THIRTEEN MONTHS PRIOR TO THE DEATH OF OLIVER SALLOW

To seventeen-year-old Oliver, it was almost frightening how easily Finn slid into his routine.

It didn't make any sense, really. They were opposites in nearly every way: there was Oliver with his all-black wardrobe and Shakespeare plays, his eyeliner and penchant for all things arcane, and then there was Finn, with his bright red hair and dimpling grin, his football friends and the lovingly filled Bambi lunch box he brought to school every day.

For the two years that Oliver had lived in Blissby, they'd existed in different solar systems; now, it was as if their orbits had collided, leaving them to circle unerringly around each other.

It didn't make any sense, but Oliver didn't think it needed to. Like one didn't question the gravity between planets, one didn't need to understand the intricate workings of the friendship between a student librarian and a star football player to accept that it was.

All of this was to say that, as the days went on, Oliver found himself inexplicably fond of Finn O'Connell. The boy who shuffled through the library doors seemed to him like an entirely different creature from the one who brawled with his friends in front of the lockers and interrupted class cracking jokes.

(Or so Oliver had heard. He didn't have any classes with Finn, but he did have the gift of wearing a perpetually disinterested expression that goaded people into comfortably carrying all sorts of conversations in his earshot, confident that Oliver Sallow, of all people, wasn't possibly interested in their petty gossip. Fools. The library was his court and they were his jesters. He thrived on petty gossip.)

Class clown or not, there was something unexpectedly sweet about Finn. He was usually soft-spoken, sometimes sleepy, and almost always the secret highlight of Oliver's day. Part of it, he thought, was that Finn never pried. He didn't ask the typical questions like: How old were you when you got put into the system? (Six.) Do you remember anything before that? (I don't even remember what I did five days ago.) Do you not have real parents? (What the fuck are real parents.)

These questions irked Oliver mostly because of their pushiness and the assumption that they were somehow entitled to the Oliver Sallow Sob Story, not because any of it was too emotional to talk about. He truly did not remember anything about before aside from the key facts: his father was unknown and his mother had died. It was possible that someone had once told him how, but he'd either repressed the answer or otherwise misplaced it.

Before he had perfected the art of silently staring people down until they admitted defeat, he'd come up with all kinds of gruesome scenarios. Died in a plane crash. Abducted by aliens. Worked as a spy until her fake identity was discovered and she was fed to a swimming pool of piranhas. Oliver himself had never felt the need to believe in any of them. As far as he was concerned, he had sprung fully-formed from the English Channel; a scrawny, distrustful Venus minus the Botticelli curls.

The point was this: unlike ninety-nine percent of the school's population, Oliver didn't just tolerate Finn—he genuinely looked forward to seeing him slump into one of the seats with his tie askew and his hair mussed after football practice.

Suddenly, it was easy to accept that the library wasn't Oliver's alone anymore, regardless of how outraged past him would've been at the idea. Easy to put down his plays and novels whenever Finn came over to his desk. Easy to agree to grammar-checking Finn's essays in exchange for Maltesers, smiley faces drawn in red on the bottom of the page, Pleasure doing business with you.

And when Oliver asked Finn for his number one Thursday afternoon so he could send him one of his playlists, that was easy, too.

***

Finn O'Connell: Why are there over a hundred playlists on your Spotify?

O: why are there only three on yours

Finn O'Connell: Because I only need three

Finn O'Connell: Why are they named this way??

O: ???

Finn O'Connell: "rip ophelia you would've loved mitski"?

O: it's true

Finn O'Connell: "songs to ride lucretia to"

Finn O'Connell: Do I even want to know who Lucretia is?

O: you've met her, she waits for me outside school every day

O: bit quiet

O: incredibly sexy

O: things between us are getting pretty serious, i'm not going to lie

Finn O'Connell: [facepalm gif]

Finn O'Connell: "oh, to be a gothic heroine wandering the hallways of a crumbling castle in a floor-length night gown after explicitly being told not to leave my room after night fall (dying of consumption but make it sexy)"?

Finn O'Connell: Oliver, this is an essay

O: silence, heathen.

O: i will not allow criticism from someone whose three (3) playlists are called vibes 1, locker room hype songs, and vibes 2

Finn O'Connell: I just made another one called vibes 3

O: blocked and reported

O: unfollow my spotify right this instant

O: in fact, do not ever come back to the library

Finn O'Connell: See you on Monday 😊

***

Oliver wasn't the only one with an appreciation for routines. Gabby, his foster mother of two years and counting, was of the firm belief that daily shared meals were the unshakable foundation on which any family was built. As in her neurobiology class, attendance was obligatory, and deliberately missing it akin to skipping the last supper.

At the beginning of his stay, Oliver had tried his hardest to get out of the ritual. Routines were supposed to be of his making; fifteen years old and unnerved by the blatant affection displayed by his new foster family, the idea of a daily obligation such as this one had terrified him.

Routines were a slippery slope. They led into familiarity led into comfort led into an illusion of permanence—and the latter, he had learned by then, was only to be found within himself. He knew how this dance went. He didn't want to end up in another family three months from then, conditioned into missing what was supposed to be just another layover by a stimulus as silly as a set dinner time.

Unfortunately, Gabby Walker was patient, and there were only so many times one could fake a stomach bug without being threatened to be dragged to the doctor.

Oliver had succumbed to the routine.

Not just that: he had been well and truly pavloved. Like the dog at the chiming of the bell, he came down the stairs at five p.m. sharp and dutifully delivered his line. "Hey. D'you need any help with dinner?"

Predictably, it was Daniel, his foster father, who responded. He was sat cross-legged on the living room floor with a half-finished Lego model of the Death Star sitting in front of him. The co-architect was Milo, Oliver's ten-year-old foster brother. "That late already?" He squinted at the clock on the wall, his half-blindness hard-earned through his IT job. Oliver, who had acquired his own near-sightedness through years of reading under blankets in different bedrooms, could empathize. "Did Gabby say what I was supposed to make?"

"Not sure." Oliver turned a little so he could glance inside the kitchen on the other side of the hallway he was standing in. "Hey, Gabby?"

Gabby sat at the kitchen table amidst a graveyard of empty coffee mugs and probably also her student's dreams, if the look on her face as she worked her way through the stack of essays in front of her was any indication. At the sound of Oliver clearing his throat, she pushed her glasses to the top of her head and offered him a smile. "What's up?"

"Daniel asks what he was supposed to cook tonight."

Gabby craned her neck to catch a glimpse of the grocery list tacked to the blackboard on the wall. "Let me see... something salad-y? I wrote down salad."

Grimacing, Oliver turned to the right again. "Something salad-y," he reported.

Daniel and Milo glanced up from their project with matching looks of disappointment. "Just salad?" Daniel asked.

Turn to the left. "Just salad?"

"Er... maybe bruschetta?" Gabby offered. "We still have tomatoes. Someone would have to run down to the bakery before it shuts, though."

"I can go," Oliver immediately said. Turn to the right. "Hey, Milo. Wanna take a trip to the bakery with me?"

Milo sat perfectly still for a moment, looking from the half-finished Death Star to Oliver and then back. Finally, he gave a nod and scrambled to his feet.

Oliver, with his confidence boosted by this unexpected victory, accepted the money Gabby pressed into his hand.

"Two loaves of ciabatta should be enough," she said. "You're a gem, Oliver."

He shrugged on his coat, his smile hidden behind his curtain of dark hair. Even though he was well aware of the impermanence of it all, he couldn't deny that he liked playing at domesticity with the Walkers.

Out of all his foster families (which were nine; almost one for every year he'd been in the system), they were his favourite. Gabby and Daniel were the perfect level of involved where Oliver could tell that they cared about what was going on in his life but was never bothered by them prying into the details.

Where other foster mothers had tried to stop him from dressing the way he wanted, Gabby gamely borrowed him her eyeshadow palette and put every reprimand of him breaking the school's dress code through the paper shredder in her office without batting an eye.

Daniel had basically become Oliver's favourite foster dad the moment he'd discovered Lucretia catching dust in the back of the garage, a role that was firmly cemented when Oliver found her again on the morning of his seventeenth birthday, much shinier this time and with a new helmet dangling from the handlebar.

Oliver's favourite feature of the Walker household, however, was the one that shuffled down the sidewalk with him now. Being passed from foster family to foster family, Oliver had quickly realized that the key to a half-way tolerable time often wasn't building a relationship with the parents; it was getting on good terms with their kids. They were the ones he had to go to school with. They were the ones who usually felt the most threatened by his presence. And they were the ones who, with enough whining and complaining, could get Oliver kicked out and shipped off to another town faster than anything else.

With some of them, he had to assert himself, show that he wasn't to be messed with. With others, he had to be careful and quiet, just enough of a shadow that they didn't see him as an intruder.

With Milo, it had been none of these.

He was sensitive and intelligent, listening to Oliver's stories with an engaged frown (like a man in a tiny kid's body, Daniel had once described him). He was interested in all things technological and read books far above his reading age.

He was also selectively mute. Gabby had warned Oliver when she had picked him up from the train station that there was a high chance that Milo wouldn't speak to him anytime soon—or ever. Oliver had accepted this. Objectively, he looked terrifying to a lot of children, and anyway, what did he care if his foster brother didn't talk to him? He'd be gone soon either way.

Fast forward to a day three weeks after his move-in when Milo had come up to him and asked in a tiny voice if Oliver could help him tie his shoelaces.

Oliver didn't think anything would measure up to the sheer amount of fondness he had experienced at that moment, the feeling as unexpected as it had been terrifying. Milo trusted him; Milo had chosen him, scary eye make-up and all, to be part of the tiny circle he felt comfortable enough with to verbalize his thoughts.

It was rude, really, how quickly he had wormed his way into Oliver's heart.

"Did you know," Milo chattered as they made their way down the cobblestone street, "That the Death Star is at least as big as Pluto?"

"Really?" Oliver said, smiling against his will. It was hard not to when Milo was beaming up at him—his toothy grin a mirror of his dad's, his deep brown skin and springy curls courtesy of his mum. His small hand was clutching tightly onto Oliver's. "How are you going to fit it into the living room, then?"

Milo laughed, clearly delighted. "We aren't, silly! Our Death Star is way" —he dragged this word to three times its length— "smaller. Two million people could fit inside the original!"

Ahead of them, the bakery came into view. The setting sun painted their shadows onto the pavement; one tall and spindly, the fall of his boots echoing loudly, the other small and hurrying to keep up.

"No way. Would you want to live there?"

Milo scratched at his head, thinking hard about the question before he concluded: "Dunno. Maybe if they have a ping pong table."

Before Oliver could inquire since when Milo was interested in ping pong, they reached the door. While Milo lapsed into his usual silence, his grip on Oliver's hand tightening a little, Oliver tensed for a different reason.

At the counter, ginger hair flashing like a warning sign, stood Finn O'Connell.

The sight of him outside the library was almost too much for Oliver's brain to comprehend. He debated whether it was justifiable to simply snatch Milo and sprint back to the Walkers' home to have a sad salad-y dinner, but the traitorous bell above the doorway gave him away before he could come to a decision.

Finn glanced over his shoulder, freezing with his cash-filled hand halfway across the counter when his eyes met Oliver's. His surprised Oh was barely more than a breath, but with only the two of them, Milo, and the lady behind the register in the room, it was clearly audible.

The sound of the cashier clearing her throat snapped both of them out of their shock. Finn quickly passed her his money; she passed him a small box of what looked like cake; Oliver almost passed out when he realized how devastatingly pretty Finn O'Connell looked in a denim jacket and the horrendous knit sweater he was wearing underneath.

"Have a good day!" the cashier told him. Oliver, she addressed in a much less perky tone. "What about you?"

"Two baguettes, please," Oliver distractedly said while his gaze followed Finn.

The woman slammed the baguette down on the counter, taking her time counting the coins Oliver handed her. Through the window, Oliver could see Finn waiting outside, rocking back and forth on his feet as he glanced around the street.

Oliver all but dragged Milo out of the bakery the moment the woman gave a nod.

"Hey," Finn said. His eyes were wide, darting between Oliver and the child holding his hand with obvious confusion.

"Hey." Oliver lifted Milo's hand in a little wave. "This is Milo. Milo, this is Finn. He's the one with the terrible music taste that I've told you about."

Milo gave a sage nod.

Finn, expression caught between offended and the hopelessly endeared look that befell most who gazed upon Milo Walker, only uttered a weak, "They're a big hit in the locker room."

"Oh, I'm sure they are," Oliver snorted. "What... what are you doing here?"

Finn lifted the box he was carefully cradling in his hands. "Getting cake for my mum. She can't—she didn't want to go herself. You?"

"Getting baguette for my—" Oliver faltered the way he usually did, hastily tacking a foster to the mum.

"Oh." Finn blinked. "That's cool."

A few seconds passed in silence.

Then: "Sorry, I just didn't expect—"

"Hey, I was wondering if maybe—"

Oliver abruptly cut himself off. "Wondering if maybe what?"

"The study trip to London in two weeks." Finn's ears turned an impressive shade of pink. "I heard you were going as well? I was wondering if you'd like to room. With me, I mean."

Oliver was certain he hadn't understood him correctly. Finn was... Finn. There was no way he didn't already have ten people begging him to share a room with him. "Are you taking the—" He quickly reached out to cover Milo's ears, ignoring his exasperated huff, "Are you taking the piss right now?"

"No! I-I thought... If I had another panic attack, I think I would like it to be with you. Not one of the football guys."

Oliver paused a moment to parse the complicated feeling that spread in his chest. Finn waited, eyes darting around the gloomy alley, his foot scuffing against the cobblestones. Oliver was reminded of Milo's first words to him—the way his throat suddenly felt tight wasn't unlike the reaction he'd had then. It was the unconditional trust that did it, he thought.

"Okay."

"Okay?" Finn breathed.

"Why the hell not." Oliver gave a shrug that was far more casual than he felt on the inside before he added, "But be aware that by rooming with me you'll be required to partake in my satanic midnight mass every night. BYOS. Bring your own sacrifice."

"Huh?"

Ignoring the question, Oliver turned around, tugging Milo with him. Over his shoulder, he called, "If you don't have time to find a virgin, store-bought is fine!"

"That sounds like one of your playlist names," Finn murmured. Before Oliver could turn the corner, he hastily added, "Thanks, Ollie!"

Oliver almost stumbled over his own two feet, as if the nickname was a tripwire he should've seen coming but really, really did not.

Milo, wise man that he was, noticed the falter immediately. Small face pinched in disbelief, he echoed, "Ollie?"

"Absolutely ridiculous," huffed Oliver.

And then, he grinned at the cobblestones. Just a little.

****************************

they mean the entire world to me actually <33

in this chapter you finally met oliver's foster family!! what are your thoughts on them? :)

the trip to london is one of my favourite parts of this entire book ahh. but first, we'll pop back into the future to see how the boys are adjusting! (spoiler alert: they aren't)

p.s. today's song is synchronised sinking by the lucksmiths! it is SUCH an oliver x finn song :,)