Work Text:
Pen Hamilton @pen_ham
@birdsinmybeard Jonathan
Pen Hamilton @pen_ham
@birdsinmybeard Jonathan Jonathan
Jonathan Crowe @birdsinmybeard
@pen_ham what
Pen Hamilton @pen_ham
@birdsinmybeard Come here
Jonathan Crowe @birdsinmybeard
@pen_ham Why?
Pen Hamilton @pen_ham
@birdsinmybeard You'll see!!
Jonathan sighed and pushed back from his computer desk. Pen wasn't to be found in the bedroom, or the living room, or the kitchen, so of course Jonathan found him on the back porch, hunched over something on the table they kept there for nights of eating and drinking while staring at the skies above.
"Yes?" he said.
Pen leaned back and turned around to grin at him, brilliant and beautiful as always. "Behold!" he said, and spread his hands to show what he had hidden with the curve of his body before: a chick, befitted proudly in a tiny cloth cape and little paper crown.
Jonathan kept his face straight. It was one of his most honed skills. "What have you done?"
"I have found the king of the chickens!" The chick peeped at him and staggered around on the table, unevenly balanced from its vestments.
"That's undignified," Jonathan said. It had all begun when Jonathan went away for all of four days for a conference in Atlanta. Pen had been worryingly unresponsive to texts and tweets while he'd been away, which usually signaled that Jonathan might return home to find that he had swung into a low state and hadn't left the bed or showered in days. But no, not this time. He returned home to find that Pen had dug up half his yard to plant vegetables and constructed a chicken coop. This was Penrose Hamilton 2.0: the farmer. He still kept tabs on all the places his money was getting to these days, but his day to day was kept up with growing carrots and tending to hens. Every weekend he went to the farmer's market selling eggs and whatever he'd grown to people who bought them and ate them. Jonathan wasn't sure he'd ever seen him so happy in twenty years.
"It is not!" Pen said. "It's regal!" He picked the chick up into his palm, where it wobbled and fell over. "He's a grand king! ...or queen."
Jonathan came over and sat next to him, and reached over to rub his finger on the fuzzy down on the chick's chest. "Queen."
Pen snorted. "You don't know that," he said. "You may have a doctorate in bird, but I am totally a professional chicken-raiser now, and I know that you can't tell if these little peepers are boys or girls just with yourownpeepers."
Jonathan's hand moved down from the chick's fuzzy tummy to brush Pen's palm. "Mm, no, I can't, but it doesn't matter. It's what she feels on theinside."
He kept his gaze on the royal little chick, who seemed to be falling asleep, but he could see from the corner of his eye Pen grinning at him, the kind of grin that made every hair on his body stand on end with excitement. "Well," Pen said, and tapped the chick under the beak. "Hail to the queen."
Jonathan very gently took the royal garb off the bird -- he didn't bother to ask, at this point, when or where Pen would have acquired or made such things, after he had garbed a previous chick in muffin wrappers for a luau -- and stroked its head with his fingertip until it had entirely fallen asleep in Pen's palms. "She doesn't need a crown. I'll recognize her authority no matter what."
"Especially if she ends up a rooster," Pen said, and leaned over to kiss Jonathan on the cheek. He placed the little paper crown on the rise of Jonathan's knuckle, and Jonathan answered with a soft echo of the crowing that woke them up before dawn every morning. Pen took the little queen back to her coop, and made Jonathan an omelet for dinner. He drew a crown upon it with hot sauce.