um yes

Sasha gets a text from Lev.

when you're free we should hang out, I have something important to tell you

He sends Asher the fansite guy's number and texts 

today afternoon probably?

state of mild-but-long-lasting emergency has been declared so chances I'll have to drop everything and run are higher than usual but as far as I know 

to Lev. 

thanks

WHY WOULD YOU CLONE HITLER

IF I KNEW 

At 12:32 pm, Lev is knocking on Sasha's door.

By 12:32 pm he's home, and so are his parents. 

He opens the door. "Hi Lev —" and he switches to Russian for "Mom, Dad, this is Lev, I've told you about him," and back to English for "We can speak English here or we can go somewhere else your call." 

"Hi, Sasha's parents," he says in Russian, and "here is fine, the outside world is full of people who speak English" in English.

"Alright." He sits down on his bed and pulls Lev along with him. "Is everything okay?" 

Lev kisses Sasha on the forehead because his parents are there. It is astonishing how desperate a forehead kiss can be. 

Sasha's parents knew about the gay thing, did not previously know about the "dating Lev" thing, and are mildly surprised but mostly unconcerned. 

Sasha hugs him, puts pressure on his back and the back of his head. "Lev, I love you but you're scaring me." 

"...The medical condition that means I need to eat all the time is that I'm a mutant."

Mutant. 

Needs to eat all the time. 

Really, really good at extrapolating from details. 

"Okay," he says. "Do you have, like, powers or anything?" 

Relieved that Sasha's response wasn't "get out, mutie scum," Lev's brain processes the previous sentence.

"--wait, you love me?"

"Yes. I love you." A kiss on Lev's cheek.

"— um. You were going to tell me a thing?" 

"I love you too! --My power is kind of lame, I can look at information and figure out what it implies. So mostly I'm just really good at Sudoku and math and standardized tests." 

Or running a Spiderman fansite, he doesn't say. 

"…are you sure?" 

"Yeah, so that's the thing I wanted to talk to you about? --Asher Stark offered me a job."

Yep. Sasha's very nearly certain of it. (He will deal with the litany of 'what the fuck' in the back of his head later.) "You deserve it," he says, incredibly confident. 

"Asher Stark doesn't know I'm fifteen. He wants to give me a full-time job. He offered me a hundred thousand dollars a year and when I was like 'um' he was like 'fine, a hundred and twenty.'"

"Tell him you're fifteen but also tell him the situation with your parents," he says immediately, and then realizes that Lev has no way of knowing why he's so confident. 

"Yeah, that's why I need advice and you're. Literally the only person I can talk to about this. --My parents hate mutants, if they find out I'm gay they'll disown me but if they find out I'm a mutant they might kill me."

"I'm serious. Tell all of this to Asher Stark. I swear to whatever you need me to swear to, he will fix it. — and don't tell your parents anything until you're already gone." 

"Do I look like a person who tells things to my parents? But like. I can't just run away, if I'm a missing person I can't go to school, I can't go to a good college with a GED, I'd basically be locking myself in to making a living with my powers for the rest of my life--"

"First of all, you can definitely get into a good school with a GED. Second of all, you do have marketable skills that are not your powers, and a good school is not actually necessary to get a job. Third of all, tell this to Asher, he can help better than I can."