Chapter Text
Jack pulls up in front of the Haus and puts the Civic into park, killing the engine and looking across Eric in the passenger seat toward the heat-scorched yard and the front steps of what used to be as close to home as he had outside of the family cottage.
He hasn’t been back on Samwell’s campus since May and it feels disorienting to be here now, though not as painful as he’d feared it might be. So much has shifted in the past ten weeks that his years at Samwell are already starting to feel like they were the experience of...not someone else, but a version of himself whose priorities and expectations have since been scrambled and reordered in ways that former self had never consciously anticipated.
He thinks of what Eric said last night, it feels like going backward, and realizes that’s how he would feel, too, if after the summer they’ve had for some reason he had to return here full-time. It’s uncomfortable and a little sad. He remembers how good it felt to be a student here, to play hockey and study at the library and make friends who had lives outside of training. Even when they irritated them for failing to take the game as seriously as he thought they should. It throws him that this doesn’t feel like the place for him anymore.
Except, of course, that Eric is still here, for another two years. And where Eric is will always feel like a version of home.
“You want help with your bags?” He asks, reaching to unbuckle his seatbelt.
“Honey, wait --” Eric’s looking down at his phone. “Holster says Nursey and Dex are here? Do you -- do we want them to know you’re dropping me off?”
Jack shrugs, “They know you’ve been in Pawtucket with me, right?” The only members of Eric’s team they’ve officially told (and sworn to secrecy until it’s no longer a secret) are the current Haus residents -- Ransom, Holster, Chowder, and Lardo -- plus Farmer, who’s an honorary team-member and Haus resident in part because everyone knows anything Chowder knows Farmer will know sooner rather than later. It saves everyone a lot of trouble just to treat her up-front as part of the inner circle.
“I’ve posted a few pictures on Facebook and Twitter so, yeah,” Eric agrees.
“Then I’ll help you unpack. We don’t have to explain what the air mattress is for,” he smiles and reaches for Eric’s hand -- far out of sight of anyone being nosy from nearby windows -- and squeezes. Eric gives him a brief smile.
“Let’s go then. Ransom’s bringing the taddies by at ten and I want your ass on the other side of campus so I have the boys’ full attention while I lay down the law.”
Jack snorts.
Chowder’s unpacking in Jack’s old room when they reach the second floor, and Jack lingers momentarily in the hallway, torn between commenting on the pervasive turquoise theme -- Chowder appears to have acquired even more Sharks gear over the summer -- and pointing out that Chowder’s standing approximately in the spot where Eric had been standing when Jack first kissed him.
“Jack!” Chowder sees him and drops the armload of clothes he’s in the middle of unpacking on his bed. “I didn’t expect to see -- that is,” he cranes his neck to peer around Jack’s shoulder. “Hey Bitty!”
“Hey Chowder,” Eric calls back over his shoulder as he unlocks the door to his room across the hall and drags the suitcase he’s brought with him into the room. The other suitcase, empty, is tucked in the back of the bedroom closet in Pawtucket and at least half of the clothes Eric brought with him from Georgia are still on the shelves where Jack had cleared room.
Jack isn’t complaining.
“Are you helping Eric move back in? That’s so sweet of you!” Chowder says, and Jack thinks that apart from Eric, Chris Chow may be the only member of the Samwell Men’s Hockey team capable of telling someone they’re being sweet with one hundred percent sincerity. “You do know that Dex ‘n Nursey are --”
“Yeah, we got it,” Jack says, shifting the duffel bag with the inflatable mattress in it under his arm.
“Okay, cool! I just --” Chowder nods. “I just want you guys to know if you ever need --” he glances from Jack to behind Jack’s shoulder again and Jack turns to see Eric leaning in his own doorway listening to their exchange.
“Chowder, honey,” he says. “You are the sweetest. The best thing you can do for us right now is to treat Jack spending time here as normal. If everyone at the Haus treats Jack being here like it’s no big deal, it’ll help everyone assume he’s just hanging here with his friends. Which he is.” He leans a little heavily on the final sentence.
Chowder sucks on his braces like he does when he’s thinking and narrows his eyes at Eric and then Jack in turn. “Uh-huh,” he says. “Like all of us thought you two were just ‘hanging out’ --” he actually uses air quote “-- last spring.”
Jack laughs, startled. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Eric throw up his hands, “I give up. I give up!”
Chris actually leans forward and pats Jack on the forearm. “We got this,” he says. “Holster even had a Haus meeting about it this morning.”
Jack realizes the situation is rapidly escaping his grasp let alone his control. “Holster.”
“We had to run through scenarios. Ransom had a spreadsheet -- you know his spreadsheets. He and Holster had a list of questions people ask the friends of celebrities when they’re trawling for information about their relationships. And they made us run through how we would answer them.”
Jack blinks. “Um.”
“Well,” Eric says, clearing his throat. “That’s -- very prepared.”
Chowder nods, looking from Jack to Eric and back again. “Cait was there too because--”
“--honorary Haus resident,” Eric and Jack both agree, automatically.
“Right.”
“So,” Eric asks, cautiously, in the tone of someone who isn’t quite sure he wants to know but feels he has to ask. “Did any of these scenarios cover…Jack staying the night? For instance.”
Chris grins. “The Haus is open to all members of the Samwell Men’s Hockey team, past and present,” he says. “Once a member, always a member. We often let alumni crash on the couch after they’ve come to a home game or swing by for a kegster. Better to sleep on the couch than be on the road after drinking some of Shitty’s tub juice, right?”
After leaving Eric to his tadpole duties, Jack parks the car in one of Samwell’s visitor lots and takes a leisurely walk around campus. This early in August, it’s still mostly deserted except for the student athletes and the kids who never went home for the summer because of campus jobs or summer classes. He goes to the library and browses the new book wall, then to the campus art gallery that’s cool and quiet and smells of paint and clay. He knows Lardo has studio space somewhere in the building, and thinks about asking if he can go looking for her, but figures she’ll be busy with the guys today. He’ll remember to ask about her current projects the next time he sees her, or swing by her studio on his next visit to campus.
Eric’s asked him to stay tonight, but he’s babysitting Emmy tomorrow evening so Georgia and Joelle can catch a movie. And Eric will be busy all weekend and into the following week with conditioning and orientation activities. They should probably figure out how often is … too often for Jack to visit.
He glances at his watch and then ducks into Annie’s for an iced coffee and an egg salad sandwich that he takes to a bench under the birches that edge the Pond. It’s a warm summer day, but the humidity is low and in the shade it’s tolerable. He eats his sandwich, throwing a few shreds of crusts to the greedy Canada geese that strut across the grass like they own the place (and they do).
He pulls his phone out of his camera bag with the hand that isn’t holding his sweating iced coffee and thumbs it on to a short run of texts from Eric:
OMG Tango is going to be the death of me
that boy is even more instructive than Chowder
*inquisitive
Sweetheart I have a favor to ask
We forgot sheets for the mattress
Would you run to IKEA this afternoon?
I’d go with but Coach Hall has us in a meeting starting in … 12 minutes
Sure, Jack texts back. He doesn’t have anything else to fill the time until Eric is free after six and even then he’ll have to be careful about when and how he show’s up at the house.
The next couple of months are going to be tedious. He has a feeling by the time the Falconers have their thing he’s going to be over being pissed that anyone cares who he sleeps with and anxious about who might hate him or try to hurt Eric and just want the damn thing over and done with already.
He waits for Eric’s 
and then puts his phone back in his bag and goes off to find the car.
It’s nearly midnight when Jack and Eric are finally making up the inflatable mattress on the floor next to Eric’s bed. Eric hadn’t said anything earlier in the evening, when Jack had shown up at the Haus with sheets the same color as the ones on their bed back in Pawtucket, along with a duvet cover and new duvet to match. But he hadn’t needed to say anything because the look on his face, when he pulled the packages out of the IKEA bag, had been utterly transparent.
He’d also bought Eric a duplicate of the rug that Eric had on his side of their bed, the one that makes Jack think of honeycomb. Jack had worried it might be overkill, standing in the checkout line, but the second he unrolls it next to the mattress, where it fits perfectly between Eric’s side of the mattress (they already have sides of the bed, Jack realizes, that transcend specific locations -- is that normal?) and the door.
“Oh, Jack,” Eric says, looking down at it. “I didn’t need -- you really shouldn’t have.” In a tone that tells Jack exactly the opposite.
“I definitely should,” Jack says, straightening. “Any better?”
“What?”
“Your ‘terrible horrible no good very bad’ room,” Jack quotes back at him with a smile. “Any better now?”
Eric’s face softens and he steps around the edge of the mattress so they’re both standing on the carpet. “Much,” he agrees.