Chapter Text
The problem with studying stars for a living, Anthony often thought, was that eventually people started assuming you were looking for meaning in them.
He wasn’t.
Meaning implied intent. Purpose. Some great cosmic hand arranging things carefully enough to matter.
Anthony knew better than that.
The universe was mostly hydrogen, emptiness, and violence conducted over impossible distances. Which, to be fair, was not a bad description of London public transport either.
Beautiful, certainly.
But beauty and meaning were not remotely the same thing.
Morning light filtered weakly through the windows of Anthony’s house, turning everything the particular shade of gold-grey unique to London in October. Not gloomy, exactly. Mostly just drab.
Anthony rather approved of that.
The mews house was meticulously clean in the way places often were when they had recently been reclaimed after being half-forgotten, though “minimalist” would have been unfair. Anthony owned things. Lots of things, actually. Books on shelves or stacked in careful horizontal piles. Records alphabetized with near-religious intensity. Several blankets draped over the sofa in a way that looked accidental but absolutely was not. The garage beneath the mews still smelled faintly of motor oil despite not having housed a car in years.
And plants.
Far, far too many plants for a man who claimed not to enjoy being responsible for living things. Bookshelves lined one wall in strict alphabetical order, interrupted only by aggressively healthy greenery spilling from ceramic pots with cheerful disregard for spatial planning.
Anthony paused beside a trailing pothos near the kitchen window, narrowing his eyes at it. “You’re showing off,” he informed the plant.
The pothos continued existing smugly.
Anthony shrugged. “Right. Fair enough.” He watered it anyway.
The kettle clicked softly behind him as Anthony moved through the kitchen with the unconscious precision of long habit, humming under his breath. He did not notice himself humming, which was fortunate, because he would have found it deeply embarrassing if he had.
Coffee first. Nothing good had ever come from interacting with other people before coffee. Entire wars had probably started that way.
He leaned against the counter while it brewed, staring absently out the rain-flecked kitchen window at the street below. Someone across the road was attempting to walk two dachshunds in tiny yellow coats. The dogs appeared united in their belief that this constituted a personal betrayal.
Anthony snorted quietly into his mug.
It was, objectively speaking, a good life.
The house was pleasant. His work mattered. His students tolerated him with surprising enthusiasm considering he regularly assigned essays with titles like Please Stop Calling Every Bright Object A Black Hole.
He had colleagues he occasionally drank with and exactly three friends he trusted enough to help him move furniture, which was honestly more than most people managed in London.
And yet—
Sometimes he would come home after a lecture or wake suddenly in the middle of the night with the distinct feeling that something enormous had gone missing while he wasn’t paying attention.
Like reaching instinctively for something in the dark and finding empty air instead.
Anthony disliked examining the feeling too closely. Mostly because once he started, it tended to linger for days afterward in irritating and inconvenient ways.
So instead he carried his coffee to the kitchen table and opened the pile of lecture notes and half-graded assignments he was supposed to be revising for Monday. One student had confidently described Saturn in last week’s homework as “the aesthetic planet.”
Anthony stared at the sentence for several moments. Then, reluctantly, penciled a small tick beside it.
Fair enough, actually.
He made a note in the lecture draft beside him:
cultural perception of planetary imagery
Which sounded significantly more academic than:
the student is unfortunately correct
He flipped to the next page.
Humans have always looked upward searching for meaning.
Anthony frowned.
Too dramatic.
Worse, it sounded uncomfortably sincere.
He crossed the sentence out hard enough to nearly tear the paper.
Humans have historically used stellar positioning for navigation and agricultural planning.
Better.
Less likely to accidentally derail an astronomy lecture into existentialism before noon.
Anthony preferred things that could be measured. Predicted. Explained.
The other feeling — the enormous missing thing lurking somewhere just outside conscious reach — generally got handled by refusing to look directly at it.
Which, historically speaking, had worked beautifully.
Probably.
He took another sip of coffee and glanced around the mews house. The move itself had been impulsive by Anthony’s standards, which meant he had only spent three days deciding to move into one of his family’s homes and then one month doing the move.
His previous flat had been perfectly… what was a good word. Adequate? That seemed appropriate. It was perfectly Adequate.
Too loud, though.
Not in any meaningful sense. The street itself had actually been fairly quiet. But there had always been this vague feeling of static beneath everything there, like he could never fully settle into the space no matter how meticulously he arranged it.
This mews felt quieter.
Softer, somehow.
Like exhaling.
Definitely familiar.
Anthony hadn’t realized how badly he’d wanted that until he moved in. Why he’d wanted it quite so desperately remained unclear.
Saturday wandered in without much permission.
London did that sometimes—just sort of unfolded itself into being without asking whether anyone was ready for it. Wet pavement, traffic lights smeared into red and green reflections, buses sighing past like they had opinions about everything.
Anthony had nowhere in particular to be.
Which, on paper, was most of his weekends.
He decided he needed to be somewhere anyway, so he walked. More like meandered.
He passed cafés with fogged-up windows. A man arguing gently with a self-checkout machine as though it might eventually come around to his point of view. Someone laughing too loudly at something he couldn’t quite hear.
Anthony noticed all of it. He always did. It was part of the job, or part of the brain, or possibly just an unfortunate side effect of being unable to completely ignore the world.
A woman stood outside a bakery adjusting her partner’s scarf with absent tenderness before leaning in to kiss his cheek.
Anthony looked away immediately. It felt like seeing something through a window he hadn’t realized he’d stopped having access to.
He shook his head and kept walking. It was a bit maudlin for a Saturday morning, so he resolved to not think about it.
Mostly.
He wasn’t looking for the bookshop when he found it.
That was probably important.
Or not.
It sat between a bakery and a shuttered repair store, as though someone had placed it there and then briefly forgotten it existed. The outside was painted a cheery blue, the windows crowded with uneven stacks of books, handwritten recommendation cards curling slightly at the edges, like they had opinions but were trying to stay polite about it.
Warm light spilled out onto the pavement in a way that made the street around it look colder by comparison.
Anthony slowed.
He didn’t know why.
That was becoming a familiar theme this Saturday, apparently.
Something tightened in his chest, like a cord being gently drawn taut. Something irritatingly difficult to name. He tried to parse it out and all he could come up with was— Recognition.
Must be because it was another London bookshop. He had never been here before, so that had to be the reason. Anthony stood still for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, as though waiting for the feeling to either prove itself or embarrass itself into leaving.
It did neither.
A bus passed behind him, splashing water that didn’t reach the pavement he was standing on. The world continued doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
The shop did too.
Just a shop. Warm light. Books stacked in uneven confidence behind the window, handwritten cards curling against the glass.
Anthony frowned slightly.
Whatever that was, it didn’t mean anything.
Probably.
He reached for the door.
Opened it.
And went in.