Chapter Text
One
The nightmare starts the same as it always does. His hands, small, clammy, are over his ears, his eyes are shut. There’s shouting, and his heart is hammering its way out of his skinny chest. Bare floorboards beneath his feet, cool and polished from years of walking over them. It leeches up his bony ankles, his calves. His sleep shirt, a few sizes too big, hangs off him like a thin shawl for how his arms are raised. Covering his ears.
A sound, akin to a car backfiring and then a soft ring of silence.
His hands are over his ears, his eyes shut, and his face is wet. There’s a puddle of warmth lapping at his bare feet, copper and ammonia combined.
And the rasping, hitched, strange noises. Like sandpaper over worn stone.
He doesn’t see, he doesn’t see.
His eyes are shut.
“Your school semester is starting next week, is that right?” Helen asks, notepad sat on one crossed knee and chin in hand.
She’s got her hair up today, the pin-straight dark strands held together by a calico clip that matched her pen. She was tiny in her chair, tiny in a way that was mildly terrifying to Gale. Who, while wasn’t huge, he was tall, and rangy, and it scared him a bit, being so much bigger than her.
Gale nods.
“And how’re you feeling about that?”
“It’s my last two semesters,” he says, “I’ll be defending this time next year.”
Gale sucks his cheek, “That’s not a feeling,” he corrects himself.
Helen smiles at him. She’s got a wedding ring on her finger and he wonders if it’s from a man, or a woman, or maybe an heirloom she just liked wearing. There are no family photos in her office; plenty of art and awards but nothing personal enough to prove she existed in any capacity outside their hour sessions on Tuesdays. It was unnerving in a way, not knowing the sort of woman it was that held all his secrets
“I’m feeling…”
Gale hates this part, hates the looking and the searching, sifting through the facts his mind presented him to find the emotional core underneath, “Apprehensive.”
There’s a quirk to Helen’s mouth, like she’s laughing to herself a bit. He’s getting to know her mannerisms now. Enough to know he’s said something to amuse her as she makes a note on her paper.
“Do you think you’re able to elaborate?”
Picking at the cuticle of his thumb with his pointer finger, nail catching on ragged skin, Gale shakes his head. He’s getting a bit of a headache, tired from a sleepless night. He has little desire to chase the rabbit of what apprehensive might be hiding.
Helen sits back, uncrossing her legs and placing her bare feet on the plush rug. She always invited Gale to take his shoes off too, even to stay in just his socks, but he’d yet to accept the offer. She makes another note on her pad, and Gale tries to ignore the feeling he’s disappointed her in some way. Or failed some sort of test.
“If I fail, it’s all for nothing. If I pass everything changes.”
“Crossroads are scary,” Helen encourages, the lines around her face creasing in a smile. She couldn’t be much older than Gale’s twenty-six, but she had marks bracketing her mouth like she smiled a lot.
“I don’t like uncertainty,” he corrects her.
“Most people don’t, unless they have a different sort of thing wrong with them.”
It’s a joke, so Gale laughs. But sobers quickly.
“Chick’s entrusted me with– I mean, I’ve been studying them for years, but these frogs– I’ll be the first to successfully breed and hatch them.”
“ If I can breed and hatch them,” he corrects himself a moment later, “They’re only just classified and most conservation programs don’t even have a breeding pair.”
“And you got them–”
“Chick discovered them,” Gale explains, almost sheepish because anyone outside of his fellow candidates who he explained that he was studying frogs tended to be kindly confused or scornfully skeptical, “And he said I’ve got a knack for environments, figuring out what they need. That I’ve got a better chance than half the experienced conservation breeders out there.”
“High praise,” Helen muses.
Gale shrugs, “It’s just about paying attention to what they need. They can’t talk like people so it’s all in the behavior. What makes them come out from hiding, what parts of the enclosure they most enjoy, what makes them sing. They’ll tell you, if you pay attention and I pay attention better’n most.”
“So you, by your own admission are capable, and your advisor thinks you’re capable. I think apprehension is normal and healthy, but with the facts on the table I think you should try not to let it rule all your waking moments.”
He shrugs again, “I suppose.”
“Good session?” Marge asks as Gale buckles his seatbelt.
Rubbing his hands over his face and leaning back with a sigh, Gale nods, “I like her,” he admits, “I think.”
Marge hums, her hair loose around her shoulders and lipstick just slightly smudged at one corner, “That’s good.”
“It’s a lotta talkin’,” Gale says, pressing his palms hard into his eyes until stars spark and then dropping them. His phone has a couple of unread texts; one from his insurance company saying they’d recieved the bill for his session aready, and one from Benny DeMarco asking if he wanted to get together to source search this weekend.
He liked Benny; considered him a friend, or at least something close to it. He was quiet, and didn’t mind spending time over at Gale and Marge’s for most of their study sessions. And he was an oddball candidate too, with his tupperware cups of beetles and grubs that he doted over like a worried mother. He was Gale’s sort of person, if Gale had a sort of person.
Mostly he just had Marge.
She’s laughing at him, pressing her mouth to the outer crook of her wrist as she pulls out of the parking lot, “Think that’s largely the point, talkin’ about stuff.”
He smiles over at her, rubbing around one eye against the headache that was still clinging around, and flicks the radio on until something not too obnoxious is playing. Marge seems to recognize it because she starts singing along under her breath.
It’s comfortable, a welcome wind-down from the hour of soul-searching and talking he’s just had to do.
“Listen, I wanna talk about the house again,” she says after the fading notes turn to radio chatter.
“Right,” Gale says, smile faltering slightly.
“Construction’s starting soon, and Charlie and I are gonna be visiting his parents for a couple weeks in March. Which will be towards the end of all the work. I’ll need you to probably make some judgment calls, or at least be around to let the guys in and out.”
“Where do I go besides here, school, and home?”
“And be nice to them.” Marge continues.
Gale frowns, “You’re building me up to be some sort of jerk to these guys.”
“I’ve also explained the need for a sterile environment in your half of the house.”
“They aren’t workin’ on my half, there’s delicate–”
“I know, and I told them. But they might have to get out through the backyard to bring stuff through. I talked to the guy running it myself, in person. He understands.”
Gale scoffs, tries not to be too derisive about it, about what a bunch of rough-palmed blue-collar workers might think of being forced to tread carefully because of frogs . Not so much a look-down on them, but simple experience, but his daddy’s words in his ears telling him to quit crying over a squashed bug, quit bawling over the deer strapped to the hood of their truck, don’t you want us to eat, Gale?
“They’re sensitive to noises, to temperature, to smells. They breathe through their skin Marge, and if they’re painting or doing any sort of chemical shit that’s gonna be like gassing them.”
The agitation is accidental, and more than a little unfair; Marge had never laughed behind her hand at how much he cared; how serious he was about what he did. Batrachology was not a word most of the population was aware of. Marge had known what it meant since she was thirteen. Had bought him books and DVD’s and sat on logs scratching at bug bites while Gale scrounged through the muck for plants to decorate his rudimentary, rimmed tanks with.
He takes a breath, rubbing his hands together. Marge allows him the moment of composure.
“You can talk to him too, when he does the first walk-through. He seems like a nice man.” She glances over, “Ex-military.”
Gale hums, puts a nail between his teeth, and bites down before extracting it and reaching for the tin of toothpicks in his pocket. Sticks that between his lips and sinks his jaws into the fragile basalt wood instead.
“But nice,” Marge adds again, realizing where Gale’s head is going, “real–”
“-nice,” Gale finishes for her, and eases the sting with a smile, “I got that part, I think.”
Their house is a split level buried into the side of a hill; the front yard nearly fifteen feet above the back, and the steep slope punctuated by a fence in between. The upper floors are ranch-style, the rooms flowing into each other one after another. Bedroom, living room, office, laundry room, kitchen, and dining room. A porch, stood up on stilts to cover a shaded patio where two sliding doors let into Gale’s half of the house, half built into the hill with its own large living space, small kitchenette, and then a half flight of stairs leading up to a small landing with an office room on one side, with a second, smaller room tucked off one wall of that, and a bedroom on the other; with an ensuite built in. Another short flight of steps led up to the rest of the building.
They’d bought it together, off Marge’s inheritance and the few grand Gale had scraped together working in labs during undergrad. They’d known the kitchen was in need of a full remodel, the plumbing on the way out, and the entire first floor in need of gutting, really.
It would be a project home, something to get them through their twenties and hopefully turn a profit upon selling.
It had been Crank who took care of most of the pipework, and the aging electrical systems; pulling from his day job to save them a few thousand on an outside professional. But his expertise began and ended with the guts of the house, and he had been more than happy to turn the rest over to the experts. He was in the kitchen now when they came home, kissing Marge hello and bumping knuckles with Gale, who was coming in with the last of the groceries Marge had picked up during his therapy session. The other man’s duckling-fluff curls were most in place, washed clean for the evening.
“Evenin’, Gale,” Crank says, “Session go well?”
Marge watches them both, and the tea kettle she’s placed on the stove just about the only thing still left on the counters.
Most of their cookware had been packed away, or handed off to Gale for safekeeping in his tiny half-kitchen. What they had now would only last the next week until construction began, or would be similarly delegated to Gale’s fridge. He had free reign to most of it, as a thank-you for the inconvenience, but he didn’t care much for the brand of creamer Crank used– too sugary sweet– and Marge had been on a buckwheat kick lately.
Gale shrugs, “Head’s feelin’ a little shrunk.”
“That means it’s workin',” Crank says, his thick Boston nasal well out of place between their softer midwestern drawls.
“Done a lot of therapy, have you?”
“Sure,” Crank shrugs, “Saw a man walk in front of the train when I was a teen, skippin’ school and bumming around Southie. Took a week before my mom got it out of me and she plonked me right in a leather chair soon as.”
Gale slips another toothpick between his lips and hums, “Was there a package for me?”
“Left it by the steps,” Crank says, clapping Gale on the shoulder and going to greet his girlfriend properly.
Gale leaves them to it, tucking the cardboard box under one arm and opening the door to the second half of the home. Down the steps, he takes a right on the landing, into the right hand door left ajar and filtering out the soft sounds of water. In through the rows of tanks, he goes into the smaller, second room. This one with a large wooden table in the middle, covered with a dark cloth and ring light already flicked on, camera on its stand. He sets it to record, checking the microphone briefly and then goes about opening the package, keeping his face carefully out of frame.
Voiceovers will come later, audio fine-tuning saved for tonight; when he wasn’t quite ready to face sleep. So he keeps as quiet as possible as he works, movements slow and methodical as he slices open the packing tape, slips out the styrofoam lid, and tugs aside the carefully packed layers of newspaper to pull out the collection of tissue culture plants. Sat in their clear jelly, he takes them over to the sink and washes the roots one by one, careful to remove every little bit. The sound of the water hitting the sink overpowers the softer whisper of filters and pump-fed waterfalls, but not quite loud enough to drown out the quiet peeping from the various tanks lining the floor-to-ceiling walls, the entire room smelling rich and earthy from soil and water and growing things.
Laying out the now freshly washed plants, he trims their roots with sterile scissors and pulls out a tray from the bottom of the tank racks, settling them into pots to grow out for a few weeks under UV lights.
Then he switches the camera to handheld and goes about caring for his livestock, dropping vitamin-dusted crickets and wingless fruit flies into various enclosures. Makes sure to capture any of his more enthusiastic hunters on film. Then, when everyone has been fed, and watered, and checked over, he sits in the center of the room, dimming the lights with an app on his phone and just listens, and breathes.
This was his favorite time of night; when the internal clocks in his frogs' tiny little bodies told them it was time to eat, to venture out, to sing. He’d sit and listen to their chirps for minutes, sometimes an hour or more, so long as they were interested in calling out to each other. Knew that they were happy, safe, fed. Cared for, to the very best of his skill and ability.
Gale closes his eyes, tilts his head to the ceiling and breathes quietly.
While numerous studies have been conducted on the effects of captivity on other classes of vertebrates, very few studies have investigated the effects of captivity and its related stresses on amphibians. Chronic stress results in elevated levels of corticosterone (CORT) released from the adrenocortical cells, which in turn result in hyperglycemia, anorexia, and changes in behavior–
Gale flips to another page, pink highlighter caught between his teeth as he goes to underline another paragraph
Unlike in birds and mammals, physiological levels of CORT are not shown to have any ill effects on reproduction; however, induced elevations of CORT to more than two times levels seen in stressed frogs results in suppression of calling in male green treefrogs.
He sets the highlighter down, pulls up his phone and scrolls through his own notes.
In front of him sits a plastic soup container of frog spawn, the proud parents housed in the tank on the shelf to his left, their bright cerulean and white splotchy bodies at home amongst the myriad of mosses and lichens he’d attached to the carefully carved wall. At the bottom was a pool fed by a small waterfall that trickled over the greenery, plenty of moisture and a little bit of ground, off to one side, where the frogs could rest.
They didn’t have a name yet, not officially, and while Gale referred to them only as Specimens 1 through 3 in his notes, he’d taken to calling them each by name. Eridanus was the smaller, shy male, Carina , the larger of the two females with a deep teal color to her face, and Auriga , who ate voraciously and had a pinkish hue to her toes that Gale found himself endeared by.
He’d filmed the entire build of their enclosure, their vocalizations, their eventual mating. All are to be presented with his thesis and, once approved, posted online for any casual viewing.
They’d already spawned once, unsuccessfully; the eggs going rotten overnight, discolored and covered in a fine moldy film of rot.
This time he’d removed the gelatinous clump from the enclosure immediately after laying, and left the lid open to allow for some humidity escape. The eggs should, in theory, be soft and bouncy; the jelly clear and the dots in the middle wiggling and twitching on occasion as cells became tadpoles.
But they were still, slightly off-color, too-sweet smelling, and certainly not viable.
Gale carefully films the failed clutch, then photographs them, cupped in white sterile gloves and fighting back a frustrated lump in his throat before carefully dumping them into a tupperware to be disposed of. Sits back at the desk, pushing his hair out of his face and watching Auriga watch him, her pale throat bobbing with breaths. He wondered if they cared that their clutch was gone, if they felt any sort of lingering maternal instinct.
G. Cleven (9:36 a.m.) I don’t understand. I was able to get dart frogs, tree frogs, hell even milk frogs to give me viable eggs. My Whites have thrown clutches half a dozen times in the last year.
Harding (9:42 a.m.) we’re working with a lot of unknowns here. Trust your instincts. Even if you don’t get a successful clutch you’ve already got them breeding. It’s just a matter of time.
G. Cleven (9:52 a.m.) Matter of time doesn’t get me a doctorate.
G. Cleven (9:52 a.m.) Dramatic. Ignore that. I’ll try lowering the temperature of the water slightly. Maybe that’ll combat the humidity.
Harding (10:36 a.m.) Try going outside for a walk too. See the sun.
He’s younger than Gale expected, under thirty, rather than well over, and taller than Gale at first glance. Talking to Marge, forearm braced on the doorframe above his head and large body holding the build and weight of a man who used to be in the peak of shape but had begun to slack off, just a bit. Biceps rounded with muscle, and then a layer of fat above; and a stomach that bowed out just a bit before going sharply flat. His thighs were thick, well muscled for how they filled out his jeans, one knee crossed over the other, and his hair was cropped short, but too short to show off curls, fluffing around his ears in an unruly bid for escape. A hefty scar split one eyebrow in two different spots, and did nothing whatsoever to detract from his looks.
Smiling at Marge, his ears moving upwards with the expression like a dogs did, there were crinkles around his eyes, around his mouth, and even from the kitchen to the open front door where they stood Gale can hear the rough timbre of his voice.
For a brief, indulgent, moment, Gale allows himself to look.
Marge catches his eye, waves in a quick curl of her fingers and then gestures him over.
It’s enough to get the man looking over his shoulder, as handsome full-on as in profile and Gale finds himself straightening his shoulders slightly. It’s morning, early enough that he’s wearing his hair loose around his shoulders instead of tied back off his face, dressed in plaid pajamas and a faded university t-shirt. It’s not as if he were trying to impress anyone, but the way the man’s looking him over Gale can tell he’s being given a once-over.
Ex-military , Marge had said.
And Gale knows the type, knows the image he cuts, and so he waits for some modicum of scorn, or disgust to cross his onlooker's face. But those blue eyes remain nothing beyond curious, a little tired like he’d not yet had his morning coffee.
“Gale, this is–”
“Bucky Egan,” he says, reaching out a hand for Gale to shake.
His aren’t much bigger than Gale’s. Fingers just as long and elegant, though broader, scarred and calloused from hard work. Bucky gives Gale’s hand a strong grip, and Gale gives it right back, offering a friendly, controlled smile.
“Gale Cleven.”
Bucky’s got blue eyes. Not quite the washed out of Gale’s, but something richer, deeper. The sort of pond you looked into and couldn’t see the bottom of. Nothing in them but that singular color, like whoever designed him had plucked from a single color wheel of navy tones. Gale drops his hand, goes to cross his arms over his chest before realizing he’s still got a coffee in hand.
“I hear we’ve got some precious cargo my boys and I are supposed to be tiptoeing around,” Bucky says. Talks with the side of his mouth, talks like the words fill the full, wide cavity of it. Talked like he was right out of an old movie; John Wayne or Clark Gable or Humphrey Bogart. All grandstanding tones.
And bold, bawdy, pitched to carry like he had something worth saying.
“You’re the contractor?”
Gale knows Bucky is, can see the paint on his khaki pants and the name of the construction company on his stained shirt. There’s paint around his cuticles, like he’d not done quite thorough enough of a job before coming from his last job, and a faint smell of sawdust, though there wasn’t any trace of wood on him. He asks because he doesn’t want Bucky to think he’s been dreading this, been marking the days off on his calendar with a black marker, gut-twisting as he does the calculations on all the variables that could go wrong.
He can’t leave the house, can’t move all his creatures without significant time, money, and stress on the sensitive amphibians.
Bucky hands him a business card. The name on the front says John Egan.
“According to this paper.”
Gale has the sense he’s being laughed at, a quirk to the corner of John’s mouth that was a little bit wider than it had been moments previous, an extra crinkle around his eyes.
“You have to take your shoes off,” he says, “I’m trying to limit any outside contaminants.”
John’s still taller than him even without heavy workboots. Not by much, not even a handful of inches, really. But enough that Gale feels it, sees where their shoulders don’t line up, their elbows and their hips. He’s aware of the other man, bent over with hands on knees at his side to look into one of the taller enclosures, a cascade of vines and water down a hand-made rockface where a few slit-eyed frogs watch curiously.
“They’re all self-contained systems,” Gale was explaining as John tilted his head, millimeters from having his beaky nose squished up against the glass like a child, “That way if one tank has any sort of bacterial or viral issue it won’t spread to the others.”
“And you made these yourself? From scratch?” the impressed note in John’s voice is unmistakable. If Gale wanted John around just a little more, he might have preened.
“Down to the frames, for some of them,” he can’t help but brag, just a bit.
John whistles.
“I’ve got an air filtration system for the vents, but any chemicals you’re using will be airborne. Even if you don’t need masks it could still affect them. The sawing, the sanding, even the noise will stress them out.”
“Don’t blame ‘em, shit’s loud,” John says, straightening and twisting his spine with a groan, elbows held up. His shirt rises once again, showing off a strip of belly and dark hair. Not very thick, patchy and faint, but in a broad swath between his hipbones, “I can’t do anything about the noise, but I’ll set up a seal around your door at the top of the steps. My guys might have to go through now and then, but it’ll be something.”
It’s a good enough answer, if Gale was interested in being understanding. The problem is, for all his reason and rationale, he doesn’t want this to happen at all. Not when things were so critical, the creatures under his care so delicate, his life in the balance, and all relying on a trio of frogs yet to give him anything viable.
“How long is it supposed to take? Don’t–” Gale watches John freeze, finger a millimeter from another tank where one of his dart frogs, buttery yellow and deep black, eyes the digit curiously, “ – tap on the glass. It’s like a concussive blast to them.”
John cuts him an unimpressed look, waving his finger back and forth for the frog to track with rapid interest, “I’ve been to aquariums.”
Gale holds back an eye roll through sheer determination, “Then you know the rules. Look, don’t touch.”
John hums, crosses his arms, and then uncrosses them, reaching out to test the sturdiness of the rack with one calloused finger, “Schedule says about–” he pauses, taps his fingers against the polished wood one at a time in rapid succession, counting, “Eight, nine weeks? We’re doing the kitchen and the add-on. But between you and me, these things always run long because someone, somewhere along the process fucks up.”
“Sounds inefficient.”
“People tend to be. Is it efficient having all those tanks on their own water filter loop?”
“It’s safer.”
John shrugs, a rolling heave of his large shoulders, “well, you get back to me when you trust robots to build your house more than a full, sound, human mind.”
“I saw the design plans,” Gale admits, “It’s going to look nice.”
John grins. Two of his teeth, an incisor and canine, are slightly whiter than the rest down near the edge, like they had once been broken off. “My buddy, Curt. He’s got a face like a bulldog but he’s a genius when it comes to interiors.”
John drives a truck, painted an old, classic blue, clear of rust spots like most trucks of that age; like it had been well-cherished. Gale sees it as he leaves for his morning run after he’d handed John back off to Marge to talk kitchen hardware. The other man is sat in the cab, one knee braced up on the dash and talking into his phone on loudspeaker, the mouthpiece held up close. He doesn’t see Gale exit the house, staring straight ahead and Gale takes the opportunity to look him over again.
Take in the heft of him, the stretch of his shoulders in the shirt, and the baseball cap now firmly on his head, as if he were too respectful to wear it indoors. His nose was faintly crooked, like it had been broken a few times, a lump at the center of the bridge where the bone had knit back together. There were a couple fast food wrappers crumpled on the dashboard of the truck, a tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the mirror along with a crucifix and a pair of dog tags.
“ – Yeah the woman’s alright. Friendly, good mid-western girl through and through. She seems excited to just have more usable space; I swear I’ve never seen a layout as cramped what she’s been putting up with. Didn’t meet her fella, he was at work.”
“That’s good.” The voice is male, sharp and bored-sounding. Gale can hear the faint noise of fingers on a keyboard.
“The other guy though,” John continues, clicks his tongue and then sucks in a breath through his teeth.
Gale, bent over to tie his shoes in case the other man looked over and saw him listening, stiffens. He waits, laces twisted tight around his fingers, for John to say more. But he seems to have nothing left to express, and the man on the other end of the phone simply hums thoughtfully.
“Manageable, though?”
“Yeah, just seems high-strung.”
“Play nice, Bucky.”
“When do I not play nice?”
“You talk to your mother recently?” Marge asks, cross-legged on his couch and sipping a steaming up of coffee. She has on one of Crank’s shirts, and a pair of Gale’s old sweatpants. Her hair was up in a clip and she was bare of makeup in a way that reminded Gale of high school.
Gale shakes his head, “Texted her last week but I think she’s been busy. Was traveling last I heard.”
He doesn’t begrudge her, wanting to live her life now that she could. Didn’t resent the way being a family had been painful, for all she’d done her best. She sent him pictures of frogs she came across on her cruises, on her cross-country vacations, and on her singular jaunt to Paris. He sent her obscure, strange recipes he found online for her to try and give her thoughts. He called on her birthday, and she on his, and sent one another gifts through the mail. He’d received hers just last month; a new SD card for his camera that was more expensive than Gale cared to think about. They had their own way of staying in touch.
“Yeah, that's what I saw on Facebook, she’s heading up to Seattle with that new boyfriend of hers. They seem happy.”
“That’s good,” Gale says. And does mean it, for the most part.
He’s sat at the kitchen table, looking through his charts, his notes, photos from Harding’s expedition to bring back the frogs from New Guinea. Pictures of them in the wild, and of now; looking for any difference in weight, in color, in the way they interacted with each other or how they ate. They’d dropped a few pounds on the initial transport, gained them back under Gale’s careful attention, and were voracious eaters regardless of what he put in front of them. There was nothing that he could find amiss, nothing that might indicate why they’d thrown two failed clutches in as many weeks.
Marge had come down to keep him company before work, as they tended to do a couple days of the week; drinking their coffee as Marge prepared herself for a day at court and Gale went over his research from the day previous.
“How’d your walkthrough with Egan go?” Marge asks carefully, and her entire plan of attack falls apart with the carefully neutral tone of her voice.
Gale shoots her an exasperated look, “Well, he took his shoes off when told and didn’t laugh in my face.”
“He was nice, right?”
“He tried to tap on the glass, like some kid.”
The corners of Marge’s mouth pinch, as if against a smile, “Right.”
“I’ve got some homework for you this week, Gale.”
“Homework?”
“Yeah; no papers or anything, I’m not trying to add to the load. But I want you to try breaking your routine a bit. Even if it’s as simple as going for a run before your coffee instead of after.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”