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Chapter Text

Austin Michael Browning was an ordinary boy with an ordinary life. 

His childhood was a meander through fields of corn and wheat, his lips berry-red from raspberry brambles on the edge of the field, his eyes touched by starlight streaming from rural skies. He had two older sisters and two younger sisters, a mother who kissed him goodnight and a father he was expected to grow up to be. When he was seven years old, he skinned his knee falling off a tree, and staggered, laughing, to wash the blood off by the stream.

Austin Michael Browning had an ordinary family with ordinary aspirations. He didn’t have big dreams, and so he didn’t have fear. He was a good brother, a decent son. He was woken each day by the rooster’s crow and he went to bed each night with a prayer on his lips. 

He believed he was happy. And if he wasn’t, well, didn’t he already have everything he’d ever wanted anyway?

***

Samuel Arthur Towns was not, by any reasonable reckoning, ordinary.

He was the rising star, the golden boy, the jock and the teacher’s pet. His mornings were backstreet sprints and music dripping through headphones like quicksilver, his evenings painted violet by the New York sky. He was an only child, and so his parents lavished upon him every ounce of love they had, spoiling him rotten but also giving him space to grow. When he was seven years old, he skinned his knee playing exy with a tennis ball and wooden sticks; ten years later, he was the best backliner his school had ever seen.

Samuel Arthur Towns had a reckless family with reckless aspirations. He dreamed of life as often as he dreamed of love—which is to say, every night. He was tar and cobblestone, fluorescent lights and subway tracks. The city beat a steady pulse in his veins, and he dreamed of a world where the sky was his home.

He believed he was happy, because he was. But he was never satisfied.

***

They couldn’t have been more different.

***

When Austin announced that he was going to become a criminal justice major, no one could quite believe him. When he changed his mind and took a double major of law and criminal justice, they believed him even less. 

What was a good farm boy, born to bend his back underneath the noonday sun and go to bed by the first ray of the moon, going to do with something like that? He was meant to count on his fingers and breathe the syrup of trees. He was meant to cow to his father’s will and stay at his mother’s side. He would never survive in the world he felt compelled to attach himself to. 

A few, chortling, commented that they would quite like to see him try, like to see him flounder and return with his tail beneath his legs. Because if he did try to continue down this ridiculous path, flounder he would, and return he must. Others shushed them, confident that the boy would come to his senses soon enough.

But the whispers stayed confined to whispers, and as the days went by, his resolve only hardened. Austin Michael Browning didn’t have dreams, but he did have a restless, nameless longing for something more. Maybe everybody was right. Maybe he really was wading out of his depth. But maybe he was waiting for the moment his feet could no longer touch the riverbed, so that he might find out if he could float. 

Maybe, maybe, he could even learn to swim.

When he left his Georgia village and headed straight for the lion’s den that is New York City, no one stopped him, and only a few prayed that he would not get scratched too badly.

***

When Sam announced that he was going to major in psychology and law, no one was surprised. 

The rising star, the golden boy, the jock and the teacher’s pet—he was going to reach places, touch the stars, carve his name on the sun. (When he said he was going to study in Columbia, they were a little taken aback, but decided to keep their inhibitions to themselves.)

Contrary to popular belief, Sam was sure of nothing. In fact, he was a little terrified. His future loomed over the horizon, and it drew closer each time the tide came in. He was afraid of losing his footing. He was afraid that he would drown. But when the time came to step into the waters, he closed his eyes and let the waves wash the sand off his feet. 

In front of him: the open sea. Beyond it: every day of the rest of his life. And Sam was not going to let anything come between him and his future. 

So, tripping over seaweed and clutching flotsam to his chest, he made his way to the other side.

***

Their stories will not converge for at least a few years yet. But when they do converge, oh, what a convergence it will be.

Chapter Text

“The law, Honoré argues, is mainly concerned with the question of obedience to authority, and establishing the situations in which obedience is required and those in which it may be waived ought to be the central concern of all legal…”

Dr. Rhinehart continued to drone on, and Austin felt his mind beginning to wander. He’d already read all of Honoré’s essays, because they had been assigned readings for the pre-term, and he didn’t see the use of going over his most basic theories when there was so much new ground left to explore. Shouldn’t the actual lectures be reserved for topics that are difficult to understand by oneself? Or for questions, and simulations, and things like that? He tapped a pen against his leg, allowing his eyes to skate from the board to the open window. An autumn-yellowed tree was pressed up against the building, its few remaining leaves rustling in the breeze. 

It was his second year as a law and criminal justice student, and Austin had already determined that calling NYU a second home would be immensely inaccurate, because it was the first place that had let him feel as though he truly belonged. Because Georgia would always be the magical hinterland of his sunsets, the knee-deep ocean of corn and stardust that lived in his heart and beat in his veins, but as from all other dreams, he’d had to wake up. And New York City had jolted him right awake.

His first week, he had been disoriented beyond reason. The city was a maze with identical but unspeakably different landmarks in every direction, each street named some variation of ‘Fifth Avenue’ and rounding the corner to another McDonalds. Nighttime was nearly as bright as the day, except it wasn’t lit by stars—in fact, he could barely see any stars at all—but instead by streetlights, shop windows, and every other form of artificial light imaginable. It was as if its population, realizing that they had extinguished the night sky, had decided to bring the stars to the ground.

It wasn’t as though he had never been to a city before, but the last time he had visited any place that could be called remotely urban, he had been ten years old and too preoccupied with wanting “city ice cream” to have properly noticed anything else. New York City had been a punch to the gut; it had forced his life to double over in shock and realign the entirety of his worldview. 

If Georgia had been a dream, New York was the feeling of coming alive. 

The scuffing of shoes and knocking back of chairs brought Austin back to the present, and he blinked, then capped his pen and hefted his copy of Honoré’s About Law . On his way out of the classroom, he exchanged a nod with Dr. Rhinehart, then quickened his pace. He had thirty minutes before his next lecture—on Causality in Criminality —and if he hurried, he could get a start on finalizing his essay’s topic so that he could at least pretend to have begun working on it. For a course that had initially seemed at least somewhat, if not entirely, a subject rooted in—

“Hey, Texas!” 

Austin stopped short, allowing himself a moment to gather his thoughts, then turned. “Last I checked, you knew my name.”

Eddie grinned, and Austin’s insides squirmed in response. God, he should've known that  the cafeteria cheese wouldn't suit him. “I don’t know why you mind. I’m from Los Angeles, and I wouldn’t mind if you called me Angel.”

Rolling his eyes, Austin turned away and resumed walking, knowing that Eddie was following. “I’m not from Texas.”

“Last I checked, Austin’s in Texas.”

Austin sighed. No variation of this argument ever ended with him winning. “Of course.”

“Ha!” Eddie elbowed him playfully in the side, then threw an arm around his shoulders. “Where are you going?”

“Dorms.”

He wiggled his eyebrows, something that annoyed Austin and therefore delighted Eddie. “Slacking off, are we?”

“I have work to do. I’m going to do it at the dorms.”

“I see.” Eddie tilted his head to one side. “In that case, allow me to join you. I’ve got, like, a shit ton of assignments due by the end of the month, and starting them has not been a priority.”

“What else, pray tell, could possibly have been a priority?”

“Guess.” Eddie beamed, and Austin looked away.

After a moment, he relented. “You can come, but only if you study and don’t try to distract me.”

Another infuriating eyebrow-wiggle. “You think I’m distracting?”

Austin rolled his eyes again. At this rate, he was going to wake up one day to find his eyes turned permanently inward. 

~

Ten minutes later, the clock was ticking ever closer to the lecture, and he and his endeavor to formulate a topic were at a stalemate of indeterminate length. He let his head drop to his desk, his knee knocking against the leg of his chair. 

“Stuck?” Eddie asked from his place on the floor. Austin made a noncommittal sound, and the sound of scraping, followed by a weight by his shoulder, alerted him to the fact that Eddie had joined him at the desk. He raised his head, raising an eyebrow in question. “Let me help.”

Wordlessly, Austin handed him the criteria list and watched him skim the words. His eyes were earth-bright in the soft light of the room, and long shadows arched beneath his lashes and over his cheekbones. 

After a moment, Eddie looked back up. “Yeah, I don’t understand shit.”

Austin laughed, a little breathlessly. He scrubbed absently at his throat, then reached across the desk for a glass of water. Eddie reached for it at the same time, and their knuckles knocked. Startled, Austin jerked his hand back, catching the edge of the glass in the process. As if in slow motion, it first listed slightly to the side, then tipped over entirely, a flood of water spilling onto the desk.

“Damn it!” Austin grabbed his books and flung them to the bed, then looked around for something to mop the water up.

"Hold on, I've got this." Eddie snatched up a piece of cloth lying by his feet—a pillowcase, Austin noted, though God knew how it’d gotten there—and pressed it against the desk. “I'm sorry, man, I—”

“Why are you apologizing?” Austin demanded. He was still looking for something he could do to help; he felt very useless standing by awkwardly while Eddie did all the work. “And move over, let me do that.” He reached for the pillowcase and tried to wrest it from his grasp. 

Eddie held on tight. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to clean my own fucking—“

“Texas.”

“It’s not a big deal, I just spilled a little water, but this is still wood and I don’t know, I don’t want it to rot or something and if the—“

“Texas, you’re—“

“—they’ll have my head, and it’s my responsibility to fix the messes I make and you don’t need to help me or even be here and I should be—“

“Austin, look at me.” 

He shut up, and met Eddie’s eyes. 

For a beat, neither moved. Eddie opened his mouth to say something, then seemed to change his mind. Austin was sharply aware of the spot where Eddie’s finger pressed against his, both their fists still curled around the pillowcase. 

Afterward, he would tell himself that he had not seen this coming. He would convince himself that he had not leaned forward, had not felt his chest contract at the feeling of Eddie’s breath against his cheek. He would bury his head underneath his blankets and beg himself to forget the moment that followed. 

Because the second Eddie’s lips touched his, his entire world seemed to evaporate. There was a faint buzzing in the pit of his head, a quiet rasp at the back of his throat, and he was certain Eddie could taste his heartbeat. 

Then reality struck him, and he jerked back, breathing hard. Eddie stared back at him, eyes wide. “That was—“

Although he was certain his knees would give out underneath him, Austin stood up. “Please leave.”

A crease appeared between Eddie’s brows. “But I thought—“

“Please. Leave.” The words felt as though they were being dragged from him. “Please.”

“Austin, I’m sorry, I didn’t think you—“ He shook his head. “I thought we were on the same page.”

“We were not.” His breath stuttered. “We are not. Please leave and don’t come back.”

Eddie left and didn’t come back. 

The next time Austin passed him in the hallway, they both walked wordlessly past the other, as if they had never been friends at all.