Chapter Text
On Saturday it’s raining when Eric wakes up, a soft steady rain that began sometime in the night after he had said his goodnights to Jack and fallen asleep.
The night had not been a restful one, and he wakes with a sour mouth and a blurry headache -- the punishment of kegster aftermath with none of actual fun. Sleep had been a tangle of confused, unhappy dreams about running naked through the deserted halls of his old high school, trying to get away from the middle school football team -- except they were all wearing hockey gear and skating after him. He woke up several times with his heart pounding and his mouth dry, but never awake enough to untangle himself from the sheets and call Jack -- even though Jack had made him promise to call if talking triggered the nightmares.
He fumbles for his phone and wakes it up with slow fingers. Jack’s already texted to say good morning and to let Eric know he and his parents are off to Stoughton. Eric texts back:
Have fun!
Take selfies!
Remember Ransom and Holster’s rule:
no trip to IKEA is complete without buying a stuffed animal
Then he drags himself out of bed for a shower. He’s in a foul mood and the dim light of the rainy morning is no help. He takes two acetaminophen before brushing his teeth and then goes down to the kitchen for breakfast.
His father is sitting at the kitchen table reading about the Stanley Cup playoffs on his tablet and eating his usual half grapefruit and bowl of shredded wheat. It’s the only breakfast Eric can remember his father eating on days when breakfast is not a family affair.
Coach has kept up with NCAA hockey since Eric started at Samwell and now, apparently, follows the professional leagues as well. At least he and Jack will have something to talk about, Eric thinks glumly. Maybe the fact that Eric’s gay will be overshadowed by the fact that he’s dating a professional hockey player -- someone whose masculinity his father might finally find unimpeachable and understandable.
Eric can feel his throat closing up, a tightness in his chest, and realizes that if the day is going to improve he’s going to need a change of scene.
“Y’all mind if I take the car and drive up to Phipps Plaza?”
“As long as you fill ‘er up on the way home,” Coach responds. “I’d thought to start work on the back fence today but with this weather it’ll have to wait.”
“You or Mama need me to pick up anything on my way home?”
“Ask your mother,” Coach says, nodding toward the basement stairs. “I imagine she’s plans for dinner. But there’s always something.”
Eric scrolls through the movie listings on his phone while he lingers over his coffee and toast, waiting for the painkiller to clear his head. The AMC at Phipps Plaza is playing all the big blockbusters so he’ll have his pick of pretty boys as super heroes, pretty boys as action heroes, the new Pitch Perfect ... anything to just turn his brain off for a few hours and forget about being back in Georgia.
He merges onto I-20 less than an hour later with Halestorm for moral support and a second cup of coffee in a Camp Oconee travel mug beside him. The further he gets from Madison, alone in the cab of his father’s truck, the easier it is to feel like himself in the now -- Bitty, twenty-year-old hockey player, rising Samwell junior, with a vlog that has several thousand subscribers, and a boyfriend who can’t wait to see him -- rather than himself back then.
The conversation with Jack the night before hadn’t been easy, even though he’d had most of the day to think about how to explain.
He’d worried that Jack wouldn’t understand, that he’d think Eric was making a big deal out of nothing -- Jack had grown up in quasi-professional locker rooms, after all. Jack, who’d been impatient with Eric’s thing about checking. He’d probably just think if only Eric were more … assertive … or worked harder to … fit in … he would have made himself less of a target.
So he’d tried to explain, preemptively, with his usual torrent of words, what it had been like in sixth and seventh grades. The way a couple of ringleaders from the football team had latched onto the fact he was a figure skater and would wait to ambush him in the halls. They always managed to corner him when no-one but their own hangers-on were around. There were never any witnesses he could look to for support. They’d give him shit about how he was so small he probably competed against the girls -- and the girls probably out-skated him. About how he was a fag who probably fantasized about skating doubles with another fag because then he’d get to be "the girl." How he’d probably come all over himself every time his partner picked him up.
He told Jack about how they’d escalated in seventh grade, when they were physically bigger and stronger than they had been the year before. How Ty and Ricky would grab him and pretend-lift him up as if they were going to throw him into a spin -- except they’d just used it as an excuse to grope him and then joke about how small he was, how he’d just have to take it in the ass because no one would ever be satisfied with --
“Bitty -- Bitty.” Jack had interrupted Eric’s flood of words.
“--the time they locked me in the utility closet after sixth period and my parents were so freaked out when I didn’t come home from school that they tried to file a missing persons’ -- Jack?”
“I can’t -- why didn’t we know this? Why didn’t I know this?” He’d sounded angry, and part of Eric had shrunk back from the sound. Even though he trusted that Jack wasn’t angry at him.
“I -- what do you mean?”
“Bits -- we were your teammates for two years. I was your captain. This is why you have trouble with the checking, isn’t it? I thought you were just -- if I’d known I would have --”
“Would have what, Jack?” Eric sounded pleading even to his own ears. “My scholarship at Samwell is conditional on my being able to play. Being able to deal with checking is part of playing. If I’d told you and Hall and Murray y’all would probably’ve stopped pushing me and I -- I wouldn’t have made the progress I did -- and I could have lost my place on the team, and my scholarship. Jack." He stops to drag in a ragged breath.
"I needed to stay at Samwell. It’s the only way I was ever getting out of Georgia.”
Jack swore under his breath in what Eric suspected was Québecois, then said: “At least tell me you know you didn’t deserve any of that. That it wasn’t your fault, that it wasn’t anything you did or didn’t do. Please. Tell me you know that.”
Eric had opened his mouth. Then closed it again. Then drawn a shaky breath. “I--”
“Did your parents know?” Jack asked. “They must have known after--”
“--they knew after -- after the utility closet.” Eric still remembers how kind Mr. Hernandez the janitor had been, how he’d made Eric hot chocolate using the Keurig in the staff lounge, and hovered in the background as Eric had borrowed Mr. Hernandez’s cell phone to call his parents. Eric himself had been too exhausted and numb at that point to be very responsive, but he had baked Mr. Hernandez a peach-apple pie the following weekend in thanks.
“Ty and Ricky and three other guys who’d been there got suspended for two weeks, and benched for the rest of the season but -- I couldn’t go back there, so. I finished the last month of seventh grade at home. My parents were looking into charter and private school options when Coach got recruited to go to Morgan County and we moved up to Madison.”
“Where Travis started harassing you.”
Eric had sighed.
He ends up going to see the 10:20am matinee showing of Furious 7 even though he’d already gone to see it once with Ransom and Holster and Lardo on opening weekend. He needs the rush of fast cars and the infusion of uncomplicated joy that comes from watching Vin Diesel eyefuck everyone on the cast.
Once again, Paul Walker’s death is a twist to the gut. But Eric’s been shipping Dom Toretto and Brian O’Connor since before he had words for how he felt when they looked at each other over the sleek jumped-up body of their latest car. So he can’t help but feel that it’s a fitting tribute to the actor to be watching his final performance multiple times, weeping freely into his box of jujubes in the near-deserted theatre.
He gets home mid-afternoon feeling a bit more his current self than he when he’d woken up that morning. He carries the groceries Suzanne had requested into the kitchen and is unpacking them when his mother comes up from the basement.
“Dickey? You have a good time at the movies?”
“I did,” he pulls the blackstrap molasses out of the bottom of the paper bag. “You still keep this in the cupboard over here?”
“Third shelf up, by the honey and corn syrup,” Suzanne nods. “There’s a package for you, came Priority -- Mr. Kim had me sign for it.” She washing her hands at the sink and nods to the countertop by the telephone, where Eric sees a flat rate Priority mail box, slightly battered from its journey, sitting under a few pieces of junk mail.
He extracts the box and sees it was mailed from Provincetown but with Jack’s Pawtucket return address on the label. Jack’s angular printing -- J. Zimmermann and Eric Bittle -- is unmistakable. He must have gotten the Bittles' address from Alicia.
“You order something?” Suzanne asks, making conversation.
“No I -- it’s from Jack.” Jack hadn’t mentioned sending Eric anything.
“He still with Alicia and Bob up on Cape Cod?” Suzanne asks, “When does he start his new job with the NHL?”
“His contract starts Monday, June 1st--” Eric says absently.
He pulls out his phone. You sent me a present?
Jack’s home from IKEA and currently wrestling the bed frame he’d picked out -- it doesn’t escape Eric’s notice that he decided on a queen-sized mattress -- into submission with Alicia’s help. (Apparently mother and son agreed that Bob was a liability when it came to D.I.Y. projects and he had been sent out in search of dinner.)
Jack had also sent a “selfie” of the stuffed animal he had acquired, per instructions, to the group text:
The team was currently engaged in a lively debate over what the elephant’s name should be.
I sent you a present. Jack texts back. Something I wanted you to have.
I should open it now? Eric asks.
It’s sort of an anniversary present.
Our one-week anniversary.
Even though it’s late.
Eric considers opening the box standing where he is in the kitchen, but then worries that its contents will be somehow ... incriminating. So he takes a chilled soda from the fridge and retreats to his room before getting out a pair of scissors and prying the adhesive flaps of the box open to extract the contents.
Whatever Jack has sent him is heavily padded with bubble wrap and beneath that in white butcher paper and string. He cuts the string rather than untying the knots and pushes the paper away to reveal a picture frame. He’s opened the package upside down and he sees first the brown paper backing of the frame, the tiny studio label at the bottom and a twist of hanging wire screwed to the top edge.
He turns the frame over carefully, fingers light on the edge to avoid touching what he can tell is glass, and sees himself.
It’s a photograph of Eric taken sometime during the past spring, in the Haus kitchen. He thinks, looking at the image blankly, that he remembers the day -- remembers Jack with his camera taking pictures while they talk about Jack’s senior thesis research, about the rom com Holster had made them watch the night before, about the frittata recipe Eric had been testing out for a possible vlog episode.
No single exchange had been responsible for the expression of utter contentment -- of joy and thereness -- that Eric now sees in his own face as he cradles the frame between his palms. He remembers a couple of other photographs in this series had made it into Jack’s final project presentation. One of Eric’s hands with the knife, cutting bell peppers; one of Chowder gesticulating with a fork as he tasted the results of Eric’s labors.
But this one -- this one is an image Eric has never seen before.
And as he looks at the photograph, Eric slowly realizes why. Because the look in Eric’s face, as he turns towards away from the cutting board to respond to something Jack has said from behind the camera, is one of pure love. It’s an utterly private, unguarded moment between the two of them -- one of hundreds they shared in the Haus kitchen over the course of the past year without even realizing it -- that Jack inadvertently caught on film.
Eric realizes what he’s holding in his hands is a wordless love letter.
He can’t sit still and he can’t actually look at himself a second longer -- it’s all too raw -- so he drops the picture on the bed and stands up, physically walking away from the tidal wave of emotion that overtakes him with such force that he’s trembling all over.
“Oh -- Oh my god, oh my god, OhMyGod--” he finds himself chanting under his breath as he circles the room, shaking out his hands at the wrists, trying to burn off the adrenaline that’s flooded his system. “Oh, oh, oh, Jack, Jack, Jack, oh, Jack honey--”
When he can control his fingers, he pulls out his phone and manages to enter his passcode and put a call through to Jack.
Jack picks up the phone sounding slightly breathless, hesitant. “Bitty?”
“Oh my god,” Eric manages, though it’s a rough whisper pushed through tears that are too fucking close to the surface today. “I love you and I miss you so much. So, so much, Jack.”
“I love you and I miss you, too, Bits.” Jack echoes back, like a promise.