Work Text:
Natalie once asked David and Gabe if they’d both instantly evaporate if they were separated for more than a few hours.
It was more of an offhand observation than anything else, delivered in the middle of a FaceTime while she was doing something else, folding laundry, maybe, or pacing her room with the phone balanced on her arm as she was holding other things. The details weren’t anything to remember. The comment barely slowed the conversation. Gabe laughed, David made a noncommittal noise, and they moved on.
But the question lingered in his mind for a bit.
Gabe brought it up later, not because it bothered him, but because it was funny in that way where you just can’t help circling back to it.
“She thinks we’d, like,” he said, waving a hand vaguely in the air, fingers splaying, “cease to exist”.
They were in David’s flat, late afternoon light leaking in through the thin curtains and pooling weakly across the carpet. The room smelled faintly of chamomile and old paper. Gabe was sitting on the floor with his back against the sofa, legs stretched out, joints slightly complaining. David sat above him, cross-legged, knees bracketing Gabe’s shoulders.
Gabe leaned his head back until it rested against David’s knee. He closed his eyes for a second, as David hummed slowly. “D’you think we would?”
It wasn’t a joke when he asked it. It wasn’t serious either. Just curious, in the way David often was about things that couldn’t be quantified.
The obvious answer was no, of course not. Gabe still thought about it longer than necessary.
He pictured distance. Actual distance, time zones, trains, rooms without David in them. He pictured his body on a bad day without somewhere to lean, his hands empty, reaching for nothing. It felt like ice water was being pumped into his veins.
Then he shrugged, and leaned back into David’s legs, head falling back so it laid in his lap, turning to the side, like the answer lived there.
“I mean,” he said, voice muffled slightly by fabric, “I’d miss you.”
David’s response was most likely entirely unconscious. His fingers slipped into Gabe’s hair, gentle and sure, combing through curls until his palm settled warm at the crown of his head.
They stayed like that for a while after, Gabe breathing slow and even, David’s hand moving in small, repetitive motions that soothed them both. Outside, someone passed on the street below. Somewhere in the building, a door closed.
They didn’t revisit the question.
They didn’t need to. The answer was written into the shape they made together without thinking. The way Gabe’s hand remained curled around David’s ankle, the way David didn’t shift even when his leg started to go numb, the way neither of them registered the contact as something chosen.
It was just… there. It had always been.
And once you noticed it, once someone like Natalie pointed it out, it became impossible not to see it everywhere.
If they were in the same room, there was always contact between them. Not always obvious, but always in some form. A knee pressed against a knee at the table. A shoulder leaned into another while standing. Pinky fingers brushing, then hooking, then staying that way until someone needed their hand for something else.
Sometimes, they were aware of it only when it stopped.
If Gabe stood to cross the room, David would feel strangely unmoored without the familiar weight against him. If David left early for lectures, Gabe would wake with an indescribable sense of wrongness, only to realize the other side of the bed was cold.
Neither of them framed this as odd. It was closer to just orientation. A compass knowing where north was without thinking about it. Like gravity. Fact of the world.
When they were together, things aligned. When they weren’t, there was a slight, persistent pull in the wrong direction.
Gabe was the more obvious half of it.
He leaned like it was his natural state, like gravity had recalibrated itself around David specifically and everything else was secondary. He sat too close, draped himself without asking, tangled his limbs wherever they fit. It wasn’t something he performed or even seemed aware of, his body simply assumed that closeness was available and moved accordingly.
His mother used to compare him to a koala when he was little. Gabe clung to people the moment he was allowed to, arms wrapped tight around waists, his whole weight surrendered like he was afraid of falling otherwise. Even then, there had been something insistent about it, a quiet urgency that didn’t quite match his size.
That habit never really left him. It just found a more permanent home.
On his good days, it was easy to miss. More playful, or casual, than anything. He slung himself sideways into David’s space, stole any warmth he could get, sprawled across furniture like it was designed with this exact purpose in mind. On bad days, the difference was subtle but unmistakable. Gabe got quieter. His movements slowed.
He pressed his forehead into David’s shoulder and stayed there. He clung to fabric, fist closing around sleeves or hems like it was something solid he could anchor himself to. He hooked ankles beneath tables or twisted his legs together with David’s.
He didn’t ask, or apologize. And David never pulled away.
Initially, he rarely reached first, but he was always there to be reached for. He adjusted and shifted himself so Gabe could collapse safely. His hands were careful in the way of someone who understood how easily touch could hurt if done wrong.
That carefulness had history.
David had grown up in a house where affection was implied rather than enacted. His mother loved him, of that David had never truly doubted, but from his father, love was shown through provision. His father’s presence was constant, but praise was rare, and help was even rarer. Hugs were formal, reserved for birthdays or good grades. A pat on the shoulder, a hand clasped once, a fleeting brush of hair from the forehead, they had a distinctly ceremonial feel to them. David learned early how to keep his wants contained, how to accept closeness when offered and not ask for more.
So when Gabe came into his life with hands that reached and reached, with a body that sought contact without apology, that caused him as much strain as David’s mind caused himself, David always let him. Responding felt simpler than initiating, anchoring safer than asking.
Gabe’s history was more than a bit different from David’s.
Years spent in residential care for his illness had taught him how to exist without as much softness. Hands that brushed him were hurried and professional. Arms that held him were temporary and clinical, or quick and worried from his mother. Affection came in schedules, only when his family was allowed to visit. He was self-contained because he had to be, and took as much as he could when he got the chance. He learned to rely on his own body for reassurance, on routines and walls and small pockets of control.
He could go for days, weeks, even months without realizing how much he longed for contact that wasn’t medical or minimal. And when he did notice, it came first as a flicker of discomfort, a mild ache that he shoved aside because it was easier than acknowledging it until he had his family or friends with him.
Now, it surfaced in the way he clung.
In the way he always found David in a room. In the way he folded himself into David’s space at the first opportunity, as if making up for time. In the way pain drove him closer, not farther away.
What was less visible, was how much David needed it too.
He just needed it differently.
There were days when his brain moved faster than his body could follow. When thoughts stacked on top of one another, each demanding to be solved immediately. He’d start a sentence and forget where it was going halfway through.
On those days, the air felt thinner. His hands would hover uselessly over whatever he was meant to be doing, fingers twitching like they were waiting for instructions that wouldn’t come. Underneath it all, lower and uglier, there was sometimes the old whisper that felt more like a shout.
You could fix this.
It had been months. He had worked hard. He had other, better things to resort to, but the pathway still existed in his mind like an emergency exit he wished he could brick up entirely.
Gabe usually noticed before he said anything.
David would get very still when he was overwhelmed. His jaw would tighten. His knee would bounce, then stop as if he’d forced it into submission. He’d retreat into himself.
Sometimes David would shake his head, automatic when Gabe asked if he was alright. Sometimes he didn’t trust his voice.
And that was where the difference lay. Gabe reached when he needed comfort. David, when he needed it most, forgot he was allowed to.
So instead, he would edge closer under the guise of something else. Sit down beside him rather than across. Let their shoulders touch. Let his hand rest palm-up on the sofa between them, close enough that Gabe might notice.
And he always did.
He would slide his hand over David’s without comment, threading their fingers together like it had been the plan all along. Or he’d tug gently at David’s sleeve until David leaned into him.
The first time David had done it without pretense, without disguising it as coincidence, had startled them both.
He’d been pacing. The room felt too small. His skin didn’t fit right. Gabe had been watching him silently from the sofa, concern visible in his eyes. David had stopped mid stride.
There had been a split second where pride could have won. Where he could have insisted he just needed air.
Instead, he crossed the room in three steps and sat himself down directly between Gabe’s knees. He leaned forward until his forehead pressed into Gabe’s sternum, hands fisting in the fabric of his shirt. His breath came uneven, shallow at first.
“I can’t,” he muttered, the words scraped thin.
Gabe didn’t ask what David meant. He just wrapped both arms around him, one hand sliding up to cradle the back of David’s head.
“I’ve got you,” Gabe said, steady as anything. “Stay here.”
Warmth, pressure, the solid reality of another body. Gabe’s heartbeat beneath his ear. The slow rise and fall of his chest.
David focused on that instead of the static in his own head. The voice in the back of his mind was replaced with something less destructive, the simple need to be held.
After that, it became slightly easier to reach back when Gabe reached first. He would lace their fingers together intentionally. He would pull Gabe closer in bed instead of lying rigid and awake beside him.
And on the worst days, the days when he felt himself slipping toward habits he had sworn off to the best of his ability, he would press his palm flat against Gabe’s chest and count heartbeats like stepping stones.
A small proof of life.
In cafés, Gabe ended up halfway in David’s seat, legs over his lap, head tipped against his shoulder. On trains, David took the edge so Gabe could curl in, joints protected from jostling. In bed, they slept twisted together.
People noticed. They usually did. Friends commented on it lightly. Strangers glanced sometimes. Natalie, as she’s shown, clocks it every time she calls. Still, none of it ever felt like something that needed correcting.
If someone was to see David and Gabe in a room together, there was more than a small chance you’d find them wrapped up in each other.
And if separation ever happened, it wasn’t the idea that they may evaporate on the spot that they feared. Well, Gabe doubted they would, anyway. That was entirely Natalie’s idea.
But he’d be more than fine not testing that theory anytime soon.