it flickers briefly between the half-empty bottle and Kaelix’s face. A better, more sober Kaelix might have noticed the rueful tinge in Zeal’s expression, the way his brow furrows slightly. But this Kaelix, muddled by alcohol and frustration, misses it entirely. “He’ll have help. So you don’t need to worry too much.”
Seible shifts uneasily in his seat even though he’s largely unattuned to what else is happening on a pheromone-level. Kaelix can sense the outpouring of his own anger now through scent—metallic like wet pennies left to dry out in the sun—flooding the room. Zeal just stands there, radiating this infuriating steadiness, meeting it with a mute calm and his own that makes Kaelix want to knock something over. The air feels thick between them, like trying to breathe through wet cotton. Kaelix’s vision swims at the edges as he watches Seible’s eyes dart between them, waiting for whatever’s about to break.
Kaelix tries to work through whatever’s Zeal just set down in front of him in pieces, trying to locate what exactly he means. Help from whom, in what way, and why Zeal sounds so certain about all of it. There is a part of this decidedly not being said that Kaelix already knows the answer to. It’s more than likely that Zeal can tell and he’s just trying to get it back in words.
The kitchen lights reflect off the counter’s polished surface, glaring almost. His throat constricts as he realizes he’s gripping his glass so tightly his knuckles have gone white.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” The words scrape out of him, roughened and more raw than he expects. Something hot presses behind his eyes, and he blinks hard against it, breathes deep to fight to keep it down, but his chest already feels like it might crack open. He tries for calm, but his voice gives on him anyway, wavering in spite of himself.
“Wait,” Kaelix says, the word coming unsteadily as he fixes his eyes on Zeal. He swallows, fighting the thickness in his throat. “So. You know about it.”
Zeal doesn’t move for a second. His mouth flattens, and he shifts his weight almost imperceptibly. The pause stretches between them, Zeal’s eyes never leaving Kaelix’s face, searching for signs of how much truth he might be able to handle. Kaelix recognizes that careful calculation. Even now, with anger blustering his system, the realization stings: Zeal is handling him, measuring out the truth in careful doses like medicine for a child.
“...about the baby?” Zeal finally says, voice gentle in a way that makes Kaelix want to scream. Seible winces. “Yes.” Zeal wets his lips, hesitating on his next words. “The—uhm—babies, actually. Twins.”
Kaelix’s lungs seize mid-breath. The word drops into his stomach like a stone through ice, cracking something open deep in his chest. Twins. Not just one child he’d failed to be there for from the beginning. Seible makes a quiet sound somewhere across from him, but Kaelix can only hear the rush of blood in his ears, the thundering reminder of five months of absence, of moments he’ll never be able to take back. A sound presses up hard enough to hurt, but he forces it back down. The kitchen lights glare overhead, too bright and too exposing.
Twins.
His palm presses against the cool marble, searching for an anchor as the guilt threatens to pull him under completely.
Kaelix’s words come out thick and halting. “So my—so you’re telling me,” he stops, swallowing hard enough that his Adam’s apple bobs visibly before he speaks next, each syllable wobbling like he’s walking a tightrope, “that my—that my boyfriend has been talking to his ex about my child—” the word splinters in his throat as his fingers curl against the counter. “About my children. With him.” The final words emerge as a strained murmur, fractured by a tremor that runs through his entire body.
He knows it’s objectively worse to say it like this. Seible shoots Zeal a wide-eyed look as if to say “say something reassuring now, please,” but Zeal only exhales and sets his shoulders.
“Cut him some slack, Kaelix,” Zeal says. “You didn’t even know until three weeks ago—”
“I didn’t know because no one told me!” Kaelix snaps before he can stop himself, nearly hitting the countertop hard under his palm. “I’m sorry,” he says, dragging out the word, “I can’t seem to read minds.”
Zeal’s jaw shifts as he considers his response. He takes a breath like he’s about to say something measured, but then seems to abandon it.
“Yeah? Look. Be real with me for a second, Kaelix.” His voice rises just enough to match Kaelix’s intensity, though his eyes flicker with something like reluctance. “You and I both know any self-respecting alpha would’ve picked up on it the moment his scent changed. Or did you ignore the signs because it was easier? Keeping things slow, right? Wasn’t that the plan?” The words hang there, and despite the weight of it, some of the force leaves Zeal’s face, as if he’d just stepped over a line he hadn’t meant to cross. But Kaelix is too far gone to notice or care about the regret tightening the corners of Zeal’s mouth.
Kaelix opens his mouth to argue, but the words fall apart before they can really form and so he ends up saying nothing. It aches everywhere. His gaze falls to counter where his fingertips have gone paler against the marble, then drifts to his watered down drink with its promise of temporary relief, then finally settles on the space between things, that nowhere place that feels safer than meeting anyone’s eyes right now.
Zeal isn’t wrong and his words sit between them, unadorned, giving Kaelix nowhere to hide from the shape of the truth inside them. The longer the silence stretches, the more pieces slot properly into place—every moment he’d told himself not to pry, every time he’d stepped back instead of forward, every excuse he’d make about timing or caution or both.
He can see now how much of that came from the fear of pushing too hard, fear of saying he wanted more than Freo might’ve been prepared to give, fear of being wrong about whatever it is they were working toward by deciding to stay together. And even what that meant… They’d never really spoken of anything in absolute terms. At the time, that fear had felt like a steadying hand. Now it feels closer to a weight dropped on a fragile edge, spreading cracks with each second he avoids looking at them.
The lump in his throat rises fast. Kaelix stares at the counter until the surface starts to blur through the sting in his eyes. His hands stay braced on his knees, fingers trembling just slightly, anchoring the rest of him in place, but he can’t look at Zeal now. Heat gathers at the corners of his eyes, threatening to spill over if he so much as blinks. His throat feels like he’s swallowed broken glass.
A shuddering breath escapes him as the full weight of Zeal’s accuracy settles over him, unmistakable and impossible to dismiss. Part of him wonders if he should defend himself but another also just wants to ask Zeal about everything: how long he’s known, what exactly Freo has told him, why Zeal sounds so certain about details Kaelix is only now piecing together.
Seible lifts both hands, a gesture of peace as tension crackles in the air. “Okay, maybe we should all just take a moment to breathe,” he suggests, his voice wavering slightly, betraying the worry etched across his features. “Look, Gin-chan, you can see Kaelix is—” Kaelix winces at Seible’s use of his full first name, but can’t comment on it. Seible swallows and tries again. “Just… he’s clearly overwhelmed right now so maybe… maybe you could dial it back? It’s been a long day for everyone.” His attempt to mediate feels earnest, though the weight of his words hangs in the room, struggling to cut through the thick atmosphere; after all, what’s been said has already been said.
Zeal’s shoulders rise with a restrained inhale, then fall again. For a moment he looks like he might step toward Kaelix, but his hands stay at his side. Kaelix is almost grateful for that distance; he isn’t sure he could take comfort from Zeal right now without truly breaking apart at the irony of it all.
“Hey, I’m not here to fight,” Zeal says, voice dropping to a sort of careful tone that makes it clear he’s nervous but in this too deep to likewise go and take anything of what he’s said back, so he might as well.
“I’m just trying to give you another angle on things,” he adds, and then hesitates before continuing on to say, “you know how big this is for him, Kaelix. It’s not just the kids. It’s what you want to do with your life, too. And—look, I don’t mean to push, but—” he gestures vaguely between them, “do you?”
“Gin-cha—” Seible tries, but Zeal speaks over him.
“I just figured he needed a sure thing. It doesn’t have to be anything, not more than support, really—”
Whatever else he says blurs for Kaelix. His mind jumps ahead to the obvious: doctor’s visits, early appointments, the drives across the city, Freo walking into exam rooms while someone who wasn’t him waited outside. Every missed moment hits him in the gut, each one stacking on the last. He feels his throat tighten again, and Zeal’s voice filters back in at the tail end:
“Well, do you know?”
Kaelix’s pulse is a heavy thrum in his chest. His collar feels suddenly too tight, the room too warm as he opens his mouth and closes it once before managing, “I—I don’t know yet.”
Zeal nods. He sounds anything but patronizing but the thought alone does little to make feel Kaelix any better. “And that’s fine,” Zeal starts to say, “and it’s up to you, you know? But think about everything that’s happened so far. Where do you even meet in the middle like that?” He shakes his head slightly. “I just wanted to give Freo options.”
Kaelix’s jaw tenses. “That again. Options.”
Zeal doesn’t flinch, nor does he back down from the point he’s making. “Yeah. He deserves that at least, doesn’t he? After all this.”
Kaelix bites his lip and tears his gaze away, tongue pressing against his cheek as his hands ball into fists. The alcohol adds a fuzzy edge to his irritation, but beneath it is exhaustion, weeks of uncertainty, and the hollow ache of realizing he’d let silence shape more of this than intention ever did. “Zeal, I’m sorry, look. I get what you’re trying to do. I do. But it’s not your place.”
Zeal’s reply is immediate anyway. “That’s for Freo to decide, though, isn’t it?”
Kaelix closes his eyes for half a second, breathing through the sensation of barbed wire unspooling between his ribs. Zeal is right. Zeal has been right all night, and Kaelix hates how much of the truth he’s forced to see because of it. Freo might already be leaning toward one of those so-called options, and Kaelix knows he’s the one who left that space open.
The counter by now is near indistinct as the room shifts slightly under his feet, not spinning exactly, just unsteady in a way that makes Kaelix want to leave before he says something more that he can’t undo.
Seible watches them both, his worry still written plainly across his face.
Kaelix drags a rough breath in, already sorry to them both. “I’ll just… I’ll go,” he mutters, pushing himself upright. The stool legs scrape lightly against the floor as he tries not to topple over when he stands. “If you two have stuff to work on.”
“K-chan,” Seible says gently, stepping forward, “let me call you a driver, hold on.”
“No.” Kaelix grips the back of the chair until he finds his balance again. It takes a beat. “I’m fine. I can make it home.”
Seible looks like he doesn’t believe that for a second and Kaelix can see it in the pinch between his brows, but he doesn’t fight him or bother to explain further. Zeal stands with his arms folded loosely, watching Kaelix with a look that he can’t get a good read on with his mind muddled this much already. He can say as much that there’s no anger there, just a kind of quiet assessment that Kaelix doesn’t want to probe into right now.
He turns toward the hallway. His pulse thumps loud in his ears with each step. The night outside will be cold; the elevator ride will feel too long; he doesn’t care. He just really, really needs air right now and to be away.
Seible walks him to the door. “I asked the front desk to hail you a cab anyway,” he says with a soft huff as Kaelix shoves on his shoes. “Sleep this off, okay? You’ll think clearer and thank yourself for it later, I bet.”
Kaelix nods and pulls him into a loose hug. “Mm. I’ll… apologize to Zeal later,” he mumbles.
Seible squeezes him once. “Good. But just know I won’t let him off the hook either.”
Kaelix lets out a weak laugh at that, more air than sound. Seible pulls him into one more hug for the road, holding on just long enough to steady him before reluctantly letting go. The world tilts slightly as Kaelix steps into the hallway, the plush carpet muffling his unsteady footsteps. Behind him, the door clicks shut with quiet finality, sealing off the warmth of Seible’s house and finally leaving him alone with his thoughts, for better or worse.
Kaelix’s hands are steady on the elevator call button, but the rest of him is nothing but static and glass. The lobby of Seible’s building is so silent at this hour that every footstep from the security desk echoes off the marble in a way that feels vaguely like being shamed in a museum. The ride down is a floating, hot-cheeked blur, because he keeps replaying his own words from upstairs, every fumbled phrase and all the things he should have said and didn’t and couldn’t. Outside, the city air is cold and humid and he can taste the memory of Zeal’s voice in the back of his throat. It’s almost enough to sober him, but not quite.
He should go home. He should sleep this off, do what Seible and even Zeal would tell him and let things settle down. But it’s two in the morning and he’s well more than one drink past reasonable and every part of him feels like a puzzle missing the one center piece. So when the driver, cheerful in a way that makes Kaelix want to crawl out of his own skin, asks where to, he says the name of Freo’s street without even thinking.
The cab ride is an endless stretch of headlight reflections and city LED lights, their cold blue-white glare on the dark glass throwing everything inside into a flickering shadow-puppet show. Kaelix fidgets the entire way, biting at the nail of his right thumb, his leg bouncing incessantly. He tries once to pull out his phone and text Freo to warn him, but all that comes out is: “are you up?” and then, three dots, then nothing, and then he shoves the phone away because he’s terrified of what might come back.
He fumbles with the fare, gets the calculation wrong twice, and finally ambles out into the cold air of the street. The stoop leading up to Freo’s place looms before him, its concrete steps oddly tilted in his vision. He navigates them one by one, swaying slightly, guided only by the ambient glow of streetlights since the light above the door is off. At the landing, he stops in front of the door, palm flat against its surface, and pauses for a second to breathe.
He knocks. It’s somewhere between gentle and desperate, in that uncanny valley where you know you shouldn’t have shown up and yet here you are, stubbornly hoping for absolution.
Freo answers quick. He’s in an oversized threadbare sleepshirt and shorts, hair a little mussed on one side, eyes already scanning Kaelix’s face for clues. He perhaps clocks the redness there, the swollen look in the skin beneath, the way his posture seems to be collapsed in on itself.
“Oh, what the—Kaelix, are you okay?”
“Amazing, thanks,” Kaelix replies, and he means to smile but it breaks halfway and just comes out as strained.
Freo’s concern doesn’t manifest as panic, but as a rapid switch into caretaker mode: he steps forward and tugs Kaelix inside. He closes the door behind them, ushering Kaelix deeper into the space. Kaelix means to explain, maybe even apologize, but the words back up behind his tongue and instead all he can focus on is the way the shadows pool in the corners of the entryway and the way his stomach chooses that exact moment to remind him of how poorly he’s holding himself together.
He gets a mouthful of air, finds it sour, and then the acid surges up, hot and warning.
“I’m sorry—” he says, but he’s already covering his mouth, a flash of dread rising because the last thing he wants is for this to get any more embarrassing. He tries to move past Freo toward the bathroom, but Freo goes right with him, catching his elbow and guiding him the short way there with surprising force.
“Hey, slow d—” Freo tries, but Kaelix is already on his knees in front of the toilet, one arm braced on the edge and the other pressed over his lips.
He gags, and then everything comes up in a rush, the taste of liquor and shame and too many words he hasn’t yet said burning his throat raw. He can’t remember the last time he felt this sick and this stupid. Freo’s hands are instantly at his back, the touch is meant to be firm and grounding, but only makes Kaelix feel even more unmoored. He can feel one of Freo’s hands sweeping his hair out of the way and the other one rubbing up and down between his shoulder blades, moving in slow, mechanical circles.
“Easy, easy,” Freo murmurs gently, kneeling beside him. “Breathe through it. Don’t hold back.”
Kaelix wants to shake his head, to say something, but it’s all he can do to hold onto the porcelain and try not to die on the spot. He retches again, body shuddering, and then it’s over for a second and the room sways around him. He pushes back, sucking in air, and immediately wishes he hadn’t.
“Sorry—don’t—” He tries to shoo Freo away, but in doing so he manages to elbow him in the ribs, making him lose his balance momentarily. Kaelix realizes it with horror, and the panic on his face is immediate and obvious. “Oh god, I didn’t mean to—”
Freo just shakes his head, lips pulling into a faint, crooked smile as he rights himself next to Kaelix. “It’s fine. Nothing I can’t handle.”
There’s a warm palm cupping the side of his face, a thumb smoothing at the edge of his temple. Kaelix blinks, tears welling up in his eyes, unsure if it’s from the effort of throwing up or the sting of mortification. Likely both.
He huffs out a hollow laugh that turns into another dry heave, but when it passes, Freo is somehow right there with a glass of water and a steadying touch. “Here. Rinse, don’t swallow yet.”
Kaelix does as he’s told, swishing and spitting into the bowl. Freo’s fingers linger at his nape, gentle and insistent, thumb drawing soft lines against his skin.
“I’m so sorry,” Kaelix says again, voice hoarse and shaky. “I wanted to talk. I wasn’t supposed to be—”
Freo brushes the damp hair off his forehead. “You don’t have to talk right now. Just breathe first and we’ll get you sorted, alright? And then we can do words.”
Kaelix has never hated himself so much as he does in this moment. Freo shouldn’t be seeing him like this. And as much as he wants to revel in the care Freo is freely offering him, every gentle touch of his hand on Kaelix’s back only makes him feel smaller. He was supposed to seem ready. He was supposed to come back here and make a case for being someone Freo deserved. Instead he’s hunched over in his bathroom, unable to even meet Freo’s eyes, the bitter taste of failure mixing with the bile in his mouth because, well, now he’s just another problem added to the long list of things Freo has to take care of.
Kaelix’s hands are shaking, but he can’t seem to unclench them from the cold rim of the toilet even though the worst of it feels like it’s over. Freo gently pries his fingers loose and, with a quiet “c’mon, up,” helps him shift to sitting on the floor, back against the wall.
“Stay there. I’ll be right back.” Kaelix sits with his eyes squeezed shut, every sense dialed up to a screaming sensitivity. He hears the tap run, hears the soft clatter of glass, hears the faint rustle of fabric as Freo moves around the small bathroom. There’s a pause, and then the warmth of a towel at his cheek, and then Freo’s also wiping away the sweat and whatever else is stuck to his face.
When Kaelix finally opens his eyes, Freo’s kneeling in front of him again, soft hand cupped around the back of his neck.
“Sorry,” Kaelix rasps out for the third time.
“If you say that again, I’m going to feed you a mouthful of toothpaste without the brush,” Freo threatens, though there’s no ounce of heat to it.
Kaelix’s mouth twitches in what should be a laugh but comes out as a grimace instead. His throat feels raw and scraped hollow. When he looks up at Freo, his eyes are red-rimmed, face blotchy with shame. “Think you’d win that one,” he mutters weakly, swallowing hard against the burning sensation.
Freo smiles gently back at him, but the concern doesn’t leave his eyes. He reaches forward and starts undoing the buttons on Kaelix’s shirt, fingers deft and unhurried as they work them out one by one. Kaelix is so tired he doesn’t even question it, just lets Freo strip him of his ruined shirt, sliding it off his shoulders before tossing it somewhere behind him.
He only notices that the has been tub running when Freo stands to adjust the temperature, bare feet quiet on the tile. When he looks back, Kaelix is still where he left him, knees drawn up.
“You want to get in first, or do you need me to help?” Freo asks.
Kaelix tries to stand on his own and manages it, though he’s a little unsteady on his feet. Freo doesn’t comment, just helps him the rest of the way out of his pants, and Kaelix is dimly aware that he should feel awkward about being naked and sick and useless and Like This, but he’s so numb and wrung out that all he can do is let it happen.
Freo guides Kaelix to the tub, then helps him lower in. The water is hotter than Kaelix expects, and the shock of it brings him back to his body with a sudden jolt.
Freo kneels on the mat beside the tub. He dips a hand in the water, swirling it around, then grabs a cup and pours it gently over Kaelix’s shoulders, over his hair.
Kaelix’s lips barely part as he speaks. “You don’t have to do this.” The words come out like a whisper against frosted glass, hanging in the steam between them.
Freo’s face remains still, eyes flickering only once to meet Kaelix’s before returning to his task, setting the cup aside. “I know.” His fingertips press into Kaelix’s scalp, creating tiny circles of pressure there. “But I want to.”
He works shampoo into a lather, thumbs tracing the curve where skull meets neck. Bubbles slide down Kaelix’s temples in thin rivulets and each stroke of Freo’s fingers sends ripples through the bathwater, little waves lapping against Kaelix’s collarbone. Kaelix’s head grows heavy in Freo’s palms. He surrenders to the weight of it, eyes drifting closed as Freo’s nails scratch lightly behind his ears, then down to the nape of his neck. For a moment, the bathroom dissolves around them—pulling away the sticky residue of the night, the embarrassment, his too-loud thoughts, and the cab ride he spent with his forehead pressed against cold glass, counting streetlights as he passed.
When Freo finishes, he rinses the soap away and then stays, perched on the edge of the tub. “So what were you up to today? Before...” He gestures vaguely at Kaelix’s general state.
Kaelix sinks lower, water lapping at his chin. “Seible’s. Lawyers finished the deposition stuff.” His voice sounds hollow even to his own ears. “Then a few drinks.”
“You mean too many drinks?”
“Too many drinks,” Kaelix concedes.
“I can tell.” Freo’s mouth quirks up at one corner, not quite a whole smile. He swirls his fingers through the cooling bathwater, drawing invisible patterns beneath the surface.
For a long time neither of them says anything else. The only sound is the fan overhead and the faint drip of water from the faucet. Kaelix watches Freo’s fingers trace patterns in the water, sending out small rings that fade before they reach the edge of the tub. His chest aches with the weight of everything they shouldn’t but haven’t really been talking about. The careful distance in Freo’s eyes makes him want to sink beneath the water completely, but instead he clears his throat. He could say more now, he could start this conversation earnestly, but instead he hears himself asking:
“Did you eat dinner?”
Freo’s eyes flick up to meet his. “Mm, late lunch. I was going to make food if I got hungry again.”
Kaelix looks directly at Freo, water lapping at his collarbone. “You need to eat more than that, you know. If you’re—” The word sticks in his throat, lodged somewhere between rightful acknowledgment and the nervous kinetic energy that comes with so much as thinking about it. He bites his lip, the unfinished sentence suspended between them.
Freo’s gaze flickers, but he doesn’t make Kaelix say it. “I know,” he says softly.
They lapse into another quiet, and Kaelix finds himself tracing the grout lines of the tile with his eyes, like if he stares hard enough he can draw a path out of this moment and into a version of the future that doesn’t feel so raw.
When the water has truly cooled off, Freo stands and grabs a towel. “Come on, out before you turn into a prune. I’ll dry you off.”
Things happen in short order from that and with a brisk efficiency he’s always associated with Freo. Getting clothed at one point, although in only a pair of pajama pants because any collared shirts feel like something strangling at his neck right now, and probably contingency for if he ends up needing to lean over the toilet again later on.
It’s not long until they’re standing side by side in front of the mirror in Freo’s bathroom, brushing their teeth in quiet synchrony. Kaelix keeps his eyes down, focusing on the sink’s drain rather than risk seeing his own reflection. When he finally chances a glance upward, the mirror shows him exactly what he feared: puffy eyes rimmed red with exhaustion, a stranger’s face hollowed by shame. Beside him, Freo studies the back of the toothpaste tube off to the side, squinting slightly at the ingredients list. Kaelix’s gaze drifts to Freo’s profile, to the soft curve of his cheek, his usual put-together-waves a bit all over the place today, before he tears his eyes away, lest Freo catch him looking. The silence between them an aftermath of a storm, debris still everywhere around them.
They finish in near-unison, rinse and spit, and then Freo wipes his mouth with a small towel.
“Should get some sleep,” he says. His voice is a little husky from the hour and the earlier mess, but there’s a softness to it still.
Kaelix follows Freo out of the bathroom, the hallway light casting long shadows across the floor. Three steps toward the bedroom. Four. And then his hand reaches out before his mind catches up, fingers grazing Freo’s wrist. The touch stops them both in their tracks and it isn’t long before Kaelix steps forward to wrap him up from behind, arms cinched tight around Freo’s middle. He presses his face into the slope of Freo’s neck, where the skin is still warm from the bath and carries the soft, clean scent of soap over the milder traces of Freo underneath.
Kaelix breathes in deep, eyes closing as he relishes anyway, as he tightens his hold around him. “Missed you so much,” he murmurs, voice a rough scrape in the hush.
Freo’s hand comes up, palm covering Kaelix’s where it sits flat over his stomach. “Yeah,” Freo responds quietly, leaning back into him a little. “Me too.”
Kaelix loosens his grip, just enough for Freo to turn. They look at each other in the dim hallway light, a moment suspended between heartbeats. Kaelix’s thumb traces the curve of Freo’s cheekbone, skimming over the soft skin there, mapping the face he’s missed for so long. Then he leans in, kissing him slow and full of all the mess and want he’s been carrying for weeks. Freo doesn’t pull away, arms sliding around Kaelix’s shoulders, fingers threading through the still-damp hair at the nape of his neck, pulling him closer until there’s nothing between them but shared breath.
That first kiss is needy, and the next is hungrier. Kaelix pushes Freo back gently against the door frame to his bedroom, like if he can just get close enough the world might stop coming apart at the seams. He kisses until his lungs feel short of air, until the only thing left is the taste of Freo.
Freo finally breaks it, hands holding Kaelix in place as he rests their foreheads together.
“Wait—” he says, breathless, and Kaelix freezes, his chest stuttering with it.
He doesn’t say anything at first, but the look in Freo’s eyes tells him it’s not rejection. Not yet, at least.
“What is it?” Kaelix asks eventually, keeping his voice as level as he can. But he’s already spiraling: Did I do something wrong again? Am I overstepping? I should not have come here tonight. Everything a mile a minute.
Freo shakes his head. “Just… this. It’s a lot.” His fingers tighten fractionally at Kaelix’s nape. “You’re still not really here, are you?”
There’s truth in Freo’s words and though Kaelix wants to deny it, he only finds himself stilled, mind waterlogged, thoughts moving slow and murky beneath the surface of too much alcohol and the thousand other things swimming alongside it. He’s been drifting all night, tethered only by the warmth of Freo’s fingers against his skin. The bath, the comfort, his kindness—all of it standing as temporary scaffolding keeping a crumbling building from falling apart. Every worry he’s had leading up to now, his fresh jealousy of Zeal, the hollow ache of all the moments he’d missed, and the uncertainty of where all this was headed, press at his sternum where the one breath he’s been holding on to so he can keep himself together threatens to give.
His gaze travels over Freo’s face, searching, but for what yet, Kaelix doesn’t really know. He’s busy picking his resolve up from the floor and he means to ease Freo into this, to get the answers to his burning questions with the same gentle patience Freo usually meets him with, but what comes out instead is, “were you really thinking of raising them with him?”
Freo freezes, eyes widening. “What? Did he—did you—”
Kaelix feels a hot flush crawl up his neck, muscles tightening in his jaw as something cold and sharp slides between his ribs at the telling expression on Freo’s face. The hurt surges into his throat before anything else can claw its way to the surface. The realization must be clear to Freo too and written plainly across Kaelix’s face because Freo’s posture changes instantly as they take a step back from each other. Freo frowns, shoulders squared like’s bracing for impact.
“What did you mean by that?” Freo asks, brow furrowing into the crease that only appears when he’s truly worried.
Kaelix’s stomach twists with a sickening lurch. The thought of Zeal standing where he should be, helping raise his children, floods him with the same bitter shame that had crashed over him at Seible’s apartment. All that anger just dissolves into the gutting recognition that what he’s really done here is leave that space empty and create the void Zeal had stepped into. That he’s failed before he’s even begun.
“You were considering it,” he says. His voice comes out steadier than he expects, a thin veneer of calm over the roiling mess inside. His hands tremble at his sides, and he curls his fingers into his palms to stop them. “Zeal’s offer. You were actually... you were thinking about it.”
Freo blinks, startled just before the frustration flickers across his face, his eyes narrowing slightly and the corners of his mouth tightening in a small frown. “I did discuss something like that with him. But I thought… I thought you were going to think about it. And bring this up again when you were really ready to talk about it?”
The confirmation hits Kaelix like a slap, as does Freo’s deflection. He tastes metal late, realizing belatedly he’s bitten the inside of his cheek. “So you did talk about it with him?”
Freo fixes him with a disbelieving stare. “Are you serious? Right now?”
Kaelix’s heart hammers against his ribs, each beat a warning drum. His mouth goes dry as sandpaper. “Just... just please answer the question.”
Freo rolls his eyes, hands on his hips. “We did, alright? Happy? But not—” he exhales, before forging on, “it wasn’t anything concrete and just, you know, contingencies. We were talking as friends. And you…”
“What about me, Freo?” Kaelix echoes in a rasp, throat tight. He blinks, Freo’s face blurring a little before him. His mouth pulls tight; when his lower lip starts to give on him, he bites down hard enough to stop it and turns toward the window instead, where the late evening-early morning presses still dark against the glass.
Freo’s voice softens, although the tension remains in his shoulders as he speaks. “And you just… You have everything ahead of you. I didn’t want to make you feel pressured to take all this on when whatever’s been going between us was still so new, so I—”
“Yeah?” Kaelix cuts in, his voice a raw scrape. He starts pacing before he’s fully aware of it, turning away only to wheel back again a second later, too wound up to stay still. “If you were so intent on giving me ‘options,’ you should’ve just given them to me from the start.” He swallows hard against the pressure building in the back of his throat, but it does nothing to ease the anger threaded through it too, low and quiet and no less painful for being held in check. He drags a hand through his hair, takes another step, then another. “Why wait? Why tell anyone else but me? Why even entertain that offer and consider raising our child—” His voice wavers, but he pushes through it anyway, rushing to speak everything that’s been on his mind. “No, our children—which, by the way, I didn’t even know you were having twins.” He lets out a hollow laugh and turns back toward Freo again. “Because, surprise, someone seems to have forgotten to tell me.”
Freo frowns. “I was not— I told you, it’s not like I said I’d marry him—”
“Then, what?” Kaelix cuts in, voice rising. Freo glares at him, but Kaelix barrels on. “He’s there for every doctor’s appointment? When they babies are born? You might as well have, Freo! At this point, what’s stopping you?”
Freo’s eyes widen slightly, brows drawing together in a look that’s equal parts hurt and indignation. His mouth opens, then closes, but he doesn’t say anything at first. Kaelix knows that he’s rightfully affronted about it but can’t take the words back either.
The fight visibly drains from Freo. He takes a deep breath before lifting his gaze to him again. “I guess we’re just wasting each other’s time then, right?” The question comes out flat in a way that makes Kaelix’s chest constrict. He sees Freo hand gently touch his stomach, a protective gesture so subtle Kaelix almost misses it.
"No, no wait. Freo, wait. I'm sorry that—" Kaelix reaches out, but stops short of touching him. The words die in his throat as he catches the exhaustion etched into Freo’s face and how he holds himself in a way that’s clear to Kaelix the last thing he should be doing right now is get any closer. Kaelix's fingers curl back toward his palm, the rejection lancing through him as Freo draws another breath to speak.
“All I’m asking of you, Kaelix,” Freo cuts in, his voice dropping to it’s usual softness, although it shakes as he tries to articulate himself, “is that you… that you sit and have a quiet moment with yourself and really think about what you want.” He looks away, throat working as he swallows. “Because the last thing I want is for you to wake up one day and realize this isn’t the life you wanted, that you could’ve had more or better, or just... something that wasn’t all this—” his hand makes a vague gesture to punctuate his words, encompassing him, the apartment, and everything between them, “—and then resenting me for that.”
Kaelix reels back. The sudden, fierce sadness of it makes him dizzy. “So you just… what, decided for me?”
Freo is quiet, his eyes dropping to the floor between them, just enough to confirm that Kaelix is right about that much, at least.
“Freo, I...” Kaelix starts, then stops. His legs feel suddenly unreliable beneath him. He sighs as he runs his hands through his hair in frustration, before dropping heavily onto Freo’s couch. The cushions exhale beneath his weight as he leans back, staring at the ceiling. His fingernails dig crescents into his palms while he blinks rapidly, willing the heat behind his eyes to subside. The refrigerator hums in the kitchen. The wall clock ticks. If Freo sees him crying now, it’s over—just more proof that Kaelix is exactly what Freo thinks: too immature to handle fatherhood, too much of a mess to trust with anything this fragile, too much. But the words spill out anyway.
“I’m scared, Freo,” he finally admits.
Kaelix stares at his trembling hands, then presses the heels of his palms against his eyes until he sees stars. “I just… I keep thinking maybe you wouldn’t want me anymore after all of that. After everything we’ve been through together and apart. All I’ve seemed to do since we met is put you through the wringer.” His voice cracks. “And then after I found out, I couldn’t help but wonder if, maybe you were hesitant to let me know because you’ve seen something in me that might’ve proven to you that I wouldn’t be good enough…” He feels the heat and the dampness there, where he’s pressed against, but can do little to control the way it wets the rest of his cheek, his hands.
Tears track down his wrists and he reluctantly pulls off from holding himself like that, lowering his hands and finally looking up. Freo is watching him from where he’s standing still, expression unreadable. At first, Kaelix’s stomach drops, thinking of what Freo must be taking in right now. And it’s not the lover, not his partner, or someone who could ever hope to be his alpha, but just the guy with “everything ahead of him.” Just the guy seated and crying on his couch. Just Kaelix proving Freo right with every shaky breath it takes for him to say whatever’s on his mind.
But then the tight line of his mouth relaxes, as do the look in his pretty eyes.
Freo’s gaze softens, holding Kaelix’s with the same quiet tenderness he recognizes from the day he thought they were going to lose all this before it even began, from the night he’d managed to coax those would-be vows out of him.
There’s a movement and a shift in the quality of the silence that’s settled between them. The city outside is still dark, but the horizon’s edge is just beginning to pale, a faint suggestion of morning floating over the rooftops and casting a bruised-blue haze through the window. Kaelix still wants to crawl inside himself and disappear, or at least find a way to freeze time at this exact moment before anything else can go wrong.
“Make some room,” Freo says quietly, voice cutting through all the static in Kaelix’s head.
Kaelix startles a little, then blinks in understanding, shifting back so his back presses against the seat better, clearing space in the mess of cushions and a half-finished argument.
Freo settles his weight onto Kaelix’s thighs, face a little pale in the rising light. He presses into him, allowing himself to be gathered in. They stay like that for a moment, just looking at each other, whatever else they had to say suspended between their shared breaths, or lost to it at this point, really. Freo tilts his head, nosing at Kaelix’s neck, at the pulse of his scent gland somewhere. He inhales, eyes fluttering closed before pressing his lips to that tender spot, trailing upward with unhurried purpose. When their mouths finally meet, Freo’s thumb catches something wet on Kaelix’s cheek. Kaelix blinks, making more tears fall, but Freo just brushes them away, one after another as they continue to kiss.
They part only enough to breathe. The city outside glows the color of tin and spent matches, dawn not so much rising as it is leaking in through the spaces between buildings.
Freo stays close, his mouth still soft from kissing, his eyes searching Kaelix’s face checking for damage and finding, somehow, that the answer is not as dire as it had been an hour ago. He lifts a hand and smooths a loose lock of Kaelix’s hair back behind his ear. His fingertips linger there, warm against the shell of it, against the line where Kaelix can feel his pulse still trying to behave like it hasn’t been badly handling the entire night. The rush of tenderness that fills him floors him in recognition of the feeling mirrored back to him in this way. That the sunlight has pooled beneath his ribs, spilling outward from his sternum to his fingertips to leak through his own scent.
Kaelix’s hands settle more firmly at Freo’s waist and over the small of his back, drawing him in with an instinct he doesn’t bother disguising. Freo isn’t showing much yet, not in any way that might catch a passing stranger’s eye, even at five months, but like this, with all that soft, stubborn closeness between them, Kaelix can feel it. The faint curve of him pressed against Kaelix’s abdomen, though slight, undeniable. His fingers flex where they hold Freo, and the motion earns him the smallest shift in Freo’s expression, something gentler than surprise.
“You know what’s funny,” Freo says after a beat.
Kaelix huffs out a breath because he’s still reeling. “No,” he replies truthfully.
The corner of Freo’s mouth twitches, eyes crinkling.
“Not right now at least,” Kaelix adds, pouting a little, because his head is still too full of feeling to make room for anything so orderly as humor.
The ensuing smile Freo gives him is like catching a patch of blue sky after a week of rain.
“We’re wearing a matching set.”
Kaelix blinks and looks down like the information has to travel the whole length of him before it can make sense. He looks down at himself and, sure enough, finds his own legs clad in striped mustard-yellow and off-white pajama pants he doesn’t remember buying but absolutely remembers folding into one of Freo’s drawers. Freo, meanwhile, is wearing the top half of the same set, the shirt hanging loose on him because it is very obviously Kaelix’s and therefore too broad through the shoulders, too long in the sleeves, the cuffs shoved back past his elbows in a way that makes the whole thing look unfairly domestic.
“I noticed earlier,” Freo adds, and there’s something helplessly amused in his voice now, like he still can’t believe the timing of it. “When we were fighting... I couldn’t stop thinking how ridiculous we probably looked.”
Kaelix huffs out another breath that almost becomes a laugh again. “That’s what you were thinking about?”
“Among other things.” Freo traces his fingertips lightly along Kaelix’s shoulder. “Made it seem like we’ve been doing this for years.”
The fondness in his voice does something helplessly warm to Kaelix’s chest.
Freo’s gaze only softens as he speaks. “And when I thought that… I guess I realized then and there that I wanted that. All of this, really. With you.” He glances down briefly, thoughtful in a way that only pronounces the ache in Kaelix’s chest further. “Maybe less of the fighting, if we can help it. But it kind of really sank in then that we could finally have this, you know?” His hand comes back to Kaelix’s face. “Maybe the babies are just speeding the process up along.”
Freo says it with such quiet honesty that Kaelix can’t do anything with it except take it in and let it ruin him a little. It’s too much in the terrible excellent sense of it, leaving him stripped down to the simplest possible truths.
Freo strokes his cheek again, then leans in and presses a kiss to Kaelix’s forehead, absurdly indulgent, more openly affectionate than he’s ever been with him, maybe because they’ve both run out of places to hide. Freo is kind, yes. Freo is patient, often to the point of sainthood. But this particular softness, this open and unguarded way of tending to him, feels almost lavish.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs against him. “But if you’re serious, Kaelix, then I really shouldn’t be so stubborn about what I think is best for you, if you’re sure about what you want.” He exhales something rueful. “And I’m sorry for being so stubborn in the first place. For hurting you and… for not telling you sooner.”
The tears threaten to come back so quickly that it’s almost embarrassing in its efficiency, except Kaelix is running on empty and also not, so he doesn’t have it in him to care too much anymore either. He drops his face into Freo’s chest and wraps both arms around his middle, holding him as carefully as he can while still clinging, the fabric of the pajama shirt bunching under his hands. Freo’s palm moves over his back in slow, steady passes that make him feel humiliatingly manageable.
Kaelix stays there until the wave passes enough for him to breathe around it.
When he finally lifts his head, his throat still feels a little tight. “Were you like that because you were scared?”
Freo hums in consideration. He doesn’t rush the answer to soothe him, which Kaelix has always respected even while resenting it on occasion.
“A little,” he concedes after awhile.
Kaelix studies him. He isn’t sure if he wants to keep probing, but because he is the way that he is, he does anyway.
Freo gives a small shrug, but the expression on his face open is honest without being careless about it. “Partly, that, I guess. And for what it’s worth, it really wasn’t anything. Reimu would’ve been there too, it’s just that, incidentally, Zeal has a car…”
He trails off, knowing how flimsy that sounds once said aloud. “So, less that and more… Mostly because I knew you’d be like this when you found out, for better or worse.”
His gaze slips away from Kaelix for a moment, toward nothing, toward the dim edge of the room where dawn keeps gathering itself. “I was scared you’d act like this and immediately choose the more difficult road, knowing I was the one who sort of led you down there... here.”
Kaelix shakes his head. “It takes two to tango, Freo.”
“Well, true…” Freo trails off, mouth quirking.
“And for what it’s worth, I really did think about it, I—”
He stops as a memory finally catches up to him, sitting on Freo’s couch, holding him like this. Freo notices it without missing a beat, because of course he does. His expression shifts into something small and knowing, and he tilts his head toward the side table beside the couch.
Kaelix follows that gesture, his line of sight meeting the box in plain view. As velvet and stately aged and a deep, dark wine red as the day his mother gave it to him.
He goes still. “So you saw it?”
“I did empty out your pants before throwing them in laundry,” Freo says.
Kaelix winces. “Better than it accidentally breaking your washing machine, I guess.”
Freo laughs, a quick bright thing that unspools more of the tension still lingering, lighting up the room with the sound. Kaelix stares at him for a second longer than necessary, mostly because every time he’s heard him laugh in the last hour feels like waiting for the rope to lower down to bottom of the emotional well he’s found himself in.
“I went home recently,” Kaelix explains without prompting, reaching for the box. The velvet catches slightly against his fingers before yielding. “Partly because I missed my family. And partly to debrief with my mom.”
Freo’s brows lift in mild sympathy at that phrasing.
“She, uhm, gave me an inheritance, I guess,” he tells him, opening the box between them. “In hopes that it might help convince you.”
They both look down at it between them.
Freo smiles, small and private. “I see.”
Kaelix glances at him from under his lashes. “Uh… So, is it working?”
Freo’s tips his head, and with the faintest spark of mischief in his voice, just says, “I can maybe be persuaded.”
Kaelix laughs then, properly this time, the first real laugh of the night, and the relief of it feels so strange and easy in his own chest that he almost has to stop and listen to it. Freo smiles at hearing it, and for a moment they just sit there with the box open between them, the whole absurd fragile future of it glinting softly in the half-light.
Then the quiet folds over them again, lengthening as it does, but not in the brittle way it did earlier. They look up from the ring to each other, and something about it does feel like the first time in too long that they’re getting a good look at one another, not through panic or shared guilt or from borrowed grief. Not through timing, or emerging from the wreckage, or all the things that had once made them impossible and then, somehow, inevitable anyway.
Kaelix takes a breath and lets it out slowly.
“Freo,” he glances up, just once, to see Freo listening with that same attentive stillness that’s always made him feel entirely too visible. He wets his lips and continues, “you once told me that you’d choose me, even if we didn’t get it right the first time, or in times when we don’t even make sense.”
Freo’s eyes widen a fraction.
The memory opens between them with startling clarity: Freo on Kaelix’s couch beneath light too warm for the hour, holding crumpled pages that were supposed to be about someone else, speaking too steadily for words that had never belonged to them. Kaelix had sat there then with his whole life up until that point tilting under him, understanding too much and not enough, while Freo gave away something neither of them could afford to put a proper name to. He remembers the cadence of it more than the exact order, the terrible gentleness, the way Freo had looked at him after, in acceptance of the cost of letting all of that tenderness go.
“Well,” Kaelix starts, and his voice nearly fails him on the next part, emotion rising so fast he has to push through it, “I think that’s… all of the above right now.”
Freo’s laugh is soft, helpless, and touched through with his own nerves. He strokes his thumb over the back of Kaelix’s hand where it rests near the ring box.
“So, I hope you’ll do good on that promise,” Kaelix adds.
“Those were just hypotheticals at the time,” Freo points out, though there isn’t any real resistance in it.
“I don’t know,” Kaelix says, smiling despite the sting behind his eyes. “I also recall a certain someone saying he meant all of it.”
Freo rolls his eyes, but fondly, the motion undercut by the color rising into his cheeks. “Okay, fine, whatever.”
And just because he’s feeling more himself now, and can’t help it, he adds, “I also recall someone saying that he’s all mine now.”
That lands exactly where Kaelix hoped it would and that blush deepens. Freo doesn’t deny it, which feels even better than if he had in that adorable, indignant way of his, just for the sake of it.
Kaelix’s hand tightens around the ring box. He looks at Freo and lets himself do what he should have done a long time ago: say the thing clearly, without disguise, without asking for someone else’s crisis or someone else’s timing to carry it for him.
“Freo, I know I’ve said this before. That you’ve made every hard decision up to this point, for both of us. And you’ve always said all the difficult things that had to be said between us. Whether it was those vows, or at…” He draws in a careful breath. “At the wedding.”
Freo goes very quiet and very still.
“So it’s only fair that I tell you now that I’ve always loved you.” The words keep tumbling out of him, each one making the next easier and harder at once. “I’ll always love you. And it’s almost scary how overwhelming it is, and near oppressive when I think about just how much. I’m always afraid of how that might scare you too.” He gives a tiny, helpless smile. “I’m sorry it’s taken so long, but, Freo, I’m only yours now.”
For one suspended second, Freo just stares at him.
His eyes widen, just slightly, and the blush high on his face deepens in a way that Kaelix, under any other circumstances, would have smugly treasured for at least a week. Even now the sight of it strikes him clean through. For all Freo’s poise, for all his maddening ability to remain composed through disasters and difficult conversations and other people’s emotional incompetence, surprise looks beautiful on him. So does being loved openly. So does this. He has the absurd thought that he could live on the sight of it for years.
Kaelix smiles at Freo, through the thundering of where fear still lives in his chest alongside where he is entirely helpless about being in love, as he lifts the ring from where it’s been nestled in the box for too long at last.
Then, finally, he lets himself ask for the future he has, until now, only ever allowed himself in pieces.
“Marry me? Please?”
Later, once everything has quieted, Freo’s bedroom settles into that peculiar, velvety stillness that only seems to exist in the first hours of morning, when the curtains are still drawn and the world outside feels held at bay by fabric and shadow. Freo’s sheets are soft and faintly cool where they are not warmed by their bodies, and Kaelix lies half-tangled in them and half around Freo, too awake with happiness to sleep yet, even as his limbs begin to grow pleasantly heavy.
It should probably concern him, how quickly his mind leaps from the enormity of what has just happened to logistics. Instead it seems like the most natural thing in the world, as though loving Freo has always wanted somewhere practical to go.
“So, it’s bi-weekly?” he murmurs, voice low in the hush. “Okay. I can work around that. I mean it. I don’t care if Seible has to suffer a little for it.”
Freo makes a soft sound against his chest, somewhere between amusement and sleepiness, but Kaelix is already going.
“No, really. He’ll live. He might act like the company falls apart if I’m gone for a few hours, but I’m starting to suspect he just enjoys complaining as a hobby. And if he says anything, I’ll remind him this is technically his fault for employing me in the first place.”
That earns him a quiet breath of laughter, warm against his skin.
Kaelix tips his head down to look at him. Freo is tucked close, one leg threaded with his, hair mussed into the pillow and across Kaelix’s shoulder in smoky turquoise disarray that makes him look younger and softer, though the ring on his finger and the fresh mark at his neck undo that thought just as quickly. Kaelix’s chest tightens with a tenderness so immediate it is almost disorienting. He’s still more than a little dazed by both.
“We should talk about living arrangements too,” he says, a little more softly, though not with any less momentum. “I mean, we can stay here for a while if that makes more sense, or mine, though mine probably needs more work if there are going to be babies in it. But it’s probably fine for while we wait. And we can find somewhere new, properly new, and start there.” He pauses, already picturing things with the intensity of someone who has spent too long being denied the right to imagine them. “Do you think we’d be the sort of people to paint the nursery ourselves?”
At that, Freo yawns.
It isn’t a restrained yawn either. It catches him whole, opening his mouth against Kaelix’s shoulder, his body softening further as the fatigue overtakes him.
Kaelix huffs a laugh. “Am I boring you already?”
Freo only nuzzles closer in immediate apology, pressing his nose beneath Kaelix’s jaw and fitting himself there with sleepy instinct. “No,” he murmurs, draping himself over Kaelix a little closer. “I just get so sleepy these days.”
Kaelix smiles and slides a hand down his back. “That makes sense.”
And it does. Of course it does. Freo has been living for three people. The thought arrives simple and bright at first, affectionate in its logic, but then something quieter opens beneath it. Three people. For months. Carrying that weight, however lightly he has made it seem. Going to work, making decisions, getting through each day with those two small lives tucked inside him and no one beside him for the worst of it.
The ache of that realization is a little different now than it was before, no longer cut through with the sharpness of panic or guilt. It is gentler, heavier, and a sorrow he can hold without being split by it completely in half.
Before it can settle too deeply into his face, Freo lifts himself just enough to kiss him, soft and unhurried, as if he’s somehow felt the turn in Kaelix’s thoughts without the need for it to be said out loud. Then he mutters, voice drowsy and warm, “I’ll be in your care.”
Something in Kaelix goes helplessly soft.
He smiles and presses a kiss to Freo’s forehead, then draws him in a little closer, one hand smoothing slowly up his back until his fingers skim the fresh mark at Freo’s neck. “Mm,” he hums, because anything fuller would probably come out too thick.
He breathes Freo in again, more deliberately this time, his face half-buried in Freo’s hair.
At first, before everything had become impossible to ignore, Kaelix hadn’t let himself think too hard about the change. Or perhaps he had, and simply chosen foolishness over understanding. There had been days at Freo’s apartment when the air felt sweeter somehow, gentler, touched by something floral and damp with green freshness, and Kaelix, in a feat of astonishing self-protective idiocy, had assumed Freo must’ve bought some sort of aroma diffuser. Something tasteful and quietly expensive. Something Freo-like enough to keep Kaelix from looking any closer.
Now, with Freo given into the bone-deep tiredness and in his arms, their lives remade around them, the truth is almost embarrassingly obvious. His scent has grown sweeter.
Not cloying, never that. Freo has never smelled saccharine. It is lilies more than anything now, fresh in bloom, the petals still cool with rain. A dewy kind of sweetness, calm instead of heavy. Flowers and mint and that dark, grounding richness of coffee beneath it all. Kaelix remembers, with a small private thrill, that Freo only used to smell like this when he was aroused, and was told once before that it was the same edging toward pre-heat, when his scent would open up for brief moments and then fold back into itself. But this is different, and constant now. Settled into him. His body, changed and speaking in ways Kaelix had not yet learned how to hear.
He lets himself drink it in.
His hand slips gently along Freo’s side, stroking with absent care, then drifts lower to the soft curve of his belly. Freo already has one hand resting there in sleep-heavy instinct, and Kaelix traces close to it rather than over it at first, his touch reverent enough to surprise even himself. He keeps it there, smoothing slowly, until Freo’s breathing deepens and evens out.
For a while Kaelix simply lies there watching nothing, feeling everything. The room is dim and warm. Somewhere beyond the curtains, the city is beginning to sort itself into day, but here the light only sneaks through in fine pale lines at the edges, not enough to disturb the dark.
Eventually he settles his own hand over Freo’s.
The ring presses cool and small against his skin before warming there, the sensation so strange and good that Kaelix can only smile with his eyes closed. He feels the shape of Freo’s hand beneath his, the gentle rise of Freo’s body with each breath, and at last his own exhaustion begins to tug him under too.
Kaelix is already halfway through drifting off, when something flutters beneath his palm while he adjusts his hold of Freo.
He stills instantly.
It isn’t anything dramatic. Not a kick like in stories, not some unmistakable jolt. Only a soft movement, delicate and brief, like something tiny turning in sleep. But it had definitely been there. Entirely, impossibly there.
Beside him, Freo stirs just enough to murmur, voice rough with sleep and eyes still closed, “you feel that?”
Kaelix nods before he realizes Freo can’t see it. He presses his face into Freo’s hair instead, brushing a kiss to his forehead because he needs to put his mouth somewhere, needs to hold this moment in his body as much as his mind. “Yeah,” he whispers, and his heart clenches so hard it almost hurts, except this time the pain is made of wonder.
Freo smiles without waking properly. “Saying hi, I think.”
Kaelix has to blink against the sudden sting in his eyes. He kisses Freo where he can reach again, lingering there for a second before drawing him closer with all the care he can manage, mindful of the hour, of Freo’s tiredness, of the fact that his happiness feels large enough to become unruly if he isn’t gentle with it.
He stays quiet after that. The movement doesn’t come again right away, and maybe it had only been one of them, or both, or simply some small shifting that means nothing and everything. It doesn’t really matter. The knowledge of it anyway stays under his hand like a second pulse.
Eventually the twins settle, or the twin, whichever one of them it had been, and the room goes back to stillness.
Kaelix keeps his face close to Freo’s head, breathing in dew-kissed lilies and mint and coffee, his hand still folded over Freo’s on that slight, precious curve. The lines of morning light grow a little clearer through the curtains, thin gold finding the seams of the room, and sometime beneath the dim, patient brightness, they finally fall asleep like that, gathered into each other and held fast.
It’s a month later, give or take, and a Tuesday that arrives under steady rain with the kind of stubbornness that makes everything look slightly grayer and more intimate at once. It beads on windows all morning, turns the streets slick and reflective, and rattles softly against the glass of the conference room he and his team are working in today until Kaelix starts checking the time often enough that even people who don’t usually notice such things begin to look amused.
He said he’d only be in for half the day. In theory, that should’ve meant a clean exit. In practice, nearly everyone seems to need something from him before noon. There’s a stack of approvals that somehow can’t wait, a call he has to sit in on because no one else remembers half the details, and one entirely avoidable crisis involving a campaign deck and a panicking junior producer, which, in Kaelix’s private opinion, could have solved itself if everyone had stopped replying all for ten more minutes.
By the time he’s finally shrugging into his coat, he’s vibrating with a particular kind of impatience that makes him more efficient rather than less. Seible, watching from the doorway of his office with the insufferable delight of someone enjoying this far too much, waves to make his presence there known.
“Let’s go, let’s pick up the pace~” he sings out, practically ushering him out of their floor with the force of his own good mood. “Go on, K-chan! Can’t keep him waiting.”
Kaelix gives him a look that’s meant to be withering and is probably ruined by the fact that he’s already halfway turned toward the elevator and trying not to break into an actual sprint. “I would never!”
Seible’s laugh follows him anyway. He rocks once on his heels, glancing sideways at him with entirely too much satisfaction as they wait for the elevator.
“Early congratulations, by the way.”
Kaelix cuts him a scandalized look. “Save it for when it’s actually happened. I don’t think I can’t handle anything jinxing it now.”
“Aw, but—”
“No, I’m serious,” Kaelix says, with the full conviction of someone who knows he’s being unreasonable and has no intention of stopping. “Absolutely not. Do not say anything portentous to me in the ten minutes before I leave. I’m already contending with weather, traffic, government bureaucracy, and whatever else the universe might decide to throw in for sport.”
Seible laughs outright just as the elevator dings open.
Kaelix adjusts his coat—he checks himself for wallet, phone, keys—and then he feels Seible pat his back with both hands, practically pushing him inside. “Get ‘em!!”
The doors slide shut on Kaelix before he can turn around and respond to all that, shaking his head to himself, unable to help the small, entertained curve of his mouth.
In the end, despite everything, Kaelix gets there almost an hour early.
The courthouse is housed in one of those old municipal buildings that always seem slightly too severe for the weather, all stone and narrow windows and steps gone darker with rain. Kaelix stands outside with an umbrella in one hand and an unreasonable amount of alertness in his body, watching each cab that slows at the curb, each figure passing beneath hoods and umbrellas of their own.
He tells himself he’s only here this early to be safe. To make sure Freo doesn’t get turned around in the rain, or walk straight past the building because his mind is elsewhere, or arrive and have to stand alone under the awning looking for Kaelix.
The truth, less flattering and far simpler, is that he can’t bear the thought of being anything less than already there when Freo arrives.
At twenty minutes past the hour, he checks the time.
At half past, he tells himself that the traffic’s probably ugly in weather like this.
At forty down to the hour, a cab finally pulls in near the curb, yellow dimmed by the rain and the overcast light. The back door opens, and there Freo is, one hand braced on the frame as he steps out carefully onto the wet pavement.
Kaelix is moving before he thinks better of it.
He crosses the distance fast enough that Freo barely has time to look up before the umbrella is over both of them, the rain breaking harmlessly against black fabric instead of his shoulders. Freo blinks, startled, then smiles in a way that is small but also immediate and terribly fond.
“You’re early,” he says.
“You’re here,” Kaelix answers, which isn’t really a response at all, but he doesn’t care, because Freo is slightly damp already from the dash out of the cab though no less beautiful in the wet gray light, his hair a deeper smoky turquoise where the rain has touched it, already tilting toward him, knowing exactly what’s coming.
Kaelix kisses him before either of them can say anything more. It’s only a brief kiss, mouth to mouth and sweet with familiarity, but it lands with the satisfying certainty of something they’ve both chosen on purpose. Close like this, Kaelix catches how Freo is starting to smell a little more like him these days too, his own scent worked gently through the sweetness of what it is in pregnancy, undercut by something powdery and sun-warm, like linen left out to dry and brought in still holding the day. The realization pulls low at him, intimate in a way that feels almost private even here on the sidewalk.
Kaelix ushers him in closer beneath the umbrella and away from the curb before the driver can splash them both with the next pullout.
“Come on,” he murmurs. “Before this turns into a scene.”
Freo gives him a look that suggests Kaelix is, in fact, the one most likely to cause a scene, but allows himself to be steered toward the building all the same.
Inside, it’s exactly as clerical as one would expect.
The hallway smells faintly of old paper, wet coats, and aggressively neutral cleaning products. The lights are too bright in the way only government buildings specialize in, and the whole place has that brisk, impersonal rhythm of people there to stamp, sign, verify, and move things along. Kaelix had expected something more ceremonial when he was younger and stupider, perhaps because “getting married” had once sounded to him like a threshold the world ought to acknowledge with greater drama. But after everything they’ve already lived through, the bureaucracy of it feels almost funny. Funny and incredibly human. A little drab and very real.
At the front desk and then again at the clerk’s window farther in, Freo takes charge without effort.
Kaelix falls into place just behind him, a tall shadow in a brown coat, umbrella dripping quietly into the stand by the door. Freo speaks to the staff with that composed, pleasant efficiency of his, all clear answers and gentle corrections, producing forms and IDs and the little details they had discussed beforehand with the competence of a man who’s shepherded dozens of other people through weddings far more elaborate than his own. Kaelix watches him do it with a kind of private awe he’s long since stopped finding embarrassing.
His eyes drift, idly and inevitably, to the mark at Freo’s neck.
It’s been about a month now so the bite has healed into itself a little, no longer new but not old either. Something in between and settled in time. On anyone else, in any other context, Kaelix might have felt more possessive about the sight of it. With Freo, what he feels is that too, but a bit stranger and maybe deeper; something almost reverent. A quiet internal recognition, each time, that the thing he once thought he had no right to even want now lives openly on Freo’s skin.
Freo turns slightly to answer another question from the clerk, and the line of his profile catches the fluorescent light. Kaelix is absurdly aware, all at once, of the paperwork under Freo’s hand, the damp hem of his coat, the mark on his neck, the fact that in less than thirty minutes they are leaving this building married.
He remembers they’d talked briefly about vows and then, almost simultaneously, abandoned the idea.
Mostly because they’ve already said so much by now. Not in one neat exchange before a witness, but over the course of a year that’s stripped them bare and remade them more than once. In kitchens and bedrooms and hallways and on couches in the gray hour before dawn. Through fury, fear, longing, grief, and the astonishing gentleness that would survive all of it. Kaelix doesn’t think either of them lacks for vows. If anything, they might be oversupplied.
So they sign where they’re told to, answer what they must, and let the rest remain where it belongs: between them.
It takes less than thirty minutes.
A weekday in the rain is apparently ideal for efficiency. There’s no queue worth mentioning, no prolonged waiting, no dramatic delay. Only signatures, verification, the shortest of affirmations, one final stamped document, and then they’re being directed out with polite finality, as if they’d just completed an errand instead of altered the legal shape of their lives.
Outside again, the rain is still steady, fine and whispering against the pavement.
Freo waits beneath the awning while Kaelix opens the umbrella, and for one suspended second they just stand there looking at each other with that faintly stunned silence that seems to follow every threshold crossed too quickly. Kaelix is just beginning to think he should say something when memory strikes him with such force that he actually stops mid-step.
“Oh!”
Freo blinks. “What?”
But Kaelix has already handed him the umbrella and is already turning back toward the doors.
He hears Freo call his name behind him, not alarmed so much as confused, but Kaelix only lifts a hand in vague reassurance and hurries back inside, scattering a few droplets from his shoes across the entry mat and tile.
The clerk at one of the desks in there looks up when he appears again, recognition flickering across her face before it gives way to amusement.
“You’re back.”
Kaelix feels heat crawl up his neck. “I, ah. Yes.”
The bouquet is where he left it, tucked safely behind the counter next to someone’s lunch box. It’s small, but carefully made. Lilies, of course. Kaelix had bought them on the way over and then, at the last minute, lost his nerve entirely at the idea of carrying flowers into a courthouse like some sort of lovestruck fool out of a serialized romance. One of the clerks had taken one look at his face and laughed so hard she had to put a hand to her mouth before agreeing to hide them until he came back.
He collects them now with what dignity he can salvage, thanks her again profusely, and earns another grin for his trouble.
When he steps back out beneath the awning, Freo is exactly where he left him, though now with one eyebrow slightly raised. Kaelix comes toward him, bouquet in hand, and Freo’s expression shifts at once into something softer, touched all through with amusement, looking from the flowers to Kaelix’s face.
“Don’t tell me,” Freo starts, “you got embarrassed about it at the last minute?”
“No,” Kaelix responds instantly.
Then, because Freo only watches him with that calm, somewhat disbelieving patience of his, exhales out a little defeated whimper before he says, “okay, yes.”
That wins Kaelix the look he knew was coming: Freo’s mouth tipping slightly, eyes warming at the sight of him squirming, not surprised in the least and far too pleased to have caught him out so easily.
Kaelix clears his throat, his gaze slipping briefly off to the rain-darkened street. “I got one of the clerks to hold onto it first while we were wrapped up in the wonderful bureaucracy of getting married,” he admits, and the humiliation of saying it out loud is lessened only by the fact that Freo looks so entertained. “And they honest to god laughed at me, but, hey, they did it anyway.”
Freo rolls his eyes, though there’s no real severity in it. “Of course they wouldn’t be able to resist a request from someone like you.”
Kaelix can feel his cheeks color at that, the flush climbing steadily across his face.
Freo’s expression gentles further, like he’s decided that this is enough teasing for now. He leans up slightly and kisses Kaelix before he can produce any real defense worth hearing, light and lingering and entirely unfair in how effectively it undoes him.
“Thank you,” Freo murmurs when he pulls back, taking the flowers from his hands.
Kaelix trades it for the umbrella and adjusts his hold on the plastic envelope tucked under his other arm, grateful all over again that Freo had smartly insisted they bring it. The paperwork inside is dry and safe despite the weather, protected from the rain and from Kaelix’s own tendency to carry important things with more sentiment than caution. Freo, bouquet in one hand, shifts closer beneath the umbrella once more.
Then they start home, which is finally in the same direction, in one place.
The rain persists, enough that walking the whole distance would be miserable if they tried to be heroic about it, but neither of them seems in any hurry to step into another cab just yet. So they go partway on foot instead, sharing the umbrella, shoulders brushing every few steps as they make their way down slick sidewalks lined with dripping green trees and shopfronts blurred by weather. Their hands stay linked between them, easy and unhidden. Freo’s other ring has been traded for the matching band they’d picked out together beforehand and simply worn to the courthouse anyway, practical even in this. Kaelix keeps catching the dull gleam of it when their joined hands shift as they walk.
Married, he thinks, and the word still sits strangely in him. Not because it feels wrong. Because it feels both too large and perfectly ordinary, as though it’s been simply waiting for them to finally catch up to it.
Freo glances at him after the third or fourth time he catches him staring. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, that’s never true.”
Kaelix smiles despite himself and tips the umbrella a little more toward Freo as the wind shifts. “I’m allowed to look at my husband.”
Freo nearly misses a step.
The reaction is small, but Kaelix sees all of it: the flicker in his face, the quick blink, the faint tinge of pink that settles high on his cheeks before he schools it back into composure. Then Freo looks ahead again as though the pavement has suddenly become very interesting.
“That,” he says after a moment, very calm and therefore entirely unconvincing, “is going to become a problem.”
Kaelix’s smile just widens. “Probably.”
Freo’s shoulder leans into his for half a second, a quiet concession, a fond warning, and then they keep walking together toward the general direction of home.
The city feels muted in this weather, giving everything a softened edge. Traffic hushes to a gentler roar, tires hissing on wet roads. Water threads down the awning of a shuttered café they pass, gathering in the dark grooves of the street, tuning every traffic light and shop sign into something blurred and painterly on the pavement. People move by in scattered currents beneath umbrellas of black and clear plastic and navy blue, all of them carrying that slight forward lean common to bad weather. Beneath the umbrella, though, Kaelix’s world keeps reducing itself to smaller things: the warmth of Freo’s hand in his, the occasional brush of Freo’s sleeve against Kaelix’s wrist. Freo holds the lilies carefully in his free hand, though the outermost ones still catch the drifting mist when the wind shifts, beading them with silver. Kaelix finds himself looking over again and again for no reason other than he can.
They are actually, blessedly in season. He knows that. Freo would know it better.
It’s not anything they’ve ever spoken of again, not directly, not since day and those words were first let loose in a moment they’d both mistaken as the ending to all this, when every tenderness had seemed to arrive already touched with goodbye. Too much of that night had lodged under Kaelix’s skin for forgetting: the impossible honesty in Freo’s voice, the admission of all the versions of them he’d apparently been carrying too. The garden hall, the darker suit, the thought of eloping he’d said like a joke but also not a joke at all. And then, because Kaelix had already been more than halfway undone, his own confession tumbling after it—the lilies that would be in Freo’s hands on their wedding day.
He hadn’t thought of it as a promise, because promises implied a future he hadn’t believed they’d get to together.
But here Freo is now, walking beside him through a rainy Tuesday afternoon with their documents tucked away under Kaelix’s arm and a small bouquet of lilies growing damp at the edges in his hand, as though some tender and foolish part of Kaelix had reached back through time and placed them there.
The sight catches at him in a way that feels like discovering a memory from someone else’s life—one that somehow belongs to him now, inexplicably, perfectly, despite how little he’s done to deserve it.
Freo notices, of course. He always does. His thumb shifts lightly against Kaelix’s knuckles. “What does my husband want this time?”
Kaelix can’t help the smile that it pulls from him. “Nothing,” he says.
It is true, and not true at all.
Freo’s own small smile answers it, quiet and knowing, but he lets Kaelix keep whatever part of it he isn’t ready to say.
Kaelix watches another drop collect at the lip of a white petal and slip free. The flowers look luminous like that in the rain, pale and a little windswept, held against Freo’s dark coat. Not arranged for photographs, not framed by some carefully planned aisle or reception lighting, only this gray afternoon, this wet sidewalk, this city carrying on around them without ceremony. It should feel smaller than what they’d once imagined.
Instead it feels strangely exact.
Maybe that’s the thing he could never have explained back then, when their wanting still needed to disguise itself as hypotheticals and then soon resign itself to almost-but-not-quite, to goodbye.
It was never only the hall, or the suit, or the flowers themselves. It was Freo beside him. Freo looking slightly amused and a little windswept, wedding band catching dim light whenever their hands swing between them. Freo carrying lilies through the rain because Kaelix had once, in what feels like another life, wanted him with impossible force and not known what to do with it.
The umbrella tips as the wind shifts. Kaelix adjusts it automatically, drawing Freo a little closer beneath it. Freo lets himself be guided in without protest, bouquet tucked safely to his chest now, and for a few steps they walk almost pressed side to side.
Rain taps softly overhead. From farther down the block comes more of the muffled wash of traffic. Potholes along the curb have filled to the brim, trembling whenever passing tires send ripples through them, and at the next crosswalk a man makes a doomed run for it with his briefcase held over his head to little effect. The air has that rainy chill to it, cool where it touches Kaelix’s face and the backs of his fingers, but along the line of their joined hands there is a pocket of gathered warmth there that makes the weather feel farther away than it is. The shop windows beside them glow faint and gold against all the gray, and their reflections move in fragments there—two dark figures beneath one umbrella, hands linked, with a small, simple bouquet bright between them.
Kaelix looks once more at the lilies, then at Freo, who, still looking ahead, gives Kaelix’s hand a small squeeze, absent and easy, as though he might’ve felt the drift of his thoughts without needing to turn his head for it. Kaelix is drawn gently back into the present by it, and he answers with a gentle squeeze of his own, a quiet yes, I’m here passed between their palms as they keep walking.
This may not have been the season for them. It may not have been any plan they ever got to keep.
But still, somehow, Kaelix has this. And Freo, rain-kissed and warm at his side, is carrying the flowers anyway.