#halfabreath

But he does and Ransom doesn’t know so Holster stands and laughs when Ransom tells Jack about the Chads setting their house on fire, on purpose, to practice for their upcoming games and how the dean hadn’t been at all pleased to see fireballs whipping back and forth the lawn.

____________

Living with so many different elements in one Haus is a lot on Holster’s nerves. Most of the time, when he’s not pretending to not be in love with Ransom, he’s on the hammock with Lardo in the backyard. She’s better at hiding it, but he knows it gets to her too.

Lardo stomps her foot and jerks her chin upward and a wall of clay grows steadily out of the ground. Holster does the same, and soon they have a makeshift tent burying the hammock in shade. It’s a little wet, smells a little crisply earthen. It’s perfect.

“Dex and Nursey?” Lardo asks, curling against his side. He shifts to adjust for her and the hammock swings just enough to be comfortable.

He hums. “I don’t get it,” he says. He twists his fingers lazily; below them, a thin column of earth stretches up and starts massaging the knot just below his shoulder blade.

Lardo asks, “Don’t get what,” in a way that suggests she knows what he’s about to say. She probably does. They’ve had this talk before.

“They’re supposed to be good d-men, they’re opposites, so why—?” Holster breaks off in a sigh that borders on a yawn.

“Get me one,” Lardo says. He doesn’t say anything. He can tell without looking that she rolls her eyes before saying, “Earth-massager. Get me one.”

Holster drums the fingers of his other hand in the air and smiles when she sighs at the pressure.

“Better,” she says. There’s a silence in which he thinks she’s weighing something. “Shitty’s been trying to figure out where he wants to go next year.”

“Thought he decided on Harvard?”

“Mm. Me too. But he’s not sure, it’s his parents’ idea, and you know what he says about following his parents’ ideas.”

“‘Only dead fish go with the flow,’ right,” Holster says. He closes his eyes.

He’d made one of these earth tents for Ransom once. For Canada’s independence day. There’s a park nearly halfway between Buffalo and Toronto with the exact curling slide Holster always swears was in his middle school playground, and that Ransom always says was in every middle school playground everywhere. They’d climbed to the top of the play structure and everything was so small and Holster wanted to kiss Ransom so badly he nearly caused a cave-in.

Ransom had wanted to see what it was like inside one of them and Holster was, as always, so sunk for him that he made one. Ransom had taken one breath inside before he’d started panicking.

Earth and air don’t always balance, his mom said when he’d told her. She’d meant it romantically, but it works for hockey too. There’s a give and take that opposing elements are supposed to have with each other that the frogs lack.

“Maybe they’re too different,” Holster says now.

He feels rather than sees Lardo yawn at him. “Shitty and his ‘rents?”

“Well. Yeah,” he says. He yawns. Lardo elbows him and this time he looks and she’s so pleased with herself he sticks his tongue out. “Dex and Nursey. Water and fire don’t always balance, sometimes they make each other worse.”

“Maybe,” Lardo says. He doesn’t like how she seems to know what he’s not saying. Water and fire is an easy parallel with earth and air.

She kicks the wall and they swing, swing, swing for a long time.

____________

Another breeze slides cool hands down Holster’s face. He sucks in his lip, smoothing out the page of his econ book again, and tries not to sound like a dick when he says, “Hey, Rans?”

Ransom doesn’t turn around. Holster sighs and pushes and the clay ball Ransom has on his desk rocks back and forth slightly. Ransom takes out a headphone as he swivels around in his chair. It’d be a smoother action if the headphones hadn’t caught on the arm of the chair, yanking his head down.

“Ow. What’s up?”

Holster squeezes his eyes shut as another breeze skims his jaw. “Will you stop? Please?”

Ransom frowns. “Stop what,” he says.

“Wind,” Holster says, awkwardly waving a hand around his face. “It keeps touching me.”

“Air tends to do that, Holtzy.”

Holster asks, “Please,” softly.

Ransom nods, still looking confused, but he says, “Sure, bro.”

They turn back to their desks. Holster tries to forget how the air had smelled like Ransom’s cologne, the kind he wears when he hooks up with March. He aims his desk fan straight at himself to blow the smell away but it’s like it’s trapped in the pages of his book right next to asymmetric shock. A part of him thinks it fits there. A small thing affecting him more than Ransom.

Thirty minutes pass and the amount of gusts that ruffle his papers and don’t touch him pricks steadily at the back of his neck and underneath his shoulder blade. Holster shifts in his chair experimentally. The resulting squeak cracks the silence and he winces, but Ransom’s stuck in his music and in his bio slides and Holster’s not sure just yet if it hurts that he doesn’t look up.

There’s a gap between Ransom and his chair. Holster pinches the bridge of his nose and exhales once, quickly, and stands up.

Ransom jumps when Holster pushes down on his shoulder. “You were floating again,” Holster says. The pricking’s moved to his eyes now. “I — sorry, I’ve gotta—”

He practically jumps down the attic stairs before Ransom can say anything more than “Holtz?”

____________

Jack and Bitty both stare at him when he bursts into the kitchen. He ignores them in favor of the blueberry crumble sitting on the counter. Bitty stops him before he can take the whole dish, handing him a metal pie server that’s still just too warm from his fingers. Holster takes it gingerly, then wraps his sleeve around his fingers.

“Sorry,” Bitty says. The way he holds himself, curled inward like he’s burning out, makes Holster feel like dried soil. Crumbly.

Holster deliberately holds the handle with his bare fingers. “Takes a lot more than this to bother me,” he says. Bitty’s smile widens when Holster scoops out an extra large slice of pie. Jack doesn’t move, but the pie server cools a fraction of a degree until Holster really could hold it all day. He mouths a thank you once Bitty turns back to his French homework.

He smashes the pie in a minute exactly. “Thanks, Bits,” he says, making Bitty and Jack subtly lean back from the resulting spray of crumbs.

“Any time, honey,” Bitty tells him warmly. Bitty meets Jack’s eyes and they have a conversation without words that doesn’t last long enough for Holster to wonder at. “Thought you might need it.”

The prickle at his neck starts up again. “Why would you—”

Bitty just stares at him, unimpressed. Jack says, “We’re not blind, Birkholtz.”

“What do you. What,” Holster says, before the prickle travels up his spinal column to the base of his skull. He jams the palm of his hands against his eyes.

Cool fingers press the back of his neck. Holster lurches into a seat at the table and bows his head, letting Jack quietly ease the knots away. Warm hands slide up and down his back now, tap lightly along his shoulders. There’s an occasional hiss of steam when Jack and Bitty bump into each other, but other than the dishwasher laboring away, it’s the only sound in the room.

____________

Most days Holster’s fine but most days he doesn’t wake up to Ransom bobbing against the ceiling in the middle of a wind storm. It takes him half a second to figure out what to say, but even that’s too long; the wind rips the sound from his throat the moment he opens his mouth.

He tries again but the only sound is the air whipping their room into a cyclone and Ransom’s feet against the attic ceiling.

Holster stretches as tall as he can and reaches. His fingers brush the edge of Ransom’s hideous salmon boxers, but the fabric slips easily out of his grasp.

He’s on Ransom’s bunk in an instant, gathering his blankets in both hands, and tossing them over Ransom’s arm. Ransom snatches them when they flap against his ankle, and Holster nearly cries in relief. He tows him in, slowly, steadily. If nothing else, he must be steady.

Ransom tumbles bodily back onto his bed. He’s on Holster’s leg, but Holster can’t bring himself to care just then.

“Hey, I’ve got you,” he whispers. Ransom scootches in closer at the sound of his voice. “I’ll anchor you.”

There’s a pause. “Thank you,” Ransom whispers back. “Thanks.”

____________

They fall asleep with elbows in stomachs and knees uncomfortably under thighs and there’s a drool splotch on Holster’s chest and he knows he snores and must wake Ransom up, but he doesn’t complain.

A breeze caresses Holster’s jaw. When he opens his eyes, he’s alone in the bed.

Rain makes the Haus windows shiver.

There’s another blueberry crumble pie on the counter.

____________

Three weeks after he pulled Ransom down from the ceiling, Ransom passes Holster a puck he should easily catch. It slides between his skates.

“What’s the problem, son?” Hall asks him after practice. There’s a small puddle forming under his skates; after the pucks are all collected, the fire elements relax their hold on their heat. Dex always says it’s to help the zaboni. Everyone else always rolls their eyes.

Hall doesn’t roll his eyes. He keeps his gaze centered on Holster until Holster feels like an excavation site.

“Just an off spell,” he mumbles. He puts pressure on his neck before the discomfort start up again; he really can’t afford to pay to fix the sidewalk again.

“Make sure you take care of that,” is all Hall says. He claps Holster on the shoulder.

Holster says, “I’ll try, Coach.”

____________

It’s so, so unfair how good Ransom looks in their fratty party lighting. Bits and pieces of purple and green flecks bounce off his cheekbones, hiding now and then along the side of his nose and under his collar. Holster thinks he’d quite like to find them.

His empty cup seems to want to collect the light of Ransom’s skin, too. An empty cup, he thinks, he can fix. He dunks the ladle into the tub juice.

“Go easy on that,” Lardo yells to him. He blinks until he realizes she’s wearing glitter; he’d been trying to figure out how she made the lights stay on her like that. “Shitty made it real strong this time. I’m on patrol tonight, I’m not afraid to ground you.”

But Holster’s been grounded his whole life. Tonight he wants to fly, so he tips the cup back and downs it in one.

The party passes in a blur. He thinks Kent Parson might show up, maybe; the air gets cold like it does when Jack’s nervous about a test or something. Last time it affected everyone like this was Parson’s Cup day. Holster thinks icicles lean down from the ceiling but that could just be him leaning down for more juice.

“Think that’s enough,” someone’s voice says in his ear. Beautiful hands take the cup out of his fingers and he reaches for it — he’d just passed the Rockies, he wants to fly a little longer, a little higher — but the beautiful fingers twist and a gust of air sends the cup rattling across the floor. He thinks maybe it rattles. It’s too loud to tell.

The beautiful hands sling his arm over beautiful shoulders. Holster turns his head, and there’s a purple fleck on the beautiful mouth. He kisses it.

“Yeah, definitely bedtime,” the voice says. It becomes Ransom’s voice when they get to the attic.

Ransom gently eases him out of his shoes and jeans and tucks him into his bottom bunk. Holster smiles at him dreamily; there’s a smudge on the corner of his lips.

“Rans,” he says, flopping a hand toward him. Ransom takes it. His eyes look amused. “I flew, Rans. Over the Rockies.”

“You’re drunk, Holster.”

How had he never realized how comfortable his bed is? Holster burrows into the pillows. He says, “Going to Everest next.”

“Get some rest, idiot,” Ransom tells him. Holster closes his eyes when he’s told to. He thinks, maybe, someone kisses his forehead, but then a breeze comes and whisks him off to sleep.

____________

Holster regrets last night as soon as he opens his eyes the next morning.

“Turn off the sun,” he mumbles through a mouthful as heavy as earth.

Ransom’s laugh is a lot closer than Holster thought it would be so he opens his eyes again and then immediately regrets it. He compromises for squinting. Squinting’s safe; there’s a Ransom-shaped blob on a chair by his bed and less light piercing his retinas.

“When the sun wants to turn off,” Ransom says, feeling Holster’s forehead, “she’ll do so on her own.”

“What time is it?”

“Somewhere around one-thirty.”

“Can you—” Holster twiddles his fingers in a way that on some level he knows doesn’t at all resemble air manipulation, but Ransom sends him a subtle stream of cool air anyway. It brushes over his lips. He frowns. “Did I kiss someone last night? It feels like I kissed someone last night.”

Ransom’s hesitation is so slight Holster wouldn’t have caught it had they spent the last three years, forty days being friends, or had he not spent the last three years, thirty-five days being in love with him.

“I did, didn’t I.” Ransom still doesn’t say anything. “Just so long as it wasn’t April, the volleyball team’ll kill me.”

“It was me,” Ransom says now, and now Holster feels like he’s floating next to the ceiling. Apprehension curls up next to his spleen. “Don’t worry though, it’s fine. You were drunk. That’s all that happened.”

“I wasn’t that drunk,” Holster says automatically.

“Holtzy,” Ransom says. There’s a reluctant smile dawning on his face. “You asked Jack if his Ice Town cost him, an ice clown, his town crown. I still have no idea what that means.”

“You still haven’t watched Parks and Rec.”

Ransom says lightly, “There’s been a lot going on.”

“There has.”

A pause. Holster uses it to study Ransom, to look at the dirt smudges still on his face and hands that he must have gotten from carrying him up the stairs. He must’ve sat here all night. Just the idea of it makes Holster clench his hands to avoid an earthquake.

He sits up carefully. “Justin, there’s something I should tell you.”

Ransom doesn’t say anything. Holster’s profoundly grateful for it. It takes him time to speak, he has to build momentum — it’s a shared earth element trait, he supposes; Lardo’s the same way. Rockfalls building to a landslide. These rocks have been falling for longer than three years.

He is going to start small. Something about the way Ransom looks when he asks the wind to work with him, about how it felt when the perfumed gusts of wind kissed his cheek. Maybe the way they connect on the ice, about how the balance each other in the Haus and locker room and buses. How those flecks of light looked darting here and there across his nose.

These are his rocks. These little things that build up his rockslide.

But the rockslide wants to be heard first, so Holster says, “I’m in love with you.” He shuts his eyes.

Ransom doesn’t say anything, but the next wind that comes ghosts over Holster’s mouth like a kiss.

When Holster opens his eyes Ransom traces the path the wind took with his lips.

____________

It is times like this that the Holster thinks the earth in his limbs have weighted him so he’s exactly where he should be. Ransom’s walking an inch off the ground as they step over the newly misshapen sidewalk in front of the Haus, and this time Holster doesn’t pull him down. This time, Holster tugs him in for a kiss, and Ransom lifts him up.