Chapter Text
He knows better than to fill a box like this with books, but.
But he’s not here to make the smartest decisions. So he’s going to fill the box up with his books, and he’ll suffer the consequences later. When he does, he probably won’t remember this moment, but that won’t matter when he’s loading and unloading heavy boxes.
He goes through his mental checklist: He’s got most of his stuff packed up, save for what he needs for the immediate two-week future, but not all of it; he’s finished two papers and just needs to edit them; whatever happens on his exam is between him and the exam; he’s already given his presentation; he still hasn’t told Tucker the full moving plans.
…he still hasn’t told Tucker the full moving plans. And he’s leaving in, what, two weeks?
It’s not that he doesn’t want to, it’s just that even he didn’t have a good idea until recently, and on top of that he’s just not sure how. He wants it to be better than just ‘we’re moving out of the building but I want you to come with us’. Then there’s also the part where he’s going out of state for a little while, which is a whole mess all on its own. There’ll be a three hour time difference to fight with again, and they’ll both be bringing even more stuff back with them…
Ugh. He just really wishes that this were all infinitely more simple than it actually is—or, maybe, that he’d managed to get more of a warning about it himself. And it’s not even that Tucker’s completely in the dark—he knows they’re going to visit family—just that. Well. There’s more than just that happening. He could go back and forth on the ‘but to be fair’s forever, but it doesn’t make a difference in the end.
His phone starts blasting Ghostbusters—he still hasn’t changed it from that time that Tucker got ahold of it and changed his own ringtone—and snaps him out of his thoughts. He’s not completely certain where it is—in the Packing Haze, his room has become a mess—so he has to rifle around and check in the boxes he hasn’t taped up yet to try to find it. When he does, there’s a missed call and a message.
Tucker
Huh????
Specs
You heard me the first time
…read.
You read me the first time.
Shit
YOU GET WHAT I MEAN
Tucker
u can’t just drop a “i never read the crucible but did perfectly on a paper about it” on someone and have them NOT be surprised
Specs
It wasn’t intentional!
And I don’t know why you’re so surprised
Everyone has to bullshit an assignment eventually right
Tucker
I Mean. Yes. But 1 most of us don’t do perfectly 2 i wouldn’t expect you specifically to bullshit an assignment like that
how did you do well?? and how didn’t you combust?????
Specs
Exhaustion and the buildup of other work. And it’s a fairly clear-cut story in terms of symbolism and allegory
Right?
Tucker
…yeah. sure. whatever makes you happy enough to sleep at night
And, okay, fair enough, but it really wasn’t that complicated and there were a few other circumstances that influenced his grade, not least because it was in his first semester and because of the easy way that professor graded. That's all that it really is.
Specs
It doesn't, actually
It's just what happened
Extenuating circumstances, and all that
I'll be right back, I'm almost done packing
He throws his phone back on his bed—it has the bare bones of what he needs, and it's a very sad looking bed now, but it's a necessary evil in this process. And once he gets a few more boxes out of his room, he can hijack the television and turn on House on Haunted Hill.
Specs turns his attention elsewhere.
He can hear Bon Jovi playing from the other room. At this point, he’s too preoccupied with trying to get things done to argue about it like he normally would. Besides, he already knows that he's right—and, honestly, he doesn’t mind it, but he wouldn’t admit that just on principle.
He looks down at his box, giving it a small, experimental lift; it’s not as bad as he’d feared. He grabs the tape off of his bed and closes the box up, then tapes it shut. He can’t wait to be done with all of this; he's excited to be out of the apartment building, yes, but that doesn't mean that this isn't stressful. It doesn’t help that there’s definitely a more ideal way that they could go about this, they’re just doing it this way—leaving some stuff in storage until they get back, flying all the way to Jersey to get the last of their stuff, then coming back to Oregon.
Unfortunately, that’s just the plan they have.
He turns his attention to the other boxes; now that he has them all packed and isn’t planning on moving where everything’s packed away he can tape those shut too, but he really doesn’t want to. He really hates moving, actually.
Tucker
what.
Is it fine if I come over really quick?
Still no response. It’s been long enough that he can tell that Specs is just caught up in packing—whatever all of that entails, he really wouldn’t expect it to be this long unless there was procrastination taking over—but still.
He wants to at least figure out some of the plans for summer and figure out how long they’ll be gone. Specs had left a standing open invitation for Tucker to stop by whenever he wanted, and this is definitely not the time to shy away from taking advantage of it, so he pockets his phone and starts on his way.
Through the elevator, down the hall…
Once he gets to the right door, he knocks, but he doesn’t have to wait long. The door is opened quickly, but whoever it is—presumably Specs’s brother, because he left—doesn’t stop to even say hello, just keeps going on with… whatever it is he’s doing.
There are a lot of cardboard boxes everywhere, which makes sense if they’re both packing, but.
It looks like they’re packing everything they have here.
He’d expected them to be packing enough for a trip to visit their parents, but this looks like they’re moving , and—
Holy shit. They’re moving.
No, no, not just that: they’re moving, and he hadn’t known. Not that he’s entitled to know, just that… he’d have liked to. But that’s besides the point, now, he decides.
He makes his way to Specs’s room, sidestepping boxes (Specs and his brother seem to have prioritised getting everything into a box first, then moving the boxes themselves second—not the worst, but not the best, either) as he goes. The door is half-open, and he knocks on it as he leans in the doorway.
Specs looks up from where he’s messing with a box, looking like he thinks he’s been caught doing something that he shouldn’t, eyes wide behind his glasses. Then he registers that it’s Tucker.
“You’re here! Great—do you mind hijacking the TV for me?”
“Is it hijacking if there’s nothing currently playing on it?” Tucker steps his way through the room carefully so he can sit on Specs’s bed. “Do you want any help?”
“No, I’m almost done,” Specs shakes his head. “Once I pack all of this up, we should be ready to move it all out,”
There it is.
“You’re moving out permanently?” Tucker asks carefully. It’s fair—after what happened in April alone, even Tucker would be inclined to leave.
Specs pauses, deliberately keeping his eyes averted, and Tucker’s pretty sure that he feels an actual kind of fear for a moment. He knows why—he’s more than whipped and more importantly Specs is his best friend—but he really doesn’t like it, already trying to wrestle the feeling down into nonexistence.
“Well—we’re going back to our parents’ house for a little bit, but we're coming back. I have some stuff I need to grab,”
“...so you’re packing your entire apartment?” Tucker has only felt this amount of relief a handful of times, but he’s still confused.
Specs looks at him funny. “Yeah. We’re coming back to Oregon, but not this apartment,”
Oh. “So then… what?”
There’s a moment where Tucker’s certain Specs isn’t going to tell him. Until, suddenly, unexpectedly, “we’re… acquiring a house. Or at least trying to,”
Not the string of words he’d expected.
“...why did you say it like that?” because if he doesn’t distract himself somehow, he’s not sure what he’ll do. Probably something stupid.
“Okay. Uh. This isn’t how I planned for any of this to happen. I promise I was going to tell you—,”
“When?”
“When I asked you to move in with me?” Specs hesitates, closing his eyes tightly for a second before giving Tucker his undivided attention, gaze a heavy nervous weight. “I was going to do this differently—I wanted to give you better timing for your tenant contract, and I was going to do something special, and then finals and time’s just been—,”
“What?” because he doesn’t know what else to say. He can't even be upset anymore, he’s just trying to process this—whatever this is. At least that explains the odd line of questioning about Tucker’s apartment and roommate from months ago that Specs had never elaborated on—until now.
“...surprise? It’s not the most ideal—the house is small, and it’ll mess with a lot of scheduling, but it’s what we have right now. And you don’t have to say yes, in fact I’d understand it if you didn’t, but—yeah. If you want to, then you can,”
Is he really expecting a no?
Well—based on the nervous looks, the deer-in-headlights expression, the rambling, Tucker’s guessing yes. But really, there’s no other answer he can give; all things considered, it just feels like the natural progression of everything. He may not know Specs’s brother’s name (though neither of them are at fault, Specs is simply adamant about not introducing them properly, and at this point they’re both committed to the bit of Annoying Him About It), but he knows Specs better than almost anyone else. He knows his preferred daily routine and his actual routine, and the fact that sometimes when he can’t sleep he just cleans everything until he gives up part way through, and the way he keeps all of his discs—both CDs and DVDs—organised, the way (and more importantly the circumstances under which) he likes his hot chocolate, the way his ears flush when he gets embarrassed or particularly worked up, the way that he over-explains things just to be safe.
Living together is nothing.
“Yeah. Okay,” he agrees.
“‘Yeah, okay’ like you understand, or ‘yeah, okay’ like you want to?”
“Both,”
Specs is careful not to react too much. Tucker can see it, plain as day on his face, and—again, he knows him, they haven’t even been friends a full year and he can see through him. This is the same man that he’d been willing to fight a demongodthing for. “Right, okay, great. So, uh, we’ll let you know when I know more—but things will hopefully be happening soon. So.”
He’s really nervous. He’s allowed to be, but. Again. This is just another natural step in whatever it is they’re doing. Honestly, it should probably be more of a surprise that this didn’t happen sooner.
“Do you want me to leave you alone so you can pack?”
“No! You can stay,” Specs adjusts his glasses nervously. He’s just asked Tucker to live with him, and he’s nervous about asking him to stay while he finishes up the very last of the packing. “Please. Stay,”
So he does, even though there isn’t much else to do. Really, Tucker’s pretty impressed by their efficiency.
He checks the clock again. It’s just barely out of his line of sight if he sits normally, in the corner of his eye, and he has to turn his head away from the television and Tucker to see it.
“You already did the math,” Tucker reminds him, elbowing him gently. Specs looks over with his brow furrowed. “The movie will be over before we need to go,”
“I know,” Specs sighs, kicking Tucker’s foot lightly and still not giving the TV his attention. Not even Peter Lorre and Vincent Price (with Rhubarb the cat following along and meowing) going to kill Basil Rathbone can hold his attention, now, not with his nervous anticipation. If not for the fact that he does like this movie he’d be tempted to just turn it off.
They’re about to be on different ends of the country. He doesn’t even try to stop his thoughts from wandering, now, not even when Price asks Lorre what he’s discovered about the windows.
“Every one of them has a bolt,” Lorre’s character warns Price. Price’s character is, predictably, not pleased by this.
“...of all the distrustful—well, I will not be denied,”
Tucker elbows him again, trying to turn his attention back to the television—Lorre is getting on the roof, now, and Rathbone is reciting the Scottish play—he’s learned his lesson from Tucker well enough, and he’s not tempting fate to try to say the full name.
Rathbone’s still going on the Scottish play when he tries to force his attention on the movie. He has a sword now, and Lorre is—reasonably—still trying to hide.
“I still think he should’ve done a one-man show,” Tucker announces, stretching his legs out in front of him.
“Of the Scottish play?”
“Yeah,” Tucker pauses. “He could do others, but he’s doing the Scottish play right now,”
And, yeah, he definitely is, while Vincent Price’s absolute rag doll of a character sleeps outside and Peter Lorre’s tries to avoid getting stabbed and Rhubarb’s waits. They’ve both seen this movie enough to know what’ll happen without having to watch it, from Lorre and Price at a funeral dumping a “carcass” out of a coffin and into the ground to Karloff poisoning Price then going back to bed as Price dramatically falls onto Rathbone, but he’d still like to watch it.
But there’s a lot on his mind, a lot he needs to be prepared for—
Yeah, okay, despite the hopes this movie isn’t helping as much as he’d hoped. He looks at the clock again.
“Clock’s still not faster,” Tucker reminds him. Specs slumps in his seat, obstructing his own view of the clock on the wall, and tries to force his attention on the movie for the umpteenth time. “Would something else be better?”
“No,” Specs groans. “Then we will lose track of time,”
“...with all of the alarms you’ve set?” Tucker snorts. “No, we won’t be late,”
Specs stays low, glowering at the television—Price and Lorre have Rathbone in the basement now, and it’s created a whole mess for them. The movie itself hasn’t changed, and neither has his affection for it—if anything it’s only grown stronger after the past Halloween, when they stayed in and watched movies all night—but he really isn’t getting anything out of it. It’s not even personal to just this movie; he knows that nothing they turn on will have the intended effect of distracting him long enough for time to pass quickly.
“You’re sure it’s fine—,”
“Yes,” Tucker looks over at him, eyebrow raised like he’s daring him to argue. “We’ll be living in the same house soon anyways. Might as well let our collections start merging,”
Oh, shit, that’s true. He should really go ahead and start deciding how to keep that all organised—if he’s honest, he does know how he wants it, but it’s… comforting, to have it written down.
He could start working on that now, actually. “Do you care if I sort through your DVDs?”
“Nah,” Tucker gestures vaguely at the TV stand; there are numerous DVD cases and a few disc booklets in the shelves under the television that he can sort through. Once Specs grabs his notebook from his bag he’s taking with him on the plane he settles himself closer to the TV, grabbing the booklets and as many cases as he can so he can start writing down which ones Tucker already has. It keeps him busy even after the movie’s done, Rhubarb the cat walking around the set while he writes the names of the movies in his notebook. Hopefully he can use his free time in Jersey—at least whatever he gets between packing up everything he owns that’s there—to organise the list.
Tucker’s long accepted that he’s the driver between the two of them; frankly, he’s not sure he wants to be in a car if Specs is driving it, any affection he has for his friend notwithstanding. Even if he weren’t , though, he’d probably still be here—be it because parking at the airport for an extended period of time is kind of unideal or simply because Specs is his friend.
It needs to be done. He knows that, and because he knows that, it’s easier for him to push aside how little he wants to drop Specs off at the airport.
…admittedly, though, it’s made just slightly easier with Specs himself in the passenger seat, fussing with the cassette player like nothing’s wrong. When Tucker flicks his eyes over for just a second, Specs has the tape in his hands, inspecting it carefully—after it wouldn’t play and just automatically reverted to the radio, he’d poked around the player, but couldn’t find anything weird. The player’s always been rather hit or miss, no matter how much Tucker messes with it, so he’s mostly given up; Specs, on the other hand, seems determined to make it work.
When they’re stopped for a moment, Tucker gives the player a light smack and holds his hand out. Specs gives him the tape back, and he shoves it into the player hopefully, but—no dice.
“What’s wrong with it?” Specs asks, pulling the cassette from the player again and looking at it critically.
“It doesn’t like its job,”
Specs huffs and goes back to fighting it—
I can’t stop the way I feel
Things you do don’t seem real
Tell me what you’ve got in mind
‘Cause we’re running out of time
Specs almost cheers when the song starts, settling back into the passenger seat. Tucker continues driving, and they listen to the music in quiet as the tape plays through four songs—
The tape stops. Specs and Tucker both make a sound of irritation, and Specs is quick to punch a button with one of his knuckles to switch it to the radio before he starts rifling through the book of CDs in Tucker’s car.
“I hate your player,” Specs grumbles, putting a CD in instead. He leaves the tape where it is this time, though, and fiddles with the volume and AC. Past that, though, they stay quiet—almost like if they try hard enough, they can pretend that the summer is shorter than it actually is. It’s really not even like this trip will be that long at all. There’s probably something to be said about how attached they are, but Tucker’s not sure he’s ready to examine that on multiple levels.
They’re at the airport far too soon.
Tucker stops the car near the doors and gets out when Specs does, going around the car to get one of his bags from the back while Specs grabs his other bag that he’d had at his feet. When they reconvene on the passenger side of the car so that Tucker can pass off the one he has, Specs already has it on his back, and he looks… almost sombre, but mostly determined.
“I’ll be back by the end of July, end of August at the latest,” Specs tells him, adjusting his hold on the bag that Tucker gave him. He sounds much less like he’s listing this off for the purpose of communicating the plan than Tucker would expect; it’s more akin to the comfort of knowing the plan already in place and how to follow it.
“I know,” Tucker nods. Specs has already told him how he hopes this will all go, and nothing he’s hearing is changed from that.
“Right,” Specs gives him a quick, pasted-on smile, before he pats Tucker’s shoulder. “I’ll see you then,” he decides, and then he’s going.
It’s warm outside, the sun shining, even as Tucker watches his best friend walk away. It’s wrong—he’s nothing but a lowly tech guy, he doesn’t study symbolism and things like that to this degree, but it’s not very reflective of his mood at all.
Specs turns around and waves one last time before he goes into the airport, and Tucker loses sight of him almost immediately. It doesn’t stop him from staying, just for a moment longer, watching with careful eyes before he tears himself away. He gets back in the car, and when he cranks it the tape that they’d fought with starts playing again.
—Tell me what I have to say
To keep you with me
To make you stay
To have you every day—
He turns the radio off quickly, easily, and takes a moment to breathe.
After a very brief moment, he manages to start driving, leaving the airport behind him.
Tucker
let me know when you land
did you get with ur brother?
Specs
Will do! I’ll miss you
And yeah, I did, he’s here now. Not too excited about what this’ll be like, but it’s fine
Tucker
Yeah yeah
have fun!
and good luck
Specs
Thanks, we’ll need it, I think
I’ll see you soon :)
And remember you can watch the Doctor Who (please do) but you have to put them back in order
Tucker
I know
Same goes for Bond + Star Trek
and the Casper vhs needs to stay on display on my mantel, and the other vhs tapes have to be temperature controlled
The cds you left are to stay organized by release order for each artist and alphabetized by artist
Did i get everything?
Specs
…just about, yeah
Okay. I’ll let you know when we get there