Chapter Text
For the better part of the last ten minutes, Tim has been repeatedly trying and failing to roll a bottle cap over his knuckles. Every time it falls he has to duck down and root around for it as it tumbles under the furniture and Alex's mouth will quirk up just a touch in response. In fact, Tim is so focussed on his task, he’s not even noticed that Alex has switched out the CD in their tinny little player for his scratched up copy of Ænima, polyrhythms filling the otherwise lightly moldy air of their shared flat. In a moment, Alex thinks he’ll offer to see if he can fit the cap between his front teeth and pass the amusement back, but for now he’s content to take his own half empty bottle, wander over to their computer and flick through his emails, head bobbing unconsciously along to the music.
There’s only one waiting for him in his inbox, the one he’s been expecting—dreading, anticipating—the most. A tidy and formal message from the university confirming his practicum location for this semester of student teaching.
"Go on then, where are they sending you?"
Alex doesn’t bother wondering why Tim knows what he’s looking at, distracted as he is by the information before him. When he looks up to reply Tim's own pinched gaze is still focussed on the bottle cap as it clatters on the coffee table again.
"Erm," Alex says, eyes darting between the screen and his friend, deliberating for long enough that Tim finally loses interest in his new hobby, flicks the cap somewhere into the folds of the couch, and hauls himself to his feet to take a look of his own. There's a moment's silence as Tim reads over Alex’s shoulder, his brow knitting together in a shallow frown of confusion.
"Now hold on,” Tim says, pushing up his glasses as Alex winces. “Isn't this your old school?"
Well, yes, hence the mild tremor Alex now has to hide by sitting palm up on his hands and squeezing the backs of his denim clad legs.
"Mhmm," he hums, probably in agreement. He hasn't reached the age yet where his hum settles into something properly non-committal.
It’s a mixed feeling. It’s not that Alex was ever avoiding his home town, he’ll visit when he has to, Christmas and birthdays all that, in fact it’d be nice to be somewhere familiar. It’s just… strenuous. He loves his parents, really, and they do their best. His brothers are better, but sometimes it feels like ever since he came out all his parents have done is copy paste everything they would say to his brothers onto him. Like everything about him, all his hobbies and interests and area of study got replaced with a big neon sign reminding them that he’s a boy and they can’t talk about anything else. He’s already thinking ahead to how he’ll have to find a new place, a tidy one year lease he can sign before he skips town again and finds a school in London in desperate need of a classics teacher so he can live with Timmy again.
Tim, oblivious to this internal monologue, barrels into Alex's train of thought and pulls it to a sudden stop. "Now don't let me put the cat among the horses, so to speak-"
"Sorry?" Alex interrupts, twisting in his chair to face Tim properly. "Surely you mean mice? Or pigeons? It's pigeons, isn't it?"
"Sorry?" Tim parrots back, scrunching up his face, insulting in that way mates can be. "What's a pigeon got to do with anything? Here I was saying something completely normal and you had to go and bring up birds."
"I just think if you're putting a cat among anything it should be something they're going to hunt, right?" And at the back of his mind Alex appreciates it, the distraction. A bit of Tim's patented mental gymnastics to get him through a wobble.
"Now how's a cat gonna hunt a pigeon? They can fly, you dweeb." And he crosses his arms like he's won the fight.
Alex gives it to him because how else would they have been mates all through uni. "Alright, so, avoiding cats and horses," and he trails off, waving his hand to prompt the rest of Tim's initial thought.
"Right, as I was trying to say before you so rudely interrupted me, aren't you a bit worried they'll, I don't know, recognise you?"
Ah, and there's the rub. As though he suddenly realised it might be a bit of a sore topic, Tim retreats to the couch.
"A bit," Alex admits, scratching at the soft peach fuzz coating his jaw. "But ehm, I do look quite a bit different than I did, ah, four years ago."
Tim scoffs, not unkindly. "Well that's kind of the point, isn't it? You think they won't notice that in the intervening years you've gone and become a boy?"
If he's being honest with himself, no, he doesn't think "they'll" notice, whoever they are. Alex's secondary school experience had almost entirely consisted of doing his best to fly under the radar, let his older brother take the limelight and his younger one be the brat and make sure no one noticed that their middle "sister" would rather be someone else.
The sorry tale goes like this. The last two years of high school had been a hell of his own making as he came out to his two best mates at the time and then had to sit there while they misgendered him to his teachers and classmates because he was too scared to reveal himself to the rest of the world. He had started hormones as soon as he turned 18 in the beautiful anonymity of Cambridge DIY, came out to his parents once he was safely miles away over the most stressful phone call of his life to about as much support as he could hope for, and had all his documentation reorganised by his second year of study, alongside a legal prescription which made him feel less like a criminal for being himself. As far as his old school would know, he had always been just Alex.
Besides, all the students that would have been there alongside him would be gone by now. It would just be the teachers, and Alex simply can't imagine why the memory of him would stand out as anything remarkable. Maybe he'd be lucky enough to see his old drama teacher again, but he was always going on about how he was planning to move on from the school soon enough, so there was every chance he'd be gone too by the time Alex got back.
"I'll sort something," he says instead of all that. "D'you want me to call you? Keep, ehm, contact while I'm away?"
"Sure, Horne. Gab my ear off with your stories of snotty teens and snobby English teachers, why don’t you." It might've been mean, but that's just how Tim talks when he's agreeing with you.
“Alright, Timmy.” And he taps out a reply to the email, leaving their conversation there.
Task complete, he stands, stretches, and wanders into the kitchenette to grab them both a new bottle and on the way back cycles out the CD before Tim complains. He really does want to try that bottle cap trick. He'd rather not use the one that's slipped into the depths of the couch, but he will if Tim asks.
The other man goes for a different question when Alex flops back down onto the couch. “Why'd you even request to be there?”
“I didn't.” Alex replies. “Must've mixed up my request with my records or something.” He's talking into his bottle, hiding his face as much as he can.
“Really? But you do a list don't you? Your top three preferred places or sommat like that.” Tim's needling like he knows something is up and it makes Alex frown.
“I did do a list,” Alex says over enunciating around his lisp. “Dunno how my old school got in there.”
“Hmm.” Tim's hum is much more settled, dissatisfied with Alex's argument. “Well whatever has you scurrying back home, I hope it's worth it.”
I hope so too, Alex thinks to himself.
