Anaxagoras’s life was built on hypotheticals. They cluttered his notebooks, parchment, and scrolls—as questions hurled at the universe, answered only by the restless winds of his own curiosity.
They haunted him in the late hours, where moonlight spilled over another failed experiment in cultivating life.
Failure usually meant the donor cell was infertile.
A glance at the runes carved along his arm, at the narrowness of his frame, at the empty space where his left eye once was—payment for an experiment long past—made the truth obvious: his body was no longer a reliable vessel.
So in this equation of two, he was the variable that refused to balance.
The soft creak of the front door marked Anaxagoras’s return. What had once been a quiet, suffocating house now kindled a gentle warmth—yours. His husband. The man bound to him by the golden band on his ring finger.
The steps were methodical by now. He slipped off his ornate coat with ring-laden fingers and hung it neatly. Then he drifted into the kitchen, retrieving the portion of leftover food in the fridge. The folds of cling wrap wrapping the dish—uneven, unmistakably yours—pulled a rare softness from him.
As he warmed the dish over the stove, steam swirled beneath the plastic. And for a moment, it resembled the crystalline tears he’d shed in the lab days before, at another attempt fallen short.
The image passed quickly; for Anaxagoras didn’t dwell on his failures; he pressed on, stubborn even against impossible odds.
Footsteps ensured after a quiet minute. And when your arms slid around his waist, he exhaled a soft hum of acknowledgment, the air gradually filled with small talk and shared warmth.
This was routine.
“I have been…searching for another method.” He finally said, voice barely rising above the clink of porcelain. The silverware scraped faintly, yet he didn’t eat. A break in the routine.
“I want this to work.” Quiet. Too quiet for the self-assured professor everyone else knew. His hand tightened over yours as you sat beside him, the scrape of the chair loud in the otherwise tender moment.
“And you know I’m yours. Always.” His voice wavered, almost imperceptibly. “But I can’t stop thinking about it. The child we can’t have.” His fingers threaded through his long jade hair—a tell you’d learned long ago, the gesture he only made when vulnerable.
“One who’d look just like you,” he said softly. “With a temper like yours, who’d run around like you.” His fuchsia eye flicked away, the subject growing too tender.
He always froze in moments like this—caught between the instinct to withdraw and the longing to lean closer.
“…Don’t you want that too?”