Chapter 4: A New Day's Scale
Renae woke into a warmth that was solid and alive. It took a disorienting second for his memory to slot the sensation into place: the steady, rhythmic thump beneath his ear, the rise and fall, the scent of clean cotton and skin. He was still on Mattius’s chest, cradled in the loose cup of his hands. A giant, living blanket.
He didn’t open his eyes. He pressed his cheek against the soft fabric of the t-shirt and inhaled, committing the specific gravity of this moment to memory. The absolute safety of it was a drug. He wriggled slightly, trying to burrow deeper, a subconscious seeking of more.
A low, sleepy hum vibrated through the chest beneath him. The sound traveled up his spine.
Renae tilted his head back and opened his eyes.
Mattius was already awake. Propped against the headboard just as he had been hours before, his shaggy black hair was a mess against the pillow, a few strands stuck to his temple. In the soft, grey morning light filtering through the blinds, his face was all gentle planes and shadow. His dark blue eyes were fixed on Renae, soft and unmistakably tired, but clear. A faint, unguarded smile touched his lips, the kind that appeared only in private, before the world demanded his focus.
Heat flooded Renae’s cheeks, but the instinct to crack a joke, to deflect, felt distant and weak. Instead, he stretched, a full-body, cat-like extension that made his joints give tiny pops. He pushed his hands against Mattius’s shirt, arching his back, then relaxed into a contented slump.
“‘Morning,” Renae murmured, his voice gravelly with sleep.
“Hey,” Mattius whispered back. The word was a quiet rumble Renae felt as much as heard.
Mattius’s thumb, which had been resting against Renae’s side, moved. It was an absent, barely-there stroke along the length of his back, over the shrunken fabric of his hoodie. The touch was so natural, so unthinkingly tender, that it made Renae’s breath hitch. The world didn’t just feel small. It felt singular. It felt right.
“You stayed like that all night,” Renae said, not accusing, just stating a bewildering fact.
A slight shrug moved the landscape under him. “You were sleeping.”
“Your arms must be dead.”
“They’re fine.”
“You’re a terrible liar before coffee.”
This earned a slightly wider smile. Mattius’s thumb did another slow pass. “You snore. A little. It’s… high-pitched. Like a frustrated bee.”
Renae snorted, a tiny puff of air. “I do not. You’re hearing the house settling. Or your own conscience.” He settled his head back down, listening to the strong, sure heartbeat. “Thanks. For not… you know. Rolling over.”
Mattius’s hands tightened around him, just for a second. A protective squeeze. “Never.”
They lay there in the quiet. The furnace was off. The house was still. It was just the two of them in a pool of morning stillness, existing in a scale that should have been impossible but felt, in this suspended moment, like the most natural thing in the world. Renae watched the dust motes dance in the slanted light, each one a glittering satellite. Mattius watched Renae, the way the light caught the brown of his short hair, the complete trust in the relaxed line of his body.
It was painfully, overwhelmingly cute. The giant, rumpled genius cradling the tiny, sleepy mechanic with a devotion so absolute it rendered the absurdity of the situation momentarily invisible. There was a fluffy, uncomplicated sweetness to it, a raw tenderness that existed before the day’s worries could encroach.
Renae broke the silence, his voice soft. “So. What’s the plan for today, oh mighty rescuer?”
Mattius let out a long breath. The cozy spell thinned, reality seeping back in at the edges. “Logistics,” he said, his voice shifting into its familiar, problem-solving register. “You need a better base of operations than a matchbox. Something with walls. A door. And a way for you to get around without me having to play elevator all the time.”
“I could get used to the elevator service,” Renae quipped, but he nodded. “Autonomy’s good. What’re you thinking?”
“I’ve got some clear acrylic scraps downstairs. I can make a proper enclosure. Drill some proper air holes. Figure out a pulley system for the nightstand.” He paused. “And I need to start prepping for the reversal. The German shipment won’t get here for almost two weeks, but the calculations… they’re intense. I need to model the spacetime fold inversion perfectly. The first attempt was… messy.”
“The first attempt landed me in your pajamas,” Renae said, patting the shirt beneath him.
A flicker of pain crossed Mattius’s face. “Exactly.”
“Hey.” Renae sat up, looking directly up at him. “We’re good. I’m good. Just… don’t burn the house down with your math, okay? I’d like my old room back eventually. The one with the floor I can’t fall off of.”
Mattius’s expression softened again. He brought his hand up, slowly, until Renae was level with his face. He didn’t say anything. Just looked at him, his gaze tracing the details of Renae’s face with a focus usually reserved for faulty wiring.
Renae held still, his heart beating a frantic tattoo against his ribs. The proximity was dizzying. He could see the faint stubble along Mattius’s jaw, the individual lashes framing his tired eyes.
“I’ll fix this,” Mattius said, the promise quiet and fierce.
“I know,” Renae replied. Simple. Absolute.
Mattius nodded once, a decisive gesture. Then, with careful ceremony, he lowered his hand to the rumpled sheets beside him, giving Renae a stable platform. He swung his legs out of bed, his joints cracking. He stood, stretching his arms overhead with a groan, and the ceiling seemed to soar even higher.
“First,” he announced, looking down at the tiny figure on his bed, “Coffee. For me. And I’ll find you a… a crumb of something spectacular.”
“Make it a spectacular sugary crumb,” Renae called after him as he padded toward the door. “I’ve had a traumatic night. I require compensation.”
Mattius glanced back from the doorway, the morning light cutting across his shoulders. The smile returned, real and warm. “You got it.”
“You got it.”
The smell of brewing coffee eventually wafted up the stairs, a rich, earthy promise of normalcy. Renae paced the territory of the rumpled sheet, careful to stay well away from the cliff of the mattress. The scale of the room still pressed in, but the deep, residual warmth from Mattius’s chest held the worst of the vertigo at bay.
Mattius returned with two mugs, steam curling from one. He set them on the nightstand and laid his hand flat on the bed. Renae climbed on, and was transported to the vast, smooth plain of pine beside the coffee. Mattius produced a single, perfect golden-brown crumb from a cookie, placing it reverently before him. “Your compensation, sir.”
“A maître d’and a ride service,” Renae said, sitting next to the crumb that was nearly as tall as his knee. He broke off a piece. It dissolved on his tongue, sweet and buttery. “Okay, forgiven.”
They worked in companionable silence for a while, Mattius sipping his coffee, Renae demolishing his crumb. The simple shared act of breakfast, this bizarre new version of it, settled something in both of them. The crisis had moved from acute terror to a strange, manageable routine.
“Acrylic’s a pain to work with without proper tools,” Mattius finally said, staring into his mug. “Sealing the edges, making it safe… it’d take days. And it’d feel like a lab specimen jar.”
“Not a great aesthetic,” Renae agreed, brushing crumbs from his hands. “What’s the alternative?”
Mattius’s eyes swept the room, landing on nothing, then flickered with an idea. He stood abruptly. “Stay there.”
He left and returned a minute later from the garage, his arms full. He laid the items on the cleared desk with a soft clatter: wood glue, a hobby knife, a small sanding block, and a simple, unpainted wooden birdhouse. It was a basic A-frame with a circular entrance hole.
“Something plane and simple,” Mattius said, a trace of apology in his voice as he picked it up.
Renae looked from the birdhouse to Mattius’s earnest face. A laugh bubbled out of him, sudden and genuine. “It’s perfect. Seriously. Walls. A roof. A goddamn door. It’s a penthouse.”
The next few hours were a lesson in focused, miniature construction. Mattius removed the birdhouse from its base and carefully sanded every edge until they were silky smooth. He found a sheet of thick, double-walled cardboard in a recycling bin and cut a square.
From his closet, he dug out a faded grey cotton t-shirt from a band he hadn’t listened to in years. He cut a careful square from the back, where the fabric was softest from countless washes, and glued it taut across the cardboard. The familiar, worn fabric became a tiny furnished yard.
“The mattress,” Mattius murmured, more to himself than to Renae, who was observing everything from a perch on the desk lamp’s base.
He vanished into his bedroom and returned with a slim slice of memory foam he’d cut from an old mattress topper. He wrapped it in a piece of the same soft t-shirt, stitching the edges with impossibly fine, precise stitches. For the bed frame, he used scraps of balsa wood, measuring and carving with the hobby knife under Renae’s direction.
“A little more off the left leg,” Renae would call out, squinting. “Yeah. Now it’s level.”
The bed, once assembled, was placed on the fabric-covered cardboard within a traced outline of the birdhouse’s walls. A small, bright yellow plastic container, once holding a Kinder Egg toy, was rinsed and positioned as a basin. Mattius then glued the birdhouse itself securely over it all. The final structure was whimsical, sturdy, and profoundly personal.
He lifted it onto the nightstand, anchoring it with a weight, and turned to Renae. “Ready for the tour?”
“Hell yes.”
Mattius transported him to the entrance of the arched doorway. Renae stepped inside, his boots silent on the fabric floor. He walked the perimeter, a king surveying a new domain. He ran a hand over the smooth inner walls, peered into the washing basin, and approached the bed. He pushed a hand into the memory foam mattress, and it yielded slowly, perfectly.
“It’s… it’s really good, Matt,” Renae said, his voice thick. He looked at the giant form of his friend crouched nearby, watching him. “It feels like a place. Not just a box.”
Mattius’s shoulders relaxed. He’d been holding tension there all afternoon. “Good.”
Night fell again, softer this time. Renae bathed in the Kinder Egg basin, the water warmed from a single drop Mattius had heated in a teaspoon. He hung his tiny clothes on a makeshift line made from a toothpick and thread. He lay in his custom bed, under a roof, and the distant hum of the house was just a sound, not a threat.
He could see Mattius at his desk, the blue light of his laptop screen washing over his tired face. He was deep in the calculations for the reversal, the spacetime fold inversion formulas glowing on the screen like a galaxy of urgent numbers.
Renae watched the concentrated line of his back, the occasional hand running through his hair. The quiet was different now. It was no longer the quiet of fear, but the quiet of a shared project, of a problem being worked in tandem across a vast, impossible gap.
He rolled over on his memory foam, facing the open archway. Through it, he could see the colossal, fuzzy outline of Mattius, working through the night to bring him home.
He closed his eyes, listening to the soft tap of keys. The sound, now, was a lullaby too.
The sound, now, was a lullaby too.
Renae floated in the soft hold of it, the rhythmic tapping a metronome for his dreams, where wrenches were the size of buildings and a familiar laugh echoed down canyon-wide hallways. Then a deeper, wooden groan cut through the digital rhythm. The tapping stopped.
He came out of his light doze when the creak of Matt’s bed broke through the dark silence.
Renae sat up in his memory foam bed, the worn-t-shirt sheets soft under his hands. Through the arched doorway of his birdhouse, he saw the vast shadows of the room shift. Mattius was a dark shape standing beside his own bed, running a hand down his face. The blue laptop light from the desk painted the exhaustion on his profile in stark, sickly highlights. He’d been at it for hours.
Renae watched him. Mattius pulled back his comforter and slid in, the fabric sighing. He shifted, a massive tectonic adjustment of shoulders and hips, trying to find a comfortable position on his back. The mountain of a man settled, his outline becoming still against the pillows.
A quiet resolve, firm and clear, clicked into place in Renae’s chest. He threw off his own tiny covers.
The five-inch-tall man rose from his bed and walked to the entrance of his new bedroom. The nightstand’s surface was a cool, vast plain under the dim ambient light from the streetlamp outside. He took a breath, the air tasting of dust and ozone from the day’s work.
Then he started walking toward the bed.
The journey felt epic. The gap between the nightstand and the mattress was a chasm he couldn’t cross, but the quilt hung over the side, its fabric waterfalling down to meet the wooden shore. Renae grabbed a handful of the thick, quilted material and began to climb. His arms burned almost immediately, the muscles he used for engine blocks protesting this new, vertical torture. He hauled himself up, one deliberate fist-over-fist pull.
He crested the cliff of the mattress and lay there for a second, catching his breath on the vast, textured landscape of cotton and fleece. The scale was still monstrous, but it was a familiar monster now. He pushed himself up and started walking toward the source of the warmth, the sound of slow, deep breathing.
He reached the terrain of the pillow, its linen folds like rolling hills. Mattius was right there, his head turned slightly away, the pulse in his neck visible and steady.
He stood there, so close to the heat radiating from Mattius’s skin. He could see the fine details of his stubble, the curve of his ear, the dark fan of his eyelashes against his cheek. He wasn’t sleeping. His eyes were open, staring blankly at the ceiling, held hostage by some unshakeable calculation or a guilt that ran deeper than formulas.
“Hey,” Renae said, his small voice barely a whisper in the cavernous room.
Mattius started, his head turning slowly. His eyes, wide and adjusting, found Renae’s form standing beside his head. The blank stress melted into pure, unfiltered surprise. “Ren? What’s wrong? Is something—?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Renae interrupted, his tone soft but firm. “Your thinking is loud. It’s keeping me up.”
A faint, tired smile ghosted across Mattius’s lips. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Renae took another step closer, until he was standing on the pillow’s edge, right beside the thick, dark strands of Mattius’s hair. “You gonna stare a hole in the ceiling all night, or what?”
“The inversion parameters are fighting me,” Mattius admitted, the words slipping out into the dark. “The fold is stable, which is good, but that makes it sticky. Reversing it isn’t just running the process backward. It’s like trying to unbake a cake. The eggs are already cooked.”
“So we’ll make a soufflé instead,” Renae said, shrugging. He sat down, crossing his legs, right there on the pillow. The intimacy of it was dizzying. “You figured out the birdhouse. You’ll figure out the eggs.”
Mattius was silent for a long moment. He turned his head fully on the pillow, his nose a vast cliff-face now only inches away. Renae could feel the gentle, warm exhalation of his breath. “I’m scared,” Mattius whispered, the confession so quiet it was almost lost in the sheets.
The admission hung between them, vast and simple.
“I know,” Renae said. He didn’t offer empty platitudes. He just let it sit there, acknowledged. “Me too. But I’m not scared of you. Or your math.”
He leaned back, lying down on the pillow so he was staring up at the same ceiling. From here, the stippled texture looked like a strange, concrete sky. Mattius’s breathing was the only weather. After a minute, he felt a shift. Mattius’s hand came up, slow and tentative, from under the covers.
His fingers, warm and enormous, didn’t try to pick him up. They just settled on the pillow beside Renae, a wall of comforting heat and presence. An offering. A connection.
Renae didn’t hesitate. He scooted over, his back against the solid warmth of Mattius’s fingertip. It was like leaning against a sun-warmed tree. He let out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.
“Better than the ceiling,” Renae murmured.
“Yeah,” Mattius breathed, his voice thick. His finger curled minutely, just enough to be a fuller support.
The silence that fell this time was different. It was shared. The weight of the problem was still in the room, but it was no longer solely on Mattius’s chest. It was on the pillow between them, being faced.
Renae listened to Mattius’s breathing gradually deepen and slow. The frantic energy that had been crackling off him since the accident finally began to dissipate, soothed by the simple, illogical fact of Renae’s chosen proximity. The fear was still there, but it was background noise now.
Just as Renae felt his own consciousness start to blur again, Mattius’s sleeping form shifted. It was a small, unconscious movement. His hand, the one Renae wasn’t leaning against, moved across his own chest. And his thumb, clumsy with sleep, came down.
It settled softly, with the weight of a fallen leaf, over Renae.
It wasn’t a grip. It was a cover. A blanket of living skin. Warm, heavy in a way that felt anchoring, not trapping. Safe.
Renae froze, then melted. He closed his eyes, enveloped in the dark and the warmth and the profound, unspoken truth of it.
On the desk, the laptop screen dimmed, then went black. The only light was the faint orange glow from the street. The only sound was the synchronized rhythm of their breath.
Mattius slept, finally. And Renae, held under the gentle custody of that thumb, slept with him.
The problem of the eggs, the soufflé, the universe itself, could wait until morning.