Work Text:
It's still dark when he slips out of bed and quietly pads to the kitchen. Of course it is, it's barely 4 am. The sky isn’t pitch black though, even at this hour, all the way out here, it has a weird glow; due to light pollution maybe, scattered street lights, fireflies, or a million other things. What matters is that it filters through the kitchen window enough that he can find his way around without turning on any lights, guided by muscle memory and outlines of edges and surfaces.
He stops at the entrance to the kitchen and leans on the doorframe, taking in the empty, lonely space in front of him. That's all it is when Lily's not there to fill it with her mirth, her smile, soon to be this kitchen’s new normal.
He doesn’t want to think about it, but he has to. He has to acquaint himself with these feelings, slowly, gradually, building up a tolerance so they don’t hit him full force like they did all those years ago.
No, he wasn’t enough to get that asshole to stick around, but that’s fine, he sees it now. He has to wonder though, how could he possibly hold the interest of the most amazing, wonderful, angelic human being on the planet when he couldn't hold that of a mediocre academic? (A mediocre academic who also happened to be his own flesh and blood. Relevant detail.) In theory, Lily should have higher standards.
While he’d like to think he’s better equipped to deal with this kind of thing at the ripe old age of fifty, the truth is losing Lily would mean losing someone he actually wants around, likes, loves, with whom he’s spent decades building the only life his adult self knows: she was in New York for two days, and for two days a full cup of coffee ended up in the sink. Who knows how many more will meet the same fate, how long it will take to shake the habit if she really does leave? How long he can bear the glimpses of her clothes every time he opens the closet, her favorite mug in the cupboard, her books and her soap and her perfume and every little thing she leaves behind?
It wouldn't just be a month, or six months, or even a year—a job like that is permanent, as good as tenure, and even if Arlyle were to fingers crossed burn down tomorrow, there’ll be other Arlyles, not a one in Railton.
He'll miss her, and cope by thinking about the next time she'll visit, or he will, planning the perfect weekend and being deadly afraid to fuck it up. Most of all he'll think about how her dream life doesn't involve him anymore, how he's right there with the clothes and the mugs, just another object with a newer, shinier counterpart in New York.
Suddenly the house will seem too big, and he’ll be nothing but a lost soul wandering the halls on autopilot, the porch, the empty garden. And he’ll mope. He’s already moping now, so it’s not that big a stretch, and while he'll bottle it all up, grin and joke when his colleagues ask about her and the hardships of long-distance, without Lily there to calm him down he might finally snap. He blames them for all this, by the way. Before the dinner party Lily's mind was made up, but no, they had to stick their schnozes where they didn't belong.
He puts the kettle on for a chamomile. Getting more sleep is impossible now that he's up, but going straight for coffee would mean admitting defeat. Sighing, he leans forward on the counter, drumming his fingers while he waits for the water to boil.
The alternative… well, it’s not an alternative, for one. The roots he’s put down here in Railton have been sinking into the pavement for five decades now, cracking cement and digging their way deeper and deeper, so enmeshed there’s no way to pull them out without fatally disrupting the whole system anymore.
At 20% happiness, any little shift counts. Sure, he could climb to 25%, 28 even, but it would be just as easy, if not easier, to fall to 15, 14, 13—an inexorable countdown that can only lead to… what? Would he slide right down into the negatives, like Lily said? What would that even look like? He's not sure he wants to find out.
He carries the mug to the table and sits, facing the window. His wedding ring makes a little ding sound when his palms close around the steaming ceramic, letting the warmth spread through his skin, almost scalding.
Things were going—not well, per se, far from well really, but they were stable, propelled by nothing but inertia in a way that allowed him to predict what every day would look like. It was boring, but boring meant he’d been able to learn to cope once and for all.
So for months, years even, the waves rocking Hank Devereaux’s little life raft were small enough that there was no danger of it tipping over, their only effect a mild seasickness.
And then… what happened? He’s still not sure. Some kind of inciting incident, he’d tell his students, a figurative tidal wave that threw this Hank character off balance and plunged him straight into freezing water.
But it’s his fault, they’d say, the warning signs were there, but Hank had been too self-centered to see it coming. Then again a character never knows what kind of story he's in until the plot is well underway, and by the time he catches on it might be too late. Hank is gasping for air now, but no one’s coming to save him, because the only person who cared enough to try ditched his pathetic dinghy for a yacht.
The truth is, the whole thing sucks. A lesser writer might waste time and energy trying to come up with better, more colorful adjectives to describe the situation, but sometimes being practical, clear and straightforward takes precedence. It sucks. It really fucking sucks. So there.
He sips his tasteless drink, now that it’s not a third-degree burn hazard anymore. Second-degree, maybe. But he’d deserve that.
Okay, so he's miserable. But Lily, Lily will be happy, he just knows it—that’s the whole point, really, for her to wake up every morning and throw the windows open to a wonderfully sunny day, birds singing for her like a modern Cinderella, looking—and feeling—radiant.
And that's all that matters. The world needs her to keep bringing that joyful energy into it; it’s a hopeless shithole, but if there weren't people like Lily around it might as well be time to nuke the whole thing.
If New York and a fulfilling career is what she needs, so be it. He will stick around, floating through life like he's always done (i.e. in the dead fish sense, not the post-coital sense) and no doubt the world will be all the better for it. So it would be selfish to deprive the world—though let’s be honest, who cares about that—to deprive Lily, light of his life, of that joy.
The other boat Hank’s still sort of commandeering is the English Department's, which, despite being closer to an actual ship than his little life raft, does have the most unbearable and incompetent crew a captain wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. Still, rest assured it’s as doomed as the raft, and yes, he’s going down with that, too.
He chuckles. For someone whose entire sailing experience is taking the River Link ferry back and forth a handful of times, there's a lot of nautical imagery in him today; perhaps because he was thinking of ropes and nooses earlier. Maybe he could put that in his next book.
“Put what in your next book?”
Startled by Lily’s voice, he turns sharply. His expression softens when they lock eyes. “Nothing,” he sighs. “Sorry. Did I wake you?”
Lily only shrugs, coming up behind him to rest her hands on his shoulders. She works her fingertips into the knots there—Gordian knots, really, a root system so messy and tangled the only way to unwind it is a clean cut down the middle.
“Feels nice,” he says, closing his eyes and relaxing into the touch. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? I guess it’s late enough to make a pot now.”
“No, thanks. Hank—” she starts.
“Here, sit down,” he says, taking her hand off his shoulder and encouraging her to sit beside him. “Chamomile?” He pushes the mug towards her.
Lily takes a sip, if only to shut down the beverage offerings, then continues. “Hank… you do understand why I want to take the job, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” he says lightly, raising his eyebrows at her. Rationally? Sure. Emotionally? He’s considering handcuffing her to him, not in the fun way. But it’s better if he doesn’t say that out loud. “Listen, I’m fine,” he says, anticipating her question.
“Clearly. You're up at 4 because you're fine,” she says, pinching the bridge of her nose.
He expects her to mention his scene at the table last night, but she’s graceful enough not to. “I'm up at 4 because it’s what old people do,” he says.
“And you know I don't want to leave you, right?” she says, picking up her line of questioning where she left off. She takes his hand, stroking his palm with her thumbs. There can’t be any knots there, not physically at least, but he still feels them being worked on, jostled under the surface.
He nods, gearing up to lay out his reasons to stay again—all his irrational, trauma-soaked cards face up on the somber table. But Lily stands up, squeezing his hand. “This town has poisoned you,” she says. “I wish you loved yourself enough to see that and get away.”
But he does see. He sees it all, in fact—his past, and the grip it has on the person he is today, pinning his arms like a straightjacket.
It’s what he can’t see that scares him. He doesn’t know what change looks like, what feeling better looks like. If Hank somehow managed to swim to shore, braving the waves and the cold and the salty water in his lungs, who knows who that man—lying on the sand, soaked and exhausted but alive—would be. All he knows is that he likes being current Hank (there’s a joke in there somewhere) even with all the gasping and struggling, and that he wouldn’t trade him for anyone else.
Before Lily can move away, Hank’s arms wrap around her waist. He clings to her and shuts his eyes, plunging into real darkness now instead of the pale gloom of the kitchen. His head rests on her midsection, the house so quiet he can hear the muffled, rhythmic thump of her heart against the shell of his ear. He exhales softly when Lily’s fingers find his hair and stroke it gently, brushing back the thinning strands.
Of course Lily’s right, she always is. But he can't make promises he can't keep.