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[thebloodyglue]

It's too early to be awake. Newt stirs but fights to stay asleep, burrowing deeper into quilts and pillows. He's got things to do, he knows that he has, but Alby will let him sleep until he has to, until he needs to go out and check on the growing things and help the other shanks get the Glade going for the day. Still, in bed, he's warm and safe, cosy, and he doesn't want to get up just yet.

He mumbles something, and pulls the quilt up over his head.

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[mitsubishievo]

Kavinsky rolled over in bed, sleepy and lazy, in search of his husband. The large bed often let them drift apart in the nights, and this was no different from one of those nights. When he encountered narrow shoulders under the blankets, he sighed a little, working his fingers sleepily across Newt's shoulders and up to his hair.

There was something a little weird, but he was pretty sure that was just the waking up moment he was in.

[thebloodyglue]

Someone touches him, touches his hair and Newt squirms away from it. Whatever Gally is up to, it's too early for that. Unwittingly, he ends up too close to the edge of the bed, over balancing in a flail of limbs and blanket and too big t-shirt.

"Shucking hell!"

[mitsubishievo]

The noise was smaller somehow, the voice higher and brighter than he was expecting. Kavinsky groaned unhappily, still a little asleep, as his husband made all that noise getting out of bed. He sat up a little bit, blurry-eyed, sleep-tussled. Newt hadn't popped up from where he'd fallen off the bed.

"You okay, sugar?" he mumbled, rubbing his eyes. Based on the quieter thump and higher voice, Kavinsky was expecting something, that was for sure. It had been a while since Darrow did something to them, and not just the people around them.

[thebloodyglue]

Emerging from the blanket he's wrapped in, Newt frowns, his shoulders hunched almost up to his shoulders. He looks up at the boy looking down from him in the bed; he's handsome, but older, some kind of older that Newt can't put his finger on.

"Name's Newt," he says. "Not Sugar."

[mitsubishievo]

Tangled on the floor, looking flustered and confused, was Newt--but not Newt as Kavinsky had known him. When they had met almost six year ago, he'd already narrowed out of these round cheeks and grown into a those gangly limbs. And, besides that, his hair was shorter than it had been when they went to bed last night.

Kavinsky sat there a moment, the sheet pooled around his hips to keep some semblance of modesty.

"Shit," he muttered. "Well, shit."

[thebloodyglue]

Newt blinks owlishly up at him, drowning in the t-shirt that he's wearing, still swaddled in the blanket.

"Who are you?" he asks.

[mitsubishievo]

And that answered another question, one that Kavinsky had been hoping wouldn't be the case. He had, for a moment, a generally exhausted expression. This place was constantly testing him.

"My name's Kavinsky," he said, low and level. "And this is going to sound crazy, but we've known each other for about six years. You're in a place called Darrow."

[thebloodyglue]

"Kavinsky," echoes Newt, sounding out each unfamiliar syllable carefully. "I...don't remember. Sorry." That part, at least, isn't new. "I've known you since I was seven? That's before the Glade."

It doesn't even occur to him to ask where Darrow is.

[mitsubishievo]

"I--no. Shit." Kavinsky scrubbed down his face and then turned away to get out of bed. For once in his life, he was a little nervous about getting up, naked as he was. But there was no avoiding it.

He got out of bed with his back to Newt and grabbed a pair of sweatpants and a shirt from the end of the bed, where he'd put them when he took them off last night.

"Listen, this won't make any more sense over tea, but you'll feel better with it. So c'mon. Breakfast and I'll do my best to explain the whole shit."

[thebloodyglue]

Newt blushes reflexively when Kavinsky climbs out of bed and he sees a lot of bare skin before he pulls on his clothes. He thinks about it for a moment and then nods, standing up and keeping his blanket swaddled around his shoulders.

"Okay," he says. "Tea sounds good."

[mitsubishievo]

The worst part of it was that Kavinsky wanted to shower Newt in the attention he might normally have and he couldn't. The wary attention pointed at him made his skin crawl a little bit, knowing that none of this looked good on the surface.

So he shuffled out of the bedroom and toward the kitchen. The cats followed, yowling a little bit like they weren't rotund little beasts. These days, without Charlie, they were the noisiest thing in the house.

He opened curtains on the way, letting in light from the garden into the living room and from the front lawn into the kitchen. It was automatic to check the water in the kettle and set it on the stove, bustling around a little like it was any other morning.

[thebloodyglue]

Swathed in too big pajamas, the blanket wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak, Newt shuffles after him, squinting a little in the bright glare from the windows. When a cat wraps its way around his ankles, he bends from the waist to scratch behind his ears.

"This place is nice," he says.

[mitsubishievo]

"Yeah, it--yeah. Yeah, it's come a long way."

Kavinsky scrubbed his hand down his face, as easily frustrated as ever but not specifically at Newt so much as at the situation. He kept his gaze on the kettle for a moment, and then turned to look at Newt.

The boy standing there in everything oversized looked a lot more like the teenager that Kavinsky had met years ago than the man he'd gone to sleep next to, and Kavinsky had this moment of realizing that six years was a long time that did a lot of someone. That wasn't even touching the time between this and the teen he'd met all the things he knew about that Newt had been through.

"You're not in the Glade anymore," he said. "You're in a place called Darrow. It's--it's a little hard to explain how you got here, but you did in your future. Which is...six years ago for me. Six and change."

[thebloodyglue]

"Six years?" says Newt, his eyes round and incredulous. "That's like...nearly half my shucking age." He pads closer, barefoot on the kitchen tile. "That's...really shucking weird." He looks up at Kavinsky. "How old are you?"

[mitsubishievo]

"The time here's not a one for one--I mean, it is once it gets moving, but not always everything else. So, we met when we were both seventeen--seventeenish. That'll be a few years for you now, sounds like."

He was quiet for a moment. The kettle was starting to steam, but not quite whistle.

"Twenty three," he said. He hadn't expected to get to eighteen, and every birthday after that felt like strange, borrowed time. "I'll be twenty four in a couple months. We picked out a birthday in the summer for you, so you turned twenty three this year too."

He turned his wedding band on his ring, a nervous tick that didn't ground him like it normally did. Gally, who had grown into quite a dignified cat over the years they'd had him, came over and jumped from foot to shoulder on Kavinsky, perching over his shoulder to peer down at Newt in this unfamiliar variation.

[thebloodyglue]

"Four," says Newt, leaning his arms on the counter and his chin on the back of one hand as he looks up at Kavinsky. His little face brightens. "A birthday? That's shiny. I don't even remember when mine shucking is."

He watches Kavinsky fiddle with the ring on his finger, his eyes darting to the cat's little face. "He's cute."

[mitsubishievo]

"That's why we picked it. Our first year together."

Kavinsky scooped Gally gently off his shoulders, ignoring how the cat squawked in indignity but didn't wiggle at all. He held the cat out to Newt, smiling just a little bit.

"Here, hold him while I get the tea made. It'll help, I promise, it's what he's good for, the fat little dumpling."