def modern_au():

contents

1

def find_housing_solution(hawkins, you):
    if you.generous and hawkins.desperate:
        return "unexpected_roommate_situation"
    else:
        return "hawkins_and_faust_homeless"

⸺

You were staring at the wall in your home office in an attempt to rest your eyes when your phone rang. The only people who would ever call you like this were friends or your favorite coworker, so you picked up without checking the contact.

"Hello?"

"…A warmer reception than I expected."

What the fuck. You removed your phone from your ear and read none other than Basil Hawkins, whose contact photo you set to The Hermit toward the end of your relationship, how he withdrew from you without any real explanation.

"What's up?"

"How are you?" he hedged. "Where are you these days?"

How long had it been? He was your first boyfriend after college, and you broke up with him three years later. You talked sometimes, birthday wishes that were usually late, and you usually kept it to light topics, like—

"I'm around. How's Faust?"

"I'm actually calling about Faust."

A brick dropped into your stomach. You got Faust when you moved in together, a tiny, very vocal black kitten from a barn cat's surprise litter. Hawkins kept him when you moved out, and he should be healthy, only about six years old.

"Sorry—that was ominous," he backtracked.

"That's my biggest problem with you."

"I think you're just anxious."

"It can be both," you said. "Well? What have you done with my son?"

To your surprise, Hawkins exhaled a sigh of relief. "You still love him? That's good."

"Of course I do. I'm not a monster." If you really examined yourself, you loved Hawkins, too, fixture of your early twenties that he was.

"Could you… take him for a few weeks?"

"What?"

"Maybe a few months. I think I need to go back home and my mother—"

"She's allergic, yeah. But why? Is she okay?"

"No, no. It's—it's complicated."

Your eyes narrowed with suspicion. "Hawkins. Let's meet."

"Well, yeah, I need to give you Faust and all his—"

"I mean us."

"…Where?"

"Just come here."

You could probably afford to take your ThinkPad to a cafe, but you loathed to sacrifice screen real estate just to see what your ex-boyfriend was up to. You buzzed him in without looking at the camera, putting off whatever seeing his face again would make you feel, and when your door swung open, he'd never looked worse.

"Jesus," you said.

Hawkins was always pale, but his skin had a gray tinge on which the shadows under his eyes were a shock. His hair was pulled back into a low, messy bun, and you guessed it was shorter based on the volume. He only ever put it up if stress upset his routine.

"Thanks," he said ironically. "Can I…?" He gestured around the entryway for permission.

"Shoes off," you reminded him, and though he'd never been here, he knew to search around for a basket of house slippers you kept for guests. He appraised your living room with his brows raised.

"You're doing well for yourself," Hawkins said. "I didn't think there'd be much in religious studies."

You kept your tone and your face muscles neutral as you leaned your hip against your kitchen island. "I dropped out. I'm corporate."

"Really." He looked you up and down, from your sports bra under a flannel—his, you realized too late—to the fluffy, highlighter yellow slides on your feet.

"Remote work," you explained.

"In what?"

"Tech."

He all but whistled.

"And you? Did your shop pan out?"

He barked a laugh, a cold one, and you winced. "What do you think?"

"I'm really sorry, Hawkins," you said, and you meant it. "That's rough as hell."

Hawkins didn't ask, but you cast the chart for his grand opening—which you didn't attend, away from the city for school—and if you really believed in electional astrology, he could have waited a few more weeks.

But there were surely other, terrestrial factors.

"I sold the rest of the inventory off to other businesses," Hawkins said with a shrug, "so I have money for a while."

"All of it?"

"…there's a lot of oracle decks left," he mumbled.

You held back a tut that would obviously be an I told you so. "Do you want to sit? A drink?" You'd just run your dishwasher, thank god.

"Just water," he said. Instead of sitting he just rested his forearms against the counter, and even with that stoop to his posture he towered above you. "So you dumped me for grad school and didn't even finish," Hawkins said lightly.

"Listen—"

"But if you were still a student, you'd have no time for Faust," he said. "So thank you."

You bit your lip as you handed him his glass. "What's your plan? You really want to go back home?"

"I can get a loan from my grandparents if I play it right."

"…the Catholic ones?"

Hawkins sighed. "Why does it matter?"

"Because we co-parent a cat."

"'We'? You're a deadbeat."

"Let me make it up to you two." And some more sensible friend, someone who knew you both when you were 25 and agonizing over whether to break up with him or not, would scream at your train of thought. "I have a spare room. You can look at it right now. To be honest," you said, "I'm not sure I have time for Faust. We're about to launch something at work, and I think it'd be best for him and his routine if he had you."

Hawkins crossed his arms. "I don't need charity."

"Yes, you do. We all do sometimes. And it's rich for you to say that since last I checked you were getting into Minchiate. What do you do when Charity comes up?"

"Ignore it. That deck's too damn big."

"Do you still have reading clients at least?" you asked.

"Mostly walk-ins. To be honest," he said meaningfully, "they're more interested in astrology, and I have to tell them the best astrologer I know retired."

You looked up at the ceiling. "You'd know others if you took it seriously."

"I don't need to."

Know other astrologers or take astrology seriously?

You met his gaze again. "Well? You can pay rent if you feel that bad, but I will give it back to you when you leave. This is mostly for Faust."

"I'll think about it."

Why were you offended?

"His litter box goes in the bathroom, either way," you decided.

"That's where it is at my place," he agreed.

"It's only one bathroom, obviously. I'm not an oil baron."

"I didn't say you were."

You huffed. "Do you think this is a kind of selling out? Yes, I'm an employee, of a company, but it means I don't end up in situations like yours."

"…You're projecting. A lot."

"I'm just trying to guess what you're thinking," you said.

"You can always ask."

You supposed that was true even when you were each other's whole world, and back then you never did. "What are you thinking?"

Hawkins looked not-at you, somewhere lower than your eyes as he chose his words. "That you find being kind very embarrassing," he said seriously. "But it's still in your nature."

You didn't expect that at all.

"Let me show you the room."

2

def observe_roommate_routine():
    while you.proper_meals == 0:
        hawkins.worry.increment()
        if hawkins.worry > hawkins.tolerance:
            hawkins.action = "stealth_kitchen_takeover"
            break

⸺

Three years was and wasn't a long time. For one thing, Hawkins thought you'd be teaching undergrads right now, and probably in a relationship with someone you agreed with more. You were on cordial enough terms that he'd expect a wedding invitation, and he'd even go without a plus one.

Instead he watched you dip the diagonal shard of a broken chocolate fudge Pop Tart into a scalded latte at the standing desk in your living room during a Zoom call you took without headphones. You mouthed an apology at him as you scrambled but ultimately failed to find a pair. When you summoned him here to explain himself two weeks ago, he noticed that the office portion of your condo's open floor plan threatened to take over the living space, as blunt a metaphor as any for what he gleaned about your daily routine.

Faust woke Hawkins with loud meows for his breakfast at 5:30, like always, undaunted by the change of venue and really quite indifferent to living with his "mother" for the first time since he was a kitten. The apartment was dark and stayed dark while Hawkins did his morning tarot spread and half-hearted tasseomancy watching the sun rise over the skyline, and still you didn't stir. He thought about waking you before stopping himself with not your boyfriend, not your boyfriend, he didn't know your schedule…

…until you slid out of your bedroom on hand-knit socks, clad in boxers—not his, not like the flannel that hung over your absurdly overpriced chair—straight to your desk, elevating it to a standing height and starting your PC. You sock-skated from there to put your moka pot on the stove, and Hawkins knew it was the same pot you had in your early twenties because he was the one to scorch the bottom an unscrubbable black when he forgot to add water before turning coffee grounds to ash in an attempt to bring you breakfast in bed.

You didn't so much as look at him until he joined you in the kitchen, and you jumped.

"Jesus, Hawkins."

"Language," he tutted while opening the fridge to hand you a near-empty bottle of whole milk. "Do you need anything? I'm going grocery shopping."

"Hmm?" you said distractedly, scrolling your phone. From his superior height, it looked like Slack—not that he'd had a job where he needed it in since before the shop. "Milk."

"And…?"

"And?"

He opened the fridge door wide. Besides the milk, you had kimchi, what he guessed was severely underfed sourdough starter (since when?), the biggest jar of Lao Gan Ma he'd seen to date, and little else.

"Venmo me," you said distractedly.

Now Hawkins sat on your couch, writing a shopping list by hand and not even pretending he wasn't eavesdropping on your call. It seemed like your coworkers spanned several time zones, which, if anything, made your day too flexible. You should at least have a head start on the ones west of here. With them, you seemed at ease—a remote-first company that let you work like this had to be a little lax—and spoke in jargon he'd never heard from you. Your relationship was built on a shared vocabulary, which wasn't enough to make it last, but it was stark how little he understood you now. He supposed you were always more left-brained. One of your several mad weekend projects was learning to calculate horoscopes by hand, which you even attempted analog for the first few hours. You were more interested in numerology when it came to tarot, too.

"What's a PR?" Hawkins said when you hung up.

"I thought you were leaving," you said as you scribbled something in a notebook. You still favored paper and fountain pens. Were you on the same bottle of ink he gave you for your last birthday together? He never understood the appeal, or he was paranoid about the ink on his hands getting on his cards.

"I'll pick up lunch on the way back. What do you want?"

"Lunch?" You looked at him like it confused you. "I just ate. Uhh… whatever you're having."

Salad, Hawkins decided. An enormous chicken Caesar for protein.

Faust chose then to slink across the back of the couch between you two, and absently reached over to scratch his head as you lowered your desk.

He couldn't resist. "Eat with me."

"Huh?"

"You should use your kitchen. Aren't you worried about crumbs in your keyboard?"

Your keyboard bewildered him. It was a neat grid with about half as many keys as any normal person would expect, and its keycaps were blank.

"Smaller surface area." Faust leapt over at that and laid across your desk mat, purring happily, his spine parallel to the board. You cooed at him and scritched his chin before addressing Hawkins: "Did he help you work like this?"

Hawkins tried not to flinch. Apart from your initial, pointed questioning—you all but called him a petit-bourgeois failure—you didn't pry about the end of his shop and never patronized it, despite still being in the city. You taught yourself astrology on a broke liberal arts grad's budget (piracy). You didn't believe in crystals or burn candles for anything but the scent, and your tarot deck collection was a fraction of his, in no small part because it was the stock he couldn't get any other business owners to buy, not even Amy, the neighborhood apothecary.

"He's the other reader, yeah."

"Mmm. More popular?"

"Obviously."

Really, Faust spent most days napping behind the register. And though you never darkened his door, you knew the cat well enough to guess.

"I should've gotten you a lucky cat."

"I think their energy would conflict."

You hummed a little laugh. "Are you bad luck, Faust? No…"

Well…

Hawkins was selective in his superstitions.

"Come on, Faust. We need to look at these PRs." And registering Hawkins' question at last: "Pull requests."

That didn't explain anything at all.