Thanks for swinging by, Nat! 🍫🍫

Have some foggy horror I just hastily typed up 😌:

If Ronan opened the camera roll on his phone and scrolled back five or six years, he’d find a picture of Adam sitting the exact same way on that exact same stool. Whenever he got home while Ronan was still neck-deep in a project, he’d silently slip into Ronan’s workshop and watch as Ronan melted or blew or fused or molded. Wearing massive headphones that pumped bass and synth into his ears, Ronan almost never heard his husband arrive, but it never surprised him when Adam appeared. Typically, Ronan didn’t document it, but the afternoon he’d snapped that picture of Adam watching him work, there’d been something about Adam’s devoted attention and the orange-pink summer sunset peering through the open barn door behind him that made Ronan pull out his phone. In hindsight, he should have taken pictures every single time, and that hindsight prompted him to take a photo now. Not just because he wanted more pictures of Adam — he did — but when this fog-based version of Adam showed up on the screen of Ronan’s phone, it proved Ronan wasn’t hallucinating. That this was all really happening.

“What?” Adam asked after Ronan put his phone away and rested his chin on the end of the broom handle to simply stare at Adam.

It was a question Ronan didn’t have an answer for. How could he explain that turning around and seeing Adam again — any Adam — put a vise around all of his internal organs? How the air was squeezed out of his lungs and his heart couldn’t beat because of the tight hold they were in? Even if he had the right words — he didn’t — this Adam wouldn’t understand. Fog didn’t lose partners only for uncanny valley versions of them to show up years later.

So Ronan shook his head and replied, “Nothing.” But then Adam smiled a little. Thin, contained, and so Adam-like that it cracked Ronan into saying, “God, you look so much like him.”

“I know,” Adam replied, that shadow of a smile staying on his lips.

[Trick or treat!]