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— SEI —
The prior day had been…

Well, it sure had. The dinner had been, well, dinner. It was cheese pizza with a side of cheesy bread. Diryas sighed when he saw it, but he got himself some lactaid without saying anything further about it.

They did talk, but it felt strained. Diryas’ expression hadn’t ticked an inch. Tobias tried to joke, but it only did so much. Teegan seemed happy to finally be back at a table with all four of them there, but he kept glancing at Zebulon, glancing at Tobias, probably trying to find approval or perhaps a read on Diryas. And Zebulon?

He was glad that he had dodged a bullet–mostly thanks to Teegan’s defense, not anyone else–but he didn’t know what he had stepped into. This was drastic. He felt like when everyone went to bed, they went to bed uncomfortably. Diryas hadn’t even wanted anything else when they went to bed.

Zebulon expected to be kicked onto the couch.

He wasn’t, but when he woke up? “Hey, Dise?” He rolled over and squinted, patting where he expected to find Diryas curled up at his back, but instead feeling blankets. Had Diryas scooted a bit further over on the bed?

It wouldn’t surprise him. Zebulon had ******** up.

But as he moved to get himself rolled over to the other side of the Alaska King, Zebulon was able to make a few more connections. Diryas wasn’t there at all. Why? It was Saturday, right? Not a day of work.

His first thought was to check on Tobias and Teegan, the other two people Diryas was assuredly angry with. Though there was a part of him expecting to step outside of the bedroom into a room of three men ready to drill him, he found that it was quite quiet in the house. The guest bedroom still had the door cracked open, and when he peaked in, he could see Teegan’s body curled up to Tobias’, arm wrapped around him.

Cute, but they were still asleep. Where the ******** was his husband?

Zebulon took out his phone, went to the app to find his friends–something the two of them had decided to keep active after everything that had happened–and looked at Diryas al-Baksh Castaneda.

Ah.

He went to work. On a Saturday. In the early ******** hell.

Zebulon went to the kitchen, pulling a small bit of cold brew concentrate out of the fridge along with some oat milk and too much creamer. He was going to need something to wake him up if he was going to confront this head-on. Diryas had left on purpose. He was probably trying to get away from them all.

He was probably trying to escape him.

He added a bit of extra creamer.

One-handedly, he flicked open his Discord and found Diryas, ignoring the messages he had pending from a few other friends. Using the text messages yesterday had been because the situation was more urgent. This wasn’t.

Hopefully.



— AMA—
Diryas heard his phone ping over the idle clinking noises of the stir bar in the titrating flask in front of him. At first, he wasn’t going to answer it. He had his sounds categorized and customized enough to know that was Discord, not a text message. Discord wasn’t used for anything urgent. He had identity and purity tests to conduct.

A winery had sent some of their wines out to be tested. That was always exciting. Sulfur dioxide testing was noxious as hell, and the mischief in Diryas enjoyed the exclamations of disgust whenever someone else would enter the lab. There were exhaust fans on the lab benches! But the smell still permeated!

When he started that, it would be a good way to make sure he was left alone.

But, anyway, he hadn’t actually started titrating, yet. Perchloric acid sat in the buret, ready to be dispensed. If he was going to check his phone, now was a good time. So he went and checked his phone, pulling off the latex gloves he was wearing and throwing them into their specially labeled bin. The message from Zebulon made him pause.

Was he mad at him?

Well, yes. He was mad at all three of them, but it was the kind of anger that grumbled and tossed and turned rather than the latent fury that had consumed his many past months. Had Tobias been able to finally wear him down? He didn’t know and didn’t like the thought of it, but–at the same time–he had to acknowledge the possibility.

Diryas considered whether he had energy for this. He was only at work because someone on the weekend shift had called in, and there were samples coming off test that had to be analyzed before a certain time. Diryas had been the only person available to cover them until the afternoon weekenders got there at three. Besides, it was a good distraction.

He paused.

One more.


— SEI —
Zebulon didn’t expect a fast response, necessarily. It wasn’t an emergency even if Zebulon was nervous about his status in Diryas’ heart. He would survive. Probably. He had some coffee to drink.

He should add some whipped cream.

He could almost visualize Teegan waking up, stretching, and coming out to the kitchen to ask if Zebulon was actually drinking any coffee with the absolute pile of nonsense he was putting on top of it. He shook the can of whipped cream and put on a few extra swirls.

Did he even want coffee or was this just a sad boy hours sweets delivery device?

Maybe he should get some of the chocolate curls out of the cabinet while he was at it.

As he sat back down and idly stirred at his overloaded coffee-adjacent drink with his metal straw, he picked up his phone. What was he supposed to do now? Everyone was asleep. He couldn’t lament to Tobias, and to be honest, he wasn't sure if he should anyway. He wasn’t sure if he and Teegan really were okay after yesterday or if he needed to start working on how to make up that favour. And he wasn’t sure what to do about the Diryas problem other than just … wait.

He bit his lip as he tried to avoid doomscrolling and instead hopped onto TikTok.

The moment that Diryas’ message popped up in his notifications, though, he decided he didn’t care too much about whatever this bullshit it was trying to get him to buy was.

Ah.

So Diryas was angry, but … not furious? Was he getting that right?


— AMA—
He didn’t really have time for this, but a quick response wouldn’t hurt anything…

With that said, he put his phone back down and went back to the lab bench. Donning a fresh pair of gloves, he reflected that he hoped Zebulon was ready for the slowest conversation they’d had in a long time. He reached for the stopper valve on the buret and opened it oh so carefully. Liquid began to drip into the flask below, but the pink color existed only in a flash before disappearing.

He opened the valve further, dispensed the perchloric acid faster. This was going to take forever if he did it drip-wise…

— SEI —
Oh, was he on break? Diryas is typing… popped up pretty fast, and there was some relief in the concept that maybe they could resolve this quickly.

Hm. He supposed Diryas wasn’t wrong. They could have tried talking in the car. There probably would have been people wondering why there were yells coming from the car and gestures and maybe accidental smacking of the horn as he gestured a bit. Zebulon had paced. Teegan had tried to leave.



When he realized he wasn’t getting an immediate response, he sighed and returned his attention to his sad boy not-coffee. It tasted like … something. What cold brew flavour had he even started with?

… Irish cream? G-d, everything was coming up Teegan today.

— AMA—
It was a couple hours later, on Diryas’ meal break, that he got back around to answering Zebulon’s messages. In fact, he still had to read them, first. He pursed his lips faintly at the reasoning for not talking in the car, debated pointing out that they were both adults and surely could modulate their tone and volume for the occasion. But he was sick and tired of beating dead horses. He’d been beating one hell of a dead horse for the past several months, and where had it gotten him?

Nowhere, functionally. Everyone was upset with each other. Everyone was upset with him. And standing his ground wasn’t doing any good in making him feel better about what had happened, that Teegan had been part of the enemy camp. In fact, he’d been part of it long enough to gain a rank. Who knew what he’d done to get that?

Teegan didn’t even know, and that was part of the rub. How meaningful were apologies when the offense was lost? But how meaningful was a grudge when the offender could never meaningfully remember what he’d done wrong and had tried to make it right?

He took a sullen bite of his sandwich. One of his coworkers came in, greeted him with a wave, and was promptly ignored.


— SEI —
He must have not been on break. The response he sent wasn’t addressed for ten minutes, then twenty, then an hour more. The only explanation for how long Diryas was taking was that he had taken an actual assignment for the day he wasn’t supposed to be in the office anyway.

Zebulon might’ve groaned aloud, but he wasn’t sure what he was expecting.

As he told Teegan, and as Teegan had agreed: this all sucked. Diryas’ feelings on the matter also sucked, but there had been a reason why Zebulon had never pushed Diryas to accept Teegan faster. His own feelings also sucked! They sucked so much that he had violated a boundary of his own in some messy desire for vengeance! They sucked so much that he still wasn’t entirely unconvinced he wasn’t dancing on the edge of a lava pool.

As time ticked on, the other two got up and greeted him with a hello. Teegan had hesitated, but he dared to poke fun at Zebulon’s mostly empty coffee approximation.

It felt normal enough for a few moments, enough where when Zebulon looked up, he moreso expected to see Elliot from years before they had all hit their thirtieth birthdays than the Teegan who had replaced him. He snorted.

“Needed something to wake me up.” Zebulon was notorious for sleeping all Saturday morning away.

Not today.

Tobias and Teegan had moved themselves to the living room, and Zebulon figured it was probably best to keep an eye on them if just for Diryas’ sake. While the two of them were snuggling on the wide-seat comfortable couch, Zebulon took himself to the loveseat, where he stared at his phone some more until the prophetic words crossed his screen.

Had he accomplished what he wanted? What did he want? He glanced up at the other two men in the room.

He just wanted to come home to his three husbands. Hm.


Well enough, he supposed.

He had gone too far. Teegan had accepted his apology, and they had a heart-to-heart, but those welts looked … unusually bad. He was fine. It was an accident. But would it be fine? Tobias had looked like he was going to murder him.


— AMA—
Indeed. What was normal, now? Diryas pinched the bridge of his nose, glasses set on the table by his elbow. What did Diryas even want anymore? What was going to give him whatever that was?

He knew he didn’t want to keep coming home to an empty house, a bed with too-few people in it, wondering if Tobias was ever going to move back in and knowing that it was–ultimately–up to Diryas himself. And, if he was honest with himself, it wasn’t just Tobias he was missing. Tending Teegan's injuries had been a familiar task, something he used to do more regularly whenever Zebulon would get rough with him.

Zebulon had never broken anything on any of them, though. And how much of that was Diryas’ fault? Or, at least, how much of it might not have happened if Diryas wasn’t in part dragging things on, potentially delaying everyone’s healing? Even his own? He groaned quietly and put his glasses back on to reread Zebulon’s messages.


— SEI —
There had been a bit of a too-long pause after he sent his last set of messages, and he ultimately felt his stomach flop as he wondered if it still was the wrong answer. But what was the right answer in this situation? It was hard to find anyone who had anything equivalent. Cheating happened often enough, and that was the closest equivalent to the sensation of betrayal, but Elliot had never cheated so much as disappeared. (Zeb was going to do his best to ignore the whole sleeping with people and draining them part of that. Arguably adjacent to cheating to not tell them about those partners, but this situation was messy.) Partners turned out to be unexpected criminals all the time, but the resolution to that was usually someone ending up in jail, not that identity dying and leaving someone with half a memory and a heavier heart.

There was nothing he could truly process to equate it to.

Then, Tobias’ reactions pulled Zebulon to start pushing down the gates back into his heart. And he missed Teegan! Terribly! They were arguably two sides of the same coin! Nothing felt right without him in the house, and it felt even worse without Tobias!

… Something was nice about them being nearby, snuggling and watching television. A part of him felt a spike of jealousy at that comfort.

He buried it as he pondered what Diryas might have wanted with that question.



— AMA—
Yes.

What would kicking them out do? What purpose would that serve? Diryas had said Teegan couldn’t just move back in, and he still intended to stick by that, but that didn’t mean he had to rush them out of the house. Just sitting on the couch, watching television? That seemed so… normal.

Wasn’t that what he wanted, ultimately? Zebulon wasn’t the only one who wanted to return to normalcy. Diryas glanced up to the clock, gauging how much time he still had on his break. Would it be better to call Zebulon? Maybe, but where could he go that was quiet enough, where he wouldn’t be overheard?

Well, he could also go to his car, same as he’d suggested to Zebulon. But did he want to? No, not really. So, texting it would be.

Also very normal.

— SEI —
There was a portion of Zebulon that was relieved that Diryas said no, just as much as a small part of him wondered if them still being in the house was the right answer. Would it at least be easier on Diryas if they were gone before he returned?

Conversely, would it be harder if they were already gone?

Having them in the house felt as much right as it felt wrong in the same breath, but he didn’t know what was wrong about it. Was it just a long-term discomfort, fueled by what had started it?

He should have expected the back question, as much as it made him wince. It did confirm a few things for him, though. Diryas had been concerned, and he was still concerned. That was all likely linked to why Diryas hadn’t bothered defending him, dovetailing with the fact that that wasn’t an accident. Though if Zebulon was showing a new type of behaviour, he was fairly sure even Tobias would have booted him the same way they had booted Jason.

Or Diryas would kick his a** extra hard.



— AMA—

Another pause. An internal debate on the next thing he was about to send to him.

Hopefully Zebulon wouldn’t look too far into that question. But, then again, the question did necessitate a couple assumptions…

— SEI —
Zebulon was relieved that good was the only answer, and not another set of questions related to Teegan’s state.

It didn’t quite stop the way his eyes drifted up from his phone to the pair curled up on the couch in front of him. Maybe it was a bit odd that he had isolated himself off to the loveseat. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps it all made sense. Perhaps none of it did.

He saw the screen move under his nose and he glanced back down to his phone.

Did Diryas need to pick up anything on the way home?

Well, no, right? It was just the two of them, and they didn’t really need much. Zebulon ate like s**t most of the time when left to his own devices, and he had plenty of his s**t food around. Diryas was likely to go back to what he had been doing with their stretches of silence. What was it right now? A five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle?

… But was there another reason why he was asking?

Tobias and Teegan were snuggling and watching a movie. Zebulon had made no move to make them leave, so they hadn’t. And why would they? They had all bought the couch together a few years back before Elliot vanished into the abyss of the Negaverse. The seats were wider and made for sinking into. Diryas’ feet didn’t even reach the ground. The loveseat was made of a similar structure, but it didn’t have the same level of sinking into it that the couch could.

Henri and Alec seemed to like it well enough when they came over. Part of the reason why they had gotten the loveseat was for their regular guests–

Anyway, of course they were in no rush to leave. They had helped them choose that set for a reason. Were they just hoping Zebulon and Diryas would never make them?

Zebulon brought his mind back to the text he was staring at. So what was the right answer?



— AMA—
Did he intend on letting them stay for dinner again? For Tobias, that was a no-brainer. Of course he wanted Tobias to stay for dinner again. For Teegan, though, that answer was a bit more complicated. He still needed distance, time.

…Didn’t he?

Diryas frowned, then replied.

There. Compromise. Tobias should be proud of him—


— SEI —

Was it, though? Was it fair to let them back into their house and let them stay the night and let them feel the rhythm of what the norm had been and then immediately rip that from them? When would they have this again? Tobias had anchored himself to Teegan, and no doubt that was intentional, but was it a way to guarantee it would be another few months before any of them had the comfort of home?

He found himself avoiding home more than he ever had before these days, and he knew it wasn’t just him. It was just easier to not be there, to not think about it at all. He was uneasy that the other shoe would drop at any time, and found himself unwilling to snuggle with them, but this at least felt closer to an approximation to normal.

Would the dinner feel closer to an approximation of normalcy, too, or would it just be another attempt to maneuver around an awkward silence? Would it be fair to cut it off even if it was only an approximation? Would it be fairer to avoid it altogether if they were going to tell them to get out?

Could he even bring himself to tell them?



— AMA—

He put his phone down to pinch the bridge of his nose again. He guessed it was only fair, but it wasn’t something he was going to enjoy doing, he realized. He didn’t want to tell them to get out of the house. That whole, ‘you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here’ thing didn’t really fit when the house should be their home. Had been their home.

Did he have to tell them to leave? He started typing, ‘nevermind’ to Zebulon, paused, then erased it. Then started typing it again, then erased it again. What was the actual good reason that he was sending Teegan away for? ‘I’m angry at you for being part of the enemy’ didn’t really carry the same weight when Teegan had risked a considerable amount to stop being part of the enemy. And what of his actions as part of the Negaverse?

They didn’t know what those were, besides draining Zebulon that one time and probably draining other people. They didn’t know if Teegan had killed anyone, but they were never going to know. Was it fair to hold that over his head on a ‘maybe’? What if he was guilty of murder?

But what if he was innocent? Plus, it had been months by this point and, dammit, he missed Teegan. Missed him apart from missing Tobias and Tobias using himself as a bargaining chip to get them to accept Teegan back again. This all seemed like a lot of drama to go through on a ‘maybe’, objectively.

The rest of his shift was going to drag on.


— SEI —
Fine.

It was giving the same response as Diryas had given yesterday when he had given up and thrown his hands up about the whole thing, metaphorically. Zebulon pinched the bridge of his nose and let out a quiet sigh, leaning his head back on the loveseat. If Diryas wanted them to leave, he could handle it. It was fair, right? Arguably, this was Diryas’ house anyway. This was under his control.

… Zebulon was on the deed, but he still often thought of it as Diryas’ first. He was, after all, the last one to move in. But the second-to-last one that remained now.

Diryas was vexed, though. Perturbed, even. Was leaving the responsibility to him making that worse? Should he even bother thinking about it? Diryas had already agreed, so did it really matter? They would leave, and the house would be back to its quiet rhythm. Perhaps quiet cacophony was a better concept.


Than what? What had he even planned on eating that night? Probably frozen macaroni and cheese again… or a couple of frozen burritos? The frozen tamales his parents insisted he needed to try?

Nailed it.

He placed the phone beside him, just in case Diryas decided to message him again, and tried to tune into whatever the two nearby were watching. A romance movie? Probably a romance movie. Teegan was a hopeless romantic, after all.

Tobias was just a romantic, but that was neither here nor there.


— AMA—



— SEI —