A Touch of Courage (Troyler AU)

Chapter 46: Like Real People

Life isn't about finding yourself, it's about creating yourself

- Troye Sivan, 2015

Tyler's POV

At breakfast, Troye sighed and slipped around the table to sit beside Tyler, resting his head down on his folded arms and closing his eyes.

"Hey," Tyler said, tapping the back of Troye's hand briefly and trying in vain to smooth his hair.  "You're cold."

"And you're warm," Troye said, sounding sleepy. Tyler had slept in his bedroom again last night, so he knew Troye hadn't gotten much sleep.

Tyler nudged a piece of toast into Troye's hands and Troye nibbled at it without opening his eyes.

They had grown closer in the days following Troye's return. Now, wrapped in sunlight and shared silence, Tyler wondered at how they had let so much space expand between them, and whether it was really possible they were finally closing it.

Tyler studied him, trying to figure out when the change in the other boy had taken root.

It was like how they always were but...more. Maybe it had always been this way and they were less barriers in the way now. 

He hadn't slept on the couch since Troye had asked him to stay, and Troye hadn't seen fit to comment on it.

A part of Tyler had worried that once Troye was shoved back into his regular routine, he would retreat behind the façade he'd carefully manufactured for so long. But Troye didn't even go back to his place. He finished his classes and headed directly back to Tyler's, and did so pretty much every day now.

And the most noticeable change of all: Troye talked. He talked a lot. The thing that had stilled his tongue before seemed to have lifted.

It was so incredibly weird.

Last night, they'd sat on the floor on Troye's side of the room.

Troye's side of the room.

It was funny how quickly something shy and unfamiliar turned into something close to normal.

Troye was talking.

He had taken the blankets off the bed and sat with Tyler on the floor. Quietly, he'd spoken about the plan he had to catch up on his classes, an upcoming presentation he was nervous about, feelings of anxiety which seemed to be untethered to a concrete cause, his uncertainty about what the rest of the year would look like, the images spinning in his head he was trying to figure out how to capture.

Tyler realized that Troye was letting him in to a part of himself he had never shared before, and he found himself drawn wholly in, even as the experience felt new and revelatory. Troye never opened his thoughts like this. He'd always kept himself intensely private, making decisions alone and revealing himself only through extreme crisis.

Tyler didn't say anything. He just waited, and in the space of that waiting, Troye talked. And Troye told him things he couldn't have imagined hearing before – how he was born, how he'd grown up, how he'd first met James and what it had meant to have someone who was completely on his side again. He spoke about that and his voice slowly faded and died away.

The silence, after all that talking, was conspicuous. Tyler gazed at him but Troye didn't seem withdrawn, just a little pensive, as though lost in thought. Feeling Tyler's gaze on him, Troye turned and caught Tyler's eyes, smiling briefly. His posture seemed more casual, his weight leaned back on his arms, body loose, watching Tyler as he sometimes did. But this was a new version of himself, stripped back, youthful with ease, less presented, and Tyler realized he was seeing Troye with quite a few of his defenses down. At least one or two. Maybe all of them.