Times are Tough, We All Could Use a Helping Hand

Chapter Three

They chop the rest of the broth vegetables and leave the pot on the oven to boil.

"Should we cut everything else?" Miles asks. "To save time?"

"The broth will take a while," Hobie shakes his head. "Better to cut them fresh."

"So what do we do now?" Miles asks. This time he's the one to walk around the counter and hug Hobie from behind.

"Whatever we want, love," Hobie says, leaning into Miles' touch.

Miles crouches, and for a moment Hobie's wondering  what on earth he could be doing, and then Hobie's floating in midair. Miles has picked him up, bridal-style. How romantic. Hobie slings his arms around Miles' neck.

"This is easier than I thought it would be," Miles says.

"Are you saying I look heavy?" Hobie asks, teasing.

"No!" Miles protests, then stutters as he tries to backtrack. "I just meant. You look. I don't know what I meant. You look great"

"It's fine." Hobie leans into Miles, enjoying the stability of this younger boy. "We're all malnourished around here. That's why your vegetables are in such high demand. I could stand to gain a few."

"Gain?" Miles repeats. "I guess that makes sense. Back home everyone's always talking about losing weight, but I guess that's because we're all overfed."

"Most of the people in your universe are fine," Hobie says. "Skinny culture is overrated. You can't win at life if you're focused on losing all the time."

"Where to?" Miles asks, clearly desperate to change the subject. "I don't remember where anything is, though. You'll have to direct me."

"We can't leave," Hobie says, kicking his feet. He almost hits one of the extra pots on the counter. Whoops. "We have to watch the stove. Everything's falling apart around here, love."

"Oh," Miles says, but doesn't put Hobie back on the ground. Not that Hobie's complaining, of course. He loves being picked up and carried and tossed around. "We could kiss?"

Hobie interrupts before Miles can bring their lips together. "What's your favourite colour?"

"Pardon?"

"It's just occurred to me. I don't know your favourite colour. We saved the multiverse together and I don't even know if you like red or blue more. Or some other colour, of course."

"Yellow, actually." Miles relaxes slightly, shifting Hobie into an easier position to hold onto. "Is this your attempt to be romantic and gentlemanly? We've already kissed - it's a bit silly to insist on getting to know me before we kiss right now."

"It's a friendship thing!" Hobie says, aware his smile is not reflected on Miles' face. "We're friends, right? So I should know that your favourite colour is yellow and you should know that mine is pink."

"Pink?" Miles asks.

"You can't be surprised," Hobie says. "It's only one letter off from punk, after all. And it's a nice colour."

"You confuse me," Miles says, lifting Hobie for a kiss once again. This time, Hobie doesn't interrupt and ruin it. He just relaxes into Miles, basking in the feeling of being held and protected and cared for.

 

"What's this for?" Miles asks, holding the blue shoelace tied around Hobie's calf. It's an awkward position, his wrist bent forward as far as it will go and his fingers stretched just to be able to reach it with the tips of his fingers. "Your favourite colour is pink, but this is blue. I heard my dad asking about it. It means something, doesn't it?"

"Let me down," Hobie says, and Miles sets him down like he's been caught stealing a very expensive ceramic vase. "We should check on the broth."

"Sorry I asked," Miles says, as Hobie gets a pair of metal tongs and a large bowl from the counter beside them.

"No, don't be," Hobie says. "I use it for two reasons. Firstly, it's lace code, which is several decades old and defunct in most universes now. I don't know why we still have it on good old Earth-138. Secondly, it's hanky code, which is also several decades old and defunct in most universes, but not here. I guess we just like our outdated systems of showing our personalities through colour."

"It's a shoelace, though," Miles says. "Not a hanky."

"I've got it tied somewhere a lace shouldn't go, which makes it a hanky when I want it to be," Hobie explains, lifting the now-flavourless vegetables out of the broth and turning off the stove.

"I see. So what does blue mean?" Miles asks, taking the bowl of now-flavourless vegetables to the counter.

"Hanky code is all about advertising my sexual preferences when I'm out cruising - looking for casual sex." And even though it's hardly Miles' first time hearing Hobie say something openly sexual, he still swallows and blinks a little more than necessary. He's so cute when he's flustered.

"Oh," Miles says, and Hobie passes him a potato.

"Now we can start cutting things," he says. "Specifically, light blue on my left side in hanky code means I like giving blowjobs."

"Okay," Miles says, and he stops cutting his potato for a moment. Safety first. Hobie approves.

They dump their chopped potatoes in a separate bowl to be added to the soup.

"What does it mean in lace code?" Miles asks. "In hanky code it's blowjobs, but you never mentioned what it means in lace code."

Hobie takes a deep breath and it's his turn to put down the knife. Miles loves his da, as much as Hobie can't believe he can. "Blue lace in lace code means I'm a cop killer."

Miles puts down his knife too. "Pardon?"

"It means I've killed a cop."

"You killed a police officer?"

"I don't know how much more plainly I can say this. I wear a blue lace because I've killed a cop." Hobie's aware he should be delivering this information much more softly, but Miles has to already know that cops are more often trouble than not. He's a teenaged Black boy, for goodness' sake. Unless they don't have police brutality on Earth-1610. But that's impossible. The very existence of police is brutality.

"You killed a police officer." Miles has completely abandoned his potato, taken two steps back from the counter, and is now rubbing his forehead with both hands again. "I'm dating a cop killer. My dad is a cop. I just changed how we think of the multiverse to save his life. What am I doing?"

"Your da may very well be different," Hobie picks up his knife and potato again. "But in every universe I've ever visited, including and especially this one, cops are nothing but trouble. Last month, Robbie's great-grandmother fucking died because a cop tased her until she fell to the ground. You know why a pig tased a ninety-five year old woman suffering from dementia who had to use a walker to get around? She was armed with a steak knife. A steak knife. We're cutting potatoes with knives more dangerous than what she was holding¹."

"That's awful," Miles says.

Hobie starts on another potato. "That's what they do to elderly white women. I'm a reasonably healthy young Black man who couldn't look more punk. I'm technically homeless, an elementary school dropout, and I'm wanted for killing the president. Twice. It's them or me, and I'm not trying to die young. No goddamn pig is going to catch me off my guard."

"You killed two different presidents?" Miles asks.

Third potato. "Nah. Same one. But the first time didn't stick."

"I guess I see why you're so anti-police," Miles says, finally resuming his potato chopping duties. "But still. How many police officers have you killed?"

Fuck. Honesty is the best policy, Hobie knows, but is it really? He should've said a blue lace meant he ran a soup kitchen, or something. "I don't know."

"You don't know?" But this time Miles reaches for another potato instead of backing away.

"I don't stop to check their vitals and kiss their boo-boos after I hit them," Hobie says, and reaches for another potato.

"Fair enough, I guess," Miles says. "But my dad's nothing like these cops, you know. And all his co-workers are good people too."

"I'm sure they've been nothing but nice to you, but you remember how Gwen's da is. He was a good father, until he had to be a good cop. Then he was a good little piggy." It's a low blow, but Miles needs to understand why Hobie wears the blue lace so prominently. Politics don't begin to cover it.

"My dad's not like that," Miles repeats, accepting Hobie's offer of a carrot.

"I hope he never will be," Hobie says. "But if you ever need anything, I will welcome you and anyone else you bring with open arms. You, your mother, anyone. We don't have much, but we share what we have."

"Thanks for the offer, but I'll never need it."

He can't think of a way to respond nicely to Miles' insistence that his da is a different sort of cop - as if there's more than one kind of cop, so Hobie just cuts the potatoes in silence, hoping the atmosphere of the kitchen returns to normal.

 

Miles continues cutting vegetables even after Hobie implied his father was a case of domestic abuse waiting to happen. That must mean that deep down, Miles knows Hobie's right about how dangerous it is to trust a cop.

"If you don't let cops into the neighbourhood, how did one tase an old woman?" Miles asks as Hobie dumps the bowl of hard vegetables into the broth. "Aren't you post-revolution? Living the commune life?"

"She was outside the neighbourhood," Hobie says.

"Why?" Miles asks, then quickly adds, "If you don't mind telling me."

"We are post-revolution," Hobie says, arranging the soft vegetables on the counter for when it's their time to go in. "But the thing they don't tell you about revolution is that when you start from scratch, you start with nothing. A whole bunch of infants, disabled people, and elderly people had to leave when we cut ourselves off. We've opened up some passages - Robbie got a guy to deliver insulin, for example - but we just don't have the right resources to care for everyone. It kills me to have to send people back into the system we fought so hard to dismantle, but it would be worse to watch them die because we were too stubborn to admit we can't care for them properly."

"Damn," Miles whispers, leaning against the counter. "All this revolutionary punk stuff is complicated."

It's this, more than anything else, which drives home just how much younger Miles is. Not just in terms of chronological age, but life experiences. There's so much Miles doesn't know. But it's not his fault they literally grew up in different universes.

"It's the world I grew up in," Hobie shrugs, moving to lean against Miles. It's a bit difficult because Hobie's significantly taller, but he tries anyway. "I'm sorry, you're here for our first proper date and I'm bombarding you with explanations of why we live the way we do. It's too much for one day. We should do something more fun."

Miles scoops Hobie off the ground once again, then pauses. "We still have to watch the stove, don't we?"

"Yeah," Hobie says.

"Kiss again?" Miles asks, and Hobie is more than happy to oblige. As well as the obvious pleasure of kissing Miles, he's relieved his history of killing cops isn't enough to drive a lasting wedge between he and Miles. It's probably because it doesn't quite seem real, here in this kitchen where they're making a giant pot of vegetable soup. Violence is a million miles away from this safe, warm room.