Chapter Text
Hands hang, joined, between Ernest and his lover's seats at their usual table. Right outside the science hallway's exit, at the farthest table beyond the cafeteria doors. Right where they can be ignored by the rest of the school. Their senior privileges could afford them any of the indoor seating sprinkled around the school, of course, but Ernest isn't the sort of young man to break a habit. He's been sitting here since he walked into this school four years ago. Did his routine not suffer enough change when he invited his boyfriend, Mal, to sit with him shortly after they got together?
Soon, it will suffer more. A butterfly rests on the opposite edge of the table from them, moving its wings slowly like a rise of breath, capturing all of the future Hatter's attention. A herald of spring. A call for the future.
"Do you want to go to dinner tonight?" Ernest asks, breaking his Mal's attention away from the butterfly and back to him. Mal's expression burns to a smile when he realizes the way Ernest is looking at him, attentive, sweet. Nervous as ever, despite the fact they've been together for just over a year.
"Of course! Something special?" Mal bumps their elbows together, letting Ernest's nerves bloom into something softer, something shy with sweetness.
"Well, we never did anything to celebrate your internship."
Mal utterly lights up at the mere mention of it. A high school career spent on local design competitions and protests for home ec funding paid off, earning him an internship with a hatmaker. The specifics are beyond Ernest, rendered into static with terminology and niche award names, but the baseline is obvious.
Mal is moving to follow his dream.
It cracked Ernest to the bone when Mal called him with the news a few nights prior, even though it shouldn't have. Ernest is moving, anyway. Following the call of his own dream-- a chemistry degree, pre-med, residency, a life in terminology beyond Mal's head, a life so far separated from their hometown that he began planning before Mal's heart opened for him.
Perhaps it's different. Perhaps there's a difference between knowing something is doomed before indulging and finding out more nails have been ordered for its coffin. Perhaps there's simply a difference in knowing Mal won't be readily available if Ernest cringes from the immense workload his career path demands.
"I'd love to go out with you. What time should I pick you up?"
"First relationships are made to be broken," Ernest whispers to himself in the mirror, a crack in his voice. His hands stuck halfway up the line of buttons pulling his shirt together, leaving it a Y cutting over him, an autopsy unperformed. (What's the cause of heartache? Rummage past his ribs and see.)
"It's just practice before college. That's when dating really starts." He swallows over it. Fingers in a twitch, fumbling the next buttonhole, he could never be a surgeon.
Ideas swirl around in his head, placed there by old relatives, by past hopes for himself. Tasting of tear salt and clogging his throat.
"I'll meet a... I'll meet someone nice and settle down wherever will pay me best." It would be a promise if it wasn't a threat. Or, if it didn't spark the same anxiety in his belly as a threat.
Ernest sinks to the ground, the creep of familiar panic threatening his lungs. He settles his head between his knees, taking breaths with the care Mal has taught him to reserve for himself, modeled after the way he handles his hat-making materials.
What will he do without him? How will he handle the weight of his coursework? How will he endure sharing a dormitory with a stranger, being cut off from his family, and from his Mal?
Ernest swallows again. Best not to think of him as my Mal.
His fingers still enough to button his shirt up. Once the rest of him steadies, he stands and finishes getting ready. A shirt, a vest, a weary smile. Perfect.
Ernest walks out the front door, finding Mal ready and waiting in his hand-me-down car with patchwork upholstery. Ernest slides into the passenger seat-- his seat-- and clicks the seat belt in place. He tugs it to make sure it's secure, nodding before Mal pulls out of his driveway.
Dinner is lovely. They hold hands like everything is okay (and perhaps everything is okay for Mal. He was forewarned. He knew what he was signing up for.) They go back to Mal's house afterward like everything is fine, sneaking up to his bedroom, whispering about graduation plans. They'll be celebrating with their respective families. They won't be able to rendezvous until their relatives have filtered away, leaving in their wake the grime of judgment unique to extended, external families.
They speed through planning their summers, penny-pinched in preparation for their separate lives. Days to be spent strolling under the sun, and nights to be spent at the local pool until they're shooed away by lifeguards desperate to go home.
"And then we can help each other pack up!" Mal says, like it's some sort of gift. A last opportunity to do something sweet together: sorting through the artifacts of their lives before shipping them out of their context.
Ernest nods and indulges Mal for a kiss when he cups his face. He misses him the second their lips part.