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Alex loves Danny’s sweaters.
He loves how ugly they are, and how soft. He loves that Danny wears something just because it’s comfortable, and doesn’t care about the style of it. He’s fond of the colours, too; the sweaters always have a mismatch of them, and the patterns are truly hideous. It’s lovely.
Alex is monochromatic; always has been. His flat is all variations of black, white and the combination of them. Danny walks into his life and splashes him with light, colour and glee.
Then one day Danny puts on Alex’s dress shirt and his black suit-trousers, and stands for a long time, looking at himself in the mirror. For a while Alex remains on the couch, watching him, but then he stands. He moves so he’s behind Danny, a little right of him, and they can both look at Danny’s newly clad body in the mirror.
“I think I like me like this,” Danny says. He turns and watches his side in the mirror. When he catches Alex’s eye, he smirks.
“You look good,” Alex says. It earns him a soft kiss, and Danny’s hands lightly placed on his shoulders during it. Danny’s touches are always gentle; Alex loves him for it.
“Do you like me like this?” Danny asks. It’s a pickup line, meant to be seductive; he draws out the words and makes his voice lower than usual as he says them. Alex loves him for that.
“I like that you like yourself,” he says, truthfully.
Danny chuckles, but a few days later he allows Alex to bring him to a proper tailor and buy him a proper suit and three proper dress-shirts.
Alex loves Danny’s sweaters, but he also loves Danny in the suits, and the secretiveness of the bee-printed socks and sunflower-printed pants he’s wearing underneath them. Danny wears the sweaters less, but it’s all right, because Alex learns to love this new side of him, too.
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There are several things like that, that Alex is fond of: He likes how Danny is all right with a job he doesn’t care about, because it doesn’t have to define him. He also likes the unequivocal pleasure Danny takes in eating a good piece of meat.
Then one night, while they lie in bed and Danny is touching the shell of Alex’s ear, he says, “I think I want to quit my job,” and he begins trying to pursuit his writing instead; Alex buys him a book about story structure and uses that favour he’s owed from various people to help Danny into the business.
When Danny, after reading about the consequences of the meat and dairy industry, decides to become a vegan, Alex simply kisses his temple and learns how to cook with squash and fake cheese.
The thing about that soulmate conversation and why Alex doesn’t believe in them, is because the theory leaves out the presence of choice and the importance of continued work. It ignores the fact that love is not stagnant, and the potential of change.
Love must be adaptive, and with every small change in Danny, Alex adapts his love so it is still able to fit tightly and snugly around Danny, engulfing him; he forms it so the love he has continues to be of Danny’s shape, including everything and excluding nothing. He forms it so there are no hollow spaces for coldness to seep in through.
Danny does believe in soulmates, so, naturally, Alex is worried that he already has the shape of his love down, and that Alex will have to be the one to make himself continue to fit into it.
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He shouldn’t have been.
One of the first things he learns about Danny, and Danny’s relation to him, is that Danny likes to take care of him. Not just in the bedroom; it seeps into all of the spaces of their lives.
It’s in the way Danny’s hand or fingers always find some part of Alex to touch, whether they are out or at home, like a quiet reassurance that he’s there. It’s in the way he coaxes the important stories out of Alex, but allows him to keep the rest of them to himself.
It’s in his constant, always there, “I understand.”
It builds Alex up. It makes him stronger; not in his intelligence or in his physical strength, but in his emotions. They are no longer his enemy, supressed, but the things that back him up when the work becomes tough, and the things he can draw his motivation from.
Danny loves him, he knows, so he doesn’t think that Danny will be upset that Alex is now more able to stand on his own, without Danny’s supporting hands and words. He does worry that he’ll feel sad for losing his caretaker role, though.
He’s wrong. Danny teaches him how to be that, too.
They’re sitting on a bench, and Danny is telling him about his parents; they’ve reached out to him recently, despite years of silence. Alex takes Danny’s hand.
Danny stops in his tracks, and looks down at their intertwined fingers, too. His eyebrows tense in that slight way they do when he’s concentrating. However, when he looks back up at Alex, he’s smiling.
“You’re taking care of me, now,” he says. It sounds like it’s the first time he’s really noticed.
“Do you mind?” Alex studies Danny’s expression carefully, looking for any sort of sign of distress. He finds none.
“No,” Danny says. He looks back down at their fingers again, and squeezes Alex’s hand. There’s not a trace of a lie on his features. “I like it.”
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Danny’s glee has always been one of the things Alex has admired most about him: His ability to always be smiling, to always be kind, despite the past that he has with him, is inspiring to Alex, who has spent entirely too long with the yellow creature of sadness clawing at his insides.
Danny is young, but he still has lines around his mouth and his eyes from all the smiling he does; he’s liberal with them, but they still feel like small presents each time; like they’ve been wrapped up and decorated with a bow, and are handed to Alex like the purest of treasures. They are.
Then Danny gets in a fight with Scotty.
It must be a rather serious one, but whenever Alex tries asking, Danny’s mouth gets tighter and he shuts up entirely. Alex stops trying.
What he doesn’t stop, is loving Danny. It doesn’t matter to his feelings that Danny will now stay in bed for entire days, or that Danny’s eyes are more often filled with the narrowness of sadness or the hardness of anger, than they are with joy and affection.
One afternoon Alex joins Danny in his bed, on his back, watching the ceiling. Danny turns from where he’s been laying on his back, too, and instead pushes himself into Alex’s body. Alex’s arm comes up and around his shoulders.
“Do you like me less, right now?” he asks. He doesn’t lift his head from Alex’s chest, so Alex can’t see his expression. He still feels Danny’s tension. He wishes he could steal it from him, and give him back his softness; this doesn’t mean that his love is not still the same.
“No,” he says.
Danny stirs a little, but his hand comes up to rest against Alex’s collarbone.
“Are you lying?” he asks.
“No.” Alex is not. “Do you believe that?”
For a while, Danny is silent; he must be considering it. Then he says, “Yes.”
Danny does get better after a while, and then he goes to see Scotty again. That night he comes home, and looks absolutely finished with exhaustion, but they must have talked some stuff out, because from then on, Danny and Scotty are friends again.
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In the beginning, Alex is bad at asking for affection, and not too good at showing it himself either. He’s never been allowed before, and he’s never been anything but shut down upon asking.
Danny challenges that; just as he is generous with his smiles, he is generous with his touches and his kisses and his fond words, too. He’s not sappy – neither of them will probably ever be – but he’s always, always fond.
Alex is pretty secure that Danny doesn’t mind his emotional stuntedness; in fact, it seems like he almost finds it endearing. Whenever Alex does try to allow himself to touch Danny’s neck as he walks past him, just for the sake of it, or permits himself to let out some of all of the fond words brewing and bubbling inside of him, Danny sends him a smile so big and so real it takes Alex’s breath away.
Slowly, as time together stretches out behind them as well as in front of them, Alex learns to ask.
He learns to run his fingertip down Danny’s cheekbone in the morning, saying, “Kiss me, please.” He learns to suck on Danny’s earlobe and push his thumb into the soft place by his hipbone, asking him to take him to bed.
He learns to say “I love you,” even when it’s just because he feels like it, and he learns to say, “Say you love me back.”
When he does that the first time, Danny sends him a smile that is an exact replica, down to the smallest bit of code and data, of the smile he used to send him when he was too nervous and stunted to ask for anything at all.
What Alex deduces is this: Danny still finds him endearing, even when he’s gone and turned 180 degrees. There are implications of that, Alex thinks. Mostly that Danny will probably find him endearing no matter what.
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Danny is a fan of lazy Sundays. He used to be, too, but it gets increasingly bigger, if you were to judge by how often Alex wakes up on Sunday mornings and finds toast and juice, and a Danny lying on top of him, requesting that they stay in bed by weighing him down to it.
They are doing this very thing, and Alex is touching Danny’s back as Danny pushes his hair out of his face, when he says, “’I get it now.”
They weren’t talking, and despite Alex’s deductive prowess, he is not able to figure out what is meant. It’s all right; he’s learned how to be unknowing, too.
“You get it?” he asks. Danny hums and kisses Alex’s jaw.
“The thing about us not being soulmates.” Alex’s attention is fully awoken, at that. “About love being a choice.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No,” Danny agrees. “But that’s what you meant, right? The point is, that what we do now is choosing to make this work. Continuing to learn, when things change. Because of love.”
Alex kisses Danny instead of replying. His hands come up to hold Danny’s jaw; it’s light, and not enough to hold Danny close – that’s all of Danny himself. He aches with it, Alex; being understood. Danny smiles into the kiss.
“Tell me that I’m right,” he says, when he pulls back. His lips keep pressing to the underside of Alex’s chin.
“You’re right.”
Danny kisses Alex again. Alex changes the calculated odds of them staying together in his mind; switches them up. He finally feels like the shape of Danny’s love matches the shape of him; not a single thing excluded, all of it there.