Chapter Text
May, 1979
When Matt walks through the front door there is music flooding the room. It welcomes him like a warm hug, like a cup of coffee, like a kiss. Matt carries a can of wood sealant in one hand and a brush in the other and he grins as he toes off his shoes. From the mud room he can see Jay’s back, sat at the upright piano with his head ducked down, a sweet, rolling song drifting all around them. It sounds like lilacs and the sea and old wood and it waltzes like cattails in the wind. It sounds like baby blues and sea green and tinges of purple around the edges.
“Hey little bird,” Matt calls from the doorway. “What’cha playing?”
Jay startles, the song faltering under his fingers with a lurch. His head whips towards the door.
“Sorry,” Matt smiles. “Keep going.”
He does. Jay smiles and his hands reconvene with the keys, sunlight and foxgloves and seafoam. “Just improvising,” he shrugs. “Did they have the right stuff?”
“Yeah, it’s a—uh— polyacrylic shit. Should protect the wood from the rain. Then we won’t have to replace anything again for a while.”
“Awesome,” says Jay. Matt sets the sealant down and he crosses the little sun-soaked living room to him, his hands landing on Jay’s shoulders. He presses a kiss to the top of his head, nestling it into dark curls, and he breathes him in.
Jay’s hair has little tinges of grey streaked in now, little strands buried in tousled dark waves. Somewhere over the years he’s learned how to properly take care of his curls, and they’re nearly perfect just about all the time, even as he first wakes in the morning. Jay— when they first met— was preternaturally gorgeous; stunning and classically handsome, but he’s grown into his looks even more as the years trudge on.
There is no sheet music on the piano stand. There never is, Jay doesn't need it. The top of the piano itself is cluttered with all sorts of things: books, trinkets, several lamps, but on the stand itself sits only the polaroid of eleven year old Matt he’d dug out of the closet all those years ago, smiling wide. The colours are fading but Matt's little face is still visible under the aged light sensitive plastic. Jay will keep it there when it has faded to white nothing and he will imagine he can still see that smiling face.
Jay tilts his head way back, the rolling melody continuing. Matt kisses the bridge of his nose, freckling as spring rolls around to summer, then he’s making his way into the kitchen.
There are no doorways inside the house, save for the front and back door. The bedroom is the upstairs attic, beginning at the top of the staircase with no door to close. Matt likes it this way, likes that he can see into every room from nearly anywhere he stands. The house is small enough that even if the two of them are on opposite sides, they’re still close by, can almost always still see each other.
Even in his older years, Matt doesn’t like not being able to see Jay. He goes out for errands in town once in a blue moon, or goes for walks or sits in the garden, but the thread of sight between them never stays broken for long. Matt’s not sure what it is, exactly, if it’s a restless anxiety or if it’s just a symptom of regular, garden-variety love, but he likes their tether anyway. He likes that they don’t really spend time apart (unless Matt needs a different type of wood sealant for the back porch and Jay gets dreadfully bored at the general store, but he was only gone for twenty minutes). It had taken him some time to be able to leave the house at all without Jay. He’d feel a little rope wrap tight around his heart until he came home and found Jay playing the piano or napping on the couch and felt like everything was alright again.
“One of the old ladies from the legion was asking about you,” Matt says as he turns on the kitchen sink and washes off the layer of dust his hands picked up from the sealant can. “Hélène.”
“What’d she say?
“Fuck if I remember. Oh! Wait, yes, um. She—uh.” Matt squeezes his eyes shut. Jay grins at him. “She said—um— I got it: ‘tu devrais réparer tes volets.’
Jay laughs. Matt’s French never improved.
The old ladies in town always ask about Jay during the rare occurrences that Matt is seen out and about without him. They ask how he’s doing, if he’s composed anything recently, if he’ll play at their church or legion sometime. They don’t ask any pressing, digging questions, very little about their lives together or their past or how they appeared from thin air in fuck-ass nowhere northern Québec one day without speaking a lick of French. They’re nice enough, certainly having taken a liking to Jay, even gifting him their upright Wurlitzer when they had replaced the one in the church years back.
Once or twice, though, one of them had asked Matt about the scar on his forehead, in some indistinct worried tone. Matt would make something up on the spot about him tripping into a picnic table or falling off a horse or something equally stupid, and they’d leave it at that. Matt didn’t like to talk about it.
And, anyway, Jay has been doing well. The nightmares have trickled down to a much more manageable frequency over the years, and the episodes of dissociation are rare now. That scar on his forehead is the only one that stuck around, and most of the time it’s hidden behind a curtain of dark curls. Matt is grateful for that.
Though sometimes, still, in the late nights, in the dark bedroom with the windows open and the curtains flowing around a gentle sea-breeze, Matt feels Jay shake and shake and shake. He hears the sound of soft whimpers and sharp breaths in the dark, sees Jay’s fingers curl and uncurl against the pillowcase. Matt would put his hand on his back and jostle him, just gently, just enough to wake him up and make it all stop. And Jay would wake with a gasp and his chest would heave with heavy breathes, eyes wild and unfocused in the black of the room, and Matt would shush him and gather him up in his arms, tuck his face into the crook of his shoulder. Matt would rock him back and forth, and together they’d listen to the hush of the sea outside the window. He would say it’s alright, birdie, you’re okay. I’m right here. You’re safe. I love you, and Jay would breathe in deep and nuzzle at Matt’s cheek and all would be right in the world and they could amble together back to the world of precarious unconscious.
Matt never asks about exactly what happened to him that night in Boston. Only a few times over the years Jay had told him some specifics, but Matt never liked to hear about it. Maybe it was selfish, maybe a better man would get a grip and allow the nasty, bloody details to wash over him, but he just couldn’t stomach the burnt up film negatives he saw in his mind. Once, Jay had told him about the faceless man who had grabbed him by his hair and slammed his face against the motel bathroom sink, and Matt had to leave the room to be sick.
“Wanna give me a hand with the back porch?” Matt calls from the kitchen as the song in the room comes to a flourishing end. Jay’s eyes crinkle when he smiles.
The mid May sunshine feels good on their faces. Together they wrestle the set of deck chairs and the patio swing out from the beaten down shed in the garden, wipe off the coating of dust that had settled over the winter and arrange them nicely on the little porch. A few winters ago the wood had started to warp and crack from the snow that would collect there, so Matt had the wherewithal this year to plan for some preventative maintenance this time.
The porch overlooks a small garden, where dandelions and trout lilies and crocuses have begun to bloom under the trees, and the garden overlooks the sea. Today, the early evening sun shines low and peach-orange, and the sea is quiet. The house attached to the porch is a baby-blue shiplap home with sea-green curtains and an upright piano and it’s always filled with music and it always feels warm and safe.
“Nice day,” Jay hums happily. Together they lean against the wood railing and watch the waves clamber over each other in the gulf, watch the young leaves sway in the trees. A Goldfinch lands on a branch and pecks at the buds. “Glad it’s getting warmer.”
“Uh huh,” says Matt. “Rough winter, huh?”
“Rough winter!” Jay grins. Matt slides his hand up to Jay’s cheek and kisses him, warm and soft in the evening light. It never gets old. It never gets tiring.
A wave crashed onto the rocks. “Remember that house in Massachusetts?" Jay asks when Matt’s lips aren’t on his anymore. It’s a silly question.
“Sure,” Matt muses, thumbing at a flash of greying hair at Jay’s temple. “Remember how convinced you were that there were seals in the Boston harbour?”
“There were seals. We just didn’t see any that day.”
“Right, my bad,” Matt snorts, and he kisses him again. “Love you, bird.”
“Love you too,” Jay sighs, and they settle into an easy quiet. Another Goldfinch joins the first on the treebranch, wings fluttering as they greet each other. They listen to the birds sing and the waves heave and sigh and Matt swears he hears jazz music in his head.
Matt can remember a time when the curtains were closed for days on end when they first moved into this house. He remembers a time when he would feel a panic in his body that coursed through him like being electrocuted, like bolts of lightning, itching under every inch of skin. It all caught up to him the day they stopped running. It barreled into him like a train. Waking up in the night and blindly reaching and grasping until he felt a breathing body next to him.
But it’s not like that any more. The lightning strikes of dread had dulled to a low rumble of thunder of the years, a distant storm over the sea.
And suddenly Jay says: “We should get married.”
And Matt pulls his head away, studies his face, lays his thumbs on Jay’s cheekbones, just below his eyes, and he shakes his head.
“...We can’t.” There are a hundred reasons why, and walking Jay through them is meaningless.
“I know,” Jay says quietly. “But we could, like…pretend. Or something. We could pretend to be married.”
“Pretend to be married?”
“Yeah. I don’t know.”
“How would we do that?”
Jay shrugs, eyes falling to the ground, to the unsealed and untreated cedarwood of the porch. “I don’t know. It just sounds…nice. You know? You being my husband.”
And it does. Nothing on planet Earth has ever sounded nicer, sound nor song, and maybe Matt hadn’t given it too much of a thought over the last ten years—why would he? He has everything he could ever want— but the way the words come out of Jay’s mouth makes him swoon on his feet. Husband. Husband. Husband.
“And how would we go about that, exactly?” Matt asks, and he’s cracking a smile, and it’s making Jay smile too, even as he looks away from him and out towards the sprawling, sparkling sea.
“Okay, I guess it was stupid. I was just thinking out loud.”
“No, no,” Matt prods. “What should I—should I propose to you? Pretend propose to you, bird?”
“Whatever, Matt—” Jay whines, his fangs peaking out of his smile.
“What? Now you don’t want to?”
“Yeah, but—I’m not supposed to know you’re gonna propose. That takes away from the whole point. It’s supposed to be a surprise.”
“Oh, right. Well, my bad.”
“And you don’t even have a ring. And you can’t propose without a ring, everyone knows that.”
Matt snorts. “I see,” he says. Matt turns back to the garden, one hand on the wood rail. The peepers are starting to sing to each other, buried unseen by the lapping water. The breeze that floats in from the sea rustles their hair.
And then Matt says: “Give me a sec.”
“Matt—” but Matt is gone, disappearing through the open back door and into the kitchen. Jay watches the door, waits for him to poke back out and tell him he’s just kidding, he’s just doing a bit. It was a stupid thing to say, anyway. Get married. What a silly idea.
A plastic rustling from the kitchen, muffled by the surge of the waves. Jay frowns towards the house, and then Matt reappears in the doorway, one hand shut into a fist.
“Jay,” Matt says as he returns to his side.
“Matt, what. What is this?”
“Hey, I’m doing a whole thing. Let me talk, okay? I’ve got a whole thing.”
“Oh, okay. Sorry. Go ahead.”
Matt makes a big show of steeling himself, shaking his shoulders out and huffing a breath like he’s waiting behind a curtain. Jay’s lips curl into a smile.
“Jay,” Matt starts again. “Bird. Jaybird. Birdie.”
Jay laughs out loud like it’s startled out of him. It’s absurd, all of it, more than anything the earnest look on Matt’s face. Matt lightly swats at Jay’s shoulder, Jay’s hand comes to cover his mouth. “Sorry,” he squeaks. Matt begins again.
“The last ten years have been nothing like I imagined they ever would be. Right? How crazy is this, when you think about it. I thought I was gonna be a CIA desk jockey till I died. I thought I was gonna spend the rest of my life in this stupid, meaningless agency where I was complicit in all sorts of American government atrocities. And then, I thought I was gonna spend the rest of my life alone forever. What a dream, right, bird?”
“Uh huh.” Jay’s smiling so hard it hurts.
“And you know what? I’m glad those brainless fucks couldn’t figure out how to land on the moon. I’m actually glad. Because if they had, I wouldn’t have met you. So, really, it’s a net positive for the world that we lost the stupid fucking space race. Because I met you. So fuck America and fuck Russia and fuck their spaceships. I won. They should publish that headline: Matt Johnson Wins the Space Race.”
Something in the look on Matt’s face changes then; the wild, stupid grin seems to melt at the edges, softens to something real.
“Birdie. I love you more than anything. I actually kind of don’t know how to handle it.” he says, and it’s not funny anymore. It’s the most serious thing he’s ever said in his entire life. “Birdie—”
And then he’s dropping down onto one knee, the splintered wood creaking beneath him. He watches Jay watch him, watches the smile on his face change shape too.
“Birdie, marry me. For real. Or—at least as real as we can manage.”
The sea sighs. The frogs chirp. Jay’s throat tightens.
“Okay, yeah.” Jay swallows. It comes out shaky and breathless. “Yeah. Yes.” And then Matt’s hand opens.
Jay laughs so hard he thinks he might puke. “Is that a fucking Froot Loop?”
Matt hoists himself up, harder now in his older years than ever before. His knees creak and ache. Then his hand is on the back of Jay’s head and the other is on his jaw and he’s kissing him with the searing heat of a hundred suns and stars. Jay’s hands find their way to Matt’s hips and he holds their bodies together. Forever and forever.
“Give me that,” Jay mumbles as he comes up for air. Matt hands him the little green Froot Loop in his palm. Jay slips it into his mouth.
“Jay!” Matt squawks. “God damn it! You can’t fucking eat that! That’s—” Jay kisses him again. The sun comes down to kiss the sea.
Above them, half hidden in the trees, the moon is full. They kiss and kiss until they get tired and the air gets cold. They fuck on the kitchen counter until Jay whines that his lower back hurts, and then they tuck themselves into bed, facing each other so their faces are the first thing they’ll see if they wake in the night. The moon is full and silver and it says goodbye to the sun as it dips below the water and it climbs to the highest point in the sky, watching like a camera.
Until the heat death of the universe, until the expanse of existence itself fizzles out, the moon orbits the Earth forever and ever and ever.