Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Anyway, this song, yeah?”

It’s not that he doesn’t understand that what they’re about to do is absolutely ridiculous, Balthazar knows it is. It’s one thing to write the songs, it’s another thing to put them online where Peter can see them, it’s another thing altogether to ask him to sing them with him. But he’d been trying to write this song for weeks and it wasn’t working, there was something off about it, or rather, something incomplete. Once he made it a duet, it locked into place. And he thought about asking Paige, but that would have felt weird, or Kit, but that wouldn’t have been right either; it would slide out of place, he thinks. He wrote it for Peter, and Peter singing it with him would be the only way it would work. But still, it’s totally, entirely, completely ridiculous for them to be singing a romantic duet together, no matter which way Balth tries to spin it.

Singing with Peter now, it feels like he’s asking him something. Something like, can this be the time you listen to what I’m telling you? Can you understand it? Can you feel it too? Because it isn’t just a cover of a love song this time, or a melancholy ballad or a goddamn ode, it’s a duet. And it really does feel like this time he might listen. Because there’d been all these moments lately, Peter making the time to study with him, always buying the brand of oat milk he likes, waiting after rehearsals to walk home with him, acting like he cares. And Balth couldn’t help but mirror it. He’d thought, after the last flat challenge, that if he could spend the rest of life in his room, never having to have another interaction with Peter, he’d happily do it. But he just couldn’t stop himself from thinking that it might not just be acting; maybe he actually cares. And he really has never had a chance of stopping himself from getting caught in Peter’s hook. His well practiced avoidance techniques are getting rusty, when given the option to run, he’s been choosing to stay. And as well aware as he is of the dangers, or rather, the stupidity, of hope, when it comes to Peter, he still hopes that he might be choosing that too.

By the time they get to the end of the song, Balthazar feels sort of jittery. The part of him that thinks this was all a completely terrible idea is still there, because if there was going to be a time for Peter to question what the song was actually about, this would be it. But there’s another part of him that thinks he felt something shift right at the end, on the penultimate line, and it’s kind of unignorable. As is the look on Peter’s face now. It makes him feel shaky.

“There’s that look again.”

“What look?”

“That look of potential.” Jittery, shaky, hooked. He’s being pulled somewhere. Hopes to god it’s towards dry land.

Peter holds his gaze, holds still. Balth feels their proximity like a crackling livewire. “Potential?” He feels one foot still in the sea…

Peter starts to say something, but glances towards the camera, the red light still blinking at them. Balth had completely forgotten about it. When Peter reaches over to turn it off, it makes his heart rate pick up. A turned off camera combined with the conversation they had before the song, adds up to something he knows he shouldn’t even think about.

“Yeah.” Peter keeps his voice gentle, in a way Balth hasn’t heard all year. A way that reminds him of carpeted bedroom floors in Auckland, a way that makes him ache. “Like potentially… I think there’s something here.” Peter swallows, as if giving himself time to figure out what to say. “This isn’t just all in my head right?” Balthazar feels himself being pulled onto shore.

“I- no, definitely not just in your head.” His own brain is going fuzzy, maybe it makes him lose his sense of judgement. “I mean, you heard that song right?”

Peter laughs, just a little. “I never know what you mean though. Or what you actually want.”

Balth has to look down, this conversation too overwhelming to maintain eye contact. Luckily, he’s well-versed in dodging those type of questions. “What do you want?”

“I meant what I said before.” Peter says firmly.

“What part?” Balth’s brain trips over itself to pull out the important parts of that conversation. Did he say something about wanting to be with someone? Or did that sentence end with the word ‘casually’?

“This part.” Peter takes Balth’s hand from where it’s been resting in his lap, turns his palm gently upwards. Balthazar has never been so hyper-aware of the placement of his limbs in his life. He tries to push the fuzz away, have some kind of a coherent thought, but it sticks stubbornly to all the logical bits of his mind so all that’s left to think is the achingly lovesick part. And then Peter intertwines their fingers. And the aching dulls and the jittery part dulls and the fuzz dissipates and he just feels calm.

“You okay?” Peter asks softly.

He just nods, hoping it will convey enough.

“Is this what you want?”

“Yeah. Yes.” He almost has to laugh with how obvious that statement seems. I mean, god, he literally wrote a song about this.

“Okay. Cool.” Peter looks down at their joint hands, and then up at Balth with that sunlit sort of expression he has sometimes which makes Balth squeeze his hand tighter.

“Okay.” He breaths, and then doesn’t overthink it, just pulls Peter’s hand towards him and kisses him.

It’s a little hard and a little soft at the same time and he always thought that if this ever actually happened, it would feel so much bigger than anything he had imagined, that he would feel overcome with it. That it would be an oh, so this is what this is supposed to be like sort of moment. But in reality, it just feels familiar, it feels like what him and Peter have always felt like. Like being at home.

When they pull apart, Peter keeps his hands pressed to Balth’s cheeks and he half hopes he’ll keep them there forever and half wishes he would stop so that he can’t feel the heat that’s building in them. Peter kisses him again, just quickly, and he has to laugh. This felt impossible three weeks ago. God, this felt impossible three years ago.

“I’ve um…” Peter squeezes his hand. “Wanted to do that for a while.”

“A while?” He wants to know what constitutes ‘a while’ for Peter. Does the apology party count as a while? Was that day they made those videos in the bath a while ago? He knows he and Peter are working off of severely different time scales here.

“Well if you’re counting all the time I spent being oblivious to how much I wanted to, then it’s like, three years.”

Oh. So not that different then. “Are you… seriously?”

Peter laughs. “Yes! Did you not know this?”

“Well it’s not like you said anything.”

“I did! I asked you to go outside. You didn’t say anything.”

“Pete, come on.”

Now Peter’s the one blushing, it makes Balth feel sort of light and fizzy, in the way it always has. “Okay yeah, fair. I was an idiot.”

“Yeah, I can’t argue with that.”

“I swear I’ll be way, way less of an idiot now though.”

“Okay.” His brain flicks through a grim kind of montage of ibuprofen and slammed doors and you’re not always right you know’s. “Good.”

“Good.” Peter hooks Balthazar’s eyes back from where they’ve wandered down to his slightly shaky hand still joined with Peter’s. “I feel like you don’t really believe me.” He says. “I really want this.”

Balth feels jolted out of himself. “What’s ‘this’?”

“I want to be with you.”

It’s not like being electric shocked, or melted, or getting butterflies or even a click. Which would maybe be disappointing if it didn’t sound so melodical, if he didn’t think he’s going to have those words playing on repeat in his head like the catchiest hook in the world for the rest of his life.

“That’s what you meant by potential?”

“Yeah. It is.”

--

It isn’t until they’ve been kissing for another hour and they hear Ben get home from his sociology lecture that they remember the camera.

“Well thank god we remembered to turn that off.” Peter says, sitting up and absently trying to shape his hair back into something decent. He feels untethered. Like he can’t get all the bits of his mind to line up in the right order. He can’t quite believe they just did that. He really didn’t know kissing could even be that good.

Balth gives him that smile he sometimes does that makes Peter’s heart flip. “Yeah, I think that’s an understatement.”

And it’s only really then that he thinks about what the implications of a camera being in the room right now actually are. It’s kind of ridiculous, given that this whole situation came out of a conversation about the rules, but he had genuinely forgotten about them. “Shit. What do we do?”

“Well we should probably give it back to Ben…”

“I mean about the rules.”

Balth pauses. “Well you said you wanted to stop, right? Just tell them we’re not doing it anymore?”

“Yeah, I guess, yeah.” He feels something heavy in his chest, doesn’t understand why he’s not jumping at the chance. “I mean, what would they even do about it right?”

“Probably gunge us or something” Balth says. “I don’t know, do you think they’d stop if we stopped?”

Peter really has no idea. It feels like some strange, kind of fucked-up game of pretend, like if two of them stopped playing, the whole game would fall apart. He knows Ben and Freddie aren’t ready to come back to reality yet though, and he can’t pretend he doesn’t like the imaginary world better than the real one a lot of the time, even if he doesn’t know why.

“I think they’re both way to stubborn for that to be honest.” He says instead. “What do you want to do?” It’s like he can’t stop asking that. It’s only been a couple of hours and this all still feels a little bit like a dream and he knows he’s about one wrong sentence away from fucking it up at any moment. He’s so desperate to make Balthazar happy he feels dizzy with it, but it scares him too.

“I don’t know…” Balth glances towards the camera. “I kind of don’t want to have to deal with that right now, y’know? I’m kind of… I don’t know, like, this whole thing is a lot and having that argument with them would be a lot and since everyone’s already so tense about the tent…”

Peter doesn’t know why he thought there was even a chance that Balth might want to have that argument. And since he already feels so close to ruining this entire thing, it doesn’t feel like the right move to contest it. As stupid as the rules are. As much as he doesn’t need them.

“Okay, yeah.” He takes Balth’s hand again, kisses him softly on the mouth, and the forehead, and bridge of his nose, feels overcome with it. “We’ll just give Ben the camera back.”

“And leave him to wonder what the hell that conversation was about.”

“Yeah, and after that song.”

“What’s that supposed to mean.” Balth feigns annoyance.

“Sorry, you’re just really not subtle.”

“Maybe if you were better at getting hints I wouldn’t have to be.”

“Maybe it was just a ploy to get you to write more songs about me.”

“You actually suck.”

It takes them another twenty minutes to get the camera to Ben.  

--

A week later, Balth is leaving a tutorial for his poetry class, it’s a sunny day and he’s in a good mood, made even better when he finds Peter waiting outside.

He pulls him out of the way of the other students filing out of the classroom. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for you to get out of class.” The way Peter says it, it sounds like there’s an of course at the end of the sentence.

“How’d you even know where it was?”

“You keep your timetable on your desk.”

“Right.” Balth has to take a moment just to let the fact of Peter taking notice of that settle. “Why were you waiting for me to get out of class?”

“Well, I was thinking if you’re not busy, we should go on a date.” It’s the way he doesn’t even ask it as a question, rather a fact. It’s so deeply the way Peter would ask him out that it makes Balth’s chest squeeze.

“You want to go on a date?” He says.

“Yeah, I know it’s hard to remember, but I think that’s what people who are dating tend to do.”

Phrased like that, it’s kind of daunting. They’re dating. Again, this fact didn’t occur to Balthazar to be quite so factual. He’s not sure it even does now, and not only because dating Peter has been so cemented in fantasy in him for so long that it would probably take years for that feeling to dislodge itself, but because their ‘dating’ has been so strictly confined to the few moments they can get when everyone else is either out of the house or asleep.

“If you want to, obviously.” Peter hastens to add when he doesn’t say anything right away.

“Of course I want to.”

Even if this whole situation isn’t perfect, this moment right now, when they’re not worrying about the sound of the front door opening or trying to be inconspicuous, this obviousness, feels so much like what he dared to hope university might be like at the start of the year that it makes his head spin. Peter waiting for him after class, taking his hand, walking across campus together, he’s pretty sure he’s daydreamed this exact scene. He kind of wrote a song about it.

*

At a (unfortunately non-vegan, they had to avoid Boyet’s) café near uni, Balth plays with the sugar packets at their table while Peter orders their drinks. He feels so out of practice at this. He’d only been on one, kind of awkward, date all year, and the dates with Damien before that weren’t much better. And he knows this is different, it’s Peter, it’s not like they won’t have anything to talk about. But still, he feels like there’s stakes that haven’t been there when they’ve just been hanging out in their rooms this week. Like if it goes badly, Peter could think this was all a mistake.

“What’s wrong?” He hadn’t even noticed Peter coming back to their table.

“Hmm?”

“You looked so, I don’t know, pensive.”

“Pensive?”

“Well yeah, I don’t know, what’s up?”

Balth usually can’t stand being asked what’s wrong, but this, of course, feels different. How could he hate this? “Just thinking about how I haven’t been on a date in forever, I guess.”

Peter half laughs. “Yeah, it’s weird right? It feels like we’ve had the rules forever when it’s only been like, three months.”

“Yeah, I mean before them though too.” Balth picks the sugar packet back up.

Peter shifts a little, his eyes dropping down to the table. Anything before the rules, Balth guesses, is pretty much off-limits. Which he can’t say isn’t a little frustrating. He doesn’t really know how they’re supposed to do this without talking about it. Not frustrating enough to bring it up though, obviously.

“Yeah, right.” Peter pulls out of himself. “God, I don’t think I’ve actually been on a date since like… Celia.”

“That wasn’t that long ago.”

“It was the summer before Year 13!” Peter protests. “It definitely feels like a long time ago. And anyway, you can’t talk, you dated someone way after that.”

“True.”

A waitress appears with their coffees. “Two oat milk lattes?”

“Thanks.” Peter gives him a look after accepting the drinks. “Don’t worry, I remembered it’s Friday.”

Balthazar has to laugh. “That’s kind of ridiculous.”

“Why would it be ridiculous? I take the veganism rule very seriously.”

“Especially when you’re on dates?”

“Especially when I’m on dates with you. It’s your rule.”

It makes Balth think that’s a good sign this date isn’t going as terribly as he was scared it would. And about how weird it is that he hasn’t even really thought about breaking any other rules this week.

“Anyway, about you and Damien.” Peter starts stirring sugar into his coffee. “Why did you guys actually break up?”

“Is this what you normally talk about with your dates? Why they broke up with their last partner?”

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.” Peter puts his spoon back on the saucer with a little too much force and drops of his coffee spatter across the table. "You don’t have to answer that.”

“No, it’s fine.” Balth says. “It was just like, I was dating him to try to get over you and it wasn’t working and he knew that and I knew that and then I was going to move in with you so… yeah.” It feels so stupidly vulnerable, like the exact kind of thing he would never say. But he would never normally be in a situation like this with Peter either, so he tries his best to stop his brain from screaming at him. Still, he holds his breath waiting for Peter to respond.

“Oh, um. I’m sorry?” Peter says, although he looks just a little bit pleased.

Balth laughs. “For what? You weren’t exactly encouraging me.” He doesn’t mean anything by it. Probably.

“For… asking you to go outside with me, I guess? If that was as confusing for you as it was for me then it wouldn’t have helped that whole situation.”

Balth’s heart twists. He hadn’t even considered it being confusing for Peter too. It worries him a little as well. If Peter didn’t want to go out with him then… “Do you regret doing that?” He asks.

“No I-.” Peter starts, with far less surety in his voice than usual. “I wouldn’t say regret, I just- it probably wouldn’t have been good if we actually started going out then, right?”

Balthazar nods slowly. It’s the closest Peter has come to even hinting that the start of the year existed at all; he doesn’t want to break it. “No, probably not.” He pauses. “Are you sure it’s a good thing now?”

Peter starts a little, clearly not expecting the question. “I- what?” He looks at Balth firmly. “Are you not?”

Balth only then realises what the question must have sounded like, and tries hurriedly to backtrack. “No, no, I just…” How to phrase this in a way that doesn’t sound accusatory, or judgemental. He knows those are the worst two things he could possibly be to Peter. “I seriously understand if a full-on relationship isn’t what you want.” He says carefully.

Peter just looks at him for a moment. “Why would I be here if it wasn’t what I want?” He says finally. “I said that I wanted to be with you.” His voice is getting maybe a little too firm, it makes Balth pick up another sugar packet. “And I wouldn’t screw you around like that, you know that right?”

“No, I know.” Balth says, as if offering a premature olive branch. He really, really, does not want this to be an argument. “I just want to make sure you’re not just doing this because you know how not over you I am. Like, if you’re not into monogamy or long-term relationships or whatever, that’s fine, I just want to be on the same page about it.” He says it all in a rush, like a race with himself to see which side of his brain will win out.

“Balth, oh my god, what can I do to convince you?” Peter says, a little exasperated, mostly kind. “I promise you I would not have said anything if I didn’t actually want it, why would I do that?”

“Yeah, no, of course, I don’t know. It’s just…” Balth swallows. “Do you think you’d still want to if it weren’t for the rules?” He doesn’t realise how much he’d been thinking it until he says it.

“What do the rules have to with it?”

“Just because you were like, talking about how it sucks being single and stuff.” He pauses, breathes. “I guess I’m just worried if you would still choose to be in a relationship like this with me, if you had the option of being in any kind of relationship with anyone.” Another rush, another breath.

Peter places his hand, palm up, in the centre of the table. Hesitantly, Balth fills it with his own, lets himself calm. Peter curls his fingers around his, squeezes. “You know, the reason you were the first person I came out to was because you were the one person I trusted enough to let me change.” Balth squeezes back, tighter. “Can you trust me enough to let me do it again now?”

Trust is a funny thing, Balth thinks, it’s not as obvious as one might think. It’s so easily startled, feels much more liquid than solid a lot of the time. But of course, there’s only one answer.

--

The entire time he’s on the phone with his parents, Peter mentally runs through about a hundred different ways of saying look, I really would love him to stay but my flatmates would never let it happen and I truly cannot explain why. There’s no way he can actually say no to this though, and by the time he’s hanging up, he’s already flipped to mentally preparing the argument he’s going to make to the others.

He finds them in the tent, limbs all overlapping just enough; it really would be kind of nice, being able to sit out here together on warm days like this, if the circumstances were different.

When he crawls inside, Balth shuffles over a bit for him and Peter’s highly grateful that Meg’s practically using his other shoulder as a pillow, letting him overlap his hand with Balth’s, just enough so as not to draw attention to it. As much as he wishes they could hold hands properly, there is something he sort of loves about it, this thing that only they know about, that they can have for themselves, in amongst the constant surveillance and gossip.

“Alright guys?” He wants to test the waters, scope out the likelihood of a confrontation. But really, he’s kidding himself. A confrontation is the inevitable conclusion to a proposal like this. “Is everyone good?”

“Not really.” Bea says flatly, Meg mirroring her, and none of the others’ blank faces tell a much more encouraging story. Well, whatever, if there’s one thing Peter can do, it’s get people to follow his lead.

“I want to make a new rule.” He says, as firmly as he can, feels Balth shift beside him. He barrels on before anyone can protest. “If everyone can agree to break a rule- or bend it, that’s pretty much what we’ve been doing so far.”

Everyone straightens up, Bea and Meg looking confused, Ben and Freddie so ready for a fight he wouldn’t be surprised if they’d been prepared for this moment for months. “We’re not breaking any rules.” Ben says, and Bea pulls her hand away from where it had been resting on his knee. It gives Peter a brief pang of guilt.

“What rule do you even want to break?” Freddie asks, apprehensively, and Balth squeezes his hand a little and he feels, suddenly, that he’s asking for the wrong thing.

“I want John to stay here.” Balth’s grip loosens and Peter desperately resists looking at his face.

“No way.” Meg says

“Yeah, he can’t stay in the house.” Bea says, in that tone of voice she has right before it gets venomous.

“We can’t just start making exceptions.” Freddie insists, almost frantically. “That totally undermines the point of the rules.”

“It wouldn’t really be fair.” Ben says, a little gentler which makes Beatrice glare daggers at him. “Freddie’s right, we can’t break rules for some people and not others.”

“Or you could just break them for all of us.” Bea says under her breath which is Peter’s cue to step in before the conversation devolves completely.

“Look, it wouldn’t be long term, just a couple of weeks. And you can punish me for it.”

“That’s not how the punishments work though!” The frantic energy in Freddie’s voice is solid now. “We can’t just let each other break rules whenever we want.”

“It wouldn’t be whenever though right?” It almost shocks him to hear Balth speak up. “It’s one exception for his brother.” It warms something in Peter’s chest. Maybe this is what an actual relationship is supposed to be like, having Balth in his corner, even when he knows he’s probably desperate to get as far away from this conversation as possible right now.

“Okay.” Meg says, her tone at complete odds with Balthazar’s. “Then Benedick can make an exception right now for his girlfriend.”

“I can’t do that.” Ben says quietly.

“Well then you’re sure as hell not doing it for John.” Beatrice says, venom in full force, dripping, and it makes Peter feel such a powerful surge of protectiveness for his brother, he almost yells back at her.

“Sorry Pete.” Ben says, his voice shaky. “I just don’t think we can justify it.”

Well, he knew it wasn’t all that unlikely that this would happen. “Right.” He says, as calmly as he can manage. “What would you actually do though?”

“What do you mean?” Freddie asks, defensive.

“I mean if he came and stayed in my room, which I’m paying for, what would you do about it? Like how would you actually stop that from happening?” It feels dangerous, pulling on this thread, asking for this concession. It’s not one he’s sure he even wants to hear, but he’s not about to tell John he can’t stay with him. Doesn’t even want to think about what that would mean for them.

“Well we’d have to punish you.” Freddie says, uncertain, maybe a little scared.

“I know. I already said I’d do a punishment.”

Ben and Freddie give each other a look, and Peter feels sort of vindicated in finally doing something they weren’t prepared for.

“It’s all of our flat Peter.” Ben starts. “We should all get a say in who we’re comfortable having in the house.”

The way he phrases it, it almost makes sense. But John is more important. “That’s part of the rules though, and I’m telling you, I’m breaking the rules. My mum’s already booked flights anyway, so what am I supposed to do? You’re just going to have to put up with it for two weeks.”

He doesn’t give them a chance to keep arguing - not they that they really could, he’s made up his mind - and crawls out of the tent, an annoyingly undramatic exit.

“Fuck all of you, seriously.” He hears Bea say, as he walks back across the lawn.

*

In his room, he puts his headphones on and turns up the playlist he always listens to when he’s pissed off. He hadn’t played it probably since August, back when it was mostly a ‘pretending my flatmates don’t exist, pretending the rest of my life doesn’t exist and I’m the only person left on the planet’ set of songs. With his curtains closed and his lights off, it does feel like it could be August, or June, or March. It makes him wonder, just for split second, if this rule breaking thing is worth it.

But then there’s a knock on the door, faint, through a heavy bass line and screamed lyrics. A Balth sort of knock, thank god, there’s no one else he could cope with right now. So maybe he wouldn’t want to be entirely alone in the world.

“Yeah?” He says, just loud enough for it to get through the door, which opens gently,

“Hey.” Balth says, just as softly. Peter pulls his headphones down around his neck. “Can I sit?”

Peter sits up, making room for him. “So, are they all ripping each other to shreds right now?”

“Pretty much.” Balth says grimly. “Are you okay?”

Peter isn’t sure when the last time someone actually asked him that was and it makes him suddenly, stupidly, emotional. He’d spent so long dreading the question, but now, coming from Balthazar, it feels like a gift. It feels precious. He hadn’t realised how badly he’d been aching for it.

But he also feels out of practice, doesn’t know how to respond. “I don’t know… I mean, I knew they wouldn’t be happy about it… it’s just important to me, y’know?”

They hadn’t ever gotten a chance to talk about it, the John Thing, but Peter knows Balth will get it anyway, he spent enough time at their house before everything, he was the only person Peter ever really told about the whole thing, all the weird, conflicting, fucked up ways he was feeling. Sometimes, he feels that Balthazar understands him so completely it makes him feel undeserving, even guilty.

“I know.” Balthazar says, of course. “You did the right thing.”

“You think so?” As much as he knows he needed to, questioning the rules like that, something didn’t feel right about it, or maybe right isn’t the correct word, maybe it just felt bad. He hates that it would feel bad.

“I do. You were right, there really is nothing stopping us from breaking them.”

Peter almost laughs. “Well yeah, I think the fifty times I’ve kissed you in the past week proves that.”

Balth smiles, goes a little red which makes Peter smile in return. “But seriously.” Balth says. “There’s nothing they could actually do. We could just tell them. If we say we’re stopping then I think they would have to stop too. Then John wouldn’t be a problem.”

“I thought you didn’t want to tell them?”

“I didn’t want to have the argument, but now the argument’s already happening.” He shifts a little, looks down at his hands. “I don’t know, I guess I feel like it doesn’t make sense not to tell them now.

There’s a heaviness in Peter’s chest, his stomach, his throat, that he can’t shake. Something about telling the others feels like it would break something, this conversation already feels like a fracture that hasn’t yet been x-rayed. He can feel the crack, but can’t see it.

So of course, he has to be the irrational one again, the one who pushes back, ruins everything. “But don’t you think stopping now would just make things worse? It’s not like they’ll just be like ‘okay cool, lets all stop then and John can stay and we can all just fucking make out with each other now!’”

Balth looks back up at him, a look on his face that’s partly incredulous, like he can’t believe this could even be a point of contention, and partly deeply uncomfortable that it is one. Peter has fully prepared himself for Balth to just walk out now, but it proves unnecessary. “But you just said it yourself? There aren’t actually any consequences.” He says. “I’m kind of surprised you’re not jumping at this.”

“There are consequences though.” Peter presses. “We’d be totally screwing Ben and Freddie over. We can’t just bail on them.”

“Since when do you care about screwing Ben and Freddie over?”

He does get it. Why this would seem so completely out of character. In fact, the last time he was in this room with the curtains closed, his entire goal in life was basically to fuck with Ben and Freddie. But it’s also disappointing that Balth hasn’t seen it as well as Peter thought he had. How much closer Peter feels with all of them, he’s not above admitting he cares, not anymore. Part of it scares him, sure. He’s not sure he’s ready to have them care about him back. Desperately hopes his defensiveness for them won’t be turned back on him.  So he’s ready to bend that relationship, not break it.

But he desperately doesn’t want to break this relationship either. Plan B is compromise. “Look, I get it, this whole thing is fucked up, but can we just wait until this stuff with John is over? I really think adding anything else on top of that will just make them more pissed off, and I just really, really don’t think any of us need a big blow up right now.” He tries his best to appeal to something he knows Balth won’t be able to disagree with, hopes it will help him understand, even if it really doesn’t explain anything.

Balth sighs, just slightly, not enough to seem actually annoyed. “Yeah, okay. After.”

The soft way he says it brings the ache back to Peter’s chest. “I care about this too much to do anything that could ruin it.” He says, trying for the same type of tender.

Balth looks at him, a little inquisitively. If Peter were a more pessimistic person, he might even call it untrustingly. “Yeah, me too.”

He moves up the bed, so he’s sitting next to Peter against the headboard, takes his hand, intertwines their fingers.

“So, do you want to talk about how you’re actually feeling about John staying?”

Peter honestly has no idea how he ever lived without this.

--

By the time John’s spent two days in the flat, everyone’s indignance has settled down to bare a simmer, mostly in the interest of not being outwardly rude, Balth thinks. Really, it would be hard to be mad when John is so completely unobtrusive. It would hardly make a difference if Peter wasn’t so strung out and Ben hadn’t taken to practically filming John’s every move and Freddie starting and ending every conversation with a reminder of some chore they had forgotten to do. Add a secret relationship on top and it’s really starting to stress him out.

John is supposed to be sleeping on Peter’s floor, which really means his bed once Peter can sneak into Balth’s room after the others have gone to sleep. Which really should be nice - which is nice - it’s just that Peter being so anxious about getting caught is making him anxious about it and he doesn’t want to say that he does kind of miss having the space to himself and definitely doesn’t want to say how weirdly off-kilter this whole situation is feeling. The secretiveness is one thing, he can cope with that, for now at least, but as much as he’s trying to ignore it, there’s something that feels so not right about it all that he wakes up with a lump in his throat. It would be pointless to say anything anyway. He’s not about to ruin this thing they have; it would feel like betrayal, and not necessarily to Peter.

So when he can’t sleep and wakes up long before his alarm again, he takes a moment to appreciate it, Peter’s arm strung loosely around his waist, his mussed-up hair, his slightly uneven breath. And he knows this moment shouldn’t make him anything but calm, but he’s already thinking about the mugs scattered on the bedside tables which Freddie will be mad about and the camera that will probably be set up as soon as Ben wakes up and the argument Beatrice will start once she gets back from work this afternoon and, and, and. And he doesn’t know how long mornings like this with Peter are going to last.

Thank god he has an essay to work on. It’s probably a little weird how much he genuinely enjoys writing them, the structure and the research he can get lost in and the stringing all these thoughts together until they click into something that flows and makes sense. Something completely new made out a history of other people doing the same thing. It doesn’t feel all that different from song writing really. It makes the buzzing in his brain dim, this thing he can control. And as he analyses the techniques Emily Dickinson used when she wrote of a plank in reason breaking, he looks over at Peter, and listens to the sounds of the flat, he feels his own plank splintering. As she drops down and down, he writes faster, and faster.

*

“What time is it?” Peter’s sleep-addled voice sounds from next to him, some unknown time later.

Balth flicks his eyes down to the bottom of his laptop screen, which tells him it has somehow been two and a half hours. “Quarter to eight. Good morning.”

“Ugh.” Peter buries his face half back into the pillow. “Why is it so early. Why are you awake.”

“English essay.”

“Why are you writing an essay at eight in the morning.” Peter mumbles, voice still muffled by the pillow.

“I was awake.” Balth shrugs. “And I’m working after uni.”

“Mm, you’re always working.”

“I’m really not.” Balth half-heartedly protests.

“Sure.” Peter sits up just enough to take Balth’s laptop from his lap and put it on the bedside table on the other side of the bed.

“Hey, I was in the middle of a sentence.”

“The sentence is gonna have to wait.” Peter wraps his arms around Balth, half tackling him, and pulls him down, wrapping him tightly in the duvet.

“You’re ridiculous.” Balth says, but he feels a little breathless which isn’t helped by the way Peter is looking at him.

Peter just pulls him closer in response, holds him against his chest, and they just breathe like that together. Balthazar can’t help but think of the title of another Dickinson poem, Sweet - safe - Houses.

After a minute, Peter pulls away just slightly, arms still around him, to look Balth in eyes. It makes Balth feel alight with something, but also a little terrifyingly vulnerable. “What are you stressed about?” Peter asks.

Oh, he wasn’t really expecting that. He sifts through his ten thousand stressors to find one that doesn’t actually mean anything but comes up blank. It makes him a little mad at himself that Peter has even noticed. “I’m not stressed.” He says, probably totally unconvincingly.

“Balth, c’mon.” Peter holds him a little tighter. “You know you can talk to me.”

Not about this though, when Balthazar doesn’t even really know what’s bothering him so much. Not when Peter will beat himself up about whatever he says. Not when all of this is so fragile. “It’s really nothing Pete, I just have a lot of assignments due.”

“Okay…” Peter doesn’t sound convinced. “It’s not anything to do with us?”

He can’t have this conversation, he just can’t. Just the thought of it feels like walls closing in, like a drumming in the ears. The blanket suddenly feels stifling around him. He’s careful not to lie directly, not to say no. “I have like three essays due next week.”

Still, Peter just looks at him thoughtfully, searches his face for what he knows Balth’s not telling him. “I’ll talk to Ben and Freddie again. Try to get them to chill out.”

Balth rolls onto his back, prefers the blankness of the ceiling to Peter’s look of concern. “You don’t have to do anything for me, I’m seriously fine.”

Peter lets out an almost imperceptible sigh that sounds like it’s hovering somewhere between, worry, tiredness and annoyance. Guilt pools in his stomach as if Peter’s breath turned on a tap inside of him, shallow but spreading. This isn’t how this is supposed to feel.

Peter turns onto his back, mirroring him, reaches for his hand under the blankets and Balth lets it ground him, if only for moment. “You’re gonna have to leave before the others wake up.” He breaks the silence.

“I know.” Peter says. “I just want to be in this world for a little longer.” And he doesn’t loosen his grip.

--

Balthazar’s birthday could be exactly what they all need, Peter thinks. And after all of the arguments and tension and stubbornness proliferating the flat since the conversation in the tent, Kit’s suggestion of a rules hiatus catches Peter totally off guard, and it stuns him even more that it’s actually agreed to. Freddie got on board so quickly, he almost thought she must have been replaced with an imposter, and while Ben was hesitant, he couldn’t look at Bea for very long without giving in as well. Because a rules hiatus is different from rule breaking, it’s an essential distinction he knows they’re all clinging onto. They can’t go too far, but they can give themselves this. Maybe it’s not all that unlike what he and Balth have. The weird thing is no one actually asked him if he wanted it.

“You don’t seem that pumped?” He says to Balth, in the kitchen, over the sound of water in the sink as they wash the dishes from dinner once everyone else has gone to bed. Of course a drama had to be made of the whole thing, all of them sitting with a camera pointed at them in a way that felt far too reminiscent of a scene from last year for Peter’s liking. And after all of that, Balth didn’t really seem to know how to react.

“About the rules?” Balthazar sets a bowl carefully in the drying rack.

“Yeah.”

“Well, I don’t know. I’m not not pumped.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s just a lot, I guess. No rules. A party.”

Peter can’t pretend he doesn’t feel much the same way. That same dizzy sort of feeling he’s been getting whenever he thinks about abandoning the rules lately rises up in him, that unplaceable uneasiness. Add alcohol on top and it feels a lot like vertigo. “Yeah, I s’pose.” He says instead. “It’ll be good though right? Not having to think about them for a night?”

Balth looks at him, jarringly cutting. “Yeah, for a night.”

It stings, that look, which holds a phantom of first semester in its hurt, and Peter wants desperately to rectify it. Wants, badly, to be able to do anything for Balthazar and for Balthazar to know that. Wants to never have to see that look from him again. “We won’t have to keep this a secret.”

Balth doesn’t say anything for a moment, just dries another bowl. “That might raise a few questions.” He says finally.

“Which we wouldn’t have to answer if we didn’t want to.”

“And then what? Just pretend it didn’t happen in the morning?”

“No, and then we don’t have to pretend anything anymore.” He doesn’t think it through, just knows he’s been doing something so wrong, needs so urgently to be able to trust himself to do this one thing right. To give Balth what he needs here. And fuck it. This ridiculous fucking desperately heavy, looping vertigo he’s getting is just that, ridiculous. He doesn’t owe Ben and Freddie anything. He hates not feeling in control of his own life, he hates being told what to do, he hates not being able to be with Balth in the way he wants to. He wants this for himself as well.

Balth leans back on the counter, most of him gentle, some of him guarded and so exactly himself that Peter feels awash with an adoration so sudden and complete he has to steady himself on the counter as well.

“You want to do that?” Balth asks carefully. “At the party?”

He forces some sureness into his voice. “With any luck they’ll realise they don’t want them either, there’s a reason they agreed to this.”

“Even if they did, it’s not like they wouldn’t still be mad.”

“Okay?” It frustrates him sometimes, this almost pathological avoidance strategy. The way Balth wants things to happen to him without ever actually participating in them. A method of plausible deniability maybe, or maybe it’s just a way to never be in the wrong. Peter knows how this will play out, he’ll take the fall for them, of course, and then he’ll end up where he always ends up.

Balth won’t meet his eyes, which only makes Peter more annoyed. “I just don’t know if a party would be the best place to do it.” He says.

“You don’t want to tell them now?”

“That’s not what I said.” Peter bristles at the exasperation in his voice. “I just don’t want to do it at a party when there’s a million people around and everyone’s drunk.”

“Do you want me to pretend that’s not pointed?” Maybe if he wasn’t already so on edge about this, he could be more rational, but he already doesn’t trust himself and now Balth doesn’t either, which of course he doesn’t, why would he? But he wishes he would just say that.

“It’s not, Peter.” Balth’s voice is tense. “Everyone will be drinking. I’m just already kind of overwhelmed by the idea of this party and I really would rather not cause another drama.”

“That’s exactly what you said the last time we talked about this!” There’s a tightness in his chest he can’t shake, doesn’t know if he wants to. God, why can’t he figure out one single thing he wants? “You can’t act so hurt about not telling them and then come up with an excuse every time I suggest it.”

Balth crosses his arms across his chest, curls into himself in a way that makes him look so small, it makes Peter ache. But he doesn’t know how to back down from this. Doesn’t want to. “It’s not an excuse. You don’t want to tell them for some reason, and I don’t want to tell them at my birthday so let’s just drop it.”

Fuck. That fucking inflection. As if Balth can see right through him, knows the exact dimensions of Peter’s want, or lack thereof, better than he does. It’s an incision that at first he’s not even sure Balthazar knows he’s making, but when he turns to leave, Peter knows he does. “Balthazar, Jesus, don’t just walk out.”

 Balth stops in the doorway, finally meets his eyes. “You want me to stay here so you can yell at me?”

“No. For fuck’s sake, I want you to stay so you can tell me what you actually want. I’m sick of mixed messages with us.”

“I don’t know how to tell you and get you to actually listen.” And he leaves before Peter can say another word. And as he stands there in the dimly lit kitchen, dry mouth and pulled-taut heart, all he can think is if I leave you will you be okay?

--

Balthazar wakes up on the morning of his birthday to an empty right side of the bed. This doesn’t have to mean anything, they really have mostly been fine since the argument, Balth, for his part, determined to forget about it. But still, he wanted Peter here this morning. He’s twisted up and untied all at once. He’s nineteen and already so tired.

He’s about to get up to make coffee when there’s a knock at the door.

“Yeah?”

Peter opens it carefully, sleep still in his eyes and hair just mussed up enough to make Balth’s heart pang, a present wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper in his hand.

“Happy birthday.” He says, more genuinely than Balth thinks anyone has ever said those words, and takes his side of the bed.

“Thanks.” Balth smiles, twists and unties.

“How does nineteen feel so far?”

“For the five minutes I’ve been awake, a lot like eighteen.”

“It’s kind of crazy that we’re technically adults right?”

Balth laughs a little. “In technicality only, I think.”

Peter seems to get caught up in some private thought for a moment, which Balthazar longs to see into. He shakes himself out of it before he can think about asking though. “I got you this. Sorry about the paper, I don’t know how it was the only one we had when we weren’t even here for Christmas.” He hands Balth the gift.

“I thought the rules hiatus was my present.” Balth takes the package.

Peter looks incredulous. “Obviously I was going to actually get you something.”

Obviously. “Well, thank you.” Peter smiles tentatively at him, as if uncharacteristically nervous. “Should I do the card first?”

“Go ahead.”

Balthazar pulls the card out of its envelope, Hallmark embossment wishing him a happy birthday in gold loopy letters.

Balth,

Happy birthday. I hope 19 is a lot better than 18 was and you have a great year.

I hope you like your present – they made me think of you.

- Peter

It’s a weird card, or rather, so strangely impersonal. Balth had gotten cards with both sides covered in tiny handwriting from Peter before. Or he had before last year. He swallows the lump that’s appeared in his throat. Tries not to look at the one word sign-off.

“Thank you.”

“Okay, open the present now.”

He wants this not to feel important, doesn’t want to put pressure on it. Because a gift from someone you’re dating doesn’t actually matter more than a gift from your best friend, he knows that. But maybe it’s not even about that. Maybe he’s just hoping for proof of something.

He peels the tape off carefully, he’s always been the type to save wrapping paper. It’s a stack of five CDs –, Modern Baseball’s Sports, Radiator Hospital’s Something Wild, Mumford & Sons’ Sigh No More, The Paper Kites’ Woodland, Linda Perhac’s Parallelograms. Even without listening to them, just looking at the album art transports him back through high school, almost painfully so. The music Peter was listening to in history class when they first met, the album he had on in his bedroom when Peter first came over to his house and which he spent at least an hour agonising over, the one they listened to on repeat while studying for Year 12 exams, hanging out in the park with Hero and Ursula, the one they were listening to when Peter came out to him.

It’s lovely. Of course it’s lovely, the fact that Peter would even remember those moments is almost unbelievably lovely. He thought they only mattered to him. It’s just… this is all history. These songs are relics of a relationship they used to have but which was well and truly over by the end of last year. He’ll always love this music for that, but he’ll love it in the same way you love childhood drawings, not for what they are, but for what they represent. It’s the exact type of achingly resonant nostalgia only the music you listened you listened to when you were fourteen can bring you. And he doesn’t want this to be nostalgic, he wants something new. The way he wants Peter now is entirely different from the way his sixteen-year-old self wanted him, and he doesn’t want to be reminded of his sixteen-year-old self. He wants the chance to make something that self wouldn’t have even dreamt about.

But still. “Thank you.” He says. “I- wow, I can’t believe you could even remember any of these.”

“Of course I remembered them.” There’s surety in Peter’s voice, but a thread of something else too.

“I never thought you were paying that much attention.”

“Are you kidding?” Peter says. “I would listen to all of these on repeat like, all through school.”

“Good to know we’re both as stupidly sentimental as each other then.” Except this sentimentality feels like blank static.

Peter seems to want to say something else but stops himself. “Do you want some super sentimental birthday kisses then?”

“Definitely.”

Peter cups his jaw, kisses him softly at first, and then a little harder, and something Balth has learnt over the past few weeks is that this just doesn’t feel more normal the more he does it. As Peter presses against him, as he pulls him closer and lets himself be pulled, he thinks that this can’t possibly be sentimentality, it has to be something more. This has to be some type of creation.

**

It’s not that Balthazar doesn’t want this party, it’s just that everyone else seems to want it a little more than he does. He supposes a rules hiatus would feel like a bit more of a big deal when you haven’t already been breaking the one rule you really care about. But still, the music is just right and the lighting is just right and he does genuinely like having everyone here, he just doesn’t love the alcohol and Peter’s immediate disappearance.

He lets himself get pulled into shots and way too many awkward half-yelled conversations with people he’s never met before he finds anyone he actually knows to talk to.

“Balthy!” Ben flops down next to him where he’s found a spot on one of the couches. “Are you having a good birthday?’

“I’m having a wonderful birthday Ben.” Balth finds it easier to just agree.

“Me too.” Ben says, a little slurred. “Wait-. It’s not my birthday. But if I was my birthday I’d be having a wonderful time. But I’m having a wonderful time anyway… you know what I mean.”

“Are you drunk Ben?

“Only a little. Are you drunk?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well why not?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s your birthday! You need to be having fun.”

“I am having fun.” He loves Ben, he really does, but oh my god.

“You need to be having more fun.” Ben insists. “What about the rules hiatus. Are you breaking any rules?

It’s perhaps the topic he wants to be broaching with Ben the absolute least. What rules Ben even wants him to be breaking, he doesn’t know. “Well, it’s like 1am right now.”

Ben groans dramatically. “Yeah but that’s a boring one. What about the no shenanigans one or something?” The thing about Ben is he really hasn’t gotten the art of subtlety mastered. Balth wraps his hands tighter around the drink he’s holding.

“I’m not really one for party hookups.”

“I know. But like it wouldn’t have to just be a hookup.”

“You know the hiatus only lasts for twenty-four hours right?”

“Well I don’t know, you could at least do something.”

“Ben…” He doesn’t even know how to respond, almost has to laugh. He knows how Ben would react if he knew, and this whole conversation is so goddamn ridiculous in light of that. And as much as Ben might want him and Peter together, this fiction, contract, fucking protection, whatever it is they’ve made together, overshadows all of it. And it’s not that he doesn’t understand why Ben, or Peter for that matter, would feel so tied to it, he agreed to the rules himself for a reason after all, but it really is starting to feel all so disillusioning, so fictional. And it’s getting more and more difficult to see how they could possibly get a happy ending out of it.

“I’m just saying, have you even spoken to Peter all night?”

“I don’t know… maybe a few hours ago.” A pretty conspicuous few hours. But it’s fine, it’s not like he has to spend every second with him.

“So you should talk to him! Wait, we should go find him, he’s probably in the kitchen lets-“ Ben tries to stand but immediately collapses back onto the couch.

“Yeah, I think we should probably just stay here.”

“Maybe just for a bit, or we could go to the bath, he’ll know where to find us there.”

“Um, I think the couch is fine.”

Almost as if on cue, Peter appears in front of them. “Balth! There you are.” He’s drunk, so very, very drunk. A lump forms in Balth’s throat. He takes a sip of the drink he forgot he was holding.

“Hey.” He says softly. “You okay?”

Ben doesn’t give him a chance to respond. “Peter! Peter Peter Peter. We were just talking about you.”

“Were you?”

“Yeah… yeah.” He glances at Balth as if just then realising the conversation probably shouldn’t be repeated. “We were just going to go find you. And look, we found you!”

Peter just looks confused, turns his attention back to Balth and Balth feels himself shrinking under it. “Do you want to dance?” His words are so slurred. So anxiety inducing.

“Um.” Honestly he doesn’t particularly want to do anything with Peter right now. Anything other than help him down a glass of water maybe. He will always love every version of Peter, even this one, but whenever he’s like this, Balth just… freezes, the walls go up involuntarily, he feels so deep inside of himself. “I think I’m good here for now.” He says.

“Okay…” Peter seems to have to take a moment to gather his thoughts. “Do you want another drink?”

Balth almost wants to ask him if he means one of the two he’s already holding. “I’m good, thanks.”

Peter’s expression turns from confused to a little annoyed. The other thing about Peter’s drinking that makes Balth’s chest tighten is that he’s a belligerent drunk. How to stop this before it begins. “Well what do you want to do?” He asks, a little too forcefully. “I want to hang out with you.”

“Okay, just- I’m gonna go.” Ben says, finally figuring out how to stand. “And Peter you can sit here and you guys can just like… talk or something.”

“I don’t think Balthazar wants to talk.” Peter says in a way that starts up the alarm bells in Balth’s head.

“Pete, no, of course I do.”

“Do you?” He shoots back, so quickly it’s like he knew what Balth would say. “Because it seems like you just want to avoid me.”

Fuck. He doesn’t want to do this. He can’t do this. Please, please can they not be doing this. “Peter, I don’t want to avoid you, I never want to avoid you.”

“Okay so what the fuck do you want?” So goddamn belligerent. “Because you don’t want to dance with me, you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t want to fucking kiss me, so what?”

The music goes dim, his head gets so, so loud. Twisted and untied and so awfully knotted up. The one thing he actually did want to avoid. Why couldn’t Peter even let him have that? This one goddamn thing when everything else that Balth’s wanted, he’s kept to himself. But no, of course he had to make this happen in the worst possible context, when he’s this far from blackout drunk, when Ben’s standing between them looking so fucking bewildered, when he was already so uncomfortable, when he hadn’t prepared, when they’re yelling at each other, when when when. When Peter drinks, he gets belligerent. When Balth drinks, he just gets spirally.

“Peter, you know I do.” He tries to say it as gently as he possibly can. “But do you think now is really the best time?”

“There are no rules! When is there going to be a better time!?”

“When you get over them!” He doesn’t even notice his tone shifting at first. “When we can have this conversation like adults!” But maybe this is what fighting back feels like.

“We can’t have any conversation if you won’t actually talk to me about anything.” Peter shouts. Most of the chatter in the room has stopped, there are so many eyes on them which even if Peter doesn’t feel, Balthazar sure does.

“How am I supposed to talk to you if you never actually tell me how you feel?”

“Are you kidding?” Peter’s tone is so sickeningly harsh. “I’m the only one actually putting any effort in, I’m the one actually trying to make to make this work and I just want to hang out with on your birthday and you won’t even do that.”

Balth doesn’t think he’s ever felt like this before, like he understands how Peter felt at the beginning of the year, like he can’t believe he could be this misunderstood by someone he thought understood him so completely. Like he could break something, like how fucking dare he, like he’s so exhausted. Like this so deeply wasn’t the way this was supposed to go, and fuck, it’s heartbreaking. “Peter, oh my god, Peter. How can you be so desperate to kiss me right now when you won’t even say that you like me?”

Peter just stops, freezes as if a wire’s been cut. The dim music turns to a buzz. And he should be freaking out right now, but all Balth can feel is relief that he’s finally said it.

Peter shifts back into life, but changed from a split second ago, sapped of energy. ‘Balth, what- what do you mean?” Voice just a little cracked.

Balth just waits, doesn’t want to explain himself, knows he doesn’t have to. He knows this and Peter knows this and neither of them have been able to say it.

‘Balth, oh my god. Of course I like you. Of course I like you. I mean I don’t just… I love you.”

It stuns him for a second, pulls something loose inside of him, something which had been tightening itself for years. He lets himself be overcome with it, just for a second, lets this mean something so, so special. But only for a second, before the thread gets pulled taut once more. Because he’s drunk. This can’t be special at all because Peter is so completely wasted right now. He remembers with jarring clarity that there’s a reason he never lets his guard down. If you do, you get pulled so tight it’s strangling.

But how does he let Peter say that to him and not say it back. How does he let it go this way? He doesn’t know which one of them he owes more to.

He meets Peter’s eyes and it feels like the crackle of static electricity, the kind that puts you on edge because you know the shock is about to come. “You make being in love with you so hard.” It comes out as a sigh, and he hardly even hears it and there are so many eyes on them. He just wants to go to bed.

He holds his breath for Peter’s response, but it proves unnecessary. Peter’s expression transforms from soft and a little desperate, to cold, accusing, and the pit that became a permanent fixture of Balthazar’s stomach sometime around September last year, opens back up. And then Peter turns, goes to his room, slams the door shut, leaves Balthazar falling and his ears ringing.

--

In the split second between when he wakes up and gains consciousness, Peter thinks he’s dying. In the second after, he just feels like shit.

Even with the curtains closed and all the lights off, it still feels too bright. His head hurts. His throat hurts. His stomach hurts. He doesn’t even let himself think about his heart. As much he buries his head in his pillow, squeezes his eyes shut, tries to let the headache take over his brain completely, all he can see is Balth’s face right before he turned away, all his hurt laid out bare in a way he usually kept so carefully concealed, and as the pain splits Peter’s head open, he feels his whole self go with it.

After a time that’s somehow far too short and far too achingly long, there’s hesitant knock on his door. Not the Balth kind of hesitant, and far too gentle to be Freddie, he guesses Ben would be too pissed off. God. Fuck. He doesn’t want to do this. He had almost forgotten that Balth was far from the only way he had majorly fucked up last night. Of course, he can’t seem to be able to get through a party without fucking up at least three relationships anymore. He doesn’t know how he ever thought it could go any other way.

“Peter?” Comes John’s voice from the other side of the door and Peter pushes his face further into the pillow. “You awake?”

He lifts himself up as best he can, grapples around him for his phone, finds it tangled in the duvet at the other end of his bed. The screen is blindingly bright. 11:30.

Another knock. “Peter?” He wonders vaguely, amidst the hurt, how long it will take for John to give up. “I have water and Panadol.”

Fuck. It makes something that feels like what Peter can only imagine as a knife blade shoot through his chest. Balthazar’s absence so stupidly obvious in John’s presence, like a dull yet persistent pain. And the fact of John doing this… it’s almost dizzying in its meaning. It nauseates him. Peter fucking hates himself for making John do this, for being the wrong kind of person, no matter how hard he tries to change.

He waits a whole minute to make sure John is well and truly gone before he attempts to get himself out of bed to open the door himself. The ground feels wobbly, his whole body, whole self, off-kilter.

The water and drugs are there, just as John promised, and he slams the door shut again before downing them.

**

After another half an hour, the physical pain has mostly dulled to a low simmer, but Peter almost wishes he still had it as a tool for distraction. It’s a kind of anger he hasn’t felt since last year, a full body, pressing weight of self-hatred. It feels almost ironic really, in a ridiculously devasting way, that this could even be caused by Balth loving him, because that love is so totally incompatible with the kind of person he is. It’s a love he’s never deserved and so completely doesn’t now that he almost wants to be mad at Balth for feeling it. Wants to take him by the shoulders and shake him. But the unshakeable truth of all of this is that he could never really be mad at Balth, not for this, not for anything. Whatever anger he has in the thick of intoxication without fail turns into pathetic guilt and concern in the morning. He feels Bath’s love as an inevitable truth and feels his own as a hopeless path he just can’t stop following.

He makes up his mind to stay in his room all day, can’t bear the thought of anyone else seeing him, having to actually talk to anyone. As long as he stays in here, he won’t know what any of them are thinking. He has to keep the lid on the box for as long as possible.

Despite it making him feel like an absolute stereotype of himself, he finds his headphones somewhere on the floor and pulls up Spotify, finds Glare. It’s a song that always pulls him so far into himself, it blocks every external factor. Makes all the causation behind his feelings disappears and leaves only the symptoms. He is left in an undoing.

Now though, something’s different. He can’t stop thinking about Balth and Ben and Freddie on the other side of the door, feels himself getting pulled back into reality after every chorus and the collision hurts. He feels his self from the start of the year collide with his present self in the same way, a jarring disorientation. That version of himself is at once a stranger and exactly the same person he is now. He gets out of bed.

Making it out to the living room, there’s no sign of John, but the couches have been moved back to their normal places and he finds Ben and Freddie sitting on them, a camera set up in a way which makes his stomach turn and reminds him a little too much of another moment like this. They both look up at the same time when they hear his door open, both expressions a mixture of anger and pity and something Peter could only interpret as hurt. He steels himself against it, attempts to muster carelessness, but that’s never worked and this time is no different. In fact, he cares so much it makes him ache.

“Great. You’re up.” Freddie says, in her I’m the one running this conversation and I’m letting you know now so you don’t try anything kind of way.

“Apparently so.” He won’t try anything; he doesn’t think he has it in him.

“We’re having a flat meeting.” Ben says, almost distantly, as if his mind, body and voice are all in different rooms.

Well of course they are. That’s how this goes. He can’t even bring himself to be pissed off about it. Only wonders where Balth is.

He sits himself next to Freddie who looks between him and Ben and the camera quickly, as if keeping them all in her line of sight is the only way to stop them from doing anything unpredictable. She gets up, goes to Balth’s door, knocks, waits. Peter swallows a lump in his throat.

“Balth?”

There’s no way he’s going to come out, Peter thinks, no way he would face a situation like this. No way he would sit next to him. But maybe he doesn’t know Balth as well as he thought he did; just as Freddie raises her hand to knock again, he opens the door.

The lump reappears in his throat. Standing there in the doorway in a too big, white t-shirt, hair mussed, Balthazar looks so fucking gorgeous, it makes his mind blank completely, the forever spinning record of rules and self-hatred and being in love with you’s suddenly comes to a standstill. But while he can’t take his eyes off of Balth, Balth seems to be looking anywhere but at him.

“…We’re having a flat meeting.” Freddie says awkwardly, looking at Balth as if he’s an injured animal that might frighten easily.

“Right.”

Just as Peter did, Balth doesn’t argue, just goes to sit next to Ben, resignedly, as far away from Peter as possible. Peter’s chest clenches. Freddie sits back down on his other side, face still flickering with concern, while Ben’s has just turned to stone.

“So, some rules have been broken.” He says, voice equally as unflinching as his expression, he stares into the camera lens.

Well, obviously, Peter wants to retort, but says nothing.

“This is really disappointing guys.” Freddie jumps in when the silence holds on for a little too long. “We made the rules for a reason, pretty much for this exact reason.” She looks between Balth and Peter; Peter can tell there’s something she can’t figure out here, and that she’s probably finding that unbearable.

She looks to Peter as if expecting him to argue, but he can’t. She’s right. It shouldn’t be a surprise to any of them that this happened really. When put to a test with Balth, he fails it. It’s like some fucked up kind of destiny. The rules are the only reason it hadn’t happened for a while.

“How long had this been going on for.” Ben asks, more statement than question.

Peter thinks back. It feels like longer than it’s actually been, far more than three weeks. When he tells Ben this, trying to keep his voice passive, Ben’s hurt reveals itself on his face and Peter wonders how the fuck they ended up here, where this could feel like betrayal, and not only from Ben’s perspective.

“You know I wouldn’t mind so much if you hadn’t been keeping it secret this whole time.” Ben says.

“Really, Ben?” God, it’s so ridiculous a statement, he almost laughs. “You wouldn’t have minded? I find that a little hard to believe.”

Some of Ben’s unwavering composure breaks. “I wanted you two to be together. It doesn’t make it okay that you broke them but- I mean that rule wouldn’t exist in the first place if I didn’t want that.”

“What does that even mean?”

“I made the rule for you guys. I guess I thought it would help.” Now, Ben just sounds dejected.

Fuck. It’s such a Ben sort of logic, Peter’s hit with the urge to laugh for a second time. But he can’t even say it was really that stupid. It did work.

But they’re still here. “So what was your plan for if it did help?” Strangely, he wishes his tone could be more accusing than it is. It used to be his default when talking to Ben. He doesn’t know when that changed.

“I guess I didn’t think it would get this bad.” Ben says quietly, sadly, maybe thinking of something else.

“So what?” Freddie jumps in before the conversation can venture too far out of her control. “You don’t want the rules now either?”

Ben startles. “We’re keeping the rules.” He says firmly. “We have to.”

“I thought this was a meeting? What are we even talking about it if you two have already decided?” Peter says, thinking of Balth, who hasn’t said a word.

“So you want to scrap them completely.” Freddie says it not as a question, but an accusation.

But he doesn’t. He really, stupidly, unreasonably doesn’t. Last night only proved to him how completely he can’t function without the rules, how much he’d been relying on them for the past couple of months, without even realising it. If last night’s hiatus went the way it did, it scares him to think about what an indefinite hiatus would do to him. What it would do to Balth. So maybe it makes him a coward, but he just can’t do this. “I never said that.” He says, meeting Freddie’s eyes.

Freddie visibly relaxes, Ben looks almost as if he wants to say something else but thinks better of it. Balth just looks blank. Now that three of them have spoken, it’s decided. Peter swallows hard, wants to ask for Balth’s input but is too scared of his response. Fucking cowardly. He cracks his knuckles.

“So we’re keeping the rules.” Freddie announces, as if this was inevitably going to be her decree, which Peter supposes it was. “And um, well I guess you two don’t really need another punishment…” She looks between Peter and Balth again, nervously. “I um- well I don’t know what you want to do, but obviously you can’t really keep-.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Balth says, the words like an electric shock, the first real words Peter has heard him say since last night. He starts to get up and Peter’s heart starts to pull itself apart. “It won’t be a problem.” He says, voice unfaltering. He doesn’t look at Peter when he says it and Peter, just for startling second, hates him for it.

Peter watches him walk to the front door as if seeing it on play on old film, disjointed, not quite real. Balth open the door, looks at them all frozen on the couch, and Peter feels himself tied to Ben and Freddie as if with red string, feels the string tying him to Balth straining against itself, pulled taught. Feels a fissure run a trail down through all four chambers of his heart, one for each of them in the room, unable to give himself completely to any one of them.

“I just need to get some air.” Balth says, voice crackly, as if it too has been recorded on a long-forgotten tape.

But when he closes the door behind him, Peter knows he’s not coming back.

**

He doesn’t know how long he stays sitting on the couch before John finds him, just staring into space, mind blank. He feels unreal, like if he could stay here in this position for long enough, everyone could just forget he ever existed.

“You need to at least eat something.” John’s voice comes out of nowhere, Peter hadn’t even realised he was sitting on the couch next to him, holding a plate of buttered toast out in his direction.

“I’m not hungry.” He mumbles.

“I know. You still need to eat.” It reminds him too much of Ben, he hated being his problem then, and he desperately doesn’t want to be John’s now. He takes the plate and just holds it in his lap.

“You don’t need to look after me.”

“No one does, right?”

That makes him look up at John, find something bordering on concern in his face. He fucking hates it. He wishes, for a moment that he had never let him come to stay in the first place, so he wouldn’t have had to be here for this. “No, and especially not you.” He wants it to sound soft, but it comes out harsh. He presses his nails into his palms.

“I’m your brother.”

“Exactly.”

“So I’m going to be here whether you like it or not.”

Peter swallows a lump in his throat. There’s a stinging in his eyes. They had both been carefully threading these stitches for so long but this was never supposed to be the result. John is supposed be his burden, not the other way around.

“I don’t deserve that.” He says, the words coming out frustratingly choked. “If you hadn’t already realised that, I’ve surely proven it now.”

“What does it prove? That you’re a human being?”

“That you’d be better off just giving up on me. It’s not worth the energy, it- I’m not fixable.”

John is silent for a moment. “After last year, how do you still think you’re the type of person people give up on Peter?”

It’s like pulling on the thread they’d stitched. Because the whole time it had felt the exact opposite, last year was the entire reason for people giving up on him. It felt so completely inevitable that he never stopped to see it had never actually happened. All of them stayed. Every single one of them. He’d been waiting for so long for Balth to walk out on him, holding his breath the entire time, that he almost feels as if he willed it into existence. And if he loved him, then it would only hurt more. So he couldn’t love him. The rules were only a way to justify it, a container to fill with his fear, to place his love outside of reality. It got to a point, when they sang the song together, that the container just couldn’t hold it anymore, it overflowed. But still, as long as it all stayed secret, it all stayed unreal, they could live in this world the four of them had created for themselves for a little bit longer, and as long as none of them gave up on the rules, none of them could give up on him. Committing to Balth, in earnest, would be giving up, it would be making himself vulnerable, he would have to confront a part of himself he didn’t want to invite back. To face it would be to remind himself, and Ben and Balth of that person, and then, what other choice would they have than to give up on him?

“Do you need a hug?” John breaks Peter’s silence.

Peter half laughs, tears building behind his eyes. “You hate hugs.”

“I can make an exception.”

“Yes, please.” He tries to wipe the tears out of his eyes, but they’re stubborn.

John pulls him to his chest and Peter just breaks down, cries about all of it, wishes he’d let himself do it sooner.

--

He feels like a complete burden in Paige and Chelsey’s house, but he doesn’t know where else to go. He just needs somewhere to be right now that isn’t the flat, hopes he’ll feel okay enough to go back after just one night, knows that won’t happen, knows he can’t do it anymore.

He sits at their kitchen counter, cradling a cup of tea, caught frustratingly between wishing they would stop feeling like they need to take care of him, and desperately craving that care.

“If you apologise one more time, I might actually have to kick you out.” Paige says, sitting next to him.

“Sorry.”

“Balth.”

“I know, I know.” He doesn’t know how to do this, how he’s supposed to talk about it when the very act of being here feels like a slight on Peter, an accusation or an admittance. “I just don’t want you to feel like you guys have to look after me.”

“We want to look after you.” Paige says gently. “Can we talk about this?”

“I don’t know what to say.” He so desperately doesn’t want to make this another Peter Problem. Now, in the blaring light of day, he feels starkly that Peter was right about him. He wanted it so badly that he couldn’t cope with actually having it. And now he’s ruined it. It’s irretrievable. “I fucked up.”

“You didn’t feel that way last night though.”

“I was angry last night. I wasn’t thinking.”

“You’re allowed to be angry. Being angry doesn’t make you wrong.”

It’s an immediate association for Balth though, anger and irrationality, he doesn’t know how to be angry and still be himself. “But I shouldn’t have been. He was only telling me what was true.”

“Okay. Sure. You should have been open with him. But so should of he.”

“I was being hypocritical though. I never told him I liked him either.”

She seems to consider this for a moment. “Why didn’t you?” She asks plainly.

It takes him aback. Why hadn’t he? Peter not saying it had felt like such a purposeful choice, it felt mean. It meant something crucial, something intentional. But for Balth his love was such an obvious and absolute fact it didn’t feel like it needed saying. He knew Peter knew it, saying it would just feel redundant. “He already knows. He’s always known it.”

“Right. But I know Chelsey loves me. I still want her to tell me sometimes.”

“Fuck. Yeah. This is what I’m saying, I can’t blame him when it’s my fault.”

“There were two of you in the relationship, yes?”

“Yeah.” He mumbles. “I just…”

Paige just waits, sips her tea. He lets his own mug cool under his palms.

“I felt like all I’d been doing for years was telling him and telling him and telling him and getting nothing back. I didn’t think this time would be any different.”

Paige nods. “That makes sense. And it should have made sense to him too, right?”

“I guess.” He sighs. “I don’t think I want it to have made sense to him though. I don’t want him to know he was hurting me and still keep doing it.”

“Do you think Peter would hurt you intentionally?” It’s a genuine question, and it makes Balth’s chest clench. The answer to it has always been as clear as his own love.

“No.”

“Okay. So that matters right?”

Balth pauses, lets her statement settle as something true. Something obvious. “I just think that as much as I trust that he wouldn’t hurt me, I don’t trust that he could actually love me either.” He holds the truth of those two facts against each other, Peter’s equal capacity for care and hurt. The dichotomy that always been a part of why Balth has loved him and why even now, he can’t find it within himself to stop.

“And do you still believe that?” Paige says it so gently, it feels as if she’s wrapping her arms around him.

It hits him like a gut punch, last night comes back to him in a wave of nauseating recollection, the awful, inescapable frustration of it, the absolute claustrophobia. But then the crack in Peter’s voice, the desperation, the way he froze. Even if he was drunk. Even Balth can’t really convince himself it was the product of intoxication. Because it was an expression of complete and irrepressible truth. It couldn’t be anything but love.

“I don’t think the way he loves me is the way I had imagined it and I didn’t know what to do with it. It fucked with me because I had just thought about it way too much. It was meant to go a certain way and it just… it didn’t.”

“Do you think you can be okay with it going a different way?”

An imagined life is a hard thing to shake. It almost makes him feel guilty, like he’s let down his thirteen-year-old self, let Peter down even more, as if he’s been forcing him into a box just as much as everyone else, needing his own way of expressing his love to be matched. The rules then, were a way to make all of that impossible, to shut down the part of himself that ever wanted for anything and just couldn’t stop wanting. He needed it all to be unreal, for none it to be possible. To have a reason for not talking about it, confronting it. But he’ll never stop wanting it, no matter what form it takes. He knows, with startingly clarity, that he will spend the rest of his life wanting Peter desperately, no matter how much they change, they will always be changing around each other, each of them the sea letting the tide go out, and carrying it back in.

“If he’ll let me.”

Paige smiles at him softly, holds out her arms for him to sink into, and he does, with total relief.

“I think he will Balth, I think he will.”

--

He stares at the notebook for forty-five minutes after he writes the last word, and rewrites it, and rewrites it.

The poem had been finished two weeks ago, technically, ready for Balthazar’s birthday, but since coming back from rehearsal after they officially scrapped the rules, all Peter’s been able to do is scribble out lines and write ten different versions of the same adjective and come up with a thousand almost rhymes. And then stare at the page some more.

He tries, not completely in vain this time, to convince himself that Bea and Meg and Kit giving up on them too, that everyone they love has finally escaped them, is not only his fault. That all of this, Bea’s snap after realising three of them had been breaking the rules for weeks now, Ben’s inability to do anything but stare blankly into the camera lens, quitting the play and somehow managing to let even more people down, not all of it is him. He just doesn’t have that much power. He presses it into his brain that all of them agreed to this, wanted it, chose it for themselves and then were too beholden to this false sense of safety to let it go before it was too late. The past week has been the most devastatingly ridiculous of his life, it’s forced him to make a choice. And he knows what he’ll choose, every single time.

He realises now, too late of course, that if he hadn’t been so scared, so unable to face Balth or himself, and had just given him the sonnet on his birthday, none of this would have happened. Balth would still be in the flat, Ben and Freddie wouldn’t be so miserable. They wouldn’t be broken up. Or whatever they are. But part of him is almost glad he didn’t give it to him, feels like it wouldn’t have been real enough, it wouldn’t have said everything he needs to say.

Looking into the camera lens he’s jittery in a way he can’t ever remember feeling before. He’s so in love it hurts. Needs this to work so badly he feels faint with it. Hopes with every part of him that it’s enough. Tries his absolute hardest to convince himself that he could be enough for Balthazar. Fights against every belief he’d held with such bone-deep, stuck in his throat surety this year that maybe, somehow, at some point, he could even be good for him.              

He wants to do something other than hurt. And he wants, for the first time in so long, something more than entropy. He wants to pull himself out of this pit of apathy. He can’t fight against his innate, human need for impact, to care and to be cared for anymore. It doesn’t work. He’s exhausted. He’s never going to stop meaning something to other people. He’s resigned to that fact now. Maybe one day, he’ll even find joy in it.

For now though, he says his last words as clearly as he can, give me thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss, hold them within himself for a moment, hopes more than anything that Balth will hold them as gently, and turns off the camera.                                                                                                                  

--

It takes at least a full minute for his brain to catch up to the fact that Peter is currently standing in Fred’s living room. By that time, everyone is already bickering, and he fights against the urge to just block it all out, pretend it isn’t happening.

When Peter meets his eyes, he feels out at sea.

He vaguely hears something about the rules being scrapped, something about Peter’s play, an offer of cocoa, but what he’s really listening to is just Peter, Peter, Peter drumming in his head. It shouldn’t be this dramatic, it’s only been two weeks, but in that time, the ocean has been wide, the waves turbulent.

Eventually, everyone else piles out onto the balcony, but Peter stays put, in that way he has of determinedly standing his ground, letting you know he doesn’t plan on going anywhere, that he’s staying.

“Do you want to go somewhere else?” Peter asks, like he’s afraid of the answer, but not untrusting.

“Yeah, yeah sure.”

They leave the others outside, and Balth leads them down to the beach with his mind as blank as possible, not letting himself think about the end point of this walk.

“Are you okay to do this?” Peter asks softly, once they’re standing on the sand, the wind pulling at them, the sound of the tide washing out in their ears.

“Yeah, I am.” Balth wraps his arms around himself, keeping himself contained.

“Did you see the video?” There’s something in Peter’s voice that Balth can’t quite grasp, something he’s never heard there before.

“I did.”

“I am so, so incredibly sorry Balth.” Peter’s voice cracks, there are tears in his eyes, it makes Balth’s heart twist, he holds himself tighter.

“Me too, I- I thought I was protecting you but I was just hurting you. I’m sorry.”

Peter almost smiles. “Weird. I thought the same thing.”

“Funny how that works.”

“We are very, very clever.”

They stand, taking each other in for a moment, and for the first time in months, maybe even years, Balthazar lets himself just be here, present, nothing mattering as much as this moment they’re both breathing inside of. He lets all of it go, feels it wash out to sea.

“You told me when we started this that you wanted to be together.” Balth musters the courage to say, feeling like the sentence is so much longer than it really is, feeling one foot back in sea, once again. “I realised I never properly told you that that’s what I want as well.”

Peter smiles properly now. “I know it is Balth, I’ve kind of always known that to be honest.”

“I still should have told you.”

“Okay. Yeah, you should have told me.” Peters says, shifts himself a little closer. Balth feels himself being pulled.

“Is that still what you want?” He makes himself ask it this time, wants to face the answer for once.

“It is.” Peter says with so much certainty it washes over Balth, makes him feel as if he’s being held, safe and stable and calm. Even the ocean rolling next to them seems tranquil now. “I want that so badly you don’t even know.”

“Mm, I think I sort of do.”

Peter laughs, pulls the line in further. “Okay, yeah, maybe you do.”

Balth listens to the tide for a moment, watches Peter watching him. Grounds himself on dry land. “I love you.” He says, simply. Drops his arms to his sides, opens himself to Peter.

Peter moves forwards, just slightly, to take hold of his arms, so gently, it makes something in Balth melt. “I love you too Balth, I love you too.”

And Balth can tell he’s never meant anything so sincerely.

“I love you I love you I love you.” Peter keeps saying, smiling now, as if he just can’t contain any of it.

Balth laughs softly. “I believe you Peter.”

Peter holds him a little tighter. “Do you?” His eyes search Balth’s, reaching desperately for the truth that Balth knows he’s holding there.

“Absolutely.” He can’t think of any other word, the feeling is so absolute, so completely, unflinchingly certain.

“Do you believe me?”  

Peter looks down to his hands around Balth’s wrists for a moment, gathering himself, then meets his eyes firmly. “I think I do. I’m trying. And I’m going to keep trying.”

Balth feels a rush of warmth against the wind whipping around them, flooded with it, a hook, a catch, a heartbeat. He doesn’t think he’s ever loved Peter more, never loved any version of him as completely as he’s loved this one, every shaky, cracking and imperfect part of him. Balth takes in all of it with a sort of reverence. He’s ready to confront those parts of Peter, and shape his own flaws around them.

“I’ll be here to help you.” He says. “If you’ll help me too.”

Peter lets out a breath. “Of course, Balth, of fucking course I will.”

God, this is it. This is where that feeling he’s been missing is. A want so exact, the dissipation of his longing so complete, it almost hurts. It’s what duets are made of. The feeling of two voices intertwining and creating something new, something goddamn beautiful.

Pulling his wrists gently away from Peter’s, he takes Peter’s hand, links their fingers together, and holds.

It’s perfectly realised potential.