Chapter Text
For Sam, everything changes when his dad returns from the army, riddled with PTSD and war stories and an awkward space between him and the family. Kent comes home craving peace and love, but one son has grown so much and the other has seemingly made no life progress altogether—yet he can’t seem to connect with either of them. Sam plays the guitar too loudly, sometimes on purpose but not maliciously, and Vincent is a good kid but he’s everywhere, all the time. Kent is overwhelmed, which means Jodi is overbearing, and Sam can’t stand being in the house longer than he needs to.
For Abigail, everything changes when Caroline bans Sam from the house for being up at stupid hours to play loud music away from Kent. It’s affecting your father’s business negatively, she says, and besides, Sam works for the enemy. Yeah, well, it’s not Sam’s fault that nobody else in town is hiring, and it’s also not Sam’s fault that Pierre hasn’t sold a single thing since Joja Mart set up shop across town. Begrudgingly, Abigail can see how a wailing guitar could turn away customers, if they ever came by in the first place.
So Sam isn’t talking to his family, and Abigail isn’t talking to her family, and Sebastian kind of never talked to his family in the first place. Band practice is indefinitely cancelled and the space between the three of them is bleak and joyless, until Abigail comes back from one of her forest exploration days. She pounds down Sam’s door and drags him, Joja uniform and acoustic guitar and all, to a rickety one-room farmhouse.
“This place belongs to a ghost, and also, we can make all the noise we want!” she says with a series of excited bounces.
“Well, sure,” says Sam, “Old Farmer Joe is dead, but that doesn’t mean the place is haunted.” He’s not excited at all. The farmhouse is super shitty; it’s more of a shack than anything else. It doesn’t even have a bathroom.
Abigail scowls. “It’s totally haunted,” she says. “Now let’s be exhibitionists in front of Joe the ghost like the horny young adults we are.”
They do that. The sex is passionate and loud, tempered by their weeks-long dry spell and Sam’s disposition for being as noisy as possible all the time. Sam changes his mind about the farmhouse being shitty. The farmhouse is great!
A few hours later, Sam strongarms Sebastian over to the cabin by showing up to Robin’s house wearing nothing but flip-flops (his), purple briefs (Abigail’s), and a set of worn dog tags (his dad’s). Sam has a key, of course, and lets himself in to knock on Sebastian’s basement bedroom door. “Sebastian! Open the door; I’m naked.” The nudity was maybe a mistake; Sam’s skin is covered in goosebumps from the late fall chill.
Ribbit, comes a noise from the other side of the door.
“Come on, dude, that’s not remotely what a cricket sounds like.” Plus, Sebastian doesn’t have any animals, nor does he sleep during normal person hours.
The door opens to reveal Sebastian with mussed hair and an open fly. He cocks his head in a greeting.
“Your fly is open,” says Sam.
Sebastian shrugs and zips himself up. “Nothing you haven’t seen befo— shit, you are naked!” he whisper-yelps. “Why are you naked?” He glances down. “Are those mine?”
“Nothing you haven’t seen before,” says Sam, winking salaciously.
“Get your nudity out of my house before anyone sees you!” Sam is suddenly insistently being shoved toward the front door, and he breaks into a sprint. Sam hops in and pushes off on his skateboard past the community centre to the farmhouse. Sebastian, predictably, swings on his motorcycle and gives chase, driving at an abysmally slow speed to protect Lewis’s carefully maintained cobblestone paths, because he can be considerate sometimes. Not all the time, though, because Sebastian yells several profanities that Sam knows are there, but pretends to not hear over the motorcycle’s engine.
(They actually run into Emily on the way, who wolf-whistles at Sam’s shorts. Dammit, he’ll be the talk of the town tomorrow.)
“This is what you wanted to show me?” says Sebastian dryly when his bike is finally parked in the nook behind the house. “You got naked to lure me out in the middle of the night for an abandoned shack?” His hair is matted down to his face with helmet sweat and he’s still wearing pajamas, but the moon—high in the cloudless night sky—bathes Sebastian in a pale glow. Sam’s breath hitches. He can never forget how beautiful Sebastian is.
“Yes!” beams Abigail, throwing open the front door (the only door) and yanking Sebastian inside. Unlike Sam and his pitiful attempt at decorum, Abigail is fully covered in Sam’s hoodie and a towel.
“Ah,” says Sebastian. “Not just an abandoned shack, but a sex shack.”
“Well, no, but also I guess sure,” says Abigail.
Sebastian sighs, forfeiting the game of flirting chicken as usual. “So what is it?” Sebastian sweeps his gaze around the single room, outfitted with Abigail’s flute and starter tambourine, Sam’s acoustic guitar, clothes strewn on top of said guitar, and Sebastian’s keytar.
Sam has not stopped grinning since he knocked at Sebastian’s door, and he’s still infectiously excited. “This, Sebastian, is the new practice space for our band!”
For Sebastian, everything changes not when Kent comes back, nor when the band relocates practice to the abandoned farmhouse, but when Abigail and Sam sat him down last month during the luau and told him they were dating. Sebastian is both Abigail and Sam’s best friend and ex-boyfriend, so the dynamic transition included joke flirting, lots of gay chicken, and lots of straight chicken, so maybe it’s just bi chicken? ...And maybe not all of the flirting was a joke. Sebastian always backs off first during flirting chicken; he loves them both but not like that. He can’t, and that’s actually why they’re his exes, but this new dynamic makes a part of Sebastian’s heart shudder.
When Kent comes back and the band takes a break, Sebastian breathes in the freshness of this new, quiet, open space. Sebastian likes the excuse to retreat to the privacy of his bedroom, and it’s nice to not have to deal with their oppressive presence all the time. This works, and Sebastian is able to throw himself into work and into avoiding the world, until Abigail finds the abandoned farmhouse in the woods.
And then suddenly, the three of them are in each other’s pockets again, spending most of their days in a shack with no other company but the wind, the supposed ghost of Old Farmer Joe, and the music. It’s like the brief period of separation never happened, and Sebastian is right back where he started.
—
Days turn into weeks, and the cabin starts filling up. Nearly all of Sam’s instruments are there, as well as Abigail’s drum kit and Sebastian’s keyboard and a shitty portable recording station. Abigail gets seriously good at the flute and picks up other folk woodwinds, such as the Jew’s harp and the milk jug and DIY bagpipes. Sebastian uses mixing for the band as an excuse to plug in headphones and tune out the world. Sam gets familiar with writing each bandmate’s style preference into the music. Within a month of having a dedicated jamming and production space, they have enough music for two albums.
Non-music personal effects start to litter the place too. Parts of the drywall are peeling, so Abigail grabs some of Pierre’s old wallpaper swatches and wheat pastes them to the wall. The sleeping bags become a permanent fixture, as does a washboard and some staple clothing items. Sam brings in a jar of Joja Cola-flavoured marshmallows for roasting. They strip the bed of the miserably threadbare mattress, and use it to house Solarian Chronicles maps.
“I’m sleeping over with Abigail,” says Sam when Jodi asks. “But we’re not, you know, doing bad stuff.” Jodi thinks Abigail is a good kid and a way better influence on him than Sebastian.
“I’m sleeping over with Sebastian,” says Abigail when Pierre asks where she goes. Caroline thinks Sebastian is a way better influence on her than Sam.
“I’m going to the old farmhouse,” says Sebastian when Demetrius asks, because there’s nothing unreasonable about what he’s doing. But mostly, Demetrius doesn’t ask because even though Sebastian goes to the farmhouse twice a week for practice and once more for drinks, he doesn’t make it a habit to sleep over like Sam and Abigail do.
They book a week of back-to-back performances in the first week of winter, and they use the advance to commission Maru to build them a portable generator for the cabin, which barely has running water, let alone heat or electricity. Between the three of them, Abigail is the only one who isn’t employed, so she spends a lot of time chopping wood. Aside from the fire, she also uses the wood to craft a thousand chests to store their things in.
“You know,” says Maru, imperceptibly shivering from either the cold or the nerves of actually talking to her elusive stepbrother, “the farmhouse is rickety, but not completely disconnected. You could probably get Mom to fix the walls and hook up some real electricity and this could be a decent, I don’t know, bro cave.”
“Yeah, a great bro cave where I cover my ears with a pillow while the two lovebirds go at it,” says Sebastian flatly.
Maru ducks her suddenly enflamed face down and goes back to work.
Sam glares at Sebastian. “You know, it wouldn’t be so bad to fix this place up,” he muses. He keeps musing about it, sketching out furnishing plans and floor plans and payment plans over the next two weeks. He muses about it so hard that he trips on a bucket of water at work, careening Morris, Shane, and the front desk lady into a wall. Joja Mart closes for a month because everyone else is too injured and Sam, the only one unscathed, clearly can’t be trusted to run the store by himself.
(Pierre gets lots of business that month, which makes Morris super mad.)
Being unemployed means Sam is home more often again, and he and Kent drive each other up the walls, which in turn makes Jodi and Vincent distraught. Sam finally throws his arms up and moves out into the farmhouse. Abigail officially moves in too, and the two have a housewarming party on the last day of winter. Their families squeeze on their new bed and eat some awful food made over a campfire from Joja produce, but for the first time since Kent came back, everyone is getting along.
After dinner, Caroline pulls Abigail aside. “Honey, I was wrong about Sam being a bad influence,” she says. “He’s clearly a goal-oriented young man, taking steps to turn this shitstain of a shack into a cozy little house like this. You two will be great farmers.”
“That’s... really sweet, Mom.” Abigail smiles. “Who said anything about us being farmers, though?”
Caroline’s brows furrow. “Huh, I guess I’m not sure where that came from. Of course you don’t have to be a farmer if you don’t want to.”
Abigail hugs her mother. “I’m glad you changed your mind about Sam. I love you.”
Caroline hugs back. “Be good to yourself and to each other, and don’t have any threesomes with Sebastian.”
“Mom!” screeches Abigail. “First, that’s not your business; and second, Sam and I will have as many threesomes we want, whether that number is zero or a thousand!” (Sam’s entire family goes red inside the house.)
Caroline giggles. “I’m just messing with you, dear. I love you too.” Abigail giggles too, but underneath the good humour, she thinks she sees a hint of wistfulness in her mother’s face.
Sam and Abigail’s families leave, and not half an hour later, Sebastian shows up with a sleeping bag and a six-pack of beer. They drink late into the night, laughing over memories and the bright outlook of the future.
—
The next morning, Sam wakes up with Abigail’s face mashed into his shoulder and Sebastian’s presence on the floor. He groans, rolling over in the too-small bed and abruptly launches both himself and Abigail on the floor. They land right on top of not only Sebastian, but a small mountain of parsnip seed packs piled on Sebastian’s face. They’re each decorated with a little apple mascot on the back.
“Huh,” he says amidst Sebastian’s complaining about being woken too early, “Abigail, did your dad leave us a housewarming gift?”