#billykaplan

an anthology

iii. obvious

The team figured it out before Teddy and Billy did, which was, in retrospect, deeply embarrassing for two people who were meant to be sharp enough to fight gods.

It was Kate who said it first, because Kate said everything first. They were debriefing in the brownstone after a long ugly night against something with too many arms, all of them bruised and running on the specific adrenaline crash that comes after you've survived a thing you weren't sure you would. Teddy was crouched over a scrape on Billy's forearm, cleaning it with a concentration entirely out of proportion to the injury — it was barely a graze, it would be gone by morning, Billy could probably have wished it closed if he'd bothered — and Kate watched this performance of unnecessary tenderness for exactly as long as she could stand it.

"Oh my god," she announced to the room, dropping into a chair. "You two. The whole — the thing. The pining. We can all see it. It's like watching a glacier fall in love. In slow motion. With another glacier."

Teddy went a color his green had never managed.

Billy, to his eternal credit, recovered faster, because Billy had always been braver about wanting things out loud than Teddy was about wanting anything at all.

"We're not—" Teddy started.

"We're not yet," Billy corrected, and the yet did something to the whole room. It changed the air pressure. Cassie clapped a hand over her mouth. Kate pointed at Billy with both index fingers like she'd won an argument she'd been having alone for months. Even the new kid, who barely knew them, grinned at the floor.

Teddy looked at Billy. Billy looked back, steady, the cotton ball still pressed to the unimportant scrape, and did not take the yet back.

Later, when the others had mercifully dispersed to their separate corners and their separate exhaustions, Teddy found Billy out on the fire escape with his knees pulled up, watching the avenue.

"Yet," Teddy said. He sat down on the metal grating, which complained under his weight the way the staircase always had, the way every structure in his life seemed to.

"I panicked," Billy admitted. "It just came out."

"No." Teddy was quiet for a moment, gathering the enormous and specific courage it takes a boy who can become anyone to simply be himself, out loud, on purpose, with no costume and no escape hatch. "I liked it. The yet." He made himself look at Billy instead of at the street. "I've been — Billy, I've been doing this thing for months where I let myself think about it for exactly five seconds and then I put it away, because I was so sure that if I actually said it, I'd lose the staircase. The two feet of step. I didn't want to risk the one good thing for the chance at a better one."

"And now?"

"And now Kate's compared us to glaciers in front of everyone and I've got nothing left to protect." A breath. "So. Let's make it a when."

Billy turned and looked at him, and there it was — the staircase in his eyes, the there you are, the old tired magician who had spent his whole life seeing the back of everyone finally looking at the one person whose back he couldn't see and deciding that not-knowing was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He reached over, slowly, and laced his fingers through Teddy's — pale through green, the way it had been on the roof, the way it would be at an altar at the end of two empires — right there on the fire escape where the whole team could've seen if any of them had been looking.

None of them were looking. The team already knew. They'd known before the boys did.

"When," Billy agreed.

an anthology

ii. skin

It happened on a rooftop, because of course it did.

They were seventeen and indestructible and entirely destructible, sitting on the tar-paper roof of the brownstone with their backs against the warm brick of the chimney stack, and the city was doing its long electric exhale below them, and Billy had just asked the question Teddy had been dreading since the staircase. He asked it the way Billy asked the hard things, which was quietly, looking at something else — in this case, the orange smear of light pollution where the sky should have been.

"Do you ever feel like you don't know what you actually look like?"

Teddy went still.

He could have lied. He was very good at lying with his body; it was, after all, the one thing his body did without being asked. He could have said everyone feels that way and Billy would have let him, because Billy let people keep their doors closed even when he could see straight through the glass. That was the thing about Billy. He never forced a curtain. He only ever waited beside it.

Instead Teddy held out his hand, palm up, in the wash of the streetlight four stories down, and let it change.

The skin went first. It blushed from pale to a deep impossible green, a green with no apology in it, the green of something that had grown rather than been made. Then the architecture beneath rearranged — knuckles broadening, a ridge rising along the forearm, the bones speaking a different grammar. He kept his face exactly the same on purpose, so that Billy would understand: this is still me. Not a costume worn over the creature. Not a creature wearing the boy. Both. Equally, exhaustingly, both.

He waited for the flinch. He had built his whole life around the certainty of the flinch.

Billy didn't flinch.

This was the thing Teddy would carry for the rest of his life — longer than the rest of his life, into whatever cosmic stretch of centuries a half-Skrull prince was owed. Billy looked at the green hand the way you look at a word in a language you are only just beginning to love: carefully, wanting to get the weight of it right. And then he reached out and laced his fingers through it.

"There you are," Billy said.

Not what are you. Not how. Not show me again. Just — there you are. As if Teddy were a person who had been away a very long time and had finally, against all odds, come home.

Teddy's eyes stung and he let them. He let the green hold steady, let Billy feel the unfamiliar landscape of it, the heat that ran a few degrees warmer than human, the slight give where there should have been none.

"My mother used to say I was hiding," he said. "All the time. Even when I was just sitting still at the dinner table, she'd say, stop hiding, Theodore. And I never knew how to tell her that I wasn't doing anything. That this — " he turned the green hand slightly, and Billy's fingers turned with it — "this is the not-hiding. The other one's the costume. The pink one. The one everybody likes."

"I like both," Billy said.

"You haven't seen both."

"I'm holding both." Billy's thumb moved once across the broad green knuckle, slow, deliberate. "Same hand."

Teddy looked at him. The wind came up off the river and moved Billy's hair and Billy didn't bother to fix it, and somewhere below a man laughed at something on a stoop, oblivious, and the radiator vents on the surrounding roofs breathed their small warm breaths into the dark.

"It doesn't scare you," Teddy said. It wasn't quite a question.

"No."

"It should."

"Probably." Billy considered this with the seriousness he brought to everything that mattered and almost nothing that didn't. "But here's the thing I figured out about you on the stairs, that first night. Everybody else I meet, I can see the back of them. The strings, the want. You're the only person I've ever met who's more honest when you're hiding something. Like the thing you keep hidden is the most truthful part." He tightened his grip, green and pale knotted together against the dark roof. "So no. The green doesn't scare me. The green is just you finally telling me the truth out loud."

Teddy didn't have an answer to that. There wasn't one. There was only the rooftop, and the held hand, and the orange ruined sky, and the slow understanding settling over him like a blanket someone had laid down without being asked — that he had spent seventeen years certain that being seen all the way down would be the end of him, and here he was, seen all the way down, and the world had not ended. The world had gotten quieter and warmer and turned slightly toward him like a plant toward a window.

"Keep it out a while longer," Billy said, settling his shoulder more firmly against Teddy's. "The green. If it's not — if it doesn't cost you anything."

"It doesn't cost me anything," Teddy said, and realized as he said it that it was true, that here, with this boy, the green cost him nothing at all. "Why?"

"Because it's the first time you've shown me the whole thing," Billy said simply, "and I don't want to give it back yet."

an anthology

i. the staircase

The brownstone on the Lower East Side belonged to no one anymore, which was the only reason a group of teenagers had been able to colonize it. The deed was tangled in an estate dispute that would not resolve for years, and in the meantime the lights still worked and the radiators still clanked and a boy with a borrowed key had decided it would be their headquarters, and so it was.

Teddy Altman was too big for the doorway and he knew it. He had spent his whole life learning to fold himself smaller — to round his shoulders, to lower his voice, to become the particular kind of large that apologizes for taking up space — and so when he stepped into the front room for the first time, the first thing he did was duck, even though the lintel cleared his head by an inch.

The room went quiet the way rooms do. Four faces turned. He had rehearsed this. He had not rehearsed any of this.

"You're the one from the news," said the girl with the bow slung across her back, not unkindly, already cataloguing him the way she catalogued everything. "The fire on Avenue B. You pulled three people out before the trucks got there."

"I didn't pull anyone," Teddy said. The truth was complicated and green and not something he said out loud. "I was just there."

There was a boy sitting halfway up the staircase with a paperback splayed open on one knee, and he had not stopped looking at Teddy since the door opened. Not staring, exactly. Reading. Like Teddy was a page he had half-written himself and was now encountering in print for the first time.

"Billy," the boy said, when Teddy's eyes finally found his. Just the name, offered like a small key. "You don't have to duck. The ceiling's higher than it looks." A beat. "Most things are."

It was a stupid thing to say and it landed in Teddy's chest like a thrown rope. He straightened — slowly, to his full ridiculous height — and for the first time in longer than he could name, the size of him did not feel like an accusation he had to answer for. The other kids resumed their arguing about patrol routes and pizza. Billy went back to his book, or pretended to. But there was a space on the stairs now that had not been there a moment ago, a deliberate clear two feet of step beside him, and the invitation was so obvious that Teddy almost laughed.

He sat. The staircase complained under his weight and held. Up close the boy smelled like ozone and library paste and something underneath that Teddy didn't have a word for and would spend years failing to find a word for. Their shoulders touched. Neither of them moved away.

"What are you reading," Teddy said, because it was the only sentence he could find.

Billy tilted the cover so he could see. It was a battered library copy of something about the history of stage magic — Houdini, the Davenport brothers, the men who made audiences believe. The spine had been broken so many times it fell open on its own.

"Magic's just a contract," Billy said. "You agree not to look at the part where the work happens, and in exchange you get to be amazed. The second you look at the work, it's gone." He turned a page he wasn't reading. "I think about that a lot."

"Why."

Billy didn't answer right away. He had a way of letting a question sit until it was ready, which Teddy would come to understand was not evasiveness but a kind of respect — he didn't hand you the easy version of a thing because he assumed you'd come for the real one.

"Because I'd like to be amazed by something," Billy said finally, "without already knowing how it's done." He looked at Teddy then, full on, and something behind his eyes was very old and very tired for a boy of seventeen. "Everybody I meet, I can already see the work. The strings. What they want, why they want it. It's exhausting. It's like being at a magic show where the curtain's made of glass." He shrugged, and the shrug cost him something. "You're the first person in a long time I can't see the back of."

Teddy sat with that. Below them the others had given up on patrol routes and were debating, with the doomed intensity of teenagers, whether a hot dog was a sandwich. The radiator knocked four times in a sequence — clank, clank, clank-clank — and then settled.

"You can't see the back of me," Teddy said slowly, "because there's a part of me I keep there. On purpose."

"I know," Billy said. "That's why I trust you."

It was the wrong logic and it was exactly right, and Teddy felt the bottom go out of something in his chest, gently, the way a held breath finally goes. He had walked into this house an hour ago bracing to be a curiosity, the big strange new one, the alien at the back of the room. Instead he was on a staircase that was learning to hold his weight, beside a boy who trusted him because he was hidden, and the city outside did whatever the city did, and in here something quiet and enormous had begun, and both of them were pretending very hard not to notice that it already had a name.

"What are you," Billy asked. Not unkindly. Just — finally.

"I don't know yet," Teddy said. It was the truest thing he'd said all night. "I'm still finding out."

"Okay," Billy said, and went back to his book, and left the two feet of step exactly where it was. "Find out next to me, then."

It happens on a rooftop, because of course it does. They are seventeen and indestructible and entirely destructible, and Billy has just asked the question Teddy has been dreading since the staircase, the one that goes do you ever feel like you don't know what you really look like.

Teddy could lie. He is very good at lying with his body; it is, after all, the one thing his body does without being asked. Instead he holds out his hand, palm up, in the orange wash of a streetlight, and lets it change.

The skin goes first, blushing from pink to a deep impossible green. Then the bones rearrange under it, knuckles broadening, a ridge rising along the forearm. He keeps his face the same on purpose, so Billy will understand that this is still him, that the boy is not a costume worn over the creature but that both are equally, exhaustingly true.

Billy does not flinch. This is the thing Teddy will remember for the rest of his life, longer than the rest of his life, into whatever cosmic stretch of years a half-Skrull prince gets. Billy looks at the green hand the way you look at a word in a language you are just starting to love, and then he reaches out and laces his fingers through it.

"There you are," Billy says.

Not what are you. Not how. There you are, like Teddy is a person who has been away a long time and has finally, finally come home. Teddy's eyes sting and he lets the green hold, lets Billy feel the unfamiliar architecture of him, and does not shrink a single inch.

"My mother used to say I was hiding," Teddy manages. "All the time. Even when I was just sitting still."

an anthology

vi. the throne

They put a crown on his head and Teddy thinks about a staircase.

The throne room is the size of a cathedral built by a civilization that considers cathedrals modest. The assembled lords of two empires — green and blue, Skrull and Kree, two peoples who have spent longer at war than humans have had writing — are watching a half-breed boy from Earth be told that he is their heir. Their bridge. Their long-prophesied and largely unwanted end to a conflict older than the light from some of the stars in their banners. Teddy has been awake for two days. The ceremonial armor itches in a place he cannot reach. He is, beneath the crown and the prophecy and the eyes of a billion subjects, extremely tired, and what he wants, with an ache that surprises him, is to be home — wherever home is now, which is wherever Billy is, which at this moment is exactly one half-step behind his right shoulder, the only person in two empires permitted to stand on the dais.

"You don't have to do this," Billy murmurs, pitched for Teddy alone. "Say the word. I'll fold space and we'll be back on the fire escape before the speeches start. I'll make it so we were never here. I'm good at that now. I'm careful now." A small dark joke, the two of them the only ones who'd get it. "You taught me careful."

And Teddy wants to. God, he wants to. The crown is heavy and the war is not his and he never asked to be the answer to anyone's prophecy; he asked, once, on a staircase, only to find out what he was, and the universe has answered him with this, with a throne and a crown and the weight of ending a thing he didn't start.

But he looks out over the green faces and the blue faces — all of them watching this impossible boy who is, biologically, both of them at once, the living proof that the war was always, only ever, a choice — and he thinks about every doorway he ever ducked through, every time he made himself smaller to fit a space the world had decided was the right size for him. And he understands, with the crown's weight settling real and cold against his brow, that this is the opposite of ducking. This is a doorway asking him to be exactly as large as he actually is.

"No," he tells Billy, gently. "I have to do this. Not because I'm royal — I don't care about royal. Because if I leave, they go back to the war. And I'm the only person in the galaxy both sides will look at without reaching for a weapon. That's not a crown, Billy. That's just — being useful. In the one specific way that only I can be."

Billy is quiet a moment. The throne room holds its enormous breath.

"You spent your whole life," Billy says slowly, "thinking being able to be anyone meant you were no one. And it turns out it meant you were the only one who could be this."

"Yeah."

"The thing you hated about yourself is the thing that ends a war."

"Apparently the universe has a sense of humor."

"It's not funny."

"It's a little funny."

Billy lets out a breath that is half a laugh and half something heavier, and then he squeezes Teddy's hand — green knuckles under his pale ones, the staircase grip, the rooftop grip, the fire-escape grip, the same lacing of fingers that has anchored both of them through every impossible thing — right there, in front of two empires, where a billion subjects can see.

A billion subjects see.

A ripple goes through the assembled lords, green and blue both, at the sight of their new sovereign holding the hand of a grey-eyed human boy as if it were the most natural and load-bearing fact in the cosmos. Which it is. Which it has always been.

"But I'm renegotiating," Billy says, "the part where I have to call you Your Highness."

Teddy laughs — the big helpless laugh, the one that used to mortify him at seventeen because it took up so much room, and now takes up exactly as much room as it likes in a throne room built for a god. The whole assembly flinchesa at the sound of a king being, for one unguarded second, just a boy. And in that second the war forgets to exist.

an anthology

viii. tuesday

The war is over.

Some war is always over; there is always another one being born somewhere. But this one — the big one, the one with the wrong stars and the unmaking and the throne carved from a meteor — is genuinely, finally over, and Teddy Altman is making eggs.

This is the part no comic lingers on and no story bothers to tell: the long flat country that comes after the climax, the years of ordinary mornings, and it is Teddy's favorite place in the entire universe. He has commanded fleets. He has sat a throne. He has held the line at the literal edge of a collapsing reality with his own widened green body for forty hours without rest. None of it competes, in the private accounting of his heart, with the specific Tuesday-morning weight of a spatula in his hand and a man asleep down the hall.

Billy comes into the kitchen still wearing the warp in his hair that sleep — and probably some small unconscious spell — has left there. He is older now. There are threads of grey at his temples that he insists, with total seriousness, he conjured on purpose for gravitas. He kisses the back of Teddy's neck, reaches past him for a mug, and says nothing, because they are decades past the stage of love that requires saying things.

"You changed the kettle again," Teddy says.

"I changed the kettle's mind."

"It wanted to be blue."

"It was already blue."

"Now it's sure."

Teddy laughs — the big helpless laugh, taking up exactly as much room as it likes in a kitchen that is theirs, in a life that is theirs, in a peace that two boys from a complaining staircase somehow built out of years and patience and the occasional saved universe.

He plates the eggs. He sets one plate down for Billy and keeps one for himself, and they eat standing up at the counter, the way they always end up doing despite owning a perfectly good table, and outside the window the city does whatever the city does, indifferent and enormous and entirely unaware that one of the two men eating eggs in this apartment once ended a war by refusing to be smaller than he was.

Billy reaches over, without looking, and laces his fingers through Teddy's free hand. Pale through green. The staircase grip. The rooftop grip. The grip from the throne and the fire escape and the dark night the sky came apart. Forty years of the same two hands finding each other without being asked.

"There you are," Billy says, around a mouthful of egg, like he says most mornings, like he has said ten thousand times, like he will say until one of them runs out of mornings.

And Teddy — king, bridge, shapeshifter, the boy who spent seventeen years certain that being seen all the way down would be the end of him — squeezes the pale hand in his green one and looks at the one true unborrowed face he kept, out of all the infinite faces in the world, and answers the way he has always answered, the way he will answer for as long as there is a Tuesday left to answer in:

an anthology

vii. the long way home

The worst part of being the bridge between two empires, Teddy decides, is the commute.

He is half a galaxy away, sitting in a war-council that has run nine hours over a trade dispute that could, if mishandled by an idiot or a hothead, reignite a thousand-year conflict over the rights to a single asteroid belt. He is the only person in the chamber both delegations trust, which means he cannot leave, which means he has not been home in three weeks. He is so tired that the green of his own hands looks unfamiliar to him, like a coat he forgot he owned. A Skrull admiral is delivering a speech of monumental, weaponized tedium. Teddy nods at the appropriate intervals. He has become very good at nodding.

And then, in the middle of the admiral's seventeenth subordinate clause, a small folded note appears on the table in front of him out of nothing at all, smelling faintly of ozone and library paste.

He palms it before anyone notices. Under the vast stone table, in his lap, he unfolds it. Billy's handwriting — conjured across an impossible distance, because a reality-warper who misses his husband will, it turns out, casually bend the postal laws of the universe rather than wait for a comm-relay.

Kettle's still blue, it says. Bed's too big. The plant you like is being dramatic but alive — it dropped four leaves to make a point and then changed its mind. Kate asked when you're back and I said "when two empires stop being children" and she said "so never" and honestly. Come home when you can. Not before you fix the galaxy — I'm not a monster — but the SECOND after. I love you in every shape you've ever worn and the one you keep for me. Don't read this twice, you'll lose your place in the speech. — B

Teddy reads it four times.

The admiral drones on. Two empires hang on whatever this strange green human boy decides about an asteroid belt. And under the table, gripping a note that crossed half a galaxy because someone loved him enough to break the universe's rules about distance, Teddy Altman finds — somehow, from somewhere — the patience to fix one more thing. Because there is a kettle that is sure it is blue. Because there is a bed that is too big. Because there is a boy on a fire escape who once said find out next to me, and Teddy intends to keep finding out, for as long as both of them last, which he has every cosmic intention of being a very long time.

He folds the note carefully and tucks it against his chest, inside the ceremonial armor, where all his true things go. Then he raises one green hand and interrupts the admiral with the specific calm authority of a man who has somewhere to get back to.

"Let's try this differently," he says. "I have somewhere to be."

an anthology

vi. the throne

They put a crown on his head and Teddy thinks about a staircase.

The throne room is the size of a cathedral built by a civilization that considers cathedrals modest. The assembled lords of two empires — green and blue, Skrull and Kree, two peoples who have spent longer at war than humans have had writing — are watching a half-breed boy from Earth be told that he is their heir. Their bridge. Their long-prophesied and largely unwanted end to a conflict older than the light from some of the stars in their banners. Teddy has been awake for two days. The ceremonial armor itches in a place he cannot reach. He is, beneath the crown and the prophecy and the eyes of a billion subjects, extremely tired, and what he wants, with an ache that surprises him, is to be home — wherever home is now, which is wherever Billy is, which at this moment is exactly one half-step behind his right shoulder, the only person in two empires permitted to stand on the dais.

"You don't have to do this," Billy murmurs, pitched for Teddy alone. "Say the word. I'll fold space and we'll be back on the fire escape before the speeches start. I'll make it so we were never here. I'm good at that now. I'm careful now." A small dark joke, the two of them the only ones who'd get it. "You taught me careful."

And Teddy wants to. God, he wants to. The crown is heavy and the war is not his and he never asked to be the answer to anyone's prophecy; he asked, once, on a staircase, only to find out what he was, and the universe has answered him with this, with a throne and a crown and the weight of ending a thing he didn't start.

But he looks out over the green faces and the blue faces — all of them watching this impossible boy who is, biologically, both of them at once, the living proof that the war was always, only ever, a choice — and he thinks about every doorway he ever ducked through, every time he made himself smaller to fit a space the world had decided was the right size for him. And he understands, with the crown's weight settling real and cold against his brow, that this is the opposite of ducking. This is a doorway asking him to be exactly as large as he actually is.

"No," he tells Billy, gently. "I have to do this. Not because I'm royal — I don't care about royal. Because if I leave, they go back to the war. And I'm the only person in the galaxy both sides will look at without reaching for a weapon. That's not a crown, Billy. That's just — being useful. In the one specific way that only I can be."

Billy is quiet a moment. The throne room holds its enormous breath.

"You spent your whole life," Billy says slowly, "thinking being able to be anyone meant you were no one. And it turns out it meant you were the only one who could be this."

"Yeah."

"The thing you hated about yourself is the thing that ends a war."

"Apparently the universe has a sense of humor."

"It's not funny."

"It's a little funny."

Billy lets out a breath that is half a laugh and half something heavier, and then he squeezes Teddy's hand — green knuckles under his pale ones, the staircase grip, the rooftop grip, the fire-escape grip, the same lacing of fingers that has anchored both of them through every impossible thing — right there, in front of two empires, where a billion subjects can see.

A billion subjects see.

A ripple goes through the assembled lords, green and blue both, at the sight of their new sovereign holding the hand of a grey-eyed human boy as if it were the most natural and load-bearing fact in the cosmos. Which it is. Which it has always been.

"But I'm renegotiating," Billy says, "the part where I have to call you Your Highness."

Teddy laughs — the big helpless laugh, the one that used to mortify him at seventeen because it took up so much room, and now takes up exactly as much room as it likes in a throne room built for a god. The whole assembly flinches at the sound of a king being, for one unguarded second, just a boy. And in that second the war forgets to exist.