9. participating in their hobby even if it doesn’t personally interest you

“What are you doing?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“I don’t know, Trevor, that’s why I asked.”

Trevor rolled his eyes with a small smile, glancing toward his boyfriend before looking down at the cardboard square on the table again. He hadn’t been working on the puzzle for very long, so only the edges were done, but it was relaxing. There was a kind of peace that came with putting together the picture on the boxes, with solving a puzzle and the sense of accomplishment that came along with it. “Have you ever done a puzzle before, Deke?”

“I don’t even know what this is, so take a guess.” Deke moved to sit down in the seat next to his, looking at the little pieces of colored cardboard with a frown. He didn’t understand it, but he was content, for a few moments, to watch his boyfriend’s fingers start to assemble them into... something.

“Well, a puzzle is just trying to make the picture on the box. All of these pieces go together in a certain way, and it’ll make the picture when it’s done.”

Deke stared at the scattered pieces across the table for a moment before meeting his gaze. “It seems kind of boring.”

Trevor shrugged, his smile soft while he fit a few more pieces together and connected them to the established edges. “Kind of. But it’s going to look really cool when it’s done. Wanna help?”

After another moment of hesitation, he nodded his head with a smile of his own and scanned the tabletop for pieces with similar colors.

( years later, when they had cat hair on their pajamas and rings on their fingers, trevor tore through wrapping paper on christmas morning to find three boxes inside, various pictures from their wedding day and trips taken together in collages and printed onto cardboard for repeated assembly )

“FFWF is a state of mind” is my new favorite statement. Thank you, Kayti.

As for the (trevord)EEK timeline, I just kind of.... guestimated? There are some big events that I know take place in a certain order (SHIELD knows about them before Trevor proposes, they’re engaged before Deke gets Clover, Clover is a part of their lives before the move, the move is before the engagement party, etc.) but otherwise I just put some stuff in randomly based on.... need, in some cases?

When I was arranging the fics when I first put the series together on ao3, I knew that the thunder fic took place before Trevor moved into Deke’s apartment, so it had to go before the Halloween mini-arc, but because the follow-up fic for the thunder fic involved them having sex, it had to go after ‘and it’s bliss’ and anything/simmer had to go after that one, too, for the same reason.

other tiny “it had to go in this order” things:

- subtlety had to go before anything where SHIELD knew about their relationship, because Jemma seeing through the secret was the entire plot - approval had to go before the engagement party so Deke could go into that interaction with his grandparents knowing they were both happy for him - ‘til you drop came before approval because........ I decided I didn’t want to write any of their married life until I wrote their wedding (I thought about it a lot this morning) - under the stars is so early in the series because trevor explicitly refers to deke as his ‘boyfriend’ and not his fiancé, and so on