Chapter Text
They sit on the couch with a few inches of space between them until Patrick scoots closer and puts his hand on David’s knee. A knowing look passes between them, and Patrick responds with a squeeze of encouragement. It’s odd—not bad, but odd—to see her son engage in an entire nonverbal conversation with someone else and know that in many ways he is closer to this stranger than he is to either Clint or Marcy now.
But in other ways, every time Patrick looks at David, every time he touches him and smiles at him and knocks their shoulders together, she discovers another part of him. Another part of them both. Her sweet boy is grown up and so beautiful that her heart aches with it.
“I’m sorry you’re finding out this way,” he says as he takes a grateful sip of the glass of water she hands him. “I thought you were in Ashville or near there. If I’d known you’d come this far I would have—”
“No, no,” she waves him off. “Please. You couldn’t have known. Let’s not do what-ifs. Tell me what is.”
There's a long pause, like everyone is waiting for someone to speak first.
David puts his hand on top of Patrick’s on his knee and turns toward Marcy and Clint. “I should leave you all to catch up and spend some quality time with your son.”
“Stay,” Patrick says, weaving their fingers together.
“Mmm, I’ll be right outside. I’m going to check on Bear and make sure he hasn't murdered your cat.” Their giant, appropriately named dog introduced himself a few minutes after Patrick and David, shaking the mud off his thick black coat and splattering it all over Marcy’s grapevines.
“It might be the other way around,” Clint says.
David kisses Patrick’s temple and whispers, “I love you,” and Patrick says it back with such intimate fierceness that it brings tears to Marcy’s eyes. They’d hoped he was happy. They hadn’t known to hope for this.
As the screen door closes behind him, Marcy turns back to Patrick. “We love you so much,” she says, and this time, she says it like she should have said it every time they spoke. With all the strength she has.
“I love you guys, too,” he says.
“Tell us everything,” Clint prompts.
He talks a little bit about life in the bunker, but he glosses over a lot of it with a shrug. “There were good days and bad days.”
Mostly he focuses on the last few years. It’s getting hot as the late afternoon sun shines through the window. He pushes his sleeves up and Marcy sees the thick scar that runs along the inside of his forearm.
“Patrick,” Clint says, grabbing his hand and turning it. “What happened?”
“One of the bad days,” he says, pulling the sleeve back down again. “I’ll tell you another time.”
“I should have been there,” Marcy says, her brain working overtime to triage an injury she’s several years too late to. “I could have—”
“No. It doesn't bother me. You said no what-ifs. Only what is, remember?”
She nods, no longer happy with that policy.
He distracts them by telling the story of how he met David as a reentry coordinator for Bunker 13, where David was living. Tells them about his sister. His parents. He talks about Ray, who he still respects. Stevie, their best friend. And Ted, who he’s been close to since they spent a year in Bunker 8 together after Patrick gave up his suite in Bunker 10. And then he’s back to David, to their house above the old general store they’re going to turn into a more specific store.
“An apothecary, maybe. We just started talking about it on the way here.”
His face when he talks about his life, about the ways David challenges him and still makes everything okay, makes her heart swell so much it hurts.
“He seems like a really great partner, honey,” she says, exchanging a look with Clint. It’s still so surreal, having him here.
“He is,” Patrick says, near tears. “I looked for you for years. It took me a long time to realize it was okay to be happy with him, even though I couldn’t find you. But. I’ve never been happier in my life.”
"I'm so glad you didn't wait," she says. She promised no what-ifs, but she can’t help but wonder what might have happened if they’d arrived on June 10th as planned. If Patrick hadn’t switched bunkers, would he have met the same people? Would he have met David? Would he have needed him in the same way if Clint and Marcy were there, too? If any part of these years of separation were responsible for what he has now, she would do all of it again. Every day in the van watching rations dwindle and hope along with them. Every last step on that long, horrible road from Ashville to here. Every sleepless night. Every piece of bad news. Every minute of anticipatory grief about their worst fears being realized.
“Do you think David will come back in and talk to us?” Clint asks. “We’d like the chance to fall in love with him too.”
Patrick sniffles and nods. “I’ll go get him.”
“We have a son-in-law,” Clint murmurs, putting his arm across Marcy’s shoulders. “Why does that make me feel older than gray hair and a bad knee?”
“Maybe because you are old, baby.” She smiles and kisses him to take away the sting.
When the boys come back, they ask them about the wedding. David tells them about the vows, how he took the time to compose something heartfelt while Patrick stole from Mariah Carey, but his face is so easy to read, his dark eyes shining, that it’s clear he loved it. Patrick tells them that rain threatened to postpone the ceremony but they went ahead with it anyway, that people helped him set out tarps and tents to keep the ground dry. David describes the big oak tree where they got married, and how the community picked wildflowers and hung them from its branches. He tells them about the acorns the tree dropped for the first time since the fires, that they fell like hail the week after their wedding. He pulls one out of his pocket.
“I usually keep a couple on me. Here,” David says, handing it to her. “I picked this one up before we left. My mother, in the ceremony, said a marriage is made of little things multiplied by time. Like an acorn into an oak. It’s a reminder for me, I guess.”
Patrick makes a noise low in his throat. “I didn’t know that’s why you keep them.”
David just bites down on his smile and takes his hand again.
“Patrick told us a little bit about your parents. They sound lovely,” Marcy says, turning the acorn in her fingers. Its knicks and scratches are nearly buffed smooth from being handled.
David and Patrick laugh together, a pair of sharp, staccato sounds, like people whose bodies start to speak the same language after enough time together. “Lovely isn’t the word most people use.” David says with a knowing look at Patrick.
“You’ll like them when you meet them,” Patrick says.
“We will,” Marcy says, and tries not to worry about what her patients will do if she leaves.
They talk more. David tells them about the summer festival, and Marcy pieces together the misunderstanding with Jon at the library. She tells them they’d heard Patrick was in Schitt’s Creek, but someone had described him as a person who wears fantastic sweaters even though it’s hotter than the sun.
“I didn’t understand how clothes could be a distinguishing feature,” Clint says.
Patrick just laughs and looks at David like he is the sun. “You will in time.”
Eventually, they get into what Clint and Marcy have been up to. They tell them about the van and the long walk with Colin, about Tennessee and the Morrisons and the clinic in Elm Valley, and everyone else who has kept them going.
“I can’t believe you came all this way,” Patrick says.
“Oh honey. You’re the most important thing in the world to us,” she says, patting his hand. “Nothing could have stopped us.”
“That’s not true,” Patrick insists. “I’m suitably impressed.”
“I don’t know,” Clint says, looking at Marcy. “There were days I thought your mom was going to pick me up and carry me on her back if that’s what it took.”
“You carried me some of the way,” she says softly, blinking back another round of tears.
The relief of Patrick, the surprise of David, the work of sharing their separate experiences and trying not to dwell on how it might have gone differently together, the uncertainty about where they go from here . . . it’s all simmering at the surface. She’s not sure which will spill over first.
“Well I am very glad you made it this far, Mr. and Mrs. Brewer,” David says. “You’ve saved us a lot of walking.”
Clint barks a laugh, and joy wins out, smoothing over the complicated mix of all that she’s feeling. There’s more to talk about, but joy seems like a good place to pause it.
“C’mon,” she says, standing up. “I’ll give you the tour.”
They all stand, too.
“Great. I want to see your life hacks,” Patrick says.
David rubs his palms across Patrick’s shoulders vigorously. “I thought we talked about ‘life hacks.’”
“Yes, and if there were ever an appropriate use of the term.” Patrick gestures with his hands like that says it all.
David’s look of fond annoyance in response is one Marcy understands viscerally.
“Let’s start in the garden,” she says, smiling at them both.
It’s just a garden, but it feels a little like starting where they left off on those long phone calls so many years ago. She’s in the process of telling them about the super seeds they used to stretch their time in the van, when she realizes she left out something important.
“We couldn’t have done it without you, Patrick. We wouldn’t have been ready. We wouldn’t have made it.”
“I’m glad you did,” he says softly.
He gives her another hug, in almost the same place as the first one, and doesn’t let go for a long time. She knows they’ll probably do this again and again, reach out just to make sure they're still here, say Thank you and How are you, really? and I love you until those words banish all the residual worry and fear and grief that have been a constant for past several years.
“David, maybe you can help me get dinner going,” Clint says.
“Mmmkay,” he says. “Although I was hoping I would get more time to make a good impression before we had to involve my cooking skills.”
“Nonsense,” Clint says. “I like you a lot. You won't change that with potato and bean hash.”
“See you say that now, but.” David doesn’t finish, just follows with a shy smile and a final squeeze of Patrick’s bicep.
They eat dinner around the fire outside and then Marcy and Clint help them get settled in the room where Colin sleeps when he’s in town.
By the time she and Clint crawl into bed, there are still plans to finalize. Decisions to make. But she feels free to make them. For the first time in six years, she feels free.
The next day, Patrick and David bring her lunch at the clinic and she walks them down Main Street to introduce them around. They finish their tour at the library. She feels silly and transparent introducing David and Patrick to Tim and Jon, who are the first queer people she’s called friends in either world. She’s still trying to find a way to tell Patrick that she’s not blind to the things she and Clint could have done differently. Even amid the dangers of this world, she knows there are wounds from the old world that are harder to heal: ignorance, assumptions, even off-hand remarks that she didn’t mean to be harmful. She wants Patrick to know he doesn’t have to heal those wounds by himself.
All things considered, they haven’t been in Elm Valley that long. But in some ways, returning to the scrubby highway for the long walk south to Schitt’s Creek feels like leaving home. Really, it sort of is. They’ll stay with Patrick and David for the summer festival and then come back to Elm Valley with Colin and stop using the word temporary. They don’t have to leave again until they want to. And Patrick and David will come visit as often as they can. In the next year or two, they might even be able to use dispatch centers to resume their weekly calls.
She and Clint went back and forth on whether they should move. For the last six years, her sole motivating purpose has been to find Patrick. And they’ve come all this way. Now, she has to find a new purpose. In the end, it comes down to what it’s always come down to. Marcy has a clinic in Elm Valley. And they need her. She wants to stay where she is needed most.
As they get closer to the festival, they see more people on the road or camped alongside it. Some people are bringing wares, crafts, and artwork. Others carry instruments. Others just bring themselves, talking and making friends along the way. It's such a different feeling from all those lonely months of walking. Marcy has spent a lot of time on the road, but never when she is sure something good is waiting for her. Never when she is at peace with her destination. With the extra people, without the clawing fear, the walk is almost nice. It's the first time it feels like the new world might offer a peace the old world didn't.
When they get there, Patrick hugs them both, and they introduce him to Colin.
“I’ve heard quite a few embarrassing stories about you, young man,” he says, pulling him into a back-slapping hug.
David perks up. “Colin, can I interest you in some tea? I would like to hear a few of these stories.”
Patrick just laughs and then cries in Colin’s arms. “I guess that’s a price I’m willing to pay," he says, and then, “Thank you. For them.”
The festival itself is more beautiful than she expected. David’s hand is everywhere, from the layout to the signage to the schedule of events and performances to the inclusion of artists to groupings of goods in the market. But it’s also communal in a way she didn’t realize was possible yet. That part feels like Patrick.
Between festivities, Ted comes with an armful of notebooks and they compare their logs about medical procedures and remedies with their limited resources. She helps him see patients during the festival, and tries not to pick up a habit of making puns.
George treats them to a meal, which they eat around the big center table in the general store. It's a nice break from the festival, and offers a little time to get to know the Roses better. Stevie fills in all the gaps Patrick and David leave out when they tell stories, and spends a long time talking with Clint about how she wants to shape local government as chairperson. Alexis is delightful and funny. She is also one of the only people Marcy has ever met whose stories from before the world was on fire are more harrowing than her stories from after. Johnny and Moira are interesting and baffling, but Patrick is right, she likes them.
At dinner, Marcy recognizes something kindred in Moira. Marcy wears her resistence to this world in the lines of her face, deepened by a year on the road. Moira wears her resistence in the lines of her clothes that mean so much more than fashion now. Neither of them agreed to accept this world as it first presented itself. And neither of them would let it change them completely. As she and Clint tell the story of their trip to Elm Valley, Marcy catches Moira giving her an appraising look across the table with the slightest, unexpectedly soft smile on her face.
It’s going to be harder than she thought to leave.
Ray gives them a tour of Bunker 13 so Patrick doesn’t have to, and even as luxurious as it is, Marcy can’t imagine being trapped down there. There was something about the barn that felt authentic in a way this doesn’t. It was dire and scary and too crowded and it made it impossible to fool themselves for even one day that the world they would find when they finally got to leave would be dramatically different. There was no jarring reentry from the barn. Only temporary relief and then dogged perseverance. Marcy looks down the center light well to the depths of the bunker, then up at the hazy glass of the geodesic dome. It feels like a place that belongs to someone else’s story. A part of her is grateful it’s not hers.
“Do you ever wish you could say, ‘I told you so?’” Clint asks as Ray walks them back up the ramp and out the big overhead door at the top of it.
“Only very rarely.” His smile is thoughtful, almost bittersweet, as he drops his chipper tone. “There is not much satisfaction in being right about this.” Ray looks at the bunker for a long moment before turning back to them, his normal, cheerful smile back in its place. “Anyway, I just knew Patrick's parents would be as wonderful as he is. Now that is something I am very happy to be right about.”
On the closing night of the festival, everyone who hasn’t gone home gathers around a bonfire in the center of town. Musicians and performers take turns, like an informal open mic night, and Patrick sits with Clint at the center of it. Clint borrowed a guitar from a woman they met from Elm Glen and he and Patrick bend their heads together, talking as they play low notes back and forth.
“Okay,” Patrick says, clearing his throat to quiet the low hum of voices. “This one is for my mom.”
He plucks the opening notes of “Here Comes the Sun,” her favorite song. He watches his own hands on the strings for the first few bars, and then he tips his head up to smile at her from under his lashes as he sings, “Little darling, the smile’s returning to their faces. Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been here.”
“Here comes the sun, do dun do do,” Clint joins in on the chorus, grinning at Marcy because he knows he really can't sing. She just shakes her head at him and blinks against tears pressing at her eyes.
“I see where Patrick gets it from, now,” David says, rubbing her back when she can’t keep the tears from flowing.
“What’s that, dear?”
“The need to perform embarrassingly public displays of affection.”
Marcy laughs, wiping her nose with her handkerchief. “You’re just lucky he didn’t get Clint’s voice, too.”
“Well.” David appears to search for a diplomatic response. “You said it.”
She laughs again and rests her head on his shoulder. Together, they watch their husbands play the rest of the song.
All the gathered performers try to play a final set of songs together. It’s been a long time since some of them have played with other musicians. Many of them have just been playing for themselves or their families, just to continue to exist as a person who makes art in the world. The whole thing is discordant and fumbling and beautiful. It’s beautiful.
They finish their trip with a picnic under the tree where David and Patrick were married, the leaves lush and green above them, a cool breeze whispering along their skin, birds chattering to one another in the canopy. David seems more comfortable here in the place where he became her second son, with all the stress of the festival behind him. He's bigger and louder and generous and teasing and bright. When they leave, she tells David she loves him very, very much, even though he’s not ready to hear it. Life is unpredictable enough, and she won’t risk never getting the chance to say it.
When they finally make it home to their yellow house on the ridge above Elm Valley, they unpack the essentials and go to bed early. Scout acts like they’ve been gone for months and burrows herself between their legs.
“Where do you suppose Patrick is tonight?” Clint asks, brushing his smile against her forehead.
She laughs, a little wild and so uncomplicated. Finally. “At home. With his husband,” she whispers, nuzzling into his chest. “And Clint. He’s so happy.”
He pulls her in closer, tighter. “He is.”
A red oak tree emerges out of a patch of shaggy grass set several meters back from the sidewalk east of the old town hall. A lone sentinel, it has grown stout and wide for a century or more, its branches reaching out toward the corners of the empty lot from which it sprouted. For decades, its leaves sprang forth from the bones of winter, pink and delicate, until they found the courage to unfurl into a dark green canopy. They shivered in the wind and clung to the branches through the summer storms and each year, as if by magic, the summer heat left the air and soaked the green until it burst into a glowing red. Each year the leaves fell, drifting slowly to the ground until the last leaf landed gently on the fading green below. They formed a carpet across the earth, crunched under feet, and whipped up against passing cars before the winter snow buried them again.
The oak rooted to this place before the town took shape around it. And it stayed there after the town emptied, fleeing outward and downward as the fires advanced. Like everything that survived, it bore the scars of its resistance. The west side was singed and truncated by lightning. The trunk was slashed. The leaves were muted by the light and strangled by the air and wilted by the heat. Without the seasons, the branches forgot when to sprout and when to fall and the result was that the tree often looked as if it was stuck somewhere in between what it used to be and what it was becoming.
As the fires cleared and the clouds thinned, the town emerged from its own in-between. And the tree bore defiant witness to it all. Its trunk, more than a meter in diameter, is unassailable. Its knuckled branches claimed the air in every direction, such that using this piece of land for anything else has been unthinkable for generations.
Before, when the illusion of balance existed, the tree was shelter. Shade against the bright sun, respite from the press of to-do lists and deadlines. After, alone in a world charred by its own undoing, it was nothing. Then a cool wind blew in, like the memory of changing seasons. A man held the love of his life against the trunk to kiss him after their first night together, and later, he married him under its branches. The town watched as they made promises that seemed unthinkable during the fires, and not only because of how much they had been changed by them. Love rushed in to prop up all that was heavy, and balance was restored.
There was talk of a memorial at the tree ever since the first group came upstairs after the fires. It seemed like the thing to do, after tragedy. To make a collective place to deposit memories, to hold them close, and even loan them out should the need arise. But the longer the townspeople lived among the wreckage of the world, they realized the memories were inescapable. The landscape was drenched with them, flooded with loss. They didn't need another place to drown in the past. So the tree was spared a more official purpose.
Which is why it is what it is now. A place where people sit alone, or sit together, or sit alone together. A place where people hold one another up. A place to start a journey. A place to restart one. Still shade for a dog near the end of his life. Still a respite for a man and his partner, whispering the secret to all their years together. Still, people keep coming to the tree when they need it. There are some who come to the tree just to lay their hands on the rough surface of its bark. To feel the supportive strength of it, the pulse of survival. More than any memorial they can design, the tree links them to a past and a future.
Twice a year, a family separated by fire reunites under its branches, growing their ranks until one by one they, too, return to the earth that made them. In the branches of the oak, one warm September evening many decades after fires and weddings and reunions, a bluebird sings to a blackbird, and they take flight into the brilliant, cloudless sky together.