Work Text:
"What would it be like," you ask, "Were we important men?"
He is quiet. You are young men, now--as young as you ever will be, together--and he is as thoughtful as he ever will be. Old age, you will one day learn, only make him more convicted and impulsive.
But for now, he is young, and still shy with his English around you.
(he wonders, too, what it would be like to be important, special somehow--he knew of children selected for some odd purpose within the camps, he will tell you one day, children taught languages and math and literature, taught strange tricks)
There, in the streets, he makes a noncommittal sound, a little hum, and says only, "Perhaps this would be different, already," accent thick. He's carrying dinner in his left hand, your favorite restaurant, neat cartons in a paper sack. You've never been there, yourself, save to wait outside; an uneven kerb, a handful of stairs, the world an endless progression of obstacles. Often, you wonder why it seems to anger Erik more.
In your apartment, later, as you both deliberate on plates and decide against, as you're preparing to argue over the third egg roll, he speaks up again.
"Yes, the world would be different," he swears, "I would change it now, myself."
You smile up at him, this man who wandered in your life one day as if fate existed, and you ask how he'd plan to do so, and you already know the answer: any means possible.
"Surely the ends don't always justify the means," you say. And, only half-joking, "Perhaps, my friend, I'd have to stop you."
He laughs, then, a sound you'll never cease to be amazed by, his grin wide.
"Yes," he repeats. "We could change the world, you and I, but even were we important men, we could never change each other."
You'll think of this conversation often, in the years to follow. Were we powerful men, you'll think, sometimes, as Erik argues softly on the telephone, a voice you're not meant to hear; as you wheel the circuitous route through the back halls of higher learning.
It seems inevitable that you should have met, like something out of a movie (a rainy night, Erik nearly stumbling forward off the bridge as you call out, thinking the wrong thing. Or perhaps the right, for he'll never tell you, not for all the years you're together). Perhaps there are other worlds, like Hank sometimes hypothesizes. Perhaps you know each other there, perhaps you can change the world.
And perhaps, as Erik says, you cannot change each other.
"Would you give this up," you nearly ask him, once, "if you had the power to change this all," but you're afraid of his answer.
You're afraid of your own.
It's a moot point, anyway. This isn't one of Raven's art projects, those depressing comics where all the characters are broken and fallible, nothing like the heroes you remember. This is life:
Waking for the first time next to Erik, a thrill of joy that someone would want you again, something you never hoped for yourself. Waking next to him day after day, month after month. The times you've fallen asleep angry at one another, the times you've shaken him from his screaming, the times you've cursed at him and your body, and the times you've woken alone.
Writing, studying, getting an office on the first floor because they'll never put in an elevator, and by the time they do it's 1981 and you've been there too long, change unthinkable, and they only get to renovate your office when you finally retire.
Erik, the dark void of days after the trials, a belated education. Surprising you as he also goes into teaching, as he spends his nights pouring over coursework while he stubbornly works during the day, "earning his keep," as he says.
"Special education," it's euphemistically called, and Erik bristles at the thousands of casual slips against his students, constantly. His English better every day; his BSL more fluent, he says one day, than his Polish, and you know it's true when he's signing, angrily, as you disagree.
This is life: a constant cycle of success and failure.
"See," you'll say, brushing your fingers over his nape as he sits before you, reading the paper, all headlines on the Civil Partnership Act.
Erik will close the paper, brusquely. He is old and grey, now, and you are bald.
And you are charmed by him more each day, despite yourself.
"When I moved in with you," he reminds, "this was illegal." You know he means progress is too slow. But it feels like success to you.
"I'm sorry," you'll say, as he's laid off once more. You'll trace your fingers down his spine, and this will happen five times, and never will it get easier. It's not about the money, of which he earns little. It's about his fears, his hopes, his abhorrence for abandonment. It's about what the government deems "necessary spending," it's about the joy you will see, sometimes, when Erik meets a former student in the street and they laugh about his strictness, about how they feared living alone before.
Every time, you know he's the first to go, and every time you wonder. Is it his lack of adherence to the status quo? Is it the way he frightens parents, sometimes, with his sharp manner and the things he says to the students
(When did you learn you can't make decisions on your own?
When did you learn you were going to be treated a child, for the rest of your days?
Who was it that said you are only worth the jobs they decide for you, that you don't deserve privacy, that you can never go out on your own for fear you'll make a mistake?)
Or if it's because of you, of your life together. You'll suggest only once separate apartments, a guise of normalcy. He will be withdrawn, inwardly furious, and later he'll tell you he'll never be ashamed, never stoop to hiding what he is, here, with you.
This is life, and you grow older. You'll wonder if, were you powerful men, the schools would always be open. If you wouldn't have ever feared sprawling, young and flushed, on a grassy hill with him pressed over you. If you would have had a chance to eat at that restaurant, which closed, and was demolished, and when you pass that block, now, there's no sign of it ever existing at all.
Would you sacrifice this, to change this all.
Perhaps.
One day, you'll be in your study (you moved only three times in the last four decades, out of laziness or stubbornness) and you'll be writing, again (another essay on genetic ethics, a field you're astonished now exists so prominently) and you'll hear him in the next room.
He's perhaps on the phone, perhaps with Raven or Emma or any one of your old friends still living, and his voice is a murmur. He laughs, suddenly, bright in the afternoon air.
He read something to you, once, leaning his head back on your legs.
He wasn't singing for you, or about you.
He had some other source of joy,
nothing to do with you at all --
he was an unknown man, singing in his own room, alone.
Why did you feel so hurt then, and so curious,
and so happy,
and also set free?
And you're nearly certain, then.
But you're no longer a young man, no longer idealistic, and you've learned one can be certain of few things.
The frailty of bodies, the unrelenting progress of time.